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?  That’s the way to treat these meddlesome persons.  Is it possible that he still stands behind my back, waiting?”

Razumov felt a faint chill run down his spine.  It was not fear.  He was certain that it was not fear—­not fear for himself—­but it was, all the same, a sort of apprehension as if for another, for some one he knew without being able to put a name on the personality.  But the recollection that the officious Englishman had a train to meet tranquillized him for a time.  It was too stupid to suppose that he should be wasting his time in waiting.  It was unnecessary to look round and make sure.

But what did the man mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly.  It was a damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could be capable of.  All this was a sort of sport for him—­the sport of revolution—­a game to look at from the height of his superiority.  And what on earth did he mean by his exclamation, “Won’t the truth do?”