The Seven Who Were Hanged Part 9

"It is foolish, Sergey! To die more easily, you should weaken the body and not strengthen it. It is foolish!"

So he dropped his gymnastics and the rub-downs. To the soldier he shouted, as if to explain and justify himself:

"Never mind that I have stopped. It's a good thing, my friend,--but not for those who are to be hanged. But it's very good for all others."

And, indeed, he began to feel somewhat better. He tried also to eat less, so as to grow still weaker, but notwithstanding the lack of pure air and exercises, his appet.i.te was very good,--it was difficult for him to control it, and he ate everything that was brought to him. Then he began to manage differently--before starting to eat he would pour out half into the pail, and this seemed to work. A dull drowsiness and faintness came over him.

"I'll show you what I can do!" he threatened his body, and at the same time sadly, yet tenderly he felt his flabby, softened muscles with his hand.

Soon, however, his body grew accustomed to this regime as well, and the fear of death appeared again--not so keen, nor so burning, but more disgusting, somewhat akin to a nauseating sensation. "It's because they are dragging it out so long," thought Sergey. "It would be a good idea to sleep all the time till the day of the execution," and he tried to sleep as much as possible. At first he succeeded, but later, either because he had slept too much, or for some other reason, insomnia appeared. And with it came eager, penetrating thoughts and a longing for life.

"I am not afraid of this devil!" he thought of Death. "I simply feel sorry for my life. It is a splendid thing, no matter what the pessimists say about it. What if they were to hang a pessimist? Ah, I feel sorry for life, very sorry! And why does my beard grow now? It didn't grow before, but suddenly it grows--why?"

He shook his head mournfully, heaving long, painful sighs. Silence--then a sigh; then a brief silence again--followed by a longer, deeper sigh.

Thus it went on until the trial and the terrible meeting with his parents. When he awoke in his cell the next day he realized clearly that everything between him and life was ended, that there were only a few empty hours of waiting and then death would come,--and a strange sensation took possession of him. He felt as though he had been stripped, stripped entirely,--as if not only his clothes, but the sun, the air, the noise of voices and his ability to do things had been wrested from him. Death was not there as yet, but life was there no longer,--there was something new, something astonishing, inexplicable, not entirely reasonable and yet not altogether without meaning,--something so deep and mysterious and supernatural that it was impossible to understand.

"Fie, you devil!" wondered Sergey, painfully. "What is this? Where am I?

I--who am I?"

He examined himself attentively, with interest, beginning with his large prison slippers, ending with his stomach where his coat protruded. He paced the cell, spreading out his arms and continuing to survey himself like a woman in a new dress which is too long for her. He tried to turn his head, and it turned. And this strange, terrible, uncouth creature was he, Sergey Golovin, and soon he would be no more!

Everything became strange.

He tried to walk across the cell--and it seemed strange to him that he could walk. He tried to sit down--and it seemed strange to him that he could sit. He tried to drink some water--and it seemed strange to him that he could drink, that he could swallow, that he could hold the cup, that he had fingers and that those fingers were trembling. He choked, began to cough and while coughing, thought: "How strange it is that I am coughing."

"Am I losing my reason?" thought Sergey, growing cold. "Am I coming to that, too? The devil take them!"

He rubbed his forehead with his hand, and this also seemed strange to him. And then he remained breathless, motionless, petrified for hours, suppressing every thought, all loud breathing, all motion,--for every thought seemed to him but madness, every motion--madness. Time was no more; it appeared transformed into s.p.a.ce, airless and transparent, into an enormous square upon which all were there--the earth and life and people. He saw all that at one glance, all to the very end, to the mysterious abyss--Death. And he was tortured not by the fact that Death was visible, but that both Life and Death were visible at the same time.

The curtain which through eternity has hidden the mystery of life and the mystery of death was pushed aside by a sacrilegious hand, and the mysteries ceased to be mysteries--yet they remained incomprehensible, like the Truth written in a foreign tongue. There were no conceptions in his human mind, no words in his human language that could define what he saw. And the words "I am afraid" were uttered by him only because there were no other words, because no other conceptions existed, nor could other conceptions exist which would grasp this new, un-human condition.

Thus would it be with a man if, while remaining within the bounds of human reason, experience and feelings, he were suddenly to see G.o.d Himself. He would see Him but would not understand, even though he knew that it was G.o.d, and he would tremble with inconceivable sufferings of incomprehension.

