His eyes which he turned upon Razumov seemed to be starting out of his head. This grotesqueness of aspect no longer shocked Razumov. He said with gloomy conviction–
“Haldin will never speak.”
“That remains to be seen,” muttered the General.
“I am certain,” insisted Razumov. “A man like this never speaks. . . . Do you imagine that I am here from fear?” he added violently. He felt ready to stand by his opinion of Haldin to the last extremity.
“Certainly not,” protested the General, with great simplicity of tone. “And I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Razumov, that if he had not come with his tale to such a staunch and loyal Russian as you, he would have disappeared like a stone in the water . . . which would have had a detestable effect,” he added, with a bright, cruel smile under his stony stare. “So you see, there can be no suspicion of any fear here.”
The Prince intervened, looking at Razumov round the back of the armchair.
“Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action. Be at ease in that respect, pray.”
He turned to the General uneasily.
“That’s why I am here. You may be surprised why I should . . . .”
The General hastened to interrupt.
“Not at all. Extremely natural. You saw the importance. . . .”
“Yes,” broke in the Prince. “And I venture to ask insistently that mine and Mr. Razumov’s intervention should not become public. He is a young man of promise–of remarkable aptitudes.”
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” murmured the General. “He inspires confidence.”
“All sorts of pernicious views are so widespread nowadays–they taint such unexpected quarters– that, monstrous as it seems, he might suffer. . . his studies. . . his. . .”
The General, with his elbows on the desk, took his head between his hands.
“Yes. Yes. I am thinking it out. . . . How long is it since you left him at your rooms, Mr. Razumov?”
Razumov mentioned the hour which nearly corresponded with the time of his distracted flight from the big slum house. He had made up his mind to keep Ziemianitch out of the affair completely. To mention him at all would mean imprisonment for the “bright soul,” perhaps cruel floggings, and in the end a journey to Siberia in chains. Razumov, who had beaten Ziemianitch, felt for him now a vague,
remorseful tenderness.
The General, giving way for the first time to his secret sentiments, exclaimed contemptuously–
“And you say he came in to make you this confidence like this–for nothing–_a propos des bottes_.”
Razumov felt danger in the air. The merciless suspicion of despotism had spoken openly at last. Sudden fear sealed Razumov’s lips. The silence of the room resembled now the silence of a deep dungeon, where time does not count, and a suspect person is sometimes forgotten for ever. But the Prince came to the rescue.
“Providence itself has led the wretch in a moment of mental aberration to seek Mr. Razumov on the strength of some old, utterly
misinterpreted exchange of ideas–some sort of idle speculative conversation–months ago–I am told–and completely forgotten till now by Mr. Razumov.”
“Mr. Razumov,” queried the General meditatively, after a short silence, “do you often indulge in speculative conversation?”
“No, Excellency,” answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of self-confidence. “I am a man of deep convictions. Crude opinions are in the air. They are not always worth combating. But even the silent contempt of a serious mind may be misinterpreted by headlong utopists.”
The General stared from between his hands. Prince K— murmured–
“A serious young man. _Un esprit superieur_.”
“I see that, _mon cher Prince_,” said the General. “Mr. Razumov is quite safe with me. I am interested in him. He has, it seems, the great and useful quality of inspiring
confidence. What I was wondering at is why the other should mention anything at all–I mean even the bare fact alone–if his object was only to obtain temporary shelter for a few hours. For, after all, nothing was easier than to say nothing about it unless, indeed, he were trying, under a crazy misapprehension of your true sentiments, to enlist your assistance–eh, Mr. Razumov?”
It seemed to Razumov that the floor was moving slightly. This grotesque man in a tight uniform was terrible. It was right that he should be terrible.
“I can see what your Excellency has in your mind. But I can only answer that I don’t know why.”
“I have nothing in my mind,” murmured the General, with gentle surprise.
“I am his prey–his helpless prey,” thought Razumov. The fatigues and the disgusts of that afternoon, the need to forget, the fear which he could not keep off, reawakened his hate for Haldin.
“Then I can’t help your Excellency. I don’t know what he meant. I only know there was a moment when I wished to kill him. There was also a moment when I wished myself dead. I said nothing. I was overcome. I provoked no
confidence–I asked for no explanations–“
Razumov seemed beside himself; but his mind was lucid. It was really a calculated outburst.
“It is rather a pity,” the General said, “that you did not. Don’t you know at all what he means to do?” Razumov calmed down and saw an opening there.
“He told me he was in hopes that a sledge would meet him about half an hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post on the left from the upper end of Karabelnaya. At any rate, he meant to be there at that time. He did not even ask me for a change of clothes.”
“_Ah voila_!” said the General, turning to Prince K with an air of satisfaction. “There is a way to keep your _protege_, Mr. Razumov, quite clear of any connexion with the actual arrest. We shall be ready for that gentleman in
Karabelnaya.”
The Prince expressed his gratitude. There was real emotion in his voice. Razumov, motionless, silent, sat staring at the carpet. The General turned to him.
“Half an hour after midnight. Till then we have to depend on you, Mr. Razumov. You don’t think he is likely to change his purpose?”
“How can I tell?” said Razumov. “Those men are not of the sort that ever changes its purpose.”
” What men do you mean?”
“Fanatical lovers of liberty in general. Liberty with a capital L, Excellency. Liberty that means nothing precise. Liberty in whose name crimes are committed.”
The General murmured–
“I detest rebels of every kind. I can’t help it. It’s my nature!”
He clenched a fist and shook it, drawing back his arm. “They shall be destroyed, then.”
“They have made a sacrifice of their lives beforehand,” said Razumov with malicious pleasure and looking the General straight in the face. “If Haldin does change his purpose to- night, you may depend on it that it will not be to save his life by flight in some other way. He would have thought then of something else to attempt. But that is not likely.”
The General repeated as if to himself, “They shall be destroyed.”
Razumov assumed an impenetrable expression.
The Prince exclaimed–
“What a terrible necessity!”
The General’s arm was lowered slowly.
“One comfort there is. That brood leaves no posterity. I’ve always said it, one effort, pitiless, persistent, steady–and we are done with them for ever.”
Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not have gone on bearing the responsibility.
“I detest rebels. These subversive minds! These intellectual _debauches_! My existence has been built on fidelity. It’s a feeling. To defend it I am ready to lay down my life–and even my honour–if that were needed. But pray tell me what honour can there be as against rebels–against people that deny God Himself– perfect unbelievers! Brutes. It is horrible to think of.”
During this tirade Razumov, facing the General, had nodded slightly twice. Prince K—,
standing on one side with his grand air, murmured, casting up his eyes–
“_Helas!_”
Then lowering his glance and with great decision declared–
“This young man, General, is perfectly fit to apprehend the bearing of your memorable words.”
