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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under Western Eyes
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]
+[Last updated: July 28, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER WESTERN EYES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDER WESTERN EYES
+
+by JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+
+
+
+“I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece
+of bread.” Miss HALDIN
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+
+
+To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of
+imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create
+for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the
+Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov.
+
+If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been
+smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words.
+Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for
+many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length
+becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight
+an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes
+a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a
+mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
+
+This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Razumov or guessed at his
+reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was.
+Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly
+beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the
+readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of
+documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on
+a document; all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the Russian
+language, which is sufficient for what is attempted here. The document,
+of course, is something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not
+exactly that in its actual form. For instance, most of it was not
+written up from day to day, though all the entries are dated. Some of
+these entries cover months of time and extend over dozens of pages. All
+the earlier part is a retrospect, in a narrative form, relating to an
+event which took place about a year before.
+
+I must mention that I have lived for a long time in Geneva. A whole
+quarter of that town, on account of many Russians residing there,
+is called La Petite Russie--Little Russia. I had a rather extensive
+connexion in Little Russia at that time. Yet I confess that I have
+no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their
+attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the
+exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars;
+but there must be something else in the way, some special human
+trait--one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere
+professors. What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the
+Russians’ extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish
+them, but they don’t hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary, they
+are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with an
+enthusiasm, a sweeping abundance, with such an aptness of application
+sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can’t
+defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they
+say. There is a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as
+far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected
+to be classed as eloquence.... But I must apologize for this
+digression.
+
+It would be idle to inquire why Mr. Razumov has left this record behind
+him. It is inconceivable that he should have wished any human eye to see
+it. A mysterious impulse of human nature comes into play here. Putting
+aside Samuel Pepys, who has forced in this way the door of immortality,
+innumerable people, criminals, saints, philosophers, young girls,
+statesmen, and simple imbeciles, have kept self-revealing records from
+vanity no doubt, but also from other more inscrutable motives. There
+must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have
+used them for self-communion. Being myself a quiet individual I take
+it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some
+formula of peace. Certainly they are crying loud enough for it at the
+present day. What sort of peace Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov expected
+to find in the writing up of his record it passeth my understanding to
+guess.
+
+The fact remains that he has written it.
+
+Mr. Razumov was a tall, well-proportioned young man, quite unusually
+dark for a Russian from the Central Provinces. His good looks would have
+been unquestionable if it had not been for a peculiar lack of fineness
+in the features. It was as if a face modelled vigorously in wax (with
+some approach even to a classical correctness of type) had been
+held close to a fire till all sharpness of line had been lost in
+the softening of the material. But even thus he was sufficiently
+good-looking. His manner, too, was good. In discussion he was easily
+swayed by argument and authority. With his younger compatriots he took
+the attitude of an inscrutable listener, a listener of the kind that
+hears you out intelligently and then--just changes the subject.
+
+This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual
+insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one’s own convictions,
+procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of
+exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent
+discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited
+with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, third year’s student in philosophy, was
+looked upon as a strong nature--an altogether trustworthy man. This,
+in a country where an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or
+sometimes by a fate worse than mere death, meant that he was worthy
+of being trusted with forbidden opinions. He was liked also for his
+amiability and for his quiet readiness to oblige his comrades even at
+the cost of personal inconvenience.
+
+Mr. Razumov was supposed to be the son of an Archpriest and to be
+protected by a distinguished nobleman--perhaps of his own distant
+province. But his outward appearance accorded badly with such humble
+origin. Such a descent was not credible. It was, indeed, suggested that
+Mr. Razumov was the son of an Archpriest’s pretty daughter--which, of
+course, would put a different complexion on the matter. This theory also
+rendered intelligible the protection of the distinguished nobleman. All
+this, however, had never been investigated maliciously or otherwise. No
+one knew or cared who the nobleman in question was. Razumov received
+a modest but very sufficient allowance from the hands of an obscure
+attorney, who seemed to act as his guardian in some measure. Now and
+then he appeared at some professor’s informal reception. Apart from
+that Razumov was not known to have any social relations in the town.
+He attended the obligatory lectures regularly and was considered by the
+authorities as a very promising student. He worked at home in the manner
+of a man who means to get on, but did not shut himself up severely for
+that purpose. He was always accessible, and there was nothing secret or
+reserved in his life.
+
+I
+
+The origin of Mr. Razumov’s record is connected with an event
+characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination
+of a prominent statesman--and still more characteristic of the moral
+corruption of an oppressed society where the noblest aspirations of
+humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of
+justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are
+prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of
+an uneasy despotism.
+
+The fact alluded to above is the successful attempt on the life of Mr.
+de P---, the President of the notorious Repressive Commission of some
+years ago, the Minister of State invested with extraordinary powers. The
+newspapers made noise enough about that fanatical, narrow-chested figure
+in gold-laced uniform, with a face of crumpled parchment, insipid,
+bespectacled eyes, and the cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung
+under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month
+passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated
+papers of Europe. He served the monarchy by imprisoning, exiling, or
+sending to the gallows men and women, young and old, with an equable,
+unwearied industry. In his mystic acceptance of the principle of
+autocracy he was bent on extirpating from the land every vestige of
+anything that resembled freedom in public institutions; and in his
+ruthless persecution of the rising generation he seemed to aim at the
+destruction of the very hope of liberty itself.
+
+It is said that this execrated personality had not enough imagination
+to be aware of the hate he inspired. It is hardly credible; but it is a
+fact that he took very few precautions for his safety. In the preamble
+of a certain famous State paper he had declared once that “the thought
+of liberty has never existed in the Act of the Creator. From the
+multitude of men’s counsel nothing could come but revolt and disorder;
+and revolt and disorder in a world created for obedience and stability
+is sin. It was not Reason but Authority which expressed the Divine
+Intention. God was the Autocrat of the Universe....” It may be that
+the man who made this declaration believed that heaven itself was bound
+to protect him in his remorseless defence of Autocracy on this earth.
+
+No doubt the vigilance of the police saved him many times; but, as a
+matter of fact, when his appointed fate overtook him, the competent
+authorities could not have given him any warning. They had no knowledge
+of any conspiracy against the Minister’s life, had no hint of any plot
+through their usual channels of information, had seen no signs, were
+aware of no suspicious movements or dangerous persons.
+
+Mr. de P--- was being driven towards the railway station in a two-horse
+uncovered sleigh with footman and coachman on the box. Snow had been
+falling all night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this early
+hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the
+sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to the
+left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking
+slowly on the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of
+his sheepskin coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the
+falling snow. On being overtaken this peasant suddenly faced about and
+swung his arm. In an instant there was a terrible shock, a detonation
+muffled in the multitude of snowflakes; both horses lay dead and mangled
+on the ground and the coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen off the
+box mortally wounded. The footman (who survived) had no time to see the
+face of the man in the sheepskin coat. After throwing the bomb this last
+got away, but it is supposed that, seeing a lot of people surging up on
+all sides of him in the falling snow, and all running towards the scene
+of the explosion, he thought it safer to turn back with them.
+
+In an incredibly short time an excited crowd assembled round the sledge.
+The Minister-President, getting out unhurt into the deep snow, stood
+near the groaning coachman and addressed the people repeatedly in his
+weak, colourless voice: “I beg of you to keep off: For the love of God,
+I beg of you good people to keep off.”
+
+It was then that a tall young man who had remained standing perfectly
+still within a carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped out into
+the street and walking up rapidly flung another bomb over the heads of
+the crowd. It actually struck the Minister-President on the shoulder
+as he stooped over his dying servant, then falling between his feet
+exploded with a terrific concentrated violence, striking him dead to the
+ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the empty
+sledge in the twinkling of an eye. With a yell of horror the crowd broke
+up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell dead or dying
+where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and one or two
+others who did not fall till they had run a little way.
+
+The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment,
+the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of
+yards in each direction. Through the falling snow people looked from
+afar at the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the
+carcases of the two horses. Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks
+of a street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the
+dead. Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on
+the pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant’s sheepskin coat; but
+the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the
+pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was
+never established.
+
+That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning
+within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working
+for some time in the library. He heard the first vague rumour of
+something in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students’
+ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two o’clock dinner. But
+this rumour was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where
+it was not always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much
+interested in certain kinds of whispers. Razumov was one of those
+men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an
+instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware
+of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an
+indefinite way. But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and
+with his own future.
+
+Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the
+Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his
+opinions or his feelings. He was as lonely in the world as a man
+swimming in the deep sea. The word Razumov was the mere label of
+a solitary individuality. There were no Razumovs belonging to him
+anywhere. His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he
+was a Russian. Whatever good he expected from life would be given to or
+withheld from his hopes by that connexion alone. This immense parentage
+suffered from the throes of internal dissensions, and he shrank mentally
+from the fray as a good-natured man may shrink from taking definite
+sides in a violent family quarrel.
+
+Razumov, going home, reflected that having prepared all the matters of
+the forthcoming examination, he could now devote his time to the subject
+of the prize essay. He hankered after the silver medal. The prize was
+offered by the Ministry of Education; the names of the competitors would
+be submitted to the Minister himself. The mere fact of trying would be
+considered meritorious in the higher quarters; and the possessor of the
+prize would have a claim to an administrative appointment of the better
+sort after he had taken his degree. The student Razumov in an access of
+elation forgot the dangers menacing the stability of the institutions
+which give rewards and appointments. But remembering the medallist of
+the year before, Razumov, the young man of no parentage, was sobered. He
+and some others happened to be assembled in their comrade’s rooms at the
+very time when that last received the official advice of his success.
+He was a quiet, unassuming young man: “Forgive me,” he had said with a
+faint apologetic smile and taking up his cap, “I am going out to order
+up some wine. But I must first send a telegram to my folk at home. I
+say! Won’t the old people make it a festive time for the neighbours for
+twenty miles around our place.”
+
+Razumov thought there was nothing of that sort for him in the world. His
+success would matter to no one. But he felt no bitterness against
+the nobleman his protector, who was not a provincial magnate as was
+generally supposed. He was in fact nobody less than Prince K---, once
+a great and splendid figure in the world and now, his day being over,
+a Senator and a gouty invalid, living in a still splendid but more
+domestic manner. He had some young children and a wife as aristocratic
+and proud as himself.
+
+In all his life Razumov was allowed only once to come into personal
+contact with the Prince.
+
+It had the air of a chance meeting in the little attorney’s office.
+One day Razumov, coming in by appointment, found a stranger standing
+there--a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey
+sidewhiskers. The bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out,
+“Come in--come in, Mr. Razumov,” with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then
+turning deferentially to the stranger with the grand air, “A ward
+of mine, your Excellency. One of the most promising students of his
+faculty in the St. Petersburg University.”
+
+To his intense surprise Razumov saw a white shapely hand extended to
+him. He took it in great confusion (it was soft and passive) and heard
+at the same time a condescending murmur in which he caught only the
+words “Satisfactory” and “Persevere.” But the most amazing thing of all
+was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of the white shapely hand
+just before it was withdrawn: a light pressure like a secret sign. The
+emotion of it was terrible. Razumov’s heart seemed to leap into his
+throat. When he raised his eyes the aristocratic personage, motioning
+the little lawyer aside, had opened the door and was going out.
+
+The attorney rummaged amongst the papers on his desk for a time. “Do you
+know who that was?” he asked suddenly.
+
+Razumov, whose heart was thumping hard yet, shook his head in silence.
+
+“That was Prince K---. You wonder what he could be doing in the hole of
+a poor legal rat like myself--eh? These awfully great people have their
+sentimental curiosities like common sinners. But if I were you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch,” he continued, leering and laying a peculiar emphasis on
+the patronymic, “I wouldn’t boast at large of the introduction. It would
+not be prudent, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Oh dear no! It would be in fact
+dangerous for your future.”
+
+The young man’s ears burned like fire; his sight was dim. “That man!”
+ Razumov was saying to himself. “He!”
+
+Henceforth it was by this monosyllable that Mr. Razumov got into
+the habit of referring mentally to the stranger with grey silky
+side-whiskers. From that time too, when walking in the more fashionable
+quarters, he noted with interest the magnificent horses and carriages
+with Prince K---‘s liveries on the box. Once he saw the Princess get
+out--she was shopping--followed by two girls, of which one was nearly a
+head taller than the other. Their fair hair hung loose down their backs
+in the English style; they had merry eyes, their coats, muffs, and
+little fur caps were exactly alike, and their cheeks and noses were
+tinged a cheerful pink by the frost. They crossed the pavement in front
+of him, and Razumov went on his way smiling shyly to himself. “His”
+ daughters. They resembled “Him.” The young man felt a glow of warm
+friendliness towards these girls who would never know of his existence.
+Presently they would marry Generals or Kammerherrs and have girls and
+boys of their own, who perhaps would be aware of him as a celebrated old
+professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories of
+Russia--nothing more!
+
+But a celebrated professor was a somebody. Distinction would convert the
+label Razumov into an honoured name. There was nothing strange in
+the student Razumov’s wish for distinction. A man’s real life is that
+accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or
+natural love. Returning home on the day of the attempt on Mr. de P---‘s
+life Razumov resolved to have a good try for the silver medal.
+
+Climbing slowly the four flights of the dark, dirty staircase in the
+house where he had his lodgings, he felt confident of success. The
+winner’s name would be published in the papers on New Year’s Day. And at
+the thought that “He” would most probably read it there, Razumov stopped
+short on the stairs for an instant, then went on smiling faintly at his
+own emotion. “This is but a shadow,” he said to himself, “but the medal
+is a solid beginning.”
+
+With those ideas of industry in his head the warmth of his room was
+agreeable and encouraging. “I shall put in four hours of good work,”
+ he thought. But no sooner had he closed the door than he was horribly
+startled. All black against the usual tall stove of white tiles gleaming
+in the dusk, stood a strange figure, wearing a skirted, close-fitting,
+brown cloth coat strapped round the waist, in long boots, and with a
+little Astrakhan cap on its head. It loomed lithe and martial. Razumov
+was utterly confounded. It was only when the figure advancing two paces
+asked in an untroubled, grave voice if the outer door was closed that he
+regained his power of speech.
+
+“Haldin!... Victor Victorovitch!... Is that you?... Yes. The
+outer door is shut all right. But this is indeed unexpected.”
+
+Victor Haldin, a student older than most of his contemporaries at the
+University, was not one of the industrious set. He was hardly ever seen
+at lectures; the authorities had marked him as “restless” and “unsound
+“--very bad notes. But he had a great personal prestige with his
+comrades and influenced their thoughts. Razumov had never been intimate
+with him. They had met from time to time at gatherings in other
+students’ houses. They had even had a discussion together--one of those
+discussions on first principles dear to the sanguine minds of youth.
+
+Razumov wished the man had chosen some other time to come for a chat. He
+felt in good trim to tackle the prize essay. But as Haldin could not be
+slightingly dismissed Razumov adopted the tone of hospitality, asking
+him to sit down and smoke.
+
+“Kirylo Sidorovitch,” said the other, flinging off his cap, “we are not
+perhaps in exactly the same camp. Your judgment is more philosophical.
+You are a man of few words, but I haven’t met anybody who dared to
+doubt the generosity of your sentiments. There is a solidity about your
+character which cannot exist without courage.”
+
+Razumov felt flattered and began to murmur shyly something about being
+very glad of his good opinion, when Haldin raised his hand.
+
+“That is what I was saying to myself,” he continued, “as I dodged in the
+woodyard down by the river-side. ‘He has a strong character this young
+man,’ I said to myself. ‘He does not throw his soul to the winds.’ Your
+reserve has always fascinated me, Kirylo Sidorovitch. So I tried to
+remember your address. But look here--it was a piece of luck. Your
+dvornik was away from the gate talking to a sleigh-driver on the other
+side of the street. I met no one on the stairs, not a soul. As I came up
+to your floor I caught sight of your landlady coming out of your rooms.
+But she did not see me. She crossed the landing to her own side, and
+then I slipped in. I have been here two hours expecting you to come in
+every moment.”
+
+Razumov had listened in astonishment; but before he could open his mouth
+Haldin added, speaking deliberately, “It was I who removed de P--- this
+morning.” Razumov kept down a cry of dismay. The sentiment of his life
+being utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime expressed itself
+quaintly by a sort of half-derisive mental exclamation, “There goes my
+silver medal!”
+
+Haldin continued after waiting a while--
+
+“You say nothing, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I understand your silence. To be
+sure, I cannot expect you with your frigid English manner to embrace
+me. But never mind your manners. You have enough heart to have heard the
+sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth this man raised in the land. That
+would be enough to get over any philosophical hopes. He was uprooting
+the tender plant. He had to be stopped. He was a dangerous man--a
+convinced man. Three more years of his work would have put us back fifty
+years into bondage--and look at all the lives wasted, at all the souls
+lost in that time.”
+
+His curt, self-confident voice suddenly lost its ring and it was in a
+dull tone that he added, “Yes, brother, I have killed him. It’s weary
+work.”
+
+Razumov had sunk into a chair. Every moment he expected a crowd of
+policemen to rush in. There must have been thousands of them out looking
+for that man walking up and down in his room. Haldin was talking again
+in a restrained, steady voice. Now and then he flourished an arm,
+slowly, without excitement.
+
+He told Razumov how he had brooded for a year; how he had not slept
+properly for weeks. He and “Another” had a warning of the Minister’s
+movements from “a certain person” late the evening before. He and that
+“Another” prepared their “engines” and resolved to have no sleep till
+“the deed” was done. They walked the streets under the falling snow with
+the “engines” on them, exchanging not a word the livelong night. When
+they happened to meet a police patrol they took each other by the arm
+and pretended to be a couple of peasants on the spree. They reeled and
+talked in drunken hoarse voices. Except for these strange outbreaks they
+kept silence, moving on ceaselessly. Their plans had been previously
+arranged. At daybreak they made their way to the spot which they
+knew the sledge must pass. When it appeared in sight they exchanged a
+muttered good-bye and separated. The “other” remained at the corner,
+Haldin took up a position a little farther up the street....
+
+After throwing his “engine” he ran off and in a moment was overtaken
+by the panic-struck people flying away from the spot after the second
+explosion. They were wild with terror. He was jostled once or twice. He
+slowed down for the rush to pass him and then turned to the left into a
+narrow street. There he was alone.
+
+He marvelled at this immediate escape. The work was done. He could
+hardly believe it. He fought with an almost irresistible longing to lie
+down on the pavement and sleep. But this sort of faintness--a drowsy
+faintness--passed off quickly. He walked faster, making his way to one
+of the poorer parts of the town in order to look up Ziemianitch.
+
+This Ziemianitch, Razumov understood, was a sort of town-peasant who had
+got on; owner of a small number of sledges and horses for hire. Haldin
+paused in his narrative to exclaim--
+
+“A bright spirit! A hardy soul! The best driver in St. Petersburg. He
+has a team of three horses there.... Ah! He’s a fellow!”
+
+This man had declared himself willing to take out safely, at any time,
+one or two persons to the second or third railway station on one of the
+southern lines. But there had been no time to warn him the night before.
+His usual haunt seemed to be a low-class eating-house on the outskirts
+of the town. When Haldin got there the man was not to be found. He was
+not expected to turn up again till the evening. Haldin wandered away
+restlessly.
+
+He saw the gate of a woodyard open and went in to get out of the wind
+which swept the bleak broad thoroughfare. The great rectangular piles of
+cut wood loaded with snow resembled the huts of a village. At first the
+watchman who discovered him crouching amongst them talked in a friendly
+manner. He was a dried-up old man wearing two ragged army coats one over
+the other; his wizened little face, tied up under the jaw and over the
+ears in a dirty red handkerchief, looked comical. Presently he grew
+sulky, and then all at once without rhyme or reason began to shout
+furiously.
+
+“Aren’t you ever going to clear out of this, you loafer? We know all
+about factory hands of your sort. A big, strong, young chap! You aren’t
+even drunk. What do you want here? You don’t frighten us. Take yourself
+and your ugly eyes away.”
+
+Haldin stopped before the sitting Razumov. His supple figure, with
+the white forehead above which the fair hair stood straight up, had an
+aspect of lofty daring.
+
+“He did not like my eyes,” he said. “And so...here I am.”
+
+Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.
+
+“But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch. We know each other so little....
+I don’t see why you....”
+
+“Confidence,” said Haldin.
+
+This word sealed Razumov’s lips as if a hand had been clapped on his
+mouth. His brain seethed with arguments.
+
+“And so--here you are,” he muttered through his teeth.
+
+The other did not detect the tone of anger. Never suspected it.
+
+“Yes. And nobody knows I am here. You are the last person that could
+be suspected--should I get caught. That’s an advantage, you see. And
+then--speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the
+truth. It occurred to me that you--you have no one belonging to you--no
+ties, no one to suffer for it if this came out by some means. There
+have been enough ruined Russian homes as it is. But I don’t see how my
+passage through your rooms can be ever known. If I should be got hold
+of, I’ll know how to keep silent--no matter what they may be pleased to
+do to me,” he added grimly.
+
+He began to walk again while Razumov sat still appalled.
+
+“You thought that--” he faltered out almost sick with indignation.
+
+“Yes, Razumov. Yes, brother. Some day you shall help to build. You
+suppose that I am a terrorist, now--a destructor of what is, But
+consider that the true destroyers are they who destroy the spirit of
+progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the
+persecutors of human dignity. Men like me are necessary to make room for
+self-contained, thinking men like you. Well, we have made the sacrifice
+of our lives, but all the same I want to escape if it can be done. It
+is not my life I want to save, but my power to do. I won’t live idle. Oh
+no! Don’t make any mistake, Razumov. Men like me are rare. And, besides,
+an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator
+vanishes without a trace. They sit in their offices and palaces and
+quake. All I want you to do is to help me to vanish. No great matter
+that. Only to go by and by and see Ziemianitch for me at that place
+where I went this morning. Just tell him, ‘He whom you know wants a
+well-horsed sledge to pull up half an hour after midnight at the seventh
+lamp-post on the left counting from the upper end of Karabelnaya. If
+nobody gets in, the sledge is to run round a block or two, so as to come
+back past the same spot in ten minutes’ time.’”
+
+Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to
+go away long before. Was it weakness or what?
+
+He concluded that it was a sound instinct. Haldin must have been seen.
+It was impossible that some people should not have noticed the face and
+appearance of the man who threw the second bomb. Haldin was a noticeable
+person. The police in their thousands must have had his description
+within the hour. With every moment the danger grew. Sent out to wander
+in the streets he could not escape being caught in the end.
+
+The police would very soon find out all about him. They would set about
+discovering a conspiracy. Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in
+the greatest danger. Unguarded expressions, little facts in themselves
+innocent would be counted for crimes. Razumov remembered certain words
+he said, the speeches he had listened to, the harmless gatherings he
+had attended--it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that
+sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.
+
+Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress, worried, badgered, perhaps
+ill-used. He saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life
+broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope. He saw himself--at best--leading
+a miserable existence under police supervision, in some small, faraway
+provincial town, without friends to assist his necessities or even
+take any steps to alleviate his lot--as others had. Others had fathers,
+mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on
+their behalf--he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him some
+morning would forget his existence before sunset.
+
+He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation--his
+strength give way, his mind become an abject thing. He saw himself
+creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets--dying unattended
+in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
+hospital.
+
+He shuddered. Then the peace of bitter calmness came over him. It was
+best to keep this man out of the streets till he could be got rid of
+with some chance of escaping. That was the best that could be done.
+Razumov, of course, felt the safety of his lonely existence to be
+permanently endangered. This evening’s doings could turn up against
+him at any time as long as this man lived and the present institutions
+endured. They appeared to him rational and indestructible at that
+moment. They had a force of harmony--in contrast with the horrible
+discord of this man’s presence. He hated the man. He said quietly--
+
+“Yes, of course, I will go. ‘You must give me precise directions, and
+for the rest--depend on me.”
+
+“Ah! You are a fellow! Collected--cool as a cucumber. A regular
+Englishman. Where did you get your soul from? There aren’t many like
+you. Look here, brother! Men like me leave no posterity, but their souls
+are not lost. No man’s soul is ever lost. It works for itself--or else
+where would be the sense of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction,
+of faith--the labours of the soul? What will become of my soul when I
+die in the way I must die--soon--very soon perhaps? It shall not perish.
+Don’t make a mistake, Razumov. This is not murder--it is war, war. My
+spirit shall go on warring in some Russian body till all falsehood is
+swept out of the world. The modern civilization is false, but a new
+revelation shall come out of Russia. Ha! you say nothing. You are a
+sceptic. I respect your philosophical scepticism, Razumov, but don’t
+touch the soul. The Russian soul that lives in all of us. It has a
+future. It has a mission, I tell you, or else why should I have been
+moved to do this--reckless--like a butcher--in the middle of all these
+innocent people--scattering death--I! I!... I wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
+
+“Not so loud,” warned Razumov harshly.
+
+Haldin sat down abruptly, and leaning his head on his folded arms burst
+into tears. He wept for a long time. The dusk had deepened in the room.
+Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder, listened to the sobs.
+
+The other raised his head, got up and with an effort mastered his voice.
+
+“Yes. Men like me leave no posterity,” he repeated in a subdued tone,
+“I have a sister though. She’s with my old mother--I persuaded them to
+go abroad this year--thank God. Not a bad little girl my sister. She has
+the most trustful eyes of any human being that ever walked this earth.
+She will marry well, I hope. She may have children--sons perhaps. Look
+at me. My father was a Government official in the provinces, He had a
+little land too. A simple servant of God--a true Russian in his way. His
+was the soul of obedience. But I am not like him. They say I resemble
+my mother’s eldest brother, an officer. They shot him in ‘28. Under
+Nicholas, you know. Haven’t I told you that this is war, war.... But
+God of Justice! This is weary work.”
+
+Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his hand, spoke as if from
+the bottom of an abyss.
+
+“You believe in God, Haldin?”
+
+“There you go catching at words that are wrung from one. What does it
+matter? What was it the Englishman said: ‘There is a divine soul in
+things...’ Devil take him--I don’t remember now. But he spoke the
+truth. When the day of you thinkers comes don’t you forget what’s
+divine in the Russian soul--and that’s resignation. Respect that in your
+intellectual restlessness and don’t let your arrogant wisdom spoil its
+message to the world. I am speaking to you now like a man with a rope
+round his neck. What do you imagine I am? A being in revolt? No. It’s
+you thinkers who are in everlasting revolt. I am one of the resigned.
+When the necessity of this heavy work came to me and I understood that
+it had to be done--what did I do? Did I exult? Did I take pride in
+my purpose? Did I try to weigh its worth and consequences? No! I was
+resigned. I thought ‘God’s will be done.’”
+
+He threw himself full length on Razumov’s bed and putting the backs of
+his hands over his eyes remained perfectly motionless and silent. Not
+even the sound of his breathing could be heard. The dead stillness
+or the room remained undisturbed till in the darkness Razumov said
+gloomily--
+
+“Haldin.”
+
+“Yes,” answered the other readily, quite invisible now on the bed and
+without the slightest stir.
+
+“Isn’t it time for me to start?”
+
+“Yes, brother.” The other was heard, lying still in the darkness as
+though he were talking in his sleep. “The time has come to put fate to
+the test.”
+
+He paused, then gave a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal
+voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer.
+As he was leaving the room the voice on the bed said after him--
+
+“Go with God, thou silent soul.”
+
+On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked the door and put the key
+in his pocket.
+
+II
+
+The words and events of that evening must have been graven as if with
+a steel tool on Mr. Razumov’s brain since he was able to write his
+relation with such fullness and precision a good many months afterwards.
+
+The record of the thoughts which assailed him in the street is even more
+minute and abundant. They seem to have rushed upon him with the greater
+freedom because his thinking powers were no longer crushed by Haldin’s
+presence--the appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning force
+of a great fanaticism. On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov’s
+diary I own that a “rush of thoughts” is not an adequate image.
+
+The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts--the
+faithful reflection of the state of his feelings. The thoughts in
+themselves were not numerous--they were like the thoughts of most human
+beings, few and simple--but they cannot be reproduced here in all
+their exclamatory repetitions which went on in an endless and weary
+turmoil--for the walk was long.
+
+If to the Western reader they appear shocking, inappropriate, or even
+improper, it must be remembered that as to the first this may be the
+effect of my crude statement. For the rest I will only remark here that
+this is not a story of the West of Europe.
+
+Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments
+have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young
+Englishman should find himself in Razumov’s situation. This being so it
+would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe
+surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at
+this crisis of his fate. He would not have an hereditary and personal
+knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
+guards its power, and defends its existence. By an act of mental
+extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison,
+but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
+not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
+either of investigation or of punishment.
+
+This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
+Western thought. I don’t know that this danger occurred, specially, to
+Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
+and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
+was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
+the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
+the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
+impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
+utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
+natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
+him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
+amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.
+
+The peculiar circumstances of Razumov’s parentage, or rather of his lack
+of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
+remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
+atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. “Because I haven’t that, must
+everything else be taken away from me?” he thought.
+
+He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
+glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
+black face of the night. “For it is a crime,” he was saying to
+himself. “A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
+institutions....”
+
+A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. “I must be courageous,”
+ he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
+if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
+because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
+the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
+Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.
+
+Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
+end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
+black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
+footfalls.
+
+It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
+tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
+duty. She walked leisurely in the blizzard as though she had no home to
+hurry to, she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black bread with
+an air of guarding a priceless booty: and Razumov averting his glance
+envied her the peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.
+
+To one reading Mr. Razumov’s narrative it is really a wonder how he
+managed to keep going as he did along one interminable street after
+another on pavements that were gradually becoming blocked with snow.
+It was the thought of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the desperate
+desire to get rid of his presence which drove him forward. No rational
+determination had any part in his exertions. Thus, when on arriving at
+the low eating-house he heard that the man of horses, Ziemianitch, was
+not there, he could only stare stupidly.
+
+The waiter, a wild-haired youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt,
+exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch
+had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a
+bottle under each arm to keep it up amongst the horses--he supposed.
+
+The owner of the vile den, a bony short man in a dirty cloth caftan
+coming down to his heels, stood by, his hands tucked into his belt, and
+nodded confirmation.
+
+The reek of spirits, the greasy rancid steam of food got Razumov by the
+throat. He struck a table with his clenched hand and shouted violently--
+
+“You lie.”
+
+Bleary unwashed faces were turned to his direction. A mild-eyed ragged
+tramp drinking tea at the next table moved farther away. A murmur of
+wonder arose with an undertone of uneasiness. A laugh was heard too, and
+an exclamation, “There! there!” jeeringly soothing. The waiter looked
+all round and announced to the room--
+
+“The gentleman won’t believe that Ziemianitch is drunk.”
+
+
+From a distant corner a hoarse voice belonging to a horrible,
+nondescript, shaggy being with a black face like the muzzle of a bear
+grunted angrily--
+
+“The cursed driver of thieves. What do we want with his gentlemen here?
+We are all honest folk in this place.”
+
+Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep himself from bursting
+into imprecations, followed the owner of the den, who, whispering “Come
+along, little father,” led him into a tiny hole of a place behind
+the wooden counter, whence proceeded a sound of splashing. A wet and
+bedraggled creature, a sort of sexless and shivering scarecrow, washed
+glasses in there, bending over a wooden tub by the light of a tallow
+dip.
+
+“Yes, little father,” the man in the long caftan said plaintively. He
+had a brown, cunning little face, a thin greyish beard. Trying to light
+a tin lantern he hugged it to his breast and talked garrulously the
+while.
+
+He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies
+told. And he would show him drunk. His woman, it seems, ran away from
+him last night. “Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!” He spat. They were
+always running away from that driver of the devil--and he sixty years
+old too; could never get used to it. But each heart knows sorrow after
+its own kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his days. And then he
+would fly to the bottle. “‘Who could bear life in our land without the
+bottle?’ he says. A proper Russian man--the little pig.... Be pleased
+to follow me.”
+
+Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow enclosed between high walls
+with innumerable windows. Here and there a dim yellow light hung within
+the four-square mass of darkness. The house was an enormous slum, a hive
+of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of
+starvation and despair.
+
+In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and Razumov followed the
+light of the lantern through a small doorway into a long cavernous place
+like a neglected subterranean byre. Deep within, three shaggy little
+horses tied up to rings hung their heads together, motionless and
+shadowy in the dim light of the lantern. It must have been the famous
+team of Haldin’s escape. Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom. His
+guide pawed in the straw with his foot.
+
+“Here he is. Ah! the little pigeon. A true Russian man. ‘No heavy hearts
+for me,’ he says. ‘Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my
+sight.’ Ha! ha! ha! That’s the fellow he is.”
+
+He held the lantern over a prone form of a man, apparently fully dressed
+for outdoors. His head was lost in a pointed cloth hood. On the other
+side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet in monstrous thick
+boots.
+
+“Always ready to drive,” commented the keeper of the eating-house. “A
+proper Russian driver that. Saint or devil, night or day is all one to
+Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow. ‘I don’t ask who you
+are, but where you want to go,’ he says. He would drive Satan himself to
+his own abode and come back chirruping to his horses. Many a one he has
+driven who is clanking his chains in the Nertchinsk mines by this time.”
+
+Razumov shuddered.
+
+“Call him, wake him up,” he faltered out.
+
+The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the
+prostrate sleeper. The man shook at the impact but did not move. At the
+third kick he grunted but remained inert as before.
+
+The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.
+
+“You see for yourself how it is. We have done what we can for you.”
+
+He picked up the lantern. The intense black spokes of shadow swung
+about in the circle of light. A terrible fury--the blind rage of
+self-preservation--possessed Razumov.
+
+“Ah! The vile beast,” he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made
+the lantern jump and tremble! “I shall wake you! Give me...give
+me...”
+
+He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a stablefork and rushing
+forward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a
+time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and
+shadows of the cellar-like stable. Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with
+an insatiable fury, in great volleys of sounding thwacks. Except for the
+violent movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither the beaten man
+nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls. And only the sound of blows was
+heard. It was a weird scene.
+
+Suddenly there was a sharp crack. The stick broke and half of it flew
+far away into the gloom beyond the light. At the same time Ziemianitch
+sat up. At this Razumov became as motionless as the man with the
+lantern--only his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.
+
+Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling
+night of drunkenness enwrapping the “bright Russian soul” of Haldin’s
+enthusiastic praise. But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing. His eyeballs
+blinked all white in the light once, twice--then the gleam went out.
+For a moment he sat in the straw with closed eyes with a strange air of
+weary meditation, then fell over slowly on his side without making the
+slightest sound. Only the straw rustled a little. Razumov stared wildly,
+fighting for his breath. After a second or two he heard a light snore.
+
+He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went
+off with great hasty strides without looking back once.
+
+After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked
+into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.
+
+This recalled him to himself; and glancing about he discovered he had
+been going in the wrong direction. He retraced his steps, but now at a
+more moderate pace. When passing before the house he had just left he
+flourished his fist at the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing its
+sinister bulk on the white ground. It had an air of brooding. He let his
+arm fall by his side--discouraged.
+
+Ziemianitch’s passionate surrender to sorrow and consolation had baffled
+him. That was the people. A true Russian man! Razumov was glad he had
+beaten that brute--the “bright soul” of the other. Here they were: the
+people and the enthusiast.
+
+Between the two he was done for. Between the drunkenness of the peasant
+incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable
+of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men. It
+was a sort of terrible childishness. But children had their masters.
+“Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand,” thought Razumov, longing for
+power to hurt and destroy.
+
+He was glad he had thrashed that brute. The physical exertion had left
+his body in a comfortable glow. His mental agitation too was clarified
+as if all the feverishness had gone out of him in a fit of outward
+violence. Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was
+conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.
+
+He walked slower and slower. And indeed, considering the guest he had
+in his rooms, it was no wonder he lingered on the way. It was like
+harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life,
+but would take from you all that made life worth living--a subtle pest
+that would convert earth into a hell.
+
+What was he doing now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his
+hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on
+his bed--the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots,
+the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, “I’ll kill
+him when I get home.” But he knew very well that that was of no use.
+The corpse hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal as the living
+man. Nothing short of complete annihilation would do. And that was
+impossible. What then? Must one kill oneself to escape this visitation?
+
+Razumov’s despair was too profoundly tinged with hate to accept that
+issue.
+
+And yet it was despair--nothing less--at the thought of having to live
+with Haldin for an indefinite number of days in mortal alarm at every
+sound. But perhaps when he heard that this “bright soul” of Ziemianitch
+suffered from a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his infernal
+resignation somewhere else. And that was not likely on the face of it.
+
+Razumov thought: “I am being crushed--and I can’t even run away.”
+ Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth--some little house in
+the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles. A material
+refuge. He had nothing. He had not even a moral refuge--the refuge of
+confidence. To whom could he go with this tale--in all this great, great
+land?
+
+Razumov stamped his foot--and under the soft carpet of snow felt the
+hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic
+mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet--his native soil!--his very
+own--without a fireside, without a heart!
+
+He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall,
+and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky
+of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.
+It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.
+
+Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of
+countless millions.
+
+He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born to an
+inheritance of space and numbers. Under the sumptuous immensity of the
+sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains
+of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of
+the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a
+monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.
+It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like
+Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin--murdering
+foolishly.
+
+It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A
+voice seemed to cry within him, “Don’t touch it.” It was a guarantee of
+duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on--a
+work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their
+shifting impulses--but of peace. What it needed was not the conflicting
+aspirations of a people, but a will strong and one: it wanted not the
+babble of many voices, but a man--strong and one!
+
+Razumov stood on the point of conversion. He was fascinated by its
+approach, by its overpowering logic. For a train of thought is never
+false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in
+secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence
+combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and
+the dread of uncertain days.
+
+In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many
+brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict
+to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy
+for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever,
+touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing
+of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict
+with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.
+
+“Haldin means disruption,” he thought to himself, beginning to walk
+again. “What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage--with
+his talk of God’s justice? All that means disruption. Better that
+thousands should suffer than that a people should become a disintegrated
+mass, helpless like dust in the wind. Obscurantism is better than the
+light of incendiary torches. The seed germinates in the night. Out of
+the dark soil springs the perfect plant. But a volcanic eruption
+is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground. And am I, who love my
+country--who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in--am I
+to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary
+fanatic?”
+
+The grace entered into Razumov. He believed now in the man who would
+come at the appointed time.
+
+What is a throne? A few pieces of wood upholstered in velvet. But a
+throne is a seat of power too. The form of government is the shape of
+a tool--an instrument. But twenty thousand bladders inflated by the
+noblest sentiments and jostling against each other in the air are a
+miserable incumbrance of space, holding no power, possessing no will,
+having nothing to give.
+
+He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a discourse with himself
+with extraordinary abundance and facility. Generally his phrases came
+to him slowly, after a conscious and painstaking wooing. Some superior
+power had inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as certain
+converted sinners become overwhelmingly loquacious.
+
+He felt an austere exultation.
+
+“What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear
+grasp of my intellect?” he thought. “Is not this my country? Have I not
+got forty million brothers?” he asked himself, unanswerably victorious
+in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given
+the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a
+pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. “No! If I must suffer
+let me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason--my
+cool superior reason--rejects.”
+
+He ceased to think for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete.
+But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we
+enter an unlighted strange place--the irrational feeling that something
+may jump upon us in the dark--the absurd dread of the unseen.
+
+Of course he was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was
+not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption...
+and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted
+hearts. But absolute power should be preserved--the tool ready for the
+man--for the great autocrat of the future. Razumov believed in him. The
+logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded
+him, “What else?” he asked himself ardently, “could move all that mass
+in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will.”
+
+He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of
+liberalism--rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian truth.
+“That’s patriotism,” he observed mentally, and added, “There’s no
+stopping midway on that road,” and then remarked to himself, “I am not a
+coward.”
+
+And again there was a dead silence in Razumov’s breast. He walked with
+lowered head, making room for no one. He walked slowly and his thoughts
+returning spoke within him with solemn slowness.
+
+“What is this Haldin? And what am I? Only two grains of sand. But a
+great mountain is made up of just such insignificant grains. And the
+death of a man or of many men is an insignificant thing. Yet we combat
+a contagious pestilence. Do I want his death? No! I would save him if I
+could--but no one can do that--he is the withered member which must be
+cut off. If I must perish through him, let me at least not perish
+with him, and associated against my will with his sombre folly that
+understands nothing either of men or things. Why should I leave a false
+memory?”
+
+It passed through his mind that there was no one in the world who
+cared what sort of memory he left behind him. He exclaimed to himself
+instantly, “Perish vainly for a falsehood!... What a miserable fate!”
+
+He was now in a more animated part of the town. He did not remark the
+crash of two colliding sledges close to the curb. The driver of one
+bellowed tearfully at his fellow--
+
+“Oh, thou vile wretch!”
+
+This hoarse yell, let out nearly in his ear, disturbed Razumov. He shook
+his head impatiently and went on looking straight before him. Suddenly
+on the snow, stretched on his back right across his path, he saw Haldin,
+solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands over his eyes, clad in a
+brown close-fitting coat and long boots. He was lying out of the way a
+little, as though he had selected that place on purpose. The snow round
+him was untrodden.
+
+This hallucination had such a solidity of aspect that the first movement
+of Razumov was to reach for his pocket to assure himself that the key of
+his rooms was there. But he checked the impulse with a disdainful curve
+of his lips. He understood. His thought, concentrated intensely on
+the figure left lying on his bed, had culminated in this extraordinary
+illusion of the sight. Razumov tackled the phenomenon calmly. With a
+stern face, without a check and gazing far beyond the vision, he walked
+on, experiencing nothing but a slight tightening of the chest. After
+passing he turned his head for a glance, and saw only the unbroken track
+of his footsteps over the place where the breast of the phantom had been
+lying.
+
+Razumov walked on and after a little time whispered his wonder to
+himself.
+
+“Exactly as if alive! Seemed to breathe! And right in my way too! I have
+had an extraordinary experience.”
+
+He made a few steps and muttered through his set teeth--
+
+“I shall give him up.”
+
+Then for some twenty yards or more all was blank. He wrapped his cloak
+closer round him. He pulled his cap well forward over his eyes.
+
+“Betray. A great word. What is betrayal? They talk of a man betraying
+his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond
+first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience
+engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction, am
+I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him? On the
+contrary--every obligation of true courage is the other way.”
+
+Razumov looked round from under his cap.
+
+“What can the prejudice of the world reproach me with? Have I provoked
+his confidence? No! Have I by a single word, look, or gesture given him
+reason to suppose that I accepted his trust in me? No! It is true that
+I consented to go and see his Ziemianitch. Well, I have been to see him.
+And I broke a stick on his back too--the brute.”
+
+Something seemed to turn over in his head bringing uppermost a
+singularly hard, clear facet of his brain.
+
+“It would be better, however,” he reflected with a quite different
+mental accent, “to keep that circumstance altogether to myself.”
+
+He had passed beyond the turn leading to his lodgings, and had reached
+a wide and fashionable street. Some shops were still open, and all the
+restaurants. Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur
+coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an
+air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere
+believer for the frivolous crowd. It was the world--those officers,
+dignitaries, men of fashion, officials, members of the Yacht Club. The
+event of the morning affected them all. What would they say if they knew
+what this student in a cloak was going to do?
+
+“Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can.
+How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?”
+
+Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided.
+Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered
+what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some
+other mind’s sanction.
+
+With something resembling anguish he said to himself--
+
+“I want to be understood.” The universal aspiration with all its
+profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst
+eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open
+himself.
+
+The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of
+chicane too much. One could not go and lay one’s conscience before the
+policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief
+of his district’s police--a common-looking person whom he used to see
+sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering
+cigarette stuck to his lower lip. “He would begin by locking me up most
+probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful
+commotion,” thought Razumov practically.
+
+An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.
+
+Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who
+knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked
+terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable
+outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal
+conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant
+only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without
+going mad.
+
+Razumov had reached that point of vision. To escape from it he embraced
+for a whole minute the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings
+and flinging himself on his knees by the side of the bed with the dark
+figure stretched on it; to pour out a full confession in passionate
+words that would stir the whole being of that man to its innermost
+depths; that would end in embraces and tears; in an incredible
+fellowship of souls--such as the world had never seen. It was sublime!
+
+Inwardly he wept and trembled already. But to the casual eyes that were
+cast upon him he was aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in
+a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll. He noted, too, the sidelong,
+brilliant glance of a pretty woman--with a delicate head, and covered
+in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and
+beautiful savage--which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking
+tenderness on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.
+
+Suddenly Razumov stood still. The glimpse of a passing grey whisker,
+caught and lost in the same instant, had evoked the complete image of
+Prince K---, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man had
+pressed it--a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a
+half-unwilling caress.
+
+And Razumov marvelled at himself. Why did he not think of him before!
+
+“A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the very man--He!”
+
+A strange softening emotion came over Razumov--made his knees shake a
+little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment
+was pernicious nonsense. He couldn’t be quick enough; and when he got
+into a sledge he shouted to the driver--“to the K--- Palace. Get
+on--you! Fly!” The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of
+his eyes, answered obsequiously--
+
+“I hear, your high Nobility.”
+
+It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K--- was not a man of timid
+character. On the day of Mr. de P---‘s murder an extreme alarm and
+despondency prevailed in the high official spheres.
+
+Prince K---, sitting sadly alone in his study, was told by his alarmed
+servants that a mysterious young man had forced his way into the hall,
+refused to tell his name and the nature of his business, and would not
+move from there till he had seen his Excellency in private. Instead of
+locking himself up and telephoning for the police, as nine out of ten
+high personages would have done that evening, the Prince gave way to
+curiosity and came quietly to the door of his study.
+
+In the hall, the front door standing wide open, he recognised at once
+Razumov, pale as death, his eyes blazing, and surrounded by perplexed
+lackeys.
+
+The Prince was vexed beyond measure, and even indignant. But his humane
+instincts and a subtle sense of self-respect could not allow him to
+let this young man be thrown out into the street by base menials.
+He retreated unseen into his room, and after a little rang his bell.
+Razumov heard in the hall an ominously raised harsh voice saying
+somewhere far away--
+
+“Show the gentleman in here.”
+
+Razumov walked in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable--raised
+far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince
+looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of
+which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was
+not asked to sit down.
+
+Half an hour later they appeared in the hall together. The lackeys stood
+up, and the Prince, moving with difficulty on his gouty feet, was helped
+into his furs. The carriage had been ordered before. When the great
+double door was flung open with a crash, Razumov, who had been standing
+silent with a lost gaze but with every faculty intensely on the alert,
+heard the Prince’s voice--
+
+“Your arm, young man.”
+
+The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards officer, man of showy
+missions, experienced in nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue
+and worldly success, had been equally impressed by the more obvious
+difficulties of such a situation and by Razumov’s quiet dignity in
+stating them.
+
+He had said, “No. Upon the whole I can’t condemn the step you ventured
+to take by coming to me with your story. It is not an affair for police
+understrappers. The greatest importance is attached to.... Set
+your mind at rest. I shall see you through this most extraordinary and
+difficult situation.”
+
+Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and Razumov, making a short bow,
+had said with deference--
+
+“I have trusted my instinct. A young man having no claim upon anybody
+in the world has in an hour of trial involving his deepest political
+convictions turned to an illustrious Russian--that’s all.”
+
+The Prince had exclaimed hastily--
+
+“You have done well.”
+
+In the carriage--it was a small brougham on sleigh runners--Razumov
+broke the silence in a voice that trembled slightly.
+
+“My gratitude surpasses the greatness of my presumption.”
+
+He gasped, feeling unexpectedly in the dark a momentary pressure on his
+arm.
+
+“You have done well,” repeated the Prince.
+
+When the carriage stopped the Prince murmured to Razumov, who had never
+ventured a single question--
+
+“The house of General T---.”
+
+In the middle of the snow-covered roadway blazed a great bonfire.
+Some Cossacks, the bridles of their horses over the arm, were warming
+themselves around. Two sentries stood at the door, several gendarmes
+lounged under the great carriage gateway, and on the first-floor
+landing two orderlies rose and stood at attention. Razumov walked at the
+Prince’s elbow.
+
+A surprising quantity of hot-house plants in pots cumbered the floor of
+the ante-room. Servants came forward. A young man in civilian clothes
+arrived hurriedly, was whispered to, bowed low, and exclaiming
+zealously, “Certainly--this minute,” fled within somewhere. The Prince
+signed to Razumov.
+
+They passed through a suite of reception-rooms all barely lit and one
+of them prepared for dancing. The wife of the General had put off
+her party. An atmosphere of consternation pervaded the place. But the
+General’s own room, with heavy sombre hangings, two massive desks, and
+deep armchairs, had all the lights turned on. The footman shut the door
+behind them and they waited.
+
+There was a coal fire in an English grate; Razumov had never before seen
+such a fire; and the silence of the room was like the silence of the
+grave; perfect, measureless, for even the clock on the mantelpiece
+made no sound. Filling a corner, on a black pedestal, stood a
+quarter-life-size smooth-limbed bronze of an adolescent figure, running.
+The Prince observed in an undertone--
+
+“Spontini’s. ‘Flight of Youth.’ Exquisite.”
+
+“Admirable,” assented Razumov faintly.
+
+They said nothing more after this, the Prince silent with his grand air,
+Razumov staring at the statue. He was worried by a sensation resembling
+the gnawing of hunger.
+
+He did not turn when he heard an inner door fly open, and a quick
+footstep, muffled on the carpet.
+
+The Prince’s voice immediately exclaimed, thick with excitement--
+
+“We have got him--_ce miserable_. A worthy young man came to me--No!
+It’s incredible....”
+
+Razumov held his breath before the bronze as if expecting a crash.
+Behind his back a voice he had never heard before insisted politely--
+
+“_Asseyez-vous donc_.”
+
+The Prince almost shrieked, “_Mais comprenez-vous, mon cher!
+L’assassin_! the murderer--we have got him....”
+
+Razumov spun round. The General’s smooth big cheeks rested on the stiff
+collar of his uniform. He must have been already looking at Razumov,
+because that last saw the pale blue eyes fastened on him coldly.
+
+The Prince from a chair waved an impressive hand.
+
+“This is a most honourable young man whom Providence itself... Mr.
+Razumov.”
+
+The General acknowledged the introduction by frowning at Razumov, who
+did not make the slightest movement.
+
+Sitting down before his desk the General listened with compressed lips.
+It was impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his face.
+
+Razumov watched the immobility of the fleshy profile. But it lasted only
+a moment, till the Prince had finished; and when the General turned to
+the providential young man, his florid complexion, the blue, unbelieving
+eyes and the bright white flash of an automatic smile had an air of
+jovial, careless cruelty. He expressed no wonder at the extraordinary
+story--no pleasure or excitement--no incredulity either. He betrayed no
+sentiment whatever. Only with a politeness almost deferential suggested
+that “the bird might have flown while Mr.--Mr. Razumov was running about
+the streets.”
+
+Razumov advanced to the middle of the room and said, “The door is locked
+and I have the key in my pocket.”
+
+His loathing for the man was intense. It had come upon him so unawares
+that he felt he had not kept it out of his voice. The General looked up
+at him thoughtfully, and Razumov grinned.
+
+All this went over the head of Prince K--- seated in a deep armchair,
+very tired and impatient.
+
+“A student called Haldin,” said the General thoughtfully.
+
+Razumov ceased to grin.
+
+“That is his name,” he said unnecessarily loud. “Victor Victorovitch
+Haldin--a student.”
+
+The General shifted his position a little.
+
+“How is he dressed? Would you have the goodness to tell me?”
+
+Razumov angrily described Haldin’s clothing in a few jerky words. The
+General stared all the time, then addressing the Prince--
+
+“We were not without some indications,” he said in French. “A good woman
+who was in the street described to us somebody wearing a dress of the
+sort as the thrower of the second bomb. We have detained her at the
+Secretariat, and every one in a Tcherkess coat we could lay our hands
+on has been brought to her to look at. She kept on crossing herself
+and shaking her head at them. It was exasperating....” He turned to
+Razumov, and in Russian, with friendly reproach--
+
+“Take a chair, Mr. Razumov--do. Why are you standing?”
+
+Razumov sat down carelessly and looked at the General.
+
+“This goggle-eyed imbecile understands nothing,” he thought.
+
+The Prince began to speak loftily.
+
+“Mr. Razumov is a young man of conspicuous abilities. I have it at heart
+that his future should not....”
+
+“Certainly,” interrupted the General, with a movement of the hand. “Has
+he any weapons on him, do you think, Mr. Razumov?”
+
+The General employed a gentle musical voice. Razumov answered with
+suppressed irritation--
+
+“No. But my razors are lying about--you understand.”
+
+The General lowered his head approvingly.
+
+“Precisely.”
+
+Then to the Prince, explaining courteously--
+
+“We want that bird alive. It will be the devil if we can’t make him sing
+a little before we are done with him.”
+
+The grave-like silence of the room with its mute clock fell upon the
+polite modulations of this terrible phrase. The Prince, hidden in the
+chair, made no sound.
+
+The General unexpectedly developed a thought.
+
+“Fidelity to menaced institutions on which depend the safety of a
+throne and of a people is no child’s play. We know that, _mon Prince,_
+and--_tenez_--” he went on with a sort of flattering harshness, “Mr.
+Razumov here begins to understand that too.”
+
+His eyes which he turned upon Razumov seemed to be starting out of his
+head. This grotesqueness of aspect no longer shocked Razumov. He said
+with gloomy conviction--
+
+“Haldin will never speak.”
+
+“That remains to be seen,” muttered the General.
+
+“I am certain,” insisted Razumov. “A man like this never speaks....
+Do you imagine that I am here from fear?” he added violently. He felt
+ready to stand by his opinion of Haldin to the last extremity.
+
+“Certainly not,” protested the General, with great simplicity of tone.
+“And I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Razumov, that if he had not come
+with his tale to such a staunch and loyal Russian as you, he would
+have disappeared like a stone in the water... which would have had a
+detestable effect,” he added, with a bright, cruel smile under his stony
+stare. “So you see, there can be no suspicion of any fear here.”
+
+The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round the back of the
+armchair.
+
+“Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action. Be at ease in that
+respect, pray.”
+
+He turned to the General uneasily.
+
+“That’s why I am here. You may be surprised why I should....”
+
+The General hastened to interrupt.
+
+“Not at all. Extremely natural. You saw the importance....”
+
+“Yes,” broke in the Prince. “And I venture to ask insistently that mine
+and Mr. Razumov’s intervention should not become public. He is a young
+man of promise--of remarkable aptitudes.”
+
+“I haven’t a doubt of it,” murmured the General. “He inspires
+confidence.”
+
+“All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread nowadays--they taint
+such unexpected quarters--that, monstrous as it seems, he might suffer
+...his studies...his...”
+
+The General, with his elbows on the desk, took his head between his
+hands.
+
+“Yes. Yes. I am thinking it out.... How long is it since you left him
+at your rooms, Mr. Razumov?”
+
+Razumov mentioned the hour which nearly corresponded with the time of
+his distracted flight from the big slum house. He had made up his mind
+to keep Ziemianitch out of the affair completely. To mention him at all
+would mean imprisonment for the “bright soul,” perhaps cruel floggings,
+and in the end a journey to Siberia in chains. Razumov, who had beaten
+Ziemianitch, felt for him now a vague, remorseful tenderness.
+
+The General, giving way for the first time to his secret sentiments,
+exclaimed contemptuously--
+
+“And you say he came in to make you this confidence like this--for
+nothing--_a propos des bottes_.”
+
+Razumov felt danger in the air. The merciless suspicion of despotism had
+spoken openly at last. Sudden fear sealed Razumov’s lips. The silence
+of the room resembled now the silence of a deep dungeon, where time does
+not count, and a suspect person is sometimes forgotten for ever. But the
+Prince came to the rescue.
+
+“Providence itself has led the wretch in a moment of mental aberration
+to seek Mr. Razumov on the strength of some old, utterly misinterpreted
+exchange of ideas--some sort of idle speculative conversation--months
+ago--I am told--and completely forgotten till now by Mr. Razumov.”
+
+“Mr. Razumov,” queried the General meditatively, after a short silence,
+“do you often indulge in speculative conversation?”
+
+“No, Excellency,” answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of
+self-confidence. “I am a man of deep convictions. Crude opinions are
+in the air. They are not always worth combating. But even the silent
+contempt of a serious mind may be misinterpreted by headlong utopists.”
+
+The General stared from between his hands. Prince K--- murmured--
+
+“A serious young man. _Un esprit superieur_.”
+
+“I see that, _mon cher Prince_,” said the General. “Mr. Razumov is quite
+safe with me. I am interested in him. He has, it seems, the great and
+useful quality of inspiring confidence. What I was wondering at is why
+the other should mention anything at all--I mean even the bare fact
+alone--if his object was only to obtain temporary shelter for a few
+hours. For, after all, nothing was easier than to say nothing about it
+unless, indeed, he were trying, under a crazy misapprehension of your
+true sentiments, to enlist your assistance--eh, Mr. Razumov?”
+
+It seemed to Razumov that the floor was moving slightly. This grotesque
+man in a tight uniform was terrible. It was right that he should be
+terrible.
+
+“I can see what your Excellency has in your mind. But I can only answer
+that I don’t know why.”
+
+“I have nothing in my mind,” murmured the General, with gentle surprise.
+
+“I am his prey--his helpless prey,” thought Razumov. The fatigues and
+the disgusts of that afternoon, the need to forget, the fear which he
+could not keep off, reawakened his hate for Haldin.
+
+“Then I can’t help your Excellency. I don’t know what he meant. I only
+know there was a moment when I wished to kill him. There was also a
+moment when I wished myself dead. I said nothing. I was overcome. I
+provoked no confidence--I asked for no explanations--”
+
+Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was lucid. It was really a
+calculated outburst.
+
+“It is rather a pity,” the General said, “that you did not. Don’t you
+know at all what he means to do?” Razumov calmed down and saw an opening
+there.
+
+“He told me he was in hopes that a sledge would meet him about half an
+hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post on the left from the upper
+end of Karabelnaya. At any rate, he meant to be there at that time. He
+did not even ask me for a change of clothes.”
+
+“_Ah voila_!” said the General, turning to Prince K with an air of
+satisfaction. “There is a way to keep your _protege_, Mr. Razumov, quite
+clear of any connexion with the actual arrest. We shall be ready for
+that gentleman in Karabelnaya.”
+
+The Prince expressed his gratitude. There was real emotion in his voice.
+Razumov, motionless, silent, sat staring at the carpet. The General
+turned to him.
+
+“Half an hour after midnight. Till then we have to depend on you, Mr.
+Razumov. You don’t think he is likely to change his purpose?”
+
+“How can I tell?” said Razumov. “Those men are not of the sort that ever
+changes its purpose.”
+
+“What men do you mean?”
+
+“Fanatical lovers of liberty in general. Liberty with a capital L,
+Excellency. Liberty that means nothing precise. Liberty in whose name
+crimes are committed.”
+
+The General murmured--
+
+“I detest rebels of every kind. I can’t help it. It’s my nature!”
+
+He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back his arm. “They shall be
+destroyed, then.”
+
+“They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand,” said Razumov
+with malicious pleasure and looking the General straight in the face.
+“If Haldin does change his purpose to-night, you may depend on it that
+it will not be to save his life by flight in some other way. He would
+have thought then of something else to attempt. But that is not likely.”
+
+The General repeated as if to himself, “They shall be destroyed.”
+
+Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
+
+The Prince exclaimed--
+
+“What a terrible necessity!”
+
+The General’s arm was lowered slowly.
+
+“One comfort there is. That brood leaves no posterity. I’ve always said
+it, one effort, pitiless, persistent, steady--and we are done with them
+for ever.”
+
+Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much
+arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not
+have gone on bearing the responsibility.
+
+“I detest rebels. These subversive minds! These intellectual
+_debauches_! My existence has been built on fidelity. It’s a feeling.
+To defend it I am ready to lay down my life--and even my honour--if
+that were needed. But pray tell me what honour can there be as against
+rebels--against people that deny God Himself--perfect unbelievers!
+Brutes. It is horrible to think of.”
+
+During this tirade Razumov, facing the General, had nodded slightly
+twice. Prince K---, standing on one side with his grand air, murmured,
+casting up his eyes--
+
+“_Helas!_”
+
+Then lowering his glance and with great decision declared--
+
+“This young man, General, is perfectly fit to apprehend the bearing of
+your memorable words.”
+
+The General’s whole expression changed from dull resentment to perfect
+urbanity.
+
+“I would ask now, Mr. Razumov,” he said, “to return to his home. Note
+that I don’t ask Mr. Razumov whether he has justified his absence to his
+guest. No doubt he did this sufficiently. But I don’t ask. Mr. Razumov
+inspires confidence. It is a great gift. I only suggest that a more
+prolonged absence might awaken the criminal’s suspicions and induce him
+perhaps to change his plans.”
+
+He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted his visitors to the
+ante-room encumbered with flower-pots.
+
+Razumov parted with the Prince at the corner of a street. In the
+carriage he had listened to speeches where natural sentiment struggled
+with caution. Evidently the Prince was afraid of encouraging any hopes
+of future intercourse. But there was a touch of tenderness in the voice
+uttering in the dark the guarded general phrases of goodwill. And the
+Prince too said--
+
+“I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov.”
+
+“They all, it seems, have confidence in me,” thought Razumov dully. He
+had an indulgent contempt for the man sitting shoulder to shoulder with
+him in the confined space. Probably he was afraid of scenes with his
+wife. She was said to be proud and violent.
+
+It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in
+the comfort and safety of lives. But he wanted to put the Prince’s
+mind at ease; and with a proper amount of emphasis he said that, being
+conscious of some small abilities and confident in his power of work, he
+trusted his future to his own exertions. He expressed his gratitude for
+the helping hand. Such dangerous situations did not occur twice in the
+course of one life--he added.
+
+“And you have met this one with a firmness of mind and correctness
+of feeling which give me a high idea of your worth,” the Prince said
+solemnly. “You have now only to persevere--to persevere.”
+
+On getting out on the pavement Razumov saw an ungloved hand extended to
+him through the lowered window of the brougham. It detained his own in
+its grasp for a moment, while the light of a street lamp fell upon the
+Prince’s long face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
+
+“I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences...”
+
+“After what your Excellency has condescended to do for me, I can only
+rely on my conscience.”
+
+“_Adieu_,” said the whiskered head with feeling.
+
+Razumov bowed. The brougham glided away with a slight swish in the
+snow--he was alone on the edge of the pavement.
+
+He said to himself that there was nothing to think about, and began
+walking towards his home.
+
+He walked quietly. It was a common experience to walk thus home to bed
+after an evening spent somewhere with his fellows or in the cheaper
+seats of a theatre. After he had gone a little way the familiarity of
+things got hold of him. Nothing was changed. There was the familiar
+corner; and when he turned it he saw the familiar dim light of the
+provision shop kept by a German woman. There were loaves of stale bread,
+bunches of onions and strings of sausages behind the small window-panes.
+They were closing it. The sickly lame fellow whom he knew so well by
+sight staggered out into the snow embracing a large shutter.
+
+Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with
+feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases.
+
+The sense of life’s continuity depended on trifling bodily impressions.
+The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And
+this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to
+climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the
+familiar clammy banister. The exceptional could not prevail against the
+material contacts which make one day resemble another. To-morrow would
+be like yesterday.
+
+It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged.
+
+“I suppose,” thought Razumov, “that if I had made up my mind to blow out
+my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly
+as I am doing it now. What’s a man to do? What must be must be.
+Extraordinary things do happen. But when they have happened they are
+done with. Thus, too, when the mind is made up. That question is done
+with. And the daily concerns, the familiarities of our thought swallow
+it up--and the life goes on as before with its mysterious and secret
+sides quite out of sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing.”
+
+Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out; entered very quietly and
+bolted the door behind him carefully.
+
+He thought, “He hears me,” and after bolting the door he stood still
+holding his breath. There was not a sound. He crossed the bare outer
+room, stepping deliberately in the darkness. Entering the other, he felt
+all over his table for the matchbox. The silence, but for the groping of
+his hand, was profound. Could the fellow be sleeping so soundly?
+
+He struck a light and looked at the bed. Haldin was lying on his back as
+before, only both his hands were under his head. His eyes were open. He
+stared at the ceiling.
+
+Razumov held the match up. He saw the clear-cut features, the firm
+chin, the white forehead and the topknot of fair hair against the white
+pillow. There he was, lying flat on his back. Razumov thought suddenly,
+“I have walked over his chest.”
+
+He continued to stare till the match burnt itself out; then struck
+another and lit the lamp in silence without looking towards the bed any
+more. He had turned his back on it and was hanging his coat on a peg
+when he heard Haldin sigh profoundly, then ask in a tired voice--
+
+“Well! And what have you arranged?”
+
+The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad to put his hands against
+the wall. A diabolical impulse to say, “I have given you up to the
+police,” frightened him exceedingly. But he did not say that. He said,
+without turning round, in a muffled voice--
+
+“It’s done.”
+
+Again he heard Haldin sigh. He walked to the table, sat down with the
+lamp before him, and only then looked towards the bed.
+
+In the distant corner of the large room far away from the lamp, which
+was small and provided with a very thick china shade, Haldin appeared
+like a dark and elongated shape--rigid with the immobility of death.
+This body seemed to have less substance than its own phantom walked over
+by Razumov in the street white with snow. It was more alarming in its
+shadowy, persistent reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion.
+
+Haldin was heard again.
+
+“You must have had a walk--such a walk,...” he murmured
+deprecatingly. “This weather....”
+
+Razumov answered with energy--
+
+“Horrible walk.... A nightmare of a walk.”
+
+He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then--
+
+“And so you have seen Ziemianitch--brother?”
+
+“I’ve seen him.”
+
+Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with the Prince, thought it
+prudent to add, “I had to wait some time.”
+
+“A character--eh? It’s extraordinary what a sense of the necessity of
+freedom there is in that man. And he has sayings too--simple, to the
+point, such as only the people can invent in their rough sagacity. A
+character that....”
+
+“I, you understand, haven’t had much opportunity....” Razumov
+muttered through his teeth.
+
+Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
+
+“You see, brother, I have been a good deal in that house of late. I used
+to take there books--leaflets. Not a few of the poor people who live
+there can read. And, you see, the guests for the feast of freedom must
+be sought for in byways and hedges. The truth is, I have almost lived in
+that house of late. I slept sometimes in the stable. There is a
+stable....”
+
+“That’s where I had my interview with Ziemianitch,” interrupted
+Razumov gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, “It was
+satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved.”
+
+“Ah! he’s a fellow,” went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling. “I
+came to know him in that way, you see. For some weeks now, ever since I
+resigned myself to do what had to be done, I tried to isolate myself. I
+gave up my rooms. What was the good of exposing a decent widow woman
+to the risk of being worried out of her mind by the police? I gave up
+seeing any of our comrades....”
+
+Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper and began to trace lines
+on it with a pencil.
+
+“Upon my word,” he thought angrily, “he seems to have thought of
+everybody’s safety but mine.”
+
+Haldin was talking on.
+
+“This morning--ah! this morning--that was different. How can I explain
+to you? Before the deed was done I wandered at night and lay hid in the
+day, thinking it out, and I felt restful. Sleepless but restful. What
+was there for me to torment myself about? But this morning--after! Then
+it was that I became restless. I could not have stopped in that big
+house full of misery. The miserable of this world can’t give you peace.
+Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself,
+‘There is a young man in this town head and shoulders above common
+prejudices.’”
+
+“Is he laughing at me?” Razumov asked himself, going on with his
+aimless drawing of triangles and squares. And suddenly he thought: “My
+behaviour must appear to him strange. Should he take fright at my manner
+and rush off somewhere I shall be undone completely. That infernal
+General....”
+
+He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the
+shadowy figure extended full length on it--so much more indistinct than
+the one over whose breast he had walked without faltering. Was this,
+too, a phantom?
+
+The silence had lasted a long time. “He is no longer here,” was the
+thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at
+its absurdity. “He is already gone and this...only...”
+
+He could resist no longer. He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, “I am
+intolerably anxious,” and in a few headlong strides stood by the side
+of the bed. His hand fell lightly on Haldin’s shoulder, and directly
+he felt its reality he was beset by an insane temptation to grip that
+exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of that body, lest it should
+escape his custody, leaving only a phantom behind.
+
+Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed eyes moving a little
+gazed upwards at Razumov with wistful gratitude for this manifestation
+of feeling.
+
+Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room. “It would have been
+possibly a kindness,” he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the
+nature of that apology for a murderous intention his mind had found
+somewhere within him. And all the same he could not give it up. He
+became lucid about it. “What can he expect?” he thought. “The halter--in
+the end. And I....”
+
+This argument was interrupted by Haldin’s voice.
+
+“Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my
+soul from this world. I tell you what--I believe in this world so much
+that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life. That
+is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die.”
+
+“H’m,” muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk
+up and down and to carry on his strange argument.
+
+Yes, to a man in such a situation--of course it would be an act of
+kindness. The question, however, was not how to be kind, but how to be
+firm. He was a slippery customer.
+
+“I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this world of ours,” he said
+with force. “I too, while I live.... But you seem determined to haunt
+it. You can’t seriously...mean...”
+
+The voice of the motionless Haldin began--
+
+“Haunt it! Truly, the oppressors of thought which quickens the world,
+the destroyers of souls which aspire to perfection of human dignity,
+they shall be haunted. As to the destroyers of my mere body, I have
+forgiven them beforehand.”
+
+Razumov had stopped apparently to listen, but at the same time he was
+observing his own sensations. He was vexed with himself for attaching so
+much importance to what Haldin said.
+
+“The fellow’s mad,” he thought firmly, but this opinion did not mollify
+him towards Haldin. It was a particularly impudent form of lunacy--and
+when it got loose in the sphere of public life of a country, it was
+obviously the duty of every good citizen....
+
+This train of thought broke off short there and was succeeded by a
+paroxysm of silent hatred towards Haldin, so intense that Razumov
+hastened to speak at random.
+
+“Yes. Eternity, of course. I, too, can’t very well represent it to
+myself.... I imagine it, however, as something quiet and dull. There
+would be nothing unexpected--don’t you see? The element of time would be
+wanting.”
+
+He pulled out his watch and gazed at it. Haldin turned over on his side
+and looked on intently.
+
+Razumov got frightened at this movement. A slippery customer this fellow
+with a phantom. It was not midnight yet. He hastened on--
+
+“And unfathomable mysteries! Can you conceive secret places in Eternity?
+Impossible. Whereas life is full of them. There are secrets of birth,
+for instance. One carries them on to the grave. There is something
+comical...but never mind. And there are secret motives of conduct. A
+man’s most open actions have a secret side to them. That is interesting
+and so unfathomable! For instance, a man goes out of a room for a walk.
+Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He
+comes back--he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice
+of the snow on the ground--and behold he is no longer the same man. The
+most unlikely things have a secret power over one’s thoughts--the grey
+whiskers of a particular person--the goggle eyes of another.”
+
+Razumov’s forehead was moist. He took a turn or two in the room, his
+head low and smiling to himself viciously.
+
+“Have you ever reflected on the power of goggle eyes and grey whiskers?
+Excuse me. You seem to think I must be crazy to talk in this vein at
+such a time. But I am not talking lightly. I have seen instances. It has
+happened to me once to be talking to a man whose fate was affected by
+physical facts of that kind. And the man did not know it. Of course, it
+was a case of conscience, but the material facts such as these brought
+about the solution.... And you tell me, Victor Victorovitch, not to
+be anxious! Why! I am responsible for you,” Razumov almost shrieked.
+
+He avoided with difficulty a burst of Mephistophelian laughter. Haldin,
+very pale, raised himself on his elbow.
+
+“And the surprises of life,” went on Razumov, after glancing at the
+other uneasily. “Just consider their astonishing nature. A mysterious
+impulse induces you to come here. I don’t say you have done wrong.
+Indeed, from a certain point of view you could not have done better. You
+might have gone to a man with affections and family ties. You have
+such ties yourself. As to me, you know I have been brought up in an
+educational institute where they did not give us enough to eat. To talk
+of affection in such a connexion--you perceive yourself.... As
+to ties, the only ties I have in the world are social. I must get
+acknowledged in some way before I can act at all. I sit here working....
+And don’t you think I am working for progress too? I’ve got to find
+my own ideas of the true way.... Pardon me,” continued Razumov, after
+drawing breath and with a short, throaty laugh, “but I haven’t inherited
+a revolutionary inspiration together with a resemblance from an uncle.”
+
+He looked again at his watch and noticed with sickening disgust that
+there were yet a good many minutes to midnight. He tore watch and chain
+off his waistcoat and laid them on the table well in the circle of
+bright lamplight. Haldin, reclining on his elbow, did not stir. Razumov
+was made uneasy by this attitude. “What move is he meditating over so
+quietly?” he thought. “He must be prevented. I must keep on talking to
+him.”
+
+He raised his voice.
+
+“You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin--I don’t know what--to no
+end of people. I am just a man. Here I stand before you. A man with a
+mind. Did it ever occur to you how a man who had never heard a word of
+warm affection or praise in his life would think on matters on which
+you would think first with or against your class, your domestic
+tradition--your fireside prejudices?... Did you ever consider how a
+man like that would feel? I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing
+to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back
+to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away
+your future? Am I to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a
+better lot, be robbed of the only thing it has to go upon at the will of
+violent enthusiasts? You come from your province, but all this land is
+mine--or I have nothing. No doubt you shall be looked upon as a martyr
+some day--a sort of hero--a political saint. But I beg to be excused. I
+am content in fitting myself to be a worker. And what can you people do
+by scattering a few drops of blood on the snow? On this Immensity. On
+this unhappy Immensity! I tell you,” he cried, in a vibrating, subdued
+voice, and advancing one step nearer the bed, “that what it needs is not
+a lot of haunting phantoms that I could walk through--but a man!”
+
+Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him off in horror.
+
+“I understand it all now,” he exclaimed, with awestruck dismay. “I
+understand--at last.”
+
+Razumov staggered back against the table. His forehead broke out in
+perspiration while a cold shudder ran down his spine.
+
+“What have I been saying?” he asked himself. “Have I let him slip
+through my fingers after all?”
+
+“He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and instead of a reassuring
+smile only achieved an uncertain grimace.
+
+“What will you have?” he began in a conciliating voice which got steady
+after the first trembling word or two. “What will you have? Consider--a
+man of studious, retired habits--and suddenly like this.... I am not
+practised in talking delicately. But...”
+
+He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him again.
+
+“What were we to do together till midnight? Sit here opposite each other
+and think of your--your--shambles?”
+
+Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude. He bowed his head; his hands
+hung between his knees. His voice was low and pained but calm.
+
+“I see now how it is, Razumov--brother. You are a magnanimous soul, but
+my action is abhorrent to you--alas....”
+
+Razumov stared. From fright he had set his teeth so hard that his whole
+face ached. It was impossible for him to make a sound.
+
+“And even my person, too, is loathsome to you perhaps,” Haldin added
+mournfully, after a short pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing
+his gaze on the floor. “For indeed, unless one....”
+
+He broke off evidently waiting for a word. Razumov remained silent.
+Haldin nodded his head dejectedly twice.
+
+“Of course. Of course,” he murmured.... “Ah! weary work!”
+
+He remained perfectly still for a moment, then made Razumov’s leaden
+heart strike a ponderous blow by springing up briskly.
+
+“So be it,” he cried sadly in a low, distinct tone. “Farewell then.”
+
+Razumov started forward, but the sight of Haldin’s raised hand checked
+him before he could get away from the table. He leaned on it heavily,
+listening to the faint sounds of some town clock tolling the hour.
+Haldin, already at the door, tall and straight as an arrow, with his
+pale face and a hand raised attentively, might have posed for the statue
+of a daring youth listening to an inner voice. Razumov mechanically
+glanced down at his watch. When he looked towards the door again Haldin
+had vanished. There was a faint rustling in the outer room, the feeble
+click of a bolt drawn back lightly. He was gone--almost as noiseless as
+a vision.
+
+Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted, voiceless lips. The outer
+door stood open. Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far over the
+banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glimmering
+flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of
+somebody running down the stairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift,
+pattering sound, which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting
+shadow passed over the glimmer--a wink of the tiny flame. Then
+stillness.
+
+Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells
+of the unclean staircase. All quiet.
+
+He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him. The
+peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch. Razumov
+stood looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes
+to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.
+
+“Slow,” he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.
+His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an
+instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell
+himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to
+stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled--
+
+“Stopped,” and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly--
+
+“It’s done.... And now to work.”
+
+He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began
+to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold
+on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought--
+
+“There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
+across the street.”
+
+He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
+cloak to the nose and with a General’s plumed, cocked hat on his head.
+This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally
+had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be
+disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar.... Perhaps he would
+be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick--a
+shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.
+
+This evocation brought on positive nausea. “Why do I want to bother
+about this?” thought Razumov with disgust. “Am I a gendarme? Moreover,
+it is done.”
+
+He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till
+half-past twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to
+despair. Impossible to know the time! The landlady and all the people
+across the landing were asleep. How could he go and... God knows
+what they would imagine, or how much they would guess. He dared not
+go into the streets to find out. “I am a suspect now. There’s no use
+shirking that fact,” he said to himself bitterly. If Haldin from
+some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the
+Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging. And if he were not
+in he could never clear himself. Never. Razumov looked wildly about as
+if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped
+him altogether. He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the
+striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night. And he was
+not even sure now whether he had heard it really on this night.
+
+He went to the window and stood there with slightly bent head on the
+watch for the faint sound. “I will stay here till I hear something,”
+ he said to himself. He stood still, his ear turned to the panes. An
+atrocious aching numbness with shooting pains in his back and legs
+tortured him. He did not budge. His mind hovered on the borders of
+delirium. He heard himself suddenly saying, “I confess,” as a person
+might do on the rack. “I am on the rack,” he thought. He felt ready to
+swoon. The faint deep boom of the distant clock seemed to explode in his
+head--he heard it so clearly.... One!
+
+If Haldin had not turned up the police would have been already here
+ransacking the house. No sound reached him. This time it was done.
+
+He dragged himself painfully to the table and dropped into the chair.
+He flung the book away and took a square sheet of paper. It was like the
+pile of sheets covered with his neat minute handwriting, only blank. He
+took a pen brusquely and dipped it with a vague notion of going on with
+the writing of his essay--but his pen remained poised over the sheet.
+It hung there for some time before it came down and formed long scrawly
+letters.
+
+Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began to write. When he wrote
+a large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether--became
+unsteady, almost childish. He wrote five lines one under the other.
+History not Theory. Patriotism not Internationalism. Evolution not
+Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption.
+
+He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and remained
+fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand groped all
+over the table for the penknife.
+
+He rose at last, and walking up with measured steps stabbed the paper
+with the penknife to the lath and plaster wall at the head of the bed.
+This done he stepped back a pace and flourished his hand with a glance
+round the room.
+
+After that he never looked again at the bed. He took his big cloak down
+from its peg and, wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on
+the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of his room. A leaden
+sleep closed his eyelids at once. Several times that night he woke up
+shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia
+where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an
+immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its
+enormous expanse as if it were a map. But after each shuddering start
+his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and he slept again.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov’s story, my mind, the decent mind
+of an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of
+the task.
+
+The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_
+of a strange human document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
+clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
+earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less
+discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word
+that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word
+which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the
+moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.
+
+I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov’s record, I
+lay it aside, I take up the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
+of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in
+creeping under its point is no other word than “cynicism.”
+
+For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its
+pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the
+secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is
+the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen,
+the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of
+prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and
+the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.... But I
+must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration
+of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative
+convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his
+age, had become crystallized by the shock of his contact with Haldin.
+
+Razumov woke up for the tenth time perhaps with a heavy shiver. Seeing
+the light of day in his window, he resisted the inclination to lay
+himself down again. He did not remember anything, but he did not think
+it strange to find himself on the sofa in his cloak and chilled to the
+bone. The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless,
+containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young
+man. It was the awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man ninety
+years old. He looked at the lamp which had burnt itself out. It stood
+there, the extinguished beacon of his labours, a cold object of brass
+and porcelain, amongst the scattered pages of his notes and small
+piles of books--a mere litter of blackened paper--dead matter--without
+significance or interest.
+
+He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the
+peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness,
+a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life
+had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts.
+There was not a sound in the house.
+
+Turning away from the peg, he thought in that same lifeless manner that
+it must be very early yet; but when he looked at the watch on his table
+he saw both hands arrested at twelve o’clock.
+
+“Ah! yes,” he mumbled to himself, and as if beginning to get roused
+a little he took a survey of his room. The paper stabbed to the wall
+arrested his attention. He eyed it from the distance without approval or
+perplexity; but when he heard the servant-girl beginning to bustle about
+in the outer room with the _samovar_ for his morning tea, he walked up
+to it and took it down with an air of profound indifference.
+
+While doing this he glanced down at the bed on which he had not slept
+that night. The hollow in the pillow made by the weight of Haldin’s head
+was very noticeable.
+
+Even his anger at this sign of the man’s passage was dull. He did not
+try to nurse it into life. He did nothing all that day; he neglected
+even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him--and
+if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he
+was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
+
+He yawned frequently. He drank large quantities of tea, he walked about
+aimlessly, and when he sat down he did not budge for a long time. He
+spent some time drumming on the window with his finger-tips quietly. In
+his listless wanderings round about the table he caught sight of his own
+face in the looking-glass and that arrested him. The eyes which returned
+his stare were the most unhappy eyes he had ever seen. And this was the
+first thing which disturbed the mental stagnation of that day.
+
+He was not affected personally. He merely thought that life without
+happiness is impossible. What was happiness? He yawned and went on
+shuffling about and about between the walls of his room. Looking
+forward was happiness--that’s all--nothing more. To look forward to
+the gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion,
+love, ambition, hate--hate too indubitably. Love and hate. And to escape
+the dangers of existence, to live without fear, was also happiness.
+There was nothing else. Absence of fear--looking forward. “Oh! the
+miserable lot of humanity!” he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in
+his thought, “I ought to be happy enough as far as that goes.” But he
+was not excited by that assurance. On the contrary, he yawned again as
+he had been yawning all day. He was mildly surprised to discover himself
+being overtaken by night. The room grew dark swiftly though time had
+seemed to stand still. How was it that he had not noticed the passing of
+that day? Of course, it was the watch being stopped....
+
+He did not light his lamp, but went over to the bed and threw himself on
+it without any hesitation. Lying on his back, he put his hands under his
+head and stared upward. After a moment he thought, “I am lying here like
+that man. I wonder if he slept while I was struggling with the blizzard
+in the streets. No, he did not sleep. But why should I not sleep?” and
+he felt the silence of the night press upon all his limbs like a weight.
+
+In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear-cut strokes of the town
+clock counting off midnight penetrated the quietness of his suspended
+animation.
+
+Again he began to think. It was twenty-four hours since that man left
+his room. Razumov had a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress was
+sleeping that night. It was a certitude which made him angry because
+he did not want to think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself by
+physiological and psychological reasons. The fellow had hardly slept for
+weeks on his own confession, and now every incertitude was at an end
+for him. No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his
+martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for
+resignation to die. Haldin slept perhaps more soundly than General T---,
+whose task--weary work too--was not done, and over whose head hung the
+sword of revolutionary vengeance.
+
+Razumov, remembering the thick-set man with his heavy jowl resting on
+the collar of his uniform, the champion of autocracy, who had let no
+sign of surprise, incredulity, or joy escape him, but whose goggle eyes
+could express a mortal hatred of all rebellion--Razumov moved uneasily
+on the bed.
+
+“He suspected me,” he thought. “I suppose he must suspect everybody. He
+would be capable of suspecting his own wife, if Haldin had gone to her
+boudoir with his confession.”
+
+Razumov sat up in anguish. Was he to remain a political suspect all his
+days? Was he to go through life as a man not wholly to be trusted--with
+a bad secret police note tacked on to his record? What sort of future
+could he look forward to?
+
+“I am now a suspect,” he thought again; but the habit of reflection and
+that desire of safety, of an ordered life, which was so strong in him
+came to his assistance as the night wore on. His quiet, steady, and
+laborious existence would vouch at length for his loyalty. There were
+many permitted ways to serve one’s country. There was an activity that
+made for progress without being revolutionary. The field of influence
+was great and infinitely varied--once one had conquered a name.
+
+His thought like a circling bird reverted after four-and-twenty hours to
+the silver medal, and as it were poised itself there.
+
+When the day broke he had not slept, not for a moment, but he got up
+not very tired and quite sufficiently self-possessed for all practical
+purposes.
+
+He went out and attended three lectures in the morning. But the work in
+the library was a mere dumb show of research. He sat with many volumes
+open before him trying to make notes and extracts. His new tranquillity
+was like a flimsy garment, and seemed to float at the mercy of a casual
+word. Betrayal! Why! the fellow had done all that was necessary to
+betray himself. Precious little had been needed to deceive him.
+
+“I have said no word to him that was not strictly true. Not one word,”
+ Razumov argued with himself.
+
+Once engaged on this line of thought there could be no question of doing
+useful work. The same ideas went on passing through his mind, and he
+pronounced mentally the same words over and over again. He shut up all
+the books and rammed all his papers into his pocket with convulsive
+movements, raging inwardly against Haldin.
+
+As he was leaving the library a long bony student in a threadbare
+overcoat joined him, stepping moodily by his side. Razumov answered his
+mumbled greeting without looking at him at all.
+
+“What does he want with me?” he thought with a strange dread of the
+unexpected which he tried to shake off lest it should fasten itself
+upon his life for good and all. And the other, muttering cautiously with
+downcast eyes, supposed that his comrade had seen the news of de P---‘s
+executioner--that was the expression he used--having been arrested the
+night before last....
+
+“I’ve been ill--shut up in my rooms,” Razumov mumbled through his teeth.
+
+The tall student, raising his shoulders, shoved his hands deep into his
+pockets. He had a hairless, square, tallowy chin which trembled slightly
+as he spoke, and his nose nipped bright red by the sharp air looked like
+a false nose of painted cardboard between the sallow cheeks. His whole
+appearance was stamped with the mark of cold and hunger. He stalked
+deliberately at Razumov’s elbow with his eyes on the ground.
+
+“It’s an official statement,” he continued in the same cautious mutter.
+“It may be a lie. But there was somebody arrested between midnight and
+one in the morning on Tuesday. This is certain.”
+
+And talking rapidly under the cover of his downcast air, he told Razumov
+that this was known through an inferior Government clerk employed at
+the Central Secretariat. That man belonged to one of the revolutionary
+circles. “The same, in fact, I am affiliated to,” remarked the student.
+
+They were crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed
+Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared
+confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. “He
+may be affiliated to the police,” was the thought that passed through
+his mind. “Who could tell?” But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped,
+famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity of his
+suspicion.
+
+“But I--you know--I don’t belong to any circle. I....”
+
+He dared not say any more. Neither dared he mend his pace. The
+other, raising and setting down his lamentably shod feet with exact
+deliberation, protested in a low tone that it was not necessary for
+everybody to belong to an organization. The most valuable personalities
+remained outside. Some of the best work was done outside the
+organization. Then very fast, with whispering, feverish lips--
+
+“The man arrested in the street was Haldin.”
+
+And accepting Razumov’s dismayed silence as natural enough, he assured
+him that there was no mistake. That Government clerk was on night duty
+at the Secretariat. Hearing a great noise of footsteps in the hall and
+aware that political prisoners were brought over sometimes at night from
+the fortress, he opened the door of the room in which he was working,
+suddenly. Before the gendarme on duty could push him back and slam the
+door in his face, he had seen a prisoner being partly carried, partly
+dragged along the hall by a lot of policemen. He was being used very
+brutally. And the clerk had recognized Haldin perfectly. Less than half
+an hour afterwards General T--- arrived at the Secretariat to examine
+that prisoner personally.
+
+“Aren’t you astonished?” concluded the gaunt student.
+
+“No,” said Razumov roughly--and at once regretted his answer.
+
+“Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces--with his people. Didn’t
+you?”
+
+The student turned his big hollow eyes upon Razumov, who said
+unguardedly--
+
+“His people are abroad.”
+
+He could have bitten his tongue out with vexation. The student
+pronounced in a tone of profound meaning--
+
+“So! You alone were aware,...” and stopped.
+
+“They have sworn my ruin,” thought Razumov. “Have you spoken of this to
+anyone else?” he asked with bitter curiosity.
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+“No, only to you. Our circle thought that as Haldin had been often heard
+expressing a warm appreciation of your character....”
+
+Razumov could not restrain a gesture of angry despair which the other
+must have misunderstood in some way, because he ceased speaking and
+turned away his black, lack-lustre eyes.
+
+They moved side by side in silence. Then the gaunt student began to
+whisper again, with averted gaze--
+
+“As we have at present no one affiliated inside the fortress so as
+to make it possible to furnish him with a packet of poison, we have
+considered already some sort of retaliatory action--to follow very
+soon....”
+
+Razumov trudging on interrupted--
+
+“Were you acquainted with Haldin? Did he know where you live?”
+
+“I had the happiness to hear him speak twice,” his companion answered in
+the feverish whisper contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face and
+bearing. “He did not know where I live.... I am lodging poorly with
+an artisan family.... I have just a corner in a room. It is not very
+practicable to see me there, but if you should need me for anything I am
+ready....”
+
+Razumov trembled with rage and fear. He was beside himself, but kept his
+voice low.
+
+“You are not to come near me. You are not to speak to me. Never address
+a single word to me. I forbid you.”
+
+“Very well,” said the other submissively, showing no surprise whatever
+at this abrupt prohibition. “You don’t wish for secret reasons...
+perfectly... I understand.”
+
+He edged away at once, not looking up even; and Razumov saw his gaunt,
+shabby, famine-stricken figure cross the street obliquely with lowered
+head and that peculiar exact motion of the feet.
+
+He watched him as one would watch a vision out of a nightmare, then he
+continued on his way, trying not to think. On his landing the landlady
+seemed to be waiting for him. She was a short, thick, shapeless woman
+with a large yellow face wrapped up everlastingly in a black woollen
+shawl. When she saw him come up the last flight of stairs she flung both
+her arms up excitedly, then clasped her hands before her face.
+
+“Kirylo Sidorovitch--little father--what have you been doing? And such
+a quiet young man, too! The police are just gone this moment after
+searching your rooms.”
+
+Razumov gazed down at her with silent, scrutinizing attention. Her puffy
+yellow countenance was working with emotion. She screwed up her eyes at
+him entreatingly.
+
+“Such a sensible young man! Anybody can see you are sensible. And
+now--like this--all at once.... What is the good of mixing yourself
+up with these Nihilists? Do give over, little father. They are unlucky
+people.”
+
+Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
+
+“Or is it that some secret enemy has been calumniating you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch? The world is full of black hearts and false denunciations
+nowadays. There is much fear about.”
+
+“Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?” asked Razumov,
+without taking his eyes off her quivering face.
+
+But she had not heard anything. She had tried to find out by asking
+the police captain while his men were turning the room upside down. The
+police captain of the district had known her for the last eleven years
+and was a humane person. But he said to her on the landing, looking very
+black and vexed--
+
+“My good woman, do not ask questions. I don’t know anything myself. The
+order comes from higher quarters.”
+
+And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the arrival of the
+policemen of the district, a very superior gentleman in a fur coat and
+a shiny hat, who sat down in the room and looked through all the papers
+himself. He came alone and went away by himself, taking nothing with
+him. She had been trying to put things straight a little since they
+left.
+
+Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.
+
+All his books had been shaken and thrown on the floor. His landlady
+followed him, and stooping painfully began to pick them up into her
+apron. His papers and notes which were kept always neatly sorted (they
+all related to his studies) had been shuffled up and heaped together
+into a ragged pile in the middle of the table.
+
+This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably. He sat down
+and stared. He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being
+undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away
+from him one by one. He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and
+made a movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.
+
+The old woman, rising to her feet with a low groan, shot all the
+books she had collected in her apron on to the sofa and left the room
+muttering and sighing.
+
+It was only then that he noticed that the sheet of paper which for one
+night had remained stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was lying on
+top of the pile.
+
+When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four,
+absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table. And now he saw it
+lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the
+confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the
+last three years. It had not been flung there. It had been placed
+there--smoothed out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound
+meaning--or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
+
+He sat staring at the piece of paper till his eyes began to smart. He
+did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the
+next day--which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution.
+This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to
+live--neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from
+the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide. The idea of laying
+violent hands upon his body did not occur to Razumov. The unrelated
+organism bearing that label, walking, breathing, wearing these clothes,
+was of no importance to anyone, unless maybe to the landlady. The true
+Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future--in that
+future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy--for autocracy knows
+no law--and the lawlessness of revolution. The feeling that his moral
+personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that
+he asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing
+the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.
+
+“What is the good of exerting my intelligence, of pursuing the
+systematic development of my faculties and all my plans of work?” he
+asked himself. “I want to guide my conduct by reasonable convictions,
+but what security have I against something--some destructive
+horror--walking in upon me as I sit here?...”
+
+Razumov looked apprehensively towards the door of the outer room as if
+expecting some shape of evil to turn the handle and appear before him
+silently.
+
+“A common thief,” he said to himself, “finds more guarantees in the law
+he is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his consolation.”
+ Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the
+incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear
+and their lives remained their own.
+
+But he slept as soundly that night as though he had been consoling
+himself in the manner of Ziemianitch. He dropped off suddenly, lay like
+a log, remembered no dream on waking. But it was as if his soul had gone
+out in the night to gather the flowers of wrathful wisdom. He got up in
+a mood of grim determination and as if with a new knowledge of his own
+nature. He looked mockingly on the heap of papers on his table; and left
+his room to attend the lectures, muttering to himself, “We shall see.”
+
+He was in no humour to talk to anybody or hear himself questioned as
+to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to
+repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair
+hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of “Madcap
+Kostia.” He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate
+Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the
+periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal
+remonstrances. Noisily blundering like a retriever puppy, his elated
+voice and great gestures filled the bare academy corridors with the
+joy of thoughtless animal life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great
+distance. His usual discourses treated of trotting horses, wine-parties
+in expensive restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy virtue,
+with a disarming artlessness of outlook. He pounced upon Razumov about
+midday, somewhat less uproariously than his habit was, and led him
+aside.
+
+“Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch. A few words here in this quiet
+corner.”
+
+He felt Razumov’s reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm
+caressingly.
+
+“No--pray do. I don’t want to talk to you about any of my silly scrapes.
+What are my scrapes? Absolutely nothing. Mere childishness. The other
+night I flung a fellow out of a certain place where I was having a
+fairly good time. A tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from the
+Treasury department. He was bullying the people of the house. I rebuked
+him. ‘You are not behaving humanely to God’s creatures that are a jolly
+sight more estimable than yourself,’ I said. I can’t bear to see any
+tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Upon my word I can’t. He didn’t take it in
+good part at all. ‘Who’s that impudent puppy?’ he begins to shout. I
+was in excellent form as it happened, and he went through the closed
+window very suddenly. He flew quite a long way into the yard. I raged
+like--like a--minotaur. The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers
+got under the table.... Such fun! My dad had to put his hand pretty
+deep into his pocket, I can tell you.” He chuckled.
+
+“My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do
+get into unholy scrapes.”
+
+His elation fell. That was just it. What was his life? Insignificant;
+no good to anyone; a mere festivity. It would end some fine day in his
+getting his skull split with a champagne bottle in a drunken brawl. At
+such times, too, when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas. But he
+could never get any ideas into his head. His head wasn’t worth anything
+better than to be split by a champagne bottle.
+
+Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away.
+The other’s tone changed to confidential earnestness.
+
+“For God’s sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me make some sort of
+sacrifice. It would not be a sacrifice really. I have my rich dad behind
+me. There’s positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket.”
+
+And rejecting indignantly Razumov’s suggestion that this was drunken
+raving, he offered to lend him some money to escape abroad with. He
+could always get money from his dad. He had only to say that he had
+lost it at cards or something of that sort, and at the same time promise
+solemnly not to miss a single lecture for three months on end. That
+would fetch the old man; and he, Kostia, was quite equal to the
+sacrifice. Though he really did not see what was the good for him to
+attend the lectures. It was perfectly hopeless.
+
+“Won’t you let me be of some use?” he pleaded to the silent Razumov,
+who with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real
+drift of the other’s intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up
+the point.
+
+“What makes you think I want to go abroad?” he asked at last very
+quietly.
+
+Kostia lowered his voice.
+
+“You had the police in your rooms yesterday. There are three or four of
+us who have heard of that. Never mind how we know. It is sufficient that
+we do. So we have been consulting together.”
+
+“Ah! You got to know that so soon,” muttered Razumov negligently.
+
+“Yes. We did. And it struck us that a man like you...”
+
+“What sort of a man do you take me to be?” Razumov interrupted him.
+
+“A man of ideas--and a man of action too. But you are very deep, Kirylo.
+There’s no getting to the bottom of your mind. Not for fellows like me.
+But we all agreed that you must be preserved for our country. Of that we
+have no doubt whatever--I mean all of us who have heard Haldin speak of
+you on certain occasions. A man doesn’t get the police ransacking his
+rooms without there being some devilry hanging over his head.... And
+so if you think that it would be better for you to bolt at once....”
+
+Razumov tore himself away and walked down the corridor, leaving the
+other motionless with his mouth open. But almost at once he returned
+and stood before the amazed Kostia, who shut his mouth slowly. Razumov
+looked him straight in the eyes, before saying with marked deliberation
+and separating his words--
+
+“I thank--you--very--much.”
+
+He went away again rapidly. Kostia, recovering from his surprise at
+these manoeuvres, ran up behind him pressingly.
+
+“No! Wait! Listen. I really mean it. It would be like giving your
+compassion to a starving fellow. Do you hear, Kirylo? And any disguise
+you may think of, that too I could procure from a costumier, a Jew I
+know. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly. Perhaps
+also a false beard or something of that kind may be needed.
+
+“Razumov turned at bay.
+
+“There are no false beards needed in this business, Kostia--you
+good-hearted lunatic, you. What do you know of my ideas? My ideas may be
+poison to you.” The other began to shake his head in energetic protest.
+
+“What have you got to do with ideas? Some of them would make an end
+of your dad’s money-bags. Leave off meddling with what you don’t
+understand. Go back to your trotting horses and your girls, and then
+you’ll be sure at least of doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to
+yourself.”
+
+The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this disdain.
+
+“You’re sending me back to my pig’s trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I
+am an unlucky beast--and I shall die like a beast too. But mind--it’s
+your contempt that has done for me.”
+
+Razumov went off with long strides. That this simple and grossly festive
+soul should have fallen too under the revolutionary curse affected him
+as an ominous symptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling
+troubled. Personally he ought to have felt reassured. There was an
+obvious advantage in this conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for
+what he was not. But was it not strange?
+
+Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of
+his hands by Haldin’s revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and laborious
+existence had been destroyed--the only thing he could call his own on
+this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?
+
+What infuriated him most was to feel that the “thinkers” of the
+University were evidently connecting him with Haldin--as a sort of
+confidant in the background apparently. A mysterious connexion! Ha ha!
+...He had been made a personage without knowing anything about it. How
+that wretch Haldin must have talked about him! Yet it was likely that
+Haldin had said very little. The fellow’s casual utterances were caught
+up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not
+all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and
+lies?
+
+“Impossible to think of anything else,” muttered Razumov to himself.
+“I’ll become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are
+murdering my intelligence.”
+
+He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of
+his intelligence.
+
+He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement
+which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an
+official-looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik.
+
+“A gendarme brought it,” said the man. “He asked if you were at home.
+I told him ‘No, he’s not at home.’ So he left it. ‘Give it into his own
+hands,’ says he. Now you’ve got it--eh?”
+
+He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope
+in hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course
+this official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A
+suspect! A suspect!
+
+He stared in dreary astonishment at the absurdity of his position. He
+thought with a sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years of good
+work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardized--turned from
+hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves
+into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break
+through. Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady’s back is
+turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man’s name,
+clothed in flesh--wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots--lounging
+against the stove. It asks you, “Is the outer door closed?”--and you
+don’t know enough to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You
+don’t know. You welcome the crazy fate. “Sit down,” you say. And it is
+all over. You cannot shake it off any more. It will cling to you for
+ever. Neither halter nor bullet can give you back the freedom of your
+life and the sanity of your thought.... It was enough to dash one’s
+head against a wall.
+
+Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if to select a spot to dash
+his head against. Then he opened the letter. It directed the student
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself without delay at the
+General Secretariat.
+
+Razumov had a vision of General T---‘s goggle eyes waiting for him--the
+embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied
+the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the
+incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of
+a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion
+by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to
+understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism.
+
+“What can he want with me precisely--I wonder?” he asked himself.
+
+As if that mental question had evoked the familiar phantom, Haldin stood
+suddenly before him in the room with an extraordinary completeness of
+detail. Though the short winter day had passed already into the sinister
+twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw plainly the narrow
+leather strap round the Tcherkess coat. The illusion of that hateful
+presence was so perfect that he half expected it to ask, “Is the outer
+door closed?” He looked at it with hatred and contempt. Souls do not
+take a shape of clothing. Moreover, Haldin could not be dead yet.
+Razumov stepped forward menacingly; the vision vanished--and turning
+short on his heel he walked out of his room with infinite disdain.
+
+But after going down the first flight of stairs it occurred to him that
+perhaps the superior authorities of police meant to confront him with
+Haldin in the flesh. This thought struck him like a bullet, and had he
+not clung with both hands to the banister he would have rolled down to
+the next landing most likely. His legs were of no use for a considerable
+time.... But why? For what conceivable reason? To what end?
+
+There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov
+remembered the promise made by the General to Prince K---. His action
+was to remain unknown.
+
+He got down to the bottom of the stairs, lowering himself as it were
+from step to step, by the banister. Under the gate he regained much of
+his firmness of thought and limb. He went out into the street without
+staggering visibly. Every moment he felt steadier mentally. And yet
+he was saying to himself that General T--- was perfectly capable of
+shutting him up in the fortress for an indefinite time. His temperament
+fitted his remorseless task, and his omnipotence made him inaccessible
+to reasonable argument.
+
+But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he discovered that he would
+have nothing to do with General T---. It is evident from Mr. Razumov’s
+diary that this dreaded personality was to remain in the background. A
+civilian of superior rank received him in a private room after a period
+of waiting in outer offices where a lot of scribbling went on at many
+tables in a heated and stuffy atmosphere.
+
+The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in the corridor--
+
+“You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin.”
+
+There was nothing formidable about the man bearing that name. His mild,
+expectant glance was turned on the door already when Razumov entered.
+At once, with the penholder he was holding in his hand, he pointed to a
+deep sofa between two windows. He followed Razumov with his eyes while
+that last crossed the room and sat down. The mild gaze rested on him,
+not curious, not inquisitive--certainly not suspicious--almost
+without expression. In its passionless persistence there was something
+resembling sympathy.
+
+Razumov, who had prepared his will and his intelligence to encounter
+General T--- himself, was profoundly troubled. All the moral bracing
+up against the possible excesses of power and passion went for nothing
+before this sallow man, who wore a full unclipped beard. It was
+fair, thin, and very fine. The light fell in coppery gleams on the
+protuberances of a high, rugged forehead. And the aspect of the broad,
+soft physiognomy was so homely and rustic that the careful middle
+parting of the hair seemed a pretentious affectation.
+
+The diary of Mr. Razumov testifies to some irritation on his part. I may
+remark here that the diary proper consisting of the more or less daily
+entries seems to have been begun on that very evening after Mr. Razumov
+had returned home.
+
+Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated. His strung-up individuality had gone
+to pieces within him very suddenly.
+
+“I must be very prudent with him,” he warned himself in the silence
+during which they sat gazing at each other. It lasted some little time,
+and was characterized (for silences have their character) by a sort of
+sadness imparted to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner of
+the bearded official. Razumov learned later that he was the chief of a
+department in the General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil service
+equivalent to that of a colonel in the army.
+
+Razumov’s mistrust became acute. The main point was, not to be drawn
+into saying too much. He had been called there for some reason. What
+reason? To be given to understand that he was a suspect--and also no
+doubt to be pumped. As to what precisely? There was nothing. Or perhaps
+Haldin had been telling lies.... Every alarming uncertainty beset
+Razumov. He could bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself for
+his weakness spoke first, though he had promised himself not to do so on
+any account.
+
+“I haven’t lost a moment’s time,” he began in a hoarse, provoking tone;
+and then the faculty of speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of
+Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly--
+
+“Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact....”
+
+But the spell was broken, and Razumov interrupted him boldly, under
+a sudden conviction that this was the safest attitude to take. With a
+great flow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even
+as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that
+the word “misunderstood” was better than the word “mistrusted,” and he
+repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized
+with fright before the attentive immobility of the official. “What am
+I talking about?” he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze.
+Mistrusted--not misunderstood--was the right symbol for these people.
+Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his
+head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his
+hand over his brow--an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was
+too careless to restrain. At that moment Razumov beheld his own brain
+suffering on the rack--a long, pale figure drawn asunder horizontally
+with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to
+see. It was as though he had dreamed for an infinitesimal fraction of
+time of some dark print of the Inquisition.
+
+It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov had actually dozed off
+and had dreamed in the presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print
+of the Inquisition. He was indeed extremely exhausted, and he records
+a remarkably dream-like experience of anguish at the circumstance
+that there was no one whatever near the pale and extended figure. The
+solitude of the racked victim was particularly horrible to behold. The
+mysterious impossibility to see the face, he also notes, inspired a sort
+of terror. All these characteristics of an ugly dream were present. Yet
+he is certain that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the
+sofa, leaning forward with his hands between his knees and turning his
+cap round and round in his fingers. But everything vanished at the voice
+of Councillor Mikulin. Razumov felt profoundly grateful for the even
+simplicity of its tone.
+
+“Yes. I have listened with interest. I comprehend in a measure your...
+But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you....” Councillor Mikulin
+uttered a series of broken sentences. Instead of finishing them he
+glanced down his beard. It was a deliberate curtailment which somehow
+made the phrases more impressive. But he could talk fluently enough, as
+became apparent when changing his tone to persuasiveness he went on: “By
+listening to you as I did, I think I have proved that I do not regard
+our intercourse as strictly official. In fact, I don’t want it to have
+that character at all.... Oh yes! I admit that the request for your
+presence here had an official form. But I put it to you whether it was a
+form which would have been used to secure the attendance of a....”
+
+“Suspect,” exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official’s
+eyes. They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim,
+steadfast gaze. “A suspect.” The open repetition of that word which
+had been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of
+satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. “Surely you do
+know that I’ve had my rooms searched by the police?”
+
+“I was about to say a ‘misunderstood person,’ when you interrupted me,”
+ insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin.
+
+Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual
+superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little
+disdainfully--
+
+“I know I am but a reed. But I beg you to allow me the superiority of
+the thinking reed over the unthinking forces that are about to crush
+him out of existence. Practical thinking in the last instance is but
+criticism. I may perhaps be allowed to express my wonder at this action
+of the police being delayed for two full days during which, of course,
+I could have annihilated everything compromising by burning it--let us
+say--and getting rid of the very ashes, for that matter.”
+
+“You are angry,” remarked the official, with an unutterable simplicity
+of tone and manner. “Is that reasonable?”
+
+Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.
+
+“I am reasonable. I am even--permit me to say--a thinker, though to
+be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of
+revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought--devil
+knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I
+think like a Russian. I think faithfully--and I take the liberty to call
+myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word, as far as I know.”
+
+“No. Why should it be a forbidden word?” Councillor Mikulin turned in
+his seat with crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table propped
+his head on the knuckles of a half-closed hand. Razumov noticed a thick
+forefinger clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-red stone--a
+signet ring that, looking as if it could weigh half a pound, was
+an appropriate ornament for that ponderous man with the accurate
+middle-parting of glossy hair above a rugged Socratic forehead.
+
+“Could it be a wig?” Razumov detected himself wondering with an
+unexpected detachment. His self-confidence was much shaken. He resolved
+to chatter no more. Reserve! Reserve! All he had to do was to keep
+the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination, when the
+questions came. Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers.
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly. Razumov’s self-confidence
+abandoned him completely. It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.
+Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing
+else. He made an effort to brace himself up. It was a failure. But
+Councillor Mikulin was surprisingly detached too.
+
+“Why should it be forbidden?” he repeated. “I too consider myself
+a thinking man, I assure you. The principal condition is to think
+correctly. I admit it is difficult sometimes at first for a young man
+abandoned to himself--with his generous impulses undisciplined, so to
+speak--at the mercy of every wild wind that blows. Religious belief, of
+course, is a great....”
+
+Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension
+was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with gloomy
+discontent--
+
+“That man, Haldin, believed in God.”
+
+“Ah! You are aware,” breathed out Councillor Mikulin, making the point
+softly, as if with discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly
+enough, as if he too were put off his guard by Razumov’s remark.
+The young man preserved an impassive, moody countenance, though he
+reproached himself bitterly for a pernicious fool, to have given thus an
+utterly false impression of intimacy. He kept his eyes on the floor.
+“I must positively hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak,” he
+admonished himself. And at once against his will the question, “Hadn’t
+I better tell him everything?” presented itself with such force that he
+had to bite his lower lip. Councillor Mikulin could not, however, have
+nourished any hope of confession. He went on--
+
+“You tell me more than his judges were able to get out of him. He was
+judged by a commission of three. He would tell them absolutely nothing.
+I have the report of the interrogatories here, by me. After every
+question there stands ‘Refuses to answer--refuses to answer.’ It’s like
+that page after page. You see, I have been entrusted with some further
+investigations around and about this affair. He has left me nothing to
+begin my investigations on. A hardened miscreant. And so, you say, he
+believed in....”
+
+Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard with a faint grimace;
+but he did not pause for long. Remarking with a shade of scorn that
+blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he concluded by supposing that
+Mr. Razumov had conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject.
+
+“No,” said Razumov loudly, without looking up. “He talked and I
+listened. That is not a conversation.”
+
+“Listening is a great art,” observed Mikulin parenthetically.
+
+“And getting people to talk is another,” mumbled Razumov.
+
+“Well, no--that is not very difficult,” Mikulin said innocently,
+“except, of course, in special cases. For instance, this Haldin. Nothing
+could induce him to talk. He was brought four times before the delegated
+judges. Four secret interrogatories--and even during the last, when your
+personality was put forward....”
+
+“My personality put forward?” repeated Razumov, raising his head
+brusquely. “I don’t understand.” Councillor Mikulin turned squarely to
+the table, and taking up some sheets of grey foolscap dropped them one
+after another, retaining only the last in his hand. He held it before
+his eyes while speaking.
+
+“It was--you see--judged necessary. In a case of that gravity no means
+of action upon the culprit should be neglected. You understand that
+yourself, I am certain.
+
+“Razumov stared with enormous wide eyes at the side view of Councillor
+Mikulin, who now was not looking at him at all.
+
+“So it was decided (I was consulted by General T---) that a certain
+question should be put to the accused. But in deference to the earnest
+wishes of Prince K--- your name has been kept out of the documents
+and even from the very knowledge of the judges themselves. Prince K---
+recognized the propriety, the necessity of what we proposed to do, but
+he was concerned for your safety. Things do leak out--that we can’t
+deny. One cannot always answer for the discretion of inferior officials.
+There was, of course, the secretary of the special tribunal--one or two
+gendarmes in the room. Moreover, as I have said, in deference to Prince
+K--- even the judges themselves were to be left in ignorance. The
+question ready framed was sent to them by General T--- (I wrote it out
+with my own hand) with instructions to put it to the prisoner the very
+last of all. Here it is.
+
+“Councillor Mikulin threw back his head into proper focus and went on
+reading monotonously: ‘Question--Has the man well known to you, in whose
+rooms you remained for several hours on Monday and on whose information
+you have been arrested--has he had any previous knowledge of your
+intention to commit a political murder?...’ Prisoner refuses to reply.
+
+“Question repeated. Prisoner preserves the same stubborn silence.
+
+“The venerable Chaplain of the Fortress being then admitted and
+exhorting the prisoner to repentance, entreating him also to atone for
+his crime by an unreserved and full confession which should help to
+liberate from the sin of rebellion against the Divine laws and the
+sacred Majesty of the Ruler, our Christ-loving land--the prisoner opens
+his lips for the first time during this morning’s audience and in a
+loud, clear voice rejects the venerable Chaplain’s ministrations.
+
+“At eleven o’clock the Court pronounces in summary form the death
+sentence.
+
+“The execution is fixed for four o’clock in the afternoon, subject to
+further instructions from superior authorities.”
+
+Councillor Mikulin dropped the page of foolscap, glanced down his beard,
+and turning to Razumov, added in an easy, explanatory tone--
+
+“We saw no object in delaying the execution. The order to carry out the
+sentence was sent by telegraph at noon. I wrote out the telegram myself.
+He was hanged at four o’clock this afternoon.”
+
+The definite information of Haldin’s death gave Razumov the feeling of
+general lassitude which follows a great exertion or a great excitement.
+He kept very still on the sofa, but a murmur escaped him--
+
+“He had a belief in a future existence.”
+
+Councillor Mikulin shrugged his shoulders slightly, and Razumov got up
+with an effort. There was nothing now to stay for in that room. Haldin
+had been hanged at four o’clock. There could be no doubt of that. He
+had, it seemed, entered upon his future existence, long boots, Astrakhan
+fur cap and all, down to the very leather strap round his waist. A
+flickering, vanishing sort of existence. It was not his soul, it was his
+mere phantom he had left behind on this earth--thought Razumov, smiling
+caustically to himself while he crossed the room, utterly forgetful of
+where he was and of Councillor Mikulin’s existence. The official could
+have set a lot of bells ringing all over the building without leaving
+his chair. He let Razumov go quite up to the door before he spoke.
+
+“Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch--what are you doing?”
+
+Razumov turned his head and looked at him in silence. He was not in the
+least disconcerted. Councillor Mikulin’s arms were stretched out on the
+table before him and his body leaned forward a little with an effort of
+his dim gaze.
+
+“Was I actually going to clear out like this?” Razumov wondered
+at himself with an impassive countenance. And he was aware of this
+impassiveness concealing a lucid astonishment.
+
+“Evidently I was going out if he had not spoken,” he thought. “What
+would he have done then? I must end this affair one way or another. I
+must make him show his hand.”
+
+For a moment longer he reflected behind the mask as it were, then let go
+the door-handle and came back to the middle of the room.
+
+“I’ll tell you what you think,” he said explosively, but not raising his
+voice. “You think that you are dealing with a secret accomplice of that
+unhappy man. No, I do not know that he was unhappy. He did not tell me.
+He was a wretch from my point of view, because to keep alive a false
+idea is a greater crime than to kill a man. I suppose you will not deny
+that? I hated him! Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their
+Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a
+contempt for the secular logic of human development.”
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared. “What a tirade!” he thought.
+The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The
+bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an
+idol with dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov’s voice changed involuntarily.
+
+“If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as
+Haldin, I would answer you--there is nothing sentimental in it. I did
+not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder. Abhorrence is
+not hate. I hated him simply because I am sane. It is in that character
+that he outraged me. His death...”
+
+Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat. The dimness of
+Councillor Mikulin’s eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it
+indistinct to Razumov’s sight. He tried to disregard these phenomena.
+
+“Indeed,” he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, “what is his
+death to me? If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his
+breast.... The fellow is a mere phantom....”
+
+Razumov’s voice died out very much against his will. Mikulin behind the
+table did not allow himself the slightest movement. The silence lasted
+for some little time before Razumov could go on again.
+
+“He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
+other’s rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young
+Guards’ officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery.
+...Upon my Word,”--Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of
+Ziemianitch, lowered his voice forcibly,--“upon my word, we Russians are
+a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves
+wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or
+set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know?
+To cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in
+a desert one must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the
+grog-shop, falls on your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
+something about your appearance has taken his fancy, what then--kindly
+tell me? You may break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
+succeed in beating him off....”
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
+deliberately.
+
+“That’s... of course,” he said in an undertone.
+
+The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
+unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. Razumov
+remembered his intention of making him show his hand.
+
+“I have said all this to Prince K---,” he began with assumed
+indifference, but lost it on seeing Councillor Mikulin’s slow nod of
+assent. “You know it? You’ve heard.... Then why should I be called
+here to be told of Haldin’s execution? Did you want to confront me with
+his silence now that the man is dead? What is his silence to me! This is
+incomprehensible. You want in some way to shake my moral balance.”
+
+“No. Not that,” murmured Councillor Mikulin, just audibly. “The service
+you have rendered is appreciated....”
+
+“Is it?” interrupted Razumov ironically.
+
+“...and your position too.” Councillor Mikulin did not raise his
+voice. “But only think! You fall into Prince K---‘s study as if from
+the sky with your startling information.... You are studying yet,
+Mr. Razumov, but we are serving already--don’t forget that.... And
+naturally some curiosity was bound to....”
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked down his beard. Razumov’s lips trembled.
+
+“An occurrence of that sort marks a man,” the homely murmur went on. “I
+admit I was curious to see you. General T--- thought it would be useful,
+too.... Don’t think I am incapable of understanding your sentiments.
+When I was young like you I studied....”
+
+“Yes--you wished to see me,” said Razumov in a tone of profound
+distaste. “Naturally you have the right--I mean the power. It all
+amounts to the same thing. But it is perfectly useless, if you were
+to look at me and listen to me for a year. I begin to think there
+is something about me which people don’t seem able to make out. It’s
+unfortunate. I imagine, however, that Prince K--- understands. He seemed
+to.”
+
+Councillor Mikulin moved slightly and spoke.
+
+“Prince K--- is aware of everything that is being done, and I don’t
+mind informing you that he approved my intention of becoming personally
+acquainted with you.”
+
+Razumov concealed an immense disappointment under the accents of railing
+surprise.
+
+“So he is curious too!... Well--after all, Prince K--- knows me very
+little. It is really very unfortunate for me, but--it is not exactly my
+fault.”
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised a hasty deprecatory hand and inclined his head
+slightly over his shoulder.
+
+“Now, Mr. Razumov--is it necessary to take it in that way? Everybody I
+am sure can....”
+
+He glanced rapidly down his beard, and when he looked up again there
+was for a moment an interested expression in his misty gaze. Razumov
+discouraged it with a cold, repellent smile.
+
+“No. That’s of no importance to be sure--except that in respect of all
+this curiosity being aroused by a very simple matter.... What is to
+be done with it? It is unappeasable. I mean to say there is nothing to
+appease it with. I happen to have been born a Russian with patriotic
+instincts--whether inherited or not I am not in a position to say.”
+
+Razumov spoke consciously with elaborate steadiness.
+
+“Yes, patriotic instincts developed by a faculty of independent
+thinking--of detached thinking. In that respect I am more free than any
+social democratic revolution could make me. It is more than probable
+that I don’t think exactly as you are thinking. Indeed, how could it be?
+You would think most likely at this moment that I am elaborately lying
+to cover up the track of my repentance.”
+
+Razumov stopped. His heart had grown too big for his breast. Councillor
+Mikulin did not flinch.
+
+“Why so?” he said simply. “I assisted personally at the search of your
+rooms. I looked through all the papers myself. I have been greatly
+impressed by a sort of political confession of faith. A very remarkable
+document. Now may I ask for what purpose....”
+
+“To deceive the police naturally,” said Razumov savagely.... “What is
+all this mockery? Of course you can send me straight from this room
+to Siberia. That would be intelligible. To what is intelligible I can
+submit. But I protest against this comedy of persecution. The whole
+affair is becoming too comical altogether for my taste. A comedy of
+errors, phantoms, and suspicions. It’s positively indecent....”
+
+Councillor Mikulin turned an attentive ear. “Did you say phantoms?” he
+murmured.
+
+“I could walk over dozens of them.” Razumov, with an impatient wave of
+his hand, went on headlong, “But, really, I must claim the right to be
+done once for all with that man. And in order to accomplish this I shall
+take the liberty....”
+
+Razumov on his side of the table bowed slightly to the seated
+bureaucrat.
+
+“... To retire--simply to retire,” he finished with great resolution.
+
+He walked to the door, thinking, “Now he must show his hand. He must
+ring and have me arrested before I am out of the building, or he must
+let me go. And either way....”
+
+An unhurried voice said--
+
+“Kirylo Sidorovitch.” Razumov at the door turned his head.
+
+“To retire,” he repeated.
+
+“Where to?” asked Councillor Mikulin softly.
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain
+proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man
+of imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his
+instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development
+of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes. But this is not
+a work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking
+lies not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and
+strong in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to
+invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent
+a transition.
+
+Dropping then Mr. Razumov’s record at the point where Councillor
+Mikulin’s question “Where to?” comes in with the force of an insoluble
+problem, I shall simply say that I made the acquaintance of these ladies
+about six months before that time. By “these ladies” I mean, of course,
+the mother and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
+
+By what arguments he had induced his mother to sell their little
+property and go abroad for an indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely.
+I have an idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son’s wish, would have set fire
+to her house and emigrated to the moon without any sign of surprise or
+apprehension; and that Miss Haldin--Nathalie, caressingly Natalka--would
+have given her assent to the scheme.
+
+Their proud devotion to that young man became clear to me in a
+very short time. Following his directions they went straight to
+Switzerland--to Zurich--where they remained the best part of a year.
+From Zurich, which they did not like, they came to Geneva. A friend
+of mine in Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the University (he had
+married a Russian lady, a distant connection of Mrs. Haldin’s), wrote to
+me suggesting I should call on these ladies. It was a very kindly
+meant business suggestion. Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of
+reading the best English authors with a competent teacher.
+
+Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly. Her bad French, of which she was
+smilingly conscious, did away with the formality of the first interview.
+She was a tall woman in a black silk dress. A wide brow, regular
+features, and delicately cut lips, testified to her past beauty. She sat
+upright in an easy chair and in a rather weak, gentle voice told me that
+her Natalka simply thirsted after knowledge. Her thin hands were lying
+on her lap, her facial immobility had in it something monachal. “In
+Russia,” she went on, “all knowledge was tainted with falsehood. Not
+chemistry and all that, but education generally,” she explained.
+The Government corrupted the teaching for its own purposes. Both her
+children felt that. Her Natalka had obtained a diploma of a Superior
+School for Women and her son was a student at the St. Petersburg
+University. He had a brilliant intellect, a most noble unselfish nature,
+and he was the oracle of his comrades. Early next year, she hoped he
+would join them and they would then go to Italy together. In any other
+country but their own she would have been certain of a great future for
+a man with the extraordinary abilities and the lofty character of her
+son--but in Russia....
+
+The young lady sitting by the window turned her head and said--
+
+“Come, mother. Even with us things change with years.”
+
+Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet caressing in its harshness.
+She had a dark complexion, with red lips and a full figure. She gave the
+impression of strong vitality. The old lady sighed.
+
+“You are both young--you two. It is easy for you to hope. But I, too, am
+not hopeless. Indeed, how could I be with a son like this.”
+
+I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors she wished to read. She
+directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
+became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically
+her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
+something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as
+direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world’s
+wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there
+was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better
+definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to
+think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously
+she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was--to look at
+her was enough--very capable of being roused by an idea or simply by
+a person. At least, so I judged with I believe an unbiassed mind; for
+clearly my person could not be the person--and as to my ideas!...
+
+We became excellent friends in the course of our reading. It was very
+pleasant. Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I
+became very much attached to that young girl. At the end of four
+months I told her that now she could very well go on reading English
+by herself. It was time for the teacher to depart. My pupil looked
+unpleasantly surprised.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and kindly expression of the
+eyes, uttered from her armchair in her uncertain French, “_Mais l’ami
+reviendra._” And so it was settled. I returned--not four times a week
+as before, but pretty frequently. In the autumn we made some short
+excursions together in company with other Russians. My friendship with
+these ladies gave me a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise I
+could not have had.
+
+The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P---‘s assassination--it
+was a Sunday--I met the two ladies in the street and walked with them
+for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy grey cloak, I remember,
+over her black silk dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very quiet
+expression.
+
+“We have been to the late service,” she said. “Natalka came with me.
+Her girl-friends, the students here, of course don’t.... With us in
+Russia the church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost
+necessary when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope
+of a future existence. But I cannot give up praying for my son.”
+
+She added with a sort of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and
+in French, “_Ce n’est peut etre qu’une habitude._” (“It may be only
+habit.”)
+
+Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She did not glance at her
+mother.
+
+“You and Victor are both profound believers,” she said.
+
+I communicated to them the news from their country which I had just
+read in a cafe. For a whole minute we walked together fairly briskly in
+silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
+
+“There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this. They may be
+even closing the University. There is neither peace nor rest in Russia
+for one but in the grave.
+
+“Yes. The way is hard,” came from the daughter, looking straight before
+her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing
+the end of the street. “But concord is not so very far off.”
+
+“That is what my children think,” observed Mrs. Haldin to me.
+
+I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of
+concord. Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought
+very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the
+situation. She was very calm and youthfully superior.
+
+“You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as
+social contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
+something quite different.”
+
+“It is quite possible that I don’t understand,” I admitted.
+
+That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
+understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
+Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all
+the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.
+I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a
+terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and
+hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret
+of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they
+detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas
+we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its
+sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....
+
+I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in
+the afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
+Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
+platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
+softened in her grey eyes.
+
+Mr. Razumov’s record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the
+memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from
+all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the
+living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death. He must
+have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the
+hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into
+eternity. That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their
+compatriots--more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and
+the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
+des Philosophes was very much crowded.
+
+I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too. I took
+her hand and was moved to revert to that morning’s conversation in the
+street.
+
+“Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of
+your...” I began.
+
+It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious
+fore-knowledge. She checked me gently--
+
+“Their impulses--their...” she sought the proper expression and found
+it, but in French... _“their mouvements d’ame._”
+
+Her voice was not much above a whisper.
+
+“Very well,” I said. “But still we are looking at a conflict. You say
+it is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose
+I admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more
+easily--can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord
+which you proclaim to be so near?”
+
+She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering
+my reasonable question--my obvious, my unanswerable question.
+
+“It is inconceivable,” I added, with something like annoyance.
+
+“Everything is inconceivable,” she said. “The whole world is
+inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to
+our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to
+our conceptions. It is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong
+to the majority. We Russians shall find some better form of national
+freedom than an artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong because
+it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is left
+for us Russians to discover a better way.”
+
+Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window. She turned upon me the
+almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her
+big dark eyes.
+
+“That’s what my children think,” she declared.
+
+“I suppose,” I addressed Miss Haldin, “that you will be shocked if I
+tell you that I haven’t understood--I won’t say a single word; I’ve
+understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied
+concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its
+plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic
+conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were
+before they can be made understandable.”
+
+I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred. She
+smiled with her eyes only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the
+door, very amiable.
+
+“Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor. It
+is not so. He understands me better than I can understand him. When he
+joins us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul
+it is.” She paused. “He is not a strong man in the conventional sense,
+you know,” she added. “But his character is without a flaw.”
+
+“I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with
+your brother Victor.”
+
+“Don’t expect to understand him quite,” she said, a little maliciously.
+“He is not at all--at all--western at bottom.”
+
+And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in
+the doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
+autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard
+des Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of
+Geneva, where there is a quarter called “La Petite Russie.” Whenever two
+Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging
+their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private
+life, their public utterances--haunting the secret of their silences.
+
+What struck me next in the course of a week or so was the silence of
+these ladies. I used to meet them walking in the public garden near the
+University. They greeted me with their usual friendliness, but I could
+not help noticing their taciturnity. By that time it was generally known
+that the assassin of M. de P--- had been caught, judged, and executed.
+So much had been declared officially to the news agencies. But for the
+world at large he remained anonymous. The official secrecy had withheld
+his name from the public. I really cannot imagine for what reason.
+
+One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the main valley of the
+Bastions under the naked trees.
+
+“Mother is not very well,” she explained.
+
+As Mrs. Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day’s illness in her life,
+this indisposition was disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
+
+“I think she is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for
+rather a long time.”
+
+“No news--good news,” I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly
+side by side.
+
+“Not in Russia,” she breathed out so low that I only just caught the
+words. I looked at her with more attention.
+
+“You too are anxious?”
+
+She admitted after a moment of hesitation that she was.
+
+“It is really such a long time since we heard....”
+
+And before I could offer the usual banal suggestions she confided in me.
+
+“Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote to a family we know in
+Petersburg. They had not seen him for more than a month. They thought
+he was already with us. They were even offended a little that he should
+have left Petersburg without calling on them. The husband of the lady
+went at once to his lodgings. Victor had left there and they did not
+know his address.”
+
+I remember her catching her breath rather pitifully. Her brother had not
+been seen at lectures for a very long time either. He only turned up now
+and then at the University gate to ask the porter for his letters. And
+the gentleman friend was told that the student Haldin did not come to
+claim the last two letters for him. But the police came to inquire if
+the student Haldin ever received any correspondence at the University
+and took them away.
+
+“My two last letters,” she said.
+
+We faced each other. A few snow-flakes fluttered under the naked boughs.
+The sky was dark.
+
+“What do you think could have happened?” I asked.
+
+Her shoulders moved slightly.
+
+“One can never tell--in Russia.”
+
+I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their
+submission or their revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face
+nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear eyes that shone upon me
+brilliantly grey in the murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
+
+“Let us move on,” she said. “It is cold standing--to-day.”
+
+She shuddered a little and stamped her little feet. We moved briskly to
+the end of the alley and back to the great gates of the garden.
+
+“Have you told your mother?” I ventured to ask.
+
+“No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the impression of this letter.”
+
+I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came from her muff. She had the
+letter with her in there.
+
+“What is it that you are afraid of?” I asked.
+
+To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and
+conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.
+I did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
+
+“For us--for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.
+People do disappear. Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine what
+it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--months--years! This friend of ours
+has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police getting hold of
+the letters. I suppose he was afraid of compromising himself. He has a
+wife and children--and why should he, after all.... Moreover, he is
+without influential connections and not rich. What could he do?...
+Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor mother. She won’t be able
+to bear it. For my brother I am afraid of...” she became almost
+indistinct, “of anything.”
+
+We were now near the gate opposite the theatre. She raised her voice.
+
+“But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do you know what my last
+hope is? Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into
+our rooms.”
+
+I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong,
+after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff,
+crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
+
+On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and
+glancing down the correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams but
+the correspondence--the first thing that caught my eye was the name
+of Haldin. Mr. de P---‘s death was no longer an actuality, but the
+enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
+unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got
+hold of Haldin’s name, and had picked up the story of the midnight
+arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of
+view was already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than
+twenty lines out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a
+sleepless night. I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason
+to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic
+discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French
+and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning,
+wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of
+being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The
+incongruity of such a complication in those two women’s lives was
+sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due
+to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them
+for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their
+apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....
+
+The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there
+was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.
+The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
+instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the
+day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother’s
+room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
+
+I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number
+of the _Standard_ could have the effect of Medusa’s head. Her face went
+stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The most terrible thing was that
+being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her palpitating
+heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It
+was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to
+foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.
+As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the
+firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given
+way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--ruined. But only for
+a moment. She said with decision--
+
+“I am going to tell my mother at once.”
+
+“Would that be safe in her state?” I objected.
+
+“What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?
+We understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don’t
+imagine I am defending him before you.”
+
+She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur
+not to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
+reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
+her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
+heavily as if completely exhausted.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in
+bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she
+lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.
+
+“She will call me in presently,” added Miss Haldin. “I left a bell near
+the bed.”
+
+I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
+readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
+was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
+spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There
+is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the
+grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
+had the associations of bombs and gallows--a lurid, Russian colouring
+which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
+
+I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
+display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command
+over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the
+stillness of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the
+door of Mrs. Haldin’s room, with the old mother alone in there, had a
+rather awful aspect.
+
+Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--
+
+“I suppose you are wondering what my feelings are?”
+
+Essentially that was true. It was that very wonder which unsettled my
+sympathy of a dense Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of some
+commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our
+impotence before each other’s trials I mumbled something to the effect
+that, for the young, life held its hopes and compensations. It held
+duties too--but of that I was certain it was not necessary to remind
+her.
+
+She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled at it nervously.
+
+“I am not likely to forget my mother,” she said. “We used to be three.
+Now we are two--two women. She’s not so very old. She may live quite a
+long time yet. What have we to look for in the future? For what hope
+and what consolation?”
+
+“You must take a wider view,” I said resolutely, thinking that with this
+exceptional creature this was the right note to strike. She looked at
+me steadily for a moment, and then the tears she had been keeping down
+flowed unrestrained. She jumped up and stood in the window with her back
+to me.
+
+I slipped away without attempting even to approach her. Next day I was
+told at the door that Mrs. Haldin was better. The middle-aged servant
+remarked that a lot of people--Russians--had called that day, but Miss
+Haldin bad not seen anybody. A fortnight later, when making my daily
+call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin sitting in her usual place by
+the window.
+
+At first one would have thought that nothing was changed. I saw
+across the room the familiar profile, a little sharper in outline
+and overspread by a uniform pallor as might have been expected in an
+invalid. But no disease could have accounted for the change in her black
+eyes, smiling no longer with gentle irony. She raised them as she gave
+me her hand. I observed the three weeks’ old number of the _Standard_
+folded with the correspondence from Russia uppermost, lying on a little
+table by the side of the armchair. Mrs. Haldin’s voice was startlingly
+weak and colourless. Her first words to me framed a question.
+
+“Has there been anything more in papers?”
+
+I released her long emaciated hand, shook my head negatively, and sat
+down.
+
+“The English press is wonderful. Nothing can be kept secret from it,
+and all the world must hear. Only our Russian news is not always easy to
+understand. Not always easy.... But English mothers do not look for
+news like that....”
+
+She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it away again. I said--
+
+“We too have had tragic times in our history.”
+
+“A long time ago. A very long time ago.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“There are nations that have made their bargain with fate,” said Miss
+Haldin, who had approached us. “We need not envy them.”
+
+“Why this scorn?” I asked gently. “It may be that our bargain was not
+a very lofty one. But the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
+hallowed by the price.”
+
+Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out of the window for a
+time, with that new, sombre, extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so
+completely made another woman of her.
+
+“That Englishman, this correspondent,” she addressed me suddenly, “do
+you think it is possible that he knew my son?”
+
+To this strange question I could only say that it was possible of
+course. She saw my surprise.
+
+“If one knew what sort of man he was one could perhaps write to him,”
+ she murmured.
+
+“Mother thinks,” explained Miss Haldin, standing between us, with one
+hand resting on the back of my chair, “that my poor brother perhaps did
+not try to save himself.”
+
+I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic consternation, but Miss Haldin
+was looking down calmly at her mother. The latter said--
+
+“We do not know the address of any of his friends. Indeed, we know
+nothing of his Petersburg comrades. He had a multitude of young friends,
+only he never spoke much of them. One could guess that they were his
+disciples and that they idolized him. But he was so modest. One would
+think that with so many devoted....”
+
+She averted her head again and looked down the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, a singularly arid and dusty thoroughfare, where nothing
+could be seen at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a pinafore
+hopping on one leg, and in the distance a workman wheeling a bicycle.
+
+“Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was found a Judas,” she
+whispered as if to herself, but with the evident intention to be heard
+by me.
+
+The Russian visitors assembled in little knots, conversed amongst
+themselves meantime, in low murmurs, and with brief glances in our
+direction. It was a great contrast to the usual loud volubility of these
+gatherings. Miss Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
+
+“People will come,” she said. “We cannot shut the door in their faces.”
+
+While I was putting on my overcoat she began to talk to me of her
+mother. Poor Mrs. Haldin was fretting after more news. She wanted to go
+on hearing about her unfortunate son. She could not make up her mind to
+abandon him quietly to the dumb unknown. She would persist in pursuing
+him in there through the long days of motionless silence face to face
+with the empty Boulevard des Philosophes. She could not understand why
+he had not escaped--as so many other revolutionists and conspirators
+had managed to escape in other instances of that kind. It was really
+inconceivable that the means of secret revolutionary organisations
+should have failed so inexcusably to preserve her son. But in reality
+the inconceivable that staggered her mind was nothing but the cruel
+audacity of Death passing over her head to strike at that young and
+precious heart.
+
+Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look, handed me my hat. I
+understood from her that the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
+simple idea that her son must have perished because he did not want
+to be saved. It could not have been that he despaired of his country’s
+future. That was impossible. Was it possible that his mother and sister
+had not known how to merit his confidence; and that, after having done
+what he was compelled to do, his spirit became crushed by an intolerable
+doubt, his mind distracted by a sudden mistrust.
+
+I was very much shocked by this piece of ingenuity.
+
+“Our three lives were like that!” Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both
+her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking
+straight into my face. “That’s what poor mother found to torment herself
+and me with, for all the years to come,” added the strange girl. At that
+moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
+passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life was likely to be by the
+side of Mrs. Haldin’s terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.
+But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes
+of feeling. Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our
+complex Western natures. But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to
+suspect my embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say anything, but
+as if reading my thoughts on my face she went on courageously--
+
+“At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to
+think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
+strain. You see yourself how cruel that is....”
+
+I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it
+would be deplorable in the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
+
+“But all these strange details in the English paper,” she exclaimed
+suddenly. “What is the meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But is
+it not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone,
+as if in despair, about the streets at night....”
+
+We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see
+her biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause she
+said--
+
+“I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false
+friend or simply by some cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to
+believe that.”
+
+I understood now the poor woman’s whispered allusion to Judas.
+
+“It may be easier,” I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the
+subtlety of the girl’s outlook. She was dealing with life as it was
+made for her by the political conditions of her country. She faced cruel
+realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making. I could not defend
+myself from a certain feeling of respect when she added simply--
+
+“Time they say can soften every sort of bitterness. But I cannot believe
+that it has any power over remorse. It is better that mother should
+think some person guilty of Victor’s death, than that she should connect
+it with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of her own.”
+
+“But you, yourself, don’t suppose that....” I began.
+
+She compressed her lips and shook her head. She harboured no evil
+thoughts against any one, she declared--and perhaps nothing that
+happened was unnecessary. On these words, pronounced low and sounding
+mysterious in the half obscurity of the ante-room, we parted with an
+expressive and warm handshake. The grip of her strong, shapely hand had
+a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite virility. I do not know why
+she should have felt so friendly to me. It may be that she thought I
+understood her much better than I was able to do. The most precise
+of her sayings seemed always to me to have enigmatical prolongations
+vanishing somewhere beyond my reach. I am reduced to suppose that she
+appreciated my attention and my silence. The attention she could see was
+quite sincere, so that the silence could not be suspected of coldness.
+It seemed to satisfy her. And it is to be noted that if she confided
+in me it was clearly not with the expectation of receiving advice, for
+which, indeed she never asked.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Our daily relations were interrupted at this period for something like a
+fortnight. I had to absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva. On my return
+I lost no time in directing my steps up the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+
+Through the open door of the drawing-room I was annoyed to hear a
+visitor holding forth steadily in an unctuous deep voice.
+
+Mrs. Haldin’s armchair by the window stood empty. On the sofa, Nathalie
+Haldin raised her charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting accompanied
+by the merest hint of a welcoming smile. But she made no movement. With
+her strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of her mourning dress
+she faced a man who presented to me a robust back covered with black
+broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep voice. He turned his head
+sharply over his shoulder, but only for a moment.
+
+“Ah! your English friend. I know. I know. That’s nothing.”
+
+He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall silk hat stood on the
+floor by the side of his chair. Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he
+went on with his discourse, precipitating his delivery a little more.
+
+“I have never changed the faith I held while wandering in the forests
+and bogs of Siberia. It sustained me then--it sustains me now. The great
+Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--and the cause of their collapse
+will be very simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling against
+their proletariat. In Russia it is different. In Russia we have no
+classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and
+the other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean
+bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as
+the ocean. No, we have no classes. But we have the Russian woman. The
+admirable Russian woman! I receive most remarkable letters signed by
+women. So elevated in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble ardour
+of service! The greatest part of our hopes rests on women. I behold
+their thirst for knowledge. It is admirable. Look how they absorb, how
+they are making it their own. It is miraculous. But what is knowledge?
+...I understand that you have not been studying anything
+especially--medicine for instance. No? That’s right. Had I been honoured
+by being asked to advise you on the use of your time when you arrived
+here I would have been strongly opposed to such a course. Knowledge in
+itself is mere dross.”
+
+He had one of those bearded Russian faces without shape, a mere
+appearance of flesh and hair with not a single feature having any sort
+of character. His eyes being hidden by the dark glasses there was an
+utter absence of all expression. I knew him by sight. He was a Russian
+refugee of mark. All Geneva knew his burly black-coated figure. At one
+time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written by himself
+and translated into seven or more languages. In his youth he had led
+an idle, dissolute life. Then a society girl he was about to marry died
+suddenly and thereupon he abandoned the world of fashion, and began
+to conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after that, his native
+autocracy took good care that the usual things should happen to him.
+He was imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch of his life, and
+condemned to work in mines, with common criminals. The great success of
+his book, however, was the chain.
+
+I do not remember now the details of the weight and length of the
+fetters riveted on his limbs by an “Administrative” order, but it was in
+the number of pounds and the thickness of links an appalling assertion
+of the divine right of autocracy. Appalling and futile too, because this
+big man managed to carry off that simple engine of government with him
+into the woods. The sensational clink of these fetters is heard all
+through the chapters describing his escape--a subject of wonder to two
+continents. He had begun by concealing himself successfully from
+his guard in a hole on a river bank. It was the end of the day; with
+infinite labour he managed to free one of his legs. Meantime night
+fell. He was going to begin on his other leg when he was overtaken by a
+terrible misfortune. He dropped his file.
+
+All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history.
+It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced
+girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his
+fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat,
+with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way
+across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and,
+as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But she arrived too
+late. Her lover had died only a week before.
+
+Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the history of ideas in
+Russia, the file came into his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
+resolution to regain his liberty. When it slipped through his fingers it
+was as if it had gone straight into the earth. He could by no manner of
+means put his hand on it again in the dark. He groped systematically
+in the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing
+meantime, the precious night on which he counted to get away into the
+forests, his only chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted by
+despair to give up; but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic
+girl, he felt profoundly ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him
+for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favour
+conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred
+trust. To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness
+of self-sacrifice and womanly love.
+
+There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like
+a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman’s
+spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed since in several volumes.
+His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his
+extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province,
+with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off
+his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at
+intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the
+slack links from getting hooked in the bushes. He became very fierce.
+He developed an unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and hunted
+existence. He learned to creep into villages without betraying his
+presence by anything more than an occasional faint jingle. He broke into
+outhouses with an axe he managed to purloin in a wood-cutters’ camp. In
+the deserted tracts of country he lived on wild berries and hunted for
+honey. His clothing dropped off him gradually. His naked tawny figure
+glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with a cloud of mosquitoes and flies
+hovering about the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through whole
+districts. His temper grew savage as the days went by, and he was
+glad to discover that that there was so much of a brute in him. He had
+nothing else to put his trust in. For it was as though there had been
+two human beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The civilized
+man, the enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the
+triumph of spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy,
+primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom
+from day to day, like a tracked wild beast.
+
+The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific
+coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
+watched the proceedings with awe. Through all these weeks he could never
+make up his mind to appeal to human compassion. In the wary primeval
+savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the
+civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping “political” had developed
+an absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
+originating perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain.
+These links, he fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind. It
+was a repugnant and suggestive load. Nobody could feel any pity at the
+disgusting sight of a man escaping with a broken chain. His imagination
+became affected by his fetters in a precise, matter-of-fact manner.
+It seemed to him impossible that people could resist the temptation of
+fastening the loose end to a staple in the wall while they went for the
+nearest police official. Crouching in holes or hidden in thickets, he
+had tried to read the faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in the
+clearings or passing along the paths within a foot or two of his
+eyes. His feeling was that no man on earth could be trusted with the
+temptation of the chain.
+
+One day, however, he chanced to come upon a solitary woman. It was on an
+open slope of rough grass outside the forest. She sat on the bank of a
+narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket
+was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be
+seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool
+shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He
+approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick
+cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled
+hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links
+fluttered from his waist. A faint clink of his fetters made the woman
+turn her head. Too terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or
+even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted to faint.... Expecting
+nothing less than to be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with
+her hands to avoid the sight of the descending axe. When at last she
+found courage to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man sitting on
+the bank six feet away from her. His thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked
+legs; the long beard covered the knees on which he rested his chin; all
+these clasped, folded limbs, the bare shoulders, the wild head with red
+staring eyes, shook and trembled violently while the bestial creature
+was making efforts to speak. It was six weeks since he had heard the
+sound of his own voice. It seemed as though he had lost the faculty
+of speech. He had become a dumb and despairing brute, till the woman’s
+sudden, unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of her feminine
+compassion discovering the complex misery of the man under the
+terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him to the ranks of humanity.
+This point of view is presented in his book, with a very effective
+eloquence. She ended, he says, by shedding tears over him, sacred,
+redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the manner of a
+converted sinner. Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait patiently
+(a police patrol was expected in the Settlement) she went away towards
+the houses, promising to return at night.
+
+As if providentially appointed to be the newly wedded wife of the
+village blacksmith, the woman persuaded her husband to come out with
+her, bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a chisel, a small
+anvil.... “My fetters”--the book says--“were struck off on the banks
+of the stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an athletic, taciturn
+young man of the people, kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a
+liberating genius stood by with clasped hands.” Obviously a symbolic
+couple. At the same time they furnished his regained humanity with some
+decent clothing, and put heart into the new man by the information that
+the seacoast of the Pacific was only a very few miles away. It could be
+seen, in fact, from the top of the next ridge....
+
+The rest of his escape does not lend itself to mystic treatment and
+symbolic interpretation. He ended by finding his way to the West by
+the Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching the shores of South
+Europe he sat down to write his autobiography--the great literary
+success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with
+the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached
+generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under
+the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain
+Madame de S--, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once
+upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat.
+Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of
+modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the
+republican territory of Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big
+landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares
+of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness,
+with a pair of big gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short veil
+of black lace, which, coming down no further than her vividly red lips,
+resembled a mask. Usually the “heroic fugitive” (this name was bestowed
+upon him in a review of the English edition of his book)--the “heroic
+fugitive” accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded and darkly
+bespectacled, not by her side, but opposite her, with his back to the
+horses. Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the roomy carriage,
+their airings suggested a conscious public manifestation. Or it may have
+been unconscious. Russian simplicity often marches innocently on the
+edge of cynicism for some lofty purpose. But it is a vain enterprise for
+sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings. Considering the
+air of gravity extending even to the physiognomy of the coachman and the
+action of the showy horses, this quaint display might have possessed
+a mystic significance, but to the corrupt frivolity of a Western mind,
+like my own, it seemed hardly decent.
+
+However, it is not becoming for an obscure teacher of languages to
+criticize a “heroic fugitive” of worldwide celebrity. I was aware from
+hearsay that he was an industrious busy-body, hunting up his compatriots
+in hotels, in private lodgings, and--I was told--conferring upon them
+the honour of his notice in public gardens when a suitable opening
+presented itself. I was under the impression that after a visit or
+two, several months before, he had given up the ladies Haldin--no doubt
+reluctantly, for there could be no question of his being a determined
+person. It was perhaps to be expected that he should reappear again on
+this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a revolutionist, to say the
+right thing, to strike the true, perhaps a comforting, note. But I did
+not like to see him sitting there. I trust that an unbecoming jealousy
+of my privileged position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to
+a special standing for my silent friendship. Removed by the difference
+of age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I
+produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an
+anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power
+to protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since Miss Haldin with her
+sure instinct had refrained from introducing me to the burly celebrity,
+I would have retired quietly and returned later on, had I not met a
+peculiar expression in her eyes which I interpreted as a request to
+stay, with the view, perhaps, of shortening an unwelcome visit.
+
+He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on his knees.
+
+“We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna. To-day I have called only
+to mark those feelings towards your honoured mother and yourself,
+the nature of which you cannot doubt. I needed no urging, but
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- herself has in a way sent me. She extends to you
+the hand of feminine fellowship. There is positively in all the range
+of human sentiments no joy and no sorrow that woman cannot understand,
+elevate, and spiritualize by her interpretation. That young man newly
+arrived from St. Petersburg, I have mentioned to you, is already under
+the charm.”
+
+At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly. I was glad. He did not
+evidently expect anything so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
+back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland curiosity. At last,
+recollecting himself, he stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
+with great adroitness.
+
+“How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have kept aloof so long, from
+what after all is--let disparaging tongues say what they like--a unique
+centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to shape a high conception
+of our future? In the case of your honoured mother I understand in a
+measure. At her age new ideas--new faces are not perhaps.... But you!
+Was it mistrust--or indifference? You must come out of your reserve.
+We Russians have no right to be reserved with each other. In our
+circumstances it is almost a crime against humanity. The luxury of
+private grief is not for us. Nowadays the devil is not combated by
+prayers and fasting. And what is fasting after all but starvation. You
+must not starve yourself, Natalia Victorovna. Strength is what we want.
+Spiritual strength, I mean. As to the other kind, what could withstand
+us Russians if we only put it forth? Sin is different in our day, and
+the way of salvation for pure souls is different too. It is no longer to
+be found in monasteries but in the world, in the...”
+
+The deep sound seemed to rise from under the floor, and one felt steeped
+in it to the lips. Miss Haldin’s interruption resembled the effort of
+a drowning person to keep above water. She struck in with an accent of
+impatience--
+
+“But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don’t mean to retire into a monastery. Who
+would look for salvation there?”
+
+“I spoke figuratively,” he boomed.
+
+“Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too. But sorrow is sorrow and
+pain is pain in the old way. They make their demands upon people. One
+has got to face them the best way one can. I know that the blow which
+has fallen upon us so unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a
+people. You may rest assured that I don’t forget that. But just now
+I have to think of my mother. How can you expect me to leave her to
+herself...?”
+
+“That is putting it in a very crude way,” he protested in his great
+effortless voice.
+
+Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to die out.
+
+“And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange people. The idea is
+distasteful for me; and I do not know what else you may mean?”
+
+He towered before her, enormous, deferential, cropped as close as a
+convict and this big pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild
+head with matted locks peering through parted bushes, glimpses of naked,
+tawny limbs slinking behind the masses of sodden foliage under a cloud
+of flies and mosquitoes. It was an involuntary tribute to the vigour
+of his writing. Nobody could doubt that he had wandered in Siberian
+forests, naked and girt with a chain. The black broadcloth coat invested
+his person with a character of austere decency--something recalling a
+missionary.
+
+“Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?” he uttered solemnly. “I
+want you to be a fanatic.”
+
+“A fanatic?”
+
+“Yes. Faith alone won’t do.”
+
+His voice dropped to a still lower tone. He raised for a moment one
+thick arm; the other remained hanging down against his thigh, with the
+fragile silk hat at the end.
+
+“I shall tell you now something which I entreat you to ponder
+over carefully. Listen, we need a force that would move heaven and
+earth--nothing less.”
+
+The profound, subterranean note of this “nothing less” made one shudder,
+almost, like the deep muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
+
+“And are we to find that force in the salon of Madame de S--? Excuse
+me, Peter Ivanovitch, if I permit myself to doubt it. Is not that lady a
+woman of the great world, an aristocrat?”
+
+“Prejudice!” he cried. “You astonish me. And suppose she was all that!
+She is also a woman of flesh and blood. There is always something to
+weigh down the spiritual side in all of us. But to make of it a reproach
+is what I did not expect from you. No! I did not expect that. One would
+think you have listened to some malevolent scandal.”
+
+“I have heard no gossip, I assure you. In our province how could we? But
+the world speaks of her. What can there be in common in a lady of that
+sort and an obscure country girl like me?”
+
+“She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and peerless spirit,”
+ he broke in. “Her charm--no, I shall not speak of her charm. But,
+of course, everybody who approaches her falls under the spell....
+Contradictions vanish, trouble falls away from one.... Unless I
+am mistaken--but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters--you are
+troubled in your soul, Natalia Victorovna.”
+
+Miss Haldin’s clear eyes looked straight at his soft enormous face;
+I received the impression that behind these dark spectacles of his he
+could be as impudent as he chose.
+
+“Only the other evening walking back to town from Chateau Borel with our
+latest interesting arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the powerful
+soothing influence--I may say reconciling influence.... There he was,
+all these kilometres along the shores of the lake, silent, like a man
+who has been shown the way of peace. I could feel the leaven working in
+his soul, you understand. For one thing he listened to me patiently.
+I myself was inspired that evening by the firm and exquisite genius
+of Eleanor--Madame de S--, you know. It was a full moon and I could
+observe his face. I cannot be deceived....”
+
+Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
+
+“Well! I will think of what you said, Peter Ivanovitch. I shall try to
+call as soon as I can leave mother for an hour or two safely.”
+
+Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at the concession. He
+snatched her right hand with such fervour that I thought he was going
+to press it to his lips or his breast. But he only held it by the
+finger-tips in his great paw and shook it a little up and down while he
+delivered his last volley of words.
+
+“That’s right. That’s right. I haven’t obtained your full confidence
+as yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The
+sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It’s simply
+impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers,
+tears, applause--that has had its time; it’s a mediaeval conception. The
+arena, the arena itself is the place for women!”
+
+He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if giving it to her for a
+gift, and remained still, his head bowed in dignified submission before
+her femininity.
+
+“The arena!... You must descend into the arena, Natalia.”
+
+He made one step backwards, inclined his enormous body, and was gone
+swiftly. The door fell to behind him. But immediately the powerful
+resonance of his voice was heard addressing in the ante-room the
+middle-aged servant woman who was letting him out. Whether he exhorted
+her too to descend into the arena I cannot tell. The thing sounded like
+a lecture, and the slight crash of the outer door cut it short suddenly.
+
+
+III
+
+
+“We remained looking at each other for a time.”
+
+“Do you know who he is?”
+
+Miss Haldin, coming forward, put this question to me in English.
+
+I took her offered hand.
+
+“Everybody knows. He is a revolutionary feminist, a great writer, if
+you like, and--how shall I say it--the--the familiar guest of Madame de
+S--‘s mystic revolutionary salon.”
+
+Miss Haldin passed her hand over her forehead.
+
+“You know, he was with me for more than an hour before you came in. I
+was so glad mother was lying down. She has many nights without sleep,
+and then sometimes in the middle of the day she gets a rest of several
+hours. It is sheer exhaustion--but still, I am thankful.... If it
+were not for these intervals....”
+
+She looked at me and, with that extraordinary penetration which used to
+disconcert me, shook her head.
+
+“No. She would not go mad.”
+
+“My dear young lady,” I cried, by way of protest, the more shocked
+because in my heart I was far from thinking Mrs. Haldin quite sane.
+
+“You don’t know what a fine, lucid intellect mother had,” continued
+Nathalie Haldin, with her calm, clear-eyed simplicity, which seemed to
+me always to have a quality of heroism.
+
+“I am sure....” I murmured.
+
+“I darkened mother’s room and came out here. I’ve wanted for so long to
+think quietly.”
+
+She paused, then, without giving any sign of distress, added, “It’s so
+difficult,” and looked at me with a strange fixity, as if watching for a
+sign of dissent or surprise.
+
+I gave neither. I was irresistibly impelled to say--
+
+“The visit from that gentleman has not made it any easier, I fear.”
+
+Miss Haldin stood before me with a peculiar expression in her eyes.
+
+“I don’t pretend to understand completely. Some guide one must have,
+even if one does not wholly give up the direction of one’s conduct to
+him. I am an inexperienced girl, but I am not slavish, There has been
+too much of that in Russia. Why should I not listen to him? There is no
+harm in having one’s thoughts directed. But I don’t mind confessing
+to you that I have not been completely candid with Peter Ivanovitch. I
+don’t quite know what prevented me at the moment....”
+
+She walked away suddenly from me to a distant part of the room; but
+it was only to open and shut a drawer in a bureau. She returned with
+a piece of paper in her hand. It was thin and blackened with close
+handwriting. It was obviously a letter.
+
+“I wanted to read you the very words,” she said. “This is one of my poor
+brother’s letters. He never doubted. How could he doubt? They make only
+such a small handful, these miserable oppressors, before the unanimous
+will of our people.”
+
+“Your brother believed in the power of a people’s will to achieve
+anything?”
+
+“It was his religion,” declared Miss Haldin.
+
+I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
+
+“Of course the will must be awakened, inspired, concentrated,” she went
+on. “That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up
+one’s life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must
+be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to
+reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are
+only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful of cruel--perhaps
+blind--officials against a nation.”
+
+The letter rustled slightly in her hand. I glanced down at the
+flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic,
+incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.
+
+“Stated like this,” I confessed, “the problem seems simple enough. But I
+fear I shall not see it solved. And if you go back to Russia I know that
+I shall not see you again. Yet once more I say: go back! Don’t suppose
+that I am thinking of your preservation. No! I know that you will not
+be returning to personal safety. But I had much rather think of you in
+danger there than see you exposed to what may be met here.”
+
+“I tell you what,” said Miss Haldin, after a moment of reflection. “I
+believe that you hate revolution; you fancy it’s not quite honest. You
+belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn’t like
+to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to
+us--so much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea
+of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were
+something--how shall I say it--not quite decent.”
+
+I bowed my head.
+
+“You are quite right,” I said. “I think very highly of you”
+
+“Don’t suppose I do not know it,” she began hurriedly. “Your friendship
+has been very valuable.”
+
+“I have done little else but look on.”
+
+She was a little flushed under the eyes.
+
+“There is a way of looking on which is valuable I have felt less lonely
+because of it. It’s difficult to explain.”
+
+“Really? Well, I too have felt less lonely. That’s easy to explain,
+though. But it won’t go on much longer. The last thing I want to tell
+you is this: in a real revolution--not a simple dynastic change or a
+mere reform of institutions--in a real revolution the best characters
+do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of
+narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards
+comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.
+Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left
+out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane,
+and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a
+movement--but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of
+a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of
+disenchantment--often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals
+caricatured--that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have
+been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of
+that. My meaning is that I don’t want you to be a victim.”
+
+“If I could believe all you have said I still wouldn’t think of myself,”
+ protested Miss Haldin. “I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry
+man would snatch at a piece of bread. The true progress must begin
+after. And for that the right men shall be found. They are already
+amongst us. One comes upon them in their obscurity, unknown, preparing
+themselves....”
+
+She spread out the letter she had kept in her hand all the time, and
+looking down at it--
+
+“Yes! One comes upon such men!” she repeated, and then read out the
+words, “Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.”
+
+Folding up the letter, while I looked at her interrogatively, she
+explained--
+
+“These are the words which my brother applies to a young man he came to
+know in St. Petersburg. An intimate friend, I suppose. It must be. His
+is the only name my brother mentions in all his correspondence with me.
+Absolutely the only one, and--would you believe it?--the man is here. He
+arrived recently in Geneva.”
+
+“Have you seen him?” I inquired. “But, of course; you must have seen
+him.”
+
+“No! No! I haven’t! I didn’t know he was here. It’s Peter Ivanovitch
+himself who told me. You have heard him yourself mentioning a new
+arrival from Petersburg.... Well, that is the man of ‘unstained,
+lofty, and solitary existence.’ My brother’s friend!”
+
+“Compromised politically, I suppose,” I remarked.
+
+“I don’t know. Yes. It must be so. Who knows! Perhaps it was this very
+friendship with my brother which.... But no! It is scarcely possible.
+Really, I know nothing except what Peter Ivanovitch told me of him. He
+has brought a letter of introduction from Father Zosim--you know, the
+priest-democrat; you have heard of Father Zosim?”
+
+“Oh yes. The famous Father Zosim was staying here in Geneva for some two
+months about a year ago,” I said. “When he left here he seems to have
+disappeared from the world.”
+
+“It appears that he is at work in Russia again. Somewhere in the
+centre,” Miss Haldin said, with animation. “But please don’t mention
+that to any one--don’t let it slip from you, because if it got into the
+papers it would be dangerous for him.”
+
+“You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend of your brother?” I
+asked.
+
+Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket. Her eyes looked beyond my
+shoulder at the door of her mother’s room.
+
+“Not here,” she murmured. “Not for the first time, at least.”
+
+After a moment of silence I said good-bye, but Miss Haldin followed me
+into the ante-room, closing the door behind us carefully.
+
+“I suppose you guess where I mean to go tomorrow?”
+
+“You have made up your mind to call on Madame de S--.”
+
+“Yes. I am going to the Chateau Borel. I must.”
+
+“What do you expect to hear there?” I asked, in a low voice.
+
+I wondered if she were not deluding herself with some impossible hope.
+It was not that, however.
+
+“Only think--such a friend. The only man mentioned in his letters. He
+would have something to give me, if nothing more than a few poor words.
+It may be something said and thought in those last days. Would you want
+me to turn my back on what is left of my poor brother--a friend?”
+
+“Certainly not,” I said. “I quite understand your pious curiosity.”
+
+“--Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences,” she murmured to herself.
+“There are! There are! Well, let me question one of them about the loved
+dead.”
+
+“How do you know, though, that you will meet him there? Is he staying in
+the Chateau as a guest--do you suppose?”
+
+“I can’t really tell,” she confessed. “He brought a written introduction
+from Father Zosim--who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S-- too. She
+can’t be such a worthless woman after all.”
+
+“There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Father Zosim himself,” I
+observed.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Calumny is a weapon of our government too. It’s well known. Oh yes! It
+is a fact that Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-General
+of a certain province. We talked on the subject with my brother two
+years ago, I remember. But his work was good. And now he is proscribed.
+What better proof can one require. But no matter what that priest was
+or is. All that cannot affect my brother’s friend. If I don’t meet him
+there I shall ask these people for his address. And, of course, mother
+must see him too, later on. There is no guessing what he may have to
+tell us. It would be a mercy if mamma could be soothed. You know what
+she imagines. Some explanation perhaps may be found, or--or even made
+up, perhaps. It would be no sin.”
+
+“Certainly,” I said, “it would be no sin. It may be a mistake, though.”
+
+“I want her only to recover some of her old spirit. While she is like
+this I cannot think of anything calmly.”
+
+“Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud for your mother’s sake?”
+ I asked.
+
+“Why fraud? Such a friend is sure to know something of my brother in
+these last days. He could tell us.... There is something in the
+facts which will not let me rest. I am certain he meant to join us
+abroad--that he had some plans--some great patriotic action in view;
+not only for himself, but for both of us. I trusted in that. I looked
+forward to the time! Oh! with such hope and impatience. I could have
+helped. And now suddenly this appearance of recklessness--as if he had
+not cared....”
+
+She remained silent for a time, then obstinately she concluded--
+
+“I want to know....”
+
+Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the
+Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was
+it that she wanted to know? What I had heard of her history was enough
+to give me a clue. In the educational establishment for girls where Miss
+Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably.
+She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by
+official teaching. Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their
+country place, both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly
+on public events, had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism.
+The three-horse trap of the district police-captain began to be seen
+frequently in their village. “I must keep an eye on the peasants”--so he
+explained his visits up at the house. “Two lonely ladies must be looked
+after a little.” He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to
+pierce them with his eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books
+in the drawing-room negligently, and after the usual refreshments,
+would depart. But the old priest of the village came one evening in the
+greatest distress and agitation, to confess that he--the priest--had
+been ordered to watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his
+spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house,
+and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who
+they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers
+to that part of the country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in
+an agony of humiliation and terror. “I came to warn you. Be cautious in
+your conduct, for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is
+no getting out from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I
+see, because if I did not there is my deacon. He would make the worst
+of things to curry favour. And then my son-in-law, the husband of my
+Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would
+soon kick him out--and maybe send him away somewhere.” The old man
+lamented the necessities of the times--“when people do not agree
+somehow” and wiped his eyes. He did not wish to spend the evening of his
+days with a shaven head in the penitent’s cell of some monastery--“and
+subjected to all the severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for
+they would show no mercy to an old man,” he groaned. He became almost
+hysterical, and the two ladies, full of commiseration, soothed him the
+best they could before they let him go back to his cottage. But, as a
+matter of fact, they had very few visitors. The neighbours--some of them
+old friends--began to keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked
+disdain, being grand people that came only for the summer--Miss Haldin
+explained to me--aristocrats, reactionaries. It was a solitary existence
+for a young girl. Her relations with her mother were of the tenderest
+and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her
+own generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its apostasies too. Her
+affection for her children was expressed by the suppression of all signs
+of anxiety. She maintained a heroic reserve. To Nathalie Haldin, her
+brother with his Petersburg existence, not enigmatical in the least
+(there could be no doubt of what he felt or thought) but conducted a
+little mysteriously, was the only visible representative of a proscribed
+liberty. All the significance of freedom, its indefinite promises, lived
+in their long discussions, which breathed the loftiest hope of action
+and faith in success. Then, suddenly, the action, the hopes, came to
+an end with the details ferreted out by the English journalist. The
+concrete fact, the fact of his death remained! but it remained obscure
+in its deeper causes. She felt herself abandoned without explanation.
+But she did not suspect him. What she wanted was to learn almost at any
+cost how she could remain faithful to his departed spirit.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Several days elapsed before I met Nathalie Haldin again. I was crossing
+the place in front of the theatre when I made out her shapely figure
+in the very act of turning between the gate pillars of the unattractive
+public promenade of the Bastions. She walked away from me, but I knew
+we should meet as she returned down the main alley--unless, indeed, she
+were going home. In that case, I don’t think I should have called on her
+yet. My desire to keep her away from these people was as strong as ever,
+but I had no illusions as to my power. I was but a Westerner, and it was
+clear that Miss Haldin would not, could not listen to my wisdom; and as
+to my desire of listening to her voice, it were better, I thought, not
+to indulge overmuch in that pleasure. No, I should not have gone to the
+Boulevard des Philosophes; but when at about the middle of the principal
+alley I saw Miss Haldin coming towards me, I was too curious, and too
+honest, perhaps, to run away.
+
+There was something of the spring harshness in the air. The blue sky was
+hard, but the young leaves clung like soft mist about the uninteresting
+range of trees; and the clear sun put little points of gold into the
+grey of Miss Haldin’s frank eyes, turned to me with a friendly greeting.
+
+I inquired after the health of her mother.
+
+She had a slight movement of the shoulders and a little sad sigh.
+
+“But, you see, I did come out for a walk...for exercise, as you
+English say.”
+
+I smiled approvingly, and she added an unexpected remark--
+
+“It is a glorious day.”
+
+Her voice, slightly harsh, but fascinating with its masculine and
+bird-like quality, had the accent of spontaneous conviction. I was glad
+of it. It was as though she had become aware of her youth--for there was
+but little of spring-like glory in the rectangular railed space of
+grass and trees, framed visibly by the orderly roof-slopes of that town,
+comely without grace, and hospitable without sympathy. In the very air
+through which she moved there was but little warmth; and the sky, the
+sky of a land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April
+showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed
+suddenly by the ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there,
+lingered yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow. All the glory
+of the season must have been within herself--and I was glad this feeling
+had come into her life, if only for a little time.
+
+“I am pleased to hear you say these words.” She gave me a quick look.
+Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely
+incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very
+rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly--if I may
+say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen
+and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use the word
+aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered
+in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our
+day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame
+de Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the
+booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for
+an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy
+in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.
+And Madame de S-- was very far from resembling the gifted author of
+_Corinne_. She made a great noise about being persecuted. I don’t
+know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous. As to being
+watched, I imagine that the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a
+most distant observation. It was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for
+hatching superior plots--whether serious or futile. But all this did not
+interest me. I wanted to know the effect its extraordinary inhabitants
+and its special atmosphere had produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so
+true, so honest, but so dangerously inexperienced! Her unconsciously
+lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind left her disarmed
+before her own impulses. And there was also that friend of her brother,
+the significant new arrival from Russia.... I wondered whether she
+had managed to meet him.
+
+We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.
+
+“You know,” I attacked her suddenly, “if you don’t intend telling me
+anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
+final. But I won’t play at delicacy. I ask you point-blank for all the
+details.”
+
+She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.
+
+“You are as curious as a child.”
+
+“No. I am only an anxious old man,” I replied earnestly.
+
+She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety
+or the number of my years. My physiognomy has never been expressive,
+I believe, and as to my years I am not ancient enough as yet to be
+strikingly decrepit. I have no long beard like the good hermit of a
+romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of
+a slow, venerable sage. Those picturesque advantages are not mine. I am
+old, alas, in a brisk, commonplace way. And it seemed to me as though
+there were some pity for me in Miss Haldin’s prolonged glance. She
+stepped out a little quicker.
+
+“You ask for all the details. Let me see. I ought to remember them. It
+was novel enough for a--a village girl like me.”
+
+After a moment of silence she began by saying that the Chateau Borel was
+almost as neglected inside as outside. It was nothing to wonder at, a
+Hamburg banker, I believe, retired from business, had it built to cheer
+his remaining days by the view of that lake whose precise, orderly,
+and well-to-do beauty must have been attractive to the unromantic
+imagination of a business man. But he died soon. His wife departed
+too (but only to Italy), and this house of moneyed ease, presumably
+unsaleable, had stood empty for several years. One went to it up a
+gravel drive, round a large, coarse grass-plot, with plenty of time to
+observe the degradation of its stuccoed front. Miss Haldin said that the
+impression was unpleasant. It grew more depressing as one came nearer.
+
+She observed green stains of moss on the steps of the terrace. The front
+door stood wide open. There was no one about. She found herself in a
+wide, lofty, and absolutely empty hall, with a good many doors. These
+doors were all shut. A broad, bare stone staircase faced her, and
+the effect of the whole was of an untenanted house. She stood still,
+disconcerted by the solitude, but after a while she became aware of a
+voice speaking continuously somewhere.
+
+“You were probably being observed all the time,” I suggested. “There
+must have been eyes.”
+
+“I don’t see how that could be,” she retorted. “I haven’t seen even a
+bird in the grounds. I don’t remember hearing a single twitter in the
+trees. The whole place appeared utterly deserted except for the voice.”
+
+She could not make out the language--Russian, French, or German. No one
+seemed to answer it. It was as though the voice had been left behind by
+the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare walls. It went on volubly,
+with a pause now and then. It was lonely and sad. The time seemed very
+long to Miss Haldin. An invincible repugnance prevented her from opening
+one of the doors in the hall. It was so hopeless. No one would come, the
+voice would never stop. She confessed to me that she had to resist an
+impulse to turn round and go away unseen, as she had come.
+
+“Really? You had that impulse?” I cried, full of regret. “What a pity
+you did not obey it.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“What a strange memory it would have been for one. Those deserted
+grounds, that empty hall, that impersonal, voluble voice, and--nobody,
+nothing, not a soul.”
+
+The memory would have been unique and harmless. But she was not a girl
+to run away from an intimidating impression of solitude and mystery.
+“No, I did not run away,” she said. “I stayed where I was--and I did see
+a soul. Such a strange soul.”
+
+As she was gazing up the broad staircase, and had concluded that
+the voice came from somewhere above, a rustle of dress attracted her
+attention. She looked down and saw a woman crossing the hall, having
+issued apparently through one of the many doors. Her face was averted,
+so that at first she was not aware of Miss Haldin.
+
+On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she appeared very much
+startled. From her slender figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young
+girl; but if her face was almost childishly round, it was also sallow
+and wrinkled, with dark rings under the eyes. A thick crop of dusty
+brown hair was parted boyishly on the side with a lateral wave above the
+dry, furrowed forehead. After a moment of dumb blinking, she suddenly
+squatted down on the floor.
+
+“What do you mean by squatted down?” I asked, astonished. “This is a
+very strange detail.”
+
+Miss Haldin explained the reason. This person when first seen was
+carrying a small bowl in her hand. She had squatted down to put it
+on the floor for the benefit of a large cat, which appeared then from
+behind her skirts, and hid its head into the bowl greedily. She got up,
+and approaching Miss Haldin asked with nervous bluntness--
+
+“What do you want? Who are you?”
+
+Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name of Peter Ivanovitch.
+The girlish, elderly woman nodded and puckered her face into a momentary
+expression of sympathy. Her black silk blouse was old and even frayed
+in places; the black serge skirt was short and shabby. She continued to
+blink at close quarters, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed shabby
+too. Miss Haldin, speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and
+sensitive person, explained how it was that her visit could not be an
+altogether unexpected event to Madame de S--.
+
+“Ah! Peter Ivanovitch brought you an invitation. How was I to know? A
+_dame de compangnie_ is not consulted, as you may imagine.”
+
+The shabby woman laughed a little. Her teeth, splendidly white and
+admirably even, looked absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls on
+the neck of a ragged tramp. “Peter Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of
+the century perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man living. So if
+you have an appointment with him you must not be surprised to hear that
+he is not here.”
+
+Miss Haldin explained that she had no appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.
+She became interested at once in that bizarre person.
+
+“Why should he put himself out for you or any one else? Oh! these
+geniuses. If you only knew! Yes! And their books--I mean, of course, the
+books that the world admires, the inspired books. But you have not been
+behind the scenes. Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half a day
+with a pen in your hand. He can walk up and down his rooms for hours and
+hours. I used to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I would lose my
+balance and fall off the chair all at once.”
+
+She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes, fixed on Miss
+Haldin’s face, betrayed no animation whatever. Miss Haldin, gathering
+that the lady who called herself a _dame de compangnie_ was proud of
+having acted as secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable remark.
+
+“You could not imagine a more trying experience,” declared the lady.
+“There is an Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de S-- now,
+or I would take you up,” she continued in a changed tone and glancing
+towards the staircase. “I act as master of ceremonies.”
+
+It appeared that Madame de S-- could not bear Swiss servants about
+her person; and, indeed, servants would not stay for very long in the
+Chateau Borel. There were always difficulties. Miss Haldin had already
+noticed that the hall was like a dusty barn of marble and stucco with
+cobwebs in the corners and faint tracks of mud on the black and white
+tessellated floor.
+
+“I look also after this animal,” continued the _dame de compagnie_,
+keeping her hands folded quietly in front of her; and she bent her
+worn gaze upon the cat. “I don’t mind a bit. Animals have their rights;
+though, strictly speaking, I see no reason why they should not suffer as
+well as human beings. Do you? But of course they never suffer so much.
+That is impossible. Only, in their case it is more pitiful because they
+cannot make a revolution. I used to be a Republican. I suppose you are a
+Republican?”
+
+Miss Haldin confessed to me that she did not know what to say. But she
+nodded slightly, and asked in her turn--
+
+“And are you no longer a Republican?”
+
+“After taking down Peter Ivanovitch from dictation for two years, it is
+difficult for me to be anything. First of all, you have to sit perfectly
+motionless. The slightest movement you make puts to flight the ideas of
+Peter Ivanovitch. You hardly dare to breathe. And as to coughing--God
+forbid! Peter Ivanovitch changed the position of the table to the wall
+because at first I could not help raising my eyes to look out of the
+window, while waiting for him to go on with his dictation. That was not
+allowed. He said I stared so stupidly. I was likewise not permitted to
+look at him over my shoulder. Instantly Peter Ivanovitch stamped his
+foot, and would roar, ‘Look down on the paper!’ It seems my expression,
+my face, put him off. Well, I know that I am not beautiful, and that my
+expression is not hopeful either. He said that my air of unintelligent
+expectation irritated him. These are his own words.”
+
+Miss Haldin was shocked, but admitted to me that she was not altogether
+surprised.
+
+“Is it possible that Peter Ivanovitch could treat any woman so rudely?”
+ she cried.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ nodded several times with an air of discretion,
+then assured Miss Haldin that she did not mind in the least. The trying
+part of it was to have the secret of the composition laid bare before
+her; to see the great author of the revolutionary gospels grope for
+words as if he were in the dark as to what he meant to say.
+
+“I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To
+give one’s life for the cause is nothing. But to have one’s illusions
+destroyed--that is really almost more than one can bear. I really don’t
+exaggerate,” she insisted. “It seemed to freeze my very beliefs in
+me--the more so that when we worked in winter Peter Ivanovitch, walking
+up and down the room, required no artificial heat to keep himself warm.
+Even when we move to the South of France there are bitterly cold days,
+especially when you have to sit still for six hours at a stretch. The
+walls of these villas on the Riviera are so flimsy. Peter Ivanovitch did
+not seem to be aware of anything. It is true that I kept down my shivers
+from fear of putting him out. I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt
+absolutely locked. In the moments when Peter Ivanovitch interrupted his
+dictation, and sometimes these intervals were very long--often twenty
+minutes, no less, while he walked to and fro behind my back muttering
+to himself--I felt I was dying by inches, I assure you. Perhaps if I had
+let my teeth rattle Peter Ivanovitch might have noticed my distress, but
+I don’t think it would have had any practical effect. She’s very miserly
+in such matters.”
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ glanced up the staircase. The big cat had
+finished the milk and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously against
+her skirt. She dived to snatch it up from the floor.
+
+“Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know,” she
+continued, holding the cat in her folded arms. “With us it is misers who
+can spare money for worthy objects--not the so-called generous natures.
+But pray don’t think I am a sybarite. My father was a clerk in the
+Ministry of Finances with no position at all. You may guess by this that
+our home was far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually
+suffer from cold. I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began
+to think by myself. It is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to
+be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth. I am indebted for my
+salvation to an old apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway
+of the house we lived in. She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most
+friendly voice imaginable. One day, casually, we began to talk about a
+child, a ragged little girl we had seen begging from men in the streets
+at dusk; and from one thing to another my eyes began to open gradually
+to the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in
+this world, only in order that governments might exist. After I once
+understood the crime of the upper classes, I could not go on living with
+my parents. Not a single charitable word was to be heard in our home
+from year’s end to year’s end; there was nothing but the talk of vile
+office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries, and of courting the
+favour of the chiefs. The mere idea of marrying one day such another man
+as my father made me shudder. I don’t mean that there was anyone wanting
+to marry me. There was not the slightest prospect of anything of the
+kind. But was it not sin enough to live on a Government salary while
+half Russia was dying of hunger? The Ministry of Finances! What a
+grotesque horror it is! What does the starving, ignorant people want
+with a Ministry of Finances? I kissed my old folks on both cheeks, and
+went away from them to live in cellars, with the proletariat. I tried
+to make myself useful to the utterly hopeless. I suppose you understand
+what I mean? I mean the people who have nowhere to go and nothing to
+look forward to in this life. Do you understand how frightful that
+is--nothing to look forward to! Sometimes I think that it is only in
+Russia that there are such people and such a depth of misery can be
+reached. Well, I plunged into it, and--do you know--there isn’t much
+that one can do in there. No, indeed--at least as long as there are
+Ministries of Finances and such like grotesque horrors to stand in the
+way. I suppose I would have gone mad there just trying to fight the
+vermin, if it had not been for a man. It was my old friend and
+teacher, the poor saintly apple-woman, who discovered him for me, quite
+accidentally. She came to fetch me late one evening in her quiet way. I
+followed her where she would lead; that part of my life was in her hands
+altogether, and without her my spirit would have perished miserably. The
+man was a young workman, a lithographer by trade, and he had got
+into trouble in connexion with that affair of temperance tracts--you
+remember. There was a lot of people put in prison for that. The Ministry
+of Finances again! What would become of it if the poor folk ceased
+making beasts of themselves with drink? Upon my word, I would think that
+finances and all the rest of it are an invention of the devil; only that
+a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone
+are quite capable of every wickedness. Finances indeed!”
+
+Hatred and contempt hissed in her utterance of the word “finances,” but
+at the very moment she gently stroked the cat reposing in her arms.
+She even raised them slightly, and inclining her head rubbed her cheek
+against the fur of the animal, which received this caress with the
+complete detachment so characteristic of its kind. Then looking at Miss
+Haldin she excused herself once more for not taking her upstairs to
+Madame S-- The interview could not be interrupted. Presently the
+journalist would be seen coming down the stairs. The best thing was to
+remain in the hall; and besides, all these rooms (she glanced all
+round at the many doors), all these rooms on the ground floor were
+unfurnished.
+
+“Positively there is no chair down here to offer you,” she continued.
+“But if you prefer your own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on
+the bottom step here and keep silent.”
+
+Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the contrary, she was very
+much interested in the story of the journeyman lithographer. He was a
+revolutionist, of course.
+
+“A martyr, a simple man,” said the _dame de compangnie_, with a faint
+sigh, and gazing through the open front door dreamily. She turned her
+misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.
+
+“I lived with him for four months. It was like a nightmare.”
+
+As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the
+emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution.
+The room into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a
+miserable den under the roof of a sordid house. The plaster fallen off
+the walls covered the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible
+tapestry of black cobwebs waved in the draught. He had been liberated a
+few days before--flung out of prison into the streets. And Miss Haldin
+seemed to see for the first time, a name and a face upon the body of
+that suffering people whose hard fate had been the subject of so many
+conversations, between her and her brother, in the garden of their
+country house.
+
+He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that
+affair of the lithographed temperance tracts. Unluckily, having got hold
+of a great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract
+from some of them other information relating to the revolutionist
+propaganda.
+
+“They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation,” went on the
+_dame de compagnie_, “that they injured him internally. When they had
+done with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld
+him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a
+bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker,
+who happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was,
+uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the
+room for the water to quench his thirst with. There was nothing
+whatever--just that bedstead and the bare floor.”
+
+“Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and
+revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?” asked Miss
+Haldin indignantly.
+
+“Yes. But you do not know the most terrible part of that man’s misery.
+Listen. It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at last,
+his firmness gave way, and he did let out some information. Poor soul,
+the flesh is weak, you know. What it was he did not tell me. There was
+a crushed spirit in that mangled body. Nothing I found to say could make
+him whole. When they let him out, he crept into that hole, and bore his
+remorse stoically. He would not go near anyone he knew. I would have
+sought assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I have gone looking
+for it? Where was I to look for anyone who had anything to spare or any
+power to help? The people living round us were all starving and drunken.
+They were the victims of the Ministry of Finances. Don’t ask me how we
+lived. I couldn’t tell you. It was like a miracle of wretchedness. I had
+nothing to sell, and I assure you my clothes were in such a state that
+it was impossible for me to go out in the daytime. I was indecent. I had
+to wait till it was dark before I ventured into the streets to beg for a
+crust of bread, or whatever I could get, to keep him and me alive. Often
+I got nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie on the floor by the
+side of his couch. Oh yes, I can sleep quite soundly on bare boards.
+That is nothing, and I am only mentioning it to you so that you should
+not think I am a sybarite. It was infinitely less killing than the task
+of sitting for hours at a table in a cold study to take the books of
+Peter Ivanovitch from dictation. But you shall see yourself what that is
+like, so I needn’t say any more about it.”
+
+“It is by no means certain that I will ever take Peter Ivanovitch from
+dictation,” said Miss Haldin.
+
+“No!” cried the other incredulously. “Not certain? You mean to say that
+you have not made up your mind?”
+
+When Miss Haldin assured her that there never had been any question of
+that between her and Peter Ivanovitch, the woman with the cat compressed
+her lips tightly for a moment.
+
+“Oh, you will find yourself settled at the table before you know that
+you have made up your mind. Don’t make a mistake, it is disenchanting
+to hear Peter Ivanovitch dictate, but at the same time there is a
+fascination about it. He is a man of genius. Your face is certain not to
+irritate him; you may perhaps even help his inspiration, make it easier
+for him to deliver his message. As I look at you, I feel certain that
+you are the kind of woman who is not likely to check the flow of his
+inspiration.”
+
+Miss Haldin thought it useless to protest against all these assumptions.
+
+“But this man--this workman did he die under your care?” she said, after
+a short silence.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_, listening up the stairs where now two voices
+were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When
+the loud sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible
+murmur, she turned to Miss Haldin.
+
+“Yes, he died, but not, literally speaking, in my arms, as you might
+suppose. As a matter of fact, I was asleep when he breathed his last.
+So even now I cannot say I have seen anybody die. A few days before
+the end, some young men found us out in our extremity. They were
+revolutionists, as you might guess. He ought to have trusted in his
+political friends when he came out of prison. He had been liked and
+respected before, and nobody would have dreamed of reproaching him with
+his indiscretion before the police. Everybody knows how they go to work,
+and the strongest man has his moments of weakness before pain. Why, even
+hunger alone is enough to give one queer ideas as to what may be done. A
+doctor came, our lot was alleviated as far as physical comforts go, but
+otherwise he could not be consoled--poor man. I assure you, Miss Haldin,
+that he was very lovable, but I had not the strength to weep. I was
+nearly dead myself. But there were kind hearts to take care of me.
+A dress was found to clothe my nakedness. I tell you, I was not
+decent--and after a time the revolutionists placed me with a Jewish
+family going abroad, as governess. Of course I could teach the children,
+I finished the sixth class of the Lyceum; but the real object was,
+that I should carry some important papers across the frontier. I was
+entrusted with a packet which I carried next my heart. The gendarmes
+at the station did not suspect the governess of a Jewish family, busy
+looking after three children. I don’t suppose those Hebrews knew what I
+had on me, for I had been introduced to them in a very roundabout way by
+persons who did not belong to the revolutionary movement, and naturally
+I had been instructed to accept a very small salary. When we reached
+Germany I left that family and delivered my papers to a revolutionist
+in Stuttgart; after this I was employed in various ways. But you do not
+want to hear all that. I have never felt that I was very useful, but I
+live in hopes of seeing all the Ministries destroyed, finances and
+all. The greatest joy of my life has been to hear what your brother has
+done.”
+
+She directed her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the
+cat reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like
+meditation.
+
+“Yes! I rejoiced,” she began again. “For me there is a heroic ring about
+the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in
+their Ministries--all those men with fiendish hearts. Here I stand
+talking to you, and when I think of all the cruelties, oppressions,
+and injustices that are going on at this very moment, my head begins to
+swim. I have looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one’s
+own eyes had not to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me
+hate myself for my helplessness. I hated my hands that had no power,
+my voice that could not be heard, my very mind that would not become
+unhinged. Ah! I have seen things. And you?”
+
+Miss Haldin was moved. She shook her head slightly.
+
+“No, I have seen nothing for myself as yet,” she murmured “We have
+always lived in the country. It was my brother’s wish.”
+
+“It is a curious meeting--this--between you and me,” continued the
+other. “Do you believe in chance, Miss Haldin? How could I have expected
+to see you, his sister, with my own eyes? Do you know that when the news
+came the revolutionaries here were as much surprised as pleased, every
+bit? No one seemed to know anything about your brother. Peter Ivanovitch
+himself had not foreseen that such a blow was going to be struck. I
+suppose your brother was simply inspired. I myself think that such
+deeds should be done by inspiration. It is a great privilege to have the
+inspiration and the opportunity. Did he resemble you at all? Don’t you
+rejoice, Miss Haldin?”
+
+“You must not expect too much from me,” said Miss Haldin, repressing
+an inclination to cry which came over her suddenly. She succeeded, then
+added calmly, “I am not a heroic person!”
+
+“You think you couldn’t have done such a thing yourself perhaps?”
+
+“I don’t know. I must not even ask myself till I have lived a little
+longer, seen more....”
+
+The other moved her head appreciatively. The purring of the cat had
+a loud complacency in the empty hall. No sound of voices came from
+upstairs. Miss Haldin broke the silence.
+
+“What is it precisely that you heard people say about my brother? You
+said that they were surprised. Yes, I supposed they were. Did it not
+seem strange to them that my brother should have failed to save himself
+after the most difficult part--that is, getting away from the spot--was
+over? Conspirators should understand these things well. There are
+reasons why I am very anxious to know how it is he failed to escape.”
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ had advanced to the open hall-door. She glanced
+rapidly over her shoulder at Miss Haldin, who remained within the hall.
+
+“Failed to escape,” she repeated absently. “Didn’t he make the sacrifice
+of his life? Wasn’t he just simply inspired? Wasn’t it an act of
+abnegation? Aren’t you certain?”
+
+“What I am certain of,” said Miss Haldin, “is that it was not an act
+of despair. Have you not heard some opinion expressed here upon his
+miserable capture?”
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ mused for a while in the doorway.
+
+“Did I hear? Of course, everything is discussed here. Has not all the
+world been speaking about your brother? For my part, the mere mention
+of his achievement plunges me into an envious ecstasy. Why should a man
+certain of immortality think of his life at all?”
+
+She kept her back turned to Miss Haldin. Upstairs from behind a great
+dingy white and gold door, visible behind the balustrade of the first
+floor landing, a deep voice began to drone formally, as if reading over
+notes or something of the sort. It paused frequently, and then ceased
+altogether.
+
+“I don’t think I can stay any longer now,” said Miss Haldin. “I may
+return another day.”
+
+She waited for the _dame de compagnie_ to make room for her exit; but
+the woman appeared lost in the contemplation of sunshine and shadows,
+sharing between themselves the stillness of the deserted grounds. She
+concealed the view of the drive from Miss Haldin. Suddenly she said--
+
+“It will not be necessary; here is Peter Ivanovitch himself coming up.
+But he is not alone. He is seldom alone now.”
+
+Hearing that Peter Ivanovitch was approaching, Miss Haldin was not so
+pleased as she might have been expected to be. Somehow she had lost
+the desire to see either the heroic captive or Madame de S--, and the
+reason of that shrinking which came upon her at the very last minute is
+accounted for by the feeling that those two people had not been treating
+the woman with the cat kindly.
+
+“Would you please let me pass?” said Miss Haldin at last, touching
+lightly the shoulder of the _dame de compagnie_.
+
+But the other, pressing the cat to her breast, did not budge.
+
+“I know who is with him,” she said, without even looking back.
+
+More unaccountably than ever Miss Haldin felt a strong impulse to leave
+the house.
+
+“Madame de S-- may be engaged for some time yet, and what I have got to
+say to Peter Ivanovitch is just a simple question which I might put to
+him when I meet him in the grounds on my way down. I really think I
+must go. I have been some time here, and I am anxious to get back to my
+mother. Will you let me pass, please?”
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ turned her head at last.
+
+“I never supposed that you really wanted to see Madame de S--,” she
+said, with unexpected insight. “Not for a moment.” There was something
+confidential and mysterious in her tone. She passed through the door,
+with Miss Haldin following her, on to the terrace, and they descended
+side by side the moss-grown stone steps. There was no one to be seen on
+the part of the drive visible from the front of the house.
+
+“They are hidden by the trees over there,” explained Miss Haldin’s new
+acquaintance, “but you shall see them directly. I don’t know who that
+young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has taken such a fancy. He must
+be one of us, or he would not be admitted here when the others come.
+You know what I mean by the others. But I must say that he is not at
+all mystically inclined. I don’t know that I have made him out yet.
+Naturally I am never for very long in the drawing-room. There is
+always something to do for me, though the establishment here is not so
+extensive as the villa on the Riviera. But still there are plenty of
+opportunities for me to make myself useful.”
+
+To the left, passing by the ivy-grown end of the stables, appeared Peter
+Ivanovitch and his companion. They walked very slowly, conversing with
+some animation. They stopped for a moment, and Peter Ivanovitch was seen
+to gesticulate, while the young man listened motionless, with his arms
+hanging down and his head bowed a little. He was dressed in a dark brown
+suit and a black hat. The round eyes of the _dame de compagnie_ remained
+fixed on the two figures, which had resumed their leisurely approach.
+
+“An extremely polite young man,” she said. “You shall see what a bow he
+will make; and it won’t altogether be so exceptional either. He bows in
+the same way when he meets me alone in the hall.”
+
+She moved on a few steps, with Miss Haldin by her side, and things
+happened just as she had foretold. The young man took off his hat, bowed
+and fell back, while Peter Ivanovitch advanced quicker, his black, thick
+arms extended heartily, and seized hold of both Miss Haldin’s hands,
+shook them, and peered at her through his dark glasses.
+
+“That’s right, that’s right!” he exclaimed twice, approvingly. “And so
+you have been looked after by....” He frowned slightly at the
+_dame de compagnie_, who was still nursing the cat. “I conclude
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- is engaged. I know she expected somebody to-day.
+So the newspaper man did turn up, eh? She is engaged?”
+
+For all answer the _dame de compagnie_ turned away her head.
+
+“It is very unfortunate--very unfortunate indeed. I very much regret
+that you should have been....” He lowered suddenly his voice. “But
+what is it--surely you are not departing, Natalia Victorovna? You got
+bored waiting, didn’t you?”
+
+“Not in the least,” Miss Haldin protested. “Only I have been here some
+time, and I am anxious to get back to my mother.”
+
+“The time seemed long, eh? I am afraid our worthy friend here” (Peter
+Ivanovitch suddenly jerked his head sideways towards his right shoulder
+and jerked it up again),--“our worthy friend here has not the art of
+shortening the moments of waiting. No, distinctly she has not the art;
+and in that respect good intentions alone count for nothing.”
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ dropped her arms, and the cat found itself
+suddenly on the ground. It remained quite still after alighting, one
+hind leg stretched backwards. Miss Haldin was extremely indignant on
+behalf of the lady companion.
+
+“Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments I have passed in
+the hall of this house have been not a little interesting, and very
+instructive too. They are memorable. I do not regret the waiting, but
+I see that the object of my call here can be attained without taking up
+Madame de S--‘s time.”
+
+At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin. The above relation is founded
+on her narrative, which I have not so much dramatized as might be
+supposed. She had rendered, with extraordinary feeling and animation,
+the very accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the
+irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor.
+Miss Haldin’s true and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked
+by the uncongenial fate of her new acquaintance, that lady companion,
+secretary, whatever she was. For my own part, I was pleased to discover
+in it one more obstacle to intimacy with Madame de S--. I had a
+positive abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed
+Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. I do not know what was her attitude to the
+unseen, but I know that in the affairs of this world she was avaricious,
+greedy, and unscrupulous. It was within my knowledge that she had been
+worsted in a sordid and desperate quarrel about money matters with the
+family of her late husband, the diplomatist. Some very august personages
+indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving
+in her affairs) had incurred her animosity. I find it perfectly easy to
+believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for
+reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de sante_--a madhouse
+of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however, that certain high-placed
+personages opposed it for reasons which....
+
+But it’s no use to go into details.
+
+Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of
+languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this
+and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly
+enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
+which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase,
+a poetic image, the accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art,
+and not having invented Madame de S--, I feel bound to explain how I
+came to know so much about her.
+
+My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
+the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
+last fact of Madame de S--‘s history, with which I intend to trouble
+my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
+sources, of the cause of Madame de S--‘s flight from Russia, some years
+before. It was neither more nor less than this: that she became suspect
+to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
+Alexander. The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded
+expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her
+salon. Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who
+hastened to play the informer, I suppose. At any rate, the overheard
+matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she
+was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge. Some of
+my readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris,
+a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected
+piece of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more
+than hints at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous
+innuendoes that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but
+with a palace intrigue. When I observed to my friend, the professor’s
+wife, that the life of Madame de S--, with its unofficial diplomacy,
+its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere
+of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth
+century than for the conditions of our own time, she assented with
+a smile, but a moment after went on in a reflective tone:
+“Charlatanism?--yes, in a certain measure. Still, times are changed.
+There are forces now which were non-existent in the eighteenth century.
+I should not be surprised if she were more dangerous than an Englishman
+would be willing to believe. And what’s more, she is looked upon as
+really dangerous by certain people--_chez nous_.”
+
+_Chez nous_ in this connexion meant Russia in general, and the Russian
+political police in particular. The object of my digression from the
+straight course of Miss Haldin’s relation (in my own words) of her visit
+to the Chateau Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my friend,
+the professor’s wife. I wanted to bring it forward simply to make what I
+have to say presently of Mr. Razumov’s presence in Geneva, a little more
+credible--for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I
+have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and
+cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced
+at our end of Europe. And this I state as my excuse for having left Miss
+Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two men who
+had come together below the terrace of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The knowledge which I have just stated was in my mind when, as I have
+said, I interrupted Miss Haldin. I interrupted her with the cry of
+profound satisfaction--
+
+“So you never saw Madame de S--, after all?”
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head. It was very satisfactory to me. She had
+not seen Madame de S--! That was excellent, excellent! I welcomed the
+conviction that she would never know Madame de S-- now. I could not
+explain the reason of the conviction but by the knowledge that Miss
+Haldin was standing face to face with her brother’s wonderful friend. I
+preferred him to Madame de S-- as the companion and guide of that young
+girl, abandoned to her inexperience by the miserable end of her brother.
+But, at any rate, that life now ended had been sincere, and perhaps its
+thoughts might have been lofty, its moral sufferings profound, its last
+act a true sacrifice. It is not for us, the staid lovers calmed by
+the possession of a conquered liberty, to condemn without appeal the
+fierceness of thwarted desire.
+
+I am not ashamed of the warmth of my regard for Miss Haldin. It was, it
+must be admitted, an unselfish sentiment, being its own reward. The late
+Victor Haldin--in the light of that sentiment--appeared to me not as a
+sinister conspirator, but as a pure enthusiast. I did not wish indeed
+to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape, that fact which
+brought so much trouble to both his mother and his sister, spoke to me
+in his favour. Meantime, in my fear of seeing the girl surrender to the
+influence of the Chateau Borel revolutionary feminism, I was more than
+willing to put my trust in that friend of the late Victor Haldin. He was
+nothing but a name, you will say. Exactly! A name! And what’s more,
+the only name; the only name to be found in the correspondence between
+brother and sister. The young man had turned up; they had come face to
+face, and, fortunately, without the direct interference of Madame de
+S--. What will come of it? what will she tell me presently? I was
+asking myself.
+
+It was only natural that my thought should turn to the young man, the
+bearer of the only name uttered in all the dream-talk of a future to be
+brought about by a revolution. And my thought took the shape of asking
+myself why this young man had not called upon these ladies. He had been
+in Geneva for some days before Miss Haldin heard of him first in my
+presence from Peter Ivanovitch. I regretted that last’s presence at
+their meeting. I would rather have had it happen somewhere out of his
+spectacled sight. But I supposed that, having both these young people
+there, he introduced them to each other.
+
+I broke the silence by beginning a question on that point--
+
+“I suppose Peter Ivanovitch....”
+
+Miss Haldin gave vent to her indignation. Peter Ivanovitch directly he
+had got his answer from her had turned upon the _dame de compagnie_ in a
+shameful manner.
+
+“Turned upon her?” I wondered. “What about? For what reason?”
+
+“It was unheard of; it was shameful,” Miss Haldin pursued, with angry
+eyes. “_Il lui a fait une scene_--like this, before strangers. And for
+what? You would never guess. For some eggs.... Oh!”
+
+I was astonished. “Eggs, did you say?”
+
+“For Madame de S--. That lady observes a special diet, or something
+of the sort. It seems she complained the day before to Peter Ivanovitch
+that the eggs were not rightly prepared. Peter Ivanovitch suddenly
+remembered this against the poor woman, and flew out at her. It was most
+astonishing. I stood as if rooted.”
+
+“Do you mean to say that the great feminist allowed himself to be
+abusive to a woman?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, not that! It was something you have no conception of. It was an
+odious performance. Imagine, he raised his hat to begin with. He made
+his voice soft and deprecatory. ‘Ah! you are not kind to us--you will
+not deign to remember....’ This sort of phrases, that sort of tone.
+The poor creature was terribly upset. Her eyes ran full of tears.
+She did not know where to look. I shouldn’t wonder if she would have
+preferred abuse, or even a blow.”
+
+I did not remark that very possibly she was familiar with both on
+occasions when no one was by. Miss Haldin walked by my side, her head up
+in scornful and angry silence.
+
+“Great men have their surprising peculiarities,” I observed inanely.
+“Exactly like men who are not great. But that sort of thing cannot
+be kept up for ever. How did the great feminist wind up this very
+characteristic episode?”
+
+Miss Haldin, without turning her face my way, told me that the end
+was brought about by the appearance of the interviewer, who had been
+closeted with Madame de S--.
+
+He came up rapidly, unnoticed, lifted his hat slightly, and paused to
+say in French: “The Baroness has asked me, in case I met a lady on my
+way out, to desire her to come in at once.”
+
+After delivering this message, he hurried down the drive. The _dame de
+compagnie_ flew towards the house, and Peter Ivanovitch followed her
+hastily, looking uneasy. In a moment Miss Haldin found herself alone
+with the young man, who undoubtedly must have been the new arrival
+from Russia. She wondered whether her brother’s friend had not already
+guessed who she was.
+
+I am in a position to say that, as a matter of fact, he had guessed.
+It is clear to me that Peter Ivanovitch, for some reason or other, had
+refrained from alluding to these ladies’ presence in Geneva. But Razumov
+had guessed. The trustful girl! Every word uttered by Haldin lived in
+Razumov’s memory. They were like haunting shapes; they could not be
+exorcised. The most vivid amongst them was the mention of the sister.
+The girl had existed for him ever since. But he did not recognize her
+at once. Coming up with Peter Ivanovitch, he did observe her; their eyes
+had met, even. He had responded, as no one could help responding, to
+the harmonious charm of her whole person, its strength, its grace, its
+tranquil frankness--and then he had turned his gaze away. He said to
+himself that all this was not for him; the beauty of women and the
+friendship of men were not for him. He accepted that feeling with a
+purposeful sternness, and tried to pass on. It was only her outstretched
+hand which brought about the recognition. It stands recorded in the
+pages of his self-confession, that it nearly suffocated him physically
+with an emotional reaction of hate and dismay, as though her appearance
+had been a piece of accomplished treachery.
+
+He faced about. The considerable elevation of the terrace concealed them
+from anyone lingering in the doorway of the house; and even from the
+upstairs windows they could not have been seen. Through the thickets run
+wild, and the trees of the gently sloping grounds, he had cold, placid
+glimpses of the lake. A moment of perfect privacy had been vouchsafed
+to them at this juncture. I wondered to myself what use they had made of
+that fortunate circumstance.
+
+“Did you have time for more than a few words?” I asked.
+
+That animation with which she had related to me the incidents of her
+visit to the Chateau Borel had left her completely. Strolling by my
+side, she looked straight before her; but I noticed a little colour on
+her cheek. She did not answer me.
+
+After some little time I observed that they could not have hoped to
+remain forgotten for very long, unless the other two had discovered
+Madame de S-- swooning with fatigue, perhaps, or in a state of morbid
+exaltation after the long interview. Either would require their devoted
+ministrations. I could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily
+out of the house again, bareheaded, perhaps, and on across the terrace
+with his swinging gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating
+clear of his stout light grey legs. I confess to having looked upon
+these young people as the quarry of the “heroic fugitive.” I had the
+notion that they would not be allowed to escape capture. But of that I
+said nothing to Miss Haldin, only as she still remained uncommunicative,
+I pressed her a little.
+
+“Well--but you can tell me at least your impression.”
+
+She turned her head to look at me, and turned away again.
+
+“Impression?” she repeated slowly, almost dreamily; then in a quicker
+tone--
+
+“He seems to be a man who has suffered more from his thoughts than from
+evil fortune.”
+
+“From his thoughts, you say?”
+
+“And that is natural enough in a Russian,” she took me up. “In a young
+Russian; so many of them are unfit for action, and yet unable to rest.”
+
+“And you think he is that sort of man?”
+
+“No, I do not judge him. How could I, so suddenly? You asked for my
+impression--I explain my impression. I--I--don’t know the world, nor yet
+the people in it; I have been too solitary--I am too young to trust my
+own opinions.”
+
+“Trust your instinct,” I advised her. “Most women trust to that, and
+make no worse mistakes than men. In this case you have your brother’s
+letter to help you.”
+
+She drew a deep breath like a light sigh. “Unstained, lofty, and
+solitary existences,” she quoted as if to herself. But I caught the
+wistful murmur distinctly.
+
+“High praise,” I whispered to her.
+
+“The highest possible.”
+
+“So high that, like the award of happiness, it is more fit to come
+only at the end of a life. But still no common or altogether unworthy
+personality could have suggested such a confident exaggeration of praise
+and...”
+
+“Ah!” She interrupted me ardently. “And if you had only known the heart
+from which that judgment has come!”
+
+She ceased on that note, and for a space I reflected on the character of
+the words which I perceived very well must tip the scale of the girl’s
+feelings in that young man’s favour. They had not the sound of a
+casual utterance. Vague they were to my Western mind and to my Western
+sentiment, but I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin’s side,
+I was like a traveller in a strange country. It had also become clear to
+me that Miss Haldin was unwilling to enter into the details of the only
+material part of their visit to the Chateau Borel. But I was not hurt.
+Somehow I didn’t feel it to be a want of confidence. It was some other
+difficulty--a difficulty I could not resent. And it was without the
+slightest resentment that I said--
+
+“Very well. But on that high ground, which I will not dispute, you, like
+anyone else in such circumstances, you must have made for yourself
+a representation of that exceptional friend, a mental image of him,
+and--please tell me--you were not disappointed?”
+
+“What do you mean? His personal appearance?”
+
+“I don’t mean precisely his good looks, or otherwise.”
+
+We turned at the end of the alley and made a few steps without looking
+at each other.
+
+“His appearance is not ordinary,” said Miss Haldin at last.
+
+“No, I should have thought not--from the little you’ve said of your
+first impression. After all, one has to fall back on that word.
+Impression! What I mean is that something indescribable which is likely
+to mark a ‘not ordinary’ person.”
+
+I perceived that she was not listening. There was no mistaking her
+expression; and once more I had the sense of being out of it--not
+because of my age, which at any rate could draw inferences--but
+altogether out of it, on another plane whence I could only watch her
+from afar. And so ceasing to speak I watched her stepping out by my
+side.
+
+“No,” she exclaimed suddenly, “I could not have been disappointed with a
+man of such strong feeling.”
+
+“Aha! Strong feeling,” I muttered, thinking to myself censoriously: like
+this, at once, all in a moment!
+
+“What did you say?” inquired Miss Haldin innocently.
+
+“Oh, nothing. I beg your pardon. Strong feeling. I am not surprised.”
+
+“And you don’t know how abruptly I behaved to him!” she cried
+remorsefully.
+
+I suppose I must have appeared surprised, for, looking at me with a
+still more heightened colour, she said she was ashamed to admit that she
+had not been sufficiently collected; she had failed to control her words
+and actions as the situation demanded. She lost the fortitude worthy of
+both the men, the dead and the living; the fortitude which should have
+been the note of the meeting of Victor Haldin’s sister with Victor
+Haldin’s only known friend. He was looking at her keenly, but said
+nothing, and she was--she confessed--painfully affected by his want of
+comprehension. All she could say was: “You are Mr. Razumov.” A slight
+frown passed over his forehead. After a short, watchful pause, he made a
+little bow of assent, and waited.
+
+At the thought that she had before her the man so highly regarded by her
+brother, the man who had known his value, spoken to him, understood him,
+had listened to his confidences, perhaps had encouraged him--her lips
+trembled, her eyes ran full of tears; she put out her hand, made a step
+towards him impulsively, saying with an effort to restrain her emotion,
+“Can’t you guess who I am?” He did not take the proffered hand. He
+even recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin imagined that he was unpleasantly
+affected. Miss Haldin excused him, directing her displeasure at
+herself. She had behaved unworthily, like an emotional French girl.
+A manifestation of that kind could not be welcomed by a man of stern,
+self-contained character.
+
+He must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very timid with women, not
+to respond in a more human way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie
+Haldin--I thought to myself. Those lofty and solitary existences (I
+remembered the words suddenly) make a young man shy and an old man
+savage--often.
+
+“Well,” I encouraged Miss Haldin to proceed.
+
+She was still very dissatisfied with herself.
+
+“I went from bad to worse,” she said, with an air of discouragement very
+foreign to her. “I did everything foolish except actually bursting into
+tears. I am thankful to say I did not do that. But I was unable to speak
+for quite a long time.”
+
+She had stood before him, speechless, swallowing her sobs, and when
+she managed at last to utter something, it was only her brother’s
+name--“Victor--Victor Haldin!” she gasped out, and again her voice
+failed her.
+
+“Of course,” she commented to me, “this distressed him. He was
+quite overcome. I have told you my opinion that he is a man of deep
+feeling--it is impossible to doubt it. You should have seen his face.
+He positively reeled. He leaned against the wall of the terrace. Their
+friendship must have been the very brotherhood of souls! I was grateful
+to him for that emotion, which made me feel less ashamed of my own lack
+of self-control. Of course I had regained the power of speech at once,
+almost. All this lasted not more than a few seconds. ‘I am his sister,’
+I said. ‘Maybe you have heard of me.’”
+
+“And had he?” I interrupted.
+
+“I don’t know. How could it have been otherwise? And yet.... But what
+does that matter? I stood there before him, near enough to be touched
+and surely not looking like an impostor. All I know is, that he put
+out both his hands then to me, I may say flung them out at me, with
+the greatest readiness and warmth, and that I seized and pressed them,
+feeling that I was finding again a little of what I thought was lost
+to me for ever, with the loss of my brother--some of that hope,
+inspiration, and support which I used to get from my dear dead....”
+
+I understood quite well what she meant. We strolled on slowly. I
+refrained from looking at her. And it was as if answering my own
+thoughts that I murmured--
+
+“No doubt it was a great friendship--as you say. And that young man
+ended by welcoming your name, so to speak, with both hands. After that,
+of course, you would understand each other. Yes, you would understand
+each other quickly.”
+
+It was a moment before I heard her voice.
+
+“Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words. A reserved man--even when
+he is strongly moved.”
+
+Unable to forget---or even to forgive--the bass-toned expansiveness of
+Peter Ivanovitch, the Archpatron of revolutionary parties, I said that
+I took this for a favourable trait of character. It was associated with
+sincerity--in my mind.
+
+“And, besides, we had not much time,” she added.
+
+“No, you would not have, of course.” My suspicion and even dread of the
+feminist and his Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help asking
+with real anxiety, which I made smiling--
+
+“But you escaped all right?”
+
+She understood me, and smiled too, at my uneasiness.
+
+“Oh yes! I escaped, if you like to call it that. I walked away quickly.
+There was no need to run. I am neither frightened nor yet fascinated,
+like that poor woman who received me so strangely.”
+
+“And Mr.--Mr. Razumov...?”
+
+“He remained there, of course. I suppose he went into the house after I
+left him. You remember that he came here strongly recommended to Peter
+Ivanovitch--possibly entrusted with important messages for him.”
+
+“Ah yes! From that priest who...”
+
+“Father Zosim--yes. Or from others, perhaps.”
+
+“You left him, then. But have you seen him since, may I ask?”
+
+For some time Miss Haldin made no answer to this very direct question,
+then--
+
+“I have been expecting to see him here to-day,” she said quietly.
+
+“You have! Do you meet, then, in this garden? In that case I had better
+leave you at once.”
+
+“No, why leave me? And we don’t meet in this garden. I have not seen Mr.
+Razumov since that first time. Not once. But I have been expecting
+him....”
+
+She paused. I wondered to myself why that young revolutionist should
+show so little alacrity.
+
+“Before we parted I told Mr. Razumov that I walked here for an hour
+every day at this time. I could not explain to him then why I did not
+ask him to come and see us at once. Mother must be prepared for such a
+visit. And then, you see, I do not know myself what Mr. Razumov has to
+tell us. He, too, must be told first how it is with poor mother. All
+these thoughts flashed through my mind at once. So I told him hurriedly
+that there was a reason why I could not ask him to see us at home, but
+that I was in the habit of walking here.... This is a public place,
+but there are never many people about at this hour. I thought it would
+do very well. And it is so near our apartments. I don’t like to be very
+far away from mother. Our servant knows where I am in case I should be
+wanted suddenly.”
+
+“Yes. It is very convenient from that point of view,” I agreed.
+
+In fact, I thought the Bastions a very convenient place, since the
+girl did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to
+her mother. It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of
+ground of deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go
+on in the exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments,
+too poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these
+two, escaped out of four score of millions of human beings ground
+between the upper and nether millstone, walking under these trees, their
+young heads close together. Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk
+in. It even occurred to me, while we turned once more away from the wide
+iron gates, that when tired they would have plenty of accommodation to
+rest themselves. There was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed
+between the restaurant chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted
+deals spread out under the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a
+solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to
+the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a
+republic that could almost be held in the palm of ones hand. The man,
+colourlessly uncouth, was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the
+woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the rough chair, gazed idly
+around.
+
+There is little logic to be expected on this earth, not only in the
+matter of thought, but also of sentiment. I was surprised to discover
+myself displeased with that unknown young man. A week had gone by since
+they met. Was he callous, or shy, or very stupid? I could not make it
+out.
+
+“Do you think,” I asked Miss Haldin, after we had gone some distance up
+the great alley, “that Mr Razumov understood your intention?”
+
+“Understood what I meant?” she wondered. “He was greatly moved. That
+I know! In my own agitation I could see it. But I spoke distinctly. He
+heard me; he seemed, indeed, to hang on my words...”
+
+Unconsciously she had hastened her pace. Her utterance, too, became
+quicker.
+
+I waited a little before I observed thoughtfully--
+
+“And yet he allowed all these days to pass.”
+
+“How can we tell what work he may have to do here? He is not an idler
+travelling for his pleasure. His time may not be his own--nor yet his
+thoughts, perhaps.”
+
+She slowed her pace suddenly, and in a lowered voice added--
+
+“Or his very life”--then paused and stood still “For all I know, he may
+have had to leave Geneva the very day he saw me.”
+
+“Without telling you!” I exclaimed incredulously.
+
+“I did not give him time. I left him quite abruptly. I behaved
+emotionally to the end. I am sorry for it. Even if I had given him the
+opportunity he would have been justified in taking me for a person not
+to be trusted. An emotional, tearful girl is not a person to confide in.
+But even if he has left Geneva for a time, I am confident that we shall
+meet again.”
+
+“Ah! you are confident.... I dare say. But on what ground?”
+
+“Because I’ve told him that I was in great need of some one, a
+fellow-countryman, a fellow-believer, to whom I could give my confidence
+in a certain matter.”
+
+“I see. I don’t ask you what answer he made. I confess that this is good
+ground for your belief in Mr. Razumov’s appearance before long. But he
+has not turned up to-day?”
+
+“No,” she said quietly, “not to-day;” and we stood for a time in
+silence, like people that have nothing more to say to each other and
+let their thoughts run widely asunder before their bodies go off their
+different ways. Miss Haldin glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a
+brusque movement. She had already overstayed her time, it seemed.
+
+“I don’t like to be away from mother,” she murmured, shaking her head.
+“It is not that she is very ill now. But somehow when I am not with her
+I am more uneasy than ever.”
+
+Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion to her son for the last
+week or more. She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking
+out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial
+things.
+
+“For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of
+talk is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly
+endure it, and I dare not break it.”
+
+Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her glove which had come
+undone. I knew well enough what a hard time of it she must be having.
+The stress, its causes, its nature, would have undermined the health
+of an Occidental girl; but Russian natures have a singular power of
+resistance against the unfair strains of life. Straight and supple, with
+a short jacket open on her black dress, which made her figure appear
+more slender and her fresh but colourless face more pale, she compelled
+my wonder and admiration.
+
+“I can’t stay a moment longer. You ought to come soon to see mother. You
+know she calls you ‘_L’ami._’ It is an excellent name, and she really
+means it. And now _au revoir_; I must run.”
+
+She glanced vaguely down the broad walk--the hand she put out to me
+eluded my grasp by an unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
+shoulder. Her red lips were slightly parted, not in a smile, however,
+but expressing a sort of startled pleasure. She gazed towards the gates
+and said quickly, with a gasp--
+
+“There! I knew it. Here he comes!”
+
+I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov. A young man was walking up
+the alley, without haste. His clothes were some dull shade of brown, and
+he carried a stick. When my eyes first fell on him, his head was hanging
+on his breast as if in deep thought. While I was looking at him he
+raised it sharply, and at once stopped. I am certain he did, but that
+pause was nothing more perceptible than a faltering check in his gait,
+instantaneously overcome. Then he continued his approach, looking at us
+steadily. Miss Haldin signed to me to remain, and advanced a step or two
+to meet him.
+
+I turned my head away from that meeting, and did not look at them
+again till I heard Miss Haldin’s voice uttering his name in the way
+of introduction. Mr. Razumov was informed, in a warm, low tone, that,
+besides being a wonderful teacher, I was a great support “in our sorrow
+and distress.”
+
+Of course I was described also as an Englishman. Miss Haldin spoke
+rapidly, faster than I have ever heard her speak, and that by contrast
+made the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
+
+“I have given him my confidence,” she added, looking all the time at Mr.
+Razumov. That young man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin,
+but certainly did not look into her eyes which were so ready for him.
+Afterwards he glanced backwards and forwards at us both, while the faint
+commencement of a forced smile, followed by the suspicion of a frown,
+vanished one after another; I detected them, though neither could have
+been noticed by a person less intensely bent upon divining him than
+myself. I don’t know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my attention
+seized the very shades of these movements. The attempted smile was given
+up, the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so that there should
+be no sign; but I imagined him exclaiming inwardly--
+
+“Her confidence! To this elderly person--this foreigner!”
+
+I imagined this because he looked foreign enough to me. I was upon the
+whole favourably impressed. He had an air of intelligence and even
+some distinction quite above the average of the students and other
+inhabitants of the _Petite Russie_. His features were more decided
+than in the generality of Russian faces; he had a line of the jaw,
+a clean-shaven, sallow cheek; his nose was a ridge, and not a mere
+protuberance. He wore the hat well down over his eyes, his dark hair
+curled low on the nape of his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes
+there were sturdy limbs; a slight stoop brought out a satisfactory
+breadth of shoulders. Upon the whole I was not disappointed.
+Studious--robust--shy.
+
+Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on
+mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry. Not a word or
+even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.
+
+I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me
+lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct
+wish. Let him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near
+Nathalie Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling
+matter to me. I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as
+it were poised in the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and
+my mind trying to penetrate her intention. She had turned to Razumov.
+
+“Well. This is the place. Yes, it is here that I meant you to come. I
+have been walking every day.... Don’t excuse yourself--I understand.
+I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot
+stay now. It is impossible. I must hurry off home. Yes, even with you
+standing before me, I must run off. I have been too long away.... You
+know how it is?”
+
+These last words were addressed to me. I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed
+the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man
+might do. He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his,
+and held it--detained it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back
+movement.
+
+“Thank you once more for--for understanding me,” she went on warmly. He
+interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn’t like him
+speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat,
+as it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with
+a parched throat.
+
+“What is there to thank me for? Understand you?... How did I
+understand you?... You had better know that I understand nothing.
+I was aware that you wanted to see me in this garden. I could not come
+before. I was hindered. And even to-day, you see...late.”
+
+She still held his hand.
+
+“I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as
+a weak, emotional girl. No doubt I want sustaining. I am very ignorant.
+But I can be trusted. Indeed I can!”
+
+“You are ignorant,” he repeated thoughtfully. He had raised his head,
+and was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand.
+They stood like this for a long moment. She released his hand.
+
+“Yes. You did come late. It was good of you to come on the chance of
+me having loitered beyond my time. I was talking with this good friend
+here. I was talking of you. Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you. He was with
+me when I first heard of your being here in Geneva. He can tell you
+what comfort it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news. He knew
+I meant to seek you out. It was the only object of my accepting the
+invitation of Peter Ivanovitch....
+
+“Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me,” he interrupted, in that
+wavering, hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.
+
+“Very little. Just told me your name, and that you had arrived here. Why
+should I have asked for more? What could he have told me that I did not
+know already from my brother’s letter? Three lines! And how much they
+meant to me! I will show them to you one day, Kirylo Sidorovitch. But
+now I must go. The first talk between us cannot be a matter of five
+minutes, so we had better not begin....”
+
+I had been standing a little aside, seeing them both in profile. At that
+moment it occurred to me that Mr. Razumov’s face was older than his age.
+
+“If mother”--the girl had turned suddenly to me, “were to wake up in my
+absence (so much longer than usual) she would perhaps question me. She
+seems to miss me more, you know, of late. She would want to know what
+delayed me--and, you see, it would be painful for me to dissemble before
+her.”
+
+I understood the point very well. For the same reason she checked what
+seemed to be on Mr. Razumov’s part a movement to accompany her.
+
+“No! No! I go alone, but meet me here as soon as possible.” Then to me
+in a lower, significant tone--
+
+“Mother may be sitting at the window at this moment, looking down
+the street. She must not know anything of Mr. Razumov’s presence here
+till--till something is arranged.” She paused before she added a little
+louder, but still speaking to me, “Mr. Razumov does not quite understand
+my difficulty, but you know what it is.”
+
+
+V
+
+
+With a quick inclination of the head for us both, and an earnest,
+friendly glance at the young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our heads
+and looking after her straight, supple figure receding rapidly. Her walk
+was not that hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some women, but
+a frank, strong, healthy movement forward. Rapidly she increased the
+distance--disappeared with suddenness at last. I discovered only then
+that Mr. Razumov, after ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking
+me over from head to foot. I dare say I was a very unexpected fact for
+that young Russian to stumble upon. I caught in his physiognomy, in his
+whole bearing, an expression compounded of curiosity and scorn, tempered
+by alarm--as though he had been holding his breath while I was not
+looking. But his eyes met mine with a gaze direct enough. I saw then for
+the first time that they were of a clear brown colour and fringed with
+thick black eyelashes. They were the youngest feature of his face. Not
+at all unpleasant eyes. He swayed slightly, leaning on his stick and
+generally hung in the wind. It flashed upon me that in leaving us
+together Miss Haldin had an intention--that something was entrusted to
+me, since, by a mere accident I had been found at hand. On this assumed
+ground I put all possible friendliness into my manner. I cast about
+for some right thing to say, and suddenly in Miss Haldin’s last words I
+perceived the clue to the nature of my mission.
+
+“No,” I said gravely, if with a smile, “you cannot be expected to
+understand.”
+
+His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little before he said, as if
+wickedly amused--
+
+“But haven’t you heard just now? I was thanked by that young lady for
+understanding so well.”
+
+I looked at him rather hard. Was there a hidden and inexplicable sneer
+in this retort? No. It was not that. It might have been resentment. Yes.
+But what had he to resent? He looked as though he had not slept very
+well of late. I could almost feel on me the weight of his unrefreshed,
+motionless stare, the stare of a man who lies unwinking in the dark,
+angrily passive in the toils of disastrous thoughts. Now, when I know
+how true it was, I can honestly affirm that this was the effect he
+produced on me. It was painful in a curiously indefinite way--for,
+of course, the definition comes to me now while I sit writing in the
+fullness of my knowledge. But this is what the effect was at that time
+of absolute ignorance. This new sort of uneasiness which he seemed to
+be forcing upon me I attempted to put down by assuming a conversational,
+easy familiarity.
+
+“That extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl (I am--as
+you see--old enough to be frank in my expressions) was referring to her
+own feelings. Surely you must have understood that much?”
+
+He made such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little.
+
+“Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other
+things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well--and if she
+is! I suppose I can see that for myself.”
+
+This sally would have been insulting if his voice had not been
+practically extinct, dried up in his throat; and the rustling effort of
+his speech too painful to give real offence.
+
+I remained silent, checked between the obvious fact and the subtle
+impression. It was open to me to leave him there and then; but the sense
+of having been entrusted with a mission, the suggestion of Miss Haldin’s
+last glance, was strong upon me. After a moment of reflection I said--
+
+“Shall we walk together a little?”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again. I saw it
+out of the corner of my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow. He
+had fallen back a little and was practically out of my sight, unless
+I turned my head to look at him. I did not wish to indispose him
+still further by an appearance of marked curiosity. It might have
+been distasteful to such a young and secret refugee from under the
+pestilential shadow hiding the true, kindly face of his land. And the
+shadow, the attendant of his countrymen, stretching across the middle of
+Europe, was lying on him too, darkening his figure to my mental vision.
+“Without doubt,” I said to myself, “he seems a sombre, even a desperate
+revolutionist; but he is young, he may be unselfish and humane, capable
+of compassion, of....”
+
+I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat, and became all
+attention.
+
+“This is beyond everything,” were his first words. “It is beyond
+everything! I find you here, for no reason that I can understand, in
+possession of something I cannot be expected to understand! A confidant!
+A foreigner! Talking about an admirable Russian girl. Is the admirable
+girl a fool, I begin to wonder? What are you at? What is your object?”
+
+He was barely audible, as if his throat had no more resonance than a dry
+rag, a piece of tinder. It was so pitiful that I found it extremely easy
+to control my indignation.
+
+“When you have lived a little longer, Mr. Razumov, you will discover
+that no woman is an absolute fool. I am not a feminist, like that
+illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a
+little suspect to me....”
+
+He interrupted me, in a surprising note of whispering astonishment.
+
+“Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!...”
+
+“Yes, in a certain aspect he is,” I said, dismissing my remark lightly.
+“As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will
+learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign
+to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even
+the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
+never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely
+deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open,
+if all the truth were known.”
+
+“Upon my word,” he cried at my elbow, “what is it to me whether women
+are fools or lunatics? I really don’t care what you think of them. I--I
+am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a
+novel. How do you know that I want to learn anything about women?...
+What is the meaning of all this?”
+
+“The object, you mean, of this conversation, which I admit I have forced
+upon you in a measure.”
+
+“Forced! Object!” he repeated, still keeping half a pace or so behind
+me. “You wanted to talk about women, apparently. That’s a subject. But
+I don’t care for it. I have never.... In fact, I have had other
+subjects to think about.”
+
+“I am concerned here with one woman only--a young girl--the sister of
+your dead friend--Miss Haldin. Surely you can think a little of her.
+What I meant from the first was that there is a situation which you
+cannot be expected to understand.”
+
+I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side for the space of several
+strides.
+
+“I think that it may prepare the ground for your next interview with
+Miss Haldin if I tell you of it. I imagine that she might have had
+something of the kind in her mind when she left us together. I believe
+myself authorized to speak. The peculiar situation I have alluded to
+has arisen in the first grief and distress of Victor Haldin’s execution.
+There was something peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest. You no
+doubt know the whole truth....”
+
+I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next instant found myself
+swung so as to face Mr. Razumov.
+
+“You spring up from the ground before me with this talk. Who the devil
+are you? This is not to be borne! Why! What for? What do you know
+what is or is not peculiar? What have you to do with any confounded
+circumstances, or with anything that happens in Russia, anyway?”
+
+He leaned on his stick with his other hand, heavily; and when he let go
+my arm, I was certain in my mind that he was hardly able to keep on his
+feet.
+
+“Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables,” I proposed,
+disregarding this display of unexpectedly profound emotion. It was not
+without its effect on me, I confess. I was sorry for him.
+
+“What tables? What are you talking about? Oh--the empty tables? The
+tables there. Certainly. I will sit at one of the empty tables.”
+
+I led him away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals
+before the _chalet_. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were
+alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let
+fall his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands,
+stared at me persistently, openly, and continuously, while I signalled
+the waiter and ordered some beer. I could not quarrel with this silent
+inspection very well, because, truth to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of
+having been sprung on him with some abruptness--of having “sprung from
+the ground,” as he expressed it.
+
+While waiting to be served I mentioned that, born from parents settled
+in St. Petersburg, I had acquired the language as a child. The town I
+did not remember, having left it for good as a boy of nine, but in later
+years I had renewed my acquaintance with the language. He listened,
+without as much as moving his eyes the least little bit. He had to
+change his position when the beer came, and the instant draining of his
+glass revived him. He leaned back in his chair and, folding his arms
+across his chest, continued to stare at me squarely. It occurred to me
+that his clean-shaven, almost swarthy face was really of the very mobile
+sort, and that the absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit of
+a revolutionist, of a conspirator everlastingly on his guard against
+self-betrayal in a world of secret spies.
+
+“But you are an Englishman--a teacher of English literature,” he
+murmured, in a voice that was no longer issuing from a parched throat.
+“I have heard of you. People told me you have lived here for years.”
+
+“Quite true. More than twenty years. And I have been assisting Miss
+Haldin with her English studies.”
+
+“You have been reading English poetry with her,” he said, immovable now,
+like another man altogether, a complete stranger to the man of the heavy
+and uncertain footfalls a little while ago--at my elbow.
+
+“Yes, English poetry,” I said. “But the trouble of which I speak was
+caused by an English newspaper.”
+
+He continued to stare at me. I don’t think he was aware that the story
+of the midnight arrest had been ferreted out by an English journalist
+and given to the world. When I explained this to him he muttered
+contemptuously, “It may have been altogether a lie.”
+
+“I should think you are the best judge of that,” I retorted, a little
+disconcerted. “I must confess that to me it looks to be true in the
+main.”
+
+“How can you tell truth from lies?” he queried in his new, immovable
+manner.
+
+“I don’t know how you do it in Russia,” I began, rather nettled by his
+attitude. He interrupted me.
+
+“In Russia, and in general everywhere--in a newspaper, for instance. The
+colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same.”
+
+“Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the
+publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration
+of the motive, and so on. I don’t trust blindly the accuracy of special
+correspondents--but why should this one have gone to the trouble of
+concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance to
+the world?”
+
+“That’s what it is,” he grumbled. “What’s going on with us is of
+no importance--a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the
+papers--the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of. But
+let them wait a bit!”
+
+He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to the western world.
+Disregarding the anger in his stare, I pointed out that whether the
+journalist was well- or ill-informed, the concern of the friends of
+these ladies was with the effect the few lines of print in question had
+produced--the effect alone. And surely he must be counted as one of
+the friends--if only for the sake of his late comrade and intimate
+fellow-revolutionist. At that point I thought he was going to speak
+vehemently; but he only astounded me by the convulsive start of his
+whole body. He restrained himself, folded his loosened arms tighter
+across his chest, and sat back with a smile in which there was a twitch
+of scorn and malice.
+
+“Yes, a comrade and an intimate.... Very well,” he said.
+
+“I ventured to speak to you on that assumption. And I cannot be
+mistaken. I was present when Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival
+here to Miss Haldin, and I saw her relief and thankfulness when your
+name was mentioned. Afterwards she showed me her brother’s letter,
+and read out the few words in which he alludes to you. What else but a
+friend could you have been?”
+
+“Obviously. That’s perfectly well known. A friend. Quite correct....
+Go on. You were talking of some effect.”
+
+I said to myself: “He puts on the callousness of a stern revolutionist,
+the insensibility to common emotions of a man devoted to a destructive
+idea. He is young, and his sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger,
+a foreigner, an old man. Youth must assert itself....” As concisely
+as possible I exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs. Haldin had been
+thrown into by the news of her son’s untimely end.
+
+He listened--I felt it--with profound attention. His level stare
+deflected gradually downwards, left my face, and rested at last on the
+ground at his feet.
+
+“You can enter into the sister’s feelings. As you said, I have only read
+a little English poetry with her, and I won’t make myself ridiculous in
+your eyes by trying to speak of her. But you have seen her. She is one
+of these rare human beings that do not want explaining. At least I think
+so. They had only that son, that brother, for a link with the wider
+world, with the future. The very groundwork of active existence for
+Nathalie Haldin is gone with him. Can you wonder then that she turns
+with eagerness to the only man her brother mentions in his letters. Your
+name is a sort of legacy.”
+
+“What could he have written of me?” he cried, in a low, exasperated
+tone.
+
+“Only a few words. It is not for me to repeat them to you, Mr. Razumov;
+but you may believe my assertion that these words are forcible enough to
+make both his mother and his sister believe implicitly in the worth of
+your judgment and in the truth of anything you may have to say to them.
+It’s impossible for you now to pass them by like strangers.”
+
+I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few
+people passing up and down the broad central walk. While I was speaking
+his head had sunk upon his breast above his folded arms. He raised it
+sharply.
+
+“Must I go then and lie to that old woman!”
+
+It was not anger; it was something else, something more poignant, and
+not so simple. I was aware of it sympathetically, while I was profoundly
+concerned at the nature of that exclamation.
+
+“Dear me! Won’t the truth do, then? I hoped you could have told them
+something consoling. I am thinking of the poor mother now. Your Russia
+_is_ a cruel country.”
+
+He moved a little in his chair.
+
+“Yes,” I repeated. “I thought you would have had something authentic to
+tell.”
+
+The twitching of his lips before he spoke was curious.
+
+“What if it is not worth telling?”
+
+“Not worth--from what point of view? I don’t understand.”
+
+“From every point of view.”
+
+I spoke with some asperity.
+
+“I should think that anything which could explain the circumstances of
+that midnight arrest....”
+
+“Reported by a journalist for the amusement of the civilized Europe,” he
+broke in scornfully.
+
+“Yes, reported.... But aren’t they true? I can’t make out your
+attitude in this? Either the man is a hero to you, or...”
+
+He approached his face with fiercely distended nostrils close to mine so
+suddenly that I had the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
+
+“You ask me! I suppose it amuses you, all this. Look here! I am a
+worker. I studied. Yes, I studied very hard. There is intelligence
+here.” (He tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.) “Don’t you think a
+Russian may have sane ambitions? Yes--I had even prospects. Certainly! I
+had. And now you see me here, abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed.
+You see me here--and you ask! You see me, don’t you?--sitting before
+you.”
+
+He threw himself back violently. I kept outwardly calm.
+
+“Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here on account of the Haldin
+affair?”
+
+His manner changed.
+
+“You call it the Haldin affair--do you?” he observed indifferently.
+
+“I have no right to ask you anything,” I said. “I wouldn’t presume. But
+in that case the mother and the sister of him who must be a hero in
+your eyes cannot be indifferent to you. The girl is a frank and generous
+creature, having the noblest--well--illusions. You will tell her
+nothing--or you will tell her everything. But speaking now of the object
+with which I’ve approached you first, we have to deal with the morbid
+state of the mother. Perhaps something could be invented under your
+authority as a cure for a distracted and suffering soul filled with
+maternal affection.”
+
+His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I could not help
+thinking, wilfully.
+
+“Oh yes. Something might,” he mumbled carelessly.
+
+He put his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. When he uncovered his
+lips they were smiling faintly.
+
+“Pardon me. This has been a long conversation, and I have not had much
+sleep the last two nights.”
+
+This unexpected, somewhat insolent sort of apology had the merit of
+being perfectly true. He had had no nightly rest to speak of since that
+day when, in the grounds of the Chateau Borel, the sister of Victor
+Haldin had appeared before him. The perplexities and the complex
+terrors--I may say--of this sleeplessness are recorded in the document
+I was to see later--the document which is the main source of this
+narrative. At the moment he looked to me convincingly tired, gone slack
+all over, like a man who has passed through some sort of crisis.
+
+“I have had a lot of urgent writing to do,” he added.
+
+I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my example, without haste,
+a little heavily.
+
+“I must apologize for detaining you so long,” I said.
