Through Russia Part 7

Our line of march was directed obliquely, and in the opposite direction to the current. Also, I, as the rearmost of the party, found it pleasant to note how the wary little Ossip of the silvery head went looping over the ice with the deftness of a hare, and practically no raising of the feet, while behind him there trailed, in wild-goose fashion, and as though tied to a single invisible string, six dark and undulating figures the shadows of which kept making themselves visible on the ice, from those figures' feet to points indefinitely remote. And as we proceeded, all of us kept our heads lowered as though we had been descending from a mountain in momentary fear of a false step.

Also, though the shouting in our rear kept growing in volume, and we could tell that by this time a crowd had gathered, not a word could we distinguish, but only a sort of ugly din.

In time our cautious march became for me a mere, mechanical, wearisome task, for on ordinary occasions it was my custom to maintain a pace of greater rapidity. Thus, eventually I sank into the semiconscious condition amid which the soul turns to vacuity, and one no longer thinks of oneself, but, on the contrary issues from one's personality, and begins to see objects with unwonted clarity, and to hear sounds with unwonted precision. Under my feet the seams in the blue-grey, leaden ice lay full of water, while as for the ice itself, it was blinding in its expansive glitter, even though in places it had come to be either cracked or bulbous, or had ground itself into powder with its own movement, or had become heaped into slushy hummocks of pumice-like sponginess and the consistency of broken gla.s.s. And everywhere around me I could discern the chilly, gaping smile of blue crevices which caught at my feet, and rendered the tread of my boot-soles unstable.

And ever, as we marched, could the voices of Boev and the old soldier be heard speaking in antiphony, like two pipes being fluted by one and the same pair of lips.

"I won't be responsible," said the one voice.

"Nor I," responded the other.

"The only reason why I have come is that I was told to do so. That's all about it."

"Yes, and the same with me."

"One man gives an order, and another man, perhaps a man a thousand times more sensible than he, is forced to obey it."

"Is any man, in these days, sensible, seeing what a racket we have to live among?"

By this time Ossip had tucked the skirts of his greatcoat into his belt, while beneath those skirts his legs (clad in grey cloth gaiters of a military pattern) were shuffling along as lightly and easily as springs, and in a manner that suggested that there was turning and twisting in front of him some person whom, though desirous of barring to him the direct course, the shortest route, Ossip successfully opposed and evaded by dint of dodges and deviations to right and left, and occasional turns about, and the execution of dance steps and loops and semicircles. Meanwhile in the tones of Ossip's voice there was a soft, musical ring that struck agreeably upon the ear, and harmonised to admiration with the song of the bells just when we were approaching the middle of the river's breadth of four hundred sazheni. There resounded over the surface of the ice a vicious rustle while a piece of ice slid from under my feet. Stumbling, and powerless to retain my footing, I blundered down upon my knees in helpless astonishment; and then, as I glanced upstream, fear gripped at my throat, deprived me of speech, and darkened all my vision. For the whole substance of the grey ice-core had come to life and begun to heave itself upwards! Yes, the hitherto level surface was thrusting forth sharp angular ridges, and the air seemed full of a strange sound like the trampling of some heavy being over broken gla.s.s.

With a quiet trickle there came a swirl of water around me, while an adjacent pine bough cracked and squeaked as though it too had come to life. My companions shouted, and collected into a knot; whereupon, at once dominating and quelling the tense, painful hubbub of sounds, there rang forth the voice of Ossip.

"Mother of G.o.d!" he shouted. "Scatter, lads! Get away from one another, and keep each to himself! Now! Courage!"

With that, springing towards us as though wasps had been after him, and grasping the spirit-level as though it had been a weapon, he jabbed it to every side, as though fighting invisible foes, while, just as the quivering town began, seemingly, to glide past us, and the ice at my feet gave a screech and crumbled to fragments beneath me, so that water bubbled to my knees. I leapt up from where I was, and rushed blindly in Ossip's direction.

"Where are you coming to, fool?" was his shout as he brandished the spirit-level. "Stand still where you are!"

Indeed, Ossip seemed no longer to be Ossip at all, but a person curiously younger, a person in whom all that had been familiar in Ossip had become effaced. Yes, the once blue eyes had turned to grey, and the figure added half an arshin to its stature as, standing as erect as a newly made nail, and pressing both feet together, the foreman stretched himself to his full height, and shouted with his mouth open to its widest extent:

"Don't shuffle about, nor crowd upon one another, or I'll break your heads!"

Whereafter, of myself in particular, he inquired as he raised the spirit-level:

"What is the matter with YOU, pray?"

"I am feeling frightened," I muttered in response.

"Feeling frightened of WHAT, indeed?"

"Of being drowned."

