Tarabas

16

NOW Tarabas was alone with the dead Kontsev. They had washed the face, cleaned the uniform of the traces of blood and mud, polished the high boots, brushed the mighty moustache. Sword and pistol lay beside him, to the right and to the left; the powerful, hairy hands with their large and damaged finger-nails were folded low over the body. The eternal peace into which he had entered hovered over the soldierly, sharp features with a softening shine. But the features of Colonel Tarabas wore an expression of bitterness and unrest and distraction. He wished that he could weep, that he might give way to an insane fit of rage. But Colonel Tarabas could not weep. He noticed that the sergeant-major was grey at the temples; he passed his hand over the grey hair at the temples, but drew it away at once, taken aback by his own tenderness. He thought about the gipsy’s prophecy. Nothing so far announced his saintliness!

Foolish words, buried long since under the weight of fearful happenings, drowned in the blood that one had shed, submerged, like the years in New York, the café-owner, the girl Katharina, Cousin Maria, father, mother, and home! Tarabas tried hard to call these pictures that rose before him “memories,” and thus to deprive them of their power. These thoughts that had come now to torture him, he would gladly have given them those trivial titles which would have stamped them as mere harmless, insignificant shadows of the past, no sooner come than gone again. He tried to take flight before them in his bitterness at the death of Kontsev, the best man he had, and to lash up his thirst to be revenged for that death. Now he hated them all, these Jews, these peasants, this Koropta, this regiment, this whole new country, this peace, this revolution which had brought it forth and made it what it was. What should he do? Ah yes — how rapid were all Tarabas’s decisions! — he would put things in order first and then resign, tell little General Lakubeit a home truth or two, and then get up and go! Get up and go! But where to, mighty Tarabas? Was there still an America? Was there still the house where he was born? Where was home? Was there no war anywhere in all the world?

Tarabas was roused out of these meditations — they were, as one can see, nothing but ideas in an incoherent chain — by the orderly’s voice announcing through the closed door that the call for General Lakubeit would come through in twenty minutes, and would the colonel kindly go down to the post-office to receive it. Tarabas swore at the primitive and inconvenient postal arrangements — another evil consequence of founding new and superfluous states. He ordered candles, a vigil for the dead, a priest, and departed for the post-office. He sent away the single clerk on duty, saying that he had business of state to conduct. The clerk went away.

The telephone rang and the colonel himself took up the receiver.

“General Lakubeit!”

Tarabas prepared to give a brief report.

But the distinct, soft voice of the little general, sounding as though it came from the life beyond, said: “Don’t interrupt!” And thereupon proceeded to give short and concise instructions: the regiment was to be held in readiness, reinforcements from the distant garrison at Ladka could not be sent out for another forty-eight hours; fresh outbreaks were to be expected; all the peasants of the district were gathering, to go and see the miracle; the local priest must be asked to keep the people quiet; all Jews were to remain inside their houses—“so far as there are any left,” those were the general’s actual words — and Colonel Tarabas caught the rebuke and scorn of the remark.

“That is all!” the general concluded; then “Wait a minute!” he called.

Tarabas waited.

“Repeat, please!” commanded Lakubeit.

Tarabas went rigid with rage and fright. He repeated obediently.

“That’ll do!” said Lakubeit.

Thunderstruck, impotent and full of rage, annihilated by the feeble, distant voice of a feeble old man, not even a soldier but “only a lawyer” at that, the mighty Tarabas left the post-office. It almost surprised him to be greeted by the clerk, who had been waiting outside the entrance. Strong in appearance but in reality weak and devoid of his old pride, the great Tarabas walked through the ruins of the little town of Koropta. On either side of the high street were places where the fire still smoked and smouldered. And Tarabas, in spite of the undoubted tangibility of his flesh and muscle, looked like a gigantic ghost moving amidst the ashes and the debris and the needlessly salvaged, ownerless objects in miscellaneous heaps outside the houses.

Without a glance towards the soldiers, he went back into the inn. Astonishment brought him to a standstill in the parlour, for behind the bar, nodding and bowing as though nothing had happened, stood the Jew Kristianpoller. As though nothing had happened, the servant Fedya was washing up the glasses.

At the sight of the Jew, going about his everyday business as casual and unscathed as though suddenly emerged from behind a cloud which had hidden and protected him until that moment, a suspicion awoke in Tarabas that there might in fact be sorcerers among these Jews, and that this one actually was responsible for the desecration of the Madonna’s image. The whole great wall, the insuperable wall of clearest ice and cut and polished hatred, of strangeness and mistrust, which stands, no less today than a thousand years ago, between Jews and Christians, as though God himself had put it there, rose now before the eyes of Tarabas. Visible through the transparency of the ice stood Kristianpoller, no longer a harmless fellow of an inn-keeper and tradesman, no longer merely a contemptible but harmless member of an inferior caste, but an alien, incomprehensible, mysterious personage, equipped with hellish weapons for his war against men and saints, against heaven and God. Out of the unfathomable deep of Tarabas’s mind rose now, as yesterday out of the devout prostrations of the soldiers and peasants, unconscious of what currents flowed beneath their fervour, a blind and lusting hatred of the Jew, scatheless now, and emerging by some power unscathed for ever from every other peril likewise. This time his name was Nathan Kristianpoller. Another time it would be something else. A third time he would have yet another name. Upstairs in Tarabas’s room lay his dear, good Kontsev, dead to all eternity, and he had died for this immune and diabolic Kristianpoller. Tarabas would have given a hundred thousand Jews and more for one boot from his dead Kontsev’s foot! Tarabas did not return Kristianpoller’s deferential greeting. He sat down. He did not even order tea or vodka. He knew the man would bring him something of his own accord.

And Kristianpoller did. He brought a glass of hot and steaming golden tea. He knew that Tarabas was not in the mood for alcohol at that moment. Tea is calming. Tea clears the tangled mind, and in clarity is no danger for reasonable men. It went through Tarabas’s brain: He’s cooked this tea in hell. How did he know what I was wanting? When I came in I had decided to order tea. — And yet, suspicion notwithstanding, the colonel felt it as a compliment that Kristianpoller had divined his wish. He could not deny the Jew a certain admiration. He was moreover curious to learn by what means Kristianpoller had contrived to hide himself, and reappear this morning fresh and unconcerned.

He began a cross-examination: “Do you know what’s been going on here?”

“Yes, Your Excellency!”

“It’s your fault that your fellow-Jews were beaten and ill-treated. Some of my men were killed in the fighting. My good old Kontsev is dead — on your account! I’m going to have you hanged, my friend! You’re an inciter to rebellion, a desecrator of churches; you’re doing what you can to sabotage the new state which took us centuries to get back again. Well, what have you to say?”

“Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller, and he unbent his back and stood straight up, and looked the terrible one full in the face with his one good eye, “I have incited no one to rebellion, I have desecrated no church, nor anything belonging to one; I love this country as much and as little as everybody else. May I make a general remark, Your Excellency?”

“You may,” said Tarabas.

“Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller, and bent his back again, “I am only a Jew!”

“That’s just the point,” said Tarabas.

“Your Excellency,” replied Kristianpoller, “I should like most respectfully to mention that I became a Jew through no will of my own.”

Tarabas said nothing. It was no longer the terrible Colonel Tarabas who sat there saying nothing, but beginning to turn things over in his mind. It was the youth Tarabas, thought to have died long since, once a revolutionary, a member of a secret group which assassinated the governor of Kherson; the student Tarabas who had spent a thousand nights listening to discussions; the pliable, passionate Tarabas, rebellious son of a stony father, endowed with gifts of mind to think and to consider, but also the Tarabas who never grew and ripened, whose senses ruled and confused his head, who plunged headlong into whatever came his way — manslaughter, love or jealousy, or superstition, or war, cruelty, drunkenness, or despair.

The cause which the Jew Kristianpoller defended with his implacable common sense had nothing whatsoever to do with the mighty Tarabas and the chequered career which had been his! And yet it shed a light into the darknesses which had had Tarabas in their possession for many years. Kristianpoller’s answer fell upon the colonel’s brain like a flash of light into a cellar, illuminating for a moment lost and secret depths, and corners full of shadow. And although the colonel had meant, when he began his catechism, to learn and elucidate the mysterious faculties of this uncanny Jew, now he was forced inwardly to confess that Kristianpoller’s answer had come like a sudden beam of light, sooner to illuminate the darkness in his own heart than that in which the Jew went wrapped, together with all his strange race. For a while Tarabas said nothing. For a moment his loud, heroic life showed itself to him in all its worthlessness, stupidity, and emptiness; he wondered if he ought not rather envy the despised Kristianpoller his unfailing reason, and the well-ordered existence that he doubtless led. The moment of insight did not last. For in the mighty Tarabas that pride had not yet abated which crushes reason in the minds of all the great ones of this earth, enveloping as in a cloud of spurious gold the rare intimations of the truth which sometimes come to them. Pride spoke now out of Tarabas:

“You let those other Jews, your brothers, be destroyed. If you had come forward, nothing would have been done to them! Even your own people you betrayed! You’re not worthy of the name of human being. I shall exterminate you!”

“Your Excellency,” answered Kristianpoller, “those others would have all been beaten just the same, and I should have been killed. I have a wife and seven children. When Your Excellency came I sent them away to Kyrbitki, because I knew that there was danger. A new regime is always dangerous for us Jews. You are a noble gentleman, Your Excellency, I’m certain of it. But …”

Tarabas looked up and Kristianpoller broke off. He was in mortal terror of that “But” which had slipped out. He bowed again, and stood there with his back bent so low that the eyes of Tarabas, seated at the table, were on a level with the silk skull-cap worn by all Jews in the house.

“‘But’ what?” asked Tarabas. “Out with it!”

“But,” repeated Kristianpoller, and stood up straight once more, “but even you yourself, Your Excellency, are in God’s hand. He guides us as He wishes us to go, and we know nothing. We do not understand His cruelty, nor His goodness either …”

“No philosophizing, Jew,” Tarabas shouted. “Say what’s in your mind, I tell you!”

“Well,” said Kristianpoller, “Your Excellency spent too much time in the barracks yesterday.” And after a while he added: “It was God’s will.”

“You’re hiding behind God again,” said Tarabas. “God’s not your screen! I’m going to hang you, just the same. But first I want to know where you hid. And you’re to hide again. I have orders from headquarters to see that all Jews are kept out of sight. A lot of peasants are on their way here; they want to see the miracle in your yard. You’ll be the first they’ll slaughter, if they find you. But I’m going to have you hanged, and I want to see to that myself. Take care that my pleasure is not spoiled!”

“Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller. “The cellar is my hiding-place. My cellar is double-storied. I keep the spirits on the first floor. Underneath I have very old wine stored. At the bottom of the first staircase down there is a big flagstone, with a hook in it. I have an iron ring that fits into the hook, and an iron bar that goes into the ring. That’s how I lift up the stone. When I’m in the lower cellar, I leave the tip of the iron bar between the trapdoor and the floor. Your Excellency can have me fetched out of that hiding-place and executed.”

Tarabas said nothing. The Jew was not lying. But out of that mouth even the truth must contain some lie. Even the courage the inn-keeper Kristianpoller suddenly displayed must be a mask for some hidden cowardice, some devilish kind of cowardice. So Tarabas said: “You’ll be fetched. And now I want to know why you defiled the church in your yard, and the Madonna’s picture.”

“It was not I!” cried Kristianpoller. “This house is very old. It came down to me from my great-grandfather. I don’t know when they turned the chapel into a lumber-room. I don’t know. I am innocent!”

These protestations of Nathan Kristianpoller’s rang with such passion of sincerity that even Tarabas was moved to believe them.

“Very well! Now go and hide yourself,” the colonel said. “And I want another room; I have had Kontsev put in mine.”

“I have already seen to that,” Kristianpoller answered. “I have given Your Excellency my late grand-father’s room. It is on the second floor, next to the attic, I’m sorry to say. It is all ready. The bed is comfortable. The room is warmed. Fedya will show it to Your Excellency. I have put out a dozen candles for the late Sergeant-Major Kontsev. They are in the drawer of the pedestal beside the bed. The priest is upstairs, Your Excellency.”

“Call him!” commanded Tarabas.

17

THE priest of Koropta was an old man. For more than thirty years he had had the cure of souls in this community. A simple, humble, and ungrateful labour. His ancient soutane, shiny with grease, hung slackly on his bony frame. The years had made him very small and thin; they had bent his back, and dug deep moats around his big, grey eyes, and furrows to either side of his narrow, toothless mouth; they had uncovered his brow and weakened his simple heart. He had seen the war come and go, the vast anger of heaven, and hundreds of mornings on which he could not read the mass. He had buried men who, struck down by chance bullets, had not been able to receive the final sacrament, and comforted the grief of parents whose children had been killed or died of injuries. And now his own desire was for death. Feeble and meagre, with extinguished eyes and trembling limbs, he appeared before Tarabas.

It was important, the colonel expounded, that the peasants who were approaching Koropta in force, athirst to see the miracle, be prevented from becoming excited. The harm already done was great enough. The army counted on the influence of the clergy, and he, Colonel Tarabas, upon the help of Koropta’s priest.

“Quite so!” said the priest. In the course of the past few years many new commanders had marched into Koropta, and spoken to him in words almost identical with those of Colonel Tarabas, and he had given all of them exactly the same answer—“Quite so!”

For a moment his big, light eyes turned their dim and ancient gaze upon the colonel’s face. The priest felt pity for Colonel Tarabas. Yes, the priest was probably the only person in all Koropta who pitied Colonel Tarabas.

“I will speak to them tomorrow as you wish,” he said.

But to Tarabas he seemed to have said this rather: “I know how it is with you, my son! You are bewildered and confused. You are powerful and powerless. You are brave but frightened. You give me instructions, but you know very well that you would feel much better if I could tell you what to do instead.”

Tarabas said nothing. He waited for the old man to speak again. But he did not.

“Won’t you drink something?” asked Tarabas.

“I should like a glass of water,” said the priest.

Fedya brought it, and the old man drank a mouthful.

“Brandy!” called the colonel. Fedya brought this too; it was clear and colourless, like water. Tarabas tossed it off.

“Soldiers can stand a great deal of alcohol,” said the priest.

“Yes, yes,” answered Tarabas, absently. He felt strange and far away.

Both saw that there was nothing more to say. The priest was only waiting for a sign that he might go. There was much that Tarabas would gladly enough have said, for his heart was full; but it was also shut. A heavy sack, tied close about its secrets, so lay his heart in the breast of mighty Tarabas.

“What other orders have you for me, Colonel?” asked the priest.

“None, thank you,” said Tarabas.

“Praise be to Jesus Christ,” said the priest.

Tarabas too got up and whispered: “World without end, amen!”

