XVIII

Never dare to repeat what you did yesterday. Courting in the Romeo and Juliet style is always absurd, particularly in this little hole of a place.

In the daytime Romashov tried to obtain a distant glimpse of Shurochka in the street, but he never succeeded. He often thought he recognized the mistress of his heart in some lady walking along. With beating heart and thrills of bliss he hurried nearer, but every time this turned out a bitter disappointment; and when he found out his mistake he felt in his soul an abandonment and deadly void that caused him pain.

ONEday towards the end of May, a young soldier belonging to Captain Osadchi’s company hanged himself. Curiously enough, this suicide happened on the same date as a similar dreadful event in the previous year, and that, too, in Osadchi’s company.

About this time drinking-bouts were arranged in the regiment. These, in spite of their quasi-official character, were not one whit inferior in coarseness to the regular and more private gatheringsinter pocula. It is highly probable that such stimulating entertainments were felt a special necessity when men, who have been tied to one another by fate, through a soul-destructive inactivity or senseless cruelty towards their kind, have chanced to look somewhat more deeply into each other’s hearts, and then—in spite of prejudices, unscrupulousness, and spiritual darkness—suddenly realize in what a bottomless pit of darkness they all are. In order to deaden the pangs of conscience and remorse at a life ruined and thrown away, all their insidious, brutish instincts have to be let loose at once and all their passions satisfied.

Shortly after the suicide in question, a similar crisis occurred among the officers. Osadchi, as might be expected, became the instigator and high-priest of the orgies. In the course of several days he organized in the mess, games of hazard morerecklessly than ever, during which fearful quantities of spirit were consumed. Strangely enough, this wild beast in human form soon managed to entice pretty nearly all the officers of his regiment into a whirl of mad dissipations. And during all these carousals Osadchi, with unparalleled cynicism, insolence, and heartlessness, tried to provoke expressions of disapproval and opposition, by invoking all the powers of the nether-world to insult the name and memory of the unhappy man who had taken his own life.

It was about 6 p.m., Romashov was sitting at his window with his legs resting on the window-sill, and whistling softly a waltz out ofFaust. The sparrows and magpies were making a noise and laughing at each other in the garden. It was not yet evening, but the shadows beneath the trees grew longer and fainter.

Suddenly a powerful voice was heard outside singing, not without a certain spirit, but out of tune—

“The chargers are champing, snorting, and neighing.The foam-covered bridle still holds them in sway.”

Immediately afterwards the door was flung wide open, and Viätkin rolled into Romashov’s room with a loud peal of laughter. Although it was all he could do to stand on his legs, he kept on singing—

“Matrons and maidens with sorrowful glancesWatch till their hero is lost to their sight.”

Viätkin was still completely intoxicated from the libations of the preceding day, and his eyelids werered and swollen from a night without sleep. His hat was half off his head, and his long, waxed moustache hung down like the tusks of a walrus.

“R-romuald, Syria’s holy hermit, come, let me kiss you!” he roared in a way that echoed through the whole house. “How long do you intend to sit brooding here? Come, let us go. There’s wine and play and jolly fellows down there. Come!”

Viätkin gave Romashov a sounding kiss and rubbed his face with his wet moustache.

“Well, well, that will do, Pavel Pavlich. Is that the way to go on?” Romashov tried to defend himself against Viätkin’s repeated caresses, but in vain.

“Hold out your hand, my friend. Osadchi is kicking up a row down there, so there’s not a pane of glass unbroken. Romashevich, I love you. Come here and let me give you a real Russian kiss, right on the mouth—do you hear?”

Viätkin with his swollen face, glassy eyes, and stinking breath was unspeakably forbidding to Romashov, but, as usual, the latter could not ward off such caresses, to which he now responded by a sickly and submissive smile.

“Wait and you shall hear why I came,” shrieked Viätkin, hiccupping and stumbling about the room. “Something important, you may well believe. Bobetinski was cleaned out by me to his last copeck. Then he wanted, of course, to give an IOU. ‘Much obliged, dear boy, but that cock won’t fight. But perhaps you have something left to pledge.’ Then he drew out his revolver—here it is, by the way.” Viätkin drew from his breeches pocket, which followed, turned inside out, a choice little, well-constructed revolver protected by a chamois-leather case. “As you see, dear boy, the Mervintype. ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘how much will you venture on that—twenty—ten—fifteen?’ And can you imagine such a curmudgeon? The first time only a rouble, on the ‘colour,’ of course. But all the same—hey, presto! slap-bang! After five raisings the revolver was mine and the cartridges too. And now you shall have it, Romashevich, as a keepsake of our old friendship. Some day you will always think of me thus: ‘Viätkin was always a brave and generous officer.’ But what are you doing? Are you writing verses?”

“Well, well, what have you brought this for, Pavel Pavlich? Put it away.”

