by Maxim Gorky
“Is this the way to work nowadays? Dear me!”
Apparently no one knew a means by which the elemental growth of the popular revolt could be restrained.
“They will comb our curls,” said Piotr, cracking his knuckles.
“They’ll take us off the list if we remain alive,” Solovyov chimed in dismally.
“If they would give us a pension at least! But they won’t.”
“A noose around our necks, not a pension,” said Melnikov sombrely.
The spies were all exhausted and confused; all trembled in fear of the morrow. Both they and the officials seemed to have faded. The people who but a short time ago had been terrible in Yevsey’s eyes, who had appeared to him to be the powerful and invincible masters of life, now ran from one corner of the Department of Safety to another, and fluttered about in the streets like last year’s dried leaves.
He observed with amazement that there were other people, cheerful, simple, and trusting, who were able to walk into the future, carelessly stepping over every obstacle and snare in their way, everyone of whom was good in his own fashion, and everyone of whom clearly hinted at the possibility of something better than himself. Yevsey compared them with the spies, who, unwillingly with clandestine tread, crept along the streets and into houses, and secretly spirited away these people at night, in order to seclude them in prisons. He clearly realized that the spies did not understand the aim of their work, did not believe that it was needful for life, and did not think or reason when, instinctively, according to their habit, they went about half-sick, half-drunk, driven by different fears.
He liked the tranquil talk of Olga, her greyish blue eyes, and that live strong pity for people which sounded in the girl’s every word. He liked the noisy, jesting, somewhat boastful talker Yakov, the careless Aleksey, good-naturedly ready to give away his last shirt and penny to anyone who asked for them. He met an increasing number of people new to him, in each of whom he perceived faith in the victory of his dream. And Yevsey involuntarily, insensibly, yielded to this faith.
Observing the quick crumbling of that power which he had hitherto submissively served, Yevsey began to seek a way by which it would be possible for him to circumvent and escape the necessity of betrayal. He reasoned thus:
“If I go to them, then it will be impossible for me not to deliver them up. To hand them over to another agent is still worse. I must tell them. Now that they are becoming more powerful, it will be better for me to be with them.”
So, yielding to the attraction exerted upon him by persons new to him, he visited Yakov more frequently, and became more insistent in endeavoring to meet Olga. After each visit he reported in a quiet voice to Sasha every detail of his intercourse with them—what they said, what they read, and what they wanted to do. He enjoyed telling of them, in fact, repeated their talk with secret satisfaction.
“Oh, a funeral,” snuffled Sasha, angrily and sarcastically fixing Klimkov with his dim eyes. “You must push them on yourself, if they are inattentive. You must get in a hint that you can furnish them with type, fix up a printing office. Is it possible you can’t do that?”
Yevsey was silent.
“I am asking you, idiot, can you do it? Well?”
“I can.”
“Why don’t you speak out? Suggest it to them tomorrow, do you hear?”
“Very well.”
It was easy for Klimkov to fulfil Sasha’s order. In reporting about his cousin’s circle, he had not ventured to tell Sasha that both Olga and Yakov had already asked him twice, whether he could obtain type for them. Each time he had managed to get away without answering.
The next evening he went to Olga, carrying in his breast the dark feeling of emptiness he always experienced in moments of nervous tension. The resolution to fulfil the task was put into him by a stranger’s will; he did not have to think about it himself. This resolution spread within him, and crowded out all fear, all inconvenient sympathy.
But when the tall figure of Olga stood before him in the small dimly lighted room, and behind her he saw her large shadow on the wall, which moved to meet him, Klimkov lost courage, grew confused, and stood in the doorway without speaking.
“I’ve just returned from the factory,” said Olga pressing his hand. “We had another meeting today. What’s the matter with you? Are you tired? Are you sick? Come in, sit down. Let’s have some tea, yes?”
She turned the light in the lamp higher, and looked at Klimkov with a smile. While getting the dishes ready she continued.
“I like to drink tea with you alone. I myself and all the comrades, we talk a great deal. We must talk so much, we scarcely have time to think. That’s absurd, and bad, but it’s true. So it’s pleasant to see a taciturn, thinking man. Will you have a glass of milk? It will do you good. You are growing very thin, it seems to me.”
Klimkov took the glass she offered him, and slowly sipped the watery unsavory milk. He wanted to get through with the business at once.
“This is it. You said you need type.”
“I did. I know you’ll give it to us.”
She said these words simply, with a confidence not to be shaken. They were like a blow to Yevsey. He flung himself on the back of the chair astonished.
“Why do you know?” he asked dully after a pause.
“When I asked you, you said neither yes nor no. So I thought you would certainly say yes.”
Yevsey did not understand. He tried not to meet her look.
“Why?” he queried again.
“It must be because I consider you a good man. I trust you.”
“You mustn’t trust,” said Yevsey.
“Well, enough nonsense, you must.”
“And suppose you’ve been mistaken?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, what of it?” After a pause she added calmly, “Not to believe a man means not to respect him. It means to think him beforehand a liar, an ugly person. Is that possible?”
“That’s what is necessary,” mumbled Yevsey.
“What?”
