Something strange, like a dream, grew in the city, rushing onward with irresistible rapidity. People lost their fear completely. On the faces which only a short time ago had been flat and humble, an expression of conscious power and preoccupation now appeared sharply and clearly. All recalled builders preparing to pull down an old structure, and busily considering the best way of beginning the work.

Almost every day the workingmen in the factory suburb openly arranged meetings, at which known revolutionists appeared, who in the very presence of the police and officials of the Department of Safety sharply censured the order of life, and pointed out that the manifesto of the minister convoking the Duma was an attempt of the administration to pacify the people, who were stirred up by misfortune, in order to deceive them in the end, as always. The speakers urged their listeners not to believe anybody except their own reason.

Once when a rebel orator shouted, "The people alone are the true and legal masters of life; to them belong the whole earth and all freedom," a triumphant roar came in reply, "True, brother!"

Yevsey deafened by the shouts turned away, and met Melnikov who had been standing in back of him. His eyes burned, he was black and dishevelled. He flapped his arms, as a crow flaps its wings, and bawled:

"Tr-r-r-ue!"

Klimkov pulled the skirt of his coat in amazement, and whispered in a low voice:

"What ails you? The speaker is a Socialist. He's under surveillance."

Melnikov blinked his eyes, and asked:

"He?" Without awaiting a reply, he shouted again, "Hurray! True!" Then to Yevsey very angrily, "Get out! It's all the same who speaks the truth."

Yevsey smiled timidly at the new speeches. He looked around helplessly for some person in the crowd with whom he might speak openly; but on finding a pleasant face that inspired confidence, he sighed and thought:

"I'll begin to talk with him, and he'll at once understand that I'm a spy."

He frequently heard the revolutionists speak of the necessity of arranging another life upon earth. Dreams of his childhood returned, broadened and filled with a clear content. He believed in the hot fearless words. But the faith grew feebly and lazily upon the shaky, slimy soil of his soul, choked with impressions, poisoned by fear, and exhausted by violence. His faith was like a child suffering with rachitis, bow-legged, with large eyes always gazing into the distance.

Yevsey admired the beautiful growth of the rebellion. But he lacked the power to fall in love with it. He believed words. He did not believe people. The dreams stirring his heart died the instant they touched it. A timorous spectator he walked along the shore of a stream without the desire to plunge into its soul-refreshing waves. At the same time he longed wistfully for someone to triumph, for someone to make life calm and pleasing, and point out a comfortable place in it where he might find repose.

At first he could not comprehend why both the revolutionists and the officers of the spies censured the administration, why both asserted that someone wanted to deceive the people. When the people themselves, however, came out into the street, and began to speak, Yevsey stopped to think about this question.

The spies walked about slowly, indolently; they all grew strange to one another, maintaining sullen silence, and looking into the eyes of their comrades suspiciously, as if expecting something dangerous from one another. The officials ceased to talk, and sank into the background. They gave out no plans of action, and said nothing new.

"Has nothing been heard in regard to this St. Petersburg league of princes?" Krasavin asked almost every day.

Once Piotr joyously announced:

"Boys, Sasha has been summoned to St. Petersburg. He'll fix up a game there, you'll see."

Viakhirev, the hook-nosed, reddish spy, remarked lazily:

"The League of Russian People has been permitted to organize fighting bands to kill the revolutionists. I'll go there, I'm a good shot."

"A pistol is a fine thing," said someone. "You shoot, and then run away."

"How simply they speak about everything," thought Yevsey. He involuntarily recalled other conversations—Olga and Makarov—which he impatiently pushed away from himself.

Sasha returned from St. Petersburg, as it were stronger. Concentrated green sparks gleamed in his dim eyes. His voice had become deeper, his entire body seemed to have straightened and grown sounder.

"What are we going to do?" asked Piotr.

"You'll soon find out," answered Sasha, showing his teeth.

