He walked slower and slower.  And indeed, considering the guest he had in his rooms, it was no wonder he lingered on the way.  It was like harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life, but would take from you all that made life worth living—­a subtle pest that would convert earth into a hell.

What was he doing now?  Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his hands over his eyes?  Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on his bed—­the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots, the upturned feet.  And in his abhorrence he said to himself, “I’ll kill him when I get home.”  But he knew very well that that was of no use.  The corpse hanging round his neck would be nearly as fatal as the living man.  Nothing short of complete annihilation would do.  And that was impossible.  What then?  Must one kill oneself to escape this visitation?

Razumov’s despair was too profoundly tinged with hate to accept that issue.

And yet it was despair—­nothing less—­at the thought of having to live with Haldin for an indefinite number of days in mortal alarm at every sound.  But perhaps when he heard that this “bright soul” of Ziemianitch suffered from a drunken eclipse the fellow would take his infernal resignation somewhere else.  And that was not likely on the face of it.

Razumov thought:  “I am being crushed—­and I can’t even run away.”  Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth—­some little house in the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles.  A material refuge.  He had nothing.  He had not even a moral refuge—­the refuge of confidence.  To whom could he go with this tale—­in all this great, great land?

Razumov stamped his foot—­and under the soft carpet of snow felt the hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet—­his native soil!—­his very own—­without a fireside, without a heart!

He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed.  The snow had ceased to fall, and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.  It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.

Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of countless millions.

He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born to an inheritance of space and numbers.  Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.  It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin—­murdering foolishly.