Part 11

At last my father summoned me to his study. I opened the door and stopped timidly on the threshold. The melancholy autumn sun was shining in through the windows. My father was sitting in an arm chair before a portrait of my mother, and did not turn to look at me as I came in. I could hear the anxious beating of my own heart.

At last my father turned round; I raised my eyes and instantly dropped them again. My father’s face looked terrible to me. Half a minute passed, and I could feel his stern, fixed, withering gaze riveted upon me.

“Did you take your sister’s doll?”

The words fell upon my ears so suddenly and sharply that I quivered.

“Yes,” I answered in a low voice.

“And do you know that that doll was a present from your mother, and that you ought to have preserved it as something sacred? Did you steal it?”

“No,” I answered, raising my head.

“How can you say no?” my father suddenly shouted. “You stole it and took it away. Whom did you take it to? Speak!”

He strode swiftly toward me, and laid a heavy hand upon my shoulder. I raised my head with an effort, and looked up. My father’s face was pale. The frown of pain which had lain between his brows since my mother’s death was still there, but now his eyes were flashing with sombre wrath. I shrank away. I seemed to see madness--or was it hatred?--glaring at me out of those eyes.

“Well, what did you do? Answer!” And the hand which was holding my shoulder gripped it more tightly than before.

“I--I won’t tell you,” I answered in a low voice.

“Yes, you will tell me!” my father rapped out, and there was a threat in his voice.

“I won’t tell you,” I whispered lower still.

“You will, you will!”

He repeated these words in a muffled voice as if they had burst from him with a painful effort. I felt his hand trembling, and even seemed to hear the rage boiling in his breast. My head sank lower and lower, and tears began to drip slowly out of my eyes upon the floor, but I still kept repeating almost inaudibly:

“No, I won’t tell; I’ll never, never tell.”

It was my father’s son speaking in me. He could never have succeeded in extorting an answer from me, no, not by the fiercest tortures. There welled up in my breast in response to his threats the almost unconscious feeling of injury that comes to an ill-used child, and a sort of burning love for those whose betrayal my father was demanding.

My father drew a deep breath. I shrank away still farther, and the bitter tears scalded my cheeks. I waited.

It would be hard for me to describe my sensations at that moment. I knew that his breast was seething with rage, and that at any moment my body might be struggling helplessly in his strong, delirious arms. What would he do to me? Would he hurl me from him? Would he crush me? But I did not seem to dread that now. I even loved the man in that moment of fear, but, at the same time, I felt instinctively that he was about to shatter this love with one mad effort, and that for ever and ever after I should carry the same little flame of hatred in my heart which I had seen gleaming in his eyes.

I had lost all sense of fear. Instead, there had begun to throb in my heart a feeling exasperating, bold, challenging; I seemed to be waiting, and longing for the catastrophe to come at last.

It would be better so--yes--better--better----

Once more my father sighed heavily. I was no longer looking at him. I only heard his sighs, long, deep, and convulsive, and I know not to this day whether he himself overcame the frenzy that possessed him or whether it failed to find an outlet owing to an unexpected occurrence. I only know that at that critical moment Tiburtsi suddenly shouted under the open window in his harsh voice:

“Hi, there, my poor little friend!”

“Tiburtsi is here!” flashed through my mind, but his coming made no other impression on me. I was all beside myself with suspense, and did not even heed the trembling of my father’s hand upon my shoulder, or realise that Tiburtsi’s appearance or any other external circumstance could come between my father and myself, or could avert that which I believed to be inevitable, and which I was awaiting with such a flood of passionate anger.

Meanwhile Tiburtsi had quickly opened the door of the room, and now stood on the threshold embracing us both with his piercing, lynx-like glance. I can remember to this day the smallest details of the scene. For a moment a flash of cold, malevolent mockery gleamed in the greenish eyes and passed over the wide, uncouth face of this gutter orator, but it was only a flash. Then he shook his head, and there was more of sorrow than of his accustomed irony in his voice as he said:

“Oho, I see that my young friend is in an awkward situation.”

