God’s Way and Man’s
I
It happened in Russia in the ’seventies, when the struggle between the Revolutionists and the Government was at its height.
The General-Governor of a district in South Russia, a healthy-looking German with drooping moustaches and a cold look on his expressionless face, dressed in a military uniform, with a white cross at his neck, sat one evening in his cabinet, at a table on which were placed four candles with green shades, looking through and signing papers left for him by his secretary.
Among those papers was the death-warrant of Anatole Svetlogoúb, a graduate of the Novorossíysk University, sentenced for taking part in a conspiracy to overthrow the then existing Government. The General, frowning deeply, signed that paper, too. With his white, well-kept fingers, wrinkled by old age and the use of much soap, he carefully adjusted the edges of the sheets and laid them aside. The next paper dealt with the sums assigned for the carriage of provender. He read this attentively, considering whether the amounts were correctly or wrongly calculated, when suddenly he remembered a talk he had had with his assistant about Svetlogoúb’s case. The General thought that the dynamite found in Svetlogoúb’s possession was not sufficient proof of criminal intentions; while the assistant insisted that besides the dynamite there was sufficient evidence to prove that Svetlogoúb was the leader of the gang. And, remembering this, the General became thoughtful; and his heart, under the padded coat with facings as stiff as cardboard, began to beat nervously; and he breathed so hard that the large white cross—the object of his joy and pride—visibly rose and sank on his breast. The secretary might still be called back, and the sentence might at least be delayed, if not remitted.
“Shall I call him back, or shall I not?”
His heart beat more irregularly. He rang; and the courier entered with quick, nervous footsteps.
“Has Iván Matvéitch gone?”
“No, your Excellency; he is in the office.”
The General’s heart now stopped, now beat quickly. He remembered the warnings of the doctor who had examined him a few days before.
“Above all,” the doctor had said, “if you begin to feel that you have a heart, stop working—divert your mind. There is nothing so bad as agitation. On no account allow yourself to be agitated.”
“Shall I call him, your Excellency?”
“No, it is not necessary,” answered the General. “Yes,” said he to himself, “nothing is so agitating as indecision. It is signed and done with. … ‘Ein jeder macht sich sein Bett und muss d’rauf schlafen’ ”:320 he repeated his favourite proverb. “Besides, it is not my business. I only fulfil the Supreme Will,321 and must stand above that kind of consideration,” he added, frowning to awaken in himself the cruelty which was not natural to him.
And here he remembered his last interview with the Tsar—how the latter had fixed his cold, icy look on him and had said: “I trust you! As in war you did not spare yourself, so you must act with the same firmness now in the fight with the ‘red ones,’ and must not allow yourself to be either deceived or frightened. … Goodbye!” Then the Tsar had embraced him, offering his shoulder to the General to kiss. The General recalled the words with which he had answered the Tsar: “My one desire is to give my life to serve my Emperor and my country!”
And as he recalled the feeling of servile emotion which the consciousness of his self-sacrificing loyalty to his Sovereign had evoked in him, he drove from his mind the thought which for a moment had disturbed him—signed the rest of the papers, and rang again.
“Is tea ready?” he asked.
“It is just being served, your Excellency.”
“All right … you may go.”
The Governor sighed deeply, and rubbed the place where his heart was. Then, heavily treading through the large empty hall, with its freshly polished parquet-floor, he went towards the drawing-room, whence came the sound of voices.
The General’s wife had visitors: the Governor and his wife; an old Princess, an ardent patriot; and an officer of the Guards—the fiancé of his last unmarried daughter. His wife, a thin-lipped, cold-faced woman, sat at a low table, on which tea was laid, a silver teapot standing on the top of the samovar. She was speaking with affected sadness of her anxiety about her husband’s health, to the Governor’s wife—a lady who gave herself the airs of a young woman.
“Every day fresh information brings to light conspiracies and all sorts of dreadful things. … And it all falls on Basil—he has to decide everything.”
“Oh, don’t mention it!” said the Princess. “Je deviens féroce quand je pense à cette maudite engeance!”322
“Yes, yes … it’s awful! Will you believe it? He works twelve hours a day, and with his weak heart, too. I really am afraid. …”
Seeing her husband enter, she did not finish the sentence.
“Oh yes, you must hear him! Barbini is a wonderful tenor,” she said, smiling amiably at the Governor’s wife. She referred to a singer newly arrived in Russia, and did so as naturally as though he had been the sole subject of their conversation.
The General’s daughter, a plump, pretty young girl, was sitting with her fiancé behind a Chinese screen at the other end of the drawing-room. They both rose and went up to her father.
“Dear me! Why, we have not yet seen one another today!” said the General, kissing his daughter and pressing her fiancé’s hand.
After greeting his guests, the General sat down at a small table, and began talking with the Governor about the latest news.
“No, no! You must not talk business—it is forbidden!” the General’s wife said, interrupting the Governor. “Ah … and, as luck will have it, here is Kópyef: he will tell us something amusing!”
And Kópyef, noted for his gaiety and wit, did tell them the latest anecdote, which made everybody laugh.
II
“No, no! It cannot be, it cannot! … Let me go!” Svetlogoúb’s mother shouted piercingly, struggling to free herself from the grasp of the schoolmaster—her son’s friend—and of the doctor, who were trying to keep her back.
Svetlogoúb’s mother was a nice-looking middle-aged woman, with grey curls and a star of wrinkles near each eye.
The schoolmaster, when he heard that the death-warrant was signed, wanted to prepare her gently for the terrible news; but he had hardly begun to speak about her son when, by the tone of his voice and his timid look, she guessed that what she dreaded had really happened. This took place in a small room in the best hotel in the town.
“Oh dear! Why do you hold me? Let go!” she shouted, freeing herself from the doctor—an old friend of the family, who with one hand held her by her thin elbow, and with the other put a bottle of medicine on the table which stood before the sofa. She was glad they held her, because she felt that she ought to do something, but did not know what to do, and was afraid of herself.
“Don’t be so agitated. … Here, take these valerian drops,” said the doctor, handing her a glass of turbid liquid.
She suddenly grew quiet, and, bent almost double, her head drooping onto her hollow chest, she closed her eyes and sank onto the sofa.
She remembered how, three months ago, her son had taken leave of her with a look of mystery and sorrow on his face. Then she recalled him as an eight-year-old boy, dressed in a velvet jacket, with bare legs and long fair ringlets.
“And him … him, that very boy … they are going to destroy! …”
She jumped up, pushing away the table, and tore herself from the doctor; but on reaching the door she again sank onto a chair.
“And they say there is a God! … What God is He, if He allows it? … May the devil take Him, that God!” she screamed, now sobbing, now breaking into hysterical laughter. “To hang him … who gave up all—his whole career, all his property—to others … gave it all to the people! …” She, who had formerly reproached her son for this, was now speaking of his self-abnegation as a merit. “And him—him … they will do it to him! … And you say there is a God!” she cried.
“But I do not say anything: I only ask you to take these drops.”
“I want nothing. … Ha, ha, ha!” she laughed and sobbed, beside herself with despair.
Towards night she was so exhausted with suffering that she could neither speak nor weep, but only stared in front of her with a fixed, insane gaze. The doctor injected morphia, and she fell asleep.
It was a dreamless sleep, but the awakening was worse than what had gone before. What appeared most terrible was that people could be so cruel: not only those dreadful Generals with their shaved cheeks, and the gendarmes, but everybody, everybody: the maid who came to do the room, with her quiet face, and the people in the next room, who greeted one another cheerfully, and laughed as if nothing had happened.
