The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Created LegendThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Created LegendAuthor: Fyodor SologubTranslator: John CournosRelease date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7480]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Texgt file produced by Eric Eldred, Camilla Venezuela and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREATED LEGEND ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Created LegendAuthor: Fyodor SologubTranslator: John CournosRelease date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7480]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Texgt file produced by Eric Eldred, Camilla Venezuela and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger
Title: The Created Legend
Author: Fyodor SologubTranslator: John Cournos
Author: Fyodor Sologub
Translator: John Cournos
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7480]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Texgt file produced by Eric Eldred, Camilla Venezuela and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREATED LEGEND ***
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
FOOTNOTES:
“For there is nothing either good orbad but thinking makes it so.”SHAKESPEARE“To the impure all things are impure.”NIETZSCHE
In “The Little Demon” Sologub has shown us how the evil within us peering out through our imagination makes all the world seem evil to us. In “The Created Legend,” feeling perhaps the need of reacting from his morose creation Peredonov, the author has set himself the task of showing the reverse of the picture: how the imagination, no longer warped, but sensitized with beauty, is capable of creating a world of its own, legendary yet none the less real for the legend.
The Russian title of the book is more descriptive of the author’s intentions than an English translation will permit it to be. “Tvorimaya Legenda” actually means “The legend in the course of creation.” The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active, eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle “morality play.” The modern novel is perhaps over-psychologized; eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight of under the mass of unnecessary naturalistic detail.
In this novel life passes by the author as a kind of dream, a dream within that nightmare Reality, a legend within that amorphousness called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual’s ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately naïve, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical manner—this taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well as the ideas.
As a background we have “the abortive revolution of1905.”This novel is an emotional statement of those “nightmarish” days. Against this rather hazy, tempestuous background we have the sharply outlined portrait of an individual, a poet, containing a world within himself, a more radiant and orderly world than the one which his eyes look upon outwardly. It is this “inner vision” which permits him to see the legend in the outer chaos, and we read in this book of his efforts to disentangle the thread of this legend by the establishment of a kind of Hellenic Utopia.
It is not alone the poet who is capable of creating his legend, but any one who refuses to be subject to the whims of fate and to serve the goddess of chance and chaos, “the prodigal scatterer of episodes” (Aisa). The tragic thing about this philosophy, as one Russian critic points out, is that even the definite settling of the question does not assure one complete consolation, for, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov,” one may say: “I do not accept God, I do not accept the world created by Him, God’s world; I simply return Him the ticket most respectfully.” Still it is with some such definite decision that he enters the kingdom of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity. Readers of “The Little Demon” have seen a practical illustration of the two forces in Peredonov and Liudmilla. Peredonov was petty and pitiful, “a little demon”—nevertheless he too “strove towards the truth in common with all conscious life, and this striving tormented him. He himself did not understand that he, like all men, was striving towards the truth, and that was why he had that confused unrest. He could not find his truth, and he became entangled, and was perishing.” Liudmilla, however, had saved herself from the pettiness and provinciality of this “unclean, impotent earth” by creating a new world for herself. She, at any rate, had her beautiful legend, knew her truth.
Elisaveta, of “The Created Legend,” also belongs to the Kingdom of Ananke. She finds her salvation in “the dream of liberation,” the dream dreamt by all good Russians and made an active creative legend by the efforts to realize it in life. Being an antithesis to the analytical novel, this novel treats of sex, not as a psychology but as a philosophy; nuances are avoided, the feminine figure becomes a symbol, drawn, not photographically but broadly, in fluent, even exaggerated Botticellian outlines. I might go even further and say that as a symbol of Russian revolution the figure of Elisaveta is perhaps meant to stand out with the statuesque boldness of the Victory of Samothrace. The feminine figure, nude or thinly draped, has been used as symbol for ideas in the plastic arts ever since art was born; our puritans have never been faced with the problem of what some of the mythological divinities in stone would do if they should suddenly come to life, become human. Yet it is a problem of this sort that Sologub has attempted to solve—the problem of the gods in exile. As for Elisaveta, Sologub goes indeed the length of describing her previous existence in the second of the series of novels that go under the general head of “The Created Legend”; she was then the Queen Ortruda of some beautiful isles in the Mediterranean, and she is fated to carry her queenliness into her later life.