The General’s whole expression changed from dull resentment to perfect urbanity.
“I would ask now, Mr. Razumov,” he said, “to return to his home. Note that I don’t ask Mr. Razumov whether he has justified his absence to his guest. No doubt he did this sufficiently. But I don’t ask. Mr. Razumov inspires
confidence. It is a great gift. I only suggest that a more prolonged absence might awaken the criminal’s suspicions and induce him perhaps to change his plans.”
He rose and with a scrupulous courtesy escorted his visitors to the ante-room encumbered with flower-pots.
Razumov parted with the Prince at the corner of a street. In the carriage he had listened to speeches where natural sentiment struggled with caution. Evidently the Prince was afraid of encouraging any hopes of future intercourse. But there was a touch of tenderness in the voice uttering in the dark the guarded general phrases of goodwill. And the Prince too said–
“I have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Razumov.”
“They all, it seems, have confidence in me,” thought Razumov dully. He had an indulgent contempt for the man sitting shoulder to shoulder with him in the confined space. Probably he was afraid of scenes with his wife. She was said to be proud and violent.
It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in the comfort and safety of lives. But he wanted to put the Prince’s mind at ease; and with a proper amount of emphasis he said that, being conscious of some small abilities and confident in his power of work, he trusted his future to his own
exertions. He expressed his gratitude for the helping hand. Such dangerous situations did not occur twice in the course of one life–he added.
“And you have met this one with a firmness of mind and correctness of feeling which give me a high idea of your worth,” the Prince said solemnly. “You have now only to persevere–to persevere.”
On getting out on the pavement Razumov saw an ungloved hand extended to him through the lowered window of the brougham. It detained his own in its grasp for a moment, while the light of a street lamp fell upon the Prince’s long face and old-fashioned grey whiskers.
“I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences. . . “
“After what your Excellency has condescended to do for me, I can only rely on my conscience.”
“_Adieu_,” said the whiskered head with feeling.
Razumov bowed. The brougham glided away with a slight swish in the snow–he was alone on the edge of the pavement.
He said to himself that there was nothing to think about, and began walking towards his home.
He walked quietly. It was a common experience to walk thus home to bed after an evening spent somewhere with his fellows or in the cheaper seats of a theatre. After he had gone a little way the familiarity of things got hold of him. Nothing was changed. There was the familiar corner; and when he turned it he saw the familiar dim light of the provision shop kept by a German woman. There were loaves of stale bread, bunches of onions and strings of sausages behind the small window-panes. They were closing it. The sickly lame fellow whom he knew so well by sight staggered out into the snow embracing a large shutter.
Nothing would change. There was the familiar gateway yawning black with feeble glimmers marking the arches of the different staircases.
The sense of life’s continuity depended on trifling bodily impressions. The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the familiar clammy banister. The
exceptional could not prevail against the material contacts which make one day resemble another. To-morrow would be like yesterday.
It was only on the stage that the unusual was outwardly acknowledged.
“I suppose,” thought Razumov, “that if I had made up my mind to blow out my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly as I am doing it now. What’s a man to do? What must be must be. Extraordinary things do happen. But when they have happened they are done with. Thus, too, when the mind is made up. That question is done with. And the daily concerns, the familiarities of our thought swallow it up–and the life goes on as before with its mysterious and secret sides quite out of sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing.”
Razumov unlocked his door and took the key out; entered very quietly and bolted the door behind him carefully.
He thought, “He hears me,” and after bolting the door he stood still holding his breath. There was not a sound. He crossed the bare outer room, stepping deliberately in the darkness. Entering the other, he felt all over his table for the matchbox. The silence, but for the groping of his hand, was profound. Could the fellow be sleeping so soundly?
He struck a light and looked at the bed. Haldin was lying on his back as before, only both his hands were under his head. His eyes were open. He stared at the ceiling.
Razumov held the match up. He saw the clear-cut features, the firm chin, the white forehead and the topknot of fair hair against the white pillow. There he was, lying flat on his back. Razumov thought suddenly, “I have walked over his chest.”
He continued to stare till the match burnt itself out; then struck another and lit the lamp in silence without looking towards the bed any more. He had turned his back on it and was hanging his coat on a peg when he heard Haldin sigh profoundly, then ask in a tired voice–
“Well! And what have you arranged?”
The emotion was so great that Razumov was glad to put his hands against the wall. A diabolical impulse to say, “I have given you up to the police,” frightened him exceedingly. But he did not say that. He said, without turning round, in a muffled voice–
“It’s done.”
Again he heard Haldin sigh. He walked to the table, sat down with the lamp before him, and only then looked towards the bed.
In the distant corner of the large room far away from the lamp, which was small and provided with a very thick china shade, Haldin appeared like a dark and elongated shape–rigid with the immobility of death. This body seemed to have less substance than its own phantom walked over by Razumov in the street white with snow. It was more alarming in its shadowy, persistent reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion.
Haldin was heard again.
“You must have had a walk–such a walk. . .” he murmured deprecatingly.” This weather. . . .”
Razumov answered with energy–
” Horrible walk. . . . A nightmare of a walk.”
He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then–
“And so you have seen Ziemianitch–brother?”
“I’ve seen him.”
Razumov, remembering the time he had spent with the Prince, thought it prudent to add, “I had to wait some time.”
“A character–eh? It’s extraordinary what a sense of the necessity of freedom there is in that man. And he has sayings too–simple, to the point, such as only the people can invent in their rough sagacity. A character that. . . .”
“I, you understand, haven’t had much
opportunity. . . .” Razumov muttered through his teeth.
Haldin continued to stare at the ceiling.
“You see, brother, I have been a good deal in that house of late. I used to take there books– leaflets. Not a few of the poor people who live there can read. And, you see, the guests for the feast of freedom must be sought for in byways and hedges. The truth is, I have almost lived in that house of late. I slept sometimes in the stable. There is a stable. . . .”
“That’s where I had my interview with Ziemianitch,” interrupted Razumov gently. A mocking spirit entered into him and he added, “It was satisfactory in a sense. I came away from it much relieved.”
“Ah! he’s a fellow,” went on Haldin, talking slowly at the ceiling. “I came to know him in that way, you see. For some weeks now, ever since I resigned myself to do what had to be done, I tried to isolate myself. I gave up my rooms. What was the good of exposing a decent widow woman to the risk of being worried out of her mind by the police? I gave up seeing any of our comrades. . . .”
Razumov drew to himself a half-sheet of paper and began to trace lines on it with a pencil.
“Upon my word,” he thought angrily, “he seems to have thought of everybody’s safety but mine.”
Haldin was talking on.
