War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [583]
The Sokolniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, by the hospice and the madhouse, could bunches of men in white clothes be seen, and several solitary ones dressed the same way, walking across the field, shouting something and waving their arms.
One of them ran to intercept Count Rastopchin’s caleche. And Count Rastopchin himself, and his driver, and the dragoons all looked with a vague feeling of horror and curiosity at these released madmen and especially at the one who was running towards them.
Swaying on his long, thin legs, his robe flying, the madman was running headlong, his eyes fixed on Rastopchin, shouting something to him in a hoarse voice and making signs for him to stop. The madman’s somber and solemn face, overgrown with uneven tufts of beard, was thin and yellow. His jet-black pupils shifted low and anxiously in their saffron-yellow whites.
“Wait! Stop, I tell you!” he called out piercingly and then cried something else, breathlessly, with imposing intonations and gestures.
He drew even with the carriage and ran alongside it.
“Thrice they killed me, thrice I rose from the dead. They have stoned me, they have crucified me…I shall rise…rise…rise. They have rent my body. The kingdom of God will be destroyed…Thrice will I destroy it, thrice will I raise it up,” he cried, raising his voice more and more. Count Rastopchin suddenly grew pale, just as he had grown pale when the crowd fell upon Vereshchagin. He turned away.
“Dr…drive faster!” he cried to the coachman in a trembling voice.
The carriage raced as fast as the horses could pull it; but for a long time Count Rastopchin heard the ever more distant, mad, desperate shouting, and before his eyes saw only the surprised, frightened, bloody face of the traitor in the fur-lined coat.
Fresh as that memory was, Rastopchin felt that it was now deeply, bloodily engraved in his heart. He felt clearly now that the bloody trace of that memory would never heal, but that, on the contrary, the longer he lived, the more cruelly and tormentingly that terrible memory would live in his heart. He now fancied he could hear the sound of his own words: “Cut him down, or you’ll answer to me with your heads!” “Why did I say those words! They came out somehow accidentally…I might not have said them,” he thought, “then nothing would have happened.” He saw the frightened and then suddenly cruel face of the dragoon who struck him, and the look of silent, timid reproach cast at him by that boy in the fox-lined coat…“But I didn’t do it for myself, I had to act that way. La plèbe, le traître…le bien publique,” he thought.
Troops were still crowding around the Yauzsky bridge. It was hot. Kutuzov, frowning, glum, was sitting on a bench by the bridge and playing in the sand with his whip, when a caleche noisily galloped up to him. A man in a general’s uniform, in a plumed hat, his shifting eyes either wrathful or frightened, came up to Kutuzov and began saying something to him in French. It was Count Rastopchin. He said to Kutuzov that he had come there because Moscow and the capital were no more and there was only the army.
“It would be different if Your Serenity had not told me you would not surrender Moscow without offering another battle: none of this would have happened!” he said.
Kutuzov was looking at Rastopchin and, as if not understanding the meaning of the words being addressed to him, was trying hard to read something special written at that moment on the face of the man who was speaking to him. Rastopchin, embarrassed, fell silent. Kutuzov shook his head slightly and, not taking his searching gaze from Rastopchin’s face, said softly:
“No, I won’t give up Moscow without offering battle.”
Whether Kutuzov was thinking of something completely different as he said those words, or he spoke them deliberately, aware of their meaninglessness, Count Rastopchin said nothing and hastily walked away from Kutuzov. And strange thing! The commander