CHAPTER IV

<h2><a id="link2HCH0030"/>
  CHAPTER IV
</h2>
<p>
  Raskolnikov had been a vigorous and active champion of Sonia against
  Luzhin, although he had such a load of horror and anguish in his own
  heart. But having gone through so much in the morning, he found a sort of
  relief in a change of sensations, apart from the strong personal feeling
  which impelled him to defend Sonia. He was agitated too, especially at
  some moments, by the thought of his approaching interview with Sonia: he
  <i>had</i> to tell her who had killed Lizaveta. He knew the terrible
  suffering it would be to him and, as it were, brushed away the thought of
  it. So when he cried as he left Katerina Ivanovna’s, “Well, Sofya
  Semyonovna, we shall see what you’ll say now!” he was still superficially
  excited, still vigorous and defiant from his triumph over Luzhin. But,
  strange to say, by the time he reached Sonia’s lodging, he felt a sudden
  impotence and fear. He stood still in hesitation at the door, asking
  himself the strange question: “Must he tell her who killed Lizaveta?” It
  was a strange question because he felt at the very time not only that he
  could not help telling her, but also that he could not put off the
  telling. He did not yet know why it must be so, he only <i>felt</i> it,
  and the agonising sense of his impotence before the inevitable almost
  crushed him. To cut short his hesitation and suffering, he quickly opened
  the door and looked at Sonia from the doorway. She was sitting with her
  elbows on the table and her face in her hands, but seeing Raskolnikov she
  got up at once and came to meet him as though she were expecting him.
</p>
<p>
  “What would have become of me but for you?” she said quickly, meeting him
  in the middle of the room.
</p>
<p>
  Evidently she was in haste to say this to him. It was what she had been
  waiting for.
</p>
<p>
  Raskolnikov went to the table and sat down on the chair from which she had
  only just risen. She stood facing him, two steps away, just as she had
  done the day before.
</p>
<p>
  “Well, Sonia?” he said, and felt that his voice was trembling, “it was all
  due to ‘your social position and the habits associated with it.’ Did you
  understand that just now?”
 </p>
<p>
  Her face showed her distress.
</p>
<p>
  “Only don’t talk to me as you did yesterday,” she interrupted him. “Please
  don’t begin it. There is misery enough without that.”
 </p>
<p>
  She made haste to smile, afraid that he might not like the reproach.
</p>
<p>
  “I was silly to come away from there. What is happening there now? I
  wanted to go back directly, but I kept thinking that... you would come.”
 </p>
<p>
  He told her that Amalia Ivanovna was turning them out of their lodging and
  that Katerina Ivanovna had run off somewhere “to seek justice.”
 </p>
<p>
  “My God!” cried Sonia, “let’s go at once....”
 </p>
<p>
  And she snatched up her cape.
</p>
<p>
  “It’s everlastingly the same thing!” said Raskolnikov, irritably. “You’ve
  no thought except for them! Stay a little with me.”
 </p>
<p>
  “But... Katerina Ivanovna?”
 </p>
<p>
  “You won’t lose Katerina Ivanovna, you may be sure, she’ll come to you
  herself since she has run out,” he added peevishly. “If she doesn’t find
  you here, you’ll be blamed for it....”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia sat down in painful suspense. Raskolnikov was silent, gazing at the
  floor and deliberating.
</p>
<p>
  “This time Luzhin did not want to prosecute you,” he began, not looking at
  Sonia, “but if he had wanted to, if it had suited his plans, he would have
  sent you to prison if it had not been for Lebeziatnikov and me. Ah?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Yes,” she assented in a faint voice. “Yes,” she repeated, preoccupied and
  distressed.
</p>
<p>
  “But I might easily not have been there. And it was quite an accident
  Lebeziatnikov’s turning up.”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia was silent.
</p>
<p>
  “And if you’d gone to prison, what then? Do you remember what I said
  yesterday?”
 </p>
<p>
  Again she did not answer. He waited.
</p>
<p>
  “I thought you would cry out again ‘don’t speak of it, leave off.’”
   Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one. “What, silence again?”
   he asked a minute later. “We must talk about something, you know. It would
  be interesting for me to know how you would decide a certain ‘problem’ as
  Lebeziatnikov would say.” (He was beginning to lose the thread.) “No,
  really, I am serious. Imagine, Sonia, that you had known all Luzhin’s
  intentions beforehand. Known, that is, for a fact, that they would be the
  ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children and yourself thrown in—since
  you don’t count yourself for anything—Polenka too... for she’ll go
  the same way. Well, if suddenly it all depended on your decision whether
  he or they should go on living, that is whether Luzhin should go on living
  and doing wicked things, or Katerina Ivanovna should die? How would you
  decide which of them was to die? I ask you?”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia looked uneasily at him. There was something peculiar in this
  hesitating question, which seemed approaching something in a roundabout
  way.
</p>
<p>
  “I felt that you were going to ask some question like that,” she said,
  looking inquisitively at him.
</p>
<p>
  “I dare say you did. But how is it to be answered?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Why do you ask about what could not happen?” said Sonia reluctantly.
</p>
<p>
  “Then it would be better for Luzhin to go on living and doing wicked
  things? You haven’t dared to decide even that!”
 </p>
<p>
  “But I can’t know the Divine Providence.... And why do you ask what can’t
  be answered? What’s the use of such foolish questions? How could it happen
  that it should depend on my decision—who has made me a judge to
  decide who is to live and who is not to live?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing
  anything,” Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.
</p>
<p>
  “You’d better say straight out what you want!” Sonia cried in distress.
  “You are leading up to something again.... Can you have come simply to
  torture me?”
 </p>
<p>
  She could not control herself and began crying bitterly. He looked at her
  in gloomy misery. Five minutes passed.
</p>
<p>
  “Of course you’re right, Sonia,” he said softly at last. He was suddenly
  changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone.
  Even his voice was suddenly weak. “I told you yesterday that I was not
  coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I’ve said is to ask
  forgiveness.... I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake. I
  was asking forgiveness, Sonia....”
 </p>
<p>
  He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in his
  pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.
</p>
<p>
  And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred
  for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened of
  this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met
  her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was love in
  them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling; he
  had taken the one feeling for the other. It only meant that <i>that</i>
  minute had come.
</p>
<p>
  He hid his face in his hands again and bowed his head. Suddenly he turned
  pale, got up from his chair, looked at Sonia, and without uttering a word
  sat down mechanically on her bed.
</p>
<p>
  His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had stood
  over the old woman with the axe in his hand and felt that “he must not
  lose another minute.”
 </p>
<p>
  “What’s the matter?” asked Sonia, dreadfully frightened.
</p>
<p>
  He could not utter a word. This was not at all, not at all the way he had
  intended to “tell” and he did not understand what was happening to him
  now. She went up to him, softly, sat down on the bed beside him and
  waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart throbbed and sank. It was
  unendurable; he turned his deadly pale face to her. His lips worked,
  helplessly struggling to utter something. A pang of terror passed through
  Sonia’s heart.
</p>
<p>
  “What’s the matter?” she repeated, drawing a little away from him.
</p>
<p>
  “Nothing, Sonia, don’t be frightened.... It’s nonsense. It really is
  nonsense, if you think of it,” he muttered, like a man in delirium. “Why
  have I come to torture you?” he added suddenly, looking at her. “Why,
  really? I keep asking myself that question, Sonia....”
 </p>
<p>
  He had perhaps been asking himself that question a quarter of an hour
  before, but now he spoke helplessly, hardly knowing what he said and
  feeling a continual tremor all over.
</p>
<p>
  “Oh, how you are suffering!” she muttered in distress, looking intently at
  him.
</p>
<p>
  “It’s all nonsense.... Listen, Sonia.” He suddenly smiled, a pale helpless
  smile for two seconds. “You remember what I meant to tell you yesterday?”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia waited uneasily.
</p>
<p>
  “I said as I went away that perhaps I was saying good-bye for ever, but
  that if I came to-day I would tell you who... who killed Lizaveta.”
 </p>
<p>
  She began trembling all over.
</p>
<p>
  “Well, here I’ve come to tell you.”
 </p>
<p>
  “Then you really meant it yesterday?” she whispered with difficulty. “How
  do you know?” she asked quickly, as though suddenly regaining her reason.
