I
The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov’s breast,
it could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of
his life had deposited there.
“What is the meaning of all this?” he thought, staring downwards at
the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. “Why has that
meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
tale of a crazy old woman?”
He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
reference to the young girl. “A crazy old woman,” he repeated to
himself. “It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd?
But no! I am wrong! I can’t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may
be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one
to guard against it? It puts to rout one’s intelligence. The more
intelligent one is the less one suspects an absurdity.”
A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking,
like a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his
thought had some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.
“After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
insignificant--absolutely. The craze of an old woman--the fussy
officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
the way? Haven’t I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven’t I just? That’s
the way to treat these meddlesome persons. Is it possible that he still
stands behind my back, waiting?”
Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine. It was not fear. He was
certain that it was not fear--not fear for himself--but it was, all the
same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he
knew without being able to put a name on the personality. But the
recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet
tranquillized him for a time. It was too stupid to suppose that he
should be wasting his time in waiting. It was unnecessary to look round
and make sure.
But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the
newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a
damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could
be capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him--the sport of
revolution--a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And
what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, “Won’t the truth do?”
Razumov pressed his folded arms to the stone coping over which he was
leaning with force. “Won’t the truth do? The truth for the crazy old
mother of the--”
The young man shuddered again. Yes. The truth would do! Apparently
it would do. Exactly. And receive thanks, he thought, formulating the
unspoken words cynically. “Fall on my neck in gratitude, no doubt,” he
jeered mentally. But this mood abandoned him at once. He felt sad, as
if his heart had become empty suddenly. “Well, I must be cautious,” he
concluded, coming to himself as though his brain had been awakened from
a trance. “There is nothing, no one, too insignificant, too absurd to be
disregarded,” he thought wearily. “I must be cautious.”
Razumov pushed himself with his hand away from the balustrade and,
retracing his steps along the bridge, walked straight to his lodgings,
where, for a few days, he led a solitary and retired existence. He
neglected Peter Ivanovitch, to whom he was accredited by the Stuttgart
group; he never went near the refugee revolutionists, to whom he had
been introduced on his arrival. He kept out of that world altogether.
And he felt that such conduct, causing surprise and arousing suspicion,
contained an element of danger for himself.
This is not to say that during these few days he never went out. I met
him several times in the streets, but he gave me no recognition.
Once, going home after an evening call on the ladies Haldin, I saw him
crossing the dark roadway of the Boulevard des Philosophes. He had a
broad-brimmed soft hat, and the collar of his coat turned up. I watched
him make straight for the house, but, instead of going in, he stopped
opposite the still lighted windows, and after a time went away down a
side-street.
I knew that he had not been to see Mrs. Haldin yet. Miss Haldin told
me he was reluctant; moreover, the mental condition of Mrs. Haldin
had changed. She seemed to think now that her son was living, and she
perhaps awaited his arrival. Her immobility in the great arm-chair in
front of the window had an air of expectancy, even when the blind was
down and the lamps lighted.
For my part, I was convinced that she had received her death-stroke;
Miss Haldin, to whom, of course, I said nothing of my forebodings,
thought that no good would come from introducing Mr. Razumov just then,
an opinion which I shared fully. I knew that she met the young man on
the Bastions. Once or twice I saw them strolling slowly up the main
alley. They met every day for weeks. I avoided passing that way during
the hour when Miss Haldin took her exercise there. One day, however,
in a fit of absent-mindedness, I entered the gates and came upon her
walking alone. I stopped to exchange a few words. Mr. Razumov failed to
turn up, and we began to talk about him--naturally.
“Did he tell you anything definite about your brother’s activities--his
end?” I ventured to ask.
“No,” admitted Miss Haldin, with some hesitation. “Nothing definite.”
I understood well enough that all their conversations must have been
referred mentally to that dead man who had brought them together. That
was unavoidable. But it was in the living man that she was interested.
That was unavoidable too, I suppose. And as I pushed my inquiries
I discovered that he had disclosed himself to her as a by no means
conventional revolutionist, contemptuous of catchwords, of theories, of
men too. I was rather pleased at that--but I was a little puzzled.
“His mind goes forward, far ahead of the struggle,” Miss Haldin
explained. “Of course, he is an actual worker too,” she added.
“And do you understand him?” I inquired point-blank.
She hesitated again. “Not altogether,” she murmured.