My father received him with a gloomy, threatening look, but Tiburtsi endured it calmly. He had grown serious now, and his mockery had ceased. There was a striking look of sadness in his eyes.

“My Lord Judge,” he said gently. “You are a just man; let the child go! The boy has been ‘in bad company,’ but God knows he has done no bad deeds, and if his little heart is drawn toward my unfortunate people, I swear to the Queen of Heaven that you may hang me if you wish, but I will not allow the boy to suffer for that. Here is your doll, my lad.”

He untied a little bundle, and took out the doll.

The hands that had been gripping my shoulder relaxed. My father looked surprised.

“What does this mean?” he asked at last.

“Let the boy go!” Tiburtsi repeated, stroking my bowed head lovingly with his broad palm. “You will get nothing out of him with your threats, and besides, I will gladly tell you everything you want to know. Come, Your Honour, let us go into another room.”

My father consented, with his eyes fixed in surprise on Tiburtsi’s face. They went out together, and I stayed rooted to the spot, overwhelmed with the emotions with which my heart was bursting. At that moment I was unconscious of what was going on around me, and if, in calling to mind the details of this scene, I remember that sparrows were twittering outside the window and that the rhythmic splash of the water-wheel came to me from the river, why that is only the mechanical action of my memory. Nothing external existed for me then; there existed only a little boy in whose breast two separate emotions were seething: anger and love; seething so fiercely that my heart was troubled as a glass of water is dimmed when two different liquids are poured into it at the same time. Such a little boy existed, and that boy was I; I was even sorry, in a way, for myself. There existed also two voices, that came to me from the next room in a confused but animated conversation.

I was still standing on the same spot when the study door opened, and both talkers came into the room. Once more I felt a hand on my head, and trembled.

It was my father’s, and he was tenderly stroking my hair.

Tiburtsi took my hands, and set me upon his knees right in my father’s presence.

“Come and see us,” he said. “Your father will let you come and say good-bye to my little girl. She--she is dead.”

Tiburtsi’s voice trembled, and he winked his eyes queerly, but he at once rose quickly to his feet, set me down on the floor, pulled himself together, and left the room.

I raised my eyes inquiringly to my father’s face. Another man was standing before me now, and there was something lovable about him which I had sought in vain before. He was looking at me with his usual pensive gaze, but there was a shade of surprise in his eyes, and what might have been a question. The storm which had just passed over our heads seemed to have dispelled the heavy mist that had lain on my father’s soul and frozen the gentle, kind expression on his face. He now seemed to recognise in me the familiar features of his own son.

I took his hand trustfully, and said:

“I didn’t steal it. Sonia lent it to me herself.”

“Yes,” he answered thoughtfully. “I know; I am guilty before you, boy, but you will try to forget it sometime, won’t you?”

I seized his hand and kissed it. I knew that he would never again look at me with the dreadful eyes which I had seen only a few moments before, and my long pent-up love burst forth in a torrent. I did not fear him now.

“Will you let me go to the hill?” I suddenly asked, remembering Tiburtsi’s invitation.

“Ye-es--go, boy, and say good-bye,” he answered tenderly, but with still the same shade of hesitation in his voice. “No, wait a minute; wait a minute, boy, please.”

He went into his bed-room and came back in a minute with a few bills which he thrust into my hand.

“Give these to Tiburtsi. Tell him that I beg him--do you understand?--that I beg him to accept this money--from you. Do you understand? And say, too,” added my father, “say that if he knows any one called Feodorovich he had better tell that Feodorovich to leave this town. And now run along boy, quickly.”

Panting and incoherent, I overtook Tiburtsi on the hill and gave him my father’s message.

“My father begs you to----” I said, and pressed the money which I had received into his hand.

I did not look at his face. He took the money, and gloomily listened to my message concerning Feodorovich.