</p>
<p>
  Sonia’s face grew paler and paler, and she breathed painfully.
</p>
<p>
  “I know.”
 </p>
<p>
  She paused a minute.
</p>
<p>
  “Have they found him?” she asked timidly.
</p>
<p>
  “No.”
 </p>
<p>
  “Then how do you know about <i>it</i>?” she asked again, hardly audibly
  and again after a minute’s pause.
</p>
<p>
  He turned to her and looked very intently at her.
</p>
<p>
  “Guess,” he said, with the same distorted helpless smile.
</p>
<p>
  A shudder passed over her.
</p>
<p>
  “But you... why do you frighten me like this?” she said, smiling like a
  child.
</p>
<p>
  “I must be a great friend of <i>his</i>... since I know,” Raskolnikov went
  on, still gazing into her face, as though he could not turn his eyes away.
  “He... did not mean to kill that Lizaveta... he... killed her
  accidentally.... He meant to kill the old woman when she was alone and he
  went there... and then Lizaveta came in... he killed her too.”
 </p>
<p>
  Another awful moment passed. Both still gazed at one another.
</p>
<p>
  “You can’t guess, then?” he asked suddenly, feeling as though he were
  flinging himself down from a steeple.
</p>
<p>
  “N-no...” whispered Sonia.
</p>
<p>
  “Take a good look.”
 </p>
<p>
  As soon as he had said this again, the same familiar sensation froze his
  heart. He looked at her and all at once seemed to see in her face the face
  of Lizaveta. He remembered clearly the expression in Lizaveta’s face, when
  he approached her with the axe and she stepped back to the wall, putting
  out her hand, with childish terror in her face, looking as little children
  do when they begin to be frightened of something, looking intently and
  uneasily at what frightens them, shrinking back and holding out their
  little hands on the point of crying. Almost the same thing happened now to
  Sonia. With the same helplessness and the same terror, she looked at him
  for a while and, suddenly putting out her left hand, pressed her fingers
  faintly against his breast and slowly began to get up from the bed, moving
  further from him and keeping her eyes fixed even more immovably on him.
  Her terror infected him. The same fear showed itself on his face. In the
  same way he stared at her and almost with the same <i>childish</i> smile.
</p>
<p>
  “Have you guessed?” he whispered at last.
</p>
<p>
  “Good God!” broke in an awful wail from her bosom.
</p>
<p>
  She sank helplessly on the bed with her face in the pillows, but a moment
  later she got up, moved quickly to him, seized both his hands and,
  gripping them tight in her thin fingers, began looking into his face again
  with the same intent stare. In this last desperate look she tried to look
  into him and catch some last hope. But there was no hope; there was no
  doubt remaining; it was all true! Later on, indeed, when she recalled that
  moment, she thought it strange and wondered why she had seen at once that
  there was no doubt. She could not have said, for instance, that she had
  foreseen something of the sort—and yet now, as soon as he told her,
  she suddenly fancied that she had really foreseen this very thing.
</p>
<p>
  “Stop, Sonia, enough! don’t torture me,” he begged her miserably.
</p>
<p>
  It was not at all, not at all like this he had thought of telling her, but
  this is how it happened.
</p>
<p>
  She jumped up, seeming not to know what she was doing, and, wringing her
  hands, walked into the middle of the room; but quickly went back and sat
  down again beside him, her shoulder almost touching his. All of a sudden
  she started as though she had been stabbed, uttered a cry and fell on her
  knees before him, she did not know why.
</p>
<p>
  “What have you done—what have you done to yourself?” she said in
  despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms
  round him, and held him tightly.
</p>
<p>
  Raskolnikov drew back and looked at her with a mournful smile.
</p>
<p>
  “You are a strange girl, Sonia—you kiss me and hug me when I tell
  you about that.... You don’t think what you are doing.”
 </p>
<p>
  “There is no one—no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!”
   she cried in a frenzy, not hearing what he said, and she suddenly broke
  into violent hysterical weeping.
</p>
<p>
  A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at
  once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes and
  hung on his eyelashes.
</p>
<p>
  “Then you won’t leave me, Sonia?” he said, looking at her almost with
  hope.
