| I THE RUINS |
| My mother died when I was six years old. |
| After her death my father surrendered himself entirely to his own grief, and seemed to forget my existence. |
| He caressed my little sister at times, and saw to her welfare in his own way, because he could trace her mother’s features in her face, but I grew up like a wild sapling of the fields; |
| no one gave me any especial care, though, on the other hand, no one restricted my freedom. |
| The little village where we lived was called Kniazh Gorodok or Princetown. |
| It belonged to a proud but impoverished race of Polish noblemen, and presented all the typical features of any small town in Southwestern Russia, where the pitiful remnants of stately Polish grandeur drag out their weary days in a gently flowing current of incessant toil mingled with the trivial bustle of Jewish “geschäft” or business. |
| If you approached the village from the east, the first thing that caught your eye was the prison — the great architectural ornament of the town. |
| The village itself lay spread below you on the shores of its slumberous ponds, and you descended to it by a steep highway that was barred at last by the traditional city gates. |
| The drowsy veteran who was toasting his red face in the sun, the very embodiment of tranquil sleep, would lazily raise the barrier, and behold! you were in the town, although at first you might not perceive it. |
| Grey fences and vacant lots littered with piles of rubbish were interspersed here and there among the crumbling and staring-eyed little “khatkas” or huts. |
| Farther on, the wide market place appeared, bright with the roofs of the Jewish “travellers’ rests,” while the Government buildings gave an air of melancholy to the scene, with their white walls and their barrack-like regularity of outline. |
| The wooden bridge thrown across the little river would groan and tremble under the wheels of your carriage, swaying like a decrepit old man. |
| A Jewish street led away from the bridge, lined with warehouses, shops, miserable bazaars, and bakers’ booths, while the Hebrew money-changers sat at their tables on the sidewalks under their parasols. |
| Everywhere were dirt and swarms of children tumbling in the dust of the street. |
| Another minute, however, and you were already beyond the village. |
| Softly the birches would be whispering over the graves in the cemetery, while the breeze stirred the wheat fields, and sang in mournful cadences among the roadside telegraph wires. |
| The little river, spanned by the above mentioned bridge, flowed from one pond into another, and thus enclosed the town at the north and south by swamps and broad expanses of water. |
| The ponds had grown shallower from year to year, until at last they had become choked by vegetation, and tall, thickly-growing reeds now rippled like the sea upon the wide marshes. |
| In the centre of one of these ponds was an island, and on the island stood an old, half-ruined castle. |
| I remember with what terror I used always to contemplate this mighty, decaying pile. |
| Stories and legends, each one more frightful than the last, were current about it. |
| The island, it was said, was artificial, piled up by the hands of captive Turks. |
| “The castle is built upon human bones;” so ran the saying among the old people of the village, and my childish imagination pictured with horror thousands of Turkish skeletons supporting with bony hands the island, the castle, and the tall, pyramidal poplar trees. |
| Of course this only made the castle appear more terrible than ever, and even on bright days, if, emboldened by the sunlight and the loud voices of the birds, we approached it too closely, it would ofttimes throw us into spasms of panic fear, so horribly did the dark cavities of its windows glower down upon us. |
| A mysterious rustling would seem to stray through its deserted halls, and pebbles and bits of plaster would come rattling down, awakening the muffled echoes. At such times we would scamper away without even a glance behind us, seeming to hear, long after, sounds of clattering and banging and laughter resounding in our ears. |
| But, on autumn nights, when the giant poplars swayed and chanted under the wind that came flying to them across the ponds, this horror would spread from the island to the mainland and would reign over the whole village. |
| “Oi vei mir!” |
| the Jews would whisper with terror, while God-fearing old citizens crossed themselves, and even our nearest neighbour, the blacksmith, the very incarnation of diabolical strength, would come out into his little yard and, making the sign of the cross, would mutter under his breath a prayer for the peace of departed souls. |
| Old, grey-bearded Yanush, who, for lack of any other abode, had taken refuge in a cellar of the castle, had often told us that on such nights as these he could clearly hear cries rising from under the ground. |
| It was the Turks stirring under the island, knocking their bones together, and loudly charging their Polish masters with cruelty. |
| Then in the old castle halls and on the island would resound the clanking of arms, and the lords would call their liegemen together with loud shouts. |
| Yanush could hear quite plainly, through the moaning and howling of the storm, the stamping of horses’ hoofs, the clashing of swords, and the words of command. |
| He even heard, once, the great-grandfather of the present Count, immortalised by the memory of his ruthless deeds, come trampling out on his blooded steed, and, riding to the centre of the island, cry out with a dreadful oath: |
| “Silence there, you yelping heathen dogs!” |
| The descendants of this Count had long since abandoned the home of their ancestors. |
| The greater part of the ducats and treasure with which their coffers had once been filled to overflowing had crossed over the bridge into the hands of the Jews, and the last representatives of the glorious line had built themselves a commonplace white house on a hill a little farther from the town. |
| Here their tedious but vainglorious lives were spent in contemptuous and dignified isolation. |
| Only at rare intervals did the old Count, himself a ruin as gloomy as the castle and the island, appear in the little town, mounted on an old nag of English breed. |
| At his side through the streets rode his daughter, majestic and thin, in a black riding-habit, while their head groom followed respectfully behind. |
| The stately Countess was fated to remain forever unwed. |
| Any possible suitors who were her equals in birth had faint-heartedly scattered across the world in search of the rich daughters of merchants in foreign lands, and had either deserted their ancestral castles or had turned them over to be pulled down by the Jews. As for the little town which lay spread out at the foot of the hill, not a youth could be found there who would dare to raise his eyes to the beautiful Countess. |
| We little boys, on catching sight of these three riders, would pick ourselves up out of the soft dust of the street, and, scattering timidly like a flock of birds into various houses, would follow the gloomy lords of the terrible castle with eyes full of curiosity and fear. |
| On a hill west of the town, among decaying crosses and sunken graves, there stood a long-deserted dissenting chapel, the offspring of a city in the valley proper below. |
| Hither, in days of yore, the chapel bell had summoned the townsfolk in their clean if plain surtouts, with staves in their hands in place of the swords which rattled at the sides of the small farmers, also called hither from the neighbouring villages and farms by the clear notes of the chapel bell. |
| From here could be seen the island, with its great, sombre poplars, but the castle kept itself angrily and contemptuously hidden from the chapel behind their dense greenery. Only when the southwest wind rose from the reed-beds and descended upon the island did the sighing poplars sway aside and the castle windows gleam between them, allowing the castle to cast dark glances at the little chapel. |
| Both were corpses now. |
| The castle’s eyes were dim and no longer reflected the rays of the setting sun; |
| the chapel’s roof had fallen in, and, in place of its sonorous, high-toned copper bell, the screech owls now raised their evil, midnight voices among its rafters. |
| But the old, historic gulf that had, in former times, divided the proud, lordly castle from the bourgeois dissenting chapel, continued even after their death, kept open by the worms that had burrowed into the crumbling corpses and had occupied the safest corners of their vaults and cellars. |
| The coffin-worms infesting these lifeless buildings were men. |
| There had been a time when the ancient castle had served as a free refuge without restrictions of any kind for every poor wretch that needed it. |
| Every one who could find no shelter in the town, every poor creature that had fallen on evil days and had lost, for one reason or another, the power to pay even the few copecks needed for a roof and fire by night and in stormy weather — all these poor wretches found their way to the island, and there hid their vanquished heads among the gloomy, threatening, tottering ruins, paying for the hospitality they found there only by the danger they ran of being buried alive under a pile of débris. |
| “He lives in the castle” had come to be the expression used to denote the last stages of beggardom and civilian degradation. |
| The old castle gladly received and sheltered every variety of wandering destitution: poor writers temporarily ruined, forlorn old women, and homeless vagabonds. |
| These persons tore down the interior of the rotting building, broke up its floors and ceilings, lit their stoves, cooked heaven knows what, and, in a word, fulfilled in some way or another their functions of life. |
| Nevertheless, there came a day when dissension broke out among the company roosting under the roof of those hoary ruins. |
| Then it was that old Yanush, who had once been one of the Count’s smaller “officials,” prepared a sort of gubernatorial manifesto for himself and seized the reins of power. |
| He set himself to reorganise things, and for several days such a hubbub ensued and such cries arose on the island that it seemed at times as if the Turks had torn themselves from their prison underground in order to avenge themselves upon their Polish tyrants. |
| This Yanush sorted out the inhabitants of the ruins, dividing the sheep from the goats. |
| The sheep, who remained in the castle as before, helped him to expel the unhappy goats, who were stubborn and put up a desperate but ineffectual resistance. |
| When, at last, with the silent but no less effective coöperation of the policeman, order was once more restored on the island it appeared that the change effected had been distinctly aristocratic in character. |
| Yanush had allowed only “good Christians,” that is, Roman Catholics, to remain in the castle, and, besides this, most of them were either former servants or descendants of servants of the Count’s family. |
| They were all either old men in long, tattered cloaks with huge red noses, or hideous, scolding hags who still clung, in the last stages of destitution, to their caps and mantles. |
| They formed a homogeneous, closely united, aristocratic circle that had established, as it were, a monopoly in the trade of beggary. |
| On week-days these old dames and gaffers would go with prayers on their lips from house to house of the more prosperous townspeople, carrying gossip, complaining of their hard lot, and pouring forth tears and supplications; but on Sundays they would appear as the most honoured members of those long lines that, in Western Russia, extend from the doors of Roman Catholic churches. There they would proudly accept offerings in the name of the “Lord Jesus” and the “Lady Mother of God.” |
| Attracted by the uproar and shouts that came to us from the island during the revolution, I betook myself thither with a few of my companions, and, hiding behind the thick trunks of the poplars, we watched Yanush at the head of an army of red-nosed dotards and unsightly shrews drive out the last inhabitants of the castle that were liable to expulsion. |
| Evening fell. |
| Drops of rain were already falling from a cloud that was hanging over the high summits of the poplars. |
| A few unhappy wretches, wrapping their impossibly tattered rags about them, still lingered about the island, piteous, confused, and scared, and, like toads that have been poked out of their holes by boys, tried to crawl back unnoticed into some cranny of the castle wall. |
| But Yanush and the beldames drove them away with curses and cries, threatening them with sticks and pitchforks, while the silent policeman stood by, also grasping a stout oaken cudgel, and preserving an armed neutrality, although he plainly favoured the conquering party. |
| So this unhappy riffraff disappeared grumbling over the bridge, leaving the island forever, until one by one they were swallowed up in the rainy darkness of the rapidly falling night. |
| After that memorable evening both Yanush and the old castle, which had both, until then, impressed me with their vague grandeur, lost all their attraction in my eyes. |
| Before that night I had liked to cross over to the island and to contemplate the grey castle walls and mossy roof, even from afar. |
| When the motley figures of its inmates crawled out into the brightness of morning, yawning, coughing, and crossing themselves in the sunlight, I had looked upon them with a sort of reverence, as upon creatures clothed in the same mystery that surrounded the whole castle. |
| “They sleep there at night,” thought I; “they hear everything that happens when the moon looks in at the broken windows and the wind howls through the great halls.” |
| I had loved to listen to Yanush, when, with all the loquacity of seventy years, he had taken his seat beneath a poplar tree and told me tales of the glorious past of the dying building. |
| Images of this past would rise before my childish imagination, and there would be wafted into my heart a solemn melancholy and a vague sympathy for the life lived here of old inside these dismal walls. Romantic shades of an antiquity unknown to me would flit across my young soul as the light shadows of clouds flit across a bright field on a windy day. |
| But after that evening the castle and its bard appeared to me in a new light. |
| Meeting me the following day near the island, Yanush called me to him and assured me with satisfaction that “the son of such honoured parents as mine” could now boldly visit the island, as he would find an absolutely orderly population upon it. |
| He even led me by the hand up to the very castle, but I snatched my hand out of his almost in tears, and ran away as fast as my legs could carry me; |
| the castle had become odious to me. |
| The windows of the upper story had been boarded up, while the lower floor was ruled over by the “mantles and caps.” |
| The old women crawled out, looking so unattractive, fawning upon me so mawkishly, and at the same time scolding one another so loudly that I honestly wondered how the old Count who was wont to discipline his Turks on stormy nights could stand having these old crones so near him. |
| But chiefly I could not forget the cold ruthlessness with which the triumphant inhabitants of the castle had driven away their unfortunate fellow-inmates, and my heart contracted at the remembrance of the poor creatures left without a roof over their heads. |
| However this may be, the old castle taught me for the first time the great fact that, from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. |
| That which was sublime in the castle was all overgrown with convolvulus and ivy, and that which was ridiculous was revolting to me, and wounded my childish susceptibility too keenly for me to feel the irony of the contrast; this was still inaccessible to me. |
| II QUEER CHARACTERS |
| The nights following the revolution on the island were passed by the town in great anxiety. |
| Dogs barked, house doors creaked, and the citizens kept emerging into the streets, knocking on the fences with sticks, and letting every one know how valiant they were. |
| The town knew that a band of shivering and hungry folk was roaming through the streets, cold and wet, in the raw darkness of the rainy night, and realising full well that only harsh feelings could exist in the hearts of these people toward it, the town put itself on guard and answered these sentiments with threats. |
| And, as if on purpose, the nights now fell upon the earth in the midst of torrents of cold rain, and passed away leaving low-flying clouds hanging close above the ground. |