+
+“Why apologize? One can’t very well go to bed before night. And you did
+not detain me. I could have left you at any time.”
+
+I had not stayed with him to be offended.
+
+“I am glad you have been sufficiently interested,” I said calmly. “No
+merit of mine, though--the commonest sort of regard for the mother of
+your friend was enough.... As to Miss Haldin herself, she at one time
+was disposed to think that her brother had been betrayed to the police
+in some way.”
+
+To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again suddenly. I stared at
+him, and I must say that he returned my stare without winking for quite
+a considerable time.
+
+“In some way,” he mumbled, as if he had not understood or could not
+believe his ears.
+
+“Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might have done that,” I went
+on. “Or, as she characteristically put it to me, the folly or weakness
+of some unhappy fellow-revolutionist.”
+
+“Folly or weakness,” he repeated bitterly.
+
+“She is a very generous creature,” I observed after a time. The man
+admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground. I turned away and
+moved off, apparently unnoticed by him. I nourished no resentment of
+the moody brusqueness with which he had treated me. The sentiment I was
+carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness. Before
+I had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined
+me.
+
+“H’m, yes!” I heard him at my elbow again. “But what do you think?”
+
+I did not look round even.
+
+“I think that you people are under a curse.”
+
+He made no sound. It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I
+heard him again.
+
+“I should like to walk with you a little.”
+
+After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated
+compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I saw no reason for being
+particularly gracious.
+
+“I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here,
+to meet a friend from England,” I said, for all answer to his unexpected
+proposal. I hoped that something informing could come of it. As we stood
+on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily--
+
+“I like what you said just now.”
+
+“Do you?”
+
+We stepped off the pavement together.
+
+“The great problem,” he went on, “is to understand thoroughly the nature
+of the curse.”
+
+“That’s not very difficult, I think.”
+
+“I think so too,” he agreed with me, and his readiness, strangely
+enough, did not make him less enigmatical in the least.
+
+“A curse is an evil spell,” I tried him again. “And the important, the
+great problem, is to find the means to break it.”
+
+“Yes. To find the means.”
+
+That was also an assent, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.
+We had crossed diagonally the open space before the theatre, and began
+to descend a broad, sparely frequented street in the direction of one of
+the smaller bridges. He kept on by my side without speaking for a long
+time.
+
+“You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?” I asked.
+
+He was silent for so long that I began to think I had been indiscreet,
+and should get no answer at all. Yet on looking at him I almost believed
+that my question had caused him something in the nature of positive
+anguish. I detected it mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he
+put a great force stealthily. Once, however, he had overcome that sort
+of agonizing hesitation sufficiently to tell me that he had no such
+intention, he became rather communicative--at least relatively to
+the former off-hand curtness of his speeches. The tone, too, was more
+amiable. He informed me that he intended to study and also to write. He
+went even so far as to tell me he had been to Stuttgart. Stuttgart, I
+was aware, was one of the revolutionary centres. The directing committee
+of one of the Russian parties (I can’t tell now which) was located in
+that town. It was there that he got into touch with the active work of
+the revolutionists outside Russia.
+
+“I have never been abroad before,” he explained, in a rather inanimate
+voice now. Then, after a slight hesitation, altogether different from
+the agonizing irresolution my first simple question “whether he meant to
+stay in Geneva” had aroused, he made me an unexpected confidence--
+
+“The fact is, I have received a sort of mission from them.”
+
+“Which will keep you here in Geneva?”
+
+“Yes. Here. In this odious....”
+
+I was satisfied with my faculty for putting two and two together when I
+drew the inference that the mission had something to do with the
+person of the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I kept that surmise to myself
+naturally, and Mr. Razumov said nothing more for some considerable time.
+It was only when we were nearly on the bridge we had been making for
+that he opened his lips again, abruptly--
+
+“Could I see that precious article anywhere?”
+
+I had to think for a moment before I saw what he was referring to.
+
+“It has been reproduced in parts by the Press here. There are files to
+be seen in various places. My copy of the English newspaper I have left
+with Miss Haldin, I remember, on the day after it reached me. I was
+sufficiently worried by seeing it lying on a table by the side of the
+poor mother’s chair for weeks. Then it disappeared. It was a relief, I
+assure you.”
+
+He had stopped short.
+
+“I trust,” I continued, “that you will find time to see these ladies
+fairly often--that you will make time.”
+
+He stared at me so queerly that I hardly know how to define his aspect.
+I could not understand it in this connexion at all. What ailed him? I
+asked myself. What strange thought had come into his head? What vision
+of all the horrors that can be seen in his hopeless country had come
+suddenly to haunt his brain? If it were anything connected with the fate
+of Victor Haldin, then I hoped earnestly he would keep it to himself
+for ever. I was, to speak plainly, so shocked that I tried to conceal my
+impression by--Heaven forgive me--a smile and the assumption of a light
+manner.
+
+“Surely,” I exclaimed, “that needn’t cost you a great effort.”
+
+He turned away from me and leaned over the parapet of the bridge. For a
+moment I waited, looking at his back. And yet, I assure you, I was not
+anxious just then to look at his face again. He did not move at all. He
+did not mean to move. I walked on slowly on my way towards the station,
+and at the end of the bridge I glanced over my shoulder. No, he had not
+moved. He hung well over the parapet, as if captivated by the smooth
+rush of the blue water under the arch. The current there is swift,
+extremely swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at
+it for any length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly
+snatched away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the
+suggestion of irresistible power and of headlong motion.
+
+It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov. I left him hanging far over
+the parapet of the bridge. The way he had behaved to me could not be put
+down to mere boorishness. There was something else under his scorn and
+impatience. Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to hidden truth,
+it was the same thing which had kept him over a week, nearly ten days
+indeed, from coming near Miss Haldin. But what it was I could not tell.
+
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
+rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
+granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov’s breast,
+it could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of
+his life had deposited there.
+
+“What is the meaning of all this?” he thought, staring downwards at
+the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
+air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
+disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. “Why has that
+meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
+tale of a crazy old woman?”
+
+He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
+reference to the young girl. “A crazy old woman,” he repeated to
+himself. “It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd?
+But no! I am wrong! I can’t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may
+be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one
+to guard against it? It puts to rout one’s intelligence. The more
+intelligent one is the less one suspects an absurdity.”
+
+A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
+leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking,
+like a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his
+thought had some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
+
+“After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
+insignificant--absolutely. The craze of an old woman--the fussy
+officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
+the way? Haven’t I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven’t I just? That’s
+the way to treat these meddlesome persons. Is it possible that he still
+stands behind my back, waiting?”
+
+Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine. It was not fear. He was
+certain that it was not fear--not fear for himself--but it was, all the
+same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he
+knew without being able to put a name on the personality. But the
+recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet
+tranquillized him for a time. It was too stupid to suppose that he
+should be wasting his time in waiting. It was unnecessary to look round
+and make sure.
+
+But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the
+newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a
+damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could
+be capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him--the sport of
+revolution--a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And
+what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, “Won’t the truth do?”
+
+Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone coping over which he was
+leaning with force. “Won’t the truth do? The truth for the crazy old
+mother of the--”
+
+The young man shuddered again. Yes. The truth would do! Apparently
+it would do. Exactly. And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
+unspoken words cynically. “Fall on my neck in gratitude, no doubt,” he
+jeered mentally. But this mood abandoned him at once. He felt sad, as
+if his heart had become empty suddenly. “Well, I must be cautious,” he
+concluded, coming to himself as though his brain had been awakened from
+a trance. “There is nothing, no one, too insignificant, too absurd to be
+disregarded,” he thought wearily. “I must be cautious.”
+
+Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from the balustrade and,
+retracing his steps along the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
+where, for a few days, he led a solitary and retired existence. He
+neglected Peter Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the Stuttgart
+group; he never went near the refugee revolutionists, to whom he had
+been introduced on his arrival. He kept out of that world altogether.
+And he felt that such conduct, causing surprise and arousing suspicion,
+contained an element of danger for himself.
+
+This is not to say that during these few days he never went out. I met
+him several times in the streets, but he gave me no recognition.
+Once, going home after an evening call on the ladies Haldin, I saw him
+crossing the dark roadway of the Boulevard des Philosophes. He had a
+broad-brimmed soft hat, and the collar of his coat turned up. I watched
+him make straight for the house, but, instead of going in, he stopped
+opposite the still lighted windows, and after a time went away down a
+side-street.
+
+I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin yet. Miss Haldin told
+me he was reluctant; moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin
+had changed. She seemed to think now that her son was living, and she
+perhaps awaited his arrival. Her immobility in the great arm-chair in
+front of the window had an air of expectancy, even when the blind was
+down and the lamps lighted.
+
+For my part, I was convinced that she had received her death-stroke;
+Miss Haldin, to whom, of course, I said nothing of my forebodings,
+thought that no good would come from introducing Mr. Razumov just then,
+an opinion which I shared fully. I knew that she met the young man on
+the Bastions. Once or twice I saw them strolling slowly up the main
+alley. They met every day for weeks. I avoided passing that way during
+the hour when Miss Haldin took her exercise there. One day, however,
+in a fit of absent-mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon her
+walking alone. I stopped to exchange a few words. Mr. Razumov failed to
+turn up, and we began to talk about him--naturally.
+
+“Did he tell you anything definite about your brother’s activities--his
+end?” I ventured to ask.
+
+“No,” admitted Miss Haldin, with some hesitation. “Nothing definite.”
+
+I understood well enough that all their conversations must have been
+referred mentally to that dead man who had brought them together. That
+was unavoidable. But it was in the living man that she was interested.
+That was unavoidable too, I suppose. And as I pushed my inquiries
+I discovered that he had disclosed himself to her as a by no means
+conventional revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of theories, of
+men too. I was rather pleased at that--but I was a little puzzled.
+
+“His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle,” Miss Haldin
+explained. “Of course, he is an actual worker too,” she added.
+
+“And do you understand him?” I inquired point-blank.
+
+She hesitated again. “Not altogether,” she murmured.
+
+I perceived that he had fascinated her by an assumption of mysterious
+reserve.
+
+“Do you know what I think?” she went on, breaking through her reserved,
+almost reluctant attitude: “I think that he is observing, studying me,
+to discover whether I am worthy of his trust....”
+
+“And that pleases you?”
+
+She kept mysteriously silent for a moment. Then with energy, but in a
+confidential tone--
+
+“I am convinced;” she declared, “that this extraordinary man is
+meditating some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by
+it--he suffers from it--and from being alone in the world.”
+
+“And so he’s looking for helpers?” I commented, turning away my head.
+
+Again there was a silence.
+
+“Why not?” she said at last.
+
+The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign friend, had fallen
+into a distant background. But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was
+absolutely nowhere now. And this thought consoled me. Yet I saw the
+gigantic shadow of Russian life deepening around her like the darkness
+of an advancing night. It would devour her presently. I inquired after
+Mrs. Haldin--that other victim of the deadly shade.
+
+A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank eyes. Mother seemed no
+worse, but if I only knew what strange fancies she had sometimes! Then
+Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch, declared that she could not stay a
+moment longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off lightly.
+
+Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that day. Incomprehensible
+youth!
+
+But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing the Place Mollard, I
+caught sight of him boarding a South Shore tramcar.
+
+“He’s going to the Chateau Borel,” I thought.
+
+
+After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half
+a mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two
+straight lines of shady trees. Across the roadway in the sunshine a
+short wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out
+had an intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly
+slopes on the opposite shore. The whole view, with the harbour jetties
+of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to
+the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting
+promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering
+quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with
+contempt. He thought it odious--oppressively odious--in its unsuggestive
+finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after
+centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the
+entrance to the grounds of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark
+weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
+wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for
+a very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey
+stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small
+side entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
+as though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov,
+trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
+
+“Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently,” he muttered
+to himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he
+looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the
+clean, broad avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms
+hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in
+lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.
+
+“Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!” Razumov muttered to himself. “A brute,
+all the same.”
+
+Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of
+the drive, trying to think of nothing--to rest his head, to rest his
+emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house
+he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
+mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped
+short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow
+arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept
+narrow flower-bed along its foot.
+
+“It is here!” he thought, with a sort of awe. “It is here--on this very
+spot....”
+
+He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
+with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move,
+and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but
+because he knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could
+not leave Geneva. He recognized, even without thinking, that it was
+impossible. It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral
+suicide. It would have been also physically dangerous. Slowly he
+ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish
+stone urns of funereal aspect.
+
+Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
+discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
+shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had
+been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter
+Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his approach.
+
+The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared head of Europe’s greatest
+feminist accentuated the dubiousness of his status in the house rented
+by Madame de S--, his Egeria. His aspect combined the formality of the
+caller with the freedom of the proprietor. Florid and bearded and masked
+by the dark blue glasses, he met the visitor, and at once took him
+familiarly under the arm.
+
+Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by an effort which the
+constant necessity of prudence had rendered almost mechanical. And
+this necessity had settled his expression in a cast of austere, almost
+fanatical, aloofness. The “heroic fugitive,” impressed afresh by the
+severe detachment of this new arrival from revolutionary Russia, took a
+conciliatory, even a confidential tone. Madame de S-- was resting after
+a bad night. She often had bad nights. He had left his hat upstairs on
+the landing and had come down to suggest to his young friend a stroll
+and a good open-hearted talk in one of the shady alleys behind the
+house. After voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at the unmoved
+face by his side, and could not restrain himself from exclaiming--
+
+“On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary person.”
+
+“I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch. If I were really an
+extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden
+in Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of--what’s the name of the
+Commune this place belongs to?... Never mind--the heart of democracy,
+anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as
+much value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians,
+wandering abroad.”
+
+But Peter Ivanovitch dissented emphatically--
+
+“No! No! You are not ordinary. I have some experience of Russians who
+are--well--living abroad. You appear to me, and to others too, a marked
+personality.”
+
+“What does he mean by this?” Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes
+fully on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a
+meditative seriousness.
+
+“You don’t suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I have not heard of you
+from various points where you made yourself known on your way here? I
+have had letters.”
+
+“Oh, we are great in talking about each other,” interjected Razumov, who
+had listened with great attention. “Gossip, tales, suspicions, and
+all that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny,
+even.”
+
+In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very well to conceal the
+feeling of anxiety which had come over him. At the same time he was
+saying to himself that there could be no earthly reason for anxiety. He
+was relieved by the evident sincerity of the protesting voice.
+
+“Heavens!” cried Peter Ivanovitch. “What are you talking about? What
+reason can _you_ have to...?”
+
+The great exile flung up his arms as if words had failed him in sober
+truth. Razumov was satisfied. Yet he was moved to continue in the same
+vein.
+
+“I am talking of the poisonous plants which flourish in the world of
+conspirators, like evil mushrooms in a dark cellar.”
+
+“You are casting aspersions,” remonstrated Peter Ivanovitch, “which as
+far as you are concerned--”
+
+“No!” Razumov interrupted without heat. “Indeed, I don’t want to cast
+aspersions, but it’s just as well to have no illusions.”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance of his dark spectacles,
+accompanied by a faint smile.
+
+“The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one,” he
+said, in a very friendly tone. “But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
+You aim at stoicism.”
+
+“Stoicism! That’s a pose of the Greeks and the Romans. Let’s leave
+it to them. We are Russians, that is--children; that is--sincere; that
+is--cynical, if you like. But that’s not a pose.”
+
+A long silence ensued. They strolled slowly under the lime-trees.
+Peter Ivanovitch had put his hands behind his back. Razumov felt the
+ungravelled ground of the deeply shaded walk damp and as if slippery
+under his feet. He asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were saying the
+right things. The direction of the conversation ought to have been more
+under his control, he reflected. The great man appeared to be reflecting
+on his side too. He cleared his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at
+once a painful reawakening of scorn and fear.
+
+“I am astonished,” began Peter Ivanovitch gently. “Supposing you are
+right in your indictment, how can you raise any question of calumny
+or gossip, in your case? It is unreasonable. The fact is, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, there is not enough known of you to give hold to gossip or
+even calumny. Just now you are a man associated with a great deed, which
+had been hoped for, and tried for too, without success. People have
+perished for attempting that which you and Haldin have done at last. You
+come to us out of Russia, with that prestige. But you cannot deny that
+you have not been communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met
+imparted their impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I
+form my own opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out
+of the common. That’s positively so. You are close, very close. This
+taciturnity, this severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in
+you, inspires hopes and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There
+is something of a Brutus....”
+
+“Pray spare me those classical allusions!” burst out Razumov nervously.
+“What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
+say,” he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, “that the Russian
+revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
+clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps,
+pondering.
+
+“Not _all_ patricians,” he muttered at last. “But you, at any rate, are
+one of _us_.”
+
+Razumov smiled bitterly.
+
+“To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer,” he said in a sneering tone. “I
+am not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck.
+I have no name, I have no....”
+
+The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace
+and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
+entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.
+
+“But, my dear young friend!” he cried. “My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch....”
+
+Razumov shook his head.
+
+“The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I
+have no legal right to--but what of that? I don’t wish to claim it.
+I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my
+mother’s grandfather was a peasant--a serf. See how much I am one of
+_you_. I don’t want anyone to claim me. But Russia _can’t_ disown me.
+She cannot!”
+
+Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
+
+“I am _it_!”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
+vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity
+was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he
+thought, with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark
+glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he
+fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but
+with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on
+that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming
+light-headed. “It is not what is expected of me,” he repeated to
+himself. “It is not what is--I could get away by breaking the fastening
+on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock.
+Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat!
+These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing.
+They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade--but I
+would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?” he asked
+himself in a fright.
+
+The great man was heard--musing in an undertone.
+
+“H’m, yes! That--no doubt--in a certain sense....” He raised his
+voice. “There is a deal of pride about you....”
+
+The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring,
+acknowledging, in a way, Razumov’s claim to peasant descent.
+
+“A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo. And I don’t say that you have no
+justification for it. I have admitted you had. I have ventured to allude
+to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance
+to it. You are one of us--_un des notres_. I reflect on that with
+satisfaction.”
+
+“I attach some importance to it also,” said Razumov quietly. “I won’t
+even deny that it may have some importance for you too,” he continued,
+after a slight pause and with a touch of grimness of which he was
+himself aware, with some annoyance. He hoped it had escaped the
+perception of Peter Ivanovitch. “But suppose we talk no more about it?”
+
+“Well, we shall not--not after this one time, Kirylo Sidorovitch,”
+ persisted the noble arch-priest of Revolution. “This shall be the last
+occasion. You cannot believe for a moment that I had the slightest idea
+of wounding your feelings. You are clearly a superior nature--that’s how
+I read you. Quite above the common--h’m--susceptibilities. But the fact
+is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I don’t know your susceptibilities. Nobody, out
+of Russia, knows much of you--as yet!”
+
+“You have been watching me?” suggested Razumov.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect frankness, but as they
+turned their faces to each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
+spectacles. Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch hinted that he had felt
+for some time the need of meeting a man of energy and character, in view
+of a certain project. He said nothing more precise, however; and after
+some critical remarks upon the personalities of the various members
+of the committee of revolutionary action in Stuttgart, he let the
+conversation lapse for quite a long while. They paced the alley from end
+to end. Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a
+glance at the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited.
+With its grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from
+top to bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very
+well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
+futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly
+rumour had it, by Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
+deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another
+sort. Razumov had never seen Madame de S-- but in the carriage.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
+
+“Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
+leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people.
+Now, if you ask me what are the dregs of a people--h’m--it would take
+too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
+that for me go to the making up of these dregs--of that which ought,
+_must_ remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be subject
+to discussion. But I can tell you what is _not_ the dregs. On that it
+is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the
+dregs; neither is its highest class--well--the nobility. Reflect on
+that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection.
+Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or
+development, is--well--dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
+Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second thing I would
+offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment there yawns
+a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by
+foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or cheating.
+Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up.”
+
+A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
+feminist. He seized Razumov’s arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
+shake.
+
+“Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
+up.”
+
+Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
+
+“Don’t you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
+subject?” he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased
+the distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went
+on strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words
+and theories could never fill that chasm. No meditation was necessary.
+A sacrifice of many lives could alone--He fell silent without finishing
+the phrase.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head slowly. After a moment he
+proposed that they should go and see if Madame de S-- was now visible.
+
+“We shall get some tea,” he said, turning out of the shaded gloomy walk
+with a brisker step.
+
+The lady companion had been on the look out. Her dark skirt whisked into
+the doorway as the two men came in sight round the corner. She ran off
+somewhere altogether, and had disappeared when they entered the hall. In
+the crude light falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the black
+and white tessellated floor, covered with muddy tracks, their footsteps
+echoed faintly. The great feminist led the way up the stairs. On the
+balustrade of the first-floor landing a shiny tall hat reposed, rim
+upwards, opposite the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it
+was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by
+fugitive revolutionists. The cracked white paint of the panels, the
+tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but
+dust and emptiness within. Before turning the massive brass handle,
+Peter Ivanovitch gave his young companion a sharp, partly critical,
+partly preparatory glance.
+
+“No one is perfect,” he murmured discreetly. Thus, the possessor of a
+rare jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no
+gem perhaps is flawless.
+
+He remained with his hand on the door-handle so long that Razumov
+assented by a moody “No.”
+
+“Perfection itself would not produce that effect,” pursued Peter
+Ivanovitch, “in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a
+mind--no!--the quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand
+any perplexity you may be suffering from by the irresistible,
+enlightening force of sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before
+that--that--inspired, yes, inspired penetration, this true light of
+femininity.”
+
+The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy steadfastness gave his
+face an air of absolute conviction. Razumov felt a momentary shrinking
+before that closed door.
+
+“Penetration? Light,” he stammered out. “Do you mean some sort of
+thought-reading?”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
+
+“I mean something utterly different,” he retorted, with a faint, pitying
+smile.
+
+Razumov began to feel angry, very much against his wish.
+
+“This is very mysterious,” he muttered through his teeth.
+
+“You don’t object to being understood, to being guided?” queried the
+great feminist. Razumov exploded in a fierce whisper.
+
+“In what sense? Be pleased to understand that I am a serious person. Who
+do you take me for?”
+
+They looked at each other very closely. Razumov’s temper was cooled
+by the impenetrable earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his stare.
+Peter Ivanovitch turned the handle at last.
+
+“You shall know directly,” he said, pushing the door open.
+
+A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the room.
+
+“_Enfin_.”
+
+In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking the view, Peter
+Ivanovitch boomed in a hearty tone with something boastful in it.
+
+“Yes. Here I am!”
+
+He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who waited for him to move on.
+
+“And I am bringing you a proved conspirator--a real one this time. _Un
+vrai celui la_.”
+
+This pause in the doorway gave the “proved conspirator” time to make
+sure that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his mental
+disgust.
+
+These sentiments stand confessed in Mr. Razumov’s memorandum of
+his first interview with Madame de S--. The very words I use in my
+narrative are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected. The
+record, which could not have been meant for anyone’s eyes but his own,
+was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion
+common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable
+existence of “compromising documents” in all the plots and conspiracies
+of history. Mr. Razumov looked at it, I suppose, as a man looks at
+himself in a mirror, with wonder, perhaps with anguish, with anger or
+despair. Yes, as a threatened man may look fearfully at his own face in
+the glass, formulating to himself reassuring excuses for his appearance
+marked by the taint of some insidious hereditary disease.
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Egeria of the “Russian Mazzini” produced, at first view, a strong
+effect by the death-like immobility of an obviously painted face. The
+eyes appeared extraordinarily brilliant. The figure, in a close-fitting
+dress, admirably made, but by no means fresh, had an elegant stiffness.
+The rasping voice inviting him to sit down; the rigidity of the upright
+attitude with one arm extended along the back of the sofa, the white
+gleam of the big eyeballs setting off the black, fathomless stare of the
+enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than anything he had seen since
+his hasty and secret departure from St. Petersburg. A witch in Parisian
+clothes, he thought. A portent! He actually hesitated in his advance,
+and did not even comprehend, at first, what the rasping voice was
+saying.
+
+“Sit down. Draw your chair nearer me. There--”
+
+He sat down. At close quarters the rouged cheekbones, the wrinkles, the
+fine lines on each side of the vivid lips, astounded him. He was being
+received graciously, with a smile which made him think of a grinning
+skull.
+
+“We have been hearing about you for some time.”
+
+He did not know what to say, and murmured some disconnected words. The
+grinning skull effect vanished.
+
+“And do you know that the general complaint is that you have shown
+yourself very reserved everywhere?”
+
+Razumov remained silent for a time, thinking of his answer.
+
+“I, don’t you see, am a man of action,” he said huskily, glancing
+upwards.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch stood in portentous expectant silence by the side of
+his chair. A slight feeling of nausea came over Razumov. What could be
+the relations of these two people to each other? She like a galvanized
+corpse out of some Hoffman’s Tale--he the preacher of feminist gospel
+for all the world, and a super-revolutionist besides! This ancient,
+painted mummy with unfathomable eyes, and this burly, bull-necked,
+deferential...what was it? Witchcraft, fascination.... “It’s for
+her money,” he thought. “She has millions!”
+
+The walls, the floor of the room were bare like a barn. The few pieces
+of furniture had been discovered in the garrets and dragged down into
+service without having been properly dusted, even. It was the refuse the
+banker’s widow had left behind her. The windows without curtains had an
+indigent, sleepless look. In two of them the dirty yellowy-white blinds
+had been pulled down. All this spoke, not of poverty, but of sordid
+penuriousness.
+
+The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily--
+
+“You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I have been shamefully
+robbed, positively ruined.”
+
+A rattling laugh, which seemed beyond her control, interrupted her for a
+moment.
+
+“A slavish nature would find consolation in the fact that the principal
+robber was an exalted and almost a sacrosanct person--a Grand Duke, in
+fact. Do you understand, Mr. Razumov? A Grand Duke--No! You have no idea
+what thieves those people are! Downright thieves!”
+
+Her bosom heaved, but her left arm remained rigidly extended along the
+back of the couch.
+
+“You will only upset yourself,” breathed out a deep voice, which, to
+Razumov’s startled glance, seemed to proceed from under the steady
+spectacles of Peter Ivanovitch, rather than from his lips, which had
+hardly moved.
+
+“What of hat? I say thieves! _Voleurs! Voleurs!_”
+
+Razumov was quite confounded by this unexpected clamour, which had in
+it something of wailing and croaking, and more than a suspicion of
+hysteria.
+
+“_Voleurs! Voleurs! Vol_....”
+
+“No power on earth can rob you of your genius,” shouted Peter Ivanovitch
+in an overpowering bass, but without stirring, without a gesture of any
+kind. A profound silence fell.
+
+Razumov remained outwardly impassive. “What is the meaning of this
+performance?” he was asking himself. But with a preliminary sound
+of bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a
+threadbare black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on
+her heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously
+too heavy for her. Razumov made an instinctive movement to help, which
+startled her so much that she nearly dropped her hissing burden. She
+managed, however, to land it on the table, and looked so frightened that
+Razumov hastened to sit down. She produced then, from an adjacent room,
+four glass tumblers, a teapot, and a sugar-basin, on a black iron tray.
+
+The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly--
+
+“_Les gateaux_? Have you remembered to bring the cakes?”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, without a word, marched out on to the landing, and
+returned instantly with a parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which
+he must have extracted from the interior of his hat. With imperturbable
+gravity he undid the string and smoothed the paper open on a part of the
+table within reach of Madame de S--‘s hand. The lady companion poured
+out the tea, then retired into a distant corner out of everybody’s
+sight. From time to time Madame de S-- extended a claw-like hand,
+glittering with costly rings, towards the paper of cakes, took up one
+and devoured it, displaying her big false teeth ghoulishly. Meantime she
+talked in a hoarse tone of the political situation in the Balkans. She
+built great hopes on some complication in the peninsula for arousing
+a great movement of national indignation in Russia against “these
+thieves--thieves thieves.”
+
+“You will only upset yourself,” Peter Ivanovitch interposed, raising
+his glassy gaze. He smoked cigarettes and drank tea in silence,
+continuously. When he had finished a glass, he flourished his hand
+above his shoulder. At that signal the lady companion, ensconced in her
+corner, with round eyes like a watchful animal, would dart out to the
+table and pour him out another tumblerful.
+
+Razumov looked at her once or twice. She was anxious, tremulous, though
+neither Madame de S-- nor Peter Ivanovitch paid the slightest attention
+to her. “What have they done between them to that forlorn creature?”
+ Razumov asked himself. “Have they terrified her out of her senses with
+ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?” When she gave him
+his second glass of tea, he noticed that her lips trembled in the manner
+of a scared person about to burst into speech. But of course she said
+nothing, and retired into her corner, as if hugging to herself the smile
+of thanks he gave her.
+
+“She may be worth cultivating,” thought Razumov suddenly.
+
+He was calming down, getting hold of the actuality into which he had
+been thrown--for the first time perhaps since Victor Haldin had entered
+his room...and had gone out again. He was distinctly aware of being
+the object of the famous--or notorious--Madame de S--‘s ghastly
+graciousness.
+
+Madame de S-- was pleased to discover that this young man was different
+from the other types of revolutionist members of committees, secret
+emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough students,
+ex-cobblers with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged enthusiasts,
+Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come and go
+around Peter Ivanovitch--fanatics, pedants, proletarians all. It was
+pleasant to talk to this young man of notably good appearance--for
+Madame de S-- was not always in a mystical state of mind. Razumov’s
+taciturnity only excited her to a quicker, more voluble utterance. It
+still dealt with the Balkans. She knew all the statesmen of that region,
+Turks, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Roumanians, Greeks, Armenians, and
+nondescripts, young and old, the living and the dead. With some money an
+intrigue could be started which would set the Peninsula in a blaze and
+outrage the sentiment of the Russian people. A cry of abandoned brothers
+could be raised, and then, with the nation seething with indignation, a
+couple of regiments or so would be enough to begin a military revolution
+in St. Petersburg and make an end of these thieves....
+
+“Apparently I’ve got only to sit still and listen,” the silent Razumov
+thought to himself. “As to that hairy and obscene brute” (in such terms
+did Mr. Razumov refer mentally to the popular expounder of a feministic
+conception of social state), “as to him, for all his cunning he too
+shall speak out some day.”
+
+Razumov ceased to think for a moment. Then a sombre-toned reflection
+formulated itself in his mind, ironical and bitter. “I have the gift of
+inspiring confidence.” He heard himself laughing aloud. It was like a
+goad to the painted, shiny-eyed harridan on the sofa.
+
+“You may well laugh!” she cried hoarsely. “What else can one do!
+Perfect swindlers--and what base swindlers at that! Cheap
+Germans--Holstein-Gottorps! Though, indeed, it’s hardly safe to say who
+and what they are. A family that counts a creature like Catherine the
+Great in its ancestry--you understand!”
+
+“You are only upsetting yourself,” said Peter Ivanovitch, patiently but
+in a firm tone. This admonition had its usual effect on the Egeria. She
+dropped her thick, discoloured eyelids and changed her position on the
+sofa. All her angular and lifeless movements seemed completely automatic
+now that her eyes were closed. Presently she opened them very full.
+Peter Ivanovitch drank tea steadily, without haste.
+
+“Well, I declare!” She addressed Razumov directly. “The people who have
+seen you on your way here are right. You are very reserved. You haven’t
+said twenty words altogether since you came in. You let nothing of your
+thoughts be seen in your face either.”
+
+“I have been listening, Madame,” said Razumov, using French for the
+first time, hesitatingly, not being certain of his accent. But it seemed
+to produce an excellent impression. Madame de S-- looked meaningly into
+Peter Ivanovitch’s spectacles, as if to convey her conviction of this
+young man’s merit. She even nodded the least bit in his direction, and
+Razumov heard her murmur under her breath the words, “Later on in
+the diplomatic service,” which could not but refer to the favourable
+impression he had made. The fantastic absurdity of it revolted him
+because it seemed to outrage his ruined hopes with the vision of a
+mock-career. Peter Ivanovitch, impassive as though he were deaf, drank
+some more tea. Razumov felt that he must say something.
+
+“Yes,” he began deliberately, as if uttering a meditated opinion.
+“Clearly. Even in planning a purely military revolution the temper of
+the people should be taken into account.”
+
+“You have understood me perfectly. The discontent should be
+spiritualized. That is what the ordinary heads of revolutionary
+committees will not understand. They aren’t capable of it. For instance,
+Mordatiev was in Geneva last month. Peter Ivanovitch brought him here.
+You know Mordatiev? Well, yes--you have heard of him. They call him
+an eagle--a hero! He has never done half as much as you have. Never
+attempted--not half....”
+
+Madame de S-- agitated herself angularly on the sofa.
+
+“We, of course, talked to him. And do you know what he said to me?
+‘What have we to do with Balkan intrigues? We must simply extirpate the
+scoundrels.’ Extirpate is all very well--but what then? The imbecile!
+I screamed at him, ‘But you must spiritualize--don’t you
+understand?--spiritualize the discontent.’...”
+
+She felt nervously in her pocket for a handkerchief; she pressed it to
+her lips.
+
+“Spiritualize?” said Razumov interrogatively, watching her heaving
+breast. The long ends of an old black lace scarf she wore over her head
+slipped off her shoulders and hung down on each side of her ghastly rosy
+cheeks.
+
+“An odious creature,” she burst out again. “Imagine a man who takes five
+lumps of sugar in his tea.... Yes, I said spiritualize! How else can
+you make discontent effective and universal?”
+
+“Listen to this, young man.” Peter Ivanovitch made himself heard
+solemnly. “Effective and universal.”
+
+Razumov looked at him suspiciously.
+
+“Some say hunger will do that,” he remarked.
+
+“Yes. I know. Our people are starving in heaps. But you can’t make
+famine universal. And it is not despair that we want to create. There is
+no moral support to be got out of that. It is indignation....”
+
+Madame de S-- let her thin, extended arm sink on her knees.
+
+“I am not a Mordatiev,” began Razumov.
+
+“Bien sur!” murmured Madame de S--.
+
+“Though I too am ready to say extirpate, extirpate! But in my ignorance
+of political work, permit me to ask: A Balkan--well--intrigue, wouldn’t
+that take a very long time?”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch got up and moved off quietly, to stand with his face to
+the window. Razumov heard a door close; he turned his head and perceived
+that the lady companion had scuttled out of the room.
+
+“In matters of politics I am a supernaturalist.” Madame de S-- broke
+the silence harshly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch moved away from the window and struck Razumov lightly
+on the shoulder. This was a signal for leaving, but at the same time he
+addressed Madame de S-- in a peculiar reminding tone---
+
+“Eleanor!”
+
+Whatever it meant, she did not seem to hear him. She leaned back in the
+corner of the sofa like a wooden figure. The immovable peevishness of
+the face, framed in the limp, rusty lace, had a character of cruelty.
+
+“As to extirpating,” she croaked at the attentive Razumov, “there is
+only one class in Russia which must be extirpated. Only one. And that
+class consists of only one family. You understand me? That one family
+must be extirpated.”
+
+Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigor of a corpse galvanized into
+harsh speech and glittering stare by the force of murderous hate. The
+sight fascinated Razumov--yet he felt more self-possessed than at
+any other time since he had entered this weirdly bare room. He was
+interested. But the great feminist by his side again uttered his
+appeal--
+
+“Eleanor!”
+
+She disregarded it. Her carmine lips vaticinated with an extraordinary
+rapidity. The liberating spirit would use arms before which rivers would
+part like Jordan, and ramparts fall down like the walls of Jericho. The
+deliverance from bondage would be effected by plagues and by signs, by
+wonders and by war. The women....
+
+“Eleanor!”
+
+She ceased; she had heard him at last. She pressed her hand to her
+forehead.
+
+“What is it? Ah yes! That girl--the sister of....”
+
+It was Miss Haldin that she meant. That young girl and her mother had
+been leading a very retired life. They were provincial ladies--were they
+not? The mother had been very beautiful--traces were left yet. Peter
+Ivanovitch, when he called there for the first time, was greatly
+struck....But the cold way they received him was really surprising.
+
+“He is one of our national glories,” Madams de S-- cried out, with
+sudden vehemence. “All the world listens to him.”
+
+“I don’t know these ladies,” said Razumov loudly rising from his chair.
+
+“What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I understand that she was
+talking to you here, in the garden, the other day.”
+
+“Yes, in the garden,” said Razumov gloomily. Then, with an effort, “She
+made herself known to me.”
+
+“And then ran away from us all,” Madame de S-- continued, with ghastly
+vivacity. “After coming to the very door! What a peculiar proceeding!
+Well, I have been a shy little provincial girl at one time. Yes,
+Razumov” (she fell into this familiarity intentionally, with an
+appalling grimace of graciousness. Razumov gave a perceptible start),
+“yes, that’s my origin. A simple provincial family.
+
+“You are a marvel,” Peter Ivanovich uttered.
+
+But it was to Razumov that she gave her death’s-head smile. Her tone was
+quite imperious.
+
+“You must bring the wild young thing here. She is wanted. I reckon upon
+your success--mind!”
+
+“She is not a wild young thing,” muttered Razumov, in a surly voice.
+
+“Well, then--that’s all the same. She may be one of these young
+conceited democrats. Do you know what I think? I think she is very much
+like you in character. There is a smouldering fire of scorn in you. You
+are darkly self-sufficient, but I can see your very soul.”
+
+Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which, missing Razumov, gave
+him an absurd notion that she was looking at something which was visible
+to her behind him. He cursed himself for an impressionable fool, and
+asked with forced calmness--
+
+“What is it you see? Anything resembling me?”
+
+She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.
+
+“Some sort of phantom in my image?” pursued Razumov slowly. “For, I
+suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There are
+phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.”
+
+The tenseness of Madame de S--‘s stare had relaxed, and now she looked
+at Razumov in a silence that became disconcerting.
+
+“I myself have had an experience,” he stammered out, as if compelled.
+“I’ve seen a phantom once.” The unnaturally red lips moved to frame a
+question harshly.
+
+“Of a dead person?”
+
+“No. Living.”
+
+“A friend?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“An enemy?”
+
+“I hated him.”
+
+“Ah! It was not a woman, then?”
+
+“A woman!” repeated Razumov, his eyes looking straight into the eyes
+of Madame de S--. “Why should it have been a woman? And why this
+conclusion? Why should I not have been able to hate a woman?”
+
+As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman was new to him. At that
+moment he hated Madame de S--. But it was not exactly hate. It was more
+like the abhorrence that may be caused by a wooden or plaster figure of
+a repulsive kind. She moved no more than if she were such a figure; even
+her eyes, whose unwinking stare plunged into his own, though shining,
+were lifeless, as though they were as artificial as her teeth. For the
+first time Razumov became aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was
+it nauseated him exceedingly. Again Peter Ivanovitch tapped him slightly
+on the shoulder. Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away when
+he received the unexpected favour of a bony, inanimate hand extended to
+him, with the two words in hoarse French--
+
+“_Au revoir!_”
+
+He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the room, escorted by the great
+man, who made him go out first. The voice from the sofa cried after
+them--
+
+“You remain here, _Pierre_.”
+
+“Certainly, _ma chere amie_.”
+
+But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the door behind him. The
+landing was prolonged into a bare corridor, right and left, desolate
+perspectives of white and gold decoration without a strip of carpet. The
+very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and
+a solitary speck reposing on the balustrade of white marble--the silk
+top-hat of the great feminist--asserted itself extremely, black and
+glossy in all that crude whiteness.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch escorted the visitor without opening his lips. Even
+when they had reached the head of the stairs Peter Ivanovitch did not
+break the silence. Razumov’s impulse to continue down the flight and out
+of the house without as much as a nod abandoned him suddenly. He stopped
+on the first step and leaned his back against the wall. Below him the
+great hall with its chequered floor of black and white seemed absurdly
+large and like some public place where a great power of resonance awaits
+the provocation of footfalls and voices. As if afraid of awakening the
+loud echoes of that empty house, Razumov adopted a low tone.
+
+“I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist.”
+
+Peter Ivanovitch shook his head slightly, very serious.
+
+“Or spend my time in spiritual ecstasies or sublime meditations upon the
+gospel of feminism,” continued Razumov. “I made my way here for my share
+of action--action, most respected Peter Ivanovitch! It was not the great
+European writer who attracted me, here, to this odious town of liberty.
+It was somebody much greater. It was the idea of the chief which
+attracted me. There are starving young men in Russia who believe in
+you so much that it seems the only thing that keeps them alive in their
+misery. Think of that, Peter Ivanovitch! No! But only think of that!”
+
+The great man, thus entreated, perfectly motionless and silent, was the
+very image of patient, placid respectability.
+
+“Of course I don’t speak of the people. They are brutes,” added Razumov,
+in the same subdued but forcible tone. At this, a protesting murmur
+issued from the “heroic fugitive’s” beard. A murmur of authority.
+
+“Say--children.”
+
+“No! Brutes!” Razumov insisted bluntly.
+
+“But they are sound, they are innocent,” the great man pleaded in a
+whisper.
+
+“As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough.” Razumov raised his
+voice at last. “And you can’t deny the natural innocence of a brute.
+But what’s the use of disputing about names? You just try to give these
+children the power and stature of men and see what they will be like.
+You just give it to them and see.... But never mind. I tell you,
+Peter Ivanovitch, that half a dozen young men do not come together
+nowadays in a shabby student’s room without your name being whispered,
+not as a leader of thought, but as a centre of revolutionary
+energies--the centre of action. What else has drawn me near you, do you
+think? It is not what all the world knows of you, surely. It’s precisely
+what the world at large does not know. I was irresistibly drawn-let us
+say impelled, yes, impelled; or, rather, compelled, driven--driven,”
+ repented Razumov loudly, and ceased, as if startled by the hollow
+reverberation of the word “driven” along two bare corridors and in the
+great empty hall.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch did not seem startled in the least. The young man
+could not control a dry, uneasy laugh. The great revolutionist remained
+unmoved with an effect of commonplace, homely superiority.
+
+“Curse him,” said Razumov to himself, “he is waiting behind his
+spectacles for me to give myself away.” Then aloud, with a satanic
+enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the
+great man--
+
+“Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew--no, which
+_drove_ me towards you! The irresistible force.”
+
+He did not feel any desire to laugh now. This time Peter Ivanovitch
+moved his head sideways, knowingly, as much as to say, “Don’t I?” This
+expressive movement was almost imperceptible. Razumov went on in secret
+derision--
+
+“All these days you have been trying to read me, Peter Ivanovitch. That
+is natural. I have perceived it and I have been frank. Perhaps you may
+think I have not been very expansive? But with a man like you it was not
+needed; it would have looked like an impertinence, perhaps. And besides,
+we Russians are prone to talk too much as a rule. I have always felt
+that. And yet, as a nation, we are dumb. I assure you that I am not
+likely to talk to you so much again--ha! ha!--”
+
+Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a little nearer to the
+great man.
+
+“You have been condescending enough. I quite understood it was to lead
+me on. You must render me the justice that I have not tried to please. I
+have been impelled, compelled, or rather sent--let us say sent--towards
+you for a work that no one but myself can do. You would call it a
+harmless delusion: a ridiculous delusion at which you don’t even smile.
+It is absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember
+these words, I hope. Enough of this. Here I stand before you-confessed!
+But one thing more I must add to complete it: a mere blind tool I can
+never consent to be.”
+
+Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared for, he was not prepared
+to have both his hands seized in the great man’s grasp. The swiftness of
+the movement was aggressive enough to startle. The burly feminist could
+not have been quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov treacherously
+up on the landing and bundle him behind one of the numerous closed
+doors near by. This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his hands being
+released after a darkly eloquent squeeze, he smiled, with a beating
+heart, straight at the beard and the spectacles hiding that impenetrable
+man.
+
+He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his handwriting), “I won’t
+move from here till he either speaks or turns away. This is a duel.”
+ Many seconds passed without a sign or sound.
+
+“Yes, yes,” the great man said hurriedly, in subdued tones, as if the
+whole thing had been a stolen, breathless interview. “Exactly. Come
+to see us here in a few days. This must be gone into deeply--deeply,
+between you and me. Quite to the bottom. To the...And, by the by,
+you must bring along Natalia Victorovna--you know, the Haldin girl....
+
+“Am I to take this as my first instruction from you?” inquired Razumov
+stiffly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new attitude.
+
+“Ah! h’m! You are naturally the proper person--_la personne indiquee_.
+Every one shall be wanted presently. Every one.”
+
+He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who had lowered his eyes.
+
+“The moment of action approaches,” he murmured.
+
+Razumov did not look up. He did not move till he heard the door of the
+drawing-room close behind the greatest of feminists returning to his
+painted Egeria. Then he walked down slowly into the hall. The door stood
+open, and the shadow of the house was lying aslant over the greatest
+part of the terrace. While crossing it slowly, he lifted his hat and
+wiped his damp forehead, expelling his breath with force to get rid of
+the last vestiges of the air he had been breathing inside. He looked at
+the palms of his hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.
+
+He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an independent
+sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole person very
+distinctly indeed. “This is curious,” he thought. After a while he
+formulated his opinion of it in the mental ejaculation: “Beastly!”
+ This disgust vanished before a marked uneasiness. “This is an effect of
+nervous exhaustion,” he reflected with weary sagacity. “How am I to
+go on day after day if I have no more power of resistance--moral
+resistance?”
+
+He followed the path at the foot of the terrace. “Moral resistance,
+moral resistance;” he kept on repeating these words mentally. Moral
+endurance. Yes, that was the necessity of the situation. An immense
+longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the
+town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept
+everything clean out of his mind for a moment. “Is it possible that I am
+but a weak creature after all?” he asked himself, in sudden alarm. “Eh!
+What’s that?”
+
+He gave a start as if awakened from a dream. He even swayed a little
+before recovering himself.
+
+“Ah! You stole away from us quietly to walk about here,” he said.
+
+The lady companion stood before him, but how she came there he had not
+the slightest idea. Her folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.
+
+“I have been unconscious as I walked, it’s a positive fact,” said
+Razumov to himself in wonder. He raised his hat with marked civility.
+
+The sallow woman blushed duskily. She had her invariably scared
+expression, as if somebody had just disclosed to her some terrible news.
+But she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without timidity. “She is
+incredibly shabby,” he thought. In the sunlight her black costume looked
+greenish, with here and there threadbare patches where the stuff seemed
+decomposed by age into a velvety, black, furry state. Her very hair and
+eyebrows looked shabby. Razumov wondered whether she were sixty years
+old. Her figure, though, was young enough. He observed that she did not
+appear starved, but rather as if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps
+and leavings of plates.
+
+Razumov smiled amiably and moved out of her way. She turned her head to
+keep her scared eyes on him.
+
+“I know what you have been told in there,” she affirmed, without
+preliminaries. Her tone, in contrast with her manner, had an
+unexpectedly assured character which put Razumov at his ease.
+
+“Do you? You must have heard all sorts of talk on many occasions in
+there.”
+
+She varied her phrase, with the same incongruous effect of positiveness.
+
+“I know to a certainty what you have been told to do.”
+
+“Really?” Razumov shrugged his shoulders a little. He was about to pass
+on with a bow, when a sudden thought struck him. “Yes. To be sure! In
+your confidential position you are aware of many things,” he murmured,
+looking at the cat.
+
+That animal got a momentary convulsive hug from the lady companion.
+
+“Everything was disclosed to me a long time ago,” she said.
+
+“Everything,” Razumov repeated absently.
+
+“Peter Ivanovitch is an awful despot,” she jerked out.
+
+Razumov went on studying the stripes on the grey fur of the cat.
+
+“An iron will is an integral part of such a temperament. How else could
+he be a leader? And I think that you are mistaken in--”
+
+“There!” she cried. “You tell me that I am mistaken. But I tell you all
+the same that he cares for no one.” She jerked her head up. “Don’t you
+bring that girl here. That’s what you have been told to do--to bring
+that girl here. Listen to me; you had better tie a stone round her neck
+and throw her into the lake.”
+
+Razumov had a sensation of chill and gloom, as if a heavy cloud had
+passed over the sun.
+
+“The girl?” he said. “What have I to do with her?”
+
+“But you have been told to bring Nathalie Haldin here. Am I not right?
+Of course I am right. I was not in the room, but I know. I know Peter
+Ivanovitch sufficiently well. He is a great man. Great men are horrible.
+Well, that’s it. Have nothing to do with her. That’s the best you
+can do, unless you want her to become like me--disillusioned!
+Disillusioned!”
+
+“Like you,” repeated Razumov, glaring at her face, as devoid of all
+comeliness of feature and complexion as the most miserable beggar is
+of money. He smiled, still feeling chilly: a peculiar sensation which
+annoyed him. “Disillusioned as to Peter Ivanovitch! Is that all you have
+lost?”
+
+She declared, looking frightened, but with immense conviction, “Peter
+Ivanovitch stands for everything.” Then she added, in another tone,
+“Keep the girl away from this house.”
+
+“And are you absolutely inciting me to disobey Peter Ivanovitch just
+because--because you are disillusioned?”
+
+She began to blink.
+
+“Directly I saw you for the first time I was comforted. You took your
+hat off to me. You looked as if one could trust you. Oh!”
+
+She shrank before Razumov’s savage snarl of, “I have heard something
+like this before.”
+
+She was so confounded that she could do nothing but blink for a long
+time.
+
+“It was your humane manner,” she explained plaintively. “I have been
+starving for, I won’t say kindness, but just for a little civility, for
+I don’t know how long. And now you are angry....”
+
+“But no, on the contrary,” he protested. “I am very glad you trust me.
+It’s possible that later on I may...”
+
+“Yes, if you were to get ill,” she interrupted eagerly, “or meet some
+bitter trouble, you would find I am not a useless fool. You have only to
+let me know. I will come to you. I will indeed. And I will stick to you.
+Misery and I are old acquaintances--but this life here is worse than
+starving.”
+
+She paused anxiously, then in a voice for the first time sounding really
+timid, she added--
+
+“Or if you were engaged in some dangerous work. Sometimes a humble
+companion--I would not want to know anything. I would follow you with
+joy. I could carry out orders. I have the courage.”
+
+Razumov looked attentively at the scared round eyes, at the withered,
+sallow, round cheeks. They were quivering about the corners of the
+mouth.
+
+“She wants to escape from here,” he thought.
+
+“Suppose I were to tell you that I am engaged in dangerous work?” he
+uttered slowly.
+
+She pressed the cat to her threadbare bosom with a breathless
+exclamation. “Ah!” Then not much above a whisper: “Under Peter
+Ivanovitch?”
+
+“No, not under Peter Ivanovitch.”
+
+He read admiration in her eyes, and made an effort to smile.
+
+“Then--alone?”
+
+He held up his closed hand with the index raised. “Like this finger,” he
+said.
+
+She was trembling slightly. But it occurred to Razumov that they might
+have been observed from the house, and he became anxious to be gone. She
+blinked, raising up to him her puckered face, and seemed to beg mutely
+to be told something more, to be given a word of encouragement for her
+starving, grotesque, and pathetic devotion.
+
+“Can we be seen from the house?” asked Razumov confidentially.
+
+She answered, without showing the slightest surprise at the question--
+
+“No, we can’t, on account of this end of the stables.” And she added,
+with an acuteness which surprised Razumov, “But anybody looking out of
+an upstairs window would know that you have not passed through the gates
+yet.”
+
+“Who’s likely to spy out of the window?” queried Razumov. “Peter
+Ivanovitch?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“Why should he trouble his head?”
+
+“He expects somebody this afternoon.”
+
+“You know the person?”
+
+“There’s more than one.”
+
+She had lowered her eyelids. Razumov looked at her curiously.
+
+“Of course. You hear everything they say.”
+
+She murmured without any animosity--
+
+“So do the tables and chairs.”
+
+He understood that the bitterness accumulated in the heart of that
+helpless creature had got into her veins, and, like some subtle poison,
+had decomposed her fidelity to that hateful pair. It was a great piece
+of luck for him, he reflected; because women are seldom venal after the
+manner of men, who can be bought for material considerations. She would
+be a good ally, though it was not likely that she was allowed to hear
+as much as the tables and chairs of the Chateau Borel. That could not be
+expected. But still.... And, at any rate, she could be made to talk.
+
+When she looked up her eyes met the fixed stare of Razumov, who began to
+speak at once.
+
+“Well, well, dear...but upon my word, I haven’t the pleasure of
+knowing your name yet. Isn’t it strange?”
+
+For the first time she made a movement of the shoulders.
+
+“Is it strange? No one is told my name. No one cares. No one talks to
+me, no one writes to me. My parents don’t even know if I’m alive. I have
+no use for a name, and I have almost forgotten it myself.”
+
+Razumov murmured gravely, “Yes, but still...”
+
+She went on much slower, with indifference--
+
+“You may call me Tekla, then. My poor Andrei called me so. I was devoted
+to him. He lived in wretchedness and suffering, and died in misery. That
+is the lot of all us Russians, nameless Russians. There is nothing else
+for us, and no hope anywhere, unless...”
+
+“Unless what?”
+
+“Unless all these people with names are done away with,” she finished,
+blinking and pursing up her lips.
+
+“It will be easier to call you Tekla, as you direct me,” said
+Razumov, “if you consent to call me Kirylo, when we are talking like
+this--quietly--only you and me.”
+
+And he said to himself, “Here’s a being who must be terribly afraid of
+the world, else she would have run away from this situation before.”
+ Then he reflected that the mere fact of leaving the great man abruptly
+would make her a suspect. She could expect no support or countenance
+from anyone. This revolutionist was not fit for an independent
+existence.
+
+She moved with him a few steps, blinking and nursing the cat with a
+small balancing movement of her arms.
+
+“Yes--only you and I. That’s how I was with my poor Andrei, only he was
+dying, killed by these official brutes--while you! You are strong. You
+kill the monsters. You have done a great deed. Peter Ivanovitch himself
+must consider you. Well--don’t forget me--especially if you are going
+back to work in Russia. I could follow you, carrying anything that
+was wanted--at a distance, you know. Or I could watch for hours at the
+corner of a street if necessary,--in wet or snow--yes, I could--all day
+long. Or I could write for you dangerous documents, lists of names or
+instructions, so that in case of mischance the handwriting could not
+compromise you. And you need not be afraid if they were to catch me. I
+would know how to keep dumb. We women are not so easily daunted by pain.
+I heard Peter Ivanovitch say it is our blunt nerves or something. We can
+stand it better. And it’s true; I would just as soon bite my tongue out
+and throw it at them as not. What’s the good of speech to me? Who would
+ever want to hear what I could say? Ever since I closed the eyes of my
+poor Andrei I haven’t met a man who seemed to care for the sound of
+my voice. I should never have spoken to you if the very first time you
+appeared here you had not taken notice of me so nicely. I could not help
+speaking of you to that charming dear girl. Oh, the sweet creature! And
+strong! One can see that at once. If you have a heart don’t let her set
+her foot in here. Good-bye!”
+
+Razumov caught her by the arm. Her emotion at being thus seized
+manifested itself by a short struggle, after which she stood still, not
+looking at him.
+
+“But you can tell me,” he spoke in her ear, “why they--these people in
+that house there--are so anxious to get hold of her?”
+
+She freed herself to turn upon him, as if made angry by the question.
+
+“Don’t you understand that Peter Ivanovitch must direct, inspire,
+influence? It is the breath of his life. There can never be too many
+disciples. He can’t bear thinking of anyone escaping him. And a woman,
+too! There is nothing to be done without women, he says. He has written
+it. He--”
+
+The young man was staring at her passion when she broke off suddenly and
+ran away behind the stable.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Razumov, thus left to himself, took the direction of the gate. But on
+this day of many conversations, he discovered that very probably he
+could not leave the grounds without having to hold another one.
+
+Stepping in view from beyond the lodge appeared the expected visitors
+of Peter Ivanovitch: a small party composed of two men and a woman. They
+noticed him too, immediately, and stopped short as if to consult. But in
+a moment the woman, moving aside, motioned with her arm to the two men,
+who, leaving the drive at once, struck across the large neglected
+lawn, or rather grass-plot, and made directly for the house. The woman
+remained on the path waiting for Razumov’s approach. She had recognized
+him. He, too, had recognized her at the first glance. He had been made
+known to her at Zurich, where he had broken his journey while on his
+way from Dresden. They had been much together for the three days of his
+stay.
+
+She was wearing the very same costume in which he had seen her first. A
+blouse of crimson silk made her noticeable at a distance. With that
+she wore a short brown skirt and a leather belt. Her complexion was
+the colour of coffee and milk, but very clear; her eyes black and
+glittering, her figure erect. A lot of thick hair, nearly white, was
+done up loosely under a dusty Tyrolese hat of dark cloth, which seemed
+to have lost some of its trimmings.
+
+The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov,
+after approaching her close, felt obliged to smile. She greeted him with
+a manly hand-grasp.
+
+“What! Are you going away?” she exclaimed. “How is that, Razumov?”
+
+“I am going away because I haven’t been asked to stay,” Razumov
+answered, returning the pressure of her hand with much less force than
+she had put into it.
+
+She jerked her head sideways like one who understands. Meantime
+Razumov’s eyes had strayed after the two men. They were crossing the
+grass-plot obliquely, without haste. The shorter of the two was buttoned
+up in a narrow overcoat of some thin grey material, which came nearly
+to his heels. His companion, much taller and broader, wore a short,
+close-fitting jacket and tight trousers tucked into shabby top-boots.
+
+The woman, who had sent them out of Razumov’s way apparently, spoke in a
+businesslike voice.
+
+“I had to come rushing from Zurich on purpose to meet the train and take
+these two along here to see Peter Ivanovitch. I’ve just managed it.”
+
+“Ah! indeed,” Razumov said perfunctorily, and very vexed at her staying
+behind to talk to him “From Zurich--yes, of course. And these two, they
+come from....”
+
+She interrupted, without emphasis--
+
+“From quite another direction. From a distance, too. A considerable
+distance.”
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. The two men from a distance, after
+having reached the wall of the terrace, disappeared suddenly at its foot
+as if the earth had opened to swallow them up.
+
+“Oh, well, they have just come from America.” The woman in the crimson
+blouse shrugged her shoulders too a little before making that statement.
+“The time is drawing near,” she interjected, as if speaking to herself.
+“I did not tell them who you were. Yakovlitch would have wanted to
+embrace you.”
+
+“Is that he with the wisp of hair hanging from his chin, in the long
+coat?”
+
+“You’ve guessed aright. That’s Yakovlitch.”
+
+“And they could not find their way here from the station without you
+coming on purpose from Zurich to show it to them? Verily, without women
+we can do nothing. So it stands written, and apparently so it is.”
+
+He was conscious of an immense lassitude under his effort to be
+sarcastic. And he could see that she had detected it with those steady,
+brilliant black eyes.
+
+“What is the matter with you?”
+
+“I don’t know. Nothing. I’ve had a devil of a day.”
+
+She waited, with her black eyes fixed on his face. Then--
+
+“What of that? You men are so impressionable and self-conscious. One day
+is like another, hard, hard--and there’s an end of it, till the great
+day comes. I came over for a very good reason. They wrote to warn Peter
+Ivanovitch of their arrival. But where from? Only from Cherbourg on a
+bit of ship’s notepaper. Anybody could have done that. Yakovlitch has
+lived for years and years in America. I am the only one at hand who had
+known him well in the old days. I knew him very well indeed. So Peter
+Ivanovitch telegraphed, asking me to come. It’s natural enough, is it
+not?”
+
+“You came to vouch for his identity?” inquired Razumov.
+
+“Yes. Something of the kind. Fifteen years of a life like his make
+changes in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think
+of Yakovlitch before he went to America--”
+
+The softness of the low tone caused Razumov to glance at her sideways.
+She sighed; her black eyes were looking away; she had plunged the
+fingers of her right hand deep into the mass of nearly white hair, and
+stirred them there absently. When she withdrew her hand the little hat
+perched on the top of her head remained slightly tilted, with a queer
+inquisitive effect, contrasting strongly with the reminiscent murmur
+that escaped her.
+
+“We were not in our first youth even then. But a man is a child always.”
+
+Razumov thought suddenly, “They have been living together.” Then aloud--
+
+“Why didn’t you follow him to America?” he asked point-blank.
+
+She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
+
+“Don’t you remember what was going on fifteen years ago? It was a time
+of activity. The Revolution has its history by this time. You are in
+it and yet you don’t seem to know it. Yakovlitch went away then on a
+mission; I went back to Russia. It had to be so. Afterwards there was
+nothing for him to come back to.”
+
+“Ah! indeed,” muttered Razumov, with affected surprise. “Nothing!”
+
+“What are you trying to insinuate” she exclaimed quickly. “Well, and
+what then if he did get discouraged a little....”
+
+“He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee hanging from his chin. A
+regular Uncle Sam,” growled Razumov. “Well, and you? You who went to
+Russia? You did not get discouraged.”
+
+“Never mind. Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be doubted. He, at any rate,
+is the right sort.”
+
+Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon Razumov while she spoke,
+and for a moment afterwards.
+
+“Pardon me,” Razumov inquired coldly, “but does it mean that you, for
+instance, think that I am not the right sort?”
+
+She made no protest, gave no sign of having heard the question;
+she continued looking at him in a manner which he judged not to be
+absolutely unfriendly. In Zurich when he passed through she had taken
+him under her charge, in a way, and was with him from morning till night
+during his stay of two days. She took him round to see several people.
+At first she talked to him a great deal and rather unreservedly, but
+always avoiding all reference to herself; towards the middle of the
+second day she fell silent, attending him zealously as before, and even
+seeing him off at the railway station, where she pressed his hand firmly
+through the lowered carriage window, and, stepping back without a word,
+waited till the train moved. He had noticed that she was treated with
+quiet regard. He knew nothing of her parentage, nothing of her private
+history or political record; he judged her from his own private point of
+view, as being a distinct danger in his path. “Judged” is not perhaps
+the right word. It was more of a feeling, the summing up of slight
+impressions aided by the discovery that he could not despise her as he
+despised all the others. He had not expected to see her again so soon.
+
+No, decidedly; her expression was not unfriendly. Yet he perceived an
+acceleration in the beat of his heart. The conversation could not be
+abandoned at that point. He went on in accents of scrupulous inquiry--
+
+“Is it perhaps because I don’t seem to accept blindly every development
+of the general doctrine--such for instance as the feminism of our great
+Peter Ivanovitch? If that is what makes me suspect, then I can only say
+I would scorn to be a slave even to an idea.”
+
+She had been looking at him all the time, not as a listener looks
+at one, but as if the words he chose to say were only of secondary
+interest. When he finished she slipped her hand, by a sudden and decided
+movement, under his arm and impelled him gently towards the gate of the
+grounds. He felt her firmness and obeyed the impulsion at once, just as
+the other two men had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the wave
+of her hand.
+
+They made a few steps like this.
+
+“No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all right,” she said. “You may be
+valuable--very valuable. What’s the matter with you is that you don’t
+like us.”
+
+She released him. He met her with a frosty smile.
+
+“Am I expected then to have love as well as convictions?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“You know very well what I mean. People have been thinking you not quite
+whole-hearted. I have heard that opinion from one side and another. But
+I have understood you at the end of the first day....”
+
+Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
+
+“I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault here.”
+
+“What phrases he uses!” she exclaimed parenthetically. “Ah! Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and
+afraid of trifles. Moreover, you had no training. What you want is to
+be taken in hand by some woman. I am sorry I am not staying here a few
+days. I am going back to Zurich to-morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch
+with me most likely.”
+
+This information relieved Razumov.
+
+“I am sorry too,” he said. “But, all the same, I don’t think you
+understand me.”
+
+He breathed more freely; she did not protest, but asked, “And how did
+you get on with Peter Ivanovitch? You have seen a good deal of each
+other. How is it between you two?”
+
+Not knowing what answer to make, the young man inclined his head slowly.
+
+Her lips had been parted in expectation. She pressed them together, and
+seemed to reflect.
+
+“That’s all right.”
+
+This had a sound of finality, but she did not leave him. It was
+impossible to guess what she had in her mind. Razumov muttered--
+
+“It is not of me that you should have asked that question. In a moment
+you shall see Peter Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
+naturally. He will be curious to know what has delayed you so long in
+this garden.”
+
+“No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something to say to me. Several
+things. He may even speak of you--question me. Peter Ivanovitch is
+inclined to trust me generally.”
+
+“Question you? That’s very likely.”
+
+She smiled, half serious.
+
+“Well--and what shall I say to him?”
+
+“I don’t know. You may tell him of your discovery.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“Why--my lack of love for....”
+
+
+“Oh! That’s between ourselves,” she interrupted, it was hard to say
+whether in jest or earnest.
+
+“I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch something in my favour,”
+ said Razumov, with grim playfulness. “Well, then, you can tell him that
+I am very much in earnest about my mission. I mean to succeed.”
+
+“You have been given a mission!” she exclaimed quickly.
+
+“It amounts to that. I have been told to bring about a certain event.”
+
+She looked at him searchingly.
+
+“A mission,” she repeated, very grave and interested all at once. “What
+sort of mission?”
+
+“Something in the nature of propaganda work.”
+
+“Ah! Far away from here?”
+
+“No. Not very far,” said Razumov, restraining a sudden desire to laugh,
+although he did not feel joyous in the least.
+
+“So!” she said thoughtfully. “Well, I am not asking questions. It’s
+sufficient that Peter Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
+Everything is bound to come right in the end.”
+
+“You think so?”
+
+“I don’t think, young man. I just simply believe it.”
+
+“And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that faith?”
+
+She did not answer the question, and they stood idle, silent, as if
+reluctant to part with each other.
+
+“That’s just like a man,” she murmured at last. “As if it were possible
+to tell how a belief comes to one.” Her thin Mephistophelian eyebrows
+moved a little. “Truly there are millions of people in Russia who would
+envy the life of dogs in this country. It is a horror and a shame to
+confess this even between ourselves. One must believe for very pity.
+This can’t go on. No! It can’t go on. For twenty years I have been
+coming and going, looking neither to the left nor to the right....
+What are you smiling to yourself for? You are only at the beginning. You
+have begun well, but you just wait till you have trodden every particle
+of yourself under your feet in your comings and goings. For that is
+what it comes to. You’ve got to trample down every particle of your own
+feelings; for stop you cannot, you must not. I have been young, too--but
+perhaps you think that I am complaining-eh?”
+
+“I don’t think anything of the sort,” protested Razumov indifferently.
+
+“I dare say you don’t, you dear superior creature. You don’t care.”
+
+She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair on the left side,
+and that brusque movement had the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat
+straight on her head. She frowned under it without animosity, in the
+manner of an investigator. Razumov averted his face carelessly.
+
+“You men are all alike. You mistake luck for merit. You do it in good
+faith too! I would not be too hard on you. It’s masculine nature.
+You men are ridiculously pitiful in your aptitude to cherish childish
+illusions down to the very grave. There are a lot of us who have been at
+work for fifteen years--I mean constantly--trying one way after another,
+underground and above ground, looking neither to the right nor to the
+left! I can talk about it. I have been one of these that never
+rested.... There! What’s the use of talking.... Look at my grey hairs!
+And here two babies come along--I mean you and Haldin--you come along
+and manage to strike a blow at the very first try.”
+
+At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and energetic lips of the
+woman revolutionist, Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of the
+irrevocable. But in all the months which had passed over his head he
+had become hardened to the experience. The consciousness was no longer
+accompanied by the blank dismay and the blind anger of the early days.
+He had argued himself into new beliefs; and he had made for himself a
+mental atmosphere of gloomy and sardonic reverie, a sort of murky
+medium through which the event appeared like a featureless shadow having
+vaguely the shape of a man; a shape extremely familiar, yet utterly
+inexpressive, except for its air of discreet waiting in the dusk. It was
+not alarming.
+
+“What was he like?” the woman revolutionist asked unexpectedly.
+
+“What was he like?” echoed Razumov, making a painful effort not to turn
+upon her savagely. But he relieved himself by laughing a little while he
+stole a glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. This reception of
+her inquiry disturbed her.
+
+“How like a woman,” he went on. “What is the good of concerning yourself
+with his appearance? Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all feminine
+influences now.”
+
+A frown, making three folds at the root of her nose, accentuated the
+Mephistophelian slant of her eyebrows.
+
+“You suffer, Razumov,” she suggested, in her low, confident voice.
+
+“What nonsense!” Razumov faced the woman fairly. “But now I think of it,
+I am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the
+one over there--Madame de S--, you know. Formerly the dead were allowed
+to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old
+harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true that
+they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But couldn’t
+the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity? Couldn’t
+she conjure him up for you?”--he jested like a man in pain.
+
+Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
+wearily, “Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea
+for us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov.”
+
+“You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
+some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
+with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the
+ghost of it--the cold ghost of it--still lingering in the temple. But as
+to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
+We mustn’t, We can’t. The other day I read in some paper or other an
+alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.
+It impresses the world. It’s our prestige.”
+
+“He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;” the woman in the
+crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
+her black eyes never left Razumov’s face. “And what for, pray? Simply
+because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his
+petty masculine standards. You might think he was one of these nervous
+sensitives that come to a bad end. And yet,” she went on, after a short,
+reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, “and yet I
+have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of
+character, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed--you are.”
+
+The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their
+eyes met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared
+at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar,
+quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to
+him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He
+was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had
+a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any
+instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some
+momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody’s
+lips. As long as he managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down
+his irritability there was nothing to fear. The only condition of
+success and safety was indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
+
+He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were
+actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary
+plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime.
+Silently he indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral
+and mental remoteness. He did not even smile when he heard her repeat
+the words--
+
+“Yes! A strong character.”
+
+He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not
+thinking of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of
+freedom.
+
+“If you don’t look out,” he mumbled, still looking away, “you shall
+certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea.”
+
+She was not to be shaken off in such a way. As a matter of fact he had
+not expected to succeed.
+
+“Never mind, it will be no great loss. I mean the missing of her tea and
+only the ghost of it at that. As to the lady, you must understand that
+she has her positive uses. See _that_, Razumov.”
+
+He turned his head at this imperative appeal and saw the woman
+revolutionist making the motions of counting money into the palm of her
+hand.
+
+“That’s what it is. You see?”
+
+Razumov uttered a slow “I see,” and returned to his prisoner-like gazing
+upon the neat and shady road.
+
+“Material means must be obtained in some way, and this is easier than
+breaking into banks. More certain too. There! I am joking.... What is
+he muttering to himself now?” she cried under her breath.
+
+“My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch’s devoted self-sacrifice, that’s all.
+It’s enough to make one sick.”
+
+“Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature. Sick! Makes him sick! And what
+do you know of the truth of it? There’s no looking into the secrets of
+the heart. Peter Ivanovitch knew her years ago, in his worldly days,
+when he was a young officer in the Guards. It is not for us to judge
+an inspired person. That’s where you men have an advantage. You are
+inspired sometimes both in thought and action. I have always admitted
+that when you _are_ inspired, when you manage to throw off your
+masculine cowardice and prudishness you are not to be equalled by us.
+Only, how seldom.... Whereas the silliest woman can always be made
+of use. And why? Because we have passion, unappeasable passion.... I
+should like to know what he is smiling at?”
+
+“I am not smiling,” protested Razumov gloomily.
+
+“Well! How is one to call it? You made some sort of face. Yes, I know!
+You men can love here and hate there and desire something or other--and
+you make a great to-do about it, and you call it passion! Yes! While
+it lasts. But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these
+very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That’s why we can’t be
+bribed off so easily as you men. In life, you see, there is not much
+choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us,
+painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot.”
+
+She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact tone. Razumov’s attention
+had wandered away on a track of its own--outside the bars of the
+gate--but not out of earshot. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his
+coat.
+
+“Rot or burn! Powerfully stated. Painted or unpainted. Very vigorous.
+Painted or...Do tell me--she would be infernally jealous of him,
+wouldn’t she?”
+
+“Who? What? The Baroness? Eleanor Maximovna? Jealous of Peter
+Ivanovitch? Heavens! Are these the questions the man’s mind is running
+on? Such a thing is not to be thought of.”
+
+“Why? Can’t a wealthy old woman be jealous? Or, are they all pure
+spirits together?”
+
+“But what put it into your head to ask such a question?” she wondered.
+
+“Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like.”
+
+“I don’t like,” she retorted at once. “It is not the time to be
+frivolous. What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps,
+you are only playing a part.”
+
+Razumov had felt that woman’s observation of him like a physical
+contact, like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he
+received the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a
+closer grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying
+himself.
+
+“Playing a Part,” he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. “It
+must be done very badly since you see through the assumption.”
+
+She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin
+black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He
+added hardly audibly--
+
+“You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us.”
+
+“Who is doing it?” she snapped out.
+
+“Who? Everybody,” he said impatiently. “You are a materialist, aren’t
+you?”
+
+“Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense.”
+
+“But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: ‘Man is a digestive
+tube.’ I imagine now....”
+
+“I spit on him.”
+
+“What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can’t ignore the importance of a
+good digestion. The joy of life--you know the joy of life?--depends on
+a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism,
+breeds black fancies and thoughts of death. These are facts ascertained
+by physiologists. Well, I assure you that ever since I came over from
+Russia I have been stuffed with indigestible foreign concoctions of the
+most nauseating kind--pah!”
+
+“You are joking,” she murmured incredulously. He assented in a detached
+way.
+
+“Yes. It is all a joke. It’s hardly worth while talking to a man like
+me. Yet for that very reason men have been known to take their own
+life.”
+
+“On the contrary, I think it is worth while talking to you.”
+
+He kept her in the corner of his eye. She seemed to be thinking out some
+scathing retort, but ended by only shrugging her shoulders slightly.
+
+“Shallow talk! I suppose one must pardon this weakness in you,” she
+said, putting a special accent on the last word. There was something
+anxious in her indulgent conclusion.
+
+Razumov noted the slightest shades in this conversation, which he had
+not expected, for which he was not prepared. That was it. “I was not
+prepared,” he said to himself. “It has taken me unawares.” It seemed to
+him that if he only could allow himself to pant openly like a dog for a
+time this oppression would pass away. “I shall never be found prepared,”
+ he thought, with despair. He laughed a little, saying as lightly as he
+could--
+
+“Thanks. I don’t ask for mercy.” Then affecting a playful uneasiness,
+“But aren’t you afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of plotting
+something unauthorized together by the gate here?”
+
+“No, I am not afraid. You are quite safe from suspicions while you are
+with me, my dear young man.” The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
+out. “Peter Ivanovitch trusts me,” she went on, quite austerely. “He
+takes my advice. I am his right hand, as it were, in certain most
+important things.... That amuses you what? Do you think I am
+boasting?”
+
+“God forbid. I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch
+seems to have solved the woman question pretty completely.”
+
+Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone. All
+day long he had been saying the wrong things. It was folly, worse than
+folly. It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his
+will. Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the
+promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a
+great store of secret knowledge and so much influence? Why give her this
+puzzling impression? But she did not seem inimical. There was no anger
+in her voice. It was strangely speculative.
+
+“One does not know what to think, Razumov. You must have bitten
+something bitter in your cradle.” Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
+
+“H’m! Something bitter? That’s an explanation,” he muttered. “Only it
+was much later. And don’t you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I
+come from the same cradle?”
+
+The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had
+experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman
+revolutionist murmured, after a pause--
+
+“You mean--Russia?”
+
+He disdained even to nod. She seemed softened, her black eyes very
+still, as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all
+its tender associations. But suddenly she knitted her brows in a
+Mephistophelian frown.
+
+“Yes. Perhaps no wonder, then. Yes. One lies there lapped up in evils,
+watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
+They must be driven away, destroyed utterly. In regard of that task
+nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful.
+That’s how I came to feel in the end. The great thing is not to quarrel
+amongst ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles. Remember
+that, Razumov.”
+
+Razumov was not listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched
+in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his
+scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him
+that now they were blunted for ever. “I am a match for them all,”
+ he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman
+revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was
+no one passing along the road. He almost forgot that he was not alone.
+He heard her voice again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the
+hesitation which had been the real reason of her prolonged silence.
+
+“I say, Razumov!”
+
+Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man
+who hears a false note.
+
+“Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually
+attended the lectures at the University?”
+
+An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of
+the question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after
+the flash of the fired shot. Luckily his disengaged hand was ready
+to grip a bar of the gate. He held it with a terrible force, but his
+presence of mind was gone. He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy
+sound.
+
+“Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!” she urged him. “I know you are not a
+boastful man. _That_ one must say for you. You are a silent man. Too
+silent, perhaps. You are feeding on some bitterness of your own. You are
+not an enthusiast. You are, perhaps, all the stronger for that. But you
+might tell me. One would like to understand you a little more. I was so
+immensely struck.... Have you really done it?”
+
+He got his voice back. The shot had missed him. It had been fired at
+random, altogether, more like a signal for coming to close quarters.
+It was to be a plain struggle for self-preservation. And she was a
+dangerous adversary too. But he was ready for battle; he was so ready
+that when he turned towards her not a muscle of his face moved.
+
+“Certainly,” he said, without animation, secretly strung up but
+perfectly sure of himself. “Lectures--certainly, But what makes you
+ask?”
+
+It was she who was animated.
+
+“I had it in a letter, written by a young man in Petersburg; one of
+us, of course. You were seen--you were observed with your notebook,
+impassible, taking notes....”
+
+He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
+
+“What of that?”
+
+“I call such coolness superb--that’s all. It is a proof of uncommon
+strength of character. The young man writes that nobody could have
+guessed from your face and manner the part you had played only some two
+hours before--the great, momentous, glorious part....”
+
+“Oh no. Nobody could have guessed,” assented Razumov gravely, “because,
+don’t you see, nobody at that time....”
+
+“Yes, yes. But all the same you are a man of exceptional fortitude, it
+seems. You looked exactly as usual. It was remembered afterwards with
+wonder....”
+
+“It cost me no effort,” Razumov declared, with the same staring gravity.
+
+“Then it’s almost more wonderful still!” she exclaimed, and fell silent
+while Razumov asked himself whether he had not said there something
+utterly unnecessary--or even worse.
+
+She raised her head eagerly.
+
+“Your intention was to stay in Russia? You had planned....”
+
+“No,” interrupted Razumov without haste. “I had made no plans of any
+sort.”
+
+“You just simply walked away?” she struck in.
+
+He bowed his head in slow assent. “Simply--yes.” He had gradually
+released his hold on the bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
+conviction that no random shot could knock him over now. And suddenly he
+was inspired to add, “The snow was coming down very thick, you know.”
+
+She had a slight appreciative movement of the head, like an expert
+in such enterprises, very interested, capable of taking every point
+professionally. Razumov remembered something he had heard.
+
+“I turned into a narrow side street, you understand,” he went on
+negligently, and paused as if it were not worth talking about. Then he
+remembered another detail and dropped it before her, like a disdainful
+dole to her curiosity.
+
+“I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep there.”
+
+She clicked her tongue at that symptom, very struck indeed. Then--
+
+“But the notebook! The amazing notebook, man. You don’t mean to say you
+had put it in your pocket beforehand!” she cried.
+
+Razumov gave a start. It might have been a sign of impatience.
+
+“I went home. Straight home to my rooms,” he said distinctly.
+
+“The coolness of the man! You dared?”
+
+“Why not? I assure you I was perfectly calm. Ha! Calmer than I am now
+perhaps.”
+
+“I like you much better as you are now than when you indulge that bitter
+vein of yours, Razumov. And nobody in the house saw you return--eh? That
+might have appeared queer.”
+
+“No one,” Razumov said firmly. “Dvornik, landlady, girl, all out of the
+way. I went up like a shadow. It was a murky morning. The stairs were
+dark. I glided up like a phantom. Fate? Luck? What do you think?”
+
+“I just see it!” The eyes of the woman revolutionist snapped darkly.
+“Well--and then you considered....”
+
+Razumov had it all ready in his head.
+
+“No. I looked at my watch, since you want to know. There was just time.
+I took that notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe. Have you ever
+listened to the pit-pat of a man running round and round the shaft of
+a deep staircase? They have a gaslight at the bottom burning night
+and day. I suppose it’s gleaming down there now.... The sound dies
+out--the flame winks....”
+
+He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity
+of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist
+received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He
+checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man
+who has been dreaming aloud.
+
+“Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning?
+At night it’s another matter. I did not care if all the house had been
+there to look at me. But I don’t suppose there was anyone. It’s best not
+to be seen or heard. Aha! The people that are neither seen nor heard are
+the lucky ones--in Russia. Don’t you admire my luck?”
+
+“Astonishing,” she said. “If you have luck as well as determination,
+then indeed you are likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for the
+work in hand.”
+
+Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov that it was speculative,
+even as though she were already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
+of the work. Her eyes were cast down. He waited, not very alert now, but
+with the grip of the ever-present danger giving him an air of
+attentive gravity. Who could have written about him in that letter
+from Petersburg? A fellow student, surely--some imbecile victim of
+revolutionary propaganda, some foolish slave of foreign, subversive
+ideals. A long, famine-stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to
+his mental search. That must have been the fellow!
+
+He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing,
+the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like
+a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage
+in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and
+piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist
+refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means
+constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his
+advantage rather, a piece of sinister luck which had only to be accepted
+with proper caution.
+
+“And yet, Razumov,” he heard the musing voice of the woman, “you have
+not the face of a lucky man.” She raised her eyes with renewed interest.
+“And so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked
+off and made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I
+suppose it was agreed beforehand that, once the business over, each of
+you would go his own way?”
+
+Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate,
+if cautious, manner of speaking.
+
+“Was not that the best thing to do?” he asked, in a dispassionate tone.
+“And anyway,” he added, after waiting a moment, “we did not give much
+thought to what would come after. We never discussed formally any line
+of conduct. It was understood, I think.”
+
+She approved his statement with slight nods.
+
+“You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?”
+
+“In St. Petersburg itself,” emphasized Razumov. “It was the only safe
+course for me. And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go.”
+
+“Yes! Yes! I know. Clearly. And the other--this wonderful Haldin
+appearing only to be regretted--you don’t know what he intended?”
+
+Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet
+him sooner or later. He raised his hands a little and let them fall
+helplessly by his side--nothing more.
+
+It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
+silence.
+
+“Very curious,” she pronounced slowly. “And you did not think, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?”
+
+Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.
+But he thought that he owed it to himself to speak. A negative sign
+would not do again. Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what
+that St. Petersburg letter might have contained.
+
+“I stayed at home next day,” he said, bending down a little and plunging
+his glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not
+observe the trembling of his lips. “Yes, I stayed at home. As my actions
+are remembered and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I
+was _not_ seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn’t know? Well, I
+stopped at home-the live-long day.”
+
+As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic “I see! It
+must have been trying enough.”
+
+“You seem to understand one’s feelings,” said Razumov steadily. “It was
+trying. It was horrible; it was an atrocious day. It was not the last.”
+
+“Yes, I understand. Afterwards, when you heard they had got him. Don’t
+I know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight? One’s
+ashamed of being left. And I can remember so many. Never mind. They
+shall be avenged before long. And what is death? At any rate, it is not
+a shameful thing like some kinds of life.”
+
+Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and
+unpleasant tremor.
+
+“Some kinds of life?” he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
+
+“The subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy
+heap of iniquity which the world is. Life, Razumov, not to be vile must
+be a revolt--a pitiless protest--all the time.”
+
+She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
+instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
+businesslike manner that she went on--
+
+“You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
+immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I
+set my eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich. Oh! You are full of bitter
+revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may
+become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
+justice which armed your and Haldin’s hands to strike down that
+fanatical brute...for it was that--nothing but that! I have been
+thinking it out. It could have been nothing else but that.”
+
+Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
+sinister immobility of feature.
+
+“I can’t speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
+conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive
+justice.”
+
+“Good, that,” he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
+and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
+should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As
+if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be
+changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at
+the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for
+arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted
+through Razumov’s head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand,
+the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had
+such a weight in the “active” section of every party. She was much more
+representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric,
+mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
+revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave
+him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own
+mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the
+purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical
+theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting
+in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in
+that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous
+lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a
+thoughtful frown.
+
+“That’s it. Retributive. No pity!” was the conclusion of her silence.
+And this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating
+sentences--
+
+“Listen to my story, Razumov!...” Her father was a clever but unlucky
+artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty;
+all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose
+rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the
+very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood
+of his sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him?
+Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal
+I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing
+except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread--but no consolation for your
+trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your
+miserable life.
+
+And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died. He died in the hospital.
+Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence--she
+saw it whole. She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of
+the humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of
+a society which nothing can absolve.
+
+“Yes, Razumov,” she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, “it was
+like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed
+not the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great
+social iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied
+sufferings. From that moment I was a revolutionist.”
+
+Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of
+contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance. She,
+with an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice
+since he had come in contact with the woman, went on--
+
+“As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system
+exhorted such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the
+secret societies as soon as I knew how to find my way. I was sixteen
+years old--no more, Razumov! And--look at my white hair.”
+
+In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness
+too was gone.
+
+“There is a lot of it. I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of
+a girl. Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that
+there was the first step towards crushing the social infamy. Crush the
+Infamy! A fine watchword! I would placard it on the walls of prisons and
+palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that
+empty sky for a sign of hope and terror--a portent of the end....”
+
+“You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna,” Razumov interrupted suddenly.
+“Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in water....”
+
+She was checked but not offended. “Who knows? Very soon it may become
+a fact written all over that great land of ours,” she hinted meaningly.
+“And then one would have lived long enough. White hair won’t matter.”
+
+Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years
+seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt. It
+threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the
+brilliant black glance, the upright compact figure, the simple,
+brisk self-possession of the mature personality--as though in her
+revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret, not of
+everlasting youth, but of everlasting endurance.
+
+How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov. Her mother might have been
+a Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what. He reflected that a
+revolutionist is seldom true to the settled type. All revolt is the
+expression of strong individualism--ran his thought vaguely. One
+can tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings. It was
+astonishing that the police....
+
+“We shall not meet again very soon, I think,” she was saying. “I am
+leaving to-morrow.”
+
+“For Zurich?” Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from
+any distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a
+wrestling match.
+
+“Yes, Zurich--and farther on, perhaps, much farther. Another journey.
+When I think of all my journeys! The last must come some day. Never
+mind, Razumov. We had to have a good long talk. I would have certainly
+tried to see you if we had not met. Peter Ivanovitch knows where you
+live? Yes. I meant to have asked him--but it’s better like this. You
+see, we expect two more men; and I had much rather wait here talking
+with you than up there at the house with....”
+
+Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself. “Here
+they are,” she said rapidly. “Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to
+say good-bye, presently.”
+
+
+IV
+
+
+In his incertitude of the ground on which he stood Razumov felt
+perturbed. Turning his head quickly, he saw two men on the opposite side
+of the road. Seeing themselves noticed by Sophia Antonovna, they crossed
+over at once, and passed one after another through the little gate
+by the side of the empty lodge. They looked hard at the stranger, but
+without mistrust, the crimson blouse being a flaring safety signal. The
+first, great white hairless face, double chin, prominent stomach, which
+he seemed to carry forward consciously within a strongly distended
+overcoat, only nodded and averted his eyes peevishly; his
+companion--lean, flushed cheekbones, a military red moustache below a
+sharp, salient nose--approached at once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her
+warmly. His voice was very strong but inarticulate. It sounded like a
+deep buzzing. The woman revolutionist was quietly cordial.
+
+“This is Razumov,” she announced in a clear voice.
+
+The lean new-comer made an eager half-turn. “He will want to embrace
+me,” thought our young man with a deep recoil of all his being, while
+his limbs seemed too heavy to move. But it was a groundless alarm. He
+had to do now with a generation of conspirators who did not kiss each
+other on both cheeks; and raising an arm that felt like lead he dropped
+his hand into a largely-outstretched palm, fleshless and hot as if
+dried up by fever, giving a bony pressure, expressive, seeming to say,
+“Between us there’s no need of words.” The man had big, wide-open eyes.
+Razumov fancied he could see a smile behind their sadness.
+
+“This is Razumov,” Sophia Antonovna repeated loudly for the benefit of
+the fat man, who at some distance displayed the profile of his stomach.
+
+No one moved. Everything, sounds, attitudes, movements, and immobility
+seemed to be part of an experiment, the result of which was a thin voice
+piping with comic peevishness--
+
+“Oh yes! Razumov. We have been hearing of nothing but Mr. Razumov for
+months. For my part, I confess I would rather have seen Haldin on this
+spot instead of Mr. Razumov.”
+
+The squeaky stress put on the name “Razumov--Mr. Razumov” pierced the
+ear ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an
+elaborate joke. Astonishment was Razumov’s first response, followed by
+sudden indignation.
+
+“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked in a stern tone.
+
+“Tut! Silliness. He’s always like that.” Sophia Antonovna was obviously
+vexed. But she dropped the information, “Necator,” from her lips just
+loud enough to be heard by Razumov. The abrupt squeaks of the fat man
+seemed to proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his
+overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless,
+hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair
+straggling down the fat nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a
+stare on the verge of horror and laughter.
+
+Nikita, surnamed Necator, with a sinister aptness of alliteration!
+Razumov had heard of him. He had heard so much since crossing the
+frontier of these celebrities of the militant revolution; the legends,
+the stories, the authentic chronicle, which now and then peeps out
+before a half-incredulous world. Razumov had heard of him. He was
+supposed to have killed more, gendarmes and police agents than any
+revolutionist living. He had been entrusted with executions.
+
+The paper with the letters N.N., the very pseudonym of murder,
+found pinned on the stabbed breast of a certain notorious spy (this
+picturesque detail of a sensational murder case had got into
+the newspapers), was the mark of his handiwork. “By order of the
+Committee.--N.N.” A corner of the curtain lifted to strike the
+imagination of the gaping world. He was said to have been innumerable
+times in and out of Russia, the Necator of bureaucrats, of provincial
+governors, of obscure informers. He lived between whiles, Razumov had
+heard, on the shores of the Lake of Como, with a charming wife, devoted
+to the cause, and two young children. But how could that creature, so
+grotesque as to set town dogs barking at its mere sight, go about on
+those deadly errands and slip through the meshes of the police?
+
+“What now? what now?” the voice squeaked. “I am only sincere. It’s not
+denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been
+better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a
+sentimentalist. Say what I think...only natural.”
+
+Squeak, squeak, squeak, without a gesture, without a stir--the horrible
+squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy--this man of a sinister
+alliterative nickname, this executioner of revolutionary verdicts, the
+terrifying N.N. exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention
+attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur. Sophia Antonovna
+shrugged her shoulders. The comrade with the martial red moustache
+hurried towards Razumov full of conciliatory intentions in his strong
+buzzing voice.
+
+“Devil take it! And in this place, too, in the public street, so to
+speak. But you can see yourself how it is. One of his fantastic sallies.
+Absolutely of no consequence.”
+
+“Pray don’t concern yourself,” cried Razumov, going off into a long fit
+of laughter. “Don’t mention it.”
+
+The other, his hectic flush like a pair of burns on his cheek-bones,
+stared for a moment and burst out laughing too. Razumov, whose hilarity
+died out all at once, made a step forward.
+
+“Enough of this,” he began in a clear, incisive voice, though he could
+hardly control the trembling of his legs. “I will have no more of it. I
+shall not permit anyone.... I can see very well what you are at with
+those allusions.... Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not
+be played with.”
+
+He had spoken such words before. He had been driven to cry them out in
+the face of other suspicions. It was an infernal cycle bringing round
+that protest like a fatal necessity of his existence. But it was no use.
+He would be always played with. Luckily life does not last for ever.
+
+“I won’t have it!” he shouted, striking his fist into the palm of his
+other hand.
+
+“Kirylo Sidorovitch--what has come to you?” The woman revolutionist
+interfered with authority. They were all looking at Razumov now; the
+slayer of spies and gendarmes had turned about, presenting his enormous
+stomach in full, like a shield.
+
+“Don’t shout. There are people passing.” Sophia Antonovna was
+apprehensive of another outburst. A steam-launch from Monrepos had
+come to the landing-stage opposite the gate, its hoarse whistle and
+the churning noise alongside all unnoticed, had landed a small bunch of
+local passengers who were dispersing their several ways. Only a specimen
+of early tourist in knickerbockers, conspicuous by a brand-new yellow
+leather glass-case, hung about for a moment, scenting something unusual
+about these four people within the rusty iron gates of what looked the
+grounds run wild of an unoccupied private house. Ah! If he had only
+known what the chance of commonplace travelling had suddenly put in his
+way! But he was a well-bred person; he averted his gaze and moved off
+with short steps along the avenue, on the watch for a tramcar.
+
+A gesture from Sophia Antonovna, “Leave him to me,” had sent the two men
+away--the buzzing of the inarticulate voice growing fainter and fainter,
+and the thin pipe of “What now? what’s the matter?” reduced to the
+proportions of a squeaking toy by the distance. They had left him to
+her. So many things could be left safely to the experience of Sophia
+Antonovna. And at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried
+to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is
+born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the
+force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts,
+assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final
+appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She
+had seen--often had only divined--scores of these young men and young
+women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a
+moody egotist. And besides, it was a special--a unique case. She had
+never met an individuality which interested and puzzled her so much.
+
+“Take care, Razumov, my good friend. If you carry on like this you will
+go mad. You are angry with everybody and bitter with yourself, and on
+the look out for something to torment yourself with.”
+
+“It’s intolerable!” Razumov could only speak in gasps. “You must admit
+that I can have no illusions on the attitude which...it isn’t clear...or
+rather only too clear.”
+
+He made a gesture of despair. It was not his courage that failed him.
+The choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat--the thought
+of being condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere
+without the hope of ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
+
+“A glass of cold water is what you want.” Sophia Antonovna glanced up
+the grounds at the house and shook her head, then out of the gate at
+the brimful placidity of the lake. With a half-comical shrug of the
+shoulders, she gave the remedy up in the face of that abundance.
+
+“It is you, my dear soul, who are flinging yourself at something which
+does not exist. What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You
+couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was
+taken.”
+
+She remonstrated with him reasonably, at some length too. He had nothing
+to complain of in his reception. Every new-comer was discussed more or
+less. Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
+No one that she could remember had been shown from the first so much
+confidence. Soon, very soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, he would
+be given an opportunity of showing his devotion to the sacred task of
+crushing the Infamy.
+
+Razumov, listening quietly, thought: “It may be that she is trying to
+lull my suspicions to sleep. On the other hand, it is obvious that most
+of them are fools.” He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his
+arms on his breast, leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
+
+“As to what remains obscure in the fate of that poor Haldin,” Sophia
+Antonovna dropped into a slowness of utterance which was to Razumov like
+the falling of molten lead drop by drop; “as to that--though no one ever
+hinted that either from fear or neglect your conduct has not been what
+it should have been--well, I have a bit of intelligence....”
+
+Razumov could not prevent himself from raising his head, and Sophia
+Antonovna nodded slightly.
+
+“I have. You remember that letter from St. Petersburg I mentioned to you
+a moment ago?”
+
+“The letter? Perfectly. Some busybody has been reporting my conduct on
+a certain day. It’s rather sickening. I suppose our police are greatly
+edified when they open these interesting and--and--superfluous letters.”
+
+“Oh dear no! The police do not get hold of our letters as easily as you
+imagine. The letter in question did not leave St. Petersburg till the
+ice broke up. It went by the first English steamer which left the Neva
+this spring. They have a fireman on board--one of us, in fact. It has
+reached me from Hull....”
+
+She paused as if she were surprised at the sullen fixity of Razumov’s
+gaze, but went on at once, and much faster.
+
+“We have some of our people there who...but never mind. The writer
+of the letter relates an incident which he thinks may possibly be
+connected with Haldin’s arrest. I was just going to tell you when those
+two men came along.”
+
+“That also was an incident,” muttered Razumov, “of a very charming
+kind--for me.”
+
+“Leave off that!” cried Sophia Antonovna. “Nobody cares for Nikita’s
+barking. There’s no malice in him. Listen to what I have to say. You
+may be able to throw a light. There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town
+peasant--a man who owned horses. He came to town years ago to work for
+some relation as a driver and ended by owning a cab or two.”
+
+She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture:
+“Wait!” Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted
+her now, not to save his life. The contraction of his facial muscles had
+been involuntary, a mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as
+before.
+
+“He was not a quite ordinary man of his class--it seems,” she went on.
+“The people of the house--my informant talked with many of them--you
+know, one of those enormous houses of shame and misery....”
+
+Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.
+Razumov saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled
+in snowflakes, with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining
+greasily very near the ground. The ghost of that night pursued him. He
+stood up to it with rage and with weariness.
+
+“Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?” Sophia
+Antonovna was anxious to know.
+
+“Yes.” Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling
+into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he
+probably could not have said no. “He mentioned to me once,” he added, as
+if making an effort of memory, “a house of that sort. He used to visit
+some workmen there.”
+
+“Exactly.”
+
+Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact
+quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having
+made friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described
+Haldin’s appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into
+their misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and--her
+correspondent wrote--sometimes he spent a night in the house, sleeping,
+they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.
+
+“Note that, Razumov! In a stable.”
+
+Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
+
+“Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole
+house.”
+
+“No doubt,” assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw
+closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed
+beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were
+condemned to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that
+it proved Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant--a
+reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other
+inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of
+a band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was
+driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the
+fellow of having given a hint to the police and...
+
+The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
+
+“And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain
+Ziemianitch?”
+
+Razumov was ready for the name. He had been looking out for the
+question. “When it comes I shall own up,” he had said to himself. But he
+took his time.
+
+“To be sure!” he began slowly. “Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
+horses. Yes. On one occasion. Ziemianitch! Certainly! Ziemianitch of the
+horses.... How could it have slipped my memory like this? One of the
+last conversations we had together.”
+
+“That means,”--Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,--“that means,
+Razumov, it was very shortly before--eh?”
+
+“Before what?” shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked
+astonished but stood her ground. “Before.... Oh! Of course, it was
+before! How could it have been after? Only a few hours before.”
+
+“And he spoke of him favourably?”
+
+“With enthusiasm! The horses of Ziemianitch! The free soul of
+Ziemianitch!”
+
+Razumov took a savage delight in the loud utterance of that name, which
+had never before crossed his lips audibly. He fixed his blazing eyes
+on the woman till at last her fascinated expression recalled him to
+himself.
+
+“The late Haldin,” he said, holding himself in, with downcast eyes,
+“was inclined to take sudden fancies to people, on--on--what shall I
+say--insufficient grounds.”
+
+“There!” Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands. “That, to my mind, settles
+it. The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused....”
+
+“Aha! Your correspondent,” Razumov said in an almost openly mocking
+tone. “What suspicions? How aroused? By this Ziemianitch? Probably some
+drunken, gabbling, plausible...”
+
+“You talk as if you had known him.”
+
+Razumov looked up.
+
+“No. But I knew Haldin.”
+
+Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.
+
+“I see. Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion
+communicated to me in that very interesting letter. This Ziemianitch was
+found one morning hanging from a hook in the stable--dead.”
+
+Razumov felt a profound trouble. It was visible, because Sophia
+Antonovna was moved to observe vivaciously--
+
+“Aha! You begin to see.”
+
+He saw it clearly enough--in the light of a lantern casting spokes of
+shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long
+boots hanging against the wall. A pointed hood, with the ends wound
+about up to the eyes, hid the face. “But that does not concern me,” he
+reflected. “It does not affect my position at all. He never knew who had
+thrashed him. He could not have known.” Razumov felt sorry for the old
+lover of the bottle and women.
+
+“Yes. Some of them end like that,” he muttered. “What is your idea,
+Sophia Antonovna?”
+
+It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had
+adopted it fully. She stated it in one word--“Remorse.” Razumov opened
+his eyes very wide at that. Sophia Antonovna’s informant, by listening
+to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed
+to come very near to the truth of Haldin’s relation to Ziemianitch.
+
+“It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of--that your friend
+had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St.
+Petersburg, at any rate. Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for
+the rest. And that fellow’s horses were part of the plan.”
+
+“They have actually got at the truth,” Razumov marvelled to himself,
+while he nodded judicially. “Yes, that’s possible, very possible.” But
+the woman revolutionist was very positive that it was so. First of all,
+a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been
+partly overheard. Then there were the suspicions of the people in the
+house when their “young gentleman” (they did not know Haldin by
+his name) ceased to call at the house. Some of them used to charge
+Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence. He denied it with
+exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin’s disappearance he
+was not himself, growing moody and thin. Finally, during a quarrel with
+some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of the inmates of
+the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy,
+an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven “our young
+gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke
+into houses.” In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch
+got flung down a flight of stairs. Thereupon he drank and moped for a
+week, and then hanged himself.
+
+Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale. She charged
+Ziemianitch either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a
+certain date, overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop--perhaps in
+the very eating-shop on the ground floor of the house--or, maybe, a
+downright denunciation, followed by remorse. A man like that would be
+capable of anything. People said he was a flighty old chap. And if he
+had been once before mixed up with the police--as seemed certain, though
+he always denied it--in connexion with these thieves, he would be sure
+to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look out for
+something to report. Possibly at first his tale was not made anything of
+till the day that scoundrel de P--- got his deserts. Ah! But then every
+bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally
+they were bound to get Haldin.
+
+Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands--“Fatally.”
+
+Fatality--chance! Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the
+queer verisimilitude of these inferences. They were obviously to his
+advantage.
+
+“It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally.”
+ Sophia Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again. She had received
+the letter three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter
+Ivanovitch. She knew then that she would have the opportunity presently
+of meeting several men of action assembled for an important purpose.
+
+“I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself
+at large. I have it in my pocket now. You understand how pleased I was
+to come upon you.”
+
+Razumov was saying to himself, “She won’t offer to show the letter to
+me. Not likely. Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers
+has found out?” He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not
+ask.
+
+“Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?”
+
+“No, no,” she protested. “There you are again with your sensitiveness.
+It makes you stupid. Don’t you see, there was no starting-point for an
+investigation even if any one had thought of it. A perfect blank! That’s
+exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving
+you cautiously. It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my
+informant striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser
+lodging in that particular slum-house. A wonderful coincidence!”
+
+“A pious person,” suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, “would say that
+the hand of God has done it all.”
+
+“My poor father would have said that.” Sophia Antonovna did not smile.
+She dropped her eyes. “Not that his God ever helped him. It’s a long
+time since God has done anything for the people. Anyway, it’s done.”
+
+“All this would be quite final,” said Razumov, with every appearance of
+reflective impartiality, “if there was any certitude that the ‘our young
+gentleman’ of these people was Victor Haldin. Have we got that?”
+
+“Yes. There’s no mistake. My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin’s
+personal appearance as with your own,” the woman affirmed decisively.
+
+“It’s the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt,” Razumov said to himself,
+with reawakened uneasiness. Had his own visit to that accursed house
+passed unnoticed? It was barely possible. Yet it was hardly probable.
+It was just the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt
+busybody had been picking up. But the letter did not seem to contain any
+allusion to that. Unless she had suppressed it. And, if so, why? If it
+had really escaped the prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a
+confounded genius for recognizing people from description, it could
+only be for a time. He would come upon it presently and hasten to write
+another letter--and then!
+
+For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and
+disdain, Razumov shuddered inwardly. It guarded him from common fear,
+but it could not defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way
+by these people. It was a sort of superstitious dread. Now, since his
+position had been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of
+Ziemianitch, he felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom
+from direct lying, with its power of moving amongst them silent,
+unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate of their
+crimes and their folly. Was this advantage his already? Or not yet? Or
+never would be?
+
+“Well, Sophia Antonovna,” his air of reluctant concession was genuine
+in so far that he was really loath to part with her without testing her
+sincerity by a question it was impossible to bring about in any way;
+“well, Sophia Antonovna, if that is so, then--”
+
+“The creature has done justice to himself,” the woman observed, as if
+thinking aloud.
+
+“What? Ah yes! Remorse,” Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
+
+“Don’t be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend.” There
+was no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes
+seemed detached for an instant from vengeful visions. “He was a man of
+the people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It’s
+something to know that.”
+
+“Consoling?” insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
+
+“Leave off railing,” she checked him explosively. “Remember, Razumov,
+that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the
+negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all
+action. Don’t rail! Leave off.... I don’t know how it is, but there
+are moments when you are abhorrent to me....”
+
+She averted her face. A languid silence, as if all the electricity of
+the situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for
+some time. Razumov had not flinched. Suddenly she laid the tips of her
+fingers on his sleeve.
+
+“Don’t mind.”
+
+“I don’t mind,” he said very quietly.
+
+He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face. He was
+really mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure
+oppression. And suddenly he asked himself, “Why the devil did I go to
+that house? It was an imbecile thing to do.”
+
+A profound disgust came over him. Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking
+in a friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention. And it was
+still about the famous letter, referring to various minute details
+given by her informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch. The “victim of
+remorse” had been buried several weeks before her correspondent began
+frequenting the house. It--the house--contained very good revolutionary
+material. The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens
+of black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all
+the miseries that oppress mankind. Razumov listened without hearing,
+gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that
+degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost
+impossible to practice.
+
+No. The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this
+conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted
+not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal
+connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left
+Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself. And, anyway,
+who could have foreseen this woman’s “informant” stumbling upon that
+particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying
+flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! “It’s a
+perfect, diabolic surprise,” thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude
+of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna’s remarks
+upon the psychology of “the people,” “Oh yes--certainly,” rather
+coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of
+confession out of her throat.
+
+Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of
+relaxed tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to
+the subject of his uneasiness. How it came about he could only guess,
+his mind being absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia
+Antonovna’s complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people. For
+instance--that Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the
+last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been
+beaten by the devil.
+
+“The devil,” repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
+
+“The actual devil. The devil in person. You may well look astonished,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch. Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken,
+a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful
+thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched
+creature’s body was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in
+the house.”
+
+“But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don’t believe in the actual devil?”
+
+“Do you?” retorted the woman curtly. “Not but that there are plenty of
+men worse than devils to make a hell of this earth,” she muttered to
+herself.
+
+Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold
+between her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away. It was
+obvious that she did not make much of the story--unless, indeed, this
+was the perfection of duplicity. “A dark young man,” she explained
+further. “Never seen there before, never seen afterwards. Why are you
+smiling, Razumov?”
+
+“At the devil being still young after all these ages,” he answered
+composedly. “But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you
+say, was dead-drunk at the time?”
+
+“Oh! The eating-house keeper has described him. An overbearing,
+swarthy young man in a student’s cloak, who came rushing in, demanded
+Ziemianitch, beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving
+the eating-house keeper paralysed with astonishment.”
+
+“Does he, too, believe it was the devil?”
+
+“That I can’t say. I am told he’s very reserved on the matter. Those
+sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally. I should think he
+knows more of it than anybody.”
+
+“Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what’s your theory?” asked Razumov
+in a tone of great interest. “Yours and your informant’s, who is on the
+spot.”
+
+“I agree with him. Some police-hound in disguise. Who else could beat a
+helpless man so unmercifully? As for the rest, if they were out that day
+on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might
+have thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more
+information, or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly
+detective was sent to fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him
+so drunk broke a stable fork over his ribs. Later on, after they had the
+big game safe in the net, they troubled their heads no more about that
+peasant.”
+
+Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this
+conversation, keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in
+the verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion
+of the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost
+depths of self-deception. Razumov, after shaking hands with Sophia
+Antonovna, left the grounds, crossed the road, and walking out on the
+little steamboat pier leaned over the rail.
+
+His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days,
+ever since that night...the night. The conversation with the woman
+revolutionist had given him the view of his danger at the very moment
+this danger vanished, characteristically enough. “I ought to have
+foreseen the doubts that would arise in those people’s minds,” he
+thought. Then his attention being attracted by a stone of peculiar
+shape, which he could see clearly lying at the bottom, he began to
+speculate as to the depth of water in that spot. But very soon, with a
+start of wonder at this extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment,
+he returned to his train of thought. “I ought to have told very
+circumstantial lies from the first,” he said to himself, with a mortal
+distaste of the mere idea which silenced his mental utterance for quite
+a perceptible interval. “Luckily, that’s all right now,” he reflected,
+and after a time spoke to himself, half aloud, “Thanks to the devil,”
+ and laughed a little.
+
+The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts. He was not
+exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting
+in it a certain piquancy. He owned to himself that, had he known of that
+suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making
+such excellent use of it for his own purposes. He ought to be infinitely
+obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity,
+“A wonderful psychologist apparently,” he said to himself sarcastically.
+Remorse, indeed! It was a striking example of your true conspirator’s
+blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea. This was
+a drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself
+mockingly. A woman the old fellow was making up to! A robust pedlar,
+clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs.... And at
+sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.
+That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch. Even the
+comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme
+crisis. At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of
+an unquenchable passion. And, besides, there was the wild exasperation
+aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with
+the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing,
+added to these simple and bitter sorrows. “Devil, eh?” Razumov
+exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting
+discovery. “Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism. So many of our
+true Russian souls end in that way! Very characteristic.” He felt pity
+for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an
+unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above--like a community
+of crawling ants working out its destiny. It was as if this Ziemianitch
+could not possibly have done anything else. And Sophia Antonovna’s
+cocksure and contemptuous “some police-hound” was characteristically
+Russian in another way. But there was no tragedy there. This was a
+comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a game
+with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch,
+then with those revolutionists. The devil’s own game this.... He
+interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his
+own expense. “Hallo! I am falling into mysticism too.”
+
+His mind was more at ease than ever. Turning about he put his back
+against the rail comfortably. “All this fits with marvellous aptness,”
+ he continued to think. “The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no
+longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague. The mystic
+Ziemianitch accounts for that. An incredible chance has served me. No
+more need of lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from
+getting the upper hand of my caution.”
+
+He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was
+a long time before he started forward from that pose, with the
+recollection that he had made up his mind to do something important that
+day. What it was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort
+of memory, for he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.
+
+He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he
+slowed down, almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure
+walking in the contrary direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft,
+broad-brimmed hat, picturesque but diminutive, as if seen through the
+big end of an opera-glass. It was impossible to avoid that tiny man, for
+there was no issue for retreat.
+
+“Another one going to that mysterious meeting,” thought Razumov. He was
+right in his surmise, only _this_ one, unlike the others who came from a
+distance, was known to him personally. Still, he hoped to pass on with
+a mere bow, but it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with
+hairy wrist and knuckles protruded in a friendly wave from under the
+folds of the cloak, worn Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm
+day, a corner flung over the shoulder.
+
+“And how is Herr Razumov?” sounded the greeting in German, by that alone
+made more odious to the object of the affable recognition. At closer
+quarters the diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an
+ordinary-sized man, with a lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising
+of the hat, the great pepper-and salt full beard spread over the
+proportionally broad chest. A fine bold nose jutted over a thin mouth
+hidden in the mass of fine hair. All this, accented features, strong
+limbs in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without the
+slightest sign of debility. The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown,
+were too big, with the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour
+under a lamp. The obscure celebrity of the tiny man was well known to
+Razumov. Polyglot, of unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality,
+anarchist, with a pedantic and ferocious temperament, and an amazingly
+inflammatory capacity for invective, he was a power in the background,
+this violent pamphleteer clamouring for revolutionary justice, this
+Julius Laspara, editor of the _Living Word_, confidant of conspirators,
+inditer of sanguinary menaces and manifestos, suspected of being in the
+secret of every plot. Laspara lived in the old town in a sombre,
+narrow house presented to him by a naive middle-class admirer of his
+humanitarian eloquence. With him lived his two daughters, who overtopped
+him head and shoulders, and a pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing
+in the dark rooms in blue cotton overalls and clumsy boots, who might
+have belonged to either one of them or to neither. No stranger could
+tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after
+casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him
+possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained
+from asking her for details--no, not so much as the name of the father,
+because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been
+admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top
+floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of sweepings all over
+the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every table, the two
+Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent, sleepy-eyed,
+corsetless, and generally, in their want of shape and the disorder
+of their rumpled attire, resembling old dolls; the great but obscure
+Julius, his feet twisted round his three-legged stool, always ready to
+receive the visitors, the pen instantly dropped, the body screwed round
+with a striking display of the lofty brow and of the great austere
+beard. When he got down from his stool it was as though he had descended
+from the heights of Olympus. He was dwarfed by his daughters, by the
+furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature. But he very seldom left
+it, and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.
+
+It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him
+out in that direction that afternoon. Evidently he wished to be amiable
+to that young man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world
+of political refugees. In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and
+wrote four or five other European languages, without distinction and
+without force (other than that of invective), he inquired if Razumov
+had taken his inscriptions at the University as yet. And the young man,
+shaking his head negatively--
+
+“There’s plenty of time for that. But, meantime, are you not going to
+write something for us?”
+
+He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on
+anything, social, economic, historical--anything. Any subject could be
+treated in the right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution. And,
+as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a review
+of advanced ideas. “We must educate, educate everybody--develop the
+great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice.”
+
+Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.
+
+“Write in Russian. We’ll have it translated There can be no difficulty.
+Why, without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin. My daughters go to
+see her sometimes.” He nodded significantly. “She does nothing, has
+never done anything in her life. She would be quite competent, with a
+little assistance. Only write. You know you must. And so good-bye for
+the present.”
+
+He raised his arm and went on. Razumov backed against the low wall,
+looked after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry
+mutter--
+
+“Cursed Jew!”
+
+He did not know anything about it. Julius Laspara might have been a
+Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse
+towns for anything he could tell to the contrary. But this is not a
+story of the West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by
+the comment that it was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best
+adapted to the nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.
+He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted. He
+walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive
+harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull
+people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he
+discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge. He slowed down
+at once. To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green
+slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the
+picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
+water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.
+
+He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on
+slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get
+out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to
+his profound absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive
+journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write!
+A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made
+up his mind to do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that
+step and then had forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to
+escape from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger.
+He was ready to despise himself for it. What was it? Levity, or
+deep-seated weakness? Or an unconscious dread?
+
+“Is it that I am shrinking? It can’t be! It’s impossible. To shrink now
+would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
+damnation,” he thought. “Is it possible that I have a conventional
+conscience?”
+
+He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
+pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street
+facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that
+it was there before him. But at the moment a couple of carriages and a
+slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left,
+following the quay again, but now away from the lake.
+
+“It may be just my health,” he thought, allowing himself a very unusual
+doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment
+or two, he had never been ill in his life. But that was a danger, too.
+Only, it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially
+remarkable way. “If I believed in an active Providence,” Razumov said
+to himself, amused grimly, “I would see here the working of an ironical
+finger. To have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind
+me of my purpose is--Write, he had said. I must write--I must, indeed!
+I shall write--never fear. Certainly. That’s why I am here. And for the
+future I shall have something to write about.”
+
+He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy. But the idea of
+writing evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of
+privacy, and naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the
+necessary exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile
+influence awaiting him within those odious four walls.
+
+“Suppose one of these revolutionists,” he asked himself, “were to take
+a fancy to call on me while I am writing?” The mere prospect of such
+an interruption made him shudder. One could lock one’s door, or ask
+the tobacconist downstairs (some sort of a refugee himself) to tell
+inquirers that one was not in. Not very good precautions those. The
+manner of his life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for
+suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences
+as a delay in opening a locked door. “I wish I were in the middle of
+some field miles away from everywhere,” he thought.
+
+He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of
+being on a bridge again. This one was much narrower than the other, and
+instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point
+of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of
+gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile
+neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped
+on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a
+bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal.
+
+On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the
+woman in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the
+island. There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about
+that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+Something pretentious and shabby, too. He asked for a glass of milk,
+which he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea had passed his
+lips since the morning), and was going away with a weary, lagging step
+when a thought stopped him short. He had found precisely what he needed.
+If solitude could ever be secured in the open air in the middle of a
+town, he would have it there on this absurd island, together with the
+faculty of watching the only approach.
+
+He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the
+place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The
+materials he had on him. “I shall always come here,” he said to himself,
+and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought
+and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the
+declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw
+the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he
+pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his
+knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the
+connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people
+crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the
+islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat
+enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of
+bronze. After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish
+haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first
+tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But
+the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful
+nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless,
+the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got
+up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.
+
+“There can be no doubt that now I am safe,” he thought. His fine ear
+could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking
+against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to
+them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was
+too elusive.
+
+“Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to,” he murmured. And
+it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen
+to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of
+water, the voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions. All
+the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of
+a soul.
+
+This was Mr. Razumov’s feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and
+the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far
+as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his
+body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it
+must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov’s case the bitterness of solitude
+from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+That I should, at the beginning of this retrospect, mention again that
+Mr. Razumov’s youth had no one in the world, as literally no one as it
+can be honestly affirmed of any human being, is but a statement of fact
+from a man who believes in the psychological value of facts. There
+is also, perhaps, a desire of punctilious fairness. Unidentified with
+anyone in this narrative where the aspects of honour and shame are
+remote from the ideas of the Western world, and taking my stand on the
+ground of common humanity, it is for that very reason that I feel a
+strange reluctance to state baldly here what every reader has most
+likely already discovered himself. Such reluctance may appear absurd if
+it were not for the thought that because of the imperfection of language
+there is always something ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the
+exhibition of naked truth. But the time has come when Councillor of
+State Mikulin can no longer be ignored. His simple question “Where to?”
+ on which we left Mr. Razumov in St. Petersburg, throws a light on the
+general meaning of this individual case.
+
+“Where to?” was the answer in the form of a gentle question to what we
+may call Mr. Razumov’s declaration of independence. The question was not
+menacing in the least and, indeed, had the ring of innocent inquiry.
+Had it been taken in a merely topographical sense, the only answer to it
+would have appeared sufficiently appalling to Mr Razumov. Where to? Back
+to his rooms, where the Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden
+test his dormant instincts, his half-conscious thoughts and almost
+wholly unconscious ambitions, by the touch as of some furious and
+dogmatic religion, with its call to frantic sacrifices, its tender
+resignations, its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by the side of the
+most sombre moods of despair. And Mr. Razumov had let go the door-handle
+and had come back to the middle of the room, asking Councillor Mikulin
+angrily, “What do you mean by it?”
+
+As far as I can tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question.
+He drew Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation. It is the peculiarity of
+Russian natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action,
+they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas. This
+conversation (and others later on) need not be recorded. Suffice it to
+say that it brought Mr. Razumov as we know him to the test of another
+faith. There was nothing official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was
+led to defend his attitude of detachment. But Councillor Mikulin would
+have none of his arguments. “For a man like you,” were his last weighty
+words in the discussion, “such a position is impossible. Don’t forget
+that I have seen that interesting piece of paper. I understand your
+liberalism. I have an intellect of that kind myself. Reform for me is
+mainly a question of method. But the principle of revolt is a physical
+intoxication, a sort of hysteria which must be kept away from the
+masses. You agree to this without reserve, don’t you? Because, you see,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, abstention, reserve, in certain situations, come
+very near to political crime. The ancient Greeks understood that very
+well.”
+
+Mr. Razumov, listening with a faint smile, asked Councillor Mikulin
+point-blank if this meant that he was going to have him watched.
+
+The high official took no offence at the cynical inquiry.
+
+“No, Kirylo Sidorovitch,” he answered gravely. “I don’t mean to have you
+watched.”
+
+Razumov, suspecting a lie, affected yet the greatest liberty of mind
+during the short remainder of that interview. The older man expressed
+himself throughout in familiar terms, and with a sort of shrewd
+simplicity. Razumov concluded that to get to the bottom of that mind was
+an impossible feat. A great disquiet made his heart beat quicker. The
+high official, issuing from behind the desk, was actually offering to
+shake hands with him.
+
+“Good-bye, Mr Razumov. An understanding between intelligent men is
+always a satisfactory occurrence. Is it not? And, of course, these rebel
+gentlemen have not the monopoly of intelligence.”
+
+“I presume that I shall not be wanted any more?” Razumov brought out
+that question while his hand was still being grasped. Councillor Mikulin
+released it slowly.
+
+“That, Mr. Razumov,” he said with great earnestness, “is as it may
+be. God alone knows the future. But you may rest assured that I
+never thought of having you watched. You are a young man of great
+independence. Yes. You are going away free as air, but you shall end by
+coming back to us.”
+
+“I! I!” Razumov exclaimed in an appalled murmur of protest. “What for?”
+ he added feebly.
+
+“Yes! You yourself, Kirylo Sidorovitch,” the high police functionary
+insisted in a low, severe tone of conviction. “You shall be coming back
+to us. Some of our greatest minds had to do that in the end.”
+
+“You have no better friend than Prince K---, and as to myself it is a
+long time now since I’ve been honoured by his....”
+
+He glanced down his beard.
+
+“I won’t detain you any longer. We live in difficult times, in times
+of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies. We shall
+certainly meet once more. It may be some little time, though, before
+we do. Till then may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!” Once in the
+street, Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction.
+At first he thought of nothing; but in a little while the consciousness
+of his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous,
+and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of
+that complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he
+termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through
+his mind.
+
+Go back! What for? Confess! To what? “I have been speaking to him with
+the greatest openness,” he said to himself with perfect truth. “What
+else could I tell him? That I have undertaken to carry a message to that
+brute Ziemianitch? Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance
+of safety I have won for nothing--what folly!”
+
+Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin
+was, perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct.
+To be understood appeared extremely fascinating.
+
+On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to
+run out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated
+as if in a desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so
+before he could proceed on his way. He reached his rooms at last.
+
+Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all
+at once removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities,
+from his very room, even. He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to
+himself to be existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything
+that had ever happened to him. He came out of this state slowly, with an
+effect, that is to say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number
+of days was not very great. And when he had got back into the middle of
+things they were all changed, subtly and provokingly in their nature:
+inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl,
+the staircase, the streets, the very air. He tackled these changed
+conditions in a spirit of severity. He walked to and fro to the
+University, ascended stairs, paced the passages, listened to lectures,
+took notes, crossed courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard
+till his jaws ached.
+
+He was perfectly aware of madcap Kostia gazing like a young retriever
+from a distance, of the famished student with the red drooping nose,
+keeping scrupulously away as desired; of twenty others, perhaps, he
+knew well enough to speak to. And they all had an air of curiosity and
+concern as if they expected something to happen. “This can’t last much
+longer,” thought Razumov more than once. On certain days he was afraid
+that anyone addressing him suddenly in a certain way would make him
+scream out insanely a lot of filthy abuse. Often, after returning home,
+he would drop into a chair in his cap and cloak and remain still for
+hours holding some book he had got from the library in his hand; or
+he would pick up the little penknife and sit there scraping his nails
+endlessly and feeling furious all the time--simply furious. “This is
+impossible,” he would mutter suddenly to the empty room.
+
+Fact to be noted: this room might conceivably have become physically
+repugnant to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable.
+But no. Nothing of the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first),
+nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he liked his lodgings
+better than any other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever
+hired before. He liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very
+account, he found a certain difficulty in making up his mind to go out.
+It resembled a physical seduction such as, for instance, makes a man
+reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold day.
+
+For as, at that time, he seldom stirred except to go to the University
+(what else was there to do?) it followed that whenever he went abroad he
+felt himself at once closely involved in the moral consequences of his
+act. It was there that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on
+him, clung to him like a poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off.
+He suffered from it exceedingly, as well as from the conversational,
+commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with the other kind of students.
+“They must be wondering at the change in me,” he reflected anxiously. He
+had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent,
+nice enough fellows to go to the devil. Once a married professor he used
+to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: “How is it we never see
+you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” Razumov was conscious of
+meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor
+was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all
+this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin:
+a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of
+the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on
+his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to
+haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it,
+but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who had
+the upper hand, in a composed sense of his own superiority. A vanquished
+phantom--nothing more. Often in the evening, his repaired watch faintly
+ticking on the table by the side of the lighted lamp, Razumov would
+look up from his writing and stare at the bed with an expectant,
+dispassionate attention. Nothing was to be seen there. He never really
+supposed that anything ever could be seen there. After a while he would
+shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work. For he had
+gone to work and, at first, with some success. His unwillingness to
+leave that place where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at
+last he ceased to go out at all. From early morning till far into the
+night he wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time,
+and only throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open
+no longer. Then, one afternoon, quite casually, he happened to glance at
+his watch. He laid down his pen slowly.
+
+“At this very hour,” was his thought, “the fellow stole unseen into this
+room while I was out. And there he sat quiet as a mouse--perhaps in
+this very chair.” Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily,
+glancing at the watch now and then. “This is the time when I returned
+and found him standing against the stove,” he observed to himself. When
+it grew dark he lit his lamp. Later on he interrupted his tramping once
+more, only to wave away angrily the girl who attempted to enter the
+room with tea and something to eat on a tray. And presently he noted the
+watch pointing at the hour of his own going forth into the falling snow
+on that terrible errand.
+
+“Complicity,” he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his
+eye on the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.
+
+“And, after all,” he thought suddenly, “I might have been the chosen
+instrument of Providence. This is a manner of speaking, but there may be
+truth in every manner of speaking. What if that absurd saying were true
+in its essence?”
+
+He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with
+stony eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair
+like a man totally abandoned by Providence--desolate.
+
+He noted the time of Haldin’s departure and continued to sit still for
+another half-hour; then muttering, “And now to work,” drew up to the
+table, seized the pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a
+profoundly disquieting reflection: “There’s three weeks gone by and no
+word from Mikulin.”
+
+What did it mean! Was he forgotten? Possibly. Then why not remain
+forgotten--creep in somewhere? Hide. But where? How? With whom? In what
+hole? And was it to be for ever, or what?
+
+But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers. The eye of the social
+revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and
+despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it
+possible that he no longer belonged to himself? This was damnable.
+But why not simply keep on as before? Study. Advance. Work hard as if
+nothing had happened (and first of all win the Silver Medal), acquire
+distinction, become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States.
+Servant, too, of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind with a
+capability for logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity
+of force and aim such as the world had never dreamt of... the Russian
+nation!
+
+Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand
+towards the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed. He rushed at
+it, enraged, with a mental scream: “it’s you, crazy fanatic, who stands
+in the way!” He flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the
+blankets aside.... Nothing there. And, turning away, he caught for
+an instant in the air, like a vivid detail in a dissolving view of two
+heads, the eyes of General T--- and of Privy-Councillor Mikulin side
+by side fixed upon him, quite different in character, but with the same
+unflinching and weary and yet purposeful expression...servants of the
+nation!
+
+Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some
+water and bathed his forehead. “This will pass and leave no trace,” he
+thought confidently. “I am all right.” But as to supposing that he had
+been forgotten it was perfect nonsense. He was a marked man on that
+side. And that was nothing. It was what that miserable phantom stood for
+which had to be got out of the way.... “If one only could go and spit
+it all out at some of them--and take the consequences.”
+
+He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking
+his fist in his face. “From that one, though,” he reflected, “there’s
+nothing to be got, because he has no mind of his own. He’s living in
+a red democratic trance. Ah! you want to smash your way into universal
+happiness, my boy. I will give you universal happiness, you silly,
+hypnotized ghoul, you! And what about my own happiness, eh? Haven’t I
+got any right to it, just because I can think for myself?...”
+
+And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself,
+“I am young. Everything can be lived down.” At that moment he was
+crossing the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to
+compose his thoughts. But before he had got so far everything abandoned
+him--hope, courage, belief in himself trust in men. His heart had, as it
+were, suddenly emptied itself. It was no use struggling on. Rest, work,
+solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike
+forbidden to him. Everything was gone. His existence was a great cold
+blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled
+with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
+
+He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like
+that, sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the
+rest of the night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with
+the samovar thumped with her fist on the door, calling out, “Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, please! It is time for you to get up!”
+
+Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov
+opened his eyes and got up.
+
+
+Nobody will be surprised to hear, I suppose, that when the summons came
+he went to see Councillor Mikulin. It came that very morning, while,
+looking white and shaky, like an invalid just out of bed, he was trying
+to shave himself. The envelope was addressed in the little attorney’s
+handwriting. That envelope contained another, superscribed to Razumov,
+in Prince K---‘s hand, with the request “Please forward under cover
+at once” in a corner. The note inside was an autograph of Councillor
+Mikulin. The writer stated candidly that nothing had arisen which needed
+clearing up, but nevertheless appointed a meeting with Mr. Razumov at a
+certain address in town which seemed to be that of an oculist.
+
+Razumov read it, finished shaving, dressed, looked at the note again,
+and muttered gloomily, “Oculist.” He pondered over it for a time, lit
+a match, and burned the two envelopes and the enclosure carefully.
+Afterwards he waited, sitting perfectly idle and not even looking at
+anything in particular till the appointed hour drew near--and then went
+out.
+
+Whether, looking at the unofficial character of the summons, he might
+have refrained from attending to it is hard to say. Probably not. At any
+rate, he went; but, what’s more, he went with a certain eagerness, which
+may appear incredible till it is remembered that Councillor Mikulin was
+the only person on earth with whom Razumov could talk, taking the Haldin
+adventure for granted. And Haldin, when once taken for granted, was no
+longer a haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre. Whatever troubling power
+he exercised in all the other places of the earth, Razumov knew very
+well that at this oculist’s address he would be merely the hanged
+murderer of M. de P--- and nothing more. For the dead can live only
+with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by
+the living. So Mr. Razumov, certain of relief, went to meet Councillor
+Mikulin with the eagerness of a pursued person welcoming any sort of
+shelter.
+
+This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first
+interview and of the several others. To the morality of a Western reader
+an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character
+of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding
+subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to
+protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion
+of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view,
+allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted. With what
+greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact shade of mere
+mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error,
+always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly
+betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.
+
+Councillor Mikulin was one of those powerful officials who, in a
+position not obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous, exercise
+a great influence over the methods rather than over the conduct of
+affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal
+sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue
+the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor
+Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he
+was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of
+five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be
+an enlightened patron of the art of female dancing. Later on the larger
+world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of
+those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average plain man who
+reads the newspapers, by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in
+the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious
+disturbance of muddy waters, Councillor Mikulin went under, dignified,
+with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No
+disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the
+secrets of the miserable _arcana imperii_ deposited in his patriotic
+breast, a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s
+ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence
+understood only by the very few of the initiated, and not without a
+certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a sybarite.
+For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councillor Mikulin civilly into a
+corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict.
+
+It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy,
+does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It
+devours its friends and servants as well. The downfall of His Excellency
+Gregory Gregorievitch Mikulin (which did not occur till some years
+later) completes all that is known of the man. But at the time of M. de
+P---‘s murder (or execution) Councillor Mikulin, under the modest style
+of Head of Department at the General Secretariat, exercised a wide
+influence as the confidant and right-hand man of his former schoolfellow
+and lifelong friend, General T---. One can imagine them talking over the
+case of Mr. Razumov, with the full sense of their unbounded power
+over all the lives in Russia, with cursory disdain, like two Olympians
+glancing at a worm. The relationship with Prince K--- was enough to save
+Razumov from some carelessly arbitrary proceeding, and it is also very
+probable that after the interview at the Secretariat he would have been
+left alone. Councillor Mikulin would not have forgotten him (he forgot
+no one who ever fell under his observation), but would have simply
+dropped him for ever. Councillor Mikulin was a good-natured man and
+wished no harm to anyone. Besides (with his own reforming tendencies) he
+was favourably impressed by that young student, the son of Prince K---,
+and apparently no fool.
+
+But as fate would have it, while Mr. Razumov was finding that no way of
+life was possible to him, Councillor Mikulin’s discreet abilities were
+rewarded by a very responsible post--nothing less than the direction of
+the general police supervision over Europe. And it was then, and then
+only, when taking in hand the perfecting of the service which watches
+the revolutionist activities abroad, that he thought again of Mr.
+Razumov. He saw great possibilities of special usefulness in that
+uncommon young man on whom he had a hold already, with his peculiar
+temperament, his unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a struggling in
+the toils of a false position.... It was as if the revolutionists
+themselves had put into his hand that tool so much finer than the common
+base instruments, so perfectly fitted, if only vested with sufficient
+credit, to penetrate into places inaccessible to common informers.
+Providential! Providential! And Prince K---, taken into the secret, was
+ready enough to adopt that mystical view too. “It will be necessary,
+though, to make a career for him afterwards,” he had stipulated
+anxiously. “Oh! absolutely. We shall make that our affair,” Mikulin had
+agreed. Prince K---‘s mysticism was of an artless kind; but Councillor
+Mikulin was astute enough for two.
+
+Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they
+must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect
+command. The power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to
+seize upon that sense, that side in the men he used. It did not matter
+to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent
+pride or stupid conceit, it was all one to him as long as the man could
+be made to serve. The obscure, unrelated young student Razumov, in the
+moment of great moral loneliness, was allowed to feel that he was an
+object of interest to a small group of people of high position. Prince
+K--- was persuaded to intervene personally, and on a certain occasion
+gave way to a manly emotion which, all unexpected as it was, quite upset
+Mr. Razumov. The sudden embrace of that man, agitated by his loyalty to
+a throne and by suppressed paternal affection, was a revelation to Mr.
+Razumov of something within his own breast.
+
+“So that was it!” he exclaimed to himself. A sort of contemptuous
+tenderness softened the young man’s grim view of his position as
+he reflected upon that agitated interview with Prince K---. This
+simpleminded, worldly ex-Guardsman and senator whose soft grey official
+whiskers had brushed against his cheek, his aristocratic and convinced
+father, was he a whit less estimable or more absurd than that
+famine-stricken, fanatical revolutionist, the red-nosed student?
+
+And there was some pressure, too, besides the persuasiveness. Mr.
+Razumov was always being made to feel that he had committed himself.
+There was no getting away from that feeling, from that soft,
+unanswerable, “Where to?” of Councillor Mikulin. But no susceptibilities
+were ever hurt. It was to be a dangerous mission to Geneva for
+obtaining, at a critical moment, absolutely reliable information from a
+very inaccessible quarter of the inner revolutionary circle. There were
+indications that a very serious plot was being matured.... The repose
+indispensable to a great country was at stake.... A great scheme of
+orderly reforms would be endangered.... The highest personages in the
+land were patriotically uneasy, and so on. In short, Councillor Mikulin
+knew what to say. This skill is to be inferred clearly from the mental
+and psychological self-confession, self-analysis of Mr. Razumov’s
+written journal--the pitiful resource of a young man who had near him no
+trusted intimacy, no natural affection to turn to.
+
+How all this preliminary work was concealed from observation need not
+be recorded. The expedient of the oculist gives a sufficient instance.
+Councillor Mikulin was resourceful, and the task not very difficult. Any
+fellow-student, even the red-nosed one, was perfectly welcome to see Mr.
+Razumov entering a private house to consult an oculist. Ultimate success
+depended solely on the revolutionary self-delusion which credited
+Razumov with a mysterious complicity in the Haldin affair. To be
+compromised in it was credit enough-and it was their own doing. It was
+precisely _that_ which stamped Mr. Razumov as a providential man, wide
+as poles apart from the usual type of agent for “European supervision.”
+
+And it was _that_ which the Secretariat set itself the task to foster by
+a course of calculated and false indiscretions.
+
+It came at last to this, that one evening Mr. Razumov was unexpectedly
+called upon by one of the “thinking” students whom formerly, before
+the Haldin affair, he used to meet at various private gatherings; a big
+fellow with a quiet, unassuming manner and a pleasant voice.
+
+Recognizing his voice raised in the ante-room, “May one come in?”
+ Razumov, lounging idly on his couch, jumped up. “Suppose he were coming
+to stab me?” he thought sardonically, and, assuming a green shade over
+his left eye, said in a severe tone, “Come in.”
+
+The other was embarrassed; hoped he was not intruding.
+
+“You haven’t been seen for several days, and I’ve wondered.” He coughed
+a little. “Eye better?”
+
+“Nearly well now.”
+
+“Good. I won’t stop a minute; but you see I, that is, we--anyway, I
+have undertaken the duty to warn you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that you are
+living in false security maybe.”
+
+Razumov sat still with his head leaning on his hand, which nearly
+concealed the unshaded eye.
+
+“I have that idea, too.”
+
+“That’s all right, then. Everything seems quiet now, but those people
+are preparing some move of general repression. That’s of course. But it
+isn’t that I came to tell you.” He hitched his chair closer, dropped his
+voice. “You will be arrested before long--we fear.”
+
+An obscure scribe in the Secretariat had overheard a few words of a
+certain conversation, and had caught a glimpse of a certain report. This
+intelligence was not to be neglected.
+
+Razumov laughed a little, and his visitor became very anxious.
+
+“Ah! Kirylo Sidorovitch, this is no laughing matter. They have left you
+alone for a while, but...! Indeed, you had better try to leave the
+country, Kirylo Sidorovitch, while there’s yet time.”
+
+Razumov jumped up and began to thank him for the advice with mocking
+effusiveness, so that the other, colouring up, took himself off with
+the notion that this mysterious Razumov was not a person to be warned or
+advised by inferior mortals.
+
+Councillor Mikulin, informed the next day of the incident, expressed
+his satisfaction. “H’m! Ha! Exactly what was wanted to...” and glanced
+down his beard.
+
+“I conclude,” said Razumov, “that the moment has come for me to start on
+my mission.”
+
+“The psychological Moment,” Councillor Mikulin insisted softly--very
+gravely--as if awed.
+
+All the arrangements to give verisimilitude to the appearance of a
+difficult escape were made. Councillor Mikulin did not expect to see
+Mr. Razumov again before his departure. These meetings were a risk, and
+there was nothing more to settle.
+
+“We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch,”
+ said the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov’s hand with that
+unreserved heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner. “There is
+nothing obscure between us. And I will tell you what! I consider myself
+fortunate in having--h’m--your...”
+
+He glanced down his beard, and, after a moment of thoughtful silence,
+handed to Razumov a half-sheet of notepaper--an abbreviated note of
+matters already discussed, certain points of inquiry, the line of
+conduct agreed on, a few hints as to personalities, and so on. It was
+the only compromising document in the case, but, as Councillor Mikulin
+observed, “it could be easily destroyed. Mr. Razumov had better not see
+any one now--till on the other side of the frontier, when, of course, it
+will be just that.... See and hear and...”
+
+He glanced down his beard; but when Razumov declared his intention
+to see one person at least before leaving St. Petersburg, Councillor
+Mikulin failed to conceal a sudden uneasiness. The young man’s studious,
+solitary, and austere existence was well known to him. It was the
+greatest guarantee of fitness. He became deprecatory. Had his dear
+Kirylo Sidorovitch considered whether, in view of such a momentous
+enterprise, it wasn’t really advisable to sacrifice every sentiment....
+
+Razumov interrupted the remonstrance scornfully. It was not a young
+woman, it was a young fool he wished to see for a certain purpose.
+Councillor Mikulin was relieved, but surprised.
+
+“Ah! And what for--precisely?”
+
+“For the sake of improving the aspect of verisimilitude,” said Razumov
+curtly, in a desire to affirm his independence. “I must be trusted in
+what I do.”
+
+Councillor Mikulin gave way tactfully, murmuring, “Oh, certainly,
+certainly. Your judgment...”
+
+And with another handshake they parted.
+
+The fool of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive
+student known as madcap Kostia. Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable,
+one could make certain of his utter and complete indiscretion. But that
+riotous youth, when reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some
+time ago, passed from his usual elation into boundless dismay.
+
+“Oh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, my dearest friend--my saviour--what shall I
+do? I’ve blown last night every rouble I had from my dad the other day.
+Can’t you give me till Thursday? I shall rush round to all the usurers
+I know.... No, of course, you can’t! Don’t look at me like that.
+What shall I do? No use asking the old man. I tell you he’s given me a
+fistful of big notes three days ago. Miserable wretch that I am.”
+
+He wrung his hands in despair. Impossible to confide in the old man.
+“They” had given him a decoration, a cross on the neck only last year,
+and he had been cursing the modern tendencies ever since. Just then he
+would see all the intellectuals in Russia hanged in a row rather than
+part with a single rouble.
+
+“Kirylo Sidorovitch, wait a moment. Don’t despise me. I have it. I’ll,
+yes--I’ll do it--I’ll break into his desk. There’s no help for it. I
+know the drawer where he keeps his plunder, and I can buy a chisel on my
+way home. He will be terribly upset, but, you know, the dear old duffer
+really loves me. He’ll have to get over it--and I, too. Kirylo, my dear
+soul, if you can only wait for a few hours-till this evening--I shall
+steal all the blessed lot I can lay my hands on! You doubt me! Why?
+You’ve only to say the word.”
+
+“Steal, by all means,” said Razumov, fixing him stonily.
+
+“To the devil with the ten commandments!” cried the other, with the
+greatest animation. “It’s the new future now.”
+
+But when he entered Razumov’s room late in the evening it was with an
+unaccustomed soberness of manner, almost solemnly.
+
+“It’s done,” he said.
+
+Razumov sitting bowed, his clasped hands hanging between his knees,
+shuddered at the familiar sound of these words. Kostia deposited slowly
+in the circle of lamplight a small brown-paper parcel tied with a piece
+of string.
+
+“As I’ve said--all I could lay my hands on. The old boy’ll think the end
+of the world has come.” Razumov nodded from the couch, and contemplated
+the hare-brained fellow’s gravity with a feeling of malicious pleasure.
+
+“I’ve made my little sacrifice,” sighed mad Kostia. “And I’ve to thank
+you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, for the opportunity.”
+
+“It has cost you something?”
+
+“Yes, it has. You see, the dear old duffer really loves me. He’ll be
+hurt.”
+
+“And you believe all they tell you of the new future and the sacred will
+of the people?”
+
+“Implicitly. I would give my life.... Only, you see, I am like a pig
+at a trough. I am no good. It’s my nature.”
+
+Razumov, lost in thought, had forgotten his existence till the
+youth’s voice, entreating him to fly without loss of time, roused him
+unpleasantly.
+
+“All right. Well--good-bye.”
+
+“I am not going to leave you till I’ve seen you out of St. Petersburg,”
+ declared Kostia unexpectedly, with calm determination. “You can’t refuse
+me that now. For God’s sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here
+any moment, and when they get you they’ll immure you somewhere for
+ages--till your hair turns grey. I have down there the best trotter of
+dad’s stables and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the
+moon sets, and find some roadside station....”
+
+Razumov looked up amazed. The journey was decided--unavoidable. He
+had fixed the next day for his departure on the mission. And now he
+discovered suddenly that he had not believed in it. He had gone about
+listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the
+growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever
+did such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was
+amazed! Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness.
+“If I don’t go now, at once,” thought Razumov, with a start of fear, “I
+shall never go.” He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia thrust
+his cap on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he would have left
+the room bareheaded as he stood. He was walking out silently when a
+sharp cry arrested him.
+
+“Kirylo!”
+
+“What?” He turned reluctantly in the doorway. Upright, with a stiffly
+extended arm, Kostia, his face set and white, was pointing an eloquent
+forefinger at the brown little packet lying forgotten in the circle of
+bright light on the table. Razumov hesitated, came back for it under the
+severe eyes of his companion, at whom he tried to smile. But the boyish,
+mad youth was frowning. “It’s a dream,” thought Razumov, putting the
+little parcel into his pocket and descending the stairs; “nobody does
+such things.” The other held him under the arm, whispering of
+dangers ahead, and of what he meant to do in certain contingencies.
+“Preposterous,” murmured Razumov, as he was being tucked up in the
+sledge. He gave himself up to watching the development of the dream
+with extreme attention. It continued on foreseen lines, inexorably
+logical--the long drive, the wait at the small station sitting by a
+stove. They did not exchange half a dozen words altogether. Kostia,
+gloomy himself, did not care to break the silence. At parting they
+embraced twice--it had to be done; and then Kostia vanished out of the
+dream.
+
+When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full
+of bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose
+quietly, lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great
+plain of snow a small brown-paper parcel. Then he sat down again muffled
+up and motionless. “For the people,” he thought, staring out of the
+window. The great white desert of frozen, hard earth glided past his
+eyes without a sign of human habitation.
+
+That had been a waking act; and then the dream had him again: Prussia,
+Saxony, Wurtemberg, faces, sights, words--all a dream, observed with
+an angry, compelled attention. Zurich, Geneva--still a dream, minutely
+followed, wearing one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death--with the
+fear of awakening at the end.
+
+
+II
+
+
+“Perhaps life is just that,” reflected Razumov, pacing to and fro under
+the trees of the little island, all alone with the bronze statue of
+Rousseau. “A dream and a fear.” The dusk deepened. The pages written
+over and torn out of his notebook were the first-fruit of his “mission.”
+ No dream that. They contained the assurance that he was on the eve of
+real discoveries. “I think there is no longer anything in the way of my
+being completely accepted.”
+
+He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the
+conversations. He even went so far as to write: “By the by, I have
+discovered the personality of that terrible N.N. A horrible, paunchy
+brute. If I hear anything of his future movements I shall send a
+warning.”
+
+The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could
+not believe in the reality of his mission. He looked round despairingly,
+as if for some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable
+feeling. He crushed angrily in his hand the pages of the notebook. “This
+must be posted,” he thought.
+
+He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he
+remembered having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure
+shop stocked with cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely
+dirty cardboard-bound volumes of a small circulating library. They
+sold stationery there, too. A morose, shabby old man dozed behind
+the counter. A thin woman in black, with a sickly face, produced the
+envelope he had asked for without even looking at him. Razumov thought
+that these people were safe to deal with because they no longer cared
+for anything in the world. He addressed the envelope on the counter with
+the German name of a certain person living in Vienna. But Razumov knew
+that this, his first communication for Councillor Mikulin, would
+find its way to the Embassy there, be copied in cypher by somebody
+trustworthy, and sent on to its destination, all safe, along with the
+diplomatic correspondence. That was the arrangement contrived to cover
+up the track of the information from all unfaithful eyes, from all
+indiscretions, from all mishaps and treacheries. It was to make him
+safe--absolutely safe.
+
+He wandered out of the wretched shop and made for the post office. It
+was then that I saw him for the second time that day. He was crossing
+the Rue Mont Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller. He
+did not recognize me, but I made him out at some distance. He was
+very good-looking, I thought, this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin’s
+brother. I watched him go up to the letter-box and then retrace his
+steps. Again he passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see
+me that time, either. He carried his head well up, but he had the
+expression of a somnambulist struggling with the very dream which drives
+him forth to wander in dangerous places. My thoughts reverted to Natalia
+Haldin, to her mother. He was all that was left to them of their son and
+brother.
+
+The westerner in me was discomposed. There was something shocking in
+the expression of that face. Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian
+political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical
+conclusion from this chance glimpse. As it was, it only discomposed me
+strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in
+regard to Natalia Haldin. All this is rather inexplicable, but such
+was the origin of the purpose I formed there and then to call on these
+ladies in the evening, after my solitary dinner. It was true that I had
+met Miss Haldin only a few hours before, but Mrs. Haldin herself I had
+not seen for some considerable time. The truth is, I had shirked calling
+of late.
+
+Poor Mrs. Haldin! I confess she frightened me a little. She was one
+of those natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being
+interested, because they provoke both terror and pity. One dreads their
+contact for oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear
+it is that they are born to suffer and to make others suffer, too. It is
+strange to think that, I won’t say liberty, but the mere liberalism of
+outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and
+if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our
+deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like
+ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a
+matter of tears and anguish and blood. Mrs. Haldin had felt the pangs
+of her own generation. There was that enthusiast brother of hers--the
+officer they shot under Nicholas. A faintly ironic resignation is
+no armour for a vulnerable heart. Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her
+children, was bound to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the
+anguish of the future. She was of those who do not know how to heal
+themselves, of those who are too much aware of their heart, who, neither
+cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at its wounds--and count the
+cost.
+
+Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor’s meal. If
+anybody wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of
+Natalia Haldin, I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.
+She had all her life before her. Let it be admitted, then, that I was
+thinking of Natalia Haldin’s life in terms of her mother’s character, a
+manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old
+yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth
+before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy,
+overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly sombre youth
+given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious
+antagonisms.
+
+I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done. One felt so
+helpless, and even worse--so unrelated, in a way. At the last moment I
+hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good?
+
+The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner. The blind was
+down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in
+her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired
+the poignant quality of mad expectation.
+
+I thought that I was sufficiently authorized by the light to knock at
+the door. The ladies had not retired as yet. I only hoped they would
+not have any visitors of their own nationality. A broken-down, retired
+Russian official was to be found there sometimes in the evening. He was
+infinitely forlorn and wearisome by his mere dismal presence. I think
+these ladies tolerated his frequent visits because of an ancient
+friendship with Mr. Haldin, the father, or something of that sort. I
+made up my mind that if I found him prosing away there in his feeble
+voice I should remain but a very few minutes.
+
+The door surprised me by swinging open before I could ring the bell. I
+was confronted by Miss Haldin, in hat and jacket, obviously on the point
+of going out. At that hour! For the doctor, perhaps?
+
+Her exclamation of welcome reassured me. It sounded as if I had been the
+very man she wanted to see. My curiosity was awakened. She drew me in,
+and the faithful Anna, the elderly German maid, closed the door, but did
+not go away afterwards. She remained near it as if in readiness to let
+me out presently. It appeared that Miss Haldin had been on the point of
+going out to find me.
+
+She spoke in a hurried manner very unusual with her. She would have
+gone straight and rung at Mrs. Ziegler’s door, late as it was, for Mrs.
+Ziegler’s habits....
+
+Mrs. Ziegler, the widow of a distinguished professor who was an intimate
+friend of mine, lets me have three rooms out of her very large and fine
+apartment, which she didn’t give up after her husband’s death; but I
+have my own entrance opening on the same landing. It was an arrangement
+of at least ten years’ standing. I said that I was very glad that I had
+the idea to....
+
+Miss Haldin made no motion to take off her outdoor things. I observed
+her heightened colour, something pronouncedly resolute in her tone. Did
+I know where Mr. Razumov lived?
+
+Where Mr. Razumov lived? Mr. Razumov? At this hour--so urgently? I threw
+my arms up in sign of utter ignorance. I had not the slightest idea
+where he lived. If I could have foreseen her question only three hours
+ago, I might have ventured to ask him on the pavement before the new
+post office building, and possibly he would have told me, but very
+possibly, too, he would have dismissed me rudely to mind my own
+business. And possibly, I thought, remembering that extraordinary
+hallucined, anguished, and absent expression, he might have fallen down
+in a fit from the shock of being spoken to. I said nothing of all this
+to Miss Haldin, not even mentioning that I had a glimpse of the young
+man so recently. The impression had been so extremely unpleasant that I
+would have been glad to forget it myself.
+
+“I don’t see where I could make inquiries,” I murmured helplessly. I
+would have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to
+fetch any man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in
+her common sense. “What made you think of coming to me for that
+information?” I asked.
+
+“It wasn’t exactly for that,” she said, in a low voice. She had the air
+of some one confronted by an unpleasant task.
+
+“Am I to understand that you must communicate with Mr. Razumov this
+evening?”
+
+Natalia Haldin moved her head affirmatively; then, after a glance at the
+door of the drawing-room, said in French--
+
+“_C’est maman_,” and remained perplexed for a moment. Always serious,
+not a girl to be put out by any imaginary difficulties, my curiosity was
+suspended on her lips, which remained closed for a moment. What was Mr.
+Razumov’s connexion with this mention of her mother? Mrs. Haldin had not
+been informed of her son’s friend’s arrival in Geneva.
+
+“May I hope to see your mother this evening?” I inquired.
+
+Miss Haldin extended her hand as if to bar the way.
+
+“She is in a terrible state of agitation. Oh, you would not be able
+to detect.... It’s inward, but I who know mother, I am appalled. I
+haven’t the courage to face it any longer. It’s all my fault; I suppose
+I cannot play a part; I’ve never before hidden anything from mother.
+There has never been an occasion for anything of that sort between us.
+But you know yourself the reason why I refrained from telling her at
+once of Mr. Razumov’s arrival here. You understand, don’t you? Owing to
+her unhappy state. And--there--I am no actress. My own feelings being
+strongly engaged, I somehow.... I don’t know. She noticed something
+in my manner. She thought I was concealing something from her. She
+noticed my longer absences, and, in fact, as I have been meeting Mr.
+Razumov daily, I used to stay away longer than usual when I went out.
+Goodness knows what suspicions arose in her mind. You know that she has
+not been herself ever since.... So this evening she--who has been so
+awfully silent: for weeks-began to talk all at once. She said that she
+did not want to reproach me; that I had my character as she had her own;
+that she did not want to pry into my affairs or even into my thoughts;
+for her part, she had never had anything to conceal from her
+children...cruel things to listen to. And all this in her quiet voice,
+with that poor, wasted face as calm as a stone. It was unbearable.”
+
+Miss Haldin talked in an undertone and more rapidly than I had ever
+heard her speak before. That in itself was disturbing. The ante-room
+being strongly lighted, I could see under the veil the heightened colour
+of her face. She stood erect, her left hand was resting lightly on a
+small table. The other hung by her side without stirring. Now and then
+she caught her breath slightly.
+
+“It was too startling. Just fancy! She thought that I was making
+preparations to leave her without saying anything. I knelt by the side
+of her chair and entreated her to think of what she was saying! She put
+her hand on my head, but she persists in her delusion all the same. She
+had always thought that she was worthy of her children’s confidence, but
+apparently it was not so. Her son could not trust her love nor yet her
+understanding--and now I was planning to abandon her in the same cruel
+and unjust manner, and so on, and so on. Nothing I could say.... It
+is morbid obstinacy.... She said that she felt there was something,
+some change in me.... If my convictions were calling me away, why
+this secrecy, as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe to
+trust? ‘As if my heart could play traitor to my children,’ she said....
+It was hardly to be borne. And she was smoothing my head all the
+time.... It was perfectly useless to protest. She is ill. Her very
+soul is....”
+
+I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us. I looked
+into her eyes, glistening through the veil.
+
+“I! Changed!” she exclaimed in the same low tone. “My convictions
+calling me away! It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I
+am weak and cannot see what I ought to do. You know that. And to end it
+all I did a selfish thing. To remove her suspicions of myself I told her
+of Mr. Razumov. It was selfish of me. You know we were completely
+right in agreeing to keep the knowledge away from her. Perfectly right.
+Directly I told her of our poor Victor’s friend being here I saw how
+right we have been. She ought to have been prepared; but in my distress
+I just blurted it out. Mother got terribly excited at once. How long
+has he been here? What did he know, and why did he not come to see us at
+once, this friend of her Victor? What did that mean? Was she not to be
+trusted even with such memories as there were left of her son?... Just
+think how I felt seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly motionless,
+with her thin hands gripping the arms of the chair. I told her it was
+all my fault.”
+
+I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair,
+there, behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me.
+The silence in there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an
+historical fact and the modern instances of its working. That view
+flashed through my mind, but I could not doubt that Miss Haldin had had
+an atrocious time of it. I quite understood when she said that she could
+not face the night upon the impression of that scene. Mrs. Haldin
+had given way to most awful imaginings, to most fantastic and cruel
+suspicions. All this had to be lulled at all costs and without loss of
+time. It was no shock to me to learn that Miss Haldin had said to her,
+“I will go and bring him here at once.” There was nothing absurd in that
+cry, no exaggeration of sentiment. I was not even doubtful in my “Very
+well, but how?”
+
+It was perfectly right that she should think of me, but what could I do
+in my ignorance of Mr. Razumov’s quarters.
+
+“And to think he may be living near by, within a stone’s-throw,
+perhaps!” she exclaimed.
+
+I doubted it; but I would have gone off cheerfully to fetch him from the
+other end of Geneva. I suppose she was certain of my readiness, since
+her first thought was to come to me. But the service she meant to ask of
+me really was to accompany her to the Chateau Borel.
+
+I had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre
+grounds, and the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy
+and intrigue and feminist adoration. I objected that Madame de S-- most
+likely would know nothing of what we wanted to find out. Neither did I
+think it likely that the young man would be found there. I remembered
+my glimpse of his face, and somehow gained the conviction that a man who
+looked worse than if he had seen the dead would want to shut himself up
+somewhere where he could be alone. I felt a strange certitude that Mr.
+Razumov was going home when I saw him.
+
+“It is really of Peter Ivanovitch that I was thinking,” said Miss Haldin
+quietly.
+
+Ah! He, of course, would know. I looked at my watch. It was twenty
+minutes past nine only.... Still.
+
+“I would try his hotel, then,” I advised. “He has rooms at the
+Cosmopolitan, somewhere on the top floor.”
+
+I did not offer to go by myself, simply from mistrust of the reception I
+should meet with. But I suggested the faithful Anna, with a note asking
+for the information.
+
+Anna was still waiting by the door at the other end of the room, and we
+two discussed the matter in whispers. Miss Haldin thought she must go
+herself. Anna was timid and slow. Time would be lost in bringing back
+the answer, and from that point of view it was getting late, for it was
+by no means certain that Mr. Razumov lived near by.
+
+“If I go myself,” Miss Haldin argued, “I can go straight to him from the
+hotel. And in any case I should have to go out, because I must explain
+to Mr. Razumov personally--prepare him in a way. You have no idea of
+mother’s state of mind.”
+
+Her colour came and went. She even thought that both for her mother’s
+sake and for her own it was better that they should not be together for
+a little time. Anna, whom her mother liked, would be at hand.
+
+“She could take her sewing into the room,” Miss Haldin continued,
+leading the way to the door. Then, addressing in German the maid who
+opened it before us, “You may tell my mother that this gentleman called
+and is gone with me to find Mr. Razumov. She must not be uneasy if I am
+away for some length of time.”
+
+We passed out quickly into the street, and she took deep breaths of the
+cool night air. “I did not even ask you,” she murmured.
+
+“I should think not,” I said, with a laugh. The manner of my reception
+by the great feminist could not be considered now. That he would be
+annoyed to see me, and probably treat me to some solemn insolence, I had
+no doubt, but I supposed that he would not absolutely dare to throw me
+out. And that was all I cared for. “Won’t you take my arm?” I asked.
+
+She did so in silence, and neither of us said anything worth recording
+till I let her go first into the great hall of the hotel. It was
+brilliantly lighted, and with a good many people lounging about.
+
+“I could very well go up there without you,” I suggested.
+
+“I don’t like to be left waiting in this place,” she said in a low
+voice.
+
+“I will come too.”
+
+I led her straight to the lift then. At the top floor the attendant
+directed us to the right: “End of the corridor.”
+
+The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in
+profusion, and the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike
+and numbered, made me think of the perfect order of some severely
+luxurious model penitentiary on the solitary confinement principle. Up
+there under the roof of that enormous pile for housing travellers
+no sound of any kind reached us, the thick crimson felt muffled our
+footsteps completely. We hastened on, not looking at each other till we
+found ourselves before the very last door of that long passage. Then our
+eyes met, and we stood thus for a moment lending ear to a faint murmur
+of voices inside.
+
+“I suppose this is it,” I whispered unnecessarily. I saw Miss Haldin’s
+lips move without a sound, and after my sharp knock the murmur of voices
+inside ceased. A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then
+the door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red
+blouse, with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in
+an untidy and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn
+together. I learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous--or
+the notorious--Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint
+Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so
+curiously evil-less, so--I may say--un-devilish. It got softened still
+more as she looked up at Miss Haldin, who stated, in her rich, even
+voice, her wish to see Peter Ivanovitch for a moment.
+
+“I am Miss Haldin,” she added.
+
+At this, with her brow completely smoothed out now, but without a word
+in answer, the woman in the red blouse walked away to a sofa and sat
+down, leaving the door wide open.
+
+And from the sofa, her hands lying on her lap, she watched us enter,
+with her black, glittering eyes.
+
+Miss Haldin advanced into the middle of the room; I, faithful to my part
+of mere attendant, remained by the door after closing it behind me. The
+room, quite a large one, but with a low ceiling, was scantily furnished,
+and an electric bulb with a porcelain shade pulled low down over a big
+table (with a very large map spread on it) left its distant parts in a
+dim, artificial twilight. Peter Ivanovitch was not to be seen, neither
+was Mr. Razumov present. But, on the sofa, near Sophia Antonovna, a
+bony-faced man with a goatee beard leaned forward with his hands on
+his knees, staring hard with a kindly expression. In a remote corner a
+broad, pale face and a bulky shape could be made out, uncouth, and as if
+insecure on the low seat on which it rested. The only person known to me
+was little Julius Laspara, who seemed to have been poring over the map,
+his feet twined tightly round the chair-legs. He got down briskly and
+bowed to Miss Haldin, looking absurdly like a hooknosed boy with a
+beautiful false pepper-and-salt beard. He advanced, offering his seat,
+which Miss Haldin declined. She had only come in for a moment to say a
+few words to Peter Ivanovitch.
+
+His high-pitched voice became painfully audible in the room.
+
+“Strangely enough, I was thinking of you this very afternoon, Natalia
+Victorovna. I met Mr. Razumov. I asked him to write me an article on
+anything he liked. You could translate it into English--with such a
+teacher.”
+
+He nodded complimentarily in my direction. At the name of Razumov an
+indescribable sound, a sort of feeble squeak, as of some angry small
+animal, was heard in the corner occupied by the man who seemed much too
+large for the chair on which he sat. I did not hear what Miss Haldin
+said. Laspara spoke again.
+
+“It’s time to do something, Natalia Victorovna. But I suppose you have
+your own ideas. Why not write something yourself? Suppose you came to
+see us soon? We could talk it over. Any advice...”
+
+Again I did not catch Miss Haldin’s words. It was Laspara’s voice once
+more.
+
+“Peter Ivanovitch? He’s retired for a moment into the other room. We
+are all waiting for him.” The great man, entering at that moment, looked
+bigger, taller, quite imposing in a long dressing-gown of some dark
+stuff. It descended in straight lines down to his feet. He suggested
+a monk or a prophet, a robust figure of same desert-dweller--something
+Asiatic; and the dark glasses in conjunction with this costume made him
+more mysterious than ever in the subdued light.
+
+Little Laspara went back to his chair to look at the map, the only
+brilliantly lit object in the room. Even from my distant position by the
+door I could make out, by the shape of the blue part representing the
+water, that it was a map of the Baltic provinces. Peter Ivanovitch
+exclaimed slightly, advancing towards Miss Haldin, checked himself
+on perceiving me, very vaguely no doubt; and peered with his dark,
+bespectacled stare. He must have recognized me by my grey hair, because,
+with a marked shrug of his broad shoulders, he turned to Miss Haldin in
+benevolent indulgence. He seized her hand in his thick cushioned palm,
+and put his other big paw over it like a lid.
+
+While those two standing in the middle of the floor were exchanging a
+few inaudible phrases no one else moved in the room: Laspara, with his
+back to us, kneeling on the chair, his elbows propped on the big-scale
+map, the shadowy enormity in the corner, the frankly staring man with
+the goatee on the sofa, the woman in the red blouse by his side--not one
+of them stirred. I suppose that really they had no time, for Miss Haldin
+withdrew her hand immediately from Peter Ivanovitch and before I was
+ready for her was moving to the door. A disregarded Westerner, I threw
+it open hurriedly and followed her out, my last glance leaving them all
+motionless in their varied poses: Peter Ivanovitch alone standing up,
+with his dark glasses like an enormous blind teacher, and behind him the
+vivid patch of light on the coloured map, pored over by the diminutive
+Laspara.
+
+Later on, much later on, at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were
+vague and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia,
+I remembered the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its
+central figure. No details ever came out, but it was known that the
+revolutionary parties abroad had given their assistance, had sent
+emissaries in advance, that even money was found to dispatch a steamer
+with a cargo of arms and conspirators to invade the Baltic provinces.
+And while my eyes scanned the imperfect disclosures (in which the world
+was not much interested) I thought that the old, settled Europe had been
+given in my person attending that Russian girl something like a glimpse
+behind the scenes. A short, strange glimpse on the top floor of a great
+hotel of all places in the world: the great man himself; the motionless
+great bulk in the corner of the slayer of spies and gendarmes;
+Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient terrorist campaigns; the woman, with
+her hair as white as mine and the lively black eyes, all in a mysterious
+half-light, with the strongly lighted map of Russia on the table. The
+woman I had the opportunity to see again. As we were waiting for the
+lift she came hurrying along the corridor, with her eyes fastened
+on Miss Haldin’s face, and drew her aside as if for a confidential
+communication. It was not long. A few words only.
+
+Going down in the lift, Natalia Haldin did not break the silence. It was
+only when out of the hotel and as we moved along the quay in the fresh
+darkness spangled by the quay lights, reflected in the black water of
+the little port on our left hand, and with lofty piles of hotels on our
+right, that she spoke.
+
+“That was Sophia Antonovna--you know the woman?...”
+
+“Yes, I know--the famous...”
+
+“The same. It appears that after we went out Peter Ivanovitch told them
+why I had come. That was the reason she ran out after us. She named
+herself to me, and then she said, ‘You are the sister of a brave man who
+shall be remembered. You may see better times.’ I told her I hoped to
+see the time when all this would be forgotten, even if the name of my
+brother were to be forgotten too. Something moved me to say that, but
+you understand?”
+
+“Yes,” I said. “You think of the era of concord and justice.”
+
+“Yes. There is too much hate and revenge in that work. It must be done.
+It is a sacrifice--and so let it be all the greater. Destruction is the
+work of anger. Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together,
+and only the reconstructors be remembered.’’
+
+“And did Sophia Antonovna agree with you?” I asked sceptically.
+
+“She did not say anything except, ‘It is good for you to believe in
+love.’ I should think she understood me. Then she asked me if I hoped to
+see Mr. Razumov presently. I said I trusted I could manage to bring him
+to see my mother this evening, as my mother had learned of his being
+here and was morbidly impatient to learn if he could tell us something
+of Victor. He was the only friend of my brother we knew of, and a great
+intimate. She said, ‘Oh! Your brother--yes. Please tell Mr. Razumov that
+I have made public the story which came to me from St. Petersburg. It
+concerns your brother’s arrest,’ she added. ‘He was betrayed by a man of
+the people who has since hanged himself. Mr. Razumov will explain it all
+to you. I gave him the full information this afternoon. And please tell
+Mr. Razumov that Sophia Antonovna sends him her greetings. I am going
+away early in the morning--far away.’”
+
+And Miss Haldin added, after a moment of silence--“I was so moved
+by what I heard so unexpectedly that I simply could not speak to you
+before.... A man of the people! Oh, our poor people!”
+
+She walked slowly, as if tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the
+windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound
+of hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red
+posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial
+effect.--and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the
+streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible
+dreariness.
+
+I had taken for granted she had obtained the address, and let myself be
+guided by her. On the Mont Blanc bridge, where a few dark figures seemed
+lost in the wide and long perspective defined by the lights, she said--
+
+“It isn’t very far from our house. I somehow thought it couldn’t be.
+The address is Rue de Carouge. I think it must be one of those big new
+houses for artisans.”
+
+She took my arm confidingly, familiarly, and accelerated her pace. There
+was something primitive in our proceedings. We did not think of
+the resources of civilization. A late tramcar overtook us; a row of
+_fiacres_ stood by the railing of the gardens. It never entered our
+heads to make use of these conveyances. She was too hurried, perhaps,
+and as to myself--well, she had taken my arm confidingly. As we were
+ascending the easy incline of the Corraterie, all the shops shuttered
+and no light in any of the windows (as if all the mercenary population
+had fled at the end of the day), she said tentatively--
+
+“I could run in for a moment to have a look at mother. It would not be
+much out of the way.”
+
+I dissuaded her. If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that
+night it would have been unwise to show herself without him. The sooner
+we got hold of the young man and brought him along to calm her mother’s
+agitation the better. She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed
+diagonally the Place de Theatre, bluish grey with its floor of slabs of
+stone, under the electric light, and the lonely equestrian statue
+all black in the middle. In the Rue de Carouge we were in the poorer
+quarters and approaching the outskirts of the town. Vacant building
+plots alternated with high, new houses. At the corner of a side street
+the crude light of a whitewashed shop fell into the night, fan-like,
+through a wide doorway. One could see from a distance the inner wall
+with its scantily furnished shelves, and the deal counter painted brown.
+That was the house. Approaching it along the dark stretch of a fence
+of tarred planks, we saw the narrow pallid face of the cut angle, five
+single windows high, without a gleam in them, and crowned by the heavy
+shadow of a jutting roof slope.
+
+“We must inquire in the shop,” Miss Haldin directed me.
+
+A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a
+frayed tie, laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both
+elbows far over the bare counter, answered that the person I was
+inquiring for was indeed his _locataire_ on the third floor, but that
+for the moment he was out.
+
+“For the moment,” I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin. “Does this
+mean that you expect him back at once?”
+
+He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips. He smiled
+faintly as though he knew all about everything. Mr. Razumov, after being
+absent all day, had returned early in the evening. He was very surprised
+about half an hour or a little more since to see him come down again.
+Mr. Razumov left his key, and in the course of some words which passed
+between them had remarked that he was going out because he needed air.
+
+From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held
+between his hands. Air. Air. But whether that meant a long or a short
+absence it was difficult to say. The night was very close, certainly.
+
+After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added--
+
+“The storm shall drive him in.”
+
+“There’s going to be a storm?” I asked.
+
+“Why, yes!”
+
+As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
+
+Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up
+her quest that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home
+within half an hour, to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop. We
+would look in again presently.
+
+For all answer he moved his head imperceptibly. The approval of Miss
+Haldin was expressed by her silence. We walked slowly down the street,
+away from the town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to
+demolition were overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage,
+lighted from below by gas lamps. The violent and monotonous noise of the
+icy waters of the Arve falling over a low dam swept towards us with a
+chilly draught of air across a great open space, where a double line of
+lamp-lights outlined a street as yet without houses. But on the other
+shore, overhung by the awful blackness of the thunder-cloud, a solitary
+dim light seemed to watch us with a weary stare. When we had strolled as
+far as the bridge, I said--
+
+“We had better get back....”
+
+
+In the shop the sickly man was studying his smudgy newspaper, now spread
+out largely on the counter. He just raised his head when I looked in and
+shook it negatively, pursing up his lips. I rejoined Miss Haldin outside
+at once, and we moved off at a brisk pace. She remarked that she would
+send Anna with a note the first thing in the morning. I respected her
+taciturnity, silence being perhaps the best way to show my concern.
+
+The semi-rural street we followed on our return changed gradually to the
+usual town thoroughfare, broad and deserted. We did not meet four people
+altogether, and the way seemed interminable, because my companion’s
+natural anxiety had communicated itself sympathetically to me. At last
+we turned into the Boulevard des Philosophes, more wide, more empty,
+more dead--the very desolation of slumbering respectability. At the
+sight of the two lighted windows, very conspicuous from afar, I had
+the mental vision of Mrs. Haldin in her armchair keeping a dreadful,
+tormenting vigil under the evil spell of an arbitrary rule: a victim of
+tyranny and revolution, a sight at once cruel and absurd.
+
+
+III
+
+
+
+“You will come in for a moment?” said Natalia Haldin.
+
+I demurred on account of the late hour. “You know mother likes you so
+much,” she insisted.
+
+“I will just come in to hear how your mother is.”
+
+She said, as if to herself, “I don’t even know whether she will believe
+that I could not find Mr. Razumov, since she has taken it into her head
+that I am concealing something from her. You may be able to persuade
+her....”
+
+“Your mother may mistrust me too,” I observed.
+
+“You! Why? What could you have to conceal from her? You are not a
+Russian nor a conspirator.”
+
+I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made
+up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end. The distant
+rolling of thunder in the valley of the Rhone was coming nearer to the
+sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality. We crossed
+the street opposite the great dark gateway, and Miss Haldin rang at the
+door of the apartment. It was opened almost instantly, as if the
+elderly maid had been waiting in the ante-room for our return. Her flat
+physiognomy had an air of satisfaction. The gentleman was there, she
+declared, while closing the door.
+
+Neither of us understood. Miss Haldin turned round brusquely to her.
+“Who?”
+
+“Herr Razumov,” she explained.
+
+She had heard enough of our conversation before we left to know why her
+young mistress was going out. Therefore, when the gentleman gave his
+name at the door, she admitted him at once.
+
+“No one could have foreseen that,” Miss Haldin murmured, with her
+serious grey eyes fixed upon mine. And, remembering the expression of
+the young man’s face seen not much more than four hours ago, the look of
+a haunted somnambulist, I wondered with a sort of awe.
+
+“You asked my mother first?” Miss Haldin inquired of the maid.
+
+“No. I announced the gentleman,” she answered, surprised at our troubled
+faces.
+
+“Still,” I said in an undertone, “your mother was prepared.”
+
+“Yes. But he has no idea....”
+
+It seemed to me she doubted his tact. To her question how long the
+gentleman had been with her mother, the maid told us that Der Herr had
+been in the drawing-room no more than a short quarter of an hour.
+
+She waited a moment, then withdrew, looking a little scared. Miss Haldin
+gazed at me in silence.
+
+“As things have turned out,” I said, “you happen to know exactly what
+your brother’s friend has to tell your mother. And surely after that...”
+
+“Yes,” said Natalia Haldin slowly. “I only wonder, as I was not here
+when he came, if it wouldn’t be better not to interrupt now.”
+
+We remained silent, and I suppose we both strained our ears, but no
+sound reached us through the closed door. The features of Miss Haldin
+expressed a painful irresolution; she made a movement as if to go in,
+but checked herself. She had heard footsteps on the other side of the
+door. It came open, and Razumov, without pausing, stepped out into the
+ante-room. The fatigue of that day and the struggle with himself had
+changed him so much that I would have hesitated to recognize that face
+which, only a few hours before, when he brushed against me in front of
+the post office, had been startling enough but quite different. It
+had been not so livid then, and its eyes not so sombre. They certainly
+looked more sane now, but there was upon them the shadow of something
+consciously evil.
+
+I speak of that, because, at first, their glance fell on me, though
+without any sort of recognition or even comprehension. I was simply in
+the line of his stare. I don’t know if he had heard the bell or expected
+to see anybody. He was going out, I believe, and I do not think that
+he saw Miss Haldin till she advanced towards him a step or two. He
+disregarded the hand she put out.
+
+“It’s you, Natalia Victorovna.... Perhaps you are surprised...at
+this late hour. But, you see, I remembered our conversations in that
+garden. I thought really it was your wish that I should--without loss of
+time...so I came. No other reason. Simply to tell...”
+
+He spoke with difficulty. I noticed that, and remembered his declaration
+to the man in the shop that he was going out because he “needed air.”
+ If that was his object, then it was clear that he had miserably failed.
+With downcast eyes and lowered head he made an effort to pick up the
+strangled phrase.
+
+“To tell what I have heard myself only to-day--to-day....”
+
+Through the door he had not closed I had a view of the drawing-room. It
+was lighted only by a shaded lamp--Mrs. Haldin’s eyes could not support
+either gas or electricity. It was a comparatively big room, and in
+contrast with the strongly lighted ante-room its length was lost in
+semi-transparent gloom backed by heavy shadows; and on that ground I saw
+the motionless figure of Mrs. Haldin, inclined slightly forward, with a
+pale hand resting on the arm of the chair.
+
+She did not move. With the window before her she had no longer that
+attitude suggesting expectation. The blind was down; and outside
+there was only the night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town
+indifferent and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration--a
+respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were
+nothing. Her white head was bowed.
+
+The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great
+stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this
+other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words
+and gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother,
+refused in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more
+than Rachel’s inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more
+inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined
+mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile suggested
+the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a beloved head were
+resting there.
+
+I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by
+the young man, shut the door. It was not done without hesitation. For a
+moment I thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only
+an anxious glance. Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved...but no. There
+was in the immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of
+suffering without remedy.
+
+Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor. The thought
+that he would have to repeat the story he had told already was
+intolerable to him. He had expected to find the two women together. And
+then, he had said to himself, it would be over for all time--for all
+time. “It’s lucky I don’t believe in another world,” he had thought
+cynically.
+
+Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained
+a certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary. He was
+aware of the danger of that strange self-indulgence. He alludes to it
+himself, but he could not refrain. It calmed him--it reconciled him
+to his existence. He sat there scribbling by the light of a solitary
+candle, till it occurred to him that having heard the explanation of
+Haldin’s arrest, as put forward by Sophia Antonovna, it behoved him to
+tell these ladies himself. They were certain to hear the tale through
+some other channel, and then his abstention would look strange, not only
+to the mother and sister of Haldin, but to other people also. Having
+come to this conclusion, he did not discover in himself any marked
+reluctance to face the necessity, and very soon an anxiety to be done
+with it began to torment him. He looked at his watch. No; it was not
+absolutely too late.
+
+The fifteen minutes with Mrs. Haldin were like the revenge of the
+unknown: that white face, that weak, distinct voice; that head, at
+first turned to him eagerly, then, after a while, bowed again and
+motionless--in the dim, still light of the room in which his words
+which he tried to subdue resounded so loudly--had troubled him like some
+strange discovery. And there seemed to be a secret obstinacy in that
+sorrow, something he could not understand; at any rate, something he had
+not expected. Was it hostile? But it did not matter. Nothing could touch
+him now; in the eyes of the revolutionists there was now no shadow on
+his past. The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left
+behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow.
+And this was the phantom’s mother consumed with grief and white as a
+ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no
+importance. Mothers did not matter. He could not shake off the poignant
+impression of that silent, quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of
+sternness crept into his thoughts. These were the consequences. Well,
+what of it? “Am I then on a bed of roses?” he had exclaimed to himself,
+sitting at some distance with his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow.
+He had said all he had to say to her, and when he had finished she had
+not uttered a word. She had turned away her head while he was speaking.
+The silence which had fallen on his last words had lasted for five
+minutes or more. What did it mean? Before its incomprehensible character
+he became conscious of anger in his stern mood, the old anger against
+Haldin reawakened by the contemplation of Haldin’s mother. And was
+it not something like enviousness which gripped his heart, as if of
+a privilege denied to him alone of all the men that had ever passed
+through this world? It was the other who had attained to repose and yet
+continued to exist in the affection of that mourning old woman, in
+the thoughts of all these people posing for lovers of humanity. It
+was impossible to get rid of him. “It’s myself whom I have given up
+to destruction,” thought Razumov. “He has induced me to do it. I can’t
+shake him off.”
+
+Alarmed by that discovery, he got up and strode out of the silent,
+dim room with its silent old woman in the chair, that mother! He never
+looked back. It was frankly a flight. But on opening the door he saw
+his retreat cut off: There was the sister. He had never forgotten the
+sister, only he had not expected to see her then--or ever any more,
+perhaps. Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the
+apparition of her brother had been. Razumov gave a start as though he
+had discovered himself cleverly trapped. He tried to smile, but could
+not manage it, and lowered his eyes. “Must I repeat that silly story
+now?” he asked himself, and felt a sinking sensation. Nothing solid
+had passed his lips since the day before, but he was not in a state to
+analyse the origins of his weakness. He meant to take up his hat and
+depart with as few words as possible, but Miss Haldin’s swift movement
+to shut the door took him by surprise. He half turned after her, but
+without raising his eyes, passively, just as a feather might stir in the
+disturbed air. The next moment she was back in the place she had started
+from, with another half-turn on his part, so that they came again into
+the same relative positions.
+
+“Yes, yes,” she said hurriedly. “I am very grateful to you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, for coming at once--like this.... Only, I wish I had....
+Did mother tell you?”
+
+“I wonder what she could have told me that I did not know before,” he
+said, obviously to himself, but perfectly audible. “Because I always did
+know it,” he added louder, as if in despair.
+
+He hung his head. He had such a strong sense of Natalia Haldin’s
+presence that to look at her he felt would be a relief. It was she who
+had been haunting him now. He had suffered that persecution ever since
+she had suddenly appeared before him in the garden of the Villa Borel
+with an extended hand and the name of her brother on her lips....
+The ante-room had a row of hooks on the wall nearest to the outer door,
+while against the wall opposite there stood a small dark table and one
+chair. The paper, bearing a very faint design, was all but white. The
+light of an electric bulb high up under the ceiling searched that clear
+square box into its four bare corners, crudely, without shadows--a
+strange stage for an obscure drama.
+
+“What do you mean?” asked Miss Haldin. “What is it that you knew
+always?”
+
+He raised his face, pale, full of unexpressed suffering. But that
+look in his eyes of dull, absent obstinacy, which struck and surprised
+everybody he was talking to, began to pass away. It was as though he
+were coming to himself in the awakened consciousness of that marvellous
+harmony of feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the
+girl before him a being so rare, outside, and, as it were, above the
+common notion of beauty. He looked at her so long that she coloured
+slightly.
+
+“What is it that you knew?” she repeated vaguely.
+
+That time he managed to smile.
+
+“Indeed, if it had not been for a word of greeting or two, I would doubt
+whether your mother was aware at all of my existence. You understand?”
+
+Natalia Haldin nodded; her hands moved slightly by her side.
+
+“Yes. Is it not heart-breaking? She has not shed a tear yet--not a
+single tear.”
+
+“Not a tear! And you, Natalia Victorovna? You have been able to cry?”
+
+“I have. And then I am young enough, Kirylo Sidorovitch, to believe in
+the future. But when I see my mother so terribly distracted, I almost
+forget everything. I ask myself whether one should feel proud--or only
+resigned. We had such a lot of people coming to see us. There were
+utter strangers who wrote asking for permission to call to present their
+respects. It was impossible to keep our door shut for ever. You know
+that Peter Ivanovitch himself.... Oh yes, there was much sympathy,
+but there were persons who exulted openly at that death. Then, when I
+was left alone with poor mother, all this seemed so wrong in spirit,
+something not worth the price she is paying for it. But directly I heard
+you were here in Geneva, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I felt that you were the
+only person who could assist me....”
+
+“In comforting a bereaved mother? Yes!” he broke in in a manner which
+made her open her clear unsuspecting eyes. “But there is a question of
+fitness. Has this occurred to you?”
+
+There was a breathlessness in his utterance which contrasted with the
+monstrous hint of mockery in his intention.
+
+“Why!” whispered Natalia Haldin with feeling. “Who more fit than you?”
+
+He had a convulsive movement of exasperation, but controlled himself.
+
+“Indeed! Directly you heard that I was in Geneva, before even seeing me?
+It is another proof of that confidence which....”
+
+All at once his tone changed, became more incisive and more detached.
+
+“Men are poor creatures, Natalia Victorovna. They have no intuition of
+sentiment. In order to speak fittingly to a mother of her lost son one
+must have had some experience of the filial relation. It is not the case
+with me--if you must know the whole truth. Your hopes have to deal here
+with ‘a breast unwarmed by any affection,’ as the poet says.... That
+does not mean it is insensible,” he added in a lower tone.
+
+“I am certain your heart is not unfeeling,” said Miss Haldin softly.
+
+“No. It is not as hard as a stone,” he went on in the same introspective
+voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in
+that unwarmed breast of which he spoke. “No, not so hard. But how to
+prove what you give me credit for--ah! that’s another question. No one
+has ever expected such a thing from me before. No one whom my tenderness
+would have been of any use to. And now you come. You! Now! No, Natalia
+Victorovna. It’s too late. You come too late. You must expect nothing
+from me.”
+
+She recoiled from him a little, though he had made no movement, as
+if she had seen some change in his face, charging his words with the
+significance of some hidden sentiment they shared together. To me, the
+silent spectator, they looked like two people becoming conscious of a
+spell which had been lying on them ever since they first set eyes on
+each other. Had either of them cast a glance then in my direction, I
+would have opened the door quietly and gone out. But neither did; and
+I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous
+remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian
+problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings--the prison of
+their souls.
+
+Frank, courageous, Miss Haldin controlled her voice in the midst of her
+trouble.
+
+“What can this mean?” she asked, as if speaking to herself.
+
+“It may mean that you have given yourself up to vain imaginings while I
+have managed to remain amongst the truth of things and the realities of
+life--our Russian life--such as they are.”
+
+“They are cruel,” she murmured.
+
+“And ugly. Don’t forget that--and ugly. Look where you like. Look near
+you, here abroad where you are, and then look back at home, whence you
+came.”
+
+“One must look beyond the present.” Her tone had an ardent conviction.
+
+“The blind can do that best. I have had the misfortune to be born
+clear-eyed. And if you only knew what strange things I have seen! What
+amazing and unexpected apparitions!... But why talk of all this?”
+
+“On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you,” she protested
+with earnest serenity. The sombre humours of her brother’s friend left
+her unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were
+the signs of an indignant rectitude. She saw that he was not an ordinary
+person, and perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to
+her trustful eyes. “Yes, with you especially,” she insisted. “With you
+of all the Russian people in the world....” A faint smile dwelt for
+a moment on her lips. “I am like poor mother in a way. I too seem unable
+to give up our beloved dead, who, don’t forget, was all in all to us. I
+don’t want to abuse your sympathy, but you must understand that it is in
+you that we can find all that is left of his generous soul.”
+
+I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least. And
+yet, even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility. It was a
+sort of rapt thoughtfulness. Then he stirred slightly.
+
+“You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” she asked.
+
+“I! Going? Where? Oh yes, but I must tell you first....” His voice
+was muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance,
+as if speech were something disgusting or deadly. “That story, you
+know--the story I heard this afternoon....”
+
+“I know the story already,” she said sadly.
+
+“You know it! Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?”
+
+“No. It’s Sophia Antonovna. I have seen her just now. She sends you her
+greetings. She is going away to-morrow.”
+
+He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down,
+and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the
+four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity
+of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my
+Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My
+existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now
+make a movement. And I thought to myself that, of course, they had to
+come together, the sister and the friend of that dead man. The ideas,
+the hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom, expressed in their
+common affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of autocracy,--all
+this must draw them to each other fatally. Her very ignorance and his
+loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.
+And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already. Of course. It was
+manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time
+before they met. She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling
+her imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for
+him to see that exceptional girl was enough. The only cause for surprise
+was his gloomy aloofness before her clearly expressed welcome. But he
+was young, and however austere and devoted to his revolutionary ideals,
+he was not blind. The period of reserve was over; he was coming forward
+in his own way. I could not mistake the significance of this late visit,
+for in what he had to say there was nothing urgent. The true cause
+dawned upon me: he had discovered that he needed her and she was moved
+by the same feeling. It was the second time that I saw them together,
+and I knew that next time they met I would not be there, either
+remembered or forgotten. I would have virtually ceased to exist for both
+these young people.
+
+I made this discovery in a very few moments. Meantime, Natalia Haldin
+was telling Razumov briefly of our peregrinations from one end of Geneva
+to the other. While speaking she raised her hands above her head to
+untie her veil, and that movement displayed for an instant the seductive
+grace of her youthful figure, clad in the simplest of mourning. In the
+transparent shadow the hat rim threw on her face her grey eyes had an
+enticing lustre. Her voice, with its unfeminine yet exquisite timbre,
+was steady, and she spoke quickly, frank, unembarrassed. As she
+justified her action by the mental state of her mother, a spasm of pain
+marred the generously confiding harmony of her features. I perceived
+that with his downcast eyes he had the air of a man who is listening
+to a strain of music rather than to articulated speech. And in the same
+way, after she had ceased, he seemed to listen yet, motionless, as if
+under the spell of suggestive sound. He came to himself, muttering--
+
+“Yes, yes. She has not shed a tear. She did not seem to hear what I
+was saying. I might have told her anything. She looked as if no longer
+belonging to this world.”
+
+Miss Haldin gave signs of profound distress. Her voice faltered. “You
+don’t know how bad it has come to be. She expects now to see _him_!” The
+veil dropped from her fingers and she clasped her hands in anguish. “It
+shall end by her seeing him,” she cried.
+
+Razumov raised his head sharply and attached on her a prolonged
+thoughtful glance.
+
+“H’m. That’s very possible,” he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if
+giving his opinion on a matter of fact. “I wonder what....” He
+checked himself.
+
+“That would be the end. Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will
+follow.”
+
+Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
+
+“You think so?” he queried profoundly. Miss Haldin’s lips were slightly
+parted. Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man’s
+character had fascinated her from the first. “No! There’s neither truth
+nor consolation to be got from the phantoms of the dead,” he added after
+a weighty pause. “I might have told her something true; for instance,
+that your brother meant to save his life--to escape. There can be no
+doubt of that. But I did not.”
+
+“You did not! But why?”
+
+“I don’t know. Other thoughts came into my head,” he answered. He seemed
+to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count
+his own heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face
+of the girl. “You were not there,” he continued. “I had made up my mind
+never to see you again.”
+
+This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
+
+“You.... How is it possible?”
+
+“You may well ask.... However, I think that I refrained from telling
+your mother from prudence. I might have assured her that in the last
+conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both....”
+
+“That last conversation was with you,” she struck in her deep, moving
+voice. “Some day you must....”
+
+“It was with me. Of you he said that you had trustful eyes. And why I
+have not been able to forget that phrase I don’t know. It meant
+that there is in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no
+suspicion--nothing in your heart that could give you a conception of a
+living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it came in your way. That you are
+a predestined victim.... Ha! what a devilish suggestion!”
+
+The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the
+precarious hold he had over himself. He was like a man defying his own
+dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the
+precipice. Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast. The dropped black
+veil lay on the floor between them. Her movement steadied him. He looked
+intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again
+his eyes to her face. But he did not give her time to speak.
+
+“No? You don’t understand? Very well.” He had recovered his calm by a
+miracle of will. “So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?”
+
+“Yes. Sophia Antonovna told me....” Miss Haldin stopped, wonder
+growing in her wide eyes.
+
+“H’m. That’s the respectable enemy,” he muttered, as though he were
+alone.
+
+“The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly,” remarked
+Miss Haldin, after waiting for a while.
+
+“Is that your impression? And she the most intelligent of the lot,
+too. Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires
+to...Ah! these conspirators,” he said slowly, with an accent of scorn;
+“they would get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I
+have the greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition
+of an active Providence. It’s irresistible.... The alternative, of
+course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if
+so, he has overdone it altogether--the old Father of Lies--our national
+patron--our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has
+overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough.... That’s it! I
+ought to have known.... And I did know it,” he added in a tone of
+poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.
+
+“This man is deranged,” I said to myself, very much frightened.
+
+The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of
+commonplace definitions. It was as though he had stabbed himself outside
+and had come in there to show it; and more than that--as though he were
+turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect. That was the
+impression, rendered in physical terms. One could not defend oneself
+from a certain amount of pity. But it was for Miss Haldin, already so
+tried in her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern. Her
+attitude, her face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the
+verge of terror.
+
+“What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” There was a hint of tenderness in
+that cry. He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his
+faculties which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
+
+“Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I have
+approached you frankly. I need at this time to see clearly in
+myself....” She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to
+utter at last some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother’s
+friend. His silence became impressive, like a sign of a momentous
+resolution.
+
+In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly--
+
+“I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to
+come to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems
+as if you were keeping back something from me.”
+
+“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he was heard at last in a strange
+unringing voice, “whom did you see in that place?”
+
+She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
+
+“Where? In Peter Ivanovitch’s rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three
+other people.”
+
+“Ha! The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot,” he commented to
+himself. “Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
+change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
+Ivanovitch should be the head of a State.”
+
+“You are teasing me,” she said. “Our dear one told me once to remember
+that men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea.”
+
+“Our dear one,” he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
+absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being
+with hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical
+suffering, had lost all their fire. “Ah! your brother.... But on
+your lips, in your voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is
+divine.... I wish I could know the innermost depths of your thoughts,
+of your feelings.”
+
+“But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” she cried, alarmed by these words coming
+out of strangely lifeless lips.
+
+“Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And
+Sophia Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?”
+
+“She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything
+from you. She had no time for more than a few words.” Miss Haldin’s
+voice dropped and she became silent for a moment. “The man, it appears,
+has taken his life,” she said sadly.
+
+“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he asked after a pause, “do you believe
+in remorse?”
+
+“What a question!”
+
+“What can _you_ know of it?” he muttered thickly. “It is not for such as
+you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy
+of remorse?”
+
+She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted
+up.
+
+“Yes,” she said firmly.
+
+“So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
+brute.”
+
+A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
+
+“But a man of the people,” Razumov went on, “to whom they, the
+revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must
+be forgiven.... And you must not believe all you’ve heard from that
+source, either,” he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.
+
+“You are concealing something from me,” she exclaimed.
+
+“Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?”
+
+“Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
+to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner,
+betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light
+breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that
+there can be no union and no love.”
+
+“I hear. No revenge for you, then? Never? Not the least bit?” He smiled
+bitterly with his colourless lips. “You yourself are like the very
+spirit of that merciful future. Strange that it does not make it
+easier.... No! But suppose that the real betrayer of your
+brother--Ziemianitch had a part in it too, but insignificant and quite
+involuntary--suppose that he was a young man, educated, an intellectual
+worker, thoughtful, a man your brother might have trusted lightly,
+perhaps, but still--suppose.... But there’s a whole story there.”
+
+“And you know the story! But why, then--”
+
+“I have heard it. There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but
+that does not matter if a man always serves something greater than
+himself--the idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?”
+
+“In that tale!” Miss Haldin repeated. She seemed turned into stone.
+
+“Do you know why I came to you? It is simply because there is no one
+anywhere in the whole great world I could go to. Do you understand
+what I say? Not one to go to. Do you conceive the desolation of the
+thought--no one--to--go--to?”
+
+Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in
+the letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely
+days, in their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to
+see the truth struggling on his lips. What she was conscious of was the
+obscure form of his suffering. She was on the point of extending her
+hand to him impulsively when he spoke again.
+
+“An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors of
+remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the
+atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before
+me with your voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed
+villa.”
+
+She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of
+despairing insight went straight to the point.
+
+“The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!”
+
+“There is no more to tell!” He made a movement forward, and she actually
+put her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed
+her, and he kept his ground, though trembling in every limb. “It ends
+here--on this very spot.” He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast
+with force, and became perfectly still.
+
+I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of
+Miss Haldin and lower her down. As she sank into it she swung half round
+on my arm, and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back.
+He looked at her with an appalling expressionless tranquillity.
+Incredulity, struggling with astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived
+me for a time of the power of speech. Then I turned on him, whispering
+from very rage--
+
+“This is monstrous. What are you staying for? Don’t let her catch sight
+of you again. Go away!...” He did not budge. “Don’t you understand
+that your presence is intolerable--even to me? If there’s any sense of
+shame in you....”
+
+Slowly his sullen eyes moved in my direction. “How did this old man
+come here?” he muttered, astounded.
+
+Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and
+tottered. Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried
+to her assistance. I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into
+the drawing-room. Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant
+end, the profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had
+the stillness of a sombre painting. Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed
+mournfully at the tragic immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a
+beloved head lying in her lap.
+
+That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in
+its human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely
+the ruthless working of political institutions. After assisting Miss
+Haldin to the sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed
+in the opening, in the searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes
+fell on Razumov, still there, standing before the empty chair, as if
+rooted for ever to the spot of his atrocious confession. A wonder came
+over me that the mysterious force which had torn it out of him had
+failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed.
+I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing
+immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin
+looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing
+at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage
+swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands.
+Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he
+seemed to vanish before he moved.
+
+The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on
+contemplating the empty chair in the empty ante-room. The meaning
+of what I had seen reached my mind with a staggering shock. I seized
+Natalia Haldin by the shoulder.
+
+“That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!” I cried, in the
+scared, deadened voice of an awful discovery. “He....”
+
+The rest remained unspoken. I stepped back and looked down at her, in
+silent horror. Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her
+lap. She raised her grey eyes slowly. Shadows seemed to come and go in
+them as if the steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate
+at last in the cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark
+immensity claiming her for its own, where virtues themselves fester into
+crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt.
+
+“It is impossible to be more unhappy....” The languid whisper of her
+voice struck me with dismay. “It is impossible.... I feel my heart
+becoming like ice.”
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Razumov walked straight home on the wet glistening pavement. A heavy
+shower passed over him; distant lightning played faintly against the
+fronts of the dumb houses with the shuttered shops all along the Rue
+de Carouge; and now and then, after the faint flash, there was a faint,
+sleepy rumble; but the main forces of the thunderstorm remained
+massed down the Rhone valley as if loath to attack the respectable and
+passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of
+dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent, hospitality to tourists
+of all nations and to international conspirators of every shade.
+
+The owner of the shop was making ready to close when Razumov entered and
+without a word extended his hand for the key of his room. On reaching
+it for him, from a shelf, the man was about to pass a small joke as to
+taking the air in a thunderstorm, but, after looking at the face of his
+lodger, he only observed, just to say something--
+
+“You’ve got very wet.”
+
+“Yes, I am washed clean,” muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head
+to foot, and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading
+to his room.
+
+He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off
+his watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to
+write. The book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer,
+which he pulled out violently, and did not even trouble to push back
+afterwards.
+
+In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in
+hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means
+with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been
+already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing
+new to the psychological side of this disclosure (there is even one more
+allusion to the silver medal in this last entry), comes a page and
+a half of incoherent writing where his expression is baffled by the
+novelty and the mysteriousness of that side of our emotional life to
+which his solitary existence had been a stranger. Then only he begins
+to address directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express in
+broken sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that
+very word) power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the
+dormant seed of her brother’s words.
+
+“... The most trustful eyes in the world--your brother said of you
+when he was as well as a dead man already. And when you stood before me
+with your hand extended, I remembered the very sound of his voice, and
+I looked into your eyes--and that was enough. I knew that something had
+happened, but I did not know then what.... But don’t be deceived,
+Natalia Victorovna. I believed that I had in my breast nothing but an
+inexhaustible fund of anger and hate for you both. I remembered that he
+had looked to you for the perpetuation of his visionary soul. He, this
+man who had robbed me of my hard-working, purposeful existence. I, too,
+had my guiding idea; and remember that, amongst us, it is more difficult
+to lead a life of toil and self-denial than to go out in the street and
+kill from conviction. But enough of that. Hate or no hate, I felt at
+once that, while shunning the sight of you, I could never succeed in
+driving away your image. I would say, addressing that dead man, ‘Is
+this the way you are going to haunt me?’ It is only later on that I
+understood--only to-day, only a few hours ago. What could I have known
+of what was tearing me to pieces and dragging the secret for ever to
+my lips? You were appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself
+back into truth and peace. You! And you have done it in the same way,
+too, in which he ruined me: by forcing upon me your confidence. Only
+what I detested him for, in you ended by appearing noble and exalted.
+But, I repeat, be not deceived. I was given up to evil. I exulted in
+having induced that silly innocent fool to steal his father’s money. He
+was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one. It was necessary. I had
+to confirm myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed. I have
+suffered from as many vipers in my heart as any social democrat of them
+all--vanity, ambitions, jealousies, shameful desires, evil passions of
+envy and revenge. I had my security stolen from me, years of good work,
+my best hopes. Listen--now comes the true confession. The other was
+nothing. To save me, your trustful eyes had to entice my thought to the
+very edge of the blackest treachery. I could see them constantly looking
+at me with the confidence of your pure heart which had not been touched
+by evil things. Victor Haldin had stolen the truth of my life from me,
+who had nothing else in the world, and he boasted of living on through
+you on this earth where I had no place to lay my head on. She will marry
+some day, he had said--and your eyes were trustful. And do you know what
+I said to myself? I shall steal his sister’s soul from her. When we met
+that first morning in the gardens, and you spoke to me confidingly
+in the generosity of your spirit, I was thinking, ‘Yes, he himself by
+talking of her trustful eyes has delivered her into my hands!’ If you
+could have looked then into my heart, you would have cried out aloud
+with terror and disgust.
+
+“Perhaps no one will believe the baseness of such an intention to be
+possible. It’s certain that, when we parted that morning, I gloated
+over it. I brooded upon the best way. The old man you introduced me to
+insisted on walking with me. I don’t know who he is. He talked of you,
+of your lonely, helpless state, and every word of that friend of yours
+was egging me on to the unpardonable sin of stealing a soul. Could he
+have been the devil himself in the shape of an old Englishman? Natalia
+Victorovna, I was possessed! I returned to look at you every day,
+and drink in your presence the poison of my infamous intention. But
+I foresaw difficulties. Then Sophia Antonovna, of whom I was not
+thinking--I had forgotten her existence--appears suddenly with that
+tale from St. Petersburg.... The only thing needed to make me safe--a
+trusted revolutionist for ever.
+
+“It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further
+crime. The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible. These people
+stood doomed by the folly and the illusion that was in them--they being
+themselves the slaves of lies. Natalia Victorovna, I embraced the might
+of falsehood, I exulted in it--I gave myself up to it for a time. Who
+could have resisted! You yourself were the prize of it. I sat alone in
+my room, planning a life, the very thought of which makes me shudder
+now, like a believer who had been tempted to an atrocious sacrilege. But
+I brooded ardently over its images. The only thing was that there seemed
+to be no air in it. And also I was afraid of your mother. I never knew
+mine. I’ve never known any kind of love. There is something in the mere
+word.... Of you, I was not afraid--forgive me for telling you this.
+No, not of you. You were truth itself. You could not suspect me. As to
+your mother, you yourself feared already that her mind had given way
+from grief. Who could believe anything against me? Had not Ziemianitch
+hanged himself from remorse? I said to myself, ‘Let’s put it to the
+test, and be done with it once for all.’ I trembled when I went in;
+but your mother hardly listened to what I was saying to her, and, in a
+little while, seemed to have forgotten my very existence. I sat looking
+at her. There was no longer anything between you and me. You were
+defenceless--and soon, very soon, you would be alone.... I thought of
+you. Defenceless. For days you have talked with me--opening your heart.
+I remembered the shadow of your eyelashes over your grey trustful eyes.
+And your pure forehead! It is low like the forehead of statues--calm,
+unstained. It was as if your pure brow bore a light which fell on me,
+searched my heart and saved me from ignominy, from ultimate undoing.
+And it saved you too. Pardon my presumption. But there was that in your
+glances which seemed to tell me that you.... Your light! your truth!
+I felt that I must tell you that I had ended by loving you. And to tell
+you that I must first confess. Confess, go out--and perish.
+
+“Suddenly you stood before me! You alone in all the world to whom I
+must confess. You fascinated me--you have freed me from the blindness of
+anger and hate--the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me. Now I
+have done it; and as I write here, I am in the depths of anguish,
+but there is air to breathe at last--air! And, by the by, that old man
+sprang up from somewhere as I was speaking to you, and raged at me like
+a disappointed devil. I suffer horribly, but I am not in despair. There
+is only one more thing to do for me. After that--if they let me--I shall
+go away and bury myself in obscure misery. In giving Victor Haldin up,
+it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most basely. You must
+believe what I say now, you can’t refuse to believe this. Most basely.
+It is through you that I came to feel this so deeply. After all, it is
+they and not I who have the right on their side!--theirs is the
+strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don’t be deceived, Natalia
+Victorovna, I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave? No! I
+am independent--and therefore perdition is my lot.”
+
+On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the
+black veil he had carried off. He then ransacked the drawers for
+paper and string, made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin,
+Boulevard des Philosophes, and then flung the pen away from him into a
+distant corner.
+
+This done, he sat down with the watch before him. He could have gone out
+at once, but the hour had not struck yet. The hour would be midnight.
+There was no reason for that choice except that the facts and the words
+of a certain evening in his past were timing his conduct in the present.
+The sudden power Natalia Haldin had gained over him he ascribed to the
+same cause. “You don’t walk with impunity over a phantom’s breast,”
+ he heard himself mutter. “Thus he saves me,” he thought suddenly. “He
+himself, the betrayed man.” The vivid image of Miss Haldin seemed to
+stand by him, watching him relentlessly. She was not disturbing. He had
+done with life, and his thought even in her presence tried to take an
+impartial survey. Now his scorn extended to himself. “I had neither the
+simplicity nor the courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel,
+or an exceptionally able man. For who, with us in Russia, is to tell a
+scoundrel from an exceptionally able man?...”
+
+He was the puppet of his past, because at the very stroke of midnight he
+jumped up and ran swiftly downstairs as if confident that, by the power
+of destiny, the house door would fly open before the absolute necessity
+of his errand. And as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom
+of the stairs, it was opened for him by some people of the house coming
+home late--two men and a woman. He slipped out through them into the
+street, swept then by a fitful gust of wind. They were, of course, very
+much startled. A flash of lightning enabled them to observe him walking
+away quickly. One of the men shouted, and was starting in pursuit, but
+the woman had recognized him. “It’s all right. It’s only that young
+Russian from the third floor.” The darkness returned with a single clap
+of thunder, like a gun fired for a warning of his escape from the prison
+of lies.
+
+He must have heard at some time or other and now remembered
+unconsciously that there was to be a gathering of revolutionists at the
+house of Julius Laspara that evening. At any rate, he made straight for
+the Laspara house, and found himself without surprise ringing at its
+street door, which, of course, was closed. By that time the thunderstorm
+had attacked in earnest. The steep incline of the street ran with water,
+the thick fall of rain enveloped him like a luminous veil in the play
+of lightning. He was perfectly calm, and, between the crashes, listened
+attentively to the delicate tinkling of the doorbell somewhere within
+the house.
+
+There was some difficulty before he was admitted. His person was not
+known to that one of the guests who had volunteered to go downstairs and
+see what was the matter. Razumov argued with him patiently. There could
+be no harm in admitting a caller. He had something to communicate to the
+company upstairs.
+
+“Something of importance?”
+
+“That’ll be for the hearers to judge.”
+
+“Urgent?”
+
+“Without a moment’s delay.”
+
+Meantime, one of the Laspara daughters descended the stairs, small lamp
+in hand, in a grimy and crumpled gown, which seemed to hang on her by a
+miracle, and looking more than ever like an old doll with a dusty brown
+wig, dragged from under a sofa. She recognized Razumov at once.
+
+“How do you do? Of course you may come in.”
+
+Following her light, Razumov climbed two flights of stairs from the
+lower darkness. Leaving the lamp on a bracket on the landing, she opened
+a door, and went in, accompanied by the sceptical guest. Razumov entered
+last. He closed the door behind him, and stepping on one side, put his
+back against the wall.
+
+The three little rooms _en suite_, with low, smoky ceilings and lit by
+paraffin lamps, were crammed with people. Loud talking was going on
+in all three, and tea-glasses, full, half-full, and empty, stood
+everywhere, even on the floor. The other Laspara girl sat, dishevelled
+and languid, behind an enormous samovar. In the inner doorway Razumov
+had a glimpse of the protuberance of a large stomach, which he
+recognized. Only a few feet from him Julius Laspara was getting down
+hurriedly from his high stool.
+
+The appearance of the midnight visitor caused no small sensation.
+Laspara is very summary in his version of that night’s happenings.
+After some words of greeting, disregarded by Razumov, Laspara (ignoring
+purposely his guest’s soaked condition and his extraordinary manner of
+presenting himself) mentioned something about writing an article. He
+was growing uneasy, and Razumov appeared absent-minded. “I have written
+already all I shall ever write,” he said at last, with a little laugh.
+
+The whole company’s attention was riveted on the new-comer, dripping
+with water, deadly pale, and keeping his position against the wall.
+Razumov put Laspara gently aside, as though he wished to be seen from
+head to foot by everybody. By then the buzz of conversations had died
+down completely, even in the most distant of the three rooms. The
+doorway facing Razumov became blocked by men and women, who craned their
+necks and certainly seemed to expect something startling to happen.
+
+A squeaky, insolent declaration was heard from that group.
+
+“I know this ridiculously conceited individual.”
+
+“What individual?” asked Razumov, raising his bowed head, and searching
+with his eyes all the eyes fixed upon him. An intense surprised silence
+lasted for a time. “If it’s me....”
+
+He stopped, thinking over the form of his confession, and found it
+suddenly, unavoidably suggested by the fateful evening of his life.
+
+“I am come here,” he began, in a clear voice, “to talk of an individual
+called Ziemianitch. Sophia Antonovna has informed me that she would make
+public a certain letter from St. Petersburg....”
+
+“Sophia Antonovna has left us early in the evening,” said Laspara. “It’s
+quite correct. Everybody here has heard....”
+
+“Very well,” Razumov interrupted, with a shade of impatience, for his
+heart was beating strongly. Then, mastering his voice so far that there
+was even a touch of irony in his clear, forcible enunciation--
+
+“In justice to that individual, the much ill-used peasant, Ziemianitch,
+I now declare solemnly that the conclusions of that letter calumniate a
+man of the people--a bright Russian soul. Ziemianitch had nothing to do
+with the actual arrest of Victor Haldin.”
+
+Razumov dwelt on the name heavily, and then waited till the faint,
+mournful murmur which greeted it had died out.
+
+“Victor Victorovitch Haldin,” he began again, “acting with, no doubt,
+noble-minded imprudence, took refuge with a certain student of whose
+opinions he knew nothing but what his own illusions suggested to his
+generous heart. It was an unwise display of confidence. But I am not
+here to appreciate the actions of Victor Haldin. Am I to tell you of
+the feelings of that student, sought out in his obscure solitude, and
+menaced by the complicity forced upon him? Am I to tell you what he did?
+It’s a rather complicated story. In the end the student went to General
+T--- himself, and said, ‘I have the man who killed de P--- locked up in
+my room, Victor Haldin--a student like myself.’”
+
+A great buzz arose, in which Razumov raised his voice.
+
+“Observe--that man had certain honest ideals in view. But I didn’t come
+here to explain him.”
+
+“No. But you must explain how you know all this,” came in grave tones
+from somebody.
+
+“A vile coward!” This simple cry vibrated with indignation. “Name him!”
+ shouted other voices.
+
+“What are you clamouring for?” said Razumov disdainfully, in the
+profound silence which fell on the raising of his hand. “Haven’t you all
+understood that I am that man?”
+
+Laspara went away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool.
+In the first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to
+be torn to pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing
+came of it but noise. It was bewildering. His head ached terribly.
+In the confused uproar he made out several times the name of Peter
+Ivanovitch, the word “judgement,” and the phrase, “But this is a
+confession,” uttered by somebody in a desperate shriek. In the midst
+of the tumult, a young man, younger than himself, approached him with
+blazing eyes.
+
+“I must beg you,” he said, with venomous politeness, “to be good enough
+not to move from this spot till you are told what you are to do.”
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. “I came in voluntarily.”
+
+“Maybe. But you won’t go out till you are permitted,” retorted the
+other.
+
+He beckoned with his hand, calling out, “Louisa! Louisa! come here,
+please”; and, presently, one of the Laspara girls (they had been staring
+at Razumov from behind the samovar) came along, trailing a bedraggled
+tail of dirty flounces, and dragging with her a chair, which she set
+against the door, and, sitting down on it, crossed her legs. The young
+man thanked her effusively, and rejoined a group carrying on an animated
+discussion in low tones. Razumov lost himself for a moment.
+
+A squeaky voice screamed, “Confession or no confession, you are a police
+spy!”
+
+The revolutionist Nikita had pushed his way in front of Razumov, and
+faced him with his big, livid cheeks, his heavy paunch, bull neck, and
+enormous hands. Razumov looked at the famous slayer of gendarmes in
+silent disgust.
+
+“And what are you?” he said, very low, then shut his eyes, and rested
+the back of his head against the wall.
+
+“It would be better for you to depart now.” Razumov heard a mild, sad
+voice, and opened his eyes. The gentle speaker was an elderly man, with
+a great brush of fine hair making a silvery halo all round his
+keen, intelligent face. “Peter Ivanovitch shall be informed of your
+confession--and you shall be directed....”
+
+Then, turning to Nikita, nicknamed Necator, standing by, he appealed to
+him in a murmur--
+
+“What else can we do? After this piece of sincerity he cannot be
+dangerous any longer.”
+
+The other muttered, “Better make sure of that before we let him go.
+Leave that to me. I know how to deal with such gentlemen.”
+
+He exchanged meaning glances with two or three men, who nodded slightly,
+then turning roughly to Razumov, “You have heard? You are not wanted
+here. Why don’t you get out?”
+
+The Laspara girl on guard rose, and pulled the chair out of the way
+unemotionally. She gave a sleepy stare to Razumov, who started, looked
+round the room and passed slowly by her as if struck by some sudden
+thought.
+
+“I beg you to observe,” he said, already on the landing, “that I had
+only to hold my tongue. To-day, of all days since I came amongst you,
+I was made safe, and to-day I made myself free from falsehood, from
+remorse--independent of every single human being on this earth.”
+
+He turned his back on the room, and walked towards the stairs, but, at
+the violent crash of the door behind him, he looked over his shoulder
+and saw that Nikita, with three others, had followed him out. “They are
+going to kill me, after all,” he thought.
+
+Before he had time to turn round and confront them fairly, they set
+on him with a rush. He was driven headlong against the wall. “I wonder
+how,” he completed his thought. Nikita cried, with a shrill laugh right
+in his face, “We shall make you harmless. You wait a bit.”
+
+Razumov did not struggle. The three men held him pinned against
+the wall, while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side,
+deliberately swung off his enormous arm. Razumov, looking for a knife
+in his hand, saw it come at him open, unarmed, and received a tremendous
+blow on the side of his head over his ear. At the same time he heard a
+faint, dull detonating sound, as if some one had fired a pistol on the
+other side of the wall. A raging fury awoke in him at this outrage.
+The people in Laspara’s rooms, holding their breath, listened to the
+desperate scuffling of four men all over the landing; thuds against the
+walls, a terrible crash against the very door, then all of them went
+down together with a violence which seemed to shake the whole house.
+Razumov, overpowered, breathless, crushed under the weight of his
+assailants, saw the monstrous Nikita squatting on his heels near his
+head, while the others held him down, kneeling on his chest, gripping
+his throat, lying across his legs.
+
+“Turn his face the other way,” the paunchy terrorist directed, in an
+excited, gleeful squeak.
+
+Razumov could struggle no longer. He was exhausted; he had to watch
+passively the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in a degrading
+blow over his other ear. It seemed to split his head in two, and all at
+once the men holding him became perfectly silent--soundless as shadows.
+In silence they pulled him brutally to his feet, rushed with him
+noiselessly down the staircase, and, opening the door, flung him out
+into the street.
+
+He fell forward, and at once rolled over and over helplessly, going down
+the short slope together with the rush of running rain water. He came to
+rest in the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on his back,
+with a great flash of lightning over his face--a vivid, silent flash of
+lightning which blinded him utterly. He picked himself up, and put his
+arm over his eyes to recover his sight. Not a sound reached him from
+anywhere, and he began to walk, staggering, down a long, empty street.
+The lightning waved and darted round him its silent flames, the water of
+the deluge fell, ran, leaped, drove--noiseless like the drift of mist.
+In this unearthly stillness his footsteps fell silent on the pavement,
+while a dumb wind drove him on and on, like a lost mortal in a phantom
+world ravaged by a soundless thunderstorm. God only knows where his
+noiseless feet took him to that night, here and there, and back again
+without pause or rest. Of one place, at least, where they did lead
+him, we heard afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first
+south-shore tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled,
+soaked man without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his
+head down, step right in front of his car, and go under.
+
+When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side,
+Razumov had not lost consciousness. It was as though he had tumbled,
+smashing himself, into a world of mutes. Silent men, moving unheard,
+lifted him up, laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing
+round him their alarm, horror, and compassion. A red face with
+moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving, eyes rolling. Razumov
+tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show. To those who
+stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously hurt,
+seemed composed in meditation. Afterwards his eyes sent out at them
+a look of fear and closed slowly. They stared at him. Razumov made an
+effort to remember some French words.
+
+“_Je suis sourd_,” he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
+
+“He is deaf,” they exclaimed to each other. “That’s why he did not hear
+the car.”
+
+They carried him off in that same car. Before it started on its journey,
+a woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of
+some private grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and
+would not be put off.
+
+“I am a relation,” she insisted, in bad French. “This young man is a
+Russian, and I am his relation.” On this plea they let her have her way.
+She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes
+avoided looking at his deathlike face. At the corner of a street, on the
+other side of the town, a stretcher met the car. She followed it to the
+door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a
+bed. Razumov’s new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials
+had some difficulty in inducing her to go away. The porter observed her
+lingering on the opposite pavement for a long time. Suddenly, as though
+she had remembered something, she ran off.
+
+The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S--,
+had made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to
+the Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. She had found work to do after her own
+heart.
+
+But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there
+had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation. The terrible
+Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in
+horrible glee before all the company--
+
+“Razumov! Mr. Razumov! The wonderful Razumov! He shall never be any use
+as a spy on any one. He won’t talk, because he will never hear anything
+in his life--not a thing! I have burst the drums of his ears for him.
+Oh, you may trust me. I know the trick. Ha! Ha! Ha! I know the trick.”
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was nearly a fortnight after her mother’s funeral that I saw Natalia
+Haldin for the last time.
+
+In those silent, sombre days the doors of the _appartement_ on the
+Boulevard des Philosophes were closed to every one but myself. I believe
+I was of some use, if only in this, that I alone was aware of the
+incredible part of the situation. Miss Haldin nursed her mother alone
+to the last moment. If Razumov’s visit had anything to do with
+Mrs. Haldin’s end (and I cannot help thinking that it hastened it
+considerably), it is because the man, trusted impulsively by the
+ill-fated Victor Haldin, had failed to gain the confidence of Victor
+Haldin’s mother. What tale, precisely, he told her cannot be known--at
+any rate, I do not know it--but to me she seemed to die from the shock
+of an ultimate disappointment borne in silence. She had not believed
+him. Perhaps she could no longer believe any one, and consequently had
+nothing to say to any one--not even to her daughter. I suspect that Miss
+Haldin lived the heaviest hours of her life by that silent death-bed.
+I confess I was angry with the broken-hearted old woman passing away in
+the obstinacy of her mute distrust of her daughter.
+
+When it was all over I stood aside. Miss Haldin had her compatriots
+round her then. A great number of them attended the funeral. I was
+there too, but afterwards managed to keep away from Miss Haldin, till I
+received a short note rewarding my self-denial. “It is as you would have
+it. I am going back to Russia at once. My mind is made up. Come and see
+me.”
+
+Verily, it was a reward of discretion. I went without delay to receive
+it. The _appartement_ of the Boulevard des Philosophes presented the
+dreary signs of impending abandonment. It looked desolate and as if
+already empty to my eyes.
+
+Standing, we exchanged a few words about her health, mine, remarks as to
+some people of the Russian colony, and then Natalia Haldin, establishing
+me on the sofa, began to talk openly of her future work, of her plans.
+It was all to be as I had wished it. And it was to be for life. We
+should never see each other again. Never!
+
+I gathered this success to my breast. Natalia Haldin looked matured by
+her open and secret experiences. With her arms folded she walked up and
+down the whole length of the room, talking slowly, smooth-browed, with a
+resolute profile. She gave me a new view of herself, and I marvelled at
+that something grave and measured in her voice, in her movements, in her
+manner. It was the perfection of collected independence. The strength
+of her nature had come to surface because the obscure depths had been
+stirred.
+
+“We two can talk of it now,” she observed, after a silence and stopping
+short before me. “Have you been to inquire at the hospital lately?”
+
+“Yes, I have.” And as she looked at me fixedly, “He will live, the
+doctors say. But I thought that Tekla....”
+
+“Tekla has not been near me for several days,” explained Miss Haldin
+quickly. “As I never offered to go to the hospital with her, she thinks
+that I have no heart. She is disillusioned about me.”
+
+And Miss Haldin smiled faintly.
+
+“Yes. She sits with him as long and as often as they will let her,” I
+said. “She says she must never abandon him--never as long as she lives.
+He’ll need somebody--a hopeless cripple, and stone deaf with that.”
+
+“Stone deaf? I didn’t know,” murmured Natalia Haldin.
+
+“He is. It seems strange. I am told there were no apparent injuries to
+the head. They say, too, that it is not very likely that he will live so
+very long for Tekla to take care of him.”
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head.
+
+“While there are travellers ready to fall by the way our Tekla shall
+never be idle. She is a good Samaritan by an irresistible vocation. The
+revolutionists didn’t understand her. Fancy a devoted creature like that
+being employed to carry about documents sewn in her dress, or made to
+write from dictation.”
+
+“There is not much perspicacity in the world.”
+
+No sooner uttered, I regretted that observation. Natalia Haldin, looking
+me straight in the face, assented by a slight movement of her head. She
+was not offended, but turning away began to pace the room again. To my
+western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite
+beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance. I
+remained silent as though it were hopeless to raise my voice. The sound
+of hers, so close to me, made me start a little.
+
+“Tekla saw him picked up after the accident. The good soul never
+explained to me really how it came about. She affirms that there was
+some understanding between them--some sort of compact--that in any sore
+need, in misfortune, or difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her.”
+
+“Was there?” I said. “It is lucky for him that there was, then. He’ll
+need all the devotion of the good Samaritan.”
+
+It was a fact that Tekla, looking out of her window at five in the
+morning, for some reason or other, had beheld Razumov in the grounds of
+the Chateau Borel, standing stockstill, bare-headed in the rain, at the
+foot of the terrace. She had screamed out to him, by name, to know
+what was the matter. He never even raised his head. By the time she had
+dressed herself sufficiently to run downstairs he was gone. She started
+in pursuit, and rushing out into the road, came almost directly upon the
+arrested tramcar and the small knot of people picking up Razumov. That
+much Tekla had told me herself one afternoon we happened to meet at the
+door of the hospital, and without any kind of comment. But I did not
+want to meditate very long on the inwardness of this peculiar episode.
+
+“Yes, Natalia Victorovna, he shall need somebody when they dismiss him,
+on crutches and stone deaf from the hospital. But I do not think that
+when he rushed like an escaped madman into the grounds of the Chateau
+Borel it was to seek the help of that good Tekla.”
+
+“No,” said Natalia, stopping short before me, “perhaps not.” She sat
+down and leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. The silence lasted
+for several minutes. During that time I remembered the evening of his
+atrocious confession--the plaint she seemed to have hardly enough life
+left in her to utter, “It is impossible to be more unhappy....” The
+recollection would have given me a shudder if I had not been lost
+in wonder at her force and her tranquillity. There was no longer any
+Natalia Haldin, because she had completely ceased to think of herself.
+It was a great victory, a characteristically Russian exploit in
+self-suppression.
+
+She recalled me to myself by getting up suddenly like a person who has
+come to a decision. She walked to the writing-table, now stripped of all
+the small objects associated with her by daily use--a mere piece of dead
+furniture; but it contained something living, still, since she took from
+a recess a flat parcel which she brought to me.
+
+“It’s a book,” she said rather abruptly. “It was sent to me wrapped
+up in my veil. I told you nothing at the time, but now I’ve decided to
+leave it with you. I have the right to do that. It was sent to me. It
+is mine. You may preserve it, or destroy it after you have read it. And
+while you read it, please remember that I was defenceless. And that
+he..”
+
+“Defenceless!” I repeated, surprised, looking hard at her.
+
+“You’ll find the very word written there,” she whispered. “Well, it’s
+true! I _was_ defenceless--but perhaps you were able to see that for
+yourself.” Her face coloured, then went deadly pale. “In justice to the
+man, I want you to remember that I was. Oh, I was, I was!”
+
+I rose, a little shakily.
+
+“I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting.”
+
+Her hand fell into mine.
+
+“It’s difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us.”
+
+She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
+
+“Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands
+are free now. As for the rest--which of us can fail to hear the stifled
+cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world.”
+
+“The world is more conscious of your discordant voices,” I said. “It is
+the way of the world.”
+
+“Yes.” She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment. “I must
+own to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when
+all discord shall be silenced. Try to imagine its dawn! The tempest of
+blows and of execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising,
+and the weary men united at last, taking count in their conscience of
+the ended contest, feel saddened by their victory, because so many ideas
+have perished for the triumph of one, so many beliefs have abandoned
+them without support. They feel alone on the earth and gather close
+together. Yes, there must be many bitter hours! But at last the anguish
+of hearts shall be extinguished in love.”
+
+And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so
+cruel sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin. It is hard to think
+I shall never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl--wedded
+to an invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like
+a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn by
+struggles, watered with tears.
+
+
+
+It must be understood that at that time I didn’t know anything of Mr.
+Razumov’s confession to the assembled revolutionists. Natalia Haldin
+might have guessed what was the “one thing more” which remained for him
+to do; but this my western eyes had failed to see.
+
+Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S--, haunted his bedside at
+the hospital. We met once or twice at the door of that establishment,
+but on these occasions she was not communicative. She gave me news of
+Mr. Razumov as concisely as possible. He was making a slow recovery, but
+would remain a hopeless cripple all his life. Personally, I never went
+near him: I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood
+by, a watchful but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin. He
+was in due course discharged from the hospital, and his “relative”--so I
+was told--had carried him off somewhere.
+
+My information was completed nearly two years later. The opportunity,
+certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
+much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
+gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
+
+He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch--a
+dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with
+something hushed and circumspect in his manner. He approached
+me, choosing the moment when there was no one near, followed by a
+grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.
+
+“Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you,” he addressed me,
+in his guarded voice. “And so I leave you two to have a talk together.”
+
+“I would never have intruded myself upon your notice,” the grey-haired
+lady began at once, “if I had not been charged with a message for you.”
+
+It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin. Sophia
+Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and
+had seen Miss Haldin. She lived in a town “in the centre,” sharing her
+compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the
+heartrending misery of bereaved homes. She did not spare herself in good
+service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.
+
+“She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable
+body,” the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of
+enthusiasm.
+
+A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest
+on my side. We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted
+us. In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna
+remarked suddenly--
+
+“I suppose you remember seeing me before? That evening when Natalia came
+to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young
+man who...”
+
+“I remember perfectly,” I said. When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had
+in my possession that young man’s journal given me by Miss Haldin she
+became intensely interested. She did not conceal her curiosity to see
+the document.
+
+I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me
+next day for that purpose.
+
+She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed
+me the book with a faint sigh. While moving about Russia, she had seen
+Razumov too. He lived, not “in the centre,” but “in the south.” She
+described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some
+very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown
+with nettles. He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla
+the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish
+devotion. There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.
+
+I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have
+visited Mr. Razumov. I did not even understand the motive. But she
+informed me that she was not the only one.
+
+“Some of _us_ always go to see him when passing through. He is
+intelligent. He has ideas.... He talks well, too.”
+
+Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov’s public confession in
+Laspara’s house. Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what
+had occurred there. Razumov himself had told her all about it, most
+minutely.
+
+Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes--
+
+“There are evil moments in every life. A false suggestion enters one’s
+brain, and then fear is born--fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or else
+a false courage--who knows? Well, call it what you like; but tell me,
+how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition
+(as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly
+debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this--he
+was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe
+and more--infinitely more--when the possibility of being loved by
+that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his
+bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and
+pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him.
+There’s character in such a discovery.”
+
+I accepted her conclusion in silence. Who would care to question the
+grounds of forgiveness or compassion? However, it appeared later on,
+that there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the
+revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer. Sophia Antonovna continued
+uneasily--
+
+“And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage. It was not
+authorized. Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him. He
+had confessed voluntarily. And that Nikita who burst the drums of his
+ears purposely, out on the landing, you know, as if carried away by
+indignation--well, he has turned out to be a scoundrel of the worst
+kind--a traitor himself, a betrayer--a spy! Razumov told me he had
+charged him with it by a sort of inspiration....”
+
+“I had a glimpse of that brute,” I said. “How any of you could have been
+deceived for half a day passes my comprehension!”
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+“There! There! Don’t talk of it. The first time I saw him, I, too, was
+appalled. They cried me down. We were always telling each other, ‘Oh!
+you mustn’t mind his appearance.’ And then he was always ready to kill.
+There was no doubt of it. He killed--yes! in both camps. The fiend....”
+
+Then Sophia Antonovna, after mastering the angry trembling of her lips,
+told me a very queer tale. It went that Councillor Mikulin, travelling
+in Germany (shortly after Razumov’s disappearance from Geneva), happened
+to meet Peter Ivanovitch in a railway carriage. Being alone in the
+compartment, these two talked together half the night, and it was then
+that Mikulin the Police Chief gave a hint to the Arch-Revolutionist
+as to the true character of the arch-slayer of gendarmes. It looks as
+though Mikulin had wanted to get rid of that particular agent of his
+own! He might have grown tired of him, or frightened of him. It must
+also be said that Mikulin had inherited the sinister Nikita from his
+predecessor in office.
+
+And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a
+mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my
+Western eyes. But I permitted myself a question--
+
+“Tell me, please, Sophia Antonovna, did Madame de S-- leave all her
+fortune to Peter Ivanovitch?”
+
+“Not a bit of it.” The woman revolutionist shrugged her shoulders in
+disgust. “She died without making a will. A lot of nephews and nieces
+came down from St. Petersburg, like a flock of vultures, and fought
+for her money amongst themselves. All beastly Kammerherrs and Maids of
+Honour--abominable court flunkeys. Tfui!”
+
+“One does not hear much of Peter Ivanovitch now,” I remarked, after a
+pause.
+
+“Peter Ivanovitch,” said Sophia Antonovna gravely, “has united himself
+to a peasant girl.”
+
+I was truly astonished.
+
+“What! On the Riviera?”
+
+“What nonsense! Of course not.”
+
+Sophia Antonovna’s tone was slightly tart.
+
+“Is he, then, living actually in Russia? It’s a tremendous risk--isn’t
+it?” I cried. “And all for the sake of a peasant girl. Don’t you think
+it’s very wrong of him?”
+
+Sophia Antonovna preserved a mysterious silence for a while, then made a
+statement. “He just simply adores her.”
+
+“Does he? Well, then, I hope that she won’t hesitate to beat him.”
+
+Sophia Antonovna got up and wished me good-bye, as though she had not
+heard a word of my impious hope; but, in the very doorway, where I
+attended her, she turned round for an instant, and declared in a firm
+voice--
+
+“Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under Western Eyes
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]
+[Last updated: July 28, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER WESTERN EYES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      UNDER WESTERN EYES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by JOSEPH CONRAD
+    </h2>
+<div class="middle">
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> &ldquo;I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would
+      snatch a piece of bread."<br /> &mdash;Miss HALDIN <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+</div>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PART1"> PART FIRST </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PART2"> PART SECOND </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PART3"> PART THIRD </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PART4"> PART FOUR </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART1" id="link2H_PART1">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PART FIRST
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;Kirylo Sidorovitch&mdash;Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo; 
+      extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish them, but
+      they don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact remains that he has written it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;just
+      changes the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual insufficiency
+      or from an imperfect trust in one&rsquo;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&rsquo;s student in philosophy, was looked upon
+      as a strong nature&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Razumov was supposed to be the son of an Archpriest and to be
+      protected by a distinguished nobleman&mdash;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&rsquo;s pretty daughter&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The origin of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s record is connected with an event
+      characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination of a
+      prominent statesman&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact alluded to above is the successful attempt on the life of Mr. de
+      P&mdash;-, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the thought of
+      liberty has never existed in the Act of the Creator. From the multitude of
+      men&rsquo;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....&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. de P&mdash;- was being driven towards the railway station in a
+      two-horse uncovered sleigh with footman and coachman on the box. Snow had
+      been falling all night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this early
+      hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the
+      sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to the
+      left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking slowly on
+      the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin
+      coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the falling snow. On
+      being overtaken this peasant suddenly faced about and swung his arm. In an
+      instant there was a terrible shock, a detonation muffled in the multitude
+      of snowflakes; both horses lay dead and mangled on the ground and the
+      coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen off the box mortally wounded. The
+      footman (who survived) had no time to see the face of the man in the
+      sheepskin coat. After throwing the bomb this last got away, but it is
+      supposed that, seeing a lot of people surging up on all sides of him in
+      the falling snow, and all running towards the scene of the explosion, he
+      thought it safer to turn back with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;I beg of you to keep off: For the love of God, I beg of
+      you good people to keep off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo; ordinary, where he was
+      accustomed to eat his two o&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s rooms at the very
+      time when that last received the official advice of his success. He was a
+      quiet, unassuming young man: &ldquo;Forgive me,&rdquo; he had said with a faint
+      apologetic smile and taking up his cap, &ldquo;I am going out to order up some
+      wine. But I must first send a telegram to my folk at home. I say! Won&rsquo;t
+      the old people make it a festive time for the neighbours for twenty miles
+      around our place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;-, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all his life Razumov was allowed only once to come into personal
+      contact with the Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had the air of a chance meeting in the little attorney&rsquo;s office. One
+      day Razumov, coming in by appointment, found a stranger standing there&mdash;a
+      tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey sidewhiskers. The
+      bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out, &ldquo;Come in&mdash;come in,
+      Mr. Razumov,&rdquo; with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then turning deferentially
+      to the stranger with the grand air, &ldquo;A ward of mine, your Excellency. One
+      of the most promising students of his faculty in the St. Petersburg
+      University.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Satisfactory&rdquo; and &ldquo;Persevere.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attorney rummaged amongst the papers on his desk for a time. &ldquo;Do you
+      know who that was?&rdquo; he asked suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, whose heart was thumping hard yet, shook his head in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was Prince K&mdash;-. You wonder what he could be doing in the hole
+      of a poor legal rat like myself&mdash;eh? These awfully great people have
+      their sentimental curiosities like common sinners. But if I were you,
+      Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo; he continued, leering and laying a peculiar emphasis
+      on the patronymic, &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man&rsquo;s ears burned like fire; his sight was dim. &ldquo;That man!&rdquo;
+       Razumov was saying to himself. &ldquo;He!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;-&rsquo;s
+      liveries on the box. Once he saw the Princess get out&mdash;she was
+      shopping&mdash;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. &ldquo;His&rdquo; daughters. They resembled
+      &ldquo;Him.&rdquo; The young man felt a glow of warm friendliness towards these girls
+      who would never know of his existence. Presently they would marry Generals
+      or Kammerherrs and have girls and boys of their own, who perhaps would be
+      aware of him as a celebrated old professor, decorated, possibly a Privy
+      Councillor, one of the glories of Russia&mdash;nothing more!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s wish for distinction. A man&rsquo;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&mdash;-&rsquo;s life
+      Razumov resolved to have a good try for the silver medal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s name
+      would be published in the papers on New Year&rsquo;s Day. And at the thought
+      that &ldquo;He&rdquo; would most probably read it there, Razumov stopped short on the
+      stairs for an instant, then went on smiling faintly at his own emotion.