“All right. Perhaps you think it’s no good? I could kill an elephant with it. Will experiment with it at once. Where’s that slave of yours? He shall get us a target on the spot. Wait a second. Hainán!—slave!—squire-at-arms!—hi!”

Viätkin rolled out of the door and then into Hainán’s closet, where for several minutes he was heard kicking up a row. Suddenly he returned in triumph with Pushkin’s bust under his arm.

“Well I never, Pavel Pavlich! Don’t make a fool of yourself. Let that alone.” But there was not sufficient force in Romashov’s objections, and Viätkin went on as he pleased.

“Rubbish! You chatter like a starling. Now we’ll put this on thetabouret. Stand up, you ass. I’ll teach you, by Jove!”

With these adjurations to poor Pushkin, Viätkin returned to Romashov, took his stand at the window-sill, and cocked his revolver. As he was not sober, he swung the muzzle of the weapon here and there, and Romashov expected every second that one of them would be killed.

The distance was about five paces. Viätkin waslong in taking aim, during which the muzzle described some dangerous curves in the air. At last the shot rang out, and in Pushkin’s right cheek appeared a big black, irregular hole. Romashov was for some moments deafened by the report.

“Well aimed!” shrieked Viätkin, rejoicing. “Here’s your revolver, and don’t forget my friendship. Hurry on now with your uniform jacket and come with us to the mess. Long live the glorious Russian Army!”

“Pavel Pavlich, I really cannot to-day,” protested Romashov weakly. He could not defend himself. In his resistance to the other’s strenuous pressing, he neither found the proper decisive word nor the tone of voice requisite for enforcing respect, and, blaming himself inwardly for his despicable passive weakness, he wearily followed Viätkin, who with his shaky legs bravely stumbled among the cucumbers and turnips in the kitchen-garden.

The officers’ meeting that night was more than usually noisy and stormy, and finally assumed an absolutely mad character. First they caroused at mess, then drove to the railway station to drink wine, after which the orgy proceeded in the officers’ casino. Romashov held aloof at first, was angry with himself for yielding, and experienced the feeling of loathing that overcomes every sober individual in a company of drunkards. The laughter struck him as being artificial, the witticisms poor, and the singing out of tune. But the hot red wine he drank at the station mounted to his head and produced in him a noisy, nervous merriment. A curtain of millions, as it were, of grains of sand dancing round each other was spread before his eyes, which were heavy with wine, and at the same time everything seemed to him so enjoyable, comic, and humorous.

The hours flew like seconds, and it was only when the lamps of thesalle-à-mangerwere lighted that Romashov began to realize how the time had sped and that night had set in.

“Gentlemen,” called some one, “the ladies are waiting for us. Let us be off to Schleyfer’s.”

“Hurrah!—to Schleyfer’s, to Schleyfer’s.”

The proposal was hailed with laughter and jubilation. All got up and the chairs danced along the floor. This evening everything, moreover, went off, as it were, automatically. Outside the mess-room door stood a whole row of phaetons, but nobody knew who ordered them and how they came there. Romashov was for some time tossed between moments of semi-consciousness and the fully wide-awake state and alertness of mind of a sober man. Suddenly he found himself sitting in a carriage beside Viätkin. On the front seat sat a third person whose features Romashov could not distinguish in the darkness of the night, however much he might, by violent jerks of his body sidewards, bend forward to look closely at the unknown. The latter’s face was quite dark. Now it shrunk up to the size of a man’s fist, at another time it stretched itself out awry, and then seemed to Romashov extraordinarily familiar. Romashov suddenly burst out into a roar of laughter that sounded unnatural and idiotic, and did not seem to come from himself, but from some stranger in his immediate vicinity.

“You’re lying, Viätkin. I know very well, my dear fellow, where we are going to,” babbled Romashov, in a drunken, chaffing tone. “You’re taking me to the girls, you rascal.”

At that moment a carriage passed them with adeafening noise. By the light of the lamp the outlines of a couple of brown country horses dragging quickly along in an awkward and ridiculous gallop an open carriage with a drunken coachman slashing his whip in a frantic way, and four no less intoxicated officers, were reproduced for a second.

Consciousness and the faculty of reflection returned to Romashov for a moment. Yes, it could not be disputed; he was actually on his way to a place where women surrendered their bodies to caresses and embraces for payment in cash. “Ugh! after all, it’s perhaps the same thing in the end. Women are women,” shouted a wild, brutish, impatient voice within him. At the same time, there rang in his soul a lovely, far-away, scarcely audible music—the memory of Shurochka, but in this unconscious coincidence there was nothing low, defiling, or insulting. On the contrary, the thought of her at this moment had a refreshing, soothing, and at the same time exciting and inflaming effect on his heart.