In the crypt, on a bench in a dark corner, I found Marusia lying. The word death has little meaning for a child, but bitter tears choked me at the sight of her lifeless body. My little friend was lying there looking very serious and sad, and her tiny face was pitifully drawn. Her closed eyes were a little sunken and the blue circles around them were darker than before. Her little mouth was slightly open, and wore an expression of childish grief. This little grimace was Marusia’s answer to our tears.

The Professor was standing at her bedside, indifferently shaking his head. The Grenadier was hammering in a corner, making a coffin out of some old boards torn from the chapel roof. Lavrovski, sober and with a look of perfect understanding, was strewing Marusia’s body with autumn flowers which he himself had gathered. Valek was lying asleep in a corner, shuddering all over in his dreams, and crying out restlessly from time to time.

X

CONCLUSION

Soon after this the members of the “bad company” dispersed to the four corners of the earth. There remained behind only the Professor, who until his death continued to haunt the streets of the town, and Turkevich, to whom my father would give a little writing to do from time to time. For my part, I lost not a little blood in combats with the Jewish boys who tormented the Professor by reminding him of sharp and pointed instruments.

The Grenadier and the other suspicious characters went elsewhere to seek their fortunes. Tiburtsi and Valek suddenly and completely vanished, and no one could say whither they had gone, as no one knew whence they had come.

The old chapel has suffered much since then from the onslaughts of Time. First the roof fell in, breaking down the ceiling of the crypt. Then landslides began to form around the building, and the place grew more dismal than ever. The owls now hoot more loudly than before among its ruins, and the will-o’-the-wisps on the graves still glow with a malign blue fire on dark autumn nights.

One grave only, surrounded by a little fence, grows green with fresh grass every spring, and lies bedecked with brilliant flowers.

Sonia and I used often to visit this little grave, and sometimes our father would go with us. We liked to sit there in the shade of the whispering birch trees, with the town below us shimmering placidly in the sunlight. Here my sister and I read and dreamed together, sharing our first young thoughts and our first premonitions of upright, winged youth.

And when at last the time came for us to leave the quiet city of our birth, it was here, over this little grave, in the Springtime of life and hope, that we made our last compacts with one another on the last day that we spent at home.

THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

A TALE OF LITTLE RUSSIA[I]

The lights are out, the moon is rising. The were-wolf in the wood is feeding.

--Shevchenko.

I

Listen to me, man; go out of your khata on a clear night, or better still walk to the top of some little hill, and look well at the sky and the earth. Watch the bright moon climbing the heavens, and the stars winking and twinkling, and the light clouds of mist rising from the earth and wandering off somewhere one behind the other like belated travellers on a night journey. The woods will lie as if bewitched, listening to the spells that rise from them after the midnight hour, and the sleepy river will flow murmuring by you, whispering to the sycamores on its banks. Then tell me after that if anything, if any miracle, is not possible in this khata of God’s which we call the wide world.

Everything is possible. Take, for instance, an adventure that happened to a friend of mine, the miller from Novokamensk. If no one has told you the story already, I will tell it to you now, only please don’t make me swear that every word is true. I won’t swear to a thing, for though I got it from the miller himself, I don’t know to this day whether it really happened to him or not.

But whether it’s true or not, I shall tell it to you as I heard it.

One evening the miller was returning from vespers in Novokamensk, which was about three versts, not more, from his mill. For some reason the miller was a little out of temper, though he himself could not have said why. Everything had gone well in the church, and our miller, who could shout with the best, had read the prayers so loudly and so fast that the good people had been astonished.

“How he does bawl, that son of a gun!” they had exclaimed with the deepest respect. “You can’t understand one word he says. He’s a regular wheel, he is; he turns and spins and you know he has spokes in him, but you can’t see a single one, no matter how closely you look. His reading sounds like an iron wheel rumbling over a stony road; you can’t catch a word of it to save your life.”

The miller heard what the people were saying among themselves, and it made him glad. _He_ knew how to work for the glory of God, he did! He swung his tongue as a lusty lad swings a flail on a threshing floor, till he was parched to the bottom of his throat and his eyes were popping out of his head.

