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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under Western Eyes
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER WESTERN EYES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDER WESTERN EYES
+
+by JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+
+
+
+"I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece
+of bread." Miss HALDIN
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+
+
+To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of
+imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create
+for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the
+Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov.
+
+If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been
+smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words.
+Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for
+many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length
+becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight
+an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes
+a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a
+mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
+
+This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Razumov or guessed at his
+reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was.
+Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly
+beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the
+readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of
+documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on
+a document; all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the Russian
+language, which is sufficient for what is attempted here. The document,
+of course, is something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not
+exactly that in its actual form. For instance, most of it was not
+written up from day to day, though all the entries are dated. Some of
+these entries cover months of time and extend over dozens of pages. All
+the earlier part is a retrospect, in a narrative form, relating to an
+event which took place about a year before.
+
+I must mention that I have lived for a long time in Geneva. A whole
+quarter of that town, on account of many Russians residing there,
+is called La Petite Russie--Little Russia. I had a rather extensive
+connexion in Little Russia at that time. Yet I confess that I have
+no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their
+attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the
+exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars;
+but there must be something else in the way, some special human
+trait--one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere
+professors. What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the
+Russians' extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish
+them, but they don't hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary, they
+are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with an
+enthusiasm, a sweeping abundance, with such an aptness of application
+sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't
+defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they
+say. There is a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as
+far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected
+to be classed as eloquence.... But I must apologize for this
+digression.
+
+It would be idle to inquire why Mr. Razumov has left this record behind
+him. It is inconceivable that he should have wished any human eye to see
+it. A mysterious impulse of human nature comes into play here. Putting
+aside Samuel Pepys, who has forced in this way the door of immortality,
+innumerable people, criminals, saints, philosophers, young girls,
+statesmen, and simple imbeciles, have kept self-revealing records from
+vanity no doubt, but also from other more inscrutable motives. There
+must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have
+used them for self-communion. Being myself a quiet individual I take
+it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some
+formula of peace. Certainly they are crying loud enough for it at the
+present day. What sort of peace Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov expected
+to find in the writing up of his record it passeth my understanding to
+guess.
+
+The fact remains that he has written it.
+
+Mr. Razumov was a tall, well-proportioned young man, quite unusually
+dark for a Russian from the Central Provinces. His good looks would have
+been unquestionable if it had not been for a peculiar lack of fineness
+in the features. It was as if a face modelled vigorously in wax (with
+some approach even to a classical correctness of type) had been
+held close to a fire till all sharpness of line had been lost in
+the softening of the material. But even thus he was sufficiently
+good-looking. His manner, too, was good. In discussion he was easily
+swayed by argument and authority. With his younger compatriots he took
+the attitude of an inscrutable listener, a listener of the kind that
+hears you out intelligently and then--just changes the subject.
+
+This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual
+insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one's own convictions,
+procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of
+exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent
+discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited
+with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, third year's student in philosophy, was
+looked upon as a strong nature--an altogether trustworthy man. This,
+in a country where an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or
+sometimes by a fate worse than mere death, meant that he was worthy
+of being trusted with forbidden opinions. He was liked also for his
+amiability and for his quiet readiness to oblige his comrades even at
+the cost of personal inconvenience.
+
+Mr. Razumov was supposed to be the son of an Archpriest and to be
+protected by a distinguished nobleman--perhaps of his own distant
+province. But his outward appearance accorded badly with such humble
+origin. Such a descent was not credible. It was, indeed, suggested that
+Mr. Razumov was the son of an Archpriest's pretty daughter--which, of
+course, would put a different complexion on the matter. This theory also
+rendered intelligible the protection of the distinguished nobleman. All
+this, however, had never been investigated maliciously or otherwise. No
+one knew or cared who the nobleman in question was. Razumov received
+a modest but very sufficient allowance from the hands of an obscure
+attorney, who seemed to act as his guardian in some measure. Now and
+then he appeared at some professor's informal reception. Apart from
+that Razumov was not known to have any social relations in the town.
+He attended the obligatory lectures regularly and was considered by the
+authorities as a very promising student. He worked at home in the manner
+of a man who means to get on, but did not shut himself up severely for
+that purpose. He was always accessible, and there was nothing secret or
+reserved in his life.
+
+I
+
+The origin of Mr. Razumov's record is connected with an event
+characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination
+of a prominent statesman--and still more characteristic of the moral
+corruption of an oppressed society where the noblest aspirations of
+humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of
+justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are
+prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of
+an uneasy despotism.
+
+The fact alluded to above is the successful attempt on the life of Mr.
+de P---, the President of the notorious Repressive Commission of some
+years ago, the Minister of State invested with extraordinary powers. The
+newspapers made noise enough about that fanatical, narrow-chested figure
+in gold-laced uniform, with a face of crumpled parchment, insipid,
+bespectacled eyes, and the cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung
+under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month
+passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated
+papers of Europe. He served the monarchy by imprisoning, exiling, or
+sending to the gallows men and women, young and old, with an equable,
+unwearied industry. In his mystic acceptance of the principle of
+autocracy he was bent on extirpating from the land every vestige of
+anything that resembled freedom in public institutions; and in his
+ruthless persecution of the rising generation he seemed to aim at the
+destruction of the very hope of liberty itself.
+
+It is said that this execrated personality had not enough imagination
+to be aware of the hate he inspired. It is hardly credible; but it is a
+fact that he took very few precautions for his safety. In the preamble
+of a certain famous State paper he had declared once that "the thought
+of liberty has never existed in the Act of the Creator. From the
+multitude of men's counsel nothing could come but revolt and disorder;
+and revolt and disorder in a world created for obedience and stability
+is sin. It was not Reason but Authority which expressed the Divine
+Intention. God was the Autocrat of the Universe...." It may be that
+the man who made this declaration believed that heaven itself was bound
+to protect him in his remorseless defence of Autocracy on this earth.
+
+No doubt the vigilance of the police saved him many times; but, as a
+matter of fact, when his appointed fate overtook him, the competent
+authorities could not have given him any warning. They had no knowledge
+of any conspiracy against the Minister's life, had no hint of any plot
+through their usual channels of information, had seen no signs, were
+aware of no suspicious movements or dangerous persons.
+
+Mr. de P--- was being driven towards the railway station in a two-horse
+uncovered sleigh with footman and coachman on the box. Snow had been
+falling all night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this early
+hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the
+sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to the
+left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking
+slowly on the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of
+his sheepskin coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the
+falling snow. On being overtaken this peasant suddenly faced about and
+swung his arm. In an instant there was a terrible shock, a detonation
+muffled in the multitude of snowflakes; both horses lay dead and mangled
+on the ground and the coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen off the
+box mortally wounded. The footman (who survived) had no time to see the
+face of the man in the sheepskin coat. After throwing the bomb this last
+got away, but it is supposed that, seeing a lot of people surging up on
+all sides of him in the falling snow, and all running towards the scene
+of the explosion, he thought it safer to turn back with them.
+
+In an incredibly short time an excited crowd assembled round the sledge.
+The Minister-President, getting out unhurt into the deep snow, stood
+near the groaning coachman and addressed the people repeatedly in his
+weak, colourless voice: "I beg of you to keep off: For the love of God,
+I beg of you good people to keep off."
+
+It was then that a tall young man who had remained standing perfectly
+still within a carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped out into
+the street and walking up rapidly flung another bomb over the heads of
+the crowd. It actually struck the Minister-President on the shoulder
+as he stooped over his dying servant, then falling between his feet
+exploded with a terrific concentrated violence, striking him dead to the
+ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the empty
+sledge in the twinkling of an eye. With a yell of horror the crowd broke
+up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell dead or dying
+where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and one or two
+others who did not fall till they had run a little way.
+
+The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment,
+the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of
+yards in each direction. Through the falling snow people looked from
+afar at the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the
+carcases of the two horses. Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks
+of a street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the
+dead. Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on
+the pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant's sheepskin coat; but
+the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the
+pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was
+never established.
+
+That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning
+within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working
+for some time in the library. He heard the first vague rumour of
+something in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students'
+ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two o'clock dinner. But
+this rumour was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where
+it was not always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much
+interested in certain kinds of whispers. Razumov was one of those
+men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an
+instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware
+of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an
+indefinite way. But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and
+with his own future.
+
+Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the
+Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his
+opinions or his feelings. He was as lonely in the world as a man
+swimming in the deep sea. The word Razumov was the mere label of
+a solitary individuality. There were no Razumovs belonging to him
+anywhere. His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he
+was a Russian. Whatever good he expected from life would be given to or
+withheld from his hopes by that connexion alone. This immense parentage
+suffered from the throes of internal dissensions, and he shrank mentally
+from the fray as a good-natured man may shrink from taking definite
+sides in a violent family quarrel.
+
+Razumov, going home, reflected that having prepared all the matters of
+the forthcoming examination, he could now devote his time to the subject
+of the prize essay. He hankered after the silver medal. The prize was
+offered by the Ministry of Education; the names of the competitors would
+be submitted to the Minister himself. The mere fact of trying would be
+considered meritorious in the higher quarters; and the possessor of the
+prize would have a claim to an administrative appointment of the better
+sort after he had taken his degree. The student Razumov in an access of
+elation forgot the dangers menacing the stability of the institutions
+which give rewards and appointments. But remembering the medallist of
+the year before, Razumov, the young man of no parentage, was sobered. He
+and some others happened to be assembled in their comrade's rooms at the
+very time when that last received the official advice of his success.
+He was a quiet, unassuming young man: "Forgive me," he had said with a
+faint apologetic smile and taking up his cap, "I am going out to order
+up some wine. But I must first send a telegram to my folk at home. I
+say! Won't the old people make it a festive time for the neighbours for
+twenty miles around our place."
+
+Razumov thought there was nothing of that sort for him in the world. His
+success would matter to no one. But he felt no bitterness against
+the nobleman his protector, who was not a provincial magnate as was
+generally supposed. He was in fact nobody less than Prince K---, once
+a great and splendid figure in the world and now, his day being over,
+a Senator and a gouty invalid, living in a still splendid but more
+domestic manner. He had some young children and a wife as aristocratic
+and proud as himself.
+
+In all his life Razumov was allowed only once to come into personal
+contact with the Prince.
+
+It had the air of a chance meeting in the little attorney's office.
+One day Razumov, coming in by appointment, found a stranger standing
+there--a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey
+sidewhiskers. The bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out,
+"Come in--come in, Mr. Razumov," with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then
+turning deferentially to the stranger with the grand air, "A ward
+of mine, your Excellency. One of the most promising students of his
+faculty in the St. Petersburg University."
+
+To his intense surprise Razumov saw a white shapely hand extended to
+him. He took it in great confusion (it was soft and passive) and heard
+at the same time a condescending murmur in which he caught only the
+words "Satisfactory" and "Persevere." But the most amazing thing of all
+was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of the white shapely hand
+just before it was withdrawn: a light pressure like a secret sign. The
+emotion of it was terrible. Razumov's heart seemed to leap into his
+throat. When he raised his eyes the aristocratic personage, motioning
+the little lawyer aside, had opened the door and was going out.
+
+The attorney rummaged amongst the papers on his desk for a time. "Do you
+know who that was?" he asked suddenly.
+
+Razumov, whose heart was thumping hard yet, shook his head in silence.
+
+"That was Prince K---. You wonder what he could be doing in the hole of
+a poor legal rat like myself--eh? These awfully great people have their
+sentimental curiosities like common sinners. But if I were you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch," he continued, leering and laying a peculiar emphasis on
+the patronymic, "I wouldn't boast at large of the introduction. It would
+not be prudent, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Oh dear no! It would be in fact
+dangerous for your future."
+
+The young man's ears burned like fire; his sight was dim. "That man!"
+Razumov was saying to himself. "He!"
+
+Henceforth it was by this monosyllable that Mr. Razumov got into
+the habit of referring mentally to the stranger with grey silky
+side-whiskers. From that time too, when walking in the more fashionable
+quarters, he noted with interest the magnificent horses and carriages
+with Prince K---'s liveries on the box. Once he saw the Princess get
+out--she was shopping--followed by two girls, of which one was nearly a
+head taller than the other. Their fair hair hung loose down their backs
+in the English style; they had merry eyes, their coats, muffs, and
+little fur caps were exactly alike, and their cheeks and noses were
+tinged a cheerful pink by the frost. They crossed the pavement in front
+of him, and Razumov went on his way smiling shyly to himself. "His"
+daughters. They resembled "Him." The young man felt a glow of warm
+friendliness towards these girls who would never know of his existence.
+Presently they would marry Generals or Kammerherrs and have girls and
+boys of their own, who perhaps would be aware of him as a celebrated old
+professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories of
+Russia--nothing more!
+
+But a celebrated professor was a somebody. Distinction would convert the
+label Razumov into an honoured name. There was nothing strange in
+the student Razumov's wish for distinction. A man's real life is that
+accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or
+natural love. Returning home on the day of the attempt on Mr. de P---'s
+life Razumov resolved to have a good try for the silver medal.
+
+Climbing slowly the four flights of the dark, dirty staircase in the
+house where he had his lodgings, he felt confident of success. The
+winner's name would be published in the papers on New Year's Day. And at
+the thought that "He" would most probably read it there, Razumov stopped
+short on the stairs for an instant, then went on smiling faintly at his
+own emotion. "This is but a shadow," he said to himself, "but the medal
+is a solid beginning."
+
+With those ideas of industry in his head the warmth of his room was
+agreeable and encouraging. "I shall put in four hours of good work,"
+he thought. But no sooner had he closed the door than he was horribly
+startled. All black against the usual tall stove of white tiles gleaming
+in the dusk, stood a strange figure, wearing a skirted, close-fitting,
+brown cloth coat strapped round the waist, in long boots, and with a
+little Astrakhan cap on its head. It loomed lithe and martial. Razumov
+was utterly confounded. It was only when the figure advancing two paces
+asked in an untroubled, grave voice if the outer door was closed that he
+regained his power of speech.
+
+"Haldin!... Victor Victorovitch!... Is that you?... Yes. The
+outer door is shut all right. But this is indeed unexpected."
+
+Victor Haldin, a student older than most of his contemporaries at the
+University, was not one of the industrious set. He was hardly ever seen
+at lectures; the authorities had marked him as "restless" and "unsound
+"--very bad notes. But he had a great personal prestige with his
+comrades and influenced their thoughts. Razumov had never been intimate
+with him. They had met from time to time at gatherings in other
+students' houses. They had even had a discussion together--one of those
+discussions on first principles dear to the sanguine minds of youth.
+
+Razumov wished the man had chosen some other time to come for a chat. He
+felt in good trim to tackle the prize essay. But as Haldin could not be
+slightingly dismissed Razumov adopted the tone of hospitality, asking
+him to sit down and smoke.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch," said the other, flinging off his cap, "we are not
+perhaps in exactly the same camp. Your judgment is more philosophical.
+You are a man of few words, but I haven't met anybody who dared to
+doubt the generosity of your sentiments. There is a solidity about your
+character which cannot exist without courage."
+
+Razumov felt flattered and began to murmur shyly something about being
+very glad of his good opinion, when Haldin raised his hand.
+
+"That is what I was saying to myself," he continued, "as I dodged in the
+woodyard down by the river-side. 'He has a strong character this young
+man,' I said to myself. 'He does not throw his soul to the winds.' Your
+reserve has always fascinated me, Kirylo Sidorovitch. So I tried to
+remember your address. But look here--it was a piece of luck. Your
+dvornik was away from the gate talking to a sleigh-driver on the other
+side of the street. I met no one on the stairs, not a soul. As I came up
+to your floor I caught sight of your landlady coming out of your rooms.
+But she did not see me. She crossed the landing to her own side, and
+then I slipped in. I have been here two hours expecting you to come in
+every moment."
+
+Razumov had listened in astonishment; but before he could open his mouth
+Haldin added, speaking deliberately, "It was I who removed de P--- this
+morning." Razumov kept down a cry of dismay. The sentiment of his life
+being utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime expressed itself
+quaintly by a sort of half-derisive mental exclamation, "There goes my
+silver medal!"
+
+Haldin continued after waiting a while--
+
+"You say nothing, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I understand your silence. To be
+sure, I cannot expect you with your frigid English manner to embrace
+me. But never mind your manners. You have enough heart to have heard the
+sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth this man raised in the land. That
+would be enough to get over any philosophical hopes. He was uprooting
+the tender plant. He had to be stopped. He was a dangerous man--a
+convinced man. Three more years of his work would have put us back fifty
+years into bondage--and look at all the lives wasted, at all the souls
+lost in that time."
+
+His curt, self-confident voice suddenly lost its ring and it was in a
+dull tone that he added, "Yes, brother, I have killed him. It's weary
+work."
+
+Razumov had sunk into a chair. Every moment he expected a crowd of
+policemen to rush in. There must have been thousands of them out looking
+for that man walking up and down in his room. Haldin was talking again
+in a restrained, steady voice. Now and then he flourished an arm,
+slowly, without excitement.
+
+He told Razumov how he had brooded for a year; how he had not slept
+properly for weeks. He and "Another" had a warning of the Minister's
+movements from "a certain person" late the evening before. He and that
+"Another" prepared their "engines" and resolved to have no sleep till
+"the deed" was done. They walked the streets under the falling snow with
+the "engines" on them, exchanging not a word the livelong night. When
+they happened to meet a police patrol they took each other by the arm
+and pretended to be a couple of peasants on the spree. They reeled and
+talked in drunken hoarse voices. Except for these strange outbreaks they
+kept silence, moving on ceaselessly. Their plans had been previously
+arranged. At daybreak they made their way to the spot which they
+knew the sledge must pass. When it appeared in sight they exchanged a
+muttered good-bye and separated. The "other" remained at the corner,
+Haldin took up a position a little farther up the street....
+
+After throwing his "engine" he ran off and in a moment was overtaken
+by the panic-struck people flying away from the spot after the second
+explosion. They were wild with terror. He was jostled once or twice. He
+slowed down for the rush to pass him and then turned to the left into a
+narrow street. There he was alone.
+
+He marvelled at this immediate escape. The work was done. He could
+hardly believe it. He fought with an almost irresistible longing to lie
+down on the pavement and sleep. But this sort of faintness--a drowsy
+faintness--passed off quickly. He walked faster, making his way to one
+of the poorer parts of the town in order to look up Ziemianitch.
+
+This Ziemianitch, Razumov understood, was a sort of town-peasant who had
+got on; owner of a small number of sledges and horses for hire. Haldin
+paused in his narrative to exclaim--
+
+"A bright spirit! A hardy soul! The best driver in St. Petersburg. He
+has a team of three horses there.... Ah! He's a fellow!"
+
+This man had declared himself willing to take out safely, at any time,
+one or two persons to the second or third railway station on one of the
+southern lines. But there had been no time to warn him the night before.
+His usual haunt seemed to be a low-class eating-house on the outskirts
+of the town. When Haldin got there the man was not to be found. He was
+not expected to turn up again till the evening. Haldin wandered away
+restlessly.
+
+He saw the gate of a woodyard open and went in to get out of the wind
+which swept the bleak broad thoroughfare. The great rectangular piles of
+cut wood loaded with snow resembled the huts of a village. At first the
+watchman who discovered him crouching amongst them talked in a friendly
+manner. He was a dried-up old man wearing two ragged army coats one over
+the other; his wizened little face, tied up under the jaw and over the
+ears in a dirty red handkerchief, looked comical. Presently he grew
+sulky, and then all at once without rhyme or reason began to shout
+furiously.
+
+"Aren't you ever going to clear out of this, you loafer? We know all
+about factory hands of your sort. A big, strong, young chap! You aren't
+even drunk. What do you want here? You don't frighten us. Take yourself
+and your ugly eyes away."
+
+Haldin stopped before the sitting Razumov. His supple figure, with
+the white forehead above which the fair hair stood straight up, had an
+aspect of lofty daring.
+
+"He did not like my eyes," he said. "And so...here I am."
+
+Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.
+
+"But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch. We know each other so little....
+I don't see why you...."
+
+"Confidence," said Haldin.
+
+This word sealed Razumov's lips as if a hand had been clapped on his
+mouth. His brain seethed with arguments.
+
+"And so--here you are," he muttered through his teeth.
+
+The other did not detect the tone of anger. Never suspected it.
+
+"Yes. And nobody knows I am here. You are the last person that could
+be suspected--should I get caught. That's an advantage, you see. And
+then--speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the
+truth. It occurred to me that you--you have no one belonging to you--no
+ties, no one to suffer for it if this came out by some means. There
+have been enough ruined Russian homes as it is. But I don't see how my
+passage through your rooms can be ever known. If I should be got hold
+of, I'll know how to keep silent--no matter what they may be pleased to
+do to me," he added grimly.
+
+He began to walk again while Razumov sat still appalled.
+
+"You thought that--" he faltered out almost sick with indignation.
+
+"Yes, Razumov. Yes, brother. Some day you shall help to build. You
+suppose that I am a terrorist, now--a destructor of what is, But
+consider that the true destroyers are they who destroy the spirit of
+progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the
+persecutors of human dignity. Men like me are necessary to make room for
+self-contained, thinking men like you. Well, we have made the sacrifice
+of our lives, but all the same I want to escape if it can be done. It
+is not my life I want to save, but my power to do. I won't live idle. Oh
+no! Don't make any mistake, Razumov. Men like me are rare. And, besides,
+an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator
+vanishes without a trace. They sit in their offices and palaces and
+quake. All I want you to do is to help me to vanish. No great matter
+that. Only to go by and by and see Ziemianitch for me at that place
+where I went this morning. Just tell him, 'He whom you know wants a
+well-horsed sledge to pull up half an hour after midnight at the seventh
+lamp-post on the left counting from the upper end of Karabelnaya. If
+nobody gets in, the sledge is to run round a block or two, so as to come
+back past the same spot in ten minutes' time.'"
+
+Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to
+go away long before. Was it weakness or what?
+
+He concluded that it was a sound instinct. Haldin must have been seen.
+It was impossible that some people should not have noticed the face and
+appearance of the man who threw the second bomb. Haldin was a noticeable
+person. The police in their thousands must have had his description
+within the hour. With every moment the danger grew. Sent out to wander
+in the streets he could not escape being caught in the end.
+
+The police would very soon find out all about him. They would set about
+discovering a conspiracy. Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in
+the greatest danger. Unguarded expressions, little facts in themselves
+innocent would be counted for crimes. Razumov remembered certain words
+he said, the speeches he had listened to, the harmless gatherings he
+had attended--it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that
+sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.
+
+Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress, worried, badgered, perhaps
+ill-used. He saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life
+broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope. He saw himself--at best--leading
+a miserable existence under police supervision, in some small, faraway
+provincial town, without friends to assist his necessities or even
+take any steps to alleviate his lot--as others had. Others had fathers,
+mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on
+their behalf--he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him some
+morning would forget his existence before sunset.
+
+He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation--his
+strength give way, his mind become an abject thing. He saw himself
+creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets--dying unattended
+in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
+hospital.
+
+He shuddered. Then the peace of bitter calmness came over him. It was
+best to keep this man out of the streets till he could be got rid of
+with some chance of escaping. That was the best that could be done.
+Razumov, of course, felt the safety of his lonely existence to be
+permanently endangered. This evening's doings could turn up against
+him at any time as long as this man lived and the present institutions
+endured. They appeared to him rational and indestructible at that
+moment. They had a force of harmony--in contrast with the horrible
+discord of this man's presence. He hated the man. He said quietly--
+
+"Yes, of course, I will go. 'You must give me precise directions, and
+for the rest--depend on me."
+
+"Ah! You are a fellow! Collected--cool as a cucumber. A regular
+Englishman. Where did you get your soul from? There aren't many like
+you. Look here, brother! Men like me leave no posterity, but their souls
+are not lost. No man's soul is ever lost. It works for itself--or else
+where would be the sense of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction,
+of faith--the labours of the soul? What will become of my soul when I
+die in the way I must die--soon--very soon perhaps? It shall not perish.
+Don't make a mistake, Razumov. This is not murder--it is war, war. My
+spirit shall go on warring in some Russian body till all falsehood is
+swept out of the world. The modern civilization is false, but a new
+revelation shall come out of Russia. Ha! you say nothing. You are a
+sceptic. I respect your philosophical scepticism, Razumov, but don't
+touch the soul. The Russian soul that lives in all of us. It has a
+future. It has a mission, I tell you, or else why should I have been
+moved to do this--reckless--like a butcher--in the middle of all these
+innocent people--scattering death--I! I!... I wouldn't hurt a fly!"
+
+"Not so loud," warned Razumov harshly.
+
+Haldin sat down abruptly, and leaning his head on his folded arms burst
+into tears. He wept for a long time. The dusk had deepened in the room.
+Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder, listened to the sobs.
+
+The other raised his head, got up and with an effort mastered his voice.
+
+"Yes. Men like me leave no posterity," he repeated in a subdued tone,
+"I have a sister though. She's with my old mother--I persuaded them to
+go abroad this year--thank God. Not a bad little girl my sister. She has
+the most trustful eyes of any human being that ever walked this earth.
+She will marry well, I hope. She may have children--sons perhaps. Look
+at me. My father was a Government official in the provinces, He had a
+little land too. A simple servant of God--a true Russian in his way. His
+was the soul of obedience. But I am not like him. They say I resemble
+my mother's eldest brother, an officer. They shot him in '28. Under
+Nicholas, you know. Haven't I told you that this is war, war.... But
+God of Justice! This is weary work."
+
+Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his hand, spoke as if from
+the bottom of an abyss.
+
+"You believe in God, Haldin?"
+
+"There you go catching at words that are wrung from one. What does it
+matter? What was it the Englishman said: 'There is a divine soul in
+things...' Devil take him--I don't remember now. But he spoke the
+truth. When the day of you thinkers comes don't you forget what's
+divine in the Russian soul--and that's resignation. Respect that in your
+intellectual restlessness and don't let your arrogant wisdom spoil its
+message to the world. I am speaking to you now like a man with a rope
+round his neck. What do you imagine I am? A being in revolt? No. It's
+you thinkers who are in everlasting revolt. I am one of the resigned.
+When the necessity of this heavy work came to me and I understood that
+it had to be done--what did I do? Did I exult? Did I take pride in
+my purpose? Did I try to weigh its worth and consequences? No! I was
+resigned. I thought 'God's will be done.'"
+
+He threw himself full length on Razumov's bed and putting the backs of
+his hands over his eyes remained perfectly motionless and silent. Not
+even the sound of his breathing could be heard. The dead stillness
+or the room remained undisturbed till in the darkness Razumov said
+gloomily--
+
+"Haldin."
+
+"Yes," answered the other readily, quite invisible now on the bed and
+without the slightest stir.
+
+"Isn't it time for me to start?"
+
+"Yes, brother." The other was heard, lying still in the darkness as
+though he were talking in his sleep. "The time has come to put fate to
+the test."
+
+He paused, then gave a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal
+voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer.
+As he was leaving the room the voice on the bed said after him--
+
+"Go with God, thou silent soul."
+
+On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked the door and put the key
+in his pocket.
+
+II
+
+The words and events of that evening must have been graven as if with
+a steel tool on Mr. Razumov's brain since he was able to write his
+relation with such fullness and precision a good many months afterwards.
+
+The record of the thoughts which assailed him in the street is even more
+minute and abundant. They seem to have rushed upon him with the greater
+freedom because his thinking powers were no longer crushed by Haldin's
+presence--the appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning force
+of a great fanaticism. On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov's
+diary I own that a "rush of thoughts" is not an adequate image.
+
+The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts--the
+faithful reflection of the state of his feelings. The thoughts in
+themselves were not numerous--they were like the thoughts of most human
+beings, few and simple--but they cannot be reproduced here in all
+their exclamatory repetitions which went on in an endless and weary
+turmoil--for the walk was long.
+
+If to the Western reader they appear shocking, inappropriate, or even
+improper, it must be remembered that as to the first this may be the
+effect of my crude statement. For the rest I will only remark here that
+this is not a story of the West of Europe.
+
+Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments
+have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young
+Englishman should find himself in Razumov's situation. This being so it
+would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe
+surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at
+this crisis of his fate. He would not have an hereditary and personal
+knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
+guards its power, and defends its existence. By an act of mental
+extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison,
+but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
+not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
+either of investigation or of punishment.
+
+This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
+Western thought. I don't know that this danger occurred, specially, to
+Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
+and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
+was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
+the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
+the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
+impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
+utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
+natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
+him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
+amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.
+
+The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's parentage, or rather of his lack
+of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
+remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
+atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. "Because I haven't that, must
+everything else be taken away from me?" he thought.
+
+He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
+glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
+black face of the night. "For it is a crime," he was saying to
+himself. "A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
+institutions...."
+
+A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. "I must be courageous,"
+he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
+if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
+because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
+the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
+Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.
+
+Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
+end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
+black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
+footfalls.
+
+It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
+tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
+duty. She walked leisurely in the blizzard as though she had no home to
+hurry to, she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black bread with
+an air of guarding a priceless booty: and Razumov averting his glance
+envied her the peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.
+
+To one reading Mr. Razumov's narrative it is really a wonder how he
+managed to keep going as he did along one interminable street after
+another on pavements that were gradually becoming blocked with snow.
+It was the thought of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the desperate
+desire to get rid of his presence which drove him forward. No rational
+determination had any part in his exertions. Thus, when on arriving at
+the low eating-house he heard that the man of horses, Ziemianitch, was
+not there, he could only stare stupidly.
+
+The waiter, a wild-haired youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt,
+exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch
+had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a
+bottle under each arm to keep it up amongst the horses--he supposed.
+
+The owner of the vile den, a bony short man in a dirty cloth caftan
+coming down to his heels, stood by, his hands tucked into his belt, and
+nodded confirmation.
+
+The reek of spirits, the greasy rancid steam of food got Razumov by the
+throat. He struck a table with his clenched hand and shouted violently--
+
+"You lie."
+
+Bleary unwashed faces were turned to his direction. A mild-eyed ragged
+tramp drinking tea at the next table moved farther away. A murmur of
+wonder arose with an undertone of uneasiness. A laugh was heard too, and
+an exclamation, "There! there!" jeeringly soothing. The waiter looked
+all round and announced to the room--
+
+"The gentleman won't believe that Ziemianitch is drunk."
+
+
+From a distant corner a hoarse voice belonging to a horrible,
+nondescript, shaggy being with a black face like the muzzle of a bear
+grunted angrily--
+
+"The cursed driver of thieves. What do we want with his gentlemen here?
+We are all honest folk in this place."
+
+Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep himself from bursting
+into imprecations, followed the owner of the den, who, whispering "Come
+along, little father," led him into a tiny hole of a place behind
+the wooden counter, whence proceeded a sound of splashing. A wet and
+bedraggled creature, a sort of sexless and shivering scarecrow, washed
+glasses in there, bending over a wooden tub by the light of a tallow
+dip.
+
+"Yes, little father," the man in the long caftan said plaintively. He
+had a brown, cunning little face, a thin greyish beard. Trying to light
+a tin lantern he hugged it to his breast and talked garrulously the
+while.
+
+He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies
+told. And he would show him drunk. His woman, it seems, ran away from
+him last night. "Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!" He spat. They were
+always running away from that driver of the devil--and he sixty years
+old too; could never get used to it. But each heart knows sorrow after
+its own kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his days. And then he
+would fly to the bottle. "'Who could bear life in our land without the
+bottle?' he says. A proper Russian man--the little pig.... Be pleased
+to follow me."
+
+Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow enclosed between high walls
+with innumerable windows. Here and there a dim yellow light hung within
+the four-square mass of darkness. The house was an enormous slum, a hive
+of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of
+starvation and despair.
+
+In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and Razumov followed the
+light of the lantern through a small doorway into a long cavernous place
+like a neglected subterranean byre. Deep within, three shaggy little
+horses tied up to rings hung their heads together, motionless and
+shadowy in the dim light of the lantern. It must have been the famous
+team of Haldin's escape. Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom. His
+guide pawed in the straw with his foot.
+
+"Here he is. Ah! the little pigeon. A true Russian man. 'No heavy hearts
+for me,' he says. 'Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my
+sight.' Ha! ha! ha! That's the fellow he is."
+
+He held the lantern over a prone form of a man, apparently fully dressed
+for outdoors. His head was lost in a pointed cloth hood. On the other
+side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet in monstrous thick
+boots.
+
+"Always ready to drive," commented the keeper of the eating-house. "A
+proper Russian driver that. Saint or devil, night or day is all one to
+Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow. 'I don't ask who you
+are, but where you want to go,' he says. He would drive Satan himself to
+his own abode and come back chirruping to his horses. Many a one he has
+driven who is clanking his chains in the Nertchinsk mines by this time."
+
+Razumov shuddered.
+
+"Call him, wake him up," he faltered out.
+
+The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the
+prostrate sleeper. The man shook at the impact but did not move. At the
+third kick he grunted but remained inert as before.
+
+The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.
+
+"You see for yourself how it is. We have done what we can for you."
+
+He picked up the lantern. The intense black spokes of shadow swung
+about in the circle of light. A terrible fury--the blind rage of
+self-preservation--possessed Razumov.
+
+"Ah! The vile beast," he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made
+the lantern jump and tremble! "I shall wake you! Give me...give
+me..."
+
+He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a stablefork and rushing
+forward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a
+time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and
+shadows of the cellar-like stable. Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with
+an insatiable fury, in great volleys of sounding thwacks. Except for the
+violent movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither the beaten man
+nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls. And only the sound of blows was
+heard. It was a weird scene.
+
+Suddenly there was a sharp crack. The stick broke and half of it flew
+far away into the gloom beyond the light. At the same time Ziemianitch
+sat up. At this Razumov became as motionless as the man with the
+lantern--only his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.
+
+Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling
+night of drunkenness enwrapping the "bright Russian soul" of Haldin's
+enthusiastic praise. But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing. His eyeballs
+blinked all white in the light once, twice--then the gleam went out.
+For a moment he sat in the straw with closed eyes with a strange air of
+weary meditation, then fell over slowly on his side without making the
+slightest sound. Only the straw rustled a little. Razumov stared wildly,
+fighting for his breath. After a second or two he heard a light snore.
+
+He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went
+off with great hasty strides without looking back once.
+
+After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked
+into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.
+
+This recalled him to himself; and glancing about he discovered he had
+been going in the wrong direction. He retraced his steps, but now at a
+more moderate pace. When passing before the house he had just left he
+flourished his fist at the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing its
+sinister bulk on the white ground. It had an air of brooding. He let his
+arm fall by his side--discouraged.
+
+Ziemianitch's passionate surrender to sorrow and consolation had baffled
+him. That was the people. A true Russian man! Razumov was glad he had
+beaten that brute--the "bright soul" of the other. Here they were: the
+people and the enthusiast.
+
+Between the two he was done for. Between the drunkenness of the peasant
+incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable
+of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men. It
+was a sort of terrible childishness. But children had their masters.
+"Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand," thought Razumov, longing for
+power to hurt and destroy.
+
+He was glad he had thrashed that brute. The physical exertion had left
+his body in a comfortable glow. His mental agitation too was clarified
+as if all the feverishness had gone out of him in a fit of outward
+violence. Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was
+conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.
+
+He walked slower and slower. And indeed, considering the guest he had
+in his rooms, it was no wonder he lingered on the way. It was like
+harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life,
+but would take from you all that made life worth living--a subtle pest
+that would convert earth into a hell.
+
+What was he doing now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his
+hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on
+his bed--the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots,
+the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll kill
+him when I get home." But he knew very well that that was of no use.
+The corpse hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal as the living
+man. Nothing short of complete annihilation would do. And that was
+impossible. What then? Must one kill oneself to escape this visitation?
+
+Razumov's despair was too profoundly tinged with hate to accept that
+issue.
+
+And yet it was despair--nothing less--at the thought of having to live
+with Haldin for an indefinite number of days in mortal alarm at every
+sound. But perhaps when he heard that this "bright soul" of Ziemianitch
+suffered from a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his infernal
+resignation somewhere else. And that was not likely on the face of it.
+
+Razumov thought: "I am being crushed--and I can't even run away."
+Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth--some little house in
+the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles. A material
+refuge. He had nothing. He had not even a moral refuge--the refuge of
+confidence. To whom could he go with this tale--in all this great, great
+land?
+
+Razumov stamped his foot--and under the soft carpet of snow felt the
+hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic
+mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet--his native soil!--his very
+own--without a fireside, without a heart!
+
+He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall,
+and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky
+of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.
+It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.
+
+Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of
+countless millions.
+
+He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born to an
+inheritance of space and numbers. Under the sumptuous immensity of the
+sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains
+of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of
+the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a
+monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.
+It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like
+Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin--murdering
+foolishly.
+
+It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A
+voice seemed to cry within him, "Don't touch it." It was a guarantee of
+duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on--a
+work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their
+shifting impulses--but of peace. What it needed was not the conflicting
+aspirations of a people, but a will strong and one: it wanted not the
+babble of many voices, but a man--strong and one!
+
+Razumov stood on the point of conversion. He was fascinated by its
+approach, by its overpowering logic. For a train of thought is never
+false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in
+secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence
+combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and
+the dread of uncertain days.
+
+In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many
+brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict
+to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy
+for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever,
+touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing
+of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict
+with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.
+
+"Haldin means disruption," he thought to himself, beginning to walk
+again. "What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage--with
+his talk of God's justice? All that means disruption. Better that
+thousands should suffer than that a people should become a disintegrated
+mass, helpless like dust in the wind. Obscurantism is better than the
+light of incendiary torches. The seed germinates in the night. Out of
+the dark soil springs the perfect plant. But a volcanic eruption
+is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground. And am I, who love my
+country--who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in--am I
+to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary
+fanatic?"
+
+The grace entered into Razumov. He believed now in the man who would
+come at the appointed time.
+
+What is a throne? A few pieces of wood upholstered in velvet. But a
+throne is a seat of power too. The form of government is the shape of
+a tool--an instrument. But twenty thousand bladders inflated by the
+noblest sentiments and jostling against each other in the air are a
+miserable incumbrance of space, holding no power, possessing no will,
+having nothing to give.
+
+He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a discourse with himself
+with extraordinary abundance and facility. Generally his phrases came
+to him slowly, after a conscious and painstaking wooing. Some superior
+power had inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as certain
+converted sinners become overwhelmingly loquacious.
+
+He felt an austere exultation.
+
+"What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear
+grasp of my intellect?" he thought. "Is not this my country? Have I not
+got forty million brothers?" he asked himself, unanswerably victorious
+in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given
+the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a
+pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. "No! If I must suffer
+let me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason--my
+cool superior reason--rejects."
+
+He ceased to think for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete.
+But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we
+enter an unlighted strange place--the irrational feeling that something
+may jump upon us in the dark--the absurd dread of the unseen.
+
+Of course he was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was
+not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption...
+and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted
+hearts. But absolute power should be preserved--the tool ready for the
+man--for the great autocrat of the future. Razumov believed in him. The
+logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded
+him, "What else?" he asked himself ardently, "could move all that mass
+in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will."
+
+He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of
+liberalism--rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian truth.
+"That's patriotism," he observed mentally, and added, "There's no
+stopping midway on that road," and then remarked to himself, "I am not a
+coward."
+
+And again there was a dead silence in Razumov's breast. He walked with
+lowered head, making room for no one. He walked slowly and his thoughts
+returning spoke within him with solemn slowness.
+
+"What is this Haldin? And what am I? Only two grains of sand. But a
+great mountain is made up of just such insignificant grains. And the
+death of a man or of many men is an insignificant thing. Yet we combat
+a contagious pestilence. Do I want his death? No! I would save him if I
+could--but no one can do that--he is the withered member which must be
+cut off. If I must perish through him, let me at least not perish
+with him, and associated against my will with his sombre folly that
+understands nothing either of men or things. Why should I leave a false
+memory?"
+
+It passed through his mind that there was no one in the world who
+cared what sort of memory he left behind him. He exclaimed to himself
+instantly, "Perish vainly for a falsehood!... What a miserable fate!"
+
+He was now in a more animated part of the town. He did not remark the
+crash of two colliding sledges close to the curb. The driver of one
+bellowed tearfully at his fellow--
+
+"Oh, thou vile wretch!"
+
+This hoarse yell, let out nearly in his ear, disturbed Razumov. He shook
+his head impatiently and went on looking straight before him. Suddenly
+on the snow, stretched on his back right across his path, he saw Haldin,
+solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands over his eyes, clad in a
+brown close-fitting coat and long boots. He was lying out of the way a
+little, as though he had selected that place on purpose. The snow round
+him was untrodden.
+
+This hallucination had such a solidity of aspect that the first movement
+of Razumov was to reach for his pocket to assure himself that the key of
+his rooms was there. But he checked the impulse with a disdainful curve
+of his lips. He understood. His thought, concentrated intensely on
+the figure left lying on his bed, had culminated in this extraordinary
+illusion of the sight. Razumov tackled the phenomenon calmly. With a
+stern face, without a check and gazing far beyond the vision, he walked
+on, experiencing nothing but a slight tightening of the chest. After
+passing he turned his head for a glance, and saw only the unbroken track
+of his footsteps over the place where the breast of the phantom had been
+lying.
+
+Razumov walked on and after a little time whispered his wonder to
+himself.
+
+"Exactly as if alive! Seemed to breathe! And right in my way too! I have
+had an extraordinary experience."
+
+He made a few steps and muttered through his set teeth--
+
+"I shall give him up."
+
+Then for some twenty yards or more all was blank. He wrapped his cloak
+closer round him. He pulled his cap well forward over his eyes.
+
+"Betray. A great word. What is betrayal? They talk of a man betraying
+his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond
+first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience
+engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction, am
+I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him? On the
+contrary--every obligation of true courage is the other way."
+
+Razumov looked round from under his cap.
+
+"What can the prejudice of the world reproach me with? Have I provoked
+his confidence? No! Have I by a single word, look, or gesture given him
+reason to suppose that I accepted his trust in me? No! It is true that
+I consented to go and see his Ziemianitch. Well, I have been to see him.
+And I broke a stick on his back too--the brute."
+
+Something seemed to turn over in his head bringing uppermost a
+singularly hard, clear facet of his brain.
+
+"It would be better, however," he reflected with a quite different
+mental accent, "to keep that circumstance altogether to myself."
+
+He had passed beyond the turn leading to his lodgings, and had reached
+a wide and fashionable street. Some shops were still open, and all the
+restaurants. Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur
+coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an
+air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere
+believer for the frivolous crowd. It was the world--those officers,
+dignitaries, men of fashion, officials, members of the Yacht Club. The
+event of the morning affected them all. What would they say if they knew
+what this student in a cloak was going to do?
+
+"Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can.
+How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?"
+
+Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided.
+Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered
+what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some
+other mind's sanction.
+
+With something resembling anguish he said to himself--
+
+"I want to be understood." The universal aspiration with all its
+profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst
+eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open
+himself.
+
+The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of
+chicane too much. One could not go and lay one's conscience before the
+policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief
+of his district's police--a common-looking person whom he used to see
+sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering
+cigarette stuck to his lower lip. "He would begin by locking me up most
+probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful
+commotion," thought Razumov practically.
+
+An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.
+
+Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who
+knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked
+terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable
+outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal
+conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant
+only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without
+going mad.
+
+Razumov had reached that point of vision. To escape from it he embraced
+for a whole minute the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings
+and flinging himself on his knees by the side of the bed with the dark
+figure stretched on it; to pour out a full confession in passionate
+words that would stir the whole being of that man to its innermost
+depths; that would end in embraces and tears; in an incredible
+fellowship of souls--such as the world had never seen. It was sublime!
+
+Inwardly he wept and trembled already. But to the casual eyes that were
+cast upon him he was aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in
+a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll. He noted, too, the sidelong,
+brilliant glance of a pretty woman--with a delicate head, and covered
+in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and
+beautiful savage--which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking
+tenderness on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.
+
+Suddenly Razumov stood still. The glimpse of a passing grey whisker,
+caught and lost in the same instant, had evoked the complete image of
+Prince K---, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man had
+pressed it--a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a
+half-unwilling caress.
+
+And Razumov marvelled at himself. Why did he not think of him before!
+
+"A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the very man--He!"
+
+A strange softening emotion came over Razumov--made his knees shake a
+little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment
+was pernicious nonsense. He couldn't be quick enough; and when he got
+into a sledge he shouted to the driver--"to the K--- Palace. Get
+on--you! Fly!" The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of
+his eyes, answered obsequiously--
+
+"I hear, your high Nobility."
+
+It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K--- was not a man of timid
+character. On the day of Mr. de P---'s murder an extreme alarm and
+despondency prevailed in the high official spheres.
+
+Prince K---, sitting sadly alone in his study, was told by his alarmed
+servants that a mysterious young man had forced his way into the hall,
+refused to tell his name and the nature of his business, and would not
+move from there till he had seen his Excellency in private. Instead of
+locking himself up and telephoning for the police, as nine out of ten
+high personages would have done that evening, the Prince gave way to
+curiosity and came quietly to the door of his study.
+
+In the hall, the front door standing wide open, he recognised at once
+Razumov, pale as death, his eyes blazing, and surrounded by perplexed
+lackeys.
+
+The Prince was vexed beyond measure, and even indignant. But his humane
+instincts and a subtle sense of self-respect could not allow him to
+let this young man be thrown out into the street by base menials.
+He retreated unseen into his room, and after a little rang his bell.
+Razumov heard in the hall an ominously raised harsh voice saying
+somewhere far away--
+
+"Show the gentleman in here."
+
+Razumov walked in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable--raised
+far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince
+looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of
+which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was
+not asked to sit down.
+
+Half an hour later they appeared in the hall together. The lackeys stood
+up, and the Prince, moving with difficulty on his gouty feet, was helped
+into his furs. The carriage had been ordered before. When the great
+double door was flung open with a crash, Razumov, who had been standing
+silent with a lost gaze but with every faculty intensely on the alert,
+heard the Prince's voice--
+
+"Your arm, young man."
+
+The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards officer, man of showy
+missions, experienced in nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue
+and worldly success, had been equally impressed by the more obvious
+difficulties of such a situation and by Razumov's quiet dignity in
+stating them.
+
+He had said, "No. Upon the whole I can't condemn the step you ventured
+to take by coming to me with your story. It is not an affair for police
+understrappers. The greatest importance is attached to.... Set
+your mind at rest. I shall see you through this most extraordinary and
+difficult situation."
+
+Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and Razumov, making a short bow,
+had said with deference--
+
+"I have trusted my instinct. A young man having no claim upon anybody
+in the world has in an hour of trial involving his deepest political
+convictions turned to an illustrious Russian--that's all."
+
+The Prince had exclaimed hastily--
+
+"You have done well."
+
+In the carriage--it was a small brougham on sleigh runners--Razumov
+broke the silence in a voice that trembled slightly.
+
+"My gratitude surpasses the greatness of my presumption."
+
+He gasped, feeling unexpectedly in the dark a momentary pressure on his
+arm.
+
+"You have done well," repeated the Prince.
+
+When the carriage stopped the Prince murmured to Razumov, who had never
+ventured a single question--
+
+"The house of General T---."
+
+In the middle of the snow-covered roadway blazed a great bonfire.
+Some Cossacks, the bridles of their horses over the arm, were warming
+themselves around. Two sentries stood at the door, several gendarmes
+lounged under the great carriage gateway, and on the first-floor
+landing two orderlies rose and stood at attention. Razumov walked at the
+Prince's elbow.
+
+A surprising quantity of hot-house plants in pots cumbered the floor of
+the ante-room. Servants came forward. A young man in civilian clothes
+arrived hurriedly, was whispered to, bowed low, and exclaiming
+zealously, "Certainly--this minute," fled within somewhere. The Prince
+signed to Razumov.
+
+They passed through a suite of reception-rooms all barely lit and one
+of them prepared for dancing. The wife of the General had put off
+her party. An atmosphere of consternation pervaded the place. But the
+General's own room, with heavy sombre hangings, two massive desks, and
+deep armchairs, had all the lights turned on. The footman shut the door
+behind them and they waited.
+
+There was a coal fire in an English grate; Razumov had never before seen
+such a fire; and the silence of the room was like the silence of the
+grave; perfect, measureless, for even the clock on the mantelpiece
+made no sound. Filling a corner, on a black pedestal, stood a
+quarter-life-size smooth-limbed bronze of an adolescent figure, running.
+The Prince observed in an undertone--
+
+"Spontini's. 'Flight of Youth.' Exquisite."
+
+"Admirable," assented Razumov faintly.
+
+They said nothing more after this, the Prince silent with his grand air,
+Razumov staring at the statue. He was worried by a sensation resembling
+the gnawing of hunger.
+
+He did not turn when he heard an inner door fly open, and a quick
+footstep, muffled on the carpet.
+
+The Prince's voice immediately exclaimed, thick with excitement--
+
+"We have got him--_ce miserable_. A worthy young man came to me--No!
+It's incredible...."
+
+Razumov held his breath before the bronze as if expecting a crash.
+Behind his back a voice he had never heard before insisted politely--
+
+"_Asseyez-vous donc_."
+
+The Prince almost shrieked, "_Mais comprenez-vous, mon cher!
+L'assassin_! the murderer--we have got him...."
+
+Razumov spun round. The General's smooth big cheeks rested on the stiff
+collar of his uniform. He must have been already looking at Razumov,
+because that last saw the pale blue eyes fastened on him coldly.
+
+The Prince from a chair waved an impressive hand.
+
+"This is a most honourable young man whom Providence itself... Mr.
+Razumov."
+
+The General acknowledged the introduction by frowning at Razumov, who
+did not make the slightest movement.
+
+Sitting down before his desk the General listened with compressed lips.
+It was impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his face.
+
+Razumov watched the immobility of the fleshy profile. But it lasted only
+a moment, till the Prince had finished; and when the General turned to
+the providential young man, his florid complexion, the blue, unbelieving
+eyes and the bright white flash of an automatic smile had an air of
+jovial, careless cruelty. He expressed no wonder at the extraordinary
+story--no pleasure or excitement--no incredulity either. He betrayed no
+sentiment whatever. Only with a politeness almost deferential suggested
+that "the bird might have flown while Mr.--Mr. Razumov was running about
+the streets."
+
+Razumov advanced to the middle of the room and said, "The door is locked
+and I have the key in my pocket."
+
+His loathing for the man was intense. It had come upon him so unawares
+that he felt he had not kept it out of his voice. The General looked up
+at him thoughtfully, and Razumov grinned.
+
+All this went over the head of Prince K--- seated in a deep armchair,
+very tired and impatient.
+
+"A student called Haldin," said the General thoughtfully.
+
+Razumov ceased to grin.
+
+"That is his name," he said unnecessarily loud. "Victor Victorovitch
+Haldin--a student."
+
+The General shifted his position a little.
+
+"How is he dressed? Would you have the goodness to tell me?"
+
+Razumov angrily described Haldin's clothing in a few jerky words. The
+General stared all the time, then addressing the Prince--
+
+"We were not without some indications," he said in French. "A good woman
+who was in the street described to us somebody wearing a dress of the
+sort as the thrower of the second bomb. We have detained her at the
+Secretariat, and every one in a Tcherkess coat we could lay our hands
+on has been brought to her to look at. She kept on crossing herself
+and shaking her head at them. It was exasperating...." He turned to
+Razumov, and in Russian, with friendly reproach--
+
+"Take a chair, Mr. Razumov--do. Why are you standing?"
+
+Razumov sat down carelessly and looked at the General.
+
+"This goggle-eyed imbecile understands nothing," he thought.
+
+The Prince began to speak loftily.
+
+"Mr. Razumov is a young man of conspicuous abilities. I have it at heart
+that his future should not...."
+
+"Certainly," interrupted the General, with a movement of the hand. "Has
+he any weapons on him, do you think, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+The General employed a gentle musical voice. Razumov answered with
+suppressed irritation--
+
+"No. But my razors are lying about--you understand."
+
+The General lowered his head approvingly.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+Then to the Prince, explaining courteously--
+
+"We want that bird alive. It will be the devil if we can't make him sing
+a little before we are done with him."
+
+The grave-like silence of the room with its mute clock fell upon the
+polite modulations of this terrible phrase. The Prince, hidden in the
+chair, made no sound.
+
+The General unexpectedly developed a thought.
+
+"Fidelity to menaced institutions on which depend the safety of a
+throne and of a people is no child's play. We know that, _mon Prince,_
+and--_tenez_--" he went on with a sort of flattering harshness, "Mr.
+Razumov here begins to understand that too."
+
+His eyes which he turned upon Razumov seemed to be starting out of his
+head. This grotesqueness of aspect no longer shocked Razumov. He said
+with gloomy conviction--
+
+"Haldin will never speak."
+
+"That remains to be seen," muttered the General.
+
+"I am certain," insisted Razumov. "A man like this never speaks....
+Do you imagine that I am here from fear?" he added violently. He felt
+ready to stand by his opinion of Haldin to the last extremity.
+
+"Certainly not," protested the General, with great simplicity of tone.
+"And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Razumov, that if he had not come
+with his tale to such a staunch and loyal Russian as you, he would
+have disappeared like a stone in the water... which would have had a
+detestable effect," he added, with a bright, cruel smile under his stony
+stare. "So you see, there can be no suspicion of any fear here."
+
+The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round the back of the
+armchair.
+
+"Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action. Be at ease in that
+respect, pray."
+
+He turned to the General uneasily.
+
+"That's why I am here. You may be surprised why I should...."
+
+The General hastened to interrupt.
+
+"Not at all. Extremely natural. You saw the importance...."
+
+"Yes," broke in the Prince. "And I venture to ask insistently that mine
+and Mr. Razumov's intervention should not become public. He is a young
+man of promise--of remarkable aptitudes."
+
+"I haven't a doubt of it," murmured the General. "He inspires
+confidence."
+
+"All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread nowadays--they taint
+such unexpected quarters--that, monstrous as it seems, he might suffer
+...his studies...his..."
+
+The General, with his elbows on the desk, took his head between his
+hands.
+
+"Yes. Yes. I am thinking it out.... How long is it since you left him
+at your rooms, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+Razumov mentioned the hour which nearly corresponded with the time of
+his distracted flight from the big slum house. He had made up his mind
+to keep Ziemianitch out of the affair completely. To mention him at all
+would mean imprisonment for the "bright soul," perhaps cruel floggings,
+and in the end a journey to Siberia in chains. Razumov, who had beaten
+Ziemianitch, felt for him now a vague, remorseful tenderness.
+
+The General, giving way for the first time to his secret sentiments,
+exclaimed contemptuously--
+
+"And you say he came in to make you this confidence like this--for
+nothing--_a propos des bottes_."
+
+Razumov felt danger in the air. The merciless suspicion of despotism had
+spoken openly at last. Sudden fear sealed Razumov's lips. The silence
+of the room resembled now the silence of a deep dungeon, where time does
+not count, and a suspect person is sometimes forgotten for ever. But the
+Prince came to the rescue.
+
+"Providence itself has led the wretch in a moment of mental aberration
+to seek Mr. Razumov on the strength of some old, utterly misinterpreted
+exchange of ideas--some sort of idle speculative conversation--months
+ago--I am told--and completely forgotten till now by Mr. Razumov."
+
+"Mr. Razumov," queried the General meditatively, after a short silence,
+"do you often indulge in speculative conversation?"
+
+"No, Excellency," answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of
+self-confidence. "I am a man of deep convictions. Crude opinions are
+in the air. They are not always worth combating. But even the silent
+contempt of a serious mind may be misinterpreted by headlong utopists."
+
+The General stared from between his hands. Prince K--- murmured--
+
+"A serious young man. _Un esprit superieur_."
+
+"I see that, _mon cher Prince_," said the General. "Mr. Razumov is quite
+safe with me. I am interested in him. He has, it seems, the great and
+useful quality of inspiring confidence. What I was wondering at is why
+the other should mention anything at all--I mean even the bare fact
+alone--if his object was only to obtain temporary shelter for a few
+hours. For, after all, nothing was easier than to say nothing about it
+unless, indeed, he were trying, under a crazy misapprehension of your
+true sentiments, to enlist your assistance--eh, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+It seemed to Razumov that the floor was moving slightly. This grotesque
+man in a tight uniform was terrible. It was right that he should be
+terrible.
+
+"I can see what your Excellency has in your mind. But I can only answer
+that I don't know why."
+
+"I have nothing in my mind," murmured the General, with gentle surprise.
+
+"I am his prey--his helpless prey," thought Razumov. The fatigues and
+the disgusts of that afternoon, the need to forget, the fear which he
+could not keep off, reawakened his hate for Haldin.
+
+"Then I can't help your Excellency. I don't know what he meant. I only
+know there was a moment when I wished to kill him. There was also a
+moment when I wished myself dead. I said nothing. I was overcome. I
+provoked no confidence--I asked for no explanations--"
+
+Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was lucid. It was really a
+calculated outburst.
+
+"It is rather a pity," the General said, "that you did not. Don't you
+know at all what he means to do?" Razumov calmed down and saw an opening
+there.
+
+"He told me he was in hopes that a sledge would meet him about half an
+hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post on the left from the upper
+end of Karabelnaya. At any rate, he meant to be there at that time. He
+did not even ask me for a change of clothes."