</p>
<p>
  “No, no, never, nowhere!” cried Sonia. “I will follow you, I will follow
  you everywhere. Oh, my God! Oh, how miserable I am!... Why, why didn’t I
  know you before! Why didn’t you come before? Oh, dear!”
 </p>
<p>
  “Here I have come.”
 </p>
<p>
  “Yes, now! What’s to be done now?... Together, together!” she repeated as
  it were unconsciously, and she hugged him again. “I’ll follow you to
  Siberia!”
 </p>
<p>
  He recoiled at this, and the same hostile, almost haughty smile came to
  his lips.
</p>
<p>
  “Perhaps I don’t want to go to Siberia yet, Sonia,” he said.
</p>
<p>
  Sonia looked at him quickly.
</p>
<p>
  Again after her first passionate, agonising sympathy for the unhappy man
  the terrible idea of the murder overwhelmed her. In his changed tone she
  seemed to hear the murderer speaking. She looked at him bewildered. She
  knew nothing as yet, why, how, with what object it had been. Now all these
  questions rushed at once into her mind. And again she could not believe
  it: “He, he is a murderer! Could it be true?”
 </p>
<p>
  “What’s the meaning of it? Where am I?” she said in complete bewilderment,
  as though still unable to recover herself. “How could you, you, a man like
  you.... How could you bring yourself to it?... What does it mean?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Oh, well—to plunder. Leave off, Sonia,” he answered wearily, almost
  with vexation.
</p>
<p>
  Sonia stood as though struck dumb, but suddenly she cried:
</p>
<p>
  “You were hungry! It was... to help your mother? Yes?”
 </p>
<p>
  “No, Sonia, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. “I was
  not so hungry.... I certainly did want to help my mother, but... that’s
  not the real thing either.... Don’t torture me, Sonia.”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia clasped her hands.
</p>
<p>
  “Could it, could it all be true? Good God, what a truth! Who could believe
  it? And how could you give away your last farthing and yet rob and murder!
  Ah,” she cried suddenly, “that money you gave Katerina Ivanovna... that
  money.... Can that money...”
 </p>
<p>
  “No, Sonia,” he broke in hurriedly, “that money was not it. Don’t worry
  yourself! That money my mother sent me and it came when I was ill, the day
  I gave it to you.... Razumihin saw it... he received it for me.... That
  money was mine—my own.”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia listened to him in bewilderment and did her utmost to comprehend.
</p>
<p>
  “And <i>that</i> money.... I don’t even know really whether there was any
  money,” he added softly, as though reflecting. “I took a purse off her
  neck, made of chamois leather... a purse stuffed full of something... but
  I didn’t look in it; I suppose I hadn’t time.... And the things—chains
  and trinkets—I buried under a stone with the purse next morning in a
  yard off the V—— Prospect. They are all there now....”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia strained every nerve to listen.
</p>
<p>
  “Then why... why, you said you did it to rob, but you took nothing?” she
  asked quickly, catching at a straw.
</p>
<p>
  “I don’t know.... I haven’t yet decided whether to take that money or
  not,” he said, musing again; and, seeming to wake up with a start, he gave
  a brief ironical smile. “Ach, what silly stuff I am talking, eh?”
 </p>
<p>
  The thought flashed through Sonia’s mind, wasn’t he mad? But she dismissed
  it at once. “No, it was something else.” She could make nothing of it,
  nothing.
</p>
<p>
  “Do you know, Sonia,” he said suddenly with conviction, “let me tell you:
  if I’d simply killed because I was hungry,” laying stress on every word
  and looking enigmatically but sincerely at her, “I should be <i>happy</i>
  now. You must believe that! What would it matter to you,” he cried a
  moment later with a sort of despair, “what would it matter to you if I
  were to confess that I did wrong? What do you gain by such a stupid
  triumph over me? Ah, Sonia, was it for that I’ve come to you to-day?”
 </p>
<p>
  Again Sonia tried to say something, but did not speak.
</p>
<p>
  “I asked you to go with me yesterday because you are all I have left.”
 </p>
<p>
  “Go where?” asked Sonia timidly.
</p>
<p>
  “Not to steal and not to murder, don’t be anxious,” he smiled bitterly.