In a short time he would then find himself in close contact with that curious, mysterious, and much-vaunted species of women that he had never gazed on before. He dreamt of how he would meet their glances, take their hands, and listen to their merry laughter and joyous songs, and he felt that all this would bring him relief and consolation in his incessant longing and torturing desire for Shurochka, the only woman in the world who existed for him. In all these dreams, however, there was not a trace of degraded, sensual lust. As a dead-tired bird on the wing rushes, in the cold and darkness of an autumn night, blindly against the irresistibly attractive flood of light from the lighthouse, so,too, his soul, tortured by a cruel and capricious woman, was drawn into this sphere of undisguised, sensual tenderness and careless, boisterous merriment.

Suddenly the horses made a sharp swerve to the right, and at once the noise of the carriage and the squeaking of the wheel-tyres ceased. The carriage rocked here and there in the shallow cavities of the deep, sandy road. Romashov opened his eyes. Far beneath him and on a wide stretch of land, a multitude of small lights or lamps here and there cast their faint, uncertain glimmer. Now they disappeared behind invisible trees and houses, now they bobbed up before his eyes, and it looked as if a huge, fantastic, disordered crowd of people or a procession with torches and lanterns was moving forward down the road. An acrid smell of wormwood, a big dark branch slowly waved up and down over the heads of the parties who were being driven along, and, at the same time, they found themselves suddenly environed by a new atmosphere—cold, raw, and moist, as if it had arisen from a vault.

“Where are we?” asked Romashov.

“At Savalie,” shrieked in reply the dark figure sitting on the box-seat, in whom Romashov now recognized Lieutenant Epifanov. “We’re at Schleyfer’s, you know. Haven’t you ever been here before?”

“Go to hell,” grumbled Romashov. Epifanov kept on laughing.

“Hark you, Yuri Alexievich, shall we tell the little darlings in a whisper what an innocent you are? Later on, you’ll put all our noses out of joint.”

Again Romashov felt, half-unconsciously, that hehad sunk back into impenetrable darkness, until he, as suddenly, found himself standing in a large room with parqueted floor and Vienna chairs along the walls. Over the entrance to the room, and over three other doors leading to small, dark chambers, lay hangings of red and yellow flowered cotton. Curtains of the same stuff and colour flickered in the draught from the windows opened on a gloomy backyard. Lamps were burning on the walls, but the great room was filled with smoke and the smell of meat from the adjacent kitchen; and the fumes were only dispersed occasionally by the balmy spring air entering through the window, and by the fresh scent of the white acacias that bloomed outside the house.

About ten officers took part in this excursion. All seemed bent on solving the delicate problem of contriving to shriek, laugh, and bawl at the same time. Romashov strolled about the room with a feeling of naïve, unreflecting enjoyment, and, with a certain astonishment and delight, gradually recognized all his boon-companions—Biek-Agamalov, Lbov, Viätkin, Epifanov, Artschakovski, Olisár, etc. Even Staff-Captain Lieschtschenko was discovered there. He sat huddled up in a window with his usual, eternal, resignedWeltschmerzgrin. On a table stood a respectable row of bottles containing ale and a dark, thick, syrupy cherry-cordial. No one knew who had ordered all these bottles. They were thought—like so much else that night—to have come of their own accord. Romashov drank, proposed healths, and embraced every one he met, and began to feel sticky and messy about his lips and fingers.

There were five or six women in the room. One of them—a girl of fourteen dressed as a page, withrose-coloured stockings—sat on Biek-Agamalov’s knee and played with his epaulettes. Another—a big, coarse blonde in a red silkbasquineand dark skirt, and with powdered face, and broad, black, painted eyebrows—went straight up to Romashov.

“Gracious, my good sir, why do you look so miserable? Come with me into that room,” she added in a whisper.

She threw herself carelessly on a table, and there sat with one leg over the other. Romashov noticed how the strong outlines of her well-formed knee were shown off by the thin skirt. A shudder thrilled him, and his hands trembled.

“What’s your name?”

“Mine? Malvina.” She turned away with an air of indifference, and began swinging her legs. “Order me a cigarette.”

Two Jewish musicians came on the scene, one with a violin, the other with a tambourine. Soon a vulgar, hackneyed, screeching polka tune was heard in the room, whereupon Olisár and Artschakovski at once began to dance thecancan. They hopped round the room first on one leg, then on the other, snapped their fingers, wagged their hips, and bent backwards and forwards with vulgar, cynical gestures. This unattractive ballet was suddenly interrupted by Biek-Agamalov, who jumped off the table, shrieking in his sharp, penetrating voice—

“To hell with thestarar! Out with the ragtag and bobtail!”

Down by the door stood two young exquisites, both of whom had many acquaintances among officers, and had even been guests at the regimental soirées. One of them was a Treasury official, the other a landed proprietor and brother of the policemagistrate of the town. They both belonged to the so-called “cream” of Society.

The Treasury official turned white, but forced a smile, and answered in an affable tone—

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but can’t we join? We are old acquaintances, you know. My name is Dubiezki. We should not interfere with you at all.”

“Possibly in making love, but not when the fight begins,” added the magistrate’s brother, who tried to adopt a good-humoured tone.