+
+"_Ah voila_!" said the General, turning to Prince K with an air of
+satisfaction. "There is a way to keep your _protege_, Mr. Razumov, quite
+clear of any connexion with the actual arrest. We shall be ready for
+that gentleman in Karabelnaya."
+
+The Prince expressed his gratitude. There was real emotion in his voice.
+Razumov, motionless, silent, sat staring at the carpet. The General
+turned to him.
+
+"Half an hour after midnight. Till then we have to depend on you, Mr.
+Razumov. You don't think he is likely to change his purpose?"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Razumov. "Those men are not of the sort that ever
+changes its purpose."
+
+"What men do you mean?"
+
+"Fanatical lovers of liberty in general. Liberty with a capital L,
+Excellency. Liberty that means nothing precise. Liberty in whose name
+crimes are committed."
+
+The General murmured--
+
+"I detest rebels of every kind. I can't help it. It's my nature!"
+
+He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back his arm. "They shall be
+destroyed, then."
+
+"They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand," said Razumov
+with malicious pleasure and looking the General straight in the face.
+"If Haldin does change his purpose to-night, you may depend on it that
+it will not be to save his life by flight in some other way. He would
+have thought then of something else to attempt. But that is not likely."
+
+The General repeated as if to himself, "They shall be destroyed."
+
+Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
+
+The Prince exclaimed--
+
+"What a terrible necessity!"
+
+The General's arm was lowered slowly.
+
+"One comfort there is. That brood leaves no posterity. I've always said
+it, one effort, pitiless, persistent, steady--and we are done with them
+for ever."
+
+Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much
+arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not
+have gone on bearing the responsibility.
+
+"I detest rebels. These subversive minds! These intellectual
+_debauches_! My existence has been built on fidelity. It's a feeling.
+To defend it I am ready to lay down my life--and even my honour--if
+that were needed. But pray tell me what honour can there be as against
+rebels--against people that deny God Himself--perfect unbelievers!
+Brutes. It is horrible to think of."
+
+During this tirade Razumov, facing the General, had nodded slightly
+twice. Prince K---, standing on one side with his grand air, murmured,
+casting up his eyes--
+
+"_Helas!_"
+
+Then lowering his glance and with great decision declared--
+
+"This young man, General, is perfectly fit to apprehend the bearing of
+your memorable words."
+
+The General's whole expression changed from dull resentment to perfect
+urbanity.
+
+"I would ask now, Mr. Razumov," he said, "to return to his home. Note
+that I don't ask Mr. Razumov whether he has justified his absence to his
+guest. No doubt he did this sufficiently. But I don't ask. Mr. Razumov
+inspires confidence. It is a great gift. I only suggest that a more
+prolonged absence might awaken the criminal's suspicions and induce him
+perhaps to change his plans."
+
+He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted his visitors to the
+ante-room encumbered with flower-pots.
+
+Razumov parted with the Prince at the corner of a street. In the
+carriage he had listened to speeches where natural sentiment struggled
+with caution. Evidently the Prince was afraid of encouraging any hopes
+of future intercourse. But there was a touch of tenderness in the voice
+uttering in the dark the guarded general phrases of goodwill. And the
+Prince too said--
+
+"I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov."
+
+"They all, it seems, have confidence in me," thought Razumov dully. He
+had an indulgent contempt for the man sitting shoulder to shoulder with
+him in the confined space. Probably he was afraid of scenes with his
+wife. She was said to be proud and violent.
+
+It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in
+the comfort and safety of lives. But he wanted to put the Prince's
+mind at ease; and with a proper amount of emphasis he said that, being
+conscious of some small abilities and confident in his power of work, he
+trusted his future to his own exertions. He expressed his gratitude for
+the helping hand. Such dangerous situations did not occur twice in the
+course of one life--he added.
+
+"And you have met this one with a firmness of mind and correctness
+of feeling which give me a high idea of your worth," the Prince said
+solemnly. "You have now only to persevere--to persevere."
+
+On getting out on the pavement Razumov saw an ungloved hand extended to
+him through the lowered window of the brougham. It detained his own in
+its grasp for a moment, while the light of a street lamp fell upon the
+Prince's long face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
+
+"I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences..."
+
+"After what your Excellency has condescended to do for me, I can only
+rely on my conscience."
+
+"_Adieu_," said the whiskered head with feeling.
+
+Razumov bowed. The brougham glided away with a slight swish in the
+snow--he was alone on the edge of the pavement.
+
+He said to himself that there was nothing to think about, and began
+walking towards his home.
+
+He walked quietly. It was a common experience to walk thus home to bed
+after an evening spent somewhere with his fellows or in the cheaper
+seats of a theatre. After he had gone a little way the familiarity of
+things got hold of him. Nothing was changed. There was the familiar
+corner; and when he turned it he saw the familiar dim light of the
+provision shop kept by a German woman. There were loaves of stale bread,
+bunches of onions and strings of sausages behind the small window-panes.
+They were closing it. The sickly lame fellow whom he knew so well by
+sight staggered out into the snow embracing a large shutter.
+
+Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with
+feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases.
+
+The sense of life's continuity depended on trifling bodily impressions.
+The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And
+this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to
+climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the
+familiar clammy banister. The exceptional could not prevail against the
+material contacts which make one day resemble another. To-morrow would
+be like yesterday.
+
+It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged.
+
+"I suppose," thought Razumov, "that if I had made up my mind to blow out
+my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly
+as I am doing it now. What's a man to do? What must be must be.
+Extraordinary things do happen. But when they have happened they are
+done with. Thus, too, when the mind is made up. That question is done
+with. And the daily concerns, the familiarities of our thought swallow
+it up--and the life goes on as before with its mysterious and secret
+sides quite out of sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing."
+
+Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out; entered very quietly and
+bolted the door behind him carefully.
+
+He thought, "He hears me," and after bolting the door he stood still
+holding his breath. There was not a sound. He crossed the bare outer
+room, stepping deliberately in the darkness. Entering the other, he felt
+all over his table for the matchbox. The silence, but for the groping of
+his hand, was profound. Could the fellow be sleeping so soundly?
+
+He struck a light and looked at the bed. Haldin was lying on his back as
+before, only both his hands were under his head. His eyes were open. He
+stared at the ceiling.
+
+Razumov held the match up. He saw the clear-cut features, the firm
+chin, the white forehead and the topknot of fair hair against the white
+pillow. There he was, lying flat on his back. Razumov thought suddenly,
+"I have walked over his chest."
+
+He continued to stare till the match burnt itself out; then struck
+another and lit the lamp in silence without looking towards the bed any
+more. He had turned his back on it and was hanging his coat on a peg
+when he heard Haldin sigh profoundly, then ask in a tired voice--
+
+"Well! And what have you arranged?"
+
+The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad to put his hands against
+the wall. A diabolical impulse to say, "I have given you up to the
+police," frightened him exceedingly. But he did not say that. He said,
+without turning round, in a muffled voice--
+
+"It's done."
+
+Again he heard Haldin sigh. He walked to the table, sat down with the
+lamp before him, and only then looked towards the bed.
+
+In the distant corner of the large room far away from the lamp, which
+was small and provided with a very thick china shade, Haldin appeared
+like a dark and elongated shape--rigid with the immobility of death.
+This body seemed to have less substance than its own phantom walked over
+by Razumov in the street white with snow. It was more alarming in its
+shadowy, persistent reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion.
+
+Haldin was heard again.
+
+"You must have had a walk--such a walk,..." he murmured
+deprecatingly. "This weather...."
+
+Razumov answered with energy--
+
+"Horrible walk.... A nightmare of a walk."
+
+He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then--
+
+"And so you have seen Ziemianitch--brother?"
+
+"I've seen him."
+
+Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with the Prince, thought it
+prudent to add, "I had to wait some time."
+
+"A character--eh? It's extraordinary what a sense of the necessity of
+freedom there is in that man. And he has sayings too--simple, to the
+point, such as only the people can invent in their rough sagacity. A
+character that...."
+
+"I, you understand, haven't had much opportunity...." Razumov
+muttered through his teeth.
+
+Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
+
+"You see, brother, I have been a good deal in that house of late. I used
+to take there books--leaflets. Not a few of the poor people who live
+there can read. And, you see, the guests for the feast of freedom must
+be sought for in byways and hedges. The truth is, I have almost lived in
+that house of late. I slept sometimes in the stable. There is a
+stable...."
+
+"That's where I had my interview with Ziemianitch," interrupted
+Razumov gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, "It was
+satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved."
+
+"Ah! he's a fellow," went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling. "I
+came to know him in that way, you see. For some weeks now, ever since I
+resigned myself to do what had to be done, I tried to isolate myself. I
+gave up my rooms. What was the good of exposing a decent widow woman
+to the risk of being worried out of her mind by the police? I gave up
+seeing any of our comrades...."
+
+Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper and began to trace lines
+on it with a pencil.
+
+"Upon my word," he thought angrily, "he seems to have thought of
+everybody's safety but mine."
+
+Haldin was talking on.
+
+"This morning--ah! this morning--that was different. How can I explain
+to you? Before the deed was done I wandered at night and lay hid in the
+day, thinking it out, and I felt restful. Sleepless but restful. What
+was there for me to torment myself about? But this morning--after! Then
+it was that I became restless. I could not have stopped in that big
+house full of misery. The miserable of this world can't give you peace.
+Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself,
+'There is a young man in this town head and shoulders above common
+prejudices.'"
+
+"Is he laughing at me?" Razumov asked himself, going on with his
+aimless drawing of triangles and squares. And suddenly he thought: "My
+behaviour must appear to him strange. Should he take fright at my manner
+and rush off somewhere I shall be undone completely. That infernal
+General...."
+
+He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the
+shadowy figure extended full length on it--so much more indistinct than
+the one over whose breast he had walked without faltering. Was this,
+too, a phantom?
+
+The silence had lasted a long time. "He is no longer here," was the
+thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at
+its absurdity. "He is already gone and this...only..."
+
+He could resist no longer. He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, "I am
+intolerably anxious," and in a few headlong strides stood by the side
+of the bed. His hand fell lightly on Haldin's shoulder, and directly
+he felt its reality he was beset by an insane temptation to grip that
+exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of that body, lest it should
+escape his custody, leaving only a phantom behind.
+
+Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed eyes moving a little
+gazed upwards at Razumov with wistful gratitude for this manifestation
+of feeling.
+
+Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room. "It would have been
+possibly a kindness," he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the
+nature of that apology for a murderous intention his mind had found
+somewhere within him. And all the same he could not give it up. He
+became lucid about it. "What can he expect?" he thought. "The halter--in
+the end. And I...."
+
+This argument was interrupted by Haldin's voice.
+
+"Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my
+soul from this world. I tell you what--I believe in this world so much
+that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life. That
+is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die."
+
+"H'm," muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk
+up and down and to carry on his strange argument.
+
+Yes, to a man in such a situation--of course it would be an act of
+kindness. The question, however, was not how to be kind, but how to be
+firm. He was a slippery customer.
+
+"I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this world of ours," he said
+with force. "I too, while I live.... But you seem determined to haunt
+it. You can't seriously...mean..."
+
+The voice of the motionless Haldin began--
+
+"Haunt it! Truly, the oppressors of thought which quickens the world,
+the destroyers of souls which aspire to perfection of human dignity,
+they shall be haunted. As to the destroyers of my mere body, I have
+forgiven them beforehand."
+
+Razumov had stopped apparently to listen, but at the same time he was
+observing his own sensations. He was vexed with himself for attaching so
+much importance to what Haldin said.
+
+"The fellow's mad," he thought firmly, but this opinion did not mollify
+him towards Haldin. It was a particularly impudent form of lunacy--and
+when it got loose in the sphere of public life of a country, it was
+obviously the duty of every good citizen....
+
+This train of thought broke off short there and was succeeded by a
+paroxysm of silent hatred towards Haldin, so intense that Razumov
+hastened to speak at random.
+
+"Yes. Eternity, of course. I, too, can't very well represent it to
+myself.... I imagine it, however, as something quiet and dull. There
+would be nothing unexpected--don't you see? The element of time would be
+wanting."
+
+He pulled out his watch and gazed at it. Haldin turned over on his side
+and looked on intently.
+
+Razumov got frightened at this movement. A slippery customer this fellow
+with a phantom. It was not midnight yet. He hastened on--
+
+"And unfathomable mysteries! Can you conceive secret places in Eternity?
+Impossible. Whereas life is full of them. There are secrets of birth,
+for instance. One carries them on to the grave. There is something
+comical...but never mind. And there are secret motives of conduct. A
+man's most open actions have a secret side to them. That is interesting
+and so unfathomable! For instance, a man goes out of a room for a walk.
+Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He
+comes back--he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice
+of the snow on the ground--and behold he is no longer the same man. The
+most unlikely things have a secret power over one's thoughts--the grey
+whiskers of a particular person--the goggle eyes of another."
+
+Razumov's forehead was moist. He took a turn or two in the room, his
+head low and smiling to himself viciously.
+
+"Have you ever reflected on the power of goggle eyes and grey whiskers?
+Excuse me. You seem to think I must be crazy to talk in this vein at
+such a time. But I am not talking lightly. I have seen instances. It has
+happened to me once to be talking to a man whose fate was affected by
+physical facts of that kind. And the man did not know it. Of course, it
+was a case of conscience, but the material facts such as these brought
+about the solution.... And you tell me, Victor Victorovitch, not to
+be anxious! Why! I am responsible for you," Razumov almost shrieked.
+
+He avoided with difficulty a burst of Mephistophelian laughter. Haldin,
+very pale, raised himself on his elbow.
+
+"And the surprises of life," went on Razumov, after glancing at the
+other uneasily. "Just consider their astonishing nature. A mysterious
+impulse induces you to come here. I don't say you have done wrong.
+Indeed, from a certain point of view you could not have done better. You
+might have gone to a man with affections and family ties. You have
+such ties yourself. As to me, you know I have been brought up in an
+educational institute where they did not give us enough to eat. To talk
+of affection in such a connexion--you perceive yourself.... As
+to ties, the only ties I have in the world are social. I must get
+acknowledged in some way before I can act at all. I sit here working....
+And don't you think I am working for progress too? I've got to find
+my own ideas of the true way.... Pardon me," continued Razumov, after
+drawing breath and with a short, throaty laugh, "but I haven't inherited
+a revolutionary inspiration together with a resemblance from an uncle."
+
+He looked again at his watch and noticed with sickening disgust that
+there were yet a good many minutes to midnight. He tore watch and chain
+off his waistcoat and laid them on the table well in the circle of
+bright lamplight. Haldin, reclining on his elbow, did not stir. Razumov
+was made uneasy by this attitude. "What move is he meditating over so
+quietly?" he thought. "He must be prevented. I must keep on talking to
+him."
+
+He raised his voice.
+
+"You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin--I don't know what--to no
+end of people. I am just a man. Here I stand before you. A man with a
+mind. Did it ever occur to you how a man who had never heard a word of
+warm affection or praise in his life would think on matters on which
+you would think first with or against your class, your domestic
+tradition--your fireside prejudices?... Did you ever consider how a
+man like that would feel? I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing
+to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back
+to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away
+your future? Am I to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a
+better lot, be robbed of the only thing it has to go upon at the will of
+violent enthusiasts? You come from your province, but all this land is
+mine--or I have nothing. No doubt you shall be looked upon as a martyr
+some day--a sort of hero--a political saint. But I beg to be excused. I
+am content in fitting myself to be a worker. And what can you people do
+by scattering a few drops of blood on the snow? On this Immensity. On
+this unhappy Immensity! I tell you," he cried, in a vibrating, subdued
+voice, and advancing one step nearer the bed, "that what it needs is not
+a lot of haunting phantoms that I could walk through--but a man!"
+
+Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him off in horror.
+
+"I understand it all now," he exclaimed, with awestruck dismay. "I
+understand--at last."
+
+Razumov staggered back against the table. His forehead broke out in
+perspiration while a cold shudder ran down his spine.
+
+"What have I been saying?" he asked himself. "Have I let him slip
+through my fingers after all?"
+
+"He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and instead of a reassuring
+smile only achieved an uncertain grimace.
+
+"What will you have?" he began in a conciliating voice which got steady
+after the first trembling word or two. "What will you have? Consider--a
+man of studious, retired habits--and suddenly like this.... I am not
+practised in talking delicately. But..."
+
+He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him again.
+
+"What were we to do together till midnight? Sit here opposite each other
+and think of your--your--shambles?"
+
+Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude. He bowed his head; his hands
+hung between his knees. His voice was low and pained but calm.
+
+"I see now how it is, Razumov--brother. You are a magnanimous soul, but
+my action is abhorrent to you--alas...."
+
+Razumov stared. From fright he had set his teeth so hard that his whole
+face ached. It was impossible for him to make a sound.
+
+"And even my person, too, is loathsome to you perhaps," Haldin added
+mournfully, after a short pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing
+his gaze on the floor. "For indeed, unless one...."
+
+He broke off evidently waiting for a word. Razumov remained silent.
+Haldin nodded his head dejectedly twice.
+
+"Of course. Of course," he murmured.... "Ah! weary work!"
+
+He remained perfectly still for a moment, then made Razumov's leaden
+heart strike a ponderous blow by springing up briskly.
+
+"So be it," he cried sadly in a low, distinct tone. "Farewell then."
+
+Razumov started forward, but the sight of Haldin's raised hand checked
+him before he could get away from the table. He leaned on it heavily,
+listening to the faint sounds of some town clock tolling the hour.
+Haldin, already at the door, tall and straight as an arrow, with his
+pale face and a hand raised attentively, might have posed for the statue
+of a daring youth listening to an inner voice. Razumov mechanically
+glanced down at his watch. When he looked towards the door again Haldin
+had vanished. There was a faint rustling in the outer room, the feeble
+click of a bolt drawn back lightly. He was gone--almost as noiseless as
+a vision.
+
+Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted, voiceless lips. The outer
+door stood open. Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far over the
+banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glimmering
+flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of
+somebody running down the stairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift,
+pattering sound, which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting
+shadow passed over the glimmer--a wink of the tiny flame. Then
+stillness.
+
+Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells
+of the unclean staircase. All quiet.
+
+He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him. The
+peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch. Razumov
+stood looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes
+to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.
+
+"Slow," he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.
+His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an
+instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell
+himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to
+stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled--
+
+"Stopped," and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly--
+
+"It's done.... And now to work."
+
+He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began
+to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold
+on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought--
+
+"There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
+across the street."
+
+He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
+cloak to the nose and with a General's plumed, cocked hat on his head.
+This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally
+had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be
+disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar.... Perhaps he would
+be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick--a
+shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.
+
+This evocation brought on positive nausea. "Why do I want to bother
+about this?" thought Razumov with disgust. "Am I a gendarme? Moreover,
+it is done."
+
+He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till
+half-past twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to
+despair. Impossible to know the time! The landlady and all the people
+across the landing were asleep. How could he go and... God knows
+what they would imagine, or how much they would guess. He dared not
+go into the streets to find out. "I am a suspect now. There's no use
+shirking that fact," he said to himself bitterly. If Haldin from
+some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the
+Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging. And if he were not
+in he could never clear himself. Never. Razumov looked wildly about as
+if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped
+him altogether. He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the
+striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night. And he was
+not even sure now whether he had heard it really on this night.
+
+He went to the window and stood there with slightly bent head on the
+watch for the faint sound. "I will stay here till I hear something,"
+he said to himself. He stood still, his ear turned to the panes. An
+atrocious aching numbness with shooting pains in his back and legs
+tortured him. He did not budge. His mind hovered on the borders of
+delirium. He heard himself suddenly saying, "I confess," as a person
+might do on the rack. "I am on the rack," he thought. He felt ready to
+swoon. The faint deep boom of the distant clock seemed to explode in his
+head--he heard it so clearly.... One!
+
+If Haldin had not turned up the police would have been already here
+ransacking the house. No sound reached him. This time it was done.
+
+He dragged himself painfully to the table and dropped into the chair.
+He flung the book away and took a square sheet of paper. It was like the
+pile of sheets covered with his neat minute handwriting, only blank. He
+took a pen brusquely and dipped it with a vague notion of going on with
+the writing of his essay--but his pen remained poised over the sheet.
+It hung there for some time before it came down and formed long scrawly
+letters.
+
+Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began to write. When he wrote
+a large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether--became
+unsteady, almost childish. He wrote five lines one under the other.
+History not Theory. Patriotism not Internationalism. Evolution not
+Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption.
+
+He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and remained
+fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand groped all
+over the table for the penknife.
+
+He rose at last, and walking up with measured steps stabbed the paper
+with the penknife to the lath and plaster wall at the head of the bed.
+This done he stepped back a pace and flourished his hand with a glance
+round the room.
+
+After that he never looked again at the bed. He took his big cloak down
+from its peg and, wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on
+the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of his room. A leaden
+sleep closed his eyelids at once. Several times that night he woke up
+shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia
+where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an
+immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its
+enormous expanse as if it were a map. But after each shuddering start
+his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and he slept again.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov's story, my mind, the decent mind
+of an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of
+the task.
+
+The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_
+of a strange human document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
+clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
+earth's surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less
+discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word
+that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word
+which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the
+moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.
+
+I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov's record, I
+lay it aside, I take up the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
+of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in
+creeping under its point is no other word than "cynicism."
+
+For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its
+pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the
+secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is
+the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen,
+the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of
+prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and
+the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.... But I
+must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration
+of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative
+convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his
+age, had become crystallized by the shock of his contact with Haldin.
+
+Razumov woke up for the tenth time perhaps with a heavy shiver. Seeing
+the light of day in his window, he resisted the inclination to lay
+himself down again. He did not remember anything, but he did not think
+it strange to find himself on the sofa in his cloak and chilled to the
+bone. The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless,
+containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young
+man. It was the awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man ninety
+years old. He looked at the lamp which had burnt itself out. It stood
+there, the extinguished beacon of his labours, a cold object of brass
+and porcelain, amongst the scattered pages of his notes and small
+piles of books--a mere litter of blackened paper--dead matter--without
+significance or interest.
+
+He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the
+peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness,
+a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life
+had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts.
+There was not a sound in the house.
+
+Turning away from the peg, he thought in that same lifeless manner that
+it must be very early yet; but when he looked at the watch on his table
+he saw both hands arrested at twelve o'clock.
+
+"Ah! yes," he mumbled to himself, and as if beginning to get roused
+a little he took a survey of his room. The paper stabbed to the wall
+arrested his attention. He eyed it from the distance without approval or
+perplexity; but when he heard the servant-girl beginning to bustle about
+in the outer room with the _samovar_ for his morning tea, he walked up
+to it and took it down with an air of profound indifference.
+
+While doing this he glanced down at the bed on which he had not slept
+that night. The hollow in the pillow made by the weight of Haldin's head
+was very noticeable.
+
+Even his anger at this sign of the man's passage was dull. He did not
+try to nurse it into life. He did nothing all that day; he neglected
+even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him--and
+if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he
+was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
+
+He yawned frequently. He drank large quantities of tea, he walked about
+aimlessly, and when he sat down he did not budge for a long time. He
+spent some time drumming on the window with his finger-tips quietly. In
+his listless wanderings round about the table he caught sight of his own
+face in the looking-glass and that arrested him. The eyes which returned
+his stare were the most unhappy eyes he had ever seen. And this was the
+first thing which disturbed the mental stagnation of that day.
+
+He was not affected personally. He merely thought that life without
+happiness is impossible. What was happiness? He yawned and went on
+shuffling about and about between the walls of his room. Looking
+forward was happiness--that's all--nothing more. To look forward to
+the gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion,
+love, ambition, hate--hate too indubitably. Love and hate. And to escape
+the dangers of existence, to live without fear, was also happiness.
+There was nothing else. Absence of fear--looking forward. "Oh! the
+miserable lot of humanity!" he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in
+his thought, "I ought to be happy enough as far as that goes." But he
+was not excited by that assurance. On the contrary, he yawned again as
+he had been yawning all day. He was mildly surprised to discover himself
+being overtaken by night. The room grew dark swiftly though time had
+seemed to stand still. How was it that he had not noticed the passing of
+that day? Of course, it was the watch being stopped....
+
+He did not light his lamp, but went over to the bed and threw himself on
+it without any hesitation. Lying on his back, he put his hands under his
+head and stared upward. After a moment he thought, "I am lying here like
+that man. I wonder if he slept while I was struggling with the blizzard
+in the streets. No, he did not sleep. But why should I not sleep?" and
+he felt the silence of the night press upon all his limbs like a weight.
+
+In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear-cut strokes of the town
+clock counting off midnight penetrated the quietness of his suspended
+animation.
+
+Again he began to think. It was twenty-four hours since that man left
+his room. Razumov had a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress was
+sleeping that night. It was a certitude which made him angry because
+he did not want to think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself by
+physiological and psychological reasons. The fellow had hardly slept for
+weeks on his own confession, and now every incertitude was at an end
+for him. No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his
+martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for
+resignation to die. Haldin slept perhaps more soundly than General T---,
+whose task--weary work too--was not done, and over whose head hung the
+sword of revolutionary vengeance.
+
+Razumov, remembering the thick-set man with his heavy jowl resting on
+the collar of his uniform, the champion of autocracy, who had let no
+sign of surprise, incredulity, or joy escape him, but whose goggle eyes
+could express a mortal hatred of all rebellion--Razumov moved uneasily
+on the bed.
+
+"He suspected me," he thought. "I suppose he must suspect everybody. He
+would be capable of suspecting his own wife, if Haldin had gone to her
+boudoir with his confession."
+
+Razumov sat up in anguish. Was he to remain a political suspect all his
+days? Was he to go through life as a man not wholly to be trusted--with
+a bad secret police note tacked on to his record? What sort of future
+could he look forward to?
+
+"I am now a suspect," he thought again; but the habit of reflection and
+that desire of safety, of an ordered life, which was so strong in him
+came to his assistance as the night wore on. His quiet, steady, and
+laborious existence would vouch at length for his loyalty. There were
+many permitted ways to serve one's country. There was an activity that
+made for progress without being revolutionary. The field of influence
+was great and infinitely varied--once one had conquered a name.
+
+His thought like a circling bird reverted after four-and-twenty hours to
+the silver medal, and as it were poised itself there.
+
+When the day broke he had not slept, not for a moment, but he got up
+not very tired and quite sufficiently self-possessed for all practical
+purposes.
+
+He went out and attended three lectures in the morning. But the work in
+the library was a mere dumb show of research. He sat with many volumes
+open before him trying to make notes and extracts. His new tranquillity
+was like a flimsy garment, and seemed to float at the mercy of a casual
+word. Betrayal! Why! the fellow had done all that was necessary to
+betray himself. Precious little had been needed to deceive him.
+
+"I have said no word to him that was not strictly true. Not one word,"
+Razumov argued with himself.
+
+Once engaged on this line of thought there could be no question of doing
+useful work. The same ideas went on passing through his mind, and he
+pronounced mentally the same words over and over again. He shut up all
+the books and rammed all his papers into his pocket with convulsive
+movements, raging inwardly against Haldin.
+
+As he was leaving the library a long bony student in a threadbare
+overcoat joined him, stepping moodily by his side. Razumov answered his
+mumbled greeting without looking at him at all.
+
+"What does he want with me?" he thought with a strange dread of the
+unexpected which he tried to shake off lest it should fasten itself
+upon his life for good and all. And the other, muttering cautiously with
+downcast eyes, supposed that his comrade had seen the news of de P---'s
+executioner--that was the expression he used--having been arrested the
+night before last....
+
+"I've been ill--shut up in my rooms," Razumov mumbled through his teeth.
+
+The tall student, raising his shoulders, shoved his hands deep into his
+pockets. He had a hairless, square, tallowy chin which trembled slightly
+as he spoke, and his nose nipped bright red by the sharp air looked like
+a false nose of painted cardboard between the sallow cheeks. His whole
+appearance was stamped with the mark of cold and hunger. He stalked
+deliberately at Razumov's elbow with his eyes on the ground.
+
+"It's an official statement," he continued in the same cautious mutter.
+"It may be a lie. But there was somebody arrested between midnight and
+one in the morning on Tuesday. This is certain."
+
+And talking rapidly under the cover of his downcast air, he told Razumov
+that this was known through an inferior Government clerk employed at
+the Central Secretariat. That man belonged to one of the revolutionary
+circles. "The same, in fact, I am affiliated to," remarked the student.
+
+They were crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed
+Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared
+confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. "He
+may be affiliated to the police," was the thought that passed through
+his mind. "Who could tell?" But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped,
+famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity of his
+suspicion.
+
+"But I--you know--I don't belong to any circle. I...."
+
+He dared not say any more. Neither dared he mend his pace. The
+other, raising and setting down his lamentably shod feet with exact
+deliberation, protested in a low tone that it was not necessary for
+everybody to belong to an organization. The most valuable personalities
+remained outside. Some of the best work was done outside the
+organization. Then very fast, with whispering, feverish lips--
+
+"The man arrested in the street was Haldin."
+
+And accepting Razumov's dismayed silence as natural enough, he assured
+him that there was no mistake. That Government clerk was on night duty
+at the Secretariat. Hearing a great noise of footsteps in the hall and
+aware that political prisoners were brought over sometimes at night from
+the fortress, he opened the door of the room in which he was working,
+suddenly. Before the gendarme on duty could push him back and slam the
+door in his face, he had seen a prisoner being partly carried, partly
+dragged along the hall by a lot of policemen. He was being used very
+brutally. And the clerk had recognized Haldin perfectly. Less than half
+an hour afterwards General T--- arrived at the Secretariat to examine
+that prisoner personally.
+
+"Aren't you astonished?" concluded the gaunt student.
+
+"No," said Razumov roughly--and at once regretted his answer.
+
+"Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces--with his people. Didn't
+you?"
+
+The student turned his big hollow eyes upon Razumov, who said
+unguardedly--
+
+"His people are abroad."
+
+He could have bitten his tongue out with vexation. The student
+pronounced in a tone of profound meaning--
+
+"So! You alone were aware,..." and stopped.
+
+"They have sworn my ruin," thought Razumov. "Have you spoken of this to
+anyone else?" he asked with bitter curiosity.
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+"No, only to you. Our circle thought that as Haldin had been often heard
+expressing a warm appreciation of your character...."
+
+Razumov could not restrain a gesture of angry despair which the other
+must have misunderstood in some way, because he ceased speaking and
+turned away his black, lack-lustre eyes.
+
+They moved side by side in silence. Then the gaunt student began to
+whisper again, with averted gaze--
+
+"As we have at present no one affiliated inside the fortress so as
+to make it possible to furnish him with a packet of poison, we have
+considered already some sort of retaliatory action--to follow very
+soon...."
+
+Razumov trudging on interrupted--
+
+"Were you acquainted with Haldin? Did he know where you live?"
+
+"I had the happiness to hear him speak twice," his companion answered in
+the feverish whisper contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face and
+bearing. "He did not know where I live.... I am lodging poorly with
+an artisan family.... I have just a corner in a room. It is not very
+practicable to see me there, but if you should need me for anything I am
+ready...."
+
+Razumov trembled with rage and fear. He was beside himself, but kept his
+voice low.
+
+"You are not to come near me. You are not to speak to me. Never address
+a single word to me. I forbid you."
+
+"Very well," said the other submissively, showing no surprise whatever
+at this abrupt prohibition. "You don't wish for secret reasons...
+perfectly... I understand."
+
+He edged away at once, not looking up even; and Razumov saw his gaunt,
+shabby, famine-stricken figure cross the street obliquely with lowered
+head and that peculiar exact motion of the feet.
+
+He watched him as one would watch a vision out of a nightmare, then he
+continued on his way, trying not to think. On his landing the landlady
+seemed to be waiting for him. She was a short, thick, shapeless woman
+with a large yellow face wrapped up everlastingly in a black woollen
+shawl. When she saw him come up the last flight of stairs she flung both
+her arms up excitedly, then clasped her hands before her face.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--little father--what have you been doing? And such
+a quiet young man, too! The police are just gone this moment after
+searching your rooms."
+
+Razumov gazed down at her with silent, scrutinizing attention. Her puffy
+yellow countenance was working with emotion. She screwed up her eyes at
+him entreatingly.
+
+"Such a sensible young man! Anybody can see you are sensible. And
+now--like this--all at once.... What is the good of mixing yourself
+up with these Nihilists? Do give over, little father. They are unlucky
+people."
+
+Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
+
+"Or is it that some secret enemy has been calumniating you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch? The world is full of black hearts and false denunciations
+nowadays. There is much fear about."
+
+"Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?" asked Razumov,
+without taking his eyes off her quivering face.
+
+But she had not heard anything. She had tried to find out by asking
+the police captain while his men were turning the room upside down. The
+police captain of the district had known her for the last eleven years
+and was a humane person. But he said to her on the landing, looking very
+black and vexed--
+
+"My good woman, do not ask questions. I don't know anything myself. The
+order comes from higher quarters."
+
+And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the arrival of the
+policemen of the district, a very superior gentleman in a fur coat and
+a shiny hat, who sat down in the room and looked through all the papers
+himself. He came alone and went away by himself, taking nothing with
+him. She had been trying to put things straight a little since they
+left.
+
+Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.
+
+All his books had been shaken and thrown on the floor. His landlady
+followed him, and stooping painfully began to pick them up into her
+apron. His papers and notes which were kept always neatly sorted (they
+all related to his studies) had been shuffled up and heaped together
+into a ragged pile in the middle of the table.
+
+This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably. He sat down
+and stared. He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being
+undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away
+from him one by one. He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and
+made a movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.
+
+The old woman, rising to her feet with a low groan, shot all the
+books she had collected in her apron on to the sofa and left the room
+muttering and sighing.
+
+It was only then that he noticed that the sheet of paper which for one
+night had remained stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was lying on
+top of the pile.
+
+When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four,
+absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table. And now he saw it
+lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the
+confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the
+last three years. It had not been flung there. It had been placed
+there--smoothed out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound
+meaning--or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
+
+He sat staring at the piece of paper till his eyes began to smart. He
+did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the
+next day--which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution.
+This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to
+live--neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from
+the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide. The idea of laying
+violent hands upon his body did not occur to Razumov. The unrelated
+organism bearing that label, walking, breathing, wearing these clothes,
+was of no importance to anyone, unless maybe to the landlady. The true
+Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future--in that
+future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy--for autocracy knows
+no law--and the lawlessness of revolution. The feeling that his moral
+personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that
+he asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing
+the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.
+
+"What is the good of exerting my intelligence, of pursuing the
+systematic development of my faculties and all my plans of work?" he
+asked himself. "I want to guide my conduct by reasonable convictions,
+but what security have I against something--some destructive
+horror--walking in upon me as I sit here?..."
+
+Razumov looked apprehensively towards the door of the outer room as if
+expecting some shape of evil to turn the handle and appear before him
+silently.
+
+"A common thief," he said to himself, "finds more guarantees in the law
+he is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his consolation."
+Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the
+incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear
+and their lives remained their own.
+
+But he slept as soundly that night as though he had been consoling
+himself in the manner of Ziemianitch. He dropped off suddenly, lay like
+a log, remembered no dream on waking. But it was as if his soul had gone
+out in the night to gather the flowers of wrathful wisdom. He got up in
+a mood of grim determination and as if with a new knowledge of his own
+nature. He looked mockingly on the heap of papers on his table; and left
+his room to attend the lectures, muttering to himself, "We shall see."
+
+He was in no humour to talk to anybody or hear himself questioned as
+to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to
+repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair
+hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of "Madcap
+Kostia." He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate
+Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the
+periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal
+remonstrances. Noisily blundering like a retriever puppy, his elated
+voice and great gestures filled the bare academy corridors with the
+joy of thoughtless animal life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great
+distance. His usual discourses treated of trotting horses, wine-parties
+in expensive restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy virtue,
+with a disarming artlessness of outlook. He pounced upon Razumov about
+midday, somewhat less uproariously than his habit was, and led him
+aside.
+
+"Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch. A few words here in this quiet
+corner."
+
+He felt Razumov's reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm
+caressingly.
+
+"No--pray do. I don't want to talk to you about any of my silly scrapes.
+What are my scrapes? Absolutely nothing. Mere childishness. The other
+night I flung a fellow out of a certain place where I was having a
+fairly good time. A tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from the
+Treasury department. He was bullying the people of the house. I rebuked
+him. 'You are not behaving humanely to God's creatures that are a jolly
+sight more estimable than yourself,' I said. I can't bear to see any
+tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Upon my word I can't. He didn't take it in
+good part at all. 'Who's that impudent puppy?' he begins to shout. I
+was in excellent form as it happened, and he went through the closed
+window very suddenly. He flew quite a long way into the yard. I raged
+like--like a--minotaur. The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers
+got under the table.... Such fun! My dad had to put his hand pretty
+deep into his pocket, I can tell you." He chuckled.
+
+"My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do
+get into unholy scrapes."
+
+His elation fell. That was just it. What was his life? Insignificant;
+no good to anyone; a mere festivity. It would end some fine day in his
+getting his skull split with a champagne bottle in a drunken brawl. At
+such times, too, when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas. But he
+could never get any ideas into his head. His head wasn't worth anything
+better than to be split by a champagne bottle.
+
+Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away.
+The other's tone changed to confidential earnestness.
+
+"For God's sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me make some sort of
+sacrifice. It would not be a sacrifice really. I have my rich dad behind
+me. There's positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket."
+
+And rejecting indignantly Razumov's suggestion that this was drunken
+raving, he offered to lend him some money to escape abroad with. He
+could always get money from his dad. He had only to say that he had
+lost it at cards or something of that sort, and at the same time promise
+solemnly not to miss a single lecture for three months on end. That
+would fetch the old man; and he, Kostia, was quite equal to the
+sacrifice. Though he really did not see what was the good for him to
+attend the lectures. It was perfectly hopeless.
+
+"Won't you let me be of some use?" he pleaded to the silent Razumov,
+who with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real
+drift of the other's intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up
+the point.
+
+"What makes you think I want to go abroad?" he asked at last very
+quietly.
+
+Kostia lowered his voice.
+
+"You had the police in your rooms yesterday. There are three or four of
+us who have heard of that. Never mind how we know. It is sufficient that
+we do. So we have been consulting together."
+
+"Ah! You got to know that so soon," muttered Razumov negligently.
+
+"Yes. We did. And it struck us that a man like you..."
+
+"What sort of a man do you take me to be?" Razumov interrupted him.
+
+"A man of ideas--and a man of action too. But you are very deep, Kirylo.
+There's no getting to the bottom of your mind. Not for fellows like me.
+But we all agreed that you must be preserved for our country. Of that we
+have no doubt whatever--I mean all of us who have heard Haldin speak of
+you on certain occasions. A man doesn't get the police ransacking his
+rooms without there being some devilry hanging over his head.... And
+so if you think that it would be better for you to bolt at once...."
+
+Razumov tore himself away and walked down the corridor, leaving the
+other motionless with his mouth open. But almost at once he returned
+and stood before the amazed Kostia, who shut his mouth slowly. Razumov
+looked him straight in the eyes, before saying with marked deliberation
+and separating his words--
+
+"I thank--you--very--much."
+
+He went away again rapidly. Kostia, recovering from his surprise at
+these manoeuvres, ran up behind him pressingly.
+
+"No! Wait! Listen. I really mean it. It would be like giving your
+compassion to a starving fellow. Do you hear, Kirylo? And any disguise
+you may think of, that too I could procure from a costumier, a Jew I
+know. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly. Perhaps
+also a false beard or something of that kind may be needed.
+
+"Razumov turned at bay.
+
+"There are no false beards needed in this business, Kostia--you
+good-hearted lunatic, you. What do you know of my ideas? My ideas may be
+poison to you." The other began to shake his head in energetic protest.
+
+"What have you got to do with ideas? Some of them would make an end
+of your dad's money-bags. Leave off meddling with what you don't
+understand. Go back to your trotting horses and your girls, and then
+you'll be sure at least of doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to
+yourself."
+
+The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this disdain.
+
+"You're sending me back to my pig's trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I
+am an unlucky beast--and I shall die like a beast too. But mind--it's
+your contempt that has done for me."
+
+Razumov went off with long strides. That this simple and grossly festive
+soul should have fallen too under the revolutionary curse affected him
+as an ominous symptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling
+troubled. Personally he ought to have felt reassured. There was an
+obvious advantage in this conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for
+what he was not. But was it not strange?
+
+Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of
+his hands by Haldin's revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and laborious
+existence had been destroyed--the only thing he could call his own on
+this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?
+
+What infuriated him most was to feel that the "thinkers" of the
+University were evidently connecting him with Haldin--as a sort of
+confidant in the background apparently. A mysterious connexion! Ha ha!
+...He had been made a personage without knowing anything about it. How
+that wretch Haldin must have talked about him! Yet it was likely that
+Haldin had said very little. The fellow's casual utterances were caught
+up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not
+all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and
+lies?
+
+"Impossible to think of anything else," muttered Razumov to himself.
+"I'll become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are
+murdering my intelligence."
+
+He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of
+his intelligence.
+
+He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement
+which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an
+official-looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik.
+
+"A gendarme brought it," said the man. "He asked if you were at home.
+I told him 'No, he's not at home.' So he left it. 'Give it into his own
+hands,' says he. Now you've got it--eh?"
+
+He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope
+in hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course
+this official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A
+suspect! A suspect!
+
+He stared in dreary astonishment at the absurdity of his position. He
+thought with a sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years of good
+work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardized--turned from
+hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves
+into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break
+through. Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady's back is
+turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man's name,
+clothed in flesh--wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots--lounging
+against the stove. It asks you, "Is the outer door closed?"--and you
+don't know enough to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You
+don't know. You welcome the crazy fate. "Sit down," you say. And it is
+all over. You cannot shake it off any more. It will cling to you for
+ever. Neither halter nor bullet can give you back the freedom of your
+life and the sanity of your thought.... It was enough to dash one's
+head against a wall.
+
+Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if to select a spot to dash
+his head against. Then he opened the letter. It directed the student
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself without delay at the
+General Secretariat.
+
+Razumov had a vision of General T---'s goggle eyes waiting for him--the
+embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied
+the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the
+incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of
+a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion
+by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to
+understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism.
+
+"What can he want with me precisely--I wonder?" he asked himself.
+
+As if that mental question had evoked the familiar phantom, Haldin stood
+suddenly before him in the room with an extraordinary completeness of
+detail. Though the short winter day had passed already into the sinister
+twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw plainly the narrow
+leather strap round the Tcherkess coat. The illusion of that hateful
+presence was so perfect that he half expected it to ask, "Is the outer
+door closed?" He looked at it with hatred and contempt. Souls do not
+take a shape of clothing. Moreover, Haldin could not be dead yet.
+Razumov stepped forward menacingly; the vision vanished--and turning
+short on his heel he walked out of his room with infinite disdain.
+
+But after going down the first flight of stairs it occurred to him that
+perhaps the superior authorities of police meant to confront him with
+Haldin in the flesh. This thought struck him like a bullet, and had he
+not clung with both hands to the banister he would have rolled down to
+the next landing most likely. His legs were of no use for a considerable
+time.... But why? For what conceivable reason? To what end?
+
+There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov
+remembered the promise made by the General to Prince K---. His action
+was to remain unknown.
+
+He got down to the bottom of the stairs, lowering himself as it were
+from step to step, by the banister. Under the gate he regained much of
+his firmness of thought and limb. He went out into the street without
+staggering visibly. Every moment he felt steadier mentally. And yet
+he was saying to himself that General T--- was perfectly capable of
+shutting him up in the fortress for an indefinite time. His temperament
+fitted his remorseless task, and his omnipotence made him inaccessible
+to reasonable argument.
+
+But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he discovered that he would
+have nothing to do with General T---. It is evident from Mr. Razumov's
+diary that this dreaded personality was to remain in the background. A
+civilian of superior rank received him in a private room after a period
+of waiting in outer offices where a lot of scribbling went on at many
+tables in a heated and stuffy atmosphere.
+
+The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in the corridor--
+
+"You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin."
+
+There was nothing formidable about the man bearing that name. His mild,
+expectant glance was turned on the door already when Razumov entered.
+At once, with the penholder he was holding in his hand, he pointed to a
+deep sofa between two windows. He followed Razumov with his eyes while
+that last crossed the room and sat down. The mild gaze rested on him,
+not curious, not inquisitive--certainly not suspicious--almost
+without expression. In its passionless persistence there was something
+resembling sympathy.
+
+Razumov, who had prepared his will and his intelligence to encounter
+General T--- himself, was profoundly troubled. All the moral bracing
+up against the possible excesses of power and passion went for nothing
+before this sallow man, who wore a full unclipped beard. It was
+fair, thin, and very fine. The light fell in coppery gleams on the
+protuberances of a high, rugged forehead. And the aspect of the broad,
+soft physiognomy was so homely and rustic that the careful middle
+parting of the hair seemed a pretentious affectation.
+
+The diary of Mr. Razumov testifies to some irritation on his part. I may
+remark here that the diary proper consisting of the more or less daily
+entries seems to have been begun on that very evening after Mr. Razumov
+had returned home.
+
+Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated. His strung-up individuality had gone
+to pieces within him very suddenly.
+
+"I must be very prudent with him," he warned himself in the silence
+during which they sat gazing at each other. It lasted some little time,
+and was characterized (for silences have their character) by a sort of
+sadness imparted to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner of
+the bearded official. Razumov learned later that he was the chief of a
+department in the General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil service
+equivalent to that of a colonel in the army.
+
+Razumov's mistrust became acute. The main point was, not to be drawn
+into saying too much. He had been called there for some reason. What
+reason? To be given to understand that he was a suspect--and also no
+doubt to be pumped. As to what precisely? There was nothing. Or perhaps
+Haldin had been telling lies.... Every alarming uncertainty beset
+Razumov. He could bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself for
+his weakness spoke first, though he had promised himself not to do so on
+any account.
+
+"I haven't lost a moment's time," he began in a hoarse, provoking tone;
+and then the faculty of speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of
+Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly--
+
+"Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact...."
+
+But the spell was broken, and Razumov interrupted him boldly, under
+a sudden conviction that this was the safest attitude to take. With a
+great flow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even
+as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that
+the word "misunderstood" was better than the word "mistrusted," and he
+repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized
+with fright before the attentive immobility of the official. "What am
+I talking about?" he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze.
+Mistrusted--not misunderstood--was the right symbol for these people.
+Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his
+head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his
+hand over his brow--an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was
+too careless to restrain. At that moment Razumov beheld his own brain
+suffering on the rack--a long, pale figure drawn asunder horizontally
+with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to
+see. It was as though he had dreamed for an infinitesimal fraction of
+time of some dark print of the Inquisition.
+
+It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov had actually dozed off
+and had dreamed in the presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print
+of the Inquisition. He was indeed extremely exhausted, and he records
+a remarkably dream-like experience of anguish at the circumstance
+that there was no one whatever near the pale and extended figure. The
+solitude of the racked victim was particularly horrible to behold. The
+mysterious impossibility to see the face, he also notes, inspired a sort
+of terror. All these characteristics of an ugly dream were present. Yet
+he is certain that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the
+sofa, leaning forward with his hands between his knees and turning his
+cap round and round in his fingers. But everything vanished at the voice
+of Councillor Mikulin. Razumov felt profoundly grateful for the even
+simplicity of its tone.
+
+"Yes. I have listened with interest. I comprehend in a measure your...
+But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you...." Councillor Mikulin
+uttered a series of broken sentences. Instead of finishing them he
+glanced down his beard. It was a deliberate curtailment which somehow
+made the phrases more impressive. But he could talk fluently enough, as
+became apparent when changing his tone to persuasiveness he went on: "By
+listening to you as I did, I think I have proved that I do not regard
+our intercourse as strictly official. In fact, I don't want it to have
+that character at all.... Oh yes! I admit that the request for your
+presence here had an official form. But I put it to you whether it was a
+form which would have been used to secure the attendance of a...."
+
+"Suspect," exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official's
+eyes. They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim,
+steadfast gaze. "A suspect." The open repetition of that word which
+had been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of
+satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. "Surely you do
+know that I've had my rooms searched by the police?"
+
+"I was about to say a 'misunderstood person,' when you interrupted me,"
+insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin.
+
+Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual
+superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little
+disdainfully--
+
+"I know I am but a reed. But I beg you to allow me the superiority of
+the thinking reed over the unthinking forces that are about to crush
+him out of existence. Practical thinking in the last instance is but
+criticism. I may perhaps be allowed to express my wonder at this action
+of the police being delayed for two full days during which, of course,
+I could have annihilated everything compromising by burning it--let us
+say--and getting rid of the very ashes, for that matter."
+
+"You are angry," remarked the official, with an unutterable simplicity
+of tone and manner. "Is that reasonable?"
+
+Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.
+
+"I am reasonable. I am even--permit me to say--a thinker, though to
+be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of
+revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought--devil
+knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I
+think like a Russian. I think faithfully--and I take the liberty to call
+myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word, as far as I know."
+
+"No. Why should it be a forbidden word?" Councillor Mikulin turned in
+his seat with crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table propped
+his head on the knuckles of a half-closed hand. Razumov noticed a thick
+forefinger clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-red stone--a
+signet ring that, looking as if it could weigh half a pound, was
+an appropriate ornament for that ponderous man with the accurate
+middle-parting of glossy hair above a rugged Socratic forehead.
+
+"Could it be a wig?" Razumov detected himself wondering with an
+unexpected detachment. His self-confidence was much shaken. He resolved
+to chatter no more. Reserve! Reserve! All he had to do was to keep
+the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination, when the
+questions came. Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers.
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly. Razumov's self-confidence
+abandoned him completely. It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.
+Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing
+else. He made an effort to brace himself up. It was a failure. But
+Councillor Mikulin was surprisingly detached too.
+
+"Why should it be forbidden?" he repeated. "I too consider myself
+a thinking man, I assure you. The principal condition is to think
+correctly. I admit it is difficult sometimes at first for a young man
+abandoned to himself--with his generous impulses undisciplined, so to
+speak--at the mercy of every wild wind that blows. Religious belief, of
+course, is a great...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension
+was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with gloomy
+discontent--
+
+"That man, Haldin, believed in God."
+
+"Ah! You are aware," breathed out Councillor Mikulin, making the point
+softly, as if with discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly
+enough, as if he too were put off his guard by Razumov's remark.
+The young man preserved an impassive, moody countenance, though he
+reproached himself bitterly for a pernicious fool, to have given thus an
+utterly false impression of intimacy. He kept his eyes on the floor.
+"I must positively hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak," he
+admonished himself. And at once against his will the question, "Hadn't
+I better tell him everything?" presented itself with such force that he
+had to bite his lower lip. Councillor Mikulin could not, however, have
+nourished any hope of confession. He went on--
+
+"You tell me more than his judges were able to get out of him. He was
+judged by a commission of three. He would tell them absolutely nothing.
+I have the report of the interrogatories here, by me. After every
+question there stands 'Refuses to answer--refuses to answer.' It's like
+that page after page. You see, I have been entrusted with some further
+investigations around and about this affair. He has left me nothing to
+begin my investigations on. A hardened miscreant. And so, you say, he
+believed in...."
+
+Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard with a faint grimace;
+but he did not pause for long. Remarking with a shade of scorn that
+blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he concluded by supposing that
+Mr. Razumov had conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject.
+
+"No," said Razumov loudly, without looking up. "He talked and I
+listened. That is not a conversation."
+
+"Listening is a great art," observed Mikulin parenthetically.
+
+"And getting people to talk is another," mumbled Razumov.
+
+"Well, no--that is not very difficult," Mikulin said innocently,
+"except, of course, in special cases. For instance, this Haldin. Nothing
+could induce him to talk. He was brought four times before the delegated
+judges. Four secret interrogatories--and even during the last, when your
+personality was put forward...."
+
+"My personality put forward?" repeated Razumov, raising his head
+brusquely. "I don't understand." Councillor Mikulin turned squarely to
+the table, and taking up some sheets of grey foolscap dropped them one
+after another, retaining only the last in his hand. He held it before
+his eyes while speaking.
+
+"It was--you see--judged necessary. In a case of that gravity no means
+of action upon the culprit should be neglected. You understand that
+yourself, I am certain.
+
+"Razumov stared with enormous wide eyes at the side view of Councillor
+Mikulin, who now was not looking at him at all.
+
+"So it was decided (I was consulted by General T---) that a certain
+question should be put to the accused. But in deference to the earnest
+wishes of Prince K--- your name has been kept out of the documents
+and even from the very knowledge of the judges themselves. Prince K---
+recognized the propriety, the necessity of what we proposed to do, but
+he was concerned for your safety. Things do leak out--that we can't
+deny. One cannot always answer for the discretion of inferior officials.
+There was, of course, the secretary of the special tribunal--one or two
+gendarmes in the room. Moreover, as I have said, in deference to Prince
+K--- even the judges themselves were to be left in ignorance. The
+question ready framed was sent to them by General T--- (I wrote it out
+with my own hand) with instructions to put it to the prisoner the very
+last of all. Here it is.
+
+"Councillor Mikulin threw back his head into proper focus and went on
+reading monotonously: 'Question--Has the man well known to you, in whose
+rooms you remained for several hours on Monday and on whose information
+you have been arrested--has he had any previous knowledge of your
+intention to commit a political murder?...' Prisoner refuses to reply.
+
+"Question repeated. Prisoner preserves the same stubborn silence.
+
+"The venerable Chaplain of the Fortress being then admitted and
+exhorting the prisoner to repentance, entreating him also to atone for
+his crime by an unreserved and full confession which should help to
+liberate from the sin of rebellion against the Divine laws and the
+sacred Majesty of the Ruler, our Christ-loving land--the prisoner opens
+his lips for the first time during this morning's audience and in a
+loud, clear voice rejects the venerable Chaplain's ministrations.
+
+"At eleven o'clock the Court pronounces in summary form the death
+sentence.
+
+"The execution is fixed for four o'clock in the afternoon, subject to
+further instructions from superior authorities."
+
+Councillor Mikulin dropped the page of foolscap, glanced down his beard,
+and turning to Razumov, added in an easy, explanatory tone--
+
+"We saw no object in delaying the execution. The order to carry out the
+sentence was sent by telegraph at noon. I wrote out the telegram myself.
+He was hanged at four o'clock this afternoon."
+
+The definite information of Haldin's death gave Razumov the feeling of
+general lassitude which follows a great exertion or a great excitement.
+He kept very still on the sofa, but a murmur escaped him--
+
+"He had a belief in a future existence."
+
+Councillor Mikulin shrugged his shoulders slightly, and Razumov got up
+with an effort. There was nothing now to stay for in that room. Haldin
+had been hanged at four o'clock. There could be no doubt of that. He
+had, it seemed, entered upon his future existence, long boots, Astrakhan
+fur cap and all, down to the very leather strap round his waist. A
+flickering, vanishing sort of existence. It was not his soul, it was his
+mere phantom he had left behind on this earth--thought Razumov, smiling
+caustically to himself while he crossed the room, utterly forgetful of
+where he was and of Councillor Mikulin's existence. The official could
+have set a lot of bells ringing all over the building without leaving
+his chair. He let Razumov go quite up to the door before he spoke.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch--what are you doing?"
+
+Razumov turned his head and looked at him in silence. He was not in the
+least disconcerted. Councillor Mikulin's arms were stretched out on the
+table before him and his body leaned forward a little with an effort of
+his dim gaze.
+
+"Was I actually going to clear out like this?" Razumov wondered
+at himself with an impassive countenance. And he was aware of this
+impassiveness concealing a lucid astonishment.
+
+"Evidently I was going out if he had not spoken," he thought. "What
+would he have done then? I must end this affair one way or another. I
+must make him show his hand."
+
+For a moment longer he reflected behind the mask as it were, then let go
+the door-handle and came back to the middle of the room.
+
+"I'll tell you what you think," he said explosively, but not raising his
+voice. "You think that you are dealing with a secret accomplice of that
+unhappy man. No, I do not know that he was unhappy. He did not tell me.
+He was a wretch from my point of view, because to keep alive a false
+idea is a greater crime than to kill a man. I suppose you will not deny
+that? I hated him! Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their
+Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a
+contempt for the secular logic of human development."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought.
+The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The
+bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an
+idol with dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov's voice changed involuntarily.
+
+"If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as
+Haldin, I would answer you--there is nothing sentimental in it. I did
+not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder. Abhorrence is
+not hate. I hated him simply because I am sane. It is in that character
+that he outraged me. His death..."
+
+Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat. The dimness of
+Councillor Mikulin's eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it
+indistinct to Razumov's sight. He tried to disregard these phenomena.
+
+"Indeed," he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, "what is his
+death to me? If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his
+breast.... The fellow is a mere phantom...."
+
+Razumov's voice died out very much against his will. Mikulin behind the
+table did not allow himself the slightest movement. The silence lasted
+for some little time before Razumov could go on again.
+
+"He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
+other's rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young
+Guards' officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery.
+...Upon my Word,"--Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of
+Ziemianitch, lowered his voice forcibly,--"upon my word, we Russians are
+a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves
+wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or
+set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know?
