he is altogether an Englishman; even his hands are English, the red
hair upon them so thick that they seem to be covered with tow. “But
then,” the guest reflects, “would an Englishman talk so amazingly
much and so animatedly?” Hands really English would not be trembling
at his age, and, moreover, if possessing such strength as Zotov’s, an
Englishman’s face would not be so pale, so uneasy without any visible
cause. Zotov is wearing black spectacles for the second day now,
because one of his eye-brows is injured,--he slipped, so he says, on
a banana peel in a bar; which means that he was rather far gone! And
yet here, on this island, he is a personage because of his position.
His hold on his guest’s curiosity and attention does not flag for a
minute. This man, audacious to the verge of insolence, infects one with
his audacity, his energy,--at times even enraptures. But, listening
to him, wondering at him, one looks upon him and thinks: “But he is
drunk,--he is drunk!” He is always tipsy,--from nervousness, from the
heat, from whiskey; Englishmen drink a great deal, but, of course, not
a single one of them in all this white city drinks as much as Zotov,
nor swallows iced soda water as avidly, nor smokes such a quantity of
cigars and cigarettes, nor speaks so much and so confusedly....
After his training abroad he worked at home and enjoyed the unbounded
trust of the man who had brought him up. But he no longer wanted to
know any mean in his independence, as well as in his expenditures. Sent
into Central Asia, he suddenly, on some trifling pretext, quarrelled
with Nechaev, severing all connections with him,--and, from a man
steadily and surely climbing upward, was transformed into something
very like an adventurer. He had traversed all of Siberia; had been
in Amur, in China, consumed with impatience to found some enterprise
all his own,--let it be something new, let it be something he was not
familiar with, let it even be of a predatory nature,--but an enterprise
such as would quickly lead to riches. Having returned to Russia he had
insinuated himself into a great tea firm, besides having arranged two
other posts for himself,--and it is now the sixth year that he has
been living here in the tropics, clad in no mean powers.... It is a
rare European who would have so easily cancelled his fate, amazing in
its successfulness,--or even his specialty, which had taken so many
years of toil to acquire! No European would have yielded himself to
the whims of chance, or have shouldered not only a governmental post,
but also a steamship agency and a tea business; or have started, along
with all these, certain affairs with pearl-bearing shells; or would
have maintained a black mistress all his own,--a rare beauty, according
to rumour,--to the wonder of the whole city.... He keeps his counsel
very much to himself, but at times he is very tactless; reveals, with
equal force, now great firmness of character, now unrestraint; now
secretiveness, now loquacity. He flaunts his common origin and at the
same time boasts of his acquaintance with people of rank; swears, for
all he is worth, at the Russian Government,--and with evident pride
keeps on his desk a photographic portrait of a Russian Grand Duke,
handsome and rather young, who had personally bestowed this portrait
upon him, with a short signature in autograph. When he is narrating
something that, in his opinion, is humorous, he frequently does not
comprehend that the point of this amusing matter may be interpreted
not at all to his advantage,--for example, it was from no other source
than his own stories that the guest found out that Zotov had appeared
as far too omniscient, almost as a passer-by, to those men of affairs
in Siberia and Manchuria with whom he so rapidly attained to terms of
intimacy, whom he so quickly charmed at first with his obligingness and
sociability, his mannerisms of a man used to living on a grand scale, a
man conversant with what is what, in absolutely all things, beginning
with cigars, wine, women, and culminating with some excavations on
the Philippine Islands, rather lethal, it would seem, on account of an
earthly microbe....
In the evening the guest rides with him beyond the city.
Beyond the city, on the shore of the ocean, stands a small but a very
fashionable restaurant, where the tourists and the residents rest
from the sultriness of the city, drinking tea, brandy, and champagne,
and admiring the sunset from the front piazza of the restaurant. They
come there in tiny rickshaws, following one another, over an endless
road amid age-old vegetation, past bungalows and past the huts of the
savages. And for a whole hour the guest from Russia sees before him
only the naked body of a brown man, carrying him at a run farther and
farther under the green vault of the branches of spreading trees; and
beyond him, beyond this body and black-haired head, the big white
figure of Zotov, sitting high and erect in his little carriage. Halfway
to their destination he suddenly turns around and, raising his stick,
calls out to his guest:
“Would you care to drive in?”
