CHAPTER VIIIA drag upon the hand and brain,A chain of gold is still a chain.
A drag upon the hand and brain,A chain of gold is still a chain.
A drag upon the hand and brain,A chain of gold is still a chain.
A huge rack of cloud was driving across the sky at a speed that frayed out long rags from its bellying sails, and trailed them heavily along the tops of the dark pine forest. The earth, but recently freed from the weight of the snow-mantle that for month after month had hidden it from sight, was brown and oozy, dotted with pools and ponds and spontaneous brooks and rivulets engendered by that appalling infliction, a Russian spring break-up.
Hard to bear, even in Moscow or Petersburg, this manifestation of nature becomes in the open country an actual calamity; for it is no small trial to wade from liquid mud to liquid mud, from spongy road to spongier path, while the great wind-storms that precede and follow the breaking of the ice, gurgle and howl and hoot like an army of drunken banshees beneath the arch of deluge overhead.
The solemn ceremonies announcing the formal ending of winter had already taken place. In the presence of the Czar, his Court, and his hierarchy, the cannon rending the hard-glittering surface of the Neva had done its work, and, therefore, officially speaking, spring was born to the Muscovite people. But how dour and morose was this infant season that particular year, shivering and cowering in the cold rain! Indeed, it had not as yet unfolded its very faintest green banner, and continued to sulk awaythe days and the nights, hiding from all the expectant eyes so impatiently awaiting its advent.
The Province of Tvernovna was being especially ill-treated, and coarse brutality might justly have been laid at the door of the storm-powers responsible for its evil case. There, rivers that had usually been content with flowing like slightly ruffled mill-ponds when once debarrassed of their winter coatings, now turned themselves into raging torrents, demolishing their banks with, so to speak, a wrathful heaving of the shoulder, and spreading out over the steppe in billowing waves, foam-slavered and yellow, sufficient to carry a house off its feet among the débris of trees and bushes that seemed but a smaller edition of the Sargasso Sea.
As a matter of fact the loosed waters had for days been encroaching on the outskirts of the village of Tverna, and already stretched broad tongues and ribbons of wetness toward the base of the slope whereon it nestled below the Castle, until it seemed stranded like a peninsula in a lagoon, and the dark soil floated up by the unpleasing tide spread in an ever-increasing stain over the drowned turf.
The lanes separating theisbasinto a very unconventional imitation of blocks was well-nigh impassable, save where logs and lengths of rough board had been precariously anchored by stones, so as to allow the inhabitants at least to reach thekabàk—or drinking-shop—this indispensable adjunct of any human habitation, especially in the North, wherever that North may befind itself. It is a populous village, numbering twelve hundred “souls,” as is plainly testified in orthodox characters by a painted sign at the entrance of the chief thoroughfare. Also itskabàkis of a better class than is usually found in such villages, for upon its once whitewashed walls are tacked highly inflamed pictures of many saints and sinners (mostly obtained from wandering peddlers), and the short curtainsof the square windows are of heavy red material, large enough to be drawn straight across the double glass of an evening, when “lights out” should be the order of the hour. Of course the atmosphere of the place is neither better nor worse than is to be encountered in similar places the Empire over. An unhappy mixture ofvòdka,kwàss, red-cabbage soup—wherein clots of sour milk are wont to lurk—stale tobacco, and the odor of humanity clad in thick woolens and greasy sheepskins gives it its unfragrant character during the day, while at night these amiable factors are overtoned by the smoking kerosene-lamps which an all-wise Providence has been powerless to spare to themujiksin this their era of progress.
Tverna has the fortune to be situated in one of Russia’s most prosperous provinces. Unlike Sámàrâ, Vintkà, and many others, it does not belong to a famine government, also the cholera is seldom heard of there, but, nevertheless, it has its drawbacks; for as it is of great agrarian and political importance, it is visited more frequently than is wholesome for it by professional agitators, who, daring the might of Prince Basil Palitzin, invade its purlieus whenever that kindly lord ventures to absent himself. It is well known that when the “presence flag” waves its silken folds above the Castle, peace and quiet abide in Tverna; but the minute it is hauled down and the tröika bearing him away has disappeared from view, the trouble-makers are once more at their evil work.
All day it had been raining densely, and a disheartening evening was setting in, with no prospect whatsoever of better things for the morrow. In thekabàkwere assembled the more important members of the village council, thestaròstá—a gigantic man, blond as ripe corn, pink-faced, and with a pair of prominent eyes—so beautifully blue that it is a pity to have to call them stupid—and a dozen or so of less illustrious persons, content with sitting in corners and listening to the pow-wow.
