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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 69
with one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed
and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such
obvious traces? He had come gradually to many different and
curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not
so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime,
as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to
a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenome-"
nal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution
are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of
reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease>
developed gradually and reached its highest point just before
the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence
at the moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after,
according to the individual case, and then passed off like any
other disease. The question whether the disease gives rise to
the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is
always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he
did not yet feel able to decide.
When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his
own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his
reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carry-
ing out his design, for the simple reason that his design was "not
a crime. ..." We will omit all the process by means of which
he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead
already. . . . We may add only that the practical, purely ma-
terial difficulties of the afiFair occupied a secondary position in
his mind. "One has but to keep all one's will power and reason
to deal with them, and they will all be overcome at the time
when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details
of the business. . . ." But this preparation had never been begun.
His final decisions were what he came to trust least, and when
the hour struck, it all came to pass quite diflFerently, as it were
accidentally and unexpectedly.
One trifling circumstance upset his calculations, before he had
even left the staircase. When he reached the landlady's kitchen,
the door of which was open as usual, he glanced cautiously in
to sec whether, Nastasya's absence, the landlady herself was
there, or if not, whether the door to her own room was closed, so
that she might not peep out when he went in for the axe. But
what was his amazement when he suddenly saw that Nastasya
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