+To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in
+a desert one must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the
+grog-shop, falls on your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
+something about your appearance has taken his fancy, what then--kindly
+tell me? You may break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
+succeed in beating him off...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
+deliberately.
+
+"That's... of course," he said in an undertone.
+
+The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
+unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. Razumov
+remembered his intention of making him show his hand.
+
+"I have said all this to Prince K---," he began with assumed
+indifference, but lost it on seeing Councillor Mikulin's slow nod of
+assent. "You know it? You've heard.... Then why should I be called
+here to be told of Haldin's execution? Did you want to confront me with
+his silence now that the man is dead? What is his silence to me! This is
+incomprehensible. You want in some way to shake my moral balance."
+
+"No. Not that," murmured Councillor Mikulin, just audibly. "The service
+you have rendered is appreciated...."
+
+"Is it?" interrupted Razumov ironically.
+
+"...and your position too." Councillor Mikulin did not raise his
+voice. "But only think! You fall into Prince K---'s study as if from
+the sky with your startling information.... You are studying yet,
+Mr. Razumov, but we are serving already--don't forget that.... And
+naturally some curiosity was bound to...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked down his beard. Razumov's lips trembled.
+
+"An occurrence of that sort marks a man," the homely murmur went on. "I
+admit I was curious to see you. General T--- thought it would be useful,
+too.... Don't think I am incapable of understanding your sentiments.
+When I was young like you I studied...."
+
+"Yes--you wished to see me," said Razumov in a tone of profound
+distaste. "Naturally you have the right--I mean the power. It all
+amounts to the same thing. But it is perfectly useless, if you were
+to look at me and listen to me for a year. I begin to think there
+is something about me which people don't seem able to make out. It's
+unfortunate. I imagine, however, that Prince K--- understands. He seemed
+to."
+
+Councillor Mikulin moved slightly and spoke.
+
+"Prince K--- is aware of everything that is being done, and I don't
+mind informing you that he approved my intention of becoming personally
+acquainted with you."
+
+Razumov concealed an immense disappointment under the accents of railing
+surprise.
+
+"So he is curious too!... Well--after all, Prince K--- knows me very
+little. It is really very unfortunate for me, but--it is not exactly my
+fault."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised a hasty deprecatory hand and inclined his head
+slightly over his shoulder.
+
+"Now, Mr. Razumov--is it necessary to take it in that way? Everybody I
+am sure can...."
+
+He glanced rapidly down his beard, and when he looked up again there
+was for a moment an interested expression in his misty gaze. Razumov
+discouraged it with a cold, repellent smile.
+
+"No. That's of no importance to be sure--except that in respect of all
+this curiosity being aroused by a very simple matter.... What is to
+be done with it? It is unappeasable. I mean to say there is nothing to
+appease it with. I happen to have been born a Russian with patriotic
+instincts--whether inherited or not I am not in a position to say."
+
+Razumov spoke consciously with elaborate steadiness.
+
+"Yes, patriotic instincts developed by a faculty of independent
+thinking--of detached thinking. In that respect I am more free than any
+social democratic revolution could make me. It is more than probable
+that I don't think exactly as you are thinking. Indeed, how could it be?
+You would think most likely at this moment that I am elaborately lying
+to cover up the track of my repentance."
+
+Razumov stopped. His heart had grown too big for his breast. Councillor
+Mikulin did not flinch.
+
+"Why so?" he said simply. "I assisted personally at the search of your
+rooms. I looked through all the papers myself. I have been greatly
+impressed by a sort of political confession of faith. A very remarkable
+document. Now may I ask for what purpose...."
+
+"To deceive the police naturally," said Razumov savagely.... "What is
+all this mockery? Of course you can send me straight from this room
+to Siberia. That would be intelligible. To what is intelligible I can
+submit. But I protest against this comedy of persecution. The whole
+affair is becoming too comical altogether for my taste. A comedy of
+errors, phantoms, and suspicions. It's positively indecent...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin turned an attentive ear. "Did you say phantoms?" he
+murmured.
+
+"I could walk over dozens of them." Razumov, with an impatient wave of
+his hand, went on headlong, "But, really, I must claim the right to be
+done once for all with that man. And in order to accomplish this I shall
+take the liberty...."
+
+Razumov on his side of the table bowed slightly to the seated
+bureaucrat.
+
+"... To retire--simply to retire," he finished with great resolution.
+
+He walked to the door, thinking, "Now he must show his hand. He must
+ring and have me arrested before I am out of the building, or he must
+let me go. And either way...."
+
+An unhurried voice said--
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch." Razumov at the door turned his head.
+
+"To retire," he repeated.
+
+"Where to?" asked Councillor Mikulin softly.
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain
+proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man
+of imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his
+instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development
+of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes. But this is not
+a work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking
+lies not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and
+strong in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to
+invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent
+a transition.
+
+Dropping then Mr. Razumov's record at the point where Councillor
+Mikulin's question "Where to?" comes in with the force of an insoluble
+problem, I shall simply say that I made the acquaintance of these ladies
+about six months before that time. By "these ladies" I mean, of course,
+the mother and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
+
+By what arguments he had induced his mother to sell their little
+property and go abroad for an indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely.
+I have an idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son's wish, would have set fire
+to her house and emigrated to the moon without any sign of surprise or
+apprehension; and that Miss Haldin--Nathalie, caressingly Natalka--would
+have given her assent to the scheme.
+
+Their proud devotion to that young man became clear to me in a
+very short time. Following his directions they went straight to
+Switzerland--to Zurich--where they remained the best part of a year.
+From Zurich, which they did not like, they came to Geneva. A friend
+of mine in Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the University (he had
+married a Russian lady, a distant connection of Mrs. Haldin's), wrote to
+me suggesting I should call on these ladies. It was a very kindly
+meant business suggestion. Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of
+reading the best English authors with a competent teacher.
+
+Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly. Her bad French, of which she was
+smilingly conscious, did away with the formality of the first interview.
+She was a tall woman in a black silk dress. A wide brow, regular
+features, and delicately cut lips, testified to her past beauty. She sat
+upright in an easy chair and in a rather weak, gentle voice told me that
+her Natalka simply thirsted after knowledge. Her thin hands were lying
+on her lap, her facial immobility had in it something monachal. "In
+Russia," she went on, "all knowledge was tainted with falsehood. Not
+chemistry and all that, but education generally," she explained.
+The Government corrupted the teaching for its own purposes. Both her
+children felt that. Her Natalka had obtained a diploma of a Superior
+School for Women and her son was a student at the St. Petersburg
+University. He had a brilliant intellect, a most noble unselfish nature,
+and he was the oracle of his comrades. Early next year, she hoped he
+would join them and they would then go to Italy together. In any other
+country but their own she would have been certain of a great future for
+a man with the extraordinary abilities and the lofty character of her
+son--but in Russia....
+
+The young lady sitting by the window turned her head and said--
+
+"Come, mother. Even with us things change with years."
+
+Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet caressing in its harshness.
+She had a dark complexion, with red lips and a full figure. She gave the
+impression of strong vitality. The old lady sighed.
+
+"You are both young--you two. It is easy for you to hope. But I, too, am
+not hopeless. Indeed, how could I be with a son like this."
+
+I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors she wished to read. She
+directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
+became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically
+her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
+something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as
+direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's
+wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there
+was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better
+definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to
+think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously
+she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was--to look at
+her was enough--very capable of being roused by an idea or simply by
+a person. At least, so I judged with I believe an unbiassed mind; for
+clearly my person could not be the person--and as to my ideas!...
+
+We became excellent friends in the course of our reading. It was very
+pleasant. Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I
+became very much attached to that young girl. At the end of four
+months I told her that now she could very well go on reading English
+by herself. It was time for the teacher to depart. My pupil looked
+unpleasantly surprised.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and kindly expression of the
+eyes, uttered from her armchair in her uncertain French, "_Mais l'ami
+reviendra._" And so it was settled. I returned--not four times a week
+as before, but pretty frequently. In the autumn we made some short
+excursions together in company with other Russians. My friendship with
+these ladies gave me a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise I
+could not have had.
+
+The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P---'s assassination--it
+was a Sunday--I met the two ladies in the street and walked with them
+for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy grey cloak, I remember,
+over her black silk dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very quiet
+expression.
+
+"We have been to the late service," she said. "Natalka came with me.
+Her girl-friends, the students here, of course don't.... With us in
+Russia the church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost
+necessary when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope
+of a future existence. But I cannot give up praying for my son."
+
+She added with a sort of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and
+in French, "_Ce n'est peut etre qu'une habitude._" ("It may be only
+habit.")
+
+Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She did not glance at her
+mother.
+
+"You and Victor are both profound believers," she said.
+
+I communicated to them the news from their country which I had just
+read in a cafe. For a whole minute we walked together fairly briskly in
+silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
+
+"There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this. They may be
+even closing the University. There is neither peace nor rest in Russia
+for one but in the grave.
+
+"Yes. The way is hard," came from the daughter, looking straight before
+her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing
+the end of the street. "But concord is not so very far off."
+
+"That is what my children think," observed Mrs. Haldin to me.
+
+I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of
+concord. Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought
+very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the
+situation. She was very calm and youthfully superior.
+
+"You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as
+social contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
+something quite different."
+
+"It is quite possible that I don't understand," I admitted.
+
+That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
+understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
+Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all
+the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.
+I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a
+terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and
+hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret
+of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they
+detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas
+we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its
+sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....
+
+I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in
+the afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
+Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
+platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
+softened in her grey eyes.
+
+Mr. Razumov's record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the
+memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from
+all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the
+living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death. He must
+have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the
+hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into
+eternity. That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their
+compatriots--more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and
+the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
+des Philosophes was very much crowded.
+
+I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too. I took
+her hand and was moved to revert to that morning's conversation in the
+street.
+
+"Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of
+your..." I began.
+
+It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious
+fore-knowledge. She checked me gently--
+
+"Their impulses--their..." she sought the proper expression and found
+it, but in French..."their _mouvements d'ame._"
+
+Her voice was not much above a whisper.
+
+"Very well," I said. "But still we are looking at a conflict. You say
+it is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose
+I admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more
+easily--can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord
+which you proclaim to be so near?"
+
+She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering
+my reasonable question--my obvious, my unanswerable question.
+
+"It is inconceivable," I added, with something like annoyance.
+
+"Everything is inconceivable," she said. "The whole world is
+inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to
+our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to
+our conceptions. It is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong
+to the majority. We Russians shall find some better form of national
+freedom than an artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong because
+it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is left
+for us Russians to discover a better way."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window. She turned upon me the
+almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her
+big dark eyes.
+
+"That's what my children think," she declared.
+
+"I suppose," I addressed Miss Haldin, "that you will be shocked if I
+tell you that I haven't understood--I won't say a single word; I've
+understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied
+concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its
+plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic
+conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were
+before they can be made understandable."
+
+I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred. She
+smiled with her eyes only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the
+door, very amiable.
+
+"Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor. It
+is not so. He understands me better than I can understand him. When he
+joins us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul
+it is." She paused. "He is not a strong man in the conventional sense,
+you know," she added. "But his character is without a flaw."
+
+"I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with
+your brother Victor."
+
+"Don't expect to understand him quite," she said, a little maliciously.
+"He is not at all--at all--western at bottom."
+
+And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in
+the doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
+autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard
+des Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of
+Geneva, where there is a quarter called "La Petite Russie." Whenever two
+Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging
+their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private
+life, their public utterances--haunting the secret of their silences.
+
+What struck me next in the course of a week or so was the silence of
+these ladies. I used to meet them walking in the public garden near the
+University. They greeted me with their usual friendliness, but I could
+not help noticing their taciturnity. By that time it was generally known
+that the assassin of M. de P--- had been caught, judged, and executed.
+So much had been declared officially to the news agencies. But for the
+world at large he remained anonymous. The official secrecy had withheld
+his name from the public. I really cannot imagine for what reason.
+
+One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the main valley of the
+Bastions under the naked trees.
+
+"Mother is not very well," she explained.
+
+As Mrs. Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day's illness in her life,
+this indisposition was disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
+
+"I think she is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for
+rather a long time."
+
+"No news--good news," I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly
+side by side.
+
+"Not in Russia," she breathed out so low that I only just caught the
+words. I looked at her with more attention.
+
+"You too are anxious?"
+
+She admitted after a moment of hesitation that she was.
+
+"It is really such a long time since we heard...."
+
+And before I could offer the usual banal suggestions she confided in me.
+
+"Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote to a family we know in
+Petersburg. They had not seen him for more than a month. They thought
+he was already with us. They were even offended a little that he should
+have left Petersburg without calling on them. The husband of the lady
+went at once to his lodgings. Victor had left there and they did not
+know his address."
+
+I remember her catching her breath rather pitifully. Her brother had not
+been seen at lectures for a very long time either. He only turned up now
+and then at the University gate to ask the porter for his letters. And
+the gentleman friend was told that the student Haldin did not come to
+claim the last two letters for him. But the police came to inquire if
+the student Haldin ever received any correspondence at the University
+and took them away.
+
+"My two last letters," she said.
+
+We faced each other. A few snow-flakes fluttered under the naked boughs.
+The sky was dark.
+
+"What do you think could have happened?" I asked.
+
+Her shoulders moved slightly.
+
+"One can never tell--in Russia."
+
+I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their
+submission or their revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face
+nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear eyes that shone upon me
+brilliantly grey in the murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
+
+"Let us move on," she said. "It is cold standing--to-day."
+
+She shuddered a little and stamped her little feet. We moved briskly to
+the end of the alley and back to the great gates of the garden.
+
+"Have you told your mother?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the impression of this letter."
+
+I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came from her muff. She had the
+letter with her in there.
+
+"What is it that you are afraid of?" I asked.
+
+To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and
+conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.
+I did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
+
+"For us--for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.
+People do disappear. Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine what
+it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--months--years! This friend of ours
+has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police getting hold of
+the letters. I suppose he was afraid of compromising himself. He has a
+wife and children--and why should he, after all.... Moreover, he is
+without influential connections and not rich. What could he do?...
+Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor mother. She won't be able
+to bear it. For my brother I am afraid of..." she became almost
+indistinct, "of anything."
+
+We were now near the gate opposite the theatre. She raised her voice.
+
+"But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do you know what my last
+hope is? Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into
+our rooms."
+
+I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong,
+after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff,
+crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
+
+On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and
+glancing down the correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams but
+the correspondence--the first thing that caught my eye was the name
+of Haldin. Mr. de P---'s death was no longer an actuality, but the
+enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
+unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got
+hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight
+arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of
+view was already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than
+twenty lines out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a
+sleepless night. I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason
+to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic
+discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French
+and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning,
+wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of
+being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The
+incongruity of such a complication in those two women's lives was
+sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due
+to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them
+for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their
+apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....
+
+The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there
+was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.
+The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
+instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the
+day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother's
+room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
+
+I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number
+of the _Standard_ could have the effect of Medusa's head. Her face went
+stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The most terrible thing was that
+being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her palpitating
+heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It
+was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to
+foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.
+As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the
+firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given
+way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--ruined. But only for
+a moment. She said with decision--
+
+"I am going to tell my mother at once."
+
+"Would that be safe in her state?" I objected.
+
+"What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?
+We understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don't
+imagine I am defending him before you."
+
+She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur
+not to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
+reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
+her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
+heavily as if completely exhausted.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in
+bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she
+lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.
+
+"She will call me in presently," added Miss Haldin. "I left a bell near
+the bed."
+
+I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
+readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
+was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
+spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There
+is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the
+grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
+had the associations of bombs and gallows--a lurid, Russian colouring
+which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
+
+I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
+display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command
+over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the
+stillness of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the
+door of Mrs. Haldin's room, with the old mother alone in there, had a
+rather awful aspect.
+
+Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--
+
+"I suppose you are wondering what my feelings are?"
+
+Essentially that was true. It was that very wonder which unsettled my
+sympathy of a dense Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of some
+commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our
+impotence before each other's trials I mumbled something to the effect
+that, for the young, life held its hopes and compensations. It held
+duties too--but of that I was certain it was not necessary to remind
+her.
+
+She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled at it nervously.
+
+"I am not likely to forget my mother," she said. "We used to be three.
+Now we are two--two women. She's not so very old. She may live quite a
+long time yet. What have we to look for in the future? For what hope
+and what consolation?"
+
+"You must take a wider view," I said resolutely, thinking that with this
+exceptional creature this was the right note to strike. She looked at
+me steadily for a moment, and then the tears she had been keeping down
+flowed unrestrained. She jumped up and stood in the window with her back
+to me.
+
+I slipped away without attempting even to approach her. Next day I was
+told at the door that Mrs. Haldin was better. The middle-aged servant
+remarked that a lot of people--Russians--had called that day, but Miss
+Haldin bad not seen anybody. A fortnight later, when making my daily
+call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin sitting in her usual place by
+the window.
+
+At first one would have thought that nothing was changed. I saw
+across the room the familiar profile, a little sharper in outline
+and overspread by a uniform pallor as might have been expected in an
+invalid. But no disease could have accounted for the change in her black
+eyes, smiling no longer with gentle irony. She raised them as she gave
+me her hand. I observed the three weeks' old number of the _Standard_
+folded with the correspondence from Russia uppermost, lying on a little
+table by the side of the armchair. Mrs. Haldin's voice was startlingly
+weak and colourless. Her first words to me framed a question.
+
+"Has there been anything more in papers?"
+
+I released her long emaciated hand, shook my head negatively, and sat
+down.
+
+"The English press is wonderful. Nothing can be kept secret from it,
+and all the world must hear. Only our Russian news is not always easy to
+understand. Not always easy.... But English mothers do not look for
+news like that...."
+
+She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it away again. I said--
+
+"We too have had tragic times in our history."
+
+"A long time ago. A very long time ago."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There are nations that have made their bargain with fate," said Miss
+Haldin, who had approached us. "We need not envy them."
+
+"Why this scorn?" I asked gently. "It may be that our bargain was not
+a very lofty one. But the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
+hallowed by the price."
+
+Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out of the window for a
+time, with that new, sombre, extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so
+completely made another woman of her.
+
+"That Englishman, this correspondent," she addressed me suddenly, "do
+you think it is possible that he knew my son?"
+
+To this strange question I could only say that it was possible of
+course. She saw my surprise.
+
+"If one knew what sort of man he was one could perhaps write to him,"
+she murmured.
+
+"Mother thinks," explained Miss Haldin, standing between us, with one
+hand resting on the back of my chair, "that my poor brother perhaps did
+not try to save himself."
+
+I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic consternation, but Miss Haldin
+was looking down calmly at her mother. The latter said--
+
+"We do not know the address of any of his friends. Indeed, we know
+nothing of his Petersburg comrades. He had a multitude of young friends,
+only he never spoke much of them. One could guess that they were his
+disciples and that they idolized him. But he was so modest. One would
+think that with so many devoted...."
+
+She averted her head again and looked down the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, a singularly arid and dusty thoroughfare, where nothing
+could be seen at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a pinafore
+hopping on one leg, and in the distance a workman wheeling a bicycle.
+
+"Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was found a Judas," she
+whispered as if to herself, but with the evident intention to be heard
+by me.
+
+The Russian visitors assembled in little knots, conversed amongst
+themselves meantime, in low murmurs, and with brief glances in our
+direction. It was a great contrast to the usual loud volubility of these
+gatherings. Miss Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
+
+"People will come," she said. "We cannot shut the door in their faces."
+
+While I was putting on my overcoat she began to talk to me of her
+mother. Poor Mrs. Haldin was fretting after more news. She wanted to go
+on hearing about her unfortunate son. She could not make up her mind to
+abandon him quietly to the dumb unknown. She would persist in pursuing
+him in there through the long days of motionless silence face to face
+with the empty Boulevard des Philosophes. She could not understand why
+he had not escaped--as so many other revolutionists and conspirators
+had managed to escape in other instances of that kind. It was really
+inconceivable that the means of secret revolutionary organisations
+should have failed so inexcusably to preserve her son. But in reality
+the inconceivable that staggered her mind was nothing but the cruel
+audacity of Death passing over her head to strike at that young and
+precious heart.
+
+Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look, handed me my hat. I
+understood from her that the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
+simple idea that her son must have perished because he did not want
+to be saved. It could not have been that he despaired of his country's
+future. That was impossible. Was it possible that his mother and sister
+had not known how to merit his confidence; and that, after having done
+what he was compelled to do, his spirit became crushed by an intolerable
+doubt, his mind distracted by a sudden mistrust.
+
+I was very much shocked by this piece of ingenuity.
+
+"Our three lives were like that!" Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both
+her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking
+straight into my face. "That's what poor mother found to torment herself
+and me with, for all the years to come," added the strange girl. At that
+moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
+passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life was likely to be by the
+side of Mrs. Haldin's terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.
+But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes
+of feeling. Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our
+complex Western natures. But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to
+suspect my embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say anything, but
+as if reading my thoughts on my face she went on courageously--
+
+"At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to
+think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
+strain. You see yourself how cruel that is...."
+
+I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it
+would be deplorable in the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
+
+"But all these strange details in the English paper," she exclaimed
+suddenly. "What is the meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But is
+it not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone,
+as if in despair, about the streets at night...."
+
+We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see
+her biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause she
+said--
+
+"I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false
+friend or simply by some cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to
+believe that."
+
+I understood now the poor woman's whispered allusion to Judas.
+
+"It may be easier," I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the
+subtlety of the girl's outlook. She was dealing with life as it was
+made for her by the political conditions of her country. She faced cruel
+realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making. I could not defend
+myself from a certain feeling of respect when she added simply--
+
+"Time they say can soften every sort of bitterness. But I cannot believe
+that it has any power over remorse. It is better that mother should
+think some person guilty of Victor's death, than that she should connect
+it with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of her own."
+
+"But you, yourself, don't suppose that...." I began.
+
+She compressed her lips and shook her head. She harboured no evil
+thoughts against any one, she declared--and perhaps nothing that
+happened was unnecessary. On these words, pronounced low and sounding
+mysterious in the half obscurity of the ante-room, we parted with an
+expressive and warm handshake. The grip of her strong, shapely hand had
+a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite virility. I do not know why
+she should have felt so friendly to me. It may be that she thought I
+understood her much better than I was able to do. The most precise
+of her sayings seemed always to me to have enigmatical prolongations
+vanishing somewhere beyond my reach. I am reduced to suppose that she
+appreciated my attention and my silence. The attention she could see was
+quite sincere, so that the silence could not be suspected of coldness.
+It seemed to satisfy her. And it is to be noted that if she confided
+in me it was clearly not with the expectation of receiving advice, for
+which, indeed she never asked.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Our daily relations were interrupted at this period for something like a
+fortnight. I had to absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva. On my return
+I lost no time in directing my steps up the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+
+Through the open door of the drawing-room I was annoyed to hear a
+visitor holding forth steadily in an unctuous deep voice.
+
+Mrs. Haldin's armchair by the window stood empty. On the sofa, Nathalie
+Haldin raised her charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting accompanied
+by the merest hint of a welcoming smile. But she made no movement. With
+her strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of her mourning dress
+she faced a man who presented to me a robust back covered with black
+broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep voice. He turned his head
+sharply over his shoulder, but only for a moment.
+
+"Ah! your English friend. I know. I know. That's nothing."
+
+He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall silk hat stood on the
+floor by the side of his chair. Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he
+went on with his discourse, precipitating his delivery a little more.
+
+"I have never changed the faith I held while wandering in the forests
+and bogs of Siberia. It sustained me then--it sustains me now. The great
+Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--and the cause of their collapse
+will be very simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling against
+their proletariat. In Russia it is different. In Russia we have no
+classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and
+the other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean
+bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as
+the ocean. No, we have no classes. But we have the Russian woman. The
+admirable Russian woman! I receive most remarkable letters signed by
+women. So elevated in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble ardour
+of service! The greatest part of our hopes rests on women. I behold
+their thirst for knowledge. It is admirable. Look how they absorb, how
+they are making it their own. It is miraculous. But what is knowledge?
+...I understand that you have not been studying anything
+especially--medicine for instance. No? That's right. Had I been honoured
+by being asked to advise you on the use of your time when you arrived
+here I would have been strongly opposed to such a course. Knowledge in
+itself is mere dross."
+
+He had one of those bearded Russian faces without shape, a mere
+appearance of flesh and hair with not a single feature having any sort
+of character. His eyes being hidden by the dark glasses there was an
+utter absence of all expression. I knew him by sight. He was a Russian
+refugee of mark. All Geneva knew his burly black-coated figure. At one
+time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written by himself
+and translated into seven or more languages. In his youth he had led
+an idle, dissolute life. Then a society girl he was about to marry died
+suddenly and thereupon he abandoned the world of fashion, and began
+to conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after that, his native
+autocracy took good care that the usual things should happen to him.
+He was imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch of his life, and
+condemned to work in mines, with common criminals. The great success of
+his book, however, was the chain.
+
+I do not remember now the details of the weight and length of the
+fetters riveted on his limbs by an "Administrative" order, but it was in
+the number of pounds and the thickness of links an appalling assertion
+of the divine right of autocracy. Appalling and futile too, because this
+big man managed to carry off that simple engine of government with him
+into the woods. The sensational clink of these fetters is heard all
+through the chapters describing his escape--a subject of wonder to two
+continents. He had begun by concealing himself successfully from
+his guard in a hole on a river bank. It was the end of the day; with
+infinite labour he managed to free one of his legs. Meantime night
+fell. He was going to begin on his other leg when he was overtaken by a
+terrible misfortune. He dropped his file.
+
+All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history.
+It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced
+girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his
+fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat,
+with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way
+across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and,
+as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But she arrived too
+late. Her lover had died only a week before.
+
+Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the history of ideas in
+Russia, the file came into his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
+resolution to regain his liberty. When it slipped through his fingers it
+was as if it had gone straight into the earth. He could by no manner of
+means put his hand on it again in the dark. He groped systematically
+in the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing
+meantime, the precious night on which he counted to get away into the
+forests, his only chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted by
+despair to give up; but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic
+girl, he felt profoundly ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him
+for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favour
+conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred
+trust. To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness
+of self-sacrifice and womanly love.
+
+There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like
+a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman's
+spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed since in several volumes.
+His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his
+extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province,
+with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off
+his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at
+intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the
+slack links from getting hooked in the bushes. He became very fierce.
+He developed an unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and hunted
+existence. He learned to creep into villages without betraying his
+presence by anything more than an occasional faint jingle. He broke into
+outhouses with an axe he managed to purloin in a wood-cutters' camp. In
+the deserted tracts of country he lived on wild berries and hunted for
+honey. His clothing dropped off him gradually. His naked tawny figure
+glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with a cloud of mosquitoes and flies
+hovering about the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through whole
+districts. His temper grew savage as the days went by, and he was
+glad to discover that that there was so much of a brute in him. He had
+nothing else to put his trust in. For it was as though there had been
+two human beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The civilized
+man, the enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the
+triumph of spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy,
+primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom
+from day to day, like a tracked wild beast.
+
+The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific
+coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
+watched the proceedings with awe. Through all these weeks he could never
+make up his mind to appeal to human compassion. In the wary primeval
+savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the
+civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping "political" had developed
+an absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
+originating perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain.
+These links, he fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind. It
+was a repugnant and suggestive load. Nobody could feel any pity at the
+disgusting sight of a man escaping with a broken chain. His imagination
+became affected by his fetters in a precise, matter-of-fact manner.
+It seemed to him impossible that people could resist the temptation of
+fastening the loose end to a staple in the wall while they went for the
+nearest police official. Crouching in holes or hidden in thickets, he
+had tried to read the faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in the
+clearings or passing along the paths within a foot or two of his
+eyes. His feeling was that no man on earth could be trusted with the
+temptation of the chain.
+
+One day, however, he chanced to come upon a solitary woman. It was on an
+open slope of rough grass outside the forest. She sat on the bank of a
+narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket
+was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be
+seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool
+shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He
+approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick
+cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled
+hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links
+fluttered from his waist. A faint clink of his fetters made the woman
+turn her head. Too terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or
+even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted to faint.... Expecting
+nothing less than to be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with
+her hands to avoid the sight of the descending axe. When at last she
+found courage to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man sitting on
+the bank six feet away from her. His thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked
+legs; the long beard covered the knees on which he rested his chin; all
+these clasped, folded limbs, the bare shoulders, the wild head with red
+staring eyes, shook and trembled violently while the bestial creature
+was making efforts to speak. It was six weeks since he had heard the
+sound of his own voice. It seemed as though he had lost the faculty
+of speech. He had become a dumb and despairing brute, till the woman's
+sudden, unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of her feminine
+compassion discovering the complex misery of the man under the
+terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him to the ranks of humanity.
+This point of view is presented in his book, with a very effective
+eloquence. She ended, he says, by shedding tears over him, sacred,
+redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the manner of a
+converted sinner. Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait patiently
+(a police patrol was expected in the Settlement) she went away towards
+the houses, promising to return at night.
+
+As if providentially appointed to be the newly wedded wife of the
+village blacksmith, the woman persuaded her husband to come out with
+her, bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a chisel, a small
+anvil.... "My fetters"--the book says--"were struck off on the banks
+of the stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an athletic, taciturn
+young man of the people, kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a
+liberating genius stood by with clasped hands." Obviously a symbolic
+couple. At the same time they furnished his regained humanity with some
+decent clothing, and put heart into the new man by the information that
+the seacoast of the Pacific was only a very few miles away. It could be
+seen, in fact, from the top of the next ridge....
+
+The rest of his escape does not lend itself to mystic treatment and
+symbolic interpretation. He ended by finding his way to the West by
+the Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching the shores of South
+Europe he sat down to write his autobiography--the great literary
+success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with
+the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached
+generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under
+the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain
+Madame de S--, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once
+upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat.
+Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of
+modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the
+republican territory of Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big
+landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares
+of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness,
+with a pair of big gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short veil
+of black lace, which, coming down no further than her vividly red lips,
+resembled a mask. Usually the "heroic fugitive" (this name was bestowed
+upon him in a review of the English edition of his book)--the "heroic
+fugitive" accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded and darkly
+bespectacled, not by her side, but opposite her, with his back to the
+horses. Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the roomy carriage,
+their airings suggested a conscious public manifestation. Or it may have
+been unconscious. Russian simplicity often marches innocently on the
+edge of cynicism for some lofty purpose. But it is a vain enterprise for
+sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings. Considering the
+air of gravity extending even to the physiognomy of the coachman and the
+action of the showy horses, this quaint display might have possessed
+a mystic significance, but to the corrupt frivolity of a Western mind,
+like my own, it seemed hardly decent.
+
+However, it is not becoming for an obscure teacher of languages to
+criticize a "heroic fugitive" of worldwide celebrity. I was aware from
+hearsay that he was an industrious busy-body, hunting up his compatriots
+in hotels, in private lodgings, and--I was told--conferring upon them
+the honour of his notice in public gardens when a suitable opening
+presented itself. I was under the impression that after a visit or
+two, several months before, he had given up the ladies Haldin--no doubt
+reluctantly, for there could be no question of his being a determined
+person. It was perhaps to be expected that he should reappear again on
+this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a revolutionist, to say the
+right thing, to strike the true, perhaps a comforting, note. But I did
+not like to see him sitting there. I trust that an unbecoming jealousy
+of my privileged position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to
+a special standing for my silent friendship. Removed by the difference
+of age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I
+produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an
+anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power
+to protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since Miss Haldin with her
+sure instinct had refrained from introducing me to the burly celebrity,
+I would have retired quietly and returned later on, had I not met a
+peculiar expression in her eyes which I interpreted as a request to
+stay, with the view, perhaps, of shortening an unwelcome visit.
+
+He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on his knees.
+
+"We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna. To-day I have called only
+to mark those feelings towards your honoured mother and yourself,
+the nature of which you cannot doubt. I needed no urging, but
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- herself has in a way sent me. She extends to you
+the hand of feminine fellowship. There is positively in all the range
+of human sentiments no joy and no sorrow that woman cannot understand,
+elevate, and spiritualize by her interpretation. That young man newly
+arrived from St. Petersburg, I have mentioned to you, is already under
+the charm."
+
+At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly. I was glad. He did not
+evidently expect anything so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
+back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland curiosity. At last,
+recollecting himself, he stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
+with great adroitness.
+
+"How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have kept aloof so long, from
+what after all is--let disparaging tongues say what they like--a unique
+centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to shape a high conception
+of our future? In the case of your honoured mother I understand in a
+measure. At her age new ideas--new faces are not perhaps.... But you!
+Was it mistrust--or indifference? You must come out of your reserve.
+We Russians have no right to be reserved with each other. In our
+circumstances it is almost a crime against humanity. The luxury of
+private grief is not for us. Nowadays the devil is not combated by
+prayers and fasting. And what is fasting after all but starvation. You
+must not starve yourself, Natalia Victorovna. Strength is what we want.
+Spiritual strength, I mean. As to the other kind, what could withstand
+us Russians if we only put it forth? Sin is different in our day, and
+the way of salvation for pure souls is different too. It is no longer to
+be found in monasteries but in the world, in the..."
+
+The deep sound seemed to rise from under the floor, and one felt steeped
+in it to the lips. Miss Haldin's interruption resembled the effort of
+a drowning person to keep above water. She struck in with an accent of
+impatience--
+
+"But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don't mean to retire into a monastery. Who
+would look for salvation there?"
+
+"I spoke figuratively," he boomed.
+
+"Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too. But sorrow is sorrow and
+pain is pain in the old way. They make their demands upon people. One
+has got to face them the best way one can. I know that the blow which
+has fallen upon us so unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a
+people. You may rest assured that I don't forget that. But just now
+I have to think of my mother. How can you expect me to leave her to
+herself...?"
+
+"That is putting it in a very crude way," he protested in his great
+effortless voice.
+
+Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to die out.
+
+"And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange people. The idea is
+distasteful for me; and I do not know what else you may mean?"
+
+He towered before her, enormous, deferential, cropped as close as a
+convict and this big pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild
+head with matted locks peering through parted bushes, glimpses of naked,
+tawny limbs slinking behind the masses of sodden foliage under a cloud
+of flies and mosquitoes. It was an involuntary tribute to the vigour
+of his writing. Nobody could doubt that he had wandered in Siberian
+forests, naked and girt with a chain. The black broadcloth coat invested
+his person with a character of austere decency--something recalling a
+missionary.
+
+"Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?" he uttered solemnly. "I
+want you to be a fanatic."
+
+"A fanatic?"
+
+"Yes. Faith alone won't do."
+
+His voice dropped to a still lower tone. He raised for a moment one
+thick arm; the other remained hanging down against his thigh, with the
+fragile silk hat at the end.
+
+"I shall tell you now something which I entreat you to ponder
+over carefully. Listen, we need a force that would move heaven and
+earth--nothing less."
+
+The profound, subterranean note of this "nothing less" made one shudder,
+almost, like the deep muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
+
+"And are we to find that force in the salon of Madame de S--? Excuse
+me, Peter Ivanovitch, if I permit myself to doubt it. Is not that lady a
+woman of the great world, an aristocrat?"
+
+"Prejudice!" he cried. "You astonish me. And suppose she was all that!
+She is also a woman of flesh and blood. There is always something to
+weigh down the spiritual side in all of us. But to make of it a reproach
+is what I did not expect from you. No! I did not expect that. One would
+think you have listened to some malevolent scandal."
+
+"I have heard no gossip, I assure you. In our province how could we? But
+the world speaks of her. What can there be in common in a lady of that
+sort and an obscure country girl like me?"
+
+"She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and peerless spirit,"
+he broke in. "Her charm--no, I shall not speak of her charm. But,
+of course, everybody who approaches her falls under the spell....
+Contradictions vanish, trouble falls away from one.... Unless I
+am mistaken--but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters--you are
+troubled in your soul, Natalia Victorovna."
+
+Miss Haldin's clear eyes looked straight at his soft enormous face;
+I received the impression that behind these dark spectacles of his he
+could be as impudent as he chose.
+
+"Only the other evening walking back to town from Chateau Borel with our
+latest interesting arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the powerful
+soothing influence--I may say reconciling influence.... There he was,
+all these kilometres along the shores of the lake, silent, like a man
+who has been shown the way of peace. I could feel the leaven working in
+his soul, you understand. For one thing he listened to me patiently.
+I myself was inspired that evening by the firm and exquisite genius
+of Eleanor--Madame de S--, you know. It was a full moon and I could
+observe his face. I cannot be deceived...."
+
+Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Well! I will think of what you said, Peter Ivanovitch. I shall try to
+call as soon as I can leave mother for an hour or two safely."
+
+Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at the concession. He
+snatched her right hand with such fervour that I thought he was going
+to press it to his lips or his breast. But he only held it by the
+finger-tips in his great paw and shook it a little up and down while he
+delivered his last volley of words.
+
+"That's right. That's right. I haven't obtained your full confidence
+as yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The
+sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It's simply
+impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers,
+tears, applause--that has had its time; it's a mediaeval conception. The
+arena, the arena itself is the place for women!"
+
+He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if giving it to her for a
+gift, and remained still, his head bowed in dignified submission before
+her femininity.
+
+"The arena!... You must descend into the arena, Natalia."
+
+He made one step backwards, inclined his enormous body, and was gone
+swiftly. The door fell to behind him. But immediately the powerful
+resonance of his voice was heard addressing in the ante-room the
+middle-aged servant woman who was letting him out. Whether he exhorted
+her too to descend into the arena I cannot tell. The thing sounded like
+a lecture, and the slight crash of the outer door cut it short suddenly.
+
+
+III
+
+
+"We remained looking at each other for a time."
+
+"Do you know who he is?"
+
+Miss Haldin, coming forward, put this question to me in English.
+
+I took her offered hand.
+
+"Everybody knows. He is a revolutionary feminist, a great writer, if
+you like, and--how shall I say it--the--the familiar guest of Madame de
+S--'s mystic revolutionary salon."
+
+Miss Haldin passed her hand over her forehead.
+
+"You know, he was with me for more than an hour before you came in. I
+was so glad mother was lying down. She has many nights without sleep,
+and then sometimes in the middle of the day she gets a rest of several
+hours. It is sheer exhaustion--but still, I am thankful.... If it
+were not for these intervals...."
+
+She looked at me and, with that extraordinary penetration which used to
+disconcert me, shook her head.
+
+"No. She would not go mad."
+
+"My dear young lady," I cried, by way of protest, the more shocked
+because in my heart I was far from thinking Mrs. Haldin quite sane.
+
+"You don't know what a fine, lucid intellect mother had," continued
+Nathalie Haldin, with her calm, clear-eyed simplicity, which seemed to
+me always to have a quality of heroism.
+
+"I am sure...." I murmured.
+
+"I darkened mother's room and came out here. I've wanted for so long to
+think quietly."
+
+She paused, then, without giving any sign of distress, added, "It's so
+difficult," and looked at me with a strange fixity, as if watching for a
+sign of dissent or surprise.
+
+I gave neither. I was irresistibly impelled to say--
+
+"The visit from that gentleman has not made it any easier, I fear."
+
+Miss Haldin stood before me with a peculiar expression in her eyes.
+
+"I don't pretend to understand completely. Some guide one must have,
+even if one does not wholly give up the direction of one's conduct to
+him. I am an inexperienced girl, but I am not slavish, There has been
+too much of that in Russia. Why should I not listen to him? There is no
+harm in having one's thoughts directed. But I don't mind confessing
+to you that I have not been completely candid with Peter Ivanovitch. I
+don't quite know what prevented me at the moment...."
+
+She walked away suddenly from me to a distant part of the room; but
+it was only to open and shut a drawer in a bureau. She returned with
+a piece of paper in her hand. It was thin and blackened with close
+handwriting. It was obviously a letter.
+
+"I wanted to read you the very words," she said. "This is one of my poor
+brother's letters. He never doubted. How could he doubt? They make only
+such a small handful, these miserable oppressors, before the unanimous
+will of our people."
+
+"Your brother believed in the power of a people's will to achieve
+anything?"
+
+"It was his religion," declared Miss Haldin.
+
+I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
+
+"Of course the will must be awakened, inspired, concentrated," she went
+on. "That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up
+one's life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must
+be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to
+reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are
+only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful of cruel--perhaps
+blind--officials against a nation."
+
+The letter rustled slightly in her hand. I glanced down at the
+flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic,
+incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.
+
+"Stated like this," I confessed, "the problem seems simple enough. But I
+fear I shall not see it solved. And if you go back to Russia I know that
+I shall not see you again. Yet once more I say: go back! Don't suppose
+that I am thinking of your preservation. No! I know that you will not
+be returning to personal safety. But I had much rather think of you in
+danger there than see you exposed to what may be met here."
+
+"I tell you what," said Miss Haldin, after a moment of reflection. "I
+believe that you hate revolution; you fancy it's not quite honest. You
+belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like
+to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to
+us--so much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea
+of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were
+something--how shall I say it--not quite decent."
+
+I bowed my head.
+
+"You are quite right," I said. "I think very highly of you"
+
+"Don't suppose I do not know it," she began hurriedly. "Your friendship
+has been very valuable."
+
+"I have done little else but look on."
+
+She was a little flushed under the eyes.
+
+"There is a way of looking on which is valuable I have felt less lonely
+because of it. It's difficult to explain."
+
+"Really? Well, I too have felt less lonely. That's easy to explain,
+though. But it won't go on much longer. The last thing I want to tell
+you is this: in a real revolution--not a simple dynastic change or a
+mere reform of institutions--in a real revolution the best characters
+do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of
+narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards
+comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.
+Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left
+out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane,
+and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a
+movement--but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of
+a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of
+disenchantment--often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals
+caricatured--that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have
+been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of
+that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be a victim."
+
+"If I could believe all you have said I still wouldn't think of myself,"
+protested Miss Haldin. "I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry
+man would snatch at a piece of bread. The true progress must begin
+after. And for that the right men shall be found. They are already
+amongst us. One comes upon them in their obscurity, unknown, preparing
+themselves...."
+
+She spread out the letter she had kept in her hand all the time, and
+looking down at it--
+
+"Yes! One comes upon such men!" she repeated, and then read out the
+words, "Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences."
+
+Folding up the letter, while I looked at her interrogatively, she
+explained--
+
+"These are the words which my brother applies to a young man he came to
+know in St. Petersburg. An intimate friend, I suppose. It must be. His
+is the only name my brother mentions in all his correspondence with me.
+Absolutely the only one, and--would you believe it?--the man is here. He
+arrived recently in Geneva."
+
+"Have you seen him?" I inquired. "But, of course; you must have seen
+him."
+
+"No! No! I haven't! I didn't know he was here. It's Peter Ivanovitch
+himself who told me. You have heard him yourself mentioning a new
+arrival from Petersburg.... Well, that is the man of 'unstained,
+lofty, and solitary existence.' My brother's friend!"
+
+"Compromised politically, I suppose," I remarked.
+
+"I don't know. Yes. It must be so. Who knows! Perhaps it was this very
+friendship with my brother which.... But no! It is scarcely possible.
+Really, I know nothing except what Peter Ivanovitch told me of him. He
+has brought a letter of introduction from Father Zosim--you know, the
+priest-democrat; you have heard of Father Zosim?"
+
+"Oh yes. The famous Father Zosim was staying here in Geneva for some two
+months about a year ago," I said. "When he left here he seems to have
+disappeared from the world."
+
+"It appears that he is at work in Russia again. Somewhere in the
+centre," Miss Haldin said, with animation. "But please don't mention
+that to any one--don't let it slip from you, because if it got into the
+papers it would be dangerous for him."
+
+"You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend of your brother?" I
+asked.
+
+Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket. Her eyes looked beyond my
+shoulder at the door of her mother's room.
+
+"Not here," she murmured. "Not for the first time, at least."
+
+After a moment of silence I said good-bye, but Miss Haldin followed me
+into the ante-room, closing the door behind us carefully.
+
+"I suppose you guess where I mean to go tomorrow?"
+
+"You have made up your mind to call on Madame de S--."
+
+"Yes. I am going to the Chateau Borel. I must."
+
+"What do you expect to hear there?" I asked, in a low voice.
+
+I wondered if she were not deluding herself with some impossible hope.
+It was not that, however.
+
+"Only think--such a friend. The only man mentioned in his letters. He
+would have something to give me, if nothing more than a few poor words.
+It may be something said and thought in those last days. Would you want
+me to turn my back on what is left of my poor brother--a friend?"
+
+"Certainly not," I said. "I quite understand your pious curiosity."
+
+"--Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences," she murmured to herself.
+"There are! There are! Well, let me question one of them about the loved
+dead."
+
+"How do you know, though, that you will meet him there? Is he staying in
+the Chateau as a guest--do you suppose?"
+
+"I can't really tell," she confessed. "He brought a written introduction
+from Father Zosim--who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S-- too. She
+can't be such a worthless woman after all."
+
+"There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Father Zosim himself," I
+observed.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Calumny is a weapon of our government too. It's well known. Oh yes! It
+is a fact that Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-General
+of a certain province. We talked on the subject with my brother two
+years ago, I remember. But his work was good. And now he is proscribed.
+What better proof can one require. But no matter what that priest was
+or is. All that cannot affect my brother's friend. If I don't meet him
+there I shall ask these people for his address. And, of course, mother
+must see him too, later on. There is no guessing what he may have to
+tell us. It would be a mercy if mamma could be soothed. You know what
+she imagines. Some explanation perhaps may be found, or--or even made
+up, perhaps. It would be no sin."
+
+"Certainly," I said, "it would be no sin. It may be a mistake, though."
+
+"I want her only to recover some of her old spirit. While she is like
+this I cannot think of anything calmly."
+
+"Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud for your mother's sake?"
+I asked.
+
+"Why fraud? Such a friend is sure to know something of my brother in
+these last days. He could tell us.... There is something in the
+facts which will not let me rest. I am certain he meant to join us
+abroad--that he had some plans--some great patriotic action in view;
+not only for himself, but for both of us. I trusted in that. I looked
+forward to the time! Oh! with such hope and impatience. I could have
+helped. And now suddenly this appearance of recklessness--as if he had
+not cared...."
+
+She remained silent for a time, then obstinately she concluded--
+
+"I want to know...."
+
+Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the
+Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was
+it that she wanted to know? What I had heard of her history was enough
+to give me a clue. In the educational establishment for girls where Miss
+Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably.
+She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by
+official teaching. Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their
+country place, both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly
+on public events, had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism.
+The three-horse trap of the district police-captain began to be seen
+frequently in their village. "I must keep an eye on the peasants"--so he
+explained his visits up at the house. "Two lonely ladies must be looked
+after a little." He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to
+pierce them with his eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books
+in the drawing-room negligently, and after the usual refreshments,
+would depart. But the old priest of the village came one evening in the
+greatest distress and agitation, to confess that he--the priest--had
+been ordered to watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his
+spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house,
+and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who
+they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers
+to that part of the country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in
+an agony of humiliation and terror. "I came to warn you. Be cautious in
+your conduct, for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is
+no getting out from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I
+see, because if I did not there is my deacon. He would make the worst
+of things to curry favour. And then my son-in-law, the husband of my
+Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would
+soon kick him out--and maybe send him away somewhere." The old man
+lamented the necessities of the times--"when people do not agree
+somehow" and wiped his eyes. He did not wish to spend the evening of his
+days with a shaven head in the penitent's cell of some monastery--"and
+subjected to all the severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for
+they would show no mercy to an old man," he groaned. He became almost
+hysterical, and the two ladies, full of commiseration, soothed him the
+best they could before they let him go back to his cottage. But, as a
+matter of fact, they had very few visitors. The neighbours--some of them
+old friends--began to keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked
+disdain, being grand people that came only for the summer--Miss Haldin
+explained to me--aristocrats, reactionaries. It was a solitary existence
+for a young girl. Her relations with her mother were of the tenderest
+and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her
+own generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its apostasies too. Her
+affection for her children was expressed by the suppression of all signs
+of anxiety. She maintained a heroic reserve. To Nathalie Haldin, her
+brother with his Petersburg existence, not enigmatical in the least
+(there could be no doubt of what he felt or thought) but conducted a
+little mysteriously, was the only visible representative of a proscribed
+liberty. All the significance of freedom, its indefinite promises, lived
+in their long discussions, which breathed the loftiest hope of action
+and faith in success. Then, suddenly, the action, the hopes, came to
+an end with the details ferreted out by the English journalist. The
+concrete fact, the fact of his death remained! but it remained obscure
+in its deeper causes. She felt herself abandoned without explanation.
+But she did not suspect him. What she wanted was to learn almost at any
+cost how she could remain faithful to his departed spirit.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Several days elapsed before I met Nathalie Haldin again. I was crossing
+the place in front of the theatre when I made out her shapely figure
+in the very act of turning between the gate pillars of the unattractive
+public promenade of the Bastions. She walked away from me, but I knew
+we should meet as she returned down the main alley--unless, indeed, she
+were going home. In that case, I don't think I should have called on her
+yet. My desire to keep her away from these people was as strong as ever,
+but I had no illusions as to my power. I was but a Westerner, and it was
+clear that Miss Haldin would not, could not listen to my wisdom; and as
+to my desire of listening to her voice, it were better, I thought, not
+to indulge overmuch in that pleasure. No, I should not have gone to the
+Boulevard des Philosophes; but when at about the middle of the principal
+alley I saw Miss Haldin coming towards me, I was too curious, and too
+honest, perhaps, to run away.
+
+There was something of the spring harshness in the air. The blue sky was
+hard, but the young leaves clung like soft mist about the uninteresting
+range of trees; and the clear sun put little points of gold into the
+grey of Miss Haldin's frank eyes, turned to me with a friendly greeting.
+
+I inquired after the health of her mother.
+
+She had a slight movement of the shoulders and a little sad sigh.
+
+"But, you see, I did come out for a walk...for exercise, as you
+English say."
+
+I smiled approvingly, and she added an unexpected remark--
+
+"It is a glorious day."
+
+Her voice, slightly harsh, but fascinating with its masculine and
+bird-like quality, had the accent of spontaneous conviction. I was glad
+of it. It was as though she had become aware of her youth--for there was
+but little of spring-like glory in the rectangular railed space of
+grass and trees, framed visibly by the orderly roof-slopes of that town,
+comely without grace, and hospitable without sympathy. In the very air
+through which she moved there was but little warmth; and the sky, the
+sky of a land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April
+showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed
+suddenly by the ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there,
+lingered yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow. All the glory
+of the season must have been within herself--and I was glad this feeling
+had come into her life, if only for a little time.
+
+"I am pleased to hear you say these words." She gave me a quick look.
+Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely
+incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very
+rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly--if I may
+say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen
+and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use the word
+aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered
+in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our
+day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame
+de Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the
+booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for
+an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy
+in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.
+And Madame de S-- was very far from resembling the gifted author of
+_Corinne_. She made a great noise about being persecuted. I don't
+know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous. As to being
+watched, I imagine that the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a
+most distant observation. It was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for
+hatching superior plots--whether serious or futile. But all this did not
+interest me. I wanted to know the effect its extraordinary inhabitants
+and its special atmosphere had produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so
+true, so honest, but so dangerously inexperienced! Her unconsciously
+lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind left her disarmed
+before her own impulses. And there was also that friend of her brother,
+the significant new arrival from Russia.... I wondered whether she
+had managed to meet him.
+
+We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.
+
+"You know," I attacked her suddenly, "if you don't intend telling me
+anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
+final. But I won't play at delicacy. I ask you point-blank for all the
+details."
+
+She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.
+
+"You are as curious as a child."
+
+"No. I am only an anxious old man," I replied earnestly.
+
+She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety
+or the number of my years. My physiognomy has never been expressive,
+I believe, and as to my years I am not ancient enough as yet to be
+strikingly decrepit. I have no long beard like the good hermit of a
+romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of
+a slow, venerable sage. Those picturesque advantages are not mine. I am
+old, alas, in a brisk, commonplace way. And it seemed to me as though
+there were some pity for me in Miss Haldin's prolonged glance. She
+stepped out a little quicker.
+
+"You ask for all the details. Let me see. I ought to remember them. It
+was novel enough for a--a village girl like me."
+
+After a moment of silence she began by saying that the Chateau Borel was
+almost as neglected inside as outside. It was nothing to wonder at, a
+Hamburg banker, I believe, retired from business, had it built to cheer
+his remaining days by the view of that lake whose precise, orderly,
+and well-to-do beauty must have been attractive to the unromantic
+imagination of a business man. But he died soon. His wife departed
+too (but only to Italy), and this house of moneyed ease, presumably
+unsaleable, had stood empty for several years. One went to it up a
+gravel drive, round a large, coarse grass-plot, with plenty of time to
+observe the degradation of its stuccoed front. Miss Haldin said that the
+impression was unpleasant. It grew more depressing as one came nearer.
+
+She observed green stains of moss on the steps of the terrace. The front
+door stood wide open. There was no one about. She found herself in a
+wide, lofty, and absolutely empty hall, with a good many doors. These
+doors were all shut. A broad, bare stone staircase faced her, and
+the effect of the whole was of an untenanted house. She stood still,
+disconcerted by the solitude, but after a while she became aware of a
+voice speaking continuously somewhere.
+
+"You were probably being observed all the time," I suggested. "There
+must have been eyes."
+
+"I don't see how that could be," she retorted. "I haven't seen even a
+bird in the grounds. I don't remember hearing a single twitter in the
+trees. The whole place appeared utterly deserted except for the voice."
+
+She could not make out the language--Russian, French, or German. No one
+seemed to answer it. It was as though the voice had been left behind by
+the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare walls. It went on volubly,
+with a pause now and then. It was lonely and sad. The time seemed very
+long to Miss Haldin. An invincible repugnance prevented her from opening
+one of the doors in the hall. It was so hopeless. No one would come, the
+voice would never stop. She confessed to me that she had to resist an
+impulse to turn round and go away unseen, as she had come.
+
+"Really? You had that impulse?" I cried, full of regret. "What a pity
+you did not obey it."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"What a strange memory it would have been for one. Those deserted
+grounds, that empty hall, that impersonal, voluble voice, and--nobody,
+nothing, not a soul."
+
+The memory would have been unique and harmless. But she was not a girl
+to run away from an intimidating impression of solitude and mystery.
+"No, I did not run away," she said. "I stayed where I was--and I did see
+a soul. Such a strange soul."
+
+As she was gazing up the broad staircase, and had concluded that
+the voice came from somewhere above, a rustle of dress attracted her
+attention. She looked down and saw a woman crossing the hall, having
+issued apparently through one of the many doors. Her face was averted,
+so that at first she was not aware of Miss Haldin.
+
+On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she appeared very much
+startled. From her slender figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young
+girl; but if her face was almost childishly round, it was also sallow
+and wrinkled, with dark rings under the eyes. A thick crop of dusty
+brown hair was parted boyishly on the side with a lateral wave above the
+dry, furrowed forehead. After a moment of dumb blinking, she suddenly
+squatted down on the floor.
+
+"What do you mean by squatted down?" I asked, astonished. "This is a
+very strange detail."
+
+Miss Haldin explained the reason. This person when first seen was
+carrying a small bowl in her hand. She had squatted down to put it
+on the floor for the benefit of a large cat, which appeared then from
+behind her skirts, and hid its head into the bowl greedily. She got up,
+and approaching Miss Haldin asked with nervous bluntness--
+
+"What do you want? Who are you?"
+
+Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name of Peter Ivanovitch.
+The girlish, elderly woman nodded and puckered her face into a momentary
+expression of sympathy. Her black silk blouse was old and even frayed
+in places; the black serge skirt was short and shabby. She continued to
+blink at close quarters, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed shabby
+too. Miss Haldin, speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and
+sensitive person, explained how it was that her visit could not be an
+altogether unexpected event to Madame de S--.
+
+"Ah! Peter Ivanovitch brought you an invitation. How was I to know? A
+_dame de compangnie_ is not consulted, as you may imagine."
+
+The shabby woman laughed a little. Her teeth, splendidly white and
+admirably even, looked absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls on
+the neck of a ragged tramp. "Peter Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of
+the century perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man living. So if
+you have an appointment with him you must not be surprised to hear that
+he is not here."
+
+Miss Haldin explained that she had no appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.
+She became interested at once in that bizarre person.
+
+"Why should he put himself out for you or any one else? Oh! these
+geniuses. If you only knew! Yes! And their books--I mean, of course, the
+books that the world admires, the inspired books. But you have not been
+behind the scenes. Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half a day
+with a pen in your hand. He can walk up and down his rooms for hours and
+hours. I used to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I would lose my
+balance and fall off the chair all at once."
+
+She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes, fixed on Miss
+Haldin's face, betrayed no animation whatever. Miss Haldin, gathering
+that the lady who called herself a _dame de compangnie_ was proud of
+having acted as secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable remark.
+
+"You could not imagine a more trying experience," declared the lady.
+"There is an Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de S-- now,
+or I would take you up," she continued in a changed tone and glancing
+towards the staircase. "I act as master of ceremonies."
+
+It appeared that Madame de S-- could not bear Swiss servants about
+her person; and, indeed, servants would not stay for very long in the
+Chateau Borel. There were always difficulties. Miss Haldin had already
+noticed that the hall was like a dusty barn of marble and stucco with
+cobwebs in the corners and faint tracks of mud on the black and white
+tessellated floor.
