His responses to all these inquiries were curt and tetchy, as if to say that instructions from him were now no longer necessary because all his careful preparations had been ruined by somebody, and that somebody would have to answer for anything that might happen from now on.
'Oh, tell that idiot,' he replied to the inquiry from the Registrar's Department, 'to stay on and guard his own archives. And what's all this nonsense about the Fire Brigade? If they have any horses, let them go off to Vladimir. Don't leave them behind for the French to get hold of.'
'Sir, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum is here. What are your orders for him?'
'Orders? Tell them all to go, that's all . . . And let the lunatics out into the town. We've got madmen in charge of our armies, so God must want this lot out as well.'
When asked about the convicts in the gaol, the count roared furiously at the overseer:
'What, do you want me to give you two non-existent battalions to escort them? Just let them go, and have done with it!'
'Sir, there are some political prisoners - Meshkov, Vereshchagin . . .'
'Vereshchagin! Haven't they hanged him yet?' cried Rostopchin. 'Bring him in here.'
CHAPTER 25
By nine o'clock next morning, with the troops on their way through Moscow, people had stopped coming to Rostopchin for instructions. Anyone who could get away was doing so without any prompting, and those who stayed behind were making their own decisions about what needed to be done.
Count Rostopchin had himself driven to Sokolniki, where he sat down in his study with his arms folded and a dark scowl on his sallow face, and waited in silence.
In moments of untroubled repose every administrator feels that the entire population working under him is kept going only by his efforts; this feeling of being absolutely indispensable gives every administrator his greatest sense of reward for all the hard work that he puts in. It is easy to understand that while ever the ocean of history remains calm, a pilot-administrator in a little bobbing boat holding on to the ship of the people with a tiny boathook, and moving along with it, might easily think he is driving the ship that he is clinging to. But the moment a storm comes up, with the sea heaving and the ship tossing about, this kind of delusion immediately becomes impossible. The great ship on its vast course is a free agent, the boathook can no longer reach the moving vessel, and the pilot who had been in charge, providing all the power, finds himself transformed into a creature that is pathetically useless.
Rostopchin could sense this, and he was infuriated. The police-chief who had been confronted by the crowd arrived to see him just as an adjutant walked in to tell him his horses were ready. Both men were pale, and the police-chief, after reporting that he had carried out his assignment, told Count Rostopchin there was a huge crowd of people out in the courtyard wanting to see him.
Without saying a word Rostopchin got to his feet and walked out quickly into his airy, luxuriously appointed drawing-room, where he crossed to the balcony door and took hold of the handle, only to let go of it and move across to a window that gave a better view of the whole crowd. The tall young man was standing at the front, with a serious look on his face, waving his arms in the air and saying something. The bloody-faced blacksmith stood next to him looking truculent. The roar of raised voices came in through the closed windows.
'Is the carriage ready?' said Rostopchin, moving back from the window.
'Yes, your Excellency,' said the adjutant.
Rostopchin went back to the balcony door.
'Well, what do they want?' he asked the police-chief.
'Sir, they say they are following your orders and they have come together to go and fight the French. There was some shouting about treachery. But they are a rough lot, your Excellency. I only just managed to get away. Your Excellency, if I may advise you . . .'
'Please go. I know what to do without any help from you,' cried Rostopchin angrily. He stood at the balcony door looking down at the crowd. 'Look what they've done to Russia! Look what they've done to me!' he thought, feeling a great surge of uncontainable fury against the persons unknown who must be to blame for what was happening. As is often the case with hot-headed people, the fact that he was in a foul temper meant that he needed someone to vent his fury on. 'There they are - the mob, the dregs,' he thought, looking down at the crowd. 'This is the rabble they have stirred up by their folly. What they need is a victim,' it occurred to him as he watched the tall man in front with his arm in the air. And why did it occur to him? Because he too needed a victim, some object to vent his fury on.
'Is the carriage ready?' he asked again.
'Yes, your Excellency. What are your orders in relation to Vereshchagin? He is waiting by the steps,' answered the adjutant.
