CHAPTER III
“Already my earthly life is drawing to a close: my voice is going, I am growing deaf and blind. I beseech you to relieve me from my office of sacristan, grant me permission to end my days in a monastery!”
The Tsarevitch, lost in dream-memories, scarcely noticed the monotonous wail of Father John, who returning from his cell sat down beside him on the bench.
“My small house, chattels and superfluous furniture, could be sold; my two orphaned nieces placed in some nunnery, and the little money I have scraped together, I would bring as my gift to the monastery. Thus I would not live on the bounty of others; and my offerings might be acceptable to God, like the two mites of the widow. Then I might live for a little while in silence and repentance, until God wills to take me from this into eternal life. I feel that I have reached the end of my span, for even so did my parent die at the same age——”
Awakening, as from a deep slumber, the Tsarevitch saw it was night. The white church towers, tinged with palest blue, more than ever suggested gigantic flowers, huge lilies of paradise; the golden domes shone silvery in heaven’s dark blue vault, studded with stars. The Milky Way glimmered but faintly. And the fresh breezes of heaven, even as the breathing of a slumberer, seemed to bring with them from the heavens a foreboding of eternal rest, and unbroken quietude. The slow murmuring words of Father John mingled with the stillness:—
“Give me but leave to go to my resting place, a holy monastery, and let me live in silence until the time that I shall be taken hence——”
He continued to mumble for some time, stopped, again resumed, went away; and soon returning called the Tsarevitch to supper. Alexis had again closed his eyes and fallen into that dark dreamy abode, where twixt sleep and waking hover the shadows of the past. Again memories, visions, image after image passed before him, like a long chain, link after link; above them all towered one awe inspiring image, his Father. And as a wanderer looking back at night from a summit beholds in a flash of lightning all the road he has traversed, so the relentless light from that figure laid bare his whole life.
He is seventeen, at the age when in olden days the Tsarevitch was proclaimed to the people, who would flock from all parts to gaze at him, as at some wonder. But on Alexis a man’s toil is imposed, too heavy for his young strength; he is perpetually travelling from town to town, buying provisions for the army, felling and despatching timber for the fleet, printing books, casting cannon, writing ukases, levying armies, searching for young deserters under penalty of death—himself only a lad relentlessly executing the law on those of his own age; he supervises everything to prevent defalcations of any kind.
He hurries from German declensions to fortifications, from garrisons to orgies; from orgies to deserters, until his brain is in a whirl. The more he attempts the more is demanded. He has neither leisure nor rest. He feels ready to drop like an over-ridden hack. And at the same time he knows that his efforts are all in vain; it is impossible for him ever to please his father.
At the same time he continues his studies, as if he were a schoolboy. “Two weeks shall be devoted to the German language, to master well the declensions, and then attention shall be given to French and arithmetic. Instruction to take place each day.”
At last his strength gave way. During the severe frost in January 1709, he was bringing to his father, then at Suma in the Ukraine, five regiments from Moscow which he had himself levied and which were destined to take part in the battle of Poltava. On the journey he caught cold, fell ill, and lay for weeks insensible. His life was despaired of.
He regained consciousness one sunny morning, early in spring. Slanting rays of sunlight flooded the room. Snow was lying outside, wet drops hung already on the icicle tips. Brooks were murmuring on their way, and from the sky the lark showered his song in melodious strains. Alexis sees his father’s face bent over him, the one so dear to him in years gone by, a face full of tenderness.
“My son, my love, do you feel better?”
Too weak to answer Alexis can but smile.
“Well, glory and thanks be to God!” exclaims his father piously. “The Lord hath shown mercy upon me and heard my prayer. Now you will soon be well!”
Alexis was told later that his father never left him during the whole of his illness. Neglecting all other work, he had spent night after night without sleep. When the patient grew worse, he ordered the celebration of mass and made a vow to erect a church in the name of “St. Alexis, the man of God.”
