Part 18

"Far? I should say we've been two months on the road," replied the best-dressed man of the three. He had fur cuffs and collar on his long sheepskin coat, and his boots were strong and well made.

"Can you tell me where we can get some tobacco?" he asked.

I directed him down the street a little way. He took a piece of silver from a leather purse he wore round his neck, and gave it to one of his companions, who left on the errand. The other man went round to the tail of the cart and took down two bags of grain for the horses' supper.

"Good horses you have there," I said, to say something.

"Yes, indeed; the best horses a man ever had; less good ones would have died on the road long ago. I bought them for fifty roubles apiece, and I wouldn't take two hundred and fifty for them to-day. But, then, they're all I have left of back there." He spoke in a quiet voice, scratching his stubby, unshaven face, absent-mindedly.

"Is he traveling with you?" I asked, pointing to the man who was slinging the grain-bags round the horses' necks.

"Yes. I picked him up along the road. His horse had died under him and he counted himself no longer a human being. What was he, indeed, with nothing he could call his own in the world any more? I let him come along with me. I had extra room. So I let him come along with me." His voice had no expression in it.

"But haven't you a family?" I asked.

"I have three children," he replied.

"It must be hard to take care of children at such a time as this."

"God knows it is," he replied. There was a sudden desperate note in his voice. "It's a woman's business. But my wife died on the way. A month and a half ago--soon after we started. It seems soon, now, but we'd been long enough on the road to kill her with the jolting and misery of it."

"Was she sick?"

"She died in childbirth. There was no one to take care of her, and nothing for her to eat. I made a fire, and she lay on the ground. All night she moaned. She died toward morning. The baby only lived a few hours. It was better it should die. What was ahead of it but suffering? It was a boy, and my wife and I had always wanted a boy. But I wouldn't have minded so much if the little wife had lived. It's hard without her."

The man returned with the tobacco and the three peasants lighted cigarettes. All was quiet. I heard nothing but the champing of the horses as they munched the grain and the whistling of the wind through the poplars in the convent garden.

"Kiev is a big city--a holy city, I've heard. Many from our town have made a pilgrimage here," the rich peasant observed.

For the moment I'd forgotten where I was. Now I heard the city noises; the footsteps grinding on pavements; the whistle and grinding of trains. And the lights from the city reddened the mists that rose from the Dnieper.

The carts in front began to move on.

"Where are we going?"--"What are the orders?"--"Is there a relief station here?" every one cried at once.

"Good-bye. A good journey," I cried.

"Thank you. Good-bye."

The men stepped out into the road again. I watched cart after cart pass me. The women looked straight out between the horses' ears, and showed no curiosity or wonderment at being in a big city for the first time in their lives. Strange sights and faces had no significance for them any more.

I ducked under a horse's nose and went indoors again.

There is something shameful in our security. We have shelter and bread. We can only feel life indirectly, after all. We are always muffled up by things. And America. A pathologic fear clutches me, for how will it all end?

My love to you every minute.

RUTH.

October.

Dearests:--

There seems no beginning or end to my stay here. How strange it is to look back to July and remember the long, hot days and the languorous nights when, in spite of the war, people walked in the gardens and listened to the music and drank punch out of tea-cups, pretending it was tea. The still, starlit nights of July.