+
+"I look also after this animal," continued the _dame de compagnie_,
+keeping her hands folded quietly in front of her; and she bent her
+worn gaze upon the cat. "I don't mind a bit. Animals have their rights;
+though, strictly speaking, I see no reason why they should not suffer as
+well as human beings. Do you? But of course they never suffer so much.
+That is impossible. Only, in their case it is more pitiful because they
+cannot make a revolution. I used to be a Republican. I suppose you are a
+Republican?"
+
+Miss Haldin confessed to me that she did not know what to say. But she
+nodded slightly, and asked in her turn--
+
+"And are you no longer a Republican?"
+
+"After taking down Peter Ivanovitch from dictation for two years, it is
+difficult for me to be anything. First of all, you have to sit perfectly
+motionless. The slightest movement you make puts to flight the ideas of
+Peter Ivanovitch. You hardly dare to breathe. And as to coughing--God
+forbid! Peter Ivanovitch changed the position of the table to the wall
+because at first I could not help raising my eyes to look out of the
+window, while waiting for him to go on with his dictation. That was not
+allowed. He said I stared so stupidly. I was likewise not permitted to
+look at him over my shoulder. Instantly Peter Ivanovitch stamped his
+foot, and would roar, 'Look down on the paper!' It seems my expression,
+my face, put him off. Well, I know that I am not beautiful, and that my
+expression is not hopeful either. He said that my air of unintelligent
+expectation irritated him. These are his own words."
+
+Miss Haldin was shocked, but admitted to me that she was not altogether
+surprised.
+
+"Is it possible that Peter Ivanovitch could treat any woman so rudely?"
+she cried.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ nodded several times with an air of discretion,
+then assured Miss Haldin that she did not mind in the least. The trying
+part of it was to have the secret of the composition laid bare before
+her; to see the great author of the revolutionary gospels grope for
+words as if he were in the dark as to what he meant to say.
+
+"I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To
+give one's life for the cause is nothing. But to have one's illusions
+destroyed--that is really almost more than one can bear. I really don't
+exaggerate," she insisted. "It seemed to freeze my very beliefs in
+me--the more so that when we worked in winter Peter Ivanovitch, walking
+up and down the room, required no artificial heat to keep himself warm.
+Even when we move to the South of France there are bitterly cold days,
+especially when you have to sit still for six hours at a stretch. The
+walls of these villas on the Riviera are so flimsy. Peter Ivanovitch did
+not seem to be aware of anything. It is true that I kept down my shivers
+from fear of putting him out. I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt
+absolutely locked. In the moments when Peter Ivanovitch interrupted his
+dictation, and sometimes these intervals were very long--often twenty
+minutes, no less, while he walked to and fro behind my back muttering
+to himself--I felt I was dying by inches, I assure you. Perhaps if I had
+let my teeth rattle Peter Ivanovitch might have noticed my distress, but
+I don't think it would have had any practical effect. She's very miserly
+in such matters."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ glanced up the staircase. The big cat had
+finished the milk and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously against
+her skirt. She dived to snatch it up from the floor.
+
+"Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know," she
+continued, holding the cat in her folded arms. "With us it is misers who
+can spare money for worthy objects--not the so-called generous natures.
+But pray don't think I am a sybarite. My father was a clerk in the
+Ministry of Finances with no position at all. You may guess by this that
+our home was far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually
+suffer from cold. I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began
+to think by myself. It is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to
+be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth. I am indebted for my
+salvation to an old apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway
+of the house we lived in. She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most
+friendly voice imaginable. One day, casually, we began to talk about a
+child, a ragged little girl we had seen begging from men in the streets
+at dusk; and from one thing to another my eyes began to open gradually
+to the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in
+this world, only in order that governments might exist. After I once
+understood the crime of the upper classes, I could not go on living with
+my parents. Not a single charitable word was to be heard in our home
+from year's end to year's end; there was nothing but the talk of vile
+office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries, and of courting the
+favour of the chiefs. The mere idea of marrying one day such another man
+as my father made me shudder. I don't mean that there was anyone wanting
+to marry me. There was not the slightest prospect of anything of the
+kind. But was it not sin enough to live on a Government salary while
+half Russia was dying of hunger? The Ministry of Finances! What a
+grotesque horror it is! What does the starving, ignorant people want
+with a Ministry of Finances? I kissed my old folks on both cheeks, and
+went away from them to live in cellars, with the proletariat. I tried
+to make myself useful to the utterly hopeless. I suppose you understand
+what I mean? I mean the people who have nowhere to go and nothing to
+look forward to in this life. Do you understand how frightful that
+is--nothing to look forward to! Sometimes I think that it is only in
+Russia that there are such people and such a depth of misery can be
+reached. Well, I plunged into it, and--do you know--there isn't much
+that one can do in there. No, indeed--at least as long as there are
+Ministries of Finances and such like grotesque horrors to stand in the
+way. I suppose I would have gone mad there just trying to fight the
+vermin, if it had not been for a man. It was my old friend and
+teacher, the poor saintly apple-woman, who discovered him for me, quite
+accidentally. She came to fetch me late one evening in her quiet way. I
+followed her where she would lead; that part of my life was in her hands
+altogether, and without her my spirit would have perished miserably. The
+man was a young workman, a lithographer by trade, and he had got
+into trouble in connexion with that affair of temperance tracts--you
+remember. There was a lot of people put in prison for that. The Ministry
+of Finances again! What would become of it if the poor folk ceased
+making beasts of themselves with drink? Upon my word, I would think that
+finances and all the rest of it are an invention of the devil; only that
+a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone
+are quite capable of every wickedness. Finances indeed!"
+
+Hatred and contempt hissed in her utterance of the word "finances," but
+at the very moment she gently stroked the cat reposing in her arms.
+She even raised them slightly, and inclining her head rubbed her cheek
+against the fur of the animal, which received this caress with the
+complete detachment so characteristic of its kind. Then looking at Miss
+Haldin she excused herself once more for not taking her upstairs to
+Madame S-- The interview could not be interrupted. Presently the
+journalist would be seen coming down the stairs. The best thing was to
+remain in the hall; and besides, all these rooms (she glanced all
+round at the many doors), all these rooms on the ground floor were
+unfurnished.
+
+"Positively there is no chair down here to offer you," she continued.
+"But if you prefer your own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on
+the bottom step here and keep silent."
+
+Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the contrary, she was very
+much interested in the story of the journeyman lithographer. He was a
+revolutionist, of course.
+
+"A martyr, a simple man," said the _dame de compangnie_, with a faint
+sigh, and gazing through the open front door dreamily. She turned her
+misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.
+
+"I lived with him for four months. It was like a nightmare."
+
+As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the
+emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution.
+The room into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a
+miserable den under the roof of a sordid house. The plaster fallen off
+the walls covered the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible
+tapestry of black cobwebs waved in the draught. He had been liberated a
+few days before--flung out of prison into the streets. And Miss Haldin
+seemed to see for the first time, a name and a face upon the body of
+that suffering people whose hard fate had been the subject of so many
+conversations, between her and her brother, in the garden of their
+country house.
+
+He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that
+affair of the lithographed temperance tracts. Unluckily, having got hold
+of a great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract
+from some of them other information relating to the revolutionist
+propaganda.
+
+"They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation," went on the
+_dame de compagnie_, "that they injured him internally. When they had
+done with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld
+him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a
+bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker,
+who happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was,
+uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the
+room for the water to quench his thirst with. There was nothing
+whatever--just that bedstead and the bare floor."
+
+"Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and
+revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?" asked Miss
+Haldin indignantly.
+
+"Yes. But you do not know the most terrible part of that man's misery.
+Listen. It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at last,
+his firmness gave way, and he did let out some information. Poor soul,
+the flesh is weak, you know. What it was he did not tell me. There was
+a crushed spirit in that mangled body. Nothing I found to say could make
+him whole. When they let him out, he crept into that hole, and bore his
+remorse stoically. He would not go near anyone he knew. I would have
+sought assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I have gone looking
+for it? Where was I to look for anyone who had anything to spare or any
+power to help? The people living round us were all starving and drunken.
+They were the victims of the Ministry of Finances. Don't ask me how we
+lived. I couldn't tell you. It was like a miracle of wretchedness. I had
+nothing to sell, and I assure you my clothes were in such a state that
+it was impossible for me to go out in the daytime. I was indecent. I had
+to wait till it was dark before I ventured into the streets to beg for a
+crust of bread, or whatever I could get, to keep him and me alive. Often
+I got nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie on the floor by the
+side of his couch. Oh yes, I can sleep quite soundly on bare boards.
+That is nothing, and I am only mentioning it to you so that you should
+not think I am a sybarite. It was infinitely less killing than the task
+of sitting for hours at a table in a cold study to take the books of
+Peter Ivanovitch from dictation. But you shall see yourself what that is
+like, so I needn't say any more about it."
+
+"It is by no means certain that I will ever take Peter Ivanovitch from
+dictation," said Miss Haldin.
+
+"No!" cried the other incredulously. "Not certain? You mean to say that
+you have not made up your mind?"
+
+When Miss Haldin assured her that there never had been any question of
+that between her and Peter Ivanovitch, the woman with the cat compressed
+her lips tightly for a moment.
+
+"Oh, you will find yourself settled at the table before you know that
+you have made up your mind. Don't make a mistake, it is disenchanting
+to hear Peter Ivanovitch dictate, but at the same time there is a
+fascination about it. He is a man of genius. Your face is certain not to
+irritate him; you may perhaps even help his inspiration, make it easier
+for him to deliver his message. As I look at you, I feel certain that
+you are the kind of woman who is not likely to check the flow of his
+inspiration."
+
+Miss Haldin thought it useless to protest against all these assumptions.
+
+"But this man--this workman did he die under your care?" she said, after
+a short silence.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_, listening up the stairs where now two voices
+were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When
+the loud sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible
+murmur, she turned to Miss Haldin.
+
+"Yes, he died, but not, literally speaking, in my arms, as you might
+suppose. As a matter of fact, I was asleep when he breathed his last.
+So even now I cannot say I have seen anybody die. A few days before
+the end, some young men found us out in our extremity. They were
+revolutionists, as you might guess. He ought to have trusted in his
+political friends when he came out of prison. He had been liked and
+respected before, and nobody would have dreamed of reproaching him with
+his indiscretion before the police. Everybody knows how they go to work,
+and the strongest man has his moments of weakness before pain. Why, even
+hunger alone is enough to give one queer ideas as to what may be done. A
+doctor came, our lot was alleviated as far as physical comforts go, but
+otherwise he could not be consoled--poor man. I assure you, Miss Haldin,
+that he was very lovable, but I had not the strength to weep. I was
+nearly dead myself. But there were kind hearts to take care of me.
+A dress was found to clothe my nakedness. I tell you, I was not
+decent--and after a time the revolutionists placed me with a Jewish
+family going abroad, as governess. Of course I could teach the children,
+I finished the sixth class of the Lyceum; but the real object was,
+that I should carry some important papers across the frontier. I was
+entrusted with a packet which I carried next my heart. The gendarmes
+at the station did not suspect the governess of a Jewish family, busy
+looking after three children. I don't suppose those Hebrews knew what I
+had on me, for I had been introduced to them in a very roundabout way by
+persons who did not belong to the revolutionary movement, and naturally
+I had been instructed to accept a very small salary. When we reached
+Germany I left that family and delivered my papers to a revolutionist
+in Stuttgart; after this I was employed in various ways. But you do not
+want to hear all that. I have never felt that I was very useful, but I
+live in hopes of seeing all the Ministries destroyed, finances and
+all. The greatest joy of my life has been to hear what your brother has
+done."
+
+She directed her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the
+cat reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like
+meditation.
+
+"Yes! I rejoiced," she began again. "For me there is a heroic ring about
+the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in
+their Ministries--all those men with fiendish hearts. Here I stand
+talking to you, and when I think of all the cruelties, oppressions,
+and injustices that are going on at this very moment, my head begins to
+swim. I have looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one's
+own eyes had not to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me
+hate myself for my helplessness. I hated my hands that had no power,
+my voice that could not be heard, my very mind that would not become
+unhinged. Ah! I have seen things. And you?"
+
+Miss Haldin was moved. She shook her head slightly.
+
+"No, I have seen nothing for myself as yet," she murmured "We have
+always lived in the country. It was my brother's wish."
+
+"It is a curious meeting--this--between you and me," continued the
+other. "Do you believe in chance, Miss Haldin? How could I have expected
+to see you, his sister, with my own eyes? Do you know that when the news
+came the revolutionaries here were as much surprised as pleased, every
+bit? No one seemed to know anything about your brother. Peter Ivanovitch
+himself had not foreseen that such a blow was going to be struck. I
+suppose your brother was simply inspired. I myself think that such
+deeds should be done by inspiration. It is a great privilege to have the
+inspiration and the opportunity. Did he resemble you at all? Don't you
+rejoice, Miss Haldin?"
+
+"You must not expect too much from me," said Miss Haldin, repressing
+an inclination to cry which came over her suddenly. She succeeded, then
+added calmly, "I am not a heroic person!"
+
+"You think you couldn't have done such a thing yourself perhaps?"
+
+"I don't know. I must not even ask myself till I have lived a little
+longer, seen more...."
+
+The other moved her head appreciatively. The purring of the cat had
+a loud complacency in the empty hall. No sound of voices came from
+upstairs. Miss Haldin broke the silence.
+
+"What is it precisely that you heard people say about my brother? You
+said that they were surprised. Yes, I supposed they were. Did it not
+seem strange to them that my brother should have failed to save himself
+after the most difficult part--that is, getting away from the spot--was
+over? Conspirators should understand these things well. There are
+reasons why I am very anxious to know how it is he failed to escape."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ had advanced to the open hall-door. She glanced
+rapidly over her shoulder at Miss Haldin, who remained within the hall.
+
+"Failed to escape," she repeated absently. "Didn't he make the sacrifice
+of his life? Wasn't he just simply inspired? Wasn't it an act of
+abnegation? Aren't you certain?"
+
+"What I am certain of," said Miss Haldin, "is that it was not an act
+of despair. Have you not heard some opinion expressed here upon his
+miserable capture?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ mused for a while in the doorway.
+
+"Did I hear? Of course, everything is discussed here. Has not all the
+world been speaking about your brother? For my part, the mere mention
+of his achievement plunges me into an envious ecstasy. Why should a man
+certain of immortality think of his life at all?"
+
+She kept her back turned to Miss Haldin. Upstairs from behind a great
+dingy white and gold door, visible behind the balustrade of the first
+floor landing, a deep voice began to drone formally, as if reading over
+notes or something of the sort. It paused frequently, and then ceased
+altogether.
+
+"I don't think I can stay any longer now," said Miss Haldin. "I may
+return another day."
+
+She waited for the _dame de compagnie_ to make room for her exit; but
+the woman appeared lost in the contemplation of sunshine and shadows,
+sharing between themselves the stillness of the deserted grounds. She
+concealed the view of the drive from Miss Haldin. Suddenly she said--
+
+"It will not be necessary; here is Peter Ivanovitch himself coming up.
+But he is not alone. He is seldom alone now."
+
+Hearing that Peter Ivanovitch was approaching, Miss Haldin was not so
+pleased as she might have been expected to be. Somehow she had lost
+the desire to see either the heroic captive or Madame de S--, and the
+reason of that shrinking which came upon her at the very last minute is
+accounted for by the feeling that those two people had not been treating
+the woman with the cat kindly.
+
+"Would you please let me pass?" said Miss Haldin at last, touching
+lightly the shoulder of the _dame de compagnie_.
+
+But the other, pressing the cat to her breast, did not budge.
+
+"I know who is with him," she said, without even looking back.
+
+More unaccountably than ever Miss Haldin felt a strong impulse to leave
+the house.
+
+"Madame de S-- may be engaged for some time yet, and what I have got to
+say to Peter Ivanovitch is just a simple question which I might put to
+him when I meet him in the grounds on my way down. I really think I
+must go. I have been some time here, and I am anxious to get back to my
+mother. Will you let me pass, please?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ turned her head at last.
+
+"I never supposed that you really wanted to see Madame de S--," she
+said, with unexpected insight. "Not for a moment." There was something
+confidential and mysterious in her tone. She passed through the door,
+with Miss Haldin following her, on to the terrace, and they descended
+side by side the moss-grown stone steps. There was no one to be seen on
+the part of the drive visible from the front of the house.
+
+"They are hidden by the trees over there," explained Miss Haldin's new
+acquaintance, "but you shall see them directly. I don't know who that
+young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has taken such a fancy. He must
+be one of us, or he would not be admitted here when the others come.
+You know what I mean by the others. But I must say that he is not at
+all mystically inclined. I don't know that I have made him out yet.
+Naturally I am never for very long in the drawing-room. There is
+always something to do for me, though the establishment here is not so
+extensive as the villa on the Riviera. But still there are plenty of
+opportunities for me to make myself useful."
+
+To the left, passing by the ivy-grown end of the stables, appeared Peter
+Ivanovitch and his companion. They walked very slowly, conversing with
+some animation. They stopped for a moment, and Peter Ivanovitch was seen
+to gesticulate, while the young man listened motionless, with his arms
+hanging down and his head bowed a little. He was dressed in a dark brown
+suit and a black hat. The round eyes of the _dame de compagnie_ remained
+fixed on the two figures, which had resumed their leisurely approach.
+
+"An extremely polite young man," she said. "You shall see what a bow he
+will make; and it won't altogether be so exceptional either. He bows in
+the same way when he meets me alone in the hall."
+
+She moved on a few steps, with Miss Haldin by her side, and things
+happened just as she had foretold. The young man took off his hat, bowed
+and fell back, while Peter Ivanovitch advanced quicker, his black, thick
+arms extended heartily, and seized hold of both Miss Haldin's hands,
+shook them, and peered at her through his dark glasses.
+
+"That's right, that's right!" he exclaimed twice, approvingly. "And so
+you have been looked after by...." He frowned slightly at the
+_dame de compagnie_, who was still nursing the cat. "I conclude
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- is engaged. I know she expected somebody to-day.
+So the newspaper man did turn up, eh? She is engaged?"
+
+For all answer the _dame de compagnie_ turned away her head.
+
+"It is very unfortunate--very unfortunate indeed. I very much regret
+that you should have been...." He lowered suddenly his voice. "But
+what is it--surely you are not departing, Natalia Victorovna? You got
+bored waiting, didn't you?"
+
+"Not in the least," Miss Haldin protested. "Only I have been here some
+time, and I am anxious to get back to my mother."
+
+"The time seemed long, eh? I am afraid our worthy friend here" (Peter
+Ivanovitch suddenly jerked his head sideways towards his right shoulder
+and jerked it up again),--"our worthy friend here has not the art of
+shortening the moments of waiting. No, distinctly she has not the art;
+and in that respect good intentions alone count for nothing."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ dropped her arms, and the cat found itself
+suddenly on the ground. It remained quite still after alighting, one
+hind leg stretched backwards. Miss Haldin was extremely indignant on
+behalf of the lady companion.
+
+"Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments I have passed in
+the hall of this house have been not a little interesting, and very
+instructive too. They are memorable. I do not regret the waiting, but
+I see that the object of my call here can be attained without taking up
+Madame de S--'s time."
+
+At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin. The above relation is founded
+on her narrative, which I have not so much dramatized as might be
+supposed. She had rendered, with extraordinary feeling and animation,
+the very accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the
+irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor.
+Miss Haldin's true and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked
+by the uncongenial fate of her new acquaintance, that lady companion,
+secretary, whatever she was. For my own part, I was pleased to discover
+in it one more obstacle to intimacy with Madame de S--. I had a
+positive abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed
+Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. I do not know what was her attitude to the
+unseen, but I know that in the affairs of this world she was avaricious,
+greedy, and unscrupulous. It was within my knowledge that she had been
+worsted in a sordid and desperate quarrel about money matters with the
+family of her late husband, the diplomatist. Some very august personages
+indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving
+in her affairs) had incurred her animosity. I find it perfectly easy to
+believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for
+reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de sante_--a madhouse
+of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however, that certain high-placed
+personages opposed it for reasons which....
+
+But it's no use to go into details.
+
+Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of
+languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this
+and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly
+enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
+which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase,
+a poetic image, the accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art,
+and not having invented Madame de S--, I feel bound to explain how I
+came to know so much about her.
+
+My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
+the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
+last fact of Madame de S--'s history, with which I intend to trouble
+my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
+sources, of the cause of Madame de S--'s flight from Russia, some years
+before. It was neither more nor less than this: that she became suspect
+to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
+Alexander. The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded
+expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her
+salon. Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who
+hastened to play the informer, I suppose. At any rate, the overheard
+matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she
+was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge. Some of
+my readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris,
+a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected
+piece of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more
+than hints at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous
+innuendoes that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but
+with a palace intrigue. When I observed to my friend, the professor's
+wife, that the life of Madame de S--, with its unofficial diplomacy,
+its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere
+of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth
+century than for the conditions of our own time, she assented with
+a smile, but a moment after went on in a reflective tone:
+"Charlatanism?--yes, in a certain measure. Still, times are changed.
+There are forces now which were non-existent in the eighteenth century.
+I should not be surprised if she were more dangerous than an Englishman
+would be willing to believe. And what's more, she is looked upon as
+really dangerous by certain people--_chez nous_."
+
+_Chez nous_ in this connexion meant Russia in general, and the Russian
+political police in particular. The object of my digression from the
+straight course of Miss Haldin's relation (in my own words) of her visit
+to the Chateau Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my friend,
+the professor's wife. I wanted to bring it forward simply to make what I
+have to say presently of Mr. Razumov's presence in Geneva, a little more
+credible--for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I
+have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and
+cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced
+at our end of Europe. And this I state as my excuse for having left Miss
+Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two men who
+had come together below the terrace of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The knowledge which I have just stated was in my mind when, as I have
+said, I interrupted Miss Haldin. I interrupted her with the cry of
+profound satisfaction--
+
+"So you never saw Madame de S--, after all?"
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head. It was very satisfactory to me. She had
+not seen Madame de S--! That was excellent, excellent! I welcomed the
+conviction that she would never know Madame de S-- now. I could not
+explain the reason of the conviction but by the knowledge that Miss
+Haldin was standing face to face with her brother's wonderful friend. I
+preferred him to Madame de S-- as the companion and guide of that young
+girl, abandoned to her inexperience by the miserable end of her brother.
+But, at any rate, that life now ended had been sincere, and perhaps its
+thoughts might have been lofty, its moral sufferings profound, its last
+act a true sacrifice. It is not for us, the staid lovers calmed by
+the possession of a conquered liberty, to condemn without appeal the
+fierceness of thwarted desire.
+
+I am not ashamed of the warmth of my regard for Miss Haldin. It was, it
+must be admitted, an unselfish sentiment, being its own reward. The late
+Victor Haldin--in the light of that sentiment--appeared to me not as a
+sinister conspirator, but as a pure enthusiast. I did not wish indeed
+to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape, that fact which
+brought so much trouble to both his mother and his sister, spoke to me
+in his favour. Meantime, in my fear of seeing the girl surrender to the
+influence of the Chateau Borel revolutionary feminism, I was more than
+willing to put my trust in that friend of the late Victor Haldin. He was
+nothing but a name, you will say. Exactly! A name! And what's more,
+the only name; the only name to be found in the correspondence between
+brother and sister. The young man had turned up; they had come face to
+face, and, fortunately, without the direct interference of Madame de
+S--. What will come of it? what will she tell me presently? I was
+asking myself.
+
+It was only natural that my thought should turn to the young man, the
+bearer of the only name uttered in all the dream-talk of a future to be
+brought about by a revolution. And my thought took the shape of asking
+myself why this young man had not called upon these ladies. He had been
+in Geneva for some days before Miss Haldin heard of him first in my
+presence from Peter Ivanovitch. I regretted that last's presence at
+their meeting. I would rather have had it happen somewhere out of his
+spectacled sight. But I supposed that, having both these young people
+there, he introduced them to each other.
+
+I broke the silence by beginning a question on that point--
+
+"I suppose Peter Ivanovitch...."
+
+Miss Haldin gave vent to her indignation. Peter Ivanovitch directly he
+had got his answer from her had turned upon the _dame de compagnie_ in a
+shameful manner.
+
+"Turned upon her?" I wondered. "What about? For what reason?"
+
+"It was unheard of; it was shameful," Miss Haldin pursued, with angry
+eyes. "_Il lui a fait une scene_--like this, before strangers. And for
+what? You would never guess. For some eggs.... Oh!"
+
+I was astonished. "Eggs, did you say?"
+
+"For Madame de S--. That lady observes a special diet, or something
+of the sort. It seems she complained the day before to Peter Ivanovitch
+that the eggs were not rightly prepared. Peter Ivanovitch suddenly
+remembered this against the poor woman, and flew out at her. It was most
+astonishing. I stood as if rooted."
+
+"Do you mean to say that the great feminist allowed himself to be
+abusive to a woman?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, not that! It was something you have no conception of. It was an
+odious performance. Imagine, he raised his hat to begin with. He made
+his voice soft and deprecatory. 'Ah! you are not kind to us--you will
+not deign to remember....' This sort of phrases, that sort of tone.
+The poor creature was terribly upset. Her eyes ran full of tears.
+She did not know where to look. I shouldn't wonder if she would have
+preferred abuse, or even a blow."
+
+I did not remark that very possibly she was familiar with both on
+occasions when no one was by. Miss Haldin walked by my side, her head up
+in scornful and angry silence.
+
+"Great men have their surprising peculiarities," I observed inanely.
+"Exactly like men who are not great. But that sort of thing cannot
+be kept up for ever. How did the great feminist wind up this very
+characteristic episode?"
+
+Miss Haldin, without turning her face my way, told me that the end
+was brought about by the appearance of the interviewer, who had been
+closeted with Madame de S--.
+
+He came up rapidly, unnoticed, lifted his hat slightly, and paused to
+say in French: "The Baroness has asked me, in case I met a lady on my
+way out, to desire her to come in at once."
+
+After delivering this message, he hurried down the drive. The _dame de
+compagnie_ flew towards the house, and Peter Ivanovitch followed her
+hastily, looking uneasy. In a moment Miss Haldin found herself alone
+with the young man, who undoubtedly must have been the new arrival
+from Russia. She wondered whether her brother's friend had not already
+guessed who she was.
+
+I am in a position to say that, as a matter of fact, he had guessed.
+It is clear to me that Peter Ivanovitch, for some reason or other, had
+refrained from alluding to these ladies' presence in Geneva. But Razumov
+had guessed. The trustful girl! Every word uttered by Haldin lived in
+Razumov's memory. They were like haunting shapes; they could not be
+exorcised. The most vivid amongst them was the mention of the sister.
+The girl had existed for him ever since. But he did not recognize her
+at once. Coming up with Peter Ivanovitch, he did observe her; their eyes
+had met, even. He had responded, as no one could help responding, to
+the harmonious charm of her whole person, its strength, its grace, its
+tranquil frankness--and then he had turned his gaze away. He said to
+himself that all this was not for him; the beauty of women and the
+friendship of men were not for him. He accepted that feeling with a
+purposeful sternness, and tried to pass on. It was only her outstretched
+hand which brought about the recognition. It stands recorded in the
+pages of his self-confession, that it nearly suffocated him physically
+with an emotional reaction of hate and dismay, as though her appearance
+had been a piece of accomplished treachery.
+
+He faced about. The considerable elevation of the terrace concealed them
+from anyone lingering in the doorway of the house; and even from the
+upstairs windows they could not have been seen. Through the thickets run
+wild, and the trees of the gently sloping grounds, he had cold, placid
+glimpses of the lake. A moment of perfect privacy had been vouchsafed
+to them at this juncture. I wondered to myself what use they had made of
+that fortunate circumstance.
+
+"Did you have time for more than a few words?" I asked.
+
+That animation with which she had related to me the incidents of her
+visit to the Chateau Borel had left her completely. Strolling by my
+side, she looked straight before her; but I noticed a little colour on
+her cheek. She did not answer me.
+
+After some little time I observed that they could not have hoped to
+remain forgotten for very long, unless the other two had discovered
+Madame de S-- swooning with fatigue, perhaps, or in a state of morbid
+exaltation after the long interview. Either would require their devoted
+ministrations. I could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily
+out of the house again, bareheaded, perhaps, and on across the terrace
+with his swinging gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating
+clear of his stout light grey legs. I confess to having looked upon
+these young people as the quarry of the "heroic fugitive." I had the
+notion that they would not be allowed to escape capture. But of that I
+said nothing to Miss Haldin, only as she still remained uncommunicative,
+I pressed her a little.
+
+"Well--but you can tell me at least your impression."
+
+She turned her head to look at me, and turned away again.
+
+"Impression?" she repeated slowly, almost dreamily; then in a quicker
+tone--
+
+"He seems to be a man who has suffered more from his thoughts than from
+evil fortune."
+
+"From his thoughts, you say?"
+
+"And that is natural enough in a Russian," she took me up. "In a young
+Russian; so many of them are unfit for action, and yet unable to rest."
+
+"And you think he is that sort of man?"
+
+"No, I do not judge him. How could I, so suddenly? You asked for my
+impression--I explain my impression. I--I--don't know the world, nor yet
+the people in it; I have been too solitary--I am too young to trust my
+own opinions."
+
+"Trust your instinct," I advised her. "Most women trust to that, and
+make no worse mistakes than men. In this case you have your brother's
+letter to help you."
+
+She drew a deep breath like a light sigh. "Unstained, lofty, and
+solitary existences," she quoted as if to herself. But I caught the
+wistful murmur distinctly.
+
+"High praise," I whispered to her.
+
+"The highest possible."
+
+"So high that, like the award of happiness, it is more fit to come
+only at the end of a life. But still no common or altogether unworthy
+personality could have suggested such a confident exaggeration of praise
+and..."
+
+"Ah!" She interrupted me ardently. "And if you had only known the heart
+from which that judgment has come!"
+
+She ceased on that note, and for a space I reflected on the character of
+the words which I perceived very well must tip the scale of the girl's
+feelings in that young man's favour. They had not the sound of a
+casual utterance. Vague they were to my Western mind and to my Western
+sentiment, but I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin's side,
+I was like a traveller in a strange country. It had also become clear to
+me that Miss Haldin was unwilling to enter into the details of the only
+material part of their visit to the Chateau Borel. But I was not hurt.
+Somehow I didn't feel it to be a want of confidence. It was some other
+difficulty--a difficulty I could not resent. And it was without the
+slightest resentment that I said--
+
+"Very well. But on that high ground, which I will not dispute, you, like
+anyone else in such circumstances, you must have made for yourself
+a representation of that exceptional friend, a mental image of him,
+and--please tell me--you were not disappointed?"
+
+"What do you mean? His personal appearance?"
+
+"I don't mean precisely his good looks, or otherwise."
+
+We turned at the end of the alley and made a few steps without looking
+at each other.
+
+"His appearance is not ordinary," said Miss Haldin at last.
+
+"No, I should have thought not--from the little you've said of your
+first impression. After all, one has to fall back on that word.
+Impression! What I mean is that something indescribable which is likely
+to mark a 'not ordinary' person."
+
+I perceived that she was not listening. There was no mistaking her
+expression; and once more I had the sense of being out of it--not
+because of my age, which at any rate could draw inferences--but
+altogether out of it, on another plane whence I could only watch her
+from afar. And so ceasing to speak I watched her stepping out by my
+side.
+
+"No," she exclaimed suddenly, "I could not have been disappointed with a
+man of such strong feeling."
+
+"Aha! Strong feeling," I muttered, thinking to myself censoriously: like
+this, at once, all in a moment!
+
+"What did you say?" inquired Miss Haldin innocently.
+
+"Oh, nothing. I beg your pardon. Strong feeling. I am not surprised."
+
+"And you don't know how abruptly I behaved to him!" she cried
+remorsefully.
+
+I suppose I must have appeared surprised, for, looking at me with a
+still more heightened colour, she said she was ashamed to admit that she
+had not been sufficiently collected; she had failed to control her words
+and actions as the situation demanded. She lost the fortitude worthy of
+both the men, the dead and the living; the fortitude which should have
+been the note of the meeting of Victor Haldin's sister with Victor
+Haldin's only known friend. He was looking at her keenly, but said
+nothing, and she was--she confessed--painfully affected by his want of
+comprehension. All she could say was: "You are Mr. Razumov." A slight
+frown passed over his forehead. After a short, watchful pause, he made a
+little bow of assent, and waited.
+
+At the thought that she had before her the man so highly regarded by her
+brother, the man who had known his value, spoken to him, understood him,
+had listened to his confidences, perhaps had encouraged him--her lips
+trembled, her eyes ran full of tears; she put out her hand, made a step
+towards him impulsively, saying with an effort to restrain her emotion,
+"Can't you guess who I am?" He did not take the proffered hand. He
+even recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin imagined that he was unpleasantly
+affected. Miss Haldin excused him, directing her displeasure at
+herself. She had behaved unworthily, like an emotional French girl.
+A manifestation of that kind could not be welcomed by a man of stern,
+self-contained character.
+
+He must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very timid with women, not
+to respond in a more human way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie
+Haldin--I thought to myself. Those lofty and solitary existences (I
+remembered the words suddenly) make a young man shy and an old man
+savage--often.
+
+"Well," I encouraged Miss Haldin to proceed.
+
+She was still very dissatisfied with herself.
+
+"I went from bad to worse," she said, with an air of discouragement very
+foreign to her. "I did everything foolish except actually bursting into
+tears. I am thankful to say I did not do that. But I was unable to speak
+for quite a long time."
+
+She had stood before him, speechless, swallowing her sobs, and when
+she managed at last to utter something, it was only her brother's
+name--"Victor--Victor Haldin!" she gasped out, and again her voice
+failed her.
+
+"Of course," she commented to me, "this distressed him. He was
+quite overcome. I have told you my opinion that he is a man of deep
+feeling--it is impossible to doubt it. You should have seen his face.
+He positively reeled. He leaned against the wall of the terrace. Their
+friendship must have been the very brotherhood of souls! I was grateful
+to him for that emotion, which made me feel less ashamed of my own lack
+of self-control. Of course I had regained the power of speech at once,
+almost. All this lasted not more than a few seconds. 'I am his sister,'
+I said. 'Maybe you have heard of me.'"
+
+"And had he?" I interrupted.
+
+"I don't know. How could it have been otherwise? And yet.... But what
+does that matter? I stood there before him, near enough to be touched
+and surely not looking like an impostor. All I know is, that he put
+out both his hands then to me, I may say flung them out at me, with
+the greatest readiness and warmth, and that I seized and pressed them,
+feeling that I was finding again a little of what I thought was lost
+to me for ever, with the loss of my brother--some of that hope,
+inspiration, and support which I used to get from my dear dead...."
+
+I understood quite well what she meant. We strolled on slowly. I
+refrained from looking at her. And it was as if answering my own
+thoughts that I murmured--
+
+"No doubt it was a great friendship--as you say. And that young man
+ended by welcoming your name, so to speak, with both hands. After that,
+of course, you would understand each other. Yes, you would understand
+each other quickly."
+
+It was a moment before I heard her voice.
+
+"Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words. A reserved man--even when
+he is strongly moved."
+
+Unable to forget---or even to forgive--the bass-toned expansiveness of
+Peter Ivanovitch, the Archpatron of revolutionary parties, I said that
+I took this for a favourable trait of character. It was associated with
+sincerity--in my mind.
+
+"And, besides, we had not much time," she added.
+
+"No, you would not have, of course." My suspicion and even dread of the
+feminist and his Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help asking
+with real anxiety, which I made smiling--
+
+"But you escaped all right?"
+
+She understood me, and smiled too, at my uneasiness.
+
+"Oh yes! I escaped, if you like to call it that. I walked away quickly.
+There was no need to run. I am neither frightened nor yet fascinated,
+like that poor woman who received me so strangely."
+
+"And Mr.--Mr. Razumov...?"
+
+"He remained there, of course. I suppose he went into the house after I
+left him. You remember that he came here strongly recommended to Peter
+Ivanovitch--possibly entrusted with important messages for him."
+
+"Ah yes! From that priest who..."
+
+"Father Zosim--yes. Or from others, perhaps."
+
+"You left him, then. But have you seen him since, may I ask?"
+
+For some time Miss Haldin made no answer to this very direct question,
+then--
+
+"I have been expecting to see him here to-day," she said quietly.
+
+"You have! Do you meet, then, in this garden? In that case I had better
+leave you at once."
+
+"No, why leave me? And we don't meet in this garden. I have not seen Mr.
+Razumov since that first time. Not once. But I have been expecting
+him...."
+
+She paused. I wondered to myself why that young revolutionist should
+show so little alacrity.
+
+"Before we parted I told Mr. Razumov that I walked here for an hour
+every day at this time. I could not explain to him then why I did not
+ask him to come and see us at once. Mother must be prepared for such a
+visit. And then, you see, I do not know myself what Mr. Razumov has to
+tell us. He, too, must be told first how it is with poor mother. All
+these thoughts flashed through my mind at once. So I told him hurriedly
+that there was a reason why I could not ask him to see us at home, but
+that I was in the habit of walking here.... This is a public place,
+but there are never many people about at this hour. I thought it would
+do very well. And it is so near our apartments. I don't like to be very
+far away from mother. Our servant knows where I am in case I should be
+wanted suddenly."
+
+"Yes. It is very convenient from that point of view," I agreed.
+
+In fact, I thought the Bastions a very convenient place, since the
+girl did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to
+her mother. It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of
+ground of deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go
+on in the exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments,
+too poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these
+two, escaped out of four score of millions of human beings ground
+between the upper and nether millstone, walking under these trees, their
+young heads close together. Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk
+in. It even occurred to me, while we turned once more away from the wide
+iron gates, that when tired they would have plenty of accommodation to
+rest themselves. There was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed
+between the restaurant chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted
+deals spread out under the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a
+solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to
+the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a
+republic that could almost be held in the palm of ones hand. The man,
+colourlessly uncouth, was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the
+woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the rough chair, gazed idly
+around.
+
+There is little logic to be expected on this earth, not only in the
+matter of thought, but also of sentiment. I was surprised to discover
+myself displeased with that unknown young man. A week had gone by since
+they met. Was he callous, or shy, or very stupid? I could not make it
+out.
+
+"Do you think," I asked Miss Haldin, after we had gone some distance up
+the great alley, "that Mr Razumov understood your intention?"
+
+"Understood what I meant?" she wondered. "He was greatly moved. That
+I know! In my own agitation I could see it. But I spoke distinctly. He
+heard me; he seemed, indeed, to hang on my words..."
+
+Unconsciously she had hastened her pace. Her utterance, too, became
+quicker.
+
+I waited a little before I observed thoughtfully--
+
+"And yet he allowed all these days to pass."
+
+"How can we tell what work he may have to do here? He is not an idler
+travelling for his pleasure. His time may not be his own--nor yet his
+thoughts, perhaps."
+
+She slowed her pace suddenly, and in a lowered voice added--
+
+"Or his very life"--then paused and stood still "For all I know, he may
+have had to leave Geneva the very day he saw me."
+
+"Without telling you!" I exclaimed incredulously.
+
+"I did not give him time. I left him quite abruptly. I behaved
+emotionally to the end. I am sorry for it. Even if I had given him the
+opportunity he would have been justified in taking me for a person not
+to be trusted. An emotional, tearful girl is not a person to confide in.
+But even if he has left Geneva for a time, I am confident that we shall
+meet again."
+
+"Ah! you are confident.... I dare say. But on what ground?"
+
+"Because I've told him that I was in great need of some one, a
+fellow-countryman, a fellow-believer, to whom I could give my confidence
+in a certain matter."
+
+"I see. I don't ask you what answer he made. I confess that this is good
+ground for your belief in Mr. Razumov's appearance before long. But he
+has not turned up to-day?"
+
+"No," she said quietly, "not to-day;" and we stood for a time in
+silence, like people that have nothing more to say to each other and
+let their thoughts run widely asunder before their bodies go off their
+different ways. Miss Haldin glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a
+brusque movement. She had already overstayed her time, it seemed.
+
+"I don't like to be away from mother," she murmured, shaking her head.
+"It is not that she is very ill now. But somehow when I am not with her
+I am more uneasy than ever."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion to her son for the last
+week or more. She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking
+out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial
+things.
+
+"For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of
+talk is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly
+endure it, and I dare not break it."
+
+Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her glove which had come
+undone. I knew well enough what a hard time of it she must be having.
+The stress, its causes, its nature, would have undermined the health
+of an Occidental girl; but Russian natures have a singular power of
+resistance against the unfair strains of life. Straight and supple, with
+a short jacket open on her black dress, which made her figure appear
+more slender and her fresh but colourless face more pale, she compelled
+my wonder and admiration.
+
+"I can't stay a moment longer. You ought to come soon to see mother. You
+know she calls you '_L'ami._' It is an excellent name, and she really
+means it. And now _au revoir_; I must run."
+
+She glanced vaguely down the broad walk--the hand she put out to me
+eluded my grasp by an unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
+shoulder. Her red lips were slightly parted, not in a smile, however,
+but expressing a sort of startled pleasure. She gazed towards the gates
+and said quickly, with a gasp--
+
+"There! I knew it. Here he comes!"
+
+I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov. A young man was walking up
+the alley, without haste. His clothes were some dull shade of brown, and
+he carried a stick. When my eyes first fell on him, his head was hanging
+on his breast as if in deep thought. While I was looking at him he
+raised it sharply, and at once stopped. I am certain he did, but that
+pause was nothing more perceptible than a faltering check in his gait,
+instantaneously overcome. Then he continued his approach, looking at us
+steadily. Miss Haldin signed to me to remain, and advanced a step or two
+to meet him.
+
+I turned my head away from that meeting, and did not look at them
+again till I heard Miss Haldin's voice uttering his name in the way
+of introduction. Mr. Razumov was informed, in a warm, low tone, that,
+besides being a wonderful teacher, I was a great support "in our sorrow
+and distress."
+
+Of course I was described also as an Englishman. Miss Haldin spoke
+rapidly, faster than I have ever heard her speak, and that by contrast
+made the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
+
+"I have given him my confidence," she added, looking all the time at Mr.
+Razumov. That young man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin,
+but certainly did not look into her eyes which were so ready for him.
+Afterwards he glanced backwards and forwards at us both, while the faint
+commencement of a forced smile, followed by the suspicion of a frown,
+vanished one after another; I detected them, though neither could have
+been noticed by a person less intensely bent upon divining him than
+myself. I don't know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my attention
+seized the very shades of these movements. The attempted smile was given
+up, the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so that there should
+be no sign; but I imagined him exclaiming inwardly--
+
+"Her confidence! To this elderly person--this foreigner!"
+
+I imagined this because he looked foreign enough to me. I was upon the
+whole favourably impressed. He had an air of intelligence and even
+some distinction quite above the average of the students and other
+inhabitants of the _Petite Russie_. His features were more decided
+than in the generality of Russian faces; he had a line of the jaw,
+a clean-shaven, sallow cheek; his nose was a ridge, and not a mere
+protuberance. He wore the hat well down over his eyes, his dark hair
+curled low on the nape of his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes
+there were sturdy limbs; a slight stoop brought out a satisfactory
+breadth of shoulders. Upon the whole I was not disappointed.
+Studious--robust--shy.
+
+Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on
+mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry. Not a word or
+even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.
+
+I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me
+lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct
+wish. Let him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near
+Nathalie Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling
+matter to me. I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as
+it were poised in the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and
+my mind trying to penetrate her intention. She had turned to Razumov.
+
+"Well. This is the place. Yes, it is here that I meant you to come. I
+have been walking every day.... Don't excuse yourself--I understand.
+I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot
+stay now. It is impossible. I must hurry off home. Yes, even with you
+standing before me, I must run off. I have been too long away.... You
+know how it is?"
+
+These last words were addressed to me. I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed
+the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man
+might do. He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his,
+and held it--detained it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back
+movement.
+
+"Thank you once more for--for understanding me," she went on warmly. He
+interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn't like him
+speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat,
+as it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with
+a parched throat.
+
+"What is there to thank me for? Understand you?... How did I
+understand you?... You had better know that I understand nothing.
+I was aware that you wanted to see me in this garden. I could not come
+before. I was hindered. And even to-day, you see...late."
+
+She still held his hand.
+
+"I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as
+a weak, emotional girl. No doubt I want sustaining. I am very ignorant.
+But I can be trusted. Indeed I can!"
+
+"You are ignorant," he repeated thoughtfully. He had raised his head,
+and was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand.
+They stood like this for a long moment. She released his hand.
+
+"Yes. You did come late. It was good of you to come on the chance of
+me having loitered beyond my time. I was talking with this good friend
+here. I was talking of you. Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you. He was with
+me when I first heard of your being here in Geneva. He can tell you
+what comfort it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news. He knew
+I meant to seek you out. It was the only object of my accepting the
+invitation of Peter Ivanovitch....
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me," he interrupted, in that
+wavering, hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.
+
+"Very little. Just told me your name, and that you had arrived here. Why
+should I have asked for more? What could he have told me that I did not
+know already from my brother's letter? Three lines! And how much they
+meant to me! I will show them to you one day, Kirylo Sidorovitch. But
+now I must go. The first talk between us cannot be a matter of five
+minutes, so we had better not begin...."
+
+I had been standing a little aside, seeing them both in profile. At that
+moment it occurred to me that Mr. Razumov's face was older than his age.
+
+"If mother"--the girl had turned suddenly to me, "were to wake up in my
+absence (so much longer than usual) she would perhaps question me. She
+seems to miss me more, you know, of late. She would want to know what
+delayed me--and, you see, it would be painful for me to dissemble before
+her."
+
+I understood the point very well. For the same reason she checked what
+seemed to be on Mr. Razumov's part a movement to accompany her.
+
+"No! No! I go alone, but meet me here as soon as possible." Then to me
+in a lower, significant tone--
+
+"Mother may be sitting at the window at this moment, looking down
+the street. She must not know anything of Mr. Razumov's presence here
+till--till something is arranged." She paused before she added a little
+louder, but still speaking to me, "Mr. Razumov does not quite understand
+my difficulty, but you know what it is."
+
+
+V
+
+
+With a quick inclination of the head for us both, and an earnest,
+friendly glance at the young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our heads
+and looking after her straight, supple figure receding rapidly. Her walk
+was not that hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some women, but
+a frank, strong, healthy movement forward. Rapidly she increased the
+distance--disappeared with suddenness at last. I discovered only then
+that Mr. Razumov, after ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking
+me over from head to foot. I dare say I was a very unexpected fact for
+that young Russian to stumble upon. I caught in his physiognomy, in his
+whole bearing, an expression compounded of curiosity and scorn, tempered
+by alarm--as though he had been holding his breath while I was not
+looking. But his eyes met mine with a gaze direct enough. I saw then for
+the first time that they were of a clear brown colour and fringed with
+thick black eyelashes. They were the youngest feature of his face. Not
+at all unpleasant eyes. He swayed slightly, leaning on his stick and
+generally hung in the wind. It flashed upon me that in leaving us
+together Miss Haldin had an intention--that something was entrusted to
+me, since, by a mere accident I had been found at hand. On this assumed
+ground I put all possible friendliness into my manner. I cast about
+for some right thing to say, and suddenly in Miss Haldin's last words I
+perceived the clue to the nature of my mission.
+
+"No," I said gravely, if with a smile, "you cannot be expected to
+understand."
+
+His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little before he said, as if
+wickedly amused--
+
+"But haven't you heard just now? I was thanked by that young lady for
+understanding so well."
+
+I looked at him rather hard. Was there a hidden and inexplicable sneer
+in this retort? No. It was not that. It might have been resentment. Yes.
+But what had he to resent? He looked as though he had not slept very
+well of late. I could almost feel on me the weight of his unrefreshed,
+motionless stare, the stare of a man who lies unwinking in the dark,
+angrily passive in the toils of disastrous thoughts. Now, when I know
+how true it was, I can honestly affirm that this was the effect he
+produced on me. It was painful in a curiously indefinite way--for,
+of course, the definition comes to me now while I sit writing in the
+fullness of my knowledge. But this is what the effect was at that time
+of absolute ignorance. This new sort of uneasiness which he seemed to
+be forcing upon me I attempted to put down by assuming a conversational,
+easy familiarity.
+
+"That extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl (I am--as
+you see--old enough to be frank in my expressions) was referring to her
+own feelings. Surely you must have understood that much?"
+
+He made such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little.
+
+"Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other
+things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well--and if she
+is! I suppose I can see that for myself."
+
+This sally would have been insulting if his voice had not been
+practically extinct, dried up in his throat; and the rustling effort of
+his speech too painful to give real offence.
+
+I remained silent, checked between the obvious fact and the subtle
+impression. It was open to me to leave him there and then; but the sense
+of having been entrusted with a mission, the suggestion of Miss Haldin's
+last glance, was strong upon me. After a moment of reflection I said--
+
+"Shall we walk together a little?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again. I saw it
+out of the corner of my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow. He
+had fallen back a little and was practically out of my sight, unless
+I turned my head to look at him. I did not wish to indispose him
+still further by an appearance of marked curiosity. It might have
+been distasteful to such a young and secret refugee from under the
+pestilential shadow hiding the true, kindly face of his land. And the
+shadow, the attendant of his countrymen, stretching across the middle of
+Europe, was lying on him too, darkening his figure to my mental vision.
+"Without doubt," I said to myself, "he seems a sombre, even a desperate
+revolutionist; but he is young, he may be unselfish and humane, capable
+of compassion, of...."
+
+I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat, and became all
+attention.
+
+"This is beyond everything," were his first words. "It is beyond
+everything! I find you here, for no reason that I can understand, in
+possession of something I cannot be expected to understand! A confidant!
+A foreigner! Talking about an admirable Russian girl. Is the admirable
+girl a fool, I begin to wonder? What are you at? What is your object?"
+
+He was barely audible, as if his throat had no more resonance than a dry
+rag, a piece of tinder. It was so pitiful that I found it extremely easy
+to control my indignation.
+
+"When you have lived a little longer, Mr. Razumov, you will discover
+that no woman is an absolute fool. I am not a feminist, like that
+illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a
+little suspect to me...."
+
+He interrupted me, in a surprising note of whispering astonishment.
+
+"Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!..."
+
+"Yes, in a certain aspect he is," I said, dismissing my remark lightly.
+"As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will
+learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign
+to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even
+the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
+never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely
+deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open,
+if all the truth were known."
+
+"Upon my word," he cried at my elbow, "what is it to me whether women
+are fools or lunatics? I really don't care what you think of them. I--I
+am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a
+novel. How do you know that I want to learn anything about women?...
+What is the meaning of all this?"
+
+"The object, you mean, of this conversation, which I admit I have forced
+upon you in a measure."
+
+"Forced! Object!" he repeated, still keeping half a pace or so behind
+me. "You wanted to talk about women, apparently. That's a subject. But
+I don't care for it. I have never.... In fact, I have had other
+subjects to think about."
+
+"I am concerned here with one woman only--a young girl--the sister of
+your dead friend--Miss Haldin. Surely you can think a little of her.
+What I meant from the first was that there is a situation which you
+cannot be expected to understand."
+
+I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side for the space of several
+strides.
+
+"I think that it may prepare the ground for your next interview with
+Miss Haldin if I tell you of it. I imagine that she might have had
+something of the kind in her mind when she left us together. I believe
+myself authorized to speak. The peculiar situation I have alluded to
+has arisen in the first grief and distress of Victor Haldin's execution.
+There was something peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest. You no
+doubt know the whole truth...."
+
+I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next instant found myself
+swung so as to face Mr. Razumov.
+
+"You spring up from the ground before me with this talk. Who the devil
+are you? This is not to be borne! Why! What for? What do you know
+what is or is not peculiar? What have you to do with any confounded
+circumstances, or with anything that happens in Russia, anyway?"
+
+He leaned on his stick with his other hand, heavily; and when he let go
+my arm, I was certain in my mind that he was hardly able to keep on his
+feet.
+
+"Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables," I proposed,
+disregarding this display of unexpectedly profound emotion. It was not
+without its effect on me, I confess. I was sorry for him.
+
+"What tables? What are you talking about? Oh--the empty tables? The
+tables there. Certainly. I will sit at one of the empty tables."
+
+I led him away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals
+before the _chalet_. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were
+alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let
+fall his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands,
+stared at me persistently, openly, and continuously, while I signalled
+the waiter and ordered some beer. I could not quarrel with this silent
+inspection very well, because, truth to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of
+having been sprung on him with some abruptness--of having "sprung from
+the ground," as he expressed it.
+
+While waiting to be served I mentioned that, born from parents settled
+in St. Petersburg, I had acquired the language as a child. The town I
+did not remember, having left it for good as a boy of nine, but in later
+years I had renewed my acquaintance with the language. He listened,
+without as much as moving his eyes the least little bit. He had to
+change his position when the beer came, and the instant draining of his
+glass revived him. He leaned back in his chair and, folding his arms
+across his chest, continued to stare at me squarely. It occurred to me
+that his clean-shaven, almost swarthy face was really of the very mobile
+sort, and that the absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit of
+a revolutionist, of a conspirator everlastingly on his guard against
+self-betrayal in a world of secret spies.
+
+"But you are an Englishman--a teacher of English literature," he
+murmured, in a voice that was no longer issuing from a parched throat.
+"I have heard of you. People told me you have lived here for years."
+
+"Quite true. More than twenty years. And I have been assisting Miss
+Haldin with her English studies."
+
+"You have been reading English poetry with her," he said, immovable now,
+like another man altogether, a complete stranger to the man of the heavy
+and uncertain footfalls a little while ago--at my elbow.
+
+"Yes, English poetry," I said. "But the trouble of which I speak was
+caused by an English newspaper."
+
+He continued to stare at me. I don't think he was aware that the story
+of the midnight arrest had been ferreted out by an English journalist
+and given to the world. When I explained this to him he muttered
+contemptuously, "It may have been altogether a lie."
+
+"I should think you are the best judge of that," I retorted, a little
+disconcerted. "I must confess that to me it looks to be true in the
+main."
+
+"How can you tell truth from lies?" he queried in his new, immovable
+manner.
+
+"I don't know how you do it in Russia," I began, rather nettled by his
+attitude. He interrupted me.
+
+"In Russia, and in general everywhere--in a newspaper, for instance. The
+colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same."
+
+"Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the
+publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration
+of the motive, and so on. I don't trust blindly the accuracy of special
+correspondents--but why should this one have gone to the trouble of
+concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance to
+the world?"
+
+"That's what it is," he grumbled. "What's going on with us is of
+no importance--a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the
+papers--the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of. But
+let them wait a bit!"
+
+He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to the western world.
+Disregarding the anger in his stare, I pointed out that whether the
+journalist was well- or ill-informed, the concern of the friends of
+these ladies was with the effect the few lines of print in question had
+produced--the effect alone. And surely he must be counted as one of
+the friends--if only for the sake of his late comrade and intimate
+fellow-revolutionist. At that point I thought he was going to speak
+vehemently; but he only astounded me by the convulsive start of his
+whole body. He restrained himself, folded his loosened arms tighter
+across his chest, and sat back with a smile in which there was a twitch
+of scorn and malice.
+
+"Yes, a comrade and an intimate.... Very well," he said.
+
+"I ventured to speak to you on that assumption. And I cannot be
+mistaken. I was present when Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival
+here to Miss Haldin, and I saw her relief and thankfulness when your
+name was mentioned. Afterwards she showed me her brother's letter,
+and read out the few words in which he alludes to you. What else but a
+friend could you have been?"
+
+"Obviously. That's perfectly well known. A friend. Quite correct....
+Go on. You were talking of some effect."
+
+I said to myself: "He puts on the callousness of a stern revolutionist,
+the insensibility to common emotions of a man devoted to a destructive
+idea. He is young, and his sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger,
+a foreigner, an old man. Youth must assert itself...." As concisely
+as possible I exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs. Haldin had been
+thrown into by the news of her son's untimely end.
+
+He listened--I felt it--with profound attention. His level stare
+deflected gradually downwards, left my face, and rested at last on the
+ground at his feet.
+
+"You can enter into the sister's feelings. As you said, I have only read
+a little English poetry with her, and I won't make myself ridiculous in
+your eyes by trying to speak of her. But you have seen her. She is one
+of these rare human beings that do not want explaining. At least I think
+so. They had only that son, that brother, for a link with the wider
+world, with the future. The very groundwork of active existence for
+Nathalie Haldin is gone with him. Can you wonder then that she turns
+with eagerness to the only man her brother mentions in his letters. Your
+name is a sort of legacy."
+
+"What could he have written of me?" he cried, in a low, exasperated
+tone.
+
+"Only a few words. It is not for me to repeat them to you, Mr. Razumov;
+but you may believe my assertion that these words are forcible enough to
+make both his mother and his sister believe implicitly in the worth of
+your judgment and in the truth of anything you may have to say to them.
+It's impossible for you now to pass them by like strangers."
+
+I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few
+people passing up and down the broad central walk. While I was speaking
+his head had sunk upon his breast above his folded arms. He raised it
+sharply.
+
+"Must I go then and lie to that old woman!"
+
+It was not anger; it was something else, something more poignant, and
+not so simple. I was aware of it sympathetically, while I was profoundly
+concerned at the nature of that exclamation.