Seated sidewise on the massive table was a man of entirely different breed and aspect. To begin with, he wore an ordinary suit of mixed goods, such as any other inhabitants of the world at large might have sported; a scarlet tie—stained and crumpled—showed above his garish waistcoat, and a watch-chain of extreme thickness and brassiness dangled across his lean stomach. Quick, active, alert, lamentably unwashed as to neck and hands, he created at first glance the impression of believing himself to be somebody—a belief that since the morning two or three weeks before, when he had been, as he put it, “marooned” by the swollen waters of the Tvernovo, he had studiously endeavored to popularize.
In spite of his unrecherché appearance and regrettable vulgarity of apparel, he had money—not in great quantities, perhaps, but much more than the fewkopeksthe others there could afford to carry abroad with them.
During his “enforced” sojourn he had constantly posed for the well-informed person who has traveled much, who reads the “leaves” (newspapers), and he had always in his pocket some disgustingly thumbed brochure of an eminently provocative nature, embellished with prints which should never have seen the light of day—or night, either, for the matter of that—but which he displayed with much pride on every possible occasion. So far, it may as well be admitted, he had not shown himself aggressive, nor had he given any one the right to consider him a revolutionary agent, but mayhap he was only a little cleverer than those who had preceded him, or he was merely biding a favorable moment for a declaration of principles. Be this as it might, to-night he seemed more loquacious than heretofore, and began to engage thestaròstáin an animated conversation—the animation being, of course, all on his side, for the other was a man of a really bovine stolidity.
“What’ll you do if the water rises any higher?” thevisitor demanded of that worthy. His accent was not pure, and belonged to no district of Russia. Indeed, it had a vague Teuton flavor, too slight, however, to be noticed by his illiterate audience; also his sentences did not conform precisely to the idiom of a native-born Muscovite.
“Do?” Thestaròstáremoved his pipe from between his thick lips, cast a speculative glance at the dingy ceiling, and brought it slowly down again to the level of his interlocutor. “Why, we have already advised thetchinòvnik. What more can we do? It is his affair to help us when we’re in trouble.” He replaced his pipe in its natural receptacle, pushed back his fur cap, and fell silent again, as though the point was settled once and for all.
“Thetchinòvnik!” mocked the other. “Can he make the river go back to bed? And what about your tyrant? Why don’t you advisehimof the muddle you’re in here? Perhaps he’d be cleverer at that game than thetchinòvnik, and it’s his duty to protect you from harm, anyhow, isn’t it?”
“The Prince?” put in an elder who was lounging by the stove and now raised himself on one elbow. He looked the patriarch to the life, with his long white beard, and snowy locks falling benignantly around his finely wrinkled face. His eyes were still singularly bright under their shaggy eyebrows. “The Prince is far away, and does not know what occurs here.”
“He should know!” asserted the man who had given his name as Gregor Lukitch. “What’s the use of a tyrant if he’s not here when for once in a way he should be—tell me that? Eh?”
The elder pondered for a moment before answering this curious question.
“Well,” he said at last, “the Prince is good to us. We have no cause for complaint. His father was the same before him. All of them were always fineBarines. There are not many like them.”
Gregor Lukitch sneered. “Oh, you ancients!” he pronounced. “To listen to you one would think you had never been serfs, slaves, wretched creatures crushed by oppressors, victims of a tyrannical system that rested like a curse upon you, and still bears its bitter fruits. GoodBarinessay you? Ach! You make me sick.”
This lofty flight of words was rather lost upon the audience, but a few vague murmurs of approbation were heard to proceed from the corner where the younger men had congregated to smoke vile cigarettes—like kerosene-lamps, cigarettes are modern “luxuries” among the Russian peoples. Indeed, to indulge in “paper pipes”—as they are called—is looked upon as a sign of independence and enlightenment. Unfortunately those obtainable there by the masses are beyond all description offensive, and even the speaker’s nostrils, accustomed as they were to the terrible savor of public gatherings, began to quiver queerly.
“Gott verdamm!” he swore in a most un-Russian way, but happily quite under his breath. “Why do you little fathers persist in rotting the atmosphere with your beastly cigarettes? Here, have some decentish cigars. At any rate, they’ll not poison us!” Which was not strictly true, since the packet of “Perfectos” he pulled from a capacious pocket were, to say the best one could for them, rolled from nicotine-soaked cabbage-leaf, and dangerous-looking at that. Themujikis not particular, however, and cigars are to him the absolute complement of wealth and luxury; so with immense gratitude were the “delicacies” accepted and retained, excepting by thestaròstáand the elder, who knew better than to be tempted.
“If I were you,” the irrepressible Gregor now went on, “I would speedily put myself in a position to live on the fat of the land, eat my fill, drink something better than governmentvòdka, and enjoy life while I’ve got it to enjoy.”