'Oh is he?' cried Rostopchin, as if he had suddenly remembered something.
He flung open the door and strode purposefully out on to the balcony. The roar of voices instantly died down, caps and hats were doffed, and all eyes looked up at the governor.
'Good day, men!' said the count, raising his voice and speaking quickly. 'Thank you for coming here. I'll be with you in a moment, but first we have to deal with a criminal. We have to punish the villain who has brought Moscow to its knees. Wait there for me!' And he strode back inside, slamming the door behind him.
A murmur of approval and pleasure ran through the crowd. 'He'll sort 'em out, all them traitors. Talk about the French . . . he's got the measure of that lot!' said the people, only too keen to blame everybody else for their own lack of faith.
A few minutes later an officer hurried out of the main entrance, and brought the dragoons to attention. The crowd surged eagerly across from the balcony to the front steps. An angry-looking Rostopchin emerged rapidly at the top of them, and glanced round quickly as if he was looking for somebody.
'Where is he?' he said, and the moment he said it he caught sight of a young man with a long, thin neck, and the shaven half of his head covered with a short stubble, coming round the corner of the building between two dragoons. This young man was wearing a thin blue coat with a fox-fur lining that had once looked very smart, and a filthy pair of rough and baggy convict's trousers with the bottoms shoved down into a pair of dirty boots that had worn thin. His feeble and spindly legs were heavily shackled and he was finding it difficult to walk properly.
'Ah!' said Rostopchin, hurriedly averting his eyes from the young man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step. 'Place him there.'
Clanking his shackles, the young man struggled to his appointed place on the step. Running a finger round the inside of his coat-collar, which was too tight, he turned his long neck this way and that, and then gave a deep sigh as he folded his thin hands (not the hands of a workman) over his stomach in a gesture of resignation.
For several seconds, while the young man was getting himself up on to the step, there was complete silence. Only at the back of the crowd, with everybody pressing forward in the same direction, was there any noise: some grunting and groaning amid all the pushing and shoving.
Rostopchin scowled and passed a hand over his face as he waited for him to arrive at the appointed spot.
'Listen, men!' he said, with a metallic ring to his voice. 'This man, Vereshchagin, is the swine that has lost Moscow for us.'
The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little and showing no resistance, stood there with hands still clasped together over his stomach. His haggard young face, with its look of despair and hideously disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down. At these opening words he slowly raised his head and looked up at the count from below, as if he wanted to say something to him, or at least to catch his eye. But Rostopchin kept his eyes away from him. A blue vein behind the young man's ear stood out like a cord on his long, thin neck, and suddenly his face coloured up.
All eyes were on him. He stared out at the crowd, and, as if detecting signs of encouragement on the faces before him, he gave a pathetic little smile and looked down aga
in, shuffling his feet on the step.
'He is a traitor to his Tsar and his country. He went over to Bonaparte. He is the only Russian to have disgraced a Russian name. It is because of him that we are losing Moscow,' said Rostopchin in a grating monotone, and suddenly he took a quick glance down at Vereshchagin, who was still standing there in the same attitude of resignation. As if to indicate that one look at him was the last straw, he raised a fist in the air and virtually screamed at the crowd:
'You judge him! Do what you want with him!'
The people were silent; all they did was squeeze up closer. Clutching at each other, struggling to breathe in that highly charged, stifling atmosphere, unable to move, vaguely sensing the approach of some indescribable horror, the mob could not take much more. The men at the front who had seen and heard all that had gone on before them stood there horror-stricken with wide eyes and gaping mouths, straining their backs to resist the pressure from behind.
'Give him a thrashing! . . . Let this traitor die and no longer disgrace the name of a Russian citizen!' screamed Rostopchin. 'Kill him! That's an order!'
No one could hear what Rostopchin was saying, but the fury in his voice was enough to send a deep groan through the mob and make them surge forward. But then once again they stopped.
