The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales: Including Stories by Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky, Jörgen Wilhelm; Bergsöe and Bernhard Severin IngemannVarious
General
The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales: Including Stories by Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky, Jörgen Wilhelm; Bergsöe and Bernhard Severin Ingemann
Various
Detective and mystery stories
He reached home toward evening, perhaps at about eight o'clock--how,
and by what particular way he never recollected--but, speedily
undressing, he lay down on the couch, trembling like a beaten horse,
and, drawing his overcoat over him, he fell immediately into a deep
sleep. He awoke in a high fever and delirious. Some days later he came
to himself, rose and went out. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had
disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the
dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head
began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his
inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not
even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be
finished "today," at one blow, immediately, or he would never return
home, because he had no desire to live thus. How to finish? By what
means? No matter how, and he did not want to think. He drove away any
thoughts which disturbed him, and only clung to the necessity of
ending all, "no matter how," said he, with desperate self-confidence
and decision. By force of habit he took his old walk, and set out in
the direction of the Haymarket. Farther on, he came on a young man who
was grinding some very feeling ballads upon a barrel organ. Near the
man, on the footpath, was a young girl of about fifteen years of age,
fashionably dressed, with crinoline, mantle, and gloves, and a straw
hat trimmed with gaudy feathers, but all old and terribly worn out,
who, in a loud and cracked though not altogether unpleasing voice, was
singing before a shop in expectation of a couple of kopecks.
Raskolnikoff stopped and joined one or two listeners, took out a
five-kopeck piece, and gave it to the girl. The latter at once stopped
on a very high note which she had just reached, and cried to the man,
"Come along," and both immediately moved on to another place.
"Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikoff to a middle-aged man
standing near him. The latter looked at him in surprise, but smiled.
"I love it," continued Raskolnikoff, "especially when they sing to the
organ on a cold, dark, gray winter's evening, when all the passers-by
seem to have pale, green, sickly-looking faces--when the snow is
falling like a sleet, straight down and with no wind, you know, and
while the lamps shine on it all."
"I don't know. Excuse me," said the man, frightened at the question
and Raskolnikoff's strange appearance, and hastily withdrawing to the
other side of the street.
Raskolnikoff went on, and came to the place in the Haymarket where he
had met the trader and his wife and Elizabeth. No one was there at the
moment. He stopped, and turned to a young fellow, in a red shirt, who
was gaping at the entrance to a flour shop.
"A man trades here at this corner, with his wife, eh?"
"Everyone trades here," replied the lad, scanning his questioner from
head to foot.
"What is he called?"
"What he was christened."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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