Part 4

"Here lie nine brothers who lived for twenty years in this cell. Their only food was bread and water three times a week. As you see, they had no room to stand upright in, and were always pressed close to each other."

The peasants peered through the bars wonderingly.

We passed a body stretched out on a stone ledge.

"This holy saint cured the blind," the priest continued in a sing-song voice. "He lived in a cell too small to lie down in. For twenty-two years he never opened his mouth. His body, like the bodies of all the holy saints in these catacombs, is preserved without a sign of decay under this cloth." A peasant woman lifted her little boy up to kiss the edge of the dirty red pall. The pale flame of her candle flickered and the melted wax dripped on to the cloth. The woman wiped it off quickly, and glanced in a frightened way at the priest. But he turned away indifferently and went on.

We saw the bust of a man buried to his arm-pits in the floor. I would have stumbled over him, but the priest caught my arm.

"This is a holy saint, who, for twenty-five years, stood as you see him, buried in the earth to above his waist. He never spoke and only ate bread and water twice a week."

I looked at the peasants. Their faces were scared and white. A few hung back with a morbid curiosity.

"Come, come," the priest called impatiently. "Keep together. Some get lost here and never get out again."

I had heard of three pretty peasant girls who had mysteriously disappeared in the catacombs.

"Ouf!" The priest unlocked an iron door and we came squinting out into the daylight again. He held the door open and mopped his face as we filed past him, snuffing our candles. The pilgrims kept theirs.

Outside, some of the peasants clustered about the priest and asked him questions. As I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw the circle of round, inquiring faces with their look of unbounded confidence.

We went around back of the monastery to an open plateau overlooking the Dnieper. The river curved like a blue ribbon, and we could see the three pontoon bridges for "military reasons." On the low bank opposite were the soldiers' white tents laid out in regular squares. A ferry-boat was carrying some soldiers across the river. The sun flashed on the sentries' bayonets along the bank.

I heard the whine of a hand-organ. An armless beggar was turning the crank of an organ with his bare feet. The plateau was fairly alive with beggars, hopping about in the dust like fleas. Some were armless; others legless. They swung along at our heels on long, muscular arms, with leather on the palms of their hands, or dragged distorted, paralyzed bodies that tried to stand upright by our sides.

In the white, hot sunlight squatted an old man with a white, pointed beard so long that it lay out on the dust in front of him. In his arms he held a book done up in red cloth. He was blind. If you put a coin in a tin cup he wore round his neck, he would undo his book and open it, and by divine inspiration read the holy words of the page in front of him.

A row of seven blind women lined the exit. They began to whine as we approached, and stretched out their hands gropingly. The eyes of one woman had completely disappeared as though they had been knotted up and pulled back into her head. Another's bulged like a dead fish's, with that dull, bluish look in them. Another's lids were closed and crusted with sores, flies continuously creeping over them, but apparently she was indifferent. The seven blind women sat in rags and filth. Shall I ever forget them in the burning sunlight, with their terrible eyes and greedy fingers and the whine of their voices merging into the tune of the hand-organ?

When we left the monastery, a group of wounded soldiers were just entering. With them was a woman in a man's uniform. Her hair was curly and short, and her chin pointed. Her feet looked ridiculously small in the heavy, high, soldier's boots, and in spite of a strut her knees knocked together in an unmistakably feminine manner. But the men treated her quite as one of themselves. One soldier, who had had his leg cut off up to the thigh, supported himself by her shoulder. I have seen several women soldiers in Kiev, and they say there are many in the Russian army.

It is strange, seeing these things without Peter. I expect to go back to Bucharest with Marie and Janchu within a week. There Peter will meet us. I wish he were here now.

So much love, my dearests, every day and every night from

RUTH.

July 20, 1915.

Darlingest Mother and Dad:--

Before dawn this morning I was wakened by a shuffling noise from the street. It was not soldiers marching. There was no rhythm to it. Marie and I went to the window and looked out.

Behind the dark points of the poplars, in the convent garden across the street, the sky was growing light. The birds were beginning to sing. The air was sweet and cool after the night. And down the hill was passing a stream of people, guarded on either side by soldiers with bayonets. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes to look more closely, for there was something ominous in the snail's pace of the procession.

They were Jews, waxen-faced, their thin bodies bent with fatigue. Some had taken their shoes off, and limped along barefooted over the cobble-stones. Others would have fallen if their comrades had not held them up. Once or twice a man lurched out of the procession as though he was drunk or had suddenly gone blind, and a soldier cuffed him back into line again. Some of the women carried babies wrapped in their shawls. There were older children dragging at the women's skirts. The men carried bundles knotted up in their clothes. They stumbled and pitched along, as if they had no control over their skinny bodies; as if after another step they would all suddenly collapse and fall down on their faces like a crowd of scarecrows with a strong wind behind them. Some had their eyes closed; others stared ahead with their faces like dirty gray masks, with huge bony noses and sunken eyes. The procession showed no sign of coming to an end. It crawled on and on, and a stench rose from it that poisoned the morning air. The sound of the shuffling feet seemed to fill the universe.

"Where are they going?"--I whispered to Marie.

"To the Detention Camp here. They come from Galicia, and Kiev is one of the stopping-places on their way to Siberia."

"Do they walk all the way here?"

"Usually. Let's shut the window and keep out the smell."