continuation of the Old, that Judaism has outlived its day. . . .
Picking out his phrases, he seemed to be trying to put together the
forces of his conviction and to smother with them the uneasiness of his
soul, and to prove to himself that in giving up the religion of his
fathers he had done nothing dreadful or peculiar, but had acted as a
thinking man free from prejudice, and that therefore he could boldly
remain in a room all alone with his conscience. He was trying to
convince himself, and with his eyes besought my assistance.
Meanwhile a big clumsy wick had burned up on our tallow candle. It was
by now getting light. At the gloomy little window, which was turning
blue, we could distinctly see both banks of the Donets River and the oak
copse beyond the river. It was time to sleep.
"It will be very interesting here to-morrow," said my companion when I
put out the candle and went to bed. "After early mass, the procession
will go in boats from the Monastery to the Hermitage."
Raising his right eyebrow and putting his head on one side, he prayed
before the ikons, and, without undressing, lay down on his little sofa.
"Yes," he said, turning over on the other side.
"Why yes?" I asked.
"When I accepted orthodoxy in Novotcherkassk my mother was looking for
me in Rostov. She felt that I meant to change my religion," he sighed,
and went on: "It is six years since I was there in the province of
Mogilev. My sister must be married by now."
After a short silence, seeing that I was still awake, he began talking
quietly of how they soon, thank God, would give him a job, and that at
last he would have a home of his own, a settled position, his daily
bread secure. . . . And I was thinking that this man would never have a
home of his own, nor a settled position, nor his daily bread secure. He
dreamed aloud of a village school as of the Promised Land; like the
majority of people, he had a prejudice against a wandering life, and
regarded it as something exceptional, abnormal and accidental, like an
illness, and was looking for salvation in ordinary workaday life. The
tone of his voice betrayed that he was conscious of his abnormal
position and regretted it. He seemed as it were apologizing and
justifying himself.
Not more than a yard from me lay a homeless wanderer; in the rooms of
the hostels and by the carts in the courtyard among the pilgrims some
hundreds of such homeless wanderers were waiting for the morning, and
further away, if one could picture to oneself the whole of Russia, a
vast multitude of such uprooted creatures was pacing at that moment
along highroads and side-tracks, seeking something better, or were
waiting for the dawn, asleep in wayside inns and little taverns, or on
the grass under the open sky. . . . As I fell asleep I imagined how
amazed and perhaps even overjoyed all these people would have been if
reasoning and words could be found to prove to them that their life was
as little in need of justification as any other. In my sleep I heard a
bell ring outside as plaintively as though shedding bitter tears, and
the lay brother calling out several times:
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us! Come to mass!"
When I woke up my companion was not in the room. It was sunny and there
was a murmur of the crowds through the window. Going out, I learned that
mass was over and that the procession had set off for the Hermitage some
time before. The people were wandering in crowds upon the river bank
and, feeling at liberty, did not know what to do with themselves: they
could not eat or drink, as the late mass was not yet over at the
Hermitage; the Monastery shops where pilgrims are so fond of crowding
and asking prices were still shut. In spite of their exhaustion, many of
them from sheer boredom were trudging to the Hermitage. The path from
the Monastery to the Hermitage, towards which I directed my steps,
twined like a snake along the high steep bank, going up and down and
threading in and out among the oaks and pines. Below, the Donets
gleamed, reflecting the sun; above, the rugged chalk cliff stood up
white with bright green on the top from the young foliage of oaks and
pines, which, hanging one above another, managed somehow to grow on the
vertical cliff without falling. The pilgrims trailed along the path in
single file, one behind another. The majority of them were Little
Russians from the neighbouring districts, but there were many from a
distance, too, who had come on foot from the provinces of Kursk and
Orel; in the long string of varied colours there were Greek settlers,
too, from Mariupol, strongly built, sedate and friendly people, utterly
unlike their weakly and degenerate compatriots who fill our southern
seaside towns. There were men from the Donets, too, with red stripes on
their breeches, and emigrants from the Tavritchesky province. There were
a good many pilgrims of a nondescript class, like my Alexandr Ivanitch;
what sort of people they were and where they came from it was impossible
to tell from their faces, from their clothes, or from their speech. The
path ended at the little landing-stage, from which a narrow road went to
the left to the Hermitage, cutting its way through the mountain. At the
landing-stage stood two heavy big boats of a forbidding aspect, like the
New Zealand pirogues which one may see in the works of Jules Verne. One
boat with rugs on the seats was destined for the clergy and the singers,
the other without rugs for the public. When the procession was returning
I found myself among the elect who had succeeded in squeezing themselves
into the second. There were so many of the elect that the boat scarcely
moved, and one had to stand all the way without stirring and to be
careful that one's hat was not crushed. The route was lovely. Both
banks--one high, steep and white, with overhanging pines and oaks, with
the crowds hurrying back along the path, and the other shelving, with
green meadows and an oak copse bathed in sunshine--looked as happy and
rapturous as though the May morning owed its charm only to them. The
reflection of the sun in the rapidly flowing Donets quivered and raced
away in all directions, and its long rays played on the chasubles, on
the banners and on the drops splashed up by the oars. The singing of the
Easter hymns, the ringing of the bells, the splash of the oars in the
water, the calls of the birds, all mingled in the air into something
tender and harmonious. The boat with the priests and the banners led the
way; at its helm the black figure of a lay brother stood motionless as a
statue.
