My mother died when I was six years old. After her death my father
surrendered himself entirely to his own grief, and seemed to forget
my existence. He caressed my little sister at times, and saw to her
welfare in his own way, because he could trace her mother’s features in
her face, but I grew up like a wild sapling of the fields; no one gave
me any especial care, though, on the other hand, no one restricted my
freedom.
The little village where we lived was called Kniazh Gorodok or
Princetown. It belonged to a proud but impoverished race of Polish
noblemen, and presented all the typical features of any small town
in Southwestern Russia, where the pitiful remnants of stately Polish
grandeur drag out their weary days in a gently flowing current of
incessant toil mingled with the trivial bustle of Jewish “geschäft” or
business.
If you approached the village from the east, the first thing that
caught your eye was the prison--the great architectural ornament of the
town. The village itself lay spread below you on the shores of its
slumberous ponds, and you descended to it by a steep highway that was
barred at last by the traditional city gates. The drowsy veteran who
was toasting his red face in the sun, the very embodiment of tranquil
sleep, would lazily raise the barrier, and behold! you were in the
town, although at first you might not perceive it. Grey fences and
vacant lots littered with piles of rubbish were interspersed here and
there among the crumbling and staring-eyed little “khatkas” or huts.
Farther on, the wide market place appeared, bright with the roofs of
the Jewish “travellers’ rests,” while the Government buildings gave
an air of melancholy to the scene, with their white walls and their
barrack-like regularity of outline. The wooden bridge thrown across
the little river would groan and tremble under the wheels of your
carriage, swaying like a decrepit old man. A Jewish street led away
from the bridge, lined with warehouses, shops, miserable bazaars, and
bakers’ booths, while the Hebrew money-changers sat at their tables on
the sidewalks under their parasols. Everywhere were dirt and swarms of
children tumbling in the dust of the street. Another minute, however,
and you were already beyond the village. Softly the birches would be
whispering over the graves in the cemetery, while the breeze stirred
the wheat fields, and sang in mournful cadences among the roadside
telegraph wires.
The little river, spanned by the above mentioned bridge, flowed
from one pond into another, and thus enclosed the town at the north
and south by swamps and broad expanses of water. The ponds had grown
shallower from year to year, until at last they had become choked by
vegetation, and tall, thickly-growing reeds now rippled like the sea
upon the wide marshes. In the centre of one of these ponds was an
island, and on the island stood an old, half-ruined castle.
I remember with what terror I used always to contemplate this mighty,
decaying pile. Stories and legends, each one more frightful than the
last, were current about it. The island, it was said, was artificial,
piled up by the hands of captive Turks. “The castle is built upon
human bones;” so ran the saying among the old people of the village,
and my childish imagination pictured with horror thousands of Turkish
skeletons supporting with bony hands the island, the castle, and the
tall, pyramidal poplar trees. Of course this only made the castle
appear more terrible than ever, and even on bright days, if, emboldened
by the sunlight and the loud voices of the birds, we approached it
too closely, it would ofttimes throw us into spasms of panic fear, so
horribly did the dark cavities of its windows glower down upon us. A
mysterious rustling would seem to stray through its deserted halls, and
pebbles and bits of plaster would come rattling down, awakening the
muffled echoes. At such times we would scamper away without even a
glance behind us, seeming to hear, long after, sounds of clattering and
banging and laughter resounding in our ears.
But, on autumn nights, when the giant poplars swayed and chanted under
the wind that came flying to them across the ponds, this horror would
spread from the island to the mainland and would reign over the whole
village. “Oi vei mir!” the Jews would whisper with terror, while
God-fearing old citizens crossed themselves, and even our nearest
neighbour, the blacksmith, the very incarnation of diabolical strength,
would come out into his little yard and, making the sign of the cross,
would mutter under his breath a prayer for the peace of departed souls.
Old, grey-bearded Yanush, who, for lack of any other abode, had taken
refuge in a cellar of the castle, had often told us that on such nights
as these he could clearly hear cries rising from under the ground. It
was the Turks stirring under the island, knocking their bones together,
and loudly charging their Polish masters with cruelty. Then in the old
castle halls and on the island would resound the clanking of arms,
and the lords would call their liegemen together with loud shouts.
