“You don’t like him,” said Ivanov. “You had a scene with him a few days ago, I believe?”
Gletkin thought of the scene when Rubashov had sat on his bunk and pulled his shoe over his ragged sock.
“That does not matter,” he said.
“His personality does not matter.
It is the method which I consider wrong.
It will never make him give in.”
“When Rubashov capitulates,” said Ivanov, “it won’t be out of cowardice, but by logic.
It is no use trying the hard method with him.
He is made out of a certain material which becomes the tougher the more you hammer on it.”
“That is just talk,” said Gletkin.
“Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist. I have never seen one.
Experience shows me that the resistance of the human nerve system is limited by Nature.”
“I wouldn’t like to fall into your hands,” said Ivanov smilingly, but with a trace of uneasiness.
“Anyhow, you are a living refutation of your own theory.”
His smiling glance rated for a second on the scar on Gletkin’s skull.
The story of that scar was well-known.
When, during the Civil War, Gletkin had fallen into the enemy’s hands, they had tied a lighted candlewick on to his shaven skull, to extract from him certain information.
A few haws later his own people recaptured the position and found him unconscious.
The wick had burnt right to the end; Gletkin had kept silence.
He looked at Ivanov with his expressionless eyes.
“That’s only talk, too,” he said.
“I did not give in because I fainted.
If I had stayed conscious another minute, I should have spoken.
It is a question of constitution.”
He emptied his glass with a deliberate gesture; his cuffs crackled as he put it down on the table again.
When I came to, I was convinced at first that I had spoken. But the two N.C.O.s who were freed together with me asserted the contrary.
So I was decorated.
It is all a question of constitution; the rest is just fairy tales.”
Ivanov was drinking too.
He had already drunk quite a lot of the cheap wine.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Since when have you had this notable constitution theory?
After all, during the first years these methods did not exist.
At that time we were still full of illusions.
Abolition of punishment and of retaliation for crime; sanatoriums with flower gardens for the a-social elements.
It’s all humbug.”
“I don’t believe it is,” said Gletkin.
“You are a cynic.
In a hundred years we will have all that.
But first we have to get through.
The quicker, the better.
The only illusion was, to believe the time had already come.
When I first was put here, I was also under that illusion.
Most of us were—in fact, the entire apparatus up to the top.
We wanted to start at once with the flower gardens.
That was a mistake.
In a hundred years we will be able to appeal to the criminal’s reason and social instincts.
To-day we have still to work on his physical constitution, and crash him, physically and mentally, if necessary.”
Ivanov wondered whether Gletkin was drunk.
But he saw by his quiet, expressionless eyes that he was not.
Ivanov smiled at him rather vaguely.