“Out of this!” screamed Biek-Agamalov. “March to the door!”

“Gentlemen, by all means, put thestararout,” sneered Artschakovski.

A horrible confusion arose in the room. Tables and chairs were thrown over; the men shrieked, laughed, and stamped with all their might. The flames of the lamps rose like fiery tongues on high. The cold night air penetrated through the open windows, but without any cooling or calming effect on all these half-demented fighting-cocks. The two civilians had already been thrown into the backyard, where they were heard fiercely screeching and threatening with tears in their voices—

“Opritschniker,[20]brigands! This affair will cost you dear. We shall lodge a complaint with your commander, with the Governor.”

“Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,” Viätkin sneered in mockery, whilst stretching out of the window. “Go to blazes!”

It seemed to Romashov as if all the events of the day had followed one another without a break, but also without the least intelligible connection, just asif a series of wild pictures in loud and motley colours had been unrolled before his eyes. Again were heard the scraping of the violin and the tambourine’s blustering noise. One of the “partners” had now gone so far as to pirouette on the floor with nothing but his shirt on. A pretty, slender woman, who had up to then escaped Romashov’s notice, with dishevelled hair over her bare neck, and sharp, prominent shoulder-blades, wound her arms round poor Lieschtschenko’s neck and sang in his ear in her shrill soprano, and in unison with the violin’s awful melody:

“When consumption sets its mark,And you’re lying pale and stark,And doctors are seen fumbling round your couch.”

Bobetinski slung a glass of ale between the curtains of one of the little, darkcabinets, whence very soon proceeded an angry, but sleepy, thick voice—

“Aren’t you ashamed, sir? Who dares ...? Such a low swine!”

“I say! how long have you been here?” asked Romashov of the lady in the redbasquine, whilst, as it were, in an absent-minded way, he rested his hand on her strong, warm knee.

She made some answer, but he did not hear it. A fresh scene of savagery had absorbed all his attention. Sub-lieutenant Lbov was driving before him one of the musicians, and banging him on the head all the time with the tambourine. The poor Jew, terrified out of his wits, ran from corner to corner, screaming and babbling his unintelligible jargon, with wholly ineffectual attempts to catch his long, fluttering coat-tails, and incessantly glancing behind him from the corners of his eyes at hisunmerciful persecutor. Everybody was laughing. Artschakovski fell flat on the floor, and wriggled with tears in his eyes and in alarming convulsions of laughter. Directly afterwards the other Jew’s piercing yells were audible. Another of the company had snatched the violin, and thrown it down with fearful violence. With a crashing sound that harmonized, in an almost touching way, with the musician’s desperate cries for help, the instrument broke into a thousand fragments. What followed this Romashov never perceived, inasmuch as, for several minutes, he was in a sort of dark “nirvana.” When he had somewhat regained the use of his reason, he saw, as though in a fever-dream, that all in the room were running round each other with wild shrieks and gestures of despair. For an instant the whole swarm gathered round Biek-Agamalov, only in the next instant to be scattered like chaff in all directions. The majority sought safety in the little, darkcabinets.

“Out of it! I won’t stand a single one!” shrieked Biek-Agamalov in Berserker fury. He ground his teeth, stamped on the floor, and struck about him with his clenched fists. His face was crimson; the veins in his forehead from the roots of his hair to his nose stood like strained ropes; his head was lowered like a bull’s, and his unnaturally prominent eyes with their bloodshot whites were terrifying. He was unable to utter any human sounds, but groaned, like a wild beast, in a vibrating voice—

“Ah-ah-ah-ah!”

Suddenly, whilst bending the upper part of his body to the left with the suppleness of a panther, he drew his sabre, as quick as lightning, from its sheath. The broad, sharp blade described, witha whistling sound, several rapid circles over his head.

In frantic terror every living creature fled helter-skelter from the room through doors and windows, the women screaming hysterically, the men trampling down all that lay in their way. Romashov was carried by the current irresistibly towards the door, where an officer rushing past caused him, by the sharp facet of his uniform-button, a long, bleeding scratch on his face. The next moment all stood whooping and yelling in the yard, except Romashov, who alone remained by the door of the room. He felt his heart beating with increased force and quickness; but the murderous, unbridled scene filled him not only with terror, but also with an intoxicating feeling of savage, exulting defiance.

“I will have blood!” screamed Biek-Agamalov, with gnashing teeth. The sight of the terror he inspired deprived him of the last remains of understanding and reflection. With frantic strength and rage he smashed, with a few strokes, all the furniture nearest to him, and, after that, hurled his sabre with such force at a large mirror that the glass splinters hailed on all sides. With another blow he laid waste the table, which was crowded with a number of bottles and glasses, the fragments and contents of which were thrown all over the floor.

But just at that moment cried a piercing voice of indescribable fury and boldness—

“Fool! Cad!”

