as if she had been struck in the mouth, and put her hands up to her face
to shut out the sight of what she saw. For below in the courtyard her
father was working with a shovel and throwing up broken, frozen, brown
earth. A soldier was breaking the ground with a pick. And about the
workers stood a large group of soldiers with their rifles, watching
Kirsakoff dig a grave!
Katerin backed away from the window, sobbing, and threw herself upon a
bench.
“You submit to Zorogoff or you die—both of you!” said Shimilin. “There
is yet time to save your father.”
Katerin stood up and faced Shimilin.
“You have betrayed us!” she cried. “There is no truth in you, you are
not worthy of trust! Death is better than life where there is no honor,
no truth, no faith in any man!” She turned her back upon the Cossack,
and held out her arms to the icon of the Virgin Mother. “Mercy on the
soul that goes to greet you—mercy, mercy, oh Mother of God!”
A whistle broke shrilly on the cold air outside. Shimilin leaped at
Katerin, and grasping her by the shoulders, swung her round and thrust
her at the window.
“Look!” he commanded. “If you can be so stubborn! Look, and see if you
still wish to disobey the orders of the Ataman!”
Katerin saw her father standing with his back to the old wall of the
court and six soldiers before him with their rifles upraised and aimed
at the old general.
She fell back against Shimilin, half fainting, but recovering herself,
staggered away from the window and fell upon her knees, her head bent
toward the icon, moaning prayers.
“Your father can be saved,” warned Shimilin. “Would you send him to
execution? Tell me where the money is hidden—or when I lift my hand to
the window, the soldiers will fire!”
“We are ready for death. I commend my soul and the soul of my father to
God! Better death than life under the cruelty of a Mongol and the
treachery of our Cossacks!”
“You will not trust me,” said Shimilin. “I could save you both. Fools! I
am ready to risk my own life to save you, yet you will not believe!” He
raised his hand to the window.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
THE PLACE OF THE VOW
A NEW conductor boarded the train in the night. He was a big fellow,
with a body round as a bear’s and covered with many coats. He wore a big
sheepskin cap, and carried a smoking lantern which was made of tin and
was square, with a red circular glass in one side, a blue one in the
other, and white ones on opposite sides. He held the lantern aloft and
studied the sleepers on the shelves, making rainbows in the dim light of
the car as he turned his prismatic lantern.
Snicking the ice from his whiskers, he waited till the train moved out
again, when he promptly lay down in the passage between the
sleeping-shelves and began snoring into the red light of the lantern on
the floor beside him.
Lieutenant Peter Gordon, who was on a lower shelf, was awake with the
first glimmer of gray light through the frosted windows. And as he
looked out upon the floor of the car, he was startled by the sanguinary
face of the new conductor in the red glow of the lantern as it rattled
with the jolting of the car. Peter studied the queer figure prone on the
floor, and observed the booted feet stretched out toward the cold stove
in the corner.
Before long the conductor sat up, rubbed his eyes and yawned a chasm of
a yawn. He dug into his clothing with a burrowing motion of his arm and
brought forth through many strata of coats a watch fit for a giant. He
put it to his ear, tilting his great cap to one side, and listened to
the ticking. Then he squinted at it in the red light, and having assured
himself that the new day had arrived on time, he buried the watch
somewhere in Pliocene recesses and hove himself to his feet and
attempted to look out of the window.
There was a remnant of candle stuck to the dirty window-sill by its own
frozen cataract of tallow. The conductor fumbled for a match, struck it,
and lighted the candle. The heat from its flame began to melt a widening
oval in the frost. The jumping flame revealed more of the interior of
the car—rifles hanging to the walls and rattling against the boarding
with every lurch of the train, shoes hung on nails, garments swinging
from the upper shelves, bare feet sticking out from blankets, outlandish
bundles tied with bits of rope and twisted cloths, cartridge belts
toothed with the brass tops of cartridges. And above the complaints of
the laboring train could be heard the snores and sleep-mutterings of the
Czech soldiers—men of an improvised army which had fought its way across
Siberia and was now on the back trail to fight again that their comrades
might be saved from annihilation by treacherous enemies.
