He was more and more terrified, especially after this second murder, entirely unpremeditated by him.  He was in a hurry to be gone; had he then been in a state to see things more clearly, had he only been able to form an idea of the difficulties besetting his position, to see how desperate, how hideous, how absurd it was, to understand how many obstacles there still remained for him to surmount, perhaps even crimes to commit, to escape from this house and return home, he would most likely have withdrawn from the struggle, and have gone at once and given himself up to justice; it was not cowardice which would have prompted him to do so, but the horror of what he had done.  This last impression became more and more powerful every minute.  Nothing in the world could now have made him return to the trunk, nor even reenter the room in which it lay.  Little by little his mind became diverted by other thoughts, and he lapsed into a kind of reverie; at times the murderer seemed to forget his position, or rather the most important part of it, and to concentrate his attention on trifles.  After a while, happening to glance in the kitchen, he observed a pail half full of water, standing on a bench, and that gave him the idea of washing his hands and the hatchet.  The blood had made his hands sticky.  After plunging the blade of the hatchet in the water, he took a small piece of soap which lay on the window sill, and commenced his ablutions.  When he had washed his hands, he set to cleaning the iron part of his weapon; then he devoted three minutes to soaping the wooden handle, which was also stained with blood.

After this he wiped it with a cloth which had been hung up to dry on a line stretched across the kitchen.  This done, he drew near the window and carefully examined the hatchet for some minutes.  The accusing stains had disappeared, but the handle was still damp.  Raskolnikoff carefully hid the weapon under his coat by replacing it in the loop; after which, he minutely inspected his clothes, that is to say so far as the dim light of the kitchen allowed him to do so.  He saw nothing suspicious about the coat and trousers, but there were bloodstains on the boots.  He removed them with the aid of a damp rag.  But these precautions only half reassured him, for he knew that he could not see properly and that certain stains had very likely escaped him.  He stood irresolute in the middle of the room, a prey to a somber, agonizing thought, the thought that he was going mad, that at that moment he was not in a fit state to come to a determination and to watch over his security, that his way of going to work was probably not the one the circumstances demanded.  “Good heavens!  I ought to go, to go away at once!” murmured he, and he rushed to the anteroom where the greatest terror he had yet experienced awaited him.