Cupid once upon a bedOf roses laid his weary head;Luckless archer, not to seeWithin the leaves a slumbering bee!The bee awak’d—with anger wildThe bee awak’d, and stung the child.Loud and piteous are his cries;To Venus quick he runs, he flies!“Oh, mother!—I am wounded though—I die with pain—in sooth I do,Stung by some little angry thing,Some serpent on a tiny wing—A bee it was—for once I knowI heard a rustic call it so.”Thus he spoke, and she the whileHeard him with a soothing smile;Then said, “My infant, if so muchThou feel the little wild bee’s touch,How must the heart, ah Cupid! be,The hapless heart that’s stung by thee!”
Cupid once upon a bedOf roses laid his weary head;Luckless archer, not to seeWithin the leaves a slumbering bee!The bee awak’d—with anger wildThe bee awak’d, and stung the child.Loud and piteous are his cries;To Venus quick he runs, he flies!“Oh, mother!—I am wounded though—I die with pain—in sooth I do,Stung by some little angry thing,Some serpent on a tiny wing—A bee it was—for once I knowI heard a rustic call it so.”Thus he spoke, and she the whileHeard him with a soothing smile;Then said, “My infant, if so muchThou feel the little wild bee’s touch,How must the heart, ah Cupid! be,The hapless heart that’s stung by thee!”
Cupid once upon a bed
Of roses laid his weary head;
Luckless archer, not to see
Within the leaves a slumbering bee!
The bee awak’d—with anger wild
The bee awak’d, and stung the child.
Loud and piteous are his cries;
To Venus quick he runs, he flies!
“Oh, mother!—I am wounded though—
I die with pain—in sooth I do,
Stung by some little angry thing,
Some serpent on a tiny wing—
A bee it was—for once I know
I heard a rustic call it so.”
Thus he spoke, and she the while
Heard him with a soothing smile;
Then said, “My infant, if so much
Thou feel the little wild bee’s touch,
How must the heart, ah Cupid! be,
The hapless heart that’s stung by thee!”
The ladies, who had never heard any poetry except sacred chants and psalms, were charmed.
It came very appropriately, for the next moment Peter himself, as the signal to begin the fireworks, lit and started a flying machine in the shape of Cupid bearing a burning torch. Along an invisible wire Cupid glided down from the gallery to a raft on the Neva, where screens had been erected for “fire diversions” in wicker work designs, and with his torch he set the first allegory on fire—two flaring red hearts on an altar of dazzling light. On one of them was traced in green light a Latin P, on the other a C—Petrus, Caterina. The two hearts merged into one, the inscription appeared: “Out of two I create one.” Venus and Cupid blessed the wedlock of Peter and Catherine.
Another configuration appeared, a transparent luminous picture with two designs; on the one side the god Neptune looking towards Cronstadt, the newly erected fortress in the sea, with the inscription “Videt et stupescit—He sees and is amazed.” On the other—Petersburg, the new town amidst marshes and woods, with the inscription “Urbs ubi sylva fuit.”
Peter, a great lover of fireworks, managing everything himself, explained the allegories to the audience.
With pealing hiss, in sheaves of fire, numerous rockets soared into the heavens, and there, in the vaulted darkness, dissolved into a rain of slowly dropping and fading red, blue, green and violet stars. The Neva reflected and multiplied them in her black mirror. Fiery wheels were set turning; fiery jets sprang forth; serpents began to hiss and twirl; water and air balls, bursting like bombs, crashed with a deafening noise. A fiery hall appeared with blazing pillars, flaming arches and staircases, and in its centre, dazzling as the sun, shone forth the last tableau: a sculptor—was it the Titan Prometheus?—standing before an unfinished statue, which he is hewing with chisel and hammer out of a block of marble. Above on a pediment was the All-seeing Eye in a glory, with the inscription,“Deo adjuvante.” The stone block represented ancient Russia. The statue, although unfinished, already bore the semblance of the goddess Venus—she was the new Russia. The sculptor was, in fact, Peter himself. This tableau did not quite succeed: the statue burnt down too quickly and crumbled at the sculptor’s feet. He seemed to beat the air; then the hammer too crumbled away, and the hand remained still. The All-seeing Eye grew dim; it leered suspiciously and gave an ominous wink.
No one, however, paid any attention to this; all were occupied by a new spectacle. In clouds of smoke, illumined by a rainbow of Bengal lights, there appeared a huge monster, neither horse nor dragon; with pointed wings and fins, and its tail covered with scales, it came swimming along the Neva from the fortress towards the Summer Garden, towed by a flotilla of rowing boats. In a gigantic shell on the monster’s back, sat Neptune, with a long white beard and a harpoon at his feet—sirens and tritons blowing trumpets: “The tritons of the Northern Neptune sound the fame of Russia’s Tsar wherever they go,” explained one of the onlookers, the chaplain of the fleet, Gabriel Boushínsky. The monster was dragging after it six pair of empty barrels tightly bunged, with the cardinals of the “most Foolish Conclave” sitting astride, one on each barrel, securely strapped so as to prevent their falling into the water; they swam in this procession, pair after pair, loudly blowing their cow horns. After this followed a raft made up entirely of such barrels; it carried a huge tub filled with beer on which the Kniaz-Pope, prelate of Bacchus, floated in a wooden ladle as in a boat; Bacchus himself sat on the edge of the tub. Accompanied by strains of solemn music, this huge water machine slowly approached the Summer Garden, stopped at the Central Pavilion, where the gods landed.
Neptune turned out to be the Tsar’s court jester, the old boyar Tourgenev; the sirens, with their long fish-tails dragging after them, like long trains, almost concealing their feet, were serf girls; the tritons, the stable-men of the Admiral Apraksin; the Satyr or Pan accompanying Bacchus was the French dancing master of Prince Ménshikoff;the adroit Frenchman executed such gambols, that one could believe he had goat’s legs like a real faun. In Bacchus, wearing a tiger’s skin and a wreath of artificial grapes, with a sausage in one hand and a brandy bottle in the other, they recognised Konon Kárpoff, the leader of the court choristers; he was exceptionally fat and had a ruddy face; to make him appear more real, he had for three whole days been pitilessly filled with brandy, so that, according to his companions, “he had grown like a ripe cranberry,” and thus become a veritable Bacchus.
