“‘Hypotheses non fingo!’” he concluded with an inspired air, repeating Newton’s great saying.
Tichon was still listening, and the ancient prophetic cawings of the three old men seemed to fit in with the most exact deductions of science. Closing his eyes, he saw a lonely lane, banked up with snowdrifts, and at its end, rising just above the white snow, between the black houses, on the very edge of the dark blue sky, a large, delicately-transparent star. And again, just as in childhood’s days, the familiar sensation clutched his heart with unbearable fear and joy. He dropped Leonardo’s book, which in its fall caught the tube of the astrolabe, and with a loud crash they both fell to the ground. In hurried Glück. He knew Tichon was subject to fits, and perceiving him at the top of the ladder, pale and trembling, hastened to him, caught him in his arms, and helped him down. This time the fit did not come on. Bruce too had come in. They sympathetically tried to make Tichon talk; but he remained silent, he felt that it was impossible to discuss this with anybody.
“Poor lad!” said Bruce apart to Glück, “I feel almost convinced that our talk has frightened him, they are all alike here, one idea seems to possess them—the thought about the end of the world. I have noticed of late that the madness seems to spread among them like an epidemic. God alone knows where this unhappy people will end!”
On leaving the school, Tichon was expected to enter the ranks of the army, like other young men belonging to the nobility. Pahómitch had died. Glück was preparing for a journey to Sweden and England, commissioned by Bruce to buy new mathematical instruments. He invited Tichon to accompany him. Tichon, forgetting all his childish superstitions and Pahómitch’s warnings, gave himself with ever increasing love to the study of mathematics. His health had improved and his fits did not recur. A long-cherished curiosity drew him to foreign lands, almost as mysterious to him as the invisible legendary town. Thus, owing to Bruce’s intervention, Tichon Zapólsky, scholar of the Navigation School, was by the Tsar’s decree ordered, along with other Russian youths, to finish his studies abroad. They arrived with Glück in Petersburg in the beginning of June, 1715. Tichon was twenty-five years old, the same age as the Tsarevitch Alexis, yet he looked a mere boy. The trading vessel, which was to take them to Stockholm, was due to leave Kronslot in a few days.
Suddenly all in Tichon’s life had changed! Petersburg, in its general aspect so unlike Moscow, had startled Tichon. For days he would wander about the streets looking in amazement at the endless canals, prospects, houses erected on piles, driven into the yielding mud of the marshes, all in a row, along a straight line, according to a law, which forbade any new building either to go beyond or fall short of the prescribed line, modest whitewashed huts amidst woods and waste lands, often roofed in the Finnish manner with turf and birch-bark, palaces of elaborate structure, after the Prussian fashion, melancholy garrison dépôts, ammunition stores, sheds, churches with Dutch spires, and striking clocks—everything was flat, ordinary, colourless, very much like a dream-vision. At times, on dull mornings, it seemed to him that the city, shrouded in a muddy yellow mist, would lift with the fog and vanish like a dream. In the legendary city that which is, remains invisible, while here in Petersburg on the contrary, the visible is that which is not; yet both cities were equally visionary. And again there arose within him that strange feeling, which he had not experienced for a long time—the presentiment of the end. Only it no longer resolved itself into ecstasy and fear, but oppressed him with a more definite anguish.
One day, on the Troïtsa Square near the Four Frigates coffee house, he met a tall man wearing the leather jacket of a Dutch skipper. And just as in Moscow, on the Red Square near the Lóbnoye Palace, where his father’s head on the spike had looked with its empty eye-socket straight into that tall man’s very eyes, Tichon again recognised him—the Tsar Peter. The terrible face suddenly explained to him the terrible town—they both bore the same impress.
That same day he met the monk Cornelius; he was delighted to see him and did not leave him again. He slept the night in the old man’s cell and spent his days on the rafts and barges among the “hidden runaway folk.” He listened to their tales about the lives of great hermits, who lived in the north, in the woods along the sea coast, the Onega and Olonetz where Cornelius, on leaving Moscow, had spent many years; about terrible burnings, where many thousands had sought a fiery death. From the barge Cornelius was now going to preach the Red Death in the woods beyond the Volga. Tichon had not studied in vain; much of what these people believed he no longer could believe; he thought differently, but felt the same as they, and what was more important still—common to them all was the presentiment of the end. That about which he never could speak, which none of the learned would have comprehended, these people understood and by it alone they lived. All he remembered Pahómitch telling him in his earliest childhood now suddenly had revived in his soul with new force. Again he felt drawn to the woods, the deserts, the secret settlements and peaceful refuges. Again through the air of the white night he seemed to hear over the Neva the bells of that visionary city, in the chimes of the Dutch clocks, again with languid melancholy and yearning he would repeat the ballad about Prince Joseph:—
Fair solitude! my heart’s desire
Through forest and mire
Over hill, dale, and peak....