| And the wind bellowed in the heart of the evil weather, shaking the tree-tops, thundering against the walls, and chanting to me in my bed of the dozens of human creatures deprived of warmth, with no roof over their heads. |
| But at last spring triumphed over winter’s rage; the sun dried the wet earth, and in the meantime the homeless wanderers had slipped away, whither, heaven knows. |
| The nightly barking of the dogs diminished, the townsfolk stopped knocking on the fences, and life assumed once more its monotonous and sleepy aspect. |
| The hot sun rose in the sky, scorched the dusty streets, and drove the lively sons of Israel into the shelter of their little booths; |
| the “commissionaires” lounged lazily in the sun, sharply eyeing the passers-by and the Jewish “geschäft”; |
| the scratching of official pens was heard through the open windows of the Government buildings; |
| the town ladies wandered up and down the bazaars in the mornings with baskets on their arms, and in the evenings came out walking majestically, leaning upon the arms of their spouses, stirring up the street dust with the full trains of their dresses. |
| The old men and women from the castle decorously made the round of their patrons without disturbing the universal harmony. |
| The townsfolk gladly recognised their right to existence, and considered it absolutely proper that some people should receive alms every Saturday, while the denizens of the castle accepted this charity with the utmost respectability. |
| Only the unfortunate exiles now found no protection in the town. |
| It is true they no longer roamed the streets at night, and people said they had taken refuge somewhere on the hill near the dissenting chapel, but how they had managed to find a dwelling place there no one could exactly say. |
| All saw, however, the most impossible and suspicious-looking figures in the world climb down every morning from the cliffs on which the chapel stood and disappear again at twilight in the same direction. |
| These people disturbed the quiet, sleepy life of the town by their appearance, standing out like sombre stains against the grey background of village life. |
| The citizens looked at them askance with feelings of hostility and alarm, while they, on the other hand, watched the village with furtively attentive eyes that sent cold chills running down the back of many a townsman. |
| These persons did not resemble in any way the aristocratic mendicants from the castle; the town did not recognise them and they did not ask for recognition. |
| Their relations with the community were purely war-like in character; |
| they preferred cursing a townsman to flattering him; they preferred taking things themselves to asking for them. |
| Nevertheless, as often happens among a sombre mass of unfortunates, there were those among them who, for brains and talent, would have been an honour to the more select society of the castle, but who had been discontented there, and preferred the more democratic life of the dissenting chapel. |
| A few of these poor creatures were distinguished by characteristics of profoundest tragedy. |
| I remember vividly to this day how merrily the street would hum as the melancholy, stooping figure of the old “Professor” walked along it. |
| He was a gentle being, oppressed by a clouded intelligence, and he wore an old frieze overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with a faded cockade. |
| His learned title he had appropriated, it seemed, because of a vague tradition that he had once, somehow, somewhere, been a tutor. |
| It would be hard to imagine a creature more mild and harmless. |
| He could generally be seen wandering about the streets with dim eyes and head sunk forward on his breast. |
| The ingenious townsfolk knew two peculiarities of his which they made use of to procure a cruel enjoyment for themselves. |
| The Professor was always muttering something to himself and no one could ever make out what he was saying. |
| His words would trickle after one another with the troubled murmur of a little brooklet, while he fixed his vague eyes upon his listener’s face as if he were trying to convey to that man’s mind the elusive meaning of his long discourses. |
| He could be wound up like a clock, and to do this it was only necessary for one of the lanky commissionaires dozing on the sidewalk to call the old man to him and ask him some question. |
| The Professor would shake his head, pensively fix his faded eyes upon the face of his interlocutor, and begin to murmur something sorrowful without an end. |
| Thereupon his questioner could calmly walk away or go to sleep, and when he woke he would still be certain to see over him that dark, melancholy figure, murmuring his unintelligible phrases. |
| But, naturally, this situation was not, in itself, particularly interesting. |
| It was the second of the Professor’s characteristics that enabled the louts of the street-corners to procure their most striking effects. |
| The unhappy man could never hear sharp or pointed instruments mentioned without emotion. |
| And so, at the very height of his unintelligible eloquence, his listener would suddenly jump up and scream in a harsh voice: |
| “Knives, scissors, needles, pins!” |
| Then the poor old man, interrupted in the midst of his reverie, would throw up his arms with the gesture of a wounded bird, and stare about him in terror with his hands clutching at his breast. |
| Ah, how many sufferings are incomprehensible to lanky commissionaires because the sufferers cannot express their pain by means of a lusty blow! |
| But the poor Professor would only look about him in deep distress, and his inexpressible suffering could be divined from his voice as he turned his clouded eyes upon his tormentor and cried, convulsively tearing at his breast: |
| “A hook — a hook in my heart!” |
| He was probably trying to say that his heart had been rent by the townsman’s exclamation, but naturally it was his very circumstance that had served to dispel somewhat the tedium of the street loafer. |
| So the poor Professor would hurry away, his head bowed even lower than before, as if he feared a blow, and loud peals of laughter would pursue him as the pert townsfolk ran out into the street, filling the air with screams like the blows of a lash and shouting: |
| “Knives, scissors, needles, pins!” |
| In justice to the exiles from the castle, it must be said that they always stood loyally by one another, and if two or three of Turkevich’s tatterdemalions, or, more especially, if the retired grenadier Zausailov descended upon the Professor’s pursuers at such a time a cruel punishment always overtook a large number of that crowd. |
| Zausailov, who was the possessor of a huge frame, a purplish blue nose, and fiercely protruding eyes, had long since declared war on every living being, and recognised neither treaties nor neutrality. |
| Each time that he met the Professor with the rabble in pursuit his angry shouts would fill the air then and long after, as he swept through the streets like Tamerlane, destroying everything that stood in the way of his redoubtable progress. |
| Thus he practised “pogroms” on the Jews on a large scale long before they had begun to break out elsewhere. |
| He would torture every Jew that fell a prisoner into his hands and wreak insults on the Hebrew ladies until at last the expedition of the bold grenadier would come to an end in the gaol, where he was invariably domiciled after his bloody bouts with the populace in which both sides always manifested no small amount of valour. |
| The other individual the sight of whose misfortunes and downfall was a source of great amusement to the people, was Lavrovski, a retired and absolutely drink-sodden Civil Servant. |
| The inhabitants of the town could easily remember the time when Lavrovski was never spoken of as anything but “My Lord the Secretary”; when he went about in a uniform with brass buttons, his neck swathed in handkerchiefs of the most marvellous hues. |
| It is likely that this circumstance lent an additional piquancy to the contemplation of his present state. |
| The change in Lavrovski’s life had come swiftly; |
| it had sufficed for a certain brilliant officer of dragoons to come to Kniazh Gorodok and live there for two weeks. In that time he succeeded in winning and carrying off a golden-haired lady, the rich inn-keeper’s daughter. |
| The inhabitants of the town never heard of the beautiful Anna again, for she had sunk forever beneath their horizon. |
| And so Lavrovski was left with all his bright-hued handkerchiefs, but without the hope that had once embellished the life of the little official. |
| It was long since he had ceased to be a Civil Servant. |
| Somewhere, in some remote village, there lived a family whose hope and mainstay he had once been, but he had lost all care for anything now. |
| In his rare sober moments he would walk swiftly through the streets with downcast eyes, looking at no one, as if he were overcome with shame at the fact of his own existence. |
| Ragged, dirty, with long, unkempt hair, he was always a prominent figure in a crowd, and attracted universal attention to himself, but he seemed never to notice any one, or to hear anything. |
| Only occasionally would he cast a wild look of bewilderment about him, as much as to say: |
| “What do these strangers want of me? |
| What have I done to them, and why do they follow me so persistently with their mockery?” |
| If, during one of these flashes of consciousness, his ear caught the name of the lady with the golden hair a tempestuous fury would rise in his heart, his eyes would shine in his pale face with dark fire, and he would throw himself upon the crowd of his tormentors, which would then quickly disperse. |
| These flashes of anger, rare as they were, strangely provoked the interest of the loafers who found that time hung heavily on their hands, and it is no wonder, then, that when Lavrovski walked down the street with downcast eyes, the rabble that followed him should try to rouse him from his apathy, and at last begin to throw mud and stones at him. |
| When Lavrovski was drunk he would obstinately seek out dark fence-corners and swampy meadows and other such extraordinary places, and there he would sit, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his poor grey head sunk on his breast. |
| Solitude and vodka awoke in him a flow of expansiveness and a desire to pour forth the sorrow of his heavy heart, so he would embark upon endless stories of his ruined youth, addressing himself now to the grey posts of the ancient fence, now to the birch trees indulgently whispering something over his head, now to the magpies that came hopping up to his gloomy figure with feminine curiosity. |
| If any of us little boys succeeded in tracking him to such a place we would silently surround him and listen with beating hearts to his long and terrible stories. |
| Our hair would stand on end as we gazed with horror at that pale creature accusing himself of every crime under the sun. |
| According to Lavrovski’s own account he had killed his father, driven his mother into the grave, and brought disgrace on his brothers and sisters. |
| We had no reason for not believing these fearful confessions, and were only surprised that Lavrovski seemed to have had several fathers; he had thrust a sword into the heart of one, another he had killed with slow poison, a third he had dragged down with him into some abyss or other. |
| So we would listen, overwhelmed with sympathy and horror, until Lavrovski’s tongue became more and more entangled and at last ceased to be able to pronounce articulate sounds; merciful sleep would then put an end to the outpouring of his confessions. |
| The grown people laughed at us and told us that these stories were all moonshine, and that Lavrovski’s parents had died a natural death from sickness or starvation. |
| But our tender, childish hearts heard the cries of genuine affliction in his groans, and, taking the allegories of the unhappy man literally, we came nearer than our elders to understanding the tragic wrecking of his life. |
| When Lavrovski’s head had sunk lower than ever and snores, broken by nervous sobs, came from his throat, we would lean our little heads over the poor man. |
| We would peer into his face and watch the shadows of his misdeeds flitting across it even in his sleep; we would see his brows contract convulsively and his lips tighten in a piteous, almost childishly plaintive grimace. |
| “I’ll kill you!” |
| he once shrieked suddenly, conscious of a vague uneasiness caused by our presence, and at this we scattered like a flock of startled birds. |
| It sometimes happened that rain fell on him sleeping thus, dust covered him, and several times in the autumn he was literally buried in snow. |
| If he did not die an untimely death, he without doubt owed this to the care which other unfortunates like himself took of his pitiful person. Especially did he owe his life to the jolly Turkevich, who would search him out, pull him up, set him on his feet, and take him away with him. |
| Turkevich belonged to the class of people, who, as he himself expressed it, do not spit in their own porridge, and while the Professor and Lavrovski were passive sufferers, he presented the appearance of a person who was happy and fortunate in many ways. |
| To begin with, he had suddenly announced that he was a general without asking the assent of any one, and demanded that the townsfolk should call him by that honourable title. |
| As no one dared to question his right to it, Turkevich very soon became imbued with a belief in his own greatness. |
| He always stalked along very majestically, knitting his brows severely, and displaying a perfect readiness to break any one’s jaw, which last act he evidently considered the special prerogative of a general. |
| If his care free brain was ever visited for a moment by doubts on the score of his title, he would catch the first man he saw on the street and sternly ask him: |
| “Who am I, eh?” |
| “General Turkevich!” |
| the man would answer meekly, feeling himself in an awkward position, whereupon Turkevich would slowly release him and proudly twirl his whiskers. |
| “Ex-actly!” |
| And as he had, beside all this, a very special way of twirling his beetling moustache and an inexhaustible fund of quaint sayings and witticisms, it was not surprising that he was constantly surrounded by a crowd of lively listeners. Even the doors of the best restaurants, where the landholders of the country assembled to play billiards, were open to him. |
| To tell the truth, however, it not infrequently happened that General Turkevich would come flying out of them with the alacrity of a man who is being shoved rather unceremoniously from behind. |
| But these incidents, which he explained by the lack of respect the landholders had for wit, had no effect upon Turkevich’s general frame of mind. |
| A state of happy self-confidence and continual intoxication — that was his normal condition. |
| In this last circumstance lay the second key to his felicity; one glass of vodka was enough to keep him fuddled for a day. |
| This fact people explained by the immense quantity which Turkevich had already drunk, and which was said to have converted his blood into a solution of vodka. |
| All that was necessary now was for the General to bring this solution to a proper strength, for it to ripple and rush through his veins, painting the world for him with rainbow tints. |
| If, on the other hand, for one reason or another, the General could not procure a glass of vodka for a day or two, he would suffer the most excruciating torture. |
| First he would fall into a fit of melancholy and low spirits. |
| All knew that at these times the terrible General was more helpless than a child, and many hastened to wreak vengeance upon him then for insults received. |
| They would beat him and spit upon him and cover him with mud, while he would not even try to run away from the disgrace, but would bellow at the top of his lungs while the tears streamed in torrents down his long, drooping moustache. |
| The poor wretch would turn to every one, imploring them to kill him; saying that, anyhow, he was doomed to die a dog’s death in a fence corner. |
| At that every one would stand aside, for there was something in the voice and face of the General at those times which sent even his most determined enemies away as fast as their legs could carry them. |
| They could not bear to see the face, to hear the voice of a man who, for an instant, was conscious of the appalling tragedy of his lot. Then another change would come over the General and he would grow terrible to look at. |
| His eyes would flash feverishly, his cheeks would cave in, his short hair would bristle on his head, he would go off into a kind of frenzy, and, rising to his feet, would stalk triumphantly through the streets, beating his breast and announcing to every one in a loud voice: |