The gods surrounded the statue of Venus. Bacchus, reverently supported by the cardinals and the mock-Pope, fell on his knees before the statue, bowed before her very low, and proclaimed in a thunderous bass voice, worthy of a cathedral precentor: “Most honourable mother Venus, thy humble servant Bacchus, born of Semele, the creator of wine and joy, petitions thee against thy son Eros. Do not allow him, that mad Eros, to hurt us thy people, to ruin our souls, to wound our hearts; may it please thee, Gracious Queen, to be merciful unto us.” The cardinals responded with “Amen.” Drunk as he was, by force of habit Kárpoff was just going to start a church hymn in response, but was checked in time.
Then the Kniaz-Pope, the Tsar’s aged tutor, a boyar and table-companion in Tsar Alexis’ time, Nikíta Zotoff, in a burlesque mantle of red velvet trimmed with ermine, on his head a threefold tiara crowned with the indecent figure of a naked Eros, placed before the statue, on a brazier made of kitchen turnspits, a round brass pan, such as was commonly used for preparing hot punch. Pouring some brandy into it, he lit it. On long poles, bending with the weight, the Tsar’s grenadiers brought in a tub of peppered brandy. Besides the clergy, who were present at this festival, as at all similar burlesques, all the guests, both cavaliers and dames and even young girls, were obliged to approach the tub one by one; they had to accept a large wooden spoonful of brandy, were expected to all but empty it, and pour the few remaining drops on the altar fire. Then the cavaliers kissed Venus; the older ones her foot, the younger ones her hand, while the ladies greeted her with ceremonious courtesy. The ceremonies, every detail of which had beenthought out and arranged for by the Tsar, had to be punctiliously gone through under pain of severe punishment, even lashing. The old Tsaritsa Proscovy, Peter’s sister-in-law, his brother John’s widow, also drank brandy from the tub and curtsied before Venus. She, as a rule, tried to please Peter and yielded to all his new-fangled ideas; it was of no use trying to sail against the wind. Yet when the dignified old dame, dressed in her dark widow’s jerkin—Peter allowed her to wear the old style of dress—made the curtsey after the foreign manner before “the shameless naked wench,” she felt very uneasy at heart.
“I would rather be dead than see all this!” thought she. The Tsarevitch also humbly kissed the hand of Venus. Avrámoff tried to hide himself, but he was soon found out and brought back by force; although he quaked, and paled, and shuddered, and sweated, and almost swooned, when, kissing Satan’s image, he felt his lips touch the cold marble, yet he accurately performed the ceremony, watched by the keen eye of the Tsar whom he feared even more than the “white devils.”
The goddess seemed to look down upon these desecrations of the gods, this play of the barbarians, without the least wrath. They adored her involuntarily, even in this scoffing; the burlesque tripod became a real altar on which in the flickering bluish flame, thin as the serpent’s sting, burnt the soul of Dionysus, her brother god. And illumined by this flame the goddess smiled her subtle smile.
The banquet began. At the top end of the table, under a canopy made of hop foliage and whortleberries, which grew on the hillocks of the native marshes and took the place of the classic myrtle, sat Bacchus astride a barrel from which the Kniaz-Pope filled the glasses with wine.
Tolstoi, addressing himself to Bacchus, declaimed another poem by Anacreon.
When Bacchus, Jove’s immortal boy,The rosy harbinger of joy,Who, with the sunshine of the bowl,Thaws the winter of our soul;When to my inmost core he glides,And bathes it with his ruby tides,A flow of joy, a lively heat,Fires my brain, and wings my feet!’Tis surely something sweet, I think,Nay, something heavenly sweet, to drink!Sing, sing of love, let music’s breathSoftly beguile our rapturous death,While, my young Venus, thou and ITo the voluptuous cadence die!Then waking from our languid trance,Again we’ll sport, again we’ll dance.
When Bacchus, Jove’s immortal boy,The rosy harbinger of joy,Who, with the sunshine of the bowl,Thaws the winter of our soul;When to my inmost core he glides,And bathes it with his ruby tides,A flow of joy, a lively heat,Fires my brain, and wings my feet!’Tis surely something sweet, I think,Nay, something heavenly sweet, to drink!Sing, sing of love, let music’s breathSoftly beguile our rapturous death,While, my young Venus, thou and ITo the voluptuous cadence die!Then waking from our languid trance,Again we’ll sport, again we’ll dance.
When Bacchus, Jove’s immortal boy,
The rosy harbinger of joy,
Who, with the sunshine of the bowl,
Thaws the winter of our soul;
When to my inmost core he glides,
And bathes it with his ruby tides,
A flow of joy, a lively heat,
Fires my brain, and wings my feet!
’Tis surely something sweet, I think,
Nay, something heavenly sweet, to drink!
Sing, sing of love, let music’s breath
Softly beguile our rapturous death,
While, my young Venus, thou and I
To the voluptuous cadence die!
Then waking from our languid trance,
Again we’ll sport, again we’ll dance.
“It’s plain from the verses,” remarked Peter, “that Anacreon was a lordly drunkard and took life mighty easily.”
After the customary toasts for the welfare of the fleet, the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, the Archimandrite Theodosius Janovski stood up with solemn air, glass in hand. Notwithstanding the Polish expression of self-esteem on his face—he belonged to the minor Polish nobility—notwithstanding the blue decoration ribbon, and the diamond panagia with the Emperor’s likeness on one side and the crucifix on the other, with the diamonds more in number and larger on the former than the latter, notwithstanding all this, Theodosius, to quote Avrámoff’s account, “had the appearance of some monstrosity,” of a starveling or an abortion. He was small, thin and angular; in his tall mitre with its long folds of black crêpe, his very wide pall with wide open sleeves, he greatly resembled a bat. Yet when he joked and especially when he scoffed at sacred things, which usually happened when he was drunk, his sly eyes would sparkle with such wit, such impudent mirth, that the miserable face of the bat-like abortion became almost attractive.
“This will not be a flattering oration,” said Theodosius, turning to the Tsar, “but I speak the truth from my heart: by your Majesty’s actions we have been led from the darkness of ignorance into the lighted theatre of fame, from death into life, and have even joined the throng of civilised nations. Monarch! you have renewed and revived everything, and more yet, given new life to your subjects. What was Russia in olden times? What is she to-day? Let us consider the houses: old rough huts have been replaced by bright palaces; withered twigs by blooming gardens. Let us consider the fortifications: here have we things which prior to this we have not even beheld on charts!”
