Through Russia Part 22

"These are mere accesses of impulse which come upon her. And that is only what might be expected. Even as in song or in vice there is no holding her, so remorse, when it has fastened upon such a woman's heart, will know no bounds. I may tell you that on one occasion two young merchants took her, stripped her stark naked, and drove her in their carriage down Zhitnaia Street, with themselves sitting on the seats of the vehicle, and Felitzata standing upright between them--yes, in a state of nudity! Thereafter they beat her almost to death."

As I stepped out into the dark, narrow vestibule, Antipa, who was following me, muttered:

"Such a lament as hers could come only of genuine grief."

We found Felitzata in front of the hut, with her back covering the window. There, with hands pressed to her bosom, and her skirt all awry, she was straining her dishevelled head towards the heavens, while the evening breeze, stirring her fine auburn hair, scattered it promiscuously over her flushed, sharply-defined features and wildly protruding eyes. A bizarre, pitiable, and extraordinary figure did she cut as she wailed in a throaty voice which constantly gathered strength:

Oh winds of ice, winds cruel and rude, Press on my heart till its throbbings fail! Arrest the current of my blood! Turn these hot melting tears to hail!

Before her there was posted a knot of women, compa.s.sionate contemplators of the singer's distracted, grief-wrought features.

Through the ravine's dark opening I could see the sun sinking below the suburb before plunging into the marshy forest and having his disk pierced by sharp, black tips of pine trees. Already everything around him was red. Already, seemingly, he had been wounded, and was bleeding to death.

THE CEMETERY

In a town of the steppes where I found life exceedingly dull, the best and the brightest spot was the cemetery. Often did I use to walk there, and once it happened that I fell asleep on some thick, rich, sweet-smelling gra.s.s in a cradle-like hollow between two tombs.

From that sleep I was awakened with the sound of blows being struck against the ground near my head. The concussion of them jarred me not a little, as the earth quivered and tinkled like a bell. Raising myself to a sitting posture, I found sleep still so heavy upon me that at first my eyes remained blinded with unfathomable darkness, and could not discern what the matter was. The only thing that I could see amid the golden glare of the June sunlight was a wavering blur which at intervals seemed to adhere to a grey cross, and to make it give forth a succession of soft creaks.

Presently, however--against my wish, indeed--that wavering blur resolved itself into a little, elderly man. Sharp-featured, with a thick, silvery tuft of hair beneath his under lip, and a bushy white moustache curled in military fas.h.i.+on, on his upper, he was using the cross as a means of support as, with his disengaged hand outstretched, and sawing the air, he dug his foot repeatedly into the ground, and, as he did so, bestowed upon me sundry dry, covert glances from the depths of a pair of dark eyes.

"What have you got there?" I inquired.

"A snake," he replied in an educated ba.s.s voice, and with a rugged forefinger he pointed downwards; whereupon I perceived that wriggling on the path at his feet and convulsively whisking its tail, there was an echidna.

"Oh, it is only a gra.s.sworm," I said vexedly.

The old man pushed away the dull, iridescent, rope-like thing with the toe of his boot, raised a straw hat in salute, and strode firmly onwards.

"I thank you," I called out; whereupon, he replied without looking behind him:

"If the thing really WAS a gra.s.sworm, of course there was no danger."

Then he disappeared among the tombstones.

Looking at the sky, I perceived the time to be about five o'clock.

The steppe wind was sighing over the tombs, and causing long stems of gra.s.s to rock to and fro, and freighting the heated air with the silken rustling of birches and limes and other trees, and leading one to detect amid the humming of summer a note of quiet grief eminently calculated to evoke lofty, direct thoughts concerning life and one's fellow-men.

Veiling with greenery, grey and white tombstones worn with the snows of winter, crosses streaked with marks of rain, and the wall with which the graveyard was encircled, the rank vegetation served to also conceal the propinquity of a slovenly, clamorous town which lay coated with rich, sooty grime amid an atmosphere of dust and smells.

As I set off for a ramble among the tombs and tangled gra.s.s, I could discern through openings in the curtain of verdure a belfry's gilded cross which reared itself solemnly over crosses and memorials. At the foot of those memorials the sacramental vestment of the cemetery was studded with a kaleidoscopic sheen of flowers over which bees and wasps were so hovering and humming that the gra.s.s's sad, prayerful murmur seemed charged with a song of life which yet did not hinder reflections on death. Fluttering above me on noiseless wing were birds the flight of which sometimes made me start, and stand wondering whether the object before my gaze was really a bird or not: and everywhere the s.h.i.+mmer of gilded sunlight was setting the close-packed graveyard in a quiver which made the mounds of its tombs reminiscent of a sea when, after a storm, the wind has fallen, and all the green level is an expanse of smooth, foamless billows.

