A CLOUD
When the Osterno party reached home that same evening the starosta was
waiting to see Steinmetz. His news was such that Steinmetz sent for
Paul, and the three men went together to the little room beyond the
smoking-room in the old part of the castle.
"Well?" said Paul, with the unconscious hauteur which made him a prince
to these people.
The starosta spread out his hands.
"Your Excellency," he answered, "I am afraid."
"Of what?"
The starosta shrugged his narrow shoulders in cringing deprecation.
"Excellency, I do not know. There is something in the village--something
in the whole country. I know not what it is. It is a feeling--one cannot
see it, one cannot define it; but it is there, like the gleam of water
at the bottom of a deep well. The moujiks are getting dangerous. They
will not speak to me. I am suspected. I am watched."
His shifty eyes, like black beads, flitted from side to side as he
spoke. He was like a weasel at bay. It was the face of a man who went in
bodily fear.
"I will go with you down to the village now," said Paul. "Is there any
excuse--any illness?"
"Ah, Excellency," replied the chief, "there is always that excuse."
Paul looked at the clock.
"I will go now," he said. He began his simple preparations at once.
"There is dinner to be thought of," suggested Steinmetz, with a resigned
smile. "It is half-past seven."
"Dinner can wait," replied Paul in English. "You might tell the ladies
that I have gone out, and will dine alone when I come back."
Steinmetz shrugged his broad shoulders.
"I think you are a fool," he said, "to go alone. If they discover your
identity they will tear you to pieces."
"I am not afraid of them," replied Paul, with his head in the medicine
cupboard, "any more than I am afraid of a horse. They are like horses;
they do not know their own strength."
"With this difference," added Steinmetz, "that the moujik will one day
make the discovery. He is beginning to make it now. The starosta is
quite right, Paul. There is something in the air. It is about time that
you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone."
"That time will never come again," answered Paul. "I am not going to
leave you alone again."
He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching
to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in
Osterno as ever would an angel's wing.
Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the
table.
"At all events," he said, "you may as well have the wherewithal to make
a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst."
"As you like," answered Paul, slipping the fire-arm into his pocket.
The starosta moved away a pace or two. He was essentially a man of
peace.
Half an hour later it became known in the village that the Moscow doctor
was in the house of one Ivan Krass, where he was prepared to see all
patients who were now suffering from infectious complaints. The door of
this cottage was soon besieged by the sick and the idle, while the
starosta stood in the door-way and kept order.
Within, in the one dwelling-room of the cottage, were assembled as
picturesque and as unsavory a group as the most enthusiastic modern
"slummer" could desire to see.
Paul, standing by the table with two paraffin lamps placed behind him,
saw each suppliant in turn, and all the while he kept up a running
conversation with the more intelligent, some of whom lingered on to talk
and watch.
"Ah, John the son of John," he would say, "what is the matter with you?
It is not often I see you. I thought you were clean and thrifty."
To which John the son of John replied that the winter had been hard and
fuel scarce, that his wife was dead and his children stricken with
influenza.
"But you have had relief; our good friend the starosta--"
"Does what he can," grumbled John, "but he dare not do much. The bárins
will not let him. The nobles want all the money for themselves. The
Emperor is living in his palace, where there are fountains of wine. We
pay for that with our taxes. You see my hand--I cannot work; but I must
pay the taxes, or else we shall be turned out into the street."
Paul, while attending to the wounded hand--an old story of an old wound
neglected, and a constitution with all the natural healing power drained
out of it by hunger and want and vodka--Paul, ever watchful, glanced
round and saw sullen, lowering faces, eager eyes, hungry, cruel lips.
"But the winter is over now. You are mistaken about the nobles. They do
what they can. The Emperor pays for the relief that you have had all
these months. It is foolish to talk as you do."
"I only tell the truth," replied the man, wincing as Paul deliberately
cut away the dead flesh. "We know now why it is that we are all so
poor."
"Why?" asked Paul, pouring some lotion over a wad of lint and speaking
indifferently.
"Because the nobles--" began the man, and some one nudged him from
behind, urging him to silence.
"You need not be afraid of me," said Paul. "I tell no tales, and I take
no money."
"Then why do you come?" asked a voice in the background. "Some one pays
you; who is it?"
"Ah, Tula," said Paul, without looking up. "You are there, are you? The
great Tula. There is a hardworking, sober man, my little fathers, who
never beats his wife, and never drinks, and never borrows money. A
useful neighbor! What is the matter with you, Tula? You have been too
sparing with the vodka, no doubt. I must order you a glass every hour."
There was a little laugh. But Paul, who knew these people, was quite
alive to the difference of feeling toward himself. They still accepted
his care, his help, his medicine; but they were beginning to doubt him.
"There is your own prince," he went on fearlessly to the man whose hand
he was binding up. "He will help you when there is real distress."
An ominous silence greeted this observation.
Paul raised his head and looked round. In the dim light of the two smoky
lamps he saw a ring of wild faces. Men with shaggy beards and hair all
entangled and unkempt, with fierce eyes and lowering glances; women with
faces that unsexed them. There were despair and desperation and utter
recklessness in the air, in the attitude, in the hearts of these people.