Autumn came as always quiet and melancholy. But the people did not remark its advent. Yesterday bold and noisy, to-day they came out into the streets still bolder, still more confident, and upheld Yevsey's faith in their victory, in the nearness, of a calm, peaceful, comfortable life.

Then came the fabulously terrible and marvellous days, when all the people ceased to work, and the customary life that for so long had held oppressive sway, oppressive in its cruelty and aimless play, suddenly ceased, as if crushed by a giant embrace. The people refused the city, their ruler, bread, fire, and water. And for a number of nights it stood in darkness, hungry, thirsty, sullen, and affronted. During those dark, insulting nights, the working-people walked through the streets with song, childish joy shining in their eyes. For the first time they clearly saw their power, and themselves were amazed at its significance. They understood their might over life, and good-naturedly exulted, looking at the blinded houses, the motionless dead machines, the dumbfounded police, the closed, ever-hungry jaws of the shops and restaurants, the frightened faces, the humble figures of those persons who had never learned to work, but only to eat much, and who therefore considered themselves the best blood in the city. Their power over people had been torn from their impotent hands in these days, yet their cruelty and cunning remained. Klimkov looked at the men accustomed to command now silently submitting to the will of the hungry, poor, and unwashed. He understood that it had become a shame for the lords to live. So trying to cover up their shame, they smiled approvingly upon the working-people, and lied to them. They were afraid of the workers. In spite of the lords, however, it seemed to Yevsey that the past would not return. He felt that new masters had arisen, and if they had been able all of a sudden to stop the course of life, then they would now be able to arrange it differently, more freely, and more easily for themselves and for all.

The old, the cruel, and the malicious abandoned the city. It melted away in the darkness. The people perceptibly grew better, and though the city remained without illumination, yet the nights were stirring, merry as the days.

Everywhere crowds of people gathered and spoke animatedly, in free, bold, human speech, of the approaching days of the triumph of truth. They believed in it hotly. The unbelievers were silent, but looked into the new faces, impressing the new speech upon their minds.

Often Klimkov observed the spies in the crowds. Not wishing to be seen by them, he walked away. He met Melnikov more frequently than the others. This man roused his particular interest. A dense crowd always gathered around him, and his thick voice flowed from the centre of the group like a dark stream.

"There, you see! The people wanted it, and everything is up. If the people want it, they will take everything into their own hands. They're a power, the people are. Remember this—don't let what you have obtained slip from your grasp. Take care! More than everything, guard against the cunning of various gentlemen. Away with them. Drive them off! If they dispute, beat them to death."

When Klimkov heard this, he thought:

"For such talk people used to be put in prison. What numbers have been put in prison! And now they speak that way themselves."

He wandered about in the crowd alone from morning until late at night. Sometimes he had an irresistible yearning to speak; but as soon as he felt the desire coming upon him, he immediately walked off into empty by-streets and dark corners.

"If I speak, they'll recognize me," he thought with importunate dread. And he comforted himself by reflecting, "No hurry. I'll have time enough yet to speak."

One night while walking along the street, he saw Maklakov hidden in a gateway, looking up to a lighted window on the opposite side of the street like a hungry dog waiting for a sop.

"Keeps at his work," thought Yevsey, then said to Maklakov: "Do you want me to take your place, Timofey Vasilyevich?"

"You, me, Yevsey?" exclaimed the spy in a subdued voice, and Klimkov felt that something was wrong, for it was the first time that the spy had ever addressed him by the first name. Moreover Maklakov's voice was not his own. "No, go," he said.

The spy always so smooth and decorous now had a shabby appearance. His hair, as a rule carefully and prettily combed behind his ears, lay in disorder over his forehead and temples. He smelt of whiskey.

"Good-by," said Yevsey raising his hat and walking off slowly. He had taken only a few steps, however, when he heard a call behind him.

"Listen!"

Yevsey turned back noiselessly, and stood beside Maklakov.

"Let's walk together."

"He must be very drunk," thought Yevsey.

"Do you know who lives in that house?" asked Maklakov, looking back.

"No."

"Mironov, the writer. Do you remember him?"