This insult was hurled by the same bare-headed woman with naked arms as had just embraced Lieschtschenko. This was the first time that Romashov had noticed her. She was standing in a recess behind the stove, leaning forward with clenched hands tightly pressed against her hips,and pouring out an uninterrupted flow of “Billingsgate” with a rapidity and readiness which the vilest market-woman might have envied.

“Fool! Cad! Scum! I am not afraid of you! Fool! Fool! Fool!”

Biek-Agamalov lowered his sabre, and seemed, for a moment, to lose all power over himself. Romashov saw how his face grew whiter and whiter, how his eyebrows puckered, and how the yellow pupils first darkened and then hurled a blinding flash of diabolical hatred and rage which no longer knew bounds. His knees gave way, and his head fell on his chest. At that moment, Biek-Agamalov was no longer a human being. He was transformed into a bloodthirsty wild beast straining every nerve for the fatal leap.

“Silence!” It sounded as if he had spat out the word. Speak he could not.

“Scoundrel, brute, beast, I shall not be silent!” shrieked the fury in the stove corner, her body trembling all over at every word she hurled.

Romashov felt himself getting whiter and whiter every moment. He felt a sensation of void in his brain, a sensation of release from every oppressive act of thought or reflection. A curious mixture of joy and terror arose in his soul, just as the bubbles of sparkling wine ascend to the edge of a goblet. He saw Biek-Agamalov, whilst continually following the woman with his eyes, slowly raise his sabre above his head. An irresistible flow of frantic jubilation, fear, inconsiderate boldness, carried Romashov away. He rushed forward so rapidly that he did not even hear Biek-Agamalov hiss his last question—

“Will you be silent? For the last time——”

Romashov, with a force he never thought hewas capable of, gripped Agamalov’s wrist. During the course of a few seconds and at a distance of a couple of inches between their faces, the two officers eyed one another without moving, stiff as if carved out of stone. Romashov heard his comrade’s quick, panting breath; he saw his eyes glitter with hate and a thirst for revenge, and his lips foam with the spasmodic movements of his lower jaw; but he felt that the fire of wrath would, in a few minutes, be extinguished in this man who had never yet sought, of his own accord, to curb his passions. But to Romashov this feeling of proud triumph in a game of life and death, from which he now knew he should come out the victor, was almost intolerable. He knew that all those who were anxiously watching this scene from outside also realized in what deadly danger he stood. Out in the yard and by the open windows there brooded such a hush and quiet that, all of a sudden, a nightingale a few paces off began to trill her joyous lay.

“Let me go,” came at last like a hoarse whisper from Biek-Agamalov’s bitten lips.

“Biek, you must never strike a woman,” replied Romashov calmly. “You would blush for it as long as you lived.”

The last sparks of rage and madness now died out in Agamalov’s eyes. Romashov drew a deep breath as if from a long swoon. His heart beat irregularly and quick, and his head was again heavy and feverishly hot.

“Let me go!” shrieked Biek-Agamalov once more in a fierce tone, and tried to release himself. Romashov felt he would no longer be able to keep his hold of him; but he had no further dread of his wrath. He said in a caressingbrotherly tone, as he laid his hand on his comrade’s shoulder—

“Forgive me, Biek, but I know that a day will come when you will thank me for this.”

Biek-Agamalov with a loud snap stuck his sabre into its sheath.

“All right, confound you!” he screamed in an angry tone, in which, however, there was a note of shame and confusion. “We’ll settle this matter afterwards. But what right have you——?”

The valiant crowd in the yard now understood that all danger was over for the present. With loud, but not quite natural, peals of laughter, the lot now rushed into the room. But he now seemed extinguished, his strength exhausted, and there was something apathetic and ironically contemptuous about him.

Now Madame Schleyfer herself—a massive lady with a hard look, small dark pouches under her eyes, disappearing eyelashes, and great layers of fat on her neck and bosom—entered the room. She attacked first one and then the other of the officers; took tight hold of one by a button, of another by a sleeve, and howled to each of them who could stand and listen her everlasting song—

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, who will make good all this? Who will pay for the mirror, the furniture, the bottles, the girls?”

All this meanwhile was settled to the satisfaction of the authorities by the same mysterious “benefactor” who had provided for everything else in the course of this memorable excursion. The officers left the room in groups. Every one of them inhaled with delight the mild, pure air of the May night. Romashov felt all his being thrilled with a certain joyous agitation. It seemed to him as if all tracesof the day’s orgies had vanished from his brain, as if a pair of innocent fresh lips had repurified and refreshed him by a soft kiss on his brow.

Biek-Agamalov came up to him, took his hand, and said—

“Romashov, come and ride in my carriage. I wish you to do so.”

And when Romashov, on one occasion during the journey home, turned towards the right to observe the awkward gallop of the horses, Biek-Agamalov seized his hand and pressed it for a long time warmly—nay, so hard that it almost caused pain. Not a word, however, passed between the two officers during the whole way.

