CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY UNDER THE
EDITORSHIP OF STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE REPUBLIC OF
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY
_Edited with Introductions_
By STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE SWEET SCENTED NAME
By Fedor Sologub
WAR AND CHRISTIANITY
THREE CONVERSATIONS
By Vladimir Solovyof
THE WAY OF THE CROSS
By V. Doroshevitch
A SLAV SOUL AND OTHER STORIES
By Alexander Kuprin
THE EMIGRANT
By L. F. Dostoieffshaya
THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE GOOD
By Vladimir Solovyof
THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
AND OTHER STORIES
By Valery Brussof
THE REPUBLIC OF
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
VALERY BRUSSOF
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1918
INTRODUCTION
VALERY BRUSSOF
Valery Brussof is a celebrated Russian writer of the present time. He is
in the front rank of contemporary literature, and is undoubtedly very
gifted, being considered by some to be the greatest of living Russian
poets, and being in addition a critic of penetration and judgment, a
writer of short tales, and the author of one long historical novel from
the life of Germany in the sixteenth century.
He is a Russian of strong European tastes and temperament, a sort of
Mediterraneanised Russian, with greater affinities in France and Italy
than in his native land; an artificial production in the midst of the
Russian literary world. A hard, polished, and even merciless
personality, he has little in common with the compassionate spirits of
Russia. If Kuprin or Gorky may be taken as characteristic of modern
Russia, Brussof is their opposite. He sheds no tears with the reader, he
makes no passionate and “unmanly” defiance of the world, but is
restrained and concentrated and wrapped up in himself and his ideas. The
average length of a sentence of Dostoieffsky is probably about
twenty-five words, of Kuprin thirty, but of Brussof only twenty, and if
you take the staccato “Republic of the Southern Cross,” only twelve. His
fine virile style is admired by Russians for its brevity and directness.
He has been called a maker of sentences in bronze.
It is curious, however, that the theme of his writing has little in
common with the virility of his style. As far as our Western point of
view is concerned it is considered rather feminine than masculine to
doubt the reality of our waking life and to give credence to dreams. Yet
such is undoubtedly the preoccupation of Brussof in these stories.
He says in his preface to the second edition of that collection which
bears the title _The Axis of the Earth_, “the stories are written to
show, in various ways, that there is no fixed boundary line between the
world of reality and that of the imagination, between the dreaming and
the waking world, life and fantasy; that what we commonly call
‘imaginary’ may be the greatest reality of the world, and that which all
call reality the most dreadful delirium.”
This volume, to which we have given the title of _The Republic of the
Southern Cross_ contains the best of Brussof’s tales, and they all
exemplify this particular attitude towards life. Six tales are taken
from _The Axis of the Earth_, but “For Herself or Another” is taken
from the volume entitled _Nights and Days_, and “Rhea Silvia” and
“Eluli, son of Eluli,” from the book bearing the title of _Rhea Silvia_,
in the Russian Universal Library.
In Russia, as I have previously pointed out, the short story is
considered of much more literary importance than it is here. It is the
fashion to write short stories, and readers remember those they have
read and refer to them, as we do to the distinctive and memorable poems
on our intimate bookshelves. But, then, as a rule in Russia a short
story must possess as its foundation some particular literary idea and
conception. The story written for the sake of the story is almost
unknown, and as a general rule the sort of love story and “love
interest” so indispensable with us is not asked there. It often happens,
therefore, that a volume of short tales makes a real and vital
contribution to literature. I think possibly that these specimen volumes
of Russian stories which I have edited from Sologub Kuprin and Brussof
may be helpful in our own literary world as affording new conceptions,
new models, and showing new possibilities of literary form. Brussof’s
volume is an emotional study of reality and unreality cast in the form
of brilliant tales.
* * * * *
“Rhea Silvia,” the longest and perhaps the best, tells of the dream
which becomes reality in the Golden House of Nero which had been lost;
the subterranean Rome where a Goth can meet a crazed girl who imagines
she is the vestal Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus who
founded Rome itself, and that the Goth, one of the barbarian destroyers
of Rome, is the god Mars; the whole before and after intermingled.
* * * * *
In “The Republic of the Southern Cross” Brussof projects himself several
centuries into the future and imagines an industrial community of
millions of workers, so divorced from reality that they are living at
the South Pole where no life is possible, in a huge town called Star
City where no star is visible, because they have built an immense opaque
roof to the town--literally a “lid,” as they imagine it in New York,
where they give you the freedom of the city “with the lid off”; where
the polar cold is defied by machinery which keeps the temperature at the
same point for ever, and the six months’ polar night--and, indeed, no
night--is ever known, because the great box is kept constantly
illuminated by electric light; Star City, where the Town Hall is
actually built on the _spot_ of the South Pole, the centre of the town,
whence you can only walk northward, whence the six main roads, with
thirteen-story buildings on each side, go out like meridians of
longitude, and the cross-roads are concentric circles of latitude; Star
City, stricken at last by the disease of contradiction, which creates
anarchy between the ideal and the real, impulse and action, as if the
approximation of latitude and longitude had hypnotised men’s souls;
plague-stricken Star City, where the only refuge is the Town Hall where
all earthly meridians become one, is all used with appalling power by
Brussof to suggest his mental conceit. I once read outside a Russian
theatre, “People of weak will are asked to refrain from taking tickets
for this drama.” A similar caution might be addressed to those who turn
to read “The Republic of the Southern Cross.”