"There is Mueller for you!" he suddenly uttered loudly, with extreme conviction, and shook his head. And with that unexpected break in his feelings, of which the human soul is so capable, he laughed heartily and cheerfully.

"Oh, Mueller! My dear Mueller! Oh, you splendid German! After all you are right, Mueller, and I am an a.s.s!"

He paced the cell quickly several times and to the great astonishment of the soldier who was watching him through the peephole, he quickly undressed himself and cheerfully went through all the eighteen exercises with the greatest care. He stretched and expanded his young, somewhat emaciated body, sat down for a moment, drew deep breaths of air and exhaled it, stood up on tip-toe, stretched his arms and his feet. And after each exercise he announced, with satisfaction:

"That's it! That's the real way, Mueller!" His cheeks flushed; drops of warm, pleasant perspiration came from the pores of his body, and his heart beat soundly and evenly.

"The fact is, Mueller," philosophized Sergey, expanding his chest so that the ribs under his thin, tight skin were outlined clearly,--"the fact is, that there is a nineteenth exercise--to hang by the neck motionless. That is called execution. Do you understand, Mueller? They take a live man, let us say Sergey Golovin, they swaddle him as a doll and they hang him by the neck until he is dead. It is a foolish exercise, Mueller, but it can't be helped,--we have to do it."

He bent over on the right side and repeated:

"We have to do it, Mueller."

CHAPTER IX DREADFUL SOLITUDE

Under the same ringing of the clock, separated from Sergey and Musya by only a few empty cells, but yet so painfully desolate and alone in the whole world as though no other soul existed, poor Vasily Kashirin was pa.s.sing the last hours of his life in terror and in anguish.

Perspiring, his moist shirt clinging to his body, his once curly hair disheveled, he tossed about in the cell convulsively and hopelessly, like a man suffering from an unbearable physical torture. He would sit down for awhile, then start to run again, he would press his forehead against the wall, stop and seek something with his eyes--as if looking for some medicine. His expression changed as though he had two different faces. The former, the young face, had disappeared somewhere, and a new one, a terrible face that had seemed to have come out of the darkness, had taken its place.

The fear of death had come upon him all at once and taken possession of him completely and forcibly. In the morning, while facing almost certain death, he had been care-free and had scorned it, but toward evening when he was placed in a cell in solitary confinement, he was whirled and carried away by a wave of mad fear. So long as he went of his own free will to face danger and death, so long as he had death, even though it seemed terrible, in his own hands, he felt at ease. He was even cheerful; in the sensation of boundless freedom, of brave and firm conviction of his fearless will, his little, shrunken, womanish fear was drowned, leaving no trace. With an infernal machine at his girdle, he made the cruel force of dynamite his own, also its fiery death-bearing power. And as he walked along the street, amidst the bustling, plain people, who were occupied with their affairs, who were hurriedly avoiding the dangers from the horses of carriages and cars, he seemed to himself as a stranger from another, unknown world, where neither death nor fear was known.

And suddenly this harsh, wild, stupefying change. He can no longer go where he pleases, but he is led where others please. He can no longer choose the place he likes, but he is placed in a stone cage, and locked up like a thing. He can no longer choose freely, like all people, between life and death, but he will surely and inevitably be put to death. The incarnation of will-power, life and strength an instant before, he has now become a wretched image of the most pitiful weakness in the world. He has been transformed into an animal waiting to be slaughtered, a deaf-mute object which may be taken from place to place, burnt and broken. It matters not what he might say, n.o.body would listen to his words, and if he endeavored to shout, they would stop his mouth with a rag. Whether he can walk alone or not, they will take him away and hang him.

And if he should offer resistance, struggle or lie down on the ground--they will overpower him, lift him, bind him and carry him, bound, to the gallows. And the fact that this machine-like work will be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new, extraordinary and ominous aspect--they seemed to him like ghosts that came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic puppets on springs.

They would seize him, take him, carry him, hang him, pull him by the feet. They would cut the rope, take him down, carry him off and bury him.

From the first day of his imprisonment the people and life seemed to him to have turned into an incomprehensibly terrible world of phantoms and automatic puppets. Almost maddened with fear, he attempted to picture to himself that human beings had tongues and that they could speak, but he could not--they seemed to him to be mute. He tried to recall their speech, the meaning of the words that people used in their relations with one another--but he could not. Their mouths seemed to open, some sounds were heard; then they moved their feet and disappeared. And nothing more.

