IMAR'S TALE--PEACE
"Happiness appears to me to resemble the black eagle of the mountains
more than the fair dove of the proverb. Restless and swift of wing, it
flutters, scarcely long enough for a hover, over any home of ours, and
even then too high for us to be sure that we have seen it. Not until it
is gone, can we believe that it has been with us; and we know in our
hearts that to look for it destroys the chance of seeing it.
"Shamyl was in a rage that Oria dared to pledge her faith to me, without
consulting the 'Mountain-lion,' as his flatterers now called him.
Whether he hoped to make money of her, or what other reason he may have
had, I will not pretend to say. But when by means of my good service,
and without the loss of a single man, he secured all those fair prizes,
and thus recovered his favourite son, not to mention an excellent sum in
cash, and good wives for some of his officers, the least he should have
done in my opinion was to smile and pour his blessing upon the union of
Oria and Imar. Instead of that, on the very day when the last of the
Russian ladies left the lonely recesses of Darghi, he sent a score of
his bodyguard, without even the courtesy of asking my consent, to escort
the Princess Oria to his own headquarters.
"Bad breeding here made a great mistake, as it usually does among
gentlemen. For if he had sent his orders to me, as the officer to whom
he had intrusted the captives, I should have felt myself bound to obey
him, however much against my liking. But being treated in this rough
manner, which the Avar Chief was too fond of employing, I threw off at
once my allegiance to him,--which was not that of a tribesman, and had
been already encroached upon a little too uncouthly. For at present he
was quite prosperous, and seemed well able to hold his own,--though the
enemy had begun already their new plan of campaign, by which they
prevailed in the end against him,--so that there could be no dishonour
in leaving him with his glory. If the Russians had been pressing on him,
I would not have quitted him; though nothing would have made me leave
the Princess at his mercy. For when she confided herself to me, what
things I said, and what vows I made, and what contempt I truly felt for
every human being who thought lightly of such loftiness! Those officers
who came with Shamyl's orders, were as faithful as could be to him; but
ten times as many would not have availed to march my Oria eastwards.
"'This lady goes with me,' I said, 'she will be my wife in three days'
time, just when you rejoin the camp. I will give you a letter to that
effect to the inspired Commander. My men also will come with me; and if,
as the General, he has any need of them hereafter, they will be at his
service. You know that I do not speak in vain.'
"They all knew that, and many no doubt wished that they also were
homeward bound. They went one way, and we the other; and the sons of
gloomy Islam heard the songs of our rejoiceful faith borne back to them
through the mountain passes, by the soft air from the west.
"For three or four years after that, I led a very peaceful life, happy
in the perfect love of Oria, and the esteem of my faithful tribe. Being
thoroughly versed in mountain war, we made ourselves respected by the
badly armed and undisciplined races to the westward and the north of us.
If they attempted an inroad, as their manner was, upon us, for their
sakes we regretted it, but for our own were gratified. Because instead
of plundering us of our honest crops and cattle, they always lost their
thievish own; so that we grew very comfortable, and poverty was unknown
among us. We sternly repressed all robbery, and to afford an abiding
lesson to neighbours of lax principle, we deprived them of the means of
outrage, placing these under our own control. At one time the numerous
Osset tribes, far beyond Rukhan's rule, promised to join him in the
plunder of our prosperity. But before they could mature their
contradictory ideas, we passed with a chosen band through their only
fruitful places, obtaining many specimens of things we cannot cultivate,
and leaving them so much to talk of that they fell with one accord upon
one another. So that they were compelled to send a humble petition to us
for seed, as soon as the sun came back again.
"These little matters kept our arms from rusting, and our bodies from
torpor. We injured no one who did not require it, and we taught them to
abstain from injury. We encouraged literature in every village
possessing two men who could read, and within ten miles of Karthlos
Tower there were five or six poets growing. All this I mention not by
way of vaunt, but to show how much can be accomplished, when the mind is
easy.