+
+"Dear me! Won't the truth do, then? I hoped you could have told them
+something consoling. I am thinking of the poor mother now. Your Russia
+_is_ a cruel country."
+
+He moved a little in his chair.
+
+"Yes," I repeated. "I thought you would have had something authentic to
+tell."
+
+The twitching of his lips before he spoke was curious.
+
+"What if it is not worth telling?"
+
+"Not worth--from what point of view? I don't understand."
+
+"From every point of view."
+
+I spoke with some asperity.
+
+"I should think that anything which could explain the circumstances of
+that midnight arrest...."
+
+"Reported by a journalist for the amusement of the civilized Europe," he
+broke in scornfully.
+
+"Yes, reported.... But aren't they true? I can't make out your
+attitude in this? Either the man is a hero to you, or..."
+
+He approached his face with fiercely distended nostrils close to mine so
+suddenly that I had the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
+
+"You ask me! I suppose it amuses you, all this. Look here! I am a
+worker. I studied. Yes, I studied very hard. There is intelligence
+here." (He tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.) "Don't you think a
+Russian may have sane ambitions? Yes--I had even prospects. Certainly! I
+had. And now you see me here, abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed.
+You see me here--and you ask! You see me, don't you?--sitting before
+you."
+
+He threw himself back violently. I kept outwardly calm.
+
+"Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here on account of the Haldin
+affair?"
+
+His manner changed.
+
+"You call it the Haldin affair--do you?" he observed indifferently.
+
+"I have no right to ask you anything," I said. "I wouldn't presume. But
+in that case the mother and the sister of him who must be a hero in
+your eyes cannot be indifferent to you. The girl is a frank and generous
+creature, having the noblest--well--illusions. You will tell her
+nothing--or you will tell her everything. But speaking now of the object
+with which I've approached you first, we have to deal with the morbid
+state of the mother. Perhaps something could be invented under your
+authority as a cure for a distracted and suffering soul filled with
+maternal affection."
+
+His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I could not help
+thinking, wilfully.
+
+"Oh yes. Something might," he mumbled carelessly.
+
+He put his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. When he uncovered his
+lips they were smiling faintly.
+
+"Pardon me. This has been a long conversation, and I have not had much
+sleep the last two nights."
+
+This unexpected, somewhat insolent sort of apology had the merit of
+being perfectly true. He had had no nightly rest to speak of since that
+day when, in the grounds of the Chateau Borel, the sister of Victor
+Haldin had appeared before him. The perplexities and the complex
+terrors--I may say--of this sleeplessness are recorded in the document
+I was to see later--the document which is the main source of this
+narrative. At the moment he looked to me convincingly tired, gone slack
+all over, like a man who has passed through some sort of crisis.
+
+"I have had a lot of urgent writing to do," he added.
+
+I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my example, without haste,
+a little heavily.
+
+"I must apologize for detaining you so long," I said.
+
+"Why apologize? One can't very well go to bed before night. And you did
+not detain me. I could have left you at any time."
+
+I had not stayed with him to be offended.
+
+"I am glad you have been sufficiently interested," I said calmly. "No
+merit of mine, though--the commonest sort of regard for the mother of
+your friend was enough.... As to Miss Haldin herself, she at one time
+was disposed to think that her brother had been betrayed to the police
+in some way."
+
+To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again suddenly. I stared at
+him, and I must say that he returned my stare without winking for quite
+a considerable time.
+
+"In some way," he mumbled, as if he had not understood or could not
+believe his ears.
+
+"Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might have done that," I went
+on. "Or, as she characteristically put it to me, the folly or weakness
+of some unhappy fellow-revolutionist."
+
+"Folly or weakness," he repeated bitterly.
+
+"She is a very generous creature," I observed after a time. The man
+admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground. I turned away and
+moved off, apparently unnoticed by him. I nourished no resentment of
+the moody brusqueness with which he had treated me. The sentiment I was
+carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness. Before
+I had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined
+me.
+
+"H'm, yes!" I heard him at my elbow again. "But what do you think?"
+
+I did not look round even.
+
+"I think that you people are under a curse."
+
+He made no sound. It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I
+heard him again.
+
+"I should like to walk with you a little."
+
+After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated
+compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I saw no reason for being
+particularly gracious.
+
+"I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here,
+to meet a friend from England," I said, for all answer to his unexpected
+proposal. I hoped that something informing could come of it. As we stood
+on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily--
+
+"I like what you said just now."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+We stepped off the pavement together.
+
+"The great problem," he went on, "is to understand thoroughly the nature
+of the curse."
+
+"That's not very difficult, I think."
+
+"I think so too," he agreed with me, and his readiness, strangely
+enough, did not make him less enigmatical in the least.
+
+"A curse is an evil spell," I tried him again. "And the important, the
+great problem, is to find the means to break it."
+
+"Yes. To find the means."
+
+That was also an assent, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.
+We had crossed diagonally the open space before the theatre, and began
+to descend a broad, sparely frequented street in the direction of one of
+the smaller bridges. He kept on by my side without speaking for a long
+time.
+
+"You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?" I asked.
+
+He was silent for so long that I began to think I had been indiscreet,
+and should get no answer at all. Yet on looking at him I almost believed
+that my question had caused him something in the nature of positive
+anguish. I detected it mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he
+put a great force stealthily. Once, however, he had overcome that sort
+of agonizing hesitation sufficiently to tell me that he had no such
+intention, he became rather communicative--at least relatively to
+the former off-hand curtness of his speeches. The tone, too, was more
+amiable. He informed me that he intended to study and also to write. He
+went even so far as to tell me he had been to Stuttgart. Stuttgart, I
+was aware, was one of the revolutionary centres. The directing committee
+of one of the Russian parties (I can't tell now which) was located in
+that town. It was there that he got into touch with the active work of
+the revolutionists outside Russia.
+
+"I have never been abroad before," he explained, in a rather inanimate
+voice now. Then, after a slight hesitation, altogether different from
+the agonizing irresolution my first simple question "whether he meant to
+stay in Geneva" had aroused, he made me an unexpected confidence--
+
+"The fact is, I have received a sort of mission from them."
+
+"Which will keep you here in Geneva?"
+
+"Yes. Here. In this odious...."
+
+I was satisfied with my faculty for putting two and two together when I
+drew the inference that the mission had something to do with the
+person of the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I kept that surmise to myself
+naturally, and Mr. Razumov said nothing more for some considerable time.
+It was only when we were nearly on the bridge we had been making for
+that he opened his lips again, abruptly--
+
+"Could I see that precious article anywhere?"
+
+I had to think for a moment before I saw what he was referring to.
+
+"It has been reproduced in parts by the Press here. There are files to
+be seen in various places. My copy of the English newspaper I have left
+with Miss Haldin, I remember, on the day after it reached me. I was
+sufficiently worried by seeing it lying on a table by the side of the
+poor mother's chair for weeks. Then it disappeared. It was a relief, I
+assure you."
+
+He had stopped short.
+
+"I trust," I continued, "that you will find time to see these ladies
+fairly often--that you will make time."
+
+He stared at me so queerly that I hardly know how to define his aspect.
+I could not understand it in this connexion at all. What ailed him? I
+asked myself. What strange thought had come into his head? What vision
+of all the horrors that can be seen in his hopeless country had come
+suddenly to haunt his brain? If it were anything connected with the fate
+of Victor Haldin, then I hoped earnestly he would keep it to himself
+for ever. I was, to speak plainly, so shocked that I tried to conceal my
+impression by--Heaven forgive me--a smile and the assumption of a light
+manner.
+
+"Surely," I exclaimed, "that needn't cost you a great effort."
+
+He turned away from me and leaned over the parapet of the bridge. For a
+moment I waited, looking at his back. And yet, I assure you, I was not
+anxious just then to look at his face again. He did not move at all. He
+did not mean to move. I walked on slowly on my way towards the station,
+and at the end of the bridge I glanced over my shoulder. No, he had not
+moved. He hung well over the parapet, as if captivated by the smooth
+rush of the blue water under the arch. The current there is swift,
+extremely swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at
+it for any length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly
+snatched away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the
+suggestion of irresistible power and of headlong motion.
+
+It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov. I left him hanging far over
+the parapet of the bridge. The way he had behaved to me could not be put
+down to mere boorishness. There was something else under his scorn and
+impatience. Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to hidden truth,
+it was the same thing which had kept him over a week, nearly ten days
+indeed, from coming near Miss Haldin. But what it was I could not tell.
+
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
+rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
+granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov's breast,
+it could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of
+his life had deposited there.
+
+"What is the meaning of all this?" he thought, staring downwards at
+the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
+air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
+disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. "Why has that
+meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
+tale of a crazy old woman?"
+
+He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
+reference to the young girl. "A crazy old woman," he repeated to
+himself. "It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd?
+But no! I am wrong! I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may
+be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one
+to guard against it? It puts to rout one's intelligence. The more
+intelligent one is the less one suspects an absurdity."
+
+A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
+leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking,
+like a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his
+thought had some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
+
+"After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
+insignificant--absolutely. The craze of an old woman--the fussy
+officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
+the way? Haven't I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven't I just? That's
+the way to treat these meddlesome persons. Is it possible that he still
+stands behind my back, waiting?"
+
+Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine. It was not fear. He was
+certain that it was not fear--not fear for himself--but it was, all the
+same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he
+knew without being able to put a name on the personality. But the
+recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet
+tranquillized him for a time. It was too stupid to suppose that he
+should be wasting his time in waiting. It was unnecessary to look round
+and make sure.
+
+But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the
+newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a
+damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could
+be capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him--the sport of
+revolution--a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And
+what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, "Won't the truth do?"
+
+Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone coping over which he was
+leaning with force. "Won't the truth do? The truth for the crazy old
+mother of the--"
+
+The young man shuddered again. Yes. The truth would do! Apparently
+it would do. Exactly. And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
+unspoken words cynically. "Fall on my neck in gratitude, no doubt," he
+jeered mentally. But this mood abandoned him at once. He felt sad, as
+if his heart had become empty suddenly. "Well, I must be cautious," he
+concluded, coming to himself as though his brain had been awakened from
+a trance. "There is nothing, no one, too insignificant, too absurd to be
+disregarded," he thought wearily. "I must be cautious."
+
+Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from the balustrade and,
+retracing his steps along the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
+where, for a few days, he led a solitary and retired existence. He
+neglected Peter Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the Stuttgart
+group; he never went near the refugee revolutionists, to whom he had
+been introduced on his arrival. He kept out of that world altogether.
+And he felt that such conduct, causing surprise and arousing suspicion,
+contained an element of danger for himself.
+
+This is not to say that during these few days he never went out. I met
+him several times in the streets, but he gave me no recognition.
+Once, going home after an evening call on the ladies Haldin, I saw him
+crossing the dark roadway of the Boulevard des Philosophes. He had a
+broad-brimmed soft hat, and the collar of his coat turned up. I watched
+him make straight for the house, but, instead of going in, he stopped
+opposite the still lighted windows, and after a time went away down a
+side-street.
+
+I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin yet. Miss Haldin told
+me he was reluctant; moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin
+had changed. She seemed to think now that her son was living, and she
+perhaps awaited his arrival. Her immobility in the great arm-chair in
+front of the window had an air of expectancy, even when the blind was
+down and the lamps lighted.
+
+For my part, I was convinced that she had received her death-stroke;
+Miss Haldin, to whom, of course, I said nothing of my forebodings,
+thought that no good would come from introducing Mr. Razumov just then,
+an opinion which I shared fully. I knew that she met the young man on
+the Bastions. Once or twice I saw them strolling slowly up the main
+alley. They met every day for weeks. I avoided passing that way during
+the hour when Miss Haldin took her exercise there. One day, however,
+in a fit of absent-mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon her
+walking alone. I stopped to exchange a few words. Mr. Razumov failed to
+turn up, and we began to talk about him--naturally.
+
+"Did he tell you anything definite about your brother's activities--his
+end?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"No," admitted Miss Haldin, with some hesitation. "Nothing definite."
+
+I understood well enough that all their conversations must have been
+referred mentally to that dead man who had brought them together. That
+was unavoidable. But it was in the living man that she was interested.
+That was unavoidable too, I suppose. And as I pushed my inquiries
+I discovered that he had disclosed himself to her as a by no means
+conventional revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of theories, of
+men too. I was rather pleased at that--but I was a little puzzled.
+
+"His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle," Miss Haldin
+explained. "Of course, he is an actual worker too," she added.
+
+"And do you understand him?" I inquired point-blank.
+
+She hesitated again. "Not altogether," she murmured.
+
+I perceived that he had fascinated her by an assumption of mysterious
+reserve.
+
+"Do you know what I think?" she went on, breaking through her reserved,
+almost reluctant attitude: "I think that he is observing, studying me,
+to discover whether I am worthy of his trust...."
+
+"And that pleases you?"
+
+She kept mysteriously silent for a moment. Then with energy, but in a
+confidential tone--
+
+"I am convinced;" she declared, "that this extraordinary man is
+meditating some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by
+it--he suffers from it--and from being alone in the world."
+
+"And so he's looking for helpers?" I commented, turning away my head.
+
+Again there was a silence.
+
+"Why not?" she said at last.
+
+The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign friend, had fallen
+into a distant background. But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was
+absolutely nowhere now. And this thought consoled me. Yet I saw the
+gigantic shadow of Russian life deepening around her like the darkness
+of an advancing night. It would devour her presently. I inquired after
+Mrs. Haldin--that other victim of the deadly shade.
+
+A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank eyes. Mother seemed no
+worse, but if I only knew what strange fancies she had sometimes! Then
+Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch, declared that she could not stay a
+moment longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off lightly.
+
+Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that day. Incomprehensible
+youth!
+
+But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing the Place Mollard, I
+caught sight of him boarding a South Shore tramcar.
+
+"He's going to the Chateau Borel," I thought.
+
+
+After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half
+a mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two
+straight lines of shady trees. Across the roadway in the sunshine a
+short wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out
+had an intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly
+slopes on the opposite shore. The whole view, with the harbour jetties
+of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to
+the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting
+promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering
+quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with
+contempt. He thought it odious--oppressively odious--in its unsuggestive
+finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after
+centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the
+entrance to the grounds of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark
+weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
+wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for
+a very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey
+stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small
+side entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
+as though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov,
+trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
+
+"Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently," he muttered
+to himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he
+looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the
+clean, broad avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms
+hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in
+lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.
+
+"Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!" Razumov muttered to himself. "A brute,
+all the same."
+
+Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of
+the drive, trying to think of nothing--to rest his head, to rest his
+emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house
+he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
+mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped
+short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow
+arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept
+narrow flower-bed along its foot.
+
+"It is here!" he thought, with a sort of awe. "It is here--on this very
+spot...."
+
+He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
+with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move,
+and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but
+because he knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could
+not leave Geneva. He recognized, even without thinking, that it was
+impossible. It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral
+suicide. It would have been also physically dangerous. Slowly he
+ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish
+stone urns of funereal aspect.
+
+Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
+discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
+shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had
+been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter
+Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his approach.
+
+The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared head of Europe's greatest
+feminist accentuated the dubiousness of his status in the house rented
+by Madame de S--, his Egeria. His aspect combined the formality of the
+caller with the freedom of the proprietor. Florid and bearded and masked
+by the dark blue glasses, he met the visitor, and at once took him
+familiarly under the arm.
+
+Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by an effort which the
+constant necessity of prudence had rendered almost mechanical. And
+this necessity had settled his expression in a cast of austere, almost
+fanatical, aloofness. The "heroic fugitive," impressed afresh by the
+severe detachment of this new arrival from revolutionary Russia, took a
+conciliatory, even a confidential tone. Madame de S-- was resting after
+a bad night. She often had bad nights. He had left his hat upstairs on
+the landing and had come down to suggest to his young friend a stroll
+and a good open-hearted talk in one of the shady alleys behind the
+house. After voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at the unmoved
+face by his side, and could not restrain himself from exclaiming--
+
+"On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary person."
+
+"I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch. If I were really an
+extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden
+in Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of--what's the name of the
+Commune this place belongs to?... Never mind--the heart of democracy,
+anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as
+much value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians,
+wandering abroad."
+
+But Peter Ivanovitch dissented emphatically--
+
+"No! No! You are not ordinary. I have some experience of Russians who
+are--well--living abroad. You appear to me, and to others too, a marked
+personality."
+
+"What does he mean by this?" Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes
+fully on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a
+meditative seriousness.
+
+"You don't suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I have not heard of you
+from various points where you made yourself known on your way here? I
+have had letters."
+
+"Oh, we are great in talking about each other," interjected Razumov, who
+had listened with great attention. "Gossip, tales, suspicions, and
+all that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny,
+even."
+
+In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very well to conceal the
+feeling of anxiety which had come over him. At the same time he was
+saying to himself that there could be no earthly reason for anxiety. He
+was relieved by the evident sincerity of the protesting voice.
+
+"Heavens!" cried Peter Ivanovitch. "What are you talking about? What
+reason can _you_ have to...?"
+
+The great exile flung up his arms as if words had failed him in sober
+truth. Razumov was satisfied. Yet he was moved to continue in the same
+vein.
+
+"I am talking of the poisonous plants which flourish in the world of
+conspirators, like evil mushrooms in a dark cellar."
+
+"You are casting aspersions," remonstrated Peter Ivanovitch, "which as
+far as you are concerned--"
+
+"No!" Razumov interrupted without heat. "Indeed, I don't want to cast
+aspersions, but it's just as well to have no illusions."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance of his dark spectacles,
+accompanied by a faint smile.
+
+"The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one," he
+said, in a very friendly tone. "But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
+You aim at stoicism."
+
+"Stoicism! That's a pose of the Greeks and the Romans. Let's leave
+it to them. We are Russians, that is--children; that is--sincere; that
+is--cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose."
+
+A long silence ensued. They strolled slowly under the lime-trees.
+Peter Ivanovitch had put his hands behind his back. Razumov felt the
+ungravelled ground of the deeply shaded walk damp and as if slippery
+under his feet. He asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were saying the
+right things. The direction of the conversation ought to have been more
+under his control, he reflected. The great man appeared to be reflecting
+on his side too. He cleared his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at
+once a painful reawakening of scorn and fear.
+
+"I am astonished," began Peter Ivanovitch gently. "Supposing you are
+right in your indictment, how can you raise any question of calumny
+or gossip, in your case? It is unreasonable. The fact is, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, there is not enough known of you to give hold to gossip or
+even calumny. Just now you are a man associated with a great deed, which
+had been hoped for, and tried for too, without success. People have
+perished for attempting that which you and Haldin have done at last. You
+come to us out of Russia, with that prestige. But you cannot deny that
+you have not been communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met
+imparted their impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I
+form my own opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out
+of the common. That's positively so. You are close, very close. This
+taciturnity, this severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in
+you, inspires hopes and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There
+is something of a Brutus...."
+
+"Pray spare me those classical allusions!" burst out Razumov nervously.
+"What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
+say," he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, "that the Russian
+revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
+clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps,
+pondering.
+
+"Not _all_ patricians," he muttered at last. "But you, at any rate, are
+one of _us_."
+
+Razumov smiled bitterly.
+
+"To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer," he said in a sneering tone. "I
+am not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck.
+I have no name, I have no...."
+
+The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace
+and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
+entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.
+
+"But, my dear young friend!" he cried. "My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch...."
+
+Razumov shook his head.
+
+"The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I
+have no legal right to--but what of that? I don't wish to claim it.
+I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my
+mother's grandfather was a peasant--a serf. See how much I am one of
+_you_. I don't want anyone to claim me. But Russia _can't_ disown me.
+She cannot!"
+
+Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
+
+"I am _it_!"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
+vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity
+was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he
+thought, with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark
+glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he
+fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but
+with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on
+that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming
+light-headed. "It is not what is expected of me," he repeated to
+himself. "It is not what is--I could get away by breaking the fastening
+on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock.
+Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat!
+These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing.
+They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade--but I
+would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?" he asked
+himself in a fright.
+
+The great man was heard--musing in an undertone.
+
+"H'm, yes! That--no doubt--in a certain sense...." He raised his
+voice. "There is a deal of pride about you...."
+
+The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring,
+acknowledging, in a way, Razumov's claim to peasant descent.
+
+"A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo. And I don't say that you have no
+justification for it. I have admitted you had. I have ventured to allude
+to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance
+to it. You are one of us--_un des notres_. I reflect on that with
+satisfaction."
+
+"I attach some importance to it also," said Razumov quietly. "I won't
+even deny that it may have some importance for you too," he continued,
+after a slight pause and with a touch of grimness of which he was
+himself aware, with some annoyance. He hoped it had escaped the
+perception of Peter Ivanovitch. "But suppose we talk no more about it?"
+
+"Well, we shall not--not after this one time, Kirylo Sidorovitch,"
+persisted the noble arch-priest of Revolution. "This shall be the last
+occasion. You cannot believe for a moment that I had the slightest idea
+of wounding your feelings. You are clearly a superior nature--that's how
+I read you. Quite above the common--h'm--susceptibilities. But the fact
+is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I don't know your susceptibilities. Nobody, out
+of Russia, knows much of you--as yet!"
+
+"You have been watching me?" suggested Razumov.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect frankness, but as they
+turned their faces to each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
+spectacles. Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch hinted that he had felt
+for some time the need of meeting a man of energy and character, in view
+of a certain project. He said nothing more precise, however; and after
+some critical remarks upon the personalities of the various members
+of the committee of revolutionary action in Stuttgart, he let the
+conversation lapse for quite a long while. They paced the alley from end
+to end. Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a
+glance at the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited.
+With its grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from
+top to bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very
+well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
+futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly
+rumour had it, by Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
+deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another
+sort. Razumov had never seen Madame de S-- but in the carriage.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
+
+"Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
+leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people.
+Now, if you ask me what are the dregs of a people--h'm--it would take
+too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
+that for me go to the making up of these dregs--of that which ought,
+_must_ remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be subject
+to discussion. But I can tell you what is _not_ the dregs. On that it
+is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the
+dregs; neither is its highest class--well--the nobility. Reflect on
+that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection.
+Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or
+development, is--well--dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
+Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second thing I would
+offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment there yawns
+a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by
+foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or cheating.
+Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up."
+
+A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
+feminist. He seized Razumov's arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
+shake.
+
+"Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
+up."
+
+Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
+
+"Don't you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
+subject?" he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased
+the distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went
+on strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words
+and theories could never fill that chasm. No meditation was necessary.
+A sacrifice of many lives could alone--He fell silent without finishing
+the phrase.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head slowly. After a moment he
+proposed that they should go and see if Madame de S-- was now visible.
+
+"We shall get some tea," he said, turning out of the shaded gloomy walk
+with a brisker step.
+
+The lady companion had been on the look out. Her dark skirt whisked into
+the doorway as the two men came in sight round the corner. She ran off
+somewhere altogether, and had disappeared when they entered the hall. In
+the crude light falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the black
+and white tessellated floor, covered with muddy tracks, their footsteps
+echoed faintly. The great feminist led the way up the stairs. On the
+balustrade of the first-floor landing a shiny tall hat reposed, rim
+upwards, opposite the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it
+was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by
+fugitive revolutionists. The cracked white paint of the panels, the
+tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but
+dust and emptiness within. Before turning the massive brass handle,
+Peter Ivanovitch gave his young companion a sharp, partly critical,
+partly preparatory glance.
+
+"No one is perfect," he murmured discreetly. Thus, the possessor of a
+rare jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no
+gem perhaps is flawless.
+
+He remained with his hand on the door-handle so long that Razumov
+assented by a moody "No."
+
+"Perfection itself would not produce that effect," pursued Peter
+Ivanovitch, "in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a
+mind--no!--the quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand
+any perplexity you may be suffering from by the irresistible,
+enlightening force of sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before
+that--that--inspired, yes, inspired penetration, this true light of
+femininity."
+
+The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy steadfastness gave his
+face an air of absolute conviction. Razumov felt a momentary shrinking
+before that closed door.
+
+"Penetration? Light," he stammered out. "Do you mean some sort of
+thought-reading?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
+
+"I mean something utterly different," he retorted, with a faint, pitying
+smile.
+
+Razumov began to feel angry, very much against his wish.
+
+"This is very mysterious," he muttered through his teeth.
+
+"You don't object to being understood, to being guided?" queried the
+great feminist. Razumov exploded in a fierce whisper.
+
+"In what sense? Be pleased to understand that I am a serious person. Who
+do you take me for?"
+
+They looked at each other very closely. Razumov's temper was cooled
+by the impenetrable earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his stare.
+Peter Ivanovitch turned the handle at last.
+
+"You shall know directly," he said, pushing the door open.
+
+A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the room.
+
+"_Enfin_."
+
+In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking the view, Peter
+Ivanovitch boomed in a hearty tone with something boastful in it.
+
+"Yes. Here I am!"
+
+He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who waited for him to move on.
+
+"And I am bringing you a proved conspirator--a real one this time. _Un
+vrai celui la_."
+
+This pause in the doorway gave the "proved conspirator" time to make
+sure that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his mental
+disgust.
+
+These sentiments stand confessed in Mr. Razumov's memorandum of
+his first interview with Madame de S--. The very words I use in my
+narrative are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected. The
+record, which could not have been meant for anyone's eyes but his own,
+was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion
+common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable
+existence of "compromising documents" in all the plots and conspiracies
+of history. Mr. Razumov looked at it, I suppose, as a man looks at
+himself in a mirror, with wonder, perhaps with anguish, with anger or
+despair. Yes, as a threatened man may look fearfully at his own face in
+the glass, formulating to himself reassuring excuses for his appearance
+marked by the taint of some insidious hereditary disease.
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Egeria of the "Russian Mazzini" produced, at first view, a strong
+effect by the death-like immobility of an obviously painted face. The
+eyes appeared extraordinarily brilliant. The figure, in a close-fitting
+dress, admirably made, but by no means fresh, had an elegant stiffness.
+The rasping voice inviting him to sit down; the rigidity of the upright
+attitude with one arm extended along the back of the sofa, the white
+gleam of the big eyeballs setting off the black, fathomless stare of the
+enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than anything he had seen since
+his hasty and secret departure from St. Petersburg. A witch in Parisian
+clothes, he thought. A portent! He actually hesitated in his advance,
+and did not even comprehend, at first, what the rasping voice was
+saying.
+
+"Sit down. Draw your chair nearer me. There--"
+
+He sat down. At close quarters the rouged cheekbones, the wrinkles, the
+fine lines on each side of the vivid lips, astounded him. He was being
+received graciously, with a smile which made him think of a grinning
+skull.
+
+"We have been hearing about you for some time."
+
+He did not know what to say, and murmured some disconnected words. The
+grinning skull effect vanished.
+
+"And do you know that the general complaint is that you have shown
+yourself very reserved everywhere?"
+
+Razumov remained silent for a time, thinking of his answer.
+
+"I, don't you see, am a man of action," he said huskily, glancing
+upwards.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch stood in portentous expectant silence by the side of
+his chair. A slight feeling of nausea came over Razumov. What could be
+the relations of these two people to each other? She like a galvanized
+corpse out of some Hoffman's Tale--he the preacher of feminist gospel
+for all the world, and a super-revolutionist besides! This ancient,
+painted mummy with unfathomable eyes, and this burly, bull-necked,
+deferential...what was it? Witchcraft, fascination.... "It's for
+her money," he thought. "She has millions!"
+
+The walls, the floor of the room were bare like a barn. The few pieces
+of furniture had been discovered in the garrets and dragged down into
+service without having been properly dusted, even. It was the refuse the
+banker's widow had left behind her. The windows without curtains had an
+indigent, sleepless look. In two of them the dirty yellowy-white blinds
+had been pulled down. All this spoke, not of poverty, but of sordid
+penuriousness.
+
+The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily--
+
+"You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I have been shamefully
+robbed, positively ruined."
+
+A rattling laugh, which seemed beyond her control, interrupted her for a
+moment.
+
+"A slavish nature would find consolation in the fact that the principal
+robber was an exalted and almost a sacrosanct person--a Grand Duke, in
+fact. Do you understand, Mr. Razumov? A Grand Duke--No! You have no idea
+what thieves those people are! Downright thieves!"
+
+Her bosom heaved, but her left arm remained rigidly extended along the
+back of the couch.
+
+"You will only upset yourself," breathed out a deep voice, which, to
+Razumov's startled glance, seemed to proceed from under the steady
+spectacles of Peter Ivanovitch, rather than from his lips, which had
+hardly moved.
+
+"What of hat? I say thieves! _Voleurs! Voleurs!_"
+
+Razumov was quite confounded by this unexpected clamour, which had in
+it something of wailing and croaking, and more than a suspicion of
+hysteria.
+
+"_Voleurs! Voleurs! Vol_...."
+
+"No power on earth can rob you of your genius," shouted Peter Ivanovitch
+in an overpowering bass, but without stirring, without a gesture of any
+kind. A profound silence fell.
+
+Razumov remained outwardly impassive. "What is the meaning of this
+performance?" he was asking himself. But with a preliminary sound
+of bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a
+threadbare black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on
+her heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously
+too heavy for her. Razumov made an instinctive movement to help, which
+startled her so much that she nearly dropped her hissing burden. She
+managed, however, to land it on the table, and looked so frightened that
+Razumov hastened to sit down. She produced then, from an adjacent room,
+four glass tumblers, a teapot, and a sugar-basin, on a black iron tray.
+
+The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly--
+
+"_Les gateaux_? Have you remembered to bring the cakes?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, without a word, marched out on to the landing, and
+returned instantly with a parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which
+he must have extracted from the interior of his hat. With imperturbable
+gravity he undid the string and smoothed the paper open on a part of the
+table within reach of Madame de S--'s hand. The lady companion poured
+out the tea, then retired into a distant corner out of everybody's
+sight. From time to time Madame de S-- extended a claw-like hand,
+glittering with costly rings, towards the paper of cakes, took up one
+and devoured it, displaying her big false teeth ghoulishly. Meantime she
+talked in a hoarse tone of the political situation in the Balkans. She
+built great hopes on some complication in the peninsula for arousing
+a great movement of national indignation in Russia against "these
+thieves--thieves thieves."
+
+"You will only upset yourself," Peter Ivanovitch interposed, raising
+his glassy gaze. He smoked cigarettes and drank tea in silence,
+continuously. When he had finished a glass, he flourished his hand
+above his shoulder. At that signal the lady companion, ensconced in her
+corner, with round eyes like a watchful animal, would dart out to the
+table and pour him out another tumblerful.
+
+Razumov looked at her once or twice. She was anxious, tremulous, though
+neither Madame de S-- nor Peter Ivanovitch paid the slightest attention
+to her. "What have they done between them to that forlorn creature?"
+Razumov asked himself. "Have they terrified her out of her senses with
+ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?" When she gave him
+his second glass of tea, he noticed that her lips trembled in the manner
+of a scared person about to burst into speech. But of course she said
+nothing, and retired into her corner, as if hugging to herself the smile
+of thanks he gave her.
+
+"She may be worth cultivating," thought Razumov suddenly.
+
+He was calming down, getting hold of the actuality into which he had
+been thrown--for the first time perhaps since Victor Haldin had entered
+his room...and had gone out again. He was distinctly aware of being
+the object of the famous--or notorious--Madame de S--'s ghastly
+graciousness.
+
+Madame de S-- was pleased to discover that this young man was different
+from the other types of revolutionist members of committees, secret
+emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough students,
+ex-cobblers with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged enthusiasts,
+Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come and go
+around Peter Ivanovitch--fanatics, pedants, proletarians all. It was
+pleasant to talk to this young man of notably good appearance--for
+Madame de S-- was not always in a mystical state of mind. Razumov's
+taciturnity only excited her to a quicker, more voluble utterance. It
+still dealt with the Balkans. She knew all the statesmen of that region,
+Turks, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Roumanians, Greeks, Armenians, and
+nondescripts, young and old, the living and the dead. With some money an
+intrigue could be started which would set the Peninsula in a blaze and
+outrage the sentiment of the Russian people. A cry of abandoned brothers
+could be raised, and then, with the nation seething with indignation, a
+couple of regiments or so would be enough to begin a military revolution
+in St. Petersburg and make an end of these thieves....
+
+"Apparently I've got only to sit still and listen," the silent Razumov
+thought to himself. "As to that hairy and obscene brute" (in such terms
+did Mr. Razumov refer mentally to the popular expounder of a feministic
+conception of social state), "as to him, for all his cunning he too
+shall speak out some day."
+
+Razumov ceased to think for a moment. Then a sombre-toned reflection
+formulated itself in his mind, ironical and bitter. "I have the gift of
+inspiring confidence." He heard himself laughing aloud. It was like a
+goad to the painted, shiny-eyed harridan on the sofa.
+
+"You may well laugh!" she cried hoarsely. "What else can one do!
+Perfect swindlers--and what base swindlers at that! Cheap
+Germans--Holstein-Gottorps! Though, indeed, it's hardly safe to say who
+and what they are. A family that counts a creature like Catherine the
+Great in its ancestry--you understand!"
+
+"You are only upsetting yourself," said Peter Ivanovitch, patiently but
+in a firm tone. This admonition had its usual effect on the Egeria. She
+dropped her thick, discoloured eyelids and changed her position on the
+sofa. All her angular and lifeless movements seemed completely automatic
+now that her eyes were closed. Presently she opened them very full.
+Peter Ivanovitch drank tea steadily, without haste.
+
+"Well, I declare!" She addressed Razumov directly. "The people who have
+seen you on your way here are right. You are very reserved. You haven't
+said twenty words altogether since you came in. You let nothing of your
+thoughts be seen in your face either."
+
+"I have been listening, Madame," said Razumov, using French for the
+first time, hesitatingly, not being certain of his accent. But it seemed
+to produce an excellent impression. Madame de S-- looked meaningly into
+Peter Ivanovitch's spectacles, as if to convey her conviction of this
+young man's merit. She even nodded the least bit in his direction, and
+Razumov heard her murmur under her breath the words, "Later on in
+the diplomatic service," which could not but refer to the favourable
+impression he had made. The fantastic absurdity of it revolted him
+because it seemed to outrage his ruined hopes with the vision of a
+mock-career. Peter Ivanovitch, impassive as though he were deaf, drank
+some more tea. Razumov felt that he must say something.
+
+"Yes," he began deliberately, as if uttering a meditated opinion.
+"Clearly. Even in planning a purely military revolution the temper of
+the people should be taken into account."
+
+"You have understood me perfectly. The discontent should be
+spiritualized. That is what the ordinary heads of revolutionary
+committees will not understand. They aren't capable of it. For instance,
+Mordatiev was in Geneva last month. Peter Ivanovitch brought him here.
+You know Mordatiev? Well, yes--you have heard of him. They call him
+an eagle--a hero! He has never done half as much as you have. Never
+attempted--not half...."
+
+Madame de S-- agitated herself angularly on the sofa.
+
+"We, of course, talked to him. And do you know what he said to me?
+'What have we to do with Balkan intrigues? We must simply extirpate the
+scoundrels.' Extirpate is all very well--but what then? The imbecile!
+I screamed at him, 'But you must spiritualize--don't you
+understand?--spiritualize the discontent.'..."
+
+She felt nervously in her pocket for a handkerchief; she pressed it to
+her lips.
+
+"Spiritualize?" said Razumov interrogatively, watching her heaving
+breast. The long ends of an old black lace scarf she wore over her head
+slipped off her shoulders and hung down on each side of her ghastly rosy
+cheeks.
+
+"An odious creature," she burst out again. "Imagine a man who takes five
+lumps of sugar in his tea.... Yes, I said spiritualize! How else can
+you make discontent effective and universal?"
+
+"Listen to this, young man." Peter Ivanovitch made himself heard
+solemnly. "Effective and universal."
+
+Razumov looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"Some say hunger will do that," he remarked.
+
+"Yes. I know. Our people are starving in heaps. But you can't make
+famine universal. And it is not despair that we want to create. There is
+no moral support to be got out of that. It is indignation...."
+
+Madame de S-- let her thin, extended arm sink on her knees.
+
+"I am not a Mordatiev," began Razumov.
+
+"Bien sur!" murmured Madame de S--.
+
+"Though I too am ready to say extirpate, extirpate! But in my ignorance
+of political work, permit me to ask: A Balkan--well--intrigue, wouldn't
+that take a very long time?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch got up and moved off quietly, to stand with his face to
+the window. Razumov heard a door close; he turned his head and perceived
+that the lady companion had scuttled out of the room.
+
+"In matters of politics I am a supernaturalist." Madame de S-- broke
+the silence harshly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch moved away from the window and struck Razumov lightly
+on the shoulder. This was a signal for leaving, but at the same time he
+addressed Madame de S-- in a peculiar reminding tone---
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+Whatever it meant, she did not seem to hear him. She leaned back in the
+corner of the sofa like a wooden figure. The immovable peevishness of
+the face, framed in the limp, rusty lace, had a character of cruelty.
+
+"As to extirpating," she croaked at the attentive Razumov, "there is
+only one class in Russia which must be extirpated. Only one. And that
+class consists of only one family. You understand me? That one family
+must be extirpated."
+
+Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigor of a corpse galvanized into
+harsh speech and glittering stare by the force of murderous hate. The
+sight fascinated Razumov--yet he felt more self-possessed than at
+any other time since he had entered this weirdly bare room. He was
+interested. But the great feminist by his side again uttered his
+appeal--
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She disregarded it. Her carmine lips vaticinated with an extraordinary
+rapidity. The liberating spirit would use arms before which rivers would
+part like Jordan, and ramparts fall down like the walls of Jericho. The
+deliverance from bondage would be effected by plagues and by signs, by
+wonders and by war. The women....
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She ceased; she had heard him at last. She pressed her hand to her
+forehead.
+
+"What is it? Ah yes! That girl--the sister of...."
+
+It was Miss Haldin that she meant. That young girl and her mother had
+been leading a very retired life. They were provincial ladies--were they
+not? The mother had been very beautiful--traces were left yet. Peter
+Ivanovitch, when he called there for the first time, was greatly
+struck....But the cold way they received him was really surprising.
+
+"He is one of our national glories," Madams de S-- cried out, with
+sudden vehemence. "All the world listens to him."
+
+"I don't know these ladies," said Razumov loudly rising from his chair.
+
+"What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I understand that she was
+talking to you here, in the garden, the other day."
+
+"Yes, in the garden," said Razumov gloomily. Then, with an effort, "She
+made herself known to me."
+
+"And then ran away from us all," Madame de S-- continued, with ghastly
+vivacity. "After coming to the very door! What a peculiar proceeding!
+Well, I have been a shy little provincial girl at one time. Yes,
+Razumov" (she fell into this familiarity intentionally, with an
+appalling grimace of graciousness. Razumov gave a perceptible start),
+"yes, that's my origin. A simple provincial family.
+
+"You are a marvel," Peter Ivanovich uttered.
+
+But it was to Razumov that she gave her death's-head smile. Her tone was
+quite imperious.
+
+"You must bring the wild young thing here. She is wanted. I reckon upon
+your success--mind!"
+
+"She is not a wild young thing," muttered Razumov, in a surly voice.
+
+"Well, then--that's all the same. She may be one of these young
+conceited democrats. Do you know what I think? I think she is very much
+like you in character. There is a smouldering fire of scorn in you. You
+are darkly self-sufficient, but I can see your very soul."
+
+Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which, missing Razumov, gave
+him an absurd notion that she was looking at something which was visible
+to her behind him. He cursed himself for an impressionable fool, and
+asked with forced calmness--
+
+"What is it you see? Anything resembling me?"
+
+She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.
+
+"Some sort of phantom in my image?" pursued Razumov slowly. "For, I
+suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There are
+phantoms of the living as well as of the dead."
+
+The tenseness of Madame de S--'s stare had relaxed, and now she looked
+at Razumov in a silence that became disconcerting.
+
+"I myself have had an experience," he stammered out, as if compelled.
+"I've seen a phantom once." The unnaturally red lips moved to frame a
+question harshly.
+
+"Of a dead person?"
+
+"No. Living."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+"No."
+
+"An enemy?"
+
+"I hated him."
+
+"Ah! It was not a woman, then?"
+
+"A woman!" repeated Razumov, his eyes looking straight into the eyes
+of Madame de S--. "Why should it have been a woman? And why this
+conclusion? Why should I not have been able to hate a woman?"
+
+As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman was new to him. At that
+moment he hated Madame de S--. But it was not exactly hate. It was more
+like the abhorrence that may be caused by a wooden or plaster figure of
+a repulsive kind. She moved no more than if she were such a figure; even
+her eyes, whose unwinking stare plunged into his own, though shining,
+were lifeless, as though they were as artificial as her teeth. For the
+first time Razumov became aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was
+it nauseated him exceedingly. Again Peter Ivanovitch tapped him slightly
+on the shoulder. Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away when
+he received the unexpected favour of a bony, inanimate hand extended to
+him, with the two words in hoarse French--
+
+"_Au revoir!_"
+
+He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the room, escorted by the great
+man, who made him go out first. The voice from the sofa cried after
+them--
+
+"You remain here, _Pierre_."
+
+"Certainly, _ma chere amie_."
+
+But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the door behind him. The
+landing was prolonged into a bare corridor, right and left, desolate
+perspectives of white and gold decoration without a strip of carpet. The
+very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and
+a solitary speck reposing on the balustrade of white marble--the silk
+top-hat of the great feminist--asserted itself extremely, black and
+glossy in all that crude whiteness.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch escorted the visitor without opening his lips. Even
+when they had reached the head of the stairs Peter Ivanovitch did not
+break the silence. Razumov's impulse to continue down the flight and out
+of the house without as much as a nod abandoned him suddenly. He stopped
+on the first step and leaned his back against the wall. Below him the
+great hall with its chequered floor of black and white seemed absurdly
+large and like some public place where a great power of resonance awaits
+the provocation of footfalls and voices. As if afraid of awakening the
+loud echoes of that empty house, Razumov adopted a low tone.
+
+"I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch shook his head slightly, very serious.
+
+"Or spend my time in spiritual ecstasies or sublime meditations upon the
+gospel of feminism," continued Razumov. "I made my way here for my share
+of action--action, most respected Peter Ivanovitch! It was not the great
+European writer who attracted me, here, to this odious town of liberty.
+It was somebody much greater. It was the idea of the chief which
+attracted me. There are starving young men in Russia who believe in
+you so much that it seems the only thing that keeps them alive in their
+misery. Think of that, Peter Ivanovitch! No! But only think of that!"
+
+The great man, thus entreated, perfectly motionless and silent, was the
+very image of patient, placid respectability.
+
+"Of course I don't speak of the people. They are brutes," added Razumov,
+in the same subdued but forcible tone. At this, a protesting murmur
+issued from the "heroic fugitive's" beard. A murmur of authority.
+
+"Say--children."
+
+"No! Brutes!" Razumov insisted bluntly.
+
+"But they are sound, they are innocent," the great man pleaded in a
+whisper.
+
+"As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough." Razumov raised his
+voice at last. "And you can't deny the natural innocence of a brute.
+But what's the use of disputing about names? You just try to give these
+children the power and stature of men and see what they will be like.
+You just give it to them and see.... But never mind. I tell you,
+Peter Ivanovitch, that half a dozen young men do not come together
+nowadays in a shabby student's room without your name being whispered,
+not as a leader of thought, but as a centre of revolutionary
+energies--the centre of action. What else has drawn me near you, do you
+think? It is not what all the world knows of you, surely. It's precisely
+what the world at large does not know. I was irresistibly drawn-let us
+say impelled, yes, impelled; or, rather, compelled, driven--driven,"
+repented Razumov loudly, and ceased, as if startled by the hollow
+reverberation of the word "driven" along two bare corridors and in the
+great empty hall.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch did not seem startled in the least. The young man
+could not control a dry, uneasy laugh. The great revolutionist remained
+unmoved with an effect of commonplace, homely superiority.
+
+"Curse him," said Razumov to himself, "he is waiting behind his
+spectacles for me to give myself away." Then aloud, with a satanic
+enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the
+great man--
+
+"Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew--no, which
+_drove_ me towards you! The irresistible force."
+
+He did not feel any desire to laugh now. This time Peter Ivanovitch
+moved his head sideways, knowingly, as much as to say, "Don't I?" This
+expressive movement was almost imperceptible. Razumov went on in secret
+derision--
+
+"All these days you have been trying to read me, Peter Ivanovitch. That
+is natural. I have perceived it and I have been frank. Perhaps you may
+think I have not been very expansive? But with a man like you it was not
+needed; it would have looked like an impertinence, perhaps. And besides,
+we Russians are prone to talk too much as a rule. I have always felt
+that. And yet, as a nation, we are dumb. I assure you that I am not
+likely to talk to you so much again--ha! ha!--"
+
+Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a little nearer to the
+great man.
+
+"You have been condescending enough. I quite understood it was to lead
+me on. You must render me the justice that I have not tried to please. I
+have been impelled, compelled, or rather sent--let us say sent--towards
+you for a work that no one but myself can do. You would call it a
+harmless delusion: a ridiculous delusion at which you don't even smile.
+It is absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember
+these words, I hope. Enough of this. Here I stand before you-confessed!
+But one thing more I must add to complete it: a mere blind tool I can
+never consent to be."
+
+Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared for, he was not prepared
+to have both his hands seized in the great man's grasp. The swiftness of
+the movement was aggressive enough to startle. The burly feminist could
+not have been quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov treacherously
+up on the landing and bundle him behind one of the numerous closed
+doors near by. This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his hands being
+released after a darkly eloquent squeeze, he smiled, with a beating
+heart, straight at the beard and the spectacles hiding that impenetrable
+man.
+
+He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his handwriting), "I won't
+move from here till he either speaks or turns away. This is a duel."
+Many seconds passed without a sign or sound.
+
+"Yes, yes," the great man said hurriedly, in subdued tones, as if the
+whole thing had been a stolen, breathless interview. "Exactly. Come
+to see us here in a few days. This must be gone into deeply--deeply,
+between you and me. Quite to the bottom. To the...And, by the by,
+you must bring along Natalia Victorovna--you know, the Haldin girl....
+
+"Am I to take this as my first instruction from you?" inquired Razumov
+stiffly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new attitude.
+
+"Ah! h'm! You are naturally the proper person--_la personne indiquee_.
+Every one shall be wanted presently. Every one."
+
+He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who had lowered his eyes.
+
+"The moment of action approaches," he murmured.
+
+Razumov did not look up. He did not move till he heard the door of the
+drawing-room close behind the greatest of feminists returning to his
+painted Egeria. Then he walked down slowly into the hall. The door stood
+open, and the shadow of the house was lying aslant over the greatest
+part of the terrace. While crossing it slowly, he lifted his hat and
+wiped his damp forehead, expelling his breath with force to get rid of
+the last vestiges of the air he had been breathing inside. He looked at
+the palms of his hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.
+
+He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an independent
+sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole person very
+distinctly indeed. "This is curious," he thought. After a while he
+formulated his opinion of it in the mental ejaculation: "Beastly!"
+This disgust vanished before a marked uneasiness. "This is an effect of
+nervous exhaustion," he reflected with weary sagacity. "How am I to
+go on day after day if I have no more power of resistance--moral
+resistance?"
+
+He followed the path at the foot of the terrace. "Moral resistance,
+moral resistance;" he kept on repeating these words mentally. Moral
+endurance. Yes, that was the necessity of the situation. An immense
+longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the
+town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept
+everything clean out of his mind for a moment. "Is it possible that I am
+but a weak creature after all?" he asked himself, in sudden alarm. "Eh!
+What's that?"
+
+He gave a start as if awakened from a dream. He even swayed a little
+before recovering himself.
+
+"Ah! You stole away from us quietly to walk about here," he said.
+
+The lady companion stood before him, but how she came there he had not
+the slightest idea. Her folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.
+
+"I have been unconscious as I walked, it's a positive fact," said
+Razumov to himself in wonder. He raised his hat with marked civility.
+
+The sallow woman blushed duskily. She had her invariably scared
+expression, as if somebody had just disclosed to her some terrible news.
+But she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without timidity. "She is
+incredibly shabby," he thought. In the sunlight her black costume looked
+greenish, with here and there threadbare patches where the stuff seemed
+decomposed by age into a velvety, black, furry state. Her very hair and
+eyebrows looked shabby. Razumov wondered whether she were sixty years
+old. Her figure, though, was young enough. He observed that she did not
+appear starved, but rather as if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps
+and leavings of plates.
+
+Razumov smiled amiably and moved out of her way. She turned her head to
+keep her scared eyes on him.
+
+"I know what you have been told in there," she affirmed, without
+preliminaries. Her tone, in contrast with her manner, had an
+unexpectedly assured character which put Razumov at his ease.
+
+"Do you? You must have heard all sorts of talk on many occasions in
+there."
+
+She varied her phrase, with the same incongruous effect of positiveness.
+
+"I know to a certainty what you have been told to do."
+
+"Really?" Razumov shrugged his shoulders a little. He was about to pass
+on with a bow, when a sudden thought struck him. "Yes. To be sure! In
+your confidential position you are aware of many things," he murmured,
+looking at the cat.
+
+That animal got a momentary convulsive hug from the lady companion.
+
+"Everything was disclosed to me a long time ago," she said.
+
+"Everything," Razumov repeated absently.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an awful despot," she jerked out.
+
+Razumov went on studying the stripes on the grey fur of the cat.
+
+"An iron will is an integral part of such a temperament. How else could
+he be a leader? And I think that you are mistaken in--"
+
+"There!" she cried. "You tell me that I am mistaken. But I tell you all
+the same that he cares for no one." She jerked her head up. "Don't you
+bring that girl here. That's what you have been told to do--to bring
+that girl here. Listen to me; you had better tie a stone round her neck
+and throw her into the lake."
+
+Razumov had a sensation of chill and gloom, as if a heavy cloud had
+passed over the sun.
+
+"The girl?" he said. "What have I to do with her?"
+
+"But you have been told to bring Nathalie Haldin here. Am I not right?
+Of course I am right. I was not in the room, but I know. I know Peter
+Ivanovitch sufficiently well. He is a great man. Great men are horrible.
+Well, that's it. Have nothing to do with her. That's the best you
+can do, unless you want her to become like me--disillusioned!
+Disillusioned!"
+
+"Like you," repeated Razumov, glaring at her face, as devoid of all
+comeliness of feature and complexion as the most miserable beggar is
+of money. He smiled, still feeling chilly: a peculiar sensation which
+annoyed him. "Disillusioned as to Peter Ivanovitch! Is that all you have
+lost?"
+
+She declared, looking frightened, but with immense conviction, "Peter
+Ivanovitch stands for everything." Then she added, in another tone,
+"Keep the girl away from this house."
+
+"And are you absolutely inciting me to disobey Peter Ivanovitch just
+because--because you are disillusioned?"
+
+She began to blink.
+
+"Directly I saw you for the first time I was comforted. You took your
+hat off to me. You looked as if one could trust you. Oh!"
+
+She shrank before Razumov's savage snarl of, "I have heard something
+like this before."
+
+She was so confounded that she could do nothing but blink for a long
+time.
+
+"It was your humane manner," she explained plaintively. "I have been
+starving for, I won't say kindness, but just for a little civility, for
+I don't know how long. And now you are angry...."
+
+"But no, on the contrary," he protested. "I am very glad you trust me.
+It's possible that later on I may..."
+
+"Yes, if you were to get ill," she interrupted eagerly, "or meet some
+bitter trouble, you would find I am not a useless fool. You have only to
+let me know. I will come to you. I will indeed. And I will stick to you.
+Misery and I are old acquaintances--but this life here is worse than
+starving."
+
+She paused anxiously, then in a voice for the first time sounding really
+timid, she added--
+
+"Or if you were engaged in some dangerous work. Sometimes a humble
+companion--I would not want to know anything. I would follow you with
+joy. I could carry out orders. I have the courage."
+
+Razumov looked attentively at the scared round eyes, at the withered,
+sallow, round cheeks. They were quivering about the corners of the
+mouth.
+
+"She wants to escape from here," he thought.
+
+"Suppose I were to tell you that I am engaged in dangerous work?" he
+uttered slowly.
+
+She pressed the cat to her threadbare bosom with a breathless
+exclamation. "Ah!" Then not much above a whisper: "Under Peter
+Ivanovitch?"
+
+"No, not under Peter Ivanovitch."
+
+He read admiration in her eyes, and made an effort to smile.
+
+"Then--alone?"
+
+He held up his closed hand with the index raised. "Like this finger," he
+said.
+
+She was trembling slightly. But it occurred to Razumov that they might
+have been observed from the house, and he became anxious to be gone. She
+blinked, raising up to him her puckered face, and seemed to beg mutely
+to be told something more, to be given a word of encouragement for her
+starving, grotesque, and pathetic devotion.
+
+"Can we be seen from the house?" asked Razumov confidentially.
+
+She answered, without showing the slightest surprise at the question--
+
+"No, we can't, on account of this end of the stables." And she added,
+with an acuteness which surprised Razumov, "But anybody looking out of
+an upstairs window would know that you have not passed through the gates
+yet."
+
+"Who's likely to spy out of the window?" queried Razumov. "Peter
+Ivanovitch?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Why should he trouble his head?"
+
+"He expects somebody this afternoon."
+
+"You know the person?"
+
+"There's more than one."
+
+She had lowered her eyelids. Razumov looked at her curiously.
+
+"Of course. You hear everything they say."
+
+She murmured without any animosity--
+
+"So do the tables and chairs."
+
+He understood that the bitterness accumulated in the heart of that
+helpless creature had got into her veins, and, like some subtle poison,
+had decomposed her fidelity to that hateful pair. It was a great piece
+of luck for him, he reflected; because women are seldom venal after the
+manner of men, who can be bought for material considerations. She would
+be a good ally, though it was not likely that she was allowed to hear
+as much as the tables and chairs of the Chateau Borel. That could not be
+expected. But still.... And, at any rate, she could be made to talk.
+
+When she looked up her eyes met the fixed stare of Razumov, who began to
+speak at once.
+
+"Well, well, dear...but upon my word, I haven't the pleasure of
+knowing your name yet. Isn't it strange?"
+
+For the first time she made a movement of the shoulders.
+
+"Is it strange? No one is told my name. No one cares. No one talks to
+me, no one writes to me. My parents don't even know if I'm alive. I have
+no use for a name, and I have almost forgotten it myself."
+
+Razumov murmured gravely, "Yes, but still..."
+
+She went on much slower, with indifference--
+
+"You may call me Tekla, then. My poor Andrei called me so. I was devoted
+to him. He lived in wretchedness and suffering, and died in misery. That
+is the lot of all us Russians, nameless Russians. There is nothing else
+for us, and no hope anywhere, unless..."
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless all these people with names are done away with," she finished,
+blinking and pursing up her lips.
+
+"It will be easier to call you Tekla, as you direct me," said
+Razumov, "if you consent to call me Kirylo, when we are talking like
+this--quietly--only you and me."
+
+And he said to himself, "Here's a being who must be terribly afraid of
+the world, else she would have run away from this situation before."
+Then he reflected that the mere fact of leaving the great man abruptly
+would make her a suspect. She could expect no support or countenance
+from anyone. This revolutionist was not fit for an independent
+existence.
+
+She moved with him a few steps, blinking and nursing the cat with a
+small balancing movement of her arms.
+
+"Yes--only you and I. That's how I was with my poor Andrei, only he was
+dying, killed by these official brutes--while you! You are strong. You
+kill the monsters. You have done a great deed. Peter Ivanovitch himself
+must consider you. Well--don't forget me--especially if you are going
+back to work in Russia. I could follow you, carrying anything that
+was wanted--at a distance, you know. Or I could watch for hours at the
+corner of a street if necessary,--in wet or snow--yes, I could--all day
+long. Or I could write for you dangerous documents, lists of names or
+instructions, so that in case of mischance the handwriting could not
+compromise you. And you need not be afraid if they were to catch me. I
+would know how to keep dumb. We women are not so easily daunted by pain.
+I heard Peter Ivanovitch say it is our blunt nerves or something. We can
+stand it better. And it's true; I would just as soon bite my tongue out
+and throw it at them as not. What's the good of speech to me? Who would
+ever want to hear what I could say? Ever since I closed the eyes of my
+poor Andrei I haven't met a man who seemed to care for the sound of
+my voice. I should never have spoken to you if the very first time you
+appeared here you had not taken notice of me so nicely. I could not help
+speaking of you to that charming dear girl. Oh, the sweet creature! And
+strong! One can see that at once. If you have a heart don't let her set
+her foot in here. Good-bye!"
+
+Razumov caught her by the arm. Her emotion at being thus seized
+manifested itself by a short struggle, after which she stood still, not
+looking at him.
+
+"But you can tell me," he spoke in her ear, "why they--these people in
+that house there--are so anxious to get hold of her?"
+
+She freed herself to turn upon him, as if made angry by the question.
+
+"Don't you understand that Peter Ivanovitch must direct, inspire,
+influence? It is the breath of his life. There can never be too many
+disciples. He can't bear thinking of anyone escaping him. And a woman,
+too! There is nothing to be done without women, he says. He has written
+it. He--"
+
+The young man was staring at her passion when she broke off suddenly and
+ran away behind the stable.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Razumov, thus left to himself, took the direction of the gate. But on
+this day of many conversations, he discovered that very probably he
+could not leave the grounds without having to hold another one.
