Peasant Tales of Russia

Nina, with blushing and tears, had confessed to her that for two years she had been in love. When she uttered the name of the man she loved Helene had pushed her away so abruptly that the poor little thing had fallen against a piece of furniture. The "nun" remembered her mad fit of anger; without being touched by her sister's sobs, she shut herself in her room, refusing to open the door each time that Nina came and knocked at it.

On the morrow her anger had cooled and been succeeded by a sad tenderness, a profound remorse for her harshness. She went to her sister's room and found her asleep without having undressed, her cheeks still showing the traces of tears. She bent over her to embrace her. Nina flung her arms around her, whispering in her ear, with tears of joy this time:

"I knew that you would not long be vexed with me; there was no reason why you should be, I am no longer a child; I am eighteen; I could not hide it from you any longer."

"But he – how does he feel towards you?" interrupted Helene.

As she put this fateful question, she pressed her hand to her heart as though she feared it would betray her by its beating.

"I think … he also loves me; he is so attentive, so affectionate in his manner."

Helene did not ask any more; she forced herself to smile, and till the hour of her departure, she was constantly with her sister; at the bottom of her heart she wished her to be happy, but in this same heart an icy despair was daily growing more intense.

"He has been affectionate and attentive to me also," she said to herself. Had she not seen his gaze constantly following her? Did not the very tone of his voice change when he spoke to her? She had deceived herself then! And indeed how could she, the taciturn "nun," hope to rival her graceful little sister? She had been blind, and worse than that – ridiculous. He loved Nina, and naturally had more smiles for her elder sister than for others.

Shortly after her sister's avowal, Helene went to pay a visit to some relatives, where she remained several days, considering what she should do. One moment she believed that he hesitated between her and Nina. But Nina had been entrusted to her care by her dying mother; could she ever come between her and her happiness? Never! Should she bring tears to those clear eyes? Should she ruin by her egotism "her child's" future? He might hesitate, but she must not! Only what should she do?

She had not to reflect long. Her mother had taught her to forget herself and accustomed her to the thought of self-sacrifice. Happiness bought at the cost of another's suffering could not be endurable, she said to herself. Even if he did not yet love Nina, she would entrust her to his care, at the moment of her departure, and love would soon follow. Her sister would not miss her; those who are in love do not need a third person. Her life, as far as she was concerned, was finished; she would never love again; natures like hers neither change nor forget. As for being present to witness the spectacle of this youthful happiness, that was beyond her power. Perhaps in course of time, when everything had settled down, she might return. At present she must go where they could not discover her, or even if they did so, not be able to bring her back into the world.

It was then that she recollected the peace that she thought she had seen pervading the convents which she had visited with her mother, and that devotional atmosphere which soothes those whom life has cheated. She recalled to memory the face of Sister Melanie, of whom it was said that she had lived through all the trials that can come upon a woman. How serene her face was and how grand and noble that once passionate heart!

After her absence, Helene, returning one evening to her house, found her sister and him in the garden. A nightingale was singing, and the flowers were exhaling their scents. She thought she saw on the faces of the two young people an expression of happiness. The next day she told her sister that she was leaving for Petrograd, and that their aunt would stay with her during her absence. She took leave of both for "a certain time" as she said, and ignored his melancholy air when she entrusted her little girl to his care. She wrote seldom from Petrograd; Nina's letters showed signs of ennui; Helene explained it to herself by the fact that the younger one had never been without her before. Later on, she left for a foreign country, and it was from thence that she announced to her family the unexpected news of her entering the convent; she was happy, she said, and wished them the same happiness; she would only write seldom, and perhaps would never return to Russia.

She did return, however, chose at random a small provincial town, entered a convent there as a novice, and disappeared from the world. She never knew if her family had looked for her; it was as though a curtain had dropped between her and her former life.