III
Svetlogoúb had lived through a great deal during the three months of his solitary confinement. From his very childhood he had unconsciously felt the injustice of the exceptional position he held as a rich man; and though he tried to stifle this feeling, often when he came in contact with the poverty of the common people—or sometimes even when he was particularly happy and comfortable himself—he felt rather ashamed of his relation to the people: to peasants, old men, women, and children, who were born, grew up and died, not only without knowing the pleasures he enjoyed, but without even understanding them, and never free from toil and hardship. When he had finished his studies at the University—in order to liberate himself from the consciousness of this injustice—he organized a school in the village on his estate: a model school, a Cooperative Store, and a Home for the aged poor. Yet, strange to say, when occupied with all this, he felt even more ashamed than when he was at supper with his comrades or when he purchased an expensive riding horse. He felt that it was not the right thing, and, even worse than that: there seemed to be something bad about it, something morally impure.
In one of these fits of disillusionment about his village activities he went to Kiev, where he met a fellow-University student. Three years later that fellow-student was shot in the moat of Kiev fortress.
That comrade, an ardent and extremely gifted young man, drew Svetlogoúb into a society the object of which was to enlighten the people, to awaken them to a consciousness of their rights, and to form them into federated groups aiming at freeing the people from the landlords and the Government. His conversation with this man and this man’s friends, seemed to ripen into a clear perception all that Svetlogoúb had been vaguely feeling. He understood now what he had to do. Without breaking off his intercourse with his new comrades, he returned to the country, and there began quite a fresh line of activity. He himself took the place of schoolmaster, arranged adult classes, read books and pamphlets to the peasants, and explained to them their true position. Besides all this, he published illegal323 books and pamphlets for the people, and gave all that, without taking anything from his mother, he could give for the formation of similar centres in other villages.
From the first, Svetlogoúb was faced in this activity by two unexpected obstacles: the first was the fact that the majority of the people treated his preaching with indifference, or even with a certain contempt. Only exceptional men (often men of doubtful morality) listened and sympathized with him. The other obstacle came from the side of the Government. They closed his school; and the police searched his house and the dwellings of all who were connected with him, and confiscated books and papers.
Svetlogoúb was too indignant with the second obstacle—the senseless and humiliating oppression of the Government—to pay much attention to the first. The same was felt by his comrades who were active in other centres, and the feeling of irritation they fomented in one another reached such a pitch of intensity that the great majority of their Group decided to fight the Government by force. The head of that Group was a certain Mezhenétsky, regarded by everybody as a man of indomitable power, incontestable logic, and entirely devoted to the cause of Revolution.
Svetlogoúb submitted to this man’s influence, and with the same energy with which he had worked among the people, now gave himself up to terrorist activity. That activity was dangerous, but the danger more than anything else attracted Svetlogoúb.
He said to himself: “Victory or martyrdom … and if it is to be martyrdom it will still be victory in the future!” And the fire that had been kindled within him, remained not only unextinguished during the seven years of his revolutionary activity, but fanned by the affection and esteem of those among whom he moved, burned more and more fiercely.
He attached no importance to the fact that he had given away for the cause almost all his fortune (inherited from his father), nor to the hardships and privations which he often had to encounter in the course of his activity. The only thing that grieved him was the sorrow he was causing to his mother and her ward—a girl who lived with her and loved him.
At last one of his comrades—a terrorist whom he did not much like, a disagreeable man—when tracked by the police, asked Svetlogoúb to hide some dynamite in his house. Just because he did not like that comrade, Svetlogoúb agreed; and the next day the police searched the house and found the dynamite. When asked how the dynamite had come into his possession, Svetlogoúb refused to answer.
And now the martyrdom he expected began. At that time, after so many of his friends had been executed, imprisoned, or exiled, and so many women had suffered, Svetlogoúb almost desired martyrdom. During the first moments after his arrest and examination he felt a peculiar exultation and almost joy.
He felt this while he was being undressed and searched, and while he was being led to prison, and when the iron doors were locked upon him. But when one day passed, and another, and a third, a week, two weeks, three weeks, in the dirty, damp, vermin-infested cell, in loneliness and enforced idleness, varied only by cheerless or bad news, which his comrades and fellow-prisoners communicated by tapping on the walls of their cells; and by occasional examinations by cold, hostile men who tried to torment him into incriminating his comrades, his moral—and with it his physical—strength gradually began to give way. He became despondent and, as he said to himself, longed for this insufferable position to end one way or another. His despondency was aggravated by doubts of his own endurance. In the second month of his incarceration he detected himself thinking of revealing the whole truth: anything to be free! He was appalled at this weakness, but could no longer find in himself his former strength; and, hating and despising himself, became more despondent than ever. But what was most terrible was the fact that, in prison, he began to regret the youthful powers and pleasures he had sacrificed so lightly when he was free, and which now appeared so enchanting that he almost repented of doing what he had once considered right, and sometimes even of the whole of his activity. Thoughts came to him of how happy he would be if he had liberty, living in the country or abroad, free, among loving and beloved friends; how he might marry her, or perhaps another, and with her might live a simple, joyous, bright life.
IV
On one of the painfully monotonous days of the second month of Svetlogoúb’s imprisonment, the inspector, while making his daily round, handed him a little book with a gilt cross on its brown binding, saying that the Governor’s wife had visited the prison and had left some Testaments, and that permission had been granted to distribute them among the prisoners. Svetlogoúb thanked him, and smiled slightly as he put the book on the little table screwed fast to the wall. When the inspector had gone, Svetlogoúb informed his neighbour by tapping that the inspector had been, and had said nothing new, but had left a Testament. The neighbour replied that he also had received one.
After dinner Svetlogoúb opened the book, the pages of which stuck together from the damp, and began to read. He had never before read the gospels as a book, and knew them only as he had gone through them with the Scripture teacher at school, and as the priests and deacons chanted them in church.
“Chapter 1: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham … Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah …” and he went on to read: “Zorubbabel begat Abiud. …”
All this was just what he expected—some kind of involved, worthless jargon. Had he not been in prison he could not have read a single page to the end; but here he went on reading for the sake of the mechanical act of reading—“Just like Gógol’s Petroúsha,” he thought to himself. He read the first chapter, about the Virgin Birth and the prophecy which said that the newborn child would be named Emmanuel, which meant “God with us.”
“But where does the prophecy come in?” he thought, and went on reading the second chapter, about the wandering star; and the third, about John who ate locusts; and the fourth, about some devil who suggested to Christ a gymnastic performance from a roof. All this seemed so uninteresting to him that, in spite of the dullness of the prison, he was about to close the book and start on his usual evening occupation—flea-hunting on the shirt he took off—when suddenly he remembered how at an examination of the fifth class at school he had forgotten one of the Beatitudes, and how the rosy-faced, curly-headed priest had suddenly grown angry and given him a bad mark. He could not recollect the text, so he began reading the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read. “This might relate also to us,” he thought. “Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you. … Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.”
“This quite plainly refers to us,” he thought, and read farther. When he had read the whole of the fifth chapter, he became thoughtful. “Do not be angry, don’t commit adultery, bear with evil, love your enemies. … Yes, if all men lived so,” he thought, “there would be no need of revolutions.” As he read farther he entered more and more into the spirit of the passages which were quite comprehensible; and the longer he read the more the idea grew on him that something very important was said in that book—something important, simple and touching; something he had never heard before, and which yet seemed to have long been familiar.
“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what shall a man be profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:24–26).
