‘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.