Since then five long sad years had passed. She hoped she had secured the happiness of those she loved, but she had not gained that sweet quietude, that healing forgetfulness which she had expected. On the contrary, her sadness increased with the lapse of time; memory became more active; through the most of her tears she no longer even saw the great ideal which was to safeguard her from herself. One single thought possessed her: she would never be able to return again to those she loved so well.

Sometimes, as she lay on her bed, her lean arms crossed over her breast, she said to herself, that one day she would be so stretched in her coffin, but then her sufferings would be ended, and death did not alarm her; she smiled at him as a prisoner smiles at the radiant hour of deliverance. But that hour came very slowly.

It was still dark when the bells rang for matins. Helene dressed herself quickly and went out. From all sides black figures were gliding in the shadow towards the lighted portal of the church. Some saluted her, others did not notice her. Silence reigned everywhere.

She went to efface herself in her favourite corner, in the shadow where she loved to stand, leaning her head against the cold wall. She did not succeed in attaining to forgetfulness; on the contrary her memories oppressed her, though she tried to lose herself in the contemplation of the gentle Virgin who seemed to regard her with pity. It would have been a relief if at least she could have shared her sorrow with some sister soul, but Sister Seraphine was the only one who passed and re-passed her, grumbling to herself as she went.

"Why do you stand there, like a statue? Make at any rate on your forehead the penitent's sign of the cross! They are a real sorrow, these young ones! You all have your eyes fixed on the holy pictures, but your hearts are elsewhere. Think of it, Sister Helene! At the hour of death you will be glad to pray, but then your hand will not have the power to make the sign of the holy cross." And the old woman disappeared behind the columns.

Helene went back to her room. It was still dark, and the gloom had invaded her soul also. Why was it that she was suffering to-day more than usual? Was it a presentiment which oppressed her heart? What was going to happen?

V

Six o'clock had just struck. The grey light of morning broke into the cell in which Helene walked up and down with a nervous step, casting from time to time a sad glance out of the window; she felt that to-day neither sleep nor calm would come to her. Olia, woken by the sound of her footsteps, had come several times to her door; but Helene had always sent her away, begging her not to be anxious about her.

There was nothing in her past with which she had to reproach herself. She had given all that she had. Why then did the consciousness of having acted rightly not bring her the peace for which she longed? Then, catching herself murmuring, she began to pray, but the prayer did not come from her heart. Her exhaustion caused her to feel giddy; she even rejoiced in this, seeing in it a sign of the torpor for which she craved. Passing into her inner room, she lay down on her bed, with her eyes closed, but sleep did not come. Dawn broadened into day, and the austere countenances of the icons seemed to be bent fixedly on poor Helene as she lay, deprived of strength. She made a movement and her hand touched the old newspapers in which the preserves sent by the general's wife had been wrapped. Hardly knowing what she did, she unfolded one of them, and glanced at it carelessly; the paper glided with a light rustle behind her bed; a vague desire to know what was going on in the world seized her; she took another sheet; her eye fell on the not very edifying details of a divorce case; she turned the page and found there, by a strange chance, a correspondent's letter from her native town of which she had heard nothing for so long. She saw that the date of this letter was that of the year in which she had left her country.

Scarcely had she glanced through some lines than her blood turned to ice in her veins and a chill pierced her heart. She uttered such a groan that Olia awoke with a start. As though she could not trust her eyes, poor Helene read the article a second time. Yes, they were there, those cursed lines! a thing more horrible than murder. She had not yet taken in the awfulness of it. A fit of frenzy seized her brain. She seized the newspaper and brandished it at the sacred pictures, saying, "There! There!"

What she had read was as follows:

"A tragedy has just disturbed our quiet provincial town. Two young girls of good society fell in love with the same young man; one was twenty-five, the other nineteen. There was an explanation between the two sisters: the elder did not wish to stand in the way of the happiness of the younger; she went away for good, telling her friends that she intended to enter a convent, and would never return. This is where the affair took a dramatic turn. The young man loved the girl who had gone away; he only waited for her return to declare himself. When he heard of the step she had taken, he applied to the authorities to be exchanged into another regiment, and went off without informing any one. This morning the younger of the two sisters was found dead in her room, killed by a pistol-shot. On the table was a short note:

"'Dear Sister, —

"'Where are you? Forgive me! I could not, I ought not, I dared not live any longer.

