“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.