Then Raskolnikov repeated (rather dryly) his conversation with Svidrigailov, omitting his account of the ghostly visitations of Marfa Petrovna, wishing to avoid all unnecessary talk.
“What answer did you give him?” asked Dounia.
“At first I said I would not take any message to you. Then he said that he would do his utmost to obtain an interview with you without my help. He assured me that his passion for you was a passing infatuation, now he has no feeling for you. He doesn’t want you to marry Luzhin. … His talk was altogether rather muddled.”
“How do you explain him to yourself, Rodya? How did he strike you?”
“I must confess I don’t quite understand him. He offers you ten thousand, and yet says he is not well off. He says he is going away, and in ten minutes he forgets he has said it. Then he says is he going to be married and has already fixed on the girl. … No doubt he has a motive, and probably a bad one. But it’s odd that he should be so clumsy about it if he had any designs against you. … Of course, I refused this money on your account, once for all. Altogether, I thought him very strange. … One might almost think he was mad. But I may be mistaken; that may only be the part he assumes. The death of Marfa Petrovna seems to have made a great impression on him.”
“God rest her soul,” exclaimed Pulcheria Alexandrovna. “I shall always, always pray for her! Where should we be now, Dounia, without this three thousand! It’s as though it had fallen from heaven! Why, Rodya, this morning we had only three roubles in our pocket and Dounia and I were just planning to pawn her watch, so as to avoid borrowing from that man until he offered help.”
Dounia seemed strangely impressed by Svidrigailov’s offer. She still stood meditating.
“He has got some terrible plan,” she said in a half whisper to herself, almost shuddering.
Raskolnikov noticed this disproportionate terror.
“I fancy I shall have to see him more than once again,” he said to Dounia.
“We will watch him! I will track him out!” cried Razumihin, vigorously. “I won’t lose sight of him. Rodya has given me leave. He said to me himself just now. ‘Take care of my sister.’ Will you give me leave, too, Avdotya Romanovna?”
Dounia smiled and held out her hand, but the look of anxiety did not leave her face. Pulcheria Alexandrovna gazed at her timidly, but the three thousand roubles had obviously a soothing effect on her.
A quarter of an hour later, they were all engaged in a lively conversation. Even Raskolnikov listened attentively for some time, though he did not talk. Razumihin was the speaker.
“And why, why should you go away?” he flowed on ecstatically. “And what are you to do in a little town? The great thing is, you are all here together and you need one another—you do need one another, believe me. For a time, anyway. … Take me into partnership, and I assure you we’ll plan a capital enterprise. Listen! I’ll explain it all in detail to you, the whole project! It all flashed into my head this morning, before anything had happened … I tell you what; I have an uncle, I must introduce him to you (a most accommodating and respectable old man). This uncle has got a capital of a thousand roubles, and he lives on his pension and has no need of that money. For the last two years he has been bothering me to borrow it from him and pay him six per cent. interest. I know what that means; he simply wants to help me. year I had no need of it, but this year I resolved to borrow it as soon as he arrived. Then you lend me another thousand of your three and we have enough for a start, so we’ll go into partnership, and what are we going to do?”
Then Razumihin began to unfold his project, and he explained at length that almost all our publishers and booksellers know nothing at all of what they are selling, and for that reason they are usually bad publishers, and that any decent publications pay as a rule and give a profit, sometimes a considerable one. Razumihin had, indeed, been dreaming of setting up as a publisher. For the last two years he had been working in publishers’ offices, and knew three European languages well, though he had told Raskolnikov six days before that he was “schwach” in German with an object of persuading him to take half his translation and half the payment for it. He had told a lie then, and Raskolnikov knew he was lying.
