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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+#25 in our series by Joseph Conrad
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+Under Western Eyes
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+Joseph Conrad
+
+January, 2001  [Etext #2480]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
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+
+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
+mufffled 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, w
+ho 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 Siderovitch.  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--
+
+"TotheK--- 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 mei?" .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
+expecti?" 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 hislower 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 andlady 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
+reInajned 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 fourand-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 affectecI 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 irresoIution 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 men
+tal 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!  Asuspect!
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+