“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.