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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 11
being so directly addressed. In spite of the momentary desire
he had just been feeUng for company of any sort, on being
actually spoken to he felt immediately his habitual irritable and
imeasy aversion for any stranger who approached or attempted
to approach him.
"A student then, or formerly a student," cried the clerk.
"Just what I thought! I'm a man of experience, immense ex-
perience, sir," and he tapped his forehead with his fingers in
self-approval. "You've been a student or have attended some
learned institution! . . . But allow me. . . ." He got up, stag-
gered, took up his jug and glass, and sat down beside the young
man, facing him a little sideways. He was drunk, but spoke
fluently and boldly, only occasionally losing the thread of his
sentences and drawling his words. He pounced upon Raskol-
nikov as greedily as though he too had not spoken to a soul for
a month.
"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is
not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness
is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, hon-
oured sir,beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your
innate nobility of soul, but in beggary — never — no one. For
beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick,
he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as
possible; and quite right too, forasmuch as in beggary I am
ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot house!
Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a
beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me! Do
you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of
simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on
the Neva?"
"No, I have not happened to," answered Raskolnikov. "What
do you mean?"
"Well I've just come from one and it's the fifth night I've
slept so. . . ." He filled his glass, emptied it and paused. Bits of
hay were in fact clinging to his clothes and sticking to his hair.
It seemed quite probable that he had not undressed or washed
for the last five days. His hands, particularly, were filthy. They
were fat and red, with black nails.
His conversation seemed to excite a general though languid
interest. The boys at the counter fell to sniggering. The inn-
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