+      &ldquo;This is but a shadow,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;but the medal is a solid
+      beginning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With those ideas of industry in his head the warmth of his room was
+      agreeable and encouraging. &ldquo;I shall put in four hours of good work,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haldin!... Victor Victorovitch!... Is that you?... Yes. The outer door is
+      shut all right. But this is indeed unexpected.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;restless&rdquo; and &ldquo;unsound &ldquo;&mdash;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&rsquo; houses. They
+      had even had a discussion together&mdash;one of those discussions on first
+      principles dear to the sanguine minds of youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo; said the other, flinging off his cap, &ldquo;we are not
+      perhaps in exactly the same camp. Your judgment is more philosophical. You
+      are a man of few words, but I haven&rsquo;t met anybody who dared to doubt the
+      generosity of your sentiments. There is a solidity about your character
+      which cannot exist without courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt flattered and began to murmur shyly something about being
+      very glad of his good opinion, when Haldin raised his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I was saying to myself,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;as I dodged in the
+      woodyard down by the river-side. &lsquo;He has a strong character this young
+      man,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;He does not throw his soul to the winds.&rsquo; Your
+      reserve has always fascinated me, Kirylo Sidorovitch. So I tried to
+      remember your address. But look here&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had listened in astonishment; but before he could open his mouth
+      Haldin added, speaking deliberately, &ldquo;It was I who removed de P&mdash;-
+      this morning.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;There goes
+      my silver medal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin continued after waiting a while&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;a convinced man.
+      Three more years of his work would have put us back fifty years into
+      bondage&mdash;and look at all the lives wasted, at all the souls lost in
+      that time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His curt, self-confident voice suddenly lost its ring and it was in a dull
+      tone that he added, &ldquo;Yes, brother, I have killed him. It&rsquo;s weary work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told Razumov how he had brooded for a year; how he had not slept
+      properly for weeks. He and &ldquo;Another&rdquo; had a warning of the Minister&rsquo;s
+      movements from &ldquo;a certain person&rdquo; late the evening before. He and that
+      &ldquo;Another&rdquo; prepared their &ldquo;engines&rdquo; and resolved to have no sleep till &ldquo;the
+      deed&rdquo; was done. They walked the streets under the falling snow with the
+      &ldquo;engines&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;other&rdquo; remained at the corner, Haldin took up a
+      position a little farther up the street....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After throwing his &ldquo;engine&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a drowsy
+      faintness&mdash;passed off quickly. He walked faster, making his way to
+      one of the poorer parts of the town in order to look up Ziemianitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A bright spirit! A hardy soul! The best driver in St. Petersburg. He has
+      a team of three horses there.... Ah! He&rsquo;s a fellow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;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&rsquo;t even
+      drunk. What do you want here? You don&rsquo;t frighten us. Take yourself and
+      your ugly eyes away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did not like my eyes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And so...here I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch. We know each other so little.... I
+      don&rsquo;t see why you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confidence,&rdquo; said Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This word sealed Razumov&rsquo;s lips as if a hand had been clapped on his
+      mouth. His brain seethed with arguments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so&mdash;here you are,&rdquo; he muttered through his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other did not detect the tone of anger. Never suspected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And nobody knows I am here. You are the last person that could be
+      suspected&mdash;should I get caught. That&rsquo;s an advantage, you see. And
+      then&mdash;speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the
+      truth. It occurred to me that you&mdash;you have no one belonging to you&mdash;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&rsquo;t see how my passage
+      through your rooms can be ever known. If I should be got hold of, I&rsquo;ll
+      know how to keep silent&mdash;no matter what they may be pleased to do to
+      me,&rdquo; he added grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to walk again while Razumov sat still appalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You thought that&mdash;&rdquo; he faltered out almost sick with indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Razumov. Yes, brother. Some day you shall help to build. You suppose
+      that I am a terrorist, now&mdash;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&rsquo;t live idle. Oh no! Don&rsquo;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,
+      &lsquo;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&rsquo; time.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to
+      go away long before. Was it weakness or what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that
+      sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;at best&mdash;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&mdash;as others had. Others had fathers,
+      mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on
+      their behalf&mdash;he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him
+      some morning would forget his existence before sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation&mdash;his
+      strength give way, his mind become an abject thing. He saw himself
+      creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets&mdash;dying unattended
+      in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
+      hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;in contrast with the horrible discord of this man&rsquo;s
+      presence. He hated the man. He said quietly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of course, I will go. &lsquo;You must give me precise directions, and for
+      the rest&mdash;depend on me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You are a fellow! Collected&mdash;cool as a cucumber. A regular
+      Englishman. Where did you get your soul from? There aren&rsquo;t many like you.
+      Look here, brother! Men like me leave no posterity, but their souls are
+      not lost. No man&rsquo;s soul is ever lost. It works for itself&mdash;or else
+      where would be the sense of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction,
+      of faith&mdash;the labours of the soul? What will become of my soul when I
+      die in the way I must die&mdash;soon&mdash;very soon perhaps? It shall not
+      perish. Don&rsquo;t make a mistake, Razumov. This is not murder&mdash;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&rsquo;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&mdash;reckless&mdash;like
+      a butcher&mdash;in the middle of all these innocent people&mdash;scattering
+      death&mdash;I! I!... I wouldn&rsquo;t hurt a fly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so loud,&rdquo; warned Razumov harshly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other raised his head, got up and with an effort mastered his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Men like me leave no posterity,&rdquo; he repeated in a subdued tone, &ldquo;I
+      have a sister though. She&rsquo;s with my old mother&mdash;I persuaded them to
+      go abroad this year&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;a true Russian in his way.
+      His was the soul of obedience. But I am not like him. They say I resemble
+      my mother&rsquo;s eldest brother, an officer. They shot him in &lsquo;28. Under
+      Nicholas, you know. Haven&rsquo;t I told you that this is war, war.... But God
+      of Justice! This is weary work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his hand, spoke as if from the
+      bottom of an abyss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You believe in God, Haldin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you go catching at words that are wrung from one. What does it
+      matter? What was it the Englishman said: &lsquo;There is a divine soul in
+      things...&rsquo; Devil take him&mdash;I don&rsquo;t remember now. But he spoke the
+      truth. When the day of you thinkers comes don&rsquo;t you forget what&rsquo;s divine
+      in the Russian soul&mdash;and that&rsquo;s resignation. Respect that in your
+      intellectual restlessness and don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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
+      &lsquo;God&rsquo;s will be done.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw himself full length on Razumov&rsquo;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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haldin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered the other readily, quite invisible now on the bed and
+      without the slightest stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it time for me to start?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, brother.&rdquo; The other was heard, lying still in the darkness as though
+      he were talking in his sleep. &ldquo;The time has come to put fate to the test.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go with God, thou silent soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked the door and put the key in
+      his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words and events of that evening must have been graven as if with a
+      steel tool on Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s brain since he was able to write his relation
+      with such fullness and precision a good many months afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      presence&mdash;the appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning
+      force of a great fanaticism. On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s
+      diary I own that a &ldquo;rush of thoughts&rdquo; is not an adequate image.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts&mdash;the
+      faithful reflection of the state of his feelings. The thoughts in
+      themselves were not numerous&mdash;they were like the thoughts of most
+      human beings, few and simple&mdash;but they cannot be reproduced here in
+      all their exclamatory repetitions which went on in an endless and weary
+      turmoil&mdash;for the walk was long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
+      Western thought. I don&rsquo;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&mdash;the night birds of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The peculiar circumstances of Razumov&rsquo;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. &ldquo;Because I haven&rsquo;t that, must
+      everything else be taken away from me?&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;For it is a crime,&rdquo; he was saying to himself. &ldquo;A
+      murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
+      institutions....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. &ldquo;I must be courageous,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To one reading Mr. Razumov&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;he supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You lie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;There! there!&rdquo; jeeringly soothing. The waiter looked all
+      round and announced to the room&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The gentleman won&rsquo;t believe that Ziemianitch is drunk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The cursed driver of thieves. What do we want with his gentlemen here? We
+      are all honest folk in this place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep himself from bursting into
+      imprecations, followed the owner of the den, who, whispering &ldquo;Come along,
+      little father,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, little father,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!&rdquo; He spat. They were always
+      running away from that driver of the devil&mdash;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. &ldquo;&lsquo;Who could bear life in our land without the bottle?&rsquo; he
+      says. A proper Russian man&mdash;the little pig.... Be pleased to follow
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      escape. Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom. His guide pawed in the
+      straw with his foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here he is. Ah! the little pigeon. A true Russian man. &lsquo;No heavy hearts
+      for me,&rsquo; he says. &lsquo;Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my
+      sight.&rsquo; Ha! ha! ha! That&rsquo;s the fellow he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always ready to drive,&rdquo; commented the keeper of the eating-house. &ldquo;A
+      proper Russian driver that. Saint or devil, night or day is all one to
+      Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow. &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t ask who you are,
+      but where you want to go,&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call him, wake him up,&rdquo; he faltered out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see for yourself how it is. We have done what we can for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He picked up the lantern. The intense black spokes of shadow swung about
+      in the circle of light. A terrible fury&mdash;the blind rage of
+      self-preservation&mdash;possessed Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! The vile beast,&rdquo; he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made the
+      lantern jump and tremble! &ldquo;I shall wake you! Give me...give me...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;only
+      his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling
+      night of drunkenness enwrapping the &ldquo;bright Russian soul&rdquo; of Haldin&rsquo;s
+      enthusiastic praise. But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing. His eyeballs
+      blinked all white in the light once, twice&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went off
+      with great hasty strides without looking back once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked
+      into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;discouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ziemianitch&rsquo;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&mdash;the &ldquo;bright soul&rdquo; of the other. Here they were:
+      the people and the enthusiast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Ah! the
+      stick, the stick, the stern hand,&rdquo; thought Razumov, longing for power to
+      hurt and destroy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a subtle pest that
+      would convert earth into a hell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots,
+      the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll kill
+      him when I get home.&rdquo; 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov&rsquo;s despair was too profoundly tinged with hate to accept that
+      issue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet it was despair&mdash;nothing less&mdash;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 &ldquo;bright soul&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov thought: &ldquo;I am being crushed&mdash;and I can&rsquo;t even run away.&rdquo;
+       Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth&mdash;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&mdash;the refuge of
+      confidence. To whom could he go with this tale&mdash;in all this great,
+      great land?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov stamped his foot&mdash;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&mdash;his native soil!&mdash;his
+      very own&mdash;without a fireside, without a heart!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of
+      countless millions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;murdering foolishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A voice
+      seemed to cry within him, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t touch it.&rdquo; It was a guarantee of
+      duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on&mdash;a
+      work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their
+      shifting impulses&mdash;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&mdash;strong and one!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haldin means disruption,&rdquo; he thought to himself, beginning to walk again.
+      &ldquo;What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage&mdash;with his
+      talk of God&rsquo;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&mdash;who have nothing
+      but that to love and put my faith in&mdash;am I to have my future, perhaps
+      my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary fanatic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grace entered into Razumov. He believed now in the man who would come
+      at the appointed time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt an austere exultation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear grasp
+      of my intellect?&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;Is not this my country? Have I not got
+      forty million brothers?&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;No! If I must suffer let
+      me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason&mdash;my
+      cool superior reason&mdash;rejects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the irrational feeling that
+      something may jump upon us in the dark&mdash;the absurd dread of the
+      unseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the tool ready for the man&mdash;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, &ldquo;What
+      else?&rdquo; he asked himself ardently, &ldquo;could move all that mass in one
+      direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of
+      liberalism&mdash;rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian
+      truth. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s patriotism,&rdquo; he observed mentally, and added, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no
+      stopping midway on that road,&rdquo; and then remarked to himself, &ldquo;I am not a
+      coward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again there was a dead silence in Razumov&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;but
+      no one can do that&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;Perish vainly for a falsehood!... What a miserable fate!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, thou vile wretch!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov walked on and after a little time whispered his wonder to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly as if alive! Seemed to breathe! And right in my way too! I have
+      had an extraordinary experience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a few steps and muttered through his set teeth&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall give him up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;every
+      obligation of true courage is the other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked round from under his cap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;the brute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something seemed to turn over in his head bringing uppermost a singularly
+      hard, clear facet of his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be better, however,&rdquo; he reflected with a quite different mental
+      accent, &ldquo;to keep that circumstance altogether to myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s sanction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With something resembling anguish he said to himself&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to be understood.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of
+      chicane too much. One could not go and lay one&rsquo;s conscience before the
+      policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief of
+      his district&rsquo;s police&mdash;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. &ldquo;He would begin by locking me up most
+      probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful
+      commotion,&rdquo; thought Razumov practically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who
+      knows what true loneliness is&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;such
+      as the world had never seen. It was sublime!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;with a delicate head, and covered in the
+      hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and beautiful
+      savage&mdash;which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking tenderness
+      on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;-, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man
+      had pressed it&mdash;a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign,
+      like a half-unwilling caress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Razumov marvelled at himself. Why did he not think of him before!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the very man&mdash;He!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A strange softening emotion came over Razumov&mdash;made his knees shake a
+      little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment was
+      pernicious nonsense. He couldn&rsquo;t be quick enough; and when he got into a
+      sledge he shouted to the driver&mdash;&ldquo;to the K&mdash;- Palace. Get on&mdash;you!
+      Fly!&rdquo; The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of his eyes,
+      answered obsequiously&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear, your high Nobility.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K&mdash;- was not a man of timid
+      character. On the day of Mr. de P&mdash;-&rsquo;s murder an extreme alarm and
+      despondency prevailed in the high official spheres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prince K&mdash;-, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show the gentleman in here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov walked in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s voice&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your arm, young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s quiet dignity in stating
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had said, &ldquo;No. Upon the whole I can&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and Razumov, making a short bow,
+      had said with deference&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince had exclaimed hastily&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have done well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the carriage&mdash;it was a small brougham on sleigh runners&mdash;Razumov
+      broke the silence in a voice that trembled slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My gratitude surpasses the greatness of my presumption.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gasped, feeling unexpectedly in the dark a momentary pressure on his
+      arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have done well,&rdquo; repeated the Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the carriage stopped the Prince murmured to Razumov, who had never
+      ventured a single question&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house of General T&mdash;-.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;Certainly&mdash;this minute,&rdquo; fled within somewhere. The Prince signed to
+      Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spontini&rsquo;s. &lsquo;Flight of Youth.&rsquo; Exquisite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Admirable,&rdquo; assented Razumov faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not turn when he heard an inner door fly open, and a quick
+      footstep, muffled on the carpet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince&rsquo;s voice immediately exclaimed, thick with excitement&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have got him&mdash;<i>ce miserable</i>. A worthy young man came to me&mdash;No!
+      It&rsquo;s incredible....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov held his breath before the bronze as if expecting a crash. Behind
+      his back a voice he had never heard before insisted politely&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Asseyez-vous donc</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince almost shrieked, &ldquo;<i>Mais comprenez-vous, mon cher! L&rsquo;assassin</i>!
+      the murderer&mdash;we have got him....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov spun round. The General&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince from a chair waved an impressive hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a most honourable young man whom Providence itself... Mr.
+      Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General acknowledged the introduction by frowning at Razumov, who did
+      not make the slightest movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting down before his desk the General listened with compressed lips. It
+      was impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;no
+      pleasure or excitement&mdash;no incredulity either. He betrayed no
+      sentiment whatever. Only with a politeness almost deferential suggested
+      that &ldquo;the bird might have flown while Mr.&mdash;Mr. Razumov was running
+      about the streets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov advanced to the middle of the room and said, &ldquo;The door is locked
+      and I have the key in my pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this went over the head of Prince K&mdash;- seated in a deep armchair,
+      very tired and impatient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A student called Haldin,&rdquo; said the General thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov ceased to grin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is his name,&rdquo; he said unnecessarily loud. &ldquo;Victor Victorovitch
+      Haldin&mdash;a student.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General shifted his position a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is he dressed? Would you have the goodness to tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov angrily described Haldin&rsquo;s clothing in a few jerky words. The
+      General stared all the time, then addressing the Prince&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were not without some indications,&rdquo; he said in French. &ldquo;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....&rdquo; He turned to Razumov,
+      and in Russian, with friendly reproach&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take a chair, Mr. Razumov&mdash;do. Why are you standing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov sat down carelessly and looked at the General.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This goggle-eyed imbecile understands nothing,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince began to speak loftily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Razumov is a young man of conspicuous abilities. I have it at heart
+      that his future should not....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; interrupted the General, with a movement of the hand. &ldquo;Has he
+      any weapons on him, do you think, Mr. Razumov?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General employed a gentle musical voice. Razumov answered with
+      suppressed irritation&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But my razors are lying about&mdash;you understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General lowered his head approvingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then to the Prince, explaining courteously&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want that bird alive. It will be the devil if we can&rsquo;t make him sing a
+      little before we are done with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The General unexpectedly developed a thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fidelity to menaced institutions on which depend the safety of a throne
+      and of a people is no child&rsquo;s play. We know that, <i>mon Prince,</i> and&mdash;<i>tenez</i>&mdash;&rdquo;
+       he went on with a sort of flattering harshness, &ldquo;Mr. Razumov here begins
+      to understand that too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haldin will never speak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That remains to be seen,&rdquo; muttered the General.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am certain,&rdquo; insisted Razumov. &ldquo;A man like this never speaks.... Do you
+      imagine that I am here from fear?&rdquo; he added violently. He felt ready to
+      stand by his opinion of Haldin to the last extremity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; protested the General, with great simplicity of tone.
+      &ldquo;And I don&rsquo;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,&rdquo; he added, with a bright, cruel smile under his stony stare. &ldquo;So
+      you see, there can be no suspicion of any fear here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round the back of the armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action. Be at ease in that
+      respect, pray.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the General uneasily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why I am here. You may be surprised why I should....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General hastened to interrupt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. Extremely natural. You saw the importance....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; broke in the Prince. &ldquo;And I venture to ask insistently that mine
+      and Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s intervention should not become public. He is a young man
+      of promise&mdash;of remarkable aptitudes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t a doubt of it,&rdquo; murmured the General. &ldquo;He inspires confidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread nowadays&mdash;they taint
+      such unexpected quarters&mdash;that, monstrous as it seems, he might
+      suffer ...his studies...his...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General, with his elbows on the desk, took his head between his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Yes. I am thinking it out.... How long is it since you left him at
+      your rooms, Mr. Razumov?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;bright soul,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The General, giving way for the first time to his secret sentiments,
+      exclaimed contemptuously&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you say he came in to make you this confidence like this&mdash;for
+      nothing&mdash;<i>a propos des bottes</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt danger in the air. The merciless suspicion of despotism had
+      spoken openly at last. Sudden fear sealed Razumov&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;some sort of idle speculative conversation&mdash;months
+      ago&mdash;I am told&mdash;and completely forgotten till now by Mr.
+      Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Razumov,&rdquo; queried the General meditatively, after a short silence,
+      &ldquo;do you often indulge in speculative conversation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Excellency,&rdquo; answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of
+      self-confidence. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General stared from between his hands. Prince K&mdash;- murmured&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A serious young man. <i>Un esprit superieur</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see that, <i>mon cher Prince</i>,&rdquo; said the General. &ldquo;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&mdash;I mean even the bare fact
+      alone&mdash;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&mdash;eh, Mr. Razumov?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can see what your Excellency has in your mind. But I can only answer
+      that I don&rsquo;t know why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have nothing in my mind,&rdquo; murmured the General, with gentle surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am his prey&mdash;his helpless prey,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I can&rsquo;t help your Excellency. I don&rsquo;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&mdash;I asked for no explanations&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was lucid. It was really a
+      calculated outburst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is rather a pity,&rdquo; the General said, &ldquo;that you did not. Don&rsquo;t you know
+      at all what he means to do?&rdquo; Razumov calmed down and saw an opening there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Ah voila</i>!&rdquo; said the General, turning to Prince K with an air of
+      satisfaction. &ldquo;There is a way to keep your <i>protege</i>, Mr. Razumov,
+      quite clear of any connexion with the actual arrest. We shall be ready for
+      that gentleman in Karabelnaya.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half an hour after midnight. Till then we have to depend on you, Mr.
+      Razumov. You don&rsquo;t think he is likely to change his purpose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I tell?&rdquo; said Razumov. &ldquo;Those men are not of the sort that ever
+      changes its purpose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What men do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fanatical lovers of liberty in general. Liberty with a capital L,
+      Excellency. Liberty that means nothing precise. Liberty in whose name
+      crimes are committed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General murmured&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I detest rebels of every kind. I can&rsquo;t help it. It&rsquo;s my nature!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back his arm. &ldquo;They shall be
+      destroyed, then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand,&rdquo; said Razumov with
+      malicious pleasure and looking the General straight in the face. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General repeated as if to himself, &ldquo;They shall be destroyed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince exclaimed&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a terrible necessity!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General&rsquo;s arm was lowered slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One comfort there is. That brood leaves no posterity. I&rsquo;ve always said
+      it, one effort, pitiless, persistent, steady&mdash;and we are done with
+      them for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I detest rebels. These subversive minds! These intellectual <i>debauches</i>!
+      My existence has been built on fidelity. It&rsquo;s a feeling. To defend it I am
+      ready to lay down my life&mdash;and even my honour&mdash;if that were
+      needed. But pray tell me what honour can there be as against rebels&mdash;against
+      people that deny God Himself&mdash;perfect unbelievers! Brutes. It is
+      horrible to think of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During this tirade Razumov, facing the General, had nodded slightly twice.
+      Prince K&mdash;-, standing on one side with his grand air, murmured,
+      casting up his eyes&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Helas!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then lowering his glance and with great decision declared&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This young man, General, is perfectly fit to apprehend the bearing of
+      your memorable words.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The General&rsquo;s whole expression changed from dull resentment to perfect
+      urbanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would ask now, Mr. Razumov,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to return to his home. Note that
+      I don&rsquo;t ask Mr. Razumov whether he has justified his absence to his guest.
+      No doubt he did this sufficiently. But I don&rsquo;t ask. Mr. Razumov inspires
+      confidence. It is a great gift. I only suggest that a more prolonged
+      absence might awaken the criminal&rsquo;s suspicions and induce him perhaps to
+      change his plans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted his visitors to the
+      ante-room encumbered with flower-pots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They all, it seems, have confidence in me,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have met this one with a firmness of mind and correctness of
+      feeling which give me a high idea of your worth,&rdquo; the Prince said
+      solemnly. &ldquo;You have now only to persevere&mdash;to persevere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s long face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After what your Excellency has condescended to do for me, I can only rely
+      on my conscience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Adieu</i>,&rdquo; said the whiskered head with feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov bowed. The brougham glided away with a slight swish in the snow&mdash;he
+      was alone on the edge of the pavement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said to himself that there was nothing to think about, and began
+      walking towards his home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with
+      feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sense of life&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; thought Razumov, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out; entered very quietly and
+      bolted the door behind him carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought, &ldquo;He hears me,&rdquo; 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I have
+      walked over his chest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! And what have you arranged?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad to put his hands against
+      the wall. A diabolical impulse to say, &ldquo;I have given you up to the
+      police,&rdquo; frightened him exceedingly. But he did not say that. He said,
+      without turning round, in a muffled voice&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again he heard Haldin sigh. He walked to the table, sat down with the lamp
+      before him, and only then looked towards the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin was heard again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must have had a walk&mdash;such a walk,...&rdquo; he murmured
+      deprecatingly. &ldquo;This weather....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov answered with energy&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Horrible walk.... A nightmare of a walk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so you have seen Ziemianitch&mdash;brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with the Prince, thought it
+      prudent to add, &ldquo;I had to wait some time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A character&mdash;eh? It&rsquo;s extraordinary what a sense of the necessity of
+      freedom there is in that man. And he has sayings too&mdash;simple, to the
+      point, such as only the people can invent in their rough sagacity. A
+      character that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, you understand, haven&rsquo;t had much opportunity....&rdquo; Razumov muttered
+      through his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, brother, I have been a good deal in that house of late. I used
+      to take there books&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s where I had my interview with Ziemianitch,&rdquo; interrupted Razumov
+      gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, &ldquo;It was
+      satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! he&rsquo;s a fellow,&rdquo; went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper and began to trace lines on
+      it with a pencil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; he thought angrily, &ldquo;he seems to have thought of
+      everybody&rsquo;s safety but mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin was talking on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This morning&mdash;ah! this morning&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;t give you peace.
+      Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself, &lsquo;There is
+      a young man in this town head and shoulders above common prejudices.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he laughing at me?&rdquo; Razumov asked himself, going on with his aimless
+      drawing of triangles and squares. And suddenly he thought: &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the shadowy
+      figure extended full length on it&mdash;so much more indistinct than the
+      one over whose breast he had walked without faltering. Was this, too, a
+      phantom?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence had lasted a long time. &ldquo;He is no longer here,&rdquo; was the
+      thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at
+      its absurdity. &ldquo;He is already gone and this...only...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could resist no longer. He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, &ldquo;I am
+      intolerably anxious,&rdquo; and in a few headlong strides stood by the side of
+      the bed. His hand fell lightly on Haldin&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room. &ldquo;It would have been
+      possibly a kindness,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;What can he expect?&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;The halter&mdash;in the
+      end. And I....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This argument was interrupted by Haldin&rsquo;s voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my
+      soul from this world. I tell you what&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m,&rdquo; muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk up
+      and down and to carry on his strange argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, to a man in such a situation&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this world of ours,&rdquo; he said with
+      force. &ldquo;I too, while I live.... But you seem determined to haunt it. You
+      can&rsquo;t seriously...mean...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice of the motionless Haldin began&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fellow&rsquo;s mad,&rdquo; he thought firmly, but this opinion did not mollify
+      him towards Haldin. It was a particularly impudent form of lunacy&mdash;and
+      when it got loose in the sphere of public life of a country, it was
+      obviously the duty of every good citizen....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Eternity, of course. I, too, can&rsquo;t very well represent it to
+      myself.... I imagine it, however, as something quiet and dull. There would
+      be nothing unexpected&mdash;don&rsquo;t you see? The element of time would be
+      wanting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled out his watch and gazed at it. Haldin turned over on his side
+      and looked on intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov got frightened at this movement. A slippery customer this fellow
+      with a phantom. It was not midnight yet. He hastened on&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;he
+      has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice of the snow on
+      the ground&mdash;and behold he is no longer the same man. The most
+      unlikely things have a secret power over one&rsquo;s thoughts&mdash;the grey
+      whiskers of a particular person&mdash;the goggle eyes of another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov&rsquo;s forehead was moist. He took a turn or two in the room, his head
+      low and smiling to himself viciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; Razumov almost shrieked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He avoided with difficulty a burst of Mephistophelian laughter. Haldin,
+      very pale, raised himself on his elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the surprises of life,&rdquo; went on Razumov, after glancing at the other
+      uneasily. &ldquo;Just consider their astonishing nature. A mysterious impulse
+      induces you to come here. I don&rsquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;t you think I am working for
+      progress too? I&rsquo;ve got to find my own ideas of the true way.... Pardon
+      me,&rdquo; continued Razumov, after drawing breath and with a short, throaty
+      laugh, &ldquo;but I haven&rsquo;t inherited a revolutionary inspiration together with
+      a resemblance from an uncle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;What move is he meditating over so quietly?&rdquo; he
+      thought. &ldquo;He must be prevented. I must keep on talking to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know what&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;or I have nothing. No
+      doubt you shall be looked upon as a martyr some day&mdash;a sort of hero&mdash;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,&rdquo; he cried, in a vibrating, subdued voice, and advancing one step
+      nearer the bed, &ldquo;that what it needs is not a lot of haunting phantoms that
+      I could walk through&mdash;but a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him off in horror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand it all now,&rdquo; he exclaimed, with awestruck dismay. &ldquo;I
+      understand&mdash;at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov staggered back against the table. His forehead broke out in
+      perspiration while a cold shudder ran down his spine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I been saying?&rdquo; he asked himself. &ldquo;Have I let him slip through
+      my fingers after all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and instead of a reassuring smile
+      only achieved an uncertain grimace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will you have?&rdquo; he began in a conciliating voice which got steady
+      after the first trembling word or two. &ldquo;What will you have? Consider&mdash;a
+      man of studious, retired habits&mdash;and suddenly like this.... I am not
+      practised in talking delicately. But...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were we to do together till midnight? Sit here opposite each other
+      and think of your&mdash;your&mdash;shambles?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude. He bowed his head; his hands
+      hung between his knees. His voice was low and pained but calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see now how it is, Razumov&mdash;brother. You are a magnanimous soul,
+      but my action is abhorrent to you&mdash;alas....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And even my person, too, is loathsome to you perhaps,&rdquo; Haldin added
+      mournfully, after a short pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing his
+      gaze on the floor. &ldquo;For indeed, unless one....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He broke off evidently waiting for a word. Razumov remained silent. Haldin
+      nodded his head dejectedly twice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. Of course,&rdquo; he murmured.... &ldquo;Ah! weary work!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained perfectly still for a moment, then made Razumov&rsquo;s leaden heart
+      strike a ponderous blow by springing up briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So be it,&rdquo; he cried sadly in a low, distinct tone. &ldquo;Farewell then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov started forward, but the sight of Haldin&rsquo;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&mdash;almost as noiseless as a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a wink of the tiny flame. Then stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells
+      of the unclean staircase. All quiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slow,&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stopped,&rdquo; and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s done.... And now to work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
+      across the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
+      cloak to the nose and with a General&rsquo;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&mdash;a shifty-eyed rascal,
+      smelling of raw onions and spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This evocation brought on positive nausea. &ldquo;Why do I want to bother about
+      this?&rdquo; thought Razumov with disgust. &ldquo;Am I a gendarme? Moreover, it is
+      done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till half-past
+      twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to despair. Impossible
+      to know the time! The landlady and all the people across the landing were
+      asleep. How could he go and... God knows what they would imagine, or how
+      much they would guess. He dared not go into the streets to find out. &ldquo;I am
+      a suspect now. There&rsquo;s no use shirking that fact,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to the window and stood there with slightly bent head on the watch
+      for the faint sound. &ldquo;I will stay here till I hear something,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;I confess,&rdquo; as a person might do on the rack. &ldquo;I am on
+      the rack,&rdquo; he thought. He felt ready to swoon. The faint deep boom of the
+      distant clock seemed to explode in his head&mdash;he heard it so
+      clearly.... One!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;but his pen remained poised over the sheet. It
+      hung there for some time before it came down and formed long scrawly
+      letters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began to write. When he wrote a
+      large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and remained
+      fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand groped all over
+      the table for the penknife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s story, my mind, the decent mind of
+      an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of the
+      task.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a <i>precis</i>
+      of a strange human document, but the rendering&mdash;I perceive it now
+      clearly&mdash;of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
+      earth&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s record, I
+      lay it aside, I take up the pen&mdash;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 &ldquo;cynicism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a mere litter
+      of blackened paper&mdash;dead matter&mdash;without significance or
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! yes,&rdquo; 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 <i>samovar</i> for his morning tea, he walked
+      up to it and took it down with an air of profound indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s head was
+      very noticeable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even his anger at this sign of the man&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that&rsquo;s all&mdash;nothing more. To look forward to the
+      gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion, love,
+      ambition, hate&mdash;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&mdash;looking forward. &ldquo;Oh! the
+      miserable lot of humanity!&rdquo; he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in
+      his thought, &ldquo;I ought to be happy enough as far as that goes.&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo; and he
+      felt the silence of the night press upon all his limbs like a weight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;-, whose task&mdash;weary
+      work too&mdash;was not done, and over whose head hung the sword of
+      revolutionary vengeance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;Razumov moved uneasily on
+      the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He suspected me,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;with
+      a bad secret police note tacked on to his record? What sort of future
+      could he look forward to?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am now a suspect,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s country. There was an activity that made for progress
+      without being revolutionary. The field of influence was great and
+      infinitely varied&mdash;once one had conquered a name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thought like a circling bird reverted after four-and-twenty hours to
+      the silver medal, and as it were poised itself there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have said no word to him that was not strictly true. Not one word,&rdquo;
+       Razumov argued with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does he want with me?&rdquo; 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&mdash;-&rsquo;s
+      executioner&mdash;that was the expression he used&mdash;having been
+      arrested the night before last....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been ill&mdash;shut up in my rooms,&rdquo; Razumov mumbled through his
+      teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s elbow with his eyes on the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an official statement,&rdquo; he continued in the same cautious mutter.
+      &ldquo;It may be a lie. But there was somebody arrested between midnight and one
+      in the morning on Tuesday. This is certain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;The same, in fact, I am affiliated to,&rdquo; remarked the student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;He
+      may be affiliated to the police,&rdquo; was the thought that passed through his
+      mind. &ldquo;Who could tell?&rdquo; But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped,
+      famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity of his
+      suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I&mdash;you know&mdash;I don&rsquo;t belong to any circle. I....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man arrested in the street was Haldin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And accepting Razumov&rsquo;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&mdash;- arrived at the Secretariat to examine
+      that prisoner personally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you astonished?&rdquo; concluded the gaunt student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Razumov roughly&mdash;and at once regretted his answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces&mdash;with his people.
+      Didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The student turned his big hollow eyes upon Razumov, who said unguardedly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His people are abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could have bitten his tongue out with vexation. The student pronounced
+      in a tone of profound meaning&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So! You alone were aware,...&rdquo; and stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have sworn my ruin,&rdquo; thought Razumov. &ldquo;Have you spoken of this to
+      anyone else?&rdquo; he asked with bitter curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, only to you. Our circle thought that as Haldin had been often heard
+      expressing a warm appreciation of your character....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved side by side in silence. Then the gaunt student began to
+      whisper again, with averted gaze&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;to follow very soon....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov trudging on interrupted&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you acquainted with Haldin? Did he know where you live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had the happiness to hear him speak twice,&rdquo; his companion answered in
+      the feverish whisper contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face and
+      bearing. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov trembled with rage and fear. He was beside himself, but kept his
+      voice low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not to come near me. You are not to speak to me. Never address a
+      single word to me. I forbid you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said the other submissively, showing no surprise whatever at
+      this abrupt prohibition. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t wish for secret reasons...
+      perfectly... I understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch&mdash;little father&mdash;what have you been doing?
+      And such a quiet young man, too! The police are just gone this moment
+      after searching your rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such a sensible young man! Anybody can see you are sensible. And now&mdash;like
+      this&mdash;all at once.... What is the good of mixing yourself up with
+      these Nihilists? Do give over, little father. They are unlucky people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?&rdquo; asked Razumov,
+      without taking his eyes off her quivering face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good woman, do not ask questions. I don&rsquo;t know anything myself. The
+      order comes from higher quarters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably. He sat down and
+      stared. He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being undermined
+      in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away from him one
+      by one. He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and made a
+      movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;smoothed
+      out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound meaning&mdash;or
+      perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution. This
+      irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to live&mdash;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&mdash;in that future menaced by the
+      lawlessness of autocracy&mdash;for autocracy knows no law&mdash;and the
+      lawlessness of revolution. The feeling that his moral personality was at
+      the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he asked himself
+      seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the mental
+      functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the good of exerting my intelligence, of pursuing the systematic
+      development of my faculties and all my plans of work?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+      &ldquo;I want to guide my conduct by reasonable convictions, but what security
+      have I against something&mdash;some destructive horror&mdash;walking in
+      upon me as I sit here?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A common thief,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;finds more guarantees in the law he
+      is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his consolation.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;We shall see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Madcap Kostia.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch. A few words here in this quiet
+      corner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt Razumov&rsquo;s reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm
+      caressingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;pray do. I don&rsquo;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. &lsquo;You are not behaving humanely to God&rsquo;s creatures that are a jolly
+      sight more estimable than yourself,&rsquo; I said. I can&rsquo;t bear to see any
+      tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Upon my word I can&rsquo;t. He didn&rsquo;t take it in
+      good part at all. &lsquo;Who&rsquo;s that impudent puppy?&rsquo; 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&mdash;like
+      a&mdash;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.&rdquo; He chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do get
+      into unholy scrapes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;t worth anything
+      better than to be split by a champagne bottle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away. The
+      other&rsquo;s tone changed to confidential earnestness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For God&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+      positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And rejecting indignantly Razumov&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you let me be of some use?&rdquo; he pleaded to the silent Razumov, who
+      with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real drift
+      of the other&rsquo;s intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up the point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What makes you think I want to go abroad?&rdquo; he asked at last very quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kostia lowered his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You got to know that so soon,&rdquo; muttered Razumov negligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. We did. And it struck us that a man like you...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of a man do you take me to be?&rdquo; Razumov interrupted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man of ideas&mdash;and a man of action too. But you are very deep,
+      Kirylo. There&rsquo;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&mdash;I mean all of us who have heard
+      Haldin speak of you on certain occasions. A man doesn&rsquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank&mdash;you&mdash;very&mdash;much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went away again rapidly. Kostia, recovering from his surprise at these
+      manoeuvres, ran up behind him pressingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Razumov turned at bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no false beards needed in this business, Kostia&mdash;you
+      good-hearted lunatic, you. What do you know of my ideas? My ideas may be
+      poison to you.&rdquo; The other began to shake his head in energetic protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you got to do with ideas? Some of them would make an end of
+      your dad&rsquo;s money-bags. Leave off meddling with what you don&rsquo;t understand.
+      Go back to your trotting horses and your girls, and then you&rsquo;ll be sure at
+      least of doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this disdain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re sending me back to my pig&rsquo;s trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I am
+      an unlucky beast&mdash;and I shall die like a beast too. But mind&mdash;it&rsquo;s
+      your contempt that has done for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of his
+      hands by Haldin&rsquo;s revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and laborious
+      existence had been destroyed&mdash;the only thing he could call his own on
+      this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What infuriated him most was to feel that the &ldquo;thinkers&rdquo; of the University
+      were evidently connecting him with Haldin&mdash;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&rsquo;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible to think of anything else,&rdquo; muttered Razumov to himself. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+      become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are
+      murdering my intelligence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of
+      his intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gendarme brought it,&rdquo; said the man. &ldquo;He asked if you were at home. I
+      told him &lsquo;No, he&rsquo;s not at home.&rsquo; So he left it. &lsquo;Give it into his own
+      hands,&rsquo; says he. Now you&rsquo;ve got it&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope in
+      hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course this
+      official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A suspect!
+      A suspect!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&rsquo;s back is turned; you come
+      home and find it in possession bearing a man&rsquo;s name, clothed in flesh&mdash;wearing
+      a brown cloth coat and long boots&mdash;lounging against the stove. It
+      asks you, &ldquo;Is the outer door closed?&rdquo;&mdash;and you don&rsquo;t know enough to
+      take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You don&rsquo;t know. You welcome
+      the crazy fate. &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s head against a wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had a vision of General T&mdash;-&rsquo;s goggle eyes waiting for him&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can he want with me precisely&mdash;I wonder?&rdquo; he asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Is the outer door closed?&rdquo; 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&mdash;and turning short on his heel he
+      walked out of his room with infinite disdain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov
+      remembered the promise made by the General to Prince K&mdash;-. His action
+      was to remain unknown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;- 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he discovered that he would
+      have nothing to do with General T&mdash;-. It is evident from Mr.
+      Razumov&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in the corridor&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;certainly not suspicious&mdash;almost
+      without expression. In its passionless persistence there was something
+      resembling sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, who had prepared his will and his intelligence to encounter
+      General T&mdash;- 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated. His strung-up individuality had gone to
+      pieces within him very suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must be very prudent with him,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t lost a moment&rsquo;s time,&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;misunderstood&rdquo; was better than the word &ldquo;mistrusted,&rdquo; and he repeated it
+      again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized with fright before
+      the attentive immobility of the official. &ldquo;What am I talking about?&rdquo; he
+      thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze. Mistrusted&mdash;not misunderstood&mdash;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&mdash;an involuntary
+      gesture of suffering, which he was too careless to restrain. At that
+      moment Razumov beheld his own brain suffering on the rack&mdash;a long,
+      pale figure drawn asunder horizontally with terrific force in the darkness
+      of a vault, whose face he failed to see. It was as though he had dreamed
+      for an infinitesimal fraction of time of some dark print of the
+      Inquisition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov had actually dozed off and
+      had dreamed in the presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print of the
+      Inquisition. He was indeed extremely exhausted, and he records a
+      remarkably dream-like experience of anguish at the circumstance that there
+      was no one whatever near the pale and extended figure. The solitude of the
+      racked victim was particularly horrible to behold. The mysterious
+      impossibility to see the face, he also notes, inspired a sort of terror.
+      All these characteristics of an ugly dream were present. Yet he is certain
+      that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the sofa, leaning
+      forward with his hands between his knees and turning his cap round and
+      round in his fingers. But everything vanished at the voice of Councillor
+      Mikulin. Razumov felt profoundly grateful for the even simplicity of its
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I have listened with interest. I comprehend in a measure your...
+      But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you....&rdquo; Councillor Mikulin uttered
+      a series of broken sentences. Instead of finishing them he glanced down
+      his beard. It was a deliberate curtailment which somehow made the phrases
+      more impressive. But he could talk fluently enough, as became apparent
+      when changing his tone to persuasiveness he went on: &ldquo;By listening to you
+      as I did, I think I have proved that I do not regard our intercourse as
+      strictly official. In fact, I don&rsquo;t want it to have that character at
+      all.... Oh yes! I admit that the request for your presence here had an
+      official form. But I put it to you whether it was a form which would have
+      been used to secure the attendance of a....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suspect,&rdquo; exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official&rsquo;s eyes.
+      They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim,
+      steadfast gaze. &ldquo;A suspect.&rdquo; The open repetition of that word which had
+      been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of
+      satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. &ldquo;Surely you do
+      know that I&rsquo;ve had my rooms searched by the police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was about to say a &lsquo;misunderstood person,&rsquo; when you interrupted me,&rdquo;
+       insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual
+      superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little
+      disdainfully&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know I am but a reed. But I beg you to allow me the superiority of the
+      thinking reed over the unthinking forces that are about to crush him out
+      of existence. Practical thinking in the last instance is but criticism. I
+      may perhaps be allowed to express my wonder at this action of the police
+      being delayed for two full days during which, of course, I could have
+      annihilated everything compromising by burning it&mdash;let us say&mdash;and
+      getting rid of the very ashes, for that matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are angry,&rdquo; remarked the official, with an unutterable simplicity of
+      tone and manner. &ldquo;Is that reasonable?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am reasonable. I am even&mdash;permit me to say&mdash;a thinker, though
+      to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of
+      revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought&mdash;devil
+      knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think
+      like a Russian. I think faithfully&mdash;and I take the liberty to call
+      myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word, as far as I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Why should it be a forbidden word?&rdquo; Councillor Mikulin turned in his
+      seat with crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table propped his head
+      on the knuckles of a half-closed hand. Razumov noticed a thick forefinger
+      clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-red stone&mdash;a signet
+      ring that, looking as if it could weigh half a pound, was an appropriate
+      ornament for that ponderous man with the accurate middle-parting of glossy
+      hair above a rugged Socratic forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could it be a wig?&rdquo; Razumov detected himself wondering with an unexpected
+      detachment. His self-confidence was much shaken. He resolved to chatter no
+      more. Reserve! Reserve! All he had to do was to keep the Ziemianitch
+      episode secret with absolute determination, when the questions came. Keep
+      Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly. Razumov&rsquo;s self-confidence
+      abandoned him completely. It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.
+      Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing
+      else. He made an effort to brace himself up. It was a failure. But
+      Councillor Mikulin was surprisingly detached too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should it be forbidden?&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;I too consider myself a
+      thinking man, I assure you. The principal condition is to think correctly.
+      I admit it is difficult sometimes at first for a young man abandoned to
+      himself&mdash;with his generous impulses undisciplined, so to speak&mdash;at
+      the mercy of every wild wind that blows. Religious belief, of course, is a
+      great....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension was
+      relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with gloomy
+      discontent&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man, Haldin, believed in God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You are aware,&rdquo; breathed out Councillor Mikulin, making the point
+      softly, as if with discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly enough,
+      as if he too were put off his guard by Razumov&rsquo;s remark. The young man
+      preserved an impassive, moody countenance, though he reproached himself
+      bitterly for a pernicious fool, to have given thus an utterly false
+      impression of intimacy. He kept his eyes on the floor. &ldquo;I must positively
+      hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak,&rdquo; he admonished himself. And
+      at once against his will the question, &ldquo;Hadn&rsquo;t I better tell him
+      everything?&rdquo; presented itself with such force that he had to bite his
+      lower lip. Councillor Mikulin could not, however, have nourished any hope
+      of confession. He went on&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tell me more than his judges were able to get out of him. He was
+      judged by a commission of three. He would tell them absolutely nothing. I
+      have the report of the interrogatories here, by me. After every question
+      there stands &lsquo;Refuses to answer&mdash;refuses to answer.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s like that
+      page after page. You see, I have been entrusted with some further
+      investigations around and about this affair. He has left me nothing to
+      begin my investigations on. A hardened miscreant. And so, you say, he
+      believed in....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard with a faint grimace; but
+      he did not pause for long. Remarking with a shade of scorn that
+      blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he concluded by supposing that
+      Mr. Razumov had conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Razumov loudly, without looking up. &ldquo;He talked and I listened.
+      That is not a conversation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listening is a great art,&rdquo; observed Mikulin parenthetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And getting people to talk is another,&rdquo; mumbled Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, no&mdash;that is not very difficult,&rdquo; Mikulin said innocently,
+      &ldquo;except, of course, in special cases. For instance, this Haldin. Nothing
+      could induce him to talk. He was brought four times before the delegated
+      judges. Four secret interrogatories&mdash;and even during the last, when
+      your personality was put forward....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My personality put forward?&rdquo; repeated Razumov, raising his head
+      brusquely. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo; Councillor Mikulin turned squarely to the
+      table, and taking up some sheets of grey foolscap dropped them one after
+      another, retaining only the last in his hand. He held it before his eyes
+      while speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was&mdash;you see&mdash;judged necessary. In a case of that gravity no
+      means of action upon the culprit should be neglected. You understand that
+      yourself, I am certain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Razumov stared with enormous wide eyes at the side view of Councillor
+      Mikulin, who now was not looking at him at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it was decided (I was consulted by General T&mdash;-) that a certain
+      question should be put to the accused. But in deference to the earnest
+      wishes of Prince K&mdash;- your name has been kept out of the documents
+      and even from the very knowledge of the judges themselves. Prince K&mdash;-
+      recognized the propriety, the necessity of what we proposed to do, but he
+      was concerned for your safety. Things do leak out&mdash;that we can&rsquo;t
+      deny. One cannot always answer for the discretion of inferior officials.
+      There was, of course, the secretary of the special tribunal&mdash;one or
+      two gendarmes in the room. Moreover, as I have said, in deference to
+      Prince K&mdash;- even the judges themselves were to be left in ignorance.
+      The question ready framed was sent to them by General T&mdash;- (I wrote
+      it out with my own hand) with instructions to put it to the prisoner the
+      very last of all. Here it is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Councillor Mikulin threw back his head into proper focus and went on
+      reading monotonously: &lsquo;Question&mdash;Has the man well known to you, in
+      whose rooms you remained for several hours on Monday and on whose
+      information you have been arrested&mdash;has he had any previous knowledge
+      of your intention to commit a political murder?...&rsquo; Prisoner refuses to
+      reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Question repeated. Prisoner preserves the same stubborn silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The venerable Chaplain of the Fortress being then admitted and exhorting
+      the prisoner to repentance, entreating him also to atone for his crime by
+      an unreserved and full confession which should help to liberate from the
+      sin of rebellion against the Divine laws and the sacred Majesty of the
+      Ruler, our Christ-loving land&mdash;the prisoner opens his lips for the
+      first time during this morning&rsquo;s audience and in a loud, clear voice
+      rejects the venerable Chaplain&rsquo;s ministrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At eleven o&rsquo;clock the Court pronounces in summary form the death
+      sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The execution is fixed for four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, subject to
+      further instructions from superior authorities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin dropped the page of foolscap, glanced down his beard,
+      and turning to Razumov, added in an easy, explanatory tone&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We saw no object in delaying the execution. The order to carry out the
+      sentence was sent by telegraph at noon. I wrote out the telegram myself.
+      He was hanged at four o&rsquo;clock this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The definite information of Haldin&rsquo;s death gave Razumov the feeling of
+      general lassitude which follows a great exertion or a great excitement. He
+      kept very still on the sofa, but a murmur escaped him&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had a belief in a future existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin shrugged his shoulders slightly, and Razumov got up
+      with an effort. There was nothing now to stay for in that room. Haldin had
+      been hanged at four o&rsquo;clock. There could be no doubt of that. He had, it
+      seemed, entered upon his future existence, long boots, Astrakhan fur cap
+      and all, down to the very leather strap round his waist. A flickering,
+      vanishing sort of existence. It was not his soul, it was his mere phantom
+      he had left behind on this earth&mdash;thought Razumov, smiling
+      caustically to himself while he crossed the room, utterly forgetful of
+      where he was and of Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s existence. The official could
+      have set a lot of bells ringing all over the building without leaving his
+      chair. He let Razumov go quite up to the door before he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch&mdash;what are you doing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov turned his head and looked at him in silence. He was not in the
+      least disconcerted. Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s arms were stretched out on the
+      table before him and his body leaned forward a little with an effort of
+      his dim gaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was I actually going to clear out like this?&rdquo; Razumov wondered at himself
+      with an impassive countenance. And he was aware of this impassiveness
+      concealing a lucid astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evidently I was going out if he had not spoken,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;What would
+      he have done then? I must end this affair one way or another. I must make
+      him show his hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment longer he reflected behind the mask as it were, then let go
+      the door-handle and came back to the middle of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what you think,&rdquo; he said explosively, but not raising his
+      voice. &ldquo;You think that you are dealing with a secret accomplice of that
+      unhappy man. No, I do not know that he was unhappy. He did not tell me. He
+      was a wretch from my point of view, because to keep alive a false idea is
+      a greater crime than to kill a man. I suppose you will not deny that? I
+      hated him! Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their Utopias
+      inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a contempt
+      for the secular logic of human development.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared. &ldquo;What a tirade!&rdquo; he thought.
+      The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The
+      bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an
+      idol with dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov&rsquo;s voice changed involuntarily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as
+      Haldin, I would answer you&mdash;there is nothing sentimental in it. I did
+      not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder. Abhorrence is
+      not hate. I hated him simply because I am sane. It is in that character
+      that he outraged me. His death...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat. The dimness of
+      Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it
+      indistinct to Razumov&rsquo;s sight. He tried to disregard these phenomena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, &ldquo;what is his death
+      to me? If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his breast....
+      The fellow is a mere phantom....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov&rsquo;s voice died out very much against his will. Mikulin behind the
+      table did not allow himself the slightest movement. The silence lasted for
+      some little time before Razumov could go on again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
+      other&rsquo;s rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young Guards&rsquo; 
+      officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery. ...Upon
+      my Word,&rdquo;&mdash;Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of Ziemianitch,
+      lowered his voice forcibly,&mdash;&ldquo;upon my word, we Russians are a drunken
+      lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves wild with
+      sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or set fire to
+      the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know? To cut
+      oneself entirely from one&rsquo;s kind is impossible. To live in a desert one
+      must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the grog-shop, falls on
+      your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because something about your
+      appearance has taken his fancy, what then&mdash;kindly tell me? You may
+      break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not succeed in beating him
+      off....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
+      deliberately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s... of course,&rdquo; he said in an undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
+      unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. Razumov
+      remembered his intention of making him show his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have said all this to Prince K&mdash;-,&rdquo; he began with assumed
+      indifference, but lost it on seeing Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s slow nod of
+      assent. &ldquo;You know it? You&rsquo;ve heard.... Then why should I be called here to
+      be told of Haldin&rsquo;s execution? Did you want to confront me with his
+      silence now that the man is dead? What is his silence to me! This is
+      incomprehensible. You want in some way to shake my moral balance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Not that,&rdquo; murmured Councillor Mikulin, just audibly. &ldquo;The service
+      you have rendered is appreciated....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it?&rdquo; interrupted Razumov ironically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;...and your position too.&rdquo; Councillor Mikulin did not raise his voice.
+      &ldquo;But only think! You fall into Prince K&mdash;-&rsquo;s study as if from the sky
+      with your startling information.... You are studying yet, Mr. Razumov, but
+      we are serving already&mdash;don&rsquo;t forget that.... And naturally some
+      curiosity was bound to....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin looked down his beard. Razumov&rsquo;s lips trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An occurrence of that sort marks a man,&rdquo; the homely murmur went on. &ldquo;I
+      admit I was curious to see you. General T&mdash;- thought it would be
+      useful, too.... Don&rsquo;t think I am incapable of understanding your
+      sentiments. When I was young like you I studied....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;you wished to see me,&rdquo; said Razumov in a tone of profound
+      distaste. &ldquo;Naturally you have the right&mdash;I mean the power. It all
+      amounts to the same thing. But it is perfectly useless, if you were to
+      look at me and listen to me for a year. I begin to think there is
+      something about me which people don&rsquo;t seem able to make out. It&rsquo;s
+      unfortunate. I imagine, however, that Prince K&mdash;- understands. He
+      seemed to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin moved slightly and spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prince K&mdash;- is aware of everything that is being done, and I don&rsquo;t
+      mind informing you that he approved my intention of becoming personally
+      acquainted with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov concealed an immense disappointment under the accents of railing
+      surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is curious too!... Well&mdash;after all, Prince K&mdash;- knows me
+      very little. It is really very unfortunate for me, but&mdash;it is not
+      exactly my fault.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin raised a hasty deprecatory hand and inclined his head
+      slightly over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, Mr. Razumov&mdash;is it necessary to take it in that way? Everybody
+      I am sure can....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced rapidly down his beard, and when he looked up again there was
+      for a moment an interested expression in his misty gaze. Razumov
+      discouraged it with a cold, repellent smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. That&rsquo;s of no importance to be sure&mdash;except that in respect of
+      all this curiosity being aroused by a very simple matter.... What is to be
+      done with it? It is unappeasable. I mean to say there is nothing to
+      appease it with. I happen to have been born a Russian with patriotic
+      instincts&mdash;whether inherited or not I am not in a position to say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov spoke consciously with elaborate steadiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, patriotic instincts developed by a faculty of independent thinking&mdash;of
+      detached thinking. In that respect I am more free than any social
+      democratic revolution could make me. It is more than probable that I don&rsquo;t
+      think exactly as you are thinking. Indeed, how could it be? You would
+      think most likely at this moment that I am elaborately lying to cover up
+      the track of my repentance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov stopped. His heart had grown too big for his breast. Councillor
+      Mikulin did not flinch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why so?&rdquo; he said simply. &ldquo;I assisted personally at the search of your
+      rooms. I looked through all the papers myself. I have been greatly
+      impressed by a sort of political confession of faith. A very remarkable
+      document. Now may I ask for what purpose....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To deceive the police naturally,&rdquo; said Razumov savagely.... &ldquo;What is all
+      this mockery? Of course you can send me straight from this room to
+      Siberia. That would be intelligible. To what is intelligible I can submit.
+      But I protest against this comedy of persecution. The whole affair is
+      becoming too comical altogether for my taste. A comedy of errors,
+      phantoms, and suspicions. It&rsquo;s positively indecent....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin turned an attentive ear. &ldquo;Did you say phantoms?&rdquo; he
+      murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could walk over dozens of them.&rdquo; Razumov, with an impatient wave of his
+      hand, went on headlong, &ldquo;But, really, I must claim the right to be done
+      once for all with that man. And in order to accomplish this I shall take
+      the liberty....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov on his side of the table bowed slightly to the seated bureaucrat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... To retire&mdash;simply to retire,&rdquo; he finished with great resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked to the door, thinking, &ldquo;Now he must show his hand. He must ring
+      and have me arrested before I am out of the building, or he must let me
+      go. And either way....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An unhurried voice said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch.&rdquo; Razumov at the door turned his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To retire,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where to?&rdquo; asked Councillor Mikulin softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART SECOND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain
+      proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man of
+      imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his
+      instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development
+      of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes. But this is not a
+      work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking lies
+      not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and strong
+      in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to invent
+      anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent a
+      transition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping then Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s record at the point where Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s
+      question &ldquo;Where to?&rdquo; comes in with the force of an insoluble problem, I
+      shall simply say that I made the acquaintance of these ladies about six
+      months before that time. By &ldquo;these ladies&rdquo; I mean, of course, the mother
+      and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By what arguments he had induced his mother to sell their little property
+      and go abroad for an indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely. I have an
+      idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son&rsquo;s wish, would have set fire to her house
+      and emigrated to the moon without any sign of surprise or apprehension;
+      and that Miss Haldin&mdash;Nathalie, caressingly Natalka&mdash;would have
+      given her assent to the scheme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their proud devotion to that young man became clear to me in a very short
+      time. Following his directions they went straight to Switzerland&mdash;to
+      Zurich&mdash;where they remained the best part of a year. From Zurich,
+      which they did not like, they came to Geneva. A friend of mine in
+      Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the University (he had married a
+      Russian lady, a distant connection of Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s), wrote to me
+      suggesting I should call on these ladies. It was a very kindly meant
+      business suggestion. Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of reading
+      the best English authors with a competent teacher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly. Her bad French, of which she was
+      smilingly conscious, did away with the formality of the first interview.
+      She was a tall woman in a black silk dress. A wide brow, regular features,
+      and delicately cut lips, testified to her past beauty. She sat upright in
+      an easy chair and in a rather weak, gentle voice told me that her Natalka
+      simply thirsted after knowledge. Her thin hands were lying on her lap, her
+      facial immobility had in it something monachal. &ldquo;In Russia,&rdquo; she went on,
+      &ldquo;all knowledge was tainted with falsehood. Not chemistry and all that, but
+      education generally,&rdquo; she explained. The Government corrupted the teaching
+      for its own purposes. Both her children felt that. Her Natalka had
+      obtained a diploma of a Superior School for Women and her son was a
+      student at the St. Petersburg University. He had a brilliant intellect, a
+      most noble unselfish nature, and he was the oracle of his comrades. Early
+      next year, she hoped he would join them and they would then go to Italy
+      together. In any other country but their own she would have been certain
+      of a great future for a man with the extraordinary abilities and the lofty
+      character of her son&mdash;but in Russia....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young lady sitting by the window turned her head and said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, mother. Even with us things change with years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet caressing in its harshness. She
+      had a dark complexion, with red lips and a full figure. She gave the
+      impression of strong vitality. The old lady sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are both young&mdash;you two. It is easy for you to hope. But I, too,
+      am not hopeless. Indeed, how could I be with a son like this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors she wished to read. She
+      directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I became
+      aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically her personality
+      could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman something else than
+      the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as direct and trustful as
+      that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world&rsquo;s wise lessons. And it was
+      intrepid, but in this intrepidity there was nothing aggressive. A naive
+      yet thoughtful assurance is a better definition. She had reflected already
+      (in Russia the young begin to think early), but she had never known
+      deception as yet because obviously she had never yet fallen under the sway
+      of passion. She was&mdash;to look at her was enough&mdash;very capable of
+      being roused by an idea or simply by a person. At least, so I judged with
+      I believe an unbiassed mind; for clearly my person could not be the person&mdash;and
+      as to my ideas!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We became excellent friends in the course of our reading. It was very
+      pleasant. Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I became
+      very much attached to that young girl. At the end of four months I told
+      her that now she could very well go on reading English by herself. It was
+      time for the teacher to depart. My pupil looked unpleasantly surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and kindly expression of the
+      eyes, uttered from her armchair in her uncertain French, &ldquo;<i>Mais l&rsquo;ami
+      reviendra.</i>&rdquo; And so it was settled. I returned&mdash;not four times a
+      week as before, but pretty frequently. In the autumn we made some short
+      excursions together in company with other Russians. My friendship with
+      these ladies gave me a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise I
+      could not have had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P&mdash;-&rsquo;s assassination&mdash;it
+      was a Sunday&mdash;I met the two ladies in the street and walked with them
+      for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy grey cloak, I remember, over
+      her black silk dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very quiet
+      expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have been to the late service,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Natalka came with me. Her
+      girl-friends, the students here, of course don&rsquo;t.... With us in Russia the
+      church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost necessary
+      when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope of a future
+      existence. But I cannot give up praying for my son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added with a sort of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and in
+      French, &ldquo;<i>Ce n&rsquo;est peut etre qu&rsquo;une habitude.</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;It may be only
+      habit.&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She did not glance at her
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You and Victor are both profound believers,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I communicated to them the news from their country which I had just read
+      in a cafe. For a whole minute we walked together fairly briskly in
+      silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this. They may be even
+      closing the University. There is neither peace nor rest in Russia for one
+      but in the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. The way is hard,&rdquo; came from the daughter, looking straight before
+      her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing the
+      end of the street. &ldquo;But concord is not so very far off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what my children think,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Haldin to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of
+      concord. Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought
+      very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the
+      situation. She was very calm and youthfully superior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as social
+      contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
+      something quite different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is quite possible that I don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
+      understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
+      Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the
+      practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose
+      one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible
+      corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless
+      cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound
+      difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the
+      irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it
+      with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a
+      digression indeed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in the
+      afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
+      Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
+      platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
+      softened in her grey eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the
+      memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from
+      all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the
+      living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death. He must
+      have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the
+      hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into
+      eternity. That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their
+      compatriots&mdash;more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and
+      the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard des
+      Philosophes was very much crowded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too. I took
+      her hand and was moved to revert to that morning&rsquo;s conversation in the
+      street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of your...&rdquo;
+       I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious
+      fore-knowledge. She checked me gently&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their impulses&mdash;their...&rdquo; she sought the proper expression and found
+      it, but in French...&ldquo;their <i>mouvements d&rsquo;ame.</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice was not much above a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But still we are looking at a conflict. You say it
+      is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose I
+      admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more easily&mdash;can
+      they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord which you
+      proclaim to be so near?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering
+      my reasonable question&mdash;my obvious, my unanswerable question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is inconceivable,&rdquo; I added, with something like annoyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything is inconceivable,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The whole world is inconceivable
+      to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and
+      we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions. It
+      is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong to the majority. We
+      Russians shall find some better form of national freedom than an
+      artificial conflict of parties&mdash;which is wrong because it is a
+      conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is left for us
+      Russians to discover a better way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window. She turned upon me the
+      almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her
+      big dark eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what my children think,&rdquo; she declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; I addressed Miss Haldin, &ldquo;that you will be shocked if I tell
+      you that I haven&rsquo;t understood&mdash;I won&rsquo;t say a single word; I&rsquo;ve
+      understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied
+      concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its
+      plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic
+      conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were
+      before they can be made understandable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred. She
+      smiled with her eyes only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the
+      door, very amiable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor. It is
+      not so. He understands me better than I can understand him. When he joins
+      us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul it is.&rdquo;
+       She paused. &ldquo;He is not a strong man in the conventional sense, you know,&rdquo;
+       she added. &ldquo;But his character is without a flaw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with your
+      brother Victor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t expect to understand him quite,&rdquo; she said, a little maliciously.
+      &ldquo;He is not at all&mdash;at all&mdash;western at bottom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in the
+      doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
+      autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard des
+      Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of Geneva, where
+      there is a quarter called &ldquo;La Petite Russie.&rdquo; Whenever two Russians come
+      together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging their thoughts,
+      their views, their most intimate feelings, their private life, their
+      public utterances&mdash;haunting the secret of their silences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What struck me next in the course of a week or so was the silence of these
+      ladies. I used to meet them walking in the public garden near the
+      University. They greeted me with their usual friendliness, but I could not
+      help noticing their taciturnity. By that time it was generally known that
+      the assassin of M. de P&mdash;- had been caught, judged, and executed. So
+      much had been declared officially to the news agencies. But for the world
+      at large he remained anonymous. The official secrecy had withheld his name
+      from the public. I really cannot imagine for what reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the main valley of the Bastions
+      under the naked trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother is not very well,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Mrs. Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day&rsquo;s illness in her life, this
+      indisposition was disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for
+      rather a long time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No news&mdash;good news,&rdquo; I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly
+      side by side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in Russia,&rdquo; she breathed out so low that I only just caught the
+      words. I looked at her with more attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You too are anxious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She admitted after a moment of hesitation that she was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is really such a long time since we heard....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And before I could offer the usual banal suggestions she confided in me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote to a family we know in
+      Petersburg. They had not seen him for more than a month. They thought he
+      was already with us. They were even offended a little that he should have
+      left Petersburg without calling on them. The husband of the lady went at
+      once to his lodgings. Victor had left there and they did not know his
+      address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember her catching her breath rather pitifully. Her brother had not
+      been seen at lectures for a very long time either. He only turned up now
+      and then at the University gate to ask the porter for his letters. And the
+      gentleman friend was told that the student Haldin did not come to claim
+      the last two letters for him. But the police came to inquire if the
+      student Haldin ever received any correspondence at the University and took
+      them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My two last letters,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We faced each other. A few snow-flakes fluttered under the naked boughs.
+      The sky was dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think could have happened?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her shoulders moved slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One can never tell&mdash;in Russia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their
+      submission or their revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face nestled
+      in a fur collar and darken her clear eyes that shone upon me brilliantly
+      grey in the murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us move on,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It is cold standing&mdash;to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered a little and stamped her little feet. We moved briskly to
+      the end of the alley and back to the great gates of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you told your mother?&rdquo; I ventured to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the impression of this letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came from her muff. She had the
+      letter with her in there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it that you are afraid of?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and conspiracies
+      seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel. I did not like
+      to be more definite in my inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For us&mdash;for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.
+      People do disappear. Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine what
+      it is&mdash;the cruelty of the dumb weeks&mdash;months&mdash;years! This
+      friend of ours has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police
+      getting hold of the letters. I suppose he was afraid of compromising
+      himself. He has a wife and children&mdash;and why should he, after all....
+      Moreover, he is without influential connections and not rich. What could
+      he do?... Yes, I am afraid of silence&mdash;for my poor mother. She won&rsquo;t
+      be able to bear it. For my brother I am afraid of...&rdquo; she became almost
+      indistinct, &ldquo;of anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were now near the gate opposite the theatre. She raised her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do you know what my last hope
+      is? Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into our
+      rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong,
+      after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff,
+      crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and
+      glancing down the correspondence from Russia&mdash;not the telegrams but
+      the correspondence&mdash;the first thing that caught my eye was the name
+      of Haldin. Mr. de P&mdash;-&rsquo;s death was no longer an actuality, but the
+      enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
+      unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got hold
+      of Haldin&rsquo;s name, and had picked up the story of the midnight arrest in
+      the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of view was
+      already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than twenty lines
+      out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a sleepless night. I
+      perceived that it would have been a sort of treason to let Miss Haldin
+      come without preparation upon that journalistic discovery which would
+      infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French and Swiss newspapers. I
+      had a very bad time of it till the morning, wakeful with nervous worry and
+      night-marish with the feeling of being mixed up with something theatrical
+      and morbidly affected. The incongruity of such a complication in those two
+      women&rsquo;s lives was sensible to me all night in the form of absolute
+      anguish. It seemed due to their refined simplicity that it should remain
+      concealed from them for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at
+      the door of their apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of
+      vandalism....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there was
+      a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table. The
+      motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
+      instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the day.
+      Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother&rsquo;s room
+      with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number of
+      the <i>Standard</i> could have the effect of Medusa&rsquo;s head. Her face went
+      stony in a moment&mdash;her eyes&mdash;her limbs. The most terrible thing
+      was that being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her
+      palpitating heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy
+      circumlocution. It was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so
+      still from head to foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard
+      her draw a breath. As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and
+      affected the firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to
+      have given way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged&mdash;ruined.
+      But only for a moment. She said with decision&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to tell my mother at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would that be safe in her state?&rdquo; I objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month? We
+      understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don&rsquo;t
+      imagine I am defending him before you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur not
+      to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
+      reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
+      her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
+      heavily as if completely exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in bed,
+      and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she lay down
+      gently and had motioned her daughter away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will call me in presently,&rdquo; added Miss Haldin. &ldquo;I left a bell near
+      the bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
+      readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
+      was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
+      spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There is
+      no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the grief I
+      had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It had the
+      associations of bombs and gallows&mdash;a lurid, Russian colouring which
+      made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
+      display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command over
+      herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the stillness
+      of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the door of Mrs.
+      Haldin&rsquo;s room, with the old mother alone in there, had a rather awful
+      aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you are wondering what my feelings are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Essentially that was true. It was that very wonder which unsettled my
+      sympathy of a dense Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of some
+      commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our
+      impotence before each other&rsquo;s trials I mumbled something to the effect
+      that, for the young, life held its hopes and compensations. It held duties
+      too&mdash;but of that I was certain it was not necessary to remind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled at it nervously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not likely to forget my mother,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We used to be three. Now
+      we are two&mdash;two women. She&rsquo;s not so very old. She may live quite a
+      long time yet. What have we to look for in the future? For what hope and
+      what consolation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must take a wider view,&rdquo; I said resolutely, thinking that with this
+      exceptional creature this was the right note to strike. She looked at me
+      steadily for a moment, and then the tears she had been keeping down flowed
+      unrestrained. She jumped up and stood in the window with her back to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I slipped away without attempting even to approach her. Next day I was
+      told at the door that Mrs. Haldin was better. The middle-aged servant
+      remarked that a lot of people&mdash;Russians&mdash;had called that day,
+      but Miss Haldin bad not seen anybody. A fortnight later, when making my
+      daily call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin sitting in her usual
+      place by the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first one would have thought that nothing was changed. I saw across the
+      room the familiar profile, a little sharper in outline and overspread by a
+      uniform pallor as might have been expected in an invalid. But no disease
+      could have accounted for the change in her black eyes, smiling no longer
+      with gentle irony. She raised them as she gave me her hand. I observed the
+      three weeks&rsquo; old number of the <i>Standard</i> folded with the
+      correspondence from Russia uppermost, lying on a little table by the side
+      of the armchair. Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s voice was startlingly weak and colourless.
+      Her first words to me framed a question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has there been anything more in papers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I released her long emaciated hand, shook my head negatively, and sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The English press is wonderful. Nothing can be kept secret from it, and
+      all the world must hear. Only our Russian news is not always easy to
+      understand. Not always easy.... But English mothers do not look for news
+      like that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it away again. I said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We too have had tragic times in our history.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A long time ago. A very long time ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are nations that have made their bargain with fate,&rdquo; said Miss
+      Haldin, who had approached us. &ldquo;We need not envy them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why this scorn?&rdquo; I asked gently. &ldquo;It may be that our bargain was not a
+      very lofty one. But the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
+      hallowed by the price.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out of the window for a time,
+      with that new, sombre, extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so completely
+      made another woman of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Englishman, this correspondent,&rdquo; she addressed me suddenly, &ldquo;do you
+      think it is possible that he knew my son?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this strange question I could only say that it was possible of course.
+      She saw my surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one knew what sort of man he was one could perhaps write to him,&rdquo; she
+      murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother thinks,&rdquo; explained Miss Haldin, standing between us, with one hand
+      resting on the back of my chair, &ldquo;that my poor brother perhaps did not try
+      to save himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic consternation, but Miss Haldin
+      was looking down calmly at her mother. The latter said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do not know the address of any of his friends. Indeed, we know nothing
+      of his Petersburg comrades. He had a multitude of young friends, only he
+      never spoke much of them. One could guess that they were his disciples and
+      that they idolized him. But he was so modest. One would think that with so
+      many devoted....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She averted her head again and looked down the Boulevard des Philosophes,
+      a singularly arid and dusty thoroughfare, where nothing could be seen at
+      the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a pinafore hopping on one leg,
+      and in the distance a workman wheeling a bicycle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was found a Judas,&rdquo; she
+      whispered as if to herself, but with the evident intention to be heard by
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Russian visitors assembled in little knots, conversed amongst
+      themselves meantime, in low murmurs, and with brief glances in our
+      direction. It was a great contrast to the usual loud volubility of these
+      gatherings. Miss Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People will come,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We cannot shut the door in their faces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While I was putting on my overcoat she began to talk to me of her mother.
+      Poor Mrs. Haldin was fretting after more news. She wanted to go on hearing
+      about her unfortunate son. She could not make up her mind to abandon him
+      quietly to the dumb unknown. She would persist in pursuing him in there
+      through the long days of motionless silence face to face with the empty
+      Boulevard des Philosophes. She could not understand why he had not escaped&mdash;as
+      so many other revolutionists and conspirators had managed to escape in
+      other instances of that kind. It was really inconceivable that the means
+      of secret revolutionary organisations should have failed so inexcusably to
+      preserve her son. But in reality the inconceivable that staggered her mind
+      was nothing but the cruel audacity of Death passing over her head to
+      strike at that young and precious heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look, handed me my hat. I
+      understood from her that the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
+      simple idea that her son must have perished because he did not want to be
+      saved. It could not have been that he despaired of his country&rsquo;s future.
+      That was impossible. Was it possible that his mother and sister had not
+      known how to merit his confidence; and that, after having done what he was
+      compelled to do, his spirit became crushed by an intolerable doubt, his
+      mind distracted by a sudden mistrust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was very much shocked by this piece of ingenuity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our three lives were like that!&rdquo; Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both
+      her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking
+      straight into my face. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what poor mother found to torment herself
+      and me with, for all the years to come,&rdquo; added the strange girl. At that
+      moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
+      passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life was likely to be by the
+      side of Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.
+      But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes of
+      feeling. Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our complex
+      Western natures. But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to suspect my
+      embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say anything, but as if reading
+      my thoughts on my face she went on courageously&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to
+      think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
+      strain. You see yourself how cruel that is....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it
+      would be deplorable in the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But all these strange details in the English paper,&rdquo; she exclaimed
+      suddenly. &ldquo;What is the meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But is it
+      not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone, as if
+      in despair, about the streets at night....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see her
+      biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause she said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false friend
+      or simply by some cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to believe
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood now the poor woman&rsquo;s whispered allusion to Judas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be easier,&rdquo; I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the
+      subtlety of the girl&rsquo;s outlook. She was dealing with life as it was made
+      for her by the political conditions of her country. She faced cruel
+      realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making. I could not defend
+      myself from a certain feeling of respect when she added simply&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Time they say can soften every sort of bitterness. But I cannot believe
+      that it has any power over remorse. It is better that mother should think
+      some person guilty of Victor&rsquo;s death, than that she should connect it with
+      a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of her own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you, yourself, don&rsquo;t suppose that....&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She compressed her lips and shook her head. She harboured no evil thoughts
+      against any one, she declared&mdash;and perhaps nothing that happened was
+      unnecessary. On these words, pronounced low and sounding mysterious in the
+      half obscurity of the ante-room, we parted with an expressive and warm
+      handshake. The grip of her strong, shapely hand had a seductive frankness,
+      a sort of exquisite virility. I do not know why she should have felt so
+      friendly to me. It may be that she thought I understood her much better
+      than I was able to do. The most precise of her sayings seemed always to me
+      to have enigmatical prolongations vanishing somewhere beyond my reach. I
+      am reduced to suppose that she appreciated my attention and my silence.
+      The attention she could see was quite sincere, so that the silence could
+      not be suspected of coldness. It seemed to satisfy her. And it is to be
+      noted that if she confided in me it was clearly not with the expectation
+      of receiving advice, for which, indeed she never asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our daily relations were interrupted at this period for something like a
+      fortnight. I had to absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva. On my return I
+      lost no time in directing my steps up the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the open door of the drawing-room I was annoyed to hear a visitor
+      holding forth steadily in an unctuous deep voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s armchair by the window stood empty. On the sofa, Nathalie
+      Haldin raised her charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting accompanied
+      by the merest hint of a welcoming smile. But she made no movement. With
+      her strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of her mourning dress she
+      faced a man who presented to me a robust back covered with black
+      broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep voice. He turned his head
+      sharply over his shoulder, but only for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! your English friend. I know. I know. That&rsquo;s nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall silk hat stood on the floor
+      by the side of his chair. Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he went on
+      with his discourse, precipitating his delivery a little more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never changed the faith I held while wandering in the forests and
+      bogs of Siberia. It sustained me then&mdash;it sustains me now. The great
+      Powers of Europe are bound to disappear&mdash;and the cause of their
+      collapse will be very simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling
+      against their proletariat. In Russia it is different. In Russia we have no
+      classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and the
+      other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean
+      bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as the
+      ocean. No, we have no classes. But we have the Russian woman. The
+      admirable Russian woman! I receive most remarkable letters signed by
+      women. So elevated in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble ardour
+      of service! The greatest part of our hopes rests on women. I behold their
+      thirst for knowledge. It is admirable. Look how they absorb, how they are
+      making it their own. It is miraculous. But what is knowledge? ...I
+      understand that you have not been studying anything especially&mdash;medicine
+      for instance. No? That&rsquo;s right. Had I been honoured by being asked to
+      advise you on the use of your time when you arrived here I would have been
+      strongly opposed to such a course. Knowledge in itself is mere dross.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had one of those bearded Russian faces without shape, a mere appearance
+      of flesh and hair with not a single feature having any sort of character.
+      His eyes being hidden by the dark glasses there was an utter absence of
+      all expression. I knew him by sight. He was a Russian refugee of mark. All
+      Geneva knew his burly black-coated figure. At one time all Europe was
+      aware of the story of his life written by himself and translated into
+      seven or more languages. In his youth he had led an idle, dissolute life.
+      Then a society girl he was about to marry died suddenly and thereupon he
+      abandoned the world of fashion, and began to conspire in a spirit of
+      repentance, and, after that, his native autocracy took good care that the
+      usual things should happen to him. He was imprisoned in fortresses, beaten
+      within an inch of his life, and condemned to work in mines, with common
+      criminals. The great success of his book, however, was the chain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember now the details of the weight and length of the fetters
+      riveted on his limbs by an &ldquo;Administrative&rdquo; order, but it was in the
+      number of pounds and the thickness of links an appalling assertion of the
+      divine right of autocracy. Appalling and futile too, because this big man
+      managed to carry off that simple engine of government with him into the
+      woods. The sensational clink of these fetters is heard all through the
+      chapters describing his escape&mdash;a subject of wonder to two
+      continents. He had begun by concealing himself successfully from his guard
+      in a hole on a river bank. It was the end of the day; with infinite labour
+      he managed to free one of his legs. Meantime night fell. He was going to
+      begin on his other leg when he was overtaken by a terrible misfortune. He
+      dropped his file.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history.
+      It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced girl.
+      The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his fellow
+      convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat, with
+      broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way across
+      half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and, as it
+      seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But she arrived too late.
+      Her lover had died only a week before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the history of ideas in
+      Russia, the file came into his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
+      resolution to regain his liberty. When it slipped through his fingers it
+      was as if it had gone straight into the earth. He could by no manner of
+      means put his hand on it again in the dark. He groped systematically in
+      the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing meantime,
+      the precious night on which he counted to get away into the forests, his
+      only chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted by despair to give up;
+      but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic girl, he felt profoundly
+      ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him for the gift of liberty and
+      he must show himself worthy of the favour conferred by her feminine,
+      indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred trust. To fail would have
+      been a sort of treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice and
+      womanly love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like a
+      white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman&rsquo;s spiritual
+      superiority&mdash;his new faith confessed since in several volumes. His
+      first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his
+      extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province,
+      with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off
+      his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at
+      intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the slack
+      links from getting hooked in the bushes. He became very fierce. He
+      developed an unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and hunted
+      existence. He learned to creep into villages without betraying his
+      presence by anything more than an occasional faint jingle. He broke into
+      outhouses with an axe he managed to purloin in a wood-cutters&rsquo; camp. In
+      the deserted tracts of country he lived on wild berries and hunted for
+      honey. His clothing dropped off him gradually. His naked tawny figure
+      glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with a cloud of mosquitoes and flies
+      hovering about the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through whole
+      districts. His temper grew savage as the days went by, and he was glad to
+      discover that that there was so much of a brute in him. He had nothing
+      else to put his trust in. For it was as though there had been two human
+      beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The civilized man, the
+      enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the triumph of
+      spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy, primeval savage,
+      pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom from day to day,
+      like a tracked wild beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific
+      coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
+      watched the proceedings with awe. Through all these weeks he could never
+      make up his mind to appeal to human compassion. In the wary primeval
+      savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the
+      civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping &ldquo;political&rdquo; had developed an
+      absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity, originating
+      perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain. These links, he
+      fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind. It was a repugnant and
+      suggestive load. Nobody could feel any pity at the disgusting sight of a
+      man escaping with a broken chain. His imagination became affected by his
+      fetters in a precise, matter-of-fact manner. It seemed to him impossible
+      that people could resist the temptation of fastening the loose end to a
+      staple in the wall while they went for the nearest police official.
+      Crouching in holes or hidden in thickets, he had tried to read the faces
+      of unsuspecting free settlers working in the clearings or passing along
+      the paths within a foot or two of his eyes. His feeling was that no man on
+      earth could be trusted with the temptation of the chain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, however, he chanced to come upon a solitary woman. It was on an
+      open slope of rough grass outside the forest. She sat on the bank of a
+      narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket
+      was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be seen
+      a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by
+      birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He approached her
+      silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel in his hand;
+      there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled hair, in his matted
+      beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links fluttered from his
+      waist. A faint clink of his fetters made the woman turn her head. Too
+      terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or even to scream, she was
+      yet too stout-hearted to faint.... Expecting nothing less than to be
+      murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with her hands to avoid the
+      sight of the descending axe. When at last she found courage to look again,
+      she saw the shaggy wild man sitting on the bank six feet away from her.
+      His thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked legs; the long beard covered the
+      knees on which he rested his chin; all these clasped, folded limbs, the
+      bare shoulders, the wild head with red staring eyes, shook and trembled
+      violently while the bestial creature was making efforts to speak. It was
+      six weeks since he had heard the sound of his own voice. It seemed as
+      though he had lost the faculty of speech. He had become a dumb and
+      despairing brute, till the woman&rsquo;s sudden, unexpected cry of profound
+      pity, the insight of her feminine compassion discovering the complex
+      misery of the man under the terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him
+      to the ranks of humanity. This point of view is presented in his book,
+      with a very effective eloquence. She ended, he says, by shedding tears
+      over him, sacred, redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the
+      manner of a converted sinner. Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait
+      patiently (a police patrol was expected in the Settlement) she went away
+      towards the houses, promising to return at night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if providentially appointed to be the newly wedded wife of the village
+      blacksmith, the woman persuaded her husband to come out with her, bringing
+      some tools of his trade, a hammer, a chisel, a small anvil.... &ldquo;My
+      fetters&rdquo;&mdash;the book says&mdash;&ldquo;were struck off on the banks of the
+      stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an athletic, taciturn young
+      man of the people, kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a liberating
+      genius stood by with clasped hands.&rdquo; Obviously a symbolic couple. At the
+      same time they furnished his regained humanity with some decent clothing,
+      and put heart into the new man by the information that the seacoast of the
+      Pacific was only a very few miles away. It could be seen, in fact, from
+      the top of the next ridge....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest of his escape does not lend itself to mystic treatment and
+      symbolic interpretation. He ended by finding his way to the West by the
+      Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching the shores of South Europe
+      he sat down to write his autobiography&mdash;the great literary success of
+      its year. This book was followed by other books written with the declared
+      purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached generally the
+      cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under the rites of
+      special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame de S&mdash;,
+      a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the
+      intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. Her loud pretensions
+      to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of modern sentiment, she
+      sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the republican territory of
+      Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big landau she exhibited to the
+      indifference of the natives and the stares of the tourists a long-waisted,
+      youthful figure of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big gleaming eyes,
+      rolling restlessly behind a short veil of black lace, which, coming down
+      no further than her vividly red lips, resembled a mask. Usually the
+      &ldquo;heroic fugitive&rdquo; (this name was bestowed upon him in a review of the
+      English edition of his book)&mdash;the &ldquo;heroic fugitive&rdquo; accompanied her,
+      sitting, portentously bearded and darkly bespectacled, not by her side,
+      but opposite her, with his back to the horses. Thus, facing each other,
+      with no one else in the roomy carriage, their airings suggested a
+      conscious public manifestation. Or it may have been unconscious. Russian
+      simplicity often marches innocently on the edge of cynicism for some lofty
+      purpose. But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and
+      understand these doings. Considering the air of gravity extending even to
+      the physiognomy of the coachman and the action of the showy horses, this
+      quaint display might have possessed a mystic significance, but to the
+      corrupt frivolity of a Western mind, like my own, it seemed hardly decent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, it is not becoming for an obscure teacher of languages to
+      criticize a &ldquo;heroic fugitive&rdquo; of worldwide celebrity. I was aware from
+      hearsay that he was an industrious busy-body, hunting up his compatriots
+      in hotels, in private lodgings, and&mdash;I was told&mdash;conferring upon
+      them the honour of his notice in public gardens when a suitable opening
+      presented itself. I was under the impression that after a visit or two,
+      several months before, he had given up the ladies Haldin&mdash;no doubt
+      reluctantly, for there could be no question of his being a determined
+      person. It was perhaps to be expected that he should reappear again on
+      this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a revolutionist, to say the right
+      thing, to strike the true, perhaps a comforting, note. But I did not like
+      to see him sitting there. I trust that an unbecoming jealousy of my
+      privileged position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to a
+      special standing for my silent friendship. Removed by the difference of
+      age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I
+      produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an
+      anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power to
+      protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since Miss Haldin with her sure
+      instinct had refrained from introducing me to the burly celebrity, I would
+      have retired quietly and returned later on, had I not met a peculiar
+      expression in her eyes which I interpreted as a request to stay, with the
+      view, perhaps, of shortening an unwelcome visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna. To-day I have called only to
+      mark those feelings towards your honoured mother and yourself, the nature
+      of which you cannot doubt. I needed no urging, but Eleanor&mdash;Madame de
+      S&mdash; herself has in a way sent me. She extends to you the hand of
+      feminine fellowship. There is positively in all the range of human
+      sentiments no joy and no sorrow that woman cannot understand, elevate, and
+      spiritualize by her interpretation. That young man newly arrived from St.
+      Petersburg, I have mentioned to you, is already under the charm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly. I was glad. He did not
+      evidently expect anything so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
+      back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland curiosity. At last,
+      recollecting himself, he stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
+      with great adroitness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have kept aloof so long, from
+      what after all is&mdash;let disparaging tongues say what they like&mdash;a
+      unique centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to shape a high
+      conception of our future? In the case of your honoured mother I understand
+      in a measure. At her age new ideas&mdash;new faces are not perhaps.... But
+      you! Was it mistrust&mdash;or indifference? You must come out of your
+      reserve. We Russians have no right to be reserved with each other. In our
+      circumstances it is almost a crime against humanity. The luxury of private
+      grief is not for us. Nowadays the devil is not combated by prayers and
+      fasting. And what is fasting after all but starvation. You must not starve
+      yourself, Natalia Victorovna. Strength is what we want. Spiritual
+      strength, I mean. As to the other kind, what could withstand us Russians
+      if we only put it forth? Sin is different in our day, and the way of
+      salvation for pure souls is different too. It is no longer to be found in
+      monasteries but in the world, in the...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The deep sound seemed to rise from under the floor, and one felt steeped
+      in it to the lips. Miss Haldin&rsquo;s interruption resembled the effort of a
+      drowning person to keep above water. She struck in with an accent of
+      impatience&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don&rsquo;t mean to retire into a monastery. Who would
+      look for salvation there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spoke figuratively,&rdquo; he boomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too. But sorrow is sorrow and pain
+      is pain in the old way. They make their demands upon people. One has got
+      to face them the best way one can. I know that the blow which has fallen
+      upon us so unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a people. You
+      may rest assured that I don&rsquo;t forget that. But just now I have to think of
+      my mother. How can you expect me to leave her to herself...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is putting it in a very crude way,&rdquo; he protested in his great
+      effortless voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to die out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange people. The idea is
+      distasteful for me; and I do not know what else you may mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He towered before her, enormous, deferential, cropped as close as a
+      convict and this big pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild head
+      with matted locks peering through parted bushes, glimpses of naked, tawny
+      limbs slinking behind the masses of sodden foliage under a cloud of flies
+      and mosquitoes. It was an involuntary tribute to the vigour of his
+      writing. Nobody could doubt that he had wandered in Siberian forests,
+      naked and girt with a chain. The black broadcloth coat invested his person
+      with a character of austere decency&mdash;something recalling a
+      missionary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?&rdquo; he uttered solemnly. &ldquo;I
+      want you to be a fanatic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fanatic?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Faith alone won&rsquo;t do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice dropped to a still lower tone. He raised for a moment one thick
+      arm; the other remained hanging down against his thigh, with the fragile
+      silk hat at the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall tell you now something which I entreat you to ponder over
+      carefully. Listen, we need a force that would move heaven and earth&mdash;nothing
+      less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The profound, subterranean note of this &ldquo;nothing less&rdquo; made one shudder,
+      almost, like the deep muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And are we to find that force in the salon of Madame de S&mdash;? Excuse
+      me, Peter Ivanovitch, if I permit myself to doubt it. Is not that lady a
+      woman of the great world, an aristocrat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prejudice!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You astonish me. And suppose she was all that! She
+      is also a woman of flesh and blood. There is always something to weigh
+      down the spiritual side in all of us. But to make of it a reproach is what
+      I did not expect from you. No! I did not expect that. One would think you
+      have listened to some malevolent scandal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard no gossip, I assure you. In our province how could we? But
+      the world speaks of her. What can there be in common in a lady of that
+      sort and an obscure country girl like me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and peerless spirit,&rdquo; he
+      broke in. &ldquo;Her charm&mdash;no, I shall not speak of her charm. But, of
+      course, everybody who approaches her falls under the spell....
+      Contradictions vanish, trouble falls away from one.... Unless I am
+      mistaken&mdash;but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters&mdash;you
+      are troubled in your soul, Natalia Victorovna.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin&rsquo;s clear eyes looked straight at his soft enormous face; I
+      received the impression that behind these dark spectacles of his he could
+      be as impudent as he chose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only the other evening walking back to town from Chateau Borel with our
+      latest interesting arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the powerful
+      soothing influence&mdash;I may say reconciling influence.... There he was,
+      all these kilometres along the shores of the lake, silent, like a man who
+      has been shown the way of peace. I could feel the leaven working in his
+      soul, you understand. For one thing he listened to me patiently. I myself
+      was inspired that evening by the firm and exquisite genius of Eleanor&mdash;Madame
+      de S&mdash;, you know. It was a full moon and I could observe his face. I
+      cannot be deceived....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! I will think of what you said, Peter Ivanovitch. I shall try to
+      call as soon as I can leave mother for an hour or two safely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at the concession. He
+      snatched her right hand with such fervour that I thought he was going to
+      press it to his lips or his breast. But he only held it by the finger-tips
+      in his great paw and shook it a little up and down while he delivered his
+      last volley of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right. That&rsquo;s right. I haven&rsquo;t obtained your full confidence as
+      yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The sister
+      of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It&rsquo;s simply impossible.
+      And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers, tears, applause&mdash;that
+      has had its time; it&rsquo;s a mediaeval conception. The arena, the arena itself
+      is the place for women!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if giving it to her for a
+      gift, and remained still, his head bowed in dignified submission before
+      her femininity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The arena!... You must descend into the arena, Natalia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made one step backwards, inclined his enormous body, and was gone
+      swiftly. The door fell to behind him. But immediately the powerful
+      resonance of his voice was heard addressing in the ante-room the
+      middle-aged servant woman who was letting him out. Whether he exhorted her
+      too to descend into the arena I cannot tell. The thing sounded like a
+      lecture, and the slight crash of the outer door cut it short suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We remained looking at each other for a time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know who he is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin, coming forward, put this question to me in English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took her offered hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody knows. He is a revolutionary feminist, a great writer, if you
+      like, and&mdash;how shall I say it&mdash;the&mdash;the familiar guest of
+      Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s mystic revolutionary salon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin passed her hand over her forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, he was with me for more than an hour before you came in. I was
+      so glad mother was lying down. She has many nights without sleep, and then
+      sometimes in the middle of the day she gets a rest of several hours. It is
+      sheer exhaustion&mdash;but still, I am thankful.... If it were not for
+      these intervals....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me and, with that extraordinary penetration which used to
+      disconcert me, shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. She would not go mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear young lady,&rdquo; I cried, by way of protest, the more shocked because
+      in my heart I was far from thinking Mrs. Haldin quite sane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know what a fine, lucid intellect mother had,&rdquo; continued
+      Nathalie Haldin, with her calm, clear-eyed simplicity, which seemed to me
+      always to have a quality of heroism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure....&rdquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I darkened mother&rsquo;s room and came out here. I&rsquo;ve wanted for so long to
+      think quietly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused, then, without giving any sign of distress, added, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s so
+      difficult,&rdquo; and looked at me with a strange fixity, as if watching for a
+      sign of dissent or surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave neither. I was irresistibly impelled to say&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The visit from that gentleman has not made it any easier, I fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin stood before me with a peculiar expression in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t pretend to understand completely. Some guide one must have, even
+      if one does not wholly give up the direction of one&rsquo;s conduct to him. I am
+      an inexperienced girl, but I am not slavish, There has been too much of
+      that in Russia. Why should I not listen to him? There is no harm in having
+      one&rsquo;s thoughts directed. But I don&rsquo;t mind confessing to you that I have
+      not been completely candid with Peter Ivanovitch. I don&rsquo;t quite know what
+      prevented me at the moment....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She walked away suddenly from me to a distant part of the room; but it was
+      only to open and shut a drawer in a bureau. She returned with a piece of
+      paper in her hand. It was thin and blackened with close handwriting. It
+      was obviously a letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to read you the very words,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;This is one of my poor
+      brother&rsquo;s letters. He never doubted. How could he doubt? They make only
+      such a small handful, these miserable oppressors, before the unanimous
+      will of our people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your brother believed in the power of a people&rsquo;s will to achieve
+      anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was his religion,&rdquo; declared Miss Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course the will must be awakened, inspired, concentrated,&rdquo; she went
+      on. &ldquo;That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up one&rsquo;s
+      life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must be
+      uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to reform.
+      There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are only arbitrary
+      decrees. There is only a handful of cruel&mdash;perhaps blind&mdash;officials
+      against a nation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter rustled slightly in her hand. I glanced down at the flimsy
+      blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic, incomprehensible
+      to the experience of Western Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stated like this,&rdquo; I confessed, &ldquo;the problem seems simple enough. But I
+      fear I shall not see it solved. And if you go back to Russia I know that I
+      shall not see you again. Yet once more I say: go back! Don&rsquo;t suppose that
+      I am thinking of your preservation. No! I know that you will not be
+      returning to personal safety. But I had much rather think of you in danger
+      there than see you exposed to what may be met here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you what,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin, after a moment of reflection. &ldquo;I
+      believe that you hate revolution; you fancy it&rsquo;s not quite honest. You
+      belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn&rsquo;t like to
+      be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us&mdash;so
+      much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea of
+      revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were something&mdash;how
+      shall I say it&mdash;not quite decent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I bowed my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite right,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I think very highly of you&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t suppose I do not know it,&rdquo; she began hurriedly. &ldquo;Your friendship
+      has been very valuable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have done little else but look on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a little flushed under the eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a way of looking on which is valuable I have felt less lonely
+      because of it. It&rsquo;s difficult to explain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? Well, I too have felt less lonely. That&rsquo;s easy to explain,
+      though. But it won&rsquo;t go on much longer. The last thing I want to tell you
+      is this: in a real revolution&mdash;not a simple dynastic change or a mere
+      reform of institutions&mdash;in a real revolution the best characters do
+      not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of
+      narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards
+      comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.
+      Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out
+      the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and
+      devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement&mdash;but
+      it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They
+      are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment&mdash;often of
+      remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured&mdash;that is the
+      definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution
+      hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I
+      don&rsquo;t want you to be a victim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could believe all you have said I still wouldn&rsquo;t think of myself,&rdquo;
+       protested Miss Haldin. &ldquo;I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man
+      would snatch at a piece of bread. The true progress must begin after. And
+      for that the right men shall be found. They are already amongst us. One
+      comes upon them in their obscurity, unknown, preparing themselves....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spread out the letter she had kept in her hand all the time, and
+      looking down at it&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! One comes upon such men!&rdquo; she repeated, and then read out the words,
+      &ldquo;Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Folding up the letter, while I looked at her interrogatively, she
+      explained&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are the words which my brother applies to a young man he came to
+      know in St. Petersburg. An intimate friend, I suppose. It must be. His is
+      the only name my brother mentions in all his correspondence with me.
+      Absolutely the only one, and&mdash;would you believe it?&mdash;the man is
+      here. He arrived recently in Geneva.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you seen him?&rdquo; I inquired. &ldquo;But, of course; you must have seen him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No! I haven&rsquo;t! I didn&rsquo;t know he was here. It&rsquo;s Peter Ivanovitch
+      himself who told me. You have heard him yourself mentioning a new arrival
+      from Petersburg.... Well, that is the man of &lsquo;unstained, lofty, and
+      solitary existence.&rsquo; My brother&rsquo;s friend!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Compromised politically, I suppose,&rdquo; I remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Yes. It must be so. Who knows! Perhaps it was this very
+      friendship with my brother which.... But no! It is scarcely possible.
+      Really, I know nothing except what Peter Ivanovitch told me of him. He has
+      brought a letter of introduction from Father Zosim&mdash;you know, the
+      priest-democrat; you have heard of Father Zosim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes. The famous Father Zosim was staying here in Geneva for some two
+      months about a year ago,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;When he left here he seems to have
+      disappeared from the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It appears that he is at work in Russia again. Somewhere in the centre,&rdquo;
+       Miss Haldin said, with animation. &ldquo;But please don&rsquo;t mention that to any
+      one&mdash;don&rsquo;t let it slip from you, because if it got into the papers it
+      would be dangerous for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend of your brother?&rdquo; I
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket. Her eyes looked beyond my
+      shoulder at the door of her mother&rsquo;s room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here,&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;Not for the first time, at least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence I said good-bye, but Miss Haldin followed me
+      into the ante-room, closing the door behind us carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you guess where I mean to go tomorrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have made up your mind to call on Madame de S&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I am going to the Chateau Borel. I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you expect to hear there?&rdquo; I asked, in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wondered if she were not deluding herself with some impossible hope. It
+      was not that, however.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only think&mdash;such a friend. The only man mentioned in his letters. He
+      would have something to give me, if nothing more than a few poor words. It
+      may be something said and thought in those last days. Would you want me to
+      turn my back on what is left of my poor brother&mdash;a friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I quite understand your pious curiosity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences,&rdquo; she murmured to
+      herself. &ldquo;There are! There are! Well, let me question one of them about
+      the loved dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know, though, that you will meet him there? Is he staying in
+      the Chateau as a guest&mdash;do you suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t really tell,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;He brought a written introduction
+      from Father Zosim&mdash;who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S&mdash;
+      too. She can&rsquo;t be such a worthless woman after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Father Zosim himself,&rdquo; I
+      observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Calumny is a weapon of our government too. It&rsquo;s well known. Oh yes! It is
+      a fact that Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-General of a
+      certain province. We talked on the subject with my brother two years ago,
+      I remember. But his work was good. And now he is proscribed. What better
+      proof can one require. But no matter what that priest was or is. All that
+      cannot affect my brother&rsquo;s friend. If I don&rsquo;t meet him there I shall ask
+      these people for his address. And, of course, mother must see him too,
+      later on. There is no guessing what he may have to tell us. It would be a
+      mercy if mamma could be soothed. You know what she imagines. Some
+      explanation perhaps may be found, or&mdash;or even made up, perhaps. It
+      would be no sin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it would be no sin. It may be a mistake, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want her only to recover some of her old spirit. While she is like this
+      I cannot think of anything calmly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud for your mother&rsquo;s sake?&rdquo; I
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why fraud? Such a friend is sure to know something of my brother in these
+      last days. He could tell us.... There is something in the facts which will
+      not let me rest. I am certain he meant to join us abroad&mdash;that he had
+      some plans&mdash;some great patriotic action in view; not only for
+      himself, but for both of us. I trusted in that. I looked forward to the
+      time! Oh! with such hope and impatience. I could have helped. And now
+      suddenly this appearance of recklessness&mdash;as if he had not cared....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained silent for a time, then obstinately she concluded&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the Boulevard
+      des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was it that she
+      wanted to know? What I had heard of her history was enough to give me a
+      clue. In the educational establishment for girls where Miss Haldin
+      finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably. She was
+      suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by official
+      teaching. Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their country place,
+      both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly on public events,
+      had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism. The three-horse trap
+      of the district police-captain began to be seen frequently in their
+      village. &ldquo;I must keep an eye on the peasants&rdquo;&mdash;so he explained his
+      visits up at the house. &ldquo;Two lonely ladies must be looked after a little.&rdquo;
+       He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to pierce them with his
+      eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books in the drawing-room
+      negligently, and after the usual refreshments, would depart. But the old
+      priest of the village came one evening in the greatest distress and
+      agitation, to confess that he&mdash;the priest&mdash;had been ordered to
+      watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his spiritual power
+      with the servants) all that was going on in the house, and especially in
+      respect of the visitors these ladies received, who they were, the length
+      of their stay, whether any of them were strangers to that part of the
+      country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in an agony of
+      humiliation and terror. &ldquo;I came to warn you. Be cautious in your conduct,
+      for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is no getting out
+      from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I see, because if I did
+      not there is my deacon. He would make the worst of things to curry favour.
+      And then my son-in-law, the husband of my Parasha, who is a writer in the
+      Government Domain office; they would soon kick him out&mdash;and maybe
+      send him away somewhere.&rdquo; The old man lamented the necessities of the
+      times&mdash;&ldquo;when people do not agree somehow&rdquo; and wiped his eyes. He did
+      not wish to spend the evening of his days with a shaven head in the
+      penitent&rsquo;s cell of some monastery&mdash;&ldquo;and subjected to all the
+      severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for they would show no mercy to
+      an old man,&rdquo; he groaned. He became almost hysterical, and the two ladies,
+      full of commiseration, soothed him the best they could before they let him
+      go back to his cottage. But, as a matter of fact, they had very few
+      visitors. The neighbours&mdash;some of them old friends&mdash;began to
+      keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked disdain, being grand
+      people that came only for the summer&mdash;Miss Haldin explained to me&mdash;aristocrats,
+      reactionaries. It was a solitary existence for a young girl. Her relations
+      with her mother were of the tenderest and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin
+      had seen the experiences of her own generation, its sufferings, its
+      deceptions, its apostasies too. Her affection for her children was
+      expressed by the suppression of all signs of anxiety. She maintained a
+      heroic reserve. To Nathalie Haldin, her brother with his Petersburg
+      existence, not enigmatical in the least (there could be no doubt of what
+      he felt or thought) but conducted a little mysteriously, was the only
+      visible representative of a proscribed liberty. All the significance of
+      freedom, its indefinite promises, lived in their long discussions, which
+      breathed the loftiest hope of action and faith in success. Then, suddenly,
+      the action, the hopes, came to an end with the details ferreted out by the
+      English journalist. The concrete fact, the fact of his death remained! but
+      it remained obscure in its deeper causes. She felt herself abandoned
+      without explanation. But she did not suspect him. What she wanted was to
+      learn almost at any cost how she could remain faithful to his departed
+      spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      IV
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several days elapsed before I met Nathalie Haldin again. I was crossing
+      the place in front of the theatre when I made out her shapely figure in
+      the very act of turning between the gate pillars of the unattractive
+      public promenade of the Bastions. She walked away from me, but I knew we
+      should meet as she returned down the main alley&mdash;unless, indeed, she
+      were going home. In that case, I don&rsquo;t think I should have called on her
+      yet. My desire to keep her away from these people was as strong as ever,
+      but I had no illusions as to my power. I was but a Westerner, and it was
+      clear that Miss Haldin would not, could not listen to my wisdom; and as to
+      my desire of listening to her voice, it were better, I thought, not to
+      indulge overmuch in that pleasure. No, I should not have gone to the
+      Boulevard des Philosophes; but when at about the middle of the principal
+      alley I saw Miss Haldin coming towards me, I was too curious, and too
+      honest, perhaps, to run away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something of the spring harshness in the air. The blue sky was
+      hard, but the young leaves clung like soft mist about the uninteresting
+      range of trees; and the clear sun put little points of gold into the grey
+      of Miss Haldin&rsquo;s frank eyes, turned to me with a friendly greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I inquired after the health of her mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a slight movement of the shoulders and a little sad sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, you see, I did come out for a walk...for exercise, as you English
+      say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled approvingly, and she added an unexpected remark&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a glorious day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice, slightly harsh, but fascinating with its masculine and
+      bird-like quality, had the accent of spontaneous conviction. I was glad of
+      it. It was as though she had become aware of her youth&mdash;for there was
+      but little of spring-like glory in the rectangular railed space of grass
+      and trees, framed visibly by the orderly roof-slopes of that town, comely
+      without grace, and hospitable without sympathy. In the very air through
+      which she moved there was but little warmth; and the sky, the sky of a
+      land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April showers,
+      extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed suddenly by the
+      ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there, lingered yet a few
+      miserable trails and patches of snow. All the glory of the season must
+      have been within herself&mdash;and I was glad this feeling had come into
+      her life, if only for a little time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am pleased to hear you say these words.&rdquo; She gave me a quick look.
+      Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely
+      incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very
+      rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly&mdash;if I
+      may say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had
+      seen and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use the word
+      aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered in
+      the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our day,
+      like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame de
+      Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the booted
+      heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for an enemy
+      worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy in mystic
+      vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest. And Madame de S&mdash;
+      was very far from resembling the gifted author of <i>Corinne</i>. She made
+      a great noise about being persecuted. I don&rsquo;t know if she were regarded in
+      certain circles as dangerous. As to being watched, I imagine that the
+      Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a most distant observation. It
+      was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for hatching superior plots&mdash;whether
+      serious or futile. But all this did not interest me. I wanted to know the
+      effect its extraordinary inhabitants and its special atmosphere had
+      produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so true, so honest, but so
+      dangerously inexperienced! Her unconsciously lofty ignorance of the baser
+      instincts of mankind left her disarmed before her own impulses. And there
+      was also that friend of her brother, the significant new arrival from
+      Russia.... I wondered whether she had managed to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know,&rdquo; I attacked her suddenly, &ldquo;if you don&rsquo;t intend telling me
+      anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
+      final. But I won&rsquo;t play at delicacy. I ask you point-blank for all the
+      details.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are as curious as a child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I am only an anxious old man,&rdquo; I replied earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety or
+      the number of my years. My physiognomy has never been expressive, I
+      believe, and as to my years I am not ancient enough as yet to be
+      strikingly decrepit. I have no long beard like the good hermit of a
+      romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of a
+      slow, venerable sage. Those picturesque advantages are not mine. I am old,
+      alas, in a brisk, commonplace way. And it seemed to me as though there
+      were some pity for me in Miss Haldin&rsquo;s prolonged glance. She stepped out a
+      little quicker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ask for all the details. Let me see. I ought to remember them. It was
+      novel enough for a&mdash;a village girl like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of silence she began by saying that the Chateau Borel was
+      almost as neglected inside as outside. It was nothing to wonder at, a
+      Hamburg banker, I believe, retired from business, had it built to cheer
+      his remaining days by the view of that lake whose precise, orderly, and
+      well-to-do beauty must have been attractive to the unromantic imagination
+      of a business man. But he died soon. His wife departed too (but only to
+      Italy), and this house of moneyed ease, presumably unsaleable, had stood
+      empty for several years. One went to it up a gravel drive, round a large,
+      coarse grass-plot, with plenty of time to observe the degradation of its
+      stuccoed front. Miss Haldin said that the impression was unpleasant. It
+      grew more depressing as one came nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She observed green stains of moss on the steps of the terrace. The front
+      door stood wide open. There was no one about. She found herself in a wide,
+      lofty, and absolutely empty hall, with a good many doors. These doors were
+      all shut. A broad, bare stone staircase faced her, and the effect of the
+      whole was of an untenanted house. She stood still, disconcerted by the
+      solitude, but after a while she became aware of a voice speaking
+      continuously somewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were probably being observed all the time,&rdquo; I suggested. &ldquo;There must
+      have been eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see how that could be,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen even a bird
+      in the grounds. I don&rsquo;t remember hearing a single twitter in the trees.
+      The whole place appeared utterly deserted except for the voice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not make out the language&mdash;Russian, French, or German. No
+      one seemed to answer it. It was as though the voice had been left behind
+      by the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare walls. It went on volubly,
+      with a pause now and then. It was lonely and sad. The time seemed very
+      long to Miss Haldin. An invincible repugnance prevented her from opening
+      one of the doors in the hall. It was so hopeless. No one would come, the
+      voice would never stop. She confessed to me that she had to resist an
+      impulse to turn round and go away unseen, as she had come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? You had that impulse?&rdquo; I cried, full of regret. &ldquo;What a pity you
+      did not obey it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a strange memory it would have been for one. Those deserted grounds,
+      that empty hall, that impersonal, voluble voice, and&mdash;nobody,
+      nothing, not a soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The memory would have been unique and harmless. But she was not a girl to
+      run away from an intimidating impression of solitude and mystery. &ldquo;No, I
+      did not run away,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I stayed where I was&mdash;and I did see a
+      soul. Such a strange soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she was gazing up the broad staircase, and had concluded that the voice
+      came from somewhere above, a rustle of dress attracted her attention. She
+      looked down and saw a woman crossing the hall, having issued apparently
+      through one of the many doors. Her face was averted, so that at first she
+      was not aware of Miss Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she appeared very much
+      startled. From her slender figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young
+      girl; but if her face was almost childishly round, it was also sallow and
+      wrinkled, with dark rings under the eyes. A thick crop of dusty brown hair
+      was parted boyishly on the side with a lateral wave above the dry,
+      furrowed forehead. After a moment of dumb blinking, she suddenly squatted
+      down on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean by squatted down?&rdquo; I asked, astonished. &ldquo;This is a very
+      strange detail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin explained the reason. This person when first seen was carrying
+      a small bowl in her hand. She had squatted down to put it on the floor for
+      the benefit of a large cat, which appeared then from behind her skirts,
+      and hid its head into the bowl greedily. She got up, and approaching Miss
+      Haldin asked with nervous bluntness&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want? Who are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name of Peter Ivanovitch. The
+      girlish, elderly woman nodded and puckered her face into a momentary
+      expression of sympathy. Her black silk blouse was old and even frayed in
+      places; the black serge skirt was short and shabby. She continued to blink
+      at close quarters, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed shabby too. Miss
+      Haldin, speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and sensitive person,
+      explained how it was that her visit could not be an altogether unexpected
+      event to Madame de S&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Peter Ivanovitch brought you an invitation. How was I to know? A <i>dame
+      de compangnie</i> is not consulted, as you may imagine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The shabby woman laughed a little. Her teeth, splendidly white and
+      admirably even, looked absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls on
+      the neck of a ragged tramp. &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of
+      the century perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man living. So if
+      you have an appointment with him you must not be surprised to hear that he
+      is not here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin explained that she had no appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.
+      She became interested at once in that bizarre person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he put himself out for you or any one else? Oh! these
+      geniuses. If you only knew! Yes! And their books&mdash;I mean, of course,
+      the books that the world admires, the inspired books. But you have not
+      been behind the scenes. Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half a
+      day with a pen in your hand. He can walk up and down his rooms for hours
+      and hours. I used to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I would lose
+      my balance and fall off the chair all at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes, fixed on Miss
+      Haldin&rsquo;s face, betrayed no animation whatever. Miss Haldin, gathering that
+      the lady who called herself a <i>dame de compangnie</i> was proud of
+      having acted as secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could not imagine a more trying experience,&rdquo; declared the lady.
+      &ldquo;There is an Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de S&mdash;
+      now, or I would take you up,&rdquo; she continued in a changed tone and glancing
+      towards the staircase. &ldquo;I act as master of ceremonies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It appeared that Madame de S&mdash; could not bear Swiss servants about
+      her person; and, indeed, servants would not stay for very long in the
+      Chateau Borel. There were always difficulties. Miss Haldin had already
+      noticed that the hall was like a dusty barn of marble and stucco with
+      cobwebs in the corners and faint tracks of mud on the black and white
+      tessellated floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I look also after this animal,&rdquo; continued the <i>dame de compagnie</i>,
+      keeping her hands folded quietly in front of her; and she bent her worn
+      gaze upon the cat. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind a bit. Animals have their rights; though,
+      strictly speaking, I see no reason why they should not suffer as well as
+      human beings. Do you? But of course they never suffer so much. That is
+      impossible. Only, in their case it is more pitiful because they cannot
+      make a revolution. I used to be a Republican. I suppose you are a
+      Republican?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin confessed to me that she did not know what to say. But she
+      nodded slightly, and asked in her turn&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And are you no longer a Republican?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After taking down Peter Ivanovitch from dictation for two years, it is
+      difficult for me to be anything. First of all, you have to sit perfectly
+      motionless. The slightest movement you make puts to flight the ideas of
+      Peter Ivanovitch. You hardly dare to breathe. And as to coughing&mdash;God
+      forbid! Peter Ivanovitch changed the position of the table to the wall
+      because at first I could not help raising my eyes to look out of the
+      window, while waiting for him to go on with his dictation. That was not
+      allowed. He said I stared so stupidly. I was likewise not permitted to
+      look at him over my shoulder. Instantly Peter Ivanovitch stamped his foot,
+      and would roar, &lsquo;Look down on the paper!&rsquo; It seems my expression, my face,
+      put him off. Well, I know that I am not beautiful, and that my expression
+      is not hopeful either. He said that my air of unintelligent expectation
+      irritated him. These are his own words.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin was shocked, but admitted to me that she was not altogether
+      surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it possible that Peter Ivanovitch could treat any woman so rudely?&rdquo;
+       she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> nodded several times with an air of
+      discretion, then assured Miss Haldin that she did not mind in the least.
+      The trying part of it was to have the secret of the composition laid bare
+      before her; to see the great author of the revolutionary gospels grope for
+      words as if he were in the dark as to what he meant to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To give
+      one&rsquo;s life for the cause is nothing. But to have one&rsquo;s illusions destroyed&mdash;that
+      is really almost more than one can bear. I really don&rsquo;t exaggerate,&rdquo; she
+      insisted. &ldquo;It seemed to freeze my very beliefs in me&mdash;the more so
+      that when we worked in winter Peter Ivanovitch, walking up and down the
+      room, required no artificial heat to keep himself warm. Even when we move
+      to the South of France there are bitterly cold days, especially when you
+      have to sit still for six hours at a stretch. The walls of these villas on
+      the Riviera are so flimsy. Peter Ivanovitch did not seem to be aware of
+      anything. It is true that I kept down my shivers from fear of putting him
+      out. I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt absolutely locked. In the
+      moments when Peter Ivanovitch interrupted his dictation, and sometimes
+      these intervals were very long&mdash;often twenty minutes, no less, while
+      he walked to and fro behind my back muttering to himself&mdash;I felt I
+      was dying by inches, I assure you. Perhaps if I had let my teeth rattle
+      Peter Ivanovitch might have noticed my distress, but I don&rsquo;t think it
+      would have had any practical effect. She&rsquo;s very miserly in such matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> glanced up the staircase. The big cat had
+      finished the milk and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously against
+      her skirt. She dived to snatch it up from the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know,&rdquo; she continued,
+      holding the cat in her folded arms. &ldquo;With us it is misers who can spare
+      money for worthy objects&mdash;not the so-called generous natures. But
+      pray don&rsquo;t think I am a sybarite. My father was a clerk in the Ministry of
+      Finances with no position at all. You may guess by this that our home was
+      far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually suffer from cold.
+      I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began to think by myself.
+      It is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to be put in the way of
+      it, awakened to the truth. I am indebted for my salvation to an old
+      apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway of the house we lived in.
+      She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most friendly voice imaginable. One
+      day, casually, we began to talk about a child, a ragged little girl we had
+      seen begging from men in the streets at dusk; and from one thing to
+      another my eyes began to open gradually to the horrors from which innocent
+      people are made to suffer in this world, only in order that governments
+      might exist. After I once understood the crime of the upper classes, I
+      could not go on living with my parents. Not a single charitable word was
+      to be heard in our home from year&rsquo;s end to year&rsquo;s end; there was nothing
+      but the talk of vile office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries,
+      and of courting the favour of the chiefs. The mere idea of marrying one
+      day such another man as my father made me shudder. I don&rsquo;t mean that there
+      was anyone wanting to marry me. There was not the slightest prospect of
+      anything of the kind. But was it not sin enough to live on a Government
+      salary while half Russia was dying of hunger? The Ministry of Finances!
+      What a grotesque horror it is! What does the starving, ignorant people
+      want with a Ministry of Finances? I kissed my old folks on both cheeks,
+      and went away from them to live in cellars, with the proletariat. I tried
+      to make myself useful to the utterly hopeless. I suppose you understand
+      what I mean? I mean the people who have nowhere to go and nothing to look
+      forward to in this life. Do you understand how frightful that is&mdash;nothing
+      to look forward to! Sometimes I think that it is only in Russia that there
+      are such people and such a depth of misery can be reached. Well, I plunged
+      into it, and&mdash;do you know&mdash;there isn&rsquo;t much that one can do in
+      there. No, indeed&mdash;at least as long as there are Ministries of
+      Finances and such like grotesque horrors to stand in the way. I suppose I
+      would have gone mad there just trying to fight the vermin, if it had not
+      been for a man. It was my old friend and teacher, the poor saintly
+      apple-woman, who discovered him for me, quite accidentally. She came to
+      fetch me late one evening in her quiet way. I followed her where she would
+      lead; that part of my life was in her hands altogether, and without her my
+      spirit would have perished miserably. The man was a young workman, a
+      lithographer by trade, and he had got into trouble in connexion with that
+      affair of temperance tracts&mdash;you remember. There was a lot of people
+      put in prison for that. The Ministry of Finances again! What would become
+      of it if the poor folk ceased making beasts of themselves with drink? Upon
+      my word, I would think that finances and all the rest of it are an
+      invention of the devil; only that a belief in a supernatural source of
+      evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
+      Finances indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hatred and contempt hissed in her utterance of the word &ldquo;finances,&rdquo; but at
+      the very moment she gently stroked the cat reposing in her arms. She even
+      raised them slightly, and inclining her head rubbed her cheek against the
+      fur of the animal, which received this caress with the complete detachment
+      so characteristic of its kind. Then looking at Miss Haldin she excused
+      herself once more for not taking her upstairs to Madame S&mdash; The
+      interview could not be interrupted. Presently the journalist would be seen
+      coming down the stairs. The best thing was to remain in the hall; and
+      besides, all these rooms (she glanced all round at the many doors), all
+      these rooms on the ground floor were unfurnished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Positively there is no chair down here to offer you,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;But
+      if you prefer your own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on the
+      bottom step here and keep silent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the contrary, she was very
+      much interested in the story of the journeyman lithographer. He was a
+      revolutionist, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A martyr, a simple man,&rdquo; said the <i>dame de compangnie</i>, with a faint
+      sigh, and gazing through the open front door dreamily. She turned her
+      misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lived with him for four months. It was like a nightmare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the
+      emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution. The room
+      into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a miserable den
+      under the roof of a sordid house. The plaster fallen off the walls covered
+      the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible tapestry of black
+      cobwebs waved in the draught. He had been liberated a few days before&mdash;flung
+      out of prison into the streets. And Miss Haldin seemed to see for the
+      first time, a name and a face upon the body of that suffering people whose
+      hard fate had been the subject of so many conversations, between her and
+      her brother, in the garden of their country house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that affair
+      of the lithographed temperance tracts. Unluckily, having got hold of a
+      great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract from
+      some of them other information relating to the revolutionist propaganda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation,&rdquo; went on the <i>dame
+      de compagnie</i>, &ldquo;that they injured him internally. When they had done
+      with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld him
+      lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a bundle
+      of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker, who
+      happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was, uncovered,
+      burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the room for the water
+      to quench his thirst with. There was nothing whatever&mdash;just that
+      bedstead and the bare floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and
+      revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?&rdquo; asked Miss Haldin
+      indignantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But you do not know the most terrible part of that man&rsquo;s misery.
+      Listen. It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at last, his
+      firmness gave way, and he did let out some information. Poor soul, the
+      flesh is weak, you know. What it was he did not tell me. There was a
+      crushed spirit in that mangled body. Nothing I found to say could make him
+      whole. When they let him out, he crept into that hole, and bore his
+      remorse stoically. He would not go near anyone he knew. I would have
+      sought assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I have gone looking
+      for it? Where was I to look for anyone who had anything to spare or any
+      power to help? The people living round us were all starving and drunken.
+      They were the victims of the Ministry of Finances. Don&rsquo;t ask me how we
+      lived. I couldn&rsquo;t tell you. It was like a miracle of wretchedness. I had
+      nothing to sell, and I assure you my clothes were in such a state that it
+      was impossible for me to go out in the daytime. I was indecent. I had to
+      wait till it was dark before I ventured into the streets to beg for a
+      crust of bread, or whatever I could get, to keep him and me alive. Often I
+      got nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie on the floor by the side
+      of his couch. Oh yes, I can sleep quite soundly on bare boards. That is
+      nothing, and I am only mentioning it to you so that you should not think I
+      am a sybarite. It was infinitely less killing than the task of sitting for
+      hours at a table in a cold study to take the books of Peter Ivanovitch
+      from dictation. But you shall see yourself what that is like, so I needn&rsquo;t
+      say any more about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is by no means certain that I will ever take Peter Ivanovitch from
+      dictation,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; cried the other incredulously. &ldquo;Not certain? You mean to say that
+      you have not made up your mind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Miss Haldin assured her that there never had been any question of
+      that between her and Peter Ivanovitch, the woman with the cat compressed
+      her lips tightly for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you will find yourself settled at the table before you know that you
+      have made up your mind. Don&rsquo;t make a mistake, it is disenchanting to hear
+      Peter Ivanovitch dictate, but at the same time there is a fascination
+      about it. He is a man of genius. Your face is certain not to irritate him;
+      you may perhaps even help his inspiration, make it easier for him to
+      deliver his message. As I look at you, I feel certain that you are the
+      kind of woman who is not likely to check the flow of his inspiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin thought it useless to protest against all these assumptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this man&mdash;this workman did he die under your care?&rdquo; she said,
+      after a short silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i>, listening up the stairs where now two voices
+      were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When the
+      loud sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible murmur,
+      she turned to Miss Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he died, but not, literally speaking, in my arms, as you might
+      suppose. As a matter of fact, I was asleep when he breathed his last. So
+      even now I cannot say I have seen anybody die. A few days before the end,
+      some young men found us out in our extremity. They were revolutionists, as
+      you might guess. He ought to have trusted in his political friends when he
+      came out of prison. He had been liked and respected before, and nobody
+      would have dreamed of reproaching him with his indiscretion before the
+      police. Everybody knows how they go to work, and the strongest man has his
+      moments of weakness before pain. Why, even hunger alone is enough to give
+      one queer ideas as to what may be done. A doctor came, our lot was
+      alleviated as far as physical comforts go, but otherwise he could not be
+      consoled&mdash;poor man. I assure you, Miss Haldin, that he was very
+      lovable, but I had not the strength to weep. I was nearly dead myself. But
+      there were kind hearts to take care of me. A dress was found to clothe my
+      nakedness. I tell you, I was not decent&mdash;and after a time the
+      revolutionists placed me with a Jewish family going abroad, as governess.
+      Of course I could teach the children, I finished the sixth class of the
+      Lyceum; but the real object was, that I should carry some important papers
+      across the frontier. I was entrusted with a packet which I carried next my
+      heart. The gendarmes at the station did not suspect the governess of a
+      Jewish family, busy looking after three children. I don&rsquo;t suppose those
+      Hebrews knew what I had on me, for I had been introduced to them in a very
+      roundabout way by persons who did not belong to the revolutionary
+      movement, and naturally I had been instructed to accept a very small
+      salary. When we reached Germany I left that family and delivered my papers
+      to a revolutionist in Stuttgart; after this I was employed in various
+      ways. But you do not want to hear all that. I have never felt that I was
+      very useful, but I live in hopes of seeing all the Ministries destroyed,
+      finances and all. The greatest joy of my life has been to hear what your
+      brother has done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She directed her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the cat
+      reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like
+      meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! I rejoiced,&rdquo; she began again. &ldquo;For me there is a heroic ring about
+      the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in their
+      Ministries&mdash;all those men with fiendish hearts. Here I stand talking
+      to you, and when I think of all the cruelties, oppressions, and injustices
+      that are going on at this very moment, my head begins to swim. I have
+      looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one&rsquo;s own eyes had not
+      to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me hate myself for my
+      helplessness. I hated my hands that had no power, my voice that could not
+      be heard, my very mind that would not become unhinged. Ah! I have seen
+      things. And you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin was moved. She shook her head slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I have seen nothing for myself as yet,&rdquo; she murmured &ldquo;We have always
+      lived in the country. It was my brother&rsquo;s wish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a curious meeting&mdash;this&mdash;between you and me,&rdquo; continued
+      the other. &ldquo;Do you believe in chance, Miss Haldin? How could I have
+      expected to see you, his sister, with my own eyes? Do you know that when
+      the news came the revolutionaries here were as much surprised as pleased,
+      every bit? No one seemed to know anything about your brother. Peter
+      Ivanovitch himself had not foreseen that such a blow was going to be
+      struck. I suppose your brother was simply inspired. I myself think that
+      such deeds should be done by inspiration. It is a great privilege to have
+      the inspiration and the opportunity. Did he resemble you at all? Don&rsquo;t you
+      rejoice, Miss Haldin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must not expect too much from me,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin, repressing an
+      inclination to cry which came over her suddenly. She succeeded, then added
+      calmly, &ldquo;I am not a heroic person!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think you couldn&rsquo;t have done such a thing yourself perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. I must not even ask myself till I have lived a little
+      longer, seen more....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other moved her head appreciatively. The purring of the cat had a loud
+      complacency in the empty hall. No sound of voices came from upstairs. Miss
+      Haldin broke the silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it precisely that you heard people say about my brother? You said
+      that they were surprised. Yes, I supposed they were. Did it not seem
+      strange to them that my brother should have failed to save himself after
+      the most difficult part&mdash;that is, getting away from the spot&mdash;was
+      over? Conspirators should understand these things well. There are reasons
+      why I am very anxious to know how it is he failed to escape.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> had advanced to the open hall-door. She
+      glanced rapidly over her shoulder at Miss Haldin, who remained within the
+      hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Failed to escape,&rdquo; she repeated absently. &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t he make the sacrifice
+      of his life? Wasn&rsquo;t he just simply inspired? Wasn&rsquo;t it an act of
+      abnegation? Aren&rsquo;t you certain?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I am certain of,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin, &ldquo;is that it was not an act of
+      despair. Have you not heard some opinion expressed here upon his miserable
+      capture?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> mused for a while in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I hear? Of course, everything is discussed here. Has not all the
+      world been speaking about your brother? For my part, the mere mention of
+      his achievement plunges me into an envious ecstasy. Why should a man
+      certain of immortality think of his life at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept her back turned to Miss Haldin. Upstairs from behind a great
+      dingy white and gold door, visible behind the balustrade of the first
+      floor landing, a deep voice began to drone formally, as if reading over
+      notes or something of the sort. It paused frequently, and then ceased
+      altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I can stay any longer now,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin. &ldquo;I may return
+      another day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She waited for the <i>dame de compagnie</i> to make room for her exit; but
+      the woman appeared lost in the contemplation of sunshine and shadows,
+      sharing between themselves the stillness of the deserted grounds. She
+      concealed the view of the drive from Miss Haldin. Suddenly she said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will not be necessary; here is Peter Ivanovitch himself coming up. But
+      he is not alone. He is seldom alone now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hearing that Peter Ivanovitch was approaching, Miss Haldin was not so
+      pleased as she might have been expected to be. Somehow she had lost the
+      desire to see either the heroic captive or Madame de S&mdash;, and the
+      reason of that shrinking which came upon her at the very last minute is
+      accounted for by the feeling that those two people had not been treating
+      the woman with the cat kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you please let me pass?&rdquo; said Miss Haldin at last, touching lightly
+      the shoulder of the <i>dame de compagnie</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the other, pressing the cat to her breast, did not budge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know who is with him,&rdquo; she said, without even looking back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More unaccountably than ever Miss Haldin felt a strong impulse to leave
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame de S&mdash; may be engaged for some time yet, and what I have got
+      to say to Peter Ivanovitch is just a simple question which I might put to
+      him when I meet him in the grounds on my way down. I really think I must
+      go. I have been some time here, and I am anxious to get back to my mother.
+      Will you let me pass, please?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> turned her head at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never supposed that you really wanted to see Madame de S&mdash;,&rdquo; she
+      said, with unexpected insight. &ldquo;Not for a moment.&rdquo; There was something
+      confidential and mysterious in her tone. She passed through the door, with
+      Miss Haldin following her, on to the terrace, and they descended side by
+      side the moss-grown stone steps. There was no one to be seen on the part
+      of the drive visible from the front of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are hidden by the trees over there,&rdquo; explained Miss Haldin&rsquo;s new
+      acquaintance, &ldquo;but you shall see them directly. I don&rsquo;t know who that
+      young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has taken such a fancy. He must be
+      one of us, or he would not be admitted here when the others come. You know
+      what I mean by the others. But I must say that he is not at all mystically
+      inclined. I don&rsquo;t know that I have made him out yet. Naturally I am never
+      for very long in the drawing-room. There is always something to do for me,
+      though the establishment here is not so extensive as the villa on the
+      Riviera. But still there are plenty of opportunities for me to make myself
+      useful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To the left, passing by the ivy-grown end of the stables, appeared Peter
+      Ivanovitch and his companion. They walked very slowly, conversing with
+      some animation. They stopped for a moment, and Peter Ivanovitch was seen
+      to gesticulate, while the young man listened motionless, with his arms
+      hanging down and his head bowed a little. He was dressed in a dark brown
+      suit and a black hat. The round eyes of the <i>dame de compagnie</i>
+      remained fixed on the two figures, which had resumed their leisurely
+      approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An extremely polite young man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You shall see what a bow he
+      will make; and it won&rsquo;t altogether be so exceptional either. He bows in
+      the same way when he meets me alone in the hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved on a few steps, with Miss Haldin by her side, and things
+      happened just as she had foretold. The young man took off his hat, bowed
+      and fell back, while Peter Ivanovitch advanced quicker, his black, thick
+      arms extended heartily, and seized hold of both Miss Haldin&rsquo;s hands, shook
+      them, and peered at her through his dark glasses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, that&rsquo;s right!&rdquo; he exclaimed twice, approvingly. &ldquo;And so you
+      have been looked after by....&rdquo; He frowned slightly at the <i>dame de
+      compagnie</i>, who was still nursing the cat. &ldquo;I conclude Eleanor&mdash;Madame
+      de S&mdash; is engaged. I know she expected somebody to-day. So the
+      newspaper man did turn up, eh? She is engaged?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For all answer the <i>dame de compagnie</i> turned away her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very unfortunate&mdash;very unfortunate indeed. I very much regret
+      that you should have been....&rdquo; He lowered suddenly his voice. &ldquo;But what is
+      it&mdash;surely you are not departing, Natalia Victorovna? You got bored
+      waiting, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in the least,&rdquo; Miss Haldin protested. &ldquo;Only I have been here some
+      time, and I am anxious to get back to my mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The time seemed long, eh? I am afraid our worthy friend here&rdquo; (Peter
+      Ivanovitch suddenly jerked his head sideways towards his right shoulder
+      and jerked it up again),&mdash;&ldquo;our worthy friend here has not the art of
+      shortening the moments of waiting. No, distinctly she has not the art; and
+      in that respect good intentions alone count for nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>dame de compagnie</i> dropped her arms, and the cat found itself
+      suddenly on the ground. It remained quite still after alighting, one hind
+      leg stretched backwards. Miss Haldin was extremely indignant on behalf of
+      the lady companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments I have passed in the hall
+      of this house have been not a little interesting, and very instructive
+      too. They are memorable. I do not regret the waiting, but I see that the
+      object of my call here can be attained without taking up Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin. The above relation is founded on
+      her narrative, which I have not so much dramatized as might be supposed.
+      She had rendered, with extraordinary feeling and animation, the very
+      accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the irreconcilable
+      hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor. Miss Haldin&rsquo;s true
+      and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked by the uncongenial fate
+      of her new acquaintance, that lady companion, secretary, whatever she was.
+      For my own part, I was pleased to discover in it one more obstacle to
+      intimacy with Madame de S&mdash;. I had a positive abhorrence for the
+      painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. I
+      do not know what was her attitude to the unseen, but I know that in the
+      affairs of this world she was avaricious, greedy, and unscrupulous. It was
+      within my knowledge that she had been worsted in a sordid and desperate
+      quarrel about money matters with the family of her late husband, the
+      diplomatist. Some very august personages indeed (whom in her fury she had
+      insisted upon scandalously involving in her affairs) had incurred her
+      animosity. I find it perfectly easy to believe that she had come to within
+      an ace of being spirited away, for reasons of state, into some discreet <i>maison
+      de sante</i>&mdash;a madhouse of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however,
+      that certain high-placed personages opposed it for reasons which....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it&rsquo;s no use to go into details.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of languages
+      knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this and that of
+      his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly enough he may
+      not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in which his own belief
+      is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase, a poetic image, the
+      accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art, and not having
+      invented Madame de S&mdash;, I feel bound to explain how I came to know so
+      much about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
+      the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
+      last fact of Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s history, with which I intend to trouble
+      my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
+      sources, of the cause of Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s flight from Russia, some
+      years before. It was neither more nor less than this: that she became
+      suspect to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
+      Alexander. The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded
+      expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her
+      salon. Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who
+      hastened to play the informer, I suppose. At any rate, the overheard
+      matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she
+      was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge. Some of my
+      readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris, a
+      mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected piece
+      of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more than hints
+      at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous innuendoes
+      that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but with a palace
+      intrigue. When I observed to my friend, the professor&rsquo;s wife, that the
+      life of Madame de S&mdash;, with its unofficial diplomacy, its intrigues,
+      lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere of scandal,
+      occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth century than
+      for the conditions of our own time, she assented with a smile, but a
+      moment after went on in a reflective tone: &ldquo;Charlatanism?&mdash;yes, in a
+      certain measure. Still, times are changed. There are forces now which were
+      non-existent in the eighteenth century. I should not be surprised if she
+      were more dangerous than an Englishman would be willing to believe. And
+      what&rsquo;s more, she is looked upon as really dangerous by certain people&mdash;<i>chez
+      nous</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Chez nous</i> in this connexion meant Russia in general, and the
+      Russian political police in particular. The object of my digression from
+      the straight course of Miss Haldin&rsquo;s relation (in my own words) of her
+      visit to the Chateau Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my
+      friend, the professor&rsquo;s wife. I wanted to bring it forward simply to make
+      what I have to say presently of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s presence in Geneva, a little
+      more credible&mdash;for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which,
+      as I have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism
+      and cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already
+      silenced at our end of Europe. And this I state as my excuse for having
+      left Miss Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two
+      men who had come together below the terrace of the Chateau Borel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knowledge which I have just stated was in my mind when, as I have
+      said, I interrupted Miss Haldin. I interrupted her with the cry of
+      profound satisfaction&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you never saw Madame de S&mdash;, after all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin shook her head. It was very satisfactory to me. She had not
+      seen Madame de S&mdash;! That was excellent, excellent! I welcomed the
+      conviction that she would never know Madame de S&mdash; now. I could not
+      explain the reason of the conviction but by the knowledge that Miss Haldin
+      was standing face to face with her brother&rsquo;s wonderful friend. I preferred
+      him to Madame de S&mdash; as the companion and guide of that young girl,
+      abandoned to her inexperience by the miserable end of her brother. But, at
+      any rate, that life now ended had been sincere, and perhaps its thoughts
+      might have been lofty, its moral sufferings profound, its last act a true
+      sacrifice. It is not for us, the staid lovers calmed by the possession of
+      a conquered liberty, to condemn without appeal the fierceness of thwarted
+      desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not ashamed of the warmth of my regard for Miss Haldin. It was, it
+      must be admitted, an unselfish sentiment, being its own reward. The late
+      Victor Haldin&mdash;in the light of that sentiment&mdash;appeared to me
+      not as a sinister conspirator, but as a pure enthusiast. I did not wish
+      indeed to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape, that fact
+      which brought so much trouble to both his mother and his sister, spoke to
+      me in his favour. Meantime, in my fear of seeing the girl surrender to the
+      influence of the Chateau Borel revolutionary feminism, I was more than
+      willing to put my trust in that friend of the late Victor Haldin. He was
+      nothing but a name, you will say. Exactly! A name! And what&rsquo;s more, the
+      only name; the only name to be found in the correspondence between brother
+      and sister. The young man had turned up; they had come face to face, and,
+      fortunately, without the direct interference of Madame de S&mdash;. What
+      will come of it? what will she tell me presently? I was asking myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only natural that my thought should turn to the young man, the
+      bearer of the only name uttered in all the dream-talk of a future to be
+      brought about by a revolution. And my thought took the shape of asking
+      myself why this young man had not called upon these ladies. He had been in
+      Geneva for some days before Miss Haldin heard of him first in my presence
+      from Peter Ivanovitch. I regretted that last&rsquo;s presence at their meeting.
+      I would rather have had it happen somewhere out of his spectacled sight.
+      But I supposed that, having both these young people there, he introduced
+      them to each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I broke the silence by beginning a question on that point&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose Peter Ivanovitch....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin gave vent to her indignation. Peter Ivanovitch directly he had
+      got his answer from her had turned upon the <i>dame de compagnie</i> in a
+      shameful manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turned upon her?&rdquo; I wondered. &ldquo;What about? For what reason?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was unheard of; it was shameful,&rdquo; Miss Haldin pursued, with angry
+      eyes. &ldquo;<i>Il lui a fait une scene</i>&mdash;like this, before strangers.
+      And for what? You would never guess. For some eggs.... Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was astonished. &ldquo;Eggs, did you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Madame de S&mdash;. That lady observes a special diet, or something
+      of the sort. It seems she complained the day before to Peter Ivanovitch
+      that the eggs were not rightly prepared. Peter Ivanovitch suddenly
+      remembered this against the poor woman, and flew out at her. It was most
+      astonishing. I stood as if rooted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to say that the great feminist allowed himself to be abusive
+      to a woman?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, not that! It was something you have no conception of. It was an
+      odious performance. Imagine, he raised his hat to begin with. He made his
+      voice soft and deprecatory. &lsquo;Ah! you are not kind to us&mdash;you will not
+      deign to remember....&rsquo; This sort of phrases, that sort of tone. The poor
+      creature was terribly upset. Her eyes ran full of tears. She did not know
+      where to look. I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if she would have preferred abuse, or
+      even a blow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not remark that very possibly she was familiar with both on
+      occasions when no one was by. Miss Haldin walked by my side, her head up
+      in scornful and angry silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great men have their surprising peculiarities,&rdquo; I observed inanely.
+      &ldquo;Exactly like men who are not great. But that sort of thing cannot be kept
+      up for ever. How did the great feminist wind up this very characteristic
+      episode?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin, without turning her face my way, told me that the end was
+      brought about by the appearance of the interviewer, who had been closeted
+      with Madame de S&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came up rapidly, unnoticed, lifted his hat slightly, and paused to say
+      in French: &ldquo;The Baroness has asked me, in case I met a lady on my way out,
+      to desire her to come in at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After delivering this message, he hurried down the drive. The <i>dame de
+      compagnie</i> flew towards the house, and Peter Ivanovitch followed her
+      hastily, looking uneasy. In a moment Miss Haldin found herself alone with
+      the young man, who undoubtedly must have been the new arrival from Russia.
+      She wondered whether her brother&rsquo;s friend had not already guessed who she
+      was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am in a position to say that, as a matter of fact, he had guessed. It is
+      clear to me that Peter Ivanovitch, for some reason or other, had refrained
+      from alluding to these ladies&rsquo; presence in Geneva. But Razumov had
+      guessed. The trustful girl! Every word uttered by Haldin lived in
+      Razumov&rsquo;s memory. They were like haunting shapes; they could not be
+      exorcised. The most vivid amongst them was the mention of the sister. The
+      girl had existed for him ever since. But he did not recognize her at once.
+      Coming up with Peter Ivanovitch, he did observe her; their eyes had met,
+      even. He had responded, as no one could help responding, to the harmonious
+      charm of her whole person, its strength, its grace, its tranquil frankness&mdash;and
+      then he had turned his gaze away. He said to himself that all this was not
+      for him; the beauty of women and the friendship of men were not for him.
+      He accepted that feeling with a purposeful sternness, and tried to pass
+      on. It was only her outstretched hand which brought about the recognition.
+      It stands recorded in the pages of his self-confession, that it nearly
+      suffocated him physically with an emotional reaction of hate and dismay,
+      as though her appearance had been a piece of accomplished treachery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He faced about. The considerable elevation of the terrace concealed them
+      from anyone lingering in the doorway of the house; and even from the
+      upstairs windows they could not have been seen. Through the thickets run
+      wild, and the trees of the gently sloping grounds, he had cold, placid
+      glimpses of the lake. A moment of perfect privacy had been vouchsafed to
+      them at this juncture. I wondered to myself what use they had made of that
+      fortunate circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you have time for more than a few words?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That animation with which she had related to me the incidents of her visit
+      to the Chateau Borel had left her completely. Strolling by my side, she
+      looked straight before her; but I noticed a little colour on her cheek.
+      She did not answer me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After some little time I observed that they could not have hoped to remain
+      forgotten for very long, unless the other two had discovered Madame de S&mdash;
+      swooning with fatigue, perhaps, or in a state of morbid exaltation after
+      the long interview. Either would require their devoted ministrations. I
+      could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily out of the house
+      again, bareheaded, perhaps, and on across the terrace with his swinging
+      gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating clear of his stout light
+      grey legs. I confess to having looked upon these young people as the
+      quarry of the &ldquo;heroic fugitive.&rdquo; I had the notion that they would not be
+      allowed to escape capture. But of that I said nothing to Miss Haldin, only
+      as she still remained uncommunicative, I pressed her a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;but you can tell me at least your impression.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her head to look at me, and turned away again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impression?&rdquo; she repeated slowly, almost dreamily; then in a quicker tone&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He seems to be a man who has suffered more from his thoughts than from
+      evil fortune.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From his thoughts, you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that is natural enough in a Russian,&rdquo; she took me up. &ldquo;In a young
+      Russian; so many of them are unfit for action, and yet unable to rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you think he is that sort of man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I do not judge him. How could I, so suddenly? You asked for my
+      impression&mdash;I explain my impression. I&mdash;I&mdash;don&rsquo;t know the
+      world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too solitary&mdash;I am too
+      young to trust my own opinions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trust your instinct,&rdquo; I advised her. &ldquo;Most women trust to that, and make
+      no worse mistakes than men. In this case you have your brother&rsquo;s letter to
+      help you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew a deep breath like a light sigh. &ldquo;Unstained, lofty, and solitary
+      existences,&rdquo; she quoted as if to herself. But I caught the wistful murmur
+      distinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;High praise,&rdquo; I whispered to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The highest possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So high that, like the award of happiness, it is more fit to come only at
+      the end of a life. But still no common or altogether unworthy personality
+      could have suggested such a confident exaggeration of praise and...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; She interrupted me ardently. &ldquo;And if you had only known the heart
+      from which that judgment has come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ceased on that note, and for a space I reflected on the character of
+      the words which I perceived very well must tip the scale of the girl&rsquo;s
+      feelings in that young man&rsquo;s favour. They had not the sound of a casual
+      utterance. Vague they were to my Western mind and to my Western sentiment,
+      but I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin&rsquo;s side, I was like a
+      traveller in a strange country. It had also become clear to me that Miss
+      Haldin was unwilling to enter into the details of the only material part
+      of their visit to the Chateau Borel. But I was not hurt. Somehow I didn&rsquo;t
+      feel it to be a want of confidence. It was some other difficulty&mdash;a
+      difficulty I could not resent. And it was without the slightest resentment
+      that I said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. But on that high ground, which I will not dispute, you, like
+      anyone else in such circumstances, you must have made for yourself a
+      representation of that exceptional friend, a mental image of him, and&mdash;please
+      tell me&mdash;you were not disappointed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean? His personal appearance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean precisely his good looks, or otherwise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We turned at the end of the alley and made a few steps without looking at
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His appearance is not ordinary,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I should have thought not&mdash;from the little you&rsquo;ve said of your
+      first impression. After all, one has to fall back on that word.
+      Impression! What I mean is that something indescribable which is likely to
+      mark a &lsquo;not ordinary&rsquo; person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that she was not listening. There was no mistaking her
+      expression; and once more I had the sense of being out of it&mdash;not
+      because of my age, which at any rate could draw inferences&mdash;but
+      altogether out of it, on another plane whence I could only watch her from
+      afar. And so ceasing to speak I watched her stepping out by my side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she exclaimed suddenly, &ldquo;I could not have been disappointed with a
+      man of such strong feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! Strong feeling,&rdquo; I muttered, thinking to myself censoriously: like
+      this, at once, all in a moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo; inquired Miss Haldin innocently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, nothing. I beg your pardon. Strong feeling. I am not surprised.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don&rsquo;t know how abruptly I behaved to him!&rdquo; she cried
+      remorsefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I must have appeared surprised, for, looking at me with a still
+      more heightened colour, she said she was ashamed to admit that she had not
+      been sufficiently collected; she had failed to control her words and
+      actions as the situation demanded. She lost the fortitude worthy of both
+      the men, the dead and the living; the fortitude which should have been the
+      note of the meeting of Victor Haldin&rsquo;s sister with Victor Haldin&rsquo;s only
+      known friend. He was looking at her keenly, but said nothing, and she was&mdash;she
+      confessed&mdash;painfully affected by his want of comprehension. All she
+      could say was: &ldquo;You are Mr. Razumov.&rdquo; A slight frown passed over his
+      forehead. After a short, watchful pause, he made a little bow of assent,
+      and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the thought that she had before her the man so highly regarded by her
+      brother, the man who had known his value, spoken to him, understood him,
+      had listened to his confidences, perhaps had encouraged him&mdash;her lips
+      trembled, her eyes ran full of tears; she put out her hand, made a step
+      towards him impulsively, saying with an effort to restrain her emotion,
+      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess who I am?&rdquo; He did not take the proffered hand. He even
+      recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin imagined that he was unpleasantly
+      affected. Miss Haldin excused him, directing her displeasure at herself.
+      She had behaved unworthily, like an emotional French girl. A manifestation
+      of that kind could not be welcomed by a man of stern, self-contained
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very timid with women, not to
+      respond in a more human way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie Haldin&mdash;I
+      thought to myself. Those lofty and solitary existences (I remembered the
+      words suddenly) make a young man shy and an old man savage&mdash;often.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I encouraged Miss Haldin to proceed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was still very dissatisfied with herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went from bad to worse,&rdquo; she said, with an air of discouragement very
+      foreign to her. &ldquo;I did everything foolish except actually bursting into
+      tears. I am thankful to say I did not do that. But I was unable to speak
+      for quite a long time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had stood before him, speechless, swallowing her sobs, and when she
+      managed at last to utter something, it was only her brother&rsquo;s name&mdash;&ldquo;Victor&mdash;Victor
+      Haldin!&rdquo; she gasped out, and again her voice failed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she commented to me, &ldquo;this distressed him. He was quite
+      overcome. I have told you my opinion that he is a man of deep feeling&mdash;it
+      is impossible to doubt it. You should have seen his face. He positively
+      reeled. He leaned against the wall of the terrace. Their friendship must
+      have been the very brotherhood of souls! I was grateful to him for that
+      emotion, which made me feel less ashamed of my own lack of self-control.
+      Of course I had regained the power of speech at once, almost. All this
+      lasted not more than a few seconds. &lsquo;I am his sister,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Maybe you
+      have heard of me.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And had he?&rdquo; I interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. How could it have been otherwise? And yet.... But what does
+      that matter? I stood there before him, near enough to be touched and
+      surely not looking like an impostor. All I know is, that he put out both
+      his hands then to me, I may say flung them out at me, with the greatest
+      readiness and warmth, and that I seized and pressed them, feeling that I
+      was finding again a little of what I thought was lost to me for ever, with
+      the loss of my brother&mdash;some of that hope, inspiration, and support
+      which I used to get from my dear dead....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood quite well what she meant. We strolled on slowly. I refrained
+      from looking at her. And it was as if answering my own thoughts that I
+      murmured&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt it was a great friendship&mdash;as you say. And that young man
+      ended by welcoming your name, so to speak, with both hands. After that, of
+      course, you would understand each other. Yes, you would understand each
+      other quickly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a moment before I heard her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words. A reserved man&mdash;even
+      when he is strongly moved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unable to forget&mdash;-or even to forgive&mdash;the bass-toned
+      expansiveness of Peter Ivanovitch, the Archpatron of revolutionary
+      parties, I said that I took this for a favourable trait of character. It
+      was associated with sincerity&mdash;in my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, besides, we had not much time,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you would not have, of course.&rdquo; My suspicion and even dread of the
+      feminist and his Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help asking
+      with real anxiety, which I made smiling&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you escaped all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She understood me, and smiled too, at my uneasiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes! I escaped, if you like to call it that. I walked away quickly.
+      There was no need to run. I am neither frightened nor yet fascinated, like
+      that poor woman who received me so strangely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Mr.&mdash;Mr. Razumov...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He remained there, of course. I suppose he went into the house after I
+      left him. You remember that he came here strongly recommended to Peter
+      Ivanovitch&mdash;possibly entrusted with important messages for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah yes! From that priest who...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father Zosim&mdash;yes. Or from others, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You left him, then. But have you seen him since, may I ask?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some time Miss Haldin made no answer to this very direct question,
+      then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been expecting to see him here to-day,&rdquo; she said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have! Do you meet, then, in this garden? In that case I had better
+      leave you at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, why leave me? And we don&rsquo;t meet in this garden. I have not seen Mr.
+      Razumov since that first time. Not once. But I have been expecting
+      him....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused. I wondered to myself why that young revolutionist should show
+      so little alacrity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before we parted I told Mr. Razumov that I walked here for an hour every
+      day at this time. I could not explain to him then why I did not ask him to
+      come and see us at once. Mother must be prepared for such a visit. And
+      then, you see, I do not know myself what Mr. Razumov has to tell us. He,
+      too, must be told first how it is with poor mother. All these thoughts
+      flashed through my mind at once. So I told him hurriedly that there was a
+      reason why I could not ask him to see us at home, but that I was in the
+      habit of walking here.... This is a public place, but there are never many
+      people about at this hour. I thought it would do very well. And it is so
+      near our apartments. I don&rsquo;t like to be very far away from mother. Our
+      servant knows where I am in case I should be wanted suddenly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It is very convenient from that point of view,&rdquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact, I thought the Bastions a very convenient place, since the girl
+      did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to her mother.
+      It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of ground of
+      deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go on in the
+      exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments, too poignant,
+      perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these two, escaped out
+      of four score of millions of human beings ground between the upper and
+      nether millstone, walking under these trees, their young heads close
+      together. Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk in. It even occurred
+      to me, while we turned once more away from the wide iron gates, that when
+      tired they would have plenty of accommodation to rest themselves. There
+      was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed between the restaurant
+      chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted deals spread out under
+      the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a solitary Swiss couple,
+      whose fate was made secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected
+      mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be
+      held in the palm of ones hand. The man, colourlessly uncouth, was drinking
+      beer out of a glittering glass; the woman, rustic and placid, leaning back
+      in the rough chair, gazed idly around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is little logic to be expected on this earth, not only in the matter
+      of thought, but also of sentiment. I was surprised to discover myself
+      displeased with that unknown young man. A week had gone by since they met.
+      Was he callous, or shy, or very stupid? I could not make it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think,&rdquo; I asked Miss Haldin, after we had gone some distance up
+      the great alley, &ldquo;that Mr Razumov understood your intention?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Understood what I meant?&rdquo; she wondered. &ldquo;He was greatly moved. That I
+      know! In my own agitation I could see it. But I spoke distinctly. He heard
+      me; he seemed, indeed, to hang on my words...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unconsciously she had hastened her pace. Her utterance, too, became
+      quicker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waited a little before I observed thoughtfully&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet he allowed all these days to pass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we tell what work he may have to do here? He is not an idler
+      travelling for his pleasure. His time may not be his own&mdash;nor yet his
+      thoughts, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She slowed her pace suddenly, and in a lowered voice added&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or his very life&rdquo;&mdash;then paused and stood still &ldquo;For all I know, he
+      may have had to leave Geneva the very day he saw me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without telling you!&rdquo; I exclaimed incredulously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not give him time. I left him quite abruptly. I behaved emotionally
+      to the end. I am sorry for it. Even if I had given him the opportunity he
+      would have been justified in taking me for a person not to be trusted. An
+      emotional, tearful girl is not a person to confide in. But even if he has
+      left Geneva for a time, I am confident that we shall meet again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! you are confident.... I dare say. But on what ground?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I&rsquo;ve told him that I was in great need of some one, a
+      fellow-countryman, a fellow-believer, to whom I could give my confidence
+      in a certain matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. I don&rsquo;t ask you what answer he made. I confess that this is good
+      ground for your belief in Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s appearance before long. But he has
+      not turned up to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said quietly, &ldquo;not to-day;&rdquo; and we stood for a time in silence,
+      like people that have nothing more to say to each other and let their
+      thoughts run widely asunder before their bodies go off their different
+      ways. Miss Haldin glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a brusque
+      movement. She had already overstayed her time, it seemed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like to be away from mother,&rdquo; she murmured, shaking her head. &ldquo;It
+      is not that she is very ill now. But somehow when I am not with her I am
+      more uneasy than ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion to her son for the last
+      week or more. She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking
+      out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+      When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of talk
+      is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly endure
+      it, and I dare not break it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her glove which had come
+      undone. I knew well enough what a hard time of it she must be having. The
+      stress, its causes, its nature, would have undermined the health of an
+      Occidental girl; but Russian natures have a singular power of resistance
+      against the unfair strains of life. Straight and supple, with a short
+      jacket open on her black dress, which made her figure appear more slender
+      and her fresh but colourless face more pale, she compelled my wonder and
+      admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t stay a moment longer. You ought to come soon to see mother. You
+      know she calls you &lsquo;<i>L&rsquo;ami.</i>&rsquo; It is an excellent name, and she really
+      means it. And now <i>au revoir</i>; I must run.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced vaguely down the broad walk&mdash;the hand she put out to me
+      eluded my grasp by an unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
+      shoulder. Her red lips were slightly parted, not in a smile, however, but
+      expressing a sort of startled pleasure. She gazed towards the gates and
+      said quickly, with a gasp&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There! I knew it. Here he comes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov. A young man was walking up
+      the alley, without haste. His clothes were some dull shade of brown, and
+      he carried a stick. When my eyes first fell on him, his head was hanging
+      on his breast as if in deep thought. While I was looking at him he raised
+      it sharply, and at once stopped. I am certain he did, but that pause was
+      nothing more perceptible than a faltering check in his gait,
+      instantaneously overcome. Then he continued his approach, looking at us
+      steadily. Miss Haldin signed to me to remain, and advanced a step or two
+      to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned my head away from that meeting, and did not look at them again
+      till I heard Miss Haldin&rsquo;s voice uttering his name in the way of
+      introduction. Mr. Razumov was informed, in a warm, low tone, that, besides
+      being a wonderful teacher, I was a great support &ldquo;in our sorrow and
+      distress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course I was described also as an Englishman. Miss Haldin spoke
+      rapidly, faster than I have ever heard her speak, and that by contrast
+      made the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have given him my confidence,&rdquo; she added, looking all the time at Mr.
+      Razumov. That young man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin, but
+      certainly did not look into her eyes which were so ready for him.
+      Afterwards he glanced backwards and forwards at us both, while the faint
+      commencement of a forced smile, followed by the suspicion of a frown,
+      vanished one after another; I detected them, though neither could have
+      been noticed by a person less intensely bent upon divining him than
+      myself. I don&rsquo;t know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my attention
+      seized the very shades of these movements. The attempted smile was given
+      up, the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so that there should be
+      no sign; but I imagined him exclaiming inwardly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her confidence! To this elderly person&mdash;this foreigner!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagined this because he looked foreign enough to me. I was upon the
+      whole favourably impressed. He had an air of intelligence and even some
+      distinction quite above the average of the students and other inhabitants
+      of the <i>Petite Russie</i>. His features were more decided than in the
+      generality of Russian faces; he had a line of the jaw, a clean-shaven,
+      sallow cheek; his nose was a ridge, and not a mere protuberance. He wore
+      the hat well down over his eyes, his dark hair curled low on the nape of
+      his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes there were sturdy limbs; a
+      slight stoop brought out a satisfactory breadth of shoulders. Upon the
+      whole I was not disappointed. Studious&mdash;robust&mdash;shy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on
+      mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry. Not a word or
+      even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me lightly
+      on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct wish. Let
+      him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near Nathalie
+      Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling matter to me. I
+      stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as it were poised in
+      the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and my mind trying to
+      penetrate her intention. She had turned to Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well. This is the place. Yes, it is here that I meant you to come. I have
+      been walking every day.... Don&rsquo;t excuse yourself&mdash;I understand. I am
+      grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot stay now. It
+      is impossible. I must hurry off home. Yes, even with you standing before
+      me, I must run off. I have been too long away.... You know how it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These last words were addressed to me. I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed
+      the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man might
+      do. He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his, and held it&mdash;detained
+      it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you once more for&mdash;for understanding me,&rdquo; she went on warmly.
+      He interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn&rsquo;t like him
+      speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat, as
+      it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with a
+      parched throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there to thank me for? Understand you?... How did I understand
+      you?... You had better know that I understand nothing. I was aware that
+      you wanted to see me in this garden. I could not come before. I was
+      hindered. And even to-day, you see...late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She still held his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as a
+      weak, emotional girl. No doubt I want sustaining. I am very ignorant. But
+      I can be trusted. Indeed I can!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are ignorant,&rdquo; he repeated thoughtfully. He had raised his head, and
+      was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand. They
+      stood like this for a long moment. She released his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You did come late. It was good of you to come on the chance of me
+      having loitered beyond my time. I was talking with this good friend here.
+      I was talking of you. Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you. He was with me when
+      I first heard of your being here in Geneva. He can tell you what comfort
+      it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news. He knew I meant to seek
+      you out. It was the only object of my accepting the invitation of Peter
+      Ivanovitch....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me,&rdquo; he interrupted, in that wavering,
+      hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very little. Just told me your name, and that you had arrived here. Why
+      should I have asked for more? What could he have told me that I did not
+      know already from my brother&rsquo;s letter? Three lines! And how much they
+      meant to me! I will show them to you one day, Kirylo Sidorovitch. But now
+      I must go. The first talk between us cannot be a matter of five minutes,
+      so we had better not begin....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had been standing a little aside, seeing them both in profile. At that
+      moment it occurred to me that Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s face was older than his age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If mother&rdquo;&mdash;the girl had turned suddenly to me, &ldquo;were to wake up in
+      my absence (so much longer than usual) she would perhaps question me. She
+      seems to miss me more, you know, of late. She would want to know what
+      delayed me&mdash;and, you see, it would be painful for me to dissemble
+      before her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood the point very well. For the same reason she checked what
+      seemed to be on Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s part a movement to accompany her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No! I go alone, but meet me here as soon as possible.&rdquo; Then to me in
+      a lower, significant tone&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother may be sitting at the window at this moment, looking down the
+      street. She must not know anything of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s presence here till&mdash;till
+      something is arranged.&rdquo; She paused before she added a little louder, but
+      still speaking to me, &ldquo;Mr. Razumov does not quite understand my
+      difficulty, but you know what it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      V
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a quick inclination of the head for us both, and an earnest, friendly
+      glance at the young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our heads and
+      looking after her straight, supple figure receding rapidly. Her walk was
+      not that hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some women, but a frank,
+      strong, healthy movement forward. Rapidly she increased the distance&mdash;disappeared
+      with suddenness at last. I discovered only then that Mr. Razumov, after
+      ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking me over from head to foot.
+      I dare say I was a very unexpected fact for that young Russian to stumble
+      upon. I caught in his physiognomy, in his whole bearing, an expression
+      compounded of curiosity and scorn, tempered by alarm&mdash;as though he
+      had been holding his breath while I was not looking. But his eyes met mine
+      with a gaze direct enough. I saw then for the first time that they were of
+      a clear brown colour and fringed with thick black eyelashes. They were the
+      youngest feature of his face. Not at all unpleasant eyes. He swayed
+      slightly, leaning on his stick and generally hung in the wind. It flashed
+      upon me that in leaving us together Miss Haldin had an intention&mdash;that
+      something was entrusted to me, since, by a mere accident I had been found
+      at hand. On this assumed ground I put all possible friendliness into my
+      manner. I cast about for some right thing to say, and suddenly in Miss
+      Haldin&rsquo;s last words I perceived the clue to the nature of my mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said gravely, if with a smile, &ldquo;you cannot be expected to
+      understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little before he said, as if
+      wickedly amused&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But haven&rsquo;t you heard just now? I was thanked by that young lady for
+      understanding so well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him rather hard. Was there a hidden and inexplicable sneer in
+      this retort? No. It was not that. It might have been resentment. Yes. But
+      what had he to resent? He looked as though he had not slept very well of
+      late. I could almost feel on me the weight of his unrefreshed, motionless
+      stare, the stare of a man who lies unwinking in the dark, angrily passive
+      in the toils of disastrous thoughts. Now, when I know how true it was, I
+      can honestly affirm that this was the effect he produced on me. It was
+      painful in a curiously indefinite way&mdash;for, of course, the definition
+      comes to me now while I sit writing in the fullness of my knowledge. But
+      this is what the effect was at that time of absolute ignorance. This new
+      sort of uneasiness which he seemed to be forcing upon me I attempted to
+      put down by assuming a conversational, easy familiarity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl (I am&mdash;as
+      you see&mdash;old enough to be frank in my expressions) was referring to
+      her own feelings. Surely you must have understood that much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other
+      things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well&mdash;and if
+      she is! I suppose I can see that for myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This sally would have been insulting if his voice had not been practically
+      extinct, dried up in his throat; and the rustling effort of his speech too
+      painful to give real offence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remained silent, checked between the obvious fact and the subtle
+      impression. It was open to me to leave him there and then; but the sense
+      of having been entrusted with a mission, the suggestion of Miss Haldin&rsquo;s
+      last glance, was strong upon me. After a moment of reflection I said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we walk together a little?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again. I saw it
+      out of the corner of my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow. He had
+      fallen back a little and was practically out of my sight, unless I turned
+      my head to look at him. I did not wish to indispose him still further by
+      an appearance of marked curiosity. It might have been distasteful to such
+      a young and secret refugee from under the pestilential shadow hiding the
+      true, kindly face of his land. And the shadow, the attendant of his
+      countrymen, stretching across the middle of Europe, was lying on him too,
+      darkening his figure to my mental vision. &ldquo;Without doubt,&rdquo; I said to
+      myself, &ldquo;he seems a sombre, even a desperate revolutionist; but he is
+      young, he may be unselfish and humane, capable of compassion, of....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat, and became all attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is beyond everything,&rdquo; were his first words. &ldquo;It is beyond
+      everything! I find you here, for no reason that I can understand, in
+      possession of something I cannot be expected to understand! A confidant! A
+      foreigner! Talking about an admirable Russian girl. Is the admirable girl
+      a fool, I begin to wonder? What are you at? What is your object?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was barely audible, as if his throat had no more resonance than a dry
+      rag, a piece of tinder. It was so pitiful that I found it extremely easy
+      to control my indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you have lived a little longer, Mr. Razumov, you will discover that
+      no woman is an absolute fool. I am not a feminist, like that illustrious
+      author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a little suspect
+      to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He interrupted me, in a surprising note of whispering astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in a certain aspect he is,&rdquo; I said, dismissing my remark lightly.
+      &ldquo;As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will
+      learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign
+      to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even
+      the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
+      never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely
+      deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open, if
+      all the truth were known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; he cried at my elbow, &ldquo;what is it to me whether women are
+      fools or lunatics? I really don&rsquo;t care what you think of them. I&mdash;I
+      am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a novel.
+      How do you know that I want to learn anything about women?... What is the
+      meaning of all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The object, you mean, of this conversation, which I admit I have forced
+      upon you in a measure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forced! Object!&rdquo; he repeated, still keeping half a pace or so behind me.
+      &ldquo;You wanted to talk about women, apparently. That&rsquo;s a subject. But I don&rsquo;t
+      care for it. I have never.... In fact, I have had other subjects to think
+      about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am concerned here with one woman only&mdash;a young girl&mdash;the
+      sister of your dead friend&mdash;Miss Haldin. Surely you can think a
+      little of her. What I meant from the first was that there is a situation
+      which you cannot be expected to understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side for the space of several
+      strides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that it may prepare the ground for your next interview with Miss
+      Haldin if I tell you of it. I imagine that she might have had something of
+      the kind in her mind when she left us together. I believe myself
+      authorized to speak. The peculiar situation I have alluded to has arisen
+      in the first grief and distress of Victor Haldin&rsquo;s execution. There was
+      something peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest. You no doubt know
+      the whole truth....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next instant found myself swung
+      so as to face Mr. Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You spring up from the ground before me with this talk. Who the devil are
+      you? This is not to be borne! Why! What for? What do you know what is or
+      is not peculiar? What have you to do with any confounded circumstances, or
+      with anything that happens in Russia, anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned on his stick with his other hand, heavily; and when he let go my
+      arm, I was certain in my mind that he was hardly able to keep on his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables,&rdquo; I proposed, disregarding
+      this display of unexpectedly profound emotion. It was not without its
+      effect on me, I confess. I was sorry for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What tables? What are you talking about? Oh&mdash;the empty tables? The
+      tables there. Certainly. I will sit at one of the empty tables.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I led him away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals
+      before the <i>chalet</i>. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were
+      alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let fall
+      his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands, stared
+      at me persistently, openly, and continuously, while I signalled the waiter
+      and ordered some beer. I could not quarrel with this silent inspection
+      very well, because, truth to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of having been
+      sprung on him with some abruptness&mdash;of having &ldquo;sprung from the
+      ground,&rdquo; as he expressed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While waiting to be served I mentioned that, born from parents settled in
+      St. Petersburg, I had acquired the language as a child. The town I did not
+      remember, having left it for good as a boy of nine, but in later years I
+      had renewed my acquaintance with the language. He listened, without as
+      much as moving his eyes the least little bit. He had to change his
+      position when the beer came, and the instant draining of his glass revived
+      him. He leaned back in his chair and, folding his arms across his chest,
+      continued to stare at me squarely. It occurred to me that his
+      clean-shaven, almost swarthy face was really of the very mobile sort, and
+      that the absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit of a
+      revolutionist, of a conspirator everlastingly on his guard against
+      self-betrayal in a world of secret spies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you are an Englishman&mdash;a teacher of English literature,&rdquo; he
+      murmured, in a voice that was no longer issuing from a parched throat. &ldquo;I
+      have heard of you. People told me you have lived here for years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite true. More than twenty years. And I have been assisting Miss Haldin
+      with her English studies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been reading English poetry with her,&rdquo; he said, immovable now,
+      like another man altogether, a complete stranger to the man of the heavy
+      and uncertain footfalls a little while ago&mdash;at my elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, English poetry,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But the trouble of which I speak was
+      caused by an English newspaper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He continued to stare at me. I don&rsquo;t think he was aware that the story of
+      the midnight arrest had been ferreted out by an English journalist and
+      given to the world. When I explained this to him he muttered
+      contemptuously, &ldquo;It may have been altogether a lie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think you are the best judge of that,&rdquo; I retorted, a little
+      disconcerted. &ldquo;I must confess that to me it looks to be true in the main.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you tell truth from lies?&rdquo; he queried in his new, immovable
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how you do it in Russia,&rdquo; I began, rather nettled by his
+      attitude. He interrupted me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Russia, and in general everywhere&mdash;in a newspaper, for instance.
+      The colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the
+      publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration of
+      the motive, and so on. I don&rsquo;t trust blindly the accuracy of special
+      correspondents&mdash;but why should this one have gone to the trouble of
+      concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance to the
+      world?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what it is,&rdquo; he grumbled. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s going on with us is of no
+      importance&mdash;a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the
+      papers&mdash;the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of.
+      But let them wait a bit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to the western world.
+      Disregarding the anger in his stare, I pointed out that whether the
+      journalist was well- or ill-informed, the concern of the friends of these
+      ladies was with the effect the few lines of print in question had produced&mdash;the
+      effect alone. And surely he must be counted as one of the friends&mdash;if
+      only for the sake of his late comrade and intimate fellow-revolutionist.
+      At that point I thought he was going to speak vehemently; but he only
+      astounded me by the convulsive start of his whole body. He restrained
+      himself, folded his loosened arms tighter across his chest, and sat back
+      with a smile in which there was a twitch of scorn and malice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a comrade and an intimate.... Very well,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ventured to speak to you on that assumption. And I cannot be mistaken.
+      I was present when Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival here to Miss
+      Haldin, and I saw her relief and thankfulness when your name was
+      mentioned. Afterwards she showed me her brother&rsquo;s letter, and read out the
+      few words in which he alludes to you. What else but a friend could you
+      have been?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Obviously. That&rsquo;s perfectly well known. A friend. Quite correct.... Go
+      on. You were talking of some effect.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said to myself: &ldquo;He puts on the callousness of a stern revolutionist,
+      the insensibility to common emotions of a man devoted to a destructive
+      idea. He is young, and his sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger, a
+      foreigner, an old man. Youth must assert itself....&rdquo; As concisely as
+      possible I exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs. Haldin had been
+      thrown into by the news of her son&rsquo;s untimely end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened&mdash;I felt it&mdash;with profound attention. His level stare
+      deflected gradually downwards, left my face, and rested at last on the
+      ground at his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can enter into the sister&rsquo;s feelings. As you said, I have only read a
+      little English poetry with her, and I won&rsquo;t make myself ridiculous in your
+      eyes by trying to speak of her. But you have seen her. She is one of these
+      rare human beings that do not want explaining. At least I think so. They
+      had only that son, that brother, for a link with the wider world, with the
+      future. The very groundwork of active existence for Nathalie Haldin is
+      gone with him. Can you wonder then that she turns with eagerness to the
+      only man her brother mentions in his letters. Your name is a sort of
+      legacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could he have written of me?&rdquo; he cried, in a low, exasperated tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a few words. It is not for me to repeat them to you, Mr. Razumov;
+      but you may believe my assertion that these words are forcible enough to
+      make both his mother and his sister believe implicitly in the worth of
+      your judgment and in the truth of anything you may have to say to them.
+      It&rsquo;s impossible for you now to pass them by like strangers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few
+      people passing up and down the broad central walk. While I was speaking
+      his head had sunk upon his breast above his folded arms. He raised it
+      sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must I go then and lie to that old woman!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not anger; it was something else, something more poignant, and not
+      so simple. I was aware of it sympathetically, while I was profoundly
+      concerned at the nature of that exclamation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me! Won&rsquo;t the truth do, then? I hoped you could have told them
+      something consoling. I am thinking of the poor mother now. Your Russia <i>is</i>
+      a cruel country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved a little in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I repeated. &ldquo;I thought you would have had something authentic to
+      tell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The twitching of his lips before he spoke was curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What if it is not worth telling?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not worth&mdash;from what point of view? I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From every point of view.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke with some asperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think that anything which could explain the circumstances of
+      that midnight arrest....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reported by a journalist for the amusement of the civilized Europe,&rdquo; he
+      broke in scornfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, reported.... But aren&rsquo;t they true? I can&rsquo;t make out your attitude in
+      this? Either the man is a hero to you, or...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He approached his face with fiercely distended nostrils close to mine so
+      suddenly that I had the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ask me! I suppose it amuses you, all this. Look here! I am a worker.
+      I studied. Yes, I studied very hard. There is intelligence here.&rdquo; (He
+      tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.) &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think a Russian may
+      have sane ambitions? Yes&mdash;I had even prospects. Certainly! I had. And
+      now you see me here, abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed. You see me
+      here&mdash;and you ask! You see me, don&rsquo;t you?&mdash;sitting before you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw himself back violently. I kept outwardly calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here on account of the Haldin
+      affair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His manner changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You call it the Haldin affair&mdash;do you?&rdquo; he observed indifferently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no right to ask you anything,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t presume. But in
+      that case the mother and the sister of him who must be a hero in your eyes
+      cannot be indifferent to you. The girl is a frank and generous creature,
+      having the noblest&mdash;well&mdash;illusions. You will tell her nothing&mdash;or
+      you will tell her everything. But speaking now of the object with which
+      I&rsquo;ve approached you first, we have to deal with the morbid state of the
+      mother. Perhaps something could be invented under your authority as a cure
+      for a distracted and suffering soul filled with maternal affection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I could not help thinking,
+      wilfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes. Something might,&rdquo; he mumbled carelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. When he uncovered his
+      lips they were smiling faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me. This has been a long conversation, and I have not had much
+      sleep the last two nights.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This unexpected, somewhat insolent sort of apology had the merit of being
+      perfectly true. He had had no nightly rest to speak of since that day
+      when, in the grounds of the Chateau Borel, the sister of Victor Haldin had
+      appeared before him. The perplexities and the complex terrors&mdash;I may
+      say&mdash;of this sleeplessness are recorded in the document I was to see
+      later&mdash;the document which is the main source of this narrative. At
+      the moment he looked to me convincingly tired, gone slack all over, like a
+      man who has passed through some sort of crisis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a lot of urgent writing to do,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my example, without haste, a
+      little heavily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must apologize for detaining you so long,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why apologize? One can&rsquo;t very well go to bed before night. And you did
+      not detain me. I could have left you at any time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had not stayed with him to be offended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad you have been sufficiently interested,&rdquo; I said calmly. &ldquo;No
+      merit of mine, though&mdash;the commonest sort of regard for the mother of
+      your friend was enough.... As to Miss Haldin herself, she at one time was
+      disposed to think that her brother had been betrayed to the police in some
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again suddenly. I stared at him,
+      and I must say that he returned my stare without winking for quite a
+      considerable time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In some way,&rdquo; he mumbled, as if he had not understood or could not
+      believe his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might have done that,&rdquo; I went on.
+      &ldquo;Or, as she characteristically put it to me, the folly or weakness of some
+      unhappy fellow-revolutionist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Folly or weakness,&rdquo; he repeated bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is a very generous creature,&rdquo; I observed after a time. The man
+      admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground. I turned away and
+      moved off, apparently unnoticed by him. I nourished no resentment of the
+      moody brusqueness with which he had treated me. The sentiment I was
+      carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness. Before I
+      had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m, yes!&rdquo; I heard him at my elbow again. &ldquo;But what do you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not look round even.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that you people are under a curse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no sound. It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I
+      heard him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to walk with you a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated
+      compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I saw no reason for being
+      particularly gracious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here, to
+      meet a friend from England,&rdquo; I said, for all answer to his unexpected
+      proposal. I hoped that something informing could come of it. As we stood
+      on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like what you said just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We stepped off the pavement together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The great problem,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;is to understand thoroughly the nature
+      of the curse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not very difficult, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so too,&rdquo; he agreed with me, and his readiness, strangely enough,
+      did not make him less enigmatical in the least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A curse is an evil spell,&rdquo; I tried him again. &ldquo;And the important, the
+      great problem, is to find the means to break it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. To find the means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was also an assent, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.
+      We had crossed diagonally the open space before the theatre, and began to
+      descend a broad, sparely frequented street in the direction of one of the
+      smaller bridges. He kept on by my side without speaking for a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent for so long that I began to think I had been indiscreet, and
+      should get no answer at all. Yet on looking at him I almost believed that
+      my question had caused him something in the nature of positive anguish. I
+      detected it mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he put a great
+      force stealthily. Once, however, he had overcome that sort of agonizing
+      hesitation sufficiently to tell me that he had no such intention, he
+      became rather communicative&mdash;at least relatively to the former
+      off-hand curtness of his speeches. The tone, too, was more amiable. He
+      informed me that he intended to study and also to write. He went even so
+      far as to tell me he had been to Stuttgart. Stuttgart, I was aware, was
+      one of the revolutionary centres. The directing committee of one of the
+      Russian parties (I can&rsquo;t tell now which) was located in that town. It was
+      there that he got into touch with the active work of the revolutionists
+      outside Russia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never been abroad before,&rdquo; he explained, in a rather inanimate
+      voice now. Then, after a slight hesitation, altogether different from the
+      agonizing irresolution my first simple question &ldquo;whether he meant to stay
+      in Geneva&rdquo; had aroused, he made me an unexpected confidence&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fact is, I have received a sort of mission from them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which will keep you here in Geneva?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Here. In this odious....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was satisfied with my faculty for putting two and two together when I
+      drew the inference that the mission had something to do with the person of
+      the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I kept that surmise to myself naturally,
+      and Mr. Razumov said nothing more for some considerable time. It was only
+      when we were nearly on the bridge we had been making for that he opened
+      his lips again, abruptly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could I see that precious article anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had to think for a moment before I saw what he was referring to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has been reproduced in parts by the Press here. There are files to be
+      seen in various places. My copy of the English newspaper I have left with
+      Miss Haldin, I remember, on the day after it reached me. I was
+      sufficiently worried by seeing it lying on a table by the side of the poor
+      mother&rsquo;s chair for weeks. Then it disappeared. It was a relief, I assure
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had stopped short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I trust,&rdquo; I continued, &ldquo;that you will find time to see these ladies
+      fairly often&mdash;that you will make time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at me so queerly that I hardly know how to define his aspect. I
+      could not understand it in this connexion at all. What ailed him? I asked
+      myself. What strange thought had come into his head? What vision of all
+      the horrors that can be seen in his hopeless country had come suddenly to
+      haunt his brain? If it were anything connected with the fate of Victor
+      Haldin, then I hoped earnestly he would keep it to himself for ever. I
+      was, to speak plainly, so shocked that I tried to conceal my impression by&mdash;Heaven
+      forgive me&mdash;a smile and the assumption of a light manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely,&rdquo; I exclaimed, &ldquo;that needn&rsquo;t cost you a great effort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned away from me and leaned over the parapet of the bridge. For a
+      moment I waited, looking at his back. And yet, I assure you, I was not
+      anxious just then to look at his face again. He did not move at all. He
+      did not mean to move. I walked on slowly on my way towards the station,
+      and at the end of the bridge I glanced over my shoulder. No, he had not
+      moved. He hung well over the parapet, as if captivated by the smooth rush
+      of the blue water under the arch. The current there is swift, extremely
+      swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at it for any
+      length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly snatched
+      away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the suggestion of
+      irresistible power and of headlong motion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov. I left him hanging far over the
+      parapet of the bridge. The way he had behaved to me could not be put down
+      to mere boorishness. There was something else under his scorn and
+      impatience. Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to hidden truth, it
+      was the same thing which had kept him over a week, nearly ten days indeed,
+      from coming near Miss Haldin. But what it was I could not tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART THIRD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
+      rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
+      granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov&rsquo;s breast, it
+      could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of his
+      life had deposited there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the meaning of all this?&rdquo; he thought, staring downwards at the
+      headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
+      air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
+      disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. &ldquo;Why has that
+      meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
+      tale of a crazy old woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
+      reference to the young girl. &ldquo;A crazy old woman,&rdquo; he repeated to himself.
+      &ldquo;It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd? But no! I am
+      wrong! I can&rsquo;t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the
+      starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one to guard
+      against it? It puts to rout one&rsquo;s intelligence. The more intelligent one
+      is the less one suspects an absurdity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
+      leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking, like
+      a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his thought had
+      some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
+      insignificant&mdash;absolutely. The craze of an old woman&mdash;the fussy
+      officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
+      the way? Haven&rsquo;t I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven&rsquo;t I just? That&rsquo;s
+      the way to treat these meddlesome persons. Is it possible that he still
+      stands behind my back, waiting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine. It was not fear. He was
+      certain that it was not fear&mdash;not fear for himself&mdash;but it was,
+      all the same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he
+      knew without being able to put a name on the personality. But the
+      recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet
+      tranquillized him for a time. It was too stupid to suppose that he should
+      be wasting his time in waiting. It was unnecessary to look round and make
+      sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the
+      newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a
+      damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could be
+      capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him&mdash;the sport of
+      revolution&mdash;a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And
+      what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t the truth do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone coping over which he was
+      leaning with force. &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t the truth do? The truth for the crazy old
+      mother of the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man shuddered again. Yes. The truth would do! Apparently it
+      would do. Exactly. And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
+      unspoken words cynically. &ldquo;Fall on my neck in gratitude, no doubt,&rdquo; he
+      jeered mentally. But this mood abandoned him at once. He felt sad, as if
+      his heart had become empty suddenly. &ldquo;Well, I must be cautious,&rdquo; he
+      concluded, coming to himself as though his brain had been awakened from a
+      trance. &ldquo;There is nothing, no one, too insignificant, too absurd to be
+      disregarded,&rdquo; he thought wearily. &ldquo;I must be cautious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from the balustrade and,
+      retracing his steps along the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
+      where, for a few days, he led a solitary and retired existence. He
+      neglected Peter Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the Stuttgart
+      group; he never went near the refugee revolutionists, to whom he had been
+      introduced on his arrival. He kept out of that world altogether. And he
+      felt that such conduct, causing surprise and arousing suspicion, contained
+      an element of danger for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not to say that during these few days he never went out. I met him
+      several times in the streets, but he gave me no recognition. Once, going
+      home after an evening call on the ladies Haldin, I saw him crossing the
+      dark roadway of the Boulevard des Philosophes. He had a broad-brimmed soft
+      hat, and the collar of his coat turned up. I watched him make straight for
+      the house, but, instead of going in, he stopped opposite the still lighted
+      windows, and after a time went away down a side-street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin yet. Miss Haldin told me he
+      was reluctant; moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin had changed.
+      She seemed to think now that her son was living, and she perhaps awaited
+      his arrival. Her immobility in the great arm-chair in front of the window
+      had an air of expectancy, even when the blind was down and the lamps
+      lighted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my part, I was convinced that she had received her death-stroke; Miss
+      Haldin, to whom, of course, I said nothing of my forebodings, thought that
+      no good would come from introducing Mr. Razumov just then, an opinion
+      which I shared fully. I knew that she met the young man on the Bastions.
+      Once or twice I saw them strolling slowly up the main alley. They met
+      every day for weeks. I avoided passing that way during the hour when Miss
+      Haldin took her exercise there. One day, however, in a fit of
+      absent-mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon her walking alone. I
+      stopped to exchange a few words. Mr. Razumov failed to turn up, and we
+      began to talk about him&mdash;naturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he tell you anything definite about your brother&rsquo;s activities&mdash;his
+      end?&rdquo; I ventured to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; admitted Miss Haldin, with some hesitation. &ldquo;Nothing definite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood well enough that all their conversations must have been
+      referred mentally to that dead man who had brought them together. That was
+      unavoidable. But it was in the living man that she was interested. That
+      was unavoidable too, I suppose. And as I pushed my inquiries I discovered
+      that he had disclosed himself to her as a by no means conventional
+      revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of theories, of men too. I was
+      rather pleased at that&mdash;but I was a little puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle,&rdquo; Miss Haldin explained.
+      &ldquo;Of course, he is an actual worker too,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you understand him?&rdquo; I inquired point-blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated again. &ldquo;Not altogether,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that he had fascinated her by an assumption of mysterious
+      reserve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I think?&rdquo; she went on, breaking through her reserved,
+      almost reluctant attitude: &ldquo;I think that he is observing, studying me, to
+      discover whether I am worthy of his trust....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that pleases you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept mysteriously silent for a moment. Then with energy, but in a
+      confidential tone&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am convinced;&rdquo; she declared, &ldquo;that this extraordinary man is meditating
+      some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by it&mdash;he
+      suffers from it&mdash;and from being alone in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so he&rsquo;s looking for helpers?&rdquo; I commented, turning away my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was a silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; she said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign friend, had fallen into a
+      distant background. But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was absolutely
+      nowhere now. And this thought consoled me. Yet I saw the gigantic shadow
+      of Russian life deepening around her like the darkness of an advancing
+      night. It would devour her presently. I inquired after Mrs. Haldin&mdash;that
+      other victim of the deadly shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank eyes. Mother seemed no
+      worse, but if I only knew what strange fancies she had sometimes! Then
+      Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch, declared that she could not stay a
+      moment longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that day. Incomprehensible
+      youth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing the Place Mollard, I
+      caught sight of him boarding a South Shore tramcar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s going to the Chateau Borel,&rdquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half a
+      mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two
+      straight lines of shady trees. Across the roadway in the sunshine a short
+      wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out had an
+      intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly slopes
+      on the opposite shore. The whole view, with the harbour jetties of white
+      stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to the left, and the
+      expanding space of water to the right with jutting promontories of no
+      particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very
+      fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with contempt. He thought
+      it odious&mdash;oppressively odious&mdash;in its unsuggestive finish: the
+      very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and
+      culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the entrance to the grounds
+      of the Chateau Borel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark
+      weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
+      wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for a
+      very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey stone
+      as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small side
+      entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked as
+      though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov, trying to
+      push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently,&rdquo; he muttered to
+      himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he looked
+      back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the clean, broad
+      avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms hung over the
+      low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in lordly repose, as
+      if everything in sight belonged to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!&rdquo; Razumov muttered to himself. &ldquo;A brute,
+      all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of the
+      drive, trying to think of nothing&mdash;to rest his head, to rest his
+      emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house he
+      faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
+      mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped short
+      and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow arches,
+      meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept narrow
+      flower-bed along its foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is here!&rdquo; he thought, with a sort of awe. &ldquo;It is here&mdash;on this
+      very spot....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
+      with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move, and
+      that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but because he
+      knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could not leave Geneva.
+      He recognized, even without thinking, that it was impossible. It would
+      have been a fatal admission, an act of moral suicide. It would have been
+      also physically dangerous. Slowly he ascended the stairs of the terrace,
+      flanked by two stained greenish stone urns of funereal aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
+      discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
+      shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had been
+      noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter
+      Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared head of Europe&rsquo;s greatest
+      feminist accentuated the dubiousness of his status in the house rented by
+      Madame de S&mdash;, his Egeria. His aspect combined the formality of the
+      caller with the freedom of the proprietor. Florid and bearded and masked
+      by the dark blue glasses, he met the visitor, and at once took him
+      familiarly under the arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by an effort which the
+      constant necessity of prudence had rendered almost mechanical. And this
+      necessity had settled his expression in a cast of austere, almost
+      fanatical, aloofness. The &ldquo;heroic fugitive,&rdquo; impressed afresh by the
+      severe detachment of this new arrival from revolutionary Russia, took a
+      conciliatory, even a confidential tone. Madame de S&mdash; was resting
+      after a bad night. She often had bad nights. He had left his hat upstairs
+      on the landing and had come down to suggest to his young friend a stroll
+      and a good open-hearted talk in one of the shady alleys behind the house.
+      After voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at the unmoved face by
+      his side, and could not restrain himself from exclaiming&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch. If I were really an
+      extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden in
+      Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of&mdash;what&rsquo;s the name of the
+      Commune this place belongs to?... Never mind&mdash;the heart of democracy,
+      anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as much
+      value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians, wandering
+      abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Peter Ivanovitch dissented emphatically&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No! You are not ordinary. I have some experience of Russians who are&mdash;well&mdash;living
+      abroad. You appear to me, and to others too, a marked personality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does he mean by this?&rdquo; Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes fully
+      on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a meditative
+      seriousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I have not heard of you from
+      various points where you made yourself known on your way here? I have had
+      letters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we are great in talking about each other,&rdquo; interjected Razumov, who
+      had listened with great attention. &ldquo;Gossip, tales, suspicions, and all
+      that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny, even.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very well to conceal the
+      feeling of anxiety which had come over him. At the same time he was saying
+      to himself that there could be no earthly reason for anxiety. He was
+      relieved by the evident sincerity of the protesting voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; cried Peter Ivanovitch. &ldquo;What are you talking about? What
+      reason can <i>you</i> have to...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great exile flung up his arms as if words had failed him in sober
+      truth. Razumov was satisfied. Yet he was moved to continue in the same
+      vein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am talking of the poisonous plants which flourish in the world of
+      conspirators, like evil mushrooms in a dark cellar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are casting aspersions,&rdquo; remonstrated Peter Ivanovitch, &ldquo;which as far
+      as you are concerned&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; Razumov interrupted without heat. &ldquo;Indeed, I don&rsquo;t want to cast
+      aspersions, but it&rsquo;s just as well to have no illusions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance of his dark spectacles,
+      accompanied by a faint smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one,&rdquo; he
+      said, in a very friendly tone. &ldquo;But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
+      You aim at stoicism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stoicism! That&rsquo;s a pose of the Greeks and the Romans. Let&rsquo;s leave it to
+      them. We are Russians, that is&mdash;children; that is&mdash;sincere; that
+      is&mdash;cynical, if you like. But that&rsquo;s not a pose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A long silence ensued. They strolled slowly under the lime-trees. Peter
+      Ivanovitch had put his hands behind his back. Razumov felt the ungravelled
+      ground of the deeply shaded walk damp and as if slippery under his feet.
+      He asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were saying the right things. The
+      direction of the conversation ought to have been more under his control,
+      he reflected. The great man appeared to be reflecting on his side too. He
+      cleared his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at once a painful
+      reawakening of scorn and fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am astonished,&rdquo; began Peter Ivanovitch gently. &ldquo;Supposing you are right
+      in your indictment, how can you raise any question of calumny or gossip,
+      in your case? It is unreasonable. The fact is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, there
+      is not enough known of you to give hold to gossip or even calumny. Just
+      now you are a man associated with a great deed, which had been hoped for,
+      and tried for too, without success. People have perished for attempting
+      that which you and Haldin have done at last. You come to us out of Russia,
+      with that prestige. But you cannot deny that you have not been
+      communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met imparted their
+      impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I form my own
+      opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out of the common.
+      That&rsquo;s positively so. You are close, very close. This taciturnity, this
+      severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in you, inspires hopes
+      and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There is something of a
+      Brutus....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray spare me those classical allusions!&rdquo; burst out Razumov nervously.
+      &ldquo;What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
+      say,&rdquo; he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, &ldquo;that the Russian
+      revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
+      clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps, pondering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not <i>all</i> patricians,&rdquo; he muttered at last. &ldquo;But you, at any rate,
+      are one of <i>us</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov smiled bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer,&rdquo; he said in a sneering tone. &ldquo;I am
+      not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck. I
+      have no name, I have no....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace and
+      his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
+      entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear young friend!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I have
+      no legal right to&mdash;but what of that? I don&rsquo;t wish to claim it. I have
+      no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my mother&rsquo;s
+      grandfather was a peasant&mdash;a serf. See how much I am one of <i>you</i>.
+      I don&rsquo;t want anyone to claim me. But Russia <i>can&rsquo;t</i> disown me. She
+      cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am <i>it</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
+      vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity was
+      an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he thought,
+      with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark glasses, became
+      to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he fancied he could
+      have stabbed him not only without compunction, but with a horrible,
+      triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on that atrocity in spite
+      of himself. It was as if he were becoming light-headed. &ldquo;It is not what is
+      expected of me,&rdquo; he repeated to himself. &ldquo;It is not what is&mdash;I could
+      get away by breaking the fastening on the little gate I see there in the
+      back wall. It is a flimsy lock. Nobody in the house seems to know he is
+      here with me. Oh yes. The hat! These women would discover presently the
+      hat he has left on the landing. They would come upon him, lying dead in
+      this damp, gloomy shade&mdash;but I would be gone and no one could
+      ever...Lord! Am I going mad?&rdquo; he asked himself in a fright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great man was heard&mdash;musing in an undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m, yes! That&mdash;no doubt&mdash;in a certain sense....&rdquo; He raised his
+      voice. &ldquo;There is a deal of pride about you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring,
+      acknowledging, in a way, Razumov&rsquo;s claim to peasant descent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo. And I don&rsquo;t say that you have no
+      justification for it. I have admitted you had. I have ventured to allude
+      to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance to
+      it. You are one of us&mdash;<i>un des notres</i>. I reflect on that with
+      satisfaction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I attach some importance to it also,&rdquo; said Razumov quietly. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t even
+      deny that it may have some importance for you too,&rdquo; he continued, after a
+      slight pause and with a touch of grimness of which he was himself aware,
+      with some annoyance. He hoped it had escaped the perception of Peter
+      Ivanovitch. &ldquo;But suppose we talk no more about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we shall not&mdash;not after this one time, Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo;
+       persisted the noble arch-priest of Revolution. &ldquo;This shall be the last
+      occasion. You cannot believe for a moment that I had the slightest idea of
+      wounding your feelings. You are clearly a superior nature&mdash;that&rsquo;s how
+      I read you. Quite above the common&mdash;h&rsquo;m&mdash;susceptibilities. But
+      the fact is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I don&rsquo;t know your susceptibilities.
+      Nobody, out of Russia, knows much of you&mdash;as yet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been watching me?&rdquo; suggested Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect frankness, but as they
+      turned their faces to each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
+      spectacles. Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch hinted that he had felt
+      for some time the need of meeting a man of energy and character, in view
+      of a certain project. He said nothing more precise, however; and after
+      some critical remarks upon the personalities of the various members of the
+      committee of revolutionary action in Stuttgart, he let the conversation
+      lapse for quite a long while. They paced the alley from end to end.
+      Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a glance at
+      the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited. With its
+      grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from top to
+      bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very well have
+      been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning, futile ghost
+      of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly rumour had it, by
+      Madame de S&mdash; to meet statesmen, diplomatists, deputies of various
+      European Parliaments, must have been of another sort. Razumov had never
+      seen Madame de S&mdash; but in the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
+      leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people. Now,
+      if you ask me what are the dregs of a people&mdash;h&rsquo;m&mdash;it would take
+      too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
+      that for me go to the making up of these dregs&mdash;of that which ought,
+      <i>must</i> remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be
+      subject to discussion. But I can tell you what is <i>not</i> the dregs. On
+      that it is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not
+      the dregs; neither is its highest class&mdash;well&mdash;the nobility.
+      Reflect on that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for
+      reflection. Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by
+      origin or development, is&mdash;well&mdash;dirt! Intelligence in the wrong
+      place is that. Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second
+      thing I would offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment
+      there yawns a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be
+      bridged by foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or
+      cheating. Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
+      feminist. He seized Razumov&rsquo;s arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
+      shake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
+      up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
+      subject?&rdquo; he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased the
+      distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went on
+      strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words and
+      theories could never fill that chasm. No meditation was necessary. A
+      sacrifice of many lives could alone&mdash;He fell silent without finishing
+      the phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head slowly. After a moment he
+      proposed that they should go and see if Madame de S&mdash; was now
+      visible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall get some tea,&rdquo; he said, turning out of the shaded gloomy walk
+      with a brisker step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady companion had been on the look out. Her dark skirt whisked into
+      the doorway as the two men came in sight round the corner. She ran off
+      somewhere altogether, and had disappeared when they entered the hall. In
+      the crude light falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the black and
+      white tessellated floor, covered with muddy tracks, their footsteps echoed
+      faintly. The great feminist led the way up the stairs. On the balustrade
+      of the first-floor landing a shiny tall hat reposed, rim upwards, opposite
+      the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it was said, by evoked
+      ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by fugitive revolutionists.
+      The cracked white paint of the panels, the tarnished gilt of the
+      mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but dust and emptiness within.
+      Before turning the massive brass handle, Peter Ivanovitch gave his young
+      companion a sharp, partly critical, partly preparatory glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one is perfect,&rdquo; he murmured discreetly. Thus, the possessor of a rare
+      jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no gem
+      perhaps is flawless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained with his hand on the door-handle so long that Razumov assented
+      by a moody &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfection itself would not produce that effect,&rdquo; pursued Peter
+      Ivanovitch, &ldquo;in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a mind&mdash;no!&mdash;the
+      quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand any perplexity
+      you may be suffering from by the irresistible, enlightening force of
+      sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before that&mdash;that&mdash;inspired,
+      yes, inspired penetration, this true light of femininity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy steadfastness gave his face
+      an air of absolute conviction. Razumov felt a momentary shrinking before
+      that closed door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Penetration? Light,&rdquo; he stammered out. &ldquo;Do you mean some sort of
+      thought-reading?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean something utterly different,&rdquo; he retorted, with a faint, pitying
+      smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov began to feel angry, very much against his wish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very mysterious,&rdquo; he muttered through his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t object to being understood, to being guided?&rdquo; queried the great
+      feminist. Razumov exploded in a fierce whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In what sense? Be pleased to understand that I am a serious person. Who
+      do you take me for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They looked at each other very closely. Razumov&rsquo;s temper was cooled by the
+      impenetrable earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his stare. Peter
+      Ivanovitch turned the handle at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall know directly,&rdquo; he said, pushing the door open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Enfin</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking the view, Peter Ivanovitch
+      boomed in a hearty tone with something boastful in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Here I am!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who waited for him to move on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I am bringing you a proved conspirator&mdash;a real one this time. <i>Un
+      vrai celui la</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This pause in the doorway gave the &ldquo;proved conspirator&rdquo; time to make sure
+      that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his mental disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These sentiments stand confessed in Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s memorandum of his first
+      interview with Madame de S&mdash;. The very words I use in my narrative
+      are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected. The record, which
+      could not have been meant for anyone&rsquo;s eyes but his own, was not, I think,
+      the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion common to men who lead
+      secret lives, and accounting for the invariable existence of &ldquo;compromising
+      documents&rdquo; in all the plots and conspiracies of history. Mr. Razumov
+      looked at it, I suppose, as a man looks at himself in a mirror, with
+      wonder, perhaps with anguish, with anger or despair. Yes, as a threatened
+      man may look fearfully at his own face in the glass, formulating to
+      himself reassuring excuses for his appearance marked by the taint of some
+      insidious hereditary disease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Egeria of the &ldquo;Russian Mazzini&rdquo; produced, at first view, a strong
+      effect by the death-like immobility of an obviously painted face. The eyes
+      appeared extraordinarily brilliant. The figure, in a close-fitting dress,
+      admirably made, but by no means fresh, had an elegant stiffness. The
+      rasping voice inviting him to sit down; the rigidity of the upright
+      attitude with one arm extended along the back of the sofa, the white gleam
+      of the big eyeballs setting off the black, fathomless stare of the
+      enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than anything he had seen since
+      his hasty and secret departure from St. Petersburg. A witch in Parisian
+      clothes, he thought. A portent! He actually hesitated in his advance, and
+      did not even comprehend, at first, what the rasping voice was saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down. Draw your chair nearer me. There&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down. At close quarters the rouged cheekbones, the wrinkles, the
+      fine lines on each side of the vivid lips, astounded him. He was being
+      received graciously, with a smile which made him think of a grinning
+      skull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have been hearing about you for some time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not know what to say, and murmured some disconnected words. The
+      grinning skull effect vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you know that the general complaint is that you have shown
+      yourself very reserved everywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov remained silent for a time, thinking of his answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, don&rsquo;t you see, am a man of action,&rdquo; he said huskily, glancing upwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch stood in portentous expectant silence by the side of his
+      chair. A slight feeling of nausea came over Razumov. What could be the
+      relations of these two people to each other? She like a galvanized corpse
+      out of some Hoffman&rsquo;s Tale&mdash;he the preacher of feminist gospel for
+      all the world, and a super-revolutionist besides! This ancient, painted
+      mummy with unfathomable eyes, and this burly, bull-necked,
+      deferential...what was it? Witchcraft, fascination.... &ldquo;It&rsquo;s for her
+      money,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;She has millions!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The walls, the floor of the room were bare like a barn. The few pieces of
+      furniture had been discovered in the garrets and dragged down into service
+      without having been properly dusted, even. It was the refuse the banker&rsquo;s
+      widow had left behind her. The windows without curtains had an indigent,
+      sleepless look. In two of them the dirty yellowy-white blinds had been
+      pulled down. All this spoke, not of poverty, but of sordid penuriousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I have been shamefully robbed,
+      positively ruined.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A rattling laugh, which seemed beyond her control, interrupted her for a
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A slavish nature would find consolation in the fact that the principal
+      robber was an exalted and almost a sacrosanct person&mdash;a Grand Duke,
+      in fact. Do you understand, Mr. Razumov? A Grand Duke&mdash;No! You have
+      no idea what thieves those people are! Downright thieves!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her bosom heaved, but her left arm remained rigidly extended along the
+      back of the couch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will only upset yourself,&rdquo; breathed out a deep voice, which, to
+      Razumov&rsquo;s startled glance, seemed to proceed from under the steady
+      spectacles of Peter Ivanovitch, rather than from his lips, which had
+      hardly moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of hat? I say thieves! <i>Voleurs! Voleurs!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov was quite confounded by this unexpected clamour, which had in it
+      something of wailing and croaking, and more than a suspicion of hysteria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Voleurs! Voleurs! Vol</i>....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No power on earth can rob you of your genius,&rdquo; shouted Peter Ivanovitch
+      in an overpowering bass, but without stirring, without a gesture of any
+      kind. A profound silence fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov remained outwardly impassive. &ldquo;What is the meaning of this
+      performance?&rdquo; he was asking himself. But with a preliminary sound of
+      bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a threadbare
+      black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on her heels, and
+      carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously too heavy for her.
+      Razumov made an instinctive movement to help, which startled her so much
+      that she nearly dropped her hissing burden. She managed, however, to land
+      it on the table, and looked so frightened that Razumov hastened to sit
+      down. She produced then, from an adjacent room, four glass tumblers, a
+      teapot, and a sugar-basin, on a black iron tray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Les gateaux</i>? Have you remembered to bring the cakes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch, without a word, marched out on to the landing, and
+      returned instantly with a parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which
+      he must have extracted from the interior of his hat. With imperturbable
+      gravity he undid the string and smoothed the paper open on a part of the
+      table within reach of Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s hand. The lady companion poured
+      out the tea, then retired into a distant corner out of everybody&rsquo;s sight.
+      From time to time Madame de S&mdash; extended a claw-like hand, glittering
+      with costly rings, towards the paper of cakes, took up one and devoured
+      it, displaying her big false teeth ghoulishly. Meantime she talked in a
+      hoarse tone of the political situation in the Balkans. She built great
+      hopes on some complication in the peninsula for arousing a great movement
+      of national indignation in Russia against &ldquo;these thieves&mdash;thieves
+      thieves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will only upset yourself,&rdquo; Peter Ivanovitch interposed, raising his
+      glassy gaze. He smoked cigarettes and drank tea in silence, continuously.
+      When he had finished a glass, he flourished his hand above his shoulder.
+      At that signal the lady companion, ensconced in her corner, with round
+      eyes like a watchful animal, would dart out to the table and pour him out
+      another tumblerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked at her once or twice. She was anxious, tremulous, though
+      neither Madame de S&mdash; nor Peter Ivanovitch paid the slightest
+      attention to her. &ldquo;What have they done between them to that forlorn
+      creature?&rdquo; Razumov asked himself. &ldquo;Have they terrified her out of her
+      senses with ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?&rdquo; When she
+      gave him his second glass of tea, he noticed that her lips trembled in the
+      manner of a scared person about to burst into speech. But of course she
+      said nothing, and retired into her corner, as if hugging to herself the
+      smile of thanks he gave her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She may be worth cultivating,&rdquo; thought Razumov suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was calming down, getting hold of the actuality into which he had been
+      thrown&mdash;for the first time perhaps since Victor Haldin had entered
+      his room...and had gone out again. He was distinctly aware of being the
+      object of the famous&mdash;or notorious&mdash;Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s ghastly
+      graciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de S&mdash; was pleased to discover that this young man was
+      different from the other types of revolutionist members of committees,
+      secret emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough
+      students, ex-cobblers with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged
+      enthusiasts, Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come
+      and go around Peter Ivanovitch&mdash;fanatics, pedants, proletarians all.
+      It was pleasant to talk to this young man of notably good appearance&mdash;for
+      Madame de S&mdash; was not always in a mystical state of mind. Razumov&rsquo;s
+      taciturnity only excited her to a quicker, more voluble utterance. It
+      still dealt with the Balkans. She knew all the statesmen of that region,
+      Turks, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Roumanians, Greeks, Armenians, and
+      nondescripts, young and old, the living and the dead. With some money an
+      intrigue could be started which would set the Peninsula in a blaze and
+      outrage the sentiment of the Russian people. A cry of abandoned brothers
+      could be raised, and then, with the nation seething with indignation, a
+      couple of regiments or so would be enough to begin a military revolution
+      in St. Petersburg and make an end of these thieves....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apparently I&rsquo;ve got only to sit still and listen,&rdquo; the silent Razumov
+      thought to himself. &ldquo;As to that hairy and obscene brute&rdquo; (in such terms
+      did Mr. Razumov refer mentally to the popular expounder of a feministic
+      conception of social state), &ldquo;as to him, for all his cunning he too shall
+      speak out some day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov ceased to think for a moment. Then a sombre-toned reflection
+      formulated itself in his mind, ironical and bitter. &ldquo;I have the gift of
+      inspiring confidence.&rdquo; He heard himself laughing aloud. It was like a goad
+      to the painted, shiny-eyed harridan on the sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may well laugh!&rdquo; she cried hoarsely. &ldquo;What else can one do! Perfect
+      swindlers&mdash;and what base swindlers at that! Cheap Germans&mdash;Holstein-Gottorps!
+      Though, indeed, it&rsquo;s hardly safe to say who and what they are. A family
+      that counts a creature like Catherine the Great in its ancestry&mdash;you
+      understand!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are only upsetting yourself,&rdquo; said Peter Ivanovitch, patiently but in
+      a firm tone. This admonition had its usual effect on the Egeria. She
+      dropped her thick, discoloured eyelids and changed her position on the
+      sofa. All her angular and lifeless movements seemed completely automatic
+      now that her eyes were closed. Presently she opened them very full. Peter
+      Ivanovitch drank tea steadily, without haste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I declare!&rdquo; She addressed Razumov directly. &ldquo;The people who have
+      seen you on your way here are right. You are very reserved. You haven&rsquo;t
+      said twenty words altogether since you came in. You let nothing of your
+      thoughts be seen in your face either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been listening, Madame,&rdquo; said Razumov, using French for the first
+      time, hesitatingly, not being certain of his accent. But it seemed to
+      produce an excellent impression. Madame de S&mdash; looked meaningly into
+      Peter Ivanovitch&rsquo;s spectacles, as if to convey her conviction of this
+      young man&rsquo;s merit. She even nodded the least bit in his direction, and
+      Razumov heard her murmur under her breath the words, &ldquo;Later on in the
+      diplomatic service,&rdquo; which could not but refer to the favourable
+      impression he had made. The fantastic absurdity of it revolted him because
+      it seemed to outrage his ruined hopes with the vision of a mock-career.
+      Peter Ivanovitch, impassive as though he were deaf, drank some more tea.
+      Razumov felt that he must say something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he began deliberately, as if uttering a meditated opinion.
+      &ldquo;Clearly. Even in planning a purely military revolution the temper of the
+      people should be taken into account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have understood me perfectly. The discontent should be spiritualized.
+      That is what the ordinary heads of revolutionary committees will not
+      understand. They aren&rsquo;t capable of it. For instance, Mordatiev was in
+      Geneva last month. Peter Ivanovitch brought him here. You know Mordatiev?
+      Well, yes&mdash;you have heard of him. They call him an eagle&mdash;a
+      hero! He has never done half as much as you have. Never attempted&mdash;not
+      half....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de S&mdash; agitated herself angularly on the sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We, of course, talked to him. And do you know what he said to me? &lsquo;What
+      have we to do with Balkan intrigues? We must simply extirpate the
+      scoundrels.&rsquo; Extirpate is all very well&mdash;but what then? The imbecile!
+      I screamed at him, &lsquo;But you must spiritualize&mdash;don&rsquo;t you understand?&mdash;spiritualize
+      the discontent.&rsquo;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt nervously in her pocket for a handkerchief; she pressed it to her
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spiritualize?&rdquo; said Razumov interrogatively, watching her heaving breast.
+      The long ends of an old black lace scarf she wore over her head slipped
+      off her shoulders and hung down on each side of her ghastly rosy cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An odious creature,&rdquo; she burst out again. &ldquo;Imagine a man who takes five
+      lumps of sugar in his tea.... Yes, I said spiritualize! How else can you
+      make discontent effective and universal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to this, young man.&rdquo; Peter Ivanovitch made himself heard solemnly.
+      &ldquo;Effective and universal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked at him suspiciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some say hunger will do that,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I know. Our people are starving in heaps. But you can&rsquo;t make famine
+      universal. And it is not despair that we want to create. There is no moral
+      support to be got out of that. It is indignation....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de S&mdash; let her thin, extended arm sink on her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a Mordatiev,&rdquo; began Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bien sur!&rdquo; murmured Madame de S&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Though I too am ready to say extirpate, extirpate! But in my ignorance of
+      political work, permit me to ask: A Balkan&mdash;well&mdash;intrigue,
+      wouldn&rsquo;t that take a very long time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch got up and moved off quietly, to stand with his face to
+      the window. Razumov heard a door close; he turned his head and perceived
+      that the lady companion had scuttled out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In matters of politics I am a supernaturalist.&rdquo; Madame de S&mdash; broke
+      the silence harshly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch moved away from the window and struck Razumov lightly on
+      the shoulder. This was a signal for leaving, but at the same time he
+      addressed Madame de S&mdash; in a peculiar reminding tone&mdash;-
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever it meant, she did not seem to hear him. She leaned back in the
+      corner of the sofa like a wooden figure. The immovable peevishness of the
+      face, framed in the limp, rusty lace, had a character of cruelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to extirpating,&rdquo; she croaked at the attentive Razumov, &ldquo;there is only
+      one class in Russia which must be extirpated. Only one. And that class
+      consists of only one family. You understand me? That one family must be
+      extirpated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigor of a corpse galvanized into
+      harsh speech and glittering stare by the force of murderous hate. The
+      sight fascinated Razumov&mdash;yet he felt more self-possessed than at any
+      other time since he had entered this weirdly bare room. He was interested.
+      But the great feminist by his side again uttered his appeal&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She disregarded it. Her carmine lips vaticinated with an extraordinary
+      rapidity. The liberating spirit would use arms before which rivers would
+      part like Jordan, and ramparts fall down like the walls of Jericho. The
+      deliverance from bondage would be effected by plagues and by signs, by
+      wonders and by war. The women....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleanor!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ceased; she had heard him at last. She pressed her hand to her
+      forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? Ah yes! That girl&mdash;the sister of....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Miss Haldin that she meant. That young girl and her mother had been
+      leading a very retired life. They were provincial ladies&mdash;were they
+      not? The mother had been very beautiful&mdash;traces were left yet. Peter
+      Ivanovitch, when he called there for the first time, was greatly
+      struck....But the cold way they received him was really surprising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is one of our national glories,&rdquo; Madams de S&mdash; cried out, with
+      sudden vehemence. &ldquo;All the world listens to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know these ladies,&rdquo; said Razumov loudly rising from his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I understand that she was
+      talking to you here, in the garden, the other day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in the garden,&rdquo; said Razumov gloomily. Then, with an effort, &ldquo;She
+      made herself known to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then ran away from us all,&rdquo; Madame de S&mdash; continued, with
+      ghastly vivacity. &ldquo;After coming to the very door! What a peculiar
+      proceeding! Well, I have been a shy little provincial girl at one time.
+      Yes, Razumov&rdquo; (she fell into this familiarity intentionally, with an
+      appalling grimace of graciousness. Razumov gave a perceptible start),
+      &ldquo;yes, that&rsquo;s my origin. A simple provincial family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a marvel,&rdquo; Peter Ivanovich uttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was to Razumov that she gave her death&rsquo;s-head smile. Her tone was
+      quite imperious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must bring the wild young thing here. She is wanted. I reckon upon
+      your success&mdash;mind!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is not a wild young thing,&rdquo; muttered Razumov, in a surly voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&mdash;that&rsquo;s all the same. She may be one of these young
+      conceited democrats. Do you know what I think? I think she is very much
+      like you in character. There is a smouldering fire of scorn in you. You
+      are darkly self-sufficient, but I can see your very soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which, missing Razumov, gave him
+      an absurd notion that she was looking at something which was visible to
+      her behind him. He cursed himself for an impressionable fool, and asked
+      with forced calmness&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you see? Anything resembling me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some sort of phantom in my image?&rdquo; pursued Razumov slowly. &ldquo;For, I
+      suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There are
+      phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tenseness of Madame de S&mdash;&lsquo;s stare had relaxed, and now she
+      looked at Razumov in a silence that became disconcerting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I myself have had an experience,&rdquo; he stammered out, as if compelled.
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen a phantom once.&rdquo; The unnaturally red lips moved to frame a
+      question harshly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of a dead person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An enemy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hated him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! It was not a woman, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman!&rdquo; repeated Razumov, his eyes looking straight into the eyes of
+      Madame de S&mdash;. &ldquo;Why should it have been a woman? And why this
+      conclusion? Why should I not have been able to hate a woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman was new to him. At that
+      moment he hated Madame de S&mdash;. But it was not exactly hate. It was
+      more like the abhorrence that may be caused by a wooden or plaster figure
+      of a repulsive kind. She moved no more than if she were such a figure;
+      even her eyes, whose unwinking stare plunged into his own, though shining,
+      were lifeless, as though they were as artificial as her teeth. For the
+      first time Razumov became aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was it
+      nauseated him exceedingly. Again Peter Ivanovitch tapped him slightly on
+      the shoulder. Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away when he
+      received the unexpected favour of a bony, inanimate hand extended to him,
+      with the two words in hoarse French&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Au revoir!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the room, escorted by the great
+      man, who made him go out first. The voice from the sofa cried after them&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remain here, <i>Pierre</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, <i>ma chere amie</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the door behind him. The
+      landing was prolonged into a bare corridor, right and left, desolate
+      perspectives of white and gold decoration without a strip of carpet. The
+      very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and a
+      solitary speck reposing on the balustrade of white marble&mdash;the silk
+      top-hat of the great feminist&mdash;asserted itself extremely, black and
+      glossy in all that crude whiteness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch escorted the visitor without opening his lips. Even when
+      they had reached the head of the stairs Peter Ivanovitch did not break the
+      silence. Razumov&rsquo;s impulse to continue down the flight and out of the
+      house without as much as a nod abandoned him suddenly. He stopped on the
+      first step and leaned his back against the wall. Below him the great hall
+      with its chequered floor of black and white seemed absurdly large and like
+      some public place where a great power of resonance awaits the provocation
+      of footfalls and voices. As if afraid of awakening the loud echoes of that
+      empty house, Razumov adopted a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch shook his head slightly, very serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or spend my time in spiritual ecstasies or sublime meditations upon the
+      gospel of feminism,&rdquo; continued Razumov. &ldquo;I made my way here for my share
+      of action&mdash;action, most respected Peter Ivanovitch! It was not the
+      great European writer who attracted me, here, to this odious town of
+      liberty. It was somebody much greater. It was the idea of the chief which
+      attracted me. There are starving young men in Russia who believe in you so
+      much that it seems the only thing that keeps them alive in their misery.
+      Think of that, Peter Ivanovitch! No! But only think of that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great man, thus entreated, perfectly motionless and silent, was the
+      very image of patient, placid respectability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t speak of the people. They are brutes,&rdquo; added Razumov,
+      in the same subdued but forcible tone. At this, a protesting murmur issued
+      from the &ldquo;heroic fugitive&rsquo;s&rdquo; beard. A murmur of authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say&mdash;children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! Brutes!&rdquo; Razumov insisted bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they are sound, they are innocent,&rdquo; the great man pleaded in a
+      whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough.&rdquo; Razumov raised his voice
+      at last. &ldquo;And you can&rsquo;t deny the natural innocence of a brute. But what&rsquo;s
+      the use of disputing about names? You just try to give these children the
+      power and stature of men and see what they will be like. You just give it
+      to them and see.... But never mind. I tell you, Peter Ivanovitch, that
+      half a dozen young men do not come together nowadays in a shabby student&rsquo;s
+      room without your name being whispered, not as a leader of thought, but as
+      a centre of revolutionary energies&mdash;the centre of action. What else
+      has drawn me near you, do you think? It is not what all the world knows of
+      you, surely. It&rsquo;s precisely what the world at large does not know. I was
+      irresistibly drawn-let us say impelled, yes, impelled; or, rather,
+      compelled, driven&mdash;driven,&rdquo; repented Razumov loudly, and ceased, as
+      if startled by the hollow reverberation of the word &ldquo;driven&rdquo; along two
+      bare corridors and in the great empty hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch did not seem startled in the least. The young man could
+      not control a dry, uneasy laugh. The great revolutionist remained unmoved
+      with an effect of commonplace, homely superiority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Curse him,&rdquo; said Razumov to himself, &ldquo;he is waiting behind his spectacles
+      for me to give myself away.&rdquo; Then aloud, with a satanic enjoyment of the
+      scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the great man&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew&mdash;no,
+      which <i>drove</i> me towards you! The irresistible force.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not feel any desire to laugh now. This time Peter Ivanovitch moved
+      his head sideways, knowingly, as much as to say, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t I?&rdquo; This
+      expressive movement was almost imperceptible. Razumov went on in secret
+      derision&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All these days you have been trying to read me, Peter Ivanovitch. That is
+      natural. I have perceived it and I have been frank. Perhaps you may think
+      I have not been very expansive? But with a man like you it was not needed;
+      it would have looked like an impertinence, perhaps. And besides, we
+      Russians are prone to talk too much as a rule. I have always felt that.
+      And yet, as a nation, we are dumb. I assure you that I am not likely to
+      talk to you so much again&mdash;ha! ha!&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a little nearer to the
+      great man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been condescending enough. I quite understood it was to lead me
+      on. You must render me the justice that I have not tried to please. I have
+      been impelled, compelled, or rather sent&mdash;let us say sent&mdash;towards
+      you for a work that no one but myself can do. You would call it a harmless
+      delusion: a ridiculous delusion at which you don&rsquo;t even smile. It is
+      absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember these
+      words, I hope. Enough of this. Here I stand before you-confessed! But one
+      thing more I must add to complete it: a mere blind tool I can never
+      consent to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared for, he was not prepared to
+      have both his hands seized in the great man&rsquo;s grasp. The swiftness of the
+      movement was aggressive enough to startle. The burly feminist could not
+      have been quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov treacherously up on
+      the landing and bundle him behind one of the numerous closed doors near
+      by. This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his hands being released after
+      a darkly eloquent squeeze, he smiled, with a beating heart, straight at
+      the beard and the spectacles hiding that impenetrable man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his handwriting), &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t
+      move from here till he either speaks or turns away. This is a duel.&rdquo; Many
+      seconds passed without a sign or sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; the great man said hurriedly, in subdued tones, as if the
+      whole thing had been a stolen, breathless interview. &ldquo;Exactly. Come to see
+      us here in a few days. This must be gone into deeply&mdash;deeply, between
+      you and me. Quite to the bottom. To the...And, by the by, you must bring
+      along Natalia Victorovna&mdash;you know, the Haldin girl....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I to take this as my first instruction from you?&rdquo; inquired Razumov
+      stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! h&rsquo;m! You are naturally the proper person&mdash;<i>la personne
+      indiquee</i>. Every one shall be wanted presently. Every one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who had lowered his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The moment of action approaches,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov did not look up. He did not move till he heard the door of the
+      drawing-room close behind the greatest of feminists returning to his
+      painted Egeria. Then he walked down slowly into the hall. The door stood
+      open, and the shadow of the house was lying aslant over the greatest part
+      of the terrace. While crossing it slowly, he lifted his hat and wiped his
+      damp forehead, expelling his breath with force to get rid of the last
+      vestiges of the air he had been breathing inside. He looked at the palms
+      of his hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an independent
+      sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole person very distinctly
+      indeed. &ldquo;This is curious,&rdquo; he thought. After a while he formulated his
+      opinion of it in the mental ejaculation: &ldquo;Beastly!&rdquo; This disgust vanished
+      before a marked uneasiness. &ldquo;This is an effect of nervous exhaustion,&rdquo; he
+      reflected with weary sagacity. &ldquo;How am I to go on day after day if I have
+      no more power of resistance&mdash;moral resistance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed the path at the foot of the terrace. &ldquo;Moral resistance, moral
+      resistance;&rdquo; he kept on repeating these words mentally. Moral endurance.
+      Yes, that was the necessity of the situation. An immense longing to make
+      his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the town, of throwing
+      himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept everything clean
+      out of his mind for a moment. &ldquo;Is it possible that I am but a weak
+      creature after all?&rdquo; he asked himself, in sudden alarm. &ldquo;Eh! What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a start as if awakened from a dream. He even swayed a little
+      before recovering himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You stole away from us quietly to walk about here,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady companion stood before him, but how she came there he had not the
+      slightest idea. Her folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been unconscious as I walked, it&rsquo;s a positive fact,&rdquo; said Razumov
+      to himself in wonder. He raised his hat with marked civility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sallow woman blushed duskily. She had her invariably scared
+      expression, as if somebody had just disclosed to her some terrible news.
+      But she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without timidity. &ldquo;She is
+      incredibly shabby,&rdquo; he thought. In the sunlight her black costume looked
+      greenish, with here and there threadbare patches where the stuff seemed
+      decomposed by age into a velvety, black, furry state. Her very hair and
+      eyebrows looked shabby. Razumov wondered whether she were sixty years old.
+      Her figure, though, was young enough. He observed that she did not appear
+      starved, but rather as if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps and
+      leavings of plates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov smiled amiably and moved out of her way. She turned her head to
+      keep her scared eyes on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know what you have been told in there,&rdquo; she affirmed, without
+      preliminaries. Her tone, in contrast with her manner, had an unexpectedly
+      assured character which put Razumov at his ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you? You must have heard all sorts of talk on many occasions in
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She varied her phrase, with the same incongruous effect of positiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know to a certainty what you have been told to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo; Razumov shrugged his shoulders a little. He was about to pass on
+      with a bow, when a sudden thought struck him. &ldquo;Yes. To be sure! In your
+      confidential position you are aware of many things,&rdquo; he murmured, looking
+      at the cat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That animal got a momentary convulsive hug from the lady companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything was disclosed to me a long time ago,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything,&rdquo; Razumov repeated absently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch is an awful despot,&rdquo; she jerked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov went on studying the stripes on the grey fur of the cat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An iron will is an integral part of such a temperament. How else could he
+      be a leader? And I think that you are mistaken in&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You tell me that I am mistaken. But I tell you all
+      the same that he cares for no one.&rdquo; She jerked her head up. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you
+      bring that girl here. That&rsquo;s what you have been told to do&mdash;to bring
+      that girl here. Listen to me; you had better tie a stone round her neck
+      and throw her into the lake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had a sensation of chill and gloom, as if a heavy cloud had passed
+      over the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The girl?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What have I to do with her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have been told to bring Nathalie Haldin here. Am I not right? Of
+      course I am right. I was not in the room, but I know. I know Peter
+      Ivanovitch sufficiently well. He is a great man. Great men are horrible.
+      Well, that&rsquo;s it. Have nothing to do with her. That&rsquo;s the best you can do,
+      unless you want her to become like me&mdash;disillusioned! Disillusioned!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like you,&rdquo; repeated Razumov, glaring at her face, as devoid of all
+      comeliness of feature and complexion as the most miserable beggar is of
+      money. He smiled, still feeling chilly: a peculiar sensation which annoyed
+      him. &ldquo;Disillusioned as to Peter Ivanovitch! Is that all you have lost?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She declared, looking frightened, but with immense conviction, &ldquo;Peter
+      Ivanovitch stands for everything.&rdquo; Then she added, in another tone, &ldquo;Keep
+      the girl away from this house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And are you absolutely inciting me to disobey Peter Ivanovitch just
+      because&mdash;because you are disillusioned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to blink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Directly I saw you for the first time I was comforted. You took your hat
+      off to me. You looked as if one could trust you. Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shrank before Razumov&rsquo;s savage snarl of, &ldquo;I have heard something like
+      this before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was so confounded that she could do nothing but blink for a long time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was your humane manner,&rdquo; she explained plaintively. &ldquo;I have been
+      starving for, I won&rsquo;t say kindness, but just for a little civility, for I
+      don&rsquo;t know how long. And now you are angry....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no, on the contrary,&rdquo; he protested. &ldquo;I am very glad you trust me.
+      It&rsquo;s possible that later on I may...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, if you were to get ill,&rdquo; she interrupted eagerly, &ldquo;or meet some
+      bitter trouble, you would find I am not a useless fool. You have only to
+      let me know. I will come to you. I will indeed. And I will stick to you.
+      Misery and I are old acquaintances&mdash;but this life here is worse than
+      starving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused anxiously, then in a voice for the first time sounding really
+      timid, she added&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or if you were engaged in some dangerous work. Sometimes a humble
+      companion&mdash;I would not want to know anything. I would follow you with
+      joy. I could carry out orders. I have the courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked attentively at the scared round eyes, at the withered,
+      sallow, round cheeks. They were quivering about the corners of the mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wants to escape from here,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I were to tell you that I am engaged in dangerous work?&rdquo; he
+      uttered slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pressed the cat to her threadbare bosom with a breathless exclamation.
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; Then not much above a whisper: &ldquo;Under Peter Ivanovitch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not under Peter Ivanovitch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He read admiration in her eyes, and made an effort to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held up his closed hand with the index raised. &ldquo;Like this finger,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was trembling slightly. But it occurred to Razumov that they might
+      have been observed from the house, and he became anxious to be gone. She
+      blinked, raising up to him her puckered face, and seemed to beg mutely to
+      be told something more, to be given a word of encouragement for her
+      starving, grotesque, and pathetic devotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can we be seen from the house?&rdquo; asked Razumov confidentially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered, without showing the slightest surprise at the question&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, we can&rsquo;t, on account of this end of the stables.&rdquo; And she added, with
+      an acuteness which surprised Razumov, &ldquo;But anybody looking out of an
+      upstairs window would know that you have not passed through the gates
+      yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s likely to spy out of the window?&rdquo; queried Razumov. &ldquo;Peter
+      Ivanovitch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he trouble his head?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He expects somebody this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know the person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s more than one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had lowered her eyelids. Razumov looked at her curiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. You hear everything they say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She murmured without any animosity&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do the tables and chairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He understood that the bitterness accumulated in the heart of that
+      helpless creature had got into her veins, and, like some subtle poison,
+      had decomposed her fidelity to that hateful pair. It was a great piece of
+      luck for him, he reflected; because women are seldom venal after the
+      manner of men, who can be bought for material considerations. She would be
+      a good ally, though it was not likely that she was allowed to hear as much
+      as the tables and chairs of the Chateau Borel. That could not be expected.
+      But still.... And, at any rate, she could be made to talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she looked up her eyes met the fixed stare of Razumov, who began to
+      speak at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, dear...but upon my word, I haven&rsquo;t the pleasure of knowing
+      your name yet. Isn&rsquo;t it strange?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the first time she made a movement of the shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it strange? No one is told my name. No one cares. No one talks to me,
+      no one writes to me. My parents don&rsquo;t even know if I&rsquo;m alive. I have no
+      use for a name, and I have almost forgotten it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov murmured gravely, &ldquo;Yes, but still...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on much slower, with indifference&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may call me Tekla, then. My poor Andrei called me so. I was devoted
+      to him. He lived in wretchedness and suffering, and died in misery. That
+      is the lot of all us Russians, nameless Russians. There is nothing else
+      for us, and no hope anywhere, unless...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless all these people with names are done away with,&rdquo; she finished,
+      blinking and pursing up her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be easier to call you Tekla, as you direct me,&rdquo; said Razumov, &ldquo;if
+      you consent to call me Kirylo, when we are talking like this&mdash;quietly&mdash;only
+      you and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he said to himself, &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s a being who must be terribly afraid of the
+      world, else she would have run away from this situation before.&rdquo; Then he
+      reflected that the mere fact of leaving the great man abruptly would make
+      her a suspect. She could expect no support or countenance from anyone.
+      This revolutionist was not fit for an independent existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved with him a few steps, blinking and nursing the cat with a small
+      balancing movement of her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;only you and I. That&rsquo;s how I was with my poor Andrei, only he
+      was dying, killed by these official brutes&mdash;while you! You are
+      strong. You kill the monsters. You have done a great deed. Peter
+      Ivanovitch himself must consider you. Well&mdash;don&rsquo;t forget me&mdash;especially
+      if you are going back to work in Russia. I could follow you, carrying
+      anything that was wanted&mdash;at a distance, you know. Or I could watch
+      for hours at the corner of a street if necessary,&mdash;in wet or snow&mdash;yes,
+      I could&mdash;all day long. Or I could write for you dangerous documents,
+      lists of names or instructions, so that in case of mischance the
+      handwriting could not compromise you. And you need not be afraid if they
+      were to catch me. I would know how to keep dumb. We women are not so
+      easily daunted by pain. I heard Peter Ivanovitch say it is our blunt
+      nerves or something. We can stand it better. And it&rsquo;s true; I would just
+      as soon bite my tongue out and throw it at them as not. What&rsquo;s the good of
+      speech to me? Who would ever want to hear what I could say? Ever since I
+      closed the eyes of my poor Andrei I haven&rsquo;t met a man who seemed to care
+      for the sound of my voice. I should never have spoken to you if the very
+      first time you appeared here you had not taken notice of me so nicely. I
+      could not help speaking of you to that charming dear girl. Oh, the sweet
+      creature! And strong! One can see that at once. If you have a heart don&rsquo;t
+      let her set her foot in here. Good-bye!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov caught her by the arm. Her emotion at being thus seized manifested
+      itself by a short struggle, after which she stood still, not looking at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you can tell me,&rdquo; he spoke in her ear, &ldquo;why they&mdash;these people
+      in that house there&mdash;are so anxious to get hold of her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She freed herself to turn upon him, as if made angry by the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you understand that Peter Ivanovitch must direct, inspire,
+      influence? It is the breath of his life. There can never be too many
+      disciples. He can&rsquo;t bear thinking of anyone escaping him. And a woman,
+      too! There is nothing to be done without women, he says. He has written
+      it. He&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man was staring at her passion when she broke off suddenly and
+      ran away behind the stable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, thus left to himself, took the direction of the gate. But on this
+      day of many conversations, he discovered that very probably he could not
+      leave the grounds without having to hold another one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stepping in view from beyond the lodge appeared the expected visitors of
+      Peter Ivanovitch: a small party composed of two men and a woman. They
+      noticed him too, immediately, and stopped short as if to consult. But in a
+      moment the woman, moving aside, motioned with her arm to the two men, who,
+      leaving the drive at once, struck across the large neglected lawn, or
+      rather grass-plot, and made directly for the house. The woman remained on
+      the path waiting for Razumov&rsquo;s approach. She had recognized him. He, too,
+      had recognized her at the first glance. He had been made known to her at
+      Zurich, where he had broken his journey while on his way from Dresden.
+      They had been much together for the three days of his stay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was wearing the very same costume in which he had seen her first. A
+      blouse of crimson silk made her noticeable at a distance. With that she
+      wore a short brown skirt and a leather belt. Her complexion was the colour
+      of coffee and milk, but very clear; her eyes black and glittering, her
+      figure erect. A lot of thick hair, nearly white, was done up loosely under
+      a dusty Tyrolese hat of dark cloth, which seemed to have lost some of its
+      trimmings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov, after
+      approaching her close, felt obliged to smile. She greeted him with a manly
+      hand-grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! Are you going away?&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;How is that, Razumov?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going away because I haven&rsquo;t been asked to stay,&rdquo; Razumov answered,
+      returning the pressure of her hand with much less force than she had put
+      into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She jerked her head sideways like one who understands. Meantime Razumov&rsquo;s
+      eyes had strayed after the two men. They were crossing the grass-plot
+      obliquely, without haste. The shorter of the two was buttoned up in a
+      narrow overcoat of some thin grey material, which came nearly to his
+      heels. His companion, much taller and broader, wore a short, close-fitting
+      jacket and tight trousers tucked into shabby top-boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, who had sent them out of Razumov&rsquo;s way apparently, spoke in a
+      businesslike voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to come rushing from Zurich on purpose to meet the train and take
+      these two along here to see Peter Ivanovitch. I&rsquo;ve just managed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! indeed,&rdquo; Razumov said perfunctorily, and very vexed at her staying
+      behind to talk to him &ldquo;From Zurich&mdash;yes, of course. And these two,
+      they come from....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She interrupted, without emphasis&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From quite another direction. From a distance, too. A considerable
+      distance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov shrugged his shoulders. The two men from a distance, after having
+      reached the wall of the terrace, disappeared suddenly at its foot as if
+      the earth had opened to swallow them up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well, they have just come from America.&rdquo; The woman in the crimson
+      blouse shrugged her shoulders too a little before making that statement.
+      &ldquo;The time is drawing near,&rdquo; she interjected, as if speaking to herself. &ldquo;I
+      did not tell them who you were. Yakovlitch would have wanted to embrace
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that he with the wisp of hair hanging from his chin, in the long
+      coat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve guessed aright. That&rsquo;s Yakovlitch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they could not find their way here from the station without you
+      coming on purpose from Zurich to show it to them? Verily, without women we
+      can do nothing. So it stands written, and apparently so it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was conscious of an immense lassitude under his effort to be sarcastic.
