ALEXANDER KUPRIN (continued 4)

He came to his senses again in a stuffy iron cage, which was jolting and shaking as it was drawn along the cobbled roadway, on a badly-jointed vehicle trembling in all its parts. From its acrid doggy odour Jack guessed at once that this cart must have been used for years to convey dogs of all breeds and all ages. On the box in front sat two men, whose out-ward appearance was not at all calculated to inspire confidence.

There was already a sufficiently large company in the cart. First of all, Jack noticed the mouse-coloured dog whom he had just met and quarrelled with in the street. He was standing with his head stuck out between two of the iron bars, and he whined pitifully as his body was jolted backwards and forwards by the movement of the cart. In the middle of the cage lay an old white poodle, his wise-looking head lying between his gouty paws. His coat was cut to make him look like a lion, with tufts left on his knees and at the end of his tail. The poodle had apparently resigned himself to his situation with a stoic philosophy, and if he had not sighed occasionally and wrinkled his brows, it might have been thought that he slept. By his side, trembling from agitation and the cold of the early morning, sat a fine well-kept greyhound, with long thin legs and sharp-pointed head. She yawned nervously from time to time, rolling up her rosy little tongue into a tube, accompanying the yawn with a long-drawn-out, high-pitched whine.... Near the back of the cage, pressed close up to the bars, was a black dachshund, with smooth skin dappled with yellow on the breast and above the eyes. She could not get over her astonishment at her position, and she looked a strangely comical figure with her flopping paws and crocodile body, and the serious expression of her head with its ears reaching almost to the ground.

Besides this more or less distinguished society, there were in the cage two unmistakable yard dogs. One of them was that sort of dog which is generally called Bouton, and is always noted for its meanness of disposition. She was a shaggy, reddish-coloured animal with a shaggy tail, curled up like the figure 9. She had been the first of the dogs to be captured, and she had apparently become so accustomed to her position that she had for some time past made many efforts to begin an interesting conversation with someone. The last dog of all was out of sight, he had been driven into the darkest corner, and lay there curled up in a heap. He had only moved once all the time, and that had been to growl at Jack when he had found himself near him. Everyone in the company felt a strong antipathy against him. In the first place, he was smeared all over with a violet colour, the work of certain journeyman whitewashers; secondly, his hair was rough and bristly and uncombed; thirdly, he was evidently mangy, hungry, strong and daring—this had been quite evident in the resolute push of his lean body with which he had greeted the arrival of the unconscious Jack.

There was silence for a quarter of an hour. At last Jack, whose healthy sense of humour never forsook him under any circumstances, remarked in a jaunty tone:

“The adventure begins to be interesting. I am curious to know where these gentlemen will make their first stopping place.”

The old poodle did not like the frivolous tone of the brown pointer. He turned his head slowly in Jack’s direction, and said sharply, with a cold sarcasm:

“I can satisfy your curiosity, young man. These gentlemen will make their first stopping place at the slaughter-house.”

“Where? Pardon me, please, I didn’t catch the word,” muttered Jack, sitting down involuntarily, for his legs had suddenly begun to tremble. “You were pleased to say—at the s-s ...”

“Yes, at the slaughter-house,” repeated the poodle coldly, turning his head away.

“Pardon me, but I don’t quite understand.... Slaughter-house? ... What kind of an institution is that? Won’t you be so good as to explain?”

The poodle was silent. But as the greyhound and the terrier both joined their petition to Jack’s, the old poodle, who did not wish to appear impolite in the presence of ladies, felt obliged to enter into certain details.

“Well, you see mesdames, it is a sort of large courtyard surrounded by a high fence with sharp points, where they shut in all dogs found wandering in the streets. I’ve had the unhappiness to be taken there three times already.”

“I’ve never seen you!” was heard in a hoarse voice from the dark corner. “And this is the seventh time I’ve been there.”

There was no doubt that the voice from the dark corner belonged to the violet-coloured dog. The company was shocked at the interruption of their conversation by this rude person, and so pretended not to hear the remark. But Bouton, with the cringing eagerness of an upstart in society, cried out: “Please don’t interfere in other people’s conversation unless you’re asked,” and then turned at once to the important-looking mouse-coloured dog for approbation.

“I’ve been there three times,” the poodle went on, “but my master has always come and fetched me away again. I play in a circus, and you understand that I am of some value. Well, in this unpleasant place they have a collection of two or three hundred dogs....”

“But, tell me ... is there good society there?” asked the greyhound affectedly.

“Sometimes. They feed us very badly and give us little to eat. Occasionally one of the dogs disappears, and then they give us a dinner of ...”

In order to heighten the effect of his words, the poodle made a slight pause, looked round on his audience, and then added with studied indifference:

—“Of dog’s flesh.”

At these words the company was filled with terror and indignation.

“Devil take it ... what low-down scoundrelism!” exclaimed Jack.

“I shall faint ... I feel so ill,” murmured the greyhound.

“That’s dreadful ... dreadful ...” moaned the dachshund.

“I’ve always said that men were scoundrels,” snarled the mouse-coloured dog.

“What a strange death!” sighed Bouton.

But from the dark corner was heard once more the voice of the violet-coloured dog. With gloomy and cynical sarcasm he said:

“The soup’s not so bad, though—it’s not at all bad, though, of course, some ladies who are accustomed to eat chicken cutlets would find dog’s flesh a little too tough.”

The poodle paid no attention to this rude remark, but went on:

“And afterwards I gathered from the manager’s talk that our late companion’s skin had gone to make ladies’ gloves. But ... prepare your nerves, mesdames ... but, this is nothing.... In order to make the skin softer and more smooth, it must be taken from the living animal.”

Cries of despair broke in upon the poodle’s speech.

“How inhuman!”

“What mean conduct!”

“No, that can’t be true!”

“O Lord!”

“Murderers!”

“No, worse than murderers!”

After this outburst there was a strained and melancholy silence. Each of them had a mental picture, a fearful foreboding of what it might be to be skinned alive.

“Ladies and gentlemen, is there no way of getting all honourable dogs free, once and for all, from their shameful slavery to mankind?” cried Jack passionately.

“Be so good as to find a way,” said the old poodle ironically.

The dogs all began to try and think of a way.

“Bite them all, and have an end of it!” said the big dog in his angry bass.

“Yes, that’s the way; we need a radical remedy,” seconded the servile Bouton. “In the end they’ll be afraid of us.”

“Yes, bite them all—that’s a splendid idea,” said the old poodle. “But what’s your opinion, dear sirs, about their long whips? No doubt you’re acquainted with them!”

“H’m.” The dog coughed and cleared his throat.

“H’m,” echoed Bouton.

“No, take my word for it, gentlemen, we cannot struggle against men. I’ve lived in this world for some time, and I’ve not had a bad life.... Take for example such simple things as kennels, whips, chains, muzzles—things, I imagine, not unknown to any one of us. Let us suppose that we dogs succeed in thinking out a plan which will free us from these things. Will not man then arm himself with more perfect instruments? There is no doubt that he will. Haven’t you seen what instruments of torture they make for one another? No, we must submit to them, gentlemen, that’s all about it. It’s a law of Nature.”

“Well, he’s shown us his philosophy,” whispered the dachshund in Jack’s ear. “I’ve no patience with these old folks and their teaching.”

“You’re quite right, mademoiselle,” said Jack, gallantly wagging his tail.

The mouse-coloured dog was looking very melancholy and snapping at the flies. He drawled out in a whining tone:

“Eh, it’s a dog’s life!”

“And where is the justice of it all?”—the greyhound, who had been silent up to this point, began to agitate herself—“You, Mr. Poodle, pardon me, I haven’t the honour of knowing your name.”

“Arto, professor of equilibristics, at your service.” The poodle bowed.

“Well, tell me, Mr. Professor, you have apparently had such great experience, let alone your learning—tell me, where is the higher justice of it all? Are human beings so much more worthy and better than we are, that they are allowed to take advantage of so many cruel privileges with impunity?”

“They are not any better or any more worthy than we are, dear young lady, but they are stronger and wiser,” answered Arto, with some heat. “Oh, I know the morals of these two-legged animals very well.... In the first place, they are greedy—greedier than any dog on earth. They have so much bread and meat and water that all these monsters could be satisfied and well-fed all their lives. But instead of sharing it out, a tenth of them get all the provisions for life into their hands, and not being able to devour it all themselves, they force the remaining nine-tenths to go hungry. Now, tell me, is it possible that a well-fed dog would not share a gnawed bone with his neighbour?”