“The Little Demon” is Sologub’s “Inferno,” “The Created Legend” his “Paradiso.” And just as the problem there was the abuse of bodily beauty, so it is here the idealism of bodily beauty. It is natural that the over-draping of our bodies, the supposed symbol of our modesty, but in reality an evidence of our lust, should form part of his thesis. But M. Anatole France has already pointed out brilliantly in “Penguin Island” how immodesty originated in the invention of clothes.
The conclusion is quite clear: it is beauty that can save the world, it is our eyes and our imaginations behind our eyes that can remodel the world into “a chaste dream.” Like Don Quixote, whom Sologub loves, we must see Dulcinea in our Aldonza, and our persistent thought of her as Dulcinea may make her Dulcinea in actuality.
Such are the thoughts behind this strange book, in which fantasy and reality rub unfriendly shoulders. But it would be robbing the reader of his prerogative to explain the various symbols the author employs; for this is in the full sense a Symbolist novel, and, like a piece of music or a picture in patterns, its charm to him who will like it will lie in individual interpretation. I cannot, however, resist the desire to speak of my own personal preference for Chapter XIII, in which the death of certain musty Russian institutions is brilliantly symbolized by the author in the passage of the risen dead on St. John’s Eve.
In the “quiet children” the author has resurrected, as it were, the child heroes in which his stories abound, and given them an existence on a new plane, “beyond good and evil.” It is only children, beings chaste and impressionable, who are capable of transformation—or shall we say transfiguration?—and if they happen to be in this case more paradisian than earthly it is because truth expressed in symbols must of necessity appear fantastic and exaggerated. It is, for the same reason, that we find the worthlessness of Matov expressed in his being turned by Trirodov into a paper-weight. Then there is the Sun, the Flaming Dragon, the infuriator of men’s passions, powerless, however, to affect the “quiet children,” who, freed of all passion—“the beast in man”—may have their white feet covered with the light dust of the earth, but never scorched by the evil heat.
The various references to the art and ideas of the poet Trirodov and to the poet’s tardy recognition are certain to be recognized as autobiographical.
I must add that in the original this first of “Created Legend” novels is called “Drops of Blood,” a phrase which recurs several times in the course of the narrative in connexion with the problem of cruelty in life.
February1916
I take a piece of life, coarse and poor, and create from it a delightful legend—because I am a poet. Whether it linger in the darkness; whether it be dim, commonplace, or raging with a furious fire—life is before you; I, a poet, will erect the legend I have created about the enchanting and the beautiful.
Chance caught in the entangling net of circumstance brings about every beginning. Yet it is better to begin with what is splendid in earthly experience, or at any rate with what is beautiful and pleasing. Splendid are the body, the youth, and the gaiety in man; splendid are the water, the light, and the summer in nature.
It was a bright, hot midday in summer, and the heavy glances of the flaming Dragon fell on the River Skorodyen. The water, the light, and the summer beamed and were glad; they beamed because of the sunlight that filled the immense space, they were glad because of the wind that blew from some far land, because of the many birds, because of the two nude maidens.
Two sisters, Elisaveta and Elena, were bathing in the River Skorodyen. And the sun and the water were gay, because the two maidens were beautiful and were naked. And the two girls felt also gay and cool, and they wanted to scamper and to laugh, to chatter and to jest. They were talking about a man who had aroused their curiosity.
They were the daughters of a rich proprietor. The place where they bathed adjoined the spacious old garden of their estate. Perhaps they enjoyed their bathing because they felt themselves the mistresses of these fast-flowing waters and of the sand-shoals under their agile feet. And they swam about and laughed in this river with the assurance and freedom of princesses born to rule. Few know the boundaries of their kingdom—but fortunate are they who know what they possess and exercise their sway.