When the procession was getting near the Monastery, I noticed Alexandr
Ivanitch among the elect. He was standing in front of them all, and, his
mouth wide open with pleasure and his right eyebrow cocked up, was
gazing at the procession. His face was beaming; probably at such
moments, when there were so many people round him and it was so bright,
he was satisfied with himself, his new religion, and his conscience.
When a little later we were sitting in our room, drinking tea, he still
beamed with satisfaction; his face showed that he was satisfied both
with the tea and with me, that he fully appreciated my being an
intellectual, but that he would know how to play his part with credit if
any intellectual topic turned up. . . .
"Tell me, what psychology ought I to read?" he began an intellectual
conversation, wrinkling up his nose.
"Why, what do you want it for?"
"One cannot be a teacher without a knowledge of psychology. Before
teaching a boy I ought to understand his soul."
I told him that psychology alone would not be enough to make one
understand a boy's soul, and moreover psychology for a teacher who had
not yet mastered the technical methods of instruction in reading,
writing, and arithmetic would be a luxury as superfluous as the higher
mathematics. He readily agreed with me, and began describing how hard
and responsible was the task of a teacher, how hard it was to eradicate
in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him
think honestly and independently, to instil into him true religion, the
ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on. In answer to this I
said something to him. He agreed again. He agreed very readily, in fact.
Obviously his brain had not a very firm grasp of all these "intellectual
subjects."
Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery,
whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether
he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows! I
remember we sat together under a clump of yellow acacia in one of the
little gardens that are scattered on the mountain side.
"I am leaving here in a fortnight," he said; "it is high time."
"Are you going on foot?"
"From here to Slavyansk I shall walk, then by railway to Nikitovka; from
Nikitovka the Donets line branches off, and along that branch line I
shall walk as far as Hatsepetovka, and there a railway guard, I know,
will help me on my way."
I thought of the bare, deserted steppe between Nikitovka and
Hatsepetovka, and pictured to myself Alexandr Ivanitch striding along
it, with his doubts, his homesickness, and his fear of solitude . . . .
He read boredom in my face, and sighed.
"And my sister must be married by now," he said, thinking aloud, and at
once, to shake off melancholy thoughts, pointed to the top of the rock
and said:
"From that mountain one can see Izyum."
As we were walking up the mountain he had a little misfortune. I suppose
he stumbled, for he slit his cotton trousers and tore the sole of his
shoe.
"Tss!" he said, frowning as he took off a shoe and exposed a bare foot
without a stocking. "How unpleasant! . . . That's a complication, you
know, which . . . Yes!"
Turning the shoe over and over before his eyes, as though unable to
believe that the sole was ruined for ever, he spent a long time
frowning, sighing, and clicking with his tongue.
I had in my trunk a pair of boots, old but fashionable, with pointed
toes and laces. I had brought them with me in case of need, and only
wore them in wet weather. When we got back to our room I made up a
phrase as diplomatic as I could and offered him these boots. He accepted
them and said with dignity:
"I should thank you, but I know that you consider thanks a convention."
He was pleased as a child with the pointed toes and the laces, and even
changed his plans.
"Now I shall go to Novotcherkassk in a week, and not in a fortnight," he
said, thinking aloud. "In shoes like these I shall not be ashamed to
show myself to my godfather. I was not going away from here just because
I hadn't any decent clothes. . . ."
When the coachman was carrying out my trunk, a lay brother with a good
ironical face came in to sweep out the room. Alexandr Ivanitch seemed
flustered and embarrassed and asked him timidly:
"Am I to stay here or go somewhere else?"
He could not make up his mind to occupy a whole room to himself, and
evidently by now was feeling ashamed of living at the expense of the
Monastery. He was very reluctant to part from me; to put off being
lonely as long as possible, he asked leave to see me on my way.
The road from the Monastery, which had been excavated at the cost of no
little labour in the chalk mountain, moved upwards, going almost like a
spiral round the mountain, over roots and under sullen overhanging
pines. . . .
The Donets was the first to vanish from our sight, after it the
Monastery yard with its thousands of people, and then the green roofs. .
