It was not that he was so cowardly and downtrodden, even quite the contrary; but for some time he had been in an irritable and tense state, resembling hypochondria. He was so immersed in himself and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting his landlady but of meeting anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty; but even his strained circumstances had lately ceased to burden him. He had entirely given up attending to his daily affairs and did not want to attend to them. As a matter of fact, he was not afraid of any landlady, whatever she might be plotting against him. But to stop on the stairs, to listen to all sorts of nonsense about this commonplace rubbish, which he could not care less about, all this badgering for payment, these threats and complaints, and to have to dodge all the while, make excuses, lie—oh, no, better to steal catlike down the stairs somehow and slip away unseen by anyone.
This time, however, as he walked out to the street, even he was struck by his fear of meeting his creditor.
“I want to attempt such a thing, and at the same time I'm afraid of such trifles!” he thought with a strange smile. “Hm...yes...man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice...That is an axiom...I wonder, what are people most afraid of? A new step, their own new word, that's what they're most afraid of...I babble too much, however. That's why I don't do anything, because I babble. However, maybe it's like this: I babble because I don't do anything. I've learned to babble over this past month, lying in a corner day in and day out, thinking about...cuckooland. Why on earth am I going now? Am I really capable of that? Is that something serious? No, not serious at all. I'm just toying with it, for the sake of fantasy. A plaything! Yes, a plaything, if you like!”
It was terribly hot out, and moreover it was close, crowded; lime, scaffolding, bricks, dust everywhere, and that special summer stench known so well to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a summer house—all at once these things unpleasantly shook the young man's already overwrought nerves. The intolerable stench from the taverns, especially numerous in that part of the city, and the drunkards he kept running into even though it was a weekday, completed the loathsome and melancholy coloring of the picture. A feeling of the deepest revulsion flashed for a moment in the young man's fine features. Incidentally, he was remarkably good-looking, taller than average, slender and trim, with beautiful dark eyes and dark blond hair. But soon he lapsed as if into deep thought, or even, more precisely, into some sort of oblivion, and walked on no longer noticing what was around him, and not wishing to notice. He only muttered something to himself from time to time, out of that habit of monologues he had just confessed to himself. And at the same moment he was aware that his thoughts sometimes became muddled and that he was very weak: it was the second day that he had had almost nothing to eat.
He was so badly dressed that another man, even an accustomed one, would have been ashamed to go out in such rags during the daytime. However, the neighborhood was such that it was hard to cause any surprise with one's dress. The proximity of the Haymarket, the abundance of certain establishments, a population predominantly of craftsmen and artisans, who clustered in these central Petersburg streets and lanes, sometimes produced such a motley of types in the general panorama that to be surprised at meeting any sort of figure would even have been strange. But so much spiteful contempt was already stored up in the young man's soul that, for all his sometimes very youthful touchiness, he was least ashamed of his rags in the street. It was a different matter when he met some acquaintances or former friends, whom he generally disliked meeting...And yet, when a drunk man who was just then being taken through the street in an enormous cart harnessed to an enormous cart-horse, no one knew why or where, suddenly shouted to him as he passed by: “Hey, you, German hatter!”—pointing at him and yelling at the top of his lungs—the young man suddenly stopped and convulsively clutched his hat. It was a tall, cylindrical Zimmerman hat,[1] but all worn out, quite faded, all holes and stains, brimless, and dented so that it stuck out at an ugly angle. Yet it was not shame but quite a different feeling, even more like fear, that seized him.
“I just knew it!” he muttered in confusion. “It's just as I thought! That's the worst of all! Some stupid thing like that, some trivial detail, can ruin the whole scheme! Yes, the hat is too conspicuous...Ludicrous, and therefore conspicuous...My rags certainly call for a cap, even if it's some old pancake, not this monster. Nobody wears this kind, it can be noticed a mile away, and remembered...above all, it will be remembered later, so there's evidence for you. Here one must be as inconspicuous as possible...Details, details above all! ... It's these details that ruin everything always...”
He did not have far to go; he even knew how many steps it was from the gate of his house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. Once, when he was far gone in his dreaming, he had counted them. At that time he did not yet believe in these dreams of his, and only chafed himself with their ugly but seductive audacity. Whereas now, a month later, he was beginning to look at them differently and, despite all those taunting monologues about his own powerlessness and indecision, had grown used, even somehow involuntarily, to regarding the “ugly” dream as a real undertaking, though he still did not believe himself. Now he was even going to make a trial of his undertaking, and at every step his excitement grew stronger and stronger.
With a sinking heart and nervous trembling he came up to a most enormous house that faced a canal on one side and ------y Street on the other. The house was all small apartments inside, and was inhabited by all sorts of working people—tailors, locksmiths, cooks, various Germans, girls living on their own, petty clerkdom, and so on. People kept coming and going, darting through both gateways and across both courtyards. Three or four caretakers worked there. The young man was very pleased not to have met any one of them, and slipped inconspicuously from the gate directly to the stairway on the right. The stairway was dark and narrow, a “back” stairway, but he had known and made a study of all that before, and he liked the whole situation: in that darkness even a curious glance was no danger. “If I'm so afraid now, what if it really should somehow get down to the business itself? . . .” he thought involuntarily, going up to the fourth floor. There his way was blocked by some porters, ex-soldiers who were moving furniture out of one apartment. He already knew from before that a German, an official, had been living in that apartment with his family: “It means the German is now moving out; which means that on the fourth floor of this stairway, on this landing, for a while only the old woman's apartment will be left occupied. That's good... just in case...” he thought again, and rang at the old woman's apartment. The bell jingled feebly, as though it were made not of brass but of tin. In the small apartments of such houses almost all the bells are like that. He had forgotten the ring of this bell, and now its peculiar ring seemed suddenly to remind him of something and bring it clearly before him...He jumped, so weak had his nerves become this time. In a short while the door was opened a tiny crack: the woman lodger was looking at the visitor through the crack with obvious mistrust, and only her little eyes could be seen glittering from the darkness. But seeing a number of people on the landing, she took courage and opened the door all the way. The young man stepped across the threshold into the dark entryway, divided by a partition, behind which was a tiny kitchen. The old woman stood silently before him, looking at him inquiringly. She was a tiny, dried-up old crone, about sixty, with sharp, spiteful little eyes and a small, sharp nose. She was bareheaded, and her colorless and only slightly graying hair was thickly greased. Her long, thin neck, which resembled a chicken's leg, was wrapped in some flannel rags, and, despite the heat, a fur-trimmed jacket, completely worn out and yellow with age, hung loosely from her shoulders. The little old woman coughed and groaned all the time. The young man must have glanced at her with some peculiar glance, because the earlier mistrust suddenly flashed in her eyes again.
1
Zimmerman was a famous hatter with a shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. Dostoevsky owned a Zimmerman hat.