Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

The warder on duty came in and led the women away to the women’s quarters. Mezhenétsky went to the other end of the corridor so as not to meet him. The warder came back and locked the cell of the new political prisoners, and suggested to Mezhenétsky that he should go back to his own. Mezhenétsky obeyed mechanically, but asked that his door should not be locked.

In his cell, Mezhenétsky lay down on the bunk with his face to the wall.

Was it possible that all his powers had been wasted: his energy, his strength of will, his genius (he did not consider anyone above him in mental qualities) wasted for nothing? He remembered the letter he had received quite lately, when already on his way to Siberia, from Svetlogoúb’s mother, reproaching him (“like a woman,” stupidly, as he thought) for having led her son to perdition by drawing him into the terrorist activity. When he received that letter he had only smiled contemptuously; what could that stupid woman understand of the aims that stood before him and Svetlogoúb? But now, when he recalled the letter and Svetlogoúb’s sweet, trusting, affectionate nature, he began to muse: first about Svetlogoúb, and then about himself. Could his whole life have been a mistake? He closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but was horrified to find that the state he had been in during his first month in the Petropávlof Fortress had again returned. Again he felt the pain in the crown of his head, again he saw faces with enormous mouths, shaggy and terrible, on a dark background, speckled with little stars; and again forms appeared before his open eyes. There was only this new about it: he saw a criminal with shaved head and grey trousers swinging before him, and by a sequence of ideas he began to look for a ventilator to which he could attach a rope. Intolerable hatred that demanded expression, burned in Mezhenétsky’s heart. He could not lie still, could not grow calm, and could not get rid of his thoughts.

“How?” he began to ask himself. “By cutting an artery? I might not succeed.⁠ ⁠… Hanging?⁠ ⁠… Of course! That’s the simplest!” He remembered that he had seen a bundle of logs tied together by a cord in the corridor. “Get up on the logs, or on a stool?⁠ ⁠… The watchman is pacing up and down the corridor, but he will fall asleep or go away.⁠ ⁠… I shall have to wait, and then take the rope and fasten it to the ventilator.”

Standing at his door, Mezhenétsky listened to the watchman’s steps, and now and then, when the latter was at the far end of the corridor, he looked out through the chink. But the watchman did not go away nor fall asleep, and still Mezhenétsky listened eagerly to the sound of his footsteps, and waited.

At the same time, in the cell where the sick old man lay in complete darkness but for a smoky lamp, amid the sleepy sounds of night⁠—breathing, groaning, snoring, coughing⁠—the greatest of life’s events was taking place. The old sectarian was dying; and to his spiritual vision was revealed all that he had so desired during his whole life. In the midst of dazzling light he saw the Lamb in the shape of a radiant youth, and a great multitude of people of all nations standing before him clothed in white; and they all rejoiced that there was no more evil on earth. All this was happening in his own soul and in the whole world, as the old man knew, and he was filled with a great joy and peace.

But the others in the cell knew nothing of it, and heard only the death-rattle in the old man’s throat; and his neighbour awoke and roused the others, and when the rattle ceased and the old man’s body grew cold, his fellow-inmates knocked at the door.

The watchman came in, and ten minutes later two convicts carried the lifeless body out of the cell and down to the mortuary. The watchman followed them out and locked the outside door after him. The corridor was left empty.

“Lock up, lock up!” thought Mezhenétsky, who from his door had followed all that went on. “You will not prevent me from escaping from all these horrors!”

Mezhenétsky no longer felt the inward terror that had hitherto oppressed him; he was absorbed by only one thought: the fear of being prevented from carrying out his intention.

With beating heart he went out, and reaching the logs, undid the cord that bound them together, and drew it from under the bundle; then, looking round at the outer door, he took the cord into his cell. There he got onto the stool, threw the cord over the ventilator, and, having tied the ends together, made a noose out of the double cord. It hung too low. He altered this and again made a noose, measured it round his neck, and anxiously listening and looking towards the door, again got onto the stool, put his head into the noose, adjusted it, kicked away the stool, and remained hanging.

It was only when making his morning round that the warder noticed Mezhenétsky standing, with his legs bent at the knees, beside the stool, which lay on its side.

He was taken down, and the prison inspector came running, and, hearing that Román was a physician, called him to give his aid to the strangled man.

All the usual remedies were administered to bring him back to life, but Mezhenétsky did not come to.

His body was carried down to the mortuary, and laid beside the body of the old sectarian.

1906.

Mine is a strange and wonderful lot! The chances are that there is not a single wretched beggar suffering under the luxury and oppression of the rich who feels anything like as keenly as I do either the injustice, the cruelty, and the horror