“This morning–ah! this morning–that was different. How can I explain to you? Before the deed was done I wandered at night and lay hid in the day, thinking it out, and I felt restful. Sleepless but restful. What was there for me to torment myself about? But this morning–after! Then it was that I became restless. I could not have stopped in that big house full of misery. The miserable of this world can’t give you peace. Then when that silly caretaker began to shout, I said to myself, ‘There is a young man in this town head and shoulders above common prejudices.'”
“Is he laughing at me?” .Razumov asked himself, going on with his aimless drawing of triangles and squares. And suddenly he thought: “My behaviour must appear to him strange. Should he take fright at my manner and rush off somewhere I shall be undone completely. That infernal General. . . .”
He dropped the pencil and turned abruptly towards the bed with the shadowy figure extended full length on it–so much more indistinct than the one over whose breast he had walked without faltering. Was this, too, a phantom?
The silence had lasted a long time. “He is no longer here,” was the thought against which Razumov struggled desperately, quite frightened at its absurdity. “He is already gone and this. . .only. . . .”
He could resist no longer. He sprang to his feet, saying aloud, “I am intolerably anxious,” and in a few headlong strides stood by the side of the bed. His hand fell lightly on Haldin’s shoulder, and directly he felt its reality he was beset by an insane temptation to grip that exposed throat and squeeze the breath out of that body, lest it should escape his custody, leaving only a phantom behind.
Haldin did not stir a limb, but his overshadowed eyes moving a little gazed upwards at Razumov with wistful gratitude for this manifestation of feeling.
Razumov turned away and strode up and down the room. “It would have been possibly a kindness,” he muttered to himself, and was appalled by the nature of that apology for a murderous intention his mind had found somewhere within him. And all the same he could not give it up. He became lucid about it. “What can he expect?” he thought. “The halter–in the end. And I. . . .”
This argument was interrupted by Haldin’s voice.
“Why be anxious for me? They can kill my body, but they cannot exile my soul from this world. I tell you what–I believe in this world so much that I cannot conceive eternity otherwise than as a very long life. That is perhaps the reason I am so ready to die.”
“H’m,” muttered Razumov, and biting his lower lip he continued to walk up and down and to carry on his strange argument.
Yes, to a man in such a situation–of course it would be an act of kindness. The question, however, was not how to be kind, but how to be firm. He was a slippery customer
“I too, Victor Victorovitch, believe in this world of ours,” he said with force. “I too, while I live. . . . But you seem determined to haunt it. You can’t seriously. . . mean”
The voice of the motionless Haldin began–
“Haunt it! Truly, the oppressors of thought which quickens the world, the destroyers of souls which aspire to perfection of human dignity, they shall be haunted. As to the destroyers of my mere body, I have forgiven them beforehand.”
Razumov had stopped apparently to listen, but at the same time he was observing his own
sensations. He was vexed with himself for attaching so much importance to what Haldin said.
“The fellow’s mad,” he thought firmly, but this opinion did not mollify him towards Haldin. It was a particularly impudent form of lunacy–and when it got loose in the sphere of public life of a country, it was obviously the duty of every good citizen. . . .
This train of thought broke off short there and was succeeded by a paroxysm of silent hatred towards Haldin, so intense that Razumov hastened to speak at random.
“Yes. Eternity, of course. I, too, can’t very well represent it to myself. . . . I imagine it, however, as something quiet and dull. There would be nothing unexpected–don’t you see? The element of time would be wanting.”
He pulled out his watch and gazed at it. Haldin turned over on his side and looked on intently.
Razumov got frightened at this movement. A slippery customer this fellow with a phantom. It was not midnight yet. He hastened on–
“And unfathomable mysteries! Can you conceive secret places in Eternity? Impossible. Whereas life is full of them. There are secrets of birth, for instance. One carries them on to the grave. There is something comical. . . but never mind. And there are secret motives of conduct. A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them. That is interesting and so unfathomable! For instance, a man goes out of a room for a walk. Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He comes back–he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice of the snow on the ground–and behold he is no longer the same man. The most unlikely things have a secret power over one’s thoughts–the grey whiskers of a particular person–the goggle eyes of another.”
Razumov’s forehead was moist. He took a turn or two in the room, his head low and smiling to himself viciously.
“Have you ever reflected on the power of goggle eyes and grey whiskers? Excuse me. You seem to think I must be crazy to talk in this vein at such a time. But I am not talking lightly. I have seen instances. It has happened to me once to be talking to a man whose fate was affected by physical facts of that kind. And the man did not know it. Of course, it was a case of conscience, but the material facts such as these brought about the solution. . . . And you tell me, Victor Victorovitch, not to be anxious! Why! I am responsible for you,” Razumov almost shrieked.
He avoided with difficulty a burst of Mephistophelian laughter. Haldin, very pale, raised himself on his elbow.
“And the surprises of life,” went on Razumov, after glancing at the other uneasily. “Just consider their astonishing nature. A mysterious impulse induces you to come here. I don’t say you have done wrong. Indeed, from a certain point of view you could not have done better. You might have gone to a man with affections and family ties. You have such ties yourself. As to me, you know I have been brought up in an educational institute where they did not give us enough to eat. To talk of affection in such a connexion–you perceive yourself. . . . As to ties, the only ties I have in the world are social. I must get acknowledged in some way before I can act at all. I sit here working. . . . And don’t you think I am working for progress too? I’ve got to find my own ideas of the true way. . . . Pardon me,” continued Razumov, after drawing breath and with a short, throaty laugh, “but I haven’t inherited a revolutionary inspiration together with a resemblance from an uncle.”
He looked again at his watch and noticed with sickening disgust that there were yet a good many minutes to midnight. He tore watch and chain off his waistcoat and laid them on the table well in the circle of bright lamplight. Haldin, reclining on his elbow, did not stir. Razumov was made uneasy by this attitude. “What move is he meditating over so quietly?” he thought. “He must be prevented. I must keep on talking to him.”
He raised his voice.
“You are a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin–I don’t know what–to no end of people. I am just a man. Here I stand before you. A man with a mind. Did it ever occur to you how a man who had never heard a word of warm affection or praise in his life would think on matters on which you would think first with or against your class, your domestic tradition–your fireside prejudices?. . . Did you ever consider how a man like that would feel? I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your future? Am I to let my intelligence, my aspirations towards a better lot, be robbed of the only thing it has to go upon at the will of violent enthusiasts? You come from your province, but all this land is mine–or I have nothing. No doubt you shall be looked upon as a martyr some day–a sort of hero–a political saint. But I beg to be excused. I am content in fitting myself to be a worker. And what can you people do by
scattering a few drops of blood on the snow? On this Immensity. On this unhappy Immensity! I tell you,” he cried, in a vibrating, subdued voice, and advancing one step nearer the bed, “that what it needs is not a lot of haunting phantoms that I could walk through–but a man!”