They swam up and down and across the river, and tried to outswim and outdive one another. Their bodies, immersed in the water, would have presented an entrancing sight to any one who might have looked down upon them from the bench in the garden on the high bank and watched the exquisite play of their muscles under their thin elastic skin. Pink tones lost themselves in the skin-yellow pearl of their bodies. But pink triumphed in their faces, and in those parts of the body most often exposed.
The river-bank opposite rose in a slope. There were bushes here; behind them for a great distance stretched fields of rye, while just over the edge, where the earth and the sky met, were visible the far huts of the suburban village. Peasant boys passed by on the bank. They did not look at the bathing women. But a schoolboy, who had come a long way from the other end of the town, sat on his heels behind the bushes. He called himself an ass because he had not brought his camera. But he consoled himself with the thought:
“To-morrow I’ll surely bring it.”
The schoolboy quickly looked at his watch in order to make a note of the time the girls went out bathing. He knew them, and often came to their house to see his friend, their relative. Elena, the younger, now appealed most to him; she was plump, cheerful, white, rosy, her hands and feet were small. He did not like the hands and feet of the elder sister, Elisaveta—they seemed to him to be too large and too red. Her face also was red, very sunburnt, and she was altogether quite large.
“Oh well,” he reflected, “she is certainly well formed, you can’t deny her that.”
About a year had now passed since the retiredprivat-docentGiorgiy Sergeyevitch Trirodov, a doctor of chemistry, had settled in the town of Skorodozh.1From the very first he had caused much talk in the town, mostly unsympathetic. It was quite natural that the two rose-yellow, black-haired girls in the water should also talk of him. They splashed about gaily, and as they raised jewel-like spray with their feet they kept up a conversation.
“How puzzling it all is!” said Elena, the younger sister. “No one knows where his income comes from, what he does in his house, and why he has this colony of children. There are all sorts of strange rumours about him. It’s certainly a mystery.”
Elena’s words reminded Elisaveta of an article she had read lately in a philosophic periodical published at Moscow. Elisaveta had a good memory. She recalled a phrase:
“In our world reason will never dominate, and the mysterious will always maintain its place.”
She tried to recall more, but suddenly realizing that it would not interest Elena, she gave a sigh and grew silent. Elena gave her a tender, appealing look and said:
“When it is so bright you want everything to be as clear as it is around us now.”
“Is everything really clear now?” exclaimed Elisaveta. “The sun blinds your eyes, the water flashes and dazzles, and in this ragingly bright world we do not even know whether there isn’t some one a couple of paces away peeping at us.”
At this moment the sisters were standing breast-high in the water, near the overgrown bank. The schoolboy who sat on his heels behind the bush heard Elisaveta’s words. He grew cold in his confusion, and began to crawl on all-fours between the bushes, away from the river. He got in among the rye, then perched himself on the rail-fence and pretended to rest, as though he were not even aware of the closeness of the river. But no one had noticed him, as if he were non-existent.
The schoolboy sat there a little while, then went home with a vague feeling of disenchantment, injury, and irritation. There was something especially humiliating to him in the thought that to the two girl bathers he was merely a possibility speculated upon but actually non-existent.
Everything in this world has an end. There was an end also to the sisters’ bathing. They made their way silently together out of the pleasant, cool, deep water towards the dry ground, heaven’s terrestrial footstool, and out into the air, where they met the hot kisses of the slowly, cumbrously rising Dragon. They stood a while on the bank, yielding themselves to the Dragon’s kisses, then entered the protected bath-house where they had left their clothes.
Elisaveta’s clothes were very simple. They consisted of a greenish yellow, not over-long tunic-dress without sleeves, and a plain straw hat. Elisaveta nearly always wore yellow dresses. She loved yellow, she loved buttercups and gold, and though she sometimes said that she wore yellow in order to soften her ruddy complexion, she really loved it simply, sincerely, and for its own sake. Yellow delighted Elisaveta. There was something remote and unpremeditated in this, as if it were a thing remembered from another, previous life.
