Razumov looked round from under his cap.
“What can the prejudice of the world reproach me with? Have I provoked his confidence? No! Have I by a single word, look, or gesture given him reason to suppose that I accepted his trust in me? No! It is true that I consented to go and see his Ziemianitch. Well, I have been to see him. And I broke a stick on his back too—the brute.”
Something seemed to turn over in his head bringing uppermost a singularly hard, clear facet of his brain.
“It would be better, however,” he reflected with a quite different mental accent, “to keep that circumstance altogether to myself.”
He had passed beyond the turn leading to his lodgings, and had reached a wide and fashionable street. Some shops were still open, and all the restaurants. Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere believer for the frivolous crowd. It was the world—those officers, dignitaries, men of fashion, officials, members of the Yacht Club. The event of the morning affected them all. What would they say if they knew what this student in a cloak was going to do?
“Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can. How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?”
Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided. Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some other mind’s sanction.
With something resembling anguish he said to himself—
“I want to be understood.” The universal aspiration with all its profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open himself.
The attorney was not to be thought of. He despised the little agent of chicane too much. One could not go and lay one’s conscience before the policeman at the corner. Neither was Razumov anxious to go to the chief of his district’s police—a common-looking person whom he used to see sometimes in the street in a shabby uniform and with a smouldering cigarette stuck to his lower lip. “He would begin by locking me up most probably. At any rate, he is certain to get excited and create an awful commotion,” thought Razumov practically.
An act of conscience must be done with outward dignity.
Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
Razumov had reached that point of vision. To escape from it he embraced for a whole minute the delirious purpose of rushing to his lodgings and flinging himself on his knees by the side of the bed with the dark figure stretched on it; to pour out a full confession in passionate words that would stir the whole being of that man to its innermost depths; that would end in embraces and tears; in an incredible fellowship of souls—such as the world had never seen. It was sublime!
Inwardly he wept and trembled already. But to the casual eyes that were cast upon him he was aware that he appeared as a tranquil student in a cloak, out for a leisurely stroll. He noted, too, the sidelong, brilliant glance of a pretty woman—with a delicate head, and covered in the hairy skins of wild beasts down to her feet, like a frail and beautiful savage—which rested for a moment with a sort of mocking tenderness on the deep abstraction of that good-looking young man.
Suddenly Razumov stood still. The glimpse of a passing grey whisker, caught and lost in the same instant, had evoked the complete image of Prince K—, the man who once had pressed his hand as no other man had pressed it—a faint but lingering pressure like a secret sign, like a half-unwilling caress.
And Razumov marvelled at himself. Why did he not think of him before!
“A senator, a dignitary, a great personage, the very man—He!”
A strange softening emotion came over Razumov—made his knees shake a little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment was pernicious nonsense. He couldn’t be quick enough; and when he got into a sledge he shouted to the driver—“to the K— Palace. Get on—you! Fly!” The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of his eyes, answered obsequiously—
“I hear, your high Nobility.”
It was lucky for Razumov that Prince K— was not a man of timid character. On the day of Mr. de P—’s murder an extreme alarm and despondency prevailed in the high official spheres.
Prince K—, sitting sadly alone in his study, was told by his alarmed servants that a mysterious young man had forced his way into the hall, refused to tell his name and the nature of his business, and would not move from there till he had seen his Excellency in private. Instead of locking himself up and telephoning for the police, as nine out of ten high personages would have done that evening, the Prince gave way to curiosity and came quietly to the door of his study.
In the hall, the front door standing wide open, he recognised at once Razumov, pale as death, his eyes blazing, and surrounded by perplexed lackeys.
The Prince was vexed beyond measure, and even indignant. But his humane instincts and a subtle sense of self-respect could not allow him to let this young man be thrown out into the street by base menials. He retreated unseen into his room, and after a little rang his bell. Razumov heard in the hall an ominously raised harsh voice saying somewhere far away—
“Show the gentleman in here.”
Razumov walked in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable—raised far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was not asked to sit down.
Half an hour later they appeared in the hall together. The lackeys stood up, and the Prince, moving with difficulty on his gouty feet, was helped into his furs. The carriage had been ordered before. When the great double door was flung open with a crash, Razumov, who had been standing silent with a lost gaze but with every faculty intensely on the alert, heard the Prince’s voice—
“Your arm, young man.”
The mobile, superficial mind of the ex-Guards officer, man of showy missions, experienced in nothing but the arts of gallant intrigue and worldly success, had been equally impressed by the more obvious difficulties of such a situation and by Razumov’s quiet dignity in stating them.
He had said, “No. Upon the whole I can’t condemn the step you ventured to take by coming to me with your story. It is not an affair for police understrappers. The greatest importance is attached to. … Set your mind at rest. I shall see you through this most extraordinary and difficult situation.”
Then the Prince rose to ring the bell, and Razumov, making a short bow, had said with deference—
“I have trusted my instinct. A young man having no claim upon anybody in the world has in an hour of trial involving his deepest political convictions turned to an illustrious Russian—that’s all.”
The Prince had exclaimed hastily—
“You have done well.”
In the carriage—it was a small brougham on sleigh runners—Razumov broke the silence in a voice that trembled slightly.
“My