  “We are so different.... And you know, Sonia, it’s only now, only this
  moment that I understand <i>where</i> I asked you to go with me yesterday!
  Yesterday when I said it I did not know where. I asked you for one thing,
  I came to you for one thing—not to leave me. You won’t leave me,
  Sonia?”
 </p>
<p>
  She squeezed his hand.
</p>
<p>
  “And why, why did I tell her? Why did I let her know?” he cried a minute
  later in despair, looking with infinite anguish at her. “Here you expect
  an explanation from me, Sonia; you are sitting and waiting for it, I see
  that. But what can I tell you? You won’t understand and will only suffer
  misery... on my account! Well, you are crying and embracing me again. Why
  do you do it? Because I couldn’t bear my burden and have come to throw it
  on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such
  a mean wretch?”
 </p>
<p>
  “But aren’t you suffering, too?” cried Sonia.
</p>
<p>
  Again a wave of the same feeling surged into his heart, and again for an
  instant softened it.
</p>
<p>
  “Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great
  deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn’t have come.
  But I am a coward and... a mean wretch. But... never mind! That’s not the
  point. I must speak now, but I don’t know how to begin.”
 </p>
<p>
  He paused and sank into thought.
</p>
<p>
  “Ach, we are so different,” he cried again, “we are not alike. And why,
  why did I come? I shall never forgive myself that.”
 </p>
<p>
  “No, no, it was a good thing you came,” cried Sonia. “It’s better I should
  know, far better!”
 </p>
<p>
  He looked at her with anguish.
</p>
<p>
  “What if it were really that?” he said, as though reaching a conclusion.
  “Yes, that’s what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I
  killed her.... Do you understand now?”
 </p>
<p>
  “N-no,” Sonia whispered naïvely and timidly. “Only speak, speak, I shall
  understand, I shall understand <i>in myself</i>!” she kept begging him.
</p>
<p>
  “You’ll understand? Very well, we shall see!” He paused and was for some
  time lost in meditation.
</p>
<p>
  “It was like this: I asked myself one day this question—what if
  Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not
  had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career
  with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there
  had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be
  murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand).
  Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other
  means? Wouldn’t he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental
  and... and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I worried myself
  fearfully over that ‘question’ so that I was awfully ashamed when I
  guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given
  him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was not
  monumental... that he would not have seen that there was anything in it to
  pause over, and that, if he had had no other way, he would have strangled
  her in a minute without thinking about it! Well, I too... left off
  thinking about it... murdered her, following his example. And that’s
  exactly how it was! Do you think it funny? Yes, Sonia, the funniest thing
  of all is that perhaps that’s just how it was.”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia did not think it at all funny.
</p>
<p>
  “You had better tell me straight out... without examples,” she begged,
  still more timidly and scarcely audibly.
</p>
<p>
  He turned to her, looked sadly at her and took her hands.
</p>
<p>
  “You are right again, Sonia. Of course that’s all nonsense, it’s almost
  all talk! You see, you know of course that my mother has scarcely
  anything, my sister happened to have a good education and was condemned to
  drudge as a governess. All their hopes were centered on me. I was a
  student, but I couldn’t keep myself at the university and was forced for a
  time to leave it. Even if I had lingered on like that, in ten or twelve
  years I might (with luck) hope to be some sort of teacher or clerk with a
  salary of a thousand roubles” (he repeated it as though it were a lesson)
  “and by that time my mother would be worn out with grief and anxiety and I
  could not succeed in keeping her in comfort while my sister... well, my
  sister might well have fared worse! And it’s a hard thing to pass
  everything by all one’s life, to turn one’s back upon everything, to
  forget one’s mother and decorously accept the insults inflicted on one’s
  sister. Why should one? When one has buried them to burden oneself with
  others—wife and children—and to leave them again without a
  farthing? So I resolved to gain possession of the old woman’s money and to
  use it for my first years without worrying my mother, to keep myself at
  the university and for a little while after leaving it—and to do
  this all on a broad, thorough scale, so as to build up a completely new
  career and enter upon a new life of independence.... Well... that’s
  all.... Well, of course in killing the old woman I did wrong.... Well,
  that’s enough.”
 </p>
<p>
  He struggled to the end of his speech in exhaustion and let his head sink.