Then came the slow joyful days of convalescence. To Alexis his father’s caresses were as health-giving as the warm bright sunshine. In blissful lassitude, with a pleasurable weakness in his body, he would lie the whole day long without moving. He was never tired of looking at his father’s grand open countenance, his bright, fierce yet tender eyes, and the charming, slightly cunning smile on those finely-curved lips. The father could not do enough to show his love to Alexis. Once he brought him a small snuff-box carved by himself out of ivory, with the inscription, “A small gift, but from a loving heart.” Many a year the Tsarevitch had kept it, and every time he looked at it, something burning, poignant, akin to measureless pity for his father would surge up within him.
Another time while gently caressing his son’s hair, Peter said in a timid shy voice, as if excusing himself, “If ever I said or did anything that hurt you, for God’s sake remember it no longer and do not sorrow over it. Forgive me, Alexis! Petty annoyances are sufficient to arouse anger in an arduous life, and my life is indeed hard. I have no one to consult, not even a single helper.”
Alexis, as in the days of his childhood, threw his arm round his father’s neck and all trembling and melting in shy tenderness whispered in his ear:—
“Daddy darling, I love you; I love you!”
But in proportion as he returned to health, so his father once more receded from him. There seemed to be a merciless fate upon them both, to be companions and yet strangers; secretly loving, while openly estranged and hating one another.
And again all things fell back into the old ruts: the collection of provisions, detection of deserters, casting of cannon, felling of timber, building battlements, wandering from town to town. Again Alexis toiled like a convict and his father remained as ever dissatisfied, even suspecting his son of laziness, “leaving off work, running after idleness.” Sometimes Alexis would like to remind him of what happened at Suma, but he could never bring himself to do it.
“Son, we instruct you to depart for Dresden. During your sojourn in that city we command you to live honestly and apply yourself diligently to studies: especially languages, geometry and fortification, and also partly to political science. And inform us by letter when geometry and fortification have been successfully acquired.”
Abroad the Tsarevitch lived like an exile, neglected by everyone. His father again forgot his existence; he did not remember him save when he wanted to marry him to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The Tsarevitch had no liking for his bride; he had no wish whatever to marry a foreigner. “Why did they force this devil of a wife on me?” he used to cry out when flushed with wine.
Before the nuptials he had to conduct humiliating negotiations about his bride’s dowry. Peter was eager to squeeze as much money as possible out of the Germans.
Six months after his marriage Alexis left his wife for another tour: from Stettin to Mecklenburg, from Mecklenburg to Abo, from Abo to Novgorod, from Novgorod to Ládoga—again interminable fatigue, interminable fears.
The dread he felt before each interview with his father developed into a nervous terror. Approaching the door of his father’s room he would mutely repeat a prayer: “Remember, O God, King David and all his humility!” He would jerk out disconnected fragments of lessons on navigation, it being beyond his power to remember the barbarous terminology of such words as: “krup-kamer, balk-vegerse, haigen-blok (anchor-stock),” and he would fumble for his amulet, the gift of his nurse, a blade of grass embedded in wax, with a paper bearing an ancient charm to soften the anger of a father:—
“On a momentous day was I born. I fenced myself with iron, and went unto my father. My parent became wrathful, began to break my bones, to pinch my body, to trample on me with his feet, and drink my blood. Bright sun, clear stars, still sea, ripe fields! Ye all stand peaceful and still. May my father throughout all his hours and days, his nights and midnights, be as quiet and still as ye!”
“Well, my son, I must say this is a first-rate fortress,” said his father with a shrug of his shoulders, looking at his son’s plan. “You have apparently learnt a great deal abroad.”
Alexis grew only more confused, and winced like a guilty schoolboy before the rod.
To escape such torture at times he used to take medicine and “feign illness.”
Terror was merging into hatred.
Just before the Pruth campaign, Peter fell seriously ill, “he did not expect to live.” When the news reached Alexis he experienced for the first time a feeling of pleasure at the possible death of his father. This joy frightened him; he banished it but could not destroy it; it hid itself at the bottom of his heart, ready to spring forth like a lurking beast.