Yanush could hear quite plainly, through the moaning and howling of
the storm, the stamping of horses’ hoofs, the clashing of swords, and
the words of command. He even heard, once, the great-grandfather of
the present Count, immortalised by the memory of his ruthless deeds,
come trampling out on his blooded steed, and, riding to the centre of
the island, cry out with a dreadful oath: “Silence there, you yelping
heathen dogs!”
The descendants of this Count had long since abandoned the home of
their ancestors. The greater part of the ducats and treasure with which
their coffers had once been filled to overflowing had crossed over the
bridge into the hands of the Jews, and the last representatives of the
glorious line had built themselves a commonplace white house on a hill
a little farther from the town. Here their tedious but vainglorious
lives were spent in contemptuous and dignified isolation.
Only at rare intervals did the old Count, himself a ruin as gloomy as
the castle and the island, appear in the little town, mounted on an
old nag of English breed. At his side through the streets rode his
daughter, majestic and thin, in a black riding-habit, while their head
groom followed respectfully behind. The stately Countess was fated
to remain forever unwed. Any possible suitors who were her equals in
birth had faint-heartedly scattered across the world in search of the
rich daughters of merchants in foreign lands, and had either deserted
their ancestral castles or had turned them over to be pulled down by
the Jews. As for the little town which lay spread out at the foot of
the hill, not a youth could be found there who would dare to raise his
eyes to the beautiful Countess. We little boys, on catching sight of
these three riders, would pick ourselves up out of the soft dust of
the street, and, scattering timidly like a flock of birds into various
houses, would follow the gloomy lords of the terrible castle with eyes
full of curiosity and fear.
On a hill west of the town, among decaying crosses and sunken graves,
there stood a long-deserted dissenting chapel, the offspring of a city
in the valley proper below. Hither, in days of yore, the chapel bell
had summoned the townsfolk in their clean if plain surtouts, with
staves in their hands in place of the swords which rattled at the sides
of the small farmers, also called hither from the neighbouring villages
and farms by the clear notes of the chapel bell.
From here could be seen the island, with its great, sombre poplars,
but the castle kept itself angrily and contemptuously hidden from
the chapel behind their dense greenery. Only when the southwest wind
rose from the reed-beds and descended upon the island did the sighing
poplars sway aside and the castle windows gleam between them, allowing
the castle to cast dark glances at the little chapel. Both were corpses
now. The castle’s eyes were dim and no longer reflected the rays of
the setting sun; the chapel’s roof had fallen in, and, in place of its
sonorous, high-toned copper bell, the screech owls now raised their
evil, midnight voices among its rafters.
But the old, historic gulf that had, in former times, divided the
proud, lordly castle from the bourgeois dissenting chapel, continued
even after their death, kept open by the worms that had burrowed into
the crumbling corpses and had occupied the safest corners of their
vaults and cellars. The coffin-worms infesting these lifeless buildings
were men.
There had been a time when the ancient castle had served as a free
refuge without restrictions of any kind for every poor wretch that
needed it. Every one who could find no shelter in the town, every poor
creature that had fallen on evil days and had lost, for one reason or
another, the power to pay even the few copecks needed for a roof and
fire by night and in stormy weather--all these poor wretches found
their way to the island, and there hid their vanquished heads among the
gloomy, threatening, tottering ruins, paying for the hospitality they
found there only by the danger they ran of being buried alive under a
pile of débris. “He lives in the castle” had come to be the expression
used to denote the last stages of beggardom and civilian degradation.
The old castle gladly received and sheltered every variety of wandering
destitution: poor writers temporarily ruined, forlorn old women, and
homeless vagabonds. These persons tore down the interior of the rotting
building, broke up its floors and ceilings, lit their stoves, cooked
heaven knows what, and, in a word, fulfilled in some way or another
their functions of life.
Nevertheless, there came a day when dissension broke out among the
company roosting under the roof of those hoary ruins. Then it was that
old Yanush, who had once been one of the Count’s smaller “officials,”
prepared a sort of gubernatorial manifesto for himself and seized the
reins of power. He set himself to reorganise things, and for several
days such a hubbub ensued and such cries arose on the island that it
seemed at times as if the Turks had torn themselves from their prison
underground in order to avenge themselves upon their Polish tyrants.