+
+Stepping in view from beyond the lodge appeared the expected visitors
+of Peter Ivanovitch: a small party composed of two men and a woman. They
+noticed him too, immediately, and stopped short as if to consult. But in
+a moment the woman, moving aside, motioned with her arm to the two men,
+who, leaving the drive at once, struck across the large neglected
+lawn, or rather grass-plot, and made directly for the house. The woman
+remained on the path waiting for Razumov's approach. She had recognized
+him. He, too, had recognized her at the first glance. He had been made
+known to her at Zurich, where he had broken his journey while on his
+way from Dresden. They had been much together for the three days of his
+stay.
+
+She was wearing the very same costume in which he had seen her first. A
+blouse of crimson silk made her noticeable at a distance. With that
+she wore a short brown skirt and a leather belt. Her complexion was
+the colour of coffee and milk, but very clear; her eyes black and
+glittering, her figure erect. A lot of thick hair, nearly white, was
+done up loosely under a dusty Tyrolese hat of dark cloth, which seemed
+to have lost some of its trimmings.
+
+The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov,
+after approaching her close, felt obliged to smile. She greeted him with
+a manly hand-grasp.
+
+"What! Are you going away?" she exclaimed. "How is that, Razumov?"
+
+"I am going away because I haven't been asked to stay," Razumov
+answered, returning the pressure of her hand with much less force than
+she had put into it.
+
+She jerked her head sideways like one who understands. Meantime
+Razumov's eyes had strayed after the two men. They were crossing the
+grass-plot obliquely, without haste. The shorter of the two was buttoned
+up in a narrow overcoat of some thin grey material, which came nearly
+to his heels. His companion, much taller and broader, wore a short,
+close-fitting jacket and tight trousers tucked into shabby top-boots.
+
+The woman, who had sent them out of Razumov's way apparently, spoke in a
+businesslike voice.
+
+"I had to come rushing from Zurich on purpose to meet the train and take
+these two along here to see Peter Ivanovitch. I've just managed it."
+
+"Ah! indeed," Razumov said perfunctorily, and very vexed at her staying
+behind to talk to him "From Zurich--yes, of course. And these two, they
+come from...."
+
+She interrupted, without emphasis--
+
+"From quite another direction. From a distance, too. A considerable
+distance."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. The two men from a distance, after
+having reached the wall of the terrace, disappeared suddenly at its foot
+as if the earth had opened to swallow them up.
+
+"Oh, well, they have just come from America." The woman in the crimson
+blouse shrugged her shoulders too a little before making that statement.
+"The time is drawing near," she interjected, as if speaking to herself.
+"I did not tell them who you were. Yakovlitch would have wanted to
+embrace you."
+
+"Is that he with the wisp of hair hanging from his chin, in the long
+coat?"
+
+"You've guessed aright. That's Yakovlitch."
+
+"And they could not find their way here from the station without you
+coming on purpose from Zurich to show it to them? Verily, without women
+we can do nothing. So it stands written, and apparently so it is."
+
+He was conscious of an immense lassitude under his effort to be
+sarcastic. And he could see that she had detected it with those steady,
+brilliant black eyes.
+
+"What is the matter with you?"
+
+"I don't know. Nothing. I've had a devil of a day."
+
+She waited, with her black eyes fixed on his face. Then--
+
+"What of that? You men are so impressionable and self-conscious. One day
+is like another, hard, hard--and there's an end of it, till the great
+day comes. I came over for a very good reason. They wrote to warn Peter
+Ivanovitch of their arrival. But where from? Only from Cherbourg on a
+bit of ship's notepaper. Anybody could have done that. Yakovlitch has
+lived for years and years in America. I am the only one at hand who had
+known him well in the old days. I knew him very well indeed. So Peter
+Ivanovitch telegraphed, asking me to come. It's natural enough, is it
+not?"
+
+"You came to vouch for his identity?" inquired Razumov.
+
+"Yes. Something of the kind. Fifteen years of a life like his make
+changes in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think
+of Yakovlitch before he went to America--"
+
+The softness of the low tone caused Razumov to glance at her sideways.
+She sighed; her black eyes were looking away; she had plunged the
+fingers of her right hand deep into the mass of nearly white hair, and
+stirred them there absently. When she withdrew her hand the little hat
+perched on the top of her head remained slightly tilted, with a queer
+inquisitive effect, contrasting strongly with the reminiscent murmur
+that escaped her.
+
+"We were not in our first youth even then. But a man is a child always."
+
+Razumov thought suddenly, "They have been living together." Then aloud--
+
+"Why didn't you follow him to America?" he asked point-blank.
+
+She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
+
+"Don't you remember what was going on fifteen years ago? It was a time
+of activity. The Revolution has its history by this time. You are in
+it and yet you don't seem to know it. Yakovlitch went away then on a
+mission; I went back to Russia. It had to be so. Afterwards there was
+nothing for him to come back to."
+
+"Ah! indeed," muttered Razumov, with affected surprise. "Nothing!"
+
+"What are you trying to insinuate" she exclaimed quickly. "Well, and
+what then if he did get discouraged a little...."
+
+"He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee hanging from his chin. A
+regular Uncle Sam," growled Razumov. "Well, and you? You who went to
+Russia? You did not get discouraged."
+
+"Never mind. Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be doubted. He, at any rate,
+is the right sort."
+
+Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon Razumov while she spoke,
+and for a moment afterwards.
+
+"Pardon me," Razumov inquired coldly, "but does it mean that you, for
+instance, think that I am not the right sort?"
+
+She made no protest, gave no sign of having heard the question;
+she continued looking at him in a manner which he judged not to be
+absolutely unfriendly. In Zurich when he passed through she had taken
+him under her charge, in a way, and was with him from morning till night
+during his stay of two days. She took him round to see several people.
+At first she talked to him a great deal and rather unreservedly, but
+always avoiding all reference to herself; towards the middle of the
+second day she fell silent, attending him zealously as before, and even
+seeing him off at the railway station, where she pressed his hand firmly
+through the lowered carriage window, and, stepping back without a word,
+waited till the train moved. He had noticed that she was treated with
+quiet regard. He knew nothing of her parentage, nothing of her private
+history or political record; he judged her from his own private point of
+view, as being a distinct danger in his path. "Judged" is not perhaps
+the right word. It was more of a feeling, the summing up of slight
+impressions aided by the discovery that he could not despise her as he
+despised all the others. He had not expected to see her again so soon.
+
+No, decidedly; her expression was not unfriendly. Yet he perceived an
+acceleration in the beat of his heart. The conversation could not be
+abandoned at that point. He went on in accents of scrupulous inquiry--
+
+"Is it perhaps because I don't seem to accept blindly every development
+of the general doctrine--such for instance as the feminism of our great
+Peter Ivanovitch? If that is what makes me suspect, then I can only say
+I would scorn to be a slave even to an idea."
+
+She had been looking at him all the time, not as a listener looks
+at one, but as if the words he chose to say were only of secondary
+interest. When he finished she slipped her hand, by a sudden and decided
+movement, under his arm and impelled him gently towards the gate of the
+grounds. He felt her firmness and obeyed the impulsion at once, just as
+the other two men had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the wave
+of her hand.
+
+They made a few steps like this.
+
+"No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all right," she said. "You may be
+valuable--very valuable. What's the matter with you is that you don't
+like us."
+
+She released him. He met her with a frosty smile.
+
+"Am I expected then to have love as well as convictions?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You know very well what I mean. People have been thinking you not quite
+whole-hearted. I have heard that opinion from one side and another. But
+I have understood you at the end of the first day...."
+
+Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
+
+"I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault here."
+
+"What phrases he uses!" she exclaimed parenthetically. "Ah! Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and
+afraid of trifles. Moreover, you had no training. What you want is to
+be taken in hand by some woman. I am sorry I am not staying here a few
+days. I am going back to Zurich to-morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch
+with me most likely."
+
+This information relieved Razumov.
+
+"I am sorry too," he said. "But, all the same, I don't think you
+understand me."
+
+He breathed more freely; she did not protest, but asked, "And how did
+you get on with Peter Ivanovitch? You have seen a good deal of each
+other. How is it between you two?"
+
+Not knowing what answer to make, the young man inclined his head slowly.
+
+Her lips had been parted in expectation. She pressed them together, and
+seemed to reflect.
+
+"That's all right."
+
+This had a sound of finality, but she did not leave him. It was
+impossible to guess what she had in her mind. Razumov muttered--
+
+"It is not of me that you should have asked that question. In a moment
+you shall see Peter Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
+naturally. He will be curious to know what has delayed you so long in
+this garden."
+
+"No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something to say to me. Several
+things. He may even speak of you--question me. Peter Ivanovitch is
+inclined to trust me generally."
+
+"Question you? That's very likely."
+
+She smiled, half serious.
+
+"Well--and what shall I say to him?"
+
+"I don't know. You may tell him of your discovery."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Why--my lack of love for...."
+
+
+"Oh! That's between ourselves," she interrupted, it was hard to say
+whether in jest or earnest.
+
+"I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch something in my favour,"
+said Razumov, with grim playfulness. "Well, then, you can tell him that
+I am very much in earnest about my mission. I mean to succeed."
+
+"You have been given a mission!" she exclaimed quickly.
+
+"It amounts to that. I have been told to bring about a certain event."
+
+She looked at him searchingly.
+
+"A mission," she repeated, very grave and interested all at once. "What
+sort of mission?"
+
+"Something in the nature of propaganda work."
+
+"Ah! Far away from here?"
+
+"No. Not very far," said Razumov, restraining a sudden desire to laugh,
+although he did not feel joyous in the least.
+
+"So!" she said thoughtfully. "Well, I am not asking questions. It's
+sufficient that Peter Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
+Everything is bound to come right in the end."
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"I don't think, young man. I just simply believe it."
+
+"And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that faith?"
+
+She did not answer the question, and they stood idle, silent, as if
+reluctant to part with each other.
+
+"That's just like a man," she murmured at last. "As if it were possible
+to tell how a belief comes to one." Her thin Mephistophelian eyebrows
+moved a little. "Truly there are millions of people in Russia who would
+envy the life of dogs in this country. It is a horror and a shame to
+confess this even between ourselves. One must believe for very pity.
+This can't go on. No! It can't go on. For twenty years I have been
+coming and going, looking neither to the left nor to the right....
+What are you smiling to yourself for? You are only at the beginning. You
+have begun well, but you just wait till you have trodden every particle
+of yourself under your feet in your comings and goings. For that is
+what it comes to. You've got to trample down every particle of your own
+feelings; for stop you cannot, you must not. I have been young, too--but
+perhaps you think that I am complaining-eh?"
+
+"I don't think anything of the sort," protested Razumov indifferently.
+
+"I dare say you don't, you dear superior creature. You don't care."
+
+She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair on the left side,
+and that brusque movement had the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat
+straight on her head. She frowned under it without animosity, in the
+manner of an investigator. Razumov averted his face carelessly.
+
+"You men are all alike. You mistake luck for merit. You do it in good
+faith too! I would not be too hard on you. It's masculine nature.
+You men are ridiculously pitiful in your aptitude to cherish childish
+illusions down to the very grave. There are a lot of us who have been at
+work for fifteen years--I mean constantly--trying one way after another,
+underground and above ground, looking neither to the right nor to the
+left! I can talk about it. I have been one of these that never
+rested.... There! What's the use of talking.... Look at my grey hairs!
+And here two babies come along--I mean you and Haldin--you come along
+and manage to strike a blow at the very first try."
+
+At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and energetic lips of the
+woman revolutionist, Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of the
+irrevocable. But in all the months which had passed over his head he
+had become hardened to the experience. The consciousness was no longer
+accompanied by the blank dismay and the blind anger of the early days.
+He had argued himself into new beliefs; and he had made for himself a
+mental atmosphere of gloomy and sardonic reverie, a sort of murky
+medium through which the event appeared like a featureless shadow having
+vaguely the shape of a man; a shape extremely familiar, yet utterly
+inexpressive, except for its air of discreet waiting in the dusk. It was
+not alarming.
+
+"What was he like?" the woman revolutionist asked unexpectedly.
+
+"What was he like?" echoed Razumov, making a painful effort not to turn
+upon her savagely. But he relieved himself by laughing a little while he
+stole a glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. This reception of
+her inquiry disturbed her.
+
+"How like a woman," he went on. "What is the good of concerning yourself
+with his appearance? Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all feminine
+influences now."
+
+A frown, making three folds at the root of her nose, accentuated the
+Mephistophelian slant of her eyebrows.
+
+"You suffer, Razumov," she suggested, in her low, confident voice.
+
+"What nonsense!" Razumov faced the woman fairly. "But now I think of it,
+I am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the
+one over there--Madame de S--, you know. Formerly the dead were allowed
+to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old
+harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true that
+they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But couldn't
+the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity? Couldn't
+she conjure him up for you?"--he jested like a man in pain.
+
+Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
+wearily, "Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea
+for us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov."
+
+"You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
+some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
+with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the
+ghost of it--the cold ghost of it--still lingering in the temple. But as
+to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
+We mustn't, We can't. The other day I read in some paper or other an
+alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.
+It impresses the world. It's our prestige."
+
+"He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;" the woman in the
+crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
+her black eyes never left Razumov's face. "And what for, pray? Simply
+because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his
+petty masculine standards. You might think he was one of these nervous
+sensitives that come to a bad end. And yet," she went on, after a short,
+reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, "and yet I
+have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of
+character, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed--you are."
+
+The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their
+eyes met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared
+at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar,
+quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to
+him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He
+was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had
+a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any
+instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some
+momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody's
+lips. As long as he managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down
+his irritability there was nothing to fear. The only condition of
+success and safety was indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
+
+He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were
+actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary
+plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime.
+Silently he indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral
+and mental remoteness. He did not even smile when he heard her repeat
+the words--
+
+"Yes! A strong character."
+
+He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not
+thinking of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of
+freedom.
+
+"If you don't look out," he mumbled, still looking away, "you shall
+certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea."
+
+She was not to be shaken off in such a way. As a matter of fact he had
+not expected to succeed.
+
+"Never mind, it will be no great loss. I mean the missing of her tea and
+only the ghost of it at that. As to the lady, you must understand that
+she has her positive uses. See _that_, Razumov."
+
+He turned his head at this imperative appeal and saw the woman
+revolutionist making the motions of counting money into the palm of her
+hand.
+
+"That's what it is. You see?"
+
+Razumov uttered a slow "I see," and returned to his prisoner-like gazing
+upon the neat and shady road.
+
+"Material means must be obtained in some way, and this is easier than
+breaking into banks. More certain too. There! I am joking.... What is
+he muttering to himself now?" she cried under her breath.
+
+"My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch's devoted self-sacrifice, that's all.
+It's enough to make one sick."
+
+"Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature. Sick! Makes him sick! And what
+do you know of the truth of it? There's no looking into the secrets of
+the heart. Peter Ivanovitch knew her years ago, in his worldly days,
+when he was a young officer in the Guards. It is not for us to judge
+an inspired person. That's where you men have an advantage. You are
+inspired sometimes both in thought and action. I have always admitted
+that when you _are_ inspired, when you manage to throw off your
+masculine cowardice and prudishness you are not to be equalled by us.
+Only, how seldom.... Whereas the silliest woman can always be made
+of use. And why? Because we have passion, unappeasable passion.... I
+should like to know what he is smiling at?"
+
+"I am not smiling," protested Razumov gloomily.
+
+"Well! How is one to call it? You made some sort of face. Yes, I know!
+You men can love here and hate there and desire something or other--and
+you make a great to-do about it, and you call it passion! Yes! While
+it lasts. But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these
+very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That's why we can't be
+bribed off so easily as you men. In life, you see, there is not much
+choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us,
+painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot."
+
+She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact tone. Razumov's attention
+had wandered away on a track of its own--outside the bars of the
+gate--but not out of earshot. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his
+coat.
+
+"Rot or burn! Powerfully stated. Painted or unpainted. Very vigorous.
+Painted or...Do tell me--she would be infernally jealous of him,
+wouldn't she?"
+
+"Who? What? The Baroness? Eleanor Maximovna? Jealous of Peter
+Ivanovitch? Heavens! Are these the questions the man's mind is running
+on? Such a thing is not to be thought of."
+
+"Why? Can't a wealthy old woman be jealous? Or, are they all pure
+spirits together?"
+
+"But what put it into your head to ask such a question?" she wondered.
+
+"Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like."
+
+"I don't like," she retorted at once. "It is not the time to be
+frivolous. What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps,
+you are only playing a part."
+
+Razumov had felt that woman's observation of him like a physical
+contact, like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he
+received the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a
+closer grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying
+himself.
+
+"Playing a Part," he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. "It
+must be done very badly since you see through the assumption."
+
+She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin
+black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He
+added hardly audibly--
+
+"You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us."
+
+"Who is doing it?" she snapped out.
+
+"Who? Everybody," he said impatiently. "You are a materialist, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense."
+
+"But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive
+tube.' I imagine now...."
+
+"I spit on him."
+
+"What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can't ignore the importance of a
+good digestion. The joy of life--you know the joy of life?--depends on
+a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism,
+breeds black fancies and thoughts of death. These are facts ascertained
+by physiologists. Well, I assure you that ever since I came over from
+Russia I have been stuffed with indigestible foreign concoctions of the
+most nauseating kind--pah!"
+
+"You are joking," she murmured incredulously. He assented in a detached
+way.
+
+"Yes. It is all a joke. It's hardly worth while talking to a man like
+me. Yet for that very reason men have been known to take their own
+life."
+
+"On the contrary, I think it is worth while talking to you."
+
+He kept her in the corner of his eye. She seemed to be thinking out some
+scathing retort, but ended by only shrugging her shoulders slightly.
+
+"Shallow talk! I suppose one must pardon this weakness in you," she
+said, putting a special accent on the last word. There was something
+anxious in her indulgent conclusion.
+
+Razumov noted the slightest shades in this conversation, which he had
+not expected, for which he was not prepared. That was it. "I was not
+prepared," he said to himself. "It has taken me unawares." It seemed to
+him that if he only could allow himself to pant openly like a dog for a
+time this oppression would pass away. "I shall never be found prepared,"
+he thought, with despair. He laughed a little, saying as lightly as he
+could--
+
+"Thanks. I don't ask for mercy." Then affecting a playful uneasiness,
+"But aren't you afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of plotting
+something unauthorized together by the gate here?"
+
+"No, I am not afraid. You are quite safe from suspicions while you are
+with me, my dear young man." The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
+out. "Peter Ivanovitch trusts me," she went on, quite austerely. "He
+takes my advice. I am his right hand, as it were, in certain most
+important things.... That amuses you what? Do you think I am
+boasting?"
+
+"God forbid. I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch
+seems to have solved the woman question pretty completely."
+
+Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone. All
+day long he had been saying the wrong things. It was folly, worse than
+folly. It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his
+will. Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the
+promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a
+great store of secret knowledge and so much influence? Why give her this
+puzzling impression? But she did not seem inimical. There was no anger
+in her voice. It was strangely speculative.
+
+"One does not know what to think, Razumov. You must have bitten
+something bitter in your cradle." Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
+
+"H'm! Something bitter? That's an explanation," he muttered. "Only it
+was much later. And don't you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I
+come from the same cradle?"
+
+The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had
+experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman
+revolutionist murmured, after a pause--
+
+"You mean--Russia?"
+
+He disdained even to nod. She seemed softened, her black eyes very
+still, as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all
+its tender associations. But suddenly she knitted her brows in a
+Mephistophelian frown.
+
+"Yes. Perhaps no wonder, then. Yes. One lies there lapped up in evils,
+watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
+They must be driven away, destroyed utterly. In regard of that task
+nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful.
+That's how I came to feel in the end. The great thing is not to quarrel
+amongst ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles. Remember
+that, Razumov."
+
+Razumov was not listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched
+in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his
+scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him
+that now they were blunted for ever. "I am a match for them all,"
+he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman
+revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was
+no one passing along the road. He almost forgot that he was not alone.
+He heard her voice again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the
+hesitation which had been the real reason of her prolonged silence.
+
+"I say, Razumov!"
+
+Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man
+who hears a false note.
+
+"Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually
+attended the lectures at the University?"
+
+An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of
+the question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after
+the flash of the fired shot. Luckily his disengaged hand was ready
+to grip a bar of the gate. He held it with a terrible force, but his
+presence of mind was gone. He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy
+sound.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!" she urged him. "I know you are not a
+boastful man. _That_ one must say for you. You are a silent man. Too
+silent, perhaps. You are feeding on some bitterness of your own. You are
+not an enthusiast. You are, perhaps, all the stronger for that. But you
+might tell me. One would like to understand you a little more. I was so
+immensely struck.... Have you really done it?"
+
+He got his voice back. The shot had missed him. It had been fired at
+random, altogether, more like a signal for coming to close quarters.
+It was to be a plain struggle for self-preservation. And she was a
+dangerous adversary too. But he was ready for battle; he was so ready
+that when he turned towards her not a muscle of his face moved.
+
+"Certainly," he said, without animation, secretly strung up but
+perfectly sure of himself. "Lectures--certainly, But what makes you
+ask?"
+
+It was she who was animated.
+
+"I had it in a letter, written by a young man in Petersburg; one of
+us, of course. You were seen--you were observed with your notebook,
+impassible, taking notes...."
+
+He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
+
+"What of that?"
+
+"I call such coolness superb--that's all. It is a proof of uncommon
+strength of character. The young man writes that nobody could have
+guessed from your face and manner the part you had played only some two
+hours before--the great, momentous, glorious part...."
+
+"Oh no. Nobody could have guessed," assented Razumov gravely, "because,
+don't you see, nobody at that time...."
+
+"Yes, yes. But all the same you are a man of exceptional fortitude, it
+seems. You looked exactly as usual. It was remembered afterwards with
+wonder...."
+
+"It cost me no effort," Razumov declared, with the same staring gravity.
+
+"Then it's almost more wonderful still!" she exclaimed, and fell silent
+while Razumov asked himself whether he had not said there something
+utterly unnecessary--or even worse.
+
+She raised her head eagerly.
+
+"Your intention was to stay in Russia? You had planned...."
+
+"No," interrupted Razumov without haste. "I had made no plans of any
+sort."
+
+"You just simply walked away?" she struck in.
+
+He bowed his head in slow assent. "Simply--yes." He had gradually
+released his hold on the bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
+conviction that no random shot could knock him over now. And suddenly he
+was inspired to add, "The snow was coming down very thick, you know."
+
+She had a slight appreciative movement of the head, like an expert
+in such enterprises, very interested, capable of taking every point
+professionally. Razumov remembered something he had heard.
+
+"I turned into a narrow side street, you understand," he went on
+negligently, and paused as if it were not worth talking about. Then he
+remembered another detail and dropped it before her, like a disdainful
+dole to her curiosity.
+
+"I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep there."
+
+She clicked her tongue at that symptom, very struck indeed. Then--
+
+"But the notebook! The amazing notebook, man. You don't mean to say you
+had put it in your pocket beforehand!" she cried.
+
+Razumov gave a start. It might have been a sign of impatience.
+
+"I went home. Straight home to my rooms," he said distinctly.
+
+"The coolness of the man! You dared?"
+
+"Why not? I assure you I was perfectly calm. Ha! Calmer than I am now
+perhaps."
+
+"I like you much better as you are now than when you indulge that bitter
+vein of yours, Razumov. And nobody in the house saw you return--eh? That
+might have appeared queer."
+
+"No one," Razumov said firmly. "Dvornik, landlady, girl, all out of the
+way. I went up like a shadow. It was a murky morning. The stairs were
+dark. I glided up like a phantom. Fate? Luck? What do you think?"
+
+"I just see it!" The eyes of the woman revolutionist snapped darkly.
+"Well--and then you considered...."
+
+Razumov had it all ready in his head.
+
+"No. I looked at my watch, since you want to know. There was just time.
+I took that notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe. Have you ever
+listened to the pit-pat of a man running round and round the shaft of
+a deep staircase? They have a gaslight at the bottom burning night
+and day. I suppose it's gleaming down there now.... The sound dies
+out--the flame winks...."
+
+He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity
+of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist
+received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He
+checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man
+who has been dreaming aloud.
+
+"Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning?
+At night it's another matter. I did not care if all the house had been
+there to look at me. But I don't suppose there was anyone. It's best not
+to be seen or heard. Aha! The people that are neither seen nor heard are
+the lucky ones--in Russia. Don't you admire my luck?"
+
+"Astonishing," she said. "If you have luck as well as determination,
+then indeed you are likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for the
+work in hand."
+
+Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov that it was speculative,
+even as though she were already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
+of the work. Her eyes were cast down. He waited, not very alert now, but
+with the grip of the ever-present danger giving him an air of
+attentive gravity. Who could have written about him in that letter
+from Petersburg? A fellow student, surely--some imbecile victim of
+revolutionary propaganda, some foolish slave of foreign, subversive
+ideals. A long, famine-stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to
+his mental search. That must have been the fellow!
+
+He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing,
+the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like
+a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage
+in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and
+piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist
+refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means
+constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his
+advantage rather, a piece of sinister luck which had only to be accepted
+with proper caution.
+
+"And yet, Razumov," he heard the musing voice of the woman, "you have
+not the face of a lucky man." She raised her eyes with renewed interest.
+"And so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked
+off and made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I
+suppose it was agreed beforehand that, once the business over, each of
+you would go his own way?"
+
+Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate,
+if cautious, manner of speaking.
+
+"Was not that the best thing to do?" he asked, in a dispassionate tone.
+"And anyway," he added, after waiting a moment, "we did not give much
+thought to what would come after. We never discussed formally any line
+of conduct. It was understood, I think."
+
+She approved his statement with slight nods.
+
+"You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?"
+
+"In St. Petersburg itself," emphasized Razumov. "It was the only safe
+course for me. And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go."
+
+"Yes! Yes! I know. Clearly. And the other--this wonderful Haldin
+appearing only to be regretted--you don't know what he intended?"
+
+Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet
+him sooner or later. He raised his hands a little and let them fall
+helplessly by his side--nothing more.
+
+It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
+silence.
+
+"Very curious," she pronounced slowly. "And you did not think, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?"
+
+Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.
+But he thought that he owed it to himself to speak. A negative sign
+would not do again. Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what
+that St. Petersburg letter might have contained.
+
+"I stayed at home next day," he said, bending down a little and plunging
+his glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not
+observe the trembling of his lips. "Yes, I stayed at home. As my actions
+are remembered and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I
+was _not_ seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn't know? Well, I
+stopped at home-the live-long day."
+
+As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic "I see! It
+must have been trying enough."
+
+"You seem to understand one's feelings," said Razumov steadily. "It was
+trying. It was horrible; it was an atrocious day. It was not the last."
+
+"Yes, I understand. Afterwards, when you heard they had got him. Don't
+I know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight? One's
+ashamed of being left. And I can remember so many. Never mind. They
+shall be avenged before long. And what is death? At any rate, it is not
+a shameful thing like some kinds of life."
+
+Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and
+unpleasant tremor.
+
+"Some kinds of life?" he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
+
+"The subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy
+heap of iniquity which the world is. Life, Razumov, not to be vile must
+be a revolt--a pitiless protest--all the time."
+
+She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
+instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
+businesslike manner that she went on--
+
+"You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
+immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I
+set my eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich. Oh! You are full of bitter
+revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may
+become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
+justice which armed your and Haldin's hands to strike down that
+fanatical brute...for it was that--nothing but that! I have been
+thinking it out. It could have been nothing else but that."
+
+Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
+sinister immobility of feature.
+
+"I can't speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
+conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive
+justice."
+
+"Good, that," he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
+and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
+should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As
+if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be
+changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at
+the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for
+arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted
+through Razumov's head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand,
+the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had
+such a weight in the "active" section of every party. She was much more
+representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric,
+mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
+revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave
+him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own
+mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the
+purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical
+theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting
+in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in
+that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous
+lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a
+thoughtful frown.
+
+"That's it. Retributive. No pity!" was the conclusion of her silence.
+And this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating
+sentences--
+
+"Listen to my story, Razumov!..." Her father was a clever but unlucky
+artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty;
+all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose
+rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the
+very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood
+of his sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him?
+Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal
+I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing
+except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread--but no consolation for your
+trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your
+miserable life.
+
+And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died. He died in the hospital.
+Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence--she
+saw it whole. She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of
+the humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of
+a society which nothing can absolve.
+
+"Yes, Razumov," she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, "it was
+like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed
+not the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great
+social iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied
+sufferings. From that moment I was a revolutionist."
+
+Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of
+contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance. She,
+with an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice
+since he had come in contact with the woman, went on--
+
+"As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system
+exhorted such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the
+secret societies as soon as I knew how to find my way. I was sixteen
+years old--no more, Razumov! And--look at my white hair."
+
+In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness
+too was gone.
+
+"There is a lot of it. I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of
+a girl. Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that
+there was the first step towards crushing the social infamy. Crush the
+Infamy! A fine watchword! I would placard it on the walls of prisons and
+palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that
+empty sky for a sign of hope and terror--a portent of the end...."
+
+"You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna," Razumov interrupted suddenly.
+"Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in water...."
+
+She was checked but not offended. "Who knows? Very soon it may become
+a fact written all over that great land of ours," she hinted meaningly.
+"And then one would have lived long enough. White hair won't matter."
+
+Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years
+seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt. It
+threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the
+brilliant black glance, the upright compact figure, the simple,
+brisk self-possession of the mature personality--as though in her
+revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret, not of
+everlasting youth, but of everlasting endurance.
+
+How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov. Her mother might have been
+a Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what. He reflected that a
+revolutionist is seldom true to the settled type. All revolt is the
+expression of strong individualism--ran his thought vaguely. One
+can tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings. It was
+astonishing that the police....
+
+"We shall not meet again very soon, I think," she was saying. "I am
+leaving to-morrow."
+
+"For Zurich?" Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from
+any distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a
+wrestling match.
+
+"Yes, Zurich--and farther on, perhaps, much farther. Another journey.
+When I think of all my journeys! The last must come some day. Never
+mind, Razumov. We had to have a good long talk. I would have certainly
+tried to see you if we had not met. Peter Ivanovitch knows where you
+live? Yes. I meant to have asked him--but it's better like this. You
+see, we expect two more men; and I had much rather wait here talking
+with you than up there at the house with...."
+
+Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself. "Here
+they are," she said rapidly. "Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to
+say good-bye, presently."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+In his incertitude of the ground on which he stood Razumov felt
+perturbed. Turning his head quickly, he saw two men on the opposite side
+of the road. Seeing themselves noticed by Sophia Antonovna, they crossed
+over at once, and passed one after another through the little gate
+by the side of the empty lodge. They looked hard at the stranger, but
+without mistrust, the crimson blouse being a flaring safety signal. The
+first, great white hairless face, double chin, prominent stomach, which
+he seemed to carry forward consciously within a strongly distended
+overcoat, only nodded and averted his eyes peevishly; his
+companion--lean, flushed cheekbones, a military red moustache below a
+sharp, salient nose--approached at once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her
+warmly. His voice was very strong but inarticulate. It sounded like a
+deep buzzing. The woman revolutionist was quietly cordial.
+
+"This is Razumov," she announced in a clear voice.
+
+The lean new-comer made an eager half-turn. "He will want to embrace
+me," thought our young man with a deep recoil of all his being, while
+his limbs seemed too heavy to move. But it was a groundless alarm. He
+had to do now with a generation of conspirators who did not kiss each
+other on both cheeks; and raising an arm that felt like lead he dropped
+his hand into a largely-outstretched palm, fleshless and hot as if
+dried up by fever, giving a bony pressure, expressive, seeming to say,
+"Between us there's no need of words." The man had big, wide-open eyes.
+Razumov fancied he could see a smile behind their sadness.
+
+"This is Razumov," Sophia Antonovna repeated loudly for the benefit of
+the fat man, who at some distance displayed the profile of his stomach.
+
+No one moved. Everything, sounds, attitudes, movements, and immobility
+seemed to be part of an experiment, the result of which was a thin voice
+piping with comic peevishness--
+
+"Oh yes! Razumov. We have been hearing of nothing but Mr. Razumov for
+months. For my part, I confess I would rather have seen Haldin on this
+spot instead of Mr. Razumov."
+
+The squeaky stress put on the name "Razumov--Mr. Razumov" pierced the
+ear ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an
+elaborate joke. Astonishment was Razumov's first response, followed by
+sudden indignation.
+
+"What's the meaning of this?" he asked in a stern tone.
+
+"Tut! Silliness. He's always like that." Sophia Antonovna was obviously
+vexed. But she dropped the information, "Necator," from her lips just
+loud enough to be heard by Razumov. The abrupt squeaks of the fat man
+seemed to proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his
+overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless,
+hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair
+straggling down the fat nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a
+stare on the verge of horror and laughter.
+
+Nikita, surnamed Necator, with a sinister aptness of alliteration!
+Razumov had heard of him. He had heard so much since crossing the
+frontier of these celebrities of the militant revolution; the legends,
+the stories, the authentic chronicle, which now and then peeps out
+before a half-incredulous world. Razumov had heard of him. He was
+supposed to have killed more, gendarmes and police agents than any
+revolutionist living. He had been entrusted with executions.
+
+The paper with the letters N.N., the very pseudonym of murder,
+found pinned on the stabbed breast of a certain notorious spy (this
+picturesque detail of a sensational murder case had got into
+the newspapers), was the mark of his handiwork. "By order of the
+Committee.--N.N." A corner of the curtain lifted to strike the
+imagination of the gaping world. He was said to have been innumerable
+times in and out of Russia, the Necator of bureaucrats, of provincial
+governors, of obscure informers. He lived between whiles, Razumov had
+heard, on the shores of the Lake of Como, with a charming wife, devoted
+to the cause, and two young children. But how could that creature, so
+grotesque as to set town dogs barking at its mere sight, go about on
+those deadly errands and slip through the meshes of the police?
+
+"What now? what now?" the voice squeaked. "I am only sincere. It's not
+denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been
+better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a
+sentimentalist. Say what I think...only natural."
+
+Squeak, squeak, squeak, without a gesture, without a stir--the horrible
+squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy--this man of a sinister
+alliterative nickname, this executioner of revolutionary verdicts, the
+terrifying N.N. exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention
+attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur. Sophia Antonovna
+shrugged her shoulders. The comrade with the martial red moustache
+hurried towards Razumov full of conciliatory intentions in his strong
+buzzing voice.
+
+"Devil take it! And in this place, too, in the public street, so to
+speak. But you can see yourself how it is. One of his fantastic sallies.
+Absolutely of no consequence."
+
+"Pray don't concern yourself," cried Razumov, going off into a long fit
+of laughter. "Don't mention it."
+
+The other, his hectic flush like a pair of burns on his cheek-bones,
+stared for a moment and burst out laughing too. Razumov, whose hilarity
+died out all at once, made a step forward.
+
+"Enough of this," he began in a clear, incisive voice, though he could
+hardly control the trembling of his legs. "I will have no more of it. I
+shall not permit anyone.... I can see very well what you are at with
+those allusions.... Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not
+be played with."
+
+He had spoken such words before. He had been driven to cry them out in
+the face of other suspicions. It was an infernal cycle bringing round
+that protest like a fatal necessity of his existence. But it was no use.
+He would be always played with. Luckily life does not last for ever.
+
+"I won't have it!" he shouted, striking his fist into the palm of his
+other hand.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--what has come to you?" The woman revolutionist
+interfered with authority. They were all looking at Razumov now; the
+slayer of spies and gendarmes had turned about, presenting his enormous
+stomach in full, like a shield.
+
+"Don't shout. There are people passing." Sophia Antonovna was
+apprehensive of another outburst. A steam-launch from Monrepos had
+come to the landing-stage opposite the gate, its hoarse whistle and
+the churning noise alongside all unnoticed, had landed a small bunch of
+local passengers who were dispersing their several ways. Only a specimen
+of early tourist in knickerbockers, conspicuous by a brand-new yellow
+leather glass-case, hung about for a moment, scenting something unusual
+about these four people within the rusty iron gates of what looked the
+grounds run wild of an unoccupied private house. Ah! If he had only
+known what the chance of commonplace travelling had suddenly put in his
+way! But he was a well-bred person; he averted his gaze and moved off
+with short steps along the avenue, on the watch for a tramcar.
+
+A gesture from Sophia Antonovna, "Leave him to me," had sent the two men
+away--the buzzing of the inarticulate voice growing fainter and fainter,
+and the thin pipe of "What now? what's the matter?" reduced to the
+proportions of a squeaking toy by the distance. They had left him to
+her. So many things could be left safely to the experience of Sophia
+Antonovna. And at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried
+to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is
+born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the
+force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts,
+assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final
+appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She
+had seen--often had only divined--scores of these young men and young
+women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a
+moody egotist. And besides, it was a special--a unique case. She had
+never met an individuality which interested and puzzled her so much.
+
+"Take care, Razumov, my good friend. If you carry on like this you will
+go mad. You are angry with everybody and bitter with yourself, and on
+the look out for something to torment yourself with."
+
+"It's intolerable!" Razumov could only speak in gasps. "You must admit
+that I can have no illusions on the attitude which...it isn't clear...or
+rather only too clear."
+
+He made a gesture of despair. It was not his courage that failed him.
+The choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat--the thought
+of being condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere
+without the hope of ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
+
+"A glass of cold water is what you want." Sophia Antonovna glanced up
+the grounds at the house and shook her head, then out of the gate at
+the brimful placidity of the lake. With a half-comical shrug of the
+shoulders, she gave the remedy up in the face of that abundance.
+
+"It is you, my dear soul, who are flinging yourself at something which
+does not exist. What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It's absurd. You
+couldn't have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was
+taken."
+
+She remonstrated with him reasonably, at some length too. He had nothing
+to complain of in his reception. Every new-comer was discussed more or
+less. Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
+No one that she could remember had been shown from the first so much
+confidence. Soon, very soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, he would
+be given an opportunity of showing his devotion to the sacred task of
+crushing the Infamy.
+
+Razumov, listening quietly, thought: "It may be that she is trying to
+lull my suspicions to sleep. On the other hand, it is obvious that most
+of them are fools." He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his
+arms on his breast, leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
+
+"As to what remains obscure in the fate of that poor Haldin," Sophia
+Antonovna dropped into a slowness of utterance which was to Razumov like
+the falling of molten lead drop by drop; "as to that--though no one ever
+hinted that either from fear or neglect your conduct has not been what
+it should have been--well, I have a bit of intelligence...."
+
+Razumov could not prevent himself from raising his head, and Sophia
+Antonovna nodded slightly.
+
+"I have. You remember that letter from St. Petersburg I mentioned to you
+a moment ago?"
+
+"The letter? Perfectly. Some busybody has been reporting my conduct on
+a certain day. It's rather sickening. I suppose our police are greatly
+edified when they open these interesting and--and--superfluous letters."
+
+"Oh dear no! The police do not get hold of our letters as easily as you
+imagine. The letter in question did not leave St. Petersburg till the
+ice broke up. It went by the first English steamer which left the Neva
+this spring. They have a fireman on board--one of us, in fact. It has
+reached me from Hull...."
+
+She paused as if she were surprised at the sullen fixity of Razumov's
+gaze, but went on at once, and much faster.
+
+"We have some of our people there who...but never mind. The writer
+of the letter relates an incident which he thinks may possibly be
+connected with Haldin's arrest. I was just going to tell you when those
+two men came along."
+
+"That also was an incident," muttered Razumov, "of a very charming
+kind--for me."
+
+"Leave off that!" cried Sophia Antonovna. "Nobody cares for Nikita's
+barking. There's no malice in him. Listen to what I have to say. You
+may be able to throw a light. There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town
+peasant--a man who owned horses. He came to town years ago to work for
+some relation as a driver and ended by owning a cab or two."
+
+She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture:
+"Wait!" Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted
+her now, not to save his life. The contraction of his facial muscles had
+been involuntary, a mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as
+before.
+
+"He was not a quite ordinary man of his class--it seems," she went on.
+"The people of the house--my informant talked with many of them--you
+know, one of those enormous houses of shame and misery...."
+
+Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.
+Razumov saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled
+in snowflakes, with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining
+greasily very near the ground. The ghost of that night pursued him. He
+stood up to it with rage and with weariness.
+
+"Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?" Sophia
+Antonovna was anxious to know.
+
+"Yes." Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling
+into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he
+probably could not have said no. "He mentioned to me once," he added, as
+if making an effort of memory, "a house of that sort. He used to visit
+some workmen there."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact
+quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having
+made friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described
+Haldin's appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into
+their misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and--her
+correspondent wrote--sometimes he spent a night in the house, sleeping,
+they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.
+
+"Note that, Razumov! In a stable."
+
+Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
+
+"Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole
+house."
+
+"No doubt," assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw
+closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed
+beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were
+condemned to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that
+it proved Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant--a
+reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other
+inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of
+a band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was
+driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the
+fellow of having given a hint to the police and...
+
+The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
+
+"And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain
+Ziemianitch?"
+
+Razumov was ready for the name. He had been looking out for the
+question. "When it comes I shall own up," he had said to himself. But he
+took his time.
+
+"To be sure!" he began slowly. "Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
+horses. Yes. On one occasion. Ziemianitch! Certainly! Ziemianitch of the
+horses.... How could it have slipped my memory like this? One of the
+last conversations we had together."
+
+"That means,"--Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,--"that means,
+Razumov, it was very shortly before--eh?"
+
+"Before what?" shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked
+astonished but stood her ground. "Before.... Oh! Of course, it was
+before! How could it have been after? Only a few hours before."
+
+"And he spoke of him favourably?"
+
+"With enthusiasm! The horses of Ziemianitch! The free soul of
+Ziemianitch!"
+
+Razumov took a savage delight in the loud utterance of that name, which
+had never before crossed his lips audibly. He fixed his blazing eyes
+on the woman till at last her fascinated expression recalled him to
+himself.
+
+"The late Haldin," he said, holding himself in, with downcast eyes,
+"was inclined to take sudden fancies to people, on--on--what shall I
+say--insufficient grounds."
+
+"There!" Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands. "That, to my mind, settles
+it. The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused...."
+
+"Aha! Your correspondent," Razumov said in an almost openly mocking
+tone. "What suspicions? How aroused? By this Ziemianitch? Probably some
+drunken, gabbling, plausible..."
+
+"You talk as if you had known him."
+
+Razumov looked up.
+
+"No. But I knew Haldin."
+
+Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.
+
+"I see. Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion
+communicated to me in that very interesting letter. This Ziemianitch was
+found one morning hanging from a hook in the stable--dead."
+
+Razumov felt a profound trouble. It was visible, because Sophia
+Antonovna was moved to observe vivaciously--
+
+"Aha! You begin to see."
+
+He saw it clearly enough--in the light of a lantern casting spokes of
+shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long
+boots hanging against the wall. A pointed hood, with the ends wound
+about up to the eyes, hid the face. "But that does not concern me," he
+reflected. "It does not affect my position at all. He never knew who had
+thrashed him. He could not have known." Razumov felt sorry for the old
+lover of the bottle and women.
+
+"Yes. Some of them end like that," he muttered. "What is your idea,
+Sophia Antonovna?"
+
+It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had
+adopted it fully. She stated it in one word--"Remorse." Razumov opened
+his eyes very wide at that. Sophia Antonovna's informant, by listening
+to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed
+to come very near to the truth of Haldin's relation to Ziemianitch.
+
+"It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of--that your friend
+had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St.
+Petersburg, at any rate. Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for
+the rest. And that fellow's horses were part of the plan."
+
+"They have actually got at the truth," Razumov marvelled to himself,
+while he nodded judicially. "Yes, that's possible, very possible." But
+the woman revolutionist was very positive that it was so. First of all,
+a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been
+partly overheard. Then there were the suspicions of the people in the
+house when their "young gentleman" (they did not know Haldin by
+his name) ceased to call at the house. Some of them used to charge
+Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence. He denied it with
+exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin's disappearance he
+was not himself, growing moody and thin. Finally, during a quarrel with
+some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of the inmates of
+the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy,
+an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven "our young
+gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke
+into houses." In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch
+got flung down a flight of stairs. Thereupon he drank and moped for a
+week, and then hanged himself.
+
+Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale. She charged
+Ziemianitch either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a
+certain date, overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop--perhaps in
+the very eating-shop on the ground floor of the house--or, maybe, a
+downright denunciation, followed by remorse. A man like that would be
+capable of anything. People said he was a flighty old chap. And if he
+had been once before mixed up with the police--as seemed certain, though
+he always denied it--in connexion with these thieves, he would be sure
+to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look out for
+something to report. Possibly at first his tale was not made anything of
+till the day that scoundrel de P--- got his deserts. Ah! But then every
+bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally
+they were bound to get Haldin.
+
+Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands--"Fatally."
+
+Fatality--chance! Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the
+queer verisimilitude of these inferences. They were obviously to his
+advantage.
+
+"It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally."
+Sophia Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again. She had received
+the letter three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter
+Ivanovitch. She knew then that she would have the opportunity presently
+of meeting several men of action assembled for an important purpose.
+
+"I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself
+at large. I have it in my pocket now. You understand how pleased I was
+to come upon you."
+
+Razumov was saying to himself, "She won't offer to show the letter to
+me. Not likely. Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers
+has found out?" He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not
+ask.
+
+"Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?"
+
+"No, no," she protested. "There you are again with your sensitiveness.
+It makes you stupid. Don't you see, there was no starting-point for an
+investigation even if any one had thought of it. A perfect blank! That's
+exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving
+you cautiously. It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my
+informant striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser
+lodging in that particular slum-house. A wonderful coincidence!"
+
+"A pious person," suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, "would say that
+the hand of God has done it all."
+
+"My poor father would have said that." Sophia Antonovna did not smile.
+She dropped her eyes. "Not that his God ever helped him. It's a long
+time since God has done anything for the people. Anyway, it's done."
+
+"All this would be quite final," said Razumov, with every appearance of
+reflective impartiality, "if there was any certitude that the 'our young
+gentleman' of these people was Victor Haldin. Have we got that?"
+
+"Yes. There's no mistake. My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin's
+personal appearance as with your own," the woman affirmed decisively.
+
+"It's the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt," Razumov said to himself,
+with reawakened uneasiness. Had his own visit to that accursed house
+passed unnoticed? It was barely possible. Yet it was hardly probable.
+It was just the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt
+busybody had been picking up. But the letter did not seem to contain any
+allusion to that. Unless she had suppressed it. And, if so, why? If it
+had really escaped the prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a
+confounded genius for recognizing people from description, it could
+only be for a time. He would come upon it presently and hasten to write
+another letter--and then!
+
+For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and
+disdain, Razumov shuddered inwardly. It guarded him from common fear,
+but it could not defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way
+by these people. It was a sort of superstitious dread. Now, since his
+position had been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of
+Ziemianitch, he felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom
+from direct lying, with its power of moving amongst them silent,
+unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate of their
+crimes and their folly. Was this advantage his already? Or not yet? Or
+never would be?
+
+"Well, Sophia Antonovna," his air of reluctant concession was genuine
+in so far that he was really loath to part with her without testing her
+sincerity by a question it was impossible to bring about in any way;
+"well, Sophia Antonovna, if that is so, then--"
+
+"The creature has done justice to himself," the woman observed, as if
+thinking aloud.
+
+"What? Ah yes! Remorse," Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
+
+"Don't be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend." There
+was no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes
+seemed detached for an instant from vengeful visions. "He was a man of
+the people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It's
+something to know that."
+
+"Consoling?" insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
+
+"Leave off railing," she checked him explosively. "Remember, Razumov,
+that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the
+negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all
+action. Don't rail! Leave off.... I don't know how it is, but there
+are moments when you are abhorrent to me...."
+
+She averted her face. A languid silence, as if all the electricity of
+the situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for
+some time. Razumov had not flinched. Suddenly she laid the tips of her
+fingers on his sleeve.
+
+"Don't mind."
+
+"I don't mind," he said very quietly.
+
+He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face. He was
+really mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure
+oppression. And suddenly he asked himself, "Why the devil did I go to
+that house? It was an imbecile thing to do."
+
+A profound disgust came over him. Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking
+in a friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention. And it was
+still about the famous letter, referring to various minute details
+given by her informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch. The "victim of
+remorse" had been buried several weeks before her correspondent began
+frequenting the house. It--the house--contained very good revolutionary
+material. The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens
+of black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all
+the miseries that oppress mankind. Razumov listened without hearing,
+gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that
+degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost
+impossible to practice.
+
+No. The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this
+conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted
+not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal
+connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left
+Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself. And, anyway,
+who could have foreseen this woman's "informant" stumbling upon that
+particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying
+flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! "It's a
+perfect, diabolic surprise," thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude
+of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna's remarks
+upon the psychology of "the people," "Oh yes--certainly," rather
+coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of
+confession out of her throat.
+
+Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of
+relaxed tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to
+the subject of his uneasiness. How it came about he could only guess,
+his mind being absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia
+Antonovna's complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people. For
+instance--that Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the
+last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been
+beaten by the devil.
+
+"The devil," repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
+
+"The actual devil. The devil in person. You may well look astonished,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch. Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken,
+a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful
+thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched
+creature's body was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in
+the house."
+
+"But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don't believe in the actual devil?"
+
+"Do you?" retorted the woman curtly. "Not but that there are plenty of
+men worse than devils to make a hell of this earth," she muttered to
+herself.
+
+Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold
+between her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away. It was
+obvious that she did not make much of the story--unless, indeed, this
+was the perfection of duplicity. "A dark young man," she explained
+further. "Never seen there before, never seen afterwards. Why are you
+smiling, Razumov?"
+
+"At the devil being still young after all these ages," he answered
+composedly. "But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you
+say, was dead-drunk at the time?"
+
+"Oh! The eating-house keeper has described him. An overbearing,
+swarthy young man in a student's cloak, who came rushing in, demanded
+Ziemianitch, beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving
+the eating-house keeper paralysed with astonishment."
+
+"Does he, too, believe it was the devil?"
+
+"That I can't say. I am told he's very reserved on the matter. Those
+sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally. I should think he
+knows more of it than anybody."
+
+"Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what's your theory?" asked Razumov
+in a tone of great interest. "Yours and your informant's, who is on the
+spot."
+
+"I agree with him. Some police-hound in disguise. Who else could beat a
+helpless man so unmercifully? As for the rest, if they were out that day
+on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might
+have thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more
+information, or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly
+detective was sent to fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him
+so drunk broke a stable fork over his ribs. Later on, after they had the
+big game safe in the net, they troubled their heads no more about that
+peasant."
+
+Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this
+conversation, keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in
+the verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion
+of the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost
+depths of self-deception. Razumov, after shaking hands with Sophia
+Antonovna, left the grounds, crossed the road, and walking out on the
+little steamboat pier leaned over the rail.
+
+His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days,
+ever since that night...the night. The conversation with the woman
+revolutionist had given him the view of his danger at the very moment
+this danger vanished, characteristically enough. "I ought to have
+foreseen the doubts that would arise in those people's minds," he
+thought. Then his attention being attracted by a stone of peculiar
+shape, which he could see clearly lying at the bottom, he began to
+speculate as to the depth of water in that spot. But very soon, with a
+start of wonder at this extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment,
+he returned to his train of thought. "I ought to have told very
+circumstantial lies from the first," he said to himself, with a mortal
+distaste of the mere idea which silenced his mental utterance for quite
+a perceptible interval. "Luckily, that's all right now," he reflected,
+and after a time spoke to himself, half aloud, "Thanks to the devil,"
+and laughed a little.
+
+The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts. He was not
+exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting
+in it a certain piquancy. He owned to himself that, had he known of that
+suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making
+such excellent use of it for his own purposes. He ought to be infinitely
+obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity,
+"A wonderful psychologist apparently," he said to himself sarcastically.
+Remorse, indeed! It was a striking example of your true conspirator's
+blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea. This was
+a drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself
+mockingly. A woman the old fellow was making up to! A robust pedlar,
+clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs.... And at
+sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.
+That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch. Even the
+comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme
+crisis. At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of
+an unquenchable passion. And, besides, there was the wild exasperation
+aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with
+the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing,
+added to these simple and bitter sorrows. "Devil, eh?" Razumov
+exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting
+discovery. "Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism. So many of our
+true Russian souls end in that way! Very characteristic." He felt pity
+for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an
+unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above--like a community
+of crawling ants working out its destiny. It was as if this Ziemianitch
+could not possibly have done anything else. And Sophia Antonovna's
+cocksure and contemptuous "some police-hound" was characteristically
+Russian in another way. But there was no tragedy there. This was a
+comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a game
+with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch,
+then with those revolutionists. The devil's own game this.... He
+interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his
+own expense. "Hallo! I am falling into mysticism too."
+
+His mind was more at ease than ever. Turning about he put his back
+against the rail comfortably. "All this fits with marvellous aptness,"
+he continued to think. "The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no
+longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague. The mystic
+Ziemianitch accounts for that. An incredible chance has served me. No
+more need of lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from
+getting the upper hand of my caution."
+
+He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was
+a long time before he started forward from that pose, with the
+recollection that he had made up his mind to do something important that
+day. What it was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort
+of memory, for he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.
+
+He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he
+slowed down, almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure
+walking in the contrary direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft,
+broad-brimmed hat, picturesque but diminutive, as if seen through the
+big end of an opera-glass. It was impossible to avoid that tiny man, for
+there was no issue for retreat.
+
+"Another one going to that mysterious meeting," thought Razumov. He was
+right in his surmise, only _this_ one, unlike the others who came from a
+distance, was known to him personally. Still, he hoped to pass on with
+a mere bow, but it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with
+hairy wrist and knuckles protruded in a friendly wave from under the
+folds of the cloak, worn Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm
+day, a corner flung over the shoulder.
+
+"And how is Herr Razumov?" sounded the greeting in German, by that alone
+made more odious to the object of the affable recognition. At closer
+quarters the diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an
+ordinary-sized man, with a lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising
+of the hat, the great pepper-and salt full beard spread over the
+proportionally broad chest. A fine bold nose jutted over a thin mouth
+hidden in the mass of fine hair. All this, accented features, strong
+limbs in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without the
+slightest sign of debility. The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown,
+were too big, with the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour
+under a lamp. The obscure celebrity of the tiny man was well known to
+Razumov. Polyglot, of unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality,
+anarchist, with a pedantic and ferocious temperament, and an amazingly
+inflammatory capacity for invective, he was a power in the background,
+this violent pamphleteer clamouring for revolutionary justice, this
+Julius Laspara, editor of the _Living Word_, confidant of conspirators,
+inditer of sanguinary menaces and manifestos, suspected of being in the
+secret of every plot. Laspara lived in the old town in a sombre,
+narrow house presented to him by a naive middle-class admirer of his
+humanitarian eloquence. With him lived his two daughters, who overtopped
+him head and shoulders, and a pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing
+in the dark rooms in blue cotton overalls and clumsy boots, who might
+have belonged to either one of them or to neither. No stranger could
+tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after
+casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him
+possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained
+from asking her for details--no, not so much as the name of the father,
+because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been
+admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top
+floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of sweepings all over
+the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every table, the two
+Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent, sleepy-eyed,
+corsetless, and generally, in their want of shape and the disorder
+of their rumpled attire, resembling old dolls; the great but obscure
+Julius, his feet twisted round his three-legged stool, always ready to
+receive the visitors, the pen instantly dropped, the body screwed round
+with a striking display of the lofty brow and of the great austere
+beard. When he got down from his stool it was as though he had descended
+from the heights of Olympus. He was dwarfed by his daughters, by the
+furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature. But he very seldom left
+it, and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.
+
+It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him
+out in that direction that afternoon. Evidently he wished to be amiable
+to that young man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world
+of political refugees. In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and
+wrote four or five other European languages, without distinction and
+without force (other than that of invective), he inquired if Razumov
+had taken his inscriptions at the University as yet. And the young man,
+shaking his head negatively--
+
+"There's plenty of time for that. But, meantime, are you not going to
+write something for us?"
+
+He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on
+anything, social, economic, historical--anything. Any subject could be
+treated in the right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution. And,
+as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a review
+of advanced ideas. "We must educate, educate everybody--develop the
+great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice."
+
+Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.
+
+"Write in Russian. We'll have it translated There can be no difficulty.
+Why, without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin. My daughters go to
+see her sometimes." He nodded significantly. "She does nothing, has
+never done anything in her life. She would be quite competent, with a
+little assistance. Only write. You know you must. And so good-bye for
+the present."
+
+He raised his arm and went on. Razumov backed against the low wall,
+looked after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry
+mutter--
+
+"Cursed Jew!"
+
+He did not know anything about it. Julius Laspara might have been a
+Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse
+towns for anything he could tell to the contrary. But this is not a
+story of the West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by
+the comment that it was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best
+adapted to the nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.
+He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted. He
+walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive
+harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull
+people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he
+discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge. He slowed down
+at once. To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green
+slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the
+picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
+water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.
