nt there is swift,
extremely swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at
it for any length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly
snatched away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the
suggestion of irresistible power and of headlong motion.

It apparently had a charm for Mr. Razumov. I left him hanging far over
the parapet of the bridge. The way he had behaved to me could not be put
down to mere boorishness. There was something else under his scorn and
impatience. Perhaps, I thought, with sudden approach to hidden truth,
it was the same thing which had kept him over a week, nearly ten days
indeed, from coming near Miss Haldin. But what it was I could not tell.

PART THIRD

I

The water under the bridge ran violent and deep. Its slightly undulating
rush seemed capable of scouring out a channel for itself through solid
granite while you looked. But had it flowed through Razumov's breast,
it could not have washed away the accumulated bitterness the wrecking of
his life had deposited there.

"What is the meaning of all this?" he thought, staring downwards at
the headlong flow so smooth and clean that only the passage of a faint
air-bubble, or a thin vanishing streak of foam like a white hair,
disclosed its vertiginous rapidity, its terrible force. "Why has that
meddlesome old Englishman blundered against me? And what is this silly
tale of a crazy old woman?"

He was trying to think brutally on purpose, but he avoided any mental
reference to the young girl. "A crazy old woman," he repeated to
himself. "It is a fatality! Or ought I to despise all this as absurd?
But no! I am wrong! I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may
be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications. How is one
to guard against it? It puts to rout one's intelligence. The more
intelligent one is the less one suspects an absurdity."

A wave of wrath choked his thoughts for a moment. It even made his body
leaning over the parapet quiver; then he resumed his silent thinking,
like a secret dialogue with himself. And even in that privacy, his
thought had some reservations of which he was vaguely conscious.

"After all, this is not absurd. It is insignificant. It is absolutely
insignificant--absolutely. The craze of an old woman--the fussy
officiousness of a blundering elderly Englishman. What devil put him in
the way? Haven't I treated him cavalierly enough? Haven't I just