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- 4 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
and was inhabited by working people of all kinds — tailors, lock-
smiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best
they could, petty clerks, &c. There was a continual coming and
going through the two gates and in the two courtyards of the
house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the build-
ing. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and
at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up
the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he
was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he Uked all
these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive
eyes were not to be dreaded.
"If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came
X) pass that I were really going to do it?" he could not help ask-
ing himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress
was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furni-
ture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by
a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German
was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase
would be untenanted except by the old woman. "That's a good
thing anyway," he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the
old woman's flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were
made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses
always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note
of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of
something and to bring it clearly before him. . . . He started, his
nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the
door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor
with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be
seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a
number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened
the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry,
which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old
woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at
him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty,
with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colour-
less, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and
she wore" no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which
looked like a hen's leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag,
and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a
mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and
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