I perceived that he had fascinated her by an assumption of mysterious
reserve.
“Do you know what I think?” she went on, breaking through her reserved,
almost reluctant attitude: “I think that he is observing, studying me,
to discover whether I am worthy of his trust....”
“And that pleases you?”
She kept mysteriously silent for a moment. Then with energy, but in a
confidential tone--
“I am convinced;” she declared, “that this extraordinary man is
meditating some vast plan, some great undertaking; he is possessed by
it--he suffers from it--and from being alone in the world.”
“And so he’s looking for helpers?” I commented, turning away my head.
Again there was a silence.
“Why not?” she said at last.
The dead brother, the dying mother, the foreign friend, had fallen
into a distant background. But, at the same time, Peter Ivanovitch was
absolutely nowhere now. And this thought consoled me. Yet I saw the
gigantic shadow of Russian life deepening around her like the darkness
of an advancing night. It would devour her presently. I inquired after
Mrs. Haldin--that other victim of the deadly shade.
A remorseful uneasiness appeared in her frank eyes. Mother seemed no
worse, but if I only knew what strange fancies she had sometimes! Then
Miss Haldin, glancing at her watch, declared that she could not stay a
moment longer, and with a hasty hand-shake ran off lightly.
Decidedly, Mr. Razumov was not to turn up that day. Incomprehensible
youth!
But less than an hour afterwards, while crossing the Place Mollard, I
caught sight of him boarding a South Shore tramcar.
“He’s going to the Chateau Borel,” I thought.
After depositing Razumov at the gates of the Chateau Borel, some half
a mile or so from the town, the car continued its journey between two
straight lines of shady trees. Across the roadway in the sunshine a
short wooden pier jutted into the shallow pale water, which farther out
had an intense blue tint contrasting unpleasantly with the green orderly
slopes on the opposite shore. The whole view, with the harbour jetties
of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to
the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting
promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering
quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with
contempt. He thought it odious--oppressively odious--in its unsuggestive
finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after
centuries of toil and culture. And turning his back on it, he faced the
entrance to the grounds of the Chateau Borel.
The bars of the central way and the wrought-iron arch between the dark
weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for
a very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey
stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small
side entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
as though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov,
trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.
“Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently,” he muttered
to himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he
looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the
clean, broad avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms
hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in
lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.
“Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!” Razumov muttered to himself. “A brute,
all the same.”
Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of
the drive, trying to think of nothing--to rest his head, to rest his
emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house
he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped
short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow
arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept
narrow flower-bed along its foot.
“It is here!” he thought, with a sort of awe. “It is here--on this very
spot....”
He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move,
and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but
because he knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could
not leave Geneva. He recognized, even without thinking, that it was
impossible. It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral
suicide. It would have been also physically dangerous. Slowly he
ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish
stone urns of funereal aspect.
Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had
been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter
Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for his approach.
The ceremonious black frock-coat and the bared head of Europe’s greatest
feminist accentuated the dubiousness of his status in the house rented
by Madame de S--, his Egeria. His aspect combined the formality of the
caller with the freedom of the proprietor. Florid and bearded and masked
by the dark blue glasses, he met the visitor, and at once took him
familiarly under the arm.
Razumov suppressed every sign of repugnance by an effort which the
constant necessity of prudence had rendered almost mechanical. And
this necessity had settled his expression in a cast of austere, almost
fanatical, aloofness. The “heroic fugitive,” impressed afresh by the
severe detachment of this new arrival from revolutionary Russia, took a
conciliatory, even a confidential tone. Madame de S-- was resting after
a bad night. She often had bad nights. He had left his hat upstairs on
the landing and had come down to suggest to his young friend a stroll
and a good open-hearted talk in one of the shady alleys behind the
house. After voicing this proposal, the great man glanced at the unmoved
face by his side, and could not restrain himself from exclaiming--
“On my word, young man, you are an extraordinary person.”
“I fancy you are mistaken, Peter Ivanovitch. If I were really an
extraordinary person, I would not be here, walking with you in a garden
in Switzerland, Canton of Geneva, Commune of--what’s the name of the
Commune this place belongs to?... Never mind--the heart of democracy,
anyhow. A fit heart for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as
much value. I am no more extraordinary than the rest of us Russians,
wandering abroad.”