Atlantic Narratives Part 31

'It's your birthday, old chap,' he said, putting his arm around Wilbur.

'I thought you might like a new ball.'

He felt Wilbur trembling slightly and wondered whether, in spite of the little fellow's seemingly perfect health, he could be an over-strung and nervous child.

'Now you have two b.a.l.l.s,' Aunt Susan said fatuously, rocking herself in her old rocker.

'Yes'm,' said Wilbur.

From the security of his immense felicity he smiled at her kindly, very kindly, very indulgently, for how could she understand?

BABANCHIK

BY CHRISTINA KRYSTO

I

IT was my smallest brother who called him that, because, at the time of their meeting, he could not manage the whole of his very long name. But his friends took it up presently, liking the ridiculous yet oddly caressing sound of it, until all who knew him well knew him only as Babanchik.

I remember him first as a chance guest in my father's house by the side of the Black Sea--a big, deep-chested man in a badly wrinkled pongee suit, who missed his train because we children had drawn him into a game of hide-and-seek. I can still hear his laughter-filled voice demanding fiercely, 'Where are they? Where are they?' as he flung himself about the room, making wide detours to avoid our feet, which protruded from under the cloth-hung table, while the train, with his car attached, paused a moment at the 'half station' at the far end of the pasture and went roaring on along the sh.o.r.e. He stayed the night with us, and our child-world changed forthwith.

During the two years which followed, the play-times of Babanchik and his children were inextricably bound with ours, and the distance between our homes grew very short. At Christmas we danced around the scintillating tree in his s.p.a.cious Tiflis house, and at Easter he helped us with the beating of the innumerable eggs which go into the Easter bread of Russia, spattering the kitchen wall most dreadfully.

Business brought him often to Batum, which lay just over the hill from us--so often that we fell into the habit of racing down to the pasture-bars every Sat.u.r.day to wait for the afternoon train. It was long and wearying, that walk back, on the days when the train clattered by without pausing. But on other days, when, just this side of the cliff, the engine whistled to announce the stop,--when we listened, breathless, for the setting of the brakes, when we saw his huge figure swing lightly from the steps, coat-pockets bulging with mysteries, and heard the gay voice shouting that his own car would not come by until Monday,--the walk home was a march of triumph. Two summers we spent together in a half-starved Georgian village high in the Caucasus Mountains, where we lived on bread and eggs, both reeking with the wild garlic which grew thick among the wheat; ran, bare of head and foot, over the pine-grown canons; and loved every moment of it.

It was in those two summers that we came to know Babanchik best and to adore him accordingly. We might emulate the manners of Manya, his young-lady daughter of twelve; we might acknowledge the leadership of his harum-scarum son Kolya; but it was Babanchik who really counted. It was he who led our marvelous expeditions to the neighboring peaks, his clothes steaming with the effort of that leadership--he who showed us where to look for mushrooms, and later fried those mushrooms for us, surrept.i.tiously, lest mother begrudge us the b.u.t.ter where no new supply was to be had. His mind it was which settled, wisely and fairly, all our momentous quarrels, and invented countless new and fascinating games when we had tired of the everlasting croquet. But for him we should never have bathed in the yellow water of the mad Kura, water so muddy that it left great streaks across the bath-towels; but for him we should never have been forgiven for robbing the little forest church of candles with which to rub the porch floor whenever we wanted to dance.

That the merry existence of his vacations was but a small part of his life, we knew, even as we guessed that the man who frolicked with us lived only in the hours of play. For often at tea-time on the porch we came upon the other Babanchik, a bitter and fearsome man who talked to father in a voice which, to us, was the voice of a stranger. They made us very wretched, those tea-times, when from an obscure porch corner we watched him striding up and down along the railing, the smile gone from his eyes, his cheeks flushed, his arms waving wildly. For we could never understand why the man who taught us that it was cruel to step on ants, seemed so ready and eager, at those times, to throttle some one, we knew not whom, unless it were the terrible creature he called the Russian government. It all hurt us inexpressibly. Yet hour after hour we watched him and listened to his long, involved denunciations of oppression and dishonesty and selfishness and cla.s.s-distinction and many other long words which we could not grasp. And most difficult to fathom was his oft-repeated a.s.sertion that he was doing all that talking in behalf of us.

