Through Russia Part 38

Somewhere near me a woman is gulping out sobs. For a moment or two I listen; then I approach her, and come upon her seated in a corner with her head in her hands, and her body rocking to and fro as though she were doing me obeisance.

Yet I feel angry, somehow, and remain standing before her without speaking--until at length I ask:

"Are you mad?"

"Go away," is, after a pause, her only reply.

"I heard all that you said to that young fellow."

"Oh, did you? Then what business is it of yours? Are you my brother?"

Yet she speaks the words absent-mindedly rather than angrily. Around us the dim, blurred walls are peering in our direction with sightless eyes, while in the vicinity a bullock is drawing deep breaths.

I seat myself by her side.

"Should you remain much longer in that position," I remark, "you will have a headache."

There follows no reply.

"Am I disturbing you?" I continue.

"Oh no; not at all." And, lowering her hands, she looks at me. "Whence do you come?"

"From Nizhni Novgorod."

"Oh, from a long way off!"

"Do you care for that young fellow?"

Not for a moment or two does she answer; and when she does so she answers as though the words have been rehea.r.s.ed.

"Not particularly. It is that he is a strong young fellow who has lost his way, and is too much of a fool (as you too must have seen) to find it again. So I am very sorry for him. A good muzhik ought to be well placed."

On the bell of the church there strikes the hour of two. Without interrupting herself, the woman crosses her breast at each stroke.

"Always," she continues, "I feel sorry when I see a fine young fellow going to the dogs. If I were able, I would take all such young men, and restore them to the right road."

"Then you are not sorry FOR YOURSELF?"

"Not for myself? Oh yes, for myself as well."

"Then why flaunt yourself before this b.o.o.by, as you have been doing?"

"Because I might reform him. Do you not think so? Ah, you do not know me."

A sigh escapes her.

"He hit you, I think?" I venture.

"No, he did not. And in any case you are not to touch him."

"Yet you cried out?"

Suddenly she leans towards me, and says:

"Yes, he did strike me--he struck me on the breast, and would have overpowered me had it not been that I cannot, I will not, do things heartlessly, like a cat. Oh, the brutes that men can be!"

Here the conversation undergoes an interruption through the fact that someone has come out to the hut door, and is whistling softly, as for a dog.

"There he is!" whispers the woman.

"Then had I not best send him about his business?"

"No, no!" she exclaims, catching at my knees. "No need is there for that, no need is there for that!"

Then with a low moan she adds:

"Oh Lord, how I pity our folk and their lives! Oh G.o.d our Father!"

Her shoulders heave, and presently she bursts into tears, with a whisper, between the pitiful sobs, of:

"How, on such a night as this, one remembers all that one has ever seen, and the folk that ever one has known! And oh, how wearisome, wearisome it all is! And how I should like to cry throughout the world--But to cry what? I know not--I have no message to deliver."

That feeling I can understand as well as she, for all too often has it seemed to crush my soul with voiceless longing.

Then, as I stroke her bowed head and quivering shoulder, I ask her who she is; and presently, on growing a little calmer, she tells me the history of her life.

She is, it appears, the daughter of a carpenter and bee-keeper. On her mother's death, this man married a young woman, and allowed her, as stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till adolescence, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as forester on the convent's estate.

As the woman relates this, I feel vexed that I cannot see her face--only a dim, round blur amid which there looms what appears to be a pair of closed eyes. Also, so complete is the stillness, that she can narrate her story in a barely audible whisper; and I gain the impression that the pair of us are sitting plunged in a void of darkness where life does not exist, yet where we are destined to begin life.

"However, the man was a libertine and a drunkard, and many a riotous night did he spend with his cronies in the porter's lodge of the convent. Also, he tried to arouse a similar taste in myself; and though for a time I resisted the tendency, I at length, on his taking to beating me, yielded. Only for one man, however, had I really a liking; and with him it was, and not with my husband, that I first learnt the meaning of spousehood.... Unfortunately, my lover himself was married; and in time his wife came to hear of me, and procured my husband's dismissal. The chief reason was that the lady, a person of great wealth, was herself handsome, albeit stout, and did not care to see her place a.s.sumed by a n.o.body. Next, my husband died of drink; and as my father had long been dead, and I found myself alone, I went to see and consult my stepmother. All that she said, however, was: 'Why come to me? Go and think things out for yourself.' And I too then reflected: 'Yes, why should I have gone to her?' and repaired to the convent. Yet even there there seemed to be no place left for me, and eventually old Mother Taisia, who had once been my governess, said: 'Tatiana, do you return to the world, for there, and only there, will you have a chance of happiness. So to the world I returned--and still am roaming it."

"Your quest of happiness is not following an easy road!"

"It is following the road that it best can."

By now the darkness has ceased to keep spread over us, as it were, the stretched web of a heavy curtain, but has grown thinner and more transparent with the tension, save that, in places (for instance, in the window of the hut), it still lies in thick folds or clots as it peers at us with its sightless eyes.

Over the hummock-like roofs of the huts rise the church's steeple and the poplar trees; while hither and thither on the wall of the hut, the cracks and holes in the crumbling plaster have caused the wall to resemble the map of an unknown country.

Glancing at the woman's dark eyes, I perceive them to be shining as pensively, innocently as the eyes of a young maiden.

"You are indeed a curious woman!" I remark.

"Perhaps I am," she replies as she moistens her lips with a slender, almost feline tongue.

"What are you really seeking?"