The priest took him home with him after church, gave him tea, and set a full bottle of herb brandy before him, and this was afterwards taken away empty. The moon was floating high above the fields, and was staring down into the swift little Stony River when the miller left the priest’s house and started home to his mill.

Some of the villagers were already asleep; some were sitting in their khatas eating their suppers by the light of a tallow-dip, and some had been tempted out into the street by the warm, clear autumn night. The old people were sitting at the doors of their khatas, but the lasses and lads had gone out under the hedges where the heavy shade of the cherry trees hid them from view, and only their low voices could be heard in various places, with an occasional peal of suppressed laughter, and now and then the incautious kiss of a young couple. Yes, many things can happen in the dense shade of a cherry tree on such a clear, warm night!

But though the miller could not see the villagers, they could see him very well because he was walking down the middle of the street in the full light of the moon. And so they occasionally called out to him as he passed:

“Good evening, Mr. Miller! Aren’t you coming from the priest’s? Is it at his house you have been such a long time?”

Every one knew that he could not have been anywhere else, but the miller liked the question, and, slackening his pace, he would answer a little proudly each time:

“Yes, yes, I’ve made him a little visit!” and then he would walk on more puffed-up than ever.

On the other hand, some of the people sat as silent as mice under the eaves of their houses, and only hoped he would go by quickly and not see where they were hidden. But the miller was not the man to pass or forget people who owed him for flour or for grinding, or who simply had borrowed money from him. No use for them to sit out of sight in the dark, as silent as if they had taken a mouthful of water! The miller would stop in front of them every time and say:

“Good evening! Are you there? You can hold your tongues or not as you like, but get ready to pay me your debts, because your time will be up early to-morrow morning. And I won’t wait for the money, I promise you!”

And then he would walk on down the street with his shadow running beside him, so black, so very black, that the miller, who was a bookman and always ready to use his brain if need be, said to himself:

“Goodness, how black my shadow is! It really is strange. When a man’s overcoat is whiter than flour why should his shadow be blacker than soot?”

At this point in his reflections he reached the inn kept by Yankel the Jew, which stood on a little hill not far from the village. The Sabbath had been over since sunset, but the inn-keeper was not at home; only Kharko was there, the Jew’s servant, who took his place on Sabbaths and feast-days. Kharko lit his master’s candles for him and collected his debts on each Hebrew holiday, for the Jews, as every one knows, strictly observe the rules of their faith. Do you think a Jew would light a candle or touch money on a holiday? Not he! It would be a sin. Kharko the servant did all that for the inn-keeper, and he, his wife, and his children, only followed him sharply with their eyes to see that no stray five or ten copeck pieces wandered into his pocket by accident instead of into the till.

“They’re cunning people!” thought the miller to himself. “Oh, they’re very cunning! They know how to please their God and catch every penny at the same time. Yes, they’re clever people, far cleverer than we are, there’s no use denying it!”

He paused on the little patch of earth at the inn door trampled hard by the numberless human feet that jostled each other there every week day and shouted:

“Yankel! Hey, Yankel! Are you at home or not?”

“He isn’t at home, can’t you see that?” answered the servant from behind the counter.

“Where is he, then?”

“Where should he be? In the city of course,” answered the servant. “Don’t you know what to-day is?”

“No, what is it?”

“Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement!”

“Ah, so that’s the explanation!” thought the miller.

And I must tell you that even though Kharko was a common servant and the servant of a Jew at that, he had been a soldier, and could write, and was a very proud person. He liked to turn up his nose and give himself airs, especially before the miller. He could read in church no worse than the miller himself, except that he had a cracked voice and talked through his nose. In reading the prayers he always managed to keep up with Philip the miller, but in reading the Acts he was left far behind. But he never yielded an inch. If the miller said one thing, he always said another. If the miller said “I don’t know,” the servant would answer “I do.” A disagreeable fellow he was! So now he was delighted because he had said something that had made the miller scratch his head under his hat.

