He went forward. He did not stumble in the darkness but I almost fell on his back every step I took. He seemed to roll down like a stone, and his strange voice resounded in the stillness.
"If I believed them, it would be an end of everything. I am not especially kind-hearted. I had a brother in the military, and he hanged himself. My sister worked as a servant in a farmer's house near Birsky, and she gave birth to a child who is lame. It is four years old now and cannot walk. It means that a girl's life was ruined on account of a man's caprice. Where should she go now? My father is a drunkard and my elder brother has taken all the land. I have nothing."
We turned into the underbrush in the gray darkness. Now the stream went away from us into the depth, now again it flowed at our feet. Over our heads the night birds flew noiselessly, and above them were the stars.
I wanted to walk fast, but the man in front of me did not hurry and muttered to himself unceasingly, as if he were counting his words, and taking their weight.
"That dark one, Ratkof, is a good man. He lives according to the new law and takes the part of the oppressed. A policeman once beat me with a club and he immediately felled the policeman to the ground. He had to sit fourteen days for it. 'How can you fight the authorities?' I asked him when he came out. He immediately explained his law to me. I went to the priest, and the priest said, 'Ah, are these the thoughts you are plaiting?' Ratkof was sent to the prison in the city. He sat three months, and I nineteen days. 'What did he say?' they asked me there. 'Nothing.' 'What did he teach?' 'He taught nothing.' I am no fool myself. Ratkof came out. 'Forgive me,' I said to him, 'I was a fool.' But he laughed. 'It was nonsense,' he said."
My guide remained silent, and then, in a new voice, and lower, he continued:
"Everything is nonsense to him. He spits blood, that is nonsense; he starves, that too is nonsense."
Suddenly he began to swear grossly, turned about and faced me, and hissed through his teeth:
"I can understand everything. My brother died--that happens in the military. My sister's case is not a rare one. But why do they torture that man to death? That I cannot understand. I go like a dog wherever he sends me. He calls me Earth. 'Eh, you Earth,' he says and laughs. But the fact that they are always torturing him, that is like a knife in my heart!"