* * * * *
“The Mirror,” into which the vain woman looks and sees a reflection
which is not quite herself, who detects the particular personality of
her reflection, becomes afraid of it, is finally overcome by it and
forced to step into the mirror and let the reflection get out and walk
about the world, is subtly suggestive of the instability of what we call
the real, the solid ground under our feet. A characteristic detail is
that the special mirror before which the woman stands is a revolving
one, and when she gets angry she can make it go round like the earth on
its axis, and as the glass goes over and under, in again and out again,
so it is, as it were, night and day, dream and waking, reality and
unreality.
The drunken locksmith, seeing the seventh-century-old Italian bust of a
woman in the house to which he has been called to repair a desk, and
becoming obsessed with the idea that it is the face of a woman whose
love he betrayed, the woman of his bright and fortunate days, who tells
the long sad story which is more real to him than the realities of the
prison or the doss-house, though he does not himself know whether the
story be truth or whether he invented it, is another hauntingly
suggestive tale.
* * * * *
In “Eluli, son of Eluli,” two excavators in the French Congo discover a
marvellous Phœnician tomb somewhere about the equatorial line and
only partially decipher the curse on those who shall disturb the rest of
the sleeping Eluli whose tomb it is. It is in a fever-stricken district
of exhausting climate, and the older and weaker of the archæologists
becomes obsessed with the reality of the dead Eluli, son of Eluli, who
visits his bedside and pronounces over him the awful curse. Both men
eventually perish. Only the normal and stronger man, namely, the one
further away from the axis of reality, remained untouched and unseeing.
* * * * *
“For Herself or Another,” one of the cleverest tales in this
selection, describes the doubt that a Russian tourist has that a
fellow-countrywoman whom he sees in the crowd is or is not his
long-cast-off sweetheart. She is so like as to be a perfect double. It
seems impossible that such similarity between two persons should exist.
The man conceives the idea that the woman is feigning to be someone else
merely to punish him. He is so persistent that she for her part agrees
to pretend that she is indeed his old-time friend, and some of the most
tantalising description is that in which she seems to pretend that she
is that she is.
* * * * *
What the new realists who dominate our Western schools of philosophy
would say to Valery Brussof would be curious. He is not an hysterical
type of writer and is not emotionally convinced of the truth of his
writing, but wilfully persistent, affirming unreality intellectually and
defending his conception with a sort of masculine impressionism. He
drives his idea to the reader’s mind clad in complete armour, no
tenderness, no apologetics, no willingness to please a lady’s eye in the
use of his words and phrases.
The theme of several of the stories might have been worked out readily
by our Mr. Algernon Blackwood, but so would have been more discursive,
and the mystery of them better hidden. But Brussof, as it were, draws
the skull and crossbones at the top of the page before he writes a word
and then goes on. Inevitably the interest is reflected from the stories
to the personality of the author.
It should be said that a slight strain of madness seems to cast a sort
of glamour on an artist in Russia, whereas in the West, unless the
artist be a musician, it is certainly a handicap. One of the strongest
prejudices against taking Nietzsche seriously in England is that he
finished his days in an asylum. And it is as prejudicial to be thought
_pas normal_ in France as to have lost a mental balance with us. But
Russia, with her epileptic Dostoieffsky, hypochondriac Gogol, inebriate
Nekrasof, has other traditions, and it is not unfitting that the artist
who made hundreds of marvellous studies of a primeval demon, the most
clever painter of modern Russia, Michael Vrubel, should have painted as
his last picture before removal to an asylum, Valery Brussof, the author
of these tales, a reproduction of this portrait serving aptly as a
frontispiece for this book.
Both Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells have been described as average or
standard types of intelligence, and both are proud of level-headedness.
But in the Russian literary world claims of that kind are not put
forward nowadays. In fact, Russia, though most heartily
progressive--perhaps too heartily from our point of view--does not
reckon the credibility of the earth and light and truth and ordinary
measurement as in any way superior to the credibility of the world of
fantasy. It is worth while writing in Russia, not so much to affirm the
real as to find and then set in ever more striking pose the paradoxes of
human life.
Brussof’s poetry, for which he enjoys a great reputation, is dedicated
to the same ideas as his stories, though in them he is before all else a
most polished craftsman and cares more for perfection of technique than
for anything else.