18

ON that day, as so often before, there was drumming and commanding in Koropta that the Jews must not appear in the streets. Nor had they any desire to do so. They sat in the few remaining houses of their own people. They barricaded doors and windows. This was, as far back as any of them could remember, their saddest Saturday. But still they tried to console each other and hope that God would soon send help to them. They thanked Him for having at least left them their lives. Some had been hurt. They sat about with bound-up heads, with dislocated arms supported in white slings, with lacerated faces on which the purple lattice of the thongs was drawn, with naked chests and backs and shoulders, about which damp towels had been bound over the wounds. Even without these further injuries they were weak or crippled, and all of them old; the young and sound ones had been devoured by the war. They did not feel the indignity that had been put upon them, they were conscious only of their pains. For the people of Israel has lived for twice a thousand years under another indignity, compared with which the later scorn and insults of its foes are trivial merely — the indignity of knowing that there is in Jerusalem no temple. Whatever else of shame and ridicule and suffering may come their way is but the consequence of that bitter fact. Sometimes the Eternal One, as though the heavy cup of woe were not yet full, sends new punishments and plagues. Occasionally he employs the country-folk to serve His ends. There is no means of defence. But even if there were, ought one to take it? God willed that yesterday the Jews of Koropta should be beaten. And they were beaten. Had they not believed, in sinful exuberance, that peace was come again? Had they not ceased to be afraid? A Jew of Koropta has no right to be without fear.

They sat there, rocking their mauled bodies to and fro in the darkness of the little rooms, where the shutters had been nailed over the windows, although it is forbidden to knock nails in on the Sabbath. But the commandment to preserve life is as binding as that which enjoins the keeping holy of the Sabbath. They swayed and said the psalms aloud in sing-song, those that they knew by heart, and the others they read with their blurred eyes close against the pages of their books in the deep twilight of the rooms. Spectacles, broken and cracked, tied together with string, rested upon their long and sorrowful noses; they sat pressed close against each other to read, for the books were few, not more than one to every three or four of them. And they were careful not to raise their voices, for fear that they might be heard outside. From time to time they stopped and strained their ears for noises in the street. Some even ventured to peep through the cracks and crosspieces of the shutters. Were they already there, the new persecutors against whom the drums had warned them? They must play dead; hope lay in making the advancing horde of peasants think that not one Jew had remained alive in Koropta.

Among these pitiable souls was the sexton of the synagogue, Shemariah, of all unhappy Jews the most unhappy. His woe was known to everyone. He had been long years a widower, and had an only son. Yes — had! For in reality he could no longer call his son by that name, since — it happened during the war — he had spat upon his father and announced his intention to become a revolutionary. True, Shemariah, the father, was to blame for it; he had saved up a few hundred rubles with which to send his son to the university. The foolish sexton of the Koropta synagogue had once allowed himself the wish to see his son an educated man, a doctor of medicine or law. But what had come of this forward undertaking? An insubordinate schoolboy first, who had struck a master, been turned out of the school, and then apprenticed to a watchmaker; who founded a revolutionary “circle” in Koropta, repudiated God, read books, and prophesied the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although he had a feeble constitution like his father, and the army would have none of him, he enlisted as a volunteer — by no means in order to defend his Tsar, but, as he declared, to “make a clean sweep of all the despots.” In addition to which he stated that he did not believe in God because He was only an invention of the Tsar’s and the rabbis’.

“But you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” old Shemariah had asked.

And “No, Father,” the terrible son had answered, “I am not!”

He had left home and gone to the war, and after the outbreak of the first revolution wrote a last letter to his old father, containing the information that he would never come back home again. They were to think of him as dead and done with.

Shemariah thought of him, accordingly, as dead and done with, sat in mourning over him for seven days as the law prescribed, and ceased to be a father.

He was poor in health and very thin, and, despite his advanced age, still violently red of hair and beard. He looked the picture of a wicked sorcerer with his fan of bristling, flaming beard, the countless freckles on his pale, bony face, the scraggy arms, long as a monkey’s, and the long, limp hands, thin too and covered with red hairs. He was called “Red Shemariah.” And many a Jewish woman went in fear of his yellow eyes. But in reality he was a harmless man, resigned, humble, simple, pious, good-humoured, and full of zeal and diligence. He lived on onions, radishes, and bread. In summer maize-cobs were his delicacy and luxury. His income was the few copeks the congregation paid him, and the occasional alms which came his way, mostly on the eve of the holy days. For his son’s end he blamed himself. It was the punishment for his paternal arrogance. True, he had now, according to the laws of his religion, which was the only reality he recognized, no son. But in his dreams and waking hours thoughts of his child often came back to him. Perhaps he would come back one day from the dead? Perhaps God would send him home? To bring such things about one needs but to be pious, ever more and more so. Therefore in piety and observance of the law Shemariah surpassed all others in the congregation.

Yesterday he, too, had been thrown up into the air a few times. And someone’s fist had struck against his chin. Today his jaw gave him such pain that he could hardly speak an intelligible word. But he gave his sufferings no thought. Another care preoccupied him. They had set fire to the little synagogue. Perhaps the scrolls were burnt? And if they were not, should they not be rescued now while there was still time? And if they were, should they not now, as the law prescribes, be buried in the cemetery?

All day long Shemariah’s anxious thoughts hovered round the scrolls. But jealousy kept him silent. He kept his care a secret for fear lest there might be another one besides himself prepared to save the sacred things. But this magnificent deed should be reserved for him alone. In the great ledger in which the account of every Jew was kept in heaven, the Eternal One would enter a flourishing “Excellent” against his name, and fate might even bring him back his son as a reward. Therefore Shemariah kept his worry to himself. He did not know yet by what means it might be possible to reach the street without being seen by the soldiers of the dangerous Tarabas, or by the still more dangerous peasants. But the thought that the scrolls of the law, ruined by fire, should wait in vain for honourable burial, filled Shemariah with unspeakable anguish. If only he could talk about it! Pour out his heart! But the prospect of unique merit and a blest reward forbade him to utter a word.

Late in the afternoon, at the very hour when the Jews of Koropta were used on other days to celebrate the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of another week, loud noises penetrated to them through the fastened shutters. The peasants were coming, the peasants! Ah, these are no longer the more or less familiar and friendly neighbours from the villages around Koropta, although it was just those who had beaten one and thrown one into the air! But, ah! these are strange peasants, peasants never seen before. Everything conceivable and inconceivable can be expected from these — outrage of every kind, murder even. On second thought the cruelties of yesterday were jests, yes, positively harmless jests, when all was said and done! But what might now come, that would certainly be dead earnest.

The peasants were moving towards Koropta. They were coming nearer and nearer, in long processions, singing hymns. With many bright banners embroidered in gold and silver, and led by white-robed priests, the women and men, the girls and children came. There were some among them who were not satisfied merely to make the pilgrimage to Koropta. They had to make the holy task still harder. Therefore they let themselves fall down every five, seven, or ten paces, and shuffled the next ten steps upon their knees. Others threw themselves upon the ground at certain intervals, lay there as long as it took to repeat a paternoster, rose, staggered along a while, then fell again. Almost all had candles in their hands. Their well-polished Sunday boots were slung over their shoulders, to save the soles. The women were wearing their brightest, prettiest kerchiefs; the men their Sunday vests embroidered with gay flowers, which looked like the meadows of spring. Shrill, out of tune and hoarse, but with voices warm with fervour, they sent the miracle their songs still from afar.

For the news of the wonder that had taken place in Kristianpoller’s yard spread through the villages of the whole district within a single day. Yes, the manner and the speed of this was a miracle in itself. Of the peasants who had come to the Koropta market not a few had driven to distant villages that same night to bring the fabulous tidings to relatives, friends, and strangers there. Certain events evoke an echo far and wide in some inexplicable way, needing no aid from any of the modern means of travel and communication to make themselves known to all the world. The air transmits the news to all whom it concerns. And word of the miracle in Koropta went out thus and was heard for miles around.

While the peasants thus approached from every side at once, so that no less than six processions converged at Kristianpoller’s inn at the same moment; and while the Jews in the few darkened houses sat longing for the delivering night to come, Tarabas sat together with his officers in the inn parlour, the servant Fedya waiting on them in his master’s stead. Kristianpoller had gone into hiding.

But the pious peasants cherished no thoughts of vengeance and violence today. They had taken the admonitions of their priests to heart. Gently their ardour flowed towards the miracle, like a full stream between dikes. Services were held, several in close succession, one for each group of pilgrims. An improvised altar had been set up. The out-house recalled one of those chapels, roughly and hastily erected hardly three hundred years before by the first missionaries to that land. For three hundred years this people had been receiving Christian baptism. And yet at the end of a day’s gay pig-market, and after a few rounds of beer, and at the sight of a lame Jew, the ancient heathen woke in all of them.

Things were not left wholly to the priests today; soldiers patrolled the street and all the lanes of Koropta. Amongst the officers in Kristianpoller’s parlour excitement reigned. For the first time since Tarabas had taken over his command, they were daring to say in his presence what they thought. Undeterred by his presence there, drinking his accustomed spirits, wrapped in fierce gloom, and silent, they shouted and laughed noisily, quarrelled and argued; some were expounding various theories about the new state, the army, and revolution, about religion, peasants, superstition, and Jews. They seemed neither to fear nor to respect him, all at once. It was as though the miracle in Kristianpoller’s out-house and the Koropta fire had deprived Colonel Tarabas of dignity and power.

The officers of the new regiment had come, like the men, from all sections of the former army and the front. They were Russians, Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Crimeans, Caucasians, and others. Accident and need had swept them hither. They were soldiers, proper mercenaries, taking service where they found it. All that they wanted was to go on being soldiers, no matter where. Without a uniform, without an army, they could not live. And they needed, like all their kind no matter where, a commanding officer without a weakness and without a fault, a visible weakness, that is, and a visible fault. But yesterday Tarabas had quarrelled with them; there had even been a fight. And they had seen him drunk and senseless. They did not doubt that in a few days he would be deposed. Moreover each one of them believed that he himself was far more capable than Tarabas or any other, to form a regiment and to be its leader.

The silent Tarabas was well aware of what the officers were thinking. Suddenly it seemed to him that until then his progress had been due only to luck, and to no merit at all. He had exploited the accident of his relationship to the War Minister, yes, more than that, he had abused it. He had never really been a hero. If he had shown courage, it was because his life was worthless. He had been a good soldier in the war only because he had wanted to die, and because in war death is nearer than elsewhere. You have been leading a wasted, ruined life, Tarabas, these many years. It began in your third term as a student. You have never known what was right for you. Home, Katharina, New York, father and mother, Maria, the army and the war, all lost! You were not even able to die, Tarabas! But you let many others die; and many died by your own hand. With pomp and in a masquerade of power you go about the world, but they have seen through you. The first to do so was General Lakubeit, then came the Jew Kristianpoller, and now the officers. And Kontsev, the only one that still believed in you, is dead.

So spoke Tarabas to himself. And soon it seemed to him that there were two Tarabases. Of these one stood by the table in a shabby, ash-grey coat; the mighty Tarabas sat at the table, armed, in uniform with all his medal-ribbons, booted and spurred. But the seated Tarabas was growing less and less, while the poor one on his feet in front of him and so humbly clad held his head high, and grew and grew.

Colonel Tarabas had ceased to listen to the conversation of the officers around him, so wholly did this poverty-stricken, proud image of himself preoccupy him. Suddenly he thought it seemed to be advising him to go upstairs to the dead Kontsev. He stumbled out of the room. He went upstairs, clinging to the banister. It was a long time before he reached the top. Then he went and stood beside the bed. He sent away the two soldiers who were keeping the dead-watch. Four great wax candles, two at the head and two at the feet, cast an unsteady, flickering, golden shine. There was a stuffy, sweetish smell in the room. A few drops of wax had fallen on Kontsev’s shoulder. Tarabas scratched them off with his fingernail, and rubbed his sleeve over the dead man’s tunic, brushing the last traces of the wax away. “Pray,” came into his mind. Mechanically he recited one Our Father after another.

He opened the door, called the soldiers back, and went clumsily down the stairs again.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are aware that the burial is to be tomorrow. At midday. Sergeant-Major Kontsev and the others.”

It seemed to Colonel Tarabas that this announcement to his officers was one of the last that he would ever make, as though it were the hour of his own funeral that he had just informed them of.

He did not leave his table all that night. Something told him that he must wait there for the other Tarabas.

“He probably won’t come again,” said Tarabas to himself. “He won’t have any more to do with me.”

And he fell asleep, lying across the table with his head upon his folded arms.

19

A BLUE and silver Sunday morning, humming golden bells and the choir of worshipping peasants still in the out-house, woke Colonel Tarabas. He got up immediately. Fedya was there already with the steaming tea, but Tarabas drank but a mouthful or two, impatiently. He was quite wide-awake and clear in his mind. He could remember everything that had taken place the day before. He recalled the conversation of each of the officers. And every word the other Tarabas had said to him stood distinctly in his memory. The other Tarabas was real; the colonel doubted this no longer. He went out into the high street. The soldiers were resting beside the ruins of the houses. They rose to their feet and saluted. A sergeant reported that the night had been quiet. Tarabas said: “Good, good, very good!” And went on.

The deep bells hummed, the peasants sang their hymns.

Tarabas thought about the burial of Kontsev and the others at midday. There was plenty of time; it was only nine o’clock.

There was not a soul to be seen in Koropta, not a single Jew. Not a sound from the few houses the fire had left them, now bolted and shuttered with blind windows.

“Perhaps they’re all suffocated!” thought Tarabas. Let them be suffocated, it was immaterial to him.

“It can’t be immaterial to you,” said the other Tarabas, however.

The colonel answered: “Yes, it is. I hate them.”

Suddenly something black, suspicious, emerged from one of the little houses. It vanished round a corner.

Tarabas might have fancied it; he went calmly on his way.

But as he turned the next corner into a side street, a perfectly terrifying apparition ran straight into his arms.

It was a radiant Sunday morning. The golden echo of the bells still swung in the soft breeze. The peasants were leaving the church upon the hill-top; the women’s bright kerchiefs shone out in many colours. It looked as though the whole hill were moving down towards the town, its slopes a mass of huge and brilliant flowers. A gentle wind wafted the last notes of the organ into the sky. The Sunday with the fading music of the organ and the bells seemed one with sky and earth and all that moved between them. Like the impious symbols of an impious revolt against the laws of peaceful nature, the razed places and the still smoking ruins in the town showed black against the rest, a violation of this Sunday mood. The sunshine flooded the hill that rose to the south-west of the little town. The moving flowers seemed to crowd into an ever-denser carpet as the peasant women descended the slope. The yellow church floated in a sea of sunlight. And upon its little tower glittered the cross, gay and serene and holy, like an exalted toy.

This was the aspect of the world, as the terrifying apparition ran headlong into Tarabas.

This terrifying apparition was a skinny, wretched, feeble, but nonetheless extraordinarily red-haired Jew. Like a flaming garland the short beard surrounded his pale, freckled face. On his head he wore a shimmering skull-cap of black corded silk, now green with age, from which fiery red curls escaped to join the flaming beard on either cheek. The man’s greenish-yellow eyes, surmounted by thick red eyebrows like two tiny, blazing brushes, seemed also to shoot forth flames, sparks of a different kind, jets of icy fire. To Tarabas nothing worse than this could happen on a Sunday.

His mind went back to that ill-fated other Sunday from which his whole misfortune dated. That, too, had been a glorious day like this one; in the Galician village, too, the church bells had been ringing when it happened. And there, on the edge of the road, the new, red-headed soldier had stood before him, the messenger of doom. Ah! Had the mighty Colonel Tarabas imagined that doom could be outwitted? That one could escape it? That one could continue wars on one’s own account, when they were done and over?

