Darkness at Noon (19 page)

He paused; Rubashov did not answer. He went on:

“Have you ever read brochures of an anti-vivisectionist society? They are shattering and heartbreaking; when one reads how some poor cur which has had its liver cut out, whines and licks his tormentor’s hands, one is just as nauseated as you were to-night. But if these people had their say, we would have no serums against cholera, typhoid, or diphtheria. ...”

He emptied the rest of the bottle, yawned, stretched and stood up. He limped over to Rubashov at the window, and looked out.

“It’s getting light,” he said. “Don’t be a fool, Rubashov. Everything I brought up to-night is elementary knowledge, which you know as well as I. You were in a state of nervous depression, but now it is over.” He stood next to Rubashov at the window, with his arm round Rubashov’s shoulders; his voice was nearly tender. “Now go and sleep it off, old warhorse; to-morrow the time is up, and we will both need a clear head to concoct your deposition. Don’t shrug your shoulders—you are yourself at least half convinced that you will sign. If you deny it, it’s just moral cowardice. Moral cowardice has driven many to martyrdom.”

Rubashov looked out into the grey light. The sentry was just doing a right-about turn. Above the machinegun turret the sky was pale grey, with a shade of red. “I’ll think it over again,” said Rubashov after a while.

When the door had closed behind his visitor, Rubashov knew that he had already half-surrendered. He threw himself on the bunk, exhausted and yet strangely relieved. He felt hollowed-out and sucked dry, and at the same time as if a weight had been lifted from him. Bogrov’s pathetic appeal had in his memory lost some of its acoustic sharpness. Who could call it betrayal if, instead of the dead, one held faith with the living?

While Rubashov slept quietly and dreamlessly—the toothache had also quietened down—Ivanov, on the way to his room, paid a visit to Gletkin. Gletkin sat at his desk in full uniform, and was working through files. For years he had had the habit of working right through the night three or four times a week. When Ivanov entered the room, Gletkin stood up to attention.

“It is all right,” said Ivanov. “To-morrow he will sign. But I had to sweat to repair your idiocy.”

Gletkin did not answer; he stood stiffly in front of his desk. Ivanov, who remembered the sharp scene he had had with Gletkin before his visit to Rubashov’s cell and knew that Gletkin did not forget a rebuff so easily, shrugged his shoulders and blew cigarette smoke into Gletkin’s face. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “You all still suffer from personal feelings. In his place, you would be even more stubborn.”

“I have a backbone, which he hasn’t” said Gletkin.

“But you’re an idiot,” said Ivanov. “For that answer you ought to be shot before him.”

He hobbled to the door and banged it from outside.

Gletkin sat down to his desk again. He did not believe Ivanov would succeed, and at the same time he was afraid of it. Ivanov’s last sentence had sounded like a threat, and with him one never knew what was a joke and what serious. Perhaps he did not know himself—like all these intellectual cynics. ...

Gletkin shrugged his shoulders, shoved his collar and crackling cuffs into place, and went on with his work on the pile of documents.

Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it, or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand, to be produced immediately.

MACHIAVELLI:

Instructions to Raffaello Girolami

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

Matt. v. 37

Extract from N. S. Rubashov’s diary,

20th Day of Prison.

“... VLADIMIR BOGROV has fallen out of the swing. A hundred and fifty Years ago, the day of the storming of the Bastille, the European swing, after long inaction, again started to move. It had pushed o,$ from tyranny with gusto; with an apparently uncheckable impetus, it had swung up towards the blue sky of freedom. For a hundred years it had risen higher and higher into the spheres of liberalism and democracy. But, see, gradually the pace slowed down, the swing neared the summit and turning-point of its course; then, after a second of immobility, it started the movement backwards, with ever-increasing speed With the same Impetus as on the way up, the swing carried its passengers back from freedom to tyranny again. He who had gazed upwards instead of clinging on, became dizzy and fell out.

“Whoever wishes to avoid becoming dizzy must try to find out the swing’s law of motion. We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, from democracy back to absolute dictatorship.

“The amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity. The aforementioned pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing of the masses does not follow a continuous rising curve, as does the growing up of an individual, but that it is governed by more complicated laws.

“The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people’s capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and functioning of the whole social body.

“Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. Hence the political maturity of the masses cannot be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively, i.e. in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment.

“When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization—the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example—again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership.

“This process might be compared to the lifting of a ship through a lock with several chambers. When it first enters a lock chamber, the ship is on a low level relative to the capacity of the chamber; it is slowly lifted up until the water-level reaches its highest point. But this grandeur is illusory, the next lock chamber is higher still, the levelling process has to start again. The walls of the lock chambers represent the objective state of control of natural forces, of the technical civilization; the water-level in the lock chamber represents the political maturity of the masses. It would be meaningless to measure the latter as an absolute height above sea-level; what counts is the relative height of the level in the lock chamber.