His poetry is not difficult, and can be recommended for those who read
Russian and prefer to study up-to-date matter. In my opinion, however,
the best volumes of Balmont have more lyrical beauty than the best of
Brussof. There is, moreover, a good deal of erotic verse which is
bankrupt of real vital thought, as there are stories of this kind not by
any means commendable for British consumption. Brussof evidently reads
English, and one or two of his poems are reminiscent of better things at
home.
In the midst of his wide literary activities Brussof is also an
interesting critic, and I know few more elucidative volumes than
“_Dalekie i Bliskie_, Near and Far,” a collection of essays on the
Russian poets.
STEPHEN GRAHAM.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS 1
II. THE MARBLE BUST 33
III. FOR HERSELF OR FOR ANOTHER 41
IV. IN THE MIRROR 55
V. PROTECTION 73
VI. THE “BEMOL” SHOP OF STATIONERY 84
VII. RHEA SILVIA 94
VIII. ELULI, SON OF ELULI 140
IX. IN THE TOWER 155
THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
There have appeared lately a whole series of descriptions of the
dreadful catastrophe which has overtaken the Republic of the Southern
Cross. They are strikingly various, and give many details of a
manifestly fantastic and improbable character. Evidently the writers of
these descriptions have lent a too ready ear to the narratives of the
survivors from Star City (_Zvezdny_), the inhabitants of which, as is
common knowledge, were all stricken with a psychical distemper. For that
reason we consider it opportune to give an account here of all the
reliable evidence which we have as yet of this tragedy of the Southern
Pole.
The Republic of the Southern Cross came into being some forty years ago,
as a development from three hundred steel works established in the
Southern Polar regions. In a circular note sent to each and every
Government of the whole world, the new state expressed its pretensions
to all lands, whether mainland or island, within the limits of the
Antarctic circle, as also all parts of these lands stretching beyond
the line. It announced its readiness to purchase from the various other
states affected the lands which they considered to be under their
special protectorate. The pretensions of the new Republic did not meet
with any opposition on the part of the fifteen great powers of the
world. Debateable points concerning certain islands lying entirely
outside the Polar circle, but closely related to the Southern Polar
state were settled by special treaties. On the fulfilment of the various
formalities the Republic of the Southern Cross was received into the
family of world states, and its representatives were recognised by all
Governments.
The chief city of the Republic, having the name of Zvezdny, was situated
at the actual Pole itself. At that imaginary point where the earth’s
axis passes and all earthly meridians become one, stood the Town Hall,
and the roof with its pointed towers looked upon the nadir of the
heavens. The streets of the town extended along meridians from the Town
Hall and these meridians were intersected by other streets in concentric
circles. The height of all the buildings was the same, as was also their
external appearance. There were no windows in the walls, as all the
houses were lit by electricity and the streets were lighted by
electricity. Because of the severity of the climate, an impenetrable and
opaque roof had been built over the town, with powerful ventilators for
a constant change of air. These localities of the globe have but one day
in six months, and one long night also of six months, but the streets of
Zvezdny were always lighted by a bright and even light. In the same way
in all seasons of the year the temperature of the streets was kept at
one and the same height.
According to the last census the population of Zvezdny had reached two
and a half millions. The whole of the remaining population of the
Republic, numbering fifty millions, were concentrated in the
neighbourhood of the ports and factories. These other points were also
marked by the settlement of millions of people in towns which in
external characteristics were reminiscent of Zvezdny. Thanks to a clever
application of electric power, the entrance to the local havens remained
open all the year round. Overhead electric railways connected the most
populated parts of the Republic, and every day tens of thousands of
people and millions of kilogrammes of material passed along these roads
from one town to another. The interior of the country remained
uninhabited. Travellers looking out of the train window saw before them
only monotonous wildernesses, white in winter, and overgrown with
wretched grass during the three months of summer. Wild animals had long
since been destroyed, and for human beings there was no means of
sustenance. The more remarkable was the hustling life of the ports and
industrial centres. In order to give some understanding of the life, it
is perhaps enough to say that of late years about seven-tenths of the
whole of the world’s output of metal has come from the State mines of
the Republic.
The constitution of the Republic, according to outward signs, appeared
to be the realisation of extreme democracy. The only fully enfranchised
citizens were the metal-workers, who numbered about sixty per cent of
the whole population. The factories and mines were State property. The
life of the miners was facilitated by all possible conveniences, and
even with luxury. At their disposal, apart from magnificent
accommodation and a _recherché_ cuisine, were various educational
institutions and means of amusement: libraries, museums, theatres,
concerts, halls for all types of sport, etc. The number of working hours
in the day were small in the extreme. The training and teaching of
children, the giving of medical and legal aid, and the ministry of the
various religious cults were all taken upon itself by the State. Ample
provision for all the needs and even whims of the workmen of the State
factories having been made, no wages whatever were paid; but families of
citizens who had served twenty years in a factory, or who in their years
of service had died or become enfeebled, received a handsome
life-pension on condition that they did not leave the Republic. From
the workmen, by universal ballot, the representatives of the Law-making
Chamber of the Republic were elected, and this Chamber had cognisance of
all the questions of the political life of the country, being, however,
without power to alter its fundamental laws.