"'Nina.'"

"No! It is impossible! It is false! I am delirious!" exclaimed poor Helene, crushing the paper in her clenched hand. She went near the window in order to read again the fatal lines. They were indeed there; they did not disappear! Nothing took their place. They turned from black to red; they blazed like fire; they burned her heart!

"Dear Sister, —

"Where are you? Forgive me! I could not, I ought not, I dared not live any longer.

"Nina."

Helene seized her black head-dress and bursting into wild laughter rushed towards the door. She herself had fastened it, but she imagined that some one was holding it from without, and shook it, sobbing and laughing at the same time. Then without hesitation she turned the key, went out, passed Olia who, pale as a sheet, gazed at her without comprehension and ran down the stairs uttering unintelligible sounds.

A moment after she was hammering at the closed door of the church and uttering maledictions to the great alarm of Sister Seraphine, who ran to tell the abbess, making the sign of the cross and crying, "Saints preserve us! It was not for nothing that the wind last night blew so fiercely against the windows. It is a real sin of these young ones."

At the sound of Helene's wild cries the other nuns, frightened and half-dressed, left their cells and ran in the raw cold of the morning to help their unhappy sister.

Alas! she had misunderstood!

THE LUCK OF IVAN THE FORGETFUL

I

The old convict spent the whole day walking up and down the prison courtyard, wearing a gloomy expression and sunk in deep meditation like a man trying to recollect something which he had long forgotten. He was entered on the roll of prisoners as Ivan the Forgetful, but his fellow-prisoners nicknamed him "Ivan the Runaway," because of his numerous attempts to escape. No one spoke to him, for all knew that nothing could be got from him but words of abuse and gloomy looks. On this particular day Ivan the Runaway was in a specially bad humour.

The spring had arrived in the previous night, and the mounds of snow at the corners of the grey towers, which in winter were so hard that the prisoners could amuse themselves by climbing on them, were now as full of holes as a sponge and discharged dirty-looking rivulets into the pools near them.

The sky was so warm and bright, and the wind blew so softly that a strange giddiness seized the old man, and the thick walls with the iron-barred windows seemed to him more hateful than ever. He was taken back to his cell; the key turned creaking in the door; he felt as though something in his heart were turned round with it, and his expression became more gloomy and morose than ever; he looked at the door like a hunted wolf. Ah, if he could only grip the warder's throat! – one squeeze would finish the business! The convict went to the window, and laid his hot face against the cold rusty iron bars. He could not gaze long enough at the deep blue sky behind them, and dreamt of dark forests, wide fields and majestic rivers rolling freely along. Just then a little cloud rose and hung motionless in space; rosy lights passed over it and its edges glowed like fiery gold. "The sun is setting," thought the prisoner, and lingered by the window till the little wandering cloud turned pale and was lost in the darkness, and the first star began to tremble in the sky. Ivan the Runaway went to sleep, but in dreams he heard the tops of the pines whispering, and the fir-cones dropping on the soft soil of the forest; he heard invisible wings beating and the stream fretting against the gnarled roots which barred its way to liberty.

II

The first thunderstorm, the harbinger of spring, has aroused the earth from her light slumber. At day-break, the convicts were mustered outside the prison walls. "Ivan the Forgetful," called out the warder, with the list in his hand. The old convict sulkily took his place in the row. He scanned with a searching glance the weak-looking undergrown soldiers of the escort, who in their ill-fitting grey cloaks looked almost deformed. Their bayonets gleamed in the sun, their musket-barrels were stopped with wads of cloth. "Loaded," said the old man to himself and smiled significantly. It was on just such a spring morning in the previous year that blindly-fired shots had rung out behind him. He remembered the warm scent of the earth on which he had then flung himself, as though he wished to be one with it, and then the deep weird silence during which he seemed to hear incessantly soft creeping footsteps behind him … and finally, for a time, freedom. But now? Would he really have to recommence the hated hard labour with which he had already been so familiar? The dark mine-shaft yawned plainly enough at his feet; like mole-holes the galleries wound through rocks and earth; here and there in the darkness glimmered the miners' lamps, and he heard the melancholy sound of monotonous, ceaseless hammering. The convicts were driven down into the subterranean darkness before sunrise, and only when the sun had sunk behind the blue mountains could they come up again, so that they never saw the cheerful daylight.

