“You are a strange girl, Sonia—you kiss me and hug me when I tell you about that. … You don’t think what you are doing.”
“There is no one—no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!” she cried in a frenzy, not hearing what he said, and she suddenly broke into violent hysterical weeping.
A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.
“Then you won’t leave me, Sonia?” he said, looking at her almost with hope.
“No, no, never, nowhere!” cried Sonia. “I will follow you, I will follow you everywhere. Oh, my God! Oh, how miserable I am! … Why, why didn’t I know you before! Why didn’t you come before? Oh, dear!”
“Here I have come.”
“Yes, now! What’s to be done now? … Together, together!” she repeated as it were unconsciously, and she hugged him again. “I’ll follow you to Siberia!”
He recoiled at this, and the same hostile, almost haughty smile came to his lips.
“Perhaps I don’t want to go to Siberia yet, Sonia,” he said.
Sonia looked at him quickly.
Again after her first passionate, agonising sympathy for the unhappy man the terrible idea of the murder overwhelmed her. In his changed tone she seemed to hear the murderer speaking. She looked at him bewildered. She knew nothing as yet, why, how, with what object it had been. Now all these questions rushed at once into her mind. And again she could not believe it: “He, he is a murderer! Could it be true?”
“What’s the meaning of it? Where am I?” she said in complete bewilderment, as though still unable to recover herself. “How could you, you, a man like you. … How could you bring yourself to it? … What does it mean?”
“Oh, well—to plunder. Leave off, Sonia,” he answered wearily, almost with vexation.
Sonia stood as though struck dumb, but suddenly she cried:
“You were hungry! It was … to help your mother? Yes?”
“No, Sonia, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. “I was not so hungry. … I certainly did want to help my mother, but … that’s not the real thing either. … Don’t torture me, Sonia.”
Sonia clasped her hands.
“Could it, could it all be true? Good God, what a truth! Who could believe it? And how could you give away your last farthing and yet rob and murder! Ah,” she cried suddenly, “that money you gave Katerina Ivanovna … that money. … Can that money …”
“No, Sonia,” he broke in hurriedly, “that money was not it. Don’t worry yourself! That money my mother sent me and it came when I was ill, the day I gave it to you. … Razumihin saw it … he received it for me. … That money was mine—my own.”
Sonia listened to him in bewilderment and did her utmost to comprehend.
“And that money. … I don’t even know really whether there was any money,” he added softly, as though reflecting. “I took a purse off her neck, made of chamois leather … a purse stuffed full of something … but I didn’t look in it; I suppose I hadn’t time. … And the things—chains and trinkets—I buried under a stone with the purse next morning in a yard off the V—— Prospect. They are all there now. …”
Sonia strained every nerve to listen.
“Then why … why, you said you did it to rob, but you took nothing?” she asked quickly, catching at a straw.
“I don’t know. … I haven’t yet decided whether to take that money or not,” he said, musing again; and, seeming to wake up with a start, he gave a brief ironical smile. “Ach, what silly stuff I am talking, eh?”
The thought flashed through Sonia’s mind, wasn’t he mad? But she dismissed it at once. “No, it was something else.” She could make nothing of it, nothing.
“Do you know, Sonia,” he said suddenly with conviction, “let me tell you: if I’d simply killed because I was hungry,” laying stress on every word and looking enigmatically but sincerely at her, “I should be happy now. You must believe that! What would it matter to you,” he cried a moment later with a sort of despair, “what would it matter to you if I were to confess that I did wrong? What do you gain by such a stupid triumph over me? Ah, Sonia, was it for that I’ve come to you to-day?”
Again Sonia tried to say something, but did not speak.
“I asked you to go with me yesterday because you are all I have left.”
“Go where?” asked Sonia timidly.
“Not to steal and not to murder, don’t be anxious,” he smiled bitterly. “We are so different. … And you know, Sonia, it’s only now, only this moment that I understand where I asked you to go with me yesterday! Yesterday when I said it I did not know where. I asked you for one thing, I came to you for one thing—not to leave me. You won’t leave me, Sonia?”
She squeezed his hand.
“And why, why did I tell her? Why did I let her know?” he cried a minute later in despair, looking with infinite anguish at her. “Here you expect an explanation from me, Sonia; you are sitting and waiting for it, I see that. But what can I tell you? You won’t understand and will only suffer misery … on my account! Well, you are crying and embracing me again. Why do you do it? Because I couldn’t bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such a mean wretch?”
“But aren’t you suffering, too?” cried Sonia.
Again a wave of the same feeling surged into his heart, and again for an instant softened it.
“Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn’t have come. But I am a coward and … a mean wretch. But … never mind! That’s not the point. I must speak now, but I don’t know how to begin.”
He paused and sank into thought.
“Ach, we are so different,” he cried again, “we are not alike. And why, why did I come? I shall never forgive myself that.”
“No, no, it was a good thing you came,” cried Sonia. “It’s better I should know, far better!”
He looked at her with anguish.
“What if it were really that?” he said, as though reaching a conclusion. “Yes, that’s what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her. … Do you understand now?”
“N-no,” Sonia whispered naively and timidly. “Only speak, speak, I shall understand, I shall understand in myself!” she kept begging him.
