War and Peace (168 page)

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
á 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 almshouse 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 plébe … 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.