+
+He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on
+slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get
+out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to
+his profound absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive
+journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write!
+A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made
+up his mind to do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that
+step and then had forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to
+escape from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger.
+He was ready to despise himself for it. What was it? Levity, or
+deep-seated weakness? Or an unconscious dread?
+
+"Is it that I am shrinking? It can't be! It's impossible. To shrink now
+would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
+damnation," he thought. "Is it possible that I have a conventional
+conscience?"
+
+He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
+pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street
+facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that
+it was there before him. But at the moment a couple of carriages and a
+slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left,
+following the quay again, but now away from the lake.
+
+"It may be just my health," he thought, allowing himself a very unusual
+doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment
+or two, he had never been ill in his life. But that was a danger, too.
+Only, it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially
+remarkable way. "If I believed in an active Providence," Razumov said
+to himself, amused grimly, "I would see here the working of an ironical
+finger. To have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind
+me of my purpose is--Write, he had said. I must write--I must, indeed!
+I shall write--never fear. Certainly. That's why I am here. And for the
+future I shall have something to write about."
+
+He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy. But the idea of
+writing evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of
+privacy, and naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the
+necessary exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile
+influence awaiting him within those odious four walls.
+
+"Suppose one of these revolutionists," he asked himself, "were to take
+a fancy to call on me while I am writing?" The mere prospect of such
+an interruption made him shudder. One could lock one's door, or ask
+the tobacconist downstairs (some sort of a refugee himself) to tell
+inquirers that one was not in. Not very good precautions those. The
+manner of his life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for
+suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences
+as a delay in opening a locked door. "I wish I were in the middle of
+some field miles away from everywhere," he thought.
+
+He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of
+being on a bridge again. This one was much narrower than the other, and
+instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point
+of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of
+gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile
+neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped
+on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a
+bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal.
+
+On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the
+woman in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the
+island. There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about
+that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+Something pretentious and shabby, too. He asked for a glass of milk,
+which he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea had passed his
+lips since the morning), and was going away with a weary, lagging step
+when a thought stopped him short. He had found precisely what he needed.
+If solitude could ever be secured in the open air in the middle of a
+town, he would have it there on this absurd island, together with the
+faculty of watching the only approach.
+
+He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the
+place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The
+materials he had on him. "I shall always come here," he said to himself,
+and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought
+and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the
+declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw
+the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he
+pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his
+knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the
+connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people
+crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the
+islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat
+enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of
+bronze. After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish
+haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first
+tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But
+the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful
+nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless,
+the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got
+up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.
+
+"There can be no doubt that now I am safe," he thought. His fine ear
+could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking
+against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to
+them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was
+too elusive.
+
+"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to," he murmured. And
+it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen
+to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of
+water, the voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions. All
+the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of
+a soul.
+
+This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and
+the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far
+as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his
+body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it
+must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of solitude
+from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+That I should, at the beginning of this retrospect, mention again that
+Mr. Razumov's youth had no one in the world, as literally no one as it
+can be honestly affirmed of any human being, is but a statement of fact
+from a man who believes in the psychological value of facts. There
+is also, perhaps, a desire of punctilious fairness. Unidentified with
+anyone in this narrative where the aspects of honour and shame are
+remote from the ideas of the Western world, and taking my stand on the
+ground of common humanity, it is for that very reason that I feel a
+strange reluctance to state baldly here what every reader has most
+likely already discovered himself. Such reluctance may appear absurd if
+it were not for the thought that because of the imperfection of language
+there is always something ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the
+exhibition of naked truth. But the time has come when Councillor of
+State Mikulin can no longer be ignored. His simple question "Where to?"
+on which we left Mr. Razumov in St. Petersburg, throws a light on the
+general meaning of this individual case.
+
+"Where to?" was the answer in the form of a gentle question to what we
+may call Mr. Razumov's declaration of independence. The question was not
+menacing in the least and, indeed, had the ring of innocent inquiry.
+Had it been taken in a merely topographical sense, the only answer to it
+would have appeared sufficiently appalling to Mr Razumov. Where to? Back
+to his rooms, where the Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden
+test his dormant instincts, his half-conscious thoughts and almost
+wholly unconscious ambitions, by the touch as of some furious and
+dogmatic religion, with its call to frantic sacrifices, its tender
+resignations, its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by the side of the
+most sombre moods of despair. And Mr. Razumov had let go the door-handle
+and had come back to the middle of the room, asking Councillor Mikulin
+angrily, "What do you mean by it?"
+
+As far as I can tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question.
+He drew Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation. It is the peculiarity of
+Russian natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action,
+they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas. This
+conversation (and others later on) need not be recorded. Suffice it to
+say that it brought Mr. Razumov as we know him to the test of another
+faith. There was nothing official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was
+led to defend his attitude of detachment. But Councillor Mikulin would
+have none of his arguments. "For a man like you," were his last weighty
+words in the discussion, "such a position is impossible. Don't forget
+that I have seen that interesting piece of paper. I understand your
+liberalism. I have an intellect of that kind myself. Reform for me is
+mainly a question of method. But the principle of revolt is a physical
+intoxication, a sort of hysteria which must be kept away from the
+masses. You agree to this without reserve, don't you? Because, you see,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, abstention, reserve, in certain situations, come
+very near to political crime. The ancient Greeks understood that very
+well."
+
+Mr. Razumov, listening with a faint smile, asked Councillor Mikulin
+point-blank if this meant that he was going to have him watched.
+
+The high official took no offence at the cynical inquiry.
+
+"No, Kirylo Sidorovitch," he answered gravely. "I don't mean to have you
+watched."
+
+Razumov, suspecting a lie, affected yet the greatest liberty of mind
+during the short remainder of that interview. The older man expressed
+himself throughout in familiar terms, and with a sort of shrewd
+simplicity. Razumov concluded that to get to the bottom of that mind was
+an impossible feat. A great disquiet made his heart beat quicker. The
+high official, issuing from behind the desk, was actually offering to
+shake hands with him.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr Razumov. An understanding between intelligent men is
+always a satisfactory occurrence. Is it not? And, of course, these rebel
+gentlemen have not the monopoly of intelligence."
+
+"I presume that I shall not be wanted any more?" Razumov brought out
+that question while his hand was still being grasped. Councillor Mikulin
+released it slowly.
+
+"That, Mr. Razumov," he said with great earnestness, "is as it may
+be. God alone knows the future. But you may rest assured that I
+never thought of having you watched. You are a young man of great
+independence. Yes. You are going away free as air, but you shall end by
+coming back to us."
+
+"I! I!" Razumov exclaimed in an appalled murmur of protest. "What for?"
+he added feebly.
+
+"Yes! You yourself, Kirylo Sidorovitch," the high police functionary
+insisted in a low, severe tone of conviction. "You shall be coming back
+to us. Some of our greatest minds had to do that in the end."
+
+"You have no better friend than Prince K---, and as to myself it is a
+long time now since I've been honoured by his...."
+
+He glanced down his beard.
+
+"I won't detain you any longer. We live in difficult times, in times
+of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies. We shall
+certainly meet once more. It may be some little time, though, before
+we do. Till then may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!" Once in the
+street, Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction.
+At first he thought of nothing; but in a little while the consciousness
+of his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous,
+and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of
+that complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he
+termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through
+his mind.
+
+Go back! What for? Confess! To what? "I have been speaking to him with
+the greatest openness," he said to himself with perfect truth. "What
+else could I tell him? That I have undertaken to carry a message to that
+brute Ziemianitch? Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance
+of safety I have won for nothing--what folly!"
+
+Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin
+was, perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct.
+To be understood appeared extremely fascinating.
+
+On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to
+run out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated
+as if in a desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so
+before he could proceed on his way. He reached his rooms at last.
+
+Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all
+at once removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities,
+from his very room, even. He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to
+himself to be existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything
+that had ever happened to him. He came out of this state slowly, with an
+effect, that is to say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number
+of days was not very great. And when he had got back into the middle of
+things they were all changed, subtly and provokingly in their nature:
+inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl,
+the staircase, the streets, the very air. He tackled these changed
+conditions in a spirit of severity. He walked to and fro to the
+University, ascended stairs, paced the passages, listened to lectures,
+took notes, crossed courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard
+till his jaws ached.
+
+He was perfectly aware of madcap Kostia gazing like a young retriever
+from a distance, of the famished student with the red drooping nose,
+keeping scrupulously away as desired; of twenty others, perhaps, he
+knew well enough to speak to. And they all had an air of curiosity and
+concern as if they expected something to happen. "This can't last much
+longer," thought Razumov more than once. On certain days he was afraid
+that anyone addressing him suddenly in a certain way would make him
+scream out insanely a lot of filthy abuse. Often, after returning home,
+he would drop into a chair in his cap and cloak and remain still for
+hours holding some book he had got from the library in his hand; or
+he would pick up the little penknife and sit there scraping his nails
+endlessly and feeling furious all the time--simply furious. "This is
+impossible," he would mutter suddenly to the empty room.
+
+Fact to be noted: this room might conceivably have become physically
+repugnant to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable.
+But no. Nothing of the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first),
+nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he liked his lodgings
+better than any other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever
+hired before. He liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very
+account, he found a certain difficulty in making up his mind to go out.
+It resembled a physical seduction such as, for instance, makes a man
+reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold day.
+
+For as, at that time, he seldom stirred except to go to the University
+(what else was there to do?) it followed that whenever he went abroad he
+felt himself at once closely involved in the moral consequences of his
+act. It was there that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on
+him, clung to him like a poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off.
+He suffered from it exceedingly, as well as from the conversational,
+commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with the other kind of students.
+"They must be wondering at the change in me," he reflected anxiously. He
+had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent,
+nice enough fellows to go to the devil. Once a married professor he used
+to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: "How is it we never see
+you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" Razumov was conscious of
+meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor
+was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all
+this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin:
+a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of
+the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on
+his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to
+haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it,
+but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who had
+the upper hand, in a composed sense of his own superiority. A vanquished
+phantom--nothing more. Often in the evening, his repaired watch faintly
+ticking on the table by the side of the lighted lamp, Razumov would
+look up from his writing and stare at the bed with an expectant,
+dispassionate attention. Nothing was to be seen there. He never really
+supposed that anything ever could be seen there. After a while he would
+shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work. For he had
+gone to work and, at first, with some success. His unwillingness to
+leave that place where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at
+last he ceased to go out at all. From early morning till far into the
+night he wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time,
+and only throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open
+no longer. Then, one afternoon, quite casually, he happened to glance at
+his watch. He laid down his pen slowly.
+
+"At this very hour," was his thought, "the fellow stole unseen into this
+room while I was out. And there he sat quiet as a mouse--perhaps in
+this very chair." Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily,
+glancing at the watch now and then. "This is the time when I returned
+and found him standing against the stove," he observed to himself. When
+it grew dark he lit his lamp. Later on he interrupted his tramping once
+more, only to wave away angrily the girl who attempted to enter the
+room with tea and something to eat on a tray. And presently he noted the
+watch pointing at the hour of his own going forth into the falling snow
+on that terrible errand.
+
+"Complicity," he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his
+eye on the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.
+
+"And, after all," he thought suddenly, "I might have been the chosen
+instrument of Providence. This is a manner of speaking, but there may be
+truth in every manner of speaking. What if that absurd saying were true
+in its essence?"
+
+He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with
+stony eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair
+like a man totally abandoned by Providence--desolate.
+
+He noted the time of Haldin's departure and continued to sit still for
+another half-hour; then muttering, "And now to work," drew up to the
+table, seized the pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a
+profoundly disquieting reflection: "There's three weeks gone by and no
+word from Mikulin."
+
+What did it mean! Was he forgotten? Possibly. Then why not remain
+forgotten--creep in somewhere? Hide. But where? How? With whom? In what
+hole? And was it to be for ever, or what?
+
+But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers. The eye of the social
+revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and
+despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it
+possible that he no longer belonged to himself? This was damnable.
+But why not simply keep on as before? Study. Advance. Work hard as if
+nothing had happened (and first of all win the Silver Medal), acquire
+distinction, become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States.
+Servant, too, of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind with a
+capability for logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity
+of force and aim such as the world had never dreamt of... the Russian
+nation!
+
+Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand
+towards the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed. He rushed at
+it, enraged, with a mental scream: "it's you, crazy fanatic, who stands
+in the way!" He flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the
+blankets aside.... Nothing there. And, turning away, he caught for
+an instant in the air, like a vivid detail in a dissolving view of two
+heads, the eyes of General T--- and of Privy-Councillor Mikulin side
+by side fixed upon him, quite different in character, but with the same
+unflinching and weary and yet purposeful expression...servants of the
+nation!
+
+Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some
+water and bathed his forehead. "This will pass and leave no trace," he
+thought confidently. "I am all right." But as to supposing that he had
+been forgotten it was perfect nonsense. He was a marked man on that
+side. And that was nothing. It was what that miserable phantom stood for
+which had to be got out of the way.... "If one only could go and spit
+it all out at some of them--and take the consequences."
+
+He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking
+his fist in his face. "From that one, though," he reflected, "there's
+nothing to be got, because he has no mind of his own. He's living in
+a red democratic trance. Ah! you want to smash your way into universal
+happiness, my boy. I will give you universal happiness, you silly,
+hypnotized ghoul, you! And what about my own happiness, eh? Haven't I
+got any right to it, just because I can think for myself?..."
+
+And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself,
+"I am young. Everything can be lived down." At that moment he was
+crossing the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to
+compose his thoughts. But before he had got so far everything abandoned
+him--hope, courage, belief in himself trust in men. His heart had, as it
+were, suddenly emptied itself. It was no use struggling on. Rest, work,
+solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike
+forbidden to him. Everything was gone. His existence was a great cold
+blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled
+with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
+
+He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like
+that, sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the
+rest of the night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with
+the samovar thumped with her fist on the door, calling out, "Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, please! It is time for you to get up!"
+
+Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov
+opened his eyes and got up.
+
+
+Nobody will be surprised to hear, I suppose, that when the summons came
+he went to see Councillor Mikulin. It came that very morning, while,
+looking white and shaky, like an invalid just out of bed, he was trying
+to shave himself. The envelope was addressed in the little attorney's
+handwriting. That envelope contained another, superscribed to Razumov,
+in Prince K---'s hand, with the request "Please forward under cover
+at once" in a corner. The note inside was an autograph of Councillor
+Mikulin. The writer stated candidly that nothing had arisen which needed
+clearing up, but nevertheless appointed a meeting with Mr. Razumov at a
+certain address in town which seemed to be that of an oculist.
+
+Razumov read it, finished shaving, dressed, looked at the note again,
+and muttered gloomily, "Oculist." He pondered over it for a time, lit
+a match, and burned the two envelopes and the enclosure carefully.
+Afterwards he waited, sitting perfectly idle and not even looking at
+anything in particular till the appointed hour drew near--and then went
+out.
+
+Whether, looking at the unofficial character of the summons, he might
+have refrained from attending to it is hard to say. Probably not. At any
+rate, he went; but, what's more, he went with a certain eagerness, which
+may appear incredible till it is remembered that Councillor Mikulin was
+the only person on earth with whom Razumov could talk, taking the Haldin
+adventure for granted. And Haldin, when once taken for granted, was no
+longer a haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre. Whatever troubling power
+he exercised in all the other places of the earth, Razumov knew very
+well that at this oculist's address he would be merely the hanged
+murderer of M. de P--- and nothing more. For the dead can live only
+with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by
+the living. So Mr. Razumov, certain of relief, went to meet Councillor
+Mikulin with he eagerness of a pursued person welcoming any sort of
+shelter.
+
+This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first
+interview and of the several others. To the morality of a Western reader
+an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character
+of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding
+subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to
+protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion
+of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view,
+allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted. With what
+greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact shade of mere
+mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error,
+always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly
+betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.
+
+Councillor Mikulin was one of those powerful officials who, in a
+position not obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous, exercise
+a great influence over the methods rather than over the conduct of
+affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal
+sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue
+the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor
+Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he
+was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of
+five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be
+an enlightened patron of the art of female dancing. Later on the larger
+world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of
+those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average plain man who
+reads the newspapers, by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in
+the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious
+disturbance of muddy waters, Councillor Mikulin went under, dignified,
+with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No
+disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the
+secrets of the miserable _arcana imperii_ deposited in his patriotic
+breast, a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official's
+ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence
+understood only by the very few of the initiated, and not without a
+certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a sybarite.
+For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councillor Mikulin civilly into a
+corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict.
+
+It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy,
+does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It
+devours its friends and servants as well. The downfall of His Excellency
+Gregory Gregorievitch Mikulin (which did not occur till some years
+later) completes all that is known of the man. But at the time of M. de
+P---'s murder (or execution) Councillor Mikulin, under the modest style
+of Head of Department at the General Secretariat, exercised a wide
+influence as the confidant and right-hand man of his former schoolfellow
+and lifelong friend, General T---. One can imagine them talking over the
+case of Mr. Razumov, with the full sense of their unbounded power
+over all the lives in Russia, with cursory disdain, like two Olympians
+glancing at a worm. The relationship with Prince K--- was enough to save
+Razumov from some carelessly arbitrary proceeding, and it is also very
+probable that after the interview at the Secretariat he would have been
+left alone. Councillor Mikulin would not have forgotten him (he forgot
+no one who ever fell under his observation), but would have simply
+dropped him for ever. Councillor Mikulin was a good-natured man and
+wished no harm to anyone. Besides (with his own reforming tendencies) he
+was favourably impressed by that young student, the son of Prince K---,
+and apparently no fool.
+
+But as fate would have it, while Mr. Razumov was finding that no way of
+life was possible to him, Councillor Mikulin's discreet abilities were
+rewarded by a very responsible post--nothing less than the direction of
+the general police supervision over Europe. And it was then, and then
+only, when taking in hand the perfecting of the service which watches
+the revolutionist activities abroad, that he thought again of Mr.
+Razumov. He saw great possibilities of special usefulness in that
+uncommon young man on whom he had a hold already, with his peculiar
+temperament, his unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a struggling in
+the toils of a false position.... It was as if the revolutionists
+themselves had put into his hand that tool so much finer than the common
+base instruments, so perfectly fitted, if only vested with sufficient
+credit, to penetrate into places inaccessible to common informers.
+Providential! Providential! And Prince K---, taken into the secret, was
+ready enough to adopt that mystical view too. "It will be necessary,
+though, to make a career for him afterwards," he had stipulated
+anxiously. "Oh! absolutely. We shall make that our affair," Mikulin had
+agreed. Prince K---'s mysticism was of an artless kind; but Councillor
+Mikulin was astute enough for two.
+
+Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they
+must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect
+command. The power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to
+seize upon that sense, that side in the men he used. It did not matter
+to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent
+pride or stupid conceit, it was all one to him as long as the man could
+be made to serve. The obscure, unrelated young student Razumov, in the
+moment of great moral loneliness, was allowed to feel that he was an
+object of interest to a small group of people of high position. Prince
+K--- was persuaded to intervene personally, and on a certain occasion
+gave way to a manly emotion which, all unexpected as it was, quite upset
+Mr. Razumov. The sudden embrace of that man, agitated by his loyalty to
+a throne and by suppressed paternal affection, was a revelation to Mr.
+Razumov of something within his own breast.
+
+"So that was it!" he exclaimed to himself. A sort of contemptuous
+tenderness softened the young man's grim view of his position as
+he reflected upon that agitated interview with Prince K---. This
+simpleminded, worldly ex-Guardsman and senator whose soft grey official
+whiskers had brushed against his cheek, his aristocratic and convinced
+father, was he a whit less estimable or more absurd than that
+famine-stricken, fanatical revolutionist, the red-nosed student?
+
+And there was some pressure, too, besides the persuasiveness. Mr.
+Razumov was always being made to feel that he had committed himself.
+There was no getting away from that feeling, from that soft,
+unanswerable, "Where to?" of Councillor Mikulin. But no susceptibilities
+were ever hurt. It was to be a dangerous mission to Geneva for
+obtaining, at a critical moment, absolutely reliable information from a
+very inaccessible quarter of the inner revolutionary circle. There were
+indications that a very serious plot was being matured.... The repose
+indispensable to a great country was at stake.... A great scheme of
+orderly reforms would be endangered.... The highest personages in the
+land were patriotically uneasy, and so on. In short, Councillor Mikulin
+knew what to say. This skill is to be inferred clearly from the mental
+and psychological self-confession, self-analysis of Mr. Razumov's
+written journal--the pitiful resource of a young man who had near him no
+trusted intimacy, no natural affection to turn to.
+
+How all this preliminary work was concealed from observation need not
+be recorded. The expedient of the oculist gives a sufficient instance.
+Councillor Mikulin was resourceful, and the task not very difficult. Any
+fellow-student, even the red-nosed one, was perfectly welcome to see Mr.
+Razumov entering a private house to consult an oculist. Ultimate success
+depended solely on the revolutionary self-delusion which credited
+Razumov with a mysterious complicity in the Haldin affair. To be
+compromised in it was credit enough-and it was their own doing. It was
+precisely _that_ which stamped Mr. Razumov as a providential man, wide
+as poles apart from the usual type of agent for "European supervision."
+
+And it was _that_ which the Secretariat set itself the task to foster by
+a course of calculated and false indiscretions.
+
+It came at last to this, that one evening Mr. Razumov was unexpectedly
+called upon by one of the "thinking" students whom formerly, before
+the Haldin affair, he used to meet at various private gatherings; a big
+fellow with a quiet, unassuming manner and a pleasant voice.
+
+Recognizing his voice raised in the ante-room, "May one come in?"
+Razumov, lounging idly on his couch, jumped up. "Suppose he were coming
+to stab me?" he thought sardonically, and, assuming a green shade over
+his left eye, said in a severe tone, "Come in."
+
+The other was embarrassed; hoped he was not intruding.
+
+"You haven't been seen for several days, and I've wondered." He coughed
+a little. "Eye better?"
+
+"Nearly well now."
+
+"Good. I won't stop a minute; but you see I, that is, we--anyway, I
+have undertaken the duty to warn you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that you are
+living in false security maybe."
+
+Razumov sat still with his head leaning on his hand, which nearly
+concealed the unshaded eye.
+
+"I have that idea, too."
+
+"That's all right, then. Everything seems quiet now, but those people
+are preparing some move of general repression. That's of course. But it
+isn't that I came to tell you." He hitched his chair closer, dropped his
+voice. "You will be arrested before long--we fear."
+
+An obscure scribe in the Secretariat had overheard a few words of a
+certain conversation, and had caught a glimpse of a certain report. This
+intelligence was not to be neglected.
+
+Razumov laughed a little, and his visitor became very anxious.
+
+"Ah! Kirylo Sidorovitch, this is no laughing matter. They have left you
+alone for a while, but...! Indeed, you had better try to leave the
+country, Kirylo Sidorovitch, while there's yet time."
+
+Razumov jumped up and began to thank him for the advice with mocking
+effusiveness, so that the other, colouring up, took himself off with
+the notion that this mysterious Razumov was not a person to be warned or
+advised by inferior mortals.
+
+Councillor Mikulin, informed the next day of the incident, expressed
+his satisfaction. "H'm! Ha! Exactly what was wanted to..." and glanced
+down his beard.
+
+"I conclude," said Razumov, "that the moment has come for me to start on
+my mission."
+
+"The psychological Moment," Councillor Mikulin insisted softly--very
+gravely--as if awed.
+
+All the arrangements to give verisimilitude to the appearance of a
+difficult escape were made. Councillor Mikulin did not expect to see
+Mr. Razumov again before his departure. These meetings were a risk, and
+there was nothing more to settle.
+
+"We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch,"
+said the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov's hand with that
+unreserved heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner. "There is
+nothing obscure between us. And I will tell you what! I consider myself
+fortunate in having--h'm--your..."
+
+He glanced down his beard, and, after a moment of thoughtful silence,
+handed to Razumov a half-sheet of notepaper--an abbreviated note of
+matters already discussed, certain points of inquiry, the line of
+conduct agreed on, a few hints as to personalities, and so on. It was
+the only compromising document in the case, but, as Councillor Mikulin
+observed, "it could be easily destroyed. Mr. Razumov had better not see
+any one now--till on the other side of the frontier, when, of course, it
+will be just that.... See and hear and..."
+
+He glanced down his beard; but when Razumov declared his intention
+to see one person at least before leaving St. Petersburg, Councillor
+Mikulin failed to conceal a sudden uneasiness. The young man's studious,
+solitary, and austere existence was well known to him. It was the
+greatest guarantee of fitness. He became deprecatory. Had his dear
+Kirylo Sidorovitch considered whether, in view of such a momentous
+enterprise, it wasn't really advisable to sacrifice every sentiment....
+
+Razumov interrupted the remonstrance scornfully. It was not a young
+woman, it was a young fool he wished to see for a certain purpose.
+Councillor Mikulin was relieved, but surprised.
+
+"Ah! And what for--precisely?"
+
+"For the sake of improving the aspect of verisimilitude," said Razumov
+curtly, in a desire to affirm his independence. "I must be trusted in
+what I do."
+
+Councillor Mikulin gave way tactfully, murmuring, "Oh, certainly,
+certainly. Your judgment..."
+
+And with another handshake they parted.
+
+The fool of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive
+student known as madcap Kostia. Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable,
+one could make certain of his utter and complete indiscretion. But that
+riotous youth, when reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some
+time ago, passed from his usual elation into boundless dismay.
+
+"Oh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, my dearest friend--my saviour--what shall I
+do? I've blown last night every rouble I had from my dad the other day.
+Can't you give me till Thursday? I shall rush round to all the usurers
+I know.... No, of course, you can't! Don't look at me like that.
+What shall I do? No use asking the old man. I tell you he's given me a
+fistful of big notes three days ago. Miserable wretch that I am."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair. Impossible to confide in the old man.
+"They" had given him a decoration, a cross on the neck only last year,
+and he had been cursing the modern tendencies ever since. Just then he
+would see all the intellectuals in Russia hanged in a row rather than
+part with a single rouble.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch, wait a moment. Don't despise me. I have it. I'll,
+yes--I'll do it--I'll break into his desk. There's no help for it. I
+know the drawer where he keeps his plunder, and I can buy a chisel on my
+way home. He will be terribly upset, but, you know, the dear old duffer
+really loves me. He'll have to get over it--and I, too. Kirylo, my dear
+soul, if you can only wait for a few hours-till this evening--I shall
+steal all the blessed lot I can lay my hands on! You doubt me! Why?
+You've only to say the word."
+
+"Steal, by all means," said Razumov, fixing him stonily.
+
+"To the devil with the ten commandments!" cried the other, with the
+greatest animation. "It's the new future now."
+
+But when he entered Razumov's room late in the evening it was with an
+unaccustomed soberness of manner, almost solemnly.
+
+"It's done," he said.
+
+Razumov sitting bowed, his clasped hands hanging between his knees,
+shuddered at the familiar sound of these words. Kostia deposited slowly
+in the circle of lamplight a small brown-paper parcel tied with a piece
+of string.
+
+"As I've said--all I could lay my hands on. The old boy'll think the end
+of the world has come." Razumov nodded from the couch, and contemplated
+the hare-brained fellow's gravity with a feeling of malicious pleasure.
+
+"I've made my little sacrifice," sighed mad Kostia. "And I've to thank
+you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, for the opportunity."
+
+"It has cost you something?"
+
+"Yes, it has. You see, the dear old duffer really loves me. He'll be
+hurt."
+
+"And you believe all they tell you of the new future and the sacred will
+of the people?"
+
+"Implicitly. I would give my life.... Only, you see, I am like a pig
+at a trough. I am no good. It's my nature."
+
+Razumov, lost in thought, had forgotten his existence till the
+youth's voice, entreating him to fly without loss of time, roused him
+unpleasantly.
+
+"All right. Well--good-bye."
+
+"I am not going to leave you till I've seen you out of St. Petersburg,"
+declared Kostia unexpectedly, with calm determination. "You can't refuse
+me that now. For God's sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here
+any moment, and when they get you they'll immure you somewhere for
+ages--till your hair turns grey. I have down there the best trotter of
+dad's stables and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the
+moon sets, and find some roadside station...."
+
+Razumov looked up amazed. The journey was decided--unavoidable. He
+had fixed the next day for his departure on the mission. And now he
+discovered suddenly that he had not believed in it. He had gone about
+listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the
+growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever
+did such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was
+amazed! Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness.
+"If I don't go now, at once," thought Razumov, with a start of fear, "I
+shall never go." He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia thrust
+his cap on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he would have left
+the room bareheaded as he stood. He was walking out silently when a
+sharp cry arrested him.
+
+"Kirylo!"
+
+"What?" He turned reluctantly in the doorway. Upright, with a stiffly
+extended arm, Kostia, his face set and white, was pointing an eloquent
+forefinger at the brown little packet lying forgotten in the circle of
+bright light on the table. Razumov hesitated, came back for it under the
+severe eyes of his companion, at whom he tried to smile. But the boyish,
+mad youth was frowning. "It's a dream," thought Razumov, putting the
+little parcel into his pocket and descending the stairs; "nobody does
+such things." The other held him under the arm, whispering of
+dangers ahead, and of what he meant to do in certain contingencies.
+"Preposterous," murmured Razumov, as he was being tucked up in the
+sledge. He gave himself up to watching the development of the dream
+with extreme attention. It continued on foreseen lines, inexorably
+logical--the long drive, the wait at the small station sitting by a
+stove. They did not exchange half a dozen words altogether. Kostia,
+gloomy himself, did not care to break the silence. At parting they
+embraced twice--it had to be done; and then Kostia vanished out of the
+dream.
+
+When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full
+of bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose
+quietly, lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great
+plain of snow a small brown-paper parcel. Then he sat down again muffled
+up and motionless. "For the people," he thought, staring out of the
+window. The great white desert of frozen, hard earth glided past his
+eyes without a sign of human habitation.
+
+That had been a waking act; and then the dream had him again: Prussia,
+Saxony, Wurtemberg, faces, sights, words--all a dream, observed with
+an angry, compelled attention. Zurich, Geneva--still a dream, minutely
+followed, wearing one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death--with the
+fear of awakening at the end.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Perhaps life is just that," reflected Razumov, pacing to and fro under
+the trees of the little island, all alone with the bronze statue of
+Rousseau. "A dream and a fear." The dusk deepened. The pages written
+over and torn out of his notebook were the first-fruit of his "mission."
+No dream that. They contained the assurance that he was on the eve of
+real discoveries. "I think there is no longer anything in the way of my
+being completely accepted."
+
+He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the
+conversations. He even went so far as to write: "By the by, I have
+discovered the personality of that terrible N.N. A horrible, paunchy
+brute. If I hear anything of his future movements I shall send a
+warning."
+
+The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could
+not believe in the reality of his mission. He looked round despairingly,
+as if for some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable
+feeling. He crushed angrily in his hand the pages of the notebook. "This
+must be posted," he thought.
+
+He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he
+remembered having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure
+shop stocked with cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely
+dirty cardboard-bound volumes of a small circulating library. They
+sold stationery there, too. A morose, shabby old man dozed behind
+the counter. A thin woman in black, with a sickly face, produced the
+envelope he had asked for without even looking at him. Razumov thought
+that these people were safe to deal with because they no longer cared
+for anything in the world. He addressed the envelope on the counter with
+the German name of a certain person living in Vienna. But Razumov knew
+that this, his first communication for Councillor Mikulin, would
+find its way to the Embassy there, be copied in cypher by somebody
+trustworthy, and sent on to its destination, all safe, along with the
+diplomatic correspondence. That was the arrangement contrived to cover
+up the track of the information from all unfaithful eyes, from all
+indiscretions, from all mishaps and treacheries. It was to make him
+safe--absolutely safe.
+
+He wandered out of the wretched shop and made for the post office. It
+was then that I saw him for the second time that day. He was crossing
+the Rue Mont Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller. He
+did not recognize me, but I made him out at some distance. He was
+very good-looking, I thought, this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin's
+brother. I watched him go up to the letter-box and then retrace his
+steps. Again he passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see
+me that time, either. He carried his head well up, but he had the
+expression of a somnambulist struggling with the very dream which drives
+him forth to wander in dangerous places. My thoughts reverted to Natalia
+Haldin, to her mother. He was all that was left to them of their son and
+brother.
+
+The westerner in me was discomposed. There was something shocking in
+the expression of that face. Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian
+political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical
+conclusion from this chance glimpse. As it was, it only discomposed me
+strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in
+regard to Natalia Haldin. All this is rather inexplicable, but such
+was the origin of the purpose I formed there and then to call on these
+ladies in the evening, after my solitary dinner. It was true that I had
+met Miss Haldin only a few hours before, but Mrs. Haldin herself I had
+not seen for some considerable time. The truth is, I had shirked calling
+of late.
+
+Poor Mrs. Haldin! I confess she frightened me a little. She was one
+of those natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being
+interested, because they provoke both terror and pity. One dreads their
+contact for oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear
+it is that they are born to suffer and to make others suffer, too. It is
+strange to think that, I won't say liberty, but the mere liberalism of
+outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and
+if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our
+deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like
+ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a
+matter of tears and anguish and blood. Mrs. Haldin had felt the pangs
+of her own generation. There was that enthusiast brother of hers--the
+officer they shot under Nicholas. A faintly ironic resignation is
+no armour for a vulnerable heart. Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her
+children, was bound to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the
+anguish of the future. She was of those who do not know how to heal
+themselves, of those who are too much aware of their heart, who, neither
+cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at its wounds--and count the
+cost.
+
+Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor's meal. If
+anybody wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of
+Natalia Haldin, I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.
+She had all her life before her. Let it be admitted, then, that I was
+thinking of Natalia Haldin's life in terms of her mother's character, a
+manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old
+yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth
+before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy,
+overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly sombre youth
+given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious
+antagonisms.
+
+I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done. One felt so
+helpless, and even worse--so unrelated, in a way. At the last moment I
+hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good?
+
+The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner. The blind was
+down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in
+her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired
+the poignant quality of mad expectation.
+
+I thought that I was sufficiently authorized by the light to knock at
+the door. The ladies had not retired as yet. I only hoped they would
+not have any visitors of their own nationality. A broken-down, retired
+Russian official was to be found there sometimes in the evening. He was
+infinitely forlorn and wearisome by his mere dismal presence. I think
+these ladies tolerated his frequent visits because of an ancient
+friendship with Mr. Haldin, the father, or something of that sort. I
+made up my mind that if I found him prosing away there in his feeble
+voice I should remain but a very few minutes.
+
+The door surprised me by swinging open before I could ring the bell. I
+was confronted by Miss Haldin, in hat and jacket, obviously on the point
+of going out. At that hour! For the doctor, perhaps?
+
+Her exclamation of welcome reassured me. It sounded as if I had been the
+very man she wanted to see. My curiosity was awakened. She drew me in,
+and the faithful Anna, the elderly German maid, closed the door, but did
+not go away afterwards. She remained near it as if in readiness to let
+me out presently. It appeared that Miss Haldin had been on the point of
+going out to find me.
+
+She spoke in a hurried manner very unusual with her. She would have
+gone straight and rung at Mrs. Ziegler's door, late as it was, for Mrs.
+Ziegler's habits....
+
+Mrs. Ziegler, the widow of a distinguished professor who was an intimate
+friend of mine, lets me have three rooms out of her very large and fine
+apartment, which she didn't give up after her husband's death; but I
+have my own entrance opening on the same landing. It was an arrangement
+of at least ten years' standing. I said that I was very glad that I had
+the idea to....
+
+Miss Haldin made no motion to take off her outdoor things. I observed
+her heightened colour, something pronouncedly resolute in her tone. Did
+I know where Mr. Razumov lived?
+
+Where Mr. Razumov lived? Mr. Razumov? At this hour--so urgently? I threw
+my arms up in sign of utter ignorance. I had not the slightest idea
+where he lived. If I could have foreseen her question only three hours
+ago, I might have ventured to ask him on the pavement before the new
+post office building, and possibly he would have told me, but very
+possibly, too, he would have dismissed me rudely to mind my own
+business. And possibly, I thought, remembering that extraordinary
+hallucined, anguished, and absent expression, he might have fallen down
+in a fit from the shock of being spoken to. I said nothing of all this
+to Miss Haldin, not even mentioning that I had a glimpse of the young
+man so recently. The impression had been so extremely unpleasant that I
+would have been glad to forget it myself.
+
+"I don't see where I could make inquiries," I murmured helplessly. I
+would have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to
+fetch any man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in
+her common sense. "What made you think of coming to me for that
+information?" I asked.
+
+"It wasn't exactly for that," she said, in a low voice. She had the air
+of some one confronted by an unpleasant task.
+
+"Am I to understand that you must communicate with Mr. Razumov this
+evening?"
+
+Natalia Haldin moved her head affirmatively; then, after a glance at the
+door of the drawing-room, said in French--
+
+"_C'est maman_," and remained perplexed for a moment. Always serious,
+not a girl to be put out by any imaginary difficulties, my curiosity was
+suspended on her lips, which remained closed for a moment. What was Mr.
+Razumov's connexion with this mention of her mother? Mrs. Haldin had not
+been informed of her son's friend's arrival in Geneva.
+
+"May I hope to see your mother this evening?" I inquired.
+
+Miss Haldin extended her hand as if to bar the way.
+
+"She is in a terrible state of agitation. Oh, you would not he able
+to detect.... It's inward, but I who know mother, I am appalled. I
+haven't the courage to face it any longer. It's all my fault; I suppose
+I cannot play a part; I've never before hidden anything from mother.
+There has never been an occasion for anything of that sort between us.
+But you know yourself the reason why I refrained from telling her at
+once of Mr. Razumov's arrival here. You understand, don't you? Owing to
+her unhappy state. And--there--I am no actress. My own feelings being
+strongly engaged, I somehow.... I don't know. She noticed something
+in my manner. She thought I was concealing something from her. She
+noticed my longer absences, and, in fact, as I have been meeting Mr.
+Razumov daily, I used to stay away longer than usual when I went out.
+Goodness knows what suspicions arose in her mind. You know that she has
+not been herself ever since.... So this evening she--who has been so
+awfully silent: for weeks-began to talk all at once. She said that she
+did not want to reproach me; that I had my character as she had her own;
+that she did not want to pry into my affairs or even into my thoughts;
+for her part, she had never had anything to conceal from her
+children...cruel things to listen to. And all this in her quiet voice,
+with that poor, wasted face as calm as a stone. It was unbearable."
+
+Miss Haldin talked in an undertone and more rapidly than I had ever
+heard her speak before. That in itself was disturbing. The ante-room
+being strongly lighted, I could see under the veil the heightened colour
+of her face. She stood erect, her left hand was resting lightly on a
+small table. The other hung by her side without stirring. Now and then
+she caught her breath slightly.
+
+"It was too startling. Just fancy! She thought that I was making
+preparations to leave her without saying anything. I knelt by the side
+of her chair and entreated her to think of what she was saying! She put
+her hand on my head, but she persists in her delusion all the same. She
+had always thought that she was worthy of her children's confidence, but
+apparently it was not so. Her son could not trust her love nor yet her
+understanding--and now I was planning to abandon her in the same cruel
+and unjust manner, and so on, and so on. Nothing I could say.... It
+is morbid obstinacy.... She said that she felt there was something,
+some change in me.... If my convictions were calling me away, why
+this secrecy, as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe to
+trust? 'As if my heart could play traitor to my children,' she said....
+It was hardly to be borne. And she was smoothing my head all the
+time.... It was perfectly useless to protest. She is ill. Her very
+soul is...."
+
+I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us. I looked
+into her eyes, glistening through the veil.
+
+"I! Changed!" she exclaimed in the same low tone. "My convictions
+calling me away! It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I
+am weak and cannot see what I ought to do. You know that. And to end it
+all I did a selfish thing. To remove her suspicions of myself I told her
+of Mr. Razumov. It was selfish of me. You know we were completely
+right in agreeing to keep the knowledge away from her. Perfectly right.
+Directly I told her of our poor Victor's friend being here I saw how
+right we have been. She ought to have been prepared; but in my distress
+I just blurted it out. Mother got terribly excited at once. How long
+has he been here? What did he know, and why did he not come to see us at
+once, this friend of her Victor? What did that mean? Was she not to be
+trusted even with such memories as there were left of her son?... Just
+think how I felt seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly motionless,
+with her thin hands gripping the arms of the chair. I told her it was
+all my fault."
+
+I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair,
+there, behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me.
+The silence in there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an
+historical fact and the modern instances of its working. That view
+flashed through my mind, but I could not doubt that Miss Haldin had had
+an atrocious time of it. I quite understood when she said that she could
+not face the night upon the impression of that scene. Mrs. Haldin
+had given way to most awful imaginings, to most fantastic and cruel
+suspicions. All this had to be lulled at all costs and without loss of
+time. It was no shock to me to learn that Miss Haldin had said to her,
+"I will go and bring him here at once." There was nothing absurd in that
+cry, no exaggeration of sentiment. I was not even doubtful in my "Very
+well, but how?"
+
+It was perfectly right that she should think of me, but what could I do
+in my ignorance of Mr. Razumov's quarters.
+
+"And to think he may be living near by, within a stone's-throw,
+perhaps!" she exclaimed.
+
+I doubted it; but I would have gone off cheerfully to fetch him from the
+other end of Geneva. I suppose she was certain of my readiness, since
+her first thought was to come to me. But the service she meant to ask of
+me really was to accompany her to the Chateau Borel.
+
+I had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre
+grounds, and the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy
+and intrigue and feminist adoration. I objected that Madame de S-- most
+likely would know nothing of what we wanted to find out. Neither did I
+think it likely that the young man would be found there. I remembered
+my glimpse of his face, and somehow gained the conviction that a man who
+looked worse than if he had seen the dead would want to shut himself up
+somewhere where he could be alone. I felt a strange certitude that Mr.
+Razumov was going home when I saw him.
+
+"It is really of Peter Ivanovitch that I was thinking," said Miss Haldin
+quietly.
+
+Ah! He, of course, would know. I looked at my watch. It was twenty
+minutes past nine only.... Still.
+
+"I would try his hotel, then," I advised. "He has rooms at the
+Cosmopolitan, somewhere on the top floor."
+
+I did not offer to go by myself, simply from mistrust of the reception I
+should meet with. But I suggested the faithful Anna, with a note asking
+for the information.
+
+Anna was still waiting by the door at the other end of the room, and we
+two discussed the matter in whispers. Miss Haldin thought she must go
+herself. Anna was timid and slow. Time would be lost in bringing back
+the answer, and from that point of view it was getting late, for it was
+by no means certain that Mr. Razumov lived near by.
+
+"If I go myself," Miss Haldin argued, "I can go straight to him from the
+hotel. And in any case I should have to go out, because I must explain
+to Mr. Razumov personally--prepare him in a way. You have no idea of
+mother's state of mind."
+
+Her colour came and went. She even thought that both for her mother's
+sake and for her own it was better that they should not be together for
+a little time. Anna, whom her mother liked, would be at hand.
+
+"She could take her sewing into the room," Miss Haldin continued,
+leading the way to the door. Then, addressing in German the maid who
+opened it before us, "You may tell my mother that this gentleman called
+and is gone with me to find Mr. Razumov. She must not be uneasy if I am
+away for some length of time."
+
+We passed out quickly into the street, and she took deep breaths of the
+cool night air. "I did not even ask you," she murmured.
+
+"I should think not," I said, with a laugh. The manner of my reception
+by the great feminist could not be considered now. That he would be
+annoyed to see me, and probably treat me to some solemn insolence, I had
+no doubt, but I supposed that he would not absolutely dare to throw me
+out. And that was all I cared for. "Won't you take my arm?" I asked.
+
+She did so in silence, and neither of us said anything worth recording
+till I let her go first into the great hall of the hotel. It was
+brilliantly lighted, and with a good many people lounging about.
+
+"I could very well go up there without you," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like to be left waiting in this place," she said in a low
+voice.
+
+"I will come too."
+
+I led her straight to the lift then. At the top floor the attendant
+directed us to the right: "End of the corridor."
+
+The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in
+profusion, and the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike
+and numbered, made me think of the perfect order of some severely
+luxurious model penitentiary on the solitary confinement principle. Up
+there under the roof of that enormous pile for housing travellers
+no sound of any kind reached us, the thick crimson felt muffled our
+footsteps completely. We hastened on, not looking at each other till we
+found ourselves before the very last door of that long passage. Then our
+eyes met, and we stood thus for a moment lending ear to a faint murmur
+of voices inside.
+
+"I suppose this is it," I whispered unnecessarily. I saw Miss Haldin's
+lips move without a sound, and after my sharp knock the murmur of voices
+inside ceased. A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then
+the door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red
+blouse, with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in
+an untidy and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn
+together. I learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous--or
+the notorious--Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint
+Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so
+curiously evil-less, so--I may say--un-devilish. It got softened still
+more as she looked up at Miss Haldin, who stated, in her rich, even
+voice, her wish to see Peter Ivanovitch for a moment.
+
+"I am Miss Haldin," she added.
+
+At this, with her brow completely smoothed out now, but without a word
+in answer, the woman in the red blouse walked away to a sofa and sat
+down, leaving the door wide open.
+
+And from the sofa, her hands lying on her lap, she watched us enter,
+with her black, glittering eyes.
+
+Miss Haldin advanced into the middle of the room; I, faithful to my part
+of mere attendant, remained by the door after closing it behind me. The
+room, quite a large one, but with a low ceiling, was scantily furnished,
+and an electric bulb with a porcelain shade pulled low down over a big
+table (with a very large map spread on it) left its distant parts in a
+dim, artificial twilight. Peter Ivanovitch was not to be seen, neither
+was Mr. Razumov present. But, on the sofa, near Sophia Antonovna, a
+bony-faced man with a goatee beard leaned forward with his hands on
+his knees, staring hard with a kindly expression. In a remote corner a
+broad, pale face and a bulky shape could be made out, uncouth, and as if
+insecure on the low seat on which it rested. The only person known to me
+was little Julius Laspara, who seemed to have been poring over the map,
+his feet twined tightly round the chair-legs. He got down briskly and
+bowed to Miss Haldin, looking absurdly like a hooknosed boy with a
+beautiful false pepper-and-salt beard. He advanced, offering his seat,
+which Miss Haldin declined. She had only come in for a moment to say a
+few words to Peter Ivanovitch.
+
+His high-pitched voice became painfully audible in the room.
+
+"Strangely enough, I was thinking of you this very afternoon, Natalia
+Victorovna. I met Mr. Razumov. I asked him to write me an article on
+anything he liked. You could translate it into English--with such a
+teacher."
+
+He nodded complimentarily in my direction. At the name of Razumov an
+indescribable sound, a sort of feeble squeak, as of some angry small
+animal, was heard in the corner occupied by the man who seemed much too
+large for the chair on which he sat. I did not hear what Miss Haldin
+said. Laspara spoke again.
+
+"It's time to do something, Natalia Victorovna. But I suppose you have
+your own ideas. Why not write something yourself? Suppose you came to
+see us soon? We could talk it over. Any advice..."
+
+Again I did not catch Miss Haldin's words. It was Laspara's voice once
+more.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch? He's retired for a moment into the other room. We
+are all waiting for him." The great man, entering at that moment, looked
+bigger, taller, quite imposing in a long dressing-gown of some dark
+stuff. It descended in straight lines down to his feet. He suggested
+a monk or a prophet, a robust figure of same desert-dweller--something
+Asiatic; and the dark glasses in conjunction with this costume made him
+more mysterious than ever in the subdued light.
+
+Little Laspara went back to his chair to look at the map, the only
+brilliantly lit object in the room. Even from my distant position by the
+door I could make out, by the shape of the blue part representing the
+water, that it was a map of the Baltic provinces. Peter Ivanovitch
+exclaimed slightly, advancing towards Miss Haldin, checked himself
+on perceiving me, very vaguely no doubt; and peered with his dark,
+bespectacled stare. He must have recognized me by my grey hair, because,
+with a marked shrug of his broad shoulders, he turned to Miss Haldin in
+benevolent indulgence. He seized her hand in his thick cushioned palm,
+and put his other big paw over it like a lid.
+
+While those two standing in the middle of the floor were exchanging a
+few inaudible phrases no one else moved in the room: Laspara, with his
+back to us, kneeling on the chair, his elbows propped on the big-scale
+map, the shadowy enormity in the corner, the frankly staring man with
+the goatee on the sofa, the woman in the red blouse by his side--not one
+of them stirred. I suppose that really they had no time, for Miss Haldin
+withdrew her hand immediately from Peter Ivanovitch and before I was
+ready for her was moving to the door. A disregarded Westerner, I threw
+it open hurriedly and followed her out, my last glance leaving them all
+motionless in their varied poses: Peter Ivanovitch alone standing up,
+with his dark glasses like an enormous blind teacher, and behind him the
+vivid patch of light on the coloured map, pored over by the diminutive
+Laspara.
+
+Later on, much later on, at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were
+vague and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia,
+I remembered the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its
+central figure. No details ever came out, but it was known that the
+revolutionary parties abroad had given their assistance, had sent
+emissaries in advance, that even money was found to dispatch a steamer
+with a cargo of arms and conspirators to invade the Baltic provinces.
+And while my eyes scanned the imperfect disclosures (in which the world
+was not much interested) I thought that the old, settled Europe had been
+given in my person attending that Russian girl something like a glimpse
+behind the scenes. A short, strange glimpse on the top floor of a great
+hotel of all places in the world: the great man himself; the motionless
+great bulk in the corner of the slayer of spies and gendarmes;
+Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient terrorist campaigns; the woman, with
+her hair as white as mine and the lively black eyes, all in a mysterious
+half-light, with the strongly lighted map of Russia on the table. The
+woman I had the opportunity to see again. As we were waiting for the
+lift she came hurrying along the corridor, with her eyes fastened
+on Miss Haldin's face, and drew her aside as if for a confidential
+communication. It was not long. A few words only.
+
+Going down in the lift, Natalia Haldin did not break the silence. It was
+only when out of the hotel and as we moved along the quay in the fresh
+darkness spangled by the quay lights, reflected in the black water of
+the little port on our left hand, and with lofty piles of hotels on our
+right, that she spoke.
+
+"That was Sophia Antonovna--you know the woman?..."
+
+"Yes, I know--the famous..."
+
+"The same. It appears that after we went out Peter Ivanovitch told them
+why I had come. That was the reason she ran out after us. She named
+herself to me, and then she said, 'You are the sister of a brave man who
+shall be remembered. You may see better times.' I told her I hoped to
+see the time when all this would be forgotten, even if the name of my
+brother were to be forgotten too. Something moved me to say that, but
+you understand?"
+
+"Yes," I said. "You think of the era of concord and justice."
+
+"Yes. There is too much hate and revenge in that work. It must be done.
+It is a sacrifice--and so let it be all the greater. Destruction is the
+work of anger. Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together,
+and only the reconstructors be remembered.''
+
+"And did Sophia Antonovna agree with you?" I asked sceptically.
+
+"She did not say anything except, 'It is good for you to believe in
+love.' I should think she understood me. Then she asked me if I hoped to
+see Mr. Razumov presently. I said I trusted I could manage to bring him
+to see my mother this evening, as my mother had learned of his being
+here and was morbidly impatient to learn if he could tell us something
+of Victor. He was the only friend of my brother we knew of, and a great
+intimate. She said, 'Oh! Your brother--yes. Please tell Mr. Razumov that
+I have made public the story which came to me from St. Petersburg. It
+concerns your brother's arrest,' she added. 'He was betrayed by a man of
+the people who has since hanged himself. Mr. Razumov will explain it all
+to you. I gave him the full information this afternoon. And please tell
+Mr. Razumov that Sophia Antonovna sends him her greetings. I am going
+away early in the morning--far away.'"
+
+And Miss Haldin added, after a moment of silence--"I was so moved
+by what I heard so unexpectedly that I simply could not speak to you
+before.... A man of the people! Oh, our poor people!"
+
+She walked slowly, as if tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the
+windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound
+of hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red
+posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial
+effect.--and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the
+streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible
+dreariness.
+
+I had taken for granted she had obtained the address, and let myself be
+guided by her. On the Mont Blanc bridge, where a few dark figures seemed
+lost in the wide and long perspective defined by the lights, she said--
+
+"It isn't very far from our house. I somehow thought it couldn't be.
+The address is Rue de Carouge. I think it must be one of those big new
+houses for artisans."
+
+She took my arm confidingly, familiarly, and accelerated her pace. There
+was something primitive in our proceedings. We did not think of
+the resources of civilization. A late tramcar overtook us; a row of
+_fiacres_ stood by the railing of the gardens. It never entered our
+heads to make use of these conveyances. She was too hurried, perhaps,
+and as to myself--well, she had taken my arm confidingly. As we were
+ascending the easy incline of the Corraterie, all the shops shuttered
+and no light in any of the windows (as if all the mercenary population
+had fled at the end of the day), she said tentatively--
+
+"I could run in for a moment to have a look at mother. It would not be
+much out of the way."
+
+I dissuaded her. If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that
+night it would have been unwise to show herself without him. The sooner
+we got hold of the young man and brought him along to calm her mother's
+agitation the better. She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed
+diagonally the Place de Theatre, bluish grey with its floor of slabs of
+stone, under the electric light, and the lonely equestrian statue
+all black in the middle. In the Rue de Carouge we were in the poorer
+quarters and approaching the outskirts of the town. Vacant building
+plots alternated with high, new houses. At the corner of a side street
+the crude light of a whitewashed shop fell into the night, fan-like,
+through a wide doorway. One could see from a distance the inner wall
+with its scantily furnished shelves, and the deal counter painted brown.
+That was the house. Approaching it along the dark stretch of a fence
+of tarred planks, we saw the narrow pallid face of the cut angle, five
+single windows high, without a gleam in them, and crowned by the heavy
+shadow of a jutting roof slope.
+
+"We must inquire in the shop," Miss Haldin directed me.
+
+A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a
+frayed tie, laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both
+elbows far over the bare counter, answered that the person I was
+inquiring for was indeed his _locataire_ on the third floor, but that
+for the moment he was out.
+
+"For the moment," I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin. "Does this
+mean that you expect him back at once?"
+
+He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips. He smiled
+faintly as though he knew all about everything. Mr. Razumov, after being
+absent all day, had returned early in the evening. He was very surprised
+about half an hour or a little more since to see him come down again.
+Mr. Razumov left his key, and in the course of some words which passed
+between them had remarked that he was going out because he needed air.
+
+From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held
+between his hands. Air. Air. But whether that meant a long or a short
+absence it was difficult to say. The night was very close, certainly.
+
+After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added--
+
+"The storm shall drive him in."
+
+"There's going to be a storm?" I asked.
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
+
+Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up
+her quest that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home
+within half an hour, to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop. We
+would look in again presently.
+
+For all answer he moved his head imperceptibly. The approval of Miss
+Haldin was expressed by her silence. We walked slowly down the street,
+away from the town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to
+demolition were overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage,
+lighted from below by gas lamps. The violent and monotonous noise of the
+icy waters of the Arve falling over a low dam swept towards us with a
+chilly draught of air across a great open space, where a double line of
+lamp-lights outlined a street as yet without houses. But on the other
+shore, overhung by the awful blackness of the thunder-cloud, a solitary
+dim light seemed to watch us with a weary stare. When we had strolled as
+far as the bridge, I said--
+
+"We had better get back...."
+
+
+In the shop the sickly man was studying his smudgy newspaper, now spread
+out largely on the counter. He just raised his head when I looked in and
+shook it negatively, pursing up his lips. I rejoined Miss Haldin outside
+at once, and we moved off at a brisk pace. She remarked that she would
+send Anna with a note the first thing in the morning. I respected her
+taciturnity, silence being perhaps the best way to show my concern.
+
+The semi-rural street we followed on our return changed gradually to the
+usual town thoroughfare, broad and deserted. We did not meet four people
+altogether, and the way seemed interminable, because my companion's
+natural anxiety had communicated itself sympathetically to me. At last
+we turned into the Boulevard des Philosophes, more wide, more empty,
+more dead--the very desolation of slumbering respectability. At the
+sight of the two lighted windows, very conspicuous from afar, I had
+the mental vision of Mrs. Haldin in her armchair keeping a dreadful,
+tormenting vigil under the evil spell of an arbitrary rule: a victim of
+tyranny and revolution, a sight at once cruel and absurd.
+
+
+III
+
+
+
+"You will come in for a moment?" said Natalia Haldin.
+
+I demurred on account of the late hour. "You know mother likes you so
+much," she insisted.
+
+"I will just come in to hear how your mother is."
+
+She said, as if to herself, "I don't even know whether she will believe
+that I could not find Mr. Razumov, since she has taken it into her head
+that I am concealing something from her. You may be able to persuade
+her...."
+
+"Your mother may mistrust me too," I observed.
+
+"You! Why? What could you have to conceal from her? You are not a
+Russian nor a conspirator."
+
+I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made
+up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end. The distant
+rolling of thunder in the valley of the Rhone was coming nearer to the
+sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality. We crossed
+the street opposite the great dark gateway, and Miss Haldin rang at the
+door of the apartment. It was opened almost instantly, as if the
+elderly maid had been waiting in the ante-room for our return. Her flat
+physiognomy had an air of satisfaction. The gentleman was there, she
+declared, while closing the door.