The conductor studied the frozen wilderness through the window. Having
satisfied himself with the landscape, he stared at the cold stove. He
took the big ax which braced the door of the car shut and attacked a
chunk of wood on the floor with crashing blows. With the splinters split
off he started a fire and dumped in slabs of Manchurian coal, which
crackled like a line of musketry and threw out into the car ribbons of
yellow stifling smoke.
All the sleepers began to cough as the smoke penetrated the car. Soon
there was a chattering and a rattling of mess gear, and some one at the
other end of the car started the other stove—and a counter smoke-screen
against the conductor’s. Another day had begun in the filthy
rabbit-hutch of a car. And the gallant Czechs, content to endure their
Valley Forge of Siberia, chanted the songs of their homeland.
Peter threw off his blankets and sat up. The conductor smiled at him and
reached Peter’s boots up to him from the floor.
“The fire will make it warm soon,” he said, not knowing that Peter was
an American officer and not supposed to understand or speak Russian.
“How soon will we get to Chita, my friend?” asked Peter.
“To Chita? Oh, soon.”
“And how soon?”
“Perhaps half an hour. But you are going to Omsk?”
“Only to Irkutsk,” said Peter. He broke the ice in his canvas bucket and
washed his face, while the conductor looked on awe-struck at any person
who could be so mad as to wash in ice water. He scanned Peter’s tunic,
which hung from the shelf.
“Are you Czech?” he asked finally.
“No, I am an American—an officer.”
The conductor opened his mouth wide and crossed himself with both hands.
“But you speak Russian,” he said. “It is not right that you should speak
Russian like a Russian and be an American!”
“I am really Russian,” said Peter. “But it is that I have been in
America a long time. I came from Petersburg, and now I have come back to
help Russia to be free. Do you know Chita well?”
“I? Yes, a little. My wife’s cousin died there in the time of the
pestilence. He was a fur-hunter, but he was a stingy. I am not sorry
that he died. He ate much when he came to see us, and never had an extra
kopeck for the children.”
“Who is the governor of Chita now?”
The conductor gave a snort of disgust. “How could there be a governor in
this time of freedom? That is the old way. But we are free men now, as
good as anybody. Am I not as good as an officer?”
“Better,” said Peter. “But there was a governor in the old days. Every
place had a governor for the Czar. You know that as well as I, my
friend.”
“True, I know it. But what does it matter now? This is not the old
time.”
“There was a prison in Chita—or was there?”
“True, there was a prison. A big one on a hill. You shall see it in time
as we come to the city. But it is empty now, and the devil may live in
it for all I care.”
“I have heard that there was a Colonel Governor in Chita with one eye.
He lost the other in a fight with a tiger, but he killed the tiger.”
“Poosh!” said the conductor. “That is somebody’s vodka-story. I have
been on the railroad from the time it began, and I never heard of any
Colonel Governor who killed a tiger, or who had one eye. The last
governor at Chita was named Kolessow, and he had a bad leg, not a bad
eye. He ran away when the revolution came. Before that was Kirsakoff,
and I can tell you Kirsakoff had both his eyes. I never saw him—and a
good thing, too, or——”
“There never was a governor here named Kirsakoff,” said Peter.
“No!” cried the conductor. “You have been in foreign lands, but you know
more than I about this, do you? I say that there was a governor—Michael
Alexandrovitch, and a general!”
“Perhaps I am wrong after all. Forgive me. But I had forgotten, because
Kirsakoff went to Odessa.”
“Perhaps he did. I don’t know,” said the conductor. “Are you looking for
him?”
“Oh, no,” said Peter. “I am looking for my brother. All I know is that
my brother was in a place where a Colonel Governor with one eye
lived—the fellow who had a fight with a tiger. But it was not Kirsakoff,
surely.”
“No,” said the conductor. “It could not be he. So you have lost your
brother? It is always the same story. Since we got freedom everybody is
lost. I have not had my pay for six months, and I have seven children
living and my wife is sick. My children cannot eat freedom, but it is
the capitalists who are keeping us poor. In the old days I had a cow.
And now the Americans have come. It is said that they want to steal our
railroad and take our work away from us.”
“That is a lie,” said Peter. “The Americans are your friends.”
