All that year Katya had heard nothing but the impotent grinding of teeth and sighs of despair, had seen nothing—as on that March morning in her father's house—but distorted faces, clenched fists.
Colonel Tetkin, it is true, had neither sighed nor ground his teeth, but he had been, in his own words, a kind of God's fool, and had welcomed the revolution with a blissful faith in justice.
Everyone in Katya's set had seen in the revolution the ruin of Russia and Russian culture, the annihilation of life, spontaneous risings on a colossal scale—the promised Apocalypse.
There had once been an empire whose workings were comprehensible and definite.
The peasant ploughed, the miner hewed coal, factories turned out cheap and useful goods, merchants traded briskly, clerks worked diligently—everything went as if by clockwork.
The people at the top derived luxurious comforts from all this.
Some said it was an unjust system.
But what was to be done if that was how God had ordained things?
And suddenly it had all been shattered into smithereens, and instead of an empire there was an exposed antheap. And the plain man staggered on, his eyes pale with horror....
For a long time the train waited at a halt in the midst of a profound stillness.
Katya put her head out of the window.
The leaves of a tall tree rustled in the darkness.
The starry sky seemed to spread boundlessly over this strange land.
Katya leaned her elbows on the top of the open window.
The rustle of the leaves, the stars, the warm fragrance of the earth, reminded her of one night in a park near Paris.... A few persons, almost all friends, and all from Petersburg, had gone there in two cars.... It had been delightful in the summerhouse on the lake where they had had supper.
The weeping willows had hung over the water like silvery clouds.
One of the company was a man in evening dress without a hat, whom Katya did not know—a German who spoke excellent French and had lived in Russia for a long time.
He was lean, with a longish, nervous-looking face, a high, sloping forehead, from which the hair retreated, and grave, heavy-lidded eyes.
He sat quietly at the table, his long fingers caressing his wineglass.
When Katya liked somebody, the atmosphere became one of warmth and tenderness.
The July night over the lake seemed to be descending upon her partly-exposed shoulders.
Stars showed through the leaves of the creepers overhead.
The warm glow of the candles fell on the faces of the assembled company, the moths on the tablecloth, the musing face of the new acquaintance.
Katya could feel that he was looking at her thoughtfully.
She must have been very beautiful that evening.
When they rose from the table, to stroll along an alley beneath the curved roof formed by towering trees, towards a terrace at the end of the park, from which the lights of Paris could be seen, the German had kept at Katya's side.
"Do you not consider, Madame," he said, "that there is something impermissible in beauty—something not to be tolerated?" he said in austere tones, making it as clear as possible that there was no latent significance in his words.
Katya walked slowly on.
She liked this man to be talking to her, his voice not drowning the rustle of the leafy roof overhead.
Walking on her left side, the German looked in front of him into the depths of the alley, at the end of which the crimson glow of the town could be discerned.
He went on talking. "I'm an engineer.
My father is very rich, I work in great concerns.
I have dealings with thousands of people.
I see and know much that is unknown to you.
Excuse me— perhaps I'm boring you?"
Katya had turned her head towards him, smiling in silence.
He could see her eyes and her smile in the faint reflection of the distant glow, and went on:
"We are living, unfortunately, at the meeting point of two eras.
One, majestic and splendid, is in its decline.
The other is being born in bleak, monotonous industrial districts, amidst the clatter of machinery.
Its name is the masses, the masses of humanity, in whose midst all distinctions are destroyed.
A man is nothing but deft hands guiding machines.
Here are different laws, different calculations of time, a different truth.
You, Madame, belong to the last remnants of the old era.
That is why it makes me so sad to look at your face.
The new era does not want it, any more than it wants anything which is useless, inimitable, capable of exciting obsolete feelings—love, self-sacrifice, poetry, tears of joy.... Beauty!
What is it for?
It is disturbing, it is not to be tolerated. I assure you, in the future, there will be laws against beauty. You may have heard of the conveyor system?
It is the latest novelty from America.
The philosophy of work at a continuously moving belt must be inculcated in the masses.... Robbery and murder must be made to appear less criminal than a moment of dreaming at the conveyor.... Just imagine now: beauty, moving, disturbing, suddenly, invades the iron halls of industrial workshops! What would be the result?