“Why didn’t you follow him to America?” he asked point-blank.
She looked up at him with a perturbed air.
“Don’t you remember what was going on fifteen years ago? It was a time
of activity. The Revolution has its history by this time. You are in
it and yet you don’t seem to know it. Yakovlitch went away then on a
mission; I went back to Russia. It had to be so. Afterwards there was
nothing for him to come back to.”
“Ah! indeed,” muttered Razumov, with affected surprise. “Nothing!”
“What are you trying to insinuate” she exclaimed quickly. “Well, and
what then if he did get discouraged a little....”
“He looks like a Yankee, with that goatee hanging from his chin. A
regular Uncle Sam,” growled Razumov. “Well, and you? You who went to
Russia? You did not get discouraged.”
“Never mind. Yakovlitch is a man who cannot be doubted. He, at any rate,
is the right sort.”
Her black, penetrating gaze remained fixed upon Razumov while she spoke,
and for a moment afterwards.
“Pardon me,” Razumov inquired coldly, “but does it mean that you, for
instance, think that I am not the right sort?”
She made no protest, gave no sign of having heard the question;
she continued looking at him in a manner which he judged not to be
absolutely unfriendly. In Zurich when he passed through she had taken
him under her charge, in a way, and was with him from morning till night
during his stay of two days. She took him round to see several people.
At first she talked to him a great deal and rather unreservedly, but
always avoiding all reference to herself; towards the middle of the
second day she fell silent, attending him zealously as before, and even
seeing him off at the railway station, where she pressed his hand firmly
through the lowered carriage window, and, stepping back without a word,
waited till the train moved. He had noticed that she was treated with
quiet regard. He knew nothing of her parentage, nothing of her private
history or political record; he judged her from his own private point of
view, as being a distinct danger in his path. “Judged” is not perhaps
the right word. It was more of a feeling, the summing up of slight
impressions aided by the discovery that he could not despise her as he
despised all the others. He had not expected to see her again so soon.
No, decidedly; her expression was not unfriendly. Yet he perceived an
acceleration in the beat of his heart. The conversation could not be
abandoned at that point. He went on in accents of scrupulous inquiry--
“Is it perhaps because I don’t seem to accept blindly every development
of the general doctrine--such for instance as the feminism of our great
Peter Ivanovitch? If that is what makes me suspect, then I can only say
I would scorn to be a slave even to an idea.”
She had been looking at him all the time, not as a listener looks
at one, but as if the words he chose to say were only of secondary
interest. When he finished she slipped her hand, by a sudden and decided
movement, under his arm and impelled him gently towards the gate of the
grounds. He felt her firmness and obeyed the impulsion at once, just as
the other two men had, a moment before, obeyed unquestioningly the wave
of her hand.
They made a few steps like this.
“No, Razumov, your ideas are probably all right,” she said. “You may be
valuable--very valuable. What’s the matter with you is that you don’t
like us.”
She released him. He met her with a frosty smile.
“Am I expected then to have love as well as convictions?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You know very well what I mean. People have been thinking you not quite
whole-hearted. I have heard that opinion from one side and another. But
I have understood you at the end of the first day....”
Razumov interrupted her, speaking steadily.
“I assure you that your perspicacity is at fault here.”
“What phrases he uses!” she exclaimed parenthetically. “Ah! Kirylo
Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and
afraid of trifles. Moreover, you had no training. What you want is to
be taken in hand by some woman. I am sorry I am not staying here a few
days. I am going back to Zurich to-morrow, and shall take Yakovlitch
with me most likely.”
This information relieved Razumov.
“I am sorry too,” he said. “But, all the same, I don’t think you
understand me.”
He breathed more freely; she did not protest, but asked, “And how did
you get on with Peter Ivanovitch? You have seen a good deal of each
other. How is it between you two?”
Not knowing what answer to make, the young man inclined his head slowly.
Her lips had been parted in expectation. She pressed them together, and
seemed to reflect.
“That’s all right.”
This had a sound of finality, but she did not leave him. It was
impossible to guess what she had in her mind. Razumov muttered--
“It is not of me that you should have asked that question. In a moment
you shall see Peter Ivanovitch himself, and the subject will come up
naturally. He will be curious to know what has delayed you so long in
this garden.”