</p>
<p>
  “Oh, that’s not it, that’s not it,” Sonia cried in distress. “How could
  one... no, that’s not right, not right.”
 </p>
<p>
  “You see yourself that it’s not right. But I’ve spoken truly, it’s the
  truth.”
 </p>
<p>
  “As though that could be the truth! Good God!”
 </p>
<p>
  “I’ve only killed a louse, Sonia, a useless, loathsome, harmful creature.”
 </p>
<p>
  “A human being—a louse!”
 </p>
<p>
  “I too know it wasn’t a louse,” he answered, looking strangely at her.
  “But I am talking nonsense, Sonia,” he added. “I’ve been talking nonsense
  a long time.... That’s not it, you are right there. There were quite,
  quite other causes for it! I haven’t talked to anyone for so long,
  Sonia.... My head aches dreadfully now.”
 </p>
<p>
  His eyes shone with feverish brilliance. He was almost delirious; an
  uneasy smile strayed on his lips. His terrible exhaustion could be seen
  through his excitement. Sonia saw how he was suffering. She too was
  growing dizzy. And he talked so strangely; it seemed somehow
  comprehensible, but yet... “But how, how! Good God!” And she wrung her
  hands in despair.
</p>
<p>
  “No, Sonia, that’s not it,” he began again suddenly, raising his head, as
  though a new and sudden train of thought had struck and as it were roused
  him—“that’s not it! Better... imagine—yes, it’s certainly
  better—imagine that I am vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive
  and... well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity. (Let’s have it all out
  at once! They’ve talked of madness already, I noticed.) I told you just
  now I could not keep myself at the university. But do you know that
  perhaps I might have done? My mother would have sent me what I needed for
  the fees and I could have earned enough for clothes, boots and food, no
  doubt. Lessons had turned up at half a rouble. Razumihin works! But I
  turned sulky and wouldn’t. (Yes, sulkiness, that’s the right word for it!)
  I sat in my room like a spider. You’ve been in my den, you’ve seen it....
  And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul
  and the mind? Ah, how I hated that garret! And yet I wouldn’t go out of
  it! I wouldn’t on purpose! I didn’t go out for days together, and I
  wouldn’t work, I wouldn’t even eat, I just lay there doing nothing. If
  Nastasya brought me anything, I ate it, if she didn’t, I went all day
  without; I wouldn’t ask, on purpose, from sulkiness! At night I had no
  light, I lay in the dark and I wouldn’t earn money for candles. I ought to
  have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies an inch thick on the
  notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and thinking. And I kept
  thinking.... And I had dreams all the time, strange dreams of all sorts,
  no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy that... No, that’s not it!
  Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept asking myself then: why am I
  so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I
  won’t be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for everyone to get
  wiser it will take too long.... Afterwards I understood that that would
  never come to pass, that men won’t change and that nobody can alter it and
  that it’s not worth wasting effort over it. Yes, that’s so. That’s the law
  of their nature, Sonia,... that’s so!... And I know now, Sonia, that
  whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who
  is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will
  be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the
  right! So it has been till now and so it will always be. A man must be
  blind not to see it!”
 </p>
<p>
  Though Raskolnikov looked at Sonia as he said this, he no longer cared
  whether she understood or not. The fever had complete hold of him; he was
  in a sort of gloomy ecstasy (he certainly had been too long without
  talking to anyone). Sonia felt that his gloomy creed had become his faith
  and code.
</p>
<p>
  “I divined then, Sonia,” he went on eagerly, “that power is only
  vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one
  thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in
  my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of
  before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a
  single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight
  for it all and send it flying to the devil! I... I wanted <i>to have the
  daring</i>... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring, Sonia!
  That was the whole cause of it!”
 </p>
<p>
  “Oh hush, hush,” cried Sonia, clasping her hands. “You turned away from
  God and God has smitten you, has given you over to the devil!”
 </p>
<p>
  “Then Sonia, when I used to lie there in the dark and all this became
  clear to me, was it a temptation of the devil, eh?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Hush, don’t laugh, blasphemer! You don’t understand, you don’t
  understand! Oh God! He won’t understand!”
