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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

PART I

CHAPTER I

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of

the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though

in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His

garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more

like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret,

dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time

he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which

invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a

sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was

hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but

for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition,

verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in

himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not

only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the

anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had

given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all

desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror

for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her

trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats

and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to

lie--no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and

slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely

aware of his fears.

“I want to attempt a thing _like that_ and am frightened by these

trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hm... yes, all is in a man’s

hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would

be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new

step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.... But I am talking

too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is

that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this

last month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the

Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of _that_? Is

_that_ serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse

myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.”

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle

and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that

special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out

of town in summer--all worked painfully upon the young man’s already

overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which

are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men

whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed

the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest

disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was,

by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim,

well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank

into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness

of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring

to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the

habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these

moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a

tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted

food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would

have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter

of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have

created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number

of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading

and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the

heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets

that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was

such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart, that,

in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least

of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with

acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked

meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown

reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy

dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German

hatter” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him--the young

man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall

round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all

torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly

fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror

had overtaken him.

“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst

of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might

spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable.... It looks absurd

and that makes it noticeable.... With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any

sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such

a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered.... What