The Spy

"Not so rough! Not so rough! The beasts! How they beat me – with clubs. To beat a man with clubs! Please be more careful. Don't you understand?"

Yevsey handed the water, removed the spy's shoes, and listened to his groans. He took secret satisfaction in his tears and blood. Accustomed as he was to see people beaten until blood was drawn, their outcries did not touch him even though he remembered the pain of the pummelings he had received in his childhood.

"Who did it to you?" asked Rayisa when the spy was settled in bed.

"They trapped me, surrounded me, in a suburb near a thread factory. Now I must go to another city. I will ask for a transfer."

When Yevsey lay down to sleep, the spy and Rayisa began to quarrel aloud.

"I won't go," said the woman in a loud and unusually firm voice.

"Keep quiet! Don't excite a sick man!" the spy exclaimed with tears in his voice.

"I won't go!"

"I will make you."

In the morning Yevsey understood by Rayisa's stony face and the spy's angry excitement that the two did not agree. At supper they began to quarrel again. The spy, who had grown stronger during the day, cursed and swore. His swollen blue face was horrible to look upon, his right hand was in a sling, and he shook his left hand menacingly. Rayisa, pale and imperturbable, rolled her round eyes, and followed the swinging of his red hand.

"Never, I'll never go," she stubbornly repeated, scarcely varying her words.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to."

"But you know I can ruin you."

"I don't care."

"No, you'll go."

"I won't."

"We shall see. Who are you anyway? Have you forgotten?"

"It's all the same to me."

"All right."

After supper the spy wrapped his face in his scarf, and departed without saying anything. Rayisa sent Yevsey for whiskey. When he had brought her a bottle of table whiskey and another bottle of some dark liquid, she poured a portion of the contents of each into a cup, sipped the entire draught, and remained standing a long time with her eyes screwed up and wiping her neck with the palm of her hand.

"Do you want some?" she asked, nodding over the bottle. "No? Take a drink. You'll begin to drink some time or other anyway."

Yevsey looked at her high bosom, which had already begun to wither, at her little mouth, into her round dimmed eyes, and remembering how she had been before, he pitied her with a melancholy pity. He felt heavy and gloomy in the presence of this woman.

"Ah, Yevsey," she said, "if one could only live his whole life with a clean conscience."

Her lips twitched spasmodically. She filled a cup and offered it to him.

"Drink!"

He shook his head in declination.

"You little coward!" she laughed quietly. "Life is hard for you – I understand. But why you live I don't understand. Why? Tell me."

"Just so," answered Yevsey gloomily. "I live. What else is one to do?"

Rayisa looked at him, and said tenderly:

"I think you are going to choke yourself."

Yevsey was aggrieved and sighed. He settled himself more firmly in his chair.

Rayisa paced through the room, stepping lazily and inaudibly. She stopped before a mirror, and looked at her face long without winking. She felt her full white neck with her hands, her shoulders quivered, her hands dropped heavily, and she began again to pace the room, her hips moving up and down. She hummed without opening her mouth. Her voice was stifled like the groan of one who suffers from toothache.

A lamp covered with a green shade was burning on the table. Through the window the round disk of the moon could be seen in the vacant heavens. The moon, too, looked green, as it hung there motionless like the shadows in the room, and it augured ill.

"I am going to bed," said Yevsey rising from his chair.

Rayisa did not answer, and did not look at him. Then he stepped to the door, and repeated in a lower voice:

"Good-night. I am going to sleep."

"Go, I'm not keeping you. Go."

Yevsey understood that Rayisa felt nauseated. He wanted to tell her something.

"Can I do anything for you?" he inquired, stopping at the door.

She looked into his face with her weary sleepy eyes.

"No, nothing," she answered quietly after a pause.

She walked up and down in the room for a long time. Yevsey heard the rustle of her skirt and the doleful sound of her song, and the clinking of the bottles. Occasionally she coughed dully.

Rayisa's composed words stood motionless in Yevsey's heart, "I think you are going to choke yourself." They lay upon him heavily, pressing like stones.

In the middle of the night the spy awoke Klimkov rudely.

"Where is Rayisa?" he asked in a loud whisper. "Where did she go? Has she been gone long? You don't know? You fool!"

Dorimedont left the room hastily, then thrust his head through the door, and asked sternly:

"What was she doing?"

"Nothing."

"Was she drinking?"