Beyond the wall of the cemetery the blue void of the firmament was pierced with smoky chimneys of oil-mills and soap factories, the roofs of which showed up like particoloured stains against the darker rags and tatters of other buildings; while blinking in the sunlight I could discern clatter-emitting, windows which looked to me like watchful eyes. Only on the nearer side of the wall was a spa.r.s.e strip of turf dotted over with ragged, withered, tremulous stems, and beyond this, again, lay the site of a burnt building which const.i.tuted a black patch of earth-heaps, broken stoves, dull grey ashes, and coal dust. To heaven gaped the black, noisome mouths of burning-pits wherein the more economical citizens were accustomed nightly to get rid of the contents of their dustbins. Among the tall stems of steppe gra.s.s waved large, glossy leaves of ergot; in the sunlight splinters of broken gla.s.s sparkled as though they were laughing; and, from two spots in the dark brown plot which formed a semicircle around the cemetery, there projected, like teeth, two buildings the new yellow paint of which nevertheless made them look mean and petty amid the tangle of rubbish, pigweed, groundsel, and dock.

Indolently roaming hither and thither, a few speckled hens resembled female pedlars, and some pompous red c.o.c.kerels a troupe of firemen; in the orifices of the burning-pits a number of mournful-eyed, homeless dogs were lying sheltered; among the shoots of the steppe scrub some lean cats were stalking sparrows; and a band of children who were playing hide-and-seek among the orifices above-mentioned presented, a pitiful sight as they went skipping over the filthy earth, disappearing in the crevices among the piles of heaped-up dirt.

Beyond the site of the burnt-out building there stretched a series of mean, close-packed huts which, crammed exclusively with needy folk, stood staring, with their dim, humble eyes of windows, at the crumbling bricks of the cemetery wall, and the dense ma.s.s of trees which that wall enclosed. Here, in one such hut, had I myself a lodging in a diminutive attic, which not only smelt of lamp-oil, but stood in a position to have wafted to it the least gasp or e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n on the part of my landlord, Iraklei Virubov, a clerk in the local treasury. In short, I could never glance out of the window at the cemetery on the other side of the strip of dead, burnt, polluted earth without reflecting that, by comparison, that cemetery was a place of sheer beauty, a place of ceaseless attraction.

And ever, that day, as though he had been following me, could there be sighted among the tombs the dark figure of the old man who had so abruptly awakened me from slumber; and since his straw hat reflected the sunlight as brilliantly as the disk of a sunflower as it meandered hither and thither, I, in my turn, found myself following him, though thinking, all the while, of Iraklei Virubov. Only a week was it since Iraklei's wife, a thin, shrewish, long-nosed woman with green and catlike eyes, had set forth on a pilgrimage to Kiev, and Iraklei had hastened to import into the hut a stout, squint-eyed damsel whom he had introduced to me as his "niece by marriage."

"She was baptised Evdokia," he had said on the occasion referred to.

"Usually, however, I call her Dikanka. Pray be friendly with her, but remember, also, that she is not a person with whom to take liberties."

Large, round-shouldered, and clean-shaven like a chef, Virubov was for ever hitching up breeches which had slipped from a stomach ruined with surfeits of watermelon. And always were his fat lips parted as though athirst, and perpetually had he in his colourless eyes an expression of insatiable hunger.

One evening I overheard a dialogue to the following effect.

"Dikanka, pray come and scratch my back. Yes, between the shoulder-blades. O-o-oh, that is it. My word, how strong you are!"

Whereat Dikanka had laughed shrilly. And only when I had moved my chair, and thrown down my book, had the laughter and unctuous whispering died away, and given place to a whisper of:

"Holy Father Nicholas, pray for us unto G.o.d! Is the supper kvas ready, Dikanka?"

And softly the pair had departed to the kitchen--there to grunt and squeal once more like a couple of pigs....

The old man with the grey moustache stepped over the turf with the elastic stride of youth, until at length he halted before a large monument in drab granite, and stood reading the inscription thereon.

Featured not altogether in accordance with the Russian type, he had on a dark-blue jacket, a turned-down collar, and a black stock finished off with a large bow--the latter contrasting agreeably with the thick, silvery, as it were molten, chin-tuft. Also, from the centre of a fierce moustache there projected a long and gristly nose, while over the grey skin of his cheeks there ran a network of small red veins. In the act of raising his hand to his hat (presumably for the purpose of saluting the dead), he, after conning the dark letters of the inscription on the tomb, turned a sidelong eye upon myself; and since I found the fact embarra.s.sing, I frowned, and pa.s.sed onward, full, still, of thoughts of the street where I was residing and where I desired to fathom the mean existence eked out by Virubov and his "niece."

