Through Russia Read online

  By now the darkness has ceased to keep spread over us, as it were, the stretched web of a heavy curtain, but has grown thinner and more transparent with the tension, save that, in places (for instance, in the window of the hut), it still lies in thick folds or clots as it peers at us with its sightless eyes.

  Over the hummock-like roofs of the huts rise the church's steeple and the poplar trees; while hither and thither on the wall of the hut, the cracks and holes in the crumbling plaster have caused the wall to resemble the map of an unknown country.

  Glancing at the woman's dark eyes, I perceive them to be shining as pensively, innocently as the eyes of a young maiden.

  "You are indeed a curious woman!" I remark.

  "Perhaps I am," she replies as she moistens her lips with a slender, almost feline tongue.

  "What are you really seeking?"

  "I have considered the matter, and know, at last, my mind. It is this: I hope some day to fall in with a good muzhik with whom to go in search of land. Probably land of the kind, I mean, is to be found in the neighbourhood of New Athos, [A monastery in the Caucasus, built on the reputed site of a cave tenanted by Simeon the Canaanite] for I have been there already, and know of a likely spot for the purpose. And there we shall set our place in order, and lay out a garden and an orchard, and prepare as much plough land as we may need for our working."

  Her words are now firmer, more assured.

  "And when we have put everything in order, other folk may join us; and then, as the oldest settlers in the place, we shall hold the position of honour. And thus things will continue until a new village, really a fine settlement, will have become formed—a settlement of which my husband will be selected the warden until such time as I shall have made of him a barin [Gentleman or squire] outright. Also, children may one day play in that garden, and a summer-house be built there. Ah, how delightful such a life appears!"

  In fact, she has planned out the future so thoroughly that already she can describe the new establishment in as much detail as though she has long been a resident in it.

  "Yes, I yearn indeed for a nice home!" she continues. "Oh that such a home could fall to my lot! But the first requisite, of course, is a muzhik."

  Her gentle face and eyes peer into the waning night as though they aspire to caress everything upon which they may light.

  And all the while I am feeling sorry for her—sorry almost to tears. To conceal the fact I murmur:

  "Should I myself suit you?"

  She gives a faint laugh.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because the ideas in your mind are different from mine."

  "How do you know what my ideas are?"

  She edges away from me a little, then says drily:

  "Because I can see them in your eyes. To be plain, I could never consent."

  With a finger tapping upon the mouldy, gnarled old oaken stump on which we are sitting, she adds:

  "The Cossacks, for instance, live comfortably enough; yet I do not like them."

  "What in them is it that displeases you?"

  "Somehow they repel me. True, much of everything is theirs; yet also they have ways which alienate me."

  Unable any longer to conceal from her my pity, I say gently:

  "Never, I fear, will you discover what you are seeking."

  She shakes her head protestingly.

  "And never ought a woman to be discouraged," she retorts. "Woman's proper round is to wish for a child, and to nurse it, and, when it has been weaned, to get herself ready to have another one. That is how woman should live. She should live as pass spring and summer, autumn and winter."

  I find it a pleasure to watch the play of the woman's intellectual features; and though, also, I long to take her in my arms, I feel that my better plan will be to seek once more the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily deprived me of my passport.

  "What are you yourself seeking?" she asks suddenly as again she edges towards me.

  "Simply nothing. My one desire is to observe how folk live."

  "And are you travelling alone?"

  "I am."

  "Even as am I. Oh God, how many lonely people there are in the world!"

  By this time the cattle are awakening from slumber, and, with their soft lowings, reminding one of a pipe which I used to hear played by a certain blind old man. Next, four times, with unsteady touch, the drowsy watchman strikes his gong—twice softly, once with a vigour that clangs the metal again, and a fourth time with a mere tap of the iron hammer against the copper plate.

  "What sort of lives do the majority of folk lead?"

  "Sorry lives."

  "Yes, that is what I too have found."

  A pause follows. Then the woman says quietly:

  "See, dawn is breaking, yet never this night have my eyes closed. Often I am like that; often I keep thinking and thinking until I seem to be the only human being in the world, and the only human being destined to re-order it."

  "Many folk live unworthy lives. They live them amid discord, abasement, and wrongs innumerable, wrongs born of want and stupidity."

  And as the words leave my lips my mind loses itself in recollections of all the dark and harrowing and shameful scenes that I have beheld.

  "Listen," I say. "You may approach a man with nothing but good in your heart, and be prepared to surrender both your freedom and your strength; yet still he may fail to understand you aright. And how shall he be blamed for this, seeing that never may he have been shown what is good?"

  She lays a hand upon my shoulder, and looks straight into my eyes as she parts her comely lips.

  "True," she rejoins—"But, dear friend, it is also true that goodness never bargains."

  Together she and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer. It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered, transparent clouds which, like thousands of snow-white birds, go gliding over our heads.

  "Yes," she whispers again as gently she gives me a nudge. "As one pursues one's lonely way one thinks and thinks—but of what? Dear friend, you have said that no one really cares what is the matter. Ah, HOW true that is!"

