The Spy

"Enough! I've taken sins enough upon myself. On the other side of the Volga I have an uncle, a very old man. He is all I have in this world. I'll go to him. He keeps an apiary – when he was young he was tried for forgery." After another pause of silence the spy laughed quietly.

"What's the matter?" asked Yevsey, annoyed.

"I'm forgetting everything. My uncle has now been dead for three years."

They reached a café known to them. Yevsey stopped at the door, and looked meditatively at the illuminated windows.

"People again," he muttered, dissatisfied. "I don't want to go in there."

"Let's go in. It's all the same," said Melnikov, taking him by the arm, and leading him after himself. "It will be tiresome for me to be here alone. Besides I've become fearsome. I'm not afraid of being killed if I'm recognized as a spy. It's just a general feeling of dread."

The two men did not enter the room in which their comrades were wont to gather, but took seats in a corner of the common hall, where there were a number of persons, of whom none were drunk, though the talk was noisy and evinced unusual excitement. Klimkov by habit began to listen to the conversations, while the thought of Sasha clung to him, and quietly unfolded itself in his head, stupefied by the impressions of the last days, but freshened by the constant influx of poignant hatred and fear of the spy.

He recalled the sullen face of the dead Zarubin, the mauled body of the fair-haired man. He looked in perplexity at the noisy public, blinking as if half asleep. All was incoherent, as in a nightmare. Melnikov drank tea with no appetite, keeping silent and from time to time stretching himself.

Not far from them at a table sat three men, apparently clerks with the characteristic speech of the class. They were young and fashionably dressed, with a display of gay necktie. One of them, a curly-headed youth with a tanned face spoke excitedly, his dark eyes flashing.

"They utilize the ferocity of hungry ragged rowdies, by which they want to prove to us that liberty is impossible because of the many barbarians such as these. However – permit me – savages did not show themselves for the first time yesterday. There have always been such, and justice has always been able to cope with them; they could be held under fear of the law. Then why are they permitted to perpetrate every sort of outrage and bestiality to-day?" He looked around the hall with the air of a victor, and answered his question with hot conviction. "Because they want to point out to us, 'You are for freedom, ladies and gentlemen, well here you have it. Freedom for you means murder, robbery, and all kinds of mob violence.'"

"Do you hear?" demanded Yevsey, triumphantly. "Isn't that Sasha's scheme?" The hot voice of the orator roused in his soul the quiet smouldering hope. "Maybe Sasha won't conquer."

Melnikov looked at him sullenly, without replying.

The curly-headed man rose from the chair, and continued waving a glass of wine in his hand.

"It's not true, and I protest. Honest people want liberty, not in order to crush one another, but in order for each to be protected against the prevailing violence of our lawless life. Liberty is the goddess of reason. They have drunk enough of our blood. I protest. Long live liberty!"

The public raised a cheer, and sprang to their feet.

Melnikov looked at the curly-headed orator, and muttered:

"What a fool!"

"He speaks truly," rejoined Yevsey, angrily.

"How do you know?" asked the spy indifferently, and began to drink the beer in slow gulps.

Yevsey wanted to tell this heavy man that he himself was a fool, a blind beast, whom the cunning and cruel masters of his life had taught to hunt people down. But Melnikov raised his head, and looking into Klimkov's face with dark eyes terribly widened, said in a sounding whisper:

"I'm afraid for this reason: when I was in prison an incident happened there – "

"Hold on," said Yevsey, "I want to listen."

A thin voice which drilled the ear, pierced triumphantly through the soft mass of sounds.

"Did you hear? He says a goddess, yet we Russian people have only one goddess, the Holy Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. That's how those curly-headed youngsters speak!"

"Out with him!"

"Silence!"

"No, if you please. If there's liberty, everyone has a right – "

"You see? The curly-headed youngsters walk the streets, beat the people who rise up to maintain the Czar's truth against treachery, while we Russians, the True Orthodox, don't dare even to speak. Is this liberty?"

"They'll fight," said Klimkov, starting to tremble. "Somebody will be killed. I'm going."

"What a peculiar fellow you are! Well, let's go. The devil take them! What are they to you?"

