“Thou shalt not” and
“Thou mayst not”, and to be allowed to tear along straight towards the goal.
The blue had begun to turn pink, dusk was falling; round the tower a flock of dark birds was circling with slow, deliberate wing beats.
No, the equation did not work out.
It was obviously not enough to direct man’s eyes towards a goal and put a knife in his hand; it was unsuitable for him to experiment with a knife.
Perhaps later, one day.
For the moment he was still too young and awkward.
How he had raged in the great field of experiment, the Fatherland of the Revolution, the Bastion of Freedom!
Gletkin justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved.
But what did it look like inside?
No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete.
The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world.
No 1’s regime had besmirched the ideal of the Social state even as some Mediaeval Popes had besmirched the ideal of a Christian Empire.
The Bag of the Revolution was at half-mast.
Rubashov wandered through his cell.
It was quiet and nearly dark.
It could not be long before they came to fetch him.
There was an error somewhere in the equation—no, in the whole mathematical system of thought.
He had had an inkling of it for a long time already, since the story of Richard and the Pieta, but had never dared to admit it to himself fully.
Perhaps the Revolution had come too early, an abortion with monstrous, deformed limbs.
Perhaps the whole thing had been a bad mistake in timing.
The Roman civilization, too, had seemed to be doomed as early as the first century B.C.; had seemed as rotten to the marrow as our own; then, too, the best had believed that the time was ripe for great change; and yet the old worn-out world had held out for another five hundred years.
History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations. Perhaps it was still only the second day of creation.
How he would have liked to live and build up the theory of the relative maturity of the masses! ...
It was quiet in the cell.
Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles.
Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling.
Soon it would be over.
But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.
It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means.
It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run amuck.
What had he once written in his diary?
“We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.”
Perhaps the heart of the evil lay there.
Perhaps it did not suit mankind to sail without ballast.
And perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist.
Perhaps now would come the time of great darkness.
Perhaps later, much later, the new movement would arise—with new flags, a new spirit knowing of both: of economic fatality and the “oceanic sense”.
Perhaps the members of the new party will wear monks’ cowls, and preach that only purity of means can justify the ends.
Perhaps they will teach that the tenet is wrong which says that a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million, and will introduce a new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop a consciousness and an individuality of its own, with an “oceanic feeling” increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet self-contained space.
Rubashov broke off his pacing and listened.
The sound of muffled drumming came down the corridor.
3
The drumming sounded as though it were brought from the distance by the wind; it was still far, it was coming closer. Rubashov did not stir.
His legs on the tiles were no longer subject to his will; he felt the earth’s force of gravity slowly mounting in them.
He took three steps backwards to the window, without taking his eye of the spy-hole.
He breathed deeply and lit a cigarette.
He heard a ticking in the wall next to the bunk:
THEY ARE FETCHING HARE-LIP. HE SENDS YOU HIS GREETINGS.
The heaviness vanished from his legs. He went to the door and started to beat against the metal quickly and rhythmically with the flat of both hands.