He was glad of the offer. He could not walk to his room alone--along the streets in the darkness. He felt a tightness in his breast and a heavy pressure on his bones, as if he were creeping under ground, and the earth were squeezing his back, his chest, his sides, and his head: while in front of him gaped a deep pit, which he could not escape, into which he must soon descend--a silent bottomless abyss down which he would drop endlessly. "That's good," said Melnikov. "I would feel bored alone." "If you would kill Sasha--" Yevsey advised him sadly. "There you are!" Melnikov fended off the idea. "What do you think--that I love to kill? They asked me twice again to hang people, a woman and a student. I declined. I might have had two to remember instead of one. The killed appear again. They come back." "Often?" "Sometimes, sometimes not. When often, it's every night. How can you defend yourself against them? I can't pray to God. I've forgotten my prayers. Have you?" "I remember mine." They entered a court, and were long in penetrating to its depths, stumbling as they walked over boards, stones, and rubbish. Then they descended a flight of steps, which Klimkov, feeling the walls with his hands, thought would never come to an end. When he found himself at last in the lodging of the spy, and had examined it in the light of the lamp, he was amazed to see the mass of gay pictures and paper flowers with which the walls were almost entirely covered. Melnikov at once became a stranger in this comfortable little room, with a broad bed in a corner behind white curtains. "All this was contrived by the woman with whom I lived," said Melnikov, starting to undress. "She ran away, the hussy! A gendarme, a quartermaster, decoyed her. I can't understand it. He's a grey-haired widower, while she's young and greedy for a male. Nevertheless she went away. The third one that's left me already. Come, let's go to bed." They lay side by side in the same bed, which rocked under Yevsey like a tossing sea, and all the time descended lower and lower. His heart sank with it. The spy's words laid themselves heavily upon his breast. "One was Olga." "What!" "Olga. Why?" "Nothing." "A little one, thin and jolly. She used to hide my hat, or something else, and I would say, 'Olga, where's my hat?' And she would say, 'Look for it. You're a spy.' She liked to joke, but she was a loose woman. I hardly had my head turned, before she was with somebody else. I was afraid to beat her. She was frail. Still I pulled her hair. You've got to do something." "Lord!" quietly exclaimed Klimkov. "What am I going to do?" His comrade was silent for a while, then said dully and slowly: "That's the way I howl, too, sometimes." Klimkov buried his head in the pillow, compressing his lips tightly, to restrain the stubborn need to utter cries and complaints. CHAPTER XXVIII