He bent forward, reached out, and lifted the hook.
His whole room was of a size that made it possible to lift the hook without getting out of bed.
True enough, the caretaker and Nastasya were standing there.
Nastasya looked him over somehow strangely. He gave the caretaker a defiant and desperate look. The latter handed him a gray paper, folded in two and sealed with bottle wax.
“A summons, from the station,” he pronounced, giving him the paper.
“What station?”
“The police, I mean; they're calling you in to the station. What other station...”
“The police! ... What for? . . .”
“How should I know? They want you, so go.” He looked at him intently, glanced around, and turned to leave.
“So you really got sick?” observed Nastasya, who had not taken her eyes off him. The caretaker also turned back for a moment. “He's had a fever since yesterday,” she added.
He made no reply and held the paper in his hands without unsealing it.
“Don't get up, then,” Nastasya continued, moved to pity and seeing that he was lowering his feet from the sofa. “Don't go, if you're sick; there's no fire. What's that in your hand?”
He looked: in his right hand were the cut-off pieces of fringe, the sock, and the scraps of the torn-out pocket. He had slept with them like that. Thinking about it afterwards, he recalled that even half-awakening in his fever, he would clutch them tightly in his hand and fall asleep again that way.
“Look, he's collected some rags and he sleeps with them like a treasure...” And Nastasya dissolved in her morbidly nervous laughter. He instantly shoved it all under the greatcoat and fixed her with a piercing look. Though at the moment he could understand very little in any full sense, he still felt that a man would not be treated that way if he were about to be arrested. “But...the police?”
“Have some tea. Would you like some? I'll bring it; I've got some left . . .”
“No...I'll go, I'll go now,” he muttered, getting to his feet.
“But you won't even make it down the stairs.”
“I'll go . . .”
“Suit yourself.”
She left after the caretaker. He immediately rushed to the light to examine the sock and the fringe. “There are stains, but not very noticeable; it's all dirty, rubbed off, discolored by now. No one would see anything unless they knew beforehand. So Nastasya couldn't have noticed anything from where she was, thank God!” Then he tremblingly unsealed the summons and began to read; he spent a long time reading it and finally understood. It was an ordinary summons from the local police to come to the chief's office that day at half past nine.
“But this is unheard of. I've never had any personal dealings with the police! And why precisely today?” he thought, in tormenting bewilderment. “Lord, get it over with!” He fell on his knees to pray, but burst out laughing instead—not at praying, but at himself. He began hurriedly to dress. “If I'm to perish, let me perish, I don't care! Must put that sock on!” he suddenly thought. “It will rub away even more in the dust and the marks will disappear.” But as soon as he put it on, he immediately pulled it off again with loathing and horror. He pulled it off, but, realizing that he had no other, he picked it up and put it on again—and again burst out laughing. “It's all conventional, all relative, all just a matter of form,” he thought fleetingly, with only a small part of his mind, while his whole body trembled. “There, I put it on! I did finally put it on!” But his laughter immediately gave way to despair. “No, I'm not strong enough . . .” the thought came to him.
His legs were trembling. “From fear,” he muttered to himself. His head was spinning and throbbing from high fever. “It's a ruse! They want to lure me there by a ruse and suddenly throw me off with everything,” he continued to himself, walking out to the stairs. “The worst of it is that I'm almost delirious...I might blurt out some foolishness . . .”
On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving the things as they were, in the hole behind the wallpaper. “And there may be a search right now, while I'm out,” he remembered and stopped. But such despair and, if one may put it so, such cynicism of perdition suddenly possessed him that he waved his hand and went on.
“Only get it over with! . . .”
Again it was unbearably hot out; not a drop of rain had fallen for all those days. Again dust, brick, lime; again the stench from the shops and taverns; again drunks all the time, Finnish peddlers, half-dilapidated cabbies. The sun flashed brightly in his eyes, so that it hurt him to look, and he became quite dizzy—the usual sensation of a man in a fever who suddenly steps outside on a bright, sunny day.
Coming to the turn onto yesterdayV street, he peered down it with tormenting anxiety, at thathouse...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.