Everything befell as the police had foretold. Four terrorists, three
men and a woman, armed with bombs, infernal machines and revolvers,
were seized at the very entrance of the house, and another woman was
later found and arrested in the house where the conspiracy had been
hatched. She was its mistress. At the same time a great deal of
dynamite and half finished bomb explosives were seized. All those
arrested were very young; the eldest of the men was twenty-eight years
old, the younger of the women was only nineteen. They were tried in the
same fortress in which they were imprisoned after the arrest; they were
tried swiftly and secretly, as was done during that unmerciful time.
At the trial all of them were calm, but very serious and thoughtful.
Their contempt for the judges was so intense that none of them wished
to emphasize his daring by even a superfluous smile or by a feigned
expression of cheerfulness. Each was simply as calm as was necessary to
hedge in his soul, from curious, evil and inimical eyes, the great
gloom that precedes death.
Sometimes they refused to answer questions; sometimes they answered,
briefly, simply and precisely, as though they were answering not the
judge, but statisticians, for the purpose of supplying information for
particular special tables. Three of them, one woman and two men, gave
their real names, while two others refused and thus remained unknown to
the judges.
They manifested for all that was going on at the trial a certain
curiosity, softened, as though through a haze, such as is peculiar to
persons who are very ill or are carried away by some great,
all-absorbing idea. They glanced up occasionally, caught some word in
the air more interesting than the others, and then resumed the thought
from which their attention had been distracted.
The man who was nearest to the judges called himself Sergey Golovin,
the son of a retired colonel, himself an ex-officer. He was still a
very young, light-haired, broad-shouldered man, so strong that neither
the prison nor the expectation of inevitable death could remove the
color from his cheeks and the expression of youthful, happy frankness
from his blue eyes. He kept energetically tugging at his bushy, small
beard, to which he had not become accustomed, and continually blinking,
kept looking out of the window.
It was toward the end of winter, when amidst the snowstorms and the
gloomy, frosty days, the approaching spring sent as a forerunner a
clear, warm, sunny day, or but an hour, yet so full of spring, so
eagerly young and beaming that sparrows on the streets lost their wits
for joy, and people seemed almost as intoxicated. And now the strange
and beautiful sky could be seen through an upper window which was
dust-covered and unwashed since the last summer. At first sight the sky
seemed to be milky-gray—smoke-colored—but when you looked longer the
dark blue color began to penetrate through the shade, grew into an ever
deeper blue—ever brighter, ever more intense. And the fact that it did
not reveal itself all at once, but hid itself chastely in the smoke of
transparent clouds, made it as charming as the girl you love. And
Sergey Golovin looked at the sky, tugged at his beard, blinked now one
eye, now the other, with its long, curved lashes, earnestly pondering
over something. Once he began to move his fingers rapidly and
thoughtlessly, knitted his brow in some joy, but then he glanced about
and his joy died out like a spark which is stepped upon. Almost
instantly an earthen, deathly blue, without first changing into pallor,
showed through the color of his cheeks. He clutched his downy hair,
tore their roots painfully with his fingers, whose tips had turned
white. But the joy of life and spring was stronger, and a few minutes
later his frank young face was again yearning toward the spring sky.
The young, pale girl, known only by the name of Musya, was also looking
in the same direction, at the sky. She was younger than Golovin, but
she seemed older in her gravity and in the darkness of her open, proud
eyes. Only her very thin, slender neck, and her delicate girlish hands
spoke of her youth; but in addition there was that ineffable something,
which is youth itself, and which sounded so distinctly in her clear,
melodious voice, tuned irreproachably like a precious instrument, every
simple word, every exclamation giving evidence of its musical timbre.
She was very pale, but it was not a deathly pallor, but that peculiar
warm whiteness of a person within whom, as it were, a great, strong
fire is burning, whose body glows transparently like fine Sèvres
porcelain. She sat almost motionless, and only at times she touched
with an imperceptible movement of her fingers the circular mark on the
middle finger of her right hand, the mark of a ring which had been
recently removed.
She gazed at the sky without caressing kindness or joyous
recollections—she looked at it simply because in all the filthy,
official hall the blue bit of sky was the most beautiful, the purest,
the most truthful object, and the only one that did not try to search
hidden depths in her eyes.
The judges pitied Sergey Golovin; her they despised.
