Katya would have trembled still more if she had known that she was in the presence of Makhno himself.
He stared at the young woman sitting on the side of the bed, in dusty boots and a crumpled but still elegant silk dress, her black shawl tied peasant fashion: apparently he could not understand what sort of a bird had flown into the hut.
His long upper lip twitched in a smile which exposed a row of widely-spaced teeth.
"Who do you belong to?" he rapped out.
Katya, who did not understand him, began to tremble.
The smile disappeared from his face, and the expression it left behind made Katya's lips quiver.
"Who are you?
A prostitute?
If you have syphilis, I'll have you shot.
Well?
Can't you speak Russian?
Are you ill?
Are you healthy?"
"I'm a prisoner," said Katya scarcely audibly.
"What can you do?
Can you manicure?
We'll supply you with instruments."
"All right," she replied, still more softly.
"But don't start any depravity in the army... d'you hear?
You can stay.
I shall come tonight after the battle —you can do my nails for me."
Many were the tales about Makhno among the people.
It was said that, while doing hard labour in the prison at Akatui, he had tried several times to escape and had once succeeded, but was trapped in a shed, and fought the soldiers with an axe.
After being beaten almost to a pulp with the butt ends of rifles, he was put in irons. And three years he had sat chained up, silent as a weasel, trying vainly, day and night, to tear the iron handcuffs from his wrists.
It was there, while doing hard labour, that he had made friends with the anarchist Arshinov-Marin, whose disciple he had become.
Nestor Makhno was from the village of Gulyai-Polye, in the Ekaterinoslav region. His father was a carpenter.
While still a mere child he served in a small general store, where he was cuffed and beaten, and nicknamed "the weasel" on account of his savage temper and brown eyes.
He was sacked while still a mere urchin for throwing boiling water over the senior shop assistant in revenge for a thrashing.
He then gathered a gang around him, raiding melon beds and orchards, doing all sorts of mischief, living a free life, till his father put him into a printshop.
There, it was said, he was noticed by the anarchist Volin, who, eighteen years later, became chief of staff and chief adviser to Makhno.
Volin was said to have taken a fancy to the lad and taught him to read and write and instructed him in anarchism, afterwards putting him to school, when Makhno had become a teacher.
But this was not true.
Makhno was never a teacher and it is more likely that he only got to know Volin much later, and learned about anarchism from Arshinov, while serving a sentence of hard labour.
In"1903 Makhno was once more at his tricks in Gulyai-Polye, this time, not in the orchards and vegetable plots but in the estates of the gentry, and the barns of the shopkeepers stealing a horse, cleaning out the contents of a cellar, sometimes sending a threatening letter to a shopkeeper, ordering him to put money under a stone.
He was at that time involved in a strange, drunken league with the police.
Makhno began to be held in real terror, but the peasants never gave him up to the authorities, for the nearer the time for the 1905 revolution came, the more resolutely Makhno annoyed the landowners.
And when at last the estates blazed, and the peasantry sallied forth to plough the lands of the gentry, Makhno made his way to the town, and to important doings.
Early in 1906 he and his followers attacked the treasury at Berdyansk, shot three officials, and seized the cashbox, but he was betrayed by a comrade and served time in Akatui....
Twelve years later, freed by the February revolution, he turned up in Gulyai-Polye again, where the peasantry, ignoring the ambiguous instructions of the Provisional Government, had chased away the landowners and shared the land among themselves.
Makhno reminded them of his former services and was elected vice-chairman of the district Zemstvo.
He immediately declared himself flatly for the "free peasant system," declaring at a sitting of the local authorities that those who supported the Zemstvo were bourgeois elements and cadets. In the heat of argument he shot down a member of the administration, and (appointed himself both chairman and district commissar.
The Provisional Government could do nothing with him, but a year later the Germans came, and Makhno had to flee.
For some time he roamed over Russia, until, in the summer of 1918, he turned up in Moscow, at that time teeming with anarchists.
Here he met many famous characters: old Arshinov, following with a jaundiced eye revolutionary events, which by some incomprehensible quirk of fate were being ruled by the Bolsheviks; that powerful theoretician and pillar of anarchy ("the mother of order"), Volin, whose beard and hair had never known a comb; then there was the ambitious and impatient Baron; Arten, Teper, Yakov Ali, Krasnokutsky, Glagson, Tsintsiper, and Chernyak and many another great man, all of whom had failed to get a footing in the revolution, and were lingering on in Moscow, penniless, with only one agenda for their daily sessions:
"System of organization, and financial matters".... Subsequently, some of them became leaders in the Makhno anarchist system, while others took part in the blowing up of the Moscow Committee of Bolsheviks in Leontyev Street.
The arrival of Makhno undoubtedly made an impression on the anarchists languishing in the cafes of Moscow.
Makhno was a man of action and, moreover, an extremely determined individual.
It was decided that he should go to Kiev, where it was planned to shoot the Hetman Skoropadsky and his generals.
Makhno, with an anarchist to assist him, went to Belenikhino on the Ukrainian frontier, evading the vigilance of the terrible commissar Sayenko, who kept a watch on the roads.
He disguised himself as an officer, but suddenly changed his mind about entering Kiev: the free air of the steppe lured him back, conspiracy was not in his line.