"I do."

"Well, I should think you would. He made you out a fool so simply."

"Yes," agreed Yevsey.

They walked slowly with noiseless tread. The narrow street was quiet, deserted, and cold.

"Let's go back," continued Maklakov. Then he adjusted his hat on his head, buttoned his overcoat, and declared thoughtfully, "Brother, I am going away—to Argentine. That's in America."

Klimkov heard something hopeless, dismal in his words, and he, too, began to feel gloomy and awkward.

"Why—so far?"

"I must."

Maklakov again stopped opposite the illuminated window, and looked up to it silently. Like a huge, solitary eye on the black face of the house, it cast a peaceful beam of light into the darkness—a small island amid black and heavy waters.

"That's his window, Mironov's," said Maklakov quietly. "That's the way he sits at night all by himself and writes. Come."

Some people advanced toward them singing softly:

"It comes, it comes, the last decisive fight!"

"We ought to cross to the other side," Yevsey proposed in a whisper.

"Are you afraid?" asked Maklakov, though he was the first to step from the pavement to cross the frozen dirt of the middle of the street. "No reason to be afraid. These fellows with their songs of war and all such things are peaceful people. The wild beasts are not among them, no. It would be good to sit down now in some warm place, in a cafÉ, but everything is closed, everything is suspended, brother."

"Come home," Klimkov suggested.

"Home? No thank you. You can go if you want to."

Yevsey remained, submissively yielding to the sad expectation of something inevitable. From the other side of the street came the sound of the people's talk.

"Misha, is it possible you don't believe?" one asked in a ringing, joyous voice.

A soft bass answered:

"I do believe, but I say it won't happen so soon."

"Listen! What the devil of a spy are you, eh?" Maklakov suddenly demanded nudging Yevsey with his elbow. "I've been watching you a long time. Your face always looks as if you had just taken an emetic."

Yevsey grew glad at the possibility of speaking about himself openly.

"I am going away, Timofey Vasilyevich," he quickly mumbled. "Just as soon as everything is arranged, I am going away. I'll gradually settle myself in business, and I'm going to live quietly by myself—"

"As soon as what is arranged?"

"Why, all this about the new life. When the people start out all for themselves."

"Eh, eh," drawled the spy, waving his hand and smiling. His smile robbed Yevsey of the desire to speak about himself.

They walked in silence again, and turned again. Both were gloomy.

"There, now," Maklakov exclaimed with unexpected roughness and acerbity as they once more approached the author's house. "I'm really going away, forever, entirely from Russia. Do you understand? And I must hand over some papers to this—this author. You see this package?"

He waved a white parcel before Yevsey's face, and continued quickly, in a low growl. "I won't go to him myself. This is the second day I've been on the watch for him, waiting for him to come out. But he's sick, and he won't come out. I would have given it to him in the street. I can't send it by mail. His letters are opened and stolen in the Post Office and given over to the Department of Safety. And it's absolutely impossible for me to go to him myself. Do you understand?"

The spy pressing the package to his breast bent his head to look into Yevsey's eyes.

"My life is in this package. I have written about myself—my story—who I am, and why. I want him to read it—he loves people."

Taking Yevsey's shoulder in a vigorous clutch the spy shook him, and commanded:

"You go and give it to him, into his own hands—go, tell him that one—" Maklakov broke off, and continued after a pause—"tell him that a certain agent of the Department of Safety sent him these papers, and begs him most humbly—tell him that way, 'begs him most humbly' to read them. I'll wait here for you, on the street. Go. But look out, don't tell him I'm here. If he asks, say I've escaped, went to Argentine. Repeat what I've told you."

"Went to Argentine."

"And don't forget, 'begs most humbly.'"

"No, I won't."

"Go on, quick!"

Giving Klimkov a gentle shove on the back he escorted him to the door of the house, walked away, and stopped to observe him.

