If to the Western reader they appear shocking, inappropriate, or even improper, it must be remembered that as to the first this may be the effect of my crude statement.  For the rest I will only remark here that this is not a story of the West of Europe.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.  It is unthinkable that any young Englishman should find himself in Razumov’s situation.  This being so it would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think.  The only safe surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at this crisis of his fate.  He would not have an hereditary and personal knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas, guards its power, and defends its existence.  By an act of mental extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison, but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure either of investigation or of punishment.

This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of Western thought.  I don’t know that this danger occurred, specially, to Mr. Razumov.  No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread and the general appallingness of this crisis.  Razumov, as has been seen, was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by the proceedings of a despotic Government.  A simple expulsion from the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his natural abilities for his place in the world.  He was a Russian:  and for him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths amongst the hopeless and the destitute—­the night birds of the city.

The peculiar circumstances of Razumov’s parentage, or rather of his lack of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts.  And he remembered them too.  He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly atrocious way by this fatal Haldin.  “Because I haven’t that, must everything else be taken away from me?” he thought.

He nerved himself for another effort to go on.  Along the roadway sledges glided phantom-like and jingling through a fluttering whiteness on the black face of the night.  “For it is a crime,” he was saying to himself.  “A murder is a murder.  Though, of course, some sort of liberal institutions....”

A feeling of horrible sickness came over him.  “I must be courageous,” he exhorted himself mentally.  All his strength was suddenly gone as if taken out by a hand.  Then by a mighty effort of will it came back because he was afraid of fainting in the street and being picked up by the police with the key of his lodgings in his pocket.  They would find Haldin there, and then, indeed, he would be undone.