Elisaveta’s heavy black braid of hair was coiled tightly and attractively around her head, and as it was lifted quite high at the back, her neck showed—sunburnt and gracefully erect. Elisaveta’s face had a keen, almost exaggerated, expression of the mastery of will and intellect over the emotions. The long and peculiarly straight parting of her lips was very exquisite. Her blue eyes were cheerful—even when her lips did not smile. Their glance was thoughtful and gentle. The bright ruddiness and strong tan of the face seemed strangely alien to it.
While waiting for Elena to finish dressing Elisaveta walked slowly on the sandy bank and looked into the monotonous distances. The fine warm grains of sand gently warmed her bare feet, which had grown cold in the water.
Elena dressed slowly. She enjoyed dressing; everything that she put on seemed an adornment to her. She delighted in the rosy reflections of her skin, in her pretty light dress of a pinkish white material, in her broad sash of pink silk fastened behind with a buckle of mother-of-pearl, in her straw hat trimmed with bright pink ribbons on top and yellow-pink velvet on its underbrim.
At last Elena was dressed. The sisters climbed the sloping bank and went where their curiosity drew them. They loved to take long walks. They had already passed several times the house and grounds of Giorgiy Trirodov, whom they had not yet seen once. To-day they wished to go that way again and to try and see what was to be seen.
The sisters walked two versts through the wood. They spoke quietly of various things, and felt a little agitated. Curiosity often agitates people.
The sinuous road with two wagon-ruts revealed picturesque views at every turn. The path finally chosen by the sisters led to a hollow. Its sides, overgrown with bushes and weeds, looked wildly beautiful. From its depth came the sweet, warm odour of clover, and down below its white bosom grass was visible. A small narrow bridge, propped up from below with thin slender stakes, hung over the hollow. On the other side of the bridge a low hedge stretched right and left, and in this hedge, quite facing the bridge, a small gate was visible.
The sisters crossed the bridge, holding on to its slender hand-rail of birch. They tried the gate—it was closed. They looked at one another. Elisaveta, growing red with vexation, said:
“We’ll have to go back again.”
“Every one says that you can’t get into the place,” said Elena, “that you’ve got to get over the hedge, and that even that is impossible for some reason or other. It’s very strange. I wonder what they can be up to?”
Suddenly there was a slight rustle in the bushes by the hedge. The branches parted. A pale boy ran up to them. He looked quickly at the sisters with his clear, intensely calm, almost dead eyes. There was something strange in the shape of his pale lips, thought Elisaveta. A motionless, sorrowful expression lurked in the corners of his mouth. He opened the gate; he seemed to say something, but so quietly that the sisters could not catch his words. Or was it the sound of the light breeze in the wavering foliage?
The boy hid himself behind the bushes so quickly that it was hard to believe that he had been there at all; the sisters had no time to be astonished or to thank him. It was as if the gate had opened by itself, or had been pushed open by one of the sisters by chance.
They stood there undecided. An incomprehensible unrest took possession of them for an instant and as quickly went from them. Curiosity again dominated them. The sisters entered.
“How did he open it?” asked Elena.
Elisaveta, without a word, went quickly forward. She was so elated at getting in that she had almost forgotten the pale boy. Only somewhere, within the domain of vague consciousness, there gleamed dimly a strange white face.
The wood was quite like the one by which they had come to the gate, quite as pensive and as tall and as isolated from the sky, and as absorbed in its own mysteries. But here it seemed to have been conquered by human activity. Not far away voices, cries, laughter resounded. Here and there were evidences of left-off games. The narrow footpaths often led to wider paths of sand. The sisters quickly followed the winding path in the direction from which the children’s voices sounded loudest. Afterwards all this jumble of sound seemed to collapse, and it renewed itself in loud, sweet singing.
