CHAPTER II CONDEMNED TO BE HANGED

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 tin 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 Sevres 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: 

“Nevermind!”

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 he together.”

Musya was silent.  Then she resolutely moved forward.