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"What does it mean?" whispered the general's wife. "Why have they opened all the doors?"

"I do not know … they were all closed last night," murmured the maid in reply, her teeth chattering with fear. She longed to ask her mistress whither they were going, and what for? She wanted to stop, and not enter the funeral chamber; but she was afraid to speak.

They passed quickly through the rooms; at the door of the last the general's wife set her candle down on a chair, and halted for a moment. The loud snoring of the reader startled them both.

"It is the deacon!" whispered the general's wife reassuringly. Rita had hardly strength to nod assent. All the same, the healthy snoring of a living man comforted her. Without moving from where she stood, the maid tremblingly drew her woolen shawl closer about her, trying to see the sofa on which the deacon lay.

Knitting her brows, and biting her lips till they were sore, Olga Vseslavovna went forward determinedly to the bier. She thrust both hands under the flowers on the pillow. The frill was untouched. The satin of the cushion was there, but where was …? Her heart, that had been beating like a hammer, suddenly stopped and stood still. There was not a trace of the will!

"Perhaps I have forgotten. Perhaps it was on the other side," thought Olga Vseslavovna, and went round to the left side of the coffin.

No! It was not there, either! Where was it? Who could have taken it? Suddenly her heart failed her utterly, and she clutched at the edge of the coffin to keep herself from falling. It seemed to her that under the stiff, pallid, rigidly clasped hands of the dead general something gleamed white through the transparent muslin of the covering, something like a piece of paper.

"Nonsense! Self-suggestion! It is impossible! Hallucination!" The thought flashed through her tortured brain. She forced herself to be calm, and to look again.

Yes! She had not been mistaken. The white corner of a folded paper appeared clearly against the general's dark uniform. At the same moment a cold draught coming from somewhere set the tapers flickering. Shadows danced around the room, over the bier, across the dead man's face; and in the quick change of light and shadow it seemed to her that the rigid features became more living, that a mournful smile formed itself on the closed lips, that the tightly-shut eyelids quivered. A wild cry rang through the whole room. With a desperate shriek: "His eyes! He is looking at me!" the general's wife staggered forward and fell fainting to the floor, beside her husband's bier.

V

The deacon sprang from his sofa with a cry, and an answering cry came from the lips of the shivering Rita, as she fled from the room. Servants rushed in, rubbing their eyes, still half-asleep, questioning each other, running this way and that. The deacon, spurred by a feeling of guilt, was determined to conceal the fact that he was sleeping. "It was the lady!" he said. "She came in to pray; she told me to stop reading while she prayed. She knelt down. Then she prayed for a long time, and suddenly … suddenly she cried out, and fainted. Grief, brothers! It is terrible! To lose such a husband!" and he set them to work with restoratives, himself rubbing the fallen woman's chilly hands.

The general's wife opened her eyes after a few minutes.

Looking wildly round in bewilderment, she seemed to be wondering where she was and how she had come there. Suddenly she remembered.

"The will! In his hands! Take it!" she cried, and fainted again. By this time the whole household was awake. Anna Iurievna had come in, full of astonishment at the sudden disturbance, but with the same feeling of deep quiet and peace still filling her heart and giving her features an expression of joy and calm. She heard the cry of the general's wife, and the words were recorded in her mind, though she did not at first give them any meaning.

She set herself, with all the tenderness of a good woman, to minister to the other's need, sending her own maid for sal volatile, chafing the fainting woman's hands, and giving orders that a bed should be prepared for her in another room, further away from the bier. As she spoke, quietly, gravely, with authority, the turmoil gradually subsided. The frightened servants recovered themselves, and moved about with the orderly obedience they ordinarily showed; and the deacon, above all anxious to cover his negligence, began intoning the liturgy, lending an atmosphere of solemnity to the whole room.