At last there appeared before them a small glade—oval in shape. Tall firs edged this open space as evenly as graceful columns in a magnificentsalle. The blue of the sky above it seemed especially bright, pure and dominant. The glade was full of children of various ages. They were sitting and reclining all around in ones, twos, and threes. In the middle some thirty boys and girls were singing and dancing; their dance followed strictly the rhythm of the tune and interpreted the words of the song with beautiful fidelity. They were directed by a tall, graceful girl who had a strong, sonorous voice, braids of magnificent golden hair, and grey, cheerful eyes.
All of them, the children as well as their instructresses—of whom three or four were to be seen—were dressed quite simply and alike. Their simple, light attire seemed beautiful. It was pleasant to look at them, perhaps because their dress revealed the active parts of their body, the arms and the legs. Dress here was made to protect, and not to conceal; to clothe, and not to muffle.
The blue and red of the hats and of the dresses gave emphasis to the vivid tones of the faces and of the arms and legs. There was a spirit of gaiety here, a sense of holiday splendour in these naturally adorned bodies, boldly revealed under clear azure skies.
Some of the children from among those who did not sing approached the sisters and looked at them in a friendly manner, smiling trustfully.
“You may sit down if you like,” said a boy with very blue eyes; “here is a bench.”
“Thank you, my dear,” said Elisaveta.
The sisters sat down. The children wished to talk to them. One little girl said:
“I’ve just seen a little squirrel. It was sitting on a pine. Then I gave a shout—you should have seen it run!”
The others also began to talk and to ask questions. The singers ended their song and scattered in all directions to play. The golden-haired instructress went up to the sisters and asked:
“Have you come from town? Are you pleased with what you have seen here?”
“Yes, it’s splendid here,” said Elisaveta. “Our place adjoins this. We are the Rameyevs. I am Elisaveta. And this is my sister Elena.”
The golden-haired girl suddenly blushed as if she felt ashamed that the wealthy young women were looking at her naked shoulders and at her legs naked to the knee. But seeing that they too were barefoot and wore short skirts, she quickly recovered and smiled at them.
“My name is Nadezhda Vestchezerova,” she said.
She looked attentively at the sisters. Elisaveta thought that she had heard the name somewhere in town—perhaps a tale in connexion with it, she could not remember exactly what. For some reason she did not mention this to Nadezhda. Perhaps it was a tragic history.
This fear of talking about the past occasionally came upon Elisaveta. Who knows what sorrow is hid behind a bright smile, and from what darkness has sprung the blossoming which gives sudden joy to a glance, elusively beautiful and born of unhappy worldly experience?
“Did you find your way in easily?” asked the golden-haired Nadezhda with a friendly but subtle smile. “It’s usually not a simple matter,” she explained.
Elisaveta replied:
“A white boy opened the gate for us. He ran off so quickly that we had not even the time to thank him.”
Nadezhda suddenly ceased smiling.
“Oh yes—he isn’t one of us,” she said falteringly. “They live over there with Trirodov. There are several of them. Wouldn’t you like to have lunch with us?” she asked, cutting short her previous remarks.
Elisaveta suspected that Nadezhda wanted to change the subject.
“We live here all day long, we eat here, we learn here, and we play here—do everything here,” said Nadezhda. “People have built cities to escape the wild beast, but they themselves have become like wild beasts, like savages.”
A bitter note crept into her voice—was it the echo of her past life or was it a thing foreign to her and grafted upon her sensitive nature? She continued:
“We have come from the town into the woods. From the wild beast, from the savages of the town. The beast must be killed. The wolf and the fox and the hawk—all those who prey upon others—they must be killed.”
Elisaveta asked:
“How is one to kill a beast who has grown iron and steel nails, and who has built his lair in the town? It is he who does the killing, and there’s no end in sight to his ferocity.”
Nadezhda knitted her eyebrows, pressed her hands, and stubbornly repeated:
“We shall kill him, we shall kill him.”
The sisters stayed to lunch.