 </p>
<p>
  “Hush, Sonia! I am not laughing. I know myself that it was the devil
  leading me. Hush, Sonia, hush!” he repeated with gloomy insistence. “I
  know it all, I have thought it all over and over and whispered it all over
  to myself, lying there in the dark.... I’ve argued it all over with
  myself, every point of it, and I know it all, all! And how sick, how sick
  I was then of going over it all! I have kept wanting to forget it and make
  a new beginning, Sonia, and leave off thinking. And you don’t suppose that
  I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man, and
  that was just my destruction. And you mustn’t suppose that I didn’t know,
  for instance, that if I began to question myself whether I had the right
  to gain power—I certainly hadn’t the right—or that if I asked
  myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn’t so for
  me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his goal without
  asking questions.... If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether
  Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn’t
  Napoleon. I had to endure all the agony of that battle of ideas, Sonia,
  and I longed to throw it off: I wanted to murder without casuistry, to
  murder for my own sake, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it
  even to myself. It wasn’t to help my mother I did the murder—that’s
  nonsense—I didn’t do the murder to gain wealth and power and to
  become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply did it; I did the
  murder for myself, for myself alone, and whether I became a benefactor to
  others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in my web and sucking
  the life out of men, I couldn’t have cared at that moment.... And it was
  not the money I wanted, Sonia, when I did it. It was not so much the money
  I wanted, but something else.... I know it all now.... Understand me!
  Perhaps I should never have committed a murder again. I wanted to find out
  something else; it was something else led me on. I wanted to find out then
  and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I
  can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not,
  whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the <i>right</i>...”
 </p>
<p>
  “To kill? Have the right to kill?” Sonia clasped her hands.
</p>
<p>
  “Ach, Sonia!” he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort, but
  was contemptuously silent. “Don’t interrupt me, Sonia. I want to prove one
  thing only, that the devil led me on then and he has shown me since that I
  had not the right to take that path, because I am just such a louse as all
  the rest. He was mocking me and here I’ve come to you now! Welcome your
  guest! If I were not a louse, should I have come to you? Listen: when I
  went then to the old woman’s I only went to <i>try</i>.... You may be sure
  of that!”
 </p>
<p>
  “And you murdered her!”
 </p>
<p>
  “But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to commit
  a murder as I went then? I will tell you some day how I went! Did I murder
  the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all,
  for ever.... But it was the devil that killed that old woman, not I.
  Enough, enough, Sonia, enough! Let me be!” he cried in a sudden spasm of
  agony, “let me be!”
 </p>
<p>
  He leaned his elbows on his knees and squeezed his head in his hands as in
  a vise.
</p>
<p>
  “What suffering!” A wail of anguish broke from Sonia.
</p>
<p>
  “Well, what am I to do now?” he asked, suddenly raising his head and
  looking at her with a face hideously distorted by despair.
</p>
<p>
  “What are you to do?” she cried, jumping up, and her eyes that had been
  full of tears suddenly began to shine. “Stand up!” (She seized him by the
  shoulder, he got up, looking at her almost bewildered.) “Go at once, this
  very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth
  which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all
  men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again. Will you
  go, will you go?” she asked him, trembling all over, snatching his two
  hands, squeezing them tight in hers and gazing at him with eyes full of
  fire.
</p>
<p>
  He was amazed at her sudden ecstasy.
</p>
<p>
  “You mean Siberia, Sonia? I must give myself up?” he asked gloomily.
</p>
<p>
  “Suffer and expiate your sin by it, that’s what you must do.”
 </p>
<p>
  “No! I am not going to them, Sonia!”
 </p>
<p>
  “But how will you go on living? What will you live for?” cried Sonia, “how
  is it possible now? Why, how can you talk to your mother? (Oh, what will
  become of them now?) But what am I saying? You have abandoned your mother
  and your sister already. He has abandoned them already! Oh, God!” she
  cried, “why, he knows it all himself. How, how can he live by himself!
  What will become of you now?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Don’t be a child, Sonia,” he said softly. “What wrong have I done them?
  Why should I go to them? What should I say to them? That’s only a
  phantom.... They destroy men by millions themselves and look on it as a
  virtue. They are knaves and scoundrels, Sonia! I am not going to them. And
  what should I say to them—that I murdered her, but did not dare to
  take the money and hid it under a stone?” he added with a bitter smile.
