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BY NINE O'CLOCK in the morning, when the troops were moving across Moscow,
people had ceased coming to Rastoptchin for instructions. All who could get away
were going without asking leave; those who stayed decided for themselves what
they had better do.
Count Rastoptchin ordered his horses in order to drive to Sokolniky, and with
a yellow and frowning face, sat in silence with folded arms in his study.
Every governing official in quiet, untroubled times feels that the whole
population under his charge is only kept going by his efforts; and it is this
sense of being indispensably necessary in which every governing official finds
the chief reward for his toils and cares. It is easy to understand that while
the ocean of history is calm, the governing official holding on from his crazy
little skiff by a pole to the ship of the people, and moving with it, must fancy
that it is his efforts that move the ship on to which he is clinging. But a
storm has but to arise to set the sea heaving and the ship tossing upon it, and
such error becomes at once impossible. The ship goes on its vast course
unchecked, the pole fails to reach the moving vessel, and the pilot, from being
the master, the source of power, finds himself a helpless, weak, and useless
person.
Rastoptchin felt this, and it drove him to frenzy. The head of the police,
who had got away from the crowd, went in to see him at the same time as an
adjutant, who came to announce that his horses were ready. Both were pale, and
the head of the police, after reporting that he had discharged the commission
given to him, informed Count Rastoptchin that there was an immense crowd of
people in his courtyard wanting to see him.
Without a word in reply, Count Rastoptchin got up and walked with rapid steps
to his light, sumptuously furnished drawing-room. He went up to the balcony
door, took hold of the door-handle, let go of it, and moved away to the window,
from which the whole crowd could be better seen. The tall young fellow was
standing in the front, and with a severe face, waving his arms and saying
something. The blood-bespattered smith stood beside him with a gloomy air.
Through the closed windows could be heard the roar of voices.
“Is the carriage ready?” said Rastoptchin, moving back from the window.
“Yes, your excellency,” said the adjutant.
Rastoptchin went again to the balcony door.
“Why, what is it they want?” he asked the head of the police.
“Your excellency, they say they have come together to go to fight the French,
by your orders; they were shouting something about treachery. But it is an angry
crowd, your excellency. I had much ado to get away. If I may venture to suggest,
your excellency …”
“Kindly leave me; I know what to do without your assistance,” cried
Rastoptchin angrily. He stood at the door of the balcony looking at the crowd.
“This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done with me!”
thought Rastoptchin, feeling a rush of irrepressible rage against the undefined
some one to whose fault what was happening could be set down. As is often the
case with excitable persons, he was possessed by fury, while still seeking an
object for it. “Here is the populace, the dregs of the people,” he thought,
looking at the crowd, “that they have stirred up by their folly. They want a
victim,” came into his mind, as he watched the waving arm of the tall fellow in
front. And the thought struck him precisely because he too wanted a victim, an
object for his wrath.
“Is the carriage ready?” he asked again.
“Yes, your excellency. What orders in regard to Vereshtchagin? He is waiting
at the steps,” answered the adjutant.
“Ah!” cried Rastoptchin, as though struck by some sudden recollection.
And rapidly opening the door, he walked resolutely out on the balcony. The
hum of talk instantly died down, caps and hats were lifted, and all eyes were
raised upon the governor.
“Good-day, lads!” said the count, speaking loudly and quickly. “Thanks for
coming. I'll come out to you in a moment, but we have first to deal with a
criminal. We have to punish the wretch by whose doing Moscow is ruined. Wait for
me!” And as rapidly he returned to the apartment, slamming the door
violently.
An approving murmur of satisfaction ran through the crowd. “He'll have all
the traitors cut down, of course. And you talk of the French … he'll show us the
rights and the wrongs of it all!” said the people, as it were reproaching one
another for lack of faith.
A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the main entrance, and
gave some order, and the dragoons drew themselves up stiffly. The crowd moved
greedily up from the balcony to the front steps. Coming out there with hasty and
angry steps, Rastoptchin looked about him hurriedly, as though seeking some
one.
“Where is he?” he said, and at the moment he said it, he caught sight of a
young man with a long, thin neck, and half of his head shaven and covered with
short hair, coming round the corner of the house between two dragoons. This
young man was clothed in a fox-lined blue cloth coat, that had once been foppish
but was now shabby, and in filthy convict's trousers of fustian, thrust into
uncleaned and battered thin boots. His uncertain gait was clogged by the heavy
manacles hanging about his thin, weak legs.
“Ah!” said Rastoptchin, hurriedly turning his eyes away from the young man in
the fox-lined coat and pointing to the bottom steps. “Put him here!”