They remained over an hour chattering cheerfully with the children and their instructresses. The children were sweet and confiding. The instructresses, no less simple and charming, seemed cheerful, care-free, and restful. Yet they were always busy, and nothing escaped them. Besides many of the children did certain things without being urged, this being evidently a part of a system, of which the sisters had as yet barely an inkling.
Instruction was mixed up with play. One of the instructresses invited the sisters to listen to what she called her lesson. The sisters listened with enjoyment to an interesting discourse concerning the objects the children had observed that day in the wood. There were other instructresses who had just returned from the depths of the wood—some children were going into the wood, others were coming out, quite different ones.
The instructress to whom the sisters were listening ended her discourse and suddenly scampered off somewhere. Through the dark foliage of the trees could be seen the glimmer of red caps and of sunburnt arms and legs. The sisters were again left alone. No one paid especial attention to them any longer; evidently there was no one they either embarrassed or hindered.
“It’s time to go,” said Elena.
Elisaveta made a move.
“Yes, let’s go,” she agreed. “It’s very interesting and delightful here, but we can’t stay for ever.”
The departure of the sisters had been noticed. A few of the children ran up to them. The children cried gaily:
“We will show you the way, or you’ll get lost.”
When the sisters paused at the gate, Elisaveta thought that some one was looking at her, out of a hiding-place, with a gaze of astonishment. In perplexity, strange and distressing, she looked around her. Behind the hedge in the bushes a small boy and a small girl were hiding. They were like the others she had seen here, except that they were very white, as though the kisses of the stern Dragon floating in the hot sky had left no traces upon their tender skin. Both the little boy and the little girl were staring with a motionless but attentive gaze. Their chaste look seemed to penetrate into the very depth of one’s soul; this rather disconcerted Elisaveta. She whispered to Elena:
“Look, what strange beings!”
Elena looked in the direction of Elisaveta’s glance and said indifferently:
“Monsters!”
Elisaveta was astonished at her sister’s observation—the faces of these hiding children seemed to her like the faces of praying angels.
By this time the children who had escorted the sisters ran back, jostling each other and laughing. Only one boy remained with them. He opened the gate and waited for the sisters to go out so that he could shut it again. Elisaveta quietly asked him:
“Who are these?”
With a light movement of her head she indicated the bushes, where the boy and the girl were hiding. The cheerful urchin looked in the direction of her glance, then at her, and said:
“There’s no one there.”
And actually no one was now visible in the bushes. Elisaveta persisted:
“But I did see a boy and a girl there. Both were quite white, not at all brown like the rest of you. They stood ever so quietly and looked.”
The cheery, dark-eyed lad looked attentively at Elisaveta, frowned slightly, lowered his eyes, reflected, then again eyed the sisters attentively and sadly, and said:
“In the main building, where Giorgiy Sergeyevitch lives, there are more of these quiet children. They are never with us. They are quiet ones. They do not play. They have been ill. It’s likely they haven’t improved yet. I don’t know. They are kept separately.”
The boy said this slowly and thoughtfully, as if he were astonished because there, in the house of the master, were other children, quiet ones, who did not join in their play. Suddenly he shook his head lustily, banishing, as it were, unaccustomed thoughts, then took off his cap and exclaimed cheerily and with some tenderness:
“A happy journey, darlings! Follow this footpath.”
He made an obeisance and ran off. The sisters were quite alone now. They went on in the direction given them by the boy. A quiet vale opened up before them, and in the distance a white wall was visible, which concealed Trirodov’s house. They continued their way towards the house. In front of them, keeping close to the bushes, walked a boy in a white dress; he appeared to be showing them the way.
It was very quiet. High above them, protecting himself from the human eye by dark purple shields, the flaming Dragon rested. His look from behind the deceptive, vacillant shields was hot and evil; he poured out his dazzling light, tormented men with it, yet wished them to rejoice in his presence and to compose hymns to him. He wished to rule, and it seemed as though he were motionless, as though he would never decide to retire. But his livid weariness already began to incline him westwards. Still his passion grew, and his kisses were scorching, and his infuriated gaze with its livid purple dimmed the glances of the two girls.
