He looked round wildly, seized the handle of a stablefork and rushing forward struck at the prostrate body with inarticulate cries.  After a time his cries ceased, and the rain of blows fell in the stillness and shadows of the cellar-like stable.  Razumov belaboured Ziemianitch with an insatiable fury, in great volleys of sounding thwacks.  Except for the violent movements of Razumov nothing stirred, neither the beaten man nor the spoke-like shadows on the walls.  And only the sound of blows was heard.  It was a weird scene.

Suddenly there was a sharp crack.  The stick broke and half of it flew far away into the gloom beyond the light.  At the same time Ziemianitch sat up.  At this Razumov became as motionless as the man with the lantern—­only his breast heaved for air as if ready to burst.

Some dull sensation of pain must have penetrated at last the consoling night of drunkenness enwrapping the “bright Russian soul” of Haldin’s enthusiastic praise.  But Ziemianitch evidently saw nothing.  His eyeballs blinked all white in the light once, twice—­then the gleam went out.  For a moment he sat in the straw with closed eyes with a strange air of weary meditation, then fell over slowly on his side without making the slightest sound.  Only the straw rustled a little.  Razumov stared wildly, fighting for his breath.  After a second or two he heard a light snore.

He flung from him the piece of stick remaining in his grasp, and went off with great hasty strides without looking back once.

After going heedlessly for some fifty yards along the street he walked into a snowdrift and was up to his knees before he stopped.

This recalled him to himself; and glancing about he discovered he had been going in the wrong direction.  He retraced his steps, but now at a more moderate pace.  When passing before the house he had just left he flourished his fist at the sombre refuge of misery and crime rearing its sinister bulk on the white ground.  It had an air of brooding.  He let his arm fall by his side—­discouraged.

Ziemianitch’s passionate surrender to sorrow and consolation had baffled him.  That was the people.  A true Russian man!  Razumov was glad he had beaten that brute—­the “bright soul” of the other.  Here they were:  the people and the enthusiast.

Between the two he was done for.  Between the drunkenness of the peasant incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men.  It was a sort of terrible childishness.  But children had their masters.  “Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand,” thought Razumov, longing for power to hurt and destroy.

He was glad he had thrashed that brute.  The physical exertion had left his body in a comfortable glow.  His mental agitation too was clarified as if all the feverishness had gone out of him in a fit of outward violence.  Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.