Later Raskolnikov finds out why the huckster invited Lizaveta. A poor family was selling women's things. She was their honest dealer. He will always treat the Hay Market meeting as more than chance. In the previous winter, after pawning a ring at Alyona Ivanovna's, he sat in a tavern and overheard a student tell an officer that the pawnbroker is rich, cruel, and useless. One death and a hundred lives in exchange, the student says: simple arithmetic. She bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite, the student adds; it almost had to be amputated. The officer agrees she does not deserve to live, then asks whether the student would kill her himself. Of course not. He was only arguing justice. Raskolnikov shudders. The talk mirrored the idea already forming in his mind.
On returning from the Hay Market he sleeps through the night and into the next day. Nastasya brings tea and soup. He eats mechanically, then wakes in feverish haste. He sews a hidden noose into his coat to carry the axe under his arm, and wraps wood and iron in paper as a fake pledge to buy seconds at the door. His own theory of crime tells him criminals fail through childish heedlessness. He insists that will not happen to him because his act is not a crime in his reasoning. Yet the more final his preparations become, the more hideous and absurd they look in his eyes, and he still cannot believe he will actually go.
At six he finds Nastasya in the kitchen hanging linen and cannot take the axe he planned to borrow. Humiliated, he almost turns back until he spots an axe under the porter's bench and slips away with it. When reason fails, the devil helps, he thinks, and his spirits lift.
He walks toward the pawnbroker's in a strange dissociation, his mind drifting to fountains and city planning while one flash compares him to a man led to execution clutching at objects on the road. A hay waggon screens him at the gate. He climbs the stairs, rings the bell twice, listens at the lock, and hears cautious movement inside. The latch unfastens.
Coming Up in Chapter 7
The door opens a tiny crack, and two sharp suspicious eyes stare out of the darkness. He will take hold of the door so she cannot shut it, try to speak easily, and bring the fake pledge into the little yellow room.