He went on talking for a long time “about laws, free learning, arts,” the fleet, these armed arks, the reformation and the new birth of the Church.
“And thou,” he exclaimed in conclusion, brandishing his arms in the heat of rhetoric, so that the wide sleeves, like black wings, made him still more like a bat, “And thou, City of Peter! young in thy supremacy! How great is the renown of thy founder! In a place where nobody even as much as dreamt of human habitation, in a short time a city has been erected worthy to hold the monarch’s throne. ‘Urbs ubi sylva fuit.’ A city in place of a wood. And who will not praise the position of this city? The district not only excels in beauty the rest of Russia, but even in other countries the like cannot be found! On a cheerful site art thou erected! Verily a metamorphosis, a change in Russia hast thou accomplished, O Majesty!”
Alexis listened, and looked at Theodosius attentively. When the later mentioned the “cheerful site” their eyes met for an instant, and the Tsarevitch seemed to discern a spark of mockery in the orator’s eyes. He remembered how Theodosius had often in his hearing, during his father’s absence, reviled this “cheerful site” and termed it a “devil’s bog,” “a devil’s haunt;” for some time already it seemed to the Tsarevitch that Theodosius was laughing at his father, almost in his very face, only disguised so cleverly and adroitly that no one save he, Alexis, noticed it; and every time on a similar occasion, Theodosius would exchange quick cunning looks with him, as if he saw in him an accomplice.
Peter, according to his custom, replied simply and concisely to the ceremonious oration:
“I am eager that the people should know how the Lord hath helped us hitherto. Yet we must not slacken our efforts; but taking up whatever burden God lays before us, work for the good and advantage of the community.”
And returning to ordinary conversation he gave in Dutch (so that the foreigners present could follow him) an exposition of the thought he had lately heard from the philosopher Leibnitz, and which had greatly struck him, “the rotation of sciences:” all science and art were born in the East and in Greece, thence they travelled to Italy,France, Germany, and lastly through Poland they came into Russia. “Now our turn has come; from us they will again return to Greece and to the East, their birthplace, completing a perfect circle in their wanderings. This Venus,” concluded Peter, lapsing into Russian, with a naïve declamatory eloquence, natural to him, “this Venus has come to us from there, from Greece. Our soil has been ploughed with the plough of Mars, and the seed has been scattered. We now await a good return which Thou, O Lord, vouchsafe unto us! May our harvest come soon and not like that of the date palm, whose fruit is never seen by those who plant it. May Venus the goddess of all that is loveable, domestic felicity, and national concord, ally herself to-day with Mars. May the union be for the glory of Russia.”
“Vivat, vivat, vivat, Peter the Great, the father of his country, the Emperor of all Russia!” shouted the guests raising their glasses of Hungarian wine. The Imperial title, announced publicly neither to Europe nor even to Russia, was accepted here in the circle of “Peter’s Eaglets.”
In the left wing of the gallery, the ladies’ pavilion, the tables had been pushed aside and dancing begun. The music of war trumpets, hautboys, and kettledrums of the Simeon and Preobrazhensky regiments, coming from behind the trees of the Summer Garden, softened by distance and perhaps by the charm of the goddess, sounded here at her feet, like the delicate flutes andvioles d’amourof Cupid’s kingdom, where lambs graze on soft meadows and shepherds loosen the girdles of shepherdesses.
Peter Tolstoi, who was dancing in the minuet with Princess Tsherkassky, hummed in his mellow voice to the strains of the music:
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,We all are, Cupid, in thy sway.Thy golden love-awaking dartHath reached and wounded every heart.
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,We all are, Cupid, in thy sway.Thy golden love-awaking dartHath reached and wounded every heart.
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,
We all are, Cupid, in thy sway.
Thy golden love-awaking dart
Hath reached and wounded every heart.
And affectedly curtsying to the cavalier, as the rule of a minuet demanded, the pretty princess responded with the languid smile of a Chloe to the aged Daphnis. Meanwhile in the dark alleys, bowers, in all the secluded nooks of theSummer Garden, whispers, rustlings, kisses, sighs of love were heard; the goddess Venus had begun her reign in the Hyperborean Scythia.
In an oak grove, apart from the rest, so that none could overhear them, a group of servants and pages, belonging to the Tsar’s household, were discussing the love exploits of their friends, the court ladies or maidens, after the manner of true Scythians and Barbarians.
In the presence of women they were shy and bashful, but when by themselves they spoke about “women” with brutal shamelessness.
“The wench Hamilton spent a night with the master,” calmly announced one of them.
It was Mary Hamilton, the Tsaritsa’s lady in waiting.
“The master is gallant, he can’t live without mistresses,” remarked another.
“It is not her first either,” retorted a page, a boy of about fifteen, deliberately spitting and again puffing the pipe which made him sick: “Before the master’s time she had a child by Golitsin.”
“And how do they manage to get rid of the brats?” the first one queried in amazement.
“And the husband does not know what his wife is after!” giggled the lad. “I saw with my own eyes just now, from behind the shrubs, how Billy Mons made love to our mistress!”
Wilhelm Mons was the Tsaritsa’s Kammerjunker, a foreigner of low origin, yet very adroit and handsome.
Huddling closer together, they began to speak about the strange rumour, which said that, quite lately, when cleaning a stopped up pipe of one of the fountains in the royal garden, the body of an infant was found, wrapped in a palace napkin.
The Summer Garden possessed the inevitable “grotto,” met with in all French gardens; it was a square edifice on the banks of the river Fontanna, rather awkward from the outside, suggesting a Dutch church, while the inside resembled a cave, laid out with large shells, mother of pearl, corals and porous stones; numerous fountains and water jets flowed into marble basins with that abundance of water, too great for the damp city of Petersburg, yet so dear to the heart of Peter.
Here staid old men, senators, and dignitaries, were also conversing about love and women.
“In olden days true wedlock was sacred, whereas nowadays, lust is considered gallantry, even by the husbands themselves, who with a calm heart watch their wives make love to others and call us fools for staking our honour on so weak a spot. They have given women their freedom; just wait a bit, they will soon master every one of us,” grumbled the oldest among them.
A younger one remarked that “free intercourse between the sexes is agreeable natural to all men, not fossilised by ancient customs. The real love passion, unknown in barbarous ages, had begun to possess sensitive hearts;” that “nowadays marriage boorishly reaps in one day all the flowers love tenderly rears for years; and jealousy is the pest of love.”
