death; death was now rather welcome to him. Death with all its eternal
mysteriousness and incomprehensibility was more acceptable to his reason
than this strangely and fantastically changed world. What is more,
death seemed to have been destroyed completely in this insane world of
phantoms and puppets, having lost its great and enigmatic significance,
becoming something mechanical and only for that reason terrible. He
would be seized, taken, led, hanged, pulled by the feet, the rope would
be cut, he would be taken down, carried off and buried.

And the man would have disappeared from the world.

At the trial the nearness of his comrades brought Kashirin to himself.
For an instant he imagined he saw real people; they were sitting
and trying him, speaking like human beings, listening, apparently
understanding him. But as he mentally rehearsed the meeting with his
mother he clearly felt with the terror of a man who is beginning to lose
his reason and who realizes it, that this old woman in the black little
kerchief was only an artificial, mechanical puppet, of the kind that can
say "pa-pa," "ma-ma," but somewhat better constructed. He tried to speak
to her, while thinking at the same time with a shudder:

"O Lord! That is a puppet. A mother doll. And there is a soldier-puppet,
and there, at home, is a father-puppet, and this is the puppet of Vasily
Kashirin."

It seemed to him that in another moment he would hear somewhere the
creaking of the mechanism, the screeching of un-oiled wheels. When his
mother began to cry, something human again flashed for an instant, but
at the very first words it disappeared again, and it was interesting and
terrible to see that water was flowing from the eyes of the doll.

Then, in his cell, when the terror had become unbearable, Vasily
Kashirin attempted to pray. Of all that had surrounded his childhood
days in his father's house under the guise of religion only a repulsive,
bitter and irritating sediment remained; but faith there was none. But
once, perhaps in his earliest childhood, he had heard a few words which
had filled him with palpitating emotion and which remained during all
his life enwrapped with tender poetry. These words were:

"The joy of all the afflicted..."

It had happened, during painful periods in his life, that he whispered
to himself, not in prayer, without being definitely conscious of it,
these words: "The joy of all the afflicted"--and suddenly he would feel
r