"There are not very many churches in these parts."
Whereafter he threw a glance across the river, and added venomously:
"Those devils THERE don't cross themselves, the accursed Serbs!"
Vasili looked at him, twisted a left-hand moustache, smoothed it again, regarded for a moment the sky and the defile, and sank his head.
"The trouble with me," he remarked in an undertone, "is that I can never remain very long in one place--always I keep fancying that I shall meet with better things elsewhere, always I keep hearing a bird singing in my heart, 'Do you go further, do you go further.'"
"That bird sings in the heart of EVERY man," the ex-soldier growled sulkily.
With a glance at us both, Vasili laughed a subdued laugh.
"'In the heart of every man'? " he repeated. "Why, such a statement is absurd. For it means, does it not, that every one of us is an idler, every one of us is constantly waiting for something to turn up--that, in fact, no one of us is any better than, or able to do any better than, the folk whose sole utterance is 'Give unto us, pray give unto us'? Yes, if that be the case, it is an unfortunate case indeed!"
And again he laughed. Yet his eyes were sorrowful, and as the fingers of his right hand lay upon his knee they twitched as though they were longing to grasp something unseen.
The ex-soldier frowned and snorted. For my own part, however, I felt troubled for, and sorry for, Vasili. Presently he rose, broke into a soft whistle, and moved away by the side of the stream.
"His head is not quite right," muttered the ex-soldier as he winked in the direction of the retreating figure. "Yes, I tell you that straight, for from the first it was clear to me. Otherwise, what could his words in depredation of Russia mean, when of Russia nothing the least hard or definite can be said? Who really knows her? What is she in reality, seeing that each of her provinces is a soul to itself, and no one could state which of the two Holy Mothers stands nearest to God--the Holy Mother of Smolensk, or the Holy Mother of Kazan? "
For a while the speaker sat scraping greasy deposit from the bottom and sides of the kettle; and all that while he grumbled as though he had a grudge against someone. At length, however, he assumed an attitude of attention, with his neck stretched out as though to listen to some sound.
"Hist!" was his exclamation.
What then followed, followed as unexpectedly as when, like an evil bird, a summer whirlwind suddenly sweeps up from the horizon, and discharges a bluish-black cloud in torrents of rain and hail, until everything is overwhelmed and battered to mud.
That is to say, with much din of whistling and other sounds there now came pouring into the defile, and began to ascend the trail beside the stream, a straggling procession of some thirty workmen with, gleaming dully in the hands of their leading files, flagons of vodka, and, suspended on the backs and shoulders of others, wallets and bags of bread and other comestibles, and, in two instances, poised on the heads of yet other processionists, large black cauldrons the effect of which was to make their bearers look like mushrooms.
"A vedro [2 3/4 gallons] and a half to the cauldron!" whispered the ex-soldier with a computative grunt as he gained his feet.
"Yes, a vedro and a half," he repeated. As he spoke the tip of his tongue protruded until it rested on the under-lip of his half-opened mouth. In his face there was a curiously thirsty, gross expression, and his attitude, as he stood there, was that of one who had just received a blow, and was about to cry out in consequence.
Meanwhile the defile rumbled like a barrel into which heavy weights are being dropped, for one of the newcomers was beating an empty tin pail, and another one whistling in a manner the tossed echoes of which drowned even the rivulet's murmur as nearer and nearer came the mob of men, a mob clad variously in black, grey, or russet, with sleeves rolled up, and heads, in many cases, bare save for their own towsled, dishevelled locks, and bodies bent with fatigue, or carried stumblingly along on legs bowed outwards. Meanwhile, as the dull, polyphonous roar of voices swept through the neck of the defile, a man shouted in broken, but truculent, accents:
"I say no! Fiddlesticks! Not a man is there who could drink more than a vedro of 'blood-and-sweat' in a day."
"A man could drink a lake of it."
"No, a vedro and a half. That is the proper reckoning."
"Aye, a vedro and a half." And the ex-soldier, as he repeated the words, spoke both as though he were an expert in the matter and as though he felt for the matter a touch of respect. Then, lurching forward like a man pushed by the scruff of the neck, he crossed the rivulet, intercepted the crowd, and became swallowed up in its midst.