THEviolent emotion felt by every member of the company during the wild scene we have just depicted found expression in a nervous irritability which, on their return to the mess-room, took the form of reckless arrogance and gross misbehaviour to all who happened to come across the officers on their way home. A poor Jew coming along was stopped and deprived of his cap. Olisár got up in the carriage, and insulted, in the outskirts of the town, in the middle of the street, all passers-by in a manner which cannot be decently described. Bobetinski whipped his coachman for no reason whatever. The others sang and bawled with all their might; only Biek-Agamalov, who rode beside Romashov, sat all the time angry, silent, and taciturn.

Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, the mess-rooms were brilliantly illuminated and full of people. In the card and billiard-rooms and at the buffet creatures with unbuttoned coats, flaming faces, vacantly staring eyes and of uncertain gait, helplessly collided with each other, heavily fuddled by the fumes of wine and tobacco smoke. Romashov, who was walking about and nodding to several of the officers, also found among them, to his great astonishment, Nikoläiev. He was sitting by Osadchi, red in face and intoxicated, but holding himself upright. On seeing Romashov approaching he eyed him sharply for a few seconds, but afterwards turnedabruptly aside, so as to avoid holding out his hand to the latter, meanwhile conversing with his neighbour with increased interest.

“Viätkin, come here and sing,” bellowed Osadchi over the heads of the rest.

“Yes, come let us sing,” chanted Viätkin, in reply, parodying, imitating, and caricaturing a melody from the Church ritual—

“Three small boys found lurchingGot an awful birchingAt the parson’s stile.”

Viätkin imitated in quick succession and in the same tone the strophes recited in the remainder of the antiphon at Mass—

“Sexton, parson, and his clerkThought the smacking quite a lark.Then the beadle said, ‘By hell,Nikifor, you smack right well.’”“Nikifor, you smack right well!”

“Sexton, parson, and his clerkThought the smacking quite a lark.Then the beadle said, ‘By hell,Nikifor, you smack right well.’”

“Nikifor, you smack right well!”

answeredpianissimoin complete harmony the hastily improvised choir of drunken officers, seconded by Osadchi’s softly rumbling bass voice.

Viätkin conducted the singing, standing on a table in the middle of the room, whilst stretching his arms in an attitude of benediction over the heads of the “congregation.” Now his eyes flashed terrifying glances of threat and condemnation; at another time they were raised to heaven with a languishing expression of infinite beatitude; then he hissed with rage at those who sang out of tune; again he stopped in time by a scarcely perceptibletremoloof the palm of his hand a run to a misplacedcrescendo.

“Staff-Captain Lieschtschenko, you’re singing damnably. Damn it, what a wretched ear!” roared Osadchi. “Keep quiet in the room, gentlemen. No noise, please, when there’s singing.”

“Once on a time a farmer so rich—Who used to like iced punch”—

continued Viätkin, in his improvised service of the Church. His eyes, however, now began to smart dreadfully from the dense tobacco smoke. Romashov was reminded by the wet and sticky tablecloth that he had not washed his hands since dinner. He went out and made his way across the yard to a side room called the “Officers’ Shelter,” which served as a sort of lavatory. It was a cold, dismal little crib with only one window. Several common cupboards stood along the wall, and between them, in hospital fashion, were placed two beds, the sheets, etc., of which were never changed. Not a man in the entire regiment could recollect when this room was swept and cleaned. There was an intolerable stench there, the main ingredients of which were rotting bedclothes, stinking boots, and bad tobacco. The room was originally intended for officers of other regiments who happened to be visiting the garrison town, but it gradually became converted into a sort ofmorguefor those who got dead drunk at mess. It was almost officially designated as “the mortuary,” which name, by a dreadful irony of fate, received its full justification from the fact that no less than two officers and one soldier had committed suicide in it during the few years the regiment had been garrisoned in the town. Moreover, not a year elapsed without one suicide taking place among the officers of this regiment.

When Romashov entered “the mortuary” he found two men sitting there on a bed near the window. The room was dark, and it was some time before Romashov recognized in one of the “guests” ex-Staff-Captain Klodt, alcoholist and thief, and on those grounds expelled from the command of his company. The other was a certain Ensign Solotuchin—a tall, lean, bald-headed, worn-out rake and gambler, feared and despised wherever he went for his evil, lying tongue and his conversation interlarded with coarse cynicisms and improprieties—a veritable type of the ensigns of the storybooks.

Between these two worthy “birds of a feather” might be seen on the table the dim outline of a schnapps bottle, an empty plate, and two full glasses. The pair of boon companions were silent when Romashov entered the room, and tried, as it were, to hide themselves in the darkness; but when he leaned over them, they looked at him with a sly smile.

“What, in the name of goodness, are you two doing here?” asked Romashov, in alarm.

“Hush!” Solotuchin made a mysterious warning gesture with his forefinger. “Wait here, and don’t disturb us.”

“Hold your jaw!” ordered Klodt in a whisper.