“What kind of friend comes to steal your work? I don’t know anything
about politics, but my children have nothing to eat but cabbage. I know
that, and they know it. I think it was better with the Czar. These
fellows who come and talk politics—they are smart men—and good men. They
gave us a lot of rubles. But with freedom it costs a hundred rubles for
a loaf of bread, and I get no pay. And those fellows who talked politics
ate my cow, and nobody wants the rubles they gave me. What kind of
business is that? Not to take rubles after my cow has been eaten!”
Peter shook his head, helpless for an answer, and finished his dressing.
He went out on the platform between cars. The cold air assailed him
witheringly, for it was more than sixty degrees below zero that morning.
He pulled the fur strap of his cap across his nose and leaned out from
the car steps to scan the snow-streaked plain.
In the distance were low hills covered with sparse fringes of pines and
larches. At the base of the hills, huddled against them like a flock of
sheep seeking shelter, were primitive huts of the aboriginal Buriats,
and stray Mongol herdsmen in winter quarters.
The train made a detour on temporary trackage to get round the wreck of
a bridge that had been blown up. The little river was frozen and
peasants were cutting a hole in the ice to get water for a pair of
scraggly little Siberian ponies with coats of long frost-covered hair
and icicles hanging from their nostrils. The men stopped to watch the
train go past, and flailed their bodies with their arms to keep warmth
in their blood.
Once more the slowly moving train changed direction and drew near to low
hills ahead, their crests serrated by timber and their sides slashed
with snow which was held in the frozen water courses. As it rounded
these hills and ran in through a low pass, a city of bizarre appearance
was unmasked. It lay in a great cup between hills—in a wide valley,
level as a plain.
At first sight the city looked more like the smoldering ruin of a vast
settlement that had recently been destroyed by fire. Rising from a sea
of small huts was what appeared to be a forest of gigantic white
fungi—columns of ivory smoking from the tops, or some poisonous growths
like giant toadstools, or a land filled with tiny craters from which
rose gray fumes that spread high in air into motionless clouds. These
queer pillars were nothing but smoke rising from the buildings of the
city and the warm air from chimneys rising straight up in the still,
frigid air.
Through the pillars of steam and smoke could be seen taller buildings,
and here and there minaretlike spires lifted out of the ruck, and
catching the morning sun, reflected the light with tints of gold and
bluish green. And there were great blue domes marking the synagogue,
while a cross and a crescent glinted with gilt from the top of a Moslem
mosque. The old exile settlement of Chita—the Valley of Despair—had
grown to a city and filled the plain.
On the slopes of the hill above, Peter saw a great yellowish stockade
built of upright logs which enclosed low, rambling buildings. The sun
flashed from tiny windows which were smaller than the gun ports of a
frigate, or where the tiny windows were broken there were black holes
like eye sockets in a skull. Many stubby chimneys built of stone gave
the low buildings the appearance of castellated walls. But no smoke
issued from the chimneys.
In contrast with the smoking city below, the place of the stockade
seemed to be deserted. The scant snow all about it was unbroken by any
path, showing that if there was a road leading to the stockade, it was
not in use. The yellow color of the walls suggested an unhealthiness—a
place shut away from the population of the city. The lines of the place
were clearly etched upon the slope like the skeleton of some monstrous
animal which had died upon the dreary and deserted hillside. And it was
a dead thing—the wreck of the old prison of the Valley of Despair.
The train puffed into the station. The platform was thronged with a
surging mob of people making a mad clamor to get into the cars filled
with soldiers. They pleaded to be allowed to ride to any place, but
there was no room for them in the stifling train and the Czechs refused
to allow the refugees aboard. So they gathered up their pitiful
belongings and swarmed back into the station out of the cold to wait for
other trains which might take them away.
Peter gathered up his blanket-roll and his bag and slipped out of the
car. He got a porter at the station, a big _moujik_ in a dirty white
apron, to take the things to a droshky in the square.
Once free of the mob, and with the station between him and the train,
Peter looked across the square. Some soldiers were drilling in the open
place—short chaps, of heavy build and awkward movements, learning to
march and countermarch under the commands of Cossack officers.
There were many brick buildings of three and four stories. But between
them were the low, squat log houses of old times, battered and unkempt,
run-down pioneers now relegated to the position of poor relations and
long neglected.
Peasant women trotted round and round their crude carts, selling blocks
of frozen soup and loaves of black bread to refugees from the station.