“The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid objective progress, and, consequently, of equally rapid subjective political retrogression. The industrial era is still young in history, the discrepancy is still great between its extremely. complicated economic structure and the masses’ understanding of it. Thus it is comprehensible that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was 200 B.C. or at the end of the feudal epoch.

“The mistake in socialist theory was to believe that the level of mass-consciousness rose constantly and steadily. Hence its helplessness before the latest swing of the pendulum, the ideological self-mutilation of the peoples. We believed that the adaptation of the masses’ conception of the world to changed circumstances was a simple process, which one could measure in years; whereas, according to all historical experience, it would have been more suitable to measure it by centuries. The peoples of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine. The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.

“As to the Fatherland of the Revolution, the masses there are governed by the same laws of thought as anywhere else. They have reached the next higher lock chamber, but they are still on the lowest level of the new basin. The new economic system which has taken the place of the old is even more incomprehensible to them. The laborious and painful rise must start anew. It will probably be several generations before the people manage to understand the new state of affairs, which they themselves created by the Revolution.

“Until then, however, a democratic form of government is impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is even less than in other countries. Until then, our leaders are obligated to govern as though in empty space. Measured by classical liberal standards, this is not a pleasant spectacle. Yet all the horror, hypocrisy and degradation which leap to the eye are merely the visible and inevitable expression of the law described above. Woe to the fool and the aesthete who only ask how and not why. But woe also unto the opposition in a period of relative immaturity of the masses, such as this.

“In periods of maturity it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses. In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the ‘higher judgment of the people’. In such situations the opposition has two alternatives: to seize the power by a coup d’état, without being able to count on the support of the masses or in mute despair to throw themselves out of the swing—‘to die in silence’.

“There is a third choice which is no less consistent, and which in our country has been developed into a system: the denial and suppression of one’s own conviction when there is no prospect of materializing it. As the only moral criterion which we recognize is that of social utility, the public disavowal of one’s conviction in order to remain in the Party’s ranks is obviously more honourable than the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle.

“Questions of personal pride; prejudices such as exist elsewhere against certain forms of self-abasement; personal feelings of tiredness, disgust and shame—are to be cut off root and branch. ...”

Rubashov had begun to write his meditations on the “swing” immediately after the first bugle blast on the morning which followed Bogrov’s execution and Ivanov’s visit. When his breakfast was brought in, he drank a mouthful of coffee and let the rest get cold. His handwriting, which during the last few days had borne a somewhat flabby and unsteady character, again became firm and disciplined; the letters became smaller, the swinging open loops gave way to sharp angles. When he read it through, he noticed the change.

At eleven o’clock in the morning he was fetched for exercise as usual, and had to stop. Arrived in the courtyard, he was given as neighbour in the roundabout, not old Rip Van Winkle, but a thin peasant with bast shoes. Rip Van Winkle was not to be seen in the yard, and Rubashov only now remembered that at breakfast he had missed the habitual “Arie, ye wretched of the earth.” Apparently, the old man had been taken away, God only knew where; a poor, ragged, last year’s moth which had miraculously and uselessly survived its appointed life-term, to reappear at the wrong season, flutter round blindly a couple of times, and in a corner fall to dust.

The peasant at first trotted along in silence beside Rubashov, watching him from the side. After the first round he cleared his throat several times, and after a further round he said:

“I come from the province D. Have you ever been there, your honour?”

Rubashov answered in the negative. D. was an out-of-the-way province in the east, of which he only had a rather vague idea.

“It certainly is a long way to go,” said the peasant. “You must ride on camels to get there. Are you a political gentleman, your honour?”

Rubashov admitted it. The peasant’s bast shoes had the soles half torn off; he was walking with bare toes on the trampled snow. He had a thin neck, and he constantly nodded his head while speaking, as though repeating the amen of a litany.

“I too am a political person,” he said; “namely, I am a reactionary. They say all reactionaries must be sent away for ten years. Do you think they will send me away for ten years, your honour?”

He nodded, and squinted anxiously at the warders in the centre of the roundabout, who formed a small group, stamping their feet, and paying no attention to the prisoners.

“What have you done?” asked Rubashov.

“I was unmasked as a reactionary at the pricking of the children,” said the peasant. “Every year the Government sends a commission out to us. Two years ago, it sent us papers to read and a whole lot of images of itself. Last year it sent a threshing machine and brushes for the teeth. This year it sent little glass pipes with needles, to prick the children. There was a woman in man’s trousers; she wanted to prick all the children one after the other. When she came to my house, I and my wife barred the door and unmasked ourselves as reactionaries. Then we all together burnt the papers and the images and broke up the threshing machine; and then a month afterwards they came to take us away.”

Rubashov murmured something and thought over the continuation of his essay on self-government. It occurred to him that he had once read about the natives of New Guinea, who were intellectually on a level with this peasant, yet lived in complete social harmony and possessed surprisingly developed democratic institutions. They had reached the highest level of a lower lock basin. ...