+      And he could see that she had detected it with those steady, brilliant
+      black eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Nothing. I&rsquo;ve had a devil of a day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She waited, with her black eyes fixed on his face. Then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of that? You men are so impressionable and self-conscious. One day
+      is like another, hard, hard&mdash;and there&rsquo;s an end of it, till the great
+      day comes. I came over for a very good reason. They wrote to warn Peter
+      Ivanovitch of their arrival. But where from? Only from Cherbourg on a bit
+      of ship&rsquo;s notepaper. Anybody could have done that. Yakovlitch has lived
+      for years and years in America. I am the only one at hand who had known
+      him well in the old days. I knew him very well indeed. So Peter Ivanovitch
+      telegraphed, asking me to come. It&rsquo;s natural enough, is it not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You came to vouch for his identity?&rdquo; inquired Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Something of the kind. Fifteen years of a life like his make changes
+      in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think of
+      Yakovlitch before he went to America&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The softness of the low tone caused Razumov to glance at her sideways. She
+      sighed; her black eyes were looking away; she had plunged the fingers of
+      her right hand deep into the mass of nearly white hair, and stirred them
+      there absently. When she withdrew her hand the little hat perched on the
+      top of her head remained slightly tilted, with a queer inquisitive effect,
+      contrasting strongly with the reminiscent murmur that escaped her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were not in our first youth even then. But a man is a child always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov thought suddenly, &ldquo;They have been living together.&rdquo; Then aloud&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you follow him to America?&rdquo; he asked point-blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you remember what was going on fifteen years ago? It was a time of
+      activity. The Revolution has its history by this time. You are in it and
+      yet you don&rsquo;t seem to know it. Yakovlitch went away then on a mission; I
+      went back to Russia. It had to be so. Afterwards there was nothing for him
+      to come back to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! indeed,&rdquo; muttered Razumov, with affected surprise. &ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you trying to insinuate&rdquo; she exclaimed quickly. &ldquo;Well, and what
+      then if he did get discouraged a little....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee hanging from his chin. A regular
+      Uncle Sam,&rdquo; growled Razumov. &ldquo;Well, and you? You who went to Russia? You
+      did not get discouraged.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind. Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be doubted. He, at any rate,
+      is the right sort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon Razumov while she spoke,
+      and for a moment afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; Razumov inquired coldly, &ldquo;but does it mean that you, for
+      instance, think that I am not the right sort?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no protest, gave no sign of having heard the question; she
+      continued looking at him in a manner which he judged not to be absolutely
+      unfriendly. In Zurich when he passed through she had taken him under her
+      charge, in a way, and was with him from morning till night during his stay
+      of two days. She took him round to see several people. At first she talked
+      to him a great deal and rather unreservedly, but always avoiding all
+      reference to herself; towards the middle of the second day she fell
+      silent, attending him zealously as before, and even seeing him off at the
+      railway station, where she pressed his hand firmly through the lowered
+      carriage window, and, stepping back without a word, waited till the train
+      moved. He had noticed that she was treated with quiet regard. He knew
+      nothing of her parentage, nothing of her private history or political
+      record; he judged her from his own private point of view, as being a
+      distinct danger in his path. &ldquo;Judged&rdquo; is not perhaps the right word. It
+      was more of a feeling, the summing up of slight impressions aided by the
+      discovery that he could not despise her as he despised all the others. He
+      had not expected to see her again so soon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, decidedly; her expression was not unfriendly. Yet he perceived an
+      acceleration in the beat of his heart. The conversation could not be
+      abandoned at that point. He went on in accents of scrupulous inquiry&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it perhaps because I don&rsquo;t seem to accept blindly every development of
+      the general doctrine&mdash;such for instance as the feminism of our great
+      Peter Ivanovitch? If that is what makes me suspect, then I can only say I
+      would scorn to be a slave even to an idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had been looking at him all the time, not as a listener looks at one,
+      but as if the words he chose to say were only of secondary interest. When
+      he finished she slipped her hand, by a sudden and decided movement, under
+      his arm and impelled him gently towards the gate of the grounds. He felt
+      her firmness and obeyed the impulsion at once, just as the other two men
+      had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the wave of her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They made a few steps like this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all right,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You may be
+      valuable&mdash;very valuable. What&rsquo;s the matter with you is that you don&rsquo;t
+      like us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She released him. He met her with a frosty smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I expected then to have love as well as convictions?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know very well what I mean. People have been thinking you not quite
+      whole-hearted. I have heard that opinion from one side and another. But I
+      have understood you at the end of the first day....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What phrases he uses!&rdquo; she exclaimed parenthetically. &ldquo;Ah! Kirylo
+      Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and
+      afraid of trifles. Moreover, you had no training. What you want is to be
+      taken in hand by some woman. I am sorry I am not staying here a few days.
+      I am going back to Zurich to-morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch with me
+      most likely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This information relieved Razumov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry too,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But, all the same, I don&rsquo;t think you
+      understand me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He breathed more freely; she did not protest, but asked, &ldquo;And how did you
+      get on with Peter Ivanovitch? You have seen a good deal of each other. How
+      is it between you two?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not knowing what answer to make, the young man inclined his head slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips had been parted in expectation. She pressed them together, and
+      seemed to reflect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This had a sound of finality, but she did not leave him. It was impossible
+      to guess what she had in her mind. Razumov muttered&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not of me that you should have asked that question. In a moment you
+      shall see Peter Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
+      naturally. He will be curious to know what has delayed you so long in this
+      garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something to say to me. Several
+      things. He may even speak of you&mdash;question me. Peter Ivanovitch is
+      inclined to trust me generally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Question you? That&rsquo;s very likely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, half serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;and what shall I say to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. You may tell him of your discovery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why&mdash;my lack of love for....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! That&rsquo;s between ourselves,&rdquo; she interrupted, it was hard to say
+      whether in jest or earnest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch something in my favour,&rdquo;
+       said Razumov, with grim playfulness. &ldquo;Well, then, you can tell him that I
+      am very much in earnest about my mission. I mean to succeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been given a mission!&rdquo; she exclaimed quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It amounts to that. I have been told to bring about a certain event.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him searchingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mission,&rdquo; she repeated, very grave and interested all at once. &ldquo;What
+      sort of mission?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something in the nature of propaganda work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Far away from here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Not very far,&rdquo; said Razumov, restraining a sudden desire to laugh,
+      although he did not feel joyous in the least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So!&rdquo; she said thoughtfully. &ldquo;Well, I am not asking questions. It&rsquo;s
+      sufficient that Peter Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
+      Everything is bound to come right in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think, young man. I just simply believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that faith?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not answer the question, and they stood idle, silent, as if
+      reluctant to part with each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s just like a man,&rdquo; she murmured at last. &ldquo;As if it were possible to
+      tell how a belief comes to one.&rdquo; Her thin Mephistophelian eyebrows moved a
+      little. &ldquo;Truly there are millions of people in Russia who would envy the
+      life of dogs in this country. It is a horror and a shame to confess this
+      even between ourselves. One must believe for very pity. This can&rsquo;t go on.
+      No! It can&rsquo;t go on. For twenty years I have been coming and going, looking
+      neither to the left nor to the right.... What are you smiling to yourself
+      for? You are only at the beginning. You have begun well, but you just wait
+      till you have trodden every particle of yourself under your feet in your
+      comings and goings. For that is what it comes to. You&rsquo;ve got to trample
+      down every particle of your own feelings; for stop you cannot, you must
+      not. I have been young, too&mdash;but perhaps you think that I am
+      complaining-eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think anything of the sort,&rdquo; protested Razumov indifferently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say you don&rsquo;t, you dear superior creature. You don&rsquo;t care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair on the left side, and that
+      brusque movement had the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat straight on
+      her head. She frowned under it without animosity, in the manner of an
+      investigator. Razumov averted his face carelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You men are all alike. You mistake luck for merit. You do it in good
+      faith too! I would not be too hard on you. It&rsquo;s masculine nature. You men
+      are ridiculously pitiful in your aptitude to cherish childish illusions
+      down to the very grave. There are a lot of us who have been at work for
+      fifteen years&mdash;I mean constantly&mdash;trying one way after another,
+      underground and above ground, looking neither to the right nor to the
+      left! I can talk about it. I have been one of these that never rested....
+      There! What&rsquo;s the use of talking.... Look at my grey hairs! And here two
+      babies come along&mdash;I mean you and Haldin&mdash;you come along and
+      manage to strike a blow at the very first try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and energetic lips of the
+      woman revolutionist, Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of the
+      irrevocable. But in all the months which had passed over his head he had
+      become hardened to the experience. The consciousness was no longer
+      accompanied by the blank dismay and the blind anger of the early days. He
+      had argued himself into new beliefs; and he had made for himself a mental
+      atmosphere of gloomy and sardonic reverie, a sort of murky medium through
+      which the event appeared like a featureless shadow having vaguely the
+      shape of a man; a shape extremely familiar, yet utterly inexpressive,
+      except for its air of discreet waiting in the dusk. It was not alarming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was he like?&rdquo; the woman revolutionist asked unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was he like?&rdquo; echoed Razumov, making a painful effort not to turn
+      upon her savagely. But he relieved himself by laughing a little while he
+      stole a glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. This reception of
+      her inquiry disturbed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How like a woman,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;What is the good of concerning yourself
+      with his appearance? Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all feminine
+      influences now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A frown, making three folds at the root of her nose, accentuated the
+      Mephistophelian slant of her eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You suffer, Razumov,&rdquo; she suggested, in her low, confident voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense!&rdquo; Razumov faced the woman fairly. &ldquo;But now I think of it, I
+      am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the one
+      over there&mdash;Madame de S&mdash;, you know. Formerly the dead were
+      allowed to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy
+      old harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true
+      that they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But
+      couldn&rsquo;t the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity?
+      Couldn&rsquo;t she conjure him up for you?&rdquo;&mdash;he jested like a man in pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
+      wearily, &ldquo;Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea for
+      us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
+      some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time with
+      such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the ghost
+      of it&mdash;the cold ghost of it&mdash;still lingering in the temple. But
+      as to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
+      We mustn&rsquo;t, We can&rsquo;t. The other day I read in some paper or other an
+      alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties. It
+      impresses the world. It&rsquo;s our prestige.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;&rdquo; the woman in the
+      crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but her
+      black eyes never left Razumov&rsquo;s face. &ldquo;And what for, pray? Simply because
+      some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his petty masculine
+      standards. You might think he was one of these nervous sensitives that
+      come to a bad end. And yet,&rdquo; she went on, after a short, reflective pause
+      and changing the mode of her address, &ldquo;and yet I have just learned
+      something which makes me think that you are a man of character, Kirylo
+      Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed&mdash;you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their eyes
+      met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared at the
+      clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar, quite
+      empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to him he
+      would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He was
+      inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had a reason
+      for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any instant, in
+      the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some momentous words
+      might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody&rsquo;s lips. As long as he
+      managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down his irritability there
+      was nothing to fear. The only condition of success and safety was
+      indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were actually
+      a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary plots, of
+      this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime. Silently he
+      indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral and mental
+      remoteness. He did not even smile when he heard her repeat the words&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! A strong character.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not thinking
+      of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t look out,&rdquo; he mumbled, still looking away, &ldquo;you shall
+      certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not to be shaken off in such a way. As a matter of fact he had not
+      expected to succeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind, it will be no great loss. I mean the missing of her tea and
+      only the ghost of it at that. As to the lady, you must understand that she
+      has her positive uses. See <i>that</i>, Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head at this imperative appeal and saw the woman
+      revolutionist making the motions of counting money into the palm of her
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what it is. You see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov uttered a slow &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; and returned to his prisoner-like gazing
+      upon the neat and shady road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Material means must be obtained in some way, and this is easier than
+      breaking into banks. More certain too. There! I am joking.... What is he
+      muttering to himself now?&rdquo; she cried under her breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch&rsquo;s devoted self-sacrifice, that&rsquo;s all.
+      It&rsquo;s enough to make one sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature. Sick! Makes him sick! And what do
+      you know of the truth of it? There&rsquo;s no looking into the secrets of the
+      heart. Peter Ivanovitch knew her years ago, in his worldly days, when he
+      was a young officer in the Guards. It is not for us to judge an inspired
+      person. That&rsquo;s where you men have an advantage. You are inspired sometimes
+      both in thought and action. I have always admitted that when you <i>are</i>
+      inspired, when you manage to throw off your masculine cowardice and
+      prudishness you are not to be equalled by us. Only, how seldom.... Whereas
+      the silliest woman can always be made of use. And why? Because we have
+      passion, unappeasable passion.... I should like to know what he is smiling
+      at?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not smiling,&rdquo; protested Razumov gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! How is one to call it? You made some sort of face. Yes, I know! You
+      men can love here and hate there and desire something or other&mdash;and
+      you make a great to-do about it, and you call it passion! Yes! While it
+      lasts. But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these very
+      things I tell you, and with desire itself. That&rsquo;s why we can&rsquo;t be bribed
+      off so easily as you men. In life, you see, there is not much choice. You
+      have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us, painted or
+      unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact tone. Razumov&rsquo;s attention
+      had wandered away on a track of its own&mdash;outside the bars of the gate&mdash;but
+      not out of earshot. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rot or burn! Powerfully stated. Painted or unpainted. Very vigorous.
+      Painted or...Do tell me&mdash;she would be infernally jealous of him,
+      wouldn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? What? The Baroness? Eleanor Maximovna? Jealous of Peter Ivanovitch?
+      Heavens! Are these the questions the man&rsquo;s mind is running on? Such a
+      thing is not to be thought of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Can&rsquo;t a wealthy old woman be jealous? Or, are they all pure spirits
+      together?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what put it into your head to ask such a question?&rdquo; she wondered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like,&rdquo; she retorted at once. &ldquo;It is not the time to be frivolous.
+      What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps, you are only
+      playing a part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had felt that woman&rsquo;s observation of him like a physical contact,
+      like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he received
+      the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a closer
+      grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Playing a Part,&rdquo; he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. &ldquo;It
+      must be done very badly since you see through the assumption.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin
+      black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He added
+      hardly audibly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is doing it?&rdquo; she snapped out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? Everybody,&rdquo; he said impatiently. &ldquo;You are a materialist, aren&rsquo;t
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: &lsquo;Man is a digestive
+      tube.&rsquo; I imagine now....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spit on him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can&rsquo;t ignore the importance of a
+      good digestion. The joy of life&mdash;you know the joy of life?&mdash;depends
+      on a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism,
+      breeds black fancies and thoughts of death. These are facts ascertained by
+      physiologists. Well, I assure you that ever since I came over from Russia
+      I have been stuffed with indigestible foreign concoctions of the most
+      nauseating kind&mdash;pah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are joking,&rdquo; she murmured incredulously. He assented in a detached
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It is all a joke. It&rsquo;s hardly worth while talking to a man like me.
+      Yet for that very reason men have been known to take their own life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary, I think it is worth while talking to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept her in the corner of his eye. She seemed to be thinking out some
+      scathing retort, but ended by only shrugging her shoulders slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shallow talk! I suppose one must pardon this weakness in you,&rdquo; she said,
+      putting a special accent on the last word. There was something anxious in
+      her indulgent conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov noted the slightest shades in this conversation, which he had not
+      expected, for which he was not prepared. That was it. &ldquo;I was not
+      prepared,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;It has taken me unawares.&rdquo; It seemed to
+      him that if he only could allow himself to pant openly like a dog for a
+      time this oppression would pass away. &ldquo;I shall never be found prepared,&rdquo;
+       he thought, with despair. He laughed a little, saying as lightly as he
+      could&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. I don&rsquo;t ask for mercy.&rdquo; Then affecting a playful uneasiness, &ldquo;But
+      aren&rsquo;t you afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of plotting something
+      unauthorized together by the gate here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I am not afraid. You are quite safe from suspicions while you are
+      with me, my dear young man.&rdquo; The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
+      out. &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch trusts me,&rdquo; she went on, quite austerely. &ldquo;He takes
+      my advice. I am his right hand, as it were, in certain most important
+      things.... That amuses you what? Do you think I am boasting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God forbid. I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch seems
+      to have solved the woman question pretty completely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone. All
+      day long he had been saying the wrong things. It was folly, worse than
+      folly. It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his
+      will. Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the
+      promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a great
+      store of secret knowledge and so much influence? Why give her this
+      puzzling impression? But she did not seem inimical. There was no anger in
+      her voice. It was strangely speculative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One does not know what to think, Razumov. You must have bitten something
+      bitter in your cradle.&rdquo; Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m! Something bitter? That&rsquo;s an explanation,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;Only it was
+      much later. And don&rsquo;t you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I come
+      from the same cradle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had
+      experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman
+      revolutionist murmured, after a pause&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean&mdash;Russia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He disdained even to nod. She seemed softened, her black eyes very still,
+      as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all its tender
+      associations. But suddenly she knitted her brows in a Mephistophelian
+      frown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Perhaps no wonder, then. Yes. One lies there lapped up in evils,
+      watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
+      They must be driven away, destroyed utterly. In regard of that task
+      nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful. That&rsquo;s
+      how I came to feel in the end. The great thing is not to quarrel amongst
+      ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles. Remember that,
+      Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov was not listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched in
+      a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his scorn
+      were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him that now
+      they were blunted for ever. &ldquo;I am a match for them all,&rdquo; he thought, with
+      a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman revolutionist had ceased
+      speaking; he was not looking at her; there was no one passing along the
+      road. He almost forgot that he was not alone. He heard her voice again,
+      curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the hesitation which had been the
+      real reason of her prolonged silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Razumov!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man
+      who hears a false note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually
+      attended the lectures at the University?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of the
+      question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after the
+      flash of the fired shot. Luckily his disengaged hand was ready to grip a
+      bar of the gate. He held it with a terrible force, but his presence of
+      mind was gone. He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!&rdquo; she urged him. &ldquo;I know you are not a boastful
+      man. <i>That</i> one must say for you. You are a silent man. Too silent,
+      perhaps. You are feeding on some bitterness of your own. You are not an
+      enthusiast. You are, perhaps, all the stronger for that. But you might
+      tell me. One would like to understand you a little more. I was so
+      immensely struck.... Have you really done it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got his voice back. The shot had missed him. It had been fired at
+      random, altogether, more like a signal for coming to close quarters. It
+      was to be a plain struggle for self-preservation. And she was a dangerous
+      adversary too. But he was ready for battle; he was so ready that when he
+      turned towards her not a muscle of his face moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; he said, without animation, secretly strung up but perfectly
+      sure of himself. &ldquo;Lectures&mdash;certainly, But what makes you ask?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was she who was animated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had it in a letter, written by a young man in Petersburg; one of us, of
+      course. You were seen&mdash;you were observed with your notebook,
+      impassible, taking notes....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I call such coolness superb&mdash;that&rsquo;s all. It is a proof of uncommon
+      strength of character. The young man writes that nobody could have guessed
+      from your face and manner the part you had played only some two hours
+      before&mdash;the great, momentous, glorious part....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no. Nobody could have guessed,&rdquo; assented Razumov gravely, &ldquo;because,
+      don&rsquo;t you see, nobody at that time....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes. But all the same you are a man of exceptional fortitude, it
+      seems. You looked exactly as usual. It was remembered afterwards with
+      wonder....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cost me no effort,&rdquo; Razumov declared, with the same staring gravity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s almost more wonderful still!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and fell silent
+      while Razumov asked himself whether he had not said there something
+      utterly unnecessary&mdash;or even worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her head eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your intention was to stay in Russia? You had planned....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; interrupted Razumov without haste. &ldquo;I had made no plans of any
+      sort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You just simply walked away?&rdquo; she struck in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed his head in slow assent. &ldquo;Simply&mdash;yes.&rdquo; He had gradually
+      released his hold on the bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
+      conviction that no random shot could knock him over now. And suddenly he
+      was inspired to add, &ldquo;The snow was coming down very thick, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a slight appreciative movement of the head, like an expert in such
+      enterprises, very interested, capable of taking every point
+      professionally. Razumov remembered something he had heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I turned into a narrow side street, you understand,&rdquo; he went on
+      negligently, and paused as if it were not worth talking about. Then he
+      remembered another detail and dropped it before her, like a disdainful
+      dole to her curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She clicked her tongue at that symptom, very struck indeed. Then&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the notebook! The amazing notebook, man. You don&rsquo;t mean to say you
+      had put it in your pocket beforehand!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov gave a start. It might have been a sign of impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went home. Straight home to my rooms,&rdquo; he said distinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The coolness of the man! You dared?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? I assure you I was perfectly calm. Ha! Calmer than I am now
+      perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like you much better as you are now than when you indulge that bitter
+      vein of yours, Razumov. And nobody in the house saw you return&mdash;eh?
+      That might have appeared queer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one,&rdquo; Razumov said firmly. &ldquo;Dvornik, landlady, girl, all out of the
+      way. I went up like a shadow. It was a murky morning. The stairs were
+      dark. I glided up like a phantom. Fate? Luck? What do you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I just see it!&rdquo; The eyes of the woman revolutionist snapped darkly. &ldquo;Well&mdash;and
+      then you considered....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had it all ready in his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I looked at my watch, since you want to know. There was just time. I
+      took that notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe. Have you ever
+      listened to the pit-pat of a man running round and round the shaft of a
+      deep staircase? They have a gaslight at the bottom burning night and day.
+      I suppose it&rsquo;s gleaming down there now.... The sound dies out&mdash;the
+      flame winks....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity
+      of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist
+      received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He
+      checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man
+      who has been dreaming aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning?
+      At night it&rsquo;s another matter. I did not care if all the house had been
+      there to look at me. But I don&rsquo;t suppose there was anyone. It&rsquo;s best not
+      to be seen or heard. Aha! The people that are neither seen nor heard are
+      the lucky ones&mdash;in Russia. Don&rsquo;t you admire my luck?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Astonishing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If you have luck as well as determination, then
+      indeed you are likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for the work
+      in hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov that it was speculative,
+      even as though she were already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
+      of the work. Her eyes were cast down. He waited, not very alert now, but
+      with the grip of the ever-present danger giving him an air of attentive
+      gravity. Who could have written about him in that letter from Petersburg?
+      A fellow student, surely&mdash;some imbecile victim of revolutionary
+      propaganda, some foolish slave of foreign, subversive ideals. A long,
+      famine-stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to his mental search.
+      That must have been the fellow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing,
+      the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like a
+      thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage in
+      the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and piteous
+      imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist refugees this
+      utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means constituting a
+      danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his advantage rather,
+      a piece of sinister luck which had only to be accepted with proper
+      caution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet, Razumov,&rdquo; he heard the musing voice of the woman, &ldquo;you have not
+      the face of a lucky man.&rdquo; She raised her eyes with renewed interest. &ldquo;And
+      so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked off and
+      made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I suppose it
+      was agreed beforehand that, once the business over, each of you would go
+      his own way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate, if
+      cautious, manner of speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was not that the best thing to do?&rdquo; he asked, in a dispassionate tone.
+      &ldquo;And anyway,&rdquo; he added, after waiting a moment, &ldquo;we did not give much
+      thought to what would come after. We never discussed formally any line of
+      conduct. It was understood, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She approved his statement with slight nods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In St. Petersburg itself,&rdquo; emphasized Razumov. &ldquo;It was the only safe
+      course for me. And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! Yes! I know. Clearly. And the other&mdash;this wonderful Haldin
+      appearing only to be regretted&mdash;you don&rsquo;t know what he intended?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet him
+      sooner or later. He raised his hands a little and let them fall helplessly
+      by his side&mdash;nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very curious,&rdquo; she pronounced slowly. &ldquo;And you did not think, Kirylo
+      Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.
+      But he thought that he owed it to himself to speak. A negative sign would
+      not do again. Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what that St.
+      Petersburg letter might have contained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stayed at home next day,&rdquo; he said, bending down a little and plunging
+      his glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not observe
+      the trembling of his lips. &ldquo;Yes, I stayed at home. As my actions are
+      remembered and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I was <i>not</i>
+      seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn&rsquo;t know? Well, I stopped at
+      home-the live-long day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic &ldquo;I see! It
+      must have been trying enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to understand one&rsquo;s feelings,&rdquo; said Razumov steadily. &ldquo;It was
+      trying. It was horrible; it was an atrocious day. It was not the last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I understand. Afterwards, when you heard they had got him. Don&rsquo;t I
+      know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight? One&rsquo;s ashamed
+      of being left. And I can remember so many. Never mind. They shall be
+      avenged before long. And what is death? At any rate, it is not a shameful
+      thing like some kinds of life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and unpleasant
+      tremor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some kinds of life?&rdquo; he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy heap
+      of iniquity which the world is. Life, Razumov, not to be vile must be a
+      revolt&mdash;a pitiless protest&mdash;all the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
+      instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
+      businesslike manner that she went on&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
+      immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I set
+      my eyes on you&mdash;you remember&mdash;in Zurich. Oh! You are full of
+      bitter revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself
+      may become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
+      justice which armed your and Haldin&rsquo;s hands to strike down that fanatical
+      brute...for it was that&mdash;nothing but that! I have been thinking it
+      out. It could have been nothing else but that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
+      sinister immobility of feature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
+      conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of&mdash;well&mdash;retributive
+      justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good, that,&rdquo; he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
+      and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
+      should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if
+      anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed&mdash;neither
+      happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted
+      consciences and broken lives&mdash;a futile game for arrogant philosophers
+      and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted through Razumov&rsquo;s head
+      while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand, the respected, trusted,
+      and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had such a weight in the
+      &ldquo;active&rdquo; section of every party. She was much more representative than the
+      great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she
+      was the true spirit of destructive revolution. And she was the personal
+      adversary he had to meet. It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to
+      deceive her out of her own mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has
+      been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his
+      mind. Of that cynical theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful
+      application, flouting in its own words the very spirit of ruthless
+      revolution, embodied in that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows,
+      like slightly sinuous lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the
+      perpendicular folds of a thoughtful frown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s it. Retributive. No pity!&rdquo; was the conclusion of her silence. And
+      this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating sentences&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to my story, Razumov!...&rdquo; Her father was a clever but unlucky
+      artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty; all
+      the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose
+      rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the very
+      air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood of his
+      sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him? Be
+      submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal I
+      shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you&mdash;nothing
+      except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread&mdash;but no consolation for your
+      trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your
+      miserable life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died. He died in the hospital.
+      Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence&mdash;she
+      saw it whole. She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of the
+      humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of a
+      society which nothing can absolve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Razumov,&rdquo; she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, &ldquo;it was
+      like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed not
+      the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great social
+      iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied sufferings.
+      From that moment I was a revolutionist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of
+      contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance. She, with
+      an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice since he
+      had come in contact with the woman, went on&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system exhorted
+      such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the secret
+      societies as soon as I knew how to find my way. I was sixteen years old&mdash;no
+      more, Razumov! And&mdash;look at my white hair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness
+      too was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a lot of it. I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of a
+      girl. Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that there
+      was the first step towards crushing the social infamy. Crush the Infamy! A
+      fine watchword! I would placard it on the walls of prisons and palaces,
+      carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that empty sky
+      for a sign of hope and terror&mdash;a portent of the end....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna,&rdquo; Razumov interrupted suddenly. &ldquo;Only,
+      so far you seem to have been writing it in water....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was checked but not offended. &ldquo;Who knows? Very soon it may become a
+      fact written all over that great land of ours,&rdquo; she hinted meaningly. &ldquo;And
+      then one would have lived long enough. White hair won&rsquo;t matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years
+      seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt. It
+      threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the brilliant
+      black glance, the upright compact figure, the simple, brisk
+      self-possession of the mature personality&mdash;as though in her
+      revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret, not of everlasting
+      youth, but of everlasting endurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov. Her mother might have been a
+      Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what. He reflected that a
+      revolutionist is seldom true to the settled type. All revolt is the
+      expression of strong individualism&mdash;ran his thought vaguely. One can
+      tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings. It was
+      astonishing that the police....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall not meet again very soon, I think,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;I am
+      leaving to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Zurich?&rdquo; Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from any
+      distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a
+      wrestling match.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Zurich&mdash;and farther on, perhaps, much farther. Another journey.
+      When I think of all my journeys! The last must come some day. Never mind,
+      Razumov. We had to have a good long talk. I would have certainly tried to
+      see you if we had not met. Peter Ivanovitch knows where you live? Yes. I
+      meant to have asked him&mdash;but it&rsquo;s better like this. You see, we
+      expect two more men; and I had much rather wait here talking with you than
+      up there at the house with....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself. &ldquo;Here they
+      are,&rdquo; she said rapidly. &ldquo;Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to say
+      good-bye, presently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      IV
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his incertitude of the ground on which he stood Razumov felt perturbed.
+      Turning his head quickly, he saw two men on the opposite side of the road.
+      Seeing themselves noticed by Sophia Antonovna, they crossed over at once,
+      and passed one after another through the little gate by the side of the
+      empty lodge. They looked hard at the stranger, but without mistrust, the
+      crimson blouse being a flaring safety signal. The first, great white
+      hairless face, double chin, prominent stomach, which he seemed to carry
+      forward consciously within a strongly distended overcoat, only nodded and
+      averted his eyes peevishly; his companion&mdash;lean, flushed cheekbones,
+      a military red moustache below a sharp, salient nose&mdash;approached at
+      once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her warmly. His voice was very strong but
+      inarticulate. It sounded like a deep buzzing. The woman revolutionist was
+      quietly cordial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Razumov,&rdquo; she announced in a clear voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lean new-comer made an eager half-turn. &ldquo;He will want to embrace me,&rdquo;
+       thought our young man with a deep recoil of all his being, while his limbs
+      seemed too heavy to move. But it was a groundless alarm. He had to do now
+      with a generation of conspirators who did not kiss each other on both
+      cheeks; and raising an arm that felt like lead he dropped his hand into a
+      largely-outstretched palm, fleshless and hot as if dried up by fever,
+      giving a bony pressure, expressive, seeming to say, &ldquo;Between us there&rsquo;s no
+      need of words.&rdquo; The man had big, wide-open eyes. Razumov fancied he could
+      see a smile behind their sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Razumov,&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna repeated loudly for the benefit of the
+      fat man, who at some distance displayed the profile of his stomach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one moved. Everything, sounds, attitudes, movements, and immobility
+      seemed to be part of an experiment, the result of which was a thin voice
+      piping with comic peevishness&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes! Razumov. We have been hearing of nothing but Mr. Razumov for
+      months. For my part, I confess I would rather have seen Haldin on this
+      spot instead of Mr. Razumov.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The squeaky stress put on the name &ldquo;Razumov&mdash;Mr. Razumov&rdquo; pierced the
+      ear ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an
+      elaborate joke. Astonishment was Razumov&rsquo;s first response, followed by
+      sudden indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the meaning of this?&rdquo; he asked in a stern tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut! Silliness. He&rsquo;s always like that.&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna was obviously
+      vexed. But she dropped the information, &ldquo;Necator,&rdquo; from her lips just loud
+      enough to be heard by Razumov. The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to
+      proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his overcoat. The
+      stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the
+      enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat
+      nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror
+      and laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nikita, surnamed Necator, with a sinister aptness of alliteration! Razumov
+      had heard of him. He had heard so much since crossing the frontier of
+      these celebrities of the militant revolution; the legends, the stories,
+      the authentic chronicle, which now and then peeps out before a
+      half-incredulous world. Razumov had heard of him. He was supposed to have
+      killed more, gendarmes and police agents than any revolutionist living. He
+      had been entrusted with executions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paper with the letters N.N., the very pseudonym of murder, found
+      pinned on the stabbed breast of a certain notorious spy (this picturesque
+      detail of a sensational murder case had got into the newspapers), was the
+      mark of his handiwork. &ldquo;By order of the Committee.&mdash;N.N.&rdquo; A corner of
+      the curtain lifted to strike the imagination of the gaping world. He was
+      said to have been innumerable times in and out of Russia, the Necator of
+      bureaucrats, of provincial governors, of obscure informers. He lived
+      between whiles, Razumov had heard, on the shores of the Lake of Como, with
+      a charming wife, devoted to the cause, and two young children. But how
+      could that creature, so grotesque as to set town dogs barking at its mere
+      sight, go about on those deadly errands and slip through the meshes of the
+      police?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What now? what now?&rdquo; the voice squeaked. &ldquo;I am only sincere. It&rsquo;s not
+      denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been
+      better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a
+      sentimentalist. Say what I think...only natural.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Squeak, squeak, squeak, without a gesture, without a stir&mdash;the
+      horrible squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy&mdash;this man of a
+      sinister alliterative nickname, this executioner of revolutionary
+      verdicts, the terrifying N.N. exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the
+      attention attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur. Sophia
+      Antonovna shrugged her shoulders. The comrade with the martial red
+      moustache hurried towards Razumov full of conciliatory intentions in his
+      strong buzzing voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Devil take it! And in this place, too, in the public street, so to speak.
+      But you can see yourself how it is. One of his fantastic sallies.
+      Absolutely of no consequence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray don&rsquo;t concern yourself,&rdquo; cried Razumov, going off into a long fit of
+      laughter. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t mention it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other, his hectic flush like a pair of burns on his cheek-bones,
+      stared for a moment and burst out laughing too. Razumov, whose hilarity
+      died out all at once, made a step forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough of this,&rdquo; he began in a clear, incisive voice, though he could
+      hardly control the trembling of his legs. &ldquo;I will have no more of it. I
+      shall not permit anyone.... I can see very well what you are at with those
+      allusions.... Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not be played
+      with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had spoken such words before. He had been driven to cry them out in the
+      face of other suspicions. It was an infernal cycle bringing round that
+      protest like a fatal necessity of his existence. But it was no use. He
+      would be always played with. Luckily life does not last for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t have it!&rdquo; he shouted, striking his fist into the palm of his
+      other hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch&mdash;what has come to you?&rdquo; The woman revolutionist
+      interfered with authority. They were all looking at Razumov now; the
+      slayer of spies and gendarmes had turned about, presenting his enormous
+      stomach in full, like a shield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t shout. There are people passing.&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna was apprehensive
+      of another outburst. A steam-launch from Monrepos had come to the
+      landing-stage opposite the gate, its hoarse whistle and the churning noise
+      alongside all unnoticed, had landed a small bunch of local passengers who
+      were dispersing their several ways. Only a specimen of early tourist in
+      knickerbockers, conspicuous by a brand-new yellow leather glass-case, hung
+      about for a moment, scenting something unusual about these four people
+      within the rusty iron gates of what looked the grounds run wild of an
+      unoccupied private house. Ah! If he had only known what the chance of
+      commonplace travelling had suddenly put in his way! But he was a well-bred
+      person; he averted his gaze and moved off with short steps along the
+      avenue, on the watch for a tramcar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gesture from Sophia Antonovna, &ldquo;Leave him to me,&rdquo; had sent the two men
+      away&mdash;the buzzing of the inarticulate voice growing fainter and
+      fainter, and the thin pipe of &ldquo;What now? what&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; reduced to
+      the proportions of a squeaking toy by the distance. They had left him to
+      her. So many things could be left safely to the experience of Sophia
+      Antonovna. And at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried
+      to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is born
+      an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the force of
+      a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts, assertive
+      violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final appeasement of
+      the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She had seen&mdash;often
+      had only divined&mdash;scores of these young men and young women going
+      through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a moody egotist.
+      And besides, it was a special&mdash;a unique case. She had never met an
+      individuality which interested and puzzled her so much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care, Razumov, my good friend. If you carry on like this you will go
+      mad. You are angry with everybody and bitter with yourself, and on the
+      look out for something to torment yourself with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s intolerable!&rdquo; Razumov could only speak in gasps. &ldquo;You must admit
+      that I can have no illusions on the attitude which...it isn&rsquo;t clear...or
+      rather only too clear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a gesture of despair. It was not his courage that failed him. The
+      choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat&mdash;the thought
+      of being condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere
+      without the hope of ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A glass of cold water is what you want.&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna glanced up the
+      grounds at the house and shook her head, then out of the gate at the
+      brimful placidity of the lake. With a half-comical shrug of the shoulders,
+      she gave the remedy up in the face of that abundance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is you, my dear soul, who are flinging yourself at something which
+      does not exist. What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It&rsquo;s absurd. You
+      couldn&rsquo;t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remonstrated with him reasonably, at some length too. He had nothing
+      to complain of in his reception. Every new-comer was discussed more or
+      less. Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted. No
+      one that she could remember had been shown from the first so much
+      confidence. Soon, very soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, he would be
+      given an opportunity of showing his devotion to the sacred task of
+      crushing the Infamy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, listening quietly, thought: &ldquo;It may be that she is trying to lull
+      my suspicions to sleep. On the other hand, it is obvious that most of them
+      are fools.&rdquo; He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his arms on his
+      breast, leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to what remains obscure in the fate of that poor Haldin,&rdquo; Sophia
+      Antonovna dropped into a slowness of utterance which was to Razumov like
+      the falling of molten lead drop by drop; &ldquo;as to that&mdash;though no one
+      ever hinted that either from fear or neglect your conduct has not been
+      what it should have been&mdash;well, I have a bit of intelligence....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov could not prevent himself from raising his head, and Sophia
+      Antonovna nodded slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have. You remember that letter from St. Petersburg I mentioned to you a
+      moment ago?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The letter? Perfectly. Some busybody has been reporting my conduct on a
+      certain day. It&rsquo;s rather sickening. I suppose our police are greatly
+      edified when they open these interesting and&mdash;and&mdash;superfluous
+      letters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh dear no! The police do not get hold of our letters as easily as you
+      imagine. The letter in question did not leave St. Petersburg till the ice
+      broke up. It went by the first English steamer which left the Neva this
+      spring. They have a fireman on board&mdash;one of us, in fact. It has
+      reached me from Hull....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused as if she were surprised at the sullen fixity of Razumov&rsquo;s
+      gaze, but went on at once, and much faster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have some of our people there who...but never mind. The writer of the
+      letter relates an incident which he thinks may possibly be connected with
+      Haldin&rsquo;s arrest. I was just going to tell you when those two men came
+      along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That also was an incident,&rdquo; muttered Razumov, &ldquo;of a very charming kind&mdash;for
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave off that!&rdquo; cried Sophia Antonovna. &ldquo;Nobody cares for Nikita&rsquo;s
+      barking. There&rsquo;s no malice in him. Listen to what I have to say. You may
+      be able to throw a light. There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town
+      peasant&mdash;a man who owned horses. He came to town years ago to work
+      for some relation as a driver and ended by owning a cab or two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture:
+      &ldquo;Wait!&rdquo; Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted her
+      now, not to save his life. The contraction of his facial muscles had been
+      involuntary, a mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was not a quite ordinary man of his class&mdash;it seems,&rdquo; she went
+      on. &ldquo;The people of the house&mdash;my informant talked with many of them&mdash;you
+      know, one of those enormous houses of shame and misery....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.
+      Razumov saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled
+      in snowflakes, with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining
+      greasily very near the ground. The ghost of that night pursued him. He
+      stood up to it with rage and with weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?&rdquo; Sophia
+      Antonovna was anxious to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling into
+      a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he probably
+      could not have said no. &ldquo;He mentioned to me once,&rdquo; he added, as if making
+      an effort of memory, &ldquo;a house of that sort. He used to visit some workmen
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact
+      quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having made
+      friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described Haldin&rsquo;s
+      appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into their
+      misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and&mdash;her
+      correspondent wrote&mdash;sometimes he spent a night in the house,
+      sleeping, they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Note that, Razumov! In a stable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt,&rdquo; assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw
+      closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed beast
+      could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were condemned
+      to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that it proved
+      Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant&mdash;a
+      reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other
+      inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of a
+      band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was
+      driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the fellow
+      of having given a hint to the police and...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain Ziemianitch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov was ready for the name. He had been looking out for the question.
+      &ldquo;When it comes I shall own up,&rdquo; he had said to himself. But he took his
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure!&rdquo; he began slowly. &ldquo;Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
+      horses. Yes. On one occasion. Ziemianitch! Certainly! Ziemianitch of the
+      horses.... How could it have slipped my memory like this? One of the last
+      conversations we had together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means,&rdquo;&mdash;Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,&mdash;&ldquo;that means,
+      Razumov, it was very shortly before&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before what?&rdquo; shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked
+      astonished but stood her ground. &ldquo;Before.... Oh! Of course, it was before!
+      How could it have been after? Only a few hours before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he spoke of him favourably?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With enthusiasm! The horses of Ziemianitch! The free soul of
+      Ziemianitch!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov took a savage delight in the loud utterance of that name, which
+      had never before crossed his lips audibly. He fixed his blazing eyes on
+      the woman till at last her fascinated expression recalled him to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The late Haldin,&rdquo; he said, holding himself in, with downcast eyes, &ldquo;was
+      inclined to take sudden fancies to people, on&mdash;on&mdash;what shall I
+      say&mdash;insufficient grounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There!&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands. &ldquo;That, to my mind, settles
+      it. The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! Your correspondent,&rdquo; Razumov said in an almost openly mocking tone.
+      &ldquo;What suspicions? How aroused? By this Ziemianitch? Probably some drunken,
+      gabbling, plausible...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk as if you had known him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But I knew Haldin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion communicated
+      to me in that very interesting letter. This Ziemianitch was found one
+      morning hanging from a hook in the stable&mdash;dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov felt a profound trouble. It was visible, because Sophia Antonovna
+      was moved to observe vivaciously&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! You begin to see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw it clearly enough&mdash;in the light of a lantern casting spokes of
+      shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long
+      boots hanging against the wall. A pointed hood, with the ends wound about
+      up to the eyes, hid the face. &ldquo;But that does not concern me,&rdquo; he
+      reflected. &ldquo;It does not affect my position at all. He never knew who had
+      thrashed him. He could not have known.&rdquo; Razumov felt sorry for the old
+      lover of the bottle and women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Some of them end like that,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;What is your idea, Sophia
+      Antonovna?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had
+      adopted it fully. She stated it in one word&mdash;&ldquo;Remorse.&rdquo; Razumov
+      opened his eyes very wide at that. Sophia Antonovna&rsquo;s informant, by
+      listening to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had
+      managed to come very near to the truth of Haldin&rsquo;s relation to
+      Ziemianitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of&mdash;that your
+      friend had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St.
+      Petersburg, at any rate. Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for
+      the rest. And that fellow&rsquo;s horses were part of the plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have actually got at the truth,&rdquo; Razumov marvelled to himself, while
+      he nodded judicially. &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s possible, very possible.&rdquo; But the woman
+      revolutionist was very positive that it was so. First of all, a
+      conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been partly
+      overheard. Then there were the suspicions of the people in the house when
+      their &ldquo;young gentleman&rdquo; (they did not know Haldin by his name) ceased to
+      call at the house. Some of them used to charge Ziemianitch with knowing
+      something of this absence. He denied it with exasperation; but the fact
+      was that ever since Haldin&rsquo;s disappearance he was not himself, growing
+      moody and thin. Finally, during a quarrel with some woman (to whom he was
+      making up), in which most of the inmates of the house took part
+      apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy, an athletic pedlar,
+      for an informer, and for having driven &ldquo;our young gentleman to Siberia,
+      the same as you did those young fellows who broke into houses.&rdquo; In
+      consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch got flung down a
+      flight of stairs. Thereupon he drank and moped for a week, and then hanged
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale. She charged
+      Ziemianitch either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a
+      certain date, overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop&mdash;perhaps in
+      the very eating-shop on the ground floor of the house&mdash;or, maybe, a
+      downright denunciation, followed by remorse. A man like that would be
+      capable of anything. People said he was a flighty old chap. And if he had
+      been once before mixed up with the police&mdash;as seemed certain, though
+      he always denied it&mdash;in connexion with these thieves, he would be
+      sure to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look out
+      for something to report. Possibly at first his tale was not made anything
+      of till the day that scoundrel de P&mdash;- got his deserts. Ah! But then
+      every bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally
+      they were bound to get Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands&mdash;&ldquo;Fatally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fatality&mdash;chance! Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the
+      queer verisimilitude of these inferences. They were obviously to his
+      advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally.&rdquo; Sophia
+      Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again. She had received the letter
+      three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter Ivanovitch. She knew
+      then that she would have the opportunity presently of meeting several men
+      of action assembled for an important purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself at
+      large. I have it in my pocket now. You understand how pleased I was to
+      come upon you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov was saying to himself, &ldquo;She won&rsquo;t offer to show the letter to me.
+      Not likely. Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers has
+      found out?&rdquo; He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;There you are again with your sensitiveness. It
+      makes you stupid. Don&rsquo;t you see, there was no starting-point for an
+      investigation even if any one had thought of it. A perfect blank! That&rsquo;s
+      exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving you
+      cautiously. It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my informant
+      striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser lodging in that
+      particular slum-house. A wonderful coincidence!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A pious person,&rdquo; suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, &ldquo;would say that
+      the hand of God has done it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My poor father would have said that.&rdquo; Sophia Antonovna did not smile. She
+      dropped her eyes. &ldquo;Not that his God ever helped him. It&rsquo;s a long time
+      since God has done anything for the people. Anyway, it&rsquo;s done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this would be quite final,&rdquo; said Razumov, with every appearance of
+      reflective impartiality, &ldquo;if there was any certitude that the &lsquo;our young
+      gentleman&rsquo; of these people was Victor Haldin. Have we got that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. There&rsquo;s no mistake. My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin&rsquo;s
+      personal appearance as with your own,&rdquo; the woman affirmed decisively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt,&rdquo; Razumov said to himself, with
+      reawakened uneasiness. Had his own visit to that accursed house passed
+      unnoticed? It was barely possible. Yet it was hardly probable. It was just
+      the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt busybody had been
+      picking up. But the letter did not seem to contain any allusion to that.
+      Unless she had suppressed it. And, if so, why? If it had really escaped
+      the prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a confounded genius for
+      recognizing people from description, it could only be for a time. He would
+      come upon it presently and hasten to write another letter&mdash;and then!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and disdain,
+      Razumov shuddered inwardly. It guarded him from common fear, but it could
+      not defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way by these
+      people. It was a sort of superstitious dread. Now, since his position had
+      been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of Ziemianitch, he
+      felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom from direct lying, with
+      its power of moving amongst them silent, unquestioning, listening,
+      impenetrable, like the very fate of their crimes and their folly. Was this
+      advantage his already? Or not yet? Or never would be?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Sophia Antonovna,&rdquo; his air of reluctant concession was genuine in
+      so far that he was really loath to part with her without testing her
+      sincerity by a question it was impossible to bring about in any way;
+      &ldquo;well, Sophia Antonovna, if that is so, then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The creature has done justice to himself,&rdquo; the woman observed, as if
+      thinking aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What? Ah yes! Remorse,&rdquo; Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend.&rdquo; There was
+      no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes seemed
+      detached for an instant from vengeful visions. &ldquo;He was a man of the
+      people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It&rsquo;s something
+      to know that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Consoling?&rdquo; insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave off railing,&rdquo; she checked him explosively. &ldquo;Remember, Razumov, that
+      women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of
+      all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action. Don&rsquo;t
+      rail! Leave off.... I don&rsquo;t know how it is, but there are moments when you
+      are abhorrent to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She averted her face. A languid silence, as if all the electricity of the
+      situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for some
+      time. Razumov had not flinched. Suddenly she laid the tips of her fingers
+      on his sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; he said very quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face. He was
+      really mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure
+      oppression. And suddenly he asked himself, &ldquo;Why the devil did I go to that
+      house? It was an imbecile thing to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A profound disgust came over him. Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking in a
+      friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention. And it was still
+      about the famous letter, referring to various minute details given by her
+      informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch. The &ldquo;victim of remorse&rdquo; had
+      been buried several weeks before her correspondent began frequenting the
+      house. It&mdash;the house&mdash;contained very good revolutionary
+      material. The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens of
+      black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all the
+      miseries that oppress mankind. Razumov listened without hearing, gnawed by
+      the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that degrading
+      method of direct lying which at times he found it almost impossible to
+      practice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this
+      conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted not
+      having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal
+      connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left
+      Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself. And, anyway,
+      who could have foreseen this woman&rsquo;s &ldquo;informant&rdquo; stumbling upon that
+      particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying
+      flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a
+      perfect, diabolic surprise,&rdquo; thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude
+      of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna&rsquo;s remarks
+      upon the psychology of &ldquo;the people,&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh yes&mdash;certainly,&rdquo; rather
+      coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of
+      confession out of her throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of relaxed
+      tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to the subject
+      of his uneasiness. How it came about he could only guess, his mind being
+      absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia Antonovna&rsquo;s
+      complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people. For instance&mdash;that
+      Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the last weeks of his
+      life, he suffered from the notion that he had been beaten by the devil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil,&rdquo; repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The actual devil. The devil in person. You may well look astonished,
+      Kirylo Sidorovitch. Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken, a
+      complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful thrashing
+      while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched creature&rsquo;s body
+      was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don&rsquo;t believe in the actual devil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; retorted the woman curtly. &ldquo;Not but that there are plenty of men
+      worse than devils to make a hell of this earth,&rdquo; she muttered to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold between
+      her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away. It was obvious
+      that she did not make much of the story&mdash;unless, indeed, this was the
+      perfection of duplicity. &ldquo;A dark young man,&rdquo; she explained further. &ldquo;Never
+      seen there before, never seen afterwards. Why are you smiling, Razumov?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the devil being still young after all these ages,&rdquo; he answered
+      composedly. &ldquo;But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you say,
+      was dead-drunk at the time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! The eating-house keeper has described him. An overbearing, swarthy
+      young man in a student&rsquo;s cloak, who came rushing in, demanded Ziemianitch,
+      beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving the
+      eating-house keeper paralysed with astonishment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he, too, believe it was the devil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I can&rsquo;t say. I am told he&rsquo;s very reserved on the matter. Those
+      sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally. I should think he knows
+      more of it than anybody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what&rsquo;s your theory?&rdquo; asked Razumov in a
+      tone of great interest. &ldquo;Yours and your informant&rsquo;s, who is on the spot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree with him. Some police-hound in disguise. Who else could beat a
+      helpless man so unmercifully? As for the rest, if they were out that day
+      on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might have
+      thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more information,
+      or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly detective was sent to
+      fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him so drunk broke a stable
+      fork over his ribs. Later on, after they had the big game safe in the net,
+      they troubled their heads no more about that peasant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this conversation,
+      keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in the
+      verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion of
+      the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost depths of
+      self-deception. Razumov, after shaking hands with Sophia Antonovna, left
+      the grounds, crossed the road, and walking out on the little steamboat
+      pier leaned over the rail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days, ever
+      since that night...the night. The conversation with the woman
+      revolutionist had given him the view of his danger at the very moment this
+      danger vanished, characteristically enough. &ldquo;I ought to have foreseen the
+      doubts that would arise in those people&rsquo;s minds,&rdquo; he thought. Then his
+      attention being attracted by a stone of peculiar shape, which he could see
+      clearly lying at the bottom, he began to speculate as to the depth of
+      water in that spot. But very soon, with a start of wonder at this
+      extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment, he returned to his train
+      of thought. &ldquo;I ought to have told very circumstantial lies from the
+      first,&rdquo; he said to himself, with a mortal distaste of the mere idea which
+      silenced his mental utterance for quite a perceptible interval. &ldquo;Luckily,
+      that&rsquo;s all right now,&rdquo; he reflected, and after a time spoke to himself,
+      half aloud, &ldquo;Thanks to the devil,&rdquo; and laughed a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts. He was not
+      exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting in
+      it a certain piquancy. He owned to himself that, had he known of that
+      suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making such
+      excellent use of it for his own purposes. He ought to be infinitely
+      obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity, &ldquo;A
+      wonderful psychologist apparently,&rdquo; he said to himself sarcastically.
+      Remorse, indeed! It was a striking example of your true conspirator&rsquo;s
+      blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea. This was a
+      drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself mockingly.
+      A woman the old fellow was making up to! A robust pedlar, clearly a rival,
+      throwing him down a flight of stairs.... And at sixty, for a lifelong
+      lover, it was not an easy matter to get over. That was a feminist of a
+      different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch. Even the comfort of the bottle
+      might conceivably fail him in this supreme crisis. At such an age nothing
+      but a halter could cure the pangs of an unquenchable passion. And,
+      besides, there was the wild exasperation aroused by the unjust aspersions
+      and the contumely of the house, with the maddening impossibility to
+      account for that mysterious thrashing, added to these simple and bitter
+      sorrows. &ldquo;Devil, eh?&rdquo; Razumov exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he
+      had made an interesting discovery. &ldquo;Ziemianitch ended by falling into
+      mysticism. So many of our true Russian souls end in that way! Very
+      characteristic.&rdquo; He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such
+      as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from
+      above&mdash;like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny. It
+      was as if this Ziemianitch could not possibly have done anything else. And
+      Sophia Antonovna&rsquo;s cocksure and contemptuous &ldquo;some police-hound&rdquo; was
+      characteristically Russian in another way. But there was no tragedy there.
+      This was a comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a
+      game with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then
+      with those revolutionists. The devil&rsquo;s own game this.... He interrupted
+      his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his own expense.
+      &ldquo;Hallo! I am falling into mysticism too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His mind was more at ease than ever. Turning about he put his back against
+      the rail comfortably. &ldquo;All this fits with marvellous aptness,&rdquo; he
+      continued to think. &ldquo;The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no longer
+      darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague. The mystic Ziemianitch
+      accounts for that. An incredible chance has served me. No more need of
+      lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from getting the
+      upper hand of my caution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was a
+      long time before he started forward from that pose, with the recollection
+      that he had made up his mind to do something important that day. What it
+      was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort of memory, for
+      he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he slowed
+      down, almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure walking in the
+      contrary direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft, broad-brimmed hat,
+      picturesque but diminutive, as if seen through the big end of an
+      opera-glass. It was impossible to avoid that tiny man, for there was no
+      issue for retreat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another one going to that mysterious meeting,&rdquo; thought Razumov. He was
+      right in his surmise, only <i>this</i> one, unlike the others who came
+      from a distance, was known to him personally. Still, he hoped to pass on
+      with a mere bow, but it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with
+      hairy wrist and knuckles protruded in a friendly wave from under the folds
+      of the cloak, worn Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm day, a
+      corner flung over the shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how is Herr Razumov?&rdquo; sounded the greeting in German, by that alone
+      made more odious to the object of the affable recognition. At closer
+      quarters the diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an
+      ordinary-sized man, with a lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising of
+      the hat, the great pepper-and salt full beard spread over the
+      proportionally broad chest. A fine bold nose jutted over a thin mouth
+      hidden in the mass of fine hair. All this, accented features, strong limbs
+      in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without the slightest sign
+      of debility. The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown, were too big, with
+      the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour under a lamp. The obscure
+      celebrity of the tiny man was well known to Razumov. Polyglot, of unknown
+      parentage, of indefinite nationality, anarchist, with a pedantic and
+      ferocious temperament, and an amazingly inflammatory capacity for
+      invective, he was a power in the background, this violent pamphleteer
+      clamouring for revolutionary justice, this Julius Laspara, editor of the
+      <i>Living Word</i>, confidant of conspirators, inditer of sanguinary
+      menaces and manifestos, suspected of being in the secret of every plot.
+      Laspara lived in the old town in a sombre, narrow house presented to him
+      by a naive middle-class admirer of his humanitarian eloquence. With him
+      lived his two daughters, who overtopped him head and shoulders, and a
+      pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing in the dark rooms in blue cotton
+      overalls and clumsy boots, who might have belonged to either one of them
+      or to neither. No stranger could tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which
+      of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few years, had as
+      casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with admirable
+      pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details&mdash;no, not so
+      much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist
+      function. Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small
+      dark rooms on the top floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of
+      sweepings all over the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every
+      table, the two Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent,
+      sleepy-eyed, corsetless, and generally, in their want of shape and the
+      disorder of their rumpled attire, resembling old dolls; the great but
+      obscure Julius, his feet twisted round his three-legged stool, always
+      ready to receive the visitors, the pen instantly dropped, the body screwed
+      round with a striking display of the lofty brow and of the great austere
+      beard. When he got down from his stool it was as though he had descended
+      from the heights of Olympus. He was dwarfed by his daughters, by the
+      furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature. But he very seldom left it,
+      and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him
+      out in that direction that afternoon. Evidently he wished to be amiable to
+      that young man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world of
+      political refugees. In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and wrote
+      four or five other European languages, without distinction and without
+      force (other than that of invective), he inquired if Razumov had taken his
+      inscriptions at the University as yet. And the young man, shaking his head
+      negatively&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s plenty of time for that. But, meantime, are you not going to
+      write something for us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on
+      anything, social, economic, historical&mdash;anything. Any subject could
+      be treated in the right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution.
+      And, as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a
+      review of advanced ideas. &ldquo;We must educate, educate everybody&mdash;develop
+      the great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write in Russian. We&rsquo;ll have it translated There can be no difficulty.
+      Why, without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin. My daughters go to see
+      her sometimes.&rdquo; He nodded significantly. &ldquo;She does nothing, has never done
+      anything in her life. She would be quite competent, with a little
+      assistance. Only write. You know you must. And so good-bye for the
+      present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his arm and went on. Razumov backed against the low wall, looked
+      after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry mutter&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cursed Jew!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not know anything about it. Julius Laspara might have been a
+      Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse
+      towns for anything he could tell to the contrary. But this is not a story
+      of the West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by the
+      comment that it was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best
+      adapted to the nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.
+      He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted. He
+      walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive
+      harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull people
+      sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he
+      discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge. He slowed down
+      at once. To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green
+      slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the
+      picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
+      water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on
+      slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get out of
+      his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to his profound
+      absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled
+      in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write! A sudden light
+      flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to
+      do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that step and then had
+      forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to escape from the grip
+      of the situation was fraught with serious danger. He was ready to despise
+      himself for it. What was it? Levity, or deep-seated weakness? Or an
+      unconscious dread?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it that I am shrinking? It can&rsquo;t be! It&rsquo;s impossible. To shrink now
+      would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
+      damnation,&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;Is it possible that I have a conventional
+      conscience?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
+      pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street
+      facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that it
+      was there before him. But at the moment a couple of carriages and a
+      slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left,
+      following the quay again, but now away from the lake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be just my health,&rdquo; he thought, allowing himself a very unusual
+      doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment or
+      two, he had never been ill in his life. But that was a danger, too. Only,
+      it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially remarkable
+      way. &ldquo;If I believed in an active Providence,&rdquo; Razumov said to himself,
+      amused grimly, &ldquo;I would see here the working of an ironical finger. To
+      have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind me of my
+      purpose is&mdash;Write, he had said. I must write&mdash;I must, indeed! I
+      shall write&mdash;never fear. Certainly. That&rsquo;s why I am here. And for the
+      future I shall have something to write about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy. But the idea of writing
+      evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of privacy, and
+      naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the necessary
+      exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile influence
+      awaiting him within those odious four walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose one of these revolutionists,&rdquo; he asked himself, &ldquo;were to take a
+      fancy to call on me while I am writing?&rdquo; The mere prospect of such an
+      interruption made him shudder. One could lock one&rsquo;s door, or ask the
+      tobacconist downstairs (some sort of a refugee himself) to tell inquirers
+      that one was not in. Not very good precautions those. The manner of his
+      life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for suspicion or even
+      occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences as a delay in
+      opening a locked door. &ldquo;I wish I were in the middle of some field miles
+      away from everywhere,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of
+      being on a bridge again. This one was much narrower than the other, and
+      instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point of
+      that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of
+      gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile
+      neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on
+      the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a bronze
+      effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the woman
+      in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the island.
+      There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about that
+      unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+      Something pretentious and shabby, too. He asked for a glass of milk, which
+      he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea had passed his lips
+      since the morning), and was going away with a weary, lagging step when a
+      thought stopped him short. He had found precisely what he needed. If
+      solitude could ever be secured in the open air in the middle of a town, he
+      would have it there on this absurd island, together with the faculty of
+      watching the only approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the place
+      for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The materials
+      he had on him. &ldquo;I shall always come here,&rdquo; he said to himself, and
+      afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought and sight
+      and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the declining sun
+      to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw the shadow of
+      the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he pulled out of his
+      pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his knee, and began to
+      write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the connecting arm of the
+      bridge. These glances were needless; the people crossing over in the
+      distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled
+      effigy of the author of the <i>Social Contract</i> sat enthroned above the
+      bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze. After finishing
+      his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish haste, put away the pen,
+      then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first tearing out the written
+      pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But the folding of the flimsy
+      batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful nicety. That done, he
+      leaned back in his seat and remained motionless, the papers holding in his
+      left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got up and began to pace to and
+      fro slowly under the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There can be no doubt that now I am safe,&rdquo; he thought. His fine ear could
+      detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the
+      point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to them with
+      interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was too
+      elusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to,&rdquo; he murmured. And it
+      occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen to
+      innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of water,
+      the voice of the wind&mdash;completely foreign to human passions. All the
+      other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and
+      the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far as
+      I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his body,
+      and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it must be
+      admitted that in Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s case the bitterness of solitude from which
+      he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That I should, at the beginning of this retrospect, mention again that Mr.
+      Razumov&rsquo;s youth had no one in the world, as literally no one as it can be
+      honestly affirmed of any human being, is but a statement of fact from a
+      man who believes in the psychological value of facts. There is also,
+      perhaps, a desire of punctilious fairness. Unidentified with anyone in
+      this narrative where the aspects of honour and shame are remote from the
+      ideas of the Western world, and taking my stand on the ground of common
+      humanity, it is for that very reason that I feel a strange reluctance to
+      state baldly here what every reader has most likely already discovered
+      himself. Such reluctance may appear absurd if it were not for the thought
+      that because of the imperfection of language there is always something
+      ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the exhibition of naked truth. But
+      the time has come when Councillor of State Mikulin can no longer be
+      ignored. His simple question &ldquo;Where to?&rdquo; on which we left Mr. Razumov in
+      St. Petersburg, throws a light on the general meaning of this individual
+      case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where to?&rdquo; was the answer in the form of a gentle question to what we may
+      call Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s declaration of independence. The question was not
+      menacing in the least and, indeed, had the ring of innocent inquiry. Had
+      it been taken in a merely topographical sense, the only answer to it would
+      have appeared sufficiently appalling to Mr Razumov. Where to? Back to his
+      rooms, where the Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden test his
+      dormant instincts, his half-conscious thoughts and almost wholly
+      unconscious ambitions, by the touch as of some furious and dogmatic
+      religion, with its call to frantic sacrifices, its tender resignations,
+      its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by the side of the most sombre
+      moods of despair. And Mr. Razumov had let go the door-handle and had come
+      back to the middle of the room, asking Councillor Mikulin angrily, &ldquo;What
+      do you mean by it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As far as I can tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question. He
+      drew Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation. It is the peculiarity of
+      Russian natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action,
+      they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas. This
+      conversation (and others later on) need not be recorded. Suffice it to say
+      that it brought Mr. Razumov as we know him to the test of another faith.
+      There was nothing official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was led to
+      defend his attitude of detachment. But Councillor Mikulin would have none
+      of his arguments. &ldquo;For a man like you,&rdquo; were his last weighty words in the
+      discussion, &ldquo;such a position is impossible. Don&rsquo;t forget that I have seen
+      that interesting piece of paper. I understand your liberalism. I have an
+      intellect of that kind myself. Reform for me is mainly a question of
+      method. But the principle of revolt is a physical intoxication, a sort of
+      hysteria which must be kept away from the masses. You agree to this
+      without reserve, don&rsquo;t you? Because, you see, Kirylo Sidorovitch,
+      abstention, reserve, in certain situations, come very near to political
+      crime. The ancient Greeks understood that very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Razumov, listening with a faint smile, asked Councillor Mikulin
+      point-blank if this meant that he was going to have him watched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The high official took no offence at the cynical inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo; he answered gravely. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean to have you
+      watched.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, suspecting a lie, affected yet the greatest liberty of mind
+      during the short remainder of that interview. The older man expressed
+      himself throughout in familiar terms, and with a sort of shrewd
+      simplicity. Razumov concluded that to get to the bottom of that mind was
+      an impossible feat. A great disquiet made his heart beat quicker. The high
+      official, issuing from behind the desk, was actually offering to shake
+      hands with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Mr Razumov. An understanding between intelligent men is always
+      a satisfactory occurrence. Is it not? And, of course, these rebel
+      gentlemen have not the monopoly of intelligence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I presume that I shall not be wanted any more?&rdquo; Razumov brought out that
+      question while his hand was still being grasped. Councillor Mikulin
+      released it slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, Mr. Razumov,&rdquo; he said with great earnestness, &ldquo;is as it may be. God
+      alone knows the future. But you may rest assured that I never thought of
+      having you watched. You are a young man of great independence. Yes. You
+      are going away free as air, but you shall end by coming back to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I! I!&rdquo; Razumov exclaimed in an appalled murmur of protest. &ldquo;What for?&rdquo; he
+      added feebly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! You yourself, Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo; the high police functionary
+      insisted in a low, severe tone of conviction. &ldquo;You shall be coming back to
+      us. Some of our greatest minds had to do that in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no better friend than Prince K&mdash;-, and as to myself it is a
+      long time now since I&rsquo;ve been honoured by his....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced down his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t detain you any longer. We live in difficult times, in times of
+      monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies. We shall
+      certainly meet once more. It may be some little time, though, before we
+      do. Till then may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!&rdquo; Once in the
+      street, Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction. At
+      first he thought of nothing; but in a little while the consciousness of
+      his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous, and
+      absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of that
+      complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he termed
+      it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Go back! What for? Confess! To what? &ldquo;I have been speaking to him with the
+      greatest openness,&rdquo; he said to himself with perfect truth. &ldquo;What else
+      could I tell him? That I have undertaken to carry a message to that brute
+      Ziemianitch? Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance of
+      safety I have won for nothing&mdash;what folly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin was,
+      perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct. To be
+      understood appeared extremely fascinating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to
+      run out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated as
+      if in a desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so before
+      he could proceed on his way. He reached his rooms at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all at
+      once removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities, from
+      his very room, even. He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to
+      himself to be existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything
+      that had ever happened to him. He came out of this state slowly, with an
+      effect, that is to say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number of
+      days was not very great. And when he had got back into the middle of
+      things they were all changed, subtly and provokingly in their nature:
+      inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl, the
+      staircase, the streets, the very air. He tackled these changed conditions
+      in a spirit of severity. He walked to and fro to the University, ascended
+      stairs, paced the passages, listened to lectures, took notes, crossed
+      courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard till his jaws ached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was perfectly aware of madcap Kostia gazing like a young retriever from
+      a distance, of the famished student with the red drooping nose, keeping
+      scrupulously away as desired; of twenty others, perhaps, he knew well
+      enough to speak to. And they all had an air of curiosity and concern as if
+      they expected something to happen. &ldquo;This can&rsquo;t last much longer,&rdquo; thought
+      Razumov more than once. On certain days he was afraid that anyone
+      addressing him suddenly in a certain way would make him scream out
+      insanely a lot of filthy abuse. Often, after returning home, he would drop
+      into a chair in his cap and cloak and remain still for hours holding some
+      book he had got from the library in his hand; or he would pick up the
+      little penknife and sit there scraping his nails endlessly and feeling
+      furious all the time&mdash;simply furious. &ldquo;This is impossible,&rdquo; he would
+      mutter suddenly to the empty room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fact to be noted: this room might conceivably have become physically
+      repugnant to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable. But no.
+      Nothing of the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first), nothing of
+      the sort happened. On the contrary, he liked his lodgings better than any
+      other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever hired before. He
+      liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very account, he found a
+      certain difficulty in making up his mind to go out. It resembled a
+      physical seduction such as, for instance, makes a man reluctant to leave
+      the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For as, at that time, he seldom stirred except to go to the University
+      (what else was there to do?) it followed that whenever he went abroad he
+      felt himself at once closely involved in the moral consequences of his
+      act. It was there that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on
+      him, clung to him like a poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off. He
+      suffered from it exceedingly, as well as from the conversational,
+      commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with the other kind of students.
+      &ldquo;They must be wondering at the change in me,&rdquo; he reflected anxiously. He
+      had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent,
+      nice enough fellows to go to the devil. Once a married professor he used
+      to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: &ldquo;How is it we never see
+      you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?&rdquo; Razumov was conscious of
+      meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor was
+      obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all this
+      was Haldin, always Haldin&mdash;nothing but Haldin&mdash;everywhere
+      Haldin: a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible
+      apparition of the dead. It was only the room through which that man had
+      blundered on his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to
+      be able to haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent
+      from it, but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who
+      had the upper hand, in a composed sense of his own superiority. A
+      vanquished phantom&mdash;nothing more. Often in the evening, his repaired
+      watch faintly ticking on the table by the side of the lighted lamp,
+      Razumov would look up from his writing and stare at the bed with an
+      expectant, dispassionate attention. Nothing was to be seen there. He never
+      really supposed that anything ever could be seen there. After a while he
+      would shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work. For he
+      had gone to work and, at first, with some success. His unwillingness to
+      leave that place where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at last
+      he ceased to go out at all. From early morning till far into the night he
+      wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time, and only
+      throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open no longer.
+      Then, one afternoon, quite casually, he happened to glance at his watch.
+      He laid down his pen slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At this very hour,&rdquo; was his thought, &ldquo;the fellow stole unseen into this
+      room while I was out. And there he sat quiet as a mouse&mdash;perhaps in
+      this very chair.&rdquo; Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily,
+      glancing at the watch now and then. &ldquo;This is the time when I returned and
+      found him standing against the stove,&rdquo; he observed to himself. When it
+      grew dark he lit his lamp. Later on he interrupted his tramping once more,
+      only to wave away angrily the girl who attempted to enter the room with
+      tea and something to eat on a tray. And presently he noted the watch
+      pointing at the hour of his own going forth into the falling snow on that
+      terrible errand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Complicity,&rdquo; he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his eye
+      on the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, after all,&rdquo; he thought suddenly, &ldquo;I might have been the chosen
+      instrument of Providence. This is a manner of speaking, but there may be
+      truth in every manner of speaking. What if that absurd saying were true in
+      its essence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with
+      stony eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair like
+      a man totally abandoned by Providence&mdash;desolate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noted the time of Haldin&rsquo;s departure and continued to sit still for
+      another half-hour; then muttering, &ldquo;And now to work,&rdquo; drew up to the
+      table, seized the pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a
+      profoundly disquieting reflection: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s three weeks gone by and no
+      word from Mikulin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What did it mean! Was he forgotten? Possibly. Then why not remain
+      forgotten&mdash;creep in somewhere? Hide. But where? How? With whom? In
+      what hole? And was it to be for ever, or what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers. The eye of the social
+      revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and
+      despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it
+      possible that he no longer belonged to himself? This was damnable. But why
+      not simply keep on as before? Study. Advance. Work hard as if nothing had
+      happened (and first of all win the Silver Medal), acquire distinction,
+      become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States. Servant, too,
+      of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind with a capability for
+      logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity of force and aim
+      such as the world had never dreamt of... the Russian nation!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand
+      towards the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed. He rushed at
+      it, enraged, with a mental scream: &ldquo;it&rsquo;s you, crazy fanatic, who stands in
+      the way!&rdquo; He flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the blankets
+      aside.... Nothing there. And, turning away, he caught for an instant in
+      the air, like a vivid detail in a dissolving view of two heads, the eyes
+      of General T&mdash;- and of Privy-Councillor Mikulin side by side fixed
+      upon him, quite different in character, but with the same unflinching and
+      weary and yet purposeful expression...servants of the nation!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some
+      water and bathed his forehead. &ldquo;This will pass and leave no trace,&rdquo; he
+      thought confidently. &ldquo;I am all right.&rdquo; But as to supposing that he had
+      been forgotten it was perfect nonsense. He was a marked man on that side.
+      And that was nothing. It was what that miserable phantom stood for which
+      had to be got out of the way.... &ldquo;If one only could go and spit it all out
+      at some of them&mdash;and take the consequences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking
+      his fist in his face. &ldquo;From that one, though,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s
+      nothing to be got, because he has no mind of his own. He&rsquo;s living in a red
+      democratic trance. Ah! you want to smash your way into universal
+      happiness, my boy. I will give you universal happiness, you silly,
+      hypnotized ghoul, you! And what about my own happiness, eh? Haven&rsquo;t I got
+      any right to it, just because I can think for myself?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself, &ldquo;I
+      am young. Everything can be lived down.&rdquo; At that moment he was crossing
+      the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to compose his
+      thoughts. But before he had got so far everything abandoned him&mdash;hope,
+      courage, belief in himself trust in men. His heart had, as it were,
+      suddenly emptied itself. It was no use struggling on. Rest, work,
+      solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike
+      forbidden to him. Everything was gone. His existence was a great cold
+      blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled
+      with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like that,
+      sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the rest of the
+      night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with the samovar thumped
+      with her fist on the door, calling out, &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch, please! It is
+      time for you to get up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov
+      opened his eyes and got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody will be surprised to hear, I suppose, that when the summons came he
+      went to see Councillor Mikulin. It came that very morning, while, looking
+      white and shaky, like an invalid just out of bed, he was trying to shave
+      himself. The envelope was addressed in the little attorney&rsquo;s handwriting.
+      That envelope contained another, superscribed to Razumov, in Prince K&mdash;-&rsquo;s
+      hand, with the request &ldquo;Please forward under cover at once&rdquo; in a corner.
+      The note inside was an autograph of Councillor Mikulin. The writer stated
+      candidly that nothing had arisen which needed clearing up, but
+      nevertheless appointed a meeting with Mr. Razumov at a certain address in
+      town which seemed to be that of an oculist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov read it, finished shaving, dressed, looked at the note again, and
+      muttered gloomily, &ldquo;Oculist.&rdquo; He pondered over it for a time, lit a match,
+      and burned the two envelopes and the enclosure carefully. Afterwards he
+      waited, sitting perfectly idle and not even looking at anything in
+      particular till the appointed hour drew near&mdash;and then went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether, looking at the unofficial character of the summons, he might have
+      refrained from attending to it is hard to say. Probably not. At any rate,
+      he went; but, what&rsquo;s more, he went with a certain eagerness, which may
+      appear incredible till it is remembered that Councillor Mikulin was the
+      only person on earth with whom Razumov could talk, taking the Haldin
+      adventure for granted. And Haldin, when once taken for granted, was no
+      longer a haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre. Whatever troubling power he
+      exercised in all the other places of the earth, Razumov knew very well
+      that at this oculist&rsquo;s address he would be merely the hanged murderer of
+      M. de P&mdash;- and nothing more. For the dead can live only with the
+      exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living. So
+      Mr. Razumov, certain of relief, went to meet Councillor Mikulin with the
+      eagerness of a pursued person welcoming any sort of shelter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first
+      interview and of the several others. To the morality of a Western reader
+      an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character of
+      old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding
+      subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to
+      protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion of
+      satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view,
+      allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted. With what
+      greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact shade of mere mortal
+      man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error, always
+      dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly betrayed by a
+      short-sighted wisdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin was one of those powerful officials who, in a position
+      not obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous, exercise a great
+      influence over the methods rather than over the conduct of affairs. A
+      devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to
+      prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue the possession
+      of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor Mikulin was not
+      only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he was a bachelor
+      with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of five rooms
+      luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be an enlightened
+      patron of the art of female dancing. Later on the larger world first heard
+      of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of those State trials
+      which astonish and puzzle the average plain man who reads the newspapers,
+      by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen
+      monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy waters,
+      Councillor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm, emphatic
+      protest of his innocence&mdash;nothing more. No disclosures damaging to a
+      harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secrets of the miserable <i>arcana
+      imperii</i> deposited in his patriotic breast, a display of bureaucratic
+      stoicism in a Russian official&rsquo;s ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for
+      truth; stoicism of silence understood only by the very few of the
+      initiated, and not without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on
+      the part of a sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councillor
+      Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very much like
+      a common convict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy,
+      does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It
+      devours its friends and servants as well. The downfall of His Excellency
+      Gregory Gregorievitch Mikulin (which did not occur till some years later)
+      completes all that is known of the man. But at the time of M. de P&mdash;-&rsquo;s
+      murder (or execution) Councillor Mikulin, under the modest style of Head
+      of Department at the General Secretariat, exercised a wide influence as
+      the confidant and right-hand man of his former schoolfellow and lifelong
+      friend, General T&mdash;-. One can imagine them talking over the case of
+      Mr. Razumov, with the full sense of their unbounded power over all the
+      lives in Russia, with cursory disdain, like two Olympians glancing at a
+      worm. The relationship with Prince K&mdash;- was enough to save Razumov
+      from some carelessly arbitrary proceeding, and it is also very probable
+      that after the interview at the Secretariat he would have been left alone.
+      Councillor Mikulin would not have forgotten him (he forgot no one who ever
+      fell under his observation), but would have simply dropped him for ever.
+      Councillor Mikulin was a good-natured man and wished no harm to anyone.
+      Besides (with his own reforming tendencies) he was favourably impressed by
+      that young student, the son of Prince K&mdash;-, and apparently no fool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as fate would have it, while Mr. Razumov was finding that no way of
+      life was possible to him, Councillor Mikulin&rsquo;s discreet abilities were
+      rewarded by a very responsible post&mdash;nothing less than the direction
+      of the general police supervision over Europe. And it was then, and then
+      only, when taking in hand the perfecting of the service which watches the
+      revolutionist activities abroad, that he thought again of Mr. Razumov. He
+      saw great possibilities of special usefulness in that uncommon young man
+      on whom he had a hold already, with his peculiar temperament, his
+      unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a struggling in the toils of a false
+      position.... It was as if the revolutionists themselves had put into his
+      hand that tool so much finer than the common base instruments, so
+      perfectly fitted, if only vested with sufficient credit, to penetrate into
+      places inaccessible to common informers. Providential! Providential! And
+      Prince K&mdash;-, taken into the secret, was ready enough to adopt that
+      mystical view too. &ldquo;It will be necessary, though, to make a career for him
+      afterwards,&rdquo; he had stipulated anxiously. &ldquo;Oh! absolutely. We shall make
+      that our affair,&rdquo; Mikulin had agreed. Prince K&mdash;-&rsquo;s mysticism was of
+      an artless kind; but Councillor Mikulin was astute enough for two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they
+      must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect
+      command. The power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to seize
+      upon that sense, that side in the men he used. It did not matter to him
+      what it was&mdash;vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride or
+      stupid conceit, it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to
+      serve. The obscure, unrelated young student Razumov, in the moment of
+      great moral loneliness, was allowed to feel that he was an object of
+      interest to a small group of people of high position. Prince K&mdash;- was
+      persuaded to intervene personally, and on a certain occasion gave way to a
+      manly emotion which, all unexpected as it was, quite upset Mr. Razumov.
+      The sudden embrace of that man, agitated by his loyalty to a throne and by
+      suppressed paternal affection, was a revelation to Mr. Razumov of
+      something within his own breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So that was it!&rdquo; he exclaimed to himself. A sort of contemptuous
+      tenderness softened the young man&rsquo;s grim view of his position as he
+      reflected upon that agitated interview with Prince K&mdash;-. This
+      simpleminded, worldly ex-Guardsman and senator whose soft grey official
+      whiskers had brushed against his cheek, his aristocratic and convinced
+      father, was he a whit less estimable or more absurd than that
+      famine-stricken, fanatical revolutionist, the red-nosed student?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was some pressure, too, besides the persuasiveness. Mr. Razumov
+      was always being made to feel that he had committed himself. There was no
+      getting away from that feeling, from that soft, unanswerable, &ldquo;Where to?&rdquo;
+       of Councillor Mikulin. But no susceptibilities were ever hurt. It was to
+      be a dangerous mission to Geneva for obtaining, at a critical moment,
+      absolutely reliable information from a very inaccessible quarter of the
+      inner revolutionary circle. There were indications that a very serious
+      plot was being matured.... The repose indispensable to a great country was
+      at stake.... A great scheme of orderly reforms would be endangered.... The
+      highest personages in the land were patriotically uneasy, and so on. In
+      short, Councillor Mikulin knew what to say. This skill is to be inferred
+      clearly from the mental and psychological self-confession, self-analysis
+      of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s written journal&mdash;the pitiful resource of a young man
+      who had near him no trusted intimacy, no natural affection to turn to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How all this preliminary work was concealed from observation need not be
+      recorded. The expedient of the oculist gives a sufficient instance.
+      Councillor Mikulin was resourceful, and the task not very difficult. Any
+      fellow-student, even the red-nosed one, was perfectly welcome to see Mr.
+      Razumov entering a private house to consult an oculist. Ultimate success
+      depended solely on the revolutionary self-delusion which credited Razumov
+      with a mysterious complicity in the Haldin affair. To be compromised in it
+      was credit enough-and it was their own doing. It was precisely <i>that</i>
+      which stamped Mr. Razumov as a providential man, wide as poles apart from
+      the usual type of agent for &ldquo;European supervision.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was <i>that</i> which the Secretariat set itself the task to foster
+      by a course of calculated and false indiscretions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came at last to this, that one evening Mr. Razumov was unexpectedly
+      called upon by one of the &ldquo;thinking&rdquo; students whom formerly, before the
+      Haldin affair, he used to meet at various private gatherings; a big fellow
+      with a quiet, unassuming manner and a pleasant voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Recognizing his voice raised in the ante-room, &ldquo;May one come in?&rdquo; Razumov,
+      lounging idly on his couch, jumped up. &ldquo;Suppose he were coming to stab
+      me?&rdquo; he thought sardonically, and, assuming a green shade over his left
+      eye, said in a severe tone, &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other was embarrassed; hoped he was not intruding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t been seen for several days, and I&rsquo;ve wondered.&rdquo; He coughed a
+      little. &ldquo;Eye better?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nearly well now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good. I won&rsquo;t stop a minute; but you see I, that is, we&mdash;anyway, I
+      have undertaken the duty to warn you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that you are
+      living in false security maybe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov sat still with his head leaning on his hand, which nearly
+      concealed the unshaded eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have that idea, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, then. Everything seems quiet now, but those people are
+      preparing some move of general repression. That&rsquo;s of course. But it isn&rsquo;t
+      that I came to tell you.&rdquo; He hitched his chair closer, dropped his voice.
+      &ldquo;You will be arrested before long&mdash;we fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An obscure scribe in the Secretariat had overheard a few words of a
+      certain conversation, and had caught a glimpse of a certain report. This
+      intelligence was not to be neglected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov laughed a little, and his visitor became very anxious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Kirylo Sidorovitch, this is no laughing matter. They have left you
+      alone for a while, but...! Indeed, you had better try to leave the
+      country, Kirylo Sidorovitch, while there&rsquo;s yet time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov jumped up and began to thank him for the advice with mocking
+      effusiveness, so that the other, colouring up, took himself off with the
+      notion that this mysterious Razumov was not a person to be warned or
+      advised by inferior mortals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin, informed the next day of the incident, expressed his
+      satisfaction. &ldquo;H&rsquo;m! Ha! Exactly what was wanted to...&rdquo; and glanced down
+      his beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I conclude,&rdquo; said Razumov, &ldquo;that the moment has come for me to start on
+      my mission.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The psychological Moment,&rdquo; Councillor Mikulin insisted softly&mdash;very
+      gravely&mdash;as if awed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the arrangements to give verisimilitude to the appearance of a
+      difficult escape were made. Councillor Mikulin did not expect to see Mr.
+      Razumov again before his departure. These meetings were a risk, and there
+      was nothing more to settle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch,&rdquo; said
+      the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov&rsquo;s hand with that unreserved
+      heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner. &ldquo;There is nothing obscure
+      between us. And I will tell you what! I consider myself fortunate in
+      having&mdash;h&rsquo;m&mdash;your...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced down his beard, and, after a moment of thoughtful silence,
+      handed to Razumov a half-sheet of notepaper&mdash;an abbreviated note of
+      matters already discussed, certain points of inquiry, the line of conduct
+      agreed on, a few hints as to personalities, and so on. It was the only
+      compromising document in the case, but, as Councillor Mikulin observed,
+      &ldquo;it could be easily destroyed. Mr. Razumov had better not see any one now&mdash;till
+      on the other side of the frontier, when, of course, it will be just
+      that.... See and hear and...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced down his beard; but when Razumov declared his intention to see
+      one person at least before leaving St. Petersburg, Councillor Mikulin
+      failed to conceal a sudden uneasiness. The young man&rsquo;s studious, solitary,
+      and austere existence was well known to him. It was the greatest guarantee
+      of fitness. He became deprecatory. Had his dear Kirylo Sidorovitch
+      considered whether, in view of such a momentous enterprise, it wasn&rsquo;t
+      really advisable to sacrifice every sentiment....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov interrupted the remonstrance scornfully. It was not a young woman,
+      it was a young fool he wished to see for a certain purpose. Councillor
+      Mikulin was relieved, but surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! And what for&mdash;precisely?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the sake of improving the aspect of verisimilitude,&rdquo; said Razumov
+      curtly, in a desire to affirm his independence. &ldquo;I must be trusted in what
+      I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Councillor Mikulin gave way tactfully, murmuring, &ldquo;Oh, certainly,
+      certainly. Your judgment...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with another handshake they parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fool of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive student
+      known as madcap Kostia. Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable, one could
+      make certain of his utter and complete indiscretion. But that riotous
+      youth, when reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some time ago,
+      passed from his usual elation into boundless dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, my dearest friend&mdash;my saviour&mdash;what
+      shall I do? I&rsquo;ve blown last night every rouble I had from my dad the other
+      day. Can&rsquo;t you give me till Thursday? I shall rush round to all the
+      usurers I know.... No, of course, you can&rsquo;t! Don&rsquo;t look at me like that.
+      What shall I do? No use asking the old man. I tell you he&rsquo;s given me a
+      fistful of big notes three days ago. Miserable wretch that I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrung his hands in despair. Impossible to confide in the old man.
+      &ldquo;They&rdquo; had given him a decoration, a cross on the neck only last year, and
+      he had been cursing the modern tendencies ever since. Just then he would
+      see all the intellectuals in Russia hanged in a row rather than part with
+      a single rouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo Sidorovitch, wait a moment. Don&rsquo;t despise me. I have it. I&rsquo;ll, yes&mdash;I&rsquo;ll
+      do it&mdash;I&rsquo;ll break into his desk. There&rsquo;s no help for it. I know the
+      drawer where he keeps his plunder, and I can buy a chisel on my way home.
+      He will be terribly upset, but, you know, the dear old duffer really loves
+      me. He&rsquo;ll have to get over it&mdash;and I, too. Kirylo, my dear soul, if
+      you can only wait for a few hours-till this evening&mdash;I shall steal
+      all the blessed lot I can lay my hands on! You doubt me! Why? You&rsquo;ve only
+      to say the word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Steal, by all means,&rdquo; said Razumov, fixing him stonily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the devil with the ten commandments!&rdquo; cried the other, with the
+      greatest animation. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the new future now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he entered Razumov&rsquo;s room late in the evening it was with an
+      unaccustomed soberness of manner, almost solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s done,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov sitting bowed, his clasped hands hanging between his knees,
+      shuddered at the familiar sound of these words. Kostia deposited slowly in
+      the circle of lamplight a small brown-paper parcel tied with a piece of
+      string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I&rsquo;ve said&mdash;all I could lay my hands on. The old boy&rsquo;ll think the
+      end of the world has come.&rdquo; Razumov nodded from the couch, and
+      contemplated the hare-brained fellow&rsquo;s gravity with a feeling of malicious
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve made my little sacrifice,&rdquo; sighed mad Kostia. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ve to thank
+      you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, for the opportunity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has cost you something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it has. You see, the dear old duffer really loves me. He&rsquo;ll be
+      hurt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you believe all they tell you of the new future and the sacred will
+      of the people?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Implicitly. I would give my life.... Only, you see, I am like a pig at a
+      trough. I am no good. It&rsquo;s my nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov, lost in thought, had forgotten his existence till the youth&rsquo;s
+      voice, entreating him to fly without loss of time, roused him
+      unpleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Well&mdash;good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not going to leave you till I&rsquo;ve seen you out of St. Petersburg,&rdquo;
+       declared Kostia unexpectedly, with calm determination. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t refuse
+      me that now. For God&rsquo;s sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here any
+      moment, and when they get you they&rsquo;ll immure you somewhere for ages&mdash;till
+      your hair turns grey. I have down there the best trotter of dad&rsquo;s stables
+      and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the moon sets, and
+      find some roadside station....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov looked up amazed. The journey was decided&mdash;unavoidable. He
+      had fixed the next day for his departure on the mission. And now he
+      discovered suddenly that he had not believed in it. He had gone about
+      listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the
+      growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever did
+      such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was amazed!
+      Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness. &ldquo;If I
+      don&rsquo;t go now, at once,&rdquo; thought Razumov, with a start of fear, &ldquo;I shall
+      never go.&rdquo; He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia thrust his cap
+      on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he would have left the room
+      bareheaded as he stood. He was walking out silently when a sharp cry
+      arrested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kirylo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; He turned reluctantly in the doorway. Upright, with a stiffly
+      extended arm, Kostia, his face set and white, was pointing an eloquent
+      forefinger at the brown little packet lying forgotten in the circle of
+      bright light on the table. Razumov hesitated, came back for it under the
+      severe eyes of his companion, at whom he tried to smile. But the boyish,
+      mad youth was frowning. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a dream,&rdquo; thought Razumov, putting the
+      little parcel into his pocket and descending the stairs; &ldquo;nobody does such
+      things.&rdquo; The other held him under the arm, whispering of dangers ahead,
+      and of what he meant to do in certain contingencies. &ldquo;Preposterous,&rdquo;
+       murmured Razumov, as he was being tucked up in the sledge. He gave himself
+      up to watching the development of the dream with extreme attention. It
+      continued on foreseen lines, inexorably logical&mdash;the long drive, the
+      wait at the small station sitting by a stove. They did not exchange half a
+      dozen words altogether. Kostia, gloomy himself, did not care to break the
+      silence. At parting they embraced twice&mdash;it had to be done; and then
+      Kostia vanished out of the dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full of
+      bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose
+      quietly, lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great plain
+      of snow a small brown-paper parcel. Then he sat down again muffled up and
+      motionless. &ldquo;For the people,&rdquo; he thought, staring out of the window. The
+      great white desert of frozen, hard earth glided past his eyes without a
+      sign of human habitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That had been a waking act; and then the dream had him again: Prussia,
+      Saxony, Wurtemberg, faces, sights, words&mdash;all a dream, observed with
+      an angry, compelled attention. Zurich, Geneva&mdash;still a dream,
+      minutely followed, wearing one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death&mdash;with
+      the fear of awakening at the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps life is just that,&rdquo; reflected Razumov, pacing to and fro under
+      the trees of the little island, all alone with the bronze statue of
+      Rousseau. &ldquo;A dream and a fear.&rdquo; The dusk deepened. The pages written over
+      and torn out of his notebook were the first-fruit of his &ldquo;mission.&rdquo; No
+      dream that. They contained the assurance that he was on the eve of real
+      discoveries. &ldquo;I think there is no longer anything in the way of my being
+      completely accepted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the conversations.
+      He even went so far as to write: &ldquo;By the by, I have discovered the
+      personality of that terrible N.N. A horrible, paunchy brute. If I hear
+      anything of his future movements I shall send a warning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could not
+      believe in the reality of his mission. He looked round despairingly, as if
+      for some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable feeling. He
+      crushed angrily in his hand the pages of the notebook. &ldquo;This must be
+      posted,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he remembered
+      having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure shop stocked
+      with cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely dirty
+      cardboard-bound volumes of a small circulating library. They sold
+      stationery there, too. A morose, shabby old man dozed behind the counter.
+      A thin woman in black, with a sickly face, produced the envelope he had
+      asked for without even looking at him. Razumov thought that these people
+      were safe to deal with because they no longer cared for anything in the
+      world. He addressed the envelope on the counter with the German name of a
+      certain person living in Vienna. But Razumov knew that this, his first
+      communication for Councillor Mikulin, would find its way to the Embassy
+      there, be copied in cypher by somebody trustworthy, and sent on to its
+      destination, all safe, along with the diplomatic correspondence. That was
+      the arrangement contrived to cover up the track of the information from
+      all unfaithful eyes, from all indiscretions, from all mishaps and
+      treacheries. It was to make him safe&mdash;absolutely safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wandered out of the wretched shop and made for the post office. It was
+      then that I saw him for the second time that day. He was crossing the Rue
+      Mont Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller. He did not
+      recognize me, but I made him out at some distance. He was very
+      good-looking, I thought, this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin&rsquo;s brother.
+      I watched him go up to the letter-box and then retrace his steps. Again he
+      passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see me that time,
+      either. He carried his head well up, but he had the expression of a
+      somnambulist struggling with the very dream which drives him forth to
+      wander in dangerous places. My thoughts reverted to Natalia Haldin, to her
+      mother. He was all that was left to them of their son and brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The westerner in me was discomposed. There was something shocking in the
+      expression of that face. Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian
+      political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical
+      conclusion from this chance glimpse. As it was, it only discomposed me
+      strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in
+      regard to Natalia Haldin. All this is rather inexplicable, but such was
+      the origin of the purpose I formed there and then to call on these ladies
+      in the evening, after my solitary dinner. It was true that I had met Miss
+      Haldin only a few hours before, but Mrs. Haldin herself I had not seen for
+      some considerable time. The truth is, I had shirked calling of late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Mrs. Haldin! I confess she frightened me a little. She was one of
+      those natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being
+      interested, because they provoke both terror and pity. One dreads their
+      contact for oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear it
+      is that they are born to suffer and to make others suffer, too. It is
+      strange to think that, I won&rsquo;t say liberty, but the mere liberalism of
+      outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and if
+      of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our deepest
+      affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like ourselves
+      and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a matter of
+      tears and anguish and blood. Mrs. Haldin had felt the pangs of her own
+      generation. There was that enthusiast brother of hers&mdash;the officer
+      they shot under Nicholas. A faintly ironic resignation is no armour for a
+      vulnerable heart. Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her children, was bound
+      to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the anguish of the future. She
+      was of those who do not know how to heal themselves, of those who are too
+      much aware of their heart, who, neither cowardly nor selfish, look
+      passionately at its wounds&mdash;and count the cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor&rsquo;s meal. If
+      anybody wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of
+      Natalia Haldin, I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.
+      She had all her life before her. Let it be admitted, then, that I was
+      thinking of Natalia Haldin&rsquo;s life in terms of her mother&rsquo;s character, a
+      manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old
+      yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth
+      before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy,
+      overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly sombre youth given
+      over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious
+      antagonisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done. One felt so
+      helpless, and even worse&mdash;so unrelated, in a way. At the last moment
+      I hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des
+      Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner. The blind was
+      down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in
+      her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired
+      the poignant quality of mad expectation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought that I was sufficiently authorized by the light to knock at the
+      door. The ladies had not retired as yet. I only hoped they would not have
+      any visitors of their own nationality. A broken-down, retired Russian
+      official was to be found there sometimes in the evening. He was infinitely
+      forlorn and wearisome by his mere dismal presence. I think these ladies
+      tolerated his frequent visits because of an ancient friendship with Mr.
+      Haldin, the father, or something of that sort. I made up my mind that if I
+      found him prosing away there in his feeble voice I should remain but a
+      very few minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door surprised me by swinging open before I could ring the bell. I was
+      confronted by Miss Haldin, in hat and jacket, obviously on the point of
+      going out. At that hour! For the doctor, perhaps?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her exclamation of welcome reassured me. It sounded as if I had been the
+      very man she wanted to see. My curiosity was awakened. She drew me in, and
+      the faithful Anna, the elderly German maid, closed the door, but did not
+      go away afterwards. She remained near it as if in readiness to let me out
+      presently. It appeared that Miss Haldin had been on the point of going out
+      to find me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke in a hurried manner very unusual with her. She would have gone
+      straight and rung at Mrs. Ziegler&rsquo;s door, late as it was, for Mrs.
+      Ziegler&rsquo;s habits....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ziegler, the widow of a distinguished professor who was an intimate
+      friend of mine, lets me have three rooms out of her very large and fine
+      apartment, which she didn&rsquo;t give up after her husband&rsquo;s death; but I have
+      my own entrance opening on the same landing. It was an arrangement of at
+      least ten years&rsquo; standing. I said that I was very glad that I had the idea
+      to....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin made no motion to take off her outdoor things. I observed her
+      heightened colour, something pronouncedly resolute in her tone. Did I know
+      where Mr. Razumov lived?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where Mr. Razumov lived? Mr. Razumov? At this hour&mdash;so urgently? I
+      threw my arms up in sign of utter ignorance. I had not the slightest idea
+      where he lived. If I could have foreseen her question only three hours
+      ago, I might have ventured to ask him on the pavement before the new post
+      office building, and possibly he would have told me, but very possibly,
+      too, he would have dismissed me rudely to mind my own business. And
+      possibly, I thought, remembering that extraordinary hallucined, anguished,
+      and absent expression, he might have fallen down in a fit from the shock
+      of being spoken to. I said nothing of all this to Miss Haldin, not even
+      mentioning that I had a glimpse of the young man so recently. The
+      impression had been so extremely unpleasant that I would have been glad to
+      forget it myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see where I could make inquiries,&rdquo; I murmured helplessly. I would
+      have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to fetch
+      any man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in her common
+      sense. &ldquo;What made you think of coming to me for that information?&rdquo; I
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t exactly for that,&rdquo; she said, in a low voice. She had the air of
+      some one confronted by an unpleasant task.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I to understand that you must communicate with Mr. Razumov this
+      evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Natalia Haldin moved her head affirmatively; then, after a glance at the
+      door of the drawing-room, said in French&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>C&rsquo;est maman</i>,&rdquo; and remained perplexed for a moment. Always serious,
+      not a girl to be put out by any imaginary difficulties, my curiosity was
+      suspended on her lips, which remained closed for a moment. What was Mr.
+      Razumov&rsquo;s connexion with this mention of her mother? Mrs. Haldin had not
+      been informed of her son&rsquo;s friend&rsquo;s arrival in Geneva.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I hope to see your mother this evening?&rdquo; I inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin extended her hand as if to bar the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is in a terrible state of agitation. Oh, you would not be able to
+      detect.... It&rsquo;s inward, but I who know mother, I am appalled. I haven&rsquo;t
+      the courage to face it any longer. It&rsquo;s all my fault; I suppose I cannot
+      play a part; I&rsquo;ve never before hidden anything from mother. There has
+      never been an occasion for anything of that sort between us. But you know
+      yourself the reason why I refrained from telling her at once of Mr.
+      Razumov&rsquo;s arrival here. You understand, don&rsquo;t you? Owing to her unhappy
+      state. And&mdash;there&mdash;I am no actress. My own feelings being
+      strongly engaged, I somehow.... I don&rsquo;t know. She noticed something in my
+      manner. She thought I was concealing something from her. She noticed my
+      longer absences, and, in fact, as I have been meeting Mr. Razumov daily, I
+      used to stay away longer than usual when I went out. Goodness knows what
+      suspicions arose in her mind. You know that she has not been herself ever
+      since.... So this evening she&mdash;who has been so awfully silent: for
+      weeks-began to talk all at once. She said that she did not want to
+      reproach me; that I had my character as she had her own; that she did not
+      want to pry into my affairs or even into my thoughts; for her part, she
+      had never had anything to conceal from her children...cruel things to
+      listen to. And all this in her quiet voice, with that poor, wasted face as
+      calm as a stone. It was unbearable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin talked in an undertone and more rapidly than I had ever heard
+      her speak before. That in itself was disturbing. The ante-room being
+      strongly lighted, I could see under the veil the heightened colour of her
+      face. She stood erect, her left hand was resting lightly on a small table.
+      The other hung by her side without stirring. Now and then she caught her
+      breath slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was too startling. Just fancy! She thought that I was making
+      preparations to leave her without saying anything. I knelt by the side of
+      her chair and entreated her to think of what she was saying! She put her
+      hand on my head, but she persists in her delusion all the same. She had
+      always thought that she was worthy of her children&rsquo;s confidence, but
+      apparently it was not so. Her son could not trust her love nor yet her
+      understanding&mdash;and now I was planning to abandon her in the same
+      cruel and unjust manner, and so on, and so on. Nothing I could say.... It
+      is morbid obstinacy.... She said that she felt there was something, some
+      change in me.... If my convictions were calling me away, why this secrecy,
+      as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe to trust? &lsquo;As if my
+      heart could play traitor to my children,&rsquo; she said.... It was hardly to be
+      borne. And she was smoothing my head all the time.... It was perfectly
+      useless to protest. She is ill. Her very soul is....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us. I looked
+      into her eyes, glistening through the veil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I! Changed!&rdquo; she exclaimed in the same low tone. &ldquo;My convictions calling
+      me away! It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I am weak
+      and cannot see what I ought to do. You know that. And to end it all I did
+      a selfish thing. To remove her suspicions of myself I told her of Mr.
+      Razumov. It was selfish of me. You know we were completely right in
+      agreeing to keep the knowledge away from her. Perfectly right. Directly I
+      told her of our poor Victor&rsquo;s friend being here I saw how right we have
+      been. She ought to have been prepared; but in my distress I just blurted
+      it out. Mother got terribly excited at once. How long has he been here?
+      What did he know, and why did he not come to see us at once, this friend
+      of her Victor? What did that mean? Was she not to be trusted even with
+      such memories as there were left of her son?... Just think how I felt
+      seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly motionless, with her thin hands
+      gripping the arms of the chair. I told her it was all my fault.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair,
+      there, behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me. The
+      silence in there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an historical
+      fact and the modern instances of its working. That view flashed through my
+      mind, but I could not doubt that Miss Haldin had had an atrocious time of
+      it. I quite understood when she said that she could not face the night
+      upon the impression of that scene. Mrs. Haldin had given way to most awful
+      imaginings, to most fantastic and cruel suspicions. All this had to be
+      lulled at all costs and without loss of time. It was no shock to me to
+      learn that Miss Haldin had said to her, &ldquo;I will go and bring him here at
+      once.&rdquo; There was nothing absurd in that cry, no exaggeration of sentiment.
+      I was not even doubtful in my &ldquo;Very well, but how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was perfectly right that she should think of me, but what could I do in
+      my ignorance of Mr. Razumov&rsquo;s quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to think he may be living near by, within a stone&rsquo;s-throw, perhaps!&rdquo;
+       she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I doubted it; but I would have gone off cheerfully to fetch him from the
+      other end of Geneva. I suppose she was certain of my readiness, since her
+      first thought was to come to me. But the service she meant to ask of me
+      really was to accompany her to the Chateau Borel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre grounds,
+      and the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy and
+      intrigue and feminist adoration. I objected that Madame de S&mdash; most
+      likely would know nothing of what we wanted to find out. Neither did I
+      think it likely that the young man would be found there. I remembered my
+      glimpse of his face, and somehow gained the conviction that a man who
+      looked worse than if he had seen the dead would want to shut himself up
+      somewhere where he could be alone. I felt a strange certitude that Mr.
+      Razumov was going home when I saw him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is really of Peter Ivanovitch that I was thinking,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin
+      quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah! He, of course, would know. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes
+      past nine only.... Still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would try his hotel, then,&rdquo; I advised. &ldquo;He has rooms at the
+      Cosmopolitan, somewhere on the top floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not offer to go by myself, simply from mistrust of the reception I
+      should meet with. But I suggested the faithful Anna, with a note asking
+      for the information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anna was still waiting by the door at the other end of the room, and we
+      two discussed the matter in whispers. Miss Haldin thought she must go
+      herself. Anna was timid and slow. Time would be lost in bringing back the
+      answer, and from that point of view it was getting late, for it was by no
+      means certain that Mr. Razumov lived near by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I go myself,&rdquo; Miss Haldin argued, &ldquo;I can go straight to him from the
+      hotel. And in any case I should have to go out, because I must explain to
+      Mr. Razumov personally&mdash;prepare him in a way. You have no idea of
+      mother&rsquo;s state of mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her colour came and went. She even thought that both for her mother&rsquo;s sake
+      and for her own it was better that they should not be together for a
+      little time. Anna, whom her mother liked, would be at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She could take her sewing into the room,&rdquo; Miss Haldin continued, leading
+      the way to the door. Then, addressing in German the maid who opened it
+      before us, &ldquo;You may tell my mother that this gentleman called and is gone
+      with me to find Mr. Razumov. She must not be uneasy if I am away for some
+      length of time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed out quickly into the street, and she took deep breaths of the
+      cool night air. &ldquo;I did not even ask you,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think not,&rdquo; I said, with a laugh. The manner of my reception by
+      the great feminist could not be considered now. That he would be annoyed
+      to see me, and probably treat me to some solemn insolence, I had no doubt,
+      but I supposed that he would not absolutely dare to throw me out. And that
+      was all I cared for. &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you take my arm?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did so in silence, and neither of us said anything worth recording
+      till I let her go first into the great hall of the hotel. It was
+      brilliantly lighted, and with a good many people lounging about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could very well go up there without you,&rdquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like to be left waiting in this place,&rdquo; she said in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will come too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I led her straight to the lift then. At the top floor the attendant
+      directed us to the right: &ldquo;End of the corridor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in profusion,
+      and the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike and numbered,
+      made me think of the perfect order of some severely luxurious model
+      penitentiary on the solitary confinement principle. Up there under the
+      roof of that enormous pile for housing travellers no sound of any kind
+      reached us, the thick crimson felt muffled our footsteps completely. We
+      hastened on, not looking at each other till we found ourselves before the
+      very last door of that long passage. Then our eyes met, and we stood thus
+      for a moment lending ear to a faint murmur of voices inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose this is it,&rdquo; I whispered unnecessarily. I saw Miss Haldin&rsquo;s
+      lips move without a sound, and after my sharp knock the murmur of voices
+      inside ceased. A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then the
+      door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red blouse,
+      with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in an untidy
+      and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn together. I
+      learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous&mdash;or the
+      notorious&mdash;Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint
+      Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so
+      curiously evil-less, so&mdash;I may say&mdash;un-devilish. It got softened
+      still more as she looked up at Miss Haldin, who stated, in her rich, even
+      voice, her wish to see Peter Ivanovitch for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Miss Haldin,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this, with her brow completely smoothed out now, but without a word in
+      answer, the woman in the red blouse walked away to a sofa and sat down,
+      leaving the door wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from the sofa, her hands lying on her lap, she watched us enter, with
+      her black, glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin advanced into the middle of the room; I, faithful to my part
+      of mere attendant, remained by the door after closing it behind me. The
+      room, quite a large one, but with a low ceiling, was scantily furnished,
+      and an electric bulb with a porcelain shade pulled low down over a big
+      table (with a very large map spread on it) left its distant parts in a
+      dim, artificial twilight. Peter Ivanovitch was not to be seen, neither was
+      Mr. Razumov present. But, on the sofa, near Sophia Antonovna, a bony-faced
+      man with a goatee beard leaned forward with his hands on his knees,
+      staring hard with a kindly expression. In a remote corner a broad, pale
+      face and a bulky shape could be made out, uncouth, and as if insecure on
+      the low seat on which it rested. The only person known to me was little
+      Julius Laspara, who seemed to have been poring over the map, his feet
+      twined tightly round the chair-legs. He got down briskly and bowed to Miss
+      Haldin, looking absurdly like a hooknosed boy with a beautiful false
+      pepper-and-salt beard. He advanced, offering his seat, which Miss Haldin
+      declined. She had only come in for a moment to say a few words to Peter
+      Ivanovitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His high-pitched voice became painfully audible in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strangely enough, I was thinking of you this very afternoon, Natalia
+      Victorovna. I met Mr. Razumov. I asked him to write me an article on
+      anything he liked. You could translate it into English&mdash;with such a
+      teacher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded complimentarily in my direction. At the name of Razumov an
+      indescribable sound, a sort of feeble squeak, as of some angry small
+      animal, was heard in the corner occupied by the man who seemed much too
+      large for the chair on which he sat. I did not hear what Miss Haldin said.
+      Laspara spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s time to do something, Natalia Victorovna. But I suppose you have
+      your own ideas. Why not write something yourself? Suppose you came to see
+      us soon? We could talk it over. Any advice...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again I did not catch Miss Haldin&rsquo;s words. It was Laspara&rsquo;s voice once
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch? He&rsquo;s retired for a moment into the other room. We are
+      all waiting for him.&rdquo; The great man, entering at that moment, looked
+      bigger, taller, quite imposing in a long dressing-gown of some dark stuff.
+      It descended in straight lines down to his feet. He suggested a monk or a
+      prophet, a robust figure of same desert-dweller&mdash;something Asiatic;
+      and the dark glasses in conjunction with this costume made him more
+      mysterious than ever in the subdued light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Laspara went back to his chair to look at the map, the only
+      brilliantly lit object in the room. Even from my distant position by the
+      door I could make out, by the shape of the blue part representing the
+      water, that it was a map of the Baltic provinces. Peter Ivanovitch
+      exclaimed slightly, advancing towards Miss Haldin, checked himself on
+      perceiving me, very vaguely no doubt; and peered with his dark,
+      bespectacled stare. He must have recognized me by my grey hair, because,
+      with a marked shrug of his broad shoulders, he turned to Miss Haldin in
+      benevolent indulgence. He seized her hand in his thick cushioned palm, and
+      put his other big paw over it like a lid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While those two standing in the middle of the floor were exchanging a few
+      inaudible phrases no one else moved in the room: Laspara, with his back to
+      us, kneeling on the chair, his elbows propped on the big-scale map, the
+      shadowy enormity in the corner, the frankly staring man with the goatee on
+      the sofa, the woman in the red blouse by his side&mdash;not one of them
+      stirred. I suppose that really they had no time, for Miss Haldin withdrew
+      her hand immediately from Peter Ivanovitch and before I was ready for her
+      was moving to the door. A disregarded Westerner, I threw it open hurriedly
+      and followed her out, my last glance leaving them all motionless in their
+      varied poses: Peter Ivanovitch alone standing up, with his dark glasses
+      like an enormous blind teacher, and behind him the vivid patch of light on
+      the coloured map, pored over by the diminutive Laspara.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on, much later on, at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were
+      vague and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia, I
+      remembered the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its central
+      figure. No details ever came out, but it was known that the revolutionary
+      parties abroad had given their assistance, had sent emissaries in advance,
+      that even money was found to dispatch a steamer with a cargo of arms and
+      conspirators to invade the Baltic provinces. And while my eyes scanned the
+      imperfect disclosures (in which the world was not much interested) I
+      thought that the old, settled Europe had been given in my person attending
+      that Russian girl something like a glimpse behind the scenes. A short,
+      strange glimpse on the top floor of a great hotel of all places in the
+      world: the great man himself; the motionless great bulk in the corner of
+      the slayer of spies and gendarmes; Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient
+      terrorist campaigns; the woman, with her hair as white as mine and the
+      lively black eyes, all in a mysterious half-light, with the strongly
+      lighted map of Russia on the table. The woman I had the opportunity to see
+      again. As we were waiting for the lift she came hurrying along the
+      corridor, with her eyes fastened on Miss Haldin&rsquo;s face, and drew her aside
+      as if for a confidential communication. It was not long. A few words only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going down in the lift, Natalia Haldin did not break the silence. It was
+      only when out of the hotel and as we moved along the quay in the fresh
+      darkness spangled by the quay lights, reflected in the black water of the
+      little port on our left hand, and with lofty piles of hotels on our right,
+      that she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was Sophia Antonovna&mdash;you know the woman?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know&mdash;the famous...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The same. It appears that after we went out Peter Ivanovitch told them
+      why I had come. That was the reason she ran out after us. She named
+      herself to me, and then she said, &lsquo;You are the sister of a brave man who
+      shall be remembered. You may see better times.&rsquo; I told her I hoped to see
+      the time when all this would be forgotten, even if the name of my brother
+      were to be forgotten too. Something moved me to say that, but you
+      understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You think of the era of concord and justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. There is too much hate and revenge in that work. It must be done. It
+      is a sacrifice&mdash;and so let it be all the greater. Destruction is the
+      work of anger. Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together, and
+      only the reconstructors be remembered.&lsquo;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And did Sophia Antonovna agree with you?&rdquo; I asked sceptically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not say anything except, &lsquo;It is good for you to believe in love.&rsquo; 
+      I should think she understood me. Then she asked me if I hoped to see Mr.
+      Razumov presently. I said I trusted I could manage to bring him to see my
+      mother this evening, as my mother had learned of his being here and was
+      morbidly impatient to learn if he could tell us something of Victor. He
+      was the only friend of my brother we knew of, and a great intimate. She
+      said, &lsquo;Oh! Your brother&mdash;yes. Please tell Mr. Razumov that I have
+      made public the story which came to me from St. Petersburg. It concerns
+      your brother&rsquo;s arrest,&rsquo; she added. &lsquo;He was betrayed by a man of the people
+      who has since hanged himself. Mr. Razumov will explain it all to you. I
+      gave him the full information this afternoon. And please tell Mr. Razumov
+      that Sophia Antonovna sends him her greetings. I am going away early in
+      the morning&mdash;far away.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Miss Haldin added, after a moment of silence&mdash;&ldquo;I was so moved by
+      what I heard so unexpectedly that I simply could not speak to you
+      before.... A man of the people! Oh, our poor people!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She walked slowly, as if tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the
+      windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound of
+      hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red posters
+      blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.&mdash;and
+      the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air
+      of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had taken for granted she had obtained the address, and let myself be
+      guided by her. On the Mont Blanc bridge, where a few dark figures seemed
+      lost in the wide and long perspective defined by the lights, she said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t very far from our house. I somehow thought it couldn&rsquo;t be. The
+      address is Rue de Carouge. I think it must be one of those big new houses
+      for artisans.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took my arm confidingly, familiarly, and accelerated her pace. There
+      was something primitive in our proceedings. We did not think of the
+      resources of civilization. A late tramcar overtook us; a row of <i>fiacres</i>
+      stood by the railing of the gardens. It never entered our heads to make
+      use of these conveyances. She was too hurried, perhaps, and as to myself&mdash;well,
+      she had taken my arm confidingly. As we were ascending the easy incline of
+      the Corraterie, all the shops shuttered and no light in any of the windows
+      (as if all the mercenary population had fled at the end of the day), she
+      said tentatively&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could run in for a moment to have a look at mother. It would not be
+      much out of the way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I dissuaded her. If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that night
+      it would have been unwise to show herself without him. The sooner we got
+      hold of the young man and brought him along to calm her mother&rsquo;s agitation
+      the better. She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed diagonally the
+      Place de Theatre, bluish grey with its floor of slabs of stone, under the
+      electric light, and the lonely equestrian statue all black in the middle.
+      In the Rue de Carouge we were in the poorer quarters and approaching the
+      outskirts of the town. Vacant building plots alternated with high, new
+      houses. At the corner of a side street the crude light of a whitewashed
+      shop fell into the night, fan-like, through a wide doorway. One could see
+      from a distance the inner wall with its scantily furnished shelves, and
+      the deal counter painted brown. That was the house. Approaching it along
+      the dark stretch of a fence of tarred planks, we saw the narrow pallid
+      face of the cut angle, five single windows high, without a gleam in them,
+      and crowned by the heavy shadow of a jutting roof slope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must inquire in the shop,&rdquo; Miss Haldin directed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a frayed
+      tie, laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both elbows far
+      over the bare counter, answered that the person I was inquiring for was
+      indeed his <i>locataire</i> on the third floor, but that for the moment he
+      was out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the moment,&rdquo; I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin. &ldquo;Does this
+      mean that you expect him back at once?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips. He smiled
+      faintly as though he knew all about everything. Mr. Razumov, after being
+      absent all day, had returned early in the evening. He was very surprised
+      about half an hour or a little more since to see him come down again. Mr.
+      Razumov left his key, and in the course of some words which passed between
+      them had remarked that he was going out because he needed air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held
+      between his hands. Air. Air. But whether that meant a long or a short
+      absence it was difficult to say. The night was very close, certainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The storm shall drive him in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s going to be a storm?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up her
+      quest that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home within
+      half an hour, to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop. We would look
+      in again presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all answer he moved his head imperceptibly. The approval of Miss
+      Haldin was expressed by her silence. We walked slowly down the street,
+      away from the town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to
+      demolition were overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage,
+      lighted from below by gas lamps. The violent and monotonous noise of the
+      icy waters of the Arve falling over a low dam swept towards us with a
+      chilly draught of air across a great open space, where a double line of
+      lamp-lights outlined a street as yet without houses. But on the other
+      shore, overhung by the awful blackness of the thunder-cloud, a solitary
+      dim light seemed to watch us with a weary stare. When we had strolled as
+      far as the bridge, I said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had better get back....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the shop the sickly man was studying his smudgy newspaper, now spread
+      out largely on the counter. He just raised his head when I looked in and
+      shook it negatively, pursing up his lips. I rejoined Miss Haldin outside
+      at once, and we moved off at a brisk pace. She remarked that she would
+      send Anna with a note the first thing in the morning. I respected her
+      taciturnity, silence being perhaps the best way to show my concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The semi-rural street we followed on our return changed gradually to the
+      usual town thoroughfare, broad and deserted. We did not meet four people
+      altogether, and the way seemed interminable, because my companion&rsquo;s
+      natural anxiety had communicated itself sympathetically to me. At last we
+      turned into the Boulevard des Philosophes, more wide, more empty, more
+      dead&mdash;the very desolation of slumbering respectability. At the sight
+      of the two lighted windows, very conspicuous from afar, I had the mental
+      vision of Mrs. Haldin in her armchair keeping a dreadful, tormenting vigil
+      under the evil spell of an arbitrary rule: a victim of tyranny and
+      revolution, a sight at once cruel and absurd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will come in for a moment?&rdquo; said Natalia Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I demurred on account of the late hour. &ldquo;You know mother likes you so
+      much,&rdquo; she insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will just come in to hear how your mother is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She said, as if to herself, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t even know whether she will believe
+      that I could not find Mr. Razumov, since she has taken it into her head
+      that I am concealing something from her. You may be able to persuade
+      her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother may mistrust me too,&rdquo; I observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You! Why? What could you have to conceal from her? You are not a Russian
+      nor a conspirator.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made up
+      my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end. The distant
+      rolling of thunder in the valley of the Rhone was coming nearer to the
+      sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality. We crossed the
+      street opposite the great dark gateway, and Miss Haldin rang at the door
+      of the apartment. It was opened almost instantly, as if the elderly maid
+      had been waiting in the ante-room for our return. Her flat physiognomy had
+      an air of satisfaction. The gentleman was there, she declared, while
+      closing the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither of us understood. Miss Haldin turned round brusquely to her.
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Herr Razumov,&rdquo; she explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had heard enough of our conversation before we left to know why her
+      young mistress was going out. Therefore, when the gentleman gave his name
+      at the door, she admitted him at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one could have foreseen that,&rdquo; Miss Haldin murmured, with her serious
+      grey eyes fixed upon mine. And, remembering the expression of the young
+      man&rsquo;s face seen not much more than four hours ago, the look of a haunted
+      somnambulist, I wondered with a sort of awe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You asked my mother first?&rdquo; Miss Haldin inquired of the maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I announced the gentleman,&rdquo; she answered, surprised at our troubled
+      faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still,&rdquo; I said in an undertone, &ldquo;your mother was prepared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But he has no idea....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me she doubted his tact. To her question how long the
+      gentleman had been with her mother, the maid told us that Der Herr had
+      been in the drawing-room no more than a short quarter of an hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She waited a moment, then withdrew, looking a little scared. Miss Haldin
+      gazed at me in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As things have turned out,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you happen to know exactly what your
+      brother&rsquo;s friend has to tell your mother. And surely after that...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Natalia Haldin slowly. &ldquo;I only wonder, as I was not here when
+      he came, if it wouldn&rsquo;t be better not to interrupt now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We remained silent, and I suppose we both strained our ears, but no sound
+      reached us through the closed door. The features of Miss Haldin expressed
+      a painful irresolution; she made a movement as if to go in, but checked
+      herself. She had heard footsteps on the other side of the door. It came
+      open, and Razumov, without pausing, stepped out into the ante-room. The
+      fatigue of that day and the struggle with himself had changed him so much
+      that I would have hesitated to recognize that face which, only a few hours
+      before, when he brushed against me in front of the post office, had been
+      startling enough but quite different. It had been not so livid then, and
+      its eyes not so sombre. They certainly looked more sane now, but there was
+      upon them the shadow of something consciously evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I speak of that, because, at first, their glance fell on me, though
+      without any sort of recognition or even comprehension. I was simply in the
+      line of his stare. I don&rsquo;t know if he had heard the bell or expected to
+      see anybody. He was going out, I believe, and I do not think that he saw
+      Miss Haldin till she advanced towards him a step or two. He disregarded
+      the hand she put out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s you, Natalia Victorovna.... Perhaps you are surprised...at this late
+      hour. But, you see, I remembered our conversations in that garden. I
+      thought really it was your wish that I should&mdash;without loss of
+      time...so I came. No other reason. Simply to tell...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke with difficulty. I noticed that, and remembered his declaration
+      to the man in the shop that he was going out because he &ldquo;needed air.&rdquo; If
+      that was his object, then it was clear that he had miserably failed. With
+      downcast eyes and lowered head he made an effort to pick up the strangled
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To tell what I have heard myself only to-day&mdash;to-day....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the door he had not closed I had a view of the drawing-room. It
+      was lighted only by a shaded lamp&mdash;Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s eyes could not
+      support either gas or electricity. It was a comparatively big room, and in
+      contrast with the strongly lighted ante-room its length was lost in
+      semi-transparent gloom backed by heavy shadows; and on that ground I saw
+      the motionless figure of Mrs. Haldin, inclined slightly forward, with a
+      pale hand resting on the arm of the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not move. With the window before her she had no longer that
+      attitude suggesting expectation. The blind was down; and outside there was
+      only the night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town indifferent
+      and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration&mdash;a
+      respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were
+      nothing. Her white head was bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great
+      stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this other
+      glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words and
+      gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother, refused
+      in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more than Rachel&rsquo;s
+      inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more inaccessible in its
+      frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined mass of the high-backed
+      chair, her white, inclined profile suggested the contemplation of
+      something in her lap, as though a beloved head were resting there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by the
+      young man, shut the door. It was not done without hesitation. For a moment
+      I thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only an anxious
+      glance. Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved...but no. There was in the
+      immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of suffering
+      without remedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor. The thought that
+      he would have to repeat the story he had told already was intolerable to
+      him. He had expected to find the two women together. And then, he had said
+      to himself, it would be over for all time&mdash;for all time. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s lucky
+      I don&rsquo;t believe in another world,&rdquo; he had thought cynically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained a
+      certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary. He was aware
+      of the danger of that strange self-indulgence. He alludes to it himself,
+      but he could not refrain. It calmed him&mdash;it reconciled him to his
+      existence. He sat there scribbling by the light of a solitary candle, till
+      it occurred to him that having heard the explanation of Haldin&rsquo;s arrest,
+      as put forward by Sophia Antonovna, it behoved him to tell these ladies
+      himself. They were certain to hear the tale through some other channel,
+      and then his abstention would look strange, not only to the mother and
+      sister of Haldin, but to other people also. Having come to this
+      conclusion, he did not discover in himself any marked reluctance to face
+      the necessity, and very soon an anxiety to be done with it began to
+      torment him. He looked at his watch. No; it was not absolutely too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fifteen minutes with Mrs. Haldin were like the revenge of the unknown:
+      that white face, that weak, distinct voice; that head, at first turned to
+      him eagerly, then, after a while, bowed again and motionless&mdash;in the
+      dim, still light of the room in which his words which he tried to subdue
+      resounded so loudly&mdash;had troubled him like some strange discovery.
+      And there seemed to be a secret obstinacy in that sorrow, something he
+      could not understand; at any rate, something he had not expected. Was it
+      hostile? But it did not matter. Nothing could touch him now; in the eyes
+      of the revolutionists there was now no shadow on his past. The phantom of
+      Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left behind lying powerless and
+      passive on the pavement covered with snow. And this was the phantom&rsquo;s
+      mother consumed with grief and white as a ghost. He had felt a pitying
+      surprise. But that, of course, was of no importance. Mothers did not
+      matter. He could not shake off the poignant impression of that silent,
+      quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of sternness crept into his
+      thoughts. These were the consequences. Well, what of it? &ldquo;Am I then on a
+      bed of roses?&rdquo; he had exclaimed to himself, sitting at some distance with
+      his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow. He had said all he had to say
+      to her, and when he had finished she had not uttered a word. She had
+      turned away her head while he was speaking. The silence which had fallen
+      on his last words had lasted for five minutes or more. What did it mean?
+      Before its incomprehensible character he became conscious of anger in his
+      stern mood, the old anger against Haldin reawakened by the contemplation
+      of Haldin&rsquo;s mother. And was it not something like enviousness which
+      gripped his heart, as if of a privilege denied to him alone of all the men
+      that had ever passed through this world? It was the other who had attained
+      to repose and yet continued to exist in the affection of that mourning old
+      woman, in the thoughts of all these people posing for lovers of humanity.
+      It was impossible to get rid of him. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s myself whom I have given up to
+      destruction,&rdquo; thought Razumov. &ldquo;He has induced me to do it. I can&rsquo;t shake
+      him off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alarmed by that discovery, he got up and strode out of the silent, dim
+      room with its silent old woman in the chair, that mother! He never looked
+      back. It was frankly a flight. But on opening the door he saw his retreat
+      cut off: There was the sister. He had never forgotten the sister, only he
+      had not expected to see her then&mdash;or ever any more, perhaps. Her
+      presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the apparition of her
+      brother had been. Razumov gave a start as though he had discovered himself
+      cleverly trapped. He tried to smile, but could not manage it, and lowered
+      his eyes. &ldquo;Must I repeat that silly story now?&rdquo; he asked himself, and felt
+      a sinking sensation. Nothing solid had passed his lips since the day
+      before, but he was not in a state to analyse the origins of his weakness.
+      He meant to take up his hat and depart with as few words as possible, but
+      Miss Haldin&rsquo;s swift movement to shut the door took him by surprise. He
+      half turned after her, but without raising his eyes, passively, just as a
+      feather might stir in the disturbed air. The next moment she was back in
+      the place she had started from, with another half-turn on his part, so
+      that they came again into the same relative positions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; she said hurriedly. &ldquo;I am very grateful to you, Kirylo
+      Sidorovitch, for coming at once&mdash;like this.... Only, I wish I had....
+      Did mother tell you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder what she could have told me that I did not know before,&rdquo; he
+      said, obviously to himself, but perfectly audible. &ldquo;Because I always did
+      know it,&rdquo; he added louder, as if in despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hung his head. He had such a strong sense of Natalia Haldin&rsquo;s presence
+      that to look at her he felt would be a relief. It was she who had been
+      haunting him now. He had suffered that persecution ever since she had
+      suddenly appeared before him in the garden of the Villa Borel with an
+      extended hand and the name of her brother on her lips.... The ante-room
+      had a row of hooks on the wall nearest to the outer door, while against
+      the wall opposite there stood a small dark table and one chair. The paper,
+      bearing a very faint design, was all but white. The light of an electric
+      bulb high up under the ceiling searched that clear square box into its
+      four bare corners, crudely, without shadows&mdash;a strange stage for an
+      obscure drama.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked Miss Haldin. &ldquo;What is it that you knew always?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his face, pale, full of unexpressed suffering. But that look in
+      his eyes of dull, absent obstinacy, which struck and surprised everybody
+      he was talking to, began to pass away. It was as though he were coming to
+      himself in the awakened consciousness of that marvellous harmony of
+      feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the girl before him
+      a being so rare, outside, and, as it were, above the common notion of
+      beauty. He looked at her so long that she coloured slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it that you knew?&rdquo; she repeated vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That time he managed to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, if it had not been for a word of greeting or two, I would doubt
+      whether your mother was aware at all of my existence. You understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Natalia Haldin nodded; her hands moved slightly by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Is it not heart-breaking? She has not shed a tear yet&mdash;not a
+      single tear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a tear! And you, Natalia Victorovna? You have been able to cry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have. And then I am young enough, Kirylo Sidorovitch, to believe in the
+      future. But when I see my mother so terribly distracted, I almost forget
+      everything. I ask myself whether one should feel proud&mdash;or only
+      resigned. We had such a lot of people coming to see us. There were utter
+      strangers who wrote asking for permission to call to present their
+      respects. It was impossible to keep our door shut for ever. You know that
+      Peter Ivanovitch himself.... Oh yes, there was much sympathy, but there
+      were persons who exulted openly at that death. Then, when I was left alone
+      with poor mother, all this seemed so wrong in spirit, something not worth
+      the price she is paying for it. But directly I heard you were here in
+      Geneva, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I felt that you were the only person who could
+      assist me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In comforting a bereaved mother? Yes!&rdquo; he broke in in a manner which made
+      her open her clear unsuspecting eyes. &ldquo;But there is a question of fitness.
+      Has this occurred to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a breathlessness in his utterance which contrasted with the
+      monstrous hint of mockery in his intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why!&rdquo; whispered Natalia Haldin with feeling. &ldquo;Who more fit than you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a convulsive movement of exasperation, but controlled himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed! Directly you heard that I was in Geneva, before even seeing me?
+      It is another proof of that confidence which....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once his tone changed, became more incisive and more detached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men are poor creatures, Natalia Victorovna. They have no intuition of
+      sentiment. In order to speak fittingly to a mother of her lost son one
+      must have had some experience of the filial relation. It is not the case
+      with me&mdash;if you must know the whole truth. Your hopes have to deal
+      here with &lsquo;a breast unwarmed by any affection,&rsquo; as the poet says.... That
+      does not mean it is insensible,&rdquo; he added in a lower tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am certain your heart is not unfeeling,&rdquo; said Miss Haldin softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It is not as hard as a stone,&rdquo; he went on in the same introspective
+      voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in that
+      unwarmed breast of which he spoke. &ldquo;No, not so hard. But how to prove what
+      you give me credit for&mdash;ah! that&rsquo;s another question. No one has ever
+      expected such a thing from me before. No one whom my tenderness would have
+      been of any use to. And now you come. You! Now! No, Natalia Victorovna.
+      It&rsquo;s too late. You come too late. You must expect nothing from me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She recoiled from him a little, though he had made no movement, as if she
+      had seen some change in his face, charging his words with the significance
+      of some hidden sentiment they shared together. To me, the silent
+      spectator, they looked like two people becoming conscious of a spell which
+      had been lying on them ever since they first set eyes on each other. Had
+      either of them cast a glance then in my direction, I would have opened the
+      door quietly and gone out. But neither did; and I remained, every fear of
+      indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous remoteness from their
+      captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian problems, the boundary of
+      their eyes, of their feelings&mdash;the prison of their souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank, courageous, Miss Haldin controlled her voice in the midst of her
+      trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can this mean?&rdquo; she asked, as if speaking to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may mean that you have given yourself up to vain imaginings while I
+      have managed to remain amongst the truth of things and the realities of
+      life&mdash;our Russian life&mdash;such as they are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are cruel,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And ugly. Don&rsquo;t forget that&mdash;and ugly. Look where you like. Look
+      near you, here abroad where you are, and then look back at home, whence
+      you came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must look beyond the present.&rdquo; Her tone had an ardent conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The blind can do that best. I have had the misfortune to be born
+      clear-eyed. And if you only knew what strange things I have seen! What
+      amazing and unexpected apparitions!... But why talk of all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you,&rdquo; she protested with
+      earnest serenity. The sombre humours of her brother&rsquo;s friend left her
+      unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were the
+      signs of an indignant rectitude. She saw that he was not an ordinary
+      person, and perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to
+      her trustful eyes. &ldquo;Yes, with you especially,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;With you of
+      all the Russian people in the world....&rdquo; A faint smile dwelt for a moment
+      on her lips. &ldquo;I am like poor mother in a way. I too seem unable to give up
+      our beloved dead, who, don&rsquo;t forget, was all in all to us. I don&rsquo;t want to
+      abuse your sympathy, but you must understand that it is in you that we can
+      find all that is left of his generous soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least. And
+      yet, even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility. It was a
+      sort of rapt thoughtfulness. Then he stirred slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I! Going? Where? Oh yes, but I must tell you first....&rdquo; His voice was
+      muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance, as if
+      speech were something disgusting or deadly. &ldquo;That story, you know&mdash;the
+      story I heard this afternoon....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know the story already,&rdquo; she said sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know it! Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. It&rsquo;s Sophia Antonovna. I have seen her just now. She sends you her
+      greetings. She is going away to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down,
+      and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four
+      bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the
+      Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western
+      eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My existence
+      seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now make a
+      movement. And I thought to myself that, of course, they had to come
+      together, the sister and the friend of that dead man. The ideas, the
+      hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom, expressed in their common
+      affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of autocracy,&mdash;all this
+      must draw them to each other fatally. Her very ignorance and his
+      loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.
+      And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already. Of course. It was
+      manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time
+      before they met. She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling her
+      imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for him to
+      see that exceptional girl was enough. The only cause for surprise was his
+      gloomy aloofness before her clearly expressed welcome. But he was young,
+      and however austere and devoted to his revolutionary ideals, he was not
+      blind. The period of reserve was over; he was coming forward in his own
+      way. I could not mistake the significance of this late visit, for in what
+      he had to say there was nothing urgent. The true cause dawned upon me: he
+      had discovered that he needed her and she was moved by the same feeling.
+      It was the second time that I saw them together, and I knew that next time
+      they met I would not be there, either remembered or forgotten. I would
+      have virtually ceased to exist for both these young people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made this discovery in a very few moments. Meantime, Natalia Haldin was
+      telling Razumov briefly of our peregrinations from one end of Geneva to
+      the other. While speaking she raised her hands above her head to untie her
+      veil, and that movement displayed for an instant the seductive grace of
+      her youthful figure, clad in the simplest of mourning. In the transparent
+      shadow the hat rim threw on her face her grey eyes had an enticing lustre.
+      Her voice, with its unfeminine yet exquisite timbre, was steady, and she
+      spoke quickly, frank, unembarrassed. As she justified her action by the
+      mental state of her mother, a spasm of pain marred the generously
+      confiding harmony of her features. I perceived that with his downcast eyes
+      he had the air of a man who is listening to a strain of music rather than
+      to articulated speech. And in the same way, after she had ceased, he
+      seemed to listen yet, motionless, as if under the spell of suggestive
+      sound. He came to himself, muttering&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes. She has not shed a tear. She did not seem to hear what I was
+      saying. I might have told her anything. She looked as if no longer
+      belonging to this world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin gave signs of profound distress. Her voice faltered. &ldquo;You
+      don&rsquo;t know how bad it has come to be. She expects now to see <i>him</i>!&rdquo;
+       The veil dropped from her fingers and she clasped her hands in anguish.
+      &ldquo;It shall end by her seeing him,&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov raised his head sharply and attached on her a prolonged thoughtful
+      glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m. That&rsquo;s very possible,&rdquo; he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if giving
+      his opinion on a matter of fact. &ldquo;I wonder what....&rdquo; He checked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be the end. Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will
+      follow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think so?&rdquo; he queried profoundly. Miss Haldin&rsquo;s lips were slightly
+      parted. Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man&rsquo;s
+      character had fascinated her from the first. &ldquo;No! There&rsquo;s neither truth
+      nor consolation to be got from the phantoms of the dead,&rdquo; he added after a
+      weighty pause. &ldquo;I might have told her something true; for instance, that
+      your brother meant to save his life&mdash;to escape. There can be no doubt
+      of that. But I did not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You did not! But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. Other thoughts came into my head,&rdquo; he answered. He seemed
+      to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count
+      his own heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face of
+      the girl. &ldquo;You were not there,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;I had made up my mind never
+      to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You.... How is it possible?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may well ask.... However, I think that I refrained from telling your
+      mother from prudence. I might have assured her that in the last
+      conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That last conversation was with you,&rdquo; she struck in her deep, moving
+      voice. &ldquo;Some day you must....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was with me. Of you he said that you had trustful eyes. And why I have
+      not been able to forget that phrase I don&rsquo;t know. It meant that there is
+      in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no suspicion&mdash;nothing in
+      your heart that could give you a conception of a living, acting, speaking
+      lie, if ever it came in your way. That you are a predestined victim....
+      Ha! what a devilish suggestion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the
+      precarious hold he had over himself. He was like a man defying his own
+      dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the
+      precipice. Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast. The dropped black
+      veil lay on the floor between them. Her movement steadied him. He looked
+      intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again his
+      eyes to her face. But he did not give her time to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? You don&rsquo;t understand? Very well.&rdquo; He had recovered his calm by a
+      miracle of will. &ldquo;So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Sophia Antonovna told me....&rdquo; Miss Haldin stopped, wonder growing in
+      her wide eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m. That&rsquo;s the respectable enemy,&rdquo; he muttered, as though he were alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly,&rdquo; remarked Miss
+      Haldin, after waiting for a while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that your impression? And she the most intelligent of the lot, too.
+      Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires to...Ah!
+      these conspirators,&rdquo; he said slowly, with an accent of scorn; &ldquo;they would
+      get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I have the
+      greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition of an active
+      Providence. It&rsquo;s irresistible.... The alternative, of course, would be the
+      personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if so, he has overdone it
+      altogether&mdash;the old Father of Lies&mdash;our national patron&mdash;our
+      domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has overdone it.
+      It seems that I am not simple enough.... That&rsquo;s it! I ought to have
+      known.... And I did know it,&rdquo; he added in a tone of poignant distress
+      which overcame my astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This man is deranged,&rdquo; I said to myself, very much frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of
+      commonplace definitions. It was as though he had stabbed himself outside
+      and had come in there to show it; and more than that&mdash;as though he
+      were turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect. That was the
+      impression, rendered in physical terms. One could not defend oneself from
+      a certain amount of pity. But it was for Miss Haldin, already so tried in
+      her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern. Her attitude, her
+      face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the verge of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?&rdquo; There was a hint of tenderness in that
+      cry. He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his faculties
+      which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I have
+      approached you frankly. I need at this time to see clearly in myself....&rdquo;
+       She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to utter at last
+      some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother&rsquo;s friend. His silence
+      became impressive, like a sign of a momentous resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to come
+      to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems as if
+      you were keeping back something from me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,&rdquo; he was heard at last in a strange unringing
+      voice, &ldquo;whom did you see in that place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where? In Peter Ivanovitch&rsquo;s rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three other
+      people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! The vanguard&mdash;the forlorn hope of the great plot,&rdquo; he commented
+      to himself. &ldquo;Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
+      change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
+      Ivanovitch should be the head of a State.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are teasing me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Our dear one told me once to remember
+      that men serve always something greater than themselves&mdash;the idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our dear one,&rdquo; he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
+      absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being with
+      hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical suffering,
+      had lost all their fire. &ldquo;Ah! your brother.... But on your lips, in your
+      voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is divine.... I wish I
+      could know the innermost depths of your thoughts, of your feelings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?&rdquo; she cried, alarmed by these words coming
+      out of strangely lifeless lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And Sophia
+      Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything from
+      you. She had no time for more than a few words.&rdquo; Miss Haldin&rsquo;s voice
+      dropped and she became silent for a moment. &ldquo;The man, it appears, has
+      taken his life,&rdquo; she said sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,&rdquo; he asked after a pause, &ldquo;do you believe in
+      remorse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a question!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can <i>you</i> know of it?&rdquo; he muttered thickly. &ldquo;It is not for such
+      as you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy of
+      remorse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
+      brute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a man of the people,&rdquo; Razumov went on, &ldquo;to whom they, the
+      revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must be
+      forgiven.... And you must not believe all you&rsquo;ve heard from that source,
+      either,&rdquo; he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are concealing something from me,&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
+      to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer
+      and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on
+      our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that there can be
+      no union and no love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear. No revenge for you, then? Never? Not the least bit?&rdquo; He smiled
+      bitterly with his colourless lips. &ldquo;You yourself are like the very spirit
+      of that merciful future. Strange that it does not make it easier.... No!
+      But suppose that the real betrayer of your brother&mdash;Ziemianitch had a
+      part in it too, but insignificant and quite involuntary&mdash;suppose that
+      he was a young man, educated, an intellectual worker, thoughtful, a man
+      your brother might have trusted lightly, perhaps, but still&mdash;suppose....
+      But there&rsquo;s a whole story there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you know the story! But why, then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard it. There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but that
+      does not matter if a man always serves something greater than himself&mdash;the
+      idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that tale!&rdquo; Miss Haldin repeated. She seemed turned into stone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know why I came to you? It is simply because there is no one
+      anywhere in the whole great world I could go to. Do you understand what I
+      say? Not one to go to. Do you conceive the desolation of the thought&mdash;no
+      one&mdash;to&mdash;go&mdash;to?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in the
+      letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely days, in
+      their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to see the truth
+      struggling on his lips. What she was conscious of was the obscure form of
+      his suffering. She was on the point of extending her hand to him
+      impulsively when he spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors of
+      remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the
+      atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before
+      me with your voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed villa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of
+      despairing insight went straight to the point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no more to tell!&rdquo; He made a movement forward, and she actually
+      put her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed
+      her, and he kept his ground, though trembling in every limb. &ldquo;It ends here&mdash;on
+      this very spot.&rdquo; He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast with
+      force, and became perfectly still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of
+      Miss Haldin and lower her down. As she sank into it she swung half round
+      on my arm, and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back. He
+      looked at her with an appalling expressionless tranquillity. Incredulity,
+      struggling with astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived me for a time
+      of the power of speech. Then I turned on him, whispering from very rage&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is monstrous. What are you staying for? Don&rsquo;t let her catch sight of
+      you again. Go away!...&rdquo; He did not budge. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you understand that your
+      presence is intolerable&mdash;even to me? If there&rsquo;s any sense of shame in
+      you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly his sullen eyes moved in my direction. &ldquo;How did this old man come
+      here?&rdquo; he muttered, astounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and
+      tottered. Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried
+      to her assistance. I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into the
+      drawing-room. Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant end,
+      the profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had the stillness
+      of a sombre painting. Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed mournfully at the
+      tragic immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a beloved head lying
+      in her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in its
+      human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely the
+      ruthless working of political institutions. After assisting Miss Haldin to
+      the sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed in the
+      opening, in the searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes fell on
+      Razumov, still there, standing before the empty chair, as if rooted for
+      ever to the spot of his atrocious confession. A wonder came over me that
+      the mysterious force which had torn it out of him had failed to destroy
+      his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed. I stared at the
+      broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing immobility of his
+      limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin looked intensely black
+      in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing at it spell-bound. Next
+      moment, stooping with an incredible, savage swiftness, he snatched it up
+      and pressed it to his face with both hands. Something, extreme
+      astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he seemed to vanish before
+      he moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on
+      contemplating the empty chair in the empty ante-room. The meaning of what
+      I had seen reached my mind with a staggering shock. I seized Natalia
+      Haldin by the shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!&rdquo; I cried, in the scared,
+      deadened voice of an awful discovery. &ldquo;He....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rest remained unspoken. I stepped back and looked down at her, in
+      silent horror. Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her lap.
+      She raised her grey eyes slowly. Shadows seemed to come and go in them as
+      if the steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate at last in the
+      cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark immensity claiming
+      her for its own, where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the
+      cynicism of oppression and revolt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is impossible to be more unhappy....&rdquo; The languid whisper of her voice
+      struck me with dismay. &ldquo;It is impossible.... I feel my heart becoming like
+      ice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      IV
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov walked straight home on the wet glistening pavement. A heavy
+      shower passed over him; distant lightning played faintly against the
+      fronts of the dumb houses with the shuttered shops all along the Rue de
+      Carouge; and now and then, after the faint flash, there was a faint,
+      sleepy rumble; but the main forces of the thunderstorm remained massed
+      down the Rhone valley as if loath to attack the respectable and
+      passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of dreary
+      hotels, tendering the same indifferent, hospitality to tourists of all
+      nations and to international conspirators of every shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The owner of the shop was making ready to close when Razumov entered and
+      without a word extended his hand for the key of his room. On reaching it
+      for him, from a shelf, the man was about to pass a small joke as to taking
+      the air in a thunderstorm, but, after looking at the face of his lodger,
+      he only observed, just to say something&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got very wet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am washed clean,&rdquo; muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head to
+      foot, and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading to
+      his room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off
+      his watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to
+      write. The book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer,
+      which he pulled out violently, and did not even trouble to push back
+      afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in
+      hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means
+      with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been
+      already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing
+      new to the psychological side of this disclosure (there is even one more
+      allusion to the silver medal in this last entry), comes a page and a half
+      of incoherent writing where his expression is baffled by the novelty and
+      the mysteriousness of that side of our emotional life to which his
+      solitary existence had been a stranger. Then only he begins to address
+      directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express in broken
+      sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that very word)
+      power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the dormant seed of
+      her brother&rsquo;s words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... The most trustful eyes in the world&mdash;your brother said of you
+      when he was as well as a dead man already. And when you stood before me
+      with your hand extended, I remembered the very sound of his voice, and I
+      looked into your eyes&mdash;and that was enough. I knew that something had
+      happened, but I did not know then what.... But don&rsquo;t be deceived, Natalia
+      Victorovna. I believed that I had in my breast nothing but an
+      inexhaustible fund of anger and hate for you both. I remembered that he
+      had looked to you for the perpetuation of his visionary soul. He, this man
+      who had robbed me of my hard-working, purposeful existence. I, too, had my
+      guiding idea; and remember that, amongst us, it is more difficult to lead
+      a life of toil and self-denial than to go out in the street and kill from
+      conviction. But enough of that. Hate or no hate, I felt at once that,
+      while shunning the sight of you, I could never succeed in driving away
+      your image. I would say, addressing that dead man, &lsquo;Is this the way you
+      are going to haunt me?&rsquo; It is only later on that I understood&mdash;only
+      to-day, only a few hours ago. What could I have known of what was tearing
+      me to pieces and dragging the secret for ever to my lips? You were
+      appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself back into truth and
+      peace. You! And you have done it in the same way, too, in which he ruined
+      me: by forcing upon me your confidence. Only what I detested him for, in
+      you ended by appearing noble and exalted. But, I repeat, be not deceived.
+      I was given up to evil. I exulted in having induced that silly innocent
+      fool to steal his father&rsquo;s money. He was a fool, but not a thief. I made
+      him one. It was necessary. I had to confirm myself in my contempt and hate
+      for what I betrayed. I have suffered from as many vipers in my heart as
+      any social democrat of them all&mdash;vanity, ambitions, jealousies,
+      shameful desires, evil passions of envy and revenge. I had my security
+      stolen from me, years of good work, my best hopes. Listen&mdash;now comes
+      the true confession. The other was nothing. To save me, your trustful eyes
+      had to entice my thought to the very edge of the blackest treachery. I
+      could see them constantly looking at me with the confidence of your pure
+      heart which had not been touched by evil things. Victor Haldin had stolen
+      the truth of my life from me, who had nothing else in the world, and he
+      boasted of living on through you on this earth where I had no place to lay
+      my head on. She will marry some day, he had said&mdash;and your eyes were
+      trustful. And do you know what I said to myself? I shall steal his
+      sister&rsquo;s soul from her. When we met that first morning in the gardens, and
+      you spoke to me confidingly in the generosity of your spirit, I was
+      thinking, &lsquo;Yes, he himself by talking of her trustful eyes has delivered
+      her into my hands!&rsquo; If you could have looked then into my heart, you would
+      have cried out aloud with terror and disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps no one will believe the baseness of such an intention to be
+      possible. It&rsquo;s certain that, when we parted that morning, I gloated over
+      it. I brooded upon the best way. The old man you introduced me to insisted
+      on walking with me. I don&rsquo;t know who he is. He talked of you, of your
+      lonely, helpless state, and every word of that friend of yours was egging
+      me on to the unpardonable sin of stealing a soul. Could he have been the
+      devil himself in the shape of an old Englishman? Natalia Victorovna, I was
+      possessed! I returned to look at you every day, and drink in your presence
+      the poison of my infamous intention. But I foresaw difficulties. Then
+      Sophia Antonovna, of whom I was not thinking&mdash;I had forgotten her
+      existence&mdash;appears suddenly with that tale from St. Petersburg....
+      The only thing needed to make me safe&mdash;a trusted revolutionist for
+      ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further
+      crime. The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible. These people stood
+      doomed by the folly and the illusion that was in them&mdash;they being
+      themselves the slaves of lies. Natalia Victorovna, I embraced the might of
+      falsehood, I exulted in it&mdash;I gave myself up to it for a time. Who
+      could have resisted! You yourself were the prize of it. I sat alone in my
+      room, planning a life, the very thought of which makes me shudder now,
+      like a believer who had been tempted to an atrocious sacrilege. But I
+      brooded ardently over its images. The only thing was that there seemed to
+      be no air in it. And also I was afraid of your mother. I never knew mine.
+      I&rsquo;ve never known any kind of love. There is something in the mere word....
+      Of you, I was not afraid&mdash;forgive me for telling you this. No, not of
+      you. You were truth itself. You could not suspect me. As to your mother,
+      you yourself feared already that her mind had given way from grief. Who
+      could believe anything against me? Had not Ziemianitch hanged himself from
+      remorse? I said to myself, &lsquo;Let&rsquo;s put it to the test, and be done with it
+      once for all.&rsquo; I trembled when I went in; but your mother hardly listened
+      to what I was saying to her, and, in a little while, seemed to have
+      forgotten my very existence. I sat looking at her. There was no longer
+      anything between you and me. You were defenceless&mdash;and soon, very
+      soon, you would be alone.... I thought of you. Defenceless. For days you
+      have talked with me&mdash;opening your heart. I remembered the shadow of
+      your eyelashes over your grey trustful eyes. And your pure forehead! It is
+      low like the forehead of statues&mdash;calm, unstained. It was as if your
+      pure brow bore a light which fell on me, searched my heart and saved me
+      from ignominy, from ultimate undoing. And it saved you too. Pardon my
+      presumption. But there was that in your glances which seemed to tell me
+      that you.... Your light! your truth! I felt that I must tell you that I
+      had ended by loving you. And to tell you that I must first confess.
+      Confess, go out&mdash;and perish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suddenly you stood before me! You alone in all the world to whom I must
+      confess. You fascinated me&mdash;you have freed me from the blindness of
+      anger and hate&mdash;the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me.
+      Now I have done it; and as I write here, I am in the depths of
+      anguish, but there is air to breathe at last&mdash;air! And, by the by,
+      that old man sprang up from somewhere as I was speaking to you, and raged
+      at me like a disappointed devil. I suffer horribly, but I am not in
+      despair. There is only one more thing to do for me. After that&mdash;if
+      they let me&mdash;I shall go away and bury myself in obscure misery. In
+      giving Victor Haldin up, it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed
+      most basely. You must believe what I say now, you can&rsquo;t refuse to believe
+      this. Most basely. It is through you that I came to feel this so deeply.
+      After all, it is they and not I who have the right on their side!&mdash;theirs
+      is the strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don&rsquo;t be deceived,
+      Natalia Victorovna, I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave?
+      No! I am independent&mdash;and therefore perdition is my lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the
+      black veil he had carried off. He then ransacked the drawers for paper and
+      string, made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin, Boulevard des
+      Philosophes, and then flung the pen away from him into a distant corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This done, he sat down with the watch before him. He could have gone out
+      at once, but the hour had not struck yet. The hour would be midnight.
+      There was no reason for that choice except that the facts and the words of
+      a certain evening in his past were timing his conduct in the present. The
+      sudden power Natalia Haldin had gained over him he ascribed to the same
+      cause. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t walk with impunity over a phantom&rsquo;s breast,&rdquo; he heard
+      himself mutter. &ldquo;Thus he saves me,&rdquo; he thought suddenly. &ldquo;He himself, the
+      betrayed man.&rdquo; The vivid image of Miss Haldin seemed to stand by him,
+      watching him relentlessly. She was not disturbing. He had done with life,
+      and his thought even in her presence tried to take an impartial survey.
+      Now his scorn extended to himself. &ldquo;I had neither the simplicity nor the
+      courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel, or an exceptionally
+      able man. For who, with us in Russia, is to tell a scoundrel from an
+      exceptionally able man?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was the puppet of his past, because at the very stroke of midnight he
+      jumped up and ran swiftly downstairs as if confident that, by the power of
+      destiny, the house door would fly open before the absolute necessity of
+      his errand. And as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom of the
+      stairs, it was opened for him by some people of the house coming home late&mdash;two
+      men and a woman. He slipped out through them into the street, swept then
+      by a fitful gust of wind. They were, of course, very much startled. A
+      flash of lightning enabled them to observe him walking away quickly. One
+      of the men shouted, and was starting in pursuit, but the woman had
+      recognized him. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right. It&rsquo;s only that young Russian from the
+      third floor.&rdquo; The darkness returned with a single clap of thunder, like a
+      gun fired for a warning of his escape from the prison of lies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have heard at some time or other and now remembered unconsciously
+      that there was to be a gathering of revolutionists at the house of Julius
+      Laspara that evening. At any rate, he made straight for the Laspara house,
+      and found himself without surprise ringing at its street door, which, of
+      course, was closed. By that time the thunderstorm had attacked in earnest.
+      The steep incline of the street ran with water, the thick fall of rain
+      enveloped him like a luminous veil in the play of lightning. He was
+      perfectly calm, and, between the crashes, listened attentively to the
+      delicate tinkling of the doorbell somewhere within the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some difficulty before he was admitted. His person was not known
+      to that one of the guests who had volunteered to go downstairs and see
+      what was the matter. Razumov argued with him patiently. There could be no
+      harm in admitting a caller. He had something to communicate to the company
+      upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something of importance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;ll be for the hearers to judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Urgent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without a moment&rsquo;s delay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, one of the Laspara daughters descended the stairs, small lamp in
+      hand, in a grimy and crumpled gown, which seemed to hang on her by a
+      miracle, and looking more than ever like an old doll with a dusty brown
+      wig, dragged from under a sofa. She recognized Razumov at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do? Of course you may come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Following her light, Razumov climbed two flights of stairs from the lower
+      darkness. Leaving the lamp on a bracket on the landing, she opened a door,
+      and went in, accompanied by the sceptical guest. Razumov entered last. He
+      closed the door behind him, and stepping on one side, put his back against
+      the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three little rooms <i>en suite</i>, with low, smoky ceilings and lit
+      by paraffin lamps, were crammed with people. Loud talking was going on in
+      all three, and tea-glasses, full, half-full, and empty, stood everywhere,
+      even on the floor. The other Laspara girl sat, dishevelled and languid,
+      behind an enormous samovar. In the inner doorway Razumov had a glimpse of
+      the protuberance of a large stomach, which he recognized. Only a few feet
+      from him Julius Laspara was getting down hurriedly from his high stool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The appearance of the midnight visitor caused no small sensation. Laspara
+      is very summary in his version of that night&rsquo;s happenings. After some
+      words of greeting, disregarded by Razumov, Laspara (ignoring purposely his
+      guest&rsquo;s soaked condition and his extraordinary manner of presenting
+      himself) mentioned something about writing an article. He was growing
+      uneasy, and Razumov appeared absent-minded. &ldquo;I have written already all I
+      shall ever write,&rdquo; he said at last, with a little laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole company&rsquo;s attention was riveted on the new-comer, dripping with
+      water, deadly pale, and keeping his position against the wall. Razumov put
+      Laspara gently aside, as though he wished to be seen from head to foot by
+      everybody. By then the buzz of conversations had died down completely,
+      even in the most distant of the three rooms. The doorway facing Razumov
+      became blocked by men and women, who craned their necks and certainly
+      seemed to expect something startling to happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A squeaky, insolent declaration was heard from that group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know this ridiculously conceited individual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What individual?&rdquo; asked Razumov, raising his bowed head, and searching
+      with his eyes all the eyes fixed upon him. An intense surprised silence
+      lasted for a time. &ldquo;If it&rsquo;s me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped, thinking over the form of his confession, and found it
+      suddenly, unavoidably suggested by the fateful evening of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am come here,&rdquo; he began, in a clear voice, &ldquo;to talk of an individual
+      called Ziemianitch. Sophia Antonovna has informed me that she would make
+      public a certain letter from St. Petersburg....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sophia Antonovna has left us early in the evening,&rdquo; said Laspara. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+      quite correct. Everybody here has heard....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; Razumov interrupted, with a shade of impatience, for his
+      heart was beating strongly. Then, mastering his voice so far that there
+      was even a touch of irony in his clear, forcible enunciation&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In justice to that individual, the much ill-used peasant, Ziemianitch, I
+      now declare solemnly that the conclusions of that letter calumniate a man
+      of the people&mdash;a bright Russian soul. Ziemianitch had nothing to do
+      with the actual arrest of Victor Haldin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov dwelt on the name heavily, and then waited till the faint,
+      mournful murmur which greeted it had died out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Victor Victorovitch Haldin,&rdquo; he began again, &ldquo;acting with, no doubt,
+      noble-minded imprudence, took refuge with a certain student of whose
+      opinions he knew nothing but what his own illusions suggested to his
+      generous heart. It was an unwise display of confidence. But I am not here
+      to appreciate the actions of Victor Haldin. Am I to tell you of the
+      feelings of that student, sought out in his obscure solitude, and menaced
+      by the complicity forced upon him? Am I to tell you what he did? It&rsquo;s a
+      rather complicated story. In the end the student went to General T&mdash;-
+      himself, and said, &lsquo;I have the man who killed de P&mdash;- locked up in my
+      room, Victor Haldin&mdash;a student like myself.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A great buzz arose, in which Razumov raised his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Observe&mdash;that man had certain honest ideals in view. But I didn&rsquo;t
+      come here to explain him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But you must explain how you know all this,&rdquo; came in grave tones from
+      somebody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A vile coward!&rdquo; This simple cry vibrated with indignation. &ldquo;Name him!&rdquo;
+       shouted other voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you clamouring for?&rdquo; said Razumov disdainfully, in the profound
+      silence which fell on the raising of his hand. &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you all understood
+      that I am that man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Laspara went away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool. In
+      the first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to be torn
+      to pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing came of it
+      but noise. It was bewildering. His head ached terribly. In the confused
+      uproar he made out several times the name of Peter Ivanovitch, the word
+      &ldquo;judgement,&rdquo; and the phrase, &ldquo;But this is a confession,&rdquo; uttered by
+      somebody in a desperate shriek. In the midst of the tumult, a young man,
+      younger than himself, approached him with blazing eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must beg you,&rdquo; he said, with venomous politeness, &ldquo;to be good enough
+      not to move from this spot till you are told what you are to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;I came in voluntarily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maybe. But you won&rsquo;t go out till you are permitted,&rdquo; retorted the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He beckoned with his hand, calling out, &ldquo;Louisa! Louisa! come here,
+      please&rdquo;; and, presently, one of the Laspara girls (they had been staring
+      at Razumov from behind the samovar) came along, trailing a bedraggled tail
+      of dirty flounces, and dragging with her a chair, which she set against
+      the door, and, sitting down on it, crossed her legs. The young man thanked
+      her effusively, and rejoined a group carrying on an animated discussion in
+      low tones. Razumov lost himself for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A squeaky voice screamed, &ldquo;Confession or no confession, you are a police
+      spy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The revolutionist Nikita had pushed his way in front of Razumov, and faced
+      him with his big, livid cheeks, his heavy paunch, bull neck, and enormous
+      hands. Razumov looked at the famous slayer of gendarmes in silent disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what are you?&rdquo; he said, very low, then shut his eyes, and rested the
+      back of his head against the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be better for you to depart now.&rdquo; Razumov heard a mild, sad
+      voice, and opened his eyes. The gentle speaker was an elderly man, with a
+      great brush of fine hair making a silvery halo all round his keen,
+      intelligent face. &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch shall be informed of your confession&mdash;and
+      you shall be directed....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, turning to Nikita, nicknamed Necator, standing by, he appealed to
+      him in a murmur&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else can we do? After this piece of sincerity he cannot be dangerous
+      any longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other muttered, &ldquo;Better make sure of that before we let him go. Leave
+      that to me. I know how to deal with such gentlemen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He exchanged meaning glances with two or three men, who nodded slightly,
+      then turning roughly to Razumov, &ldquo;You have heard? You are not wanted here.
+      Why don&rsquo;t you get out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Laspara girl on guard rose, and pulled the chair out of the way
+      unemotionally. She gave a sleepy stare to Razumov, who started, looked
+      round the room and passed slowly by her as if struck by some sudden
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg you to observe,&rdquo; he said, already on the landing, &ldquo;that I had only
+      to hold my tongue. To-day, of all days since I came amongst you, I was
+      made safe, and to-day I made myself free from falsehood, from remorse&mdash;independent
+      of every single human being on this earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his back on the room, and walked towards the stairs, but, at the
+      violent crash of the door behind him, he looked over his shoulder and saw
+      that Nikita, with three others, had followed him out. &ldquo;They are going to
+      kill me, after all,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he had time to turn round and confront them fairly, they set on him
+      with a rush. He was driven headlong against the wall. &ldquo;I wonder how,&rdquo; he
+      completed his thought. Nikita cried, with a shrill laugh right in his
+      face, &ldquo;We shall make you harmless. You wait a bit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov did not struggle. The three men held him pinned against the wall,
+      while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side, deliberately
+      swung off his enormous arm. Razumov, looking for a knife in his hand, saw
+      it come at him open, unarmed, and received a tremendous blow on the side
+      of his head over his ear. At the same time he heard a faint, dull
+      detonating sound, as if some one had fired a pistol on the other side of
+      the wall. A raging fury awoke in him at this outrage. The people in
+      Laspara&rsquo;s rooms, holding their breath, listened to the desperate scuffling
+      of four men all over the landing; thuds against the walls, a terrible
+      crash against the very door, then all of them went down together with a
+      violence which seemed to shake the whole house. Razumov, overpowered,
+      breathless, crushed under the weight of his assailants, saw the monstrous
+      Nikita squatting on his heels near his head, while the others held him
+      down, kneeling on his chest, gripping his throat, lying across his legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn his face the other way,&rdquo; the paunchy terrorist directed, in an
+      excited, gleeful squeak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Razumov could struggle no longer. He was exhausted; he had to watch
+      passively the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in a degrading
+      blow over his other ear. It seemed to split his head in two, and all at
+      once the men holding him became perfectly silent&mdash;soundless as
+      shadows. In silence they pulled him brutally to his feet, rushed with him
+      noiselessly down the staircase, and, opening the door, flung him out into
+      the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell forward, and at once rolled over and over helplessly, going down
+      the short slope together with the rush of running rain water. He came to
+      rest in the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on his back, with a
+      great flash of lightning over his face&mdash;a vivid, silent flash of
+      lightning which blinded him utterly. He picked himself up, and put his arm
+      over his eyes to recover his sight. Not a sound reached him from anywhere,
+      and he began to walk, staggering, down a long, empty street. The lightning
+      waved and darted round him its silent flames, the water of the deluge
+      fell, ran, leaped, drove&mdash;noiseless like the drift of mist. In this
+      unearthly stillness his footsteps fell silent on the pavement, while a
+      dumb wind drove him on and on, like a lost mortal in a phantom world
+      ravaged by a soundless thunderstorm. God only knows where his noiseless
+      feet took him to that night, here and there, and back again without pause
+      or rest. Of one place, at least, where they did lead him, we heard
+      afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first south-shore
+      tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled, soaked man
+      without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his head down,
+      step right in front of his car, and go under.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side, Razumov
+      had not lost consciousness. It was as though he had tumbled, smashing
+      himself, into a world of mutes. Silent men, moving unheard, lifted him up,
+      laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing round him their
+      alarm, horror, and compassion. A red face with moustaches stooped close
+      over him, lips moving, eyes rolling. Razumov tried hard to understand the
+      reason of this dumb show. To those who stood around him, the features of
+      that stranger, so grievously hurt, seemed composed in meditation.
+      Afterwards his eyes sent out at them a look of fear and closed slowly.
+      They stared at him. Razumov made an effort to remember some French words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Je suis sourd</i>,&rdquo; he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is deaf,&rdquo; they exclaimed to each other. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why he did not hear
+      the car.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They carried him off in that same car. Before it started on its journey, a
+      woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of some
+      private grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and would
+      not be put off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a relation,&rdquo; she insisted, in bad French. &ldquo;This young man is a
+      Russian, and I am his relation.&rdquo; On this plea they let her have her way.
+      She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes
+      avoided looking at his deathlike face. At the corner of a street, on the
+      other side of the town, a stretcher met the car. She followed it to the
+      door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a
+      bed. Razumov&rsquo;s new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials had
+      some difficulty in inducing her to go away. The porter observed her
+      lingering on the opposite pavement for a long time. Suddenly, as though
+      she had remembered something, she ran off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S&mdash;,
+      had made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to the
+      Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. She had found work to do after her own heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there
+      had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation. The terrible
+      Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in horrible
+      glee before all the company&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Razumov! Mr. Razumov! The wonderful Razumov! He shall never be any use as
+      a spy on any one. He won&rsquo;t talk, because he will never hear anything in
+      his life&mdash;not a thing! I have burst the drums of his ears for him.
+      Oh, you may trust me. I know the trick. Ha! Ha! Ha! I know the trick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      V
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly a fortnight after her mother&rsquo;s funeral that I saw Natalia
+      Haldin for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those silent, sombre days the doors of the <i>appartement</i> on the
+      Boulevard des Philosophes were closed to every one but myself. I believe I
+      was of some use, if only in this, that I alone was aware of the incredible
+      part of the situation. Miss Haldin nursed her mother alone to the last
+      moment. If Razumov&rsquo;s visit had anything to do with Mrs. Haldin&rsquo;s end (and
+      I cannot help thinking that it hastened it considerably), it is because
+      the man, trusted impulsively by the ill-fated Victor Haldin, had failed to
+      gain the confidence of Victor Haldin&rsquo;s mother. What tale, precisely, he
+      told her cannot be known&mdash;at any rate, I do not know it&mdash;but to
+      me she seemed to die from the shock of an ultimate disappointment borne in
+      silence. She had not believed him. Perhaps she could no longer believe
+      any one, and consequently had nothing to say to any one&mdash;not even to
+      her daughter. I suspect that Miss Haldin lived the heaviest hours of her
+      life by that silent death-bed. I confess I was angry with the
+      broken-hearted old woman passing away in the obstinacy of her mute
+      distrust of her daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was all over I stood aside. Miss Haldin had her compatriots round
+      her then. A great number of them attended the funeral. I was there too,
+      but afterwards managed to keep away from Miss Haldin, till I received a
+      short note rewarding my self-denial. &ldquo;It is as you would have it. I am
+      going back to Russia at once. My mind is made up. Come and see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Verily, it was a reward of discretion. I went without delay to receive it.
+      The <i>appartement</i> of the Boulevard des Philosophes presented the
+      dreary signs of impending abandonment. It looked desolate and as if
+      already empty to my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing, we exchanged a few words about her health, mine, remarks as to
+      some people of the Russian colony, and then Natalia Haldin, establishing
+      me on the sofa, began to talk openly of her future work, of her plans. It
+      was all to be as I had wished it. And it was to be for life. We should
+      never see each other again. Never!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gathered this success to my breast. Natalia Haldin looked matured by her
+      open and secret experiences. With her arms folded she walked up and down
+      the whole length of the room, talking slowly, smooth-browed, with a
+      resolute profile. She gave me a new view of herself, and I marvelled at
+      that something grave and measured in her voice, in her movements, in her
+      manner. It was the perfection of collected independence. The strength of
+      her nature had come to surface because the obscure depths had been
+      stirred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We two can talk of it now,&rdquo; she observed, after a silence and stopping
+      short before me. &ldquo;Have you been to inquire at the hospital lately?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I have.&rdquo; And as she looked at me fixedly, &ldquo;He will live, the doctors
+      say. But I thought that Tekla....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tekla has not been near me for several days,&rdquo; explained Miss Haldin
+      quickly. &ldquo;As I never offered to go to the hospital with her, she thinks
+      that I have no heart. She is disillusioned about me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Miss Haldin smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She sits with him as long and as often as they will let her,&rdquo; I
+      said. &ldquo;She says she must never abandon him&mdash;never as long as she
+      lives. He&rsquo;ll need somebody&mdash;a hopeless cripple, and stone deaf with
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stone deaf? I didn&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; murmured Natalia Haldin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is. It seems strange. I am told there were no apparent injuries to the
+      head. They say, too, that it is not very likely that he will live so very
+      long for Tekla to take care of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Haldin shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While there are travellers ready to fall by the way our Tekla shall never
+      be idle. She is a good Samaritan by an irresistible vocation. The
+      revolutionists didn&rsquo;t understand her. Fancy a devoted creature like that
+      being employed to carry about documents sewn in her dress, or made to
+      write from dictation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is not much perspicacity in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner uttered, I regretted that observation. Natalia Haldin, looking
+      me straight in the face, assented by a slight movement of her head. She
+      was not offended, but turning away began to pace the room again. To my
+      western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite
+      beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance. I
+      remained silent as though it were hopeless to raise my voice. The sound of
+      hers, so close to me, made me start a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tekla saw him picked up after the accident. The good soul never explained
+      to me really how it came about. She affirms that there was some
+      understanding between them&mdash;some sort of compact&mdash;that in any
+      sore need, in misfortune, or difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there?&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;It is lucky for him that there was, then. He&rsquo;ll need
+      all the devotion of the good Samaritan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a fact that Tekla, looking out of her window at five in the
+      morning, for some reason or other, had beheld Razumov in the grounds of
+      the Chateau Borel, standing stockstill, bare-headed in the rain, at the
+      foot of the terrace. She had screamed out to him, by name, to know what
+      was the matter. He never even raised his head. By the time she had dressed
+      herself sufficiently to run downstairs he was gone. She started in
+      pursuit, and rushing out into the road, came almost directly upon the
+      arrested tramcar and the small knot of people picking up Razumov. That
+      much Tekla had told me herself one afternoon we happened to meet at the
+      door of the hospital, and without any kind of comment. But I did not want
+      to meditate very long on the inwardness of this peculiar episode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Natalia Victorovna, he shall need somebody when they dismiss him, on
+      crutches and stone deaf from the hospital. But I do not think that when he
+      rushed like an escaped madman into the grounds of the Chateau Borel it was
+      to seek the help of that good Tekla.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Natalia, stopping short before me, &ldquo;perhaps not.&rdquo; She sat down
+      and leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. The silence lasted for
+      several minutes. During that time I remembered the evening of his
+      atrocious confession&mdash;the plaint she seemed to have hardly enough
+      life left in her to utter, &ldquo;It is impossible to be more unhappy....&rdquo; The
+      recollection would have given me a shudder if I had not been lost in
+      wonder at her force and her tranquillity. There was no longer any Natalia
+      Haldin, because she had completely ceased to think of herself. It was a
+      great victory, a characteristically Russian exploit in self-suppression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She recalled me to myself by getting up suddenly like a person who has
+      come to a decision. She walked to the writing-table, now stripped of all
+      the small objects associated with her by daily use&mdash;a mere piece of
+      dead furniture; but it contained something living, still, since she took
+      from a recess a flat parcel which she brought to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a book,&rdquo; she said rather abruptly. &ldquo;It was sent to me wrapped up in
+      my veil. I told you nothing at the time, but now I&rsquo;ve decided to leave it
+      with you. I have the right to do that. It was sent to me. It is mine. You
+      may preserve it, or destroy it after you have read it. And while you read
+      it, please remember that I was defenceless. And that he..&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Defenceless!&rdquo; I repeated, surprised, looking hard at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find the very word written there,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s
+      true! I <i>was</i> defenceless&mdash;but perhaps you were able to see that
+      for yourself.&rdquo; Her face coloured, then went deadly pale. &ldquo;In justice to
+      the man, I want you to remember that I was. Oh, I was, I was!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose, a little shakily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hand fell into mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands
+      are free now. As for the rest&mdash;which of us can fail to hear the
+      stifled cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world is more conscious of your discordant voices,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;It is
+      the way of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment. &ldquo;I must
+      own to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when all
+      discord shall be silenced. Try to imagine its dawn! The tempest of blows
+      and of execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising, and the
+      weary men united at last, taking count in their conscience of the ended
+      contest, feel saddened by their victory, because so many ideas have
+      perished for the triumph of one, so many beliefs have abandoned them
+      without support. They feel alone on the earth and gather close together.
+      Yes, there must be many bitter hours! But at last the anguish of hearts
+      shall be extinguished in love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so cruel
+      sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin. It is hard to think I shall
+      never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl&mdash;wedded to an
+      invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like a
+      heavenly flower from the soil of men&rsquo;s earth, soaked in blood, torn by
+      struggles, watered with tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be understood that at that time I didn&rsquo;t know anything of Mr.
+      Razumov&rsquo;s confession to the assembled revolutionists. Natalia Haldin might
+      have guessed what was the &ldquo;one thing more&rdquo; which remained for him to do;
+      but this my western eyes had failed to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S&mdash;, haunted his bedside at
+      the hospital. We met once or twice at the door of that establishment, but
+      on these occasions she was not communicative. She gave me news of Mr.
+      Razumov as concisely as possible. He was making a slow recovery, but would
+      remain a hopeless cripple all his life. Personally, I never went near him:
+      I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood by, a watchful
+      but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin. He was in due course
+      discharged from the hospital, and his &ldquo;relative&rdquo;&mdash;so I was told&mdash;had
+      carried him off somewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My information was completed nearly two years later. The opportunity,
+      certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
+      much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
+      gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch&mdash;a
+      dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with
+      something hushed and circumspect in his manner. He approached me, choosing
+      the moment when there was no one near, followed by a grey-haired, alert
+      lady in a crimson blouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you,&rdquo; he addressed me, in
+      his guarded voice. &ldquo;And so I leave you two to have a talk together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would never have intruded myself upon your notice,&rdquo; the grey-haired
+      lady began at once, &ldquo;if I had not been charged with a message for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin. Sophia
+      Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and had
+      seen Miss Haldin. She lived in a town &ldquo;in the centre,&rdquo; sharing her
+      compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the
+      heartrending misery of bereaved homes. She did not spare herself in good
+      service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable body,&rdquo;
+       the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest
+      on my side. We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted us.
+      In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna remarked
+      suddenly&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you remember seeing me before? That evening when Natalia came
+      to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young
+      man who...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember perfectly,&rdquo; I said. When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had
+      in my possession that young man&rsquo;s journal given me by Miss Haldin she
+      became intensely interested. She did not conceal her curiosity to see the
+      document.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me
+      next day for that purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed me
+      the book with a faint sigh. While moving about Russia, she had seen
+      Razumov too. He lived, not &ldquo;in the centre,&rdquo; but &ldquo;in the south.&rdquo; She
+      described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some
+      very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown
+      with nettles. He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla
+      the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish
+      devotion. There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have
+      visited Mr. Razumov. I did not even understand the motive. But she
+      informed me that she was not the only one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of <i>us</i> always go to see him when passing through. He is
+      intelligent. He has ideas.... He talks well, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov&rsquo;s public confession in
+      Laspara&rsquo;s house. Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what had
+      occurred there. Razumov himself had told her all about it, most minutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are evil moments in every life. A false suggestion enters one&rsquo;s
+      brain, and then fear is born&mdash;fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or
+      else a false courage&mdash;who knows? Well, call it what you like; but
+      tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to
+      perdition (as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living,
+      secretly debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this&mdash;he
+      was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe and
+      more&mdash;infinitely more&mdash;when the possibility of being loved by
+      that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his
+      bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and
+      pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him.
+      There&rsquo;s character in such a discovery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I accepted her conclusion in silence. Who would care to question the
+      grounds of forgiveness or compassion? However, it appeared later on, that
+      there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the
+      revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer. Sophia Antonovna continued
+      uneasily&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage. It was not
+      authorized. Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him. He had
+      confessed voluntarily. And that Nikita who burst the drums of his ears
+      purposely, out on the landing, you know, as if carried away by indignation&mdash;well,
+      he has turned out to be a scoundrel of the worst kind&mdash;a traitor
+      himself, a betrayer&mdash;a spy! Razumov told me he had charged him with
+      it by a sort of inspiration....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had a glimpse of that brute,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;How any of you could have been
+      deceived for half a day passes my comprehension!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She interrupted me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There! There! Don&rsquo;t talk of it. The first time I saw him, I, too, was
+      appalled. They cried me down. We were always telling each other, &lsquo;Oh! you
+      mustn&rsquo;t mind his appearance.&rsquo; And then he was always ready to kill. There
+      was no doubt of it. He killed&mdash;yes! in both camps. The fiend....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Sophia Antonovna, after mastering the angry trembling of her lips,
+      told me a very queer tale. It went that Councillor Mikulin, travelling in
+      Germany (shortly after Razumov&rsquo;s disappearance from Geneva), happened to
+      meet Peter Ivanovitch in a railway carriage. Being alone in the
+      compartment, these two talked together half the night, and it was then
+      that Mikulin the Police Chief gave a hint to the Arch-Revolutionist as to
+      the true character of the arch-slayer of gendarmes. It looks as though
+      Mikulin had wanted to get rid of that particular agent of his own! He
+      might have grown tired of him, or frightened of him. It must also be said
+      that Mikulin had inherited the sinister Nikita from his predecessor in
+      office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a mute
+      witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western
+      eyes. But I permitted myself a question&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, please, Sophia Antonovna, did Madame de S&mdash; leave all her
+      fortune to Peter Ivanovitch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit of it.&rdquo; The woman revolutionist shrugged her shoulders in
+      disgust. &ldquo;She died without making a will. A lot of nephews and nieces came
+      down from St. Petersburg, like a flock of vultures, and fought for her
+      money amongst themselves. All beastly Kammerherrs and Maids of Honour&mdash;abominable
+      court flunkeys. Tfui!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One does not hear much of Peter Ivanovitch now,&rdquo; I remarked, after a
+      pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch,&rdquo; said Sophia Antonovna gravely, &ldquo;has united himself to
+      a peasant girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was truly astonished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! On the Riviera?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What nonsense! Of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna&rsquo;s tone was slightly tart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he, then, living actually in Russia? It&rsquo;s a tremendous risk&mdash;isn&rsquo;t
+      it?&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;And all for the sake of a peasant girl. Don&rsquo;t you think
+      it&rsquo;s very wrong of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna preserved a mysterious silence for a while, then made a
+      statement. &ldquo;He just simply adores her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he? Well, then, I hope that she won&rsquo;t hesitate to beat him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia Antonovna got up and wished me good-bye, as though she had not
+      heard a word of my impious hope; but, in the very doorway, where I
+      attended her, she turned round for an instant, and declared in a firm
+      voice&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under Western Eyes
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER WESTERN EYES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDER WESTERN EYES
+
+by JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+
+
+
+"I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece
+of bread." Miss HALDIN
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+
+
+To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of
+imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create
+for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the
+Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor--Kirylo Sidorovitch--Razumov.
+
+If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been
+smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words.
+Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for
+many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length
+becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight
+an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes
+a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a
+mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
+
+This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Razumov or guessed at his
+reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was.
+Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly
+beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the
+readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of
+documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on
+a document; all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the Russian
+language, which is sufficient for what is attempted here. The document,
+of course, is something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not
+exactly that in its actual form. For instance, most of it was not
+written up from day to day, though all the entries are dated. Some of
+these entries cover months of time and extend over dozens of pages. All
+the earlier part is a retrospect, in a narrative form, relating to an
+event which took place about a year before.
+
+I must mention that I have lived for a long time in Geneva. A whole
+quarter of that town, on account of many Russians residing there,
+is called La Petite Russie--Little Russia. I had a rather extensive
+connexion in Little Russia at that time. Yet I confess that I have
+no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their
+attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the
+exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars;
+but there must be something else in the way, some special human
+trait--one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere
+professors. What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the
+Russians' extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish
+them, but they don't hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary, they
+are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with an
+enthusiasm, a sweeping abundance, with such an aptness of application
+sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't
+defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they
+say. There is a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as
+far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected
+to be classed as eloquence.... But I must apologize for this
+digression.
+
+It would be idle to inquire why Mr. Razumov has left this record behind
+him. It is inconceivable that he should have wished any human eye to see
+it. A mysterious impulse of human nature comes into play here. Putting
+aside Samuel Pepys, who has forced in this way the door of immortality,
+innumerable people, criminals, saints, philosophers, young girls,
+statesmen, and simple imbeciles, have kept self-revealing records from
+vanity no doubt, but also from other more inscrutable motives. There
+must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have
+used them for self-communion. Being myself a quiet individual I take
+it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some
+formula of peace. Certainly they are crying loud enough for it at the
+present day. What sort of peace Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov expected
+to find in the writing up of his record it passeth my understanding to
+guess.
+
+The fact remains that he has written it.
+
+Mr. Razumov was a tall, well-proportioned young man, quite unusually
+dark for a Russian from the Central Provinces. His good looks would have
+been unquestionable if it had not been for a peculiar lack of fineness
+in the features. It was as if a face modelled vigorously in wax (with
+some approach even to a classical correctness of type) had been
+held close to a fire till all sharpness of line had been lost in
+the softening of the material. But even thus he was sufficiently
+good-looking. His manner, too, was good. In discussion he was easily
+swayed by argument and authority. With his younger compatriots he took
+the attitude of an inscrutable listener, a listener of the kind that
+hears you out intelligently and then--just changes the subject.
+
+This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual
+insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one's own convictions,
+procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of
+exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent
+discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited
+with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, third year's student in philosophy, was
+looked upon as a strong nature--an altogether trustworthy man. This,
+in a country where an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or
+sometimes by a fate worse than mere death, meant that he was worthy
+of being trusted with forbidden opinions. He was liked also for his
+amiability and for his quiet readiness to oblige his comrades even at
+the cost of personal inconvenience.
+
+Mr. Razumov was supposed to be the son of an Archpriest and to be
+protected by a distinguished nobleman--perhaps of his own distant
+province. But his outward appearance accorded badly with such humble
+origin. Such a descent was not credible. It was, indeed, suggested that
+Mr. Razumov was the son of an Archpriest's pretty daughter--which, of
+course, would put a different complexion on the matter. This theory also
+rendered intelligible the protection of the distinguished nobleman. All
+this, however, had never been investigated maliciously or otherwise. No
+one knew or cared who the nobleman in question was. Razumov received
+a modest but very sufficient allowance from the hands of an obscure
+attorney, who seemed to act as his guardian in some measure. Now and
+then he appeared at some professor's informal reception. Apart from
+that Razumov was not known to have any social relations in the town.
+He attended the obligatory lectures regularly and was considered by the
+authorities as a very promising student. He worked at home in the manner
+of a man who means to get on, but did not shut himself up severely for
+that purpose. He was always accessible, and there was nothing secret or
+reserved in his life.
+
+I
+
+The origin of Mr. Razumov's record is connected with an event
+characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination
+of a prominent statesman--and still more characteristic of the moral
+corruption of an oppressed society where the noblest aspirations of
+humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of
+justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are
+prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of
+an uneasy despotism.
+
+The fact alluded to above is the successful attempt on the life of Mr.
+de P---, the President of the notorious Repressive Commission of some
+years ago, the Minister of State invested with extraordinary powers. The
+newspapers made noise enough about that fanatical, narrow-chested figure
+in gold-laced uniform, with a face of crumpled parchment, insipid,
+bespectacled eyes, and the cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung
+under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month
+passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated
+papers of Europe. He served the monarchy by imprisoning, exiling, or
+sending to the gallows men and women, young and old, with an equable,
+unwearied industry. In his mystic acceptance of the principle of
+autocracy he was bent on extirpating from the land every vestige of
+anything that resembled freedom in public institutions; and in his
+ruthless persecution of the rising generation he seemed to aim at the
+destruction of the very hope of liberty itself.
+
+It is said that this execrated personality had not enough imagination
+to be aware of the hate he inspired. It is hardly credible; but it is a
+fact that he took very few precautions for his safety. In the preamble
+of a certain famous State paper he had declared once that "the thought
+of liberty has never existed in the Act of the Creator. From the
+multitude of men's counsel nothing could come but revolt and disorder;
+and revolt and disorder in a world created for obedience and stability
+is sin. It was not Reason but Authority which expressed the Divine
+Intention. God was the Autocrat of the Universe...." It may be that
+the man who made this declaration believed that heaven itself was bound
+to protect him in his remorseless defence of Autocracy on this earth.
+
+No doubt the vigilance of the police saved him many times; but, as a
+matter of fact, when his appointed fate overtook him, the competent
+authorities could not have given him any warning. They had no knowledge
+of any conspiracy against the Minister's life, had no hint of any plot
+through their usual channels of information, had seen no signs, were
+aware of no suspicious movements or dangerous persons.
+
+Mr. de P--- was being driven towards the railway station in a two-horse
+uncovered sleigh with footman and coachman on the box. Snow had been
+falling all night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this early
+hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the
+sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to the
+left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking
+slowly on the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of
+his sheepskin coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the
+falling snow. On being overtaken this peasant suddenly faced about and
+swung his arm. In an instant there was a terrible shock, a detonation
+muffled in the multitude of snowflakes; both horses lay dead and mangled
+on the ground and the coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen off the
+box mortally wounded. The footman (who survived) had no time to see the
+face of the man in the sheepskin coat. After throwing the bomb this last
+got away, but it is supposed that, seeing a lot of people surging up on
+all sides of him in the falling snow, and all running towards the scene
+of the explosion, he thought it safer to turn back with them.
+
+In an incredibly short time an excited crowd assembled round the sledge.
+The Minister-President, getting out unhurt into the deep snow, stood
+near the groaning coachman and addressed the people repeatedly in his
+weak, colourless voice: "I beg of you to keep off: For the love of God,
+I beg of you good people to keep off."
+
+It was then that a tall young man who had remained standing perfectly
+still within a carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped out into
+the street and walking up rapidly flung another bomb over the heads of
+the crowd. It actually struck the Minister-President on the shoulder
+as he stooped over his dying servant, then falling between his feet
+exploded with a terrific concentrated violence, striking him dead to the
+ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the empty
+sledge in the twinkling of an eye. With a yell of horror the crowd broke
+up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell dead or dying
+where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and one or two
+others who did not fall till they had run a little way.
+
+The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment,
+the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of
+yards in each direction. Through the falling snow people looked from
+afar at the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the
+carcases of the two horses. Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks
+of a street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the
+dead. Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on
+the pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant's sheepskin coat; but
+the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the
+pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was
+never established.
+
+That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning
+within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working
+for some time in the library. He heard the first vague rumour of
+something in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students'
+ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two o'clock dinner. But
+this rumour was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where
+it was not always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much
+interested in certain kinds of whispers. Razumov was one of those
+men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an
+instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware
+of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an
+indefinite way. But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and
+with his own future.
+
+Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the
+Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his
+opinions or his feelings. He was as lonely in the world as a man
+swimming in the deep sea. The word Razumov was the mere label of
+a solitary individuality. There were no Razumovs belonging to him
+anywhere. His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he
+was a Russian. Whatever good he expected from life would be given to or
+withheld from his hopes by that connexion alone. This immense parentage
+suffered from the throes of internal dissensions, and he shrank mentally
+from the fray as a good-natured man may shrink from taking definite
+sides in a violent family quarrel.
+
+Razumov, going home, reflected that having prepared all the matters of
+the forthcoming examination, he could now devote his time to the subject
+of the prize essay. He hankered after the silver medal. The prize was
+offered by the Ministry of Education; the names of the competitors would
+be submitted to the Minister himself. The mere fact of trying would be
+considered meritorious in the higher quarters; and the possessor of the
+prize would have a claim to an administrative appointment of the better
+sort after he had taken his degree. The student Razumov in an access of
+elation forgot the dangers menacing the stability of the institutions
+which give rewards and appointments. But remembering the medallist of
+the year before, Razumov, the young man of no parentage, was sobered. He
+and some others happened to be assembled in their comrade's rooms at the
+very time when that last received the official advice of his success.
+He was a quiet, unassuming young man: "Forgive me," he had said with a
+faint apologetic smile and taking up his cap, "I am going out to order
+up some wine. But I must first send a telegram to my folk at home. I
+say! Won't the old people make it a festive time for the neighbours for
+twenty miles around our place."
+
+Razumov thought there was nothing of that sort for him in the world. His
+success would matter to no one. But he felt no bitterness against
+the nobleman his protector, who was not a provincial magnate as was
+generally supposed. He was in fact nobody less than Prince K---, once
+a great and splendid figure in the world and now, his day being over,
+a Senator and a gouty invalid, living in a still splendid but more
+domestic manner. He had some young children and a wife as aristocratic
+and proud as himself.
+
+In all his life Razumov was allowed only once to come into personal
+contact with the Prince.
+
+It had the air of a chance meeting in the little attorney's office.
+One day Razumov, coming in by appointment, found a stranger standing
+there--a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey
+sidewhiskers. The bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out,
+"Come in--come in, Mr. Razumov," with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then
+turning deferentially to the stranger with the grand air, "A ward
+of mine, your Excellency. One of the most promising students of his
+faculty in the St. Petersburg University."
+
+To his intense surprise Razumov saw a white shapely hand extended to
+him. He took it in great confusion (it was soft and passive) and heard
+at the same time a condescending murmur in which he caught only the
+words "Satisfactory" and "Persevere." But the most amazing thing of all
+was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of the white shapely hand
+just before it was withdrawn: a light pressure like a secret sign. The
+emotion of it was terrible. Razumov's heart seemed to leap into his
+throat. When he raised his eyes the aristocratic personage, motioning
+the little lawyer aside, had opened the door and was going out.
+
+The attorney rummaged amongst the papers on his desk for a time. "Do you
+know who that was?" he asked suddenly.
+
+Razumov, whose heart was thumping hard yet, shook his head in silence.
+
+"That was Prince K---. You wonder what he could be doing in the hole of
+a poor legal rat like myself--eh? These awfully great people have their
+sentimental curiosities like common sinners. But if I were you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch," he continued, leering and laying a peculiar emphasis on
+the patronymic, "I wouldn't boast at large of the introduction. It would
+not be prudent, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Oh dear no! It would be in fact
+dangerous for your future."
+
+The young man's ears burned like fire; his sight was dim. "That man!"
+Razumov was saying to himself. "He!"
+
+Henceforth it was by this monosyllable that Mr. Razumov got into
+the habit of referring mentally to the stranger with grey silky
+side-whiskers. From that time too, when walking in the more fashionable
+quarters, he noted with interest the magnificent horses and carriages
+with Prince K---'s liveries on the box. Once he saw the Princess get
+out--she was shopping--followed by two girls, of which one was nearly a
+head taller than the other. Their fair hair hung loose down their backs
+in the English style; they had merry eyes, their coats, muffs, and
+little fur caps were exactly alike, and their cheeks and noses were
+tinged a cheerful pink by the frost. They crossed the pavement in front
+of him, and Razumov went on his way smiling shyly to himself. "His"
+daughters. They resembled "Him." The young man felt a glow of warm
+friendliness towards these girls who would never know of his existence.
+Presently they would marry Generals or Kammerherrs and have girls and
+boys of their own, who perhaps would be aware of him as a celebrated old
+professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories of
+Russia--nothing more!
+
+But a celebrated professor was a somebody. Distinction would convert the
+label Razumov into an honoured name. There was nothing strange in
+the student Razumov's wish for distinction. A man's real life is that
+accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or
+natural love. Returning home on the day of the attempt on Mr. de P---'s
+life Razumov resolved to have a good try for the silver medal.
+
+Climbing slowly the four flights of the dark, dirty staircase in the
+house where he had his lodgings, he felt confident of success. The
+winner's name would be published in the papers on New Year's Day. And at
+the thought that "He" would most probably read it there, Razumov stopped
+short on the stairs for an instant, then went on smiling faintly at his
+own emotion. "This is but a shadow," he said to himself, "but the medal
+is a solid beginning."
+
+With those ideas of industry in his head the warmth of his room was
+agreeable and encouraging. "I shall put in four hours of good work,"
+he thought. But no sooner had he closed the door than he was horribly
+startled. All black against the usual tall stove of white tiles gleaming
+in the dusk, stood a strange figure, wearing a skirted, close-fitting,
+brown cloth coat strapped round the waist, in long boots, and with a
+little Astrakhan cap on its head. It loomed lithe and martial. Razumov
+was utterly confounded. It was only when the figure advancing two paces
+asked in an untroubled, grave voice if the outer door was closed that he
+regained his power of speech.
+
+"Haldin!... Victor Victorovitch!... Is that you?... Yes. The
+outer door is shut all right. But this is indeed unexpected."
+
+Victor Haldin, a student older than most of his contemporaries at the
+University, was not one of the industrious set. He was hardly ever seen
+at lectures; the authorities had marked him as "restless" and "unsound
+"--very bad notes. But he had a great personal prestige with his
+comrades and influenced their thoughts. Razumov had never been intimate
+with him. They had met from time to time at gatherings in other
+students' houses. They had even had a discussion together--one of those
+discussions on first principles dear to the sanguine minds of youth.
+
+Razumov wished the man had chosen some other time to come for a chat. He
+felt in good trim to tackle the prize essay. But as Haldin could not be
+slightingly dismissed Razumov adopted the tone of hospitality, asking
+him to sit down and smoke.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch," said the other, flinging off his cap, "we are not
+perhaps in exactly the same camp. Your judgment is more philosophical.
+You are a man of few words, but I haven't met anybody who dared to
+doubt the generosity of your sentiments. There is a solidity about your
+character which cannot exist without courage."
+
+Razumov felt flattered and began to murmur shyly something about being
+very glad of his good opinion, when Haldin raised his hand.
+
+"That is what I was saying to myself," he continued, "as I dodged in the
+woodyard down by the river-side. 'He has a strong character this young
+man,' I said to myself. 'He does not throw his soul to the winds.' Your
+reserve has always fascinated me, Kirylo Sidorovitch. So I tried to
+remember your address. But look here--it was a piece of luck. Your
+dvornik was away from the gate talking to a sleigh-driver on the other
+side of the street. I met no one on the stairs, not a soul. As I came up
+to your floor I caught sight of your landlady coming out of your rooms.
+But she did not see me. She crossed the landing to her own side, and
+then I slipped in. I have been here two hours expecting you to come in
+every moment."
+
+Razumov had listened in astonishment; but before he could open his mouth
+Haldin added, speaking deliberately, "It was I who removed de P--- this
+morning." Razumov kept down a cry of dismay. The sentiment of his life
+being utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime expressed itself
+quaintly by a sort of half-derisive mental exclamation, "There goes my
+silver medal!"
+
+Haldin continued after waiting a while--
+
+"You say nothing, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I understand your silence. To be
+sure, I cannot expect you with your frigid English manner to embrace
+me. But never mind your manners. You have enough heart to have heard the
+sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth this man raised in the land. That
+would be enough to get over any philosophical hopes. He was uprooting
+the tender plant. He had to be stopped. He was a dangerous man--a
+convinced man. Three more years of his work would have put us back fifty
+years into bondage--and look at all the lives wasted, at all the souls
+lost in that time."
+
+His curt, self-confident voice suddenly lost its ring and it was in a
+dull tone that he added, "Yes, brother, I have killed him. It's weary
+work."
+
+Razumov had sunk into a chair. Every moment he expected a crowd of
+policemen to rush in. There must have been thousands of them out looking
+for that man walking up and down in his room. Haldin was talking again
+in a restrained, steady voice. Now and then he flourished an arm,
+slowly, without excitement.
+
+He told Razumov how he had brooded for a year; how he had not slept
+properly for weeks. He and "Another" had a warning of the Minister's
+movements from "a certain person" late the evening before. He and that
+"Another" prepared their "engines" and resolved to have no sleep till
+"the deed" was done. They walked the streets under the falling snow with
+the "engines" on them, exchanging not a word the livelong night. When
+they happened to meet a police patrol they took each other by the arm
+and pretended to be a couple of peasants on the spree. They reeled and
+talked in drunken hoarse voices. Except for these strange outbreaks they
+kept silence, moving on ceaselessly. Their plans had been previously
+arranged. At daybreak they made their way to the spot which they
+knew the sledge must pass. When it appeared in sight they exchanged a
+muttered good-bye and separated. The "other" remained at the corner,
+Haldin took up a position a little farther up the street....
+
+After throwing his "engine" he ran off and in a moment was overtaken
+by the panic-struck people flying away from the spot after the second
+explosion. They were wild with terror. He was jostled once or twice. He
+slowed down for the rush to pass him and then turned to the left into a
+narrow street. There he was alone.
+
+He marvelled at this immediate escape. The work was done. He could
+hardly believe it. He fought with an almost irresistible longing to lie
+down on the pavement and sleep. But this sort of faintness--a drowsy
+faintness--passed off quickly. He walked faster, making his way to one
+of the poorer parts of the town in order to look up Ziemianitch.
+
+This Ziemianitch, Razumov understood, was a sort of town-peasant who had
+got on; owner of a small number of sledges and horses for hire. Haldin
+paused in his narrative to exclaim--
+
+"A bright spirit! A hardy soul! The best driver in St. Petersburg. He
+has a team of three horses there.... Ah! He's a fellow!"
+
+This man had declared himself willing to take out safely, at any time,
+one or two persons to the second or third railway station on one of the
+southern lines. But there had been no time to warn him the night before.
+His usual haunt seemed to be a low-class eating-house on the outskirts
+of the town. When Haldin got there the man was not to be found. He was
+not expected to turn up again till the evening. Haldin wandered away
+restlessly.
+
+He saw the gate of a woodyard open and went in to get out of the wind
+which swept the bleak broad thoroughfare. The great rectangular piles of
+cut wood loaded with snow resembled the huts of a village. At first the
+watchman who discovered him crouching amongst them talked in a friendly
+manner. He was a dried-up old man wearing two ragged army coats one over
+the other; his wizened little face, tied up under the jaw and over the
+ears in a dirty red handkerchief, looked comical. Presently he grew
+sulky, and then all at once without rhyme or reason began to shout
+furiously.
+
+"Aren't you ever going to clear out of this, you loafer? We know all
+about factory hands of your sort. A big, strong, young chap! You aren't
+even drunk. What do you want here? You don't frighten us. Take yourself
+and your ugly eyes away."
+
+Haldin stopped before the sitting Razumov. His supple figure, with
+the white forehead above which the fair hair stood straight up, had an
+aspect of lofty daring.
+
+"He did not like my eyes," he said. "And so...here I am."
+
+Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.
+
+"But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch. We know each other so little....
+I don't see why you...."
+
+"Confidence," said Haldin.
+
+This word sealed Razumov's lips as if a hand had been clapped on his
+mouth. His brain seethed with arguments.
+
+"And so--here you are," he muttered through his teeth.
+
+The other did not detect the tone of anger. Never suspected it.
+
+"Yes. And nobody knows I am here. You are the last person that could
+be suspected--should I get caught. That's an advantage, you see. And
+then--speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the
+truth. It occurred to me that you--you have no one belonging to you--no
+ties, no one to suffer for it if this came out by some means. There
+have been enough ruined Russian homes as it is. But I don't see how my
+passage through your rooms can be ever known. If I should be got hold
+of, I'll know how to keep silent--no matter what they may be pleased to
+do to me," he added grimly.
+
+He began to walk again while Razumov sat still appalled.
+
+"You thought that--" he faltered out almost sick with indignation.
+
+"Yes, Razumov. Yes, brother. Some day you shall help to build. You
+suppose that I am a terrorist, now--a destructor of what is, But
+consider that the true destroyers are they who destroy the spirit of
+progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the
+persecutors of human dignity. Men like me are necessary to make room for
+self-contained, thinking men like you. Well, we have made the sacrifice
+of our lives, but all the same I want to escape if it can be done. It
+is not my life I want to save, but my power to do. I won't live idle. Oh
+no! Don't make any mistake, Razumov. Men like me are rare. And, besides,
+an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator
+vanishes without a trace. They sit in their offices and palaces and
+quake. All I want you to do is to help me to vanish. No great matter
+that. Only to go by and by and see Ziemianitch for me at that place
+where I went this morning. Just tell him, 'He whom you know wants a
+well-horsed sledge to pull up half an hour after midnight at the seventh
+lamp-post on the left counting from the upper end of Karabelnaya. If
+nobody gets in, the sledge is to run round a block or two, so as to come
+back past the same spot in ten minutes' time.'"
+
+Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to
+go away long before. Was it weakness or what?
+
+He concluded that it was a sound instinct. Haldin must have been seen.
+It was impossible that some people should not have noticed the face and
+appearance of the man who threw the second bomb. Haldin was a noticeable
+person. The police in their thousands must have had his description
+within the hour. With every moment the danger grew. Sent out to wander
+in the streets he could not escape being caught in the end.
+
+The police would very soon find out all about him. They would set about
+discovering a conspiracy. Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in
+the greatest danger. Unguarded expressions, little facts in themselves
+innocent would be counted for crimes. Razumov remembered certain words
+he said, the speeches he had listened to, the harmless gatherings he
+had attended--it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that
+sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.
+
+Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress, worried, badgered, perhaps
+ill-used. He saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life
+broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope. He saw himself--at best--leading
+a miserable existence under police supervision, in some small, faraway
+provincial town, without friends to assist his necessities or even
+take any steps to alleviate his lot--as others had. Others had fathers,
+mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on
+their behalf--he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him some
+morning would forget his existence before sunset.
+
+He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation--his
+strength give way, his mind become an abject thing. He saw himself
+creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets--dying unattended
+in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
+hospital.
+
+He shuddered. Then the peace of bitter calmness came over him. It was
+best to keep this man out of the streets till he could be got rid of
+with some chance of escaping. That was the best that could be done.
+Razumov, of course, felt the safety of his lonely existence to be
+permanently endangered. This evening's doings could turn up against
+him at any time as long as this man lived and the present institutions
+endured. They appeared to him rational and indestructible at that
+moment. They had a force of harmony--in contrast with the horrible
+discord of this man's presence. He hated the man. He said quietly--
+
+"Yes, of course, I will go. 'You must give me precise directions, and
+for the rest--depend on me."
+
+"Ah! You are a fellow! Collected--cool as a cucumber. A regular
+Englishman. Where did you get your soul from? There aren't many like
+you. Look here, brother! Men like me leave no posterity, but their souls
+are not lost. No man's soul is ever lost. It works for itself--or else
+where would be the sense of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction,
+of faith--the labours of the soul? What will become of my soul when I
+die in the way I must die--soon--very soon perhaps? It shall not perish.
+Don't make a mistake, Razumov. This is not murder--it is war, war. My
+spirit shall go on warring in some Russian body till all falsehood is
+swept out of the world. The modern civilization is false, but a new
+revelation shall come out of Russia. Ha! you say nothing. You are a
+sceptic. I respect your philosophical scepticism, Razumov, but don't
+touch the soul. The Russian soul that lives in all of us. It has a
+future. It has a mission, I tell you, or else why should I have been
+moved to do this--reckless--like a butcher--in the middle of all these
+innocent people--scattering death--I! I!... I wouldn't hurt a fly!"
+
+"Not so loud," warned Razumov harshly.
+
+Haldin sat down abruptly, and leaning his head on his folded arms burst
+into tears. He wept for a long time. The dusk had deepened in the room.
+Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder, listened to the sobs.
+
+The other raised his head, got up and with an effort mastered his voice.
+
+"Yes. Men like me leave no posterity," he repeated in a subdued tone,
+"I have a sister though. She's with my old mother--I persuaded them to
+go abroad this year--thank God. Not a bad little girl my sister. She has
+the most trustful eyes of any human being that ever walked this earth.
+She will marry well, I hope. She may have children--sons perhaps. Look
+at me. My father was a Government official in the provinces, He had a
+little land too. A simple servant of God--a true Russian in his way. His
+was the soul of obedience. But I am not like him. They say I resemble
+my mother's eldest brother, an officer. They shot him in '28. Under
+Nicholas, you know. Haven't I told you that this is war, war.... But
+God of Justice! This is weary work."
+
+Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his hand, spoke as if from
+the bottom of an abyss.
+
+"You believe in God, Haldin?"
+
+"There you go catching at words that are wrung from one. What does it
+matter? What was it the Englishman said: 'There is a divine soul in
+things...' Devil take him--I don't remember now. But he spoke the
+truth. When the day of you thinkers comes don't you forget what's
+divine in the Russian soul--and that's resignation. Respect that in your
+intellectual restlessness and don't let your arrogant wisdom spoil its
+message to the world. I am speaking to you now like a man with a rope
+round his neck. What do you imagine I am? A being in revolt? No. It's
+you thinkers who are in everlasting revolt. I am one of the resigned.
+When the necessity of this heavy work came to me and I understood that
+it had to be done--what did I do? Did I exult? Did I take pride in
+my purpose? Did I try to weigh its worth and consequences? No! I was
+resigned. I thought 'God's will be done.'"
+
+He threw himself full length on Razumov's bed and putting the backs of
+his hands over his eyes remained perfectly motionless and silent. Not
+even the sound of his breathing could be heard. The dead stillness
+or the room remained undisturbed till in the darkness Razumov said
+gloomily--
+
+"Haldin."
+
+"Yes," answered the other readily, quite invisible now on the bed and
+without the slightest stir.
+
+"Isn't it time for me to start?"
+
+"Yes, brother." The other was heard, lying still in the darkness as
+though he were talking in his sleep. "The time has come to put fate to
+the test."
+
+He paused, then gave a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal
+voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer.
+As he was leaving the room the voice on the bed said after him--
+
+"Go with God, thou silent soul."
+
+On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked the door and put the key
+in his pocket.
+
+II
+
+The words and events of that evening must have been graven as if with
+a steel tool on Mr. Razumov's brain since he was able to write his
+relation with such fullness and precision a good many months afterwards.
+
+The record of the thoughts which assailed him in the street is even more
+minute and abundant. They seem to have rushed upon him with the greater
+freedom because his thinking powers were no longer crushed by Haldin's
+presence--the appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning force
+of a great fanaticism. On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov's
+diary I own that a "rush of thoughts" is not an adequate image.
+
+The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts--the
+faithful reflection of the state of his feelings. The thoughts in
+themselves were not numerous--they were like the thoughts of most human
+beings, few and simple--but they cannot be reproduced here in all
+their exclamatory repetitions which went on in an endless and weary
+turmoil--for the walk was long.
+
+If to the Western reader they appear shocking, inappropriate, or even
+improper, it must be remembered that as to the first this may be the
+effect of my crude statement. For the rest I will only remark here that
+this is not a story of the West of Europe.
+
+Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments
+have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young
+Englishman should find himself in Razumov's situation. This being so it
+would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe
+surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at
+this crisis of his fate. He would not have an hereditary and personal
+knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
+guards its power, and defends its existence. By an act of mental
+extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison,
+but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
+not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
+either of investigation or of punishment.
+
+This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
+Western thought. I don't know that this danger occurred, specially, to
+Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
+and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
+was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
+the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
+the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
+impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
+utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
+natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
+him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
+amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.
+
+The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's parentage, or rather of his lack
+of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
+remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
+atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. "Because I haven't that, must
+everything else be taken away from me?" he thought.
+
+He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
+glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
+black face of the night. "For it is a crime," he was saying to
+himself. "A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
+institutions...."
+
+A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. "I must be courageous,"
+he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
+if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
+because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
+the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
+Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.
+
+Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
+end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
+black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
+footfalls.
+
+It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
+tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
+duty. She walked leisurely in the blizzard as though she had no home to
+hurry to, she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black bread with
+an air of guarding a priceless booty: and Razumov averting his glance
+envied her the peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.
+
+To one reading Mr. Razumov's narrative it is really a wonder how he
+managed to keep going as he did along one interminable street after
+another on pavements that were gradually becoming blocked with snow.
+It was the thought of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the desperate
+desire to get rid of his presence which drove him forward. No rational
+determination had any part in his exertions. Thus, when on arriving at
+the low eating-house he heard that the man of horses, Ziemianitch, was
+not there, he could only stare stupidly.
+
+The waiter, a wild-haired youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt,
+exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch
+had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a
+bottle under each arm to keep it up amongst the horses--he supposed.
+
+The owner of the vile den, a bony short man in a dirty cloth caftan
+coming down to his heels, stood by, his hands tucked into his belt, and
+nodded confirmation.
+
+The reek of spirits, the greasy rancid steam of food got Razumov by the
+throat. He struck a table with his clenched hand and shouted violently--
+
+"You lie."
+
+Bleary unwashed faces were turned to his direction. A mild-eyed ragged
+tramp drinking tea at the next table moved farther away. A murmur of
+wonder arose with an undertone of uneasiness. A laugh was heard too, and
+an exclamation, "There! there!" jeeringly soothing. The waiter looked
+all round and announced to the room--
+
+"The gentleman won't believe that Ziemianitch is drunk."
+
+
+From a distant corner a hoarse voice belonging to a horrible,
+nondescript, shaggy being with a black face like the muzzle of a bear
+grunted angrily--
+
+"The cursed driver of thieves. What do we want with his gentlemen here?
+We are all honest folk in this place."
+
+Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep himself from bursting
+into imprecations, followed the owner of the den, who, whispering "Come
+along, little father," led him into a tiny hole of a place behind
+the wooden counter, whence proceeded a sound of splashing. A wet and
+bedraggled creature, a sort of sexless and shivering scarecrow, washed
+glasses in there, bending over a wooden tub by the light of a tallow
+dip.
+
+"Yes, little father," the man in the long caftan said plaintively. He
+had a brown, cunning little face, a thin greyish beard. Trying to light
+a tin lantern he hugged it to his breast and talked garrulously the
+while.
+
+He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies
+told. And he would show him drunk. His woman, it seems, ran away from
+him last night. "Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!" He spat. They were
+always running away from that driver of the devil--and he sixty years
+old too; could never get used to it. But each heart knows sorrow after
+its own kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his days. And then he
+would fly to the bottle. "'Who could bear life in our land without the
+bottle?' he says. A proper Russian man--the little pig.... Be pleased
+to follow me."
+
+Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow enclosed between high walls
+with innumerable windows. Here and there a dim yellow light hung within
+the four-square mass of darkness. The house was an enormous slum, a hive
+of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of
+starvation and despair.
+
+In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and Razumov followed the
+light of the lantern through a small doorway into a long cavernous place
+like a neglected subterranean byre. Deep within, three shaggy little
+horses tied up to rings hung their heads together, motionless and
+shadowy in the dim light of the lantern. It must have been the famous
+team of Haldin's escape. Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom. His
+guide pawed in the straw with his foot.
+
+"Here he is. Ah! the little pigeon. A true Russian man. 'No heavy hearts
+for me,' he says. 'Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my
+sight.' Ha! ha! ha! That's the fellow he is."
+
+He held the lantern over a prone form of a man, apparently fully dressed
+for outdoors. His head was lost in a pointed cloth hood. On the other
+side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet in monstrous thick
+boots.
+
+"Always ready to drive," commented the keeper of the eating-house. "A
+proper Russian driver that. Saint or devil, night or day is all one to
+Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow. 'I don't ask who you
+are, but where you want to go,' he says. He would drive Satan himself to
+his own abode and come back chirruping to his horses. Many a one he has
+driven who is clanking his chains in the Nertchinsk mines by this time."
+
+Razumov shuddered.
+
+"Call him, wake him up," he faltered out.
+
+The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the
+prostrate sleeper. The man shook at the impact but did not move. At the
+third kick he grunted but remained inert as before.
+
+The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.
+
+"You see for yourself how it is. We have done what we can for you."
+
+He picked up the lantern. The intense black spokes of shadow swung
+about in the circle of light. A terrible fury--the blind rage of
+self-preservation--possessed Razumov.
+
+"Ah! The vile beast," he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made
+the lantern jump and tremble! "I shall wake you! Give me...give
+me..."
+
+He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a stablefork and rushing
+forward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a
+time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and
+shadows of the cellar-like stable. Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with
+an insatiable fury, in great volleys of sounding thwacks. Except for the
+violent movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither the beaten man
+nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls. And only the sound of blows was
+heard. It was a weird scene.
+
+Suddenly there was a sharp crack. The stick broke and half of it flew
+far away into the gloom beyond the light. At the same time Ziemianitch
+sat up. At this Razumov became as motionless as the man with the
+lantern--only his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.
+
+Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling
+night of drunkenness enwrapping the "bright Russian soul" of Haldin's
+enthusiastic praise. But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing. His eyeballs
+blinked all white in the light once, twice--then the gleam went out.
+For a moment he sat in the straw with closed eyes with a strange air of
+weary meditation, then fell over slowly on his side without making the
+slightest sound. Only the straw rustled a little. Razumov stared wildly,
+fighting for his breath. After a second or two he heard a light snore.
+
+He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went
+off with great hasty strides without looking back once.
+
+After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked
+into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.
+
+This recalled him to himself; and glancing about he discovered he had
+been going in the wrong direction. He retraced his steps, but now at a
+more moderate pace. When passing before the house he had just left he
+flourished his fist at the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing its
+sinister bulk on the white ground. It had an air of brooding. He let his
+arm fall by his side--discouraged.
+
+Ziemianitch's passionate surrender to sorrow and consolation had baffled
+him. That was the people. A true Russian man! Razumov was glad he had
+beaten that brute--the "bright soul" of the other. Here they were: the
+people and the enthusiast.
+
+Between the two he was done for. Between the drunkenness of the peasant
+incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable
+of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men. It
+was a sort of terrible childishness. But children had their masters.
+"Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand," thought Razumov, longing for
+power to hurt and destroy.
+
+He was glad he had thrashed that brute. The physical exertion had left
+his body in a comfortable glow. His mental agitation too was clarified
+as if all the feverishness had gone out of him in a fit of outward
+violence. Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was
+conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.
+
+He walked slower and slower. And indeed, considering the guest he had
+in his rooms, it was no wonder he lingered on the way. It was like
+harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life,
+but would take from you all that made life worth living--a subtle pest
+that would convert earth into a hell.
+
+What was he doing now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his
+hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on
+his bed--the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots,
+the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll kill
+him when I get home." But he knew very well that that was of no use.
+The corpse hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal as the living
+man. Nothing short of complete annihilation would do. And that was
+impossible. What then? Must one kill oneself to escape this visitation?
+
+Razumov's despair was too profoundly tinged with hate to accept that
+issue.
+
+And yet it was despair--nothing less--at the thought of having to live
+with Haldin for an indefinite number of days in mortal alarm at every
+sound. But perhaps when he heard that this "bright soul" of Ziemianitch
+suffered from a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his infernal
+resignation somewhere else. And that was not likely on the face of it.
+
+Razumov thought: "I am being crushed--and I can't even run away."
+Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth--some little house in
+the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles. A material
+refuge. He had nothing. He had not even a moral refuge--the refuge of
+confidence. To whom could he go with this tale--in all this great, great
+land?
+
+Razumov stamped his foot--and under the soft carpet of snow felt the
+hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic
+mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet--his native soil!--his very
+own--without a fireside, without a heart!
+
+He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall,
+and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky
+of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.
+It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.
+
+Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of
+countless millions.
+
+He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born to an
+inheritance of space and numbers. Under the sumptuous immensity of the
+sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains
+of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of
+the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a
+monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.
+It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like
+Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin--murdering
+foolishly.
+
+It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A
+voice seemed to cry within him, "Don't touch it." It was a guarantee of
+duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on--a
+work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their
+shifting impulses--but of peace. What it needed was not the conflicting
+aspirations of a people, but a will strong and one: it wanted not the
+babble of many voices, but a man--strong and one!
+
+Razumov stood on the point of conversion. He was fascinated by its
+approach, by its overpowering logic. For a train of thought is never
+false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in
+secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence
+combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and
+the dread of uncertain days.
+
+In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many
+brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict
+to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy
+for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever,
+touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing
+of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict
+with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.
+
+"Haldin means disruption," he thought to himself, beginning to walk
+again. "What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage--with
+his talk of God's justice? All that means disruption. Better that
+thousands should suffer than that a people should become a disintegrated
+mass, helpless like dust in the wind. Obscurantism is better than the
+light of incendiary torches. The seed germinates in the night. Out of
+the dark soil springs the perfect plant. But a volcanic eruption
+is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground. And am I, who love my
+country--who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in--am I
+to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary
+fanatic?"
+
+The grace entered into Razumov. He believed now in the man who would
+come at the appointed time.
+
+What is a throne? A few pieces of wood upholstered in velvet. But a
+throne is a seat of power too. The form of government is the shape of
+a tool--an instrument. But twenty thousand bladders inflated by the
+noblest sentiments and jostling against each other in the air are a
+miserable incumbrance of space, holding no power, possessing no will,
+having nothing to give.
+
+He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a discourse with himself
+with extraordinary abundance and facility. Generally his phrases came
+to him slowly, after a conscious and painstaking wooing. Some superior
+power had inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as certain
+converted sinners become overwhelmingly loquacious.
+
+He felt an austere exultation.
+
+"What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear
+grasp of my intellect?" he thought. "Is not this my country? Have I not
+got forty million brothers?" he asked himself, unanswerably victorious
+in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given
+the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a
+pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. "No! If I must suffer
+let me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason--my
+cool superior reason--rejects."
+
+He ceased to think for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete.
+But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we
+enter an unlighted strange place--the irrational feeling that something
+may jump upon us in the dark--the absurd dread of the unseen.
+
+Of course he was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was
+not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption...
+and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted
+hearts. But absolute power should be preserved--the tool ready for the
+man--for the great autocrat of the future. Razumov believed in him. The
+logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded
+him, "What else?" he asked himself ardently, "could move all that mass
+in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will."
+
+He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his personal longings of
+liberalism--rejecting the attractive error for the stern Russian truth.
+"That's patriotism," he observed mentally, and added, "There's no
+stopping midway on that road," and then remarked to himself, "I am not a
+coward."
+
+And again there was a dead silence in Razumov's breast. He walked with
+lowered head, making room for no one. He walked slowly and his thoughts
+returning spoke within him with solemn slowness.
+
+"What is this Haldin? And what am I? Only two grains of sand. But a
+great mountain is made up of just such insignificant grains. And the
+death of a man or of many men is an insignificant thing. Yet we combat
+a contagious pestilence. Do I want his death? No! I would save him if I
+could--but no one can do that--he is the withered member which must be
+cut off. If I must perish through him, let me at least not perish
+with him, and associated against my will with his sombre folly that
+understands nothing either of men or things. Why should I leave a false
+memory?"
+
+It passed through his mind that there was no one in the world who
+cared what sort of memory he left behind him. He exclaimed to himself
+instantly, "Perish vainly for a falsehood!... What a miserable fate!"
+
+He was now in a more animated part of the town. He did not remark the
+crash of two colliding sledges close to the curb. The driver of one
+bellowed tearfully at his fellow--
+
+"Oh, thou vile wretch!"
+
+This hoarse yell, let out nearly in his ear, disturbed Razumov. He shook
+his head impatiently and went on looking straight before him. Suddenly
+on the snow, stretched on his back right across his path, he saw Haldin,
+solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands over his eyes, clad in a
+brown close-fitting coat and long boots. He was lying out of the way a
+little, as though he had selected that place on purpose. The snow round
+him was untrodden.
+
+This hallucination had such a solidity of aspect that the first movement
+of Razumov was to reach for his pocket to assure himself that the key of
+his rooms was there. But he checked the impulse with a disdainful curve
+of his lips. He understood. His thought, concentrated intensely on
+the figure left lying on his bed, had culminated in this extraordinary
+illusion of the sight. Razumov tackled the phenomenon calmly. With a
+stern face, without a check and gazing far beyond the vision, he walked
+on, experiencing nothing but a slight tightening of the chest. After
+passing he turned his head for a glance, and saw only the unbroken track
+of his footsteps over the place where the breast of the phantom had been
+lying.
+
+Razumov walked on and after a little time whispered his wonder to
+himself.
+
+"Exactly as if alive! Seemed to breathe! And right in my way too! I have
+had an extraordinary experience."
+
+He made a few steps and muttered through his set teeth--
+
+"I shall give him up."
+
+Then for some twenty yards or more all was blank. He wrapped his cloak
+closer round him. He pulled his cap well forward over his eyes.
+
+"Betray. A great word. What is betrayal? They talk of a man betraying
+his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond
+first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience
+engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction, am
+I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him? On the
+contrary--every obligation of true courage is the other way."
+
+Razumov looked round from under his cap.
+
+"What can the prejudice of the world reproach me with? Have I provoked
+his confidence? No! Have I by a single word, look, or gesture given him
+reason to suppose that I accepted his trust in me? No! It is true that
+I consented to go and see his Ziemianitch. Well, I have been to see him.
+And I broke a stick on his back too--the brute."
+
+Something seemed to turn over in his head bringing uppermost a
+singularly hard, clear facet of his brain.
+
+"It would be better, however," he reflected with a quite different
+mental accent, "to keep that circumstance altogether to myself."
+
+He had passed beyond the turn leading to his lodgings, and had reached
+a wide and fashionable street. Some shops were still open, and all the
+restaurants. Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur
+coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an
+air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere
+believer for the frivolous crowd. It was the world--those officers,
+dignitaries, men of fashion, officials, members of the Yacht Club. The
+event of the morning affected them all. What would they say if they knew
+what this student in a cloak was going to do?
+
+"Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can.
+How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?"
+
+Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided.
+Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered
+what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some
+other mind's sanction.
+
+With something resembling anguish he said to himself--
+
+"I want to be understood." The universal aspiration with all its
+profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst
+eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open
+himself.
+
+The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of
+chicane too much. One could not go and lay one's conscience before the
+policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief
+of his district's police--a common-looking person whom he used to see
+sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering
+cigarette stuck to his lower lip. "He would begin by locking me up most
+probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful
+commotion," thought Razumov practically.
+
+An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.
+
+Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who
+knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked
+terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable
+outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal
+conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant
+only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without
+going mad.
+
+Razumov had reached that point of vision. To escape from it he embraced
+for a whole minute the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings
+and flinging himself on his knees by the side of the bed with the dark
+figure stretched on it; to pour out a full confession in passionate
+words that would stir the whole being of that man to its innermost
+depths; that would end in embraces and tears; in an incredible
+fellowship of souls--such as the world had never seen. It was sublime!
+
+Inwardly he wept and trembled already. But to the casual eyes that were
+cast upon him he was aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in
+a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll. He noted, too, the sidelong,
+brilliant glance of a pretty woman--with a delicate head, and covered
+in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and
+beautiful savage--which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking
+tenderness on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.
+
+Suddenly Razumov stood still. The glimpse of a passing grey whisker,
+caught and lost in the same instant, had evoked the complete image of
+Prince K---, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man had
+pressed it--a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a
+half-unwilling caress.
+
+And Razumov marvelled at himself. Why did he not think of him before!
+
+"A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the very man--He!"
+
+A strange softening emotion came over Razumov--made his knees shake a
+little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment
+was pernicious nonsense. He couldn't be quick enough; and when he got
+into a sledge he shouted to the driver--"to the K--- Palace. Get
+on--you! Fly!" The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of
+his eyes, answered obsequiously--
+
+"I hear, your high Nobility."
+
+It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K--- was not a man of timid
+character. On the day of Mr. de P---'s murder an extreme alarm and
+despondency prevailed in the high official spheres.
+
+Prince K---, sitting sadly alone in his study, was told by his alarmed
+servants that a mysterious young man had forced his way into the hall,
+refused to tell his name and the nature of his business, and would not
+move from there till he had seen his Excellency in private. Instead of
+locking himself up and telephoning for the police, as nine out of ten
+high personages would have done that evening, the Prince gave way to
+curiosity and came quietly to the door of his study.
+
+In the hall, the front door standing wide open, he recognised at once
+Razumov, pale as death, his eyes blazing, and surrounded by perplexed
+lackeys.
+
+The Prince was vexed beyond measure, and even indignant. But his humane
+instincts and a subtle sense of self-respect could not allow him to
+let this young man be thrown out into the street by base menials.
+He retreated unseen into his room, and after a little rang his bell.
+Razumov heard in the hall an ominously raised harsh voice saying
+somewhere far away--
+
+"Show the gentleman in here."
+
+Razumov walked in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable--raised
+far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince
+looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of
+which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was
+not asked to sit down.
+
+Half an hour later they appeared in the hall together. The lackeys stood
+up, and the Prince, moving with difficulty on his gouty feet, was helped
+into his furs. The carriage had been ordered before. When the great
+double door was flung open with a crash, Razumov, who had been standing
+silent with a lost gaze but with every faculty intensely on the alert,
+heard the Prince's voice--
+
+"Your arm, young man."
+
+The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards officer, man of showy
+missions, experienced in nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue
+and worldly success, had been equally impressed by the more obvious
+difficulties of such a situation and by Razumov's quiet dignity in
+stating them.
+
+He had said, "No. Upon the whole I can't condemn the step you ventured
+to take by coming to me with your story. It is not an affair for police
+understrappers. The greatest importance is attached to.... Set
+your mind at rest. I shall see you through this most extraordinary and
+difficult situation."
+
+Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and Razumov, making a short bow,
+had said with deference--
+
+"I have trusted my instinct. A young man having no claim upon anybody
+in the world has in an hour of trial involving his deepest political
+convictions turned to an illustrious Russian--that's all."
+
+The Prince had exclaimed hastily--
+
+"You have done well."
+
+In the carriage--it was a small brougham on sleigh runners--Razumov
+broke the silence in a voice that trembled slightly.
+
+"My gratitude surpasses the greatness of my presumption."
+
+He gasped, feeling unexpectedly in the dark a momentary pressure on his
+arm.
+
+"You have done well," repeated the Prince.
+
+When the carriage stopped the Prince murmured to Razumov, who had never
+ventured a single question--
+
+"The house of General T---."
+
+In the middle of the snow-covered roadway blazed a great bonfire.
+Some Cossacks, the bridles of their horses over the arm, were warming
+themselves around. Two sentries stood at the door, several gendarmes
+lounged under the great carriage gateway, and on the first-floor
+landing two orderlies rose and stood at attention. Razumov walked at the
+Prince's elbow.
+
+A surprising quantity of hot-house plants in pots cumbered the floor of
+the ante-room. Servants came forward. A young man in civilian clothes
+arrived hurriedly, was whispered to, bowed low, and exclaiming
+zealously, "Certainly--this minute," fled within somewhere. The Prince
+signed to Razumov.
+
+They passed through a suite of reception-rooms all barely lit and one
+of them prepared for dancing. The wife of the General had put off
+her party. An atmosphere of consternation pervaded the place. But the
+General's own room, with heavy sombre hangings, two massive desks, and
+deep armchairs, had all the lights turned on. The footman shut the door
+behind them and they waited.
+
+There was a coal fire in an English grate; Razumov had never before seen
+such a fire; and the silence of the room was like the silence of the
+grave; perfect, measureless, for even the clock on the mantelpiece
+made no sound. Filling a corner, on a black pedestal, stood a
+quarter-life-size smooth-limbed bronze of an adolescent figure, running.
+The Prince observed in an undertone--
+
+"Spontini's. 'Flight of Youth.' Exquisite."
+
+"Admirable," assented Razumov faintly.
+
+They said nothing more after this, the Prince silent with his grand air,
+Razumov staring at the statue. He was worried by a sensation resembling
+the gnawing of hunger.
+
+He did not turn when he heard an inner door fly open, and a quick
+footstep, muffled on the carpet.
+
+The Prince's voice immediately exclaimed, thick with excitement--
+
+"We have got him--_ce miserable_. A worthy young man came to me--No!
+It's incredible...."
+
+Razumov held his breath before the bronze as if expecting a crash.
+Behind his back a voice he had never heard before insisted politely--
+
+"_Asseyez-vous donc_."
+
+The Prince almost shrieked, "_Mais comprenez-vous, mon cher!
+L'assassin_! the murderer--we have got him...."
+
+Razumov spun round. The General's smooth big cheeks rested on the stiff
+collar of his uniform. He must have been already looking at Razumov,
+because that last saw the pale blue eyes fastened on him coldly.
+
+The Prince from a chair waved an impressive hand.
+
+"This is a most honourable young man whom Providence itself... Mr.
+Razumov."
+
+The General acknowledged the introduction by frowning at Razumov, who
+did not make the slightest movement.
+
+Sitting down before his desk the General listened with compressed lips.
+It was impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his face.
+
+Razumov watched the immobility of the fleshy profile. But it lasted only
+a moment, till the Prince had finished; and when the General turned to
+the providential young man, his florid complexion, the blue, unbelieving
+eyes and the bright white flash of an automatic smile had an air of
+jovial, careless cruelty. He expressed no wonder at the extraordinary
+story--no pleasure or excitement--no incredulity either. He betrayed no
+sentiment whatever. Only with a politeness almost deferential suggested
+that "the bird might have flown while Mr.--Mr. Razumov was running about
+the streets."
+
+Razumov advanced to the middle of the room and said, "The door is locked
+and I have the key in my pocket."
+
+His loathing for the man was intense. It had come upon him so unawares
+that he felt he had not kept it out of his voice. The General looked up
+at him thoughtfully, and Razumov grinned.
+
+All this went over the head of Prince K--- seated in a deep armchair,
+very tired and impatient.
+
+"A student called Haldin," said the General thoughtfully.
+
+Razumov ceased to grin.
+
+"That is his name," he said unnecessarily loud. "Victor Victorovitch
+Haldin--a student."
+
+The General shifted his position a little.
+
+"How is he dressed? Would you have the goodness to tell me?"
+
+Razumov angrily described Haldin's clothing in a few jerky words. The
+General stared all the time, then addressing the Prince--
+
+"We were not without some indications," he said in French. "A good woman
+who was in the street described to us somebody wearing a dress of the
+sort as the thrower of the second bomb. We have detained her at the
+Secretariat, and every one in a Tcherkess coat we could lay our hands
+on has been brought to her to look at. She kept on crossing herself
+and shaking her head at them. It was exasperating...." He turned to
+Razumov, and in Russian, with friendly reproach--
+
+"Take a chair, Mr. Razumov--do. Why are you standing?"
+
+Razumov sat down carelessly and looked at the General.
+
+"This goggle-eyed imbecile understands nothing," he thought.
+
+The Prince began to speak loftily.
+
+"Mr. Razumov is a young man of conspicuous abilities. I have it at heart
+that his future should not...."
+
+"Certainly," interrupted the General, with a movement of the hand. "Has
+he any weapons on him, do you think, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+The General employed a gentle musical voice. Razumov answered with
+suppressed irritation--
+
+"No. But my razors are lying about--you understand."
+
+The General lowered his head approvingly.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+Then to the Prince, explaining courteously--
+
+"We want that bird alive. It will be the devil if we can't make him sing
+a little before we are done with him."
+
+The grave-like silence of the room with its mute clock fell upon the
+polite modulations of this terrible phrase. The Prince, hidden in the
+chair, made no sound.
+
+The General unexpectedly developed a thought.
+
+"Fidelity to menaced institutions on which depend the safety of a
+throne and of a people is no child's play. We know that, _mon Prince,_
+and--_tenez_--" he went on with a sort of flattering harshness, "Mr.
+Razumov here begins to understand that too."
+
+His eyes which he turned upon Razumov seemed to be starting out of his
+head. This grotesqueness of aspect no longer shocked Razumov. He said
+with gloomy conviction--
+
+"Haldin will never speak."
+
+"That remains to be seen," muttered the General.
+
+"I am certain," insisted Razumov. "A man like this never speaks....
+Do you imagine that I am here from fear?" he added violently. He felt
+ready to stand by his opinion of Haldin to the last extremity.
+
+"Certainly not," protested the General, with great simplicity of tone.
+"And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Razumov, that if he had not come
+with his tale to such a staunch and loyal Russian as you, he would
+have disappeared like a stone in the water... which would have had a
+detestable effect," he added, with a bright, cruel smile under his stony
+stare. "So you see, there can be no suspicion of any fear here."
+
+The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round the back of the
+armchair.
+
+"Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action. Be at ease in that
+respect, pray."
+
+He turned to the General uneasily.
+
+"That's why I am here. You may be surprised why I should...."
+
+The General hastened to interrupt.
+
+"Not at all. Extremely natural. You saw the importance...."
+
+"Yes," broke in the Prince. "And I venture to ask insistently that mine
+and Mr. Razumov's intervention should not become public. He is a young
+man of promise--of remarkable aptitudes."
+
+"I haven't a doubt of it," murmured the General. "He inspires
+confidence."
+
+"All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread nowadays--they taint
+such unexpected quarters--that, monstrous as it seems, he might suffer
+...his studies...his..."
+
+The General, with his elbows on the desk, took his head between his
+hands.
+
+"Yes. Yes. I am thinking it out.... How long is it since you left him
+at your rooms, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+Razumov mentioned the hour which nearly corresponded with the time of
+his distracted flight from the big slum house. He had made up his mind
+to keep Ziemianitch out of the affair completely. To mention him at all
+would mean imprisonment for the "bright soul," perhaps cruel floggings,
+and in the end a journey to Siberia in chains. Razumov, who had beaten
+Ziemianitch, felt for him now a vague, remorseful tenderness.
+
+The General, giving way for the first time to his secret sentiments,
+exclaimed contemptuously--
+
+"And you say he came in to make you this confidence like this--for
+nothing--_a propos des bottes_."
+
+Razumov felt danger in the air. The merciless suspicion of despotism had
+spoken openly at last. Sudden fear sealed Razumov's lips. The silence
+of the room resembled now the silence of a deep dungeon, where time does
+not count, and a suspect person is sometimes forgotten for ever. But the
+Prince came to the rescue.
+
+"Providence itself has led the wretch in a moment of mental aberration
+to seek Mr. Razumov on the strength of some old, utterly misinterpreted
+exchange of ideas--some sort of idle speculative conversation--months
+ago--I am told--and completely forgotten till now by Mr. Razumov."
+
+"Mr. Razumov," queried the General meditatively, after a short silence,
+"do you often indulge in speculative conversation?"
+
+"No, Excellency," answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of
+self-confidence. "I am a man of deep convictions. Crude opinions are
+in the air. They are not always worth combating. But even the silent
+contempt of a serious mind may be misinterpreted by headlong utopists."
+
+The General stared from between his hands. Prince K--- murmured--
+
+"A serious young man. _Un esprit superieur_."
