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
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