“What’s the matter with governmentvòdka?” asked a tall, upstanding chap, blond and blue and pink as thestaròstáwas, but with less of that worthy person’s dullness. “It’s strong and cheap, isn’t it? Much cheaper than when we had to buy it from the Jew innkeepers.”
Gregor brought his shoulders to a level with the top of his small, flat, lobeless ears.
“You make me sweat!” he said, with ineffable contempt. “You’d be satisfied with anything, as long as you can burn your foolish throats with strong alcohol. Why, I tell you”—and here he beat one dirty fist into a grimier palm, the better to emphasize his point—“the government is getting millions out of you, jackasses that you are; and what do you get in return? Why, stuff not fit to wash horses’ feet with. Cheap! No! A thousand times no, not at the price your guts pay for it. Then, also, it stupefies your brains that, by G––, don’t need it! And that’s just what the government wants—to make you more imbecile than you already are. When you had to sell your harvests before they were out of the ground, in order to buy enough to get drunk as often as you could, sometimes you stopped to think. Now, with your nasty little cheap bottlefuls of ‘destroyer’ that you stow in all your pockets, and guzzle from morning till night, it’s much worse. You’re never sober. Oh, you can look at me! I don’t care. I’m speaking the truth. And who have you to thank for all this? Why, your ‘goodBarines,’ of course, your high lords who make the laws and keep you idiots under their thumbs. Government monopoly! Yah! Perhaps you were thinking that was all arranged for your benefit. But you are sheep, nothing else but sheep, grazing where you chance to be put, whether the grass is long or short, dry or juicy, never once dreaming of seeking new pastures to fill your bellies full.”
He paused, expelled a generous cloud of smoke from his well-trained lungs, and glanced triumphantly abouthim. The listeners were becoming interested, as was testified by varied and guttural grunts. Thestaròstáalone did not seem to relish the joke.
“You might talk more politely of myvòdka, you there!” he commented, raising his ponderous bulk from the bench near the stove. “I don’t get it for nothing, if I do sell it cheap! The government doesn’t make me a present of it, does it?”
The man opened his displeasing mouth wide, and laughed from the tonsils forward, his small, red-rimmed eyes disappearing almost completely in his bilious, moon-shaped face.
“Ah, well!” he chuckled. “You’ll always be the same shiftless good-for-naughts. I’ve told you so before, little fathers. I say so again!” He went on licking his cigar to reattach a ragged edge of pseudo-tobacco. “See, you! Your tyrant married a little while ago. Did he perhaps wed a dame of his own rank, even of his people—of ours, I mean?” he hastily corrected. “No, he’s taken a wife from among strangers, from an island you don’t know anything about, nor even where it is; but I do. It’s called England, and they are all merchants there, and—as you’re so devout—you might just as well know that they have another God than we in Holy Russia. Their priests are no priests at all; they dress like you and me—that is,” he interpolated, “like me, for they, of course, don’t wear yourtouloupeor yourkaftán!” He granted an approving tap to his eminently reproachable trousers and coat, which, according to him, were models of Anglican fashion, and once more glanced about him.
“Not of our religion!” chorused the audience. “Do you say that her new Highness is not of our religion?”
Gregor saw that he had scored a point, and gave instant attention to driving it home.
“They made her take some vows, of course,” he explained, unsatisfactorily. “I’ve read something of thekind in the news-sheets, but can you make a black heifer white by mumbling words over her? Can you change one from the south into one of us northerners? You can’t, eh? Well, neither can the Archimandrite change a foreign woman into a Russian lady fit to rule you as you seem to like being ruled.”
Marzof, the elder, rose to his full height. “You’re talking great foolishness, my son,” he calmly stated. “Why do you come and speak against strangers to us, who have known the grandmother of our Prince? She came from foreign parts, too, and she was an angel straight out of heaven, I’ll swear it. We gave her a name here, for we couldn’t say right the one she bore; that was too difficult for our stiff tongues, and the name we gave her was ‘Raïssa’ (the Heaven-sent). We were serfs then still—slaves, as you say—but she cared for us as if we’d been her own children. When the great sickness [cholera] came, she went from house to house, never afraid, helping us, feeding us, touching us with her tiny white hands.” The old man lifted his fur cap and reverently went on. “May God keep fresh the memory of Princess Raïssa, the blessed grandmother of our present Prince, and the mother of our late master, who, too, was kind to his people, and may He rest their souls in His Paradise!” He sat heavily down again, and Gregor Lukitch slipped from the table to the sanded floor.
“I abandon you—I leave you to your fate!” he clamored, spreading wide his arms, as one who lets drop a burden too heavy for his strength. “I leave you, I say, to your ignorance and your sloth. You will not see the truth when it’s shown to you dear as day. What more can I do!”