. . Since I was mounting upwards everything seemed vanishing into a pit.
The cross on the church, burnished by the rays of the setting sun,
gleamed brightly in the abyss and vanished. Nothing was left but the
oaks, the pines, and the white road. But then our carriage came out on a
level country, and that was all left below and behind us. Alexandr
Ivanitch jumped out and, smiling mournfully, glanced at me for the last
time with his childish eyes, and vanished from me for ever. . . .
The impressions of the Holy Mountains had already become memories, and I
saw something new: the level plain, the whitish-brown distance, the way
side copse, and beyond it a windmill which stood with out moving, and
seemed bored at not being allowed to wave its sails because it was a
holiday.
THE STEPPE The Story of a Journey I
EARLY one morning in July a shabby covered chaise, one of those
antediluvian chaises without springs in which no one travels in Russia
nowadays, except merchant's clerks, dealers and the less well-to-do
among priests, drove out of N., the principal town of the province of
Z., and rumbled noisily along the posting-track. It rattled and creaked
at every movement; the pail, hanging on behind, chimed in gruffly, and
from these sounds alone and from the wretched rags of leather hanging
loose about its peeling body one could judge of its decrepit age and
readiness to drop to pieces.
Two of the inhabitants of N. were sitting in the chaise; they were a
merchant of N. called Ivan Ivanitch Kuzmitchov, a man with a shaven face
wearing glasses and a straw hat, more like a government clerk than a
merchant, and Father Christopher Sireysky, the priest of the Church of
St. Nikolay at N., a little old man with long hair, in a grey canvas
cassock, a wide-brimmed top-hat and a coloured embroidered girdle. The
former was absorbed in thought, and kept tossing his head to shake off
drowsiness; in his countenance an habitual business-like reserve was
struggling with the genial expression of a man who has just said good-
bye to his relatives and has had a good drink at parting. The latter
gazed with moist eyes wonderingly at God's world, and his smile was so
broad that it seemed to embrace even the brim of his hat; his face was
red and looked frozen. Both of them, Father Christopher as well as
Kuzmitchov, were going to sell wool. At parting with their families they
had just eaten heartily of pastry puffs and cream, and although it was
so early in the morning had had a glass or two. . . . Both were in the
best of humours.
Apart from the two persons described above and the coachman Deniska, who
lashed the pair of frisky bay horses, there was another figure in the
chaise--a boy of nine with a sunburnt face, wet with tears. This was
Yegorushka, Kuzmitchov's nephew. With the sanction of his uncle and the
blessing of Father Christopher, he was now on his way to go to school.
His mother, Olga Ivanovna, the widow of a collegiate secretary, and
Kuzmitchov's sister, who was fond of educated people and refined
society, had entreated her brother to take Yegorushka with him when he
went to sell wool and to put him to school; and now the boy was sitting
on the box beside the coachman Deniska, holding on to his elbow to keep
from falling off, and dancing up and down like a kettle on the hob, with
no notion where he was going or what he was going for. The rapid motion
through the air blew out his red shirt like a balloon on his back and
made his new hat with a peacock's feather in it, like a coachman's, keep
slipping on to the back of his head. He felt himself an intensely
unfortunate person, and had an inclination to cry.
When the chaise drove past the prison, Yegorushka glanced at the
sentinels pacing slowly by the high white walls, at the little barred
windows, at the cross shining on the roof, and remembered how the week
before, on the day of the Holy Mother of Kazan, he had been with his
mother to the prison church for the Dedication Feast, and how before
that, at Easter, he had gone to the prison with Deniska and Ludmila the
cook, and had taken the prisoners Easter bread, eggs, cakes and roast
beef. The prisoners had thanked them and made the sign of the cross, and
one of them had given Yegorushka a pewter buckle of his own making.
The boy gazed at the familiar places, while the hateful chaise flew by
and left them all behind. After the prison he caught glimpses of black
grimy foundries, followed by the snug green cemetery surrounded by a
wall of cobblestones; white crosses and tombstones, nestling among green
cherry-trees and looking in the distance like patches of white, peeped
out gaily from behind the wall. Yegorushka remembered that when the
cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers
into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white
tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like
bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka's father
and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny
had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had
been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut. Up to the time of her
death she had been brisk, and used to bring soft rolls covered with
poppy seeds from the market. Now she did nothing but sleep and sleep. .
. .
Beyond the cemetery came the smoking brickyards. From under the long
roofs of reeds that looked as though pressed flat to the ground, a thick
black smoke rose in great clouds and floated lazily upwards. The sky was
murky above the brickyards and the cemetery, and great shadows from the
clouds of smoke crept over the fields and across the roads. Men and
horses covered with red dust were moving about in the smoke near the
roofs.
The town ended with the brickyards and the open country began.
