The company of soldiers commanded by Captain Markof had come to take part in a punitive expedition. Tired, irritable, weary from their long journey in an uncomfortable train, the men were sullen and morose. On their arrival at a station with a strange-sounding foreign name, beer and vodka were served out to them by men who seemed to be peasants. The soldiers cried "Hurrah!" sang songs and danced, but their faces wore a look of stony indifference.
Then the work began. The company could not be burdened with prisoners, and so all suspected persons whom they came across on the road, and all those who had no passports, were shot without delay. Captain Markof was not mistaken in his psychological analysis; he knew that the steadily increasing irritation of his soldiers would find a certain satisfaction in such bloody chastisement.
On the evening of December 31st the company stopped for the night at a half-ruined baronial farm. They were fifteen versts from the town, and the captain reckoned to get there by three o\'clock the next afternoon. He felt certain that his men would have serious and prolonged work there, and he wanted them to get whatever rest was possible, to quiet and strengthen them for it. He therefore gave orders that they be lodged in the various barns and outhouses of the estate. He himself occupied a large hollow-sounding, empty room, with a Gothic fireplace, in which a bed, taken from the local clergyman, had been placed.
A dark, starless night, windy and sleety, came down upon the farm, swiftly and almost unnoticeably. Alone in his immense empty chamber, Markof sat in front of the fireplace, in which some palings from the plundered estate were burning brightly. He put his feet on the grate and spread out a military map upon his bony knees, attentively studying the neighbourhood between the farm and the town. In the red firelight his face, with its high forehead, turned-up moustaches and firm, obstinate chin, seemed more severe than ever.
The sergeant-major came into the room. The water trickled down on to the floor from his waterproof cloak. He stood still for a moment or two, and then, convinced that the captain had not noticed his entrance, coughed discreetly.
"Is it you?" said the captain, bending his head back. "What is it?"
"Everything is in order, your honour. The third platoon is on guard, the first division at the church wall, the second...."
"All right! What else? Is the pass-word given?"
"Yes, your honour...." The sergeant was silent, as if waiting to hear more, but as the captain said nothing, he began in a lower tone,
"What\'s to be done, your honour, with the three who...."
"Shoot them at dawn," interrupted the captain sharply, not allowing the sergeant to finish his sentence, "And afterwards"—he frowned and looked meaningly at the soldier—"don\'t ask me any more questions about them. Do you understand?"
"Certainly, your honour," answered the soldier emphatically.... And they were both silent again. The captain lay down on the bed without undressing, and the sergeant remained at the door in the shadow. For some reason or other he delayed his departure.
"Is that all?" asked the captain impatiently, without turning his head.
"Yes, that\'s all, your honour." The soldier fidgeted from one foot to another, and then said suddenly, with a determined resolution,
"Your honour ... the soldiers want to know ... what\'s to be done with ... the old man?"
"Get out!" shouted the captain with sudden anger, jumping up from the bed and making as if to strike him.
The sergeant-major turned dexterously in double-quick time, and opened the door. But on the threshold he stopped for a moment and said in an official voice,
"Ah, your honour, permit me to congratulate your honour on the New Year, and to wish...."
"Thanks, brother," answered the captain dryly. "Don\'t forget to have the rifles examined more carefully to-morrow."
Left alone in the room, Markof, neither undressing nor taking off his sword, flung himself down upon the bed and lay with his face toward the fire. His countenance changed suddenly, taking on an appearance of age, and his closely-cropped head drooped on his shoulders; his half-closed eyes wore an expression of pain and weariness. For a whole week he had suffered tortures of fever and had only overcome his illness by force of will. No one in the company knew that at nights he tossed about in fierce paroxysms, shivering in ague, delirious, only losing consciousness for moments, and then in fantastic hideous nightmares.
He lay on his back and watched the blue flames of the dying fire, feeling every moment the stealthy approaches of dizziness and weakness, the accompaniments of his usual attack of malaria. His thoughts were connected in a strange fashion with the old man who had been taken prisoner that morning, about whom the sergeant-major had just been speaking. Markof\'s better judgment divined that the sergeant-major had been right: there was, indeed, something extraordinary about the old man, a certain magnificent indifference to life, mingled with gentleness and a deep melancholy. People of his type, people resembling this old man, though only in a very slight degree, the captain had seen at Lao-Yan and Mukden, among the unmurmuring soldiers dying on the fields of battle. When the three men had been brought before Markof that morning and he had explained to them by the help of cynically-eloquent gestures that they would be dealt with as spies, the faces of the two others had at once turned pale and been distorted by a deadly terror; but the old man had only laughed with a certain strange expression of weariness, indifference, and even ... even as it were of gentle condescending compassion towards the captain himself, the head of the punitive expedition.
"If he is really one of the rebels," Markof reflected, closing his inflamed eyes, and feeling as if a soft and bottomless abyss of darkness yawned before him, "then there is no doubt that he occupies an important position among them, and I\'ve acted very wisely in ordering him to be shot. But suppose the old man is quite innocent? So much the worse for him. I can\'t spare two men to guard him, especially considering what we\'ve got to do to-morrow. In any case, why should he escape the destiny of those fifteen whom we shot yesterday? No, it wouldn\'t be fair to spare him after what we have done to others."
The captain\'s eyes opened slowly, and he started up suddenly in mortal terror.
Seated on a low stool by the bedside, with bent head, and the palms of his hands resting upon his knees, in a quiet and sadly thoughtful attitude, was the old man who had been sentenced to death.
Markof, though he believed in the supernatural and wore on his breast a little bag containing certain holy bones, was no coward in the general sense of the word. To retire in terror, even in the face of the most mysterious and immaterial phenomenon, the captain would have reckoned as much a disgrace as if he had fled before an enemy or uttered a humiliating appeal for mercy. With a quick, accustomed movement he drew his revolver from its leathern case and pointed it at the head of his unknown visitant, and he shouted like a madman,
"If you move, you\'ll go to the devil!"
The old man slowly turned his head. Across his lips there passed that same smile which had engraved itself upon the captain\'s memory in the morning.
"Don\'t be alarmed, Captain. I have come to you without evil intention," said he. "Try to abstain from murder till the morning."
The voice of the strange visitant was as enigmatical as his smile, even monotonous, and as it were without timbre. Long, long ago, in his earliest childhood, Markof had occasionally heard voices like this when he had been left alone in a room, he had heard such voices behind him, voices without colour or expression, calling him by his own name. Obedient to the incomprehensible influence of this smile and this voice, the captain put his revolver under his pillow and lay down again, leaning his head on his elbow, and never taking his eyes from the dark figure of the unknown person. For some minutes the room was filled with a deep and painful silence; there was only heard the ticking of Markof\'s watch, hurriedly beating out the seconds, and the burnt-out fuel in the grate falling with a weak, yet resounding and metallic, crackle.
"Tell me, Markof," began the old man at length, "what would you answer, not to a judge or to the authorities, or even to the emperor, but to your own conscience, should it ask you, \'Why did you enter upon this terrible, unjust slaughter?\'"
Markof shrugged his shoulders as if in mockery.
"You speak rather freely, old man," said he, "for one who is going to be shot in four hours\' time. However, we\'ll have a little conversation, i............