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Toward nine o'clock in the morning, when the troops were already
moving through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions.
Those who were able to get away were going of their own accord,
those who remained behind decided for themselves what they must
do.
The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokolniki,
and sat in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.
In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator
that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under
his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable
every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts.
While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator
in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of
the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts
move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises
and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion
is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own
enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel,
and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and
a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
Rostopchin felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.
The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped,
went in to see him at the same time as an adjutant who informed
the count that the horses were harnessed. They were both pale,
and the superintendent of police, after reporting that he had
executed the instructions he had received, informed the count
that an immense crowd had collected in the courtyard and wished
to see him.
Without saying a word Rostopchin rose and walked hastily to
his light, luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took
hold of the handle, let it go again, and went to the window from
which he had a better view of the whole crowd. The tall lad was
standing in front, flourishing his arm and saying something with
a stern look. The blood stained smith stood beside him with a
gloomy face. A drone of voices was audible through the closed
window.
"Is my carriage ready?" asked Rostopchin, stepping
back from the window.
"It is, your excellency," replied the adjutant.
Rostopchin went again to the balcony door.
"But what do they want?" he asked the superintendent
of police.
"Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according
to your orders, to go against the French, and they shouted something
about treachery. But it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency-
I hardly managed to get away from it. Your excellency, I venture
to suggest..."
"You may go. I don't need you to tell me what to do!"
exclaimed Rostopchin angrily.
He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.
"This is what they have done with Russia! This is what
they have done with me!" thought he, full of an irrepressible
fury that welled up within him against the someone to whom what
was happening might be attributed. As often happens with passionate
people, he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object
on which to vent it. "Here is that mob, the dregs of the
people," he thought as he gazed at the crowd: "this
rabble they have roused by their folly! They want a victim,"
he thought as he looked at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And
this thought occurred to him just because he himself desired a
victim, something on which to vent his rage.
"Is the carriage ready?" he asked again.
"Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchagin?
He is waiting at the porch," said the adjutant.
"Ah!" exclaimed Rostopchin, as if struck by an unexpected
recollection.
And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the
balcony. The talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed,
and all eyes were raised to the count.
"Good morning, lads!" said the count briskly and
loudly. "Thank you for coming. I'll come out to you in a
moment, but we must first settle with the villain. We must punish
the villain who has caused the ruin of Moscow. Wait for me!"
And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed
the door behind him.
A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd.
"He'll settle with all the villains, you'll see! And you
said the French... He'll show you what law is!" the mob were
saying as if reproving one another for their lack of confidence.
A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front
door, gave an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd
moved eagerly from the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchin, coming
out there with quick angry steps, looked hastily around as if
seeking someone.
"Where is he?" he inquired. And as he spoke he saw
a young man coming round the corner of the house between two dragoons.
He had a long thin neck, and his head, that had been half shaved,
was again covered by short hair. This young man was dressed in
a threadbare blue cloth coat lined with fox fur, that had once
been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers, over which were
pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots. On his thin, weak
legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute movements.
"Ah!" said Rostopchin, hurriedly turning away his
eyes from the young man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to
the bottom step of the porch. "Put him there."
The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to
the spot indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar
which chafed his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and
that, sighed, and submissively folded before him his thin hands,
unused to work.
For several seconds while the young man was taking his place
on the step the silence continued. Only among the back rows of
the people, who were all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs,
groans, and the shuffling of feet be heard.
While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step
Rostopchin stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.
"Lads!" said he, with a metallic ring in his voice.
"This man, Vereshchagin, is the scoundrel by whose doing
Moscow is perishing."
The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood
in a submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His
emaciated young face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung
down hopelessly. At the count's first words he raised it slowly
and looked up at him as if wishing to say something or at least
to meet his eye. But Rostopchin did not look at him. A vein in
the young man's long thin neck swelled like a cord and went blue
behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.
All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered
more hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he
smiled sadly and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet
on the step.