"Pooh! Just you hold your tongue."

Yet the next moment he glanced at me, and added in a gentler, quieter tone:

"None but a fool gets drowned. Pick yourself up and come along."

Then once more he shouted full-throated words of encouragement to his men; and as he did so, his chest swelled and his head rocked with the effort.

Yet, crackling and cracking, the ice was breaking up; and soon it began slowly to bear us past the town. 'Twas as though some unknown force ash.o.r.e had awakened, and was striving to tear the banks of the river in two, so much did the portion of the landscape downstream seem to be standing still while the portion level with us seemed to be receding in the opposite direction, and thus causing a break to take place in the middle of the picture.

And soon this movement, a movement agonisingly slow, deprived me of my sense of being connected with the rest of the world, until, as the whole receded, despair again gripped my heart and unnerved my limbs.

Roseate clouds were gliding across the sky and causing stray fragments of the ice, which, seemingly, yearned to engulf me, to a.s.sume reflected tints of a similar hue. Yes, it was as though the birth of spring had reawakened the universe, and was causing it to stretch itself, and to emit deep, hurried, broken pants that cracked its bones as the river, embedded in the earth's stout framework, revivified the whole with thick, turbulent, ebullient blood.

And this sense of littleness, of impotence amid the calm, a.s.sured movement of the earth's vast bulk, weighed upon my soul, and evoked, and momentarily fanned to flame in me, the shameless human question: "What if I should stretch forth my hand and lay it upon the hill and the banks of the river, and say, 'Halt until I come to you!'?"

Meanwhile the bells continued the mournful moaning of their resonant, coppery notes; and that moaning led me to reflect that within two days (on the night of the morrow) they would be pealing a joyous welcome to the Resurrection Feast.

"Oh that all of us may live to hear that sound!" was my unspoken thought.

Before my vision there kept quavering seven dark figures--figures shuffling over the ice, and brandishing planks like oars. And, wriggling like a lamprey in front of them was a little old fellow, an old fellow resembling Saint Nicholas the Wonder-Worker, an old fellow who kept crying softly, but authoritatively:

"Do not stare about you!"

And ever the river was growing rougher and ruder; ever its backbone was beginning to puiver and flounder like a whale underfoot, with its liquescent body of cold, grey, murky water bursting with increasing frequency from its sh.e.l.l of ice, and lapping hungrily at our feet.

Yes, we were human beings traversing, as it were, a slender pole over a bottomless abyss; and as we walked, the water's soft, cantabile splash set me in mind of the depths below, of the infinite time during which a body would continue sinking through dense, chilly bulk until sight faded and the heart stopped beating. Yes, before my mind's eye there arose men drowned and devoured by crayfish, men with crumbling skulls and swollen features, and gla.s.sy, bulging eyes and puffy hands and outstretched fingers and palms of which the skin had rotted off with the damp.

The first to fall in was Mokei Budirin. He had been walking next ahead of the Morduine, and, as a man habitually silent and absorbed, proceeding on his way more quietly than the rest. Suddenly something had seemed to catch at his legs, and he had disappeared until only his head and his hands, as the latter clutched at his plank, had been left above-level.

"Run and help him, somebody!" was Ossip's instant cry. "Yes, but not all of you--just one or two. Help him I say!"

The spluttering Mokei, however, said to the Morduine and myself:

"No; do you move away, mates, for I shall best help myself. Never you mind."

And, sure enough, he did succeed in drawing himself out on to the ice without a.s.sistance. Whereafter he remarked as he shook himself:

"A nice pickle, this, to be in! I might as well have been drowned!"

And, in fact, at the moment he looked, with his chattering teeth and great tongue licking a dripping moustache, precisely like a large, good-natured dog.

Then I remembered how, a month earlier, he had accidentally driven the blade of his axe through the joint of his left thumb, and, merely picking up the white fragment of flesh with the nail turning blue, and scanning it with his unfathomable eyes, had remarked, as though it was he himself that had been at fault:

"How often before I have injured that thumb, I could not say. And when once I dislocated it, I went on working with it longer than was right....

Now I will go and bury it."

With which, carefully wrapping up the fragment in some shavings, he had thrust the whole into his pocket, and bandaged the wounded hand.

Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei, contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.

"A narrow shave of saying Vespers tonight with the devils in h.e.l.l!" he remarked as he clambered back, and stood grinning with an even more angular and attenuated appearance than usual.

The next moment Boev achieved a second plunge, and screamed, as before, for help.

"Don't shout, you goat of a Yashka!" Ossip exclaimed as he threatened him with the spirit-level. "Why scare people? I'll give it you! Look here, lads. Let every man take off his belt and turn out his pockets.

Then he'll walk lighter."