It was drawing towards evening, and once more Trirodov was alone,
tormented by his unceasing sadness. His mind was in a whirl. He was in
a half-somnolent state, which was like the foreboding of a nightmare.
His half-dreams and half-illusions were full of the day’s impressions,
full of burning, cruel reveries.
It had just grown dark. A fire was visible on a height near the town.
The town boys were making merry. They had lit a bonfire, and were
throwing the brands into the air; as they rose swiftly, the burning
brands appeared like skyrockets against the blue sky. And these
beautiful flights of fire in the darkness gave joy and sadness.
Kirsha, silent as always, came to his father. He placed himself at the
window and looked out with his dark, sad eyes upon the distant fires
of St. John’s Eve. Trirodov went up to him. Kirsha turned quietly
towards his father:
“This will be a terrible night.”
Trirodov answered as quietly:
“There will be nothing terrible. Don’t be afraid, Kirsha. You had
better go to sleep, my boy, it is time.”
As if he had not heard his father, Kirsha went on:
“The dead will soon rise from their graves.”
“The dead are already rising from their graves,” replied Trirodov.
A strange feeling of astonishment stirred within him, why did he speak
of this? Or was it due to the urgency of the questioner’s desire?
Quietly, ever so quietly, half questioning, half relating, Kirsha
persisted:
“The dead will walk on the Navii[15] footpath, the dead will speak
Navii words.”
And again, as though submitting to a strange will, not his own,
Trirodov replied:
“The dead have already risen, they are already walking upon the Navii
footpath, towards the Navii town, they are already speaking Navii
words about Navii affairs.”
And Kirsha asked:
“Are you going?”
“I am going,” said Trirodov after a brief silence.
“I am going with you,” said Kirsha resolutely.
“You had better not go, dear Kirsha,” said his father tenderly.
But Kirsha persistently repeated:
“I will spend this night with you there, at the Navii footpath. I will
see and I will hear. I will look into dead eyes.”
Trirodov said sternly:
“I do not wish to take you with me--you ought to remain here.”
There was entreaty in Kirsha’s voice:
“Perhaps mother will come by.”
Trirodov, falling into deep thought, said finally:
“Very well, come with me.”
The evening dragged on slowly and sadly. The father and son waited. It
grew quite dark by the time they went.
They walked through the garden, past the closed greenhouse with its
mysteriously glittering window-panes. The quiet children were not yet
asleep. Quietly they swung in the garden upon their swings. Quietly
clinked the swing rings, quietly creaked the wooden seats. Upon the
swings sat the quiet children, lit up by the dead moon and cooled by
the night breeze, and they swung softly and sang their songs. The
night listened to their quiet songs, and the full, clear, dead moon
also. Kirsha, lowering his voice so that the quiet children might not
hear, asked:
“Why don’t they sleep? They swing on their swings neither upward nor
downward, but evenly. Why do they do this?”
“They must not sleep to-night,” answered Trirodov, also in a whisper.
“They cannot sleep until the dawn grows rosy, until the dawn begins to
laugh. There is really no reason why they should sleep. They can sleep
as well by day.”
Again Kirsha asked:
“Will they go with us? They want to go.”
“No, Kirsha, they don’t want anything.”
“Don’t want anything?” repeated Kirsha sadly.
“They ought not to go with us unless we call them.”
“Shall we call them?” asked Kirsha joyously.
“We shall call one. Which one would you like?”
Kirsha, after some thought, said:
“Grisha.”
“Very well, we’ll call Grisha,” said Trirodov.
He turned in the direction of the swings, and called out:
“Grisha!”
A boy, who resembled the sad-faced Nadezhda, quietly jumped down from
his swing, and walked behind them, without approaching too closely.
The other quiet children looked tranquilly after him, and continued to
swing and to sing as before.
Trirodov opened the gate, and was followed by Kirsha and Grisha. The
night hovered all around them, and the forgotten Navii footpath
stretched in a black strip through the darkness.
Kirsha shivered--he felt the cold, heavy earth under his bare feet;
the cold air pressed against his bare knees, the cold moist freshness
of the night blew against his half-bared breast. He heard his father
ask in a low voice:
“Kirsha, are you not afraid?”
“No,” whispered Kirsha, as he breathed in the fresh aroma of the dew
and the light mist.
The light of the moon was seductive with mystery. She smiled with her
lifeless, tranquil face, and appeared to be saying:
“What was will be again. What was will happen more than once.”