| “I am going! |
| Like Jeremiah, I am going to denounce the ungodly!” |
| This was always the signal for an interesting scene. |
| It may safely be said that Turkevich played the part of a famous person in our little town, so it was small wonder that the sedatest and busiest of our townsmen should drop their work and mingle with the rabble at the heels of the new prophet, or that at least they should watch his progress from afar. |
| He usually went first to the Secretary of the County Court, and before his house he would hold something like a session of court, choosing suitable members of the crowd to take the parts of the plaintiff and the defendant. |
| He himself would make the pleas and reply to them, mimicking very skilfully the voice and manner of a prisoner. |
| As he was always able to give a contemporary flavour to his performances by alluding to some fact well known to all, and as he was extremely well versed in the procedures of a court room, it was not surprising that the Secretary’s cook should come flying out of the house in a twinkling, touch Turkevich on the arm, and hastily disappear, repulsing as she went the attentions of Turkevich’s followers. |
| Turkevich would laugh sardonically on receiving this gift, and, waving the money triumphantly, would retire to the nearest tavern. |
| Having slightly slaked his thirst there, he would continue to lead his audience from house to house of those whom he “denounced,” varying his programme to suit each particular case. |
| As he always received money for each performance, his fierce tone would gradually become more mild, his moustache would begin to curl once more, and the denunciatory drama gradually became a merry vaudeville that generally ended in front of the house where Kotz, the Captain of Police, lived. |
| Kotz was the most kindly of all the city officials and had only two little weaknesses: |
| he dyed his grey hair black and had a partiality for fat cooks. In everything else he showed an implicit confidence in the will of God and the “gratitude” of the townsfolk. |
| Having arrived in front of the Police Captain’s house, Turkevich would wink gaily at his companions, throw up his cap, and announce in stentorian tones that not the Police Captain lived here, but Turkevich’s own father and benefactor. |
| Then he would fix his eyes on the windows and await results. |
| The consequence was always one of two things: |
| either the fat, red-cheeked Matriona would come running out of the front door with a present from Turkevich’s “father and benefactor,” or the door would remain closed, and Turkevich would catch sight at a window of an angry old face in a frame of coal-black hair, while Matriona would creep through back ways to the police station. |
| There the cobbler Mikita, who made a very good living out of these very affairs with Turkevich, was always sitting. |
| On seeing Matriona he would immediately throw down his boot-last and rise from his seat. |
| Meanwhile Turkevich, seeing that no good results followed his dithyrambs, would, little by little, cautiously have recourse to satire. |
| He would usually begin by remarking what a pity it was that his benefactor thought it necessary to dye his honourable grey hair with shoe blacking. |
| Next, grieved by the absolute lack of attention which his eloquence received, he would raise his voice and begin to assail his benefactor as a melancholy example of a man living illegally with Matriona. |
| By the time he reached this delicate subject, the General had always lost all hope of reconciliation with his “benefactor,” and would therefore arm himself with all the genuine eloquence of indignation. |
| It was a pity that an unexpected interruption almost always came at this point in his speech. |
| Kotz’s angry yellow face would appear thrust out of one of the windows of his house, and Mikita, who had crept up with marvellous dexterity, would seize Turkevich from behind. |
| No member of his audience ever tried to warn the orator of his approaching danger, for Mikita’s artistic methods always called forth universal admiration. |
| Cut off in the midst of a word, the General would suddenly whirl through the air and find himself upside down on Mikita’s back. A few seconds more, and the sturdy cobbler would be quietly making his way to the gaol, bending slightly beneath his burden, and followed by the deafening shouts of the populace. |
| Another minute, and the black door of the police station would gape like a pair of forbidding jaws and the General would disappear into the darkness, helplessly kicking his feet. |
| The thankless mob would cry, “Hurrah for Mikita!” and gradually melt away. |
| Beside these individuals who were conspicuous among the ranks of the vagabonds, a dark crew of pitiful, ragged creatures had taken refuge near the chapel, and these never failed to create intense excitement by their appearance at the bazaars. The merchants would hastily seek to protect their goods with their hands, as a hen covers her brood when a hawk appears in the sky above her. |
| There was a rumour afloat that these poor wretches had formed a fraternal organisation and that now, since they had been deprived of their last resources by their expulsion from the castle, they occupied themselves with petty thieving in the town and its environs. |
| Such rumours were chiefly founded on the fact that a man cannot live without bread, and as all the suspicious persons had in some way or other abandoned the normal way of obtaining it, and had been cut off from the benefits of local charity, it was naturally concluded that they must either steal or die. |
| As they did not die, the very fact of their remaining alive was evidence of their guilty practices. |
| If this was true, it was no less apparent that the organiser and leader of the band could be no other than Tiburtsi Drab, the most remarkable of all the queer characters that had lost their home in the castle. |
| Drab’s origin was shrouded in the most mystifying uncertainty. |
| Those who were gifted with a vivid imagination credited him with having an aristocratic name which he had brought to shame; he was therefore obliged to conceal himself, at the same time taking part, it was said, in the exploits of the notorious Karmeliuk. |
| But, in the first place, he was not old enough for this, and, in the second place, Tiburtsi’s appearance did not present one single aristocratic feature. |
| He was tall, and his heavily stooping shoulders seemed to tell of great burdens borne by the unfortunate man. |
| His large features were coarsely expressive. |
| His short, reddish hair bristled stiffly all over his head; |
| his receding forehead, his slightly projecting lower jaw, and the rapid play of his facial muscles lent something apish to his face, but the eyes that sparkled under his beetling brows were determined and dark, and there shone in them, beside cunning, a keen perspicacity, energy, and an uncommon intelligence. |
| While his features were changing under the kaleidoscopic play of his expressions, his eyes would retain their same fixed, unvarying look, and for this reason the buffoonery of the strange man filled me with unreasoning dread. |
| Tiburtsi’s hands were callous and rough, and he stamped his great feet like a peasant. |
| Therefore the consensus of opinion among the townsfolk was that he was not of aristocratic birth, and the most they would concede was that he might have been the servant of a great family. |
| But here another difficulty presented itself: |
| how, then, explain the phenomenal learning that every one unanimously admitted he possessed? |
| It was impossible not to acknowledge this obvious fact, for there was not a tavern in the whole town where Tiburtsi had not stood on a barrel and spouted whole speeches from Cicero and Xenophon for the benefit of the Little Russians collected there on market days. |
| These Little Russians would gape and nudge one another with their elbows, while Tiburtsi, towering above them in his rags, would thunder forth Catilinus or paint the exploits of Cæsar and the craft of Mithridates. |
| Little Russians are, by nature, endowed with a glowing fancy, and these were able to read their own meaning into Tiburtsi’s fiery if unintelligible speeches. |
| When the orator beat his breast and turned to them with flashing eyes, exclaiming: “Patres Conscripti!” |
| they too would knit their brows and say to one another: |
| “Aha, the son of a gun, he does bark!” |
| Later, when Tiburtsi would raise his eyes to the ceiling and begin declaiming endless verses of Latin poetry, his whiskered audience would follow every word he uttered with timid and pitying sympathy. |
| They felt as if the soul of their orator were soaring somewhere in an unknown region where people did not talk like Christians, and by his despairing gestures they concluded that it was there meeting with the most sorrowful adventures. |
| But this sympathetic tension reached its height whenever Tiburtsi rolled up his eyes so that only the whites were visible and wrung his audience’s heart with endless recitations from Virgil and from Homer. |
| Such hollow, sepulchral tones would then shake his voice that those who sat farthest away and were most under the influence of the Jewish “gorelka”[G] would hang their heads until their long top-knots dangled before them, and begin to sob: |
| “Oh, oh, little mother, how sad it is!” |
| while the tears would flow from their eyes and trickle piteously down their long whiskers. |
| This learning of the queer fellow’s made it necessary to invent a new hypothesis about him which should tally more closely with the obvious facts. |
| It was at last agreed that Tiburtsi had once been the house-boy of a count who had sent him to a Jesuit school with his own son, desiring that he should clean the young gentleman’s boots. |
| It appeared, however, that the young count had received most of the blows of the holy fathers’ three-tailed “disciplinarian,” while the servant had appropriated the learning intended for the head of his master. |
| As a result of the mystery which surrounded Tiburtsi, he was credited among other things with having an intimate knowledge of witchcraft. |
| If a “witch-ball”[H] suddenly appeared in the billowy fields that closed like a sea about the last hovels of the town, no one could pull it up with less danger to himself and to the reapers than Tiburtsi. |
| If an owl settled in the evening on some one’s roof and, with loud cries, summoned death to the house, Tiburtsi would be sent for and would drive the ill-omened bird away by reciting quotations from Livy. |
| No one could even conjecture how Tiburtsi happened to have children, and yet the fact was obvious; |
| there were even two facts, a boy of seven, unusually well-grown and intelligent for his age, and a little girl of three. |
| Tiburtsi had led, or rather carried, the boy with him during the early days of his appearance over our horizon. |
| As for the little girl, he had seemed to vanish for several months into an absolutely unknown place in order to procure her. |
| The boy, whose name was Valek, was tall and thin and dark. He might sometimes be seen sauntering gloomily about the town with his hands in his pockets, casting sidelong glances about him without having anything in particular to do, and was the cause of many a palpitating heart to the bakers. |
| The little girl was only seen once or twice, borne aloft in Tiburtsi’s arms. She then disappeared and no one knew whither she had gone. |
| People spoke of certain subterranean passages on the hill near the dissenting chapel, and such places were not uncommon in that part of Russia, over which the Tartars had so often swept with fire and sword, where Polish licence had run high, and where the fierce heroes of the old Ukraine had held their bloody tribunals. So every one believed in the existence of these caves, especially as it was clear that the band of poor unfortunates must be living somewhere. |
| They always disappeared toward evening in precisely the direction of the chapel. |
| Thither the Professor hobbled with his drowsy gait; thither strode Tiburtsi, swiftly and resolutely; |
| thither staggered Turkevich, leading the fierce and helpless Lavrovski; |
| thither went a crowd of other suspicious creatures, and vanished into the darkness of night. There was no man brave enough to follow them up the slippery clay landslides that clothed the hillside. |
| The hill, which was honeycombed with graves, enjoyed an evil reputation. |
| Blue flames might be seen burning in the old cemetery in the dusk of autumn nights, and the screech owls hooted so shrilly and loudly in the chapel that even the blacksmith’s fearless heart would quail when the cries of the accursed birds came to his ears. |
| III MY FATHER AND I |
| “This is bad, young man, bad!” |
| old Yanush used often to say, meeting me in the street in Turkevich’s train or among Tiburtsi’s audience. |
| And as he said this the old man would wag his grey beard. |
| “This is bad, young man; you are in bad company. |
| It is a pity, a very great pity to see the son of such honourable parents among them.” |
| As a matter of fact, since my mother had died and my father’s gloomy face had become even more sombre than before, I was very seldom seen at home. |
| I used to creep into the garden like a young wolf in the late summer evenings, carefully avoid a meeting with my father, open my window which was half-concealed by lilac bushes, and slip silently into bed. |
| If my little sister was not asleep in her cradle in the next room I used to go in to see her, and we would softly kiss one another and play together, taking care not to wake our grumbling old nurse. |
| In the morning, at break of day, while every one else in the house was still asleep, I was already tracing a dewy pathway through the tall grass of our garden, jumping across the fence, and making my way to the pond where my madcap companions would be waiting for me with fishing rods. Or else I would go down to the mill where the sleepy miller would have opened the sluices a few moments before, and where the water, its glassy surface delicately quivering, would already be plunging down the mill-race, going bravely on its way to its daily toil. |
| The big mill-wheels, roused by the water’s noisy blows, would quiver too and seem to yield unwillingly, as if loath to forego their sleep, but next moment they would be turning, splashing the foam about, and bathing themselves in the cold torrent. |
| Behind them the shafts would slowly begin to revolve; inside the mill pinions would rattle, millstones would whirr, and a white floury dust would rise in clouds through the cracks of the venerable building. |
| Then I would run on — I loved to meet Nature at her awakening. |
| I was glad when I succeeded in rousing a sleepy lark or in startling a timid hare from its form. |
| The dew-drops would be dripping from the maiden-hair and from the faces of the meadow flowers as I crossed the fields on my way to the woods beyond the town. |
| The trees would greet me with a drowsy murmur. |
| The pale, surly faces of the prisoners would not yet be peering from the windows of the gaol, and only the sentry would be walking around its walls, noisily rattling his rifle as he relieved the tired night-watchman. |
| Although I had made a long round, when I reached the town again I would still meet sleepy figures here and there, opening the shutters of the houses. |
| But when the sun rose over the hill, a rackety bell would ring out across the ponds calling the school-boys together, and hunger would drive me home to my morning tea. |
| Every one called me a tramp and a young good-for-nothing, and I was on the whole so often reproached with my many wicked tendencies, that at last I came to be persuaded of them myself. |
| My father believed in them too, and sometimes made an effort to take my education in hand, but these attempts invariably ended in failure. |
| The sight of his stern, melancholy face on which lay the harsh imprint of inconsolable grief frightened me and drove me into myself. |
| I would stand uneasily before him, first on one foot and then on the other, glancing about me, and plucking at my little breeches. |
| Sometimes I seemed to feel something rising in my breast; |
| I wanted him to kiss me and take me on his knee. |
| I should then have nestled to his breast and perhaps we should have wept together — the stern man and the child — at the thought of our common loss. |
| But he would look at me instead with dim eyes that seemed to be staring at something over my head, and I would shrink under that gaze, which was incomprehensible to me. |
| “Do you remember your mother?” |
