Darkness at Noon (20 page)

The peasant next to Rubashov took his silence as a sign of disapproval and shrunk even more into himself. His toes were frozen blue; he sighed from time to time; resigned in his fate, he trotted along beside Rubashov.

As soon as Rubashov was back in his cell, he went on writing. He believed he had made a discovery in the “law of relative maturity” and wrote in a state of extreme tension. When the midday meal was brought in, he had just finished. He ate up his portion and lay back contentedly on his bunk.

He slept for an hour, quietly and dreamlessly, and
woke up feeling refreshed. No. 402 had been tapping on his wall for some time; he was obviously feeling neglected. He enquired after Rubashov's new neighbour in the roundabout, whom he had observed from the window, but Rubashov interrupted him. Smiling to himself, he tapped with his pince-nez:

I AM CAPITULATING.

He waited curiously for the effect.

For a long while nothing came; No. 402 was silenced. His answer came a whole minute later:

I'D RATHER HANG….

Rubashov smiled. He tapped:

EACH ACCORDING TO HIS KIND.

He had expected an outbreak of anger from No. 402. Instead, the tapping sign sounded subdued, as it were, resigned:

I WAS INCLINED TO CONSIDER YOU AN EXCEPTION. HAVE YOU NO SPARK OF HONOUR LEFT?

Rubashov lay on his back, his pince-nez in his hand. He felt contented and peaceful. He tapped:

OUR IDEAS OF HONOUR DIFFER.

No. 402 tapped quickly and precisely:

HONOUR IS TO LIVE AND DIE FOR ONE'S BELIEF.

Rubashov answered just as quickly:

HONOUR IS TO BE USEFUL WITHOUT VANITY.

No. 402 answered this time louder and more sharply:

HONOUR IS DECENCY—NOT USEFULNESS.

WHAT IS DECENCY? asked Rubashov, comfortably spacing the letters. The more calmly he tapped, the more furious became the knocking in the wall.

SOMETHING YOUR KIND WILL NEVER
UNDERSTAND, answered No. 402 to Rubashov's question. Rubashov shrugged his shoulders:

WE HAVE REPLACED DECENCY BY REASON, he tapped back.

No. 402 did not answer any more.

Before supper Rubashov read through again what he had written. He made one or two corrections, and made a copy of the whole text in the form of a letter, addressed to the Public Prosecutor of the Republic. He underlined the last paragraphs which treated of the alternative courses of action open to the opposition, and ended the document with this concluding sentence:

“The undersigned, N. S. Rubashov, former member of the Central Committee of the Party, former Commissar of the People, former Commander of the 2nd Division of the Revolutionary Army, bearer of the Revolutionary Order for Fearlessness before the Enemy of the People, has decided, in consideration of the reasons exposed above, utterly to renounce his oppositional attitude and to denounce publicly his errors.”

Rubashov had been waiting for two days to be taken before Ivanov. He had thought his would follow immediately after he had handed the document announcing his capitulation to the old warder; it happened to be the same day as the term set by Ivanov expired. But apparently one was no longer in such a hurry about him. Possibly Ivanov was studying his “Theory of Relative Maturity”; more
probably, the document had already been forwarded to the competent higher authorities.

Rubashov smiled at the thought of the consternation it must have caused amidst the “theorists” of the Central Committee. Before the Revolution and also for a short while after it, during the lifetime of the old leader, no distinction between “theorists” and “politicians” had existed. The tactics to be followed at any given moment were deduced straight from the revolutionary doctrine in open discussion; strategic moves during the Civil War, the requisitioning of crops, the division and distribution of the land, the introduction of the new currency, the reorganization of the factories—in fact, every administrative measure—represented an act of applied philosophy. Each one of the men with the numbered heads on the old photograph which had once decorated Ivanov's walls, knew more about the philosophy of law, political economy and statesmanship than all the highlights in the professional chairs of the universities of Europe. The discussions at the congresses during the Civil War had been on a level never before in history attained by a political body; they resembled reports in scientific periodicals—with the difference that on the outcome of the discussion depended the life and well-being of millions, and the future of the Revolution.