The night was peaceful and clear. They walked a long time--Trirodov
and Kirsha, and some distance behind them the quiet Grisha followed.
At last there appeared, quite near, peering through the mist, the low
white cemetery wall. Another road cut across theirs. Quite narrow, its
worn cobblestones gleamed dimly in the moonlight. The road of the
living and the road of the dead crossed each other at the entrance of
the cemetery. In the field near the crossing several mounds were
visible--they were the unmarked graves of suicides and convicts.
The whole neighbourhood, bewitched with mystery and fear, seemed
oppressed. The flat field stretched far--all enveloped in a light
mist. Far to the left, the town fires showed their vague glimmers
through the mist--and marked off by the wall of mist, the town seemed
to be very distant, and to be guarding jealously from the fields of
night the tumultuous voices of life.
An old witch, grey, and all bent, appeared from somewhere; she swung a
crutch and stumbled on in haste. She was mumbling angrily:
“It doesn’t smell of our spirit. Strangers have come! Why have they
come? What can strangers want here? What are they seeking? They’ll
find what they don’t want to find. Ours will see them, and will tear
them to pieces, and will scatter the pieces before all the winds.”
Suddenly there was a weird rustle, there rose all about them the
squeak of piping little voices, and the sounds of a confused
scampering. At the crosspaths there darted in all directions, as thick
as dust, countless hordes of grey sprites and evil spirits. Their
running was so impetuous that they could have borne along with them
every living, weak-willed soul. And it could already be seen that
running in their midst were the pitiful souls of little people. Kirsha
whispered in a voice full of fear:
“Quicker, quicker into the ring! They will bear us away if we don’t
mark ourselves in.”
Trirodov called quietly:
“Come here, come here, quiet boy, draw a circle around us with your
nocturnal little stick.”
They no sooner had succeeded in marking themselves in with the magic
line than the dead began to pass down the Navii path. The throng of
the dead, submitting to some evil malediction, walked towards the
town. The spectres walked in the nocturnal silence and the traces they
left behind them were light, curious, and hardly distinguishable.
Whispered conversations were heard--lifeless words. The dead walked at
random, without any defined order. At the beginning the voices merged
into a general drone, and only afterwards, by straining one’s ears, it
was possible to distinguish separate words and whole phrases.
“Be good yourself, that’s the chief thing.”
“For mercy’s sake--what perversion, what immorality!”
“Plenty of food and plenty of clothes--what more can one want?”
“I haven’t sinned much.”
“That’s what they deserve. Kisses are not for them.”
In the beginning all the dead fused into one dark, grey mass. But
gradually, if one looked intently one could distinguish the separate
corpses.
One nobleman who passed by had a cap with a red band on his head; he
was saying with calm and deliberation:
“The divine right of ownership should be inviolable. We and our
ancestors have built up the Russian land.”
Another of the same class, who walked beside him, remarked:
“My motto--autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality. My credo--a strong
redeeming power.”
A priest in a black vestment swung a censer, and cried in a tenor
voice:
“Every soul should submit to sovereign dominion. The hand that gives
will not grow poorer.”
A wise muzhik passed by muttering:
“We know everything, but are not saying anything just yet. When you
don’t know anything they leave you alone. Only you can’t cover up your
mouth with a handkerchief.”
Several soldiers walked past together. They bawled their indecorous
songs. Their faces were grey-red in colour. They stank of sweat,
putrescence, bad tobacco, and vodka.
“I have laid down my stomach for my faith, my Tsar, and my
Fatherland,” a smart young colonel was saying.
After him came a thin man with the face of a Jesuit and cried out
loudly:
“Russia for the Russians!”
A stout merchant kept on repeating:
“If you don’t cheat you can’t sell your goods. Even a fur coat might
be turned inside out. Your penny makes you well thought of anywhere.”
An austere, freckled woman was saying:
“Beat me, seeing that I’m your woman, but there’s no law that’ll let
you tie up with a girl so long as you’ve got a wife living.”
A muzhik walked at her side, a dirty, ill-smelling fellow, who said
nothing and hiccuped.
Once more there was a nobleman, large, stout, bristling,
savage-looking. He ranted:
“Hang them! Flog them!”
Trirodov turned to Kirsha:
“Don’t be afraid, Kirsha--these are dead words.”
Kirsha silently nodded his head.