Her neighbor, known only by the name of Werner, sat also motionless, in
a somewhat affected pose, his hands folded between his knees. If a face
may be said to look like a false door, this unknown man closed his face
like an iron door and bolted it with an iron lock. He stared
motionlessly at the dirty wooden floor, and it was impossible to tell
whether he was calm or whether he was intensely agitated, whether he
was thinking of something, or whether he was listening to the testimony
of the detectives as presented to the court. He was not tall in
stature. His features were refined and delicate. Tender and handsome,
so that he reminded you of a moonlit night in the South near the
seashore, where the cypress trees throw their dark shadows, he at the
same time gave the impression of tremendous, calm power, of invincible
firmness, of cold and audacious courage. The very politeness with which
he gave brief and precise answers seemed dangerous, on his lips, in his
half bow. And if the prison garb looked upon the others like the
ridiculous costume of a buffoon, upon him it was not noticeable, so
foreign was it to his personality. And although the other terrorists
had been seized with bombs and infernal machines upon them, and Werner
had had but a black revolver, the judges for some reason regarded him
as the leader of the others and treated him with a certain deference,
although succinctly and in a business-like manner.
The next man, Vasily Kashirin, was torn between a terrible, dominating
fear of death and a desperate desire to restrain the fear and not
betray it to the judges. From early morning, from the time they had
been led into court, he had been suffocating from an intolerable
palpitation of his heart. Perspiration came out in drops all along his
forehead; his hands were also perspiring and cold, and his cold,
sweat-covered shirt clung to his body, interfering with the freedom of
his movements. With a supernatural effort of will-power he forced his
fingers not to tremble, his voice to be firm and distinct, his eyes to
be calm. He saw nothing about him; the voices came to him as through a
mist, and it was to this mist that he made his desperate efforts to
answer firmly, to answer loudly. But having answered, he immediately
forgot question as well as answer, and was again struggling with
himself silently and terribly. Death was disclosed in him so clearly
that the judges avoided looking at him. It was hard to define his age,
as is the case with a corpse which has begun to decompose. According to
his passport, he was only twenty-three years old. Once or twice Werner
quietly touched his knee with his hand, and each time Kashirin spoke
shortly:
“Never mind!”
The most terrible sensation was when he was suddenly seized with an
insufferable desire to cry out, without words, the desperate cry of a
beast. He touched Werner quickly, and Werner, without lifting his eyes,
said softly:
“Never mind, Vasya. It will soon be over.”
And embracing them all with a motherly, anxious look, the fifth
terrorist, Tanya Kovalchuk, was faint with alarm. She had never had any
children; she was still young and red-cheeked, just as Sergey Golovin,
but she seemed as a mother to all of them: so full of anxiety, of
boundless love were her looks, her smiles, her sighs. She paid not the
slightest attention to the trial, regarding it as though it were
something entirely irrelevant, and she listened only to the manner in
which the others were answering the questions, to hear whether the
voice was trembling, whether there was fear, whether it was necessary
to give water to any one.
She could not look at Vasya in her anguish and only wrung her fingers
silently. At Musya and Werner she gazed proudly and respectfully, and
she assumed a serious and concentrated expression, and then tried to
transfer her smile to Sergey Golovin.
“The dear boy is looking at the sky. Look, look, my darling!” she
thought about Golovin.
“And Vasya! What is it? My God, my God! What am I to do with him? If I
should speak to him I might make it still worse. He might suddenly
start to cry.”
So like a calm pond at dawn, reflecting every hastening, passing cloud,
she reflected upon her full, gentle, kind face every swift sensation,
every thought of the other four. She did not give a single thought to
the fact that she, too, was upon trial, that she, too, would be hanged;
she was entirely indifferent to it. It was in her house that the bombs
and the dynamite had been discovered, and, strange though it may seem,
it was she who had met the police with pistol-shots and had wounded one
of the detectives in the head.
The trial ended at about eight o’clock, when it had become dark. Before
Musya’s and Golovin’s eyes the sky, which had been turning ever bluer,
was gradually losing its tint, but it did not turn rosy, did not smile
softly as in summer evenings, but became muddy, gray, and suddenly grew
cold, wintry. Golovin heaved a sigh, stretched himself, glanced again
twice at the window, but the cold darkness of the night alone was
there; then continuing to tug at his short beard, he began to examine
with childish curiosity the judges, the soldiers with their muskets,
and he smiled at Tanya Kovalchuk. When the sky had darkened Musya
calmly, without lowering her eyes to the ground, turned them to the
corner where a small cobweb was quivering from the imperceptible
radiations of the steam heat, and thus she remained until the sentence
was pronounced.
After the verdict, having bidden good-by to their frock-coated lawyers,
and evading each other’s helplessly confused, pitying and guilty eyes,
the convicted terrorists crowded in the doorway for a moment and
exchanged brief words.
“Never mind, Vasya. Everything will be over soon,” said Werner.
“I am all right, brother,” Kashirin replied loudly, calmly and even
somewhat cheerfully. And indeed, his face had turned slightly rosy, and
no longer looked like that of a decomposing corpse.
“The devil take them; they’ve hanged us,” Golovin cursed quaintly.
“That was to be expected,” replied Werner calmly.
“To-morrow the sentence will be pronounced in its final form and we
shall all be placed together,” said Tanya Kovalchuk consolingly. “Until
the execution we shall all be together.”
Musya was silent. Then she resolutely moved forward.