Under Western Eyes — Pt. 3, Ch. 4, Sec. 2

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.

Later on, after they had the big game safe in the net, they troubled their heads no more about that peasant.

” Such were the last words of the woman revolutionist in this conversation, keeping so close to the truth, departing from it so far in the verisimilitude of thoughts and conclusions as to give one the notion of the invincible nature of human error, a glimpse into the utmost depths of self-deception.

Razumov, after shaking hands with Sophia Antonovna, left the grounds, crossed the road, and walking out on the little steamboat pier leaned over the rail.

His mind was at ease; ease such as he had not known for many days, ever since that night...

the night.

The conversation with the woman revolutionist had given him the view of his danger at the very moment this danger vanished, characteristically enough.

“I ought to have foreseen the doubts that would arise in those people’s minds,” he thought.

Then his attention being attracted by a stone of peculiar shape, which he could see clearly lying at the bottom, he began to speculate as to the depth of water in that spot.

But very soon, with a start of wonder at this extraordinary instance of ill-timed detachment, he returned to his train of thought.

“I ought to have told very circumstantial lies from the first,” he said to himself, with a mortal distaste of the mere idea which silenced his mental utterance for quite a perceptible interval.

“Luckily, that’s all right now,” he reflected, and after a time spoke to himself, half aloud, “Thanks to the devil,” and laughed a little.

The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts.

He was not exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting in it a certain piquancy.

He owned to himself that, had he known of that suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making such excellent use of it for his own purposes.

He ought to be infinitely obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity, “A wonderful psychologist apparently,” he said to himself sarcastically.

Remorse, indeed!

It was a striking example of your true conspirator’s blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea.

This was a drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself mockingly.

A woman the old fellow was making up to!

A robust pedlar, clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs....

And at sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.

That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch.

Even the comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme crisis.

At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of an unquenchable passion.

And, besides, there was the wild exasperation aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing, added to these simple and bitter sorrows.

“Devil, eh?

” Razumov exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting discovery.

“Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism.

So many of our true Russian souls end in that way!

Very characteristic.

” He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above--like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny.

It was as if this Ziemianitch could not possibly have done anything else.

And Sophia Antonovna’s cocksure and contemptuous “some police-hound” was characteristically Russian in another way.

But there was no tragedy there.

This was a comedy of errors.

It was as if the devil himself were playing a game with all of them in turn.

First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then with those revolutionists.

The devil’s own game this....

He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his own expense.

“Hallo!

I am falling into mysticism too.

” His mind was more at ease than ever.

Turning about he put his back against the rail comfortably.

“All this fits with marvellous aptness,” he continued to think.

“The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague.

The mystic Ziemianitch accounts for that.

An incredible chance has served me.

No more need of lies.

I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from getting the upper hand of my caution.

” He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was a long time before he started forward from that pose, with the recollection that he had made up his mind to do something important that day.

What it was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort of memory, for he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.

He had not gone more than a hundred yards towards the town when he slowed down, almost faltered in his walk, at the sight of a figure walking in the contrary direction, draped in a cloak, under a soft, broad-brimmed hat, picturesque but diminutive, as if seen through the big end of an opera-glass.

It was impossible to avoid that tiny man, for there was no issue for retreat.

“Another one going to that mysterious meeting,” thought Razumov.

He was right in his surmise, only _this_ one, unlike the others who came from a distance, was known to him personally.

Still, he hoped to pass on with a mere bow, but it was impossible to ignore the little thin hand with hairy wrist and knuckles protruded in a friendly wave from under the folds of the cloak, worn Spanish-wise, in disregard of a fairly warm day, a corner flung over the shoulder.

“And how is Herr Razumov?

” sounded the greeting in German, by that alone made more odious to the object of the affable recognition.

At closer quarters the diminutive personage looked like a reduction of an ordinary-sized man, with a lofty brow bared for a moment by the raising of the hat, the great pepper-and salt full beard spread over the proportionally broad chest.

A fine bold nose jutted over a thin mouth hidden in the mass of fine hair.

All this, accented features, strong limbs in their relative smallness, appeared delicate without the slightest sign of debility.

The eyes alone, almond-shaped and brown, were too big, with the whites slightly bloodshot by much pen labour under a lamp.

The obscure celebrity of the tiny man was well known to Razumov.

Polyglot, of unknown parentage, of indefinite nationality, anarchist, with a pedantic and ferocious temperament, and an amazingly inflammatory capacity for invective, he was a power in the background, this violent pamphleteer clamouring for revolutionary justice, this Julius Laspara, editor of the _Living Word_, confidant of conspirators, inditer of sanguinary menaces and manifestos, suspected of being in the secret of every plot.

Laspara lived in the old town in a sombre, narrow house presented to him by a naive middle-class admirer of his humanitarian eloquence.

With him lived his two daughters, who overtopped him head and shoulders, and a pasty-faced, lean boy of six, languishing in the dark rooms in blue cotton overalls and clumsy boots, who might have belonged to either one of them or to neither.

No stranger could tell.

Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details--no, not so much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist function.

Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of sweepings all over the place, half-full glasses of tea forgotten on every table, the two Laspara daughters prowling about enigmatically silent, sleepy-eyed, corsetless, and generally, in their want of shape and the disorder of their rumpled attire, resembling old dolls; the great but obscure Julius, his feet twisted round his three-legged stool, always ready to receive the visitors, the pen instantly dropped, the body screwed round with a striking display of the lofty brow and of the great austere beard.