“Fair women have always been facile,” decided a middle-aged man, “but no doubt the devils themselves have set up their abode inside the ribs of the present giddy generation. They will hear of nothing but love-making.”
“And little girls, stirred by this example, begin to flirt, and only can’t do it, poor things, because they are too innocent. Oh! how the desire to please dominates women!”
Here entered her Majesty Catherine, attended by the Kammerjunker Mons and Mary Hamilton, her lady in waiting, a proud Scotchwoman with the face of Diana. The least elderly of the two old men, aware that Catherine was listening to their conversation, began amiably to defend the ladies.
“Truth herself proves the dignified nature of womankind by the fact, that God, at the end of His work, on the last day created Adam’s wife, as if without her the world were incomplete. Woman’s body alone is composed of all that is most charming in the universe. Add to these advantages her beauty of mind, and how can we help wondering at her perfection, and what excuses can be given by him who does not show due deference to her? Should there be some weakness about women, it is right to remember, how delicately they are made.” The oldest of the speakers only shook his head. His face clearly expressed that he was not convinced, that in his opinion “woman wasas far removed from a human being, as a crab was from a fish; a woman and the devil make a fine match.”
In the opening, between the cloven clouds, on the transparent melancholy sky bathed in golden-emerald, appeared the narrow sickle of the newborn moon; it cast a gentle beam into the depths of a dark alley, where near a fountain surrounded by the semicircle of a tall clipped hedge, on a wooden bench, at the foot of a marble Pomona, there sat a solitary girl of seventeen. She wore a wide dress of pink taffeta embroidered with small yellow florets; she had a slender waist and a fashionable head-dress; yet so Russian and simple was her face, that it was evident she had only recently left a calm country life, where she had grown up surrounded by nurses, under the thatched roof of an old house. Casting a timid look around her, she undid two or three buttons of her frock and swiftly pulled out a roll of paper, hid in her bosom and warm from the contact. It was a love missive from her nineteen year old cousin, who by the Tsar’s command had first been torn from the same peaceful spot, sent to Petersburg, then placed in the navy school connected with the admiralty, and a few days ago had been sent on a man-of-war with other gardes-marines, either to Cadiz or Lisbon—to quote his own expression “to the world’s end.” By the light of the white night and the moon the young girl read the note, written on ruled lines in large round childish characters:
“My heart’s treasure, my angel Nástia. I would like to know why you did not send me the last kiss. Cupid the thief has wounded my heart with his arrow. I suffer greatly, my heart’s blood is frozen.”
A heart was drawn with blood instead of ink between the lines, the same was pierced by two arrows; red spots stood for drops of blood.
Then followed verses probably copied from somewhere—
Remember Joy, our merry talk,Sweet words during every walk,How long is it since last I saw thee?Come my fair dove, come fly to me.Should my wish be not in vain,Mad with joy I’d be again.
Remember Joy, our merry talk,Sweet words during every walk,How long is it since last I saw thee?Come my fair dove, come fly to me.Should my wish be not in vain,Mad with joy I’d be again.
Remember Joy, our merry talk,
Sweet words during every walk,
How long is it since last I saw thee?
Come my fair dove, come fly to me.
Should my wish be not in vain,
Mad with joy I’d be again.
Having read the love letter, Nástia carefully rolled it up,hid it again in her bosom, hung her head and covered her face with a handkerchief, scented with “Cupid’s sighs.”
When she looked up again, a black cloud resembling a monster with gaping mouth had almost swallowed the narrow moon. His last beam reflected itself in the tear which hung on the young girl’s eye-lash. She watched the moon disappearing and hummed to herself the only love-song she knew—how it became known to her no one could say:—
Wherever I roam, and wherever I go,My heart it feels heavy, my spirits are low,And I, like a dove without wings, must make moan,For what is in life when my dearest is gone?Young am I and yet shedding tear after tearFor the sweetheart who left me in loneliness here....
Wherever I roam, and wherever I go,My heart it feels heavy, my spirits are low,And I, like a dove without wings, must make moan,For what is in life when my dearest is gone?Young am I and yet shedding tear after tearFor the sweetheart who left me in loneliness here....
Wherever I roam, and wherever I go,
My heart it feels heavy, my spirits are low,
And I, like a dove without wings, must make moan,
For what is in life when my dearest is gone?
Young am I and yet shedding tear after tear
For the sweetheart who left me in loneliness here....
Everything about her was strange and artificial, “after the manner of Versailles,” the fountain, Pomona, the espaliers, her dress of pink taffeta strewn with yellow florets, her hair arrangement “Budding pleasure,” and the scent “Cupid’s sighs.” Only she herself with her quiet grief and gentle song had remained simple, Russian, just as she had been under the thatched roof of her father’s country house.
Close to her, from the dark alleys, bowers and every possible nook of the Summer Garden, there continued to come whispers, rustles, kisses and love-sick sighs.
The sound of the minuet, wafted across like shepherds’ flutes andvioles d’amourfrom Venus’ kingdom, with the languid melody:—
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,Cupid, we all are in thy sway.Thy gol’en love-awaking dartHas reached and wounded every heart!
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,Cupid, we all are in thy sway.Thy gol’en love-awaking dartHas reached and wounded every heart!
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,
Cupid, we all are in thy sway.
Thy gol’en love-awaking dart
Has reached and wounded every heart!
In the pavilion, round the Tsar’s table the conversation continued. Peter was talking with the monks about the origin of Hellenic Polytheism; he could not conceive how the ancient Greeks, who had displayed sufficient knowledge about natural laws and mathematical principles, could at the same time call their soulless idols gods, and believe in them.
Here Michael Avrámoff could no longer contain himself,he mounted his hobby and began to prove that the gods exist, that they are in reality evil spirits.
“You talk about them as if you yourself had seen them,” said Peter.
“Not I, but others have really seen them, your Majesty,—beheld them with their own eyes,” exclaimed Avrámoff triumphantly. He took out of his pocket a fat leather pocket book, found in it two old cuttings from the Dutch newspapers and began to read, translating them into Russian:—
“We are informed from Spain that a stranger has brought with him to Barcelona a Satyr, a man covered with wool as with bark, and having goat’s horns and hoofs. He eats bread and milk, does not speak, but only bleats like a goat. This deformity attracts many visitors.” The second: “In Jutland fishermen have caught a siren or mermaid. The monster has a human body with a fish’s tail. The skin is pale yellow, the eyes are closed, the hair on the head is black. A membrane connects the fingers just like a goose’s foot. The fishermen pulled their net to the shore with great difficulty, breaking it in many places. Then the people made a huge tub, filled it with salt water and put the mermaid into it; they did this in the hope of preserving her from putrefying. This is reported on account of the many rumours current concerning maritime wonders, not all trustworthy, but this one may be believed, because the astonishing sea-monster has been caught.—Rotterdam,April 27, 1714.”