'Count!' Vereshchagin's timid yet theatrical voice cut across the momentary silence. 'Count, God above is our only . . .' said Vereshchagin, looking up, and again the thick vein pulsated with blood on his thin neck. The colour raced to his cheeks and just as quickly faded. He never finished what he had started to say.
'Kill him! That's an order!' yelled Rostopchin, suddenly as white as Vereshchagin himself.
'Sabres at the ready!' shouted the officer to the dragoons, drawing his own weapon.
Another wave, now overwhelming, swept through the crowd from back to front, shoving everybody forward, and sent those at the front staggering over to the bottom steps. The tall young man, with a stony look on his face, found himself right next to Vereshchagin, with his fist still rigid in the air.
'Hit him!' the officer said to the dragoons in a voice not much more than a whisper, and one of the soldiers, his face suddenly contorted with fury, lashed Vereshchagin on the head with the flat of his sword.
Vereshchagin gave a quick gasp of surprise, and looked round in alarm, as if he couldn't understand why they had done this to him. An echoing gasp of surprise and horror ran through the crowd.
'O Lord in heaven!' came a pathetic call from one side. But Vereshchagin's instinctive gasp of surprise was followed by a heartbreaking howl of pain, and this was his undoing. The thread of human sympathy that had been holding the mob in check had been stretched to breaking point, and now it snapped. The crime was begun; it must run its full course. A plaintive cry of reproach was submerged in the menacing, furious roar of the mob. Like the legendary seventh wave that shatters a ship, one last, devastating wave surged from the back of the crowd right through to the front, swept people off their feet and engulfed everything. The dragoon who had hit Vereshchagin was gathering himself for a second blow. Vereshchagin gave a scream of terror, hid his face in his hands and dashed out into the crowd. He ran straight into the tall young man, who grabbed Vereshchagin's slender neck with both hands, and roared like a wild animal as they went down together under the feet of the stampeding, trampling mob.
Some hands lashed out and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall young man. And the screams coming from people getting crushed in the crowd and from some who were trying to rescue the tall young man only increased the frenzy of the mob. It took the dragoons some time to get the bleeding, half-dead factory worker out of the crowd. And all this time, however frantically the mob tried to finish off what had been started, the men who were beating and throttling Vereshchagin, intent on tearing him limb from limb, couldn't manage to kill him. The crowd pressed in on all sides, squashing them in the middle, surging back and forth like one great heaving mass, and they could neither finish him off nor leave him alone.
'Give him one with an axe, eh? . . . Look, he's been trampled to death . . . Traitor! Judas! No, he's still alive . . . he is, you know . . . He had it coming to him . . . Try this hatchet! . . . Isn't he dead yet?'
It was only when the victim had stopped struggling, and his screams had fizzled out into a drawn-out, rhythmic gurgling sound, that the mob began to step gingerly away from the bleeding corpse that lay there on the ground. Everybody came up to have a look at what had been done, and they all shrank back in horror, amazed and accusing.
'Oh Lord, the people are like wild animals. He couldn't have lived through that!' came the voices in the crowd. 'Only a boy . . . Looks like he's a merchant's son . . . Oh, the people! . . . Somebody said they've got the wrong man . . . No, he's not the right one! . . . Oh Lord! . . . Another man's been beaten up too . . . half-dead, they do say . . . Oh, the people! They don't think about sin any more . . .' It was the same men speaking, now full of pain and pity as they looked down at the dead body with its blue face filthy with matted dust and blood, and its long, slender, half-severed neck.
A punctilious police official, thinking it wasn't very nice to leave a dead body lying around in his Excellency's courtyard, told the dragoons to haul the body out into the street. Two dragoons took hold of the mangled legs, and dragged the body away. The dead head, shaven, gory and grimy, trailed along the ground, bumping from side to side on its long neck. The crowd shrank back from the corpse.
When Vereshchagin fell to the ground, and the crowd of yelling savages closed in and surged over him, Rostopchin suddenly went pale, and instead of going through to the back entrance where his horses were waiting, he scuttled off down a corridor that led only to some ground-floor rooms, looking down and without the slightest idea where he was going or why. The count's face was white, and he couldn't control a feverish trembling in his jaw.
