Under Western Eyes

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Under Western Eyes


After throwing his "engine" he ran off and in a moment was overtaken
by the panic-struck people flying away from the spot after the second
explosion. They were wild with terror. He was jostled once or twice. He
slowed down for the rush to pass him and then turned to the left into a
narrow street. There he was alone.

He marvelled at this immediate escape. The work was done. He could
hardly believe it. He fought with an almost irresistible longing to lie
down on the pavement and sleep. But this sort of faintness--a drowsy
faintness--passed off quickly. He walked faster, making his way to one
of the poorer parts of the town in order to look up Ziemianitch.

This Ziemianitch, Razumov understood, was a sort of town-peasant who had
got on; owner of a small number of sledges and horses for hire. Haldin
paused in his narrative to exclaim--

"A bright spirit! A hardy soul! The best driver in St. Petersburg. He
has a team of three horses there.... Ah! He's a fellow!"

This man had declared himself willing to take out safely, at any time,
one or two persons to the second or third railway station on one of the
southern lines. But there had been no time to warn him the night before.
His usual haunt seemed to be a low-class eating-house on the outskirts
of the town. When Haldin got there the man was not to be found. He was
not expected to turn up again till the evening. Haldin wandered away
restlessly.

He saw the gate of a woodyard open and went in to get out of the wind
which swept the bleak broad thoroughfare. The great rectangular piles of
cut wood loaded with snow resembled the huts of a village. At first the
watchman who discovered him crouching amongst them talked in a friendly
manner. He was a dried-up old man wearing two ragged army coats one over
the other; his wizened little face, tied up under the jaw and over the
ears in a dirty red handkerchief, looked comical. Presently he grew
sulky, and then all at once without rhyme or reason began to shout
furiously.

"Aren't you ever going to clear out of this, you loafer? We know all
about factory hands of your sort. A big, strong, young chap! You aren't
even drunk. What do you want here? You don't frighten us. Take yourself
and your ugly eyes away."

Haldin stopped before the sitting Razumov. His supple figure, with
the white forehead above which the fair hair stood straight up, had an
aspect of lofty daring.

"He did not like my eyes," he said. "And so...here I am."

Razumov made an effort to speak calmly.

"But pardon me, Victor Victorovitch. We know each other so little....
I don't see why you...."

"Confidence," said Haldin.

This word sealed Razumov's lips as if a hand had been clapped on his
mouth. His brain seethed with arguments.

"And so--here you are," he muttered through his teeth.

The other did not detect the tone of anger. Never suspected it.

"Yes. And nobody knows I am here. You are the last person that could
be suspected--should I get caught. That's an advantage, you see. And
then--speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the
truth. It occurred to me that you--you have no one belonging to you--no
ties, no one to suffer for it if this came out by some means. There
have been enough ruined Russian homes as it is. But I don't see how my
passage through your rooms can be ever known. If I should be got hold
of, I'll know how to keep silent--no matter what they may be pleased to
do to me," he added grimly.

He began to walk again while Razumov sat still appalled.

"You thought that--" he faltered out almost sick with indignation.

"Yes, Razumov. Yes, brother. Some day you shall help to build. You
suppose that I am a terrorist, now--a destructor of what is, But
consider that the true destroyers are they who destroy the spirit of
progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the
persecutors of human dignity. Men like me are necessary to make room for
self-contained, thinking men like you. Well, we have made the sacrifice
of our lives, but all the same I want to escape if it can be done. It
is not my life I want to save, but my power to do. I won't live idle. Oh
no! Don't make any mistake, Razumov. Men like me are rare. And, besides,
an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator
vanishes without a trace. They sit in their offices and palaces and
quake. All I want you to do is to help me to vanish. No great matter
that. Only to go by and by and see Ziemianitch for me at that place
where I went this morning. Just tell him, 'He whom you know wants a
well-horsed sledge to pull up half an hour after midnight at the seventh
lamp-post on the left counting from the upper end of Karabelnaya. If
nobody gets in, the sledge is to run round a block or two, so as to come
back past the same spot in ten minutes' time.'"

Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to
go away long before. Was it weakness or what?

He concluded that it was a sound instinct. Haldin must have been seen.
It was impossible that some people should not have noticed the face and
appearance of the man who threw the second bomb. Haldin was a noticeable
person. The police in their thousands must have had his description
within the hour. With every moment the danger grew. Sent out to wander
in the streets he could not escape being caught in the end.