For answer the guest assents,--Zotov had pointed out a small Buddhistic
monastery,--and the savages, breathing heavily, bathed in perspiration,
roll up along the passage way, lying between the cabins, that stand
underneath the palms and all other species of trees.
“Well, isn’t this like a bit of our own; isn’t this Russian?” Zotov is
saying, stepping out of his carriage. “Only in our country is there so
unconscionably much of this verdure, of this forest, so many of these
hovels, so many dirty urchins like these! Just look!” he is saying,
pointing with his stick at the trees, at the huts and their roofs of
leaves and of rushes, at the naked children, and at the natives, young
and old, who have surrounded the little carriages in their curiosity.
“And the evening, too, is like one of our own,--oppressive, and so
wearisome, so wearisome!” he is saying in irritation, going in the
direction of the old idol temple standing on a knoll underneath slender
cocoanut palms, where a priest is already waiting, clad in a yellow
mantle, with his right shoulder bared,--his shaven head is small and
pressed in at the temples, and his eyes are black, almost insane, and
have an intense gaze.
Having entered the dark little sanctuary, the compatriots take off
their helmets, wet with perspiration and cool on the inner side. The
priest points a finger at their heads and shakes his head: as much as
to say that this is not required.
“A lot you know, you fool,” says Zotov in Russian; and for a long
while, with a certain strange gravity, gazes at the fourteen-foot
wooden statue, gilded and painted in red and yellow, lying on its side
beyond a sacrificial altar of black stone, upon which are heaped small
coins and nickel rings, and with the slenderest of brown joss-sticks
sending forth thin jets of aromatic smoke standing upon it.
“And how he is painted and lacquered all over, though!” says Zotov
jerkily. “Every bit just like the wooden bowls and cups sold at our
fairs!”
And he carelessly tosses a heavy gold coin upon the silver plate
extended by the priest....
When they arrive at the restaurant, his face is almost chalky, and it
is a frightful thing to see the black spectacles upon it. “For two
whole hours I have not been poisoning myself with anything, have drunk
nothing, nor have I smoked; and because of all that I have become dead
tired,” he is saying. And just as soon as he is seated at a small table
on the little terrace before the restaurant, over the steep shore,
cumbered below with blue bowlders that eternally bathe in the warm
water of the ocean, he immediately orders champagne.
The wine is very chill, and they both drink it avidly, rapidly growing
tipsy, and contemplate the darkening lilac ocean, the infinitely
distant sunset, turbidly and tenderly roseate. A faint, warm breeze
is stirring; the cicadas are drowsily strumming in the brushwood....
And suddenly Zotov flings his cigarette far from him, quickly lights
another, and again, with the pertinacity of a maniac, begins talking of
the similarity of this island and Russia.
The guest smiles. Zotov, hurriedly and not at all clearly, argues
with him. The matter does not lie, he urges, merely in an outward
resemblance.... And it was not even the resemblance that he had in
view, but rather his reactions.... Perhaps these reactions are not
firm, are unwholesome,--but then, that is another matter.... The devil
himself would go out of his mind in a climate like this,--it is not
a climate to be trifled with.... But now, in a discussion of all the
various dangers of the Far East, people somehow forget entirely about
that fact; messieurs the Aryans, and especially we Russians, ought to
carry out our conquering expeditions into the tropics with extreme
cautiousness, recalling with a greater frequence our forefathers
and their conquest of Hindustan, so significantly terminating in
Buddhism,--when all is said and done, it is we, the Aryans, after
Thibet intruding ourselves into the tropics, who have given birth to
this teaching, with its appallingly inapplicable wisdom! And then he
warmly begins to asseverate that “all the force of the thing” lies in
that he had already seen, had already felt the tropics even before
his arrival here, at some time very remote, perhaps a thousand years
ago,--with the eyes and the soul of his most distant ancestor....
