The Dark
I
As a rule success had accompanied him in all his undertakings, but during the last three days complications had arisen which were unfavourable, not to say critical. His life, though a short one, had long been a game of terrible hazards; he was accustomed to these sudden turns of chance and could deal with them; the stake had before been life itself, his own and others’, and this by itself had taught him alertness, swiftness of thought, and a cold hard outlook.
Chance this time had turned dangerously against him. A mere fluke, one of those unforeseeable accidents, had provided the police with a clue; for two whole days the detectives had been on his track, a known terrorist and nihilist, drawing the net ever closer round him. One after another the conspirators’ hiding places had been cut off from him; there still remained to him a few streets and boulevards and restaurants where he might go undiscovered. But his terrible exhaustion, after two sleepless nights and days of ceaseless vigilance, had brought in its train a new danger: he might drop off to sleep anywhere, on a seat in the boulevards, even in a cab, and be ludicrously arrested as a common drunk.
It was now Tuesday. On Thursday—only one day to spare—he had to carry out a terrorist act of great importance. The preparations for the assassination had kept the little organization busy for some considerable time. The “honour” of throwing the last and decisive bomb had fallen to him. He must retain self-command at all costs.
But sleep. …
It was thus, on that October evening, standing at the crossing of crowded streets, that he decided to take refuge in a brothel. He would have had recourse earlier to this refuge, though none too secure, had it not been for the good reason that all his twenty-six years he had been chaste, had never known women as mere women, had never been in a brothel. Now and then he had had to fight sternly against such desires, but gradually restraint had become habit, and had produced in him an attitude of calmness and complete indifference towards the sex. So now, at the thought of being forced into close contact with a woman who traded in such pleasures, and of perhaps seeing her naked, he had forebodings of any number of unpleasantnesses and awkward moments. True, he had only decided to go to a prostitute now, when his passion was quiescent, when a step had to be taken so important and serious that virginity and the struggle for it lost their value. But in any event it was unpleasant, as might be any other obnoxious incident which must be endured. Once, when assisting in an important act, in which he played the part of second bomb-thrower, he saw a horse which had been killed with its hind parts burst open and the entrails exposed; this incident, its filthy and disgusting character, and its needlessness, gave him a similar sensation—in its way even more unpleasant than the death of a comrade from an exploding bomb. And the more quietly and fearlessly, and even joyously, he anticipated Thursday, when he would probably have to die, the more was he oppressed with the prospect of a night with a woman who practised love as a profession, a thing utterly ridiculous, an incarnation of chaos, senseless, petty, and dirty.
But there was no alternative. He was tottering with fatigue.
II
It was still early when he arrived, about ten o’clock; but the