"But alas before these great reforms had taken solid root with us, the
final advance of the Russian forces hurried us to the war again. Shamyl,
the gallant patriot, who had for a generation baffled the power of a
boundless empire, was at last being crushed by weight of numbers, and
worn out by perpetual blows. By forcing his scanty troops together, and
closing the defiles around them, the stubborn invaders now had him in a
grip, like a wolf blocked in his own den to starve. He called upon all
who had shared his successes to help him in this last resource; and loth
as I was to leave my happy home and peaceful villages, honour and good
faith must not be starved by our prosperity.
"My sweet wife, who had never admired the great Captain as the Russian
ladies did, prayed and wept and coaxed in vain; she brought my two
children, the boy and the girl, to show me that I ought to think of more
than mere abstractions. Innocent flesh of my own flesh, and tender bone
of my own bone, and eyes more bright than any star in all the sky of
glory, what had the 'Wolf of the mountains' done to make me love him
more than these? I stood at the gate with my arm around her trembling
form; and my beautiful boy, just three years old, clung to my leg and
kissed my knee, and the little baby always wise, who now has come to be
Dariel, looked at me through her mother's hair, with the sparkle of the
brighter world babes come from still unquenched by earth. What was pride
to me, or glory, if I could not find them here? But love has never yet
sufficed to keep a man contented. He grows ashamed of living in it; and
his manhood argues that if he lets his darlings wrap it all in warmth
and softness, it will soon cease to be worth their care. I put my wife
and children by, with a prayer to the Lord to protect them, and went to
do my duty.
"How often I looked back, and thought--as all I loved grew further
off--that a man's first duty is to those who cannot live without him.
Moreover, that I should be punished for casting eyes upon and longing
for stirring rather than steadfast life. Badly begun, and sadly ended,
was to be the rule of it. At the outset thus our little band (familiar
as they once had been with every twist of the mountain-chain and every
tangle of the gorges) had managed, by living in peace so long, to get
their memories confused. And even when they hit upon the way, they found
it stopped by Cossack outposts at the very points that we used to guard.
But after many a climb and crawl, we contrived to rejoin the brave
Imaum.
"I was admitted to him at once, and saw by the weariness of his eyes,
and the looseness of his attitude, that he knew it was all over. He was
sitting at a table with the lamp behind him, and his shaggy head thrown
backward, so that the light played down the furrows of his heavy
forehead, as from below one sees the moon glistening down a wrinkled
steep. With his usual scorn of ceremony he did not rise, but grasped my
hand.
"'Imar, thou art a man,' he said, with his guttural voice, such as all
the Avars have, now a little tremulous. 'If all had been as true as
thou, I should not look like this to-night. It is Russian gold that has
conquered us. To-morrow I surrender.'
"This was such a shock to me, that I could not reply immediately. Not
that I cared for the cause of Islam, to which he had been devoted;
neither did I detest the Russians, or dream that we, with so many races
all at feud with one another, could ever form a nation. But I felt as
any true man would feel, a reverence for this dauntless hero (who had
held his own so long against resistless odds) and sorrow at the close of
a career so grand.
"'I have fought a good fight. I have held the faith. I have not striven
for my own glory, but in the cause of God most High. If it is His Holy
will to forsake us, there is no more for man to do.'
"It was useless of course to argue with him. A man at all open to
argument would not have done much against Russia. And when I met my few
surviving friends among his gallant officers, they told me that his last
defence was gone, his force reduced to four hundred men, and all his
inaccessible retreats cut off. The enemy had blocked him in his last
hole; for his own life he cared little, as he had proved a thousand
times; but the few who still remained faithful to him, and were ready to
die at his side, surely it would have been a mean requital to drive them
like sheep into the butcher's yard. Therefore must he yield at last.
"We were talking dismally about all this, and saying that the mountains
would never again be fit for a gentleman to live in, when I received
another call to Shamyl's room, and had another interview with him. He
had spent some time in prayer, and been rewarded with a holy vision from
on high, so that his eyes were full of fire, and his countenance shone
with happiness. One would scarcely believe that gloom and ferocity so
often darkened that wondrous face.
