第64章 A WOMAN(11)

Upon that she extends to me a pair of strong, capable arms, and proposes with a blush:

"Shall we kiss once more before we part?"

She clasps me with the one arm, and with the other makes the sign of the cross, adding:

"Good-bye, dear friend, and may Christ requite you for all your words, for all your sympathy!"

"Then shall we travel together?"

At the words she frees herself, and says firmly, nay, sternly:

"Not so. Never would I consent to such a plan. Of course, had you been a muzhik--but no. Even then what would have been the use of it, seeing that life is to be measured, not by a single hour, but by years?"

And, quietly smiling me a farewell, she moves away towards the hut, whilst I, remaining seated, lose myself in thoughts of her.

Will she ever overtake her quest in life? Shall I ever behold her again?

The bell for early Mass begins, though for some time past the hamlet has been astir, and humming in a sedate and non-festive fashion.

I enter the hut to fetch my wallet, and find the place empty.

Evidently the whole party has left by the gap in the broken-down wall.

I repair, next, to the Ataman's office, where I receive back my passport before setting out to look for my companions in the square.

In similar fashion to yesterday those "folk from Russia " are lolling alongside the churchyard wall, and also have seated among them, leaning his back against a log, the fat-jowled youth from Penza, with his bruised face looking even larger and uglier than before, for the reason that his eyes are sunken amid purple protuberances.

Presently there arrives a newcomer in the shape of an old man with a grey head adorned with a faded velvet skull-cap, a pointed beard, a lean, withered frame, prominent cheekbones, a red, porous-looking, cunningly hooked nose, and the eyes of a thief.

Him a flaxen-haired youth from Orel joins with a similar youth in accosting.

"Why are YOU tramping?" inquires the former.

"And why are YOU? " the old man retorts in nasal tones as, looking at no one, he proceeds to mend the handle of a battered metal teapot with a piece of wire.

"We are travelling in search of work, and therefore living as we have been commanded to live."

"By WHOM commanded?"

"By God. Have you forgotten?"

Carelessly, but succinctly, the old man retorts:

"Take heed lest upon you, some day, God vomit all the dust and litter which you are raising by tramping His earth!"

"How?" cries one of the youths, a long-eared stripling.

"Were not Christ and His Apostles also tramps?"

"Yes, CHRIST," is the old man's meaning reply as he raises his sharp eyes to those of his opponent. "But what are you talking of, you fools? With whom are you daring to compare yourselves?

Take care lest I report you to the Cossacks!"

I have listened to many such arguments, and always found them distasteful, even as I have done discussions regarding the soul.

Hence I feel inclined to depart.

At this moment, however, Konev makes his appearance. His mien is dejected, and his body perspiring, while his eyes keep blinking rapidly.

"Has any one seen Tanka--that woman from Riazan?" he inquires.

"No? Then the bitch must have bolted during the night. The fact is that, overnight, someone gave me a drop or two to drink, a mere dram, but enough to lay me as fast asleep as a bear in winter-time. And in the meantime, she must have run away with that Penza fellow."

"No, HE is here," I remark.

"Oh, he is, is he? Well, as what has the company registered itself? As a set of ikon-painters, I should think!"

Again he begins to look anxiously about him.

"Where can she have got to? " he queries.

"To Mass, maybe."

"0F course! Well, I am greatly smitten with her. Yes, my word I am!"

Nevertheless, when Mass comes to an end, and, to the sound of a merry peal of bells, the well-dressed local Cossacks file out of church, and distribute themselves in gaudy streams about the hamlet, no Tatiana makes her appearance.

"Then she IS gone," says Konev ruefully. "But I'll find her yet! I'LL come up with her!"

That this will happen I do not feel confident. Nor do I desire that it should.

*********************************

Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement.

Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists. That is to say, it would seem as though, " by order of the authorities," the inmates are presenting a stage spectacle in which they are playing, willingly and zealously, but with a complete lack of experience, imperfectly comprehended roles as prisoners, warders, and gendarmes.

For instance, today, when a warder and a gendarme came to my cell to escort me to exercise, and I said to them, " May I be excused exercise today? I am not very well, and do not feel like, etcetera, etcetera," the gendarme, a tall, handsome man with a red beard, held up to me a warning finger.

"NO ONE," he said, "has given you permission to feel, or not to feel, like doing things."

To which the warder, a man as dark as a chimney-sweep, with large blue "whites" to his eyes, added stutteringly:

"To no one here has permission been given to feel, or not to feel, like doing things. You hear that?"

So to exercise I went.

In this stone-paved yard the air is as hot as in an oven, for overhead there lours only a small, flat patch of dull, drab-tinted sky, and on three sides of the yard rise high grey walls, with, on the fourth, the entrance-gates, topped by a sort of look-out post.

Over the roof of the building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town's Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which a myriad drumsticks are beating.