| Did I remember her? |
| Ah, yes, I remembered! |
| I remembered how, in the night, I used to awaken and, finding her soft arms in the darkness, would nestle near them, covering them with kisses. |
| I remembered her as she had sat dying at the open window, gazing sorrowfully at the lovely Spring landscape before her, bidding it farewell in the last year of her life. |
| Ah, yes, I remembered her! |
| As she lay beautiful, young, and covered with flowers, but with the seal of death upon her pale face, I had crouched in a corner like a young wild thing, staring at her with burning eyes before which the whole awful riddle of life and death was being unfolded. |
| And at last, when a crowd of strangers had borne her away, was it not my sobs that filled the house with low sounds of weeping on the first night of my bereavement? |
| Ah yes, I remembered her! |
| And still, in the silence of night, I would awaken with my childish heart bursting with an overflowing love, a smile of happiness on my lips, in blessed forgetfulness, wrapped in the rosy dreams of childhood. |
| And once more it seemed that she was with me, and that at any moment I might feel again her gentle, loving kiss. |
| But my arms would reach out into the empty darkness, and again the consciousness of my bitter loneliness would pierce my soul. |
| Then I would press my hands to my aching heart and scalding tears would trickle down my cheeks. |
| Ah yes, I remembered her! |
| But at the question of that tall, stern man with whom I wished to feel a sense of kinship and could not, I would wince more than ever, and quietly withdraw my little hand from his. |
| And he would turn away from me with anger and pain. |
| He felt that he had not the slightest influence over me, that an insurmountable barrier stood between us. |
| He had loved her too much while she was alive to notice me in his happiness, and now his deep sorrow hid me from him. |
| So little by little the gulf dividing us grew ever wider and deeper. |
| He became more and more convinced that I was a wicked, worthless boy, with a hard, selfish heart, and the feeling that he should but could not teach me; should love me, but could not find a corner in his heart to harbour this love, still more increased his dislike for me. |
| And this I felt. |
| I used to watch him sometimes from where I stood hidden behind the shrubbery. |
| He would walk up and down the garden paths with ever quickening footsteps, groaning with the unbearable agony in his heart. |
| My heart too would ache with sympathy and pity at the sight of him. |
| Once, when he took his head in his hands and sank down sobbing on a bench, I could endure it no longer and ran out of the shrubbery into the path, impelled by an undefinable impulse to be near him. |
| But he, roused from his gloomy and hopeless meditations, looked at me sternly and checked me with the cold question: |
| “What do you want?” |
| I did not want anything. |
| I turned quickly away, ashamed of my outburst, afraid lest my father should read it in my blushing face. |
| I ran into the grove in the garden and falling on my face in the grass wept bitterly from vexation and pain. |
| At six years I had already experienced all the horrors of loneliness. |
| My sister Sonia was four. |
| I loved her passionately and she returned my love, but the general, fixed opinion that I was an out-and-out little rascal at last succeeded in raising a high barrier between us. |
| Whenever I began to play with her in my noisy, frolicsome way, our old nurse, always sleepy and always picking over hen feathers for pillows with closed eyes, would wake up in an instant, swiftly seize my Sonia, and carry her away, throwing an angry glance at me. |
| At such times she always reminded me of a ruffled brood-hen, while I likened myself to a marauding hawk, and Sonia to a little chicken. |
| I would be hurt and vexed. It was no wonder, then, that I soon abandoned all attempts to amuse Sonia with my objectionable games, and in a little while both our house and the little garden began to grow irksome to me, for I found there neither welcome nor kindness. |
| I began to roam. |
| My whole being was quivering with strange presentiments; a foretaste, as it were, of life. |
| It seemed to me that I should surely find something somewhere out there, in that great, unknown world beyond the old walled garden; |
| I felt as if I should and would do something, only I knew not what, and from the bottom of my soul a feeling that tempted me and teased me rose up to meet this mystery. |
| I was constantly awaiting the solution of these riddles, and instinctively fled from our nurse and her feathers, from the familiar, lazy whispering of the apple trees in our little garden, and from the silly knife-blows that resounded whenever meat was being chopped in our kitchen. |
| From then on the epithets of “street urchin” and “tramp” were added to my other unflattering appellations. |
| But I paid no heed to this; |
| I had grown accustomed to reproaches, and endured them as I endured sudden downpours of rain and the fierce heat of the sun. |
| I listened scowling to all rebukes and went my own way. |
| Wandering through the streets, I watched the life of the town with childishly inquiring eyes; I listened to the rumbling of the wagons on the highway and tried to catch the echoes of great far-away cities, either in the clatter of their wheels or in the whispering of the wind among the tall Cossack tombs by the roadside. |
| More than once did my eyes open wide with fear, more than once did my heart stop beating at the panorama of life unfolding before me, picture after picture, impression after impression, each leaving a vivid imprint on my heart. |
| I saw and knew a great deal that children much older than myself ordinarily never see, and all the while that unexplained something which had risen from the depths of my childish soul called to me as before, ceaseless, mysterious, vibrant. |
| After the shrews of the castle had deprived the old building of my respect and admiration, and when every corner of the town had become familiar to me down to the last filthy alley, then I began to turn my eyes into the distance, toward the hill on which the dissenting chapel stood. |
| At first I approached it from one side and then from another like a timid animal, not daring to climb a hill that had such an evil reputation. |
| But as I gradually grew more familiar with the place, I began to see before me only peaceful graves and fallen crosses. |
| Nowhere were there any visible signs of life or of the presence of human beings. |
| It lay quiet, deserted and alone. |
| Only the chapel frowned at me with its empty windows, as if absorbed in melancholy meditation. |
| I longed to inspect the building from every point of view, to look inside it, and so to make sure that there was nothing in it but dust. |
| But it was both terrifying and inconvenient to undertake such an expedition alone, and so I enlisted a small army of three scape-graces, urchins who were attracted to the adventure by the promise of cakes and of apples from our garden. |
| IV I MAKE SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES |
| We started on our expedition one day after dinner, and, having reached the hill, began climbing the clay landslides that had been torn from its side by grave diggers long dead and by the freshets of Spring. |
| These landslides had stripped the hillside bare, and here and there white, crumbling bones protruded through the clay. |
| In one place the rotting corner of a coffin jutted out; in another a human skull grinned at us, fixing us with its dark, hollow eyes. |
| At last, lending one another a hand, we scrambled up over the last cliff and found ourselves on the summit of the hill. |
| The sun was already nearing the horizon. |
| Its slanting rays were tenderly gilding the sward of the old cemetery, playing across its ancient, zig-zag crosses, and streaming through the windows of the chapel. |
| The air was still, and about us reigned the deep peace of a deserted burial ground. |
| Here we no longer saw skulls and shank-bones and coffins. |
| A soft, gently sloping carpet of fresh green grass had lovingly concealed in its embrace the horror and ugliness of death. |
| We were alone. |
| Only the sparrows were bustling merrily about us, and a few swallows were silently flying in and out of the windows of the chapel standing disconsolately among its grassy graves, modest crosses, and the tumble-down stone sepulchres on the débris of which gleamed the bright faces of butter-cups, violets, and clover blossoms. |
| “No one is here,” said one of my companions. |
| “The sun is setting,” added another, looking at the sun, which, although it had not yet set, was hanging low above the hill. |
| The doors and windows were boarded up for some distance above the ground, but, with the help of my companions, I had hopes of scaling them and peeping into the chapel. |
| “Don’t!” |
| cried one of my band, suddenly losing his courage and seizing my arm. |
| “Get away, you old woman!” |
| the oldest of our little army shouted at him, deftly offering me his back. |
| I jumped bravely upon it; |
| he stood up, and I found myself with my feet on his shoulders. |
| In this position I could easily reach the window-sill with my hand. I made sure of its strength, and then pulled myself up and sat on it. |
| “Well, what do you see?” |
| the boys asked from below, with lively curiosity. |
| I was silent. |
| By peering over the sill I could see down into the interior of the chapel, from whence there rose to meet me all the solemn quiet of an abandoned place of worship. |
| The interior of the tall, narrow building was innocent of paint. |
| The evening sunlight was streaming unobstructed through the open windows, staining the peeling walls a brilliant gold. |
| I saw the inside of the closed door, the crumbling gallery, the ancient tottering columns. |
| The distance from the window to the floor appeared much greater than from the window to the grass outside. |
| I seemed to be looking down into a deep abyss, and at first I could not make out what certain strange objects were whose fantastic forms were resting upon the floor. |
| Meanwhile my friends were growing weary of standing below waiting for me to give them news, and one of them climbed up by the same method that I had employed, and took his seat beside me, holding on to the window frame. |
| “That’s the altar,” he said, looking down at one of the strange objects on the floor. |
| “And that’s the lustre.” |
| “And that’s the little table for the Bible.” |
| “Yes, but what’s that?” |
| I asked, pointing to the dark shape that lay beside the altar. |
| “That’s a priest’s hat.” |
| “No, it’s a bucket.” |
| “What would they have used a bucket for?” |
| “To carry coals for the incense.” |
| “No, it certainly is a hat. |
| Anyhow, we can find out!” |
| I cried. “Here, let’s tie your belt to the window-sill, and you can let yourself down by it!” |
| “I like that! |
| Let yourself down if you want to!” |
| “Do you think I wouldn’t go?” |
| “Go on then!” |
| Acting on impulse I tied the two belts together, slipped them under the window-sill, and, giving one end to my companion, let myself down by the other. |
| I trembled as my feet touched the floor, but a glance at my friend’s face bending sympathetically over me reassured me. |
| The sound of my heels rang out under the ceiling, resounding in the chapel’s void, and echoing among its dark corners. |
| A few sparrows started up from their roosts in the gallery and fluttered out through a large hole in the roof. |
| All at once I caught sight of a stern, bearded face under a crown of thorns looking down at me from over the window in which we had been sitting. |
| It was an immense crucifix leaning out from high up under the rafters. |
| I was seized with dread. |
| My companion’s eyes sparkled, and he held his breath with curiosity and sympathy. |
| “Are you going any farther?” |
| he asked in a low voice. |
| “Yes,” I answered in the same tone, summoning all my courage, but at that instant something totally unexpected happened. |
| First, we heard the rattle of plaster falling in the gallery. |
| Then something moved overhead, stirring up clouds of dust, and a big grey mass flapped its wings and rose to the hole in the roof. |
| The chapel was darkened in a moment. |
| A huge old owl, frightened out of a dark corner by our noise, hung poised for a moment in the aperture with outstretched wings, and then sailed away. |
| A wave of shuddering fear passed over me. |
| “Pull me up!” |
| I cried to my playmate, and seized the strap. |
| “Don’t be frightened!” |
| he answered soothingly and prepared to pull me up into the sunshine and the light of day. |
| But all at once I saw his face become distorted with alarm. |
| He screamed, jumped down from the window-sill, and vanished in an instant. |
| I instinctively looked behind me, and caught sight of a strange apparition which filled me, however, more with surprise than terror. |
| The dark object that had been the subject of our dispute, and that had first looked like a bucket, then like a hat, and then at last like a kettle, suddenly flashed across my vision and vanished behind the altar. |
| All I could distinguish was the dim outline of a small, what seemed to be a child’s, hand, beckoning the object into its hiding place. |
| It would be hard to describe my sensations at that moment. |
| They were not painful, the feeling that overcame me could not even be called fear. |
| I seemed to be in another world. |
| From somewhere, as if from the world that I had left, there came to me, a few seconds later, the swift frightened pattering of three pairs of children’s feet. |
| This sound soon died away, and I was left alone in that tomb-like place, in the presence of an apparition inexplicable and strange. |
| Time ceased to exist for me, therefore I cannot say whether it was soon or not before I was aware of suppressed whispering under the altar. |
| “Why doesn’t he climb up again?” |
| “You can see, he’s frightened.” |
| The first voice seemed to be that of a very little child, the second might have belonged to a boy of my own age. |
| I seemed to see, too, a pair of black eyes shining through the chinks in the old altar. |
| “What’s he going to do now?” |
| the whisper recommenced. |
| “Wait and see,” answered the older voice. |
| Something moved so violently under the altar that the structure trembled, and a little figure emerged from underneath it. |
| It was a boy of nine, taller than I was, thin and slight as a reed. |
| He was dressed in a dirty shirt, and his hands were thrust into the pockets of a pair of short, tight breeches. |
| His black hair hung in shaggy elf-locks over his dark, pensive eyes. |
| Although he was a stranger and had appeared on the scene in such an unusual and unexpected manner, and although he was approaching me with that infinitely provocative look with which boys always met each other among our bazaars when they were preparing for a fight, I nevertheless felt very much braver than I had before. |
| My courage increased when there appeared from under the altar, or rather from a trap-door in the floor which was concealed by the altar, another grimy little face framed in golden curls, and a pair of bright blue eyes fixed on me full of childish curiosity. |
| I moved slightly away from the wall and also put my hands into my pockets according to the rules of our bazaars. |
| This was a sign that I was not afraid of my adversary and even partly wished to hint at my contempt for him. |
| We stood face to face, measuring each other with our eyes. |
| Having stared at me from head to foot, the boy asked: |
| “What are you doing here?” |
| “Nothing,” I answered. “What business is it of yours?” |
| My adversary jerked his shoulder as if he intended to take his hand out of his pocket and strike me. |
| I did not blink. |
| “I’ll show you!” |
| he threatened. |
| I stuck out my chest. |
| “Hit me! |
| Try!” |
| The moment was crucial. |
| On it depended the character of our future relationship. |
| I waited, but my opponent continued to fix me with the same scrutinising gaze and did not move. |
| “I’ll hit — too — --” I said, but more peaceably this time. |
| Meanwhile the little girl, with her tiny hands resting on the floor of the chapel, was trying to scramble up out of the trap-door. |
| She fell down, got up again, and at last came tottering with uncertain steps toward the boy. |
| Having reached him, she seized him and nestled closely to him, at the same time fixing eyes of wonder and fear upon my face. |
| This decided the affair. |
| It was obvious that the boy could not fight under conditions such as these. Of course I was too generous to take advantage of the awkward situation he was in. |
