It was a sort of sacred inertia.  Razumov felt a respect for it.  A voice seemed to cry within him, “Don’t touch it.”  It was a guarantee of duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on—­a work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their shifting impulses—­but of peace.  What it needed was not the conflicting aspirations of a people, but a will strong and one:  it wanted not the babble of many voices, but a man—­strong and one!

Razumov stood on the point of conversion.  He was fascinated by its approach, by its overpowering logic.  For a train of thought is never false.  The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and the dread of uncertain days.

In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land.  They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest.  Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.

“Haldin means disruption,” he thought to himself, beginning to walk again.  “What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage—­with his talk of God’s justice?  All that means disruption.  Better that thousands should suffer than that a people should become a disintegrated mass, helpless like dust in the wind.  Obscurantism is better than the light of incendiary torches.  The seed germinates in the night.  Out of the dark soil springs the perfect plant.  But a volcanic eruption is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground.  And am I, who love my country—­who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in—­am I to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary fanatic?”

The grace entered into Razumov.  He believed now in the man who would come at the appointed time.

What is a throne?  A few pieces of wood upholstered in velvet.  But a throne is a seat of power too.  The form of government is the shape of a tool—­an instrument.  But twenty thousand bladders inflated by the noblest sentiments and jostling against each other in the air are a miserable incumbrance of space, holding no power, possessing no will, having nothing to give.

He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a discourse with himself with extraordinary abundance and facility.  Generally his phrases came to him slowly, after a conscious and painstaking wooing.  Some superior power had inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as certain converted sinners become overwhelmingly loquacious.

He felt an austere exultation.