A rufous Jew on Sunday morning! Hair of such red as this, a beard like this, that did not merely flame but positively blazed forth sparks, Tarabas had not seen in all his life before, and there were few with eyes as trained as his to distinguish red from red in hair. At the sight of this Jew, Tarabas was not simply alarmed. Alarm was what he had felt then, the first time, when the new soldier greeted him. This time he was completely paralysed with horror. Of what avail were all the battles he had fought? What did the terrors all amount to now, those he had experienced and those that he had caused? For now it was apparent that Tarabas bore the greatest terror of all these in himself, one that he could not overcome, a fear that brought forth other fears continually, a dread that fathered spectres, and a weakness that created other weaknesses without end. He had rushed from act of heroism into act of heroism, mighty Tarabas! But not through his own will; it was the fear in his heart that had driven him through all those battles. Denying faith, he had lived on superstition, brave out of fear, powerful out of weakness.

Not less than the colonel’s consternation was that of the Jew Shemariah. He was carrying two scrolls in his arms, like two dead children, each dressed in red velvet embroidered with gold. The round wooden handles had been burnt, likewise the velvet hoods, leaving exposed the lower edges of the parchment which the fire had curled up and singed. Twice that day Shemariah had managed to convey scrolls to the cemetery, two each time. Before daybreak he had slipped out of the house. None of the soldiers had noticed him. He was convinced by now that God had specially appointed him, and him alone, to perform this holy work. Leaving the synagogue for the third time he had let imagination go so far as to believe, pitiful, credulous, simple as he was, that on this errand he was being kept invisible by that cloud of which the Bible tells. Meeting the colonel now, never doubting the cloud was round him, he stepped aside, as though thus to escape the mighty one unseen. This movement sent Tarabas into a frightful rage. He seized the Jew by the bosom of his caftan, gave him a shake, and thundered:

“What are you doing here?”

Shemariah did not answer.

“Don’t you know you’re all to stay indoors?”

Shemariah only nodded. At the same time he hugged the scrolls still closer to him, as though the colonel might try to take them from him.

“What’s that you’ve got? What are you doing with those things?”

Shemariah, too terrified to utter a word, and moreover not very familiar with the language of the country, answered by signs. When he had transferred the scroll from his right arm on to his left one, he looked more like a supernatural being than ever. Pressing his heavy burden to his breast with his weak left arm, he pointed with his skinny right hand, overgrown likewise with red stubble, to the ground, making the gesture of digging and shovelling, then began to stamp and scrape with his foot as though to smooth the fresh mound of a grave. Most of this, naturally, Tarabas could not understand. The obstinate silence of the Jew aroused his rage; it was already rising dangerously.

“Talk!” he shouted, and lifted his clenched fist.

“Your honour!” stammered Shemariah. “See, they’ve been burnt. They can’t stay this way. They must be buried. In the cemetery!” And he stuck out a hand in the direction of the burial-ground of the Koropta Jews.

“Burying’s none of your business!” thundered Tarabas.

Poor Shemariah, not quite understanding, thought he was being called upon to give further explanations. And he told, as best he could, stuttering and stammering, but radiant, how he had twice that day performed his sacred duty. This, however, could but increase the other’s anger. For to Tarabas the fact that the Jew was in the street now for the third time was a particularly dreadful crime. It was the last straw. A Jew and redhaired — on a week-day it might be overlooked; but a Sunday made this apparition horrible and ghastly; and a Sunday like this one made of it a horrible and ghastly personal affront to the colonel himself. Ah, poor, mighty, angry Tarabas!

All at once he felt the faint voice of the poor, other Tarabas. “Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” it said. But Tarabas, the mighty, did not listen. On the contrary, his rage increased.

“Be off!” he roared at the Jew. And as Shemariah went on standing there distraught and paralysed, Tarabas thrust out his hand and pushed the scrolls out of his arm. They fell with a thump to the ground, into the mire.

The next moment the appalling thing had happened. The crazed Shemariah put down his head and butted at the colonel’s mighty breast, beating upon it with both his fists. He looked like a clown in a circus giving an imitation of a raving bull. It was absurd and heartbreaking to see. It was the first time since there had been Jews in Koropta that one of them had lifted up his hand against a colonel — and what a colonel! It was the first, and it was, in all likelihood, the last time, too.

Never in his life would Tarabas have believed that such a thing as this could happen to him. Had he needed any further proof that red-haired Jews on Sunday were his especial harbingers of evil, this attack would have furnished it in plenty. It was something different from an affront. It was — for something so impossible, it was impossible to find a word. If until this moment Tarabas had been filled with bear-like rage, there now began to seethe within him a fiendish, slow, and cruel fury, an ingenious fury, resourceful, full of cunning. A change came over Tarabas’s face. All at once it had turned very white. He smiled. Like a clamp the smile lay between his lips, a cold, hard-frozen clamp. With two fingers of his left hand he flicked the red one off him. Then, with thumb and finger of his right hand he gripped poor Shemariah by the ear-lobe and pinched until a drop of blood appeared. This done — still smiling — with both hands Tarabas seized the fan-like, flaming beard. And with his whole gigantic strength he began to shake the puny, quaking body to and fro. A few of the hairs came out. He put them calmly and without haste right and left into his coat-pockets. He was still smiling, Colonel Tarabas! And like a child who has found amusement in the destruction of a toy, and with a childish, almost idiotic expression in his eyes, he took the beard between his hands again. Between the shakings, he spoke.

“You’ve got a son, haven’t you? His hair’s red, like yours, eh?”

“Yes, yes,” stammered Shemariah.

“He’s a damned revolutionist!”

“Yes, yes,” repeated Shemariah, while he was being shaken to and fro, backwards and forwards, and each separate hair upon his face felt like an open, yawning wound. He wanted to repudiate his son; he wanted to tell how his son himself had repudiated his father. But how to speak? But even if the mighty one had not been shaking him so painfully and dreadfully, Shemariah could not have made his story clear in the language of the Christians, which it was all that he could do to understand, and hardly spoke at all. His heart was fluttering wildly; he felt it inside his chest like an intolerably heavy weight that did not, however, hang still but flew madly about. His breath gave out, his mouth fell open, his tongue lolled out; he was panting for air, and as he drew it in and sent it out at once in shallow gasps, shrill, croaking little sighs burst out of him. His whole face pained him, as though ten thousand white-hot needles were being stuck into it.

“Let me die!” he tried to say, but could not.

Through the film that clouded his eyes he could see the face of his tormentor, now enormous, like a huge disk, now tiny as a hazel-nut, and both within the space of a single second. At last he uttered a shrill, ear-splitting scream, torn from the depths of his being. Some soldiers came running up. They saw Shemariah fall to the ground unconscious, and Colonel Tarabas stand over him a while with a lost air. In either hand he held a clump of red beard, and he was smiling. His eyes looked out into a vague distance, and at last he thrust his hands into his pockets, turned round, and went away.

20

TOWARDS six o’clock Colonel Tarabas woke up. He looked through the uncurtained window and saw that the stars were out. He thought it must be very late. He realized that he was in a strange room, and remembered then that he had come home in the afternoon, come back to the inn, and that the servant Fedya had given him another room because the dead sergeant-major Kontsev had lain in his old one. And it came back to Tarabas that at twelve o’clock midday they were to have buried Kontsev and the others. It was the late grandfather’s room that he was to have had, therefore this must be it, the room in which the grandfather of the Jew Kristianpoller had lived, and in which he had probably also died.

It was not dark. The objects in the room were all clearly distinguishable in the blue shimmer of the night. Tarabas sat up. He noticed that he was lying on the bed in his boots and coat, and with his belt and shoulder-straps still on. He looked about the room. He saw a heating-stove, a chest of drawers, a mirror, a cupboard, bare white-washed walls. One picture only hung on the wall to the left of the bed. Tarabas got up, the closer to examine it. It portrayed a broad face surrounded by a fan-like beard. The colonel took a step back. He put his hands into his pockets to get his match-box. They met something hairy and sticky.

He withdrew them instantly. Candle and matches were on the night-table beside the bed. Tarabas lit the candle. He lifted it up to the picture and read the inscription. It said: “Moses Montefiore.”

It was a cheap photo-engraving; in hundreds of copies it may be seen in many Jewish homes in the eastern European countries.

The name conveyed nothing to Tarabas. But the beard upset him extraordinarily. He put his hands into his pockets once again and brought out two sticky, matted bunches of red human hair. He threw them on the floor with loathing, then bent down at once and picked them up again. He regarded them a while on his open palm, and put them back into his pockets. This done, he lifted up the candle again and held it close up to the picture, studying the face of Montefiore feature by feature. The picture hung behind glass in a thin, black frame. On his head Montefiore wore a little round skull-cap, precisely like the inn-keeper Kristianpoller. The broad, white face fringed with the fan of thick white hair, reminded one of a benign moon shining through soft clouds on a summer night. The dark and heavy-lidded eyes were fixed upon some definite but unknown distance.

Tarabas put the candle down again upon the night-table, and began to walk up and down the room. He avoided looking at the picture again. But soon he felt distinctly that this Montefiore, whoever he might be, was watching him attentively from the wall. He took the picture down from its nail, turned it round and put it on the chest-of-drawers with its face to the wall. The back of the frame consisted of a thin bare sheet of wood, kept in place at the corners by little nails.

Now Tarabas believed that he could go on walking up and down in peace. But he was mistaken. True, he had turned Montefiore’s eyes away, but in his stead there came the red-haired man whose beard he still had in his pockets; there he was in the room as large as life, and as surely as Tarabas himself was there. Tarabas heard again the little, piping cries which the Jew uttered as he was being shaken to and fro, and then the last shrill scream.

Once more Tarabas pulled the matted bunch of hair out of his pocket. He stood looking at it for a long time with dull eyes.

Suddenly he said: “She was right!

“She was right,” he repeated — and resumed his pacing up and down the room. “She was right — I am a murderer.”

It seemed to him in that moment as though he had shouldered an infinitely heavy burden, but as though at the same time he had been delivered of another, unspeakably more oppressive still. His state was that of a man who, with a load at his feet which he has been condemned countless years ago to lift, knows that he has become laden with it at last, but without conscious action on his own part — as though it had put itself alive upon his back. He bent beneath its weight. He took the candle in his hand. And as though the door of the room were not high enough to let him through with his new load, he put down his head to clear it as he went. He descended the narrow, creaking stairs, carefully lighting every step. From the parlour the voices of his fellow-officers came towards him. He entered with the lighted candle in his hand. He put it down on the bar-counter. The clock showed seven. He realized that it was only seven o’clock in the evening. He greeted the officers shortly. They had gathered there for supper. To Fedya he said in a low voice:

“I want to go down into the cellar to Kristianpoller.”

They went down into the cellar. On the last step Tarabas called out: “It’s I — Tarabas!”

Kristianpoller prised up the flagstone with the point of the iron bar; Fedya pulled it open by the hook.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” said Kristianpoller.

“I want to talk to you,” said Tarabas. “We can stay here. Send Fedya away.”

When they were alone, Tarabas began.

“Who is that Moses Montefiore of yours?”

“That,” answered Kristianpoller, “was a Jew in England. He was the first Jewish mayor of London. When he was invited to dinner with the Queen, they used to cook a special meal for him, just for himself, prepared according to the laws of the Jewish religion. He was a great scholar and a pious Jew.”

“Look here,” said Tarabas, and pulled the red bunch of beard out of his pocket. “Look here, Kristianpoller, and don’t misunderstand me. I hurt a Jew yesterday — very badly.”

“Yes, I know, Your Excellency,” replied Kristianpoller. “There are a good many here who know my hiding-place. And the Jews come out of their houses just the same. One of them has been here. He told me about it. You pulled Shemariah’s beard out.”

“I’ll send one of my men with you,” said Tarabas. “Go and bring that Shemariah to me. I’ll wait here till you get back.”

They went up the stair. “Guard here!” called Tarabas. The soldier accompanied Kristianpoller into the street.

But in a few minutes the inn-keeper had returned alone.

“He’s nowhere to be found,” he said. “Your Excellency must know,” he added, “he was simple. Not quite right in his mind. It was his son’s doing. …”

“I know his son,” said Tarabas.

“They tell me that he’s run away into the woods.”

“I’ll go and find him,” said Tarabas.

They were silent for a long time. They were in the upper story of the cellar, each with a little brandy keg for a seat. On a third one stood the candle. Its light flickered. On the damp, cracked walls the shadows of the two men flitted up and down. Colonel Tarabas seemed to be thinking deeply. Kristianpoller waited:

At last Tarabas spoke. “Listen, Kristianpoller,” he said. “Go upstairs and bring me one of your own suits. I’d like to borrow it for a while.”

“Certainly. I’ll go at once,” said the Jew.

“Roll it up into a bundle,” Tarabas called after him.

When Kristianpoller returned to the cellar with the bundle, Tarabas said to him: “Thanks, my friend. I’m going to disappear now for a day or two; but I don’t want anyone to know.”

And he left the cellar.

21

THE priest rose. For the hours he kept, it was late at night and time to go to bed.

“I have come on a personal matter,” said Tarabas, still on the threshold. The oil-lamp hung low over the table; its wide shade spread deep shadow over the upper half of the four bare walls. The feeble sight of the old man could not at first distinguish his visitor’s face. He stood there in a helpless attitude. His bony aged head, too, stood in the darkness above the lampshade, and the light, falling on his old soutane with the innumerable stuff-covered buttons, showed up their shining greasiness more clearly than by day. When he at last recognized Tarabas, the old man came a few hasty little steps towards him.

“Come in, please, and be seated,” he said.

Tarabas came over to the table, but did not sit down. The darkness cast by the lampshade was what he needed. When he spoke, it was as though he talked into space, not to the priest before him. He pulled the bunch of beard out of his pocket, held it tightly in his hand, and said: “This is the beard of a poor Jew. I pulled it out today.” And as though this were an official inquiry in which he was called upon to give all the details he knew, he added:

“His name is Shemariah, and he’s got red hair. I sent someone to look for him, but he has disappeared. They say his mind’s been turned, and that he has run away into the woods round about. I want to go and look for him myself. What shall I do? Am I to blame that he has gone mad? I wish I’d killed him — that would have been better than this. Yes,” Tarabas went on in a toneless voice, “I’d far rather have killed him. I’ve done in a lot of men in my time, and they didn’t worry me afterwards. I was a soldier.”

In all his long life, the priest of Koropta had never heard a speech like this. He knew many people, this old man — farmers, their maid-servants, their men-servants. He was seventy-six years old, and thirty of these he had lived in Koropta. Before that he had been in other little towns. To countless men and women he had been father-confessor, and all of them had poured much the same sins into his ears. One had beaten his father, who had become ancient and helpless, in the hope that he might die of the effects. Women had deceived their husbands. A thirteen-year-old boy had slept with a sixteen-year-old girl and begotten a boy. The mother had strangled the new-born infant. These were all extraordinary events, and, if the old priest ever took stock of his knowledge of the world and of mankind, these cases seemed to him the most hideous conceivable examples of what human beings may be brought to by the abysmal temptations of the devil. Now, listening to Tarabas, he was rather astonished than appalled.

“Please do sit down,” said the old man, for the standing had tired him as much as the remarkable recital itself. Tarabas sat down.

“Well, now,” began the priest, trying to get the matter clear in his own mind, too, “let us try and repeat what you have said, Colonel. You have torn out the beard of a Jew unknown to you, named Shemariah. And what do you mean to do about it? I know this Shemariah; I’ve known him for thirty years. He had a son who became a revolutionist, and he turned him out of his home. He’s a dangerous-looking man, but quite harmless really, and not altogether right in his mind. Well, Colonel, what can I do for you?”