"'I have received the word of the Lord, the holy voice of Allah, to whom
be all praise and glory! Imar of the Kheusurs, it is not for thee to
hear it, being but an outer infidel. It is commanded that thou shouldest
depart from among the chosen warriors of heaven, that they who bear
witness be of the true faith. If thou and thy men can escape, behold it
is my duty to aid thee. And verily I rejoice, for thou hast been a
faithful friend to us.'
"If he rejoiced, I could tell him of some one who rejoiced a
hundred-fold, to escape a Russian jail and exile from his wife and
children, even if his life were spared; of which there was no certainty,
after the many atrocities committed by my very noble friend. Perhaps it
was not magnanimous on my part to decline--if good luck should allow
it--the glory of being shot or starved for the sake of the beloved
country. But a lot of cross tangles came into that question. Was it my
country in the first place? If it was, should I help it by quitting it
so? And again, would that beloved land show equal love to me when gone,
by attending to my belongings? No land I have heard of has ever done
that. Therefore I showed my love of my country, by deciding to remain
inside it.
"'Commander of the Caucasus,' I said, knowing that he liked that
appellation, though he never commanded half of it; 'a revelation such as
thine is not to be disregarded. But how is it to be carried out? By many
devices, and some fighting, we have made our way to thee. But the foe
hath closed in at our heels. Our little band could never hope to pass
the Russian lines again. Thrice hast thou come to life again, when the
enemy proclaimed thee dead. But this is beyond even thy resources.'
"He smiled, with the pleasant smile of a man who feels himself
underrated. 'Imar, it is not that I am beaten in the powers of the
mind,' he said, 'but never was there mortal born, and filled with the
breath of the Lord from birth, who could vanquish the love of gold in
men. The son of Manoah could not do it; neither even our Great Prophet.
I, who have gifts from Heaven also, suited to a weaker age, am beaten by
that accursed Power. It is gold alone that hath vanquished Shamyl.'
"Believing that this upon the whole was true, I left him to his sad
reflections. But presently he raised his head again, and looked at me
with his old grim smile. He spread out his woolly arms, and spoke with a
large mouth quivering.
"'Knowest thou that I could carry off every man of my four hundred left,
and laugh at the Russian beleaguerers? This night I would do it, and let
them smell for us in the morning. But to what effect? To kill a Russian
is no dinner. All the passes are closed against us, and all our villages
occupied. The winter is nigh; we should be no more than hungry wolves
upon the mountains. But thou art young, thou hast a home to go to, and
art not of our religion. Take thy faithful fifty, and go this night. My
son will show thee how. No more.'
"That was the last I saw of Shamyl, and this much I will say for him.
He never sent any man to face a peril which he himself would shrink
from, neither did he fight for his own ambition, or hide in his turban
one copek. The Russians behaved very generously and even nobly to him;
and in the quiet evening of his days he may have looked back with sorrow
upon his barbarities against them.
"Our little band had never shared in any of those atrocities. Therefore
it would be better for us, if we could not escape capture, to fall into
the hands of the foe as a separate detachment, than to surrender with
the General. And this was my reason for attempting an escape, rather
than any fair prospect of success in such a situation. But strange to
say, by means of a tunnel in the cliff unknown to the enemy, and then
some most perilous scaling of rocks--such as Englishmen delight in, but
a native of the mountains prefers to do by deputy--and then some
midnight rushes through blockaded passes and defiles, we contrived with
the loss of two men only to regain our own abodes. But more than a month
had thus been spent after we quitted Shamyl, in wandering, fighting, and
lying close, going out of our way for sustenance, and being driven out
of it by enemies and tempests. With 50,000 men to stop them, not a horse
to help them, no supplies to start with, and no village-folk to provide
them, nothing but the fruit the bears had left, to keep body and soul
together--even veterans of Shamyl's training might have been proud to
force passage thus.
"Alas that we ever achieved it! For my men's sake I am glad, of course;
but for my own, I would that God had seen fit in His mercy to lay me
dead by a Russian gun, or stretch me frozen on the mountain side!"