Through Russia Part 52

"You are a namesake of mine, then."

"Indeed? Is that so?"

With which, tapping me on the knee, the figure added:

"Come, then, namesake. 'I have mortar, and you have water, so together let us paint the town.'"

Murmuring amid the silence could be heard small, light waves that were no more than ripples. Behind us the busy clamour of the monastery had died down, and even Kalinin's cheery voice seemed subdued by the influence of the night--it seemed to have in it less of the note of self-confidence.

"My mother was a wet-nurse," he went on to volunteer, "and I her only child. When I was twelve years of age I was, owing to my height, converted into a footman. It happened thus. One day, on General Stepan (my mother's then employer) happening to catch sight of me, he exclaimed: 'Evgenia, go and tell Fedor' (the ex-soldier who was then serving the General as footman) 'that he is to teach your son to wait at table! The boy is at least tall enough for the work.' And for nine years I served the General in this capacity. And then, and then--oh, THEN I was seized with an illness.... Next, I obtained a post under a merchant who was then mayor of our town, and stayed with him twenty-one months. And next I obtained a situation in an hotel at Kharkov, and held it for a year. And after that I kept changing my places, for, steady and sober though I was, I was beginning to lack taste for my profession, and to develop a spirit of the kind which deemed all work to be beneath me, and considered that I had been created to serve only myself, not others."

Along the high road to Sukhum which lay behind us there were proceeding some invisible travellers whose sc.r.a.ping of feet as they walked proclaimed the fact that they were not over-used to journeying on foot.

Just as the party drew level with us, a musical voice hummed out softly the line "Alone will I set forth upon the road," with the word "alone"

plaintively stressed. Next, a resonant ba.s.s voice said with a sort of indolent incisiveness:

"Aphon or aphonia means loss of speech to the extent of, to the extent of--oh, to WHAT extent, most learned Vera Vasilievna?"

"To the extent of total loss of power of articulation," replied a voice feminine and youthful of timbre.

Just at that moment we saw two dark, blurred figures, with a paler figure between them, come gliding into view.

"Strange indeed is it that, that--"

"That what?"

"That so many names proper to these parts should also be so suggestive.

Take, for instance, Mount Nakopioba. Certainly folk hereabouts seem to have "ama.s.sed" things, and to have known how to do so." [The verb nakopit means to ama.s.s, to heap up.]

"For my part, I always fail to remember the name of Simon the Canaanite. Constantly I find myself calling him 'the Cainite.'"

"Look here," interrupted the musical voice in a tone of chastened enthusiasm. "As I contemplate all this beauty, and inhale this restfulness, I find myself reflecting: 'How would it be if I were to let everything go to the devil, and take up my abode here for ever?'"

At this point all further speech became drowned by the sound of the monastery's bell as it struck the hour. The only utterance that came borne to my ears was the mournful fragment:

Oh, if into a single word I could pour my inmost thoughts!

To the foregoing dialogue my companion had listened with his head tilted to one side, much as though the dialogue had deflected it in that direction: and now, as the voices died away into the distance, he sighed, straightened himself, and said:

"Clearly those people were educated folk. And see too how, as they talked of one thing and another, there cropped up the old and ever-persistent point."

"To what point are you referring?"

My companion paused a moment before he replied. Then he said:

"Can it be that you did not hear it? Did you not hear one of those people remark: 'I have a mind to surrender everything '?"

Whereafter, bending forward, and peering at me as a blind man would do, Kalinin added in a half-whisper:

"More and more are folk coming to think to themselves: 'Now must I forsake everything.' In the end I myself came to think it. For many a year did I increasingly reflect: 'Why should I be a servant? What will it ever profit me? Even if I should earn twelve, or twenty, or fifty roubles a month, to what will such earnings lead, and where will the man in me come in? Surely it would be better to do nothing at all, but just to gaze into s.p.a.ce (as I am doing now), and let my eyes stare straight before me?'"

"By the way, what were you talking to those people about?"

"Which people do you mean?"

"The bearded man and the rest, the company in the guest-chamber?"

"Ah, THAT man I did not like--I have no fancy at all for fellows who strew their grief about the world, and leave it to be trampled upon by every chance-comer. For how can the tears of my neighbour benefit me?

True, every man has his troubles; but also has every man such a predilection for his particular woe that he ends by deeming it the most bitter and remarkable grief in the universe--you may take my word for that."

Suddenly the speaker rose to his feet, a tall, lean figure.

"Now I must seek my bed," he remarked. "You see, I shall have to leave here very early tomorrow."

"And for what point?"

"For Novorossisk."

Now, the day being a Sat.u.r.day, I had drawn my week's earnings from the monastery's pay-office just before the vigil service. Also, Novorossisk did not really lie in my direction. Thirdly, I had no particular wish to exchange the monastery for any other lodging. Nevertheless, despite all this, the man interested me to such an extent (of persons who genuinely interest one there never exist but two, and, of them, oneself is always one) that straightway I observed:

"I too shall be leaving here tomorrow."

"Then let us travel together."

At dawn, therefore, we set forth to foot the road in company. At times I mentally soared aloft, and viewed the scene from that vantage-point.

Whenever I did so, I beheld two tall men traversing a narrow track by a seash.o.r.e--the one clad in a grey military overcoat and a hat with a broken crown, and the other in a drab kaftan and a plush cap. At their feet the boundless sea was splas.h.i.+ng white foam, salt-dried ribands of seaweed were strewing the path, golden leaves were dancing hither and thither, and the wind was howling at, and buffeting, the travellers as clouds sailed over their heads. Also, to their right there lay stretched a chain of mountains towards which the clouds kept wearily, nervelessly tending, while to their left there lay spread a white-laced expanse over the surface of which a roaring wind kept ceaselessly driving transparent columns of spray.

On such stormy days in autumn everything near a seash.o.r.e looks particularly cheerful and vigorous, seeing that, despite the soughing of wind and wave, and the swift onrush of cloud, and the fact that the sun is only occasionally to be seen suspended in abysses of blue, and resembles a drooping flower, one feels that the apparent chaos has lurking in it a secret harmony of mundane, but imperishable, forces--so much so that in time even one's puny human heart comes to imbibe the prevalent spirit of revolt, and, catching fire, to cry to all the universe: "I love you!"

Yes, at such times one desires to taste life to the full, and so to live that the ancient rocks shall smile, and the sea's white horses prance the higher, as one's mouth acclaims the earth in such a paean that, intoxicated with the laudation, it shall unfold its riches with added bountifulness and display more and more manifest beauty under the spur of the love expressed by one of its creatures, expressed by a human being who feels for the earth what he would feel for a woman, and yearns to fertilise the same to ever-increasing splendour.

Nevertheless, words are as heavy as stones, and after felling fancy to the ground, serve but to heap her grey coffin-lid, and cause one, as one stands contemplating the tomb, to laugh in sheer self-derision...

Suddenly, plunged in dreams as I walked along, I heard through the plash of the waves and the sizzle of the foam the unfamiliar words:

"Hymen, Demon, Igamon, and Zmiulan. Good devils are these, not bad."

"How does Christ get on with them?" I asked.

"Christ? He does not enter into the matter."

"Is He hostile to them?"

"Is He HOSTILE to them? How could He be? Devils of that kind are devils to themselves-devils of a decent sort. Besides, to no one is Christ hostile" .............................. . . . . .

[In the Russian this hiatus occurs as marked.]