“I have not come for practical advice,” said Tarabas, and looked down at the yellow, cracked linoleum with which the priest’s table was covered. “I want to atone!”

They were silent for a long time.

“Colonel,” said the priest, “I had better not have heard this, and will act as though I had not. You may go now, Colonel, if you would rather — for I have nothing to advise you. Is it spiritual consolation that you desire? May God forgive you, then! I will pray for you. You have hurt a poor, foolish Jew. Many of you have done the same, Colonel. And many more will do so. …”

“I am worse than a murderer,” said Tarabas. “And have been for years and years, but I only see it clearly now. I’ll atone for everything. I promise you. I shall put off all my murderous splendour and try to make atonement. When I came here, I still had a last, stupid hope — a sinful hope — that you might forgive me, and give me absolution. How could I have thought such a thing!”

“Go now, Colonel, please!” said the priest. “It seems to me that you will find the right way. Go, my son!”

On that same night he rode to the capital. He arrived in the early morning. He inquired where General Lakubeit lived and rode to the house. He tied up his horse and sat down outside the front door to wait until Lakubeit was up.

The general’s adjutant, the elegant lieutenant, saw Colonel Tarabas go into the general’s room, and leave it again after fifteen minutes. It was remarkable that the colonel had a parcel with him, which he would not allow to leave his hands. As to what took place between the colonel and Lakubeit, the adjutant could not, unfortunately, give any information for the entertainment of the inquisitive officers waiting in the ante-room for an audience.

The officers saluted Tarabas as he passed out. He beckoned the adjutant to him and said:

“I’ve left my horse outside. I’ll be sending for it in a few days’ time. Have it looked after in the meantime, please.”

Tarabas left the house, stood a while still outside the door, decided to go to the left, and took the broad street straight through the west of the town until he reached the fields beyond. He sat down on the edge of the road, undid his bundle, took off his uniform and put on Kristianpoller’s civilian clothes, went through the pockets of his uniform, took out nothing but a knife and Shemariah’s beard, folded the garments neatly, took a last look at them, and then began to walk along the straight highway that seemed to flow into the far, far distance and lose itself in the pale horizon.

22

MANY tramps roam on the highroads of the eastern countries. They can live on the compassion of their fellow-men. The roads are bad, and very tiring to the feet; the huts are poor and mean, and there is little room in them, but the hearts of the people are good, the bread is black and wholesome, and the doors open more readily. Even today despite the great war and the great revolution, although machines have started on their steel, precise, uncanny march towards the east of Europe, the people are still kind to the misery of strangers. There even the fools and imbeciles have a quicker and a better grasp of their neighbours’ need than the wise ones and the clever ones elsewhere. Asphalt has not yet covered all the highways. The laws and the caprices of the weather, the seasons, and the earth still change and determine the aspect and condition of the roads. In the little huts, that cling so close against the bosom of the earth, the people in them are as near to it as to the sky. Yes, there the sky itself comes down to earth and to the people, whereas in other places where the houses reach up towards it, it seems to draw away from them ever farther and ever higher. Great distances apart and scattered over all the land lie the villages. The little towns are rare, the large towns rarer, but the highroads and the byways are alive. Many people come and go upon them permanently. Their freedom and their poverty are loving sisters. This one must be a wanderer because he has no home; that one because he can find no rest; a third, because he will not rest, or because he has taken a vow to eschew repose; a fourth, because the road and the unknown houses of strangers are what he loves. One knows that in the eastern countries now, as in the west, they have begun to campaign against the beggar and the tramp. It is as though the unrest of the factories and machines, the windiness of dwellers on the sixth floor, the deceptively settled ones in their here-today and gone-tomorrow instability, can no longer bear the thought of the honest, calm, unceasing movement of the good and aimless wanderers. Where are you going to? What are you going to do when you get there? Why did you take to the road? How do you come to lead a life of your own, when we can all endure a common life? Are you better? Are you different?

Of those whom the former Colonel Nicholas Tarabas met on his wanderings here and there, were many who put this kind of question to him. He gave no answers. Kristianpoller’s clothes had long since gone to rags. His boots were torn. Tarabas still wore his soldier’s great-coat. He had taken off the epaulettes and put them in a pocket. Sometimes he put his hand into his pocket to feel them, sometimes he took them out and looked at them. The tarnished silver was yellow now, old toys. He put them back again into the pocket. He had taken the cockade off his cap. It sat upon his shaggy, unshorn mane of hair like a little wheel, far too small. It had lost its pretty grey colour. It shimmered white in some places, also greyish, yellow, and green. Round his neck, underneath his shirt, the former colonel wore two little twin bags. In one were banknotes and coins. In the other he kept an object which he would not have parted with if his life and hope of heaven had depended on his doing so.

Whenever he came upon a shrine or crucifix along the way, he knelt down and prayed long prayers before it. He prayed with fervour, although he thought he had nothing left to implore. He was content, serene, and happy in spirit. He went to great pains to find troubles and suffering and harsh treatment. But people were too good to him. Seldom was he refused a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, a shelter for the night. Did this occur, however, he answered with a blessing. He even had a gentle word for dogs who came and barked at him or tried to bite him. And if he came where they said to him: “Go away, we’ve nothing for ourselves,” then Tarabas would answer: “God’s blessing be on you! May He give you everything you need.”

Only the first week had been hard.

The lovely autumn had changed overnight to harshest winter. First the fierce rains had come; the drops had frozen singly as they fell and struck the body and face like grains of ice. Then they had become monstrous hail-stones which had swept down in a sloping, savage wall. Tarabas had welcomed the first snow, the winter’s good and gentle son. The roads became soft and bottomless. The snow melted. One longed for a solid, bitter frost. One day it came, in company with its brother, the steady, calmly moving wind from out of the north, which comes like a sword, flat, broad, and whetted to a fearful keenness. It cuts through armour. No garment can resist it. One puts one’s hands deep into one’s pockets. But the north wind blows through stuff as though it were tissue-paper. Under its breath the earth is frozen instantly, and sends its own icy breath up into the air. The wanderer grows light — yes, lighter than down; the wind can blow him clean away like the spat-out shell of a pumpkin-seed. The nearest village is far away, farther than usual. No living thing but has crept away into hiding. Even the ravens and the crows, the birds of coldest winter, the heralds of death itself, are dumb. And on either side of the frozen road, to right and left of the wanderer, spreads the plain; as far as the eye can see lie fields and meadows, covered with a thin, transparent, brittle skin of whitish ice.

In the country where the story of our Nicholas Tarabas took place, there was a guild of beggars and tramps. A well-tried, good community of the homeless, with its own customs, its own laws and now and then its own jurisdiction, its own symbols, and its own speech. These beggars are the proprietors of certain houses, too: sheds, abandoned shepherds’ huts, partially burnt-out houses, forgotten railway cars, certain caves they know of. Whoever has spent four weeks on the road has learnt, taught by mankind’s two greatest teachers, poverty and solitude, to read the secret symbols which announce a shelter in the neighbourhood. Here lies a piece of string, there a rag torn from a handkerchief, yonder a charred twig. Here, in a declivity at the roadside, one comes upon the remains of a fire. There, underneath the varnish of the frost, the print of human footsteps may be seen, all going one way and in one direction. The frost cuts into the flesh, and whets the wits as well.

Tarabas learnt to know the signs that promise warmth and safety. The war had left a great deal of useful material lying about the countryside, corrugated iron and sheet-iron, wood, broken motor-cars, train-cars left astray on narrow, improvised rails, tumble-down barracks, half-burnt cottages, abandoned trenches, well reinforced with cement. In a land where war has destroyed the possessions of the settled ones, the wanderers on the highways are well off.

When the former Colonel Tarabas entered one of these shelters, he felt that he was being rewarded far beyond his merits. And he almost regretted having come there. Yes, sometimes it happened that he had hardly arrived and let the warmth envelop him when he had got up and was gone again, having stayed there only a few moments. He was not entitled to enjoy more warmth and shelter than were absolutely needed to keep life in him. For he enjoyed his torments, and wished to prolong them if he could.

And so he went out again into the snow and ice and darkness. If another wanderer, making for the refuge, met him on the way and asked him whither he was bound, Tarabas would answer that he must reach a certain destination that day — that night.

One evening he came to one of these asylums, and found someone else already there. It was a damaged second-class train-carriage standing on the disused rails of an old cross-country railway. The windows of the compartments were broken and had been replaced with boards and cardboard. The doors between the corridor and the compartments would not shut. The leather upholstery of the seats had long since been cut away. The hard grey horse-hair sprouted in clumps out of the seats. Through chinks and apertures the wind blew mercilessly without a pause. Tarabas went into the first compartment. A second-class carriage, such as Tarabas had travelled in a thousand times in other days. He was very tired and went to sleep immediately. He carried with him into sleep the memory of the day when, as a “special courier of the Tsar on a secret mission,” he had come back to his home. “Guard!” he had called, “I want some tea!” And: “Guard! Fetch me some grapes!”—Room, room the people in the corridor had made for the special courier of the Tsar. Ah, what a man Nicholas Tarabas had been! What were his old guard doing without Tarabas? Look, said Tarabas to himself, a man can live with all that power and magnificence, and be a mighty Tarabas, and think the world will be a different place the day he ceases to be there. But now I’ve left the world — and it has not changed its looks in the very least. We’re nothing to the world one way or the other, none of us, not even such a man of power as I was!

Tarabas slept for two hours, then awoke. He opened his eyes and saw another figure in the darkness, an aged tramp. His white hair flowed over the collar of his dark coat, and his beard almost met the rope around his waist.

“You must be one of the Seven Sleepers,” said the old man. “Here I’ve been standing for a quarter of an hour, coughing and spitting, and not a thing did you hear. I heard you when you came, though, but you never even noticed that someone else was living in this car. You’re young still. I’ll bet it’s not long since you took to the road!”

“How do you know that?” asked Tarabas, and sat up.

“Because the first thing even a half-way experienced tramp does is to go through every place he comes into. How easily you might find something useful! A coin, tobacco, a candle, a piece of bread, or even a gendarme! Those queer fellows have a way of hiding in our places and waiting till the likes of us arrive, and then they want to see our papers. … But I’m all right, I’ve got mine,” he added after a pause. “I could show them to you if we had a light.”

“Here’s a candle,” said Tarabas.

“I can’t light it,” answered the old man. “You must do it yourself.”

Tarabas lit the candle-end and stuck it on the narrow window-sill.

“Why wouldn’t you light it?” he asked, looking at the old wanderer with a touch of envy, because he was so much older and looked so much more ravaged by suffering than Tarabas. Ah, this was a general in the army of the wretched! Tarabas was but a lieutenant still.

“This is Friday night,” said the other. “I am a Jew, and we are not allowed to make a fire on the Sabbath.”

“How is it that you aren’t in a warm house tonight?” asked Tarabas, and now his envy filled him to the brim, as formerly only his rages could. “All other Jews eat and sleep in their houses when the Sabbath comes. I have never met a Jewish beggar before on Friday night or Saturday.”

“Well, you see,” said the aged Jew, sitting down on the seat opposite Tarabas, “with me it’s different. I was a respected man in my community. I celebrated every Sabbath as God commands. But many other things that He commands, I did not do. It’s eight years now since I have been a wanderer like this. I was on the road all the years of the war. And those were by no means the worst. I’ve been a long way round, and seen many parts of Russia. And sometimes I was very close to the front. Close to the troops there was always something interesting going on, and always something to spare for a beggar.”

“But why have you given up observing your Sabbath?” asked Tarabas.

The old man passed his hand through his beard, leaned forward to take a nearer look at Tarabas, and said:

“Move a bit nearer to the light, so that I can get a look at you.”

Tarabas did so.

“Good!” said the old Jew. “I think you’re one that I can tell my story to. To be frank, I like telling it. But there are some folk you can talk to, and all they say is ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Is that so?’ or else they only smile, or are altogether deaf and dumb and say nothing at all. They only turn over and begin to snore at you. Now, heaven knows, I’m not a vain man, and I don’t want applause — on the contrary, I want others to know me as I am, exactly as I am. And unless they take my whole nature into consideration, it’s no use my telling them my tale at all.”

“Quite right,” said Tarabas. “I understand.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” continued the Jew — and to Tarabas’s astonishment he spoke the language of the country with perfect fluency, not like the other Jews. “I’ll tell you to begin with that I was a very rich man once. My name is Samuel Yedliner. And everybody in this country for miles around knows me. But I don’t advise you to mention me to anyone, for they’ll only curse you if you say my name. Remember that. Especially if you should ever come to Koropta. That’s where I used to live.”

“Koropta?” asked Tarabas.

“Yes. Do you know it?”

“Slightly,” said Tarabas.

“Yes,” said the aged Yedliner. “I had a house there, as big as the Koropta inn, Kristianpoller’s inn. I had a beautiful wife, strong, and buxom; and two sons. I traded in timber, I must tell you, and made a pile of money. You sell a lot of wood when the winter’s hard, like this one now, for instance. I wasn’t the only timber-merchant in the place; but I was the smartest of them all. It’s this way: in spring, when no one ever thinks that there will ever be a winter, I go to the owner of the big estate and look at his forest, and have this tree marked, and that one, and pay him something on account. Then I have my trees cut down. I don’t rely on the owner — let him cut down what he likes. I have my own wood-cutters. The trees are delivered in my yard. I let them lie out of doors when it’s wet, and when it’s dry I cover them over. That’s how you bring up the weight. For my one great principle was sale by weight, and as far as possible already sawn and chopped up small. You see? — Why should the people have men come and chop up their logs, and pay them extra for it? If they buy by the cord or by the foot they only have to get the trees sawed up for them. No, that’s not my way. I sell wood ready for use, and by weight. Now that was an absolutely original method in our part of the country.”

The old man broke off. Perhaps he reflected that this passion which he still could feel for his abandoned calling was no longer right or proper. He interrupted his description.

“Well, it was like that — more or less. It doesn’t matter any more. At any rate, I was a rich man. I had money in the house and in the bank. I had one son at the university. I sent my wife abroad every year, to Austria, to Franzensbad, because the doctor said she must have some internal trouble to account for the pains in her back, that he could find no reason for. But the devil pinched me. All summer long I earned no money, and I had no patience to wait until the autumn came. Besides, sometimes the autumns were fine and dry and very late, and no one thought about the winter — and my wood got lighter and lighter. That was pretty galling. Then that Yurych came to me one day, and made me a proposal. …”

Yedliner paused, sighed, and then went on.

“And from that day on, I was a well-paid spy in the service of the police. To begin with I only denounced people that I knew something positive against; but then I went on to others where I could only guess; and finally, anyone I had a personal grudge against I simply reported. I developed a tremendous imagination, and I was good at putting two and two together. They believed me without question. Once or twice I had luck; it turned out that everything I said was true, although I had simply gone on guess-work. But then one day Yurych went to Kristianpoller’s bar and got drunk, and said that I was earning a great deal more money than he himself.

“Well, I don’t want to bore you. To make a long story short, they fetched me out one night. Two strong Jewish butchers and the inn-keeper Kristianpoller, who’s no weakling either, beat me half to death. They forced me to leave my home and the town. My wife wouldn’t go with me. My sons spat at me. The rabbi called a Jewish court together; three very learned men sat in it. I saw what I’d done — at least twenty Jews from Koropta and round about were in prison on my account. And at least ten of them were innocent. And I swore to the Jews of Koropta that I would give up everything and go away. And that I would join the beggars of the country. And to myself I vowed and resolved that I would never again spend Sabbath in a Jewish house.

