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.
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