“He’d share it, of course he would!” agreed all the listeners.

“H’m,” coughed the dog doubtfully.

“And besides that, people are wicked. Who could ever say that one dog would kill another—on account of love or envy or malice? We bite one another sometimes, that’s true. But we don’t take each other’s lives.”

“No, indeed we don’t,” they all affirmed.

“And more than this,” went on the white poodle. “Could one dog make up his mind not to allow another dog to breathe the fresh air, or to be free to express his thoughts as to the arrangements for the happiness of dogs? But men do this.”

“Devil take them!” put in the mouse-coloured dog energetically.

“And, in conclusion, I say that men are hypocrites; they envy one another, they lie, they are inhospitable, cruel.... And yet they rule over us, and will continue to do so ... because it’s arranged like that. It is impossible for us to free ourselves from their authority. All the life of dogs, and all their happiness, is in the hands of men. In our present position each one of us, who has a good master, ought to thank Fate. Only a master can free us from the pleasure of eating a comrade’s flesh, and of imagining that comrade’s feelings when he was being skinned alive.”

The professor’s speech reduced the whole company to a state of melancholy. No other dog could utter a word. They all shivered helplessly, and shook with the joltings of the cart. The big dog whined piteously. Bouton, who was standing next to him, pressed his own body softly up against him.

But soon they felt that the wheels of the cart were passing over sand. In five minutes more they were driven through wide open gates, and they found themselves in the middle of an immense courtyard surrounded by a close paling. Sharp nails were sticking out at the top of the paling. Two hundred dogs, lean and dirty, with drooping tails and a look of melancholy on their faces, wandered about the yard.

The doors of the cage were flung open. All the seven new-comers came forth and instinctively stood together in one group.

“Here, you professor, how do you feel now?” The poodle heard a bark behind him.

He turned round and saw the violet-coloured dog smiling insolently at him.

“Oh, leave me alone,” growled the old poodle. “It’s no business of yours.”

“I only made a remark,” said the other. “You spoke such words of wisdom in the cart, but you made one mistake. Yes, you did.”

“Get away, devil take you! What mistake?”

“About a dog’s happiness. If you like, I’ll show you in whose hands a dog’s happiness lies.”

And suddenly pressing back his ears and extending his tail, the violet dog set out on such a mad career that the old professor of equilibristics could only stand and watch him with open mouth.

“Catch him! Stop him!” shouted the keepers, flinging themselves in pursuit of the escaping dog. But the violet dog had already gained the paling. With one bound he sprang up from the ground and found himself at the top, hanging on by his fore-paws. And in two more convulsive springs he had leaped over the paling, leaving on the nails a good half of his side.

The old white poodle gazed after him for a long time. He understood the mistake he had made.

XII

A CLUMP OF LILACS

Nikolai Yevgrafovitch Almazof hardly waited for his wife to open the door to him; he went straight to his study without taking off his hat or coat. His wife knew in a moment by his frowning face and nervously-bitten underlip that a great misfortune had occurred.

She followed him in silence. Almazof stood still for a moment when he reached the study, and stared gloomily into one corner, then he dashed his portfolio out of his hand on to the floor, where it lay wide open, and threw himself into an armchair, irritably snapping his fingers together.

He was a young and poor army officer attending a course of lectures at the staff office academy, and had just returned from a class. To-day he had taken in to the professor his last and most difficult practical work, a survey of the neighbourhood.

So far all his examinations had gone well, and it was only known to God and to his wife what fearful labour they had cost him.... To begin with, his very entrance into the academy had seemed impossible at first. Two years in succession he had failed ignominiously, and only in the third had he by determined effort overcome all hindrances. If it hadn’t been for his wife he would not have had sufficient energy to continue the struggle; he would have given it up entirely. But Verotchka never allowed him to lose heart, she was always encouraging him ... she met every drawback with a bright, almost gay, front. She denied herself everything so that her husband might have all the little things so necessary for a man engaged in mental labour; she was his secretary, draughtsman, reader, lesson-hearer, and note-book all in one.

For five minutes there was a dead silence, broken only by the sorry sound of their old alarm clock, familiar and tiresome ... one, two, three-three—two clear ticks, and the third with a hoarse stammer. Almazof still sat in his hat and coat, turning to one side in his chair.... Vera stood two paces from him, silent also, her beautiful mobile face full of suffering. At length she broke the stillness with the cautiousness a woman might use when speaking at the bedside of a very sick friend:

“Well, Kolya, what about the work? Was it bad?”

He shrugged his shoulders without speaking.

“Kolya, was it rejected? Tell me; we must talk it over together.”

Almazof turned to his wife and began to speak irritably and passionately, as one generally does speak when telling of an insult long endured.

“Yes, yes. They’ve rejected it, if you want to know. Can’t you see they have? It’s all gone to the devil! All that rubbish”—he kicked the portfolio with his foot—“all that rubbish had better be thrown into the fire. That’s your academy. I shall be back in the regiment with a bang next month, disgraced. And all for a filthy spot ... damn it!”

“What spot, Kolya?” asked she. “I don’t understand anything about it.”

She sat down on the side of his chair and put her arm round his neck. He made no resistance, but still continued to stare into the corner with an injured expression.

“What spot was it, Kolya?” asked his wife once more.

“Oh, an ordinary spot—of green paint. You know I sat up until three o’clock last night to finish my drawing. The plan was beautifully done. Everyone said so. Well, I sat there last night and I got so tired that my hand shook, and I made a blot—such a big one.... I tried to erase it, but I only made it worse.... I thought and thought what I had better do, and I made up my mind to put a clump of trees in that place.... It was very successful, and no one could guess there had been a blot. Well, to-day I took it in to the professor. ‘Yes, yes,’ said he, ‘that’s very well. But what have you got here, lieutenant; where have these bushes sprung from?’ Of course, I ought to have told him what had happened. Perhaps he would only have laughed ... but no, he wouldn’t, he’s such an accurate German, such a pedant. So I said, ‘There are some trees growing there.’ ‘Oh, no, no,’ said he. ‘I know this neighbourhood as well as I know the five fingers of my own hand; there can’t be any trees there.’ So, my word against his, we had a great argument about it; many of our officers were there too, listening. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if you’re so sure that there are trees in this hollow, be so good as to ride over with me to-morrow and see. I’ll prove to you that you’ve either done your work carelessly, or that you’ve copied it from a three versts to the inch map....’”

“But why was he so certain that no bushes were there?”

“Oh, Lord, why? What childish questions you do ask! Because he’s known this district for twenty years; he knows it better than his own bedroom. He’s the most fearful pedant in the world, and a German besides.... Well, of course, he’ll know in the end that I was lying and so discussed the point with him....”

All the time he spoke he kept picking up burnt matches from the ash-tray on the table in front of him, and breaking them to little bits. When he ceased speaking, he threw the pieces on the floor. It was quite evident that, strong man though he was, he was very near weeping.

For a long while husband and wife sat there silent. Then suddenly Verotchka jumped up from her seat.

“Listen, Kolya,” said she. “We must go this very minute. Make haste and get ready.”

Nikolai Yevgrafovitch wrinkled up his face as if he were suffering some intolerable pain.

“Oh, don’t talk nonsense, Vera,” he said. “You don’t think I can go and put matters right by apologising, do you? That would be asking for punishment. Don’t be foolish, please!”

“No, it’s not foolishness,” said Vera, stamping her toot. “Nobody wants you to go and apologise. But, don’t you see, if there aren’t any silly old trees there we’d better go and put some.”

“Put some—trees!” exclaimed Nikolai Yevgrafovitch, his eyes staring.

“Yes, put some there. If you didn’t speak the truth, then you must make it true. Come along, get ready. Give me my hat ... and coat. No, not there; in the cupboard.... Umbrella!”

And while Almazof, finding his objections entirely ignored, began to look for the hat and coat, Vera opened drawers and brought out various little boxes and cases.

“Earrings.... No, they’re no good. We shan’t get anything on them. Ah, here’s this ring with the valuable stone. We’ll have to buy that back some time. It would be a pity to lose it. Bracelet ... they won’t give much for that either, it’s old and bent.... Where’s your silver cigar-case, Kolya?”

In five minutes all their valuables were in her hand-bag, and Vera, dressed and ready, looked round for the last time to assure herself she hadn’t overlooked anything.

“Let us go,” she said at last, resolutely.

“But where?” Almazof tried again to protest. “It’s beginning to get dark already, and the place is ten versts away.”