Ivan jogged his neighbour with his elbow. "Where do you come from?"

"From a long way off; – farther than you can see."

"I expect you have already run away once?" asked the old man with a peculiar intonation of voice.

"Certainly I did not fly."

"Did you confess it or deny it?"

"You can confess if you choose to."

"What is your name?"

"Ivan the Distant. If you like you can also call me 'The Near'; it's all the same to me."

"Ah well, you suit us." Ivan's good humour increased perceptibly. "And what are you thinking of doing now?"

"That will be seen soon enough. I have got twenty years."

"What? Hard labour?"

"Did you think I meant sentinel duty?"

"Well, that is another point in which we are similar."

Two days had passed. The weary convicts and the no less weary warders had not been long asleep in the prison which stood in the midst of an impenetrable wood, when the sentinel suddenly heard a strange noise. There was the sound of a human body falling on the ground once – twice, and then the clanking of a chain. A dark mass rolled towards the wood. The soldier aimed hastily, a flash cut through the darkness, and the echoes of the shot woke the forest; a cry died away in the distance.

"Ivan the Distant is hit," said Ivan the Forgetful, and darted blindly forwards at random into the mysterious realm of the aged giant trees which towered like shadows in the darkness of the night. Shots and cries echoed behind him. The wood seemed to grow alive; it clutched at him with hard horny hands, it seized the skirts of his coat and dug sharp claws into his trembling body, it threw obstacles in his way so that he stumbled, it drew the ground from under his feet so that he fell into a depth; wet grass sprinkled his face with dew, and he found that he had fallen down a steep declivity. He recovered from the shock and saw that his fall had been arrested by the projecting stump of a tree. He raised his head and listened. There was deep darkness and silence above him and beneath him; only from time to time he saw the faint reflection of a flash and heard the rolling echo of distant shots. Ivan climbed carefully lower down and crawled farther on, looking round him on all sides like a beast of prey and disregarding the pain of his torn hands and knees. "It is all up with Ivan the Distant," he said to himself. "He had no luck." And he crept on farther and farther, without knowing whither, into the impenetrable darkness of the warm spring night.

III

O Liberty! With a thousand tongues she spoke to him, with a thousand tones and colours she greeted the fugitive everywhere. For two weeks he saw nothing overhead but the immense expanse of blue sky, against which the branches with their reddish opening blossoms showed in delicate relief. It seemed as if there were no such things in the world as gloomy walls and rusty prison bars. Only in his dreams at times the fugitive still heard the clanking of chains and the rattling of locks; then he awoke in terror to see above him the starry sky of night and the waving pine-tops. He would lie for hours without moving, listening to the solemn sound of the wind roaring through the forest. O Liberty!

He did not know how many versts he was from the great high road, along which he had been driven together with the whole herd of prisoners. At first he had come across clearings and settlements in the forest, seen the smoke of chimneys from a distance, and made a wide detour. It was only at night that he ventured into the neighbourhood of human dwellings, and looked about, like a wild animal, to see where he could clamber in, and get some bread without awaking the dogs. On one occasion hunger drove him into a cottage in the window of which he had seen a candle burning. An old woman who was cowering down by the hearth was paralysed by fear and began to tremble all over. What wonder? Who did not know the yellow sign on the convict's back? He tried to speak gently. "Don't fear, mother! Have you any bread?" But the old woman's tongue could not move. So he looked for and found a crust of bread and drank some water. He saw her desperate poverty and asked, "Have you got no more bread?"