It must be said that this democratic exterior concealed the purely
autocratic tyranny of the shareholders and directors of a former Trust.
Giving up to others the places of deputies in the Chamber they
inevitably brought in their own candidates as directors of the
factories. In the hands of the Board of Directors was concentrated the
economic life of the country. The directors received all the orders and
assigned them to the various factories for fulfilment; they purchased
the materials and the machines for the work; they managed the whole
business of the factories. Through their hands passed immense sums of
money, to be reckoned in milliards. The Law-making Chamber only
certified the entries of debits and credits in the upkeep of the
factories, the accounts being handed to it for that purpose, and the
balance on these accounts greatly exceeded the whole budget of the
Republic. The influence of the Board of Directors in the international
relationships of the Republic was immense. Its decisions might ruin
whole countries. The prices fixed by them determined the wages of
millions of labouring masses over the whole earth. And, moreover, the
influence of the Board, though indirect, was always decisive in the
internal affairs of the Republic. The Law-making Chamber, in fact,
appeared to be only the humble servant of the will of the Board.
For the preservation of power in its own hands the Board was obliged to
regulate mercilessly the whole life of the country. Though appearing to
have liberty, the life of the citizens was standardised even to the most
minute details. The buildings of all the towns of the Republic were
according to one and the same pattern fixed by law. The decoration of
all buildings used by the workmen, though luxurious to a degree, were
strictly uniform. All received exactly the same food at exactly the same
time. The clothes given out from the Government stores were unchanging
and in the course of tens of years were of one and the same cut. At a
signal from the Town Hall, at a definite hour, it was forbidden to go
out of the houses. The whole Press of the country was subject to a sharp
censorship. No articles directed against the dictatorship of the Board
were allowed to see light. But, as a matter of fact, the whole country
was so convinced of the benefit of this dictatorship that the
compositors themselves would have refused to set the type of articles
criticising the Board. The factories were full of the Board’s spies. At
the slightest manifestation of discontent with the Board the spies
hastened to arrange meetings and dissuade the doubters with passionate
speeches. The fact that the life of the workmen of the Republic was the
object of the envy of the entire world was of course a disarming
argument. It is said that in cases of continued agitation by certain
individuals the Board did not hesitate to resort to political murder. In
any case, during the whole existence of the Republic, the universal
ballot of the citizens never brought to power one representative who was
hostile to the directors.
The population of Zvezdny was composed chiefly of workmen who had served
their time. They were, so to speak, Government shareholders. The means
which they received from the State allowed them to live richly. It is
not astonishing, therefore, that Zvezdny was reckoned one of the gayest
cities of the world. For various _entrepreneurs_ and entertainers it was
a goldmine. The celebrities of the world brought hither their talents.
Here were the best operas, best concerts, best exhibitions; here were
brought out the best-informed gazettes. The shops of Zvezdny amazed by
the richness of their choice of goods; the restaurants by the luxury and
the delicacy of their service. Resorts of evil, where all forms of
debauch invented in either the ancient or the modern world were to be
found, abounded. However, the governmental regulation of life was
preserved in Zvezdny also. It is true that the decorations of lodgings
and the fashions of dress were not compulsorily determined, but the law
forbidding the exit from the house after a certain hour remained in
force, a strict censorship of the Press was maintained, and many spies
were kept by the Board. Order was officially maintained by the popular
police, but at the same time there existed the secret police of the
all-cognisant Board.
Such was in its general character the system of life in the Republic of
the Southern Cross and in its capital. The problem of the future
historian will be to determine how much this system was responsible for
the outbreak and spread of that fatal disease which brought to
destruction the town of Zvezdny, and with it, perhaps, the whole young
Republic.