Thus would a man feel if he were at night alone in his house and suddenly all objects were to come to life, start to move and overpower him. And suddenly they would all begin to judge him: the cupboard, the chair, the writing-table and the divan. He would cry and toss about, entreating, calling for help, while they would speak among themselves in their own language, and then would lead him to the scaffold,--they, the cupboard, the chair, the writing-table and the divan. And the other objects would look on.

To Vasily Kashirin, who was condemned to death by hanging, everything now seemed like children's playthings: his cell, the door with the peephole, the strokes of the wound-up clock, the carefully molded fortress, and especially that mechanical puppet with the gun who stamped his feet in the corridor, and the others who, frightening him, peeped into his cell through the little window and handed him the food in silence. And that which he was experiencing was not the fear of death; death was now rather welcome to him. Death with all its eternal mysteriousness and incomprehensibility was more acceptable to his reason than this strangely and fantastically changed world. What is more, death seemed to have been destroyed completely in this insane world of phantoms and puppets, having lost its great and enigmatic significance, becoming something mechanical and only for that reason terrible. He would be seized, taken, led, hanged, pulled by the feet, the rope would be cut, he would be taken down, carried off and buried.

And the man would have disappeared from the world.

At the trial the nearness of his comrades brought Kashirin to himself.

For an instant he imagined he saw real people; they were sitting and trying him, speaking like human beings, listening, apparently understanding him. But as he mentally rehea.r.s.ed the meeting with his mother he clearly felt with the terror of a man who is beginning to lose his reason and who realizes it, that this old woman in the black little kerchief was only an artificial, mechanical puppet, of the kind that can say "pa-pa," "ma-ma," but somewhat better constructed. He tried to speak to her, while thinking at the same time with a shudder:

"O Lord! That is a puppet. A mother doll. And there is a soldier-puppet, and there, at home, is a father-puppet, and this is the puppet of Vasily Kashirin."

It seemed to him that in another moment he would hear somewhere the creaking of the mechanism, the screeching of un-oiled wheels. When his mother began to cry, something human again flashed for an instant, but at the very first words it disappeared again, and it was interesting and terrible to see that water was flowing from the eyes of the doll.

Then, in his cell, when the terror had become unbearable, Vasily Kashirin attempted to pray. Of all that had surrounded his childhood days in his father's house under the guise of religion only a repulsive, bitter and irritating sediment remained; but faith there was none. But once, perhaps in his earliest childhood, he had heard a few words which had filled him with palpitating emotion and which remained during all his life enwrapped with tender poetry. These words were:

"The joy of all the afflicted..."

It had happened, during painful periods in his life, that he whispered to himself, not in prayer, without being definitely conscious of it, these words: "The joy of all the afflicted"--and suddenly he would feel relieved and a desire would come over him to go to some dear friend and question gently:

"Our life--is this life? Eh, my dearest, is this life?"

And then suddenly it would appear laughable to him and he would feel like mussing up his hair, putting forth his knee and thrusting out his chest as though to receive heavy blows; saying: "Here, strike!"

He did not tell anybody, not even his nearest comrades, about his "joy of all the afflicted" and it was as though he himself did not know about it,--so deeply was it hidden in his soul. He recalled it but rarely and cautiously.

Now when the terror of the insoluble mystery, which appeared so plainly before him, enveloped him completely, even as the water in high-flood covers the willow twigs on the sh.o.r.e,--a desire came upon him to pray. He felt like kneeling, but he was ashamed of the soldier and, folding his arms on his chest, he whispered softly:

"The joy of all the afflicted!" And he repeated tenderly, in anguish: "Joy of all the afflicted, come to me, help Vaska Kashirin."

"Long ago, while he was yet in his first term at the university and used to go off on a spree sometimes, before he had made the acquaintance of Werner and before he had entered the organization, he used then to call himself half-boastingly, half-pityingly, "Vaska Kashirin,"--and now for some reason or other he suddenly felt like calling himself by the same name again. But the words had a dead and toneless sound. "The joy of all the afflicted!"

Something stirred. It was as though some one's calm and mournful image had flashed up in the distance and died out quietly, without illuminating the deathly gloom. The wound-up clock in the steeple struck. The soldier in the corridor made a noise with his gun or with his saber and he yawned, slowly, at intervals.

"Joy of all the afflicted! You are silent! Will you not say anything to Vaska Kashirin?"