The police would very soon find out all about him. They would set about
discovering a conspiracy. Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in
the greatest danger. Unguarded expressions, little facts in themselves
innocent would be counted for crimes. Razumov remembered certain words
he said, the speeches he had listened to, the harmless gatherings he
had attended--it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that
sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.

Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress, worried, badgered, perhaps
ill-used. He saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life
broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope. He saw himself--at best--leading
a miserable existence under police supervision, in some small, faraway
provincial town, without friends to assist his necessities or even
take any steps to alleviate his lot--as others had. Others had fathers,
mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on
their behalf--he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him some
morning would forget his existence before sunset.

He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation--his
strength give way, his mind become an abject thing. He saw himself
creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets--dying unattended
in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government
hospital.

He shuddered. Then the peace of bitter calmness came over him. It was
best to keep this man out of the streets till he could be got rid of
with some chance of escaping. That was the best that could be done.
Razumov, of course, felt the safety of his lonely existence to be
permanently endangered. This evening's doings could turn up against
him at any time as long as this man lived and the present institutions
endured. They appeared to him rational and indestructible at that
moment. They had a force of harmony--in contrast with the horrible
discord of this man's presence. He hated the man. He said quietly--

"Yes, of course, I will go. 'You must give me precise directions, and
for the rest--depend on me."

"Ah! You are a fellow! Collected--cool as a cucumber. A regular
Englishman. Where did you get your soul from? There aren't many like
you. Look here, brother! Men like me leave no posterity, but their souls
are not lost. No man's soul is ever lost. It works for itself--or else
where would be the sense of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, of conviction,
of faith--the labours of the soul? What will become of my soul when I
die in the way I must die--soon--very soon perhaps? It shall not perish.
Don't make a mistake, Razumov. This is not murder--it is war, war. My
spirit shall go on warring in some Russian body till all falsehood is
swept out of the world. The modern civilization is false, but a new
revelation shall come out of Russia. Ha! you say nothing. You are a
sceptic. I respect your philosophical scepticism, Razumov, but don't
touch the soul. The Russian soul that lives in all of us. It has a
future. It has a mission, I tell you, or else why should I have been
moved to do this--reckless--like a butcher--in the middle of all these
innocent people--scattering death--I! I!... I wouldn't hurt a fly!"

"Not so loud," warned Razumov harshly.

Haldin sat down abruptly, and leaning his head on his folded arms burst
into tears. He wept for a long time. The dusk had deepened in the room.
Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder, listened to the sobs.

The other raised his head, got up and with an effort mastered his voice.

"Yes. Men like me leave no posterity," he repeated in a subdued tone,
"I have a sister though. She's with my old mother--I persuaded them to
go abroad this year--thank God. Not a bad little girl my sister. She has
the most trustful eyes of any human being that ever walked this earth.
She will marry well, I hope. She may have children--sons perhaps. Look
at me. My father was a Government official in the provinces, He had a
little land too. A simple servant of God--a true Russian in his way. His
was the soul of obedience. But I am not like him. They say I resemble
my mother's eldest brother, an officer. They shot him in '28. Under
Nicholas, you know. Haven't I told you that this is war, war.... But
God of Justice! This is weary work."

Razumov, in his chair, leaning his head on his hand, spoke as if from
the bottom of an abyss.

"You believe in God, Haldin?"

"There you go catching at words that are wrung from one. What does it
matter? What was it the Englishman said: 'There is a divine soul in
things...' Devil take him--I don't remember now. But he spoke the
truth. When the day of you thinkers comes don't you forget what's
divine in the Russian soul--and that's resignation. Respect that in your
intellectual restlessness and don't let your arrogant wisdom spoil its
message to the world. I am speaking to you now like a man with a rope
round his neck. What do you imagine I am? A being in revolt? No. It's
you thinkers who are in everlasting revolt. I am one of the resigned.
When the necessity of this heavy work came to me and I understood that
it had to be done--what did I do? Did I exult? Did I take pride in
my purpose? Did I try to weigh its worth and consequences? No! I was
resigned. I thought 'God's will be done.'"

He threw himself full length on Razumov's bed and putting the backs of
his hands over his eyes remained perfectly motionless and silent. Not
even the sound of his breathing could be heard. The dead stillness
or the room remained undisturbed till in the darkness Razumov said
gloomily--

"Haldin."

"Yes," answered the other readily, quite invisible now on the bed and
without the slightest stir.

"Isn't it time for me to start?"

"Yes, brother." The other was heard, lying still in the darkness as
though he were talking in his sleep. "The time has come to put fate to
the test."