  Here she springs to her feet, and, pulling me up with her, glues herself to my breast with a vehemence which causes me momentarily to push her away. Upon this, bursting into tears, she tends towards me again, and kisses me with lips so dry as almost to cut me—she kisses me in a way which penetrates to my very soul.

  "You have been oh, so good!" she whispers softly. As she speaks, the earth seems to be sinking under my feet.

  Then she tears herself away, glances around the courtyard, and darts to a corner where, under a fence, a clump of herbage is sprouting.

  "Go now," she adds in a whisper. "Yes, go."

  Then, with a confused smile, as, crouching among the herbage as though it had been a small cave, she rearranges her hair, she adds:

  "It has befallen so. Ah, me! May God grant unto me His pardon!"

  Astonished, feeling that I must be dreaming, I gaze at her with gratitude, for I sense an extraordinary lightness to be present in my breast, a radiant void through which joyous, intangible words and thoughts keep flying as swallows wheel across the firmament.

  "Amid a great sorrow," she adds, "even a small joy becomes a great felicity."

  Yet as I glance at the woman's bosom, whereon moist beads are standing like dewdrops on the outer earth; as I glance at that bosom, whereon the sun's rays are finding a roseate reflection, as though the blood were oozing through the skin, my rapture dies away, and turns to sorrow, heartache, and tears. For in me there is a presentiment that before
the living juice within that bosom shall have borne fruit, it will have become dried up.

  Presently, in a tone almost of self-excuse, and one wherein the words sound a little sadly, she continues:

  "Times there are when something comes pouring into my soul which makes my breasts ache with the pain of it. What is there for me to do at such moments save reveal my thoughts to the moon, or, in the daytime, to a river? Oh God in Heaven! And afterwards I feel as ashamed of myself!... Do not look at me like that. Why stare at me with those eyes, eyes so like the eyes of a child?"

  "YOUR face, rather, is like a child's," I remark.

  "What? Is it so stupid?"

  "Something like that."

  As she fastens up her bodice she continues:

  "Soon the time will be five o'clock, when the bell will ring for Mass. To Mass I must go today, for I have a prayer to offer to the Mother of God... Shall you be leaving here soon?"

  "Yes—as soon, that is to say, as I have received back my passport."

  "And for what destination?"

  "For Alatyr. And you?"

  She straightens her attire, and rises. As she does so I perceive that her hips are narrower than her shoulders, and that throughout she is well-proportioned and symmetrical.

  "I? As yet I do not know. True, I had thought of proceeding to Naltchik, but now, perhaps, I shall not do so, for all my future is uncertain."

  Upon that she extends to me a pair of strong, capable arms, and proposes with a blush:

  "Shall we kiss once more before we part?"

  She clasps me with the one arm, and with the other makes the sign of the cross, adding:

  "Good-bye, dear friend, and may Christ requite you for all your words, for all your sympathy!"

  "Then shall we travel together?"

  At the words she frees herself, and says firmly, nay, sternly:

  "Not so. Never would I consent to such a plan. Of course, had you been a muzhik—but no. Even then what would have been the use of it, seeing that life is to be measured, not by a single hour, but by years?"

  And, quietly smiling me a farewell, she moves away towards the hut, whilst I, remaining seated, lose myself in thoughts of her. Will she ever overtake her quest in life? Shall I ever behold her again?

  The bell for early Mass begins, though for some time past the hamlet has been astir, and humming in a sedate and non-festive fashion.

  I enter the hut to fetch my wallet, and find the place empty. Evidently the whole party has left by the gap in the broken-down wall.

  I repair, next, to the Ataman's office, where I receive back my passport before setting out to look for my companions in the square.

  In similar fashion to yesterday those "folk from Russia" are lolling alongside the churchyard wall, and also have seated among them, leaning his back against a log, the fat-jowled youth from Penza, with his bruised face looking even larger and uglier than before, for the reason that his eyes are sunken amid purple protuberances.

  Presently there arrives a newcomer in the shape of an old man with a grey head adorned with a faded velvet skull-cap, a pointed beard, a lean, withered frame, prominent cheekbones, a red, porous-looking, cunningly hooked nose, and the eyes of a thief.

  Him a flaxen-haired youth from Orel joins with a similar youth in accosting.

  "Why are YOU tramping?" inquires the former.

  "And why are YOU?" the old man retorts in nasal tones as, looking at no one, he proceeds to mend the handle of a battered metal teapot with a piece of wire.

  "We are travelling in search of work, and therefore living as we have been commanded to live."

  "By WHOM commanded?"

  "By God. Have you forgotten?"

  Carelessly, but succinctly, the old man retorts:

  "Take heed lest upon you, some day, God vomit all the dust and litter which you are raising by tramping His earth!"

  "How?" cries one of the youths, a long-eared stripling.

  "Were not Christ and His Apostles also tramps?"

