“But where are you going? Why? What's wrong with you? You can't do this!” Razumikhin kept murmuring, utterly at a loss.
Raskolnikov stopped again.
“Once and for all, never ask me about anything. I have no answers for you...Don't come to me. Maybe I'll come here. Leave me...but don't leave them.Do you understand me?”
It was dark in the corridor; they were standing near a light. For a minute they looked silently at each other. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov's burning and fixed look seemed to grow more intense every moment, penetrating his soul, his consciousness. All at once Razumikhin gave a start. Something strange seemed to pass between them...as if the hint of some idea, something horrible, hideous, flitted by and was suddenly understood on both sides...Razumikhin turned pale as a corpse.
“You understand now?” Raskolnikov said suddenly, with a painfully contorted face. “Go back, go to them,” he added suddenly, and, turning quickly, he walked out of the house . . .
I will not describe here what went on that evening at Pulcheria Alexandrovna's, how Razumikhin went back to them, how he tried to calm them, how he swore that Rodya needed to be allowed some rest in his illness, swore that Rodya would come without fail, would visit them every day, that he was very, very upset, that he should not be irritated; that he, Razumikhin, would keep an eye on him, would find him a doctor, a good doctor, the best, a whole consultation...In short, from that evening on Razumikhin became their son and brother.
IV
And Raskolnikov went straight to the house on the canal where Sonya lived. It was a three-storied, old, and green-colored house. He sought out the caretaker and got vague directions from him as to where Kapernaumov the tailor lived. Having located the entrance to a narrow and dark stairway in the corner of the yard, he went up, finally, to the second floor and came out onto a gallery running around it on the courtyard side. While he was wandering in the darkness and in perplexity with regard to the possible whereabouts of Kapernaumov's entrance, a door opened suddenly, three steps away from him; he took hold of it mechanically.
“Who's there?” a woman's voice asked in alarm.
“It's me...to see you,” Raskolnikov replied, and stepped into the tiny entryway. There, on a chair with a broken seat, stood a candle in a bent copper candlestick.
“It's you! Lord!” Sonya cried weakly, and stood rooted to the spot.
“Where do I go? In here?”
And, trying not to look at her, Raskolnikov went quickly into the room.
A moment later Sonya came in with the candle, put the candlestick down, and stood before him, completely at a loss, all in some inexpressible agitation, and obviously frightened by his unexpected visit. Color suddenly rushed to her pale face, and tears even came to her eyes...She had a feeling of nausea, and shame, and sweetness...Raskolnikov quickly turned away and sat down on a chair by the table. He managed to glance around the room as he did so.
It was a big but extremely low-ceilinged room, the only one let by the Kapernaumovs, the locked door to whose apartment was in the wall to the left. Opposite, in the right-hand wall, there was another door, always tightly shut. This led to another, adjoining apartment, with a different number. Sonya's room had something barnlike about it; it was of a very irregular rectangular shape, which gave it an ugly appearance. A wall with three windows looking onto the canal cut somehow obliquely across the room, making one corner, formed of a terribly acute angle, run somewhere into the depths where, in the weak light, it could not even be seen very well; the other corner was too grotesquely obtuse. The whole big room had almost no furniture in it. There was a bed in the corner to the right; a chair next to it, nearer the door. Along the same wall as the bed, just by the door to the other apartment, stood a simple wooden table covered with a dark blue cloth and, at the table, two rush-bottom chairs. Then, against the opposite wall, near the acute corner, there was a small chest of drawers, made of plain wood, standing as if lost in the emptiness. That was all there was in the room. The yellowish, frayed, and shabby wallpaper was blackened in all the corners; it must have been damp and fumy in winter. The poverty was evident; there were not even any curtains over the bed.
Sonya looked silently at her visitor, who was examining her room so attentively and unceremoniously, and at last even began to tremble with fear, as though she were standing before the judge and ruler of her destiny.
“It's late . .. already eleven?” he asked, still without raising his eyes to her.
“Yes,” Sonya murmured. “Ah, yes, it is!” she suddenly hurried on, as if the whole way out for her lay there. “The landlord's clock just struck...I heard it myself...It is!”
“I've come to you for the last time,” Raskolnikov went on sullenly, though it was in fact the first time. “I may never see you again . . .”
“You're...going away?”
“I don't know...tomorrow, everything . . .”
“So you won't be at Katerina Ivanovna's tomorrow?” Sonya's voice faltered.
“I don't know. Tomorrow morning, everything...That's not the point; I came to say one word to you . . .”
He raised his pensive eyes to her and suddenly noticed that he was sitting and she was still standing before him.
“Why are you standing? Sit down,” he said suddenly, in a changed, quiet and tender voice.
She sat down. He looked at her for about a minute, kindly and almost compassionately.
“How thin you are! Look at your hand! Quite transparent. Fingers like a dead person's.”
He took her hand. Sonya smiled weakly.
“I've always been like that,” she said.
“Even when you were living at home?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, but of course!” he uttered abruptly, and the expression of his face and the sound of his voice suddenly changed again. He looked once more around the room.
“You rent from Kapernaumov?”
“Yes, sir . . .”
“That's their door there?”
“Yes...They have a room the same as this one.”
“All in one room?”
“Yes, in one room, sir.”
“I'd be scared in your room at night,” he remarked sullenly.
“The landlords are very nice, very affectionate,” Sonya replied, as if she had still not come to her senses or collected her thoughts, “and all the furniture and everything...everything is theirs. And they're very kind, and the children often come to see me, too.”
“They're the ones who are tongue-tied?”
“Yes, sir...He stammers, and he's lame as well. And his wife, too...Not that she really stammers, but it's as if she doesn't quite get the words out. She's kind, very. And he's a former household serf. And there are seven children...and only the oldest one stammers; the rest are just sick...but they don't stammer...But how do you know about them?” she added with some surprise.
“Your father told me everything that time. He told me everything about you...How you went out at six o'clock, and came back after eight, and how Katerina Ivanovna knelt by your bed.”
Sonya was embarrassed.
“I thought I saw him today,” she whispered hesitantly.
“Whom?”
“My father. I was walking along the street, nearby, at the corner, around ten o'clock, and he seemed to be walking ahead of me. It looked just like him. I was even going to go to Katerina Ivanovna . . .”
“You were out walking?”
“Yes,” Sonya whispered abruptly, embarrassed again and looking down.
“But Katerina Ivanovna all but beat you when you lived at your father's?”
“Ah, no, what are you saying, no!” Sonya looked at him even with some sort of fright.
“So you love her?”
“Love her? But, of co-o-ourse!” Sonya drew the word out plaintively, suddenly clasping her hands together with suffering. “Ah! You don't...If only you knew her! She's just like a child. It's as if she's lost her mind...from grief. And she used to be so intelligent...so generous...so kind! You know nothing, nothing...ah!”
Sonya spoke as if in despair, worrying and suffering and wringing her hands. Her pale cheeks became flushed again; her eyes had a tormented look. One could see that terribly much had been touched in her, that she wanted terribly to express something, to speak out, to intercede. Some sort of insatiablecompassion, if one may put it so, showed suddenly in all the features of her face.