第63章 A WOMAN(10)

"Never, I fear, will you discover what you are seeking."

She shakes her head protestingly.

"And never ought a woman to be discouraged," she retorts.

"Woman's proper round is to wish for a child, and to nurse it, and, when it has been weaned, to get herself ready to have another one. That is how woman should live. She should live as pass spring and summer, autumn and winter."

I find it a pleasure to watch the play of the woman's intellectual features; and though, also, I long to take her in my arms, I feel that my better plan will be to seek once more the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily deprived me of my passport.

"What are you yourself seeking?" she asks suddenly as again she edges towards me.

"Simply nothing. My one desire is to observe how folk live."

"And are you travelling alone?"

"I am."

"Even as am I. Oh God, how many lonely people there are in the world!"

By this time the cattle are awakening from slumber, and, with their soft lowings, reminding one of a pipe which I used to hear played by a certain blind old man. Next, four times, with unsteady touch, the drowsy watchman strikes his gong--twice softly, once with a vigour that clangs the metal again, and a fourth time with a mere tap of the iron hammer against the copper plate.

"What sort of lives do the majority of folk lead?"

"Sorry lives."

"Yes, that is what I too have found."

A pause follows. Then the woman says quietly:

"See, dawn is breaking, yet never this night have my eyes closed. Often I am like that; often I keep thinking and thinking until I seem to be the only human being in the world, and the only human being destined to re-order it."

"Many folk live unworthy lives. They live them amid discord, abasement, and wrongs innumerable, wrongs born of want and stupidity."

And as the words leave my lips my mind loses itself in recollections of all the dark and harrowing and shameful scenes that I have beheld.

"Listen," I say. "You may approach a man with nothing but good in your heart, and be prepared to surrender both your freedom and your strength; yet still he may fail to understand you aright.

And how shall he be blamed for this, seeing that never may he have been shown what is good?"

She lays a hand upon my shoulder, and looks straight into my eyes as she parts her comely lips.

"True," she rejoins--"But, dear friend, it is also true that goodness never bargains."

Together she and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer. It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered, transparent clouds which, like thousands of snow-white birds, go gliding over our heads.

"Yes," she whispers again as gently she gives me a nudge. "As one pursues one's lonely way one thinks and thinks--but of what? Dear friend, you have said that no one really cares what is the matter. Ah, HOW true that is! "

Here she springs to her feet, and, pulling me up with her, glues herself to my breast with a vehemence which causes me momentarily to push her away. Upon this, bursting into tears, she tends towards me again, and kisses me with lips so dry as almost to cut me--she kisses me in a way which penetrates to my very soul.

"You have been oh, so good!" she whispers softly. As she speaks, the earth seems to be sinking under my feet.

Then she tears herself away, glances around the courtyard, and darts to a corner where, under a fence, a clump of herbage is sprouting.

"Go now," she adds in a whisper. "Yes, go."

Then, with a confused smile, as, crouching among the herbage as though it had been a small cave, she rearranges her hair, she adds:

"It has befallen so. Ah, me! May God grant unto me His pardon!"

Astonished, feeling that I must be dreaming, I gaze at her with gratitude, for I sense an extraordinary lightness to be present in my breast, a radiant void through which joyous, intangible words and thoughts keep flying as swallows wheel across the firmament.

"Amid a great sorrow," she adds, "even a small joy becomes a great felicity."

Yet as I glance at the woman's bosom, whereon moist beads are standing like dewdrops on the outer earth; as I glance at that bosom, whereon the sun's rays are finding a roseate reflection, as though the blood were oozing through the skin, my rapture dies away, and turns to sorrow, heartache, and tears. For in me there is a presentiment that before the living juice within that bosom shall have borne fruit, it will have become dried up.

Presently, in a tone almost of self-excuse, and one wherein the words sound a little sadly, she continues:

"Times there are when something comes pouring into my soul which makes my breasts ache with the pain of it. What is there for me to do at such moments save reveal my thoughts to the moon, or, in the daytime, to a river? Oh God in Heaven! And afterwards I feel as ashamed of myself! . . . Do not look at me like that. Why stare at me with those eyes, eyes so like the eyes of a child?"

"YOUR face, rather, is like a child's," I remark.

"What? Is it so stupid?"

"Something like that."

As she fastens up her bodice she continues:

"Soon the time will be five o'clock, when the bell will ring for Mass. To Mass I must go today, for I have a prayer to offer to the Mother of God. . . Shall you be leaving here soon?"

"Yes--as soon, that is to say, as I have received back my passport."

"And for what destination?"

"For Alatyr. And you?"

She straightens her attire, and rises. As she does so I perceive that her hips are narrower than her shoulders, and that throughout she is well-proportioned and symmetrical.

"I? As yet I do not know. True, I had thought of proceeding to Naltchik, but now, perhaps, I shall not do so, for all my future is uncertain."