“Yes, yes—that is it!” he suddenly exclaimed, with tears in his eyes. “That is just what I wished to do. … Yes, I wished just that: just to give my soul, not to keep it safe, but to give it. … That is where joy lies—that is life! … I have done a great deal for other people’s sake, for the sake of human approbation—not the approbation of the crowd, but for the good opinion of those I respected and loved: Natásha and Dmítry Shelómof. And then I doubted and was agitated. I felt at ease only when I did something my soul demanded—when I wished to give myself, my whole self.”
From that moment Svetlogoúb spent most of his time reading and pondering what he read in that book. This reading not only evoked in him a glow of tender emotion which carried him beyond the conditions in which he found himself, but also evoked an activity of mind such as he had never before experienced. He wondered why people did not all live as they were told to in that book. “After all, to live so, is good not for one only, but for all. We only need live like that, and there will be no sorrow and no want, only blessedness.”
“If only this would end—if only I could be free once more,” he sometimes thought. “After all, they will let me out sooner or later, or send me to penal servitude—no matter which. It is possible to live like that anywhere … and I will live so! I can and must live so … not to live so is madness!”
V
One day when he was in that joyous, exalted state, the inspector came into his cell at an unusual hour, and asked him if he was comfortable, or if he wanted anything. Svetlogoúb was surprised, and unable to understand what this change of manner meant. He asked for a packet of cigarettes and some matches, expecting a refusal. But the inspector replied that he would send some at once, and a watchman really brought him a packet of cigarettes and some matches. “Someone has probably interceded for me,” thought Svetlogoúb; and, having lit a cigarette, began to pace up and down the cell, considering what this change might portend.
Next day he was taken up to the court, where he had been several times before. This time, however, he was not examined, but one of the judges, without looking at him, rose from his chair with a paper in his hand. The others also rose. The judge began to read in an unnaturally expressionless voice. Svetlogoúb listened and looked at the judges’ faces. They all avoided looking at him, and listened with a significant and depressed expression on their faces. The document said that Anatole Svetlogoúb, for his participation in Revolutionary activity which had for its aim the overthrow, in the near or more distant future, of the existing Government, was sentenced to be deprived of all his rights, and to death by hanging.
Svetlogoúb listened and understood the words spoken by the official. He noticed the absurdity of the wording, “in the near or more distant future,” and the depriving of a man sentenced to death of all his rights; but he did not in the least understand the significance to himself of what had been read.
Only much later, when he was told that he might go, and was out in the street with a gendarme, did the meaning of the declaration he had just heard begin to dawn upon him.
“That’s not it … that’s not it. … It can’t be true! It’s absurd!” he said to himself, as he sat in the carriage that was taking him back to prison. He felt so full of vitality that he could not imagine death, could not connect the consciousness of his “I” with death—with the absence of that “I.”
When he returned to his cell he sat down on his bed, and closing his eyes, tried to imagine what awaited him, and could not manage to do so. He could not at all imagine that he would not be, nor that people could wish to kill him. “Me, young, kind, happy, loved by so many,” he thought, remembering his mother’s and Natásha’s affection for him, as well as that of his friends. “And they will kill me, hang me! … Who will do it? Why? … And then what will there be when I am not? … It’s impossible …” he said to himself.
The inspector came in. Svetlogoúb did not hear him enter.
“Who is it? What do you want?” asked Svetlogoúb, not recognizing him. “Ah, it’s you! … When is it to be?” he asked.
“I do not know,” answered the inspector, and, having stood still for a moment, suddenly began, in an insinuating, gentle voice:
“The priest is here … he would like to … to prep … he would like to see you.”
“I don’t want to—it is unnecessary! I want nothing. … Go away!” exclaimed Svetlogoúb.
“Don’t you want to write to anybody? … You can,” said the inspector.
“Yes, yes! Send what is necessary. I will write.”
The inspector went away.
“That means tomorrow morning,” thought Svetlogoúb. “They always behave like that. Tomorrow morning I shall not be … no, it is impossible! It’s a dream!”
But the watchman came in—the real, familiar watchman—and brought two pens, an inkstand, a packet of notepaper, and some blue envelopes, and moved the stool to the table. All this was reality, and not a dream.
“I must not think … only not think. Yes, I will write to Mother,” thought Svetlogoúb, and sat down on the stool and at once began.
“My own dear!” he wrote, and burst into tears. “Forgive me—forgive me all the grief I have caused you. Whether I was deluded or not, I could not act otherwise. I only ask you to forgive me!”—“But I have already written this. … Well, anyhow, there is no time to alter it now.”—“Do not sorrow on my account,” he continued. “A little sooner or a little later, is it not all the same? I am not frightened, nor do I repent of what I have done. I could not act otherwise. Only do you forgive me! And do not be angry with them—neither with those with whom I worked nor with those who are executing me. Neither the former nor the latter could act otherwise. Forgive them, for they know not what they do! I dare not say these words about myself, but they are in my soul, and lift me up and calm me. Forgive me! I kiss your dear, wrinkled, old hands!”
Two tears fell one after another and spread on the paper.
“I am crying, not with grief or fear, but with deep emotion before the most solemn moment of my life, and because I love you. Do not reproach my friends, but love them—especially Próhorof, because he was the cause of my death. It is so joyful to love one who is not exactly guilty, but whom one might reproach and hate! To learn to love a man of that kind—an enemy—is such happiness! Tell Natásha that her love was my comfort and joy. I did not fully realize it, but was conscious of it in the depths of my soul. It was easier for me to live, knowing that she existed and loved me. Now I have said everything. Goodbye!”
He folded the letter, sealed it, and sat down on his bed, folding his hands on his knees and swallowing his tears.
He could still not believe he was about to die. He asked himself several times whether he was not asleep, and vainly tried to wake up. And this thought gave rise to another: Whether life in this world is not all a dream, out of which the awaking is death? And if this be so, whether consciousness in this life is not merely an awakening out of the sleep of a former, unremembered life? So that this existence does not begin here, but is only a new form of life. “I shall die and enter into a new form.” He liked this idea, but when he tried to use it as a support, he felt that neither it, nor any kind of idea whatever, could remove the fear of death. At last he grew tired of thinking; his brain would no longer work. He shut his eyes and long sat without thinking.
He read his letter over again, and, seeing the name of Próhorof at the end, he remembered that his letter might be read by the officials—would in all probability be read—and would lead to Próhorof’s destruction.
“O God, what have I done?” he suddenly exclaimed; and, tearing the letter into strips, he began carefully burning them over the lamp.
He was in despair when he sat down to write; but now he felt calm—almost happy. He took another sheet of paper, and again began writing. Thoughts came thronging one after another into his head.
“Dear, darling mother,” he wrote, and his eyes were again misty with tears so that he had to wipe them with the sleeve of his prison coat in order to see what he was writing. “How little I knew myself and all the strength of love and gratitude to you which always dwelt in my heart! Now I know and feel it, and always when I recall our differences, and the unkind words I have said to you, I am pained and ashamed, and can hardly understand it. Forgive me, and remember only the good, if there was any in me! I am not afraid of death. To speak frankly, I do not understand it or believe in it. After all, if death—annihilation—exists, is it not all the same whether we die thirty years or thirty minutes sooner or later? And if there is no death, then it is quite indifferent whether it happens sooner or later.”
“But why am I philosophizing?” he thought. “I must say what I said in the other letter—something good at the end. Yes. … ‘Do not reproach my friends, but love them—especially the one who was the involuntary cause of my death. Kiss Natásha for me, and tell her that I have always loved her.’ ”
“What is it? What is going to happen?” he thought again, remembering. “Nothing? No, not nothing. … What, then?”
And suddenly it grew quite clear to him that for a living man there were, and could be, no answers to these questions.