As usual, the tombs were also being patrolled by Pimesha, otherwise Pimen Krozootov, a bibulous, broken-down ex-merchant who used to spend his time in stumbling and falling about the graves in search of the supposed resting-place of his wife. Bent of body, Pimesha had a small, bird-like face over-grown with grey down, the eyes of a sick rabbit, and, in general, the appearance of having undergone a chewing by a set of sharp teeth. For the past three years he had thus been roaming the cemetery, though his legs were too weak to support his undersized, shattered body; and whenever he caught his foot he fell, and for long could not rise, but lay gasping and fumbling among the gra.s.s, and rooting it up, and sniffing with a nose as sharp and red as though the skin had been flayed from it. True, his wife had been buried at Novotchevka.s.sk, a thousand versts away, but Pimen refused to credit the fact, and always, on being told it, stuttered with much blinking of his wet, faded eyes: "Natasha? Natasha is here."

Also, there used to visit the spot, well-nigh daily, a Madame Christoforov, a tall old lady who, wearing black spectacles and a plain grey, shroudlike dress that was trimmed with black velvet, never failed to have a stick between her abnormally long fingers. Wizened of face, with cheeks hanging down like bags, and a knot of grey, rather, grey-green, hair combed over her temples from under a lace scarf, and almost concealing her ears, this lady pursued her way with deliberation, and entire a.s.surance, and yielded the path to no one whom she might encounter. I have an idea that there lay buried there a son who had been killed in a roisterers' brawl.

Another habitual visitor was thin-legged, short-sighted Aulic Councillor Praotzev, ex-schoolmaster. With a book stuffed into the pocket of his canvas pea-jacket, a white umbrella grasped in his red hand, and a smile extending to ears as sharp and pointed as a rabbit's, he could, any Sunday after dinner, be seen skipping from tomb to tomb, with his umbrella brandished like a white flag soliciting terms of peace with death.

And, on returning home before the bell rang for Vespers, he would find that a crowd of boys had collected outside his garden wall; whereupon, dancing about him like puppies around a stork, they would fall to shouting in various merry keys:

"The Councillor, the Councillor! Who was it that fell in love with Madame Sukhinikh, and then fell into the pond?"

Losing his temper, and opening a great mouth, until he looked like an old rook which is about to caw, the Councillor would stamp his foot several times, as though preparing to dance to the boys' shouting, and lower his head, grasp his umbrella like a bayonet, and charge at the lads with a panting shout of:

"I'll tell your fathers! Oh, I'll tell your mothers!"

As for the Madame Sukhinikh, referred to, she was an old beggar-woman who, the year round, and in all weathers, sat on a little bench beside the cemetery wicket, and stuck to it like a stone. Her large face, a face rendered bricklike by years of inebriety, was covered with dark blotches born of frostbite, alcoholic inflammation, sunburn, and exposure to wind, and her eyes were perpetually in a state of suppuration. Never did anyone pa.s.s her but she proffered a wooden cup in a suppliant hand, and cried hoa.r.s.ely, rather as though she were cursing the person concerned:

"Give something for Christ's sake! Give in memory of your kinsfolk there!"

Once an unexpected storm blew in from the steppes, and brought a downpour which, overtaking the old woman on her way home, caused her, her sight being poor, to fall into a pond, whence Praotzev attempted to rescue her, and into which, in the end, he slipped himself. From that day onwards he was twitted on the subject by the boys of the town.

Other frequenters of the cemetery I see before me--dark, silent figures, figures of persons whom still unsevered cords of memory seemed to have bound to the place for the rest of their lives, and compelled to wander, like unburied corpses, in quest of suitable tombs. Yes, they were persons whom life had rejected, and death, as yet, refused to accept.

Also, at times there would emerge from the long gra.s.s a homeless dog with large, sullen eyes, eyes startling at once in their intelligence and in their absolute Ishmaelitism--until one almost expected to hear issue from the animal's mouth reproaches couched in human language.

And sometimes the dog would still remain halted in the cemetery as, with tail lowered, it swayed its shelterless, s.h.a.ggy head to and fro with an air of profound reflection, while occasionally venting a subdued, long-drawn yelp or howl.

Again, among the dense old lime trees, there would be scurrying an unseen mob of starlings and jackdaws whose young would, meanwhile, maintain a soft, hungry piping, a sort of gently persuasive, chirruping chorus; until in autumn, when the wind had stripped bare the boughs, these birds' black nests would come to look like mouldy, rag-swathed heads of human beings which someone had torn from their bodies and flung into the trees, to hang for ever around the white, sugarloaf-shaped church of the martyred St. Barbara. During that autumn season, indeed, everything in the cemetery's vicinity looked sad and tarnished, and the wind would wail about the place, and sigh like a lover who has been driven mad through bereavement....