Haldin threw his arms forward as if to keep him off in horror.
“I understand it all now,” he exclaimed, with awestruck dismay. “I understand–at last.”
Razumov staggered back against the table. His forehead broke out in perspiration while a cold shudder ran down his spine.
“What have I been saying?” he asked himself. “Have I let him slip through my fingers after all?”
“He felt his lips go stiff like buckram, and instead of a reassuring smile only achieved an uncertain grimace.
” What will you have?” he began in a
conciliating voice which got steady after the first trembling word or two. “What will you have? Consider–a man of studious, retired habits–and suddenly like this. . . . I am not practised in talking delicately. But. . . .”
He felt anger, a wicked anger, get hold of him again.
“What were we to do together till midnight? Sit here opposite each other and think of your–your- shambles? “
Haldin had a subdued, heartbroken attitude. He bowed his head; his hands hung between his knees. His voice was low and pained but calm.
“I see now how it is, Razumov–brother. You are a magnanimous soul, but my action is abhorrent to you–alas. . . .”
Razumov stared. From fright he had set his teeth so hard that his whole face ached. It was impossible for him to make a sound.
“And even my person, too, is loathsome to you perhaps,” Haldin added mournfully, after a short pause, looking up for a moment, then fixing his gaze on the floor. “For indeed, unless one. . . .”
He broke off evidently waiting for a word. Razumov remained silent. Haldin nodded his head dejectedly twice.
“Of course. Of course,” he murmured. . . . “Ah! weary work!”
He remained perfectly still for a moment, then made Razumov’s leaden heart strike a ponderous blow by springing up briskly.
“So be it,” he cried sadly in a low, distinct tone. “Farewell then.”
Razumov started forward, but the sight of Haldin’s raised hand checked him before he could get away from the table. He leaned on it heavily, listening to the faint sounds of some town clock tolling the hour. Haldin, already at the door, tall and straight as an arrow, with his pale face and a hand raised attentively, might have posed for the statue of a daring youth listening to an inner voice. Razumov mechanically glanced down at his watch. When he looked towards the door again Haldin had vanished. There was a faint rustling in the outer room, the feeble click of a bolt drawn back lightly. He was gone–almost as noiseless as a vision.
Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted, voiceless lips. The outer door stood open. Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far over the banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glimmering flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of somebody running down the stairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift, pattering sound, which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting shadow passed over the glimmer–a wink of the tiny flame. Then stillness.
Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells of the unclean staircase. All quiet.
He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him. The peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch. Razumov stood looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.
“Slow,” he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him. His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled–
“Stopped,” and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly–
“It’s done. . . . And now to work.”
He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought–
“There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house across the street.”
He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a cloak to the nose and with a General’s plumed, cocked hat on his head. This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally had to shake his head violently to get rid of it. The man would be disguised perhaps as a peasant. . . a beggar. . . . Perhaps he would be just buttoned up in a dark overcoat and carrying a loaded stick–a shifty-eyed rascal, smelling of raw onions and spirits.
This evocation brought on positive nausea. “Why do I want to bother about this?” thought Razumov with disgust. “Am I a gendarme?
Moreover, it is done.”
He got up in great agitation. It was not done. Not yet. Not till half-past twelve. And the watch had stopped. This reduced him to despair. Impossible to know the time! The landlady and all the people across the landing were asleep. How could he go and. . . . God knows what they would imagine, or how much they would guess. He dared not go into the streets to find out. “I am a suspect now. There’s no use shirking that fact,” he said to himself bitterly. If Haldin from some cause or another gave them the slip and failed to turn up in the Karabelnaya the police would be invading his lodging. And if he were not in he could never clear himself. Never. Razumov looked wildly about as if for some means of seizing upon time which seemed to have escaped him altogether. He had never, as far as he could remember, heard the striking of that town clock in his rooms before this night. And he was not even sure now whether he had heard it really on this night.
He went to the window and stood there with slightly bent head on the watch for the faint sound. ‘I will stay here till I hear
something,” he said to himself. He stood still, his ear turned to the panes. An atrocious aching numbness with shooting pains in his back and legs tortured him. He did not budge. His mind hovered on the borders of delirium. He heard himself suddenly saying, “I confess,” as a person might do on the rack. “I am on the rack,” he thought. He felt ready to swoon. The faint deep boom of the distant clock seemed to explode in his head–he heard it so clearly. . . . One!
If Haldin had not turned up the police would have been already here ransacking the house. No sound reached him. This time it was done.
He dragged himself painfully to the table and dropped into the chair. He flung the book away and took a square sheet of paper. It was like the pile of sheets covered with his neat minute handwriting, only blank. He took a pen
brusquely and dipped it with a vague notion of going on with the writing of his essay–but his pen remained poised over the sheet. It hung there for some time before it came down and formed long scrawly letters.
Still-faced and his lips set hard, Razumov began to write. When he wrote a large hand his neat writing lost its character altogether–became unsteady, almost childish. He wrote five lines one under the other.
History not Theory.
Patriotism not Internationalism.
Evolution not Revolution.
Direction not Destruction.
Unity not Disruption.
He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and remained fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand groped all over the table for the penknife.
He rose at last, and walking up with measured steps stabbed the paper with the penknife to the lath and plaster wall at the head of the bed. This done he stepped back a pace and flourished his hand with a glance round the room.
After that he never looked again at the bed. He took his big cloak down from its peg and, wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of his room. A leaden sleep closed his eyelids at once. Several times that night he woke up shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its enormous expanse as if it were a map. But after each shuddering start his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and he slept again.
III
Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov’s story, my mind, the decent mind of an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of the task.
The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_ of a strange human document, but the rendering–I perceive it now clearly–of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface;
conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.
I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov’s record, I lay it aside, I take up the pen–and the pen being ready for its office of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in creeping under its point is no other word than “cynicism.”
For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent. . . . But I must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his age, had become crystallized by the shock of his contact with Haldin.
Razumov woke up for the tenth time perhaps with a heavy shiver. Seeing the light of day in his window, he resisted the inclination to lay himself down again. He did not remember
anything, but he did not think it strange to find himself on the sofa in his cloak and chilled to the bone. The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless,
containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young man. It was the
awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man ninety years old. He looked at the lamp which had burnt itself out. It stood there, the extinguished beacon of his labours, a cold object of brass and porcelain, amongst the scattered pages of his notes and small piles of books–a mere litter of blackened paper–dead matter–without significance or interest.
