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 not seen at the lectures next day. Eh? You didn’t know? Well, I stopped at home—the live-long day.”
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 Zürich. 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