When he got down from his stool it was as though he had descended from the heights of Olympus.

He was dwarfed by his daughters, by the furniture, by any caller of ordinary stature.

But he very seldom left it, and still more rarely was seen walking in broad daylight.

It must have been some matter of serious importance which had driven him out in that direction that afternoon.

Evidently he wished to be amiable to that young man whose arrival had made some sensation in the world of political refugees.

In Russian now, which he spoke, as he spoke and wrote four or five other European languages, without distinction and without force (other than that of invective), he inquired if Razumov had taken his inscriptions at the University as yet.

And the young man, shaking his head negatively-- “There’s plenty of time for that.

But, meantime, are you not going to write something for us?

” He could not understand how any one could refrain from writing on anything, social, economic, historical--anything.

Any subject could be treated in the right spirit, and for the ends of social revolution.

And, as it happened, a friend of his in London had got in touch with a review of advanced ideas.

“We must educate, educate everybody--develop the great thought of absolute liberty and of revolutionary justice.

” Razumov muttered rather surlily that he did not even know English.

“Write in Russian.

We’ll have it translated There can be no difficulty.

Why, without seeking further, there is Miss Haldin.

My daughters go to see her sometimes.

” He nodded significantly.

“She does nothing, has never done anything in her life.

She would be quite competent, with a little assistance.

Only write.

You know you must.

And so good-bye for the present.

” He raised his arm and went on.

Razumov backed against the low wall, looked after him, spat violently, and went on his way with an angry mutter-- “Cursed Jew!

” He did not know anything about it.

Julius Laspara might have been a Transylvanian, a Turk, an Andalusian, or a citizen of one of the Hanse towns for anything he could tell to the contrary.

But this is not a story of the West, and this exclamation must be recorded, accompanied by the comment that it was merely an expression of hate and contempt, best adapted to the nature of the feelings Razumov suffered from at the time.

He was boiling with rage, as though he had been grossly insulted.

He walked as if blind, following instinctively the shore of the diminutive harbour along the quay, through a pretty, dull garden, where dull people sat on chairs under the trees, till, his fury abandoning him, he discovered himself in the middle of a long, broad bridge.

He slowed down at once.

To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.

He turned his head away from that view for the tourists, and walked on slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground.

One or two persons had to get out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to his profound absorption.

The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled in his mind strangely.

Write.

Must write!

He!

Write!

A sudden light flashed upon him.

To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to do that day.

He had made up his mind irrevocably to that step and then had forgotten all about it.

That incorrigible tendency to escape from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger.

He was ready to despise himself for it.

What was it?

Levity, or deep-seated weakness?

Or an unconscious dread?

“Is it that I am shrinking?

It can’t be!

It’s impossible.

To shrink now would be worse than moral suicide; it would be nothing less than moral damnation,” he thought.

“Is it possible that I have a conventional conscience?

” He rejected that hypothesis with scorn, and, checked on the edge of the pavement, made ready to cross the road and proceed up the wide street facing the head of the bridge; and that for no other reason except that it was there before him.

But at the moment a couple of carriages and a slow-moving cart interposed, and suddenly he turned sharp to the left, following the quay again, but now away from the lake.

“It may be just my health,” he thought, allowing himself a very unusual doubt of his soundness; for, with the exception of a childish ailment or two, he had never been ill in his life.

But that was a danger, too.

Only, it seemed as though he were being looked after in a specially remarkable way.

“If I believed in an active Providence,” Razumov said to himself, amused grimly, “I would see here the working of an ironical finger.

To have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind me of my purpose is--Write, he had said.

I must write--I must, indeed!

I shall write--never fear.

Certainly.

That’s why I am here.

And for the future I shall have something to write about.

” He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy.

But the idea of writing evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of privacy, and naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the necessary exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile influence awaiting him within those odious four walls.

“Suppose one of these revolutionists,” he asked himself, “were to take a fancy to call on me while I am writing?

” The mere prospect of such an interruption made him shudder.

One could lock one’s door, or ask the tobacconist downstairs (some sort of a refugee himself) to tell inquirers that one was not in.

Not very good precautions those.

The manner of his life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences as a delay in opening a locked door.

“I wish I were in the middle of some field miles away from everywhere,” he thought.

He had unconsciously turned to the left once more and now was aware of being on a bridge again.

This one was much narrower than the other, and instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle.

At the point of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile neatness.

A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal.

On setting his foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the woman in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the island.

There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Something pretentious and shabby, too.

He asked for a glass of milk, which he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea had passed his lips since the morning), and was going away with a weary, lagging step when a thought stopped him short.

He had found precisely what he needed.

If solitude could ever be secured in the open air in the middle of a town, he would have it there on this absurd island, together with the faculty of watching the only approach.

He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it.

This was the place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done.

The materials he had on him.

“I shall always come here,” he said to himself, and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought and sight and hearing, almost without life.

He sat long enough for the declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the connecting arm of the bridge.

These glances were needless; the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the _Social Contract_ sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze.

After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness.

But the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful nicety.

That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless, the papers holding in his left hand.

The twilight had deepened.

He got up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.

“There can be no doubt that now I am safe,” he thought.

His fine ear could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to them with interest.

But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was too elusive.

“Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to,” he murmured.

And it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were.

Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind--completely foreign to human passions.

All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.

This was Mr. Razumov’s feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth.

And it must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov’s case the bitterness of solitude from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.

PART FOUR