Printed matter was as a rule believed in, especially foreign news, for if foreigners lie, where could truth be found at all? Many of the people present not only believed in ghosts, nymphs, were-wolfs, water, house, and wood spirits, but had also seen the like with their own eyes. If wood spirits exist, why should not Satyrs also exist, if nymphs exist why should not mermaids with fish tails also? And why should not other gods, even this very Venus, also have true being?
The company were hushed, silenced; something strange and terrifying seemed to pass through the air; all suddenly became conscious of doing something they ought not to do.
Lower and lower sank the sky shrouded in black clouds.Brighter and brighter grew the bluish flashes of thunderless lightning. And these sudden flashes of light in the dark vault seemed to reflect the bluish flame on the altar which continued to glow at the feet of the statue; or else in the vault, as in an overturned bowl of a gigantic altar, hid by a bank of clouds, black as charcoals, there glowed the Bacchantic flames, sallying forth from time to time in the shape of lightning. The fire of the sky and the flame on the altar, responding to one another, seemed to hold converse about some terrible mystery unrevealed to mankind, yet already enacting itself in earth and sky.
The Tsarevitch, who was sitting not very far from the statue, gazed intently at her, for the first time after the reading of the newspaper cuttings. The nude white body of the goddess seemed so familiar to him, he was almost sure he had seen it before now, and even more than seen it—these very dimples on the shoulders, this virginal curve of the back appeared to him in his most passionate, secret visions, visions he felt ashamed to confess even to himself. Suddenly he remembered to have seen this same curve, these same dimples on the shoulder of his mistress, the serf girl Afrossinia. He felt dizzy, probably from the wine, the heat, the close atmosphere, and all this monstrous festival, so like a nightmare. He glanced again at the statue, and suddenly the white nude body, in the double light of the red smoky illumination vessels and the bluish flame of the tripod, appeared so real, terrible and enticing to him, that he was obliged to cast down his eyes. Was it indeed possible that the goddess Venus should appear to him also, as she did to Avrámoff, in the guise of a were-wolf—the serf girl Afrossinia? He crossed himself in thought.
“Not the Hellenes are to be wondered at, who, ignorant of the Christian law, bowed before lifeless idols,” rejoined Theodosius, continuing the conversation interrupted by the reading, “but, rather we Christians, who, ignorant of true reverence for icons, worship them as idols!”
This started one of those conversations which Peter specially delighted in, about all sorts of false wonders and signs, the deceitfulness of monks, the possessed, nervous epileptic women, saintly madmen, old wives’ tales, and thesuperstition of Russian priests. Again Alexis had to listen to all these oft-repeated odious tales: about the shift of the Queen of heaven, which the monks had brought from Jerusalem, as a gift to Catherine, and which was supposed could neither burn nor rot. When the material was experimented on it turned out to be woven of a special fireproof fibre—amianth: about the incorruptible body of the Finnish girl von Grot, whose skin “was like prepared pigshide and when pressed returned like a ball to its shape”; and about other false relics made of ivory which Peter had ordered to be sent in to the Petersburg Kunstkammer as a memento of “superstition now being exterminated by the zeal of the clergy.”
“Yes, there is much deception in the Russian Church concerning miracles,” concluded Theodosius, in his tone of plaintive malignity. He mentioned the last false wonder on record. In a small church near Petersburg an image of the Virgin had appeared, which shed tears, prophesying as it were great mishaps, even the final destruction of the new city. Peter, informed of it by Theodosius, went himself to the church, examined the icon, and exposed the deception. This had happened quite recently. The icon had not yet been sent into the Kunstkammer, and it had meanwhile been kept in the Tsar’s Summer Palace, a small Dutch house, here in the garden, only at a distance of about two yards from the gallery, on the corner between the Fontanna and the Neva. The Tsar, desirous showing it to his guests, ordered one of his servants to fetch the icon. When the man returned Peter left the table and coming out in front of the statue, where there was more room, he, leaning with his back against the marble pedestal and holding the image in his hand, began to give a careful and elaborate explanation of the deceptive mechanism. The guests again thronged round him, crowding, rising on tiptoe, striving to catch a glimpse across one another’s shoulders and heads, just as at the beginning of the festival, when the case containing the statue was being opened. Theodosius was holding the candle.
The icon was an old one. The face was dark, almost black; only the large sorrowful eyes, swollen as with tears, seemed alive. Alexis had always loved and honoured thisimage of “God’s mother, the Joy of all the sorrowing.”
Peter removed the silver trimming set with priceless gems; it came off easily, having been already loosened during the first examination. He then unscrewed the brass screws, which fastened a small piece of new limewood to the back of the icon. In its centre was fixed a smaller piece; it moved easily on a spring, a pressure of the hand was sufficient to work it. Removing both boards Peter pointed to two little cavities hollowed out in the wood just against the eyes of the image. Two tiny sponges soaked with water were placed in them, the water oozed through the almost imperceptible holes bored in the eyes, forming drops which looked like tears.
Peter proved it by an experiment; he moistened the sponges, put them into their cavities, pressed the board and the tears began to flow.
“This is the source of these miraculous tears,” said Peter. His face was as calm as if he had just been describing a curious trick of nature, or some unusual object in the Kunstkammer.
“Yes, there is much deception,” repeated Theodosius with a quiet smile.
