“No! No! You are not ordinary. I have some experience of Russians who
are--well--living abroad. You appear to me, and to others too, a marked
personality.”
“What does he mean by this?” Razumov asked himself, turning his eyes
fully on his companion. The face of Peter Ivanovitch expressed a
meditative seriousness.
“You don’t suppose, Kirylo Sidorovitch, that I have not heard of you
from various points where you made yourself known on your way here? I
have had letters.”
“Oh, we are great in talking about each other,” interjected Razumov, who
had listened with great attention. “Gossip, tales, suspicions, and
all that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny,
even.”
In indulging in this sally, Razumov managed very well to conceal the
feeling of anxiety which had come over him. At the same time he was
saying to himself that there could be no earthly reason for anxiety. He
was relieved by the evident sincerity of the protesting voice.
“Heavens!” cried Peter Ivanovitch. “What are you talking about? What
reason can _you_ have to...?”
The great exile flung up his arms as if words had failed him in sober
truth. Razumov was satisfied. Yet he was moved to continue in the same
vein.
“I am talking of the poisonous plants which flourish in the world of
conspirators, like evil mushrooms in a dark cellar.”
“You are casting aspersions,” remonstrated Peter Ivanovitch, “which as
far as you are concerned--”
“No!” Razumov interrupted without heat. “Indeed, I don’t want to cast
aspersions, but it’s just as well to have no illusions.”
Peter Ivanovitch gave him an inscrutable glance of his dark spectacles,
accompanied by a faint smile.
“The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one,” he
said, in a very friendly tone. “But I see how it is, Kirylo Sidorovitch.
You aim at stoicism.”
“Stoicism! That’s a pose of the Greeks and the Romans. Let’s leave
it to them. We are Russians, that is--children; that is--sincere; that
is--cynical, if you like. But that’s not a pose.”
A long silence ensued. They strolled slowly under the lime-trees.
Peter Ivanovitch had put his hands behind his back. Razumov felt the
ungravelled ground of the deeply shaded walk damp and as if slippery
under his feet. He asked himself, with uneasiness, if he were saying the
right things. The direction of the conversation ought to have been more
under his control, he reflected. The great man appeared to be reflecting
on his side too. He cleared his throat slightly, and Razumov felt at
once a painful reawakening of scorn and fear.
“I am astonished,” began Peter Ivanovitch gently. “Supposing you are
right in your indictment, how can you raise any question of calumny
or gossip, in your case? It is unreasonable. The fact is, Kirylo
Sidorovitch, there is not enough known of you to give hold to gossip or
even calumny. Just now you are a man associated with a great deed, which
had been hoped for, and tried for too, without success. People have
perished for attempting that which you and Haldin have done at last. You
come to us out of Russia, with that prestige. But you cannot deny that
you have not been communicative, Kirylo Sidorovitch. People you have met
imparted their impressions to me; one wrote this, another that, but I
form my own opinions. I waited to see you first. You are a man out
of the common. That’s positively so. You are close, very close. This
taciturnity, this severe brow, this something inflexible and secret in
you, inspires hopes and a little wonder as to what you may mean. There
is something of a Brutus....”
“Pray spare me those classical allusions!” burst out Razumov nervously.
“What comes Junius Brutus to do here? It is ridiculous! Do you mean to
say,” he added sarcastically, but lowering his voice, “that the Russian
revolutionists are all patricians and that I am an aristocrat?”
Peter Ivanovitch, who had been helping himself with a few gestures,
clasped his hands again behind his back, and made a few steps,
pondering.
“Not _all_ patricians,” he muttered at last. “But you, at any rate, are
one of _us_.”
Razumov smiled bitterly.
“To be sure my name is not Gugenheimer,” he said in a sneering tone. “I
am not a democratic Jew. How can I help it? Not everybody has such luck.
I have no name, I have no....”
The European celebrity showed a great concern. He stepped back a pace
and his arms flew in front of his person, extended, deprecatory, almost
entreating. His deep bass voice was full of pain.
“But, my dear young friend!” he cried. “My dear Kirylo Sidorovitch....”