“Then why am I putting these questions to myself? Why? Yes, why? I must not question, but live—live, as I was living just now while writing this letter. Have we not all been sentenced to death long ago, and yet we go on living? We live happily … joyfully … when we love. Yes, when we love. … While I was writing, I loved and felt happy, and I must go on living so. That is possible everywhere and always—when free and when in prison, today and tomorrow, till the end.”
He longed to speak to someone gently and lovingly at once, and knocked at the door. When the sentinel looked in at his window, he asked him what the time was, and if he would soon be relieved; but the sentinel did not answer. Then he asked for the inspector.
The inspector came, and wanted to know what he desired. “Here—I have written to my mother. Please let her have it;” and at the thought of his mother the tears again filled his eyes.
The inspector took the letter, promising to forward it, and was going away; but Svetlogoúb stopped him.
“Wait a minute!” he said, holding him affectionately by his sleeve. “You are kind—why do you stay in such a dismal service?”
The inspector smiled an unnatural, piteous smile, and hanging his head, he said:
“One has to live.”
“Give up this post! It is always possible to find something. … You are so kind—perhaps I might …”
The inspector suddenly sobbed, quickly turned away, and went out, banging the door after him.
This agitation increased Svetlogoúb’s loving emotion, and forcing back tears of joy, he began pacing up and down the cell—no longer experiencing any fear, but only a feeling of tenderness which lifted him above the world. The question of what would happen to him after death, which he had tried so hard and yet had been unable to solve, now seemed solved for him, and not by any decided, reasoned answer, but by the realization of the real life within himself.
He recalled the words of the Gospels: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.”—“Here am I also falling into the earth—yes, ‘verily, verily,’ ” he repeated.
“I’d better sleep,” he suddenly thought, “that my strength may not fail me tomorrow;” and he lay down, closed his eyes, and immediately fell asleep.
At six o’clock he woke up, still under the influence of a bright, merry dream. He had dreamt that he was with a little fair-haired girl, climbing wide-spreading trees covered with ripe, black cherries, which he picked into a large brass basin. The cherries missed the basin and rolled on the ground, and some sort of strange animals—something like cats—ran after them and threw them up into the air; while the little girl looked on, shaking with ringing, infectious laughter, so that Svetlogoúb also laughed merrily in his sleep, without knowing why. Suddenly the basin slipped out of the girl’s hands, and Svetlogoúb tried to catch it, but missed it. The brass basin, clanging as it knocked against the branches, fell to the ground, and he awoke smiling and listening to the still-continued clanging of the basin. This clanging was the noise made by the drawing of the iron bolts in the corridor. He heard the sound of footsteps, and the clanking of rifles outside, and suddenly he remembered everything. “Oh, to fall asleep again!” thought Svetlogoúb; but that was no longer possible. The steps approached his door. He heard the grating of the key feeling for the keyhole, and the creaking of the door as it opened.
A gendarme officer, the inspector, and the convoy soldiers came in.
“Death? Well, what of it? I will go. … It is a good thing—everything is good,” thought Svetlogoúb, and he felt the tenderly solemn mood returning, which he had experienced the evening before.
VI
An old man belonging to a “Priestless” sect, who had lost faith in his leaders and was seeking the truth, was confined in the same prison as Svetlogoúb. He denied not only the Church of Níkon,324 but also the Government that had existed since the days of Peter the Great, whom he regarded as Antichrist. He called the Tsar’s Government, “Snuff-rule,”325 and boldly denounced priests and officials. For this he had been tried, kept in gaol, and sent from prison to prison. He was not disturbed by the fact that he had lost his liberty, that the inspectors abused him, that he was manacled, that his fellow-prisoners mocked him, that they—as well as the Authorities—denied God, quarrelled with one another, and denied His image within themselves in all sorts of ways: he had seen all that when he was free, everywhere in the world outside. He knew that it all resulted from people having lost the true faith and gone astray, like blind puppies away from their mother. And yet he knew that a true faith existed, because he felt it in his heart. He sought it everywhere, but was most hopeful of finding it in the Revelation of St. John the Divine.
“He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be” (Revelation 22:11–12).
And he was always reading this mystic book and expecting every moment him who was to come, who would not only reward every man according to his works, but would reveal Divine truth to man.
On the day of Svetlogoúb’s execution this man heard the drums beat, and, having climbed to the window, saw a car arrive, and a youth with waving curls and eyes full of light, who smilingly mounted the car.
The youth held a book in his small white hand. He pressed the book to his heart, and the sectarian knew it was a Testament, and as he nodded to the prisoners at the windows he exchanged a look with the old man. The horses started, and the car, with the youth who appeared bright as an angel, and the guard who surrounded him, rattling over the stones, passed out of the gate.
The sectarian got down from the window and sat on his bunk, meditating. “That one knows the truth,” he thought. “Antichrist’s servants will strangle him with a rope for it, that he should not reveal it to anyone.”
VII
It was a dull autumn morning. The sun was invisible, and a warm, moist breeze came from the sea.
The fresh air, the sight of houses, the town, the horses, the people who looked at him, all distracted Svetlogoúb. Sitting on the bench of the car, with his back to the driver, he involuntarily examined the faces of the convoy soldiers and of the people in the streets.
It was early morning. The streets along which he was driven were almost empty, and they only met a few workmen. Some bricklayers with aprons on, all bespattered with mortar, who met the car, stopped and turned back again as it passed, as though to accompany it. One of them said something, then waved his hand, and then they all turned back again and went to their work. Some carters, carting loads of rattling iron bars, moved their heavy horses to let the car pass, and stood looking at Svetlogoúb with perplexed curiosity. One of them took off his cap and crossed himself. A cook with a white apron, a cap on her head and a basket on her arm, came out of a gate; but, seeing the car, she quickly turned back and ran out again with another woman, and they breathlessly followed the car with very wide-open eyes as long as it was in sight. A tattered, unshaven, grey-haired man explained something with energetic and evidently disapproving gestures to a porter, as he pointed to Svetlogoúb. Two boys ran after the car at a trot, caught up with it, and with their faces turned towards it, went along the pavement without looking where they were going. The older one walked with big strides, the little one, bareheaded, clung to the elder, looking at the car with frightened eyes, stumbling on his short legs, and keeping up with the other with difficulty. When Svetlogoúb’s eyes met those of the little boy, Svetlogoúb nodded to him. This action of the terrible man in the car staggered the boy so much that, staring with wide-open eyes and open mouth, he was just beginning to cry. Then Svetlogoúb kissed his hand to him with a kind smile, and the boy suddenly and unexpectedly answered with a sweet, kindly smile.
During the whole of the drive the consciousness of what awaited him did not disturb Svetlogoúb’s calm and solemn state of mind.
Only when the car approached the gallows and he was helped out, and saw the posts with the crossbeam, and the cord that hung from it slightly swinging in the breeze, he experienced an almost physical blow on his heart. He suddenly felt sick. But this did not last long. Beneath the scaffold he saw black rows of soldiers with guns; officers were walking in front of them; and as soon as they began helping him down from the car, he heard an unexpected rattle of beating drums, which made him start. Behind the rows of soldiers Svetlogoúb perceived carriages with ladies and gentlemen, who had come to see the sight. All this surprised him for a moment, but he immediately recollected himself as he had been before his imprisonment, and felt sorry these people did not know what he now knew. “But they will know. … I shall die, but truth will not die. They too will know! And how happy everybody—not I—but they all might be, and will be!”
