Never, never before had he felt himself so terribly lonely!
Yes, he felt once again that he might indeed come to hate Sonya, and precisely now, when he had made her more miserable. Why had he gone to her to beg for her tears? Why was it so necessary for him to eat up her life? Oh, meanness!
“I'll stay alone!” he suddenly said resolutely. “And she won't come to the jail!”
After about five minutes, he raised his head and smiled strangely. The thought was a strange one: “Perhaps hard labor would indeed be better,” it had suddenly occurred to him.
He did not remember how long he had been sitting in his room with vague thoughts crowding in his head. Suddenly the door opened and Avdotya Romanovna came in. She stopped first and looked at him from the threshold, as he had done earlier at Sonya's; then she went and sat down on a chair facing him, in the same place as yesterday. He looked at her silently and somehow unthinkingly.
“Don't be angry, brother, I've come only for a moment,” said Dunya. The expression of her face was thoughtful but not stern. Her eyes were clear and gentle. He could see that this one, too, had come to him with love.
“Brother, I know everything now, everything.Dmitri Prokofych has explained and told me everything. You are being persecuted and tormented because of a stupid and odious suspicion...Dmitri Prokofych told me that there isn't any danger and that you needn't take it with such horror. I disagree. I fully understandall the resentment you must feel, and that this indignation may leave its mark forever. That is what I am afraid of. I do not judge and have no right to judge you for abandoning us, and forgive me if I reproached you before. I feel in myself that if I had such a great grief, I, too, would leave everyone. I won't tell mother about this,but I'll talk about you constantly, and I'll tell her, on your behalf, that you will come very soon. Don't suffer over her; Iwill set her at ease; but don't make her suffer either—come at least once; remember she's your mother! I've come now only to say” (Dunya began to get up) “that in case you should need me for something, or should need... my whole life, or...call me, and I'll come. Good-bye!”
She turned sharply and walked to the door.
“Dunya!” Raskolnikov stopped her, got up, and went to her. “This Razumikhin, Dmitri Prokofych, is a very good man.”
Dunya blushed a little.
“Well?” she asked, after waiting a moment.
“He is a practical man, hard-working, honest, and capable of deep love...Good-bye, Dunya.”
Dunya flushed all over, and then suddenly became alarmed.
“What is it, brother, are we really parting forever, since you're making me...such bequests?”
“Never mind...good-bye . . .”
He turned and walked away from her to the window. She stood, looked at him uneasily, and left in alarm.
No, he was not cold towards her. There had been a moment (the very last) when he had wanted terribly to embrace her tightly, to make it a real farewell,and even to tell her,but he had not even dared to give her his hand.
“She might shudder later when she remembered that I embraced her now; she might say I stole her kiss!
“And will this oneendure, or will she not?” he added to himself, after a few minutes. “No, she will not; her kindcannot endure! Her kind can never endure...”
And he thought of Sonya.
There came a breath of fresh air from the window. The light outside was no longer shining so brightly. He suddenly took his cap and went out.
Of course, he could not and did not want to concern himself with his ill condition. But all this ceaseless anxiety and all this horror of the soul could not go without consequences. And if he was not yet lying in real delirium, it was perhaps precisely because this ceaseless inner anxiety still kept him on his feet and conscious, but somehow artificially, for a time.
He wandered aimlessly. The sun was going down. Some particular anguish had begun telling in him lately. There was nothing particularly acute or burning in it; but there came from it a breath of something permanent, eternal, a presentiment of unending years of this cold, deadening anguish, a presentiment of some eternity on “a square foot of space.” This feeling usually began to torment him even more strongly in the evening hours.
“Try keeping yourself from doing something stupid, with these stupid, purely physical ailments that depend only on some sunset! One could wind up going not just to Sonya, but to Dunya!” he muttered hatefully.
Someone called out to him. He turned around. Lebezyatnikov rushed up to him.
“Imagine, I was just at your place, I've been looking for you. Imagine, she carried out her intention and took the children away! Sofya Semyonovna and I had a hard time finding them. She's banging on a frying pan, making the children sing and dance. The children are crying. They stand at intersections and outside of shops. Foolish people are running after them. Come on!”
“And Sonya?...” Raskolnikov asked in alarm, hurrying after Lebezyatnikov.
“Simply in a frenzy. That is, Sofya Semyonovna's not in a frenzy, but Katerina Ivanovna is; however, Sofya Semyonovna's in a frenzy, too. And Katerina Ivanovna is in a complete frenzy. She's gone finally crazy, I tell you. They'll be taken to the police. You can imagine what effect that will have...They're at the canal now, near the------sky Bridge, not far from Sofya Semyonovna's. Nearby.”
At the canal, not very far from the bridge, two houses away from where Sonya lived, a small crowd of people had gathered. Boys and girls especially came running. The hoarse, strained voice of Katerina Ivanovna could already be heard from the bridge. And indeed it was a strange spectacle, capable of attracting the interest of the street public. Katerina Ivanovna, in her old dress, the flannel shawl, and a battered straw hat shoved to one side in an ugly lump, was indeed in a real frenzy. She was tired and short of breath. Her worn-out, consumptive face showed more suffering than ever (besides, a consumptive always looks more sick and disfigured outside, in the sun, than at home), but her agitated state would not leave her, and she was becoming more irritated every moment. She kept rushing to the children, yelling at them, coaxing them, teaching them right there, in front of people, how to dance and what to sing; she would start explaining to them why it was necessary, despair over their slow-wittedness, beat them...Then, before she had finished, she would rush to the public; if she noticed an even slightly well-dressed person stopping to look, she would immediately start explaining to him that this was what the children “of a noble, one might even say aristocratic, house” had been driven to. If she heard laughter or some taunting little remark from the crowd, she would immediately fall upon the impudent ones and start squabbling with them. Some, indeed, were laughing; others were shaking their heads; in general, everyone was curious to see the crazy woman with her frightened children. The frying pan Lebezyatnikov had spoken of was not there; at least Raskolnikov did not see it; but instead of banging on a frying pan, Katerina Ivanovna would begin clapping out the rhythm with her dry palms, making Polechka sing and Lenya and Kolya dance, even beginning to sing along herself, but breaking off each time at the second note with a racking cough, at which she would again fall into despair, curse her cough, and even weep. Most of all it was the frightened tears of Kolya and Lenya that drove her to distraction. There had indeed been an attempt to dress the children up in street-singers' costumes. The boy was wearing a turban of some red and white material, to represent a Turk. No costume could be found for Lenya; all she had was a red knitted worsted hat (or rather nightcap) from the late Semyon Zakharych, with a broken ostrich feather stuck in it that once belonged to Katerina Ivanovna's grandmother and had been kept until now in the trunk as a family curio. Polechka was wearing her usual little dress. Timid and lost, she watched her mother, would not leave her side, hiding her tears, guessing at her mother's madness, and looking around uneasily. The street and the crowd frightened her terribly. Sonya doggedly followed Katerina Ivanovna, weeping and begging her all the while to go back home. But Katerina Ivanovna was implacable.