Under Western Eyes

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Under Western Eyes


"Aha! You begin to see."

He saw it clearly enough--in the light of a lantern casting spokes of
shadow in a cellar-like stable, the body in a sheepskin coat and long
boots hanging against the wall. A pointed hood, with the ends wound
about up to the eyes, hid the face. "But that does not concern me," he
reflected. "It does not affect my position at all. He never knew who had
thrashed him. He could not have known." Razumov felt sorry for the old
lover of the bottle and women.

"Yes. Some of them end like that," he muttered. "What is your idea,
Sophia Antonovna?"

It was really the idea of her correspondent, but Sophia Antonovna had
adopted it fully. She stated it in one word--"Remorse." Razumov opened
his eyes very wide at that. Sophia Antonovna's informant, by listening
to the talk of the house, by putting this and that together, had managed
to come very near to the truth of Haldin's relation to Ziemianitch.

"It is I who can tell you what you were not certain of--that your friend
had some plan for saving himself afterwards, for getting out of St.
Petersburg, at any rate. Perhaps that and no more, trusting to luck for
the rest. And that fellow's horses were part of the plan."

"They have actually got at the truth," Razumov marvelled to himself,
while he nodded judicially. "Yes, that's possible, very possible." But
the woman revolutionist was very positive that it was so. First of all,
a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been
partly overheard. Then there were the suspicions of the people in the
house when their "young gentleman" (they did not know Haldin by
his name) ceased to call at the house. Some of them used to charge
Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence. He denied it with
exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin's disappearance he
was not himself, growing moody and thin. Finally, during a quarrel with
some woman (to whom he was making up), in which most of the inmates of
the house took part apparently, he was openly abused by his chief enemy,
an athletic pedlar, for an informer, and for having driven "our young
gentleman to Siberia, the same as you did those young fellows who broke
into houses." In consequence of this there was a fight, and Ziemianitch
got flung down a flight of stairs. Thereupon he drank and moped for a
week, and then hanged himself.

Sophia Antonovna drew her conclusions from the tale. She charged
Ziemianitch either with drunken indiscretion as to a driving job on a
certain date, overheard by some spy in some low grog-shop--perhaps in
the very eating-shop on the ground floor of the house--or, maybe, a
downright denunciation, followed by remorse. A man like that would be
capable of anything. People said he was a flighty old chap. And if he
had been once before mixed up with the police--as seemed certain, though
he always denied it--in connexion with these thieves, he would be sure
to be acquainted with some police underlings, always on the look out for
something to report. Possibly at first his tale was not made anything of
till the day that scoundrel de P--- got his deserts. Ah! But then every
bit and scrap of hint and information would be acted on, and fatally
they were bound to get Haldin.

Sophia Antonovna spread out her hands--"Fatally."

Fatality--chance! Razumov meditated in silent astonishment upon the
queer verisimilitude of these inferences. They were obviously to his
advantage.

"It is right now to make this conclusive evidence known generally."
Sophia Antonovna was very calm and deliberate again. She had received
the letter three days ago, but did not write at once to Peter
Ivanovitch. She knew then that she would have the opportunity presently
of meeting several men of action assembled for an important purpose.

"I thought it would be more effective if I could show the letter itself
at large. I have it in my pocket now. You understand how pleased I was
to come upon you."

Razumov was saying to himself, "She won't offer to show the letter to
me. Not likely. Has she told me everything that correspondent of hers
has found out?" He longed to see the letter, but he felt he must not
ask.

"Tell me, please, was this an investigation ordered, as it were?"

"No, no," she protested. "There you are again with your sensitiveness.
It makes you stupid. Don't you see, there was no starting-point for an
investigation even if any one had thought of it. A perfect blank! That's
exactly what some people were pointing out as the reason for receiving
you cautiously. It was all perfectly accidental, arising from my
informant striking an acquaintance with an intelligent skindresser
lodging in that particular slum-house. A wonderful coincidence!"

"A pious person," suggested Razumov, with a pale smile, "would say that
the hand of God has done it all."

"My poor father would have said that." Sophia Antonovna did not smile.
She dropped her eyes. "Not that his God ever helped him. It's a long
time since God has done anything for the people. Anyway, it's done."

"All this would be quite final," said Razumov, with every appearance of
reflective impartiality, "if there was any certitude that the 'our young
gentleman' of these people was Victor Haldin. Have we got that?"

"Yes. There's no mistake. My correspondent was as familiar with Haldin's
personal appearance as with your own," the woman affirmed decisively.

"It's the red-nosed fellow beyond a doubt," Razumov said to himself,
with reawakened uneasiness. Had his own visit to that accursed house
passed unnoticed? It was barely possible. Yet it was hardly probable.
It was just the right sort of food for the popular gossip that gaunt
busybody had been picking up. But the letter did not seem to contain any
allusion to that. Unless she had suppressed it. And, if so, why? If it
had really escaped the prying of that hunger-stricken democrat with a
confounded genius for recognizing people from description, it could
only be for a 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. 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.