The first to pass was the inspector. He was stout, and seemed a resolute, self-satisfied man, but he looked ghastly pale, downcast, and seemed frightened; then his assistant, frowning but resolute; behind them the watchman. They passed my door and stopped at the next, and I hear the assistant calling out in a strange voice: ‘Lozinsky, get up and put on clean linen.’ Yes. Then I hear the creaking of the door; they entered into his cell. Then I hear Lozinsky’s steps going to the opposite side of the corridor. I could only see the inspector. He stood quite pale, and buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, shrugging his shoulders. Yes. Then, as if frightened of something, he moved out of the way.
It was Lozinsky, who passed him and came up to my door. A handsome young fellow he was, you know, of that nice Polish type: broad shouldered, his head covered with fine, fair, curly hair as with a cap, and with beautiful blue eyes. So blooming, so fresh, so healthy. He stopped in front of my window, so that I could see the whole of his face. A dreadful, gaunt, livid face. ‘Kryltzoff, have you any cigarettes?’ I wished to pass him some, but the assistant hurriedly pulled out his cigarette case and passed it to him. He took out one, the assistant struck a match, and he lit the cigarette and began to smoke and seemed to be thinking. Then, as if he had remembered something, he began to speak. ‘It is cruel and unjust. I have committed no crime. I–‘ I saw something quiver in his white young throat, from which I could not take my eyes, and he stopped.
Yes. At that moment I hear Rozovsky shouting in his fine, Jewish voice. Lozinsky threw away the cigarette and stepped from the door. And Rozovsky appeared at the window. His childish face, with the limpid black eyes, was red and moist. He also had clean linen on, the trousers were too wide, and he kept pulling them up and trembled all over. He approached his pitiful face to my window. ‘Kryltzoff, it’s true that the doctor has prescribed cough mixture for me, is it not? I am not well. I’ll take some more of the mixture.’ No one answered, and he looked inquiringly, now at me, now at the inspector. What he meant to say I never made out. Yes. Suddenly the assistant again put on a stern expression, and called out in a kind of squeaking tone: ‘Now, then, no nonsense. Let us go.’ Rozovsky seemed incapable of understanding what awaited him, and hurried, almost ran, in front of him all along the corridor. But then he drew back, and I could hear his shrill voice and his cries, then the trampling of feet, and general hubbub.
He was shrieking and sobbing. The sounds came fainter and fainter, and at last the door rattled and all was quiet. Yes. And so they hanged them. Throttled them both with a rope. A watchman, another one, saw it done, and told me that Lozinsky did not resist, but Rozovsky struggled for a long time, so that they had to pull him up on to the scaffold and to force his head into the noose. Yes. This watchman was a stupid fellow. He said: ‘They told me, sir, that it would be frightful, but it was not at all frightful. After they were hanged they only shrugged their shoulders twice, like this.’ He showed how the shoulders convulsively rose and fell. ‘Then the hangman pulled a bit so as to tighten the noose, and it was all up, and they never budged.”‘ And Kryltzoff repeated the watchman’s words, “Not at all frightful,” and tried to smile, but burst into sobs instead.
For a long time after that he kept silent, breathing heavily, and repressing the sobs that were choking him.
“From that time I became a revolutionist. Yes,” he said, when he was quieter and finished his story in a few words. He belonged to the Narodovoltzy party, and was even at the head of the disorganising group, whose object was to terrorise the government so that it should give up its power of its own accord. With this object he travelled to Petersburg, to Kiev, to Odessa and abroad, and was everywhere successful. A man in whom he had full confidence betrayed him. He was arrested, tried, kept in prison for two years, and condemned to death, but the sentence was mitigated to one of hard labour for life.
He went into consumption while in prison, and in the conditions he was now placed he had scarcely more than a few months longer to live. This he knew, but did not repent of his action, but said that if he had another life he would use it in the same way to destroy the conditions in which such things as he had seen were possible.
This man’s story and his intimacy with him explained to Nekhludoff much that he had not previously understood.
CHAPTER VII
NEKHLUDOFF SEEKS AN INTERVIEW WITH MASLOVA
On the day when the convoy officer had the encounter with the prisoners at the halting station about the child, Nekhludoff, who had spent the night at the village inn, woke up late, and was some time writing letters to post at the next Government town, so that he left the inn later than usual, and did not catch up with the gang on the road as he had done previously, but came to the village where the next halting station was as it was growing dusk.
Having dried himself at the inn, which was kept by an elderly woman who had an extraordinarily fat, white neck, he had his tea in a clean room decorated with a great number of icons and pictures and then hurried away to the halting station to ask the officer for an interview with Katusha. At the last six halting stations he could not get the permission for an interview from any of the officers. Though they had been changed several times, not one of them would allow Nekhludoff inside the halting stations, so that he had not seen Katusha for more than a week. This strictness was occasioned by the fact that an important prison official was expected to pass that way. Now this official had passed without looking in at the gang, after all, and Nekhludoff hoped that the officer who had taken charge of the gang in the morning would allow him an interview with the prisoners, as former officers had done.
The landlady offered Nekhludoff a trap to drive him to the halting station, situated at the farther end of the village, but Nekhludoff preferred to walk. A young labourer, a broad-shouldered young fellow of herculean dimensions, with enormous top-boots freshly blackened with strongly smelling tar, offered himself as a guide.
A dense mist obscured the sky, and it was so dark that when the young fellow was three steps in advance of him Nekhludoff could not see him unless the light of some window happened to fall on the spot, but he could hear the heavy boots wading through the deep, sticky slush. After passing the open place in front of the church and the long street, with its rows of windows shining brightly in the darkness, Nekhludoff followed his guide to the outskirts of the village, where it was pitch dark. But soon here, too, rays of light, streaming through the mist from the lamps in the front of the halting station, became discernible through the darkness. The reddish spots of light grew bigger and bigger; at last the stakes of the palisade, the moving figure of the sentinel, a post painted with white and black stripes and the sentinel’s box became visible.
The sentinel called his usual “Who goes there?” as they approached, and seeing they were strangers treated them with such severity that he would not allow them to wait by the palisade; but Nekhludoff’s guide was not abashed by this severity.
“Hallo, lad! why so fierce? You go and rouse your boss while we wait here?”
The sentinel gave no answer, but shouted something in at the gate and stood looking at the broad-shouldered young labourer scraping the mud off Nekhludoff’s boots with a chip of wood by the light of the lamp. From behind the palisade came the hum of male and female voices. In about three minutes more something rattled, the gate opened, and