+
+Neither of us understood. Miss Haldin turned round brusquely to her.
+"Who?"
+
+"Herr Razumov," she explained.
+
+She had heard enough of our conversation before we left to know why her
+young mistress was going out. Therefore, when the gentleman gave his
+name at the door, she admitted him at once.
+
+"No one could have foreseen that," Miss Haldin murmured, with her
+serious grey eyes fixed upon mine. And, remembering the expression of
+the young man's face seen not much more than four hours ago, the look of
+a haunted somnambulist, I wondered with a sort of awe.
+
+"You asked my mother first?" Miss Haldin inquired of the maid.
+
+"No. I announced the gentleman," she answered, surprised at our troubled
+faces.
+
+"Still," I said in an undertone, "your mother was prepared."
+
+"Yes. But he has no idea...."
+
+It seemed to me she doubted his tact. To her question how long the
+gentleman had been with her mother, the maid told us that Der Herr had
+been in the drawing-room no more than a short quarter of an hour.
+
+She waited a moment, then withdrew, looking a little scared. Miss Haldin
+gazed at me in silence.
+
+"As things have turned out," I said, "you happen to know exactly what
+your brother's friend has to tell your mother. And surely after that..."
+
+"Yes," said Natalia Haldin slowly. "I only wonder, as I was not here
+when he came, if it wouldn't be better not to interrupt now."
+
+We remained silent, and I suppose we both strained our ears, but no
+sound reached us through the closed door. The features of Miss Haldin
+expressed a painful irresolution; she made a movement as if to go in,
+but checked herself. She had heard footsteps on the other side of the
+door. It came open, and Razumov, without pausing, stepped out into the
+ante-room. The fatigue of that day and the struggle with himself had
+changed him so much that I would have hesitated to recognize that face
+which, only a few hours before, when he brushed against me in front of
+the post office, had been startling enough but quite different. It
+had been not so livid then, and its eyes not so sombre. They certainly
+looked more sane now, but there was upon them the shadow of something
+consciously evil.
+
+I speak of that, because, at first, their glance fell on me, though
+without any sort of recognition or even comprehension. I was simply in
+the line of his stare. I don't know if he had heard the bell or expected
+to see anybody. He was going out, I believe, and I do not think that
+he saw Miss Haldin till she advanced towards him a step or two. He
+disregarded the hand she put out.
+
+"It's you, Natalia Victorovna.... Perhaps you are surprised...at
+this late hour. But, you see, I remembered our conversations in that
+garden. I thought really it was your wish that I should--without loss of
+time...so I came. No other reason. Simply to tell..."
+
+He spoke with difficulty. I noticed that, and remembered his declaration
+to the man in the shop that he was going out because he "needed air."
+If that was his object, then it was clear that he had miserably failed.
+With downcast eyes and lowered head he made an effort to pick up the
+strangled phrase.
+
+"To tell what I have heard myself only to-day--to-day...."
+
+Through the door he had not closed I had a view of the drawing-room. It
+was lighted only by a shaded lamp--Mrs. Haldin's eyes could not support
+either gas or electricity. It was a comparatively big room, and in
+contrast with the strongly lighted ante-room its length was lost in
+semi-transparent gloom backed by heavy shadows; and on that ground I saw
+the motionless figure of Mrs. Haldin, inclined slightly forward, with a
+pale hand resting on the arm of the chair.
+
+She did not move. With the window before her she had no longer that
+attitude suggesting expectation. The blind was down; and outside
+there was only the night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town
+indifferent and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration--a
+respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were
+nothing. Her white head was bowed.
+
+The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great
+stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this
+other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words
+and gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother,
+refused in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more
+than Rachel's inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more
+inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined
+mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile suggested
+the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a beloved head were
+resting there.
+
+I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by
+the young man, shut the door. It was not done without hesitation. For a
+moment I thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only
+an anxious glance. Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved...but no. There
+was in the immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of
+suffering without remedy.
+
+Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor. The thought
+that he would have to repeat the story he had told already was
+intolerable to him. He had expected to find the two women together. And
+then, he had said to himself, it would be over for all time--for all
+time. "It's lucky I don't believe in another world," he had thought
+cynically.
+
+Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained
+a certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary. He was
+aware of the danger of that strange self-indulgence. He alludes to it
+himself, but he could not refrain. It calmed him--it reconciled him
+to his existence. He sat there scribbling by the light of a solitary
+candle, till it occurred to him that having heard the explanation of
+Haldin's arrest, as put forward by Sophia Antonovna, it behoved him to
+tell these ladies himself. They were certain to hear the tale through
+some other channel, and then his abstention would look strange, not only
+to the mother and sister of Haldin, but to other people also. Having
+come to this conclusion, he did not discover in himself any marked
+reluctance to face the necessity, and very soon an anxiety to be done
+with it began to torment him. He looked at his watch. No; it was not
+absolutely too late.
+
+The fifteen minutes with Mrs. Haldin were like the revenge of the
+unknown: that white face, that weak, distinct voice; that head, at
+first turned to him eagerly, then, after a while, bowed again and
+motionless--in the dim, still light of the room in which his words
+which he tried to subdue resounded so loudly--had troubled him like some
+strange discovery. And there seemed to be a secret obstinacy in that
+sorrow, something he could not understand; at any rate, something he had
+not expected. Was it hostile? But it did not matter. Nothing could touch
+him now; in the eyes of the revolutionists there was now no shadow on
+his past. The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left
+behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow.
+And this was the phantom's mother consumed with grief and white as a
+ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no
+importance. Mothers did not matter. He could not shake off the poignant
+impression of that silent, quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of
+sternness crept into his thoughts. These were the consequences. Well,
+what of it? "Am I then on a bed of roses?" he had exclaimed to himself,
+sitting at some distance with his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow.
+He had said all he had to say to her, and when he had finished she had
+not uttered a word. She had turned away her head while he was speaking.
+The silence which had fallen on his last words had lasted for five
+minutes or more. What did it mean? Before its incomprehensible character
+he became conscious of anger in his stern mood, the old anger against
+Haldin reawakened by the contemplation of Haldin's mother. And was
+it not something like enviousness which gripped his heart, as if of
+a privilege denied to him alone of all the men that had ever passed
+through this world? It was the other who had attained to repose and yet
+continued to exist in the affection of that mourning old woman, in
+the thoughts of all these people posing for lovers of humanity. It
+was impossible to get rid of him. "It's myself whom I have given up
+to destruction," thought Razumov. "He has induced me to do it. I can't
+shake him off."
+
+Alarmed by that discovery, he got up and strode out of the silent,
+dim room with its silent old woman in the chair, that mother! He never
+looked back. It was frankly a flight. But on opening the door he saw
+his retreat cut off: There was the sister. He had never forgotten the
+sister, only he had not expected to see her then--or ever any more,
+perhaps. Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the
+apparition of her brother had been. Razumov gave a start as though he
+had discovered himself cleverly trapped. He tried to smile, but could
+not manage it, and lowered his eyes. "Must I repeat that silly story
+now?" he asked himself, and felt a sinking sensation. Nothing solid
+had passed his lips since the day before, but he was not in a state to
+analyse the origins of his weakness. He meant to take up his hat and
+depart with as few words as possible, but Miss Haldin's swift movement
+to shut the door took him by surprise. He half turned after her, but
+without raising his eyes, passively, just as a feather might stir in the
+disturbed air. The next moment she was back in the place she had started
+from, with another half-turn on his part, so that they came again into
+the same relative positions.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said hurriedly. "I am very grateful to you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, for coming at once--like this.... Only, I wish I had....
+Did mother tell you?"
+
+"I wonder what she could have told me that I did not know before," he
+said, obviously to himself, but perfectly audible. "Because I always did
+know it," he added louder, as if in despair.
+
+He hung his head. He had such a strong sense of Natalia Haldin's
+presence that to look at her he felt would be a relief. It was she who
+had been haunting him now. He had suffered that persecution ever since
+she had suddenly appeared before him in the garden of the Villa Borel
+with an extended hand and the name of her brother on her lips....
+The ante-room had a row of hooks on the wall nearest to the outer door,
+while against the wall opposite there stood a small dark table and one
+chair. The paper, bearing a very faint design, was all but white. The
+light of an electric bulb high up under the ceiling searched that clear
+square box into its four bare corners, crudely, without shadows--a
+strange stage for an obscure drama.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Miss Haldin. "What is it that you knew
+always?"
+
+He raised his face, pale, full of unexpressed suffering. But that
+look in his eyes of dull, absent obstinacy, which struck and surprised
+everybody he was talking to, began to pass way. It was as though he
+were coming to himself in the awakened consciousness of that marvellous
+harmony of feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the
+girl before him a being so rare, outside, and, as it were, above the
+common notion of beauty. He looked at her so long that she coloured
+slightly.
+
+"What is it that you knew?" she repeated vaguely.
+
+That time he managed to smile.
+
+"Indeed, if it had not been for a word of greeting or two, I would doubt
+whether your mother was aware at all of my existence. You understand?"
+
+Natalia Haldin nodded; her hands moved slightly by her side.
+
+"Yes. Is it not heart-breaking? She has not shed a tear yet--not a
+single tear."
+
+"Not a tear! And you, Natalia Victorovna? You have been able to cry?"
+
+"I have. And then I am young enough, Kirylo Sidorovitch, to believe in
+the future. But when I see my mother so terribly distracted, I almost
+forget everything. I ask myself whether one should feel proud--or only
+resigned. We had such a lot of people coming to see us. There were
+utter strangers who wrote asking for permission to call to present their
+respects. It was impossible to keep our door shut for ever. You know
+that Peter Ivanovitch himself.... Oh yes, there was much sympathy,
+but there were persons who exulted openly at that death. Then, when I
+was left alone with poor mother, all this seemed so wrong in spirit,
+something not worth the price she is paying for it. But directly I heard
+you were here in Geneva, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I felt that you were the
+only person who could assist me...."
+
+"In comforting a bereaved mother? Yes!" he broke in in a manner which
+made her open her clear unsuspecting eyes. "But there is a question of
+fitness. Has this occurred to you?"
+
+There was a breathlessness in his utterance which contrasted with the
+monstrous hint of mockery in his intention.
+
+"Why!" whispered Natalia Haldin with feeling. "Who more fit than you?"
+
+He had a convulsive movement of exasperation, but controlled himself.
+
+"Indeed! Directly you heard that I was in Geneva, before even seeing me?
+It is another proof of that confidence which...."
+
+All at once his tone changed, became more incisive and more detached.
+
+"Men are poor creatures, Natalia Victorovna. They have no intuition of
+sentiment. In order to speak fittingly to a mother of her lost son one
+must have had some experience of the filial relation. It is not the case
+with me--if you must know the whole truth. Your hopes have to deal here
+with 'a breast unwarmed by any affection,' as the poet says.... That
+does not mean it is insensible," he added in a lower tone.
+
+"I am certain your heart is not unfeeling," said Miss Haldin softly.
+
+"No. It is not as hard as a stone," he went on in the same introspective
+voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in
+that unwarmed breast of which he spoke. "No, not so hard. But how to
+prove what you give me credit for--ah! that's another question. No one
+has ever expected such a thing from me before. No one whom my tenderness
+would have been of any use to. And now you come. You! Now! No, Natalia
+Victorovna. It's too late. You come too late. You must expect nothing
+from me."
+
+She recoiled from him a little, though he had made no movement, as
+if she had seen some change in his face, charging his words with the
+significance of some hidden sentiment they shared together. To me, the
+silent spectator, they looked like two people becoming conscious of a
+spell which had been lying on them ever since they first set eyes on
+each other. Had either of them cast a glance then in my direction, I
+would have opened the door quietly and gone out. But neither did; and
+I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous
+remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian
+problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings--the prison of
+their souls.
+
+Frank, courageous, Miss Haldin controlled her voice in the midst of her
+trouble.
+
+"What can this mean?" she asked, as if speaking to herself.
+
+"It may mean that you have given yourself up to vain imaginings while I
+have managed to remain amongst the truth of things and the realities of
+life--our Russian life--such as they are."
+
+"They are cruel," she murmured.
+
+"And ugly. Don't forget that--and ugly. Look where you like. Look near
+you, here abroad where you are, and then look back at home, whence you
+came."
+
+"One must look beyond the present." Her tone had an ardent conviction.
+
+"The blind can do that best. I have had the misfortune to be born
+clear-eyed. And if you only knew what strange things I have seen! What
+amazing and unexpected apparitions!... But why talk of all this?"
+
+"On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you," she protested
+with earnest serenity. The sombre humours of her brother's friend left
+her unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were
+the signs of an indignant rectitude. She saw that he was not an ordinary
+person, and perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to
+her trustful eyes. "Yes, with you especially," she insisted. "With you
+of all the Russian people in the world...." A faint smile dwelt for
+a moment on her lips. "I am like poor mother in a way. I too seem unable
+to give up our beloved dead, who, don't forget, was all in all to us. I
+don't want to abuse your sympathy, but you must understand that it is in
+you that we can find all that is left of his generous soul."
+
+I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least. And
+yet, even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility. It was a
+sort of rapt thoughtfulness. Then he stirred slightly.
+
+"You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she asked.
+
+"I! Going? Where? Oh yes, but I must tell you first...." His voice
+was muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance,
+as if speech were something disgusting or deadly. "That story, you
+know--the story I heard this afternoon...."
+
+"I know the story already," she said sadly.
+
+"You know it! Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?"
+
+"No. It's Sophia Antonovna. I have seen her just now. She sends you her
+greetings. She is going away to-morrow."
+
+He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down,
+and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the
+four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity
+of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my
+Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My
+existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now
+make a movement. And I thought to myself that, of course, they had to
+come together, the sister and the friend of that dead man. The ideas,
+the hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom, expressed in their
+common affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of autocracy,--all
+this must draw them to each other fatally. Her very ignorance and his
+loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.
+And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already. Of course. It was
+manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time
+before they met. She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling
+her imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for
+him to see that exceptional girl was enough. The only cause for surprise
+was his gloomy aloofness before her clearly expressed welcome. But he
+was young, and however austere and devoted to his revolutionary ideals,
+he was not blind. The period of reserve was over; he was coming forward
+in his own way. I could not mistake the significance of this late visit,
+for in what he had to say there was nothing urgent. The true cause
+dawned upon me: he had discovered that he needed her and she was moved
+by the same feeling. It was the second time that I saw them together,
+and I knew that next time they met I would not be there, either
+remembered or forgotten. I would have virtually ceased to exist for both
+these young people.
+
+I made this discovery in a very few moments. Meantime, Natalia Haldin
+was telling Razumov briefly of our peregrinations from one end of Geneva
+to the other. While speaking she raised her hands above her head to
+untie her veil, and that movement displayed for an instant the seductive
+grace of her youthful figure, clad in the simplest of mourning. In the
+transparent shadow the hat rim threw on her face her grey eyes had an
+enticing lustre. Her voice, with its unfeminine yet exquisite timbre,
+was steady, and she spoke quickly, frank, unembarrassed. As she
+justified her action by the mental state of her mother, a spasm of pain
+marred the generously confiding harmony of her features. I perceived
+that with his downcast eyes he had the air of a man who is listening
+to a strain of music rather than to articulated speech. And in the same
+way, after she had ceased, he seemed to listen yet, motionless, as if
+under the spell of suggestive sound. He came to himself, muttering--
+
+"Yes, yes. She has not shed a tear. She did not seem to hear what I
+was saying. I might have told her anything. She looked as if no longer
+belonging to this world."
+
+Miss Haldin gave signs of profound distress. Her voice faltered. "You
+don't know how bad it has come to be. She expects now to see _him_!" The
+veil dropped from her fingers and she clasped her hands in anguish. "It
+shall end by her seeing him," she cried.
+
+Razumov raised his head sharply and attached on her a prolonged
+thoughtful glance.
+
+"H'm. That's very possible," he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if
+giving his opinion on a matter of fact. "I wonder what...." He
+checked himself.
+
+"That would be the end. Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will
+follow."
+
+Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
+
+"You think so?" he queried profoundly. Miss Haldin's lips were slightly
+parted. Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man's
+character had fascinated her from the first. "No! There's neither truth
+nor consolation to be got from the phantoms of the dead," he added after
+a weighty pause. "I might have told her something true; for instance,
+that your brother meant to save his life--to escape. There can be no
+doubt of that. But I did not."
+
+"You did not! But why?"
+
+"I don't know. Other thoughts came into my head," he answered. He seemed
+to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count
+his own heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face
+of the girl. "You were not there," he continued. "I had made up my mind
+never to see you again."
+
+This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
+
+"You.... How is it possible?"
+
+"You may well ask.... However, I think that I refrained from telling
+your mother from prudence. I might have assured her that in the last
+conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both...."
+
+"That last conversation was with you," she struck in her deep, moving
+voice. "Some day you must...."
+
+"It was with me. Of you he said that you had trustful eyes. And why I
+have not been able to forget that phrase I don't know. It meant
+that there is in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no
+suspicion--nothing in your heart that could give you a conception of a
+living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it came in your way. That you are
+a predestined victim.... Ha! what a devilish suggestion!"
+
+The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the
+precarious hold he had over himself. He was like a man defying his own
+dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the
+precipice. Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast. The dropped black
+veil lay on the floor between them. Her movement steadied him. He looked
+intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again
+his eyes to her face. But he did not give her time to speak.
+
+"No? You don't understand? Very well." He had recovered his calm by a
+miracle of will. "So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?"
+
+"Yes. Sophia Antonovna told me...." Miss Haldin stopped, wonder
+growing in her wide eyes.
+
+"H'm. That's the respectable enemy," he muttered, as though he were
+alone.
+
+"The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly," remarked
+Miss Haldin, after waiting for a while.
+
+"Is that your impression? And she the most intelligent of the lot,
+too. Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires
+to...Ah! these conspirators," he said slowly, with an accent of scorn;
+"they would get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I
+have the greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition
+of an active Providence. It's irresistible.... The alternative, of
+course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if
+so, he has overdone it altogether--the old Father of Lies--our national
+patron--our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has
+overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough.... That's it! I
+ought to have known.... And I did know it," he added in a tone of
+poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.
+
+"This man is deranged," I said to myself, very much frightened.
+
+The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of
+commonplace definitions. It was as though he had stabbed himself outside
+and had come in there to show it; and more than that--as though he were
+turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect. That was the
+impression, rendered in physical terms. One could not defend oneself
+from a certain amount of pity. But it was for Miss Haldin, already so
+tried in her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern. Her
+attitude, her face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the
+verge of terror.
+
+"What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" There was a hint of tenderness in
+that cry. He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his
+faculties which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
+
+"Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I have
+approached you frankly. I need at this time to see clearly in
+myself...." She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to
+utter at last some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother's
+friend. His silence became impressive, like a sign of a momentous
+resolution.
+
+In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly--
+
+"I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to
+come to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems
+as if you were keeping back something from me."
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he was heard at last in a strange
+unringing voice, "whom did you see in that place?"
+
+She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
+
+"Where? In Peter Ivanovitch's rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three
+other people."
+
+"Ha! The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot," he commented to
+himself. "Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
+change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
+Ivanovitch should be the head of a State."
+
+"You are teasing me," she said. "Our dear one told me once to remember
+that men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea."
+
+"Our dear one," he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
+absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being
+with hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical
+suffering, had lost all their fire. "Ah! your brother.... But on
+your lips, in your voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is
+divine.... I wish I could know the innermost depths of your thoughts,
+of your feelings."
+
+"But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she cried, alarmed by these words coming
+out of strangely lifeless lips.
+
+"Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And
+Sophia Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?"
+
+"She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything
+from you. She had no time for more than a few words." Miss Haldin's
+voice dropped and she became silent for a moment. "The man, it appears,
+has taken his life," she said sadly.
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he asked after a pause, "do you believe
+in remorse?"
+
+"What a question!"
+
+"What can _you_ know of it?" he muttered thickly. "It is not for such as
+you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy
+of remorse?"
+
+She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted
+up.
+
+"Yes," she said firmly.
+
+"So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
+brute."
+
+A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
+
+"But a man of the people," Razumov went on, "to whom they, the
+revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must
+be forgiven.... And you must not believe all you've heard from that
+source, either," he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.
+
+"You are concealing something from me," she exclaimed.
+
+"Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?"
+
+"Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
+to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner,
+betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light
+breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that
+there can be no union and no love."
+
+"I hear. No revenge for you, then? Never? Not the least bit?" He smiled
+bitterly with his colourless lips. "You yourself are like the very
+spirit of that merciful future. Strange that it does not make it
+easier.... No! But suppose that the real betrayer of your
+brother--Ziemianitch had a part in it too, but insignificant and quite
+involuntary--suppose that he was a young man, educated, an intellectual
+worker, thoughtful, a man your brother might have trusted lightly,
+perhaps, but still--suppose.... But there's a whole story there."
+
+"And you know the story! But why, then--"
+
+"I have heard it. There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but
+that does not matter if a man always serves something greater than
+himself--the idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?"
+
+"In that tale!" Miss Haldin repeated. She seemed turned into stone.
+
+"Do you know why I came to you? It is simply because there is no one
+anywhere in the whole great world I could go to. Do you understand
+what I say? Not one to go to. Do you conceive the desolation of the
+thought--no one--to--go--to?"
+
+Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in
+the letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely
+days, in their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to
+see the truth struggling on his lips. What she was conscious of was the
+obscure form of his suffering. She was on the point of extending her
+hand to him impulsively when he spoke again.
+
+"An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors of
+remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the
+atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before
+me with your voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed
+villa."
+
+She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of
+despairing insight went straight to the point.
+
+"The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!"
+
+"There is no more to tell!" He made a movement forward, and she actually
+put her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed
+her, and he kept his ground, though trembling in every limb. "It ends
+here--on this very spot." He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast
+with force, and became perfectly still.
+
+I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of
+Miss Haldin and lower her down. As she sank into it she swung half round
+on my arm, and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back.
+He looked at her with an appalling expressionless tranquillity.
+Incredulity, struggling with astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived
+me for a time of the power of speech. Then I turned on him, whispering
+from very rage--
+
+"This is monstrous. What are you staying for? Don't let her catch sight
+of you again. Go away!..." He did not budge. "Don't you understand
+that your presence is intolerable--even to me? If there's any sense of
+shame in you...."
+
+Slowly his sullen eyes moved ill my direction. "How did this old man
+come here?" he muttered, astounded.
+
+Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and
+tottered. Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried
+to her assistance. I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into
+the drawing-room. Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant
+end, the profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had
+the stillness of a sombre painting. Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed
+mournfully at the tragic immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a
+beloved head lying in her lap.
+
+That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in
+its human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely
+the ruthless working of political institutions. After assisting Miss
+Haldin to the sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed
+in the opening, in the searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes
+fell on Razumov, still there, standing before the empty chair, as if
+rooted for ever to the spot of his atrocious confession. A wonder came
+over me that the mysterious force which had torn it out of him had
+failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed.
+I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing
+immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin
+looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing
+at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage
+swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands.
+Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he
+seemed to vanish before he moved.
+
+The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on
+contemplating the empty chair in the empty ante-room. The meaning
+of what I had seen reached my mind with a staggering shock. I seized
+Natalia Haldin by the shoulder.
+
+"That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!" I cried, in the
+scared, deadened voice of an awful discovery. "He...."
+
+The rest remained unspoken. I stepped back and looked down at her, in
+silent horror. Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her
+lap. She raised her grey eyes slowly. Shadows seemed to come and go in
+them as if the steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate
+at last in the cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark
+immensity claiming her for its own, where virtues themselves fester into
+crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt.
+
+"It is impossible to be more unhappy...." The languid whisper of her
+voice struck me with dismay. "It is impossible.... I feel my heart
+becoming like ice."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Razumov walked straight home on the wet glistening pavement. A heavy
+shower passed over him; distant lightning played faintly against the
+fronts of the dumb houses with the shuttered shops all along the Rue
+de Carouge; and now and then, after the faint flash, there was a faint,
+sleepy rumble; but the main forces of the thunderstorm remained
+massed down the Rhone valley as if loath to attack the respectable and
+passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of
+dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent, hospitality to tourists
+of all nations and to international conspirators of every shade.
+
+The owner of the shop was making ready to close when Razumov entered and
+without a word extended his hand for the key of his room. On reaching
+it for him, from a shelf, the man was about to pass a small joke as to
+taking the air in a thunderstorm, but, after looking at the face of his
+lodger, he only observed, just to say something--
+
+"You've got very wet."
+
+"Yes, I am washed clean," muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head
+to foot, and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading
+to his room.
+
+He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off
+his watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to
+write. The book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer,
+which he pulled out violently, and did not even trouble to push back
+afterwards.
+
+In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in
+hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means
+with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been
+already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing
+new to the psychological side of this disclosure (there is even one more
+allusion to the silver medal in this last entry), comes a page and
+a half of incoherent writing where his expression is baffled by the
+novelty and the mysteriousness of that side of our emotional life to
+which his solitary existence had been a stranger. Then only he begins
+to address directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express in
+broken sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that
+very word) power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the
+dormant seed of her brother's words.
+
+"... The most trustful eyes in the world--your brother said of you
+when he was as well as a dead man already. And when you stood before me
+with your hand extended, I remembered the very sound of his voice, and
+I looked into your eyes--and that was enough. I knew that something had
+happened, but I did not know then what.... But don't be deceived,
+Natalia Victorovna. I believed that I had in my breast nothing but an
+inexhaustible fund of anger and hate for you both. I remembered that he
+had looked to you for the perpetuation of his visionary soul. He, this
+man who had robbed me of my hard-working, purposeful existence. I, too,
+had my guiding idea; and remember that, amongst us, it is more difficult
+to lead a life of toil and self-denial than to go out in the street and
+kill from conviction. But enough of that. Hate or no hate, I felt at
+once that, while shunning the sight of you, I could never succeed in
+driving away your image. I would say, addressing that dead man, 'Is
+this the way you are going to haunt me?' It is only later on that I
+understood--only to-day, only a few hours ago. What could I have known
+of what was tearing me to pieces and dragging the secret for ever to
+my lips? You were appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself
+back into truth and peace. You! And you have done it in the same way,
+too, in which he ruined me: by forcing upon me your confidence. Only
+what I detested him for, in you ended by appearing noble and exalted.
+But, I repeat, be not deceived. I was given up to evil. I exulted in
+having induced that silly innocent fool to steal his father's money. He
+was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one. It was necessary. I had
+to confirm myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed. I have
+suffered from as many vipers in my heart as any social democrat of them
+all--vanity, ambitions, jealousies, shameful desires, evil passions of
+envy and revenge. I had my security stolen from me, years of good work,
+my best hopes. Listen--now comes the true confession. The other was
+nothing. To save me, your trustful eyes had to entice my thought to the
+very edge of the blackest treachery. I could see them constantly looking
+at me with the confidence of your pure heart which had not been touched
+by evil things. Victor Haldin had stolen the truth of my life from me,
+who had nothing else in the world, and he boasted of living on through
+you on this earth where I had no place to lay my head on. She will marry
+some day, he had said--and your eyes were trustful. And do you know what
+I said to myself? I shall steal his sister's soul from her. When we met
+that first morning in the gardens, and you spoke to me confidingly
+in the generosity of your spirit, I was thinking, 'Yes, he himself by
+talking of her trustful eyes has delivered her into my hands!' If you
+could have looked then into my heart, you would have cried out aloud
+with terror and disgust.
+
+"Perhaps no one will believe the baseness of such an intention to be
+possible. It's certain that, when we parted that morning, I gloated
+over it. I brooded upon the best way. The old man you introduced me to
+insisted on walking with me. I don't know who he is. He talked of you,
+of your lonely, helpless state, and every word of that friend of yours
+was egging me on to the unpardonable sin of stealing a soul. Could he
+have been the devil himself in the shape of an old Englishman? Natalia
+Victorovna, I was possessed! I returned to look at you every day,
+and drink in your presence the poison of my infamous intention. But
+I foresaw difficulties. Then Sophia Antonovna, of whom I was not
+thinking--I had forgotten her existence--appears suddenly with that
+tale from St. Petersburg.... The only thing needed to make me safe--a
+trusted revolutionist for ever.
+
+"It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further
+crime. The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible. These people
+stood doomed by the folly and the illusion that was in them--they being
+themselves the slaves of lies. Natalia Victorovna, I embraced the might
+of falsehood, I exulted in it--I gave myself up to it for a time. Who
+could have resisted! You yourself were the prize of it. I sat alone in
+my room, planning a life, the very thought of which makes me shudder
+now, like a believer who had been tempted to an atrocious sacrilege. But
+I brooded ardently over its images. The only thing was that there seemed
+to be no air in it. And also I was afraid of your mother. I never knew
+mine. I've never known any kind of love. There is something in the mere
+word.... Of you, I was not afraid--forgive me for telling you this.
+No, not of you. You were truth itself. You could not suspect me. As to
+your mother, you yourself feared already that her mind had given way
+from grief. Who could believe anything against me? Had not Ziemianitch
+hanged himself from remorse? I said to myself, 'Let's put it to the
+test, and be done with it once for all.' I trembled when I went in;
+but your mother hardly listened to what I was saying to her, and, in a
+little while, seemed to have forgotten my very existence. I sat looking
+at her. There was no longer anything between you and me. You were
+defenceless--and soon, very soon, you would be alone.... I thought of
+you. Defenceless. For days you have talked with me--opening your heart.
+I remembered the shadow of your eyelashes over your grey trustful eyes.
+And your pure forehead! It is low like the forehead of statues--calm,
+unstained. It was as if your pure brow bore a light which fell on me,
+searched my heart and saved me from ignominy, from ultimate undoing.
+And it saved you too. Pardon my presumption. But there was that in your
+glances which seemed to tell me that you.... Your light! your truth!
+I felt that I must tell you that I had ended by loving you. And to tell
+you that I must first confess. Confess, go out--and perish.
+
+"Suddenly you stood before me! You alone in all the world to whom I
+must confess. You fascinated me--you have freed me from the blindness of
+anger and hate--the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me. Now I
+have done it; and as I write here, I am in the depths depths of anguish,
+but there is air to breathe at last--air! And, by the by, that old man
+sprang up from somewhere as I was speaking to you, and raged at me like
+a disappointed devil. I suffer horribly, but I am not in despair. There
+is only one more thing to do for me. After that--if they let me--I shall
+go away and bury myself in obscure misery. In giving Victor Haldin up,
+it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most basely. You must
+believe what I say now, you can't refuse to believe this. Most basely.
+It is through you that I came to feel this so deeply. After all, it is
+they and not I who have the right on their side?--theirs is the
+strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don't be deceived, Natalia
+Victorovna, I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave? No! I
+am independent--and therefore perdition is my lot."
+
+On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the
+black veil he had carried off. He then ransacked the drawers for
+paper and string, made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin,
+Boulevard des Philosophes, and then flung the pen away from him into a
+distant corner.
+
+This done, he sat down with the watch before him. He could have gone out
+at once, but the hour had not struck yet. The hour would be midnight.
+There was no reason for that choice except that the facts and the words
+of a certain evening in his past were timing his conduct in the present.
+The sudden power Natalia Haldin had gained over him he ascribed to the
+same cause. "You don't walk with impunity over a phantom's breast,"
+he heard himself mutter. "Thus he saves me," he thought suddenly. "He
+himself, the betrayed man." The vivid image of Miss Haldin seemed to
+stand by him, watching him relentlessly. She was not disturbing. He had
+done with life, and his thought even in her presence tried to take an
+impartial survey. Now his scorn extended to himself. "I had neither the
+simplicity nor the courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel,
+or an exceptionally able man. For who, with us in Russia, is to tell a
+scoundrel from an exceptionally able man?..."
+
+He was the puppet of his past, because at the very stroke of midnight he
+jumped up and ran swiftly downstairs as if confident that, by the power
+of destiny, the house door would fly open before the absolute necessity
+of his errand. And as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom
+of the stairs, it was opened for him by some people of the house coming
+home late--two men and a woman. He slipped out through them into the
+street, swept then by a fitful gust of wind. They were, of course, very
+much startled. A flash of lightning enabled them to observe him walking
+away quickly. One of the men shouted, and was starting in pursuit, but
+the woman had recognized him. "It's all right. It's only that young
+Russian from the third floor." The darkness returned with a single clap
+of thunder, like a gun fired for a warning of his escape from the prison
+of lies.
+
+He must have heard at some time or other and now remembered
+unconsciously that there was to be a gathering of revolutionists at the
+house of Julius Laspara that evening. At any rate, he made straight for
+the Laspara house, and found himself without surprise ringing at its
+street door, which, of course, was closed. By that time the thunderstorm
+had attacked in earnest. The steep incline of the street ran with water,
+the thick fall of rain enveloped him like a luminous veil in the play
+of lightning. He was perfectly calm, and, between the crashes, listened
+attentively to the delicate tinkling of the doorbell somewhere within
+the house.
+
+There was some difficulty before he was admitted. His person was not
+known to that one of the guests who had volunteered to go downstairs and
+see what was the matter. Razumov argued with him patiently. There could
+be no harm in admitting a caller. He had something to communicate to the
+company upstairs.
+
+"Something of importance?"
+
+"That'll be for the hearers to judge."
+
+"Urgent?"
+
+"Without a moment's delay."
+
+Meantime, one of the Laspara daughters descended the stairs, small lamp
+in hand, in a grimy and crumpled gown, which seemed to hang on her by a
+miracle, and looking more than ever like an old doll with a dusty brown
+wig, dragged from under a sofa. She recognized Razumov at once.
+
+"How do you do? Of course you may come in."
+
+Following her light, Razumov climbed two flights of stairs from the
+lower darkness. Leaving the lamp on a bracket on the landing, she opened
+a door, and went in, accompanied by the sceptical guest. Razumov entered
+last. He closed the door behind him, and stepping on one side, put his
+back against the wall.
+
+The three little rooms _en suite_, with low, smoky ceilings and lit by
+paraffin lamps, were crammed with people. Loud talking was going on
+in all three, and tea-glasses, full, half-full, and empty, stood
+everywhere, even on the floor. The other Laspara girl sat, dishevelled
+and languid, behind an enormous samovar. In the inner doorway Razumov
+had a glimpse of the protuberance of a large stomach, which he
+recognized. Only a few feet from him Julius Laspara was getting down
+hurriedly from his high stool.
+
+The appearance of the midnight visitor caused no small sensation.
+Laspara is very summary in his version of that night's happenings.
+After some words of greeting, disregarded by Razumov, Laspara (ignoring
+purposely his guest's soaked condition and his extraordinary manner of
+presenting himself) mentioned something about writing an article. He
+was growing uneasy, and Razumov appeared absent-minded. "I have written
+already all I shall ever write," he said at last, with a little laugh.
+
+The whole company's attention was riveted on the new-comer, dripping
+with water, deadly pale, and keeping his position against the wall.
+Razumov put Laspara gently aside, as though he wished to be seen from
+head to foot by everybody. By then the buzz of conversations had died
+down completely, even in the most distant of the three rooms. The
+doorway facing Razumov became blocked by men and women, who craned their
+necks and certainly seemed to expect something startling to happen.
+
+A squeaky, insolent declaration was heard from that group.
+
+"I know this ridiculously conceited individual."
+
+"What individual?" asked Razumov, raising his bowed head, and searching
+with his eyes all the eyes fixed upon him. An intense surprised silence
+lasted for a time. "If it's me...."
+
+He stopped, thinking over the form of his confession, and found it
+suddenly, unavoidably suggested by the fateful evening of his life.
+
+"I am come here," he began, in a clear voice, "to talk of an individual
+called Ziemianitch. Sophia Antonovna has informed me that she would make
+public a certain letter from St. Petersburg...."
+
+"Sophia Antonovna has left us early in the evening," said Laspara. "It's
+quite correct. Everybody here has heard...."
+
+"Very well," Razumov interrupted, with a shade of impatience, for his
+heart was beating strongly. Then, mastering his voice so far that there
+was even a touch of irony in his clear, forcible enunciation--
+
+"In justice to that individual, the much ill-used peasant, Ziemianitch,
+I now declare solemnly that the conclusions of that letter calumniate a
+man of the people--a bright Russian soul. Ziemianitch had nothing to do
+with the actual arrest of Victor Haldin."
+
+Razumov dwelt on the name heavily, and then waited till the faint,
+mournful murmur which greeted it had died out.
+
+"Victor Victorovitch Haldin," he began again, "acting with, no doubt,
+noble-minded imprudence, took refuge with a certain student of whose
+opinions he knew nothing but what his own illusions suggested to his
+generous heart. It was an unwise display of confidence. But I am not
+here to appreciate the actions of Victor Haldin. Am I to tell you of
+the feelings of that student, sought out in his obscure solitude, and
+menaced by the complicity forced upon him? Am I to tell you what he did?
+It's a rather complicated story. In the end the student went to General
+T--- himself, and said, 'I have the man who killed de P--- locked up in
+my room, Victor Haldin--a student like myself.'"
+
+A great buzz arose, in which Razumov raised his voice.
+
+"Observe--that man had certain honest ideals in view. But I didn't come
+here to explain him."
+
+"No. But you must explain how you know all this," came in grave tones
+from somebody.
+
+"A vile coward!" This simple cry vibrated with indignation. "Name him!"
+shouted other voices.
+
+"What are you clamouring for?" said Razumov disdainfully, in the
+profound silence which fell on the raising of his hand. "Haven't you all
+understood that I am that man?"
+
+Laspara went away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool.
+In the first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to
+be torn to pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing
+came of it but noise. It was bewildering. His head ached terribly.
+In the confused uproar he made out several times the name of Peter
+Ivanovitch, the word "judgement," and the phrase, "But this is a
+confession," uttered by somebody in a desperate shriek. In the midst
+of the tumult, a young man, younger than himself, approached him with
+blazing eyes.
+
+"I must beg you," he said, with venomous politeness, "to be good enough
+not to move from this spot till you are told what you are to do."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. "I came in voluntarily."
+
+"Maybe. But you won't go out till you are permitted," retorted the
+other.
+
+He beckoned with his hand, calling out, "Louisa! Louisa! come here,
+please"; and, presently, one of the Laspara girls (they had been staring
+at Razumov from behind the samovar) came along, trailing a bedraggled
+tail of dirty flounces, and dragging with her a chair, which she set
+against the door, and, sitting down on it, crossed her legs. The young
+man thanked her effusively, and rejoined a group carrying on an animated
+discussion in low tones. Razumov lost himself for a moment.
+
+A squeaky voice screamed, "Confession or no confession, you are a police
+spy!"
+
+The revolutionist Nikita had pushed his way in front of Razumov, and
+faced him with his big, livid cheeks, his heavy paunch, bull neck, and
+enormous hands. Razumov looked at the famous slayer of gendarmes in
+silent disgust.
+
+"And what are you?" he said, very low, then shut his eyes, and rested
+the back of his head against the wall.
+
+"It would be better for you to depart now." Razumov heard a mild, sad
+voice, and opened his eyes. The gentle speaker was an elderly man, with
+a great brush of fine hair making a silvery halo all round his
+keen, intelligent face. "Peter Ivanovitch shall be informed of your
+confession--and you shall be directed...."
+
+Then, turning to Nikita, nicknamed Necator, standing by, he appealed to
+him in a murmur--
+
+"What else can we do? After this piece of sincerity he cannot be
+dangerous any longer."
+
+The other muttered, "Better make sure of that before we let him go.
+Leave that to me. I know how to deal with such gentlemen."
+
+He exchanged meaning glances with two or three men, who nodded slightly,
+then turning roughly to Razumov, "You have heard? You are not wanted
+here. Why don't you get out?"
+
+The Laspara girl on guard rose, and pulled the chair out of the way
+unemotionally. She gave a sleepy stare to Razumov, who started, looked
+round the room and passed slowly by her as if struck by some sudden
+thought.
+
+"I beg you to observe," he said, already on the landing, "that I had
+only to hold my tongue. To-day, of all days since I came amongst you,
+I was made safe, and to-day I made myself free from falsehood, from
+remorse--independent of every single human being on this earth."
+
+He turned his back on the room, and walked towards the stairs, but, at
+the violent crash of the door behind him, he looked over his shoulder
+and saw that Nikita, with three others, had followed him out. "They are
+going to kill me, after all," he thought.
+
+Before he had time to turn round and confront them fairly, they set
+on him with a rush. He was driven headlong against the wall. "I wonder
+how," he completed his thought. Nikita cried, with a shrill laugh right
+in his face, "We shall make you harmless. You wait a bit."
+
+Razumov did not struggle. The three men held him pinned against
+the wall, while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side,
+deliberately swung off his enormous arm. Razumov, looking for a knife
+in his hand, saw it come at him open, unarmed, and received a tremendous
+blow on the side of his head over his ear. At the same time he heard a
+faint, dull detonating sound, as if some one had fired a pistol on the
+other side of the wall. A raging fury awoke in him at this outrage.
+The people in Laspara's rooms, holding their breath, listened to the
+desperate scuffling of four men all over the landing; thuds against the
+walls, a terrible crash against the very door, then all of them went
+down together with a violence which seemed to shake the whole house.
+Razumov, overpowered, breathless, crushed under the weight of his
+assailants, saw the monstrous Nikita squatting on his heels near his
+head, while the others held him down, kneeling on his chest, gripping
+his throat, lying across his legs.
+
+"Turn his face the other way," the paunchy terrorist directed, in an
+excited, gleeful squeak.
+
+Razumov could struggle no longer. He was exhausted; he had to watch
+passively the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in a degrading
+blow over his other ear. It seemed to split his head in two, and all at
+once the men holding him became perfectly silent--soundless as shadows.
+In silence they pulled him brutally to his feet, rushed with him
+noiselessly down the staircase, and, opening the door, flung him out
+into the street.
+
+He fell forward, and at once rolled over and over helplessly, going down
+the short slope together with the rush of running rain water. He came to
+rest in the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on his back,
+with a great flash of lightning over his face--a vivid, silent flash of
+lightning which blinded him utterly. He picked himself up, and put his
+arm over his eyes to recover his sight. Not a sound reached him from
+anywhere, and he began to walk, staggering, down a long, empty street.
+The lightning waved and darted round him its silent flames, the water of
+the deluge fell, ran, leaped, drove--noiseless like the drift of mist.
+In this unearthly stillness his footsteps fell silent on the pavement,
+while a dumb wind drove him on and on, like a lost mortal in a phantom
+world ravaged by a soundless thunderstorm. God only knows where his
+noiseless feet took him to that night, here and there, and back again
+without pause or rest. Of one place, at least, where they did lead
+him, we heard afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first
+south-shore tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled,
+soaked man without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his
+head down, step right in front of his car, and go under.
+
+When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side,
+Razumov had not lost consciousness. It was as though he had tumbled,
+smashing himself, into a world of mutes. Silent men, moving unheard,
+lifted him up, laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing
+round him their alarm, horror, and compassion. A red face with
+moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving, eyes rolling. Razumov
+tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show. To those who
+stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously hurt,
+seemed composed in meditation. Afterwards his eyes sent out at them
+a look of fear and closed slowly. They stared at him. Razumov made an
+effort to remember some French words.
+
+"_Je suis sourd_," he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
+
+"He is deaf," they exclaimed to each other. "That's why he did not hear
+the car."
+
+They carried him off in that same car. Before it started on its journey,
+a woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of
+some private grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and
+would not be put off.
+
+"I am a relation," she insisted, in bad French. "This young man is a
+Russian, and I am his relation." On this plea they let her have her way.
+She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes
+avoided looking at his deathlike face. At the corner of a street, on the
+other side of the town, a stretcher met the car. She followed it to the
+door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a
+bed. Razumov's new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials
+had some difficulty in inducing her to go away. The porter observed her
+lingering on the opposite pavement for a long time. Suddenly, as though
+she had remembered something, she ran off.
+
+The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S--,
+had made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to
+the Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. She had found work to do after her own
+heart.
+
+But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there
+had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation. The terrible
+Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in
+horrible glee before all the company--
+
+"Razumov! Mr. Razumov! The wonderful Razumov! He shall never be any use
+as a spy on any one. He won't talk, because he will never hear anything
+in his life--not a thing! I have burst the drums of his ears for him.
+Oh, you may trust me. I know the trick. Ha! Ha! Ha! I know the trick."
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was nearly a fortnight after her mother's funeral that I saw Natalia
+Haldin for the last time.
+
+In those silent, sombre days the doors of the _appartement_ on the
+Boulevard des Philosophes were closed to every one but myself. I believe
+I was of some use, if only in this, that I alone was aware of the
+incredible part of the situation. Miss Haldin nursed her mother alone
+to the last moment. If Razumov's visit had anything to do with
+Mrs. Haldin's end (and I cannot help thinking that it hastened it
+considerably), it is because the man, trusted impulsively by the
+ill-fated Victor Haldin, had failed to gain the confidence of Victor
+Haldin's mother. What tale, precisely, he told her cannot be known--at
+any rate, I do not know it--but to me she seemed to die from the shock
+of an ultimate disappointment borne in silence. She had not believed
+him. Perhaps she could not longer believe any one, and consequently had
+nothing to say to any one--not even to her daughter. I suspect that Miss
+Haldin lived the heaviest hours of her life by that silent death-bed.
+I confess I was angry with the broken-hearted old woman passing away in
+the obstinacy of her mute distrust of her daughter.
+
+When it was all over I stood aside. Miss Haldin had her compatriots
+round her then. A great number of them attended the funeral. I was
+there too, but afterwards managed to keep away from Miss Haldin, till I
+received a short note rewarding my self-denial. "It is as you would have
+it. I am going back to Russia at once. My mind is made up. Come and see
+me."
+
+Verily, it was a reward of discretion. I went without delay to receive
+it. The _appartement_ of the Boulevard des Philosophes presented the
+dreary signs of impending abandonment. It looked desolate and as if
+already empty to my eyes.
+
+Standing, we exchanged a few words about her health, mine, remarks as to
+some people of the Russian colony, and then Natalia Haldin, establishing
+me on the sofa, began to talk openly of her future work, of her plans.
+It was all to be as I had wished it. And it was to be for life. We
+should never see each other again. Never!
+
+I gathered this success to my breast. Natalia Haldin looked matured by
+her open and secret experiences. With her arms folded she walked up and
+down the whole length of the room, talking slowly, smooth-browed, with a
+resolute profile. She gave me a new view of herself, and I marvelled at
+that something grave and measured in her voice, in her movements, in her
+manner. It was the perfection of collected independence. The strength
+of her nature had come to surface because the obscure depths had been
+stirred.
+
+"We two can talk of it now," she observed, after a silence and stopping
+short before me. "Have you been to inquire at the hospital lately?"
+
+"Yes, I have." And as she looked at me fixedly, "He will live, the
+doctors say. But I thought that Tekla...."
+
+"Tekla has not been near me for several days," explained Miss Haldin
+quickly. "As I never offered to go to the hospital with her, she thinks
+that I have no heart. She is disillusioned about me."
+
+And Miss Haldin smiled faintly.
+
+"Yes. She sits with him as long and as often as they will let her," I
+said. "She says she must never abandon him--never as long as she lives.
+He'll need somebody--a hopeless cripple, and stone deaf with that."
+
+"Stone deaf? I didn't know," murmured Natalia Haldin.
+
+"He is. It seems strange. I am told there were no apparent injuries to
+the head. They say, too, that it is not very likely that he will live so
+very long for Tekla to take care of him."
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head.
+
+"While there are travellers ready to fall by the way our Tekla shall
+never be idle. She is a good Samaritan by an irresistible vocation. The
+revolutionists didn't understand her. Fancy a devoted creature like that
+being employed to carry about documents sewn in her dress, or made to
+write from dictation."
+
+"There is not much perspicacity in the world."
+
+No sooner uttered, I regretted that observation. Natalia Haldin, looking
+me straight in the face, assented by a slight movement of her head. She
+was not offended, but turning away began to pace the room again. To my
+western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite
+beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance. I
+remained silent as though it were hopeless to raise my voice. The sound
+of hers, so close to me, made me start a little.
+
+"Tekla saw him picked up after the accident. The good soul never
+explained to me really how it came about. She affirms that there was
+some understanding between them--some sort of compact--that in any sore
+need, in misfortune, or difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her."
+
+"Was there?" I said. "It is lucky for him that there was, then. He'll
+need all the devotion of the good Samaritan."
+
+It was a fact that Tekla, looking out of her window at five in the
+morning, for some reason or other, had beheld Razumov in the grounds of
+the Chateau Borel, standing stockstill, bare-headed in the rain, at the
+foot of the terrace. She had screamed out to him, by name, to know
+what was the matter. He never even raised his head. By the time she had
+dressed herself sufficiently to run downstairs he was gone. She started
+in pursuit, and rushing out into the road, came almost directly upon the
+arrested tramcar and the small knot of people picking up Razumov. That
+much Tekla had told me herself one afternoon we happened to meet at the
+door of the hospital, and without any kind of comment. But I did not
+want to meditate very long on the inwardness of this peculiar episode.
+
+"Yes, Natalia Victorovna, he shall need somebody when they dismiss him,
+on crutches and stone deaf from the hospital. But I do not think that
+when he rushed like an escaped madman into the grounds of the Chateau
+Borel it was to seek the help of that good Tekla."
+
+"No," said Natalia, stopping short before me, "perhaps not." She sat
+down and leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. The silence lasted
+for several minutes. During that time I remembered the evening of his
+atrocious confession--the plaint she seemed to have hardly enough life
+left in her to utter, "It is impossible to be more unhappy...." The
+recollection would have given me a shudder if I had not been lost
+in wonder at her force and her tranquillity. There was no longer any
+Natalia Haldin, because she had completely ceased to think of herself.
+It was a great victory, a characteristically Russian exploit in
+self-suppression.
+
+She recalled me to myself by getting up suddenly like a person who has
+come to a decision. She walked to the writing-table, now stripped of all
+the small objects associated with her by daily use--a mere piece of dead
+furniture; but it contained something living, still, since she took from
+a recess a flat parcel which she brought to me.
+
+"It's a book," she said rather abruptly. "It was sent to me wrapped
+up in my veil. I told you nothing at the time, but now I've decided to
+leave it with you. I have the right to do that. It was sent to me. It
+is mine. You may preserve it, or destroy it after you have read it. And
+while you read it, please remember that I was defenceless. And that
+he.."
+
+"Defenceless!" I repeated, surprised, looking hard at her.
+
+"You'll find the very word written there," she whispered. "Well, it's
+true! I _was_ defenceless--but perhaps you were able to see that for
+yourself." Her face coloured, then went deadly pale. "In justice to the
+man, I want you to remember that I was. Oh, I was, I was!"
+
+I rose, a little shakily.
+
+"I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting."
+
+Her hand fell into mine.
+
+"It's difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us."
+
+She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
+
+"Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands
+are free now. As for the rest--which of us can fail to hear the stifled
+cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world."
+
+"The world is more conscious of your discordant voices," I said. "It is
+the way of the world."
+
+"Yes." She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment. "I must
+own to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when
+all discord shall be silenced. Try to imagine its dawn! The tempest of
+blows and of execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising,
+and the weary men united at last, taking count in their conscience of
+the ended contest, feel saddened by their victory, because so many ideas
+have perished for the triumph of one, so many beliefs have abandoned
+them without support. They feel alone on the earth and gather close
+together. Yes, there must be many bitter hours! But at last the anguish
+of hearts shall be extinguished in love."
+
+And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so
+cruel sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin. It is hard to think
+I shall never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl--wedded
+to an invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like
+a heavenly flower from the soil of men's earth, soaked in blood, torn by
+struggles, watered with tears.
+
+
+
+It must be understood that at that time I didn't know anything of Mr.
+Razumov's confession to the assembled revolutionists. Natalia Haldin
+might have guessed what was the "one thing more" which remained for him
+to do; but this my western eyes had failed to see.
+
+Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S--, haunted his bedside at
+the hospital. We met once or twice at the door of that establishment,
+but on these occasions she was not communicative. She gave me news of
+Mr. Razumov as concisely as possible. He was making a slow recovery, but
+would remain a hopeless cripple all his life. Personally, I never went
+near him: I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood
+by, a watchful but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin. He
+was in due course discharged from the hospital, and his "relative"--so I
+was told--had carried him off somewhere.
+
+My information was completed nearly two years later. The opportunity,
+certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
+much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
+gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
+
+He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch--a
+dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with
+something hushed and circumspect in his manner. He approached
+me, choosing the moment when there was no one near, followed by a
+grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.
+
+"Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you," he addressed me,
+in his guarded voice. "And so I leave you two to have a talk together."
+
+"I would never have intruded myself upon your notice," the grey-haired
+lady began at once, "if I had not been charged with a message for you."
+
+It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin. Sophia
+Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and
+had seen Miss Haldin. She lived in a town "in the centre," sharing her
+compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the
+heartrending misery of bereaved homes. She did not spare herself in good
+service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.
+
+"She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable
+body," the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of
+enthusiasm.
+
+A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest
+on my side. We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted
+us. In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna
+remarked suddenly--
+
+"I suppose you remember seeing me before? That evening when Natalia came
+to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young
+man who..."
+
+"I remember perfectly," I said. When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had
+in my possession that young man's journal given me by Miss Haldin she
+became intensely interested. She did not conceal her curiosity to see
+the document.
+
+I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me
+next day for that purpose.
+
+She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed
+me the book with a faint sigh. While moving about Russia, she had seen
+Razumov too. He lived, not "in the centre," but "in the south." She
+described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some
+very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown
+with nettles. He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla
+the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish
+devotion. There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.
+
+I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have
+visited Mr. Razumov. I did not even understand the motive. But she
+informed me that she was not the only one.
+
+"Some of _us_ always go to see him when passing through. He is
+intelligent. We has ideas.... He talks well, too."
+
+Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov's public confession in
+Laspara's house. Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what
+had occurred there. Razumov himself had told her all about it, most
+minutely.
+
+Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes--
+
+"There are evil moments in every life. A false suggestion enters one's
+brain, and then fear is born--fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or else
+a false courage--who knows? Well, call it what you like; but tell me,
+how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition
+(as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly
+debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this--he
+was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe
+and more--infinitely more--when the possibility of being loved by
+that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his
+bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and
+pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him.
+There's character in such a discovery."
+
+I accepted her conclusion in silence. Who would care to question the
+grounds of forgiveness or compassion? However, it appeared later on,
+that there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the
+revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer. Sophia Antonovna continued
+uneasily--
+
+"And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage. It was not
+authorized. Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him. He
+had confessed voluntarily. And that Nikita who burst the drums of his
+ears purposely, out on the landing, you know, as if carried away by
+indignation--well, he has turned out to be a scoundrel of the worst
+kind--a traitor himself, a betrayer--a spy! Razumov told me he had
+charged him with it by a sort of inspiration...."
+
+"I had a glimpse of that brute," I said. "How any of you could have been
+deceived for half a day passes my comprehension!"
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+"There! There! Don't talk of it. The first time I saw him, I, too, was
+appalled. They cried me down. We were always telling each other, 'Oh!
+you mustn't mind his appearance.' And then he was always ready to kill.
+There was no doubt of it. He killed--yes! in both camps. The fiend...."
+
+Then Sophia Antonovna, after mastering the angry trembling of her lips,
+told me a very queer tale. It went that Councillor Mikulin, travelling
+in Germany (shortly after Razumov's disappearance from Geneva), happened
+to meet Peter Ivanovitch in a railway carriage. Being alone in the
+compartment, these two talked together half the night, and it was then
+that Mikulin the Police Chief gave a hint to the Arch-Revolutionist
+as to the true character of the arch-slayer of gendarmes. It looks as
+though Mikulin had wanted to get rid of that particular agent of his
+own! He might have grown tired of him, or frightened of him. It must
+also be said that Mikulin had inherited the sinister Nikita from his
+predecessor in office.
+
+And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a
+mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my
+Western eyes. But I permitted myself a question--
+
+"Tell me, please, Sophia Antonovna, did Madame de S-- leave all her
+fortune to Peter Ivanovitch?"
+
+"Not a bit of it." The woman revolutionist shrugged her shoulders in
+disgust. "She died without making a will. A lot of nephews and nieces
+came down from St. Petersburg, like a flock of vultures, and fought
+for her money amongst themselves. All beastly Kammerherrs and Maids of
+Honour--abominable court flunkeys. Tfui!"
+
+"One does not hear much of Peter Ivanovitch now," I remarked, after a
+pause.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch," said Sophia Antonovna gravely, "has united himself
+to a peasant girl."
+
+I was truly astonished.
+
+"What! On the Riviera?"
+
+"What nonsense! Of course not."
+
+Sophia Antonovna's tone was slightly tart.
+
+"Is he, then, living actually in Russia? It's a tremendous risk--isn't
+it?" I cried. "And all for the sake of a peasant girl. Don't you think
+it's very wrong of him?"
+
+Sophia Antonovna preserved a mysterious silence for a while, then made a
+statement. "He just simply adores her."
+
+"Does he? Well, then, I hope that she won't hesitate to beat him."
+
+Sophia Antonovna got up and wished me good-bye, as though she had not
+heard a word of my impious hope; but, in the very doorway, where I
+attended her, she turned round for an instant, and declared in a firm
+voice--
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
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