A mistress and her servant-maid walked together and exchanged
quarrelsome words.
“God didn’t make all the trees in the forest alike. I am a white bone,
you are a black bone. I am a gentlewoman, you are a peasant-woman.”
“You may be a gentlewoman, yet trash.”
“Maybe trash, but still from the gentry.”
Quite close to the magic line there was an apparent effort on the part
of an elegantly dressed woman and a young man of the breed of dandies
to emerge from the general throng. They had been only recently buried,
and they exhaled the odour of fresh corpses. The woman coquettishly
moved her half-putrefied lips and complained in a hoarse, creaking
voice:
“They’ve forced us to walk with all these _Khams_.[16] They might
have let us walk separately from all this common folk.”
The dandy suddenly complained in a squeaking voice:
“Be careful, there, muzhik, don’t nudge. What a dirty fellow!”
The muzhik had evidently only just jumped out of his grave; he was
barely awake, and he had not yet realized himself or understood his
condition. He was all dishevelled and in rags. His eyes were turbid.
Curses and indecent words issued from his dead lips. He was angry
because he had been disturbed, and he bawled:
“By what right? You are lying there and not doing any one any harm,
and are roused and made to walk along. What new rules have they got
for us--disturbing the dead! You’ve only just found your earth--when
up you must be and moving.”
Unsteady on his feet, the muzhik continued to pour out his coarse
abuse; when he saw Trirodov he opened his eyes wide and went straight
to him. He was blindly conscious of being in the presence of a
stranger and an enemy and he wished to destroy him. Kirsha trembled
and grew pale. He clung to his father in fear. The quiet boy,
retaining his tranquil sadness, stood at their side, like an angel on
guard.
The muzhik touched the enchanted line. Pain and terror transpierced
him. He stared with his dead eyes, but quickly lowered them; as he was
unable to withstand the look of the living, he fell with his forehead
to the ground just beyond the line and begged for mercy.
“Go!” said Trirodov.
The muzhik rose to his feet and scampered away. But he soon paused,
and again burst out into abuse; then ran farther.
Two lean, poorly dressed boys, with green faces, walked by. The rags
which bound their feet hung loosely. One of them said:
“Do you understand? They tormented me, tyrannized over me. I ran away
and they caught me again--I had no strength left. I went to the garret
and strangled myself. I don’t know what I shall get for it now.”
The other green boy replied:
“As for me, I was beaten with salted rods. My hands are quite clean.”
“Yes, you are lucky,” said the first boy enviously. “You will get a
little golden wreath, but what will happen to me?”
“I will entreat the angels, the archangels, the cherubim and the
seraphim for you--give me but your full name and address.”
“My sin is quite a big one, and my name is Mitka Sosipatrov, from
Nizhniya Kolotilovka.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the birched boy. “As soon as they let me in to
the upper chambers, I will at once fall at the feet of the Virgin Mary
until you are forgiven.”
“Yes, do me this great favour.”
Kirsha stood pale. His eyes sparkled. He trembled from head to foot
and kept on repeating:
“Mamma, come to me! Mamma, come to me!”
A radiant apparition suddenly appeared in the throng, and Kirsha
throbbed with joy. Kirsha’s mother passed by--all white, all lovely,
all gentle. She turned her tranquil eyes upon her dear ones and
whispered:
“I will come.”
Kirsha, transported with a quiet joy, stood motionless. His eyes
gleamed like the eyes of the quiet angel who stood there on guard.
Again the dead throng moved on. A governor passed by. All his figure
breathed might and majesty. Yet hardly awake, he grumbled:
“Make way for the Russian Governor! I’ll have no patience with you. I
will not permit it! You cannot frighten me. What! Feed the hungry, you
say?”
He appeared, as it were, to awaken at these words; he looked around
him and said in great astonishment, as he shrugged his shoulders:
“What a strange disorder! How did I get into this crowd? Where is the
police?”
Then he suddenly bawled out:
“Let the Cossacks come!”
In response to the Governor’s cry a detachment of Cossacks came
flying. Without noticing Trirodov and the children, they swept along
past them and savagely flourished their _nagaikas_.[17] The dead,
pressed from behind by the Cossacks’ horses, became a confused,
wavering mass, and answered with malignant laughter to the blows of
the _nagaikas_ upon their lifeless bodies.
The grey witch sat down on a near-by stone and shook with her hideous,
creaking laughter.