+
+"I see that, _mon cher Prince_," said the General. "Mr. Razumov is quite
+safe with me. I am interested in him. He has, it seems, the great and
+useful quality of inspiring confidence. What I was wondering at is why
+the other should mention anything at all--I mean even the bare fact
+alone--if his object was only to obtain temporary shelter for a few
+hours. For, after all, nothing was easier than to say nothing about it
+unless, indeed, he were trying, under a crazy misapprehension of your
+true sentiments, to enlist your assistance--eh, Mr. Razumov?"
+
+It seemed to Razumov that the floor was moving slightly. This grotesque
+man in a tight uniform was terrible. It was right that he should be
+terrible.
+
+"I can see what your Excellency has in your mind. But I can only answer
+that I don't know why."
+
+"I have nothing in my mind," murmured the General, with gentle surprise.
+
+"I am his prey--his helpless prey," thought Razumov. The fatigues and
+the disgusts of that afternoon, the need to forget, the fear which he
+could not keep off, reawakened his hate for Haldin.
+
+"Then I can't help your Excellency. I don't know what he meant. I only
+know there was a moment when I wished to kill him. There was also a
+moment when I wished myself dead. I said nothing. I was overcome. I
+provoked no confidence--I asked for no explanations--"
+
+Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was lucid. It was really a
+calculated outburst.
+
+"It is rather a pity," the General said, "that you did not. Don't you
+know at all what he means to do?" Razumov calmed down and saw an opening
+there.
+
+"He told me he was in hopes that a sledge would meet him about half an
+hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post on the left from the upper
+end of Karabelnaya. At any rate, he meant to be there at that time. He
+did not even ask me for a change of clothes."
+
+"_Ah voila_!" said the General, turning to Prince K with an air of
+satisfaction. "There is a way to keep your _protege_, Mr. Razumov, quite
+clear of any connexion with the actual arrest. We shall be ready for
+that gentleman in Karabelnaya."
+
+The Prince expressed his gratitude. There was real emotion in his voice.
+Razumov, motionless, silent, sat staring at the carpet. The General
+turned to him.
+
+"Half an hour after midnight. Till then we have to depend on you, Mr.
+Razumov. You don't think he is likely to change his purpose?"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Razumov. "Those men are not of the sort that ever
+changes its purpose."
+
+"What men do you mean?"
+
+"Fanatical lovers of liberty in general. Liberty with a capital L,
+Excellency. Liberty that means nothing precise. Liberty in whose name
+crimes are committed."
+
+The General murmured--
+
+"I detest rebels of every kind. I can't help it. It's my nature!"
+
+He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back his arm. "They shall be
+destroyed, then."
+
+"They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand," said Razumov
+with malicious pleasure and looking the General straight in the face.
+"If Haldin does change his purpose to-night, you may depend on it that
+it will not be to save his life by flight in some other way. He would
+have thought then of something else to attempt. But that is not likely."
+
+The General repeated as if to himself, "They shall be destroyed."
+
+Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
+
+The Prince exclaimed--
+
+"What a terrible necessity!"
+
+The General's arm was lowered slowly.
+
+"One comfort there is. That brood leaves no posterity. I've always said
+it, one effort, pitiless, persistent, steady--and we are done with them
+for ever."
+
+Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much
+arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not
+have gone on bearing the responsibility.
+
+"I detest rebels. These subversive minds! These intellectual
+_debauches_! My existence has been built on fidelity. It's a feeling.
+To defend it I am ready to lay down my life--and even my honour--if
+that were needed. But pray tell me what honour can there be as against
+rebels--against people that deny God Himself--perfect unbelievers!
+Brutes. It is horrible to think of."
+
+During this tirade Razumov, facing the General, had nodded slightly
+twice. Prince K---, standing on one side with his grand air, murmured,
+casting up his eyes--
+
+"_Helas!_"
+
+Then lowering his glance and with great decision declared--
+
+"This young man, General, is perfectly fit to apprehend the bearing of
+your memorable words."
+
+The General's whole expression changed from dull resentment to perfect
+urbanity.
+
+"I would ask now, Mr. Razumov," he said, "to return to his home. Note
+that I don't ask Mr. Razumov whether he has justified his absence to his
+guest. No doubt he did this sufficiently. But I don't ask. Mr. Razumov
+inspires confidence. It is a great gift. I only suggest that a more
+prolonged absence might awaken the criminal's suspicions and induce him
+perhaps to change his plans."
+
+He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted his visitors to the
+ante-room encumbered with flower-pots.
+
+Razumov parted with the Prince at the corner of a street. In the
+carriage he had listened to speeches where natural sentiment struggled
+with caution. Evidently the Prince was afraid of encouraging any hopes
+of future intercourse. But there was a touch of tenderness in the voice
+uttering in the dark the guarded general phrases of goodwill. And the
+Prince too said--
+
+"I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov."
+
+"They all, it seems, have confidence in me," thought Razumov dully. He
+had an indulgent contempt for the man sitting shoulder to shoulder with
+him in the confined space. Probably he was afraid of scenes with his
+wife. She was said to be proud and violent.
+
+It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in
+the comfort and safety of lives. But he wanted to put the Prince's
+mind at ease; and with a proper amount of emphasis he said that, being
+conscious of some small abilities and confident in his power of work, he
+trusted his future to his own exertions. He expressed his gratitude for
+the helping hand. Such dangerous situations did not occur twice in the
+course of one life--he added.
+
+"And you have met this one with a firmness of mind and correctness
+of feeling which give me a high idea of your worth," the Prince said
+solemnly. "You have now only to persevere--to persevere."
+
+On getting out on the pavement Razumov saw an ungloved hand extended to
+him through the lowered window of the brougham. It detained his own in
+its grasp for a moment, while the light of a street lamp fell upon the
+Prince's long face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
+
+"I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences..."
+
+"After what your Excellency has condescended to do for me, I can only
+rely on my conscience."
+
+"_Adieu_," said the whiskered head with feeling.
+
+Razumov bowed. The brougham glided away with a slight swish in the
+snow--he was alone on the edge of the pavement.
+
+He said to himself that there was nothing to think about, and began
+walking towards his home.
+
+He walked quietly. It was a common experience to walk thus home to bed
+after an evening spent somewhere with his fellows or in the cheaper
+seats of a theatre. After he had gone a little way the familiarity of
+things got hold of him. Nothing was changed. There was the familiar
+corner; and when he turned it he saw the familiar dim light of the
+provision shop kept by a German woman. There were loaves of stale bread,
+bunches of onions and strings of sausages behind the small window-panes.
+They were closing it. The sickly lame fellow whom he knew so well by
+sight staggered out into the snow embracing a large shutter.
+
+Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with
+feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases.
+
+The sense of life's continuity depended on trifling bodily impressions.
+The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And
+this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to
+climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the
+familiar clammy banister. The exceptional could not prevail against the
+material contacts which make one day resemble another. To-morrow would
+be like yesterday.
+
+It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged.
+
+"I suppose," thought Razumov, "that if I had made up my mind to blow out
+my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly
+as I am doing it now. What's a man to do? What must be must be.
+Extraordinary things do happen. But when they have happened they are
+done with. Thus, too, when the mind is made up. That question is done
+with. And the daily concerns, the familiarities of our thought swallow
+it up--and the life goes on as before with its mysterious and secret
+sides quite out of sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing."
+
+Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out; entered very quietly and
+bolted the door behind him carefully.
+
+He thought, "He hears me," and after bolting the door he stood still
+holding his breath. There was not a sound. He crossed the bare outer
+room, stepping deliberately in the darkness. Entering the other, he felt
+all over his table for the matchbox. The silence, but for the groping of
+his hand, was profound. Could the fellow be sleeping so soundly?
+
+He struck a light and looked at the bed. Haldin was lying on his back as
+before, only both his hands were under his head. His eyes were open. He
+stared at the ceiling.
+
+Razumov held the match up. He saw the clear-cut features, the firm
+chin, the white forehead and the topknot of fair hair against the white
+pillow. There he was, lying flat on his back. Razumov thought suddenly,
+"I have walked over his chest."
+
+He continued to stare till the match burnt itself out; then struck
+another and lit the lamp in silence without looking towards the bed any
+more. He had turned his back on it and was hanging his coat on a peg
+when he heard Haldin sigh profoundly, then ask in a tired voice--
+
+"Well! And what have you arranged?"
+
+The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad to put his hands against
+the wall. A diabolical impulse to say, "I have given you up to the
+police," frightened him exceedingly. But he did not say that. He said,
+without turning round, in a muffled voice--
+
+"It's done."
+
+Again he heard Haldin sigh. He walked to the table, sat down with the
+lamp before him, and only then looked towards the bed.
+
+In the distant corner of the large room far away from the lamp, which
+was small and provided with a very thick china shade, Haldin appeared
+like a dark and elongated shape--rigid with the immobility of death.
+This body seemed to have less substance than its own phantom walked over
+by Razumov in the street white with snow. It was more alarming in its
+shadowy, persistent reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion.
+
+Haldin was heard again.
+
+"You must have had a walk--such a walk,..." he murmured
+deprecatingly. "This weather...."
+
+Razumov answered with energy--
+
+"Horrible walk.... A nightmare of a walk."
+
+He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then--
+
+"And so you have seen Ziemianitch--brother?"
+
+"I've seen him."
+
+Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with the Prince, thought it
+prudent to add, "I had to wait some time."
+
+"A character--eh? It's extraordinary what a sense of the necessity of
+freedom there is in that man. And he has sayings too--simple, to the
+point, such as only the people can invent in their rough sagacity. A
+character that...."
+
+"I, you understand, haven't had much opportunity...." Razumov
+muttered through his teeth.
+
+Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
+
+"You see, brother, I have been a good deal in that house of late. I used
+to take there books--leaflets. Not a few of the poor people who live
+there can read. And, you see, the guests for the feast of freedom must
+be sought for in byways and hedges. The truth is, I have almost lived in
+that house of late. I slept sometimes in the stable. There is a
+stable...."
+
+"That's where I had my interview with Ziemianitch," interrupted
+Razumov gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, "It was
+satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved."
+
+"Ah! he's a fellow," went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling. "I
+came to know him in that way, you see. For some weeks now, ever since I
+resigned myself to do what had to be done, I tried to isolate myself. I
+gave up my rooms. What was the good of exposing a decent widow woman
+to the risk of being worried out of her mind by the police? I gave up
+seeing any of our comrades...."
+
+Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper and began to trace lines
+on it with a pencil.
+
+"Upon my word," he thought angrily, "he seems to have thought of
+everybody's safety but mine."
+
+Haldin was talking on.
+
+"This morning--ah! this morning--that was different. How can I explain
+to you? Before the deed was done I wandered at night and lay hid in the
+day, thinking it out, and I felt restful. Sleepless but restful. What
+was there for me to torment myself about? But this morning--after! Then
+it was that I became restless. I could not have stopped in that big
+house full of misery. The miserable of this world can't give you peace.
+Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself,
+'There is a young man in this town head and shoulders above common
+prejudices.'"
+
+"Is he laughing at me?" Razumov asked himself, going on with his
+aimless drawing of triangles and squares. And suddenly he thought: "My
+behaviour must appear to him strange. Should he take fright at my manner
+and rush off somewhere I shall be undone completely. That infernal
+General...."
+
+He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the
+shadowy figure extended full length on it--so much more indistinct than
+the one over whose breast he had walked without faltering. Was this,
+too, a phantom?
+
+The silence had lasted a long time. "He is no longer here," was the
+thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at
+its absurdity. "He is already gone and this...only..."
+
+He could resist no longer. He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, "I am
+intolerably anxious," and in a few headlong strides stood by the side
+of the bed. His hand fell lightly on Haldin's shoulder, and directly
+he felt its reality he was beset by an insane temptation to grip that
+exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of that body, lest it should
+escape his custody, leaving only a phantom behind.
+
+Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed eyes moving a little
+gazed upwards at Razumov with wistful gratitude for this manifestation
+of feeling.
+
+Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room. "It would have been
+possibly a kindness," he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the
+nature of that apology for a murderous intention his mind had found
+somewhere within him. And all the same he could not give it up. He
+became lucid about it. "What can he expect?" he thought. "The halter--in
+the end. And I...."
+
+This argument was interrupted by Haldin's voice.
+
+"Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my
+soul from this world. I tell you what--I believe in this world so much
+that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life. That
+is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die."
+
+"H'm," muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk
+up and down and to carry on his strange argument.
+
+Yes, to a man in such a situation--of course it would be an act of
+kindness. The question, however, was not how to be kind, but how to be
+firm. He was a slippery customer.
+
+"I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this world of ours," he said
+with force. "I too, while I live.... But you seem determined to haunt
+it. You can't seriously...mean..."
+
+The voice of the motionless Haldin began--
+
+"Haunt it! Truly, the oppressors of thought which quickens the world,
+the destroyers of souls which aspire to perfection of human dignity,
+they shall be haunted. As to the destroyers of my mere body, I have
+forgiven them beforehand."
+
+Razumov had stopped apparently to listen, but at the same time he was
+observing his own sensations. He was vexed with himself for attaching so
+much importance to what Haldin said.
+
+"The fellow's mad," he thought firmly, but this opinion did not mollify
+him towards Haldin. It was a particularly impudent form of lunacy--and
+when it got loose in the sphere of public life of a country, it was
+obviously the duty of every good citizen....
+
+This train of thought broke off short there and was succeeded by a
+paroxysm of silent hatred towards Haldin, so intense that Razumov
+hastened to speak at random.
+
+"Yes. Eternity, of course. I, too, can't very well represent it to
+myself.... I imagine it, however, as something quiet and dull. There
+would be nothing unexpected--don't you see? The element of time would be
+wanting."
+
+He pulled out his watch and gazed at it. Haldin turned over on his side
+and looked on intently.
+
+Razumov got frightened at this movement. A slippery customer this fellow
+with a phantom. It was not midnight yet. He hastened on--
+
+"And unfathomable mysteries! Can you conceive secret places in Eternity?
+Impossible. Whereas life is full of them. There are secrets of birth,
+for instance. One carries them on to the grave. There is something
+comical...but never mind. And there are secret motives of conduct. A
+man's most open actions have a secret side to them. That is interesting
+and so unfathomable! For instance, a man goes out of a room for a walk.
+Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He
+comes back--he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice
+of the snow on the ground--and behold he is no longer the same man. The
+most unlikely things have a secret power over one's thoughts--the grey
+whiskers of a particular person--the goggle eyes of another."
+
+Razumov's forehead was moist. He took a turn or two in the room, his
+head low and smiling to himself viciously.
+
+"Have you ever reflected on the power of goggle eyes and grey whiskers?
+Excuse me. You seem to think I must be crazy to talk in this vein at
+such a time. But I am not talking lightly. I have seen instances. It has
+happened to me once to be talking to a man whose fate was affected by
+physical facts of that kind. And the man did not know it. Of course, it
+was a case of conscience, but the material facts such as these brought
+about the solution.... And you tell me, Victor Victorovitch, not to
+be anxious! Why! I am responsible for you," Razumov almost shrieked.
+
+He avoided with difficulty a burst of Mephistophelian laughter. Haldin,
+very pale, raised himself on his elbow.
+
+"And the surprises of life," went on Razumov, after glancing at the
+other uneasily. "Just consider their astonishing nature. A mysterious
+impulse induces you to come here. I don't say you have done wrong.
+Indeed, from a certain point of view you could not have done better. You
+might have gone to a man with affections and family ties. You have
+such ties yourself. As to me, you know I have been brought up in an
+educational institute where they did not give us enough to eat. To talk
+of affection in such a connexion--you perceive yourself.... As
+to ties, the only ties I have in the world are social. I must get
+acknowledged in some way before I can act at all. I sit here working....
+And don't you think I am working for progress too? I've got to find
+my own ideas of the true way.... Pardon me," continued Razumov, after
+drawing breath and with a short, throaty laugh, "but I haven't inherited
+a revolutionary inspiration together with a resemblance from an uncle."
+
+He looked again at his watch and noticed with sickening disgust that
+there were yet a good many minutes to midnight. He tore watch and chain
+off his waistcoat and laid them on the table well in the circle of
+bright lamplight. Haldin, reclining on his elbow, did not stir. Razumov
+was made uneasy by this attitude. "What move is he meditating over so
+quietly?" he thought. "He must be prevented. I must keep on talking to
+him."
+
+He raised his voice.
+
+"You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin--I don't know what--to no
+end of people. I am just a man. Here I stand before you. A man with a
+mind. Did it ever occur to you how a man who had never heard a word of
+warm affection or praise in his life would think on matters on which
+you would think first with or against your class, your domestic
+tradition--your fireside prejudices?... Did you ever consider how a
+man like that would feel? I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing
+to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back
+to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away
+your future? Am I to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a
+better lot, be robbed of the only thing it has to go upon at the will of
+violent enthusiasts? You come from your province, but all this land is
+mine--or I have nothing. No doubt you shall be looked upon as a martyr
+some day--a sort of hero--a political saint. But I beg to be excused. I
+am content in fitting myself to be a worker. And what can you people do
+by scattering a few drops of blood on the snow? On this Immensity. On
+this unhappy Immensity! I tell you," he cried, in a vibrating, subdued
+voice, and advancing one step nearer the bed, "that what it needs is not
+a lot of haunting phantoms that I could walk through--but a man!"
+
+Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him off in horror.
+
+"I understand it all now," he exclaimed, with awestruck dismay. "I
+understand--at last."
+
+Razumov staggered back against the table. His forehead broke out in
+perspiration while a cold shudder ran down his spine.
+
+"What have I been saying?" he asked himself. "Have I let him slip
+through my fingers after all?"
+
+"He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and instead of a reassuring
+smile only achieved an uncertain grimace.
+
+"What will you have?" he began in a conciliating voice which got steady
+after the first trembling word or two. "What will you have? Consider--a
+man of studious, retired habits--and suddenly like this.... I am not
+practised in talking delicately. But..."
+
+He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him again.
+
+"What were we to do together till midnight? Sit here opposite each other
+and think of your--your--shambles?"
+
+Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude. He bowed his head; his hands
+hung between his knees. His voice was low and pained but calm.
+
+"I see now how it is, Razumov--brother. You are a magnanimous soul, but
+my action is abhorrent to you--alas...."
+
+Razumov stared. From fright he had set his teeth so hard that his whole
+face ached. It was impossible for him to make a sound.
+
+"And even my person, too, is loathsome to you perhaps," Haldin added
+mournfully, after a short pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing
+his gaze on the floor. "For indeed, unless one...."
+
+He broke off evidently waiting for a word. Razumov remained silent.
+Haldin nodded his head dejectedly twice.
+
+"Of course. Of course," he murmured.... "Ah! weary work!"
+
+He remained perfectly still for a moment, then made Razumov's leaden
+heart strike a ponderous blow by springing up briskly.
+
+"So be it," he cried sadly in a low, distinct tone. "Farewell then."
+
+Razumov started forward, but the sight of Haldin's raised hand checked
+him before he could get away from the table. He leaned on it heavily,
+listening to the faint sounds of some town clock tolling the hour.
+Haldin, already at the door, tall and straight as an arrow, with his
+pale face and a hand raised attentively, might have posed for the statue
+of a daring youth listening to an inner voice. Razumov mechanically
+glanced down at his watch. When he looked towards the door again Haldin
+had vanished. There was a faint rustling in the outer room, the feeble
+click of a bolt drawn back lightly. He was gone--almost as noiseless as
+a vision.
+
+Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted, voiceless lips. The outer
+door stood open. Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far over the
+banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glimmering
+flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of
+somebody running down the stairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift,
+pattering sound, which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting
+shadow passed over the glimmer--a wink of the tiny flame. Then
+stillness.
+
+Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells
+of the unclean staircase. All quiet.
+
+He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him. The
+peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch. Razumov
+stood looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes
+to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.
+
+"Slow," he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.
+His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an
+instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell
+himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to
+stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled--
+
+"Stopped," and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly--
+
+"It's done.... And now to work."
+
+He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began
+to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold
+on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought--
+
+"There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
+across the street."
+
+He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
+cloak to the nose and with a General's plumed, cocked hat on his head.
+This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally
+had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be
+disguised perhaps as a peasant... a beggar.... Perhaps he would
+be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick--a
+shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.
+
+This evocation brought on positive nausea. "Why do I want to bother
+about this?" thought Razumov with disgust. "Am I a gendarme? Moreover,
+it is done."
+
+He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till
+half-past twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to
+despair. Impossible to know the time! The landlady and all the people
+across the landing were asleep. How could he go and... God knows
+what they would imagine, or how much they would guess. He dared not
+go into the streets to find out. "I am a suspect now. There's no use
+shirking that fact," he said to himself bitterly. If Haldin from
+some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the
+Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging. And if he were not
+in he could never clear himself. Never. Razumov looked wildly about as
+if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped
+him altogether. He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the
+striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night. And he was
+not even sure now whether he had heard it really on this night.
+
+He went to the window and stood there with slightly bent head on the
+watch for the faint sound. "I will stay here till I hear something,"
+he said to himself. He stood still, his ear turned to the panes. An
+atrocious aching numbness with shooting pains in his back and legs
+tortured him. He did not budge. His mind hovered on the borders of
+delirium. He heard himself suddenly saying, "I confess," as a person
+might do on the rack. "I am on the rack," he thought. He felt ready to
+swoon. The faint deep boom of the distant clock seemed to explode in his
+head--he heard it so clearly.... One!
+
+If Haldin had not turned up the police would have been already here
+ransacking the house. No sound reached him. This time it was done.
+
+He dragged himself painfully to the table and dropped into the chair.
+He flung the book away and took a square sheet of paper. It was like the
+pile of sheets covered with his neat minute handwriting, only blank. He
+took a pen brusquely and dipped it with a vague notion of going on with
+the writing of his essay--but his pen remained poised over the sheet.
+It hung there for some time before it came down and formed long scrawly
+letters.
+
+Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began to write. When he wrote
+a large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether--became
+unsteady, almost childish. He wrote five lines one under the other.
+History not Theory. Patriotism not Internationalism. Evolution not
+Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption.
+
+He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and remained
+fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand groped all
+over the table for the penknife.
+
+He rose at last, and walking up with measured steps stabbed the paper
+with the penknife to the lath and plaster wall at the head of the bed.
+This done he stepped back a pace and flourished his hand with a glance
+round the room.
+
+After that he never looked again at the bed. He took his big cloak down
+from its peg and, wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on
+the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of his room. A leaden
+sleep closed his eyelids at once. Several times that night he woke up
+shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia
+where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an
+immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its
+enormous expanse as if it were a map. But after each shuddering start
+his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and he slept again.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov's story, my mind, the decent mind
+of an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of
+the task.
+
+The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_
+of a strange human document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
+clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
+earth's surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less
+discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word
+that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word
+which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the
+moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.
+
+I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov's record, I
+lay it aside, I take up the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
+of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in
+creeping under its point is no other word than "cynicism."
+
+For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its
+pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the
+secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is
+the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen,
+the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of
+prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and
+the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.... But I
+must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration
+of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative
+convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his
+age, had become crystallized by the shock of his contact with Haldin.
+
+Razumov woke up for the tenth time perhaps with a heavy shiver. Seeing
+the light of day in his window, he resisted the inclination to lay
+himself down again. He did not remember anything, but he did not think
+it strange to find himself on the sofa in his cloak and chilled to the
+bone. The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless,
+containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young
+man. It was the awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man ninety
+years old. He looked at the lamp which had burnt itself out. It stood
+there, the extinguished beacon of his labours, a cold object of brass
+and porcelain, amongst the scattered pages of his notes and small
+piles of books--a mere litter of blackened paper--dead matter--without
+significance or interest.
+
+He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the
+peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness,
+a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life
+had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts.
+There was not a sound in the house.
+
+Turning away from the peg, he thought in that same lifeless manner that
+it must be very early yet; but when he looked at the watch on his table
+he saw both hands arrested at twelve o'clock.
+
+"Ah! yes," he mumbled to himself, and as if beginning to get roused
+a little he took a survey of his room. The paper stabbed to the wall
+arrested his attention. He eyed it from the distance without approval or
+perplexity; but when he heard the servant-girl beginning to bustle about
+in the outer room with the _samovar_ for his morning tea, he walked up
+to it and took it down with an air of profound indifference.
+
+While doing this he glanced down at the bed on which he had not slept
+that night. The hollow in the pillow made by the weight of Haldin's head
+was very noticeable.
+
+Even his anger at this sign of the man's passage was dull. He did not
+try to nurse it into life. He did nothing all that day; he neglected
+even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him--and
+if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he
+was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
+
+He yawned frequently. He drank large quantities of tea, he walked about
+aimlessly, and when he sat down he did not budge for a long time. He
+spent some time drumming on the window with his finger-tips quietly. In
+his listless wanderings round about the table he caught sight of his own
+face in the looking-glass and that arrested him. The eyes which returned
+his stare were the most unhappy eyes he had ever seen. And this was the
+first thing which disturbed the mental stagnation of that day.
+
+He was not affected personally. He merely thought that life without
+happiness is impossible. What was happiness? He yawned and went on
+shuffling about and about between the walls of his room. Looking
+forward was happiness--that's all--nothing more. To look forward to
+the gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion,
+love, ambition, hate--hate too indubitably. Love and hate. And to escape
+the dangers of existence, to live without fear, was also happiness.
+There was nothing else. Absence of fear--looking forward. "Oh! the
+miserable lot of humanity!" he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in
+his thought, "I ought to be happy enough as far as that goes." But he
+was not excited by that assurance. On the contrary, he yawned again as
+he had been yawning all day. He was mildly surprised to discover himself
+being overtaken by night. The room grew dark swiftly though time had
+seemed to stand still. How was it that he had not noticed the passing of
+that day? Of course, it was the watch being stopped....
+
+He did not light his lamp, but went over to the bed and threw himself on
+it without any hesitation. Lying on his back, he put his hands under his
+head and stared upward. After a moment he thought, "I am lying here like
+that man. I wonder if he slept while I was struggling with the blizzard
+in the streets. No, he did not sleep. But why should I not sleep?" and
+he felt the silence of the night press upon all his limbs like a weight.
+
+In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear-cut strokes of the town
+clock counting off midnight penetrated the quietness of his suspended
+animation.
+
+Again he began to think. It was twenty-four hours since that man left
+his room. Razumov had a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress was
+sleeping that night. It was a certitude which made him angry because
+he did not want to think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself by
+physiological and psychological reasons. The fellow had hardly slept for
+weeks on his own confession, and now every incertitude was at an end
+for him. No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his
+martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for
+resignation to die. Haldin slept perhaps more soundly than General T---,
+whose task--weary work too--was not done, and over whose head hung the
+sword of revolutionary vengeance.
+
+Razumov, remembering the thick-set man with his heavy jowl resting on
+the collar of his uniform, the champion of autocracy, who had let no
+sign of surprise, incredulity, or joy escape him, but whose goggle eyes
+could express a mortal hatred of all rebellion--Razumov moved uneasily
+on the bed.
+
+"He suspected me," he thought. "I suppose he must suspect everybody. He
+would be capable of suspecting his own wife, if Haldin had gone to her
+boudoir with his confession."
+
+Razumov sat up in anguish. Was he to remain a political suspect all his
+days? Was he to go through life as a man not wholly to be trusted--with
+a bad secret police note tacked on to his record? What sort of future
+could he look forward to?
+
+"I am now a suspect," he thought again; but the habit of reflection and
+that desire of safety, of an ordered life, which was so strong in him
+came to his assistance as the night wore on. His quiet, steady, and
+laborious existence would vouch at length for his loyalty. There were
+many permitted ways to serve one's country. There was an activity that
+made for progress without being revolutionary. The field of influence
+was great and infinitely varied--once one had conquered a name.
+
+His thought like a circling bird reverted after four-and-twenty hours to
+the silver medal, and as it were poised itself there.
+
+When the day broke he had not slept, not for a moment, but he got up
+not very tired and quite sufficiently self-possessed for all practical
+purposes.
+
+He went out and attended three lectures in the morning. But the work in
+the library was a mere dumb show of research. He sat with many volumes
+open before him trying to make notes and extracts. His new tranquillity
+was like a flimsy garment, and seemed to float at the mercy of a casual
+word. Betrayal! Why! the fellow had done all that was necessary to
+betray himself. Precious little had been needed to deceive him.
+
+"I have said no word to him that was not strictly true. Not one word,"
+Razumov argued with himself.
+
+Once engaged on this line of thought there could be no question of doing
+useful work. The same ideas went on passing through his mind, and he
+pronounced mentally the same words over and over again. He shut up all
+the books and rammed all his papers into his pocket with convulsive
+movements, raging inwardly against Haldin.
+
+As he was leaving the library a long bony student in a threadbare
+overcoat joined him, stepping moodily by his side. Razumov answered his
+mumbled greeting without looking at him at all.
+
+"What does he want with me?" he thought with a strange dread of the
+unexpected which he tried to shake off lest it should fasten itself
+upon his life for good and all. And the other, muttering cautiously with
+downcast eyes, supposed that his comrade had seen the news of de P---'s
+executioner--that was the expression he used--having been arrested the
+night before last....
+
+"I've been ill--shut up in my rooms," Razumov mumbled through his teeth.
+
+The tall student, raising his shoulders, shoved his hands deep into his
+pockets. He had a hairless, square, tallowy chin which trembled slightly
+as he spoke, and his nose nipped bright red by the sharp air looked like
+a false nose of painted cardboard between the sallow cheeks. His whole
+appearance was stamped with the mark of cold and hunger. He stalked
+deliberately at Razumov's elbow with his eyes on the ground.
+
+"It's an official statement," he continued in the same cautious mutter.
+"It may be a lie. But there was somebody arrested between midnight and
+one in the morning on Tuesday. This is certain."
+
+And talking rapidly under the cover of his downcast air, he told Razumov
+that this was known through an inferior Government clerk employed at
+the Central Secretariat. That man belonged to one of the revolutionary
+circles. "The same, in fact, I am affiliated to," remarked the student.
+
+They were crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed
+Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared
+confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. "He
+may be affiliated to the police," was the thought that passed through
+his mind. "Who could tell?" But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped,
+famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity of his
+suspicion.
+
+"But I--you know--I don't belong to any circle. I...."
+
+He dared not say any more. Neither dared he mend his pace. The
+other, raising and setting down his lamentably shod feet with exact
+deliberation, protested in a low tone that it was not necessary for
+everybody to belong to an organization. The most valuable personalities
+remained outside. Some of the best work was done outside the
+organization. Then very fast, with whispering, feverish lips--
+
+"The man arrested in the street was Haldin."
+
+And accepting Razumov's dismayed silence as natural enough, he assured
+him that there was no mistake. That Government clerk was on night duty
+at the Secretariat. Hearing a great noise of footsteps in the hall and
+aware that political prisoners were brought over sometimes at night from
+the fortress, he opened the door of the room in which he was working,
+suddenly. Before the gendarme on duty could push him back and slam the
+door in his face, he had seen a prisoner being partly carried, partly
+dragged along the hall by a lot of policemen. He was being used very
+brutally. And the clerk had recognized Haldin perfectly. Less than half
+an hour afterwards General T--- arrived at the Secretariat to examine
+that prisoner personally.
+
+"Aren't you astonished?" concluded the gaunt student.
+
+"No," said Razumov roughly--and at once regretted his answer.
+
+"Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces--with his people. Didn't
+you?"
+
+The student turned his big hollow eyes upon Razumov, who said
+unguardedly--
+
+"His people are abroad."
+
+He could have bitten his tongue out with vexation. The student
+pronounced in a tone of profound meaning--
+
+"So! You alone were aware,..." and stopped.
+
+"They have sworn my ruin," thought Razumov. "Have you spoken of this to
+anyone else?" he asked with bitter curiosity.
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+"No, only to you. Our circle thought that as Haldin had been often heard
+expressing a warm appreciation of your character...."
+
+Razumov could not restrain a gesture of angry despair which the other
+must have misunderstood in some way, because he ceased speaking and
+turned away his black, lack-lustre eyes.
+
+They moved side by side in silence. Then the gaunt student began to
+whisper again, with averted gaze--
+
+"As we have at present no one affiliated inside the fortress so as
+to make it possible to furnish him with a packet of poison, we have
+considered already some sort of retaliatory action--to follow very
+soon...."
+
+Razumov trudging on interrupted--
+
+"Were you acquainted with Haldin? Did he know where you live?"
+
+"I had the happiness to hear him speak twice," his companion answered in
+the feverish whisper contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face and
+bearing. "He did not know where I live.... I am lodging poorly with
+an artisan family.... I have just a corner in a room. It is not very
+practicable to see me there, but if you should need me for anything I am
+ready...."
+
+Razumov trembled with rage and fear. He was beside himself, but kept his
+voice low.
+
+"You are not to come near me. You are not to speak to me. Never address
+a single word to me. I forbid you."
+
+"Very well," said the other submissively, showing no surprise whatever
+at this abrupt prohibition. "You don't wish for secret reasons...
+perfectly... I understand."
+
+He edged away at once, not looking up even; and Razumov saw his gaunt,
+shabby, famine-stricken figure cross the street obliquely with lowered
+head and that peculiar exact motion of the feet.
+
+He watched him as one would watch a vision out of a nightmare, then he
+continued on his way, trying not to think. On his landing the landlady
+seemed to be waiting for him. She was a short, thick, shapeless woman
+with a large yellow face wrapped up everlastingly in a black woollen
+shawl. When she saw him come up the last flight of stairs she flung both
+her arms up excitedly, then clasped her hands before her face.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--little father--what have you been doing? And such
+a quiet young man, too! The police are just gone this moment after
+searching your rooms."
+
+Razumov gazed down at her with silent, scrutinizing attention. Her puffy
+yellow countenance was working with emotion. She screwed up her eyes at
+him entreatingly.
+
+"Such a sensible young man! Anybody can see you are sensible. And
+now--like this--all at once.... What is the good of mixing yourself
+up with these Nihilists? Do give over, little father. They are unlucky
+people."
+
+Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
+
+"Or is it that some secret enemy has been calumniating you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch? The world is full of black hearts and false denunciations
+nowadays. There is much fear about."
+
+"Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?" asked Razumov,
+without taking his eyes off her quivering face.
+
+But she had not heard anything. She had tried to find out by asking
+the police captain while his men were turning the room upside down. The
+police captain of the district had known her for the last eleven years
+and was a humane person. But he said to her on the landing, looking very
+black and vexed--
+
+"My good woman, do not ask questions. I don't know anything myself. The
+order comes from higher quarters."
+
+And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the arrival of the
+policemen of the district, a very superior gentleman in a fur coat and
+a shiny hat, who sat down in the room and looked through all the papers
+himself. He came alone and went away by himself, taking nothing with
+him. She had been trying to put things straight a little since they
+left.
+
+Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.
+
+All his books had been shaken and thrown on the floor. His landlady
+followed him, and stooping painfully began to pick them up into her
+apron. His papers and notes which were kept always neatly sorted (they
+all related to his studies) had been shuffled up and heaped together
+into a ragged pile in the middle of the table.
+
+This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably. He sat down
+and stared. He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being
+undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away
+from him one by one. He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and
+made a movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.
+
+The old woman, rising to her feet with a low groan, shot all the
+books she had collected in her apron on to the sofa and left the room
+muttering and sighing.
+
+It was only then that he noticed that the sheet of paper which for one
+night had remained stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was lying on
+top of the pile.
+
+When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four,
+absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table. And now he saw it
+lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the
+confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the
+last three years. It had not been flung there. It had been placed
+there--smoothed out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound
+meaning--or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
+
+He sat staring at the piece of paper till his eyes began to smart. He
+did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the
+next day--which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution.
+This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to
+live--neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from
+the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide. The idea of laying
+violent hands upon his body did not occur to Razumov. The unrelated
+organism bearing that label, walking, breathing, wearing these clothes,
+was of no importance to anyone, unless maybe to the landlady. The true
+Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future--in that
+future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy--for autocracy knows
+no law--and the lawlessness of revolution. The feeling that his moral
+personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that
+he asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing
+the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.
+
+"What is the good of exerting my intelligence, of pursuing the
+systematic development of my faculties and all my plans of work?" he
+asked himself. "I want to guide my conduct by reasonable convictions,
+but what security have I against something--some destructive
+horror--walking in upon me as I sit here?..."
+
+Razumov looked apprehensively towards the door of the outer room as if
+expecting some shape of evil to turn the handle and appear before him
+silently.
+
+"A common thief," he said to himself, "finds more guarantees in the law
+he is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his consolation."
+Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the
+incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear
+and their lives remained their own.
+
+But he slept as soundly that night as though he had been consoling
+himself in the manner of Ziemianitch. He dropped off suddenly, lay like
+a log, remembered no dream on waking. But it was as if his soul had gone
+out in the night to gather the flowers of wrathful wisdom. He got up in
+a mood of grim determination and as if with a new knowledge of his own
+nature. He looked mockingly on the heap of papers on his table; and left
+his room to attend the lectures, muttering to himself, "We shall see."
+
+He was in no humour to talk to anybody or hear himself questioned as
+to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to
+repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair
+hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of "Madcap
+Kostia." He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate
+Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the
+periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal
+remonstrances. Noisily blundering like a retriever puppy, his elated
+voice and great gestures filled the bare academy corridors with the
+joy of thoughtless animal life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great
+distance. His usual discourses treated of trotting horses, wine-parties
+in expensive restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy virtue,
+with a disarming artlessness of outlook. He pounced upon Razumov about
+midday, somewhat less uproariously than his habit was, and led him
+aside.
+
+"Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch. A few words here in this quiet
+corner."
+
+He felt Razumov's reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm
+caressingly.
+
+"No--pray do. I don't want to talk to you about any of my silly scrapes.
+What are my scrapes? Absolutely nothing. Mere childishness. The other
+night I flung a fellow out of a certain place where I was having a
+fairly good time. A tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from the
+Treasury department. He was bullying the people of the house. I rebuked
+him. 'You are not behaving humanely to God's creatures that are a jolly
+sight more estimable than yourself,' I said. I can't bear to see any
+tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Upon my word I can't. He didn't take it in
+good part at all. 'Who's that impudent puppy?' he begins to shout. I
+was in excellent form as it happened, and he went through the closed
+window very suddenly. He flew quite a long way into the yard. I raged
+like--like a--minotaur. The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers
+got under the table.... Such fun! My dad had to put his hand pretty
+deep into his pocket, I can tell you." He chuckled.
+
+"My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do
+get into unholy scrapes."
+
+His elation fell. That was just it. What was his life? Insignificant;
+no good to anyone; a mere festivity. It would end some fine day in his
+getting his skull split with a champagne bottle in a drunken brawl. At
+such times, too, when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas. But he
+could never get any ideas into his head. His head wasn't worth anything
+better than to be split by a champagne bottle.
+
+Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away.
+The other's tone changed to confidential earnestness.
+
+"For God's sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me make some sort of
+sacrifice. It would not be a sacrifice really. I have my rich dad behind
+me. There's positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket."
+
+And rejecting indignantly Razumov's suggestion that this was drunken
+raving, he offered to lend him some money to escape abroad with. He
+could always get money from his dad. He had only to say that he had
+lost it at cards or something of that sort, and at the same time promise
+solemnly not to miss a single lecture for three months on end. That
+would fetch the old man; and he, Kostia, was quite equal to the
+sacrifice. Though he really did not see what was the good for him to
+attend the lectures. It was perfectly hopeless.
+
+"Won't you let me be of some use?" he pleaded to the silent Razumov,
+who with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real
+drift of the other's intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up
+the point.
+
+"What makes you think I want to go abroad?" he asked at last very
+quietly.
+
+Kostia lowered his voice.
+
+"You had the police in your rooms yesterday. There are three or four of
+us who have heard of that. Never mind how we know. It is sufficient that
+we do. So we have been consulting together."
+
+"Ah! You got to know that so soon," muttered Razumov negligently.
+
+"Yes. We did. And it struck us that a man like you..."
+
+"What sort of a man do you take me to be?" Razumov interrupted him.
+
+"A man of ideas--and a man of action too. But you are very deep, Kirylo.
+There's no getting to the bottom of your mind. Not for fellows like me.
+But we all agreed that you must be preserved for our country. Of that we
+have no doubt whatever--I mean all of us who have heard Haldin speak of
+you on certain occasions. A man doesn't get the police ransacking his
+rooms without there being some devilry hanging over his head.... And
+so if you think that it would be better for you to bolt at once...."
+
+Razumov tore himself away and walked down the corridor, leaving the
+other motionless with his mouth open. But almost at once he returned
+and stood before the amazed Kostia, who shut his mouth slowly. Razumov
+looked him straight in the eyes, before saying with marked deliberation
+and separating his words--
+
+"I thank--you--very--much."
+
+He went away again rapidly. Kostia, recovering from his surprise at
+these manoeuvres, ran up behind him pressingly.
+
+"No! Wait! Listen. I really mean it. It would be like giving your
+compassion to a starving fellow. Do you hear, Kirylo? And any disguise
+you may think of, that too I could procure from a costumier, a Jew I
+know. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly. Perhaps
+also a false beard or something of that kind may be needed.
+
+"Razumov turned at bay.
+
+"There are no false beards needed in this business, Kostia--you
+good-hearted lunatic, you. What do you know of my ideas? My ideas may be
+poison to you." The other began to shake his head in energetic protest.
+
+"What have you got to do with ideas? Some of them would make an end
+of your dad's money-bags. Leave off meddling with what you don't
+understand. Go back to your trotting horses and your girls, and then
+you'll be sure at least of doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to
+yourself."
+
+The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this disdain.
+
+"You're sending me back to my pig's trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I
+am an unlucky beast--and I shall die like a beast too. But mind--it's
+your contempt that has done for me."
+
+Razumov went off with long strides. That this simple and grossly festive
+soul should have fallen too under the revolutionary curse affected him
+as an ominous symptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling
+troubled. Personally he ought to have felt reassured. There was an
+obvious advantage in this conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for
+what he was not. But was it not strange?
+
+Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of
+his hands by Haldin's revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and laborious
+existence had been destroyed--the only thing he could call his own on
+this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?
+
+What infuriated him most was to feel that the "thinkers" of the
+University were evidently connecting him with Haldin--as a sort of
+confidant in the background apparently. A mysterious connexion! Ha ha!
+...He had been made a personage without knowing anything about it. How
+that wretch Haldin must have talked about him! Yet it was likely that
+Haldin had said very little. The fellow's casual utterances were caught
+up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not
+all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and
+lies?
+
+"Impossible to think of anything else," muttered Razumov to himself.
+"I'll become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are
+murdering my intelligence."
+
+He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of
+his intelligence.
+
+He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement
+which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an
+official-looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik.
+
+"A gendarme brought it," said the man. "He asked if you were at home.
+I told him 'No, he's not at home.' So he left it. 'Give it into his own
+hands,' says he. Now you've got it--eh?"
+
+He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope
+in hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course
+this official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A
+suspect! A suspect!
+
+He stared in dreary astonishment at the absurdity of his position. He
+thought with a sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years of good
+work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardized--turned from
+hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves
+into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break
+through. Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady's back is
+turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man's name,
+clothed in flesh--wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots--lounging
+against the stove. It asks you, "Is the outer door closed?"--and you
+don't know enough to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You
+don't know. You welcome the crazy fate. "Sit down," you say. And it is
+all over. You cannot shake it off any more. It will cling to you for
+ever. Neither halter nor bullet can give you back the freedom of your
+life and the sanity of your thought.... It was enough to dash one's
+head against a wall.
+
+Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if to select a spot to dash
+his head against. Then he opened the letter. It directed the student
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself without delay at the
+General Secretariat.
+
+Razumov had a vision of General T---'s goggle eyes waiting for him--the
+embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied
+the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the
+incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of
+a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion
+by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to
+understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism.
+
+"What can he want with me precisely--I wonder?" he asked himself.
+
+As if that mental question had evoked the familiar phantom, Haldin stood
+suddenly before him in the room with an extraordinary completeness of
+detail. Though the short winter day had passed already into the sinister
+twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw plainly the narrow
+leather strap round the Tcherkess coat. The illusion of that hateful
+presence was so perfect that he half expected it to ask, "Is the outer
+door closed?" He looked at it with hatred and contempt. Souls do not
+take a shape of clothing. Moreover, Haldin could not be dead yet.
+Razumov stepped forward menacingly; the vision vanished--and turning
+short on his heel he walked out of his room with infinite disdain.
+
+But after going down the first flight of stairs it occurred to him that
+perhaps the superior authorities of police meant to confront him with
+Haldin in the flesh. This thought struck him like a bullet, and had he
+not clung with both hands to the banister he would have rolled down to
+the next landing most likely. His legs were of no use for a considerable
+time.... But why? For what conceivable reason? To what end?
+
+There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov
+remembered the promise made by the General to Prince K---. His action
+was to remain unknown.
+
+He got down to the bottom of the stairs, lowering himself as it were
+from step to step, by the banister. Under the gate he regained much of
+his firmness of thought and limb. He went out into the street without
+staggering visibly. Every moment he felt steadier mentally. And yet
+he was saying to himself that General T--- was perfectly capable of
+shutting him up in the fortress for an indefinite time. His temperament
+fitted his remorseless task, and his omnipotence made him inaccessible
+to reasonable argument.
+
+But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he discovered that he would
+have nothing to do with General T---. It is evident from Mr. Razumov's
+diary that this dreaded personality was to remain in the background. A
+civilian of superior rank received him in a private room after a period
+of waiting in outer offices where a lot of scribbling went on at many
+tables in a heated and stuffy atmosphere.
+
+The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in the corridor--
+
+"You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin."
+
+There was nothing formidable about the man bearing that name. His mild,
+expectant glance was turned on the door already when Razumov entered.
+At once, with the penholder he was holding in his hand, he pointed to a
+deep sofa between two windows. He followed Razumov with his eyes while
+that last crossed the room and sat down. The mild gaze rested on him,
+not curious, not inquisitive--certainly not suspicious--almost
+without expression. In its passionless persistence there was something
+resembling sympathy.
+
+Razumov, who had prepared his will and his intelligence to encounter
+General T--- himself, was profoundly troubled. All the moral bracing
+up against the possible excesses of power and passion went for nothing
+before this sallow man, who wore a full unclipped beard. It was
+fair, thin, and very fine. The light fell in coppery gleams on the
+protuberances of a high, rugged forehead. And the aspect of the broad,
+soft physiognomy was so homely and rustic that the careful middle
+parting of the hair seemed a pretentious affectation.
+
+The diary of Mr. Razumov testifies to some irritation on his part. I may
+remark here that the diary proper consisting of the more or less daily
+entries seems to have been begun on that very evening after Mr. Razumov
+had returned home.
+
+Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated. His strung-up individuality had gone
+to pieces within him very suddenly.
+
+"I must be very prudent with him," he warned himself in the silence
+during which they sat gazing at each other. It lasted some little time,
+and was characterized (for silences have their character) by a sort of
+sadness imparted to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner of
+the bearded official. Razumov learned later that he was the chief of a
+department in the General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil service
+equivalent to that of a colonel in the army.
+
+Razumov's mistrust became acute. The main point was, not to be drawn
+into saying too much. He had been called there for some reason. What
+reason? To be given to understand that he was a suspect--and also no
+doubt to be pumped. As to what precisely? There was nothing. Or perhaps
+Haldin had been telling lies.... Every alarming uncertainty beset
+Razumov. He could bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself for
+his weakness spoke first, though he had promised himself not to do so on
+any account.
+
+"I haven't lost a moment's time," he began in a hoarse, provoking tone;
+and then the faculty of speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of
+Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly--
+
+"Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact...."
+
+But the spell was broken, and Razumov interrupted him boldly, under
+a sudden conviction that this was the safest attitude to take. With a
+great flow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even
+as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that
+the word "misunderstood" was better than the word "mistrusted," and he
+repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized
+with fright before the attentive immobility of the official. "What am
+I talking about?" he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze.
+Mistrusted--not misunderstood--was the right symbol for these people.
+Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his
+head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his
+hand over his brow--an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was
+too careless to restrain. At that moment Razumov beheld his own brain
+suffering on the rack--a long, pale figure drawn asunder horizontally
+with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to
+see. It was as though he had dreamed for an infinitesimal fraction of
+time of some dark print of the Inquisition.
+
+It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov had actually dozed off
+and had dreamed in the presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print
+of the Inquisition. He was indeed extremely exhausted, and he records
+a remarkably dream-like experience of anguish at the circumstance
+that there was no one whatever near the pale and extended figure. The
+solitude of the racked victim was particularly horrible to behold. The
+mysterious impossibility to see the face, he also notes, inspired a sort
+of terror. All these characteristics of an ugly dream were present. Yet
+he is certain that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the
+sofa, leaning forward with his hands between his knees and turning his
+cap round and round in his fingers. But everything vanished at the voice
+of Councillor Mikulin. Razumov felt profoundly grateful for the even
+simplicity of its tone.
+
+"Yes. I have listened with interest. I comprehend in a measure your...
+But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you...." Councillor Mikulin
+uttered a series of broken sentences. Instead of finishing them he
+glanced down his beard. It was a deliberate curtailment which somehow
+made the phrases more impressive. But he could talk fluently enough, as
+became apparent when changing his tone to persuasiveness he went on: "By
+listening to you as I did, I think I have proved that I do not regard
+our intercourse as strictly official. In fact, I don't want it to have
+that character at all.... Oh yes! I admit that the request for your
+presence here had an official form. But I put it to you whether it was a
+form which would have been used to secure the attendance of a...."
+
+"Suspect," exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official's
+eyes. They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim,
+steadfast gaze. "A suspect." The open repetition of that word which
+had been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of
+satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. "Surely you do
+know that I've had my rooms searched by the police?"
+
+"I was about to say a 'misunderstood person,' when you interrupted me,"
+insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin.
+
+Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual
+superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little
+disdainfully--
+
+"I know I am but a reed. But I beg you to allow me the superiority of
+the thinking reed over the unthinking forces that are about to crush
+him out of existence. Practical thinking in the last instance is but
+criticism. I may perhaps be allowed to express my wonder at this action
+of the police being delayed for two full days during which, of course,
+I could have annihilated everything compromising by burning it--let us
+say--and getting rid of the very ashes, for that matter."
+
+"You are angry," remarked the official, with an unutterable simplicity
+of tone and manner. "Is that reasonable?"
+
+Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.
+
+"I am reasonable. I am even--permit me to say--a thinker, though to
+be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of
+revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought--devil
+knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I
+think like a Russian. I think faithfully--and I take the liberty to call
+myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word, as far as I know."
+
+"No. Why should it be a forbidden word?" Councillor Mikulin turned in
+his seat with crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table propped
+his head on the knuckles of a half-closed hand. Razumov noticed a thick
+forefinger clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-red stone--a
+signet ring that, looking as if it could weigh half a pound, was
+an appropriate ornament for that ponderous man with the accurate
+middle-parting of glossy hair above a rugged Socratic forehead.
+
+"Could it be a wig?" Razumov detected himself wondering with an
+unexpected detachment. His self-confidence was much shaken. He resolved
+to chatter no more. Reserve! Reserve! All he had to do was to keep
+the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination, when the
+questions came. Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers.
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly. Razumov's self-confidence
+abandoned him completely. It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.
+Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing
+else. He made an effort to brace himself up. It was a failure. But
+Councillor Mikulin was surprisingly detached too.
+
+"Why should it be forbidden?" he repeated. "I too consider myself
+a thinking man, I assure you. The principal condition is to think
+correctly. I admit it is difficult sometimes at first for a young man
+abandoned to himself--with his generous impulses undisciplined, so to
+speak--at the mercy of every wild wind that blows. Religious belief, of
+course, is a great...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension
+was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with gloomy
+discontent--
+
+"That man, Haldin, believed in God."
+
+"Ah! You are aware," breathed out Councillor Mikulin, making the point
+softly, as if with discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly
+enough, as if he too were put off his guard by Razumov's remark.
+The young man preserved an impassive, moody countenance, though he
+reproached himself bitterly for a pernicious fool, to have given thus an
+utterly false impression of intimacy. He kept his eyes on the floor.
+"I must positively hold my tongue unless I am obliged to speak," he
+admonished himself. And at once against his will the question, "Hadn't
+I better tell him everything?" presented itself with such force that he
+had to bite his lower lip. Councillor Mikulin could not, however, have
+nourished any hope of confession. He went on--
+
+"You tell me more than his judges were able to get out of him. He was
+judged by a commission of three. He would tell them absolutely nothing.
+I have the report of the interrogatories here, by me. After every
+question there stands 'Refuses to answer--refuses to answer.' It's like
+that page after page. You see, I have been entrusted with some further
+investigations around and about this affair. He has left me nothing to
+begin my investigations on. A hardened miscreant. And so, you say, he
+believed in...."
+
+Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard with a faint grimace;
+but he did not pause for long. Remarking with a shade of scorn that
+blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he concluded by supposing that
+Mr. Razumov had conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject.
+
+"No," said Razumov loudly, without looking up. "He talked and I
+listened. That is not a conversation."
+
+"Listening is a great art," observed Mikulin parenthetically.
+
+"And getting people to talk is another," mumbled Razumov.
+
+"Well, no--that is not very difficult," Mikulin said innocently,
+"except, of course, in special cases. For instance, this Haldin. Nothing
+could induce him to talk. He was brought four times before the delegated
+judges. Four secret interrogatories--and even during the last, when your
+personality was put forward...."
+
+"My personality put forward?" repeated Razumov, raising his head
+brusquely. "I don't understand." Councillor Mikulin turned squarely to
+the table, and taking up some sheets of grey foolscap dropped them one
+after another, retaining only the last in his hand. He held it before
+his eyes while speaking.
+
+"It was--you see--judged necessary. In a case of that gravity no means
+of action upon the culprit should be neglected. You understand that
+yourself, I am certain.
+
+"Razumov stared with enormous wide eyes at the side view of Councillor
+Mikulin, who now was not looking at him at all.
+
+"So it was decided (I was consulted by General T---) that a certain
+question should be put to the accused. But in deference to the earnest
+wishes of Prince K--- your name has been kept out of the documents
+and even from the very knowledge of the judges themselves. Prince K---
+recognized the propriety, the necessity of what we proposed to do, but
+he was concerned for your safety. Things do leak out--that we can't
+deny. One cannot always answer for the discretion of inferior officials.
+There was, of course, the secretary of the special tribunal--one or two
+gendarmes in the room. Moreover, as I have said, in deference to Prince
+K--- even the judges themselves were to be left in ignorance. The
+question ready framed was sent to them by General T--- (I wrote it out
+with my own hand) with instructions to put it to the prisoner the very
+last of all. Here it is.
+
+"Councillor Mikulin threw back his head into proper focus and went on
+reading monotonously: 'Question--Has the man well known to you, in whose
+rooms you remained for several hours on Monday and on whose information
+you have been arrested--has he had any previous knowledge of your
+intention to commit a political murder?...' Prisoner refuses to reply.
+
+"Question repeated. Prisoner preserves the same stubborn silence.
+
+"The venerable Chaplain of the Fortress being then admitted and
+exhorting the prisoner to repentance, entreating him also to atone for
+his crime by an unreserved and full confession which should help to
+liberate from the sin of rebellion against the Divine laws and the
+sacred Majesty of the Ruler, our Christ-loving land--the prisoner opens
+his lips for the first time during this morning's audience and in a
+loud, clear voice rejects the venerable Chaplain's ministrations.
+
+"At eleven o'clock the Court pronounces in summary form the death
+sentence.
+
+"The execution is fixed for four o'clock in the afternoon, subject to
+further instructions from superior authorities."
+
+Councillor Mikulin dropped the page of foolscap, glanced down his beard,
+and turning to Razumov, added in an easy, explanatory tone--
+
+"We saw no object in delaying the execution. The order to carry out the
+sentence was sent by telegraph at noon. I wrote out the telegram myself.
+He was hanged at four o'clock this afternoon."
+
+The definite information of Haldin's death gave Razumov the feeling of
+general lassitude which follows a great exertion or a great excitement.
+He kept very still on the sofa, but a murmur escaped him--
+
+"He had a belief in a future existence."
+
+Councillor Mikulin shrugged his shoulders slightly, and Razumov got up
+with an effort. There was nothing now to stay for in that room. Haldin
+had been hanged at four o'clock. There could be no doubt of that. He
+had, it seemed, entered upon his future existence, long boots, Astrakhan
+fur cap and all, down to the very leather strap round his waist. A
+flickering, vanishing sort of existence. It was not his soul, it was his
+mere phantom he had left behind on this earth--thought Razumov, smiling
+caustically to himself while he crossed the room, utterly forgetful of
+where he was and of Councillor Mikulin's existence. The official could
+have set a lot of bells ringing all over the building without leaving
+his chair. He let Razumov go quite up to the door before he spoke.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch--what are you doing?"
+
+Razumov turned his head and looked at him in silence. He was not in the
+least disconcerted. Councillor Mikulin's arms were stretched out on the
+table before him and his body leaned forward a little with an effort of
+his dim gaze.
+
+"Was I actually going to clear out like this?" Razumov wondered
+at himself with an impassive countenance. And he was aware of this
+impassiveness concealing a lucid astonishment.
+
+"Evidently I was going out if he had not spoken," he thought. "What
+would he have done then? I must end this affair one way or another. I
+must make him show his hand."
+
+For a moment longer he reflected behind the mask as it were, then let go
+the door-handle and came back to the middle of the room.
+
+"I'll tell you what you think," he said explosively, but not raising his
+voice. "You think that you are dealing with a secret accomplice of that
+unhappy man. No, I do not know that he was unhappy. He did not tell me.
+He was a wretch from my point of view, because to keep alive a false
+idea is a greater crime than to kill a man. I suppose you will not deny
+that? I hated him! Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their
+Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a
+contempt for the secular logic of human development."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought.
+The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The
+bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an
+idol with dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov's voice changed involuntarily.
+
+"If you were to ask me where is the necessity of my hate for such as
+Haldin, I would answer you--there is nothing sentimental in it. I did
+not hate him because he had committed the crime of murder. Abhorrence is
+not hate. I hated him simply because I am sane. It is in that character
+that he outraged me. His death..."
+
+Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his throat. The dimness of
+Councillor Mikulin's eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made it
+indistinct to Razumov's sight. He tried to disregard these phenomena.
+
+"Indeed," he pursued, pronouncing each word carefully, "what is his
+death to me? If he were lying here on the floor I could walk over his
+breast.... The fellow is a mere phantom...."
+
+Razumov's voice died out very much against his will. Mikulin behind the
+table did not allow himself the slightest movement. The silence lasted
+for some little time before Razumov could go on again.
+
+"He went about talking of me. Those intellectual fellows sit in each
+other's rooms and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way young
+Guards' officers treat each other with foreign wines. Merest debauchery.
+...Upon my Word,"--Razumov, enraged by a sudden recollection of
+Ziemianitch, lowered his voice forcibly,--"upon my word, we Russians are
+a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves
+wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or
+set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know?
+To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in
+a desert one must be a saint. But if a drunken man runs out of the
+grog-shop, falls on your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
+something about your appearance has taken his fancy, what then--kindly
+tell me? You may break, perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
+succeed in beating him off...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it down his face
+deliberately.
+
+"That's... of course," he said in an undertone.
+
+The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov pause. It was so
+unexpected, too. What did it mean? It had an alarming aloofness. Razumov
+remembered his intention of making him show his hand.
+
+"I have said all this to Prince K---," he began with assumed
+indifference, but lost it on seeing Councillor Mikulin's slow nod of
+assent. "You know it? You've heard.... Then why should I be called
+here to be told of Haldin's execution? Did you want to confront me with
+his silence now that the man is dead? What is his silence to me! This is
+incomprehensible. You want in some way to shake my moral balance."
+
+"No. Not that," murmured Councillor Mikulin, just audibly. "The service
+you have rendered is appreciated...."
+
+"Is it?" interrupted Razumov ironically.
+
+"...and your position too." Councillor Mikulin did not raise his
+voice. "But only think! You fall into Prince K---'s study as if from
+the sky with your startling information.... You are studying yet,
+Mr. Razumov, but we are serving already--don't forget that.... And
+naturally some curiosity was bound to...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked down his beard. Razumov's lips trembled.
+
+"An occurrence of that sort marks a man," the homely murmur went on. "I
+admit I was curious to see you. General T--- thought it would be useful,
+too.... Don't think I am incapable of understanding your sentiments.
+When I was young like you I studied...."
+
+"Yes--you wished to see me," said Razumov in a tone of profound
+distaste. "Naturally you have the right--I mean the power. It all
+amounts to the same thing. But it is perfectly useless, if you were
+to look at me and listen to me for a year. I begin to think there
+is something about me which people don't seem able to make out. It's
+unfortunate. I imagine, however, that Prince K--- understands. He seemed
+to."
+
+Councillor Mikulin moved slightly and spoke.
+
+"Prince K--- is aware of everything that is being done, and I don't
+mind informing you that he approved my intention of becoming personally
+acquainted with you."
+
+Razumov concealed an immense disappointment under the accents of railing
+surprise.
+
+"So he is curious too!... Well--after all, Prince K--- knows me very
+little. It is really very unfortunate for me, but--it is not exactly my
+fault."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised a hasty deprecatory hand and inclined his head
+slightly over his shoulder.
+
+"Now, Mr. Razumov--is it necessary to take it in that way? Everybody I
+am sure can...."
+
+He glanced rapidly down his beard, and when he looked up again there
+was for a moment an interested expression in his misty gaze. Razumov
+discouraged it with a cold, repellent smile.
+
+"No. That's of no importance to be sure--except that in respect of all
+this curiosity being aroused by a very simple matter.... What is to
+be done with it? It is unappeasable. I mean to say there is nothing to
+appease it with. I happen to have been born a Russian with patriotic
+instincts--whether inherited or not I am not in a position to say."
+
+Razumov spoke consciously with elaborate steadiness.
+
+"Yes, patriotic instincts developed by a faculty of independent
+thinking--of detached thinking. In that respect I am more free than any
+social democratic revolution could make me. It is more than probable
+that I don't think exactly as you are thinking. Indeed, how could it be?
+You would think most likely at this moment that I am elaborately lying
+to cover up the track of my repentance."
+
+Razumov stopped. His heart had grown too big for his breast. Councillor
+Mikulin did not flinch.
+
+"Why so?" he said simply. "I assisted personally at the search of your
+rooms. I looked through all the papers myself. I have been greatly
+impressed by a sort of political confession of faith. A very remarkable
+document. Now may I ask for what purpose...."
+
+"To deceive the police naturally," said Razumov savagely.... "What is
+all this mockery? Of course you can send me straight from this room
+to Siberia. That would be intelligible. To what is intelligible I can
+submit. But I protest against this comedy of persecution. The whole
+affair is becoming too comical altogether for my taste. A comedy of
+errors, phantoms, and suspicions. It's positively indecent...."
+
+Councillor Mikulin turned an attentive ear. "Did you say phantoms?" he
+murmured.
+
+"I could walk over dozens of them." Razumov, with an impatient wave of
+his hand, went on headlong, "But, really, I must claim the right to be
+done once for all with that man. And in order to accomplish this I shall
+take the liberty...."
+
+Razumov on his side of the table bowed slightly to the seated
+bureaucrat.
+
+"... To retire--simply to retire," he finished with great resolution.
+
+He walked to the door, thinking, "Now he must show his hand. He must
+ring and have me arrested before I am out of the building, or he must
+let me go. And either way...."
+
+An unhurried voice said--
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch." Razumov at the door turned his head.
+
+"To retire," he repeated.
+
+"Where to?" asked Councillor Mikulin softly.
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain
+proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man
+of imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his
+instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development
+of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes. But this is not
+a work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking
+lies not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and
+strong in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to
+invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent
+a transition.
+
+Dropping then Mr. Razumov's record at the point where Councillor
+Mikulin's question "Where to?" comes in with the force of an insoluble
+problem, I shall simply say that I made the acquaintance of these ladies
+about six months before that time. By "these ladies" I mean, of course,
+the mother and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
+
+By what arguments he had induced his mother to sell their little
+property and go abroad for an indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely.
+I have an idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son's wish, would have set fire
+to her house and emigrated to the moon without any sign of surprise or
+apprehension; and that Miss Haldin--Nathalie, caressingly Natalka--would
+have given her assent to the scheme.
+
+Their proud devotion to that young man became clear to me in a
+very short time. Following his directions they went straight to
+Switzerland--to Zurich--where they remained the best part of a year.
+From Zurich, which they did not like, they came to Geneva. A friend
+of mine in Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the University (he had
+married a Russian lady, a distant connection of Mrs. Haldin's), wrote to
+me suggesting I should call on these ladies. It was a very kindly
+meant business suggestion. Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of
+reading the best English authors with a competent teacher.
+
+Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly. Her bad French, of which she was
+smilingly conscious, did away with the formality of the first interview.
+She was a tall woman in a black silk dress. A wide brow, regular
+features, and delicately cut lips, testified to her past beauty. She sat
+upright in an easy chair and in a rather weak, gentle voice told me that
+her Natalka simply thirsted after knowledge. Her thin hands were lying
+on her lap, her facial immobility had in it something monachal. "In
+Russia," she went on, "all knowledge was tainted with falsehood. Not
+chemistry and all that, but education generally," she explained.
+The Government corrupted the teaching for its own purposes. Both her
+children felt that. Her Natalka had obtained a diploma of a Superior
+School for Women and her son was a student at the St. Petersburg
+University. He had a brilliant intellect, a most noble unselfish nature,
+and he was the oracle of his comrades. Early next year, she hoped he
+would join them and they would then go to Italy together. In any other
+country but their own she would have been certain of a great future for
+a man with the extraordinary abilities and the lofty character of her
+son--but in Russia....
+
+The young lady sitting by the window turned her head and said--
+
+"Come, mother. Even with us things change with years."
+
+Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet caressing in its harshness.
+She had a dark complexion, with red lips and a full figure. She gave the
+impression of strong vitality. The old lady sighed.
+
+"You are both young--you two. It is easy for you to hope. But I, too, am
+not hopeless. Indeed, how could I be with a son like this."
+
+I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors she wished to read. She
+directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
+became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically
+her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
+something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as
+direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's
+wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there
+was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better
+definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to
+think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously
+she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was--to look at
+her was enough--very capable of being roused by an idea or simply by
+a person. At least, so I judged with I believe an unbiassed mind; for
+clearly my person could not be the person--and as to my ideas!...
+
+We became excellent friends in the course of our reading. It was very
+pleasant. Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I
+became very much attached to that young girl. At the end of four
+months I told her that now she could very well go on reading English
+by herself. It was time for the teacher to depart. My pupil looked
+unpleasantly surprised.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and kindly expression of the
+eyes, uttered from her armchair in her uncertain French, "_Mais l'ami
+reviendra._" And so it was settled. I returned--not four times a week
+as before, but pretty frequently. In the autumn we made some short
+excursions together in company with other Russians. My friendship with
+these ladies gave me a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise I
+could not have had.
+
+The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P---'s assassination--it
+was a Sunday--I met the two ladies in the street and walked with them
+for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy grey cloak, I remember,
+over her black silk dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very quiet
+expression.
+
+"We have been to the late service," she said. "Natalka came with me.
+Her girl-friends, the students here, of course don't.... With us in
+Russia the church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost
+necessary when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope
+of a future existence. But I cannot give up praying for my son."
+
+She added with a sort of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and
+in French, "_Ce n'est peut etre qu'une habitude._" ("It may be only
+habit.")
+
+Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She did not glance at her
+mother.
+
+"You and Victor are both profound believers," she said.
+
+I communicated to them the news from their country which I had just
+read in a cafe. For a whole minute we walked together fairly briskly in
+silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
+
+"There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this. They may be
+even closing the University. There is neither peace nor rest in Russia
+for one but in the grave.
+
+"Yes. The way is hard," came from the daughter, looking straight before
+her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing
+the end of the street. "But concord is not so very far off."
+
+"That is what my children think," observed Mrs. Haldin to me.
+
+I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of
+concord. Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought
+very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the
+situation. She was very calm and youthfully superior.
+
+"You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as
+social contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
+something quite different."
+
+"It is quite possible that I don't understand," I admitted.
+
+That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
+understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
+Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all
+the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.
+I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a
+terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and
+hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret
+of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they
+detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas
+we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its
+sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....
+
+I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in
+the afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
+Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
+platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
+softened in her grey eyes.
+
+Mr. Razumov's record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the
+memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from
+all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the
+living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death. He must
+have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the
+hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into
+eternity. That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their
+compatriots--more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and
+the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
+des Philosophes was very much crowded.
+
+I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too. I took
+her hand and was moved to revert to that morning's conversation in the
+street.
+
+"Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of
+your..." I began.
+
+It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious
+fore-knowledge. She checked me gently--
+
+"Their impulses--their..." she sought the proper expression and found
+it, but in French..."their _mouvements d'ame._"
+
+Her voice was not much above a whisper.
+
+"Very well," I said. "But still we are looking at a conflict. You say
+it is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose
+I admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more
+easily--can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord
+which you proclaim to be so near?"
+
+She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering
+my reasonable question--my obvious, my unanswerable question.
+
+"It is inconceivable," I added, with something like annoyance.
+
+"Everything is inconceivable," she said. "The whole world is
+inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to
+our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to
+our conceptions. It is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong
+to the majority. We Russians shall find some better form of national
+freedom than an artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong because
+it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is left
+for us Russians to discover a better way."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window. She turned upon me the
+almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her
+big dark eyes.
+
+"That's what my children think," she declared.
+
+"I suppose," I addressed Miss Haldin, "that you will be shocked if I
+tell you that I haven't understood--I won't say a single word; I've
+understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied
+concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its
+plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic
+conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were
+before they can be made understandable."
+
+I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred. She
+smiled with her eyes only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the
+door, very amiable.
+
+"Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor. It
+is not so. He understands me better than I can understand him. When he
+joins us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul
+it is." She paused. "He is not a strong man in the conventional sense,
+you know," she added. "But his character is without a flaw."
+
+"I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with
+your brother Victor."
+
+"Don't expect to understand him quite," she said, a little maliciously.
+"He is not at all--at all--western at bottom."
+
+And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in
+the doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
+autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard
+des Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of
+Geneva, where there is a quarter called "La Petite Russie." Whenever two
+Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging
+their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private
+life, their public utterances--haunting the secret of their silences.
+
+What struck me next in the course of a week or so was the silence of
+these ladies. I used to meet them walking in the public garden near the
+University. They greeted me with their usual friendliness, but I could
+not help noticing their taciturnity. By that time it was generally known
+that the assassin of M. de P--- had been caught, judged, and executed.
+So much had been declared officially to the news agencies. But for the
+world at large he remained anonymous. The official secrecy had withheld
+his name from the public. I really cannot imagine for what reason.
+
+One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the main valley of the
+Bastions under the naked trees.
+
+"Mother is not very well," she explained.
+
+As Mrs. Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day's illness in her life,
+this indisposition was disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
+
+"I think she is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for
+rather a long time."
+
+"No news--good news," I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly
+side by side.
+
+"Not in Russia," she breathed out so low that I only just caught the
+words. I looked at her with more attention.
+
+"You too are anxious?"
+
+She admitted after a moment of hesitation that she was.
+
+"It is really such a long time since we heard...."
+
+And before I could offer the usual banal suggestions she confided in me.
+
+"Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote to a family we know in
+Petersburg. They had not seen him for more than a month. They thought
+he was already with us. They were even offended a little that he should
+have left Petersburg without calling on them. The husband of the lady
+went at once to his lodgings. Victor had left there and they did not
+know his address."
+
+I remember her catching her breath rather pitifully. Her brother had not
+been seen at lectures for a very long time either. He only turned up now
+and then at the University gate to ask the porter for his letters. And
+the gentleman friend was told that the student Haldin did not come to
+claim the last two letters for him. But the police came to inquire if
+the student Haldin ever received any correspondence at the University
+and took them away.
+
+"My two last letters," she said.
+
+We faced each other. A few snow-flakes fluttered under the naked boughs.
+The sky was dark.
+
+"What do you think could have happened?" I asked.
+
+Her shoulders moved slightly.
+
+"One can never tell--in Russia."
+
+I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their
+submission or their revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face
+nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear eyes that shone upon me
+brilliantly grey in the murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
+
+"Let us move on," she said. "It is cold standing--to-day."
+
+She shuddered a little and stamped her little feet. We moved briskly to
+the end of the alley and back to the great gates of the garden.
+
+"Have you told your mother?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the impression of this letter."
+
+I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came from her muff. She had the
+letter with her in there.
+
+"What is it that you are afraid of?" I asked.
+
+To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and
+conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.
+I did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
+
+"For us--for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.
+People do disappear. Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine what
+it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--months--years! This friend of ours
+has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police getting hold of
+the letters. I suppose he was afraid of compromising himself. He has a
+wife and children--and why should he, after all.... Moreover, he is
+without influential connections and not rich. What could he do?...
+Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor mother. She won't be able
+to bear it. For my brother I am afraid of..." she became almost
+indistinct, "of anything."
+
+We were now near the gate opposite the theatre. She raised her voice.
+
+"But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do you know what my last
+hope is? Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into
+our rooms."
+
+I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong,
+after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff,
+crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
+
+On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and
+glancing down the correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams but
+the correspondence--the first thing that caught my eye was the name
+of Haldin. Mr. de P---'s death was no longer an actuality, but the
+enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
+unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got
+hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight
+arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of
+view was already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than
+twenty lines out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a
+sleepless night. I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason
+to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic
+discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French
+and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning,
+wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of
+being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The
+incongruity of such a complication in those two women's lives was
+sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due
+to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them
+for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their
+apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....
+
+The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there
+was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.
+The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
+instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the
+day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother's
+room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
+
+I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number
+of the _Standard_ could have the effect of Medusa's head. Her face went
+stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The most terrible thing was that
+being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her palpitating
+heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It
+was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to
+foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.
+As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the
+firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given
+way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--ruined. But only for
+a moment. She said with decision--
+
+"I am going to tell my mother at once."
+
+"Would that be safe in her state?" I objected.
+
+"What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?
+We understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don't
+imagine I am defending him before you."
+
+She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur
+not to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
+reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
+her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
+heavily as if completely exhausted.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in
+bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she
+lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.
+
+"She will call me in presently," added Miss Haldin. "I left a bell near
+the bed."
+
+I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
+readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
+was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
+spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There
+is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the
+grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
+had the associations of bombs and gallows--a lurid, Russian colouring
+which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
+
+I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
+display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command
+over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the
+stillness of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the
+door of Mrs. Haldin's room, with the old mother alone in there, had a
+rather awful aspect.
+
+Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--
+
+"I suppose you are wondering what my feelings are?"
+
+Essentially that was true. It was that very wonder which unsettled my
+sympathy of a dense Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of some
+commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our
+impotence before each other's trials I mumbled something to the effect
+that, for the young, life held its hopes and compensations. It held
+duties too--but of that I was certain it was not necessary to remind
+her.
+
+She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled at it nervously.
+
+"I am not likely to forget my mother," she said. "We used to be three.
+Now we are two--two women. She's not so very old. She may live quite a
+long time yet. What have we to look for in the future? For what hope
+and what consolation?"
+
+"You must take a wider view," I said resolutely, thinking that with this
+exceptional creature this was the right note to strike. She looked at
+me steadily for a moment, and then the tears she had been keeping down
+flowed unrestrained. She jumped up and stood in the window with her back
+to me.
+
+I slipped away without attempting even to approach her. Next day I was
+told at the door that Mrs. Haldin was better. The middle-aged servant
+remarked that a lot of people--Russians--had called that day, but Miss
+Haldin bad not seen anybody. A fortnight later, when making my daily
+call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin sitting in her usual place by
+the window.
+
+At first one would have thought that nothing was changed. I saw
+across the room the familiar profile, a little sharper in outline
+and overspread by a uniform pallor as might have been expected in an
+invalid. But no disease could have accounted for the change in her black
+eyes, smiling no longer with gentle irony. She raised them as she gave
+me her hand. I observed the three weeks' old number of the _Standard_
+folded with the correspondence from Russia uppermost, lying on a little
+table by the side of the armchair. Mrs. Haldin's voice was startlingly
+weak and colourless. Her first words to me framed a question.
+
+"Has there been anything more in papers?"
+
+I released her long emaciated hand, shook my head negatively, and sat
+down.
+
+"The English press is wonderful. Nothing can be kept secret from it,
+and all the world must hear. Only our Russian news is not always easy to
+understand. Not always easy.... But English mothers do not look for
+news like that...."
+
+She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it away again. I said--
+
+"We too have had tragic times in our history."
+
+"A long time ago. A very long time ago."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There are nations that have made their bargain with fate," said Miss
+Haldin, who had approached us. "We need not envy them."
+
+"Why this scorn?" I asked gently. "It may be that our bargain was not
+a very lofty one. But the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
+hallowed by the price."
+
+Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out of the window for a
+time, with that new, sombre, extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so
+completely made another woman of her.
+
+"That Englishman, this correspondent," she addressed me suddenly, "do
+you think it is possible that he knew my son?"
+
+To this strange question I could only say that it was possible of
+course. She saw my surprise.
+
+"If one knew what sort of man he was one could perhaps write to him,"
+she murmured.
+
+"Mother thinks," explained Miss Haldin, standing between us, with one
+hand resting on the back of my chair, "that my poor brother perhaps did
+not try to save himself."
+
+I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic consternation, but Miss Haldin
+was looking down calmly at her mother. The latter said--
+
+"We do not know the address of any of his friends. Indeed, we know
+nothing of his Petersburg comrades. He had a multitude of young friends,
+only he never spoke much of them. One could guess that they were his
+disciples and that they idolized him. But he was so modest. One would
+think that with so many devoted...."
+
+She averted her head again and looked down the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, a singularly arid and dusty thoroughfare, where nothing
+could be seen at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a pinafore
+hopping on one leg, and in the distance a workman wheeling a bicycle.
+
+"Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was found a Judas," she
+whispered as if to herself, but with the evident intention to be heard
+by me.
+
+The Russian visitors assembled in little knots, conversed amongst
+themselves meantime, in low murmurs, and with brief glances in our
+direction. It was a great contrast to the usual loud volubility of these
+gatherings. Miss Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
+
+"People will come," she said. "We cannot shut the door in their faces."
+
+While I was putting on my overcoat she began to talk to me of her
+mother. Poor Mrs. Haldin was fretting after more news. She wanted to go
+on hearing about her unfortunate son. She could not make up her mind to
+abandon him quietly to the dumb unknown. She would persist in pursuing
+him in there through the long days of motionless silence face to face
+with the empty Boulevard des Philosophes. She could not understand why
+he had not escaped--as so many other revolutionists and conspirators
+had managed to escape in other instances of that kind. It was really
+inconceivable that the means of secret revolutionary organisations
+should have failed so inexcusably to preserve her son. But in reality
+the inconceivable that staggered her mind was nothing but the cruel
+audacity of Death passing over her head to strike at that young and
+precious heart.
+
+Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look, handed me my hat. I
+understood from her that the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
+simple idea that her son must have perished because he did not want
+to be saved. It could not have been that he despaired of his country's
+future. That was impossible. Was it possible that his mother and sister
+had not known how to merit his confidence; and that, after having done
+what he was compelled to do, his spirit became crushed by an intolerable
+doubt, his mind distracted by a sudden mistrust.
+
+I was very much shocked by this piece of ingenuity.
+
+"Our three lives were like that!" Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both
+her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking
+straight into my face. "That's what poor mother found to torment herself
+and me with, for all the years to come," added the strange girl. At that
+moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
+passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life was likely to be by the
+side of Mrs. Haldin's terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.
+But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes
+of feeling. Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our
+complex Western natures. But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to
+suspect my embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say anything, but
+as if reading my thoughts on my face she went on courageously--
+
+"At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to
+think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
+strain. You see yourself how cruel that is...."
+
+I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it
+would be deplorable in the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
+
+"But all these strange details in the English paper," she exclaimed
+suddenly. "What is the meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But is
+it not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone,
+as if in despair, about the streets at night...."
+
+We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see
+her biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause she
+said--
+
+"I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false
+friend or simply by some cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to
+believe that."
+
+I understood now the poor woman's whispered allusion to Judas.
+
+"It may be easier," I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the
+subtlety of the girl's outlook. She was dealing with life as it was
+made for her by the political conditions of her country. She faced cruel
+realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making. I could not defend
+myself from a certain feeling of respect when she added simply--
+
+"Time they say can soften every sort of bitterness. But I cannot believe
+that it has any power over remorse. It is better that mother should
+think some person guilty of Victor's death, than that she should connect
+it with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of her own."
+
+"But you, yourself, don't suppose that...." I began.
+
+She compressed her lips and shook her head. She harboured no evil
+thoughts against any one, she declared--and perhaps nothing that
+happened was unnecessary. On these words, pronounced low and sounding
+mysterious in the half obscurity of the ante-room, we parted with an
+expressive and warm handshake. The grip of her strong, shapely hand had
+a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite virility. I do not know why
+she should have felt so friendly to me. It may be that she thought I
+understood her much better than I was able to do. The most precise
+of her sayings seemed always to me to have enigmatical prolongations
+vanishing somewhere beyond my reach. I am reduced to suppose that she
+appreciated my attention and my silence. The attention she could see was
+quite sincere, so that the silence could not be suspected of coldness.
+It seemed to satisfy her. And it is to be noted that if she confided
+in me it was clearly not with the expectation of receiving advice, for
+which, indeed she never asked.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Our daily relations were interrupted at this period for something like a
+fortnight. I had to absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva. On my return
+I lost no time in directing my steps up the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+
+Through the open door of the drawing-room I was annoyed to hear a
+visitor holding forth steadily in an unctuous deep voice.
+
+Mrs. Haldin's armchair by the window stood empty. On the sofa, Nathalie
+Haldin raised her charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting accompanied
+by the merest hint of a welcoming smile. But she made no movement. With
+her strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of her mourning dress
+she faced a man who presented to me a robust back covered with black
+broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep voice. He turned his head
+sharply over his shoulder, but only for a moment.
+
+"Ah! your English friend. I know. I know. That's nothing."
+
+He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall silk hat stood on the
+floor by the side of his chair. Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he
+went on with his discourse, precipitating his delivery a little more.
+
+"I have never changed the faith I held while wandering in the forests
+and bogs of Siberia. It sustained me then--it sustains me now. The great
+Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--and the cause of their collapse
+will be very simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling against
+their proletariat. In Russia it is different. In Russia we have no
+classes to combat each other, one holding the power of wealth, and
+the other mighty with the strength of numbers. We have only an unclean
+bureaucracy in the face of a people as great and as incorruptible as
+the ocean. No, we have no classes. But we have the Russian woman. The
+admirable Russian woman! I receive most remarkable letters signed by
+women. So elevated in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble ardour
+of service! The greatest part of our hopes rests on women. I behold
+their thirst for knowledge. It is admirable. Look how they absorb, how
+they are making it their own. It is miraculous. But what is knowledge?
+...I understand that you have not been studying anything
+especially--medicine for instance. No? That's right. Had I been honoured
+by being asked to advise you on the use of your time when you arrived
+here I would have been strongly opposed to such a course. Knowledge in
+itself is mere dross."
+
+He had one of those bearded Russian faces without shape, a mere
+appearance of flesh and hair with not a single feature having any sort
+of character. His eyes being hidden by the dark glasses there was an
+utter absence of all expression. I knew him by sight. He was a Russian
+refugee of mark. All Geneva knew his burly black-coated figure. At one
+time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written by himself
+and translated into seven or more languages. In his youth he had led
+an idle, dissolute life. Then a society girl he was about to marry died
+suddenly and thereupon he abandoned the world of fashion, and began
+to conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after that, his native
+autocracy took good care that the usual things should happen to him.
+He was imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch of his life, and
+condemned to work in mines, with common criminals. The great success of
+his book, however, was the chain.
+
+I do not remember now the details of the weight and length of the
+fetters riveted on his limbs by an "Administrative" order, but it was in
+the number of pounds and the thickness of links an appalling assertion
+of the divine right of autocracy. Appalling and futile too, because this
+big man managed to carry off that simple engine of government with him
+into the woods. The sensational clink of these fetters is heard all
+through the chapters describing his escape--a subject of wonder to two
+continents. He had begun by concealing himself successfully from
+his guard in a hole on a river bank. It was the end of the day; with
+infinite labour he managed to free one of his legs. Meantime night
+fell. He was going to begin on his other leg when he was overtaken by a
+terrible misfortune. He dropped his file.
+
+All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history.
+It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced
+girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his
+fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat,
+with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way
+across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and,
+as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But she arrived too
+late. Her lover had died only a week before.
+
+Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the history of ideas in
+Russia, the file came into his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
+resolution to regain his liberty. When it slipped through his fingers it
+was as if it had gone straight into the earth. He could by no manner of
+means put his hand on it again in the dark. He groped systematically
+in the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing
+meantime, the precious night on which he counted to get away into the
+forests, his only chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted by
+despair to give up; but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic
+girl, he felt profoundly ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him
+for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favour
+conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred
+trust. To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness
+of self-sacrifice and womanly love.
+
+There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like
+a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman's
+spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed since in several volumes.
+His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his
+extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province,
+with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off
+his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at
+intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the
+slack links from getting hooked in the bushes. He became very fierce.
+He developed an unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and hunted
+existence. He learned to creep into villages without betraying his
+presence by anything more than an occasional faint jingle. He broke into
+outhouses with an axe he managed to purloin in a wood-cutters' camp. In
+the deserted tracts of country he lived on wild berries and hunted for
+honey. His clothing dropped off him gradually. His naked tawny figure
+glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with a cloud of mosquitoes and flies
+hovering about the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through whole
+districts. His temper grew savage as the days went by, and he was
+glad to discover that that there was so much of a brute in him. He had
+nothing else to put his trust in. For it was as though there had been
+two human beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The civilized
+man, the enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the
+triumph of spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy,
+primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom
+from day to day, like a tracked wild beast.
+
+The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific
+coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
+watched the proceedings with awe. Through all these weeks he could never
+make up his mind to appeal to human compassion. In the wary primeval
+savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the
+civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping "political" had developed
+an absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
+originating perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain.
+These links, he fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind. It
+was a repugnant and suggestive load. Nobody could feel any pity at the
+disgusting sight of a man escaping with a broken chain. His imagination
+became affected by his fetters in a precise, matter-of-fact manner.
+It seemed to him impossible that people could resist the temptation of
+fastening the loose end to a staple in the wall while they went for the
+nearest police official. Crouching in holes or hidden in thickets, he
+had tried to read the faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in the
+clearings or passing along the paths within a foot or two of his
+eyes. His feeling was that no man on earth could be trusted with the
+temptation of the chain.
+
+One day, however, he chanced to come upon a solitary woman. It was on an
+open slope of rough grass outside the forest. She sat on the bank of a
+narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket
+was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be
+seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool
+shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He
+approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick
+cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled
+hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links
+fluttered from his waist. A faint clink of his fetters made the woman
+turn her head. Too terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or
+even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted to faint.... Expecting
+nothing less than to be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with
+her hands to avoid the sight of the descending axe. When at last she
+found courage to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man sitting on
+the bank six feet away from her. His thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked
+legs; the long beard covered the knees on which he rested his chin; all
+these clasped, folded limbs, the bare shoulders, the wild head with red
+staring eyes, shook and trembled violently while the bestial creature
+was making efforts to speak. It was six weeks since he had heard the
+sound of his own voice. It seemed as though he had lost the faculty
+of speech. He had become a dumb and despairing brute, till the woman's
+sudden, unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of her feminine
+compassion discovering the complex misery of the man under the
+terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him to the ranks of humanity.
+This point of view is presented in his book, with a very effective
+eloquence. She ended, he says, by shedding tears over him, sacred,
+redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the manner of a
+converted sinner. Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait patiently
+(a police patrol was expected in the Settlement) she went away towards
+the houses, promising to return at night.
+
+As if providentially appointed to be the newly wedded wife of the
+village blacksmith, the woman persuaded her husband to come out with
+her, bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a chisel, a small
+anvil.... "My fetters"--the book says--"were struck off on the banks
+of the stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an athletic, taciturn
+young man of the people, kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a
+liberating genius stood by with clasped hands." Obviously a symbolic
+couple. At the same time they furnished his regained humanity with some
+decent clothing, and put heart into the new man by the information that
+the seacoast of the Pacific was only a very few miles away. It could be
+seen, in fact, from the top of the next ridge....
+
+The rest of his escape does not lend itself to mystic treatment and
+symbolic interpretation. He ended by finding his way to the West by
+the Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching the shores of South
+Europe he sat down to write his autobiography--the great literary
+success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with
+the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached
+generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under
+the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain
+Madame de S--, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once
+upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat.
+Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of
+modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the
+republican territory of Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big
+landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares
+of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness,
+with a pair of big gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short veil
+of black lace, which, coming down no further than her vividly red lips,
+resembled a mask. Usually the "heroic fugitive" (this name was bestowed
+upon him in a review of the English edition of his book)--the "heroic
+fugitive" accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded and darkly
+bespectacled, not by her side, but opposite her, with his back to the
+horses. Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the roomy carriage,
+their airings suggested a conscious public manifestation. Or it may have
+been unconscious. Russian simplicity often marches innocently on the
+edge of cynicism for some lofty purpose. But it is a vain enterprise for
+sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings. Considering the
+air of gravity extending even to the physiognomy of the coachman and the
+action of the showy horses, this quaint display might have possessed
+a mystic significance, but to the corrupt frivolity of a Western mind,
+like my own, it seemed hardly decent.
+
+However, it is not becoming for an obscure teacher of languages to
+criticize a "heroic fugitive" of worldwide celebrity. I was aware from
+hearsay that he was an industrious busy-body, hunting up his compatriots
+in hotels, in private lodgings, and--I was told--conferring upon them
+the honour of his notice in public gardens when a suitable opening
+presented itself. I was under the impression that after a visit or
+two, several months before, he had given up the ladies Haldin--no doubt
+reluctantly, for there could be no question of his being a determined
+person. It was perhaps to be expected that he should reappear again on
+this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a revolutionist, to say the
+right thing, to strike the true, perhaps a comforting, note. But I did
+not like to see him sitting there. I trust that an unbecoming jealousy
+of my privileged position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to
+a special standing for my silent friendship. Removed by the difference
+of age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I
+produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an
+anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power
+to protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since Miss Haldin with her
+sure instinct had refrained from introducing me to the burly celebrity,
+I would have retired quietly and returned later on, had I not met a
+peculiar expression in her eyes which I interpreted as a request to
+stay, with the view, perhaps, of shortening an unwelcome visit.
+
+He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on his knees.
+
+"We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna. To-day I have called only
+to mark those feelings towards your honoured mother and yourself,
+the nature of which you cannot doubt. I needed no urging, but
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- herself has in a way sent me. She extends to you
+the hand of feminine fellowship. There is positively in all the range
+of human sentiments no joy and no sorrow that woman cannot understand,
+elevate, and spiritualize by her interpretation. That young man newly
+arrived from St. Petersburg, I have mentioned to you, is already under
+the charm."
+
+At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly. I was glad. He did not
+evidently expect anything so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
+back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland curiosity. At last,
+recollecting himself, he stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
+with great adroitness.
+
+"How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have kept aloof so long, from
+what after all is--let disparaging tongues say what they like--a unique
+centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to shape a high conception
+of our future? In the case of your honoured mother I understand in a
+measure. At her age new ideas--new faces are not perhaps.... But you!
+Was it mistrust--or indifference? You must come out of your reserve.
+We Russians have no right to be reserved with each other. In our
+circumstances it is almost a crime against humanity. The luxury of
+private grief is not for us. Nowadays the devil is not combated by
+prayers and fasting. And what is fasting after all but starvation. You
+must not starve yourself, Natalia Victorovna. Strength is what we want.
+Spiritual strength, I mean. As to the other kind, what could withstand
+us Russians if we only put it forth? Sin is different in our day, and
+the way of salvation for pure souls is different too. It is no longer to
+be found in monasteries but in the world, in the..."
+
+The deep sound seemed to rise from under the floor, and one felt steeped
+in it to the lips. Miss Haldin's interruption resembled the effort of
+a drowning person to keep above water. She struck in with an accent of
+impatience--
+
+"But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don't mean to retire into a monastery. Who
+would look for salvation there?"
+
+"I spoke figuratively," he boomed.
+
+"Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too. But sorrow is sorrow and
+pain is pain in the old way. They make their demands upon people. One
+has got to face them the best way one can. I know that the blow which
+has fallen upon us so unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a
+people. You may rest assured that I don't forget that. But just now
+I have to think of my mother. How can you expect me to leave her to
+herself...?"
+
+"That is putting it in a very crude way," he protested in his great
+effortless voice.
+
+Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to die out.
+
+"And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange people. The idea is
+distasteful for me; and I do not know what else you may mean?"
+
+He towered before her, enormous, deferential, cropped as close as a
+convict and this big pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild
+head with matted locks peering through parted bushes, glimpses of naked,
+tawny limbs slinking behind the masses of sodden foliage under a cloud
+of flies and mosquitoes. It was an involuntary tribute to the vigour
+of his writing. Nobody could doubt that he had wandered in Siberian
+forests, naked and girt with a chain. The black broadcloth coat invested
+his person with a character of austere decency--something recalling a
+missionary.
+
+"Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?" he uttered solemnly. "I
+want you to be a fanatic."
+
+"A fanatic?"
+
+"Yes. Faith alone won't do."
+
+His voice dropped to a still lower tone. He raised for a moment one
+thick arm; the other remained hanging down against his thigh, with the
+fragile silk hat at the end.
+
+"I shall tell you now something which I entreat you to ponder
+over carefully. Listen, we need a force that would move heaven and
+earth--nothing less."
+
+The profound, subterranean note of this "nothing less" made one shudder,
+almost, like the deep muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
+
+"And are we to find that force in the salon of Madame de S--? Excuse
+me, Peter Ivanovitch, if I permit myself to doubt it. Is not that lady a
+woman of the great world, an aristocrat?"
+
+"Prejudice!" he cried. "You astonish me. And suppose she was all that!
+She is also a woman of flesh and blood. There is always something to
+weigh down the spiritual side in all of us. But to make of it a reproach
+is what I did not expect from you. No! I did not expect that. One would
+think you have listened to some malevolent scandal."
+
+"I have heard no gossip, I assure you. In our province how could we? But
+the world speaks of her. What can there be in common in a lady of that
+sort and an obscure country girl like me?"
+
+"She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and peerless spirit,"
+he broke in. "Her charm--no, I shall not speak of her charm. But,
+of course, everybody who approaches her falls under the spell....
+Contradictions vanish, trouble falls away from one.... Unless I
+am mistaken--but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters--you are
+troubled in your soul, Natalia Victorovna."
+
+Miss Haldin's clear eyes looked straight at his soft enormous face;
+I received the impression that behind these dark spectacles of his he
+could be as impudent as he chose.
+
+"Only the other evening walking back to town from Chateau Borel with our
+latest interesting arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the powerful
+soothing influence--I may say reconciling influence.... There he was,
+all these kilometres along the shores of the lake, silent, like a man
+who has been shown the way of peace. I could feel the leaven working in
+his soul, you understand. For one thing he listened to me patiently.
+I myself was inspired that evening by the firm and exquisite genius
+of Eleanor--Madame de S--, you know. It was a full moon and I could
+observe his face. I cannot be deceived...."
+
+Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Well! I will think of what you said, Peter Ivanovitch. I shall try to
+call as soon as I can leave mother for an hour or two safely."
+
+Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at the concession. He
+snatched her right hand with such fervour that I thought he was going
+to press it to his lips or his breast. But he only held it by the
+finger-tips in his great paw and shook it a little up and down while he
+delivered his last volley of words.
+
+"That's right. That's right. I haven't obtained your full confidence
+as yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The
+sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It's simply
+impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers,
+tears, applause--that has had its time; it's a mediaeval conception. The
+arena, the arena itself is the place for women!"
+
+He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if giving it to her for a
+gift, and remained still, his head bowed in dignified submission before
+her femininity.
+
+"The arena!... You must descend into the arena, Natalia."
+
+He made one step backwards, inclined his enormous body, and was gone
+swiftly. The door fell to behind him. But immediately the powerful
+resonance of his voice was heard addressing in the ante-room the
+middle-aged servant woman who was letting him out. Whether he exhorted
+her too to descend into the arena I cannot tell. The thing sounded like
+a lecture, and the slight crash of the outer door cut it short suddenly.
+
+
+III
+
+
+"We remained looking at each other for a time."
+
+"Do you know who he is?"
+
+Miss Haldin, coming forward, put this question to me in English.
+
+I took her offered hand.
+
+"Everybody knows. He is a revolutionary feminist, a great writer, if
+you like, and--how shall I say it--the--the familiar guest of Madame de
+S--'s mystic revolutionary salon."
+
+Miss Haldin passed her hand over her forehead.
+
+"You know, he was with me for more than an hour before you came in. I
+was so glad mother was lying down. She has many nights without sleep,
+and then sometimes in the middle of the day she gets a rest of several
+hours. It is sheer exhaustion--but still, I am thankful.... If it
+were not for these intervals...."
+
+She looked at me and, with that extraordinary penetration which used to
+disconcert me, shook her head.
+
+"No. She would not go mad."
+
+"My dear young lady," I cried, by way of protest, the more shocked
+because in my heart I was far from thinking Mrs. Haldin quite sane.
+
+"You don't know what a fine, lucid intellect mother had," continued
+Nathalie Haldin, with her calm, clear-eyed simplicity, which seemed to
+me always to have a quality of heroism.
+
+"I am sure...." I murmured.
+
+"I darkened mother's room and came out here. I've wanted for so long to
+think quietly."
+
+She paused, then, without giving any sign of distress, added, "It's so
+difficult," and looked at me with a strange fixity, as if watching for a
+sign of dissent or surprise.
+
+I gave neither. I was irresistibly impelled to say--
+
+"The visit from that gentleman has not made it any easier, I fear."
+
+Miss Haldin stood before me with a peculiar expression in her eyes.
+
+"I don't pretend to understand completely. Some guide one must have,
+even if one does not wholly give up the direction of one's conduct to
+him. I am an inexperienced girl, but I am not slavish, There has been
+too much of that in Russia. Why should I not listen to him? There is no
+harm in having one's thoughts directed. But I don't mind confessing
+to you that I have not been completely candid with Peter Ivanovitch. I
+don't quite know what prevented me at the moment...."
+
+She walked away suddenly from me to a distant part of the room; but
+it was only to open and shut a drawer in a bureau. She returned with
+a piece of paper in her hand. It was thin and blackened with close
+handwriting. It was obviously a letter.
+
+"I wanted to read you the very words," she said. "This is one of my poor
+brother's letters. He never doubted. How could he doubt? They make only
+such a small handful, these miserable oppressors, before the unanimous
+will of our people."
+
+"Your brother believed in the power of a people's will to achieve
+anything?"
+
+"It was his religion," declared Miss Haldin.
+
+I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
+
+"Of course the will must be awakened, inspired, concentrated," she went
+on. "That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up
+one's life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must
+be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to
+reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are
+only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful of cruel--perhaps
+blind--officials against a nation."
+
+The letter rustled slightly in her hand. I glanced down at the
+flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic,
+incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.
+
+"Stated like this," I confessed, "the problem seems simple enough. But I
+fear I shall not see it solved. And if you go back to Russia I know that
+I shall not see you again. Yet once more I say: go back! Don't suppose
+that I am thinking of your preservation. No! I know that you will not
+be returning to personal safety. But I had much rather think of you in
+danger there than see you exposed to what may be met here."
+
+"I tell you what," said Miss Haldin, after a moment of reflection. "I
+believe that you hate revolution; you fancy it's not quite honest. You
+belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like
+to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to
+us--so much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea
+of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were
+something--how shall I say it--not quite decent."
+
+I bowed my head.
+
+"You are quite right," I said. "I think very highly of you"
+
+"Don't suppose I do not know it," she began hurriedly. "Your friendship
+has been very valuable."
+
+"I have done little else but look on."
+
+She was a little flushed under the eyes.
+
+"There is a way of looking on which is valuable I have felt less lonely
+because of it. It's difficult to explain."
+
+"Really? Well, I too have felt less lonely. That's easy to explain,
+though. But it won't go on much longer. The last thing I want to tell
+you is this: in a real revolution--not a simple dynastic change or a
+mere reform of institutions--in a real revolution the best characters
+do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of
+narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards
+comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.
+Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left
+out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane,
+and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a
+movement--but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of
+a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of
+disenchantment--often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals
+caricatured--that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have
+been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of
+that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be a victim."
+
+"If I could believe all you have said I still wouldn't think of myself,"
+protested Miss Haldin. "I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry
+man would snatch at a piece of bread. The true progress must begin
+after. And for that the right men shall be found. They are already
+amongst us. One comes upon them in their obscurity, unknown, preparing
+themselves...."
+
+She spread out the letter she had kept in her hand all the time, and
+looking down at it--
+
+"Yes! One comes upon such men!" she repeated, and then read out the
+words, "Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences."
+
+Folding up the letter, while I looked at her interrogatively, she
+explained--
+
+"These are the words which my brother applies to a young man he came to
+know in St. Petersburg. An intimate friend, I suppose. It must be. His
+is the only name my brother mentions in all his correspondence with me.
+Absolutely the only one, and--would you believe it?--the man is here. He
+arrived recently in Geneva."
+
+"Have you seen him?" I inquired. "But, of course; you must have seen
+him."
+
+"No! No! I haven't! I didn't know he was here. It's Peter Ivanovitch
+himself who told me. You have heard him yourself mentioning a new
+arrival from Petersburg.... Well, that is the man of 'unstained,
+lofty, and solitary existence.' My brother's friend!"
+
+"Compromised politically, I suppose," I remarked.
+
+"I don't know. Yes. It must be so. Who knows! Perhaps it was this very
+friendship with my brother which.... But no! It is scarcely possible.
+Really, I know nothing except what Peter Ivanovitch told me of him. He
+has brought a letter of introduction from Father Zosim--you know, the
+priest-democrat; you have heard of Father Zosim?"
+
+"Oh yes. The famous Father Zosim was staying here in Geneva for some two
+months about a year ago," I said. "When he left here he seems to have
+disappeared from the world."
+
+"It appears that he is at work in Russia again. Somewhere in the
+centre," Miss Haldin said, with animation. "But please don't mention
+that to any one--don't let it slip from you, because if it got into the
+papers it would be dangerous for him."
+
+"You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend of your brother?" I
+asked.
+
+Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket. Her eyes looked beyond my
+shoulder at the door of her mother's room.
+
+"Not here," she murmured. "Not for the first time, at least."
+
+After a moment of silence I said good-bye, but Miss Haldin followed me
+into the ante-room, closing the door behind us carefully.
+
+"I suppose you guess where I mean to go tomorrow?"
+
+"You have made up your mind to call on Madame de S--."
+
+"Yes. I am going to the Chateau Borel. I must."
+
+"What do you expect to hear there?" I asked, in a low voice.
+
+I wondered if she were not deluding herself with some impossible hope.
+It was not that, however.
+
+"Only think--such a friend. The only man mentioned in his letters. He
+would have something to give me, if nothing more than a few poor words.
+It may be something said and thought in those last days. Would you want
+me to turn my back on what is left of my poor brother--a friend?"
+
+"Certainly not," I said. "I quite understand your pious curiosity."
+
+"--Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences," she murmured to herself.
+"There are! There are! Well, let me question one of them about the loved
+dead."
+
+"How do you know, though, that you will meet him there? Is he staying in
+the Chateau as a guest--do you suppose?"
+
+"I can't really tell," she confessed. "He brought a written introduction
+from Father Zosim--who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S-- too. She
+can't be such a worthless woman after all."
+
+"There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Father Zosim himself," I
+observed.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Calumny is a weapon of our government too. It's well known. Oh yes! It
+is a fact that Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-General
+of a certain province. We talked on the subject with my brother two
+years ago, I remember. But his work was good. And now he is proscribed.
+What better proof can one require. But no matter what that priest was
+or is. All that cannot affect my brother's friend. If I don't meet him
+there I shall ask these people for his address. And, of course, mother
+must see him too, later on. There is no guessing what he may have to
+tell us. It would be a mercy if mamma could be soothed. You know what
+she imagines. Some explanation perhaps may be found, or--or even made
+up, perhaps. It would be no sin."
+
+"Certainly," I said, "it would be no sin. It may be a mistake, though."
+
+"I want her only to recover some of her old spirit. While she is like
+this I cannot think of anything calmly."
+
+"Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud for your mother's sake?"
+I asked.
+
+"Why fraud? Such a friend is sure to know something of my brother in
+these last days. He could tell us.... There is something in the
+facts which will not let me rest. I am certain he meant to join us
+abroad--that he had some plans--some great patriotic action in view;
+not only for himself, but for both of us. I trusted in that. I looked
+forward to the time! Oh! with such hope and impatience. I could have
+helped. And now suddenly this appearance of recklessness--as if he had
+not cared...."
+
+She remained silent for a time, then obstinately she concluded--
+
+"I want to know...."
+
+Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the
+Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was
+it that she wanted to know? What I had heard of her history was enough
+to give me a clue. In the educational establishment for girls where Miss
+Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably.
+She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by
+official teaching. Afterwards, when the two ladies returned to their
+country place, both mother and daughter, by speaking their minds openly
+on public events, had earned for themselves a reputation of liberalism.
+The three-horse trap of the district police-captain began to be seen
+frequently in their village. "I must keep an eye on the peasants"--so he
+explained his visits up at the house. "Two lonely ladies must be looked
+after a little." He would inspect the walls as though he wanted to
+pierce them with his eyes, peer at the photographs, turn over the books
+in the drawing-room negligently, and after the usual refreshments,
+would depart. But the old priest of the village came one evening in the
+greatest distress and agitation, to confess that he--the priest--had
+been ordered to watch and ascertain in other ways too (such as using his
+spiritual power with the servants) all that was going on in the house,
+and especially in respect of the visitors these ladies received, who
+they were, the length of their stay, whether any of them were strangers
+to that part of the country, and so on. The poor, simple old man was in
+an agony of humiliation and terror. "I came to warn you. Be cautious in
+your conduct, for the love of God. I am burning with shame, but there is
+no getting out from under the net. I shall have to tell them what I
+see, because if I did not there is my deacon. He would make the worst
+of things to curry favour. And then my son-in-law, the husband of my
+Parasha, who is a writer in the Government Domain office; they would
+soon kick him out--and maybe send him away somewhere." The old man
+lamented the necessities of the times--"when people do not agree
+somehow" and wiped his eyes. He did not wish to spend the evening of his
+days with a shaven head in the penitent's cell of some monastery--"and
+subjected to all the severities of ecclesiastical discipline; for
+they would show no mercy to an old man," he groaned. He became almost
+hysterical, and the two ladies, full of commiseration, soothed him the
+best they could before they let him go back to his cottage. But, as a
+matter of fact, they had very few visitors. The neighbours--some of them
+old friends--began to keep away; a few from timidity, others with marked
+disdain, being grand people that came only for the summer--Miss Haldin
+explained to me--aristocrats, reactionaries. It was a solitary existence
+for a young girl. Her relations with her mother were of the tenderest
+and most open kind; but Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her
+own generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its apostasies too. Her
+affection for her children was expressed by the suppression of all signs
+of anxiety. She maintained a heroic reserve. To Nathalie Haldin, her
+brother with his Petersburg existence, not enigmatical in the least
+(there could be no doubt of what he felt or thought) but conducted a
+little mysteriously, was the only visible representative of a proscribed
+liberty. All the significance of freedom, its indefinite promises, lived
+in their long discussions, which breathed the loftiest hope of action
+and faith in success. Then, suddenly, the action, the hopes, came to
+an end with the details ferreted out by the English journalist. The
+concrete fact, the fact of his death remained! but it remained obscure
+in its deeper causes. She felt herself abandoned without explanation.
+But she did not suspect him. What she wanted was to learn almost at any
+cost how she could remain faithful to his departed spirit.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Several days elapsed before I met Nathalie Haldin again. I was crossing
+the place in front of the theatre when I made out her shapely figure
+in the very act of turning between the gate pillars of the unattractive
+public promenade of the Bastions. She walked away from me, but I knew
+we should meet as she returned down the main alley--unless, indeed, she
+were going home. In that case, I don't think I should have called on her
+yet. My desire to keep her away from these people was as strong as ever,
+but I had no illusions as to my power. I was but a Westerner, and it was
+clear that Miss Haldin would not, could not listen to my wisdom; and as
+to my desire of listening to her voice, it were better, I thought, not
+to indulge overmuch in that pleasure. No, I should not have gone to the
+Boulevard des Philosophes; but when at about the middle of the principal
+alley I saw Miss Haldin coming towards me, I was too curious, and too
+honest, perhaps, to run away.
+
+There was something of the spring harshness in the air. The blue sky was
+hard, but the young leaves clung like soft mist about the uninteresting
+range of trees; and the clear sun put little points of gold into the
+grey of Miss Haldin's frank eyes, turned to me with a friendly greeting.
+
+I inquired after the health of her mother.
+
+She had a slight movement of the shoulders and a little sad sigh.
+
+"But, you see, I did come out for a walk...for exercise, as you
+English say."
+
+I smiled approvingly, and she added an unexpected remark--
+
+"It is a glorious day."
+
+Her voice, slightly harsh, but fascinating with its masculine and
+bird-like quality, had the accent of spontaneous conviction. I was glad
+of it. It was as though she had become aware of her youth--for there was
+but little of spring-like glory in the rectangular railed space of
+grass and trees, framed visibly by the orderly roof-slopes of that town,
+comely without grace, and hospitable without sympathy. In the very air
+through which she moved there was but little warmth; and the sky, the
+sky of a land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April
+showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed
+suddenly by the ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there,
+lingered yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow. All the glory
+of the season must have been within herself--and I was glad this feeling
+had come into her life, if only for a little time.
+
+"I am pleased to hear you say these words." She gave me a quick look.
+Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely
+incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very
+rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly--if I may
+say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen
+and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use the word
+aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered
+in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our
+day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame
+de Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the
+booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for
+an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy
+in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.
+And Madame de S-- was very far from resembling the gifted author of
+_Corinne_. She made a great noise about being persecuted. I don't
+know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous. As to being
+watched, I imagine that the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a
+most distant observation. It was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for
+hatching superior plots--whether serious or futile. But all this did not
+interest me. I wanted to know the effect its extraordinary inhabitants
+and its special atmosphere had produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so
+true, so honest, but so dangerously inexperienced! Her unconsciously
+lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind left her disarmed
+before her own impulses. And there was also that friend of her brother,
+the significant new arrival from Russia.... I wondered whether she
+had managed to meet him.
+
+We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.
+
+"You know," I attacked her suddenly, "if you don't intend telling me
+anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
+final. But I won't play at delicacy. I ask you point-blank for all the
+details."
+
+She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.
+
+"You are as curious as a child."
+
+"No. I am only an anxious old man," I replied earnestly.
+
+She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety
+or the number of my years. My physiognomy has never been expressive,
+I believe, and as to my years I am not ancient enough as yet to be
+strikingly decrepit. I have no long beard like the good hermit of a
+romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of
+a slow, venerable sage. Those picturesque advantages are not mine. I am
+old, alas, in a brisk, commonplace way. And it seemed to me as though
+there were some pity for me in Miss Haldin's prolonged glance. She
+stepped out a little quicker.
+
+"You ask for all the details. Let me see. I ought to remember them. It
+was novel enough for a--a village girl like me."
+
+After a moment of silence she began by saying that the Chateau Borel was
+almost as neglected inside as outside. It was nothing to wonder at, a
+Hamburg banker, I believe, retired from business, had it built to cheer
+his remaining days by the view of that lake whose precise, orderly,
+and well-to-do beauty must have been attractive to the unromantic
+imagination of a business man. But he died soon. His wife departed
+too (but only to Italy), and this house of moneyed ease, presumably
+unsaleable, had stood empty for several years. One went to it up a
+gravel drive, round a large, coarse grass-plot, with plenty of time to
+observe the degradation of its stuccoed front. Miss Haldin said that the
+impression was unpleasant. It grew more depressing as one came nearer.
+
+She observed green stains of moss on the steps of the terrace. The front
+door stood wide open. There was no one about. She found herself in a
+wide, lofty, and absolutely empty hall, with a good many doors. These
+doors were all shut. A broad, bare stone staircase faced her, and
+the effect of the whole was of an untenanted house. She stood still,
+disconcerted by the solitude, but after a while she became aware of a
+voice speaking continuously somewhere.
+
+"You were probably being observed all the time," I suggested. "There
+must have been eyes."
+
+"I don't see how that could be," she retorted. "I haven't seen even a
+bird in the grounds. I don't remember hearing a single twitter in the
+trees. The whole place appeared utterly deserted except for the voice."
+
+She could not make out the language--Russian, French, or German. No one
+seemed to answer it. It was as though the voice had been left behind by
+the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare walls. It went on volubly,
+with a pause now and then. It was lonely and sad. The time seemed very
+long to Miss Haldin. An invincible repugnance prevented her from opening
+one of the doors in the hall. It was so hopeless. No one would come, the
+voice would never stop. She confessed to me that she had to resist an
+impulse to turn round and go away unseen, as she had come.
+
+"Really? You had that impulse?" I cried, full of regret. "What a pity
+you did not obey it."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"What a strange memory it would have been for one. Those deserted
+grounds, that empty hall, that impersonal, voluble voice, and--nobody,
+nothing, not a soul."
+
+The memory would have been unique and harmless. But she was not a girl
+to run away from an intimidating impression of solitude and mystery.
+"No, I did not run away," she said. "I stayed where I was--and I did see
+a soul. Such a strange soul."
+
+As she was gazing up the broad staircase, and had concluded that
+the voice came from somewhere above, a rustle of dress attracted her
+attention. She looked down and saw a woman crossing the hall, having
+issued apparently through one of the many doors. Her face was averted,
+so that at first she was not aware of Miss Haldin.
+
+On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she appeared very much
+startled. From her slender figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young
+girl; but if her face was almost childishly round, it was also sallow
+and wrinkled, with dark rings under the eyes. A thick crop of dusty
+brown hair was parted boyishly on the side with a lateral wave above the
+dry, furrowed forehead. After a moment of dumb blinking, she suddenly
+squatted down on the floor.
+
+"What do you mean by squatted down?" I asked, astonished. "This is a
+very strange detail."
+
+Miss Haldin explained the reason. This person when first seen was
+carrying a small bowl in her hand. She had squatted down to put it
+on the floor for the benefit of a large cat, which appeared then from
+behind her skirts, and hid its head into the bowl greedily. She got up,
+and approaching Miss Haldin asked with nervous bluntness--
+
+"What do you want? Who are you?"
+
+Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name of Peter Ivanovitch.
+The girlish, elderly woman nodded and puckered her face into a momentary
+expression of sympathy. Her black silk blouse was old and even frayed
+in places; the black serge skirt was short and shabby. She continued to
+blink at close quarters, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed shabby
+too. Miss Haldin, speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and
+sensitive person, explained how it was that her visit could not be an
+altogether unexpected event to Madame de S--.
+
+"Ah! Peter Ivanovitch brought you an invitation. How was I to know? A
+_dame de compangnie_ is not consulted, as you may imagine."
+
+The shabby woman laughed a little. Her teeth, splendidly white and
+admirably even, looked absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls on
+the neck of a ragged tramp. "Peter Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of
+the century perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man living. So if
+you have an appointment with him you must not be surprised to hear that
+he is not here."
+
+Miss Haldin explained that she had no appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.
+She became interested at once in that bizarre person.
+
+"Why should he put himself out for you or any one else? Oh! these
+geniuses. If you only knew! Yes! And their books--I mean, of course, the
+books that the world admires, the inspired books. But you have not been
+behind the scenes. Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half a day
+with a pen in your hand. He can walk up and down his rooms for hours and
+hours. I used to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I would lose my
+balance and fall off the chair all at once."
+
+She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes, fixed on Miss
+Haldin's face, betrayed no animation whatever. Miss Haldin, gathering
+that the lady who called herself a _dame de compangnie_ was proud of
+having acted as secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable remark.
+
+"You could not imagine a more trying experience," declared the lady.
+"There is an Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de S-- now,
+or I would take you up," she continued in a changed tone and glancing
+towards the staircase. "I act as master of ceremonies."
+
+It appeared that Madame de S-- could not bear Swiss servants about
+her person; and, indeed, servants would not stay for very long in the
+Chateau Borel. There were always difficulties. Miss Haldin had already
+noticed that the hall was like a dusty barn of marble and stucco with
+cobwebs in the corners and faint tracks of mud on the black and white
+tessellated floor.
+
+"I look also after this animal," continued the _dame de compagnie_,
+keeping her hands folded quietly in front of her; and she bent her
+worn gaze upon the cat. "I don't mind a bit. Animals have their rights;
+though, strictly speaking, I see no reason why they should not suffer as
+well as human beings. Do you? But of course they never suffer so much.
+That is impossible. Only, in their case it is more pitiful because they
+cannot make a revolution. I used to be a Republican. I suppose you are a
+Republican?"
+
+Miss Haldin confessed to me that she did not know what to say. But she
+nodded slightly, and asked in her turn--
+
+"And are you no longer a Republican?"
+
+"After taking down Peter Ivanovitch from dictation for two years, it is
+difficult for me to be anything. First of all, you have to sit perfectly
+motionless. The slightest movement you make puts to flight the ideas of
+Peter Ivanovitch. You hardly dare to breathe. And as to coughing--God
+forbid! Peter Ivanovitch changed the position of the table to the wall
+because at first I could not help raising my eyes to look out of the
+window, while waiting for him to go on with his dictation. That was not
+allowed. He said I stared so stupidly. I was likewise not permitted to
+look at him over my shoulder. Instantly Peter Ivanovitch stamped his
+foot, and would roar, 'Look down on the paper!' It seems my expression,
+my face, put him off. Well, I know that I am not beautiful, and that my
+expression is not hopeful either. He said that my air of unintelligent
+expectation irritated him. These are his own words."
+
+Miss Haldin was shocked, but admitted to me that she was not altogether
+surprised.
+
+"Is it possible that Peter Ivanovitch could treat any woman so rudely?"
+she cried.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ nodded several times with an air of discretion,
+then assured Miss Haldin that she did not mind in the least. The trying
+part of it was to have the secret of the composition laid bare before
+her; to see the great author of the revolutionary gospels grope for
+words as if he were in the dark as to what he meant to say.
+
+"I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To
+give one's life for the cause is nothing. But to have one's illusions
+destroyed--that is really almost more than one can bear. I really don't
+exaggerate," she insisted. "It seemed to freeze my very beliefs in
+me--the more so that when we worked in winter Peter Ivanovitch, walking
+up and down the room, required no artificial heat to keep himself warm.
+Even when we move to the South of France there are bitterly cold days,
+especially when you have to sit still for six hours at a stretch. The
+walls of these villas on the Riviera are so flimsy. Peter Ivanovitch did
+not seem to be aware of anything. It is true that I kept down my shivers
+from fear of putting him out. I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt
+absolutely locked. In the moments when Peter Ivanovitch interrupted his
+dictation, and sometimes these intervals were very long--often twenty
+minutes, no less, while he walked to and fro behind my back muttering
+to himself--I felt I was dying by inches, I assure you. Perhaps if I had
+let my teeth rattle Peter Ivanovitch might have noticed my distress, but
+I don't think it would have had any practical effect. She's very miserly
+in such matters."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ glanced up the staircase. The big cat had
+finished the milk and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously against
+her skirt. She dived to snatch it up from the floor.
+
+"Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know," she
+continued, holding the cat in her folded arms. "With us it is misers who
+can spare money for worthy objects--not the so-called generous natures.
+But pray don't think I am a sybarite. My father was a clerk in the
+Ministry of Finances with no position at all. You may guess by this that
+our home was far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually
+suffer from cold. I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began
+to think by myself. It is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to
+be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth. I am indebted for my
+salvation to an old apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway
+of the house we lived in. She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most
+friendly voice imaginable. One day, casually, we began to talk about a
+child, a ragged little girl we had seen begging from men in the streets
+at dusk; and from one thing to another my eyes began to open gradually
+to the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in
+this world, only in order that governments might exist. After I once
+understood the crime of the upper classes, I could not go on living with
+my parents. Not a single charitable word was to be heard in our home
+from year's end to year's end; there was nothing but the talk of vile
+office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries, and of courting the
+favour of the chiefs. The mere idea of marrying one day such another man
+as my father made me shudder. I don't mean that there was anyone wanting
+to marry me. There was not the slightest prospect of anything of the
+kind. But was it not sin enough to live on a Government salary while
+half Russia was dying of hunger? The Ministry of Finances! What a
+grotesque horror it is! What does the starving, ignorant people want
+with a Ministry of Finances? I kissed my old folks on both cheeks, and
+went away from them to live in cellars, with the proletariat. I tried
+to make myself useful to the utterly hopeless. I suppose you understand
+what I mean? I mean the people who have nowhere to go and nothing to
+look forward to in this life. Do you understand how frightful that
+is--nothing to look forward to! Sometimes I think that it is only in
+Russia that there are such people and such a depth of misery can be
+reached. Well, I plunged into it, and--do you know--there isn't much
+that one can do in there. No, indeed--at least as long as there are
+Ministries of Finances and such like grotesque horrors to stand in the
+way. I suppose I would have gone mad there just trying to fight the
+vermin, if it had not been for a man. It was my old friend and
+teacher, the poor saintly apple-woman, who discovered him for me, quite
+accidentally. She came to fetch me late one evening in her quiet way. I
+followed her where she would lead; that part of my life was in her hands
+altogether, and without her my spirit would have perished miserably. The
+man was a young workman, a lithographer by trade, and he had got
+into trouble in connexion with that affair of temperance tracts--you
+remember. There was a lot of people put in prison for that. The Ministry
+of Finances again! What would become of it if the poor folk ceased
+making beasts of themselves with drink? Upon my word, I would think that
+finances and all the rest of it are an invention of the devil; only that
+a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone
+are quite capable of every wickedness. Finances indeed!"
+
+Hatred and contempt hissed in her utterance of the word "finances," but
+at the very moment she gently stroked the cat reposing in her arms.
+She even raised them slightly, and inclining her head rubbed her cheek
+against the fur of the animal, which received this caress with the
+complete detachment so characteristic of its kind. Then looking at Miss
+Haldin she excused herself once more for not taking her upstairs to
+Madame S-- The interview could not be interrupted. Presently the
+journalist would be seen coming down the stairs. The best thing was to
+remain in the hall; and besides, all these rooms (she glanced all
+round at the many doors), all these rooms on the ground floor were
+unfurnished.
+
+"Positively there is no chair down here to offer you," she continued.
+"But if you prefer your own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on
+the bottom step here and keep silent."
+
+Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the contrary, she was very
+much interested in the story of the journeyman lithographer. He was a
+revolutionist, of course.
+
+"A martyr, a simple man," said the _dame de compangnie_, with a faint
+sigh, and gazing through the open front door dreamily. She turned her
+misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.
+
+"I lived with him for four months. It was like a nightmare."
+
+As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the
+emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution.
+The room into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a
+miserable den under the roof of a sordid house. The plaster fallen off
+the walls covered the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible
+tapestry of black cobwebs waved in the draught. He had been liberated a
+few days before--flung out of prison into the streets. And Miss Haldin
+seemed to see for the first time, a name and a face upon the body of
+that suffering people whose hard fate had been the subject of so many
+conversations, between her and her brother, in the garden of their
+country house.
+
+He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that
+affair of the lithographed temperance tracts. Unluckily, having got hold
+of a great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract
+from some of them other information relating to the revolutionist
+propaganda.
+
+"They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation," went on the
+_dame de compagnie_, "that they injured him internally. When they had
+done with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld
+him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a
+bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker,
+who happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was,
+uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the
+room for the water to quench his thirst with. There was nothing
+whatever--just that bedstead and the bare floor."
+
+"Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and
+revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?" asked Miss
+Haldin indignantly.
+
+"Yes. But you do not know the most terrible part of that man's misery.
+Listen. It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at last,
+his firmness gave way, and he did let out some information. Poor soul,
+the flesh is weak, you know. What it was he did not tell me. There was
+a crushed spirit in that mangled body. Nothing I found to say could make
+him whole. When they let him out, he crept into that hole, and bore his
+remorse stoically. He would not go near anyone he knew. I would have
+sought assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I have gone looking
+for it? Where was I to look for anyone who had anything to spare or any
+power to help? The people living round us were all starving and drunken.
+They were the victims of the Ministry of Finances. Don't ask me how we
+lived. I couldn't tell you. It was like a miracle of wretchedness. I had
+nothing to sell, and I assure you my clothes were in such a state that
+it was impossible for me to go out in the daytime. I was indecent. I had
+to wait till it was dark before I ventured into the streets to beg for a
+crust of bread, or whatever I could get, to keep him and me alive. Often
+I got nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie on the floor by the
+side of his couch. Oh yes, I can sleep quite soundly on bare boards.
+That is nothing, and I am only mentioning it to you so that you should
+not think I am a sybarite. It was infinitely less killing than the task
+of sitting for hours at a table in a cold study to take the books of
+Peter Ivanovitch from dictation. But you shall see yourself what that is
+like, so I needn't say any more about it."
+
+"It is by no means certain that I will ever take Peter Ivanovitch from
+dictation," said Miss Haldin.
+
+"No!" cried the other incredulously. "Not certain? You mean to say that
+you have not made up your mind?"
+
+When Miss Haldin assured her that there never had been any question of
+that between her and Peter Ivanovitch, the woman with the cat compressed
+her lips tightly for a moment.
+
+"Oh, you will find yourself settled at the table before you know that
+you have made up your mind. Don't make a mistake, it is disenchanting
+to hear Peter Ivanovitch dictate, but at the same time there is a
+fascination about it. He is a man of genius. Your face is certain not to
+irritate him; you may perhaps even help his inspiration, make it easier
+for him to deliver his message. As I look at you, I feel certain that
+you are the kind of woman who is not likely to check the flow of his
+inspiration."
+
+Miss Haldin thought it useless to protest against all these assumptions.
+
+"But this man--this workman did he die under your care?" she said, after
+a short silence.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_, listening up the stairs where now two voices
+were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When
+the loud sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible
+murmur, she turned to Miss Haldin.
+
+"Yes, he died, but not, literally speaking, in my arms, as you might
+suppose. As a matter of fact, I was asleep when he breathed his last.
+So even now I cannot say I have seen anybody die. A few days before
+the end, some young men found us out in our extremity. They were
+revolutionists, as you might guess. He ought to have trusted in his
+political friends when he came out of prison. He had been liked and
+respected before, and nobody would have dreamed of reproaching him with
+his indiscretion before the police. Everybody knows how they go to work,
+and the strongest man has his moments of weakness before pain. Why, even
+hunger alone is enough to give one queer ideas as to what may be done. A
+doctor came, our lot was alleviated as far as physical comforts go, but
+otherwise he could not be consoled--poor man. I assure you, Miss Haldin,
+that he was very lovable, but I had not the strength to weep. I was
+nearly dead myself. But there were kind hearts to take care of me.
+A dress was found to clothe my nakedness. I tell you, I was not
+decent--and after a time the revolutionists placed me with a Jewish
+family going abroad, as governess. Of course I could teach the children,
+I finished the sixth class of the Lyceum; but the real object was,
+that I should carry some important papers across the frontier. I was
+entrusted with a packet which I carried next my heart. The gendarmes
+at the station did not suspect the governess of a Jewish family, busy
+looking after three children. I don't suppose those Hebrews knew what I
+had on me, for I had been introduced to them in a very roundabout way by
+persons who did not belong to the revolutionary movement, and naturally
+I had been instructed to accept a very small salary. When we reached
+Germany I left that family and delivered my papers to a revolutionist
+in Stuttgart; after this I was employed in various ways. But you do not
+want to hear all that. I have never felt that I was very useful, but I
+live in hopes of seeing all the Ministries destroyed, finances and
+all. The greatest joy of my life has been to hear what your brother has
+done."
+
+She directed her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the
+cat reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like
+meditation.
+
+"Yes! I rejoiced," she began again. "For me there is a heroic ring about
+the very name of Haldin. They must have been trembling with fear in
+their Ministries--all those men with fiendish hearts. Here I stand
+talking to you, and when I think of all the cruelties, oppressions,
+and injustices that are going on at this very moment, my head begins to
+swim. I have looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one's
+own eyes had not to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me
+hate myself for my helplessness. I hated my hands that had no power,
+my voice that could not be heard, my very mind that would not become
+unhinged. Ah! I have seen things. And you?"
+
+Miss Haldin was moved. She shook her head slightly.
+
+"No, I have seen nothing for myself as yet," she murmured "We have
+always lived in the country. It was my brother's wish."
+
+"It is a curious meeting--this--between you and me," continued the
+other. "Do you believe in chance, Miss Haldin? How could I have expected
+to see you, his sister, with my own eyes? Do you know that when the news
+came the revolutionaries here were as much surprised as pleased, every
+bit? No one seemed to know anything about your brother. Peter Ivanovitch
+himself had not foreseen that such a blow was going to be struck. I
+suppose your brother was simply inspired. I myself think that such
+deeds should be done by inspiration. It is a great privilege to have the
+inspiration and the opportunity. Did he resemble you at all? Don't you
+rejoice, Miss Haldin?"
+
+"You must not expect too much from me," said Miss Haldin, repressing
+an inclination to cry which came over her suddenly. She succeeded, then
+added calmly, "I am not a heroic person!"
+
+"You think you couldn't have done such a thing yourself perhaps?"
+
+"I don't know. I must not even ask myself till I have lived a little
+longer, seen more...."
+
+The other moved her head appreciatively. The purring of the cat had
+a loud complacency in the empty hall. No sound of voices came from
+upstairs. Miss Haldin broke the silence.
+
+"What is it precisely that you heard people say about my brother? You
+said that they were surprised. Yes, I supposed they were. Did it not
+seem strange to them that my brother should have failed to save himself
+after the most difficult part--that is, getting away from the spot--was
+over? Conspirators should understand these things well. There are
+reasons why I am very anxious to know how it is he failed to escape."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ had advanced to the open hall-door. She glanced
+rapidly over her shoulder at Miss Haldin, who remained within the hall.
+
+"Failed to escape," she repeated absently. "Didn't he make the sacrifice
+of his life? Wasn't he just simply inspired? Wasn't it an act of
+abnegation? Aren't you certain?"
+
+"What I am certain of," said Miss Haldin, "is that it was not an act
+of despair. Have you not heard some opinion expressed here upon his
+miserable capture?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ mused for a while in the doorway.
+
+"Did I hear? Of course, everything is discussed here. Has not all the
+world been speaking about your brother? For my part, the mere mention
+of his achievement plunges me into an envious ecstasy. Why should a man
+certain of immortality think of his life at all?"
+
+She kept her back turned to Miss Haldin. Upstairs from behind a great
+dingy white and gold door, visible behind the balustrade of the first
+floor landing, a deep voice began to drone formally, as if reading over
+notes or something of the sort. It paused frequently, and then ceased
+altogether.
+
+"I don't think I can stay any longer now," said Miss Haldin. "I may
+return another day."
+
+She waited for the _dame de compagnie_ to make room for her exit; but
+the woman appeared lost in the contemplation of sunshine and shadows,
+sharing between themselves the stillness of the deserted grounds. She
+concealed the view of the drive from Miss Haldin. Suddenly she said--
+
+"It will not be necessary; here is Peter Ivanovitch himself coming up.
+But he is not alone. He is seldom alone now."
+
+Hearing that Peter Ivanovitch was approaching, Miss Haldin was not so
+pleased as she might have been expected to be. Somehow she had lost
+the desire to see either the heroic captive or Madame de S--, and the
+reason of that shrinking which came upon her at the very last minute is
+accounted for by the feeling that those two people had not been treating
+the woman with the cat kindly.
+
+"Would you please let me pass?" said Miss Haldin at last, touching
+lightly the shoulder of the _dame de compagnie_.
+
+But the other, pressing the cat to her breast, did not budge.
+
+"I know who is with him," she said, without even looking back.
+
+More unaccountably than ever Miss Haldin felt a strong impulse to leave
+the house.
+
+"Madame de S-- may be engaged for some time yet, and what I have got to
+say to Peter Ivanovitch is just a simple question which I might put to
+him when I meet him in the grounds on my way down. I really think I
+must go. I have been some time here, and I am anxious to get back to my
+mother. Will you let me pass, please?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ turned her head at last.
+
+"I never supposed that you really wanted to see Madame de S--," she
+said, with unexpected insight. "Not for a moment." There was something
+confidential and mysterious in her tone. She passed through the door,
+with Miss Haldin following her, on to the terrace, and they descended
+side by side the moss-grown stone steps. There was no one to be seen on
+the part of the drive visible from the front of the house.
+
+"They are hidden by the trees over there," explained Miss Haldin's new
+acquaintance, "but you shall see them directly. I don't know who that
+young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has taken such a fancy. He must
+be one of us, or he would not be admitted here when the others come.
+You know what I mean by the others. But I must say that he is not at
+all mystically inclined. I don't know that I have made him out yet.
+Naturally I am never for very long in the drawing-room. There is
+always something to do for me, though the establishment here is not so
+extensive as the villa on the Riviera. But still there are plenty of
+opportunities for me to make myself useful."
+
+To the left, passing by the ivy-grown end of the stables, appeared Peter
+Ivanovitch and his companion. They walked very slowly, conversing with
+some animation. They stopped for a moment, and Peter Ivanovitch was seen
+to gesticulate, while the young man listened motionless, with his arms
+hanging down and his head bowed a little. He was dressed in a dark brown
+suit and a black hat. The round eyes of the _dame de compagnie_ remained
+fixed on the two figures, which had resumed their leisurely approach.
+
+"An extremely polite young man," she said. "You shall see what a bow he
+will make; and it won't altogether be so exceptional either. He bows in
+the same way when he meets me alone in the hall."
+
+She moved on a few steps, with Miss Haldin by her side, and things
+happened just as she had foretold. The young man took off his hat, bowed
+and fell back, while Peter Ivanovitch advanced quicker, his black, thick
+arms extended heartily, and seized hold of both Miss Haldin's hands,
+shook them, and peered at her through his dark glasses.
+
+"That's right, that's right!" he exclaimed twice, approvingly. "And so
+you have been looked after by...." He frowned slightly at the
+_dame de compagnie_, who was still nursing the cat. "I conclude
+Eleanor--Madame de S-- is engaged. I know she expected somebody to-day.
+So the newspaper man did turn up, eh? She is engaged?"
+
+For all answer the _dame de compagnie_ turned away her head.
+
+"It is very unfortunate--very unfortunate indeed. I very much regret
+that you should have been...." He lowered suddenly his voice. "But
+what is it--surely you are not departing, Natalia Victorovna? You got
+bored waiting, didn't you?"
+
+"Not in the least," Miss Haldin protested. "Only I have been here some
+time, and I am anxious to get back to my mother."
+
+"The time seemed long, eh? I am afraid our worthy friend here" (Peter
+Ivanovitch suddenly jerked his head sideways towards his right shoulder
+and jerked it up again),--"our worthy friend here has not the art of
+shortening the moments of waiting. No, distinctly she has not the art;
+and in that respect good intentions alone count for nothing."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ dropped her arms, and the cat found itself
+suddenly on the ground. It remained quite still after alighting, one
+hind leg stretched backwards. Miss Haldin was extremely indignant on
+behalf of the lady companion.
+
+"Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments I have passed in
+the hall of this house have been not a little interesting, and very
+instructive too. They are memorable. I do not regret the waiting, but
+I see that the object of my call here can be attained without taking up
+Madame de S--'s time."
+
+At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin. The above relation is founded
+on her narrative, which I have not so much dramatized as might be
+supposed. She had rendered, with extraordinary feeling and animation,
+the very accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the
+irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor.
+Miss Haldin's true and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked
+by the uncongenial fate of her new acquaintance, that lady companion,
+secretary, whatever she was. For my own part, I was pleased to discover
+in it one more obstacle to intimacy with Madame de S--. I had a
+positive abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed
+Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. I do not know what was her attitude to the
+unseen, but I know that in the affairs of this world she was avaricious,
+greedy, and unscrupulous. It was within my knowledge that she had been
+worsted in a sordid and desperate quarrel about money matters with the
+family of her late husband, the diplomatist. Some very august personages
+indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving
+in her affairs) had incurred her animosity. I find it perfectly easy to
+believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for
+reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de sante_--a madhouse
+of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however, that certain high-placed
+personages opposed it for reasons which....
+
+But it's no use to go into details.
+
+Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of
+languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this
+and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly
+enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
+which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase,
+a poetic image, the accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art,
+and not having invented Madame de S--, I feel bound to explain how I
+came to know so much about her.
+
+My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
+the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
+last fact of Madame de S--'s history, with which I intend to trouble
+my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
+sources, of the cause of Madame de S--'s flight from Russia, some years
+before. It was neither more nor less than this: that she became suspect
+to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
+Alexander. The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded
+expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her
+salon. Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who
+hastened to play the informer, I suppose. At any rate, the overheard
+matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she
+was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge. Some of
+my readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris,
+a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected
+piece of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more
+than hints at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous
+innuendoes that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but
+with a palace intrigue. When I observed to my friend, the professor's
+wife, that the life of Madame de S--, with its unofficial diplomacy,
+its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere
+of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth
+century than for the conditions of our own time, she assented with
+a smile, but a moment after went on in a reflective tone:
+"Charlatanism?--yes, in a certain measure. Still, times are changed.
+There are forces now which were non-existent in the eighteenth century.
+I should not be surprised if she were more dangerous than an Englishman
+would be willing to believe. And what's more, she is looked upon as
+really dangerous by certain people--_chez nous_."
+
+_Chez nous_ in this connexion meant Russia in general, and the Russian
+political police in particular. The object of my digression from the
+straight course of Miss Haldin's relation (in my own words) of her visit
+to the Chateau Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my friend,
+the professor's wife. I wanted to bring it forward simply to make what I
+have to say presently of Mr. Razumov's presence in Geneva, a little more
+credible--for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I
+have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and
+cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced
+at our end of Europe. And this I state as my excuse for having left Miss
+Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two men who
+had come together below the terrace of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The knowledge which I have just stated was in my mind when, as I have
+said, I interrupted Miss Haldin. I interrupted her with the cry of
+profound satisfaction--
+
+"So you never saw Madame de S--, after all?"
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head. It was very satisfactory to me. She had
+not seen Madame de S--! That was excellent, excellent! I welcomed the
+conviction that she would never know Madame de S-- now. I could not
+explain the reason of the conviction but by the knowledge that Miss
+Haldin was standing face to face with her brother's wonderful friend. I
+preferred him to Madame de S-- as the companion and guide of that young
+girl, abandoned to her inexperience by the miserable end of her brother.
+But, at any rate, that life now ended had been sincere, and perhaps its
+thoughts might have been lofty, its moral sufferings profound, its last
+act a true sacrifice. It is not for us, the staid lovers calmed by
+the possession of a conquered liberty, to condemn without appeal the
+fierceness of thwarted desire.
+
+I am not ashamed of the warmth of my regard for Miss Haldin. It was, it
+must be admitted, an unselfish sentiment, being its own reward. The late
+Victor Haldin--in the light of that sentiment--appeared to me not as a
+sinister conspirator, but as a pure enthusiast. I did not wish indeed
+to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape, that fact which
+brought so much trouble to both his mother and his sister, spoke to me
+in his favour. Meantime, in my fear of seeing the girl surrender to the
+influence of the Chateau Borel revolutionary feminism, I was more than
+willing to put my trust in that friend of the late Victor Haldin. He was
+nothing but a name, you will say. Exactly! A name! And what's more,
+the only name; the only name to be found in the correspondence between
+brother and sister. The young man had turned up; they had come face to
+face, and, fortunately, without the direct interference of Madame de
+S--. What will come of it? what will she tell me presently? I was
+asking myself.
+
+It was only natural that my thought should turn to the young man, the
+bearer of the only name uttered in all the dream-talk of a future to be
+brought about by a revolution. And my thought took the shape of asking
+myself why this young man had not called upon these ladies. He had been
+in Geneva for some days before Miss Haldin heard of him first in my
+presence from Peter Ivanovitch. I regretted that last's presence at
+their meeting. I would rather have had it happen somewhere out of his
+spectacled sight. But I supposed that, having both these young people
+there, he introduced them to each other.
+
+I broke the silence by beginning a question on that point--
+
+"I suppose Peter Ivanovitch...."
+
+Miss Haldin gave vent to her indignation. Peter Ivanovitch directly he
+had got his answer from her had turned upon the _dame de compagnie_ in a
+shameful manner.
+
+"Turned upon her?" I wondered. "What about? For what reason?"
+
+"It was unheard of; it was shameful," Miss Haldin pursued, with angry
+eyes. "_Il lui a fait une scene_--like this, before strangers. And for
+what? You would never guess. For some eggs.... Oh!"
+
+I was astonished. "Eggs, did you say?"
+
+"For Madame de S--. That lady observes a special diet, or something
+of the sort. It seems she complained the day before to Peter Ivanovitch
+that the eggs were not rightly prepared. Peter Ivanovitch suddenly
+remembered this against the poor woman, and flew out at her. It was most
+astonishing. I stood as if rooted."
+
+"Do you mean to say that the great feminist allowed himself to be
+abusive to a woman?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, not that! It was something you have no conception of. It was an
+odious performance. Imagine, he raised his hat to begin with. He made
+his voice soft and deprecatory. 'Ah! you are not kind to us--you will
+not deign to remember....' This sort of phrases, that sort of tone.
+The poor creature was terribly upset. Her eyes ran full of tears.
+She did not know where to look. I shouldn't wonder if she would have
+preferred abuse, or even a blow."
+
+I did not remark that very possibly she was familiar with both on
+occasions when no one was by. Miss Haldin walked by my side, her head up
+in scornful and angry silence.
+
+"Great men have their surprising peculiarities," I observed inanely.
+"Exactly like men who are not great. But that sort of thing cannot
+be kept up for ever. How did the great feminist wind up this very
+characteristic episode?"
+
+Miss Haldin, without turning her face my way, told me that the end
+was brought about by the appearance of the interviewer, who had been
+closeted with Madame de S--.
+
+He came up rapidly, unnoticed, lifted his hat slightly, and paused to
+say in French: "The Baroness has asked me, in case I met a lady on my
+way out, to desire her to come in at once."
+
+After delivering this message, he hurried down the drive. The _dame de
+compagnie_ flew towards the house, and Peter Ivanovitch followed her
+hastily, looking uneasy. In a moment Miss Haldin found herself alone
+with the young man, who undoubtedly must have been the new arrival
+from Russia. She wondered whether her brother's friend had not already
+guessed who she was.
+
+I am in a position to say that, as a matter of fact, he had guessed.
+It is clear to me that Peter Ivanovitch, for some reason or other, had
+refrained from alluding to these ladies' presence in Geneva. But Razumov
+had guessed. The trustful girl! Every word uttered by Haldin lived in
+Razumov's memory. They were like haunting shapes; they could not be
+exorcised. The most vivid amongst them was the mention of the sister.
+The girl had existed for him ever since. But he did not recognize her
+at once. Coming up with Peter Ivanovitch, he did observe her; their eyes
+had met, even. He had responded, as no one could help responding, to
+the harmonious charm of her whole person, its strength, its grace, its
+tranquil frankness--and then he had turned his gaze away. He said to
+himself that all this was not for him; the beauty of women and the
+friendship of men were not for him. He accepted that feeling with a
+purposeful sternness, and tried to pass on. It was only her outstretched
+hand which brought about the recognition. It stands recorded in the
+pages of his self-confession, that it nearly suffocated him physically
+with an emotional reaction of hate and dismay, as though her appearance
+had been a piece of accomplished treachery.
+
+He faced about. The considerable elevation of the terrace concealed them
+from anyone lingering in the doorway of the house; and even from the
+upstairs windows they could not have been seen. Through the thickets run
+wild, and the trees of the gently sloping grounds, he had cold, placid
+glimpses of the lake. A moment of perfect privacy had been vouchsafed
+to them at this juncture. I wondered to myself what use they had made of
+that fortunate circumstance.
+
+"Did you have time for more than a few words?" I asked.
+
+That animation with which she had related to me the incidents of her
+visit to the Chateau Borel had left her completely. Strolling by my
+side, she looked straight before her; but I noticed a little colour on
+her cheek. She did not answer me.
+
+After some little time I observed that they could not have hoped to
+remain forgotten for very long, unless the other two had discovered
+Madame de S-- swooning with fatigue, perhaps, or in a state of morbid
+exaltation after the long interview. Either would require their devoted
+ministrations. I could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily
+out of the house again, bareheaded, perhaps, and on across the terrace
+with his swinging gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating
+clear of his stout light grey legs. I confess to having looked upon
+these young people as the quarry of the "heroic fugitive." I had the
+notion that they would not be allowed to escape capture. But of that I
+said nothing to Miss Haldin, only as she still remained uncommunicative,
+I pressed her a little.
+
+"Well--but you can tell me at least your impression."
+
+She turned her head to look at me, and turned away again.
+
+"Impression?" she repeated slowly, almost dreamily; then in a quicker
+tone--
+
+"He seems to be a man who has suffered more from his thoughts than from
+evil fortune."
+
+"From his thoughts, you say?"
+
+"And that is natural enough in a Russian," she took me up. "In a young
+Russian; so many of them are unfit for action, and yet unable to rest."
+
+"And you think he is that sort of man?"
+
+"No, I do not judge him. How could I, so suddenly? You asked for my
+impression--I explain my impression. I--I--don't know the world, nor yet
+the people in it; I have been too solitary--I am too young to trust my
+own opinions."
+
+"Trust your instinct," I advised her. "Most women trust to that, and
+make no worse mistakes than men. In this case you have your brother's
+letter to help you."
+
+She drew a deep breath like a light sigh. "Unstained, lofty, and
+solitary existences," she quoted as if to herself. But I caught the
+wistful murmur distinctly.
+
+"High praise," I whispered to her.
+
+"The highest possible."
+
+"So high that, like the award of happiness, it is more fit to come
+only at the end of a life. But still no common or altogether unworthy
+personality could have suggested such a confident exaggeration of praise
+and..."
+
+"Ah!" She interrupted me ardently. "And if you had only known the heart
+from which that judgment has come!"
+
+She ceased on that note, and for a space I reflected on the character of
+the words which I perceived very well must tip the scale of the girl's
+feelings in that young man's favour. They had not the sound of a
+casual utterance. Vague they were to my Western mind and to my Western
+sentiment, but I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin's side,
+I was like a traveller in a strange country. It had also become clear to
+me that Miss Haldin was unwilling to enter into the details of the only
+material part of their visit to the Chateau Borel. But I was not hurt.
+Somehow I didn't feel it to be a want of confidence. It was some other
+difficulty--a difficulty I could not resent. And it was without the
+slightest resentment that I said--
+
+"Very well. But on that high ground, which I will not dispute, you, like
+anyone else in such circumstances, you must have made for yourself
+a representation of that exceptional friend, a mental image of him,
+and--please tell me--you were not disappointed?"
+
+"What do you mean? His personal appearance?"
+
+"I don't mean precisely his good looks, or otherwise."
+
+We turned at the end of the alley and made a few steps without looking
+at each other.
+
+"His appearance is not ordinary," said Miss Haldin at last.
+
+"No, I should have thought not--from the little you've said of your
+first impression. After all, one has to fall back on that word.
+Impression! What I mean is that something indescribable which is likely
+to mark a 'not ordinary' person."
+
+I perceived that she was not listening. There was no mistaking her
+expression; and once more I had the sense of being out of it--not
+because of my age, which at any rate could draw inferences--but
+altogether out of it, on another plane whence I could only watch her
+from afar. And so ceasing to speak I watched her stepping out by my
+side.
+
+"No," she exclaimed suddenly, "I could not have been disappointed with a
+man of such strong feeling."
+
+"Aha! Strong feeling," I muttered, thinking to myself censoriously: like
+this, at once, all in a moment!
+
+"What did you say?" inquired Miss Haldin innocently.
+
+"Oh, nothing. I beg your pardon. Strong feeling. I am not surprised."
+
+"And you don't know how abruptly I behaved to him!" she cried
+remorsefully.
+
+I suppose I must have appeared surprised, for, looking at me with a
+still more heightened colour, she said she was ashamed to admit that she
+had not been sufficiently collected; she had failed to control her words
+and actions as the situation demanded. She lost the fortitude worthy of
+both the men, the dead and the living; the fortitude which should have
+been the note of the meeting of Victor Haldin's sister with Victor
+Haldin's only known friend. He was looking at her keenly, but said
+nothing, and she was--she confessed--painfully affected by his want of
+comprehension. All she could say was: "You are Mr. Razumov." A slight
+frown passed over his forehead. After a short, watchful pause, he made a
+little bow of assent, and waited.
+
+At the thought that she had before her the man so highly regarded by her
+brother, the man who had known his value, spoken to him, understood him,
+had listened to his confidences, perhaps had encouraged him--her lips
+trembled, her eyes ran full of tears; she put out her hand, made a step
+towards him impulsively, saying with an effort to restrain her emotion,
+"Can't you guess who I am?" He did not take the proffered hand. He
+even recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin imagined that he was unpleasantly
+affected. Miss Haldin excused him, directing her displeasure at
+herself. She had behaved unworthily, like an emotional French girl.
+A manifestation of that kind could not be welcomed by a man of stern,
+self-contained character.
+
+He must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very timid with women, not
+to respond in a more human way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie
+Haldin--I thought to myself. Those lofty and solitary existences (I
+remembered the words suddenly) make a young man shy and an old man
+savage--often.
+
+"Well," I encouraged Miss Haldin to proceed.
+
+She was still very dissatisfied with herself.
+
+"I went from bad to worse," she said, with an air of discouragement very
+foreign to her. "I did everything foolish except actually bursting into
+tears. I am thankful to say I did not do that. But I was unable to speak
+for quite a long time."
+
+She had stood before him, speechless, swallowing her sobs, and when
+she managed at last to utter something, it was only her brother's
+name--"Victor--Victor Haldin!" she gasped out, and again her voice
+failed her.
+
+"Of course," she commented to me, "this distressed him. He was
+quite overcome. I have told you my opinion that he is a man of deep
+feeling--it is impossible to doubt it. You should have seen his face.
+He positively reeled. He leaned against the wall of the terrace. Their
+friendship must have been the very brotherhood of souls! I was grateful
+to him for that emotion, which made me feel less ashamed of my own lack
+of self-control. Of course I had regained the power of speech at once,
+almost. All this lasted not more than a few seconds. 'I am his sister,'
+I said. 'Maybe you have heard of me.'"
+
+"And had he?" I interrupted.
+
+"I don't know. How could it have been otherwise? And yet.... But what
+does that matter? I stood there before him, near enough to be touched
+and surely not looking like an impostor. All I know is, that he put
+out both his hands then to me, I may say flung them out at me, with
+the greatest readiness and warmth, and that I seized and pressed them,
+feeling that I was finding again a little of what I thought was lost
+to me for ever, with the loss of my brother--some of that hope,
+inspiration, and support which I used to get from my dear dead...."
+
+I understood quite well what she meant. We strolled on slowly. I
+refrained from looking at her. And it was as if answering my own
+thoughts that I murmured--
+
+"No doubt it was a great friendship--as you say. And that young man
+ended by welcoming your name, so to speak, with both hands. After that,
+of course, you would understand each other. Yes, you would understand
+each other quickly."
+
+It was a moment before I heard her voice.
+
+"Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words. A reserved man--even when
+he is strongly moved."
+
+Unable to forget---or even to forgive--the bass-toned expansiveness of
+Peter Ivanovitch, the Archpatron of revolutionary parties, I said that
+I took this for a favourable trait of character. It was associated with
+sincerity--in my mind.
+
+"And, besides, we had not much time," she added.
+
+"No, you would not have, of course." My suspicion and even dread of the
+feminist and his Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help asking
+with real anxiety, which I made smiling--
+
+"But you escaped all right?"
+
+She understood me, and smiled too, at my uneasiness.
+
+"Oh yes! I escaped, if you like to call it that. I walked away quickly.
+There was no need to run. I am neither frightened nor yet fascinated,
+like that poor woman who received me so strangely."
+
+"And Mr.--Mr. Razumov...?"
+
+"He remained there, of course. I suppose he went into the house after I
+left him. You remember that he came here strongly recommended to Peter
+Ivanovitch--possibly entrusted with important messages for him."
+
+"Ah yes! From that priest who..."
+
+"Father Zosim--yes. Or from others, perhaps."
+
+"You left him, then. But have you seen him since, may I ask?"
+
+For some time Miss Haldin made no answer to this very direct question,
+then--
+
+"I have been expecting to see him here to-day," she said quietly.
+
+"You have! Do you meet, then, in this garden? In that case I had better
+leave you at once."
+
+"No, why leave me? And we don't meet in this garden. I have not seen Mr.
+Razumov since that first time. Not once. But I have been expecting
+him...."
+
+She paused. I wondered to myself why that young revolutionist should
+show so little alacrity.
+
+"Before we parted I told Mr. Razumov that I walked here for an hour
+every day at this time. I could not explain to him then why I did not
+ask him to come and see us at once. Mother must be prepared for such a
+visit. And then, you see, I do not know myself what Mr. Razumov has to
+tell us. He, too, must be told first how it is with poor mother. All
+these thoughts flashed through my mind at once. So I told him hurriedly
+that there was a reason why I could not ask him to see us at home, but
+that I was in the habit of walking here.... This is a public place,
+but there are never many people about at this hour. I thought it would
+do very well. And it is so near our apartments. I don't like to be very
+far away from mother. Our servant knows where I am in case I should be
+wanted suddenly."
+
+"Yes. It is very convenient from that point of view," I agreed.
+
+In fact, I thought the Bastions a very convenient place, since the
+girl did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to
+her mother. It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of
+ground of deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go
+on in the exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments,
+too poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these
+two, escaped out of four score of millions of human beings ground
+between the upper and nether millstone, walking under these trees, their
+young heads close together. Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk
+in. It even occurred to me, while we turned once more away from the wide
+iron gates, that when tired they would have plenty of accommodation to
+rest themselves. There was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed
+between the restaurant chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted
+deals spread out under the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a
+solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to
+the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a
+republic that could almost be held in the palm of ones hand. The man,
+colourlessly uncouth, was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the
+woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the rough chair, gazed idly
+around.
+
+There is little logic to be expected on this earth, not only in the
+matter of thought, but also of sentiment. I was surprised to discover
+myself displeased with that unknown young man. A week had gone by since
+they met. Was he callous, or shy, or very stupid? I could not make it
+out.
+
+"Do you think," I asked Miss Haldin, after we had gone some distance up
+the great alley, "that Mr Razumov understood your intention?"
+
+"Understood what I meant?" she wondered. "He was greatly moved. That
+I know! In my own agitation I could see it. But I spoke distinctly. He
+heard me; he seemed, indeed, to hang on my words..."
+
+Unconsciously she had hastened her pace. Her utterance, too, became
+quicker.
+
+I waited a little before I observed thoughtfully--
+
+"And yet he allowed all these days to pass."
+
+"How can we tell what work he may have to do here? He is not an idler
+travelling for his pleasure. His time may not be his own--nor yet his
+thoughts, perhaps."
+
+She slowed her pace suddenly, and in a lowered voice added--
+
+"Or his very life"--then paused and stood still "For all I know, he may
+have had to leave Geneva the very day he saw me."
+
+"Without telling you!" I exclaimed incredulously.
+
+"I did not give him time. I left him quite abruptly. I behaved
+emotionally to the end. I am sorry for it. Even if I had given him the
+opportunity he would have been justified in taking me for a person not
+to be trusted. An emotional, tearful girl is not a person to confide in.
+But even if he has left Geneva for a time, I am confident that we shall
+meet again."
+
+"Ah! you are confident.... I dare say. But on what ground?"
+
+"Because I've told him that I was in great need of some one, a
+fellow-countryman, a fellow-believer, to whom I could give my confidence
+in a certain matter."
+
+"I see. I don't ask you what answer he made. I confess that this is good
+ground for your belief in Mr. Razumov's appearance before long. But he
+has not turned up to-day?"
+
+"No," she said quietly, "not to-day;" and we stood for a time in
+silence, like people that have nothing more to say to each other and
+let their thoughts run widely asunder before their bodies go off their
+different ways. Miss Haldin glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a
+brusque movement. She had already overstayed her time, it seemed.
+
+"I don't like to be away from mother," she murmured, shaking her head.
+"It is not that she is very ill now. But somehow when I am not with her
+I am more uneasy than ever."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion to her son for the last
+week or more. She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking
+out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial
+things.
+
+"For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of
+talk is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly
+endure it, and I dare not break it."
+
+Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her glove which had come
+undone. I knew well enough what a hard time of it she must be having.
+The stress, its causes, its nature, would have undermined the health
+of an Occidental girl; but Russian natures have a singular power of
+resistance against the unfair strains of life. Straight and supple, with
+a short jacket open on her black dress, which made her figure appear
+more slender and her fresh but colourless face more pale, she compelled
+my wonder and admiration.
+
+"I can't stay a moment longer. You ought to come soon to see mother. You
+know she calls you '_L'ami._' It is an excellent name, and she really
+means it. And now _au revoir_; I must run."
+
+She glanced vaguely down the broad walk--the hand she put out to me
+eluded my grasp by an unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
+shoulder. Her red lips were slightly parted, not in a smile, however,
+but expressing a sort of startled pleasure. She gazed towards the gates
+and said quickly, with a gasp--
+
+"There! I knew it. Here he comes!"
+
+I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov. A young man was walking up
+the alley, without haste. His clothes were some dull shade of brown, and
+he carried a stick. When my eyes first fell on him, his head was hanging
+on his breast as if in deep thought. While I was looking at him he
+raised it sharply, and at once stopped. I am certain he did, but that
+pause was nothing more perceptible than a faltering check in his gait,
+instantaneously overcome. Then he continued his approach, looking at us
+steadily. Miss Haldin signed to me to remain, and advanced a step or two
+to meet him.
+
+I turned my head away from that meeting, and did not look at them
+again till I heard Miss Haldin's voice uttering his name in the way
+of introduction. Mr. Razumov was informed, in a warm, low tone, that,
+besides being a wonderful teacher, I was a great support "in our sorrow
+and distress."
+
+Of course I was described also as an Englishman. Miss Haldin spoke
+rapidly, faster than I have ever heard her speak, and that by contrast
+made the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
+
+"I have given him my confidence," she added, looking all the time at Mr.
+Razumov. That young man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin,
+but certainly did not look into her eyes which were so ready for him.
+Afterwards he glanced backwards and forwards at us both, while the faint
+commencement of a forced smile, followed by the suspicion of a frown,
+vanished one after another; I detected them, though neither could have
+been noticed by a person less intensely bent upon divining him than
+myself. I don't know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my attention
+seized the very shades of these movements. The attempted smile was given
+up, the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so that there should
+be no sign; but I imagined him exclaiming inwardly--
+
+"Her confidence! To this elderly person--this foreigner!"
+
+I imagined this because he looked foreign enough to me. I was upon the
+whole favourably impressed. He had an air of intelligence and even
+some distinction quite above the average of the students and other
+inhabitants of the _Petite Russie_. His features were more decided
+than in the generality of Russian faces; he had a line of the jaw,
+a clean-shaven, sallow cheek; his nose was a ridge, and not a mere
+protuberance. He wore the hat well down over his eyes, his dark hair
+curled low on the nape of his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes
+there were sturdy limbs; a slight stoop brought out a satisfactory
+breadth of shoulders. Upon the whole I was not disappointed.
+Studious--robust--shy.
+
+Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on
+mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry. Not a word or
+even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.
+
+I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me
+lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct
+wish. Let him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near
+Nathalie Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling
+matter to me. I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as
+it were poised in the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and
+my mind trying to penetrate her intention. She had turned to Razumov.
+
+"Well. This is the place. Yes, it is here that I meant you to come. I
+have been walking every day.... Don't excuse yourself--I understand.
+I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot
+stay now. It is impossible. I must hurry off home. Yes, even with you
+standing before me, I must run off. I have been too long away.... You
+know how it is?"
+
+These last words were addressed to me. I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed
+the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man
+might do. He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his,
+and held it--detained it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back
+movement.
+
+"Thank you once more for--for understanding me," she went on warmly. He
+interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn't like him
+speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat,
+as it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with
+a parched throat.
+
+"What is there to thank me for? Understand you?... How did I
+understand you?... You had better know that I understand nothing.
+I was aware that you wanted to see me in this garden. I could not come
+before. I was hindered. And even to-day, you see...late."
+
+She still held his hand.
+
+"I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as
+a weak, emotional girl. No doubt I want sustaining. I am very ignorant.
+But I can be trusted. Indeed I can!"
+
+"You are ignorant," he repeated thoughtfully. He had raised his head,
+and was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand.
+They stood like this for a long moment. She released his hand.
+
+"Yes. You did come late. It was good of you to come on the chance of
+me having loitered beyond my time. I was talking with this good friend
+here. I was talking of you. Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you. He was with
+me when I first heard of your being here in Geneva. He can tell you
+what comfort it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news. He knew
+I meant to seek you out. It was the only object of my accepting the
+invitation of Peter Ivanovitch....
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me," he interrupted, in that
+wavering, hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.
+
+"Very little. Just told me your name, and that you had arrived here. Why
+should I have asked for more? What could he have told me that I did not
+know already from my brother's letter? Three lines! And how much they
+meant to me! I will show them to you one day, Kirylo Sidorovitch. But
+now I must go. The first talk between us cannot be a matter of five
+minutes, so we had better not begin...."
+
+I had been standing a little aside, seeing them both in profile. At that
+moment it occurred to me that Mr. Razumov's face was older than his age.
+
+"If mother"--the girl had turned suddenly to me, "were to wake up in my
+absence (so much longer than usual) she would perhaps question me. She
+seems to miss me more, you know, of late. She would want to know what
+delayed me--and, you see, it would be painful for me to dissemble before
+her."
+
+I understood the point very well. For the same reason she checked what
+seemed to be on Mr. Razumov's part a movement to accompany her.
+
+"No! No! I go alone, but meet me here as soon as possible." Then to me
+in a lower, significant tone--
+
+"Mother may be sitting at the window at this moment, looking down
+the street. She must not know anything of Mr. Razumov's presence here
+till--till something is arranged." She paused before she added a little
+louder, but still speaking to me, "Mr. Razumov does not quite understand
+my difficulty, but you know what it is."
+
+
+V
+
+
+With a quick inclination of the head for us both, and an earnest,
+friendly glance at the young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our heads
+and looking after her straight, supple figure receding rapidly. Her walk
+was not that hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some women, but
+a frank, strong, healthy movement forward. Rapidly she increased the
+distance--disappeared with suddenness at last. I discovered only then
+that Mr. Razumov, after ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking
+me over from head to foot. I dare say I was a very unexpected fact for
+that young Russian to stumble upon. I caught in his physiognomy, in his
+whole bearing, an expression compounded of curiosity and scorn, tempered
+by alarm--as though he had been holding his breath while I was not
+looking. But his eyes met mine with a gaze direct enough. I saw then for
+the first time that they were of a clear brown colour and fringed with
+thick black eyelashes. They were the youngest feature of his face. Not
+at all unpleasant eyes. He swayed slightly, leaning on his stick and
+generally hung in the wind. It flashed upon me that in leaving us
+together Miss Haldin had an intention--that something was entrusted to
+me, since, by a mere accident I had been found at hand. On this assumed
+ground I put all possible friendliness into my manner. I cast about
+for some right thing to say, and suddenly in Miss Haldin's last words I
+perceived the clue to the nature of my mission.
+
+"No," I said gravely, if with a smile, "you cannot be expected to
+understand."
+
+His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little before he said, as if
+wickedly amused--
+
+"But haven't you heard just now? I was thanked by that young lady for
+understanding so well."
+
+I looked at him rather hard. Was there a hidden and inexplicable sneer
+in this retort? No. It was not that. It might have been resentment. Yes.
+But what had he to resent? He looked as though he had not slept very
+well of late. I could almost feel on me the weight of his unrefreshed,
+motionless stare, the stare of a man who lies unwinking in the dark,
+angrily passive in the toils of disastrous thoughts. Now, when I know
+how true it was, I can honestly affirm that this was the effect he
+produced on me. It was painful in a curiously indefinite way--for,
+of course, the definition comes to me now while I sit writing in the
+fullness of my knowledge. But this is what the effect was at that time
+of absolute ignorance. This new sort of uneasiness which he seemed to
+be forcing upon me I attempted to put down by assuming a conversational,
+easy familiarity.
+
+"That extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl (I am--as
+you see--old enough to be frank in my expressions) was referring to her
+own feelings. Surely you must have understood that much?"
+
+He made such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little.
+
+"Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other
+things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well--and if she
+is! I suppose I can see that for myself."
+
+This sally would have been insulting if his voice had not been
+practically extinct, dried up in his throat; and the rustling effort of
+his speech too painful to give real offence.
+
+I remained silent, checked between the obvious fact and the subtle
+impression. It was open to me to leave him there and then; but the sense
+of having been entrusted with a mission, the suggestion of Miss Haldin's
+last glance, was strong upon me. After a moment of reflection I said--
+
+"Shall we walk together a little?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again. I saw it
+out of the corner of my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow. He
+had fallen back a little and was practically out of my sight, unless
+I turned my head to look at him. I did not wish to indispose him
+still further by an appearance of marked curiosity. It might have
+been distasteful to such a young and secret refugee from under the
+pestilential shadow hiding the true, kindly face of his land. And the
+shadow, the attendant of his countrymen, stretching across the middle of
+Europe, was lying on him too, darkening his figure to my mental vision.
+"Without doubt," I said to myself, "he seems a sombre, even a desperate
+revolutionist; but he is young, he may be unselfish and humane, capable
+of compassion, of...."
+
+I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat, and became all
+attention.
+
+"This is beyond everything," were his first words. "It is beyond
+everything! I find you here, for no reason that I can understand, in
+possession of something I cannot be expected to understand! A confidant!
+A foreigner! Talking about an admirable Russian girl. Is the admirable
+girl a fool, I begin to wonder? What are you at? What is your object?"
+
+He was barely audible, as if his throat had no more resonance than a dry
+rag, a piece of tinder. It was so pitiful that I found it extremely easy
+to control my indignation.
+
+"When you have lived a little longer, Mr. Razumov, you will discover
+that no woman is an absolute fool. I am not a feminist, like that
+illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a
+little suspect to me...."
+
+He interrupted me, in a surprising note of whispering astonishment.
+
+"Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!..."
+
+"Yes, in a certain aspect he is," I said, dismissing my remark lightly.
+"As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will
+learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign
+to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even
+the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
+never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely
+deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open,
+if all the truth were known."
+
+"Upon my word," he cried at my elbow, "what is it to me whether women
+are fools or lunatics? I really don't care what you think of them. I--I
+am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a
+novel. How do you know that I want to learn anything about women?...
+What is the meaning of all this?"
+
+"The object, you mean, of this conversation, which I admit I have forced
+upon you in a measure."
+
+"Forced! Object!" he repeated, still keeping half a pace or so behind
+me. "You wanted to talk about women, apparently. That's a subject. But
+I don't care for it. I have never.... In fact, I have had other
+subjects to think about."
+
+"I am concerned here with one woman only--a young girl--the sister of
+your dead friend--Miss Haldin. Surely you can think a little of her.
+What I meant from the first was that there is a situation which you
+cannot be expected to understand."
+
+I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side for the space of several
+strides.
+
+"I think that it may prepare the ground for your next interview with
+Miss Haldin if I tell you of it. I imagine that she might have had
+something of the kind in her mind when she left us together. I believe
+myself authorized to speak. The peculiar situation I have alluded to
+has arisen in the first grief and distress of Victor Haldin's execution.
+There was something peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest. You no
+doubt know the whole truth...."
+
+I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next instant found myself
+swung so as to face Mr. Razumov.
+
+"You spring up from the ground before me with this talk. Who the devil
+are you? This is not to be borne! Why! What for? What do you know
+what is or is not peculiar? What have you to do with any confounded
+circumstances, or with anything that happens in Russia, anyway?"
+
+He leaned on his stick with his other hand, heavily; and when he let go
+my arm, I was certain in my mind that he was hardly able to keep on his
+feet.
+
+"Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables," I proposed,
+disregarding this display of unexpectedly profound emotion. It was not
+without its effect on me, I confess. I was sorry for him.
+
+"What tables? What are you talking about? Oh--the empty tables? The
+tables there. Certainly. I will sit at one of the empty tables."
+
+I led him away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals
+before the _chalet_. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were
+alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let
+fall his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands,
+stared at me persistently, openly, and continuously, while I signalled
+the waiter and ordered some beer. I could not quarrel with this silent
+inspection very well, because, truth to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of
+having been sprung on him with some abruptness--of having "sprung from
+the ground," as he expressed it.
+
+While waiting to be served I mentioned that, born from parents settled
+in St. Petersburg, I had acquired the language as a child. The town I
+did not remember, having left it for good as a boy of nine, but in later
+years I had renewed my acquaintance with the language. He listened,
+without as much as moving his eyes the least little bit. He had to
+change his position when the beer came, and the instant draining of his
+glass revived him. He leaned back in his chair and, folding his arms
+across his chest, continued to stare at me squarely. It occurred to me
+that his clean-shaven, almost swarthy face was really of the very mobile
+sort, and that the absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit of
+a revolutionist, of a conspirator everlastingly on his guard against
+self-betrayal in a world of secret spies.
+
+"But you are an Englishman--a teacher of English literature," he
+murmured, in a voice that was no longer issuing from a parched throat.
+"I have heard of you. People told me you have lived here for years."
+
+"Quite true. More than twenty years. And I have been assisting Miss
+Haldin with her English studies."
+
+"You have been reading English poetry with her," he said, immovable now,
+like another man altogether, a complete stranger to the man of the heavy
+and uncertain footfalls a little while ago--at my elbow.
+
+"Yes, English poetry," I said. "But the trouble of which I speak was
+caused by an English newspaper."
+
+He continued to stare at me. I don't think he was aware that the story
+of the midnight arrest had been ferreted out by an English journalist
+and given to the world. When I explained this to him he muttered
+contemptuously, "It may have been altogether a lie."
+
+"I should think you are the best judge of that," I retorted, a little
+disconcerted. "I must confess that to me it looks to be true in the
+main."
+
+"How can you tell truth from lies?" he queried in his new, immovable
+manner.
+
+"I don't know how you do it in Russia," I began, rather nettled by his
+attitude. He interrupted me.
+
+"In Russia, and in general everywhere--in a newspaper, for instance. The
+colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same."
+
+"Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the
+publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration
+of the motive, and so on. I don't trust blindly the accuracy of special
+correspondents--but why should this one have gone to the trouble of
+concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance to
+the world?"
+
+"That's what it is," he grumbled. "What's going on with us is of
+no importance--a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the
+papers--the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of. But
+let them wait a bit!"
+
+He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to the western world.
+Disregarding the anger in his stare, I pointed out that whether the
+journalist was well- or ill-informed, the concern of the friends of
+these ladies was with the effect the few lines of print in question had
+produced--the effect alone. And surely he must be counted as one of
+the friends--if only for the sake of his late comrade and intimate
+fellow-revolutionist. At that point I thought he was going to speak
+vehemently; but he only astounded me by the convulsive start of his
+whole body. He restrained himself, folded his loosened arms tighter
+across his chest, and sat back with a smile in which there was a twitch
+of scorn and malice.
+
+"Yes, a comrade and an intimate.... Very well," he said.
+
+"I ventured to speak to you on that assumption. And I cannot be
+mistaken. I was present when Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival
+here to Miss Haldin, and I saw her relief and thankfulness when your
+name was mentioned. Afterwards she showed me her brother's letter,
+and read out the few words in which he alludes to you. What else but a
+friend could you have been?"
+
+"Obviously. That's perfectly well known. A friend. Quite correct....
+Go on. You were talking of some effect."
+
+I said to myself: "He puts on the callousness of a stern revolutionist,
+the insensibility to common emotions of a man devoted to a destructive
+idea. He is young, and his sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger,
+a foreigner, an old man. Youth must assert itself...." As concisely
+as possible I exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs. Haldin had been
+thrown into by the news of her son's untimely end.
+
+He listened--I felt it--with profound attention. His level stare
+deflected gradually downwards, left my face, and rested at last on the
+ground at his feet.
+
+"You can enter into the sister's feelings. As you said, I have only read
+a little English poetry with her, and I won't make myself ridiculous in
+your eyes by trying to speak of her. But you have seen her. She is one
+of these rare human beings that do not want explaining. At least I think
+so. They had only that son, that brother, for a link with the wider
+world, with the future. The very groundwork of active existence for
+Nathalie Haldin is gone with him. Can you wonder then that she turns
+with eagerness to the only man her brother mentions in his letters. Your
+name is a sort of legacy."
+
+"What could he have written of me?" he cried, in a low, exasperated
+tone.
+
+"Only a few words. It is not for me to repeat them to you, Mr. Razumov;
+but you may believe my assertion that these words are forcible enough to
+make both his mother and his sister believe implicitly in the worth of
+your judgment and in the truth of anything you may have to say to them.
+It's impossible for you now to pass them by like strangers."
+
+I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few
+people passing up and down the broad central walk. While I was speaking
+his head had sunk upon his breast above his folded arms. He raised it
+sharply.
+
+"Must I go then and lie to that old woman!"
+
+It was not anger; it was something else, something more poignant, and
+not so simple. I was aware of it sympathetically, while I was profoundly
+concerned at the nature of that exclamation.
+
+"Dear me! Won't the truth do, then? I hoped you could have told them
+something consoling. I am thinking of the poor mother now. Your Russia
+_is_ a cruel country."
+
+He moved a little in his chair.
+
+"Yes," I repeated. "I thought you would have had something authentic to
+tell."
+
+The twitching of his lips before he spoke was curious.
+
+"What if it is not worth telling?"
+
+"Not worth--from what point of view? I don't understand."
+
+"From every point of view."
+
+I spoke with some asperity.
+
+"I should think that anything which could explain the circumstances of
+that midnight arrest...."
+
+"Reported by a journalist for the amusement of the civilized Europe," he
+broke in scornfully.
+
+"Yes, reported.... But aren't they true? I can't make out your
+attitude in this? Either the man is a hero to you, or..."
+
+He approached his face with fiercely distended nostrils close to mine so
+suddenly that I had the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
+
+"You ask me! I suppose it amuses you, all this. Look here! I am a
+worker. I studied. Yes, I studied very hard. There is intelligence
+here." (He tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.) "Don't you think a
+Russian may have sane ambitions? Yes--I had even prospects. Certainly! I
+had. And now you see me here, abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed.
+You see me here--and you ask! You see me, don't you?--sitting before
+you."
+
+He threw himself back violently. I kept outwardly calm.
+
+"Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here on account of the Haldin
+affair?"
+
+His manner changed.
+
+"You call it the Haldin affair--do you?" he observed indifferently.
+
+"I have no right to ask you anything," I said. "I wouldn't presume. But
+in that case the mother and the sister of him who must be a hero in
+your eyes cannot be indifferent to you. The girl is a frank and generous
+creature, having the noblest--well--illusions. You will tell her
+nothing--or you will tell her everything. But speaking now of the object
+with which I've approached you first, we have to deal with the morbid
+state of the mother. Perhaps something could be invented under your
+authority as a cure for a distracted and suffering soul filled with
+maternal affection."
+
+His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I could not help
+thinking, wilfully.
+
+"Oh yes. Something might," he mumbled carelessly.
+
+He put his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. When he uncovered his
+lips they were smiling faintly.
+
+"Pardon me. This has been a long conversation, and I have not had much
+sleep the last two nights."
+
+This unexpected, somewhat insolent sort of apology had the merit of
+being perfectly true. He had had no nightly rest to speak of since that
+day when, in the grounds of the Chateau Borel, the sister of Victor
+Haldin had appeared before him. The perplexities and the complex
+terrors--I may say--of this sleeplessness are recorded in the document
+I was to see later--the document which is the main source of this
+narrative. At the moment he looked to me convincingly tired, gone slack
+all over, like a man who has passed through some sort of crisis.
+
+"I have had a lot of urgent writing to do," he added.
+
+I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my example, without haste,
+a little heavily.
+
+"I must apologize for detaining you so long," I said.
+
+"Why apologize? One can't very well go to bed before night. And you did
+not detain me. I could have left you at any time."
+
+I had not stayed with him to be offended.
+
+"I am glad you have been sufficiently interested," I said calmly. "No
+merit of mine, though--the commonest sort of regard for the mother of
+your friend was enough.... As to Miss Haldin herself, she at one time
+was disposed to think that her brother had been betrayed to the police
+in some way."
+
+To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again suddenly. I stared at
+him, and I must say that he returned my stare without winking for quite
+a considerable time.
+
+"In some way," he mumbled, as if he had not understood or could not
+believe his ears.
+
+"Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might have done that," I went
+on. "Or, as she characteristically put it to me, the folly or weakness
+of some unhappy fellow-revolutionist."
+
+"Folly or weakness," he repeated bitterly.
+
+"She is a very generous creature," I observed after a time. The man
+admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground. I turned away and
+moved off, apparently unnoticed by him. I nourished no resentment of
+the moody brusqueness with which he had treated me. The sentiment I was
+carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness. Before
+I had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined
+me.
+
+"H'm, yes!" I heard him at my elbow again. "But what do you think?"
+
+I did not look round even.
+
+"I think that you people are under a curse."
+
+He made no sound. It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I
+heard him again.
+
+"I should like to walk with you a little."
+
+After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated
+compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I saw no reason for being
+particularly gracious.
+
+"I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here,
+to meet a friend from England," I said, for all answer to his unexpected
+proposal. I hoped that something informing could come of it. As we stood
+on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily--
+
+"I like what you said just now."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+We stepped off the pavement together.
+
+"The great problem," he went on, "is to understand thoroughly the nature
+of the curse."
+
+"That's not very difficult, I think."
+
+"I think so too," he agreed with me, and his readiness, strangely
+enough, did not make him less enigmatical in the least.
+
+"A curse is an evil spell," I tried him again. "And the important, the
+great problem, is to find the means to break it."
+
+"Yes. To find the means."
+
+That was also an assent, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.
+We had crossed diagonally the open space before the theatre, and began
+to descend a broad, sparely frequented street in the direction of one of
+the smaller bridges. He kept on by my side without speaking for a long
+time.
+
+"You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?" I asked.
+
+He was silent for so long that I began to think I had been indiscreet,
+and should get no answer at all. Yet on looking at him I almost believed
+that my question had caused him something in the nature of positive
+anguish. I detected it mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he
+put a great force stealthily. Once, however, he had overcome that sort
+of agonizing hesitation sufficiently to tell me that he had no such
+intention, he became rather communicative--at least relatively to
+the former off-hand curtness of his speeches. The tone, too, was more
+amiable. He informed me that he intended to study and also to write. He
+went even so far as to tell me he had been to Stuttgart. Stuttgart, I
+was aware, was one of the revolutionary centres. The directing committee
+of one of the Russian parties (I can't tell now which) was located in
+that town. It was there that he got into touch with the active work of
+the revolutionists outside Russia.
+
+"I have never been abroad before," he explained, in a rather inanimate
+voice now. Then, after a slight hesitation, altogether different from
+the agonizing irresolution my first simple question "whether he meant to
+stay in Geneva" had aroused, he made me an unexpected confidence--
+
+"The fact is, I have received a sort of mission from them."
+
+"Which will keep you here in Geneva?"
+
+"Yes. Here. In this odious...."
+
+I was satisfied with my faculty for putting two and two together when I
+drew the inference that the mission had something to do with the
+person of the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I kept that surmise to myself
+naturally, and Mr. Razumov said nothing more for some considerable time.
+It was only when we were nearly on the bridge we had been making for
+that he opened his lips again, abruptly--
+
+"Could I see that precious article anywhere?"
+
+I had to think for a moment before I saw what he was referring to.
+
+"It has been reproduced in parts by the Press here. There are files to
+be seen in various places. My copy of the English newspaper I have left
+with Miss Haldin, I remember, on the day after it reached me. I was
+sufficiently worried by seeing it lying on a table by the side of the
+poor mother's chair for weeks. Then it disappeared. It was a relief, I
+assure you."
+
+He had stopped short.
+
+"I trust," I continued, "that you will find time to see these ladies
+fairly often--that you will make time."
+
+He stared at me so queerly that I hardly know how to define his aspect.
+I could not understand it in this connexion at all. What ailed him? I
+asked myself. What strange thought had come into his head? What vision
+of all the horrors that can be seen in his hopeless country had come
+suddenly to haunt his brain? If it were anything connected with the fate
+of Victor Haldin, then I hoped earnestly he would keep it to himself
+for ever. I was, to speak plainly, so shocked that I tried to conceal my
+impression by--Heaven forgive me--a smile and the assumption of a light
+manner.
+
+"Surely," I exclaimed, "that needn't cost you a great effort."
+
+He turned away from me and leaned over the parapet of the bridge. For a
+moment I waited, looking at his back. And yet, I assure you, I was not
+anxious just then to look at his face again. He did not move at all. He
+did not mean to move. I walked on slowly on my way towards the station,
+and at the end of the bridge I glanced over my shoulder. No, he had not
+moved. He hung well over the parapet, as if captivated by the smooth
+rush of the blue water under the arch. The current there is swift,
+extremely swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at
+it for any length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly
+snatched away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the
+suggestion of irresistible power and of headlong motion.
+
+It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov. I left him hanging far over
+the parapet of the bridge. The way he had behaved to me could not be put
+down to mere boorishness. There was something else under his scorn and
+impatience. Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to hidden truth,
+it was the same thing which had kept him over a week, nearly ten days
+indeed, from coming near Miss Haldin. But what it was I could not tell.
+
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
+rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
+granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov's breast,
+it could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of
+his life had deposited there.
+
+"What is the meaning of all this?" he thought, staring downwards at
+the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
+air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
+disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. "Why has that
+meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
+tale of a crazy old woman?"
+
+He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
+reference to the young girl. "A crazy old woman," he repeated to
+himself. "It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd?
+But no! I am wrong! I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may
+be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one
+to guard against it? It puts to rout one's intelligence. The more
+intelligent one is the less one suspects an absurdity."
+
+A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
+leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking,
+like a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his
+thought had some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
+
+"After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
+insignificant--absolutely. The craze of an old woman--the fussy
+officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
+the way? Haven't I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven't I just? That's
+the way to treat these meddlesome persons. Is it possible that he still
+stands behind my back, waiting?"
+
+Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine. It was not fear. He was
+certain that it was not fear--not fear for himself--but it was, all the
+same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he
+knew without being able to put a name on the personality. But the
+recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet
+tranquillized him for a time. It was too stupid to suppose that he
+should be wasting his time in waiting. It was unnecessary to look round
+and make sure.
+
+But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the
+newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a
+damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could
+be capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him--the sport of
+revolution--a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And
+what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, "Won't the truth do?"
+
+Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone coping over which he was
+leaning with force. "Won't the truth do? The truth for the crazy old
+mother of the--"
+
+The young man shuddered again. Yes. The truth would do! Apparently
+it would do. Exactly. And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
+unspoken words cynically. "Fall on my neck in gratitude, no doubt," he
+jeered mentally. But this mood abandoned him at once. He felt sad, as
+if his heart had become empty suddenly. "Well, I must be cautious," he
+concluded, coming to himself as though his brain had been awakened from
+a trance. "There is nothing, no one, too insignificant, too absurd to be
+disregarded," he thought wearily. "I must be cautious."
+
+Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from the balustrade and,
+retracing his steps along the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
+where, for a few days, he led a solitary and retired existence. He
+neglected Peter Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the Stuttgart
+group; he never went near the refugee revolutionists, to whom he had
+been introduced on his arrival. He kept out of that world altogether.
+And he felt that such conduct, causing surprise and arousing suspicion,
+contained an element of danger for himself.
+
+This is not to say that during these few days he never went out. I met
+him several times in the streets, but he gave me no recognition.
+Once, going home after an evening call on the ladies Haldin, I saw him
+crossing the dark roadway of the Boulevard des Philosophes. He had a
+broad-brimmed soft hat, and the collar of his coat turned up. I watched
+him make straight for the house, but, instead of going in, he stopped
+opposite the still lighted windows, and after a time went away down a
+side-street.
+
+I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin yet. Miss Haldin told
+me he was reluctant; moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin
+had changed. She seemed to think now that her son was living, and she
+perhaps awaited his arrival. Her immobility in the great arm-chair in
+front of the window had an air of expectancy, even when the blind was
+down and the lamps lighted.
+
+For my part, I was convinced that she had received her death-stroke;
+Miss Haldin, to whom, of course, I said nothing of my forebodings,
+thought that no good would come from introducing Mr. Razumov just then,
+an opinion which I shared fully. I knew that she met the young man on
+the Bastions. Once or twice I saw them strolling slowly up the main
+alley. They met every day for weeks. I avoided passing that way during
+the hour when Miss Haldin took her exercise there. One day, however,
+in a fit of absent-mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon her
+walking alone. I stopped to exchange a few words. Mr. Razumov failed to
+turn up, and we began to talk about him--naturally.
+
+"Did he tell you anything definite about your brother's activities--his
+end?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"No," admitted Miss Haldin, with some hesitation. "Nothing definite."
+
+I understood well enough that all their conversations must have been
+referred mentally to that dead man who had brought them together. That
+was unavoidable. But it was in the living man that she was interested.
+That was unavoidable too, I suppose. And as I pushed my inquiries
+I discovered that he had disclosed himself to her as a by no means
+conventional revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of theories, of
+men too. I was rather pleased at that--but I was a little puzzled.
+
+"His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle," Miss Haldin
+explained. "Of course, he is an actual worker too," she added.
+
+"And do you understand him?" I inquired point-blank.
+
+She hesitated again. "Not altogether," she murmured.
+
+I perceived that he had fascinated her by an assumption of mysterious
+reserve.
+
+"Do you know what I think?" she went on, breaking through her reserved,
+almost reluctant attitude: "I think that he is observing, studying me,
+to discover whether I am worthy of his trust...."
+
+"And that pleases you?"
+
+She kept mysteriously silent for a moment. Then with energy, but in a
+confidential tone--
+
+"I am convinced;" she declared, "that this extraordinary man is
+meditating some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by
+it--he suffers from it--and from being alone in the world."
+
+"And so he's looking for helpers?" I commented, turning away my head.
+
+Again there was a silence.
+
+"Why not?" she said at last.
+
+The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign friend, had fallen
+into a distant background. But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was
+absolutely nowhere now. And this thought consoled me. Yet I saw the
+gigantic shadow of Russian life deepening around her like the darkness
+of an advancing night. It would devour her presently. I inquired after
+Mrs. Haldin--that other victim of the deadly shade.
+
+A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank eyes. Mother seemed no
+worse, but if I only knew what strange fancies she had sometimes! Then
+Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch, declared that she could not stay a
+moment longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off lightly.
+
+Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that day. Incomprehensible
+youth!
+
+But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing the Place Mollard, I
+caught sight of him boarding a South Shore tramcar.
+
+"He's going to the Chateau Borel," I thought.
+
+
+After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half
+a mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two
+straight lines of shady trees. Across the roadway in the sunshine a
+short wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out
+had an intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly
+slopes on the opposite shore. The whole view, with the harbour jetties
+of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to
+the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting
+promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering
+quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with
+contempt. He thought it odious--oppressively odious--in its unsuggestive
+finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after
+centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the
+entrance to the grounds of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark
+weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
+wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for
+a very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey
+stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small
+side entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
+as though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov,
+trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
+
+"Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently," he muttered
+to himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he
+looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the
+clean, broad avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms
+hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in
+lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.
+
+"Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!" Razumov muttered to himself. "A brute,
+all the same."
+
+Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of
+the drive, trying to think of nothing--to rest his head, to rest his
+emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house
+he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
+mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped
+short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow
+arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept
+narrow flower-bed along its foot.
+
+"It is here!" he thought, with a sort of awe. "It is here--on this very
+spot...."
+
+He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
+with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move,
+and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but
+because he knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could
+not leave Geneva. He recognized, even without thinking, that it was
+impossible. It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral
+suicide. It would have been also physically dangerous. Slowly he
+ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish
+stone urns of funereal aspect.
+
+Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
+discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
+shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had
+been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter
+Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his approach.
+
+The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared head of Europe's greatest
+feminist accentuated the dubiousness of his status in the house rented
+by Madame de S--, his Egeria. His aspect combined the formality of the
+caller with the freedom of the proprietor. Florid and bearded and masked
+by the dark blue glasses, he met the visitor, and at once took him
+familiarly under the arm.
+
+Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by an effort which the
+constant necessity of prudence had rendered almost mechanical. And
+this necessity had settled his expression in a cast of austere, almost
+fanatical, aloofness. The "heroic fugitive," impressed afresh by the
+severe detachment of this new arrival from revolutionary Russia, took a
+conciliatory, even a confidential tone. Madame de S-- was resting after
+a bad night. She often had bad nights. He had left his hat upstairs on
+the landing and had come down to suggest to his young friend a stroll
+and a good open-hearted talk in one of the shady alleys behind the
+house. After voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at the unmoved
+face by his side, and could not restrain himself from exclaiming--
+
+"On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary person."
+
+"I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch. If I were really an
+extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden
+in Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of--what's the name of the
+Commune this place belongs to?... Never mind--the heart of democracy,
+anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as
+much value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians,
+wandering abroad."
+
+But Peter Ivanovitch dissented emphatically--
+
+"No! No! You are not ordinary. I have some experience of Russians who
+are--well--living abroad. You appear to me, and to others too, a marked
+personality."
+
+"What does he mean by this?" Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes
+fully on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a
+meditative seriousness.
+
+"You don't suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I have not heard of you
+from various points where you made yourself known on your way here? I
+have had letters."
+
+"Oh, we are great in talking about each other," interjected Razumov, who
+had listened with great attention. "Gossip, tales, suspicions, and
+all that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny,
+even."
+
+In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very well to conceal the
+feeling of anxiety which had come over him. At the same time he was
+saying to himself that there could be no earthly reason for anxiety. He
+was relieved by the evident sincerity of the protesting voice.
+
+"Heavens!" cried Peter Ivanovitch. "What are you talking about? What
+reason can _you_ have to...?"
+
+The great exile flung up his arms as if words had failed him in sober
+truth. Razumov was satisfied. Yet he was moved to continue in the same
+vein.
+
+"I am talking of the poisonous plants which flourish in the world of
+conspirators, like evil mushrooms in a dark cellar."
+
+"You are casting aspersions," remonstrated Peter Ivanovitch, "which as
+far as you are concerned--"
+
+"No!" Razumov interrupted without heat. "Indeed, I don't want to cast
+aspersions, but it's just as well to have no illusions."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance of his dark spectacles,
+accompanied by a faint smile.
+
+"The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one," he
+said, in a very friendly tone. "But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
+You aim at stoicism."
+
+"Stoicism! That's a pose of the Greeks and the Romans. Let's leave
+it to them. We are Russians, that is--children; that is--sincere; that
+is--cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose."
+
+A long silence ensued. They strolled slowly under the lime-trees.
+Peter Ivanovitch had put his hands behind his back. Razumov felt the
+ungravelled ground of the deeply shaded walk damp and as if slippery
+under his feet. He asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were saying the
+right things. The direction of the conversation ought to have been more
+under his control, he reflected. The great man appeared to be reflecting
+on his side too. He cleared his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at
+once a painful reawakening of scorn and fear.
+
+"I am astonished," began Peter Ivanovitch gently. "Supposing you are
+right in your indictment, how can you raise any question of calumny
+or gossip, in your case? It is unreasonable. The fact is, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, there is not enough known of you to give hold to gossip or
+even calumny. Just now you are a man associated with a great deed, which
+had been hoped for, and tried for too, without success. People have
+perished for attempting that which you and Haldin have done at last. You
+come to us out of Russia, with that prestige. But you cannot deny that
+you have not been communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met
+imparted their impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I
+form my own opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out
+of the common. That's positively so. You are close, very close. This
+taciturnity, this severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in
+you, inspires hopes and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There
+is something of a Brutus...."
+
+"Pray spare me those classical allusions!" burst out Razumov nervously.
+"What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
+say," he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, "that the Russian
+revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
+clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps,
+pondering.
+
+"Not _all_ patricians," he muttered at last. "But you, at any rate, are
+one of _us_."
+
+Razumov smiled bitterly.
+
+"To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer," he said in a sneering tone. "I
+am not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck.
+I have no name, I have no...."
+
+The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace
+and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
+entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.
+
+"But, my dear young friend!" he cried. "My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch...."
+
+Razumov shook his head.
+
+"The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I
+have no legal right to--but what of that? I don't wish to claim it.
+I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my
+mother's grandfather was a peasant--a serf. See how much I am one of
+_you_. I don't want anyone to claim me. But Russia _can't_ disown me.
+She cannot!"
+
+Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
+
+"I am _it_!"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
+vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity
+was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he
+thought, with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark
+glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he
+fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but
+with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on
+that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming
+light-headed. "It is not what is expected of me," he repeated to
+himself. "It is not what is--I could get away by breaking the fastening
+on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock.
+Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat!
+These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing.
+They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade--but I
+would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?" he asked
+himself in a fright.
+
+The great man was heard--musing in an undertone.
+
+"H'm, yes! That--no doubt--in a certain sense...." He raised his
+voice. "There is a deal of pride about you...."
+
+The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring,
+acknowledging, in a way, Razumov's claim to peasant descent.
+
+"A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo. And I don't say that you have no
+justification for it. I have admitted you had. I have ventured to allude
+to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance
+to it. You are one of us--_un des notres_. I reflect on that with
+satisfaction."
+
+"I attach some importance to it also," said Razumov quietly. "I won't
+even deny that it may have some importance for you too," he continued,
+after a slight pause and with a touch of grimness of which he was
+himself aware, with some annoyance. He hoped it had escaped the
+perception of Peter Ivanovitch. "But suppose we talk no more about it?"
+
+"Well, we shall not--not after this one time, Kirylo Sidorovitch,"
+persisted the noble arch-priest of Revolution. "This shall be the last
+occasion. You cannot believe for a moment that I had the slightest idea
+of wounding your feelings. You are clearly a superior nature--that's how
+I read you. Quite above the common--h'm--susceptibilities. But the fact
+is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I don't know your susceptibilities. Nobody, out
+of Russia, knows much of you--as yet!"
+
+"You have been watching me?" suggested Razumov.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect frankness, but as they
+turned their faces to each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
+spectacles. Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch hinted that he had felt
+for some time the need of meeting a man of energy and character, in view
+of a certain project. He said nothing more precise, however; and after
+some critical remarks upon the personalities of the various members
+of the committee of revolutionary action in Stuttgart, he let the
+conversation lapse for quite a long while. They paced the alley from end
+to end. Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a
+glance at the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited.
+With its grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from
+top to bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very
+well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
+futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly
+rumour had it, by Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
+deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another
+sort. Razumov had never seen Madame de S-- but in the carriage.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
+
+"Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
+leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people.
+Now, if you ask me what are the dregs of a people--h'm--it would take
+too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
+that for me go to the making up of these dregs--of that which ought,
+_must_ remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be subject
+to discussion. But I can tell you what is _not_ the dregs. On that it
+is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the
+dregs; neither is its highest class--well--the nobility. Reflect on
+that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection.
+Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or
+development, is--well--dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
+Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second thing I would
+offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment there yawns
+a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by
+foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or cheating.
+Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up."
+
+A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
+feminist. He seized Razumov's arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
+shake.
+
+"Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
+up."
+
+Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
+
+"Don't you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
+subject?" he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased
+the distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went
+on strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words
+and theories could never fill that chasm. No meditation was necessary.
+A sacrifice of many lives could alone--He fell silent without finishing
+the phrase.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head slowly. After a moment he
+proposed that they should go and see if Madame de S-- was now visible.
+
+"We shall get some tea," he said, turning out of the shaded gloomy walk
+with a brisker step.
+
+The lady companion had been on the look out. Her dark skirt whisked into
+the doorway as the two men came in sight round the corner. She ran off
+somewhere altogether, and had disappeared when they entered the hall. In
+the crude light falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the black
+and white tessellated floor, covered with muddy tracks, their footsteps
+echoed faintly. The great feminist led the way up the stairs. On the
+balustrade of the first-floor landing a shiny tall hat reposed, rim
+upwards, opposite the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it
+was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by
+fugitive revolutionists. The cracked white paint of the panels, the
+tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but
+dust and emptiness within. Before turning the massive brass handle,
+Peter Ivanovitch gave his young companion a sharp, partly critical,
+partly preparatory glance.
+
+"No one is perfect," he murmured discreetly. Thus, the possessor of a
+rare jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no
+gem perhaps is flawless.
+
+He remained with his hand on the door-handle so long that Razumov
+assented by a moody "No."
+
+"Perfection itself would not produce that effect," pursued Peter
+Ivanovitch, "in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a
+mind--no!--the quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand
+any perplexity you may be suffering from by the irresistible,
+enlightening force of sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before
+that--that--inspired, yes, inspired penetration, this true light of
+femininity."
+
+The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy steadfastness gave his
+face an air of absolute conviction. Razumov felt a momentary shrinking
+before that closed door.
+
+"Penetration? Light," he stammered out. "Do you mean some sort of
+thought-reading?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
+
+"I mean something utterly different," he retorted, with a faint, pitying
+smile.
+
+Razumov began to feel angry, very much against his wish.
+
+"This is very mysterious," he muttered through his teeth.
+
+"You don't object to being understood, to being guided?" queried the
+great feminist. Razumov exploded in a fierce whisper.
+
+"In what sense? Be pleased to understand that I am a serious person. Who
+do you take me for?"
+
+They looked at each other very closely. Razumov's temper was cooled
+by the impenetrable earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his stare.
+Peter Ivanovitch turned the handle at last.
+
+"You shall know directly," he said, pushing the door open.
+
+A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the room.
+
+"_Enfin_."
+
+In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking the view, Peter
+Ivanovitch boomed in a hearty tone with something boastful in it.
+
+"Yes. Here I am!"
+
+He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who waited for him to move on.
+
+"And I am bringing you a proved conspirator--a real one this time. _Un
+vrai celui la_."
+
+This pause in the doorway gave the "proved conspirator" time to make
+sure that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his mental
+disgust.
+
+These sentiments stand confessed in Mr. Razumov's memorandum of
+his first interview with Madame de S--. The very words I use in my
+narrative are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected. The
+record, which could not have been meant for anyone's eyes but his own,
+was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion
+common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable
+existence of "compromising documents" in all the plots and conspiracies
+of history. Mr. Razumov looked at it, I suppose, as a man looks at
+himself in a mirror, with wonder, perhaps with anguish, with anger or
+despair. Yes, as a threatened man may look fearfully at his own face in
+the glass, formulating to himself reassuring excuses for his appearance
+marked by the taint of some insidious hereditary disease.
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Egeria of the "Russian Mazzini" produced, at first view, a strong
+effect by the death-like immobility of an obviously painted face. The
+eyes appeared extraordinarily brilliant. The figure, in a close-fitting
+dress, admirably made, but by no means fresh, had an elegant stiffness.
+The rasping voice inviting him to sit down; the rigidity of the upright
+attitude with one arm extended along the back of the sofa, the white
+gleam of the big eyeballs setting off the black, fathomless stare of the
+enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than anything he had seen since
+his hasty and secret departure from St. Petersburg. A witch in Parisian
+clothes, he thought. A portent! He actually hesitated in his advance,
+and did not even comprehend, at first, what the rasping voice was
+saying.
+
+"Sit down. Draw your chair nearer me. There--"
+
+He sat down. At close quarters the rouged cheekbones, the wrinkles, the
+fine lines on each side of the vivid lips, astounded him. He was being
+received graciously, with a smile which made him think of a grinning
+skull.
+
+"We have been hearing about you for some time."
+
+He did not know what to say, and murmured some disconnected words. The
+grinning skull effect vanished.
+
+"And do you know that the general complaint is that you have shown
+yourself very reserved everywhere?"
+
+Razumov remained silent for a time, thinking of his answer.
+
+"I, don't you see, am a man of action," he said huskily, glancing
+upwards.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch stood in portentous expectant silence by the side of
+his chair. A slight feeling of nausea came over Razumov. What could be
+the relations of these two people to each other? She like a galvanized
+corpse out of some Hoffman's Tale--he the preacher of feminist gospel
+for all the world, and a super-revolutionist besides! This ancient,
+painted mummy with unfathomable eyes, and this burly, bull-necked,
+deferential...what was it? Witchcraft, fascination.... "It's for
+her money," he thought. "She has millions!"
+
+The walls, the floor of the room were bare like a barn. The few pieces
+of furniture had been discovered in the garrets and dragged down into
+service without having been properly dusted, even. It was the refuse the
+banker's widow had left behind her. The windows without curtains had an
+indigent, sleepless look. In two of them the dirty yellowy-white blinds
+had been pulled down. All this spoke, not of poverty, but of sordid
+penuriousness.
+
+The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily--
+
+"You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I have been shamefully
+robbed, positively ruined."
+
+A rattling laugh, which seemed beyond her control, interrupted her for a
+moment.
+
+"A slavish nature would find consolation in the fact that the principal
+robber was an exalted and almost a sacrosanct person--a Grand Duke, in
+fact. Do you understand, Mr. Razumov? A Grand Duke--No! You have no idea
+what thieves those people are! Downright thieves!"
+
+Her bosom heaved, but her left arm remained rigidly extended along the
+back of the couch.
+
+"You will only upset yourself," breathed out a deep voice, which, to
+Razumov's startled glance, seemed to proceed from under the steady
+spectacles of Peter Ivanovitch, rather than from his lips, which had
+hardly moved.
+
+"What of hat? I say thieves! _Voleurs! Voleurs!_"
+
+Razumov was quite confounded by this unexpected clamour, which had in
+it something of wailing and croaking, and more than a suspicion of
+hysteria.
+
+"_Voleurs! Voleurs! Vol_...."
+
+"No power on earth can rob you of your genius," shouted Peter Ivanovitch
+in an overpowering bass, but without stirring, without a gesture of any
+kind. A profound silence fell.
+
+Razumov remained outwardly impassive. "What is the meaning of this
+performance?" he was asking himself. But with a preliminary sound
+of bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a
+threadbare black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on
+her heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously
+too heavy for her. Razumov made an instinctive movement to help, which
+startled her so much that she nearly dropped her hissing burden. She
+managed, however, to land it on the table, and looked so frightened that
+Razumov hastened to sit down. She produced then, from an adjacent room,
+four glass tumblers, a teapot, and a sugar-basin, on a black iron tray.
+
+The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly--
+
+"_Les gateaux_? Have you remembered to bring the cakes?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, without a word, marched out on to the landing, and
+returned instantly with a parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which
+he must have extracted from the interior of his hat. With imperturbable
+gravity he undid the string and smoothed the paper open on a part of the
+table within reach of Madame de S--'s hand. The lady companion poured
+out the tea, then retired into a distant corner out of everybody's
+sight. From time to time Madame de S-- extended a claw-like hand,
+glittering with costly rings, towards the paper of cakes, took up one
+and devoured it, displaying her big false teeth ghoulishly. Meantime she
+talked in a hoarse tone of the political situation in the Balkans. She
+built great hopes on some complication in the peninsula for arousing
+a great movement of national indignation in Russia against "these
+thieves--thieves thieves."
+
+"You will only upset yourself," Peter Ivanovitch interposed, raising
+his glassy gaze. He smoked cigarettes and drank tea in silence,
+continuously. When he had finished a glass, he flourished his hand
+above his shoulder. At that signal the lady companion, ensconced in her
+corner, with round eyes like a watchful animal, would dart out to the
+table and pour him out another tumblerful.
+
+Razumov looked at her once or twice. She was anxious, tremulous, though
+neither Madame de S-- nor Peter Ivanovitch paid the slightest attention
+to her. "What have they done between them to that forlorn creature?"
+Razumov asked himself. "Have they terrified her out of her senses with
+ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?" When she gave him
+his second glass of tea, he noticed that her lips trembled in the manner
+of a scared person about to burst into speech. But of course she said
+nothing, and retired into her corner, as if hugging to herself the smile
+of thanks he gave her.
+
+"She may be worth cultivating," thought Razumov suddenly.
+
+He was calming down, getting hold of the actuality into which he had
+been thrown--for the first time perhaps since Victor Haldin had entered
+his room...and had gone out again. He was distinctly aware of being
+the object of the famous--or notorious--Madame de S--'s ghastly
+graciousness.
+
+Madame de S-- was pleased to discover that this young man was different
+from the other types of revolutionist members of committees, secret
+emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough students,
+ex-cobblers with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged enthusiasts,
+Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come and go
+around Peter Ivanovitch--fanatics, pedants, proletarians all. It was
+pleasant to talk to this young man of notably good appearance--for
+Madame de S-- was not always in a mystical state of mind. Razumov's
+taciturnity only excited her to a quicker, more voluble utterance. It
+still dealt with the Balkans. She knew all the statesmen of that region,
+Turks, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Roumanians, Greeks, Armenians, and
+nondescripts, young and old, the living and the dead. With some money an
+intrigue could be started which would set the Peninsula in a blaze and
+outrage the sentiment of the Russian people. A cry of abandoned brothers
+could be raised, and then, with the nation seething with indignation, a
+couple of regiments or so would be enough to begin a military revolution
+in St. Petersburg and make an end of these thieves....
+
+"Apparently I've got only to sit still and listen," the silent Razumov
+thought to himself. "As to that hairy and obscene brute" (in such terms
+did Mr. Razumov refer mentally to the popular expounder of a feministic
+conception of social state), "as to him, for all his cunning he too
+shall speak out some day."
+
+Razumov ceased to think for a moment. Then a sombre-toned reflection
+formulated itself in his mind, ironical and bitter. "I have the gift of
+inspiring confidence." He heard himself laughing aloud. It was like a
+goad to the painted, shiny-eyed harridan on the sofa.
+
+"You may well laugh!" she cried hoarsely. "What else can one do!
+Perfect swindlers--and what base swindlers at that! Cheap
+Germans--Holstein-Gottorps! Though, indeed, it's hardly safe to say who
+and what they are. A family that counts a creature like Catherine the
+Great in its ancestry--you understand!"
+
+"You are only upsetting yourself," said Peter Ivanovitch, patiently but
+in a firm tone. This admonition had its usual effect on the Egeria. She
+dropped her thick, discoloured eyelids and changed her position on the
+sofa. All her angular and lifeless movements seemed completely automatic
+now that her eyes were closed. Presently she opened them very full.
+Peter Ivanovitch drank tea steadily, without haste.
+
+"Well, I declare!" She addressed Razumov directly. "The people who have
+seen you on your way here are right. You are very reserved. You haven't
+said twenty words altogether since you came in. You let nothing of your
+thoughts be seen in your face either."
+
+"I have been listening, Madame," said Razumov, using French for the
+first time, hesitatingly, not being certain of his accent. But it seemed
+to produce an excellent impression. Madame de S-- looked meaningly into
+Peter Ivanovitch's spectacles, as if to convey her conviction of this
+young man's merit. She even nodded the least bit in his direction, and
+Razumov heard her murmur under her breath the words, "Later on in
+the diplomatic service," which could not but refer to the favourable
+impression he had made. The fantastic absurdity of it revolted him
+because it seemed to outrage his ruined hopes with the vision of a
+mock-career. Peter Ivanovitch, impassive as though he were deaf, drank
+some more tea. Razumov felt that he must say something.
+
+"Yes," he began deliberately, as if uttering a meditated opinion.
+"Clearly. Even in planning a purely military revolution the temper of
+the people should be taken into account."
+
+"You have understood me perfectly. The discontent should be
+spiritualized. That is what the ordinary heads of revolutionary
+committees will not understand. They aren't capable of it. For instance,
+Mordatiev was in Geneva last month. Peter Ivanovitch brought him here.
+You know Mordatiev? Well, yes--you have heard of him. They call him
+an eagle--a hero! He has never done half as much as you have. Never
+attempted--not half...."
+
+Madame de S-- agitated herself angularly on the sofa.
+
+"We, of course, talked to him. And do you know what he said to me?
+'What have we to do with Balkan intrigues? We must simply extirpate the
+scoundrels.' Extirpate is all very well--but what then? The imbecile!
+I screamed at him, 'But you must spiritualize--don't you
+understand?--spiritualize the discontent.'..."
+
+She felt nervously in her pocket for a handkerchief; she pressed it to
+her lips.
+
+"Spiritualize?" said Razumov interrogatively, watching her heaving
+breast. The long ends of an old black lace scarf she wore over her head
+slipped off her shoulders and hung down on each side of her ghastly rosy
+cheeks.
+
+"An odious creature," she burst out again. "Imagine a man who takes five
+lumps of sugar in his tea.... Yes, I said spiritualize! How else can
+you make discontent effective and universal?"
+
+"Listen to this, young man." Peter Ivanovitch made himself heard
+solemnly. "Effective and universal."
+
+Razumov looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"Some say hunger will do that," he remarked.
+
+"Yes. I know. Our people are starving in heaps. But you can't make
+famine universal. And it is not despair that we want to create. There is
+no moral support to be got out of that. It is indignation...."
+
+Madame de S-- let her thin, extended arm sink on her knees.
+
+"I am not a Mordatiev," began Razumov.
+
+"Bien sur!" murmured Madame de S--.
+
+"Though I too am ready to say extirpate, extirpate! But in my ignorance
+of political work, permit me to ask: A Balkan--well--intrigue, wouldn't
+that take a very long time?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch got up and moved off quietly, to stand with his face to
+the window. Razumov heard a door close; he turned his head and perceived
+that the lady companion had scuttled out of the room.
+
+"In matters of politics I am a supernaturalist." Madame de S-- broke
+the silence harshly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch moved away from the window and struck Razumov lightly
+on the shoulder. This was a signal for leaving, but at the same time he
+addressed Madame de S-- in a peculiar reminding tone---
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+Whatever it meant, she did not seem to hear him. She leaned back in the
+corner of the sofa like a wooden figure. The immovable peevishness of
+the face, framed in the limp, rusty lace, had a character of cruelty.
+
+"As to extirpating," she croaked at the attentive Razumov, "there is
+only one class in Russia which must be extirpated. Only one. And that
+class consists of only one family. You understand me? That one family
+must be extirpated."
+
+Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigor of a corpse galvanized into
+harsh speech and glittering stare by the force of murderous hate. The
+sight fascinated Razumov--yet he felt more self-possessed than at
+any other time since he had entered this weirdly bare room. He was
+interested. But the great feminist by his side again uttered his
+appeal--
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She disregarded it. Her carmine lips vaticinated with an extraordinary
+rapidity. The liberating spirit would use arms before which rivers would
+part like Jordan, and ramparts fall down like the walls of Jericho. The
+deliverance from bondage would be effected by plagues and by signs, by
+wonders and by war. The women....
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She ceased; she had heard him at last. She pressed her hand to her
+forehead.
+
+"What is it? Ah yes! That girl--the sister of...."
+
+It was Miss Haldin that she meant. That young girl and her mother had
+been leading a very retired life. They were provincial ladies--were they
+not? The mother had been very beautiful--traces were left yet. Peter
+Ivanovitch, when he called there for the first time, was greatly
+struck....But the cold way they received him was really surprising.
+
+"He is one of our national glories," Madams de S-- cried out, with
+sudden vehemence. "All the world listens to him."
+
+"I don't know these ladies," said Razumov loudly rising from his chair.
+
+"What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I understand that she was
+talking to you here, in the garden, the other day."
+
+"Yes, in the garden," said Razumov gloomily. Then, with an effort, "She
+made herself known to me."
+
+"And then ran away from us all," Madame de S-- continued, with ghastly
+vivacity. "After coming to the very door! What a peculiar proceeding!
+Well, I have been a shy little provincial girl at one time. Yes,
+Razumov" (she fell into this familiarity intentionally, with an
+appalling grimace of graciousness. Razumov gave a perceptible start),
+"yes, that's my origin. A simple provincial family.
+
+"You are a marvel," Peter Ivanovich uttered.
+
+But it was to Razumov that she gave her death's-head smile. Her tone was
+quite imperious.
+
+"You must bring the wild young thing here. She is wanted. I reckon upon
+your success--mind!"
+
+"She is not a wild young thing," muttered Razumov, in a surly voice.
+
+"Well, then--that's all the same. She may be one of these young
+conceited democrats. Do you know what I think? I think she is very much
+like you in character. There is a smouldering fire of scorn in you. You
+are darkly self-sufficient, but I can see your very soul."
+
+Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which, missing Razumov, gave
+him an absurd notion that she was looking at something which was visible
+to her behind him. He cursed himself for an impressionable fool, and
+asked with forced calmness--
+
+"What is it you see? Anything resembling me?"
+
+She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.
+
+"Some sort of phantom in my image?" pursued Razumov slowly. "For, I
+suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There are
+phantoms of the living as well as of the dead."
+
+The tenseness of Madame de S--'s stare had relaxed, and now she looked
+at Razumov in a silence that became disconcerting.
+
+"I myself have had an experience," he stammered out, as if compelled.
+"I've seen a phantom once." The unnaturally red lips moved to frame a
+question harshly.
+
+"Of a dead person?"
+
+"No. Living."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+"No."
+
+"An enemy?"
+
+"I hated him."
+
+"Ah! It was not a woman, then?"
+
+"A woman!" repeated Razumov, his eyes looking straight into the eyes
+of Madame de S--. "Why should it have been a woman? And why this
+conclusion? Why should I not have been able to hate a woman?"
+
+As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman was new to him. At that
+moment he hated Madame de S--. But it was not exactly hate. It was more
+like the abhorrence that may be caused by a wooden or plaster figure of
+a repulsive kind. She moved no more than if she were such a figure; even
+her eyes, whose unwinking stare plunged into his own, though shining,
+were lifeless, as though they were as artificial as her teeth. For the
+first time Razumov became aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was
+it nauseated him exceedingly. Again Peter Ivanovitch tapped him slightly
+on the shoulder. Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away when
+he received the unexpected favour of a bony, inanimate hand extended to
+him, with the two words in hoarse French--
+
+"_Au revoir!_"
+
+He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the room, escorted by the great
+man, who made him go out first. The voice from the sofa cried after
+them--
+
+"You remain here, _Pierre_."
+
+"Certainly, _ma chere amie_."
+
+But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the door behind him. The
+landing was prolonged into a bare corridor, right and left, desolate
+perspectives of white and gold decoration without a strip of carpet. The
+very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and
+a solitary speck reposing on the balustrade of white marble--the silk
+top-hat of the great feminist--asserted itself extremely, black and
+glossy in all that crude whiteness.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch escorted the visitor without opening his lips. Even
+when they had reached the head of the stairs Peter Ivanovitch did not
+break the silence. Razumov's impulse to continue down the flight and out
+of the house without as much as a nod abandoned him suddenly. He stopped
+on the first step and leaned his back against the wall. Below him the
+great hall with its chequered floor of black and white seemed absurdly
+large and like some public place where a great power of resonance awaits
+the provocation of footfalls and voices. As if afraid of awakening the
+loud echoes of that empty house, Razumov adopted a low tone.
+
+"I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch shook his head slightly, very serious.
+
+"Or spend my time in spiritual ecstasies or sublime meditations upon the
+gospel of feminism," continued Razumov. "I made my way here for my share
+of action--action, most respected Peter Ivanovitch! It was not the great
+European writer who attracted me, here, to this odious town of liberty.
+It was somebody much greater. It was the idea of the chief which
+attracted me. There are starving young men in Russia who believe in
+you so much that it seems the only thing that keeps them alive in their
+misery. Think of that, Peter Ivanovitch! No! But only think of that!"
+
+The great man, thus entreated, perfectly motionless and silent, was the
+very image of patient, placid respectability.
+
+"Of course I don't speak of the people. They are brutes," added Razumov,
+in the same subdued but forcible tone. At this, a protesting murmur
+issued from the "heroic fugitive's" beard. A murmur of authority.
+
+"Say--children."
+
+"No! Brutes!" Razumov insisted bluntly.
+
+"But they are sound, they are innocent," the great man pleaded in a
+whisper.
+
+"As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough." Razumov raised his
+voice at last. "And you can't deny the natural innocence of a brute.
+But what's the use of disputing about names? You just try to give these
+children the power and stature of men and see what they will be like.
+You just give it to them and see.... But never mind. I tell you,
+Peter Ivanovitch, that half a dozen young men do not come together
+nowadays in a shabby student's room without your name being whispered,
+not as a leader of thought, but as a centre of revolutionary
+energies--the centre of action. What else has drawn me near you, do you
+think? It is not what all the world knows of you, surely. It's precisely
+what the world at large does not know. I was irresistibly drawn-let us
+say impelled, yes, impelled; or, rather, compelled, driven--driven,"
+repented Razumov loudly, and ceased, as if startled by the hollow
+reverberation of the word "driven" along two bare corridors and in the
+great empty hall.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch did not seem startled in the least. The young man
+could not control a dry, uneasy laugh. The great revolutionist remained
+unmoved with an effect of commonplace, homely superiority.
+
+"Curse him," said Razumov to himself, "he is waiting behind his
+spectacles for me to give myself away." Then aloud, with a satanic
+enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play with the greatness of the
+great man--
+
+"Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the force which drew--no, which
+_drove_ me towards you! The irresistible force."
+
+He did not feel any desire to laugh now. This time Peter Ivanovitch
+moved his head sideways, knowingly, as much as to say, "Don't I?" This
+expressive movement was almost imperceptible. Razumov went on in secret
+derision--
+
+"All these days you have been trying to read me, Peter Ivanovitch. That
+is natural. I have perceived it and I have been frank. Perhaps you may
+think I have not been very expansive? But with a man like you it was not
+needed; it would have looked like an impertinence, perhaps. And besides,
+we Russians are prone to talk too much as a rule. I have always felt
+that. And yet, as a nation, we are dumb. I assure you that I am not
+likely to talk to you so much again--ha! ha!--"
+
+Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a little nearer to the
+great man.
+
+"You have been condescending enough. I quite understood it was to lead
+me on. You must render me the justice that I have not tried to please. I
+have been impelled, compelled, or rather sent--let us say sent--towards
+you for a work that no one but myself can do. You would call it a
+harmless delusion: a ridiculous delusion at which you don't even smile.
+It is absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you shall remember
+these words, I hope. Enough of this. Here I stand before you-confessed!
+But one thing more I must add to complete it: a mere blind tool I can
+never consent to be."
+
+Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared for, he was not prepared
+to have both his hands seized in the great man's grasp. The swiftness of
+the movement was aggressive enough to startle. The burly feminist could
+not have been quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov treacherously
+up on the landing and bundle him behind one of the numerous closed
+doors near by. This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his hands being
+released after a darkly eloquent squeeze, he smiled, with a beating
+heart, straight at the beard and the spectacles hiding that impenetrable
+man.
+
+He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his handwriting), "I won't
+move from here till he either speaks or turns away. This is a duel."
+Many seconds passed without a sign or sound.
+
+"Yes, yes," the great man said hurriedly, in subdued tones, as if the
+whole thing had been a stolen, breathless interview. "Exactly. Come
+to see us here in a few days. This must be gone into deeply--deeply,
+between you and me. Quite to the bottom. To the...And, by the by,
+you must bring along Natalia Victorovna--you know, the Haldin girl....
+
+"Am I to take this as my first instruction from you?" inquired Razumov
+stiffly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new attitude.
+
+"Ah! h'm! You are naturally the proper person--_la personne indiquee_.
+Every one shall be wanted presently. Every one."
+
+He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who had lowered his eyes.
+
+"The moment of action approaches," he murmured.
+
+Razumov did not look up. He did not move till he heard the door of the
+drawing-room close behind the greatest of feminists returning to his
+painted Egeria. Then he walked down slowly into the hall. The door stood
+open, and the shadow of the house was lying aslant over the greatest
+part of the terrace. While crossing it slowly, he lifted his hat and
+wiped his damp forehead, expelling his breath with force to get rid of
+the last vestiges of the air he had been breathing inside. He looked at
+the palms of his hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.
+
+He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an independent
+sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole person very
+distinctly indeed. "This is curious," he thought. After a while he
+formulated his opinion of it in the mental ejaculation: "Beastly!"
+This disgust vanished before a marked uneasiness. "This is an effect of
+nervous exhaustion," he reflected with weary sagacity. "How am I to
+go on day after day if I have no more power of resistance--moral
+resistance?"
+
+He followed the path at the foot of the terrace. "Moral resistance,
+moral resistance;" he kept on repeating these words mentally. Moral
+endurance. Yes, that was the necessity of the situation. An immense
+longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the
+town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept
+everything clean out of his mind for a moment. "Is it possible that I am
+but a weak creature after all?" he asked himself, in sudden alarm. "Eh!
+What's that?"
+
+He gave a start as if awakened from a dream. He even swayed a little
+before recovering himself.
+
+"Ah! You stole away from us quietly to walk about here," he said.
+
+The lady companion stood before him, but how she came there he had not
+the slightest idea. Her folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.
+
+"I have been unconscious as I walked, it's a positive fact," said
+Razumov to himself in wonder. He raised his hat with marked civility.
+
+The sallow woman blushed duskily. She had her invariably scared
+expression, as if somebody had just disclosed to her some terrible news.
+But she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without timidity. "She is
+incredibly shabby," he thought. In the sunlight her black costume looked
+greenish, with here and there threadbare patches where the stuff seemed
+decomposed by age into a velvety, black, furry state. Her very hair and
+eyebrows looked shabby. Razumov wondered whether she were sixty years
+old. Her figure, though, was young enough. He observed that she did not
+appear starved, but rather as if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps
+and leavings of plates.
+
+Razumov smiled amiably and moved out of her way. She turned her head to
+keep her scared eyes on him.
+
+"I know what you have been told in there," she affirmed, without
+preliminaries. Her tone, in contrast with her manner, had an
+unexpectedly assured character which put Razumov at his ease.
+
+"Do you? You must have heard all sorts of talk on many occasions in
+there."
+
+She varied her phrase, with the same incongruous effect of positiveness.
+
+"I know to a certainty what you have been told to do."
+
+"Really?" Razumov shrugged his shoulders a little. He was about to pass
+on with a bow, when a sudden thought struck him. "Yes. To be sure! In
+your confidential position you are aware of many things," he murmured,
+looking at the cat.
+
+That animal got a momentary convulsive hug from the lady companion.
+
+"Everything was disclosed to me a long time ago," she said.
+
+"Everything," Razumov repeated absently.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an awful despot," she jerked out.
+
+Razumov went on studying the stripes on the grey fur of the cat.
+
+"An iron will is an integral part of such a temperament. How else could
+he be a leader? And I think that you are mistaken in--"
+
+"There!" she cried. "You tell me that I am mistaken. But I tell you all
+the same that he cares for no one." She jerked her head up. "Don't you
+bring that girl here. That's what you have been told to do--to bring
+that girl here. Listen to me; you had better tie a stone round her neck
+and throw her into the lake."
+
+Razumov had a sensation of chill and gloom, as if a heavy cloud had
+passed over the sun.
+
+"The girl?" he said. "What have I to do with her?"
+
+"But you have been told to bring Nathalie Haldin here. Am I not right?
+Of course I am right. I was not in the room, but I know. I know Peter
+Ivanovitch sufficiently well. He is a great man. Great men are horrible.
+Well, that's it. Have nothing to do with her. That's the best you
+can do, unless you want her to become like me--disillusioned!
+Disillusioned!"
+
+"Like you," repeated Razumov, glaring at her face, as devoid of all
+comeliness of feature and complexion as the most miserable beggar is
+of money. He smiled, still feeling chilly: a peculiar sensation which
+annoyed him. "Disillusioned as to Peter Ivanovitch! Is that all you have
+lost?"
+
+She declared, looking frightened, but with immense conviction, "Peter
+Ivanovitch stands for everything." Then she added, in another tone,
+"Keep the girl away from this house."
+
+"And are you absolutely inciting me to disobey Peter Ivanovitch just
+because--because you are disillusioned?"
+
+She began to blink.
+
+"Directly I saw you for the first time I was comforted. You took your
+hat off to me. You looked as if one could trust you. Oh!"
+
+She shrank before Razumov's savage snarl of, "I have heard something
+like this before."
+
+She was so confounded that she could do nothing but blink for a long
+time.
+
+"It was your humane manner," she explained plaintively. "I have been
+starving for, I won't say kindness, but just for a little civility, for
+I don't know how long. And now you are angry...."
+
+"But no, on the contrary," he protested. "I am very glad you trust me.
+It's possible that later on I may..."
+
+"Yes, if you were to get ill," she interrupted eagerly, "or meet some
+bitter trouble, you would find I am not a useless fool. You have only to
+let me know. I will come to you. I will indeed. And I will stick to you.
+Misery and I are old acquaintances--but this life here is worse than
+starving."
+
+She paused anxiously, then in a voice for the first time sounding really
+timid, she added--
+
+"Or if you were engaged in some dangerous work. Sometimes a humble
+companion--I would not want to know anything. I would follow you with
+joy. I could carry out orders. I have the courage."
+
+Razumov looked attentively at the scared round eyes, at the withered,
+sallow, round cheeks. They were quivering about the corners of the
+mouth.
+
+"She wants to escape from here," he thought.
+
+"Suppose I were to tell you that I am engaged in dangerous work?" he
+uttered slowly.
+
+She pressed the cat to her threadbare bosom with a breathless
+exclamation. "Ah!" Then not much above a whisper: "Under Peter
+Ivanovitch?"
+
+"No, not under Peter Ivanovitch."
+
+He read admiration in her eyes, and made an effort to smile.
+
+"Then--alone?"
+
+He held up his closed hand with the index raised. "Like this finger," he
+said.
+
+She was trembling slightly. But it occurred to Razumov that they might
+have been observed from the house, and he became anxious to be gone. She
+blinked, raising up to him her puckered face, and seemed to beg mutely
+to be told something more, to be given a word of encouragement for her
+starving, grotesque, and pathetic devotion.
+
+"Can we be seen from the house?" asked Razumov confidentially.
+
+She answered, without showing the slightest surprise at the question--
+
+"No, we can't, on account of this end of the stables." And she added,
+with an acuteness which surprised Razumov, "But anybody looking out of
+an upstairs window would know that you have not passed through the gates
+yet."
+
+"Who's likely to spy out of the window?" queried Razumov. "Peter
+Ivanovitch?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Why should he trouble his head?"
+
+"He expects somebody this afternoon."
+
+"You know the person?"
+
+"There's more than one."
+
+She had lowered her eyelids. Razumov looked at her curiously.
+
+"Of course. You hear everything they say."
+
+She murmured without any animosity--
+
+"So do the tables and chairs."
+
+He understood that the bitterness accumulated in the heart of that
+helpless creature had got into her veins, and, like some subtle poison,
+had decomposed her fidelity to that hateful pair. It was a great piece
+of luck for him, he reflected; because women are seldom venal after the
+manner of men, who can be bought for material considerations. She would
+be a good ally, though it was not likely that she was allowed to hear
+as much as the tables and chairs of the Chateau Borel. That could not be
+expected. But still.... And, at any rate, she could be made to talk.
+
+When she looked up her eyes met the fixed stare of Razumov, who began to
+speak at once.
+
+"Well, well, dear...but upon my word, I haven't the pleasure of
+knowing your name yet. Isn't it strange?"
+
+For the first time she made a movement of the shoulders.
+
+"Is it strange? No one is told my name. No one cares. No one talks to
+me, no one writes to me. My parents don't even know if I'm alive. I have
+no use for a name, and I have almost forgotten it myself."
+
+Razumov murmured gravely, "Yes, but still..."
+
+She went on much slower, with indifference--
+
+"You may call me Tekla, then. My poor Andrei called me so. I was devoted
+to him. He lived in wretchedness and suffering, and died in misery. That
+is the lot of all us Russians, nameless Russians. There is nothing else
+for us, and no hope anywhere, unless..."
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless all these people with names are done away with," she finished,
+blinking and pursing up her lips.
+
+"It will be easier to call you Tekla, as you direct me," said
+Razumov, "if you consent to call me Kirylo, when we are talking like
+this--quietly--only you and me."
+
+And he said to himself, "Here's a being who must be terribly afraid of
+the world, else she would have run away from this situation before."
+Then he reflected that the mere fact of leaving the great man abruptly
+would make her a suspect. She could expect no support or countenance
+from anyone. This revolutionist was not fit for an independent
+existence.
+
+She moved with him a few steps, blinking and nursing the cat with a
+small balancing movement of her arms.
+
+"Yes--only you and I. That's how I was with my poor Andrei, only he was
+dying, killed by these official brutes--while you! You are strong. You
+kill the monsters. You have done a great deed. Peter Ivanovitch himself
+must consider you. Well--don't forget me--especially if you are going
+back to work in Russia. I could follow you, carrying anything that
+was wanted--at a distance, you know. Or I could watch for hours at the
+corner of a street if necessary,--in wet or snow--yes, I could--all day
+long. Or I could write for you dangerous documents, lists of names or
+instructions, so that in case of mischance the handwriting could not
+compromise you. And you need not be afraid if they were to catch me. I
+would know how to keep dumb. We women are not so easily daunted by pain.
+I heard Peter Ivanovitch say it is our blunt nerves or something. We can
+stand it better. And it's true; I would just as soon bite my tongue out
+and throw it at them as not. What's the good of speech to me? Who would
+ever want to hear what I could say? Ever since I closed the eyes of my
+poor Andrei I haven't met a man who seemed to care for the sound of
+my voice. I should never have spoken to you if the very first time you
+appeared here you had not taken notice of me so nicely. I could not help
+speaking of you to that charming dear girl. Oh, the sweet creature! And
+strong! One can see that at once. If you have a heart don't let her set
+her foot in here. Good-bye!"
+
+Razumov caught her by the arm. Her emotion at being thus seized
+manifested itself by a short struggle, after which she stood still, not
+looking at him.
+
+"But you can tell me," he spoke in her ear, "why they--these people in
+that house there--are so anxious to get hold of her?"
+
+She freed herself to turn upon him, as if made angry by the question.
+
+"Don't you understand that Peter Ivanovitch must direct, inspire,
+influence? It is the breath of his life. There can never be too many
+disciples. He can't bear thinking of anyone escaping him. And a woman,
+too! There is nothing to be done without women, he says. He has written
+it. He--"
+
+The young man was staring at her passion when she broke off suddenly and
+ran away behind the stable.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Razumov, thus left to himself, took the direction of the gate. But on
+this day of many conversations, he discovered that very probably he
+could not leave the grounds without having to hold another one.
+
+Stepping in view from beyond the lodge appeared the expected visitors
+of Peter Ivanovitch: a small party composed of two men and a woman. They
+noticed him too, immediately, and stopped short as if to consult. But in
+a moment the woman, moving aside, motioned with her arm to the two men,
+who, leaving the drive at once, struck across the large neglected
+lawn, or rather grass-plot, and made directly for the house. The woman
+remained on the path waiting for Razumov's approach. She had recognized
+him. He, too, had recognized her at the first glance. He had been made
+known to her at Zurich, where he had broken his journey while on his
+way from Dresden. They had been much together for the three days of his
+stay.
+
+She was wearing the very same costume in which he had seen her first. A
+blouse of crimson silk made her noticeable at a distance. With that
+she wore a short brown skirt and a leather belt. Her complexion was
+the colour of coffee and milk, but very clear; her eyes black and
+glittering, her figure erect. A lot of thick hair, nearly white, was
+done up loosely under a dusty Tyrolese hat of dark cloth, which seemed
+to have lost some of its trimmings.
+
+The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov,
+after approaching her close, felt obliged to smile. She greeted him with
+a manly hand-grasp.
+
+"What! Are you going away?" she exclaimed. "How is that, Razumov?"
+
+"I am going away because I haven't been asked to stay," Razumov
+answered, returning the pressure of her hand with much less force than
+she had put into it.
+
+She jerked her head sideways like one who understands. Meantime
+Razumov's eyes had strayed after the two men. They were crossing the
+grass-plot obliquely, without haste. The shorter of the two was buttoned
+up in a narrow overcoat of some thin grey material, which came nearly
+to his heels. His companion, much taller and broader, wore a short,
+close-fitting jacket and tight trousers tucked into shabby top-boots.
+
+The woman, who had sent them out of Razumov's way apparently, spoke in a
+businesslike voice.
+
+"I had to come rushing from Zurich on purpose to meet the train and take
+these two along here to see Peter Ivanovitch. I've just managed it."
+
+"Ah! indeed," Razumov said perfunctorily, and very vexed at her staying
+behind to talk to him "From Zurich--yes, of course. And these two, they
+come from...."
+
+She interrupted, without emphasis--
+
+"From quite another direction. From a distance, too. A considerable
+distance."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. The two men from a distance, after
+having reached the wall of the terrace, disappeared suddenly at its foot
+as if the earth had opened to swallow them up.
+
+"Oh, well, they have just come from America." The woman in the crimson
+blouse shrugged her shoulders too a little before making that statement.
+"The time is drawing near," she interjected, as if speaking to herself.
+"I did not tell them who you were. Yakovlitch would have wanted to
+embrace you."
+
+"Is that he with the wisp of hair hanging from his chin, in the long
+coat?"
+
+"You've guessed aright. That's Yakovlitch."
+
+"And they could not find their way here from the station without you
+coming on purpose from Zurich to show it to them? Verily, without women
+we can do nothing. So it stands written, and apparently so it is."
+
+He was conscious of an immense lassitude under his effort to be
+sarcastic. And he could see that she had detected it with those steady,
+brilliant black eyes.
+
+"What is the matter with you?"
+
+"I don't know. Nothing. I've had a devil of a day."