All were hushed. Somebody moaned in a low voice, probably a drunkard in his sleep. Someone else tittered so curiously and unexpectedly, that everybody turned round almost in terror. Alexis longed to go away. But some strange torpor held him, as in a nightmare, when the legs refuse to carry one or the voice to cry out. In this lethargy he stood and watched Theodosius holding the light, Peter nimbly and adroitly fingering the wood of the image, the tears trickling down the sorrowful face, and over all there towered the white, terrible alluring body of Venus. He looked on, and an anguish like mortal sickness seized his heart and almost choked him. And it seemed to him that this torture would never end,—that it always had been, and would be.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of lightning; as if a fiery abyss had yawned above their heads. And through the glass cupola a burning light, painfully white, whiter than the sun, bathed the marble statue. Almost at the same instant a short, deafening peal of thunder was heard, as though heaven’s vault had been cloven and fallen into ruin. A darkness, black and impenetrable, followed the lightning. Suddenly a storm broke out, and moaned, and hissed, and rolled in the darkness; high wind together with pouring rain and hail; in the pavilion a general confusion ensued. The piercing shrieks of women were heard—one of them was laughing and crying in hysterics. The terrified people fled, from what, they knew not, knocking, falling and crushing one another. Somebody moaned in despair, “St. Nicholas! Holy Mother, have mercy upon us.” Peter, letting the icon drop, hurried away in search of Catherine. The flame from the overturned tripod, going out, flared up for the last time like the forked sting of a serpent, in the shape of an azure tongue, lighting up the face of the goddess. It alone had remained calm amid the storm, darkness and terror. Someone stepped on the icon. Alexis, stooping to lift it, heard the wood crack. The image had broken in two.
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.
A coffin of pinewood tree
Stands ready prepared for me;
Within its narrow wall
I’ll await the trumpet call.
This was the song of certain heretics, the raskolniks called—“The Coffin-liers.” “Seven thousand years after the creation of the world,” said they, “the second coming of Christ will take place; and should it not happen we will burn the Gospels themselves; as for the other books it is not worth believing them.” And they left their houses, lands, goods, and cattle, and every night went out into the fields and woods, put on clean shirts and shrouds, laid themselves in coffins hollowed out of tree trunks, and saying mass waited, expecting at every moment the trumpet call of the Judgment. Such was their idea of “meeting Christ.”
Opposite the headland formed by the Neva and the lesser Neva, in the widest part of the river, close to Gagarin’s hemp warehouse, among the rafts, barges, and cargo boats, stood the oak-rafts belonging to Tsarevitch Alexis. They had come from Nishigorod to Petersburg for the Admiralty dockyard.
On the night of the Venus festival in the Summer Garden an old bourlak was sitting at the rudder of one of these rafts; though it was summer he still wore a torn sheepskin coat and bast shoes. They called him “foolish John,” and he passed for a simpleton. For thirty years, day by day, month by month, year by year, he would sitevery night till dawn waiting to “meet Christ,” always chanting the same song of the coffin-liers. Sitting quite close to the water on the very edge of the raft, bending over and with both hands clasped round his knees, he looked in expectation on the bits of golden-emerald sky which gleamed through the black torn clouds. His fixed eyes looking from under matted grey hair and his immovable face were filled with terror and hope; slowly swaying from side to side, he sang in a long drawn melancholy voice:—
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.When the angels blow,From the graves will goThose who in them lie,To God’s throne on high.Two roads are there to take,Beware which choice you make!One leads to heaven fair,One to old Satan’s lair!
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.When the angels blow,From the graves will goThose who in them lie,To God’s throne on high.Two roads are there to take,Beware which choice you make!One leads to heaven fair,One to old Satan’s lair!
A coffin of pinewood tree
Stands ready prepared for me;
Within its narrow wall
I’ll await the trumpet call.
When the angels blow,
From the graves will go
Those who in them lie,
To God’s throne on high.
Two roads are there to take,
Beware which choice you make!
One leads to heaven fair,
One to old Satan’s lair!
“Ivan! come to supper!” they called from the other side of the raft. A fire was burning there on stones which had been put together in imitation of a stove, and over it hung on three sticks an iron kettle boiling fish-soup. Ivan did not heed, but went on singing. The group which sat talking round the fire comprised, beside the boatmen and bourlaks, the aged schismatic Cornelius, who preached of self-burning and was now on his way to the Kershen forests beyond the Volga; his disciple, a runaway Moscow scholar named Tichon Zapólsky; Alexis Furlong, a gunner, deserter from Astrachan; the caulker Ivan Boudlóff, a sailor under the Admiralty, also a deserter; the clerk Larion Dokoukin, an old woman Vitalia belonging to the “runners,” who to quote her own words “led the life of a bird,” always on the move, soaring everywhere, staying nowhere; her companion Kilikeya the Barefooted, an epileptic woman, who had a “satanic suggestion” in her abdomen; and many other “people in hiding” who had fled to save themselves from the heavy taxation, soldiering, the cat-o’-nine tails, forced labour, tearing of nostrils, beard shaving,crossing with two fingers, or some of the other terrors of Antichrist.
“I feel sick at heart,” said Vitalia, an alert old woman, wearing a dark loose neckerchief who, though wrinkled, was red-cheeked as an autumn apple. “And, I know not why, the days seem so dark; the sun does not seem to shine as it used to.”
“The times are sad, the fear of Antichrist is invading the world, hence this sorrow and heaviness,” explained Cornelius, a haggard old man with a broad pleasant face, pock-marked and, apparently, mole-eyed. In reality he had piercingly sharp sight; he wore a “heretic” cape, in shape somewhat monkish, a black under-cassock which had turned brown, and a leather belt with a thong. And whenever he moved, his iron chain, weighing a hundred weight and made of crosses which deeply scored into his flesh, would clang its links together. “I too, father Cornelius, begin to see that these are the last days,” groaned the woman. “The world’s sands are running short; they say the end will come about the middle of the eighth thousand years.”
“No,” retorted the old man with decision, “it won’t even last as long as that.”
“Lord be merciful unto us,” sighed one of the company, “God knows His own time; all we can do is to say—God have mercy upon us.”
And they all lapsed into silence. Clouds had again covered up the opening of the sky which had become as dark as the Neva. The distant lightning grew brighter and brighter; with each flash the thin taper pinnacle of the Peter and Paul fortress shone forth like a streak of pale gold, and was reflected in the Neva; the flat stone battlements which seemed to be sunken into the banks, and the group of stucco buildings clustering around: mercantile and garrison depôts, hemp sheds and magazines, stood out in black relief. In the distance, on the opposite shore, the lights of the Summer Garden glittered through the trees. As a last breath of the late Northern spring a smell of pine, birch, and aspen was wafted across from the Lake of Keivoussary. The small group of people on the flat and scarcely visible raft, lit up by a red fire, between the blackthunder clouds and the dark surface of the river seemed lonely and forsaken, as if hanging in the air midway between two skies and two abysses.
When all had stopped talking such silence ensued, that only the monotonous rippling of the stream under the logs was audible, while from the other end of the raft came along the water the same old melancholy song:—
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.