And Paul had worked among them for years. The sight would have been
heart-breaking had Paul Howard Alexis been the sort of man to admit the
possibility of a broken heart. All that he had done had been frustrated
by the wall of heartless bureaucracy against which he had pitched his
single strength. There was no visible progress. These were not the faces
of men and women moving up the social scale by the aid of education and
the deeper self-respect that follows it. Some of them were young,
although they hardly looked it. They were young in years, but old in
life and misery. Some of them he knew to be educated. He had paid for
the education himself. He had risked his own personal freedom to procure
it for them, and misery had killed the seed.
He looked on this stony ground, and his stout heart was torn with pity.
It is easy to be patient in social economy when that vague jumble of
impossible ideas is calmly discussed across the dinner-table. But the
result seems hopelessly distant when the mass of the poor and wretched
stand before one in the flesh.
Paul knew that this little room was only a specimen of the whole of
Russia. Each of these poor peasants represented a million--equally
hopeless, equally powerless to contend with an impossible taxation.
He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all
under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck. The question was far
above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and
seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position
without fear.
He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of
intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which
could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine
construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a
hopeless cause.
"Well," he said. "Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?"
"You know him," answered the man who had spoken from the safe
background. "We need not tell you."
"Yes," answered Paul; "I know him."
He would not defend himself.
"There," he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged.
"You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go
dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?"
The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a
baby in her arms.
Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy
child playing at her mother's cottage door.
She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off
gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the
whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a
moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man
bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little
waif of humanity.
"When he was born he was a very fine child," said the mother.
Paul glanced at her. She was quite serious. She was looking at him with
a strange pride on her face. Paul nodded and drew aside the shawl. The
baby was staring at him with wise, grave eyes, as if it could have told
him a thing or two if it had only been gifted with the necessary speech.
Paul knew that look. It meant starvation.
"What is it?" asked the child-mother. "It is only some little illness,
is it not?"
"Yes; it is only a little illness."
He did not add that no great illness is required to kill a small child.
He was already writing something in his pocket-book. He tore the leaf
out and gave it to her.
"This," he said, "is for you--yourself, you understand? Take that each
day to the starosta and he will give you what I have written down. If
you do not eat all that he gives you and drink what there is in the
bottle as he directs you, the baby will die--you understand? You must
give nothing away; nothing even to your husband."
The next patient was the man whose voice had been heard from the safe
retreat of the background. His dominant malady was obvious. A shaky
hand, an unsteady eye, and a bloated countenance spoke for themselves.
But he had other diseases more or less developed.
"So you have no good to tell of your prince," said Paul, looking into
the man's face.
"Our prince, Excellency! He is not our prince. His forefathers seized
this land; that is all."
"Ah! Who has been telling you that?"
"No one," grumbled the man. "We know it; that is all."
"But you were his father's serfs, before the freedom. Let me see your
tongue. Yes; you have been drinking--all the winter. Ah! is not that so,
little father? Your parents were serfs before the freedom."
"Freedom!" growled the man. "A pretty freedom! We were better off
before."
"Yes; but the world interfered with serfdom, because it got its
necessary touch of sentiment. There is no sentiment in starvation."
The man did not understand. He grunted acquiescence nevertheless. The
true son of the people is always ready to grunt acquiescence to all that
sounds like abuse.
"And what is this prince like? Have you seen him?" went on Paul.
"No; I have not seen him. If I saw him I would kick his head to pieces."
"Ah, just open your mouth a little wider. Yes; you have a nasty throat
there. You have had diphtheria. So you would kick his head to pieces.
Why?"
"He is a tchinovnik--a government spy. He lives on the taxes. But it
will not be for long. There is a time coming--"
"Ah! What sort of a time? Now, you must take this to the starosta. He
will give you a bottle. It is not to drink. It is to wash your throat
with. Remember that, and do not give it to your wife by way of a tonic
as you did last time. So there are changes coming, are there?"
"There is a change coming for the prince--for all the princes," replied
the man in the usual taproom jargon. "For the Emperor too. The poor man
has had enough of it. God made the world for the poor man as well as for
the rich. Riches should be equally divided. They are going to be. The
country is going to be governed by a Mir. There will be no taxes. The
Mir makes no taxes. It is the tchinovniks who make the taxes and live on
them."
"Ah, you are very eloquent, little father. If you talk like this in the
kabak no wonder you have a bad throat. There, I can do no more for you.
You must wash more and drink less. You might try a little work perhaps;
it stimulates the appetite. And with a throat like that I should not
talk so much if I were you. Next!"
The next comer was afflicted with a wound that would not heal--a common
trouble in cold countries.
While attending to this sickening sore Paul continued his conversation
with the last patient.
"You must tell me," he said, "when these changes are about to come. I
should like to be there to see. It will be interesting."
The man laughed mysteriously.
"So the government is to be by a Mir, is it?" went on Paul.
"Yes; the poor man is to have a say in it."
"That will be interesting. But at the Mir every one talks at once and no
one listens; is it not so?"
The man made no reply.
"Is the change coming soon?" asked Paul coolly.
But there was no reply. Some one had seized the loquacious orator of the
kabak, and he was at that moment being quietly hustled out of the room.
After this there was a sullen silence, which Paul could not charm away,
charm he never so wisely.
When his patients had at last ebbed away he lighted a cigarette and
walked thoughtfully back to the castle. There was danger in the air, and
this was one of those men upon whom danger acts as a pleasant stimulant.