had
been falling all night, making the roadway, uncleared as yet at this
early hour, very heavy for the horses. It was still falling thickly. But the
sleigh must have been observed and marked down. As it drew over to
the left before taking a turn, the footman noticed a peasant walking
slowly on the edge of the pavement with his hands in the pockets of his
sheepskin coat and his shoulders hunched up to his ears under the
falling snow. On being overtaken this peasant suddenly faced about and
swung his arm. In an instant there was a terrible shock, a detonation
muffled in the multitude of snowflakes; both horses lay dead and
mangled on the ground and the coachman, with a shrill cry, had fallen
off the box mortally wounded. The footman (who survived) had no
time to see the face of the man in the sheepskin coat. After throwing the
bomb this last got away, but it is supposed that, seeing a lot of people
surging up on all sides of him in the falling snow, and all running
towards the scene of the explosion, he thought it safer to turn back with
them.
In an incredibly short time an excited crowd assembled round the
sledge. The Minister- President, getting out unhurt into the deep snow,
stood near the groaning coachman and addressed the people repeatedly
in his weak, colourless voice: "I beg of you to keep off: For the love of
God, I beg of you good people to keep off."
It was then that a tall young man who had remained standing perfectly
still within a carriage gateway, two houses lower down, stepped out
into the street and walking up rapidly flung another bomb over the
heads of the crowd. It actually struck the Minister-President on the
shoulder as he stooped over his dying servant, then falling between his
feet exploded with a terrific concentrated violence, striking him dead to
the ground, finishing the wounded man and practically annihilating the
empty sledge in the twinkling of an eye. With a yell of horror the
crowd broke up and fled in all directions, except for those who fell
dead or dying where they stood nearest to the Minister-President, and
one or two others who did not fall till they had run a little way.
The first explosion had brought together a crowd as if by enchantment,
the second made as swiftly a solitude in the street for hundreds of yards
in each direction. Through the falling snow people looked from afar at
the small heap of dead bodies lying upon each other near the carcases
of the two horses. Nobody dared to approach till some Cossacks of a
street-patrol galloped up and, dismounting, began to turn over the dead.
Amongst the innocent victims of the second explosion laid out on the
pavement there was a body dressed in a peasant's sheepskin coat; but
the face was unrecognisable, there was absolutely nothing found in the
pockets of its poor clothing, and it was the only one whose identity was
never established.
That day Mr. Razumov got up at his usual hour and spent the morning
within the University buildings listening to the lectures and working for
some time in the library. He heard the first vague rumour of something
in the way of bomb-throwing at the table of the students' ordinary,
where he was accustomed to eat his two o'clock dinner. But this rumour
was made up of mere whispers, and this was Russia, where it was not
always safe, for a student especially, to appear too much interested in
certain kinds of whispers. Razumov was one of those men who, living
in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an instinctive hold on
normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware of the emotional tension
of his time; he even responded to it in an indefinite way. But his main
concern was with his work, his studies, and with his own future.
Officially and in fact without a family (for the daughter of the
Archpriest had long been dead), no home influences had shaped his
opinions or his feelings. He was as lonely in the world as a man
swimming in the deep sea. The word Razumov was the mere label of a
solitary individuality. There were no Razumovs belonging to him
anywhere. His closest parentage was defined in the statement that he
was a Russian. Whatever good he expected from life would be given to
or withheld from his hopes by that connexion alone. This immense
parentage suffered from the throes of internal dissensions, and he
shrank mentally from the fray as a good-natured man may shrink from
taking definite sides in a violent family quarrel.
Razumov, going home, reflected that having prepared all the matters of
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