The unidentified man, who called himself Werner, was tired of life and
struggle. There was a time when he loved life very dearly, when he
enjoyed the theater, literature and social intercourse. Endowed with an
excellent memory and a firm will, he had mastered several European
languages and could easily pass for a German, a Frenchman or an
Englishman. He usually spoke German with a Bavarian accent, but when he
felt like it, he could speak like a born Berliner. He was fond of
dress, his manners were excellent and he alone, of all the members of
the organization, dared attend the balls given in high society, without
running the risk of being recognized as an outsider.
But for a long time, altogether unnoticed by his comrades, there had
ripened in his soul a dark contempt for mankind; contempt mingled with
despair and painful, almost deadly fatigue. By nature rather a
mathematician than a poet, he had not known until now any inspiration,
any ecstasy and at times he felt like a madman, looking for the
squaring of a circle in pools of human blood. The enemy against whom he
struggled every day could not inspire him with respect. It was a dense
net of stupidity, treachery and falsehood, vile insults and base
deceptions. The last incident which seemed to have destroyed in him
forever the desire to live, was the murder of the provocateur which he
had committed by order of the organization. He had killed him in cold
blood, but when he saw that dead, deceitful, now calm, and after all
pitiful, human face, he suddenly ceased to respect himself and his
work. Not that he was seized with a feeling of repentance, but he
simply stopped appreciating himself. He became uninteresting to
himself, unimportant, a dull stranger. But being a man of strong,
unbroken will-power, he did not leave the organization. He remained
outwardly the same as before, only there was something cold, yet
painful in his eyes. He never spoke to anyone of this.
He possessed another rare quality: just as there are people who have
never known headaches, so Werner had never known fear. When other
people were afraid, he looked upon them without censure but also
without any particular compassion, just as upon a rather contagious
illness from which, however, he himself had never suffered. He felt
sorry for his comrades, especially for Vasya Kashirin; but that was a
cold, almost official pity, which even some of the judges may have felt
at times.
Werner understood that the execution was not merely death, that it was
something different,—but he resolved to face it calmly, as something
not to be considered; to live until the end as if nothing had happened
and as if nothing could happen. Only in this way could he express his
greatest contempt for capital punishment and preserve his last freedom
of the spirit which could not be torn away from him. At the trial—and
even his comrades who knew well his cold, haughty fearlessness would
perhaps not have believed this,—he thought neither of death nor of
life,—but concentrated his attention deeply and coolly upon a difficult
chess game which he was playing. A superior chess player, he had
started this game on the first day of his imprisonment and continued it
uninterruptedly. Even the sentence condemning him to death by hanging
did not remove a single figure from his imaginary chessboard.
Even the knowledge that he would not be able to finish this game, did
not stop him; and the morning of the last day that he was to remain on
earth he started by correcting a not altogether successful move he had
made on the previous day. Clasping his lowered hands between his knees,
he sat for a long time motionless, then he rose and began to walk,
meditating. His walk was peculiar: he leaned the upper part of his body
slightly forward and stamped the ground with his heels firmly and
distinctly. His steps usually left deep, plain imprints even on dry
ground. He whistled softly, in one breath, a simple Italian melody,
which helped his meditation.
But this time for some reason or other the thing did not work well.
With an unpleasant feeling that he had made some important, even grave
blunder, he went back several times and examined the game almost from
the beginning. He found no blunder, yet the feeling about a blunder
committed not only failed to leave him, but even grew ever more intense
and unpleasant. Suddenly an unexpected and offensive thought came into
his mind: Did the blunder perhaps consist in his playing chess simply
because he wanted to distract his attention from the execution and thus
shield himself against the fear of death which is apparently inevitable
in every person condemned to death?
“No. What for?” he answered coldly and closed calmly his imaginary
chessboard. And with the same concentration with which he had played
chess, he tried to give himself an account of the horror and the
helplessness of his situation. As though he were going through a strict
examination, he looked over the cell, trying not to let anything
escape. He counted the hours that remained until the execution, made
for himself an approximate and quite exact picture of the execution
itself and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well?” he said to some one half-questioningly. “Here it is. Where is
the fear?”
Indeed there was no fear. Not only was it not there, but something
entirely different, the reverse of fear, developed—a sensation of
confused, but enormous and savage joy. And the error, which he had not
yet discovered, no longer called forth in him vexation or
irritation,—it seemed to speak loudly of something good and unexpected,
as though he had believed a dear friend of his to be dead, and that
friend turned out to be alive, safe and sound and laughing.