A coffin of pinewood treeStands ready prepared for me;Within its narrow wallI’ll await the trumpet call.
A coffin of pinewood tree
Stands ready prepared for me;
Within its narrow wall
I’ll await the trumpet call.
“Friends, is it true,” began Kilikeya, a young woman with a delicately transparent, almost waxen face, and feet terrible to look at, being black as the roots of an old tree (she always went about barefoot even in the keenest frost), “is it true what I heard to-day in the market, that there is no Tsar in Russia; that the present Tsar is not the right one, neither a Russian nor of royal blood, but either a foreigner or foreigner’s son, or a Swedish changeling?”
“Neither Swede nor foreigner, but a damned Jew of the tribe of Dan,” declared Cornelius.
“O Lord, Lord,” again somebody sighed heavily, “see how the royal race has degenerated!”
They began to discuss who Peter was: whether a Swede, a foreigner, or Jew.
“The devil knows who he is. Whether a witch has hatched or the damp bred him, one thing is certain: he is a were-wolf,” declared the sailor, a young man of about thirty years old, with a wide-awake, intelligent expression on his face, once probably handsome, now disfigured by the branded forehead and torn nostrils.
“Ay! My friends, I know, I know positively everything concerning the Tsar,” replied Vitalia; “I learnt from an old wandering beggar woman, and the choristers of the Ascension told me just the same. When our Tsar, the pious Peter, was abroad visiting foreign countries he came across the Glass Kingdom; this Glass Kingdom is ruled by a maiden, who, making sport of him forced him to sit on a red hot tin, and then, having shut him up in a barrel with nails, cast him into the sea.”
“No, not in a barrel, but he was laid in a trunk,” some one corrected.
“Well, it does not matter whether it was a barrel or a trunk, but the fact remains that he has been lost ever since, neither seen nor heard of. And in his stead the sea vomited up a Jew of the tribe of Dan, born of an ill-conditioned wench, and nobody knew him. And on his coming to Moscow he began to do as a Jew would; he declined the Patriarch’s blessing, would not go to the holy relics in Moscow, aware that the holy place would refuse his approach. Neither did he do honour to the tombs of former pious Tsars, for the simple reason that they were strangers to him and hateful in consequence. He saw no one of the royal family, neither the Tsaritsa nor the Tsarevitch nor the Tsarevenas, fearing they would detect him and say: ‘You don’t belong to us, you are not the Tsar, but a cursed Jew.’ He did not show himself to the people on New Year’s Day, fearing detection, just as Gregory had been detected by the people; he does not keep fast days nor go to church, nor does he wash in the bath-house on Saturdays, but lives dissolutely in a house with the foreigners. Nowadays a foreigner is an important personage in Muscovy; the sorriest foreigner stands higher than a boyar, higher even than the Patriarch himself. He himself, the cursed Jew, publicly dances with foreign courtesans; drinks wine not to the glory of God, but in an indecent ugly way, like a common toper, reeling on the ground and using bad language when drunk. For the amusement of foreigners, or, more likely, for the outraging of all Christian customs, he publicly calls his drink-companions by holy names, one, the most holy Patriarch, others again, Bishop and Archbishop, himself Archdeacon, thus defiling sacred names by applying them to shameful things.”
“The abomination of desolation, predicted by Daniel, has come to pass,” concluded Cornelius.
Other voices from the crowd chimed in:
“And the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, who is shut up in the Sousdal nunnery, tells us: ‘Have patience, keep to the Christian faith, this is not my Tsar—he is a stranger.’
“He is trying his best to make the Tsarevitch imitate him, but he can’t succeed; and that is why the Tsarwants to rid himself of him, and prevent his coming to the throne.”
“O Lord, Lord! what a trouble God has sent—the father rises against the son, the son against his father.”
“What father is he to him! The Tsarevitch himself says this man is neither father nor Tsar to me.”
“The Tsar loves the foreigners; the Tsarevitch does not love foreigners: ‘Give me time,’ says he, ‘and I will soon get rid of them.’ A foreigner once came to him and began to talk in an unknown language. The Tsarevitch burnt his clothes and scorched him; the foreigner complained to the Tsar; ‘Why do you go to him?’ was the answer, ‘while I live you will be unhurt.’”
“This is so! they all say when our Tsarevitch comes to the throne then the Tsar and his company will have to do their best to save themselves.”
“Truly, truly, it is so,” affirmed several voices cheerfully, “the Tsarevitch dearly loves the ancient ways.”
“A righteous man!”
“Russia’s Hope!”
“Many old women’s tales pass current among our folk nowadays; they cannot all be believed or trusted,” began Ivan Boudlóff, and at once his calm matter of fact words riveted the attention of the whole group. “But I must say, be he Swede or foreigner or Jew—the devil knows best—one thing is certain, ever since God sent him to rule over us we have seen no happy days; life has become hard; there is no peace. Take us mariners and soldiers. It is fifteen years since we began fighting the Swede, we have not disgraced ourselves anywhere, but have shed our blood freely; and yet to this day we see no peace. Summer and autumn we are sent to roam on the seas, the winter is spent among rocks, we are dying of sheer hunger. And the country is ruined to such an extent that in some places not even a sheep remains to the peasant. They say: ‘A clever head, a clever head.’ If he were clever, he would be able to understand his people’s needs. Where does he show his cleverness? He gave us a proof in his civic laws, the institution of the Senate. Yet what good comes of it? Not only more wages are wanted; but ask the people with law-suits if any one of them has beenpromptly attended to—— Ah! what is the use of talking? The whole nation is outraged. He so arranges matters as to drag the last bit of Christianity from our souls, the last bit of life from our bodies. How is it that God tolerates so much cruelty? But this is not happening in vain; a change will come, sooner or later, the blood will come over them.”
Suddenly one of the audience who had remained silent all this while, a woman named Elena with a simple, kind face, started defending the Tsar. “We don’t know how to express it,” she said, in a low voice, as if to herself, “but we continually pray—O Lord, bring the Tsar back to our Christian faith!”
Her timid attempt was silenced however, by indignant voices crying:—
“He is no Tsar! only a mock-Tsar; he has squandered himself, goes about as if beside himself.”
“He has become quite a Jew, he can no longer live without a sip of blood from time to time. The day he drinks blood, that day he is content and merry, but the day he gets none he can neither eat nor drink.”
“Glutton! he will have eaten everybody soon, for himself there is no extermination.”
