“I have had a lot of urgent writing to do,” he added.
I rose from my chair at once, and he followed my example, without haste, a little heavily.
“I must apologize for detaining you so long,” I said.
“Why apologize? One can’t very well go to bed before night. And you did not detain me. I could have left you at any time.”
I had not stayed with him to be offended.
“I am glad you have been sufficiently interested,” I said calmly. “No merit of mine, though—the commonest sort of regard for the mother of your friend was enough.… As to Miss Haldin herself, she at one time was disposed to think that her brother had been betrayed to the police in some way.”
To my great surprise Mr. Razumov sat down again suddenly. I stared at him, and I must say that he returned my stare without winking for quite a considerable time.
“In some way,” he mumbled, as if he had not understood or could not believe his ears.
“Some unforeseen event, a sheer accident might have done that,” I went on. “Or, as she characteristically put it to me, the folly or weakness of some unhappy fellow-revolutionist.”
“Folly or weakness,” he repeated bitterly.
“She is a very generous creature,” I observed after a time. The man admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground. I turned away and moved off, apparently unnoticed by him. I nourished no resentment of the moody brusqueness with which he had treated me. The sentiment I was carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness. Before I had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined me.
“H’m, yes!” I heard him at my elbow again. “But what do you think?”
I did not look round even.
“I think that you people are under a curse.”
He made no sound. It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I heard him again.
“I should like to walk with you a little.”
After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch. But I saw no reason for being particularly gracious.
“I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here, to meet a friend from England,” I said, for all answer to his unexpected proposal. I hoped that something informing could come of it. As we stood on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily—
“I like what you said just now.”
“Do you?”
We stepped off the pavement together.
“The great problem,” he went on, “is to understand thoroughly the nature of the curse.”
“That’s not very difficult, I think.”