Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

“There are all sorts of persons here, your Excellency,” continued the Commissioner, deferentially but briskly, while he took the Governor’s silence for consent, and commanded, in hasty whispers: “Ivanoff! quick, Isidorshuck, take the other end⁠—here, pull away now!”

With a soft, sliding rustle the dingy canvas came away and one after the other the white spots of faces dawned into view⁠—bearded and old, young and smooth⁠—all different, but united in the common likeness of death. One hardly saw the wounds and the blood, they were mostly hidden under their clothes; only in one face the eye appeared unnaturally dark and sunken, shedding strange black tears that looked in the dusk like tar. The majority had the same pale, blank stare; some had kept their identical twinkle, and one covered his face with his hand as though to shield it from the glare. But the Assistant Commissioner gazed with a pained expression at these corpses that so disturbed his sense of order.

The Governor felt that these pale faces had been among the mob that morning⁠—in the foremost ranks, he knew; and many of them he had seen personally as he parleyed with them. But now they were all beyond his recognition. This new community with death had lent them a most singular expression! They lay there lifeless and motionless on the floor; like plaster casts made flat on the back that they might rest more firmly. Yet this immovability seemed counterfeited⁠—one could hardly believe it real. They were dumb, and the silence seemed as artificial as their rigid pose; but something about them of anxious expectancy made it painfully impossible for the observers to speak. If a busy city had suddenly been turned to stone, and all its inhabitants petrified at one blow; if the sun had stood still, and the leaves had hushed their rustling, and all that walked or moved had stiffened⁠—they might have shown this same strange look of interrupted effort, of breathless expectancy and mysterious alertness for what was yet to come.

“May I ask if your Excellency wishes to order coffins or whether they shall be buried in a common trench?” asked the Assistant Commissioner, with loud naivete: the exigencies of the emergency impressed him with a certain deferential self-confidence⁠—and furthermore he was very young.

“What sort of a trench?” asked the Governor perfunctorily.

“You just dig a large ditch, your Excellency⁠—” The Governor turned abruptly and left the place. As he entered the carriage he heard behind him the heavy grating of the rusty hinges⁠—they were shutting in the dead.

Next morning he visited the wounded in the city hospital, still driven by that same tormenting curiosity: the longing to undo the inevitable, and to blot out the past. The dead at least stared at him, but these would not deign him a glance! And in the stubbornness with which they averted their eyes, he read the immutability of his accomplished act. It was finished! Something monstrous had been done, and it was idle and useless to strive to alter the fact.

And from that very moment, Time for him had stood still, and this certain something inexplicable and unspeakable had come over him. It was not remorse, for he felt himself in the right; nor was it pity, that gentle feeling that softly veils the heart and calls forth tears. He could think of these dead quite calmly; even of the little children. Their pain and their sorrows hardly moved him. But he could not rid his thoughts of them⁠—they were constantly before his mind in sharpest outline⁠—these puppets, these broken dolls! And therein lay the horrid mystery⁠—a something, like the tales of magic of one’s nursery days. According to others, four⁠—five⁠—seven⁠—days had elapsed since the catastrophe⁠—but for him in the meantime not one single hour had gone by. His thoughts played yet about that time⁠—those shots⁠—that signalling handkerchief!⁠—the realisation that something irrevocable was about to happen⁠—had happened!

He was convinced that he could far more easily be calm, and forget the things which no vain regrets could alter, if the people about him would be less pointed in their attentions. By their actions, looks and gestures; their respectful, sympathetic manner, and their voices as though soothing a fretful invalid, they firmly fastened in his brain the thought of that ineradicable occurrence.

The Chief of Police announced the next day, in soothing tones, that two or three more of the wounded had been dismissed, cured, from the hospital; each morning his wife, Maria Petrovna, pressed her lips to his forehead to see whether he had a fever⁠—as though he were a child! and those dead bodies⁠—unripe fruit, of which he had eaten too freely! What nonsense!

And eight days after the event the Right Reverend Bishop Micael himself called upon him, and at his first words clearly showed that he had the same notion as all the others, and had come to lighten the Governor’s conscience. He spoke of the workmen as sinners, and called him a peacemaker⁠—and all this without introducing a single one of his well-worn Bible texts⁠—for he knew the Governor was not particularly fond of clerical prating. The old man appeared to distressing disadvantage as he lied so aimlessly in the face of his God.

During the interview the Bishop turned his deaf ear toward his companion, and, purple with rage (he could feel himself how the blood mounted to his brow) the Governor pouted his lips and trumpeted into that great bloodless ear that was turned toward him from that soft, grey bush of hair: “Sinners they may be, your Eminence; nevertheless if I were in your place I should certainly say a Mass for their departed souls.”

The Bishop turned away his ear, smoothed down his waistcoat with a bony hand, and nodded his head as he answered, in his softest voice: “Each station has its own cross. Had I been in your Excellency’s place I should never have ordered them shot, nor burdened the Holy Office with Masses for their souls. But that is neither here