“Perhaps you don’t know even yet what day this is?”

“How can I keep track of every Jewish holiday? Am I a servant of Jews?” retorted the miller angrily.

“Every holiday, indeed! That’s just it; this isn’t like every holiday. They only have one like this every year. And let me tell you something: no other people in the whole world have a holiday like this one.”

“You don’t say so!”

“You’ve heard about Khapun, I suppose?”

“Aha!”

The miller only whistled. Of course, he might have guessed it! And he peeped in through the window of the Jewish khata. The floor was strewn with hay and straw; in two and three branched candlesticks slender tallow candles were burning; he could hear a humming that seemed to come from several huge, lusty bees. It was Yankel’s young second Wife and a few Jewish children mumbling and humming their unintelligible prayers with closed eyes. There was, however, something remarkable about these prayers; it seemed as if each one of these Jews were possessed by some alien creature, sitting there in him weeping and lamenting, remembering something and praying for something. But to whom were they praying, and for what were they asking? No one could have said. Only whatever it was, it seemed to have no connection either with the inn or with money.

The miller was filled with pity and sadness and dread as he listened to the prayers of the Jews. He glanced at the servant, who could also hear the humming through the door of the inn, and said:

“They’re praying! And so you say Yankel has gone to the city?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he want to do that for? Supposing Khapun should happen to get him?”

“I don’t know why he went,” answered the servant. “If it had been me, though I’ve fought with every heathen tribe under the sun and got a medal for it, no silver roubles on earth could have tempted me away from here. I should have stayed in my khata; Khapun would hardly snatch him out of his hut.”

“And why not? If he wanted to catch a man he’d get him in his khata as well as anywhere else, I suppose.”

“You think he would, do you? If you wanted to buy a hat or a pair of gloves, where would you go for them?”

“Where should I go but to a store?”

“And why would you go to a store?”

“What a question! Because there are plenty of hats there.”

“Very well. And if you looked into the synagogue now you would see Jews a-plenty in there. They are jostling one another, and weeping and screaming so that the whole city from one end to another can hear their lamentations. Where the gnats are there the birds go. Khapun would be a fool if he trotted about hunting and rummaging through all the woods and villages. He has only one day in the year, and do you think he would waste it like that? Some villages have Jews in them, and some haven’t.”

“Well, there aren’t many that haven’t!”

“I know there aren’t many that haven’t, but there are some. And then, he can pick and choose so much better out of a crowd.”

Both men were silent. The miller was thinking that the servant had caught him again with his clever tongue, and he was feeling uncomfortable for the second time. The humming and weeping and lamenting of the Jews still came to them through the windows of the hut.

“Perhaps they are praying for the old man?”

“Perhaps they are. Anything is possible.”

“Does it really ever happen?” asked the miller, wishing to tease the servant, and at the same time feeling a twinge of human pity for the Jew. “Perhaps it’s only gossip. You know how people will gabble silly nonsense, and how every one believes them.”

These words displeased Kharko.

“Yes, people do gabble nonsense; like you, for instance!” he answered. “Do you think I invented the story myself, or my father or my father-in-law, when every Christian knows it is true?”

“Well, but have you seen it happen yourself?” asked the miller irritably, stung by the servant’s scornful words.

Now you must know that when the miller was in a passion he sometimes said that he didn’t believe in the Devil himself, and wouldn’t, until he saw him sitting in the palm of his hand. And he was flying into a passion now.

“Have you seen it happen yourself?” he repeated. “If you haven’t, don’t say it’s true, do you hear?”

Then the servant hung his head, and even went so far as to cough. Though he had been a soldier and was a lively fellow, he could sing very small at times.

“No, I haven’t seen it myself, I won’t tell you a lie. And you, Mr. Miller, have you ever seen the city of Kiev?”

“No, I haven’t: I won’t tell you a lie, either.”

“But Kiev is there just the same!”

When he heard it put as clearly as that, the miller’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.