staggered the boy so much that, staring with wide-open eyes and open mouth, he was just beginning to cry. Then Svetlogoúb kissed his hand to him with a kind smile, and the boy suddenly and unexpectedly answered with a sweet, kindly smile.
During the whole of the drive the consciousness of what awaited him did not disturb Svetlogoúb’s calm and solemn state of mind.
Only when the car approached the gallows and he was helped out, and saw the posts with the crossbeam, and the cord that hung from it slightly swinging in the breeze, he experienced an almost physical blow on his heart. He suddenly felt sick. But this did not last long. Beneath the scaffold he saw black rows of soldiers with guns; officers were walking in front of them; and as soon as they began helping him down from the car, he heard an unexpected rattle of beating drums, which made him start. Behind the rows of soldiers Svetlogoúb perceived carriages with ladies and gentlemen, who had come to see the sight. All this surprised him for a moment, but he immediately recollected himself as he had been before his imprisonment, and felt sorry these people did not know what he now knew. “But they will know. … I shall die, but truth will not die. They too will know! And how happy everybody—not I—but they all might be, and will be!”
They led him on to the scaffold, an officer following. The drums became silent, and the officer, in an unnatural tone, which sounded peculiarly weak amid the open fields and after the rattle of the drums, read the same stupid words of the sentence that had been read to him in court: about his being deprived of all his rights—he whom they were about to kill!—and about the near and more distant future. “Oh, why, why do they do all this?” thought Svetlogoúb. “What a pity it is that they don’t know, and that I can no longer tell them of it! But they will know—everyone will know. …”