He paused, then gave a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal
voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer.
As he was leaving the room the voice on the bed said after him--

"Go with God, thou silent soul."

On the landing, moving softly, Razumov locked the door and put the key
in his pocket.

II

The words and events of that evening must have been graven as if with
a steel tool on Mr. Razumov's brain since he was able to write his
relation with such fullness and precision a good many months afterwards.

The record of the thoughts which assailed him in the street is even more
minute and abundant. They seem to have rushed upon him with the greater
freedom because his thinking powers were no longer crushed by Haldin's
presence--the appalling presence of a great crime and the stunning force
of a great fanaticism. On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov's
diary I own that a "rush of thoughts" is not an adequate image.

The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts--the
faithful reflection of the state of his feelings. The thoughts in
themselves were not numerous--they were like the thoughts of most human
beings, few and simple--but they cannot be reproduced here in all
their exclamatory repetitions which went on in an endless and weary
turmoil--for the walk was long.

If to the Western reader they appear shocking, inappropriate, or even
improper, it must be remembered that as to the first this may be the
effect of my crude statement. For the rest I will only remark here that
this is not a story of the West of Europe.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments
have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young
Englishman should find himself in Razumov's situation. This being so it
would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe
surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at
this crisis of his fate. He would not have an hereditary and personal
knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
guards its power, and defends its existence. By an act of mental
extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison,
but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
either of investigation or of punishment.

This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
Western thought. I don't know that this danger occurred, specially, to
Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.

The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's parentage, or rather of his lack
of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. "Because I haven't that, must
everything else be taken away from me?" he thought.

He nerved himself for another effort to go on. Along the roadway sledges
glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the
black face of the night. "For it is a crime," he was saying to
himself. "A murder is a murder. Though, of course, some sort of liberal
institutions...."

A feeling of horrible sickness came over him. "I must be courageous,"
he exhorted himself mentally. All his strength was suddenly gone as
if taken out by a hand. Then by a mighty effort of will it came back
because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by
the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket. They would find
Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.

Strangely enough it was this fear which seems to have kept him up to the
end. The passers-by were rare. They came upon him suddenly, looming up
black in the snowflakes close by, then vanishing all at once-without
footfalls.

It was the quarter of the very poor. Razumov noticed an elderly woman
tied up in ragged shawls. Under the street lamp she seemed a beggar off
duty. She walked leisurely in the blizzard as though she had no home to
hurry to, she hugged under one arm a round loaf of black bread with
an air of guarding a priceless booty: and Razumov averting his glance
envied her the peace of her mind and the serenity of her fate.

To one reading Mr. Razumov's narrative it is really a wonder how he
managed to keep going as he did along one interminable street after
another on pavements that were gradually becoming blocked with snow.
It was the thought of Haldin locked up in his rooms and the desperate
desire to get rid of his presence which drove him forward. No rational
determination had any part in his exertions. Thus, when on arriving at
the low eating-house he heard that the man of horses, Ziemianitch, was
not there, he could only stare stupidly.

The waiter, a wild-haired youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt,
exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch
had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a
bottle under each arm to keep it up amongst the horses--he supposed.

The owner of the vile den, a bony short man in a dirty cloth caftan
coming down to his heels, stood by, his hands tucked into his belt, and
nodded confirmation.

The reek of spirits, the greasy rancid steam of food got Razumov by the
throat. He struck a table with his clenched hand and shouted violently--

"You lie."

Bleary unwashed faces were turned to his direction. A mild-eyed ragged
tramp drinking tea at the next table moved farther away. A murmur of
wonder arose with an undertone of uneasiness. A laugh was heard too, and
an exclamation, "There! there!" jeeringly soothing. The waiter looked
all round and announced to the room--

"The gentleman won't believe that Ziemianitch is drunk."


From a distant corner a hoarse voice belonging to a horrible,
nondescript, shaggy being with a black face like the muzzle of a bear
grunted angrily--

"The cursed driver of thieves. What do we want with his gentlemen here?
We are all honest folk in this place."

Razumov, biting his lip till blood came to keep himself from bursting
into imprecations, followed the owner of the den, who, whispering "Come
along, little father," led him into a tiny hole of a place behind
the wooden counter, whence proceeded a sound of splashing. A wet and
bedraggled creature, a sort of sexless and shivering scarecrow, washed
glasses in there, bending over a wooden tub by the light of a tallow
dip.

"Yes, little father," the man in the long caftan said plaintively. He
had a brown, cunning little face, a thin greyish beard. Trying to light
a tin lantern he hugged it to his breast and talked garrulously the
while.