* * * * *
The first cases of the disease of “contradiction” were observed in the
Republic some twenty years ago. It had then the character of a rare and
sporadic malady. Nevertheless, the local mental experts were much
interested by it and gave a circumstantial account of the symptoms at
the international medical congress at Lhasa, where several reports of it
were read. Later, it was somehow or other forgotten, though in the
mental hospitals of Zvezdny there never was any difficulty in finding
examples. The disease received its name from the fact that the victims
continuously contradicted their wishes by their actions, wishing one
thing but saying and doing another. [The scientific name of the disease
is _mania contradicens_.] It begins with fairly feeble symptoms,
generally those of characteristic aphasia. The stricken, instead of
saying “yes,” say “no”; wishing to say caressing words, they splutter
abuse, etc. The majority also begin to contradict themselves in their
behaviour; intending to go to the left they turn to the right, thinking
to raise the brim of a hat so as to see better they would pull it down
over their eyes instead, and so on. As the disease develops
contradiction overtakes the whole of the bodily and spiritual life of
the patient, exhibiting infinite diversity conformable with the
idiosyncrasies of each. In general, the speech of the patient becomes
unintelligible and his actions absurd. The normality of the
physiological functions of the organism is disturbed. Acknowledging the
unwisdom of his behaviour the patient gets into a state of extreme
excitement bordering even upon insanity. Many commit suicide, sometimes
in fits of madness, sometimes in moments of spiritual brightness. Others
perish from a rush of blood to the brain. In almost all cases the
disease is mortal; cases of recovery are extremely rare.
The epidemic character was taken by _mania contradicens_ during the
middle months of this year in Zvezdny. Up till this time the number of
cases had never exceeded two per cent of the total number of patients in
the hospitals. But this proportion suddenly rose to twenty-five per cent
during the month of May (autumn month, as it is called in the Republic),
and it continued to increase during the succeeding months with as great
rapidity. By the middle of June there were already two per cent of the
whole population, that is, about fifty thousand people, officially
notified as suffering from “contradiction.” We have no statistical
details of any later date. The hospitals overflowed. The doctors on the
spot proved to be altogether insufficient. And, moreover, the doctors
themselves, and the nurses in the hospitals, caught the disease also.
There was very soon no one to whom to appeal for medical aid, and a
correct register of patients became impossible. The evidence given by
eye-witnesses, however, is in agreement on this point, that it was
impossible to find a family in which someone was not suffering. The
number of healthy people rapidly decreased as panic caused a wholesale
exodus from the town, but the number of the stricken increased. It is
probably true that in the month of August all who had remained in
Zvezdny were down with this psychical malady.
It is possible to follow the first developments of the epidemic by the
columns of the local newspapers, headed in ever larger type as the mania
grew. Since the detection of the disease in its early stages was very
difficult, the chronicle of the first days of the epidemic is full of
comic episodes. A train conductor on the metropolitan railway, instead
of receiving money from the passengers, himself pays them. A policeman,
whose duty it was to regulate the traffic, confuses it all day long. A
visitor to a gallery, walking from room to room, turns all the pictures
with their faces to the wall. A newspaper page of proof, being corrected
by the hand of a reader already overtaken by the disease, is printed
next morning full of the most amusing absurdities. At a concert, a sick
violinist suddenly interrupts the harmonious efforts of the orchestra
with the most dreadful dissonances. A whole long series of such
happenings gave plenty of scope for the wits of local journalists. But
several instances of a different type of phenomenon caused the jokes to
come to a sudden end. The first was that a doctor overtaken by the
disease prescribed poison for a girl patient in his care and she
perished. For three days the newspapers were taken up with this
circumstance. Then two nurses walking in the town gardens were overtaken
by “contradiction,” and cut the throats of forty-one children. This
event staggered the whole city. But on the evening of the same day two
victims fired the _mitrailleuse_ from the quarters of the town militia
and killed and injured some five hundred people.
At that, all the newspapers and the society of the town cried for prompt
measures against the epidemic. At a special session of the combined
Board and Legal Chamber it was decided to invite doctors from other
towns and from abroad, to enlarge the existing hospitals, to build new
ones, and to construct everywhere isolation barracks for the sufferers,
to print and distribute five hundred thousand copies of a brochure on
the disease, its symptoms and means of cure, to organise on all the
streets of the town a special patrol of doctors and their helpers for
the giving of first aid to those who had not been removed from private
lodgings. It was also decided to run special trains daily on all the
railways for the removal of the patients, as the doctors were of opinion
that change of air was one of the best remedies. Similar measures were
undertaken at the same time by various associations, societies, and
clubs. A “society for struggle with the epidemic” was even founded, and
the members gave themselves to the work with remarkable self-devotion.
But in spite of all these measures the epidemic gained ground each day,
taking in its course old men and little children, working people and
resting people, chaste and debauched. And soon the whole of society was
enveloped in the unconquerable elemental terror of the unheard-of
calamity.
The flight from Zvezdny commenced. At first only a few fled, and these
were prominent dignitaries, directors, members of the Legal Chamber and
of the Board, who hastened to send their families to the southern cities
of Australia and Patagonia. Following them, the accidental elements of
the population fled--those foreigners gladly sojourning in the “gayest
city of the southern hemisphere,” theatrical artists, various business
agents, women of light behaviour. When the epidemic showed no signs of
abating the shopkeepers fled. They hurriedly sold off their goods and
left their empty premises to the will of Fate. With them went the
bankers, the owners of theatres and restaurants, the editors and the
publishers. At last, even the established inhabitants were moved to go.