“Stupid! Come along.”

First of all they went to the pawnshop. The pawnbroker had evidently got accustomed long ago to the sight of people in distress, and could not be touched by it. He was so methodical about his work, and took so long to value the things, that Vera felt she should go crazy. What specially vexed her was that the man should test her ring with acid, and then, after weighing it, he valued it at three roubles only.

“But it’s a real brilliant,” said poor Vera. “It cost thirty-seven roubles, and then it was a bargain.”

The pawnbroker closed his eyes with the air of a man who is frankly bored.

“It’s all the same to us, madam,” said he, putting the next article into the scales. “We don’t take the stones into consideration, only the metals.”

To Vera’s astonishment, her old and bent bracelet was more valuable. Altogether they got about twenty-three roubles, and that was more than was really necessary.

When they got to the gardener’s house, the white Petersburg night had already spread over the heavens, and a pearly light was in the air. The gardener, a Tchekh, a little old man with gold eyeglasses, had only just sat down to supper with his family. He was much surprised at their request, and not altogether willing to take such a late order. He was doubtless suspicious of a practical joke, and answered dryly to Vera’s insistent demands:

“I’m very sorry. But I can’t send my workmen so far at night. If it will do to-morrow morning, I’m quite at your service.”

There was no way out of the difficulty but to tell the man the whole story of the unfortunate blot, and this Verotchka did. He listened doubtfully at first, and was almost unfriendly, but when Vera began to tell him of her plan to plant some bushes on the place, he became more attentive and smiled sympathetically several times.

“Oh, well, it’s not much to do,” he agreed, when Vera had finished her story. “What sort of bushes do you want?”

However, when they came to look at his plants, there was nothing very suitable. The only thing possible to put on the spot was a clump of lilacs.

It was in vain for Almazof to try and persuade his wife to go home. She went all the way with him, and stayed all the time the bushes were planted, feverishly fussing about and hindering the workmen. She only consented to go home when she was assured that the turf under the bushes could not be distinguished from the rest of the grass round about.

Next day Vera felt it impossible to remain in the house. She went out to meet her husband. Quite a long way off she knew, by a slight spring in his walk, that everything had gone well.... True, Almazof was covered in dust, and he could hardly move from weariness and hunger, but his face shone with the triumph of victory.

“It’s all right! Splendid!” cried he when within ten paces of his wife, in answer to the anxious expression on her face. “Just think, we went together to those bushes, and he looked and looked at them—he even plucked a leaf and chewed it. ‘What sort of a tree is this?’ says he.”

“‘I don’t know, your Excellency,’ said I.

“‘It’s a little birch, I suppose,’ says he.

“‘Yes, probably, your Excellency.’”

Then he turned to me and held out his hand.

“‘I beg your pardon, lieutenant,’ he says. ‘I must be getting old, that I didn’t remember those bushes.’ He’s a fine man, that professor, and he knows a lot. I felt quite sorry to deceive him. He’s one of the best professors we have. His learning is simply wonderful. And how quick and accurate he is in marking the plans—marvellous!”

But this meant little to Vera. She wanted to hear over and over again exactly what the professor had said about the bushes. She was interested in the smallest details—the expression on the professor’s face, the tone of his voice when he said he must be growing old, exactly how Kolya felt....

They went home together as if there had been no one in the street except themselves, holding each other by the hand and laughing at nothing. The passers-by stopped to look at them; they seemed such a strange couple.

Never before had Nikolai Yevgrafovitch enjoyed his dinner so much as on that day. After dinner, when Vera brought a glass of tea to him in the study, husband and wife suddenly looked at one another, and both laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” asked Vera.

“Well, why did you laugh?” said her husband.

“Oh, only foolishness. I was thinking all about those lilacs. And you?”

“Oh, mine was foolishness too—and the lilacs. I was just going to say that now the lilac will always be my favourite flower....”

XIII

ANATHEMA

“Father Deacon, you’re wasting the candles,” said the deacon’s wife. “It’s time to get up.”

This small, thin, yellow-faced woman treated her husband very harshly. In the school at which she had been educated there had been an opinion that—men were scoundrels, deceivers, and tyrants. But her husband, the deacon, was certainly not a tyrant. He was absolutely in awe of his half-hysterical, half-epileptic, childless wife. The deacon weighed about nine and a half poods[1] of solid flesh; he had a broad chest like the body of a motor-car, an awful voice, and with it all that gentle condescension of manner which often marks the behaviour of extraordinarily strong people in their relations towards the weak.

It always took the deacon a long time to get his voice in order. This occupation—an unpleasant, long-drawn-out torture—is, of course, well known to all those who have to sing in public: the rubbing with cocaine, the burning with caustic, the gargling with boracic acid. And, still lying upon his bed, Father Olympus began to try his voice.

“Via ... kmm! Via-a-a! Alleluia, alleluia. ... Oba-che ... kmm.... Ma-ma....”

“There’s no sound in my voice,” he said to himself. “Vla-di-ko bla-go-slo-ve-e-e.... Km....”

Like all famous singers, he was given to be anxious about his voice. It is well known that actors grow pale and cross themselves before they go on to the stage. And Father Olympus suffered from this vice of fear. Yet he was the only man in the town, and possibly in all Russia, who could make his voice resound in the old dark cathedral church, gleaming with ancient gold and mosaic.

He alone could fill all the corners of the old building with his powerful voice, and when he intoned the funeral service every crystal lustre in the candelabras trembled and jingled with the sound.

His prim wife brought him in a glass of weak tea with lemon in it, and, as usual on Sunday mornings, a glass of vodka. Olympus tried his voice once more: “Mi ... mi ... fa.... Mi-ro-no-citsi.... Here, mother,” called he to his wife, “give me re on the harmonium.”

His wife sounded a long melancholy note. “Km ... km.... Pharaoh and his chariots.... No, no, I can’t do it, my voice has gone. The devil must have got into me from that writer, what’s his name?...”

Father Olympus was very fond of reading; he read much and indiscriminately, but paid very little attention to the names of the authors. His seminary education, based chiefly on learning by heart, on reading “rubrics,” on learning indispensable quotations from the fathers of the Church, had developed his memory to an unusual degree. In order to get by heart a whole page of complicated casuistical reasoning, such as that of St. Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great or St. John Chrysostom, it was quite sufficient for him to run his eye over the lines, and he would remember them. It was a student from the Bethany Academy who brought him books to read, and only the evening before he had given him a delightful romance, a picture of life in the Caucasus, of soldiers, Cossacks, Tchetchenians, and how they lived there and fought one another, drank wine, married, hunted.

The reading of this tale had disturbed the elementary soul of the deacon. He had read it three times over, and often during the reading had laughed and wept emotionally, clenching his fists and turning his huge body from one side to the other in his chair. He continually asked himself, “Would it not have been better to have been a hunter, a trapper, a fisherman, a horseman, anything rather than a clergyman?”

He was always a little later in coming into the cathedral than he ought to have been. Just like a famous baritone at a theatre. As he came through the south door into the sanctuary, on this Sunday morning, he tried his voice for the last time. “Km ... km.... I can sing re,” he thought. “But that scoundrel will certainly give me the tone on doh. Never mind, I must change it to my note, and the choir will be obliged to follow.”

There awoke in him that pride which always slumbers in the breast of a public favourite, for he was spoilt by the whole town; even the street-boys used to collect together to stare at him with a similar veneration to that with which they gazed into the immense mouth of the brass helicon in the military band on the boulevard.

The bishop entered and was solemnly installed in his seat. He wore his mitre a little on one side. Two sub-deacons stood beside him with censers, swinging them harmoniously. The clergy, in bright festival robes, stood around. Two priests brought forward from the altar the ikons of the Saviour and the Virgin-Mother, and placed them on a stand before the people.

The cathedral was an ancient building, and had a pulpit of carved oak like that of a Catholic church. It stood close up to the wall, and was reached by a winding staircase. This was the deacon’s place.

Slowly, trying each step as he went, and carefully resting his hands on the balustrade—he was always afraid of breaking something accidentally—the deacon went up into the pulpit. Then, clearing his throat and nose and expectorating, he struck the tuning-fork, passed deliberately from doh to re, and began:

“Bless us, most reverend Father.”

“Now, you scoundrel,” he thought to himself, apostrophising the leader of the choir; “you won’t dare to change the tone in the presence of the bishop.” At that moment he felt, with pleasure, that his voice sounded much better than usual; it was quite easy to pass from one note to another, and its soft depth of tone caused all the air in the cathedral to vibrate.