They led him onto the scaffold, an officer following. The drums became silent, and the officer, in an unnatural tone, which sounded peculiarly weak amid the open fields and after the rattle of the drums, read the same stupid words of the sentence that had been read to him in court: about his being deprived of all his rights—he whom they were about to kill!—and about the near and more distant future. “Oh, why, why do they do all this?” thought Svetlogoúb. “What a pity it is that they don’t know, and that I can no longer tell them of it! But they will know—everyone will know. …”
A lean priest, with thin long hair, in a lilac cassock, with a small gilt cross on his breast and a large silver one in his weak white thick-veined hand encircled by a black velvet cuff, drew near to Svetlogoúb.
“Merciful Lord! …” he began, changing the cross from his left to his right hand, and holding it out to Svetlogoúb. Svetlogoúb shuddered and moved aside. He was on the point of saying some angry words to this priest, who was taking part in the deed that was being done to him and was at the same time speaking of mercy; but, recollecting the words of the Gospels, “they know not what they do,” he made an effort and mildly uttered the words: “Excuse me, I do not want it. Please forgive me, but really I don’t want it, thank you!”
He held out his hand to the priest, who changed the cross back into his left hand, and after pressing Svetlogoúb’s hand, descended from the scaffold, trying not to look him in the face. The drums began to roll again, deafening every other sound. After the priest, a man of medium height with sloping shoulders and muscular arms, and wearing a pea-jacket over his Russian shirt, approached Svetlogoúb with rapid steps, shaking the boards of the scaffold. This man glanced rapidly at Svetlogoúb, came quite close up to him, enveloping him in a disagreeable odour of spirits and perspiration, and with clutching fingers took him by the arms just above the wrists, and pressing them together so that they hurt, twisted them behind Svetlogoúb’s back and tied them there tightly. After that, the hangman stood for a moment or two as if considering something, looking first at Svetlogoúb, then at some things he had brought with him and had put down on the scaffold, and then at the rope dangling above. Having made his observations, he went up to the rope, did something to it, and moved Svetlogoúb forward, nearer to it and to the edge of the scaffold.
Just as, at the time when the sentence had been pronounced on him, Svetlogoúb could not realize the importance of what was being said, so now he could not comprehend the full meaning of the moment that awaited him, and looked on with wonder at the hangman, who was fulfilling his terrible task hurriedly, deftly, and in a preoccupied manner. The hangman had a most ordinary Russian workman’s face; not cruel, but engrossed, like that of a man trying to do a necessary and complicated job as accurately as possible.
“Move a bit nearer here …” he muttered in a hoarse voice, pushing Svetlogoúb towards the gallows. Svetlogoúb moved closer.
“Lord, help—have mercy on me!” he said.
Svetlogoúb had not believed in God, and had often even laughed at people who did; nor did he believe in Him now, for he was unable not only to express Him in words, but even to comprehend Him with his mind. But what he now meant, and addressed himself to, he knew to be the most real of all that he did know. He also knew that to address himself to It was necessary and important, and he knew this, because It instantly strengthened and calmed him.
He moved towards the gallows, and involuntarily cast a look round at the soldiers and at the motley crowd of onlookers, and again he thought: “Why, why do they do it?” And he pitied them and himself, and tears came to his eyes.
“And are you not sorry for me?” he said, his glance meeting the executioner’s bold grey eyes.
The executioner stopped for a moment. His face suddenly turned cruel.
“Get along! Talking! …” he muttered, and quickly stooping down to where his coat and a linen bag lay, with an adroit movement of his arms he embraced Svetlogoúb from behind and threw a linen sack over his head, and drew it hurriedly halfway down his back and chest.
“Into Thy hands I commit my spirit,” thought Svetlogoúb, recalling the words of the Gospels.
His spirit did not struggle against death, but his strong young body would not accept it, would not submit, and wanted to rebel.
He wished to shout and to tear himself away, but at that very moment he felt a push, lost his equilibrium, felt animal terror and choking, and a noise in his head, and then everything vanished.
Svetlogoúb’s body hung swinging by the cord. His shoulders twice rose and fell.
After waiting a minute or two, the executioner, frowning gloomily, put both hands on the shoulders of the corpse and pushed it downwards with a powerful movement. And the corpse became perfectly still, except for a slow swinging movement of the big doll, with the unnaturally forward-stooping head inside the sack and the outstretched legs in prison stockings.
Descending from the scaffold, the executioner told his chief that the body might now be taken down and buried.
In an hour’s time the body was taken down from the gallows, and removed to the unconsecrated cemetery. The executioner had done what he wished and what he had undertaken to do. But it had not been an easy task to fulfil. Svetlogoúb’s words, “And are you not sorry for me?” would not leave his head. He was a murderer and a convict, and the post of hangman gave him comparative freedom and luxury; but from that day he refused to fulfil the duties he had undertaken, and drank not only all the money he had received for the execution, but also his comparatively good clothing, and finished by being put into a penitentiary and afterwards into the hospital.
VIII
One of the leaders of the Revolutionary Terrorist party, Ignatius Mezhenétsky, the same who had drawn Svetlogoúb into his terrorist activity, was being transported from the Province where he had been arrested, to Petersburg. The old man who had seen Svetlogoúb taken to execution happened to be in the same prison. He was being transported to Siberia. He still continued to seek for the true faith, and sometimes remembered the bright-faced youth who had smiled so joyfully on his way to death.
When he heard that a comrade of that youth—a man holding the same faith—had been brought to the prison, the sectarian was very glad, and persuaded the watchman to let him see Svetlogoúb’s friend.
In spite of the rigorous prison discipline, Mezhenétsky never ceased intercourse with the members of his party, and was every day expecting news about the progress of a plot he himself had originated, to undermine and blow up the Emperor’s train. Calling to mind some details he had omitted, he was now trying to find means to communicate them to his adherents. When the watchman came into his cell and guardedly whispered in his ear that one of the convicts wished to see him, he was very pleased, thinking that that interview might furnish him with a chance of communicating with his party.
“Who is he?” he asked.
“A peasant.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants to have a talk about faith.”
Mezhenétsky smiled. “All right; send him to me,” he said. “These sectarians,” he thought, “also hate the Government. … He may be of use.”
The watchman went away, and a few minutes later opened the door and let in a rather short, lean old man with thick hair, a thin, grizzly goat’s beard, and kindly weary blue eyes.
“What do you want?” asked Mezhenétsky.
The old man glanced at him, and quickly dropping his eyes again, held out his small, thin but energetic hand.
“What do you want?”
“I want a word with thee.”
“What word?”
“About faith.”
“What faith?”
“They say thou art of the same faith as that youth that Antichrist’s servants strangled with a rope in Odessa.”
“What youth?”
“Him as they strangled in Odessa in the autumn.”
“Svetlogoúb, I suppose?”
“Yes, the same. … Thy friend?” At every question the old man gave Mezhenétsky’s face a searching glance with his kind eyes, and at once dropped them again.
“Yes, we were closely bound to each other.”
“And of the same faith? …”
“The same, I expect …” Mezhenétsky answered, with a smile.
“It’s about that I want a word with thee.”
“And what is it you want exactly?”
“To know your faith.”
“Our faith. Well, sit down,” said Mezhenétsky, shrugging his shoulders. “This is our faith: We believe that there are men who, having seized all the power, torment and deceive the people, and that we must not spare ourselves, but must struggle against them in order to save the people they exploit.” From habit Mezhenétsky used the word “exploit,” but correcting himself, he substituted the word “torment”; “and so they must be destroyed. They kill, and so they must be killed, until they come to their senses.”
The old sectarian sighed, without raising his eyes.
“Our faith lies in not sparing ourselves, and in abolishing despotic Government, and establishing a free, elected, popular Government.”