“That’s why I’m here. And that is my story.”

“And I,” said Tarabas, “got into a fury with one of your people, and pulled out his beard.”

They sat there facing each other. The stump of candle on the window-sill had gone out long ago.

When the morning came, an icy morning — its red and fiery dawn announced another snowstorm — they left the train-carriage, shook each other’s hand, and went their separate ways, in different directions.

23

ON that forenoon Tarabas came to the market-village of Turka. Old Yedliner’s story had given him a desire to saw up tree-trunks and chop them into logs.

Therefore he went in Turka from one house to another, asking if there was wood to chop. He found what he was looking for, half a cord of oak to be made small.

“What do you want for your work?” asked the owner of the wood.

“I shall be satisfied with any wage,” Tarabas answered.

“Very well,” said the master of the house.

He was a well-to-do man, a horse-dealer. He brought Tarabas into the yard and showed him where the wood was, brought axe and saw out of the shed and the wooden sawhorse which the people here call the “scissors.” Before he went into the yard, the horse-dealer had put on a fur coat lined with beaver, with a collar of beautiful curly astrakhan. His face was ruddy and smooth with good nourishment, his legs were encased in fur-lined high boots, he held his hands in his warm pockets. Tarabas, on the other hand, frozen in his military coat, blew upon his numb hands, and tried to cover first his right and then his left ear with the inadequate cap, for the frost was pricking both with innumerable pins and needles. The horse-dealer looked at him suspiciously. Tarabas’s face was covered with an unkempt blond beard which began at the cheekbones and bushed out over the collar of his coat. Other tramps, at least so long as they were still young, like this one here, went to the trouble of shaving once a fortnight or so. This one surely has something to hide, reflected the horse-dealer. What tell-tale murderous or thievish feature is he hiding underneath that beard? He might take the axe and saw, and simply make off with them! The cautious man decided that he would keep an eye on this stranger while he worked.

Now Tarabas, faced with the task of chopping wood for the first time in his life, set about it so unskilfully that the horse-dealer’s suspicions were redoubled.

“Listen here,” he said, and grasped Tarabas by a button of his coat. “By the looks of it, you’ve never done any work before?”

Tarabas nodded.

“You’re a convict or a criminal of some kind, eh? And you think I’m going to leave you alone in my yard? So that you can take a good look round, and come back in the night and rob me? You can’t fool me, my man, and I’m not afraid of you either. I was in the trenches three years — I was in eight big drives. Do you know what that means, eh?”

Tarabas only nodded.

The horse-dealer took away the axe and saw, and said: “Be off now, before I hand you over to the police. And don’t let me see your face round here again.”

“God be with you, sir!” said Tarabas, and went slowly out of the yard.

The horse-dealer looked after him. He was warm and cosy in his beaver coat. He felt the frost in his ruddy face as no more than a pleasant device of heaven — perhaps designed for that special purpose — to encourage a good appetite in house-owners and horse-dealers. Besides, it pleased him that he had had the cleverness to see through that suspicious fellow so promptly, and put the fear of God into him with his strong right hand. In addition to which he had been given the opportunity to mention his eight big drives once again. And finally it occurred to him that the tramp had asked for no wages. He would most likely have been satisfied with a bowl of soup in payment of his work. These considerations had a softening effect upon the horse-dealer. And he called Tarabas back before he had reached the outside gate.

“I’ll give you another trial,” he said, “because I’ve got a kind heart. How much do you want for your work?”

“I’ll be content with anything you give me,” Tarabas repeated.

He began to saw the trunk which he had laid with such evidently unpractised hands upon the stand before. He worked diligently, under his employer’s eye, and as he worked he felt the strength increasing in his muscles. He was in haste to be done, so that he might get away from the horse-dealer’s mistrustful eyes. But the man was coming to like Tarabas more and more. He was also not a little afraid of the stranger’s undeniably great strength. Also one could admit to a certain curiosity when one found oneself confronted with so remarkable a man. Therefore the master of the house said: “Come inside; you’d better have a drink to warm you up a bit!”

For the first time since many a long day Tarabas drank a glass of spirits. It was a good, strong liquor, clean and clear, greenly tinged and bitterly spiced with many different herbs which could be seen swimming about in the bottom of the massive, wide-bellied bottle like seaweed in an aquarium. They were good, reliable household health-herbs, such as Tarabas’s old father used to mix with the liquor at home. It burnt, a brief, quick fire in the throat, immediately extinguished, to change into a comforting and spacious warmth lower down. It went into the limbs, then to the head.

Tarabas stood there, the little glass in one hand, his cap in the other. His eyes betrayed such appreciation and contentment that his host, at once flattered and stirred to pity, poured him out another. Tarabas tossed it off at a single draught. His limbs grew limp, his mind confused. He wished he might sit down, but did not dare. Suddenly he was conscious of hunger, an immense hunger; it seemed to him that he could feel with his hands the absolutely void, immeasurable cavern of his stomach. His heart contracted. His mouth gaped open. For an instant which seemed to him eternity, he groped in emptiness with both his hands, caught at a chair-back and fell with a great noise to the ground, while the frightened horse-dealer uselessly and helplessly rushed to the door and tore it open. The horse-dealer’s wife flew in from the next room. They threw a pail of water over Tarabas. He woke, rose slowly, went over to the stove, wrung the water out of his coat and cap without a word, said then: “God’s blessing be on you!” and left the house.

For the first time the lightning of disease had struck him. And already he felt the first touch of death.

24

THIS year the wanderers on the highroads were impatient for the spring. It was a hard winter. It could last a long while yet, before it decided to go from the land. It had struck a hundred thousand fine, inextricably branching roots of ice into the ground everywhere. Deep underneath the earth and high over it the winter had had its dwelling. The seed was dead below, the grass and bushes dead above the ground. Even the sap in the trees at the edge of the roads and in the forests seemed to be petrified for ever. Very slowly the snow began to melt in the ploughland and the meadows, and then only in the short midday hours. But in the dark depths, in the ditches along the roadside, it still lay clear and stiff over a thick crust of ice.

It was the middle of March, and icicles were still hanging from the roofs; they melted for an hour in the brightness of the noonday sunshine. In the afternoon, when the dusk fell again, they congealed to spears once more, immovable, sharp, and brilliant. Upon the floor of the forests everything was still asleep. And in the crests of the trees no bird’s voice was to be heard. The sky abode immaculate in icy cobalt-blue. The birds of spring would not venture into that dead clarity.

The new laws of the new state were no less inimical to the wanderers than was the winter. In a new state order must reign. It must not be said of it that it is barbarian, still less a “musical comedy” affair. The statesmen of the new country have studied laws and legislation at ancient universities. The new engineers have studied at the old schools of technology. And the newest noiseless, dependable, precise machines are coming on silent, dangerous wheels into the new country. Civilization’s most dangerous beasts of prey, the great rolls of paper on which the daily press is printed, glide into the new great presses, unroll themselves independently of human agency, cover themselves with politics and art and science and literature, arrange themselves in columns, fold themselves, and flutter out into the little towns and villages. They fly into houses, cottages, and huts. And thus the newest state has reached completion. Upon its highways there are more gendarmes than tramps. Every beggar must possess a paper, for all the world as though he were a person owning money. And whoever does own money takes it to the banks. In the capital there is a stock exchange.

Tarabas was waiting for the twenty-first of March, when he would go into the capital. That was the date which General Lakubeit had set for him. Tarabas still had five days’ time. He remembered his last talk with Lakubeit. The little man had not had much time to spare. He urged Tarabas to be as quick with his story as he could.

“I understand! I understand!” he had said. “Just go on, and tell me everything.” And when Tarabas had told it all, Lakubeit said: “Good. Nobody shall know anything about you. Not even your father. You can try until the twentieth of March next year, and see whether you can stand that life. Then write to me. From the twenty-first of March on,” Lakubeit had said, “I shall see that you receive your pension monthly.”

“Good-bye,” Tarabas had said. And without waiting for an answer, ignoring Lakubeit’s outstretched hand, he had gone away. That was more than four months ago! Sometimes Tarabas longed to meet somebody who had known him in the past and would recognize him again in spite of everything. Surely there could hardly be a more voluptuous manner of humiliating oneself than that! In his sinful moments, that is, in the moments which he called sinful, Tarabas would look back over the short but eventful way upon which he had acquired the distinctions and insignia of poverty with the self-admiration with which others, who have attained to fame or riches after poor or obscure beginnings, are wont to look back on their “career.” Nor could he quite overcome a certain vanity concerning his appearance. Sometimes he would stand before his own reflection in a shop window, and look at himself with grim and spiteful satisfaction. Immersed in contemplation of his image, he would stand there until he had resumed before his mind’s eye his appearance of the past, his uniform, his tall boots. And then he would find bitter joy in pulling it to pieces, bit by bit; watching the shaven, powdered cheeks cover themselves with the unkempt beard, observing how the upright back bent over in a gentle curve.

“Yes, that’s you, the real Tarabas!” he would say then to himself. “Years ago when you associated with the revolutionists, the mark was on your forehead already. Later, when you were a loafer about the New York streets you were a good-for-nothing. Your father saw through you, Nicholas Tarabas! You spat at him — that was your farewell to your father! The red-haired soldier that had no God, he knew you for what you were, so did the clever Lakubeit. Many people, Tarabas, have known that you deceived others and yourself as well. It wasn’t your real rank that you paraded with all that mightiness; no, your uniform was a masquerade, and nothing else. I like you as you are now, Tarabas!”

In this wise Tarabas spoke to himself now and then, in the crowded, narrow streets of some town, and the people laughed at him. They took him for one not altogether in his right senses. He would then hurry away, lest they call the police. He remembered the three policemen in New York whom he had let go by, when he was still the superstitious coward Tarabas. I am atoning for that as well, he told himself with quiet joy. I should like to stop them myself and let them take me away with all the street-urchins looking on. But they would find out who I am.

Always, when he held such soliloquies as these, and when old memories raced through his brain and away from him, try as he might to detain them, he felt himself burning and freezing in turns. It was fever. Often this fever caught him and put him in an ague. It began to consume his powerful body. It established itself in his face. It dug hollows in his bearded cheeks. Sometimes his feet swelled up, so that he could hardly walk. Many a night when he found a shelter where one might undress, he found that he could remove his boots only with a great effort. His brethren of the road, watching him, inspected his swollen limbs with expert eyes and prescribed all kinds of remedies: hayflower baths and ribwort-tea; diuretic herbs of all kinds, goat’s beard and wild masterwort and wild hart’s wort. They praised the virtues of bog-bean, rosemary, and wild succory. His ailments inspired many nightly debates. There were always some who, in the course of their chequered lives, had had exactly the same complaints. But no sooner had he fallen asleep than they nudged one another and showed by signs that they did not give him much longer to live. They made a sign of the cross over the sleeper, and then composed themselves to sleep, contented with their lot. For even the sons of wretchedness loved their lives, and clung with ardour to this earth which they knew so well, its beauty and its cruelty; and they rejoiced in their good health when they saw another limping towards death. As for Tarabas, he worried more over his torn boots than over his swollen feet. Never mind if clothes hang in rags, boots must be whole! They are the wanderer’s tools. There may be long, long roads before you, Tarabas!

Sometimes he had to stop in the middle of the road and sit down. His heart raced violently. His hands shook. Before his eyes a grey mist formed, making even the nearest objects impossible to distinguish. The single trees on the opposite side of the road dissolved into a dense and endless procession of trunks and branches, an indistinct but impenetrable wall of trees. They hid the sky. One sat in the midst of open country and it was as though one were imprisoned in an airless room. Heavy weights pressed upon one’s chest and shoulders. Tarabas coughed and spat. Slowly then the cloud before his eyes dispersed. The trees along the roadside opposite parted and grew distinct again. The world resumed its normal aspect. Tarabas could go on.

The capital was still two hours’ walk away. A peasant driving his milk to town stopped and beckoned to him to get up beside him into the cart.

“I’ve got milk enough and to spare, praise be to God,” the man said as they drove along. “Have some, if you’re thirsty.”

Since his childhood Tarabas had not tasted milk. Now, as he lifted a snow-white bottle to his lips, surrounded by full and rattling cans in which the milk could be heard splashing richly, his heart was deeply stirred. He seemed to realize all at once the blessing, yes, the miracle, of milk, so white, so full of goodness, the most innocent fluid in all the world. Milk — such an everyday and obvious thing! Nobody stops to think that it is wonderful. It has its source in mothers; in them the warm, red blood is transformed into cool, white milk, the first sustenance of men and animals, the white and flowing greeting of the earth to all its new-born children.

“You know,” said Tarabas to the dairy-farmer, “it’s a wonderful thing this, that you’re driving in your cart.”

“Yes, yes,” said the peasant, “it’s splendid milk, is mine. In all Kurki — that’s my village — you’ll not find any like it. I’ve got five cows; their names are Terepa, Lala, Korova, Dusha, and Luna. Dusha’s the best. She’s a sweet one, she is! You ought to see her, only. You’d love her at once. She gives the best milk of all. There’s a brown patch on her forehead — the others are all white. But she wouldn’t need her brown patch for me to recognize her anywhere. It’s her eyes, you know, and her tail — she’s got a pretty little tail — and her voice, too. She’s like a human being. Just exactly like a human being. We get on fine together, me and Dusha.”

Now they had come into the town, and Tarabas got down. He went to the post-office. It was the general post-office, a new and splendid building. There was a young lady presiding over a little stationery stall outside the magnificent entrance; Tarabas bought paper, an envelope, and a pen of her. Then he entered the great hall and wrote at a desk to General Lakubeit.

“Your Excellency,” he wrote. “This is the day on which you told me to report. I do so respectfully here-with. I take the liberty of submitting two requests to your kind attention: first, that you would be so kind as to give instructions for my pension to be paid me in gold or silver, if this is convenient; secondly, that you will permit me to fetch the money at an hour when nobody will see me. With your kind permission I shall receive the answer to this letter here, poste restante. I remain Your Excellency’s most grateful and humble servant, Nicholas Tarabas, Colonel. Poste restante.”

He dispatched the letter. He went on his crippled feet to the hostel for vagrants, spotless and new and equipped with all the improvements of its western models. Here, with many others, he was deloused, bathed, cleansed, and presented with a bowl of soup. He was given a number on a tin disk, and a hard straw mattress chemically cleaned.

Upon this he slept until the following morning.

At the poste restante counter there was a letter for Nicholas Tarabas addressed in Lakubeit’s own hand.

“Dear Colonel Tarabas,” he had written. “If you will go today or tomorrow about twelve o’clock midday to the post-office, a young man will meet you there and hand you your pension. You need not fear any indiscretion; for our new army, your old father, and the world you are dead and forgotten. Lakubeit, General.”

At twelve o’clock, as most of the counters were closing, the clerks going home and the people leaving the great hall, a young man accosted Tarabas.

“Colonel,” said the young man, “please sign this receipt.”

Tarabas received eighty golden five-franc pieces.

“I hope you will excuse it,” said the young gentleman, “but we could not get it all in gold this time. We hope to do better next month. At this time a month from now, will you please meet me again at this same spot?”

