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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 83
The shout ended in a shriek; the last sounds came from the
yard; all was still. But at the same instant several men talking
loud and fast began noisily mounting .the stairs. There were
three or four of them. He distinguished the ringing voice of the
young man. "They!"
Filled with despair he went straight to meet them, feeling
"come what must!" If they stopped him — all was lost; if they
let him pass — all was lost too; they would remember him. They
were approaching; they were only a flight from him — and sud-
denly deliverance! A few steps from him on the right, there was
an empty flat with the door wide open, the flat on the second
floor where the painters had been at work, and which, as though
for his benefit, they had just left. It was they, no doubt, who
had just run down, shouting. The floor had only just been
painted, in the middle of the room stood a pail and a broken pot
with paint and brushes. In one instant he had whisked in at the
open door and hidden behind the wall and only in the nick of
time; they had already reached the landing. Then they turned
and went on up to the fourth floor, talking loudly. He waited,
went out on tiptoe and ran down the stairs.
No one was on the stairs, nor in the gateway. He passed
quickly through the gateway and turned to the left in the street.
He knew, he knew perfectly well that at that moment they
were at the flat, that they were greatly astonished at finding
it unlocked, as the door had just been fastened, that by now
they were looking at the bodies, that before another minute had
passed they would guess and completely realise that the mur-
derer had just been there, and had succeeded in hiding some-
where, slipping by them and escaping. They would guess most
likely that he had been in the empty flat, while they were going
upstairs. And meanwhile he dared not quicken his pace much,
though the next turning was still nearly a hundred yards away.
"Should he slip through some gateway and wait somewhere in
an unknown street? No, hopeless! Should he fling away the axe?
Should he take a cab? Hopeless, hopeless!"
At last he reached the turning. He turned down it more
dead than alive. Here he was half way to safety, and here under-
stood it;it was less risky because there was a great crowd of
people, and he was lost in it like a grain of sand. But all he had
suffered had so weakened him that he could scarcely move.
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