The old man heaved a deep sigh; rose, smoothed the skirts of his gown, sank down on his knees, and knocking his forehead on the dirty floor, lay at Mezhenétsky’s feet.
“Why are you bowing?”
“Do not deceive me! Reveal to me wherein your faith lies,” said the old man, without rising or lifting his head.
“I have told you wherein our faith lies. But get up, or else I won’t talk.”
The old man rose.
“And did that youth hold the same faith?” he said, standing before Mezhenétsky and glancing at him now and then with his kind eyes, and immediately dropping them again.
“Yes, it was … just that. That is why they hanged him. And me, you see, they are taking to the Petropávlof Fortress for the same faith.”
The old man made a deep bow and went out of the cell. “Not therein lay that youth’s faith,” he thought. “That youth knew the true faith, but this one either just boasts that he holds the same faith, or he won’t reveal it. … Well, what of that? I will go on striving. … Here or in Siberia, and everywhere, there is God, and everywhere there are men. If you’ve lost your way, ask it;” and the old man took the New Testament, which opened of itself at the pages of Revelation; and, having put on his spectacles, he sat down by the window and began to read.
IX
Another seven years passed. Mezhenétsky had served his sentence of solitary confinement in the Petropávlof Fortress, and was being transported to penal servitude in Siberia.
During those seven years he had lived through a great deal, but the trend of his thoughts had not changed, nor had his energy weakened. When cross-examined before his imprisonment in the Fortress, he had astonished the magistrates and judges by his firmness and his scornful attitude with regard to the people in whose power he found himself. In the depths of his soul he suffered because he had been caught and was unable to finish the work he had begun; but he did not show it. As soon as he was face to face with people, the energy of anger awoke in him. He remained silent when questioned, except when an opportunity presented itself to say something that would wound one of the examiners: a gendarme officer, or the Public Prosecutor.
When the usual phrase, “You can materially better your position by a frank confession,” was repeated to him, he smiled contemptuously and said, after a short pause:
“If you expect to make me betray my comrades, through fear or for profit, you are judging me by yourselves. Can you possibly imagine that when doing what you are now trying me for, I was not prepared for the worst? So you cannot surprise or frighten me by anything you do; you can do to me what you like, but I shall not speak.”
He was pleased to see how, quite abashed, they glanced at one another.
In the Petropávlof Fortress he was put into a small damp cell with a window high up in the wall, and he knew that it was not for months, but for years, and was seized with terror at the well-ordered, dead silence and by the consciousness that he was not alone, but that behind these impenetrable walls were other prisoners, sentenced to ten or twenty years’ confinement, committing suicide, being hanged, going out of their minds, or slowly dying of consumption. Here were men and women and friends, perhaps. … “Years will pass, and I too shall lose my reason, hang myself, or die. And no one will ever hear of it,” he thought.
Anger rose in his soul, against everybody, but especially against those who were the cause of his imprisonment. This anger demanded objects to wreck itself on, demanded action and noise—but here was dead silence, or the soft footsteps of silent men who answered no questions, and the sound of doors being locked or unlocked, food brought at appointed hours, visits from the silent men, the light of the rising sun shining through the dim panes, then darkness; and the same silence, and the same footsteps, and the same sounds, today and tomorrow. … And his anger, unable to vent itself, ate into his heart.
He tried to tap, but was not answered, and his tapping was followed only by the same soft footsteps, and the calm voice of a man threatening him with the punishment cell.
Only sleep brought rest and relief; but the awakening was all the more dreadful. In his dreams he always saw himself free, and generally absorbed in actions he considered incompatible with Revolutionary activity. Sometimes he was playing some strange kind of violin, sometimes courting girls, or rowing in a boat, or hunting, or having a doctor’s degree conferred on him by some foreign University for a strange scientific discovery, and returning thanks in a speech at a dinner-party. These dreams were so distinct, and the reality so dull and monotonous, that they differed little from actuality.
The only painful thing about his dreams was that he always woke up at the very moment that what he was striving for and longing for was on the point of being realized. With a sudden heart-pang all the pleasant circumstances would vanish, and only the torment of unfulfilled desires remained. And again there was the grey wall with the damp marks, lit up by a small lamp, and under his body the hard plank bed, with the hay all pushed to one side in the sack which served for a mattress. The pleasantest time was when he was asleep; but the longer he was in prison, the less he slept. He waited for sleep as for the greatest happiness: he longed for it, and the more he longed, the wider awake he became. He needed only to ask himself, “Am I falling asleep?” for his drowsiness to vanish.
Running about and jumping in his cage did not help. Active exercise only brought on weakness and excited his nerves; the crown of his head began to ache, and he had but to shut his eyes to see faces appearing on a dark, spangled background—shaggy, bald, large-mouthed, crooked-mouthed—each more horrible than the rest. These faces made most terrifying grimaces. Later on they began to appear when his eyes were open, and not only the faces, but whole figures chattering and dancing. He grew terrified, jumped up, knocked his head against the wall, and screamed. Then the slot in the door would open:
“Screaming is forbidden!” a calm, monotonous voice would remark.
“Call the inspector!” shouted Mezhenétsky. He received no answer, and the slot was again closed. And such despair would seize him that he longed for one thing only—death. Once, when in such a state, he decided to take his life. There was a ventilator in the cell, to which a rope with a noose could be fastened, and by getting onto the bedstead it would be possible to hang oneself. But he had no rope. He began to tear his sheet into strips, but there were not enough of them.
Then he decided to starve himself, and did not eat for two days; but on the third he became quite weak, and had a worse fit of hallucinations. When food was brought him he lay with open eyes, but unconscious, on the floor. The doctor came, laid him on the bed, and gave him rum and morphia, and he fell asleep.
When he awoke next morning, the doctor was standing by him, shaking his head. And suddenly Mezhenétsky was seized by the stimulating sensation of anger, which he had long not felt.
“How is it you are not ashamed to serve here?” he said, as the doctor, with bowed head, counted his pulse. “Why are you doctoring me, only to torment me again? Why, it is just the same as standing at a flogging and giving permission to repeat the operation!”
“Be so good as to turn round on your back,” the doctor said, quite unruffled, and, without looking at him, took out of his side-pocket the instruments for sounding him.
“They used to heal the wounds, in order that the remaining five thousand strokes could be given! … Go to the devil! Go to hell!” he suddenly exclaimed, taking his legs off the bed. “Be off! … I’ll die without you!”
“That’s not right, young man. … We know an answer for rudeness. …”
“To the devil, to the devil!” and Mezhenétsky was so terrible that the doctor hurried away.
X
Whether it was a result of the medicine he took, or that he had passed a crisis, or that his anger against the doctor cured him, at any rate from then onwards Mezhenétsky took himself in hand and started quite a new life.
“They can’t and won’t keep me here forever,” he thought. “After all, they will liberate me some time. Perhaps—and very likely—there will be a change of Administration (our people are working), and therefore I must take care of my life, to go out strong, healthy, and able to continue the work.”
He took a long time to consider the best way of living to attain his object; and this was how he arranged matters. He went to bed at nine, and whether he slept or not, remained in bed till 5 a.m. Then he got up, made himself tidy, washed, did gymnastics, and then, as he said to himself, went to business. In imagination he walked through the streets of Petersburg, from the Névsky to the Nadézhdinsky, trying to picture to himself all he was likely to see on his way: signboards, houses, policemen, carriages, and the people he might meet. In the Nadézhdinsky Street he entered the house of an acquaintance and fellow-worker, and there, with him and other comrades who dropped in, discussed prospects for the future. They argued, disputed: Mezhenétsky speaking for himself and the others. Sometimes he spoke aloud, and then the sentinel made remarks to him through the window in the door; but Mezhenétsky paid no heed to him, and continued his imaginary day in Petersburg. After spending a couple of hours with his comrade, he returned home to dinner, dined—first in imagination and then in reality, on the food that was brought him—and always ate moderately. Then, again in imagination, he sat at home, sometimes studying history and sometimes mathematics, and sometimes on Sundays literature. Studying history meant choosing a certain period and nation, and recalling all the facts and the chronology belonging to them. The study of mathematics meant working out and mentally solving problems. (He was particularly fond of this occupation.) On Sundays he recalled Poúshkin, Gógol, Shakespeare, or himself composed something.
