“You'll suffer too much, too much,” she repeated, stretching out her hands to him in desperate supplication.
“Still,maybe I've slapped myself with it,” he remarked gloomily, as if deep in thought, “maybe I'm stilla man and not a louse, and was being too quick to condemn myself...I'll stillfight.”
A haughty smile was forcing itself to his lips.
“To bear such suffering! And for your whole life, your whole life! . . .”
“I'll get used to it . . .” he said, grimly and pensively. “Listen,” he began after a moment, “enough tears; it's time for business: I came to tell you that they're after me now, trying to catch me . . .”
“Ah!” Sonya cried fearfully.
“So you cry out! You yourself want me to go to hard labor, and now you're afraid? Only here's what: I'm not going to let them get me. I'll still fight them; they won't be able to do anything. They don't have any real evidence. I was in great danger yesterday, I thought I was already ruined, but things got better today. All their evidence is double-ended; I mean, I can turn their accusations in my own favor, understand? And I will, because now I know how it's done...But they'll certainly put me in jail. If it weren't for one incident, they might have put me in today; certainly, they may stilleven do it today...Only it's nothing, Sonya: I'll sit there, and then they'll let me go...because they don't have one real proof, and they never will, I promise you. And they can't keep anyone behind bars with what they have. Well, enough...I just wanted you to know...I'll try to manage things with my mother and sister somehow so as to reassure them and not frighten them...My sister now seems provided for...so my mother is, too...Well, that's all. Be careful, though. Will you come and visit me when I'm in jail?”
“Oh, I will! I will!”
The two were sitting side by side, sad and crushed, as if they had been washed up alone on a deserted shore after a storm. He looked at Sonya and felt how much of her love was on him, and, strangely, he suddenly felt it heavy and painful to be loved like that. Yes, it was a strange and terrible feeling! On his way to see Sonya, he had felt she was his only hope and his only way out; he had thought he would be able to unload at least part of his torment; but now, suddenly, when her whole heart turned to him, he suddenly felt and realized that he was incomparably more unhappy than he had been before.
“Sonya,” he said, “you'd better not visit me when I'm in jail.”
Sonya did not reply; she was weeping. Several minutes passed.
“Do you have a cross on you?” she suddenly asked unexpectedly, as if suddenly remembering.
At first he did not understand the question.
“You don't, do you? Here, take this cypress one. I have another, a brass one, Lizaveta's. Lizaveta and I exchanged crosses; she gave me her cross, and I gave her my little icon. I'll wear Lizaveta's now, and you can have this one. Take it...it's mine! It's mine!” she insisted. “We'll go to suffer together, and we'll bear the cross together! . . .”
“Give it to me!” said Raskolnikov. He did not want to upset her. But he immediately drew back the hand he had held out to take the cross.
“Not now, Sonya. Better later,” he added, to reassure her.
“Yes, yes, that will be better, better,” she picked up enthusiastically. “When you go to your suffering, then you'll put it on. You'll come to me, I'll put it on you, we'll pray and go.”
At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.
“Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?” someone's very familiar and polite voice was heard.
Sonya rushed to the door in fear. The blond physiognomy of Mr. Lebezyatnikov peeked into the room.
V
Lebezyatnikov looked alarmed. “I must see you, Sofya Semyonovna. Excuse me...I thought I'd find you here,” he turned suddenly to Raskolnikov, “that is, I thought nothing...of the sort... but I precisely thought... Katerina Ivanovna has gone out of her mind there at our place,” he suddenly said abruptly to Sonya, abandoning Raskolnikov.
Sonya gave a cry.
“That is, it seems so anyway. However...We don't know what to do, that's the thing! She came back...it seems she was thrown out of somewhere, maybe beaten as well... it seems so at least... She ran to see Semyon Zakharych's superior but didn't find him at home; he was out having dinner at some other general's...Imagine, she flew over to where this dinner was...to this other general's, and imagine—she really insisted, she called Semyon Zakharych's superior out and, it seems, away from the table at that. You can imagine what came of it. Naturally, she was chased away; and, according to her, she swore and threw something at him. Which is quite likely... How it happened that she wasn't arrested is beyond me! Now she's telling everyone about it, including Amalia Ivanovna, only it's hard to understand her, she's shouting and thrashing about... Ah, yes: she's saying and shouting that since everyone has abandoned her now, she'll take the children and go into the street with a barrel-organ, and the children will sing and dance, and so will she, and collect money, and stand every day under the general's window...'Let them see,' she says, 'how the noble children of a civil servant are going about begging in the streets!' She beats all the children, and they cry. She's teaching Lenya to sing 'The Little Farm,' and the boy to dance, and Polina Mikhailovna as well; she's tearing up all the clothes, making them some sort of little hats like actors; and she herself is going to carry a basin and bang on it for music...She won't listen to anything...Imagine, you see? It's simply impossible.”
Lebezyatnikov would have gone on longer, but Sonya, who had been listening to him almost without breathing, suddenly snatched her cape and hat and ran out of the room, putting them on as she ran. Raskolnikov went out after her, and Lebezyatnikov after him.
“She's certainly gone mad!” he said to Raskolnikov, as they came out to the street. “I just didn't want to frighten Sofya Semyonovna, so I said 'it seems,' but there isn't any doubt. It's those little knobs they say come out on the brain in consumption; too bad I don't know any medicine. By the way, I tried to convince her, but she won't listen to anything.”
“You told her about the little knobs?”
“I mean, not exactly about the little knobs. Besides, she wouldn't have understood anything. But what I say is this: if one convinces a person logically that he essentially has nothing to cry about, he'll stop crying. That's clear. Or are you convinced that he won't?”
“Life would be too easy that way,” Raskolnikov replied.
“I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon, of course it's quite hard for Katerina Ivanovna to understand, but do you know that in Paris serious experiments have already been performed with regard to the possibility of curing mad people by working through logical conviction alone? A professor there, who died recently, a serious scientist, fancied that such treatment should be possible. His basic idea is that there's no specific disorder in a mad person's organism, but that madness is, so to speak, a logical error, an error of judgment, a mistaken view of things. He would gradually prove his patient wrong, and imagine, they say he achieved results! But since he used showers at the same time, the results of the treatment are, of course, subject to doubt...Or so it seems.”
Raskolnikov had long since stopped listening. Having reached his house, he nodded to Lebezyatnikov and turned in at the gateway. Lebezyatnikov came to his senses, looked around, and ran on.
Raskolnikov walked into his closet and stood in the middle of it. Why had he come back here? He looked around at the shabby, yellowish wallpaper, the dust, his sofa...Some sharp, incessant rapping was coming from the courtyard, as if something, some nail, was being hammered in somewhere...He went to the window, stood on tiptoe, and for a long time, with an extremely attentive look, peered down into the courtyard. But the courtyard was empty; whoever was doing the rapping could not be seen. In the wing to the left, open windows could be seen here and there; pots with scrawny geraniums. Laundry was hanging outside the windows...He knew it all by heart. He turned away and sat down on the sofa.