Yegorushka looked at the town for the last time, pressed his face
against Deniska's elbow, and wept bitterly.
"Come, not done howling yet, cry-baby!" cried Kuzmitchov. "You are
blubbering again, little milksop! If you don't want to go, stay behind;
no one is taking you by force!
"Never mind, never mind, Yegor boy, never mind," Father Christopher
muttered rapidly--"never mind, my boy. . . . Call upon God. . . . You are
not going for your harm, but for your good. Learning is light, as the
saying is, and ignorance is darkness. . . . That is so, truly."
"Do you want to go back?" asked Kuzmitchov.
"Yes, . . . yes, . . ." answered Yegorushka, sobbing.
"Well, you'd better go back then. Anyway, you are going for nothing;
it's a day's journey for a spoonful of porridge."
"Never mind, never mind, my boy," Father Christopher went on. "Call upon
God. . . . Lomonosov set off with the fishermen in the same way, and he
became a man famous all over Europe. Learning in conjunction with faith
brings forth fruit pleasing to God. What are the words of the prayer?
For the glory of our Maker, for the comfort of our parents, for the
benefit of our Church and our country. . . . Yes, indeed!"
"The benefit is not the same in all cases," said Kuzmitchov, lighting a
cheap cigar; "some will study twenty years and get no sense from it."
"That does happen."
"Learning is a benefit to some, but others only muddle their brains. My
sister is a woman who does not understand; she is set upon refinement,
and wants to turn Yegorka into a learned man, and she does not
understand that with my business I could settle Yegorka happily for the
rest of his life. I tell you this, that if everyone were to go in for
being learned and refined there would be no one to sow the corn and do
the trading; they would all die of hunger."
"And if all go in for trading and sowing corn there will be no one to
acquire learning."
And considering that each of them had said something weighty and
convincing, Kuzmitchov and Father Christopher both looked serious and
cleared their throats simultaneously.
Deniska, who had been listening to their conversation without
understanding a word of it, shook his head and, rising in his seat,
lashed at both the bays. A silence followed.
Meanwhile a wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills lay
stretched before the travellers' eyes. Huddling together and peeping out
from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground,
which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac
distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or
where it ends. . . . The sun had already peeped out from beyond the town
behind them, and quietly, without fuss, set to its accustomed task. At
first in the distance before them a broad, bright, yellow streak of
light crept over the ground where the earth met the sky, near the little
barrows and the windmills, which in the distance looked like tiny men
waving their arms. A minute later a similar streak gleamed a little
nearer, crept to the right and embraced the hills. Something warm
touched Yegorushka's spine; the streak of light, stealing up from
behind, darted between the chaise and the horses, moved to meet the
other streak, and soon the whole wide steppe flung off the twilight of
early morning, and was smiling and sparkling with dew.
The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp, all
withered from the sultry heat, turned brown and half dead, now washed by
the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again. Arctic petrels
flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots called to one another in
the grass. Somewhere, far away to the left, lapwings uttered their
plaintive notes. A covey of partridges, scared by the chaise, fluttered
up and with their soft "trrrr!" flew off to the hills. In the grass
crickets, locusts and grasshoppers kept up their churring, monotonous
music.
But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew stagnant, and
the disillusioned steppe began to wear its jaded July aspect. The grass
drooped, everything living was hushed. The sun-baked hills, brownish-
green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet shadowy tones, the
plain with the misty distance and, arched above them, the sky, which
seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no
woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness. . .
.
How stifling and oppressive it was! The chaise raced along, while
Yegorushka saw always the same--the sky, the plain, the low hills . . . .
The music in the grass was hushed, the petrels had flown away, the
partridges were out of sight, rooks hovered idly over the withered
grass; they were all alike and made the steppe even more monotonous.
A hawk flew just above the ground, with an even sweep of its wings,
suddenly halted in the air as though pondering on the dreariness of
life, then fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow over the steppe,
and there was no telling why it flew off and what it wanted. In the
distance a windmill waved its sails. . . .
Now and then a glimpse of a white potsherd or a heap of stones broke the
monotony; a grey stone stood out for an instant or a parched willow with
a blue crow on its top branch; a marmot would run across the road
and--again there flitted before the eyes only the high grass, the low
hills, the rooks. . . .
But at last, thank God, a waggon loaded with sheaves came to meet them;
a peasant wench was lying on the very top. Sleepy, exhausted by the
heat, she lifted her head and looked at the travellers. Deniska gaped,
looking at her; the horses stretched out their noses towards the
sheaves; the chaise, squeaking, kissed the waggon, and the pointed ears
passed over Father Christopher's hat like a brush.
"You are driving over folks, fatty!" cried Deniska. "What a swollen lump
of a face, as though a bumble-bee had stung it!"