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.”