It was the Orthodox service for the first week in Lent, and, at first, Father Olympus had not much work. The reader trumpeted out the psalms indistinctly; he was a deacon from the academy, a future professor of homiletics, and he snuffled.

Father Olympus roared out from time to time, “Let us pray.” He stood there on his raised platform, immense, in his stiff vestment of gilt brocade, his mane of grey-black hair hanging on his shoulders, and every now and then he tried his voice quietly. The church was full to the doors with sentimental old peasant women and sturdy grey-bearded peasants.

“Strange,” thought Olympus to himself suddenly, “but every one of these women’s heads, if I look at it from the side, reminds me inevitably either of the head of a fish or of a hen’s head. Even the deaconess, my wife....”

His attention, however, was not diverted from the service. He followed it all along in his seventeenth-century missal. The prayers came to an end: “Almighty God, Master and Creator of all living.” And at last, “Amen.”

Then began the affirmation of Orthodoxy. “Who is as great as the Lord, as our God? Thou art the God who alone doest wonders.” The chant had many turns in it, and was not particularly clear. Generally during the first week in Lent there follows, at this point, the ritual of anathema, which can be altered or omitted as may be thought fit by the bishop. There is a list of persons to be anathematised for special reasons, Mazeppa is cursed, Stenka Razin, Arius the iconoclast, the old-believer Avvakum, etc., etc.

But the deacon was not quite himself to-day. Certainly he must have been a little upset by the vodka his wife had given him that morning. For some reason or other he could not get the story which he had read the previous night out of his mind. He kept seeing clear and vivid pictures of a beautiful, simple, and boundlessly attractive life. Almost mechanically he went through the Creed, chanted the Amen, and proclaimed according to an ancient custom to an old and solemn tone: “This is the faith of the apostles, this is the faith of our fathers, this is the Orthodox faith, this is the universal faith, this faith is ours.”

The archbishop was a great formalist, a pedant, and a somewhat eccentric man. He never allowed a word to be dropped out of the text of the canon of our thrice-blessed Father Andrew of Crete, or from the funeral service or from any other rite. And Father Olympus, imperturbably causing the cathedral to vibrate with his lion’s roar, and making the lustres of the candelabra jingle and sound as they moved, cursed, anathematised and excommunicated from the Church the iconoclasts, all the ancient heretics from Arius onward, all those accepting the teaching of Ital, of the monk Nil, of Constantine Bulgaris and Irinik, of Varlaam and Akindin, of Gerontius and Isaac Agrir; cursed those who insulted the Church, all Mahometans, Dissenters and Judaizers; cursed the reproachers of the festival of the Annunciation, smugglers, offenders of widows and orphans, the Old-Believers, the rebels and traitors, Grishka, Otrepief, Timoshka Akundinof, Stenka Razin, Ivashka Mazeppa, Emelka Pugachof, as well as all those who uphold any teaching contrary to that of the Orthodox faith.

Then the extent of the curse was proclaimed: denial of the blessings of redemption, exclusion from the Holy Sacraments, and expulsion from the assembly of the holy fathers and their inheritance.

Curses were pronounced on those who do not think that the Orthodox Tsar was raised to the throne by the special will of God, when at his anointing, at the commencement of his high calling, the holy oil was poured out upon him; also on those daring to stir up sedition against him; on those who abuse and blaspheme the holy ikons. And to each of these proclamations the choir responded in a mournful wail, tender angelic voices giving the response, “Anathema.”

The women had long been weeping hysterically.

The deacon was about to end by singing the “Eternal Memory” for all those departed this life in the true faith, when the psalm-singer brought him a little note from the priest, telling him that his Eminence the archbishop had ordered that Count Leo Tolstoy was to be anathematised.

The deacon’s throat was sore from much reading. But he cleared his throat by a cough, and began once more: “Bless us, most reverend Father.” He guessed, rather than heard, the feeble mutterings of the aged prelate:

“The proto-deacon will now, by the grace of God, pronounce a curse upon a blasphemer and apostate from the faith of Christ, and expel from the Holy Sacraments of the Church Count Leo Tolstoy. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

“Amen,” sang the choir.

Father Olympus felt his hair stand on end. It seemed to stick out on all sides, and become stiff and painful as if turning into steel wire. And at that moment his memory recalled with extraordinary clearness the tender words of the story[1] he had read the previous night:

“Rousing himself, Yeroshka raised his head and watched the moths fluttering around the flickering flame of his candle and falling therein.

“‘Fool! fool!’ said he to one. ‘Whither are you flying? Fool! fool!’ He got up and drove the moths away with his clumsy fingers.

“‘You’ll burn yourself, little fool; come, fly away, there’s plenty of room here,’ said he, coaxing one of them with gentle voice, and striving to catch hold of it by the wings and send it away. ‘You’ll destroy yourself, and then I shall be sorry for you.’”

“Good Lord! Who is it I am to curse?” said the deacon to himself in terror. “Is it possibly he—he who made me feel so much, and weep all last night for joy and rapture?”

But, obedient to a thousand-year-old custom, he repeated the terribly moving words of cursing and excommunication, and they resounded among the crowd like blows upon a large church bell.

So the curse went on: “The ex-priest Nikita, the monks Sergei, Sabatius—yes, Sabatius—Dorofei, Gabriel—blasphemers, impenitent and stubborn in their heresy—and all who act contrary to the will of God, be they accursed!...”

He waited a moment to take breath. His face was red and perspiring. The arteries on both sides of his throat were swollen, each a finger’s thickness. And all the while he proclaimed the curse, Tolstoy’s thoughts were in his mind. He remembered another passage:

“Once as I sat beside a stream I saw a little cradle come floating bottom upwards towards me. It was quite whole, only the edges a little broken. And I thought—whose cradle is it? Those devils of soldiers have been to a hamlet and taken away all the stores; one of them must have killed a little child and cut the cradle down from its corner with his knife. How can people do such things? Ah, people have no souls! And at such thoughts I became very sad. I thought—they threw the cradle away and drove out the mother and burned the home, and by and by they’ll come to us....”

Still he went on with the curse:

“Those sinning against the Holy Ghost, like Simon the sorcerer and Ananias and Sapphira. As the dog returns to its own vomit again, may their days be few and evil, and may their prayers be turned into sin; may Satan stand at their right hand; when they are judged let them be condemned, let their names be blotted out and the memory of them perish from the earth ... and may the curses and anathemas [hat fall upon them be manifold. May there come upon them the trembling of Cain, the leprosy of Gehazi, the strangling of Judas, the destruction of Simon the sorcerer, the bursting of Arius, the sudden death of Ananias and Sapphira ... be they anathema and excommunicate, and unforgiven even in their death; may their bones be scattered and not buried in the earth; may they be in eternal torment, and tortured by day and night....”

But Tolstoy had said:

“God has made the world to be a joy to man. There is no sin anywhere, not even in the life of a beast. He lives in one place, lives in another. Where he is there is his home. What God gives he takes. But we say that for such things we shall have to suffer. I think that is all one big falsehood....”

The deacon stopped suddenly, and let his ancient missal fall with a bang. Still more dreadful curses were to come, words which could only have been imagined by the narrow minds of monks in the early centuries of Christianity.

His face had become purple, almost black; his lingers convulsively grasped the rail of the desk. For a moment he felt that he must swoon. But he recovered, and straining the whole might of his tremendous voice, he burst forth triumphantly with new words, wrong words:

“The joy of our earth, the ornament and the flower of life, the true servant and fellow-soldier of Christ, Count Leo....”

He was silent for a second. In the crowded church there was not a cough, not a whisper nor a shuffle of the foot. There was a terrible silence, the silence of hundreds of people dominated by one will, overcome by one feeling. The eyes of the deacon were burning and brimming over with tears, his face became suddenly beautiful as the face of a man in an ecstasy of inspiration. He cleared his throat once more, tried an octave, and then suddenly filling the enormous cathedral with the tones of his terrible voice, he roared out:

“Mno-ga-ya lye-e-e-ta-a-a. Ma-any ye-e-ears.” And instead of turning the candle upside down, according to the rite of anathema, he raised it high in the air.

It was in vain that the leader of the choir whispered to his boys, to knock the deacon’s head with the tuning-fork, or to put their hands over his mouth. Joyfully, as if an archangel were blowing a trumpet with silver tones, the deacon lifted his voice over the whole congregation: “Mnogaya, mnogaya, mnogaya lyeta.”