Before going to bed, he again went for a short imaginary walk; carried on amusing, merry and sometimes serious conversations with comrades, both men and women—some that had really taken place and some that were newly invented. And so it went on till bedtime; and just before lying down he really walked two thousand steps backwards and forwards in his cage for exercise, and when in bed he generally slept.
It was the same the next day. Sometimes he travelled south, and went about inciting the people and arranging riots, and with the people, expelled the landlords and divided the land among the peasants. All this, however, he did not imagine all at once, but gradually, going into every detail. In his fancy the Revolutionary parties always triumphed; the power of the Government grew weaker, and it was obliged to call together a Council. The Imperial family and all the oppressors of the people disappeared, and a Republic was established, and he, Mezhenétsky, was chosen President. Sometimes he reached this climax too quickly, and then he began again from the beginning, and attained his end by other means.
So he lived one, two, three years: occasionally discontinuing this rigorous order of life for a time, but always returning to it again. Fits of insomnia and visions of horrible faces rarely troubled him now, and when they did, he looked at the ventilator and pictured to himself how he would fasten a rope to it, make a noose, and hang himself. He managed to master these fits, and they never lasted long.
Thus he spent nearly seven years. When his term of imprisonment came to an end, and he started on his way to penal servitude in Siberia, he was quite healthy, fresh, and in perfect possession of his mental faculties.
XI
As he was a criminal of special importance, he was conveyed separately, and not allowed to communicate with others; and it was only in the prison at Krasnoyársk that he first succeeded in having some intercourse with other political prisoners who were also being sent to penal servitude. There were six of them: two women and four men. They were all young people of a new type unfamiliar to Mezhenétsky. They were Revolutionists of a newer generation—his successors—and therefore of special interest to him. Mezhenétsky expected to find them following in his footsteps, and therefore valuing very highly what had been done by their forerunners, and especially by himself, Mezhenétsky. He was prepared to treat them with kindness and condescension, but he had the unpleasant surprise of discovering that these young people not only did not regard him as a pioneer and teacher, but treated him with something like condescension, evading and excusing his superannuated opinions. According to the views of these new Revolutionists, all that Mezhenétsky and his friends had done—all their attempts to rouse the peasants, and especially their terroristic methods and their assassinations of the Governor Kropótkin, Mezentsóf, and even of Alexander II, had been a series of mistakes. They had all merely contributed to the triumph of the reaction under Alexander III, which put society back almost to the days of serfdom. According to them, the true path was a quite different one.
For two days and the greater part of two nights the disputes between Mezhenétsky and his new acquaintances hardly ceased. Especially one of them, their leader, Román (everybody called him by his Christian name), pained and grieved Mezhenétsky by his unwavering assurance of being right, and by a contemptuous and even sarcastic rejection of all the old methods of Mezhenétsky and his comrades.
According to Román, the peasants were a rough mob, a rabble. And with the peasants in their present stage of development, nothing could be done. All efforts to raise the Russian people were like attempts to set a stone or a piece of ice alight. The people had to be educated and trained for solidarity, and only large industries, and the growth of a Socialistic organization based thereon, could accomplish this.
The land was not only unnecessary to the people, but it was just the land that, both in Russia and in the rest of Europe, made them Conservatives and slaves. And he quoted the opinion of various authorities and gave statistics, which he knew by heart. The people must be liberated from the land, and the sooner this is done the better. The more of them go into factories, and the more land the capitalists get into their hands, and the more they oppress the people, the better. Despotism—and especially capitalism—can only be brought to an end by the solidarity of the workers, and this can be attained only by trade-unions and corporations of working men—i.e., only when the masses cease to own land, and become proletarians.
Mezhenétsky argued, and grew excited. A dark, rather good-looking brunette, with much hair and very brilliant eyes, irritated him particularly, as, sitting on the windowsill and hardly taking any direct part in the conversation, she occasionally put in a few words confirming Román’s arguments, or merely smiled contemptuously at Mezhenétsky’s remarks.
“Is it possible to change all the country labourers into factory hands?” said Mezhenétsky.
“Why not?” retorted Román. “It is a general economic law.”
“How do we know it to be general?” said Mezhenétsky.
“Read Kautsky!” remarked the dark woman, with a contemptuous smile.
“Even granting (though I don’t grant it) that the people will be changed into proletarians,” said Mezhenétsky, “what makes you suppose that they will take the form you have foreordained?”
“Because it is a scientific deduction,” put in the dark woman, turning away from the window.
When the kind of activity necessary to attain their aim came under discussion, their differences became even more accentuated. Román and his friends insisted on the necessity of educating an army of workmen to help in the transformation of the peasants into factory workers, and to preach Socialism among them, and not only to refrain from openly fighting the Government, but to use it for the attainment of their aims. Mezhenétsky, on the contrary, declared that one must fight the Government openly and terrorize it; since the Government was both stronger and more cunning than they. “It is not you that will deceive the Government—but you that will be deceived by it. We carried on propaganda work among the people and resisted the Government as well.”
“And much good you did!” said the dark woman.
“Yes, I do think that open warfare with the Government is a waste of energy,” remarked Román.
“March the First326 a waste of energy!” shouted Mezhenétsky. “We sacrificed ourselves, our lives—and you sit quietly at home, enjoying yourselves, and only preach!”
“We don’t enjoy ourselves very much,” said Román, glancing round at his comrades, and burst into a fit of not infectious but loud, clear and self-assured laughter.
The brunette shook her head, smiling ironically.
“We don’t enjoy ourselves much,” repeated Román; “and if we sit here we owe it to the reaction, and the reaction is the outcome of that very First of March!”
Mezhenétsky was silent. He felt himself choking with anger, and went out into the corridor.
XII
Trying to master his excitement, Mezhenétsky began pacing up and down the corridor. The doors of the cells were left open till the evening roll-call. A tall, fair-haired convict, with a face the kindly expression of which was not destroyed by the shaving of half his head, approached Mezhenétsky.
“There’s a convict here in our cell—he has seen your Honour, and he says to me: ‘Call him here’!”
“What convict?”
“ ‘Snuff-rule’ is what we call him—an old man, a sectarian. He says: ‘Tell that man to come to me.’ He means your Honour.”
“Where is he?”
“Why, here, in our cell. ‘Call that gentleman!’ he says.”
Mezhenétsky followed the convict into a rather small cell, where several prisoners were sitting and lying on the bunks.
There at the edge of the bunk on the bare boards, under his grey prison cloak, lay the same old sectarian who, seven years before, had come to ask Mezhenétsky about Svetlogoúb. The old man’s face was pale, emaciated and quite shrivelled up; his hair was still just as thick; his upturned, thin, short beard quite white; and his blue eyes kindly and attentive. He lay on his back, evidently feverish, and his cheekbones were an unhealthy red.
Mezhenétsky came up to him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The old man painfully raised himself on his elbow and held out his small, thin, trembling hand. Preparing to speak, he first breathed heavily, and drawing breath with difficulty, began in a low voice:
“Thou wouldst not reveal it to me that time … may God be with thee, but I reveal it to everybody!”
