Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read Free Book Online Page B

so recently acknowledged. At this moment he himself was conscious that every so often his thoughts grew confused, and that he was very weak: for two days now he had had practically nothing at all to eat.
    So poorly dressed was he that another man, even one inured to such a style of living, would have been ashamed to go out on the street during the daytime in such rags. However, this particular district was of such a kind that it would have been difficult to surprise anyone by one's manner of dress. The proximity of the Haymarket, the abundance of brothels and the local population which was, for the most part, made up of tradesmen and craftsmen, and huddled together in these streets and lanes of St Petersburg's centre, sometimes enlivened the general panorama with such picturesque subjects that it would have been odd for anyone to be surprised at encountering the occasional freak. But by this time so much vicious contempt had built up in the young man's soul that, in spite of all his sometimes very youthful finickiness, he was least ashamed of his rags while out on the streets. It would have been another matter had he run into people he knew, or any of his erstwhile student colleagues, whom in general he hated meeting at all times… And yet when a drunken man, who at that moment was being hauled off down the street, heaven knows where or why, in an enormous waggon drawn by an equally enormous cart-horse, suddenly shouted to him as he rode past: ‘Hey, you – German hatter!’ and began to bellow at him at the top of his voice, pointing at him – the young man suddenly stopped and grabbed convulsively at his hat. This hat had been one of those tall, round affairs from Zimmerman's, 4 but was now completely worn out and faded, covered in holes and stains and missing its brim, so that it cocked over to one side at a most outlandish angle. It was not shamethat had assailed him, however, but an emotion of quite a different kind, one more akin to terror.
    ‘I might have known it!’ he muttered in confusion. ‘I thought as much! This is worse than any of it! It is exactly this sort of nonsense, some vulgar little trivial detail, that could ruin the whole plan! Yes, a hat that's too conspicuous… It's absurd, and that's why it's conspicuous… What I need to go with my rags is a peaked cap – any old flat-top will do, but not this museum-piece. Nobody wears things like this, it would be spotted a mile off, people would remember it… the main thing is that it would be remembered afterwards, and bang! – they'd have their evidence. In this sort of business you have to be as inconspicuous as possible… The details, it's the details that matter more than anything else!… It's that sort of detail that always ruins everything…’
    He did not have far to go; he even knew how many paces he had to take in order to reach the front entrance of his tenement: seven hundred and thirty exactly. He had somehow managed to count them once, when he had been doing rather a lot of dreaming. At the time he had not yet had much faith in these dreams of his, and had merely irritated himself with their outrageous but seductive daring. Now, a month later, he was beginning to see them differently and, in spite of all his teasing monologues about his own impotence and lack of decision, had even come to view his ‘outrageous’ dream as a practical undertaking, though he still did not really believe he was capable of carrying it through. What he was actually doing now was going to perform a rehearsal of his undertaking, and with every step his excitement mounted higher and higher.
    His heart standing still, a nervous tremor running through him, he approached an enormous tenement building that over-looked the Canal 5 on one side, and — Street on the other. This building consisted entirely of tiny apartments and was inhabited by all kinds of jobbers and people trying to make a living: tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of various descriptions,