The prior, a monk, an official, the psalm-reader and the deaconess rushed up to him.

“Leave me alone ... leave me alone,” said Father Olympus in an angry whisper, roughly pushing away the monk’s arm. “I’ve spoilt my voice, but it has been for the glory of God. Go away!...”

He took off his brocaded vestment at the altar, kissed his stole with emotion, crossed himself before the altar ikon, and went out of the church. He went out, a whole head taller than the people round him, immense, majestic, solemn. And the people involuntarily made way for him, looking at him with a strange timorousness. His look was adamant as he passed the bishop’s chair, and without turning his eyes that way he strode out into the vestibule.

In the open space before the church his little wife caught him up, and weeping and pulling his cassock by the sleeve, she gasped:

“What have you gone and done, idiot, cursed one! Been guzzling vodka all the morning, disgraceful drunkard! You’ll be in luck’s way if you only get sent to a monastery for this, and given a scavenger’s job. Booh! You, Cossack of Cherkask! How many people’s doorsteps shall I have to wear out to get you out of this? Herod! Oh, you stupid bungler!”

“It doesn’t matter,” whispered the deacon to himself, with his eyes on the ground. “I will go and carry bricks or be a signalman or a sledge driver or a house porter; but, anyhow, I shall give up my post. Yes, to-morrow—I don’t want to go on; I can’t any longer. My soul won’t stand it. I firmly believe in the Creed and in Christ, and in the Apostolic Church. But I can’t assent to malice. ‘God has made the world to be a joy to man,’” he quoted suddenly the beautiful, familiar words.

“You’re a fool, a blockhead,” cried his wife. “I’ll have to put you in an asylum. I’ll go to the governor—to the Tsar himself. You’ve drunk yourself into a fever, you wooden-head!”

Father Olympus stood still, turned to her, and opening wide his wrathful eyes, said impressively and harshly:

“Well?!”

At that the deaconess became timidly silent, walked a little way from her husband, covered her face with her handkerchief, and began to weep.

And the deacon continued his way, an immense figure, dark, majestical, like a man carved out of stone.

XIV

TEMPTING PROVIDENCE

You’re always saying “accident, accident....” That’s just the point. What I want to say is that on every merest accident it is possible to look more deeply.

Permit me to remark that I am already sixty years old. And this is just the age when, after all the noisy passions of his youth, a man must choose one of three ways of life: money-making, ambition, or philosophy. For my part I think there are only two paths. Ambition must, sooner or later, take the form of getting something for oneself—money or power—in acquiring and extending either earthly or heavenly possibilities.

I don’t dare to call myself a philosopher, that’s too high-flown a title for me ... it doesn’t go with my character. I’m the sort of person who might anytime be called upon to show his credentials. But all the same, my life has been extremely broad and very varied. I have seen riches and poverty and sickness, war and the loss of friends, prison, love, ruin, faith, unbelief. And I’ve even—believe it or not, as you please—I’ve even seen people. Perhaps you think that a foolish remark? But it’s not. For one man to see another and understand him, he must first of all forget his own personality, forget to consider what impression he himself is making on his neighbours and what a fine figure he cuts in the world. There are very few who can see other people, I assure you.

Well, here I am, a sinful man, and in my declining years I love to ponder upon life. I am old, and solitary as well, and you can’t think how long the nights are to us old folk. My heart and my memory have preserved for me thousands of living recollections—of myself and of others. But it’s one thing to chew the cud of recollection as a cow chews nettles, and quite another to consider things with wisdom and judgment. And that’s what I call philosophy.

We’ve been talking of accident and fate. I quite agree with you that the happenings of life seem senseless, capricious, blind, aimless, simply foolish. But over them all—that is, over millions of happenings interwoven together, there reigns—I am perfectly certain of this—an inexorable law. Everything passes and returns again, is born again out of a little thing, out of nothing, burns and tortures itself, rejoices, reaches a height and falls, and then returns again and again, as if twining itself about the spiral curve of the flight of time. And this spiral having been accomplished, it in its turn winds back again for many years, returning and passing over its former place, and then making a new curve—a spiral of spirals.... And so on without end.

Of course you’ll say that if this law is really in existence people would long ago have discovered it and would be able to define its course and make a kind of map of it. No, I don’t think so. We are like weavers, sitting close up to an infinitely long and infinitely broad web. There are certain colours before our eyes, flowers, blues, purples, greens, all moving, moving and passing ... but because we’re so near to it we can’t make out the pattern. Only those who are able to stand above life, higher than we do, gentle scholars, prophets, dreamers, saints and poets, these may have occasional glimpses through the confusion of life, and their keen inspired gaze may see the beginnings of a harmonious design, and may divine its end.

You think I express myself extravagantly? Don’t you now? But wait a little; perhaps I can put it more clearly. You musn’t let me bore you, though.... Yet what can one do on a railway journey except talk?

I agree that there are laws of Nature governing alike in their wisdom the courses of the stars and the digestion of beetles. I believe in such laws and I revere them. But there is Something or Somebody stronger than Fate, greater than the world. If it is Something, I should call it the law of logical absurdity, or of absurd logicality, just as you please.... I can’t express myself very well. If it is Somebody, then it must be someone in comparison with whom our biblical devil and our romantic Satan are but puny jesters and harmless rogues.

Imagine to yourself an almost godlike Power over this world, having a desperate childish love of playing tricks, knowing neither good nor evil, but always mercilessly hard, sagacious, and, devil take it all, somehow strangely just. You don’t understand, perhaps? Then let me illustrate my meaning by examples.

Take Napoleon: a marvellous life, an almost impossibly great personality, inexhaustible power, and look at his end—on a tiny island, suffering from disease of the bladder, complaining of the doctors, of his food, senile grumblings in solitude.... Of course, this pitiful end was simply a mocking laugh, a derisive smile on the face of my mysterious Somebody. But consider this tragic biography thoughtfully, putting aside all the explanations of learned people—they would explain it all simply in accordance with law—and I don’t know how it will appear to you, but here I see clearly existing together this mixture of absurdity and logicality, and I cannot possibly explain it to myself.

Then General Skobelef. A great, a splendid figure. Desperate courage, and a kind of exaggerated belief in his own destiny. He always mocked at death, went into a murderous fire of the enemy with bravado, and courted endless risks in a kind of unappeasable thirst for danger. And see—he died on a common bed, in a hired room in the company of prostitutes. Again I say: absurd, cruel, yet somehow logical. It is as if each of these pitiful deaths by their contrast with the life, rounded off, blended, completed, two splendid beings.

The ancients knew and feared this mysterious Someone—you remember the ring of Polycrates—but they mistook his jest for the envy of Fate.

I assure you—i.e., I don’t assure you, but I am deeply assured of it myself—that sometime or other, perhaps after thirty thousand years, life on this earth will have become marvellously beautiful. There will be palaces, gardens, fountains.... The burdens now borne by mankind—slavery, private ownership of property, lies, and oppression—will cease. There will be no more sickness, disorder, death; no more envy, no vice, no near or far, all will have become brothers, And then He—you notice that even in speaking I pronounce the name with a capital letter—He, passing one day through the universe, will look on us, frown evilly, smile, and then breathe upon the world—and the good old Earth will cease to be. A sad end for this beautiful planet, eh? But just think to what a terrible bloody orgiastic end universal virtue might lead, if once people succeeded in getting thoroughly surfeited by it!

However, what’s the use of taking such great examples as our earth, Napoleon, and the ancient Greeks? I myself have, from time to time, caught a glimpse of this strange and inscrutable law in the most ordinary occurrences. If you like, I’ll tell you a simple incident when I myself clearly felt the mocking breath of this god.

I was travelling by train from Tomsk to Petersburg in an ordinary first-class compartment. One of my companions on the journey was a young civil engineer, a very short, stout, good-natured young man: a simple Russian face, round, well-cared for, white eyebrows and eyelashes, sparse hair brushed up from his forehead, showing the red skin beneath ... a kind, good “Yorkshireman.” His eyes were like the dull blue eyes of a sucking pig.

He proved a very pleasant companion. I have rarely seen anyone with such engaging manners. He at once gave me his lower sleeping-place, helped me to place my trunk on the rack, and was generally so kind that he even made me feel a little awkward. When we stopped at a station he bought wine and food, and had evidently great pleasure in persuading the company to share them with him.

I saw at once that he was bubbling over with some great inward happiness, and that he was desirous of seeing all around him as happy as he was.