Now the old guard was used up; the logic of history ordained that the more stable the régime became, the more rigid it had to become, in order to prevent the enormous dynamic forces which the Revolution had released from turning inwards and blowing the Revolution itself into the air. The time of philosophizing congresses was over; instead of the old portraits, a light
patch shone from Ivanov's wallpaper; philosophical incendiarism had given place to a period of wholesome sterility. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. His speeches and articles had, even in their style, the character of an infallible catechism; they were divided into question and answer, with a marvellous consistency in the gross simplification of the actual problems and facts. No. 1 doubtless had an instinct for applying the “law of the relative maturity of the masses”…. The dilettantes in tyranny had forced their subjects to act at command; No. 1 had taught them to think at command.

Rubashov was amused by the thought of what the present-day “theorists” of the Party would say to his letter. Under actual conditions, it represented the wildest heresy; the fathers of the doctrine, whose word was taboo, were criticized; spades were called spades, and even No. 1's sacrosanct person was treated objectively in its historical context. They must writhe in agony, those unfortunate theorists of to-day, whose only task was to dress up No. 1's jumps and sudden changes of course as the latest revelations of philosophy.

No. 1 sometimes indulged in strange tricks on his theorists. Once he had demanded an analysis of the American industrial crisis from the committee of experts who edited the Party's economic periodical. This required several months to complete; at last appeared the special number in which—based on the thesis exposed by No. 1 in his last Congress speech—it was proved, over approximately three hundred pages, that the American boom was only a sham-boom, and that in actual fact America
was at the bottom of a depression, which would only be overcome by the victorious revolution. On the very day on which the special number appeared, No. 1 received an American journalist and staggered him and the world, between two pulls at his pipe, by the pithy sentence:

“The crisis in America is over and business is normal again.”

The members of the Committee of Experts, expecting their dismissal and possible arrest, composed in the same night letters in which they confessed their “misdemeanours committed by the setting-up of counter-revolutionary theories and misleading analyses”; they emphasized their repentance and promised public atonement. Only Isakovitch, a contemporary of Rubashov, and the only one in the Board of Editors who belonged to the old guard—preferred to shoot himself. The initiated afterwards asserted that No. 1 had set the whole affair going with the sole intention of destroying Isakovitch, whom he suspected of oppositional tendencies.

The whole thing was a pretty grotesque comedy, Rubashov thought; at bottom all this jugglery with “revolutionary philosophy” was merely a means to consolidate the dictatorship, which, though so depressing a phenomenon, yet seemed to represent a historical necessity. So much the worse for him who took the comedy seriously, who only saw what happened on the stage, and not the machinery behind it. Formerly the revolutionary policy had been decided at open congresses; now it was decided behind the scenes—that also was a logical consequence of the law of relative maturity of the masses….

Rubashov yearned to work again in a quiet library with green lamps, and to build up his new theory on a
historical basis. The most productive times for revolutionary philosophy had always been the time of exile, the forced rests between periods of political activity. He walked up and down in his cell and let his imagination play with the idea of passing the next two years, when he would be politically excommunicated, in a kind of inner exile; his public recantation would buy him the necessary breathing-space. The outward form of capitulation did not matter much; they should have as many
mea culpas
and declarations of faith in No. 1's infallibility as the paper would hold. That was purely a matter of etiquette—a Byzantine ceremonial which had developed out of the necessity to drill every sentence into the masses by vulgarization and endless repetition; what was presented as right must shine like gold, what was presented as wrong must be as black as pitch; political statements had to be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair.

These were matters of which No. 402 understood nothing, Rubashov reflected. His narrow conception of honour belonged to another epoch. What was decency? A certain form of convention, still bound by the traditions and rules of the knightly jousts. The new conception of honour should be formulated differently: to serve without vanity and unto the last consequence….