Around the barraque the carpenters (the foreman ever glimmering among them) were hurriedly collecting tools. Presently Vasili returned--his right hand thrust into his pocket, and his left holding his cap.
"Before long those fellows will be properly drunk! " he said with a frown. "Ah, that vodka of ours! It is a perfect curse!" Then to me: "Do YOU drink?"
"No," I replied.
"Thank God for that! If one does not drink one will never really get into trouble."
For a moment he gazed gloomily in the direction of the newcomers. Then he said without moving, without even looking at me:
"You have remarkable eyes, young fellow. Also, they seem familiar to me--I have seen them somewhere before. Possibly that happened in a dream, though I cannot be sure. Where do you come from?"
I answered, but, after scanning me perplexedly, he shook his head.
"No," he remarked. "I have never visited that part of the country, or indeed, been so far from home."
"But this place is further still?"
"Further still?"
"Yes--from Kursk."
He laughed.
"I must tell you the truth," he said. "I am not a Kurskan at all, but a Pskovian. The reason why I told the ex-soldier that I was from Kursk was that I neither liked him nor cared to tell him the whole truth-he was not worth the trouble. And as for my real name, it is Paul, not Vasili--Paul Nikolaev Silantiev-- and is so marked on my passport (for a passport, and a passport quite in order, I have got)."
"And why are you on your travels? "
"For the reason that I am so--I can say no more. I look back from a given place, and wave my hand, and am gone again as a feather floats before the wind."
***************************
"Silence!" a threatening voice near the barraque broke in. "I am the foreman here."
The voice of the ex-soldier replied:
"What workmen are these of yours? They are mere sectarians, fellows who are for ever singing hymns."
To which someone else added:
"Besides, old devil that you are, aren't you bound to finish all building work before the beginning of a Sunday?"
"Let us throw their tools into the stream."
"Yes, and start a riot," was Silantiev's comment as he squatted before the embers of the fire.
Around the barraque, picked out against the yellow of its framework, a number of dark figures were surging to and fro as around a conflagration. Presently we heard something smashed to pieces--at all events, we heard the cracking and scraping of wood against stone, and then the strident, hilarious command:
"Hold on there! I'LL soon put things to rights! Carpenters, just hand over the saw!"
Apparently there were three men in charge of the proceedings: the one a red-bearded muzhik in a seaman's blouse; the second a tall man with hunched shoulders, thin legs, and long arms who kept grasping the foreman by the collar, shaking him, and bawling, "Where are your lathes? Bring them out!" (while noticeable also was a broad-shouldered young fellow in a ragged red shirt who kept thrusting pieces of scantling through the windows of the barraque, and shouting, "Catch hold of these! Lay them out in a row!"); and the third the ex-soldier himself. The last-named, as he jostled his way among the crowd, kept vociferating, viciously, virulently, and with a curious system of division of his syllables:
"Aha-a, ra-abble, secta-arians. Yo-ou would have nothing to say to me, you Se-erbs! Yet I say to YOU: Go along, my chickens, for the re-est of us are ti-ired of you, and come to sa-ay so!"
"What does he want?" asked Silantiev quietly as he lit a cigarette. "Vodka? Oh, THEY'LL give him vodka! . . . Yet are you not sorry for fellows of that stamp?"
Through the blue tobacco-smoke he gazed into the glowing embers; until at last he took a charred stick, and collected the embers into a heap glowing red-gold like a bouquet of fiery poppies; and as he did so, his handsome eyes gleamed with just such a reverent affection, such a prayerful kindliness, as must have lurked in the eyes of primeval, nomadic man in the presence of the dancing, beneficent source of light and heat.
"At least I am sorry for such fellows," Vasili continued. "Aye, the very thought of the many, many folk who have come to nothing! The very thought of it! Terrible, terrible!"
A touch of daylight was still lingering on the tops of the mountains, but in the defile itself night was beginning to loom, and to lull all things to sleep--to incline one neither to speak oneself nor to listen to the dull clamour of those others on the opposite bank, where even to the murmur of the rivulet the distasteful din seemed to communicate a note of anger.
