"Holding his torch high, Ivan skirted the
precipice" _Frontispiece_
"Your prediction is fulfilled. The Turk has
escaped" 60
"From all directions nuns came gliding
towards the lighted portal" 90
"A strange sight brought her to a standstill" 128
"At the edge of the wood lay a dead woman,
with a little living creature sobbing over
her" 145
_THE DESERTED MINE_
[Illustration]
_THE DESERTED MINE_
I
At the entrance of the Voskressensky mine stood a group of miners. All
were quite silent.
It was still dark, for the autumn days begin late. Heavy grey clouds
glided slowly over the sky, in which the first streaks of dawn were
hardly visible. These clouds glided so low that they seemed to wish to
lie on the earth in order to hide this black hole, this well-like
orifice which was about to swallow up the miners one by one. The air was
saturated with a cloud of damp dust, particles of which fell on the
men's hair and faces. The miners wore leather jerkins, and small lamps,
whose light flickered fitfully, hung at their belts. An imaginative
person might have thought that they trembled with fear at having to
descend into the heavy dense darkness of the mine.
"Listen, old man! You can never go down alone," said the young overseer
to an old miner who was of tall stature, thin and withered. His long
grey beard fell in disarray over his hollow chest, and his breath came
and went with a thin whistling sound, as though the damp air of this
dark morning found as much difficulty in entering as in leaving it. The
features of the old miner's face were strongly marked, and his two black
eyes burned in the depths of their sockets with a brilliant, almost
fantastic light. This death's-head seemed almost buried from sight
between two very high shoulders. When he walked, his back was arched,
and his whole long body leaned forward, so that he seemed to be looking
for something he had lost, or to be picking his steps very carefully.
His feeble arms hung languidly by his side, and his legs tottered and
gave way every moment under the weight of his body, slight as it was.
"You will never be able to descend the ladders! We will put you into the
basket! Hullo! you fellows over there, come and help to start old
Ivan!" the overseer called to the rest.
"Here we are, Father Ivan!" they cried, saying to each other jocosely,
"Fancy his wishing to go down the ladders with us!"
The old miner turned towards them. It was a long time ago since he had
been born in a mine about five versts distant which had been
subsequently closed. His mother, who had lost her husband by the
falling-in of one of the mine-galleries, continued to work in the same
gallery after it had been repaired. Ivan had been born in the eternal
darkness. His first cry had been drowned by the noise of blasting rocks,
his first glance met nothing but the gloom of the subterranean gallery.
He was hoisted to the surface of the ground in a large bucket full of
ore. All the first impressions of his sad childhood were intimately
connected with the mine where his mother, who was obliged to earn her
living, always worked. As she had no one to whom to entrust the child,
she took him with her, and he remained lying beside her, fixing his
wide-open eyes on his mother's flickering lamp, while he sucked at his
milk-bottle. It was this black hole which echoed to his laughter and his
crying, especially to the latter. His mother, who was naturally
taciturn, had scarcely time to caress her child, for she would have had
to quit her work; when she heard the little one's sobs, she redoubled
the blows of her pickaxe against the dark mass of coal, as though she
wished by the noise they made to drown the feeble wailing of the infant.
It was in this mine that he grew and made his first experiments in
walking; later on he began to explore, first the narrow passage where
his mother worked at her daily task, then venturing into the other
galleries of this subterranean kingdom. As his mind developed, a whole
world of phantoms created by his imagination rose around him. All these
masses of black earth with their blocks of metal, which had slumbered
for centuries in the depths, seemed to him living beings, and all the
mysterious muffled sounds which came one knew not whence, sounded in his
ears like the groans of victims imprisoned by evil genii in gloomy
caves. For him the water which filtered through the walls of the mine
was a shower of tears, and that which trickled, yellow of tint, across
the ore resembled flowing blood. The darkness was constantly traversed
by vague and ever new apparitions, vanishing as soon as they appeared,
which nevertheless left a trace of their passage on the child's
impressionable mind.