“Better die than dishonour oneself,” No. 402 had announced, and, one imagines, twirled his moustache. That was the classic expression of personal vanity. No. 402 tapped his sentences with his monocle; he, Rubashov, with his pince-nez; that was the whole difference. The only thing which mattered to him now was to work peacefully in a library and build up his new ideas. It would need many years, and produce a massive volume;
but it would be the first useful clue to the understanding of the history of democratic institutions and throw a light on the pendulum-like movements of mass psychology, which at the present time were particularly in evidence, and which the classical class struggle theory failed to explain.

Rubashov walked rapidly up and down his cell, smiling to himself. Nothing mattered as long as he was allowed time to develop his new theory. His toothache was gone; he felt wide awake, enterprising, and full of nervous impatience. Two days had passed since the nocturnal conversation with Ivanov and the sending off of his declaration, and still nothing happened. Time, which had flown so quickly during the first two weeks of his arrest, now crawled. The hours disintegrated into minutes and seconds. He worked in fits and starts, but was brought to a standstill every time by lack of historical documentation. He stood for whole quarters of an hour at the judas, in the hope of catching sight of the warder who would take him to Ivanov. But the corridor was deserted, the electric light was burning, as always.

Occasionally he hoped Ivanov himself would come, and the whole formality of his disposition would be settled in his cell; that would be far pleasanter. This time he would not even object to the bottle of brandy. He pictured the conversation in detail; how they would together work out the pompous phraseology of the “confession”, and Ivanov's cynical witticisms while they did it. Smiling, Rubashov wandered up and down through his cell, and looked at his watch every ten minutes. Had Ivanov not promised in that night to have him fetched the very next day?

Rubashov's impatience became more and more feverish; in the third night after his conversation with Ivanov he could not sleep. He lay in the dark on the bunk, listening to the faint, stifled sounds in the building, threw himself from one side to another, and for the first time since his arrest wished for the presence of a warm female body. He tried breathing regularly to help himself fall asleep, but became more and more on edge. He fought for a long time against the desire to start a conversation with No. 402, who since the question “What is decency?” had not been heard of again.

About midnight, when he had been lying awake for three hours, staring at the newspaper stuck on the broken windowpane, he could no longer hold out, and tapped against the wall with his knuckles. He waited eagerly; the wall remained silent. He tapped again and waited, feeling a hot wave of humiliation mounting in his head. No. 402 still did not answer. And yet certainly he was lying awake on the other side of the wall, killing time by chewing the cud of old adventures; he had confessed to Rubashov that he could never get to sleep before one or two o'clock in the morning, and that he had returned to the habits of his boyhood.

Rubashov lay on his back and stared into the dark. The mattress under him was pressed flat; the blanket was too warm and drew an unpleasant dampness from the skin, yet he shivered when he threw it off. He was smoking the seventh or eighth cigarette of a chain; the stumps lay scattered round the bed on the stone floor. The slightest sound had died out; time stood still; it had resolved itself into shapeless darkness. Rubashov shut his eyes and imagined Arlova lying beside him, the familiar curve of
her breast raised against the darkness. He forgot that she had been dragged over the corridor like Bogrov; the silence became so intense that it seemed to hum and sway. What were the two thousand men doing who were walled into the cells of this bee-hive? The silence was inflated by their inaudible breath, their invisible dreams, the stifled gasping of their fears and desires. If history were a matter of calculation, how much did the sum of two thousand nightmares weigh, the pressure of a two-thousandfold helpless craving? Now he really felt the sisterly scent of Arlova; his body under the woolen blanket was covered with sweat…. The cell-door was torn open janglingly; the light from the corridor stabbed into his eyes.

He saw enter two uniformed officials with revolver-belts, as yet unknown to him. One of the two men approached the bunk; he was tall, had a brutal face and a hoarse voice which seemed very loud to Rubashov. He ordered Rubashov to follow him, without explaining where to.