He got on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness, a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts. There was not a sound in the house.
Turning away from the peg, he thought in that same lifeless manner that it must be very early yet; but when he looked at the watch on his table he saw both hands arrested at twelve o’clock.
“Ah! yes,” he mumbled to himself, and as if beginning to get roused a little he took a survey of his room. The paper stabbed to the wall arrested his attention. He eyed it from the distance without approval or perplexity; but when he heard the servant-girl beginning to bustle about in the outer room with the
_samovar_ for his morning tea, he walked up to it and took it down with an air of profound indifference.
While doing this he glanced down at the bed on which he had not slept that night. The hollow in the pillow made by the weight of Haldin’s head was very noticeable.
Even his anger at this sign of the man’s passage was dull. He did not try to nurse it into life. He did nothing all that day; he neglected even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him–and if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
He yawned frequently. He drank large quantities of tea, he walked about aimlessly, and when he sat down he did not budge for a long time. He spent some time drumming on the window with his finger-tips quietly. In his listless wanderings round about the table he caught sight of his own face in the looking-glass and that arrested him. The eyes which returned his stare were the most unhappy eyes he had ever seen. And this was the first thing which disturbed the mental
stagnation of that day.
He was not affected personally. He merely thought that life without happiness is
impossible. What was happiness? He yawned and went on shuffling about and about between the walls of his room. Looking forward was
happiness–that’s all–nothing more. To look forward to the gratification of some desire, to the gratification of some passion, love, ambition, hate–hate too indubitably. Love and hate. And to escape the dangers of existence, to live without fear, was also happiness. There was nothing else. Absence of fear–looking forward. “Oh! the miserable lot of humanity!” he exclaimed mentally; and added at once in his thought, “I ought to be happy enough as far as that goes.” But he was not excited by that assurance. On the contrary, he yawned again as he had been yawning all day. He was mildly surprised to discover himself being overtaken by night. The room grew dark swiftly though time had seemed to stand still. How was it that he had not noticed the passing of that day? Of course, it was the watch being stopped. . . .
He did not light his lamp, but went over to the bed and threw himself on it without any
hesitation. Lying on his back, he put his hands under his head and stared upward. After a moment he thought, “I am lying here like that man. I wonder if he slept while I was
struggling with the blizzard in the streets. No, he did not sleep. But why should I not sleep?” and he felt the silence of the night press upon all his limbs like a weight.
In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear- cut strokes of the town clock counting off midnight penetrated the quietness of his suspended animation.
Again he began to think. It was twenty-four hours since that man left his room. Razumov had a distinct feeling that Haldin in the fortress was sleeping that night. It was a certitude which made him angry because he did not want to think of Haldin, but he justified it to himself by physiological and psychological reasons. The fellow had hardly slept for weeks on his own confession, and now every incertitude was at an end for him. No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for resignation to die. Haldin slept perhaps more soundly than General T—, whose task–weary work too–was not done, and over whose head hung the sword of revolutionary vengeance.
Razumov, remembering the thick-set man with his heavy jowl resting on the collar of his uniform, the champion of autocracy, who had let no sign of surprise, incredulity, or joy escape him, but whose goggle eyes could express a mortal hatred of all rebellion–Razumov moved uneasily on the bed.
“He suspected me,” he thought. “I suppose he must suspect everybody. He would be capable of suspecting his own wife, if Haldin had gone to her boudoir with his confession.”
Razumov sat up in anguish. Was he to remain a political suspect all his days? Was he to go through life as a man not wholly to be trusted– with a bad secret police note tacked on to his record? What sort of future could he look forward to?
“I am now a suspect,” he thought again; but the habit of reflection and that desire of safety, of an ordered life, which was so strong in him came to his assistance as the night wore on. His quiet, steady, and laborious existence would vouch at length for his loyalty. There were many permitted ways to serve one’s country. There was an activity that made for progress without being revolutionary. The field of influence was great and infinitely varied–once one had conquered a name.
His thought like a circling bird reverted after four-and-twenty hours to the silver medal, and as it were poised itself there.
When the day broke he had not slept, not for a moment, but he got up not very tired and quite sufficiently self-possessed for all practical purposes.
He went out and attended three lectures in the morning. But the work in the library was a mere dumb show of research. He sat with many volumes open before him trying to make notes and extracts. His new tranquillity was like a flimsy garment, and seemed to float at the mercy of a casual word. Betrayal! Why! the fellow had done all that was necessary to betray himself. Precious little had been needed to deceive him.
“I have said no word to him that was not strictly true. Not one word,” Razumov argued with himself.
Once engaged on this line of thought there could be no question of doing useful work. The same ideas went on passing through his mind, and he pronounced mentally the same words over and over again. He shut up all the books and rammed all his papers into his pocket with convulsive movements, raging inwardly against Haldin.
As he was leaving the library a long bony student in a threadbare overcoat joined him, stepping moodily by his side. Razumov answered his mumbled greeting without looking at him at all.
“What does he want with me? “he thought with a strange dread of the unexpected which he tried to shake off lest it should fasten itself upon his life for good and all. And the other, muttering cautiously with downcast eyes, supposed that his comrade had seen the news of de P—‘s executioner–that was the expression he used–having been arrested the night before last. . . .
“I’ve been ill–shut up in my rooms,” Razumov mumbled through his teeth.
The tall student, raising his shoulders, shoved his hands deep into his pockets. He had a hairless, square, tallowy chin which trembled slightly as he spoke, and his nose nipped bright red by the sharp air looked like a false nose of painted cardboard between the sallow cheeks. His whole appearance was stamped with the mark of cold and hunger. He stalked deliberately at Razumov’s elbow with his eyes on the ground.
“It’s an official statement,” he continued in the same cautious mutter.” It may be a lie. But there was somebody arrested between midnight and one in the morning on Tuesday. This is certain.”
And talking rapidly under the cover of his downcast air, he told Razumov that this was known through an inferior Government clerk employed at the Central Secretariat. That man belonged to one of the revolutionary circles. “The same, in fact, I am affiliated to,” remarked the student.
They were crossing a wide quadrangle. An infinite distress possessed Razumov, annihilated his energy, and before his eyes everything appeared confused and as if evanescent. He dared not leave the fellow there. “He may be affiliated to the police,” was the thought that passed through his mind. “Who could tell?” But eyeing the miserable frost-nipped, famine-struck figure of his companion he perceived the absurdity of his suspicion.
“But I–you know–I don’t belong to any circle. I. . . .”
He dared not say any more. Neither dared he mend his pace. The other, raising and setting down his lamentably shod feet with exact deliberation, protested in a low tone that it was not necessary for everybody to belong to an organization. The most valuable personalities remained outside. Some of the best work was done outside the organization. Then very fast, with whispering, feverish lips–
“The man arrested in the street was Haldin.”
