“You'd better go out at least,” she said, after a pause, “you'd at least have some wind blowing on you. Are you going to eat, or what?”
“Later,” he uttered faintly. “Go!” And he waved his hand.
She stood there a while longer, looking at him with compassion, and went out.
After a few minutes he raised his eyes and stared for a long time at the tea and soup. Then he took the bread, took the spoon, and began to eat.
He ate a little, three or four spoonfuls, without appetite, as if mechanically. His head ached less. Having finished his dinner, he stretched out on the sofa again, but could not sleep now: he lay motionless, on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow. He kept daydreaming, and his dreams were all quite strange: most often he imagined he was somewhere in Africa, in Egypt, in some oasis. The caravan is resting, the camels are peacefully lying down; palm trees stand in a full circle around; everyone is having dinner. And he keeps drinking water right from the stream, which is there just beside him, flowing and bubbling. And the air is so fresh, and the wonderful, wonderful water is so blue, cold, running over the many-colored stones and over such clean sand sparkling with gold...All at once he clearly heard the clock strike. He gave a start, came to, raised his head, looked at the window, realized what time it was, and suddenly jumped up, pulling himself together, as if someone had torn him from the sofa. He tiptoed to the door, quietly opened it a little, and began listening down the stairs. His heart was pounding terribly. It was all quiet on the stairs, as if everyone were asleep...It seemed wild and strange to him that he could have slept so obliviously since the day before and still have done nothing, prepared nothing...And meanwhile it might just have struck six o'clock...In place of sleep and torpor, an extraordinary, feverish, and somehow confused bustle came over him. The preparations, incidentally, were not many. He strained all his energies to figure everything out and not forget anything, and his heart kept beating, pounding, so that it was even hard for him to breathe. First he had to make a loop and sew it into his coat—a moment's work. He felt beneath his pillow and found one of his shirts among the linen stuffed under it, old, unwashed, completely fallen to pieces. From its tatters he tore a strip about two inches wide and fifteen inches long. He folded the strip in two, took off his sturdy, loose-fitting summer coat, made from some heavy cotton material (the only outer garment he owned), and began sewing the two ends inside it, under the left armhole. His hands trembled as he sewed, but he managed it so that nothing could be seen when he put the coat on again. The needle and thread had been made ready long ago and lay in the table drawer wrapped in a piece of paper. As for the loop itself, this was a very clever invention of his own: the loop was to hold the axe. He could not go through the streets carrying an axe in his hands. And if he were to hide it under his coat, he would still have to keep it in place with his hand, which would be noticeable. But now, with the loop, he had only to slip the axe-head into it, and the axe would hang quietly under his arm all the way. And with his hand in the side pocket of his coat, he could also hold the end of the axe handle to keep it from swinging; and since the coat was very loose, a real bag, it could not be noticed from the outside that he was holding something through the pocket with his hand. This loop he had also thought up two weeks ago.
Having finished that, he thrust his fingers into the small space between his “Turkish” sofa and the floor, felt near the left corner, and pulled out the pledgehe had prepared long before and hidden there. This pledge was, incidentally, not a pledge at all, but simply a smoothly planed little piece of wood, about the size and thickness of a silver cigarette case. He had found this piece of wood by chance during one of his walks, in a courtyard, where there was some sort of workshop in one of the wings. Later he added to the piece of wood a thin and smooth strip of iron—probably a fragment of something— which he had also found in the street at the same time. Having put the two pieces together, of which the iron one was smaller than the wooden one, he tied them tightly, crisscross, with a thread, after which he wrapped them neatly and elegantly in clean, white paper, tied round with a thin ribbon, also crosswise, and with a little knot that would be rather tricky to untie. This was to distract the old woman's attention for a while, as she began fumbling with the knot, and thereby catch the right moment. And the iron strip was added for weight, so that at least for the first moment the old woman would not guess that the “article” was made of wood. All this had been kept for the time being under the sofa. He had no sooner taken out the pledge than someone shouted somewhere in the courtyard:
“It's long past six!”
“Long past! My God!”
He rushed to the door, listened, snatched his hat, and started down his thirteen steps, cautiously, inaudibly, like a cat. He was now faced with the most important thing—stealing the axe from the kitchen. That the deed was to be done with an axe he had already decided long ago. He also had a folding pruning knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less on his own strength, and therefore finally decided on the axe. We may note, incidentally, one peculiarity with regard to all the final decisions he came to in this affair. They had one strange property: the more final they became, the more hideous and absurd they at once appeared in his own eyes. In spite of all his tormenting inner struggle, never for a single moment during the whole time could he believe in the feasibility of his designs.
If he had ever once managed to analyze and finally decide everything down to the last detail, and there were no longer any doubts left—at that point he would most likely have renounced it all as absurd, monstrous, and impossible. But there remained a whole abyss of doubts and unresolved details. As for where to get the axe, this trifle did not worry him in the least, because nothing could have been simpler. It so happened that Nastasya was constantly in and out of the house, especially during the evening: she would run to see the neighbors or to do some shopping, and would always leave the door wide open. That was the landlady's only quarrel with her. All one had to do, then, was go quietly into the kitchen when the time came, take the axe, and an hour later (when it was all over) go and put it back. But doubts also presented themselves: suppose he comes in an hour to put it back and there is Nastasya. Of course, he would have to pass by and wait until she went out again. But what if meanwhile she misses the axe, looks for it, starts shouting—there is suspicion for you, or at least the grounds for suspicion.
But these were still trifles he had not even begun to think about, nor did he have time. He had thought about the main thing, and put the trifles off until he himself was convinced of everything.But this last seemed decidedly unrealizable. At least it seemed so to him. He could in no way imagine, for example, that one day he would finish thinking, get up, and—simply go there...Even his recent trial(that is, his visit with the intention of making a final survey of the place) was only a trying outand far from the real thing, as if he had said to himself: “Why not go and try it—enough of this dreaming!” and he was immediately unable to endure it, spat, and fled, furious with himself. And yet it would seem he had already concluded the whole analysis, in terms of a moral resolution of the question: his casuistry was sharp as a razor, and he no longer found any conscious objections. But in the final instance he simply did not believe himself, and stubbornly, slavishly, sought objections on all sides, gropingly, as if someone were forcing him and drawing him to it. This last day, which had come so much by chance and resolved everything at once, affected him almost wholly mechanically: as if someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural force, without objections. As if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine and he were being dragged into it.
At first—even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary. According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure of will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes. But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.