The Seven Who Were Hanged | Page 3

Chief of the Guards stretched out his arms with a shrug.
"Exactly at one o'clock in the afternoon, your Excellency," he said.
Half surprised, half commending the work of the police, who had
managed everything skilfully, the Minister shook his head, a morose
smile upon his thick, dark lips, and still smiling obediently, and not
desiring to interfere with the plans of the police, he hastily made ready,
and went out to pass the night in some one else's hospitable palace. His
wife and his two children were also removed from the dangerous house,
before which the bomb-throwers were to gather upon the following

day.
While the lights were burning in the palace, and courteous, familiar
faces were bowing to him, smiling and expressing their concern, the
dignitary experienced a sensation of pleasant excitement-he felt as if he
had already received, or was soon to receive, some great and
unexpected reward. But the people went away, the lights were
extinguished, and through the mirrors, the lace-like and fantastic
reflection of the electric lamps on the street, quivered across the ceiling
and over the walls. A stranger in the house, with its paintings, its
statues and its silence, the light-itself silent and indefinite-awakened
painful thoughts in him as to the vanity of bolts and guards and walls.
And then, in the dead of night, in the silence and solitude of a strange
bedroom, a sensation of unbearable fear swept over the dignitary.
He had some kidney trouble, and whenever he grew strongly agitated,
his face, his hands and his feet became swollen. Now, rising like a
mountain of bloated flesh above the taut springs of the bed, he felt,
with the anguish of a sick man, his swollen face, which seemed to him
to belong to some one else. Unceasingly he kept thinking of the cruel
fate which people were preparing for him. He recalled, one after
another, all the recent horrible instances of bombs that had been thrown
at men of even greater eminence than himself; he recalled how the
bombs had torn bodies to pieces, had spattered brains over dirty brick
walls, had knocked teeth from their roots. And influenced by these
meditations, it seemed to him that his own stout, sickly body, outspread
on the bed, was already experiencing the fiery shock of the explosion.
He seemed to be able to feel his arms being severed from the shoulders,
his teeth knocked out, his brains scattered into particles, his feet
growing numb, lying quietly, their toes upward, like those of a dead
man. He stirred with an effort, breathed loudly and coughed in order
not to seem to himself to resemble a corpse in any way. He encouraged
himself with the live noise of the grating springs, of the rustling blanket;
and to assure himself that he was actually alive and not dead, he uttered
in a bass voice, loudly and abruptly, in the silence and solitude of the
bedroom:

"Molodtsi! Molodtsi! Molodtsi! (Good boys)!"
He was praising the detectives, the police, and the soldiers-all those
who guarded his life, and who so opportunely and so cleverly had
averted the assassination. But even though he stirred, even though he
praised his protectors, even though he forced an unnatural smile, in
order to express his contempt for the foolish, unsuccessful terrorists, he
nevertheless did not believe in his safety, he was not sure that his life
would not leave him suddenly, at once. Death, which people had
devised for him, and which was only in their minds, in their intention,
seemed to him to be already standing there in the room. It seemed to
him that Death would remain standing there, and would not go away
until those people had been captured, until the bombs had been taken
from them, until they had been placed in a strong prison. There Death
was standing in the corner, and would not go away-it could not go
away, even as an obedient sentinel stationed on guard by a superior's
will and order.
"At one o'clock in the afternoon, your Excellency!" this phrase kept
ringing, changing its tone continually: now it was cheerfully mocking,
now angry, now dull and obstinate. It sounded as if a hundred
wound-up gramophones had been placed in his room, and all of them,
one after another, were shouting with idiotic repetition the words they
had been made to shout:
"At one o'clock in the afternoon, your Excellency!"
And suddenly, this one o'clock in the afternoon to-morrow, which but a
short while ago was not in any way different from other hours, which
was only a quiet movement of the hand along the dial of his gold watch,
assumed an ominous finality, sprang out of the dial, began to live
separately, stretched itself into an enormously huge black pole which
cut