Tarabas went to the city gates, stood there for a moment — and then turned back at once towards the massive entrance of the post-office. In the wide square a few carriages were waiting, a horse or two tied up to the lamp-posts, a few motor-cars. It was the first warm day that spring. The noonday sun flooded the wide, stone, unshaded square with its good warmth. The horses had their heads deep in their nose-bags, eating with happy appetite, and seemed blissfully conscious of the sunshine. Suddenly one of them, harnessed to a light, two-wheeled trap, lifted its head out of the nosebag and whinnied joyfully. It was a handsome creature. Its coat was silver grey, with big, regular brown patches. Tarabas recognized it instantly, by its neck, by its whinnying call, by the brown patches.

He went into the hall, sat down on a bench and waited. When the dinner-hour was over and the counters began to open again, and the people began to fill the hall, the elder Tarabas also appeared. He had grown very old. He went now supported on two sticks. They were ebony sticks, with silver handles. The old man’s mighty moustache fell like an imposing chain across his mouth, parted in the middle and falling down low on either side, silver-white, and the two fine points touched the high snow-white collar. The old Tarabas crossed the hall unsteadily from one end to the other. The lesser folk made way for him. Upon the flagstones each of his dragging steps could be heard, and the dull, almost ghostly tapping of his two sticks with rubber tips. As the old man came to the counter, the clerk thrust his head through the window towards him.

“Good day, sir!” said the clerk.

Tarabas the younger left his bench and approached the counter where his father stood. He saw him hang one of his sticks on the ledge of the counter, pull out his wallet, fumble in it till he found some coupons, and hand these over to the clerk. Then he departed. He almost brushed against his son in passing. But with his eyes fixed on the ground, and without a look around him, he hobbled out of the building.

Nicholas followed him. He stood at the gate and saw a sympathetic stranger help the old man into the trap. Both sticks were propped beside him against the driver’s box. He gathered the reins into his hands. The horse set off. And old Tarabas drove home.

Home.

25

ONE day — it was already the end of May — Tarabas felt that the time had come to go back home and see his father and mother and sister once again. Often during his wanderings he had found himself near his native village, but had always made a wide detour round it. He was not yet sufficiently prepared; for it needs much preparation before one is ready to go home again.

Tarabas was cut off from all the world. But he was still afraid to visit the places of his childhood. He did not love his father. He never had loved his father. He could not remember his father’s ever having either kissed or beaten him. For old Tarabas was seldom angry, and as seldom was his humour good. He ruled in his household which contained his wife and children, like a king who belonged neither there nor to them. A simple, bare, and iron ritual regulated his days, his evenings, his meals, his conduct, and that of the mother and the children. It seemed as though he had never been a young man. It was as though he had come into the world with his established ritual, a complete timetable of his life and days; that he must have been begotten and born according to special laws, and grown up according to rules and regulations of extreme rigidity, and contrary to nature. It was most probable that he had never experienced any form of passion, and certainly he had never known hardship. His own father’s life had ended early, “in an accident,” so it was always said. Nobody knew what manner of accident it had been. As a boy young Tarabas used to imagine that his grandfather had been killed out hunting, in a fight with wolves or bears. For a few years his grandmother had lived on in her son’s house, in the room which was given to his little sister after the old woman’s death had left it vacant.

His sister — she was ten years old at the time — had been afraid lest the dead grandmother return. Even in life she had been a majestic ghost moving through the house, tall and big, with a broad coif on her head, snow-white and stiffly starched, her imposing figure enveloped in solemn, stiff black silk, a kind of stone silk, and in her plump and soft white hands she always held a purple rosary. Without visible reason, and apparently with the sole purpose of showing that her silent majesty was still alive, she descended the stair to the kitchen every day, received the obeisances of the cook and servants with a silent inclination of the head, billowed across the yard towards the stables, vouchsafed the groom a cold glance from her big brown eyes, which stood out from their sockets and were perpetually moist, and returned the way she had come. At meals she was enthroned at the head of the table. Father, mother, and the children approached her and kissed her soft, muscleless, and doughy hand before the soup was brought on to the table. In the presence of the grandmother no word was ever spoken. There was no sound but the imbibing of the soup and the soft clink of spoons against the dishes. After the soup, when the meat course arrived, the old woman left the table. She went to lie down. Nobody knew whether she really slept, or even rested. During the evening she appeared again, to depart as before after a quarter of an hour. Although she never spoke, or interfered in anything concerning the house or the estate, and was so seldom to be seen, yet her presence was felt by everyone — except by her son, perhaps — as a burden no less unbearable for being never mentioned. The servants hated her and called her “the shadow-queen.” Her eyes, perpetually moist, glittered with malevolence, and her wordless hauteur aroused those about her to a hatred equally silent and vindictive. They would gladly have put an end to the shadow-queen, if the opportunity had offered. The children, too, Nicholas and his sister, hated the grandmother in her wicked majesty moving within the folds of heavy stuffs which muffled every sound. And when she died one day, suddenly and without warning, and as silently as she had lived, the entire household breathed again — but only for a while.

Father Tarabas succeeded to his mother’s throne, inheriting the deathly, icy majesty that had been hers. Thenceforth it was he who sat at the head of the table. Thenceforth it was his hand the children kissed before the meal began. He differed from his mother only in that he remained after the soup, partaking of the meat course and dessert with chilly appetite, and only then departed to lie down. If in former days, while his mother was still alive, he had now and then, naturally in her absence, talked a little, and even unbent to an occasional jest, now, after her death, he seemed to emanate her entire ponderous sombreness. And they called him after his mother, “the shadow-king.”

His wife submitted to him with unquestioning obedience. She often wept. With her tears she washed away all the small store of strength with which nature had endowed her. She was thin and pale. With her peaked face and sunken chin, her red-rimmed eyes and the eternal blue apron which covered her whole dress, she looked like a servant, a kind of privileged cook or housekeeper. And the kitchen was where she spent most of her day. Her hard, dry hands, with which she sometimes stroked her children, shyly, almost timidly, as though committing some forbidden action, smelt of onions. When she put them out towards the children, her tears began to flow simultaneously and irresistibly; it was as though she wept at the tenderness which she bestowed upon the little ones. Nicholas and his sister began to avoid their mother. Every approach to her was bound up inevitably with tears and onions. She frightened them.

And yet it was home. Stronger than the sombre majesty of the father and the tearful helplessness of the mother, were the silver magic of the birches, the dark mystery of the pine wood, the fragrance of potatoes roasting in autumnal fields, the joyous trilling of larks in the sky, the wind’s monotonous song, the gay regatta of the clouds in spring, the eerie tales of the maids indoors on winter evenings, the crackling of fresh logs burning in the stove, the oily, resinous scent that went out from them, and the ghostly light the snow cast into the room through the windows, before the lights were lit. All this was home. The strange, inaccessible father and the poor, insignificant mother received a measure of the sentiments which all the rest invoked so powerfully, and Tarabas gave them part of the love he felt for all the things which went into the making of his childhood’s landscape. Memories of the strength and sweetness of that earth cloaked all the strangeness of his parents in a mantle of reconciliation.

Ah, he was afraid to see his home again! He had still been too weak! One can part with power, with war, and with the uniform; with remembrance of Maria, with the pleasures a man like Tarabas knows in the arms of women — but from the silver birch trees of home there is no parting. His old father whom he had seen upon two crutches, was he near death now? — Was his mother still alive? — What did his sister look like? — Had Tarabas a great desire to know these things? — He did not know that it was not the sight of his infirm old father which had awakened his nostalgia, but the sudden whinny of the horse, the brown-spotted grey. In that voice all his home had called to him.

The following morning — a soft, sad rain was falling, as it does in spring, mild and full of goodness — Tarabas took the road that leads to Koryla. Towards ten o’clock he came to where the avenue of birch began, which led to the house. Yes, the hollows along the road were still the same, and had been filled with gravel as he had known it done years ago. Each separate tree was known to Tarabas. If trees had names, he could have called each one by its own. On either hand the fields spread out before him. They, too, belonged to the master of Koryla. These were the fallow fields, left so as long as anyone could remember; they were a sign that one was rich enough, and had no need to plough more land than one had under grain already. True the incendiary boots of war had trampled this earth as well; but the earth of the Tarabases produced in indefatigable freshness new seed, new wild plants, new grass; it was endowed with a luxuriant, irresponsible fruitfulness, it survived wars, it was stronger than death. Nicholas Tarabas, too, the last scion of that earth, and to whom it had ceased to belong, even he was proud of it, of this triumphant earth.

But he must go warily. He knew that in the yard behind the house the dogs began to bark as soon as any stranger passed the sixth birch from the house-door. He was at pains to move as quietly as he could. He could no longer manage the long way round, along the willow path between the marshes, to reach the house through the yard and climb the vine-grown wall, as he had done on that other homecoming! Now he shuffled quietly up the six low steps that led to the russet-coloured door of the broad, white-painted house. The knocker hung on a rusty wire at the door; he knocked, timidly, as befits a beggar. He waited.

He waited long. The door was opened. It was a young servant who had opened it; Tarabas had never seen him before.

He said immediately: “The master won’t have beggars coming here!”

“I’m looking for work,” answered Tarabas. “And I’m very hungry.”

The lad let him enter the house. He led him through the dark passage — on the left was the door of Maria’s room, to the right rose the staircase — into the yard, and quieted the dogs. He let Tarabas sit down on a pile of wood, and said that he would be back presently.

But he did not come. In his stead there came an old man with a white beard. “Kabla! Turkas!” he called to the dogs. They ran to him.

It was old Andrey. Tarabas had recognized him instantly. Andrey had changed very much. He sniffed and peered about him cautiously as he went with his head bent forward and dragging feet. At first he seemed not to see Tarabas, but came on, followed by the dogs, with his head poked forward as though searching. His eyes then fell on Tarabas, seated on the wood-pile.

“Be very quiet,” said old Andrey, “or the master might come. Wait; I won’t be a minute.”

He shuffled away and returned a few moments later with a steaming earthenware bowl and a wooden spoon.

“Eat, my boy, eat it up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid! The master’s asleep — he lies down for half an hour every afternoon, so you’ve plenty of time. But when he gets up, he might come out here, and find you — that would never do. He used to be quite different, though.”

Tarabas did not wait to be asked twice to eat. When he had finished, he still scraped the walls and bottom of the earthenware bowl for the last remains.

“Ssh! Ssh! Not so loud,” said Andrey. “The old master might hear. I’m responsible, you see, for everything,” he went on. “For forty years and more I’ve been in this house. I knew the old mistress, our master’s mother, and his son, too. I saw both our children come into the world, as you might say. And then I saw the old mistress die.”

“What has become of the son?” asked Tarabas.

“Well, he got into trouble first, and went off to America. And then he was in the war. They waited and waited for him after that. But he disappeared — no one knows where. Not long ago — autumn last year it was — the post-man brought a letter, though. It was a yellow envelope with seals on it. It was just at dinnertime. I still used to wait at table then, but now young Yury does it — the lad that opened the door to you. I see the master take the letter, and then he signs a paper, and he gives it back to the post-man — I had to go and get him his glasses out of the study. Then the master reads the letter — not out loud, just to himself. And then he takes off his glasses and he says: ‘There’s no hope any more,’ he said to the mistress. ‘This letter’s from General Lakubeit, and that’s what he says.’ And he gives her the letter. And she gets up and throws down her knife and fork, and she screams out, just as though I wasn’t in the room — but she’s forgotten me. ‘No hope! You tell me that!’ she shouts — at the master, mind you. ‘You dare to tell me that! You fiend — you unnatural fiend!’ And then she rushed away, out of the room. You can imagine our surprise, for it was the first time we had ever heard her raise her voice. She’d always looked as if she’d been crying, and so she did always cry a lot, but never a word from her. And now, all of a sudden, she’s the one to make all that noise. Well, so she goes away from the table, but when she gets to the door she falls down. We had her ill for six weeks after that. Then she got well enough to get up again, but by that time the master was ill too — he’d never said a word about the letter or anything, but he must have grieved over it; in silence, you know. We had to push him about in a wheel-chair for a few weeks, but now he can get about on two sticks.”

“And you — what do you think about it all?” asked Tarabas.

“Me? It’s not my place to think. It’s God’s will, whatever comes. They say, the master has made a will giving all his fortune to the church. The notary was here, and the priest as well. What do you think of such a thing! A great fortune like his, to the church! But they say, it’s done already, and they’re nothing more than tenants in their own house. The master drives to town once a month, and once it was Yury that went with him. He said he’d seen him pay the rent at the post-office. But he can still drive himself — he can manage the reins quite well. And if you saw him up on the driver’s box, you’d think nothing ailed him.”

“I want to go somewhere, Father,” said Nicholas. “I’ve come a long way. Can you show me where?”

The old man pointed towards the hall of the house.

A mad and irresistible plan was taking shape in Tarabas’s mind. He would carry it out without delay. He raced upstairs, four steps at a time. He opened the door of his room. It lay in a bleak brown twilight; the shutters were fastened over the window. Nothing had been changed. The closet was still against the right-hand wall, the bed was still on the left. But it was stripped of covers, the red-and-white striped mattress lay bare upon the springs. It looked like the skeleton of a bed, hideously skinned. An old green overcoat — Tarabas had worn it as a boy — hung on a nail behind the door. At the foot of the bed stood a pair of shoes.

Tarabas picked these up, and put them in his pockets, one right and one left. He shut the door behind him, listened, and once again, as he had so often done before, slid down the banister on his hands. He opened the dining-room door. His father was in an arm-chair by the window, asleep. Tarabas stood on the threshold and looked at him. If anyone should find him there, he could say he had made a mistake in the door. He stood a while watching his father’s cheeks puff in and out, and the moustache rise and fall with them, and Tarabas’s heart was quite cold. His father’s hands lay inert on either arm of the chair; wasted hands along the backs of which the thick veins stood out, powerful blood-streams, swollen yet congealed, underneath the thin coating of the skin. There had been a time when Tarabas had kissed those hands; they were brown and muscular then, they smelt of tobacco and stables, earth and weather, and were not merely hands, but also more, the symbols of royal-parental power, a special kind of hand, unlike all others, which only a father, his father, might possess.

The window was wide open. The scent of the sweet May rain was in the room, and the perfume of the chestnut-candles, late in blooming. The father’s lips, invisible behind the thick moustache, opened and closed with every breath he drew, emitting loud noises that were strange and funny, yes, ribald. They seemed to mock the dignity of sleep and sleeper, and came between the son and the reverence to which he would gladly have given himself up in unseen contemplation of his father. He longed for the cold awe, even for the fear, with which his father had inspired him in the olden days. But he found his feeling rather one of pity for the faint absurdity of this old man asleep, so helplessly, so utterly surrendered to the organs of his body as they struggled weakly, whistling, for air; and far, far from lying there a mighty king wrapped in repose, he looked rather like a comical victim of sleep and broken health.

And yet for a moment the son felt that he was in duty bound to kiss his father’s lifeless hand. Yes, for a moment it seemed to him that he had come there for that purpose only. The feeling grew so strong that he no longer thought of what danger might threaten him if anyone were suddenly to open the door and find him there. He moved very quietly over to the arm-chair, knelt down cautiously, and breathed a kiss over the back of his father’s nearest hand. Then he turned away immediately, and reached the door again in three silent strides. Noiselessly he pressed the latch and opened the door, and went out of the house through the hall, as he had come. He returned to the yard and sat down again beside Andrey.

“Well, you were long enough in that elegant place,” the old man jested. “We’ve only had those new-fangled ones about a year. That’s the English style of water-closets, and we had them put in because there was no making the others decent again after we’d had the soldiers billeted on us time after time.”