One day at a feast when Peter, as was his wont, made his drunken guests quarrel with one another so that he might learn from their recriminations the thoughts of those around him, Alexis, also drunk, began to talk about the state of the empire, and the oppression of the people. All grew silent, even the buffoons stopped their shouting. The Tsar listened attentively. Alexis’ heart was beating with hope, what if he were heard? understood?
“Enough of this nonsense!” the Tsar stopped him suddenly with that mocking smile, so familiar and hateful to Alexis. “I perceive, my boy, that you know as much about political and civic affairs as a bear does of a hand-organ.”
And turning aside Peter signed to the fools to resume their shouting. Ménshikoff with other nobles, all drunk, began to dance. The Tsarevitch continued to speak in a high-pitched voice. But his father, paying him no attention, was stamping, clapping and whistling to the dancers:—
“Tare-bare, rastobare!
White snow was falling,
Grey hares were running,
Hurry! hurry up!”
His face was that of a soldier, unrefined, the rugged face of him who wrote: “The enemy received such good treatment from us that only a few infants survived.”
Suddenly Prince Ménshikoff, breathless with dancing, stopped short before the Tsarevitch, his hands on his hips and on his lips an impertinent smile—a reflection of the Tsar’s.
“Tsarevitch,” he cried, pronouncing the word, so that it meant an insult, “Tsarevitch, why are you melancholy? Come, join our dance!”
Alexis grew pale and seized his sword, then bethought himself, and turned aside ejaculating:—
“Rapscallion!”
“What? What did you say, puppet?”
Alexis turned round and, looking him straight in the face, said in a loud voice:—
“I said, ‘Rapscallion!’ A rascal’s look is worse than defilement!”
At the same moment his father’s face, contorted, flashed before him. He struck his son so hard in the face that the blood gushed from mouth and nose; then he caught him by the throat, threw him on the ground and began to strangle him. The senior nobles, Romodanovsky, Sheremetieff, Dolgorúki, who were authorized by the Tsar himself to restrain him in his attacks of madness, fell upon Peter, seized him, and dragged him away from his son, lest he should murder him.
“In order to give satisfaction” to Ménshikoff, the Tsarevitch was sent from the hall and placed on sentry duty at the doors like a naughty schoolboy who is sent into the corner. It was a cold winter’s night, frosty and snowing; he had only his kaftan on, and no fur coat. Tears and blood froze on his face. The wind moaned and whirled round and round, like a drunkard dancing and singing. And behind the lighted windows, in the room he had left, that old buffoon, the drunken princess-abbess Rjévskaya was also dancing and singing. The wild moans of the storm mingled with the wild strains of the song:—
My mother bore me while she danced,
She christened me in the Tsar’s tavern,
And bathed me in the headiest wine.
Such anguish filled Alexis that he felt like braining himself against the wall.
Suddenly some one crept up to him in the dark and, throwing a fur-lined coat round his shoulder, fell on his knees before Alexis and began to kiss his hands like some affectionate dog; it was an old soldier of the Preobrazhensky regiment, who happened to be on the same watch—a secret Raskolnik.
The old man looked up with such love to Alexis as though he would sacrifice his soul for him; he cried and whispered to him as in adoration:—
“Lord Tsarevitch, our light and sunshine, poor orphan, no father nor mother! May the Heavenly Father and the pure Virgin protect and keep thee!”
Alexis had often been beaten, with or without ceremony, with fist or cane. In everything else the Tsar followed the new ideas. Only his son he beat according to the old tradition, following the advice of Father Sylvester, author of the Domostroi, councillor to the Tsar Ivan the Terrible, (who killed his son, you remember).
“Do not let your son gain mastery in his youth, but beat him as he grows. Strike him with a stick, it won’t kill, but make a man of him!”
Alexis shrank in bodily fear from the blows, “He will kill, maim me”; but the moral suffering and shame he had grown used to. At times a hard joy kindled within him, “Well! what of it! Strike me, it is you who are shamed, not I,” he seemed to say to his father, fixing on him a look at once infinitely submissive and infinitely insolent.