At the same moment the rattling noise of atelegawas heard somewhere in the distance. Then the two strangers raised their glasses, clicked them together, and drained the contents.

“But answer me. What is the meaning of it all?” repeated Romashov in the same anxious tone.

“My little greenhorn,” replied Klodt in a significant whisper, “if you must know, it’s only our usual little morning repast; but now I hear thetelega, Ensign,” Klodt went on to say as he turned to Solotuchin. “It’s time then to finish our drink and be off. What do you think of the moonlight? Will it suit?”

“My glass is empty already,” replied Solotuchin, glancing out of the window at the moon’s slender, pointed sickle that stood drowsy and sleepy in the sky, and hung down over the little slumbering town. “But let’s just wait a wee bit. S-sh! I thought I heard a dog barking.”

And again they bent towards one another to resume their mysterious conversation, carried on in a low voice; the spluttering tone and evident lack of coherence witnessed clearly enough that the schnapps had begun to take effect. From thesalle-à-mangerhard by came now and then the melancholy, hollow tones of Viätkin’s and Osadchi’s improvised Mass for the Dead, which had a weird and threatening ring about it in the silent night.

Romashov seized his head with both hands.

“I beseech you, gentlemen, to stop this. I can’t stand it any longer.”

“Go to the devil!” roared Solotuchin. “No, stop, dear boy—whither away? But, by all that’s unholy, you shall first drink a glass with two fine fellows. Catch tight hold of him, Captain, I’ll shut the door.”

With a yell of laughter the two scoundrels jumped up to seize Romashov; but the latter’s self-command was exhausted. The whole hideous situation—this disgusting drinking-bout in the weird, dark room with its insufferable, stifling atmosphere—this mysterious midnight meeting between two individuals who were a danger to society—the vulgar bellowing of the drunken officers and their blasphemous parody of the Russian Mass—all this filledhim with frantic terror and nausea. With a piercing shriek, he thrust Solotuchin from him, and, trembling in every limb, rushed deliberately from the mortuary.

Common sense now urged him to go home, but a strange, unfathomable inward force again drove him, against his will, to the mess-room. There some of the wine-soaked company were asleep on the window-sills and chairs. A stifling heat prevailed, and, in spite of the wide-open windows, the drowsily burning lights and lamps were never reached by a quickening draught of air. The poor, dead-tired soldiers who attended to the waiting could scarcely stand on their legs, and every moment stifled a yawn, but as yet none of the champion boozers had entertained a thought of breaking up.

Viätkin had again taken his place on a table, and was singing in his high, caressive tenor voice—

“Swift as the ocean’sRoaring billows,Vanishes life in eternity.”

There were several officers in the regiment with really beautiful voices, which even now were very effective in spite of the drink.

This simple, plaintive melody exercised, at this moment, an ennobling influence on all, and more than one of them experienced a pricking, remorseful feeling at the thought of his worthless, sinful life.

“Once you’re in your coffin,Soon the world forgets your name,”

continued Viätkin in a voice of emotion, and his sleepy but good eyes were dimmed with tears. Artschakovski seconded him with unimpeachable care. To make his voice thrill he grasped his larynxwith two fingers and shook it. Osadchi accompanied it all with his heavy, long-drawn, organ notes.

After the singing there reigned a deep silence for a few moments. Suddenly Osadchi began again to recite in a subdued tone and eyes cast down—

“All ye who wander in sorrow’s heavy, narrow road——”

“No, that’s enough of it,” a voice exclaimed. “This is now, I suppose, the tenth time we have taken up this cursed Mass of Requiem——”

But the rest had already intoned the solemn melody that divides the recitative of the antiphon, and once more, in the reeking and dirty room, resounded the requiem over St. John of Damascus in clear, full-voiced strains that express in so masterly a way the inconsolable sorrow for death’s inexorable cruelty—

“All ye who believe in Me enter into the joy of My Father.”

Artschakovski, who was as familiar with the ritual as the most experienced choir-singer, at once repeated the following answer in accordance with the text—

“With our whole soul we all praise,” etc.

And so the whole antiphon was chanted; but when Osadchi’s turn came to take up the recitation for the last time, he lowered his head like an infuriated bull, the veins in his neck swelled, and as he directed his melancholy, cruel, and threatening glances towards those present, he declaimed in a half-singing tone, and in a voice that resembled the roar of distant thunder—

“Give, O Lord, Thy departed slave, Nikifor,A blessed departure hence and eternal rest.”

In the midst of this lofty and pious invocation he stopped short, and, to the horror of the bystanders, uttered two words of the most blasphemous, cynical, and disgusting import.

Romashov jumped up, and thumped his fist, like a madman, on the table.

“Be silent! I forbid this,” he roared in a voice trembling with anger and pain. “What are you laughing at, Captain Osadchi? You ought to be ashamed. Your eyes are mocking, but I see and know that remorse, terror, and the tortures of hell are raging in your heart.”