And accepting Razumov’s dismayed silence as natural enough, he assured him that there was no mistake. That Government clerk was on night duty at the Secretariat. Hearing a great noise of footsteps in the hall and aware that
political prisoners were brought over sometimes at night from the fortress, he opened the door of the room in which he was working, suddenly. Before the gendarme on duty could push him back and slam the door in his face, he had seen a prisoner being partly carried, partly dragged along the hall by a lot of policemen. He was being used very brutally. And the clerk had recognized Haldin perfectly. Less than half an hour afterwards General T— arrived at the Secretariat to examine that prisoner personally.
“Aren’t you astonished?” concluded the gaunt student.
“No,” said Razumov roughly–and at once regretted his answer.
“Everybody supposed Haldin was in the provinces– with his people. Didn’t you? “
The student turned his big hollow eyes upon Razumov, who said unguardedly–
“His people are abroad.”
He could have bitten his tongue out with vexation. The student pronounced in a tone of profound meaning-
” So! You alone were aware. . .” and stopped.
“They have sworn my ruin,” thought Razumov.” Have you spoken of this to anyone else?” he asked with bitter curiosity.
The other shook his head.
“No, only to you. Our circle thought that as Haldin had been often heard expressing a warm appreciation of your character. . . .”
Razumov could not restrain a gesture of angry despair which the other must have misunderstood in some way, because he ceased speaking and turned away his black, lack-lustre eyes.
They moved side by side in silence. Then the gaunt student began to whisper again, with averted gaze–
“As we have at present no one affiliated inside the fortress so as to make it possible to furnish him with a packet of poison, we have considered already some sort of retaliatory action–to follow very soon. . . .”
Razumov trudging on interrupted–
“Were you acquainted with Haldin? Did he know where you live?”
“I had the happiness to hear him speak twice,” his companion answered in the feverish whisper contrasting with the gloomy apathy of his face and bearing. “He did not know where I live. . . . I am lodging poorly with an artisan family. . . . I have just a corner in a room. It is not very practicable to see me there, but if you should need me for anything I am ready. . . .
Razumov trembled with rage and fear. He was beside himself, but kept his voice low.
“You are not to come near me. You are not to speak to me. Never address a single word to me. I forbid you.”
“Very well,” said the other submissively, showing no surprise whatever at this abrupt prohibition. “You don’t wish for secret
reasons. . . perfectly. . . I understand.”
He edged away at once, not looking up even; and Razumov saw his gaunt, shabby, famine-stricken figure cross the street obliquely with lowered head and that peculiar exact motion of the feet.
He watched him as one would watch a vision out of a nightmare, then he continued on his way, trying not to think. On his landing the
landlady seemed to be waiting for him. She was a short, thick, shapeless woman with a large yellow face wrapped up everlastingly in a black woollen shawl. When she saw him come up the last flight of stairs she flung both her arms up excitedly, then clasped her hands before her face.
“Kirylo Sidorovitch–little father–what have you been doing? And such a quiet young man, too! The police are just gone this moment after searching your rooms.”
Razumov gazed down at her with silent, scrutinizing attention. Her puffy yellow countenance was working with emotion. She screwed up her eyes at him entreatingly.
“Such a sensible young man! Anybody can see you are sensible. And now–like this–all at once. . . . What is the good of mixing yourself up with these Nihilists? Do give over, little father. They are unlucky people.”
Razumov moved his shoulders slightly.
“Or is it that some secret enemy has been calumniating you, Kirylo Sidorovitch? The world is full of black hearts and false denunciations nowadays. There is much fear about.”
“Have you heard that I have been denounced by some one?” asked Razumov, without taking his eyes off her quivering face.
But she had not heard anything. She had tried to find out by asking the police captain while his men were turning the room upside down. The police captain of the district had known her for the last eleven years and was a humane person. But he said to her on the landing, looking very black and vexed–
“My good woman, do not ask questions. I don’t know anything myself. The order comes from higher quarters.”
And indeed there had appeared, shortly after the arrival of the policemen of the district, a very superior gentleman in a fur coat and a shiny hat, who sat down in the room and looked through all the papers himself. He came alone and went away by himself, taking nothing with him. She had been trying to put things straight a little since they left.
Razumov turned away brusquely and entered his rooms.
All his books had been shaken and thrown on the floor. His landlady followed him, and stooping painfully began to pick them up into her apron. His papers and notes which were kept always neatly sorted (they all related to his studies) had been shuffled up and heaped together into a ragged pile in the middle of the table.
This disorder affected him profoundly, unreasonably. He sat down and stared. He had a distinct sensation of his very existence being undermined in some mysterious manner, of his moral supports falling away from him one by one. He even experienced a slight physical giddiness and made a movement as if to reach for something to steady himself with.
The old woman, rising to her feet with a low groan, shot all the books she had collected in her apron on to the sofa and left the room muttering and sighing.
It was only then that he noticed that the sheet of paper which for one night had remained stabbed to the wall above his empty bed was lying on top of the pile.
When he had taken it down the day before he had folded it in four, absent-mindedly, before dropping it on the table. And now he saw it lying uppermost, spread out, smoothed out even and covering all the confused pile of pages, the record of his intellectual life for the last three years. It had not been flung there. It had been placed there–smoothed out, too! He guessed in that an intention of profound meaning- -or perhaps some inexplicable mockery.
He sat staring at the piece of paper till his eyes began to smart. He did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the next day–which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution. This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to live–neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide. The idea of laying violent hands upon his body did not occur to Razumov. The unrelated organism bearing that label, walking, breathing, wearing these clothes, was of no importance to anyone, unless maybe to the landlady. The true Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future– in that future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy–for autocracy knows no law–and the lawlessness of revolution. The feeling that his moral personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own.
“What is the good of exerting my intelligence, of pursuing the systematic development of my faculties and all my plans of work?” he asked himself. “I want to guide my conduct by
reasonable convictions, but what security have I against something–some destructive horror– walking in upon me as I sit here?. . .”
Razumov looked apprehensively towards the door of the outer room as if expecting some shape of evil to turn the handle and appear before him silently.
“A common thief,” he said to himself,” finds more guarantees in the law he is breaking, and even a brute like Ziemianitch has his
consolation.” Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear and their lives remained their own.
But he slept as soundly that night as though he had been consoling himself in the manner of Ziemianitch. He dropped off suddenly, lay like a log, remembered no dream on waking. But it was as if his soul had gone out in the night to gather the flowers of wrathful wisdom. He got up in a mood of grim determination and as if with a new knowledge of his own nature. He looked mockingly on the heap of papers on his table; and left his room to attend the lectures, muttering to himself, “We shall see.”
