The end of Ziemianitch then arrested his wandering thoughts.  He was not exactly amused at the interpretation, but he could not help detecting in it a certain piquancy.  He owned to himself that, had he known of that suicide before leaving Russia, he would have been incapable of making such excellent use of it for his own purposes.  He ought to be infinitely obliged to the fellow with the red nose for his patience and ingenuity, “A wonderful psychologist apparently,” he said to himself sarcastically.  Remorse, indeed!  It was a striking example of your true conspirator’s blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea.  This was a drama of love, not of conscience, Razumov continued to himself mockingly.  A woman the old fellow was making up to!  A robust pedlar, clearly a rival, throwing him down a flight of stairs....  And at sixty, for a lifelong lover, it was not an easy matter to get over.  That was a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch.  Even the comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme crisis.  At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of an unquenchable passion.  And, besides, there was the wild exasperation aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing, added to these simple and bitter sorrows.  “Devil, eh?” Razumov exclaimed, with mental excitement, as if he had made an interesting discovery.  “Ziemianitch ended by falling into mysticism.  So many of our true Russian souls end in that way!  Very characteristic.”  He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above—­like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny.  It was as if this Ziemianitch could not possibly have done anything else.  And Sophia Antonovna’s cocksure and contemptuous “some police-hound” was characteristically Russian in another way.  But there was no tragedy there.  This was a comedy of errors.  It was as if the devil himself were playing a game with all of them in turn.  First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then with those revolutionists.  The devil’s own game this....  He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his own expense.  “Hallo!  I am falling into mysticism too.”

His mind was more at ease than ever.  Turning about he put his back against the rail comfortably.  “All this fits with marvellous aptness,” he continued to think.  “The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague.  The mystic Ziemianitch accounts for that.  An incredible chance has served me.  No more need of lies.  I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from getting the upper hand of my caution.”

He sighed, folded his arms, his chin dropped on his breast, and it was a long time before he started forward from that pose, with the recollection that he had made up his mind to do something important that day.  What it was he could not immediately recall, yet he made no effort of memory, for he was uneasily certain that he would remember presently.