  "Yes, CHRIST," is the old man's meaning reply as he raises his sharp eyes to those of his opponent. "But what are you talking of, you fools? With whom are you daring to compare yourselves? Take care lest I report you to the Cossacks!"

  I have listened to many such arguments, and always found them distasteful, even as I have done discussions regarding the soul. Hence I feel inclined to depart.

  At this moment, however, Konev makes his appearance. His mien is dejected, and his body perspiring, while his eyes keep blinking rapidly.

  "Has any one seen Tanka—that woman from Riazan?" he inquires. "No? Then the bitch must have bolted during the night. The fact is that, overnight, someone gave me a drop or two to drink, a mere dram, but enough to lay me as fast asleep as a bear in winter-time. And in the meantime, she must have run away with that Penza fellow."

  "No, HE is here," I remark.

  "Oh, he is, is he? Well, as what has the company registered itself? As a set of ikon-painters, I should think!"

  Again he begins to look anxiously about him.

  "Where can she have got to?" he queries.

  "To Mass, maybe."

  "Of course! Well, I am greatly smitten with her. Yes, my word I am!"

  Nevertheless, when Mass comes to an end, and, to the sound of a merry peal of bells, the well-dressed local Cossacks file out of church, and distribute themselves in gaudy streams about the hamlet, no Tatiana makes her appearance.

  "Then she IS gone," says Konev ruefully. "But I'll find her yet! I'LL come up with her!"

  That this will happen I do not feel confident. Nor do I desire that it should.

  * * *

  Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement.

  Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists. That is to say, it would seem as though, "by order of the authorities," the inmates are presenting a stage spectacle in which they are playing, willingly and zealously, but with a complete lack of experience, imperfectly comprehended roles as prisoners, warders, and gendarmes.

  For instance, today, when a warder and a gendarme came to my cell to escort me to exercise, and I said to them, "May I be excused exercise today? I am not very well, and do not feel like, etcetera, etcetera," the gendarme, a tall, handsome man with a red beard, held up to me a warning finger.

  "NO ONE," he said, "has given you permission to feel, or not to feel, like doing things."

  To which the warder, a man as dark as a chimney-sweep, with large blue "whites" to his eyes, added stutteringly:

  "To no one here has permission been given to feel, or not to feel, like doing things. You hear that?"

  So to exercise I went.

  In this stone-paved yard the air is as hot as in an oven, for overhead there lours only a small, flat patch of dull, drab-tinted sky, and on three sides of the yard rise high grey walls, with, on the fourth, the entrance-gates, topped by a sort of look-out post.

  Over the roof of the building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town's Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which a myriad drumsticks are beating.

  Through the bars of the double line of windows on the second and the third stories peer the murky faces and towsled heads of some of the inmates. One of the latter spits his furthest into the yard—evidently with the intention of hitting myself: but all his efforts prove vain. Another one shouts with a mordant expletive:

  "Hi, you! Why do you keep tramping up and down like an old hen? Hold up your head!"

  Meanwhile the inmates continue to intone in concert a strange chant which is as tangled as a skein of wool after serving as a plaything for a kitten's prolonged game of sport. Sad
ly the chant meanders, wavers, to a high, wailing note. Then, as it were, it soars yet higher towards the dull, murky sky, breaks suddenly into a snarl, and, growling like a wild beast in terror, dies away to give place to a refrain which coils, trickles forth from between the bars of the windows until it has permeated the free, torrid air.

  As I listen to that refrain, long familiar to me, it seems to voice something intelligible, and agitates my soul almost to a sense of agony....

  Presently, while pacing up and down in the shadow of the building, I happen to glance towards the line of windows. Glued to the framework of one of the iron window-squares, I can discern a blue-eyed face. Overgrown with an untidy sable beard it is, as well as stamped with a look of perpetually grieved surprise.

  "That must be Konev," I say to myself aloud.

  Konev it is—Konev of the well-remembered eyes. Even at this moment they are regarding me with puckered attention.

  I throw around me a hasty glance. My own warder is dozing on a shady bench near the entrance. Two more warders are engaged in throwing dice. A fourth is superintending the pumping of water by two convicts, and superciliously marking time for their lever with the formula, "Mashkam, dashkam! Dashkam, mashkam!"

  I move towards the wall.

  "Is that you, Konev?" is my inquiry.

  "It is," he mutters as he thrusts his head a little further through the grating. "Yes, Konev I am, but who you are I have not a notion."

  "What are you here for?"

  "For a matter of base coin, though, to be truthful, I am here accidentally, without genuine cause."

  The warder rouses himself, and, with his keys jingling like a set of fetters, utters drowsily the command:

  "Do not stand still. Also, move further from the wall. To approach it is forbidden."

  "But it is so hot in the middle of the yard, sir!"

  "Everywhere it is hot," retorts the man reprovingly, and his head subsides again. From above comes the whispered query:

  "Who ARE you?"

  "Well, do you remember Tatiana, the woman from Riazan?"

  "DO I remember her?" Konev's voice has in it a touch of subdued resentment. "DO I remember her? Why, I was tried in court together with her!"