According to law the exit of workmen from the Republic without special
sanction from the Government was forbidden on pain of loss of pension.
Deserters began to increase. The employés of the town institutions fled,
the militia fled, the hospital nurses fled, the chemists, the doctors.
The desire to flee became in its turn a mania. Everyone fled who could.
The stations of the electric railway were crushed with immense crowds,
tickets were bought for huge sums of money and only held by fighting.
For a place in a dirigible, which took only ten passengers, one paid a
whole fortune.... At the moment of the going out of trains new people
would break into the compartments and take up places which they would
not relinquish except by compulsion. Crowds stopped the trains which had
been fitted up exclusively for patients, dragged the latter out of the
carriages and compelled the engine-drivers to go on. From the end of May
train service, except between the capital and the ports, ceased to work.
From Zvezdny the trains went out overfull, passengers standing on the
steps and in the corridors, even daring to cling on outside, despite the
fact that with the speed of contemporary electric railways any person
doing such a thing risks suffocation. The steamship companies of
Australia, South America and South Africa grew inordinately rich,
transporting the refugees of the Republic to other lands. The two
Southern companies of dirigibles were not less prosperous,
accomplishing, as they did, ten journeys a day and bringing away from
Zvezdny the last belated millionaires.... On the other hand, trains
arrived at Zvezdny almost empty; for no wages was it possible to
persuade people to come to work at the Capital; only now and again
eccentric tourists and seekers of new sensations arrived at the towns.
It is reckoned that from the beginning of the exodus to the
twenty-second of June, when the regular service of trains ceased, there
passed out of Zvezdny by the six railroads some million and a half
people, that is, almost two-thirds of the whole population.
By his enterprise, valour, and strength of will, one man earned for
himself eternal fame, and that was the President of the Board, Horace
Deville. At the special session of the fifth of June, Deville was
elected, both by the Board and by the Legal Chamber, Dictator over the
town, and was given the title of Nachalnik. He had sole control of the
town treasury, of the militia, and of the municipal institutions. At
that time it was decided to remove from Zvezdny to a northern port the
Government of the Republic and the archives. The name of Horace Deville
should be written in letters of gold among the most famous names of
history. For six weeks he struggled with the growing anarchy in the
town. He succeeded in gathering around him a group of helpers as
unselfish as himself. He was able to enforce discipline, both in the
militia and in the municipal service generally, for a considerable time,
though these bodies were terrified by the general calamity and decimated
by the epidemic. Hundreds of thousands owe their escape to Horace
Deville, as, thanks to his energy and organising power, it was possible
for them to leave. He lightened the misery of the last days of thousands
of others, giving them the possibility of dying in hospitals, carefully
looked after, and not simply being stoned or beaten to death by the mad
crowd. And Deville preserved for mankind the chronicle of the
catastrophe, for one cannot but consider as a chronicle his short but
pregnant telegrams, sent several times a day from the town of Zvezdny to
the temporary residence of the Government of the Republic at the
Northern port. Deville’s first work on becoming Nachalnik of the town
was to attempt to restore calm to the population. He issued manifestos
proclaiming that the psychical infection was most quickly caught by
people who were excited, and he called upon all healthy and balanced
persons to use their authority to restrain the weak and nervous. Then
Deville used the Society for Struggle with the Epidemic and put under
the authority of its members all public places, theatres,
meeting-houses, squares, and streets. In these days there scarcely ever
passed an hour but a new case of infection might be discovered. Now
here, now there, one saw faces or whole groups of faces manifestly
expressive of abnormality. The greater number of the patients, when they
understood their condition, showed an immediate desire for help. But
under the influence of the disease this wish expressed itself in various
types of hostile action directed against those standing near. The
stricken wished to hasten home or to a hospital, but instead of doing
this they fled in fright to the outskirts of the town. The thought
occurred to them to ask the passer-by to do something for them, but
instead of that they seized him by the throat. In this way many were
suffocated, struck down, or wounded with knife or stick. So the crowd,
whenever it found itself in the presence of a man suffering from
“contradiction,” took to flight. At these moments the members of the
Society would appear on the scene, capture the sick man, calm him, and
take him to the nearest hospital; it was their work to reason with the
crowd and explain that there was really no danger, that the general
misfortune had simply spread a little further, and it was their duty to
struggle with it to the full extent of their powers.
The sudden infection of persons present in the audience of theatres or
meeting-houses often led to the most tragic catastrophes. Once at a
performance of Opera some hundreds of people stricken mad in a mass,
instead of expressing their approval of the vocalists, flung themselves
on the stage and scattered blows right and left. At the Grand Dramatic
Theatre, an actor, whose rôle it was to commit suicide by a revolver
shot, fired the revolver several times at the public. It was, of course,
blank cartridge, but it so acted on the nerves of those present that it
hastened the symptoms of the disease in many in whom it was latent. In
the confusion which followed several scores of people were killed. But
worst of all was that which happened in the Theatre of Fireworks. The
detachment of militia posted there in case of fire suddenly set fire to
the stage and to the veils by which the various light effects are
obtained. Not less than two hundred people were burnt or crushed to
death. After that occurrence Horace Deville closed all the theatres and
concert-rooms in the town.
