When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side, Razumov had not lost consciousness.  It was as though he had tumbled, smashing himself, into a world of mutes.  Silent men, moving unheard, lifted him up, laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing round him their alarm, horror, and compassion.  A red face with moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving, eyes rolling.  Razumov tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show.  To those who stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously hurt, seemed composed in meditation.  Afterwards his eyes sent out at them a look of fear and closed slowly.  They stared at him.  Razumov made an effort to remember some French words.

“Je suis sourd,” he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.

“He is deaf,” they exclaimed to each other.  “That’s why he did not hear the car.”

They carried him off in that same car.  Before it started on its journey, a woman in a shabby black dress, who had run out of the iron gate of some private grounds up the road, clambered on to the rear platform and would not be put off.

“I am a relation,” she insisted, in bad French.  “This young man is a Russian, and I am his relation.”  On this plea they let her have her way.  She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes avoided looking at his deathlike face.  At the corner of a street, on the other side of the town, a stretcher met the car.  She followed it to the door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a bed.  Razumov’s new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials had some difficulty in inducing her to go away.  The porter observed her lingering on the opposite pavement for a long time.  Suddenly, as though she had remembered something, she ran off.

The ardent hater of all Finance ministers, the slave of Madame de S—­, had made up her mind to offer her resignation as lady companion to the Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch.  She had found work to do after her own heart.

But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation.  The terrible Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in horrible glee before all the company—­

“Razumov!  Mr. Razumov!  The wonderful Razumov!  He shall never be any use as a spy on any one.  He won’t talk, because he will never hear anything in his life—­not a thing!  I have burst the drums of his ears for him.  Oh, you may trust me.  I know the trick.  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  I know the trick.”

V

It was nearly a fortnight after her mother’s funeral that I saw Natalia Haldin for the last time.