A hideous silence on the part of all followed this outbreak of temper. Then a voice from the crowd was heard to exclaim—

“Is he drunk?”

These three words relaxed all the terrible tension of the situation; but at the same moment let loose afresh—just as a few hours previously in Schleyfer’s den of infamy—all the evil spirits of orgy. There was shrieking, hooting, stamping, jumping, and dancing; the whole room was turned in a trice into an indescribable, savage, motley chaos. Viätkin, who jumped on to a table, hit his head against the big hanging lamp, which then swayed in awful zigzag curves, producing for some time a fantastic series of dissolving views on the ceiling and walls, on which drunken, frantic human beings were depicted as marvellous, gigantic shapes, or as huddled, dwarfish figures resembling embryos.

The debauch seemed at last to reach its height. All these wretched creatures were possessed, as it were, by a savage, exultant, ruthless fiend who, mocking at all the laws of sense and decency, forced his victims, by blasphemies, oaths, and all kinds of shamelessness, to abdicate the last shreds of their human dignity.

Romashov, in the smoke and stuffiness, suddenly caught sight of a person with features distorted by rage and incessant hooting, which for that reason seemed to him, in the first instant, unrecognizable. It was none other than Nikoläiev, who, now foaming with hate and fury, roared to his enemy:

“You’re a disgrace to the whole regiment, you and Nasanski! Not a word or, by God! I’ll——”

Romashov felt that some one was pulling him, gently and cautiously, a few paces backwards. He turned round and recognized Agamalov, but at the same instant forgot him, and turned quickly round to Nikoläiev. White with suppressed rage, he answered in a low, hoarse voice and a forced and bitter smile—

“What reason have you to mention Nasanski’s name? But perhaps you have some private, secret cause for hating him?”

“Rascal, scoundrel, your hour is come!” screamed Nikoläiev in a loud, trembling voice. With flashing eyes he raised his tightly clenched fist to Romashov’s face, but the expected blow never fell. Romashov experienced a momentary fear, together with a torturing, sickening sensation in his chest and ribs, and he now noticed, for the first time, that he was grasping some object with the fingers of his right hand. Then with a rapid movement he threw the remains of his half-emptied glass of ale into Nikoläiev’s face.

Instantly after this a violent blow in the region of his left eye struck him like a deafening thunderclap, and with the howl of a wounded wild beast, Romashov rushed at his foe. A heavy fall, and the two rolled over one another on the ground with furious blows and kicks. A thick cloud of dust eddied round the combatants; chairs and tables wereflung in all directions, but the two continued, with unabated fury, to force, in turn, each other’s head against the filthy floor, and panting and with rattling throats, tried to tear each other to pieces. Romashov knew he had managed somehow or other to get his fingers well into Nikoläiev’s mouth at one of the corners, and he strove with all his might to rend Nikoläiev’s cheek, with the object of destroying those hateful features for all time. He himself, however, felt no pain when his head and elbows were bumped time after time, in the course of the fight, against the hard floor.

He had not the slightest notion as to how the battle finally ended. He suddenly found himself standing in a corner, plucked from the fight by kindly hands, and, by the same well-meaning helper, prevented from renewing his attack on Nikoläiev. Biek-Agamalov handed Romashov a glass of water, and his teeth could be heard chattering, through the convulsive twitchings of his lower jaw, against the side of the glass. His uniform was torn to tatters in the back and elbows, and one shoulder-strap swung hither and thither on its torn fastening. Romashov was unable to speak, but his silent lips moved incessantly in fruitless efforts to whisper audibly—

“I’ll—show—him. I challenge him.”

Old Liech, who had been in a delightful slumber at the edge of his table during all that fearful row, now arose fully awake, sober, and severe in countenance, and, in a bitter and hectoring tone rarely employed by him, said—

“Gentlemen, in my capacity as the eldest here present, I order you all to leave the mess instantly, and to go to your respective quarters. A report of what has taken place here to-night is to behanded in to the commander of the regiment to-morrow.”

The order was obeyed without the slightest demur. All departed, cowed and shamefaced, and consequently shy at meeting each other’s glances. Each individual dreaded to read in his comrade’s eyes his own shame and self-contempt, and they all gave one the impression of dirty little malicious animals, to whose dim and undeveloped brains a gleam of human understanding had suddenly managed to grope its way.

Day began to dawn. A delightful, glorious morning with a clear, fleckless sky, refreshing coolness, and infinite harmony and peace. The moist trees, wrapped in thin, curling exhalations arising from the earth, and scarcely visible to the eye, had just awakened silently and imperceptibly from their deep, mysterious, nocturnal sleep. And when Romashov, on his way home, glanced at them, at the sky, and at the grass faintly sparkling like silver in the dew, he felt himself so low, vile, degenerate, and disgusting that he realized, with unutterable melancholy, how unworthy he was to be greeted by the innocent, smiling child-eyes of awakening Nature.

ONthat same day—it was Wednesday—Romashov received the following curt official communication—

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