“Reveal what?”
“About the Lamb. … I reveal about the Lamb … that youth had the Lamb. And it is written that the Lamb will overcome—overcome all. And those that are with him, they are the chosen, and the faithful. …”
“I do not understand,” said Mezhenétsky.
“Thou must understand in the spirit. The kings and the beast … the Lamb shall overcome them.”
“What kings?” Mezhenétsky asked.
“There are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other one is not yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short space. … That means, his end will come soon. Have you understood?”
Mezhenétsky shook his head, thinking the old man was delirious and his words meaningless. His fellow-convicts thought so too. The shaven convict, who had called Mezhenétsky, came up, and nudging his elbow to draw his attention, looked at the old man with a wink.
“Always chattering, always chattering, our ‘Snuff-rule’! What about, he don’t know himself!”
So thought Mezhenétsky and the old man’s fellow-convicts, as they looked at him; yet the old man knew very well what he was saying, and for him it had a clear, deep meaning. He meant that evil was not to reign much longer, but that the Lamb was overcoming all by righteousness and meekness, and that the Lamb would dry every tear, and there would be no more hangmen, nor sickness, nor death. And he felt that this was already happening—happening all over the world, that it was happening in his soul, enlightened by the nearness of death.
“Ay, come quickly. … Amen! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” said he, with a faint, significant, and as Mezhenétsky thought, insane smile.
XIII
“And that’s a representative of the people!” thought Mezhenétsky, as he left the old man. “And he is one of the best of them—and such ignorance! … They say” (he was thinking of Román and his friends) “that with the people as they are now, nothing can be done.”
At one time Mezhenétsky had carried on his Revolutionary activity among the peasants, and was therefore aware of the “inertia,” as he called it, of the Russian folk. He had met soldiers, some in service and some discharged, and knew their tenacious, obtuse belief in the validity of oaths and the necessity of submission; as well as the impossibility of influencing them by arguments. He knew all this, but had never arrived at the conclusion which should have been the evident outcome of that knowledge.
His talk with the Revolutionists had troubled and irritated him. “They say that all we have done—what Haltoúrin, Kibáltchitch, Sophie Peróvsky did—was unnecessary, and even harmful; and that we caused the reaction of Alexander III’s time … that, thanks to us, the people are convinced that the whole Revolutionary movement comes from landlords, who killed the Tsar because he took the serfs from them! What rubbish! What a want of understanding, and what insolence to imagine it!” he thought, continuing to pace the corridor. All the cells had now been closed, except the one where the new Revolutionists were. As he drew near he heard the laughter of the dark woman who was so antipathetic to him, and the rasping, determined sound of Román’s voice. Román was saying:
“… unable to understand the laws of economy, they took no account of what they were doing. And in a great measure it was …”
Mezhenétsky could not, and did not wish to, hear what was “in a great measure,” nor did he need to know it. The tone of voice of the man was sufficient to show in what utter contempt they held him, Mezhenétsky, the hero of the Revolution, who had sacrificed twelve years of his life to the cause.
And in Mezhenétsky’s heart there arose such dreadful hatred as he had never experienced before—hatred of everybody and everything—of all this senseless world in which only people who are like animals can live—people such as the old man with his “Lamb,” and semi-animal hangmen and gaolers, and insolent, self-assured, stillborn dogmatists.
The warder on duty came in and led the women away to the women’s quarters. Mezhenétsky went to the other end of the corridor so as not to meet him. The warder came back and locked the cell of the new political prisoners, and suggested to Mezhenétsky that he should go back to his own. Mezhenétsky obeyed mechanically, but asked that his door should not be locked.
In his cell, Mezhenétsky lay down on the bunk with his face to the wall.
Was it possible that all his powers had been wasted: his energy, his strength of will, his genius (he did not consider anyone above him in mental qualities) wasted for nothing? He remembered the letter he had received quite lately, when already on his way to Siberia, from Svetlogoúb’s mother, reproaching him (“like a woman,” stupidly, as he thought) for having led her son to perdition by drawing him into the terrorist activity. When he received that letter he had only smiled contemptuously; what could that stupid woman understand of the aims that stood before him and Svetlogoúb? But now, when he recalled the letter and Svetlogoúb’s sweet, trusting, affectionate nature, he began to muse: first about Svetlogoúb, and then about himself. Could his whole life have been a mistake? He closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but was horrified to find that the state he had been in during his first month in the Petropávlof Fortress had again returned. Again he felt the pain in the crown of his head, again he saw faces with enormous mouths, shaggy and terrible, on a dark background, speckled with little stars; and again forms appeared before his open eyes. There was only this new about it: he saw a criminal with shaved head and grey trousers swinging before him, and by a sequence of ideas he began to look for a ventilator to which he could attach a rope. Intolerable hatred that demanded expression, burned in Mezhenétsky’s heart. He could not lie still, could not grow calm, and could not get rid of his thoughts.
“How?” he began to ask himself. “By cutting an artery? I might not succeed. … Hanging? … Of course! That’s the simplest!” He remembered that he had seen a bundle of logs tied together by a cord in the corridor. “Get up on the logs, or on a stool? … The watchman is pacing up and down the corridor, but he will fall asleep or go away. … I shall have to wait, and then take the rope and fasten it to the ventilator.”
Standing at his door, Mezhenétsky listened to the watchman’s steps, and now and then, when the latter was at the far end of the corridor, he looked out through the chink. But the watchman did not go away nor fall asleep, and still Mezhenétsky listened eagerly to the sound of his footsteps, and waited.
At the same time, in the cell where the sick old man lay in complete darkness but for a smoky lamp, amid the sleepy sounds of night—breathing, groaning, snoring, coughing—the greatest of life’s events was taking place. The old sectarian was dying; and to his spiritual vision was revealed all that he had so desired during his whole life. In the midst of dazzling light he saw the Lamb in the shape of a radiant youth, and a great multitude of people of all nations standing before him clothed in white; and they all rejoiced that there was no more evil on earth. All this was happening in his own soul and in the whole world, as the old man knew, and he was filled with a great joy and peace.
But the others in the cell knew nothing of it, and heard only the death-rattle in the old man’s throat; and his neighbour awoke and roused the others, and when the rattle ceased and the old man’s body grew cold, his fellow-inmates knocked at the door.
The watchman came in, and ten minutes later two convicts carried the lifeless body out of the cell and down to the mortuary. The watchman followed them out and locked the outside door after him. The corridor was left empty.
“Lock up, lock up!” thought Mezhenétsky, who from his door had followed all that went on. “You will not prevent me from escaping from all these horrors!”
Mezhenétsky no longer felt the inward terror that had hitherto oppressed him; he was absorbed by only one thought: the fear of being prevented from carrying out his intention.
With beating heart he went out, and reaching the logs, undid the cord that bound them together, and drew it from under the bundle; then, looking round at the outer door, he took the cord into his cell. There he got onto the stool, threw the cord over the ventilator, and, having tied the ends together, made a noose out of the double cord. It hung too low. He altered this and again made a noose, measured it round his neck, and anxiously listening and looking towards the door, again got onto the stool, put his head into the noose, adjusted it, kicked away the stool, and remained hanging.
It was only when making his morning round that the warder noticed Mezhenétsky standing, with his legs bent at the knees, beside the stool, which lay on its side.
He was taken down, and the prison inspector came running, and, hearing that Román was a physician, called him to give his aid to the strangled man.
All the usual remedies were administered to bring him back to life, but Mezhenétsky did not come to.
His body was carried down to the mortuary, and laid beside the body of the old sectarian.