Yevsey agitated and seized with a fine tremor, lost consciousness of his own personality crushed by the commanding words of Maklakov. He pushed the electric button, and felt ready to crawl through the door in the desire to hide himself from the spy as quickly as possible. He struck it with his knee, and it opened. A dark figure loomed in the light, a voice asked testily:

"What do you want?"

"The writer, Mr. Mironov—him personally. I have been told to deliver a package into his own hands. Please, quick!" said Yevsey, involuntarily imitating the rapid and incoherent talk of Maklakov. Everything became confused in his brain. But the words of the spy lay there, white and cold as dead bones. And when a somewhat dull voice reached him, "What can I do for you, young man?" Yevsey said in an apathetic voice, like an automaton, "A certain agent of the Department of Safety sent you these papers, and begs you most humbly to read them. He has gone off to Argentine." The strange name embarrassed Yevsey, and he added in a lower voice, "Argentine, which is in America."

"Yes, but where are the papers?"

The voice sounded kind. Yevsey raised his head, and recognized the soldierly face with the reddish mustache. He pulled the package from his pocket, and handed it to him.

"Sit down."

Klimkov seated himself, keeping his head bowed. The sound of the tearing of the wrapping made him start. Without raising his head, he looked at the writer warily from under lowered lids. Mironov stood before him regarding the package, his mustache quivering.

"You say he's gone off?"

"Yes."

"And you yourself are also an agent?"

"Yes," said Yevsey quietly, and thought, "Now, he'll scold me."

"Your face seems familiar to me."

Yevsey tried not to look at him. But he felt the writer was smiling.

"Yes, I suppose it is familiar to you," said Yevsey sighing.

"Have you, too, been tracking me?"

"Once. You saw me from the window. You came out into the street, and gave me a letter."

"Yes, yes. I remember. The devil! So that was you? Well, excuse me, my dear man. I think I must have offended you, eh?"

Yevsey rose from the chair, looked into his laughing face incredulously, and glanced around.

"That's nothing," he said.

He felt unbearably awkward as he listened to the somewhat rude yet kindly voice. He was afraid that after all the writer would abuse him and drive him out.

"There, you see how strangely we meet this time, eh?"

"Nothing else?" asked Yevsey confused.

"Nothing else. But I believe you are tired. Sit down. Rest."

"I must be going."

"Very well. As you please. Well, thank you. Good-by."

He extended his large hand with reddish wool on the fingers. Yevsey touched it cautiously.

"Permit me also to tell you my life," he requested unexpectedly to himself. The instant he had distinctly uttered these words, he thought, "This is the very man to whom I ought to speak, if Timofey Vasilyevich himself, such a wise person and better than everybody, respects him." Recalling Maklakov, Yevsey looked at the window, and for a moment grew anxious.

"No matter," he said to himself. "It's not the first time he's had to freeze."

"Well, why not? Tell me, if you want to. Won't you take off your overcoat? And perhaps you will have a glass of tea. It's cold."

Yevsey wanted to smile, but he restrained himself. In a few minutes, his eyes half closed, he told the writer monotonously and minutely about the village, about Yakov, and about the blacksmith. He spoke in the same voice in which he reported his observations in the Department of Safety.

The writer, whom Yevsey observed from under his lashes, was sitting on a broad, heavy taborette, his elbows on the table, over which he bent, twirling his mustache with a quick movement of his fingers. His eyes gazed sharply and seriously into the distance above Klimkov's head.

"He doesn't hear me," thought Yevsey, and raised his voice a little, continuing to examine the room without himself being observed, and jealously watching the face of the author.

The room was dark and gloomy. The shelves crammed with books, which increased the thickness of the walls, apparently kept out the sounds of the street. Between the shelves the glass of the windows glistened dully, pasted over with the cold darkness of the night, and the white narrow stain of the door obtruded itself on the eye. In the middle of the room was a table, whose covering of grey cloth seemed to lend a dark grey tone to everything around it.