He was in no humour to talk to anybody or hear himself questioned as to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of “Madcap Kostia.” He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal remonstrances. Noisily
blundering like a retriever puppy, his elated voice and great gestures filled the bare academy corridors with the joy of thoughtless animal life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great distance. His usual discourses treated of trotting horses, wine-parties in expensive restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy virtue, with a disarming artlessness of outlook. He pounced upon Razumov about midday, somewhat less uproariously than his habit was, and led him aside.
“Just a moment, Kirylo Sidorovitch. A few words here in this quiet corner.”
He felt Razumov’s reluctance, and insinuated his hand under his arm caressingly.
“No–pray do. I don’t want to talk to you about any of my silly scrapes. What are my scrapes? Absolutely nothing. Mere childishness. The other night I flung a fellow out of a certain place where I was having a fairly good time. A tyrannical little beast of a quill-driver from the Treasury department. He was bullying the people of the house. I rebuked him. ‘You are not behaving humanely to God’s creatures that are a jolly sight more estimable than yourself,’ I said. I can’t bear to see any tyranny, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Upon my word I can’t. He didn’t take it in good part at all. ‘Who’s that impudent puppy ?’ he begins to shout. I was in excellent form as it happened, and he went through the closed window very suddenly. He flew quite a long way into the yard. I raged like–like a–minotaur. The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers got under the table. . . . Such fun! My dad had to put his hand pretty deep into his pocket, I can tell you.” He chuckled.
“My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do get into unholy
scrapes.”
His elation fell. That was just it. What was his life? Insignificant; no good to anyone; a mere festivity. It would end some fine day in his getting his skull split with a champagne bottle in a drunken brawl. At such times, too, when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas. But he could never get any ideas into his head. His head wasn’t worth anything better than to be split by a champagne bottle.
Razumov, protesting that he had no time, made an attempt to get away. The other’s tone changed to confidential earnestness.
“For God’s sake, Kirylo, my dear soul, let me make some sort of sacrifice. It would not be a sacrifice really. I have my rich dad behind me. There’s positively no getting to the bottom of his pocket.”
And rejecting indignantly Razumov’s suggestion that this was drunken raving, he offered to lend him some money to escape abroad with. He could always get money from his dad. He had only to say that he had lost it at cards or something of that sort, and at the same time promise solemnly not to miss a single lecture for three months on end. That would fetch the old man; and he, Kostia, was quite equal to the sacrifice. Though he really did not see what was the good for him to attend the lectures. It was
perfectly hopeless.
“Won’t you let me be of some use?” he pleaded to the silent Razumov, who with his eyes on the ground and utterly unable to penetrate the real drift of the other’s intention, felt a strange reluctance to clear up the point.
“What makes you think I want to go abroad?” he asked at last very quietly.
Kostia lowered his voice.
“You had the police in your rooms yesterday. There are three or four of us who have heard of that. Never mind how we know. It is sufficient that we do. So we have been consulting
together.”
“Ah! You got to know that so soon,” muttered Razumov negligently.
“Yes. We did. And it struck us that a man like you. . . “
“What sort of a man do you take me to be?” Razumov interrupted him.
“A man of ideas–and a man of action too. But you are very deep, Kirylo. There’s no getting to the bottom of your mind. Not for fellows like me. But we all agreed that you must be preserved for our country. Of that we have no doubt whatever–I mean all of us who have heard Haldin speak of you on certain occasions. A man doesn’t get the police ransacking his rooms without there being some devilry hanging over his head. . . . And so if you think that it would be better for you to bolt at once. . . .”
Razumov tore himself away and walked down the corridor, leaving the other motionless with his mouth open. But almost at once he returned and stood before the amazed Kostia, who shut his mouth slowly. Razumov looked him straight in the eyes, before saying with marked deliberation and separating his words-
“I thank–you–very–much.”
He went away again rapidly. Kostia, recovering from his surprise at these manoeuvres, ran up behind him pressingly.
“No! Wait! Listen. I really mean it. It would be like giving your compassion to a starving fellow. Do you hear, Kirylo? And any disguise you may think of, that too I could procure from a costumier, a Jew I know. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly. Perhaps also a false beard or something of that kind may be needed.
“Razumov turned at bay.
“There are no false beards needed in this business, Kostia–you good-hearted lunatic, you. What do you know of my ideas? My ideas may be poison to you.” The other began to shake his head in energetic protest.
“What have you got to do with ideas? Some of them would make an end of your dad’s money-bags. Leave off meddling with what you don’t
understand. Go back to your trotting horses and your girls, and then you’ll be sure at least of doing no harm to anybody, and hardly any to yourself.”
The enthusiastic youth was overcome by this disdain.
“You’re sending me back to my pig’s trough, Kirylo. That settles it. I am an unlucky beast- -and I shall die like a beast too. But mind– it’s your contempt that has done for me.”
Razumov went off with long strides. That this simple and grossly festive soul should have fallen too under the revolutionary curse affected him as an ominous symptom of the time. He reproached himself for feeling troubled. Personally he ought to have felt reassured. There was an obvious advantage in this
conspiracy of mistaken judgment taking him for what he was not. But was it not strange?
Again he experienced that sensation of his conduct being taken out of his hands by Haldin’s revolutionary tyranny. His solitary and
laborious existence had been destroyed–the only thing he could call his own on this earth. By what right? he asked himself furiously. In what name?
What infuriated him most was to feel that the “thinkers” of the University were evidently connecting him with Haldin–as a sort of confidant in the background apparently. A mysterious connexion! Ha ha!. . . He had been made a personage without knowing anything about it. How that wretch Haldin must have talked about him! Yet it was likely that Haldin had said very little. The fellow’s casual
utterances were caught up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and lies?
“Impossible to think of anything else,” muttered Razumov to himself. “I’ll become an idiot if this goes on. The scoundrels and the fools are murdering my intelligence.”
He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of his intelligence.
He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an official- looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik.
“A gendarme brought it,” said the man. ” He asked if you were at home. I told him ‘No, he’s not at home.’ So he left it. ‘Give it into his own hands,’ says he. Now you’ve got it–eh?”
He went back to his sweeping, and Razumov climbed his stairs, envelope in hand. Once in his room he did not hasten to open it. Of course this official missive was from the superior direction of the police. A suspect! A suspect!
