He turned to her. She ran down the last flight and stopped very close to him, just one step higher. A dim light came from the courtyard. Raskolnikov made out the girl's thin but dear little face, smiling and looking at him with childish cheerfulness. She had come running with an errand, which apparently pleased her very much.
“Listen, what is your name?...and also, where do you live?” she asked hurriedly, in a breathless little voice.
He put his two hands on her shoulders and looked at her with something like happiness. It gave him such pleasure to look at her—he did not know why himself.
“Who sent you?”
“My sister Sonya sent me,” the girl replied, smiling even more cheerfully.
“I just knew it was your sister Sonya.”
“Mama sent me, too. When my sister Sonya was sending me, mama also came over and said: 'Run quickly, Polenka!’”
“Do you love your sister Sonya?”
“I love her most of all!” Polenka said with some special firmness, and her smile suddenly became more serious.
“And will you love me?”
Instead of an answer, he saw the girl's little face coming towards him, her full little lips naively puckered to kiss him. Suddenly her arms, thin as matchsticks, held him hard, her head bent to his shoulder, and the girl began crying softly, pressing her face harder and harder against him.
“I'm sorry for papa!” she said after a minute, raising her tear-stained face and wiping away the tears with her hands. “We've had so many misfortunes lately,” she added unexpectedly, with that especially solemn look children try so hard to assume when they suddenly want to talk like “big people.”
“And did papa love you?”
“He loved Lidochka most of all,” she went on, very seriously and no longer smiling, just the way big people speak, “he loved her because she's little, and because she's sick, and he always brought her treats, and us he taught to read, and me he taught grammar and catechism,” she added with dignity, “and mama didn't say anything, but we still knew she liked that, and papa knew it, and mama wants to teach me French, because it's time I got my education.”
“And do you know how to pray?”
“Oh, of course we do, since long ago! I pray to myself, because I'm big now, and Kolya and Lidochka pray out loud with mother; first they recite the 'Hail, Mary' and then another prayer: 'God forgive and bless our sister Sonya,' and then 'God forgive and bless our other papa,' because our old papa died already and this one is the other one, but we pray for that one, too.”
“Polechka, my name is Rodion; pray for me, too, sometimes: 'and for the servant of God, Rodion'—that's all.”
“I'll pray for you all the rest of my life,” the girl said ardently, and suddenly laughed again, rushed to him, and again held him hard.
Raskolnikov told her his name, gave her the address, and promised to come the next day without fail. The girl went away completely delighted with him. It was past ten when he walked out to the street. Five minutes later he was standing on the bridge, in exactly the same spot from which the woman had thrown herself not long before.
“Enough!” he said resolutely and solemnly. “Away with mirages, away with false fears, away with spectres! ... There is life! Was I not alive just now? My life hasn't died with the old crone! May the Lord remember her in His kingdom, and—enough, my dear, it's time to go! Now is the kingdom of reason and light and . .. and will and strength...and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!” he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it. “And I had already consented to live on a square foot of space!
“... I'm very weak at the moment, but...all my illness seems to have gone. And I knew it would when I went out today. By the way, Pochinkov's house is just two steps away. To Razumikhin's now, certainly, even if it weren't two steps away...let him win the bet! ... Let him have his laugh—it's nothing, let him! ... Strength, what's needed is strength; without strength you get nowhere; and strength is acquired by strength—that's something they don't know,” he added proudly and self-confidently, and he left the bridge barely able to move his legs. Pride and self-confidence were growing in him every moment; with each succeeding moment he was no longer the man he had been the moment before. What special thing was it, however, that had so turned him around? He himself did not know; like a man clutching at a straw, he suddenly fancied that he, too, “could live, that there still was life, that his life had not died with the old crone.” It was perhaps a rather hasty conclusion, but he was not thinking of that.
“I did ask her to remember the servant of God, Rodion, however,” suddenly flashed in his head. “Well, but that was...just in case!” he added, and laughed at once at his own schoolboy joke. He was in excellent spirits.
He had no trouble finding Razumikhin; the new tenant of Pochinkov's house was already known, and the caretaker immediately showed him the way. From halfway up the stairs one could already hear the noise and animated conversation of a large gathering. The door to the stairs was wide open; shouts and arguing could be heard. Razumikhin's room was quite big, and about fifteen people were gathered in it. Raskolnikov stopped in the anteroom. There, behind a partition, two of the landlady's serving-girls busied themselves with two big samovars, bottles, plates and platters with pies and hors d'oeuvres brought from the landlady's kitchen. Raskolnikov asked for Razumikhin. He came running out, delighted. One could tell at a glance that he had drunk an unusual amount, and though Razumikhin was almost incapable of getting really drunk, this time the effect was somewhat noticeable.
“Listen,” Raskolnikov hurried, “I only came to tell you that you've won the bet, and that indeed nobody knows what may happen to him. But I can't come in; I'm so weak I'm about to fall over. So, hello and good-bye! Come and see me tomorrow . . .”
“You know what, I'm going to take you home! If you yourself say you're so weak, then . . .”
“What about your guests? Who's that curly one who just peeked out here?”
“Him? Devil knows! Must be some acquaintance of my uncle's, or maybe he came on his own...I'll leave my uncle with them, a most invaluable man, too bad you can't meet him right now. But devil take them all anyway! They've forgotten about me now, and besides, I need some cooling off, because you came just in time, brother: another two minutes and I'd have started a fight in there, by God! They pour out such drivel. . . You can't imagine to what extent a man can finally get himself wrapped up in lies! But why can't you imagine it? Don't we lie ourselves? Let them lie, then; and afterwards they won't lie...Sit down for a minute, I'll get Zossimov.”
Zossimov fell upon Raskolnikov even with a sort of greediness; some special curiosity could be seen in him; soon his face brightened.
“To bed without delay,” he decided, having examined the patient as well as he could, “and take a bit of something for the night. Will you? I've already prepared it...a little powder.”
“Or two, even,” Raskolnikov replied.
The powder was taken at once.
“It will be very good if you go with him,” Zossimov remarked to Razumikhin. “We'll see what may happen tomorrow, but today it's not bad at all: quite a change from this morning. Live and learn . . .”
“You know what Zossimov whispered to me just now, as we were leaving?” Razumikhin blurted out as soon as they stepped into the street. “I'll tell you everything straight out, brother, because they're fools. Zossimov told me to chat you up on the way and get you to chat back, and then tell him, because he's got this idea...that you're...mad, or close to it. Imagine that! First, you're three times smarter than he is; second, if you're not crazy, you'll spit on him having such drivel in his head; and third, this hunk of meat—a surgeon by profession—has now gone crazy over mental illnesses, and what finally turned him around about you was your conversation today with Zamyotov.”