“No doubt Peter Ivanovitch will have something to say to me. Several
things. He may even speak of you--question me. Peter Ivanovitch is
inclined to trust me generally.”
“Question you? That’s very likely.”
She smiled, half serious.
“Well--and what shall I say to him?”
“I don’t know. You may tell him of your discovery.”
“What’s that?”
“Why--my lack of love for....”
“Oh! That’s between ourselves,” she interrupted, it was hard to say
whether in jest or earnest.
“I see that you want to tell Peter Ivanovitch something in my favour,”
said Razumov, with grim playfulness. “Well, then, you can tell him that
I am very much in earnest about my mission. I mean to succeed.”
“You have been given a mission!” she exclaimed quickly.
“It amounts to that. I have been told to bring about a certain event.”
She looked at him searchingly.
“A mission,” she repeated, very grave and interested all at once. “What
sort of mission?”
“Something in the nature of propaganda work.”
“Ah! Far away from here?”
“No. Not very far,” said Razumov, restraining a sudden desire to laugh,
although he did not feel joyous in the least.
“So!” she said thoughtfully. “Well, I am not asking questions. It’s
sufficient that Peter Ivanovitch should know what each of us is doing.
Everything is bound to come right in the end.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t think, young man. I just simply believe it.”
“And is it to Peter Ivanovitch that you owe that faith?”
She did not answer the question, and they stood idle, silent, as if
reluctant to part with each other.
“That’s just like a man,” she murmured at last. “As if it were possible
to tell how a belief comes to one.” Her thin Mephistophelian eyebrows
moved a little. “Truly there are millions of people in Russia who would
envy the life of dogs in this country. It is a horror and a shame to
confess this even between ourselves. One must believe for very pity.
This can’t go on. No! It can’t go on. For twenty years I have been
coming and going, looking neither to the left nor to the right....
What are you smiling to yourself for? You are only at the beginning. You
have begun well, but you just wait till you have trodden every particle
of yourself under your feet in your comings and goings. For that is
what it comes to. You’ve got to trample down every particle of your own
feelings; for stop you cannot, you must not. I have been young, too--but
perhaps you think that I am complaining-eh?”
“I don’t think anything of the sort,” protested Razumov indifferently.
“I dare say you don’t, you dear superior creature. You don’t care.”
She plunged her fingers into the bunch of hair on the left side,
and that brusque movement had the effect of setting the Tyrolese hat
straight on her head. She frowned under it without animosity, in the
manner of an investigator. Razumov averted his face carelessly.
“You men are all alike. You mistake luck for merit. You do it in good
faith too! I would not be too hard on you. It’s masculine nature.
You men are ridiculously pitiful in your aptitude to cherish childish
illusions down to the very grave. There are a lot of us who have been at
work for fifteen years--I mean constantly--trying one way after another,
underground and above ground, looking neither to the right nor to the
left! I can talk about it. I have been one of these that never
rested.... There! What’s the use of talking.... Look at my grey hairs!
And here two babies come along--I mean you and Haldin--you come along
and manage to strike a blow at the very first try.”
At the name of Haldin falling from the rapid and energetic lips of the
woman revolutionist, Razumov had the usual brusque consciousness of the
irrevocable. But in all the months which had passed over his head he
had become hardened to the experience. The consciousness was no longer
accompanied by the blank dismay and the blind anger of the early days.
He had argued himself into new beliefs; and he had made for himself a
mental atmosphere of gloomy and sardonic reverie, a sort of murky
medium through which the event appeared like a featureless shadow having
vaguely the shape of a man; a shape extremely familiar, yet utterly
inexpressive, except for its air of discreet waiting in the dusk. It was
not alarming.
“What was he like?” the woman revolutionist asked unexpectedly.
“What was he like?” echoed Razumov, making a painful effort not to turn
upon her savagely. But he relieved himself by laughing a little while he
stole a glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. This reception of
her inquiry disturbed her.
“How like a woman,” he went on. “What is the good of concerning yourself
with his appearance? Whatever it was, he is removed beyond all feminine
influences now.”
