‘Nikolai Alexievitch!’ she exclaimed. ‘My daughter is ill. Let me have time to attend to her. I can’t leave her.’
‘What’s the matter with the child?’
‘She seems to be choking.’
‘What? Diphtheria? Why didn’t you speak before, you fool? Run and tell Nikititch to drive to Vieshenska for the doctor. Hurry!’
Nikititch brought the doctor back the next morning. He examined the unconscious, feverish child, and without replying to Aksinia’s entreaties went straight to the master. The old man received him in the ante-room.
‘Well, what’s wrong with the child?’ he asked, acknowledging the doctor’s greeting with a careless nod.
‘Diphtheria, your Excellency!’
‘Will it get better? Any hope?’
‘Hardly! It’s dying.’
‘You fool!’ The old man turned livid. ‘What did you study medicine for? Cure her!’ He slammed the door in the doctor’s face and paced up and down the hall.
Aksinia knocked and entered. ‘The doctor wants horses to take him to Vieshenska,’ she said.
The old man turned on his heel. ‘Tell him he’s a blockhead! Tell him he doesn’t leave this place until the child is well. Give him a room and feed him,’ he shouted, shaking his fist. He strode over to the window, drummed with his fingers for a minute, and then, turning to a photograph of his son as a baby in his nurse’s arms, stepped back two paces and stared hard at it.
As soon as the child had fallen sick Aksinia had decided that God was punishing her for taunting Natalia. Crushed with fear for the child’s life, she lost control of herself, wandered aimlessly about, and could not work. ‘Surely God won’t take her!’ the feverish thought beat incessantly in her brain, and not believing, with all her force trying not to believe that the child would die, she prayed frantically to God for His last mercy, that its life might be spared.
But the fever was choking the little life. The girl lay like marble, a difficult, broken cry coming from her throat. The doctor attended her four times a day, and stood of an evening smoking on the steps of the servants’ quarters, gazing at the cold sparkle of the autumnal stars.
All night Aksinia remained on her knees by the bed. The child’s gurgling rattle wrung her heart.
‘My little one, my little daughter,’ she groaned; ‘my flower, don’t go away, Tania. Look, my pretty one, open your eyes, come back. My black-eyed darling. Why, oh Lord …?’
The child occasionally opened its eyelids, and the bloodshot eyes gave her an errant, intangible glance. The mother caught at the glance greedily. It seemed to be withdrawn into itself, yearning, resigned.
She died in her mother’s arms. For the last time the little mouth gaped, and the body was racked with a convulsion. The tiny head was thrown back, out of its mother’s arm, and the little Melekhov eyes gazed with an astonished, morose stare.
Old Sashka dug a tiny grave under an old poplar by the lake, carried the coffin to the grave and with unwonted haste covered it with earth, then waited long and patiently for Aksinia to rise from the clayey mound. At last he could wait no longer, and blowing his nose violently, he went off to the stables. He drew a flask of eau-de-cologne and a little flagon of denatured alcohol out of a manger, mixed the spirits in a bottle, and muttered as he held the concoction up to the light:
‘In memory! May the heavenly kingdom open its gates to the little one! The angel soul is dead.’
Three weeks later Eugene Listnitsky sent a telegram saying he was on his way home. A troika of horses was sent to meet him at the station, and everybody on the estate was on tiptoe with expectation. Turkeys and geese were killed, and old Sashka flayed a sheep. The young master arrived at night. A freezing rain was falling, and the lamps flung fugitive little beams of light over the meadow. Throwing his warm cloak to Sashka, Eugene, limping slightly, and very agitated, walked up the steps. His father hastened to meet him, sending the chairs flying in his progress.
Aksinia served supper in the dining-room, and went to summon them to table. Looking through the keyhole, she saw the old man embracing and kissing his son on the shoulder; old Listnitsky’s shoulders were quivering. Waiting a few minutes, she looked again. This time Eugene was on his knees before a great map spread out on the floor. The old man, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe, was knocking with his knuckles on the arm of a chair and roaring indignantly:
‘It can’t be! I don’t believe it!’
