Koch keeps crossing himself and saying:
'If I had been there, he would have jumped out and killed me with his axe.'
He is going to have a thanksgiving service--ha, ha!"
"And no one saw the murderer?"
"They might well not see him; the house is a regular Noah's Ark," said the head clerk, who was listening.
"It's clear, quite clear," Nikodim Fomitch repeated warmly.
"No, it is anything but clear," Ilya Petrovitch maintained.
Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but he did not reach it....
When he recovered consciousness, he found himself sitting in a chair, supported by someone on the right side, while someone else was standing on the left, holding a yellowish glass filled with yellow water, and Nikodim Fomitch standing before him, looking intently at him. He got up from the chair.
"What's this? Are you ill?" Nikodim Fomitch asked, rather sharply.
"He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing," said the head clerk, settling back in his place, and taking up his work again.
"Have you been ill long?" cried Ilya Petrovitch from his place, where he, too, was looking through papers.
He had, of course, come to look at the sick man when he fainted, but retired at once when he recovered.
"Since yesterday," muttered Raskolnikov in reply.
"Did you go out yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Though you were ill?"
"Yes."
"At what time?"
"About seven."
"And where did you go, my I ask?"
"Along the street."
"Short and clear."
Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered sharply, jerkily, without dropping his black feverish eyes before Ilya Petrovitch's stare.
"He can scarcely stand upright. And you..." Nikodim Fomitch was beginning.
"No matter," Ilya Petrovitch pronounced rather peculiarly.
Nikodim Fomitch would have made some further protest, but glancing at the head clerk who was looking very hard at him, he did not speak.
There was a sudden silence.
It was strange.
"Very well, then," concluded Ilya Petrovitch, "we will not detain you."
Raskolnikov went out.
He caught the sound of eager conversation on his departure, and above the rest rose the questioning voice of Nikodim Fomitch.
In the street, his faintness passed off completely.
"A search--there will be a search at once," he repeated to himself, hurrying home. "The brutes! they suspect."
His former terror mastered him completely again.
CHAPTER II
"And what if there has been a search already?
What if I find them in my room?"
But here was his room.
Nothing and no one in it. No one had peeped in.
Even Nastasya had not touched it.
But heavens! how could he have left all those things in the hole?
He rushed to the corner, slipped his hand under the paper, pulled the things out and lined his pockets with them.
There were eight articles in all: two little boxes with ear-rings or something of the sort, he hardly looked to see; then four small leather cases.
There was a chain, too, merely wrapped in newspaper and something else in newspaper, that looked like a decoration....
He put them all in the different pockets of his overcoat, and the remaining pocket of his trousers, trying to conceal them as much as possible.
He took the purse, too.
Then he went out of his room, leaving the door open.
He walked quickly and resolutely, and though he felt shattered, he had his senses about him.
He was afraid of pursuit, he was afraid that in another half-hour, another quarter of an hour perhaps, instructions would be issued for his pursuit, and so at all costs, he must hide all traces before then.