“May the earth engulph him!”
“Fools! Curs!” interposed with fury the gunner Alexis Furlong, a red-haired man of huge height, with a face now suggesting a beast, now a child, “fools, for not knowing how to defend yourselves! All of you are doomed soul and body; you will be mashed up like worms in a cabbage. As for me nothing would please me better than to cut him up into little bits.”
Elena weakly sighed and made the sign of the cross; these words, she confessed afterwards, made her feel hot all over. The others looked with terror at Alexis, while he, fixing his bloodshot eyes on one spot, and clenching his fist, added slowly as if lost in thought,—and there was something yet more terrible in this measured tone than in his fury:—
“I am surprised that no one has finished him off before now. He is always about alone. There are plenty of chances to cut him up half a dozen times over.”
Elena grew pale, she wanted to say something, but her moving lips could not articulate a sound.
“Thrice have there been attempts to kill the Tsar,” said Cornelius, “but every time has failed: evil spirits attend and protect him.”
A fair, puny soldier, with an idiotic, haggard, sickly face, quite a boy, a deserter named Petka Jisla, began to talk hurriedly, stuttering and sobbing like an infant. He told them that three ships had brought branding-irons from abroad to brand people with. Strict watch was kept over them, nobody was allowed near; sentinels being stationed by them on the Cotline island.
These were the new recruit marks introduced by Peter, about which the Tsar wrote in 1712 to the general plenipotentiary Prince James Dolgorúki:—“to mark recruits, prick a cross with the needle on the left hand and rub in powder.”
“The marked men receive bread, those who have no marks go without, no matter if they starve. Ah! brethren, brethren, it is a sorry business.”
“Famine will bring us all unto the son of perdition to worship him,” affirmed Cornelius.
“Some have been already marked,” continued Petka, “I among them, lost man that I am.”
With evident difficulty he lifted with his right hand the left which hung powerless at his side, brought it to the light, and showed the recruiting mark, stamped with the government stamp.
“When stamped, the hand at once began to wither, first the left only, now the right has began; try as I may to raise and bless myself with it, I cannot.”
His companions looked terror-stricken at the dark spot, which seemed like a number of pock marks on the pale yellow, withered, lifeless hand. This was the human brand, the black cross of the crown.
“That is it, quite right,” declared Cornelius, “the sign of Antichrist. It is written: ‘he will mark them on the hand, he, who receives this mark, will lose the power to bless himself with the sign of the cross; yet his hand will be paralyzed not by chains, but by an oath, and no repentance shall be granted unto such.’”
“Brethren! brethren! what have they done unto me? Had I but known in time they should never have had me alive. They have spoilt a human body; marked a man like cattle.” Petka sobbed convulsively, and large tears rolled down his childish pathetic face.
“Friends,” ejaculated Kilikeya, as if struck by a sudden thought, “all this seems to point to one fact, that our Tsar Peter is himself the——”
She did not finish, the terrible word seemed to die on her lips.
“And what did you think?” Cornelius looked at her with his little sharp piercing eyes. “He is that very one Himself.”
“No, never fear, the veritable one has not yet appeared. He might be his forerunner,” tried to put in Dokoukin. But Cornelius stood up, the chain of iron crosses clanking; he lifted his hand, raised his two fingers in the “schismatic” way, and triumphantly announced:—
“Listen ye Orthodox, this is He who reigns, who has had dominion over you since the year 1666, the year of the Beast. In the beginning, the Tsar Alexis together with the Patriarch Nikon renounced the faith, and in so doing became the forerunner of the Beast. Now following in their footsteps Tsar Peter has finally uprooted all piety; he has annihilated the Patriarchate; claimed the Church and divine power, and, against our Lord Jesus Christ, has declared himself supreme head of the Church, the absolute pastor. And vieing with the supremacy of Christ, about whom it is written:—‘I am the first and the last,’ he called himself Peter the First. In the year 1700, on the first day of January, the new year’s day of the ancient Roman god Janus, at a firework entertainment he proclaimed on a screen—‘My time has now come.’ And he assumed unto himself the name of Christ, in the hymn sung at church in memory of the Poltava victory over the Swedes. And on his return to Moscow, he had young children in white robes placed on triumphal arches and taking part in the procession, to glorify him and sing, ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest. Lord God appear to us!’—as by God’s will, the Jewish children had praised our Lord Jesus Christ onhis entry into Jerusalem. Thus by his title he had elevated himself above every Name of God. For it has been said: under the name of Simon Peter there will appear in Rome the proud prince of this world, Antichrist, and in Russia, which is the third Rome, that Peter has appeared who is the son of darkness, the blasphemer and enemy of God, that is Antichrist. And as it is written: in all things will the false prophet strive to resemble the Son of God, so also does the aforesaid Peter, glorifying himself, say: ‘I am a father to the fatherless, a shelter for the wandering, a helper to those in trouble, a defence to the oppressed’; he has built hospitals for the sick and the aged; schools for the young; the simple and ignorant Russian people he has in a short time made shrewd and clever, and in all knowledge equal to other European nations. He has expanded the Empire, he has reinstated what was stolen, restored what had fallen to ruins, glorified what had been humbled, renewed the old; he has roused those sleeping in ignorance; and has created what was not. ‘I am gracious, meek, and merciful. Come unto me, and worship me, the living and Almighty God, for I am God, there is none other God but me.’ Thus the Beast feigns goodness; he about whom it is written, ‘That Beast is terrible and is like unto none.’ Thus a cruel wolf, masked under a sheepskin, will one day spring forth and swallow everyone. Listen then, ye Orthodox, to the word of the prophet: Go, go forth, go forth from Babylon, oh! my people and save yourselves, for there is no salvation in cities for the living; flee, persecuted faithful ones, who have no present abode, but are seeking the Coming. Flee into the woods, the deserts, hide your heads under the earth, in hills and caverns, in the earth’s abysses; for brethren you yourselves see, that we have reached the utmost evil. Antichrist himself has come, and with him the world is ending. Amen.”
He finished. A blinding flash of lightning suddenly lit up the man from head to foot, and to those who were looking at him, the small man seemed almost a giant in this glare, and the roll of the dull, as if subterranean thunder, seemed to be the echo of his words, which had filled heaven and earth.
He finished, and all around him remained silent. Againwas heard the dreamy ripple of the stream under the logs, and the languid melancholy song of Ivan wafted across from the other end of the raft:—