Eugene replied quietly, persuasively, running his fingers over the map. The old man answered:
‘In that case the supreme command was in the wrong. A narrow shortsightedness on their part. Look, Eugene, I’ll give you a similar instance from the Russo-Japanese campaign. Let me! Let me!’
Aksinia knocked. The old man came out animated, gay, and his eyes glittering youthfully. With his son he drank a bottle of wine of 1879 vintage. As Aksinia waited on them and observed their cheerful faces, she felt keenly her own loneliness. An unwept yearning rent her. After the death of the child she had wanted to weep, but tears would not come. A cry came to her throat, but her eyes were dry, and so the stony grief oppressed her doubly. She slept a great deal, seeking relief in a drowsy oblivion, but the child’s call reached her even in sleep. She imagined the infant was asleep at her side, and she turned and clawed at the pillow with her fingers, hearing the whispered: ‘Mama, Mama.’ ‘My darling,’ she would answer with chilly lips. Even in the oppressive broad daylight she sometimes imagined that the child was at her knee, and she caught herself reaching out her hand to stroke the curly head.
The third day after his arrival Eugene sat until late in the evening with old Sashka in the stables, listening to his artless stories of the former free life of the Don cossacks. He left him at nine o’clock. A wind was blowing through the yard; the mud squelched slushily underfoot. A young, yellow-whiskered moon peered between the clouds. By its light Eugene looked at his watch, and turned towards the servants’ quarters. He stopped by the steps to light a cigarette, stood thinking for a moment, then, shrugging his shoulders, went up the steps. He cautiously lifted the latch and opened the door, passed through into Aksinia’s room, and struck a match.
‘Who is that?’ she asked, drawing the blanket around her.
‘It’s only me, Listnitsky.’
‘I’ll be dressed in a minute.’
‘Don’t trouble. I shall only stop for a moment or two.’
He threw off his overcoat and sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘So your daughter died …’
‘Died …’ Aksinia exclaimed echoingly.
‘You’ve changed considerably. I can guess what the loss of the child meant to you. But I think you are torturing yourself uselessly; you can’t bring her back, and you are still young enough to have children. Take yourself in hand and be reconciled to the loss. After all, you haven’t lost everything. All your life is still before you.’
He pressed her hand and stroked her caressingly yet authoritatively, playing on the low tones of his voice. He lowered his voice to a whisper, and hearing Aksinia stifledly weeping he began to kiss her wet cheeks and eyes.
Woman’s heart is susceptible to pity and kindness. Burdened with her despair, not realizing what she was doing, Aksinia yielded herself to him with all her strong, long dormant passion. But as an unprecedently devastating, darkening wave of delight lashed her spirit she came to her senses and cried out sharply; losing all sense of reason or shame she ran out half-naked, in her shift alone, on to the steps. Eugene hastily followed her out, leaving the door open, pulling on his overcoat as he went. As he mounted the steps to the terrace of the house he smiled joyously and contentedly. Lying in his bed, rubbing his soft breast he thought: ‘From the point of view of an honest man, what I have done is shameful, immoral. I have robbed my neighbour; but after all, I have risked my life at the front. If the bullet had gone right through my head I should have been feeding the worms now. These days one has to live passionately for each moment as it comes.’ He was m
omentarily horrified by his own thoughts; but his imagination again conjured up the terrible moment of attack, and how he had raised himself from his dead horse only to fall again, shot down by bullets. As he dropped off to sleep he decided: ‘Time enough for this tomorrow, but now to rest.’
Next morning, finding himself alone with Aksinia in the dining-room he went towards her, a guilty smile on his face. But she pressed against the wall and stretched out her hands, scorching him with her frenzied whisper:
‘Keep away, you devil!’
Life dictates its own unwritten laws to man. Within three days Eugene went again to Aksinia at night, and she did not repel him.
Chapter Nine
A small garden was attached to the eye hospital. There are many such clipped, uncomfortable gardens on the outskirts of Moscow, where the eye gets no rest from the stony, heavy dreariness of the city, and as one looks at them the memory recalls still more sharply and painfully the wild freedom of the forest. Autumn reigned in the hospital garden. The paths were covered with leaves of orange and bronze, a morning frost crumpled the flowers and flooded the patches of grass with a watery green. On fine days the patients wandered along the paths, listening to the church bells of believing Moscow. When the weather was bad (and such days were frequent that year) they went from room to room, or lay silently on their beds, boring themselves and one another.