His father probably divined this, for he ceased beating him and devised another punishment. He broke off all intercourse with him. When Alexis addressed him, he remained silent, pretended not to hear, looked past him, as into space. The silence would last weeks, months, years. Alexis was conscious of it at all times and wherever he went. It grew more intolerable, more insulting than scolding, more terrible than blows. He felt it to be slow murder, a cruelty which neither man nor God could wipe out.
This sheer silence was the end of everything. Beyond, there was nothing but darkness, and through the darkness he saw the immovable face of his father, motionless as a stone mask, as it had appeared at their last interview. And the terrible words coming from lips that were dead to him: “I’ll cut you off like a gangrenous limb!”
The thread of reminiscence snapped; he opened his eyes The night was as quiet as ever; the white church towers were still wrapped in a bluish haze. The golden domes shone silvery in heaven’s dark blue vault, studded with stars; the Milky Way glimmered but faintly; and the fresh breezes of heaven, even as the breathing of a slumberer, seemed to bring with them from the heavens a foreboding of eternal rest, infinite quietude.
Alexis seemed to experience in this moment the weariness of his whole life. His back, hands, legs, his whole body was an ache, his bones were full of pain.
He wanted to get up but had no strength left. He could but raise his hands to heaven and moan, as if calling to Him who could respond:
“My God, my God!”
But no one answered. Silence reigned on earth as in heaven, it seemed his Heavenly Father had forsaken him, like his earthly one. He hid his face in his hands and leaning with his head against the stone bench he began to weep, first quietly, plaintively, as do neglected children, then louder and louder, more poignantly. He sobbed, beat his head against the stone, crying from the insult, indignation and terror. He cried because he had no father now, and in that cry was the cry from Golgotha—the eternal cry of the Son to the Father:—
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Suddenly he felt, just as that night when posted as sentry, some one approach in the darkness, stoop over and embrace him. It was Father John, the old sacristan of the Annunciation.
“What ails you, my lord? The Lord be with you. Who has grieved you?”
“Father! Father!” was all that Alexis could utter.
The old man understood it all. He sighed heavily, remained silent for a while, and then began to whisper in the spirit of hopeless resignation. The time-worn wisdom of the past was speaking through him.
“What can be done, Alexis? Submit yourself my child. The whip cannot outdo the axe, neither can you vie with the Tsar. God is in the heavens, the Tsar on earth. The Tsar’s will must not be questioned. He is responsible to God alone. And to you he is not only the Tsar but our parent ordained by God.”
“Not a father but a villain, a torturer, a murderer,” cried Alexis, “curse him, curse him, the monster!”
“Lord Tsarevitch, your Highness! Invoke not God’s wrath, use not such violent language. Great is a father’s power. It is written: Honour thy father——”
Alexis suddenly stopped weeping, turned round abruptly and fixed on the old man a searching look.
“But something else too, is written: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father.’ Do you heed, old man? God it is who turned me against my father; I have been sent from God as a sword, an enemy, to pierce the heart of my parent, I am his heaven-sent judgment and execution. I stood up not for my own sake, but for the sake of the Church, the Empire, the whole Christian people. Zealous, I was zealous for the Lord. No! I will not humble myself, nor submit, not even if it should mean my death. The world cannot hold us both. Either he or I!”
The face distorted by convulsions, the trembling jaw, the fierce fire in the eyes, suddenly bore an unsuspected likeness to his father.
The old man gazed at him in terror, as at one possessed, he made the sign of the cross, shook his head and with his time-worn lips mumbled the words of time-worn wisdom:—
“Submit! submit! bow before your father’s will”
And it seemed as if the ancient Kremlin walls, the palaces, churches, yea the very ground itself, together with the tombs of the patriarchs, echoed the words: “Submit! Submit!”