“You can speak less, in any case!” came witheringly from the corner near the stove, and a burst of laughter greeted old Marzof’s repartee. Plainly these people—save half a dozen hotheads or so who always drank in everyword Gregor pronounced—were not ready yet to swallow his preachings whole; but he was no fool, and knew well that at a given moment in Russia a mere handful of powder will set a province on fire. Where, therefore, was the use of flurry or haste? And as by now his own throat was dust-dry, he helped himself to a few deep swigs of thatvòdkahe had so harshly condemned—and looked the better for it.
Tverna was, in its way, not a bad village, where it lay spread out like a handful of grain carelessly scattered at the foot of the great Castle. There were not many rowdies there—not at least considering its comparatively large population. A few lazy, leisure-loving individuals, over-fond of drink and carousing, who, if improperly led, might give trouble, but that was all so far.
Indeed, here, more than on any other of Basil’s estates, Laurence would find her opportunity for good, if she wished to take it. As has just been seen, her husband’s grandmother had been literally worshiped at Tverna (her favorite abode), and well-beloved wherever her lord’s dominions extended; although she had, like Laurence, never set her foot on Russian soil before her marriage. She had learned the prickly language of her adopted country with an ease perhaps due to the difficulty of her own native Breton, and had adapted herself so rapidly to the customs and modes of the land she had learned to love that the remembrance of her was living, and very vividly so, where once she had reigned as a beneficent queen.
At the beginning of their wedded life Basil had been convinced that Laurence, too, would become the adored of his people. Her beauty, her grace, were factors in this task that no Slav—those passionate admirers of pretty women—would overlook. She would be pleased by their reverence, he had decided, pleased and flattered by their natural and instinctive deference of attitude; and wheneverhe had thought thus of the future—which was often—he had represented her to himself riding by his side on the forest roads or wrapped in the furs of her sleigh gliding over the snowy plains, or driving across thesteppein the golden days of summer on errands of kindness and mercy; for if Basil had a serious fault, it was to idealize, almost to the point of rendering it unrecognizable, every object of his love or affection.
That Laurence had not married him, as she so unsweetly expressed it, to go and “bury herself” in Russia, had never for a second entered his brain in those days. She had taken him for better or for worse—and certainly in his mind the latter clause could not be considered to mean the delightful accomplishment of simple duties under the most fortunate and agreeable of circumstances. She was a Russian Princess now, full-fledged and accredited—not one of the many make-believes who adopt the title as they would a new fashion as soon as they are out of the Muscovite dominions, because in the rest of Europe Russian Princes are the mode, and mere Counts and Countesses quite out of it, as it were. It followed, therefore, that she would behave in accordance with her rank—“with her heart,” he had mentally added; and so, even when some doubts had obtruded themselves upon him, when the Paris winter season began to draw to a close he did not hesitate to make all preparations for a long sojourn at Tverna.
Laurence did not openly oppose this plan. She intimated once or twice, it is true, that she would prefer to spend the spring in Paris—in fact, to remain there until theGrand Prix; but as yet not rough-shod enough to adventure herself on what she saw would be slippery ground, she ended by consenting to a speedy departure, albeit with no very good grace.
One thing only pleased her in this complete separation from her present haunts, and that was the impossibility it would bring about of any further intimacy with thePlenhöels. During the past few months she had actually succeeded in persuading herself that she really had reasons to be jealous of the “Gamin”—and jealous she had indeed become, but it was not on Basil’s account. There had been several encounters between her and her husband on the subject. Not very acrimonious ones, nor very violent, but yet quite sufficiently unpleasant to make him dread meeting his relatives when Laurence was present, for her very real hatred of Marguerite made her seize any occasion to vituperate against her. When alone Basil rarely accorded himself the joy of visiting at the Hôtel de Plenhöel, for this joy was beginning to appear to him a dangerous one. Indeed, he had by this curious course of conduct ended by arousing a sort of pained surprise in Marguerite, and a great deal of speculative astonishment in “Antinoüs,” who was gradually but surely becoming hurt and angry at his kinsman’s altered behavior and apparent coldness.
“Cette pie-grièche le rend assomant!” he pondered, which may be approximately Englished as “That sour-minded magpie is transforming him into a regular bore”—and wouldn’t Laurence have loved “Antinoüs” for this interpretation of her influence over his favorite cousin! but, ignorant of the curious inside workings of this family dissension, she rejoiced at her cleverness in estranging them from one another, little guessing what it would result in ultimately. “Leave well enough alone” is a sentence she might have called to mind with infinite profit to herself, but, unfortunately, her narrow, plotting little brain had no room for that thought for the morrow which often results so conveniently in the fruition of time.