And this proved to be the case. In ten minutes he had already began to open his heart to me. Certainly I noticed that directly he spoke of himself the other people in the carriage seemed to wriggle in their seats and take an exaggerated interest in observing the passing landscape. Later on, I realised that each of them had heard the story at least a dozen times before. And now my turn had come.

The engineer had come from the Far East, where he had been living for five years, and consequently he had not seen his family in Petersburg for five years. He had thought to dispatch his business in a year at the most, but at first official duties had kept him, then certain profitable enterprises had turned up, and after it had seemed impossible to leave a business which had become so very large and remunerative. Now everything had been wound up and he was returning home. Who could blame him for his talkativeness; to have lived for five years far from a beloved home, and come back young, healthy, successful, with a heart full of unspent love! What man could have imposed silence upon himself, or overcome that fearful itch of impatience, increasing with every hour, with every passing hundred versts?

I soon learnt from him all about his family. His wife’s name was Susannah or Sannochka, and his daughter bore the outlandish name of Yurochka. He had left her a little three-year-old girl, and “Just imagine!” cried he, “now she must be quite grown up, almost ready to be married.”

He told me his wife’s maiden name, and of the poverty they had experienced together in their early married days, when he had been a student in his last year, and had not even a second pair of trousers to wear, and what a splendid companion, nurse, mother, and sister in one, his wife had been to him then.

He struck his breast with his clenched fist, his face reddened with pride, and his eyes flashed, as he cried:

“If only you knew her! A be-eauty! If you’re in Petersburg I must introduce you to her. You must certainly come and see us there, you must, indeed, without any ceremony or excuse, Kirochnaya 156. I’ll introduce you to her, and you’ll see my old woman for yourself. A Queen! She was always the belle at our civil-engineers’ balls. You must come and see us, I swear, or I shall be offended.”

And he gave us each one of his visiting cards on which he had pencilled out his Manchurian address, and written in the Petersburg one, telling us at the same time that his sumptuous flat had been taken by his wife only a year ago—he had insisted on it when his business had reached its height.

Yes, his talk was like a waterfall. Four times a day, when we stopped at important stations, he would send home a reply-paid telegram to be delivered to him at the next big stopping-place or simply on the train, addressed to such and such a number, first-class passenger. So-and-so.... And you ought to have seen him when the conductor came along shouting in a sing-song tone “Telegram for first-class passenger So-and-so.” I assure you there was a shining halo round his head like that of the holy saints. He tipped the conductors royally, and not the conductors only either. He had an insatiable desire to give to everybody, to make people happy, to caress them. He gave us all souvenirs, knicknacks made out of Siberian and Ural stones, trinkets, studs, pins, Chinese rings, jade images, and other trifles. Among them were many things that were very valuable, some on account of their cost, others for their rare and artistic work, yet, do you know, it was impossible to refuse them, though one felt embarrassed and awkward in receiving such valuable gifts—he begged us to accept them with such earnestness and insistence, just as one cannot continue to refuse a child who continues to ask one to take a sweet.

He had with him in his boxes and in his hand luggage a whole store of things, all gifts for Sannochka and Yurochka. Wonderful things they were—priceless Chinese dresses, ivory, gold, miniatures in sardonyx, furs, painted fans, lacquered boxes, albums—and you ought to have seen and heard the tenderness and the rapture with which he spoke of his new ones, when he showed us these gifts. His love may have been somewhat blind, too noisy, and egotistical, perhaps even a little hysterical, but I swear that through these formal and trivial veilings I could see a great and genuine love—love at a sharp and painful tension.

I remember, too, how at one of the stations when another waggon was being attached to the train, a pointsman had his foot cut off. There was great excitement, all the passengers went to look at the injured man—and people travelling by train are the most empty-headed, the wildest, the most cruel in the world. The engineer did not stay in the crowd, he went quietly up to the station-master, talked with him for a few moments, and then handed him a note for a sum of money—not a small amount, I expect, for the official cap was lifted in acknowledgment with the greatest respect. He did this very quickly; no one but myself saw his action, but I have eyes that notice such things. And I saw also that he took advantage of the longer stoppage of the train and succeeded in sending off a telegram.

I can see him now as he walked across the platform—his white engineer’s cap pushed to the back of his head; his long blouse of fine tussore, with collar fastening at the side; over one shoulder the strap of his field-glasses, and crossing it, over the other shoulder, the strap of his dispatch-case—coming out of the telegraph office and looking so fresh and plump and strong with such a clear complexion, and the look of a well-fed, simple, country lad.

And at almost every big station he received a telegram. He quite spoilt the conductors—running himself to the office to inquire if there was no message for him. Poor boy! He could not keep his joy to himself, but read his telegrams aloud to us, as if we had nothing else to think about except his family happiness—“Hope you are well. We send kisses and await your arrival impatiently.—SANNOCHKA, YUROCHKA.” Or: “With watch in hand we follow on the timetable the course of your train from station to station. Our spirits and thoughts are with you.” All the telegrams were of this kind. There was even one like this: “Put your watch to Petersburg time, and exactly at eleven o’clock look at the star Alpha in the Great Bear. I will do the same.”

There was one passenger on the train who was owner or bookkeeper, or manager of a gold mine, a Siberian, with a face like that of Moses the Moor,[1] dry and elongated, thick, black, stern brows, and a long, full, greyish beard—a man who looked as if he were exceptionally experienced in all the trials of life. He made a warning remark to the engineer:

“You know, young man, it’s no use you abusing the telegraph service in such a way.”

“What do you mean? How is it no use?”

“Well, it’s impossible for a woman to keep herself all the time in such an exalted and wound-up state of mind. You ought to have mercy on other peoples’ nerves.”

But the engineer only laughed and clapped the wiseacre on the knee.

“Ah, little father, I know you, you people of the Old Testament. You’re always stealing back home unexpectedly and on the quiet. ‘Is everything as it should be on the domestic hearth?’ Eh?”

But the man with the ikon face only raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“Well, what of it? Sometimes there’s no harm in that.”

At Nizhni we had new fellow-travellers, and at Moscow new ones again. The agitation of my engineer was still increasing. What could be done with him? He made acquaintance with everybody; talked to married folks of the sacredness of home, reproached bachelors for the slovenliness and disorder of bachelor life, talked to young ladies about a single and eternal love, conversed with mothers about their children, and always led the conversation to talk about his Sannochka and Yurochka. Even now I remember that his daughter used to lisp: “I have thome yellow thlipperth,” and the like. And once, when she was pulling the cat’s tail, and the cat mewed, her mother said, “Don’t do that, Yurochka, you’re hurting the cat,” and the child answered, “No, mother, it liketh it.”

It was all very tender, very touching, but, I’m bound to confess, a little tiresome.

Next morning we were nearing Petersburg. It was a dull, wet, unpleasant day. There was not exactly a fog, but a kind of dirty cloudiness enveloped the rusty, thin-looking pines, and the wet hills looked like hairy warts extending on both sides of the line. I got up early and went along to the lavatory to wash; on the way I ran into the engineer, he was standing by the window and looking alternately at his watch and then out of the window.

“Good morning,” said I. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, good morning,” said he. “I’m just testing the speed of the train; it’s going about sixty versts an hour.”

“You test it by your watch?”

“Yes, it’s very simple. You see, there are twenty-five sazhens between the posts—a twentieth part of a verst. Therefore, if we travel these twenty-five sazhens in four seconds, it means we are going forty-five versts an hour; if in three seconds, we’re going sixty versts an hour; if in two seconds, ninety. But you can reckon the speed without a watch if you know how to count the seconds—you must count as quickly as possible, but quite distinctly, one, two, three, four, five, six—one, two, three, four, five, six—that’s a speciality of the Austrian General Staff.”

He talked on, with fidgety movements and restless eyes, and I knew quite well, of course, that all this talk about the counting of the Austrian General Staff was all beside the point, just a simple diversion of his to cheat his impatience.

It became dreadful to watch him after we had passed the station of Luban. He looked to me paler and thinner, and, in a way, older. He even stopped talking. He pretended to read a newspaper, but it was evident that it was a tiresome and distasteful occupation for him; sometimes he even held the paper upside down. He would sit still for about five minutes, then go to the window, sit down for a while and seem as if he were trying to push the train forward, then go again to the window and test the speed of the train, again turning his head, first to the right and then to the left. I know—who doesn’t know?—that days and weeks of expectation are as nothing in comparison with those last half-hours, with the last quarter of an hour.