When the Tsarevitch entered the house of the sacristan, the latter’s sister, who had been nurse to Alexis, Martha by name, glancing at his face thought him ill. Her anxiety only increased when he refused to share their supper, but went straight to his chamber. The old soul offered to give him lime-tea and to rub him with camphorated spirit. To pacify her he was obliged to take some brandy. With her own hands she put him to bed, on a couch softer, with its mountain of eiderdown and pillows, than any he had slept on for an age. The holy lamps burned peacefully before the images; the air was saturated with the familiar scent of dried herbs, cypress and myrrh. So soothing was the monotonous babbling of his nurse, while relating the old tales about the Tsar John and the grey wolf, about the Cock with the golden comb, about the Bast shoe, the baboon and the wisp of straw, who wanted to cross the river together—the straw broke, the bast shoe sank, and the baboon swelled until it burst—that it seemed to Alexis in his half-sleep he was only a little boy and was lying in his tiny bed in his grandmother’s terem, and that all which had been was not; that it was not Martha, but his granny, bending over him, covering him up, tucking him in, blessing him and whispering, “Sleep darling, sleep, may God watch over thee.” And all is still and peaceful. Only the siren bird, denizen of Eden, is again singing its royal songs, and as he listens to its melodious strains, he seems to die, to sink into an eternal, dreamless slumber.
But just before the break of day he dreamt he was walking inside the Kremlin, across the Red Square, through the throng of people.
It was Palm Sunday and Christ’s entry into Jerusalem was being solemnised. Arrayed in regal robes, with the golden mantle and crown and barma of Monomachus, he leads by the reins the ass on which sits the patriarch, a white-bearded old man, all in white and radiant in his whiteness. But looking more closely, Alexis perceives that the figure is no longer an old man, but a youth, in robes whiter than snow, with a face luminous as the sun—Christ Himself. The crowd does not see or cannot recognise Him. They all have terrible, lurid, corpse-like faces. All are silent, so silent that Alexis can hear his own heart beat. And the sky is also terrible, a livid grey, as if before an eclipse of the sun. At his feet there lolls a hunchback, in a three-cornered hat and a clay pipe in his mouth, who puffs straight into his face stinking Dutch tobacco. He babbles something, grins insolently, and points with his finger to a place whence comes a noise growing nearer and louder, like the rumbling of an approaching storm. And Alexis perceives that it comes from a procession. The Archdeacon of the ‘Most Drunken Convocation of Tsar Peter’ leads by the reins not an ass but some outlandish beast. Some one with a dark face rides on the beast. Alexis cannot distinguish it but it seems to resemble, only more terrible and repulsive than they, the scoundrel Theodosius and Peter the thief. Before them walks a shameless wench, naked; it might be Afrossinia or else the Petersburg Venus. All the bells are ringing, including the great bell of the John tower, called the Roarer, and the people shout as they had done some time before at the wedding of the Kniaz-Pope:—
“The Patriarch is married! The Patriarch is married!” Falling on their knees, they worshipped the beast, the wench and the low scoundrel.
“Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is he that cometh!”
Abandoned by every one, Alexis remains alone with Christ, alone amidst the maddened throng. The wild procession hurries straight upon them, with shouts, shrieks, bringing with it smoke and stench, which tarnish the gold of the royal robes and even dims the very sunlight of Christ’s face. Now the roysterers will be upon them, trampling, crushing, sweeping all before them, and great will be the abomination of desolation in the holy place.
And all disappears. He stands on the banks of a wide dreary river, it seems to be the highway from Poland to the Ukraine. It is late in a mid-autumn day. Wet snow and black mud. The wind sweeps the last leaves from the trembling aspens. A beggar in tattered rags, blue with the cold, plaintively asks a kopeck for Christ’s sake; some branded one too, thinks Alexis, as he notices his hands and feet covered with bloody wounds, probably a recruit who has deserted. He pities the youth and decides to give him, not merely a kopeck but a seven gulden piece. And he remembers in his dream, how he had entered in his diary along with other expenses: “November 22. For transport across the river three gulden, for quarters at a Jewish tavern five gulden, for a young lad starving seven gulden.” Already he is holding out the coins to the beggar when suddenly a rough hand is laid on his shoulder and a gruff voice, probably that of the sentinel, speaks, “For bestowing alms, a fine of five roubles; the beggar after due castigation and torture to be sent off to the Rogerwick.”
“Have pity!” pleads Alexis. “Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.” And looking closer at the deserter, the shivering lad, he perceived that his face is like the sun. The lad he dreamed was Christ Himself.