There the crowd had lit a huge bonfire, and then added to it a second one which, crackling, hissing, and emitting coils of bluish-tinted smoke, had fallen to vying with its fellow in lacing the foam of the rivulet with muslin-like patterns in red. As the mass of dark figures surged between the two flares an hilarious voice shouted to us the invitation:
"Come over here, you! Don't be backward! Come over here, I say!"
Upon which followed a clatter as of the smashing of a drinking- vessel, while from the red-bearded muzhik came a thick, raucous shout of:
"These fellows needed to be taught a lesson!"
Almost at the same moment the foreman of the carpenters broke his way clear of the crowd, and, carefully crossing the rivulet by the stepping-stones which we had constructed, squatted down upon his heels by the margin, and with much puffing and blowing fell to rinsing his face, a face which in the murky firelight looked flushed and red.
"I think that someone has given him a blow," hazarded Silantiev sotto voce.
And when the foreman rose to approach us this proved to be the case, for then we saw that dripping from his nose, and meandering over his moustache and soaked white beard, there was a stream of dark blood which had spotted and streaked his shirt-front.
"Peace to this gathering!" he said gravely as, pressing his left hand to his stomach, he bowed.
"And we pray your indulgence," was Silantiev's response, though he did not raise his eyes as he spoke. "Pray be seated."
Small, withered, and, for all but his blood-stained shirt, scrupulously clean, the old man reminded me of certain pictures of old-time hermits, and the more so since either pain or shame or the gleam of the firelight had caused his hitherto dead eyes to gather life and grow brighter--aye, and sterner. Somehow, as I looked at him, I felt awkward and abashed.
A cough twisted his broad nose. Then he wiped his beard on the palm of his hand, and his hand on his knee; whereafter, as he stretched forth the pair of senile, dark-coloured hands, and held them over the embers, he said:
"How cold the water of the rivulet is! It is absolutely icy."
With a glance from under his brows Silantiev inquired:
"Are you very badly hurt?"
"No. Merely a man caught me a blow on the bridge of the nose, where the blood flows readily. Yet, as God knows, he will gain nothing by his act, whereas the suffering which he has caused me will go to swell my account with the Holy Spirit."
As the man spoke he glanced across the rivulet. On the opposite bank two men were staggering along, and drunkenly bawling the tipsy refrain:
"In the du-u-uok let me die, In the au-autumn time!"
"Aye, long is it since I received a blow," the old man continued, scanning the two revellers from under his hand. "Twenty years it must be since last I did so. And now the blow was struck for nothing, for no real fault.. You see, I have been allowed no nails for the doing of the work, and have been obliged to make use of wooden clamps for most of it, while battens also have not been forthcoming; and, this being so, it was through no remissness of mine that the work could not be finished by sunset tonight. I suspect, too, that, to eke out its wages, that rabble has been thieving, with the eldest leading the rest. And that, again, is not a thing for which I can be held responsible. True, this is a Government job, and some of those fellows are young, and young, hungry fellows such as they will (may they be forgiven!) steal, since everyone hankers to get something in return for a very little. But, once more, how is that my fault? Yes, that rabble must be a regular set of rascals! Just now they deprived my eldest son of a saw, of a brand-new saw; and thereafter they spilt my blood, the blood of a greybeard!"
Here his small, grey face contracted into wrinkles, and, closing his eyes, he sobbed a dry, grating sob.
Silantiev fidgeted--then sighed. Presently the old man looked at him, blew his nose, wiped his hand upon his trousers, and said quietly:
"Somewhere, I think, I have seen you before."
"That is so. You saw me one evening when I visited your settlement for the mending of a thresher."
"Yes, yes. That is where I DID see you. It was you, was it not? Well, do you still disagree with me? "
To which the old man added with a nod and a smile:
"See how well I remember your words! You are, I imagine, still of the same opinion?"
"How should I not be?" responded Silantiev dourly.
"Ah, well! Ah, well!"
And the old man stretched his hands over the fire once more, discoloured hands the thumbs of which were curiously bent outwards and splayed, and, seemingly, unable to move in harmony with the fingers.
The ex-soldier shouted across the river:
"The land here is easy to work, and makes the people lazy. Who would care to live in such a region? Who would care to come to it? Much rather would I go and earn a living on difficult land."