But at last the signal-box, the endless network of crossing rails, and then the long wooden platform edged with a row of porters in white aprons.... The engineer put on his coat, took his bag in his hand, and went along the corridor to the door of the train. I was looking out of the window to hail a porter as soon as the train stopped. I could see the engineer very well, he had got outside the door on to the step. He noticed me, nodded, and smiled, but it struck me, even at that distance, how pale he was.

A tall lady in a sort of silvery bodice and a large velvet hat and blue veil went past our carriage. A little girl in a short frock, with long, white-gaitered legs, was with her. They were both looking for someone, and anxiously scanning every window. But they passed him over. I heard the engineer cry out in a strange, choking, trembling voice:

“Sannochka!”

I think they both turned round. And then, suddenly a sharp and dreadful wail.... I shall never forget it. A cry of perplexity, terror, pain, lamentation, like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

The next second I saw the engineer’s head, without a cap, somewhere between the lower part of the train and the platform. I couldn’t see his face, only his bright upstanding hair and the pinky flesh beneath, but only for a moment, it flashed past me and was gone....

Afterwards they questioned me as a witness. I remember how I tried to calm the wife, but what could one say in such a case? I saw him, too—a distorted red lump of flesh. He was dead when they got him out from under the train. I heard afterwards that his leg had been severed first, and as he was trying instinctively to save himself, he fell under the train, and his whole body was crushed under the wheels.

But now I’m coming to the most dreadful point of my story. In those terrible, never-to-be-forgotten moments I had a strange consciousness which would not leave me. “It’s a stupid death,” I thought, “absurd, cruel, unjust,” but why, from the very first moment that I heard his cry, why did it seem clear to me that the thing must happen, and that it was somehow natural and logical? Why was it? Can you explain it? Was it not that I felt here the careless indifferent smile of my devil?

His widow—I visited her afterwards, and she asked me many questions about him—said that they both had tempted Fate by their impatient love, in their certainty of meeting, in their sureness of the morrow. Perhaps so.... I can’t say.... In the East, that tried well of ancient wisdom, a man never says that he intends to do something either to-day or to-morrow without adding “Insh-Allah,” which means, “In the name of God,” or “If God will.”

And yet I don’t think that there was here a tempting of Fate, it seemed to me just the absurd logic of a mysterious god. Greater joy than their mutual expectation, when, in spite of distance, their souls met together—greater joy, perhaps, these two would never have experienced! God knows what might have awaited them later! Dischantment? Weariness? Boredom? Perhaps hate?

XV

CAIN

The company of soldiers commanded by Captain Markof had come to take part in a punitive expedition. Tired, irritable, weary from their long journey in an uncomfortable train, the men were sullen and morose. On their arrival at a station with a strange-sounding foreign name, beer and vodka were served out to them by men who seemed to be peasants. The soldiers cried “Hurrah!” sang songs and danced, but their faces wore a look of stony indifference.

Then the work began. The company could not be burdened with prisoners, and so all suspected persons whom they came across on the road, and all those who had no passports, were shot without delay. Captain Markof was not mistaken in his psychological analysis; he knew that the steadily increasing irritation of his soldiers would find a certain satisfaction in such bloody chastisement.

On the evening of December 31st the company stopped for the night at a half-ruined baronial farm. They were fifteen versts from the town, and the captain reckoned to get there by three o’clock the next afternoon. He felt certain that his men would have serious and prolonged work there, and he wanted them to get whatever rest was possible, to quiet and strengthen them for it. He therefore gave orders that they be lodged in the various barns and outhouses of the estate. He himself occupied a large hollow-sounding, empty room, with a Gothic fireplace, in which a bed, taken from the local clergyman, had been placed.

A dark, starless night, windy and sleety, came down upon the farm, swiftly and almost unnoticeably. Alone in his immense empty chamber, Markof sat in front of the fireplace, in which some palings from the plundered estate were burning brightly. He put his feet on the grate and spread out a military map upon his bony knees, attentively studying the neighbourhood between the farm and the town. In the red firelight his face, with its high forehead, turned-up moustaches and firm, obstinate chin, seemed more severe than ever.

The sergeant-major came into the room. The water trickled down on to the floor from his waterproof cloak. He stood still for a moment or two, and then, convinced that the captain had not noticed his entrance, coughed discreetly.

“Is it you?” said the captain, bending his head back. “What is it?”

“Everything is in order, your honour. The third platoon is on guard, the first division at the church wall, the second....”

“All right! What else? Is the pass-word given?”

“Yes, your honour....” The sergeant was silent, as if waiting to hear more, but as the captain said nothing, he began in a lower tone,

“What’s to be done, your honour, with the three who....”

“Shoot them at dawn,” interrupted the captain sharply, not allowing the sergeant to finish his sentence, “And afterwards”—he frowned and looked meaningly at the soldier—“don’t ask me any more questions about them. Do you understand?”

“Certainly, your honour,” answered the soldier emphatically.... And they were both silent again. The captain lay down on the bed without undressing, and the sergeant remained at the door in the shadow. For some reason or other he delayed his departure.

“Is that all?” asked the captain impatiently, without turning his head.

“Yes, that’s all, your honour.” The soldier fidgeted from one foot to another, and then said suddenly, with a determined resolution,

“Your honour ... the soldiers want to know ... what’s to be done with ... the old man?”

“Get out!” shouted the captain with sudden anger, jumping up from the bed and making as if to strike him.

The sergeant-major turned dexterously in double-quick time, and opened the door. But on the threshold he stopped for a moment and said in an official voice,

“Ah, your honour, permit me to congratulate your honour on the New Year, and to wish....”

“Thanks, brother,” answered the captain dryly. “Don’t forget to have the rifles examined more carefully to-morrow.”

Left alone in the room, Markof, neither undressing nor taking off his sword, flung himself down upon the bed and lay with his face toward the fire. His countenance changed suddenly, taking on an appearance of age, and his closely-cropped head drooped on his shoulders; his half-closed eyes wore an expression of pain and weariness. For a whole week he had suffered tortures of fever and had only overcome his illness by force of will. No one in the company knew that at nights he tossed about in fierce paroxysms, shivering in ague, delirious, only losing consciousness for moments, and then in fantastic hideous nightmares.

He lay on his back and watched the blue flames of the dying fire, feeling every moment the stealthy approaches of dizziness and weakness, the accompaniments of his usual attack of malaria. His thoughts were connected in a strange fashion with the old man who had been taken prisoner that morning, about whom the sergeant-major had just been speaking. Markof’s better judgment divined that the sergeant-major had been right: there was, indeed, something extraordinary about the old man, a certain magnificent indifference to life, mingled with gentleness and a deep melancholy. People of his type, people resembling this old man, though only in a very slight degree, the captain had seen at Lao-Yan and Mukden, among the unmurmuring soldiers dying on the fields of battle. When the three men had been brought before Markof that morning and he had explained to them by the help of cynically-eloquent gestures that they would be dealt with as spies, the faces of the two others had at once turned pale and been distorted by a deadly terror; but the old man had only laughed with a certain strange expression of weariness, indifference, and even ... even as it were of gentle condescending compassion towards the captain himself, the head of the punitive expedition.

“If he is really one of the rebels,” Markof reflected, closing his inflamed eyes, and feeling as if a soft and bottomless abyss of darkness yawned before him, “then there is no doubt that he occupies an important position among them, and I’ve acted very wisely in ordering him to be shot. But suppose the old man is quite innocent? So much the worse for him. I can’t spare two men to guard him, especially considering what we’ve got to do to-morrow. In any case, why should he escape the destiny of those fifteen whom we shot yesterday? No, it wouldn’t be fair to spare him after what we have done to others.”

The captain’s eyes opened slowly, and he started up suddenly in mortal terror.

Seated on a low stool by the bedside, with bent head, and the palms of his hands resting upon his knees, in a quiet and sadly thoughtful attitude, was the old man who had been sentenced to death.

Markof, though he believed in the supernatural and wore on his breast a little bag containing certain holy bones, was no coward in the general sense of the word. To retire in terror, even in the face of the most mysterious and immaterial phenomenon, the captain would have reckoned as much a disgrace as if he had fled before an enemy or uttered a humiliating appeal for mercy. With a quick, accustomed movement he drew his revolver from its leathern case and pointed it at the head of his unknown visitant, and he shouted like a madman,

“If you move, you’ll go to the devil!”

The old man slowly turned his head. Across his lips there passed that same smile which had engraved itself upon the captain’s memory in the morning.