| “What’s your name?” |
| asked the boy, stroking the little girl’s fair curls. |
| “Vasia. |
| What’s yours?” |
| “Mine’s Valek. |
| I know you. |
| You live in the garden near the pond. |
| You have big apples.” |
| “Yes, our apples are fine. |
| Don’t you want some?” |
| Taking out of my pocket two apples that had been intended as payment for my shamefully fugitive band, I gave one to Valek and held out the other to the little girl. |
| But she only hid her face and pressed closer to Valek. |
| “She’s frightened,” he said, and handed the apple to the child himself. |
| “What did you come down here for?” he asked next. |
| “Did I ever come into your garden?” |
| “You can come if you want to. |
| I wish you would!” |
| I answered joyfully. |
| Valek was taken back. |
| “I can’t play with you,” he answered sadly. |
| “Why not?” |
| I asked, deeply grieved by the sorrowful voice in which he had spoken these words. |
| “Your father is a judge.” |
| “Well, what if he is?” |
| I asked with candid amazement. |
| “You’d play with me, not with my father!” |
| Valek shook his head. |
| “Tiburtsi wouldn’t let me.” And as if the name had reminded him of something, he suddenly recollected himself and went on: |
| “Look here, you’re a fine boy, but you’d better go. |
| If Tiburtsi should find you here it would be awful.” |
| I agreed that it was time for me to go. |
| The last rays of the setting sun were already fading behind the windows of the chapel, and the town was some distance away. |
| “How can I get out of here?” |
| “I’ll show you. |
| We’ll go out together.” |
| “And what about her?” |
| I asked, pointing to the little girl. |
| “What, Marusia? |
| She’ll come with us.” |
| “How? Through the window?” |
| Valek reflected a moment. |
| “I’ll tell you what; |
| I’ll help you to climb through the window and we’ll go out another way.” |
| With the help of my new friend I climbed up to the window-sill. |
| Untying the belt, I slipped it around the sill, seized both ends, and swung myself into the air. |
| Then, releasing one end, I dropped to the ground and jerked down the belt. |
| Valek and Marusia were already waiting for me outside, at the foot of the wall. |
| The sun had just set behind the hill. |
| The town was sunk in purple mist, only the tall poplars on the island, stained by the last glow of the sunset, stood out sharply defined in pure gold. |
| I felt as if I had been in the old cemetery for a day and a night; it was as if I had come there the day before. |
| “It’s lovely here!” |
| I exclaimed, struck by the freshness of the evening and filling my lungs with the cool, damp air. |
| “It’s lonely here,” said Valek sadly. |
| “Do you live here?” |
| I asked, as the three of us began to descend the hill. |
| “Yes.” |
| “Where’s your house?” |
| I couldn’t imagine that children like myself could live without a house. |
| Valek smiled in his habitual sad way and did not answer. |
| We avoided the steep landslides, for Valek knew a better path. |
| Pushing through the reeds of a dry marsh and crossing a couple of little streams on narrow planks, we found ourselves on a flat at the foot of the hill. |
| Here we were forced to take leave of one another. |
| I pressed my new friend’s hand and then held out mine to the little girl. |
| She gave me her tiny paw affectionately and, looking up at me with her blue eyes, asked: |
| “Will you come again?” |
| “Oh, yes,” I answered. “I’ll surely come!” |
| “All right,” said Valek thoughtfully. “You might as well come, but only when our people are in town.” |
| “Who are your people?” |
| “Why our people: |
| all of them, Tiburtsi and Lavrovski and Turkevich and the Professor — but perhaps he wouldn’t matter.” |
| “All right, I’ll watch for them, and when they’re in town, I’ll come. |
| Good-bye!” |
| “Hi! Listen!” Valek called after me when I had gone a few steps. |
| “You won’t tell any one you’ve been here with us, will you?” |
| “No, not a soul!” I answered firmly. |
| “That’s good. |
| And when those idiots of yours ask you what you saw say the Devil.” |
| “All right. I’ll say that.” |
| “Good-bye, then!” |
| “Good-bye!” |
| The thick shades of night were descending on Kniazh Gorodok as I approached our garden wall. |
| A slender crescent moon was hanging over the castle and the sky was bright with stars. |
| I was about to climb the wall when some one seized my arm. |
| “Vasia!” my runaway friend burst out in an excited whisper. |
| “Is that you?” |
| “You know it is. |
| And so you all ran away!” |
| He hung his head, but curiosity got the better of his confusion and he asked again: |
| “What did you see there?” |
| “What do you think I saw?” I answered in a voice that would not admit of a doubt; “devils, of course. |
| And you are all cowards!” |
| Pushing my abashed companion aside, I climbed over the wall. |
| Fifteen minutes later I had sunk into a profound slumber, and was dreaming that I was watching real little devils merrily hopping up out of the hole in the chapel floor. |
| Valek was chasing them about with a birch twig, and Marusia, her eyes sparkling with pleasure, was laughing and clapping her hands. |
| V MY ACQUAINTANCESHIP IS CONTINUED |
| From thenceforth I became entirely absorbed in my new acquaintances. |
| At night as I went to bed and on rising in the morning I thought of nothing but my coming visit to the hill. |
| I now wandered about the streets for the sole purpose of ascertaining whether the whole assemblage of what Yanush called the “bad company” was there or not. |
| If Lavrovski was sprawling in the meadow and Turkevich and Tiburtsi were holding forth to their audiences, and if the rest of the suspicious characters were poking about the bazaar, I immediately ran off across the marsh and up the hill to the chapel, having first filled my pockets with apples, which I was allowed to pick in our garden, and with sweet-meats, which I always saved up for my new friends. |
| Valek, who was very serious, and whose grown-up ways inspired me with respect, would quietly accept these gifts and generally put them aside for his sister, but Marusia would clap her hands and her eyes would sparkle with unaffected pleasure. |
| The child’s pale cheeks would glow with rosy colour and she would laugh, and this laugh of our little friend’s always went straight to our hearts and rewarded us for the sweets we had sacrificed for her sake. |
| This pale, diminutive little creature reminded one of a flower that had blossomed without seeing the life-giving rays of the sun. |
| Although she was four years old, she still walked weakly on her crooked little legs, swaying like a grass-blade as she moved. |
| Her hands were transparent and thin, and her head nodded on her neck like a bluebell on its stalk, but her glance was, at times, so unchildlike and sad, and her smile reminded me so of my mother’s during her last days as she had sat at her open window with the breeze stirring her hair, that I would often grow sad myself at the sight of her little babyish face, and the tears would rise in my eyes. |
| I could not help comparing her to my sister who was the same age; |
| the latter was as round as a dumpling and as buoyant as a rubber ball. |
| Sonia ran so merrily when she was playing and laughed so ringingly, she wore such pretty dresses, and every day her nurse would braid a crimson ribbon into her dark hair. |
| But my little friend hardly ever ran and very seldom laughed; |
| when she did her laughter sounded like the tiniest of silver bells that ten steps away is scarcely audible. |
| Her dress was dirty and old, no ribbon decked her hair, which was much longer and thicker than Sonia’s. To my surprise, Valek knew how to braid it very cleverly, and this he would do every morning. |
| I was a great madcap. |
| People used to say of me: “That boy’s hands and feet are full of quicksilver.” I believed this myself, although I could not understand how and by whom the quicksilver could have been inserted. |
| During the first days of our friendship I brought my high spirits into the company of my new companions, and I doubt if the echoes of the old chapel had ever repeated such deafening shrieks as they did whilst I was trying to rouse and amuse Valek and Marusia with my pranks. |
| But in spite of them all I did not succeed. |
| Valek would gaze seriously first at me and then at the little girl, and once when I was making her run a race with me, he said: |
| “Don’t do that, you’ll make her cry.” |
| And in fact, when I had teased Marusia into running, and when she heard my steps behind her, she suddenly turned round, raised her arms above her head as if to protect herself, looked at me with the helpless eyes of a trapped bird, and burst into tears. |
| I was touched to the quick. |
| “There, you see,” said Valek. “She doesn’t like to play.” |
| He seated her on the grass and began picking flowers and tossing them to her. |
| She stopped crying and began quietly to pick up the blossoms, whispering something to the golden butter-cups and raising the blue-bells to her lips. |
| I grew quiet too, and lay down beside Valek and the little girl. |
| “Why is she like that?” |
| I finally asked, motioning with my eyes toward Marusia. |
| “Why is she so quiet, you mean?” |
| asked Valek. And then in a tone of absolute conviction, he continued: |
| “You see, it is the grey stone.” |
| “Yes,” the child repeated like a feeble echo. “It is the grey stone.” |
| “Which grey stone?” |
| I asked, not understanding what they meant. |
| “The grey stone has sucked her life away,” Valek explained, gazing at the sky as before. |
| “Tiburtsi says so. |
| Tiburtsi knows.” |
| “Yes,” the child once more echoed softly. “Tiburtsi knows everything.” |
| I understood nothing of the puzzling words which Valek had repeated after Tiburtsi, but the argument that Tiburtsi knew everything had its effect on me. |
| I raised myself on one elbow and looked at Marusia. |
| She was sitting in the same position in which Valek had placed her, and was still picking up the scattered flowers. |
| The movements of her thin hands were slow, her eyes were like blue bruises in her pale face, and her long lashes were downcast. |
| As I looked at that wee, pathetic figure I realised that in Tiburtsi’s words, although I could not understand them, there lay a bitter truth. |
| Something was surely sucking away the life of this strange child that wept when other children would have laughed. |
| But how could a grey stone do this thing? |
| There was a riddle more dreadful to me than all the ghosts in the old castle. |
| Let the Turks pining under ground be never so terrible and the old count never so cruel, they all smacked of the fantastic horror of ancient legends. |
| But here was something incredibly dreadful taking place under my very eyes. |
| Something formless, pitiless, cruel, and heavy as a stone was hanging over this little being’s head, draining the colour from her cheeks, the brightness from her eyes, and the life out of her limbs. |
| “It must be done at night,” I thought, and something wrung my heart until it ached. |
| I, too, subdued my boisterous ways under the influence of this feeling. |
| Suiting our actions to our little lady’s quiet gravity, Valek and I would put her down somewhere upon the grass and collect flowers and little bright-hued pebbles for her, or else we would catch butterflies, or make her sparrow traps of bricks. |
| Sometimes, stretched beside her on the grass, we would lie gazing at the sky and, as we watched the clouds sailing high above the chapel’s crumbling roof, we would tell Marusia stories or talk with one another. |
| These conversations cemented the friendship between Valek and me more firmly every day, and it grew steadily in spite of the sharp contrast that our characters presented. |
| He opposed a sorrowful gravity to my impulsive high spirits and won my respect by the masterly, independent way in which he spoke of grown-up people. |
| He also told me much that was new to me, things of which I had never thought before. |
| Noticing that he spoke of Tiburtsi as of a comrade I asked: |
| “Is Tiburtsi your father?” |
| “He must be,” he answered thoughtfully, as if the question had never before occurred to him. |
| “Does he love you?” |
| “Yes,” he answered much more decidedly this time. |
| “He is always doing things for me, and sometimes, you know, he kisses me and cries.” |
| “He loves me and cries too!” Marusia chimed in, with a look of childish pride. |
| “My father doesn’t love me,” I said sadly. |
| “He never kisses me. |
| He is a horrid man.” |
| “No, no,” Valek objected. “You don’t understand. |
| Tiburtsi says he isn’t. He says the Judge is the best man in the town, and that the town would have been ruined long ago if it had not been for your father and the Priest who has just gone into a monastery, and the Jewish Rabbi. |
| Those three — ” |
| “What have those three done?” |
| “The town hasn’t been ruined because they were there, so Tiburtsi says, because they look after the poor people. |
| Your father, you know, once sentenced a count to punishment.” |
| “Yes, that’s so. |
| The count was very angry.” |
| “There, you see! |
| It’s no joke to sentence a count.” |
| “Why?” |
| “Why?” |
| Valek repeated. |
| “Because a count isn’t an ordinary person. |
| A count does what he pleases and drives in a coach, and then that count had money. |
| He would have given money to any other judge, and the judge would have let him go and condemned a poor man.” |
| “Yes, that’s true. |
| I heard the count shouting in our house: ‘ |
| ‘I can buy and sell every one of you!’” |
| “And what did the Judge say?” |
| “My father said: ‘ |
| ‘Get out of my sight!’” |
| “There, now, you see! |
| And Tiburtsi says he isn’t afraid to drive a rich man away, but when old Ivanovna came to him with her rheumatism he had a chair brought for her. |
| He’s like that! |
| Even Turkevich has never raised a rumpus under his windows.” |
| That was true; |
| when he was on his denunciatory expeditions Turkevich always passed by our windows in silence, and sometimes even took off his cap. |
| All this set me thinking deeply. |
| Valek was showing me my father in a light in which I had never before seen him, and the boy’s words touched chords of filial pride in my heart. |
| I was pleased to hear these praises of my father coming from Tiburtsi who “knew everything,” but there still quivered in my breast, with a pang of aching love, the bitter certainty that this man never could and never would love me as Tiburtsi loved his children. |
| VI AMONG THE “GREY STONES” |
| Several days passed. |
| The “bad company” ceased to appear in town, and I wandered through the streets in vain, feeling sad and lonely, waiting for them to return so that I might hasten to the hill. |
| Only the Professor came down once with his sleepy walk; neither Tiburtsi nor Turkevich appeared. |
| I was thoroughly unhappy, for not to see Valek and Marusia had come to be a great loss to me. |
| But one day as I was walking down the street with hanging head Valek suddenly laid his hand upon my shoulder. |
| “Why don’t you come to see us any more?” |
| he asked. |
| “I’m afraid to — I haven’t seen your people in town.” |
| “O — oh — and I never thought of telling you! |
| Our people aren’t at home; |
| you can come. And I thought it was something else!” |
| “What?” |
| “I thought you were tired of coming.” |
| “No, no! |
| I’m coming at once; I even have the apples here with me.” |
| At mention of the apples Valek suddenly turned toward me as if he wanted to say something, but nothing came, and he only gave me an odd look. |
| “No matter, no matter,” he dismissed the question, seeing that I was looking expectantly at him. |
| “Go along up the hill; I have something to do; |
| I’ll catch you up on the way.” |
| I walked along, glancing back frequently, expecting to be overtaken by Valek, but I had climbed the hill and reached the chapel before he had appeared. |
| I stopped in doubt as to what I ought to do. Before me lay the graveyard, desolate and hushed, without the faintest sign of human habitation. Only sparrows were twittering in the sunshine, and a thicket of wild cherry trees, honeysuckle, and lilac bushes that nestled close up under the southern wall of the chapel was softly whispering something with its dark, dense foliage. |
| I looked about. |
| Where should I go next? |
| Clearly, the only thing to do was to wait for Valek. So I began to wander among the graves, idly trying to decipher the epitaphs on the mossy tombstones. |
| As I was roaming thus from grave to grave, I suddenly stumbled upon a large, half-ruined vault. |
| The roof of this vault had been taken off or else had been torn away by storms, and was lying close at hand. |
| The door was boarded up. |
| Out of curiosity I propped an old cross against the wall, climbed up, and peered into the vault. |
