It was not until he had reached his home that he remembered his work, his obligation to deliver these merry people into the hands of the gendarmes. On recalling this duty he was seized with cold anguish. He stopped in the middle of the room, his brain a void. Breathing became difficult, and he passed his dry tongue over his lips. He drew off his clothes quickly, and clad in nothing but his underwear seated himself at the window. After several minutes of numbness he thought:
"I will tell them—her—Olga."
But that very minute he heard in his memory the angry and contemptuous shouts of the joiner, "Vermin!" Klimkov shook his head in repudiation of the idea. "I'll write to her. 'Take care,' I'll say—and I'll write about myself."
This thought cheered him. The next minute, however, he reasoned:
"They'll find my letter when they make the search. They'll recognize my handwriting, and then I'm ruined."
Someone within him commanded imperiously:
"You can't do anything of yourself. Do that which you have been bidden to do."
He sat at the window almost until daybreak. It seemed to him that his entire body shrivelled up and collapsed within him like a rubber ball from which the air is expelled. Within grief relentlessly sucked at his heart; without the darkness pressed upon him, full of faces lying in wait. Amid them, like a red ball, lowered the sinister face of Sasha. Klimkov crouched on his seat unable to think. Finally he rose cautiously, and quietly hid himself under the blanket of the bed.
CHAPTER XXI
Life, like a horse that has stood idle too long, began to caper strangely, refusing to surrender to the will of those who wanted to control it—who wanted to control it just as senselessly, just as cruelly as before.