The cold air was laden with sour odors. There was a great gabbling
between buyers and sellers. The women and men kept running round in
circles for warmth, their breath bearding them with steam from their
nostrils. To the half-clad and hungry, merely keeping alive in such cold
was an agony.
A group of boys with tattered newspapers gathered about Peter, noting
his furs and his brown field-boots with curious eyes. These boys were
wrapped with long woolen scarfs, and wore uncouth clothes and men’s
boots long since thrown away by the original owners—boots lacking soles
except for rags bound round the feet. If the lads stood still for but a
minute, it was to shiver violently, so they kept jumping up and down
like marionettes moved by a string. Peter’s eyes filled with tears at
the sight of them, and he threw them a handful of paper rubles and
kopecks that they might have hot cabbage soup.
“Poor little chaps!” he said, and, getting into a droshky, told the
_iswostchik_ to drive to the best hotel. The horses broke into a gallop
at once, straight across the square, and it was then that Peter noticed
an ancient building in the line of the street ahead. It was built of
logs in the old style.
“Is that the old post-house?” he shouted to the driver.
“Yes, that is it,” said the driver.
“Then stop! In front of the post-house!” cried Peter, slapping the
driver on the back with a lusty thump. “Turn, please—and stop!”
“But it is a restaurant now,” said the driver. He seemed bewildered, but
he swung his horses into the street before the old building and brought
them up abruptly, muttering in his whiskers.
“You said to go to a hotel, and this is a restaurant,” he complained.
“How am I to know what you want, when you say two different things to me
about where you want to go?”
“I wish to stop here but a minute,” said Peter. He jumped out of the
droshky, and, standing in the street, looked up and down its length, and
turned to survey the old post-house. Sure enough, the sign over it said
it was a restaurant, and through the tops of the partly clear windows he
could see the gaudy colors of curtains hanging within.
“The Sofistkaya!” whispered Peter. “I would never have known it.” He
studied the square, the big white station, and the buildings of the
street. He walked through the loose sand to a spot directly in front of
the door of the old post-house, but well out from it, and crossed
himself twice with both hands in the old way.
He looked down at the sand and dirty snow.
“Blood of my father!” he whispered. “I have come back to keep the vow! I
pray that I am not too late—that Kirsakoff still lives!”
He stood there a few minutes, the tears streaming down his cheeks and
freezing on the flesh. He uttered prayers, and then strode back to the
droshky, entered it, and was once more rolling up the Sofistkaya.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
THE ATAMAN’S DECISION
WHEN Captain Shimilin raised his hand to the window, there was a sharp
command in the courtyard below, followed by the crash of a volley from
the rifles of the soldiers Katerin had seen standing before her father.
Katerin, kneeling in front of the icon, fell forward upon the floor at
the sound of the volley. Shimilin, still at the window, stood gazing
across the room at her, a puzzled look upon his face, as if he did not
know what to do next. He heard Wassili wailing in the kitchen below, and
from the court came the sounds of metal being thrust into flinty soil
and laughter and joking comments from soldiers.
Katerin lay still for several minutes. Then she sat up, and stared at
Shimilin as if she had just been awakened from a dream and was still in
doubt about her surroundings and why she should be there.
“It is finished,” said Shimilin. “Your father is dead. I am sorry for
you, but the Ataman must be obeyed. If you will give up the money now, I
will protect you.”
She did not answer him, but continued to stare at him, attempting to
grasp what had happened.
“You have killed my father!” she whispered, putting her hands up to her
cheeks. “You have killed my father! And now you want me to pay you for
it!”
“It is Zorogoff who has killed your father,” said Shimilin. “I obey his
orders—as you must.”
He walked over to Katerin and held out his hand to help her to her feet.
But she evaded him, and stood up.
“You are a murdering dog,” she said quietly, hatred and revulsion in her
look as she shrank away from him. “You lied to us—and you lie now! You
are no better than the Mongol—worse than Zorogoff, for he would not kill
his own kind for you!”
“Take care!” he warned, moving toward her threateningly. “Take care! My
soldiers are still below.”
She cried out with rage against him, and sprang at him and struck him in
the face with her open hand. Then she threw up her arm and whirled away
from him, to run behind the screen of her bed as if to get a weapon. But
Shimilin grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her back into the
center of the room. She tore away from him.
