wife's character. It went so far that the general felt much more
at ease when she was away. Before the last illness of Iuri
Pavlovitch, which, to tell the truth, was almost his first, Olga
Vseslavovna had gone abroad with her daughter, intending to travel
for a year; but she had hardly been gone two months when the
general unexpectedly determined to go to St. Petersburg to seek a
divorce, to see his elder daughter, and change his will. Perhaps
he would never have determined on such decisive measures had not
something wholly unexpected taken place.
Borisoff was quite mistaken in thinking that he had so carefully
destroyed all the letters which the general's young wife had
written to him, before his marriage to Anna, that no material
evidence of Olga Vseslavovna's early design of treachery remained.
Even before she married the general, she had had a confidential
servant, who carried out many commissions for the beautiful young
woman, whose fame had gone abroad through the three districts along
the Volga, the arena of her early triumphs. Later, the young lady
found a new favorite in foreign lands--the same Rita who was still
with her. Martha, the Russian confidential servant, heartily
detested the German girl, and such strife arose between them that
not only the general's wife, but even the general himself, was
deprived of peace and tranquillity. Martha was no fool; Olga
Vseslavovna had to be careful with her; she did take care, but she
herself did not know to what an extent she was in the woman's
power. Foreseeing a black day of ingratitude, Martha, with
wonderful forethought, had put on one side one or two letters from
each series of her mistress' secret correspondence, which always
passed through her hands. Perhaps she would not have made such a
bad use of them but for her mistress' last, intolerable insult.
Prizing in her servants, next to swift obedience, a knowledge of
languages, her mistress did not make use of her when traveling
abroad; but hitherto she had taken both servants with her. But on
her last journey she was so heartily tired of Martha, and her
perpetual tears and quarrels, that she determined to get on without
her, the more so that her daughter's governess was also traveling
with her. Her company was growing too numerous.
There was no limit to Martha's wrath when she learned that she was
going to be left behind. Her effrontery was so great that she
advised her mistress "for her own sake" not to put such an affront
upon her, since she would not submit to it without seeking revenge.
But her mistress never dreamed of what Martha was planning, and
what a risk she ran.
Hardly had the general's wife departed when Martha asked the
general to let her leave, saying she would find work elsewhere.
The general saw no way of keeping her; and he did not even wish to
do so, thinking her only a quarrelsome, ill-tempered woman. The
confidential servant left the house, and even the city. And
immediately her revenge and torture of the general began, cutting
straight at the root of his happiness, his health, even his life.
He began to receive, almost daily, letters from different parts of
Russia, for Martha had plenty of friends and chums. With
measureless cruelty Martha began by sending the less important
documents, still signed with her mistress' maiden name; then two or
three letters from the series of the most recent times, and finally
there came a whole packet of those sent by the general's wife to
the tutor, in the first year of her marriage with the general,
before Borisoff had met Anna.
The crafty Martha, knowing perfectly the whole state of affairs to
which these letters referred, often copied out their contents, and
kept the letters themselves concealed, saying to herself, "God
knows what may turn up, some day!
"If they are no use, I can burn them. But they may be useful. It
is always a good thing to keep our masters in our power," argued
the sagacious woman, and she was not mistaken in her calculations,
although these letters served not for her profit, but only for a
sanguinary revenge.
These notes and letters, which finally opened his eyes to the true
character of his wife, and his own crying injustice to his elder
children, were now lying in the general's dispatch box, in a neatly
tied packet, directed in the doctor's handwriting to "Her
Excellency Olga Vseslavovna Nazimoff."
As soon as she received her father's first letter Anna began to get
ready to go to St. Petersburg, but unfortunately she was kept back
by the sickness, first of one child, then of another. But for his
last telegrams, she would not have started even now, because she
did not realize the dangerous character of his illness. But now,
finding that she had come too late, the unhappy woman could not
forgive herself.
