The Seven Who Were Hanged | Page 6

another woman was
later found and arrested in the house where the conspiracy had been
hatched. She was its mistress. At the same time a great deal of
dynamite and half finished bomb explosives were seized. All those
arrested were very young; the eldest of the men was twenty-eight years
old, the younger of the women was only nineteen. They were tried in
the same fortress in which they were imprisoned after the arrest; they
were tried swiftly and secretly, as was done during that unmerciful
time.
At the trial all of them were calm, but very serious and thoughtful.
Their contempt for the judges was so intense that none of them wished
to emphasize his daring by even a superfluous smile or by a feigned
expression of cheerfulness. Each was simply as calm as was necessary
to hedge in his soul, from curious, evil and inimical eyes, the great
gloom that precedes death.
Sometimes they refused to answer questions; sometimes they answered,
briefly, simply and precisely, as though they were answering not the
judge, but statisticians, for the purpose of supplying information for
particular special tables. Three of them, one woman and two men, gave
their real names, while two others refused and thus remained unknown
to the judges.
They manifested for all that was going on at the trial a certain curiosity,
softened, as though through a haze, such as is peculiar to persons who
are very ill or are carried away by some great, all-absorbing idea. They
glanced up occasionally, caught some word in the air more interesting
than the others, and then resumed the thought from which their
attention had been distracted.
The man who was nearest to the judges called himself Sergey Golovin,
the son of a retired colonel, himself tin ex-officer. He was still a very
young, light-haired, broad-shouldered man, so strong that neither the

prison nor the expectation of inevitable death could remove the color
from his cheeks and the expression of youthful, happy frankness from
his blue eyes. He kept energetically tugging at his bushy, small beard,
to which he had not become accustomed, and continually blinking, kept
looking out of the window.
It was toward the end of winter, when amidst the snowstorms and the
gloomy, frosty days, the approaching spring sent as a forerunner a clear,
warm, sunny day, or but an hour, yet so full of spring, so eagerly young
and beaming that sparrows on the streets lost their wits for joy, and
people seemed almost as intoxicated. And now the strange and
beautiful sky could be seen through an upper window which was
dust-covered and unwashed since the last summer. At first sight the sky
seemed to be milky-gray-smoke-colored-but when you looked longer
the dark blue color began to penetrate through the shade, grew into an
ever deeper blue-ever brighter, ever more intense. And the fact that it
did not reveal itself all at once, but hid itself chastely in the smoke of
transparent clouds, made it as charming as the girl you love. And
Sergey Golovin looked at the sky, tugged at his beard, blinked now one
eye, now the other, with its long, curved lashes, earnestly pondering
over something. Once he began to move his fingers rapidly and
thoughtlessly, knitted his brow in some joy, but then he glanced about
and his joy died out like a spark which is stepped upon. Almost
instantly an earthen, deathly blue, without first changing into pallor,
showed through the color of his cheeks. He clutched his downy hair,
tore their roots painfully with his fingers, whose tips had turned white.
But the joy of life and spring was stronger, and a few minutes later his
frank young face was again yearning toward the spring sky. The young,
pale girl, known only by the name of Musya, was also looking in the
same direction, at the sky. She was younger than Golovin, but she
seemed older in her gravity and in the darkness of her open, proud eyes.
Only her very thin, slender neck, and her delicate girlish hands spoke of
her youth; but in addition there was that ineffable something, which is
youth itself, and which sounded so distinctly in her clear, melodious
voice, tuned irreproachably like a precious instrument, every simple
word, every exclamation giving evidence of its musical timbre. She
was very pale, but it was not a deathly pallor, but that peculiar warm

whiteness of a person within whom, as it were, a great, strong fire is
burning, whose body glows transparently like fine Sevres porcelain.
She sat almost motionless, and only at times she touched with an
imperceptible movement of her fingers the circular mark on the middle
finger of her right hand, the mark of a ring which had. been recently
removed.
She gazed at the