A frown, making three folds at the root of her nose, accentuated the
Mephistophelian slant of her eyebrows.
“You suffer, Razumov,” she suggested, in her low, confident voice.
“What nonsense!” Razumov faced the woman fairly. “But now I think of it,
I am not sure that he is beyond the influence of one woman at least; the
one over there--Madame de S--, you know. Formerly the dead were allowed
to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old
harridan. We revolutionists make wonderful discoveries. It is true that
they are not exactly our own. We have nothing of our own. But couldn’t
the friend of Peter Ivanovitch satisfy your feminine curiosity? Couldn’t
she conjure him up for you?”--he jested like a man in pain.
Her concentrated frowning expression relaxed, and she said, a little
wearily, “Let us hope she will make an effort and conjure up some tea
for us. But that is by no means certain. I am tired, Razumov.”
“You tired! What a confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had
some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time
with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the
ghost of it--the cold ghost of it--still lingering in the temple. But as
to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be.
We mustn’t, We can’t. The other day I read in some paper or other an
alarmist article on the tireless activity of the revolutionary parties.
It impresses the world. It’s our prestige.”
“He flings out continually these flouts and sneers;” the woman in the
crimson blouse spoke as if appealing quietly to a third person, but
her black eyes never left Razumov’s face. “And what for, pray? Simply
because some of his conventional notions are shocked, some of his
petty masculine standards. You might think he was one of these nervous
sensitives that come to a bad end. And yet,” she went on, after a short,
reflective pause and changing the mode of her address, “and yet I
have just learned something which makes me think that you are a man of
character, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Yes! indeed--you are.”
The mysterious positiveness of this assertion startled Razumov. Their
eyes met. He looked away and, through the bars of the rusty gate, stared
at the clean, wide road shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar,
quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to
him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He
was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had
a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any
instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some
momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody’s
lips. As long as he managed to preserve a clear mind and to keep down
his irritability there was nothing to fear. The only condition of
success and safety was indomitable will-power, he reminded himself.
He longed to be on the other side of the bars, as though he were
actually a prisoner within the grounds of this centre of revolutionary
plots, of this house of folly, of blindness, of villainy and crime.
Silently he indulged his wounded spirit in a feeling of immense moral
and mental remoteness. He did not even smile when he heard her repeat
the words--
“Yes! A strong character.”
He continued to gaze through the bars like a moody prisoner, not
thinking of escape, but merely pondering upon the faded memories of
freedom.
“If you don’t look out,” he mumbled, still looking away, “you shall
certainly miss seeing as much as the mere ghost of that tea.”
She was not to be shaken off in such a way. As a matter of fact he had
not expected to succeed.
“Never mind, it will be no great loss. I mean the missing of her tea and
only the ghost of it at that. As to the lady, you must understand that
she has her positive uses. See _that_, Razumov.”
He turned his head at this imperative appeal and saw the woman
revolutionist making the motions of counting money into the palm of her
hand.
“That’s what it is. You see?”
Razumov uttered a slow “I see,” and returned to his prisoner-like gazing
upon the neat and shady road.
“Material means must be obtained in some way, and this is easier than
breaking into banks. More certain too. There! I am joking.... What is
he muttering to himself now?” she cried under her breath.
“My admiration of Peter Ivanovitch’s devoted self-sacrifice, that’s all.
It’s enough to make one sick.”
“Oh, you squeamish, masculine creature. Sick! Makes him sick! And what
do you know of the truth of it? There’s no looking into the secrets of
the heart. Peter Ivanovitch knew her years ago, in his worldly days,
when he was a young officer in the Guards. It is not for us to judge
an inspired person. That’s where you men have an advantage. You are
inspired sometimes both in thought and action. I have always admitted
that when you _are_ inspired, when you manage to throw off your
masculine cowardice and prudishness you are not to be equalled by us.
Only, how seldom.... Whereas the silliest woman can always be made
of use. And why? Because we have passion, unappeasable passion.... I
should like to know what he is smiling at?”
“I am not smiling,” protested Razumov gloomily.
