It was night and I was dosing restlessly, when there reached my ear a
dull staccato sound, rising as it seemed from below the ground; it
penetrated my brain, and settled there like a round stone. After it
another forced its way in, equally short and dolorous, and my head
became heavy and sick, as though molten lead were falling upon it in
thick drops. The drops kept boring and burning into my brain; they
became ever more and more, and soon they were filling my head with a
dripping rain of impetuous staccato sounds.
“Boom! boom! boom!” Some one tall, strong and impatient kept jerking
out from afar.
I opened my eyes, and at once understood that it was the alarm-bell,
and that Slobodishtchy, the next village, was on fire. It was dark in
the room and the window was closed, and yet at the terrible call the
whole room, with its furniture, pictures and flowers, went out, as it
were, into the street, and no longer was one conscious of wall or
ceiling.
I do not remember how I got dressed, and know not why I ran alone and
not with the others; whether it was that they forgot me, or I did not
remember their existence. The tocsin called persistently and dully, as
though its sounds were falling, not from the transparent air, but were
cast forth from the immeasurable thickness of the earth. I ran on.
Amid the rosy sheen of the sky the stars twinkled above my head, and in
the garden it was strangely light, such as is neither by day, nor by
majestic, moon-lit night, but when I reached the hedge something
bright-red, seething, tossing desperately, looked up at me through the
fissures. The lofty limes, as though sprinkled with blood, trembled in
their rounded leaves, and turned them back in fear, but their sound was
inaudible on account of the short, loud strokes of the swinging bell.
Now the sounds became clear and distinct, and flew with mad speed like
a swarm of red-hot stones. They did not circle in the air like the
doves of the peaceful angelus, neither did they expand in the caressing
waves of the solemn call to prayer; they flew straight like grim
harbingers of woe, who have no time to glance backward and whose eyes
are wide with terror.
“Boom! boom! boom!” they flew with unrestrainable impetuosity, the
strong overtaking the weak, and all of them together delving into the
earth and piercing the sky.
And, as straight as they, I ran over the immense tilled plain, which
faintly scintillated with blood-red gleams like the scales of a great
black wild-beast. Above my head, at a wonderful height, bright isolated
sparks floated by, and in front was one of those terrible village
conflagrations, in which in one holocaust perish houses, cattle and
human beings. There behind the irregular line of dark trees now round,
now sharp as pikes, the dazzling flame soared aloft, arched its neck
proudly, like a maddened horse, leaped, threw burning flocks from its
midst into the black sky, and then greedily stooped for fresh prey. The
blood surged in my ears with the swiftness of my running, and my heart
beat loud and rapidly; but the irregular strokes of the tocsin overtook
my heart-beats and struck me full on head and breast. And so full of
despair was it that it seemed not the clanging of a metal bell, but as
though the very heart of the much-suffering earth were beating wildly
in the agony of death.
“Boom! boom! boom!” the red-hot conflagration ejaculated. And it was
difficult to realize that the church belfry, so small and slight, so
peaceful and still, like a maiden in a pink dress, could be giving
forth those loud, despairing cries.
I kept falling down on my hands against clods of dry earth, which
scattered beneath them, and again I would rise and run on, and the fire
and the summoning sound of the bell ran to meet me. One could already
hear the wood crackling as it caught fire, and the many-voiced cry of
human beings with the dominating notes of despair and terror. And when
the serpent-like hissing of the fire ceased for a moment, a prolonged
groaning became clearly differentiated: it was the wailing of women,
and the bellowing of cattle in a panic of terror.
A swamp intercepted my path. A wide, weed-grown swamp, which ran far to
right and left. I went into the water up to my knees, then to the
breast, but the swamp began to suck me down, and I returned to the
bank. Opposite, quite close, raged the fire, throwing up into the sky
golden sparks like the burning leaves of a gigantic tree: while the
water of the swamp stood out like a mirror sparkling with fire in a
black frame of reed and sedge. The tocsin called, despairingly in
deadly agony:
“Come! do come!”