Overhearing Fate — Crime and Punishment

The chapter opens with a flashback that Raskolnikov later reads as fate. Weeks after pawning his ring at Alyona Ivanovna's, he sits in a tavern and overhears a student tell an officer that the pawnbroker is rich, cruel, and useless to society. The student jokes he could kill her and take her money without a conscience-prick, then delivers a cold utilitarian speech: one worthless life against thousands saved, simple arithmetic. When the officer asks whether he would do it himself, the student laughs that he was only arguing justice. Raskolnikov shudders. The talk mirrored the idea already forming in his mind, and he would always treat the coincidence as something preordained.

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 at the crucial moment; 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 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 chapter ends as the latch unfastens.