Razumov shook his head.
“The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I
have no legal right to--but what of that? I don’t wish to claim it.
I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my
mother’s grandfather was a peasant--a serf. See how much I am one of
_you_. I don’t want anyone to claim me. But Russia _can’t_ disown me.
She cannot!”
Razumov struck his breast with his fist.
“I am _it_!”
Peter Ivanovitch walked on slowly, his head lowered. Razumov followed,
vexed with himself. That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity
was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he
thought, with despair. Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark
glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he
fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but
with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on
that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming
light-headed. “It is not what is expected of me,” he repeated to
himself. “It is not what is--I could get away by breaking the fastening
on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock.
Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat!
These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing.
They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade--but I
would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?” he asked
himself in a fright.
The great man was heard--musing in an undertone.
“H’m, yes! That--no doubt--in a certain sense....” He raised his
voice. “There is a deal of pride about you....”
The intonation of Peter Ivanovitch took on a homely, familiar ring,
acknowledging, in a way, Razumov’s claim to peasant descent.
“A great deal of pride, brother Kirylo. And I don’t say that you have no
justification for it. I have admitted you had. I have ventured to allude
to the facts of your birth simply because I attach no mean importance
to it. You are one of us--_un des notres_. I reflect on that with
satisfaction.”
“I attach some importance to it also,” said Razumov quietly. “I won’t
even deny that it may have some importance for you too,” he continued,
after a slight pause and with a touch of grimness of which he was
himself aware, with some annoyance. He hoped it had escaped the
perception of Peter Ivanovitch. “But suppose we talk no more about it?”
“Well, we shall not--not after this one time, Kirylo Sidorovitch,”
persisted the noble arch-priest of Revolution. “This shall be the last
occasion. You cannot believe for a moment that I had the slightest idea
of wounding your feelings. You are clearly a superior nature--that’s how
I read you. Quite above the common--h’m--susceptibilities. But the fact
is, Kirylo Sidorovitch, I don’t know your susceptibilities. Nobody, out
of Russia, knows much of you--as yet!”
“You have been watching me?” suggested Razumov.
“Yes.”
The great man had spoken in a tone of perfect frankness, but as they
turned their faces to each other Razumov felt baffled by the dark
spectacles. Under their cover, Peter Ivanovitch hinted that he had felt
for some time the need of meeting a man of energy and character, in view
of a certain project. He said nothing more precise, however; and after
some critical remarks upon the personalities of the various members
of the committee of revolutionary action in Stuttgart, he let the
conversation lapse for quite a long while. They paced the alley from end
to end. Razumov, silent too, raised his eyes from time to time to cast a
glance at the back of the house. It offered no sign of being inhabited.
With its grimy, weather-stained walls and all the windows shuttered from
top to bottom, it looked damp and gloomy and deserted. It might very
well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning,
futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly
rumour had it, by Madame de S-- to meet statesmen, diplomatists,
deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another
sort. Razumov had never seen Madame de S-- but in the carriage.
Peter Ivanovitch came out of his abstraction.
“Two things I may say to you at once. I believe, first, that neither a
leader nor any decisive action can come out of the dregs of a people.
Now, if you ask me what are the dregs of a people--h’m--it would take
too long to tell. You would be surprised at the variety of ingredients
that for me go to the making up of these dregs--of that which ought,
_must_ remain at the bottom. Moreover, such a statement might be subject
to discussion. But I can tell you what is _not_ the dregs. On that it
is impossible for us to disagree. The peasantry of a people is not the
dregs; neither is its highest class--well--the nobility. Reflect on
that, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I believe you are well fitted for reflection.
Everything in a people that is not genuine, not its own by origin or
development, is--well--dirt! Intelligence in the wrong place is that.
Foreign-bred doctrines are that. Dirt! Dregs! The second thing I would
offer to your meditation is this: that for us at this moment there yawns
a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by
foreign liberalism. All attempts at it are either folly or cheating.
Bridged it can never be! It has to be filled up.”