+
+She waited, with her black eyes fixed on his face. Then--
+
+"What of that? You men are so impressionable and self-conscious. One day
+is like another, hard, hard--and there's an end of it, till the great
+day comes. I came over for a very good reason. They wrote to warn Peter
+Ivanovitch of their arrival. But where from? Only from Cherbourg on a
+bit of ship's notepaper. Anybody could have done that. Yakovlitch has
+lived for years and years in America. I am the only one at hand who had
+known him well in the old days. I knew him very well indeed. So Peter
+Ivanovitch telegraphed, asking me to come. It's natural enough, is it
+not?"
+
+"You came to vouch for his identity?" inquired Razumov.
+
+"Yes. Something of the kind. Fifteen years of a life like his make
+changes in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think
+of Yakovlitch before he went to America--"
+
+The softness of the low tone caused Razumov to glance at her sideways.
+She sighed; her black eyes were looking away; she had plunged the
+fingers of her right hand deep into the mass of nearly white hair, and
+stirred them there absently. When she withdrew her hand the little hat
+perched on the top of her head remained slightly tilted, with a queer
+inquisitive effect, contrasting strongly with the reminiscent murmur
+that escaped her.
+
+"We were not in our first youth even then. But a man is a child always."
+
+Razumov thought suddenly, "They have been living together." Then aloud--
+
+"Why didn't you follow him to America?" he asked point-blank.
+
+She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
+
+"Don't you remember what was going on fifteen years ago? It was a time
+of activity. The Revolution has its history by this time. You are in
+it and yet you don't seem to know it. Yakovlitch went away then on a
+mission; I went back to Russia. It had to be so. Afterwards there was
+nothing for him to come back to."
+
+"Ah! indeed," muttered Razumov, with affected surprise. "Nothing!"
+
+"What are you trying to insinuate" she exclaimed quickly. "Well, and
+what then if he did get discouraged a little...."
+
+"He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee hanging from his chin. A
+regular Uncle Sam," growled Razumov. "Well, and you? You who went to
+Russia? You did not get discouraged."
+
+"Never mind. Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be doubted. He, at any rate,
+is the right sort."
+
+Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon Razumov while she spoke,
+and for a moment afterwards.
+
+"Pardon me," Razumov inquired coldly, "but does it mean that you, for
+instance, think that I am not the right sort?"
+
+She made no protest, gave no sign of having heard the question;
+she continued looking at him in a manner which he judged not to be
+absolutely unfriendly. In Zurich when he passed through she had taken
+him under her charge, in a way, and was with him from morning till night
+during his stay of two days. She took him round to see several people.
+At first she talked to him a great deal and rather unreservedly, but
+always avoiding all reference to herself; towards the middle of the
+second day she fell silent, attending him zealously as before, and even
+seeing him off at the railway station, where she pressed his hand firmly
+through the lowered carriage window, and, stepping back without a word,
+waited till the train moved. He had noticed that she was treated with
+quiet regard. He knew nothing of her parentage, nothing of her private
+history or political record; he judged her from his own private point of
+view, as being a distinct danger in his path. "Judged" is not perhaps
+the right word. It was more of a feeling, the summing up of slight
+impressions aided by the discovery that he could not despise her as he
+despised all the others. He had not expected to see her again so soon.
+
+No, decidedly; her expression was not unfriendly. Yet he perceived an
+acceleration in the beat of his heart. The conversation could not be
+abandoned at that point. He went on in accents of scrupulous inquiry--
+
+"Is it perhaps because I don't seem to accept blindly every development
+of the general doctrine--such for instance as the feminism of our great
+Peter Ivanovitch? If that is what makes me suspect, then I can only say
+I would scorn to be a slave even to an idea."
+
+She had been looking at him all the time, not as a listener looks
+at one, but as if the words he chose to say were only of secondary
+interest. When he finished she slipped her hand, by a sudden and decided
+movement, under his arm and impelled him gently towards the gate of the
+grounds. He felt her firmness and obeyed the impulsion at once, just as
+the other two men had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the wave
+of her hand.
+
+They made a few steps like this.
+
+"No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all right," she said. "You may be
+valuable--very valuable. What's the matter with you is that you don't
+like us."
+
+She released him. He met her with a frosty smile.
+
+"Am I expected then to have love as well as convictions?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You know very well what I mean. People have been thinking you not quite
+whole-hearted. I have heard that opinion from one side and another. But
+I have understood you at the end of the first day...."
+
+Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
+
+"I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault here."
+
+"What phrases he uses!" she exclaimed parenthetically. "Ah! Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and
+afraid of trifles. Moreover, you had no training. What you want is to
+be taken in hand by some woman. I am sorry I am not staying here a few
+days. I am going back to Zurich to-morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch
+with me most likely."
+
+This information relieved Razumov.
+
+"I am sorry too," he said. "But, all the same, I don't think you
+understand me."
+
+He breathed more freely; she did not protest, but asked, "And how did
+you get on with Peter Ivanovitch? You have seen a good deal of each
+other. How is it between you two?"
+
+Not knowing what answer to make, the young man inclined his head slowly.
+
+Her lips had been parted in expectation. She pressed them together, and
+seemed to reflect.
+
+"That's all right."
+
+This had a sound of finality, but she did not leave him. It was
+impossible to guess what she had in her mind. Razumov muttered--
+
+"It is not of me that you should have asked that question. In a moment
+you shall see Peter Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
+naturally. He will be curious to know what has delayed you so long in
+this garden."
+
+"No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something to say to me. Several
+things. He may even speak of you--question me. Peter Ivanovitch is
+inclined to trust me generally."
+
+"Question you? That's very likely."
+
+She smiled, half serious.
+
+"Well--and what shall I say to him?"
+
+"I don't know. You may tell him of your discovery."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Why--my lack of love for...."
+
+
+"Oh! That's between ourselves," she interrupted, it was hard to say
+whether in jest or earnest.
+
+"I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch something in my favour,"
+said Razumov, with grim playfulness. "Well, then, you can tell him that
+I am very much in earnest about my mission. I mean to succeed."
+
+"You have been given a mission!" she exclaimed quickly.
+
+"It amounts to that. I have been told to bring about a certain event."
+
+She looked at him searchingly.
+
+"A mission," she repeated, very grave and interested all at once. "What
+sort of mission?"
+
+"Something in the nature of propaganda work."
+
+"Ah! Far away from here?"
+
+"No. Not very far," said Razumov, restraining a sudden desire to laugh,
+although he did not feel joyous in the least.
+
+"So!" she said thoughtfully. "Well, I am not asking questions. It's
+sufficient that Peter Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
+Everything is bound to come right in the end."
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"I don't think, young man. I just simply believe it."
+
+"And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that faith?"
+
+She did not answer the question, and they stood idle, silent, as if
+reluctant to part with each other.
+
+"That's just like a man," she murmured at last. "As if it were possible
+to tell how a belief comes to one." Her thin Mephistophelian eyebrows
+moved a little. "Truly there are millions of people in Russia who would
+envy the life of dogs in this country. It is a horror and a shame to
+confess this even between ourselves. One must believe for very pity.
+This can't go on. No! It can't go on. For twenty years I have been
+coming and going, looking neither to the left nor to the right....
+What are you smiling to yourself for? You are only at the beginning. You
+have begun well, but you just wait till you have trodden every particle
+of yourself under your feet in your comings and goings. For that is
+what it comes to. You've got to trample down every particle of your own
+feelings; for stop you cannot, you must not. I have been young, too--but
+perhaps you think that I am complaining-eh?"
+
+"I don't think anything of the sort," protested Razumov indifferently.
+
+"I dare say you don't, you dear superior creature. You don't care."
+
+She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair on the left side,
+and that brusque movement had the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat
+straight on her head. She frowned under it without animosity, in the
+manner of an investigator. Razumov averted his face carelessly.
+
+"You men are all alike. You mistake luck for merit. You do it in good
+faith too! I would not be too hard on you. It's masculine nature.
+You men are ridiculously pitiful in your aptitude to cherish childish
+illusions down to the very grave. There are a lot of us who have been at
+work for fifteen years--I mean constantly--trying one way after another,
+underground and above ground, looking neither to the right nor to the
+left! I can talk about it. I have been one of these that never
+rested.... There! What's the use of talking.... Look at my grey hairs!
+And here two babies come along--I mean you and Haldin--you come along
+and manage to strike a blow at the very first try."
+
+At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and energetic lips of the
+woman revolutionist, Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of the
+irrevocable. But in all the months which had passed over his head he
+had become hardened to the experience. The consciousness was no longer
+accompanied by the blank dismay and the blind anger of the early days.
+He had argued himself into new beliefs; and he had made for himself a
+mental atmosphere of gloomy and sardonic reverie, a sort of murky
+medium through which the event appeared like a featureless shadow having
+vaguely the shape of a man; a shape extremely familiar, yet utterly
+inexpressive, except for its air of discreet waiting in the dusk. It was
+not alarming.
+
+"What was he like?" the woman revolutionist asked unexpectedly.
+
+"What was he like?" echoed Razumov, making a painful effort not to turn
+upon her savagely. But he relieved himself by laughing a little while he
+stole a glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. This reception of
+her inquiry disturbed her.
+
+"How like a woman," he went on. "What is the good of concerning yourself
+with his appearance? Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all feminine
+influences now."
+
+A frown, making three folds at the root of her nose, accentuated the
+Mephistophelian slant of her eyebrows.
+
+"You suffer, Razumov," she suggested, in her low, confident voice.
+
+"What nonsense!" Razumov faced the woman fairly. "But now I think of it,
+I am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the
+one over there--Madame de S--, you know. Formerly the dead were allowed
+to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old
+harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true that
+they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But couldn't
+the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity? Couldn't
+she conjure him up for you?"--he jested like a man in pain.
+
+Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
+wearily, "Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea
+for us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov."
+
+"You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
+some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
+with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the
+ghost of it--the cold ghost of it--still lingering in the temple. But as
+to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
+We mustn't, We can't. The other day I read in some paper or other an
+alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.
+It impresses the world. It's our prestige."
+
+"He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;" the woman in the
+crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
+her black eyes never left Razumov's face. "And what for, pray? Simply
+because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his
+petty masculine standards. You might think he was one of these nervous
+sensitives that come to a bad end. And yet," she went on, after a short,
+reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, "and yet I
+have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of
+character, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed--you are."
+
+The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their
+eyes met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared
+at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar,
+quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to
+him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He
+was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had
+a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any
+instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some
+momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody's
+lips. As long as he managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down
+his irritability there was nothing to fear. The only condition of
+success and safety was indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
+
+He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were
+actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary
+plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime.
+Silently he indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral
+and mental remoteness. He did not even smile when he heard her repeat
+the words--
+
+"Yes! A strong character."
+
+He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not
+thinking of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of
+freedom.
+
+"If you don't look out," he mumbled, still looking away, "you shall
+certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea."
+
+She was not to be shaken off in such a way. As a matter of fact he had
+not expected to succeed.
+
+"Never mind, it will be no great loss. I mean the missing of her tea and
+only the ghost of it at that. As to the lady, you must understand that
+she has her positive uses. See _that_, Razumov."
+
+He turned his head at this imperative appeal and saw the woman
+revolutionist making the motions of counting money into the palm of her
+hand.
+
+"That's what it is. You see?"
+
+Razumov uttered a slow "I see," and returned to his prisoner-like gazing
+upon the neat and shady road.
+
+"Material means must be obtained in some way, and this is easier than
+breaking into banks. More certain too. There! I am joking.... What is
+he muttering to himself now?" she cried under her breath.
+
+"My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch's devoted self-sacrifice, that's all.
+It's enough to make one sick."
+
+"Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature. Sick! Makes him sick! And what
+do you know of the truth of it? There's no looking into the secrets of
+the heart. Peter Ivanovitch knew her years ago, in his worldly days,
+when he was a young officer in the Guards. It is not for us to judge
+an inspired person. That's where you men have an advantage. You are
+inspired sometimes both in thought and action. I have always admitted
+that when you _are_ inspired, when you manage to throw off your
+masculine cowardice and prudishness you are not to be equalled by us.
+Only, how seldom.... Whereas the silliest woman can always be made
+of use. And why? Because we have passion, unappeasable passion.... I
+should like to know what he is smiling at?"
+
+"I am not smiling," protested Razumov gloomily.
+
+"Well! How is one to call it? You made some sort of face. Yes, I know!
+You men can love here and hate there and desire something or other--and
+you make a great to-do about it, and you call it passion! Yes! While
+it lasts. But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these
+very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That's why we can't be
+bribed off so easily as you men. In life, you see, there is not much
+choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us,
+painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot."
+
+She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact tone. Razumov's attention
+had wandered away on a track of its own--outside the bars of the
+gate--but not out of earshot. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his
+coat.
+
+"Rot or burn! Powerfully stated. Painted or unpainted. Very vigorous.
+Painted or...Do tell me--she would be infernally jealous of him,
+wouldn't she?"
+
+"Who? What? The Baroness? Eleanor Maximovna? Jealous of Peter
+Ivanovitch? Heavens! Are these the questions the man's mind is running
+on? Such a thing is not to be thought of."
+
+"Why? Can't a wealthy old woman be jealous? Or, are they all pure
+spirits together?"
+
+"But what put it into your head to ask such a question?" she wondered.
+
+"Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like."
+
+"I don't like," she retorted at once. "It is not the time to be
+frivolous. What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps,
+you are only playing a part."
+
+Razumov had felt that woman's observation of him like a physical
+contact, like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he
+received the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a
+closer grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying
+himself.
+
+"Playing a Part," he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. "It
+must be done very badly since you see through the assumption."
+
+She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin
+black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He
+added hardly audibly--
+
+"You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us."
+
+"Who is doing it?" she snapped out.
+
+"Who? Everybody," he said impatiently. "You are a materialist, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense."
+
+"But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive
+tube.' I imagine now...."
+
+"I spit on him."
+
+"What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can't ignore the importance of a
+good digestion. The joy of life--you know the joy of life?--depends on
+a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism,
+breeds black fancies and thoughts of death. These are facts ascertained
+by physiologists. Well, I assure you that ever since I came over from
+Russia I have been stuffed with indigestible foreign concoctions of the
+most nauseating kind--pah!"
+
+"You are joking," she murmured incredulously. He assented in a detached
+way.
+
+"Yes. It is all a joke. It's hardly worth while talking to a man like
+me. Yet for that very reason men have been known to take their own
+life."
+
+"On the contrary, I think it is worth while talking to you."
+
+He kept her in the corner of his eye. She seemed to be thinking out some
+scathing retort, but ended by only shrugging her shoulders slightly.
+
+"Shallow talk! I suppose one must pardon this weakness in you," she
+said, putting a special accent on the last word. There was something
+anxious in her indulgent conclusion.
+
+Razumov noted the slightest shades in this conversation, which he had
+not expected, for which he was not prepared. That was it. "I was not
+prepared," he said to himself. "It has taken me unawares." It seemed to
+him that if he only could allow himself to pant openly like a dog for a
+time this oppression would pass away. "I shall never be found prepared,"
+he thought, with despair. He laughed a little, saying as lightly as he
+could--
+
+"Thanks. I don't ask for mercy." Then affecting a playful uneasiness,
+"But aren't you afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of plotting
+something unauthorized together by the gate here?"
+
+"No, I am not afraid. You are quite safe from suspicions while you are
+with me, my dear young man." The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
+out. "Peter Ivanovitch trusts me," she went on, quite austerely. "He
+takes my advice. I am his right hand, as it were, in certain most
+important things.... That amuses you what? Do you think I am
+boasting?"
+
+"God forbid. I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch
+seems to have solved the woman question pretty completely."
+
+Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone. All
+day long he had been saying the wrong things. It was folly, worse than
+folly. It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his
+will. Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the
+promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a
+great store of secret knowledge and so much influence? Why give her this
+puzzling impression? But she did not seem inimical. There was no anger
+in her voice. It was strangely speculative.
+
+"One does not know what to think, Razumov. You must have bitten
+something bitter in your cradle." Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
+
+"H'm! Something bitter? That's an explanation," he muttered. "Only it
+was much later. And don't you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I
+come from the same cradle?"
+
+The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had
+experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman
+revolutionist murmured, after a pause--
+
+"You mean--Russia?"
+
+He disdained even to nod. She seemed softened, her black eyes very
+still, as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all
+its tender associations. But suddenly she knitted her brows in a
+Mephistophelian frown.
+
+"Yes. Perhaps no wonder, then. Yes. One lies there lapped up in evils,
+watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
+They must be driven away, destroyed utterly. In regard of that task
+nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful.
+That's how I came to feel in the end. The great thing is not to quarrel
+amongst ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles. Remember
+that, Razumov."
+
+Razumov was not listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched
+in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his
+scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him
+that now they were blunted for ever. "I am a match for them all,"
+he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman
+revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was
+no one passing along the road. He almost forgot that he was not alone.
+He heard her voice again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the
+hesitation which had been the real reason of her prolonged silence.
+
+"I say, Razumov!"
+
+Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man
+who hears a false note.
+
+"Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually
+attended the lectures at the University?"
+
+An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of
+the question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after
+the flash of the fired shot. Luckily his disengaged hand was ready
+to grip a bar of the gate. He held it with a terrible force, but his
+presence of mind was gone. He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy
+sound.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!" she urged him. "I know you are not a
+boastful man. _That_ one must say for you. You are a silent man. Too
+silent, perhaps. You are feeding on some bitterness of your own. You are
+not an enthusiast. You are, perhaps, all the stronger for that. But you
+might tell me. One would like to understand you a little more. I was so
+immensely struck.... Have you really done it?"
+
+He got his voice back. The shot had missed him. It had been fired at
+random, altogether, more like a signal for coming to close quarters.
+It was to be a plain struggle for self-preservation. And she was a
+dangerous adversary too. But he was ready for battle; he was so ready
+that when he turned towards her not a muscle of his face moved.
+
+"Certainly," he said, without animation, secretly strung up but
+perfectly sure of himself. "Lectures--certainly, But what makes you
+ask?"
+
+It was she who was animated.
+
+"I had it in a letter, written by a young man in Petersburg; one of
+us, of course. You were seen--you were observed with your notebook,
+impassible, taking notes...."
+
+He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
+
+"What of that?"
+
+"I call such coolness superb--that's all. It is a proof of uncommon
+strength of character. The young man writes that nobody could have
+guessed from your face and manner the part you had played only some two
+hours before--the great, momentous, glorious part...."
+
+"Oh no. Nobody could have guessed," assented Razumov gravely, "because,
+don't you see, nobody at that time...."
+
+"Yes, yes. But all the same you are a man of exceptional fortitude, it
+seems. You looked exactly as usual. It was remembered afterwards with
+wonder...."
+
+"It cost me no effort," Razumov declared, with the same staring gravity.
+
+"Then it's almost more wonderful still!" she exclaimed, and fell silent
+while Razumov asked himself whether he had not said there something
+utterly unnecessary--or even worse.
+
+She raised her head eagerly.
+
+"Your intention was to stay in Russia? You had planned...."
+
+"No," interrupted Razumov without haste. "I had made no plans of any
+sort."
+
+"You just simply walked away?" she struck in.
+
+He bowed his head in slow assent. "Simply--yes." He had gradually
+released his hold on the bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
+conviction that no random shot could knock him over now. And suddenly he
+was inspired to add, "The snow was coming down very thick, you know."
+
+She had a slight appreciative movement of the head, like an expert
+in such enterprises, very interested, capable of taking every point
+professionally. Razumov remembered something he had heard.
+
+"I turned into a narrow side street, you understand," he went on
+negligently, and paused as if it were not worth talking about. Then he
+remembered another detail and dropped it before her, like a disdainful
+dole to her curiosity.
+
+"I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep there."
+
+She clicked her tongue at that symptom, very struck indeed. Then--
+
+"But the notebook! The amazing notebook, man. You don't mean to say you
+had put it in your pocket beforehand!" she cried.
+
+Razumov gave a start. It might have been a sign of impatience.
+
+"I went home. Straight home to my rooms," he said distinctly.
+
+"The coolness of the man! You dared?"
+
+"Why not? I assure you I was perfectly calm. Ha! Calmer than I am now
+perhaps."
+
+"I like you much better as you are now than when you indulge that bitter
+vein of yours, Razumov. And nobody in the house saw you return--eh? That
+might have appeared queer."
+
+"No one," Razumov said firmly. "Dvornik, landlady, girl, all out of the
+way. I went up like a shadow. It was a murky morning. The stairs were
+dark. I glided up like a phantom. Fate? Luck? What do you think?"
+
+"I just see it!" The eyes of the woman revolutionist snapped darkly.
+"Well--and then you considered...."
+
+Razumov had it all ready in his head.
+
+"No. I looked at my watch, since you want to know. There was just time.
+I took that notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe. Have you ever
+listened to the pit-pat of a man running round and round the shaft of
+a deep staircase? They have a gaslight at the bottom burning night
+and day. I suppose it's gleaming down there now.... The sound dies
+out--the flame winks...."
+
+He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity
+of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist
+received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He
+checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man
+who has been dreaming aloud.
+
+"Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning?
+At night it's another matter. I did not care if all the house had been
+there to look at me. But I don't suppose there was anyone. It's best not
+to be seen or heard. Aha! The people that are neither seen nor heard are
+the lucky ones--in Russia. Don't you admire my luck?"
+
+"Astonishing," she said. "If you have luck as well as determination,
+then indeed you are likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for the
+work in hand."
+
+Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov that it was speculative,
+even as though she were already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
+of the work. Her eyes were cast down. He waited, not very alert now, but
+with the grip of the ever-present danger giving him an air of
+attentive gravity. Who could have written about him in that letter
+from Petersburg? A fellow student, surely--some imbecile victim of
+revolutionary propaganda, some foolish slave of foreign, subversive
+ideals. A long, famine-stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to
+his mental search. That must have been the fellow!
+
+He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing,
+the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like
+a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage
+in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and
+piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist
+refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means
+constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his
+advantage rather, a piece of sinister luck which had only to be accepted
+with proper caution.
+
+"And yet, Razumov," he heard the musing voice of the woman, "you have
+not the face of a lucky man." She raised her eyes with renewed interest.
+"And so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked
+off and made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I
+suppose it was agreed beforehand that, once the business over, each of
+you would go his own way?"
+
+Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate,
+if cautious, manner of speaking.
+
+"Was not that the best thing to do?" he asked, in a dispassionate tone.
+"And anyway," he added, after waiting a moment, "we did not give much
+thought to what would come after. We never discussed formally any line
+of conduct. It was understood, I think."
+
+She approved his statement with slight nods.
+
+"You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?"
+
+"In St. Petersburg itself," emphasized Razumov. "It was the only safe
+course for me. And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go."
+
+"Yes! Yes! I know. Clearly. And the other--this wonderful Haldin
+appearing only to be regretted--you don't know what he intended?"
+
+Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet
+him sooner or later. He raised his hands a little and let them fall
+helplessly by his side--nothing more.
+
+It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
+silence.
+
+"Very curious," she pronounced slowly. "And you did not think, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?"
+
+Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.
+But he thought that he owed it to himself to speak. A negative sign
+would not do again. Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what
+that St. Petersburg letter might have contained.
+
+"I stayed at home next day," he said, bending down a little and plunging
+his glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not
+observe the trembling of his lips. "Yes, I stayed at home. As my actions
+are remembered and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I
+was _not_ seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn't know? Well, I
+stopped at home-the live-long day."
+
+As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic "I see! It
+must have been trying enough."
+
+"You seem to understand one's feelings," said Razumov steadily. "It was
+trying. It was horrible; it was an atrocious day. It was not the last."
+
+"Yes, I understand. Afterwards, when you heard they had got him. Don't
+I know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight? One's
+ashamed of being left. And I can remember so many. Never mind. They
+shall be avenged before long. And what is death? At any rate, it is not
+a shameful thing like some kinds of life."
+
+Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and
+unpleasant tremor.
+
+"Some kinds of life?" he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
+
+"The subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy
+heap of iniquity which the world is. Life, Razumov, not to be vile must
+be a revolt--a pitiless protest--all the time."
+
+She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
+instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
+businesslike manner that she went on--
+
+"You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
+immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I
+set my eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich. Oh! You are full of bitter
+revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may
+become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
+justice which armed your and Haldin's hands to strike down that
+fanatical brute...for it was that--nothing but that! I have been
+thinking it out. It could have been nothing else but that."
+
+Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
+sinister immobility of feature.
+
+"I can't speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
+conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive
+justice."
+
+"Good, that," he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
+and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
+should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As
+if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be
+changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at
+the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for
+arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted
+through Razumov's head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand,
+the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had
+such a weight in the "active" section of every party. She was much more
+representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric,
+mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
+revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave
+him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own
+mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the
+purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical
+theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting
+in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in
+that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous
+lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a
+thoughtful frown.
+
+"That's it. Retributive. No pity!" was the conclusion of her silence.
+And this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating
+sentences--
+
+"Listen to my story, Razumov!..." Her father was a clever but unlucky
+artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty;
+all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose
+rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the
+very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood
+of his sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him?
+Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal
+I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing
+except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread--but no consolation for your
+trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your
+miserable life.
+
+And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died. He died in the hospital.
+Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence--she
+saw it whole. She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of
+the humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of
+a society which nothing can absolve.
+
+"Yes, Razumov," she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, "it was
+like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed
+not the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great
+social iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied
+sufferings. From that moment I was a revolutionist."
+
+Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of
+contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance. She,
+with an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice
+since he had come in contact with the woman, went on--
+
+"As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system
+exhorted such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the
+secret societies as soon as I knew how to find my way. I was sixteen
+years old--no more, Razumov! And--look at my white hair."
+
+In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness
+too was gone.
+
+"There is a lot of it. I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of
+a girl. Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that
+there was the first step towards crushing the social infamy. Crush the
+Infamy! A fine watchword! I would placard it on the walls of prisons and
+palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that
+empty sky for a sign of hope and terror--a portent of the end...."
+
+"You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna," Razumov interrupted suddenly.
+"Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in water...."
+
+She was checked but not offended. "Who knows? Very soon it may become
+a fact written all over that great land of ours," she hinted meaningly.
+"And then one would have lived long enough. White hair won't matter."
+
+Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years
+seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt. It
+threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the
+brilliant black glance, the upright compact figure, the simple,
+brisk self-possession of the mature personality--as though in her
+revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret, not of
+everlasting youth, but of everlasting endurance.
+
+How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov. Her mother might have been
+a Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what. He reflected that a
+revolutionist is seldom true to the settled type. All revolt is the
+expression of strong individualism--ran his thought vaguely. One
+can tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings. It was
+astonishing that the police....
+
+"We shall not meet again very soon, I think," she was saying. "I am
+leaving to-morrow."
+
+"For Zurich?" Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from
+any distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a
+wrestling match.
+
+"Yes, Zurich--and farther on, perhaps, much farther. Another journey.
+When I think of all my journeys! The last must come some day. Never
+mind, Razumov. We had to have a good long talk. I would have certainly
+tried to see you if we had not met. Peter Ivanovitch knows where you
+live? Yes. I meant to have asked him--but it's better like this. You
+see, we expect two more men; and I had much rather wait here talking
+with you than up there at the house with...."
+
+Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself. "Here
+they are," she said rapidly. "Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to
+say good-bye, presently."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+In his incertitude of the ground on which he stood Razumov felt
+perturbed. Turning his head quickly, he saw two men on the opposite side
+of the road. Seeing themselves noticed by Sophia Antonovna, they crossed
+over at once, and passed one after another through the little gate
+by the side of the empty lodge. They looked hard at the stranger, but
+without mistrust, the crimson blouse being a flaring safety signal. The
+first, great white hairless face, double chin, prominent stomach, which
+he seemed to carry forward consciously within a strongly distended
+overcoat, only nodded and averted his eyes peevishly; his
+companion--lean, flushed cheekbones, a military red moustache below a
+sharp, salient nose--approached at once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her
+warmly. His voice was very strong but inarticulate. It sounded like a
+deep buzzing. The woman revolutionist was quietly cordial.
+
+"This is Razumov," she announced in a clear voice.
+
+The lean new-comer made an eager half-turn. "He will want to embrace
+me," thought our young man with a deep recoil of all his being, while
+his limbs seemed too heavy to move. But it was a groundless alarm. He
+had to do now with a generation of conspirators who did not kiss each
+other on both cheeks; and raising an arm that felt like lead he dropped
+his hand into a largely-outstretched palm, fleshless and hot as if
+dried up by fever, giving a bony pressure, expressive, seeming to say,
+"Between us there's no need of words." The man had big, wide-open eyes.
+Razumov fancied he could see a smile behind their sadness.
+
+"This is Razumov," Sophia Antonovna repeated loudly for the benefit of
+the fat man, who at some distance displayed the profile of his stomach.
+
+No one moved. Everything, sounds, attitudes, movements, and immobility
+seemed to be part of an experiment, the result of which was a thin voice
+piping with comic peevishness--
+
+"Oh yes! Razumov. We have been hearing of nothing but Mr. Razumov for
+months. For my part, I confess I would rather have seen Haldin on this
+spot instead of Mr. Razumov."
+
+The squeaky stress put on the name "Razumov--Mr. Razumov" pierced the
+ear ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an
+elaborate joke. Astonishment was Razumov's first response, followed by
+sudden indignation.
+
+"What's the meaning of this?" he asked in a stern tone.
+
+"Tut! Silliness. He's always like that." Sophia Antonovna was obviously
+vexed. But she dropped the information, "Necator," from her lips just
+loud enough to be heard by Razumov. The abrupt squeaks of the fat man
+seemed to proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his
+overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless,
+hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair
+straggling down the fat nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a
+stare on the verge of horror and laughter.
+
+Nikita, surnamed Necator, with a sinister aptness of alliteration!
+Razumov had heard of him. He had heard so much since crossing the
+frontier of these celebrities of the militant revolution; the legends,
+the stories, the authentic chronicle, which now and then peeps out
+before a half-incredulous world. Razumov had heard of him. He was
+supposed to have killed more, gendarmes and police agents than any
+revolutionist living. He had been entrusted with executions.
+
+The paper with the letters N.N., the very pseudonym of murder,
+found pinned on the stabbed breast of a certain notorious spy (this
+picturesque detail of a sensational murder case had got into
+the newspapers), was the mark of his handiwork. "By order of the
+Committee.--N.N." A corner of the curtain lifted to strike the
+imagination of the gaping world. He was said to have been innumerable
+times in and out of Russia, the Necator of bureaucrats, of provincial
+governors, of obscure informers. He lived between whiles, Razumov had
+heard, on the shores of the Lake of Como, with a charming wife, devoted
+to the cause, and two young children. But how could that creature, so
+grotesque as to set town dogs barking at its mere sight, go about on
+those deadly errands and slip through the meshes of the police?
+
+"What now? what now?" the voice squeaked. "I am only sincere. It's not
+denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been
+better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a
+sentimentalist. Say what I think...only natural."
+
+Squeak, squeak, squeak, without a gesture, without a stir--the horrible
+squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy--this man of a sinister
+alliterative nickname, this executioner of revolutionary verdicts, the
+terrifying N.N. exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention
+attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur. Sophia Antonovna
+shrugged her shoulders. The comrade with the martial red moustache
+hurried towards Razumov full of conciliatory intentions in his strong
+buzzing voice.
+
+"Devil take it! And in this place, too, in the public street, so to
+speak. But you can see yourself how it is. One of his fantastic sallies.
+Absolutely of no consequence."
+
+"Pray don't concern yourself," cried Razumov, going off into a long fit
+of laughter. "Don't mention it."
+
+The other, his hectic flush like a pair of burns on his cheek-bones,
+stared for a moment and burst out laughing too. Razumov, whose hilarity
+died out all at once, made a step forward.
+
+"Enough of this," he began in a clear, incisive voice, though he could
+hardly control the trembling of his legs. "I will have no more of it. I
+shall not permit anyone.... I can see very well what you are at with
+those allusions.... Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not
+be played with."
+
+He had spoken such words before. He had been driven to cry them out in
+the face of other suspicions. It was an infernal cycle bringing round
+that protest like a fatal necessity of his existence. But it was no use.
+He would be always played with. Luckily life does not last for ever.
+
+"I won't have it!" he shouted, striking his fist into the palm of his
+other hand.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--what has come to you?" The woman revolutionist
+interfered with authority. They were all looking at Razumov now; the
+slayer of spies and gendarmes had turned about, presenting his enormous
+stomach in full, like a shield.
+
+"Don't shout. There are people passing." Sophia Antonovna was
+apprehensive of another outburst. A steam-launch from Monrepos had
+come to the landing-stage opposite the gate, its hoarse whistle and
+the churning noise alongside all unnoticed, had landed a small bunch of
+local passengers who were dispersing their several ways. Only a specimen
+of early tourist in knickerbockers, conspicuous by a brand-new yellow
+leather glass-case, hung about for a moment, scenting something unusual
+about these four people within the rusty iron gates of what looked the
+grounds run wild of an unoccupied private house. Ah! If he had only
+known what the chance of commonplace travelling had suddenly put in his
+way! But he was a well-bred person; he averted his gaze and moved off
+with short steps along the avenue, on the watch for a tramcar.
+
+A gesture from Sophia Antonovna, "Leave him to me," had sent the two men
+away--the buzzing of the inarticulate voice growing fainter and fainter,
+and the thin pipe of "What now? what's the matter?" reduced to the
+proportions of a squeaking toy by the distance. They had left him to
+her. So many things could be left safely to the experience of Sophia
+Antonovna. And at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried
+to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is
+born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the
+force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts,
+assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final
+appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She
+had seen--often had only divined--scores of these young men and young
+women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a
+moody egotist. And besides, it was a special--a unique case. She had
+never met an individuality which interested and puzzled her so much.
+
+"Take care, Razumov, my good friend. If you carry on like this you will
+go mad. You are angry with everybody and bitter with yourself, and on
+the look out for something to torment yourself with."
+
+"It's intolerable!" Razumov could only speak in gasps. "You must admit
+that I can have no illusions on the attitude which...it isn't clear...or
+rather only too clear."
+
+He made a gesture of despair. It was not his courage that failed him.
+The choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat--the thought
+of being condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere
+without the hope of ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
+
+"A glass of cold water is what you want." Sophia Antonovna glanced up
+the grounds at the house and shook her head, then out of the gate at
+the brimful placidity of the lake. With a half-comical shrug of the
+shoulders, she gave the remedy up in the face of that abundance.
+
+"It is you, my dear soul, who are flinging yourself at something which
+does not exist. What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It's absurd. You
+couldn't have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was
+taken."
+
+She remonstrated with him reasonably, at some length too. He had nothing
+to complain of in his reception. Every new-comer was discussed more or
+less. Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
+No one that she could remember had been shown from the first so much
+confidence. Soon, very soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, he would
+be given an opportunity of showing his devotion to the sacred task of
+crushing the Infamy.
+
+Razumov, listening quietly, thought: "It may be that she is trying to
+lull my suspicions to sleep. On the other hand, it is obvious that most
+of them are fools." He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his
+arms on his breast, leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
+
+"As to what remains obscure in the fate of that poor Haldin," Sophia
+Antonovna dropped into a slowness of utterance which was to Razumov like
+the falling of molten lead drop by drop; "as to that--though no one ever
+hinted that either from fear or neglect your conduct has not been what
+it should have been--well, I have a bit of intelligence...."
+
+Razumov could not prevent himself from raising his head, and Sophia
+Antonovna nodded slightly.
+
+"I have. You remember that letter from St. Petersburg I mentioned to you
+a moment ago?"
+
+"The letter? Perfectly. Some busybody has been reporting my conduct on
+a certain day. It's rather sickening. I suppose our police are greatly
+edified when they open these interesting and--and--superfluous letters."
+
+"Oh dear no! The police do not get hold of our letters as easily as you
+imagine. The letter in question did not leave St. Petersburg till the
+ice broke up. It went by the first English steamer which left the Neva
+this spring. They have a fireman on board--one of us, in fact. It has
+reached me from Hull...."
+
+She paused as if she were surprised at the sullen fixity of Razumov's
+gaze, but went on at once, and much faster.
+
+"We have some of our people there who...but never mind. The writer
+of the letter relates an incident which he thinks may possibly be
+connected with Haldin's arrest. I was just going to tell you when those
+two men came along."
+
+"That also was an incident," muttered Razumov, "of a very charming
+kind--for me."
+
+"Leave off that!" cried Sophia Antonovna. "Nobody cares for Nikita's
+barking. There's no malice in him. Listen to what I have to say. You
+may be able to throw a light. There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town
+peasant--a man who owned horses. He came to town years ago to work for
+some relation as a driver and ended by owning a cab or two."
+
+She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture:
+"Wait!" Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted
+her now, not to save his life. The contraction of his facial muscles had
+been involuntary, a mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as
+before.
+
+"He was not a quite ordinary man of his class--it seems," she went on.
+"The people of the house--my informant talked with many of them--you
+know, one of those enormous houses of shame and misery...."
+
+Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.
+Razumov saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled
+in snowflakes, with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining
+greasily very near the ground. The ghost of that night pursued him. He
+stood up to it with rage and with weariness.
+
+"Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?" Sophia
+Antonovna was anxious to know.
+
+"Yes." Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling
+into a trap. It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he
+probably could not have said no. "He mentioned to me once," he added, as
+if making an effort of memory, "a house of that sort. He used to visit
+some workmen there."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+Sophia Antonovna triumphed. Her correspondent had discovered that fact
+quite accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having
+made friends with a workman who occupied a room there. They described
+Haldin's appearance perfectly. He brought comforting words of hope into
+their misery. He came irregularly, but he came very often, and--her
+correspondent wrote--sometimes he spent a night in the house, sleeping,
+they thought, in a stable which opened upon the inner yard.
+
+"Note that, Razumov! In a stable."
+
+Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
+
+"Yes. In the straw. It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole
+house."
+
+"No doubt," assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw
+closer together her black eyes in a sinister fashion. No four-footed
+beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were
+condemned to suffer from in Russia. The point of this discovery was that
+it proved Haldin to have been familiar with that horse-owning peasant--a
+reckless, independent, free-living fellow not much liked by the other
+inhabitants of the house. He was believed to have been the associate of
+a band of housebreakers. Some of these got captured. Not while he was
+driving them, however; but still there was a suspicion against the
+fellow of having given a hint to the police and...
+
+The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
+
+"And you? Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain
+Ziemianitch?"
+
+Razumov was ready for the name. He had been looking out for the
+question. "When it comes I shall own up," he had said to himself. But he
+took his time.
+
+"To be sure!" he began slowly. "Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
+horses. Yes. On one occasion. Ziemianitch! Certainly! Ziemianitch of the
+horses.... How could it have slipped my memory like this? One of the
+last conversations we had together."
+
+"That means,"--Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,--"that means,
+Razumov, it was very shortly before--eh?"
+
+"Before what?" shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked
+astonished but stood her ground. "Before.... Oh! Of course, it was
+before! How could it have been after? Only a few hours before."
+
+"And he spoke of him favourably?"
+
+"With enthusiasm! The horses of Ziemianitch! The free soul of
+Ziemianitch!"
+
+Razumov took a savage delight in the loud utterance of that name, which
+had never before crossed his lips audibly. He fixed his blazing eyes
+on the woman till at last her fascinated expression recalled him to
+himself.
+
+"The late Haldin," he said, holding himself in, with downcast eyes,
+"was inclined to take sudden fancies to people, on--on--what shall I
+say--insufficient grounds."
+
+"There!" Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands. "That, to my mind, settles
+it. The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused...."
+
+"Aha! Your correspondent," Razumov said in an almost openly mocking
+tone. "What suspicions? How aroused? By this Ziemianitch? Probably some
+drunken, gabbling, plausible..."
+
+"You talk as if you had known him."
+
+Razumov looked up.
+
+"No. But I knew Haldin."
+
+Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.
+
+"I see. Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion
+communicated to me in that very interesting letter. This Ziemianitch was
+found one morning hanging from a hook in the stable--dead."
+
+Razumov felt a profound trouble. It was visible, because Sophia
+Antonovna was moved to observe vivaciously--
+
+"Aha! You begin to see."
+
+He saw it clearly enough--in the light of a lantern casting spokes of
+shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long
+boots hanging against the wall. A pointed hood, with the ends wound
+about up to the eyes, hid the face. "But that does not concern me," he
+reflected. "It does not affect my position at all. He never knew who had
+thrashed him. He could not have known." Razumov felt sorry for the old
+lover of the bottle and women.
+
+"Yes. Some of them end like that," he muttered. "What is your idea,
+Sophia Antonovna?"
+
+It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had
+adopted it fully. She stated it in one word--"Remorse." Razumov opened
+his eyes very wide at that. Sophia Antonovna's informant, by listening
+to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed
+to come very near to the truth of Haldin's relation to Ziemianitch.
+
+"It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of--that your friend
+had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St.
+Petersburg, at any rate. Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for
+the rest. And that fellow's horses were part of the plan."
+
+"They have actually got at the truth," Razumov marvelled to himself,
+while he nodded judicially. "Yes, that's possible, very possible." But
+the woman revolutionist was very positive that it was so. First of all,
+a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been
+partly overheard. Then there were the suspicions of the people in the
+house when their "young gentleman" (they did not know Haldin by
+his name) ceased to call at the house. Some of them used to charge
+Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence. He denied it with
+exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin's disappearance he
+was not himself, growing moody and thin. Finally, during a quarrel with
+some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of the inmates of
+the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy,
+an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven "our young
+gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke
+into houses." In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch
+got flung down a flight of stairs. Thereupon he drank and moped for a
+week, and then hanged himself.
+
+Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale. She charged
+Ziemianitch either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a
+certain date, overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop--perhaps in
+the very eating-shop on the ground floor of the house--or, maybe, a
+downright denunciation, followed by remorse. A man like that would be
+capable of anything. People said he was a flighty old chap. And if he
+had been once before mixed up with the police--as seemed certain, though
+he always denied it--in connexion with these thieves, he would be sure
+to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look out for
+something to report. Possibly at first his tale was not made anything of
+till the day that scoundrel de P--- got his deserts. Ah! But then every
+bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally
+they were bound to get Haldin.
+
+Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands--"Fatally."
+
+Fatality--chance! Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the
+queer verisimilitude of these inferences. They were obviously to his
+advantage.
+
+"It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally."
+Sophia Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again. She had received
+the letter three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter
+Ivanovitch. She knew then that she would have the opportunity presently
+of meeting several men of action assembled for an important purpose.
+
+"I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself
+at large. I have it in my pocket now. You understand how pleased I was
+to come upon you."
+
+Razumov was saying to himself, "She won't offer to show the letter to
+me. Not likely. Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers
+has found out?" He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not
+ask.
+
+"Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?"
+
+"No, no," she protested. "There you are again with your sensitiveness.
+It makes you stupid. Don't you see, there was no starting-point for an
+investigation even if any one had thought of it. A perfect blank! That's
+exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving
+you cautiously. It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my
+informant striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser
+lodging in that particular slum-house. A wonderful coincidence!"
+
+"A pious person," suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, "would say that
+the hand of God has done it all."
+
+"My poor father would have said that." Sophia Antonovna did not smile.
+She dropped her eyes. "Not that his God ever helped him. It's a long
+time since God has done anything for the people. Anyway, it's done."
+
+"All this would be quite final," said Razumov, with every appearance of
+reflective impartiality, "if there was any certitude that the 'our young
+gentleman' of these people was Victor Haldin. Have we got that?"
+
+"Yes. There's no mistake. My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin's
+personal appearance as with your own," the woman affirmed decisively.
+
+"It's the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt," Razumov said to himself,
+with reawakened uneasiness. Had his own visit to that accursed house
+passed unnoticed? It was barely possible. Yet it was hardly probable.
+It was just the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt
+busybody had been picking up. But the letter did not seem to contain any
+allusion to that. Unless she had suppressed it. And, if so, why? If it
+had really escaped the prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a
+confounded genius for recognizing people from description, it could
+only be for a time. He would come upon it presently and hasten to write
+another letter--and then!
+
+For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and
+disdain, Razumov shuddered inwardly. It guarded him from common fear,
+but it could not defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way
+by these people. It was a sort of superstitious dread. Now, since his
+position had been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of
+Ziemianitch, he felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom
+from direct lying, with its power of moving amongst them silent,
+unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate of their
+crimes and their folly. Was this advantage his already? Or not yet? Or
+never would be?
+
+"Well, Sophia Antonovna," his air of reluctant concession was genuine
+in so far that he was really loath to part with her without testing her
+sincerity by a question it was impossible to bring about in any way;
+"well, Sophia Antonovna, if that is so, then--"
+
+"The creature has done justice to himself," the woman observed, as if
+thinking aloud.
+
+"What? Ah yes! Remorse," Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
+
+"Don't be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend." There
+was no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes
+seemed detached for an instant from vengeful visions. "He was a man of
+the people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It's
+something to know that."
+
+"Consoling?" insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
+
+"Leave off railing," she checked him explosively. "Remember, Razumov,
+that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the
+negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all
+action. Don't rail! Leave off.... I don't know how it is, but there
+are moments when you are abhorrent to me...."
+
+She averted her face. A languid silence, as if all the electricity of
+the situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for
+some time. Razumov had not flinched. Suddenly she laid the tips of her
+fingers on his sleeve.
+
+"Don't mind."
+
+"I don't mind," he said very quietly.
+
+He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face. He was
+really mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure
+oppression. And suddenly he asked himself, "Why the devil did I go to
+that house? It was an imbecile thing to do."
+
+A profound disgust came over him. Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking
+in a friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention. And it was
+still about the famous letter, referring to various minute details
+given by her informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch. The "victim of
+remorse" had been buried several weeks before her correspondent began
+frequenting the house. It--the house--contained very good revolutionary
+material. The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens
+of black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all
+the miseries that oppress mankind. Razumov listened without hearing,
+gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that
+degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost
+impossible to practice.
+
+No. The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this
+conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted
+not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal
+connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left
+Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself. And, anyway,
+who could have foreseen this woman's "informant" stumbling upon that
+particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying
+flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! "It's a
+perfect, diabolic surprise," thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude
+of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna's remarks
+upon the psychology of "the people," "Oh yes--certainly," rather
+coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of
+confession out of her throat.
+
+Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of
+relaxed tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to
+the subject of his uneasiness. How it came about he could only guess,
+his mind being absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia
+Antonovna's complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people. For
+instance--that Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the
+last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been
+beaten by the devil.
+
+"The devil," repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
+
+"The actual devil. The devil in person. You may well look astonished,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch. Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken,
+a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful
+thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched
+creature's body was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in
+the house."
+
+"But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don't believe in the actual devil?"
+
+"Do you?" retorted the woman curtly. "Not but that there are plenty of
+men worse than devils to make a hell of this earth," she muttered to
+herself.
+
+Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold
+between her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away. It was
+obvious that she did not make much of the story--unless, indeed, this
+was the perfection of duplicity. "A dark young man," she explained
+further. "Never seen there before, never seen afterwards. Why are you
+smiling, Razumov?"
+
+"At the devil being still young after all these ages," he answered
+composedly. "But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you
+say, was dead-drunk at the time?"
+
+"Oh! The eating-house keeper has described him. An overbearing,
+swarthy young man in a student's cloak, who came rushing in, demanded
+Ziemianitch, beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving
+the eating-house keeper paralysed with astonishment."
+
+"Does he, too, believe it was the devil?"
+
+"That I can't say. I am told he's very reserved on the matter. Those
+sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally. I should think he
+knows more of it than anybody."
+
+"Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what's your theory?" asked Razumov
+in a tone of great interest. "Yours and your informant's, who is on the
+spot."
+
+"I agree with him. Some police-hound in disguise. Who else could beat a
+helpless man so unmercifully? As for the rest, if they were out that day
+on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might
+have thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more
+information, or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly
+detective was sent to fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him
+so drunk broke a stable fork over his ribs. Later on, after they had the
+big game safe in the net, they troubled their heads no more about that
+peasant."
+
+Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this
+conversation, keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in
+the verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion
+of the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost
+depths of self-deception. Razumov, after shaking hands with Sophia
+Antonovna, left the grounds, crossed the road, and walking out on the
+little steamboat pier leaned over the rail.
+
+His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days,
+ever since that night...the night. The conversation with the woman
+revolutionist had given him the view of his danger at the very moment
+this danger vanished, characteristically enough. "I ought to have
+foreseen the doubts that would arise in those people's minds," he
+thought. Then his attention being attracted by a stone of peculiar
+shape, which he could see clearly lying at the bottom, he began to
+speculate as to the depth of water in that spot. But very soon, with a
+start of wonder at this extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment,
+he returned to his train of thought. "I ought to have told very
+circumstantial lies from the first," he said to himself, with a mortal
+distaste of the mere idea which silenced his mental utterance for quite
+a perceptible interval. "Luckily, that's all right now," he reflected,
+and after a time spoke to himself, half aloud, "Thanks to the devil,"
+and laughed a little.
+
+The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts. He was not
+exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting
+in it a certain piquancy. He owned to himself that, had he known of that
+suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making
+such excellent use of it for his own purposes. He ought to be infinitely
+obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity,
+"A wonderful psychologist apparently," he said to himself sarcastically.
+Remorse, indeed! It was a striking example of your true conspirator's
+blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea. This was
+a drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself
+mockingly. A woman the old fellow was making up to! A robust pedlar,
+clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs.... And at
+sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.
+That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch. Even the
+comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme
+crisis. At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of
+an unquenchable passion. And, besides, there was the wild exasperation
+aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with
+the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing,
+added to these simple and bitter sorrows. "Devil, eh?" Razumov
+exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting
+discovery. "Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism. So many of our
+true Russian souls end in that way! Very characteristic." He felt pity
+for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an
+unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above--like a community
+of crawling ants working out its destiny. It was as if this Ziemianitch
+could not possibly have done anything else. And Sophia Antonovna's
+cocksure and contemptuous "some police-hound" was characteristically
+Russian in another way. But there was no tragedy there. This was a
+comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a game
+with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch,
+then with those revolutionists. The devil's own game this.... He
+interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his
+own expense. "Hallo! I am falling into mysticism too."
+
+His mind was more at ease than ever. Turning about he put his back
+against the rail comfortably. "All this fits with marvellous aptness,"
+he continued to think. "The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no
+longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague. The mystic
+Ziemianitch accounts for that. An incredible chance has served me. No
+more need of lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from
+getting the upper hand of my caution."
+
+He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was
+a long time before he started forward from that pose, with the
+recollection that he had made up his mind to do something important that
+day. What it was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort
+of memory, for he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.
+
+He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he
+slowed down, almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure
+walking in the contrary direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft,
+broad-brimmed hat, picturesque but diminutive, as if seen through the
+big end of an opera-glass. It was impossible to avoid that tiny man, for
+there was no issue for retreat.
+
+"Another one going to that mysterious meeting," thought Razumov. He was
+right in his surmise, only _this_ one, unlike the others who came from a
+distance, was known to him personally. Still, he hoped to pass on with
+a mere bow, but it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with
+hairy wrist and knuckles protruded in a friendly wave from under the
+folds of the cloak, worn Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm
+day, a corner flung over the shoulder.
+
+"And how is Herr Razumov?" sounded the greeting in German, by that alone
+made more odious to the object of the affable recognition. At closer
+quarters the diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an
+ordinary-sized man, with a lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising
+of the hat, the great pepper-and salt full beard spread over the
+proportionally broad chest. A fine bold nose jutted over a thin mouth
+hidden in the mass of fine hair. All this, accented features, strong
+limbs in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without the
+slightest sign of debility. The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown,
+were too big, with the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour
+under a lamp. The obscure celebrity of the tiny man was well known to
+Razumov. Polyglot, of unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality,
+anarchist, with a pedantic and ferocious temperament, and an amazingly
+inflammatory capacity for invective, he was a power in the background,
+this violent pamphleteer clamouring for revolutionary justice, this
+Julius Laspara, editor of the _Living Word_, confidant of conspirators,
+inditer of sanguinary menaces and manifestos, suspected of being in the
+secret of every plot. Laspara lived in the old town in a sombre,
+narrow house presented to him by a naive middle-class admirer of his
+humanitarian eloquence. With him lived his two daughters, who overtopped
+him head and shoulders, and a pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing
+in the dark rooms in blue cotton overalls and clumsy boots, who might
+have belonged to either one of them or to neither. No stranger could
+tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after
+casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him
+possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained
+from asking her for details--no, not so much as the name of the father,
+because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been
+admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top
+floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of sweepings all over
+the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every table, the two
+Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent, sleepy-eyed,
+corsetless, and generally, in their want of shape and the disorder
+of their rumpled attire, resembling old dolls; the great but obscure
+Julius, his feet twisted round his three-legged stool, always ready to
+receive the visitors, the pen instantly dropped, the body screwed round
+with a striking display of the lofty brow and of the great austere
+beard. When he got down from his stool it was as though he had descended
+from the heights of Olympus. He was dwarfed by his daughters, by the
+furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature. But he very seldom left
+it, and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.
+
+It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him
+out in that direction that afternoon. Evidently he wished to be amiable
+to that young man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world
+of political refugees. In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and
+wrote four or five other European languages, without distinction and
+without force (other than that of invective), he inquired if Razumov
+had taken his inscriptions at the University as yet. And the young man,
+shaking his head negatively--
+
+"There's plenty of time for that. But, meantime, are you not going to
+write something for us?"
+
+He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on
+anything, social, economic, historical--anything. Any subject could be
+treated in the right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution. And,
+as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a review
+of advanced ideas. "We must educate, educate everybody--develop the
+great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice."
+
+Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.
+
+"Write in Russian. We'll have it translated There can be no difficulty.
+Why, without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin. My daughters go to
+see her sometimes." He nodded significantly. "She does nothing, has
+never done anything in her life. She would be quite competent, with a
+little assistance. Only write. You know you must. And so good-bye for
+the present."
+
+He raised his arm and went on. Razumov backed against the low wall,
+looked after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry
+mutter--
+
+"Cursed Jew!"
+
+He did not know anything about it. Julius Laspara might have been a
+Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse
+towns for anything he could tell to the contrary. But this is not a
+story of the West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by
+the comment that it was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best
+adapted to the nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.
+He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted. He
+walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive
+harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull
+people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he
+discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge. He slowed down
+at once. To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green
+slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the
+picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
+water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.
+
+He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on
+slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get
+out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to
+his profound absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive
+journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write!
+A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made
+up his mind to do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that
+step and then had forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to
+escape from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger.
+He was ready to despise himself for it. What was it? Levity, or
+deep-seated weakness? Or an unconscious dread?
+
+"Is it that I am shrinking? It can't be! It's impossible. To shrink now
+would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
+damnation," he thought. "Is it possible that I have a conventional
+conscience?"
+
+He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
+pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street
+facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that
+it was there before him. But at the moment a couple of carriages and a
+slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left,
+following the quay again, but now away from the lake.
+
+"It may be just my health," he thought, allowing himself a very unusual
+doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment
+or two, he had never been ill in his life. But that was a danger, too.
+Only, it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially
+remarkable way. "If I believed in an active Providence," Razumov said
+to himself, amused grimly, "I would see here the working of an ironical
+finger. To have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind
+me of my purpose is--Write, he had said. I must write--I must, indeed!
+I shall write--never fear. Certainly. That's why I am here. And for the
+future I shall have something to write about."
+
+He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy. But the idea of
+writing evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of
+privacy, and naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the
+necessary exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile
+influence awaiting him within those odious four walls.
+
+"Suppose one of these revolutionists," he asked himself, "were to take
+a fancy to call on me while I am writing?" The mere prospect of such
+an interruption made him shudder. One could lock one's door, or ask
+the tobacconist downstairs (some sort of a refugee himself) to tell
+inquirers that one was not in. Not very good precautions those. The
+manner of his life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for
+suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences
+as a delay in opening a locked door. "I wish I were in the middle of
+some field miles away from everywhere," he thought.
+
+He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of
+being on a bridge again. This one was much narrower than the other, and
+instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point
+of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of
+gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile
+neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped
+on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a
+bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal.
+
+On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the
+woman in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the
+island. There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about
+that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+Something pretentious and shabby, too. He asked for a glass of milk,
+which he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea had passed his
+lips since the morning), and was going away with a weary, lagging step
+when a thought stopped him short. He had found precisely what he needed.
+If solitude could ever be secured in the open air in the middle of a
+town, he would have it there on this absurd island, together with the
+faculty of watching the only approach.
+
+He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the
+place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The
+materials he had on him. "I shall always come here," he said to himself,
+and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought
+and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the
+declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw
+the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he
+pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his
+knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the
+connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people
+crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the
+islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat
+enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of
+bronze. After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish
+haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first
+tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But
+the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful
+nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless,
+the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got
+up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.
+
+"There can be no doubt that now I am safe," he thought. His fine ear
+could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking
+against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to
+them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was
+too elusive.
+
+"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to," he murmured. And
+it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen
+to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of
+water, the voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions. All
+the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of
+a soul.
+
+This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and
+the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far
+as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his
+body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it
+must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of solitude
+from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+That I should, at the beginning of this retrospect, mention again that
+Mr. Razumov's youth had no one in the world, as literally no one as it
+can be honestly affirmed of any human being, is but a statement of fact
+from a man who believes in the psychological value of facts. There
+is also, perhaps, a desire of punctilious fairness. Unidentified with
+anyone in this narrative where the aspects of honour and shame are
+remote from the ideas of the Western world, and taking my stand on the
+ground of common humanity, it is for that very reason that I feel a
+strange reluctance to state baldly here what every reader has most
+likely already discovered himself. Such reluctance may appear absurd if
+it were not for the thought that because of the imperfection of language
+there is always something ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the
+exhibition of naked truth. But the time has come when Councillor of
+State Mikulin can no longer be ignored. His simple question "Where to?"
+on which we left Mr. Razumov in St. Petersburg, throws a light on the
+general meaning of this individual case.
+
+"Where to?" was the answer in the form of a gentle question to what we
+may call Mr. Razumov's declaration of independence. The question was not
+menacing in the least and, indeed, had the ring of innocent inquiry.
+Had it been taken in a merely topographical sense, the only answer to it
+would have appeared sufficiently appalling to Mr Razumov. Where to? Back
+to his rooms, where the Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden
+test his dormant instincts, his half-conscious thoughts and almost
+wholly unconscious ambitions, by the touch as of some furious and
+dogmatic religion, with its call to frantic sacrifices, its tender
+resignations, its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by the side of the
+most sombre moods of despair. And Mr. Razumov had let go the door-handle
+and had come back to the middle of the room, asking Councillor Mikulin
+angrily, "What do you mean by it?"
+
+As far as I can tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question.
+He drew Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation. It is the peculiarity of
+Russian natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action,
+they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas. This
+conversation (and others later on) need not be recorded. Suffice it to
+say that it brought Mr. Razumov as we know him to the test of another
+faith. There was nothing official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was
+led to defend his attitude of detachment. But Councillor Mikulin would
+have none of his arguments. "For a man like you," were his last weighty
+words in the discussion, "such a position is impossible. Don't forget
+that I have seen that interesting piece of paper. I understand your
+liberalism. I have an intellect of that kind myself. Reform for me is
+mainly a question of method. But the principle of revolt is a physical
+intoxication, a sort of hysteria which must be kept away from the
+masses. You agree to this without reserve, don't you? Because, you see,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, abstention, reserve, in certain situations, come
+very near to political crime. The ancient Greeks understood that very
+well."
+
+Mr. Razumov, listening with a faint smile, asked Councillor Mikulin
+point-blank if this meant that he was going to have him watched.
+
+The high official took no offence at the cynical inquiry.
+
+"No, Kirylo Sidorovitch," he answered gravely. "I don't mean to have you
+watched."
+
+Razumov, suspecting a lie, affected yet the greatest liberty of mind
+during the short remainder of that interview. The older man expressed
+himself throughout in familiar terms, and with a sort of shrewd
+simplicity. Razumov concluded that to get to the bottom of that mind was
+an impossible feat. A great disquiet made his heart beat quicker. The
+high official, issuing from behind the desk, was actually offering to
+shake hands with him.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr Razumov. An understanding between intelligent men is
+always a satisfactory occurrence. Is it not? And, of course, these rebel
+gentlemen have not the monopoly of intelligence."
+
+"I presume that I shall not be wanted any more?" Razumov brought out
+that question while his hand was still being grasped. Councillor Mikulin
+released it slowly.
+
+"That, Mr. Razumov," he said with great earnestness, "is as it may
+be. God alone knows the future. But you may rest assured that I
+never thought of having you watched. You are a young man of great
+independence. Yes. You are going away free as air, but you shall end by
+coming back to us."
+
+"I! I!" Razumov exclaimed in an appalled murmur of protest. "What for?"
+he added feebly.
+
+"Yes! You yourself, Kirylo Sidorovitch," the high police functionary
+insisted in a low, severe tone of conviction. "You shall be coming back
+to us. Some of our greatest minds had to do that in the end."
+
+"You have no better friend than Prince K---, and as to myself it is a
+long time now since I've been honoured by his...."
+
+He glanced down his beard.
+
+"I won't detain you any longer. We live in difficult times, in times
+of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies. We shall
+certainly meet once more. It may be some little time, though, before
+we do. Till then may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!" Once in the
+street, Razumov started off rapidly, without caring for the direction.
+At first he thought of nothing; but in a little while the consciousness
+of his position presented itself to him as something so ugly, dangerous,
+and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing himself from the toils of
+that complication so insoluble, that the idea of going back and, as he
+termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin flashed through
+his mind.
+
+Go back! What for? Confess! To what? "I have been speaking to him with
+the greatest openness," he said to himself with perfect truth. "What
+else could I tell him? That I have undertaken to carry a message to that
+brute Ziemianitch? Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance
+of safety I have won for nothing--what folly!"
+
+Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin
+was, perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct.
+To be understood appeared extremely fascinating.
+
+On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to
+run out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated
+as if in a desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so
+before he could proceed on his way. He reached his rooms at last.
+
+Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all
+at once removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities,
+from his very room, even. He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to
+himself to be existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything
+that had ever happened to him. He came out of this state slowly, with an
+effect, that is to say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number
+of days was not very great. And when he had got back into the middle of
+things they were all changed, subtly and provokingly in their nature:
+inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl,
+the staircase, the streets, the very air. He tackled these changed
+conditions in a spirit of severity. He walked to and fro to the
+University, ascended stairs, paced the passages, listened to lectures,
+took notes, crossed courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard
+till his jaws ached.
+
+He was perfectly aware of madcap Kostia gazing like a young retriever
+from a distance, of the famished student with the red drooping nose,
+keeping scrupulously away as desired; of twenty others, perhaps, he
+knew well enough to speak to. And they all had an air of curiosity and
+concern as if they expected something to happen. "This can't last much
+longer," thought Razumov more than once. On certain days he was afraid
+that anyone addressing him suddenly in a certain way would make him
+scream out insanely a lot of filthy abuse. Often, after returning home,
+he would drop into a chair in his cap and cloak and remain still for
+hours holding some book he had got from the library in his hand; or
+he would pick up the little penknife and sit there scraping his nails
+endlessly and feeling furious all the time--simply furious. "This is
+impossible," he would mutter suddenly to the empty room.
+
+Fact to be noted: this room might conceivably have become physically
+repugnant to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable.
+But no. Nothing of the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first),
+nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he liked his lodgings
+better than any other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever
+hired before. He liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very
+account, he found a certain difficulty in making up his mind to go out.
+It resembled a physical seduction such as, for instance, makes a man
+reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold day.
+
+For as, at that time, he seldom stirred except to go to the University
+(what else was there to do?) it followed that whenever he went abroad he
+felt himself at once closely involved in the moral consequences of his
+act. It was there that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on
+him, clung to him like a poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off.
+He suffered from it exceedingly, as well as from the conversational,
+commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with the other kind of students.
+"They must be wondering at the change in me," he reflected anxiously. He
+had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent,
+nice enough fellows to go to the devil. Once a married professor he used
+to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: "How is it we never see
+you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" Razumov was conscious of
+meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor
+was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all
+this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin:
+a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of
+the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on
+his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to
+haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it,
+but that there he had no sort of power. There it was Razumov who had
+the upper hand, in a composed sense of his own superiority. A vanquished
+phantom--nothing more. Often in the evening, his repaired watch faintly
+ticking on the table by the side of the lighted lamp, Razumov would
+look up from his writing and stare at the bed with an expectant,
+dispassionate attention. Nothing was to be seen there. He never really
+supposed that anything ever could be seen there. After a while he would
+shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work. For he had
+gone to work and, at first, with some success. His unwillingness to
+leave that place where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at
+last he ceased to go out at all. From early morning till far into the
+night he wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time,
+and only throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open
+no longer. Then, one afternoon, quite casually, he happened to glance at
+his watch. He laid down his pen slowly.
+
+"At this very hour," was his thought, "the fellow stole unseen into this
+room while I was out. And there he sat quiet as a mouse--perhaps in
+this very chair." Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily,
+glancing at the watch now and then. "This is the time when I returned
+and found him standing against the stove," he observed to himself. When
+it grew dark he lit his lamp. Later on he interrupted his tramping once
+more, only to wave away angrily the girl who attempted to enter the
+room with tea and something to eat on a tray. And presently he noted the
+watch pointing at the hour of his own going forth into the falling snow
+on that terrible errand.
+
+"Complicity," he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his
+eye on the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.
+
+"And, after all," he thought suddenly, "I might have been the chosen
+instrument of Providence. This is a manner of speaking, but there may be
+truth in every manner of speaking. What if that absurd saying were true
+in its essence?"
+
+He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with
+stony eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair
+like a man totally abandoned by Providence--desolate.
+
+He noted the time of Haldin's departure and continued to sit still for
+another half-hour; then muttering, "And now to work," drew up to the
+table, seized the pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a
+profoundly disquieting reflection: "There's three weeks gone by and no
+word from Mikulin."
+
+What did it mean! Was he forgotten? Possibly. Then why not remain
+forgotten--creep in somewhere? Hide. But where? How? With whom? In what
+hole? And was it to be for ever, or what?
+
+But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers. The eye of the social
+revolution was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and
+despairing dread, mingled with an odious sense of humiliation. Was it
+possible that he no longer belonged to himself? This was damnable.
+But why not simply keep on as before? Study. Advance. Work hard as if
+nothing had happened (and first of all win the Silver Medal), acquire
+distinction, become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States.
+Servant, too, of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind with a
+capability for logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity
+of force and aim such as the world had never dreamt of... the Russian
+nation!
+
+Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand
+towards the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed. He rushed at
+it, enraged, with a mental scream: "it's you, crazy fanatic, who stands
+in the way!" He flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the
+blankets aside.... Nothing there. And, turning away, he caught for
+an instant in the air, like a vivid detail in a dissolving view of two
+heads, the eyes of General T--- and of Privy-Councillor Mikulin side
+by side fixed upon him, quite different in character, but with the same
+unflinching and weary and yet purposeful expression...servants of the
+nation!
+
+Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some
+water and bathed his forehead. "This will pass and leave no trace," he
+thought confidently. "I am all right." But as to supposing that he had
+been forgotten it was perfect nonsense. He was a marked man on that
+side. And that was nothing. It was what that miserable phantom stood for
+which had to be got out of the way.... "If one only could go and spit
+it all out at some of them--and take the consequences."
+
+He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking
+his fist in his face. "From that one, though," he reflected, "there's
+nothing to be got, because he has no mind of his own. He's living in
+a red democratic trance. Ah! you want to smash your way into universal
+happiness, my boy. I will give you universal happiness, you silly,
+hypnotized ghoul, you! And what about my own happiness, eh? Haven't I
+got any right to it, just because I can think for myself?..."
+
+And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself,
+"I am young. Everything can be lived down." At that moment he was
+crossing the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to
+compose his thoughts. But before he had got so far everything abandoned
+him--hope, courage, belief in himself trust in men. His heart had, as it
+were, suddenly emptied itself. It was no use struggling on. Rest, work,
+solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike
+forbidden to him. Everything was gone. His existence was a great cold
+blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled
+with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
+
+He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like
+that, sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the
+rest of the night; till the girl bustling into the outer room with
+the samovar thumped with her fist on the door, calling out, "Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, please! It is time for you to get up!"
+
+Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov
+opened his eyes and got up.
+
+
+Nobody will be surprised to hear, I suppose, that when the summons came
+he went to see Councillor Mikulin. It came that very morning, while,
+looking white and shaky, like an invalid just out of bed, he was trying
+to shave himself. The envelope was addressed in the little attorney's
+handwriting. That envelope contained another, superscribed to Razumov,
+in Prince K---'s hand, with the request "Please forward under cover
+at once" in a corner. The note inside was an autograph of Councillor
+Mikulin. The writer stated candidly that nothing had arisen which needed
+clearing up, but nevertheless appointed a meeting with Mr. Razumov at a
+certain address in town which seemed to be that of an oculist.
+
+Razumov read it, finished shaving, dressed, looked at the note again,
+and muttered gloomily, "Oculist." He pondered over it for a time, lit
+a match, and burned the two envelopes and the enclosure carefully.
+Afterwards he waited, sitting perfectly idle and not even looking at
+anything in particular till the appointed hour drew near--and then went
+out.
+
+Whether, looking at the unofficial character of the summons, he might
+have refrained from attending to it is hard to say. Probably not. At any
+rate, he went; but, what's more, he went with a certain eagerness, which
+may appear incredible till it is remembered that Councillor Mikulin was
+the only person on earth with whom Razumov could talk, taking the Haldin
+adventure for granted. And Haldin, when once taken for granted, was no
+longer a haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre. Whatever troubling power
+he exercised in all the other places of the earth, Razumov knew very
+well that at this oculist's address he would be merely the hanged
+murderer of M. de P--- and nothing more. For the dead can live only
+with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by
+the living. So Mr. Razumov, certain of relief, went to meet Councillor
+Mikulin with he eagerness of a pursued person welcoming any sort of
+shelter.
+
+This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first
+interview and of the several others. To the morality of a Western reader
+an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character
+of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding
+subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to
+protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion
+of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view,
+allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted. With what
+greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact shade of mere
+mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error,
+always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly
+betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.
+
+Councillor Mikulin was one of those powerful officials who, in a
+position not obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous, exercise
+a great influence over the methods rather than over the conduct of
+affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal
+sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue
+the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor
+Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he
+was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of
+five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be
+an enlightened patron of the art of female dancing. Later on the larger
+world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of
+those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average plain man who
+reads the newspapers, by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in
+the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious
+disturbance of muddy waters, Councillor Mikulin went under, dignified,
+with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No
+disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the
+secrets of the miserable _arcana imperii_ deposited in his patriotic
+breast, a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official's
+ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence
+understood only by the very few of the initiated, and not without a
+certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a sybarite.
+For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councillor Mikulin civilly into a
+corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict.
+
+It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy,
+does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It
+devours its friends and servants as well. The downfall of His Excellency
+Gregory Gregorievitch Mikulin (which did not occur till some years
+later) completes all that is known of the man. But at the time of M. de
+P---'s murder (or execution) Councillor Mikulin, under the modest style
+of Head of Department at the General Secretariat, exercised a wide
+influence as the confidant and right-hand man of his former schoolfellow
+and lifelong friend, General T---. One can imagine them talking over the
+case of Mr. Razumov, with the full sense of their unbounded power
+over all the lives in Russia, with cursory disdain, like two Olympians
+glancing at a worm. The relationship with Prince K--- was enough to save
+Razumov from some carelessly arbitrary proceeding, and it is also very
+probable that after the interview at the Secretariat he would have been
+left alone. Councillor Mikulin would not have forgotten him (he forgot
+no one who ever fell under his observation), but would have simply
+dropped him for ever. Councillor Mikulin was a good-natured man and
+wished no harm to anyone. Besides (with his own reforming tendencies) he
+was favourably impressed by that young student, the son of Prince K---,
+and apparently no fool.
+
+But as fate would have it, while Mr. Razumov was finding that no way of
+life was possible to him, Councillor Mikulin's discreet abilities were
+rewarded by a very responsible post--nothing less than the direction of
+the general police supervision over Europe. And it was then, and then
+only, when taking in hand the perfecting of the service which watches
+the revolutionist activities abroad, that he thought again of Mr.
+Razumov. He saw great possibilities of special usefulness in that
+uncommon young man on whom he had a hold already, with his peculiar
+temperament, his unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a struggling in
+the toils of a false position.... It was as if the revolutionists
+themselves had put into his hand that tool so much finer than the common
+base instruments, so perfectly fitted, if only vested with sufficient
+credit, to penetrate into places inaccessible to common informers.
+Providential! Providential! And Prince K---, taken into the secret, was
+ready enough to adopt that mystical view too. "It will be necessary,
+though, to make a career for him afterwards," he had stipulated
+anxiously. "Oh! absolutely. We shall make that our affair," Mikulin had
+agreed. Prince K---'s mysticism was of an artless kind; but Councillor
+Mikulin was astute enough for two.
+
+Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they
+must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect
+command. The power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to
+seize upon that sense, that side in the men he used. It did not matter
+to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent
+pride or stupid conceit, it was all one to him as long as the man could
+be made to serve. The obscure, unrelated young student Razumov, in the
+moment of great moral loneliness, was allowed to feel that he was an
+object of interest to a small group of people of high position. Prince
+K--- was persuaded to intervene personally, and on a certain occasion
+gave way to a manly emotion which, all unexpected as it was, quite upset
+Mr. Razumov. The sudden embrace of that man, agitated by his loyalty to
+a throne and by suppressed paternal affection, was a revelation to Mr.
+Razumov of something within his own breast.
+
+"So that was it!" he exclaimed to himself. A sort of contemptuous
+tenderness softened the young man's grim view of his position as
+he reflected upon that agitated interview with Prince K---. This
+simpleminded, worldly ex-Guardsman and senator whose soft grey official
+whiskers had brushed against his cheek, his aristocratic and convinced
+father, was he a whit less estimable or more absurd than that
+famine-stricken, fanatical revolutionist, the red-nosed student?
+
+And there was some pressure, too, besides the persuasiveness. Mr.
+Razumov was always being made to feel that he had committed himself.
+There was no getting away from that feeling, from that soft,
+unanswerable, "Where to?" of Councillor Mikulin. But no susceptibilities
+were ever hurt. It was to be a dangerous mission to Geneva for
+obtaining, at a critical moment, absolutely reliable information from a
+very inaccessible quarter of the inner revolutionary circle. There were
+indications that a very serious plot was being matured.... The repose
+indispensable to a great country was at stake.... A great scheme of
+orderly reforms would be endangered.... The highest personages in the
+land were patriotically uneasy, and so on. In short, Councillor Mikulin
+knew what to say. This skill is to be inferred clearly from the mental
+and psychological self-confession, self-analysis of Mr. Razumov's
+written journal--the pitiful resource of a young man who had near him no
+trusted intimacy, no natural affection to turn to.
+
+How all this preliminary work was concealed from observation need not
+be recorded. The expedient of the oculist gives a sufficient instance.
+Councillor Mikulin was resourceful, and the task not very difficult. Any
+fellow-student, even the red-nosed one, was perfectly welcome to see Mr.
+Razumov entering a private house to consult an oculist. Ultimate success
+depended solely on the revolutionary self-delusion which credited
+Razumov with a mysterious complicity in the Haldin affair. To be
+compromised in it was credit enough-and it was their own doing. It was
+precisely _that_ which stamped Mr. Razumov as a providential man, wide
+as poles apart from the usual type of agent for "European supervision."
+
+And it was _that_ which the Secretariat set itself the task to foster by
+a course of calculated and false indiscretions.
+
+It came at last to this, that one evening Mr. Razumov was unexpectedly
+called upon by one of the "thinking" students whom formerly, before
+the Haldin affair, he used to meet at various private gatherings; a big
+fellow with a quiet, unassuming manner and a pleasant voice.
+
+Recognizing his voice raised in the ante-room, "May one come in?"
+Razumov, lounging idly on his couch, jumped up. "Suppose he were coming
+to stab me?" he thought sardonically, and, assuming a green shade over
+his left eye, said in a severe tone, "Come in."
+
+The other was embarrassed; hoped he was not intruding.
+
+"You haven't been seen for several days, and I've wondered." He coughed
+a little. "Eye better?"
+
+"Nearly well now."
+
+"Good. I won't stop a minute; but you see I, that is, we--anyway, I
+have undertaken the duty to warn you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that you are
+living in false security maybe."
+
+Razumov sat still with his head leaning on his hand, which nearly
+concealed the unshaded eye.
+
+"I have that idea, too."
+
+"That's all right, then. Everything seems quiet now, but those people
+are preparing some move of general repression. That's of course. But it
+isn't that I came to tell you." He hitched his chair closer, dropped his
+voice. "You will be arrested before long--we fear."
+
+An obscure scribe in the Secretariat had overheard a few words of a
+certain conversation, and had caught a glimpse of a certain report. This
+intelligence was not to be neglected.
+
+Razumov laughed a little, and his visitor became very anxious.
+
+"Ah! Kirylo Sidorovitch, this is no laughing matter. They have left you
+alone for a while, but...! Indeed, you had better try to leave the
+country, Kirylo Sidorovitch, while there's yet time."
+
+Razumov jumped up and began to thank him for the advice with mocking
+effusiveness, so that the other, colouring up, took himself off with
+the notion that this mysterious Razumov was not a person to be warned or
+advised by inferior mortals.
+
+Councillor Mikulin, informed the next day of the incident, expressed
+his satisfaction. "H'm! Ha! Exactly what was wanted to..." and glanced
+down his beard.
+
+"I conclude," said Razumov, "that the moment has come for me to start on
+my mission."
+
+"The psychological Moment," Councillor Mikulin insisted softly--very
+gravely--as if awed.
+
+All the arrangements to give verisimilitude to the appearance of a
+difficult escape were made. Councillor Mikulin did not expect to see
+Mr. Razumov again before his departure. These meetings were a risk, and
+there was nothing more to settle.
+
+"We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch,"
+said the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov's hand with that
+unreserved heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner. "There is
+nothing obscure between us. And I will tell you what! I consider myself
+fortunate in having--h'm--your..."
+
+He glanced down his beard, and, after a moment of thoughtful silence,
+handed to Razumov a half-sheet of notepaper--an abbreviated note of
+matters already discussed, certain points of inquiry, the line of
+conduct agreed on, a few hints as to personalities, and so on. It was
+the only compromising document in the case, but, as Councillor Mikulin
+observed, "it could be easily destroyed. Mr. Razumov had better not see
+any one now--till on the other side of the frontier, when, of course, it
+will be just that.... See and hear and..."
+
+He glanced down his beard; but when Razumov declared his intention
+to see one person at least before leaving St. Petersburg, Councillor
+Mikulin failed to conceal a sudden uneasiness. The young man's studious,
+solitary, and austere existence was well known to him. It was the
+greatest guarantee of fitness. He became deprecatory. Had his dear
+Kirylo Sidorovitch considered whether, in view of such a momentous
+enterprise, it wasn't really advisable to sacrifice every sentiment....
+
+Razumov interrupted the remonstrance scornfully. It was not a young
+woman, it was a young fool he wished to see for a certain purpose.
+Councillor Mikulin was relieved, but surprised.
+
+"Ah! And what for--precisely?"
+
+"For the sake of improving the aspect of verisimilitude," said Razumov
+curtly, in a desire to affirm his independence. "I must be trusted in
+what I do."
+
+Councillor Mikulin gave way tactfully, murmuring, "Oh, certainly,
+certainly. Your judgment..."
+
+And with another handshake they parted.
+
+The fool of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive
+student known as madcap Kostia. Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable,
+one could make certain of his utter and complete indiscretion. But that
+riotous youth, when reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some
+time ago, passed from his usual elation into boundless dismay.
+
+"Oh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, my dearest friend--my saviour--what shall I
+do? I've blown last night every rouble I had from my dad the other day.
+Can't you give me till Thursday? I shall rush round to all the usurers
+I know.... No, of course, you can't! Don't look at me like that.
+What shall I do? No use asking the old man. I tell you he's given me a
+fistful of big notes three days ago. Miserable wretch that I am."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair. Impossible to confide in the old man.
+"They" had given him a decoration, a cross on the neck only last year,
+and he had been cursing the modern tendencies ever since. Just then he
+would see all the intellectuals in Russia hanged in a row rather than
+part with a single rouble.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch, wait a moment. Don't despise me. I have it. I'll,
+yes--I'll do it--I'll break into his desk. There's no help for it. I
+know the drawer where he keeps his plunder, and I can buy a chisel on my
+way home. He will be terribly upset, but, you know, the dear old duffer
+really loves me. He'll have to get over it--and I, too. Kirylo, my dear
+soul, if you can only wait for a few hours-till this evening--I shall
+steal all the blessed lot I can lay my hands on! You doubt me! Why?
+You've only to say the word."
+
+"Steal, by all means," said Razumov, fixing him stonily.
+
+"To the devil with the ten commandments!" cried the other, with the
+greatest animation. "It's the new future now."
+
+But when he entered Razumov's room late in the evening it was with an
+unaccustomed soberness of manner, almost solemnly.
+
+"It's done," he said.
+
+Razumov sitting bowed, his clasped hands hanging between his knees,
+shuddered at the familiar sound of these words. Kostia deposited slowly
+in the circle of lamplight a small brown-paper parcel tied with a piece
+of string.
+
+"As I've said--all I could lay my hands on. The old boy'll think the end
+of the world has come." Razumov nodded from the couch, and contemplated
+the hare-brained fellow's gravity with a feeling of malicious pleasure.
+
+"I've made my little sacrifice," sighed mad Kostia. "And I've to thank
+you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, for the opportunity."
+
+"It has cost you something?"
+
+"Yes, it has. You see, the dear old duffer really loves me. He'll be
+hurt."
+
+"And you believe all they tell you of the new future and the sacred will
+of the people?"
+
+"Implicitly. I would give my life.... Only, you see, I am like a pig
+at a trough. I am no good. It's my nature."
+
+Razumov, lost in thought, had forgotten his existence till the
+youth's voice, entreating him to fly without loss of time, roused him
+unpleasantly.
+
+"All right. Well--good-bye."
+
+"I am not going to leave you till I've seen you out of St. Petersburg,"
+declared Kostia unexpectedly, with calm determination. "You can't refuse
+me that now. For God's sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here
+any moment, and when they get you they'll immure you somewhere for
+ages--till your hair turns grey. I have down there the best trotter of
+dad's stables and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the
+moon sets, and find some roadside station...."
+
+Razumov looked up amazed. The journey was decided--unavoidable. He
+had fixed the next day for his departure on the mission. And now he
+discovered suddenly that he had not believed in it. He had gone about
+listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the
+growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever
+did such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was
+amazed! Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness.
+"If I don't go now, at once," thought Razumov, with a start of fear, "I
+shall never go." He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia thrust
+his cap on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he would have left
+the room bareheaded as he stood. He was walking out silently when a
+sharp cry arrested him.
+
+"Kirylo!"
+
+"What?" He turned reluctantly in the doorway. Upright, with a stiffly
+extended arm, Kostia, his face set and white, was pointing an eloquent
+forefinger at the brown little packet lying forgotten in the circle of
+bright light on the table. Razumov hesitated, came back for it under the
+severe eyes of his companion, at whom he tried to smile. But the boyish,
+mad youth was frowning. "It's a dream," thought Razumov, putting the
+little parcel into his pocket and descending the stairs; "nobody does
+such things." The other held him under the arm, whispering of
+dangers ahead, and of what he meant to do in certain contingencies.
+"Preposterous," murmured Razumov, as he was being tucked up in the
+sledge. He gave himself up to watching the development of the dream
+with extreme attention. It continued on foreseen lines, inexorably
+logical--the long drive, the wait at the small station sitting by a
+stove. They did not exchange half a dozen words altogether. Kostia,
+gloomy himself, did not care to break the silence. At parting they
+embraced twice--it had to be done; and then Kostia vanished out of the
+dream.
+
+When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full
+of bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose
+quietly, lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great
+plain of snow a small brown-paper parcel. Then he sat down again muffled
+up and motionless. "For the people," he thought, staring out of the
+window. The great white desert of frozen, hard earth glided past his
+eyes without a sign of human habitation.
+
+That had been a waking act; and then the dream had him again: Prussia,
+Saxony, Wurtemberg, faces, sights, words--all a dream, observed with
+an angry, compelled attention. Zurich, Geneva--still a dream, minutely
+followed, wearing one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death--with the
+fear of awakening at the end.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Perhaps life is just that," reflected Razumov, pacing to and fro under
+the trees of the little island, all alone with the bronze statue of
+Rousseau. "A dream and a fear." The dusk deepened. The pages written
+over and torn out of his notebook were the first-fruit of his "mission."
+No dream that. They contained the assurance that he was on the eve of
+real discoveries. "I think there is no longer anything in the way of my
+being completely accepted."
+
+He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the
+conversations. He even went so far as to write: "By the by, I have
+discovered the personality of that terrible N.N. A horrible, paunchy
+brute. If I hear anything of his future movements I shall send a
+warning."
+
+The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could
+not believe in the reality of his mission. He looked round despairingly,
+as if for some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable
+feeling. He crushed angrily in his hand the pages of the notebook. "This
+must be posted," he thought.
+
+He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he
+remembered having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure
+shop stocked with cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely
+dirty cardboard-bound volumes of a small circulating library. They
+sold stationery there, too. A morose, shabby old man dozed behind
+the counter. A thin woman in black, with a sickly face, produced the
+envelope he had asked for without even looking at him. Razumov thought
+that these people were safe to deal with because they no longer cared
+for anything in the world. He addressed the envelope on the counter with
+the German name of a certain person living in Vienna. But Razumov knew
+that this, his first communication for Councillor Mikulin, would
+find its way to the Embassy there, be copied in cypher by somebody
+trustworthy, and sent on to its destination, all safe, along with the
+diplomatic correspondence. That was the arrangement contrived to cover
+up the track of the information from all unfaithful eyes, from all
+indiscretions, from all mishaps and treacheries. It was to make him
+safe--absolutely safe.
+
+He wandered out of the wretched shop and made for the post office. It
+was then that I saw him for the second time that day. He was crossing
+the Rue Mont Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller. He
+did not recognize me, but I made him out at some distance. He was
+very good-looking, I thought, this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin's
+brother. I watched him go up to the letter-box and then retrace his
+steps. Again he passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see
+me that time, either. He carried his head well up, but he had the
+expression of a somnambulist struggling with the very dream which drives
+him forth to wander in dangerous places. My thoughts reverted to Natalia
+Haldin, to her mother. He was all that was left to them of their son and
+brother.
+
+The westerner in me was discomposed. There was something shocking in
+the expression of that face. Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian
+political refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical
+conclusion from this chance glimpse. As it was, it only discomposed me
+strongly, even to the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in
+regard to Natalia Haldin. All this is rather inexplicable, but such
+was the origin of the purpose I formed there and then to call on these
+ladies in the evening, after my solitary dinner. It was true that I had
+met Miss Haldin only a few hours before, but Mrs. Haldin herself I had
+not seen for some considerable time. The truth is, I had shirked calling
+of late.
+
+Poor Mrs. Haldin! I confess she frightened me a little. She was one
+of those natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being
+interested, because they provoke both terror and pity. One dreads their
+contact for oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear
+it is that they are born to suffer and to make others suffer, too. It is
+strange to think that, I won't say liberty, but the mere liberalism of
+outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and
+if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our
+deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like
+ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a
+matter of tears and anguish and blood. Mrs. Haldin had felt the pangs
+of her own generation. There was that enthusiast brother of hers--the
+officer they shot under Nicholas. A faintly ironic resignation is
+no armour for a vulnerable heart. Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her
+children, was bound to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the
+anguish of the future. She was of those who do not know how to heal
+themselves, of those who are too much aware of their heart, who, neither
+cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at its wounds--and count the
+cost.
+
+Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor's meal. If
+anybody wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of
+Natalia Haldin, I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.
+She had all her life before her. Let it be admitted, then, that I was
+thinking of Natalia Haldin's life in terms of her mother's character, a
+manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old
+yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth
+before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy,
+overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly sombre youth
+given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious
+antagonisms.
+
+I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done. One felt so
+helpless, and even worse--so unrelated, in a way. At the last moment I
+hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good?
+
+The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner. The blind was
+down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in
+her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired
+the poignant quality of mad expectation.
+
+I thought that I was sufficiently authorized by the light to knock at
+the door. The ladies had not retired as yet. I only hoped they would
+not have any visitors of their own nationality. A broken-down, retired
+Russian official was to be found there sometimes in the evening. He was
+infinitely forlorn and wearisome by his mere dismal presence. I think
+these ladies tolerated his frequent visits because of an ancient
+friendship with Mr. Haldin, the father, or something of that sort. I
+made up my mind that if I found him prosing away there in his feeble
+voice I should remain but a very few minutes.
+
+The door surprised me by swinging open before I could ring the bell. I
+was confronted by Miss Haldin, in hat and jacket, obviously on the point
+of going out. At that hour! For the doctor, perhaps?
+
+Her exclamation of welcome reassured me. It sounded as if I had been the
+very man she wanted to see. My curiosity was awakened. She drew me in,
+and the faithful Anna, the elderly German maid, closed the door, but did
+not go away afterwards. She remained near it as if in readiness to let
+me out presently. It appeared that Miss Haldin had been on the point of
+going out to find me.
+
+She spoke in a hurried manner very unusual with her. She would have
+gone straight and rung at Mrs. Ziegler's door, late as it was, for Mrs.
+Ziegler's habits....
+
+Mrs. Ziegler, the widow of a distinguished professor who was an intimate
+friend of mine, lets me have three rooms out of her very large and fine
+apartment, which she didn't give up after her husband's death; but I
+have my own entrance opening on the same landing. It was an arrangement
+of at least ten years' standing. I said that I was very glad that I had
+the idea to....
+
+Miss Haldin made no motion to take off her outdoor things. I observed
+her heightened colour, something pronouncedly resolute in her tone. Did
+I know where Mr. Razumov lived?
+
+Where Mr. Razumov lived? Mr. Razumov? At this hour--so urgently? I threw
+my arms up in sign of utter ignorance. I had not the slightest idea
+where he lived. If I could have foreseen her question only three hours
+ago, I might have ventured to ask him on the pavement before the new
+post office building, and possibly he would have told me, but very
+possibly, too, he would have dismissed me rudely to mind my own
+business. And possibly, I thought, remembering that extraordinary
+hallucined, anguished, and absent expression, he might have fallen down
+in a fit from the shock of being spoken to. I said nothing of all this
+to Miss Haldin, not even mentioning that I had a glimpse of the young
+man so recently. The impression had been so extremely unpleasant that I
+would have been glad to forget it myself.
+
+"I don't see where I could make inquiries," I murmured helplessly. I
+would have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to
+fetch any man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in
+her common sense. "What made you think of coming to me for that
+information?" I asked.
+
+"It wasn't exactly for that," she said, in a low voice. She had the air
+of some one confronted by an unpleasant task.
+
+"Am I to understand that you must communicate with Mr. Razumov this
+evening?"
+
+Natalia Haldin moved her head affirmatively; then, after a glance at the
+door of the drawing-room, said in French--
+
+"_C'est maman_," and remained perplexed for a moment. Always serious,
+not a girl to be put out by any imaginary difficulties, my curiosity was
+suspended on her lips, which remained closed for a moment. What was Mr.
+Razumov's connexion with this mention of her mother? Mrs. Haldin had not
+been informed of her son's friend's arrival in Geneva.
+
+"May I hope to see your mother this evening?" I inquired.
+
+Miss Haldin extended her hand as if to bar the way.
+
+"She is in a terrible state of agitation. Oh, you would not he able
+to detect.... It's inward, but I who know mother, I am appalled. I
+haven't the courage to face it any longer. It's all my fault; I suppose
+I cannot play a part; I've never before hidden anything from mother.
+There has never been an occasion for anything of that sort between us.
+But you know yourself the reason why I refrained from telling her at
+once of Mr. Razumov's arrival here. You understand, don't you? Owing to
+her unhappy state. And--there--I am no actress. My own feelings being
+strongly engaged, I somehow.... I don't know. She noticed something
+in my manner. She thought I was concealing something from her. She
+noticed my longer absences, and, in fact, as I have been meeting Mr.
+Razumov daily, I used to stay away longer than usual when I went out.
+Goodness knows what suspicions arose in her mind. You know that she has
+not been herself ever since.... So this evening she--who has been so
+awfully silent: for weeks-began to talk all at once. She said that she
+did not want to reproach me; that I had my character as she had her own;
+that she did not want to pry into my affairs or even into my thoughts;
+for her part, she had never had anything to conceal from her
+children...cruel things to listen to. And all this in her quiet voice,
+with that poor, wasted face as calm as a stone. It was unbearable."
+
+Miss Haldin talked in an undertone and more rapidly than I had ever
+heard her speak before. That in itself was disturbing. The ante-room
+being strongly lighted, I could see under the veil the heightened colour
+of her face. She stood erect, her left hand was resting lightly on a
+small table. The other hung by her side without stirring. Now and then
+she caught her breath slightly.
+
+"It was too startling. Just fancy! She thought that I was making
+preparations to leave her without saying anything. I knelt by the side
+of her chair and entreated her to think of what she was saying! She put
+her hand on my head, but she persists in her delusion all the same. She
+had always thought that she was worthy of her children's confidence, but
+apparently it was not so. Her son could not trust her love nor yet her
+understanding--and now I was planning to abandon her in the same cruel
+and unjust manner, and so on, and so on. Nothing I could say.... It
+is morbid obstinacy.... She said that she felt there was something,
+some change in me.... If my convictions were calling me away, why
+this secrecy, as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe to
+trust? 'As if my heart could play traitor to my children,' she said....
+It was hardly to be borne. And she was smoothing my head all the
+time.... It was perfectly useless to protest. She is ill. Her very
+soul is...."
+
+I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us. I looked
+into her eyes, glistening through the veil.
+
+"I! Changed!" she exclaimed in the same low tone. "My convictions
+calling me away! It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I
+am weak and cannot see what I ought to do. You know that. And to end it
+all I did a selfish thing. To remove her suspicions of myself I told her
+of Mr. Razumov. It was selfish of me. You know we were completely
+right in agreeing to keep the knowledge away from her. Perfectly right.
+Directly I told her of our poor Victor's friend being here I saw how
+right we have been. She ought to have been prepared; but in my distress
+I just blurted it out. Mother got terribly excited at once. How long
+has he been here? What did he know, and why did he not come to see us at
+once, this friend of her Victor? What did that mean? Was she not to be
+trusted even with such memories as there were left of her son?... Just
+think how I felt seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly motionless,
+with her thin hands gripping the arms of the chair. I told her it was
+all my fault."
+
+I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair,
+there, behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me.
+The silence in there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an
+historical fact and the modern instances of its working. That view
+flashed through my mind, but I could not doubt that Miss Haldin had had
+an atrocious time of it. I quite understood when she said that she could
+not face the night upon the impression of that scene. Mrs. Haldin
+had given way to most awful imaginings, to most fantastic and cruel
+suspicions. All this had to be lulled at all costs and without loss of
+time. It was no shock to me to learn that Miss Haldin had said to her,
+"I will go and bring him here at once." There was nothing absurd in that
+cry, no exaggeration of sentiment. I was not even doubtful in my "Very
+well, but how?"
+
+It was perfectly right that she should think of me, but what could I do
+in my ignorance of Mr. Razumov's quarters.
+
+"And to think he may be living near by, within a stone's-throw,
+perhaps!" she exclaimed.
+
+I doubted it; but I would have gone off cheerfully to fetch him from the
+other end of Geneva. I suppose she was certain of my readiness, since
+her first thought was to come to me. But the service she meant to ask of
+me really was to accompany her to the Chateau Borel.
+
+I had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre
+grounds, and the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy
+and intrigue and feminist adoration. I objected that Madame de S-- most
+likely would know nothing of what we wanted to find out. Neither did I
+think it likely that the young man would be found there. I remembered
+my glimpse of his face, and somehow gained the conviction that a man who
+looked worse than if he had seen the dead would want to shut himself up
+somewhere where he could be alone. I felt a strange certitude that Mr.
+Razumov was going home when I saw him.
+
+"It is really of Peter Ivanovitch that I was thinking," said Miss Haldin
+quietly.
+
+Ah! He, of course, would know. I looked at my watch. It was twenty
+minutes past nine only.... Still.
+
+"I would try his hotel, then," I advised. "He has rooms at the
+Cosmopolitan, somewhere on the top floor."
+
+I did not offer to go by myself, simply from mistrust of the reception I
+should meet with. But I suggested the faithful Anna, with a note asking
+for the information.
+
+Anna was still waiting by the door at the other end of the room, and we
+two discussed the matter in whispers. Miss Haldin thought she must go
+herself. Anna was timid and slow. Time would be lost in bringing back
+the answer, and from that point of view it was getting late, for it was
+by no means certain that Mr. Razumov lived near by.
+
+"If I go myself," Miss Haldin argued, "I can go straight to him from the
+hotel. And in any case I should have to go out, because I must explain
+to Mr. Razumov personally--prepare him in a way. You have no idea of
+mother's state of mind."
+
+Her colour came and went. She even thought that both for her mother's
+sake and for her own it was better that they should not be together for
+a little time. Anna, whom her mother liked, would be at hand.
+
+"She could take her sewing into the room," Miss Haldin continued,
+leading the way to the door. Then, addressing in German the maid who
+opened it before us, "You may tell my mother that this gentleman called
+and is gone with me to find Mr. Razumov. She must not be uneasy if I am
+away for some length of time."
+
+We passed out quickly into the street, and she took deep breaths of the
+cool night air. "I did not even ask you," she murmured.
+
+"I should think not," I said, with a laugh. The manner of my reception
+by the great feminist could not be considered now. That he would be
+annoyed to see me, and probably treat me to some solemn insolence, I had
+no doubt, but I supposed that he would not absolutely dare to throw me
+out. And that was all I cared for. "Won't you take my arm?" I asked.
+
+She did so in silence, and neither of us said anything worth recording
+till I let her go first into the great hall of the hotel. It was
+brilliantly lighted, and with a good many people lounging about.
+
+"I could very well go up there without you," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like to be left waiting in this place," she said in a low
+voice.
+
+"I will come too."
+
+I led her straight to the lift then. At the top floor the attendant
+directed us to the right: "End of the corridor."
+
+The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in
+profusion, and the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike
+and numbered, made me think of the perfect order of some severely
+luxurious model penitentiary on the solitary confinement principle. Up
+there under the roof of that enormous pile for housing travellers
+no sound of any kind reached us, the thick crimson felt muffled our
+footsteps completely. We hastened on, not looking at each other till we
+found ourselves before the very last door of that long passage. Then our
+eyes met, and we stood thus for a moment lending ear to a faint murmur
+of voices inside.
+
+"I suppose this is it," I whispered unnecessarily. I saw Miss Haldin's
+lips move without a sound, and after my sharp knock the murmur of voices
+inside ceased. A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then
+the door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red
+blouse, with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in
+an untidy and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn
+together. I learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous--or
+the notorious--Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint
+Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so
+curiously evil-less, so--I may say--un-devilish. It got softened still
+more as she looked up at Miss Haldin, who stated, in her rich, even
+voice, her wish to see Peter Ivanovitch for a moment.
+
+"I am Miss Haldin," she added.
+
+At this, with her brow completely smoothed out now, but without a word
+in answer, the woman in the red blouse walked away to a sofa and sat
+down, leaving the door wide open.
+
+And from the sofa, her hands lying on her lap, she watched us enter,
+with her black, glittering eyes.
+
+Miss Haldin advanced into the middle of the room; I, faithful to my part
+of mere attendant, remained by the door after closing it behind me. The
+room, quite a large one, but with a low ceiling, was scantily furnished,
+and an electric bulb with a porcelain shade pulled low down over a big
+table (with a very large map spread on it) left its distant parts in a
+dim, artificial twilight. Peter Ivanovitch was not to be seen, neither
+was Mr. Razumov present. But, on the sofa, near Sophia Antonovna, a
+bony-faced man with a goatee beard leaned forward with his hands on
+his knees, staring hard with a kindly expression. In a remote corner a
+broad, pale face and a bulky shape could be made out, uncouth, and as if
+insecure on the low seat on which it rested. The only person known to me
+was little Julius Laspara, who seemed to have been poring over the map,
+his feet twined tightly round the chair-legs. He got down briskly and
+bowed to Miss Haldin, looking absurdly like a hooknosed boy with a
+beautiful false pepper-and-salt beard. He advanced, offering his seat,
+which Miss Haldin declined. She had only come in for a moment to say a
+few words to Peter Ivanovitch.
+
+His high-pitched voice became painfully audible in the room.
+
+"Strangely enough, I was thinking of you this very afternoon, Natalia
+Victorovna. I met Mr. Razumov. I asked him to write me an article on
+anything he liked. You could translate it into English--with such a
+teacher."
+
+He nodded complimentarily in my direction. At the name of Razumov an
+indescribable sound, a sort of feeble squeak, as of some angry small
+animal, was heard in the corner occupied by the man who seemed much too
+large for the chair on which he sat. I did not hear what Miss Haldin
+said. Laspara spoke again.
+
+"It's time to do something, Natalia Victorovna. But I suppose you have
+your own ideas. Why not write something yourself? Suppose you came to
+see us soon? We could talk it over. Any advice..."
+
+Again I did not catch Miss Haldin's words. It was Laspara's voice once
+more.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch? He's retired for a moment into the other room. We
+are all waiting for him." The great man, entering at that moment, looked
+bigger, taller, quite imposing in a long dressing-gown of some dark
+stuff. It descended in straight lines down to his feet. He suggested
+a monk or a prophet, a robust figure of same desert-dweller--something
+Asiatic; and the dark glasses in conjunction with this costume made him
+more mysterious than ever in the subdued light.
+
+Little Laspara went back to his chair to look at the map, the only
+brilliantly lit object in the room. Even from my distant position by the
+door I could make out, by the shape of the blue part representing the
+water, that it was a map of the Baltic provinces. Peter Ivanovitch
+exclaimed slightly, advancing towards Miss Haldin, checked himself
+on perceiving me, very vaguely no doubt; and peered with his dark,
+bespectacled stare. He must have recognized me by my grey hair, because,
+with a marked shrug of his broad shoulders, he turned to Miss Haldin in
+benevolent indulgence. He seized her hand in his thick cushioned palm,
+and put his other big paw over it like a lid.
+
+While those two standing in the middle of the floor were exchanging a
+few inaudible phrases no one else moved in the room: Laspara, with his
+back to us, kneeling on the chair, his elbows propped on the big-scale
+map, the shadowy enormity in the corner, the frankly staring man with
+the goatee on the sofa, the woman in the red blouse by his side--not one
+of them stirred. I suppose that really they had no time, for Miss Haldin
+withdrew her hand immediately from Peter Ivanovitch and before I was
+ready for her was moving to the door. A disregarded Westerner, I threw
+it open hurriedly and followed her out, my last glance leaving them all
+motionless in their varied poses: Peter Ivanovitch alone standing up,
+with his dark glasses like an enormous blind teacher, and behind him the
+vivid patch of light on the coloured map, pored over by the diminutive
+Laspara.
+
+Later on, much later on, at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were
+vague and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia,
+I remembered the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its
+central figure. No details ever came out, but it was known that the
+revolutionary parties abroad had given their assistance, had sent
+emissaries in advance, that even money was found to dispatch a steamer
+with a cargo of arms and conspirators to invade the Baltic provinces.
+And while my eyes scanned the imperfect disclosures (in which the world
+was not much interested) I thought that the old, settled Europe had been
+given in my person attending that Russian girl something like a glimpse
+behind the scenes. A short, strange glimpse on the top floor of a great
+hotel of all places in the world: the great man himself; the motionless
+great bulk in the corner of the slayer of spies and gendarmes;
+Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient terrorist campaigns; the woman, with
+her hair as white as mine and the lively black eyes, all in a mysterious
+half-light, with the strongly lighted map of Russia on the table. The
+woman I had the opportunity to see again. As we were waiting for the
+lift she came hurrying along the corridor, with her eyes fastened
+on Miss Haldin's face, and drew her aside as if for a confidential
+communication. It was not long. A few words only.
+
+Going down in the lift, Natalia Haldin did not break the silence. It was
+only when out of the hotel and as we moved along the quay in the fresh
+darkness spangled by the quay lights, reflected in the black water of
+the little port on our left hand, and with lofty piles of hotels on our
+right, that she spoke.
+
+"That was Sophia Antonovna--you know the woman?..."
+
+"Yes, I know--the famous..."
+
+"The same. It appears that after we went out Peter Ivanovitch told them
+why I had come. That was the reason she ran out after us. She named
+herself to me, and then she said, 'You are the sister of a brave man who
+shall be remembered. You may see better times.' I told her I hoped to
+see the time when all this would be forgotten, even if the name of my
+brother were to be forgotten too. Something moved me to say that, but
+you understand?"
+
+"Yes," I said. "You think of the era of concord and justice."
+
+"Yes. There is too much hate and revenge in that work. It must be done.
+It is a sacrifice--and so let it be all the greater. Destruction is the
+work of anger. Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together,
+and only the reconstructors be remembered.''
+
+"And did Sophia Antonovna agree with you?" I asked sceptically.
+
+"She did not say anything except, 'It is good for you to believe in
+love.' I should think she understood me. Then she asked me if I hoped to
+see Mr. Razumov presently. I said I trusted I could manage to bring him
+to see my mother this evening, as my mother had learned of his being
+here and was morbidly impatient to learn if he could tell us something
+of Victor. He was the only friend of my brother we knew of, and a great
+intimate. She said, 'Oh! Your brother--yes. Please tell Mr. Razumov that
+I have made public the story which came to me from St. Petersburg. It
+concerns your brother's arrest,' she added. 'He was betrayed by a man of
+the people who has since hanged himself. Mr. Razumov will explain it all
+to you. I gave him the full information this afternoon. And please tell
+Mr. Razumov that Sophia Antonovna sends him her greetings. I am going
+away early in the morning--far away.'"
+
+And Miss Haldin added, after a moment of silence--"I was so moved
+by what I heard so unexpectedly that I simply could not speak to you
+before.... A man of the people! Oh, our poor people!"
+
+She walked slowly, as if tired out suddenly. Her head drooped; from the
+windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound
+of hotel music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red
+posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial
+effect.--and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the
+streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible
+dreariness.
+
+I had taken for granted she had obtained the address, and let myself be
+guided by her. On the Mont Blanc bridge, where a few dark figures seemed
+lost in the wide and long perspective defined by the lights, she said--
+
+"It isn't very far from our house. I somehow thought it couldn't be.
+The address is Rue de Carouge. I think it must be one of those big new
+houses for artisans."
+
+She took my arm confidingly, familiarly, and accelerated her pace. There
+was something primitive in our proceedings. We did not think of
+the resources of civilization. A late tramcar overtook us; a row of
+_fiacres_ stood by the railing of the gardens. It never entered our
+heads to make use of these conveyances. She was too hurried, perhaps,
+and as to myself--well, she had taken my arm confidingly. As we were
+ascending the easy incline of the Corraterie, all the shops shuttered
+and no light in any of the windows (as if all the mercenary population
+had fled at the end of the day), she said tentatively--
+
+"I could run in for a moment to have a look at mother. It would not be
+much out of the way."
+
+I dissuaded her. If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that
+night it would have been unwise to show herself without him. The sooner
+we got hold of the young man and brought him along to calm her mother's
+agitation the better. She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed
+diagonally the Place de Theatre, bluish grey with its floor of slabs of
+stone, under the electric light, and the lonely equestrian statue
+all black in the middle. In the Rue de Carouge we were in the poorer
+quarters and approaching the outskirts of the town. Vacant building
+plots alternated with high, new houses. At the corner of a side street
+the crude light of a whitewashed shop fell into the night, fan-like,
+through a wide doorway. One could see from a distance the inner wall
+with its scantily furnished shelves, and the deal counter painted brown.
+That was the house. Approaching it along the dark stretch of a fence
+of tarred planks, we saw the narrow pallid face of the cut angle, five
+single windows high, without a gleam in them, and crowned by the heavy
+shadow of a jutting roof slope.
+
+"We must inquire in the shop," Miss Haldin directed me.
+
+A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a
+frayed tie, laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both
+elbows far over the bare counter, answered that the person I was
+inquiring for was indeed his _locataire_ on the third floor, but that
+for the moment he was out.
+
+"For the moment," I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin. "Does this
+mean that you expect him back at once?"
+
+He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips. He smiled
+faintly as though he knew all about everything. Mr. Razumov, after being
+absent all day, had returned early in the evening. He was very surprised
+about half an hour or a little more since to see him come down again.
+Mr. Razumov left his key, and in the course of some words which passed
+between them had remarked that he was going out because he needed air.
+
+From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held
+between his hands. Air. Air. But whether that meant a long or a short
+absence it was difficult to say. The night was very close, certainly.
+
+After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added--
+
+"The storm shall drive him in."
+
+"There's going to be a storm?" I asked.
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
+
+Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up
+her quest that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home
+within half an hour, to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop. We
+would look in again presently.
+
+For all answer he moved his head imperceptibly. The approval of Miss
+Haldin was expressed by her silence. We walked slowly down the street,
+away from the town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to
+demolition were overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage,
+lighted from below by gas lamps. The violent and monotonous noise of the
+icy waters of the Arve falling over a low dam swept towards us with a
+chilly draught of air across a great open space, where a double line of
+lamp-lights outlined a street as yet without houses. But on the other
+shore, overhung by the awful blackness of the thunder-cloud, a solitary
+dim light seemed to watch us with a weary stare. When we had strolled as
+far as the bridge, I said--
+
+"We had better get back...."
+
+
+In the shop the sickly man was studying his smudgy newspaper, now spread
+out largely on the counter. He just raised his head when I looked in and
+shook it negatively, pursing up his lips. I rejoined Miss Haldin outside
+at once, and we moved off at a brisk pace. She remarked that she would
+send Anna with a note the first thing in the morning. I respected her
+taciturnity, silence being perhaps the best way to show my concern.
+
+The semi-rural street we followed on our return changed gradually to the
+usual town thoroughfare, broad and deserted. We did not meet four people
+altogether, and the way seemed interminable, because my companion's
+natural anxiety had communicated itself sympathetically to me. At last
+we turned into the Boulevard des Philosophes, more wide, more empty,
+more dead--the very desolation of slumbering respectability. At the
+sight of the two lighted windows, very conspicuous from afar, I had
+the mental vision of Mrs. Haldin in her armchair keeping a dreadful,
+tormenting vigil under the evil spell of an arbitrary rule: a victim of
+tyranny and revolution, a sight at once cruel and absurd.
+
+
+III
+
+
+
+"You will come in for a moment?" said Natalia Haldin.
+
+I demurred on account of the late hour. "You know mother likes you so
+much," she insisted.
+
+"I will just come in to hear how your mother is."
+
+She said, as if to herself, "I don't even know whether she will believe
+that I could not find Mr. Razumov, since she has taken it into her head
+that I am concealing something from her. You may be able to persuade
+her...."
+
+"Your mother may mistrust me too," I observed.
+
+"You! Why? What could you have to conceal from her? You are not a
+Russian nor a conspirator."
+
+I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made
+up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end. The distant
+rolling of thunder in the valley of the Rhone was coming nearer to the
+sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality. We crossed
+the street opposite the great dark gateway, and Miss Haldin rang at the
+door of the apartment. It was opened almost instantly, as if the
+elderly maid had been waiting in the ante-room for our return. Her flat
+physiognomy had an air of satisfaction. The gentleman was there, she
+declared, while closing the door.
+
+Neither of us understood. Miss Haldin turned round brusquely to her.
+"Who?"
+
+"Herr Razumov," she explained.
+
+She had heard enough of our conversation before we left to know why her
+young mistress was going out. Therefore, when the gentleman gave his
+name at the door, she admitted him at once.
+
+"No one could have foreseen that," Miss Haldin murmured, with her
+serious grey eyes fixed upon mine. And, remembering the expression of
+the young man's face seen not much more than four hours ago, the look of
+a haunted somnambulist, I wondered with a sort of awe.
+
+"You asked my mother first?" Miss Haldin inquired of the maid.
+
+"No. I announced the gentleman," she answered, surprised at our troubled
+faces.
+
+"Still," I said in an undertone, "your mother was prepared."
+
+"Yes. But he has no idea...."
+
+It seemed to me she doubted his tact. To her question how long the
+gentleman had been with her mother, the maid told us that Der Herr had
+been in the drawing-room no more than a short quarter of an hour.
+
+She waited a moment, then withdrew, looking a little scared. Miss Haldin
+gazed at me in silence.
+
+"As things have turned out," I said, "you happen to know exactly what
+your brother's friend has to tell your mother. And surely after that..."
+
+"Yes," said Natalia Haldin slowly. "I only wonder, as I was not here
+when he came, if it wouldn't be better not to interrupt now."
+
+We remained silent, and I suppose we both strained our ears, but no
+sound reached us through the closed door. The features of Miss Haldin
+expressed a painful irresolution; she made a movement as if to go in,
+but checked herself. She had heard footsteps on the other side of the
+door. It came open, and Razumov, without pausing, stepped out into the
+ante-room. The fatigue of that day and the struggle with himself had
+changed him so much that I would have hesitated to recognize that face
+which, only a few hours before, when he brushed against me in front of
+the post office, had been startling enough but quite different. It
+had been not so livid then, and its eyes not so sombre. They certainly
+looked more sane now, but there was upon them the shadow of something
+consciously evil.
+
+I speak of that, because, at first, their glance fell on me, though
+without any sort of recognition or even comprehension. I was simply in
+the line of his stare. I don't know if he had heard the bell or expected
+to see anybody. He was going out, I believe, and I do not think that
+he saw Miss Haldin till she advanced towards him a step or two. He
+disregarded the hand she put out.
+
+"It's you, Natalia Victorovna.... Perhaps you are surprised...at
+this late hour. But, you see, I remembered our conversations in that
+garden. I thought really it was your wish that I should--without loss of
+time...so I came. No other reason. Simply to tell..."
+
+He spoke with difficulty. I noticed that, and remembered his declaration
+to the man in the shop that he was going out because he "needed air."
+If that was his object, then it was clear that he had miserably failed.
+With downcast eyes and lowered head he made an effort to pick up the
+strangled phrase.
+
+"To tell what I have heard myself only to-day--to-day...."
+
+Through the door he had not closed I had a view of the drawing-room. It
+was lighted only by a shaded lamp--Mrs. Haldin's eyes could not support
+either gas or electricity. It was a comparatively big room, and in
+contrast with the strongly lighted ante-room its length was lost in
+semi-transparent gloom backed by heavy shadows; and on that ground I saw
+the motionless figure of Mrs. Haldin, inclined slightly forward, with a
+pale hand resting on the arm of the chair.
+
+She did not move. With the window before her she had no longer that
+attitude suggesting expectation. The blind was down; and outside
+there was only the night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town
+indifferent and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration--a
+respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were
+nothing. Her white head was bowed.
+
+The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great
+stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this
+other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words
+and gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother,
+refused in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more
+than Rachel's inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more
+inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined
+mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile suggested
+the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a beloved head were
+resting there.
+
+I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by
+the young man, shut the door. It was not done without hesitation. For a
+moment I thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only
+an anxious glance. Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved...but no. There
+was in the immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of
+suffering without remedy.
+
+Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor. The thought
+that he would have to repeat the story he had told already was
+intolerable to him. He had expected to find the two women together. And
+then, he had said to himself, it would be over for all time--for all
+time. "It's lucky I don't believe in another world," he had thought
+cynically.
+
+Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained
+a certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary. He was
+aware of the danger of that strange self-indulgence. He alludes to it
+himself, but he could not refrain. It calmed him--it reconciled him
+to his existence. He sat there scribbling by the light of a solitary
+candle, till it occurred to him that having heard the explanation of
+Haldin's arrest, as put forward by Sophia Antonovna, it behoved him to
+tell these ladies himself. They were certain to hear the tale through
+some other channel, and then his abstention would look strange, not only
+to the mother and sister of Haldin, but to other people also. Having
+come to this conclusion, he did not discover in himself any marked
+reluctance to face the necessity, and very soon an anxiety to be done
+with it began to torment him. He looked at his watch. No; it was not
+absolutely too late.
+
+The fifteen minutes with Mrs. Haldin were like the revenge of the
+unknown: that white face, that weak, distinct voice; that head, at
+first turned to him eagerly, then, after a while, bowed again and
+motionless--in the dim, still light of the room in which his words
+which he tried to subdue resounded so loudly--had troubled him like some
+strange discovery. And there seemed to be a secret obstinacy in that
+sorrow, something he could not understand; at any rate, something he had
+not expected. Was it hostile? But it did not matter. Nothing could touch
+him now; in the eyes of the revolutionists there was now no shadow on
+his past. The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left
+behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow.
+And this was the phantom's mother consumed with grief and white as a
+ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no
+importance. Mothers did not matter. He could not shake off the poignant
+impression of that silent, quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of
+sternness crept into his thoughts. These were the consequences. Well,
+what of it? "Am I then on a bed of roses?" he had exclaimed to himself,
+sitting at some distance with his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow.
+He had said all he had to say to her, and when he had finished she had
+not uttered a word. She had turned away her head while he was speaking.
+The silence which had fallen on his last words had lasted for five
+minutes or more. What did it mean? Before its incomprehensible character
+he became conscious of anger in his stern mood, the old anger against
+Haldin reawakened by the contemplation of Haldin's mother. And was
+it not something like enviousness which gripped his heart, as if of
+a privilege denied to him alone of all the men that had ever passed
+through this world? It was the other who had attained to repose and yet
+continued to exist in the affection of that mourning old woman, in
+the thoughts of all these people posing for lovers of humanity. It
+was impossible to get rid of him. "It's myself whom I have given up
+to destruction," thought Razumov. "He has induced me to do it. I can't
+shake him off."
+
+Alarmed by that discovery, he got up and strode out of the silent,
+dim room with its silent old woman in the chair, that mother! He never
+looked back. It was frankly a flight. But on opening the door he saw
+his retreat cut off: There was the sister. He had never forgotten the
+sister, only he had not expected to see her then--or ever any more,
+perhaps. Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the
+apparition of her brother had been. Razumov gave a start as though he
+had discovered himself cleverly trapped. He tried to smile, but could
+not manage it, and lowered his eyes. "Must I repeat that silly story
+now?" he asked himself, and felt a sinking sensation. Nothing solid
+had passed his lips since the day before, but he was not in a state to
+analyse the origins of his weakness. He meant to take up his hat and
+depart with as few words as possible, but Miss Haldin's swift movement
+to shut the door took him by surprise. He half turned after her, but
+without raising his eyes, passively, just as a feather might stir in the
+disturbed air. The next moment she was back in the place she had started
+from, with another half-turn on his part, so that they came again into
+the same relative positions.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said hurriedly. "I am very grateful to you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, for coming at once--like this.... Only, I wish I had....
+Did mother tell you?"
+
+"I wonder what she could have told me that I did not know before," he
+said, obviously to himself, but perfectly audible. "Because I always did
+know it," he added louder, as if in despair.
+
+He hung his head. He had such a strong sense of Natalia Haldin's
+presence that to look at her he felt would be a relief. It was she who
+had been haunting him now. He had suffered that persecution ever since
+she had suddenly appeared before him in the garden of the Villa Borel
+with an extended hand and the name of her brother on her lips....
+The ante-room had a row of hooks on the wall nearest to the outer door,
+while against the wall opposite there stood a small dark table and one
+chair. The paper, bearing a very faint design, was all but white. The
+light of an electric bulb high up under the ceiling searched that clear
+square box into its four bare corners, crudely, without shadows--a
+strange stage for an obscure drama.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Miss Haldin. "What is it that you knew
+always?"
+
+He raised his face, pale, full of unexpressed suffering. But that
+look in his eyes of dull, absent obstinacy, which struck and surprised
+everybody he was talking to, began to pass way. It was as though he
+were coming to himself in the awakened consciousness of that marvellous
+harmony of feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the
+girl before him a being so rare, outside, and, as it were, above the
+common notion of beauty. He looked at her so long that she coloured
+slightly.
+
+"What is it that you knew?" she repeated vaguely.
+
+That time he managed to smile.
+
+"Indeed, if it had not been for a word of greeting or two, I would doubt
+whether your mother was aware at all of my existence. You understand?"
+
+Natalia Haldin nodded; her hands moved slightly by her side.
+
+"Yes. Is it not heart-breaking? She has not shed a tear yet--not a
+single tear."
+
+"Not a tear! And you, Natalia Victorovna? You have been able to cry?"
+
+"I have. And then I am young enough, Kirylo Sidorovitch, to believe in
+the future. But when I see my mother so terribly distracted, I almost
+forget everything. I ask myself whether one should feel proud--or only
+resigned. We had such a lot of people coming to see us. There were
+utter strangers who wrote asking for permission to call to present their
+respects. It was impossible to keep our door shut for ever. You know
+that Peter Ivanovitch himself.... Oh yes, there was much sympathy,
+but there were persons who exulted openly at that death. Then, when I
+was left alone with poor mother, all this seemed so wrong in spirit,
+something not worth the price she is paying for it. But directly I heard
+you were here in Geneva, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I felt that you were the
+only person who could assist me...."
+
+"In comforting a bereaved mother? Yes!" he broke in in a manner which
+made her open her clear unsuspecting eyes. "But there is a question of
+fitness. Has this occurred to you?"
+
+There was a breathlessness in his utterance which contrasted with the
+monstrous hint of mockery in his intention.
+
+"Why!" whispered Natalia Haldin with feeling. "Who more fit than you?"
+
+He had a convulsive movement of exasperation, but controlled himself.
+
+"Indeed! Directly you heard that I was in Geneva, before even seeing me?
+It is another proof of that confidence which...."
+
+All at once his tone changed, became more incisive and more detached.
+
+"Men are poor creatures, Natalia Victorovna. They have no intuition of
+sentiment. In order to speak fittingly to a mother of her lost son one
+must have had some experience of the filial relation. It is not the case
+with me--if you must know the whole truth. Your hopes have to deal here
+with 'a breast unwarmed by any affection,' as the poet says.... That
+does not mean it is insensible," he added in a lower tone.
+
+"I am certain your heart is not unfeeling," said Miss Haldin softly.
+
+"No. It is not as hard as a stone," he went on in the same introspective
+voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in
+that unwarmed breast of which he spoke. "No, not so hard. But how to
+prove what you give me credit for--ah! that's another question. No one
+has ever expected such a thing from me before. No one whom my tenderness
+would have been of any use to. And now you come. You! Now! No, Natalia
+Victorovna. It's too late. You come too late. You must expect nothing
+from me."
+
+She recoiled from him a little, though he had made no movement, as
+if she had seen some change in his face, charging his words with the
+significance of some hidden sentiment they shared together. To me, the
+silent spectator, they looked like two people becoming conscious of a
+spell which had been lying on them ever since they first set eyes on
+each other. Had either of them cast a glance then in my direction, I
+would have opened the door quietly and gone out. But neither did; and
+I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous
+remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian
+problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings--the prison of
+their souls.
+
+Frank, courageous, Miss Haldin controlled her voice in the midst of her
+trouble.
+
+"What can this mean?" she asked, as if speaking to herself.
+
+"It may mean that you have given yourself up to vain imaginings while I
+have managed to remain amongst the truth of things and the realities of
+life--our Russian life--such as they are."
+
+"They are cruel," she murmured.
+
+"And ugly. Don't forget that--and ugly. Look where you like. Look near
+you, here abroad where you are, and then look back at home, whence you
+came."
+
+"One must look beyond the present." Her tone had an ardent conviction.
+
+"The blind can do that best. I have had the misfortune to be born
+clear-eyed. And if you only knew what strange things I have seen! What
+amazing and unexpected apparitions!... But why talk of all this?"
+
+"On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you," she protested
+with earnest serenity. The sombre humours of her brother's friend left
+her unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were
+the signs of an indignant rectitude. She saw that he was not an ordinary
+person, and perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to
+her trustful eyes. "Yes, with you especially," she insisted. "With you
+of all the Russian people in the world...." A faint smile dwelt for
+a moment on her lips. "I am like poor mother in a way. I too seem unable
+to give up our beloved dead, who, don't forget, was all in all to us. I
+don't want to abuse your sympathy, but you must understand that it is in
+you that we can find all that is left of his generous soul."
+
+I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least. And
+yet, even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility. It was a
+sort of rapt thoughtfulness. Then he stirred slightly.
+
+"You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she asked.
+
+"I! Going? Where? Oh yes, but I must tell you first...." His voice
+was muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance,
+as if speech were something disgusting or deadly. "That story, you
+know--the story I heard this afternoon...."
+
+"I know the story already," she said sadly.
+
+"You know it! Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?"
+
+"No. It's Sophia Antonovna. I have seen her just now. She sends you her
+greetings. She is going away to-morrow."
+
+He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down,
+and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the
+four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity
+of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my
+Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My
+existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now
+make a movement. And I thought to myself that, of course, they had to
+come together, the sister and the friend of that dead man. The ideas,
+the hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom, expressed in their
+common affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of autocracy,--all
+this must draw them to each other fatally. Her very ignorance and his
+loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.
+And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already. Of course. It was
+manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time
+before they met. She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling
+her imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for
+him to see that exceptional girl was enough. The only cause for surprise
+was his gloomy aloofness before her clearly expressed welcome. But he
+was young, and however austere and devoted to his revolutionary ideals,
+he was not blind. The period of reserve was over; he was coming forward
+in his own way. I could not mistake the significance of this late visit,
+for in what he had to say there was nothing urgent. The true cause
+dawned upon me: he had discovered that he needed her and she was moved
+by the same feeling. It was the second time that I saw them together,
+and I knew that next time they met I would not be there, either
+remembered or forgotten. I would have virtually ceased to exist for both
+these young people.
+
+I made this discovery in a very few moments. Meantime, Natalia Haldin
+was telling Razumov briefly of our peregrinations from one end of Geneva
+to the other. While speaking she raised her hands above her head to
+untie her veil, and that movement displayed for an instant the seductive
+grace of her youthful figure, clad in the simplest of mourning. In the
+transparent shadow the hat rim threw on her face her grey eyes had an
+enticing lustre. Her voice, with its unfeminine yet exquisite timbre,
+was steady, and she spoke quickly, frank, unembarrassed. As she
+justified her action by the mental state of her mother, a spasm of pain
+marred the generously confiding harmony of her features. I perceived
+that with his downcast eyes he had the air of a man who is listening
+to a strain of music rather than to articulated speech. And in the same
+way, after she had ceased, he seemed to listen yet, motionless, as if
+under the spell of suggestive sound. He came to himself, muttering--
+
+"Yes, yes. She has not shed a tear. She did not seem to hear what I
+was saying. I might have told her anything. She looked as if no longer
+belonging to this world."
+
+Miss Haldin gave signs of profound distress. Her voice faltered. "You
+don't know how bad it has come to be. She expects now to see _him_!" The
+veil dropped from her fingers and she clasped her hands in anguish. "It
+shall end by her seeing him," she cried.
+
+Razumov raised his head sharply and attached on her a prolonged
+thoughtful glance.
+
+"H'm. That's very possible," he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if
+giving his opinion on a matter of fact. "I wonder what...." He
+checked himself.
+
+"That would be the end. Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will
+follow."
+
+Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
+
+"You think so?" he queried profoundly. Miss Haldin's lips were slightly
+parted. Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man's
+character had fascinated her from the first. "No! There's neither truth
+nor consolation to be got from the phantoms of the dead," he added after
+a weighty pause. "I might have told her something true; for instance,
+that your brother meant to save his life--to escape. There can be no
+doubt of that. But I did not."
+
+"You did not! But why?"
+
+"I don't know. Other thoughts came into my head," he answered. He seemed
+to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count
+his own heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face
+of the girl. "You were not there," he continued. "I had made up my mind
+never to see you again."
+
+This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
+
+"You.... How is it possible?"
+
+"You may well ask.... However, I think that I refrained from telling
+your mother from prudence. I might have assured her that in the last
+conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both...."
+
+"That last conversation was with you," she struck in her deep, moving
+voice. "Some day you must...."
+
+"It was with me. Of you he said that you had trustful eyes. And why I
+have not been able to forget that phrase I don't know. It meant
+that there is in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no
+suspicion--nothing in your heart that could give you a conception of a
+living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it came in your way. That you are
+a predestined victim.... Ha! what a devilish suggestion!"
+
+The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the
+precarious hold he had over himself. He was like a man defying his own
+dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the
+precipice. Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast. The dropped black
+veil lay on the floor between them. Her movement steadied him. He looked
+intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again
+his eyes to her face. But he did not give her time to speak.
+
+"No? You don't understand? Very well." He had recovered his calm by a
+miracle of will. "So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?"
+
+"Yes. Sophia Antonovna told me...." Miss Haldin stopped, wonder
+growing in her wide eyes.
+
+"H'm. That's the respectable enemy," he muttered, as though he were
+alone.
+
+"The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly," remarked
+Miss Haldin, after waiting for a while.
+
+"Is that your impression? And she the most intelligent of the lot,
+too. Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires
+to...Ah! these conspirators," he said slowly, with an accent of scorn;
+"they would get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I
+have the greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition
+of an active Providence. It's irresistible.... The alternative, of
+course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if
+so, he has overdone it altogether--the old Father of Lies--our national
+patron--our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has
+overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough.... That's it! I
+ought to have known.... And I did know it," he added in a tone of
+poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.
+
+"This man is deranged," I said to myself, very much frightened.
+
+The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of
+commonplace definitions. It was as though he had stabbed himself outside
+and had come in there to show it; and more than that--as though he were
+turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect. That was the
+impression, rendered in physical terms. One could not defend oneself
+from a certain amount of pity. But it was for Miss Haldin, already so
+tried in her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern. Her
+attitude, her face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the
+verge of terror.
+
+"What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" There was a hint of tenderness in
+that cry. He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his
+faculties which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
+
+"Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch? I have
+approached you frankly. I need at this time to see clearly in
+myself...." She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to
+utter at last some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother's
+friend. His silence became impressive, like a sign of a momentous
+resolution.
+
+In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly--
+
+"I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to
+come to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems
+as if you were keeping back something from me."
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he was heard at last in a strange
+unringing voice, "whom did you see in that place?"
+
+She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
+
+"Where? In Peter Ivanovitch's rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three
+other people."
+
+"Ha! The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot," he commented to
+himself. "Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
+change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
+Ivanovitch should be the head of a State."
+
+"You are teasing me," she said. "Our dear one told me once to remember
+that men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea."
+
+"Our dear one," he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
+absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being
+with hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical
+suffering, had lost all their fire. "Ah! your brother.... But on
+your lips, in your voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is
+divine.... I wish I could know the innermost depths of your thoughts,
+of your feelings."
+
+"But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she cried, alarmed by these words coming
+out of strangely lifeless lips.
+
+"Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And
+Sophia Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?"
+
+"She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything
+from you. She had no time for more than a few words." Miss Haldin's
+voice dropped and she became silent for a moment. "The man, it appears,
+has taken his life," she said sadly.
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he asked after a pause, "do you believe
+in remorse?"
+
+"What a question!"
+
+"What can _you_ know of it?" he muttered thickly. "It is not for such as
+you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy
+of remorse?"
+
+She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted
+up.
+
+"Yes," she said firmly.
+
+"So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
+brute."
+
+A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
+
+"But a man of the people," Razumov went on, "to whom they, the
+revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must
+be forgiven.... And you must not believe all you've heard from that
+source, either," he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.
+
+"You are concealing something from me," she exclaimed.
+
+"Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?"
+
+"Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
+to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner,
+betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light
+breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that
+there can be no union and no love."
+
+"I hear. No revenge for you, then? Never? Not the least bit?" He smiled
+bitterly with his colourless lips. "You yourself are like the very
+spirit of that merciful future. Strange that it does not make it
+easier.... No! But suppose that the real betrayer of your
+brother--Ziemianitch had a part in it too, but insignificant and quite
+involuntary--suppose that he was a young man, educated, an intellectual
+worker, thoughtful, a man your brother might have trusted lightly,
+perhaps, but still--suppose.... But there's a whole story there."
+
+"And you know the story! But why, then--"
+
+"I have heard it. There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but
+that does not matter if a man always serves something greater than
+himself--the idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?"
+
+"In that tale!" Miss Haldin repeated. She seemed turned into stone.
+
+"Do you know why I came to you? It is simply because there is no one
+anywhere in the whole great world I could go to. Do you understand
+what I say? Not one to go to. Do you conceive the desolation of the
+thought--no one--to--go--to?"
+
+Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in
+the letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely
+days, in their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to
+see the truth struggling on his lips. What she was conscious of was the
+obscure form of his suffering. She was on the point of extending her
+hand to him impulsively when he spoke again.
+
+"An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors of
+remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the
+atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before
+me with your voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed
+villa."
+
+She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of
+despairing insight went straight to the point.
+
+"The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!"
+
+"There is no more to tell!" He made a movement forward, and she actually
+put her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed
+her, and he kept his ground, though trembling in every limb. "It ends
+here--on this very spot." He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast
+with force, and became perfectly still.
+
+I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of
+Miss Haldin and lower her down. As she sank into it she swung half round
+on my arm, and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back.
+He looked at her with an appalling expressionless tranquillity.
+Incredulity, struggling with astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived
+me for a time of the power of speech. Then I turned on him, whispering
+from very rage--
+
+"This is monstrous. What are you staying for? Don't let her catch sight
+of you again. Go away!..." He did not budge. "Don't you understand
+that your presence is intolerable--even to me? If there's any sense of
+shame in you...."
+
+Slowly his sullen eyes moved ill my direction. "How did this old man
+come here?" he muttered, astounded.
+
+Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and
+tottered. Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried
+to her assistance. I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into
+the drawing-room. Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant
+end, the profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had
+the stillness of a sombre painting. Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed
+mournfully at the tragic immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a
+beloved head lying in her lap.
+
+That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in
+its human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely
+the ruthless working of political institutions. After assisting Miss
+Haldin to the sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed
+in the opening, in the searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes
+fell on Razumov, still there, standing before the empty chair, as if
+rooted for ever to the spot of his atrocious confession. A wonder came
+over me that the mysterious force which had torn it out of him had
+failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed.
+I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing
+immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin
+looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing
+at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage
+swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands.
+Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he
+seemed to vanish before he moved.
+
+The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on
+contemplating the empty chair in the empty ante-room. The meaning
+of what I had seen reached my mind with a staggering shock. I seized
+Natalia Haldin by the shoulder.
+
+"That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!" I cried, in the
+scared, deadened voice of an awful discovery. "He...."
+
+The rest remained unspoken. I stepped back and looked down at her, in
+silent horror. Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her
+lap. She raised her grey eyes slowly. Shadows seemed to come and go in
+them as if the steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate
+at last in the cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark
+immensity claiming her for its own, where virtues themselves fester into
+crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt.
+
+"It is impossible to be more unhappy...." The languid whisper of her
+voice struck me with dismay. "It is impossible.... I feel my heart
+becoming like ice."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Razumov walked straight home on the wet glistening pavement. A heavy
+shower passed over him; distant lightning played faintly against the
+fronts of the dumb houses with the shuttered shops all along the Rue
+de Carouge; and now and then, after the faint flash, there was a faint,
+sleepy rumble; but the main forces of the thunderstorm remained
+massed down the Rhone valley as if loath to attack the respectable and
+passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of
+dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent, hospitality to tourists
+of all nations and to international conspirators of every shade.
+
+The owner of the shop was making ready to close when Razumov entered and
+without a word extended his hand for the key of his room. On reaching
+it for him, from a shelf, the man was about to pass a small joke as to
+taking the air in a thunderstorm, but, after looking at the face of his
+lodger, he only observed, just to say something--
+
+"You've got very wet."
+
+"Yes, I am washed clean," muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head
+to foot, and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading
+to his room.
+
+He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off
+his watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to
+write. The book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer,
+which he pulled out violently, and did not even trouble to push back
+afterwards.
+
+In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in
+hand, there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means
+with another profounder knowledge. After some passages which have been
+already made use of in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing
+new to the psychological side of this disclosure (there is even one more
+allusion to the silver medal in this last entry), comes a page and
+a half of incoherent writing where his expression is baffled by the
+novelty and the mysteriousness of that side of our emotional life to
+which his solitary existence had been a stranger. Then only he begins
+to address directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express in
+broken sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that
+very word) power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the
+dormant seed of her brother's words.
+
+"... The most trustful eyes in the world--your brother said of you
+when he was as well as a dead man already. And when you stood before me
+with your hand extended, I remembered the very sound of his voice, and
+I looked into your eyes--and that was enough. I knew that something had
+happened, but I did not know then what.... But don't be deceived,
+Natalia Victorovna. I believed that I had in my breast nothing but an
+inexhaustible fund of anger and hate for you both. I remembered that he
+had looked to you for the perpetuation of his visionary soul. He, this
+man who had robbed me of my hard-working, purposeful existence. I, too,
+had my guiding idea; and remember that, amongst us, it is more difficult
+to lead a life of toil and self-denial than to go out in the street and
+kill from conviction. But enough of that. Hate or no hate, I felt at
+once that, while shunning the sight of you, I could never succeed in
+driving away your image. I would say, addressing that dead man, 'Is
+this the way you are going to haunt me?' It is only later on that I
+understood--only to-day, only a few hours ago. What could I have known
+of what was tearing me to pieces and dragging the secret for ever to
+my lips? You were appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself
+back into truth and peace. You! And you have done it in the same way,
+too, in which he ruined me: by forcing upon me your confidence. Only
+what I detested him for, in you ended by appearing noble and exalted.
+But, I repeat, be not deceived. I was given up to evil. I exulted in
+having induced that silly innocent fool to steal his father's money. He
+was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one. It was necessary. I had
+to confirm myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed. I have
+suffered from as many vipers in my heart as any social democrat of them
+all--vanity, ambitions, jealousies, shameful desires, evil passions of
+envy and revenge. I had my security stolen from me, years of good work,
+my best hopes. Listen--now comes the true confession. The other was
+nothing. To save me, your trustful eyes had to entice my thought to the
+very edge of the blackest treachery. I could see them constantly looking
+at me with the confidence of your pure heart which had not been touched
+by evil things. Victor Haldin had stolen the truth of my life from me,
+who had nothing else in the world, and he boasted of living on through
+you on this earth where I had no place to lay my head on. She will marry
+some day, he had said--and your eyes were trustful. And do you know what
+I said to myself? I shall steal his sister's soul from her. When we met
+that first morning in the gardens, and you spoke to me confidingly
+in the generosity of your spirit, I was thinking, 'Yes, he himself by
+talking of her trustful eyes has delivered her into my hands!' If you
+could have looked then into my heart, you would have cried out aloud
+with terror and disgust.
+
+"Perhaps no one will believe the baseness of such an intention to be
+possible. It's certain that, when we parted that morning, I gloated
+over it. I brooded upon the best way. The old man you introduced me to
+insisted on walking with me. I don't know who he is. He talked of you,
+of your lonely, helpless state, and every word of that friend of yours
+was egging me on to the unpardonable sin of stealing a soul. Could he
+have been the devil himself in the shape of an old Englishman? Natalia
+Victorovna, I was possessed! I returned to look at you every day,
+and drink in your presence the poison of my infamous intention. But
+I foresaw difficulties. Then Sophia Antonovna, of whom I was not
+thinking--I had forgotten her existence--appears suddenly with that
+tale from St. Petersburg.... The only thing needed to make me safe--a
+trusted revolutionist for ever.
+
+"It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further
+crime. The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible. These people
+stood doomed by the folly and the illusion that was in them--they being
+themselves the slaves of lies. Natalia Victorovna, I embraced the might
+of falsehood, I exulted in it--I gave myself up to it for a time. Who
+could have resisted! You yourself were the prize of it. I sat alone in
+my room, planning a life, the very thought of which makes me shudder
+now, like a believer who had been tempted to an atrocious sacrilege. But
+I brooded ardently over its images. The only thing was that there seemed
+to be no air in it. And also I was afraid of your mother. I never knew
+mine. I've never known any kind of love. There is something in the mere
+word.... Of you, I was not afraid--forgive me for telling you this.
+No, not of you. You were truth itself. You could not suspect me. As to
+your mother, you yourself feared already that her mind had given way
+from grief. Who could believe anything against me? Had not Ziemianitch
+hanged himself from remorse? I said to myself, 'Let's put it to the
+test, and be done with it once for all.' I trembled when I went in;
+but your mother hardly listened to what I was saying to her, and, in a
+little while, seemed to have forgotten my very existence. I sat looking
+at her. There was no longer anything between you and me. You were
+defenceless--and soon, very soon, you would be alone.... I thought of
+you. Defenceless. For days you have talked with me--opening your heart.
+I remembered the shadow of your eyelashes over your grey trustful eyes.
+And your pure forehead! It is low like the forehead of statues--calm,
+unstained. It was as if your pure brow bore a light which fell on me,
+searched my heart and saved me from ignominy, from ultimate undoing.
+And it saved you too. Pardon my presumption. But there was that in your
+glances which seemed to tell me that you.... Your light! your truth!
+I felt that I must tell you that I had ended by loving you. And to tell
+you that I must first confess. Confess, go out--and perish.
+
+"Suddenly you stood before me! You alone in all the world to whom I
+must confess. You fascinated me--you have freed me from the blindness of
+anger and hate--the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me. Now I
+have done it; and as I write here, I am in the depths depths of anguish,
+but there is air to breathe at last--air! And, by the by, that old man
+sprang up from somewhere as I was speaking to you, and raged at me like
+a disappointed devil. I suffer horribly, but I am not in despair. There
+is only one more thing to do for me. After that--if they let me--I shall
+go away and bury myself in obscure misery. In giving Victor Haldin up,
+it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most basely. You must
+believe what I say now, you can't refuse to believe this. Most basely.
+It is through you that I came to feel this so deeply. After all, it is
+they and not I who have the right on their side?--theirs is the
+strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don't be deceived, Natalia
+Victorovna, I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave? No! I
+am independent--and therefore perdition is my lot."
+
+On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the
+black veil he had carried off. He then ransacked the drawers for
+paper and string, made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin,
+Boulevard des Philosophes, and then flung the pen away from him into a
+distant corner.
+
+This done, he sat down with the watch before him. He could have gone out
+at once, but the hour had not struck yet. The hour would be midnight.
+There was no reason for that choice except that the facts and the words
+of a certain evening in his past were timing his conduct in the present.
+The sudden power Natalia Haldin had gained over him he ascribed to the
+same cause. "You don't walk with impunity over a phantom's breast,"
+he heard himself mutter. "Thus he saves me," he thought suddenly. "He
+himself, the betrayed man." The vivid image of Miss Haldin seemed to
+stand by him, watching him relentlessly. She was not disturbing. He had
+done with life, and his thought even in her presence tried to take an
+impartial survey. Now his scorn extended to himself. "I had neither the
+simplicity nor the courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel,
+or an exceptionally able man. For who, with us in Russia, is to tell a
+scoundrel from an exceptionally able man?..."
+
+He was the puppet of his past, because at the very stroke of midnight he
+jumped up and ran swiftly downstairs as if confident that, by the power
+of destiny, the house door would fly open before the absolute necessity
+of his errand. And as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom
+of the stairs, it was opened for him by some people of the house coming
+home late--two men and a woman. He slipped out through them into the
+street, swept then by a fitful gust of wind. They were, of course, very
+much startled. A flash of lightning enabled them to observe him walking
+away quickly. One of the men shouted, and was starting in pursuit, but
+the woman had recognized him. "It's all right. It's only that young
+Russian from the third floor." The darkness returned with a single clap
+of thunder, like a gun fired for a warning of his escape from the prison
+of lies.
+
+He must have heard at some time or other and now remembered
+unconsciously that there was to be a gathering of revolutionists at the
+house of Julius Laspara that evening. At any rate, he made straight for
+the Laspara house, and found himself without surprise ringing at its
+street door, which, of course, was closed. By that time the thunderstorm
+had attacked in earnest. The steep incline of the street ran with water,
+the thick fall of rain enveloped him like a luminous veil in the play
+of lightning. He was perfectly calm, and, between the crashes, listened
+attentively to the delicate tinkling of the doorbell somewhere within
+the house.
+
+There was some difficulty before he was admitted. His person was not
+known to that one of the guests who had volunteered to go downstairs and
+see what was the matter. Razumov argued with him patiently. There could
+be no harm in admitting a caller. He had something to communicate to the
+company upstairs.
+
+"Something of importance?"
+
+"That'll be for the hearers to judge."
+
+"Urgent?"
+
+"Without a moment's delay."
+
+Meantime, one of the Laspara daughters descended the stairs, small lamp
+in hand, in a grimy and crumpled gown, which seemed to hang on her by a
+miracle, and looking more than ever like an old doll with a dusty brown
+wig, dragged from under a sofa. She recognized Razumov at once.
+
+"How do you do? Of course you may come in."
+
+Following her light, Razumov climbed two flights of stairs from the
+lower darkness. Leaving the lamp on a bracket on the landing, she opened
+a door, and went in, accompanied by the sceptical guest. Razumov entered
+last. He closed the door behind him, and stepping on one side, put his
+back against the wall.
+
+The three little rooms _en suite_, with low, smoky ceilings and lit by
+paraffin lamps, were crammed with people. Loud talking was going on
+in all three, and tea-glasses, full, half-full, and empty, stood
+everywhere, even on the floor. The other Laspara girl sat, dishevelled
+and languid, behind an enormous samovar. In the inner doorway Razumov
+had a glimpse of the protuberance of a large stomach, which he
+recognized. Only a few feet from him Julius Laspara was getting down
+hurriedly from his high stool.
+
+The appearance of the midnight visitor caused no small sensation.
+Laspara is very summary in his version of that night's happenings.
+After some words of greeting, disregarded by Razumov, Laspara (ignoring
+purposely his guest's soaked condition and his extraordinary manner of
+presenting himself) mentioned something about writing an article. He
+was growing uneasy, and Razumov appeared absent-minded. "I have written
+already all I shall ever write," he said at last, with a little laugh.
+
+The whole company's attention was riveted on the new-comer, dripping
+with water, deadly pale, and keeping his position against the wall.
+Razumov put Laspara gently aside, as though he wished to be seen from
+head to foot by everybody. By then the buzz of conversations had died
+down completely, even in the most distant of the three rooms. The
+doorway facing Razumov became blocked by men and women, who craned their
+necks and certainly seemed to expect something startling to happen.
+
+A squeaky, insolent declaration was heard from that group.
+
+"I know this ridiculously conceited individual."
+
+"What individual?" asked Razumov, raising his bowed head, and searching
+with his eyes all the eyes fixed upon him. An intense surprised silence
+lasted for a time. "If it's me...."
+
+He stopped, thinking over the form of his confession, and found it
+suddenly, unavoidably suggested by the fateful evening of his life.
+
+"I am come here," he began, in a clear voice, "to talk of an individual
+called Ziemianitch. Sophia Antonovna has informed me that she would make
+public a certain letter from St. Petersburg...."
+
+"Sophia Antonovna has left us early in the evening," said Laspara. "It's
+quite correct. Everybody here has heard...."
+
+"Very well," Razumov interrupted, with a shade of impatience, for his
+heart was beating strongly. Then, mastering his voice so far that there
+was even a touch of irony in his clear, forcible enunciation--
+
+"In justice to that individual, the much ill-used peasant, Ziemianitch,
+I now declare solemnly that the conclusions of that letter calumniate a
+man of the people--a bright Russian soul. Ziemianitch had nothing to do
+with the actual arrest of Victor Haldin."
+
+Razumov dwelt on the name heavily, and then waited till the faint,
+mournful murmur which greeted it had died out.
+
+"Victor Victorovitch Haldin," he began again, "acting with, no doubt,
+noble-minded imprudence, took refuge with a certain student of whose
+opinions he knew nothing but what his own illusions suggested to his
+generous heart. It was an unwise display of confidence. But I am not
+here to appreciate the actions of Victor Haldin. Am I to tell you of
+the feelings of that student, sought out in his obscure solitude, and
+menaced by the complicity forced upon him? Am I to tell you what he did?
+It's a rather complicated story. In the end the student went to General
+T--- himself, and said, 'I have the man who killed de P--- locked up in
+my room, Victor Haldin--a student like myself.'"
+
+A great buzz arose, in which Razumov raised his voice.
+
+"Observe--that man had certain honest ideals in view. But I didn't come
+here to explain him."
+
+"No. But you must explain how you know all this," came in grave tones
+from somebody.
+
+"A vile coward!" This simple cry vibrated with indignation. "Name him!"
+shouted other voices.
+
+"What are you clamouring for?" said Razumov disdainfully, in the
+profound silence which fell on the raising of his hand. "Haven't you all
+understood that I am that man?"
+
+Laspara went away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool.
+In the first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to
+be torn to pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing
+came of it but noise. It was bewildering. His head ached terribly.
+In the confused uproar he made out several times the name of Peter
+Ivanovitch, the word "judgement," and the phrase, "But this is a
+confession," uttered by somebody in a desperate shriek. In the midst
+of the tumult, a young man, younger than himself, approached him with
+blazing eyes.
+
+"I must beg you," he said, with venomous politeness, "to be good enough
+not to move from this spot till you are told what you are to do."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders. "I came in voluntarily."
+
+"Maybe. But you won't go out till you are permitted," retorted the
+other.
+
+He beckoned with his hand, calling out, "Louisa! Louisa! come here,
+please"; and, presently, one of the Laspara girls (they had been staring
+at Razumov from behind the samovar) came along, trailing a bedraggled
+tail of dirty flounces, and dragging with her a chair, which she set
+against the door, and, sitting down on it, crossed her legs. The young
+man thanked her effusively, and rejoined a group carrying on an animated
+discussion in low tones. Razumov lost himself for a moment.
+
+A squeaky voice screamed, "Confession or no confession, you are a police
+spy!"
+
+The revolutionist Nikita had pushed his way in front of Razumov, and
+faced him with his big, livid cheeks, his heavy paunch, bull neck, and
+enormous hands. Razumov looked at the famous slayer of gendarmes in
+silent disgust.
+
+"And what are you?" he said, very low, then shut his eyes, and rested
+the back of his head against the wall.
+
+"It would be better for you to depart now." Razumov heard a mild, sad
+voice, and opened his eyes. The gentle speaker was an elderly man, with
+a great brush of fine hair making a silvery halo all round his
+keen, intelligent face. "Peter Ivanovitch shall be informed of your
+confession--and you shall be directed...."
+
+Then, turning to Nikita, nicknamed Necator, standing by, he appealed to
+him in a murmur--
+
+"What else can we do? After this piece of sincerity he cannot be
+dangerous any longer."
+
+The other muttered, "Better make sure of that before we let him go.
+Leave that to me. I know how to deal with such gentlemen."
+
+He exchanged meaning glances with two or three men, who nodded slightly,
+then turning roughly to Razumov, "You have heard? You are not wanted
+here. Why don't you get out?"
+
+The Laspara girl on guard rose, and pulled the chair out of the way
+unemotionally. She gave a sleepy stare to Razumov, who started, looked
+round the room and passed slowly by her as if struck by some sudden
+thought.
+
+"I beg you to observe," he said, already on the landing, "that I had
+only to hold my tongue. To-day, of all days since I came amongst you,
+I was made safe, and to-day I made myself free from falsehood, from
+remorse--independent of every single human being on this earth."
+
+He turned his back on the room, and walked towards the stairs, but, at
+the violent crash of the door behind him, he looked over his shoulder
+and saw that Nikita, with three others, had followed him out. "They are
+going to kill me, after all," he thought.
+
+Before he had time to turn round and confront them fairly, they set
+on him with a rush. He was driven headlong against the wall. "I wonder
+how," he completed his thought. Nikita cried, with a shrill laugh right
+in his face, "We shall make you harmless. You wait a bit."
+
+Razumov did not struggle. The three men held him pinned against
+the wall, while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side,
+deliberately swung off his enormous arm. Razumov, looking for a knife
+in his hand, saw it come at him open, unarmed, and received a tremendous
+blow on the side of his head over his ear. At the same time he heard a
+faint, dull detonating sound, as if some one had fired a pistol on the
+other side of the wall. A raging fury awoke in him at this outrage.
+The people in Laspara's rooms, holding their breath, listened to the
+desperate scuffling of four men all over the landing; thuds against the
+walls, a terrible crash against the very door, then all of them went
+down together with a violence which seemed to shake the whole house.
+Razumov, overpowered, breathless, crushed under the weight of his
+assailants, saw the monstrous Nikita squatting on his heels near his
+head, while the others held him down, kneeling on his chest, gripping
+his throat, lying across his legs.
+
+"Turn his face the other way," the paunchy terrorist directed, in an
+excited, gleeful squeak.
+
+Razumov could struggle no longer. He was exhausted; he had to watch
+passively the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in a degrading
+blow over his other ear. It seemed to split his head in two, and all at
+once the men holding him became perfectly silent--soundless as shadows.
+In silence they pulled him brutally to his feet, rushed with him
+noiselessly down the staircase, and, opening the door, flung him out
+into the street.
+
+He fell forward, and at once rolled over and over helplessly, going down
+the short slope together with the rush of running rain water. He came to
+rest in the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on his back,
+with a great flash of lightning over his face--a vivid, silent flash of
+lightning which blinded him utterly. He picked himself up, and put his
+arm over his eyes to recover his sight. Not a sound reached him from
+anywhere, and he began to walk, staggering, down a long, empty street.
+The lightning waved and darted round him its silent flames, the water of
+the deluge fell, ran, leaped, drove--noiseless like the drift of mist.
+In this unearthly stillness his footsteps fell silent on the pavement,
+while a dumb wind drove him on and on, like a lost mortal in a phantom
+world ravaged by a soundless thunderstorm. God only knows where his
+noiseless feet took him to that night, here and there, and back again
+without pause or rest. Of one place, at least, where they did lead
+him, we heard afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first
+south-shore tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled,
+soaked man without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his
+head down, step right in front of his car, and go under.
+
+When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side,
+Razumov had not lost consciousness. It was as though he had tumbled,
+smashing himself, into a world of mutes. Silent men, moving unheard,
+lifted him up, laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing
+round him their alarm, horror, and compassion. A red face with
+moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving, eyes rolling. Razumov
+tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show. To those who
+stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously hurt,
+seemed composed in meditation. Afterwards his eyes sent out at them
+a look of fear and closed slowly. They stared at him. Razumov made an
+effort to remember some French words.
+
+"_Je suis sourd_," he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
+
+"He is deaf," they exclaimed to each other. "That's why he did not hear
+the car."
+
+They carried him off in that same car. Before it started on its journey,
+a woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of
+some private grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and
+would not be put off.
+
+"I am a relation," she insisted, in bad French. "This young man is a
+Russian, and I am his relation." On this plea they let her have her way.
+She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes
+avoided looking at his deathlike face. At the corner of a street, on the
+other side of the town, a stretcher met the car. She followed it to the
+door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a
+bed. Razumov's new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials
+had some difficulty in inducing her to go away. The porter observed her
+lingering on the opposite pavement for a long time. Suddenly, as though
+she had remembered something, she ran off.
+
+The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S--,
+had made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to
+the Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. She had found work to do after her own
+heart.
+
+But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there
+had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation. The terrible
+Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in
+horrible glee before all the company--
+
+"Razumov! Mr. Razumov! The wonderful Razumov! He shall never be any use
+as a spy on any one. He won't talk, because he will never hear anything
+in his life--not a thing! I have burst the drums of his ears for him.
+Oh, you may trust me. I know the trick. Ha! Ha! Ha! I know the trick."
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was nearly a fortnight after her mother's funeral that I saw Natalia
+Haldin for the last time.
+
+In those silent, sombre days the doors of the _appartement_ on the
+Boulevard des Philosophes were closed to every one but myself. I believe
+I was of some use, if only in this, that I alone was aware of the
+incredible part of the situation. Miss Haldin nursed her mother alone
+to the last moment. If Razumov's visit had anything to do with
+Mrs. Haldin's end (and I cannot help thinking that it hastened it
+considerably), it is because the man, trusted impulsively by the
+ill-fated Victor Haldin, had failed to gain the confidence of Victor
+Haldin's mother. What tale, precisely, he told her cannot be known--at
+any rate, I do not know it--but to me she seemed to die from the shock
+of an ultimate disappointment borne in silence. She had not believed
+him. Perhaps she could not longer believe any one, and consequently had
+nothing to say to any one--not even to her daughter. I suspect that Miss
+Haldin lived the heaviest hours of her life by that silent death-bed.
+I confess I was angry with the broken-hearted old woman passing away in
+the obstinacy of her mute distrust of her daughter.
+
+When it was all over I stood aside. Miss Haldin had her compatriots
+round her then. A great number of them attended the funeral. I was
+there too, but afterwards managed to keep away from Miss Haldin, till I
+received a short note rewarding my self-denial. "It is as you would have
+it. I am going back to Russia at once. My mind is made up. Come and see
+me."
+
+Verily, it was a reward of discretion. I went without delay to receive
+it. The _appartement_ of the Boulevard des Philosophes presented the
+dreary signs of impending abandonment. It looked desolate and as if
+already empty to my eyes.
+
+Standing, we exchanged a few words about her health, mine, remarks as to
+some people of the Russian colony, and then Natalia Haldin, establishing
+me on the sofa, began to talk openly of her future work, of her plans.
+It was all to be as I had wished it. And it was to be for life. We
+should never see each other again. Never!
+
+I gathered this success to my breast. Natalia Haldin looked matured by
+her open and secret experiences. With her arms folded she walked up and
+down the whole length of the room, talking slowly, smooth-browed, with a
+resolute profile. She gave me a new view of herself, and I marvelled at
+that something grave and measured in her voice, in her movements, in her
+manner. It was the perfection of collected independence. The strength
+of her nature had come to surface because the obscure depths had been
+stirred.
+
+"We two can talk of it now," she observed, after a silence and stopping
+short before me. "Have you been to inquire at the hospital lately?"
+
+"Yes, I have." And as she looked at me fixedly, "He will live, the
+doctors say. But I thought that Tekla...."
+
+"Tekla has not been near me for several days," explained Miss Haldin
+quickly. "As I never offered to go to the hospital with her, she thinks
+that I have no heart. She is disillusioned about me."
+
+And Miss Haldin smiled faintly.
+
+"Yes. She sits with him as long and as often as they will let her," I
+said. "She says she must never abandon him--never as long as she lives.
+He'll need somebody--a hopeless cripple, and stone deaf with that."
+
+"Stone deaf? I didn't know," murmured Natalia Haldin.
+
+"He is. It seems strange. I am told there were no apparent injuries to
+the head. They say, too, that it is not very likely that he will live so
+very long for Tekla to take care of him."
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head.
+
+"While there are travellers ready to fall by the way our Tekla shall
+never be idle. She is a good Samaritan by an irresistible vocation. The
+revolutionists didn't understand her. Fancy a devoted creature like that
+being employed to carry about documents sewn in her dress, or made to
+write from dictation."
+
+"There is not much perspicacity in the world."
+
+No sooner uttered, I regretted that observation. Natalia Haldin, looking
+me straight in the face, assented by a slight movement of her head. She
+was not offended, but turning away began to pace the room again. To my
+western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite
+beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance. I
+remained silent as though it were hopeless to raise my voice. The sound
+of hers, so close to me, made me start a little.
+
+"Tekla saw him picked up after the accident. The good soul never
+explained to me really how it came about. She affirms that there was
+some understanding between them--some sort of compact--that in any sore
+need, in misfortune, or difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her."
+
+"Was there?" I said. "It is lucky for him that there was, then. He'll
+need all the devotion of the good Samaritan."
+
+It was a fact that Tekla, looking out of her window at five in the
+morning, for some reason or other, had beheld Razumov in the grounds of
+the Chateau Borel, standing stockstill, bare-headed in the rain, at the
+foot of the terrace. She had screamed out to him, by name, to know
+what was the matter. He never even raised his head. By the time she had
+dressed herself sufficiently to run downstairs he was gone. She started
+in pursuit, and rushing out into the road, came almost directly upon the
+arrested tramcar and the small knot of people picking up Razumov. That
+much Tekla had told me herself one afternoon we happened to meet at the
+door of the hospital, and without any kind of comment. But I did not
+want to meditate very long on the inwardness of this peculiar episode.
+
+"Yes, Natalia Victorovna, he shall need somebody when they dismiss him,
+on crutches and stone deaf from the hospital. But I do not think that
+when he rushed like an escaped madman into the grounds of the Chateau
+Borel it was to seek the help of that good Tekla."
+
+"No," said Natalia, stopping short before me, "perhaps not." She sat
+down and leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. The silence lasted
+for several minutes. During that time I remembered the evening of his
+atrocious confession--the plaint she seemed to have hardly enough life
+left in her to utter, "It is impossible to be more unhappy...." The
+recollection would have given me a shudder if I had not been lost
+in wonder at her force and her tranquillity. There was no longer any
+Natalia Haldin, because she had completely ceased to think of herself.
+It was a great victory, a characteristically Russian exploit in
+self-suppression.
+
+She recalled me to myself by getting up suddenly like a person who has
+come to a decision. She walked to the writing-table, now stripped of all
+the small objects associated with her by daily use--a mere piece of dead
+furniture; but it contained something living, still, since she took from
+a recess a flat parcel which she brought to me.
+
+"It's a book," she said rather abruptly. "It was sent to me wrapped
+up in my veil. I told you nothing at the time, but now I've decided to
+leave it with you. I have the right to do that. It was sent to me. It
+is mine. You may preserve it, or destroy it after you have read it. And
+while you read it, please remember that I was defenceless. And that
+he.."
+
+"Defenceless!" I repeated, surprised, looking hard at her.
+
+"You'll find the very word written there," she whispered. "Well, it's
+true! I _was_ defenceless--but perhaps you were able to see that for
+yourself." Her face coloured, then went deadly pale. "In justice to the
+man, I want you to remember that I was. Oh, I was, I was!"
+
+I rose, a little shakily.
+
+"I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting."
+
+Her hand fell into mine.
+
+"It's difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us."
+
+She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
+
+"Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands
+are free now. As for the rest--which of us can fail to hear the stifled
+cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world."
+
+"The world is more conscious of your discordant voices," I said. "It is
+the way of the world."
+
+"Yes." She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment. "I must
+own to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when
+all discord shall be silenced. Try to imagine its dawn! The tempest of
+blows and of execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising,
+and the weary men united at last, taking count in their conscience of
+the ended contest, feel saddened by their victory, because so many ideas
+have perished for the triumph of one, so many beliefs have abandoned
+them without support. They feel alone on the earth and gather close
+together. Yes, there must be many bitter hours! But at last the anguish
+of hearts shall be extinguished in love."
+
+And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so
+cruel sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin. It is hard to think
+I shall never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl--wedded
+to an invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like
+a heavenly flower from the soil of men's earth, soaked in blood, torn by
+struggles, watered with tears.
+
+
+
+It must be understood that at that time I didn't know anything of Mr.
+Razumov's confession to the assembled revolutionists. Natalia Haldin
+might have guessed what was the "one thing more" which remained for him
+to do; but this my western eyes had failed to see.
+
+Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S--, haunted his bedside at
+the hospital. We met once or twice at the door of that establishment,
+but on these occasions she was not communicative. She gave me news of
+Mr. Razumov as concisely as possible. He was making a slow recovery, but
+would remain a hopeless cripple all his life. Personally, I never went
+near him: I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood
+by, a watchful but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin. He
+was in due course discharged from the hospital, and his "relative"--so I
+was told--had carried him off somewhere.
+
+My information was completed nearly two years later. The opportunity,
+certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
+much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
+gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
+
+He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch--a
+dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with
+something hushed and circumspect in his manner. He approached
+me, choosing the moment when there was no one near, followed by a
+grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.
+
+"Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you," he addressed me,
+in his guarded voice. "And so I leave you two to have a talk together."
+
+"I would never have intruded myself upon your notice," the grey-haired
+lady began at once, "if I had not been charged with a message for you."
+
+It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin. Sophia
+Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and
+had seen Miss Haldin. She lived in a town "in the centre," sharing her
+compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the
+heartrending misery of bereaved homes. She did not spare herself in good
+service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.
+
+"She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable
+body," the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of
+enthusiasm.
+
+A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest
+on my side. We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted
+us. In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna
+remarked suddenly--
+
+"I suppose you remember seeing me before? That evening when Natalia came
+to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young
+man who..."
+
+"I remember perfectly," I said. When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had
+in my possession that young man's journal given me by Miss Haldin she
+became intensely interested. She did not conceal her curiosity to see
+the document.
+
+I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me
+next day for that purpose.
+
+She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed
+me the book with a faint sigh. While moving about Russia, she had seen
+Razumov too. He lived, not "in the centre," but "in the south." She
+described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some
+very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown
+with nettles. He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla
+the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish
+devotion. There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.
+
+I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have
+visited Mr. Razumov. I did not even understand the motive. But she
+informed me that she was not the only one.
+
+"Some of _us_ always go to see him when passing through. He is
+intelligent. We has ideas.... He talks well, too."
+
+Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov's public confession in
+Laspara's house. Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what
+had occurred there. Razumov himself had told her all about it, most
+minutely.
+
+Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes--
+
+"There are evil moments in every life. A false suggestion enters one's
+brain, and then fear is born--fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or else
+a false courage--who knows? Well, call it what you like; but tell me,
+how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition
+(as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly
+debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this--he
+was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe
+and more--infinitely more--when the possibility of being loved by
+that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his
+bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and
+pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him.
+There's character in such a discovery."
+
+I accepted her conclusion in silence. Who would care to question the
+grounds of forgiveness or compassion? However, it appeared later on,
+that there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the
+revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer. Sophia Antonovna continued
+uneasily--
+
+"And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage. It was not
+authorized. Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him. He
+had confessed voluntarily. And that Nikita who burst the drums of his
+ears purposely, out on the landing, you know, as if carried away by
+indignation--well, he has turned out to be a scoundrel of the worst
+kind--a traitor himself, a betrayer--a spy! Razumov told me he had
+charged him with it by a sort of inspiration...."
+
+"I had a glimpse of that brute," I said. "How any of you could have been
+deceived for half a day passes my comprehension!"
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+"There! There! Don't talk of it. The first time I saw him, I, too, was
+appalled. They cried me down. We were always telling each other, 'Oh!
+you mustn't mind his appearance.' And then he was always ready to kill.
+There was no doubt of it. He killed--yes! in both camps. The fiend...."
+
+Then Sophia Antonovna, after mastering the angry trembling of her lips,
+told me a very queer tale. It went that Councillor Mikulin, travelling
+in Germany (shortly after Razumov's disappearance from Geneva), happened
+to meet Peter Ivanovitch in a railway carriage. Being alone in the
+compartment, these two talked together half the night, and it was then
+that Mikulin the Police Chief gave a hint to the Arch-Revolutionist
+as to the true character of the arch-slayer of gendarmes. It looks as
+though Mikulin had wanted to get rid of that particular agent of his
+own! He might have grown tired of him, or frightened of him. It must
+also be said that Mikulin had inherited the sinister Nikita from his
+predecessor in office.
+
+And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a
+mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my
+Western eyes. But I permitted myself a question--
+
+"Tell me, please, Sophia Antonovna, did Madame de S-- leave all her
+fortune to Peter Ivanovitch?"
+
+"Not a bit of it." The woman revolutionist shrugged her shoulders in
+disgust. "She died without making a will. A lot of nephews and nieces
+came down from St. Petersburg, like a flock of vultures, and fought
+for her money amongst themselves. All beastly Kammerherrs and Maids of
+Honour--abominable court flunkeys. Tfui!"
+
+"One does not hear much of Peter Ivanovitch now," I remarked, after a
+pause.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch," said Sophia Antonovna gravely, "has united himself
+to a peasant girl."
+
+I was truly astonished.
+
+"What! On the Riviera?"
+
+"What nonsense! Of course not."
+
+Sophia Antonovna's tone was slightly tart.
+
+"Is he, then, living actually in Russia? It's a tremendous risk--isn't
+it?" I cried. "And all for the sake of a peasant girl. Don't you think
+it's very wrong of him?"
+
+Sophia Antonovna preserved a mysterious silence for a while, then made a
+statement. "He just simply adores her."
+
+"Does he? Well, then, I hope that she won't hesitate to beat him."
+
+Sophia Antonovna got up and wished me good-bye, as though she had not
+heard a word of my impious hope; but, in the very doorway, where I
+attended her, she turned round for an instant, and declared in a firm
+voice--
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad
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+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
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
+#25 in our series Joseph Conrad
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+Title: Under Western Eyes
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+Author: 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
+muffled in the multitude of snowflakes; both
+horses lay dead and mangled on the ground and
+the coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen off
+the box mortally wounded.  The footman (who
+survived) had no time to see the face of the man
+in the sheepskin coat.  After throwing the bomb
+this last got away, but it is supposed that,
+seeing a lot of people surging up on all sides
+of him in the falling snow, and all running
+towards the scene of the explosion, he thought
+it safer to turn back with them.
+
+In an incredibly short time an excited crowd
+assembled round the sledge.  The Minister-
+President, getting out unhurt into the deep
+snow, stood near the groaning coachman and
+addressed the people repeatedly in his weak,
+colourless voice: "I beg of you to keep off:
+For the love of God, I beg of you good people to
+keep off."
+
+It was then that a tall young man who had
+remained standing perfectly still within a
+carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped
+out into the street and walking up rapidly flung
+another bomb over the heads of the crowd.  It
+actually struck the Minister-President on the
+shoulder as he stooped over his dying servant,
+then falling between his feet exploded with a
+terrific concentrated violence, striking him
+dead to the ground, finishing the wounded man
+and practically annihilating the empty sledge in
+the twinkling of an eye.  With a yell of horror
+the crowd broke up and fled in all directions,
+except for those who fell dead or dying where
+they stood nearest to the Minister-President,
+and one or two others who did not fall till they
+had run a little way.
+
+The first explosion had brought together a crowd
+as if by enchantment, the second made as swiftly
+a solitude in the street for hundreds of yards
+in each direction.  Through the falling snow
+people looked from afar at the small heap of
+dead bodies lying upon each other near the
+carcases of the two horses.  Nobody dared to
+approach till some Cossacks of a street-patrol
+galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over
+the dead.  Amongst the innocent victims of the
+second explosion laid out on the pavement there
+was a body dressed in a peasant's sheepskin
+coat; but the face was unrecognisable, there was
+absolutely nothing found in the pockets of its
+poor clothing, and it was the only one whose
+identity was never established.
+
+That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour
+and spent the morning within the University
+buildings listening to the lectures and working
+for some time in the library.  He heard the
+first vague rumour of something in the way of
+bomb-throwing at the table of the students'
+ordinary, where he was accustomed to eat his two
+o'clock dinner.  But this rumour was made up of
+mere whispers, and this was Russia, where it was
+not always safe, for a student especially, to
+appear too much interested in certain kinds of
+whispers.  Razumov was one of those men who,
+living in a period of mental and political
+unrest, keep an instinctive hold on normal,
+practical, everyday life.  He was aware of the
+emotional tension of his time; he even responded
+to it in an indefinite way.  But his main
+concern was with his work, his studies, and with
+his own future.
+
+Officially and in fact without a family (for the
+daughter of the Archpriest had long been dead),
+no home influences had shaped his opinions or
+his feelings.  He was as lonely in the world as
+a man swimming in the deep sea.  The word
+Razumov was the mere label of a solitary
+individuality.  There were no Razumovs belonging
+to him anywhere.  His closest parentage was
+defined in the statement that he was a Russian.
+Whatever good he expected from life would be
+given to or withheld from his hopes by that
+connexion alone.  This immense parentage
+suffered from the throes of internal
+dissensions, and he shrank mentally from the
+fray as a good-natured man may shrink from
+taking definite sides in a violent family
+quarrel.
+
+Razumov, going home, reflected that having
+prepared all the matters of the forthcoming
+examination, he could now devote his time to the
+subject of the prize essay.  He hankered after
+the silver medal.  The prize was offered by the
+Ministry of Education; the names of the
+competitors would be submitted to the Minister
+himself.  The mere fact of trying would be
+considered meritorious in the higher quarters;
+and the possessor of the prize would have a
+claim to an administrative appointment of the
+better sort after he had taken his degree.  The
+student Razumov in an access of elation forgot
+the dangers menacing the stability of the
+institutions which give rewards and
+appointments.  But remembering the medallist of
+the year before, Razumov, the young man of no
+parentage, was sobered.  He and some others
+happened to be assembled in their comrade's
+rooms at the very time when that last received
+the official advice of his success.  He was a
+quiet, unassuming young man: " Forgive me," he
+had said with a faint apologetic smile and
+taking up his cap, " I am going out to order up
+some wine.  But I must first send a telegram to
+my folk at home.  I say!  Won't the old people
+make it a festive time for the neighbours for
+twenty miles around our place."
+
+Razumov thought there was nothing of that sort
+for him in the world.  His success would matter
+to no one.  But he felt no bitterness against
+the nobleman his protector, who was not a
+provincial magnate as was generally supposed.
+He was in fact nobody less than Prince K---,
+once a great and splendid figure in the world
+and now, his day being over, a Senator and a
+gouty invalid, living in a still splendid but
+more domestic manner.  He had some young
+children and a wife as aristocratic and proud as
+himself.
+
+In all his life Razumov was allowed only once to
+come into personal contact with the Prince.
+
+It had the air of a chance meeting in the little
+attorney's office.  One day Razumov, coming in
+by appointment, found a stranger standing there--
+a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with
+silky, grey sidewhiskers.  The bald-headed, sly
+little lawyer-fellow called out, "Come in--come
+in, Mr. Razumov," with a sort of ironic
+heartiness.  Then turning deferentially to the
+stranger with the grand air, "A ward of mine,
+your, Excellency.  One of the most promising
+students of his faculty in the St. Petersburg
+University."
+
+To his intense surprise Razumov saw a white
+shapely hand extended to him.  He took it in
+great confusion (it was soft and passive) and
+heard at the same time a condescending murmur in
+which he caught only the words "Satisfactory"
+and "Persevere."  But the most amazing thing of
+all was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of
+the white shapely hand just before it was
+withdrawn: a light pressure like a secret sign.
+The emotion of it was terrible.  Razumov's heart
+seemed to leap into his throat.  When he raised
+his eyes the aristocratic personage, motioning
+the little lawyer aside, had opened the door and
+was going out.
+
+The attorney rummaged amongst the papers on his
+desk for a time.  "Do you know who that was?" he
+asked suddenly.
+
+Razumov, whose heart was thumping hard yet,
+shook his head in silence.
+
+"That was Prince K---.  You wonder what he could
+be doing in the hole of a poor legal rat like
+myself--eh?  These awfully great people have
+their sentimental curiosities like common
+sinners.  But if I were you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch," he continued, leering and laying a
+peculiar emphasis on the patronymic," I wouldn't
+boast at large of the introduction.  It would
+not be prudent, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Oh dear no!
+It would be in fact dangerous for your future."
+
+The young man's ears burned like fire; his sight
+was dim.  "That man!" Razumov was saying to
+himself.  "He!"
+
+Henceforth it was by this monosyllable that Mr.
+Razumov got into the habit of referring mentally
+to the stranger with grey silky side-whiskers.
+>From that time too, when walking in the more
+fashionable quarters, he noted with interest the
+magnificent horses and carriages with Prince K---
+ 's liveries on the box.  Once he saw the
+Princess get out--she was shopping--followed by
+two girls, of which one was nearly a head taller
+than the other.  Their fair hair hung loose down
+their backs in the English style; they had merry
+eyes, their coats, muffs, and little fur caps
+were exactly alike, and their cheeks and noses
+were tinged a cheerful pink by the frost.  They
+crossed the pavement in front of him, and
+Razumov went on his way smiling shyly to
+himself.  "His" daughters.  They resembled
+"Him."  The young man felt a glow of warm
+friendliness towards these girls who would never
+know of his existence.  Presently they would
+marry Generals or Kammerherrs and have girls and
+boys of their own, who perhaps would be aware of
+him as a celebrated old professor, decorated,
+possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories
+of Russia--nothing more!
+
+But a celebrated professor was a somebody.
+Distinction would convert the label Razumov into
+an honoured name.  There was nothing strange in
+the student Razumov's wish for distinction.  A
+man's real life is that accorded to him in the
+thoughts of other men by reason of respect or
+natural love.  Returning home on the day of the
+attempt on Mr. de P---'s life Razumov resolved
+to have a good try for the silver medal.
+
+Climbing slowly the four flights of the dark,
+dirty staircase in the house where he had his
+lodgings, he felt confident of success.  The
+winner's name would be published in the papers
+on New Year's Day.  And at the thought that "He"
+would most probably read it there, Razumov
+stopped short on the stairs for an instant, then
+went on smiling faintly at his own emotion.
+"This is but a shadow," he said to himself," but
+the medal is a solid beginning."
+
+With those ideas of industry in his head the
+warmth of his room was agreeable and
+encouraging.  "I shall put in four hours of good
+work," he thought.  But no sooner had he closed
+the door than he was horribly startled.  All
+black against the usual tall stove of white
+tiles gleaming in the dusk, stood a strange
+figure, wearing a skirted, close-fitting, brown
+cloth coat strapped round the waist, in long
+boots, and with a little Astrakhan cap on its
+head.  It loomed lithe and martial.  Razumov was
+utterly confounded.  It was only when the figure
+advancing two paces asked in an untroubled,
+grave voice if the outer door was closed that he
+regained his power of speech.
+
+"Haldin!. . .  Victor Victorovitch!. . .  Is
+that you? . . .  Yes.  The outer door is shut
+all right.  But this is indeed unexpected."
+
+Victor Haldin, a student older than most of his
+contemporaries at the University, was not one of
+the industrious set.  He was hardly ever seen at
+lectures; the authorities had marked him as
+"restless" and "unsound "--very bad notes.  But
+he had a great personal prestige with his
+comrades and influenced their thoughts.  Razumov
+had never been intimate with him.  They had met
+from time to time at gatherings in other
+students' houses.  They had even had a
+discussion together--one of those discussions on
+first principles dear to the sanguine minds of
+youth.
+
+Razumov wished the man had chosen some other
+time to come for a chat.  He felt in good trim
+to tackle the prize essay.  But as Haldin could
+not be slightingly dismissed Razumov adopted the
+tone of hospitality, asking him to sit down and
+smoke.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch," said the other, flinging
+off his cap, "we are not perhaps in exactly the
+same camp.  Your judgment is more philosophical.
+ You are a man of few words, but I haven't met
+anybody who dared to doubt the generosity of
+your sentiments.  There is a solidity about your
+character which cannot exist without courage."
+
+Razumov felt flattered and began to murmur shyly
+something about being very glad of his good
+opinion, when Haldin raised his hand.
+
+"That is what I was saying to myself," he
+continued, "as I dodged in the woodyard down by
+the river-side.  'He has a strong character this
+young man,' I said to myself.  'He does not
+throw his soul to the winds.'  Your reserve has
+always fascinated me, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  So I
+tried to remember your address.  But look here--
+it was a piece of luck.  Your dvornik was away
+from the gate talking to a sleigh-driver on the
+other side of the street.  I met no one on the
+stairs, not a soul.  As I came up to your floor
+I caught sight of your landlady coming out of
+your rooms.  But she did not see me.  She
+crossed the landing to her own side, and then I
+slipped in.  I have been here two hours
+expecting you to come in every moment."
+
+Razumov had listened in astonishment; but before
+he could open his mouth Haldin added, speaking
+deliberately,"  It was I who removed de P---
+this morning." Razumov kept down a cry of
+dismay.  The sentiment of his life being utterly
+ruined by this contact with such a crime
+expressed itself quaintly by a sort of half-
+derisive mental exclamation, "There goes my
+silver medal!"
+
+Haldin continued after waiting a while--
+
+"You say nothing, Kirylo Sidorovitch!  I
+understand your silence.  To be sure, I cannot
+expect you with your frigid English manner to
+embrace me.  But never mind your manners.  You
+have enough heart to have heard the sound of
+weeping and gnashing of teeth this man raised in
+the land.  That would be enough to get over any
+philosophical hopes.  He was uprooting the
+tender plant.  He had to be stopped.  He was a
+dangerous man--a convinced man.  Three more
+years of his work would have put us back fifty
+years into bondage--and look at all the lives
+wasted, at all the souls lost in that time."
+
+His curt, self-confident voice suddenly lost its
+ring and it was in a dull tone that he added,
+"Yes, brother, I have killed him.  It's weary
+work."
+
+Razumov had sunk into a chair.  Every moment he
+expected a crowd of policemen to rush in.  There
+must have been thousands of them out looking for
+that man walking up and down in his room.
+Haldin was talking again in a restrained, steady
+voice.  Now and then he flourished an arm,
+slowly, without excitement.
+
+He told Razumov how he had brooded for a year;
+how he had not slept properly for weeks.  He and
+"Another " had a warning of the Minister's
+movements from "a certain person" late the
+evening before.  He and that "Another" prepared
+their "engines" and resolved to have no sleep
+till "the deed" was done.  They walked the
+streets under the falling snow with the
+"engines" on them, exchanging not a word the
+livelong night.  When they happened to meet a
+police patrol they took each other by the arm
+and pretended to be a couple of peasants on the
+spree.  They reeled and talked in drunken hoarse
+voices.  Except for these strange outbreaks they
+kept silence, moving on ceaselessly.  Their
+plans had been previously arranged.  At daybreak
+they made their way to the spot which they knew
+the sledge must pass.  When it appeared in sight
+they exchanged a muttered good-bye and
+separated.  The "other" remained at the corner,
+Haldin took up a position a little farther up
+the street. . . .
+
+After throwing his "engine" he ran off and in a
+moment was overtaken by the panic-struck people
+flying away from the spot after the second
+explosion.  They were wild with terror.  He was
+jostled once or twice.  He slowed down for the
+rush to pass him and then turned to the left
+into a narrow street.  There he was alone.
+
+He marvelled at this immediate escape.  The work
+was done.  He could hardly believe it.  He
+fought with an almost irresistible longing to
+lie down on the pavement and sleep.  But this
+sort of faintness--a drowsy faintness--passed
+off quickly.  He walked faster, making his way
+to one of the poorer parts of the town in order
+to look up Ziemianitch.
+
+This Ziemianitch, Razumov understood, was a sort
+of town-peasant who had got on; owner of a small
+number of sledges and horses for hire.  Haldin
+paused in his narrative to exclaim--
+
+"A bright spirit ! A hardy soul! The best driver
+in St. Petersburg.  He has a team of three
+horses there. . . .  Ah!  He's a fellow!"
+
+This man had declared himself willing to take
+out safely, at any time, one or two persons to
+the second or third railway station on one of
+the southern lines.  But there had been no time
+to warn him the night before.  His usual haunt
+seemed to be a low-class eating-house on the
+outskirts of the town.  When Haldin got there
+the man was not to be found.  He was not
+expected to turn up again till the evening.
+Haldin wandered away restlessly.
+
+He saw the gate of a woodyard open and went in
+to get out of the wind which swept the bleak
+broad thoroughfare.  The great rectangular piles
+of cut wood loaded with snow resembled the huts
+of a village.  At first the watchman who
+discovered him crouching amongst them talked in
+a friendly manner.  He was a dried-up old man
+wearing two ragged army coats one over the
+other; his wizened little face, tied up under
+the jaw and over the ears in a dirty red
+handkerchief, looked comical.  Presently he grew
+sulky, and then all at once without rhyme or
+reason began to shout furiously.
+
+"Aren't you ever going to clear out of this, you
+loafer ?  We know all about factory hands of
+your sort.  A big, strong, young chap!  You
+aren't even drunk.  What do you want here?  You
+don't frighten us.  Take yourself and your ugly
+eyes away."
+
+Haldin stopped before the sitting Razumov.  His
+supple figure, with the white forehead above
+which the fair hair stood straight up, had an
+aspect of lofty daring.
+
+" He did not like my eyes," he said.  "And so. .
+.here I am."
+
+Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.
+
+"But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch.  We know
+each other so little. . . .  I don't see why you
+. . . ."
+
+" Confidence," said Haldin.
+
+This word sealed Razumov's lips as if a hand had
+been clapped on his mouth.  His brain seethed
+with arguments
+
+"And so--here you are," he muttered through his
+teeth.
+
+The other did not detect the tone of anger.
+Never suspected it.
+
+"Yes.  And nobody knows I am here.  You are the
+last person that could be suspected--should I
+get caught.  That's an advantage, you see.  And
+then--speaking to a superior mind like yours I
+can well say all the truth.  It occurred to me
+that you--you have no one belonging to you--no
+ties, no one to suffer for it if this came out
+by some means.  There have been enough ruined
+Russian homes as it is.  But I don't see how my
+passage through your rooms can be ever known.
+If I should be got hold of, I'll know how to
+keep silent--no matter what they may be pleased
+to do to me," he added grimly.
+
+He began to walk again while Razumov sat still
+appalled.
+
+"You thought that--" he faltered out almost sick
+with indignation.
+
+"Yes, Razumov.  Yes, brother.  Some day you
+shall help to build.  You suppose that I am a
+terrorist, now--a destructor of what is, But
+consider that the true destroyers are they who
+destroy the spirit of progress and truth, not
+the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the
+persecutors of human dignity.  Men like me are
+necessary to make room for self-contained,
+thinking men like you.  Well, we have made the
+sacrifice of our lives, but all the same I want
+to escape if it can be done.  It is not my life
+I want to save, but my power to do.  I won't
+live idle.  Oh no!  Don't make any mistake,
+Razumov.  Men like me are rare.  And, besides,
+an example like this is more awful to oppressors
+when the perpetrator vanishes without a trace.
+They sit in their offices and palaces and quake.
+ All I want you to do is to help me to vanish.
+No great matter that.  Only to go by and by and
+see Ziemianitch for me at that place where I
+went this morning.  Just tell him, 'He whom you
+know wants a well-horsed sledge to pull up half
+an hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post
+on the left counting from the upper end of
+Karabelnaya.  If nobody gets in, the sledge is
+to run round a block or two, so as to come back
+past the same spot in ten minutes' time.' "
+
+Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that
+talk and told this man to go away long before.
+Was it weakness or what?
+
+He concluded that it was a sound instinct.
+Haldin must have been seen.  It was impossible
+that some people should not have noticed the
+face and appearance of the man who threw the
+second bomb.  Haldin was a noticeable person.
+The police in their thousands must have had his
+description within the hour.  With every moment
+the danger grew.  Sent out to wander in the
+streets he could not escape being caught in the
+end.
+
+The police would very soon find out all about
+him.  They would set about discovering a
+conspiracy.  Everybody Haldin had ever known
+would be in the greatest danger.  Unguarded
+expressions, little facts in themselves innocent
+would be counted for crimes.  Razumov remembered
+certain words he said, the speeches he had
+listened to, the harmless gatherings he had
+attended--it was almost impossible for a student
+to keep out of that sort of thing, without
+becoming suspect to his comrades.
+
+Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress,
+worried, badgered, perhaps ill-used.  He saw
+himself deported by an administrative order, his
+life broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope.  He
+saw himself--at best--leading a miserable
+existence under police supervision, in some
+small, faraway provincial town, without friends
+to assist his necessities or even take any steps
+to alleviate his lot--as others had.  Others had
+fathers, mothers, brothers, relations,
+connexions, to move heaven and earth on their
+behalf--he had no one.  The very officials that
+sentenced him some morning would forget his
+existence before sunset.
+
+He saw his youth pass away from him in misery
+and half starvation--his strength give way, his
+mind become an abject thing.  He saw himself
+creeping, broken down and shabby, about the
+streets--dying unattended in some filthy hole of
+a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
+hospital.
+
+He shuddered.  Then the peace of bitter calmness
+came over him.  It was best to keep this man out
+of the streets till he could be got rid of with
+some chance of escaping.  That was the best that
+could be done. Razumov, of course, felt the
+safety of his lonely existence to be permanently
+endangered.  This evening's doings could turn up
+against him at any time as long as this man
+lived and the present institutions endured.
+They appeared to him rational and indestructible
+at that moment.  They had a force of harmony--in
+contrast with the horrible discord of this man's
+presence.  He hated the man.  He said quietly--
+
+"Yes, of course, I will go.  'You must give me
+precise directions, and for the rest--depend on
+me."
+
+"Ah! You are a fellow!  Collected--cool as a
+cucumber.  A regular Englishman.  Where did you
+get your soul from?  There aren't many like you.
+ Look here, brother!  Men like me leave no
+posterity, but their souls are not lost.  No
+man's soul is ever lost.  It works for itself--
+or else where would be the sense of self-
+sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction, of faith-
+-the labours of the soul?  What will become of
+my soul when I die in the way I must die--soon--
+very soon perhaps? It shall not perish.  Don't
+make a mistake, Razumov.  This is not murder--it
+is war, war.  My spirit shall go on warring in
+some Russian body till all falsehood is swept
+out of the world.  The modern civilization is
+false, but a new revelation shall come out of
+Russia.  Ha! you say nothing.  You are a
+sceptic.  I respect your philosophical
+scepticism, Razumov, but don't touch the soul.
+The Russian soul that lives in all of us.  It
+has a future.  It has a mission, I tell you, or
+else why should I have been moved to do this--
+reckless--like a butcher--in the middle of all
+these innocent people--scattering death--I!  I!
+. . .  I wouldn't hurt a fly!"
+
+"Not so loud," warned Razumov harshly.
+
+Haldin sat down abruptly, and leaning his head
+on his folded arms burst into tears.  He wept
+for a long time.  The dusk had deepened in the
+room.  Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder,
+listened to the sobs.
+
+The other raised his head, got up and with an
+effort mastered his voice.
+
+"Yes.  Men like me leave no posterity,"  he
+repeated in a subdued tone."  I have a sister
+though.  She's with my old mother--I persuaded
+them to go abroad this year--thank God.  Not a
+bad little girl my sister.  She has the most
+trustful eyes of any human being that ever
+walked this earth.  She will marry well, I hope.
+ She may have children--sons perhaps.  Look at
+me.  My father was a Government official in the
+provinces, He had a little land too.  A simple
+servant of God--a true Russian in his way.  His
+was the soul of obedience.  But I am not like
+him.  They say I resemble my mother's eldest
+brother, an officer.  They shot him in '28.
+Under Nicholas, you know.  Haven't I told you
+that this is war, war. . . .  But God of
+Justice!  This is weary work."
+
+Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his
+hand, spoke as if from the bottom of an abyss.
+
+"You believe in God, Haldin? "
+
+"There you go catching at words that are wrung
+from one.  What does it matter?  What was it the
+Englishman said: 'There is a divine soul in
+things . . . '  Devil take him--I don't remember
+now.  But he spoke the truth.  When the day of
+you thinkers comes don't you forget what's
+divine in the Russian soul--and that's
+resignation.  Respect that in your intellectual
+restlessness and don't let your arrogant wisdom
+spoil its message to the world.  I am speaking
+to you now like a man with a rope round his
+neck.  What do you imagine I am? A being in
+revolt?  No.  It's you thinkers who are in
+everlasting revolt.  I am one of the resigned.
+When the necessity of this heavy work came to me
+and I understood that it had to be done--what
+did I do? Did I exult?  Did I take pride in my
+purpose?  Did I try to weigh its worth and
+consequences?  No!  I was resigned.  I thought
+'God's will be done.'"
+
+He threw himself full length on Razumov's bed
+and putting the backs of his hands over his eyes
+remained perfectly motionless and silent.  Not
+even the sound of his breathing could be heard.
+The dead stillness or the room remained
+undisturbed till in the darkness Razumov said
+gloomily--
+
+"Haldin."
+
+"Yes," answered the other readily, quite
+invisible now on the bed and without the
+slightest stir.
+
+"Isn't it time for me to start?"
+
+"Yes, brother."  The other was heard, lying
+still in the darkness as though he were talking
+in his sleep.  "The time has come to put fate to
+the test."
+
+He paused, then gave a few lucid directions in
+the quiet impersonal voice of a man in a trance.
+ Razumov made ready without a word of answer.
+As he was leaving the room the voice on the bed
+said after him--
+
+"Go with God, thou silent soul."
+
+On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked
+the door and put the key in his pocket.
+
+II
+
+The words and events of that evening must have
+been graven as if with a steel tool on Mr.
+Razumov's brain since he was able to write his
+relation with such fullness and precision a good
+many months afterwards.
+
+The record of the thoughts which assailed him in
+the street is even more minute and abundant.
+They seem to have rushed upon him with the
+greater freedom because his thinking powers were
+no longer crushed by Haldin's presence--the
+appalling presence of a great crime and the
+stunning force of a great fanaticism.  On
+looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov's diary
+I own that a "rush of thoughts" is not an
+adequate image.
+
+The more adequate description would be a tumult
+of thoughts--the faithful reflection of the
+state of his feelings.  The thoughts in
+themselves were not numerous--they were like the
+thoughts of most human beings, few and simple--
+but they cannot be reproduced here in all their
+exclamatory repetitions which went on in an
+endless and weary turmoil--for the walk was long.
+
+If to the Western reader they appear shocking,
+inappropriate, or even improper, it must be
+remembered that as to the first this may be the
+effect of my crude statement.  For the rest I
+will only remark here that this is not a story
+of the West of Europe.
+
+Nations it may be have fashioned their
+Governments, but the Governments have paid them
+back in the same coin.  It is unthinkable that
+any young Englishman should find himself in
+Razumov's situation.  This being so it would be
+a vain enterprise to imagine what he would
+think.  The only safe surmise to make is that he
+would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at this
+crisis of his fate.  He would not have an
+hereditary and personal knowledge or the means
+by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
+guards its power, and defends its existence.  By
+an act of mental extravagance he might imagine
+himself arbitrarily thrown into prison, but it
+would never occur to him unless he were
+delirious (and perhaps not even then) that he
+could be beaten with whips as a practical
+measure either of investigation or of punishment.
+
+This is but a crude and obvious example of the
+different conditions of Western thought.  I
+don't know that this danger occurred, specially,
+to Mr. Razumov.  No doubt it entered
+unconsciously into the general dread and the
+general appallingness of this crisis.  Razumov,
+as has been seen, was aware of more subtle ways
+in which an individual may be undone by the
+proceedings of a despotic Government.  A simple
+expulsion from the University (the very least
+that could happen to him), with an impossibility
+to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to
+ruin utterly a young man depending entirely upon
+the development of his natural abilities for his
+place in the world.  He was a Russian: and for
+him to be implicated meant simply sinking into
+the lowest social depths amongst the hopeless
+and the destitute--the night birds of the city.
+
+The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's
+parentage, or rather of his lack of parentage,
+should be taken into the account of his
+thoughts.  And he remembered them too.  He had
+been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
+atrocious way by this fatal Haldin.  "Because I
+haven't that, must everything else be taken away
+from me?" he thought.
+
+He nerved himself for another effort to go on.
+Along the roadway sledges glided phantom-like
+and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on
+the black face of the night.  "For it is a
+crime," he was saying to himself.  "A murder is
+a murder.  Though, of course, some sort of
+liberal institutions. . . ."
+
+A feeling of horrible sickness came over him.
+"I must be courageous," he exhorted himself
+mentally.  All his strength was suddenly gone as
+if taken out by a hand.  Then by a mighty effort
+of will it came back because he was afraid of
+fainting in the street and being picked up by
+the police with the key of his lodgings in his
+pocket.  They would find Haldin there, and then,
+indeed, he would be undone.
+
+Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to
+have kept him up to the end.  The passers-by
+were rare.  They came upon him suddenly, looming
+up black in the snowflakes close by, then
+vanishing all at once-without footfalls.
+
+It was the quarter of the very poor.  Razumov
+noticed an elderly woman tied up in ragged
+shawls.  Under the street lamp she seemed a
+beggar off duty.  She walked leisurely in the
+blizzard as though she had no home to hurry to,
+she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black
+bread with an air of guarding a priceless booty:
+and Razumov averting his glance envied her the
+peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.
+
+To one reading Mr. Razumov's narrative it is
+really a wonder how he managed to keep going as
+he did along one interminable street after
+another on pavements that were gradually
+becoming blocked with snow.  It was the thought
+of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the
+desperate desire to get rid of his presence
+which drove him forward.  No rational
+determination had any part in his exertions.
+Thus, when on arriving at the low eating-house
+he heard that the man of horses, Ziemianitch,
+was not there, he could only stare stupidly.
+
+The waiter, a wild-haired youth in tarred boots
+and a pink shirt, exclaimed, uncovering his pale
+gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch had got
+his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone
+away with a bottle under each arm to keep it up
+amongst the horses--he supposed.
+
+The owner of the vile den, a bony short man in a
+dirty cloth caftan coming down to his heels,
+stood by, his hands tucked into his belt, and
+nodded confirmation.
+
+The reek of spirits, the greasy rancid steam of
+food got Razumov by the throat.  He struck a
+table with his clenched hand and shouted
+violently--
+
+"You lie."
+
+Bleary unwashed faces were turned to his
+direction.  A mild-eyed ragged tramp drinking
+tea at the next table moved farther away.  A
+murmur of wonder arose with an undertone of
+uneasiness.  A laugh was heard too, and an
+exclamation, "There! there!" jeeringly soothing.
+ The waiter looked all round and announced to
+the room--
+
+"The gentleman won't believe that Ziemianitch is
+drunk."
+
+
+>From a distant corner a hoarse voice belonging
+to a horrible, nondescript, shaggy being with a
+black face like the muzzle of a bear grunted
+angrily--
+
+"The cursed driver of thieves.  What do we want
+with his gentlemen here?  We are all honest folk
+in this place."
+
+Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep
+himself from bursting into imprecations,
+followed the owner of the den, who, whispering
+"Come along, little father," led him into a tiny
+hole of a place behind the wooden counter,
+whence proceeded a sound of splashing.  A wet
+and bedraggled creature, a sort of sexless and
+shivering scarecrow, washed glasses in there,
+bending over a wooden tub by the light of a
+tallow dip.
+
+"Yes, little father," the man in the long caftan
+said plaintively.  He had a brown, cunning
+little face, a thin greyish beard.  Trying to
+light a tin lantern he hugged it to his breast
+and talked garrulously the while.
+
+He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to
+prove there were no lies told.  And he would
+show him drunk.  His woman, it seems, ran away
+from him last night.  "Such a hag she was!
+Thin!  Pfui!"  He spat.  They were always
+running away from that driver of the devil--and
+he sixty years old too; could never get used to
+it.  But each heart knows sorrow after its own
+kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his
+days.  And then he would fly to the bottle.
+"'Who could bear life in our land without the
+bottle?' he says.  A proper Russian man--the
+little pig. . . .  Be pleased to follow me."
+
+Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow
+enclosed between high walls with innumerable
+windows.  Here and there a dim yellow light hung
+within the four-square mass of darkness.  The
+house was an enormous slum, a hive of human
+vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on
+the verge of starvation and despair.
+
+In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and
+Razumov followed the light of the lantern
+through a small doorway into a long cavernous
+place like a neglected subterranean byre.  Deep
+within, three shaggy little horses tied up to
+rings hung their heads together, motionless and
+shadowy in the dim light of the lantern.  It
+must have been the famous team of Haldin's
+escape.  Razumov peered fearfully into the
+gloom.  His guide pawed in the straw with his
+foot.
+
+"Here he is.  Ah!  the little pigeon.  A true
+Russian man.  'No heavy hearts for me,' he says.
+ 'Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug
+out of my sight.' Ha! ha! ha!  That's the fellow
+he is."
+
+He held the lantern over a prone form of a man,
+apparently fully dressed for outdoors.  His head
+was lost in a pointed cloth hood.  On the other
+side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet
+in monstrous thick boots.
+
+" Always ready to drive," commented the keeper
+of the eating-house.  "A proper Russian driver
+that.  Saint or devil, night or day is all one
+to Ziemianitch when his heart is free from
+sorrow.  'I don't ask who you are, but where you
+want to go,' he says.  He would drive Satan
+himself to his own abode and come back
+chirruping to his horses.  Many a one he has
+driven who is clanking his chains in the
+Nertchinsk mines by this time."
+
+Razumov shuddered.
+
+"Call him, wake him up," he faltered out.
+
+The other set down his light, stepped back and
+launched a kick at the prostrate sleeper.  The
+man shook at the impact but did not move.  At
+the third kick he grunted but remained inert as
+before.
+
+The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a
+deep sigh.
+
+"You see for yourself how it is.  We have done
+what we can for you."
+
+He picked up the lantern.  The intense black
+spokes of shadow swung about in the circle of
+light.  A terrible fury--the blind rage of self-
+preservation--possessed Razumov.
+
+" Ah! The vile beast," he bellowed out in an
+unearthly tone which made the lantern jump and
+tremble!  "I shall wake you!  Give me . . .give
+me . . ."
+
+He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a
+stablefork and rushing forward struck at the
+prostrate body with inarticulate cries.  After a
+time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows
+fell in the stillness and shadows of the cellar-
+like stable.  Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch
+with an insatiable fury, in great volleys of
+sounding thwacks.  Except for the violent
+movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither
+the beaten man nor the spoke-like shadows on the
+walls.  And only the sound of blows was heard.
+It was a weird scene.
+
+Suddenly there was a sharp crack.  The stick
+broke and half of it flew far away into the
+gloom beyond the light.  At the same time
+Ziemianitch sat up.  At this Razumov became as
+motionless as the man with the lantern--only his
+breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.
+
+Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated
+at last the consoling night of drunkenness
+enwrapping the "bright Russian soul" of Haldin's
+enthusiastic praise.  But Ziemianitch evidently
+saw nothing.  His eyeballs blinked all white in
+the light once, twice--then the gleam went out.
+For a moment he sat in the straw with closed
+eyes with a strange air of weary meditation,
+then fell over slowly on his side without making
+the slightest sound.  Only the straw rustled a
+little.  Razumov stared wildly, fighting for his
+breath.  After a second or two he heard a light
+snore.
+
+He flung from him the piece of stick remaining
+in his grasp, and went off with great hasty
+strides without looking back once.
+
+After going heedlessly for some fifty yards
+along the street he walked into a snowdrift and
+was up to his knees before he stopped.
+
+This recalled him to himself; and glancing about
+he discovered he had been going in the wrong
+direction.  He retraced his steps, but now at a
+more moderate pace.  When passing before the
+house he had just left he flourished his fist at
+the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing
+its sinister bulk on the white ground.  It had
+an air of brooding.  He let his arm fall by his
+side--discouraged.
+
+Ziemianitch's passionate surrender to sorrow and
+consolation had baffled him.  That was the
+people.  A true Russian man!  Razumov was glad
+he had beaten that brute--the "bright soul" of
+the other.  Here they were: the people and the
+enthusiast.
+
+Between the two he was done for.  Between the
+drunkenness of the peasant incapable of action
+and the dream-intoxication of the idealist
+incapable of perceiving the reason of things,
+and the true character of men.  It was a sort of
+terrible childishness.  But children had their
+masters.  "Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern
+hand," thought Razumov, longing for power to
+hurt and destroy.
+
+He was glad he had thrashed that brute.  The
+physical exertion had left his body in a
+comfortable glow.  His mental agitation too was
+clarified as if all the feverishness had gone
+out of him in a fit of outward violence.
+Together with the persisting sense of terrible
+danger he was conscious now of a tranquil,
+unquenchable hate.
+
+He walked slower and slower.  And indeed,
+considering the guest he had in his rooms, it
+was no wonder he lingered on the way.  It was
+like harbouring a pestilential disease that
+would not perhaps take your life, but would take
+from you all that made life worth living--a
+subtle pest that would convert earth into a hell.
+
+What was he doing now?  Lying on the bed as if
+dead, with the back of his hands over his eyes ?
+ Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin
+on his bed--the white pillow hollowed by the
+head, the legs in long boots, the upturned feet.
+ And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll
+kill him when I get home."  But he knew very
+well that that was of no use.  The corpse
+hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal
+as the living man.  Nothing short of complete
+annihilation would do.  And that was impossible.
+ What then?  Must one kill oneself to escape
+this visitation ?
+
+Razumov's despair was too profoundly tinged with
+hate to accept that issue.
+
+And yet it was despair--nothing less--at the
+thought of having to live with Haldin for an
+indefinite number of days in mortal alarm at
+every sound.  But perhaps when he heard that
+this "bright soul" of Ziemianitch suffered from
+a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his
+infernal resignation somewhere else.  And that
+was not likely on the face of it.
+
+Razumov thought: "I am being crushed--and I
+can't even run away."  Other men had somewhere a
+corner of the earth--some little house in the
+provinces where they had a right to take their
+troubles.  A material refuge.  He had nothing.
+He had not even a moral refuge--the refuge of
+confidence.  To whom could he go with this tale--
+in all this great, great land?
+
+Razumov stamped his foot--and under the soft
+carpet of snow felt the hard ground of Russia,
+inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic
+mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet--
+his native soil!--his very own--without a
+fireside, without a heart!
+
+He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed.  The
+snow had ceased to fall, and now, as if by a
+miracle, he saw above his head the clear black
+sky of the northern winter, decorated with the
+sumptuous fires of the stars.  It was a canopy
+fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.
+
+Razumov received an almost physical impression
+of endless space and of countless millions.
+
+He responded to it with the readiness of a
+Russian who is born to an inheritance of space
+and numbers.  Under the sumptuous immensity of
+the sky, the snow covered the endless forests,
+the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense
+country, obliterating the landmarks, the
+accidents of the ground, levelling everything
+under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous
+blank page awaiting the record of an
+inconceivable history.  It covered the passive
+land with its lives of countless people like
+Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like
+this Haldin--murdering foolishly.
+
+It was a sort of sacred inertia.  Razumov felt a
+respect for it.  A voice seemed to cry within
+him, "Don't touch it."  It was a guarantee of
+duration, of safety, while the travail of
+maturing destiny went on--a work not of
+revolutions with their passionate levity of
+action and their shifting impulses--but of
+peace.  What it needed was not the conflicting
+aspirations of a people, but a will strong and
+one: it wanted not the babble of many voices,
+but a man--strong and one!
+
+Razumov stood on the point of conversion.  He
+was fascinated by its approach, by its
+overpowering logic.  For a train of thought is
+never false.  The falsehood lies deep in the
+necessities of existence, in secret fears and
+half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence
+combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in
+the love of hope and the dread of uncertain days.
+
+In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and
+disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have
+turned away at last from the vain and endless
+conflict to the one great historical fact of the
+land.  They turned to autocracy for the peace of
+their patriotic conscience as a weary
+unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith
+of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual
+rest.  Like other Russians before him, Razumov,
+in conflict with himself, felt the touch of
+grace upon his forehead.
+
+"Haldin means disruption," he thought to
+himself, beginning to walk again.  " What is he
+with his indignation, with his talk of bondage--
+with his talk of God's justice?  All that means
+disruption.  Better that thousands should suffer
+than that a people should become a disintegrated
+mass, helpless like dust in the wind.
+Obscurantism is better than the light of
+incendiary torches.  The seed germinates in the
+night.  Out of the dark soil springs the perfect
+plant.  But a volcanic eruption is sterile, the
+ruin of the fertile ground.  And am I, who love
+my country--who have nothing but that to love
+and put my faith in--am I to have my future,
+perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary
+fanatic?"
+
+The grace entered into Razumov.  He believed now
+in the man who would come at the appointed time.
+
+What is a throne?  A few pieces of wood
+upholstered in velvet.  But a throne is a seat
+of power too.  The form of government is the
+shape of a tool--an instrument.  But twenty
+thousand bladders inflated by the noblest
+sentiments and jostling against each other in
+the air are a miserable incumbrance of space,
+holding no power, possessing no will, having
+nothing to give.
+
+He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a
+discourse with himself with extraordinary
+abundance and facility.  Generally his phrases
+came to him slowly, after a conscious and
+painstaking wooing.  Some superior power had
+inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as
+certain converted sinners become overwhelmingly
+loquacious.
+
+He felt an austere exultation.
+
+"What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that
+fellow to the clear grasp of my intellect?" he
+thought.  "Is not this my country?  Have I not
+got forty million brothers?" he asked himself,
+unanswerably victorious in the silence of his
+breast.  And the fearful thrashing he had given
+the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign
+of intimate union, a pathetically severe
+necessity of brotherly love.  "No!  If I must
+suffer let me at least suffer for my
+convictions, not for a crime my reason--my cool
+superior reason--rejects."
+
+He ceased to think for a moment.  The silence in
+his breast was complete.  But he felt a
+suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience
+when we enter an unlighted strange place--the
+irrational feeling that something may jump upon
+us in the dark--the absurd dread of the unseen.
+
+Of course he was far from being a moss-grown
+reactionary.  Everything was not for the best.
+Despotic bureaucracy. . . abuses. . .
+corruption. . . and so on.  Capable men were
+wanted.  Enlightened intelligences.  Devoted
+hearts.  But absolute power should be preserved--
+the tool ready for the man--for the great
+autocrat of the future.  Razumov believed in
+him.  The logic of history made him unavoidable.
+ The state of the people demanded him, "What
+else?" he asked himself ardently, "could move
+all that mass in one direction?  Nothing could.
+Nothing but a single will."
+
+He was persuaded that he was sacrificing his
+personal longings of liberalism--rejecting the
+attractive error for the stern Russian truth.
+"That's patriotism," he observed mentally, and
+added, "There's no stopping midway on that
+road," and then remarked to himself, "I am not a
+coward."
+
+And again there was a dead silence in Razumov's
+breast.  He walked with lowered head, making
+room for no one.  He walked slowly and his
+thoughts returning spoke within him with solemn
+slowness.
+
+"What is this Haldin?  And what am I? Only two
+grains of sand.  But a great mountain is made up
+of just such insignificant grains.  And the
+death of a man or of many men is an
+insignificant thing.  Yet we combat a contagious
+pestilence.  Do I want his death?  No!  I would
+save him if I could--but no one can do that--he
+is the withered member which must be cut off.
+If I must perish through him, let me at least
+not perish with him, and associated against my
+will with his sombre folly that understands
+nothing either of men or things.  Why should I
+leave a false memory?"
+
+It passed through his mind that there was no one
+in the world who cared what sort of memory he
+left behind him.  He exclaimed to himself
+instantly, "Perish vainly for a falsehood! . . .
+ What a miserable fate!"
+
+He was now in a more animated part of the town.
+He did not remark the crash of two colliding
+sledges close to the curb.  The driver of one
+bellowed tearfully at his fellow-
+
+" Oh, thou vile wretch!"
+
+This hoarse yell, let out nearly in his ear,
+disturbed Razumov.  He shook his head
+impatiently and went on looking straight before
+him.  Suddenly on the snow, stretched on his
+back right across his path, he saw Haldin,
+solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands
+over his eyes, clad in a brown close-fitting
+coat and long boots.  He was lying out of the
+way a little, as though he had selected that
+place on purpose.  The snow round him was
+untrodden.
+
+This hallucination had such a solidity of aspect
+that the first movement of Razumov was to reach
+for his pocket to assure himself that the key of
+his rooms was there.  But he checked the impulse
+with a disdainful curve of his lips.  He
+understood.  His thought, concentrated intensely
+on the figure left lying on his bed, had
+culminated in this extraordinary illusion of the
+sight.  Razumov tackled the phenomenon calmly.
+With a stern face, without a check and gazing
+far beyond the vision, he walked on,
+experiencing nothing but a slight tightening of
+the chest.  After passing he turned his head for
+a glance, and saw only the unbroken track of his
+footsteps over the place where the breast of the
+phantom had been lying.
+
+Razumov walked on and after a little time
+whispered his wonder to himself.
+
+"Exactly as if alive!  Seemed to breathe!  And
+right in my way too!  I have had an
+extraordinary experience."
+
+He made a few steps and muttered through his set
+teeth--
+
+"I shall give him up."
+
+Then for some twenty yards or more all was
+blank.  He wrapped his cloak closer round him.
+He pulled his cap well forward over his eyes.
+
+"Betray.  A great word.  What is betrayal?  They
+talk of a man betraying his country, his
+friends, his sweetheart.  There must be a moral
+bond first.  All a man can betray is his
+conscience.  And how is my conscience engaged
+here;  by what bond of common faith, of common
+conviction, am I obliged to let that fanatical
+idiot drag me down with him?  On the contrary--
+every obligation of true courage is the other
+way."
+
+Razumov looked round from under his cap.
+
+"What can the prejudice of the world reproach me
+with?  Have I provoked his confidence?  No!
+Have I by a single word, look, or gesture given
+him reason to suppose that I accepted his trust
+in me?  No!  It is true that I consented to go
+and see his Ziemianitch.  Well, I have been to
+see him.  And I broke a stick on his back too--
+the brute."
+
+Something seemed to turn over in his head
+bringing uppermost a singularly hard, clear
+facet of his brain.
+
+"It would be better, however," he reflected with
+a quite different mental accent, "to keep that
+circumstance altogether to myself."
+
+He had passed beyond the turn leading to his
+lodgings, and had reached a wide and fashionable
+street.  Some shops were still open, and all the
+restaurants.  Lights fell on the pavement where
+men in expensive fur coats, with here and there
+the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an
+air of leisure.  Razumov looked at them with the
+contempt of an austere believer for the
+frivolous crowd.  It was the world--those
+officers, dignitaries, men of fashion,
+officials, members of the Yacht Club.  The event
+of the morning affected them all.  What would
+they say if they knew what this student in a
+cloak was going to do?
+
+"Not one of them is capable of feeling and
+thinking as deeply as I can.  How many of them
+could accomplish an act of conscience?"
+
+Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street.  He
+was firmly decided.  Indeed, it could hardly be
+called a decision.  He had simply discovered
+what he had meant to do all along.  And yet he
+felt the need of some other mind's sanction.
+
+With something resembling anguish he said to
+himself--
+
+"I want to be understood."  The universal
+aspiration with all its profound and melancholy
+meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst
+eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no
+heart to which he could open himself.
+
+The attorney was not to be thought of.  He
+despised the little agent of chicane too much.
+One could not go and lay one's conscience before
+the policeman at the corner.  Neither was
+Razumov anxious to go to the chief of his
+district's police--a common-looking person whom
+he used to see sometimes in the street in a
+shabby uniform and with a smouldering cigarette
+stuck to his lower lip.  "He would begin by
+locking me up most probably.  At any rate, he is
+certain to get excited and create an awful
+commotion," thought Razumov practically
+
+An act of conscience must be done with outward
+dignity.
+
+Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice,
+for moral support.  Who knows what true
+loneliness is--not the conventional word, but
+the naked terror?  To the lonely themselves it
+wears a mask.  The most miserable outcast hugs
+some memory or some illusion.  Now and then a
+fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil
+for an instant.  For an instant only.  No human
+being could bear a steady view of moral solitude
+without going mad.
+
+Razumov had reached that point of vision.  To
+escape from it he embraced for a whole minute
+the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings
+and flinging himself on his knees by the side of
+the bed with the dark figure stretched on it; to
+pour out a full confession in passionate words
+that would stir the whole being of that man to
+its innermost depths; that would end in embraces
+and tears; in an incredible fellowship of souls--
+such as the world had never seen.  It was
+sublime!
+
+Inwardly he wept and trembled already.  But to
+the casual eyes that were cast upon him he was
+aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in
+a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll.  He noted,
+too, the sidelong, brilliant glance of a pretty
+woman--with a delicate head, and covered in the
+hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet,
+like a frail and beautiful savage--which rested
+for a moment with a sort of mocking tenderness
+on the deep abstraction of that good-looking
+young man.
+
+Suddenly Razumov stood still.  The glimpse of a
+passing grey whisker, caught and lost in the
+same instant, had evoked the complete image of
+Prince K---, the man who once had pressed his
+hand as no other man had pressed it--a faint but
+lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a
+half-unwilling caress.
+
+And Razumov marvelled at himself.  Why did he
+not think of him before!
+
+"A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the
+very man--He!"
+
+A strange softening emotion came over Razumov--
+made his knees shake a little.  He repressed it
+with a new-born austerity.  All that sentiment
+was pernicious nonsense.  He couldn't be quick
+enough; and when he got into a sledge he shouted
+to the driver--
+
+"to the K--- Palace.  Get on--you! Fly!"  The
+startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites
+of his eyes, answered obsequiously--
+
+"I hear, your high Nobility."
+
+It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K--- was
+not a man of timid character.  On the day of Mr.
+de P---'s murder an extreme alarm and
+despondency prevailed in the high official
+spheres.
+
+Prince K---, sitting sadly alone in his study,
+was told by his alarmed servants that a
+mysterious young man had forced his way into the
+hall, refused to tell his name and the nature of
+his business, and would not move from there till
+he had seen his Excellency in private.  Instead
+of locking himself up and telephoning for the
+police, as nine out of ten high personages would
+have done that evening, the Prince gave way to
+curiosity and came quietly to the door of his
+study.
+
+In the hall, the front door standing wide open,
+he recognised at once Razumov, pale as death,
+his eyes blazing, and surrounded by perplexed
+lackeys.
+
+The Prince was vexed beyond measure, and even
+indignant.  But his humane instincts and a
+subtle sense of self-respect could not allow him
+to let this young man be thrown out into the
+street by base menials.  He retreated unseen
+into his room, and after a little rang his bell.
+ Razumov heard in the hall an ominously raised
+harsh voice saying somewhere far away--
+
+"Show the gentleman in here."
+
+Razumov walked in without a tremor.  He felt
+himself invulnerable--raised far above the
+shallowness of common judgment.  Though he saw
+the Prince looking at him with black
+displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of which
+he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary
+assurance.  He was not asked to sit down.
+
+Half an hour later they appeared in the hall
+together.  The lackeys stood up, and the Prince,
+moving with difficulty on his gouty feet, was
+helped into his furs.  The carriage had been
+ordered before.  When the great double door was
+flung open with a crash, Razumov, who had been
+standing silent with a lost gaze but with every
+faculty intensely on the alert, heard the
+Prince's voice--
+
+"Your arm, young man."
+
+The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards
+officer, man of showy missions, experienced in
+nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue and
+worldly success, had been equally impressed by
+the more obvious difficulties of such a
+situation and by Razumov's quiet dignity in
+stating them.
+
+He had said, "No.  Upon the whole I can't
+condemn the step you ventured to take by coming
+to me with your story.  It is not an affair for
+police understrappers.  The greatest importance
+is attached to. . . .  Set your mind at rest.  I
+shall see you through this most extraordinary
+and difficult situation."
+
+Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and
+Razumov, making a short bow, had said with
+deference--
+
+"I have trusted my instinct.  A young man having
+no claim upon anybody in the world has in an
+hour of trial involving his deepest political
+convictions turned to an illustrious Russian--
+that's all."
+
+The Prince had exclaimed hastily--
+
+"You have done well."
+
+In the carriage--it was a small brougham on
+sleigh runners--Razumov broke the silence in a
+voice that trembled slightly.
+
+"My gratitude surpasses the greatness of my
+presumption."
+
+He gasped, feeling unexpectedly in the dark a
+momentary pressure on his arm.
+
+"You have done well," repeated the Prince.
+
+When the carriage stopped the Prince murmured to
+Razumov, who had never ventured a single
+question--
+
+"The house of General T---."
+
+In the middle of the snow-covered roadway blazed
+a great bonfire.  Some Cossacks, the bridles of
+their horses over the arm, were warming
+themselves around.  Two sentries stood at the
+door, several gendarmes lounged under the great
+carriage gateway, and on the first-floor landing
+two orderlies rose and stood at attention.
+Razumov walked at the Prince's elbow.
+
+A surprising quantity of hot-house plants in
+pots cumbered the floor of the ante-room.
+Servants came forward.  A young man in civilian
+clothes arrived hurriedly, was whispered to,
+bowed low, and exclaiming zealously, "Certainly--
+this minute," fled within somewhere.  The Prince
+signed to Razumov.
+
+They passed through a suite of reception-rooms
+all barely lit and one of them prepared for
+dancing.  The wife of the General had put off
+her party.  An atmosphere of consternation
+pervaded the place.  But the General's own room,
+with heavy sombre hangings, two massive desks,
+and deep armchairs, had all the lights turned
+on.  The footman shut the door behind them and
+they waited.
+
+There was a coal fire in an English grate;
+Razumov had never before seen such a fire; and
+the silence of the room was like the silence of
+the grave; perfect, measureless, for even the
+clock on the mantelpiece made no sound.  Filling
+a corner, on a black pedestal, stood a quarter-
+life-size smooth-limbed bronze of an adolescent
+figure, running.  The Prince observed in an
+undertone-
+
+"Spontini's.  'Flight of Youth.'  Exquisite."
+
+"Admirable," assented Razumov faintly.
+
+They said nothing more after this, the Prince
+silent with his grand air, Razumov staring at
+the statue.  He was worried by a sensation
+resembling the gnawing of hunger.
+
+He did not turn when he heard an inner door fly
+open, and a quick footstep, muffled on the
+carpet.
+
+The Prince's voice immediately exclaimed, thick
+with excitement--
+
+"We have got him--_ce miserable_.  A worthy
+young man came to me--  No!  It's incredible. .
+. ."
+
+Razumov held his breath before the bronze as if
+expecting a crash.  Behind his back a voice he
+had never heard before insisted politely--
+
+"_Asseyez-vous donc_."
+
+The Prince almost shrieked, "_Mais comprenez-
+vous, mon cher!  L'assassin_! the murderer--we
+have got him. . . ."
+
+Razumov spun round.  The General's smooth big
+cheeks rested on the stiff collar of his
+uniform.  He must have been already looking at
+Razumov, because that last saw the pale blue
+eyes fastened on him coldly.
+
+The Prince from a chair waved an impressive hand.
+
+"This is a most honourable young man whom
+Providence itself. . . Mr. Razumov."
+
+The General acknowledged the introduction by
+frowning at Razumov, who did not make the
+slightest movement.
+
+Sitting down before his desk the General
+listened with compressed lips.  It was
+impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his
+face.
+
+Razumov watched the immobility of the fleshy
+profile.  But it lasted only a moment, till the
+Prince had finished; and when the General turned
+to the providential young man, his florid
+complexion, the blue, unbelieving eyes and the
+bright white flash of an automatic smile had an
+air of jovial, careless cruelty.  He expressed
+no wonder at the extraordinary story--no
+pleasure or excitement--no incredulity either.
+He betrayed no sentiment whatever.  Only with a
+politeness almost deferential suggested that
+"the bird might have flown while Mr.--Mr.
+Razumov was running about the streets."
+
+Razumov advanced to the middle of the room and
+said, "The door is locked and I have the key in
+my pocket."
+
+His loathing for the man was intense.  It had
+come upon him so unawares that he felt he had
+not kept it out of his voice.  The General
+looked up at him thoughtfully, and Razumov
+grinned.
+
+All this went over the head of Prince K---
+seated in a deep armchair, very tired and
+impatient.
+
+"A student called Haldin," said the General
+thoughtfully.
+
+Razumov ceased to grin.
+
+"That is his name," he said unnecessarily loud.
+" Victor Victorovitch Haldin--a student."
+
+The General shifted his position a little.
+
+"How is he dressed?  Would you have the goodness
+to tell me?"
+
+Razumov angrily described Haldin's clothing in a
+few jerky words.  The General stared all the
+time, then addressing the Prince--
+
+"We were not without some indications," he said
+in French.  "A good woman who was in the street
+described to us somebody wearing a dress of the
+sort as the thrower of the second bomb.  We have
+detained her at the Secretariat, and every one
+in a Tcherkess coat we could lay our hands on
+has been brought to her to look at.  She kept on
+crossing herself and shaking her head at them.
+It was exasperating. . . .  "He turned to
+Razumov, and in Russian, with friendly reproach--
+
+"Take a chair, Mr. Razumov--do.  Why are you
+standing? "
+
+Razumov sat down carelessly and looked at the
+General.
+
+"This goggle-eyed imbecile understands nothing,"
+he thought.
+
+The Prince began to speak loftily.
+
+"Mr. Razumov is a young man of conspicuous
+abilities.  I have it at heart that his future
+should not. . . ."
+
+"Certainly," interrupted the General, with a
+movement of the hand.  "Has he any weapons on
+him, do you think, Mr. Razumov? "
+
+The General employed a gentle musical voice.
+Razumov answered with suppressed irritation--
+
+"No.  But my razors are lying about--you
+understand."
+
+The General lowered his head approvingly.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+Then to the Prince, explaining courteously--
+
+"We want that bird alive.  It will be the devil
+if we can't make him sing a little before we are
+done with him."
+
+The grave-like silence of the room with its mute
+clock fell upon the polite modulations of this
+terrible phrase.  The Prince, hidden in the
+chair, made no sound.
+
+The General unexpectedly developed a thought.
+
+"Fidelity to menaced institutions on which
+depend the safety of a throne and of a people is
+no child's play.  We know that, _mon Prince,_
+and--_tenez_--"he went on with a sort of
+flattering harshness, "Mr. Razumov here begins
+to understand that too."
+
+His eyes which he turned upon Razumov seemed to
+be starting out of his head.  This grotesqueness
+of aspect no longer shocked Razumov.  He said
+with gloomy conviction--
+
+"Haldin will never speak."
+
+"That remains to be seen," muttered the General.
+
+"I am certain," insisted Razumov.  "A man like
+this never speaks. . . .  Do you imagine that I
+am here from fear?" he added violently.  He felt
+ready to stand by his opinion of Haldin to the
+last extremity.
+
+"Certainly not," protested the General, with
+great simplicity of tone.  "And I don't mind
+telling you, Mr. Razumov, that if he had not
+come with his tale to such a staunch and loyal
+Russian as you, he would have disappeared like a
+stone in the water . . . which would have had a
+detestable effect," he added, with a bright,
+cruel smile under his stony stare.  "So you see,
+there can be no suspicion of any fear here."
+
+The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round
+the back of the armchair.
+
+"Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your
+action.  Be at ease in that respect, pray."
+
+He turned to the General uneasily.
+
+"That's why I am here.  You may be surprised why
+I should . . . ."
+
+The General hastened to interrupt.
+
+"Not at all.  Extremely natural.  You saw the
+importance. . . ."
+
+"Yes," broke in the Prince.  "And I venture to
+ask insistently that mine and Mr. Razumov's
+intervention should not become public.  He is a
+young man of promise--of remarkable aptitudes."
+
+"I haven't a doubt of it," murmured the General.
+ "He inspires confidence."
+
+"All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread
+nowadays--they taint such unexpected quarters--
+that, monstrous as it seems, he might suffer. .
+. his studies. . . his. . ."
+
+The General, with his elbows on the desk, took
+his head between his hands.
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  I am thinking it out. . . .  How
+long is it since you left him at your rooms, Mr.
+Razumov?"
+
+Razumov mentioned the hour which nearly
+corresponded with the time of his distracted
+flight from the big slum house.  He had made up
+his mind to keep Ziemianitch out of the affair
+completely.  To mention him at all would mean
+imprisonment for the "bright soul," perhaps
+cruel floggings, and in the end a journey to
+Siberia in chains.  Razumov, who had beaten
+Ziemianitch, felt for him now a vague,
+remorseful tenderness.
+
+The General, giving way for the first time to
+his secret sentiments, exclaimed contemptuously--
+
+"And you say he came in to make you this
+confidence like this--for nothing--_a propos des
+bottes_."
+
+Razumov felt danger in the air.  The merciless
+suspicion of despotism had spoken openly at
+last.  Sudden fear sealed Razumov's lips.  The
+silence of the room resembled now the silence of
+a deep dungeon, where time does not count, and a
+suspect person is sometimes forgotten for ever.
+But the Prince came to the rescue.
+
+"Providence itself has led the wretch in a
+moment of mental aberration to seek Mr. Razumov
+on the strength of some old, utterly
+misinterpreted exchange of ideas--some sort of
+idle speculative conversation--months ago--I am
+told--and completely forgotten till now by Mr.
+Razumov."
+
+"Mr. Razumov," queried the General meditatively,
+after a short silence, "do you often indulge in
+speculative conversation?"
+
+"No, Excellency," answered Razumov, coolly, in a
+sudden access of self-confidence.  "I am a man
+of deep convictions.  Crude opinions are in the
+air.  They are not always worth combating.  But
+even the silent contempt of a serious mind may
+be misinterpreted by headlong utopists."
+
+The General stared from between his hands.
+Prince K--- murmured--
+
+"A serious young man.  _Un esprit superieur_."
+
+"I see that, _mon cher Prince_,"  said the
+General.  "Mr. Razumov is quite safe with me.  I
+am interested in him.  He has, it seems, the
+great and useful quality of inspiring
+confidence.  What I was wondering at is why the
+other should mention anything at all--I mean
+even the bare fact alone--if his object was only
+to obtain temporary shelter for a few hours.
+For, after all, nothing was easier than to say
+nothing about it unless, indeed, he were trying,
+under a crazy misapprehension of your true
+sentiments, to enlist your assistance--eh, Mr.
+Razumov?"
+
+It seemed to Razumov that the floor was moving
+slightly.  This grotesque man in a tight uniform
+was terrible.  It was right that he should be
+terrible.
+
+"I can see what your Excellency has in your
+mind.  But I can only answer that I don't know
+why."
+
+"I have nothing in my mind," murmured the
+General, with gentle surprise.
+
+"I am his prey--his helpless prey," thought
+Razumov.  The fatigues and the disgusts of that
+afternoon, the need to forget, the fear which he
+could not keep off, reawakened his hate for
+Haldin.
+
+"Then I can't help your Excellency.  I don't
+know what he meant.  I only know there was a
+moment when I wished to kill him.  There was
+also a moment when I wished myself dead.  I said
+nothing.  I was overcome.  I provoked no
+confidence--I asked for no explanations--"
+
+Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was
+lucid.  It was really a calculated outburst.
+
+"It is rather a pity," the General said, "that
+you did not.  Don't you know at all what he
+means to do?" Razumov calmed down and saw an
+opening there.
+
+"He told me he was in hopes that a sledge would
+meet him about half an hour after midnight at
+the seventh lamp-post on the left from the upper
+end of Karabelnaya.  At any rate, he meant to be
+there at that time.  He did not even ask me for
+a change of clothes."
+
+"_Ah voila_!" said the General, turning to
+Prince K with an air of satisfaction.  "There is
+a way to keep your _protege_, Mr. Razumov, quite
+clear of any connexion with the actual arrest.
+We shall be ready for that gentleman in
+Karabelnaya."
+
+The Prince expressed his gratitude.  There was
+real emotion in his voice.  Razumov, motionless,
+silent, sat staring at the carpet.  The General
+turned to him.
+
+"Half an hour after midnight.  Till then we have
+to depend on you, Mr. Razumov.  You don't think
+he is likely to change his purpose?"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Razumov.  "Those men are
+not of the sort that ever changes its purpose."
+
+" What men do you mean?"
+
+"Fanatical lovers of liberty in general.
+Liberty with a capital L, Excellency.  Liberty
+that means nothing precise.  Liberty in whose
+name crimes are committed."
+
+The General murmured--
+
+"I detest rebels of every kind.  I can't help
+it.  It's my nature!"
+
+He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back
+his arm.  "They shall be destroyed, then."
+
+"They have made a sacrifice of their lives
+beforehand," said Razumov with malicious
+pleasure and looking the General straight in the
+face.  "If Haldin does change his purpose to-
+night, you may depend on it that it will not be
+to save his life by flight in some other way.
+He would have thought then of something else to
+attempt. But that is not likely."
+
+The General repeated as if to himself, "They
+shall be destroyed."
+
+Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
+
+The Prince exclaimed--
+
+"What a terrible necessity!"
+
+The General's arm was lowered slowly.
+
+"One comfort there is.  That brood leaves no
+posterity.  I've always said it, one effort,
+pitiless, persistent, steady--and we are done
+with them for ever."
+
+Razumov thought to himself that this man
+entrusted with so much arbitrary power must have
+believed what he said or else he could not have
+gone on bearing the responsibility.
+
+"I detest rebels.  These subversive minds!
+These intellectual _debauches_!  My existence
+has been built on fidelity.  It's a feeling.  To
+defend it I am ready to lay down my life--and
+even my honour--if that were needed.  But pray
+tell me what honour can there be as against
+rebels--against people that deny God Himself--
+perfect unbelievers!  Brutes.  It is horrible to
+think of."
+
+During this tirade Razumov, facing the General,
+had nodded slightly twice.  Prince K---,
+standing on one side with his grand air,
+murmured, casting up his eyes--
+
+"_Helas!_"
+
+Then lowering his glance and with great decision
+declared--
+
+"This young man, General, is perfectly fit to
+apprehend the bearing of your memorable words."
+
+The General's whole expression changed from dull
+resentment to perfect urbanity.
+
+"I would ask now, Mr. Razumov," he said, "to
+return to his home.  Note that I don't ask Mr.
+Razumov whether he has justified his absence to
+his guest.  No doubt he did this sufficiently.
+But I don't ask.  Mr. Razumov inspires
+confidence.  It is a great gift.  I only suggest
+that a more prolonged absence might awaken the
+criminal's suspicions and induce him perhaps to
+change his plans."
+
+He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted
+his visitors to the ante-room encumbered with
+flower-pots.
+
+Razumov parted with the Prince at the corner of
+a street.  In the carriage he had listened to
+speeches where natural sentiment struggled with
+caution.  Evidently the Prince was afraid of
+encouraging any hopes of future intercourse.
+But there was a touch of tenderness in the voice
+uttering in the dark the guarded general phrases
+of goodwill.  And the Prince too said--
+
+"I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov."
+
+"They all, it seems, have confidence in me,"
+thought Razumov dully.  He had an indulgent
+contempt for the man sitting shoulder to
+shoulder with him in the confined space.
+Probably he was afraid of scenes with his wife.
+She was said to be proud and violent.
+
+It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should
+play such a large part in the comfort and safety
+of lives.  But he wanted to put the Prince's
+mind at ease; and with a proper amount of
+emphasis he said that, being conscious of some
+small abilities and confident in his power of
+work, he trusted his future to his own
+exertions.  He expressed his gratitude for the
+helping hand.  Such dangerous situations did not
+occur twice in the course of one life--he added.