He tells,--with a subtlety, passionateness and an eloquence never to be
expected from him,--that he had experienced extraordinary sensations
on the way over here, on those sultry, starry nights when he had first
beheld the Southern Cross, Canopus, and those first-created starry
mists that are called the Clouds of Magellan; when he had beheld the
Coal Sacks, those funereal fissures into the infinitude of universal
voids; and the awesome magnificence of the Alpha of the Centaur,
glimmering upon the utterly empty horizon, where some immeasurable
Nothingness, unattainable to our reason, seemed to be in its inception.
“Yes, yes!” exclaims he insistently, fixing the guest with his
spectacles: “The horizon was utterly empty about the Alpha! A spectacle
of a new world, of new heavens, was opened before me, but it seemed to
me,--and this sensation was vivid to the verge of terror within me, I
assure you!--it seemed to me that I had seen them before, once upon a
time. All the days and all the nights a smooth, dead swell rocked us
wide on the ocean. We were sailing toward an Eastern monsoon; it blew
sharp and strong, and its ceaseless current of air made the sailyards
hum and blurred the vision, and made our speed seem rapid.... Awaking
at night in the hot darkness of my cabin, I, in order to rest after
the exhausting sleep, would go on the upper decks, out into the wind,
under the stars,--altogether different from those I had seen all my
life, from my very birth, and with which I had already grown intimate;
stars that were altogether, altogether different,--yet at the same not
altogether new, seemingly, but as though they were _dimly recalled_.
Under their dim light hovered the ceaseless noise of the sea, the
steamer rolled slowly from one side to the other, and, like strangled
suicides in gray shrouds, with arms outspread, the long canvas
ventilators swayed and quivered near the funnel, avidly catching with
their orifices the freshness of the monsoon, upon which was already
borne toward us the hot breath of the dread Land of our First Parents.
And at such times I would be seized by such melancholy,--a melancholy
of some infinitely remote recollection,--that one can not express in
human speech even a hundredth part of it!”
A faint, delightful breeze is stirring; there is a drowsy strumming in
the brushwood. The twilight begins to swell as with sap with that faery
orange-aureate colour which always arises in the tropics when some
time had elapsed after the sunset. The surf boils up in orange-aureate
foam; the faces and the white costumes are bathed in an orange-aureate
light....
“How connect that with which he amazed me to-day with what he is
amazing me now?” the guest from Russia is reflecting, almost in fear,
about his astonishing compatriot. But the latter, is looking at him
through his black spectacles and is stubbornly reiterating:
“Yes, yes,--I have already been here.... And, in general, I am a
doomed man.... If you but knew how dreadfully muddled my affairs are!
Even more, it would seem, than my soul and my thoughts.... Oh, well,
there is a way out of everything! Just jerk back the trigger of
your revolver, having thrust its muzzle as far as possible into your
mouth,--and all these affairs, thoughts, and emotions will fly into
pieces to the devil and his dam!”
_1916._
BRETHREN
_Behold brethren, slaying one another!
I would discourse of grief._
SUTHA NIPPATHA.
The road out of Colombo, lying along the ocean, runs through dense
cocoanut groves. To the right, within their sun-dappled shady depths,
under the high canopy of feathery broom-like tree-tops, are scattered
the Senegalese cabins, half-hidden by the pale green laminæ of
bananas, resembling gigantic ears of corn, so small and low are they
in comparison with the tropical forest surrounding them. To the left,
through the dark-ringed trunks, tall and slender, fantastically bent
in all directions, one sees stretches of deep, silky sands, a gleam
of a golden, blazing mirror of smooth water, and, anchored upon it,
as though blending with the tree trunks, are the coarse sails of
primitive pirogues,--frail, cigar-shaped hollowed-out small oaks. Upon
the sand, in paradisaical nudity, are sprawling the coffee-coloured
bodies of black-haired striplings. Many such bodies are also plashing,
with laughter and yells, in the warm transparent water of the stony
coast.... Of what need, one thinks, to these people of the forests,
these direct heirs of the Land of our First Parents, as Ceylon is
styled even now,--of what need to them are cities, cents, rupees?