“Don’t be alarmed, Captain. I have come to you without evil intention,” said he. “Try to abstain from murder till the morning.”

The voice of the strange visitant was as enigmatical as his smile, even monotonous, and as it were without timbre. Long, long ago, in his earliest childhood, Markof had occasionally heard voices like this when he had been left alone in a room, he had heard such voices behind him, voices without colour or expression, calling him by his own name. Obedient to the incomprehensible influence of this smile and this voice, the captain put his revolver under his pillow and lay down again, leaning his head on his elbow, and never taking his eyes from the dark figure of the unknown person. For some minutes the room was filled with a deep and painful silence; there was only heard the ticking of Markof’s watch, hurriedly beating out the seconds, and the burnt-out fuel in the grate falling with a weak, yet resounding and metallic, crackle.

“Tell me, Markof,” began the old man at length, “what would you answer, not to a judge or to the authorities, or even to the emperor, but to your own conscience, should it ask you, ‘Why did you enter upon this terrible, unjust slaughter?’”

Markof shrugged his shoulders as if in mockery.

“You speak rather freely, old man,” said he, “for one who is going to be shot in four hours’ time. However, we’ll have a little conversation, if you like. It’s a better occupation for me than to toss about sleeplessly in fever. How shall I answer my conscience? I shall say first that I am a soldier, and that it is my duty to obey orders implicitly; and secondly, I am a Russian by birth, and I would make it clear to the whole world that he who dares to rise up against the might of the great power of Russia shall be crushed as a worm under the heel, and his very tomb shall be made level with the dust....”

“O Markof, Markof, what a wild and bloodthirsty pride speaks in your words!” replied the old man. “And what untruth! If you look at an object and put your eyes quite close to it you see only the smallest of its details, but go further away, and you see it in its true form. Do you really think that your great country is immortal? Did not the Persians think so once, and the Macedonians, and proud Rome, who seized the whole world in her iron claws, and the wild hordes of Huns who overran Europe, and mighty Spain, lord over three-fourths of the globe? Yet ask history what has become of their immeasurable power. And I can tell you that thousands of centuries before these there were great kingdoms, stronger, prouder, and more cultured than yours. But life, which is stronger than nations and more ancient than memorials, has swept them aside in her mysterious path, leaving neither trace nor memory of them.”

“That’s foolishness,” objected the captain, in a feeble voice, lying down again upon his back. “History follows out its own course, and we can neither guide it nor show it the way.”

The old man laughed noiselessly.

“You’re like that African bird which hides its head in the sand when it is pursued by the hunter. Believe me, a hundred years hence your children’s children will be ashamed of their ancestor, Alexander Vassilitch Markof, murderer and executioner.”

“You speak strongly, old man! Yes, I’ve heard of the ravings of those enthusiastic dreamers who want to change swords into ploughshares.... Ha-ha-ha! I picture to myself the sort of state these scrofulous neurasthenists and rickety idiots of pacifists would make. No, it is only wax that can forge out an athletic body and an iron character. However ...”—Markof pressed his hand to his forehead, striving to remember something—“however, this is all unimportant. ... But what was it I wanted to ask you? ... Ah, yes! Somehow I don’t think you will tell me untruths. Do you belong to these parts?”

“No.” The old man shook his head.

“But surely you were born in the district?”

“No.”

“But you are a—European? What are you, French? English? Russian? German?”

“No, no....”

Markof, in exasperation, struck the side of the bed with his fist.

“Well, who are you, then? And why the devil do I know your face so well? Have we ever met anywhere?”

The old man bent his head still lower and sat for a long time saying no word. At last he began to speak, as if hesitating:

“Yes, we have met, Markof, but you have never seen me. Probably you don’t remember, or you’ve forgotten, how once, during an epidemic of plague, your uncle hanged in one morning fifty-nine persons. I was within two paces of him that day, but he didn’t see me.”

“Yes ... that’s true ... fifty-nine ...” muttered Markof, feeling himself overwhelmed by an intolerable heat. “But they ... were ... rioters....”

“I saw your father’s cruel exploits at Sevastopol, and your work after the capture of Ismaila,” the old man went on in his hollow voice. “Before my eyes has been shed enough blood to drown the whole world. I was with Napoleon on the fields of Austerlitz, Friedland, Jena, and Borodina. I saw the mob applauding the executioner when he held up before them on the platform of the guillotine the bloody head of Louis XVI. I was present on the eve of St. Bartholomew, when the Catholics, with prayers on their lips, murdered the wives and children of the Huguenots. In the midst of a crowd of enraged fanatics I gazed whilst the holy fathers of the Inquisition burned heretics at the stake, flayed people alive for the glory of God, and poured white-hot lead into their mouths. I followed the hordes of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Solyman the Magnificent, whose paths were marked by mountains of human skulls. I was with the noisy Roman crowd in the circus when they sewed Christians up in the skins of wild animals and hunted them with dogs, when they fed the beasts with the bodies of captive slaves ... I have seen the wild and bloody orgies of Nero, and heard the wailing of the Jews at the ruined walls of Jerusalem....”

“You’re—only my dream ... go away ... you’re—only a figure in my delirium. Go away from me!” Markof’s parched lips uttered the words with difficulty.

The old man got up from the stool. His bent figure became in a moment immensely tall, so that his hair seemed to touch the ceiling. He began to speak again, slowly, monotonously, terribly:

“I saw how the blood of man was first shed upon the earth. There were two brothers. One was gentle, tender, industrious, compassionate; the other, the elder, was proud, cruel, and envious. One day they both brought offerings to the Lord according to the custom of their fathers: the younger brought of the fruits of the earth, the elder of the flesh of animals killed by him in the chase. But the elder cherished in his heart a feeling of ill-will towards his brother, and the smoke of his sacrifice spread itself out over the earth, while that of his brother ascended as an upright column to the heavens. Then the hate and envy which oppressed the soul of the elder overflowed, and there was committed the first murder on the earth....”

“Go away, leave me ... for God’s sake,” Markof muttered to himself, and tossed about in his crumpled sheets.

“Yes, I saw his eyes grow wide with the terror of death, and his clenched fingers clutch convulsively at the sand, wet with his blood. And when after his last shudder his pale cold body lay still upon the ground, then the murderer was overwhelmed by an unbearable terror. He hid his face in his hands and ran into the depths of the forest, and lay trembling there, until at eventide he heard the voice of his offended God—‘Cain, where is thy brother Abel?’”

“Go away; don’t torture me!” Markof’s lips could scarcely move. Yet he seemed to hear the voice continue,

“In fear and trembling I answered the Lord, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ And then the Lord pronounced on me an eternal curse:

“‘Thou shalt remain among the number of the living as long as the earth shall endure. Thou shalt roam as a homeless wanderer through all centuries, among all nations and in all lands, and thine eyes shall behold nought but the blood shed by thee upon the earth, thine ears shall hear only the moans of the dying—eternal reminders of the brother thou hast slain.’”

There was silence for a moment, and when the old man spoke again each word fell into Markof’s soul with pain:

“O Lord, how just and inexorable is Thy judgment! Already many centuries and tens of centuries have I wandered upon the earth, vainly expecting to die. A mighty and merciless power ever calls me to appear where on the battlefields the soldiers lie dead in their blood, where mothers weep, and curses are heaped upon me, the first murderer. There is no end to my sufferings, for every time I see the blood of man flowing from his body I see again my brother, stretched out upon the ground clutching handfuls of sand with his dying fingers ... And in vain do I desire to cry out, ‘Awake! Awake! Awake!’”

“Wake up, your honour, wake!” The insistent voice of the sergeant-major sounded in Markof’s ears. “A telegram!...”

The captain was awake and on his feet in a moment. His strong will asserted itself at once, as usual. The fire had long since died out, and the pale light of dawn gleamed through the window.

“What about ... those ...” asked Markof, in a trembling voice.

“As you ordered, your honour, just this moment.”

“But the old man? The old man?”

“As well.”

The captain sank down upon the bed as if his strength had suddenly left him. The sergeant-major stood at attention beside him, awaiting orders.

“That’s it, brother,” said the captain in a feeble voice. “You must take the command in my place. I will send in my papers to-day, for I ... I ... ’m absolutely tormented by this cursed fever.... And perhaps”—he tried to smile, but only distorted his features by the effort—“perhaps I may soon be entirely at rest.”

The sergeant-major saluted and answered calmly, as if nothing could surprise him,

“Yes, your honour.”