The robbers and thieves now began to constitute a grave danger for the
inhabitants, and in the general disorganisation they were able to carry
their depredations very far. It is said that some of them came to
Zvezdny from abroad. Some simulated madness in order to escape
punishment, others felt it unnecessary to make any pretence of
disguising their open robberies. Gangs of thieves entered the abandoned
shops, broke into private lodgings, and took off the more valuable
things or demanded gold; they stopped people in the streets and stripped
them of their valuables, such as watches, rings, and bracelets. And
there accompanied the robberies outrage of every kind, even of the most
disgusting. The Nachalnik sent companies of militia to hunt down the
criminals, but they did not dare to join in open conflict. There were
dreadful moments when among the militia or among the robbers would
suddenly appear a case of the disease, and friend would turn his weapon
against friend. At first the Nachalnik banished from the town the
robbers who fell under arrest. But those who had charge of the prison
trains liberated them, in order to take their places. Then the Nachalnik
was obliged to condemn the criminals to death. So almost after three
centuries’ break capital punishment was introduced once more on the
earth. In June a general scarcity of the indispensable articles of food
and medicine began to make itself felt. The import by rail diminished;
manufacture within the town practically ceased. Deville organised the
town bakeries and the distribution of bread and meat to the people. In
the town itself the same common tables were set up as had long since
been established in the factories. But it was not possible to find
sufficient people for kitchen and service. Some voluntary workers toiled
till they were exhausted, and they gradually diminished in numbers. The
town crematoriums flamed all day, but the number of corpses did not
decrease but increased. They began to find bodies in the streets and
left in houses. The municipal business--such as telegraph, telephone,
electric light, water supply, sanitation, and the rest, were worked by
fewer and fewer people. It is astonishing how much Deville succeeded in
doing. He looked after everything and everyone. One conjectures that he
never knew a moment’s rest. And all who were saved testify unanimously
that his activity was beyond praise.
Towards the middle of June shortage of labour on the railways began to
be felt. There were not enough engine-drivers or conductors. On the 17th
of July the first accident took place on the South-Western line, the
reason being the sudden attack of the engine-driver. In the paroxysm of
his disease the driver took his train over a precipice on to a glacier
and almost all the passengers were killed or crippled. The news of this
was brought to the town by the next train, and it came as a thunderbolt.
A hospital train was sent off at once; it brought back the dead and the
crippled, but towards the evening of that day news was circulated that a
similar catastrophe had taken place on the First line. Two of the
railway tracks connecting Zvezdny with the outside world were damaged.
Breakdown gangs were sent from Zvezdny and from North Port to repair the
lines, but it was almost impossible because of the winter temperature.
There was no hope that on these lines train service would be resumed--at
least, in the near future.
These catastrophes were simply patterns for new ones. The more alarmed
the engine-drivers became the more liable they were to the disease and
to the repetition of the mistake of their predecessors. Just because
they were afraid of destroying a train they destroyed it. During the
five days from the eighteenth to the twenty-second of June seven trains
with passengers were wrecked. Thousands of passengers perished from
injuries or starved to death unrescued in the snowy wastes. Only very
few had sufficient strength to return to the city by their own efforts.
The six main lines connecting Zvezdny with the outer world were rendered
useless. The service of dirigibles had ceased earlier. One of them had
been destroyed by the enraged mob, the pretext given being that they
were used exclusively for the rich. The others, one by one, were
wrecked, the disease probably attacking the crew. The population of the
city was at this time about six hundred thousand. For some time they
were only connected with the world by telegraph.
On the 24th of June the Metropolitan railway ceased to run. On the 26th
the telephone service was discontinued. On the 27th all chemists’ shops,
except the large central store, were closed. On the 1st of July the
inhabitants were ordered to come from the outer parts of the town into
the central districts, so that order might better be maintained, food
distributed, and medical aid afforded. Suburban dwellers abandoned their
own quarters and settled in those which had lately been abandoned by
fugitives. The sense of property vanished. No one was sorry to leave his
own, no one felt it strange to take up his abode in other people’s
houses. Nevertheless, burglars and robbers did not disappear, though
perhaps now one would rather call them demented beings than criminals.
They continued to steal, and great hoards of gold have been discovered
in the empty houses where they hid them, and precious stones beside the
decaying body of the robber himself.