| It was empty, but a window with glass panes had been let into the centre of the floor, and under these panes there gaped the black void of a subterranean chamber. |
| While I was looking into this tomb and marvelling at the strange situation of the window, Valek came running, panting and tired, to the top of the hill. |
| He was carrying a large loaf of Jewish bread in his arms, something was sticking out from under his coat, and the perspiration was streaming down his face. |
| “Oh!” |
| he cried at sight of me. |
| “There you are! |
| If Tiburtsi should find you here, how angry he would be! |
| But it’s too late to do anything now. |
| I know you’re all right and won’t tell any one where we live. |
| Let’s go in!” |
| “Go in where? |
| Is it far?” |
| “You’ll see. |
| Follow me.” |
| He pushed aside the twigs of the honeysuckle and lilac bushes and disappeared into the thicket beneath the chapel wall. |
| I followed him, and found myself on a small trampled patch of earth which had been entirely concealed from me before by foliage. |
| Between the stems of the cherry trees I saw a fairly large opening from which a flight of earthen steps led downward. |
| Valek started down, bidding me follow him, and in a few seconds we found ourselves in darkness underground. |
| Valek took my hand and led me through a narrow, damp passage, until, turning sharply to the right, we emerged into a spacious crypt. |
| I stopped at the entrance, amazed at this unexpected sight. |
| Two beams of light fell sharply from overhead, painting two luminous bands across the darkness of the crypt. |
| This light came from a couple of windows, one of which I had seen in the floor of the vault, and another, which lay beyond and which had evidently been constructed in the same way as the first. |
| The rays of the sun did not fall directly upon these windows, but were reflected into them from the walls of the two old vaults. |
| This light was diffused in the grey air underground, and fell upon the flag-stone floor, from which it was reflected once more, filling the crypt with a dusky shimmer. |
| The walls were also of stone, and massive, thick columns, rising ponderously from the floor, spread their stone arches in all directions and at last firmly clasped the vaulted roof above. |
| Two figures were sitting in a patch of light on the floor. |
| The old Professor, with bowed head and muttering something to himself, was cobbling his rags together with a needle. |
| He did not even look up as we entered the crypt, and had it not been for the slight movement of his hands, his grey figure might easily have been mistaken for some grotesque piece of stone carving. |
| Under the other window sat Marusia by a little heap of flowers, sorting them over, as her custom was. |
| A beam of light fell on her fair curls, bathing her in radiance from head to foot, but in spite of this she stood out a strange little misty speck against the grey stone background, looking as if she might melt and vanish at any moment. |
| Whenever a cloud passed over the earth, dimming the sun’s brightness, this background seemed to slip away and disappear, swallowed up in darkness, but when the sun shone out anew, the cold, cruel stones stood out once more, clasping each other above the tiny figure of the child in an indissoluble embrace. |
| I involuntarily remembered Valek’s saying about the “grey stone” that was draining Marusia’s merriment away, and a feeling of superstitious fear came stealing into my heart. |
| I seemed to be aware of an invisible but terrible stony stare directed at her, rapacious and intent; |
| I felt that the crypt was keenly eyeing its prey. |
| “Valek!” |
| lisped Marusia gaily, as she caught sight of her brother. |
| When she saw me with him a faint light shone in her eyes. |
| I gave her the apples I had brought, and Valek, breaking the loaf in two, gave her a piece and handed the rest to the Professor. |
| That unhappy man of learning accepted the gift indifferently, and began munching without tearing himself away from his occupation. |
| I shivered and moved uneasily, stifled, as it were, by the oppressive “stare” of those grey stones. |
| “Come! |
| Come away from here — --” I insisted, plucking at Valek’s sleeve. |
| “Take her away!” |
| “Come, Marusia, let’s go upstairs,” Valek called to his sister. |
| And the three of us climbed up out of the crypt, but even out of doors I felt a sense of restlessness and strain. |
| Valek was sadder and more silent than usual. |
| “Did you stay in town to buy that bread?” |
| I asked. |
| “To buy it?” |
| laughed Valek. “Where would I find the money?” |
| “How did you get it then? |
| Did you ask for it?” |
| “Yes, that’s likely! |
| Who would give it to me? |
| No, brother, I nabbed it from Sarah the Jewess’ bread-tray at the bazaar. |
| She didn’t see me.” |
| He said this in a matter-of-fact voice, sprawling on the grass with his hands under his head. |
| I raised myself on my elbow and stared at him. |
| “So you stole it?” |
| “Yes, I did.” |
| I threw myself back on the grass and we lay for a minute in silence. |
| “It’s wicked to steal!” I burst out, full of the saddest perplexity. |
| “Our people were all away. |
| Marusia was crying because she was hungry.” |
| “Yes, I was hungry,” repeated the child with pitiful simplicity. |
| I had not yet discovered what hunger was, but at the little one’s last words my breast heaved and I stared at my friends as if I were seeing them for the first time. |
| Valek was lying on the grass as before, pensively watching a soaring sparrow-hawk, but he now no longer looked impressive. |
| At the sight of Marusia holding her piece of bread in both hands my heart absolutely stopped beating. |
| “Why”--I asked with an effort — “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” |
| “I wanted to tell you, and then I changed my mind. |
| You have no money of your own.” |
| “Well, what difference does that make? |
| I should have brought a loaf from home.” |
| “What, on the sly?” |
| “Yes-es — --” |
| “Then you would have stolen it too.” |
| “I — it would have been from my father.” |
| “That’s worse!” |
| said Valek decidedly. |
| “I never rob my father.” |
| “Well, then, I should have asked for it. |
| He would have given it to me.” |
| “Oh, he might have given it to you once — but how could he provide for all the beggars in town?” |
| “Are you — beggars?” |
| I asked in a low voice. |
| “Yes, we are beggars,” answered Valek bluntly and gruffly. |
| I said nothing, and in a few minutes I rose to go. |
| “Are you going away already?” |
| asked Valek. |
| “Yes.” |
| I was going because I could not, that day, play tranquilly with my friends as before. |
| The pure, childish affection I had felt for them was sullied. |
| Although the love I bore Valek and Marusia was not diminished, there was now mingled with it a sharp current of pity that turned it to a burning heartache. |
| On reaching home I went to bed early because I did not know where to lay this new feeling of pain with which my whole soul was burning. |
| I buried my head under my pillow and wept bitterly until kindly sleep at last came with her soft breath to blow away my grief. |
| VII TIBURTSI APPEARS ON THE SCENE |
| “Good morning! |
| I thought you weren’t coming back any more!” this was Valek’s greeting to me when I appeared on the hill next day. |
| I understood why he had said this. |
| “No, I — I shall always come here,” I answered firmly, to put an end to that question forever. |
| Valek’s spirits rose perceptibly at this answer and we both felt more at ease. |
| “Well, and where are your people?” |
| I asked. “Haven’t they come back yet?” |
| “Not yet. |
| The Lord knows what has become of them.” |
| We went gaily to work to manufacture a cunning sparrow trap for which I had brought the string. |
| This string we put into Marusia’s hand, and whenever a thoughtless sparrow came hopping carelessly into the snare, Marusia would pull the string, and the cover would slam down over the bird, which we would afterwards release. |
| Meanwhile, at noon, the sky had grown overcast. Dark clouds soon came rolling up, and we could hear the storm roaring between merry claps of thunder. |
| I was very unwilling, at first, to go down into the crypt, but remembering that Valek and Marusia lived there always I overcame the unpleasant sensation, and went with them. |
| All was dark and quiet there, but we could hear the muffled din of the thunder overhead rumbling exactly as if some one were driving an enormous wagon over a monstrous bridge. |
| I soon grew more accustomed to the crypt, and we stood listening happily to the broad sheets of rain descending upon the earth, while the roar and crash of the incessant thunder-claps keyed up our nerves and woke in us an animation that demanded an outlet. |
| “Come, let’s play blind-man’s buff!” I suggested. They tied a bandage over my eyes. |
| Marusia’s pitiful little laughter rang out as her languid feet stumbled across the stone floor, while I ran in pursuit, until I suddenly found myself bending over a wet form, and at the same moment felt some one seize my leg. |
| A powerful arm raised me off the floor and held me upside down in the air. |
| The bandage fell from my eyes. |
| Tiburtsi, angry and wet and more terrible than ever from being seen upside down, was holding me by the leg and wildly rolling his eyes. |
| “What is this, hey?” |
| he asked sternly, glaring at Valek. |
| “So you are passing the time gaily here! |
| You have pleasant company, I see.” |
| “Let me go!” |
| I cried, surprised that I was able to speak at all in such an unusual position, but Tiburtsi only held my leg the tighter. |
| “ Responde! Answer!” |
| he sternly commanded Valek, who was standing under these difficult circumstances with two fingers thrust into his mouth, as if to proclaim that he had absolutely nothing to say. |
| I could see, though, that he was watching my unhappy person swinging in space like a pendulum with sympathetic eyes and a great deal of compassion. |
| Tiburtsi raised me and looked into my face. |
| “Aha, this is little master Judge unless my eyes deceive me! |
| Why does his honour favour us with a visit?” |
| “Let me go!” |
| I cried stubbornly. |
| “Let me go at once!” |
| And at this I instinctively made a movement as if I were stamping my foot on the ground, but the only result was the quivering of my body in mid-air. |
| Tiburtsi roared with laughter. |
| “Ha, ha, ha! |
| My Lord the Judge is pleased to be annoyed! |
| But come, you don’t know me yet. |
| Ego Tiburtsi sum. |
| And I am going to hold you over a fire, like this, and roast you like a little pig.” |
| I began to think that this would inevitably be my fate, especially as Valek’s despairing face seemed to foretell the possibility of such a sad ending, but fortunately Marusia came to my rescue. |
| “Don’t be frightened, Vasia! Don’t be frightened!” |
| she admonished me, going right up to Tiburtsi’s legs. |
| “He never roasts little boys over a fire. |
| That isn’t true!” |
| Tiburtsi turned me right side up with a swift movement, and set me on my feet; |
| at this I nearly fell down, for my head was swimming, but he supported me with his hand and then, sitting down on a log, stood me between his knees. |
| “And how did you get here?” |
| he asked. |
| “Have you been coming here long? |
| You tell me!” |
| he commanded, turning to Valek when he saw that I would not answer. |
| “A long time,” answered the boy. |
| “How long?” |
| “Six days.” |
| This answer seemed to please Tiburtsi. |
| “Aha, six days!” |
| he said, turning me round so that I faced him. |
| “Six days is a long time. |
| And have you babbled to any one yet where you have been?” |
| “No, not to any one.” |
| “Is that true?” |
| “Not to any one.” |
| “ Bene , that is excellent. |
| The chances are that you will not henceforth babble. |
| I always did think you were a decent little fellow from meeting you on the street. |
| You’re a real little guttersnipe, even if you are a judge. |
| Have you come here to try us, eh?” |
| He spoke kindly enough, but my feelings were deeply hurt, therefore I answered crossly: |
| “I’m not a judge. |
| I’m Vasia.” |
| “The one doesn’t interfere with the other, and Vasia can be a judge too — not now, but later on. |
| It’s an old story. |
| For instance, I am Tiburtsi, he is Valek; |
| I am a beggar, he is a beggar. |
| In fact, to speak frankly, I steal and he will steal too. |
| Your father tries me now; |
| very well then, some day you will try Valek. |
| There you have it!” |
| “I shan’t try Valek,” I answered gloomily. |
| “That isn’t true.” |
| “He won’t try Valek,” Marusia spoke up for me, confidently dismissing such an atrocious supposition. |
| The little girl nestled confidingly against the legs of this monster, and he tenderly stroked her curls with his sinewy hand. |
| “Don’t say that too soon,” said the strange fellow pensively, turning to me and speaking as if I were a grown man. “Don’t say that, amice ! |
| It’s an old story; |
| every man to his own, suum cuique ; |
| every one must go his own way, and who knows, perhaps it’s a good thing that your path has crossed ours. |
| It’s a good thing for you, amice , because it’s a good thing to have a human heart in one’s breast and not a cold stone — do you understand?” |
| I understood nothing, but nevertheless I fixed my gaze on this queer person’s face. |
| Tiburtsi’s eyes were looking deeply into mine, and there gleamed dimly in them something that seemed to pierce into my very soul. |
| “Of course you don’t understand, because you are still a child. |
| Therefore let me tell you briefly that you may some day remember the words of the philosopher Tiburtsi. |
| If you ever find yourself sitting in judgment upon that boy there, remember that even in the days when you were both silly little lads playing together, you were travelling upon the road where men walk well-clothed and well-fed, while he was running along, a ragged sans-culotte with an empty belly. |
| And besides, until that happens, remember one thing well,” he added, sharply changing his tone. |
| “If you whisper one word of what you have seen here to that Judge of yours, or even to a bird, as sure as my name is Tiburtsi Drab I’ll hang you up by the heels in that fireplace and make roast ham of you. |
| You understand that, I hope?” |
| “I won’t tell any one — I — may I come again?” |
| “You may, I give you my permission — sum conditionem --but you’re stupid yet and don’t understand Latin. |
| I have already told you about that ham — now remember!” |
| He let me go, and stretched himself wearily on a bench by the wall. |
| “Bring me that there,” he said to Valek, pointing to a large bag which he had left on the threshold as he came in. “And light the fire. |
| We’re going to cook dinner to-day.” |
| He was now no longer the same man who had frightened me a short while ago by rolling his eyes, or the mountebank who was wont to amuse the public for pennies. |
| He had taken his place as a host at the head of his family, and, like a man who has returned from his daily toil, he issued commands to his household. |
| He seemed very tired. |
| His clothes were drenched with rain, his hair was clinging to his brow, and his whole expression was one of utter weariness. |
| It was the first time I had seen that look on the face of the jolly orator of the cafés, and this glimpse behind the scenes of an actor resting after playing a difficult and exhausting rôle on the stage of life, filled my heart with a feeling of pain and dread. |
| It was another of those revelations with which the old chapel had been so rife for me. |
| Valek and I went quickly to work. |
| Valek lit a little torch, and together we entered a dark passage adjoining the crypt. |
| There, in a corner, lay some logs of half-decayed wood, bits of crosses, and old boards. |
| We chose several pieces out of this store and, heaping them up in the fireplace, kindled a little fire. |
| Then I had to stand aside while Valek with knowing hands went to work alone on the cooking. |
| Half an hour later some kind of a brew was already stewing in a pot over the fire, and while we were waiting for it to cook, Valek placed upon a rough three-legged table a frying pan in which some pieces of meat were steaming. |
| Tiburtsi rose. |
| “Is it ready?” |
| he asked. |
| “Well, that’s splendid. |
| Sit down with us, boy, you have earned your dinner. |
| Domine!”-- |
| !”--he next shouted to the Professor. |
| “Put down your needle and come to the table.” |
| “In a minute,” answered the Professor in a low voice. Such a sensible remark from him surprised me. |
| But the spark of consciousness that Tiburtsi’s voice had awakened in him did not reappear. |
| The old man thrust his needle into his rags and indifferently, with a dull look, took his seat on one of the logs that served as chairs in the crypt. |