Then the old woman recovered herself a little. "Go!" she stammered; "to-morrow I will get some more."

"Shall I take your last piece?" he said, left the crust lying on the table and departed.

Another day he met a hunter in the forest and would probably have passed him with an ordinary greeting, had not the latter pointed his gun at him.

Then a cloud came before Ivan's eyes; he rushed at the stranger and tore him down. His breath was soon choked out of him, and no one knew how long his body lay in the forest before the wolves devoured it. He had brought his death on himself. The fugitive was glad to get rid of his convict's garb and now wore a coat of sheepskin. He also had a gun to protect himself from wild beasts. If his hair had only been longer, he had no need to go out of people's way.

O Liberty! His conscience was silent; no recollection of the blood which he had shed stirred in him, or if it did occur to his mind, it troubled him as little as it troubles a beast of prey. Men had always been the old vagabond's worst enemies. He had grown up like a hungry, young dog, a mark for missiles and kicks. He received little to eat and many blows, and when hunger drove him to steal, he received more blows. In the house of correction the priest spoke to him of the sufferings of Christ, of repentance and reform. He listened gloomily and returned to his cell. "Christ is gracious to sinners," he thought, "but who has ever been gracious to me?"

After he had shed blood once, his soul seemed to become covered with a hard crust. He became like an animal, escaped from prison when he could, and no longer had a home. Since then his eyebrows were closely contracted over his gloomy eyes, and he was filled with bitter hatred against the whole world. He only longed for one thing, the solitude of field and forest, for liberty and loneliness, where he felt no one near him.

Still farther and farther he roamed between the grey scarred tree-trunks. Through the carpet of pine-needles over which his foot passed, there were springing here and there pointed little leaves and the first grass-blades. The squirrels had already ventured out of their warm nests into the sunshine and sprang briskly and blithely from branch to branch, as though they would make fun of the old vagabond. The sky sent down soft spring showers, or brief thunder-storms, or expanded itself in blue serenity as though it would warm the earth on its bosom. Ivan wandered through dark ravines, where noisy rivulets streamed down on all sides, and in the perpetual shadow the snow still lay white and untouched.

The farther he went, the louder and merrier foamed and bubbled the tides of spring. O Liberty!

When the fugitive was tired, he could find a shelter anywhere. He would fling himself down where he liked, cross his hands under his head, and look up at the sky till his eyes closed of themselves. The wounds on his legs caused by the iron fetters began to heal; no one who met him would have guessed who he was. But the primeval forest seemed quite deserted; no tree bore the mark of an axe, and none had been felled. Here a black scorched pine-tree had been blasted by the lightning; there a half-decayed one, whose top was entangled in its neighbour's branches, had collapsed from sheer old age. This solitude had been profaned by no one's foot; here was real freedom.

Only now and then he encountered wild animals. Once a bear came within gun-shot, but the old man spared his life. "You have nothing to give me now," he thought. "Your skin is no use in summer. Come again in winter." And he shouted at the animal in such a terrible voice, that it trotted off with its tail drawn in.

Sometimes he heard the howling of the wolves in the distance; in the deep silence it sounded weird and terrifying. It filled the old man with a strange feeling, not fear, but in his innermost being something seemed to howl and moan in sympathy with the beasts of prey. Was he not indeed like a wolf among men? Cowering by the fires he made, he would gaze for hours into the red glowing embers. The flames roared and strained towards the dark sky as though they would make themselves free; the fresh brushwood crackled and emitted clouds of blue whirling smoke; the birch-trunk over which the sparks danced, contracted itself as though in a spasm, till it finally flared up in a sheet of fire, and the solitary man felt ever more painfully conscious that he too was every one's enemy, and was only tolerated in this wilderness like those creatures whose howling so strangely thrilled his heart. The darkness which seemed to press from all sides on the fire looked between the grey pine-trunks on the gloomy face of the convict, and listened to his moody murmuring.