in a month--how shall I look
at it then? What shall I be feeling and thinking then?... How trivial
it all must be, what I am fretting about now! Of course it must all be
interesting... in its way... (Ha-ha-ha! What am I thinking about?) I am
becoming a baby, I am showing off to myself; why am I ashamed? Foo! how
people shove! that fat man--a German he must be--who pushed against
me, does he know whom he pushed? There's a peasant woman with a baby,
begging. It's curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might
give her something, for the incongruity of it. Here's a five copeck
piece left in my pocket, where did I get it? Here, here... take it, my
good woman!"

"God bless you," the beggar chanted in a lachrymose voice.

He went into the Hay Market. It was distasteful, very distasteful to be
in a crowd, but he walked just where he saw most people. He would have
given anything in the world to be alone; but he knew himself that he
would not have remained alone for a moment. There was a man drunk and
disorderly in the crowd; he kept trying to dance and falling down. There
was a ring round him. Raskolnikov squeezed his way through the crowd,
stared for some minutes at the drunken man and suddenly gave a short
jerky laugh. A minute later he had forgotten him and did not see him,
though he still stared. He moved away at last, not remembering where he
was; but when he got into the middle of the square an emotion suddenly
came over him, overwhelming him body and mind.

He suddenly recalled Sonia's words, "Go to the cross-roads, bow down to
the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say
aloud to the whole world, 'I am a murderer.'" He trembled, remembering
that. And the hopeless misery and anxiety of all that time, especially
of the last hours, had weighed so heavily upon him that he positively
clutched at the chance of this new unmixed, complete sensation. It came
over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and
spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the
tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot....

He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and
kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed
down a second time.

"He's boozed," a youth near him observed.

There was a roar of laughter.

"He's going to Jerusalem, brothers, and saying good-bye to his children
and his country. H