'It is for the children that I fight!' he would shout, stamping feverishly up and down the long porch; 'for my Manya and Kolya, and for your boys and girls and all the countless thousands of others whose lot has been cast with this accursed country! I must fight, for I know what will come to them! Their souls will be dwarfed and crippled by our stupid schools and our stupid laws, and their minds poisoned and embittered by suspicion and hatred and the d.a.m.ning sense of their impotence, as long as conditions here remain what they are! Our lives are behind us, yours and mine. But we must make theirs different for them, must keep them away from strait-jacket regulations, must keep them happy and trustful and brave! It is for this that I fight! And I would fight if I knew that I could not change a word of our laws and our statutes!'

He did fight. Unceasingly, along with his rouad, work,--he was one of the managers of a Caucasian railrotine--went the bigger work of making his corner of the world a better place for those who came behind him. He fought in the ranks of his employees, that the least of these might claim justice and equality; pleaded with school boards and schoolmasters for patience and generosity toward their charges; and fought--and this was the most bitter fight of all--against those who held in their hands the destinies of his city.

In all this he was severely handicapped. An Armenian by birth, which in itself matters even in cosmopolitan Caucasus, he had inherited the ungovernable temper and unbridled tongue of his people; and this, coupled with his love for truth, worked him unceasing woe among the hidebound conservatism of his a.s.sociates.

All this Babanchik knew. And yet, in spite of the knowledge, he had a dream of becoming a member of the city Duma, that he might have a real voice in the direction of the city's fortunes. It should not have been a thing so difficult of attainment. Time after time his name was proposed for the city ballot; time after time hordes of enthusiastic friends made his election a certainty; and time after time, as the deciding day drew near, his candidature was suppressed, his name withheld from the ballot, his adherents silenced--and the dream remained a dream. No one knew just when it happened, or just how: he was an Armenian and a revolutionist, a freethinker and an enemy of the government, marked '_neblagonadejny_'

(not to be depended upon) in the police-books of the city--and no country knows so well as does Russia how best to curtail the activities of such men.

What he could do in spite of these drawbacks, he did. Was he not our undauntable Babanchik? If he could not insure fair play for the men of his railroad, he could give them of his advice and sympathy, and they forgot to ask for more. If additional factory windows did not come into being at his command, he could still lend his money to those of the workers who fell victims to the foul air; and how beautifully he lost his temper when a borrower spoke of interest! And if school boards and schoolmasters remained unyielding in their demands upon the children he loved, at least the holidays were his, when he could take those children on long walks in the open and teach them to respect their souls and not to step on ants.

All of which we learned much later. At the time, he was merely our Babanchik, without whom the world could no longer be imagined; who came in the evening to blow out our candles because he had guessed that the memory of his good-night laugh cheated the dark of its dangers; whose rumbling shout awakened us in the morning and opened up for us a new day of unsuspected possibilities.

II

The third summer we did not go to the mountains. Some one else was sharing Babanchik's cottage in the Georgian village; he was leading a band of new children in search of mushrooms and adventure. But we were too excited to care, even in the face of this.

A new unrest hung over our house. All the day long father was showing strangers about the place, pointing out to them the value of the untouched forest, the richness of the pasture land, the clearness of the drinking water, the glories of the mountains and the sea. In the sun-filled gla.s.s room which served as library mother was superintending the sorting and packing of books. And a placid-faced woman with the patience of a saint was fitting our squirming bodies into trim, tight-fitting clothes, which, after the loose, shapeless things we had always worn, vexed us endlessly. We were going to America.

Babanchik came to us often in those last weeks, inexpressibly saddened by our impending departure; and his discussions, to which father listened a bit abstractedly now, grew ever more violent. Though their invariable ending filled us with an unexpected hope:--

'When my work is done here, I will come to you, in the United States. I cannot, now--there is still so much to be done for my weaker friends.