Yevsey was ensconced in a corner of a chair covered with a smooth skin. For some reason he propped his head hard against its high back, then slid down a little. The flames of the candles disturbed him; the yellow tongues slowly inclining toward each other, seemed to be holding a conversation. They trembled, and straightened themselves out, struggling upward. Back of the author over the sofa, hung a large portrait, from which a yellow face with a sharp little beard looked out sternly.

The author began to twirl his mustache more slowly, but his look as before travelled beyond the confines of the room. All this disturbed Yevsey, breaking the thread of his recollections. He be-thought himself of closing his eyes. When he did so, and darkness closely enveloped him, he sighed lightly. Suddenly he beheld himself divided in two—the man who had lived, and the other being who was able to tell about the first as about a stranger. His speech flowed on more easily, his voice grew stronger, and the events of his life drew themselves connectedly one after the other, unrolling easily like a ball of grey thread. They freed the little feeble soul from the dirty and cumbersome rags of its experiences. It was pleasant to Yevsey to tell about himself. He listened to his own voice with quiet astonishment. He spoke truthfully, and clearly saw that he had not been guilty of anything, for he had lived all his days not as he had wanted to, but as he had been compelled to do; and he had been compelled to do what was unpleasant and unnecessary to him. Filled with a sense of sincere self-pity, he was almost ready to weep and to fall in love with himself.

Whenever the author asked him a question, which Yevsey did not understand, he would say without opening his eyes, sternly and quietly:

"Wait, I'm telling it in order."

He spoke without wearying, but when he came to the moment of his meeting with Maklakov, he suddenly stopped as before a pit. He opened his eyes, and saw at the window the dull look of the autumn morning, the cold grey depth of the sky. Heaving a deep sigh, he straightened himself up. He felt washed within, unusually light, unpleasantly empty. His heart was ready submissively to receive new orders, fresh violence.

The author rose noisily from his seat, tall and strong. He pressed his hands together, cracking his fingers disagreeably.

"What do you think of doing now?" he asked, as he turned to the window without looking at Klimkov.

Yevsey also rose, and repeated with assurance what he had told Maklakov.

"As soon as the new life is arranged, I'll quietly go into some business—I'll go to another city—I've saved about one hundred and fifty rubles."

The author turned to him slowly.

"So?" he said. "You have no other desire whatsoever?"

Klimkov thought, and answered:

"No."

"And you believe in the new life? You think it will arrange itself?"

"Of course. How else? If all the people want it. Why won't it arrange itself?"

"I'm not saying anything."

Mironov keeping silent turned to the window again, and straightened out his mustache with both hands. Yevsey stood motionless, awaiting something and listening to the emptiness in his breast.

"Tell me," said the writer softly and slowly, "aren't you sorry for those people, that girl, your cousin, and his comrade?"

Klimkov bowed his head, and drew the skirts of his coat together.

"You found out that they were right, didn't you?"

"At first I was sorry for them. I must have been ashamed, I suppose. But now I'm not sorry any more."

"No? Why not?"

Klimkov did not answer at once. At the end of a few moments he said:

"Well, they are good people, and they attained to what they wanted."

"And didn't it occur to you that you were in a bad business?"

Yevsey sighed.

"Why, I don't like it. I do what I'm told to do."

The author stepped up to him, then turned aside. Klimkov saw the door through which he had entered, saw it because the author's glance was turned to it.

"I ought to go," he thought.

"Do you want to ask me anything?" inquired the author.

"No, I am going."

"Good-by." And the host moved to let him pass. Yevsey walking on tip-toe went into the ante-chamber, where he began to put on his overcoat. From the door of the room he heard a question:

"Listen, why did you tell me about yourself?"

Squeezing his hat in his hands Yevsey thought, and answered:

"Just so. Timofey Vasilyevich respects you very much, the one who sent me."

The writer smiled.

"Aha! Is that all?"

"Why did I tell him?" Klimkov suddenly wondered. Blinking his eyes, he looked fixedly into the author's face.

"Well, good-by," said the host, rubbing his hands. He moved away from his visitor.

Yevsey nodded to him politely.

"Good-by."