“I can furnish the type.” He sighed. The task was accomplished. He was silent for several minutes, sitting with his head bowed, his hands pressed tight between his knees, while he listened suspiciously to the rapid beating of his heart.
Olga leaned her elbows on the table, and in a low voice told him when and where the promised type must be brought. He made a mental note of her words, and repeated them to himself, desiring by this repetition to hinder the growth of the painful feeling in his empty breast. Now that he had fulfilled his duty a stifling nausea slowly arose from the depths of his soul; and that feeling of an alien inside himself, of a constantly widening cleft in his being, came over him in a tormenting wave.
“You noticed,” the girl said quietly, “how rapidly the people are changing, how faith in other persons is growing, how quickly one gets to know the other, how everybody seeks friends and finds them. All have become simpler, more trusting, more willing to open up their souls. See how good it is.”
Her words trembled before him like moths, each with its own character. Simple, kind, joyous, they all seemed fairly to smile. Unable to make up his mind to look Olga in the face, Klimkov took to watching her shadow on the wall over his shoulders, and drew upon it her blue eyes, the medium-sized mouth with the pale lips, her face somewhat weary and serious, but soft and kind.
“Shall I tell her now that all this is a hocus-pocus? That she will be ruined?”
He answered himself:
“They’ll drive me out. They’ll swear at me, and drive me out.”
“Do you know Zimin the joiner?” he suddenly asked.
“No, why?”
Yevsey sighed painfully.
“Just so. He’s a good man, too, a Socialist.”
“We are many,” observed Olga with assurance.
“
If she knew the joiner,” Klimkov thought slowly, “I would tell her to ask him about me. Then—”
The chair seemed to be giving way beneath him, the nausea, he thought, would immediately gush into his throat. He coughed, and examined the clean little room, which small and poor though it was, once more gripped at his heart. The moon looked into the room round as Yakov’s face, and the light in the lamp seemed irritatingly superfluous.
“More and more people come into being who realize that they are called upon by destiny to order life differently—upon truth and intellect,” said Olga dreamily and simply.
Yevsey, yielding more and more to the power of the triumphant feeling the girl and the quiet contracted room inspired in him, thought:
“I’ll put out the light, fall on my knees before her, embrace her feet, and tell her everything—and she will give me a kick.”
But the fear of ill treatment did not deter him. He raised himself heavily from his chair, and put out his hand to the lamp. Then his hand dropped lazily, drowsily, his legs shook. He started.
“What are you doing?” demanded Olga.
He tried to answer, but a soft gurgle came instead of words. He dropped to his knees, and seized her dress with trembling hands. She pressed one hot hand against his forehead, and with the other grasped his shoulder, at the same time hiding her legs under the table with a powerful movement.
“No, no, get up!” she exclaimed sternly. “Oh my, how dreadful this is! My dear, I understand, you are worn out, I am sorry for you, you are an honorable man—I cannot—why, you don’t ask for charity—then get up.”
The warmth of her strong body roused in him a sharp sensual desire, and he took the pushing of her hand as an encouraging caress.
“She’s not a saint,” darted through his mind, and he embraced the girl’s knees more vigorously.
“I tell you, get up!” she exclaimed in a muffled voice, no longer persuasively, but in a tone of command.
He rose without having succeeded in saying anything. The girl had confused his desires, his words, and feelings. She had put into his breast something insulting and stinging.
“Understand—” he mumbled, spreading out his hands.
“Yes, yes, I understand—my God, always this on the road!” she exclaimed. Looking into his face she went on harshly, “I am sick of it. I am insulted. I can’t be only a woman to everybody. Oh, God! How pitiful you all are, after all.”
She went to the window, and the table now separated her from Yevsey. A dim, cold perplexity took hold of his heart; an insulting shame quietly burned him.
“I tell you what—don’t come to me—I beg of you. I’ll feel awkward in your presence, and you, too—please.”
Yevsey took up his hat, flung his coat over his shoulders, and walked away with bowed head. Several minutes later he was sitting on a bench at the gate of a house, mumbling as if drunk:
“The baggage!” But he had to strain himself to bring out the epithet. It was not genuine. He ransacked all the shameful names for a woman, all ugly oaths, and poured them over the tall, shapely figure of Olga, desiring to sully every bit of her with mud, to darken her from head to foot, in order not to see her face and eyes. But oaths did not cling to her. She stood before his eyes, stretching out her hands, pushing him away, serene and white. Her image robbed his oaths of their force, and though Yevsey persistently roused anger within himself, he felt only shame.
He looked for a long time at the round solitary ball of the moon, which moved in the sky in bounds, as if leaping like a large bright rubber ball; and he heard the quiet sound of its motion, resembling the beatings of a heart.
He did not love this pale melancholy disk, which always seemed to watch him with cold obstinacy in the heavy movements of his life. It was late, but the city was not yet asleep. From all sides floated sounds.
“Formerly the nights were quieter,” thought Klimkov. He rose, and walked away, without putting his arms into the sleeves of his coat, his hat pushed back on his neck.
“Well, all right, wait,” he thought, doing violence to himself. Finally he decided, “I’ll deliver them over, and as a reward I’ll ask to be transferred to another city. That’s all.”