But when I am very tired, so tired that I can no longer endure it, I shall take my children and come to you--to forget the Russia that I hate.'

So we parted. We leaned over the rail of an Odessa steamer, our arms overflowing with the packages he had brought us; and he stood on the edge of the wharf, waving his hat and smiling. But tears were running down his brown cheeks and losing themselves in his beard.

The new life, the new language, new interests, caught us. From the first Russia seemed very far behind. Several letters followed us. Kolya wrote three or four in his uneven round hand--funny little letters which began, 'We have two ducks and two puppies. How many dogs have you?' and which were properly answered in kind. After that, we forgot very quickly.

But Babanchik did not forget. Once every month we found in our mail-box a fat, square, carelessly addressed envelope, which held a letter for father and a folded note for each of us. The notes were full of gay nonsense, stories and rhymes and caricatures; but father grew very thoughtful over the letters.

Life was pressing Babanchik hard. He was still without thought of defeat. But his enemies were bringing more stringent methods into the combat; he was now being constantly watched. Other troubles were even harder to bear. The government was consciously setting the hot-headed Georgians and Armenians at each other's throats, that neither might have time to think of greater issues. And Babanchik could but stand by and watch the suffering of his people. Manya was in school, in the hands of narrow and incompetent teachers, teachers selected for their political views. Kolya's turn would soon come. After that, so ran the letters, his children would have the choice between becoming power-seeking sycophants of the government, and going, as he had gone, into battle with it, knowing beforehand of their certain defeat. He could not take them away from it--yet. But he realized, he said, that each day, besides giving to him its measure of sorrow, brought a little nearer the fulfillment of his new dream. He was beginning to study English.

The years marched on. The square envelopes came less often, but they came, still full of their old-time warmth for us--full, too, of increasing enmity toward the country which we had left. Manya had gone to Petrograd to attend women's 'courses.' Two years later Kolya followed her, and entered the University in the same city at the time I was enrolled in mine. And when, a care-free soph.o.m.ore, I was working off surplus energy in basket-ball and dramatics, a new alarm crept into Babanchik's letters. Manya and Kolya were becoming involved in the revolutionary movement.

It is hard, in these clean war days, to remember the murky chaos of the Russia of 1904-06. If a revolution could have come at all, it would have come in those years, and it would have been led by students. The younger minds were afire with visions of freedom,--irrepressible combinations of deep conviction and the ardor of youth,--visions which took no cognizance of the wide and weary s.p.a.ce which lies between desire and accomplishment. Cla.s.s-rooms were hotbeds of revolutionary plots,--mad, illogical, glorious plots,--for which their authors, usually still in their teens, paid so heavily. Too heavily, for the government, alarmed, was losing its head a bit.

The heart of Babanchik beat fearfully. 'I am proud of the trend of their convictions,' he wrote, 'but sometimes I am a little afraid. They can so easily be led into a spectacular prank, a bit of mischief for which the government might take it into its head to punish them too harshly. And though we have all become accustomed to that sort of thing, it would hurt me sorely to have them spend two or three months in prison.'

He conjectured mildly. There was news one day, in our American newspapers, of the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of a Petrograd official. We pa.s.sed it by--attempted a.s.sa.s.sinations were no rare events just then--until the next letter came from Babanchik, a letter of two brief paragraphs. Both Manya and Kolya were implicated in the crime. Manya had waved her handkerchief from a window which commanded a view of the official's residence; Kolya had pa.s.sed the signal to twenty fellow conspirators. All had been caught and all had confessed. The official was unhurt and there was hope of a light sentence. Still--the two or three months of prison lengthened into a prospective two or three years.

Once more he conjectured mildly. Manya was sentenced to be hanged.