Do not the forest, ocean, sun give them everything? And yet, upon
attaining the years of maturity, some of them take to trading, others
labour upon the rice and tea plantations, a third lot--in the north of
the island--dive for pearls together with negroes, going down to the
bottom of the ocean and arising thence with bloodshot eyes; a fourth
group replace horses,--they carry Europeans over the towns and their
environs, over dark red footpaths, shaded by enormous vaults of forest
verdure over that very _kabouk_ out of which Adam was created. Horses
bear but illy the sultriness of Ceylon,--even Australian horses; every
wealthy resident who keeps a horse sends it away for the summer to the
mountains, into Candy, into Nurillia.
Upon the rickshaw-man’s left arm, between his shoulder and elbow,
the Englishmen, the present lords of the island, put a badge with a
number. There are ordinary numbers, and there are special ones. To one
old Senegalese rickshaw-man, living in a forest hut near Colombo, had
fallen a special number,--seven. “Wherefore,” the Exalted One might
have said,--“wherefore, monks, did this old man desire to multiply his
earthly sorrows?” “Because,” the monks might have answered, “because,
oh Exalted One, he was moved by earthly love, by that which, from the
start of time, summons all creatures into being,--therefore did this
old man desire to increase his earthly sorrows.” He had a wife, a
son, and many little children, dreading not that “he who hath them,
hath also the care of them.” He was black, very thin and unsightly,
resembling both a stripling and a woman; his long hair, gathered in
a knot at the nape of his neck and anointed with cocoanut oil, had
grown gray; the skin over all his body--or, to put it better, over his
bones--had wrinkled; as he ran, sweat streamed down from his nose,
chin, and the rag tied about his scanty pelvis; his narrow chest drew
breath with whistling and gasping. But strengthening himself with the
headiness of the betel, working up and expectorating a bloody froth
that soiled his moustache and lips, he sped quickly; and the white men
rolling in his black lacquered cart through the sun-scorched city, over
the dark-red pavements, soft from the sun and smelling of naphtha and
the humus of flowers, were satisfied.
Moved by love, not for himself, but for his family, for his son, did he
desire happiness, that which was not destined to be his, that which was
not given to him. He knew English but poorly; he could not make out at
once the names of the places where he was to run to--and frequently ran
at a venture. The rickshaw-man’s carriage is very small; it has a top
that can be thrown back, its wheels are narrow and high, each shaft is
no thicker than an average cane. And lo! A big man, his eyes almost all
whites, all in white, with a white sun helmet, in rough but expensive
footgear, clambers into it, seats himself snugly therein, crosses one
leg over the other, and, restrainedly commanding, deep in his throat,
hoarsely croaks his destination. Seizing his shafts, the old man bends
down to the ground and flies forward like an arrow, scarce touching
the ground with his light feet. The man in the helmet, holding a stick
in his hands covered with tow-like hair, has gone into deep thought
over his affairs, staring vacantly,--when suddenly he rolls his eyes
in wrath: why, the fellow’s rushing in an altogether wrong direction!
To put it shortly, not a few sticks had fallen upon his back, upon his
black shoulder blades, always hunched up in presentiment of a blow. But
also not a few extra cents had he snatched from Englishmen,--checking
himself at full speed at the entrance of some hotel or office and
dropping the shafts, he would so wrinkle his face, so hurriedly throw
out his thin arms, his moist, monkey-like palms cupped, that it was
impossible not to give him something additional.
