Under Western Eyes / Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924

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Title: Under Western Eyes

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #2480]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 natu