The civilian patients were in the majority in the hospital, and the wounded soldiers were accommodated in one room. There were five of them: Jan Vareikis, a tall, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed Latvian; Ivan Vrublevsky, a handsome young dragoon; a Siberian Sharpshooter named Kosikh; a restless little yellow soldier, and Gregor. At the end of September another was added to the number. He arrived in the afternoon and underwent an operation the same evening. A few minutes after he had been taken into the operating theatre, the other patients heard the muffled sound of singing. While he was under chloroform and the surgeon was removing the remains of one eye shattered by a flying piece of shell, he was singing and cursing. After the operation he was brought into the ward where the other soldiers were quartered. When the effects of the chloroform passed he informed the others that he had been wounded on the German front, that his name was Garanzha, he was a machine-gunner, an Ukrainian from Chornigov province. He made a particular friend of Gregor, whose bed was next to his, and after the evening inspection they would talk a long time in undertones.
‘Well, how goes it?’ he opened their first conversation.
‘Like soot and chalk.’
‘What’s wrong with the eye?’
‘I’m having injections.’
‘How many have you had?’
‘Eighteen, so far.’
‘Are they painful?’
‘They aren’t pleasant!’
‘Ask them to cut the eye right out.’
‘What for? I don’t want to be blind.’
Gregor’s jaundiced, venomous neighbour was discontented with everything. He cursed the government, the war, his own lot, the hospital food, the cook, the doctors, everything he could lay his tongue to.
‘What did we peasants go to war for, that’s what I want to know?’ he demanded.
‘For the same reason as everybody else.’
‘Hah! You’re a fool! I’ve got to chew it all over for you! It’s the bourgeoisie we’re fighting for, don’t you see? What are the bourgeoisie? They’re birds among the fruit-trees.’
He explained the hard words to Gregor, interlarding his speech with peppery swear-words. ‘Don’t talk so fast. I can’t understand your Ukrainian lingo. Speak more clearly,’ Gregor would interrupt him.
‘I’m not talking so thickly as that, my boy. You think you’re fighting for the Tsar, but what is the Tsar? The Tsar’s a nobody, and the Tsarina’s a chicken; but they’re both a weight on our backs. Don’t you see? The factory-owner drinks vodka, while the soldier kills the lice. The capitalist takes the profit, the worker goes bare. That’s the system we’ve got. Serve on, cossack, serve on! Earn a few more crosses, you great oak!’
Day after day he revealed truths hitherto unknown to Gregor, explaining the real causes of war, and jesting bitterly at the autocratic government. Gregor tried to raise objections, but Garanzha silenced him with simple, murderously simple questions, and he was forced to agree.
Most terrible of all was that Gregor began to think Garanzha was right, and that he was impotent to oppose him. He realized with horror that the intelligent and bitter Ukrainian was gradually but surely destroying all his former ideas of the Tsar, the country, and his own military duty as a cossack. Within a month of the Ukrainian’s arrival all the system on which Gregor’s life had been built up was a smoking ruin. It had already been rotten, eaten up with the canker of the monstrous iniquity of the war, and it needed only a jolt. That jolt was given, and Gregor’s mind awoke. He tossed about seeking a way out, a solution to his predicament, and gladly found it in Garanzha’s answers.
Late one night Gregor rose from his bed and awoke Garanzha. He sat down on the edge of the Ukrainian’s bed. The greenish light of a September moon streamed through the window. Garanzha’s cheeks were dark with furrows, the black sockets of his eyes gleamed humidly. He yawned and wrapped his legs in the blanket.
‘Aren’t you asleep?’ he grumbled.
‘I can’t sleep,’ Gregor replied. ‘Tell me this one thing. War is good for one and bad for another, isn’t it?’
‘Well?’ the Ukrainian yawned.
‘Wait!’ Gregor whispered, blazing with anger. ‘You say we are being driven to death for the benefit of the capitalists. But what about the people? Don’t they understand? Aren’t there any who could tell them, who could go and say: “Brothers, this is what you are dying for”?’