He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies
told. And he would show him drunk. His woman, it seems, ran away from
him last night. "Such a hag she was! Thin! Pfui!" He spat. They were
always running away from that driver of the devil--and he sixty years
old too; could never get used to it. But each heart knows sorrow after
its own kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his days. And then he
would fly to the bottle. "'Who could bear life in our land without the
bottle?' he says. A proper Russian man--the little pig.... Be pleased
to follow me."

Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow enclosed between high walls
with innumerable windows. Here and there a dim yellow light hung within
the four-square mass of darkness. The house was an enormous slum, a hive
of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of
starvation and despair.

In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and Razumov followed the
light of the lantern through a small doorway into a long cavernous place
like a neglected subterranean byre. Deep within, three shaggy little
horses tied up to rings hung their heads together, motionless and
shadowy in the dim light of the lantern. It must have been the famous
team of Haldin's escape. Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom. His
guide pawed in the straw with his foot.

"Here he is. Ah! the little pigeon. A true Russian man. 'No heavy hearts
for me,' he says. 'Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my
sight.' Ha! ha! ha! That's the fellow he is."

He held the lantern over a prone form of a man, apparently fully dressed
for outdoors. His head was lost in a pointed cloth hood. On the other
side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet in monstrous thick
boots.

"Always ready to drive," commented the keeper of the eating-house. "A
proper Russian driver that. Saint or devil, night or day is all one to
Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow. 'I don't ask who you
are, but where you want to go,' he says. He would drive Satan himself to
his own abode and come back chirruping to his horses. Many a one he has
driven who is clanking his chains in the Nertchinsk mines by this time."

Razumov shuddered.

"Call him, wake him up," he faltered out.

The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the
prostrate sleeper. The man shook at the impact but did not move. At the
third kick he grunted but remained inert as before.

The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.

"You see for yourself how it is. We have done what we can for you."

He picked up the lantern. The intense black spokes of shadow swung
about in the circle of light. A terrible fury--the blind rage of
self-preservation--possessed Razumov.

"Ah! The vile beast," he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made
the lantern jump and tremble! "I shall wake you! Give me...give
me..."

He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a stablefork and rushing
forward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries. After a
time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and
shadows of the cellar-like stable. Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with
an insatiable fury, in great volleys of sounding thwacks. Except for the
violent movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither the beaten man
nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls. And only the sound of blows was
heard. It was a weird scene.

Suddenly there was a sharp crack. The stick broke and half of it flew
far away into the gloom beyond the light. At the same time Ziemianitch
sat up. At this Razumov became as motionless as the man with the
lantern--only his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.

Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling
night of drunkenness enwrapping the "bright Russian soul" of Haldin's
enthusiastic praise. But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing. His eyeballs
blinked all white in the light once, twice--then the gleam went out.
For a moment he sat in the straw with closed eyes with a strange air of
weary meditation, then fell over slowly on his side without making the
slightest sound. Only the straw rustled a little. Razumov stared wildly,
fighting for his breath. After a second or two he heard a light snore.

He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went
off with great hasty strides without looking back once.

After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked
into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.

This recalled him to himself; and glancing about he discovered he had
been going in the wrong direction. He retraced his steps, but now at a
more moderate pace. When passing before the house he had just left he
flourished his fist at the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing its
sinister bulk on the white ground. It had an air of brooding. He let his
arm fall by his side--discouraged.

Ziemianitch's passionate surrender to sorrow and consolation had baffled
him. That was the people. A true Russian man! Razumov was glad he had
beaten that brute--the "bright soul" of the other. Here they were: the
people and the enthusiast.

Between the two he was done for. Between the drunkenness of the peasant
incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable
of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men. It
was a sort of terrible childishness. But children had their masters.
"Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand," thought Razumov, longing for
power to hurt and destroy.

He was glad he had thrashed that brute. The physical exertion had left
his body in a comfortable glow. His mental agitation too was clarified
as if all the feverishness had gone out of him in a fit of outward
violence. Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was
conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.

He walked slower and slower. And indeed, considering the guest he had
in his rooms, it was no wonder he lingered on the way. It was like
harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life,
but would take from you all that made life worth living--a subtle pest
that would convert earth into a hell.

What was he doing now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his
hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on
his bed--the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots,
the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll kill
him when I get home." But he knew very well that that was of no use.
The corpse hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal as the living
man. Nothing short of complete annihilation would do. And that was
impossible. What then? Must one kill oneself to escape this visitation?