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.”