He would show Ziemianitch to the gentleman to prove there were no lies told.  And he would show him drunk.  His woman, it seems, ran away from him last night.  “Such a hag she was!  Thin!  Pfui!” He spat.  They were always running away from that driver of the devil—­and he sixty years old too; could never get used to it.  But each heart knows sorrow after its own kind and Ziemianitch was a born fool all his days.  And then he would fly to the bottle. “’Who could bear life in our land without the bottle?’ he says.  A proper Russian man—­the little pig....  Be pleased to follow me.”

Razumov crossed a quadrangle of deep snow enclosed between high walls with innumerable windows.  Here and there a dim yellow light hung within the four-square mass of darkness.  The house was an enormous slum, a hive of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of starvation and despair.

In a corner the ground sloped sharply down, and Razumov followed the light of the lantern through a small doorway into a long cavernous place like a neglected subterranean byre.  Deep within, three shaggy little horses tied up to rings hung their heads together, motionless and shadowy in the dim light of the lantern.  It must have been the famous team of Haldin’s escape.  Razumov peered fearfully into the gloom.  His guide pawed in the straw with his foot.

“Here he is.  Ah! the little pigeon.  A true Russian man.  ’No heavy hearts for me,’ he says.  ’Bring out the bottle and take your ugly mug out of my sight.’  Ha! ha! ha!  That’s the fellow he is.”

He held the lantern over a prone form of a man, apparently fully dressed for outdoors.  His head was lost in a pointed cloth hood.  On the other side of a heap of straw protruded a pair of feet in monstrous thick boots.

“Always ready to drive,” commented the keeper of the eating-house.  “A proper Russian driver that.  Saint or devil, night or day is all one to Ziemianitch when his heart is free from sorrow.  ’I don’t ask who you are, but where you want to go,’ he says.  He would drive Satan himself to his own abode and come back chirruping to his horses.  Many a one he has driven who is clanking his chains in the Nertchinsk mines by this time.”

Razumov shuddered.

“Call him, wake him up,” he faltered out.

The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the prostrate sleeper.  The man shook at the impact but did not move.  At the third kick he grunted but remained inert as before.

The eating-house keeper desisted and fetched a deep sigh.

“You see for yourself how it is.  We have done what we can for you.”

He picked up the lantern.  The intense black spokes of shadow swung about in the circle of light.  A terrible fury—­the blind rage of self-preservation—­possessed Razumov.

“Ah!  The vile beast,” he bellowed out in an unearthly tone which made the lantern jump and tremble!  “I shall wake you!  Give me...give me...”