Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/62

 else in the district to make another stupid speech. It was tiresome!

At first the prisoner coughed nervously and paled. But soon even he succumbed to the all-pervading calm, monotony, and tedium. Glancing with dull respect at the judges' uniforms and the jurymen's tired faces, he blinked his eyes indifferently. The legal atmosphere and procedure, fear of which had so tortured him in gaol, acted now as a sedative. Nothing fulfilled his expectations. He had come into court charged of murder; yet he found no threatening faces, no indignant gestures, no loud phrases about justice, no interest in his uncommon lot; not even his judges turned on him a long and searching glance. The dark windows, the walls, the secretary's voice, the procurator's pose—all were soaked with official indifference and exhaled a chill. It seemed as if a murderer were a simple office accessory, as if he were to be judged not by living men, but by some invisible machine, brought God knows whence.

The narcotised peasant did not understand that his judges were as used to the dramas and tragedies of life as hospital doctors are to death, and that it was just in this mechanical impartiality that lay the terror, the hopelessness of his case. For if, instead of sitting still, he had risen and begun to implore, to shed tears for mercy, to repent bitterly, to die of