You
don't know. You welcome the crazy fate. "Sit down," you say. And it is
all over. You cannot shake it off any more. It will cling to you for
ever. Neither halter nor bullet can give you back the freedom of your
life and the sanity of your thought.... It was enough to dash one's
head against a wall.
Razumov looked slowly all round the walls as if to select a spot to dash
his head against. Then he opened the letter. It directed the student
Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov to present himself without delay at the
General Secretariat.
Razumov had a vision of General T---'s goggle eyes waiting for him--the
embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied
the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the
incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of
a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion
by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to
understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism.
"What can he want with me precisely--I wonder?" he asked himself.
As if that mental question had evoked the familiar phantom, Haldin stood
suddenly before him in the room with an extraordinary completeness of
detail. Though the short winter day had passed already into the sinister
twilight of a land buried in snow, Razumov saw plainly the narrow
leather strap round the Tcherkess coat.
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