had gone
to pieces within him very suddenly.

"I must be very prudent with him," he warned himself in the silence
during which they sat gazing at each other. It lasted some little time,
and was characterized (for silences have their character) by a sort of
sadness imparted to it perhaps by the mild and thoughtful manner of
the bearded official. Razumov learned later that he was the chief of a
department in the General Secretariat, with a rank in the civil service
equivalent to that of a colonel in the army.

Razumov's mistrust became acute. The main point was, not to be drawn
into saying too much. He had been called there for some reason. What
reason? To be given to understand that he was a suspect--and also no
doubt to be pumped. As to what precisely? There was nothing. Or perhaps
Haldin had been telling lies.... Every alarming uncertainty beset
Razumov. He could bear the silence no longer, and cursing himself for
his weakness spoke first, though he had promised himself not to do so on
any account.

"I haven't lost a moment's time," he began in a hoarse, provoking tone;
and then the faculty of speech seemed to leave him and enter the body of
Councillor Mikulin, who chimed in approvingly--

"Very proper. Very proper. Though as a matter of fact...."

But the spell was broken, and Razumov interrupted him boldly, under
a sudden conviction that this was the safest attitude to take. With a
great flow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even
as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that
the word "misunderstood" was better than the word "mistrusted," and he
repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized
with fright before the attentive immobility of the official. "What am
I talking about?" he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze.
Mistrusted--not misunderstood--was the right symbol for these people.
Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his
head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his
hand over his brow--an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was
too careless to restrain. At that moment Razumov beheld his own brain
suffering on the rack--a long, pale figure drawn asunder horizontally
with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to
see. It was as though he had dreamed for an infinitesimal fraction of
time of some dark print of the Inquisition.

It is not to be seriously supp