Melnikov flung the money on the table, and moved toward the exit, his head bowed low, as if to conceal his conspicuous face. On the street in the dark and the cold, he began to speak in a subdued voice:

"When I was in prison – it was on account of a certain foreman, who was strangled in our factory – I was hauled up, too. They told me I would get hard labor. Everybody said it, first the coroner, then the gendarmes joined in. I got frightened. I was still young, and I didn't take to the idea of hard labor. I used to cry." He coughed a clapping cough, and slackened his pace. "Once the assistant overseer of the prison, Aleksey Maksimych, a good little old man, came in to me. He loved me. He grieved for me all the time. 'Ah,' says he, 'Liapin,' – my real name is Liapin – 'Ah,' says he, 'brother, I'm sorry for you. You are such an unfortunate fellow – '"

Melnikov's speech unfolded itself like a soft band upon which Klimkov quietly let himself down, as upon a narrow path leading down into the darkness, into something terrible and awesomely interesting.

"He comes and says he, 'Liapin, I want to save you for a good life. Yours is a hard-labor case, but you can escape it. The only thing you need to do is to execute a man. He was sentenced for political assassination. He will be hanged according to law in the presence of a priest, will be given a cross to kiss, so that you needn't be uneasy about it.' I say, 'Why not? If with the consent of the authorities, and if I'm to be pardoned, I'll hang him. Only I can't.' – . 'We'll teach you,' says he. 'We have a man who knows how, but he's stricken with paralysis, and can't do it himself.' Well for a whole evening they taught me. It was in a deep dungeon. We stuffed a sack with rags, tied it with a string, so as to make a neck. Then I pulled it up on a hook. I learned how to do the business. Early in the morning they gave me half a bottle to drink, led me out into the yard with soldiers carrying guns. I see a gallows has been erected, and various officers before it. They are all muffled up and shrivelled. It was autumn then, too, November. I ascended the scaffolding, and the boards shook, creaked under my feet like teeth. This made me feel uncomfortable, and I said 'Give me more whiskey. I'm afraid.' Then they brought him – "

Melnikov again began to cough dully, and clutched at his throat. Yevsey pressed up to him, trying to keep step with him. He kept his eyes fastened on the ground, not daring to look either to the front or the side.

"I see a young powerful fellow. He stands firm, and all the time keeps stroking his head from his forehead back to his neck. I began to put the face-cloth on him. I must have pulled or pinched him in some way, and he tells me quietly without anger, 'Be more careful, brother.' Yes. The priest gave him the cross, and he says, 'Don't disturb yourself. I'm not a believer.' His face was so – as if he knew everything that would be after death, and now and to-morrow and always, knew it for certain. Somehow I strangled him, shaking all over. My hands grew numb, my legs would not hold me. I felt horrible on account of him – he was so calm about it all – a master over death."

Melnikov was silent, looked around, and began to walk more quickly.

"Well?" asked Yevsey in a whisper.

"Well, I strangled him. That's all. Only ever since, when I see or hear that a man has been killed, I recollect him – always. In my opinion he was the only man who knew the truth. That was why he was not afraid. And the main thing is, he knew what would be to-morrow – which no one knows. I tell you what, Yevsey, come to me to sleep, eh? Come, please."

"All right," said Yevsey quietly.

He was glad of the offer. He could not walk to his room alone – along the streets in the darkness. He felt a tightness in his breast and a heavy pressure on his bones, as if he were creeping under ground, and the earth were squeezing his back, his chest, his sides, and his head: while in front of him gaped a deep pit, which he could not escape, into which he must soon descend – a silent bottomless abyss down which he would drop endlessly.

"That's good," said Melnikov. "I would feel bored alone."

"If you would kill Sasha – " Yevsey advised him sadly.

"There you are!" Melnikov fended off the idea. "What do you think – that I love to kill? They asked me twice again to hang people, a woman and a student. I declined. I might have had two to remember instead of one. The killed appear again. They come back."

"Often?"

"Sometimes, sometimes not. When often, it's every night. How can you defend yourself against them? I can't pray to God. I've forgotten my prayers. Have you?"

"I remember mine."

They entered a court, and were long in penetrating to its depths, stumbling as they walked over boards, stones, and rubbish. Then they descended a flight of steps, which Klimkov, feeling the walls with his hands, thought would never come to an end. When he found himself at last in the lodging of the spy, and had examined it in the light of the lamp, he was amazed to see the mass of gay pictures and paper flowers with which the walls were almost entirely covered. Melnikov at once became a stranger in this comfortable little room, with a broad bed in a corner behind white curtains.

"All this was contrived by the woman with whom I lived," said Melnikov, starting to undress. "She ran away, the hussy! A gendarme, a quartermaster, decoyed her. I can't understand it. He's a grey-haired widower, while she's young and greedy for a male. Nevertheless she went away. The third one that's left me already. Come, let's go to bed."

They lay side by side in the same bed, which rocked under Yevsey like a tossing sea, and all the time descended lower and lower. His heart sank with it. The spy's words laid themselves heavily upon his breast.