After that he never looked again at the bed. He took his big cloak down
from its peg and, wrapping himself up closely, went to lie down on
the hard horse-hair sofa at the other side of his room. A leaden
sleep closed his eyelids at once. Several times that night he woke up
shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia
where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an
immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its
enormous expanse as if it were a map. But after each shuddering start
his heavy eyelids fell over his glazed eyes and he slept again.


III


Approaching this part of Mr. Razumov's story, my mind, the decent mind
of an old teacher of languages, feels more and more the difficulty of
the task.

The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_
of a strange human document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
earth's surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less
discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word
that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word
which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the
moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.

I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov's record, I
lay it aside, I take up the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in