He reluctantly surrendered himself to the desires to revenge himself upon Olga, and strengthened the feeling with a supreme effort. Nevertheless it continued to cover his heart with a thin scale, and was constantly breaking down so that he had to fortify it again. Beneath this desire unexpectedly appeared another, not strong, but restless. He wanted to see the girl once more, wanted to listen in silence to her talk, to sit with her in her room. He quenched the longing with thoughts that designedly lowered Olga.
“If I had a lot of money, you would dance naked before me. I know your lewd set.” But to himself he said obdurately, “You won’t sully her, you won’t attain it.”
He wanted this or the other, but neither this nor the other was attainable. In calmer moments he realized this truth, which fairly crushed him, and plunged him into a heavy sleep troubled by nightmares.
CHAPTER XXII
But Yevsey pursued his work precisely. He gave Makarov a few heavy bundles of type in three instalments, and cleverly found out from him where the printing-press would be established. This elicited public commendation from Sasha.
“Good boy! Now we have six in our hands—that’s not so bad, Klimkov. You will receive a reward.”
Yevsey treated his praise indifferently. When Sasha was gone, the sharp face of Maklakov, which had grown thin, leaped into his eyes. The spy, sitting in a dark corner of the room on a sofa, looked into Yevsey’s face, twirling his mustache, frowning, and vexed. Something in his look provoked Yevsey, who turned aside.
“Klimkov, come here,” the spy called out.
Klimkov turned back, and seated himself next to Maklakov.
“Is it true that you delivered up your brother?” asked Maklakov in a low voice.
“My cousin.”
“You’re not sorry?”
“No.” Yevsey quietly and angrily repeated the phrase that the officials often uttered. “For us, as for soldiers, there is neither mother, nor father, nor brother, only enemies of the Czar and our country.”
“Well, of course,” said Maklakov, and smiled. After a pause he added, “Really you are a ‘good boy.’”
By his voice and smile Klimkov understood that the spy was making sport of him. He felt offended.
“Maybe I am sorry.”
“Yes?”
“But if I have to serve honestly and faithfully—”
“Of course. I’m not disputing with you, you queer fellow.”
Then Maklakov lighted a cigarette, and asked Yevsey:
“Why are you sitting here?”
“Oh, for no reason. I have nothing to do.”
Maklakov slapped him on his knee, and suddenly said:
“You’re a poor unfortunate, brother, little man.”
Yevsey rose.
“Timofey Vasilyevich,” he began in a trembling voice.
“Well, what is it?”
“Tell me—”
“Tell you what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t either.”
Klimkov mumbled:
“I am sorry for my cousin—and there’s a girl there, too. They are all better than we, by God they are! Really and truly they’re better.”
Maklakov also rose to his feet, stretched himself, and stepping to the door remarked coldly:
“Go to the devil!”
Yevsey remained alone.
“Well, there,” thought he, “there’s another fellow—all alike. First they draw me on, then they push me away.”
The vengeful feeling toward Olga awoke in him, and blended with his sense of ill-will toward all people, which found ample nourishment in his soul powerl
ess to resist because of the poison of many insults. Yevsey vigorously set to work to enmeshing himself in a net of new moods, and he served now with a dull zeal hitherto unknown to him.
Gradually the night came upon which it had been decided to arrest Olga, Yakov, and all implicated in the affair of the printing-press whom Yevsey had succeeded in tracking. He knew that the printing-office was located in the wing of a house set in a garden and occupied by a large red-bearded man named Kostya and his wife, a stout, pock-marked woman. He also knew that Olga was the servant of these two people. Kostya’s head was close cropped, and his wife had a grey face and roaming eyes. Upon Yevsey both produced the impression of witless persons, or persons who have lain in a hospital a long time.
“What fearful people they are!” he remarked to Yakov when he pointed them out one evening during a party at Makarov’s lodging.
Yakov loved to boast of his acquaintances. He proudly shook his curly head, and explained with an air of importance:
“It’s from their hard life. They work in cellars at night, where it is damp, and the air is close. They get their rest in prison. Both of them are fugitives, who live on other people’s passports. Such a life turns everybody inside out and upside down. They’re jolly people, too. When Kostya begins to tell about his life, you would think it is nothing but tears, but he talks so that when he is done, your sides ache from laughing. You can’t trap such people very easily.”
Klimkov decided to get a last look at Olga. He learned through what street the prisoners would be led, and went to meet them, trying to persuade himself that all this did not touch him. All the time he was thinking about the girl.
“She’ll certainly be frightened. She’ll cry.”
He walked, as always, keeping in the shade. He tried once or twice to whistle carelessly, but never succeeded in checking the steady stream of recollections about Olga. He saw her calm face, her trusting eyes, listened to her somewhat broken voice, and remembered her words:
“It’s no use for you to talk so badly about people, Klimkov. Why, have you nothing to reproach yourself with? Suppose everybody were to say what you say, ‘It’s hard for me to live, because everybody is so mean,’ why, that would be ridiculous. Can’t you see? Value yourself highly, but do not lower others. What right have you to do that?”
