horns? Why horns? What nonsense! On the contrary, in a civil marriage there won’t be any horns! Horns are merely the natural consequence of any lawful marriage, its corrective, a protest, so in this sense they aren’t even remotely demeaning . . . And if I ever – to take an absurd example – find myself in a lawful marriage, I’ll be only too glad to wear your sodding horns, and I’ll tell my wife: “My dear, before I merely loved you, but now I respect you,16 because you’ve managed to protest!” You’re laughing? Only because you’re unable to abandon your preconceptions! I understand perfectly well how unpleasant it is to be cuckolded in a lawful marriage, dammit; but this is merely the lousy consequence of a lousy fact, whereby both parties are demeaned. When horns are on open display, as they are in a civil marriage, they no longer exist, they’re inconceivable and can no longer even be described as horns. On the contrary, your wife will simply be showing you how much she respects you by deeming you incapable of standing in the way of her happiness and enlightened enough not to seek revenge for her new husband. Dammit, I sometimes dream of how, were I to be married off – sorry, I mean were I ever to marry (be it a civil or a lawful marriage) – I’d bring my wife a lover myself, if she were slow to take one. “My dear,” I would say to her, “I love you, but on top of that I would like you to respect me – so here you go!” I’m right, am I not?’
Pyotr Petrovich tittered as he listened, but without any great enthusiasm. He wasn’t even really listening. He had something else on his mind and even Lebezyatnikov eventually noticed. In fact, Pyotr Petrovich was quite excited about something, rubbing his hands and lost in thought. Only later did Andrei Semyonovich remember this and piece it all together . . .
II
It would be hard to identify with any precision the reasons that gave rise, in the distressed mind of Katerina Ivanovna, to the notion of this idiotic banquet. Nearly half of the twenty-odd roubles received from Raskolnikov and intended for the funeral itself had been thrown at it. Perhaps Katerina Ivanovna felt that she owed it to the deceased to honour his memory by ‘doing things properly’, in order that all the tenants, and especially Amalia Ivanovna Lippewechsel, understood that not only was Marmeladov ‘not one whit worse’ than them, but very possibly ‘a cut above them’, and that none of them had any right to ‘turn their nose up’ at him. Perhaps the most influential factor here was that particular pauper’s pride, whereby certain social rituals, deemed obligatory for all and sundry in our country, lead many to stretch their resources to the limit and spend what few copecks they’ve saved merely in order to be ‘no worse than the others’ and to prevent any of these others somehow ‘finding fault’ with them. It also seems more than likely that Katerina Ivanovna, on precisely this occasion, at precisely this moment, when the whole world seemed to have forsaken her, felt like showing all these ‘worthless and poxy tenants’ that not only did she know ‘how to live and how to receive’, but also that this was nothing compared to the life she was raised for ‘in the noble, one might even say aristocratic house of a colonel’, and that the last thing she of all people was brought up to do was sweep floors and wash children’s rags by night. Such paroxysms of pride and vanity do sometimes visit the poorest and most browbeaten people, in whom, on occasion, they are transformed into a nervous, irrepressible need. Katerina Ivanovna, moreover, was not the browbeaten sort: she could be beaten to death by circumstances, but for her to be morally beaten, through intimidation and the subordination of her will – that was simply impossible. Sonechka, moreover, had every reason to say that Katerina Ivanovna was unhinged. True, it was still too early to assert this definitively, but there was no doubt that over the past year her poor mind had been through far too much not to have been at least partly affected. The later stages of consumption, the medics say, also lead to the impairment of the mental faculties.
Wines, as such, were not on offer, nor was