| Tiburtsi held Marusia on his lap. |
| She and Valek ate with an appetite that showed what a rare luxury meat was for them; |
| Marusia even licked her greasy little fingers. |
| Tiburtsi ate with frequent pauses, and, evidently obeying an irresistible impulse to talk, turned his conversation to the Professor. |
| The poor man of letters grew surprisingly attentive whenever he did this, and bowed his head to listen, with a great air of intelligence as if he understood every word. |
| Sometimes he even signified his assent by nodding and making soft little moans. |
| “You see, Domine, how little a man needs,” Tiburtsi said. |
| “Am I not right? |
| There! now our hunger is appeased, and all that now remains for us to do is to thank God — and the Roman Catholic Priest.” |
| “Aha, aha!” |
| agreed the Professor. |
| “You agree with me, Domine, but you don’t know what the Priest has to do with it. I know you well. |
| Nevertheless, if it weren’t for the Priest we shouldn’t be eating fried meat and other things now.” |
| “Did he give it to you?” |
| “This youngster has an inquiring mind, Domine,” Tiburtsi continued. |
| “Of course his Reverence gave us this, although we did not ask him for it, and although not only his left hand knew not what his right hand was doing, but neither hand had the slightest knowledge of the transaction. |
| Eat, Domine!” |
| All I could understand from this strange, confused discourse was, that the method of obtaining our dinner had not been quite regular, and I could not refrain from asking another question. |
| “Did you — take this yourself?” |
| “The boy is not devoid of shrewdness,” Tiburtsi continued. “It is only a pity that he hasn’t seen the Priest. |
| The Priest has a belly like a forty-gallon cask, and it’s no doubt very dangerous for him to indulge in greed. |
| On the other hand all of us here suffer rather from an excess of leanness than from corpulence, therefore a certain amount of food does not come amiss. |
| Am I right, Domine?” |
| “Aha, aha!” |
| pensively moaned the Professor again. |
| “There, you see! |
| You have expressed your meaning extremely successfully this time. I was beginning to think that this youngster here had more brains than some men of learning. |
| However, to return to the Priest, I always think that a good lesson is worth the price, and in this case we can say that we bought these provisions from him. |
| If he makes the doors of his store-house a little stronger in future we shall be quits. |
| However,” he cried, suddenly turning to me, “you are stupid still and there is much you don’t understand. |
| But she, there, will understand. |
| Tell me, my Marusia, did I do right to bring you some meat?” |
| “Yes!” |
| answered the child, her sapphire eyes shining softly, “Manya was hungry.” |
| At twilight that evening I turned homeward with a reeling brain. |
| Tiburtsi’s strange sayings had not for a moment stilled the conviction in my breast that it was “wicked to steal.” |
| On the contrary, the painful sensation that I had felt before had grown stronger than ever. |
| They were beggars, thieves, they had no home! |
| From every one around me I had long ago heard that contempt was always attached to such people. |
| I felt all the poignancy of contempt rising from the bottom of my soul, but I instinctively shielded my affection from this bitter alloy, and did not allow the two feelings to mingle. |
| As a result of these dark workings of my soul, my pity for Valek and Marusia grew greater and more acute, but my affection did not diminish. |
| The formula that “it was wicked to steal” remained inviolate in my mind, but when I saw in imagination my small friend licking her greasy little fingers I rejoiced in her joy and in Valek’s. |
| Next evening, in one of our dark garden paths, I unexpectedly met my father. |
| He was pacing up and down as usual, staring before him with his accustomed strange, vacant look. |
| When I appeared beside him he put his hand on my shoulder. |
| “Where have you been?” |
| “I — I have been out walking.” |
| He looked at me sharply and seemed to want to say something, but his eyes soon grew abstracted again, and, with a motion of his hand, he walked away down the path. |
| Even in those days I seemed to understand the meaning of that gesture. It said: |
| “Ah, what does it matter? |
| She is not here!” |
| I had lied almost for the first time in my life. |
| I had always been afraid of my father, and I now feared him more than ever. |
| I was harbouring in my breast a whole world of vague questions and sensations. |
| Could he understand me? |
| Could I confess anything to him without betraying my friends? |
| I trembled at the thought that in due time he would hear of my acquaintance with that “bad company,” but, betray Valek and Marusia — no, that I could never do! |
| There was a reason for my resolve: |
| if I broke my word and betrayed them, I should never be able to raise my eyes to their faces again for shame. |
| VIII AUTUMN |
| Autumn was drawing near. |
| In the fields the harvest was being reaped; the leaves were turning yellow in the woods. |
| With the approach of autumn Marusia’s health began to fail. |
| It was not that she complained of any pain, but she grew thinner every day; |
| her face grew paler, her eyes grew larger and darker, and it was with difficulty that she could raise her drooping eyelids. |
| I could climb the hill now without caring whether the “bad company” was there or not. |
| I had grown thoroughly accustomed to them, and felt absolutely at home in their abode. |
| “You’re a fine youngster, and you’ll be a great man some day,” Tiburtsi predicted. |
| The younger “suspicious persons” made me a bow and arrow out of elm wood; |
| the tall, red-nosed Grenadier twirled me in the air like a leaf as he gave me gymnastic lessons. |
| Only the Professor and Lavrovski always seemed to remain unconscious of my presence. The Professor was forever in the midst of some deep dream, while Lavrovski, when he was sober, by nature avoided all human intercourse, and preferred to crouch in a corner by himself. |
| All these people lived apart from Tiburtsi who, with his “family,” occupied the crypt I have already spoken of. |
| They inhabited a crypt which was similar to ours but larger, and which was divided from it by two narrow halls. |
| Here was less light and more dampness and gloom. |
| In places along the walls stood wooden benches and the blocks which served as chairs. |
| The benches were littered with heaps of rags, which had converted them into beds. |
| In the middle of the crypt, under a ray of light, stood a joiner’s bench at which Tiburtsi and the others sometimes worked. |
| The “bad company” included a cobbler and a basket maker, but all, with the exception of Tiburtsi, were either starvelings or triflers; men, I noticed, whose hands trembled too much for them to do any work successfully. |
| The floor of this crypt was always strewn with chips and shavings and dirt, and disorder reigned supreme, even though Tiburtsi scolded the inmates furiously at times, and made one of them sweep the floor and put the gloomy abode in order if ever so little. |
| I did not often visit them because I could not accustom myself to the foul air, and because, too, the sombre Lavrovski dwelt there when he was sober. |
| He was generally either sitting on a bench with his head in his hands, his long hair streaming, or pacing up and down from corner to corner with swift strides. |
| His whole person breathed an atmosphere of such depression and gloom that my nerves could not endure it. |
| His fellow-unfortunates, however, had long since grown accustomed to his eccentric ways. |
| “General Turkevich” would sometimes set him to work making fair copies of petitions and of quips and quirks which he himself had written for the townsfolk, or else he would make him write out the lampoons which he afterwards nailed to the lamp posts of the city. |
| Lavrovski would then quietly take his seat at a table in Tiburtsi’s room, and for hours at a time would sit forming, one after another, the beautiful, even letters of his exquisite handwriting. |
| Twice I chanced to see him carried down stupefied with drink from above ground into the crypt. |
| The unhappy man’s head was dangling and banging from side to side, his legs were trundling helplessly after him and bumping down the stone steps, his face wore a look of misery, and tears were trickling down his cheeks. |
| Marusia and I, clinging tightly to one another, watched these scenes from a distant corner, but Valek mixed quite nonchalantly with the men, supporting now a hand, now a foot, now the head of the helpless Lavrovski. |
| Everything about these people that had amused and interested me like a Punch and Judy show when I saw it in the streets was revealed to me here, behind the scenes, in all its ugly nakedness, and the sight of it weighed heavily upon my childish spirits. |
| Here Tiburtsi held undisputed sway. |
| It was he who had discovered the crypts, he who had taken possession of them, and all his band obeyed him implicitly. |
| That is probably the reason why I do not remember one single occasion on which any one of those creatures, who had certainly lost all the semblance of human beings, ever came to me with an evil suggestion. |
| Having gained in knowledge from a prosaic experience of life, I know now that there must have been a certain amount of depravity, petty vice, and rottenness among them, but to-day, when those people and scenes rise in my memory wrapped in the mists of the past, I see before me only tragedy, poverty, and the profoundest sadness. |
| Oh, Childhood and Youth, what great fountainheads of idealism you are! |
| And now Autumn began to come into its own. |
| The sky was more frequently overcast, the surrounding country sank into a misty crepuscule, torrents of rain swept noisily across the earth, and their thunder resounded monotonously and mournfully in the crypt. |
| I found it very hard to steal away from home in this weather, for my one desire was to get away unnoticed. |
| When I came back drenched to the skin, I would hang up my clothes before the fire myself, and slip quietly into bed, there to endure philosophically the torrents of scolding that would invariably flow from the lips of the servants and my nurse. |
| Every time I visited my friends I noticed that Marusia’s health was failing more and more. |
| She never went out into the fresh air now, and the grey stone — that unseen, silent monster of the crypt — did its dreadful work without interruption, sucking the life out of her little body. |
| The child spent most of her time in bed, and Valek and I exhausted every means in our power to amuse and interest her and to awaken the soft peals of her frail laughter. |
| Now that I had really become one of the “bad company” the child’s sad smile had grown almost as dear to me as my sister’s, but with Marusia I was not constantly reminded of my wickedness; |
| here was no scolding nurse; on the contrary, I knew that each time I came my arrival would call the colour into Marusia’s cheeks. |
| Valek embraced me like a brother, and even Tiburtsi would sometimes watch us three with a strange expression on his face and something very like tears glistening in his eyes. |
| Then one day the sky grew clear again. |
| The last clouds blew away, and the sun shone out upon the earth for the last time before winter’s coming. |
| We carried Marusia up into the sunlight, and there she seemed to revive. |
| She gazed about her with wide eyes, and the colour came into her cheeks. |
| It seemed as if the wind that was blowing over her with its cool, fresh breath were returning to her part of the life-blood stolen by the grey stones of the crypt. |
| But alas! this did not last long. |
| And in the meanwhile clouds were beginning to gather over my head as well. |
| One morning as I was running down the garden path as usual I caught sight of my father and old Yanush of the castle. |
| The old man was cringing and bowing and saying something to my father, and the latter was standing before him, gloomy and stern, with a frown of impatient anger between his eyes. |
| At last my father stretched out his hand as if to push Yanush aside, and said: |
| “Go away! |
| You are nothing but an old gossip!” |
| The old man blinked and, holding his hat in his hand, ran forward again and stood in my father’s path. |
| My father’s eyes flashed with anger. |
| Yanush was speaking in a low voice, and I could not hear what he was saying, but my father’s broken sentences fell upon my ears with the utmost distinctness, like the blows of a whip. |
| “I don’t believe a word of it — What do you want to persecute those people for?-- |
| ?--I won’t listen to verbal accusations, and a written one you would be obliged to prove — Silence! |
| that is my business — I won’t listen to you, I tell you.” |
| He finally pushed Yanush away so firmly that the latter did not dare to intrude upon him any longer. |
| My father turned aside into another path, and I ran out through the gate. |
| I very much disliked this old owl of the castle, and I trembled now with a premonition of evil. |
| I realised that the conversation I had overheard related to my friends and perhaps, also, to me. |
| When I told Tiburtsi what had happened he made a dreadful face. |
| “Whew, young one, what bad news that is! |
| Oh, that accursed old fox!” |
| “My father drove him away,” I answered to console him. |
| “Your father, young man, is the best judge there has been since the days of Solomon, but do you know what curriculum vitæ means? |
| Of course you don’t. But you know what the Record of Service is, don’t you? |
| Well, curriculum vitæ is the Record of Service of a man who is not employed in the County Court, and if that old screech-owl has been able to ferret out anything and can show your father my record why — well, I swear to the Queen of Heaven I wouldn’t care to fall into the Judge’s clutches!” |
| “He’s not a cruel man, is he?” |
| I asked, remembering what Valek had told me. |
| “No, no, my boy, God forbid that you should think that of your father! |
| Your father has a good heart. |
| Perhaps he already knows everything that Yanush has been able to tell him, and still holds his tongue. |
| He doesn’t think it is necessary to pursue a toothless old lion into his last lair. |
| But how can I explain it to you, my boy? |
| Your father works for a gentleman whose name is Law. |
| He has eyes and a heart only as long as Law is nicely tucked up in bed, but when that gentleman gets up and comes to your father and says: ‘ |
| ‘Come on, Judge, sha’n’t we get on the trail of Tiburtsi Drab or whatever his name is?’ |
| from that moment the Judge must lock up his heart, and his claws will become so sharp that the earth will turn upside down before Tiburtsi will escape out of his clutches. |
| Do you understand, my boy? |
| And that’s why I, why we all, respect your father as we do, because he is a faithful servant of his master, and such men are rare. |
| If all Law’s servants were like him, Law could sleep quietly in his bed and never wake up at all. |
| My whole trouble is that I had a quarrel with Law a long time ago — ah yes, my boy, a very violent quarrel!” |
| As he said this Tiburtsi got up, took Marusia’s hand, and, leading her into a distant corner, began kissing her and pressing his rough head to her tiny breast. |
| I stood motionless where I was under the spell of the impression created by the strange words of this strange man. |
| In spite of the fantastic and unintelligible twists and turns of his speech I understood perfectly the substance of what Tiburtsi had said, and my father’s image loomed more imposing than ever in my imagination, invested with a halo of stern but lovable strength amounting almost to grandeur. |
| But at the same time another and a bitterer feeling which I bore in my breast had increased in intensity. |
| “That’s what he’s like!” I thought. “And he doesn’t love me!” |
| IX THE DOLL |
| The bright days soon passed, and Marusia began to grow worse again. |
| She now gazed indifferently with her large, fixed, darkening eyes at all our cunning devices for her amusement, and it was long since we had heard her laughter. |
| I began to bring my playthings to the crypt, but they only diverted her for a short time. |
| I then decided to turn for help to my sister Sonia. |
| Sonia had a large doll with magnificent long hair and cheeks painted a brilliant red, a present from our mother. |
| I had the greatest faith in the powers of this doll, and therefore, calling my sister into a distant part of the garden one day, I asked her to lend it to me. |
