time. He would come upon it presently and hasten to write another letter—and then!
For all the envenomed recklessness of his temper, fed on hate and disdain, Razumov shuddered inwardly. It guarded him from common fear, but it could not defend him from disgust at being dealt with in any way by these people. It was a sort of superstitious dread. Now, since his position had been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of Ziemianitch, he felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom from direct lying, with its power of moving amongst them silent, unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate of their crimes and their folly. Was this advantage his already? Or not yet? Or never would be?
'Well, Sophia Antonovna,' his air of reluctant concession was genuine in so far that he was really loath to part with her without testing her sincerity by a question it was impossible to bring about in any way; 'well, Sophia Antonovna, if that is so, then—'
'The creature has done justice to himself,' the woman observed, as if thinking aloud.
'What? Ah yes! Remorse,' Razumov muttered, with equivocal contempt.
'Don't be harsh, Kirylo Sidorovitch, if you have lost a friend.' There was no hint of softness in her tone, only the black glitter of her eyes seemed detached for an instant from vengeful visions. 'He was a man of the people. The simple Russian soul is never wholly impenitent. It's something to know that.'
'Consoling?' insinuated Razumov, in a tone of inquiry.
'Leave off railing,' she checked him explosively. 'Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action. Don't rail! Leave off.... I don't know how it is, but there are moments when you are abhorrent to me....'
She averted her face. A languid silence, as if all the electricity of the situation had been discharged in this flash of passion, lasted for some time. Razumov had not flinched. Suddenly she laid the tips of her fingers on his sleeve.
'Don't mind.'
'I don't mind,' he said very quietly.
He was proud to feel that she could read nothing on his face. He was really mollified, relieved, if only for a moment, from an obscure oppression. And suddenly he asked himself, 'Why the devil did I go to that house? It was an imbecile thing to do.'
A profound disgust came over him. Sophia Antonovna lingered, talking in a friendly manner with an evident conciliatory intention. And it was still about the famous letter, referring to various minute details given by her informant, who had never seen Ziemianitch. The 'victim of remorse' had been buried several weeks before her correspondent began frequenting the house. It—the house—contained very good revolutionary material. The spirit of the heroic Haldin had passed through these dens of black wretchedness with a promise of universal redemption from all the miseries that oppress mankind. Razumov listened without hearing, gnawed by the newborn desire of safety with its independence from that degrading method of direct lying which at times he found it almost impossible to practice.
No. The point he wanted to hear about could never come into this conversation. There was no way of bringing it forward. He regretted not having composed a perfect story for use abroad, in which his fatal connexion with the house might have been owned up to. But when he left Russia he did not know that Ziemianitch had hanged himself. And, anyway, who could have foreseen this woman's 'informant' stumbling upon that particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! 'It's a perfect, diabolic surprise,' thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna's remarks upon the psychology of 'the people,' 'Oh yes—certainly,' rather coldly, but with a nervous longing in his fingers to tear some sort of confession out of her throat.
Then, at the very last, on the point of separating, the feeling of relaxed tension already upon him, he heard Sophia Antonovna allude to the subject of his uneasiness. How it came about he could only guess, his mind being absent at the moment, but it must have sprung from Sophia Antonovna's complaints of the illogical absurdity of the people. For instance—that Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been beaten by the devil.
'The devil,' repeated Razumov, as though he had not heard aright.
'The actual devil. The devil in person. You may well look astonished, Kirylo Sidorovitch. Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken, a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched creature's body was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in the house.'
'But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don't believe in the actual devil?'
'Do you?' retorted the woman curtly. 'Not but that there are plenty of men worse than devils to make a hell of this earth,' she muttered to herself.
Razumov watched her, vigorous and white-haired, with the deep fold between her thin eyebrows, and her black glance turned idly away. It was obvious that she did not make much of the story—unless, indeed, this was the perfection of duplicity. 'A dark young man,' she explained further. 'Never seen there before, never seen afterwards. Why are you smiling, Razumov?'
'At the devil being still young after all these ages,' he answered composedly. 'But who was able to describe him, since the victim, you say, was dead-drunk at the time?'
'Oh! The eating-house keeper has described him. An overbearing, swarthy young man in a student's cloak, who came rushing in, demanded Ziemianitch, beat him furiously, and rushed away without a word, leaving the eating- house keeper paralysed with astonishment.'
'Does he, too, believe it was the devil?'
'That I can't say. I am told he's very reserved on the matter. Those sellers of spirits are great scoundrels generally. I should think he knows more of it than anybody.'
'Well, and you, Sophia Antonovna, what's your theory?' asked Razumov in a tone of great interest. 'Yours and your informant's, who is on the spot.'
'I agree with him. Some police-hound in disguise. Who else could beat a helpless man so unmercifully? As for the rest, if they were out that day on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might have thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more information, or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly detective was sent to fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him so drunk broke a stable fork over his ribs.