“Yes, they’re very fine closets,” said Tarabas. “Pity there’ll be no one to inherit them.”

“Oh, well — our young lady will go on living here. If she ever does marry, there’ll be something put aside for her dowry, so they say. But it isn’t likely that she’ll find anyone now. The men have all been wiped out — those that might have done. There’s none of them left, far and wide. And then, of course, she’s not pretty, our young lady, poor thing. She looks just like her mother even now, young as she is. Sickly and thin, and as if she’s always crying. Now her cousin Maria, she wasn’t like that. She’s in Germany now. Went off with one of those Germans, she did. They say he married her, but I’ve my doubts about it. She was engaged to our young master, too — there was plenty of talk about that. They say he was in too much of a hurry to wait for the wedding — you know. And ‘once fell, never well,’ as the saying goes. They say, she had no fault to find with the war — well, the German gentleman must have noticed that too. …”

“All sorts of things go on among the rich folk,” said Tarabas.

“There’s no rich at all any more,” Andrey gossiped on. “Poor things! Everywhere else in Russia except here, they’ve had everything taken away from them, and shared out among the poor. God save me from such things, I say! I know my own luck, that I’m here, not there. … Look, there goes the mistress — see, over yonder.”

She was wearing a long, black dress and a black lace cap. Her trembling head drooped down so low that Tarabas could catch no more than a fleeting glimpse of waxen skin, shimmering yellowly, and the pointed profile of her nose. She crossed the yard with little, irregular steps. A swarm of cackling hens greeted her with noise and flapping of wings.

“She feeds the chickens, poor soul!” said Andrey.

Tarabas watched her. He heard how his mother, imitating the voices of the fowl, sent forth clucking, crowing, cheeping, quacking sounds. Greyish-yellow wisps of hair escaped from underneath her cap and fell about her face. His mother herself became, in that setting, something like a clucking hen. The whole picture of her there was foolish in the extreme; he saw her as an aged, black-clad simpleton, and it was clear beyond a doubt that the stupid fowl surrounding her had been for many years her only companions.

And Tarabas watched her, saying to himself: “Her womb bore me, she nursed me at her breasts, her voice sang me to sleep. That is my mother.”

He got up, went to her, stepping into the midst of the fowl, bent very low, and murmured: “Lady!”

Her pointed chin came up; her little red-rimmed eyes, with a few wisps of whitish-yellow hair blowing over them, cast not a look at Tarabas. She turned round and screamed: “Andrey! Andrey!” in a croaking voice.

At the same moment a window opened in the upper story of the house. Old Tarabas’s head appeared. He shouted:

“Andrey! Where is that good-for-nothing? Throw the tramp out! Go through his pockets! Where’s Yury? How many times have I got to tell the lot of you that I won’t have beggars in my place! To hell with you all!”—The old man’s voice capsized; he leaned still farther over the window-sill, the blood rushed to his head, and he screeched: “Get rid of him! At once! At once!” countless times without stopping.

Andrey took Tarabas gently by the arm and led him to the back gate.

“Go with God!” said Andrey softly. Then shut the heavy gate with much noise. It creaked on its hinges and fell to with a heavy crash of irretrievable finality. It quivered a little with the force of it.

Tarabas took the willow-path, the narrow way between the marshes.

26

A FINE, dry summer set in. But it did not warm the heart of Tarabas. The torn boots in which he had gone home for the last time he had thrown away in the swamps behind the house. They were lost to sight in a moment. There was first a slight gurgling, then the green face of the marsh had smoothed itself out again without a wrinkle to show where they had sunk. Before leaving the narrow path beside the willow trees, Tarabas put on the other shoes that he had brought with him. Trusty and faithful shoes, they had waited for him all the years of the war, and since, at the foot of his own bed. He had worn them in America. In those shoes — they pinched a little now — he had roamed the stone streets of New York every evening on his way to fetch Katharina from her work. This must be the very spot, too, where he had met Maria years ago. He remembered the rage of passion with which he had stared at the lacings of her boots; and how the two of them had trod the narrow way, one behind the other with such care, lest they miss the path and step into the marsh; and the turmoil of their senses as they pressed on impatiently towards the wood.

Those were the events of a long by-gone life. Remembrance of them lay within Tarabas, dead and cold, corpses of memories. Like a stone coffin his heart enclosed them. The sky of home, the meadows of his childhood, the familiar song of the frogs, the sweet, mild soughing of the rain, even the perfume of the limes in early blossom, and the well-known monotonous knocking of the wood-pecker, all were dead to Tarabas, although they were all round him, and he could feel and hear them. It was as though, in the moment when he had kissed his sleeping father’s hand, he had taken leave not only of the house in which he was born, and of his birthright and his home, but also of every sentiment for them and for the past. So long as he had still feared to set his foot over the threshold of the house again his parents and his sister and the landscape of home had been alive; living objects of that dangerous nostalgia which might yet have the power to seduce Tarabas from his endless, aimless wanderings. How foolish the fear had been! An unknown, mustachioed, crippled man was his father; a frightened, grey-haired simpleton, his mother. If love had lived in either of them years ago, now they were cold and empty, like Nicholas himself. He might have said: “I am your son,” and they would not have had the power to open their hearts to take him in, for their hearts were no longer alive, but had turned to stone. Had they died, had he come home to find only their two graves, his warm remembrance could have brought them back to life again, them and the house. But they were not dead; they moved about, or stood; they slept and fed the chickens; they chased beggars from their door — they were animated mummies, in which they themselves were buried, each one his own walking sarcophagus.

As Tarabas came out of the little wood that ended at the avenue of birches, he turned round once again. He saw the shimmering white façade of the house which closed the avenue at the far end, and the dark silver of the trees in front of it. Between the house and Tarabas the rain hung a flowing, thick grey curtain.

“It was all over long ago!” said Tarabas to himself.

Even in the hot noons of those summer days the shivering frosts assailed him now more and more often. His great body, which had not yet lost the strength that dwelt in it, was borne down by the fierce fever, which accompanied him throughout the halcyon summer days like his own personal and separate winter. Without warning, just as its inexplicable moods would prompt, it leapt upon him. And Tarabas learnt not to resist its onslaughts any more, as one learns in time not to resist the shadow that each man has inseparably attached to him. Sometimes he lay exhausted on the edge of the road, and felt the good sun and the radiant sky as through a thick, cold wall of glass, and froze and shivered. There he would lie, and wait for the pains to come, in the back and in the chest, together with the fits of helpless coughing. These took place with a certain regularity; one could await them confidently, like faithful, dependable enemies. Sometimes blood would flow from his mouth. It reddened the rich green of the slope, or the light, earthy grey of the road. Tarabas had seen the flowing of much blood in his time, had caused much to flow. He spat it from him, red liquid life. It dropped out of him and away. Sometimes, when he felt that the great weakness was coming on him, he would go into a tavern, fumble a coin or two out of his bag, and drink a glass of strong spirits. This was followed by hunger, as in his old days. It was as though his body still remembered the old Tarabas whom it had once enclosed within itself. The stomach still felt hunger, the throat thirst. The feet still desired to walk, and then to rest. The hands still desired to grasp and touch things. And when the night came, the eyes closed and sleep descended upon Tarabas. And when the morning broke, it was as though Tarabas had to wake himself by force, and scold his limbs for being tired and lazy; he had to order his feet to move, command them to march, as he had once commanded his regiment to do these things.

Regularly on every fifteenth day of the month, he appeared in the great hall of the post-office in the capital. And regularly he was met by the young man, who handed him his pension. These meetings were attended by a certain laconic ceremonial. Tarabas raised two fingers to his cap, while the young man lifted his hat respectfully. He said: “Thank you very much, sir!” when Tarabas had signed. He raised his hat again when they separated.

One day, however, he did not go at once but stood a while regarding Tarabas, and said then: “If I may take the liberty of suggesting it, sir, I think you should see a doctor. Hadn’t I perhaps better say something to His Excellency?”

“Say nothing whatever, please!” said Tarabas.

He inspected his face in the little mirror of the weighing-machine which had been lately set up in the vestibule of the post-office, in order to give it the final touch of modernity. And he saw that his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and that a thick network of tiny blue veins criss-crossed both his temples. He stood on the platform and dropped a coin into the slot. He weighed one hundred and eight pounds just as he was.

He went out smiling, like one who has at last learnt what he is to do. He left the capital by the road along which the dairy-farmer had driven him a few months before. A mile down, there was a parting of the ways. At this point there stood two ancient, weather-faded wooden sign-posts with arrows. On the left-hand one could be deciphered the half-erased word, “Koryla.” The arrow on the other pointed to the right towards Koropta. Tarabas took the road to Koropta.

He went slowly, almost meditatively. He did not want to reach the little town before nightfall. He seemed to be sunk in long-drawn sweet anticipation of an inescapable happiness that must await him in Koropta. When the first cottages of the little town came into sight — it was late in the afternoon — his heart began to beat fast with joy. One more curve in the road, and already the wall round the inn of the White Eagle was within view. Tarabas granted himself a rest. For the first time in many a long, long day the summer peace which lay upon the world entered him too. No fever had him in its grip. In the evening glory a happy swarm of tiny mayflies, golden in the sun, danced before his face. He watched their intricate play. He received it like a kind of welcome and recognition. The sun moved farther down the sky, the mayflies withdrew. Tarabas got up. When he reached Kristian-poller’s inn it was already evening. Fedya was standing on a ladder outside the great brown door, pouring fresh oil into the red lantern which hung on an iron arm at right-angles to the wall.

“Praise be to Jesus Christ,” cried Tarabas to Fedya above his head.

“World without end, amen, I’m coming!” answered Fedya busily. He clambered down, can in hand, and said: “Come inside!”

Tarabas sat down in the yard on one of the barrels. He saw the out-house in front of him. Its walls had been newly white-washed, and the old door replaced by a new one painted black. Fedya brought meat, potatoes, and beer, and Tarabas, pointing to the outhouse said:

“What is that over there?”

“It’s a chapel now,” said Fedya. “Nobody knew it for a long time. But one day the picture of the Madonna suddenly came out on the wall — all by itself, just think of that! It was a miracle. She got down from the wall and stretched out her arms and blessed the soldiers in their sleep — but they woke up and saw her. And then everyone went out into the streets and began to beat the Jews, but the priests came, and preached to the people. They said the Jews were not to blame. My own master, the inn-keeper here, he’s a Jew. And I know he’s innocent as the first snow. He’s even had a chapel made of the place — it used to be his lumber-room. On Sundays the priests say mass here. It’s good business for us, I can tell you, because the peasants can hardly wait till mass is over before they make a bee-line for the bar. We have our hands full on Sundays. We make even more on Sundays than on pig-market day.”

Meanwhile Tarabas ate his plate clean, thoroughly, without haste and serene in spirit. It grew dark; Kristianpoller in the parlour was lighting the big round lamp.

“I must go now,” said Fedya, and took Tarabas’s empty plate. He wanted to say: “And so must you!” But he waited a while yet.

“Have you still far to go?” he asked.

“No,” said Tarabas. “I’m almost home now.”

He got up, thanked Fedya, and went down the high street of Koropta. On either side they had begun to rebuild the houses that the fire had burnt and devastated. In front of the half-finished buildings the women sat and gossiped as before. Girls were driving a new generation of hens and ducks and geese home for their night’s rest; they urged them forward with waving arms and billowing skirts. Infants mewed. Children cried. Jews were returning, black and hurrying, from the occupations of the day. They had begun to shut their garish little shops. Iron bars clattered. The first stars glittered in the sky.

Tarabas’s way was straight ahead. At the end of the high street a by-path turned into a field. It led to the Jews’ cemetery. The little grey wall shimmered through the blue of the summer night. The gate was locked. In the cottage where the caretaker lived light was still burning. Tarabas vaulted the wall without a sound. For a while he groped up and down among the hundreds of gravestones, all alike in rows; he lit a match each time to light the angular characters which he could not read, and paused to look at the strange drawings — two hands outspread in benediction with the thumbs joined at their tips, a lion with eagle’s wings upon its back, a six-pointed star, two open pages of a book covered with the indecipherable writing.

In front of the last row of graves — a small space still waited for the next dead Jews — Tarabas scooped out a little hole in the earth with his hands, undid one of the two bags from round his neck, laid it in the hole, filled up the hole with earth again, and smoothed it with his hands. An owl cried somewhere, a bat flew by, the sky of night streamed forth its deep and luminous blue and the brilliance of its stars.

“It was a red beard,” said Tarabas to himself. “It frightened me. I have buried it.”

He left the cemetery by the way he had entered it, over the wall, and turned back along the by-path. It was quite quiet in the little town. Only the dogs, hearing Tarabas go by, began to bark. He found a shelter for the night in one of the cottages which had only just begun to be rebuilt. It smelt of damp mortar and fresh lime. Tarabas slept the night in a corner, awoke with the sunrise, and went out into the street. He met the earliest of the pious Jews, hurrying to the synagogue, stopped them, and asked where Shemariah lived. They were astonished at his question, gave no answer, but stood and looked at him a long while.

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” said Tarabas — and it seemed to him that someone laughed, as he spoke these words. Was anybody still afraid of him? It was the first time in his life that he had said such a thing. Would it have ever occurred to him to say it while he was still the mighty Tarabas — could he have done so then? “We’ve known each other for a long time, Shemariah and I,” he went on.

The Jews exchanged inquiring, knowing glances, then one of them said: “If it’s Shemariah you want, you’d better ask at Nissen’s. The blue shop, three doors from the market-place.”

The shop-keeper Nissen was sitting beside a samovar in which maize was cooking. His many-coloured wares were spread out all around him, and he was on the look-out for customers. He was a comfortable, elderly man with a grey beard and the portliness that denotes the man of substance. An esteemed citizen of Koropta and a passionate philanthropist, he seemed already to have received the safe assurance that his benefactions on earth had caused a place to be reserved for him in the Jews’ heaven, ready for him to enter when the time came.

“Yes,” he said. “Shemariah lives here with me, in the attic. The poor simple creature! You used to know him in the old days, did you? Do you know his story? Well, there was a colonel here — a new one; Tarabas was his name — may it be wiped out! But they say he died of a stroke soon after — what a merciful death for such a villain! Well, this colonel — he pulled out poor She-mariah’s beard. Just as he was on his way to bury a Torah. Ever since then he’s been quite foolish. He couldn’t work any more, or anything. So I said to myself: ‘You take him in, Nissen!’ What can you do? Someone has to look after these poor souls. He lives with me, like my brother. You can go upstairs to him if you like.”

It was a tiny attic which housed Shemariah, with a round sky-light instead of a window. A wooden bench was spread with Shemariah’s bed-clothes; this bench was what he slept on. As Tarabas entered, he was sitting at the bare table with a large book open in front of him; he was humming to himself as he read. He must have thought that it was someone he knew who had come into the room, for it was some time before he raised his head. But then a shock of terror transformed his face. His terror blazed, an icy fire, in his staring eyes. His humming song broke off; he gazed at Tarabas in a paralysis of fear. His lips moved, but no sound came from them.

“I am a beggar,” said Tarabas. “Don’t be afraid, Shemariah.” Then he added: “Have you a piece of bread to spare for me?”