“Well! How is one to call it? You made some sort of face. Yes, I know!
You men can love here and hate there and desire something or other--and
you make a great to-do about it, and you call it passion! Yes! While
it lasts. But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these
very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That’s why we can’t be
bribed off so easily as you men. In life, you see, there is not much
choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us,
painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot.”
She spoke with energy, but in a matter-of-fact tone. Razumov’s attention
had wandered away on a track of its own--outside the bars of the
gate--but not out of earshot. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his
coat.
“Rot or burn! Powerfully stated. Painted or unpainted. Very vigorous.
Painted or...Do tell me--she would be infernally jealous of him,
wouldn’t she?”
“Who? What? The Baroness? Eleanor Maximovna? Jealous of Peter
Ivanovitch? Heavens! Are these the questions the man’s mind is running
on? Such a thing is not to be thought of.”
“Why? Can’t a wealthy old woman be jealous? Or, are they all pure
spirits together?”
“But what put it into your head to ask such a question?” she wondered.
“Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like.”
“I don’t like,” she retorted at once. “It is not the time to be
frivolous. What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps,
you are only playing a part.”
Razumov had felt that woman’s observation of him like a physical
contact, like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he
received the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a
closer grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying
himself.
“Playing a Part,” he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. “It
must be done very badly since you see through the assumption.”
She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin
black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He
added hardly audibly--
“You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us.”
“Who is doing it?” she snapped out.
“Who? Everybody,” he said impatiently. “You are a materialist, aren’t
you?”
“Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense.”
“But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: ‘Man is a digestive
tube.’ I imagine now....”
“I spit on him.”
“What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can’t ignore the importance of a
good digestion. The joy of life--you know the joy of life?--depends on
a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism,
breeds black fancies and thoughts of death. These are facts ascertained
by physiologists. Well, I assure you that ever since I came over from
Russia I have been stuffed with indigestible foreign concoctions of the
most nauseating kind--pah!”
“You are joking,” she murmured incredulously. He assented in a detached
way.
“Yes. It is all a joke. It’s hardly worth while talking to a man like
me. Yet for that very reason men have been known to take their own
life.”
“On the contrary, I think it is worth while talking to you.”
He kept her in the corner of his eye. She seemed to be thinking out some
scathing retort, but ended by only shrugging her shoulders slightly.
“Shallow talk! I suppose one must pardon this weakness in you,” she
said, putting a special accent on the last word. There was something
anxious in her indulgent conclusion.
Razumov noted the slightest shades in this conversation, which he had
not expected, for which he was not prepared. That was it. “I was not
prepared,” he said to himself. “It has taken me unawares.” It seemed to
him that if he only could allow himself to pant openly like a dog for a
time this oppression would pass away. “I shall never be found prepared,”
he thought, with despair. He laughed a little, saying as lightly as he
could--
“Thanks. I don’t ask for mercy.” Then affecting a playful uneasiness,
“But aren’t you afraid Peter Ivanovitch might suspect us of plotting
something unauthorized together by the gate here?”
“No, I am not afraid. You are quite safe from suspicions while you are
with me, my dear young man.” The humorous gleam in her black eyes went
out. “Peter Ivanovitch trusts me,” she went on, quite austerely. “He
takes my advice. I am his right hand, as it were, in certain most
important things.... That amuses you what? Do you think I am
boasting?”
“God forbid. I was just only saying to myself that Peter Ivanovitch
seems to have solved the woman question pretty completely.”
Even as he spoke he reproached himself for his words, for his tone. All
day long he had been saying the wrong things. It was folly, worse than
folly. It was weakness; it was this disease of perversity overcoming his
will. Was this the way to meet speeches which certainly contained the
promise of future confidences from that woman who apparently had a
great store of secret knowledge and so much influence? Why give her this
puzzling impression? But she did not seem inimical. There was no anger
in her voice. It was strangely speculative.
“One does not know what to think, Razumov. You must have bitten
something bitter in your cradle.” Razumov gave her a sidelong glance.
“H’m! Something bitter? That’s an explanation,” he muttered. “Only it
was much later. And don’t you think, Sophia Antonovna, that you and I
come from the same cradle?”
