“As far as I am concerned the unofficial part is over,” he said.
Ivanov blew smoke rings and watched him with the same tenderly ironic smile.
“Don’t become aggressive,” he said.
“Make allowances,” said Rubashov. “Did I arrest you or did you people arrest me?” “We arrested you,” said Ivanov.
He put out his cigarette, lit another one and held out the box to Rubashov, who did not move.
“The devil take you,” said Ivanov. “Do you remember the story of the veronal?”
He bent forward and blew the smoke of his cigarette into Rubashov’s face.
“I do not want you to be shot,” he said slowly. He leaned back again in his chair. “The devil take you,” he repeated, smiling again.
“Touching of you,” said Rubashov.
“Why actually do you people intend to have me shot?”
Ivanov let a few seconds go by.
He smoked and drew figures with his pencil on the blotting-paper.
He seemed to be searching for the exact words.
“Listen, Rubashov,” he said finally. “There is one thing I would like to point out to you.
You have now repeatedly said ‘you’—meaning State and Party, as opposed to ‘I’—that is, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov.
For the public, one needs, of course, a trial and legal justification.
For us, what I have just said should be enough.”
Rubashov thought this over; he was somewhat taken aback.
For a moment it was as if Ivanov had hit a tuning fork, to which his mind responded of its own accord.
All he had believed in, fought for and preached during the last forty years swept over his mind in an irresistible wave.
The individual was nothing, the Party was all; the branch which broke from the tree must wither. ...
Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve.
Ivanov was sitting back in his chair, smoking; he was no longer smiling.
Suddenly Rubashov’s eye was caught by a square patch on the wall lighter than the rest of the wall-paper.
He knew at once that the picture with the bearded heads and the numbered names had hung there—Ivanov followed his glance without changing his expression.
Your argument is somewhat anachronistic,” said Rubashov.
“As you quite rightly remarked, we were accustomed always to use the plural ‘we’ and to avoid as far as possible the first person singular.
I have rather lost the habit of that form of speech; you stick to it.
But who is this ‘we’ in whose name you speak to-day? It needs re-defining. That is the point.” “Entirely my own opinion,” said Ivanov. “I am glad that we have reached the heart of the matter so soon.
In other words: you are convinced that ‘we’—that is to say, the Party, the State and the masses behind it—no longer represent the interests of the Revolution.”
“I should leave the masses out of it,” said Rubashov.
“Since when have you this supreme contempt for the plebs?” asked Ivanov.
“Has that, too, a connection with the grammatical change to the first person singular?”
He leant across his desk with a look of benevolent mockery.
His head now hid the light patch on the wall and suddenly the scene in the picture gallery occurred to Rubashov, when Richard’s head had come between him and the folded hands of the Pieta.
In the same instant a spasm of pain throbbed from his jaw up to his forehead and ear. For a second he shut his eyes.
“Now I am paying,” he thought. An instant later he did not know whether he had not spoken aloud.
“How do you mean?” Ivanov’s voice asked. It sounded close to his ear, mocking and slightly surprised.
The pain faded; a peaceful stillness pervaded his mind.
“Leave the masses out of it,” he repeated.
You understand nothing about them.
Nor, probably, do I any more.
Once, when the great ‘we’ still existed, we understood them as no one had ever understood them before.
We had penetrated into their depths, we worked in the amorphous raw material of history itself. ...”
Without noticing it, he had taken a cigarette out of Ivanov’s case, which still lay open on the table. Ivanov bent forward and lit it for him.
“At that time,” Rubashov went on, “we were called the Party of the Plebs.
What did the others know of history?
Passing ripples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them.
But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia,’ of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions.
That was the greatness of our doctrine.