CHAPTER IV
The monastery was abandoned. The monks had fled like ants from their ruined hillock.
In the chapel, which stood on a mound apart, the Self-burners had assembled. Thence they could observe the approach of the soldiers.
It was an ancient building made of dry logs, so constructed as to give no opportunity for escape from the flames. Instead of windows there were narrow slits; while the doors were so narrow that it was difficult for a man to pass through them. The porch and staircase had been demolished. Strong bolts had been fastened to the doors and thick planks nailed over the windows.
The preparation for the burning began; hemp, flax, straw, pitch and bark were piled up, the walls smeared with tar, and in the wooden troughs which surrounded the building gunpowder was placed, a few pounds of it being reserved for strewing on the floor at the last moment. Two sentinels watched on the roof by day and night.
All worked cheerfully as though preparing for a feast. The children helped their elders, the elders became children; every one was intoxicated with joy. Petka Jisla was the merriest of all. He worked with the energy of five. His withered hand with the “mark of the Beast” gradually got cured; he was able to move it. Old Father Cornelius ran about like a spider in his web. His eyes, as luminous in the darkness as those of a cat, had a heavy, kindly look in them, a strange charm which compelled obedience.
“Work away, friends!” he cheerily said to those who were going to die with him. “I, the old horse, you, the young colts, together we will gallop towards heaven, like Elias in his chariot of fire.”
When all was ready, the door and windows, except one—the narrowest—were nailed up. The strokes of the hammer were listened to in silence; they felt as though their coffin lid was nailed over them while they were alive.
Only John the Simpleton went on singing his interminable song;
A coffin of pine wood tree,
Stands ready, stands ready for me.
Within its narrow wall
I’ll wait the judgment call!
To those who wished to confess and be shriven old Cornelius said, “Why trouble, children! what need have you to confess? You are now like God’s angels, and more than angels; in the words of David I say: ‘Ye are gods.’ You have overcome the power of the Evil One. Sin has no longer dominion over you; you cannot sin. Even though there were one among you who had slain his father or sinned against his mother, even he will be holy and righteous. The flames purge everything.”
The monk ordered Tichon to read in a loud voice a passage in the Revelation of St. John, which is always omitted in Russian church services.
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write, for these words are true and faithful. And he said unto me: It is done.”
Tichon, in reading this aloud, experienced his familiar presentiment of the end of all things, more powerfully than ever before. He felt as though those frail wooden walls had already shut them off from the converse of the living, as the sides of a ship keep out water. Outside, time still continued its course; here it had already stopped, and the end had come; it was fulfilled.
“I see, I see, I see, beloved!” cried Kilikeya, interrupting the reading, her face pale and shrivelled, a fixed look in her dilated eyes.
“What do you see?” asked the old monk.
“I see that great city, the Holy Jerusalem, descending from heaven, like unto a precious stone, a jasper stone, clear as crystal, an emerald, a topaz and a sapphire. The twelve gates are twelve pearls; and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass. And the city has no sun, for the glory of God illumines it. I am afraid! I am afraid! O my friends! I see His face more radiant than the sun. Here He is, here He is. He is coming to us!”
And they who listened to her believed they saw it also.
When the night came and the candles were lit they all knelt and sang:—
“Behold, the Bridegroom cometh at midnight and blessed is the servant who is awake. Watch, my soul, be not heavy with sleep, lest the doors of the Kingdom be closed upon thee, and thou be delivered unto death, but awake and cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord. The Holy Virgin have mercy upon us.’ Remember the terrible day. O my soul, trim thy lamps with oil, for no one knows when the cry will be made: ‘Behold, the bridegroom cometh.’”
Sophia, standing next to Tichon, held his hand. He felt the trembling pressure of her hand, and saw the smile of shy joy on her face; so does the bride smile at her bridegroom before the altar. And his soul was filled with responsive joy. Now he believed that the Red Death was God’s will while his previous fear was Satan’s temptation. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s sake shall find it.”
They expected the soldiers that night, but they did not come. In the morning they were as heavy as after a severe drinking bout.
The monk’s vigilant eye was everywhere. To those who grew despondent and timid, he gave little balls of dark scented paste (which most likely contained a stupefying poison). Swallowing these caused a sort of mad ecstasy; the weakest no longer dreaded the fire, but raved about it as heavenly bliss.
To give themselves courage they told each other tales about the voluntary death of starvation, which was supposed to be much more terrible than death by fire.
These martyrs were placed in an empty hut, without doors and windows, furnished only with benches. To prevent their killing themselves all garments were taken from them, even the belt and cross. They were let into the hut through the roof, and the hole was fastened up so that no one could escape. Guards armed with clubs were posted around the hut. Their torments lasted three to six days; they wept, praying, “Give us to drink,” they bit their own bodies and cursed God. Once twenty people were locked up thus in a threshing barn; weary of waiting they succeeded in breaking one of the boards and crept out; but the guards knocked them on the head with their clubs and killed two; then closing the opening up, they reported what had happened to the leading monk, asking what they had better do. He ordered straw to be put round the barn and then kindled.