The girls’ glances were seeking—seeking Trirodov’s house.
Trirodov’s house stood about a verst and a half from the edge of the town, not at the end where the dirty and smoky factory buildings squatted, but quite at the other end, along the River Skorodyen, above the town of Skorodozh. This house and the estate attached to it occupied a considerable space, surrounded by a stone wall. One side of the place faced the river, the other the town, the rest adjoined the fields and woods. The house stood in the middle of an old garden. From behind the tall white stone wall the tops of the trees were to be seen, while between them, quite high, two turrets of the house, one somewhat higher than the other, were visible. The sisters felt as if some one in the high turret were looking down upon them.
There were ominous rumours concerning the house even in the days when it belonged to the previous tenant Matov, a kinsman of the Rameyev sisters. It was said that the house was inhabited by ghosts, and by phantoms who had left their graves. There was a footpath close to the house which led across the northern part of the estate, through a wood, to the Krutitsk cemetery. In the town they called this the footpath of Navii,2and they were afraid to walk upon it even by day. Many legends grew up around it. The localintelligentsiatried vainly to disprove them. The whole property was sometimes called Navii’s playground. There were some who said that they had seen with their own eyes this enigmatic inscription on the gates: “Three went in, two came out.” This inscription was, of course, no longer there. Now only lightly cut-out figures were to be seen, one under the other: ‘3’ on top, ‘2’ lower, and ‘1’ at the bottom.
All the evil rumours and warnings did not prevent Giorgiy Sergeyevitch Trirodov from buying the house. He made changes in it, and then settled here after his comparatively brief educational career had been rudely cut short.
It took a long time to rebuild and transform the house. The high walls prevented any one from seeing what was being done there. This aroused the curiosity of the townsfolk and caused all sorts of malicious gossip. The working men did not belong to the place, but were brought from a distance. Dark and short and rather gruff-looking, they did not understand the local speech, and seldom showed themselves in the streets.
“They are wicked and dark” was said about them in the town. “They carry knives about with them, and dig underground passages in Navii’s playground. He himself is clean-shaven like a German, and he’s imported these foreign earth-diggers.”
“I like that red-haired instructress, Nadezhda Vestchezerova,” said Elena.
She looked searchingly at her sister.
“Yes, she’s very sincere,” answered Elisaveta. ‘“A fine girl.”
“They are all charming,” said Elena with greater assurance.
“Yes,” observed Elisaveta, with indecision in her voice. “But there is that other—the one that ran away from us—there’s something I don’t like about her. Perhaps it’s a slight veneer of hypocrisy.”
“Why do you say so?” asked Elena.
“I simply feel it. She smiles too pleasantly, too lovingly. She seems in every way phlegmatic, yet she tries to appear animated. Her words come rather easily sometimes, and she exaggerates.”
It was quiet in the garden behind the stone wall. This was Kirsha’s free hour. But he could not play, though he tried to.
Little Kirsha, Trirodov’s son, whose mother had died not long before, was dark and thin. He had a very mobile face and restless dark eyes. He was dressed like the boys in the wood. He was quite restless to-day. He felt sad without knowing why. He felt as if some invisible being were drawing him on, calling to him in an inaudible whisper, demanding something—what? And who was it approaching their house? Why? Friend or foe? It was a stranger—yet curiously intimate.
At that moment, when the sisters were taking leave of the children in the wood, Kirsha felt especially perturbed. In the far corner of the garden he saw a boy in white dress; he ran up to him. They spoke long and quietly. Then Kirsha ran to his father.
Giorgiy Sergeyevitch Trirodov was all alone at home. He was lying on the sofa, reading a book by Wilde.
Trirodov was forty years old. He was slender and erect. His short-trimmed hair and clean-shaven face made him look very young. Only on closer scrutiny it was possible to detect the many grey hairs, the wrinkles on the forehead around the eyes. His face was pale. His broad forehead seemed very large—it was partly due to a narrow chin, lean cheeks, and baldness.