  “Why, they would laugh at me, and would call me a fool for not getting it.
  A coward and a fool! They wouldn’t understand and they don’t deserve to
  understand. Why should I go to them? I won’t. Don’t be a child, Sonia....”
 </p>
<p>
  “It will be too much for you to bear, too much!” she repeated, holding out
  her hands in despairing supplication.
</p>
<p>
  “Perhaps I’ve been unfair to myself,” he observed gloomily, pondering,
  “perhaps after all I am a man and not a louse and I’ve been in too great a
  hurry to condemn myself. I’ll make another fight for it.”
 </p>
<p>
  A haughty smile appeared on his lips.
</p>
<p>
  “What a burden to bear! And your whole life, your whole life!”
 </p>
<p>
  “I shall get used to it,” he said grimly and thoughtfully. “Listen,” he
  began a minute later, “stop crying, it’s time to talk of the facts: I’ve
  come to tell you that the police are after me, on my track....”
 </p>
<p>
  “Ach!” Sonia cried in terror.
</p>
<p>
  “Well, why do you cry out? You want me to go to Siberia and now you are
  frightened? But let me tell you: I shall not give myself up. I shall make
  a struggle for it and they won’t do anything to me. They’ve no real
  evidence. Yesterday I was in great danger and believed I was lost; but
  to-day things are going better. All the facts they know can be explained
  two ways, that’s to say I can turn their accusations to my credit, do you
  understand? And I shall, for I’ve learnt my lesson. But they will
  certainly arrest me. If it had not been for something that happened, they
  would have done so to-day for certain; perhaps even now they will arrest
  me to-day.... But that’s no matter, Sonia; they’ll let me out again... for
  there isn’t any real proof against me, and there won’t be, I give you my
  word for it. And they can’t convict a man on what they have against me.
  Enough.... I only tell you that you may know.... I will try to manage
  somehow to put it to my mother and sister so that they won’t be
  frightened.... My sister’s future is secure, however, now, I believe...
  and my mother’s must be too.... Well, that’s all. Be careful, though. Will
  you come and see me in prison when I am there?”
 </p>
<p>
  “Oh, I will, I will.”
 </p>
<p>
  They sat side by side, both mournful and dejected, as though they had been
  cast up by the tempest alone on some deserted shore. He looked at Sonia
  and felt how great was her love for him, and strange to say he felt it
  suddenly burdensome and painful to be so loved. Yes, it was a strange and
  awful sensation! On his way to see Sonia he had felt that all his hopes
  rested on her; he expected to be rid of at least part of his suffering,
  and now, when all her heart turned towards him, he suddenly felt that he
  was immeasurably unhappier than before.
</p>
<p>
  “Sonia,” he said, “you’d better not come and see me when I am in prison.”
 </p>
<p>
  Sonia did not answer, she was crying. Several minutes passed.
</p>
<p>
  “Have you a cross on you?” she asked, as though suddenly thinking of it.
</p>
<p>
  He did not at first understand the question.
</p>
<p>
  “No, of course not. Here, take this one, of cypress wood. I have another,
  a copper one that belonged to Lizaveta. I changed with Lizaveta: she gave
  me her cross and I gave her my little ikon. I will wear Lizaveta’s now and
  give you this. Take it... it’s mine! It’s mine, you know,” she begged him.
  “We will go to suffer together, and together we will bear our cross!”
 </p>
<p>
  “Give it me,” said Raskolnikov.
</p>
<p>
  He did not want to hurt her feelings. But immediately he drew back the
  hand he held out for the cross.
</p>
<p>
  “Not now, Sonia. Better later,” he added to comfort her.
</p>
<p>
  “Yes, yes, better,” she repeated with conviction, “when you go to meet
  your suffering, then put it on. You will come to me, I’ll put it on you,
  we will pray and go together.”
 </p>
<p>
  At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.
</p>
<p>
  “Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?” they heard in a very familiar and
  polite voice.
</p>
<p>
  Sonia rushed to the door in a fright. The flaxen head of Mr. Lebeziatnikov
  appeared at the door.
</p>