Two voices were speaking in the dark—Liuba's, intimate, tentative, sensitive, with delicate intonations of private apprehension such as a woman's voice always gains in the dark, and his hard, quiet, distant. He spoke his words too precisely, too harshly—the only sign of intoxication not quite passed away.
»Are your eyes open?« she asked.
»Yes.«
»Are you thinking about something?«
»Yes.«
Silence—and the dark. Then again the thoughtful, vigilant voice of the woman.
»Tell me something more about your comrades, will you?«
»What for?... They—they were.«
He said WERE as the living speak of the dead, or as the dead might speak of the living, and through the even course of his calm and almost indifferent narration it resounded like a funeral knell, as though he were an old man telling his children the heroic tale of a long departed past. And, in the darkness, before the girl's enchanted eyes, there rose the image of a little group of young men, pitifully young, bereft of father and mother, and hopelessly hostile both to the world they were fighting and to the world they were fighting for. Having travelled by dream to the distant future, to the land of brotherly men as yet unborn, they lived their short lives like pale blood-stained shadows or spectres, the scarecrows of humanity. And their lives were stupidly short—the gallows awaited every one of them, or penal servitude, or insanity—nothing else to look forward to but prison, the scaffold, or the madhouse. And there were women among them....
Liuba started and raised herself on her elbows.