Everyone was grieved to see her bitter sorrow, after the funeral
service for her father. Princess Ryadski burst into tears, as she
looked at her; and all the acquaintances and relations of the
general were far more disturbed by her despair than by the
general's death. Olga Vseslavovna was secretly scandalized at such
lack of self-control, but outwardly she seemed greatly touched and
troubled by the situation of her poor stepdaughter. But she did
not venture to express her sympathy too openly in the presence of
others, remembering the words of "the crazy creature" when she had
come to herself after her fainting fit, and her stepmother had
hurried up to embrace her.
"Leave me!" Anna had cried, when she saw her. "I cannot bear to
see you! You killed my father!"
It was well that there were only servants in the anteroom. But the
general's wife did not wish to risk another such scene, now that so
many people were present. And besides she was extremely disturbed;
the friends who had come to the funeral service had brought
flowers; and the half-crazy princess, with the aid of two other
ladies, had taken a fancy to decorate the coffin, and especially
the head, with them. It is impossible to describe what Olga
Vseslavovna suffered, as she watched all those hands moving about
among the folds of the muslin, the frills, the covering, almost
under the satin cushion even; a little more and she would have
fainted in earnest.
She had always boasted that she had strong nerves, and this was
quite true; nevertheless, during these days, their strength was
evidently giving way, as she could not get to sleep for a long time
that night, and heaven only knows what fancies passed through her
mind. It was almost morning before Olga Vseslavovna got to sleep,
and even then it was not for long.
She dreamed that she was descending endless stairs and dark
corridors, with a heavy, shapeless burden on her shoulders. A
bright, constantly-changing flame flickered before her; now red,
now yellow, now green, it flitted before her from side to side.
She knew that if she could reach it, the burden would fall from
her. But the light seemed to be taunting her, now appearing, now
disappearing, and suddenly going out altogether. And she found
herself in the darkness, in a damp cellar, seemingly empty, but
filled with something's invisible presence. What was it? She did
not know. But this pervading something frightened her terribly,
smothered her, pressing on her from all sides, depriving her of
air. She was choking! Terror seized her at the thought that
it . . . was Death! Must she die? Was it possible? But that
brightly shining light had just promised her life, gayety,
brilliance! She must hurry to overtake it. And she tried to
run. But her feet would not obey her; she could not move.
"Heaven! Heaven!" she cried, "but what is it? Whence has such a
disaster come? What is holding me? Let me go, or I shall be
smothered in this stench, under this intolerable burden!"
Suddenly Iuri Pavlovitch walked past her. She immediately
recognized him, and joyfully caught at his cloak. "Iuri! Forgive
me! Help me!" she cried.
Her husband stopped, looked sadly at her, and answered: "I would
gladly help you, but you yourself hinder me. Let me go; I must
fulfill your directions."
At that moment she awoke. She was bathed in a cold perspiration,
and clutched wildly at the coverlet with both hands. There was no
one near her, but she clearly felt someone's presence, and was
convinced that she had really seen her husband a moment before. In
her ears resounded his words: "I must fulfill your directions!"
Directions? What directions?
She sprang up, and began to feel about over the carpet with her
bare feet, looking for her slippers. A terrible thought had come
into her mind. She felt that she must settle it at once. She must
take the will, take it away from there! burn it! destroy it! She
feverishly drew on her dressing gown, and threw a shawl over her
shoulders.
"Rita! Get up quick! Quick! Come!"
The frightened maid rose, still half asleep, and rubbed her eyes,
understanding nothing. Her mistress' ice-cold hands clutched her,
and dragged her somewhere.
"Ach lieber Gott . . . Gott in Himmel!" she muttered. "What has
happened? What do you want?"
"Hush! Come quick!" And Olga Vseslavovna, with a candle in her
trembling hand, went forward, dragging the trembling Rita with her.
She opened the door of her bedroom, and went out. All the doors
were open en suite, and straight in front of her, in the center of
the fourth, shone the coffin of her husband, covered with cloth of
gold and lit up by the tall tapers standing round the bier.
"What does it mean?" whispered the general's wife. "Why have they
opened all the doors?"
