“Yes, Razumov.  Yes, brother.  Some day you shall help to build.  You suppose that I am a terrorist, now—­a destructor of what is, But consider that the true destroyers are they who destroy the spirit of progress and truth, not the avengers who merely kill the bodies of the persecutors of human dignity.  Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you.  Well, we have made the sacrifice of our lives, but all the same I want to escape if it can be done.  It is not my life I want to save, but my power to do.  I won’t live idle.  Oh no!  Don’t make any mistake, Razumov.  Men like me are rare.  And, besides, an example like this is more awful to oppressors when the perpetrator vanishes without a trace.  They sit in their offices and palaces and quake.  All I want you to do is to help me to vanish.  No great matter that.  Only to go by and by and see Ziemianitch for me at that place where I went this morning.  Just tell him, ’He whom you know wants a well-horsed sledge to pull up half an hour after midnight at the seventh lamp-post on the left counting from the upper end of Karabelnaya.  If nobody gets in, the sledge is to run round a block or two, so as to come back past the same spot in ten minutes’ time.’”

Razumov wondered why he had not cut short that talk and told this man to go away long before.  Was it weakness or what?

He concluded that it was a sound instinct.  Haldin must have been seen.  It was impossible that some people should not have noticed the face and appearance of the man who threw the second bomb.  Haldin was a noticeable person.  The police in their thousands must have had his description within the hour.  With every moment the danger grew.  Sent out to wander in the streets he could not escape being caught in the end.

The police would very soon find out all about him.  They would set about discovering a conspiracy.  Everybody Haldin had ever known would be in the greatest danger.  Unguarded expressions, little facts in themselves innocent would be counted for crimes.  Razumov remembered certain words he said, the speeches he had listened to, the harmless gatherings he had attended—­it was almost impossible for a student to keep out of that sort of thing, without becoming suspect to his comrades.

Razumov saw himself shut up in a fortress, worried, badgered, perhaps ill-used.  He saw himself deported by an administrative order, his life broken, ruined, and robbed of all hope.  He saw himself—­at best—­leading a miserable existence under police supervision, in some small, faraway provincial town, without friends to assist his necessities or even take any steps to alleviate his lot—­as others had.  Others had fathers, mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on their behalf—­he had no one.  The very officials that sentenced him some morning would forget his existence before sunset.

He saw his youth pass away from him in misery and half starvation—­his strength give way, his mind become an abject thing.  He saw himself creeping, broken down and shabby, about the streets—­dying unattended in some filthy hole of a room, or on the sordid bed of a Government hospital.