One day he ran home at an altogether unaccustomed hour in the very
heat of noonday, when those lemon-coloured birds which are called
sun-birds flutter through the forest like golden arrows; when so
gaily and shrilly scream the parrots, darting from the trees and
flashing like rainbows through the dappled boskage of the forests,
through their shade and gleaming light; when, within the enclosures
of ancient Buddhistic sanctuaries, roofed with terra-cotta tiles,
the plum-coloured blossoms of the leafless Tree of Sacrifice, that
resemble little tuberoses, yield such a sweet and heavy odour; when
thick-throated chameleons play with such vivid primary colours as
they flash over smooth-trunked trees, as well as over trees that
are as ringed as an elephant’s trunk; when so many huge, gorgeous
butterflies soar and float without motion in the sun; and when the
hot, fawn-coloured ant-hills swarm and spout, as though with agate
grain. All things in the forests chanted and praised Maru, the God of
Life and Death, the God of the “Thirst of Being”; all creatures were
pursuing one another, rejoicing with a brief joy even as they destroyed
one another; but the old rickshaw-man, no longer athirst for anything
but a cessation of his sufferings, lay down in the stuffy murk of
his mud-hut, under its parched-up roof of leaves arustle with little
red snakes, and toward evening was dead--from icy cramps and watery
dysentery. His life was extinguished together with the sun, that went
down beyond the lilac smoothness of great watery expanses, retreating
toward the west, into the purple, ashes, and gold of the most
magnificent clouds in the universe. And night came,--a night on which,
in the forests near Colombo, all that was left of the rickshaw-man
was only a little contorted corpse, that had lost its number, its
name, even as the river Kellani loses its appellation when it reaches
the ocean. The sun, upon sinking, changes to a wind; but into what
does he that has died change? ... Night was rapidly extinguishing
the roseate and green colours of the fleeting twilight,--colours as
tender as those of some fairy tale; the flying foxes darted noiselessly
underneath the branches, seeking shelter for the night; and the forests
were filling up with a black, warm darkness, were bursting into flame
with myriads of fire-flies, and were mysteriously, languishingly
murmurous with cicadas and with the flowers of which the tiny tree
frogs make their home. In the distant forest idol-temple, before a
little sacred lamp barely glimmering upon a black altar for offerings
that was drenched with cocoanut oil and strewn with rice and withered
flower petals, upon his right side, with one hand laid meekly under
his cheek, reposed the Exalted One,--a giant of sandal-wood, with
a broad gilded face and elongated slanting eyes of sapphires, with
a smile of peaceful sadness upon his thin lips. In the dark cabin,
upon his back, was lying the rickshaw-man, and the suffering of death
distorted his pitiful features,--for that the voice of the Exalted
One had not reached him when it had summoned him to forsake earthly
love; for that beyond the grave a new life of sorrow awaited him, as
a consequence of his previous unrighteous one. The buck-toothed old
woman, sitting at the threshold of the cabin, at the fire under a
cauldron, wept on this night, nourishing her grief with the self-same
unreasoning love and pity. The Exalted One would have likened her
emotions to the copper ear-ring, resembling a little barrel, which hung
in her right ear,--the ear-ring was big and heavy; it had so pulled
down the slit in the lobe of her ear that a considerable hole had
formed. Her short blouse of cotton stuff, put on right over the bare
coffee-coloured body, stood out sharply white in the darkness. Near
by, naked, imp-like children were playing, squealing, pursuing one
another. As for the son, a light-footed youth,--he was standing in the
semi-darkness beyond the fire. He had that evening seen his bride,--a
round-faced, thirteen-year-old girl from a neighbouring settlement. He
was frightened and dumbfounded upon hearing of his father’s death,--he
had not thought that this would come so soon. But, probably, he was too
much aroused by another love, which is stronger than the love men bear
for their fathers. “Forget not,” saith the Exalted One, “forget not, O
Youth, longing to enkindle life with life, even as fire is enkindled
with fire, that all the torments of this universe, where everyone is
either slayer or slain, that all its sorrows and plaints, come from
love.” But love had already crept into the youth in its entirety, even
as a scorpion creeps into its lair. He stood and gazed into the fire.
As with all savages, his legs were disproportionately long. But even
Siva would have envied the beauty of his torso, that was of the colour
of dark cinnamon. The fire made his blue-black hair glisten,--it was as
thick as horse hair, and stretched taut and gathered at the top of his
head; made his eyes glow from under their long lashes,--and their glow
was like the glow of coke near the mouth of a forge.