‘How could they? Tell me that! Supposing you did. Here we are whispering like geese in a box, but talk out loud, and you’ll have a bullet in you. The people are stone deaf. The war will wake them up. After the storm will come the fine weather.’
‘But what’s to be done about it? Tell me, you serpent! You’ve turned me upside down.’
‘Those I can turn aside, I turn aside. You must turn your rifle without any regret. You must shoot those who sent the people into hell. You know who!’ Garanzha rose in his bed, and grinding his teeth, stretched out his hand: ‘A great wave will rise and sweep them all away.’
‘So you think everything has to be turned upside down?’
‘Ha! The government must be thrown aside like an old rag. The lords must be stripped of their fleece, for they’ve murdered the people too long already.’
‘And what will you do with the war when you’ve got the new government? They’ll still go on fighting, and if not us, then our children will. How are you going to root out war, to destroy it, when men have fought for ages?’
‘True, war has gone on since the beginning of time, and will go on so long as we don’t sweep away the evil government. But when every government is a workers’ government they won’t fight any more. That’s what’s got to be done. When the Germans, and the French and all the others have got a workers’ and peasants’ government. What shall we have to fight about then? Away with frontiers, away with anger! One beautiful life all over the world. Ah …!’ Garanzha sighed, and twisting the ends of his whiskers, his one eye glittering, he smiled dreamily. ‘Grishka, I’d pour out my blood drop by drop to live to see that day.’
They talked on until the dawn came. In the grey shadows Gregor fell into a troubled sleep.
September and October passed. The days dragged by interminably, filled with mortal boredom. In the morning at nine o’clock the patients were served with tea, two miserable, transparent slices of French bread, and a knob of butter the size of a finger-nail. After dinner they were still hungry. In the evening they had tea again, carousing with a glass of water to break the monotony. The patients in the military ward changed. First the Siberian went, then the Latvian. At the end of October Gregor was discharged.
The hospita
l surgeon examined Gregor’s eyes and pronounced their sight satisfactory. But he was transferred to another hospital, as the wound in his head had unexpectedly opened and was slightly suppurating. As he said good-bye to Garanzha, Gregor remarked:
‘Shall we be meeting again?’
‘Two mountains never meet.’
‘Well, Hokhol, thank you for opening my eyes. I can see now, and I’m not good to know.’
‘When you get back to your regiment tell the cossacks what I’ve told you.’
‘I shall.’
‘And if you ever happen to be in Chornigov district, in Gorokhovka, ask for the smith Andrei Garanzha, and I’ll be glad to see you. So long, boy.’
They embraced. The picture of the Ukrainian, with his one eye and the pleasant lines running from his mouth across the sandy cheeks, remained long in Gregor’s memory.
Gregor spent ten days in the second hospital. He nursed unformulated decisions in his mind. The destructive poison of Garanzha’s teaching was working within him, and its jaundice had deeply affected him. He talked but little with his neighbours in the ward, and a certain cautious alarm was manifest in all his movements. For some days he was feverish, and lay in his bed listening to the ringing in his ears.
A high personage, one of the Imperial family, came to pay a visit to the hospital. Informed of this in the morning, the personnel of the hospital scurried about like mice in a burning granary. They redressed the wounded, changed the bedclothes before the time appointed, and one young doctor even tried to instruct the men how to reply to the personage and how to conduct themselves in conversation with her. The anxiety was communicated to the patients also, and some of them began to talk in whispers long before the time fixed for the visit. At noon a motor horn sounded at the front door, and, accompanied by the usual number of officials and officers, the personage passed through the hospital portals. She went the round of the wards, asking the stupid questions characteristic of one in her position and circumstances. The wounded, their eyes staring out of their heads, replied in accordance with the instructions of the junior surgeon. ‘Exactly so, your Imperial Highness’, and ‘Not at all, your Imperial Highness.’ The chief surgeon supplied commentaries to their answers, squirming like a grass-snake nipped by a fork. The regal personage distributed little ikons to the soldiers. The throng of brilliant uniforms and the heavy wave of expensive perfumes came towards Gregor. He stood by his bed, unshaven, gaunt, with feverish eyes. The slight tremor of the brown skin over his angular cheekbones revealed his agitation.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 31