Werner again shrugged his shoulders and felt his pulse,—his heart was
beating faster than usual, but soundly and evenly, with a specially
ringing throb. He looked about once more, attentively, like a novice
for the first time in prison,—examined the walls, the bolts, the chair
which was screwed to the floor, and thought:
“Why do I feel so easy, so joyous and free? Yes, so free? I think of
the execution to-morrow—and I feel as though it is not there. I look at
the walls—and I feel as though they are not here, either. And I feel so
free, as though I were not in prison, but had just come out of some
prison where I had spent all my life. What does this mean?”
His hands began to tremble,—something Werner had not experienced
before. His thoughts fluttered ever more furiously. It was as if
tongues of fire had flashed up in his mind, and the fire wanted to
burst forth and illumine the distance which was still dark as night.
Now the light pierced through and the widely illuminated distance began
to shine.
The fatigue that had tormented Werner during the last two years had
disappeared; the dead, cold, heavy serpent with its closed eyes and
mouth clinched in death, had fallen away from his breast. Before the
face of death, beautiful Youth came back to him physically. Indeed, it
was more than beautiful Youth. With that wonderful clarity of the
spirit which in rare moments comes over man and lifts him to the
loftiest peaks of meditation, Werner suddenly perceived both life and
death, and he was awed by the splendor of the unprecedented spectacle.
It seemed to him that he was walking along the highest mountain-ridge,
which was narrow like the blade of a knife, and on one side he saw
Life, on the other side—Death,—like two sparkling, deep, beautiful
seas, blending in one boundless, broad surface at the horizon.
“What is this? What a divine spectacle!” he said slowly, rising
involuntarily and straightening himself, as if in the presence of a
supreme being. And destroying the walls, space and time with the
impetuosity of his all-penetrating look, he cast a wide glance
somewhere into the depth of the life he was to forsake.
And life appeared to him in a new light. He did not strive, as before,
to clothe in words that which he had seen; nor were there such words in
the still poor, meager human language. That small, cynical and evil
feeling which had called forth in him a contempt for mankind and at
times even an aversion for the sight of a human face, had disappeared
completely. Thus, for a man who goes up in an airship, the filth and
litter of the narrow streets disappear and that which was ugly becomes
beautiful.
Unconsciously Werner stepped over to the table and leaned his right
hand on it. Proud and commanding by nature, he had never before assumed
such a proud, free, commanding pose, had never turned his head and
never looked as he did now,—for he had never yet been as free and
dominant as he was here in the prison, with but a few hours from
execution and death.
Now men seemed new to him,—they appeared amiable and charming to his
clarified vision. Soaring over time, he saw clearly how young mankind
was, that but yesterday it had been howling like a beast in the
forests; and that which had seemed to him terrible in human beings,
unpardonable and repulsive, suddenly became very dear to him,—like the
inability of a child to walk as grown people do, like a child’s
unconnected lisping, flashing with sparks of genius; like a child’s
comical blunders, errors and painful bruises.
“My dear people!” Werner suddenly smiled and at once lost all that was
imposing in his pose; he again became a prisoner who finds his cell
narrow and uncomfortable under lock, and he was tired of the annoying,
searching eye staring at him through the peephole in the door. And,
strange to say, almost instantly he forgot all that he had seen a
little while before so clearly and distinctly; and, what is still
stranger, he did not even make an effort to recall it. He simply sat
down as comfortably as possible, without the usual stiffness of his
body, and surveyed the walls and the bars with a faint and gentle,
strange, un-Werner-like smile. Still another new thing happened to
Werner,—something that had never happened to him before: he suddenly
started to weep.
“My dear comrades!” he whispered, crying bitterly. “My dear comrades!”
By what mysterious ways did he change from the feeling of proud and
boundless freedom to this tender and passionate compassion? He did not
know, nor did he think of it. Did he pity his dear comrades, or did his
tears conceal something else, a still loftier and more passionate
feeling?—His suddenly revived and rejuvenated heart did not know this
either. He wept and whispered:
“My dear comrades! My dear, dear comrades!”
In this man, who was bitterly weeping and smiling through tears, no one
could have recognized the cold and haughty, weary, yet daring
Werner—neither the judges, nor the comrades, nor even he himself.