The room where Trirodov was reading—his study—was large, bright, and simple, with a white, unpainted floor as smooth as a mirror. The walls were lined with open bookcases. In the wall opposite the windows, between the bookcases, a narrow space was left, large enough for a man to stand in. It gave the impression of a door being there, hidden by hangings. In the middle of the room stood a very large table, upon which lay books, papers, and several strange objects—hexahedral prisms of an unfamiliar substance, heavy and solid in appearance, dark red in colour, with purple, blue, grey, and black spots, and with veins running across it.
Kirsha knocked on the door and entered—quiet, small, troubled. Trirodov looked at him anxiously. Kirsha said:
“There are two young women in the wood. Such an inquisitive pair. They have been looking over our colony. Now they’d like to come here to take a look round.”
Trirodov let the pale green ribbon with a lightly stamped pattern fall upon the page he was reading and laid the book on the small table at his side. He then took Kirsha by the hand, drew him close, and looked attentively at him, with a slight stir in his eyes; then said quietly:
“You’ve been asking questions of those quiet boys again.”
Kirsha grew red, but stood erect and calm, Trirodov continued to reproach him:
“How often have I told you that this is wicked. It is bad for you and for them.”
“It’s all the same to them,” said Kirsha quietly.
“How do you know?” asked Trirodov.
Kirsha shrugged his shoulders and said obstinately:
“Why are they here? What are they to us?”
Trirodov turned away, then rose abruptly, went to the window, and looked gloomily into the garden. Clearly something was agitating his consciousness, something that needed deciding. Kirsha quietly walked up to him, stepping softly upon the white, warm floor with his sunburnt graceful feet, high in instep, and with long, beautiful, well-formed toes. He touched his father on the shoulder, quietly rested his sunburnt hand there, and said:
“You know, daddy, that I seldom do this, only when I must. I felt very much troubled to-day. I knew that something would happen.”
“What will happen?” asked his father.
“I have a feeling,” said Kirsha with a pleading voice, “that you must let them in to us—these inquisitive girls.”
Trirodov looked very attentively at his son and smiled. Kirsha said gravely:
“The elder one is very charming. In some way she is like mother. But the other is also nice.”
“What brings them here?” again asked Trirodov. “They might have waited until their elders brought them here.”
Kirsha smiled, sighed lightly, and said thoughtfully, shrugging his small shoulders:
“All women are curious. What’s to be done with them?”
Smiling now joyously, now gravely, Trirodov asked:
“And will mother not come to us?”
“Oh, if she only came, if only for one little minute!” exclaimed Kirsha.
“What are we to do with these girls?” asked Trirodov.
“Invite them in, show them the house,” replied Kirsha.
“And the quiet children?” quietly asked Trirodov.
“The quiet children also like the elder one,” answered Kirsha.
“And who are they, these girls?” asked Trirodov.
“They are our neighbours, the Rameyevs,” said Kirsha.
Trirodov smiled again and said:
“Yes, one can understand why they are so curious.”
He frowned, went to the table, put his hand on one of the dark, heavy prisms and picked it up cautiously, and again carefully put it back in its place, saying at the same time to Kirsha:
“Go, then, and meet them and bring them here.”
Kirsha, growing animated, asked:
“By the door or through the grotto?”
“Yes, bring them through the dark passage, underground.”
Kirsha went out. Trirodov was left alone. He opened the drawer of his writing-table, took out a strangely shaped flagon of green glass filled with a dark fluid, and looked in the direction of the secret door. At that instant it opened quietly and easily. A pale, quiet boy entered and looked at Trirodov with his dispassionate and innocent, but understanding eyes.
Trirodov went up to him. A reproach was ripe on his tongue but he could not say it. Pity and tenderness clung to his lips. Silently he gave the strange-shaped flagon to the boy. The boy went out quietly.