A sort of sinister jocularity had crept into the tones of the burly
feminist. He seized Razumov’s arm above the elbow, and gave it a slight
shake.
“Do you understand, enigmatical young man? It has got to be just filled
up.”
Razumov kept an unmoved countenance.
“Don’t you think that I have already gone beyond meditation on that
subject?” he said, freeing his arm by a quiet movement which increased
the distance a little between himself and Peter Ivanovitch, as they went
on strolling abreast. And he added that surely whole cartloads of words
and theories could never fill that chasm. No meditation was necessary.
A sacrifice of many lives could alone--He fell silent without finishing
the phrase.
Peter Ivanovitch inclined his big hairy head slowly. After a moment he
proposed that they should go and see if Madame de S-- was now visible.
“We shall get some tea,” he said, turning out of the shaded gloomy walk
with a brisker step.
The lady companion had been on the look out. Her dark skirt whisked into
the doorway as the two men came in sight round the corner. She ran off
somewhere altogether, and had disappeared when they entered the hall. In
the crude light falling from the dusty glass skylight upon the black
and white tessellated floor, covered with muddy tracks, their footsteps
echoed faintly. The great feminist led the way up the stairs. On the
balustrade of the first-floor landing a shiny tall hat reposed, rim
upwards, opposite the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it
was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by
fugitive revolutionists. The cracked white paint of the panels, the
tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but
dust and emptiness within. Before turning the massive brass handle,
Peter Ivanovitch gave his young companion a sharp, partly critical,
partly preparatory glance.
“No one is perfect,” he murmured discreetly. Thus, the possessor of a
rare jewel might, before opening the casket, warn the profane that no
gem perhaps is flawless.
He remained with his hand on the door-handle so long that Razumov
assented by a moody “No.”
“Perfection itself would not produce that effect,” pursued Peter
Ivanovitch, “in a world not meant for it. But you shall find there a
mind--no!--the quintessence of feminine intuition which will understand
any perplexity you may be suffering from by the irresistible,
enlightening force of sympathy. Nothing can remain obscure before
that--that--inspired, yes, inspired penetration, this true light of
femininity.”
The gaze of the dark spectacles in its glossy steadfastness gave his
face an air of absolute conviction. Razumov felt a momentary shrinking
before that closed door.
“Penetration? Light,” he stammered out. “Do you mean some sort of
thought-reading?”
Peter Ivanovitch seemed shocked.
“I mean something utterly different,” he retorted, with a faint, pitying
smile.
Razumov began to feel angry, very much against his wish.
“This is very mysterious,” he muttered through his teeth.
“You don’t object to being understood, to being guided?” queried the
great feminist. Razumov exploded in a fierce whisper.
“In what sense? Be pleased to understand that I am a serious person. Who
do you take me for?”
They looked at each other very closely. Razumov’s temper was cooled
by the impenetrable earnestness of the blue glasses meeting his stare.
Peter Ivanovitch turned the handle at last.
“You shall know directly,” he said, pushing the door open.
A low-pitched grating voice was heard within the room.
“_Enfin_.”
In the doorway, his black-coated bulk blocking the view, Peter
Ivanovitch boomed in a hearty tone with something boastful in it.
“Yes. Here I am!”
He glanced over his shoulder at Razumov, who waited for him to move on.
“And I am bringing you a proved conspirator--a real one this time. _Un
vrai celui la_.”
This pause in the doorway gave the “proved conspirator” time to make
sure that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his mental
disgust.
These sentiments stand confessed in Mr. Razumov’s memorandum of
his first interview with Madame de S--. The very words I use in my
narrative are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected. The
record, which could not have been meant for anyone’s eyes but his own,
was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion
common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable
existence of “compromising documents” in all the plots and conspiracies
of history. Mr. Razumov looked at it, I suppose, as a man looks at
himself in a mirror, with wonder, perhaps with anguish, with anger or
despair. Yes, as a threatened man may look fearfully at his own face in
the glass, formulating to himself reassuring excuses for his appearance
marked by the taint of some insidious hereditary disease.