Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/116

Rh as if I were actually with you. It is necessary that they should think that I I am very, very sorry.”

I tore the note into small bits. A glance at the mirror revealed my distorted, broken eyebrows. I took the check and was ready to do with it as I had done with the note. “She asked that everything as requested in the letter  without fail” My arms weakened and the hands loosened. The check was back on the table. She is stronger than I, stronger than I. It seemed as if I were going to act as she However, it is a long time before wished. Besides evening.

The check remained on the table. In the mirror—my distorted, broken eyebrows. Oh, why did I not have a doctor’s certificate for today? I should like to go and walk, walk without end around the Green Wall and then to fall on my bed to the bottom of  Yet I had to go to Auditorium No. 13, and I should have to get hold of myself, so as to bear up for two hours! Two hours without motion, at a time when I wanted to scream and stamp my feet!

The lecture was on. It was very strange to hear from the sparkling tube of the phono-lecturer not the usual metallic voice but a soft, velvety, mossy one. It was a woman’s voice, and I seemed to have a vision of the woman: a little, hooklike old woman, like the one at the Ancient House.

The Ancient House! Suddenly from within me a powerful fountain of I had to use all my strength to control myself, so as not to fill the auditorium with screams. The soft, mossy words were piercing me, yet only empty words about children and child production reached my ear. I was like a photographic plate: everything was making its imprint with a strange, senseless precision on me; the golden scythe which was nothing more than the reflection of light from the loud-speaker of the lecture apparatus: under the loud-speaker a child, a living illustration. It was leaning toward the loud-speaker, a fold of its infinitesimal