This Yanush sorted out the inhabitants of the ruins, dividing the
sheep from the goats. The sheep, who remained in the castle as before,
helped him to expel the unhappy goats, who were stubborn and put up a
desperate but ineffectual resistance. When, at last, with the silent
but no less effective coöperation of the policeman, order was once more
restored on the island it appeared that the change effected had been
distinctly aristocratic in character. Yanush had allowed only “good
Christians,” that is, Roman Catholics, to remain in the castle, and,
besides this, most of them were either former servants or descendants
of servants of the Count’s family. They were all either old men in
long, tattered cloaks with huge red noses, or hideous, scolding hags
who still clung, in the last stages of destitution, to their caps and
mantles. They formed a homogeneous, closely united, aristocratic circle
that had established, as it were, a monopoly in the trade of beggary.
On week-days these old dames and gaffers would go with prayers on their
lips from house to house of the more prosperous townspeople, carrying
gossip, complaining of their hard lot, and pouring forth tears and
supplications; but on Sundays they would appear as the most honoured
members of those long lines that, in Western Russia, extend from the
doors of Roman Catholic churches. There they would proudly accept
offerings in the name of the “Lord Jesus” and the “Lady Mother of God.”
Attracted by the uproar and shouts that came to us from the island
during the revolution, I betook myself thither with a few of my
companions, and, hiding behind the thick trunks of the poplars,
we watched Yanush at the head of an army of red-nosed dotards and
unsightly shrews drive out the last inhabitants of the castle that were
liable to expulsion. Evening fell. Drops of rain were already falling
from a cloud that was hanging over the high summits of the poplars. A
few unhappy wretches, wrapping their impossibly tattered rags about
them, still lingered about the island, piteous, confused, and scared,
and, like toads that have been poked out of their holes by boys, tried
to crawl back unnoticed into some cranny of the castle wall. But Yanush
and the beldames drove them away with curses and cries, threatening
them with sticks and pitchforks, while the silent policeman stood by,
also grasping a stout oaken cudgel, and preserving an armed neutrality,
although he plainly favoured the conquering party. So this unhappy
riffraff disappeared grumbling over the bridge, leaving the island
forever, until one by one they were swallowed up in the rainy darkness
of the rapidly falling night.
After that memorable evening both Yanush and the old castle, which
had both, until then, impressed me with their vague grandeur, lost
all their attraction in my eyes. Before that night I had liked to
cross over to the island and to contemplate the grey castle walls and
mossy roof, even from afar. When the motley figures of its inmates
crawled out into the brightness of morning, yawning, coughing, and
crossing themselves in the sunlight, I had looked upon them with a
sort of reverence, as upon creatures clothed in the same mystery that
surrounded the whole castle. “They sleep there at night,” thought I;
“they hear everything that happens when the moon looks in at the broken
windows and the wind howls through the great halls.” I had loved to
listen to Yanush, when, with all the loquacity of seventy years, he had
taken his seat beneath a poplar tree and told me tales of the glorious
past of the dying building. Images of this past would rise before my
childish imagination, and there would be wafted into my heart a solemn
melancholy and a vague sympathy for the life lived here of old inside
these dismal walls. Romantic shades of an antiquity unknown to me would
flit across my young soul as the light shadows of clouds flit across a
bright field on a windy day.
But after that evening the castle and its bard appeared to me in a new
light. Meeting me the following day near the island, Yanush called me
to him and assured me with satisfaction that “the son of such honoured
parents as mine” could now boldly visit the island, as he would find
an absolutely orderly population upon it. He even led me by the hand
up to the very castle, but I snatched my hand out of his almost in
tears, and ran away as fast as my legs could carry me; the castle had
become odious to me. The windows of the upper story had been boarded
up, while the lower floor was ruled over by the “mantles and caps.”
The old women crawled out, looking so unattractive, fawning upon me so
mawkishly, and at the same time scolding one another so loudly that
I honestly wondered how the old Count who was wont to discipline his
Turks on stormy nights could stand having these old crones so near him.
But chiefly I could not forget the cold ruthlessness with which the
triumphant inhabitants of the castle had driven away their unfortunate
fellow-inmates, and my heart contracted at the remembrance of the poor
creatures left without a roof over their heads.
However this may be, the old castle taught me for the first time the
great fact that, from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. That
which was sublime in the castle was all overgrown with convolvulus and
ivy, and that which was ridiculous was revolting to me, and wounded
my childish susceptibility too keenly for me to feel the irony of the
contrast; this was still inaccessible to me.