“Kill me!” she cried. “There is nothing left in life for me now. Kill
me, too!”
“No, I will not kill you,” said Shimilin suavely. “We do not kill women
like you too soon, Katerin Stephanovna.”
“You are swine!” she raged. “You told us my father was to go to the
Ataman. Talk to me no more, but kill me here!”
Shimilin said nothing, but stood looking at her with every sign of being
on the verge of complying with her command. But he did not put hand to
pistol. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled, went to the bed
behind the screen and pulled off a blanket. He threw it to her but she
let it fall upon the floor.
“Take the blanket,” he said gruffly. “You may have death if you want it,
but not by my hand. Take the blanket and come with me to the soldiers
below.”
Katerin kicked the blanket aside.
“I do not fear the cold any more than I fear death,” she said quietly,
and moved to the door. “Come! I will show you how a Russian woman can
die!”
Shimilin followed her down the stairs to the hall below. The old woman
in the kitchen who did the cooking was crying in a room beyond the
kitchen, out of sight. Katerin felt impelled to call a farewell to the
old woman, and to Wassili, but she refrained because she suspected that
the two servants might protest to the soldiers and draw ill treatment
and probably death.
So she passed down the hall and out through the double doors into the
courtyard. The place was full of soldiers, and her eyes lit at once upon
a pile of fresh, brown earth near the wagon-shed. That, she knew, was
her father’s grave. She walked straight to the mound, and stopping
beside it, turned and faced the soldiers.
The heavily clad men stood about with their rifles, looking like great
beetles, their heads topped with big caps, their faces wrapped in fur or
rags, their bodies rotund with many garments, and the breath from their
nostrils making what might have been inverted white horns as the air
they breathed out turned to steam and spurted out from their faces
behind the straps over their noses. They were not in ranks, these men,
but gathered in groups as if waiting for some one to tell them what they
should do next.
Captain Shimilin followed Katerin halfway across the yard, where he
stopped to speak to a tall soldier in a long coat. The pair talked
together quietly, looking at Katerin. Shimilin carried a towel which he
had snatched up as he had passed out of the hall. He whipped the towel
against his coat while he talked with the other soldier, and it was
plain that the Cossack was in bad humor.
Katerin glanced at the spade and the old pickax which had been cast
aside from the mound of earth. She lifted her eyes to the upper windows
of the house. Then she threw open her sable coat, revealing the dull
crimson of her velvet gown and the white of her throat. Gray and white
and crimson, she made a striking picture against the dull background of
the old buildings. The morning breeze which whipped in gustily over the
courtyard wall and rattled the dead vines along its top, lifted wisps of
her hair about her ears. The cold tortured her, but she gave no
indication of her suffering. She looked like a beautiful flower which
had grown in a drab garden now infested by wild things which had broken
in for destruction and hated all things beautiful.
She let her hands fall to her sides. The cold was numbing her.
“I am ready!” she called to Captain Shimilin.
The Cossack moved to her, and held out the towel. “I shall cover your
eyes so that you shall not see the rifles,” he said.
“Please do not touch me,” she begged. “It is all I ask. Let them shoot!”
The soldier who had been talking to Shimilin walked up to Katerin and
peered into her face. His features were concealed by a strap of fur.
Katerin knew by his manner that he must be an officer, though he wore no
insignia. After a casual glance at him, she looked beyond him and fixed
her gaze upon the house.
“Do you understand that you can save your life if you will follow the
advice of Captain Shimilin?” asked the stranger.
“I do not seek the advice of Captain Shimilin—nor any other person,”
said Katerin.
“You prefer to die?”
“I have done with life.”
“You talk like a brave woman,” went on the stranger.
“Oh, be done! I am cold!” said Katerin. She noted that a group of
soldiers had fallen into line before her, and that the others about the
yard gathered closer, regarding her with curious eyes.
The tall officer drew apart again with Shimilin, and they carried on a
low conversation once more. The men in line began to examine their
rifles to be in readiness. Both Shimilin and the other officer returned
and stood before her again.
“Because your father, General Kirsakoff, was Governor here in the old
days, is no reason why you should expect to oppose the new ruler,” said
the officer.
Katerin did not answer.