“Come, come, my friend, poverty is no vice! We know you're like gunpowder, unable to bear an offense. You must have gotten offended with him for some reason and couldn't help saying something,” Nikodim Fomich went on, amiably addressing Raskolnikov, “but you mustn't do that: he is a mo-o-st no-o-oble man, I must tell you, but gunpowder, gunpowder! He flares up, he boils up, he burns up—and that's it! All gone! And what's left is his heart of gold! In our regiment he was known as 'Lieutenant Gunpowder'...”
“And what a r-r-regiment it was!” exclaimed Ilya Petrovich, quite content to be so pleasantly tickled, but still sulking.
Raskolnikov suddenly wanted to say something extraordinarily pleasant to them all.
“I beg your pardon, Captain,” he began quite casually, suddenly addressing Nikodim Fomich, “but you must also understand my position...I am even ready to ask his forgiveness if for my part I was in any way disrespectful. I am a poor and sick student, weighed down” (that was how he said it: weighed down ) “by poverty. I am a former student because I cannot support myself now, but I will be getting some money...I have a mother and a sister in ------y province . . .
They will send it, and I...will pay. My landlady is a kind woman, but she is so angry because I lost my lessons and haven't paid her for four months that she won't even send up my dinner...And I absolutely do not understand what this promissory note is! She's now demanding that I pay, but how can I? Judge for yourself! . . .”
“But that is not our business . . .” the clerk observed again.
“Allow me, allow me, I completely agree with you, but allow me to explain,” Raskolnikov picked up again, still addressing himself not to the clerk but to Nikodim Fomich, but trying as hard as he could to address Ilya Petrovich as well, though he stubbornly pretended to be burrowing in his papers and contemptuously ignored him, “allow me, too, for my part, to explain that I have been living with her for about three years now, ever since I came from the province, and earlier...earlier... but then, why shouldn't I confess it, at the very beginning I made a promise that I would marry her daughter, a verbal promise, a completely free one...This girl was...however, I even liked her...though I wasn't in love...youth, in a word—that is, I mean to say that the landlady gave me considerable credit then, and my way of life was somewhat...I was quite thoughtless . . .”
“Such intimacies are hardly required of you, my dear sir, and we have no time for them,” Ilya Petrovich interrupted rudely and triumphantly, but Raskolnikov hotly cut him off, though it had suddenly become very difficult for him to speak.
“But allow me, do allow me to tell everything, more or less...how things went and...in my turn...though it's unnecessary, I agree— but a year ago this girl died of typhus, and I stayed on as a tenant like before, and when the landlady moved to her present apartment, she told me...and in a friendly way...that she had complete trust in me and all...but wouldn't I like to give her this promissory note for a hundred and fifteen roubles, which was the total amount I owed her. Allow me, sir: she precisely said that once I'd given her this paper, she would let me have as much more credit as I wanted, and that she, for her part, would never, ever—these were her own words—make use of this paper before I myself paid her...And now, when I've lost my lessons and have nothing to eat, she applies for recovery...What can I say?”
“All these touching details, my dear sir, are of no concern to us,” Ilya Petrovich insolently cut in. “You must make a response and a commitment, and as for your happening to be in love, and all these other tragic points, we could not care less about them.”
“Now that's...cruel of you...really . . .” Nikodim Fomich muttered, and he, too, sat down at the table and started signing things. He felt somehow ashamed.
“Write,” the clerk said to Raskolnikov.
“Write what?” he asked, somehow with particular rudeness.
“I'll dictate to you.”
Raskolnikov fancied that after his confession the clerk had become more casual and contemptuous with him, but—strangely—he suddenly felt decidedly indifferent to anyone's possible opinion, and this change occurred somehow in a moment, an instant. If he had only cared to reflect a little, he would of course have been surprised that he could have spoken with them as he had a minute before, and even thrust his feelings upon them. And where had these feelings come from? On the contrary, if the room were now suddenly filled not with policemen but with his foremost friends, even then, he thought, he would be unable to find a single human word for them, so empty had his heart suddenly become. A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul. It was not the abjectness of his heart's outpourings before Ilya Petrovich, nor the abjectness of the lieutenant's triumph over him, that suddenly so overturned his heart. Oh, what did he care now about his own meanness, about all these vanities, lieutenants, German women, proceedings, offices, and so on and so forth! Even if he had been sentenced to be burned at that moment, he would not have stirred, and would probably not have listened very attentively to the sentence. What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station, not only with heartfelt effusions, as he had just done, but in any way at all, and had they been his own brothers and sisters, and not police lieutenants, there would still have been no point in his addressing them, in whatever circumstances of life. Never until that minute had he experienced such a strange and terrible sensation. And most tormenting of all was that it was more a sensation than an awareness, an idea; a spontaneous sensation, the most tormenting of any he had yet experienced in his life.
The clerk began dictating to him the customary formal response for such occasions—that is, I cannot pay, I promise to pay by such-and-such a date (some day), I will not leave town, I will neither sell nor give away my property, and so on.
“You can't even write, you're barely able to hold the pen,” the clerk observed, studying Raskolnikov with curiosity. “Are you sick?”
“Yes...dizzy...go on!”
“That's all. Sign it.”
The clerk took the paper from him and busied himself with others.
Raskolnikov gave back the pen, but instead of getting up and leaving, he put both elbows on the table and pressed his head with his hands. It was as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange thought suddenly came to him: to get up now, go over to Nikodim Fomich, and tell him all about yesterday, down to the last detail, then go to his apartment with them and show them the things in the corner, in the hole. The urge was so strong that he had already risen from his seat to carry it out. “Shouldn't I at least think it over for a moment?” raced through his head. “No, better do it without thinking, just to get it off my back!” But suddenly he stopped, rooted to the spot: Nikodim Fomich was talking heatedly with Ilya Petrovich, and he caught some of the words.
“It's impossible; they'll both be released! First of all, everything's against it; just consider, why would they call the caretaker if it was their doing? To give themselves away, or what? Out of cunning? No, that would be much too cunning! And, finally, both caretakers and the tradeswoman saw the student Pestryakov just by the gate, the very moment he came in: he was walking with three friends and parted with them just by the gate, and he asked the caretakers about lodgings while his friends were still with him. Now, would such a man ask about lodgings if he had come there with such an intention? As for Koch, he spent half an hour with the silversmith downstairs before he went to the old woman's, and left him to go upstairs at exactly a quarter to eight. Think, now . . .”