Kolya, because of extreme youth, was punished by life-imprisonment. We read the story of it, scarce believing, page after anguished page in a handwriting we did not recognize. We never knew--no one ever did know, save Babanchik himself--all that went after that. His letters no longer came regularly, and, when they did come, were so incoherent with rage and despair that we gathered little information from them. We learned, however, that by some superhuman means he had obtained a stay in the execution of the sentence, had taken a leave of absence from his office in Tiflis, had called in all the money which he had loaned, borrowed what additional money he could, and had gone to Petrograd. At the end of eighteen months there was a new trial, and we were left to guess of much that went between.

It was not difficult to guess, in part. His way to that new trial had lain along the ways of personal influence, and the men who possessed that influence were the officials whom all his life he had hated and who knew him only as one 'not to be depended upon.' Could he have abandoned to their fate the twenty whom he did not even know, and worked for his children alone, his task would have been less difficult; but then he would not have been Babanchik.

So for eighteen months he worked; seeking audience in the studies of his enemies, humbling himself before their insolent eyes, accepting from them what taunts they chose to give, holding in calm control the hot temper which was hourly made less manageable by the strain under which he lived, pleading where he longed to curse, smiling where he would kill--and knowing, with a knowledge which made all these things possible, that a careless word on his part would take forever from twenty-two youngsters the one hope to which they clung. And so he accomplished the inconceivable. Somehow the new trial was held, somehow the twenty-two sentences were made lighter, unbelievably lighter. For Manya was sent into a far province and given hard labor for life, and Kolya would be free in ten years. But what those eighteen months did to the loving big soul of Babanchik can best be told in the barely legible words of the letter which brought us the news.

'It has finished us at last, this country! It has strangled my children and torn my heart to shreds! I burn with shame at the thought of being its subject, and there is no wretchedness which I hold too great for it, no plague which I would not send upon it if I could! I long to take the first steamer away from it.'

But he had his lost fortune to recover before he could go. There were his debts, too; and the children needed money, even in prison. He went back to his work with redoubled energy. But as he fought for the money which would bring him to America, he found himself fighting against a new enemy. The splendid body had not been able to with-stand the ravages upon his mind; he remembered suddenly that he was nearly seventy. He spoke little of this,--perhaps he would not believe it, quite,--but there was dejection in every word he wrote. And we began to wonder whether we should ever see our Babanchik again.

Yet in the winter of 1913 he came to us, a tired and feeble old man.

There was a burned-out look in his eyes, and his wrinkled pongee suit hung limp from stooping shoulders. The journey across Siberia had been hard, that across the Pacific still more trying; there had been an alarming wireless from the nurse who accompanied him. But he reached us, and as I remember the sound of his laugh on that first day twenty years ago, so shall I never forget the ineffable happiness in his face when he stood, a few days after his coming, and looked out over our sunlit valley.

'Peace,' he said, 'and joy. And the end of Russia forever. G.o.d has been good.'

He built for himself a tiny bungalow in a corner of our garden,--one that could be moved when Kolya should have come to him,--and was soon deeply engrossed in the simple tasks in which erstwhile busy men sometimes find such keen delight. All day long he spaded and raked and planted, wrote letters home, and went on ever-lengthening walks; but evening brought him to our living-room where, beside the humming samovar, we swung the conversation round to his wild Caucasian tales.

The stories he told were not new; we had heard them all many times before. Accounts of his own trips in pathless mountains, adventures of the danger-loving Georgians, legends of his own people, the Armenians--they had lost not a shade of their interest in the years which had gone since those other winter evenings, when the sea raged just beyond the pasture-bars and made us crowd close to the fireplace and to him. Often, too, he talked of his children, but always it was of their life before Manya had waved her handkerchief from a window. Only of Russia itself he would not speak, nor would he read our Russian newspapers.

'Let her be,' he once said, 'the vampire! I ask only to forget.'

And we thought that he did forget, for the months brought to him an ever-deepening contentment. His shoulders were squaring themselves into old accustomed lines, the illness which had menaced gave no sign. Spring found him searching for a plot of land which would be his own, for Kolya had but two more years to serve.

III