Part 56

"Quite so, dear sir. The common folk are exceedingly degenerate."

"Well, they are not developing as they ought to do."

"No, they are over-cramped," was the big peasant's rasped-out comment. "They have no room for GROWTH."

"Yes, they DO grow, but only as regards beard and moustache, as a tree grows to branch and sap."

With a glance at the purveyor of proverbs the old man assented by remarking: "Yes, true it is that the common folk are cramped." Whereafter he thrust a pinch of snuff into his nostrils, and threw back his head in anticipation of the sneeze which failed to come. At length, drawing a deep breath through his parted lips, he said as he measured the peasant again with his eyes:

"My friend, you are of a sort calculated to last."

In answer the peasant nodded.

"SOME day," he remarked, "we shall get what we want."

In front of us now, was Kazan, with the pinnacles of its churches and mosques piercing the blue sky, and looking like garlands of exotic blooms. Around them lay the grey wall of the Kremlin, and above them soared the grim Tower of Sumbek.

Here one and all were due to disembark.

I glanced towards the stern once more. The dark-browed woman was breaking off morsels from a wheaten scone that was lying in her lap, and saying as she did so:

"Presently we will have a cup of tea, and then keep together as far as Christopol."

In response the young fellow edged nearer to her, and thoughtfully eyed the large hands which, though inured to hard work, could also be very gentle.

"I have been trodden upon," he said.

"Trodden upon by whom?"

"By all. And I am afraid of them."

"Why so?"

"Because I am."

Breathing upon a morsel of the scone, the woman offered it him with the quiet words:

"You have had much to bear. Now, shall I tell you my history, or shall we first have tea?"

* * * * *

On the bank there was now to be seen the frontage of the gay, wealthy suburb of Uslon, with its brightly-dressed, rainbow-tinted women and girls tripping through the streets, and the water of its foaming river sparkling hotly, yet dimly, in the sunlight.

It was a scene like a scene beheld in a vision.

A WOMAN

The wind is scudding over the steppe, and beating upon the rampart of the Caucasian heights until their backbone seems to be bellying like a huge sail, and the earth to be whirling and whizzing through unfathomable depths of blue, and leaving behind it a rack of wind-torn clouds which, as their shadows glide over the surface of the land, seem ever to be striving to keep in touch with the onrush of the gale, and, failing to maintain the effort, dissolving in tears and despondency.

The trees too are bending in the attitude of flight--their boughs are brandishing their foliage as a dog worries a fleece, and littering the black soil with leaves among which runs a constant querulous hissing and rustling. Also, storks are uttering their snapping cry, sleek rooks cawing, steppe grasshoppers maintaining their tireless chirp, sturdy, well-grown husbandmen uttering shouts like words of command, the threshing-floors of the rolling steppe diffusing a rain of golden chaff, and eddying whirlwinds catching up stray poultry feathers, dried-onion strips, and leaves yellowed with the heat, to send them dancing again over the trim square of the little Cossack hamlet.

Similarly does the sun keep appearing and disappearing as though he were pursuing the fugitive earth, and ever and anon halting through weariness before his decline into the dark, shadowy vista where the snowclad peaks of the western mountains are rearing their heads, and fast-reddening clouds are reminding one of the surface of a ploughed field.

At times those clouds part their bulk to reveal in blinding splendour the silvery saddle of Mount Elburz, and the crystal fangs of other peaks--all, apparently, striving to catch and detain the scudding vapours. And to such a point does one come to realise the earth's flight through space that one can scarcely draw one's breath for the tension, the rapture, of the thought that with the rush of that dear and beautiful earth oneself is keeping pace towards, and ever tending towards, the region where, behind the eternal, snow-clad peaks, there lies a boundless ocean of blue--an ocean beside which there may lie stretched yet other proud and marvellous lands, a void of azure amid which one may come to descry far-distant, many-tinted spheres of planets as yet unknown, but sisters, all, to this earth of ours.