“The Red Death is infinitely easier,” concluded the speakers, “it is so quick that there is no feeling.”
But a small girl of seven, who had been sitting quietly on the bench and listening attentively, suddenly began to tremble, and jumping up, rushed to her mother, caught hold of her skirt, and cried in a piercing voice:—
“Mamma, mamma, come, come away! I don’t want to be burned!”
The mother tried in vain to quiet her, but she continued crying louder still:—
“I don’t want to burn, I don’t!”
And such animal terror was in that scream that all shuddered, realizing the horror of what was about to happen.
The child was petted, threatened, punished, yet she continued to scream till at last, almost black in the face and breathless, she fell to the ground in convulsions. Father Cornelius bent over her, blessed her with the sign of the cross, beat her with his rosary and recited an exorcism:—
“Go forth, go forth, thou evil spirit!”
Nothing did any good: he then lifted her in his arms, opened her mouth and forced her to swallow one of the balls of dark paste. He began to stroke her hair gently and whisper into her ear. The little girl grew calmer, she seemed to have dozed off, but her eyes remained open, her pupils dilated with a fixed stare, as in delirium. Tichon listened to the man’s whisper. He was telling her about the Heavenly Kingdom, the Garden of Eden.
“Uncle, will there be any raspberries there?” asked Akoulína.
“Yes, dear, there will. Very large berries, the size of an apple, and so sweet, so sweet!”
The little girl smiled, she evidently rejoiced at the idea of these heavenly raspberries. The old man continued to fondle and lull her with almost motherly tenderness. Yet to Tichon there appeared something insane, pathetic, hungry, in the monk’s luminous eyes. “Like a spider sucking in a fly,” thought he.
The second night came; but there was no sign of the soldiers.
During the night, one of the old nuns made her escape. When all were asleep, even the guards, she crept out on the roof, and tried to let herself down with a rope of neckerchiefs she had tied together, but they gave way and she fell. For a long time her moanings were heard under the windows, but at last they ceased; maybe she had crept away, or passers-by had picked her up.
There was little room in the chapel. The victims slept on the floor close to one another, the men on the right, the women on the left. Yet—were they dreams or demons?—shadows stealthily flitted from the right to the left, from the left to the right.
Tichon woke up and listened. A nightingale was singing in the distance and her song echoed the moonlit night, the freshness of a dewy meadow, the perfume of a pine forest, freedom, voluptuousness, the bliss of life. And as in response to the nightingale’s song, strange whispers, rustles, sighs, resembling sighs and kisses of love, rose from the chapel floor. Plainly the fiend was still striving in man. Human passions were not quenched, but fanned, by the imminence of death.
Cornelius did not sleep. He was praying and neither saw nor heard anything, or if he did, he pardoned “his poor children.”
“God alone is without sin, man is weak; like dust he falls and rises like an angel. Not he who goes wrong with a maid or a widow is a sinner, but he who errs in his faith. We do not sin when our body takes liberties; but the church sins when it tolerates heresy.”
Suddenly Tichon felt that somebody was embracing and clinging to him. It was Sophia. He was frightened, but it flashed upon him, “The flames will purify all,” and feeling through the black habit the warmth and freshness of the innocent body, their ardent lips met.
And the caresses of these two children in the dark building, that common coffin, were as innocent as those of Daphnis and Chloe of old on the sunny plain of Lesbos.
Meanwhile, John the Simpleton, squatting on his heels, a candle in his hands waiting for the dawn, swayed gently to and fro and sang endlessly:—
You hollowed oaks will prove,
Fit house for us.
The nightingale sang on of liberty, voluptuousness, and the bliss of life. Her song seemed a delicate mockery of the song of the Simpleton.
Tichon recalled a distant pale, white night, a group of people on a raft upon the glassy surface of the Neva, between two skies, two abysses, and the gentle languid music wafted across from the Summer Garden, kisses and sighs from the kingdom of Venus:
’Tis time to cast thy bow away.
Cupid! we all are in thy sway.
Thy golden love-awaking dart
Has reached and wounded every heart.
Before dawn, Minei, a man eighty years old, tried to escape. Kirucha caught him, they had a fight. Minei nearly killed Kirucha with his axe. The old man was seized by the throat and locked in a closet, where he went on screaming and reviling Cornelius with all his might.
At daybreak Tichon looked out to see whether the soldiers had arrived; he saw nothing but the empty glade flooded with sunshine, the dreamy, friendly, but gloomy pines, and dewdrops sparkling in iridescent hues. He felt the fresh perfume of the pinewood, the gentle warmth of the rising sun, the peace of the blue heavens; and again all that was going on in the chapel seemed a madman’s delirium.
Another long summer’s day began. The weariness of waiting grew unbearable. Famine threatened. There was but little water and bread: a bag of rye biscuits, and two baskets of sacramental loaves.