| I begged so earnestly and described the little suffering girl who had no toys of her own so vividly that Sonia, who at first had only clasped the doll more tightly to her breast, handed it to me and promised to play with her other toys for two or three days and to forget the doll entirely. |
| The effect produced on Marusia by this gaily dressed young lady with the china face exceeded all my wildest hopes. |
| The child, who had been fading like a flower in Autumn, suddenly seemed to revive again. |
| How tightly she hugged me! How merrily she laughed as she chattered to her new acquaintance! |
| The doll almost worked a miracle. |
| Marusia, who had not left her bed for many days, began to toddle about, pulling her fair-haired daughter after her, and even ran a few steps, dragging her weak little feet across the floor as she had done in former days. |
| At the same time the doll gave me many an anxious moment. |
| In the first place, on my way to the hill with my prize under my coat, I had met Yanush on the road, and the old man had followed me for a long time with his eyes, and shaken his head. |
| Then, two days later, our old nurse had noticed the disappearance of the doll, and had begun poking her nose into every corner in search of it. |
| Sonia tried to appease her, but the child’s artless assurances that she didn’t want the doll, that the doll had gone out for a walk and would soon come back, only served to create doubts in the minds of the servants, and to awaken their suspicions that this might not simply be a question of loss. |
| My father knew nothing as yet, and though Yanush, who came to him again one day, was sent away even more angrily than before, my father stopped me that morning on the way to the garden gate and ordered me not to leave home. |
| The same thing happened on the following day, and only on the fourth did I get up early and slip away over the fence while my father was still asleep. |
| Things were still going badly on the hill. |
| Marusia was in bed again and was worse. |
| Her face was strangely flushed, her fair curls were lying disheveled on her pillow, and she recognised no one. |
| Beside her lay the disastrous doll with its pink cheeks and its stupid, staring eyes. |
| I told Valek of the danger I was running, and we both decided that undoubtedly I ought to take the doll home, especially as Marusia would not notice its absence. |
| But we were mistaken! |
| No sooner did I take the doll out of the arms of the unconscious child than she opened her eyes, stared vaguely about as if she did not see me and did not know what was happening to her, and then suddenly began to cry very, very softly, but oh, so piteously, while an expression of such deep sorrow swept across her features under the veil of her delirium that, panic-stricken, I immediately laid the doll back in its former place. |
| The child smiled, drew the doll to her breast, and grew calm again. I realised that I had tried to deprive my little friend of the first and last pleasure of her short life. |
| Valek looked shyly at me. |
| “What shall we do now?” |
| he asked sadly. |
| Tiburtsi, who was sitting on a bench with his head sunk dejectedly on his breast, also looked at me, with a question in his eyes. |
| I therefore tried to look as careless as possible, and said: |
| “Never mind; |
| nurse has probably forgotten all about it by now.” |
| But the old woman had not forgotten. |
| When I reached home that day I again found Yanush at the garden gate. |
| Sonia’s eyes were red with weeping and our nurse threw me an angry, icy glance and muttered something between her toothless gums. |
| My father asked me where I had been, and having listened attentively to my usual answer, confined himself to telling me not to leave the house without his permission under any circumstances whatsoever. |
| This command was categorical and absolutely peremptory. |
| I dared not disobey it, and at the same time I could not make up my mind to ask my father for leave to go to my friends. |
| Four weary days passed. |
| I spent my time roaming dejectedly about the garden, gazing longingly in the direction of the hill, and waiting, too, for the storm which I felt was gathering over my head. |
| I had no idea what the future might bring, but my heart was as heavy as lead. |
| No one had ever punished me in my life; |
| my father had never so much as laid a finger on me, and I had never heard a harsh word from his lips, but I was suffering now from an oppressive sense of coming misfortune. |
| At last my father summoned me to his study. |
| I opened the door and stopped timidly on the threshold. |
| The melancholy autumn sun was shining in through the windows. |
| My father was sitting in an arm chair before a portrait of my mother, and did not turn to look at me as I came in. |
| I could hear the anxious beating of my own heart. |
| At last my father turned round; |
| I raised my eyes and instantly dropped them again. |
| My father’s face looked terrible to me. |
| Half a minute passed, and I could feel his stern, fixed, withering gaze riveted upon me. |
| “Did you take your sister’s doll?” |
| The words fell upon my ears so suddenly and sharply that I quivered. |
| “Yes,” I answered in a low voice. |
| “And do you know that that doll was a present from your mother, and that you ought to have preserved it as something sacred? |
| Did you steal it?” |
| “No,” I answered, raising my head. |
| “How can you say no?” |
| my father suddenly shouted. |
| “You stole it and took it away. |
| Whom did you take it to? |
| Speak!” |
| He strode swiftly toward me, and laid a heavy hand upon my shoulder. |
| I raised my head with an effort, and looked up. |
| My father’s face was pale. |
| The frown of pain which had lain between his brows since my mother’s death was still there, but now his eyes were flashing with sombre wrath. |
| I shrank away. |
| I seemed to see madness — or was it hatred?--glaring at me out of those eyes. |
| “Well, what did you do? |
| Answer!” |
| And the hand which was holding my shoulder gripped it more tightly than before. |
| “I — I won’t tell you,” I answered in a low voice. |
| “Yes, you will tell me!” |
| my father rapped out, and there was a threat in his voice. |
| “I won’t tell you,” I whispered lower still. |
| “You will, you will!” |
| He repeated these words in a muffled voice as if they had burst from him with a painful effort. |
| I felt his hand trembling, and even seemed to hear the rage boiling in his breast. |
| My head sank lower and lower, and tears began to drip slowly out of my eyes upon the floor, but I still kept repeating almost inaudibly: |
| “No, I won’t tell; |
| I’ll never, never tell.” |
| It was my father’s son speaking in me. |
| He could never have succeeded in extorting an answer from me, no, not by the fiercest tortures. |
| There welled up in my breast in response to his threats the almost unconscious feeling of injury that comes to an ill-used child, and a sort of burning love for those whose betrayal my father was demanding. |
| My father drew a deep breath. |
| I shrank away still farther, and the bitter tears scalded my cheeks. |
| I waited. |
| It would be hard for me to describe my sensations at that moment. |
| I knew that his breast was seething with rage, and that at any moment my body might be struggling helplessly in his strong, delirious arms. |
| What would he do to me? |
| Would he hurl me from him? |
| Would he crush me? But I did not seem to dread that now. |
| I even loved the man in that moment of fear, but, at the same time, I felt instinctively that he was about to shatter this love with one mad effort, and that for ever and ever after I should carry the same little flame of hatred in my heart which I had seen gleaming in his eyes. |
| I had lost all sense of fear. |
| Instead, there had begun to throb in my heart a feeling exasperating, bold, challenging; |
| I seemed to be waiting, and longing for the catastrophe to come at last. |
| It would be better so — yes — better — better — -- |
| Once more my father sighed heavily. I was no longer looking at him. |
| I only heard his sighs, long, deep, and convulsive, and I know not to this day whether he himself overcame the frenzy that possessed him or whether it failed to find an outlet owing to an unexpected occurrence. |
| I only know that at that critical moment Tiburtsi suddenly shouted under the open window in his harsh voice: |
| “Hi, there, my poor little friend!” |
| “Tiburtsi is here!” |
| flashed through my mind, but his coming made no other impression on me. |
| I was all beside myself with suspense, and did not even heed the trembling of my father’s hand upon my shoulder, or realise that Tiburtsi’s appearance or any other external circumstance could come between my father and myself, or could avert that which I believed to be inevitable, and which I was awaiting with such a flood of passionate anger. |
| Meanwhile Tiburtsi had quickly opened the door of the room, and now stood on the threshold embracing us both with his piercing, lynx-like glance. |
| I can remember to this day the smallest details of the scene. |
| For a moment a flash of cold, malevolent mockery gleamed in the greenish eyes and passed over the wide, uncouth face of this gutter orator, but it was only a flash. |
| Then he shook his head, and there was more of sorrow than of his accustomed irony in his voice as he said: |
| “Oho, I see that my young friend is in an awkward situation.” |
| My father received him with a gloomy, threatening look, but Tiburtsi endured it calmly. |
| He had grown serious now, and his mockery had ceased. There was a striking look of sadness in his eyes. |
| “My Lord Judge,” he said gently. |
| “You are a just man; |
| let the child go! |
| The boy has been ‘in bad company,’ but God knows he has done no bad deeds, and if his little heart is drawn toward my unfortunate people, I swear to the Queen of Heaven that you may hang me if you wish, but I will not allow the boy to suffer for that. |
| Here is your doll, my lad.” |
| He untied a little bundle, and took out the doll. |
| The hands that had been gripping my shoulder relaxed. |
| My father looked surprised. |
| “What does this mean?” |
| he asked at last. |
| “Let the boy go!” Tiburtsi repeated, stroking my bowed head lovingly with his broad palm. |
| “You will get nothing out of him with your threats, and besides, I will gladly tell you everything you want to know. |
| Come, Your Honour, let us go into another room.” |
| My father consented, with his eyes fixed in surprise on Tiburtsi’s face. |
| They went out together, and I stayed rooted to the spot, overwhelmed with the emotions with which my heart was bursting. |
| At that moment I was unconscious of what was going on around me, and if, in calling to mind the details of this scene, I remember that sparrows were twittering outside the window and that the rhythmic splash of the water-wheel came to me from the river, why that is only the mechanical action of my memory. |
| Nothing external existed for me then; |
| there existed only a little boy in whose breast two separate emotions were seething: |
| anger and love; seething so fiercely that my heart was troubled as a glass of water is dimmed when two different liquids are poured into it at the same time. |
| Such a little boy existed, and that boy was I; I was even sorry, in a way, for myself. |
| There existed also two voices, that came to me from the next room in a confused but animated conversation. |
| I was still standing on the same spot when the study door opened, and both talkers came into the room. |
| Once more I felt a hand on my head, and trembled. |
| It was my father’s, and he was tenderly stroking my hair. |
| Tiburtsi took my hands, and set me upon his knees right in my father’s presence. |
| “Come and see us,” he said. “Your father will let you come and say good-bye to my little girl. |
| She — she is dead.” |
| Tiburtsi’s voice trembled, and he winked his eyes queerly, but he at once rose quickly to his feet, set me down on the floor, pulled himself together, and left the room. |
| I raised my eyes inquiringly to my father’s face. |
| Another man was standing before me now, and there was something lovable about him which I had sought in vain before. |
| He was looking at me with his usual pensive gaze, but there was a shade of surprise in his eyes, and what might have been a question. |
| The storm which had just passed over our heads seemed to have dispelled the heavy mist that had lain on my father’s soul and frozen the gentle, kind expression on his face. |
| He now seemed to recognise in me the familiar features of his own son. |
| I took his hand trustfully, and said: |
| “I didn’t steal it. |
| Sonia lent it to me herself.” |
| “Yes,” he answered thoughtfully. “I know; |
| I am guilty before you, boy, but you will try to forget it sometime, won’t you?” |
| I seized his hand and kissed it. |
| I knew that he would never again look at me with the dreadful eyes which I had seen only a few moments before, and my long pent-up love burst forth in a torrent. |
| I did not fear him now. |
| “Will you let me go to the hill?” |
| I suddenly asked, remembering Tiburtsi’s invitation. |
| “Ye-es — go, boy, and say good-bye,” he answered tenderly, but with still the same shade of hesitation in his voice. |
| “No, wait a minute; |
| wait a minute, boy, please.” |
| He went into his bed-room and came back in a minute with a few bills which he thrust into my hand. |
| “Give these to Tiburtsi. |
| Tell him that I beg him — do you understand?-- |
| ?--that I beg him to accept this money — from you. |
| Do you understand? |
| And say, too,” added my father, “say that if he knows any one called Feodorovich he had better tell that Feodorovich to leave this town. |
| And now run along boy, quickly.” |
| Panting and incoherent, I overtook Tiburtsi on the hill and gave him my father’s message. |
| “My father begs you to — --” I said, and pressed the money which I had received into his hand. |
| I did not look at his face. |
| He took the money, and gloomily listened to my message concerning Feodorovich. |
| In the crypt, on a bench in a dark corner, I found Marusia lying. |
| The word death has little meaning for a child, but bitter tears choked me at the sight of her lifeless body. |
| My little friend was lying there looking very serious and sad, and her tiny face was pitifully drawn. |
| Her closed eyes were a little sunken and the blue circles around them were darker than before. |
| Her little mouth was slightly open, and wore an expression of childish grief. |
| This little grimace was Marusia’s answer to our tears. |
| The Professor was standing at her bedside, indifferently shaking his head. |
| The Grenadier was hammering in a corner, making a coffin out of some old boards torn from the chapel roof. |
| Lavrovski, sober and with a look of perfect understanding, was strewing Marusia’s body with autumn flowers which he himself had gathered. |
| Valek was lying asleep in a corner, shuddering all over in his dreams, and crying out restlessly from time to time. X |
| CONCLUSION |
| Soon after this the members of the “bad company” dispersed to the four corners of the earth. |
| There remained behind only the Professor, who until his death continued to haunt the streets of the town, and Turkevich, to whom my father would give a little writing to do from time to time. |
| For my part, I lost not a little blood in combats with the Jewish boys who tormented the Professor by reminding him of sharp and pointed instruments. |
| The Grenadier and the other suspicious characters went elsewhere to seek their fortunes. |
| Tiburtsi and Valek suddenly and completely vanished, and no one could say whither they had gone, as no one knew whence they had come. |
| The old chapel has suffered much since then from the onslaughts of Time. |
| First the roof fell in, breaking down the ceiling of the crypt. |
| Then landslides began to form around the building, and the place grew more dismal than ever. |
| The owls now hoot more loudly than before among its ruins, and the will-o’-the-wisps on the graves still glow with a malign blue fire on dark autumn nights. |
| One grave only, surrounded by a little fence, grows green with fresh grass every spring, and lies bedecked with brilliant flowers. |
| Sonia and I used often to visit this little grave, and sometimes our father would go with us. |
| We liked to sit there in the shade of the whispering birch trees, with the town below us shimmering placidly in the sunlight. |
| Here my sister and I read and dreamed together, sharing our first young thoughts and our first premonitions of upright, winged youth. |
| And when at last the time came for us to leave the quiet city of our birth, it was here, over this little grave, in the Springtime of life and hope, that we made our last compacts with one another on the last day that we spent at home. |