Chapter 17

XVII

THE LAST CRAVAT

The gentleman of the Neva said to him: "If you have nothing further
to say, we will go into the courtyard."

Rouletabille understood at last that hanging him in the room where
judgment had been pronounced was rendered impossible by the violence
of the prisoner just executed. Not only the rope and the ring-bolt
had been torn away, but part of the beam had splintered.

"There is nothing more," replied Rouletabille.

He was mistaken. Something occurred to him, an idea flashed so
suddenly that he became white as his shirt, and had to lean on the
arm of the gentleman of the Neva in order to accompany him.

The door was open. All the men who had voted his death filed out
in gloomy silence. The gentleman of the Neva, who seemed charged
with the last offices for the prisoner, pushed him gently out into
the court.

It was vast, and surrounded by a high board wall; some small
buildings, with closed doors, stood to right and left. A high
chimney, partially demolished, rose from one corner. Rouletabille
decided the whole place was part of some old abandoned mill. Above
his head the sky was pale as a winding sheet. A thunderous,
intermittent, rhythmical noise appraised him that he could not be
far from the sea.

He had plenty of time to note all these things, for they had stopped
the march to execution a moment and had made him sit down in the
open courtyard on an old box. A few steps away from him under the
shed where he certainly was going to be hanged, a man got upon a
stool (the stool that would serve Rouletabille a few moments later)
with his arm raised, and drove with a few blows of a mallet a great
ring-bolt into a beam above his head.

The reporter's eyes, which had not lost their habit of taking
everything in, rested again on a coarse canvas sack that lay on the
ground. The young man felt a slight tremor, for he saw quickly
that the sack swathed a human form. He turned his head away, but
only to confront another empty sack that was intended for him.
Then he closed his eyes. The sound of music came from somewhere
outside, notes of the balalaika. He said to himself, "Well, we
certainly are in Finland"; for he knew that, if the guzla is
Russian the balalaika certainly is Finnish. It is a kind of
accordeon that the peasants pick plaintively in the doorways of
their toubas. He had seen and heard them the afternoon that he
went to Pergalovo, and also a little further away, on the Viborg
line. He pictured to himself the ruined structure where he now
found himself shut in with the revolutionary tribunal, as it must
appear from the outside to passers-by; unsinister, like many others
near it, sheltering under its decaying roof a few