“What is it, what are you doing? Before me!” she murmured, turning pale, and her heart suddenly contracted very painfully.
He rose at once.
“I was not bowing to you, I was bowing to all human suffering,” he uttered somehow wildly, and walked to the window. “Listen,” he added, returning to her after a minute, “I told one offender today that he wasn't worth your little finger...and that I did my sister an honor by sitting her next to you.”
“Ah, how could you say that to them! And she was there?” Sonya cried fearfully. “To sit with me! An honor! But I'm...dishonorable...I'm a great, great sinner! Ah, how could you say that!”
“I said it of you not for your dishonor and sin, but for your great suffering. But that you are a great sinner is true,” he added, almost ecstatically, “and most of all you are a sinner because you destroyed yourself and betrayed yourself in vain.Isn't that a horror! Isn't it a horror that you live in this filth which you hate so much, and at the same time know yourself (you need only open your eyes) that you're not helping anyone by it, and not saving anyone from anything! But tell me, finally,” he spoke almost in a frenzy, “how such shame and baseness can be combined in you beside other opposite and holy feelings? It would be more just, a thousand times more just and reasonable, to jump headfirst into the water and end it at once!”
“And what would become of them?” Sonya asked weakly, glancing at him with suffering, but at the same time as if she were not at all surprised at his question. Raskolnikov looked at her strangely.
He read everything in that one glance of hers. So she really had already thought of it herself. Perhaps many times, in despair, she had seriously considered how to end it all at once, so seriously, indeed, that now she was almost not surprised at his suggestion. She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words (nor had she noticed, of course, the meaning of his reproaches, or his special view of her shame—that was obvious to him). But he fully understood the monstrous pain she suffered, and had long been suffering, at the thought of her dishonorable and shameful position. What, he wondered, what could so far have kept her from deciding to end it all at once? And only here did he understand fully what these poor little orphaned children meant to her, and this pitiful, half-crazed Katerina Ivanovna, with her consumption, and her beating her head against the wall.
But then, too, it was clear to him that Sonya, with her character, and the education which, after all, she did have, could in no way remain as she was. It still stood as a question for him: how had she been able to remain for so much too long a time in such a position and not lose her mind, if it was beyond her strength to drown herself? Of course, he understood that Sonya's position was an accidental social phenomenon, though unfortunately a far from isolated and exceptional one. But it would seem that this very accident, this smattering of education, and the whole of her preceding life, should have killed her at once, with her first step onto that loathsome path. What sustained her? Surely not depravity? All this shame obviously touched her only mechanically; no true depravity, not even a drop of it, had yet penetrated her heart—he could see that; she stood before him in reality . . .
“Three ways are open to her,” he thought, “to throw herself into the canal, to go to the madhouse, or...or, finally, to throw herself into a depravity that stupefies reason and petrifies the heart.” This last thought was the most loathsome of all to him; but he was already a skeptic; he was young, abstract, and consequently cruel; and therefore he could not but believe that the last outcome—that is, depravity—was the most likely.
“But can it be true?” he exclaimed to himself. “Can it be that this being, who has still kept her purity of spirit, in the end will be consciously pulled into this vile, stinking hole? Can it be that the pulling has already begun, and that she has been able to endure so far only because vice no longer seems so loathsome to her? No, no, it can't be!” he kept exclaiming, like Sonya earlier. “No, what has so far kept her from the canal is the thought of sin, and of them, those ones...And if she hasn't lost her mind so far...But who says she hasn't lost her mind? Is she in her right mind? Is it possible to talk as she does? Is it possible for someone in her right mind to reason as she does? Is it possible to sit like that over perdition, right over the stinking hole that's already dragging her in, and wave her hands and stop her ears when she's being told of the danger? What does she expect, a miracle? No doubt. And isn't this all a sign of madness?”
He stubbornly stayed at this thought. He liked this solution more than any other. He began studying her with greater attention.
“So you pray very much to God, Sonya?” he asked her.
Sonya was silent; he stood beside her, waiting for an answer.
“And what would I be without God?” she whispered quickly, energetically, glancing at him fleetingly with suddenly flashing eyes, and she pressed his hand firmly with her own.
“So that's it!” he thought.
“And what does God do for you in return?” he asked, testing her further.
Sonya was silent for a long time, as if she were unable to answer. Her frail chest was all heaving with agitation . . .
“Be still! Don't ask! You're not worthy! . . .” she cried suddenly, looking at him sternly and wrathfully.
“That's it! That's it!” he repeated insistently to himself.
“He does everything!” she whispered quickly, looking down again.
“Here's the solution! Here's the explanation of the solution!” he decided to himself, studying her with greedy curiosity.
With a new, strange, almost painful feeling, he peered at that pale, thin, irregular, and angular little face, those meek blue eyes, capable of flashing with such fire, such severe, energetic feeling, that small body still trembling with indignation and wrath, and it all seemed more and more strange to him, almost impossible. “A holy fool! A holy fool!” he kept saying within himself. [95]
There was a book lying on the chest of drawers. He had noticed it each time he paced the room; now he picked it up and looked. It was the New Testament, in Russian translation. [96] The book was old, used, bound in leather.
“Where did this come from?” he called to her across the room. She was still standing in the same place, three steps from the table.
“It was brought to me,” she answered, as if reluctantly, and without glancing at him.
“Who brought it?”
“Lizaveta. I asked her to.”
“Lizaveta! How strange!” he thought. Everything about Sonya was becoming more strange and wondrous for him with each passing minute. He took the book over to the candle and began leafing through it.
“Where is the part about Lazarus?” he asked suddenly.
Sonya went on stubbornly looking down, and did not answer.
“Where is it about the raising of Lazarus? Find it for me, Sonya.”
She gave him a sidelong glance.
“You're looking in the wrong place...it's in the fourth Gospel...” she whispered sternly, without moving towards him.
“Find it and read it to me,” he said. He sat down, leaned his elbow on the table, propped his head in his hand, and looked away sullenly, preparing to listen.
“About three weeks, and welcome to Bedlam! I'll probably be there myself, if nothing worse happens,” he muttered to himself.
Sonya stepped hesitantly to the table, mistrusting Raskolnikov's strange wish. Nevertheless, she picked up the book.
“You've never read it?” she asked, glancing at him loweringly across the table. Her voice was becoming more and more severe.
“Long ago...in school. Read it!”
“You never heard it in church?”
“I...haven't gone. Do you go often?”
“N-no,” whispered Sonya.
Raskolnikov grinned.
“I see...Then you won't go tomorrow to bury your father either?”
“Yes, I will. And I went last week...for a memorial service.”
“For whom?”
“Lizaveta. She was killed with an axe.”
His nerves were becoming more and more irritated. His head was beginning to spin.
“Were you friends with Lizaveta?”
“Yes...She was a just woman...She came...rarely...she couldn't. She and I used to read and...talk. She will see God.” [97]
95
A "holy fool"
96
The language of the Russian Orthodox Church is Old Slavonic, not Russian. The Bible was first translated into Russian in the early nineteenth century.