"I do not know . . . they were all closed last night," murmured the
maid in reply, her teeth chattering with fear. She longed to ask
her mistress whither they were going, and what for? She wanted to
stop, and not enter the funeral chamber; but she was afraid to
speak.
They passed quickly through the rooms; at the door of the last the
general's wife set her candle down on a chair, and halted for a
moment. The loud snoring of the reader startled them both.
"It is the deacon!" whispered the general's wife reassuringly.
Rita had hardly strength to nod assent. All the same, the healthy
snoring of a living man comforted her. Without moving from where
she stood, the maid tremblingly drew her woolen shawl closer about
her, trying to see the sofa on which the deacon lay.
Knitting her brows, and biting her lips till they were sore, Olga
Vseslavovna went forward determinedly to the bier. She thrust both
hands under the flowers on the pillow. The frill was untouched.
The satin of the cushion was there, but where was . . . ? Her
heart, that had been beating like a hammer, suddenly stopped and
stood still. There was not a trace of the will!
"Perhaps I have forgotten. Perhaps it was on the other side,"
thought Olga Vseslavovna, and went round to the left side of the
coffin.
No! It was not there, either! Where was it? Who could have taken
it? Suddenly her heart failed her utterly, and she clutched at the
edge of the coffin to keep herself from falling. It seemed to her
that under the stiff, pallid, rigidly clasped hands of the dead
general something gleamed white through the transparent muslin of
the covering, something like a piece of paper.
"Nonsense! Self-suggestion! It is impossible! Hallucination!"
The thought flashed through her tortured brain. She forced herself
to be calm, and to look again.
Yes! She had not been mistaken. The white corner of a folded
paper appeared clearly against the general's dark uniform. At the
same moment a cold draught coming from somewhere set the tapers
flickering. Shadows danced around the room, over the bier, across
the dead man's face; and in the quick change of light and shadow it
seemed to her that the rigid features became more living, that a
mournful smile formed itself on the closed lips, that the tightly-
shut eyelids quivered. A wild cry rang through the whole room.
With a desperate shriek: "His eyes! He is looking at me!" the
general's wife staggered forward and fell fainting to the floor,
beside her husband's bier.
V
The deacon sprang from his sofa with a cry, and an answering cry
came from the lips of the shivering Rita, as she fled from the
room. Servants rushed in, rubbing their eyes, still half-asleep,
questioning each other, running this way and that. The deacon,
spurred by a feeling of guilt, was determined to conceal the fact
that he was sleeping. "It was the lady!" he said. "She came in to
pray; she told me to stop reading while she prayed. She knelt
down. Then she prayed for a long time, and suddenly . . . suddenly
she cried out, and fainted. Grief, brothers! It is terrible! To
lose such a husband!" and he set them to work with restoratives,
himself rubbing the fallen woman's chilly hands.
The general's wife opened her eyes after a few minutes. Looking
wildly round in bewilderment, she seemed to be wondering where she
was and how she had come there. Suddenly she remembered.
"The will! In his hands! Take it!" she cried, and fainted again.
By this time the whole household was awake. Anna Iurievna had come
in, full of astonishment at the sudden disturbance, but with the
same feeling of deep quiet and peace still filling her heart and
giving her features an expression of joy and calm. She heard the
cry of the general's wife, and the words were recorded in her mind,
though she did not at first give them any meaning.
She set herself, with all the tenderness of a good woman, to
minister to the other's need, sending her own maid for sal
volatile, chafing the fainting woman's hands, and giving orders
that a bed should be prepared for her in another room, further away
from the bier. As she spoke, quietly, gravely, with authority, the
turmoil gradually subsided. The frightened servants recovered
themselves, and moved about with the orderly obedience they
ordinarily showed; and the deacon, above all anxious to cover his
negligence, began intoning the liturgy, lending an atmosphere of
solemnity to the whole room.
The servants, returning to announce that the bedroom was ready,
were ordered by Anna Iurievna to lift the fainting woman with all
care and gentleness, and she herself went with them to see the
general's wife safely bestowed in her room, and waited while the
doctor did all in his power to make her more comfortable. Olga
Vseslavovna did not at once recover consciousness. She seemed to
pass from a faint into an uneasy slumber, which, however, gradually
became more quiet.
