《War And Peace》　Book11 　CHAPTER XXIII
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

IN AN UNFINISHED HOUSE in Varvarka, the lower part of which was a pot-house,
there were sounds of drunken brawling and singing. Some ten factory hands were
sitting on benches at tables in a little, dirty room. Tipsy, sweating,
blear-eyed, with wide-gaping mouths, bloated with drink, they were singing some
sort of a song. They were singing discordantly, with toil, with labour, not
because they wanted to sing, but simply to betoken that they were drunk, and
were enjoying themselves. One of them, a tall, flaxen-headed fellow, in a clean,
blue long coat was standing over the rest. His face, with its straight, fine
nose, would have been handsome, but for the thick, compressed, continually
twitching lips and the lustreless, staring, and frowning eyes. He was standing
over the singers, and, obviously with some notion in his head, was making solemn
and angular passes over their heads with his bare, white arm, while he tried to
spread his dirty fingers out unnaturally wide apart. The sleeve of his coat was
incessantly slipping down, and the young fellow kept carefully tucking it up
again with his left hand, as though there was something of special significance
requiring that white, sinewy, waving arm to be bare. In the middle of the song,
shouts and blows were heard in the passage and the porch. The tall fellow waved
his arms.

"Shut up!" he shouted peremptorily. "A fight, lads!" and still tucking up his
sleeves, he went out to the porch.

The factory hands followed him. They had brought the tavern- keeper some
skins that morning from the factory, had had drink given them for this service,
and had been drinking under the leadership of the tall young man. The
blacksmiths working in a smithy hard by heard the sounds of revelry in the
pothouse, and supposing the house had been forcibly broken into, wanted to break
in too. A conflict was going on in the porch.

The tavern-keeper was fighting with a blacksmith in the doorway, and at the
moment when the factory hands emerged, the smith had reeled away from the
tavern-keeper, and fallen on his face on the pavement.

Another smith dashed in at the door, staggering with his chest against the
tavern-keeper.

The young man with the sleeve tucked up, as he went, dealt a blow in the face
of the smith who had dashed in at the door, and shouted wildly:

"Lads! they are beating our mates!"

Meanwhile, the smith got up from the ground, and with blood spurting from his
bruised face, cried in a wailing voice:

"Help! They have killed me ...! They have killed a man! Mates! ..."

"Oy, mercy on us, killed entirely, a man killed!" squealed a woman, coming
out of the gates next door. A crowd of people gathered round the blood-stained
smith.

"Haven't you ruined folks enough, stripping the shirts off their backs?" said
a voice, addressing the tavern-keeper; "and so now you have murdered a man!
Blackguard!"

The tall young man standing on the steps turned his bleared eyes from the
tavern-keeper to the smiths, as though considering with which to fight.

"Cut-throat!" he cried suddenly at the tavern-keeper. "Lads, bind him!"

"Indeed, and you try and bind a man like me!" bawled the tavern-keeper,
tearing himself away from the men who threw themselves on him, and taking off
his cap, he flung it on the ground. As though this act had some mysterious and
menacing significance, the factory hands, who had surrounded the tavern-keeper,
stood still in uncertainty.

"I know the law, mate, very well, I do. I'll go to the police. Are you
thinking I won't find them? Robbery's not the order of the day for any one!"
bawled the tavern-keeper, picking up his cap.

"And go we will, so there!" ... "And go we will ... so there!" the tavern-keeper
and the tall fellow repeated after one another, and both together moved forward
along the street. The blood-bespattered smith walked on a level with them. The
factory-hands and a mob of outsiders followed them with talk and shouting.

At the corner of Maroseyka, opposite a great house with closed shutters, and
the signboard of a bootmaker, stood a group of some twenty bootmakers, thin,
exhausted-looking men, with dejected faces, in loose smocks, and torn
coats.

"He ought to pay folks properly!" a thin boot hand, with a scant beard and
scowling brows, was saying. "He's sucked the life-blood out of us, and then he's
quit of us. He's been promising and promising us all the week. And now he's
driven us to the last point, and he's made off." Seeing the mob and the
blood-bespattered smith, the man paused, and the bootmakers with inquisitive
eagerness joined the moving crowd.

