Coming to the turn onto yesterday V street, he peered down it with tormenting anxiety, at that house...and immediately looked away.
“If they ask, maybe I'll tell them,” he thought, approaching the station.
The station was less than a quarter of a mile from his house. It had just been moved into new quarters, on the fourth floor of a different building. He had been in the former quarters once, briefly, but very long ago. Passing under the gateway, he saw a stairway to the right, with a peasant coming down it carrying a book. “Must be a caretaker; so the station must be there,” and on that surmise he started up the stairs. He did not want to ask anyone about anything.
“I'll walk in, fall on my knees, and tell them everything . . .” he thought, going up to the fourth floor.
The stairway was narrow, steep, and all covered with swill. The doors to the kitchens of all the apartments, on all four floors, opened onto the stairs and stood open most of the day. This made it terribly stifling. Up and down the stairs went caretakers with books under their arms, messengers, and various people of both sexes—visitors. The door of the office itself was also wide open. He went in and stopped in the anteroom. Here a number of peasants were standing and waiting. And here, too, it was extremely stifling; moreover, from the newly painted rooms a nauseating odor of fresh, not quite cured paint, made with rancid oil, assailed his nostrils. After waiting a little while, he made the decision to move on, into the next room. All the rooms were tiny and low. A terrible impatience drew him farther and farther. No one took any notice of him. In the second room some scriveners were sitting and writing; they were dressed only slightly better than he was—a strange assortment of people by the look of it. He turned to one of them.
“What do you want?”
He showed him the summons from the office.
“You're a student?” the man asked, glancing at the summons.
“A former student.”
The scrivener looked him over, though without any curiosity. He was a somehow especially disheveled man, with a fixed idea in his eyes.
“I won't get anything out of this one,” Raskolnikov thought, “it's all the same to him.”
“Go in there, to the clerk,” said the scrivener, jabbing his finger forward, pointing to the very last room.
He entered that room (the fourth one down); it was small and chock-full of the public—people whose clothes were somewhat cleaner than in the other rooms. Among the visitors were two ladies. One of them was in mourning, humbly dressed, and sat across the table from the clerk, writing something to his dictation. The other, an extremely plump and conspicuous woman, with reddish-purple blotches, all too magnificently dressed, and with a brooch the size of a saucer on her bosom, stood to one side waiting for something. Raskolnikov handed his summons to the clerk. He gave it a passing glance, said “Wait,” and continued to occupy himself with the mourning lady.
He breathed more freely. “Must be for something else!” Gradually he began to take heart; with all his might he exhorted himself to take heart and pull himself together.
“Some foolishness, some most trifling indiscretion, and I can give myself away completely! Hm...too bad it's so airless here,” he added, “stifling...My head is spinning even more...my mind, too . . .”
He felt a terrible disorder within himself. He was afraid of losing his control. He tried to bang on to something, to think at least of something, some completely unrelated thing, but could not manage to do it. The clerk, however, interested him greatly: he kept hoping to read something in his face, to pry into him. This was a very young man, about twenty-two years old, with a dark and mobile physiognomy which looked older than its years, fashionably and foppishly dressed, his hair parted behind, all combed and pomaded, with many rings and signet-rings on his white, brush-scrubbed fingers, and gold chains on his waistcoat. He even spoke a few words of French, and quite satisfactorily, with a foreigner who was there.
“Why don't you sit down, Louisa Ivanovna,” he said in passing to the bedizened reddish-purple lady, who remained standing as if she did not dare to sit down, though there was a chair beside her.
“Ich danke,”[41] she said, and quietly, with a silken rustling, lowered herself onto the chair. Her light-blue dress with white lace trimming expanded around the chair like a balloon and filled almost half the office. There was a reek of perfume. But the lady was obviously abashed that she was taking up half the space and that she reeked so much of perfume, and her smile, though cowardly and insolent at once, was also obviously uneasy.
The mourning lady finally finished and started to get up. Suddenly there was some noise and an officer came in, quite dashingly and somehow with a special swing of the shoulders at each step, tossed his cockaded cap on the table, and sat himself down in an armchair. The magnificent lady simply leaped from her seat as soon as she saw him, and began curtsying to him with some special sort of rapture; but the officer did not pay the slightest attention to her, and she now did not dare to sit down again in his presence. He was a lieutenant, the police chief's assistant, with reddish moustaches sticking out horizontally on both sides, and with extremely small features, which, incidentally, expressed nothing in particular apart from a certain insolence. He gave a sidelong and somewhat indignant glance at Raskolnikov: his costume really was too wretched, and yet, despite such humiliation, his bearing was not in keeping with his costume; Raskolnikov, from lack of prudence, looked at him too directly and steadily, so that he even became offended.
“What do you want?” he shouted, probably surprised that such a ragamuffin did not even think of effacing himself before the lightning of his gaze.
“I was summoned...by a notice . . .” Raskolnikov managed to reply.
“It's that case to do with the recovery of money, from him, the student, “ the clerk spoke hurriedly, tearing himself away from his papers. “Here, sir!” and he flipped the register over for Raskolnikov, pointing to a place in it. “Read this!”
“Money? What money?” Raskolnikov thought. “But...then it surely can't be that!” And he gave a joyful start. He suddenly felt terribly, inexpressibly light. Everything fell from his shoulders.
“And what time does it say you should come, my very dear sir?” the lieutenant shouted, getting more and more insulted for some unknown reason. “It says you should come at nine, and it's already past eleven!”
“It was brought to me only a quarter of an hour ago,” Raskolnikov replied loudly, over his shoulder, becoming suddenly and unexpectedly angry himself, and even finding a certain pleasure in it. “It's enough that I came at all, sick with fever as I am.”
“Kindly do not shout!”
“I'm not shouting, I'm speaking quite evenly; it's you who are shouting at me; but I am a student and I will not allow anyone to shout at me.”
The assistant flared up so violently that for the first moment he was even unable to say anything articulate, and only some sort of spluttering flew out of his mouth. He leaped from his seat.
“Kindly be still! You are in an official place. No r-r-rudeness, sir!”
“But you, too, are in an official place,” Raskolnikov cried, “and you are not only shouting but also smoking a cigarette, and thereby being disrespectful towards all of us!” Having said this, Raskolnikov felt an inexpressible delight.
The clerk was looking at them with a smile. The fiery lieutenant was visibly taken aback.
41
"Thank you" (German). Louisa Ivanovna's speech further on, like Mrs. Lip-pewechsel's later in the novel, is full of German words and Germanisms; these will not be glossed in our notes.