The woman, whose name he had forced himself at last to pronounce (he had
experienced a strong repugnance in letting it pass his lips), the woman
revolutionist murmured, after a pause--
“You mean--Russia?”
He disdained even to nod. She seemed softened, her black eyes very
still, as though she were pursuing the simile in her thoughts to all
its tender associations. But suddenly she knitted her brows in a
Mephistophelian frown.
“Yes. Perhaps no wonder, then. Yes. One lies there lapped up in evils,
watched over by beings that are worse than ogres, ghouls, and vampires.
They must be driven away, destroyed utterly. In regard of that task
nothing else matters if men and women are determined and faithful.
That’s how I came to feel in the end. The great thing is not to quarrel
amongst ourselves about all sorts of conventional trifles. Remember
that, Razumov.”
Razumov was not listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched
in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his
scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him
that now they were blunted for ever. “I am a match for them all,”
he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman
revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was
no one passing along the road. He almost forgot that he was not alone.
He heard her voice again, curt, businesslike, and yet betraying the
hesitation which had been the real reason of her prolonged silence.
“I say, Razumov!”
Razumov, whose face was turned away from her, made a grimace like a man
who hears a false note.
“Tell me: is it true that on the very morning of the deed you actually
attended the lectures at the University?”
An appreciable fraction of a second elapsed before the real import of
the question reached him, like a bullet which strikes some time after
the flash of the fired shot. Luckily his disengaged hand was ready
to grip a bar of the gate. He held it with a terrible force, but his
presence of mind was gone. He could make only a sort of gurgling, grumpy
sound.
“Come, Kirylo Sidorovitch!” she urged him. “I know you are not a
boastful man. _That_ one must say for you. You are a silent man. Too
silent, perhaps. You are feeding on some bitterness of your own. You are
not an enthusiast. You are, perhaps, all the stronger for that. But you
might tell me. One would like to understand you a little more. I was so
immensely struck.... Have you really done it?”
He got his voice back. The shot had missed him. It had been fired at
random, altogether, more like a signal for coming to close quarters.
It was to be a plain struggle for self-preservation. And she was a
dangerous adversary too. But he was ready for battle; he was so ready
that when he turned towards her not a muscle of his face moved.
“Certainly,” he said, without animation, secretly strung up but
perfectly sure of himself. “Lectures--certainly, But what makes you
ask?”
It was she who was animated.
“I had it in a letter, written by a young man in Petersburg; one of
us, of course. You were seen--you were observed with your notebook,
impassible, taking notes....”
He enveloped her with his fixed stare.
“What of that?”
“I call such coolness superb--that’s all. It is a proof of uncommon
strength of character. The young man writes that nobody could have
guessed from your face and manner the part you had played only some two
hours before--the great, momentous, glorious part....”
“Oh no. Nobody could have guessed,” assented Razumov gravely, “because,
don’t you see, nobody at that time....”
“Yes, yes. But all the same you are a man of exceptional fortitude, it
seems. You looked exactly as usual. It was remembered afterwards with
wonder....”
“It cost me no effort,” Razumov declared, with the same staring gravity.
“Then it’s almost more wonderful still!” she exclaimed, and fell silent
while Razumov asked himself whether he had not said there something
utterly unnecessary--or even worse.
She raised her head eagerly.
“Your intention was to stay in Russia? You had planned....”
“No,” interrupted Razumov without haste. “I had made no plans of any
sort.”
“You just simply walked away?” she struck in.
He bowed his head in slow assent. “Simply--yes.” He had gradually
released his hold on the bar of the gate, as though he had acquired the
conviction that no random shot could knock him over now. And suddenly he
was inspired to add, “The snow was coming down very thick, you know.”
She had a slight appreciative movement of the head, like an expert
in such enterprises, very interested, capable of taking every point
professionally. Razumov remembered something he had heard.
“I turned into a narrow side street, you understand,” he went on
negligently, and paused as if it were not worth talking about. Then he
remembered another detail and dropped it before her, like a disdainful
dole to her curiosity.
“I felt inclined to lie down and go to sleep there.”