‘Er, this way, your Excellency . . . Where are you going, sir? . . . Would you like to come this way?’ said a quavering, timorous voice behind him. Words were beyond Rostopchin as he turned back and went where he was shown. There was his carriage at the back entrance. Even here they could hear the distant roar of the howling mob. Count Rostopchin scrambled up into his carriage, and told them to drive to his country house at Sokolniki. When they got to Myasnitsky Street and the shouting of the mob fell away, the count began to have second thoughts. The emotion and panic he had displayed before his subordinates were now a source of embarrassment. ‘Ghastly, hideous rabble! They’re like wolves. Only flesh will satisfy them,’ he thought. ‘
Rocking gently in the softly sprung carriage, out of range of the mob and its ghastly noises, Rostopchin found himself physically comforted, and, as always, along with the physical relief came help from his intellect, which was busy fabricating good reasons for moral comfort too. The thought that reassured Rostopchin was hardly original. Since time began and men started killing each other, no man has ever committed such a crime against one of his fellows without comforting himself with the same idea. This idea is ‘the public good’, a supposed benefit for other people.
No person in control of his passions is ever aware of this benefit, but a man fresh from committing such a crime always knows for certain where the benefit lies. Rostopchin knew.
Far from reproaching himself in his own mind for what he had just done, he congratulated himself on having made the most of a fleeting opportunity to punish a criminal, and at the same time placate the mob. ‘Vereshchagin had been tried and sentenced to death,’ Rostopchin reflected (though the Senate had sentenced Vereshchagin to nothing more than hard labour). ‘He was a spy and a traitor. I couldn’t have let him go unpunished, and so I got two birds with one stone. I satisfied the mob by giving them a victim, and I executed a villain.’
By the time he had arrived home at his country house and got involved in some domestic arrangements, the count’s peace of mind was complete.
Within half an hour he was off again, speeding across the Sokolniki plain, no longer absorbed in the recent past, but thinking and planning ahead. He was heading for the Yauza bridge, where he had been told he would find Kutuzov. In his imagination he was rehearsing one or two angry, caustic phrases for use in tearing a strip off Kutuzov for his deception. He would make it clear to this foxy old courtier that all the responsibility for the calamities that were bound to follow the surrender of Moscow, and the ruin of Russia (as he cared to put it), lay upon his doddery old head. Running through what he was going to say, Rostopchin twisted furiously back and forth inside the carriage, glaring fiercely out of both windows.
The Sokolniki plain was deserted. Only at the far end, by the alms-house and the lunatic asylum, did they begin to see little knots of people in white clothing, and one or two similarly dressed individuals, walking about on the plain, shouting and waving their arms.
One of them was running across to intercept Count Rostopchin’s carriage. The count, his driver and all the dragoons stared with a confused feeling of horror mixed with curiosity at these madmen who had been given their freedom, and especially the one who was cutting across them. Wobbling along on his long, spindly legs, with his dressing-gown flapping behind him, this madman ran flat out with his eyes glued on Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and waving him down. He had a dark and solemn look on his thin, sallow face with its patchy bits of straggly beard. His agate-black eyes with their rolling saffron whites jumped and jerked. ‘Stop! I tell you! Stop!’ came his thin, shrill voice, and he followed this up with another wheezy call accompanied by other weird sounds and insistent hand-movements.
He caught up with the carriage and ran alongside.