+
+"And you have met this one with a firmness of
+mind and correctness of feeling which give me a
+high idea of your worth," the Prince said
+solemnly.  "You have now only to persevere--to
+persevere."
+
+On getting out on the pavement Razumov saw an
+ungloved hand extended to him through the
+lowered window of the brougham.  It detained his
+own in its grasp for a moment, while the light
+of a street lamp fell upon the Prince's long
+face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
+
+"I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to
+the consequences. . . "
+
+"After what your Excellency has condescended to
+do for me, I can only rely on my conscience."
+
+"_Adieu_," said the whiskered head with feeling.
+
+Razumov bowed.  The brougham glided away with a
+slight swish in the snow--he was alone on the
+edge of the pavement.
+
+He said to himself that there was nothing to
+think about, and began walking towards his home.
+
+He walked quietly.  It was a common experience
+to walk thus home to bed after an evening spent
+somewhere with his fellows or in the cheaper
+seats of a theatre.  After he had gone a little
+way the familiarity of things got hold of him.
+Nothing was changed.  There was the familiar
+corner; and when he turned it he saw the
+familiar dim light of the provision shop kept by
+a German woman.  There were loaves of stale
+bread, bunches of onions and strings of sausages
+behind the small window-panes.  They were
+closing it.  The sickly lame fellow whom he knew
+so well by sight staggered out into the snow
+embracing a large shutter.
+
+Nothing would change.  There was the familiar
+gateway yawning black with feeble glimmers
+marking the arches of the different staircases.
+
+The sense of life's continuity depended on
+trifling bodily impressions.  The trivialities
+of daily existence were an armour for the soul.
+And this thought reinforced the inward quietness
+of Razumov as he began to climb the stairs
+familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand
+on the familiar clammy banister.  The
+exceptional could not prevail against the
+material contacts which make one day resemble
+another.  To-morrow would be like yesterday.
+
+It was only on the stage that the unusual was
+outwardly acknowledged.
+
+"I suppose," thought Razumov, "that if I had
+made up my mind to blow out my brains on the
+landing I would be going up these stairs as
+quietly as I am doing it now.  What's a man to
+do?  What must be must be.  Extraordinary things
+do happen.  But when they have happened they are
+done with.  Thus, too, when the mind is made up.
+ That question is done with.  And the daily
+concerns, the familiarities of our thought
+swallow it up--and the life goes on as before
+with its mysterious and secret sides quite out
+of sight, as they should be.  Life is a public
+thing."
+
+Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out;
+entered very quietly and bolted the door behind
+him carefully.
+
+He thought, "He hears me," and after bolting the
+door he stood still holding his breath.  There
+was not a sound.  He crossed the bare outer
+room, stepping deliberately in the darkness.
+Entering the other, he felt all over his table
+for the matchbox.  The silence, but for the
+groping of his hand, was profound.  Could the
+fellow be sleeping so soundly?
+
+He struck a light and looked at the bed.  Haldin
+was lying on his back as before, only both his
+hands were under his head.  His eyes were open.
+He stared at the ceiling.
+
+Razumov held the match up.  He saw the clear-cut
+features, the firm chin, the white forehead and
+the topknot of fair hair against the white
+pillow.  There he was, lying flat on his back.
+Razumov thought suddenly, "I have walked over
+his chest."
+
+He continued to stare till the match burnt
+itself out; then struck another and lit the lamp
+in silence without looking towards the bed any
+more.  He had turned his back on it and was
+hanging his coat on a peg when he heard Haldin
+sigh profoundly, then ask in a tired voice--
+
+"Well!  And what have you arranged?"
+
+The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad
+to put his hands against the wall.  A diabolical
+impulse to say, "I have given you up to the
+police," frightened him exceedingly.  But he did
+not say that.  He said, without turning round,
+in a muffled voice--
+
+"It's done."
+
+Again he heard Haldin sigh.  He walked to the
+table, sat down with the lamp before him, and
+only then looked towards the bed.
+
+In the distant corner of the large room far away
+from the lamp, which was small and provided with
+a very thick china shade, Haldin appeared like a
+dark and elongated shape--rigid with the
+immobility of death.  This body seemed to have
+less substance than its own phantom walked over
+by Razumov in the street white with snow.  It
+was more alarming in its shadowy, persistent
+reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion.
+
+Haldin was heard again.
+
+"You must have had a walk--such a walk. . ." he
+murmured deprecatingly.''  This weather. . . ."
+
+Razumov answered with energy--
+
+" Horrible walk. . . .  A nightmare of a walk."
+
+He shuddered audibly.  Haldin sighed once more,
+then--
+
+"And so you have seen Ziemianitch--brother?"
+
+"I've seen him."
+
+Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with
+the Prince, thought it prudent to add, "I had to
+wait some time."
+
+"A character--eh?  It's extraordinary what a
+sense of the necessity of freedom there is in
+that man.  And he has sayings too--simple, to
+the point, such as only the people can invent in
+their rough sagacity.  A character that. . . ."
+
+"I, you understand, haven't had much
+opportunity. . . ."  Razumov muttered through
+his teeth.
+
+Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
+
+"You see, brother, I have been a good deal in
+that house of late.  I used to take there books--
+leaflets.  Not a few of the poor people who live
+there can read.  And, you see, the guests for
+the feast of freedom must be sought for in
+byways and hedges.  The truth is, I have almost
+lived in that house of late.  I slept sometimes
+in the stable.  There is a stable. . . ."
+
+"That's where I had my interview with
+Ziemianitch," interrupted Razumov gently.  A
+mocking spirit entered into him and he added,
+"It was satisfactory in a sense.  I came away
+from it much relieved."
+
+"Ah! he's a fellow," went on Haldin, talking
+slowly at the ceiling.  "I came to know him in
+that way, you see.  For some weeks now, ever
+since I resigned myself to do what had to be
+done, I tried to isolate myself.  I gave up my
+rooms.  What was the good of exposing a decent
+widow woman to the risk of being worried out of
+her mind by the police?  I gave up seeing any of
+our comrades. . . ."
+
+Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper
+and began to trace lines on it with a pencil.
+
+"Upon my word," he thought angrily, "he seems to
+have thought of everybody's safety but mine."
+
+Haldin was talking on.
+
+"This morning--ah! this morning--that was
+different.  How can I explain to you?  Before
+the deed was done I wandered at night and lay
+hid in the day, thinking it out, and I felt
+restful.  Sleepless but restful.  What was there
+for me to torment myself about?  But this
+morning--after!  Then it was that I became
+restless.  I could not have stopped in that big
+house full of misery.  The miserable of this
+world can't give you peace.  Then when that
+silly caretaker began to shout, I said to
+myself, 'There is a young man in this town head
+and shoulders above common prejudices.'"
+
+"Is he laughing at me?" .Razumov asked himself,
+going on with his aimless drawing of triangles
+and squares.  And suddenly he thought: "My
+behaviour must appear to him strange.  Should he
+take fright at my manner and rush off somewhere
+I shall be undone completely.  That infernal
+General. . . ."
+
+He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly
+towards the bed with the shadowy figure extended
+full length on it--so much more indistinct than
+the one over whose breast he had walked without
+faltering.  Was this, too, a phantom?
+
+The silence had lasted a long time.  "He is no
+longer here," was the thought against which
+Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened
+at its absurdity.  "He is already gone and this.
+. .only. . . ."
+
+He could resist no longer.  He sprang to his
+feet, saying aloud, "I am intolerably anxious,"
+and in a few headlong strides stood by the side
+of the bed.  His hand fell lightly on Haldin's
+shoulder, and directly he felt its reality he
+was beset by an insane temptation to grip that
+exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of
+that body, lest it should escape his custody,
+leaving only a phantom behind.
+
+Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed
+eyes moving a little gazed upwards at Razumov
+with wistful gratitude for this manifestation of
+feeling.
+
+Razumov turned away and strode up and down the
+room.  "It would have been possibly a kindness,"
+he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the
+nature of that apology for a murderous intention
+his mind had found somewhere within him.  And
+all the same he could not give it up.  He became
+lucid about it.  "What can he expect?" he
+thought.  "The halter--in the end.  And I. . . ."
+
+This argument was interrupted by Haldin's voice.
+
+"Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body,
+but they cannot exile my soul from this world.
+I tell you what--I believe in this world so much
+that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than
+as a very long life.  That is perhaps the reason
+I am so ready to die."
+
+"H'm," muttered Razumov, and biting his lower
+lip he continued to walk up and down and to
+carry on his strange argument.
+
+Yes, to a man in such a situation--of course it
+would be an act of kindness.  The question,
+however, was not how to be kind, but how to be
+firm.  He was a slippery customer
+
+"I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this
+world of ours," he said with force.  "I too,
+while I live. . . .  But you seem determined to
+haunt it.  You can't seriously. . . mean"
+
+The voice of the motionless Haldin began--
+
+"Haunt it!  Truly, the oppressors of thought
+which quickens the world, the destroyers of
+souls which aspire to perfection of human
+dignity, they shall be haunted.  As to the
+destroyers of my mere body, I have forgiven them
+beforehand."
+
+Razumov had stopped apparently to listen, but at
+the same time he was observing his own
+sensations.  He was vexed with himself for
+attaching so much importance to what Haldin said.
+
+"The fellow's mad," he thought firmly, but this
+opinion did not mollify him towards Haldin.  It
+was a particularly impudent form of lunacy--and
+when it got loose in the sphere of public life
+of a country, it was obviously the duty of every
+good citizen. . . .
+
+This train of thought broke off short there and
+was succeeded by a paroxysm of silent hatred
+towards Haldin, so intense that Razumov hastened
+to speak at random.
+
+"Yes.  Eternity, of course.  I, too, can't very
+well represent it to myself. . . .  I imagine
+it, however, as something quiet and dull.  There
+would be nothing unexpected--don't you see?  The
+element of time would be wanting."
+
+He pulled out his watch and gazed at it.  Haldin
+turned over on his side and looked on intently.
+
+Razumov got frightened at this movement.  A
+slippery customer this fellow with a phantom.
+It was not midnight yet.  He hastened on--
+
+"And unfathomable mysteries!  Can you conceive
+secret places in Eternity?  Impossible.  Whereas
+life is full of them.  There are secrets of
+birth, for instance.  One carries them on to the
+grave.  There is something comical. . . but
+never mind.  And there are secret motives of
+conduct.  A man's most open actions have a
+secret side to them.  That is interesting and so
+unfathomable!  For instance, a man goes out of a
+room for a walk.  Nothing more trivial in
+appearance.  And yet it may be momentous.  He
+comes back--he has seen perhaps a drunken brute,
+taken particular notice of the snow on the
+ground--and behold he is no longer the same man.
+ The most unlikely things have a secret power
+over one's thoughts--the grey whiskers of a
+particular person--the goggle eyes of another."
+
+Razumov's forehead was moist.  He took a turn or
+two in the room, his head low and smiling to
+himself viciously.
+
+"Have you ever reflected on the power of goggle
+eyes and grey whiskers?  Excuse me.  You seem to
+think I must be crazy to talk in this vein at
+such a time.  But I am not talking lightly.  I
+have seen instances.  It has happened to me once
+to be talking to a man whose fate was affected
+by physical facts of that kind.  And the man did
+not know it.  Of course, it was a case of
+conscience, but the material facts such as these
+brought about the solution. . . .  And you tell
+me, Victor Victorovitch, not to be anxious!
+Why!  I am responsible for you," Razumov almost
+shrieked.
+
+He avoided with difficulty a burst of
+Mephistophelian laughter.  Haldin, very pale,
+raised himself on his elbow.
+
+"And the surprises of life," went on Razumov,
+after glancing at the other uneasily.  "Just
+consider their astonishing nature.  A mysterious
+impulse induces you to come here.  I don't say
+you have done wrong.  Indeed, from a certain
+point of view you could not have done better.
+You might have gone to a man with affections and
+family ties.  You have such ties yourself.  As
+to me, you know I have been brought up in an
+educational institute where they did not give us
+enough to eat.  To talk of affection in such a
+connexion--you perceive yourself. . . .  As to
+ties, the only ties I have in the world are
+social.  I must get acknowledged in some way
+before I can act at all.  I sit here working. .
+. .  And don't you think I am working for
+progress too?  I've got to find my own ideas of
+the true way. . . .  Pardon me," continued
+Razumov, after drawing breath and with a short,
+throaty laugh, "but I haven't inherited a
+revolutionary inspiration together with a
+resemblance from an uncle."
+
+He looked again at his watch and noticed with
+sickening disgust that there were yet a good
+many minutes to midnight.  He tore watch and
+chain off his waistcoat and laid them on the
+table well in the circle of bright lamplight.
+Haldin, reclining on his elbow, did not stir.
+Razumov was made uneasy by this attitude.  "What
+move is he meditating over so quietly?"  he
+thought.  "He must be prevented.  I must keep on
+talking to him."
+
+He raised his voice.
+
+"You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin--I
+don't know what--to no end of people.  I am just
+a man.  Here I stand before you.  A man with a
+mind.  Did it ever occur to you how a man who
+had never heard a word of warm affection or
+praise in his life would think on matters on
+which you would think first with or against your
+class, your domestic tradition--your fireside
+prejudices?. . .  Did you ever consider how a
+man like that would feel?  I have no domestic
+tradition.  I have nothing to think against.  My
+tradition is historical.  What have I to look
+back to but that national past from which you
+gentlemen want to wrench away your future?  Am I
+to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a
+better lot, be robbed of the only thing it has
+to go upon at the will of violent enthusiasts?
+You come from your province, but all this land
+is mine--or I have nothing.  No doubt you shall
+be looked upon as a martyr some day--a sort of
+hero--a political saint.  But I beg to be
+excused.  I am content in fitting myself to be a
+worker.  And what can you people do by
+scattering a few drops of blood on the snow?  On
+this Immensity.  On this unhappy Immensity!  I
+tell you," he cried, in a vibrating, subdued
+voice, and advancing one step nearer the bed,
+"that what it needs is not a lot of haunting
+phantoms that I could walk through--but a man!"
+
+Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him
+off in horror.
+
+"I understand it all now," he exclaimed, with
+awestruck dismay.  "I understand--at last."
+
+Razumov staggered back against the table.  His
+forehead broke out in perspiration while a cold
+shudder ran down his spine.
+
+"What have I been saying?" he asked himself.
+"Have I let him slip through my fingers after
+all?"
+
+"He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and
+instead of a reassuring smile only achieved an
+uncertain grimace.
+
+" What will you have?" he began in a
+conciliating voice which got steady after the
+first trembling word or two.  "What will you
+have?  Consider--a man of studious, retired
+habits--and suddenly like this. . . .  I am not
+practised in talking delicately.  But. . . ."
+
+He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him
+again.
+
+"What were we to do together till midnight?  Sit
+here opposite each other and think of your--your-
+shambles? "
+
+Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude.  He
+bowed his head; his hands hung between his
+knees.  His voice was low and pained but calm.
+
+"I see now how it is, Razumov--brother.  You are
+a magnanimous soul, but my action is abhorrent
+to you--alas. . . ."
+
+Razumov stared.  From fright he had set his
+teeth so hard that his whole face ached.  It was
+impossible for him to make a sound.
+
+"And even my person, too, is loathsome to you
+perhaps," Haldin added mournfully, after a short
+pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing his
+gaze on the floor.  "For indeed, unless one. . .
+."
+
+He broke off evidently waiting for a word.
+Razumov remained silent.  Haldin nodded his head
+dejectedly twice.
+
+"Of course.  Of course," he murmured. . . .
+"Ah! weary work!"
+
+He remained perfectly still for a moment, then
+made Razumov's leaden heart strike a ponderous
+blow by springing up briskly.
+
+"So be it," he cried sadly in a low, distinct
+tone.  "Farewell then."
+
+Razumov started forward, but the sight of
+Haldin's raised hand checked him before he could
+get away from the table.  He leaned on it
+heavily, listening to the faint sounds of some
+town clock tolling the hour.  Haldin, already at
+the door, tall and straight as an arrow, with
+his pale face and a hand raised attentively,
+might have posed for the statue of a daring
+youth listening to an inner voice.  Razumov
+mechanically glanced down at his watch.  When he
+looked towards the door again Haldin had
+vanished.  There was a faint rustling in the
+outer room, the feeble click of a bolt drawn
+back lightly.  He was gone--almost as noiseless
+as a vision.
+
+Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted,
+voiceless lips.  The outer door stood open.
+Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far
+over the banister.  Gazing down into the deep
+black shaft with a tiny glimmering flame at the
+bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral
+descent of somebody running down the stairs on
+tiptoe.  It was a light, swift, pattering sound,
+which sank away from him into the depths: a
+fleeting shadow passed over the glimmer--a wink
+of the tiny flame.  Then stillness.
+
+Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air
+tainted by the evil smells of the unclean
+staircase.  All quiet.
+
+He went back into his room slowly, shutting the
+doors after him.  The peaceful steady light of
+his reading-lamp shone on the watch.  Razumov
+stood looking down at the little white dial.  It
+wanted yet three minutes to midnight.  He took
+the watch into his hand fumblingly.
+
+"Slow," he muttered, and a strange fit of
+nervelessness came over him.  His knees shook,
+the watch and chain slipped through his fingers
+in an instant and fell on the floor.  He was so
+startled that he nearly fell himself.  When at
+last he regained enough confidence in his limbs
+to stoop for it he held it to his ear at once.
+After a while he growled--
+
+"Stopped," and paused for quite a long time
+before he muttered sourly--
+
+"It's done. . . .  And now to work."
+
+He sat down, reached haphazard for a book,
+opened it in middle and began to read; but after
+going conscientiously over two lines he lost his
+hold on the print completely and did not try to
+regain it.  He thought--
+
+"There was to a certainty a police agent of some
+sort watching the house across the street."
+
+He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway,
+goggle-eyed, muffled up in a cloak to the nose
+and with a General's plumed, cocked hat on his
+head.  This absurdity made him start in the
+chair convulsively.  He literally had to shake
+his head violently to get rid of it.  The man
+would be disguised perhaps as a peasant. . . a
+beggar. . . .  Perhaps he would be just buttoned
+up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded
+stick--a shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw
+onions and spirits.
+
+This evocation brought on positive nausea.  "Why
+do I want to bother about this?"  thought
+Razumov with disgust.  "Am I a gendarme?
+Moreover, it is done."
+
+He got up in great agitation.  It was not done.
+Not yet.  Not till half-past twelve.  And the
+watch had stopped.  This reduced him to despair.
+ Impossible to know the time!  The landlady and
+all the people across the landing were asleep.
+How could he go and. . . .  God knows what they
+would imagine, or how much they would guess.  He
+dared not go into the streets to find out.  "I
+am a suspect now.  There's no use shirking that
+fact," he said to himself bitterly.  If Haldin
+from some cause or another gave them the slip
+and failed to turn up in the Karabelnaya the
+police would be invading his lodging.  And if he
+were not in he could never clear himself.
+Never.  Razumov looked wildly about as if for
+some means of seizing upon time which seemed to
+have escaped him altogether.  He had never, as
+far as he could remember, heard the striking of
+that town clock in his rooms before this night.
+And he was not even sure now whether he had
+heard it really on this night.
+
+He went to the window and stood there with
+slightly bent head on the watch for the faint
+sound.  'I will stay here till I hear
+something," he said to himself.  He stood still,
+his ear turned to the panes.  An atrocious
+aching numbness with shooting pains in his back
+and legs tortured him.  He did not budge.  His
+mind hovered on the borders of delirium.  He
+heard himself suddenly saying, "I confess," as a
+person might do on the rack.  "I am on the
+rack," he thought.  He felt ready to swoon.  The
+faint deep boom of the distant clock seemed to
+explode in his head--he heard it so clearly. . .
+.  One!
+
+If Haldin had not turned up the police would
+have been already here ransacking the house.  No
+sound reached him.  This time it was done.
+
+He dragged himself painfully to the table and
+dropped into the chair.  He flung the book away
+and took a square sheet of paper.  It was like
+the pile of sheets covered with his neat minute
+handwriting, only blank.  He took a pen
+brusquely and dipped it with a vague notion of
+going on with the writing of his essay--but his
+pen remained poised over the sheet.  It hung
+there for some time before it came down and
+formed long scrawly letters.
+
+Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began
+to write.  When he wrote a large hand his neat
+writing lost its character altogether--became
+unsteady, almost childish.  He wrote five lines
+one under the other.
+History not Theory.
+Patriotism not Internationalism.
+Evolution not Revolution.
+Direction not Destruction.
+Unity not Disruption.
+
+He gazed at them dully.  Then his eyes strayed
+to the bed and remained fixed there for a good
+many minutes, while his right hand groped all
+over the table for the penknife.
+
+He rose at last, and walking up with measured
+steps stabbed the paper with the penknife to the
+lath and plaster wall at the head of the bed.
+This done he stepped back a pace and flourished
+his hand with a glance round the room.
+
+After that he never looked again at the bed.  He
+took his big cloak down from its peg and,
+wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on
+the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of
+his room.  A leaden sleep closed his eyelids at
+once.  Several times that night he woke up
+shivering from a dream of walking through drifts
+of snow in a Russia where he was as completely
+alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an
+immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view
+could embrace in all its enormous expanse as if
+it were a map.  But after each shuddering start
+his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and
+he slept again.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov's story, my
+mind, the decent mind of an old teacher of
+languages, feels more and more the difficulty of
+the task.
+
+The task is not in truth the writing in the
+narrative form a _precis_ of a strange human
+document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
+clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a
+large portion of this earth's surface;
+conditions not easily to be understood, much
+less discovered in the limits of a story, till
+some key-word is found; a word that could stand
+at the back of all the words covering the pages;
+a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance
+hold truth enough to help the moral discovery
+which should be the object of every tale.
+
+I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of
+Mr. Razumov's record, I lay it aside, I take up
+the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
+of setting down black on white I hesitate.  For
+the word that persists in creeping under its
+point is no other word than "cynicism."
+
+For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of
+Russian revolt.  In its pride of numbers, in its
+strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the
+secret readiness to abase itself in suffering,
+the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism.
+It informs the declarations of her statesmen,
+the theories of her revolutionists, and the
+mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of
+making freedom look like a form of debauch, and
+the Christian virtues themselves appear actually
+indecent. . . .  But I must apologize for the
+digression.  It proceeds from the consideration
+of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov
+after his conservative convictions, diluted in a
+vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his
+age, had become crystallized by the shock of his
+contact with Haldin.
+
+Razumov woke up for the tenth time perhaps with
+a heavy shiver.  Seeing the light of day in his
+window, he resisted the inclination to lay
+himself down again.  He did not remember
+anything, but he did not think it strange to
+find himself on the sofa in his cloak and
+chilled to the bone.  The light coming through
+the window seemed strangely cheerless,
+containing no promise as the light of each new
+day should for a young man.  It was the
+awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man
+ninety years old.  He looked at the lamp which
+had burnt itself out.  It stood there, the
+extinguished beacon of his labours, a cold
+object of brass and porcelain, amongst the
+scattered pages of his notes and small piles of
+books--a mere litter of blackened paper--dead
+matter--without significance or interest.
+
+He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his
+cloak hung it on the peg, going through all the
+motions mechanically.  An incredible dullness, a
+ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his
+perceptions as though life had withdrawn itself
+from all things and even from his own thoughts.
+There was not a sound in the house.
+
+Turning away from the peg, he thought in that
+same lifeless manner that it must be very early
+yet; but when he looked at the watch on his
+table he saw both hands arrested at twelve
+o'clock.
+
+"Ah! yes," he mumbled to himself, and as if
+beginning to get roused a little he took a
+survey of his room.  The paper stabbed to the
+wall arrested his attention.  He eyed it from
+the distance without approval or perplexity; but
+when he heard the servant-girl beginning to
+bustle about in the outer room with the
+_samovar_ for his morning tea, he walked up to
+it and took it down with an air of profound
+indifference.
+
+While doing this he glanced down at the bed on
+which he had not slept that night.  The hollow
+in the pillow made by the weight of Haldin's
+head was very noticeable.
+
+Even his anger at this sign of the man's passage
+was dull.  He did not try to nurse it into life.
+ He did nothing all that day; he neglected even
+to brush his hair.  The idea of going out never
+occurred to him--and if he did not start a
+connected train of thought it was not because he
+was unable to think.  It was because he was not
+interested enough.
+
+He yawned frequently.  He drank large quantities
+of tea, he walked about aimlessly, and when he
+sat down he did not budge for a long time.  He
+spent some time drumming on the window with his
+finger-tips quietly.  In his listless wanderings
+round about the table he caught sight of his own
+face in the looking-glass and that arrested him.
+ The eyes which returned his stare were the most
+unhappy eyes he had ever seen.  And this was the
+first thing which disturbed the mental
+stagnation of that day.
+
+He was not affected personally.  He merely
+thought that life without happiness is
+impossible.  What was happiness?  He yawned and
+went on shuffling about and about between the
+walls of his room.  Looking forward was
+happiness--that's all--nothing more.  To look
+forward to the gratification of some desire, to
+the gratification of some passion, love,
+ambition, hate--hate too indubitably.  Love and
+hate.  And to escape the dangers of existence,
+to live without fear, was also happiness.  There
+was nothing else.  Absence of fear--looking
+forward.  "Oh! the miserable lot of humanity!"
+he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in his
+thought, "I ought to be happy enough as far as
+that goes."  But he was not excited by that
+assurance.  On the contrary, he yawned again as
+he had been yawning all day.  He was mildly
+surprised to discover himself being overtaken by
+night.  The room grew dark swiftly though time
+had seemed to stand still.  How was it that he
+had not noticed the passing of that day?  Of
+course, it was the watch being stopped. . . .
+
+He did not light his lamp, but went over to the
+bed and threw himself on it without any
+hesitation.  Lying on his back, he put his hands
+under his head and stared upward.  After a
+moment he thought, "I am lying here like that
+man.  I wonder if he slept while I was
+struggling with the blizzard in the streets.
+No, he did not sleep.  But why should I not
+sleep?" and he felt the silence of the night
+press upon all his limbs like a weight.
+
+In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear-
+cut strokes of the town clock counting off
+midnight penetrated the quietness of his
+suspended animation.
+
+Again he began to think.  It was twenty-four
+hours since that man left his room.  Razumov had
+a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress
+was sleeping that night.  It was a certitude
+which made him angry because he did not want to
+think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself
+by physiological and psychological reasons.  The
+fellow had hardly slept for weeks on his own
+confession, and now every incertitude was at an
+end for him.  No doubt he was looking forward to
+the consummation of his martyrdom.  A man who
+resigns himself to kill need not go very far for
+resignation to die.  Haldin slept perhaps more
+soundly than General T---, whose task--weary
+work too--was not done, and over whose head hung
+the sword of revolutionary vengeance.
+
+Razumov, remembering the thick-set man with his
+heavy jowl resting on the collar of his uniform,
+the champion of autocracy, who had let no sign
+of surprise, incredulity, or joy escape him, but
+whose goggle eyes could express a mortal hatred
+of all rebellion--Razumov moved uneasily on the
+bed.
+
+"He suspected me," he thought. "I suppose he
+must suspect everybody.  He would be capable of
+suspecting his own wife, if Haldin had gone to
+her boudoir with his confession."
+
+Razumov sat up in anguish.  Was he to remain a
+political suspect all his days?  Was he to go
+through life as a man not wholly to be trusted--
+with a bad secret police note tacked on to his
+record?  What sort of future could he look
+forward to?
+
+"I am now a suspect," he thought again; but the
+habit of reflection and that desire of safety,
+of an ordered life, which was so strong in him
+came to his assistance as the night wore on.
+His quiet, steady, and laborious existence would
+vouch at length for his loyalty.  There were
+many permitted ways to serve one's country.
+There was an activity that made for progress
+without being revolutionary.  The field of
+influence was great and infinitely varied--once
+one had conquered a name.
+
+His thought like a circling bird reverted after
+four-and-twenty hours to the silver medal, and
+as it were poised itself there.
+
+When the day broke he had not slept, not for a
+moment, but he got up not very tired and quite
+sufficiently self-possessed for all practical
+purposes.
+
+He went out and attended three lectures in the
+morning.  But the work in the library was a mere
+dumb show of research.  He sat with many volumes
+open before him trying to make notes and
+extracts.  His new tranquillity was like a
+flimsy garment, and seemed to float at the mercy
+of a casual word.  Betrayal!  Why!  the fellow
+had done all that was necessary to betray
+himself.  Precious little had been needed to
+deceive him.
+
+"I have said no word to him that was not
+strictly true.  Not one word," Razumov argued
+with himself.
+
+Once engaged on this line of thought there could
+be no question of doing useful work.  The same
+ideas went on passing through his mind, and he
+pronounced mentally the same words over and over
+again.  He shut up all the books and rammed all
+his papers into his pocket with convulsive
+movements, raging inwardly against Haldin.
+
+As he was leaving the library a long bony
+student in a threadbare overcoat joined him,
+stepping moodily by his side.  Razumov answered
+his mumbled greeting without looking at him at
+all.
+
+"What does he want with me?  "he thought with a
+strange dread of the unexpected which he tried
+to shake off lest it should fasten itself upon
+his life for good and all.  And the other,
+muttering cautiously with downcast eyes,
+supposed that his comrade had seen the news of
+de P---'s executioner--that was the expression
+he used--having been arrested the night before
+last. . . .
+
+"I've been ill--shut up in my rooms," Razumov
+mumbled through his teeth.
+
+The tall student, raising his shoulders, shoved
+his hands deep into his pockets.  He had a
+hairless, square, tallowy chin which trembled
+slightly as he spoke, and his nose nipped bright
+red by the sharp air looked like a false nose of
+painted cardboard between the sallow cheeks.
+His whole appearance was stamped with the mark
+of cold and hunger.  He stalked deliberately at
+Razumov's elbow with his eyes on the ground.
+
+"It's an official statement," he continued in
+the same cautious mutter."  It may be a lie.
+But there was somebody arrested between midnight
+and one in the morning on Tuesday.  This is
+certain."
+
+And talking rapidly under the cover of his
+downcast air, he told Razumov that this was
+known through an inferior Government clerk
+employed at the Central Secretariat.  That man
+belonged to one of the revolutionary circles.
+"The same, in fact, I am affiliated to,"
+remarked the student.
+
+They were crossing a wide quadrangle.  An
+infinite distress possessed Razumov, annihilated
+his energy, and before his eyes everything
+appeared confused and as if evanescent.  He
+dared not leave the fellow there.  "He may be
+affiliated to the police," was the thought that
+passed through his mind.  "Who could tell?"  But
+eyeing the miserable frost-nipped, famine-struck
+figure of his companion he perceived the
+absurdity of his suspicion.
+
+"But I--you know--I don't belong to any circle.
+I. . . ."
+
+He dared not say any more.  Neither dared he
+mend his pace.  The other, raising and setting
+down his lamentably shod feet with exact
+deliberation, protested in a low tone that it
+was not necessary for everybody to belong to an
+organization.  The most valuable personalities
+remained outside.  Some of the best work was
+done outside the organization.  Then very fast,
+with whispering, feverish lips--
+
+"The man arrested in the street was Haldin."
+
+And accepting Razumov's dismayed silence as
+natural enough, he assured him that there was no
+mistake.  That Government clerk was on night
+duty at the Secretariat.  Hearing a great noise
+of footsteps in the hall and aware that
+political prisoners were brought over sometimes
+at night from the fortress, he opened the door
+of the room in which he was working, suddenly.
+Before the gendarme on duty could push him back
+and slam the door in his face, he had seen a
+prisoner being partly carried, partly dragged
+along the hall by a lot of policemen.  He was
+being used very brutally.  And the clerk had
+recognized Haldin perfectly.  Less than half an
+hour afterwards General T---  arrived at the
+Secretariat to examine that prisoner personally.
+
+"Aren't you astonished?"  concluded the gaunt
+student.
+
+"No," said Razumov roughly--and at once
+regretted his answer.
+
+"Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces--
+with his people.  Didn't you? "
+
+The student turned his big hollow eyes upon
+Razumov, who said unguardedly--
+
+"His people are abroad."
+
+He could have bitten his tongue out with
+vexation.  The student pronounced in a tone of
+profound meaning-
+
+" So!  You alone were aware. . ." and stopped.
+
+"They have sworn my ruin," thought Razumov."
+Have you spoken of this to anyone else?" he
+asked with bitter curiosity.
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+"No, only to you.  Our circle thought that as
+Haldin had been often heard expressing a warm
+appreciation of your character. . . ."
+
+Razumov could not restrain a gesture of angry
+despair which the other must have misunderstood
+in some way, because he ceased speaking and
+turned away his black, lack-lustre eyes.
+
+They moved side by side in silence.  Then the
+gaunt student began to whisper again, with
+averted gaze--
+
+"As we have at present no one affiliated inside
+the fortress so as to make it possible to
+furnish him with a packet of poison, we have
+considered already some sort of retaliatory
+action--to follow very soon. . . ."
+
+Razumov trudging on interrupted--
+
+"Were you acquainted with Haldin?  Did he know
+where you live?"
+
+"I had the happiness to hear him speak twice,"
+his companion answered in the feverish whisper
+contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face
+and bearing.  "He did not know where I live. . .
+.  I am lodging poorly with an artisan family. .
+. .  I have just a corner in a room.  It is not
+very practicable to see me there, but if you
+should need me for anything I am ready. . . .
+
+Razumov trembled with rage and fear.  He was
+beside himself, but kept his voice low.
+
+"You are not to come near me.  You are not to
+speak to me.  Never address a single word to me.
+ I forbid you."
+
+"Very well," said the other submissively,
+showing no surprise whatever at this abrupt
+prohibition.  "You don't wish for secret
+reasons. . . perfectly. . . I understand."
+
+He edged away at once, not looking up even; and
+Razumov saw his gaunt, shabby, famine-stricken
+figure cross the street obliquely with lowered
+head and that peculiar exact motion of the feet.
+
+He watched him as one would watch a vision out
+of a nightmare, then he continued on his way,
+trying not to think.  On his landing the
+landlady seemed to be waiting for him.  She was
+a short, thick, shapeless woman with a large
+yellow face wrapped up everlastingly in a black
+woollen shawl.  When she saw him come up the
+last flight of stairs she flung both her arms up
+excitedly, then clasped her hands before her
+face.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--little father--what have
+you been doing?  And such a quiet young man,
+too!  The police are just gone this moment after
+searching your rooms."
+
+Razumov gazed down at her with silent,
+scrutinizing attention.  Her puffy yellow
+countenance was working with emotion.  She
+screwed up her eyes at him entreatingly.
+
+"Such a sensible young man!  Anybody can see you
+are sensible.  And now--like this--all at once.
+. . .  What is the good of mixing yourself up
+with these Nihilists?  Do give over, little
+father.  They are unlucky people."
+
+Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
+
+"Or is it that some secret enemy has been
+calumniating you, Kirylo Sidorovitch?  The world
+is full of black hearts and false denunciations
+nowadays.  There is much fear about."
+
+"Have you heard that I have been denounced by
+some one?" asked Razumov, without taking his
+eyes off her quivering face.
+
+But she had not heard anything.  She had tried
+to find out by asking the police captain while
+his men were turning the room upside down.  The
+police captain of the district had known her for
+the last eleven years and was a humane person.
+But he said to her on the landing, looking very
+black and vexed--
+
+"My good woman, do not ask questions.  I don't
+know anything myself.  The order comes from
+higher quarters."
+
+And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the
+arrival of the policemen of the district, a very
+superior gentleman in a fur coat and a shiny
+hat, who sat down in the room and looked through
+all the papers himself.  He came alone and went
+away by himself, taking nothing with him.  She
+had been trying to put things straight a little
+since they left.
+
+Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his
+rooms.
+
+All his books had been shaken and thrown on the
+floor.  His landlady followed him, and stooping
+painfully began to pick them up into her apron.
+His papers and notes which were kept always
+neatly sorted (they all related to his studies)
+had been shuffled up and heaped together into a
+ragged pile in the middle of the table.
+
+This disorder affected him profoundly,
+unreasonably.  He sat down and stared.  He had a
+distinct sensation of his very existence being
+undermined in some mysterious manner, of his
+moral supports falling away from him one by one.
+ He even experienced a slight physical giddiness
+and made a movement as if to reach for something
+to steady himself with.
+
+The old woman, rising to her feet with a low
+groan, shot all the books she had collected in
+her apron on to the sofa and left the room
+muttering and sighing.
+
+It was only then that he noticed that the sheet
+of paper which for one night had remained
+stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was
+lying on top of the pile.
+
+When he had taken it down the day before he had
+folded it in four, absent-mindedly, before
+dropping it on the table.  And now he saw it
+lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even
+and covering all the confused pile of pages, the
+record of his intellectual life for the last
+three years.  It had not been flung there.  It
+had been placed there--smoothed out, too!  He
+guessed in that an intention of profound meaning-
+-or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
+
+He sat staring at the piece of paper till his
+eyes began to smart.  He did not attempt to put
+his papers in order, either that evening or the
+next day--which he spent at home in a state of
+peculiar irresolution.  This irresolution bore
+upon the question whether he should continue to
+live--neither more nor less.  But its nature was
+very far removed from the hesitation of a man
+contemplating suicide.  The idea of laying
+violent hands upon his body did not occur to
+Razumov.  The unrelated organism bearing that
+label, walking, breathing, wearing these
+clothes, was of no importance to anyone, unless
+maybe to the landlady.  The true Razumov had his
+being in the willed, in the determined future--
+in that future menaced by the lawlessness of
+autocracy--for autocracy knows no law--and the
+lawlessness of revolution.  The feeling that his
+moral personality was at the mercy of these
+lawless forces was so strong that he asked
+himself seriously if it were worth while to go
+on accomplishing the mental functions of that
+existence which seemed no longer his own.
+
+"What is the good of exerting my intelligence,
+of pursuing the systematic development of my
+faculties and all my plans of work?" he asked
+himself.  "I want to guide my conduct by
+reasonable convictions, but what security have I
+against something--some destructive horror--
+walking in upon me as I sit here?. . ."
+
+Razumov looked apprehensively towards the door
+of the outer room as if expecting some shape of
+evil to turn the handle and appear before him
+silently.
+
+"A common thief," he said to himself," finds
+more guarantees in the law he is breaking, and
+even a brute like Ziemianitch has his
+consolation."  Razumov envied the materialism of
+the thief and the passion of the incorrigible
+lover.  The consequences of their actions were
+always clear and their lives remained their own.
+
+But he slept as soundly that night as though he
+had been consoling himself in the manner of
+Ziemianitch.  He dropped off suddenly, lay like
+a log, remembered no dream on waking.  But it
+was as if his soul had gone out in the night to
+gather the flowers of wrathful wisdom.  He got
+up in a mood of grim determination and as if
+with a new knowledge of his own nature.  He
+looked mockingly on the heap of papers on his
+table; and left his room to attend the lectures,
+muttering to himself, "We shall see."
+
+He was in no humour to talk to anybody or hear
+himself questioned as to his absence from
+lectures the day before.  But it was difficult
+to repulse rudely a very good comrade with a
+smooth pink face and fair hair, bearing the
+nickname amongst his fellow-students of "Madcap
+Kostia."  He was the idolized only son of a very
+wealthy and illiterate Government contractor,
+and attended the lectures only during the
+periodical fits of contrition following upon
+tearful paternal remonstrances.  Noisily
+blundering like a retriever puppy, his elated
+voice and great gestures filled the bare academy
+corridors with the joy of thoughtless animal
+life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great
+distance.  His usual discourses treated of
+trotting horses, wine-parties in expensive
+restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy
+virtue, with a disarming artlessness of outlook.
+ He pounced upon Razumov about midday, somewhat
+less uproariously than his habit was, and led
+him aside.
+
+"Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  A few words
+here in this quiet corner."
+
+He felt Razumov's reluctance, and insinuated his
+hand under his arm caressingly.
+
+"No--pray do.  I don't want to talk to you about
+any of my silly scrapes.  What are my scrapes?
+Absolutely nothing.  Mere childishness.  The
+other night I flung a fellow out of a certain
+place where I was having a fairly good time.  A
+tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from
+the Treasury department.  He was bullying the
+people of the house.  I rebuked him.  'You are
+not behaving humanely to God's creatures that
+are a jolly sight more estimable than yourself,'
+ I said.  I can't bear to see any tyranny,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Upon my word I can't.  He
+didn't take it in good part at all.  'Who's that
+impudent puppy ?' he begins to shout.  I was in
+excellent form as it happened, and he went
+through the closed window very suddenly.  He
+flew quite a long way into the yard.  I raged
+like--like a--minotaur.  The women clung to me
+and screamed, the fiddlers got under the table.
+. . .  Such fun!  My dad had to put his hand
+pretty deep into his pocket, I can tell you."
+He chuckled.
+
+"My dad is a very useful man.  Jolly good thing
+it is for me, too.  I do get into unholy
+scrapes."
+
+His elation fell.  That was just it.  What was
+his life?  Insignificant; no good to anyone; a
+mere festivity.  It would end some fine day in
+his getting his skull split with a champagne
+bottle in a drunken brawl.  At such times, too,
+when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas.
+But he could never get any ideas into his head.
+His head wasn't worth anything better than to be
+split by a champagne bottle.
+
+Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an
+attempt to get away.  The other's tone changed
+to confidential earnestness.
+
+"For God's sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me
+make some sort of sacrifice.  It would not be a
+sacrifice really.  I have my rich dad behind me.
+ There's positively no getting to the bottom of
+his pocket."
+
+And rejecting indignantly Razumov's suggestion
+that this was drunken raving, he offered to lend
+him some money to escape abroad with.  He could
+always get money from his dad.  He had only to
+say that he had lost it at cards or something of
+that sort, and at the same time promise solemnly
+not to miss a single lecture for three months on
+end.  That would fetch the old man; and he,
+Kostia, was quite equal to the sacrifice.
+Though he really did not see what was the good
+for him to attend the lectures.  It was
+perfectly hopeless.
+
+"Won't you let me be of some use?" he pleaded to
+the silent Razumov, who with his eyes on the
+ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real
+drift of the other's intention, felt a strange
+reluctance to clear up the point.
+
+"What makes you think I want to go abroad?" he
+asked at last very quietly.
+
+Kostia lowered his voice.
+
+"You had the police in your rooms yesterday.
+There are three or four of us who have heard of
+that.  Never mind how we know.  It is sufficient
+that we do.  So we have been consulting
+together."
+
+"Ah!  You got to know that so soon,"  muttered
+Razumov negligently.
+
+"Yes.  We did.  And it struck us that a man like
+you. . . "
+
+"What sort of a man do you take me to be?"
+Razumov interrupted him.
+
+"A man of ideas--and a man of action too.  But
+you are very deep, Kirylo.  There's no getting
+to the bottom of your mind.  Not for fellows
+like me.  But we all agreed that you must be
+preserved for our country.  Of that we have no
+doubt whatever--I mean all of us who have heard
+Haldin speak of you on certain occasions.  A man
+doesn't get the police ransacking his rooms
+without there being some devilry hanging over
+his head. . . .  And so if you think that it
+would be better for you to bolt at once. . . ."
+
+Razumov tore himself away and walked down the
+corridor, leaving the other motionless with his
+mouth open.  But almost at once he returned and
+stood before the amazed Kostia, who shut his
+mouth slowly.  Razumov looked him straight in
+the eyes, before saying with marked deliberation
+and separating his words-
+
+"I thank--you--very--much."
+
+He went away again rapidly.  Kostia, recovering
+from his surprise at these manoeuvres, ran up
+behind him pressingly.
+
+"No! Wait!  Listen.  I really mean it.  It would
+be like giving your compassion to a starving
+fellow.  Do you hear, Kirylo?  And any disguise
+you may think of, that too I could procure from
+a costumier, a Jew I know.  Let a fool be made
+serviceable according to his folly.  Perhaps
+also a false beard or something of that kind may
+be needed.
+
+"Razumov turned at bay.
+
+"There are no false beards needed in this
+business, Kostia--you good-hearted lunatic, you.
+ What do you know of my ideas?  My ideas may be
+poison to you."  The other began to shake his
+head in energetic protest.
+
+"What have you got to do with ideas?  Some of
+them would make an end of your dad's money-bags.
+ Leave off meddling with what you don't
+understand.  Go back to your trotting horses and
+your girls, and then you'll be sure at least of
+doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to
+yourself."
+
+The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this
+disdain.
+
+"You're sending me back to my pig's trough,
+Kirylo.  That settles it.  I am an unlucky beast-
+-and I shall die like a beast too.  But mind--
+it's your contempt that has done for me."
+
+Razumov went off with long strides.  That this
+simple and grossly festive soul should have
+fallen too under the revolutionary curse
+affected him as an ominous symptom of the time.
+He reproached himself for feeling troubled.
+Personally he ought to have felt reassured.
+There was an obvious advantage in this
+conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for
+what he was not.  But was it not strange?
+
+Again he experienced that sensation of his
+conduct being taken out of his hands by Haldin's
+revolutionary tyranny.  His solitary and
+laborious existence had been destroyed--the only
+thing he could call his own on this earth.  By
+what right?  he asked himself furiously.  In
+what name?
+
+What infuriated him most was to feel that the
+"thinkers" of the University were evidently
+connecting him with Haldin--as a sort of
+confidant in the background apparently.  A
+mysterious connexion!  Ha ha!. . .  He had been
+made a personage without knowing anything about
+it.  How that wretch Haldin must have talked
+about him! Yet it was likely that Haldin had
+said very little.  The fellow's casual
+utterances were caught up and treasured and
+pondered over by all these imbeciles.  And was
+not all secret revolutionary action based upon
+folly, self-deception, and lies?
+
+"Impossible to think of anything else," muttered
+Razumov to himself.  "I'll become an idiot if
+this goes on.  The scoundrels and the fools are
+murdering my intelligence."
+
+He lost all hope of saving his future, which
+depended on the free use of his intelligence.
+
+He reached the doorway of his house in a state
+of mental discouragement which enabled him to
+receive with apparent indifference an official-
+looking envelope from the dirty hand of the
+dvornik.
+
+"A gendarme brought it," said the man.  " He
+asked if you were at home.  I told him 'No, he's
+not at home.'  So he left it.  'Give it into his
+own hands,' says he.  Now you've got it--eh?"
+
+He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov
+climbed his stairs, envelope in hand.  Once in
+his room he did not hasten to open it.  Of
+course this official missive was from the
+superior direction of the police.  A suspect!  A
+suspect!
+
+He stared in dreary astonishment at the
+absurdity of his position.  He thought with a
+sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years
+of good work gone, the course of forty more
+perhaps jeopardized--turned from hope to terror,
+because events started by human folly link
+themselves into a sequence which no sagacity can
+foresee and no courage can break through.
+Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady's
+back is turned; you come home and find it in
+possession bearing a man's name, clothed in
+flesh--wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots-
+-lounging against the stove.  It asks you, "Is
+the outer door closed?"--and you don't know
+enough to take it by the throat and fling it
+downstairs.  You don't know.  You welcome the
+crazy fate.  "Sit down," you say.  And it is all
+over.  You cannot shake it off any more.  It
+will cling to you for ever.  Neither halter nor
+bullet can give you back the freedom of your
+life and the sanity of your thought. . . .  It
+was enough to dash one's head against a wall.
+
+Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if
+to select a spot to dash his head against.  Then
+he opened the letter.  It directed the student
+Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself
+without delay at the General Secretariat.
+
+Razumov had a vision of General T---'s goggle
+eyes waiting for him--the embodied power of
+autocracy, grotesque and terrible.  He embodied
+the whole power of autocracy because he was its
+guardian.  He was the incarnate suspicion, the
+incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of a
+political and social regime on its defence.  He
+loathed rebellion by instinct.  And Razumov
+reflected that the man was simply unable to
+understand a reasonable adherence to the
+doctrine of absolutism.
+
+"What can he want with me precisely--I wonder?"
+he asked himself.
+
+As if that mental question had evoked the
+familiar phantom, Haldin stood suddenly before
+him in the room with an extraordinary
+completeness of detail.  Though the short winter
+day had passed already into the sinister
+twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw
+plainly the narrow leather strap round the
+Tcherkess coat.  The illusion of that hateful
+presence was so perfect that he half expected it
+to ask, "Is the outer door closed?" He looked at
+it with hatred and contempt.  Souls do not take
+a shape of clothing.  Moreover, Haldin could not
+be dead yet. Razumov stepped forward menacingly;
+the vision vanished--and turning short on his
+heel he walked out of his room with infinite
+disdain.
+
+But after going down the first flight of stairs
+it occurred to him that perhaps the superior
+authorities of police meant to confront him with
+Haldin in the flesh.  This thought struck him
+like a bullet, and had he not clung with both
+hands to the banister he would have rolled down
+to the next landing most likely.  His legs were
+of no use for a considerable time. . . .  But
+why?  For what conceivable reason?  To what end?
+
+There could be no rational answer to these
+questions; but Razumov remembered the promise
+made by the General to Prince K---.  His action
+was to remain unknown.
+
+He got down to the bottom of the stairs,
+lowering himself as it were from step to step,
+by the banister. Under the gate he regained much
+of his firmness of thought and limb.  He went
+out into the street without staggering visibly.
+Every moment he felt steadier mentally.  And yet
+he was saying to himself that General T--- was
+perfectly capable of shutting him up in the
+fortress for an indefinite time.  His
+temperament fitted his remorseless task, and his
+omnipotence made him inaccessible to reasonable
+argument.
+
+But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he
+discovered that he would have nothing to do with
+General T---.  It is evident from Mr. Razumov's
+diary that this dreaded personality was to
+remain in the background.  A civilian of
+superior rank received him in a private room
+after a period of waiting in outer offices where
+a lot of scribbling went on at many tables in a
+heated and stuffy atmosphere.
+
+The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in
+the corridor--
+
+"You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin."
+
+There was nothing formidable about the man
+bearing that name.  His mild, expectant glance
+was turned on the door already when Razumov
+entered.  At once, with the penholder he was
+holding in his hand, he pointed to a deep sofa
+between two windows.  He followed Razumov with
+his eyes while that last crossed the room and
+sat down.  The mild gaze rested on him, not
+curious, not inquisitive--certainly not
+suspicious--almost without expression.  In its
+passionless persistence there was something
+resembling sympathy.
+
+Razumov, who had prepared his will and his
+intelligence to encounter General T--- himself,
+was profoundly troubled.  All the moral bracing
+up against the possible excesses of power and
+passion went for nothing before this sallow man,
+who wore a full unclipped beard.  It was fair,
+thin, and very fine.  The light fell in coppery
+gleams on the protuberances of a high, rugged
+forehead.  And the aspect of the broad, soft
+physiognomy was so homely and rustic that the
+careful middle parting of the hair seemed a
+pretentious affectation.
+
+The diary of Mr. Razumov testifies to some
+irritation on his part.  I may remark here that
+the diary proper consisting of the more or less
+daily entries seems to have been begun on that
+very evening after Mr. Razumov had returned home.
+
+Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated.  His strung-up
+individuality had gone to pieces within him very
+suddenly.
+
+"I must be very prudent with him," he warned
+himself in the silence during which they sat
+gazing at each other.  It lasted some little
+time, and was characterized (for silences have
+their character) by a sort of sadness imparted
+to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner
+of the bearded official.  Razumov learned later
+that he was the chief of a department in the
+General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil
+service equivalent to that of a colonel in the
+army.
+
+Razumov's mistrust became acute.  The main point
+was, not to be drawn into saying too much.  He
+had been called there for some reason.  What
+reason?  To be given to understand that he was a
+suspect--and also no doubt to be pumped.  As to
+what precisely?  There was nothing.  Or perhaps
+Haldin had been telling lies. . . .  Every
+alarming uncertainty beset Razumov.  He could
+bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself
+for his weakness spoke first, though he had
+promised himself not to do so on any account.
+
+"I haven't lost a moment's time," he began in a
+hoarse, provoking tone; and then the faculty of
+speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of
+Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly--
+
+"Very proper.  Very proper.  Though as a matter
+of fact. . . ."
+
+But the spell was broken, and Razumov
+interrupted him boldly, under a sudden
+conviction that this was the safest attitude to
+take.  With a great flow of words he complained
+of being totally misunderstood.  Even as he
+talked with a perception of his own audacity he
+thought that the word "misunderstood" was better
+than the word "mistrusted," and he repeated it
+again with insistence.  Suddenly he ceased,
+being seized with fright before the attentive
+immobility of the official.  "What am I talking
+about?" he thought, eyeing him with a vague
+gaze.  Mistrusted--not misunderstood--was the
+right symbol for these people.  Misunderstood
+was the other kind of curse.  Both had been
+brought on his head by that fellow Haldin.  And
+his head ached terribly.  He passed his hand
+over his brow--an involuntary gesture of
+suffering, which he was too careless to
+restrain.  At that moment Razumov beheld his own
+brain suffering on the rack--a long, pale figure
+drawn asunder horizontally with terrific force
+in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed
+to see.  It was as though he had dreamed for an
+infinitesimal fraction of time of some dark
+print of the Inquisition.
+
+It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov
+had actually dozed off and had dreamed in the
+presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print
+of the Inquisition.  He was indeed extremely
+exhausted, and he records a remarkably dream-
+like experience of anguish at the circumstance
+that there was no one whatever near the pale and
+extended figure.  The solitude of the racked
+victim was particularly horrible to behold.  The
+mysterious impossibility to see the face, he
+also notes, inspired a sort of terror.  All
+these characteristics of an ugly dream were
+present.  Yet he is certain that he never lost
+the consciousness of himself on the sofa,
+leaning forward with his hands between his knees
+and turning his cap round and round in his
+fingers.  But everything vanished at the voice
+of Councillor Mikulin.  Razumov felt profoundly
+grateful for the even simplicity of its tone.
+
+"Yes.  I have listened with interest.  I
+comprehend in a measure your. . .  But, indeed,
+you are mistaken in what you. . . .  "Councillor
+Mikulin uttered a series of broken sentences.
+Instead of finishing them he glanced down his
+beard.  It was a deliberate curtailment which
+somehow made the phrases more impressive.  But
+he could talk fluently enough, as became
+apparent when changing his tone to
+persuasiveness he went on: "By listening to you
+as I did, I think I have proved that I do not
+regard our intercourse as strictly official.  In
+fact, I don't want it to have that character at
+all. . . .  Oh yes! I admit that the request for
+your presence here had an official form.  But I
+put it to you whether it was a form which would
+have been used to secure the attendance of a. .
+. ."
+
+"Suspect," exclaimed Razumov, looking straight
+into the official's eyes.  They were big with
+heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim,
+steadfast gaze.  "A suspect."  The open
+repetition of that word which had been haunting
+all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort
+of satisfaction.  Councillor Mikulin shook his
+head slightly.  "Surely you do know that I've
+had my rooms searched by the police?"
+
+"I was about to say a 'misunderstood person,'
+when you interrupted me," insinuated quietly
+Councillor Mikulin.
+
+Razumov smiled without bitterness.  The renewed
+sense of his intellectual superiority sustained
+him in the hour of danger.  He said a little
+disdainfully--
+
+"I know I am but a reed.  But I beg you to allow
+me the superiority of the thinking reed over the
+unthinking forces that are about to crush him
+out of existence.  Practical thinking in the
+last instance is but criticism.  I may perhaps
+be allowed to express my wonder at this action
+of the police being delayed for two full days
+during which, of course, I could have
+annihilated everything compromising by burning
+it--let us say--and getting rid of the very
+ashes, for that matter."
+
+"You are angry," remarked the official, with an
+unutterable simplicity of tone and manner.  "Is
+that reasonable? "
+
+Razumov felt himself colouring with annoyance.
+
+"I am reasonable.  I am even--permit me to say--
+a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays
+seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of
+revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French
+or German thought--devil knows what foreign
+notions.  But I am not an intellectual mongrel.
+I think like a Russian.  I think faithfully--and
+I take the liberty to call myself a thinker.  It
+is not a forbidden word, as far as I know."
+
+" No.  Why should it be a forbidden word?"
+Councillor Mikulin turned in his seat with
+crossed legs and resting his elbow on the table
+propped his head on the knuckles of a half-
+closed hand.  Razumov noticed a thick forefinger
+clasped by a massive gold band set with a blood-
+red stone--a signet ring that, looking as if it
+could weigh half a pound, was an appropriate
+ornament for that ponderous man with the
+accurate middle-parting of glossy hair above a
+rugged Socratic forehead.
+
+"Could it be a wig?" Razumov detected himself
+wondering with an unexpected detachment.  His
+self-confidence was much shaken.  He resolved to
+chatter no more.  Reserve !  Reserve !  All he
+had to do was to keep the Ziemianitch episode
+secret with absolute determination, when the
+questions came.  Keep Ziemianitch strictly out
+of all the answers.
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly.
+Razumov's self-confidence abandoned him
+completely.  It seemed impossible to keep
+Ziemianitch out.  Every question would lead to
+that, because, of course, there was nothing
+else.  He made an effort to brace himself up.
+It was a failure.  But Councillor Mikulin was
+surprisingly detached too.
+
+"Why should it be forbidden?" he repeated.  "I
+too consider myself a thinking man, I assure
+you.  The principal condition is to think
+correctly.  I admit it is difficult sometimes at
+first for a young man abandoned to himself--with
+his generous impulses undisciplined, so to speak-
+-at the mercy of every wild wind that blows.
+Religious belief, of course, is a great. . . ."
+
+Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard, and
+Razumov, whose tension was relaxed by that
+unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with
+gloomy discontent-
+
+"That man, Haldin, believed in God."
+
+"Ah!  You are aware,"  breathed out Councillor
+Mikulin, making the point softly, as if with
+discretion, but making it nevertheless plainly
+enough, as if he too were put off his guard by
+Razumov's remark.  The young man preserved an
+impassive, moody countenance, though he
+reproached himself bitterly for a pernicious
+fool, to have given thus an utterly false
+impression of intimacy.  He kept his eyes on the
+floor.  "I must positively hold my tongue unless
+I am obliged to speak," he admonished himself.
+And at once against his will the question,
+"Hadn't I better tell him everything?"
+presented itself with such force that he had to
+bite his lower lip.  Councillor Mikulin could
+not, however, have nourished any hope of
+confession.  He went on--
+
+"You tell me more than his judges were able to
+get out of him.  He was judged by a commission
+of three.  He would tell them absolutely
+nothing.  I have the report of the
+interrogatories here, by me.  After every
+question there stands "Refuses to answer--
+refuses to answer.'  It's like that page after
+page.  You see, I have been entrusted with some
+further investigations around and about this
+affair.  He has left me nothing to begin my
+investigations on.  A hardened miscreant.  And
+so, you say, he believed in. . . ."
+
+Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard
+with a faint grimace; but he did not pause for
+long.  Remarking with a shade of scorn that
+blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he
+concluded by supposing that Mr. Razumov had
+conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject.
+
+"No," said Razumov loudly, without looking up.
+"He talked and I listened.  That is not a
+conversation."
+
+"Listening is a great art," observed Mikulin
+parenthetically.
+
+"And getting people to talk is another," mumbled
+Razumov.
+
+"Well, no--that is not very difficult," Mikulin
+said innocently, "except, of course, in special
+cases.  For instance, this Haldin.  Nothing
+could induce him to talk.  He was brought four
+times before the delegated judges.  Four secret
+interrogatories--and even during the last, when
+your personality was put forward. . . ."
+
+"My personality put forward?" repeated Razumov,
+raising his head brusquely.  "I don't
+understand." Councillor Mikulin turned squarely
+to the table, and taking up some sheets of grey
+foolscap dropped them one after another,
+retaining only the last in his hand.  He held it
+before his eyes while speaking.
+
+"It was--you see--judged necessary.  In a case
+of that gravity no means of action upon the
+culprit should be neglected.  You understand
+that yourself, I am certain."
+
+Razumov stared with enormous wide eyes at the
+side view of Councillor Mikulin, who now was not
+looking at him at all.
+
+"So it was decided (I was consulted by General T-
+--) that a certain question should be put to the
+accused.  But in deference to the earnest wishes
+of Prince K--- your name has been kept out of
+the documents and even from the very knowledge
+of the judges themselves.  Prince K---
+recognized the propriety, the necessity of what
+we proposed to do, but he was concerned for your
+safety.  Things do leak out--that we can't deny.
+ One cannot always answer for the discretion of
+inferior officials.  There was, of course, the
+secretary of the special tribunal--one or two
+gendarmes in the room.  Moreover, as I have
+said, in deference to Prince K--- even the
+judges themselves were to be left in ignorance.
+The question ready framed was sent to them by
+General T--- (I wrote it out with my own hand)
+with instructions to put it to the prisoner the
+very last of all.  Here it is."
+
+Councillor Mikulin threw back his head into
+proper focus and went on reading monotonously:
+"Question--Has the man well known to you, in
+whose rooms you remained for several hours on
+Monday and on whose information you have been
+arrested--has he had any previous knowledge of
+your intention to commit a political murder?. .
+.  Prisoner refuses to reply.
+
+"Question repeated.  Prisoner preserves the same
+stubborn silence.
+
+"The venerable Chaplain of the Fortress being
+then admitted and exhorting the prisoner to
+repentance, entreating him also to atone for his
+crime by an unreserved and full confession which
+should help to liberate from the sin of
+rebellion against the Divine laws and the sacred
+Majesty of the Ruler, our Christ-loving land--
+the prisoner opens his lips for the first time
+during this morning's audience and in a loud,
+clear voice rejects the venerable Chaplain's
+ministrations.
+
+"At eleven o'clock the Court pronounces in
+summary form the death sentence.
+
+"The execution is fixed for four o'clock in the
+afternoon, subject to further instructions from
+superior authorities."
+
+Councillor Mikulin dropped the page of foolscap,
+glanced down his beard, and turning to Razumov,
+added in an easy, explanatory tone--
+
+"We saw no object in delaying the execution.
+The order to carry out the sentence was sent by
+telegraph at noon.  I wrote out the telegram
+myself.  He was hanged at four o'clock this
+afternoon."
+
+The definite information of Haldin's death gave
+Razumov the feeling of general lassitude which
+follows a great exertion or a great excitement.
+He kept very still on the sofa, but a murmur
+escaped him-
+
+"He had a belief in a future existence."
+
+Councillor Mikulin shrugged his shoulders
+slightly, and Razumov got up with an effort.
+There was nothing now to stay for in that room.
+Haldin had been hanged at four o'clock.  There
+could be no doubt of that.  He had, it seemed,
+entered upon his future existence, long boots,
+Astrakhan fur cap and all, down to the very
+leather strap round his waist.  A flickering,
+vanishing sort of existence.  It was not his
+soul, it was his mere phantom he had left behind
+on this earth--thought Razumov, smiling
+caustically to himself while he crossed the
+room, utterly forgetful of where he was and of
+Councillor Mikulin's existence.  The official
+could have set a lot of bells ringing all over
+the building without leaving his chair.  He let
+Razumov go quite up to the door before he spoke.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch--what are you doing?"
+
+Razumov turned his head and looked at him in
+silence.  He was not in the least disconcerted.
+Councillor Mikulin's arms were stretched out on
+the table before him and his body leaned forward
+a little with an effort of his dim gaze.
+
+"Was I actually going to clear out like this?"
+Razumov wondered at himself with an impassive
+countenance.  And he was aware of this
+impassiveness concealing a lucid astonishment.
+
+"Evidently I was going out if he had not
+spoken," he thought.  "What would he have done
+then?  I must end this affair one way or
+another.  I must make him show his hand."
+
+For a moment longer he reflected behind the mask
+as it were, then let go the door-handle and came
+back to the middle of the room.
+
+"I'll tell you what you think," he said
+explosively, but not raising his voice.  "You
+think that you are dealing with a secret
+accomplice of that unhappy man.  No, I do not
+know that he was unhappy.  He did not tell me.
+He was a wretch from my point of view, because
+to keep alive a false idea is a greater crime
+than to kill a man.  I suppose you will not deny
+that?  I hated him!  Visionaries work
+everlasting evil on earth.  Their Utopias
+inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust
+of reality and a contempt for the secular logic
+of human development."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders and stared.
+"What a tirade!" he thought.  The silence and
+immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him.
+The bearded bureaucrat sat at his post,
+mysteriously self-possessed like an idol with
+dim, unreadable eyes. Razumov's voice changed
+involuntarily.
+
+"If you were to ask me where is the necessity of
+my hate for such as Haldin, I would answer you--
+there is nothing sentimental in it.  I did not
+hate him because he had committed the crime of
+murder.  Abhorrence is not hate.  I hated him
+simply because I am sane.  It is in that
+character that he outraged me.  His death. . ."
+
+Razumov felt his voice growing thick in his
+throat.  The dimness of Councillor Mikulin's
+eyes seemed to spread all over his face and made
+it indistinct to Razumov's sight.  He tried to
+disregard these phenomena.
+
+"Indeed," he pursued, pronouncing each word
+carefully, "what is his death to me?  If he were
+lying here on the floor I could walk over his
+breast. . . .  The fellow is a mere phantom. . .
+."
+
+Razumov's voice died out very much against his
+will.  Mikulin behind the table did not allow
+himself the slightest movement.  The silence
+lasted for some little time before Razumov could
+go on again.
+
+"He went about talking of me.  Those
+intellectual fellows sit in each other's rooms
+and get drunk on foreign ideas in the same way
+young Guards' officers treat each other with
+foreign wines.  Merest debauchery. . . .  Upon
+my Word,"--Razumov, enraged by a sudden
+recollection of Ziemianitch, lowered his voice
+forcibly,--"upon my word, we Russians are a
+drunken lot.  Intoxication of some sort we must
+have: to get ourselves wild with sorrow or
+maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a
+log or set fire to the house.  What is a sober
+man to do, I should like to know? To cut oneself
+entirely from one's kind is impossible.  To live
+in a desert one must be a saint.  But if a
+drunken man runs out of the grog-shop, falls on
+your neck and kisses you on both cheeks because
+something about your appearance has taken his
+fancy, what then--kindly tell me? You may break,
+perhaps, a cudgel on his back and yet not
+succeed in beating him off. . . ."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised his hand and passed it
+down his face deliberately.
+
+"That's. . . of course," he said in an undertone.
+
+The quiet gravity of that gesture made Razumov
+pause.  It was so unexpected, too.  What did it
+mean? It had an alarming aloofness.  Razumov
+remembered his intention of making him show his
+hand.
+
+"I have said all this to Prince K---," he began
+with assumed indifference, but lost it on seeing
+Councillor Mikulin's slow nod of assent.  "You
+know it?  You've heard. . . .  Then why should I
+be called here to be told of Haldin's execution?
+ Did you want to confront me with his silence
+now that the man is dead?  What is his silence
+to me!  This is incomprehensible.  "You want in
+some way to shake my moral balance."
+
+"No.  Not that," murmured Councillor Mikulin,
+just audibly.  "The service you have rendered is
+appreciated. . . ."
+
+"Is it?'' interrupted Razumov ironically.
+
+". . .and your position too."  Councillor
+Mikulin did not raise his voice.  "But only
+think!  You fall into Prince K---'s study as if
+from the sky with your startling information. .
+. .  You are studying yet, Mr. Razumov, but we
+are serving already--don't forget that. . . .
+And naturally some curiosity was bound to. . . ."
+
+Councillor Mikulin looked down his beard.
+Razumov's lips trembled.
+
+"An occurrence of that sort marks a man," the
+homely murmur went on.  "I admit I was curious
+to see you.  General T--- thought it would be
+useful, too. . . .  Don't think I am incapable
+of understanding your sentiments.  When I was
+young like you I studied. . . ."
+
+"Yes--you wished to see me," said Razumov in a
+tone of profound distaste.  "Naturally you have
+the right--I mean the power.  It all amounts to
+the same thing.  But it is perfectly useless, if
+you were to look at me and listen to me for a
+year.  I begin to think there is something about
+me which people don't seem able to make out.
+It's unfortunate.  I imagine, however, that
+Prince K--- understands.  He seemed to."
+
+Councillor Mikulin moved slightly and spoke.
+
+"Prince K--- is aware of everything that is
+being done, and I don't mind informing you that
+he approved my intention of becoming personally
+acquainted with you."
+
+Razumov concealed an immense disappointment
+under the accents of railing surprise.
+
+"So he is curious too!. . .  Well--after all,
+Prince K--- knows me very little.  It is really
+very unfortunate for me, but--it is not exactly
+my fault."
+
+Councillor Mikulin raised a hasty deprecatory
+hand and inclined his head slightly over his
+shoulder.
+
+"Now, Mr. Razumov--is it necessary to take it in
+that way?  Everybody I am sure can. . . ."
+
+He glanced rapidly down his beard, and when he
+looked up again there was for a moment an
+interested expression in his misty gaze.
+Razumov discouraged it with a cold, repellent
+smile.
+
+"No.  That's of no importance to be sure--except
+that in respect of all this curiosity being
+aroused by a very simple matter. . . .  What is
+to be done with it?  It is unappeasable.  I mean
+to say there is nothing to appease it with.  I
+happen to have been born a Russian with
+patriotic instincts--whether inherited or not I
+am not in a position to say."
+
+Razumov spoke consciously with elaborate
+steadiness.
+
+"Yes, patriotic instincts developed by a faculty
+of independent thinking--of detached thinking.
+In that respect I am more free than any social
+democratic revolution could make me.  It is more
+than probable that I don't think exactly as you
+are thinking.  Indeed, how could it be?  You
+would think most likely at this moment that I am
+elaborately lying to cover up the track of my
+repentance."
+
+Razumov stopped.  His heart had grown too big
+for his breast.  Councillor Mikulin did not
+flinch.
+
+"Why so?" he said simply.  "I assisted
+personally at the search of your rooms.  I
+looked through all the papers myself.  I have
+been greatly impressed by a sort of political
+confession of faith.  A very remarkable
+document.  Now may I ask for what purpose. . . ."
+
+"To deceive the police naturally," said Razumov
+savagely. . . .  "What is all this mockery?  Of
+course you can send me straight from this room
+to Siberia.  That would be intelligible.  To
+what is intelligible I can submit.  But I
+protest against this comedy of persecution.  The
+whole affair is becoming too comical altogether
+for my taste.  A comedy of errors, phantoms, and
+suspicions.  It's positively indecent. . . ."
+
+Councillor Mikulin turned an attentive ear.
+"Did you say phantoms?"  he murmured.
+
+"I could walk over dozens of them."  Razumov,
+with an impatient wave of his hand, went on
+headlong, "But, really, I must claim the right
+to be done once for all with that man.  And in
+order to accomplish this I shall take the
+liberty. . . ."
+
+Razumov on his side of the table bowed slightly
+to the seated bureaucrat.
+
+". . . To retire--simply to retire," he finished
+with great resolution.
+
+He walked to the door, thinking, "Now he must
+show his hand.  He must ring and have me
+arrested before I am out of the building, or he
+must let me go.  And either way. . . ."
+
+An unhurried voice said--
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch."  Razumov at the door
+turned his head.
+
+"To retire," he repeated.
+
+"Where to?" asked Councillor Mikulin softly.
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+In the conduct of an invented story there are,
+no doubt, certain proprieties to be observed for
+the sake of clearness and effect.  A man of
+imagination, however inexperienced in the art of
+narrative, has his instinct to guide him in the
+choice of his words, and in the development of
+the action.  A grain of talent excuses many
+mistakes.  But this is not a work of
+imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for
+this undertaking lies not in its art, but in its
+artlessness.  Aware of my limitations and strong
+in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try
+(were I able) to invent anything.  I push my
+scruples so far that I would not even invent a
+transition.
+
+Dropping then Mr. Razumov's record at the point
+where Councillor Mikulin's question "Where to?"
+comes in with the force of an insoluble problem,
+I shall simply say that I made the acquaintance
+of these ladies about six months before that
+time.  By "these ladies" I mean, of course, the
+mother and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
+
+By what arguments he had induced his mother to
+sell their little property and go abroad for an
+indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely.  I
+have an idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son's
+wish, would have set fire to her house and
+emigrated to the moon without any sign of
+surprise or apprehension; and that Miss Haldin--
+Nathalie, caressingly Natalka--would have given
+her assent to the scheme.
+
+Their proud devotion to that young man became
+clear to me in a very short time.  Following his
+directions they went straight to Switzerland--to
+Zurich--where they remained the best part of a
+year.  From Zurich, which they did not like,
+they came to Geneva.  A friend of mine in
+Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the
+University (he had married a Russian lady, a
+distant connection of Mrs. Haldin's), wrote to
+me suggesting I should call on these ladies.  It
+was a very kindly meant business suggestion.
+Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of
+reading the best English authors with a
+competent teacher.
+
+Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly.  Her bad
+French, of which she was smilingly conscious,
+did away with the formality of the first
+interview.  She was a tall woman in a black silk
+dress.  A wide brow, regular features, and
+delicately cut lips, testified to her past
+beauty.  She sat upright in an easy chair and in
+a rather weak, gentle voice told me that her
+Natalka simply thirsted after knowledge.  Her
+thin hands were lying on her lap, her facial
+immobility had in it something monachal.  "In
+Russia," she went on, "all knowledge was tainted
+with falsehood.  Not chemistry and all that, but
+education generally," she explained.  The
+Government corrupted the teaching for its own
+purposes.  Both her children felt that.  Her
+Natalka had obtained a diploma of a Superior
+School for Women and her son was a student at
+the St. Petersburg University.  He had a
+brilliant intellect, a most noble unselfish
+nature, and he was the oracle of his comrades.
+Early next year, she hoped he would join them
+and they would then go to Italy together.  In
+any other country but their own she would have
+been certain of a great future for a man with
+the extraordinary abilities and the lofty
+character of her son--but in Russia. . . .
+
+The young lady sitting by the window turned her
+head and said--
+
+"Come, mother.  Even with us things change with
+years."
+
+Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet
+caressing in its harshness.  She had a dark
+complexion, with red lips and a full figure.
+She gave the impression of strong vitality.  The
+old lady sighed.
+
+"You are both young--you two.  It is easy for
+you to hope.  But I, too, am not hopeless.
+Indeed, how could I be with a son like this."
+
+I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors
+she wished to read.  She directed upon me her
+grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
+became aware, notwithstanding my years, how
+attractive physically her personality could be
+to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
+something else than the mere grace of
+femininity.  Her glance was as direct and
+trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by
+the world's wise lessons.  And it was intrepid,
+but in this intrepidity there was nothing
+aggressive.  A naive yet thoughtful assurance is
+a better definition.  She had reflected already
+(in Russia the young begin to think early), but
+she had never known deception as yet because
+obviously she had never yet fallen under the
+sway of passion.  She was--to look at her was
+enough--very capable of being roused by an idea
+or simply by a person.  At least, so I judged
+with I believe an unbiassed mind; for clearly my
+person could not be the person--and as to my
+ideas!. . .
+
+We became excellent friends in the course of our
+reading.  It was very pleasant.  Without fear of
+provoking a smile, I shall confess that I became
+very much attached to that young girl.  At the
+end of four months I told her that now she could
+very well go on reading English by herself.  It
+was time for the teacher to depart.  My pupil
+looked unpleasantly surprised.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and
+kindly expression of the eyes, uttered from her
+armchair in her uncertain French, "_Mais l'ami
+reviendra._"  And so it was settled.  I returned-
+-not four times a week as before, but pretty
+frequently.  In the autumn we made some short
+excursions together in company with other
+Russians.  My friendship with these ladies gave
+me a standing in the Russian colony which
+otherwise I could not have had.
+
+The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P-
+--'s assassination--it was a Sunday--I met the
+two ladies in the street and walked with them
+for some distance.  Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy
+grey cloak, I remember, over her black silk
+dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very
+quiet expression.
+
+"We have been to the late service," she said.
+"Natalka came with me.  Her girl-friends, the
+students here, of course don't. . . .  With us
+in Russia the church is so identified with
+oppression, that it seems almost necessary when
+one wishes to be free in this life, to give up
+all hope of a future existence.  But I cannot
+give up praying for my son."
+
+She added with a sort of stony grimness,
+colouring slightly, and in French, "_Ce n'est
+peut etre qu'une habitude._"  ("It may be only
+habit.")
+
+Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book.  She
+did not glance at her mother.
+
+"You and Victor are both profound believers,"
+she said.
+
+I communicated to them the news from their
+country which I had just read in a cafe.  For a
+whole minute we walked together fairly briskly
+in silence.  Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
+
+"There will be more trouble, more persecutions
+for this.  They may be even closing the
+University.  There is neither peace nor rest in
+Russia for one but in the grave.
+
+"Yes.  The way is hard," came from the daughter,
+looking straight before her at the Chain of Jura
+covered with snow, like a white wall closing the
+end of the street.  "But concord is not so very
+far off."
+
+"That is what my children think," observed Mrs.
+Haldin to me.
+
+I did not conceal my feeling that these were
+strange times to talk of concord.  Nathalie
+Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had
+thought very much on the subject, that the
+occidentals did not understand the situation.
+She was very calm and youthfully superior.
+
+"You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict
+of interests, as social contests are with you in
+Europe.  But it is not that at all.  It is
+something quite different."
+
+"It is quite possible that I don't understand,"
+I admitted.
+
+That propensity of lifting every problem from
+the plane of the understandable by means of some
+sort of mystic expression, is very Russian.  I
+knew her well enough to have discovered her
+scorn for all the practical forms of political
+liberty known to the western world.  I suppose
+one must be a Russian to understand Russian
+simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in
+which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless
+cynicism.  I think sometimes that the
+psychological secret of the profound difference
+of that people consists in this, that they
+detest life, the irremediable life of the earth
+as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with
+perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental
+value.  But this is a digression indeed. . . .
+
+I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they
+asked me to call in the afternoon.  At least
+Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
+Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner
+indulgently from the rear platform of the moving
+car.  The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
+softened in her grey eyes.
+
+Mr. Razumov's record, like the open book of
+fate, revives for me the memory of that day as
+something startlingly pitiless in its freedom
+from all forebodings.  Victor Haldin was still
+with the living, but with the living whose only
+contact with life is the expectation of death.
+He must have been already referring to the last
+of his earthly affections, the hours of that
+obstinate silence, which for him was to be
+prolonged into eternity.  That afternoon the
+ladies entertained a good many of their
+compatriots--more than was usual for them to
+receive at one time; and the drawing-room on the
+ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
+des Philosophes was very much crowded.
+
+I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss
+Haldin stood up too.  I took her hand and was
+moved to revert to that morning's conversation
+in the street.
+
+"Admitting that we occidentals do not understand
+the character of your. . . ."  I began.
+
+It was as if she had been prepared for me by
+some mysterious fore-knowledge.  She checked me
+gently--
+
+"Their impulses--their. . . " she sought the
+proper expression and found it, but in French. .
+." their _mouvements d'ame._"
+
+Her voice was not much above a whisper.
+
+"Very well," I said.  " But still we are looking
+at a conflict.  You say it is not a conflict of
+classes and not a conflict of interests.
+Suppose I admitted that.  Are antagonistic ideas
+then to be reconciled more easily--can they be
+cemented with blood and violence into that
+concord which you proclaim to be so near?"
+
+She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey
+eyes, without answering my reasonable question--
+my obvious, my unanswerable question.
+
+"It is inconceivable," I added, with something
+like annoyance.
+
+"Everything is inconceivable,"  she said.  "The
+whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic
+of ideas.  And yet the world exists to our
+senses, and we exist in it.  There must be a
+necessity superior to our conceptions.  It is a
+very miserable and a very false thing to belong
+to the majority.  We Russians shall find some
+better form of national freedom than an
+artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong
+because it is a conflict and contemptible
+because it is artificial.  It is left for us
+Russians to discover a better way."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window.
+She turned upon me the almost lifeless beauty of
+her face, and the living benign glance of her
+big dark eyes.
+
+"That's what my children think," she declared.
+
+"I suppose," I addressed Miss Haldin, "that you
+will be shocked if I tell you that I haven't
+understood--I won't say a single word;  I've
+understood all the words. . . .  But what can be
+this era of disembodied concord you are looking
+forward to.  Life is a thing of form.  It has
+its plastic shape and a definite intellectual
+aspect.  The most idealistic conceptions of love
+and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it
+were before they can be made understandable."
+
+I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful
+lips never stirred.  She smiled with her eyes
+only.  Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as
+the door, very amiable.
+
+"Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of
+my brother Victor.  It is not so.  He
+understands me better than I can understand him.
+ When he joins us and you come to know him you
+will see what an exceptional soul it is."  She
+paused.  "He is not a strong man in the
+conventional sense, you know," she added.  "But
+his character is without a flaw"
+
+"I believe that it will not be difficult for me
+to make friends with your brother Victor."
+
+"Don't expect to understand him quite," she
+said, a little maliciously.  "He is not at all--
+at all--western at bottom."
+
+And on this unnecessary warning I left the room
+with another bow in the doorway to Mrs. Haldin
+in her armchair by the window.  The shadow of
+autocracy all unperceived by me had already
+fallen upon the Boulevard des Philosophes, in
+the free, independent and democratic city of
+Geneva, where there is a quarter called "La
+Petite Russie."  Whenever two Russians come
+together, the shadow of autocracy is with them,
+tinging their thoughts, their views, their most
+intimate feelings, their private life, their
+public utterances--haunting the secret of their
+silences.
+
+What struck me next in the course of a week or
+so was the silence of these ladies.  I used to
+meet them walking in the public garden near the
+University.  They greeted me with their usual
+friendliness, but I could not help noticing
+their taciturnity.  By that time it was
+generally known that the assassin of M. de P---
+had been caught, judged, and executed.  So much
+had been declared officially to the news
+agencies.  But for the world at large he
+remained anonymous.  The official secrecy had
+withheld his name from the public.  I really
+cannot imagine for what reason.
+
+One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the
+main valley of the Bastions under the naked
+trees.
+
+"Mother is not very well," she explained.
+
+As Mrs.Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day's
+illness in her life, this indisposition was
+disquieting.  It was nothing definite, too.
+
+"I think she is fretting because we have not
+heard from my brother for rather a long time."
+
+"No news--good news," I said cheerfully, and we
+began to walk slowly side by side.
+
+"Not in Russia," she breathed out so low that I
+only just caught the words.  I looked at her
+with more attention.
+
+"You too are anxious? "
+
+She admitted after a moment of hesitation that
+she was.
+
+"It is really such a long time since we heard. .
+. ."
+
+And before I could offer the usual banal
+suggestions she confided in me.
+
+"Oh!  But it is much worse than that.  I wrote
+to a family we know in Petersburg.  They had not
+seen him for more than a month.  They thought he
+was already with us.  They were even offended a
+little that he should have left Petersburg
+without calling on them.  The husband of the
+lady went at once to his lodgings.  Victor had
+left there and they did not know his address."
+
+I remember her catching her breath rather
+pitifully.  Her brother had not been seen at
+lectures for a very long time either.  He only
+turned up now and then at the University gate to
+ask the porter for his letters.  And the
+gentleman friend was told that the student
+Haldin did not come to claim the last two
+letters for him.  But the police came to inquire
+if the student Haldin ever received any
+correspondence at the University and took them
+away.
+
+"My two last letters," she said.
+
+We faced each other.  A few snow-flakes
+fluttered under the naked boughs.  The sky was
+dark.
+
+"What do you think could have happened?"  I
+asked.
+
+Her shoulders moved slightly.
+
+"One can never tell--in Russia."
+
+I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon
+Russian lives in their submission or their
+revolt.  I saw it touch her handsome open face
+nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear
+eyes that shone upon me brilliantly grey in the
+murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
+
+"Let us move on," she said."  It is cold
+standing--to-day."
+
+She shuddered a little and stamped her little
+feet.  We moved briskly to the end of the alley
+and back to the great gates of the garden.
+
+"Have you told your mother? " I ventured to ask.
+
+"No.  Not yet.  I came out to walk off the
+impression of this letter."
+
+I heard a rustle of paper somewhere.  It came
+from her muff.  She had the letter with her in
+there.
+
+"What is it that you are afraid of?"  I asked.
+
+To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of
+political plots and conspiracies seem childish,
+crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.  I
+did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
+
+"For us--for my mother specially, what I am
+afraid of is incertitude.  People do disappear.
+Yes, they do disappear.  I leave you to imagine
+what it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--
+months--years!  This friend of ours has
+abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the
+police getting hold of the letters.  I suppose
+he was afraid of compromising himself.  He has a
+wife and children--and why should he, after all.
+. . .  Moreover, he is without influential
+connections and not rich.  What could he do?. .
+.  Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor
+mother.  She won't be able to bear it.  For my
+brother I am afraid of. . ." she became almost
+indistinct, "of anything."
+
+We were now near the gate opposite the theatre.
+She raised her voice.
+
+"But lost people do turn up even in Russia.  Do
+you know what my last hope is?  Perhaps the next
+thing we know, we shall see him walking into our
+rooms."
+
+I raised my hat and she passed out of the
+gardens, graceful and strong, after a slight
+movement of the head to me, her hands in the
+muff, crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
+
+On returning home I opened the newspaper I
+receive from London, and glancing down the
+correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams
+but the correspondence--the first thing that
+caught my eye was the name of Haldin.  Mr. de P--
+-'s death was no longer an actuality, but the
+enterprising correspondent was proud of having
+ferreted out some unofficial information about
+that fact of modern history.  He had got hold of
+Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of
+the midnight arrest in the street.  But the
+sensation from a journalistic point of view was
+already well in the past.  He did not allot to
+it more than twenty lines out of a full column.
+It was quite enough to give me a sleepless
+night.  I perceived that it would have been a
+sort of treason to let Miss Haldin come without
+preparation upon that journalistic discovery
+which would infallibly be reproduced on the
+morrow by French and Swiss newspapers.  I had a
+very bad time of it till the morning, wakeful
+with nervous worry and night-marish with the
+feeling of being mixed up with something
+theatrical and morbidly affected.  The
+incongruity of such a complication in those two
+women's lives was sensible to me all night in
+the form of absolute anguish.  It seemed due to
+their refined simplicity that it should remain
+concealed from them for ever.  Arriving at an
+unconscionably early hour at the door of their
+apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit
+an act of vandalism. . . .
+
+The middle-aged servant woman led me into the
+drawing-room where there was a duster on a chair
+and a broom leaning against the centre table.
+The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I
+had not written a letter instead of coming
+myself, and was thankful for the brightness of
+the day.  Miss Haldin in a plain black dress
+came lightly out of her mother's room with a
+fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
+
+I pulled the paper out of my pocket.  I did not
+imagine that a number of the _Standard_ could
+have the effect of Medusa's head.  Her face went
+stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs.  The
+most terrible thing was that being stony she
+remained alive.  One was conscious of her
+palpitating heart.  I hope she forgave me the
+delay of my clumsy circumlocution.  It was not
+very prolonged; she could not have kept so still
+from head to foot for more than a second or two;
+and then I heard her draw a breath.  As if the
+shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and
+affected the firmness of her muscles, the
+contours of her face seemed to have given way.
+She was frightfully altered.  She looked aged--
+ruined.  But only for a moment.  She said with
+decision--
+
+"I am going to tell my mother at once."
+
+"Would that be safe in her state?"  I objected.
+
+"What can be worse than the state she has been
+in for the last month?  We understand this in
+another way.  The crime is not at his door.
+Don't imagine I am defending him before you."
+
+She went to the bedroom door, then came back to
+ask me in a low murmur not to go till she
+returned.  For twenty interminable minutes not a
+sound reached me.  At last Miss Haldin came out
+and walked across the room with her quick light
+step.  When she reached the armchair she dropped
+into it heavily as if completely exhausted.
+
+Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear.
+She was sitting up in bed, and her immobility,
+her silence, were very alarming.  At last she
+lay down gently and had motioned her daughter
+away.
+
+"She will call me in presently," added Miss
+Haldin.  "I left a bell near the bed."
+
+I confess that my very real sympathy had no
+standpoint.  The Western readers for whom this
+story is written will understand what I mean.
+It was, if I may say so, the want of experience.
+ Death is a remorseless spoliator.  The anguish
+of irreparable loss is familiar to us all.
+There is no life so lonely as to be safe against
+that experience.  But the grief I had brought to
+these two ladies had gruesome associations.  It
+had the associations of bombs and gallows--a
+lurid, Russian colouring which made the
+complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
+
+I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not
+embarrassing me by an outward display of deep
+feeling.  I admired her for that wonderful
+command over herself, even while I was a little
+frightened at it.  It was the stillness of a
+great tension.  What if it should suddenly snap?
+ Even the door of Mrs. Haldin's room, with the
+old mother alone in there, had a rather awful
+aspect.
+
+Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--
+
+"I suppose you are wondering what my feelings
+are?"
+
+Essentially that was true.  It was that very
+wonder which unsettled my sympathy of a dense
+Occidental.  I could get hold of nothing but of
+some commonplace phrases, those futile phrases
+that give the measure of our impotence before
+each other's trials I mumbled something to the
+effect that, for the young, life held its hopes
+and compensations.  It held duties too--but of
+that I was certain it was not necessary to
+remind her.
+
+She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled
+at it nervously.
+
+"I am not likely to forget my mother," she said.
+ "We used to be three.  Now we are two--two
+women.  She's not so very old.  She may live
+quite a long time yet.  What have we to look for
+in the future ?  For what hope and what
+consolation?"
+
+"You must take a wider view," I said resolutely,
+thinking that with this exceptional creature
+this was the right note to strike.  She looked
+at me steadily for a moment, and then the tears
+she had been keeping down flowed unrestrained.
+She jumped up and stood in the window with her
+back to me.
+
+I slipped away without attempting even to
+approach her.  Next day I was told at the door
+that Mrs. Haldin was better.  The middle-aged
+servant remarked that a lot of people--Russians--
+had called that day, but Miss Haldin bad not
+seen anybody.  A fortnight later, when making my
+daily call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin
+sitting in her usual place by the window.
+
+At first one would have thought that nothing was
+changed.  I saw across the room the familiar
+profile, a little sharper in outline and
+overspread by a uniform pallor as might have
+been expected in an invalid.  But no disease
+could have accounted for the change in her black
+eyes, smiling no longer with gentle irony.  She
+raised them as she gave me her hand.  I observed
+the three weeks' old number of the _Standard_
+folded with the correspondence from Russia
+uppermost, lying on a little table by the side
+of the armchair.  Mrs. Haldin's voice was
+startlingly weak and colourless.  Her first
+words to me framed a question.
+
+"Has there been anything more in papers?"
+
+I released her long emaciated hand, shook my
+head negatively, and sat down.
+
+"The English press is wonderful.  Nothing can be
+kept secret from it, and all the world must
+hear.  Only our Russian news is not always easy
+to understand.  Not always easy. . . .  But
+English mothers do not look for news like that.
+. . ."
+
+She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it
+away again.  I said--
+
+"We too have had tragic times in our history."
+
+"A long time ago.  A very long time ago."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There are nations that have made their bargain
+with fate," said Miss Haldin, who had approached
+us.  "We need not envy them."
+
+"Why this scorn?"  I asked gently.  "It may be
+that our bargain was not a very lofty one.  But
+the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
+hallowed by the price."
+
+Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out
+of the window for a time, with that new, sombre,
+extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so
+completely made another woman of her.
+
+"That Englishman, this correspondent," she
+addressed me suddenly, "do you think it is
+possible that he knew my son?"
+
+To this strange question I could only say that
+it was possible of course.  She saw my surprise.
+
+"If one knew what sort of man he was one could
+perhaps write to him," she murmured.
+
+"Mother thinks," explained Miss Haldin, standing
+between us, with one hand resting on the back of
+my chair, "that my poor brother perhaps did not
+try to save himself."
+
+I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic
+consternation, but Miss Haldin was looking down
+calmly at her mother.  The latter said--
+
+"We do not know the address of any of his
+friends.  Indeed, we know nothing of his
+Petersburg comrades.  He had a multitude of
+young friends, only he never spoke much of them.
+ One could guess that they were his disciples
+and that they idolized him.  But he was so
+modest.  One would think that with so many
+devoted. . . ."
+
+She averted her head again and looked down the
+Boulevard des Philosophes, a singularly arid and
+dusty thoroughfare, where nothing could be seen
+at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a
+pinafore hopping on one leg, and in the distance
+a workman wheeling a bicycle.
+
+"Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was
+found a Judas," she whispered as if to herself,
+but with the evident intention to be heard by me.
+
+The Russian visitors assembled in little knots,
+conversed amongst themselves meantime, in low
+murmurs, and with brief glances in our
+direction.  It was a great contrast to the usual
+loud volubility of these gatherings.  Miss
+Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
+
+"People will come," she said.  "We cannot shut
+the door in their faces."
+
+While I was putting on my overcoat she began to
+talk to me of her mother.  Poor Mrs. Haldin was
+fretting after more news.  She wanted to go on
+hearing about her unfortunate son.  She could
+not make up her mind to abandon him quietly to
+the dumb unknown.  She would persist in pursuing
+him in there through the long days of motionless
+silence face to face with the empty Boulevard
+des Philosophes.  She could not understand why
+he had not escaped--as so many other
+revolutionists and conspirators had managed to
+escape in other instances of that kind.  It was
+really inconceivable that the means of secret
+revolutionary organisations should have failed
+so inexcusably to preserve her son.  But in
+reality the inconceivable that staggered her
+mind was nothing but the cruel audacity of Death
+passing over her head to strike at that young
+and precious heart.
+
+Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look,
+handed me my hat.  I understood from her that
+the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
+simple idea that her son must have perished
+because he did not want to be saved.  It could
+not have been that he despaired of his country's
+future.  That was impossible.  Was it possible
+that his mother and sister had not known how to
+merit his confidence; and that, after having
+done what he was compelled to do, his spirit
+became crushed by an intolerable doubt, his mind
+distracted by a sudden mistrust.
+
+I was very much shocked by this piece of
+ingenuity.
+
+"Our three lives were like that!"  Miss Haldin
+twined the fingers of both her hands together in
+demonstration, then separated them slowly,
+looking straight into my face.  "That's what
+poor mother found to torment herself and me
+with, for all the years to come," added the
+strange girl.  At that moment her indefinable
+charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
+passion and stoicism.  I imagined what her life
+was likely to be by the side of Mrs. Haldin's
+terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed
+idea.  But my concern was reduced to silence by
+my ignorance of her modes of feeling.
+Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle
+for our complex Western natures.  But Miss
+Haldin probably was too simple to suspect my
+embarrassment.  She did not wait for me to say
+anything, but as if reading my thoughts on my
+face she went on courageously--
+
+"At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants
+say; then she began to think and she will go on
+now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
+strain.  You see yourself how cruel that is. . .
+."
+
+I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I
+agreed with her that it would be deplorable in
+the highest degree.  She took an anxious breath.
+
+"But all these strange details in the English
+paper," she exclaimed suddenly.  "What is the
+meaning of them?  I suppose they are true?  But
+is it not terrible that my poor brother should
+be caught wandering alone, as if in despair,
+about the streets at night. . . ."
+
+We stood so close to each other in the dark
+anteroom that I could see her biting her lower
+lip to suppress a dry sob.  After a short pause
+she said--
+
+"I suggested to mother that he may have been
+betrayed by some false friend or simply by some
+cowardly creature.  It may be easier for her to
+believe that."
+
+I understood now the poor woman's whispered
+allusion to Judas.
+
+"It may be easier," I admitted, admiring
+inwardly the directness and the subtlety of the
+girl's outlook.  She was dealing with life as it
+was made for her by the political conditions of
+her country.  She faced cruel realities, not
+morbid imaginings of her own making.  I could
+not defend myself from a certain feeling of
+respect when she added simply--
+
+"Time they say can soften every sort of
+bitterness.  But I cannot believe that it has
+any power over remorse.  It is better that
+mother should think some person guilty of
+Victor's death, than that she should connect it
+with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of
+her own."
+
+"But you, yourself, don't suppose that. . . ."
+I began.
+
+She compressed her lips and shook her head.  She
+harboured no evil thoughts against any one, she
+declared--and perhaps nothing that happened was
+unnecessary.  On these words, pronounced low and
+sounding mysterious in the half obscurity of the
+ante-room, we parted with an expressive and warm
+handshake.  The grip of her strong, shapely hand
+had a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite
+virility.  I do not know why she should have
+felt so friendly to me.  It may be that she
+thought I understood her much better than I was
+able to do.  The most precise of her sayings
+seemed always to me to have enigmatical
+prolongations vanishing somewhere beyond my
+reach.  I am reduced to suppose that she
+appreciated my attention and my silence.  The
+attention she could see was quite sincere, so
+that the silence could not be suspected of
+coldness.  It seemed to satisfy her.  And it is
+to be noted that if she confided in me it was
+clearly not with the expectation of receiving
+advice, for which, indeed she never asked.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Our daily relations were interrupted at this
+period for something like a fortnight.  I had to
+absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva.  On my
+return I lost no time in directing my steps up
+the Boulevard des Philosophes.
+
+Through the open door of the drawing-room I was
+annoyed to hear a visitor holding forth steadily
+in an unctuous deep voice.
+
+Mrs. Haldin's armchair by the window stood
+empty.  On the sofa, Nathalie Haldin raised her
+charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting
+accompanied by the merest hint of a welcoming
+smile.  But she made no movement.  With her
+strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of
+her mourning dress she faced a man who presented
+to me a robust back covered with black
+broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep
+voice.  He turned his head sharply over his
+shoulder, but only for a moment.
+
+"Ah! your English friend.  I know.  I know.
+That's nothing."
+
+He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall
+silk hat stood on the floor by the side of his
+chair.  Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he
+went on with his discourse, precipitating his
+delivery a little more.
+
+"I have never changed the faith I held while
+wandering in the forests and bogs of Siberia.
+It sustained me then--it sustains me now.  The
+great Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--
+and the cause of their collapse will be very
+simple.  They will exhaust themselves struggling
+against their proletariat.  In Russia it is
+different.  In Russia we have no classes to
+combat each other, one holding the power of
+wealth, and the other mighty with the strength
+of numbers.  We have only an unclean bureaucracy
+in the face of a people as great and as
+incorruptible as the ocean.  No, we have no
+classes.  But we have the Russian woman.  The
+admirable Russian woman!  I receive most
+remarkable letters signed by women.  So elevated
+in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble
+ardour of service!  The greatest part of our
+hopes rests on women.  I behold their thirst for
+knowledge.  It is admirable.  Look how they
+absorb, how they are making it their own.  It is
+miraculous.  But what is knowledge? . . .  I
+understand that you have not been studying
+anything especially--medicine for instance.  No?
+ That's right.  Had I been honoured by being
+asked to advise you on the use of your time when
+you arrived here I would have been strongly
+opposed to such a course.  Knowledge in itself
+is mere dross."
+
+He had one of those bearded Russian faces
+without shape, a mere appearance of flesh and
+hair with not a single feature having any sort
+of character.  His eyes being hidden by the dark
+glasses there was an utter absence of all
+expression.  I knew him by sight.  He was a
+Russian refugee of mark.  All Geneva knew his
+burly black-coated figure.  At one time all
+Europe was aware of the story of his life
+written by himself and translated into seven or
+more languages.  In his youth he had led an
+idle, dissolute life.  Then a society girl he
+was about to marry died suddenly and thereupon
+he abandoned the world of fashion, and began to
+conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after
+that, his native autocracy took good care that
+the usual things should happen to him.  He was
+imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch
+of his life, and condemned to work in mines,
+with common criminals.  The great success of his
+book, however, was the chain.
+
+I do not remember now the details of the weight
+and length of the fetters riveted on his limbs
+by an "Administrative" order, but it was in the
+number of pounds and the thickness of links an
+appalling assertion of the divine right of
+autocracy.  Appalling and futile too, because
+this big man managed to carry off that simple
+engine of government with him into the woods.
+The sensational clink of these fetters is heard
+all through the chapters describing his escape--
+a subject of wonder to two continents.  He had
+begun by concealing himself successfully from
+his guard in a hole on a river bank.  It was the
+end of the day; with infinite labour he managed
+to free one of his legs.  Meantime night fell.
+He was going to begin on his other leg when he
+was overtaken by a terrible misfortune.  He
+dropped his file.
+
+All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file
+had its pathetic history.  It was given to him
+unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced
+girl.  The poor creature had come out to the
+mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a
+delicate young man, a mechanic and a social
+democrat, with broad cheekbones and large
+staring eyes.  She had worked her way across
+half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to
+be near him, and, as it seems, with the hope of
+helping him to escape.  But she arrived too
+late.  Her lover had died only a week before.
+
+Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the
+history of ideas in Russia, the file came into
+his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
+resolution to regain his liberty.  When it
+slipped through his fingers it was as if it had
+gone straight into the earth.  He could by no
+manner of means put his hand on it again in the
+dark.  He groped systematically in the loose
+earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was
+passing meantime, the precious night on which he
+counted to get away into the forests, his only
+chance of escape.  For a moment he was tempted
+by despair to give up; but recalling the quiet,
+sad face of the heroic girl, he felt profoundly
+ashamed of his weakness.  She had selected him
+for the gift of liberty and he must show himself
+worthy of the favour conferred by her feminine,
+indomitable soul.  It appeared to be a sacred
+trust.  To fail would have been a sort of
+treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice
+and womanly love.
+
+There are in his book whole pages of self-
+analysis whence emerges like a white figure from
+a dark confused sea the conviction of woman's
+spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed
+since in several volumes.  His first tribute to
+it, the great act of his conversion, was his
+extraordinary existence in the endless forests
+of the Okhotsk Province, with the loose end of
+the chain wound about his waist.  A strip torn
+off his convict shirt secured the end firmly.
+Other strips fastened it at intervals up his
+left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent
+the slack links from getting hooked in the
+bushes.  He became very fierce.  He developed an
+unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and
+hunted existence.  He learned to creep into
+villages without betraying his presence by
+anything more than an occasional faint jingle.
+He broke into outhouses with an axe he managed
+to purloin in a wood-cutters' camp.  In the
+deserted tracts of country he lived on wild
+berries and hunted for honey.  His clothing
+dropped off him gradually.  His naked tawny
+figure glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with
+a cloud of mosquitoes and flies hovering about
+the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through
+whole districts.  His temper grew savage as the
+days went by, and he was glad to discover that
+that there was so much of a brute in him.  He
+had nothing else to put his trust in.  For it
+was as though there had been two human beings
+indissolubly joined in that enterprise.  The
+civilized man, the enthusiast of advanced
+humanitarian ideals thirsting for the triumph of
+spiritual love and political liberty; and the
+stealthy, primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in
+the preservation of his freedom from day to day,
+like a tracked wild beast.
+
+The wild beast was making its way instinctively
+eastward to the Pacific coast, and the civilised
+humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
+watched the proceedings with awe.  Through all
+these weeks he could never make up his mind to
+appeal to human compassion.  In the wary
+primeval savage this shyness might have been
+natural, but the other too, the civilized
+creature, the thinker, the escaping "political"
+had developed an absurd form of morbid
+pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
+originating perhaps in the physical worry and
+discomfort of the chain.  These links, he
+fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind.
+ It was a repugnant and suggestive load.  Nobody
+could feel any pity at the disgusting sight of a
+man escaping with a broken chain.  His
+imagination became affected by his fetters in a
+precise, matter-of-fact manner.  It seemed to
+him impossible that people could resist the
+temptation of fastening the loose end to a
+staple in the wall while they went for the
+nearest police official.  Crouching in holes or
+hidden in thickets, he had tried to read the
+faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in
+the clearings or passing along the paths within
+a foot or two of his eyes. His feeling was that
+no man on earth could be trusted with the
+temptation of the chain.
+
+One day, however, he chanced to come upon a
+solitary woman.  It was on an open slope of
+rough grass outside the forest.  She sat on the
+bank of a narrow stream; she had a red
+handkerchief on her head and a small basket was
+lying on the ground near her hand.  At a little
+distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins,
+with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by
+birch trees and looking bright as glass in the
+twilight.  He approached her silently, his
+hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel
+in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig
+in his tangled hair, in his matted beard;
+bunches of rags he had wound round the links
+fluttered from his waist.  A faint clink of his
+fetters made the woman turn her head.  Too
+terrified by this savage apparition to jump up
+or even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted
+to faint. . . .  Expecting nothing less than to
+be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes
+with her hands to avoid the sight of the
+descending axe.  When at last she found courage
+to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man
+sitting on the bank six feet away from her.  His
+thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked legs; the
+long beard covered the knees on which he rested
+his chin; all these clasped, folded limbs, the
+bare shoulders, the wild head with red staring
+eyes, shook and trembled violently while the
+bestial creature was making efforts to speak.
+It was six weeks since he had heard the sound of
+his own voice.  It seemed as though he had lost
+the faculty of speech.  He had become a dumb and
+despairing brute, till the woman's sudden,
+unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of
+her feminine compassion discovering the complex
+misery of the man under the terrifying aspect of
+the monster, restored him to the ranks of
+humanity.  This point of view is presented in
+his book, with a very effective eloquence.  She
+ended, he says, by shedding tears over him,
+sacred, redeeming tears, while he also wept with
+joy in the manner of a converted sinner.
+Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait
+patiently (a police patrol was expected in the
+Settlement) she went away towards the houses,
+promising to return at night.
+
+As if providentially appointed to be the newly
+wedded wife of the village blacksmith, the woman
+persuaded her husband to come out with her,
+bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a
+chisel, a small anvil. . . .  "My fetters"--the
+book says--" were struck off on the banks of the
+stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an
+athletic, taciturn young man of the people,
+kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a
+liberating genius stood by with clasped hands."
+Obviously a symbolic couple.  At the same time
+they furnished his regained humanity with some
+decent clothing, and put heart into the new man
+by the information that the seacoast of the
+Pacific was only a very few miles away.  It
+could be seen, in fact, from the top of the next
+ridge. . . .
+
+The rest of his escape does not lend itself to
+mystic treatment and symbolic interpretation.
+He ended by finding his way to the West by the
+Suez Canal route in the usual manner.  Reaching
+the shores of South Europe he sat down to write
+his autobiography--the great literary success of
+its year.  This book was followed by other books
+written with the declared purpose of elevating
+humanity.  In these works he preached generally
+the cult of the woman.  For his own part he
+practised it under the rites of special devotion
+to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame
+de S---, a lady of advanced views, no longer
+very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife
+of a now dead and forgotten diplomat.  Her loud
+pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern
+thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered
+(like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the
+republican territory of Geneva.  Driving through
+the streets in her big landau she exhibited to
+the indifference of the natives and the stares
+of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure
+of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big
+gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short
+veil of black lace, which, coming down no
+further than her vividly red lips, resembled a
+mask.  Usually the "heroic fugitive" (this name
+was bestowed upon him in a review of the English
+edition of his book)--the " heroic fugitive "
+accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded
+and darkly bespectacled, not by her side, but
+opposite her, with his back to the horses.
+Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the
+roomy carriage, their airings suggested a
+conscious public manifestation.  Or it may have
+been unconscious.  Russian simplicity often
+marches innocently on the edge of cynicism for
+some lofty purpose.  But it is a vain enterprise
+for sophisticated Europe to try and understand
+these doings.  Considering the air of gravity
+extending even to the physiognomy of the
+coachman and the action of the showy horses,
+this quaint display might have possessed a
+mystic significance, but to the corrupt
+frivolity of a Western mind, like my own, it
+seemed hardly decent.
+
+However, it is not becoming for an obscure
+teacher of languages to criticize a "heroic
+fugitive" of worldwide celebrity.  I was aware
+from hearsay that he was an industrious busy-
+body, hunting up his compatriots in hotels, in
+private lodgings, and--I was told--conferring
+upon them the honour of his notice in public
+gardens when a suitable opening presented
+itself.  I was under the impression that after a
+visit or two, several months before, he had
+given up the ladies Haldin--no doubt
+reluctantly, for there could be no question of
+his being a determined person.  It was perhaps
+to be expected that he should reappear again on
+this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a
+revolutionist, to say the right thing, to strike
+the true, perhaps a comforting, note.  But I did
+not like to see him sitting there.  I trust that
+an unbecoming jealousy of my privileged position
+had nothing to do with it.  I made no claim to a
+special standing for my silent friendship.
+Removed by the difference of age and nationality
+as if into the sphere of another existence, I
+produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb
+helpless ghost, of an anxious immaterial thing
+that could only hover about without the power to
+protect or guide by as much as a whisper.  Since
+Miss Haldin with her sure instinct had refrained
+from introducing me to the burly celebrity, I
+would have retired quietly and returned later
+on, had I not met a peculiar expression in her
+eyes which I interpreted as a request to stay,
+with the view, perhaps, of shortening an
+unwelcome visit.
+
+He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on
+his knees.
+
+"We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna.  To-
+day I have called only to mark those feelings
+towards your honoured mother and yourself, the
+nature of which you cannot doubt.  I needed no
+urging, but Eleanor--Madame de S--- herself has
+in a way sent me.  She extends to you the hand
+of feminine fellowship.  There is positively in
+all the range of human sentiments no joy and no
+sorrow that woman cannot understand, elevate,
+and spiritualize by her interpretation.  That
+young man newly arrived from St. Petersburg, I
+have mentioned to you, is already under the
+charm."
+
+At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly.  I
+was glad.  He did not evidently expect anything
+so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
+back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland
+curiosity.  At last, recollecting himself, he
+stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
+with great adroitness.
+
+"How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have
+kept aloof so long, from what after all is--let
+disparaging tongues say what they like--a unique
+centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to
+shape a high conception of our future?  In the
+case of your honoured mother I understand in a
+measure.  At her age new ideas--new faces are
+not perhaps. . . .  But you!  Was it mistrust--
+or indifference?  You must come out of your
+reserve.  We Russians have no right to be
+reserved with each other.  In our circumstances
+it is almost a crime against humanity.  The
+luxury of private grief is not for us.  Nowadays
+the devil is not combated by prayers and
+fasting.  And what is fasting after all but
+starvation.  You must not starve yourself,
+Natalia Victorovna.  Strength is what we want.
+Spiritual strength, I mean.  As to the other
+kind, what could withstand us Russians if we
+only put it forth?  Sin is different in our day,
+and the way of salvation for pure souls is
+different too.  It is no longer to be found in
+monasteries but in the world, in the. . . ."
+
+The deep sound seemed to rise from under the
+floor, and one felt steeped in it to the lips.
+Miss Haldin's interruption resembled the effort
+of a drowning person to keep above water.  She
+struck in with an accent of impatience--
+
+"But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don't mean to retire
+into a monastery.  Who would look for salvation
+there?"
+
+"I spoke figuratively," he boomed.
+
+"Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too.
+But sorrow is sorrow and pain is pain in the old
+way.  They make their demands upon people.  One
+has got to face them the best way one can.  I
+know that the blow which has fallen upon us so
+unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a
+people.  You may rest assured that I don't
+forget that.  But just now I have to think of my
+mother.  How can you expect me to leave her to
+herself. . . ?"
+
+"That is putting it in a very crude way," he
+protested in his great effortless voice.
+
+Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to
+die out.
+
+"And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange
+people.  The idea is distasteful for me; and I
+do not know what else you may mean?"
+
+He towered before her, enormous, deferential,
+cropped as close as a convict and this big
+pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild
+head with matted locks peering through parted
+bushes, glimpses of naked, tawny limbs slinking
+behind the masses of sodden foliage under a
+cloud of flies and mosquitoes.  It was an
+involuntary tribute to the vigour of his
+writing.  Nobody could doubt that he had
+wandered in Siberian forests, naked and girt
+with a chain.  The black broadcloth coat
+invested his person with a character of austere
+decency--something recalling a missionary.
+
+"Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?"
+he uttered solemnly.  "I want you to be a
+fanatic."
+
+"A fanatic?"
+
+"Yes.  Faith alone won't do."
+
+His voice dropped to a still lower tone.  He
+raised for a moment one thick arm; the other
+remained hanging down against his thigh, with
+the fragile silk hat at the end.
+
+"I shall tell you now something which I entreat
+you to ponder over carefully.  Listen, we need a
+force that would move heaven and earth--nothing
+less."
+
+The profound, subterranean note of this "nothing
+less" made one shudder, almost, like the deep
+muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
+
+"And are we to find that force in the salon of
+Madame de S---?  Excuse me, Peter Ivanovitch, if
+I permit myself to doubt it.  Is not that lady a
+woman of the great world, an aristocrat?"
+
+"Prejudice!"  he cried.  "You astonish me.  And
+suppose she was all that!  She is also a woman
+of flesh and blood.  There is always something
+to weigh down the spiritual side in all of us.
+But to make of it a reproach is what I did not
+expect from you.  No!  I did not expect that.
+One would think you have listened to some
+malevolent scandal."
+
+"I have heard no gossip, I assure you.  In our
+province how could we?  But the world speaks of
+her.  What can there be in common in a lady of
+that sort and an obscure country girl like me?"
+
+"She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and
+peerless spirit," he broke in.  "Her charm--no,
+I shall not speak of her charm.  But, of course,
+everybody who approaches her falls under the
+spell. . . .  Contradictions vanish, trouble
+falls away from one. . . .  Unless I am mistaken-
+-but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters-
+-you are troubled in your soul, Natalia
+Victorovna."
+
+Miss Haldin's clear eyes looked straight at his
+soft enormous face; I received the impression
+that behind these dark spectacles of his he
+could be as impudent as he chose.
+
+"Only the other evening walking back to town
+from Chateau Borel with our latest interesting
+arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the
+powerful soothing influence--I may say
+reconciling influence. . . .  There he was, all
+these kilometres along the shores of the lake,
+silent, like a man who has been shown the way of
+peace.  I could feel the leaven working in his
+soul, you understand.  For one thing he listened
+to me patiently.  I myself was inspired that
+evening by the firm and exquisite genius of
+Eleanor--Madame de S---, you know.  It was a
+full moon and I could observe his face.  I
+cannot be deceived. . . ."
+
+Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Well!  I will think of what you said, Peter
+Ivanovitch.  I shall try to call as soon as I
+can leave mother for an hour or two safely."
+
+Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at
+the concession.  He snatched her right hand with
+such fervour that I thought he was going to
+press it to his lips or his breast.  But he only
+held it by the finger-tips in his great paw and
+shook it a little up and down while he delivered
+his last volley of words.
+
+"That's right.  That's right.  I haven't
+obtained your full confidence as yet, Natalia
+Victorovna, but that will come.  All in good
+time.  The sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be
+without importance. . . .  It's simply
+impossible.  And no woman can remain sitting on
+the steps.  Flowers, tears, applause--that has
+had its time; it's a mediaeval conception.  The
+arena, the arena itself is the place for women!"
+
+He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if
+giving it to her for a gift, and remained still,
+his head bowed in dignified submission before
+her femininity.
+
+"The arena! . . .  You must descend into the
+arena, Natalia."
+
+He made one step backwards, inclined his
+enormous body, and was gone swiftly.  The door
+fell to behind him.  But immediately the
+powerful resonance of his voice was heard
+addressing in the ante-room the middle-aged
+servant woman who was letting him out.  Whether
+he exhorted her too to descend into the arena I
+cannot tell.  The thing sounded like a lecture,
+and the slight crash of the outer door cut it
+short suddenly.
+
+
+III
+
+
+We remained looking at each other for a time."
+
+"Do you know who he is?"
+
+Miss Haldin, coming forward, put this question
+to me in English.
+
+I took her offered hand.
+
+"Everybody knows.  He is a revolutionary
+feminist, a great writer, if you like, and--how
+shall I say it--the--the familiar guest of
+Madame de S---'s mystic revolutionary salon."
+
+Miss Haldin passed her hand over her forehead.
+
+"You know, he was with me for more than an hour
+before you came in.  I was so glad mother was
+lying down.  She has many nights without sleep,
+and then sometimes in the middle of the day she
+gets a rest of several hours.  It is sheer
+exhaustion--but still, I am thankful. . . .  If
+it were not for these intervals. . . ."
+
+She looked at me and, with that extraordinary
+penetration which used to disconcert me, shook
+her head.
+
+"No.  She would not go mad."
+
+"My dear young lady," I cried, by way of
+protest, the more shocked because in my heart I
+was far from thinking Mrs. Haldin quite sane.
+
+"You don't know what a fine, lucid intellect
+mother had," continued Nathalie Haldin, with her
+calm, clear-eyed simplicity, which seemed to me
+always to have a quality of heroism.
+
+"I am sure. . . ."  I murmured.
+
+"I darkened mother's room and came out here.
+I've wanted for so long to think quietly."
+
+She paused, then, without giving any sign of
+distress, added, "It's so difficult," and looked
+at me with a strange fixity, as if watching for
+a sign of dissent or surprise.
+
+I gave neither.  I was irresistibly impelled to
+say--
+
+"The visit from that gentleman has not made it
+any easier, I fear."
+
+Miss Haldin stood before me with a peculiar
+expression in her eyes.
+
+"I don't pretend to understand completely.  Some
+guide one must have, even if one does not wholly
+give up the direction of one's conduct to him.
+I am an inexperienced girl, but I am not
+slavish, There has been too much of that in
+Russia.  Why should I not listen to him?  There
+is no harm in having one's thoughts directed.
+But I don't mind confessing to you that I have
+not been completely candid with Peter
+Ivanovitch.  I don't quite know what prevented
+me at the moment. . . ."
+
+She walked away suddenly from me to a distant
+part of the room; but it was only to open and
+shut a drawer in a bureau.  She returned with a
+piece of paper in her hand.  It was thin and
+blackened with close handwriting.  It was
+obviously a letter.
+
+"I wanted to read you the very words," she said.
+ "This is one of my poor brother's letters.  He
+never doubted.  How could he doubt?  They make
+only such a small handful, these miserable
+oppressors, before the unanimous will of our
+people."
+
+"Your brother believed in the power of a
+people's will to achieve anything?"
+
+"It was his religion," declared Miss Haldin.
+
+I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
+
+"Of course the will must be awakened, inspired,
+concentrated," she went on.  "That is the true
+task of real agitators.  One has got to give up
+one's life to it.  The degradation of servitude,
+the absolutist lies must be uprooted and swept
+out.  Reform is impossible.  There is nothing to
+reform.  There is no legality, there are no
+institutions.  There are only arbitrary decrees.
+ There is only a handful of cruel--perhaps blind-
+-officials against a nation."
+
+The letter rustled slightly in her hand.  I
+glanced down at the flimsy blackened pages whose
+very handwriting seemed cabalistic,
+incomprehensible to the experience of Western
+Europe.
+
+"Stated like this," I confessed, "the problem
+seems simple enough.  But I fear I shall not see
+it solved.  And if you go back to Russia I know
+that I shall not see you again.  Yet once more I
+say: go back!  Don't suppose that I am thinking
+of your preservation.  No!  I know that you will
+not be returning to personal safety.  But I had
+much rather think of you in danger there than
+see you exposed to what may be met here."
+
+"I tell you what," said Miss Haldin, after a
+moment of reflection.  "I believe that you hate
+revolution; you fancy it's not quite honest.
+You belong to a people which has made a bargain
+with fate and wouldn't like to be rude to it.
+But we have made no bargain.  It was never
+offered to us--so much liberty for so much hard
+cash.  You shrink from the idea of revolutionary
+action for those you think well of as if it were
+something--how shall I say it--not quite decent."
+
+I bowed my head.
+
+"You are quite right," I said.  "I think very
+highly of you"
+
+"Don't suppose I do not know it," she began
+hurriedly.  "Your friendship has been very
+valuable."
+
+"I have done little else but look on."
+
+She was a little flushed under the eyes.
+
+"There is a way of looking on which is valuable
+I have felt less lonely because of it.  It's
+difficult to explain."
+
+"Really?  Well, I too have felt less lonely.
+That's easy to explain, though.  But it won't go
+on much longer.  The last thing I want to tell
+you is this: in a real revolution--not a simple
+dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions-
+-in a real revolution the best characters do not
+come to the front.  A violent revolution falls
+into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of
+tyrannical hypocrites at first.  Afterwards
+comes the turn of all the pretentious
+intellectual failures of the time.  Such are the
+chiefs and the leaders.  You will notice that I
+have left out the mere rogues.  The scrupulous
+and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted
+natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may
+begin a movement--but it passes away from them.
+They are not the leaders of a revolution.  They
+are its victims: the victims of disgust, of
+disenchantment--often of remorse.  Hopes
+grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured--that
+is the definition of revolutionary success.
+There have been in every revolution hearts
+broken by such successes.  But enough of that.
+My meaning is that I don't want you to be a
+victim."
+
+"If I could believe all you have said I still
+wouldn't think of myself," protested Miss
+Haldin.  "I would take liberty from any hand as
+a hungry man would snatch at a piece of bread.
+The true progress must begin after.  And for
+that the right men shall be found.  They are
+already amongst us.  One comes upon them in
+their obscurity, unknown, preparing themselves.
+. . ."
+
+She spread out the letter she had kept in her
+hand all the time, and looking down at it--
+
+"Yes!  One comes upon such men!" she repeated,
+and then read out the words, "Unstained, lofty,
+and solitary existences."
+
+Folding up the letter, while I looked at her
+interrogatively, she explained--
+
+"These are the words which my brother applies to
+a young man he came to know in St. Petersburg.
+An intimate friend, I suppose.  It must be.  His
+is the only name my brother mentions in all his
+correspondence with me.  Absolutely the only
+one, and--would you believe it?--the man is
+here.  He arrived recently in Geneva."
+
+"Have you seen him?"  I inquired.  "But, of
+course; you must have seen him."
+
+"No!  No!  I haven't!  I didn't know he was
+here.  It's Peter Ivanovitch himself who told
+me.  You have heard him yourself mentioning a
+new arrival from Petersburg. . . .  Well, that
+is the man of 'unstained, lofty, and solitary
+existence.'  My brother's friend!"
+
+"Compromised politically, I suppose," I remarked.
+
+"I don't know.  Yes.  It must be so.  Who knows!
+ Perhaps it was this very friendship with my
+brother which. . . .  But no!  It is scarcely
+possible.  Really, I know nothing except what
+Peter Ivanovitch told me of him.  He has brought
+a letter of introduction from Father Zosim--you
+know, the priest-democrat; you have heard of
+Father Zosim?"
+
+"Oh yes.  The famous Father Zosim was staying
+here in Geneva for some two months about a year
+ago," I said.  " When he left here he seems to
+have disappeared from the world."
+
+"It appears that he is at work in Russia again.
+Somewhere in the centre," Miss Haldin said, with
+animation.  "But please don't mention that to
+any one--don't let it slip from you, because if
+it got into the papers it would be dangerous for
+him."
+
+"You are anxious, of course, to meet that friend
+of your brother?"  I asked.
+
+Miss Haldin put the letter into her pocket.  Her
+eyes looked beyond my shoulder at the door of
+her mother's room.
+
+"Not here," she murmured.  "Not for the first
+time, at least."
+
+After a moment of silence I said good-bye, but
+Miss Haldin followed me into the ante-room,
+closing the door behind us carefully.
+
+"I suppose you guess where I mean to go
+tomorrow?"
+
+"You have made up your mind to call on Madame de
+S---."
+
+"Yes.  I am going to the Chateau Borel.  I must."
+
+"What do you expect to hear there?"  I asked, in
+a low voice.
+
+I wondered if she were not deluding herself with
+some impossible hope.  It was not that, however.
+
+"Only think--such a friend.  The only man
+mentioned in his letters.  He would have
+something to give me, if nothing more than a few
+poor words.  It may be something said and
+thought in those last days.  Would you want me
+to turn my back on what is left of my poor
+brother--a friend?"
+
+"Certainly not," I said.  "I quite understand
+your pious curiosity."
+
+"--Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences,"
+she murmured to herself.  "There are!  There
+are!  Well, let me question one of them about
+the loved dead."
+
+"How do you know, though, that you will meet him
+there?  Is he staying in the Chateau as a guest--
+do you suppose?"
+
+"I can't really tell," she confessed.  "He
+brought a written introduction from Father Zosim-
+-who, it seems, is a friend of Madame de S---
+too.  She can't be such a worthless woman after
+all."
+
+"There were all sorts of rumours afloat about
+Father Zosim himself," I observed.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Calumny is a weapon of our government too.
+It's well known.  Oh yes!  It is a fact that
+Father Zosim had the protection of the Governor-
+General of a certain province.  We talked on the
+subject with my brother two years ago, I
+remember.  But his work was good.  And now he is
+proscribed.  What better proof can one require.
+But no matter what that priest was or is.  All
+that cannot affect my brother's friend.  If I
+don't meet him there I shall ask these people
+for his address.  And, of course, mother must
+see him too, later on.  There is no guessing
+what he may have to tell us.  It would be a
+mercy if mamma could be soothed.  You know what
+she imagines.  Some explanation perhaps may be
+found, or--or even made up, perhaps.  It would
+be no sin."
+
+"Certainly," I said, "it would be no sin.  It
+may be a mistake, though."
+
+"I want her only to recover some of her old
+spirit.  While she is like this I cannot think
+of anything calmly."
+
+"Do you mean to invent some sort of pious fraud
+for your mother's sake?"  I asked.
+
+"Why fraud?  Such a friend is sure to know
+something of my brother in these last days.  He
+could tell us. . . .  There is something in the
+facts which will not let me rest.  I am certain
+he meant to join us abroad--that he had some
+plans--some great patriotic action in view; not
+only for himself, but for both of us.  I trusted
+in that.  I looked forward to the time!  Oh!
+with such hope and impatience.  I could have
+helped.  And now suddenly this appearance of
+recklessness--as if he had not cared. . . ."
+
+She remained silent for a time, then obstinately
+she concluded--
+
+"I want to know. . . ."
+
+Thinking it over, later on, while I walked
+slowly away from the Boulevard des Philosophes,
+I asked myself critically, what precisely was it
+that she wanted to know?  What I had heard of
+her history was enough to give me a clue.  In
+the educational establishment for girls where
+Miss Haldin finished her studies she was looked
+upon rather unfavourably.  She was suspected of
+holding independent views on matters settled by
+official teaching.  Afterwards, when the two
+ladies returned to their country place, both
+mother and daughter, by speaking their minds
+openly on public events, had earned for
+themselves a reputation of liberalism.  The
+three-horse trap of the district police-captain
+began to be seen frequently in their village.
+"I must keep an eye on the peasants"--so he
+explained his visits up at the house.  "Two
+lonely ladies must be looked after a little."
+He would inspect the walls as though he wanted
+to pierce them with his eyes, peer at the
+photographs, turn over the books in the drawing-
+room negligently, and after the usual
+refreshments, would depart.  But the old priest
+of the village came one evening in the greatest
+distress and agitation, to confess that he--the
+priest--had been ordered to watch and ascertain
+in other ways too (such as using his spiritual
+power with the servants) all that was going on
+in the house, and especially in respect of the
+visitors these ladies received, who they were,
+the length of their stay, whether any of them
+were strangers to that part of the country, and
+so on.  The poor, simple old man was in an agony
+of humiliation and terror.  "I came to warn you.
+ Be cautious in your conduct, for the love of
+God.  I am burning with shame, but there is no
+getting out from under the net.  I shall have to
+tell them what I see, because if I did not there
+is my deacon.  He would make the worst of things
+to curry favour.  And then my son-in-law, the
+husband of my Parasha, who is a writer in the
+Government Domain office; they would soon kick
+him out--and maybe send him away somewhere."
+The old man lamented the necessities of the
+times--"when people do not agree somehow"  and
+wiped his eyes.  He did not wish to spend the
+evening of his days with a shaven head in the
+penitent's cell of some monastery--"and
+subjected to all the severities of
+ecclesiastical discipline; for they would show
+no mercy to an old man," he groaned.  He became
+almost hysterical, and the two ladies, full of
+commiseration, soothed him the best they could
+before they let him go back to his cottage.
+But, as a matter of fact, they had very few
+visitors.  The neighbours--some of them old
+friends--began to keep away; a few from
+timidity, others with marked disdain, being
+grand people that came only for the summer--Miss
+Haldin explained to me--aristocrats,
+reactionaries.  It was a solitary existence for
+a young girl.  Her relations with her mother
+were of the tenderest and most open kind; but
+Mrs. Haldin had seen the experiences of her own
+generation, its sufferings, its deceptions, its
+apostasies too.  Her affection for her children
+was expressed by the suppression of all signs of
+anxiety.  She maintained a heroic reserve.  To
+Nathalie Haldin, her brother with his Petersburg
+existence, not enigmatical in the least (there
+could be no doubt of what he felt or thought)
+but conducted a little mysteriously, was the
+only visible representative of a proscribed
+liberty.  All the significance of freedom, its
+indefinite promises, lived in their long
+discussions, which breathed the loftiest hope of
+action and faith in success.  Then, suddenly,
+the action, the hopes, came to an end with the
+details ferreted out by the English journalist.
+The concrete fact, the fact of his death
+remained! but it remained obscure in its deeper
+causes.  She felt herself abandoned without
+explanation.  But she did not suspect him.  What
+she wanted was to learn almost at any cost how
+she could remain faithful to his departed spirit.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Several days elapsed before I met Nathalie
+Haldin again.  I was crossing the place in front
+of the theatre when I made out her shapely
+figure in the very act of turning between the
+gate pillars of the unattractive public
+promenade of the Bastions.  She walked away from
+me, but I knew we should meet as she returned
+down the main alley--unless, indeed, she were
+going home.  In that case, I don't think I
+should have called on her yet.  My desire to
+keep her away from these people was as strong as
+ever, but I had no illusions as to my power.  I
+was but a Westerner, and it was clear that Miss
+Haldin would not, could not listen to my wisdom;
+and as to my desire of listening to her voice,
+it were better, I thought, not to indulge
+overmuch in that pleasure.  No, I should not
+have gone to the Boulevard des Philosophes; but
+when at about the middle of the principal alley
+I saw Miss Haldin coming towards me, I was too
+curious, and too honest, perhaps, to run away.
+
+There was something of the spring harshness in
+the air.  The blue sky was hard, but the young
+leaves clung like soft mist about the
+uninteresting range of trees; and the clear sun
+put little points of gold into the grey of Miss
+Haldin's frank eyes, turned to me with a
+friendly greeting.
+
+I inquired after the health of her mother.
+
+She had a slight movement of the shoulders and a
+little sad sigh.
+
+"But, you see, I did come out for a walk. . .for
+exercise, as you English say."
+
+I smiled approvingly, and she added an
+unexpected remark--
+
+" It is a glorious day."
+
+Her voice, slightly harsh, but fascinating with
+its masculine and bird-like quality, had the
+accent of spontaneous conviction.  I was glad of
+it.  It was as though she had become aware of
+her youth--for there was but little of spring-
+like glory in the rectangular railed space of
+grass and trees, framed visibly by the orderly
+roof-slopes of that town, comely without grace,
+and hospitable without sympathy.  In the very
+air through which she moved there was but little
+warmth; and the sky, the sky of a land without
+horizons, swept and washed clean by the April
+showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without
+elevation, narrowed suddenly by the ugly, dark
+wall of the Jura where, here and there, lingered
+yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow.
+All the glory of the season must have been
+within herself--and I was glad this feeling had
+come into her life, if only for a little time.
+
+"I am pleased to hear you say these words."  She
+gave me a quick look.  Quick, not stealthy.  If
+there was one thing of which she was absolutely
+incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity
+was expressed in the very rhythm of her walk.
+It was I who was looking at her covertly--if I
+may say so.  I knew where she had been, but I
+did not know what she had seen and heard in that
+nest of aristocratic conspiracies.  I use the
+word aristocratic, for want of a better term.
+The Chateau Borel, embowered in the trees and
+thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame
+in our day, like the residence of that other
+dangerous and exiled woman, Madame de Stael, in
+the Napoleonic era.  Only the Napoleonic
+despotism, the booted heir of the Revolution,
+which counted that intellectual woman for an
+enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite
+unlike the autocracy in mystic vestments,
+engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.
+And Madame de S--- was very far from resembling
+the gifted author of _Corinne_.  She made a
+great noise about being persecuted.  I don't
+know if she were regarded in certain circles as
+dangerous.  As to being watched, I imagine that
+the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a
+most distant observation.  It was in its
+exclusiveness an ideal abode for hatching
+superior plots--whether serious or futile.  But
+all this did not interest me.  I wanted to know
+the effect its extraordinary inhabitants and its
+special atmosphere had produced on a girl like
+Miss Haldin, so true, so honest, but so
+dangerously inexperienced!  Her unconsciously
+lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of
+mankind left her disarmed before her own
+impulses.  And there was also that friend of her
+brother, the significant new arrival from
+Russia. . . .  I wondered whether she had
+managed to meet him.
+
+We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.
+
+"You know," I attacked her suddenly, "if you
+don't intend telling me anything, you must say
+so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
+final.  But I won't play at delicacy.  I ask you
+point-blank for all the details."
+
+She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.
+
+"You are as curious as a child."
+
+"No.  I am only an anxious old man," I replied
+earnestly.
+
+She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain
+the degree of my anxiety or the number of my
+years.  My physiognomy has never been
+expressive, I believe, and as to my years I am
+not ancient enough as yet to be strikingly
+decrepit.  I have no long beard like the good
+hermit of a romantic ballad; my footsteps are
+not tottering, my aspect not that of a slow,
+venerable sage.  Those picturesque advantages
+are not mine.  I am old, alas, in a brisk,
+commonplace way.  And it seemed to me as though
+there were some pity for me in Miss Haldin's
+prolonged glance.  She stepped out a little
+quicker.
+
+"You ask for all the details.  Let me see.  I
+ought to remember them.  It was novel enough for
+a--a village girl like me."
+
+After a moment of silence she began by saying
+that the Chateau Borel was almost as neglected
+inside as outside.  It was nothing to wonder at,
+a Hamburg banker, I believe, retired from
+business, had it built to cheer his remaining
+days by the view of that lake whose precise,
+orderly, and well-to-do beauty must have been
+attractive to the unromantic imagination of a
+business man.  But he died soon.  His wife
+departed too (but only to Italy), and this house
+of moneyed ease, presumably unsaleable, had
+stood empty for several years.  One went to it
+up a gravel drive, round a large, coarse grass-
+plot, with plenty of time to observe the
+degradation of its stuccoed front.  Miss Haldin
+said that the impression was unpleasant.  It
+grew more depressing as one came nearer.
+
+She observed green stains of moss on the steps
+of the terrace.  The front door stood wide open.
+ There was no one about.  She found herself in a
+wide, lofty, and absolutely empty hall, with a
+good many doors.  These doors were all shut.  A
+broad, bare stone staircase faced her, and the
+effect of the whole was of an untenanted house.
+She stood still, disconcerted by the solitude,
+but after a while she became aware of a voice
+speaking continuously somewhere.
+
+"You were probably being observed all the time,"
+I suggested.  " There must have been eyes."
+
+"I don't see how that could be," she retorted.
+"I haven't seen even a bird in the grounds.  I
+don't remember hearing a single twitter in the
+trees.  The whole place appeared utterly
+deserted except for the voice."
+
+She could not make out the language--Russian,
+French, or German.  No one seemed to answer it.
+It was as though the voice had been left behind
+by the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare
+walls.  It went on volubly, with a pause now and
+then.  It was lonely and sad.  The time seemed
+very long to Miss Haldin.  An invincible
+repugnance prevented her from opening one of the
+doors in the hall.  It was so hopeless.  No one
+would come, the voice would never stop.  She
+confessed to me that she had to resist an
+impulse to turn round and go away unseen, as she
+had come.
+
+''Really?  You had that impulse?"  I cried, full
+of regret.  "What a pity you did not obey it."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"What a strange memory it would have been for
+one.  Those deserted grounds, that empty hall,
+that impersonal, voluble voice, and--nobody,
+nothing, not a soul."
+
+The memory would have been unique and harmless.
+But she was not a girl to run away from an
+intimidating impression of solitude and mystery.
+ "No, I did not run away," she said.  "I stayed
+where I was--and I did see a soul.  Such a
+strange soul."
+
+As she was gazing up the broad staircase, and
+had concluded that the voice came from somewhere
+above, a rustle of dress attracted her
+attention.  She looked down and saw a woman
+crossing the hall, having issued apparently
+through one of the many doors.  Her face was
+averted, so that at first she was not aware of
+Miss Haldin.
+
+On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she
+appeared very much startled.  From her slender
+figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young
+girl; but if her face was almost childishly
+round, it was also sallow and wrinkled, with
+dark rings under the eyes.  A thick crop of
+dusty brown hair was parted boyishly on the side
+with a lateral wave above the dry, furrowed
+forehead.  After a moment of dumb blinking, she
+suddenly squatted down on the floor.
+
+"What do you mean by squatted down?"  I asked,
+astonished.  "This is a very strange detail."
+
+Miss Haldin explained the reason.  This person
+when first seen was carrying a small bowl in her
+hand.  She had squatted down to put it on the
+floor for the benefit of a large cat, which
+appeared then from behind her skirts, and hid
+its head into the bowl greedily.  She got up,
+and approaching Miss Haldin asked with nervous
+bluntness--
+
+"What do you want?  Who are you?"
+
+Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name
+of Peter Ivanovitch.  The girlish, elderly woman
+nodded and puckered her face into a momentary
+expression of sympathy.  Her black silk blouse
+was old and even frayed in places; the black
+serge skirt was short and shabby.  She continued
+to blink at close quarters, and her eyelashes
+and eyebrows seemed shabby too.  Miss Haldin,
+speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and
+sensitive person, explained how it was that her
+visit could not be an altogether unexpected
+event to Madame de S---.
+
+"Ah!  Peter Ivanovitch brought you an
+invitation.  How was I to know?  A _dame de
+compangnie_ is not consulted, as you may
+imagine."
+
+The shabby woman laughed a little.  Her teeth,
+splendidly white and admirably even, looked
+absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls
+on the neck of a ragged tramp.  "Peter
+Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of the century
+perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man
+living.  So if you have an appointment with him
+you must not be surprised to hear that he is not
+here."
+
+Miss Haldin explained that she had no
+appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.  She became
+interested at once in that bizarre person.
+
+"Why should he put himself out for you or any
+one else?  Oh! these geniuses.  If you only
+knew!  Yes!  And their books--I mean, of course,
+the books that the world admires, the inspired
+books.  But you have not been behind the scenes.
+ Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half
+a day with a pen in your hand.  He can walk up
+and down his rooms for hours and hours.  I used
+to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I
+would lose my balance and fall off the chair all
+at once."
+
+She kept her hands folded in front of her, and
+her eyes, fixed on Miss Haldin's face, betrayed
+no animation whatever.  Miss Haldin, gathering
+that the lady who called herself a _dame de
+compangnie_ was proud of having acted as
+secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable
+remark.
+
+"You could not imagine a more trying
+experience," declared the lady.  "There is an
+Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de
+S--- now, or I would take you up," she continued
+in a changed tone and glancing towards the
+staircase.  "I act as master of ceremonies."
+
+It appeared that Madame de S--- could not bear
+Swiss servants about her person; and, indeed,
+servants would not stay for very long in the
+Chateau Borel.  There were always difficulties.
+Miss Haldin had already noticed that the hall
+was like a dusty barn of marble and stucco with
+cobwebs in the corners and faint tracks of mud
+on the black and white tessellated floor.
+
+"I look also after this animal," continued the
+_dame de compagnie_, keeping her hands folded
+quietly in front of her; and she bent her worn
+gaze upon the cat.  "I don't mind a bit.
+Animals have their rights; though, strictly
+speaking, I see no reason why they should not
+suffer as well as human beings.  Do you?  But of
+course they never suffer so much.  That is
+impossible.  Only, in their case it is more
+pitiful because they cannot make a revolution.
+I used to be a Republican.  I suppose you are a
+Republican?"
+
+Miss Haldin confessed to me that she did not
+know what to say.  But she nodded slightly, and
+asked in her turn--
+
+"And are you no longer a Republican?"
+
+"After taking down Peter Ivanovitch from
+dictation for two years, it is difficult for me
+to be anything.  First of all, you have to sit
+perfectly motionless.  The slightest movement
+you make puts to flight the ideas of Peter
+Ivanovitch.  You hardly dare to breathe.  And as
+to coughing--God forbid!  Peter Ivanovitch
+changed the position of the table to the wall
+because at first I could not help raising my
+eyes to look out of the window, while waiting
+for him to go on with his dictation.  That was
+not allowed.  He said I stared so stupidly.  I
+was likewise not permitted to look at him over
+my shoulder.  Instantly Peter Ivanovitch stamped
+his foot, and would roar, 'Look down on the
+paper!'  It seems my expression, my face, put
+him off.  Well, I know that I am not beautiful,
+and that my expression is not hopeful either.
+He said that my air of unintelligent expectation
+irritated him.  These are his own words."
+
+Miss Haldin was shocked, but admitted to me that
+she was not altogether surprised.
+
+"Is it possible that Peter Ivanovitch could
+treat any woman so rudely?" she cried.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ nodded several times
+with an air of discretion, then assured Miss
+Haldin that she did not mind in the least.  The
+trying part of it was to have the secret of the
+composition laid bare before her; to see the
+great author of the revolutionary gospels grope
+for words as if he were in the dark as to what
+he meant to say.
+
+"I am quite willing to be the blind instrument
+of higher ends.  To give one's life for the
+cause is nothing.  But to have one's illusions
+destroyed--that is really almost more than one
+can bear.  I really don't exaggerate," she
+insisted.  "It seemed to freeze my very beliefs
+in me--the more so that when we worked in winter
+Peter Ivanovitch, walking up and down the room,
+required no artificial heat to keep himself
+warm.  Even when we move to the South of France
+there are bitterly cold days, especially when
+you have to sit still for six hours at a
+stretch.  The walls of these villas on the
+Riviera are so flimsy.  Peter Ivanovitch did not
+seem to be aware of anything.  It is true that I
+kept down my shivers from fear of putting him
+out.  I used to set my teeth till my jaws felt
+absolutely locked.  In the moments when Peter
+Ivanovitch interrupted his dictation, and
+sometimes these intervals were very long--often
+twenty minutes, no less, while he walked to and
+fro behind my back muttering to himself--I felt
+I was dying by inches, I assure you.  Perhaps if
+I had let my teeth rattle Peter Ivanovitch might
+have noticed my distress, but I don't think it
+would have had any practical effect.  She's very
+miserly in such matters."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ glanced up the
+staircase.  The big cat had finished the milk
+and was rubbing its whiskered cheek sinuously
+against her skirt.  She dived to snatch it up
+from the floor.
+
+"Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise,
+you know," she continued, holding the cat in her
+folded arms.  "With us it is misers who can
+spare money for worthy objects--not the so-
+called generous natures.  But pray don't think I
+am a sybarite.  My father was a clerk in the
+Ministry of Finances with no position at all.
+You may guess by this that our home was far from
+luxurious, though of course we did not actually
+suffer from cold.  I ran away from my parents,
+you know, directly I began to think by myself.
+It is not very easy, such thinking.  One has got
+to be put in the way of it, awakened to the
+truth.  I am indebted for my salvation to an old
+apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway
+of the house we lived in.  She had a kind
+wrinkled face, and the most friendly voice
+imaginable.  One day, casually, we began to talk
+about a child, a ragged little girl we had seen
+begging from men in the streets at dusk; and
+from one thing to another my eyes began to open
+gradually to the horrors from which innocent
+people are made to suffer in this world, only in
+order that governments might exist.  After I
+once understood the crime of the upper classes,
+I could not go on living with my parents.  Not a
+single charitable word was to be heard in our
+home from year's end to year's end; there was
+nothing but the talk of vile office intrigues,
+and of promotion and of salaries, and of
+courting the favour of the chiefs.  The mere
+idea of marrying one day such another man as my
+father made me shudder.  I don't mean that there
+was anyone wanting to marry me.  There was not
+the slightest prospect of anything of the kind.
+But was it not sin enough to live on a
+Government salary while half Russia was dying of
+hunger?  The Ministry of Finances!  What a
+grotesque horror it is!  What does the starving,
+ignorant people want with a Ministry of
+Finances?  I kissed my old folks on both cheeks,
+and went away from them to live in cellars, with
+the proletariat.  I tried to make myself useful
+to the utterly hopeless.  I suppose you
+understand what I mean?  I mean the people who
+have nowhere to go and nothing to look forward
+to in this life.  Do you understand how
+frightful that is--nothing to look forward to!
+Sometimes I think that it is only in Russia that
+there are such people and such a depth of misery
+can be reached.  Well, I plunged into it, and--
+do you know--there isn't much that one can do in
+there.  No, indeed--at least as long as there
+are Ministries of Finances and such like
+grotesque horrors to stand in the way.  I
+suppose I would have gone mad there just trying
+to fight the vermin, if it had not been for a
+man.  It was my old friend and teacher, the poor
+saintly apple-woman, who discovered him for me,
+quite accidentally.  She came to fetch me late
+one evening in her quiet way.  I followed her
+where she would lead; that part of my life was
+in her hands altogether, and without her my
+spirit would have perished miserably.  The man
+was a young workman, a lithographer by trade,
+and he had got into trouble in connexion with
+that affair of temperance tracts--you remember.
+There was a lot of people put in prison for
+that.  The Ministry of Finances again!  What
+would become of it if the poor folk ceased
+making beasts of themselves with drink?  Upon my
+word, I would think that finances and all the
+rest of it are an invention of the devil; only
+that a belief in a supernatural source of evil
+is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of
+every wickedness.  Finances indeed!"
+
+Hatred and contempt hissed in her utterance of
+the word "finances," but at the very moment she
+gently stroked the cat reposing in her arms.
+She even raised them slightly, and inclining her
+head rubbed her cheek against the fur of the
+animal, which received this caress with the
+complete detachment so characteristic of its
+kind.  Then looking at Miss Haldin she excused
+herself once more for not taking her upstairs to
+Madame S--- The interview could not be
+interrupted.  Presently the journalist would be
+seen coming down the stairs.  The best thing was
+to remain in the hall; and besides, all these
+rooms (she glanced all round at the many doors),
+all these rooms on the ground floor were
+unfurnished.
+
+"Positively there is no chair down here to offer
+you," she continued.  "But if you prefer your
+own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on
+the bottom step here and keep silent."
+
+Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the
+contrary, she was very much interested in the
+story of the journeyman lithographer.  He was a
+revolutionist, of course.
+
+"A martyr, a simple man," said the _dame de
+compangnie_, with a faint sigh, and gazing
+through the open front door dreamily.  She
+turned her misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.
+
+"I lived with him for four months.  It was like
+a nightmare."
+
+As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she
+began to describe the emaciated face of the man,
+his fleshless limbs, his destitution.  The room
+into which the apple-woman had led her was a
+tiny garret, a miserable den under the roof of a
+sordid house.  The plaster fallen off the walls
+covered the floor, and when the door was opened
+a horrible tapestry of black cobwebs waved in
+the draught.  He had been liberated a few days
+before--flung out of prison into the streets.
+And Miss Haldin seemed to see for the first
+time, a name and a face upon the body of that
+suffering people whose hard fate had been the
+subject of so many conversations, between her
+and her brother, in the garden of their country
+house.
+
+He had been arrested with scores and scores of
+other people in that affair of the lithographed
+temperance tracts.  Unluckily, having got hold
+of a great many suspected persons, the police
+thought they could extract from some of them
+other information relating to the revolutionist
+propaganda.
+
+"They beat him so cruelly in the course of
+investigation," went on the _dame de compagnie_,
+"that they injured him internally.  When they
+had done with him he was doomed.  He could do
+nothing for himself.  I beheld him lying on a
+wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his
+head on a bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out
+of charity by an old rag-picker, who happened to
+live in the basement of the house.  There he
+was, uncovered, burning with fever, and there
+was not even a jug in the room for the water to
+quench his thirst with.  There was nothing
+whatever--just that bedstead and the bare floor."
+
+"Was there no one in all that great town amongst
+the liberals and revolutionaries, to extend a
+helping hand to a brother?" asked Miss Haldin
+indignantly.
+
+"Yes.  But you do not know the most terrible
+part of that man's misery.  Listen.  It seems
+that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at
+last, his firmness gave way, and he did let out
+some information.  Poor soul, the flesh is weak,
+you know.  What it was he did not tell me.
+There was a crushed spirit in that mangled body.
+ Nothing I found to say could make him whole.
+When they let him out, he crept into that hole,
+and bore his remorse stoically.  He would not go
+near anyone he knew.  I would have sought
+assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I
+have gone looking for it?  Where was I to look
+for anyone who had anything to spare or any
+power to help?  The people living round us were
+all starving and drunken.  They were the victims
+of the Ministry of Finances.  Don't ask me how
+we lived.  I couldn't tell you.  It was like a
+miracle of wretchedness.  I had nothing to sell,
+and I assure you my clothes were in such a state
+that it was impossible for me to go out in the
+daytime.  I was indecent.  I had to wait till it
+was dark before I ventured into the streets to
+beg for a crust of bread, or whatever I could
+get, to keep him and me alive.  Often I got
+nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie on
+the floor by the side of his couch.  Oh yes, I
+can sleep quite soundly on bare boards.  That is
+nothing, and I am only mentioning it to you so
+that you should not think I am a sybarite.  It
+was infinitely less killing than the task of
+sitting for hours at a table in a cold study to
+take the books of Peter Ivanovitch from
+dictation.  But you shall see yourself what that
+is like, so I needn't say any more about it."
+
+"It is by no means certain that I will ever take
+Peter Ivanovitch from dictation," said Miss
+Haldin.
+
+"No!" cried the other incredulously.  "Not
+certain?  You mean to say that you have not made
+up your mind?"
+
+When Miss Haldin assured her that there never
+had been any question of that between her and
+Peter Ivanovitch, the woman with the cat
+compressed her lips tightly for a moment.
+
+"Oh, you will find yourself settled at the table
+before you know that you have made up your mind.
+ Don't make a mistake, it is disenchanting to
+hear Peter Ivanovitch dictate, but at the same
+time there is a fascination about it.  He is a
+man of genius.  Your face is certain not to
+irritate him; you may perhaps even help his
+inspiration, make it easier for him to deliver
+his message.  As I look at you, I feel certain
+that you are the kind of woman who is not likely
+to check the flow of his inspiration."
+
+Miss Haldin thought it useless to protest
+against all these assumptions.
+
+"But this man--this workman did he die under
+your care?" she said, after a short silence.
+
+The _dame de compagnie_, listening up the stairs
+where now two voices were alternating with some
+animation, made no answer for a time.  When the
+loud sounds of the discussion had sunk into an
+almost inaudible murmur, she turned to Miss
+Haldin.
+
+"Yes, he died, but not, literally speaking, in
+my arms, as you might suppose.  As a matter of
+fact, I was asleep when he breathed his last.
+So even now I cannot say I have seen anybody
+die.  A few days before the end, some young men
+found us out in our extremity.  They were
+revolutionists, as you might guess.  He ought to
+have trusted in his political friends when he
+came out of prison.  He had been liked and
+respected before, and nobody would have dreamed
+of reproaching him with his indiscretion before
+the police.  Everybody knows how they go to
+work, and the strongest man has his moments of
+weakness before pain.  Why, even hunger alone is
+enough to give one queer ideas as to what may be
+done.  A doctor came, our lot was alleviated as
+far as physical comforts go, but otherwise he
+could not be consoled--poor man.  I assure you,
+Miss Haldin, that he was very lovable, but I had
+not the strength to weep.  I was nearly dead
+myself.  But there were kind hearts to take care
+of me.  A dress was found to clothe my
+nakedness.  I tell you, I was not decent--and
+after a time the revolutionists placed me with a
+Jewish family going abroad, as governess.  Of
+course I could teach the children, I finished
+the sixth class of the Lyceum; but the real
+object was, that I should carry some important
+papers across the frontier.  I was entrusted
+with a packet which I carried next my heart.
+The gendarmes at the station did not suspect the
+governess of a Jewish family, busy looking after
+three children.  I don't suppose those Hebrews
+knew what I had on me, for I had been introduced
+to them in a very roundabout way by persons who
+did not belong to the revolutionary movement,
+and naturally I had been instructed to accept a
+very small salary.  When we reached Germany I
+left that family and delivered my papers to a
+revolutionist in Stuttgart; after this I was
+employed in various ways.  But you do not want
+to hear all that.  I have never felt that I was
+very useful, but I live in hopes of seeing all
+the Ministries destroyed, finances and all.  The
+greatest joy of my life has been to hear what
+your brother has done."
+
+She directed her round eyes again to the
+sunshine outside, while the cat reposed within
+her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-
+like meditation.
+
+"Yes!  I rejoiced," she began again.  "For me
+there is a heroic ring about the very name of
+Haldin.  They must have been trembling with fear
+in their Ministries--all those men with fiendish
+hearts.  Here I stand talking to you, and when I
+think of all the cruelties, oppressions, and
+injustices that are going on at this very
+moment, my head begins to swim.  I have looked
+closely at what would seem inconceivable if
+one's own eyes had not to be trusted.  I have
+looked at things that made me hate myself for my
+helplessness.  I hated my hands that had no
+power, my voice that could not be heard, my very
+mind that would not become unhinged.  Ah!  I
+have seen things.  And you?"
+
+Miss Haldin was moved.  She shook her head
+slightly.
+
+"No, I have seen nothing for myself as yet," she
+murmured "We have always lived in the country.
+It was my brother's wish."
+
+"It is a curious meeting--this--between you and
+me," continued the other.  "Do you believe in
+chance, Miss Haldin?  How could I have expected
+to see you, his sister, with my own eyes?  Do
+you know that when the news came the
+revolutionaries here were as much surprised as
+pleased, every bit?  No one seemed to know
+anything about your brother.  Peter Ivanovitch
+himself had not foreseen that such a blow was
+going to be struck.  I suppose your brother was
+simply inspired.  I myself think that such deeds
+should be done by inspiration.  It is a great
+privilege to have the inspiration and the
+opportunity.  Did he resemble you at all?  Don't
+you rejoice, Miss Haldin?"
+
+"You must not expect too much from me," said
+Miss Haldin, repressing an inclination to cry
+which came over her suddenly.  She succeeded,
+then added calmly, "I am not a heroic person!"
+
+"You think you couldn't have done such a thing
+yourself perhaps?"
+
+"I don't know.  I must not even ask myself till
+I have lived a little longer, seen more. . . ."
+
+The other moved her head appreciatively.  The
+purring of the cat had a loud complacency in the
+empty hall.  No sound of voices came from
+upstairs.  Miss Haldin broke the silence.
+
+"What is it precisely that you heard people say
+about my brother?  You said that they were
+surprised.  Yes, I supposed they were.  Did it
+not seem strange to them that my brother should
+have failed to save himself after the most
+difficult part--that is, getting away from the
+spot--was over?  Conspirators should understand
+these things well.  There are reasons why I am
+very anxious to know how it is he failed to
+escape."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ had advanced to the open
+hall-door.  She glanced rapidly over her
+shoulder at Miss Haldin, who remained within the
+hall.
+
+"Failed to escape," she repeated absently.
+"Didn't he make the sacrifice of his life?
+Wasn't he just simply inspired?  Wasn't it an
+act of abnegation?  Aren't you certain?"
+
+"What I am certain of," said Miss Haldin, "is
+that it was not an act of despair.  Have you not
+heard some opinion expressed here upon his
+miserable capture?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ mused for a while in the
+doorway.
+
+"Did I hear?  Of course, everything is discussed
+here.  Has not all the world been speaking about
+your brother?  For my part, the mere mention of
+his achievement plunges me into an envious
+ecstasy.  Why should a man certain of
+immortality think of his life at all?"
+
+She kept her back turned to Miss Haldin.
+Upstairs from behind a great dingy white and
+gold door, visible behind the balustrade of the
+first floor landing, a deep voice began to drone
+formally, as if reading over notes or something
+of the sort.  It paused frequently, and then
+ceased altogether.
+
+"I don't think I can stay any longer now," said
+Miss Haldin.  "I may return another day."
+
+She waited for the _dame de compagnie_ to make
+room for her exit; but the woman appeared lost
+in the contemplation of sunshine and shadows,
+sharing between themselves the stillness of the
+deserted grounds.  She concealed the view of the
+drive from Miss Haldin.  Suddenly she said--
+
+"It will not be necessary; here is Peter
+Ivanovitch himself coming up.  But he is not
+alone.  He is seldom alone now."
+
+Hearing that Peter Ivanovitch was approaching,
+Miss Haldin was not so pleased as she might have
+been expected to be.  Somehow she had lost the
+desire to see either the heroic captive or
+Madame de S---, and the reason of that shrinking
+which came upon her at the very last minute is
+accounted for by the feeling that those two
+people had not been treating the woman with the
+cat kindly.
+
+"Would you please let me pass?" said Miss Haldin
+at last, touching lightly the shoulder of the
+_dame de compagnie_.
+
+But the other, pressing the cat to her breast,
+did not budge.
+
+"I know who is with him," she said, without even
+looking back.
+
+More unaccountably than ever Miss Haldin felt a
+strong impulse to leave the house.
+
+"Madame de S--- may be engaged for some time
+yet, and what I have got to say to Peter
+Ivanovitch is just a simple question which I
+might put to him when I meet him in the grounds
+on my way down.  I really think I must go.  I
+have been some time here, and I am anxious to
+get back to my mother.  Will you let me pass,
+please?"
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ turned her head at last.
+
+"I never supposed that you really wanted to see
+Madame de S---," she said, with unexpected
+insight.  "Not for a moment."  There was
+something confidential and mysterious in her
+tone.  She passed through the door, with Miss
+Haldin following her, on to the terrace, and
+they descended side by side the moss-grown stone
+steps.  There was no one to be seen on the part
+of the drive visible from the front of the house.
+
+"They are hidden by the trees over there,"
+explained Miss Haldin's new acquaintance, "but
+you shall see them directly.  I don't know who
+that young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has
+taken such a fancy.  He must be one of us, or he
+would not be admitted here when the others come.
+ You know what I mean by the others.  But I must
+say that he is not at all mystically inclined.
+I don't know that I have made him out yet.
+Naturally I am never for very long in the
+drawing-room.  There is always something to do
+for me, though the establishment here is not so
+extensive as the villa on the Riviera.  But
+still there are plenty of opportunities for me
+to make myself useful."
+
+To the left, passing by the ivy-grown end of the
+stables, appeared Peter Ivanovitch and his
+companion.  They walked very slowly, conversing
+with some animation.  They stopped for a moment,
+and Peter Ivanovitch was seen to gesticulate,
+while the young man listened motionless, with
+his arms hanging down and his head bowed a
+little.  He was dressed in a dark brown suit and
+a black hat.  The round eyes of the _dame de
+compagnie_ remained fixed on the two figures,
+which had resumed their leisurely approach.
+
+"An extremely polite young man," she said.  "You
+shall see what a bow he will make; and it won't
+altogether be so exceptional either.  He bows in
+the same way when he meets me alone in the hall."
+
+She moved on a few steps, with Miss Haldin by
+her side, and things happened just as she had
+foretold.  The young man took off his hat, bowed
+and fell back, while Peter Ivanovitch advanced
+quicker, his black, thick arms extended
+heartily, and seized hold of both Miss Haldin's
+hands, shook them, and peered at her through his
+dark glasses.
+
+"That's right, that's right!" he exclaimed
+twice, approvingly.  "And so you have been
+looked after by. . . ."  He frowned slightly at
+the _dame de compagnie_, who was still nursing
+the cat.  "I conclude Eleanor--Madame de S--- is
+engaged.  I know she expected somebody to-day.
+So the newspaper man did turn up, eh?  She is
+engaged?"
+
+For all answer the _dame de compagnie_ turned
+away her head.
+
+"It is very unfortunate--very unfortunate
+indeed.  I very much regret that you should have
+been. . . ."  He lowered suddenly his voice.
+"But what is it--surely you are not departing,
+Natalia Victorovna?  You got bored waiting,
+didn't you?"
+
+"Not in the least," Miss Haldin protested.
+"Only I have been here some time, and I am
+anxious to get back to my mother."
+
+"The time seemed long, eh?  I am afraid our
+worthy friend here"  (Peter Ivanovitch suddenly
+jerked his head sideways towards his right
+shoulder and jerked it up again),--"our worthy
+friend here has not the art of shortening the
+moments of waiting.  No, distinctly she has not
+the art; and in that respect good intentions
+alone count for nothing."
+
+The _dame de compagnie_ dropped her arms, and
+the cat found itself suddenly on the ground.  It
+remained quite still after alighting, one hind
+leg stretched backwards.  Miss Haldin was
+extremely indignant on behalf of the lady
+companion.
+
+"Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments
+I have passed in the hall of this house have
+been not a little interesting, and very
+instructive too.  They are memorable.  I do not
+regret the waiting, but I see that the object of
+my call here can be attained without taking up
+Madame de S---'s time."
+
+At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin.  The
+above relation is founded on her narrative,
+which I have not so much dramatized as might be
+supposed.  She had rendered, with extraordinary
+feeling and animation, the very accent almost of
+the disciple of the old apple-woman, the
+irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the
+voluntary servant of the poor.  Miss Haldin's
+true and delicate humanity had been extremely
+shocked by the uncongenial fate of her new
+acquaintance, that lady companion, secretary,
+whatever she was.  For my own part, I was
+pleased to discover in it one more obstacle to
+intimacy with Madame de S---.  I had a positive
+abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-
+faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch.
+I do not know what was her attitude to the
+unseen, but I know that in the affairs of this
+world she was avaricious, greedy, and
+unscrupulous.  It was within my knowledge that
+she had been worsted in a sordid and desperate
+quarrel about money matters with the family of
+her late husband, the diplomatist.  Some very
+august personages indeed (whom in her fury she
+had insisted upon scandalously involving in her
+affairs) had incurred her animosity.  I find it
+perfectly easy to believe that she had come to
+within an ace of being spirited away, for
+reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de
+sante_--a madhouse of sorts, to be plain.  It
+appears, however, that certain high-placed
+personages opposed it for reasons which. . . .
+
+But it's no use to go into details.
+
+Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position
+of a teacher of languages knowing all this with
+such definiteness.  A novelist says this and
+that of his personages, and if only he knows how
+to say it earnestly enough he may not be
+questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
+which his own belief is made sufficiently
+manifest by a telling phrase, a poetic image,
+the accent of emotion.  Art is great!  But I
+have no art, and not having invented Madame de S-
+--, I feel bound to explain how I came to know
+so much about her.
+
+My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of
+mine already mentioned, the professor of
+Lausanne University.  It was from her that I
+learned the last fact of Madame de S---'s
+history, with which I intend to trouble my
+readers.  She told me, speaking positively, as a
+person who trusts her sources, of the cause of
+Madame de S---'s flight from Russia, some years
+before.  It was neither more nor less than this:
+that she became suspect to the police in
+connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
+Alexander.  The ground of this suspicion was
+either some unguarded expressions that escaped
+her in public, or some talk overheard in her
+salon.  Overheard, we must believe, by some
+guest, perhaps a friend, who hastened to play
+the informer, I suppose.  At any rate, the
+overheard matter seemed to imply her
+foreknowledge of that event, and I think she was
+wise in not waiting for the investigation of
+such a charge.  Some of my readers may remember
+a little book from her pen, published in Paris,
+a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and
+frightfully disconnected piece of writing, in
+which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more
+than hints at its supernatural origin, and
+plainly suggests in venomous innuendoes that the
+guilt of the act was not with the terrorists,
+but with a palace intrigue.  When I observed to
+my friend, the professor's wife, that the life
+of Madame de S---, with its unofficial
+diplomacy, its intrigues, lawsuits, favours,
+disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere of scandal,
+occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for
+the eighteenth century than for the conditions
+of our own time, she assented with a smile, but
+a moment after went on in a reflective tone:
+"Charlatanism?--yes, in a certain measure.
+Still, times are changed.  There are forces now
+which were non-existent in the eighteenth
+century.  I should not be surprised if she were
+more dangerous than an Englishman would be
+willing to believe.  And what's more, she is
+looked upon as really dangerous by certain
+people--_chez nous_."
+
+_Chez nous_ in this connexion meant Russia in
+general, and the Russian political police in
+particular.  The object of my digression from
+the straight course of Miss Haldin's relation
+(in my own words) of her visit to the Chateau
+Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my
+friend, the professor's wife.  I wanted to bring
+it forward simply to make what I have to say
+presently of Mr. Razumov's presence in Geneva, a
+little more credible--for this is a Russian
+story for Western ears, which, as I have
+observed already, are not attuned to certain
+tones of cynicism and cruelty, of moral
+negation, and even of moral distress already
+silenced at our end of Europe.  And this I state
+as my excuse for having left Miss Haldin
+standing, one of the little group of two women
+and two men who had come together below the
+terrace of the Chateau Borel.
+
+The knowledge which I have just stated was in my
+mind when, as I have said, I interrupted Miss
+Haldin.  I interrupted her with the cry of
+profound satisfaction--
+
+"So you never saw Madame de S---, after all?"
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head.  It was very
+satisfactory to me.  She had not seen Madame de
+S---!  That was excellent, excellent!  I
+welcomed the conviction that she would never
+know Madame de S--- now.  I could not explain
+the reason of the conviction but by the
+knowledge that Miss Haldin was standing face to
+face with her brother's wonderful friend.  I
+preferred him to Madame de S--- as the companion
+and guide of that young girl, abandoned to her
+inexperience by the miserable end of her
+brother.  But, at any rate, that life now ended
+had been sincere, and perhaps its thoughts might
+have been lofty, its moral sufferings profound,
+its last act a true sacrifice.  It is not for
+us, the staid lovers calmed by the possession of
+a conquered liberty, to condemn without appeal
+the fierceness of thwarted desire.
+
+I am not ashamed of the warmth of my regard for
+Miss Haldin.  It was, it must be admitted, an
+unselfish sentiment, being its own reward.  The
+late Victor Haldin--in the light of that
+sentiment--appeared to me not as a sinister
+conspirator, but as a pure enthusiast.  I did
+not wish indeed to judge him, but the very fact
+that he did not escape, that fact which brought
+so much trouble to both his mother and his
+sister, spoke to me in his favour.  Meantime, in
+my fear of seeing the girl surrender to the
+influence of the Chateau Borel revolutionary
+feminism, I was more than willing to put my
+trust in that friend of the late Victor Haldin.
+He was nothing but a name, you will say.
+Exactly!  A name!  And what's more, the only
+name; the only name to be found in the
+correspondence between brother and sister.  The
+young man had turned up; they had come face to
+face, and, fortunately, without the direct
+interference of Madame de S---.  What will come
+of it ? what will she tell me presently?  I was
+asking myself.
+
+It was only natural that my thought should turn
+to the young man, the bearer of the only name
+uttered in all the dream-talk of a future to be
+brought about by a revolution.  And my thought
+took the shape of asking myself why this young
+man had not called upon these ladies.  He had
+been in Geneva for some days before Miss Haldin
+heard of him first in my presence from Peter
+Ivanovitch.  I regretted that last's presence at
+their meeting.  I would rather have had it
+happen somewhere out of his spectacled sight.
+But I supposed that, having both these young
+people there, he introduced them to each other.
+
+I broke the silence by beginning a question on
+that point--
+
+"I suppose Peter Ivanovitch. . . ."
+
+Miss Haldin gave vent to her indignation.  Peter
+Ivanovitch directly he had got his answer from
+her had turned upon the _dame de compagnie_ in a
+shameful manner.
+
+"Turned upon her?"  I wondered.  "What about?
+For what reason? "
+
+"It was unheard of; it was shameful," Miss
+Haldin pursued, with angry eyes.  " _Il lui a
+fait une scene_--like this, before strangers.
+And for what?  You would never guess.  For some
+eggs. . . .  Oh!"
+
+I was astonished.  "Eggs, did you say?"
+
+"For Madame de S---.  That lady observes a
+special diet, or something of the sort.  It
+seems she complained the day before to Peter
+Ivanovitch that the eggs were not rightly
+prepared.  Peter Ivanovitch suddenly remembered
+this against the poor woman, and flew out at
+her.  It was most astonishing.  I stood as if
+rooted."
+
+"Do you mean to say that the great feminist
+allowed himself to be abusive to a woman?"  I
+asked.
+
+"Oh, not that!  It was something you have no
+conception of.  It was an odious performance.
+Imagine, he raised his hat to begin with.  He
+made his voice soft and deprecatory.  'Ah! you
+are not kind to us--you will not deign to
+remember. . . .'  This sort of phrases, that
+sort of tone.  The poor creature was terribly
+upset.  Her eyes ran full of tears.  She did not
+know where to look.  I shouldn't wonder if she
+would have preferred abuse, or even a blow."
+
+I did not remark that very possibly she was
+familiar with both on occasions when no one was
+by.  Miss Haldin walked by my side, her head up
+in scornful and angry silence.
+
+"Great men have their surprising peculiarities,"
+I observed inanely.  "Exactly like men who are
+not great.  But that sort of thing cannot be
+kept up for ever.  How did the great feminist
+wind up this very characteristic episode?"
+
+Miss Haldin, without turning her face my way,
+told me that the end was brought about by the
+appearance of the interviewer, who had been
+closeted with Madame de S---.
+
+He came up rapidly, unnoticed, lifted his hat
+slightly, and paused to say in French:  "The
+Baroness has asked me, in case I met a lady on
+my way out, to desire her to come in at once."
+
+After delivering this message, he hurried down
+the drive.  The _dame de compagnie_ flew towards
+the house, and Peter Ivanovitch followed her
+hastily, looking uneasy.  In a moment Miss
+Haldin found herself alone with the young man,
+who undoubtedly must have been the new arrival
+from Russia.  She wondered whether her brother's
+friend had not already guessed who she was.
+
+I am in a position to say that, as a matter of
+fact, he had guessed.  It is clear to me that
+Peter Ivanovitch, for some reason or other, had
+refrained from alluding to these ladies'
+presence in Geneva.  But Razumov had guessed.
+The trustful girl!  Every word uttered by Haldin
+lived in Razumov's memory.  They were like
+haunting shapes; they could not be exorcised.
+The most vivid amongst them was the mention of
+the sister.  The girl had existed for him ever
+since.  But he did not recognize her at once.
+Coming up with Peter Ivanovitch, he did observe
+her; their eyes had met, even.  He had
+responded, as no one could help responding, to
+the harmonious charm of her whole person, its
+strength, its grace, its tranquil frankness--and
+then he had turned his gaze away.  He said to
+himself that all this was not for him; the
+beauty of women and the friendship of men were
+not for him.  He accepted that feeling with a
+purposeful sternness, and tried to pass on.  It
+was only her outstretched hand which brought
+about the recognition.  It stands recorded in
+the pages of his self-confession, that it nearly
+suffocated him physically with an emotional
+reaction of hate and dismay, as though her
+appearance had been a piece of accomplished
+treachery.
+
+He faced about.  The considerable elevation of
+the terrace concealed them from anyone lingering
+in the doorway of the house; and even from the
+upstairs windows they could not have been seen.
+Through the thickets run wild, and the trees of
+the gently sloping grounds, he had cold, placid
+glimpses of the lake.  A moment of perfect
+privacy had been vouchsafed to them at this
+juncture.  I wondered to myself what use they
+had made of that fortunate circumstance.
+
+"Did you have time for more than a few words?" I
+asked.
+
+That animation with which she had related to me
+the incidents of her visit to the Chateau Borel
+had left her completely.  Strolling by my side,
+she looked straight before her; but I noticed a
+little colour on her cheek.  She did not answer
+me.
+
+After some little time I observed that they
+could not have hoped to remain forgotten for
+very long, unless the other two had discovered
+Madame de S--- swooning with fatigue, perhaps,
+or in a state of morbid exaltation after the
+long interview.  Either would require their
+devoted ministrations.  I could depict to myself
+Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily out of the house
+again, bareheaded, perhaps, and on across the
+terrace with his swinging gait, the black skirts
+of the frock-coat floating clear of his stout
+light grey legs.  I confess to having looked
+upon these young people as the quarry of the
+"heroic fugitive."  I had the notion that they
+would not be allowed to escape capture.  But of
+that I said nothing to Miss Haldin, only as she
+still remained uncommunicative, I pressed her a
+little.
+
+"Well--but you can tell me at least your
+impression."
+
+She turned her head to look at me, and turned
+away again.
+
+"Impression?" she repeated slowly, almost
+dreamily; then in a quicker tone--
+
+"He seems to be a man who has suffered more from
+his thoughts than from evil fortune."
+
+"From his thoughts, you say?"
+
+"And that is natural enough in a Russian," she
+took me up."  In a young Russian; so many of
+them are unfit for action, and yet unable to
+rest."
+
+"And you think he is that sort of man?"
+
+"No, I do not judge him.  How could I, so
+suddenly?  You asked for my impression--I
+explain my impression.  I--I--don't know the
+world, nor yet the people in it; I have been too
+solitary--I am too young to trust my own
+opinions."
+
+"Trust your instinct," I advised her.  "Most
+women trust to that, and make no worse mistakes
+than men.  In this case you have your brother's
+letter to help you"
+
+She drew a deep breath like a light sigh.
+"Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences," she
+quoted as if to herself.  But I caught the
+wistful murmur distinctly.
+
+"High praise, "I whispered to her.''
+
+"The highest possible."
+
+"So high that, like the award of happiness, it
+is more fit to come only at the end of a life.
+But still no common or altogether unworthy
+personality could have suggested such a
+confident exaggeration of praise and. . . ."
+
+"Ah!"  She interrupted me ardently.  "And if you
+had only known the heart from which that
+judgment has come!"
+
+She ceased on that note, and for a space I
+reflected on the character of the words which I
+perceived very well must tip the scale of the
+girl's feelings in that young man's favour.
+They had not the sound of a casual utterance.
+Vague they were to my Western mind and to my
+Western sentiment, but I could not forget that,
+standing by Miss Haldin's side, I was like a
+traveller in a strange country.  It had also
+become clear to me that Miss Haldin was
+unwilling to enter into the details of the only
+material part of their visit to the Chateau
+Borel.  But I was not hurt.  Somehow I didn't
+feel it to be a want of confidence.  It was some
+other difficulty--a difficulty I could not
+resent.  And it was without the slightest
+resentment that I said--
+
+"Very well.  But on that high ground, which I
+will not dispute, you, like anyone else in such
+circumstances, you must have made for yourself a
+representation of that exceptional friend, a
+mental image of him, and--please tell me--you
+were not disappointed?"
+
+"What do you mean?  His personal appearance?"
+
+"I don't mean precisely his good looks, or
+otherwise."
+
+We turned at the end of the alley and made a few
+steps without looking at each other.
+
+"His appearance is not ordinary," said Miss
+Haldin at last.
+
+"No, I should have thought not--from the little
+you've said of your first impression.  After
+all, one has to fall back on that word.
+Impression!  What I mean is that something
+indescribable which is likely to mark a 'not
+ordinary' person."
+
+I perceived that she was not listening.  There
+was no mistaking her expression; and once more I
+had the sense of being out of it--not because of
+my age, which at any rate could draw inferences--
+but altogether out of it, on another plane
+whence I could only watch her from afar.  And so
+ceasing to speak I watched her stepping out by
+my side.
+
+"No, she exclaimed suddenly, "I could not have
+been disappointed with a man of such strong
+feeling."
+
+"Aha!  Strong feeling, "I muttered, thinking to
+myself censoriously: like this, at once, all in
+a moment!
+
+"What did you say?" inquired Miss Haldin
+innocently.
+
+"Oh, nothing.  I beg your pardon.  Strong
+feeling.  I am not surprised."
+
+"And you don't know how abruptly I behaved to
+him!" she cried remorsefully.
+
+I suppose I must have appeared surprised, for,
+looking at me with a still more heightened
+colour, she said she was ashamed to admit that
+she had not been sufficiently collected; she had
+failed to control her words and actions as the
+situation demanded.  She lost the fortitude
+worthy of both the men, the dead and the living;
+the fortitude which should have been the note of
+the meeting of Victor Haldin's sister with
+Victor Haldin's only known friend.  He was
+looking at her keenly, but said nothing, and she
+was--she confessed--painfully affected by his
+want of comprehension.  All she could say was:
+"You are Mr. Razumov."  A slight frown passed
+over his forehead.  After a short, watchful
+pause, he made a little bow of assent, and
+waited.
+
+At the thought that she had before her the man
+so highly regarded by her brother, the man who
+had known his value, spoken to him, understood
+him, had listened to his confidences, perhaps
+had encouraged him--her lips trembled, her eyes
+ran full of tears; she put out her hand, made a
+step towards him impulsively, saying with an
+effort to restrain her emotion, "Can't you guess
+who I am?" He did not take the proffered hand.
+He even recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin
+imagined that he was unpleasantly affected.
+Miss Haldin excused him, directing her
+displeasure at herself.  She had behaved
+unworthily, like an emotional French girl.  A
+manifestation of that kind could not be welcomed
+by a man of stern, self-contained character.
+
+He must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very
+timid with women, not to respond in a more human
+way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie
+Haldin--I thought to myself.  Those lofty and
+solitary existences (I remembered the words
+suddenly) make a young man shy and an old man
+savage--often.
+
+"Well," I encouraged Miss Haldin to proceed.
+
+She was still very dissatisfied with herself.
+
+"I went from bad to worse," she said, with an
+air of discouragement very foreign to her.  "I
+did everything foolish except actually bursting
+into tears.  I am thankful to say I did not do
+that.  But I was unable to speak for quite a
+long time."
+
+She had stood before him, speechless, swallowing
+her sobs, and when she managed at last to utter
+something, it was only her brother's name--
+"Victor--Victor Haldin!" she gasped out, and
+again her voice failed her.
+
+"Of course," she commented to me, "this
+distressed him.  He was quite overcome.  I have
+told you my opinion that he is a man of deep
+feeling--it is impossible to doubt it.  You
+should have seen his face.  He positively
+reeled.  He leaned against the wall of the
+terrace.  Their friendship must have been the
+very brotherhood of souls!  I was grateful to
+him for that emotion, which made me feel less
+ashamed of my own lack of self-control.  Of
+course I had regained the power of speech at
+once, almost.  All this lasted not more than a
+few seconds.  'I am his sister,' I said.  'Maybe
+you have heard of me.'"
+
+" And had he?" I interrupted.
+
+"I don't know.  How could it have been
+otherwise?  And yet. . . .  But what does that
+matter?  I stood there before him, near enough
+to be touched and surely not looking like an
+impostor.  All I know is, that he put out both
+his hands then to me, I may say flung them out
+at me, with the greatest readiness and warmth,
+and that I seized and pressed them, feeling that
+I was finding again a little of what I thought
+was lost to me for ever, with the loss of my
+brother--some of that hope, inspiration, and
+support which I used to get from my dear dead. .
+. ."
+
+I understood quite well what she meant.  We
+strolled on slowly.  I refrained from looking at
+her.  And it was as if answering my own thoughts
+that I murmured--
+
+"No doubt it was a great friendship--as you say.
+ And that young man ended by welcoming your
+name, so to speak, with both hands.  After that,
+of course, you would understand each other.
+Yes, you would understand each other quickly."
+
+It was a moment before I heard her voice.
+
+"Mr. Razumov seems to be a man of few words.  A
+reserved man--even when he is strongly moved."
+
+Unable to forget---or even to forgive--the bass-
+toned expansiveness of Peter Ivanovitch, the
+Archpatron of revolutionary parties, I said that
+I took this for a favourable trait of character.
+ It was associated with sincerity--in my mind.
+
+"And, besides, we had not much time," she added.
+
+"No, you would not have, of course."  My
+suspicion and even dread of the feminist and his
+Egeria was so ineradicable that I could not help
+asking with real anxiety, which I made smiling--
+
+"But you escaped all right?"
+
+She understood me, and smiled too, at my
+uneasiness.
+
+"Oh yes!  I escaped, if you like to call it
+that.  I walked away quickly.  There was no need
+to run.  I am neither frightened nor yet
+fascinated, like that poor woman who received me
+so strangely."
+
+"And Mr.--Mr. Razumov. . .?"
+
+"He remained there, of course.  I suppose he
+went into the house after I left him.  You
+remember that he came here strongly recommended
+to Peter Ivanovitch--possibly entrusted with
+important messages for him."
+
+"Ah yes!  From that priest who. . . ."
+
+"Father Zosim--yes.  Or from others, perhaps."
+
+"You left him, then.  But have you seen him
+since, may I ask?"
+
+For some time Miss Haldin made no answer to this
+very direct question, then--
+
+"I have been expecting to see him here to-day,"
+she said quietly.
+
+"You have! Do you meet, then, in this garden?
+In that case I had better leave you at once."
+
+"No, why leave me?  And we don't meet in this
+garden.  I have not seen Mr. Razumov since that
+first time.  Not once.  But I have been
+expecting him. . . ."
+
+She paused.  I wondered to myself why that young
+revolutionist should show so little alacrity.
+
+"Before we parted I told Mr. Razumov that I
+walked here for an hour every day at this time.
+I could not explain to him then why I did not
+ask him to come and see us at once.  Mother must
+be prepared for such a visit.  And then, you
+see, I do not know myself what Mr. Razumov has
+to tell us.  He, too, must be told first how it
+is with poor mother.  All these thoughts flashed
+through my mind at once.  So I told him
+hurriedly that there was a reason why I could
+not ask him to see us at home, but that I was in
+the habit of walking here. . . .  This is a
+public place, but there are never many people
+about at this hour.  I thought it would do very
+well.  And it is so near our apartments.  I
+don't like to be very far away from mother.  Our
+servant knows where I am in case I should be
+wanted suddenly."
+
+"Yes.  It is very convenient from that point of
+view," I agreed.
+
+In fact, I thought the Bastions a very
+convenient place, since the girl did not think
+it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to
+her mother.  It was here, then, I thought,
+looking round at that plot of ground of
+deplorable banality, that their acquaintance
+will begin and go on in the exchange of generous
+indignations and of extreme sentiments, too
+poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to
+conceive.  I saw these two, escaped out of four
+score of millions of human beings ground between
+the upper and nether millstone, walking under
+these trees, their young heads close together.
+Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk in.
+It even occurred to me, while we turned once
+more away from the wide iron gates, that when
+tired they would have plenty of accommodation to
+rest themselves.  There was a quantity of tables
+and chairs displayed between the restaurant
+chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of
+painted deals spread out under the trees.  In
+the very middle of it I observed a solitary
+Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from
+the cradle to the grave by the perfected
+mechanism of democratic institutions in a
+republic that could almost be held in the palm
+of ones hand.  The man, colourlessly uncouth,
+was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the
+woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the
+rough chair, gazed idly around.
+
+There is little logic to be expected on this
+earth, not only in the matter of thought, but
+also of sentiment.  I was surprised to discover
+myself displeased with that unknown young man.
+A week had gone by since they met.  Was he
+callous, or shy, or very stupid?  I could not
+make it out.
+
+"Do you think," I asked Miss Haldin, after we
+had gone some distance up the great alley, "that
+Mr Razumov understood your intention? "
+
+"Understood what I meant?" she wondered.  "He
+was greatly moved.  That I know!  In my own
+agitation I could see it.  But I spoke
+distinctly.  He heard me; he seemed, indeed, to
+hang on my words. . ."
+
+Unconsciously she had hastened her pace.  Her
+utterance, too, became quicker.
+
+I waited a little before I observed thoughtfully-
+-
+
+"And yet he allowed all these days to pass."
+
+"How can we tell what work he may have to do
+here?  He is not an idler travelling for his
+pleasure.  His time may not be his own--nor yet
+his thoughts, perhaps."
+
+She slowed her pace suddenly, and in a lowered
+voice added--
+
+"Or his very life"--then paused and stood still
+"For all I know, he may have had to leave Geneva
+the very day he saw me."
+
+"Without telling you!"  I exclaimed
+incredulously.
+
+"I did not give him time.  I left him quite
+abruptly.  I behaved emotionally to the end.  I
+am sorry for it.  Even if I had given him the
+opportunity he would have been justified in
+taking me for a person not to be trusted.  An
+emotional, tearful girl is not a person to
+confide in.  But even if he has left Geneva for
+a time, I am confident that we shall meet again."
+
+"Ah! you are confident. . . .  I dare say.  But
+on what ground?"
+
+"Because I've told him that I was in great need
+of some one, a fellow-countryman, a fellow-
+believer, to whom I could give my confidence in
+a certain matter."
+
+"I see.  I don't ask you what answer he made.  I
+confess that this is good ground for your belief
+in Mr. Razumov's appearance before long.  But he
+has not turned up to-day?"
+
+"No," she said quietly, "not to-day;" and we
+stood for a time in silence, like people that
+have nothing more to say to each other and let
+their thoughts run widely asunder before their
+bodies go off their different ways.  Miss Haldin
+glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a
+brusque movement.  She had already overstayed
+her time, it seemed.
+
+"I don't like to be away from mother," she
+murmured, shaking her head.  "It is not that she
+is very ill now.  But somehow when I am not with
+her I am more uneasy than ever."
+
+Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion
+to her son for the last week or more.  She sat,
+as usual, in the arm-chair by the window,
+looking out silently on that hopeless stretch of
+the Boulevard des Philosophes.  When she spoke,
+a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent,
+trivial things.
+
+"For anyone who knows what the poor soul is
+thinking of, that sort of talk is more painful
+than her silence.  But that is bad too; I can
+hardly endure it, and I dare not break it.
+
+Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her
+glove which had come undone.  I knew well enough
+what a hard time of it she must be having.  The
+stress, its causes, its nature, would have
+undermined the health of an Occidental girl; but
+Russian natures have a singular power of
+resistance against the unfair strains of life.
+Straight and supple, with a short jacket open on
+her black dress, which made her figure appear
+more slender and her fresh but colourless face
+more pale, she compelled my wonder and
+admiration.
+
+"I can't stay a moment longer.  You ought to
+come soon to see mother.  You know she calls you
+'_L'ami._'  It is an excellent name, and she
+really means it.  And now _au revoir_; I must
+run."
+
+She glanced vaguely down the broad walk--the
+hand she put out to me eluded my grasp by an
+unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
+shoulder.  Her red lips were slightly parted,
+not in a smile, however, but expressing a sort
+of startled pleasure.  She gazed towards the
+gates and said quickly, with a gasp--
+
+"There!  I knew it.  Here he comes!"
+
+I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov.  A
+young man was walking up the alley, without
+haste.  His clothes were some dull shade of
+brown, and he carried a stick.  When my eyes
+first fell on him, his head was hanging on his
+breast as if in deep thought.  While I was
+looking at him he raised it sharply, and at once
+stopped.  I am certain he did, but that pause
+was nothing more perceptible than a faltering
+check in his gait, instantaneously overcome.
+Then he continued his approach, looking at us
+steadily.  Miss Haldin signed to me to remain,
+and advanced a step or two to meet him.
+
+I turned my head away from that meeting, and did
+not look at them again till I heard Miss
+Haldin's voice uttering his name in the way of
+introduction.  Mr. Razumov was informed, in a
+warm, low tone, that, besides being a wonderful
+teacher, I was a great support "in our sorrow
+and distress."
+
+Of course I was described also as an Englishman.
+ Miss Haldin spoke rapidly, faster than I have
+ever heard her speak, and that by contrast made
+the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
+
+"I have given him my confidence," she added,
+looking all the time at Mr. Razumov.  That young
+man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin,
+but certainly did not look into her eyes which
+were so ready for him.  Afterwards he glanced
+backwards and forwards at us both, while the
+faint commencement of a forced smile, followed
+by the suspicion of a frown, vanished one after
+another; I detected them, though neither could
+have been noticed by a person less intensely
+bent upon divining him than myself.  I don't
+know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my
+attention seized the very shades of these
+movements.  The attempted smile was given up,
+the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so
+that there should be no sign; but I imagined him
+exclaiming inwardly--
+
+"Her confidence!  To this elderly person--this
+foreigner!"
+
+I imagined this because he looked foreign enough
+to me.  I was upon the whole favourably
+impressed.  He had an air of intelligence and
+even some distinction quite above the average of
+the students and other inhabitants of the
+_Petite Russie_.  His features were more decided
+than in the generality of Russian faces; he had
+a line of the jaw, a clean-shaven, sallow cheek;
+his nose was a ridge, and not a mere
+protuberance.  He wore the hat well down over
+his eyes, his dark hair curled low on the nape
+of his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes
+there were sturdy limbs; a slight stoop brought
+out a satisfactory breadth of shoulders.  Upon
+the whole I was not disappointed.  Studious--
+robust--shy.
+
+Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt
+the grip of his hand on mine, a muscular, firm
+grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry.  Not a word
+or even a mutter assisted this short and arid
+handshake.
+
+I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss
+Haldin touched me lightly on the forearm with a
+significant contact, conveying a distinct wish.
+Let him smile who likes, but I was only too
+ready to stay near Nathalie Haldin, and I am not
+ashamed to say that it was no smiling matter to
+me.  I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed,
+uplifted, as it were poised in the air, but
+soberly, with my feet on the ground and my mind
+trying to penetrate her intention.  She had
+turned to Razumov.
+
+"Well.  This is the place.  Yes, it is here that
+I meant you to come.  I have been walking every
+day. . . .  Don't excuse yourself--I understand.
+ I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all
+the same I cannot stay now.  It is impossible.
+I must hurry off home.  Yes, even with you
+standing before me, I must run off.  I have been
+too long away. . . .  You know how it is?"
+
+These last words were addressed to me.  I
+noticed that Mr. Razumov passed the tip of his
+tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish
+man might do.  He took her hand in its black
+glove, which closed on his, and held it--
+detained it quite visibly to me against a
+drawing-back movement.
+
+"Thank you once more for--for understanding me,"
+she went on warmly.  He interrupted her with a
+certain effect of roughness.  I didn't like him
+speaking to this frank creature so much from
+under the brim of his hat, as it were.  And he
+produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man
+with a parched throat.
+
+"What is there to thank me for?  Understand you?
+. . .  How did I understand you? . . .  You had
+better know that I understand nothing.  I was
+aware that you wanted to see me in this garden.
+I could not come before.  I was hindered.  And
+even to-day, you see. . . late."
+
+She still held his hand.
+
+"I can, at any rate, thank you for not
+dismissing me from your mind as a weak,
+emotional girl.  No doubt I want sustaining.  I
+am very ignorant.  But I can be trusted.  Indeed
+I can!"
+
+"You are ignorant," he repeated thoughtfully.
+He had raised his head, and was looking straight
+into her face now, while she held his hand.
+They stood like this for a long moment.  She
+released his hand.
+
+"Yes.  You did come late.  It was good of you to
+come on the chance of me having loitered beyond
+my time.  I was talking with this good friend
+here.  I was talking of you.  Yes, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, of you.  He was with me when I
+first heard of your being here in Geneva.  He
+can tell you what comfort it was to my
+bewildered spirit to hear that news.  He knew I
+meant to seek you out.  It was the only object
+of my accepting the invitation of Peter
+Ivanovitch. . . .
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me," he
+interrupted, in that wavering, hoarse voice
+which suggested a horribly dry throat.
+
+"Very little.  Just told me your name, and that
+you had arrived here.  Why should I have asked
+for more?  What could he have told me that I did
+not know already from my brother's letter?
+Three lines!  And how much they meant to me!  I
+will show them to you one day, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch.  But now I must go.  The first talk
+between us cannot be a matter of five minutes,
+so we had better not begin. . . ."
+
+I had been standing a little aside, seeing them
+both in profile.  At that moment it occurred to
+me that Mr. Razumov's face was older than his
+age.
+
+"If mother"--the girl had turned suddenly to me
+" were to wake up in my absence (so much longer
+than usual) she would perhaps question me.  She
+seems to miss me more, you know, of late.  She
+would want to know what delayed me--and, you
+see, it would be painful for me to dissemble
+before her."
+
+I understood the point very well.  For the same
+reason she checked what seemed to be on Mr.
+Razumov's part a movement to accompany her.
+
+"No!  No!  I go alone, but meet me here as soon
+as possible."  Then to me in a lower,
+significant tone--
+
+"Mother may be sitting at the window at this
+moment, looking down the street.  She must not
+know anything of Mr. Razumov's presence here
+till--till something is arranged."  She paused
+before she added a little louder, but still
+speaking to me, "Mr. Razumov does not quite
+understand my difficulty, but you know what it
+is."
+
+
+V
+
+
+With a quick inclination of the head for us
+both, and an earnest, friendly glance at the
+young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our
+heads and looking after her straight, supple
+figure receding rapidly.  Her walk was not that
+hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some
+women, but a frank, strong, healthy movement
+forward.  Rapidly she increased the distance--
+disappeared with suddenness at last.  I
+discovered only then that Mr. Razumov, after
+ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking
+me over from head to foot.  I dare say I was a
+very unexpected fact for that young Russian to
+stumble upon.  I caught in his physiognomy, in
+his whole bearing, an expression compounded of
+curiosity and scorn, tempered by alarm--as
+though he had been holding his breath while I
+was not looking.  But his eyes met mine with a
+gaze direct enough.  I saw then for the first
+time that they were of a clear brown colour and
+fringed with thick black eyelashes.  They were
+the youngest feature of his face.  Not at all
+unpleasant eyes.  He swayed slightly, leaning on
+his stick and generally hung in the wind.  It
+flashed upon me that in leaving us together Miss
+Haldin had an intention--that something was
+entrusted to me, since, by a mere accident I had
+been found at hand.  On this assumed ground I
+put all possible friendliness into my manner.  I
+cast about for some right thing to say, and
+suddenly in Miss Haldin's last words I perceived
+the clue to the nature of my mission.
+
+"No," I said gravely, if with a smile, "you
+cannot be expected to understand."
+
+His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little
+before he said, as if wickedly amused--
+
+"But haven't you heard just now?  I was thanked
+by that young lady for understanding so well."
+
+I looked at him rather hard.  Was there a hidden
+and inexplicable sneer in this retort?  No.  It
+was not that.  It might have been resentment.
+Yes.  But what had he to resent?  He looked as
+though he had not slept very well of late.  I
+could almost feel on me the weight of his
+unrefreshed, motionless stare, the stare of a
+man who lies unwinking in the dark, angrily
+passive in the toils of disastrous thoughts.
+Now, when I know how true it was, I can honestly
+affirm that this was the effect he produced on
+me.  It was painful in a curiously indefinite
+way--for, of course, the definition comes to me
+now while I sit writing in the fullness of my
+knowledge.  But this is what the effect was at
+that time of absolute ignorance.  This new sort
+of uneasiness which he seemed to be forcing upon
+me I attempted to put down by assuming a
+conversational, easy familiarity.
+
+"That extremely charming and essentially
+admirable young girl (I am--as you see--old
+enough to be frank in my expressions) was
+referring to her own feelings.  Surely you must
+have understood that much?"
+
+He made such a brusque movement that he even
+tottered a little.
+
+"Must understand this!  Not expected to
+understand that!  I may have other things to do.
+ And the girl is charming and admirable.  Well--
+and if she is!  I suppose I can see that for
+myself."
+
+This sally would have been insulting if his
+voice had not been practically extinct, dried up
+in his throat; and the rustling effort of his
+speech too painful to give real offence.
+
+I remained silent, checked between the obvious
+fact and the subtle impression.  It was open to
+me to leave him there and then; but the sense of
+having been entrusted with a mission, the
+suggestion of Miss Haldin's last glance, was
+strong upon me.  After a moment of reflection I
+said--
+
+"Shall we walk together a little?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he
+tottered again.  I saw it out of the corner of
+my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow.  He
+had fallen back a little and was practically out
+of my sight, unless I turned my head to look at
+him.  I did not wish to indispose him still
+further by an appearance of marked curiosity.
+It might have been distasteful to such a young
+and secret refugee from under the pestilential
+shadow hiding the true, kindly face of his land.
+ And the shadow, the attendant of his
+countrymen, stretching across the middle of
+Europe, was lying on him too, darkening his
+figure to my mental vision.  "Without doubt," I
+said to myself, "he seems a sombre, even a
+desperate revolutionist; but he is young, he may
+be unselfish and humane, capable of compassion,
+of. . . ."
+
+I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat,
+and became all attention.
+
+"This is beyond everything," were his first
+words.  "It is beyond everything!  I find you
+here, for no reason that I can understand, in
+possession of something I cannot be expected to
+understand!  A confidant!  A foreigner!  Talking
+about an admirable Russian girl.  Is the
+admirable girl a fool, I begin to wonder?  What
+are you at?  What is your object?"
+
+He was barely audible, as if his throat had no
+more resonance than a dry rag, a piece of
+tinder.  It was so pitiful that I found it
+extremely easy to control my indignation.
+
+"When you have lived a little longer, Mr.
+Razumov, you will discover that no woman is an
+absolute fool.  I am not a feminist, like that
+illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to
+say the truth, is not a little suspect to me. .
+. ."
+
+He interrupted me, in a surprising note of
+whispering astonishment.
+
+"Suspect to you!  Peter Ivanovitch suspect to
+you!  To you! . . ."
+
+"Yes, in a certain aspect he is," I said,
+dismissing my remark lightly.  "As I was saying,
+Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough,
+you will learn to discriminate between the noble
+trustfulness of a nature foreign to every
+meanness and the flattered credulity of some
+women; though even the credulous, silly as they
+may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
+never absolute fools.  It is my belief that no
+woman is ever completely deceived.  Those that
+are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes
+open, if all the truth were known."
+
+"Upon my word," he cried at my elbow, "what is
+it to me whether women are fools or lunatics?  I
+really don't care what you think of them.  I--I
+am not interested in them.  I let them be.  I am
+not a young man in a novel.  How do you know
+that I want to learn anything about women? . . .
+ What is the meaning of all this?"
+
+"The object, you mean, of this conversation,
+which I admit I have forced upon you in a
+measure."
+
+"Forced!  Object!" he repeated, still keeping
+half a pace or so behind me.  "You wanted to
+talk about women, apparently.  That's a subject.
+ But I don't care for it.  I have never. . . .
+In fact, I have had other subjects to think
+about."
+
+"I am concerned here with one woman only--a
+young girl--the sister of your dead friend--Miss
+Haldin.  Surely you can think a little of her.
+What I meant from the first was that there is a
+situation which you cannot be expected to
+understand."
+
+I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side
+for the space of several strides.
+
+"I think that it may prepare the ground for your
+next interview with Miss Haldin if I tell you of
+it.  I imagine that she might have had something
+of the kind in her mind when she left us
+together.  I believe myself authorized to speak.
+ The peculiar situation I have alluded to has
+arisen in the first grief and distress of Victor
+Haldin's execution.  There was something
+peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest.
+You no doubt know the whole truth. . . ."
+
+I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next
+instant found myself swung so as to face Mr.
+Razumov.
+
+"You spring up from the ground before me with
+this talk.  Who the devil are you?  This is not
+to be borne!  Why!  What for?  What do you know
+what is or is not peculiar?  What have you to do
+with any confounded circumstances, or with
+anything that happens in Russia, anyway?"
+
+He leaned on his stick with his other hand,
+heavily; and when he let go my arm, I was
+certain in my mind that he was hardly able to
+keep on his feet.
+
+"Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables,"
+I proposed, disregarding this display of
+unexpectedly profound emotion.  It was not
+without its effect on me, I confess.  I was
+sorry for him.
+
+"What tables? What are you talking about?  Oh--
+the empty tables?  The tables there.  Certainly.
+ I will sit at one of the empty tables."
+
+I led him away from the path to the very centre
+of the raft of deals before the _chalet_.  The
+Swiss couple were gone by that time.  We were
+alone on the raft, so to speak.  Mr. Razumov
+dropped into a chair, let fall his stick, and
+propped on his elbows, his head between his
+hands, stared at me persistently, openly, and
+continuously, while I signalled the waiter and
+ordered some beer.  I could not quarrel with
+this silent inspection very well, because, truth
+to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of having been
+sprung on him with some abruptness--of having
+"sprung from the ground," as he expressed it.
+
+While waiting to be served I mentioned that,
+born from parents settled in St. Petersburg, I
+had acquired the language as a child.  The town
+I did not remember, having left it for good as a
+boy of nine, but in later years I had renewed my
+acquaintance with the language.  He listened,
+without as much as moving his eyes the least
+little bit.  He had to change his position when
+the beer came, and the instant draining of his
+glass revived him.  He leaned back in his chair
+and, folding his arms across his chest,
+continued to stare at me squarely.  It occurred
+to me that his clean-shaven, almost swarthy face
+was really of the very mobile sort, and that the
+absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit
+of a revolutionist, of a, conspirator
+everlastingly on his guard against self-betrayal
+in a world of secret spies.
+
+"But you are an Englishman--a teacher of English
+literature," he murmured, in a voice that was no
+longer issuing from a parched throat.  "I have
+heard of you.  People told me you have lived
+here for years."
+
+"Quite true.  More than twenty years.  And I
+have been assisting Miss Haldin with her English
+studies."
+
+"You have been reading English poetry with her,"
+he said, immovable now, like another man
+altogether, a complete stranger to the man of
+the heavy and uncertain footfalls a little while
+ago--at my elbow.
+
+"Yes, English poetry," I said.  " But the
+trouble of which I speak was caused by an
+English newspaper."
+
+He continued to stare at me.  I don't think he
+was aware that the story of the midnight arrest
+had been ferreted out by an English journalist
+and given to the world.  When I explained this
+to him he muttered contemptuously, "It may have
+been altogether a lie."
+
+"I should think you are the best judge of that,"
+I retorted, a little disconcerted.  "I must
+confess that to me it looks to be true in the
+main."
+
+"How can you tell truth from lies?" he queried
+in his new, immovable manner.
+
+"I don't know how you do it in Russia," I began,
+rather nettled by his attitude.  He interrupted
+me.
+
+"In Russia, and in general everywhere--in a
+newspaper, for instance.  The colour of the ink
+and the shapes of the letters are the same."
+
+"Well, there are other trifles one can go by.
+The character of the publication, the general
+verisimilitude of the news, the consideration of
+the motive, and so on.  I don't trust blindly
+the accuracy of special correspondents--but why
+should this one have gone to the trouble of
+concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a
+matter of no importance to the world?"
+
+"That's what it is," he grumbled.  "What's going
+on with us is of no importance--a mere
+sensational story to amuse the readers of the
+papers--the superior contemptuous Europe.  It is
+hateful to think of.  But let them wait a bit!"
+
+He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to
+the western world.  Disregarding the anger in
+his stare, I pointed out that whether the
+journalist was well- or ill-informed, the
+concern of the friends of these ladies was with
+the effect the few lines of print in question
+had produced--the effect alone.  And surely he
+must be counted as one of the friends--if only
+for the sake of his late comrade and intimate
+fellow-revolutionist.  At that point I thought
+he was going to speak vehemently; but he only
+astounded me by the convulsive start of his
+whole body.  He restrained himself, folded his
+loosened arms tighter across his chest, and sat
+back with a smile in which there was a twitch of
+scorn and malice.
+
+"Yes, a comrade and an intimate. . . .  Very
+well," he said.
+
+"I ventured to speak to you on that assumption.
+And I cannot be mistaken.  I was present when
+Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival here to
+Miss Haldin, and I saw her relief and
+thankfulness when your name was mentioned.
+Afterwards she showed me her brother's letter,
+and read out the few words in which he alludes
+to you.  What else but a friend could you have
+been?"
+
+"Obviously.  That's perfectly well known.  A
+friend.  Quite correct . . . .  Go on.  You were
+talking of some effect."
+
+I said to myself:  "He puts on the callousness
+of a stern revolutionist, the insensibility to
+common emotions of a man devoted to a
+destructive idea.  He is young, and his
+sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger, a
+foreigner, an old man.  Youth must assert
+itself. . . .  As concisely as possible I
+exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs.
+Haldin had been thrown into by the news of her
+son's untimely end.
+
+He listened--I felt it--with profound attention.
+ His level stare deflected gradually downwards,
+left my face, and rested at last on the ground
+at his feet.
+
+"You can enter into the sister's feelings.  As
+you said, I have only read a little English
+poetry with her, and I won't make myself
+ridiculous in your eyes by trying to speak of
+her.  But you have seen her.  She is one of
+these rare human beings that do not want
+explaining.  At least I think so.  They had only
+that son, that brother, for a link with the
+wider world, with the future.  The very
+groundwork of active existence for Nathalie
+Haldin is gone with him.  Can you wonder then
+that she turns with eagerness to the only man
+her brother mentions in his letters.  Your name
+is a sort of legacy."
+
+"What could he have written of me?" he cried, in
+a low, exasperated tone.
+
+"Only a few words.  It is not for me to repeat
+them to you, Mr. Razumov; but you may believe my
+assertion that these words are forcible enough
+to make both his mother and his sister believe
+implicitly in the worth of your judgment and in
+the truth of anything you may have to say to
+them.  It's impossible for you now to pass them
+by like strangers."
+
+I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the
+footsteps of the few people passing up and down
+the broad central walk.  While I was speaking
+his head had sunk upon his breast above his
+folded arms.  He raised it sharply.
+
+"Must I go then and lie to that old woman!"
+
+It was not anger; it was something else,
+something more poignant, and not so simple.  I
+was aware of it sympathetically, while I was
+profoundly concerned at the nature of that
+exclamation.
+
+"Dear me!  Won't the truth do, then?  I hoped
+you could have told them something consoling.  I
+am thinking of the poor mother now.  Your Russia
+_is_ a cruel country."
+
+He moved a little in his chair.
+
+"Yes," I repeated.  "I thought you would have
+had something authentic to tell."
+
+The twitching of his lips before he spoke was
+curious.
+
+"What if it is not worth telling?"
+
+"Not worth--from what point of view?  I don't
+understand."
+
+"From every point of view."
+
+I spoke with some asperity.
+
+"I should think that anything which could
+explain the circumstances of that midnight
+arrest. . . ."
+
+"Reported by a journalist for the amusement of
+the civilized Europe," he broke in scornfully.
+
+"Yes, reported. . . .  But aren't they true?  I
+can't make out your attitude in this?  Either
+the man is a hero to you, or. . . ."
+
+He approached his face with fiercely distended
+nostrils close to mine so suddenly that I had
+the greatest difficulty in not starting back.
+
+"You ask me!  I suppose it amuses you, all this.
+ Look here!  I am a worker.  I studied.  Yes, I
+studied very hard.  There is intelligence here."
+ (He tapped his forehead with his finger-tips.)
+"Don't you think a Russian may have sane
+ambitions?  Yes--I had even prospects.
+Certainly!  I had.  And now you see me here,
+abroad, everything gone, lost, sacrificed.  You
+see me here--and you ask!  You see me, don't
+you?--sitting before you."
+
+He threw himself back violently.  I kept
+outwardly calm.
+
+"Yes, I see you here; and I assume you are here
+on account of the Haldin affair?"
+
+His manner changed.
+
+"You call it the Haldin affair--do you?" he
+observed indifferently.
+
+"I have no right to ask you anything," I said.
+"I wouldn't presume.  But in that case the
+mother and the sister of him who must be a hero
+in your eyes cannot be indifferent to you.  The
+girl is a frank and generous creature, having
+the noblest--well--illusions.  You will tell her
+nothing--or you will tell her everything.  But
+speaking now of the object with which I've
+approached you first, we have to deal with the
+morbid state of the mother.  Perhaps something
+could be invented under your authority as a cure
+for a distracted and suffering soul filled with
+maternal affection."
+
+His air of weary indifference was accentuated, I
+could not help thinking, wilfully.
+
+"Oh yes.  Something might," he mumbled
+carelessly.
+
+He put his hand over his mouth to conceal a
+yawn.  When he uncovered his lips they were
+smiling faintly.
+
+"Pardon me.  This has been a long conversation,
+and I have not had much sleep the last two
+nights."
+
+This unexpected, somewhat insolent sort of
+apology had the merit of being perfectly true.
+He had had no nightly rest to speak of since
+that day when, in the grounds of the Chateau
+Borel, the sister of Victor Haldin had appeared
+before him.  The perplexities and the complex
+terrors--I may say--of this sleeplessness are
+recorded in the document I was to see later--the
+document which is the main source of this
+narrative.  At the moment he looked to me
+convincingly tired, gone slack all over, like a
+man who has passed through some sort of crisis.
+
+"I have had a lot of urgent writing to do," he
+added.
+
+I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my
+example, without haste, a little heavily.
+
+"I must apologize for detaining you so long," I
+said.
+
+"Why apologize?  One can't very well go to bed
+before night.  And you did not detain me.  I
+could have left you at any time."
+
+I had not stayed with him to be offended.
+
+"I am glad you have been sufficiently
+interested," I said calmly.  "No merit of mine,
+though--the commonest sort of regard for the
+mother of your friend was enough. . . .  As to
+Miss Haldin herself, she at one time was
+disposed to think that her brother had been
+betrayed to the police in some way."
+
+To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again
+suddenly.  I stared at him, and I must say that
+he returned my stare without winking for quite a
+considerable time.
+
+"In some way," he mumbled, as if he had not
+understood or could not believe his ears.
+
+"Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might
+have done that," I went on.  "Or, as she
+characteristically put it to me, the folly or
+weakness of some unhappy fellow-revolutionist."
+
+"Folly or weakness," he repeated bitterly.
+
+"She is a very generous creature," I observed
+after a time.  The man admired by Victor Haldin
+fixed his eyes on the ground.  I turned away and
+moved off, apparently unnoticed by him.  I
+nourished no resentment of the moody brusqueness
+with which he had treated me.  The sentiment I
+was carrying away from that conversation was
+that of hopelessness.  Before I had got fairly
+clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had
+rejoined me.
+
+"H'm, yes!"  I heard him at my elbow again.
+"But what do you think?"
+
+I did not look round even.
+
+"I think that you people are under a curse."
+
+He made no sound.  It was only on the pavement
+outside the gate that I heard him again.
+
+"I should like to walk with you a little."
+
+After all, I preferred this enigmatical young
+man to his celebrated compatriot, the great
+Peter Ivanovitch.  But I saw no reason for being
+particularly gracious.
+
+"I am going now to the railway station, by the
+shortest way from here, to meet a friend from
+England," I said, for all answer to his
+unexpected proposal.  I hoped that something
+informing could come of it.  As we stood on the
+curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he
+remarked gloomily--
+
+"I like what you said just now."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+We stepped off the pavement together.
+
+"The great problem," he went on, "is to
+understand thoroughly the nature of the curse."
+
+"That's not very difficult, I think."
+
+"I think so too," he agreed with me, and his
+readiness, strangely enough, did not make him
+less enigmatical in the least.
+
+"A curse is an evil spell," I tried him again.
+"And the important, the great problem, is to
+find the means to break it."
+
+"Yes.  To find the means."
+
+That was also an assent, but he seemed to be
+thinking of something else.  We had crossed
+diagonally the open space before the theatre,
+and began to descend a broad, sparely frequented
+street in the direction of one of the smaller
+bridges.  He kept on by my side without speaking
+for a long time.
+
+"You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?"
+I asked.
+
+He was silent for so long that I began to think
+I had been indiscreet, and should get no answer
+at all.  Yet on looking at him I almost believed
+that my question had caused him something in the
+nature of positive anguish.  I detected it
+mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he
+put a great force stealthily.  Once, however, he
+had overcome that sort of agonizing hesitation
+sufficiently to tell me that he had no such
+intention, he became rather communicative--at
+least relatively to the former off-hand curtness
+of his speeches.  The tone, too, was more
+amiable.  He informed me that he intended to
+study and also to write.  He went even so far as
+to tell me he had been to Stuttgart.  Stuttgart,
+I was aware, was one of the revolutionary
+centres.  The directing committee of one of the
+Russian parties (I can't tell now which) was
+located in that town.  It was there that he got
+into touch with the active work of the
+revolutionists outside Russia.
+
+"I have never been abroad before," he explained,
+in a rather inanimate voice now.  Then, after a
+slight hesitation, altogether different from the
+agonizing irresolution my first simple question
+"whether he meant to stay in Geneva" had
+aroused, he made me an unexpected confidence--
+
+"The fact is, I have received a sort of mission
+from them."
+
+"Which will keep you here in Geneva?"
+
+"Yes.  Here.  In this odious. . . ."
+
+I was satisfied with my faculty for putting two
+and two together when I drew the inference that
+the mission had something to do with the person
+of the great Peter Ivanovitch.  But I kept that
+surmise to myself naturally, and Mr. Razumov
+said nothing more for some considerable time.
+It was only when we were nearly on the bridge we
+had been making for that he opened his lips
+again, abruptly--
+
+"Could I see that precious article anywhere?"
+
+I had to think for a moment before I saw what he
+was referring to.
+
+"It has been reproduced in parts by the Press
+here.  There are files to be seen in various
+places.  My copy of the English newspaper I have
+left with Miss Haldin, I remember, on the day
+after it reached me.  I was sufficiently worried
+by seeing it lying on a table by the side of the
+poor mother's chair for weeks.  Then it
+disappeared.  It was a relief, I assure you."
+
+He had stopped short.
+
+"I trust," I continued, "that you will find time
+to see these ladies fairly often--that you will
+make time."
+
+He stared at me so queerly that I hardly know
+how to define his aspect.  I could not
+understand it in this connexion at all.  What
+ailed him?  I asked myself.  What strange
+thought had come into his head?  What vision of
+all the horrors that can be seen in his hopeless
+country had come suddenly to haunt his brain?
+If it were anything connected with the fate of
+Victor Haldin, then I hoped earnestly he would
+keep it to himself for ever.  I was, to speak
+plainly, so shocked that I tried to conceal my
+impression by--Heaven forgive me--a smile and
+the assumption of a light manner.
+
+"Surely," I exclaimed, "that needn't cost you a
+great effort."
+
+He turned away from me and leaned over the
+parapet of the bridge.  For a moment I waited,
+looking at his back.  And yet, I assure you, I
+was not anxious just then to look at his face
+again.  He did not move at all.  He did not mean
+to move.  I walked on slowly on my way towards
+the station, and at the end of the bridge I
+glanced over my shoulder.  No, he had not moved.
+ He hung well over the parapet, as if captivated
+by the smooth rush of the blue water under the
+arch.  The current there is swift, extremely
+swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can
+never look at it for any length of time without
+experiencing a dread of being suddenly snatched
+away by its destructive force.  Some brains
+cannot resist the suggestion of irresistible
+power and of headlong motion.
+
+It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov.  I
+left him hanging far over the parapet of the
+bridge.  The way he had behaved to me could not
+be put down to mere boorishness.  There was
+something else under his scorn and impatience.
+Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to
+hidden truth, it was the same thing which had
+kept him over a week, nearly ten days indeed,
+from coming near Miss Haldin.  But what it was I
+could not tell.
+
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The water under the bridge ran violent and deep.
+ Its slightly undulating rush seemed capable of
+scouring out a channel for itself through solid
+granite while you looked.  But had it flowed
+through Razumov's breast, it could not have
+washed away the accumulated bitterness the
+wrecking of his life had deposited there.
+
+"What is the meaning of all this?" he thought,
+staring downwards at the headlong flow so smooth
+and clean that only the passage of a faint air-
+bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like
+a white hair, disclosed its vertiginous
+rapidity, its terrible force.  "Why has that
+meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me?
+And what is this silly tale of a crazy old
+woman?"
+
+He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but
+he avoided any mental reference to the young
+girl.  "A crazy old woman," he repeated to
+himself."  It is a fatality!  Or ought I to
+despise all this as absurd?  But no!  I am
+wrong!  I can't afford to despise anything.  An
+absurdity may be the starting-point of the most
+dangerous complications.  How is one to guard
+against it?  It puts to rout one's intelligence.
+ The more intelligent one is the less one
+suspects an absurdity."
+
+A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a
+moment.  It even made his body leaning over the
+parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent
+thinking, like a secret dialogue with himself.
+And even in that privacy, his thought had some
+reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
+
+"After all, this is not absurd.  It is
+insignificant.  It is absolutely insignificant--
+absolutely.  The craze of an old woman--the
+fussy officiousness of a blundering elderly
+Englishman.  What devil put him in the way?
+Haven't I treated him cavalierly enough?
+Haven't I just?  That's the way to treat these
+meddlesome persons.  Is it possible that he
+still stands behind my back, waiting?"
+
+Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine.
+It was not fear.  He was certain that it was not
+fear--not fear for himself--but it was, all the
+same, a sort of apprehension as if for another,
+for some one he knew without being able to put a
+name on the personality.  But the recollection
+that the officious Englishman had a train to
+meet tranquillized him for a time.  It was too
+stupid to suppose that he should be wasting his
+time in waiting.  It was unnecessary to look
+round and make sure.
+
+But what did the man mean by his extraordinary
+rigmarole about the newspaper, and that crazy
+old woman? he thought suddenly.  It was a
+damnable presumption, anyhow, something that
+only an Englishman could be capable of.  All
+this was a sort of sport for him--the sport of
+revolution--a game to look at from the height of
+his superiority.  And what on earth did he mean
+by his exclamation, "Won't the truth do?"
+
+Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone
+coping over which he was leaning with force.
+"Won't the truth do?  The truth for the crazy
+old mother of the--"
+
+The young man shuddered again.  Yes.  The truth
+would do!  Apparently it would do.  Exactly.
+And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
+unspoken words cynically.  "Fall on my neck in
+gratitude, no doubt," he jeered mentally.  But
+this mood abandoned him at once.  He felt sad,
+as if his heart had become empty suddenly.
+"Well, I must be cautious," he concluded, coming
+to himself as though his brain had been awakened
+from a trance.  "There is nothing, no one, too
+insignificant, too absurd to be disregarded," he
+thought wearily.  "I must be cautious."
+
+Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from
+the balustrade and, retracing his steps along
+the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
+where, for a few days, he led a solitary and
+retired existence.  He neglected Peter
+Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the
+Stuttgart group; he never went near the refugee
+revolutionists, to whom he had been introduced
+on his arrival.  He kept out of that world
+altogether.  And he felt that such conduct,
+causing surprise and arousing suspicion,
+contained an element of danger for himself.
+
+This is not to say that during these few days he
+never went out.  I met him several times in the
+streets, but he gave me no recognition.  Once,
+going home after an evening call on the ladies
+Haldin, I saw him crossing the dark roadway of
+the Boulevard des Philosophes.  He had a broad-
+brimmed soft hat, and the collar of his coat
+turned up.  I watched him make straight for the
+house, but, instead of going in, he stopped
+opposite the still lighted windows, and after a
+time went away down a side-street.
+
+I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin
+yet.  Miss Haldin told me he was reluctant;
+moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin
+had changed.  She seemed to think now that her
+son was living, and she perhaps awaited his
+arrival.  Her immobility in the great arm-chair
+in front of the window had an air of expectancy,
+even when the blind was down and the lamps
+lighted.
+
+For my part, I was convinced that she had
+received her death-stroke; Miss Haldin, to whom,
+of course, I said nothing of my forebodings,
+thought that no good would come from introducing
+Mr. Razumov just then, an opinion which I shared
+fully.  I knew that she met the young man on the
+Bastions.  Once or twice I saw them strolling
+slowly up the main alley.  They met every day
+for weeks.  I avoided passing that way during
+the hour when Miss Haldin took her exercise
+there.  One day, however, in a fit of absent-
+mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon
+her walking alone.  I stopped to exchange a few
+words.  Mr. Razumov failed to turn up, and we
+began to talk about him--naturally.
+
+"Did he tell you anything definite about your
+brother's activities--his end?"  I ventured to
+ask.
+
+"No," admitted Miss Haldin, with some
+hesitation.  "Nothing definite."
+
+I understood well enough that all their
+conversations must have been referred mentally
+to that dead man who had brought them together.
+That was unavoidable.  But it was in the living
+man that she was interested.  That was
+unavoidable too, I suppose.  And as I pushed my
+inquiries I discovered that he had disclosed
+himself to her as a by no means conventional
+revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of
+theories, of men too.  I was rather pleased at
+that--but I was a little puzzled.
+
+"His mind goes forward, far ahead of the
+struggle," Miss Haldin explained.  "Of course,
+he is an actual worker too," she added.
+
+"And do you understand him?"  I inquired point-
+blank.
+
+She hesitated again.  "Not altogether," she
+murmured.
+
+I perceived that he had fascinated her by an
+assumption of mysterious reserve.
+
+"Do you know what I think?" she went on,
+breaking through her reserved, almost reluctant
+attitude: "I think that he is observing,
+studying me, to discover whether I am worthy of
+his trust. . . ."
+
+"And that pleases you?"
+
+She kept mysteriously silent for a moment.  Then
+with energy, but in a confidential tone--
+
+"I am convinced;" she declared, "that this
+extraordinary man is meditating some vast plan,
+some great undertaking; he is possessed by it--
+he suffers from it--and from being alone in the
+world."
+
+"And so he's looking for helpers?"  I commented,
+turning away my head.
+
+Again there was a silence.
+
+"Why not?" she said at last.
+
+The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign
+friend, had fallen into a distant background.
+But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was
+absolutely nowhere now.  And this thought
+consoled me.  Yet I saw the gigantic shadow of
+Russian life deepening around her like the
+darkness of an advancing night.  It would devour
+her presently.  I inquired after Mrs.  Haldin--
+that other victim of the deadly shade.
+
+A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank
+eyes.  Mother seemed no worse, but if I only
+knew what strange fancies she had sometimes!
+Then Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch,
+declared that she could not stay a moment
+longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off
+lightly.
+
+Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that
+day.  Incomprehensible youth!
+
+But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing
+the Place Mollard, I caught sight of him
+boarding a South Shore tramcar.
+
+"He's going to the Chateau Borel," I thought.
+
+
+After depositing Razumov at the gates of the
+Chateau Borel, some half a mile or so from the
+town, the car continued its journey between two
+straight lines of shady trees.  Across the
+roadway in the sunshine a short wooden pier
+jutted into the shallow pale water, which
+farther out had an intense blue tint contrasting
+unpleasantly with the green orderly slopes on
+the opposite shore.  The whole view, with the
+harbour jetties of white stone underlining
+lividly the dark front of the town to the left,
+and the expanding space of water to the right
+with jutting promontories of no particular
+character, had the uninspiring, glittering
+quality of a very fresh oleograph.  Razumov
+turned his back on it with contempt.  He thought
+it odious--oppressively odious--in its
+unsuggestive finish: the very perfection of
+mediocrity attained at last after centuries of
+toil and culture.  And turning his back on it,
+he faced the entrance to the grounds of the
+Chateau Borel.
+
+The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron
+arch between the dark weather-stained stone
+piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks
+of wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it
+had not been opened for a very long time.  But
+close against the lodge, built of the same grey
+stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded
+up), there was a small side entrance.  The bars
+of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
+as though it had not been closed for a long
+time.  In fact, Razumov, trying to push it open
+a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
+
+"Democratic virtue.  There are no thieves here,
+apparently," he muttered to himself, with
+displeasure.  Before advancing into the grounds
+he looked back sourly at an idle working man
+lounging on a bench in the clean, broad avenue.
+The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his
+arms hung over the low back of the public seat;
+he was taking a day off in lordly repose, as if
+everything in sight belonged to him.
+
+"Elector!  Eligible!  Enlightened!"  Razumov
+muttered to himself.  "A brute, all the same."
+
+Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up
+the wide sweep of the drive, trying to think of
+nothing--to rest his head, to rest his emotions
+too.  But arriving at the foot of the terrace
+before the house he faltered, affected
+physically by some invisible interference.  The
+mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats
+startled him.  He stopped short and looked at
+the brick wall of the terrace, faced with
+shallow arches, meagrely clothed by a few
+unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept narrow
+flower-bed along its foot.
+
+"It is here!" he thought, with a sort of awe.
+"It is here--on this very spot. . . ."
+
+He was tempted to flight at the mere
+recollection of his first meeting with Nathalie
+Haldin.  He confessed it to himself; but he did
+not move, and that not because he wished to
+resist an unworthy weakness, but because he knew
+that he had no place to fly to.  Moreover, he
+could not leave Geneva.  He recognized, even
+without thinking, that it was impossible.  It
+would have been a fatal admission, an act of
+moral suicide.  It would have been also
+physically dangerous.  Slowly he ascended the
+stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained
+greenish stone urns of funereal aspect.
+
+Across the broad platform, where a few blades of
+grass sprouted on the discoloured gravel, the
+door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
+shuttered, faced him, wide open.  He believed
+that his approach had been noted, because,
+framed in the doorway, without his tall hat,
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his
+approach.
+
+The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared
+head of Europe's greatest feminist accentuated
+the dubiousness of his status in the house
+rented by Madame de S---, his Egeria.  His
+aspect combined the formality of the caller with
+the freedom of the proprietor.  Florid and
+bearded and masked by the dark blue glasses, he
+met the visitor, and at once took him familiarly
+under the arm.
+
+Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by
+an effort which the constant necessity of
+prudence had rendered almost mechanical.  And
+this necessity had settled his expression in a
+cast of austere, almost fanatical, aloofness.
+The "heroic fugitive," impressed afresh by the
+severe detachment of this new arrival from
+revolutionary Russia, took a conciliatory, even
+a confidential tone.  Madame de S--- was resting
+after a bad night.  She often had bad nights.
+He had left his hat upstairs on the landing and
+had come down to suggest to his young friend a
+stroll and a good open-hearted talk in one of
+the shady alleys behind the house.  After
+voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at
+the unmoved face by his side, and could not
+restrain himself from exclaiming--
+
+"On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary
+person."
+
+"I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch.  If
+I were really an extraordinary person, I would
+not be here, walking with you in a garden in
+Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of--
+what's the name of the Commune this place
+belongs to? . . .  Never mind--the heart of
+democracy, anyhow.  A fit heart for it; no
+bigger than a parched pea and about as much
+value.  I am no more extraordinary than the rest
+of us Russians, wandering abroad."
+
+But Peter Ivanovitch dissented emphatically--
+
+"No!  No!  You are not ordinary.  I have some
+experience of Russians who are--well--living
+abroad.  You appear to me, and to others too, a
+marked personality,"
+
+"What does he mean by this?"  Razumov asked
+himself, turning his eyes fully on his
+companion.  The face of Peter Ivanovitch
+expressed a meditative seriousness.
+
+"You don't suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I
+have not heard of you from various points where
+you made yourself known on your way here?  I
+have had letters."
+
+"Oh, we are great in talking about each other,"
+interjected Razumov, who had listened with great
+attention.  "Gossip, tales, suspicions, and all
+that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to
+perfection.  Calumny, even."
+
+In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very
+well to conceal the feeling of anxiety which had
+come over him.  At the same time he was saying
+to himself that there could be no earthly reason
+for anxiety.  He was relieved by the evident
+sincerity of the protesting voice.
+
+"Heavens!" cried Peter Ivanovitch.  "What are
+you talking about?  What reason can _you_ have
+to. . .?
+
+The great exile flung up his arms as if words
+had failed him in sober truth.  Razumov was
+satisfied.  Yet he was moved to continue in the
+same vein.
+
+"I am talking of the poisonous plants which
+flourish in the world of conspirators, like evil
+mushrooms in a dark cellar."
+
+"You are casting aspersions," remonstrated Peter
+Ivanovitch, "which as far as you are concerned---
+"
+
+"No!"  Razumov interrupted without heat.
+"Indeed, I don't want to cast aspersions, but
+it's just as well to have no illusions."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance
+of his dark spectacles, accompanied by a faint
+smile.
+
+"The man who says that he has no illusions has
+at least that one," he said, in a very friendly
+tone.  "But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
+ You aim at stoicism."
+
+" Stoicism!  That's a pose of the Greeks and the
+Romans.  Let's leave it to them.  We are
+Russians, that is--children; that is--sincere;
+that is--cynical, if you like.  But that's not a
+pose."
+
+A long silence ensued.  They strolled slowly
+under the lime-trees.  Peter Ivanovitch had put
+his hands behind his back.  Razumov felt the
+ungravelled ground of the deeply shaded walk
+damp and as if slippery under his feet.  He
+asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were
+saying the right things.  The direction of the
+conversation ought to have been more under his
+control, he reflected.  The great man appeared
+to be reflecting on his side too.  He cleared
+his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at once a
+painful reawakening of scorn and fear.
+
+"I am astonished," began Peter Ivanovitch
+gently.  "Supposing you are right in your
+indictment, how can you raise any question of
+calumny or gossip, in your case?  It is
+unreasonable.  The fact is, Kirylo Sidorovitch,
+there is not enough known of you to give hold to
+gossip or even calumny.  Just now you are a man
+associated with a great deed, which had been
+hoped for, and tried for too, without success.
+People have perished for attempting that which
+you and Haldin have done at last.  You come to
+us out of Russia, with that prestige.  But you
+cannot deny that you have not been
+communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  People you
+have met imparted their impressions to me; one
+wrote this, another that, but I form my own
+opinions.  I waited to see you first.  You are a
+man out of the common.  That's positively so.
+You are close, very close.  This taciturnity,
+this severe brow, this something inflexible and
+secret in you, inspires hopes and a little
+wonder as to what you may mean.  There is
+something of a Brutus. . . ."
+
+"Pray spare me those classical allusions!" burst
+out Razumov nervously.  "What comes Junius
+Brutus to do here?  It is ridiculous!  Do you
+mean to say," he added sarcastically, but
+lowering his voice, "that the Russian
+revolutionists are all patricians and that I am
+an aristocrat?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself
+with a few gestures, clasped his hands again
+behind his back, and made a few steps, pondering.
+
+"Not _all_ patricians," he muttered at last.
+"But you, at any rate, are one of _us_."
+
+Razumov smiled bitterly.
+
+"To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer," he said
+in a sneering tone.  "I am not a democratic Jew.
+ How can I help it?  Not everybody has such
+luck.  I have no name, I have no. . . ."
+
+The European celebrity showed a great concern.
+He stepped back a pace and his arms flew in
+front of his person, extended, deprecatory,
+almost entreating.  His deep bass voice was full
+of pain.
+
+"But, my dear young friend!" he cried.  "My dear
+Kirylo Sidorovitch. . . ."
+
+Razumov shook his head.
+
+"The very patronymic you are so civil as to use
+when addressing me I have no legal right to--but
+what of that?  I don't wish to claim it.  I have
+no father.  So much the better.  But I will tell
+you what: my mother's grandfather was a peasant--
+a serf.  See how much I am one of _you_.  I
+don't want anyone to claim me.  But Russia
+_can't_ disown me.  She cannot!"
+
+Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
+
+"I am _it_ !"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head
+lowered.  Razumov followed, vexed with himself.
+That was not the right sort of talk.  All
+sincerity was an imprudence.  Yet one could not
+renounce truth altogether, he thought, with
+despair.  Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind
+his dark glasses, became to him suddenly so
+odious that if he had had a knife, he fancied he
+could have stabbed him not only without
+compunction, but with a horrible, triumphant
+satisfaction.  His imagination dwelt on that
+atrocity in spite of himself.  It was as if he
+were becoming light-headed.  " It is not what is
+expected of me," he repeated to himself.  "It is
+not what is--I could get away by breaking the
+fastening on the little gate I see there in the
+back wall.  It is a flimsy lock.  Nobody in the
+house seems to know he is here with me.  Oh yes.
+ The hat!  These women would discover presently
+the hat he has left on the landing.  They would
+come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy
+shade--but I would be gone and no one could
+ever. . .Lord!  Am I going mad?" he asked
+himself in a fright.
+
+The great man was heard--musing in an undertone.
+
+"H'm, yes!  That--no doubt--in a certain sense.
+. . ."  He raised his voice.  "There is a deal
+of pride about you. . . ."
+
+The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a
+homely, familiar ring, acknowledging, in a way,
+Razumov's claim to peasant descent.
+
+"A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo.  And I
+don't say that you have no justification for it.
+ I have admitted you had.  I have ventured to
+allude to the facts of your birth simply because
+I attach no mean importance to it.  You are one
+of us--_un des notres_.  I reflect on that with
+satisfaction."
+
+"I attach some importance to it also," said
+Razumov quietly.  "I won't even deny that it may
+have some importance for you too," he continued,
+after a slight pause and with a touch of
+grimness of which he was himself aware, with
+some annoyance.  He hoped it had escaped the
+perception of Peter Ivanovitch.  "But suppose we
+talk no more about it?"
+
+"Well, we shall not--not after this one time,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch," persisted the noble arch-
+priest of Revolution.  "This shall be the last
+occasion.  You cannot believe for a moment that
+I had the slightest idea of wounding your
+feelings.  You are clearly a superior nature--
+that's how I read you.  Quite above the common--
+h'm--susceptibilities.  But the fact is, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, I don't know your susceptibilities.
+ Nobody, out of Russia, knows much of you--as
+yet!"
+
+"You have been watching me?" suggested Razumov.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect
+frankness, but as they turned their faces to
+each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
+spectacles.  Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch
+hinted that he had felt for some time the need
+of meeting a man of energy and character, in
+view of a certain project.  He said nothing more
+precise, however; and after some critical
+remarks upon the personalities of the various
+members of the committee of revolutionary action
+in Stuttgart, he let the conversation lapse for
+quite a long while.  They paced the alley from
+end to end.  Razumov, silent too, raised his
+eyes from time to time to cast a glance at the
+back of the house.  It offered no sign of being
+inhabited.  With its grimy, weather-stained
+walls and all the windows shuttered from top to
+bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted.
+It might very well have been haunted in
+traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
+futile ghost of a middle-class order.  The
+shades evoked, as worldly rumour had it, by
+Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
+deputies of various European Parliaments, must
+have been of another sort.  Razumov had never
+seen Madame de S___ but in the carriage.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
+
+"Two things I may say to you at once.  I
+believe, first, that neither a leader nor any
+decisive action can come out of the dregs of a
+people.  Now, if you ask me what are the dregs
+of a people--h'm--it would take too long to
+tell.  You would be surprised at the variety of
+ingredients that for me go to the making up of
+these dregs--of that which ought, _must_ remain
+at the bottom.  Moreover, such a statement might
+be subject to discussion.  But I can tell you
+what is _not_ the dregs.  On that it is
+impossible for us to disagree.  The peasantry of
+a people is not the dregs; neither is its
+highest class--well--the nobility.  Reflect on
+that, Kirylo Sidorovitch!  I believe you are
+well fitted for reflection.  Everything in a
+people that is not genuine, not its own by
+origin or development, is--well--dirt!
+Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
+Foreign-bred doctrines are that.  Dirt!  Dregs!
+The second thing I would offer to your
+meditation is this: that for us at this moment
+there yawns a chasm between the past and the
+future.  It can never be bridged by foreign
+liberalism.  All attempts at it are either folly
+or cheating.  Bridged it can never be!  It has
+to be filled up."
