“And if you are a fool, you are a fool,” Pavel rejoined, with a conciliatory growl.
“You need not back out, Pasha. Maybe you are right,” Makar rejoined. “Who is absolutely free from vanity? Human nature is such a complex mechanism. One may be governed by love of approbation and, perhaps, also, by a certain adventuresome passion for the danger of the thing. The great question is whether there is something besides this. No, it is not all posing, Pasha. There are moments when I ask myself why I should not live as most people do, but I only have to realise all that is going on around us; the savage tyranny, the writhing millions, the hunger, the bottomless darkness, the unuttered groans,—I only have to think of this and of the dear comrades I have known who have been strangled on the gallows or are wasting away in the casemates; I need only picture all this, I say, to feel that even if there be an alloy of selfishness in my revolutionary interests, yet, in the main, it is this sense of the Great Wrong which keeps me from nursing my own safety. Do you know that the dangling corpses of our comrades are never absent from my mind? I am not without a heart, Pasha.”
“Nobody says you are, only you are a confounded dreamer, Makashka,” Pavel answered. “We have no time for dreams and poetry. Our struggle is one of hard, terrible prose.”
“You are even more of a dreamer than I, Pasha,” Makar retorted, blissfully.
When Makar resumed speaking the last echo of resentment was gone from his voice. “After all, one gets more than one gives. When I think of the moments of joy the movement affords me, of the ties of friendship with so many good people—the cream of the generation, the salt of the earth, the best children Russia ever gave birth to—when I think of the glorious atmosphere that surrounds me, of the divine ecstasy with which I view the future; when I recall all this I feel that I get a sort of happiness which no Rothschild could buy. To be kept in solitary confinement is anything but a pleasure, to be sure, but is there nothing to sweeten one’s life there? And how about the thought that over yonder, outside, there are people who are going on with the struggle and who think of you sometimes? Sooner or later the government will yield. And then, oh then somebody—some comrade of ours—will throw the cell-door open, and I’ll join in the celebration of our triumph. Really, Pasha, I am strong as a bull, and a few years of confinement would not kill me. While some of our people may die by the hand of the hangman, my life would be spared. Did you ever stop to think of the time when the cells of Siberia and of Peter and Paul are thrown open and one says to the immured comrades, ‘Out with you, brothers! You’re free! The nation is free!’ Come, another year or two and this will be realised.”
“You had better save your sentimentalities for novices,” Pavel said. “And, by the way, your eloquence is certainly of more use than your dreaming in a dungeon would be.”
He was arguing with a rock of stiff-necked will-power.