With a clank of manacles the young man stepped with effort on to the step
indicated to him; putting his finger into the tight collar of his coat, he
turned his long neck twice, and sighing, folded his thin, unworkmanlike hands
before him with a resigned gesture.
For several seconds, while the young man was taking up his position on the
step, there was complete silence. Only at the back of the mass of people, all
pressing in one direction, could be heard sighs and groans and sounds of pushing
and the shuffling of feet.
Rastoptchin, waiting for him to be on the spot he had directed, scowled, and
passed his hand over his face.
“Lads!” he said, with a metallic ring in his voice, “this man, Vereshtchagin,
is the wretch by whose doing Moscow is lost.”
The young man in the fox-lined coat stood in a resigned pose, clasping his
hands together in front of his body, and bending a little forward. His wasted
young face, with its look of hopelessness and the hideous disfigurement of the
half-shaven head, was turned downwards. At the count's first words he slowly
lifted his head and looked up from below at the count, as though he wanted to
say something to him, or at least to catch his eye. But Rastoptchin did not look
at him. The blue vein behind the young man's ear stood out like a cord on his
long, thin neck, and all at once his face flushed crimson.
All eyes were fixed upon him. He gazed at the crowd, and, as though made
hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled a timid,
mournful smile, and dropping his head again, shifted his feet on the step.
“He is a traitor to his Tsar and his country; he deserted to Bonaparte; he
alone of all the Russians has disgraced the name of Russia, and through him
Moscow is lost,” said Rastoptchin in a harsh, monotonous voice; but all at once
he glanced down rapidly at Vereshtchagin, who still stood in the same submissive
attitude. As though that glance had driven him to frenzy, flinging up his arms,
he almost yelled to the crowd:
“You shall deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you!”
The people were silent, and only pressed closer and closer on one another. To
bear each other's weight, to breathe in that tainted foulness, to be unable to
stir, and to be expecting something vague, uncomprehended and awful, was
becoming unbearable. The men in the front of the crowd, who saw and heard all
that was passing before them, all stood with wide-open, horror-struck eyes and
gaping mouths, straining all their strength to support the pressure from behind
on their backs.
“Beat him! … Let the traitor perish and not shame the name of Russia!”
screamed Rastoptchin. “Cut him down! I give the command!” Hearing not the words,
but only the wrathful tones of Rastoptchin's voice, the mob moaned and heaved
forward, but stopped again.
“Count!” … the timid and yet theatrical voice of Vereshtchagin broke in upon
the momentary stillness that followed. “Count, one God is above us …” said
Vereshtchagin, lifting his head, and again the thick vein swelled on his thin
neck and the colour swiftly came and faded again from his face. He did not
finish what he was trying to say.
“Cut him down! I command it! …” cried Rastoptchin, suddenly turning as white
as Vereshtchagin himself.
“Draw sabres!” shouted the officer to the dragoons, himself drawing his
sabre.
Another still more violent wave passed over the crowd, and reaching the front
rows, pushed them forward, and threw them staggering right up to the steps. The
tall young man, with a stony expression of face and his lifted arm rigid in the
air, stood close beside Vereshtchagin. “Strike at him!” the officer said almost
in a whisper to the dragoons; and one of the soldiers, his face suddenly
convulsed by fury, struck Vereshtchagin on the head with the flat of his
sword.
Vereshtchagin uttered a brief “Ah!” of surprise, looking about him in alarm,
as though he did not know what this was done to him for. A similar moan of
surprise and horror ran through the crowd.
“O Lord!” some one was heard to utter mournfully. After the exclamation of
surprise that broke from Vereshtchagin he uttered a piteous cry of pain, and
that cry was his undoing. The barrier of human feeling that still held the mob
back was strained to the utmost limit, and it snapped instantaneously. The crime
had been begun, its completion was inevitable. The piteous moan of reproach was
drowned in the angry and menacing roar of the mob. Like the great seventh wave
that shatters a ship, that last, irresistible wave surged up at the back of the
crowd, passed on to the foremost ranks, carried them off their feet and engulfed
all together. The dragoon who had struck the victim would have repeated his
blow. Vereshtchagin, with a scream of terror, putting his hands up before him,
dashed into the crowd. The tall young man, against whom he stumbled, gripped
Vereshtchagin's slender neck in his hands, and with a savage shriek fell with
him under the feet of the trampling, roaring mob. Some beat and tore at
Vereshtchagin, others at the tall young man. And the screams of persons crushed
in the crowd and of those who tried to rescue the tall young man only increased
the frenzy of the mob. For a long while the dragoons were unable to get the
bleeding, half-murdered factory workman away. And in spite of all the feverish
haste with which the mob strove to make an end of what had once been begun, the
men who beat and strangled Vereshtchagin and tore him to pieces could not kill
him. The crowd pressed on them on all sides, heaved from side to side like one
man with them in the middle, and would not let them kill him outright or let him
go.