+
+A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the
+tones of the burly feminist.  He seized
+Razumov's arm above the elbow, and gave it a
+slight shake.
+
+"Do you understand, enigmatical young man?  It
+has got to be just filled up."
+
+Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
+
+"Don't you think that I have already gone beyond
+meditation on that subject?" he said, freeing
+his arm by a quiet movement which increased the
+distance a little between himself and Peter
+Ivanovitch, as they went on strolling abreast.
+And he added that surely whole cartloads of
+words and theories could never fill that chasm.
+No meditation was necessary.  A sacrifice of
+many lives could alone--  He fell silent without
+finishing the phrase.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head
+slowly.  After a moment he proposed that they
+should go and see if Madame de S-- was now
+visible.
+
+"We shall get some tea," he said, turning out of
+the shaded gloomy walk with a brisker step.
+
+The lady companion had been on the look out.
+Her dark skirt whisked into the doorway as the
+two men came in sight round the corner.  She ran
+off somewhere altogether, and had disappeared
+when they entered the hall.  In the crude light
+falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the
+black and white tessellated floor, covered with
+muddy tracks, their footsteps echoed faintly.
+The great feminist led the way up the stairs.
+On the balustrade of the first-floor landing a
+shiny tall hat reposed, rim upwards, opposite
+the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it
+was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it
+was to be supposed, by fugitive revolutionists.
+The cracked white paint of the panels, the
+tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one
+to imagine nothing but dust and emptiness
+within.  Before turning the massive brass
+handle, Peter Ivanovitch gave his young
+companion a sharp, partly critical, partly
+preparatory glance.
+
+"No one is perfect," he murmured discreetly.
+Thus, the possessor of a rare jewel might,
+before opening the casket, warn the profane that
+no gem perhaps is flawless.
+
+He remained with his hand on the door-handle so
+long that Razumov assented by a moody "No."
+
+"Perfection itself would not produce that
+effect," pursued Peter Ivanovitch, "in a world
+not meant for it.  But you shall find there a
+mind--no!--the quintessence of feminine
+intuition which will understand any perplexity
+you may be suffering from by the irresistible,
+enlightening force of sympathy.  Nothing can
+remain obscure before that--that--inspired, yes,
+inspired penetration, this true light of
+femininity."
+
+The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy
+steadfastness gave his face an air of absolute
+conviction.  Razumov felt a momentary shrinking
+before that closed door.
+
+"Penetration?  Light," he stammered out.  "Do
+you mean some sort of thought-reading?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
+
+"I mean something utterly different," he
+retorted, with a faint, pitying smile.
+
+Razumov began to feel angry, very much against
+his wish.
+
+"This is very mysterious," he muttered through
+his teeth.
+
+"You don't object to being understood, to being
+guided?" queried the great feminist.  Razumov
+exploded in a fierce whisper.
+
+"In what sense?  Be pleased to understand that I
+am a serious person.  Who do you take me for?"
+
+They looked at each other very closely.
+Razumov's temper was cooled by the impenetrable
+earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his
+stare.  Peter Ivanovitch turned the handle at
+last.
+
+"You shall know directly," he said, pushing the
+door open.
+
+A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the
+room.
+
+"_Enfin_."
+
+In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking
+the view, Peter Ivanovitch boomed in a hearty
+tone with something boastful in it.
+
+"Yes.  Here I am!"
+
+He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who
+waited for him to move on.
+
+"And I am bringing you a proved conspirator--a
+real one this time.  _Un vrai celui la_."
+
+This pause in the doorway gave the "proved
+conspirator" time to make sure that his face did
+not betray his angry curiosity and his mental
+disgust.
+
+These sentiments stand confessed in Mr.
+Razumov's memorandum of his first interview with
+Madame de S---.  The very words I use in my
+narrative are written where their sincerity
+cannot be suspected.  The record, which could
+not have been meant for anyone's eyes but his
+own, was not, I think, the outcome of that
+strange impulse of indiscretion common to men
+who lead secret lives, and accounting for the
+invariable existence of "compromising documents"
+in all the plots and conspiracies of history.
+Mr. Razumov looked at it, I suppose, as a man
+looks at himself in a mirror, with wonder,
+perhaps with anguish, with anger or despair.
+Yes, as a threatened man may look fearfully at
+his own face in the glass, formulating to
+himself reassuring excuses for his appearance
+marked by the taint of some insidious hereditary
+disease.
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Egeria of the "Russian Mazzini" produced, at
+first view, a strong effect by the death-like
+immobility of an obviously painted face.  The
+eyes appeared extraordinarily brilliant.  The
+figure, in a close-fitting dress, admirably
+made, but by no means fresh, had an elegant
+stiffness.  The rasping voice inviting him to
+sit down; the rigidity of the upright attitude
+with one arm extended along the back of the
+sofa, the white gleam of the big eyeballs
+setting off the black, fathomless stare of the
+enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than
+anything he had seen since his hasty and secret
+departure from St. Petersburg.  A witch in
+Parisian clothes, he thought.  A portent!  He
+actually hesitated in his advance, and did not
+even comprehend, at first, what the rasping
+voice was saying.
+
+"Sit down.  Draw your chair nearer me.  There--"
+
+He sat down.  At close quarters the rouged
+cheekbones, the wrinkles, the fine lines on each
+side of the vivid lips, astounded him.  He was
+being received graciously, with a smile which
+made him think of a grinning skull.
+
+"We have been hearing about you for some time."
+
+He did not know what to say, and murmured some
+disconnected words.  The grinning skull effect
+vanished.
+
+"And do you know that the general complaint is
+that you have shown yourself very reserved
+everywhere?"
+
+Razumov remained silent for a time, thinking of
+his answer.
+
+"I, don't you see, am a man of action," he said
+huskily, glancing upwards.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch stood in portentous expectant
+silence by the side of his chair.  A slight
+feeling of nausea came over Razumov.  What could
+be the relations of these two people to each
+other?  She like a galvanized corpse out of some
+Hoffman's Tale--he the preacher of feminist
+gospel for all the world, and a super-
+revolutionist besides!  This ancient, painted
+mummy with unfathomable eyes, and this burly,
+bull-necked, deferential. . .what was it?
+Witchcraft, fascination. . . .  "It's for her
+money," he thought.  "She has millions!"
+
+The walls, the floor of the room were bare like
+a barn.  The few pieces of furniture had been
+discovered in the garrets and dragged down into
+service without having been properly dusted,
+even.  It was the refuse the banker's widow had
+left behind her.  The windows without curtains
+had an indigent, sleepless look.  In two of them
+the dirty yellowy-white blinds had been pulled
+down.  All this spoke, not of poverty, but of
+sordid penuriousness.
+
+The hoarse voice on the sofa uttered angrily-
+
+"You are looking round, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  I
+have been shamefully robbed, positively ruined."
+
+A rattling laugh, which seemed beyond her
+control, interrupted her for a moment.
+
+"A slavish nature would find consolation in the
+fact that the principal robber was an exalted
+and almost a sacrosanct person--a Grand Duke, in
+fact.  Do you understand, Mr. Razumov?  A Grand
+Duke--No!  You have no idea what thieves those
+people are!  Downright thieves!"
+
+Her bosom heaved, but her left arm remained
+rigidly extended along the back of the couch.
+
+"You will only upset yourself," breathed out a
+deep voice, which, to Razumov's startled glance,
+seemed to proceed from under the steady
+spectacles of Peter Ivanovitch, rather than from
+his lips, which had hardly moved.
+
+"What of hat?  I say thieves!  _Voleurs!
+Voleurs!_"
+
+Razumov was quite confounded by this unexpected
+clamour, which had in it something of wailing
+and croaking, and more than a suspicion of
+hysteria.
+
+"_Voleurs!  Voleurs!  Vol_. . . ."
+
+"No power on earth can rob you of your genius,"
+shouted Peter Ivanovitch in an overpowering
+bass, but without stirring, without a gesture of
+any kind.  A profound silence fell.
+
+Razumov remained outwardly impassive.  "What is
+the meaning of this performance?" he was asking
+himself.  But with a preliminary sound of
+bumping outside some door behind him, the lady
+companion, in a threadbare black skirt and
+frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on her
+heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian
+samovar, obviously too heavy for her.  Razumov
+made an instinctive movement to help, which
+startled her so much that she nearly dropped her
+hissing burden.  She managed, however, to land
+it on the table, and looked so frightened that
+Razumov hastened to sit down.  She produced
+then, from an adjacent room, four glass
+tumblers, a teapot, and a sugar-basin, on a
+black iron tray.
+
+The rasping voice asked from the sofa abruptly--
+
+"_Les gateaux_?  Have you remembered to bring
+the cakes?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch, without a word, marched out on
+to the landing, and returned instantly with a
+parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which
+he must have extracted from the interior of his
+hat.  With imperturbable gravity he undid the
+string and smoothed the paper open on a part of
+the table within reach of Madame de S---'s hand.
+ The lady companion poured out the tea, then
+retired into a distant corner out of everybody's
+sight.  From time to time Madame de S---
+extended a claw-like hand, glittering with
+costly rings, towards the paper of cakes, took
+up one and devoured it, displaying her big false
+teeth ghoulishly.  Meantime she talked in a
+hoarse tone of the political situation in the
+Balkans.  She built great hopes on some
+complication in the peninsula for arousing a
+great movement of national indignation in Russia
+against "these thieves--thieves thieves."
+
+"You will only upset yourself," Peter Ivanovitch
+interposed, raising his glassy gaze.  He smoked
+cigarettes and drank tea in silence,
+continuously.  When he had finished a glass, he
+flourished his hand above his shoulder.  At that
+signal the lady companion, ensconced in her
+corner, with round eyes like a watchful animal,
+would dart out to the table and pour him out
+another tumblerful.
+
+Razumov looked at her once or twice.  She was
+anxious, tremulous, though neither Madame de S---
+ nor Peter Ivanovitch paid the slightest
+attention to her.  "What have they done between
+them to that forlorn creature?"  Razumov asked
+himself.  "Have they terrified her out of her
+senses with ghosts, or simply have they only
+been beating her?"  When she gave him his second
+glass of tea, he noticed that her lips trembled
+in the manner of a scared person about to burst
+into speech.  But of course she said nothing,
+and retired into her corner, as if hugging to
+herself the smile of thanks he gave her.
+
+"She may be worth cultivating," thought Razumov
+suddenly.
+
+He was calming down, getting hold of the
+actuality into which he had been thrown--for the
+first time perhaps since Victor Haldin had
+entered his room. . .and had gone out again.  He
+was distinctly aware of being the object of the
+famous--or notorious--Madame de S---'s ghastly
+graciousness.
+
+Madame de S--- was pleased to discover that this
+young man was different from the other types of
+revolutionist members of committees, secret
+emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive
+professors, rough students, ex-cobblers with
+apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged
+enthusiasts, Hebrew youths, common fellows of
+all sorts that used to come and go around Peter
+Ivanovitch--fanatics, pedants, proletarians all.
+ It was pleasant to talk to this young man of
+notably good appearance--for Madame de S--- was
+not always in a mystical state of mind.
+Razumov's taciturnity only excited her to a
+quicker, more voluble utterance.  It still dealt
+with the Balkans.  She knew all the statesmen of
+that region, Turks, Bulgarians, Montenegrins,
+Roumanians, Greeks, Armenians, and nondescripts,
+young and old, the living and the dead.  With
+some money an intrigue could be started which
+would set the Peninsula in a blaze and outrage
+the sentiment of the Russian people.  A cry of
+abandoned brothers could be raised, and then,
+with the nation seething with indignation, a
+couple of regiments or so would be enough to
+begin a military revolution in St. Petersburg
+and make an end of these thieves. . . .
+
+"Apparently I've got only to sit still and
+listen," the silent Razumov thought to himself.
+"As to that hairy and obscene brute" (in such
+terms did Mr. Razumov refer mentally to the
+popular expounder of a feministic conception of
+social state), "as to him, for all his cunning
+he too shall speak out some day."
+
+Razumov ceased to think for a moment.  Then a
+sombre-toned reflection formulated itself in his
+mind, ironical and bitter.  "I have the gift of
+inspiring confidence."  He heard himself
+laughing aloud.  It was like a goad to the
+painted, shiny-eyed harridan on the sofa.
+
+"You may well laugh!" she cried hoarsely.  "What
+else can one do!  Perfect swindlers--and what
+base swindlers at that!  Cheap Germans--Holstein-
+Gottorps!  Though, indeed, it's hardly safe to
+say who and what they are.  A family that counts
+a creature like Catherine the Great in its
+ancestry--you understand!"
+
+"You are only upsetting yourself," said Peter
+Ivanovitch, patiently but in a firm tone.  This
+admonition had its usual effect on the Egeria.
+She dropped her thick, discoloured eyelids and
+changed her position on the sofa.  All her
+angular and lifeless movements seemed completely
+automatic now that her eyes were closed.
+Presently she opened them very full.  Peter
+Ivanovitch drank tea steadily, without haste.
+
+"Well, I declare!"  She addressed Razumov
+directly.  "The people who have seen you on your
+way here are right.  You are very reserved.  You
+haven't said twenty words altogether since you
+came in.  You let nothing of your thoughts be
+seen in your face either."
+
+"I have been listening, Madame," said Razumov,
+using French for the first time, hesitatingly,
+not being certain of his accent.  But it seemed
+to produce an excellent impression.  Madame de S-
+-- looked meaningly into Peter Ivanovitch's
+spectacles, as if to convey her conviction of
+this young man's merit.  She even nodded the
+least bit in his direction, and Razumov heard
+her murmur under her breath the words, " Later
+on in the diplomatic service," which could not
+but refer to the favourable impression he had
+made.  The fantastic absurdity of it revolted
+him because it seemed to outrage his ruined
+hopes with the vision of a mock-career.  Peter
+Ivanovitch, impassive as though he were deaf,
+drank some more tea.  Razumov felt that he must
+say something.
+
+"Yes," he began deliberately, as if uttering a
+meditated opinion.  "Clearly.  Even in planning
+a purely military revolution the temper of the
+people should be taken into account."
+
+"You have understood me perfectly.  The
+discontent should be spiritualized.  That is
+what the ordinary heads of revolutionary
+committees will not understand.  They aren't
+capable of it.  For instance, Mordatiev was in
+Geneva last month.  Peter Ivanovitch brought him
+here.  You know Mordatiev?  Well, yes--you have
+heard of him.  They call him an eagle--a hero!
+He has never done half as much as you have.
+Never attempted--not half. . . ."
+
+Madame de S--- agitated herself angularly on the
+sofa.
+
+"We, of course, talked to him.  And do you know
+what he said to me?  'What have we to do with
+Balkan intrigues?  We must simply extirpate the
+scoundrels.'  Extirpate is all very well--but
+what then?  The imbecile!  I screamed at him,
+'But you must spiritualize--don't you
+understand?--spiritualize the discontent.'. . ."
+
+She felt nervously in her pocket for a
+handkerchief; she pressed it to her lips.
+
+"Spiritualize?" said Razumov interrogatively,
+watching her heaving breast.  The long ends of
+an old black lace scarf she wore over her head
+slipped off her shoulders and hung down on each
+side of her ghastly rosy cheeks.
+
+"An odious creature," she burst out again.
+"Imagine a man who takes five lumps of sugar in
+his tea. . . .  Yes, I said spiritualize!  How
+else can you make discontent effective and
+universal?"
+
+"Listen to this, young man."  Peter Ivanovitch
+made himself heard solemnly.  "Effective and
+universal."
+
+Razumov looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"Some say hunger will do that," he remarked.
+
+"Yes.  I know.  Our people are starving in
+heaps.  But you can't make famine universal.
+And it is not despair that we want to create.
+There is no moral support to be got out of that.
+ It is indignation. . . ."
+
+Madame de S--- let her thin, extended arm sink
+on her knees.
+
+"I am not a Mordatiev," began Razumov.
+
+"Bien sur!" murmured Madame de S---.
+
+"Though I too am ready to say extirpate,
+extirpate!  But in my ignorance of political
+work, permit me to ask: A Balkan--well--
+intrigue, wouldn't that take a very long time?"
+
+Peter Ivanovitch got up and moved off quietly,
+to stand with his face to the window.  Razumov
+heard a door close; he turned his head and
+perceived that the lady companion had scuttled
+out of the room.
+
+"In matters of politics I am a supernaturalist."
+ Madame de S--- broke the silence harshly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch moved away from the window and
+struck Razumov lightly on the shoulder.  This
+was a signal for leaving, but at the same time
+he addressed Madame de S--- in a peculiar
+reminding tone---
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+Whatever it meant, she did not seem to hear him.
+ She leaned back in the corner of the sofa like
+a wooden figure.  The immovable peevishness of
+the face, framed in the limp, rusty lace, had a
+character of cruelty.
+
+"As to extirpating," she croaked at the
+attentive Razumov, "there is only one class in
+Russia which must be extirpated.  Only one.  And
+that class consists of only one family.  You
+understand me?  That one family must be
+extirpated."
+
+Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigor of a
+corpse galvanized into harsh speech and
+glittering stare by the force of murderous hate.
+ The sight fascinated Razumov--yet he felt more
+self-possessed than at any other time since he
+had entered this weirdly bare room.  He was
+interested.  But the great feminist by his side
+again uttered his appeal--
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She disregarded it.  Her carmine lips
+vaticinated with an extraordinary rapidity.  The
+liberating spirit would use arms before which
+rivers would part like Jordan, and ramparts fall
+down like the walls of Jericho.  The deliverance
+from bondage would be effected by plagues and by
+signs, by wonders and by war.  The women. . . .
+
+"Eleanor!"
+
+She ceased; she had heard him at last.  She
+pressed her hand to her forehead.
+
+"What is it?  Ah yes!  That girl--the sister of.
+. . ."
+
+It was Miss Haldin that she meant.  That young
+girl and her mother had been leading a very
+retired life.  They were provincial ladies--were
+they not?  The mother had been very beautiful--
+traces were left yet.  Peter Ivanovitch, when he
+called there for the first time, was greatly
+struck. . . .  But the cold way they received
+him was really surprising.
+
+"He is one of our national glories," Madams de S-
+-- cried out, with sudden vehemence.  "All the
+world listens to him."
+
+"I don't know these ladies," said Razumov loudly
+rising from his chair.
+
+"What are you saying, Kirylo Sidorovitch?  I
+understand that she was talking to you here, in
+the garden, the other day."
+
+"Yes, in the garden," said Razumov gloomily.
+Then, with an effort, "She made herself known to
+me."
+
+"And then ran away from us all," Madame de S---
+continued, with ghastly vivacity.  "After coming
+to the very door!  What a peculiar proceeding!
+Well, I have been a shy little provincial girl
+at one time.  Yes, Razumov" (she fell into this
+familiarity intentionally, with an appalling
+grimace of graciousness.  Razumov gave a
+perceptible start), "yes, that's my origin.  A
+simple provincial family
+
+"You are a marvel," Peter Ivanovich uttered in
+his
+
+But it was to Razumov that she gave her death's-
+head smile.  Her tone was quite imperious.
+
+"You must bring the wild young thing here.  She
+is wanted.  I reckon upon your success--mind!"
+
+"She is not a wild young thing," muttered
+Razumov, in a surly voice.
+
+"Well, then--that's all the same.  She may be
+one of these young conceited democrats.  Do you
+know what I think?  I think she is very much
+like you in character.  There is a smouldering
+fire of scorn in you.  You are darkly self-
+sufficient, but I can see your very soul."
+
+Her shiny eyes had a dry, intense stare, which,
+missing Razumov, gave him an absurd notion that
+she was looking at something which was visible
+to her behind him.  He cursed himself for an
+impressionable fool, and asked with forced
+calmness--
+
+"What is it you see?  Anything resembling me?"
+
+She moved her rigidly set face from left to
+right, negatively.
+
+"Some sort of phantom in my image?" pursued
+Razumov slowly.  "For, I suppose, a soul when it
+is seen is just that.  A vain thing.  There are
+phantoms of the living as well as of the dead."
+
+The tenseness of Madame de S---'s stare had
+relaxed, and now she looked at Razumov in a
+silence that became disconcerting.
+
+"I myself have had an experience," he stammered
+out, as if compelled.  " I've seen a phantom
+once."  The unnaturally red lips moved to frame
+a question harshly.
+
+"Of a dead person?"
+
+"No.  Living."
+
+"A friend?"
+
+" No."
+
+"An enemy?"
+
+"I hated him."
+
+"Ah! It was not a woman, then?"
+
+"A woman!" repeated Razumov, his eyes looking
+straight into the eyes of Madame de S---.  "Why
+should it have been a woman?  And why this
+conclusion?  Why should I not have been able to
+hate a woman?"
+
+As a matter of fact, the idea of hating a woman
+was new to him.  At that moment he hated Madame
+de S---.  But it was not exactly hate.  It was
+more like the abhorrence that may be caused by a
+wooden or plaster figure of a repulsive kind.
+She moved no more than if she were such a
+figure; even her eyes, whose unwinking stare
+plunged into his own, though shining, were
+lifeless, as though they were as artificial as
+her teeth.  For the first time Razumov became
+aware of a faint perfume, but faint as it was it
+nauseated him exceedingly.  Again Peter
+Ivanovitch tapped him slightly on the shoulder.
+Thereupon he bowed, and was about to turn away
+when he received the unexpected favour of a
+bony, inanimate hand extended to him, with the
+two words in hoarse French--
+
+"_Au revoir!_"
+
+He bowed over the skeleton hand and left the
+room, escorted by the great man, who made him go
+out first.  The voice from the sofa cried after
+them-
+
+"You remain here, _Pierre_."
+
+"Certainly, _ma chere amie_."
+
+But he left the room with Razumov, shutting the
+door behind him.  The landing was prolonged into
+a bare corridor, right and left, desolate
+perspectives of white and gold decoration
+without a strip of carpet.  The very light,
+pouring through a large window at the end,
+seemed dusty; and a solitary speck reposing on
+the balustrade of white marble--the silk top-hat
+of the great feminist--asserted itself
+extremely, black and glossy in all that crude
+whiteness.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch escorted the visitor without
+opening his lips.  Even when they had reached
+the head of the stairs Peter Ivanovitch did not
+break the silence.  Razumov's impulse to
+continue down the flight and out of the house
+without as much as a nod abandoned him suddenly.
+ He stopped on the first step and leaned his
+back against the wall.  Below him the great hall
+with its chequered floor of black and white
+seemed absurdly large and like some public place
+where a great power of resonance awaits the
+provocation of footfalls and voices.  As if
+afraid of awakening the loud echoes of that
+empty house, Razumov adopted a low tone.
+
+"I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante
+spiritualist."
+
+Peter Ivanovitch shook his head slightly, very
+serious.
+
+"Or spend my time in spiritual ecstasies or
+sublime meditations upon the gospel of
+feminism," continued Razumov.  "I made my way
+here for my share of action--action, most
+respected Peter Ivanovitch!  It was not the
+great European writer who attracted me, here, to
+this odious town of liberty.  It was somebody
+much greater.  It was the idea of the chief
+which attracted me.  There are starving young
+men in Russia who believe in you so much that it
+seems the only thing that keeps them alive in
+their misery.  Think of that, Peter Ivanovitch!
+No!  But only think of that!"
+
+The great man, thus entreated, perfectly
+motionless and silent, was the very image of
+patient, placid respectability.
+
+"Of course I don't speak of the people.  They
+are brutes," added Razumov, in the same subdued
+but forcible tone.  At this, a protesting murmur
+issued from the "heroic fugitive's" beard.  A
+murmur of authority.
+
+"Say--children."
+
+"No!  Brutes!"  Razumov insisted bluntly.
+
+"But they are sound, they are innocent," the
+great man pleaded in a whisper.
+
+"As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough."
+Razumov raised his voice at last.  "And you
+can't deny the natural innocence of a brute.
+But what's the use of disputing about names?
+You just try to give these children the power
+and stature of men and see what they will be
+like.  You just give it to them and see. . . .
+But never mind.  I tell you, Peter Ivanovitch,
+that half a dozen young men do not come together
+nowadays in a shabby student's room without your
+name being whispered, not as a leader of
+thought, but as a centre of revolutionary
+energies--the centre of action.  What else has
+drawn me near you, do you think?  It is not what
+all the world knows of you, surely.  It's
+precisely what the world at large does not know.
+ I was irresistibly drawn-let us say impelled,
+yes, impelled; or, rather, compelled, driven--
+driven,'' repented Razumov loudly, and ceased,
+as if startled by the hollow reverberation of
+the word "driven" along two bare corridors and
+in the great empty hall.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch did not seem startled in the
+least.  The young man could not control a dry,
+uneasy laugh.  The great revolutionist remained
+unmoved with an effect of commonplace, homely
+superiority.
+
+"Curse him," said Razumov to himself, "he is
+waiting behind his spectacles for me to give
+myself away."  Then aloud, with a satanic
+enjoyment of the scorn prompting him to play
+with the greatness of the great man--
+
+"Ah, Peter Ivanovitch, if you only knew the
+force which drew--no, which _drove_ me towards
+you!  The irresistible force."
+
+He did not feel any desire to laugh now.  This
+time Peter Ivanovitch moved his head sideways,
+knowingly, as much as to say, "Don't I?"  This
+expressive movement was almost imperceptible.
+Razumov went on in secret derision--
+
+"All these days you have been trying to read me,
+Peter Ivanovitch.  That is natural.  I have
+perceived it and I have been frank.  Perhaps you
+may think I have not been very expansive?  But
+with a man like you it was not needed; it would
+have looked like an impertinence, perhaps.  And
+besides, we Russians are prone to talk too much
+as a rule.  I have always felt that.  And yet,
+as a nation, we are dumb.  I assure you that I
+am not likely to talk to you so much again--ha!
+ha!--"
+
+Razumov, still keeping on the lower step, came a
+little nearer to the great man.
+
+"You have been condescending enough.  I quite
+understood it was to lead me on.  You must
+render me the justice that I have not tried to
+please.  I have been impelled, compelled, or
+rather sent--let us say sent--towards you for a
+work that no one but myself can do.  You would
+call it a harmless delusion: a ridiculous
+delusion at which you don't even smile.  It is
+absurd of me to talk like this, yet some day you
+shall remember these words, I hope.  Enough of
+this.  Here I stand before you-confessed!  But
+one thing more I must add to complete it: a mere
+blind tool I can never consent to be."
+
+Whatever acknowledgment Razumov was prepared
+for, he was not prepared to have both his hands
+seized in the great man's grasp.  The swiftness
+of the movement was aggressive enough to
+startle.  The burly feminist could not have been
+quicker had his purpose been to jerk Razumov
+treacherously up on the landing and bundle him
+behind one of the numerous closed doors near by.
+ This idea actually occurred to Razumov; his
+hands being released after a darkly eloquent
+squeeze, he smiled, with a beating heart,
+straight at the beard and the spectacles hiding
+that impenetrable man.
+
+He thought to himself (it stands confessed in
+his handwriting), "I won't move from here till
+he either speaks or turns away.  This is a
+duel."  Many seconds passed without a sign or
+sound.
+
+"Yes, yes," the great man said hurriedly, in
+subdued tones, as if the whole thing had been a
+stolen, breathless interview.  "Exactly.  Come
+to see us here in a few days.  This must be gone
+into deeply--deeply, between you and me.  Quite
+to the bottom.  To the. . . .  And, by the by,
+you must bring along Natalia Victorovna--you
+know, the Haldin girl. . . .
+
+"Am I to take this as my first instruction from
+you?" inquired Razumov stiffly.
+
+Peter Ivanovitch seemed perplexed by this new
+attitude.
+
+"Ah! h'm!  You are naturally the proper person--
+_la personne indiquee_.  Every one shall be
+wanted presently.  Every one."
+
+He bent down from the landing over Razumov, who
+had lowered his eyes.
+
+"The moment of action approaches,'' he murmured.
+
+Razumov did not look up.  He did not move till
+he heard the door of the drawing-room close
+behind the greatest of feminists returning to
+his painted Egeria.  Then he walked down slowly
+into the hall.  The door stood open, and the
+shadow of the house was lying aslant over the
+greatest part of the terrace.  While crossing it
+slowly, he lifted his hat and wiped his damp
+forehead, expelling his breath with force to get
+rid of the last vestiges of the air he had been
+breathing inside.  He looked at the palms of his
+hands, and rubbed them gently against his thighs.
+
+He felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though
+another self, an independent sharer of his mind,
+had been able to view his whole person very
+distinctly indeed.  "This is curious," he
+thought.  After a while he formulated his
+opinion of it in the mental ejaculation:
+"Beastly!"  This disgust vanished before a
+marked uneasiness.  "This is an effect of
+nervous exhaustion," he reflected with weary
+sagacity.  "How am I to go on day after day if I
+have no more power of resistance--moral
+resistance?"
+
+He followed the path at the foot of the terrace.
+ "Moral resistance, moral resistance;" he kept
+on repeating these words mentally.  Moral
+endurance.  Yes, that was the necessity of the
+situation.  An immense longing to make his way
+out of these grounds and to the other end of the
+town, of throwing himself on his bed and going
+to sleep for hours, swept everything clean out
+of his mind for a moment.  "Is it possible that
+I am but a weak creature after all?" he asked
+himself, in sudden alarm.  "Eh!  What's that?"
+
+He gave a start as if awakened from a dream.  He
+even swayed a little before recovering himself.
+
+"Ah!  You stole away from us quietly to walk
+about here," he said.
+
+The lady companion stood before him, but how she
+came there he had not the slightest idea.  Her
+folded arms were closely cherishing the cat.
+
+"I have been unconscious as I walked, it's a
+positive fact," said Razumov to himself in
+wonder.  He raised his hat with marked civility.
+
+The sallow woman blushed duskily.  She had her
+invariably scared expression, as if somebody had
+just disclosed to her some terrible news.  But
+she held her ground, Razumov noticed, without
+timidity.  "She is incredibly shabby," he
+thought.  In the sunlight her black costume
+looked greenish, with here and there threadbare
+patches where the stuff seemed decomposed by age
+into a velvety, black, furry state.  Her very
+hair and eyebrows looked shabby.  Razumov
+wondered whether she were sixty years old.  Her
+figure, though, was young enough.  He observed
+that she did not appear starved, but rather as
+if she had been fed on unwholesome scraps and
+leavings of plates.
+
+Razumov smiled amiably and moved out of her way.
+ She turned her head to keep her scared eyes on
+him.
+
+"I know what you have been told in there," she
+affirmed, without preliminaries.  Her tone, in
+contrast with her manner, had an unexpectedly
+assured character which put Razumov at his ease.
+
+"Do you?  You must have heard all sorts of talk
+on many occasions in there."
+
+She varied her phrase, with the same incongruous
+effect of positiveness.
+
+"I know to a certainty what you have been told
+to do."
+
+"Really?"  Razumov shrugged his shoulders a
+little.  He was about to pass on with a bow,
+when a sudden thought struck him.  "Yes.  To be
+sure!  In your confidential position you are
+aware of many things," he murmured, looking at
+the cat.
+
+That animal got a momentary convulsive hug from
+the lady companion.
+
+"Everything was disclosed to me a long time
+ago," she said.
+
+"Everything," Razumov repeated absently.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an awful despot," she
+jerked out.
+
+Razumov went on studying the stripes on the grey
+fur of the cat.
+
+"An iron will is an integral part of such a
+temperament.  How else could he be a leader?
+And I think that you are mistaken in--"
+
+"There!" she cried.  " You tell me that I am
+mistaken.  But I tell you all the same that he
+cares for no one."  She jerked her head up.
+"Don't you bring that girl here.  That's what
+you have been told to do--to bring that girl
+here.  Listen to me; you had better tie a stone
+round her neck and throw her into the lake."
+
+Razumov had a sensation of chill and gloom, as
+if a heavy cloud had passed over the sun.
+
+"The girl?" he said.  "What have I to do with
+her?"
+
+"But you have been told to bring Nathalie Haldin
+here.  Am I not right?  Of course I am right.  I
+was not in the room, but I know.  I know Peter
+Ivanovitch sufficiently well.  He is a great
+man.  Great men are horrible.  Well, that's it.
+Have nothing to do with her.  That's the best
+you can do, unless you want her to become like
+me--disillusioned!  Disillusioned!"
+
+"Like you," repeated Razumov, glaring at her
+face, as devoid of all comeliness of feature and
+complexion as the most miserable beggar is of
+money.  He smiled, still feeling chilly: a
+peculiar sensation which annoyed him."
+Disillusioned as to Peter Ivanovitch!  Is that
+all you have lost?"
+
+She declared, looking frightened, but with
+immense conviction, "Peter Ivanovitch stands for
+everything."  Then she added, in another tone,
+"Keep the girl away from this house."
+
+"And are you absolutely inciting me to disobey
+Peter Ivanovitch just because--because you are
+disillusioned?"
+
+She began to blink.
+
+"Directly I saw you for the first time I was
+comforted.  You took your hat off to me.  You
+looked as if one could trust you.  Oh!"
+
+She shrank before Razumov's savage snarl of, "I
+have heard something like this before."
+
+She was so confounded that she could do nothing
+but blink for a long time.
+
+"It was your humane manner," she explained
+plaintively.  "I have been starving for, I won't
+say kindness, but just for a little civility,
+for I don't know how long.  And now you are
+angry. . . ."
+
+"But no, on the contrary," he protested.  " I am
+very glad you trust me.  It's possible that
+later on I may. . . ."
+
+"Yes, if you were to get ill," she interrupted
+eagerly, " or meet some bitter trouble, you
+would find I am not a useless fool.  You have
+only to let me know.  I will come to you.  I
+will indeed.  And I will stick to you.  Misery
+and I are old acquaintances--but this life here
+is worse than starving."
+
+She paused anxiously, then in a voice for the
+first time sounding really timid, she added--
+
+"Or if you were engaged in some dangerous work.
+Sometimes a humble companion--I would not want
+to know anything.  I would follow you with joy.
+I could carry out orders.  I have the courage."
+
+Razumov looked attentively at the scared round
+eyes, at the withered, sallow, round cheeks.
+They were quivering about the corners of the
+mouth.
+
+"She wants to escape from here," he thought.
+
+"Suppose I were to tell you that I am engaged in
+dangerous work?" he uttered slowly.
+
+She pressed the cat to her threadbare bosom with
+a breathless exclamation.  "Ah!"  Then not much
+above a whisper: "Under Peter Ivanovitch?"
+
+"No, not under Peter Ivanovitch."
+
+He read admiration in her eyes, and made an
+effort to smile.
+
+"Then--alone?"
+
+He held up his closed hand with the index
+raised.  "Like this finger," he said.
+
+She was trembling slightly.  But it occurred to
+Razumov that they might have been observed from
+the house, and he became anxious to be gone.
+She blinked, raising up to him her puckered
+face, and seemed to beg mutely to be told
+something more, to be given a word of
+encouragement for her starving, grotesque, and
+pathetic devotion.
+
+"Can we be seen from the house?" asked Razumov
+confidentially.
+
+She answered, without showing the slightest
+surprise at the question--
+
+"No, we can't, on account of this end of the
+stables."  And she added, with an acuteness
+which surprised Razumov,"  But anybody looking
+out of an upstairs window would know that you
+have not passed through the gates yet."
+
+"Who's likely to spy out of the window?" queried
+Razumov.  "Peter Ivanovitch?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Why should he trouble his head?"
+
+"He expects somebody this afternoon."
+
+"You know the person?"
+
+"There's more than one."
+
+She had lowered her eyelids.  Razumov looked at
+her curiously.
+
+"Of course.  You hear everything they say."
+
+She murmured without any animosity--
+
+"So do the tables and chairs."
+
+He understood that the bitterness accumulated in
+the heart of that helpless creature had got into
+her veins, and, like some subtle poison, had
+decomposed her fidelity to that hateful pair.
+It was a great piece of luck for him, he
+reflected; because women are seldom venal after
+the manner of men, who can be bought for
+material considerations.  She would be a good
+ally, though it was not likely that she was
+allowed to hear as much as the tables and chairs
+of the Chateau Borel.  That could not be
+expected.  But still. . . .  And, at any rate,
+she could be made to talk.
+
+When she looked up her eyes met the fixed stare
+of Razumov, who began to speak at once.
+
+"Well, well, dear. . .but upon my word, I
+haven't the pleasure of knowing your name yet.
+Isn't it strange?"
+
+For the first time she made a movement of the
+shoulders.
+
+"Is it strange?  No one is told my name.  No one
+cares.  No one talks to me, no one writes to me.
+ My parents don't even know if I'm alive.  I
+have no use for a name, and I have almost
+forgotten it myself."
+
+Razumov murmured gravely, "Yes, but still. . ."
+
+She went on much slower, with indifference--
+
+"You may call me Tekla, then.  My poor Andrei
+called me so.  I was devoted to him.  He lived
+in wretchedness and suffering, and died in
+misery.  That is the lot of all us Russians,
+nameless Russians.  There is nothing else for
+us, and no hope anywhere, unless. . ."
+
+"Unless what?"
+
+"Unless all these people with names are done
+away with," she finished, blinking and pursing
+up her lips.
+
+"It will be easier to call you Tekla, as you
+direct me," said Razumov, "if you consent to
+call me Kirylo, when we are talking like this--
+quietly--only you and me."
+
+And he said to himself, "Here's a being who must
+be terribly afraid of the world, else she would
+have run away from this situation before."  Then
+he reflected that the mere fact of leaving the
+great man abruptly would make her a suspect.
+She could expect no support or countenance from
+anyone.  This revolutionist was not fit for an
+independent existence.
+
+She moved with him a few steps, blinking and
+nursing the cat with a small balancing movement
+of her arms.
+
+"Yes--only you and I.  That's how I was with my
+poor Andrei, only he was dying, killed by these
+official brutes--while you!  You are strong.
+You kill the monsters.  You have done a great
+deed.  Peter Ivanovitch himself must consider
+you.  Well--don't forget me--especially if you
+are going back to work in Russia.  I could
+follow you, carrying anything that was wanted--
+at a distance, you know.  Or I could watch for
+hours at the corner of a street if necessary,--
+in wet or snow--yes, I could--all day long.  Or
+I could write for you dangerous documents, lists
+of names or instructions, so that in case of
+mischance the handwriting could not compromise
+you.  And you need not be afraid if they were to
+catch me.  I would know how to keep dumb.  We
+women are not so easily daunted by pain.  I
+heard Peter Ivanovitch say it is our blunt
+nerves or something.  We can stand it better.
+And it's true; I would just as soon bite my
+tongue out and throw it at them as not.  What's
+the good of speech to me?  Who would ever want
+to hear what I could say?  Ever since I closed
+the eyes of my poor Andrei I haven't met a man
+who seemed to care for the sound of my voice.  I
+should never have spoken to you if the very
+first time you appeared here you had not taken
+notice of me so nicely.  I could not help
+speaking of you to that charming dear girl.  Oh,
+the sweet creature!  And strong!  One can see
+that at once.  If you have a heart don't let her
+set her foot in here.  Good-bye!"
+
+Razumov caught her by the arm.  Her emotion at
+being thus seized manifested itself by a short
+struggle, after which she stood still, not
+looking at him.
+
+"But you can tell me," he spoke in her ear, "why
+they--these people in that house there--are so
+anxious to get hold of her?"
+
+She freed herself to turn upon him, as if made
+angry by the question.
+
+"Don't you understand that Peter Ivanovitch must
+direct, inspire, influence?  It is the breath of
+his life.  There can never be too many
+disciples.  He can't bear thinking of anyone
+escaping him.  And a woman, too!  There is
+nothing to be done without women, he says.  He
+has written it.  He--"
+
+The young man was staring at her passion when
+she broke off suddenly and ran away behind the
+stable.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Razumov, thus left to himself, took the
+direction of the gate.  But on this day of many
+conversations, he discovered that very probably
+he could not leave the grounds without having to
+hold another one.
+
+Stepping in view from beyond the lodge appeared
+the expected visitors of Peter Ivanovitch: a
+small party composed of two men and a woman.
+They noticed him too, immediately, and stopped
+short as if to consult.  But in a moment the
+woman, moving aside, motioned with her arm to
+the two men, who, leaving the drive at once,
+struck across the large neglected lawn, or
+rather grass-plot, and made directly for the
+house.  The woman remained on the path waiting
+for Razumov's approach.  She had recognized him.
+ He, too, had recognized her at the first
+glance.  He had been made known to her at
+Zurich, where he had broken his journey while on
+his way from Dresden.  They had been much
+together for the three days of his stay.
+
+She was wearing the very same costume in which
+he had seen her first.  A blouse of crimson silk
+made her noticeable at a distance.  With that
+she wore a short brown skirt and a leather belt.
+ Her complexion was the colour of coffee and
+milk, but very clear; her eyes black and
+glittering, her figure erect.  A lot of thick
+hair, nearly white, was done up loosely under a
+dusty Tyrolese hat of dark cloth, which seemed
+to have lost some of its trimmings.
+
+The expression of her face was grave, intent; so
+grave that Razumov, after approaching her close,
+felt obliged to smile.  She greeted him with a
+manly hand-grasp.
+
+"What!  Are you going away?" she exclaimed.
+"How is that, Razumov?"
+
+"I am going away because I haven't been asked to
+stay," Razumov answered, returning the pressure
+of her hand with much less force than she had
+put into it.
+
+She jerked her head sideways like one who
+understands.  Meantime Razumov's eyes had
+strayed after the two men.  They were crossing
+the grass-plot obliquely, without haste.  The
+shorter of the two was buttoned up in a narrow
+overcoat of some thin grey material, which came
+nearly to his heels.  His companion, much taller
+and broader, wore a short, close-fitting jacket
+and tight trousers tucked into shabby top-boots.
+
+The woman, who had sent them out of Razumov's
+way apparently, spoke in a businesslike voice.
+
+"I had to come rushing from Zurich on purpose to
+meet the train and take these two along here to
+see Peter Ivanovitch.  I've just managed it."
+
+"Ah! indeed," Razumov said perfunctorily, and
+very vexed at her staying behind to talk to him
+"From Zurich--yes, of course.  And these two,
+they come from. . . ."
+
+She interrupted, without emphasis--
+
+"From quite another direction.  From a distance,
+too.  A considerable distance."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders.  The two men
+from a distance, after having reached the wall
+of the terrace, disappeared suddenly at its foot
+as if the earth had opened to swallow them up.
+
+"Oh, well, they have just come from America."
+The woman in the crimson blouse shrugged her
+shoulders too a little before making that
+statement.  "The time is drawing near," she
+interjected, as if speaking to herself.  "I did
+not tell them who you were.  Yakovlitch would
+have wanted to embrace you."
+
+"Is that he with the wisp of hair hanging from
+his chin, in the long coat?"
+
+"You've guessed aright.  That's Yakovlitch."
+
+"And they could not find their way here from the
+station without you coming on purpose from
+Zurich to show it to them?  Verily, without
+women we can do nothing.  So it stands written,
+and apparently so it is."
+
+He was conscious of an immense lassitude under
+his effort to be sarcastic.  And he could see
+that she had detected it with those steady,
+brilliant black eyes.
+
+"What is the matter with you?"
+
+"I don't know.  Nothing.  I've had a devil of a
+day."
+
+She waited, with her black eyes fixed on his
+face.  Then--
+
+"What of that?  You men are so impressionable
+and self-conscious.  One day is like another,
+hard, hard--and there's an end of it, till the
+great day comes.  I came over for a very good
+reason.  They wrote to warn Peter Ivanovitch of
+their arrival.  But where from?  Only from
+Cherbourg on a bit of ship's notepaper.  Anybody
+could have done that.  Yakovlitch has lived for
+years and years in America.  I am the only one
+at hand who had known him well in the old days.
+I knew him very well indeed.  So Peter
+Ivanovitch telegraphed, asking me to come.  It's
+natural enough, is it not?"
+
+"You came to vouch for his identity?" inquired
+Razumov.
+
+"Yes.  Something of the kind.  Fifteen years of
+a life like his make changes in a man.  Lonely,
+like a crow in a strange country.  When I think
+of Yakovlitch before he went to America--"
+
+The softness of the low tone caused Razumov to
+glance at her sideways.  She sighed; her black
+eyes were looking away; she had plunged the
+fingers of her right hand deep into the mass of
+nearly white hair, and stirred them there
+absently.  When she withdrew her hand the little
+hat perched on the top of her head remained
+slightly tilted, with a queer inquisitive
+effect, contrasting strongly with the
+reminiscent murmur that escaped her.
+
+"We were not in our first youth even then.  But
+a man is a child always."
+
+Razumov thought suddenly, "They have been living
+together."  Then aloud--
+
+"Why didn't you follow him to America?" he asked
+point-blank.
+
+She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
+
+"Don't you remember what was going on fifteen
+years ago?  It was a time of activity.  The
+Revolution has its history by this time.  You
+are in it and yet you don't seem to know it.
+Yakovlitch went away then on a mission; I went
+back to Russia.  It had to be so.  Afterwards
+there was nothing for him to come back to."
+
+"Ah! indeed," muttered Razumov, with affected
+surprise.  " Nothing!"
+
+"What are you trying to insinuate " she
+exclaimed quickly.  " Well, and what then if he
+did get discouraged a little. . . ."
+
+"He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee
+hanging from his chin.  A regular Uncle Sam,"
+growled Razumov.  "Well, and you?  You who went
+to Russia?  You did not get discouraged."
+
+"Never mind.  Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be
+doubted.  He, at any rate, is the right sort."
+
+Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon
+Razumov while she spoke, and for a moment
+afterwards.
+
+"Pardon me, "Razumov inquired coldly, "but does
+it mean that you, for instance, think that I am
+not the right sort?"
+
+She made no protest, gave no sign of having
+heard the question; she continued looking at him
+in a manner which he judged not to be absolutely
+unfriendly.  In Zurich when he passed through
+she had taken him under her charge, in a way,
+and was with him from morning till night during
+his stay of two days.  She took him round to see
+several people.  At first she talked to him a
+great deal and rather unreservedly, but always
+avoiding all reference to herself; towards the
+middle of the second day she fell silent,
+attending him zealously as before, and even
+seeing him off at the railway station, where she
+pressed his hand firmly through the lowered
+carriage window, and, stepping back without a
+word, waited till the train moved.  He had
+noticed that she was treated with quiet regard.
+He knew nothing of her parentage, nothing of her
+private history or political record; he judged
+her from his own private point of view, as being
+a distinct danger in his path.  "Judged " is not
+perhaps the right word.  It was more of a
+feeling, the summing up of slight impressions
+aided by the discovery that he could not despise
+her as he despised all the others.  He had not
+expected to see her again so soon.
+
+No, decidedly; her expression was not
+unfriendly.  Yet he perceived an acceleration in
+the beat of his heart.  The conversation could
+not be abandoned at that point.  He went on in
+accents of scrupulous inquiry--
+
+"Is it perhaps because I don't seem to accept
+blindly every development of the general
+doctrine--such for instance as the feminism of
+our great Peter Ivanovitch?  If that is what
+makes me suspect, then I can only say I would
+scorn to be a slave even to an idea."
+
+She had been looking at him all the time, not as
+a listener looks at one, but as if the words he
+chose to say were only of secondary interest.
+When he finished she slipped her hand, by a
+sudden and decided movement, under his arm and
+impelled him gently towards the gate of the
+grounds.  He felt her firmness and obeyed the
+impulsion at once, just as the other two men
+had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the
+wave of her hand.
+
+They made a few steps like this.
+
+"No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all
+right," she said.  "You may be valuable--very
+valuable.  What's the matter with you is that
+you don't like us."
+
+She released him.  He met her with a frosty
+smile.
+
+" Am I expected then to have love as well as
+convictions?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You know very well what I mean.  People have
+been thinking you not quite whole-hearted.  I
+have heard that opinion from one side and
+another.  But I have understood you at the end
+of the first day. . . ."
+
+Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
+
+"I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault
+here."
+
+"What phrases he uses!" she exclaimed
+parenthetically.  "Ah!  Kirylo Sidorovitch, you
+like other men are fastidious, full of self-love
+and afraid of trifles.  Moreover, you had no
+training.  What you want is to be taken in hand
+by some woman.  I am sorry I am not staying here
+a few days.  I am going back to Zurich to-
+morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch with me most
+likely."
+
+This information relieved Razumov.
+
+"I am sorry too," he said.  "But, all the same,
+I don't think you understand me."
+
+He breathed more freely; she did not protest,
+but asked, "And how did you get on with Peter
+Ivanovitch?  You have seen a good deal of each
+other.  How is it between you two?"
+
+Not knowing what answer to make, the young man
+inclined his head slowly.
+
+Her lips had been parted in expectation.  She
+pressed them together, and seemed to reflect.
+
+"That's all right."
+
+This had a sound of finality, but she did not
+leave him.  It was impossible to guess what she
+had in her mind.  Razumov muttered--
+
+"It is not of me that you should have asked that
+question.  In a moment you shall see Peter
+Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
+naturally.  He will be curious to know what has
+delayed you so long in this garden."
+
+"No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something
+to say to me.  Several things.  He may even
+speak of you--question me.  Peter Ivanovitch is
+inclined to trust me generally."
+
+"Question you?  That's very likely."
+
+She smiled, half serious.
+
+"Well--and what shall I say to him?"
+
+"I don't know.  You may tell him of your
+discovery."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Why--my lack of love for. . . ."
+
+
+"Oh!  That's between ourselves," she
+interrupted, it was hard to say whether in jest
+or earnest.
+
+"I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch
+something in my favour," said Razumov, with grim
+playfulness.  "Well, then, you can tell him that
+I am very much in earnest about my mission.  I
+mean to succeed."
+
+"You have been given a mission!" she exclaimed
+quickly.
+
+"It amounts to that.  I have been told to bring
+about a certain event."
+
+She looked at him searchingly.
+
+"A mission," she repeated, very grave and
+interested all at once.  "What sort of mission?"
+
+"Something in the nature of propaganda work."
+
+" Ah ! Far away from here?"
+
+"No.  Not very far," said Razumov, restraining a
+sudden desire to laugh, although he did not feel
+joyous in the least.
+
+"So!" she said thoughtfully.  "Well, I am not
+asking questions.  It's sufficient that Peter
+Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
+ Everything is bound to come right in the end."
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"I don't think, young man.  I just simply
+believe it."
+
+"And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that
+faith?"
+
+She did not answer the question, and they stood
+idle, silent, as if reluctant to part with each
+other.
+
+"That's just like a man," she murmured at last.
+"As if it were possible to tell how a belief
+comes to one."  Her thin Mephistophelian
+eyebrows moved a little.  "Truly there are
+millions of people in Russia who would envy the
+life of dogs in this country.  It is a horror
+and a shame to confess this even between
+ourselves.  One must believe for very pity.
+This can't go on.  No!  It can't go on.  For
+twenty years I have been coming and going,
+looking neither to the left nor to the right. .
+. .  What are you smiling to yourself for?  You
+are only at the beginning.  You have begun well,
+but you just wait till you have trodden every
+particle of yourself under your feet in your
+comings and goings.  For that is what it comes
+to.  You've got to trample down every particle
+of your own feelings; for stop you cannot, you
+must not.  I have been young, too--but perhaps
+you think that I am complaining-eh?"
+
+"I don't think anything of the sort," protested
+Razumov indifferently.
+
+"I dare say you don't, you dear superior
+creature.  You don't care."
+
+She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair
+on the left side, and that brusque movement had
+the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat straight
+on her head.  She frowned under it without
+animosity, in the manner of an investigator.
+Razumov averted his face carelessly.
+
+"You men are all alike.  You mistake luck for
+merit.  You do it in good faith too!  I would
+not be too hard on you.  It's masculine nature.
+You men are ridiculously pitiful in your
+aptitude to cherish childish illusions down to
+the very grave.  There are a lot of us who have
+been at work for fifteen years--I mean
+constantly--trying one way after another,
+underground and above ground, looking neither to
+the right nor to the left!  I can talk about it.
+ I have been one of these that never rested. . .
+.  There!  What's the use of talking. . . .
+Look at my grey hairs!  And here two babies come
+along--I mean you and Haldin--you come along and
+manage to strike a blow at the very first try."
+
+At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and
+energetic lips of the woman revolutionist,
+Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of
+the irrevocable.  But in all the months which
+had passed over his head he had become hardened
+to the experience.  The consciousness was no
+longer accompanied by the blank dismay and the
+blind anger of the early days.  He had argued
+himself into new beliefs; and he had made for
+himself a mental atmosphere of gloomy and
+sardonic reverie, a sort of murky medium through
+which the event appeared like a featureless
+shadow having vaguely the shape of a man; a
+shape extremely familiar, yet utterly
+inexpressive, except for its air of discreet
+waiting in the dusk.  It was not alarming.
+
+"What was he like?" the woman revolutionist
+asked unexpectedly.
+
+"What was he like?" echoed Razumov, making a
+painful effort not to turn upon her savagely.
+But he relieved himself by laughing a little
+while he stole a glance at her out of the
+corners of his eyes.  This reception of her
+inquiry disturbed her.
+
+"How like a woman," he went on.  "What is the
+good of concerning yourself with his appearance?
+ Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all
+feminine influences now."
+
+A frown, making three folds at the root of her
+nose, accentuated the Mephistophelian slant of
+her eyebrows.
+
+"You suffer, Razumov," she suggested, in her
+low, confident voice.
+
+"What nonsense!"  Razumov faced the woman
+fairly.  "But now I think of it, I am not sure
+that he is beyond the influence of one woman at
+least; the one over there--Madame de S---, you
+know.  Formerly the dead were allowed to rest,
+but now it seems they are at the beck and call
+of a crazy old harridan.  We revolutionists make
+wonderful discoveries.  It is true that they are
+not exactly our own.  We have nothing of our
+own.  But couldn't the friend of Peter
+Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity?
+Couldn't she conjure him up for you?"--he jested
+like a man in pain.
+
+Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed,
+and she said, a little wearily, "Let us hope she
+will make an effort and conjure up some tea for
+us.  But that is by no means certain.  I am
+tired, Razumov."
+
+"You tired!  What a confession!  Well, there has
+been tea up there.  I had some.  If you hurry on
+after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
+with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as
+myself, you may find the ghost of it--the cold
+ghost of it--still lingering in the temple.  But
+as to you being tired I can hardly believe it.
+We are not supposed to be.  We mustn't, We
+can't.  The other day I read in some paper or
+other an alarmist article on the tireless
+activity of the revolutionary parties.  It
+impresses the world.  It's our prestige."
+
+"He flings out continually these flouts and
+sneers;" the woman in the crimson blouse spoke
+as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
+her black eyes never left Razumov's face.  "And
+what for, pray?  Simply because some of his
+conventional notions are shocked, some of his
+petty masculine standards.  You might think he
+was one of these nervous sensitives that come to
+a bad end.  And yet," she went on, after a
+short, reflective pause and changing the mode of
+her address, "and yet I have just learned
+something which makes me think that you are a
+man of character, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  Yes!
+indeed--you are."
+
+The mysterious positiveness of this assertion
+startled Razumov.  Their eyes met.  He looked
+away and, through the bars of the rusty gate,
+stared at the clean, wide road shaded by the
+leafy trees.  An electric tramcar, quite empty,
+ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle.  It
+seemed to him he would have given anything to be
+sitting inside all alone.  He was inexpressibly
+weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he
+had a reason for not being the first to break
+off the conversation.  At any instant, in the
+visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists,
+some momentous words might fall on his ear; from
+her lips, from anybody's lips.  As long as he
+managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep
+down his irritability there was nothing to fear.
+ The only condition of success and safety was
+indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
+
+He longed to be on the other side of the bars,
+as though he were actually a prisoner within the
+grounds of this centre of revolutionary plots,
+of this house of folly, of blindness, of
+villainy and crime.  Silently he indulged his
+wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral and
+mental remoteness.  He did not even smile when
+he heard her repeat the words--
+
+"Yes!  A strong character."
+
+He continued to gaze through the bars like a
+moody prisoner, not thinking of escape, but
+merely pondering upon the faded memories of
+freedom.
+
+"If you don't look out," he mumbled, still
+looking away, "you shall certainly miss seeing
+as much as the mere ghost of that tea."
+
+She was not to be shaken off in such a way.  As
+a matter of fact he had not expected to succeed.
+
+"Never mind, it will be no great loss.  I mean
+the missing of her tea and only the ghost of it
+at that.  As to the lady, you must understand
+that she has her positive uses.  See _that_,
+Razumov."
+
+He turned his head at this imperative appeal and
+saw the woman revolutionist making the motions
+of counting money into the palm of her hand.
+
+"That's what it is.  You see?"
+
+Razumov uttered a slow "I see," and returned to
+his prisoner-like gazing upon the neat and shady
+road.
+
+"Material means must be obtained in some way,
+and this is easier than breaking into banks.
+More certain too.  There!  I am joking. . . .
+What is he muttering to himself now?" she cried
+under her breath.
+
+"My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch's devoted
+self-sacrifice, that's all.  It's enough to make
+one sick."
+
+"Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature.  Sick!
+Makes him sick!  And what do you know of the
+truth of it?  There's no looking into the
+secrets of the heart.  Peter Ivanovitch knew her
+years ago, in his worldly days, when he was a
+young officer in the Guards.  It is not for us
+to judge an inspired person.  That's where you
+men have an advantage.  You are inspired
+sometimes both in thought and action.  I have
+always admitted that when you _are_ inspired,
+when you manage to throw off your masculine
+cowardice and prudishness you are not to be
+equalled by us.  Only, how seldom. . . .
+Whereas the silliest woman can always be made of
+use.  And why?  Because we have passion,
+unappeasable passion. . . .  I should like to
+know what he is smiling at?"
+
+"I am not smiling," protested Razumov gloomily.
+
+"Well!  How is one to call it?  You made some
+sort of face.  Yes, I know!  You men can love
+here and hate there and desire something or
+other--and you make a great to-do about it, and
+you call it passion!  Yes!  While it lasts.  But
+we women are in love with love, and with hate,
+with these very things I tell you, and with
+desire itself.  That's why we can't be bribed
+off so easily as you men.  In life, you see,
+there is not much choice.  You have either to
+rot or to burn.  And there is not one of us,
+painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn
+than rot."
+
+She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact
+tone.  Razumov's attention had wandered away on
+a track of its own--outside the bars of the gate-
+-but not out of earshot.  He stuck his hands
+into the pockets of his coat.
+
+"Rot or burn!  Powerfully stated.  Painted or
+unpainted.  Very vigorous.  Painted or. . . .
+Do tell me--she would be infernally jealous of
+him, wouldn't she?"
+
+"Who?  What?  The Baroness?  Eleanor Maximovna?
+Jealous of Peter Ivanovitch?  Heavens!  Are
+these the questions the man's mind is running
+on?  Such a thing is not to be thought of."
+
+"Why?  Can't a wealthy old woman be jealous?
+Or, are they all pure spirits together?"
+
+"But what put it into your head to ask such a
+question?" she wondered.
+
+"Nothing.  I just asked.  Masculine frivolity,
+if you like."
+
+"I don't like," she retorted at once.  "It is
+not the time to be frivolous.  What are you
+flinging your very heart against?  Or, perhaps,
+you are only playing a part."
+
+Razumov had felt that woman's observation of him
+like a physical contact, like a hand resting
+lightly on his shoulder.  At that moment he
+received the mysterious impression of her having
+made up her mind for a closer grip.  He
+stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without
+betraying himself.
+
+"Playing a Part," he repeated, presenting to her
+an unmoved profile.  "It must be done very badly
+since you see through the assumption."
+
+She watched him, her forehead drawn into
+perpendicular folds, the thin black eyebrows
+diverging upwards like tile antennae of an
+insect.  He added hardly audibly--
+
+"You are mistaken.  I am doing it no more than
+the rest of us."
+
+"Who is doing it?" she snapped out.
+
+"Who?  Everybody," he said impatiently.  "You
+are a materialist, aren't you?"
+
+"Eh!  My dear soul, I have outlived all that
+nonsense."
+
+"But you must remember the definition of
+Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive tube.'  I imagine
+now. . . ."
+
+"I spit on him."
+
+"What?  On Cabanis?  All right.  But you can't
+ignore the importance of a good digestion.  The
+joy of life--you know the joy of life?--depends
+on a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion
+inclines one to scepticism, breeds black fancies
+and thoughts of death.  These are facts
+ascertained by physiologists.  Well, I assure
+you that ever since I came over from Russia I
+have been stuffed with indigestible foreign
+concoctions of the most nauseating kind--pah !"
+
+"You are joking," she murmured incredulously.
+He assented in a detached way.
+
+"Yes.  It is all a joke.  It's hardly worth
+while talking to a man like me.  Yet for that
+very reason men have been known to take their
+own life."
+
+"On the contrary, I think it is worth while
+talking to you."
+
+He kept her in the corner of his eye.  She
+seemed to be thinking out some scathing retort,
+but ended by only shrugging her shoulders
+slightly.
+
+"Shallow talk!  I suppose one must pardon this
+weakness in you," she said, putting a special
+accent on the last word.  There was something
+anxious in her indulgent conclusion.
+
+Razumov noted the slightest shades in this
+conversation, which he had not expected, for
+which he was not prepared.  That was it.  "I was
+not prepared," he said to himself.  "It has
+taken me unawares."  It seemed to him that if he
+only could allow himself to pant openly like a
+dog for a time this oppression would pass away.
+"I shall never be found prepared," he thought,
+with despair.  He laughed a little, saying as
+lightly as he could--
+
+"Thanks.  I don't ask for mercy."  Then
+affecting a playful uneasiness, "But aren't you
+afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of
+plotting something unauthorized together by the
+gate here?"
+
+"No, I am not afraid.  You are quite safe from
+suspicions while you are with me, my dear young
+man."  The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
+out.  "Peter Ivanovitch trusts me," she went on,
+quite austerely.  "He takes my advice.  I am his
+right hand, as it were, in certain most
+important things. . . .  That amuses you what?
+Do you think I am boasting?"
+
+"God forbid.  I was just only saying to myself
+that Peter Ivanovitch seems to have solved the
+woman question pretty completely."
+
+Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his
+words, for his tone.  All day long he had been
+saying the wrong things.  It was folly, worse
+than folly.  It was weakness; it was this
+disease of perversity overcoming his will.  Was
+this the way to meet speeches which certainly
+contained the promise of future confidences from
+that woman who apparently had a great store of
+secret knowledge and so much influence?  Why
+give her this puzzling impression?  But she did
+not seem inimical.  There was no anger in her
+voice.  It was strangely speculative.
+
+"One does not know what to think, Razumov.  You
+must have bitten something bitter in your
+cradle."  Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
+
+"H'm!  Something bitter?  That's an
+explanation," he muttered.  "Only it was much
+later.  And don't you think, Sophia Antonovna,
+that you and I come from the same cradle?"
+
+The woman, whose name he had forced himself at
+last to pronounce (he had experienced a strong
+repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the
+woman revolutionist murmured, after a pause--
+
+"You mean--Russia?"
+
+He disdained even to nod.  She seemed softened,
+her black eyes very still, as though she were
+pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all its
+tender associations.  But suddenly she knitted
+her brows in a Mephistophelian frown.
+
+"Yes.  Perhaps no wonder, then.  Yes.  One lies
+there lapped up in evils, watched over by beings
+that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
+ They must be driven away, destroyed utterly.
+In regard of that task nothing else matters if
+men and women are determined and faithful.
+That's how I came to feel in the end.  The great
+thing is not to quarrel amongst ourselves about
+all sorts of conventional trifles.  Remember
+that, Razumov."
+
+Razumov was not listening.  He had even lost the
+sense of being watched in a sort of heavy
+tranquillity.  His uneasiness, his exasperation,
+his scorn were blunted at last by all these
+trying hours.  It seemed to him that now they
+were blunted for ever.  "I am a match for them
+all," he thought, with a conviction too firm to
+be exulting.  The woman revolutionist had ceased
+speaking; he was not looking at her; there was
+no one passing along the road.  He almost forgot
+that he was not alone.  He heard her voice
+again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the
+hesitation which had been the real reason of her
+prolonged silence.
+
+"I say, Razumov!"
+
+Razumov, whose face was turned away from her,
+made a grimace like a man who hears a false note.
+
+"Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of
+the deed you actually attended the lectures at
+the University?"
+
+An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed
+before the real import of the question reached
+him, like a bullet which strikes some time after
+the flash of the fired shot.  Luckily his
+disengaged hand was ready to grip a bar of the
+gate.  He held it with a terrible force, but his
+presence of mind was gone.  He could make only a
+sort of gurgling, grumpy sound.
+
+"Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!" she urged him.  "I
+know you are not a boastful man.  _That_ one
+must say for you.  You are a silent man.  Too
+silent, perhaps.  You are feeding on some
+bitterness of your own.  You are not an
+enthusiast.  You are, perhaps, all the stronger
+for that.  But you might tell me.  One would
+like to understand you a little more.  I was so
+immensely struck. . . .  Have you really done
+it?"
+
+He got his voice back.  The shot had missed him.
+ It had been fired at random, altogether, more
+like a signal for coming to close quarters.  It
+was to be a plain struggle for self-
+preservation.  And she was a dangerous adversary
+too.  But he was ready for battle; he was so
+ready that when he turned towards her not a
+muscle of his face moved.
+
+" Certainly," he said, without animation,
+secretly strung up but perfectly sure of
+himself.  "Lectures--certainly, But what makes
+you ask?"
+
+It was she who was animated.
+
+"I had it in a letter, written by a young man in
+Petersburg; one of us, of course.  You were seen-
+-you were observed with your notebook,
+impassible, taking notes. . . ."
+
+He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
+
+"What of that?"
+
+"I call such coolness superb--that's all.  It is
+a proof of uncommon strength of character.  The
+young man writes that nobody could have guessed
+from your face and manner the part you had
+played only some two hours before--the great,
+momentous, glorious part. . . ."
+
+"Oh no.  Nobody could have guessed," assented
+Razumov gravely, "because, don't you see, nobody
+at that time. . . ."
+
+"Yes, yes.  But all the same you are a man of
+exceptional fortitude, it seems.  You looked
+exactly as usual.  It was remembered afterwards
+with wonder. . . ."
+
+"It cost me no effort," Razumov declared, with
+the same staring gravity.
+
+"Then it's almost more wonderful still!" she
+exclaimed, and fell silent while Razumov asked
+himself whether he had not said there something
+utterly unnecessary--or even worse.
+
+She raised her head eagerly.
+
+"Your intention was to stay in Russia?  You had
+planned. . . ."
+
+"No," interrupted Razumov without haste.  "I had
+made no plans of any sort."
+
+"You just simply walked away?" she struck in.
+
+He bowed his head in slow assent.  "Simply--
+yes."  He had gradually released his hold on the
+bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
+conviction that no random shot could knock him
+over now.  And suddenly he was inspired to add,
+"The snow was coming down very thick, you know."
+
+She had a slight appreciative movement of the
+head, like an expert in such enterprises, very
+interested, capable of taking every point
+professionally.  Razumov remembered something he
+had heard.
+
+"I turned into a narrow side street, you
+understand," he went on negligently, and paused
+as if it were not worth talking about.  Then he
+remembered another detail and dropped it before
+her, like a disdainful dole to her curiosity.
+
+"I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep
+there."
+
+She clicked her tongue at that symptom, very
+struck indeed.  Then--
+
+"But the notebook!  The amazing notebook, man.
+You don't mean to say you had put it in your
+pocket beforehand!" she cried.
+
+Razumov gave a start.  It might have been a sign
+of impatience.
+
+"I went home.  Straight home to my rooms," he
+said distinctly.
+
+"The coolness of the man!  You dared?"
+
+"Why not?  I assure you I was perfectly calm.
+Ha!  Calmer than I am now perhaps."
+
+"I like you much better as you are now than when
+you indulge that bitter vein of yours, Razumov.
+And nobody in the house saw you return--eh?
+That might have appeared queer."
+
+"No one," Razumov said firmly.  "Dvornik,
+landlady, girl, all out of the way.  I went up
+like a shadow.  It was a murky morning.  The
+stairs were dark.  I glided up like a phantom.
+Fate?  Luck?  What do you think?"
+
+"I just see it!"  The eyes of the woman
+revolutionist snapped darkly.  "Well--and then
+you considered. . . ."
+
+Razumov had it all ready in his head.
+
+"No.  I looked at my watch, since you want to
+know.  There was just time.  I took that
+notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe.
+Have you ever listened to the pit-pat of a man
+running round and round the shaft of a deep
+staircase?  They have a gaslight at the bottom
+burning night and day.  I suppose it's gleaming
+down there now. . . .  The sound dies out--the
+flame winks. . . ."
+
+He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing
+over the steady curiosity of the black eyes
+fastened on his face as if the woman
+revolutionist received the sound of his voice
+into her pupils instead of her ears.  He checked
+himself, passed his hand over his forehead,
+confused, like a man who has been dreaming aloud.
+
+"Where could a student be running if not to his
+lectures in the morning?  At night it's another
+matter.  I did not care if all the house had
+been there to look at me.  But I don't suppose
+there was anyone.  It's best not to be seen or
+heard.  Aha!  The people that are neither seen
+nor heard are the lucky ones--in Russia.  Don't
+you admire my luck?"
+
+"Astonishing," she said.  "If you have luck as
+well as determination, then indeed you are
+likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for
+the work in hand."
+
+Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov
+that it was speculative, even as though she were
+already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
+of the work.  Her eyes were cast down.  He
+waited, not very alert now, but with the grip of
+the ever-present danger giving him an air of
+attentive gravity.  Who could have written about
+him in that letter from Petersburg?  A fellow
+student, surely--some imbecile victim of
+revolutionary propaganda, some foolish slave of
+foreign, subversive ideals.  A long, famine-
+stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to
+his mental search.  That must have been the
+fellow!
+
+He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-
+headedness of the whole thing, the self-
+deception of a criminal idealist shattering his
+existence like a thunder-clap out of a clear
+sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage in the
+false assumptions of those other fools.  Fancy
+that hungry and piteous imbecile furnishing to
+the curiosity of the revolutionist refugees this
+utterly fantastic detail!  He appreciated it as
+by no means constituting a danger.  On the
+contrary.  As things stood it was for his
+advantage rather, a piece of sinister luck which
+had only to be accepted with proper caution.
+
+"And yet, Razumov," he heard the musing voice of
+the woman, "you have not the face of a lucky
+man."  She raised her eyes with renewed
+interest.  "And so that
+was the way of it.  After doing your work you simply walked off and made for
+your rooms.  That sort of thing succeeds sometimes.  I suppose it was agreed
+beforehand that, once the business over, each of you would go his own way?"
+
+Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate, if
+cautious, manner of speaking.
+
+"Was not that the best thing to do?" he asked, in a dispassionate tone.  "And
+anyway," he added, after waiting a moment, " we did not give much thought to
+what would come after.  We never discussed formally any line of conduct.  It
+was understood, I think."
+
+She approved his statement with slight nods.
+
+"You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?"
+
+"In St. Petersburg itself," emphasized Razumov.  "It was the only safe course
+for me.  And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go."
+
+"Yes!  Yes!  I know.  Clearly.  And the other--this wonderful Haldin appearing
+only to be regretted--you don't know what he intended?"
+
+Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet him
+sooner or later.  He raised his hands a little and let them fall helplessly by
+his side--nothing more.
+
+It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
+silence.
+
+"Very curious," she pronounced slowly.  "And you did not think, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?"
+
+Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.  But
+he thought that he owed it to himself to speak.  A negative sign would not do
+again.  Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what that St. Petersburg
+letter might have contained.
+
+"I stayed at home next day," he said, bending down a little and plunging his
+glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not observe the
+trembling of his lips.  "Yes, I stayed at home.  As my actions are remembered
+and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I was _not_ seen at the
+lectures next day.  Eh?  You didn't know?  Well, I stopped at home-the
+live-long day."
+
+As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic "I see!  It must
+have been trying enough."
+
+"You seem to understand one's feelings," said Razumov steadily.  "It was
+trying.  It was horrible; it was an atrocious day.  It was not the last."
+
+"Yes, I understand.  Afterwards, when you heard they had got him.  Don't I know
+how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight?  One's ashamed of being
+left.  And I can remember so many.  Never mind.  They shall be avenged before
+long.  And what is death?  At any rate, it is not a shameful thing like some
+kinds of life."
+
+Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and unpleasant
+tremor.
+
+"Some kinds of life?" he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
+
+"The subservient, submissive life.  Life?  No!  Vegetation on the filthy heap
+of iniquity which the world is.  Life, Razumov, not to be vile must be a
+revolt--a pitiless protest--all the time."
+
+She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out instantly by
+the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable, businesslike manner that
+she went on--
+
+"You understand me, Razumov.  You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
+immense force of revolt in you.  I felt it from the first, directly I set my
+eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich.  Oh!  You are full of bitter revolt.
+ That is good.  Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may become a
+weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and justice which armed
+your and Haldin's hands to strike down that fanatical brute. . . for it was
+that--nothing but that!  I have been thinking it out.  It could have been
+nothing else but that."
+
+Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
+sinister immobility of feature.
+
+"I can't speak for the dead.  As for myself, I can assure you that my conduct
+was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive justice."
+
+"Good, that," he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and
+impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit
+plotting the violent way of its dream of changes.  As if anything could be
+changed!  In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor
+misery.  They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and
+broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.
+ Those thoughts darted through Razumov's head while he stood facing the old
+revolutionary hand, the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna,
+whose word had such a weight in the "active" section of every party.  She was
+much more representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch.  Stripped of
+rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
+revolution.  And she was the personal adversary he had to meet.  It gave him a
+feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth.  The
+epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of
+concealing our thoughts came into his mind.  Of that cynical theory this was a
+very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting in its own words the very
+spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in that woman with her white hair and
+black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous lines of Indian ink, drawn together by
+the perpendicular folds of a thoughtful frown.
+
+"That's it.  Retributive.  No pity!" was the conclusion of her silence.  And
+this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating sentences--
+
+"Listen to my story, Razumov! . . ."  Her father was a clever but unlucky
+artisan.  No joy had lighted up his laborious days.  He died at fifty; all the
+years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose rapacity
+exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the very air he
+breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood of his sons.  No
+protection, no guidance!  What had society to say to him?  Be submissive and be
+honest.  If you rebel I shall kill you.  If you steal I shall imprison you.
+ But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing except perhaps a beggarly
+dole of bread--but no consolation for your trouble, no respect for your
+manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your miserable life.
+
+And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died.  He died in the hospital.
+ Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence--she saw
+it whole.  She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of the
+humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of a society
+which nothing can absolve.
+
+"Yes, Razumov," she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, "it was like a
+lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed not the toil,
+not the misery which had been his lot, but the great social iniquity of the
+system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied sufferings.  From that moment I
+was a revolutionist."
+
+Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of contempt or
+compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance.  She, with an unaffected
+touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice since he had come in
+contact with the woman, went on--
+
+"As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system exhorted such
+unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the secret societies as soon
+as I knew how to find my way.  I was sixteen years old--no more, Razumov!
+And--look at my white hair."
+
+In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness.  The bitterness too
+was gone.
+
+"There is a lot of it.  I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of a
+girl.  Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that there was
+the first step towards crushing the social infamy.  Crush the Infamy!  A fine
+watchword!  I would placard it on the walls of prisons and palaces, carve it on
+hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that empty sky for a sign of hope
+and terror--a portent of the end. . . ."
+
+"You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna," Razumov interrupted suddenly.  "Only, so
+far you seem to have been writing it in water. . . ."
+
+She was checked but not offended.  "Who knows?  Very soon it may become a fact
+written all over that great land of ours," she hinted meaningly.  "And then one
+would have lived long enough.  White hair won't matter."
+
+Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years seemed
+nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt.  It threw out into
+an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the brilliant black glance, the
+upright compact figure, the simple, brisk self-possession of the mature
+personality--as though in her revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the
+secret, not of everlasting youth, but of everlasting endurance.
+
+How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov.  Her mother might have been a
+Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what.  He reflected that a revolutionist is
+seldom true to the settled type.  All revolt is the expression of strong
+individualism--ran his thought vaguely.  One can tell them a mile off in any
+society, in any surroundings.  It was astonishing that the police. . . .
+
+"We shall not meet again very soon, I think," she was saying.  "I am leaving
+to-morrow."
+
+"For Zurich?"  Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from any
+distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a wrestling
+match.
+
+"Yes, Zurich--and farther on, perhaps, much farther.  Another journey.  When I
+think of all my journeys!  The last must come some day.  Never mind, Razumov.
+ We had to have a good long talk.  I would have certainly tried to see you if
+we had not met.  Peter Ivanovitch knows where you live?  Yes.  I meant to have
+asked him--but it's better like this.  You see, we expect two more men; and I
+had much rather wait here talking with you than up there at the house with. . .
+."
+
+Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself.  "Here they
+are," she said rapidly.  "Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to say
+good-bye, presently."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+In his incertitude of the ground on which he stood Razumov felt perturbed.
+ Turning his head quickly, he saw two men on the opposite side of the road.
+ Seeing themselves noticed by Sophia Antonovna, they crossed over at once, and
+passed one after another through the little gate by the side of the empty
+lodge.  They looked hard at the stranger, but without mistrust, the crimson
+blouse being a flaring safety signal.  The first, great white hairless face,
+double chin, prominent stomach, which he seemed to carry forward consciously
+within a strongly distended overcoat, only nodded and averted his eyes
+peevishly; his companion--lean, flushed cheekbones, a military red moustache
+below a sharp, salient nose--approached at once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her
+warmly.  His voice was very strong but inarticulate.  It sounded like a deep
+buzzing.  The woman revolutionist was quietly cordial.
+
+"This is Razumov," she announced in a clear voice.
+
+The lean new-comer made an eager half-turn.  "He will want to embrace me,"
+thought our young man with a deep recoil of all his being, while his limbs
+seemed too heavy to move.  But it was a groundless alarm.  He had to do now
+with a generation of conspirators who did not kiss each other on both cheeks;
+and raising an arm that felt like lead he dropped his hand into a
+largely-outstretched palm, fleshless and hot as if dried up by fever, giving a
+bony pressure, expressive, seeming to say, "Between us there's no need of
+words."  The man had big, wide-open eyes.  Razumov fancied he could see a smile
+behind their sadness.
+
+"This is Razumov," Sophia Antonovna repeated loudly for the benefit of the fat
+man, who at some distance displayed the profile of his stomach.
+
+No one moved.  Everything, sounds, attitudes, movements, and immobility seemed
+to be part of an experiment, the result of which was a thin voice piping with
+comic peevishness--
+
+"Oh yes! Razumov.  We have been hearing of nothing but Mr. Razumov for months.
+ For my part, I confess I would rather have seen Haldin on this spot instead of
+Mr. Razumov."
+
+The squeaky stress put on the name "Razumov--Mr. Razumov" pierced the ear
+ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an elaborate joke.
+ Astonishment was Razumov's first response, followed by sudden indignation.
+
+"What's the meaning of this?" he asked in a stern tone.
+
+"Tut!  Silliness.  He's always like that."  Sophia Antonovna was obviously
+vexed.  But she dropped the information, "Necator," from her lips just loud
+enough to be heard by Razumov.  The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to
+proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his overcoat.  The
+stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the
+enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape
+of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror and
+laughter.
+
+Nikita, surnamed Necator, with a sinister aptness of alliteration!  Razumov had
+heard of him.  He had heard so much since crossing the frontier of these
+celebrities of the militant revolution; the legends, the stories, the authentic
+chronicle, which now and then peeps out before a half-incredulous world.
+ Razumov had heard of him.  He was supposed to have killed more, gendarmes and
+police agents than any revolutionist living.  He had been entrusted with
+executions.
+
+The paper with the letters N.N., the very pseudonym of murder, found pinned on
+the stabbed breast of a certain notorious spy (this picturesque detail of a
+sensational murder case had got into the newspapers), was the mark of his
+handiwork.  "By order of the Committee.--N.N."  A corner of the curtain lifted
+to strike the imagination of the gaping world.  He was said to have been
+innumerable times in and out of Russia, the Necator of bureaucrats, of
+provincial governors, of obscure informers.  He lived between whiles, Razumov
+had heard, on the shores of the Lake of Como, with a charming wife, devoted to
+the cause, and two young children.  But how could that creature, so grotesque
+as to set town dogs barking at its mere sight, go about on those deadly errands
+and slip through the meshes of the police?"
+
+"What now? what now?" the voice squeaked.  "I am only sincere.  It's not denied
+that the other was the leading spirit.  Well, it would have been better if he
+had been the one spared to us.  More useful.  I am not a sentimentalist.  Say
+what I think. . . only natural."
+
+Squeak, squeak, squeak, without a gesture, without a stir--the horrible squeaky
+burlesque of professional jealousy--this man of a sinister alliterative
+nickname, this executioner of revolutionary verdicts, the terrifying N.N.
+exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention attracted to the
+performance of an obscure amateur.  Sophia Antonovna shrugged her shoulders.
+ The comrade with the martial red moustache hurried towards Razumov full of
+conciliatory intentions in his strong buzzing voice.
+
+"Devil take it!  And in this place, too, in the public street, so to speak.
+ But you can see yourself how it is.  One of his fantastic sallies.  Absolutely
+of no consequence."
+
+"Pray don't concern yourself," cried Razumov, going off into a long fit of
+laughter.  "Don't mention it."
+
+The other, his hectic flush like a pair of burns on his cheek-bones, stared for
+a moment and burst out laughing too.  Razumov, whose hilarity died out all at
+once, made a step forward.
+
+"Enough of this," he began in a clear, incisive voice, though he could hardly
+control the trembling of his legs.  "I will have no more of it.  I shall not
+permit anyone. . . .  I can see very well what you are at with those allusions.
+. . .  Inquire, investigate!  I defy you, but I will not be played with."
+
+He had spoken such words before.  He had been driven to cry them out in the
+face of other suspicions.  It was an infernal cycle bringing round that protest
+like a fatal necessity of his existence.  But it was no use.  He would be
+always played with.  Luckily life does not last for ever.
+
+"I won't have it!" he shouted, striking his fist into the palm of his other
+hand.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch--what has come to you?"  The woman revolutionist interfered
+with authority.  They were all looking at Razumov now; the slayer of spies and
+gendarmes had turned about, presenting his enormous stomach in full, like a
+shield.
+
+"Don't shout.  There are people passing."  Sophia Antonovna was apprehensive of
+another outburst.  A steam-launch from Monrepos had come to the landing-stage
+opposite the gate, its hoarse whistle and the churning noise alongside all
+unnoticed, had landed a small bunch of local passengers who were dispersing
+their several ways.  Only a specimen of early tourist in knickerbockers,
+conspicuous by a brand-new yellow leather glass-case, hung about for a moment,
+scenting something unusual about these four people within the rusty iron gates
+of what looked the grounds run wild of an unoccupied private house.  Ah!  If he
+had only known what the chance of commonplace travelling had suddenly put in
+his way!  But he was a well-bred person; he averted his gaze and moved off with
+short steps along the avenue, on the watch for a tramcar.
+
+A gesture from Sophia Antonovna, "Leave him to me," had sent the two men
+away--the buzzing of the inarticulate voice growing fainter and fainter, and
+the thin pipe of "What now? what's the matter?" reduced to the proportions of a
+squeaking toy by the distance.  They had left him to her.  So many things could
+be left safely to the experience of Sophia Antonovna.  And at once, her black
+eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried to get at the heart of that outburst.
+ It had some meaning.  No one is born an active revolutionist.  The change
+comes disturbingly, with the force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train
+agonizing doubts, assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the
+final appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction.  She
+had seen--often had only divined--scores of these young men and young women
+going through an emotional crisis.  This young man looked like a moody egotist.
+ And besides, it was a special--a unique case.  She had never met an
+individuality which interested and puzzled her so much.
+
+"Take care, Razumov, my good friend.  If you carry on like this you will go
+mad.  You are angry with everybody and bitter with yourself, and on the look
+out for something to torment yourself with."
+
+"It's intolerable!"  Razumov could only speak in gasps.  " You must admit that
+I can have no illusions on the attitude which. . . it isn't clear. . . or
+rather only too clear."
+
+He made a gesture of despair.  It was not his courage that failed him.  The
+choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat--the thought of being
+condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere without the hope of
+ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
+
+"A glass of cold water is what you want."  Sophia Antonovna glanced up the
+grounds at the house and shook her head, then out of the gate at the brimful
+placidity of the lake.  With a half-comical shrug of the shoulders, she gave
+the remedy up in the face of that abundance.
+
+"It is you, my dear soul, who are flinging yourself at something which does not
+exist.  What is it?  Self-reproach, or what?  It's absurd.  You couldn't have
+gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken."
+
+She remonstrated with him reasonably, at some length too.  He had nothing to
+complain of in his reception.  Every new-comer was discussed more or less.
+ Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.  No one that
+she could remember had been shown from the first so much confidence.  Soon,
+very soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, he would be given an opportunity of
+showing his devotion to the sacred task of crushing the Infamy.
+
+Razumov, listening quietly, thought: "It may be that she is trying to lull my
+suspicions to sleep.  On the other hand, it is obvious that most of them are
+fools."  He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his arms on his breast,
+leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
+
+"As to what remains obscure in the fate of that poor Haldin," Sophia Antonovna
+dropped into a slowness of utterance which was to Razumov like the falling of
+molten lead drop by drop; "as to that--though no one ever hinted that either
+from fear or neglect your conduct has not been what it should have been--well,
+I have a bit of intelligence. . . ."
+
+Razumov could not prevent himself from raising his head, and Sophia Antonovna
+nodded slightly.
+
+"I have.  You remember that letter from St. Petersburg I mentioned to you a
+moment ago?"
+
+"The letter?  Perfectly.  Some busybody has been reporting my conduct on a
+certain day.  It's rather sickening.  I suppose our police are greatly edified
+when they open these interesting and--and--superfluous letters."
+
+"Oh dear no!  The police do not get hold of our letters as easily as you
+imagine.  The letter in question did not leave St. Petersburg till the ice
+broke up.  It went by the first English steamer which left the Neva this
+spring.  They have a fireman on board--one of us, in fact.  It has reached me
+from Hull. . . ."
+
+She paused as if she were surprised at the sullen fixity of Razumov's gaze, but
+went on at once, and much faster.
+
+"We have some of our people there who . . . but never mind.  The writer of the
+letter relates an incident which he thinks may possibly be connected with
+Haldin's arrest.  I was just going to tell you when those two men came along."
+
+"That also was an incident," muttered Razumov, "of a very charming kind--for
+me."
+
+"Leave off that!" cried Sophia Antonovna."  Nobody cares for Nikita's barking.
+ There's no malice in him.  Listen to what I have to say.  You may be able to
+throw a light.  There was in St. Petersburg a sort of town peasant--a man who
+owned horses.  He came to town years ago to work for some relation as a driver
+and ended by owning a cab or two."
+
+She might well have spared herself the slight effort of the gesture: "Wait!"
+ Razumov did not mean to speak; he could not have interrupted her now, not to
+save his life.  The contraction of his facial muscles had been involuntary, a
+mere surface stir, leaving him sullenly attentive as before.
+
+"He was not a quite ordinary man of his class--it seems," she went on.  " The
+people of the house--my informant talked with many of them--you know, one of
+those enormous houses of shame and misery. . . ."
+
+Sophia Antonovna need not have enlarged on the character of the house.  Razumov
+saw clearly, towering at her back, a dark mass of masonry veiled in snowflakes,
+with the long row of windows of the eating-shop shining greasily very near the
+ground.  The ghost of that night pursued him.  He stood up to it with rage and
+with weariness.
+
+"Did the late Haldin ever by chance speak to you of that house?"  Sophia
+Antonovna was anxious to know.
+
+"Yes."  Razumov, making that answer, wondered whether he were falling into a
+trap.  It was so humiliating to lie to these people that he probably could not
+have said no.  "He mentioned to me once," he added, as if making an effort of
+memory, " a house of that sort.  He used to visit some workmen there."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+Sophia Antonovna triumphed.  Her correspondent had discovered that fact quite
+accidentally from the talk of the people of the house, having made friends with
+a workman who occupied a room there.  They described Haldin's appearance
+perfectly.  He brought comforting words of hope into their misery.  He came
+irregularly, but he came very often, and--her correspondent wrote--sometimes he
+spent a night in the house, sleeping, they thought, in a stable which opened
+upon the inner yard.
+
+"Note that, Razumov!  In a stable."
+
+Razumov had listened with a sort of ferocious but amused acquiescence.
+
+"Yes.  In the straw.  It was probably the cleanest spot in the whole house."
+
+"No doubt," assented the woman with that deep frown which seemed to draw closer
+together her black eyes in a sinister fashion.  No four-footed beast could
+stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were condemned to suffer
+from in Russia.  The point of this discovery was that it proved Haldin to have
+been familiar with that horse-owning peasant--a reckless, independent,
+free-living fellow not much liked by the other inhabitants of the house.  He
+was believed to have been the associate of a band of housebreakers.  Some of
+these got captured.  Not while he was driving them, however; but still there
+was a suspicion against the fellow of having given a hint to the police and. .
+. .
+
+The woman revolutionist checked herself suddenly.
+
+"And you?  Have you ever heard your friend refer to a certain Ziemianitch?"
+
+Razumov was ready for the name.  He had been looking out for the question.
+ "When it comes I shall own up," he had said to himself.  But he took his time.
+
+"To be sure!" he began slowly.  "Ziemianitch, a peasant owning a team of
+horses.  Yes.  On one occasion.  Ziemianitch!  Certainly!  Ziemianitch of the
+horses. . . .  How could it have slipped my memory like this?  One of the last
+conversations we had together."
+
+"That means,"--Sophia Antonovna looked very grave,--"that means, Razumov, it
+was very shortly before--eh?"
+
+"Before what?" shouted Razumov, advancing at the woman, who looked astonished
+but stood her ground.  "Before. . . .  Oh! Of course, it was before!  How could
+it have been after?  Only a few hours before."
+
+"And he spoke of him favourably?"
+
+"With enthusiasm!  The horses of Ziemianitch!  The free soul of Ziemianitch!"
+
+Razumov took a savage delight in the loud utterance of that name, which had
+never before crossed his lips audibly.  He fixed his blazing eyes on the woman
+till at last her fascinated expression recalled him to himself.
+
+"The late Haldin," he said, holding himself in, with downcast eyes, "was
+inclined to take sudden fancies to people, on--on--what shall I
+say--insufficient grounds."
+
+"There!"  Sophia Antonovna clapped her hands.  "That, to my mind, settles it.
+ The suspicions of my correspondent were aroused. . . ."
+
+"Aha!  Your correspondent," Razumov said in an almost openly mocking tone.  "
+What suspicions?  How aroused?  By this Ziemianitch?  Probably some drunken,
+gabbling, plausible. . . ."
+
+"You talk as if you had known him."
+
+Razumov looked up.
+
+"No.  But I knew Haldin."
+
+Sophia Antonovna nodded gravely.
+
+"I see.  Every word you say confirms to my mind the suspicion communicated to
+me in that very interesting letter.  This Ziemianitch was found one morning
+hanging from a hook in the stable--dead."
+
+Razumov felt a profound trouble.  It was visible, because Sophia Antonovna was
+moved to observe vivaciously--
+
+"Aha! You begin to see."
+
+He saw it clearly enough--in the light of a lantern casting spokes of shadow in
+a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long boots hanging
+against the wall.  A pointed hood, with the ends wound about up to the eyes,
+hid the face.  "But that does not concern me," he reflected.  "It does not
+affect my position at all.  He never knew who had thrashed him.  He could not
+have known."  Razumov felt sorry for the old lover of the bottle and women.
+
+"Yes.  Some of them end like that," he muttered.  "What is your idea, Sophia
+Antonovna?"
+
+It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had adopted
+it fully.  She stated it in one word--"Remorse."  Razumov opened his eyes very
+wide at that.  Sophia Antonovna's informant, by listening to the talk of the
+house, by putting this and that together, had managed to come very near to the
+truth of Haldin's relation to Ziemianitch.
+
+"It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of--that your friend had
+some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St. Petersburg, at
+any rate.  Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for the rest.  And that
+fellow's horses were part of the plan."
+
+"They have actually got at the truth," Razumov marvelled to himself, while he
+nodded judicially.  "Yes, that's possible, very possible."  But the woman
+revolutionist was very positive that it was so.  First of all, a conversation
+about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been partly overheard.  Then
+there were the suspicions of the people in the house when their "young
+gentleman" (they did not know Haldin by his name) ceased to call at the house.
+ Some of them used to charge Ziemianitch with knowing something of this
+absence.  He denied it with exasperation; but the fact was that ever since
+Haldin's disappearance he was not himself, growing moody and thin.  Finally,
+during a quarrel with some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of
+the inmates of the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his
+chief enemy, an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven '' our
+young gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke
+into houses."  In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch got
+flung down a flight of stairs.  Thereupon he drank and moped for a week, and
+then hanged himself.
+
+Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale.  She charged Ziemianitch
+either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a certain date,
+overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop--perhaps in the very eating-shop on
+the ground floor of the house--or, maybe, a downright denunciation, followed by
+remorse.  A man like that would be capable of anything.  People said he was a
+flighty old chap.  And if he had been once before mixed up with the police--as
+seemed certain, though he always denied it--in connexion with these thieves, he
+would be sure to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look
+out for something to report.  Possibly at first his tale was not made anything
+of till the day that scoundrel de P--- got his deserts.  Ah!  But then every
+bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally they were
+bound to get Haldin.
+
+Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands--" Fatally."
+
+Fatality--chance!  Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the queer
+verisimilitude of these inferences.  They were obviously to his advantage.
+
+"It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally."  Sophia
+Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again.  She had received the letter
+three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter Ivanovitch.  She knew then
+that she would have the opportunity presently of meeting several men of action
+assembled for an important purpose.
+
+"I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself at
+large.  I have it in my pocket now.  You understand how pleased I was to come
+upon you."
+
+Razumov was saying to himself,"  She won't offer to show the letter to me.  Not
+likely.  Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers has found out?"
+ He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not ask.
+
+"Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?"
+
+"No, no," she protested.  "There you are again with your sensitiveness.  It
+makes you stupid.  Don't you see, there was no starting-point for an
+investigation even if any one had thought of it.  A perfect blank!  That's
+exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving you
+cautiously.  It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my informant
+striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser lodging in that
+particular slum-house.  A wonderful coincidence!"
+
+"A pious person," suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, "would say that the
+hand of God has done it all."
+
+"My poor father would have said that."  Sophia Antonovna did not smile.  She
+dropped her eyes."  Not that his God ever helped him.  It's a long time since
+God has done anything for the people.  Anyway, it's done."
+
+"All this would be quite final," said Razumov, with every appearance of
+reflective impartiality, "if there was any certitude that the 'our young
+gentleman' of these people was Victor Haldin.  Have we got that?"
+
+"Yes.  There's no mistake.  My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin's
+personal appearance as with your own," the woman affirmed decisively.
+
+"It's the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt," Razumov said to himself, with
+reawakened uneasiness.  Had his own visit to that accursed house passed
+unnoticed?  It was barely possible.  Yet it was hardly probable.  It was just
+the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt busybody had been
+picking up.  But the letter did not seem to contain any allusion to that.
+ Unless she had suppressed it.  And, if so, why?  If it had really escaped the
+prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a confounded genius for
+recognizing people from description, it could only be for a time.  He would
+come upon it presently and hasten to write another letter--and then!
+
+For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and disdain,
+Razumov shuddered inwardly.  It guarded him from common fear, but it could not
+defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way by these people.  It was
+a sort of superstitious dread.  Now, since his position had been made more
+secure by their own folly at the cost of Ziemianitch, he felt the need of
+perfect safety, with its freedom from direct lying, with its power of moving
+amongst them silent, unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate
+of their crimes and their folly.  Was this advantage his already?  Or not yet?
+ Or never would be?
+
+"Well, Sophia Antonovna," his air of reluctant concession was genuine in so far
+that he was really loath to part with her without testing her sincerity by a
+question it was impossible to bring about in any way; "well, Sophia Antonovna,
+if that is so, then--"
+
+"The creature has done justice to himself," the woman observed, as if thinking
+aloud.
+
+"What?  Ah yes!  Remorse," Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
+
+"Don't be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend."  There was no
+hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes seemed
+detached for an instant from vengeful visions.  "He was a man of the people.
+ The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent.  It's something to know
+that."
+
+"Consoling?" insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
+
+"Leave off railing," she checked him explosively.  "Remember, Razumov, that
+women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all
+saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.  Don't rail!
+ Leave off. . . .  I don't know how it is, but there are moments when you are
+abhorrent to me. . . ."
+
+She averted her face.  A languid silence, as if all the electricity of the
+situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for some time.
+ Razumov had not flinched.  Suddenly she laid the tips of her fingers on his
+sleeve.
+
+"Don't mind."
+
+"I don't mind," he said very quietly.
+
+He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face.  He was really
+mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure oppression.  And
+suddenly he asked himself, "Why the devil did I go to that house?  It was an
+imbecile thing to do."
+
+A profound disgust came over him.  Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking in a
+friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention.  And it was still about
+the famous letter, referring to various minute details given by her informant,
+who had never seen Ziemianitch.  The "victim of remorse" had been buried
+several weeks before her correspondent began frequenting the house.  It--the
+house--contained very good revolutionary material.  The spirit of the heroic
+Haldin had passed through these dens of black wretchedness with a promise of
+universal redemption from all the miseries that oppress mankind.  Razumov
+listened without hearing, gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its
+independence from that degrading method of direct lying which at times he found
+it almost impossible to practice.
+
+No.  The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this conversation.
+ There was no way of bringing it forward.  He regretted not having composed a
+perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal connexion with the house might
+have been owned up to.  But when he left Russia he did not know that
+Ziemianitch had hanged himself.  And, anyway, who could have foreseen this
+woman's "informant" stumbling upon that particular slum, of all the slums
+awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution?  Who could
+have foreseen?  Nobody!  "It's a perfect, diabolic surprise," thought Razumov,
+calm-faced in his attitude of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia
+Antonovna's remarks upon the psychology of "the people,"  "Oh yes--certainly,"
+rather coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of
+confession out of her throat.
+
+Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of relaxed
+tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to the subject of
+his uneasiness.  How it came about he could only guess, his mind being absent
+at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia Antonovna's complaints of
+the illogical absurdity of the people.  For instance--that Ziemianitch was
+notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the last weeks of his life, he suffered
+from the notion that he had been beaten by the devil.
+
+"The devil," repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
+
+"The actual devil.  The devil in person.  You may well look astonished, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch.  Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken, a complete
+stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful thrashing while he was
+lying dead-drunk in the stable.  The wretched creature's body was one mass of
+bruises.  He showed them to the people in the house."
+
+"But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don't believe in the actual devil?"
+
+"Do you?" retorted the woman curtly.  "Not but that there are plenty of men
+worse than devils to make a hell of this earth," she muttered to herself.
+
+Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold between her
+thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away.  It was obvious that she
+did not make much of the story--unless, indeed, this was the perfection of
+duplicity.  "A dark young man," she explained further.  "Never seen there
+before, never seen afterwards.  Why are you smiling, Razumov?"
+
+"At the devil being still young after all these ages," he answered composedly.
+ "But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you say, was dead-drunk
+at the time?"
+
+"Oh!  The eating-house keeper has described him.  An overbearing, swarthy young
+man in a student's cloak, who came rushing in, demanded Ziemianitch, beat him
+furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving the eating-house keeper
+paralysed with astonishment."
+
+"Does he, too, believe it was the devil?"
+
+"That I can't say.  I am told he's very reserved on the matter.  Those sellers
+of spirits are great scoundrels generally.  I should think he knows more of it
+than anybody."
+
+"Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what's your theory?" asked Razumov in a tone
+of great interest.  "Yours and your informant's, who is on the spot."
+
+"I agree with him.  Some police-hound in disguise.  Who else could beat a
+helpless man so unmercifully?  As for the rest, if they were out that day on
+every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might have thought it
+just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more information, or for
+identification, or what not.  Some scoundrelly detective was sent to fetch him
+along, and being vexed at finding him so drunk broke a stable fork over his
+ribs.  Later on, after they had the big game safe in the net, they troubled
+their heads no more about that peasant."
+
+Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this conversation,
+keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in the verisimilitude
+of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion of the invincible nature
+of human error, a glimpse into the utmost depths of self-deception.  Razumov,
+after shaking hands with Sophia Antonovna, left the grounds, crossed the road,
+and walking out on the little steamboat pier leaned over the rail.
+
+His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days, ever since
+that night. . . the night.  The conversation with the woman revolutionist had
+given him the view of his danger at the very moment this danger vanished,
+characteristically enough.  "I ought to have foreseen the doubts that would
+arise in those people's minds," he thought.  Then his attention being attracted
+by a stone of peculiar shape, which he could see clearly lying at the bottom,
+he began to speculate as to the depth of water in that spot.  But very soon,
+with a start of wonder at this extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment,
+he returned to his train of thought.  "I ought to have told very circumstantial
+lies from the first," he said to himself, with a mortal distaste of the mere
+idea which silenced his mental utterance for quite a perceptible interval.
+ "Luckily, that's all right now," he reflected, and after a time spoke to
+himself, half aloud, "Thanks to the devil," and laughed a little.
+
+The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts.  He was not
+exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting- in it a
+certain piquancy.  He owned to himself that, had he known of that suicide
+before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making such excellent
+use of it for his own purposes.  He ought to be infinitely obliged to the
+fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity, "A wonderful
+psychologist apparently," he said to himself sarcastically.  Remorse, indeed!
+ It was a striking example of your true conspirator's blindness, of the stupid
+subtlety of people with one idea.  This was a drama of love, not of conscience,
+Razumov continued to himself mockingly.  A woman the old fellow was making up
+to!  A robust pedlar, clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs. .
+. .  And at sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.
+ That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch.  Even the
+comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme crisis.  At
+such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of an unquenchable
+passion.  And, besides, there was the wild exasperation aroused by the unjust
+aspersions and the contumely of the house, with the maddening impossibility to
+account for that mysterious thrashing, added to these simple and bitter
+sorrows.  "Devil, eh?"  Razumov exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had
+made an interesting discovery.  "Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism.
+ So many of our true Russian souls end in that way!  Very characteristic."  He
+felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an
+unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above--like a community of
+crawling ants working out its destiny.  It was as if this Ziemianitch could not
+possibly have done anything else.  And Sophia Antonovna's cocksure and
+contemptuous "some police-hound" was characteristically Russian in another way.
+ But there was no tragedy there.  This was a comedy of errors.  It was as if
+the devil himself were playing a game with all of them in turn.  First with
+him, then with Ziemianitch, then with those revolutionists.  The devil's own
+game this. . . .  He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular
+thought at his own expense.  "Hallo!  I am falling into mysticism too."
+
+His mind was more at ease than ever.  Turning about he put his back against the
+rail comfortably.  "All this fits with marvellous aptness," he continued to
+think.  "The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no longer darkened by the fate
+of my supposed colleague.  The mystic Ziemianitch accounts for that.  An
+incredible chance has served me.  No more need of lies.  I shall have only to
+listen and to keep my scorn from getting the upper hand of my caution."
+
+He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was a long
+time before he started forward from that pose, with the recollection that he
+had made up his mind to do something important that day.  What it was he could
+not immediately recall, yet he made no effort of memory, for he was uneasily
+certain that he would remember presently.
+
+He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he slowed down,
+almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure walking in the contrary
+direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft, broad-brimmed hat, picturesque but
+diminutive, as if seen through the big end of an opera-glass.  It was
+impossible to avoid that tiny man, for there was no issue for retreat.
+
+"Another one going to that mysterious meeting," thought Razumov.  He was right
+in his surmise, only _this_ one, unlike the others who came from a distance,
+was known to him personally.  Still, he hoped to pass on with a mere bow, but
+it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with hairy wrist and knuckles
+protruded in a friendly wave from under the folds of the cloak, worn
+Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm day, a corner flung over the
+shoulder.
+
+"And how is Herr Razumov?" sounded the greeting in German, by that alone made
+more odious to the object of the affable recognition.  At closer quarters the
+diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an ordinary-sized man, with a
+lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising of the hat, the great pepper-and
+salt full beard spread over the proportionally broad chest.  A fine bold nose
+jutted over a thin mouth hidden in the mass of fine hair.  All this, accented
+features, strong limbs in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without
+the slightest sign of debility.  The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown, were
+too big, with the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour under a lamp.
+ The obscure celebrity of the tiny man was well known to Razumov.  Polyglot, of
+unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality, anarchist, with a pedantic and
+ferocious temperament, and an amazingly inflammatory capacity for invective, he
+was a power in the background, this violent pamphleteer clamouring for
+revolutionary justice, this Julius Laspara, editor of the _Living Word_,
+confidant of conspirators, inditer of sanguinary menaces and manifestos,
+suspected of being in the secret of every plot.  Laspara lived in the old town
+in a sombre, narrow house presented to him by a naive middle-class admirer of
+his humanitarian eloquence.  With him lived his two daughters, who overtopped
+him head and shoulders, and a pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing in the
+dark rooms in blue cotton overalls and clumsy boots, who might have belonged to
+either one of them or to neither.  No stranger could tell.  Julius Laspara no
+doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few
+years, had as casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with
+admirable pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details--no, not so
+much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist
+function.  Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small dark
+rooms on the top floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of sweepings
+all over the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every table, the two
+Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent, sleepy-eyed, corsetless,
+and generally, in their want of shape and the disorder of their rumpled attire,
+resembling old dolls; the great but obscure Julius, his feet twisted round his
+three-legged stool, always ready to receive the visitors, the pen instantly
+dropped, the body screwed round with a striking display of the lofty brow and
+of the great austere beard.  When he got down from his stool it was as though
+he had descended from the heights of Olympus.  He was dwarfed by his daughters,
+by the furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature.  But he very seldom left
+it, and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.
+
+It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him out in
+that direction that afternoon.  Evidently he wished to be amiable to that young
+man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world of political refugees.
+ In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and wrote four or five other
+European languages, without distinction and without force (other than that of
+invective), he inquired if Razumov had taken his inscriptions at the University
+as yet.  And the young man, shaking his head negatively--
+
+"There's plenty of time for that.  But, meantime, are you not going to write
+something for us?"
+
+He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on anything,
+social, economic, historical--anything.  Any subject could be treated in the
+right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution.  And, as it happened, a
+friend of his in London had got in touch with a review of advanced ideas.  "We
+must educate, educate everybody--develop the great thought of absolute liberty
+and of revolutionary justice."
+
+Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.
+
+"Write in Russian.  We'll have it translated There can be no difficulty.  Why,
+without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin.  My daughters go to see her
+sometimes."  He nodded significantly.  " She does nothing, has never done
+anything in her life.  She would be quite competent, with a little assistance.
+ Only write.  You know you must.  And so good-bye for the present."
+
+He raised his arm and went on.  Razumov backed against the low wall, looked
+after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry mutter--
+
+"Cursed Jew!"
+
+He did not know anything about it.  Julius Laspara might have been a
+Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse towns
+for anything he could tell to the contrary.  But this is not a story of the
+West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by the comment that it
+was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best adapted to the nature of
+the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.  He was boiling with rage, as
+though he had been grossly insulted.  He walked as if blind, following
+instinctively the shore of the diminutive harbour along the quay, through a
+pretty, dull garden, where dull people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his
+fury abandoning him, he discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad
+bridge.  He slowed down at once.  To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he
+saw the green slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of
+the picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of
+water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.
+
+He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on slowly,
+his eyes fixed on the ground.  One or two persons had to get out of his way,
+and then turned round to give a surprised stare to his profound absorption.
+ The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled in his mind
+strangely.  Write.  Must write!  He!  Write!  A sudden light flashed upon him.
+ To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to do that day.  He had
+made up his mind irrevocably to that step and then had forgotten all about it.
+ That incorrigible tendency to escape from the grip of the situation was
+fraught with serious danger.  He was ready to despise himself for it.  What was
+it?  Levity, or deep-seated weakness?  Or an unconscious dread?"
+
+"Is it that I am shrinking?  It can't be!  It's impossible.  To shrink now
+would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral
+damnation," he thought.  "Is it possible that I have a conventional conscience?
+"
+
+He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the
+pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street facing
+the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that it was there
+before him.  But at the moment a couple of carriages and a slow-moving cart
+interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left, following the quay again,
+but now away from the lake.
+
+"It may be just my health," he thought, allowing himself a very unusual doubt
+of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment or two, he had
+never been ill in his life.  But that was a danger, too.  Only, it seemed as
+though he were being looked after in a specially remarkable way.  "If I
+believed in an active Providence," Razumov said to himself, amused grimly, "I
+would see here the working of an ironical finger.  To have a Julius Laspara put
+in my way as if expressly to remind me of my purpose is--  Write, he had said.
+ I must write--I must, indeed!  I shall write--never fear.  Certainly.  That's
+why I am here.  And for the future I shall have something to write about."
+
+He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy.  But the idea of writing
+evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of privacy, and
+naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the necessary exertion
+of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile influence awaiting him
+within those odious four walls.
+
+"Suppose one of these revolutionists," he asked himself, "were to take a fancy
+to call on me while I am writing?"  The mere prospect of such an interruption
+made him shudder.  One could lock one's door, or ask the tobacconist downstairs
+(some sort of a refugee himself) to tell inquirers that one was not in.  Not
+very good precautions those.  The manner of his life, he felt, must be kept
+clear of every cause for suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such
+trifling occurrences as a delay in opening a locked door.  "I wish I were in
+the middle of some field miles away from everywhere," he thought.
+
+He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of being on
+a bridge again.  This one was much narrower than the other, and instead of
+being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle.  At the point of that angle a
+short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of gravel and its shores
+faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile neatness.  A couple of tall
+poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on the clean, dark gravel, and
+under them a few garden benches and a bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau
+seated on its pedestal.
+
+On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the woman in
+charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the island.  There was
+something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about that unfrequented tiny
+crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.  Something pretentious and
+shabby, too.  He asked for a glass of milk, which he drank standing, at one
+draught (nothing but tea had passed his lips since the morning), and was going
+away with a weary, lagging step when a thought stopped him short.  He had found
+precisely what he needed.  If solitude could ever be secured in the open air in
+the middle of a town, he would have it there on this absurd island, together
+with the faculty of watching the only approach.
+
+He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it.  This was the place for
+making a beginning of that writing which had to be done.  The materials he had
+on him.  "I shall always come here," he said to himself, and afterwards sat for
+quite a long time motionless, without thought and sight and hearing, almost
+without life.  He sat long enough for the declining sun to dip behind the roofs
+of the town at his back, and throw the shadow of the houses on the lake front
+over the islet, before he pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a
+small notebook on his knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now
+and then at the connecting arm of the bridge.  These glances were needless;
+ the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the
+islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat
+enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze.
+ After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish haste, put
+away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first tearing out the
+written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness.  But the folding of the
+flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful nicety.  That done, he
+leaned back in his seat and remained motionless, the papers holding in his left
+hand.  The twilight had deepened.  He got up and began to pace to and fro
+slowly under the trees.
+
+"There can be no doubt that now I am safe," he thought.  His fine ear could
+detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the
+point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to them with interest.
+ But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was too elusive.
+
+"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to," he murmured.  And it
+occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen to
+innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were.  Yes, the sound of water, the
+voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions.  All the other sounds
+of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.
+
+This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and the
+word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far as I can
+understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his body, and more
+specially in danger from the fires of this earth.  And it must be admitted that
+in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of solitude from which he suffered was not
+an altogether morbid phenomenon.
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+That I should, at the beginning of this retrospect, mention again that Mr.
+Razumov's youth had no one in the world, as literally no one as it can be
+honestly affirmed of any human being, is but a statement of fact from a man who
+believes in the psychological value of facts.  There is also, perhaps, a desire
+of punctilious fairness.  Unidentified with anyone in this narrative where the
+aspects of honour and shame are remote from the ideas of the Western world, and
+taking my stand on the ground of common humanity, it is for that very reason
+that I feel a strange reluctance to state baldly here what every reader has
+most likely already discovered himself.  Such reluctance may appear absurd if
+it were not for the thought that because of the imperfection of language there
+is always something ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the exhibition of
+naked truth.  But the time has come when Councillor of State Mikulin can no
+longer be ignored.  His simple question "Where to?" on which we left Mr.
+Razumov in St. Petersburg, throws a light on the general meaning of this
+individual case.
+
+"Where to?" was the answer in the form of a gentle question to what we may call
+Mr. Razumov's declaration of independence.  The question was not menacing in
+the least and, indeed, had the ring of innocent inquiry.  Had it been taken in
+a merely topographical sense, the only answer to it would have appeared
+sufficiently appalling to Mr Razumov.  Where to?  Back to his rooms, where the
+Revolution had sought him out to put to a sudden test his dormant instincts,
+his half-conscious thoughts and almost wholly unconscious ambitions, by the
+touch as of some furious and dogmatic religion, with its call to frantic
+sacrifices, its tender resignations, its dreams and hopes uplifting the soul by
+the side of the most sombre moods of despair.  And Mr. Razumov had let go the
+door-handle and had come back to the middle of the room, asking Councillor
+Mikulin angrily, "What do you mean by it"
+
+As far as I can tell, Councillor Mikulin did not answer that question.  He drew
+Mr. Razumov into familiar conversation.  It is the peculiarity of Russian
+natures that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action, they are still
+turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas.  This conversation (and
+others later on) need not be recorded.  Suffice it to say that it brought Mr.
+Razumov as we know him to the test of another faith.  There was nothing
+official in its expression, and Mr. Razumov was led to defend his attitude of
+detachment.  But Councillor Mikulin would have none of his arguments.  "For a
+man like you," were his last weighty words in the discussion, "such a position
+is impossible.  Don't forget that I have seen that interesting piece of paper.
+ I understand your liberalism.  I have an intellect of that kind myself.
+ Reform for me is mainly a question of method.  But the principle of revolt is
+a physical intoxication, a sort of hysteria which must be kept away from the
+masses.  You agree to this without reserve, don't you?  Because, you see,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, abstention, reserve, in certain situations, come very near
+to political crime.  The ancient Greeks understood that very well."
+
+Mr. Razumov, listening with a faint smile, asked Councillor Mikulin point-blank
+if this meant that he was going to have him watched.
+
+The high official took no offence at the cynical inquiry.
+
+"No, Kirylo Sidorovitch," he answered gravely.  "I don't mean to have you
+watched."
+
+Razumov, suspecting a lie, affected yet the greatest liberty of mind during the
+short remainder of that interview.  The older man expressed himself throughout
+in familiar terms, and with a sort of shrewd simplicity.  Razumov concluded
+that to get to the bottom of that mind was an impossible feat.  A great
+disquiet made his heart beat quicker.  The high official, issuing from behind
+the desk, was actually offering to shake hands with him.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr Razumov.  An understanding between intelligent men is always a
+satisfactory occurrence.  Is it not?  And, of course, these rebel gentlemen
+have not the monopoly of intelligence."
+
+"I presume that I shall not be wanted any more?"  Razumov brought out that
+question while his hand was still being grasped.  Councillor Mikulin released
+it slowly.
+
+"That, Mr. Razumov," he said with great earnestness, "is as it may be.  God
+alone knows the future.  But you may rest assured that I never thought of
+having you watched.  You are a young man of great independence.  Yes.  You are
+going away free as air, but you shall end by coming back to us."
+
+"I!  I!"  Razumov exclaimed in an appalled murmur of protest.  "What for?" he
+added feebly.
+
+"Yes!  You yourself, Kirylo Sidorovitch," the high police functionary insisted
+in a low, severe tone of conviction.  "You shall be coming back to us.  Some of
+our greatest minds had to do that in the end."
+
+You have no better friend than Prince K---, and as to myself it is a long time
+now since I've been honoured by his. . . ."
+
+He glanced down his beard.
+
+"I won't detain you any longer.  We live in difficult times, in times of
+monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.  We shall certainly
+meet once more.  It may be some little time, though, before we do.  Till then
+may Heaven send you fruitful reflections!"  Once in the street, Razumov started
+off rapidly, without caring for the direction.  At first he thought of nothing;
+but in a little while the consciousness of his position presented itself to him
+as something so ugly, dangerous, and absurd, the difficulty of ever freeing
+himself from the toils of that complication so insoluble, that the idea of
+going back and, as he termed it to himself, confessing to Councillor Mikulin
+flashed through his mind.
+
+Go back!  What for?  Confess!  To what?  "I have been speaking to him with the
+greatest openness," he said to himself with perfect truth.  "What else could I
+tell him?  That I have undertaken to carry a message to that brute Ziemianitch?
+ Establish a false complicity and destroy what chance of safety I have won for
+nothing--what folly!"
+
+Yet he could not defend himself from fancying that Councillor Mikulin was,
+perhaps, the only man in the world able to understand his conduct.  To be
+understood appeared extremely fascinating.
+
+On the way home he had to stop several times; all his strength seemed to run
+out of his limbs; and in the movement of the busy streets, isolated as if in a
+desert, he remained suddenly motionless for a minute or so before he could
+proceed on his way.  He reached his rooms at last
+
+Then came an illness, something in the nature of a low fever, which all at once
+removed him to a great distance from the perplexing actualities, from his very
+room, even.  He never lost consciousness; he only seemed to himself to be
+existing languidly somewhere very far away from everything that had ever
+happened to him.  He came out of this state slowly, with an effect, that is to
+say, of extreme slowness, though the actual number of days was not very great.
+ And when he had got back into the middle of things they were all changed,
+subtly and provokingly in their nature: inanimate objects, human faces, the
+landlady, the rustic servant-girl, the staircase, the streets, the very air.
+ He tackled these changed conditions in a spirit of severity.  He walked to and
+fro to the University, ascended stairs, paced the passages, listened to
+lectures, took notes, crossed courtyards in angry aloofness, his teeth set hard
+till his jaws ached.
+
+He was perfectly aware of madcap Kostia gazing like a young retriever from a
+distance, of the famished student with the red drooping nose, keeping
+scrupulously away as desired; of twenty others, perhaps, he knew well enough to
+speak to.  And they all had an air of curiosity and concern as if they expected
+something to happen.  "This can't last much longer," thought Razumov more than
+once.  On certain days he was afraid that anyone addressing him suddenly in a
+certain way would make him scream out insanely a lot of filthy abuse.  Often,
+after returning home, he would drop into a chair in his cap and cloak and
+remain still for hours holding some book he had got from the library in his
+hand; or he would pick up the little penknife and sit there scraping his nails
+endlessly and feeling furious all the time--simply furious.  "This is
+impossible," he would mutter suddenly to the empty room.
+
+Fact to be noted: this room might conceivably have become physically repugnant
+to him, emotionally intolerable, morally uninhabitable.  But no.  Nothing of
+the sort (and he had himself dreaded it at first), nothing of the sort
+happened.  On the contrary, he liked his lodgings better than any other shelter
+he, who had never known a home, had ever hired before.  He liked his lodgings
+so well that often, on that very account, he found a certain difficulty in
+making up his mind to go out.  It resembled a physical seduction such as, for
+instance, makes a man reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold
+day.
+
+For as, at that time, he seldom stirred except to go to the University (what
+else was there to do?) it followed that whenever he went abroad he felt himself
+at once closely involved in the moral consequences of his act.  It was there
+that the dark prestige of the Haldin mystery fell on him, clung to him like a
+poisoned robe it was impossible to fling off.  He suffered from it exceedingly,
+as well as from the conversational, commonplace, unavoidable intercourse with
+the other kind of students.  "They must be wondering at the change in me," he
+reflected anxiously.  He had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one
+or two innocent, nice enough fellows to go to the devil.  Once a married
+professor he used to call upon formerly addressed him in passing: "How is it we
+never see you at our Wednesdays now, Kirylo Sidorovitch?"  Razumov was
+conscious of meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness.  The
+professor was obviously too astonished to be offended.  All this was bad.  And
+all this was Haldin, always Haldin--nothing but Haldin--everywhere Haldin: a
+moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of the
+dead.  It was only the room through which that man had blundered on his way
+from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to haunt.  Not, to
+be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it, but that there he had no
+sort of power.  There it was Razumov who had the upper hand, in a composed
+sense of his own superiority.  A vanquished phantom--nothing more.  Often in
+the evening, his repaired watch faintly ticking on the table by the side of the
+lighted lamp, Razumov would look up from his writing and stare at the bed with
+an expectant, dispassionate attention.  Nothing was to be seen there.  He never
+really supposed that anything ever could be seen there.  After a while he would
+shrug his shoulders slightly and bend again over his work.  For he had gone to
+work and, at first, with some success.  His unwillingness to leave that place
+where he was safe from Haldin grew so strong that at last he ceased to go out
+at all.  From early morning till far into the night he wrote, he wrote for
+nearly a week; never looking at the time, and only throwing himself on the bed
+when he could keep his eyes open no longer.  Then, one afternoon, quite
+casually, he happened to glance at his watch.  He laid down his pen slowly.
+
+"At this very hour," was his thought, "the fellow stole unseen into this room
+while I was out.  And there he sat quiet as a mouse--perhaps in this very
+chair."  Razumov got up and began to pace the floor steadily, glancing at the
+watch now and then.  " This is the time when I returned and found him standing
+against the stove," he observed to himself.  When it grew dark he lit his lamp.
+ Later on he interrupted his tramping once more, only to wave away angrily the
+girl who attempted to enter the room with tea and something to eat on a tray.
+ And presently he noted the watch pointing at the hour of his own going forth
+into the falling snow on that terrible errand.
+
+"Complicity," he muttered faintly, and resumed his pacing, keeping his eye on
+the hands as they crept on slowly to the time of his return.
+
+"And, after all," he thought suddenly, "I might have been the chosen instrument
+of Providence.  This is a manner of speaking, but there may be truth in every
+manner of speaking.  What if that absurd saying were true in its essence?"
+
+He meditated for a while, then sat down, his legs stretched out, with stony
+eyes, and with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair like a man
+totally abandoned by Providence--desolate.
+
+He noted the time of Haldin's departure and continued to sit still for another
+half-hour; then muttering, "And now to work," drew up to the table, seized the
+pen and instantly dropped it under the influence of a profoundly disquieting
+reflection: "There's three weeks gone by and no word from Mikulin."
+
+What did it mean!  Was he forgotten?  Possibly.  Then why not remain
+forgotten--creep in somewhere?  Hide.  But where?  How?  With whom?  In what
+hole?  And was it to be for ever, or what?
+
+But a retreat was big with shadowy dangers.  The eye of the social revolution
+was on him, and Razumov for a moment felt an unnamed and despairing dread,
+mingled with an odious sense of humiliation.  Was it possible that he no longer
+belonged to himself?  This was damnable.  But why not simply keep on as before?
+ Study.  Advance.  Work hard as if nothing had happened (and first of all win
+the Silver Medal), acquire distinction, become a great reforming servant of the
+greatest of States.  Servant, too, of the mightiest homogeneous mass of mankind
+with a capability for logical, guided development in a brotherly solidarity of
+force and aim such as the world had never dreamt of. . . the Russian nation!
+
+Calm, resolved, steady in his great purpose, he was stretching his hand towards
+the pen when he happened to glance towards the bed.  He rushed at it, enraged,
+with a mental scream: "it's you, crazy fanatic, who stands in the way!"  He
+flung the pillow on the floor violently, tore the blankets aside. . . .
+ Nothing there.  And, turning away, he caught for an instant in the air, like a
+vivid detail in a dissolving view of two heads, the eyes of General T--- and of
+Privy-Councillor Mikulin side by side fixed upon him, quite different in
+character, but with the same unflinching and weary and yet purposeful
+expression. . . servants of the nation!
+
+Razumov tottered to the washstand very alarmed about himself, drank some water
+and bathed his forehead.  "This will pass and leave no trace," he thought
+confidently.  "I am all right."  But as to supposing that he had been forgotten
+it was perfect nonsense.  He was a marked man on that side.  And that was
+nothing.  It was what that miserable phantom stood for which had to be got out
+of the way. . . .  "If one only could go and spit it all out at some of
+them--and take the consequences."
+
+He imagined himself accosting the red-nosed student and suddenly shaking his
+fist in his face.  "From that one, though," he reflected," there's nothing to
+be got, because he has no mind of his own.  He's living in a red democratic
+trance.  Ah! you want to smash your way into universal happiness, my boy.  I
+will give you universal happiness, you silly, hypnotized ghoul, you! And what
+about my own happiness, eh? Haven't I got any right to it, just because I can
+think for myself?. . ."
+
+And again, but with a different mental accent, Razumov said to himself, "I am
+young.  Everything can be lived down."  At that moment he was crossing the room
+slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to compose his thoughts.  But
+before he had got so far everything abandoned him--hope, courage, belief in
+himself trust in men.  His heart had, as it were, suddenly emptied itself.  It
+was no use struggling on.  Rest, work, solitude, and the frankness of
+intercourse with his kind were alike forbidden to him.  Everything was gone.
+ His existence was a great cold blank, something like the enormous plain of the
+whole of Russia levelled with snow and fading gradually on all sides into
+shadows and mists.
+
+He sat down, with swimming head, closed his eyes, and remained like that,
+sitting bolt upright on the sofa and perfectly awake for the rest of the night;
+till the girl bustling into the outer room with the samovar thumped with her
+fist on the door, calling out," Kirylo Sidorovitch, please!  It is time for you
+to get up!"
+
+Then, pale like a corpse obeying the dread summons of judgement, Razumov opened
+his eyes and got up.
+
+
+Nobody will be surprised to hear, I suppose, that when the summons came he went
+to see Councillor Mikulin.  It came that very morning, while, looking white and
+shaky, like an invalid just out of bed, he was trying to shave himself.  The
+envelope was addressed in the little attorney's handwriting.  That envelope
+contained another, superscribed to Razumov, in Prince K---'s hand, with the
+request "Please forward under cover at once" in a corner.  The note inside was
+an autograph of Councillor Mikulin.  The writer stated candidly that nothing
+had arisen which needed clearing up, but nevertheless appointed a meeting with
+Mr. Razumov at a certain address in town which seemed to be that of an oculist.
+
+Razumov read it, finished shaving, dressed, looked at the note again, and
+muttered gloomily, "Oculist."  He pondered over it for a time, lit a match, and
+burned the two envelopes and the enclosure carefully.  Afterwards he waited,
+sitting perfectly idle and not even looking at anything in particular till the
+appointed hour drew near--and then went out.
+
+Whether, looking at the unofficial character of the summons, he might have
+refrained from attending to it is hard to say.  Probably not.  At any rate, he
+went; but, what's more, he went with a certain eagerness, which may appear
+incredible till it is remembered that Councillor Mikulin was the only person on
+earth with whom Razumov could talk, taking the Haldin adventure for granted.
+ And Haldin, when once taken for granted, was no longer a haunting,
+falsehood-breeding spectre.  Whatever troubling power he exercised in all the
+other places of the earth, Razumov knew very well that at this oculist's
+address he would be merely the hanged murderer of M. de P--- and nothing more.
+ For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life
+imparted to them by the living.  So Mr. Razumov, certain of relief, went to
+meet Councillor Mikulin with he eagerness of a pursued person welcoming any
+sort of shelter.
+
+This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first interview
+and of the several others.  To the morality of a Western reader an account of
+these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character of old legendary tales
+where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding subtly mendacious dialogues
+with some tempted soul.  It is not my part to protest.  Let me but remark that
+the Evil One, with his single passion of satanic pride for the only motive, is
+yet, on a larger, modern view, allowed to be not quite so black as he used to
+be painted.  With what greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact
+shade of mere mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in
+error, always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly
+betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.
+
+Councillor Mikulin was one of those powerful officials who, in a position not
+obscure, not occult, but simply inconspicuous, exercise a great influence over
+the methods rather than over the conduct of affairs.  A devotion to Church and
+Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the
+will of many does not argue the possession of a black heart or prove congenital
+idiocy.  Councillor Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official.
+ Privately he was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an
+apartment of five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates
+to be an enlightened patron of the art of female dancing.  Later on the larger
+world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of those
+State trials which astonish and puzzle the average plain man who reads the
+newspapers, by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues.  And in the stir of vaguely
+seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy waters,
+Councillor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm, emphatic protest of
+his innocence--nothing more.  No disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy,
+complete fidelity to the secrets of the miserable _arcana imperii_ deposited in
+his patriotic breast, a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian
+official's ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence
+understood only by the very few of the initiated, and not without a certain
+cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a sybarite.  For the terribly
+heavy sentence turned Councillor Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually
+into something very much like a common convict.
+
+It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy, does not
+limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies.  It devours its
+friends and servants as well.  The downfall of His Excellency Gregory
+Gregorievitch Mikulin (which did not occur till some years later) completes all
+that is known of the man.  But at the time of M. de P---'s murder (or
+execution) Councillor Mikulin, under the modest style of Head of Department at
+the General Secretariat, exercised a wide influence as the confidant and
+right-hand man of his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend, General T---.
+ One can imagine them talking over the case of Mr. Razumov, with the full sense
+of their unbounded power over all the lives in Russia, with cursory disdain,
+like two Olympians glancing at a worm.  The relationship with Prince K--- was
+enough to save Razumov from some carelessly arbitrary proceeding, and it is
+also very probable that after the interview at the Secretariat he would have
+been left alone.  Councillor Mikulin would not have forgotten him (he forgot no
+one who ever fell under his observation), but would have simply dropped him for
+ever.  Councillor Mikulin was a good-natured man and wished no harm to anyone.
+ Besides (with his own reforming tendencies) he was favourably impressed by
+that young student, the son of Prince K---, and apparently no fool.
+
+But as fate would have it, while Mr. Razumov was finding that no way of life
+was possible to him, Councillor Mikulin's discreet abilities were rewarded by a
+very responsible post--nothing less than the direction of the general police
+supervision over Europe.  And it was then, and then only, when taking in hand
+the perfecting of the service which watches the revolutionist activities
+abroad, that he thought again of Mr. Razumov.  He saw great possibilities of
+special usefulness in that uncommon young man on whom he had a hold already,
+with his peculiar temperament, his unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a
+struggling in the toils of a false position. . . .  It was as if the
+revolutionists themselves had put into his hand that tool so much finer than
+the common base instruments, so perfectly fitted, if only vested with
+sufficient credit, to penetrate into places inaccessible to common informers.
+ Providential!  Providential!  And Prince K---, taken into the secret, was
+ready enough to adopt that mystical view too.  "It will be necessary, though,
+to make a career for him afterwards," he had stipulated anxiously.  "Oh!
+absolutely.  We shall make that our affair," Mikulin had agreed.  Prince K---'s
+mysticism was of an artless kind; but Councillor Mikulin was astute enough for
+two.
+
+Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must
+be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command. The
+power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to seize upon that sense,
+that side in the men he used. It did not matter to him what it was--vanity,
+despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride or stupid conceit, it was all one
+to him as long as the man could be made to serve.  The obscure, unrelated young
+student Razumov, in the moment of great moral loneliness, was allowed to feel
+that he was an object of interest to a small group of people of high position.
+ Prince K--- was persuaded to intervene personally, and on a certain occasion
+gave way to a manly emotion which, all unexpected as it was, quite upset Mr.
+Razumov.  The sudden embrace of that man, agitated by his loyalty to a throne
+and by suppressed paternal affection, was a revelation to Mr. Razumov of
+something within his own breast.
+
+"So that was it!" he exclaimed to himself.  A sort of contemptuous tenderness
+softened the young man's grim view of his position as he reflected upon that
+agitated interview with Prince K---.  This simpleminded, worldly ex-Guardsman
+and senator whose soft grey official whiskers had brushed against his cheek,
+his aristocratic and convinced father, was he a whit less estimable or more
+absurd than that famine-stricken, fanatical revolutionist, the red-nosed
+student?
+
+And there was some pressure, too, besides the persuasiveness.  Mr. Razumov was
+always being made to feel that he had committed himself.  There was no getting
+away from that feeling, from that soft, unanswerable, "Where to?" of Councillor
+Mikulin.  But no susceptibilities were ever hurt.  It was to be a dangerous
+mission to Geneva for obtaining, at a critical moment, absolutely reliable
+information from a very inaccessible quarter of the inner revolutionary circle.
+ There were indications that a very serious plot was being matured. . . .  The
+repose indispensable to a great country was at stake. . . .  A great scheme of
+orderly reforms would be endangered. . . .  The highest personages in the land
+were patriotically uneasy, and so on.  In short, Councillor Mikulin knew what
+to say. This skill is to be inferred clearly from the mental and psychological
+self-confession, self-analysis of Mr. Razumov's written journal--the pitiful
+resource of a young man who had near him no trusted intimacy, no natural
+affection to turn to.
+
+How all this preliminary work was concealed from observation need not be
+recorded.  The expedient of the oculist gives a sufficient instance.
+ Councillor Mikulin was resourceful, and the task not very difficult.  Any
+fellow-student, even the red-nosed one, was perfectly welcome to see Mr.
+Razumov entering a private house to consult an oculist.  Ultimate success
+depended solely on the revolutionary self-delusion which credited Razumov with
+a mysterious complicity in the Haldin affair.  To be compromised in it was
+credit enough-and it was their own doing.  It was precisely _that_ which
+stamped Mr. Razumov as a providential man, wide as poles apart from the usual
+type of agent for "European supervision."
+
+And it was _that_ which the Secretariat set itself the task to foster by a
+course of calculated and false indiscretions.
+
+It came at last to this, that one evening Mr. Razumov was unexpectedly called
+upon by one of the "thinking" students whom formerly, before the Haldin affair,
+he used to meet at various private gatherings; a big fellow with a quiet,
+unassuming manner and a pleasant voice.
+
+Recognizing his voice raised in the ante-room, "May one come in?" Razumov,
+lounging idly on his couch, jumped up.  "Suppose he were coming to stab me?" he
+thought sardonically, and, assuming a green shade over his left eye, said in a
+severe tone, "Come in."
+
+The other was embarrassed; hoped he was not intruding.
+
+"You haven't been seen for several days, and I've wondered."  He coughed a
+little.  "Eye better?"
+
+"Nearly well now."
+
+" Good.  I won't stop a minute; but you see I, that is, we--anyway, I have
+undertaken the duty to warn you, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that you are living in
+false security maybe."
+
+Razumov sat still with his head leaning on his hand, which nearly concealed the
+unshaded eye.
+
+"I have that idea, too."
+
+"That's all right, then.  Everything seems quiet now, but those people are
+preparing some move of general repression.  That's of course.  But it isn't
+that I came to tell you."  He hitched his chair closer, dropped his voice.
+ "You will be arrested before long--we fear."
+
+An obscure scribe in the Secretariat had overheard a few words of a certain
+conversation, and had caught a glimpse of a certain report.  This intelligence
+was not to be neglected.
+
+Razumov laughed a little, and his visitor became very anxious.
+
+"Ah!  Kirylo Sidorovitch, this is no laughing matter.  They have left you alone
+for a while, but. . . !  Indeed, you had better try to leave the country,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, while there's yet time."
+
+Razumov jumped up and began to thank him for the advice with mocking
+effusiveness, so that the other, colouring up, took himself off with the notion
+that this mysterious Razumov was not a person to be warned or advised by
+inferior mortals.
+
+Councillor Mikulin, informed the next day of the incident, expressed his
+satisfaction.  "H'm.  Ha!  Exactly what was wanted to. . ." and glanced down
+his beard.
+
+"I conclude," said Razumov," that the moment has come for me to start on my
+mission."
+
+"The psychological Moment," Councillor Mikulin insisted softly--very
+gravely--as if awed.
+
+All the arrangements to give verisimilitude to the appearance of a difficult
+escape were made.  Councillor Mikulin did not expect to see Mr. Razumov again
+before his departure.  These meetings were a risk, and there was nothing more
+to settle.
+
+"We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch, "said the
+high official feelingly, pressing Razumov's hand with that unreserved
+heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner.  "There is nothing obscure
+between us.  And I will tell you what!  I consider myself fortunate in
+having--h'm--your. . . ."
+
+He glanced down his beard, and, after a moment of thoughtful silence, handed to
+Razumov a half-sheet of notepaper--an abbreviated note of matters already
+discussed, certain points of inquiry, the line of conduct agreed on, a few
+hints as to personalities, and so on. It was the only compromising document in
+the case, but, as Councillor Mikulin observed, it could be easily destroyed.
+ Mr. Razumov had better not see any one now--till on the other side of the
+frontier, when, of course, it will be just that. . . .  See and hear and. . . ."
+
+He glanced down his beard; but when Razumov declared his intention to see one
+person at least before leaving St. Petersburg, Councillor Mikulin failed to
+conceal a sudden uneasiness.  The young man's studious, solitary, and austere
+existence was well known to him.  It was the greatest guarantee of fitness.  He
+became deprecatory.  Had his dear Kirylo Sidorovitch considered whether, in
+view of such a momentous enterprise, it wasn't really advisable to sacrifice
+every sentiment. . . .
+
+Razumov interrupted the remonstrance scornfully.  It was not a young woman, it
+was a young fool he wished to see for a certain purpose.  Councillor Mikulin
+was relieved, but surprised.
+
+"Ah!  And what for--precisely?"
+
+"For the sake of improving the aspect of verisimilitude," said Razumov curtly,
+in a desire to affirm his independence.  "I must be trusted in what I do."
+
+Councillor Mikulin gave way tactfully, murmuring, "Oh, certainly, certainly.
+ Your judgment. . ."
+
+And with another handshake they parted.
+
+The fool of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive student known
+as madcap Kostia.  Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable, one could make
+certain of his utter and complete indiscretion.  But that riotous youth, when
+reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some time ago, passed from his
+usual elation into boundless dismay.
+
+"Oh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, my dearest friend--my saviour--what shall I do?  I've
+blown last night every rouble I had from my dad the other day.  Can't you give
+me till Thursday?  I shall rush round to all the usurers I know. . . .  No, of
+course, you can't!  Don't look at me like that.  What shall I do?  No use
+asking the old man.  I tell you he's given me a fistful of big notes three days
+ago.  Miserable wretch that I am."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair.  Impossible to confide in the old man.  "They"
+had given him a decoration, a cross on the neck only last year, and he had been
+cursing the modern tendencies ever since.  Just then he would see all the
+intellectuals in Russia hanged in a row rather than part with a single rouble.
+
+"Kirylo Sidorovitch, wait a moment.  Don't despise me.  I have it.  I'll,
+yes--I'll do it--I'll break into his desk.  There's no help for it.  I know the
+drawer where he keeps his plunder, and I can buy a chisel on my way home.  He
+will be terribly upset, but, you know, the dear old duffer really loves me.
+ He'll have to get over it--and I, too.  Kirylo, my dear soul, if you can only
+wait for a few hours-till this evening--I shall steal all the blessed lot I can
+lay my hands on!  You doubt me!  Why?  You've only to say the word."
+
+"Steal, by all means," said Razumov, fixing him stonily.
+
+"To the devil with the ten commandments!" cried the other, with the greatest
+animation.  "It's the new future now."
+
+But when he entered Razumov's room late in the evening it was with an
+unaccustomed soberness of manner, almost solemnly.
+
+"It's done," he said.
+
+Razumov sitting bowed, his clasped hands hanging between his knees, shuddered
+at the familiar sound of these words.  Kostia deposited slowly in the circle of
+lamplight a small brown-paper parcel tied with a piece of string.
+
+"As I've said--all I could lay my hands on.  The old boy'll think the end of
+the world has come."  Razumov nodded from the couch, and contemplated the
+hare-brained fellow's gravity with a feeling of malicious pleasure.
+
+"I've made my little sacrifice," sighed mad Kostia. "And I've to thank you,
+Kirylo Sidorovitch, for the opportunity."
+
+"It has cost you something?"
+
+"Yes, it has.  You see, the dear old duffer really loves me.  He'll be hurt."
+
+"And you believe all they tell you of the new future and the sacred will of the
+people?"
+
+"Implicitly.  I would give my life. . . .  Only, you see, I am like a pig at a
+trough.  I am no good.  It's my nature."
+
+Razumov, lost in thought, had forgotten his existence till the youth's voice,
+entreating him to fly without loss of time, roused him unpleasantly.
+
+"All right.  Well--good-bye."
+
+"I am not going to leave you till I've seen you out of St. Petersburg,"
+declared Kostia unexpectedly, with calm determination.  "You can't refuse me
+that now.  For God's sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here any moment,
+and when they get you they'll immure you somewhere for ages--till your hair
+turns grey.  I have down there the best trotter of dad's stables and a light
+sledge.  We shall do thirty miles before the moon sets, and find some roadside
+station. . . ."
+
+Razumov looked up amazed.  The journey was decided--unavoidable.  He had fixed
+the next day for his departure on the mission.  And now he discovered suddenly
+that he had not believed in it.  He had gone about listening, speaking,
+thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the growing conviction that all
+this was preposterous.  As if anybody ever did such things!  It was like a game
+of make-believe.  And now he was amazed!  Here was somebody who believed in it
+with desperate earnestness.  "If I don't go now, at once," thought Razumov,
+with a start of fear, "I shall never go."  He rose without a word, and the
+anxious Kostia thrust his cap on him, helped him into his cloak, or else he
+would have left the room bareheaded as he stood.  He was walking out silently
+when a sharp cry arrested him.
+
+"Kirylo!"
+
+"What?"  He turned reluctantly in the doorway. Upright, with a stiffly extended
+arm, Kostia, his face set and white, was pointing an eloquent forefinger at the
+brown little packet lying forgotten in the circle of bright light on the table.
+ Razumov hesitated, came back for it under the severe eyes of his companion, at
+whom he tried to smile.  But the boyish, mad youth was frowning.  "It's a
+dream," thought Razumov, putting the little parcel into his pocket and
+descending the stairs; "nobody does such things."  The other held him under the
+arm, whispering of dangers ahead, and of what he meant to do in certain
+contingencies.  "Preposterous," murmured Razumov, as he was being tucked up in
+the sledge.  He gave himself up to watching the development of the dream with
+extreme attention.  It continued on foreseen lines, inexorably logical--the
+long drive, the wait at the small station sitting by a stove.  They did not
+exchange half a dozen words altogether.  Kostia, gloomy himself, did not care
+to break the silence.  At parting they embraced twice--it had to be done; and
+then Kostia vanished out of the dream.
+
+When dawn broke, Razumov, very still in a hot, stuffy railway-car full of
+bedding and of sleeping people in all its dimly lighted length, rose quietly,
+lowered the glass a few inches, and flung out on the great plain of snow a
+small brown-paper parcel.  Then he sat down again muffled up and motionless.
+ "For the people," he thought, staring out of the window.  The great white
+desert of frozen, hard earth glided past his eyes without a sign of human
+habitation.
+
+That had been a waking act; and then the dream had him again: Prussia, Saxony,
+Wurtemberg, faces, sights, words--all a dream, observed with an angry,
+compelled attention.  Zurich, Geneva--still a dream, minutely followed, wearing
+one into harsh laughter, to fury, to death--with the fear of awakening at the
+end.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Perhaps life is just that," reflected Razumov, pacing to and fro under the
+trees of the little island, all alone with the bronze statue of Rousseau.  "A
+dream and a fear."  The dusk deepened.  The pages written over and torn out of
+his notebook were the first-fruit of his "mission."  No dream that.  They
+contained the assurance that he was on the eve of real discoveries.  "I think
+there is no longer anything in the way of my being completely accepted."
+
+He had resumed his impressions in those pages, some of the conversations.  He
+even went so far as to write: "By the by, I have discovered the personality of
+that terrible N.N.  A horrible, paunchy brute.  If I hear anything of his
+future movements I shall send a warning."
+
+The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could not
+believe in the reality of his mission.  He looked round despairingly, as if for
+some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable feeling.  He crushed
+angrily in his hand the pages of the notebook.  "This must be posted," he
+thought.
+
+He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he remembered
+having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure shop stocked with
+cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely dirty cardboard-bound
+volumes of a small circulating library. They sold stationery there, too.  A
+morose, shabby old man dozed behind the counter.  A thin woman in black, with a
+sickly face, produced the envelope he had asked for without even looking at
+him.  Razumov thought that these people were safe to deal with because they no
+longer cared for anything in the world.  He addressed the envelope on the
+counter with the German name of a certain person living in Vienna.  But Razumov
+knew that this, his first communication for Councillor Mikulin, would find its
+way to the Embassy there, be copied in cypher by somebody trustworthy, and sent
+on to its destination, all safe, along with the diplomatic correspondence.
+ That was the arrangement contrived to cover up the track of the information
+from all unfaithful eyes, from all indiscretions, from all mishaps and
+treacheries.  It was to make him safe--absolutely safe.
+
+He wandered out of the wretched shop and made for the post office.  It was then
+that I saw him for the second time that day.  He was crossing the Rue Mont
+Blanc with every appearance of an aimless stroller.  He did not recognize me,
+but I made him out at some distance.  He was very good-looking, I thought, this
+remarkable friend of Miss Haldin's brother.  I watched him go up to the
+letter-box and then retrace his steps.  Again he passed me very close, but I am
+certain he did not see me that time, either.  He carried his head well up, but
+he had the expression of a somnambulist struggling with the very dream which
+drives him forth to wander in dangerous places.  My thoughts reverted to
+Natalia Haldin, to her mother. He was all that was left to them of their son
+and brother.
+
+The westerner in me was discomposed.  There was something shocking in the
+expression of that face.  Had I been myself a conspirator, a Russian political
+refugee, I could have perhaps been able to draw some practical conclusion from
+this chance glimpse.  As it was, it only discomposed me strongly, even to the
+extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in regard to Natalia Haldin.
+ All this is rather inexplicable, but such was the origin of the purpose I
+formed there and then to call on these ladies in the evening, after my solitary
+dinner.  It was true that I had met Miss Haldin only a few hours before, but
+Mrs. Haldin herself I had not seen for some considerable time.  The truth is, I
+had shirked calling of late.
+
+Poor Mrs. Haldin!  I confess she frightened me a little.  She was one of those
+natures, rare enough, luckily, in which one cannot help being interested,
+because they provoke both terror and pity.  One dreads their contact for
+oneself, and still more for those one cares for, so clear it is that they are
+born to suffer and to make others suffer, too.  It is strange to think that, I
+won't say liberty, but the mere liberalism of outlook which for us is a matter
+of words, of ambitions, of votes (and if of feeling at all, then of the sort of
+feeling which leaves our deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings
+very much like ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of
+fortitude, a matter of tears and anguish and blood.  Mrs. Haldin had felt the
+pangs of her own generation.  There was that enthusiast brother of hers--the
+officer they shot under Nicholas.  A faintly ironic resignation is no armour
+for a vulnerable heart.  Mrs. Haldin, struck at through her children, was bound
+to suffer afresh from the past, and to feel the anguish of the future.  She was
+of those who do not know how to heal themselves, of those who are too much
+aware of their heart, who, neither cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at
+its wounds--and count the cost.
+
+Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor's meal.  If anybody
+wishes to remark that this was a roundabout way of thinking of Natalia Haldin,
+I can only retort that she was well worth some concern.  She had all her life
+before her.  Let it be admitted, then, that I was thinking of Natalia Haldin's
+life in terms of her mother's character, a manner of thinking about a girl
+permissible for an old man, not too old yet to have become a stranger to pity.
+ There was almost all her youth before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its
+natural lightness and joy, overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly
+sombre youth given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally
+ferocious antagonisms.
+
+I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done.  One felt so
+helpless, and even worse--so unrelated, in a way.  At the last moment I
+hesitated as to going there at all.  What was the good?
+
+The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des
+Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner.  The blind was down,
+but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in her usual
+attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired the poignant
+quality of mad expectation.
+
+I thought that I was sufficiently authorized by the light to knock at the door.
+ The ladies had not retired as yet.  I only hoped they would not have any
+visitors of their own nationality.  A broken-down, retired Russian official was
+to be found there sometimes in the evening.  He was infinitely forlorn and
+wearisome by his mere dismal presence.  I think these ladies tolerated his
+frequent visits because of an ancient friendship with Mr. Haldin, the father,
+or something of that sort.  I made up my mind that if I found him prosing away
+there in his feeble voice I should remain but a very few minutes.
+
+The door surprised me by swinging open before I could ring the bell.  I was
+confronted by Miss Haldin, in hat and jacket, obviously on the point of going
+out.  At that hour!  For the doctor, perhaps?
+
+Her exclamation of welcome reassured me.  It sounded as if I had been the very
+man she wanted to see.  My curiosity was awakened.  She drew me in, and the
+faithful Anna, the elderly German maid, closed the door, but did not go away
+afterwards.  She remained near it as if in readiness to let me out presently.
+ It appeared that Miss Haldin had been on the point of going out to find me.
+
+She spoke in a hurried manner very unusual with her.  She would have gone
+straight and rung at Mrs. Ziegler's door, late as it was, for Mrs. Ziegler's
+habits. . . .
+
+Mrs. Ziegler, the widow of a distinguished professor who was an intimate friend
+of mine, lets me have three rooms out of her very large and fine apartment,
+which she didn't give up after her husband's death; but I have my own entrance
+opening on the same landing.  It was an arrangement of at least ten years'
+standing.  I said that I was very glad that I had the idea to. . . .
+
+Miss Haldin made no motion to take off her outdoor things.  I observed her
+heightened colour, something pronouncedly resolute in her tone.  Did I know
+where Mr. Razumov lived?
+
+Where Mr. Razumov lived?  Mr. Razumov?  At this hour--so urgently?  I threw my
+arms up in sign of utter ignorance.  I had not the slightest idea where he
+lived.  If I could have foreseen her question only three hours ago, I might
+have ventured to ask him on the pavement before the new post office building,
+and possibly he would have told me, but very possibly, too, he would have
+dismissed me rudely to mind my own business.  And possibly, I thought,
+remembering that extraordinary hallucined, anguished, and absent expression, he
+might have fallen down in a fit from the shock of being spoken to.  I said
+nothing of all this to Miss Haldin, not even mentioning that I had a glimpse of
+the young man so recently.  The impression had been so extremely unpleasant
+that I would have been glad to forget it myself.
+
+"I don't see where I could make inquiries," I murmured helplessly.  I would
+have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to fetch any
+man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in her common sense.
+ "What made you think of coming to me for that information?"  I asked.
+
+"It wasn't exactly for that," she said, in a low voice.  She had the air of
+some one confronted by an unpleasant task.
+
+"Am I to understand that you must communicate with Mr. Razumov this evening?"
+
+Natalia Haldin moved her head affirmatively; then, after a glance at the door
+of the drawing-room, said in French--
+
+"_C'est maman_," and remained perplexed for a moment.  Always serious, not a
+girl to be put out by any imaginary difficulties, my curiosity was suspended on
+her lips, which remained closed for a moment.  What was Mr. Razumov's connexion
+with this mention of her mother?  Mrs. Haldin had not been informed of her
+son's friend's arrival in Geneva.
+
+"May I hope to see your mother this evening?"  I inquired.
+
+Miss Haldin extended her hand as if to bar the way.
+
+"She is in a terrible state of agitation.  Oh, you would not he able to detect.
+. . .  It's inward, but I who know mother, I am appalled.  I haven't the
+courage to face it any longer.  It's all my fault; I suppose I cannot play a
+part; I've never before hidden anything from mother.  There has never been an
+occasion for anything of that sort between us.  But you know yourself the
+reason why I refrained from telling her at once of Mr. Razumov's arrival here.
+ You understand, don't you?  Owing to her unhappy state.  And--there--I am no
+actress.  My own feelings being strongly engaged, I somehow . . . .  I don't
+know.  She noticed something in my manner.  She thought I was concealing
+something from her.  She noticed my longer absences, and, in fact, as I have
+been meeting Mr. Razumov daily, I used to stay away longer than usual when I
+went out.  Goodness knows what suspicions arose in her mind.  You know that she
+has not been herself ever since. . . .  So this evening she--who has been so
+awfully silent: for weeks-began to talk all at once.  She said that she did not
+want to reproach me; that I had my character as she had her own; that she did
+not want to pry into my affairs or even into my thoughts; for her part, she had
+never had anything to conceal from her children. . . cruel things to listen to.
+ And all this in her quiet voice, with that poor, wasted face as calm as a
+stone.  It was unbearable."
+
+Miss Haldin talked in an undertone and more rapidly than I had ever heard her
+speak before.  That in itself was disturbing.  The ante-room being strongly
+lighted, I could see under the veil the heightened colour of her face.  She
+stood erect, her left hand was resting lightly on a small table.  The other
+hung by her side without stirring.  Now and then she caught her breath slightly.
+
+"It was too startling.  Just fancy!  She thought that I was making preparations
+to leave her without saying anything.  I knelt by the side of her chair and
+entreated her to think of what she was saying!  She put her hand on my head,
+but she persists in her delusion all the same.  She had always thought that she
+was worthy of her children's confidence, but apparently it was not so.  Her son
+could not trust her love nor yet her understanding--and now I was planning to
+abandon her in the same cruel and unjust manner, and so on, and so on.  Nothing
+I could say. . . .  It is morbid obstinacy. . . .  She said that she felt there
+was something, some change in me. . . .  If my convictions were calling me
+away, why this secrecy, as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe
+to trust?  'As if my heart could play traitor to my children,' she said. . . .
+ It was hardly to be borne.  And she was smoothing my head all the time. . . .
+ It was perfectly useless to protest.  She is ill.  Her very soul is. . . ."
+
+I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us.  I looked into
+her eyes, glistening through the veil.
+
+"I!  Changed!" she exclaimed in the same low tone.  "My convictions calling me
+away!  It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I am weak and
+cannot see what I ought to do.  You know that.  And to end it all I did a
+selfish thing.  To remove her suspicions of myself I told her of Mr. Razumov.
+ It was selfish of me.  You know we were completely right in agreeing to keep
+the knowledge away from her.  Perfectly right.  Directly I told her of our poor
+Victor's friend being here I saw how right we have been.  She ought to have
+been prepared; but in my distress I just blurted it out.  Mother got terribly
+excited at once.  How long has he been here?  What did he know, and why did he
+not come to see us at once, this friend of her Victor?  What did that mean?
+ Was she not to be trusted even with such memories as there were left of her
+son?. . .  Just think how I felt seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly
+motionless, with her thin hands gripping the arms of the chair.  I told her it
+was all my fault."
+
+I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair, there,
+behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me.  The silence in
+there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an historical fact and the
+modern instances of its working.  That view flashed through my mind, but I
+could not doubt that Miss Haldin had had an atrocious time of it.  I quite
+understood when she said that she could not face the night upon the impression
+of that scene.  Mrs. Haldin had given way to most awful imaginings, to most
+fantastic and cruel suspicions.  All this had to be lulled at all costs and
+without loss of time.  It was no shock to me to ]earn that Miss Haldin had said
+to her, "I will go and bring him here at once."  There was nothing absurd in
+that cry, no exaggeration of sentiment.  I was not even doubtful in my "Very
+well, but how?"
+
+It was perfectly right that she should think of me, but what could I do in my
+ignorance of Mr. Razumov's quarters.
+
+"And to think he may be living near by, within a stone's-throw, perhaps!" she
+exclaimed.
+
+I doubted it; but I would have gone off cheerfully to fetch him from the other
+end of Geneva.  I suppose she was certain of my readiness, since her first
+thought was to come to me.  But the service she meant to ask of me really was
+to accompany her to the Chateau Borel.
+
+I had an unpleasant mental vision of the dark road, of the sombre grounds, and
+the desolately suspicious aspect of that home of necromancy and intrigue and
+feminist adoration.  I objected that Madame de S--- most likely would know
+nothing of what we wanted to find out.  Neither did I think it likely that the
+young man would be found there.  I remembered my glimpse of his face, and
+somehow gained the conviction that a man who looked worse than if he had seen
+the dead would want to shut himself up somewhere where he could be alone.  I
+felt a strange certitude that Mr. Razumov was going home when I saw him.
+
+"It is really of Peter Ivanovitch that I was thinking," said Miss Haldin
+quietly.
+
+Ah!  He, of course, would know.  I looked at my watch.  It was twenty minutes
+past nine only. . . .  Still.
+
+"I would try his hotel, then," I advised.  "He has rooms at the Cosmopolitan,
+somewhere on the top floor."
+
+I did not offer to go by myself, simply from mistrust of the reception I should
+meet with.  But I suggested the faithful Anna, with a note asking for the
+information.
+
+Anna was still waiting by the door at the other end of the room, and we two
+discussed the matter in whispers.  Miss Haldin thought she must go herself.
+ Anna was timid and slow.  Time would be lost in bringing back the answer, and
+from that point of view it was getting late, for it was by no means certain
+that Mr. Razumov lived near by.
+
+"If I go myself," Miss Haldin argued, "I can go straight to him from the hotel.
+ And in any case I should have to go out, because I must explain to Mr. Razumov
+personally--prepare him in a way.  You have no idea of mother's state of mind."
+
+Her colour came and went.  She even thought that both for her mother's sake and
+for her own it was better that they should not be together for a little time.
+ Anna, whom her mother liked, would be at hand.
+
+"She could take her sewing into the room," Miss Haldin continued, leading the
+way to the door.  Then, addressing in German the maid who opened it before us,
+"You may tell my mother that this gentleman called and is gone with me to find
+Mr. Razumov.  She must not be uneasy if I am away for some length of time."
+
+We passed out quickly into the street, and she took deep breaths of the cool
+night air.  "I did not even ask you," she murmured.
+
+"I should think not," I said, with a laugh.  The manner of my reception by the
+great feminist could not be considered now.  That he would be annoyed to see
+me, and probably treat me to some solemn insolence, I had no doubt, but I
+supposed that he would not absolutely dare to throw me out.  And that was all I
+cared for.  "Won't you take my arm?"  I asked.
+
+She did so in silence, and neither of us said anything worth recording till I
+let her go first into the great hall of the hotel.  It was brilliantly lighted,
+and with a good many people lounging about.
+
+"I could very well go up there without you," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like to be left waiting in this place," she said in a low voice.
+
+"I will come too."
+
+I led her straight to the lift then.  At the top floor the attendant directed
+us to the right: "End of the corridor."
+
+The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in profusion, and
+the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike and numbered, made me
+think of the perfect order of some severely luxurious model penitentiary on the
+solitary confinement principle.  Up there under the roof of that enormous pile
+for housing travellers no sound of any kind reached us, the thick crimson felt
+muffled our footsteps completely.  We hastened on, not looking at each other
+till we found ourselves before the very last door of that long passage.  Then
+our eyes met, and we stood thus for a moment lending ear to a faint murmur of
+voices inside.
+
+"I suppose this is it," I whispered unnecessarily.  I saw Miss Haldin's lips
+move without a sound, and after my sharp knock the murmur of voices inside
+ceased.  A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then the door was
+brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red blouse, with a great lot
+of nearly white hair, done up negligently in an untidy and unpicturesque
+manner.  Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn together.  I learned afterwards
+with interest that she was the famous--or the notorious--Sophia Antonovna, but
+I was struck then by the quaint Mephistophelian character of her inquiring
+glance, because it was so curiously evil-less, so--I may say--un-devilish.  It
+got softened still more as she looked up at Miss Haldin, who stated, in her
+rich, even voice, her wish to see Peter Ivanovitch for a moment.
+
+"I am Miss Haldin," she added.
+
+At this, with her brow completely smoothed out now, but without a word in
+answer, the woman in the red blouse walked away to a sofa and sat down, leaving
+the door wide open.
+
+And from the sofa, her hands lying on her lap, she watched us enter, with her
+black, glittering eyes.
+
+Miss Haldin advanced into the middle of the room; I, faithful to my part of
+mere attendant, remained by the door after closing it behind me.  The room,
+quite a large one, but with a low ceiling, was scantily furnished, and an
+electric bulb with a porcelain shade pulled low down over a big table (with a
+very large map spread on it) left its distant parts in a dim, artificial
+twilight.  Peter Ivanovitch was not to be seen, neither was Mr. Razumov
+present.  But, on the sofa, near Sophia Antonovna, a bony-faced man with a
+goatee beard leaned forward with his hands on his knees, staring hard with a
+kindly expression.  In a remote corner a broad, pale face and a bulky shape
+could be made out, uncouth, and as if insecure on the low seat on which it
+rested.  The only person known to me was little Julius Laspara, who seemed to
+have been poring over the map, his feet twined tightly round the chair-legs.
+ He got down briskly and bowed to Miss Haldin, looking absurdly like a
+hooknosed boy with a beautiful false pepper-and-salt beard.  He advanced,
+offering his seat, which Miss Haldin declined.  She had only come in for a
+moment to say a few words to Peter Ivanovitch.
+
+His high-pitched voice became painfully audible in the room.
+
+"Strangely enough, I was thinking of you this very afternoon, Natalia
+Victorovna.  I met Mr. Razumov.  I asked him to write me an article on anything
+he liked.  You could translate it into English--with such a teacher."
+
+He nodded complimentarily in my direction.  At the name of Razumov an
+indescribable sound, a sort of feeble squeak, as of some angry small animal,
+was heard in the corner occupied by the man who seemed much too large for the
+chair on which he sat.  I did not hear what Miss Haldin said.  Laspara spoke
+again.
+
+"It's time to do something, Natalia Victorovna.  But I suppose you have your
+own ideas.  Why not write something yourself?  Suppose you came to see us soon?
+ We could talk it over.  Any advice. . . .
+
+Again I did not catch Miss Haldin's words.  It was Laspara's voice once more.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch?  He's retired for a moment into the other room.  We are all
+waiting for him."  The great man, entering at that moment, looked bigger,
+taller, quite imposing in a long dressing-gown of some dark stuff.  It
+descended in straight lines down to his feet.  He suggested a monk or a
+prophet, a robust figure of same desert-dweller--something Asiatic; and the
+dark glasses in conjunction with this costume made him more mysterious than
+ever in the subdued light.
+
+Little Laspara went back to his chair to look at the map, the only brilliantly
+lit object in the room.  Even from my distant position by the door I could make
+out, by the shape of the blue part representing the water, that it was a map of
+the Baltic provinces.  Peter Ivanovitch exclaimed slightly, advancing towards
+Miss Haldin, checked himself on perceiving me, very vaguely no doubt; and
+peered with his dark, bespectacled stare.  He must have recognized me by my
+grey hair, because, with a marked shrug of his broad shoulders, he turned to
+Miss Haldin in benevolent indulgence.  He seized her hand in his thick
+cushioned palm, and put his other big paw over it like a lid.
+
+While those two standing in the middle of the floor were exchanging a few
+inaudible phrases no one else moved in the room: Laspara, with his back to us,
+kneeling on the chair, his elbows propped on the big-scale map, the shadowy
+enormity in the corner, the frankly staring man with the goatee on the sofa,
+the woman in the red blouse by his side--not one of them stirred.  I suppose
+that really they had no time, for Miss Haldin withdrew her hand immediately
+from Peter Ivanovitch and before I was ready for her was moving to the door.  A
+disregarded Westerner, I threw it open hurriedly and followed her out, my last
+glance leaving them all motionless in their varied poses: Peter Ivanovitch
+alone standing up, with his dark glasses like an enormous blind teacher, and
+behind him the vivid patch of light on the coloured map, pored over by the
+diminutive Laspara.
+
+Later on, much later on, at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were vague
+and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia, I remembered
+the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its central figure.  No details
+ever came out, but it was known that the revolutionary parties abroad had given
+their assistance, had sent emissaries in advance, that even money was found to
+dispatch a steamer with a cargo of arms and conspirators to invade the Baltic
+provinces.  And while my eyes scanned the imperfect disclosures (in which the
+world was not much interested) I thought that the old, settled Europe had been
+given in my person attending that Russian girl something like a glimpse behind
+the scenes.  A short, strange glimpse on the top floor of a great hotel of all
+places in the world: the great man himself; the motionless great bulk in the
+corner of the slayer of spies and gendarmes; Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient
+terrorist campaigns; the woman, with her hair as white as mine and the lively
+black eyes, all in a mysterious half-light, with the strongly lighted map of
+Russia on the table.  The woman I had the opportunity to see again.  As we were
+waiting for the lift she came hurrying along the corridor, with her eyes
+fastened on Miss Haldin's face, and drew her aside as if for a confidential
+communication.  It was not long.  A few words only.
+
+Going down in the lift, Natalia Haldin did not break the silence.  It was only
+when out of the hotel and as we moved along the quay in the fresh darkness
+spangled by the quay lights, reflected in the black water of the little port on
+our left hand, and with lofty piles of hotels on our right, that she spoke.
+
+"That was Sophia Antonovna--you know the woman?. . . ."
+
+"Yes, I know--the famous. . . ."
+
+"The same.  It appears that after we went out Peter Ivanovitch told them why I
+had come.  That was the reason she ran out after us.  She named herself to me,
+and then she said, 'You are the sister of a brave man who shall be remembered.
+ You may see better times.'  I told her I hoped to see the time when all this
+would be forgotten, even if the name of my brother were to be forgotten too.
+ Something moved me to say that, but you understand?"
+
+"Yes," I said.  "You think of the era of concord and justice."
+
+"Yes.  There is too much hate and revenge in that work.  It must be done.  It
+is a sacrifice--and so let it be all the greater.  Destruction is the work of
+anger.  Let the tyrants and the slayers be forgotten together, and only the
+reconstructors be remembered.''
+
+"And did Sophia Antonovna agree with you?"  I asked sceptically.
+
+"She did not say anything except, 'It is good for you to believe in love.'  I
+should think she understood me.  Then she asked me if I hoped to see Mr.
+Razumov presently.  I said I trusted I could manage to bring him to see my
+mother this evening, as my mother had learned of his being here and was
+morbidly impatient to learn if he could tell us something of Victor.  He was
+the only friend of my brother we knew of, and a great intimate.  She said, 'Oh!
+ Your brother--yes.  Please tell Mr. Razumov that I have made public the story
+which came to me from St. Petersburg.  It concerns your brother's arrest,' she
+added.  'He was betrayed by a man of the people who has since hanged himself.
+ Mr. Razumov will explain it all to you.  I gave him the full information this
+afternoon.  And please tell Mr. Razumov that Sophia Antonovna sends him her
+greetings.  I am going away early in the morning--far away.'"
+
+And Miss Haldin added, after a moment of silence-" I was so moved by what I
+heard so unexpectedly that I simply could not speak to you before. . . .  A man
+of the people!  Oh, our poor people!"
+
+She walked slowly, as if tired out suddenly.  Her head drooped; from the
+windows of a building with terraces and balconies came the banal sound of hotel
+music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under
+the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.--and the emptiness of the
+quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical
+respectability and of inexpressible dreariness.
+
+I had taken for granted she had obtained the address, and let myself be guided
+by her.  On the Mont Blanc bridge, where a few dark figures seemed lost in the
+wide and long perspective defined by the lights, she said--
+
+"It isn't very far from our house.  I somehow thought it couldn't be.  The
+address is Rue de Carouge.  I think it must be one of those big new houses for
+artisans."
+
+She took my arm confidingly, familiarly, and accelerated her pace.  There was
+something primitive in our proceedings.  We did not think of the resources of
+civilization.  A late tramcar overtook us; a row of _fiacres_ stood by the
+railing of the gardens.  It never entered our heads to make use of these
+conveyances.  She was too hurried, perhaps, and as to myself--well, she had
+taken my arm confidingly.  As we were ascending the easy incline of the
+Corraterie, all the shops shuttered and no light in any of the windows (as if
+all the mercenary population had fled at the end of the day), she said
+tentatively--
+
+"I could run in for a moment to have a look at mother.  It would not be much
+out of the way."
+
+I dissuaded her.  If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that night it
+would have been unwise to show herself without him.  The sooner we got hold of
+the young man and brought him along to calm her mother's agitation the better.
+ She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed diagonally the Place de Theatre,
+bluish grey with its floor of slabs of stone, under the electric light, and the
+lonely equestrian statue all black in the middle.  In the Rue de Carouge we
+were in the poorer quarters and approaching the outskirts of the town.  Vacant
+building plots alternated with high, new houses.  At the corner of a side
+street the crude light of a whitewashed shop fell into the night, fan-like,
+through a wide doorway.  One could see from a distance the inner wall with its
+scantily furnished shelves, and the deal counter painted brown.  That was the
+house.  Approaching it along the dark stretch of a fence of tarred planks, we
+saw the narrow pallid face of the cut angle, five single windows high, without
+a gleam in them, and crowned by the heavy shadow of a jutting roof slope.
+
+"We must inquire in the shop," Miss Haldin directed me.
+
+A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a frayed tie,
+laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both elbows far over the bare
+counter, answered that the person I was inquiring for was indeed his
+_locataire_ on the third floor, but that for the moment he was out.
+
+"For the moment," I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin.  "Does this mean
+that you expect him back at once?"
+
+He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips.  He smiled faintly as
+though he knew all about everything.  Mr. Razumov, after being absent all day,
+had returned early in the evening.  He was very surprised about half an hour or
+a little more since to see him come down again.  Mr. Razumov left his key, and
+in the course of some words which passed between them had remarked that he was
+going out because he needed air.
+
+>From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held between
+his hands.  Air.  Air.  But whether that meant a long or a short absence it was
+difficult to say.  The night was very close, certainly.
+
+After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added--
+
+"The storm shall drive him in."
+
+"There's going to be a storm?"  I asked.
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
+
+Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up her quest
+that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home within half an hour,
+to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop.  We would look in again presently.
+
+For all answer he moved his head imperceptibly.  The approval of Miss Haldin
+was expressed by her silence.  We walked slowly down the street, away from the
+town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to demolition were
+overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage, lighted from below by
+gas lamps.  The violent and monotonous noise of the icy waters of the Arve
+falling over a low dam swept towards us with a chilly draught of air across a
+great open space, where a double line of lamp-lights outlined a street as yet
+without houses.  But on the other shore, overhung by the awful blackness of the
+thunder-cloud, a solitary dim light seemed to watch us with a weary stare.
+ When we had strolled as far as the bridge, I said--
+
+"We had better get back. . . ."
+
+
+In the shop the sickly man was studying his smudgy newspaper, now spread out
+largely on the counter.  He just raised his head when I looked in and shook it
+negatively, pursing up his lips.  I rejoined Miss Haldin outside at once, and
+we moved off at a brisk pace.  She remarked that she would send Anna with a
+note the first thing in the morning.  I respected her taciturnity, silence
+being perhaps the best way to show my concern.
+
+The semi-rural street we followed on our return changed gradually to the usual
+town thoroughfare, broad and deserted.  We did not meet four people altogether,
+and the way seemed interminable, because my companion's natural anxiety had
+communicated itself sympathetically to me.  At last we turned into the
+Boulevard des Philosophes, more wide, more empty, more dead--the very
+desolation of slumbering respectability.  At the sight of the two lighted
+windows, very conspicuous from afar, I had the mental vision of Mrs. Haldin in
+her armchair keeping a dreadful, tormenting vigil under the evil spell of an
+arbitrary rule: a victim of tyranny and revolution, a sight at once cruel and
+absurd.
+
+
+III
+
+
+
+"You will come in for a moment?" said Natalia Haldin.
+
+I demurred on account of the late hour.  "You know mother likes you so much,"
+she insisted.
+
+"I will just come in to hear how your mother is."
+
+She said, as if to herself, "I don't even know whether she will believe that I
+could not find Mr. Razumov, since she has taken it into her head that I am
+concealing something from her.  You may be able to persuade her. . . ."
+
+"Your mother may mistrust me too," I observed.
+
+"You!  Why?  What could you have to conceal from her?  You are not a Russian
+nor a conspirator."
+
+I felt profoundly my European remoteness, and said nothing, but I made up my
+mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end.  The distant rolling of
+thunder in the valley of the Rhone was coming nearer to the sleeping town of
+prosaic virtues and universal hospitality.  We crossed the street opposite the
+great dark gateway, and Miss Haldin rang at the door of the apartment.  It was
+opened almost instantly, as if the elderly maid had been waiting in the
+ante-room for our return.  Her flat physiognomy had an air of satisfaction.
+ The gentleman was there, she declared, while closing the door.
+
+Neither of us understood.  Miss Haldin turned round brusquely to her.  "Who?"
+
+"Herr Razumov," she explained.
+
+She had heard enough of our conversation before we left to know why her young
+mistress was going out.  Therefore, when the gentleman gave his name at the
+door, she admitted him at once.
+
+"No one could have foreseen that," Miss Haldin murmured, with her serious grey
+eyes fixed upon mine.  And, remembering the expression of the young man's face
+seen not much more than four hours ago, the look of a haunted somnambulist, I
+wondered with a sort of awe.
+
+"You asked my mother first?" Miss Haldin inquired of the maid.
+
+"No.  I announced the gentleman," she answered, surprised at our troubled faces.
+
+"Still," I said in an undertone, "your mother was prepared."
+
+"Yes.  But he has no idea. . . ."
+
+It seemed to me she doubted his tact.  To her question how long the gentleman
+had been with her mother, the maid told us that Der Herr had been in the
+drawing-room no more than a short quarter of an hour.
+
+She waited a moment, then withdrew, looking a little scared.  Miss Haldin gazed
+at me in silence.
+
+"As things have turned out," I said, "you happen to know exactly what your
+brother's friend has to tell your mother.  And surely after that. . . ."
+
+"Yes," said Natalia Haldin slowly.  " I only wonder, as I was not here when he
+came, if it wouldn't be better not to interrupt now."
+
+We remained silent, and I suppose we both strained our ears, but no sound
+reached us through the closed door.  The features of Miss Haldin expressed a
+painful irresolution; she made a movement as if to go in, but checked herself.
+ She had heard footsteps on the other side of the door.  It came open, and
+Razumov, without pausing, stepped out into the ante-room.  The fatigue of that
+day and the struggle with himself had changed him so much that I would have
+hesitated to recognize that face which, only a few hours before, when he
+brushed against me in front of the post office, had been startling enough but
+quite different.  It had been not so livid then, and its eyes not so sombre.
+ They certainly looked more sane now, but there was upon them the shadow of
+something consciously evil.
+
+I speak of that, because, at first, their glance fell on me, though without any
+sort of recognition or even comprehension.  I was simply in the line of his
+stare.  I don't know if he had heard the bell or expected to see anybody.  He
+was going out, I believe, and I do not think that he saw Miss Haldin till she
+advanced towards him a step or two.  He disregarded the hand she put out.
+
+"It's you, Natalia Victorovna. . . .  Perhaps you are surprised. . . at this
+late hour.  But, you see, I remembered our conversations in that garden.  I
+thought really it was your wish that I should--without loss of time. . . so I
+came.  No other reason.  Simply to tell. . . ."
+
+He spoke with difficulty.  I noticed that, and remembered his declaration to
+the man in the shop that he was going out because he "needed air."  If that was
+his object, then it was clear that he had miserably failed.  With downcast eyes
+and lowered head he made an effort to pick up the strangled phrase.
+
+"To tell what I have heard myself only to-day--to-day. . . ."
+
+Through the door he had not closed I had a view of the drawing-room.  It was
+lighted only by a shaded lamp--Mrs. Haldin's eyes could not support either gas
+or electricity.  It was a comparatively big room, and in contrast with the
+strongly lighted ante-room its length was lost in semi-transparent gloom backed
+by heavy shadows; and on that ground I saw the motionless figure of Mrs.
+Haldin, inclined slightly forward, with a pale hand resting on the arm of the
+chair.
+
+She did not move.  With the window before her she had no longer that attitude
+suggesting expectation.  The blind was down; and outside there was only the
+night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town indifferent and hospitable
+in its cold, almost scornful, toleration--a respectable town of refuge to which
+all these sorrows and hopes were nothing.  Her white head was bowed.
+
+The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great stage
+of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this other glimpse
+behind the scenes, something more profound than the words and gestures of the
+public play.  I had the certitude that this mother, refused in her heart to
+give her son up after all.  It was more than Rachel's inconsolable mourning, it
+was something deeper, more inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity.  Lost in
+the ill-defined mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile
+suggested the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a beloved head
+were resting there.
+
+I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by the
+young man, shut the door.  It was not done without hesitation.  For a moment I
+thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only an anxious
+glance.  Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved. . . but no.  There was in the
+immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of suffering without
+remedy.
+
+Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor.  The thought that he
+would have to repeat the story he had told already was intolerable to him.  He
+had expected to find the two women together.  And then, he had said to himself,
+it would be over for all time--for all time.  "It's lucky I don't believe in
+another world," he had thought cynically.
+
+Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained a
+certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary.  He was aware of
+the danger of that strange self-indulgence.  He alludes to it himself, but he
+could not refrain.  It calmed him--it reconciled him to his existence.  He sat
+there scribbling by the light of a solitary candle, till it occurred to him
+that having heard the explanation of Haldin's arrest, as put forward by Sophia
+Antonovna, it behoved him to tell these ladies himself.  They were certain to
+hear the tale through some other channel, and then his abstention would look
+strange, not only to the mother and sister of Haldin, but to other people also.
+ Having come to this conclusion, he did not discover in himself any marked
+reluctance to face the necessity, and very soon an anxiety to be done with it
+began to torment him.  He looked at his watch.  No; it was not absolutely too
+late.
+
+The fifteen minutes with Mrs. Haldin were like the revenge of the unknown: that
+white face, that weak, distinct voice; that head, at first turned to him
+eagerly, then, after a while, bowed again and motionless--in the dim, still
+light of the room in which his words which he tried to subdue resounded so
+loudly--had troubled him like some strange discovery.  And there seemed to be a
+secret obstinacy in that sorrow, something he could not understand; at any
+rate, something he had not expected.  Was it hostile?  But it did not matter.
+ Nothing could touch him now; in the eyes of the revolutionists there was now
+no shadow on his past.  The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was
+left behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow.  And
+this was the phantom's mother consumed with grief and white as a ghost.  He had
+felt a pitying surprise.  But that, of course, was of no importance.  Mothers
+did not matter.  He could not shake off the poignant impression of that silent,
+quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of sternness crept into his thoughts.
+ These were the consequences.  Well, what of it?  " Am I then on a bed of
+roses?" he had exclaimed to himself, sitting at some distance with his eyes
+fixed upon that figure of sorrow.  He had said all he had to say to her, and
+when he had finished she had not uttered a word.  She had turned away her head
+while he was speaking.  The silence which had fallen on his last words had
+lasted for five minutes or more.  What did it mean?  Before its
+incomprehensible character he became conscious of anger in his stern mood, the
+old anger against Haldin reawakened by the contemplation of Haldin's mother.
+ And was it not something like enviousness which gripped his heart, as if of a
+privilege denied to him alone of all the men that had ever passed through this
+world?  It was the other who had attained to repose and yet continued to exist
+in the affection of that mourning old woman, in the thoughts of all these
+people posing for lovers of humanity.  It was impossible to get rid of him.
+ "It's myself whom I have given up to destruction," thought Razumov.  "He has
+induced me to do it.  I can't shake him off."
+
+Alarmed by that discovery, he got up and strode out of the silent, dim room
+with its silent old woman in the chair, that mother!  He never looked back.  It
+was frankly a flight.  But on opening the door he saw his retreat cut off:
+There was the sister.  He had never forgotten the sister, only he had not
+expected to see her then--or ever any more, perhaps.  Her presence in the
+ante-room was as unforeseen as the apparition of her brother had been.  Razumov
+gave a start as though he had discovered himself cleverly trapped.  He tried to
+smile, but could not manage it, and lowered his eyes.  "Must I repeat that
+silly story now?" he asked himself, and felt a sinking sensation.  Nothing
+solid had passed his lips since the day before, but he was not in a state to
+analyse the origins of his weakness.  He meant to take up his hat and depart
+with as few words as possible, but Miss Haldin's swift movement to shut the
+door took him by surprise.  He half turned after her, but without raising his
+eyes, passively, just as a feather might stir in the disturbed air.  The next
+moment she was back in the place she had started from, with another half-turn
+on his part, so that they came again into the same relative positions.
+
+"Yes, yes," she said hurriedly.  "I am very grateful to you, Kirylo
+Sidorovitch, for coming at once--like this. . . .  Only, I wish I had. . . .
+ Did mother tell you?"
+
+"I wonder what she could have told me that I did not know before," he said,
+obviously to himself, but perfectly audible.  "Because I always did know it,"
+he added louder, as if in despair.
+
+He hung his head.  He had such a strong sense of Natalia Haldin's presence that
+to look at her he felt would be a relief.  It was she who had been haunting him
+now.  He had suffered that persecution ever since she had suddenly appeared
+before him in the garden of the Villa Borel with an extended hand and the name
+of her brother on her lips. . . .  The ante-room had a row of hooks on the wall
+nearest to the outer door, while against the wall opposite there stood a small
+dark table and one chair.  The paper, bearing a very faint design, was all but
+white.  The light of an electric bulb high up under the ceiling searched that
+clear square box into its four bare corners, crudely, without shadows--a
+strange stage for an obscure drama.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Miss Haldin.  "What is it that you knew always?"
+
+He raised his face, pale, full of unexpressed suffering.  But that look in his
+eyes of dull, absent obstinacy, which struck and surprised everybody he was
+talking to, began to pass way.  It was as though he were coming to himself in
+the awakened consciousness of that marvellous harmony of feature, of lines, of
+glances, of voice, which made of the girl before him a being so rare, outside,
+and, as it were, above the common notion of beauty.  He looked at her so long
+that she coloured slightly.
+
+"What is it that you knew?" she repeated vaguely.
+
+That time he managed to smile.
+
+"Indeed, if it had not been for a word of greeting or two, I would doubt
+whether your mother was aware at all of my existence.  You understand?"
+
+Natalia Haldin nodded; her hands moved slightly by her side.
+
+"Yes.  Is it not heart-breaking?  She has not shed a tear yet--not a single
+tear."
+
+"Not a tear!  And you, Natalia Victorovna? You have been able to cry?"
+
+"I have.  And then I am young enough, Kirylo Sidorovitch, to believe in the
+future.  But when I see my mother so terribly distracted, I almost forget
+everything.  I ask myself whether one should feel proud--or only resigned.  We
+had such a lot of people coming to see us.  There were utter strangers who
+wrote asking for permission to call to present their respects.  It was
+impossible to keep our door shut for ever.  You know that Peter Ivanovitch
+himself. . . .  Oh yes, there was much sympathy, but there were persons who
+exulted openly at that death.  Then, when I was left alone with poor mother,
+all this seemed so wrong in spirit, something not worth the price she is paying
+for it.  But directly I heard you were here in Geneva, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I
+felt that you were the only person who could assist me. . . ."
+
+"In comforting a bereaved mother?  Yes!" he broke in in a manner which made her
+open her clear unsuspecting eyes.  "But there is a question of fitness.  Has
+this occurred to you?"
+
+There was a breathlessness in his utterance which contrasted with the monstrous
+hint of mockery in his intention.
+
+"Why!" whispered Natalia Haldin with feeling.  "Who more fit than you?"
+
+He had a convulsive movement of exasperation, but controlled himself.
+
+"Indeed!  Directly you heard that I was in Geneva, before even seeing me?  It
+is another proof of that confidence which. . . ."
+
+All at once his tone changed, became more incisive and more detached.
+
+"Men are poor creatures, Natalia Victorovna.  They have no intuition of
+sentiment.  In order to speak fittingly to a mother of her lost son one must
+have had some experience of the filial relation.  It is not the case with
+me--if you must know the whole truth.  Your hopes have to deal here with 'a
+breast unwarmed by any affection,' as the poet says. . . .  That does not mean
+it is insensible," he added in a lower tone.
+
+"I am certain your heart is not unfeeling," said Miss Haldin softly.
+
+"No.  It is not as hard as a stone," he went on in the same introspective
+voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in that
+unwarmed breast of which he spoke.  "No, not so hard.  But how to prove what
+you give me credit for--ah! that's another question.  No one has ever expected
+such a thing from me before.  No one whom my tenderness would have been of any
+use to.  And now you come.  You!  Now!  No, Natalia Victorovna.  It's too late.
+ You come too late.  You must expect nothing from me."
+
+She recoiled from him a little, though he had made no movement, as if she had
+seen some change in his face, charging his words with the significance of some
+hidden sentiment they shared together.  To me, the silent spectator, they
+looked like two people becoming conscious of a spell which had been lying on
+them ever since they first set eyes on each other.  Had either of them cast a
+glance then in my direction, I would have opened the door quietly and gone out.
+ But neither did; and I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense
+of my enormous remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of
+Russian problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings--the prison of
+their souls.
+
+Frank, courageous, Miss Haldin controlled her voice in the midst of her trouble.
+
+"What can this mean?" she asked, as if speaking to herself.
+
+"It may mean that you have given yourself up to vain imaginings while I have
+managed to remain amongst the truth of things and the realities of life--our
+Russian life--such as they are."
+
+"They are cruel," she murmured.
+
+"And ugly.  Don't forget that--and ugly.  Look where you like.  Look near you,
+here abroad where you are, and then look back at home, whence you came."
+
+"One must look beyond the present."  Her tone had an ardent conviction.
+
+"The blind can do that best.  I have had the misfortune to be born clear-eyed.
+ And if you only knew what strange things I have seen!  What amazing and
+unexpected apparitions!. . .  But why talk of all this?"
+
+"On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you," she protested with
+earnest serenity.  The sombre humours of her brother's friend left her
+unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were the signs of
+an indignant rectitude.  She saw that he was not an ordinary person, and
+perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to her trustful eyes.
+ "Yes, with you especially," she insisted.  "With you of all the Russian people
+in the world. . . ."  A faint smile dwelt for a moment on her lips.  "I am like
+poor mother in a way.  I too seem unable to give up our beloved dead, who,
+don't forget, was all in all to us.  I don't want to abuse your sympathy, but
+you must understand that it is in you that we can find all that is left of his
+generous soul."
+
+I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least.  And yet,
+even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility.  It was a sort of
+rapt thoughtfulness.  Then he stirred slightly.
+
+"You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she asked.
+
+"I!  Going?  Where?  Oh yes, but I must tell you first. . . ."  His voice was
+muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance, as if
+speech were something disgusting or deadly.  "That story, you know--the story I
+heard this afternoon. . . ."
+
+"I know the story already," she said sadly.
+
+"You know it!  Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?"
+
+"No.  It's Sophia Antonovna.  I have seen her just now.  She sends you her
+greetings.  She is going away to-morrow."
+
+He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and
+standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare
+walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern
+borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes.  And I
+observed them.  There was nothing else to do.  My existence seemed so utterly
+forgotten by these two that I dared not now make a movement. And I thought to
+myself that, of course, they had to come together, the sister and the friend of
+that dead man.  The ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom,
+expressed in their common affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of
+autocracy,--all this must draw them to each other fatally.  Her very ignorance
+and his loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.
+ And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already.  Of course.  It was
+manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time before
+they met.  She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling her
+imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for him to see
+that exceptional girl was enough.  The only cause for surprise was his gloomy
+aloofness before her clearly expressed welcome.  But he was young, and however
+austere and devoted to his revolutionary ideals, he was not blind.  The period
+of reserve was over; he was coming forward in his own way.  I could not mistake
+the significance of this late visit, for in what he had to say there was
+nothing urgent.  The true cause dawned upon me: he had discovered that he
+needed her and she was moved by the same feeling.  It was the second time that
+I saw them together, and I knew that next time they met I would not be there,
+either remembered or forgotten.  I would have virtually ceased to exist for
+both these young people.
+
+I made this discovery in a very few moments.  Meantime, Natalia Haldin was
+telling Razumov briefly of our peregrinations from one end of Geneva to the
+other.  While speaking she raised her hands above her head to untie her veil,
+and that movement displayed for an instant the seductive grace of her youthful
+figure, clad in the simplest of mourning.  In the transparent shadow the hat
+rim threw on her face her grey eyes had an enticing lustre.  Her voice, with
+its unfeminine yet exquisite timbre, was steady, and she spoke quickly, frank,
+unembarrassed.  As she justified her action by the mental state of her mother,
+a spasm of pain marred the generously confiding harmony of her features.  I
+perceived that with his downcast eyes he had the air of a man who is listening
+to a strain of music rather than to articulated speech.  And in the same way,
+after she had ceased, he seemed to listen yet, motionless, as if under the
+spell of suggestive sound.  He came to himself, muttering--
+
+"Yes, yes.  She has not shed a tear.  She did not seem to hear what I was
+saying.  I might have told her anything.  She looked as if no longer belonging
+to this world."
+
+Miss Haldin gave signs of profound distress.  Her voice faltered.  "You don't
+know how bad it has come to be.  She expects now to see _him_!"  The veil
+dropped from her fingers and she clasped her hands in anguish.  "It shall end
+by her seeing him," she cried.
+
+Razumov raised his head sharply and attached on her a prolonged thoughtful
+glance.
+
+"H'm.  That's very possible," he muttered in a peculiar tone, as if giving his
+opinion on a matter of fact.  "I wonder what. . . ."  He checked himself.
+
+"That would be the end.  Her mind shall be gone then, and her spirit will
+follow."
+
+Miss Haldin unclasped her hands and let them fall by her side.
+
+"You think so?" he queried profoundly.  Miss Haldin's lips were slightly
+parted.  Something unexpected and unfathomable in that young man's character
+had fascinated her from the first.  "No!  There's neither truth nor consolation
+to be got from the phantoms of the dead," he added after a weighty pause.  "I
+might have told her something true; for instance, that your brother meant to
+save his life--to escape.  There can be no doubt of that.  But I did not."
+
+"You did not!  But why?"
+
+"I don't know.  Other thoughts came into my head," he answered.  He seemed to
+me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count his own
+heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face of the girl.  "You
+were not there," he continued.  "I had made up my mind never to see you again."
+
+This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.
+
+"You. . . .  How is it possible?"
+
+"You may well ask. . . .  However, I think that I refrained from telling your
+mother from prudence.  I might have assured her that in the last conversation
+he held as a free man he mentioned you both. . . ."
+
+"That last conversation was with you," she struck in her deep, moving voice.
+ "Some day you must. . . ."
+
+"It was with me.  Of you he said that you had trustful eyes.  And why I have
+not been able to forget that phrase I don't know.  It meant that there is in
+you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no suspicion--nothing in your heart
+that could give you a conception of a living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it
+came in your way.  That you are a predestined victim. . . .  Ha! what a
+devilish suggestion!"
+
+The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the precarious
+hold he had over himself.  He was like a man defying his own dizziness in high
+places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the precipice.  Miss Haldin
+pressed her hand to her breast.  The dropped black veil lay on the floor
+between them.  Her movement steadied him.  He looked intently on that hand till
+it descended slowly, and then raised again his eyes to her face.  But he did
+not give her time to speak.
+
+"No?  You don't understand?  Very well."  He had recovered his calm by a
+miracle of will.  "So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?"
+
+"Yes.  Sophia Antonovna told me. . . ."  Miss Haldin stopped, wonder growing in
+her wide eyes.
+
+"H'm.  That's the respectable enemy," he muttered, as though he were alone.
+
+"The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly," remarked Miss
+Haldin, after waiting for a while.
+
+"Is that your impression?  And she the most intelligent of the lot, too.
+ Things then are going as well as possible.  Everything conspires to. . . .
+ Ah! these conspirators," he said slowly, with an accent of scorn; "they would
+get hold of you in no time!  You know, Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest
+difficulty in saving myself from the superstition of an active Providence.
+ It's irresistible. . . .  The alternative, of course, would be the personal
+Devil of our simple ancestors.  But, if so, he has overdone it altogether--the
+old Father of Lies--our national patron--our domestic god, whom we take with us
+when we go abroad.  He has overdone it.  It seems that I am not simple enough.
+. . .  That's it!  I ought to have known. . . .  And I did know it," he added
+in a tone of poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.
+
+"This man is deranged," I said to myself, very much frightened.
+
+The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of
+commonplace definitions.  It was as though he had stabbed himself outside and
+had come in there to show it; and more than that--as though he were turning the
+knife in the wound and watching the effect.  That was the impression, rendered
+in physical terms.  One could not defend oneself from a certain amount of pity.
+ But it was for Miss Haldin, already so tried in her deepest affections, that I
+felt a serious concern.  Her attitude, her face, expressed compassion
+struggling with doubt on the verge of terror.
+
+"What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?"  There was a hint of tenderness in that cry.
+ He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his faculties which in
+a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.
+
+"Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch?  I have approached
+you frankly.  I need at this time to see clearly in myself. . . ."  She ceased
+for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to utter at last some word worthy
+of her exalted trust in her brother's friend.  His silence became impressive,
+like a sign of a momentous resolution.
+
+In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly--
+
+"I have waited for you anxiously.  But now that you have been moved to come to
+us in your kindness, you alarm me.  You speak obscurely.  It seems as if you
+were keeping back something from me."
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he was heard at last in a strange unringing
+voice, "whom did you see in that place?"
+
+She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
+
+"Where?  In Peter Ivanovitch's rooms?  There was Mr. Laspara and three other
+people."
+
+"Ha!  The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot," he commented to
+himself.  "Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to change
+fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter Ivanovitch
+should be the head of a State."
+
+"You are teasing me," she said.  "Our dear one told me once to remember that
+men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea."
+
+"Our dear one," he repeated slowly.  The effort he made to appear unmoved
+absorbed all the force of his soul.  He stood before her like a being with
+hardly a breath of life.  His eyes, even as under great physical suffering, had
+lost all their fire.  "Ah! your brother. . . .  But on your lips, in your
+voice, it sounds. . . and indeed in you everything is divine. . . .  I wish I
+could know the innermost depths of your thoughts, of your feelings."
+
+"But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she cried, alarmed by these words coming out of
+strangely lifeless lips.
+
+"Have no fear.  It is not to betray you.  So you went there? . . . And Sophia
+Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?"
+
+"She said very little, really.  She knew that I should hear everything from
+you.  She had no time for more than a few words."  Miss Haldin's voice dropped
+and she became silent for a moment.  "The man, it appears, has taken his life,"
+she said sadly.
+
+"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he asked after a pause, "do you believe in
+remorse?"
+
+"What a question!"
+
+"What can _you_ know of it?" he muttered thickly.  "It is not for such as you.
+. . .  What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy of remorse?"
+
+She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted up.
+
+"Yes," she said firmly.
+
+"So he is absolved.  Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken brute."
+
+A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
+
+"But a man of the people,"  Razumov went on, "to whom they, the revolutionists,
+tell a tale of sublime hopes.  Well, the people must be forgiven. . . .  And
+you must not believe all you've heard from that source, either," he added, with
+a sort of sinister reluctance.
+
+"You are concealing something from me," she exclaimed.
+
+"Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?"
+
+"Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch.  I believe that the future shall be merciful to us
+all.  Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and
+betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black
+sky at last.  Pitied and forgotten; for without that there can be no union and
+no love."
+
+"I hear.  No revenge for you, then?  Never?  Not the least bit?"  He smiled
+bitterly with his colourless lips.  "You yourself are like the very spirit of
+that merciful future.  Strange that it does not make it easier. . . .  No!  But
+suppose that the real betrayer of your brother--Ziemianitch had a part in it
+too, but insignificant and quite involuntary--suppose that he was a young man,
+educated, an intellectual worker, thoughtful, a man your brother might have
+trusted lightly, perhaps, but still--suppose. . . .  But there's a whole story
+there."
+
+"And you know the story!  But why, then--"
+
+"I have heard it.  There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but that does
+not matter if a man always serves something greater than himself--the idea.  I
+wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?"
+
+"In that tale!"  Miss Haldin repeated.  She seemed turned into stone.
+
+"Do you know why I came to you?  It is simply because there is no one anywhere
+in the whole great world I could go to.  Do you understand what I say?  Not one
+to go to.  Do you conceive the desolation of the thought--no one--to--go--to?"
+
+Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in the
+letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely days, in
+their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to see the truth
+struggling on his lips.  What she was conscious of was the obscure form of his
+suffering.  She was on the point of extending her hand to him impulsively when
+he spoke again.
+
+"An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be.  The terrors of remorse,
+revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the atrocious
+temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before me with your
+voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed villa."
+
+She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of despairing
+insight went straight to the point.
+
+"The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!"
+
+"There is no more to tell!"  He made a movement forward, and she actually put
+her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed her, and he
+kept his ground, though trembling in every limb.  "It ends here--on this very
+spot."  He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast with force, and became
+perfectly still.
+
+I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of Miss
+Haldin and lower her down.  As she sank into it she swung half round on my arm,
+and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back.  He looked at her
+with an appalling expressionless tranquillity.  Incredulity, struggling with
+astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived me for a time of the power of
+speech.  Then I turned on him, whispering from very rage--
+
+"This is monstrous.  What are you staying for?  Don't let her catch sight of
+you again.  Go away! . . ."  He did not budge.  "Don't you understand that your
+presence is intolerable--even to me?  If there's any sense of shame in you. . .
+."
+
+Slowly his sullen eyes moved ill my direction.  "How did this old man come
+here?" he muttered, astounded.
+
+Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and tottered.
+ Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried to her
+assistance.  I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into the
+drawing-room.  Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant end, the
+profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had the stillness of a
+sombre painting.  Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed mournfully at the tragic
+immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a beloved head lying in her lap.
+
+That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in its
+human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely the
+ruthless working of political institutions.  After assisting Miss Haldin to the
+sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed in the opening, in the
+searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes fell on Razumov, still there,
+standing before the empty chair, as if rooted for ever to the spot of his
+atrocious confession.  A wonder came over me that the mysterious force which
+had torn it out of him had failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body.  It
+was there unscathed.  I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark
+head, the amazing immobility of his limbs.  At his feet the veil dropped by
+Miss Haldin looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light.  He was
+gazing at it spell-bound.  Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage
+swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands.
+ Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he seemed to
+vanish before he moved.
+
+The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on contemplating
+the empty chair in the empty ante-room.  The meaning of what I had seen reached
+my mind with a staggering shock.  I seized Natalia Haldin by the shoulder.
+
+"That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!" I cried, in the scared,
+deadened voice of an awful discovery.  "He. . . ."
+
+The rest remained unspoken.  I stepped back and looked down at her, in silent
+horror.  Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her lap.  She
+raised her grey eyes slowly.  Shadows seemed to come and go in them as if the
+steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate at last in the
+cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark immensity claiming her
+for its own, where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of
+oppression and revolt.
+
+"It is impossible to be more unhappy. . . ."  The languid whisper of her voice
+struck me with dismay.  "It is impossible. . . .  I feel my heart becoming like
+ice."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Razumov walked straight home on the wet glistening pavement.  A heavy shower
+passed over him; distant lightning played faintly against the fronts of the
+dumb houses with the shuttered shops all along the Rue de Carouge; and now and
+then, after the faint flash, there was a faint, sleepy rumble; but the main
+forces of the thunderstorm remained massed down the Rhone valley as if loath to
+attack the respectable and passionless abode of democratic liberty, the
+serious-minded town of dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent,
+hospitality to tourists of all nations and to international conspirators of
+every shade.
+
+The owner of the shop was making ready to close when Razumov entered and
+without a word extended his hand for the key of his room.  On reaching it for
+him, from a shelf, the man was about to pass a small joke as to taking the air
+in a thunderstorm, but, after looking at the face of his lodger, he only
+observed, just to say something--
+
+"You've got very wet."
+
+"Yes, I am washed clean," muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head to foot,
+and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading to his room.
+
+He did not change his clothes, but, after lighting the candle, took off his
+watch and chain, laid them on the table, and sat down at once to write.  The
+book of his compromising record was kept in a locked drawer, which he pulled
+out violently, and did not even trouble to push back afterwards.
+
+In this queer pedantism of a man who had read, thought, lived, pen in hand,
+there is the sincerity of the attempt to grapple by the same means with another
+profounder knowledge.  After some passages which have been already made use of
+in the building up of this narrative, or add nothing new to the psychological
+side of this disclosure (there is even one more allusion to the silver medal in
+this last entry), comes a page and a half of incoherent writing where his
+expression is baffled by the novelty and the mysteriousness of that side of our
+emotional life to which his solitary existence had been a stranger.  Then only
+he begins to address directly the reader he had in his mind, trying to express
+in broken sentences, full of wonder and awe, the sovereign (he uses that very
+word) power of her person over his imagination, in which lay the dormant seed
+of her brother's words.
+
+". . . The most trustful eyes in the world--your brother said of you when he
+was as well as a dead man already.  And when you stood before me with your hand
+extended, I remembered the very sound of his voice, and I looked into your
+eyes--and that was enough.  I knew that something had happened, but I did not
+know then what. . . .  But don't be deceived, Natalia Victorovna.  I believed
+that I had in my breast nothing but an inexhaustible fund of anger and hate for
+you both.  I remembered that he had looked to you for the perpetuation of his
+visionary soul.  He, this man who had robbed me of my hard-working, purposeful
+existence.  I, too, had my guiding idea;  and remember that, amongst us, it is
+more difficult to lead a life of toil and self-denial than to go out in the
+street and kill from conviction.  But enough of that.  Hate or no hate, I felt
+at once that, while shunning the sight of you, I could never succeed in driving
+away your image.  I would say, addressing that dead man, 'Is this the way you
+are going to haunt me?'  It is only later on that I understood--only to-day,
+only a few hours ago.  What could I have known of what was tearing me to pieces
+and dragging the secret for ever to my lips?  You were appointed to undo the
+evil by making me betray myself back into truth and peace.  You!  And you have
+done it in the same way, too, in which he ruined me: by forcing upon me your
+confidence.  Only what I detested him for, in you ended by appearing noble and
+exalted.  But, I repeat, be not deceived.  I was given up to evil.  I exulted
+in having induced that silly innocent fool to steal his father's money.  He was
+a fool, but not a thief.  I made him one.  It was necessary.  I had to confirm
+myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed.  I have suffered from as
+many vipers in my heart as any social democrat of them all--vanity, ambitions,
+jealousies, shameful desires, evil passions of envy and revenge.  I had my
+security stolen from me, years of good work, my best hopes.  Listen--now comes
+the true confession.  The other was nothing.  To save me, your trustful eyes
+had to entice my thought to the very edge of the blackest treachery.  I could
+see them constantly looking at me with the confidence of your pure heart which
+had not been touched by evil things.  Victor Haldin had stolen the truth of my
+life from me, who had nothing else in the world, and he boasted of living on
+through you on this earth where I had no place to lay my head on.  She will
+marry some day, he had said--and your eyes were trustful.  And do you know what
+I said to myself?  I shall steal his sister's soul from her.  When we met that
+first morning in the gardens, and you spoke to me confidingly in the generosity
+of your spirit, I was thinking, 'Yes, he himself by talking of her trustful
+eyes has delivered her into my hands!'  If you could have looked then into my
+heart, you would have cried out aloud with terror and disgust.
+
+"Perhaps no one will believe the baseness of such an intention to be possible.
+ It's certain that, when we parted that morning, I gloated over it.  I brooded
+upon the best way.  The old man you introduced me to insisted on walking with
+me.  I don't know who he is.  He talked of you, of your lonely, helpless state,
+and every word of that friend of yours was egging me on to the unpardonable sin
+of stealing a soul.  Could he have been the devil himself in the shape of an
+old Englishman?  Natalia Victorovna, I was possessed!  I returned to look at
+you every day, and drink in your presence the poison of my infamous intention.
+ But I foresaw difficulties.  Then Sophia Antonovna, of whom I was not
+thinking--I had forgotten her existence--appears suddenly with that tale from
+St. Petersburg. . . .  The only thing needed to make me safe--a trusted
+revolutionist for ever.
+
+"It was as if Ziemianitch had hanged himself to help me on to further crime.
+ The strength of falsehood seemed irresistible.  These people stood doomed by
+the folly and the illusion that was in them--they being themselves the slaves
+of lies.  Natalia Victorovna, I embraced the might of falsehood, I exulted in
+it--I gave myself up to it for a time.  Who could have resisted!  You yourself
+were the prize of it.  I sat alone in my room, planning a life, the very
+thought of which makes me shudder now, like a believer who had been tempted to
+an atrocious sacrilege.  But I brooded ardently over its images.  The only
+thing was that there seemed to be no air in it.  And also I was afraid of your
+mother.  I never knew mine.  I've never known any kind of love.  There is
+something in the mere word. . . .  Of you, I was not afraid--forgive me for
+telling you this.  No, not of you.  You were truth itself.  You could not
+suspect me.  As to your mother, you yourself feared already that her mind had
+given way from grief.  Who could believe anything against me?  Had not
+Ziemianitch hanged himself from remorse?  I said to myself, 'Let's put it to
+the test, and be done with it once for all.'  I trembled when I went in; but
+your mother hardly listened to what I was saying to her, and, in a little
+while, seemed to have forgotten my very existence.  I sat looking at her.
+ There was no longer anything between you and me.  You were defenceless--and
+soon, very soon, you would be alone. . . .  I thought of you.  Defenceless.
+ For days you have talked with me--opening your heart.  I remembered the shadow
+of your eyelashes over your grey trustful eyes.  And your pure forehead!  It is
+low like the forehead of statues--calm, unstained.  It was as if your pure brow
+bore a light which fell on me, searched my heart and saved me from ignominy,
+from ultimate undoing.  And it saved you too.  Pardon my presumption.  But
+there was that in your glances which seemed to tell me that you. . . .  Your
+light! your truth!  I felt that I must tell you that I had ended by loving you.
+ And to tell you that I must first confess.  Confess, go out--and perish.
+
+"Suddenly you stood before me!  You alone in all the world to whom I must
+confess.  You fascinated me--you have freed me from the blindness of anger and
+hate--the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me.  Now I have done it;
+and as I write here, I am in the depths depths of anguish, but there is air to
+breathe at last--air!  And, by the by, that old man sprang up from somewhere as
+I was speaking to you, and raged at me like a disappointed devil.  I suffer
+horribly, but I am not in despair.  There is only one more thing to do for me.
+ After that--if they let me--I shall go away and bury myself in obscure misery.
+ In giving Victor Haldin up, it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed
+most basely.  You must believe what I say now, you can't refuse to believe
+this.  Most basely.  It is through you that I came to feel this so deeply.
+ After all, it is they and not I who have the right on their side?--theirs is
+the strength of invisible powers.  So be it.  Only don't be deceived, Natalia
+Victorovna, I am not converted.  Have I then the soul of a slave?  No!  I am
+independent--and therefore perdition is my lot."
+
+On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the black
+veil he had carried off.  He then ransacked the drawers for paper and string,
+made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin, Boulevard des Philosophes,
+and then flung the pen away from him into a distant corner.
+
+This done, he sat down with the watch before him.  He could have gone out at
+once, but the hour had not struck yet.  The hour would be midnight.  There was
+no reason for that choice except that the facts and the words of a certain
+evening in his past were timing his conduct in the present.  The sudden power
+Natalia Haldin had gained over him he ascribed to the same cause.  "You don't
+walk with impunity over a phantom's breast," he heard himself mutter.  "Thus he
+saves me," he thought suddenly.  "He himself, the betrayed man."  The vivid
+image of Miss Haldin seemed to stand by him, watching him relentlessly.  She
+was not disturbing.  He had done with life, and his thought even in her
+presence tried to take an impartial survey.  Now his scorn extended to himself.
+ "I had neither the simplicity nor the courage nor the self-possession to be a
+scoundrel, or an exceptionally able man.  For who, with us in Russia, is to
+tell a scoundrel from an exceptionally able man? . . ."
+
+He was the puppet of his past, because at the very stroke of midnight he jumped
+up and ran swiftly downstairs as if confident that, by the power of destiny,
+the house door would fly open before the absolute necessity of his errand.  And
+as a matter of fact, just as he got to the bottom of the stairs, it was opened
+for him by some people of the house coming home late--two men and a woman.  He
+slipped out through them into the street, swept then by a fitful gust of wind.
+ They were, of course, very much startled.  A flash of lightning enabled them
+to observe him walking away quickly.  One of the men shouted, and was starting
+in pursuit, but the woman had recognized him.  "It's all right.  It's only that
+young Russian from the third floor."  The darkness returned with a single clap
+of thunder, like a gun fired for a warning of his escape from the prison of
+lies.
+
+He must have heard at some time or other and now remembered unconsciously that
+there was to be a gathering of revolutionists at the house of Julius Laspara
+that evening.  At any rate, he made straight for the Laspara house, and found
+himself without surprise ringing at its street door, which, of course, was
+closed.  By that time the thunderstorm had attacked in earnest.  The steep
+incline of the street ran with water, the thick fall of rain enveloped him like
+a luminous veil in the play of lightning.  He was perfectly calm, and, between
+the crashes, listened attentively to the delicate tinkling of the doorbell
+somewhere within the house.
+
+There was some difficulty before he was admitted.  His person was not known to
+that one of the guests who had volunteered to go downstairs and see what was
+the matter.  Razumov argued with him patiently.  There could be no harm in
+admitting a caller.  He had something to communicate to the company upstairs.
+
+"Something of importance?"
+
+"That'll be for the hearers to judge."
+
+"Urgent?"
+
+"Without a moment's delay."
+
+Meantime, one of the Laspara daughters descended the stairs, small lamp in
+hand, in a grimy and crumpled gown, which seemed to hang on her by a miracle,
+and looking more than ever like an old doll with a dusty brown wig, dragged
+from under a sofa.  She recognized Razumov at once.
+
+"How do you do?  Of course you may come in."
+
+following her light, Razumov climbed two flights of stairs from the lower
+darkness.  Leaving the lamp on a bracket on the landing, she opened a door, and
+went in, accompanied by the sceptical guest.  Razumov entered last.  He closed
+the door behind him, and stepping on one side, put his back against the wall.
+
+The three little rooms _en suite_, with low, smoky ceilings and lit by paraffin
+lamps, were crammed with people.  Loud talking was going on in all three, and
+tea-glasses, full, half-full, and empty, stood everywhere, even on the floor.
+ The other Laspara girl sat, dishevelled and languid, behind an enormous
+samovar.  In the inner doorway Razumov had a glimpse of the protuberance of a
+large stomach, which he recognized.  Only a few feet from him Julius Laspara
+was getting down hurriedly from his high stool.
+
+The appearance of the midnight visitor caused no small sensation.  Laspara is
+very summary in his version of that night's happenings.  After some words of
+greeting, disregarded by Razumov, Laspara (ignoring purposely his guest's
+soaked condition and his extraordinary manner of presenting himself) mentioned
+something about writing an article.  He was growing uneasy, and Razumov
+appeared absent-minded.  "I have written already all I shall ever write," he
+said at last, with a little laugh.
+
+The whole company's attention was riveted on the new-comer, dripping with
+water, deadly pale, and keeping his position against the wall.  Razumov put
+Laspara gently aside, as though he wished to be seen from head to foot by
+everybody.  By then the buzz of conversations had died down completely, even in
+the most distant of the three rooms.  The doorway facing Razumov became blocked
+by men and women, who craned their necks and certainly seemed to expect
+something startling to happen.
+
+A squeaky, insolent declaration was heard from that group.
+
+"I know this ridiculously conceited individual."
+
+"What individual?" asked Razumov, raising his bowed head, and searching with
+his eyes all the eyes fixed upon him.  An intense surprised silence lasted for
+a time.  "If it's me. . . ."
+
+He stopped, thinking over the form of his confession, and found it suddenly,
+unavoidably suggested by the fateful evening of his life.
+
+"I am come here," he began, in a clear voice, "to talk of an individual called
+Ziemianitch.  Sophia Antonovna has informed me that she would make public a
+certain letter from St. Petersburg. . . ."
+
+"Sophia Antonovna has left us early in the evening,"  said Laspara.  "It's
+quite correct.  Everybody here has heard. . . ."
+
+"Very well," Razumov interrupted, with a shade of impatience, for his heart was
+beating strongly.  Then, mastering his voice so far that there was even a touch
+of irony in his clear, forcible enunciation--
+
+"In justice to that individual, the much ill-used peasant, Ziemianitch, I now
+declare solemnly that the conclusions of that letter calumniate a man of the
+people--a bright Russian soul.  Ziemianitch had nothing to do with the actual
+arrest of Victor Haldin."
+
+Razumov dwelt on the name heavily, and then waited till the faint, mournful
+murmur which greeted it had died out.
+
+"Victor Victorovitch Haldin," he began again, "acting with, no doubt,
+noble-minded imprudence, took refuge with a certain student of whose opinions
+he knew nothing but what his own illusions suggested to his generous heart.  It
+was an unwise display of confidence.  But I am not here to appreciate the
+actions of Victor Haldin.  Am I to tell you of the feelings of that student,
+sought out in his obscure solitude, and menaced by the complicity forced upon
+him?  Am I to tell you what he did?  It's a rather complicated story.  In the
+end the student went to General T--- himself, and said, 'I have the man who
+killed de P--- locked up in my room, Victor Haldin--a student like myself.'"
+
+A great buzz arose, in which Razumov raised his voice.
+
+"Observe--that man had certain honest ideals in view.  But I didn't come here
+to explain him."
+
+"No.  But you must explain how you know all this," came in grave tones from
+somebody.
+
+"A vile coward!"  This simple cry vibrated with indignation.  "Name him!"
+shouted other voices.
+
+"What are you clamouring for?" said Razumov disdainfully, in the profound
+silence which fell on the raising of his hand.  "Haven't you all understood
+that I am that man?"
+
+Laspara went away brusquely from his side and climbed upon his stool.  In the
+first forward surge of people towards him, Razumov expected to be torn to
+pieces, but they fell back without touching him, and nothing came of it but
+noise.  It was bewildering.  His head ached terribly.  In the confused uproar
+he made out several times the name of Peter Ivanovitch, the word "judgement,"
+and the phrase, "But this is a confession," uttered by somebody in a desperate
+shriek.  In the midst of the tumult, a young man, younger than himself,
+approached him with blazing eyes.
+
+"I must beg you," he said, with venomous politeness, "to be good enough not to
+move from this spot till you are told what you are to do."
+
+Razumov shrugged his shoulders.  "I came in voluntarily."
+
+"Maybe.  But you won't go out till you are permitted," retorted the other.
+
+He beckoned with his hand, calling out, "Louisa! Louisa! come here, please";
+and, presently, one of the Laspara girls (they had been staring at Razumov from
+behind the samovar) came along, trailing a bedraggled tail of dirty flounces,
+and dragging with her a chair, which she set against the door, and, sitting
+down on it, crossed her legs.  The young man thanked her effusively, and
+rejoined a group carrying on an animated discussion in low tones.  Razumov lost
+himself for a moment.
+
+A squeaky voice screamed, "Confession or no confession, you are a police spy!"
+
+The revolutionist Nikita had pushed his way in front of Razumov, and faced him
+with his big, livid cheeks, his heavy paunch, bull neck, and enormous hands.
+ Razumov looked at the famous slayer of gendarmes in silent disgust.
+
+"And what are you?" he said, very low, then shut his eyes, and rested the back
+of his head against the wall.
+
+"It would be better for you to depart now."  Razumov heard a mild, sad voice,
+and opened his eyes.  The gentle speaker was an elderly man, with a great brush
+of fine hair making a silvery halo all round his keen, intelligent face.
+ "Peter Ivanovitch shall be informed of your confession--and you shall be
+directed. . . ."
+
+Then, turning to Nikita, nicknamed Necator, standing by, he appealed to him in
+a murmur--
+
+"What else can we do?  After this piece of sincerity he cannot be dangerous any
+longer."
+
+The other muttered, "Better make sure of that before we let him go.  Leave that
+to me.  I know how to deal with such gentlemen."
+
+He exchanged meaning glances with two or three men, who nodded slightly, then
+turning roughly to Razumov, "You have heard?  You are not wanted here.  Why
+don't you get out?"
+
+The Laspara girl on guard rose, and pulled the chair out of the way
+unemotionally.  She gave a sleepy stare to Razumov, who started, looked round
+the room and passed slowly by her as if struck by some sudden thought.
+
+"I beg you to observe," he said, already on the landing, "that I had only to
+hold my tongue.  To-day, of all days since I came amongst you, I was made safe,
+and to-day I made myself free from falsehood, from remorse--independent of
+every single human being on this earth."
+
+He turned his back on the room, and walked towards the stairs, but, at the
+violent crash of the door behind him, he looked over his shoulder and saw that
+Nikita, with three others, had followed him out.  "They are going to kill me,
+after all," he thought.
+
+Before he had time to turn round and confront them fairly, they set on him with
+a rush.  He was driven headlong against the wall.  "I wonder how," he completed
+his thought.  Nikita cried, with a shrill laugh right in his face, "We shall
+make you harmless.  You wait a bit."
+
+Razumov did not struggle.  The three men held him pinned against the wall,
+while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side, deliberately swung off
+his enormous arm.  Razumov, looking for a knife in his hand, saw it come at him
+open, unarmed, and received a tremendous blow on the side of his head over his
+ear.  At the same time he heard a faint, dull detonating sound, as if some one
+had fired a pistol on the other side of the wall.  A raging fury awoke in him
+at this outrage.  The people in Laspara's rooms, holding their breath, listened
+to the desperate scuffling of four men all over the landing; thuds against the
+walls, a terrible crash against the very door, then all of them went down
+together with a violence which seemed to shake the whole house.  Razumov,
+overpowered, breathless, crushed under the weight of his assailants, saw the
+monstrous Nikita squatting on his heels near his head, while the others held
+him down, kneeling on his chest, gripping his throat, lying across his legs.
+
+"Turn his face the other way," the paunchy terrorist directed, in an excited,
+gleeful squeak.
+
+Razumov could struggle no longer.  He was exhausted; he had to watch passively
+the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in a degrading blow over his
+other ear.  It seemed to split his head in two, and all at once the men holding
+him became perfectly silent--soundless as shadows.  In silence they pulled him
+brutally to his feet, rushed with him noiselessly down the staircase, and,
+opening the door, flung him out into the street.
+
+He fell forward, and at once rolled over and over helplessly, going down the
+short slope together with the rush of running rain water.  He came to rest in
+the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on his back, with a great flash
+of lightning over his face--a vivid, silent flash of lightning which blinded
+him utterly.  He picked himself up, and put his arm over his eyes to recover
+his sight.  Not a sound reached him from anywhere, and he began to walk,
+staggering, down a long, empty street.  The lightning waved and darted round
+him its silent flames, the water of the deluge fell, ran, leaped,
+drove--noiseless like the drift of mist.  In this unearthly stillness his
+footsteps fell silent on the pavement, while a dumb wind drove him on and on,
+like a lost mortal in a phantom world ravaged by a soundless thunderstorm.  God
+only knows where his noiseless feet took him to that night, here and there, and
+back again without pause or rest.  Of one place, at least, where they did lead
+him, we heard afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first
+south-shore tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled, soaked
+man without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his head down,
+step right in front of his car, and go under.
+
+When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side, Razumov had
+not lost consciousness.  It was as though he had tumbled, smashing himself,
+into a world of mutes.  Silent men, moving unheard, lifted him up, laid him on
+the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing round him their alarm, horror, and
+compassion.  A red face with moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving,
+eyes rolling.  Razumov tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show.
+ To those who stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously
+hurt, seemed composed in meditation.  Afterwards his eyes sent out at them a
+look of fear and closed slowly.  They stared at him.  Razumov made an effort to
+remember some French words.
+
+"_Je suis sourd_," he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
+
+"He is deaf," they exclaimed to each other.  "That's why he did not hear the
+car."
+
+They carried him off in that same car.  Before it started on its journey, a
+woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of some private
+grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and would not be put off.
+
+"I am a relation," she insisted, in bad French.  "This young man is a Russian,
+and I am his relation."  On this plea they let her have her way.  She sat down
+calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes avoided looking at
+his deathlike face.  At the corner of a street, on the other side of the town,
+a stretcher met the car.  She followed it to the door of the hospital, where
+they let her come in and see him laid on a bed.  Razumov's new-found relation
+never shed a tear, but the officials had some difficulty in inducing her to go
+away.  The porter observed her lingering on the opposite pavement for a long
+time.  Suddenly, as though she had remembered something, she ran off.
+
+The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S---, had
+made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to the Egeria of
+Peter Ivanovitch.  She had found work to do after her own heart.
+
+But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there had
+been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation.  The terrible Nikita,
+coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in horrible glee before
+all the company--
+
+"Razumov!  Mr. Razumov!  The wonderful Razumov!  He shall never be any use as a
+spy on any one.  He won't talk, because he will never hear anything in his
+life--not a thing!  I have burst the drums of his ears for him.  Oh, you may
+trust me.  I know the trick.  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  I know the trick."
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was nearly a fortnight after her mother's funeral that I saw Natalia Haldin
+for the last time.
+
+In those silent, sombre days the doors of the _appartement_ on the Boulevard
+des Philosophes were closed to every one but myself.  I believe I was of some
+use, if only in this, that I alone was aware of the incredible part of the
+situation.  Miss Haldin nursed her mother alone to the last moment.  If
+Razumov's visit had anything to do with Mrs. Haldin's end (and I cannot help
+thinking that it hastened it considerably), it is because the man, trusted
+impulsively by the ill-fated Victor Haldin, had failed to gain the confidence
+of Victor Haldin's mother.  What tale, precisely, he told her cannot be
+known--at any rate, I do not know it--but to me she seemed to die from the
+shock of an ultimate disappointment borne in silence.  She had not believed
+him.  Perhaps she could not longer believe any one, and consequently had
+nothing to say to any one--not even to her daughter.  I suspect that Miss
+Haldin lived the heaviest hours of her life by that silent death-bed.  I
+confess I was angry with the broken-hearted old woman passing away in the
+obstinacy of her mute distrust of her daughter.
+
+When it was all over I stood aside.  Miss Haldin had her compatriots round her
+then.  A great number of them attended the funeral.  I was there too, but
+afterwards managed to keep away from Miss Haldin, till I received a short note
+rewarding my self-denial.  "It is as you would have it.  I am going back to
+Russia at once.  My mind is made up.  Come and see me."
+
+Verily, it was a reward of discretion.  I went without delay to receive it.
+ The _appartement_ of the Boulevard des Philosophes presented the dreary signs
+of impending abandonment.  It looked desolate and as if already empty to my
+eyes.
+
+Standing, we exchanged a few words about her health, mine, remarks as to some
+people of the Russian colony, and then Natalia Haldin, establishing me on the
+sofa, began to talk openly of her future work, of her plans.  It was all to be
+as I had wished it.  And it was to be for life.  We should never see each other
+again.  Never!
+
+I gathered this success to my breast.  Natalia Haldin looked matured by her
+open and secret experiences.  With her arms folded she walked up and down the
+whole length of the room, talking slowly, smooth-browed, with a resolute
+profile.  She gave me a new view of herself, and I marvelled at that something
+grave and measured in her voice, in her movements, in her manner.  It was the
+perfection of collected independence.  The strength of her nature had come to
+surface because the obscure depths had been stirred.
+
+"We two can talk of it now," she observed, after a silence and stopping short
+before me.  "Have you been to inquire at the hospital lately?"
+
+"Yes, I have."  And as she looked at me fixedly, "He will live, the doctors
+say.  But I thought that Tekla. . . ."
+
+"Tekla has not been near me for several days," explained Miss Haldin quickly.
+ "As I never offered to go to the hospital with her, she thinks that I have no
+heart.  She is disillusioned about me."
+
+And Miss Haldin smiled faintly.
+
+"Yes.  She sits with him as long and as often as they will let her," I said.
+ "She says she must never abandon him--never as long as she lives.  He'll need
+somebody--a hopeless cripple, and stone deaf with that."
+
+"Stone deaf?  I didn't know," murmured Natalia Haldin.
+
+"He is.  It seems strange.  I am told there were no apparent injuries to the
+head.  They say, too, that it is not very likely that he will live so very long
+for Tekla to take care of him."
+
+Miss Haldin shook her head.
+
+"While there are travellers ready to fall by the way our Tekla shall never be
+idle.  She is a good Samaritan by an irresistible vocation.  The revolutionists
+didn't understand her.  Fancy a devoted creature like that being employed to
+carry about documents sewn in her dress, or made to write from dictation."
+
+"There is not much perspicacity in the world."
+
+No sooner uttered, I regretted that observation.  Natalia Haldin, looking me
+straight in the face, assented by a slight movement of her head.  She was not
+offended, but turning away began to pace the room again.  To my western eyes
+she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite beyond my reach
+now, but undiminished in the increasing distance.  I remained silent as though
+it were hopeless to raise my voice.  The sound of hers, so close to me, made me
+start a little.
+
+"Tekla saw him picked up after the accident.  The good soul never explained to
+me really how it came about.  She affirms that there was some understanding
+between them--some sort of compact--that in any sore need, in misfortune, or
+difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her."
+
+"Was there?" I said.  "It is lucky for him that there was, then.  He'll need
+all the devotion of the good Samaritan."
+
+It was a fact that Tekla, looking out of her window at five in the morning, for
+some reason or other, had beheld Razumov in the grounds of the Chateau Borel,
+standing stockstill, bare-headed in the rain, at the foot of the terrace.  She
+had screamed out to him, by name, to know what was the matter.  He never even
+raised his head.  By the time she had dressed herself sufficiently to run
+downstairs he was gone.  She started in pursuit, and rushing out into the road,
+came almost directly upon the arrested tramcar and the small knot of people
+picking up Razumov.  That much Tekla had told me herself one afternoon we
+happened to meet at the door of the hospital, and without any kind of comment.
+ But I did not want to meditate very long on the inwardness of this peculiar
+episode.
+
+"Yes, Natalia Victorovna, he shall need somebody when they dismiss him, on
+crutches and stone deaf from the hospital.  But I do not think that when he
+rushed like an escaped madman into the grounds of the Chateau Borel it was to
+seek the help of that good Tekla."
+
+"No," said Natalia, stopping short before me, "perhaps not."  She sat down and
+leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully.  The silence lasted for several
+minutes.  During that time I remembered the evening of his atrocious
+confession--the plaint she seemed to have hardly enough life left in her to
+utter, "It is impossible to be more unhappy. . . ."  The recollection would
+have given me a shudder if I had not been lost in wonder at her force and her
+tranquillity.  There was no longer any Natalia Haldin, because she had
+completely ceased to think of herself.  It was a great victory, a
+characteristically Russian exploit in self-suppression.
+
+She recalled me to myself by getting up suddenly like a person who has come to
+a decision.  She walked to the writing-table, now stripped of all the small
+objects associated with her by daily use--a mere piece of dead furniture; but
+it contained something living, still, since she took from a recess a flat
+parcel which she brought to me.
+
+"It's a book," she said rather abruptly.  "It was sent to me wrapped up in my
+veil.  I told you nothing at the time, but now I've decided to leave it with
+you.  I have the right to do that.  It was sent to me.  It is mine.  You may
+preserve it, or destroy it after you have read it.  And while you read it,
+please remember that I was defenceless.  And that he. . . ."
+
+"Defenceless!" I repeated, surprised, looking hard at her.
+
+"You'll find the very word written there," she whispered.  "Well, it's true!  I
+_was_ defenceless--but perhaps you were able to see that for yourself."  Her
+face coloured, then went deadly pale.  "In justice to the man, I want you to
+remember that I was.  Oh, I was, I was!"
+
+I rose, a little shakily.
+
+" I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting."
+
+Her hand fell into mine.
+
+"It's difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us."
+
+She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
+
+"Yes.  I am leaving here to-morrow.  My eyes are open at last and my hands are
+free now.  As for the rest--which of us can fail to hear the stifled cry of our
+great distress?  It may be nothing to the world."
+
+"The world is more conscious of your discordant voices," I said.  "It is the
+way of the world."
+
+"Yes."  She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment.  "I must own
+to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when all discord
+shall be silenced.  Try to imagine its dawn!  The tempest of blows and of
+execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising, and the weary men
+united at last, taking count in their conscience of the ended contest, feel
+saddened by their victory, because so many ideas have perished for the triumph
+of one, so many beliefs have abandoned them without support.  They feel alone
+on the earth and gather close together.  Yes, there must be many bitter hours!
+ But at last the anguish of hearts shall be extinguished in love."
+
+And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so cruel
+sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin.  It is hard to think I shall
+never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl--wedded to an
+invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like a heavenly
+flower from the soil of men's earth, soaked in blood, torn by struggles,
+watered with tears.
+
+
+
+It must be understood that at that time I didn't know anything of Mr. Razumov's
+confession to the assembled revolutionists.  Natalia Haldin might have guessed
+what was the "one thing more" which remained for him to do; but this my western
+eyes had failed to see.
+
+Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S---, haunted his bedside at the
+hospital.  We met once or twice at the door of that establishment, but on these
+occasions she was not communicative.  She gave me news of Mr. Razumov as
+concisely as possible.  He was making a slow recovery, but would remain a
+hopeless cripple all his life.  Personally, I never went near him: I never saw
+him again, after the awful evening when I stood by, a watchful but ignored
+spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin.  He was in due course discharged from
+the hospital, and his "relative"--so I was told--had carried him off somewhere.
+
+My information was completed nearly two years later.  The opportunity,
+certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
+much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
+gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
+
+He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch--a dark-haired
+man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with something hushed and
+circumspect in his manner.  He approached me, choosing the moment when there
+was no one near, followed by a grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.
+
+"Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you," he addressed me, in his
+guarded voice.  "And so I leave you two to have a talk together."
+
+"I would never have intruded myself upon your notice," the grey-haired lady
+began at once, "if I had not been charged with a message for you."
+
+It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin.  Sophia Antonovna
+had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and had seen Miss
+Haldin.  She lived in a town "in the centre," sharing her compassionate labours
+between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the heartrending misery of
+bereaved homes.  She did not spare herself in good service, Sophia Antonovna
+assured me.
+
+"She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable body," the
+woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of enthusiasm.
+
+A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest on my
+side.  We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted us.  In the
+course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna remarked suddenly--
+
+"I suppose you remember seeing me before?  That evening when Natalia came to
+ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young man who.
+. . ."
+
+"I remember perfectly," I said.  When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had in my
+possession that young man's journal given me by Miss Haldin she became
+intensely interested.  She did not conceal her curiosity to see the document.
+
+I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me next day
+for that purpose.
+
+She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed me the
+book with a faint sigh.  While moving about Russia, she had seen Razumov too.
+ He lived, not "in the centre," but "in the south."  She described to me a
+little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some very small town, hiding
+within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown with nettles.  He was crippled,
+ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla the Samaritan tended him unweariedly
+with the pure joy of unselfish devotion.  There was nothing in that task to
+become disillusioned about.
+
+I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have visited
+Mr. Razumov.  I did not even understand the motive.  But she informed me that
+she was not the only one.
+
+"Some of _us_ always go to see him when passing through.  He is intelligent.
+ We has ideas. . . .  He talks well, too."
+
+Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov's public confession in
+Laspara's house.  Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what had
+occurred there.  Razumov himself had told her all about it, most minutely.
+
+Then, looking hard at me with her brilliant black eyes--
+
+"There are evil moments in every life.  A false suggestion enters one's brain,
+and then fear is born--fear of oneself, fear for oneself.  Or else a false
+courage--who knows?  Well, call it what you like ; but tell me, how many of
+them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as he himself says
+in that book) rather than go on living, secretly debased in their own eyes?
+ How many? . . .  And please mark this--he was safe when he did it.  It was
+just when he believed himself safe and more--infinitely more--when the
+possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that
+he discovered that his bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work
+of his hate and pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence
+before him.  There's character in such a discovery."
+
+I accepted her conclusion in silence.  Who would care to question the grounds
+of forgiveness or compassion?  However, it appeared later on, that there was
+some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the revolutionary world to
+Razumov the betrayer.  Sophia Antonovna continued uneasily--
+
+"And then, you know, he was the victim of an outrage.  It was not authorized.
+ Nothing was decided as to what was to be done with him.  He had confessed
+voluntarily.  And that Nikita who burst the drums of his ears purposely, out on
+the landing, you know, as if carried away by indignation--well, he has turned
+out to be a scoundrel of the worst kind--a traitor himself, a betrayer--a spy!
+ Razumov told me he had charged him with it by a sort of inspiration. . . ."
+
+"I had a glimpse of that brute," I said.  "How any of you could have been
+deceived for half a day passes my comprehension!"
+
+She interrupted me.
+
+"There!  There!  Don't talk of it.  The first time I saw him, I, too, was
+appalled.  They cried me down.  We were always telling each other, 'Oh! you
+mustn't mind his appearance.'  And then he was always ready to kill.  There was
+no doubt of it.  He killed--yes! in both camps.  The fiend. . . ."
+
+Then Sophia Antonovna, after mastering the angry trembling of her lips, told me
+a very queer tale.  It went that Councillor Mikulin, travelling in Germany
+(shortly after Razumov's disappearance from Geneva), happened to meet Peter
+Ivanovitch in a railway carriage.  Being alone in the compartment, these two
+talked together half the night, and it was then that Mikulin the Police Chief
+gave a hint to the Arch-Revolutionist as to the true character of the
+arch-slayer of gendarmes.  It looks as though Mikulin had wanted to get rid of
+that particular agent of his own!  He might have grown tired of him, or
+frightened of him.  It must also be said that Mikulin had inherited the
+sinister Nikita from his predecessor in office.
+
+And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a mute
+witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes.
+ But I permitted myself a question--
+
+"Tell me, please, Sophia Antonovna, did Madame de S--- leave all her fortune to
+Peter Ivanovitch?"
+
+"Not a bit of it."  The woman revolutionist shrugged her shoulders in disgust.
+ "She died without making a will.  A lot of nephews and nieces came down from
+St. Petersburg, like a flock of vultures, and fought for her money amongst
+themselves.  All beastly Kammerherrs and Maids of Honour--abominable court
+flunkeys.  Tfui!"
+
+"One does not hear much of Peter Ivanovitch now," I remarked, after a pause.
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch," said Sophia Antonovna gravely, "has united himself to a
+peasant girl."
+
+I was truly astonished.
+
+"What!  On the Riviera?"
+
+"What nonsense!  Of course not."
+
+Sophia Antonovna's tone was slightly tart.
+
+"Is he, then, living actually in Russia?  It's a tremendous risk--isn't it?" I
+cried.  "And all for the sake of a peasant girl.  Don't you think it's very
+wrong of him?"
+
+Sophia Antonovna preserved a mysterious silence
+for a while, then made a statement.  "He just
+simply adores her."
+
+"Does he?  Well, then, I hope that she won't
+hesitate to beat him."
+
+Sophia Antonovna got up and wished me good-bye,
+as though she had not heard a word of my impious
+hope; but, in the very doorway, where I attended
+her, she turned round for an instant, and
+declared in a firm voice--
+
+"Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
+
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