When he came out of the house, he looked around, and immediately observed the black figure of a man at the end of the street in the grey twilight of the morning. The man was quietly striding along the pavement holding his head bent.

"He's waiting," Klimkov thought. He shrank back. "He'll scold me. He'll say it was too long."

The spy must have heard the resonant sound of steps on the frozen paving in the stillness of the morning. He raised his head, and fairly ran to meet Yevsey.

"Did you give it to him? Yes?"

"I did."

"Why were you so long? Did he speak to you? What did he ask?"

Maklakov shivered. His cheeks were blue, his nose red. He seized the lapels of Yevsey's overcoat, and instantly released him, blew on his fingers, as if he had burned them, and began to tramp his feet on the ground. Thus, chilled through and through, and pitiful, he was not awe-inspiring.

"I, too, told him all my life," Yevsey declared aloud. It was pleasant to tell Maklakov about it.

"Well, didn't he ask about me?"

"He asked whether you had gone away."

"What did you say?"

"I said you had."

"Yes. Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"Well, let's go. I'm frozen, brother." Maklakov darted forward, thrusting his hands in his overcoat pockets, and hunching his back. "So you told him your life?"

"The whole of it, completely, to the very moment of my last meeting with you," answered Yevsey, again experiencing a pleasant sensation, which raised him to the same level as the spy whom he respected.

"What did he say to you then?"

For some reason confused and embarrassed Klimkov waited before he replied.

"He didn't say anything."

Maklakov stopped, seized him by the sleeve, and asked in a stern though quiet tone:

"Did you give him my papers?"

"Search me, Timofey Vasilyevich," Yevsey cried sincerely.

"I won't," said Maklakov, after reflecting. "Well, now good-by. I'll disappear this very day. Take my advice. I'm giving it, because I pity you. Get out of this service and be quick about it. It's not for you, you know it yourself. Go away now. Now is the time to leave. You see what days these are. The dead are coming to life, people trust one another, they can forgive much in a period like this; they can forgive everything, I think. And above all, avoid Sasha. He's sick and insane. He's made you deliver up your cousin, he—he ought to be killed, like a mangy dog. Well, good-by, brother." He seized Yevsey's hand in his cold fingers, and pressed it firmly. "So you gave him my papers?" he asked once more. "You're sure of it, are you?"

"I did—by God! The moment I caught sight of him I at once remembered him."

"All right. I believe you. Don't speak about me there for a few days, I beg you."

"I'm not going there. On the twentieth I'll call for my salary."

"Tell them then. By that time I'll be far away. Good-by."

He turned the corner quickly. Yevsey looked after him, thinking suspiciously:

"He's going off. Probably he did something against the authorities, and got frightened. How he looks, just as if he had gotten a beating."

He grew sorry for himself at the thought that he would never again see Maklakov. Nevertheless, it was agreeable to recall how weak, chilled through, and troubled the spy had looked, the spy who had always borne himself so calmly and firmly.

"He spoke boldly even with the officers of the Department of Safety, spoke to them as if he were their equal. But apparently he was all the time afraid of the author who was under surveillance. And here am I, a little man," thought Yevsey, as he strode down the street, "a little man, afraid of everybody, yet the author didn't frighten me. I was drinking tea at his house, while Maklakov was shivering on the street." Klimkov content with himself smiled. "He couldn't say anything, the author couldn't." Yevsey was suddenly seized with a mingled feeling of sadness and insult. He slackened his pace, and sank into reflections as to why this was. He sought the cause of the grief that unexpectedly rose within him.

"Why did I speak to him?" he thought again on the way. "Instead, I should have told it that time to Olga."

The city awoke, and Yevsey wanted to sleep. He felt uneasiness, discomfort in his breast again. His heart was like a little room from which all the furniture has been removed, and which is left bare and empty, with green stains of dampness on the torn wall-paper, showing the dumb patterns made by the chinks in the plastering.

He wanted to sleep, but it was pleasant to stroll the streets, and he walked homeward with reluctant steps.