“Hit him with an axe, eh? … they have crushed him … Traitor, he sold Christ!
… living … alive … serve the thief right. With a bar! … Is he alive? …”
Only when the victim ceased to struggle, and his shrieks had passed into a
long-drawn, rhythmic death-rattle, the mob began hurriedly to change places
about the bleeding corpse on the ground. Every one went up to it, gazed at what
had been done, and pressed back horror-stricken, surprised, and
reproachful.
“O Lord, the people's like a wild beast; how could he be alive!” was heard in
the crowd. “And a young fellow too … must have been a merchant's son, to be
sure, the people … they do say it's not the right man … not the right man! … O
Lord! … They have nearly murdered another man; they say he's almost dead … Ah,
the people … who wouldn't be afraid of sin …” were saying now the same people,
looking with rueful pity at the dead body, with the blue face fouled with dust
and blood, and the long, slender, broken neck.
A punctilious police official, feeling the presence of the body unseemly in
the courtyard of his excellency, bade the dragoons drag the body away into the
street. Two dragoons took hold of the mutilated legs, and drew the body away.
The dead, shaven head, stained with blood and grimed with dust, was trailed
along the ground, rolling from side to side on the long neck. The crowd shrank
away from the corpse.
When Vereshtchagin fell, and the crowd with a savage yell closed in and
heaved about him, Rastoptchin suddenly turned white, and instead of going to the
back entrance, where horses were in waiting for him, he strode rapidly along the
corridor leading to the rooms of the lower story, looking on the floor and not
knowing where or why he was going. The count's face was white, and he could not
check the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
“Your excellency, this way … where are you going? … this way,” said a
trembling, frightened voice behind him. Count Rastoptchin was incapable of
making any reply. Obediently turning, he went in the direction indicated. At the
back entrance stood a carriage. The distant roar of the howling mob could be
heard even there. Count Rastoptchin hurriedly got into the carriage, and bade
them drive him to his house at Sokolniky beyond the town. As he drove out into
Myasnitsky Street and lost the sound of the shouts of the mob, the count began
to repent. He thought with dissatisfaction now of the excitement and terror he
had betrayed before his subordinates. “The populace is terrible, it is hideous.
They are like wolves that can only be appeased with flesh,” he thought. “Count!
there is one God over us!” Vereshtchagin's words suddenly recurred to him, and a
disagreeable chill ran down his back. But that feeling was momentary, and Count
Rastoptchin smiled contemptuously at himself. “I had other duties. The people
had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the
public good,” he thought; and he began to reflect on the social duties he had
towards his family and towards the city intrusted to his care; and on
himself—not as Fyodor Vassilyevitch Rastoptchin (he assumed that Fyodor
Vassilyevitch Rastoptchin was sacrificing himself for le bien
publique)—but as governor of Moscow, as the representative of authority
intrusted with full powers by the Tsar. “If I had been simply Fyodor
Vassilyevitch, my course of action might have been quite different; but I was
bound to preserve both the life and the dignity of the governor.”
Lightly swayed on the soft springs of the carriage, and hearing no more of
the fearful sounds of the mob, Rastoptchin was physically soothed, and as is
always the case simultaneously with physical relief, his intellect supplied him
with grounds for moral comfort. The thought that reassured Rastoptchin was not a
new one. Ever since the world has existed and men have killed one another, a man
has never committed such a crime against his fellow without consoling himself
with the same idea. That idea is le bien publique, the supposed public
good of others.
To a man not swayed by passion this good never seems certain; but a man who
has committed such a crime always knows positively where that public good lies.
And Rastoptchin now knew this.
Far from reproaching himself in his meditations on the act he had just
committed, he found grounds for self-complacency in having so successfully made
use of an occasion so à propos for executing a criminal, and at the same
time satisfying the crowd. “Vereshtchagin had been tried and condemned to the
death penalty,” Rastoptchin reflected (though Vereshtchagin had only been
condemned by the senate to hard labour). “He was a spy and a traitor; I could
not let him go unpunished, and so I hit two birds with one stone. I appeased the
mob by giving them a victim, and I punished a miscreant.”
