War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [581]
“Cut him down! I order it!…” Rastopchin shouted out, suddenly turning as pale as Vereshchagin.
“Sabers out!” the officer cried to the dragoons, drawing his own saber.
Another, still stronger wave swept over the people and, reaching the front rows, this wave pushed those in front and carried them, swaying, to the very steps of the porch. The tall fellow, with a stony expression on his face and his arm permanently raised, stood beside Vereshchagin.
“Cut him down!” the officer almost whispered to the dragoons, and one of the soldiers, his face disfigured by rage, suddenly struck Vereshchagin on the head with the flat of his broadsword.
“Ah!” Vereshchagin cried out briefly and surprisedly, looking around in fright, as though he could not understand why this thing had been done to him. The same groan of surprise and horror passed through the crowd.
“Oh, Lord!” someone exclaimed ruefully.
But after the exclamation of surprise that escaped Vereshchagin, he uttered a pitiful cry of pain, and that cry was the end of him. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost in holding back the crowd, instantly broke. The crime had begun, it was necessary to go through with it. The pitiful moan of reproach was stifled by the menacing and wrathful roar of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that breaks up ships, this last irrepressible wave surged from the back rows, raced towards the front ones, knocked them down, and engulfed everything. The dragoon who had struck Vereshchagin was about to repeat his blow. Vereshchagin, with a cry of terror, shielding himself with his hands, rushed towards the people. The tall fellow, whom he ran into, seized Vereshchagin’s thin neck with his hands and, uttering a wild cry, fell with him under the feet of the pushing, tearing people.
Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall fellow. And the shouts of the crushed men and of those who were trying to save the tall fellow only excited the fury of the crowd. For a long time the dragoons were unable to free the factory worker, bloody, beaten almost to death. And for a long time, despite all the feverish haste with which the crowd tried to finish the thing they had begun, the people who beat, strangled, and tore at Vereshchagin were unable to kill him; the crowd pressed at them from all sides, with them in the middle, heaving from side to side like a single mass, and not giving them the opportunity either to finish him off or to abandon him.
“Hit him with an ax or something?…Crush him…The traitor, he sold Christ!…alive…living…serves the thief right. Use a bar!…Is he alive?”
And only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries were replaced by a drawn-out, rhythmic wheezing, did the crowd hurriedly begin moving around the prone, blood-stained body. Everyone went up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and astonishment, pressed back again.
“Oh, Lord, the people are like beasts, how could he be alive!” was heard in the crowd. “And he’s a young fellow…must be a merchant…that’s the people for you!…they say he’s not the one…how, not the one…Oh, Lord!…The other one got beaten, they say he’s barely alive…Eh, people…No fear of sin…” the same people now said, looking with painfully pitying expressions at the dead body with its blue face all smeared with blood and dust, and with its long, thin, slashed neck.
An assiduous police officer, finding the presence of a corpse in his excellency’s courtyard inappropriate, ordered the dragoons to take the body outside. Two dragoons took hold of the mangled legs and dragged the body away. The bloody, dust-smeared, dead, shaven head, lolling on its long neck, trailed on the ground. The people shrank from the corpse.
As Vereshchagin fell and the crowd, with a wild roar, closed