When a miner's song reached him, deadened by distance, it seemed to him
to issue from the depths of the rocks. By dint of practice, his sense of
hearing had acquired a fine subtlety, and sometimes putting his ear to
the rugged walls, he listened with so much attention that he could catch
the faintest unknown and inexplicable sounds. It was perhaps only the
wrathful murmur of some imprisoned spring, but for Ivan it was the groan
of a human being struggling in his dungeon. All the objects round
him--the ore, the rocks, the water--were animated with a life visible
and comprehensible to him alone. These things were not for him, simple
parts of inanimate nature, but creatures with souls, full of life,
similar to himself, watching and listening to him as he watched and
listened to them.
Later on he made friends with an old man. He was a miner of a somewhat
sombre disposition, but his eyes always grew moist when the child ran
towards him. He would lay his wrinkled hand, hard as iron, tenderly on
the head of the little one, and, as he rested, tell him how one day our
Lord Jesus Christ had descended to the depths of this subterranean
kingdom, and since then remained there with the miners. "Jesus is in the
midst of us, I tell you," the old man would say dreamily, peering
intently into the darkness, as though his half-blind eyes could really
distinguish the divine Saviour there. As long as he was a child, Ivan
saw Him also, and seeing Him feared Him, because he knew that Jesus does
not love evil deeds and dark thoughts. Jesus is everywhere at once; He
has thousands of eyes at His disposal; He sees and knows the slightest
movements of men's hearts.
One day when the child was sitting on the old miner's knees, they heard
far off in the direction where Ivan's mother was working a dull shock--a
noise like a sigh escaping from the breast of Mother Earth herself. The
shock re-echoed in all the mine-shafts and smallest recesses of all the
galleries. The earth fell in in several places.
"Save us, Lord!" cried the old man, rising quickly. "Pray to God, little
one. A child's prayer avails much with Him."
Little Ivan knelt down, and prayed without knowing why or for what. All
his prayer consisted in repeating, "Kind Jesus!... Good Jesus!... Dear
old Jesus!" Since for him goodness was personified in the old miner, and
as on the other hand Jesus was the very incarnation of goodness, it
followed that Jesus must be old, very old. It was thus that the child
imagined Him, and under this aspect that he sometimes saw Him standing
in the darkness of the mine.
The subterranean shocks re-echoed to a great distance and did not cease
till they passed beyond the boundaries of the mine. Then only a vague
vibration remained in the air like the presentiment of a great calamity.
The old miner turned in the direction where Ivan's mother had been
working. He walked with uncertain steps and then returned hesitatingly
towards the child. When they reached the gallery they found it narrower
and contracted above where the earth had sunk. Presently they came to a
point where it shrank to a narrow hole. The old man and the child
crawled through it with difficulty. Soon, fortunately, they could stand
upright. A few steps more and the old man abruptly fell on his knees.
The place where Ivan's mother had been working no longer existed. The
child and the old man were confronted by a huge mass of damp earth. Its
dampness was constantly increasing, for it was traversed by a thread of
water from a spring which had suddenly been liberated, one knew not how,
from its long imprisonment. From underneath this damp mass projected the
feet of Ivan's mother. The child rushed forward, seized the coarse boots
which she wore and tugged at them, but in vain; the earth which lay on
his mother guarded its prey well.
"Maria! Maria!" cried the old miner in a despairing voice.
There was no reply. The feet in their coarse boots, feebly lighted by
the little lamp, remained motionless.
When Ivan grew up and became a miner in his turn his surroundings
changed their aspect in his eyes and became inanimate. The springs and
the metals, these bondslaves of the earth, no longer possessed a soul
for him. The dark rocks, when his pickaxe laid their sides open, were as
inanimate as the damp masses of ore. Jesus also, Whom he saw so clearly
in his childhood, had disappeared from the time that they had abandoned
the old mine for another one. But the impressions made on him in
childhood remained hidden and shut up in the profoundest depth of Ivan's
heart, resembling in this the hidden springs in the heart of the rock.
Later on, under the inexorable pressure of time when Ivan had become
old, these impressions rose again to the surface, and he found himself
once more surrounded by vague apparitions and mysterious murmurs. Only
Jesus remained absent, though the fixed gaze of the old Ivan searched
for Him perseveringly in the darkness of the subterranean kingdom.