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As for the rest, if they were out that day on every trail, old and new, it is probable enough that they might have thought it just as well to have Ziemianitch at hand for more information, or for identification, or what not. Some scoundrelly detective was sent to fetch him along, and being vexed at finding him so drunk broke a stable fork over his ribs.
Now, since his position had been made more secure by their own folly at the cost of Ziemianitch, he felt the need of perfect safety, with its freedom from direct lying, with its power of moving amongst them silent, unquestioning, listening, impenetrable, like the very fate of their crimes and their folly. Was this advantage his already? Or not yet? Or never would be?
It was more alarming in its shadowy, persistent reality than the distinct but vanishing illusion. Haldin was heard again. "You must have had a walk such a walk,..." he murmured deprecatingly. "This weather...." Razumov answered with energy "Horrible walk.... A nightmare of a walk." He shuddered audibly. Haldin sighed once more, then "And so you have seen Ziemianitch brother?" "I've seen him."
First of all, a conversation about horses between Haldin and Ziemianitch had been partly overheard. Some of them used to charge Ziemianitch with knowing something of this absence. He denied it with exasperation; but the fact was that ever since Haldin's disappearance he was not himself, growing moody and thin.
It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin murdering foolishly. It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A voice seemed to cry within him, "Don't touch it."
His self-confidence was much shaken. He resolved to chatter no more. Reserve! Reserve! All he had to do was to keep the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination, when the questions came. Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers. Councillor Mikulin looked at him dimly. Razumov's self-confidence abandoned him completely. It seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out.
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.
Have I not got forty million brothers?" he asked himself, unanswerably victorious in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. "No! If I must suffer let me at least suffer for my convictions, not for a crime my reason my cool superior reason rejects."
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.
Early on the very night poor Haldin was taken, a complete stranger turned up and gave Ziemianitch a most fearful thrashing while he was lying dead-drunk in the stable. The wretched creature's body was one mass of bruises. He showed them to the people in the house." "But you, Sophia Antonovna, you don't believe in the actual devil?" "Do you?" retorted the woman curtly.
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