"That is not your business, sir," he cried at last, unnaturally loud. "Make the necessary declaration. Show him, Alexander Gregorivitch. Complaints have been made about you! You don't pay your debts! You know how to fly the kite evidently!" Raskolnikoff did not listen, but greedily seized the paper. He read it through more than once, and could make nothing of it. "What is this?" he asked of the clerk. "It is a writ for recovery on a note of hand of yours. Please write," said the clerk. "Write what?" asked he rudely. "As I dictate." The clerk stood near and dictated to him the usual form of declaration: that he was unable to pay, that he would not quit the capital, dispose of his goods in any way, etc., etc. "You cannot write, your pen is falling from your fingers," said the clerk, and he looked him in the face. "Are you ill?" "Yes, my head swims. Go on." "That is all. Now sign it." Raskolnikoff let fall the pen, and seemed as if about to rise and go; but, instead of doing so, he laid both elbows on the table and supported his head with his hands. A new idea formed in his mind: to rise immediately, go straight to Nicodemus Thomich the ward officer and tell him all that had occurred; then to accompany him to his room, and show him all the things hidden away in the wall behind the paper. His desire to do all this was of such strength that he got up from the table to carry his design into execution. "Reflect, reflect a moment!" ran in his head. "No, better not think, get it off my shoulders." Suddenly he stood still as if shot. Nicodemus Thomich was at this moment hotly discussing something with Elia Petrovitch, the inspector of police, and the words caught Raskolnikoff's anxious attention. He listened. "It cannot be, they will both be released. In the first place, all is contradictory. Consider. Why did they call the porter if it were their work? To denounce themselves? Or out of cunning? Not at all, that would be too much! Besides, did not the porter see the student Pestriakoff at the very gate just as he came in, and he stood there some time with three friends who had accompanied him. And Koch: was he not below in the silversmith's for half an hour before he went up to the old woman's? Now, consider." "But see what contradictions arise! They say they knocked and found the door closed; yet three minutes after, when they went back with the porter, it was open." "That's true. The murderer was inside, and had bolted the door, and certainly he would have been captured had not Koch foolishly run off to the porter. In the interval _he_, no doubt, had time to escape downstairs. Koch explains that, if he had remained, the man would have leaped out and killed him. He wanted to have a _Te Deum_ sung. Ha, ha!" "Did nobody see the murderer?" "How could they? The house is a perfect Noah's ark," put in the clerk, who had been listening. "The thing is clear, very clear," said Nicodemus Thomich decisively.