'Er, this way, your Excellency . . . Where are you going, sir? . . . Would you like to come this way?' said a quavering, timorous voice behind him. Words were beyond Rostopchin as he turned back and went where he was shown. There was his carriage at the back entrance. Even here they could hear the distant roar of the howling mob. Count Rostopchin scrambled up into his carriage, and told them to drive to his country house at Sokolniki. When they got to Myasnitsky Street and the shouting of the mob fell away, the count began to have second thoughts. The emotion and panic he had displayed before his subordinates were now a source of embarrassment. 'Ghastly, hideous rabble! They're like wolves. Only flesh will satisfy them,' he thought. 'Count, God above is our only . . .' Vereshchagin's words suddenly came back to him, and a horrible chill ran down his spine. But it soon passed, and Count Rostopchin smiled at himself with some scorn. 'I had other things to do. The people had to be satisfied. Many other victims have perished, and are still perishing, for the public good,' he thought; and he started to run through the range of obligations he owed to his family, the city entrusted to his care, and himself - not as Fyodor Rostopchin (Fyodor Rostopchin may be considered to have sacrificed himself for 'the public good') - but as governor of Moscow, the representative of state power fully authorized by the Tsar. 'If I had been just plain Fyodor Rostopchin, my line of action might have been totally different, but I was duty bound to preserve the life and the status of the governor.'
Rocking gently in the softly sprung carriage, out of range of the mob and its ghastly noises, Rostopchin found himself physically comforted, and, as always, along with the physical relief came help from his intellect, which was busy fabricating good reasons for moral comfort too. The thought that reassured Rostopchin was hardly original. Since time began and men started killing each other, no man has ever committed such a crime against one of his fellows without comforting himself with the same idea. This idea is 'the public good', a supposed benefit for other people.
No person in control of his passions is ever aware of this benefit, but a man fresh from committing such a crime always knows for certain where the benefit lies.
Rostopchin knew.
Far from reproaching himself in his own mind for what he had just done, he congratulated himself on having made the most of a fleeting opportunity to punish a criminal, and at the same time placate the mob. 'Vereshchagin had been tried and sentenced to death,' Rostopchin reflected (though the Senate had sentenced Vereshchagin to nothing more than hard labour). 'He was a spy and a traitor. I couldn't have let him go unpunished, and so I got two birds with one stone. I satisfied the mob by giving them a victim, and I executed a villain.'
By the time he had arrived home at his country house and got involved in some domestic arrangements, the count's peace of mind was complete.
Within half an hour he was off again, speeding across the Sokolniki plain, no longer absorbed in the recent past, but thinking and planning ahead. He was heading for the Yauza bridge, where he had been told he would find Kutuzov. In his imagination he was rehearsing one or two angry, caustic phrases for use in tearing a strip off Kutuzov for his deception. He would make it clear to this foxy old courtier that all the responsibility for the calamities that were bound to follow the surrender of Moscow, and the ruin of Russia (as he cared to put it), lay upon his doddery old head. Running through what he was going to say, Rostopchin twisted furiously back and forth inside the carriage, glaring fiercely out of both windows.
The Sokolniki plain was deserted. Only at the far end, by the alms-house and the lunatic asylum, did they begin to see little knots of people in white clothing, and one or two similarly dressed individuals, walking about on the plain, shouting and waving their arms.
One of them was running across to intercept Count Rostopchin's carriage. The count, his driver and all the dragoons stared with a confused feeling of horror mixed with curiosity at these madmen who had been given their freedom, and especially the one who was cutting across them. Wobbling along on his long, spindly legs, with his dressing-gown flapping behind him, this madman ran flat out with his eyes glued on Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and waving him down. He had a dark and solemn look on his thin, sallow face with its patchy bits of straggly beard. His agate-black eyes with their rolling saffron whites jumped and jerked. 'Stop! I tell you! Stop!' came his thin, shrill voice, and he followed this up with another wheezy call accompanied by other weird sounds and insistent hand-movements.