He stared in dreary astonishment at the absurdity of his position. He thought with a sort of dry, unemotional melancholy; three years of good work gone, the course of forty more perhaps jeopardized–turned from hope to terror, because events started by human folly link themselves into a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break through. Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady’s back is turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man’s name, clothed in flesh–wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots- -lounging against the stove. It asks you, “Is the outer door closed?”–and you don’t know enough to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You don’t know. You welcome the crazy fate. “Sit down,” you say. And it is all over. You cannot shake it off any more. It will cling to you for ever. Neither halter nor bullet can give you back the freedom of your life and the sanity of your thought. . . . It was enough to dash one’s head against a wall.
Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if to select a spot to dash his head against. Then he opened the letter. It directed the student Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself without delay at the General Secretariat.
Razumov had a vision of General T—‘s goggle eyes waiting for him–the embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism.
“What can he want with me precisely–I wonder?” he asked himself.
As if that mental question had evoked the familiar phantom, Haldin stood suddenly before him in the room with an extraordinary
completeness of detail. Though the short winter day had passed already into the sinister twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw plainly the narrow leather strap round the Tcherkess coat. The illusion of that hateful presence was so perfect that he half expected it to ask, “Is the outer door closed?” He looked at it with hatred and contempt. Souls do not take a shape of clothing. Moreover, Haldin could not be dead yet. Razumov stepped forward menacingly; the vision vanished–and turning short on his heel he walked out of his room with infinite disdain.
But after going down the first flight of stairs it occurred to him that perhaps the superior authorities of police meant to confront him with Haldin in the flesh. This thought struck him like a bullet, and had he not clung with both hands to the banister he would have rolled down to the next landing most likely. His legs were of no use for a considerable time. . . . But why? For what conceivable reason? To what end?
There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov remembered the promise made by the General to Prince K—. His action was to remain unknown.
He got down to the bottom of the stairs, lowering himself as it were from step to step, by the banister. Under the gate he regained much of his firmness of thought and limb. He went out into the street without staggering visibly. Every moment he felt steadier mentally. And yet he was saying to himself that General T— was perfectly capable of shutting him up in the fortress for an indefinite time. His
temperament fitted his remorseless task, and his omnipotence made him inaccessible to reasonable argument.
But when Razumov arrived at the Secretariat he discovered that he would have nothing to do with General T—. It is evident from Mr. Razumov’s diary that this dreaded personality was to remain in the background. A civilian of
superior rank received him in a private room after a period of waiting in outer offices where a lot of scribbling went on at many tables in a heated and stuffy atmosphere.
The clerk in uniform who conducted him said in the corridor–
“You are going before Gregor Matvieitch Mikulin.”
There was nothing formidable about the man bearing that name. His mild, expectant glance was turned on the door already when Razumov entered. At once, with the penholder he was holding in his hand, he pointed to a deep sofa between two windows. He followed Razumov with his eyes while that last crossed the room and sat down. The mild gaze rested on him, not curious, not inquisitive–certainly not
suspicious–almost without expression. In its passionless persistence there was something resembling sympathy.
Razumov, who had prepared his will and his intelligence to encounter General T— himself, was profoundly troubled. All the moral bracing up against the possible excesses of power and passion went for nothing before this sallow man, who wore a full unclipped beard. It was fair, thin, and very fine. The light fell in coppery gleams on the protuberances of a high, rugged forehead. And the aspect of the broad, soft physiognomy was so homely and rustic that the careful middle parting of the hair seemed a pretentious affectation.
The diary of Mr. Razumov testifies to some irritation on his part. I may remark here that the diary proper consisting of the more or less daily entries seems to have been begun on that very evening after Mr. Razumov had returned home.
Mr. Razumov, then, was irritated. His strung-up individuality had gone to pieces within him very suddenly.
“I must be very prudent with him,” he warned himself in the silence during which they sat gazing at each other. It lasted some little time, and was characterized (for silences have their character) by a sort of sadness imparted to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner of the bearded official. Razumov learned later that he was the chief of a department in the General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil service equivalent to that of a colonel in the army.
Razumov’s mistrust became acute. The main point was, not to be drawn into saying too much. He had been called there for some reason. What reason? To be given to understand that he was a suspect–and also no doubt to be pumped. As to what precisely? There was nothing. Or perhaps Haldin had been telling lies. . . . Every alarming uncertainty beset Razumov. He could bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself for his weakness spoke first, though he had promised himself not to do so on any account.
“I haven’t lost a moment’s time,” he began in a hoarse, provoking tone; and then the faculty of speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly–
“Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact. . . .”
But the spell was broken, and Razumov interrupted him boldly, under a sudden
conviction that this was the safest attitude to take. With a great flow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that the word “misunderstood” was better than the word “mistrusted,” and he repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized with fright before the attentive immobility of the official. “What am I talking about?” he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze. Mistrusted–not misunderstood–was the right symbol for these people. Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his hand over his brow–an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was too careless to
restrain. At that moment Razumov beheld his own brain suffering on the rack–a long, pale figure drawn asunder horizontally with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to see. It was as though he had dreamed for an infinitesimal fraction of time of some dark print of the Inquisition.
It is not to be seriously supposed that Razumov had actually dozed off and had dreamed in the presence of Councillor Mikulin, of an old print of the Inquisition. He was indeed extremely exhausted, and he records a remarkably dream- like experience of anguish at the circumstance that there was no one whatever near the pale and extended figure. The solitude of the racked victim was particularly horrible to behold. The mysterious impossibility to see the face, he also notes, inspired a sort of terror. All these characteristics of an ugly dream were present. Yet he is certain that he never lost the consciousness of himself on the sofa, leaning forward with his hands between his knees and turning his cap round and round in his fingers. But everything vanished at the voice of Councillor Mikulin. Razumov felt profoundly grateful for the even simplicity of its tone.
“Yes. I have listened with interest. I comprehend in a measure your. . . But, indeed, you are mistaken in what you. . . . “Councillor Mikulin uttered a series of broken sentences. Instead of finishing them he glanced down his beard. It was a deliberate curtailment which somehow made the phrases more impressive. But he could talk fluently enough, as became apparent when changing his tone to
persuasiveness he went on: “By listening to you as I did, I think I have proved that I do not regard our intercourse as strictly official. In fact, I don’t want it to have that character at all. . . . Oh yes! I admit that the request for your presence here had an official form. But I put it to you whether it was a form which would have been used to secure the attendance of a. . . .”
“Suspect,” exclaimed Razumov, looking straight into the official’s eyes. They were big with heavy eyelids, and met his boldness with a dim, steadfast gaze. “A suspect.” The open
repetition of that word which had been haunting all his waking hours gave Razumov a strange sort of satisfaction. Councillor Mikulin shook his head slightly. “Surely you do know that I’ve had my rooms searched by the police?”
“I was about to say a ‘misunderstood person,’ when you interrupted me,” insinuated quietly Councillor Mikulin.
Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little disdainfully–