On the other hand there was a quantity of red wine. They drank it eagerly. Some one, being drunk, suddenly started a coarse song. It sounded sadder than the wildest moan.
The people began to murmur, they whispered together in corners and looked angrily at old Cornelius. What if the soldiers do not appear at all. Will they have to die of hunger? Some demanded that the door should be opened and bread sent for. Yet their eyes expressed but one thought, escape. Others wished to burn at once without waiting for the persecutors. Others prayed, but their face proclaimed they would rather have blasphemed. Others again, having eaten the dark balls, which the monk distributed more and more freely, raved, laughing and weeping. One lad in a fit of madness seized a candle burning before an icon and began to set the straw on fire. It was quenched with difficulty. Some sat for hours without a word in a kind of waking trance, not daring to look into one another’s eyes.
Sophia, sitting near Tichon, who lay on the ground, exhausted by sleeplessness and famine, sang a melancholy song which the Chlisti sang at their meeting, a song about the loneliness of a human soul, forsaken in life as in a dark wood. The song ended in a sob:—
Thrice holy mother of God,
Implore thy Son for us!
On earth are many sinners;
On the moist earth, our mother,
Our nurse supreme.
Nobody saw them. Sophia rested her head on Tichon’s shoulder, and cheek to cheek with him she wept.
“I am grieved for you, Tichon, my darling,” she whispered in his ear, “I have led you into perdition, wretch that I am! Will you escape? I will get you a rope. Or stay, I will beg Cornelius; there is a subterranean path leading into the wood, he will let you go out.”
Tichon, exhausted, remained silent, smiling at her like a child half awake. His senses wavered. Through his mind floated idly distant memories, as in some delirium; abstract mathematical definitions, to the graceful and severe beauty of which—their icy transparency and regularity—he was now specially sensitive. Well had old Pastor Glück compared mathematics to music, to the crystal music of the spheres! He remembered also the discussion between Glück and James Bruce over Newton’s Commentaries on the Apocalypse, he could hear the dry, short, wooden laughter of Bruce, and his words, which had at the time echoed in Tichon’s soul with such alarming presentiment. Bruce had said, “At the very time that Newton was writing his Commentaries, here at the other extreme of the world, here in Muscovy, wild fanatics, named Raskolniks, were also commenting in their rude, uninstructed way upon the Apocalypse, and drawing conclusions almost identical with those of Newton. The Raskolniks daily expect the end of the world; some of them sleep in coffins, and sing funeral hymns; others burn themselves alive. How extraordinary this coincidence of imaginations! That the extreme West and the extreme East, the greatest enlightenment and the greatest ignorance, should meet in a single Apocalyptic conception! A fact which in itself is enough to make one believe that the end of the world is drawing nigh; that we shall all go to the devil very soon!” Newton’s prophecy as repeated by Glück assumed a new and vivid significance, “Hypotheses non fingo! I don’t make hypotheses! Like a moth to the fire, a comet rushes to the sun. From the fusion of these the heat of the sun will so increase, that the earth will be consumed. It is written in the scriptures: ‘The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be consumed.’ Then will be fulfilled the two prophecies; that of the man of science who knew, and that of the ignorant who had faith.” Tichon also recalled the old octavo, No. 461, of Bruce’s library; gnawed by the mice, bearing the illiterate Russian inscription, “Lionardo D’Avinci’s ‘Treatise on Painting,’ in German.” A portrait of Leonardo, which had an odd look, also, of Prometheus or Simon Magus, had been slipped into the book. And beside Leonardo, Tichon thought he saw another face, likewise terrible, the face of a giant clad in a Dutch skipper’s leather jacket, whom he had once met in Petersburg in the Troïtsa square, near the “Four Frigates” coffee house. It was the face of Peter, once, he thought, so hateful to him, now suddenly admired, beloved. The two faces had something in common, something similar and yet opposed: Da Vinci stood for thoughtful Contemplation; Peter for reason in Action. And both these faces seemed to exhale on Tichon a delicious cool air, such as snow-clad mountains waft to a wanderer exhausted by the heat of the dales.
“O Physics! save me from Metaphysics!” He remembered Newton’s words, so often repeated by the drunken Glück. In these two faces lay the sole salvation from the fiery heaven of the Red Death—in both homage to Earth, the “fertile mother of all.”
Then all grew confused and Tichon fell asleep. He dreamt he was flying over some visionary city: either the old legendary town Kitesh, or the New Jerusalem, or perhaps Stockholm, or else the Glass City, “like unto clear glass and a jasper stone, clear as crystal.” A music which was at the same time mathematics filled the luminous city.
He suddenly awoke. All around him were bustling about with joyous faces.
“The soldiers, the soldiers have come!”
Tichon looked out and saw afar off, on the borders of the wood, in the evening twilight, men around a fire wearing three-cornered hats, green coats with red lapels, and brass buttons. These were the soldiers. “The soldiers have come. Kindle! friends! God is with us!”