Only then, as she was leaving the room, did Anna Iurievna bethink
her of the strange words that had fallen on her ears: "The will!
In his hands! Take it!" And repeating them questioningly to
herself, she walked slowly back toward the room in which lay her
father's body.
But she was even more occupied with her own thoughts. She no
longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga
Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a
feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her
empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she
was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world
where there was such deep happiness and joy.
She came over to her father's coffin, close to which the deacon was
still droning out his liturgy, and stood beside the dead body,
looking down at the strong, quiet face, and vividly recalling her
dream of the night before. Her eyes rested on the many stars and
medals on his breast, and on his hands, quietly clasped in death.
Then suddenly, and quite mechanically, Olga Vseslavovna's cry, as
she returned to consciousness, came back into her mind:
"The will! In his hands! Take it!" And bending down, she noted
for the first time something white beneath the muslin canopy. As
she scrutinized it wonderingly, she was conscious of an humble,
apologetic voice murmuring something at her elbow:
"Forgive me, Anna Iurievna. I humbly beg you, forgive me! It was
I . . . in the night . . . the flowers fell . . . I was putting
them back . . . fixing the head of your sainted papa. . . . It
was under his head, the paper . . . I thought he wanted to keep
it. . . . I put it in his hands, to be safe! . . . Forgive me,
Anna Iurievna, if I have done any harm."
It was the deacon, still oppressed by a feeling of guilt. Anna
Iurievna turned to him, and then turned back again, to her father's
body, to the white object shining under the muslin canopy. And
once more Olga Vseslavovna's words came into her mind:
"The will! In his hands! Take it!"
Gently raising the canopy, she softly drew the paper from beneath
the general's clasped hands, and unfolded it. She read no more
than the opening words, but she had read enough to realize that it
was, indeed, her father's will.
Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment*
* (At the risk of shocking the reader, it has been decided that the
real permanent detective stories of the world were ill represented
without Dostoyevsky's terrible tale of what might be called "self-
detection." If to sensitive readers the story seems so real as to
be hideous, it is well to recall that Dostoyevsky in 1849 underwent
the agony of sentence to death as a revolutionist. Although the
sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia, and although six
years later he was freed and again took up his writing, his mind
never rose from beneath the weight of horror and hopelessness that
hangs over offenders against the Great White Czar. Dostoyevsky,
sentenced as a criminal, herded with criminals, really BECAME a
criminal in literary imagination. Add to this a minute
observation, a marvelous memory, ardent political convictions--and
we can understand why the story here, with others of his, is taken
as a scientific text by criminologists.--EDITOR.)
One sultry evening early in July a young man emerged from the small
furnished lodging he occupied in a large five-storied house in the
Pereoulok S----, and turned slowly, with an air of indecision,
toward the K---- bridge. He was fortunate enough not to meet his
landlady on the stairs. She occupied the floor beneath him, and
her kitchen, with its usually open door, was entered from the
staircase. Thus, whenever the young man went out, he found himself
obliged to pass under the enemy's fire, which always produced a
morbid terror, humiliating him and making him knit his brows. He
owed her some money and felt afraid of encountering her.
It was not that he had been terrified or crushed by misfortune, but
that for some time past he had fallen into a state of nervous
depression akin to hypochondria. He had withdrawn from society and
shut himself up, till he was ready to shun, not merely his
landlady, but every human face. Poverty had once weighed him down,
though, of late, he had lost his sensitiveness on that score. He
had given up all his daily occupations. In his heart of hearts he
laughed scornfully at his landlady and the extremities to which she
might proceed. Still, to be waylaid on the stairs, to have to
listen to all her jargon, hear her demands, threats, and
complaints, and have to make excuses and subterfuges in return--no,
he preferred to steal down without attracting notice. On this
occasion, however, when he had gained the street, he felt surprised
himself at this dread of meeting the woman to whom he was in debt.