It was a long time before the Jew Shemariah could grasp the words. The language he could hardly understand; he must have realized Tarabas’s wish simply by the ragged clothes he wore, his attitude, his gestures. He uttered a shrill titter, rose, clung fearfully to the wall, and slunk along it, with one shoulder half turned to the stranger, still tittering, to the bed. From underneath the pillow he pulled out a piece of dry bread, laid it on the table, and pointed to it with his finger. Tarabas approached the table, Shemariah pressed himself against the bed. Tarabas saw that all round the Jew’s thin, freckled face a short and meagre, fan-like beard of silver hair had grown, with bare scars between, as though it had been gnawed by mice. It was a shabby garland of pitiful silver which had begun to clothe the marred face again.

Tarabas’s eyes fell; he took the bread and said: “I thank you.” He left the room. On the way down the narrow ladder which led to the attic, he began to eat the bread. It tasted of Shemariah’s sweat and bed.

“He didn’t recognize me,” said Tarabas to the shopkeeper Nissen, when he came downstairs again. “God be with you!”

“Here’s a maize-cob just done,” said Nissen. “Take it with you to eat on the way!” One should do good to all the poor, said the shop-keeper to himself. But a poor man may also be a thief; one need not let him remain in one’s shop longer than necessary.

“All in good order,” Tarabas thought, and went his way. “It is all in good order now.”

27

A FEW weeks later — the summer was already nearing its end, the chestnuts were ripening and the Jews of Koropta were getting ready to celebrate their high festivals — there came to the general store kept by the shop-keeper Nissen the gentle Brother Eustachius from the Lobra monastery near by. The good brethren of Lobra occupied themselves with the care of the sick; some of the brethren were accomplished surgeons and physicians, and there were even Jews in Koropta who, when they fell ill, went neither to the local quacks nor to the doctors, but to the monks.

Sometimes, at certain seasons of the year, they would come — always only two — to the little town to make a collection for the poor. A strange feeling would then take possession of the Jews — compounded of the alien and the familiar, of gratitude, respect, and fear. While the little round caps worn by the monks upon their shorn skulls were things that they knew well, so much the greater was their terror of the great metal crucifixes which hung like a weapon upon each brother’s hip, the cross which their forefathers were accused of having erected for an unspeakably dreadful purpose, which was a symbol to all the peoples of the earth that they would be blest, and to them only the token of suffering and damnation.

One of the monks had rid this Jew and that one of an aching tooth; another had applied the leech to others, or lanced an abscess. But only while they still endured their pains could the Jews feel close to their Samaritans; fear of the torment of sickness could banish for an hour or two the other, and far greater, fear — that which was born and bred in the blood. Yet in the days of health their gratitude to the godly brethren survived, and dwelt in them side by side with mistrust. As the brethren, unlike the lay healers, accepted no money for their services, one turned to them gladly, but when one was well again one asked oneself what reason these incomprehensible men could have for treating Jews for nothing. Now, it may be that the pious brethren knew, or at least divined, these sage reflections; at all events they combined with the commandment to waken their neighbours’ charity by means of pious exhortation to almsgiving, also the good purpose of hiding their strange selflessness a little from the shrewd Jews, and this was shrewd on their part.

In the Jewish houses the almsgiving was a rapid, almost hasty, ceremony. Money, clothes, and food were brought to the monks outside the door, in order that they might not cross the threshold. Their billowing, coarse brown frocks, the ample roundness of their well-fed bodies, their ruddy, shining faces, their unvarying gentleness, their complete indifference to cold and heat, rain, snow, and sun — these things all seemed unnatural to the Jews, inclined as they were to worry endlessly and always, yes, positively to wallow in their cares. Each morning they began by fearing what the day would bring; long before the winter came, they shivered in the frost to come, and in the summer they wasted away to skeletons; for ever agitated because they never did, and never could, feel that this land was home to them, they had long since lost what they once knew of calm, and lived their lives buffeted and tossed hither and thither between hate and love, anger and servility, protest, uprising, and pogrom.

For years they had been used to seeing the brethren from the monastery of Lobra appear in the little town at fixed seasons of the year. Now, however, when one of them arrived at quite another season, they began to dread the approach of some new disaster. What could be his errand? Whither was he bound? They stood in trembling suspense outside their shops, ready to plunge into hiding at a moment’s notice. Meantime the comfortable figure of the gentle monk Eustachius moved deliberately and unsuspectingly past all the fears on either side of him, down the miry middle of the street, lifting the skirts of his robe a little, and striding serenely in his thick high-boots with their double soles. Here and there an over-zealous peasant woman sprang down from the wooden sidewalk to kiss his hand. He was used to such things. With automatic dignity he put out his strong brown hand, let it be kissed, and wiped it on his robe. The anxious glances of the Jewish shop-keepers followed him. The watchers saw how he stopped at Nissen’s, read the sign above the door, and mounted the high sidewalk with one huge step. He vanished into the shop.

The dealer Nissen rose, startled and apprehensive, from the stool on which he sat. Brother Eustachius smiled gently, produced out of the depths of his robe an ivory box, and offered the Jew a pinch of snuff. The Jew reached into the box, sneezed heartily, and asked: “Reverend Father, what do you want of me?”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the monk, “but my errand is a very sad one. We have a sick man in our monastery; it will be all over with him very soon. The foolish Shemariah lives with you, I know. That was a good work of yours, to take him in. Yes, I wish such good hearts as yours could be found in all Christians.”

Somewhat calmed, but still mistrustful, Nissen answered with a general observation: “God commands us to be merciful.”

“But God is seldom obeyed by men,” replied Eustachius. “You took a burden on you of your own free will. It must be very difficult to get on with that Shemariah. Do you think that I could talk to him?”

“Reverend Father — it is impossible!” said the dealer Nissen. And his eyes considered the robe, the rosary, the crucifix. The monk followed the look and understood.

“Very well,” he said. “Will you go with me to him then? It is like this, you see. That sick man of ours says that he would like to die, but cannot. He says that he did this Shemariah great harm and wrong, and Shemariah must first forgive him. Do you know what the trouble was? Or what he means? It is possible,” continued Eustachius — for he had decided to make a concession to that common sense which rules the minds of Jews, “there is of course a possibility that he is only imagining it, for he is in a high fever, and he may be raving in delirium. But one must do what one can, so that he may die in peace. You understand?”

“Very well,” said Nissen. “I will go with you.”

And the dealer Nissen, not without trepidation, conducted the monk up the narrow ladder to Shemariah’s attic room. When they had reached the door, he said: “I had better go in first, Reverend Father.” He entered, but left the door open.

Shemariah glanced up from the great book which he seemed to pore over eternally. Behind his host and friend, Nissen, he became aware of the terrifying, fat, and alien figure of the brown-frocked monk. He shut the book sharply, got up, and went over to the wall, pressing close against it for protection. As he stood, with his emaciated head framed in the round sky-light, which was the only window in the room, he reminded the gentle Brother Eustachius of a saint or one of the apostles. Shemariah’s two thin hands, jutting far out of the sleeves of his caftan, were outstretched against his guests. His lips quivered. But he said nothing.

“Shemariah, listen carefully now to what I tell you,” Nissen began, going to the table. “You need not be afraid. The gentleman hasn’t come to take you away and lock you up. He has only come to ask you if you will do something for him — he has a little favour to ask of you. Come, say ‘yes.’—Then we’ll go away again at once.”

“What does he want?” Shemariah asked.

“There’s a man lying ill in his house — very ill. He’s going to die.” Nissen made a movement of the head to indicate the monk, who still stood at the threshold and had not come into the room. “This sick man says that he once did something terrible to you, and he can’t die in peace because of it. You must say that you are not angry with him, only that. Just ‘yes’—that’s all you need to say.”

It was a long time before Shemariah moved. Then he left the place against the wall where he had taken refuge. And to Nissen’s astonishment he said in a loud voice:

“I know who he is. Let him die in peace; I’m not angry with him.”

And to the dealer’s blank amazement, Shemariah came round the table close up to him, raised his right hand, putting the nail of the thumb against the nail of the first finger, and said:

“I’ve nothing against him, tell him, not this much! He shall die in peace. Tell him so!”

28

IN Brother Eustachius’s cell, and in his bed, lay Nicholas Tarabas. He was waiting. On the stone floor beside the bed a fire was burning, so that the sick man might have the warmth he needed. One of the brethren sat by him at the other side of the bed.

Eustachius entered, and Tarabas sat upright in the bed.

“He has forgiven,” said Eustachius.

“Did you speak to him yourself?”

“I did,” answered Eustachius.

“How is he then? Can he still be sensible? Does he know what he is saying?”

“He’s very sensible indeed,” said Eustachius. “He understood it all, perfectly. He’s a great deal clearer than they think.”

“Is he? Well … And his son?”

“He said nothing about his son.”

“Pity!” said Tarabas, and lay back on the pillows.

“I should like,” he said then, “to be buried in Koropta. Please let someone send word to my father and mother and sister; and General Lakubeit must also be told.”

Those were Tarabas’s last words. He died that evening as the sun was going down. Through the cell’s iron window-bars it cast eight burnished squares upon the coverlet, over which a gentle quiver passed, in the last second.

They buried Colonel Nicholas Tarabas in Koropta with all the military honours due to his rank. There was music, and a volley was fired over the grave. The Jews of Koropta were at the cemetery too. Accompanying the father, who hobbled to the graveside on his two handsome ebony sticks, the veiled mother and the old servant Andrey had come.

After the funeral the parents entered the black carriage, and Andrey drove them away. None of those present had seen a tear in the eyes of old Tarabas.

On the road the carriage overtook the troop returning to the barracks to the bright music of the brass.

Brother Eustachius ordered a head-stone for the dead man, a beautiful stone of black marble. Eustachius knew no more about him than the dates of his birth and death. Had it been possible, he would have had the stone inscribed with the words: “A fool that deserved to enter heaven.” But this could not be called suitable as an epitaph. Therefore Brother Eustachius meditated over the matter of a suitable one.

29

A WEEK later he went with the notary to the Jew Nissen. They climbed, all three, the ladder up to Shemariah’s attic. Shemariah rose from his seat, and shut the book.

He no longer fled before the sight of strangers. He merely rose, and remained standing by the table, with his closed book in front of him.

In the presence of the two witnesses, the reverend Brother Eustachius and Nissen Pichenik, general dealer, he declared Shemariah Korpus, sexton, sole heir of Colonel Nicholas Tarabas, recently deceased. The legacy consisted of a bag of gold coins to the value of five hundred and twenty gold francs, and a few hundred bank-notes.

The notary put the money down on the table. Brother Eustachius and the dealer Nissen counted the gold pieces, and the notary shovelled them back into the bag. The bag was then handed to Shemariah across the table.

He balanced it in his right hand, tittered, transferred it to his left. He held it by the string, flicked at it with one finger of his right hand and set it spinning with a clinking sound. He gazed at it a while with an expression of happiness, and finally let it fall upon the table.

“I don’t need it,” said Shemariah at last. “Take it away. You can have it.”

As, however, nobody moved to take it, he began without another word to offer them the little bag one after the other, first the notary, then the dealer Nissen, and lastly the monk Eustachius. But each one pushed it back.

Shemariah waited a while. Then he took the bag, went over to his bed, and put it underneath the pillow.

The three men left him. On the way down the ladder the notary said: “All that good money wasted — too bad! So he lived in vain after all, that Tarabas!”

“That we don’t know,” said Brother Eustachius. “That is something we can never know.”

They took their leave of the dealer Nissen.

“Let’s go over to Kristianpoller’s for a moment,” the notary proposed.

A few moments later they were sitting in Kristianpoller’s parlour. The one-eyed inn-keeper came to their table. “Well, he’s dead now,” he said.

“He was one of your guests,” remarked the notary.

“For a long time,” the Jew Kristianpoller answered. “He was a queer guest in the Kristianpoller inn.”

“I should say,” said the notary, “that he was a queer guest on earth altogether.”

This struck the ear of the monk Eustachius. And he decided to have Tarabas’s gravestone inscribed with this inscription:

COLONEL NICHOLAS TARABAS

A GUEST ON EARTH

It seemed to him a modest, just, appropriate epitaph.

30

AT the moment when these lines are being written, some fifteen years have passed since the death of the strange man whose story they have told. Over the grave of Colonel Nicholas Tarabas stands a simple cross of black marble, paid for by old father Tarabas.

The stranger visiting Koropta today can find no trace of these remarkable, sad, and wonderful events. All the houses in the little town have been renovated within and painted white without, and a building committee, modelled according to the western-European pattern, takes care that they are all put in order at the same time, and that they resemble each other to the last detail, like soldiers.

The old priest died a year or two ago. The foolish Shemariah still lives in the dealer Nissen’s attic; he keeps the useless bag of gold underneath his pillow and can hardly be induced to touch it, let alone show it or give it out of his hand. As the new government of the country has its own coinage now, the old gold franc and ruble pieces have — as the dealer Nissen correctly observes — lost much of their original value. The attempt to convey this fact to Shemariah proved completely fruitless. He only tittered. It may be that the fool was indeed laughing at the wise ones for their wisdom. Perhaps it was clear to him alone that the value of these gold coins never had been, nor could be, a value of the kind that is noted on the quotation lists of the world’s banks and exchanges. Doubtless the dealer Nissen nourishes an unspoken hope that he will one day inherit the bag of money. It would be, at that, no more than the obvious reward for his benefactions to the foolish Shemariah. Moreover, other poor and needy ones would have their share of it, if it fell to him. For the dealer Nissen will be a man diligent in charity and good works until he dies. He owes it to God, to his reputation, and to his business also. And probably the dealer Nissen is right.

In all Koropta he and the inn-keeper Kristianpoller are the only ones who sometimes, over a glass of mead — and the dish of salted dried peas which goes with it — talk of the strange Colonel Tarabas, and how he came, a mighty king, into the little town, to be buried there a beggar. In Kristianpoller’s out-house there still stands an altar before the miraculous picture of the Virgin, but services are held there less and less often as time goes on. A new generation is growing up which knows nothing of the old story. As in all the years before it happened, the people go to the church to pray. And the new generation is little given to praying at the best of times.

The pig-market comes round often. The little horses neigh, the pigs squeal, the peasants get very drunk. When they have reached the stage of helplessness, the servant Fedya takes their arms and drags them to their carts, where he sobers them with a flood of cold water. The Jews continue to deal in beads and kerchiefs, pocket-knives, scythes, and sickles. Every year hop-merchants from other parts come to Koropta. Many a one, taking a look round the neat little town, strolls down the high street, climbs the hill with the church on its summit, wanders through the grave-yard, and notices the odd epitaph:

COLONEL NICHOLAS TARABAS

A GUEST ON EARTH

The stranger returns to Kristianpoller’s inn, drinks a beer, a mead, or a glass of wine, and says to the inn-keeper: “And by the way, I came across a very curious grave up there in that churchyard of yours!”

Nathan Kristianpoller — he himself knows not why — likes these guests best of all who come into his house. He sits down at the stranger’s table and tells him the story of Tarabas.

“And you Jews are not afraid now, any more?” the stranger will sometimes ask.

“You know how it is”—Kristianpoller’s answer is always the same—“people forget. They forget fear and they forget the terrors that they go through. They want to live at all costs; they make themselves get used to everything, because they want to live! It is quite simple. Even miracles, even the most extraordinary things — they forget them, too, quicker even than the everyday ones. For the everyday is what they want. See it yourself, sir — at the end of every life stands death. We all know it. And who remembers it?”

Thus speaks the inn-keeper Nathan Kristianpoller to the guests that he likes best.

He is a clever man.