"Where are the folks going?"

"Going to the police, to be sure."

"Is it true we are beaten?"

"Why, what did you think? Look what folks are saying!"

Questions and answers were audible. The tavern-keeper, taking advantage of
the increased numbers of the rabble, dropped behind the mob, and went back to
his tavern.

The tall young fellow, not remarking the disappearance of his foe, the
tavern-keeper, still moved his bare arm and talked incessantly, attracting the
attention of all. The mob pressed about his figure principally, expecting to get
from him some solution of the questions that were absorbing all of them.

"Let them show the order, let him show the law, that's what the government's
for! Isn't it the truth I am saying, good Christian folk?" said the tall young
man, faintly smiling.

"Does he suppose there's no government? Could we do without government?
Wouldn't there be plenty to rob us, eh?"

"Why talk nonsense!" was murmured in the crowd. "Why, will they leave Moscow
like this! They told you a lot of stuff in joke, and you believed them. Haven't
we troops enough? No fear, they won't let him enter! That's what the
government's for. Ay, listen what folks are prating of!" they said, pointing to
the tall fellow.

By the wall of the Kitay-Gorod there was another small group of people
gathered about a man in a frieze coat, who held a paper in his hand.

"A decree, a decree being read! A decree is being read," was heard in the
crowd, and the mob surged round the reader.

The man in the frieze coat was reading the placard of the 31st of August.
When the mob crowded round, he seemed disconcerted, but at the demand of the
tall fellow who pressed close up to him, he began with a faint quiver in his
voice reading the notice again from the beginning.

"Early to-morrow I am going to his highness the prince," he read ("his
highness!" the tall young man repeated, with a triumphant smile and knitted
brows), "to consult with him, to act and to aid the troops to exterminate the
wretches; we, too, will destroy them root and branch ..." the reader went on and
paused ("D'ye see?" bawled the tall fellow with an air of victory. "He'll
unravel the whole evil for you ...") "and send our visitors packing to the devil;
I shall come back to dinner, and we will set to work, we will be doing till we
have done, and done away with the villains."

These last words were uttered by the reader in the midst of complete silence.
The tall fellow's head sank dejectedly. It was obvious that nobody had
understood these last words. The words "I shall come back to dinner" in especial
seemed to offend both reader and audience. The faculties of the crowd were
strained to the highest pitch, and this was too easy and unnecessarily simple;
it was just what any one of them might have said, and what for that reason could
not be said in a decree coming from a higher authority.

All stood in depressed silence. The tall fellow's lips moved, and he
staggered.

"Ask him! ... Isn't that himself? ... How'd it be to ask him! Or else ... He'll
explain ..." was suddenly heard in the back rows of the crowd, and the general
attention turned to the chaise of the head of the police, which drove into the
square, escorted by two mounted dragoons.

The head of the police, who had driven out that morning by Count
Rastoptchin's command to set fire to the barques in the river, and had received
for that commission a large sum of money, at that moment in his pocket, ordered
his coachman to stop on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him.

"What are those people?" he shouted to the people, who timidly approached the
chaise in detached groups. "What is this crowd, I ask you?" repeated the head of
police, receiving no reply.

"Your honour," said the man in the frieze coat, "it was their wish, your
honour, not sparing their substance, in accord with his excellency the count's
proclamation, to serve, and not to make a riot at all, as his excellency said
..."

"The count has not gone, he is here, and will give orders about you," said
the head of police. "Go on!" he said to his coachman. The crowd stood still,
pressing round those who had heard what was said by the official, and looking at
the departing chaise.

The head of the police meantime looked about him in alarm, and said something
to his coachman; the horses trotted faster.

"Cheated, mates! Lead us to himself!" bawled the voice of the tall fellow.
"Don't let him go, lads! Let him answer for it! Keep him!" roared voices, and
the crowd dashed full speed after the chaise.

The mob in noisy talk pursued the head of the police to Lubyanka.

"Why, the gentry and the tradespeople are all gone, and we are left to
perish. Are we dogs, pray?" was heard more frequently in the crowd.