The servants, returning to announce that the bedroom was ready, were ordered by Anna Iurievna to lift the fainting woman with all care and gentleness, and she herself went with them to see the general's wife safely bestowed in her room, and waited while the doctor did all in his power to make her more comfortable. Olga Vseslavovna did not at once recover consciousness. She seemed to pass from a faint into an uneasy slumber, which, however, gradually became more quiet.

Only then, as she was leaving the room, did Anna Iurievna bethink her of the strange words that had fallen on her ears: "The will! In his hands! Take it!" And repeating them questioningly to herself, she walked slowly back toward the room in which lay her father's body.

But she was even more occupied with her own thoughts. She no longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was such deep happiness and joy.

She came over to her father's coffin, close to which the deacon was still droning out his liturgy, and stood beside the dead body, looking down at the strong, quiet face, and vividly recalling her dream of the night before. Her eyes rested on the many stars and medals on his breast, and on his hands, quietly clasped in death. Then suddenly, and quite mechanically, Olga Vseslavovna's cry, as she returned to consciousness, came back into her mind:

"The will! In his hands! Take it!" And bending down, she noted for the first time something white beneath the muslin canopy. As she scrutinized it wonderingly, she was conscious of an humble, apologetic voice murmuring something at her elbow:

"Forgive me, Anna Iurievna. I humbly beg you, forgive me! It was I … in the night … the flowers fell …. I was putting them back … fixing the head of your sainted papa …. It was under his head, the paper … I thought he wanted to keep it …. I put it in his hands, to be safe! … Forgive me, Anna Iurievna, if I have done any harm."

It was the deacon, still oppressed by a feeling of guilt. Anna. Iurievna turned to him, and then turned back again, to her father's body, to the white object shining under the muslin canopy. And once more Olga Vseslavovna's words came into her mind:

"The will! In his hands! Take it!"

Gently raising the canopy, she softly drew the paper from beneath the general's clasped hands, and unfolded it. She read no more than the opening words, but she had read enough to realize that it was, indeed, her father's will.

FEODOR MIKHAILOVITCH DOSTOYEVSKY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT3

One sultry evening early in July a young man emerged from the small furnished lodging he occupied in a large five-storied house in the Pereoulok S–, and turned slowly, with an air of indecision, toward the K–bridge. He was fortunate enough not to meet his landlady on the stairs. She occupied the floor beneath him, and her kitchen, with its usually open door, was entered from the staircase. Thus, whenever the young man went out, he found himself obliged to pass under the enemy's fire, which always produced a morbid terror, humiliating him and making him knit his brows. He owed her some money and felt afraid of encountering her.

It was not that he had been terrified or crushed by misfortune, but that for some time past he had fallen into a state of nervous depression akin to hypochondria. He had withdrawn from society and shut himself up, till he was ready to shun, not merely his landlady, but every human face. Poverty had once weighed him down, though, of late, he had lost his sensitiveness on that score. He had given up all his daily occupations. In his heart of hearts he laughed scornfully at his landlady and the extremities to which she might proceed. Still, to be waylaid on the stairs, to have to listen to all her jargon, hear her demands, threats, and complaints, and have to make excuses and subterfuges in return—no, he preferred to steal down without attracting notice. On this occasion, however, when he had gained the street, he felt surprised himself at this dread of meeting the woman to whom he was in debt.

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3

(At the risk of shocking the reader, it has been decided that the real permanent detective stories of the world were ill represented without Dostoyevsky's terrible tale of what might be called "self-detection." If to sensitive readers the story seems so real as to be hideous, it is well to recall that Dostoyevsky in 1849 under-went the agony of sentence to death as a revolutionist. Although the sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia, and although six years later he was freed and again took up his writing, his mind never rose from beneath the weight of horror and hopelessness that hangs over offenders against the Great White Czar. Dostoyevsky, sentenced as a criminal, herded with criminals, really became a criminal in literary imagination. Add to this a minute observation, a marvelous memory, ardent political convictions—and we can understand why the story here, with others of his, is taken as a scientific text by criminologists.—EDITOR.)