"Comrade Flegontov! ... Come over here!" Tiktor shouted at the top of his voice.
Flegontov turned in our direction, quickening his pace a little.
"What's the matter?" he asked calmly.
"Look at that!" the electrician said pointing.
"A fuse?" Flegontov said sharply. "Where did that come from?" And making a quick decision, he shouted: "No smoking in here!"
He walked quickly to the glass-fronted office and we saw his lips move as he picked up the telephone...
We finished our job that Sunday so tired that we could hardly stand. It was dusk when we left the shop after the twelfth and last machine had slid from the wooden rollers on to its stone foundation. Many a time that day it had seemed that the shouts of "One, two, heave!" would bring the glass roof down on the heads of the cheering team of young and old men.
The carpenters had made neat, fresh-smelling pinewood boxes for the moulding mixture and set them up between the machines. New pipes were gleaming everywhere. The damped stone floor looked black from a distance.
Before the twelve new "machine-guns" could be used, they had to be tested. Hundreds of new mould-boxes had to be brought into the foundry, the machines had to be partitioned off in pairs. Dozens of tons of clean sifted moulding sand had to be carried in from the bunkers and piled in great heaps on the broad space we had just won from the foundry rubbish dump. But the hardest, preparatory work was over.
Dog-tired as we were, you'd have thought we should have dropped down on our hard mattresses and fallen into a dead sleep. Ahead of us lay a whole week of piece work. But even when we got home, we still could not settle down.
"When did they plant that mine there—that's the question!" Sasha exclaimed.
"Anyone can see that—when Wrangel ran away!" I retorted. "That year their ships often came into our harbour. When those blighters had to pack their bags, they decided to blow up the works, so that we shouldn't get it, but something must have gone wrong. Uncle Vasya was right about those technicians nosing round the shops at night."
Cicadas were chirping in the garden below. Our landlady could be heard sighing heavily in her sleep.
Talking in whispers with my friends, I still imagined myself in the foundry watching the electrician carefully dig out the fuse from under the unfinished sand-covered furnace. Even before the town OGPU chief, a short, amiable-looking man in a grey suit whom Flegontov had called up by phone, had arrived in the foundry, Flegontov himself had discovered a mysterious box under the furnace and said that it contained enough dynamite to blow up the foundations of the blast-furnace, the copper furnace, and even the main wall of the foundry.
Tolya Golovatsky pointed to the box of dynamite and said: "Look at the present those capitalists left for the working class, and remember it! They took the drawings away and put dynamite in their place. What for? To blow up the foundry and stop the works for many months. To wet this sand with workers' blood."
"One thing's not quite clear," Sasha said, breaking the silence. "Those capitalists want to get back here. Why should they blow up the foundry?"
"You are a silly fellow," Petka said in quite a grown-up way. "What's insurance for? Perhaps Caiworth insured this works before the Revolution. Whatever happens, he's bound to get his money out of the insurance company, if the tsarist government gets here."
"All right, but why didn't they hide that fuse better?" Sasha insisted.
A new idea occurred to Petka.
"Perhaps one of them put it like that on purpose. We were always throwing dregs of iron out on that dump. Just think, if a drop of hot iron had fallen on that fuse, the mine would have gone off!"
"It's better not to think of it!" Sasha replied in an awed tone.
"But you tell us this, Sasha," Petka said, tapping Sasha on the shoulder. "Why did the OGPU chief shake hands with you? Do you know him?"
"Oh he shook hands with everybody," Sasha said evasively.
"None of that! He only shook hands with Flegontov and A you," Petka retorted.
"Well, I don't know," Sasha grunted.
"But I do! Give me the matches, Petka," I broke in.
Petka rummaged under his mattress and tossed me a match-box. Striking a match, I lighted the lamp. As it burnt up, I pulled out of my breast-pocket a folded slip of paper whose existence I had almost forgotten.
"Read this, Petka. Recognize the handwriting?" I said, handing him the paper.
"His! Of course it's his!" Petka exclaimed pointing at Sasha.
Peering at the paper that Petka kindly thrust under his nose, Sasha gave a groan.
"Gosh, what a memory!... Why didn't I burn it!" "Come on, out with your story! We're your pals, aren't we?" I said.
"What is there to tell? You know yourselves. . . You wouldn't believe me when I said I'd seen Pecheritsa. You laughed at me. But I thought to myself: 'Let them laugh, but my eyes can see all right.' And I reported it. Pity I didn't destroy the copy... There's no need for you to laugh!"
"Who's laughing? You are a funny bloke! It was the right thing to do!. . . Do you think we ought to go stargazing while they plant mines under us?" I said to Sasha.
That night I was the last to go to sleep. Listening to the steady breathing of my friends I thought over everything I had seen during the day until my head ached.
The quiet, sunny seaside town seemed a very different place to me now. A desperate, struggle between the new and the old was being waged behind its facade of blissful calm. The signs of this struggle came to light suddenly, like the anonymous letter from one of Makhno's men, or the hidden fuse that Tiktor had discovered today. Our hidden class enemies were still hoping to recover the power of
which the 'Revolution had deprived them for ever. In order to hinder our progress, they would sink to any depths.
"They are on the watch for every mistake, every blunder we make," I thought. "And they are still hoping to take advantage of our carelessness and good-nature. They are hoping that we shall collapse; if we live and prosper, sooner or later we shall rid the whole world of them... They realize that and will stoop to anything to prevent it. But if that's the way things are, don't be caught out, you of the Komsomol! Have ears like axe-blades, as Polevoi used to say. Wherever you are, wherever you go, always be on the alert."
WE ATTACK!
Although we made every effort to keep our plan of attack on Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's saloon a secret and held all our rehearsals behind locked doors, the rumour of it spread round the town. Even the old men began to ask how much longer it would be before we put on our Komsomol show.
Two Leningrad musical-hall artistes, an Arkady Ignatievich and his wife, had come to our town for a seaside holiday.
Arkady Ignatievich often brought his guitar down to the beach with him. When he grew tired of the silent occupation of sun-bathing, he would sit on the edge of the pier with his legs dangling above the water and start parodying the variety singers who made money out of their public with all sorts of rubbish.
He composed his own parodies on the widely-known ditties of those early days. What a trouncing "Klavochka," beloved of all kinds of profiteers and sugar-daddies, got from him, with her "fancy ways and bursting stays!" Arkady Ignatievich did not even spare a new romance that many undiscerning people were fond of: "He was a miner, a working man..." Arkady Ignatievich spotted something in this highly romantic ballad that many people had failed to notice—the banality of it. And banal it was —a miner, who for twenty years "in gloomy mine had toiled," falling in love and pining away like an idle, good-for-nothing of high society!