Reaching his house in the suburbs, the count completely regained his
composure in arranging his domestic affairs.
Within half an hour the count was driving with rapid horses across the
Sokolniky plain, thinking no more now of the past, but absorbed in thought and
plans for what was to come. He was approaching now the Yauzsky bridge, where he
had been told that Kutuzov was. In his own mind he was preparing the biting and
angry speeches he would make, upbraiding Kutuzov for his deception. He would
make that old court fox feel that the responsibility for all the disasters bound
to follow the abandonment of Moscow, and the ruin of Russia (as Rastoptchin
considered it), lay upon his old, doting head. Going over in anticipation what
he would say to him, Rastoptchin wrathfully turned from side to side in the
carriage, and angrily looked about him.
The Sokolniky plain was deserted. Only at one end of it, by the alms-house
and lunatic asylum, there were groups of people in white garments, and similar
persons were wandering about the plain, shouting and gesticulating.
One of them was running right across in front of Count Rastoptchin's
carriage. And Count Rastoptchin himself and his coachman, and the dragoons, all
gazed with a vague feeling of horror and curiosity at these released lunatics,
and especially at the one who was running towards them.
Tottering on his long, thin legs in his fluttering dressing-gown, this madman
ran at headlong speed, with his eyes fixed on Rastoptchin, shouting something to
him in a husky voice, and making signs to him to stop. The gloomy and triumphant
face of the madman was thin and yellow, with irregular tufts of beard growing on
it. The black, agate-like pupils of his eyes moved restlessly, showing the
saffron-yellow whites above. “Stay! stop, I tell you!” he shouted shrilly, and
again breathlessly fell to shouting something with emphatic gestures and
intonations.
He reached the carriage and ran alongside it.
“Three times they slew me, three times I rose again from the dead. They
stoned me, they crucified me … I shall rise again … I shall rise again … I shall
rise again. My body they tore to pieces. The kingdom of heaven will be
overthrown … Three times I will overthrow it, and three times I will set it up
again,” he screamed, his voice growing shriller and shriller. Count Rastoptchin
suddenly turned white, as he had turned white when the crowd fell upon
Vereshtchagin. He turned away. “G … go on, faster!” he cried in a trembling
voice to his coachman.
The carriage dashed on at the horses' topmost speed. But for a long while yet
Count Rastoptchin heard behind him the frantic, desperate scream getting further
away, while before his eyes he saw nothing but the wondering, frightened,
bleeding face of the traitor in the fur-lined coat. Fresh as that image was,
Rastoptchin felt now that it was deeply for ever imprinted on his heart. He felt
clearly now that the bloody print of that memory would never leave him, that the
further he went the more cruelly, the more vindictively, would that fearful
memory rankle in his heart to the end of his life. He seemed to be hearing now
the sound of his own words: “Tear him to pieces, you shall answer for it to me!—
Why did I say these words? I said it somehow without meaning to … I might not
have said them,” he thought, “and then nothing would have happened.” He saw the
terror-stricken, and then suddenly frenzied face of the dragoon who had struck
the first blow, and the glance of silent, timid reproach cast on him by that lad
in the fox-lined coat. “But I didn't do it on my own account. I was bound to act
in that way. La plèbe … le traître … le bien publique, …” he mused.
The bridge over the Yauza was still crowded with troops. It was hot. Kutuzov,
looking careworn and weary, was sitting on a bench near the bridge, and playing
with a whip on the sand, when a carriage rattled noisily up to him. A man in the
uniform of a general, wearing a hat with plumes, came up to Kutuzov. He began
addressing him in French, his eyes shifting uneasily, with a look between anger
and terror in them. It was Count Rastoptchin. He told Kutuzov that he had come
here, for since Moscow was no more, the army was all that was left. “It might
have been very different if your highness had not told me you would not abandon
Moscow without a battle; all this would not have been!” said he.
Kutuzov stared at Rastoptchin, and, as though not understanding the meaning
of the words addressed to him, he strove earnestly to decipher the special
meaning betrayed at that minute on the face of the man addressing him.
Rastoptchin ceased speaking in discomfiture. Kutuzov slightly shook his head,
and, still keeping his searching eyes on Rastoptchin's face, he murmured
softly:
“Yes, I won't give up Moscow without a battle.”
Whether Kutuzov was thinking of something different when he uttered those
words, or said them purposely, knowing them to be meaningless, Count Rastoptchin
made him no reply, and hastily left him. And—strange to tell! the governor of
Moscow, the proud Count Rastoptchin, picking up a horse whip, went to the
bridge, and fell to shouting and driving on the crowded carts.
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