It is astonishing that in the midst of universal destruction life tended
to keep its former course. There still were shopkeepers who opened their
shops and sold for incredible sums the luxuries, flowers, books, guns,
and other goods which they had preserved.... Purchasers threw down their
unnecessary gold ungrudgingly, and miserly merchants hid it, God knows
why. There still existed secret resorts, with cards, women, and wine,
whither unfortunates sought refuge and tried to forget dreadful reality.
There the whole mingled with the diseased, and there is no chronicle of
the scenes which took place. Two or three newspapers still tried to
preserve the significance of the written word in the midst of
desolation. Copies of these newspapers are being sold now at ten or
twenty times their original value, and will undoubtedly become
bibliographical rareties of the first degree. In their columns is
reflected the horrors of the unfortunate town, described in the midst of
the reigning madness and set by half-mad compositors. There were
reporters who took note of the happenings of the town, journalists who
debated hotly the condition of affairs, and even feuilletonists who
endeavoured to enliven these tragic days. But the telegrams received
from other countries, telling as they did of real healthy life, caused
the souls of the readers in Zvezdny to fall into despair.
There were desperate attempts to escape. At the beginning of July an
immense crowd of women and children, led by a certain John Dew, decided
to set out on foot for the nearest inhabited place, Londontown. Deville
understood the madness of this attempt, but could not stop the people,
and himself supplied them with warm clothing and provisions. This whole
crowd of about two thousand people were lost in the snow and in the
continuous Polar night. A certain Whiting started to preach a more
heroic remedy: this was, to kill all who were suffering from the
disease, and he held that after that the epidemic would cease. He found
a considerable number of adherents, though in those dark days the
wildest, most inhuman, proposal which in any way promised deliverance
would have obtained attention. Whiting and his friends broke into every
house in the town and destroyed whatever sick they found. They massacred
the patients in the hospitals, they even killed those suspected to be
unwell. Robbers and madmen joined themselves to these bands of ideal
murderers. The whole town became their arena. In these difficult days
Horace Deville organised his fellow-workers into a military force,
encouraged them with his spirit, and set out to fight the followers of
Whiting. This affair lasted several days. Hundreds of men fell on one
side or the other, till at last Whiting himself was taken. He appeared
to be in the last stages of _mania contradicens_ and had to be taken to
the hospital, where he soon perished, instead of to the scaffold.
On the eighth of July one of the worst things happened. The controller
of the Central Power Station smashed all the machinery. The electric
light failed, and the whole city was plunged in absolute darkness. As
there was no other means of lighting and warming the city, the people
were left in a helpless plight. Deville had, however, foreseen such an
eventuality and had accumulated a considerable quantity of torches and
fuel. Bonfires were lighted in all the streets. Torches were distributed
in thousands. But these miserable lights could not illumine the gigantic
perspectives of the city of Zvezdny, the tens of kilometres of straight
line highways, the gloomy height of thirteen-storey buildings. With the
darkness the last discipline of the city was lost. Terror and madness
finally possessed all souls. The healthy could not be distinguished from
the sick. There commenced a dreadful orgy of the despairing.
The moral sense of the people declined with astonishing rapidity.
Culture slipped from off these people like a delicate bark, and
revealed man, wild and naked, the man-beast as he was. All sense of
right was lost, force alone was acknowledged. For women, the only law
became that of desire and of indulgence. The most virtuous matrons
behaved as the most abandoned, with no continence or faith, and used the
vile language of the tavern. Young girls ran about the streets demented
and unchaste. Drunkards made feasts in ruined cellars, not in any way
distressed that amongst the bottles lay unburied corpses. All this was
constantly aggravated by the breaking out of the disease afresh. Sad was
the position of children, abandoned by their parents to the will of
Fate. They died of hunger, of injury after assault, and they were
murdered both purposely and by accident. It is even affirmed that
cannibalism took place.
In this last period of tragedy Horace Deville could not, of course,
afford help to the whole population. But he did arrange in the Town Hall
shelter for those who still preserved their reason. The entrances to the
building were barricaded and sentries were kept continuously on guard.
There was food and water for three thousand people for forty days.
Deville, however, had only eighteen hundred people, and though there
must have been other people with sound minds in the town, they could not
have known what Deville was doing, and these remained in hiding in the
houses. Many resolved to remain indoors till the end, and bodies have
been found of many who must have died of hunger in their solitude. It is
remarkable that among those who took refuge in the Town Hall there were
very few new cases of the disease. Deville was able to keep discipline
in his small community. He kept till the last a journal of all that
happened, and that journal, together with the telegrams, makes the most
reliable source of evidence of the catastrophe. The journal was found in
a secret cupboard of the Town Hall, where the most precious documents
were kept. The last entry refers to the 20th of July. Deville writes
that a demented crowd is assailing the building, and that he is obliged
to fire with revolvers upon the people. “What I hope for,” he adds, “I
know not. No help can be expected before the spring. We have not the
food to live till the spring. But I shall fulfil my duty to the end.”
These were the last words of Deville. Noble words!