"Why should I be alarmed by these trifles when I am contemplating
such a desperate deed?" thought he, and he gave a strange smile.
"Ah, well, man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets
everything go its own way, simply through cowardice--that is an
axiom. I should like to know what people fear most:--whatever is
contrary to their usual habits, I imagine. But I am talking too
much. I talk and so I do nothing, though I might just as well say,
I do nothing and so I talk. I have acquired this habit of
chattering during the last month, while I have been lying for days
together in a corner, feeding my mind on trifles. Come, why am I
taking this walk now? Am I capable of THAT? Can THAT really be
serious? Not in the least. These are mere chimeras, idle fancies
that flit across my brain!
The heat in the streets was stifling. The crowd, the sight of
lime, bricks, scaffolding, and the peculiar odor so familiar to the
nostrils of the inhabitant of St. Petersburg who has no means of
escaping to the country for the summer, all contributed to irritate
the young man's already excited nerves. The reeking fumes of the
dram shops, so numerous in this part of the city, and the tipsy men
to be seen at every point, although it was no holiday, completed
the repulsive character of the scene. Our hero's refined features
betrayed, for a moment, an expression of bitter disgust. We may
observe casually that he was not destitute of personal attractions;
he was above middle height, with a slender and well-proportioned
figure, and he had dark auburn hair and fine dark eyes. In a
little while he sank into a deep reverie, or rather into a sort of
mental torpor. He walked on without noticing, or trying to notice,
his surroundings. Occasionally he muttered a few words to himself;
as if, as he himself had just perceived, this had become his habit.
At this moment it dawned upon him that his ideas were becoming
confused and that he was very feeble; he had eaten nothing worth
mentioning for the last two days.
His dress was so miserable that anyone else might have scrupled to
go out in such rags during the daytime. This quarter of the city,
indeed, was not particular as to dress. In the neighborhood of the
Cyennaza or Haymarket, in those streets in the heart of St.
Petersburg, occupied by the artisan classes, no vagaries in costume
call forth the least surprise. Besides the young man's fierce
disdain had reached such a pitch, that, notwithstanding his extreme
sensitiveness, he felt no shame at exhibiting his tattered garments
in the street. He would have felt differently had he come across
anyone he knew, any of the old friends whom he usually avoided.
Yet he stopped short on hearing the attention of passers-by
directed to him by the thick voice of a tipsy man shouting: "Eh,
look at the German hatter!" The exclamation came from an
individual who, for some unknown reason, was being jolted away in a
great wagon. The young man snatched off his hat and began to
examine it. It was a high-crowned hat that had been originally
bought at Zimmermann's, but had become worn and rusty, was covered
with dents and stains, slit and short of a brim, a frightful object
in short. Yet its owner, far from feeling his vanity wounded, was
suffering rather from anxiety than humiliation.
"I suspected this," muttered he, uneasily, "I foresaw it. That's
the worst of it! Some wretched trifle like this might spoil it
all. Yes, this hat is certainly too remarkable; it looks so
ridiculous. I must get a cap to suit my rags; any old thing would
be better than this horror. Hats like these are not worn; this one
would be noticeable a verst* off; it would be remembered; people
would think of it again some time after, and it might furnish a
clew. I must attract as little attention as possible just now.
Trifles become important, everything hinges on them."
* 1,000 yards.
He had not far to go; he knew the exact distance between his
lodging and present destination--just seven hundred and thirty
paces. He had counted them when his plan only floated through his
brain like a vague dream. At that time, he himself would not have
believed it capable of realization; he merely dallied in fancy with
a chimera which was both terrible and seductive. But a month had
elapsed, and he had already begun to view it in a different light.
Although he reproached himself throughout his soliloquies with
irresolution and a want of energy, he had accustomed himself,
little by little, and, indeed, in spite of himself, to consider the
realization of his dream a possibility, though he doubted his own
resolution. He was but just now rehearsing his enterprise, and his
agitation was increasing at every step.