"He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he had gone
over to Bonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced
the Russian name, he has caused Moscow to perish," said Rostopchin
in a sharp, even voice, but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchagin
who continued to stand in the same submissive attitude. As if
inflamed by the sight, he raised his arm and addressed the people,
almost shouting:
"Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you."
The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer
to one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling
atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown,
uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing
in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them,
all stood with wide open eyes and mouths, straining with all their
strength, and held back the crowd that was pushing behind them.
"Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace
the Russian name!" shouted Rostopchin. "Cut him down.
I command it."
Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchin's
voice, the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.
"Count!" exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice
of Vereshchagin in the midst of the momentary silence that ensued,
"Count! One God is above us both...." He lifted his
head and again the thick vein in his thin neck filled with blood
and the color rapidly came and went in his face.
He did not finish what he wished to say.
"Cut him down! I command it..." shouted Rostopchin,
suddenly growing pale like Vereshchagin.
"Draw sabers!" cried the dragoon officer, drawing
his own.
Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching
the front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch.
The tall youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted
arm, stood beside Vereshchagin.
"Saber him!" the dragoon officer almost whispered.
And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with
fury, struck Vereshchagin on the head with the blunt side of his
saber.
"Ah!" cried Vereshchagin in meek surprise, looking
round with a frightened glance as if not understanding why this
was done to him. A similar moan of surprise and horror ran through
the crowd. "O Lord!" exclaimed a sorrowful voice.
But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from
Vereshchagin he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry
was fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost,
that had held the crowd in check suddenly broke. The crime had
begun and must now be completed. The plaintive moan of reproach
was drowned by the threatening and angry roar of the crowd. Like
the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that last irresistible
wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks, carrying
them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about
to repeat his blow. Vereshchagin with a cry of horror, covering
his head with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth,
against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands
and, yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing,
struggling crowd.
Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall youth.
And the screams of those that were being trampled on and of those
who tried to rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the
crowd. It was a long time before the dragoons could extricate
the bleeding youth, beaten almost to death. And for a long time,
despite the feverish haste with which the mob tried to end the
work that had been begun, those who were hitting, throttling,
and tearing at Vereshchagin were unable to kill him, for the crowd
pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the center
and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or let
him go.
"Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold
Christ.... Still alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture
serves a thief right. Use the hatchet!... What- still alive?"
Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed
to a long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his
prostrate, bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each
one came up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach,
and astonishment pushed back again.
"O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he
be alive?" voices in the crowd could be heard saying. "Quite
a young fellow too... must have been a merchant's son. What men!...
and they say he's not the right one.... How not the right one?...
O Lord! And there's another has been beaten too- they say he's
nearly done for.... Oh, the people... Aren't they afraid of sinning?..."
said the same mob now, looking with pained distress at the dead
body with its long, thin, half-severed neck and its livid face
stained with blood and dust.
A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of
a corpse in his excellency's courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons
to take it away. Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and
dragged it along the ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven
head with its long neck trailed twisting along the ground. The
crowd shrank back from it.
At the moment when Vereshchagin fell and the crowd closed
in with savage yells and swayed about him, Rostopchin suddenly
turned pale and, instead of going to the back entrance where his
carriage awaited him, went with hurried steps and bent head, not
knowing where and why, along the passage leading to the rooms
on the ground floor. The count's face was white and he could not
control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
"This way, your excellency... Where are you going?...
This way, please..." said a trembling, frightened voice behind
him.
Count Rostopchin was unable to reply and, turning obediently,
went in the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his
caleche. The distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even
there. He hastily took his seat and told the coachman to drive
him to his country house in Sokolniki.
When they reached the Myasnitski Street and could no longer
hear the shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered
with dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before
his subordinates. "The mob is terrible- disgusting,"
he said to himself in French. "They are like wolves whom
nothing but flesh can appease." "Count! One God is above
us both!"- Vereshchagin's words suddenly recurred to him,
and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this was only
a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchin smiled disdainfully at
himself. "I had other duties," thought he. "The
people had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished and
are perishing for the public good"- and he began thinking
of his social duties to his family and to the city entrusted to
him, and of himself- not himself as Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin
(he fancied that Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin was sacrificing
himself for the public good) but himself as governor, the representative
of authority and of the Tsar. "Had I been simply Theodore
Vasilyevich my course of action would have been quite different,
but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as commander
in chief."
Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and
no longer hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchin
grew physically calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became
physically tranquil his mind devised reasons why he should be
mentally tranquil too. The thought which tranquillized Rostopchin
was not a new one. Since the world began and men have killed one
another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow
man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea
is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.
To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain,
but he who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare
lies. And Rostopchin now knew it.
Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done,
but he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully
contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish
a criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.
"Vereshchagin was tried and condemned to death,"
thought Rostopchin (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchagin
to hard labor), "he was a traitor and a spy. I could not
let him go unpunished and so I have killed two birds with one
stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim and at the same
time punished a miscreant."
Having reached his country house and begun to give orders
about domestic arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.
Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across
the Sokolniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but
considering what was to come. He was driving to the Yauza bridge
where he had heard that Kutuzov was. Count Rostopchin was mentally
preparing the angry and stinging reproaches he meant to address
to Kutuzov for his deception. He would make that foxy old courtier
feel that the responsibility for all the calamities that would
follow the abandonment of the city and the ruin of Russia (as
Rostopchin regarded it) would fall upon his doting old head. Planning
beforehand what he would say to Kutuzov, Rostopchin turned angrily
in his caleche and gazed sternly from side to side.
The Sokolniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in
front of the almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some
people in white and others like them walking singly across the
field shouting and gesticulating.
One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchin's
carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons
looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics
and especially at the one running toward them.
Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering
dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze
fixed on Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and
making signs to him to stop. The lunatic's solemn, gloomy face
was thin and yellow, with its beard growing in uneven tufts. His
black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly
near the lower eyelids.
"Stop! Pull up, I tell you!" he cried in a piercing
voice, and again shouted something breathlessly with emphatic
intonations and gestures.
Coming abreast of the caleche he ran beside it.
"Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from
the dead. They stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall
rise... shall rise. They have torn my body. The kingdom of God
will be overthrown... Thrice will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish
it!" he cried, raising his voice higher and higher.
Count Rostopchin suddenly grew pale as he had done when the
crowd closed in on Vereshchagin. He turned away. "Go fas...
faster!" he cried in a trembling voice to his coachman. The
caleche flew over the ground as fast as the horses could draw
it, but for a long time Count Rostopchin still heard the insane
despairing screams growing fainter in the distance, while his
eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained
face of "the traitor" in the fur-lined coat.
Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchin already felt
that it had cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now
he felt clearly that the gory trace of that recollection would
not pass with time, but that the terrible memory would, on the
contrary, dwell in his heart ever more cruelly and painfully to
the end of his life. He seemed still to hear the sound of his
own words: "Cut him down! I command it...."
"Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident
I said them.... I need not have said them," he thought. "And
then nothing would have happened." He saw the frightened
and then infuriated face of the dragoon who dealt the blow, the
look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the fur-lined coat
had turned upon him. "But I did not do it for my own sake.
I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public
welfare," thought he.
Troops were still crowding at the Yauza bridge. It was hot.
Kutuzov, dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying
with his whip in the sand when a caleche dashed up noisily. A
man in a general's uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutuzov
and said something in French. It was Count Rostopchin. He told
Kutuzov that he had come because Moscow, the capital, was no more
and only the army remained.
"Things would have been different if your Serene Highness
had not told me that you would not abandon Moscow without another
battle; all this would not have happened," he said.
Kutuzov looked at Rostopchin as if, not grasping what was
said to him, he was trying to read something peculiar written
at that moment on the face of the man addressing him. Rostopchin
grew confused and became silent. Kutuzov slightly shook his head
and not taking his penetrating gaze from Rostopchin's face muttered
softly:
"No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!"
Whether Kutuzov was thinking of something entirely different
when he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing
them to be meaningless, at any rate Rostopchin made no reply and
hastily left him. And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow,
the proud Count Rostopchin, took up a Cossack whip and went to
the bridge where he began with shouts to drive on the carts that
blocked the way.
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