-wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots--lounging
against the stove. It asks you, "Is the outer door closed?"--and you
don't know enough to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. 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. The illusion of that hateful
presence was so perfect that he half expected it to ask, "Is the outer
door closed?" He looked at it with hatred and contempt. Souls do not
take a shape of clothing. Moreover, Haldin could not be dead yet.
Razumov stepped forward menacingly; the vision vanished--and turning
short on his heel he walked out of his room with infinite disdain.

But after going down the first flight of stairs it occurred to him that
perhaps the superior authorities of police meant to confront him with
Haldin in the flesh. This thought struck him like a bullet, and had he
not clung with both hands to the banister he would have rolled down to
the next landing most likely. His legs were of no use for a considerable
time.... But why? For what conceivable reason? To what end?

There could be no rational answer to these questions; but Razumov
remembe