“But the notebook! The amazing notebook, man. You don’t mean to say you
had put it in your pocket beforehand!” she cried.
Razumov gave a start. It might have been a sign of impatience.
“I went home. Straight home to my rooms,” he said distinctly.
“The coolness of the man! You dared?”
“Why not? I assure you I was perfectly calm. Ha! Calmer than I am now
perhaps.”
“I like you much better as you are now than when you indulge that bitter
vein of yours, Razumov. And nobody in the house saw you return--eh? That
might have appeared queer.”
“No one,” Razumov said firmly. “Dvornik, landlady, girl, all out of the
way. I went up like a shadow. It was a murky morning. The stairs were
dark. I glided up like a phantom. Fate? Luck? What do you think?”
“I just see it!” The eyes of the woman revolutionist snapped darkly.
“Well--and then you considered....”
Razumov had it all ready in his head.
“No. I looked at my watch, since you want to know. There was just time.
I took that notebook, and ran down the stairs on tiptoe. Have you ever
listened to the pit-pat of a man running round and round the shaft of
a deep staircase? They have a gaslight at the bottom burning night
and day. I suppose it’s gleaming down there now.... The sound dies
out--the flame winks....”
He noticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity
of the black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist
received the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears. He
checked himself, passed his hand over his forehead, confused, like a man
who has been dreaming aloud.
“Where could a student be running if not to his lectures in the morning?
At night it’s another matter. I did not care if all the house had been
there to look at me. But I don’t suppose there was anyone. It’s best not
to be seen or heard. Aha! The people that are neither seen nor heard are
the lucky ones--in Russia. Don’t you admire my luck?”
“Astonishing,” she said. “If you have luck as well as determination,
then indeed you are likely to turn out an invaluable acquisition for the
work in hand.”
Her tone was earnest; and it seemed to Razumov that it was speculative,
even as though she were already apportioning him, in her mind, his share
of the work. Her eyes were cast down. He waited, not very alert now, but
with the grip of the ever-present danger giving him an air of
attentive gravity. Who could have written about him in that letter
from Petersburg? A fellow student, surely--some imbecile victim of
revolutionary propaganda, some foolish slave of foreign, subversive
ideals. A long, famine-stricken, red-nosed figure presented itself to
his mental search. That must have been the fellow!
He smiled inwardly at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing,
the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like
a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage
in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and
piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist
refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means
constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his
advantage rather, a piece of sinister luck which had only to be accepted
with proper caution.
“And yet, Razumov,” he heard the musing voice of the woman, “you have
not the face of a lucky man.” She raised her eyes with renewed interest.
“And so that was the way of it. After doing your work you simply walked
off and made for your rooms. That sort of thing succeeds sometimes. I
suppose it was agreed beforehand that, once the business over, each of
you would go his own way?”
Razumov preserved the seriousness of his expression and the deliberate,
if cautious, manner of speaking.
“Was not that the best thing to do?” he asked, in a dispassionate tone.
“And anyway,” he added, after waiting a moment, “we did not give much
thought to what would come after. We never discussed formally any line
of conduct. It was understood, I think.”
She approved his statement with slight nods.
“You, of course, wished to remain in Russia?”
“In St. Petersburg itself,” emphasized Razumov. “It was the only safe
course for me. And, moreover, I had nowhere else to go.”
“Yes! Yes! I know. Clearly. And the other--this wonderful Haldin
appearing only to be regretted--you don’t know what he intended?”
Razumov had foreseen that such a question would certainly come to meet
him sooner or later. He raised his hands a little and let them fall
helplessly by his side--nothing more.
It was the white-haired woman conspirator who was the first to break the
silence.
“Very curious,” she pronounced slowly. “And you did not think, Kirylo
Sidorovitch, that he might perhaps wish to get in touch with you again?”
Razumov discovered that he could not suppress the trembling of his lips.
But he thought that he owed it to himself to speak. A negative sign
would not do again. Speak he must, if only to get at the bottom of what
that St. Petersburg letter might have contained.
“I stayed at home next day,” he said, bending down a little and plunging
his glance into the black eyes of the woman so that she should not
observe the trembling of his lips. “Yes, I stayed at home. As my actions
are remembered and written about, then perhaps you are aware that I
was _not_ seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn’t know? Well, I
stopped at home-the live-long day.”
As if moved by his agitated tone, she murmured a sympathetic “I see! It
must have been trying enough.”
“You seem to understand one’s feelings,” said Razumov steadily. “It was
trying. It was horrible; it was an atrocious day. It was not the last.”
“Yes, I understand. Afterwards, when you heard they had got him. Don’t
I know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight? One’s
ashamed of being left. And I can remember so many. Never mind. They
shall be avenged before long. And what is death? At any rate, it is not
a shameful thing like some kinds of life.”
Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and
unpleasant tremor.
“Some kinds of life?” he repeated, looking at her searchingly.
“The subservient, submissive life. Life? No! Vegetation on the filthy
heap of iniquity which the world is. Life, Razumov, not to be vile must
be a revolt--a pitiless protest--all the time.”
She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out
instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable,
businesslike manner that she went on--
“You understand me, Razumov. You are not an enthusiast, but there is an
immense force of revolt in you. I felt it from the first, directly I
set my eyes on you--you remember--in Zurich. Oh! You are full of bitter
revolt. That is good. Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may
become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and
justice which armed your and Haldin’s hands to strike down that
fanatical brute...for it was that--nothing but that! I have been
thinking it out. It could have been nothing else but that.”
Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost
sinister immobility of feature.
“I can’t speak for the dead. As for myself, I can assure you that my
conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of--well--retributive
justice.”
“Good, that,” he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black
and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought
should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As
if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be
changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at
the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for
arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers. Those thoughts darted
through Razumov’s head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand,
the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had
such a weight in the “active” section of every party. She was much more
representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric,
mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive
revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave
him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own
mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the
purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical
theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting
in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in
that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous
lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a
thoughtful frown.
“That’s it. Retributive. No pity!” was the conclusion of her silence.
And this once broken, she went on impulsively in short, vibrating
sentences--
“Listen to my story, Razumov!...” Her father was a clever but unlucky
artisan. No joy had lighted up his laborious days. He died at fifty;
all the years of his life he had panted under the thumb of masters whose
rapacity exacted from him the price of the water, of the salt, of the
very air he breathed; taxed the sweat of his brow and claimed the blood
of his sons. No protection, no guidance! What had society to say to him?
Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal
I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing
except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread--but no consolation for your
trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your
miserable life.
And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died. He died in the hospital.
Standing by the common grave she thought of his tormented existence--she
saw it whole. She reckoned the simple joys of life, the birthright of
the humblest, of which his gentle heart had been robbed by the crime of
a society which nothing can absolve.
“Yes, Razumov,” she continued, in an impressive, lowered voice, “it was
like a lurid light in which I stood, still almost a child, and cursed
not the toil, not the misery which had been his lot, but the great
social iniquity of the system resting on unrequited toil and unpitied
sufferings. From that moment I was a revolutionist.”
Razumov, trying to raise himself above the dangerous weaknesses of
contempt or compassion, had preserved an impassive countenance. She,
with an unaffected touch of mere bitterness, the first he could notice
since he had come in contact with the woman, went on--
“As I could not go to the Church where the priests of the system
exhorted such unconsidered vermin as I to resignation, I went to the
secret societies as soon as I knew how to find my way. I was sixteen
years old--no more, Razumov! And--look at my white hair.”
In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness
too was gone.
“There is a lot of it. I had always magnificent hair, even as a chit of
a girl. Only, at that time we were cutting it short and thinking that
there was the first step towards crushing the social infamy. Crush the
Infamy! A fine watchword! I would placard it on the walls of prisons and
palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of fire on that
empty sky for a sign of hope and terror--a portent of the end....”
“You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna,” Razumov interrupted suddenly.
“Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in water....”
She was checked but not offended. “Who knows? Very soon it may become
a fact written all over that great land of ours,” she hinted meaningly.
“And then one would have lived long enough. White hair won’t matter.”
Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many uneasy years
seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour of revolt. It
threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled face, the
brilliant black glance, the upright compact figure, the simple,
brisk self-possession of the mature personality--as though in her
revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret, not of
everlasting youth, but of everlasting endurance.
How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov. Her mother might have been
a Jewess or an Armenian or devil knew what. He reflected that a
revolutionist is seldom true to the settled type. All revolt is the
expression of strong individualism--ran his thought vaguely. One
can tell them a mile off in any society, in any surroundings. It was
astonishing that the police....
“We shall not meet again very soon, I think,” she was saying. “I am
leaving to-morrow.”
“For Zurich?” Razumov asked casually, but feeling relieved, not from
any distinct apprehension, but from a feeling of stress as if after a
wrestling match.
“Yes, Zurich--and farther on, perhaps, much farther. Another journey.
When I think of all my journeys! The last must come some day. Never
mind, Razumov. We had to have a good long talk. I would have certainly
tried to see you if we had not met. Peter Ivanovitch knows where you
live? Yes. I meant to have asked him--but it’s better like this. You
see, we expect two more men; and I had much rather wait here talking
with you than up there at the house with....”
Having cast a glance beyond the gate, she interrupted herself. “Here
they are,” she said rapidly. “Well, Kirylo Sidorovitch, we shall have to
say good-bye, presently.”