CHAPTER VIII
A drag upon the hand and brain,
A chain of gold is still a chain.
A huge rack of cloud was driving across the sky at a speed that frayed out long rags from its bellying sails, and trailed them heavily along the tops of the dark pine forest. The earth, but recently freed from the weight of the snow-mantle that for month after month had hidden it from sight, was brown and oozy, dotted with pools and ponds and spontaneous brooks and rivulets engendered by that appalling infliction, a Russian spring break-up.
Hard to bear, even in Moscow or Petersburg, this manifestation of nature becomes in the open country an actual calamity; for it is no small trial to wade from liquid mud to liquid mud, from spongy road to spongier path, while the great wind-storms that precede and follow the breaking of the ice, gurgle and howl and hoot like an army of drunken banshees beneath the arch of deluge overhead.
The solemn ceremonies announcing the formal ending of winter had already taken place. In the presence of the Czar, his Court, and his hierarchy, the cannon rending the hard-glittering surface of the Neva had done its work, and, therefore, officially speaking, spring was born to the Muscovite people. But how dour and morose was this infant season that particular year, shivering and cowering in the cold rain! Indeed, it had not as yet unfolded its very faintest green banner, and continued to sulk away the days and the nights, hiding from all the expectant eyes so impatiently awaiting its advent.
The Province of Tvernovna was being especially ill-treated, and coarse brutality might justly have been laid at the door of the storm-powers responsible for its evil case. There, rivers that had usually been content with flowing like slightly ruffled mill-ponds when once debarrassed of their winter coatings, now turned themselves into raging torrents, demolishing their banks with, so to speak, a wrathful heaving of the shoulder, and spreading out over the steppe in billowing waves, foam-slavered and yellow, sufficient to carry a house off its feet among the débris of trees and bushes that seemed but a smaller edition of the Sargasso Sea.
As a matter of fact the loosed waters had for days been encroaching on the outskirts of the village of Tverna, and already stretched broad tongues and ribbons of wetness toward the base of the slope whereon it nestled below the Castle, until it seemed stranded like a peninsula in a lagoon, and the dark soil floated up by the unpleasing tide spread in an ever-increasing stain over the drowned turf.
The lanes separating the isbas into a very unconventional imitation of blocks was well-nigh impassable, save where logs and lengths of rough board had been precariously anchored by stones, so as to allow the inhabitants at least to reach the kabàk—or drinking-shop—this indispensable adjunct of any human habitation, especially in the North, wherever that North may befind itself. It is a populous village, numbering twelve hundred “souls,” as is plainly testified in orthodox characters by a painted sign at the entrance of the chief thoroughfare. Also its kabàk is of a better class than is usually found in such villages, for upon its once whitewashed walls are tacked highly inflamed pictures of many saints and sinners (mostly obtained from wandering peddlers), and the short curtains of the square windows are of heavy red material, large enough to be drawn straight across the double glass of an evening, when “lights out” should be the order of the hour. Of course the atmosphere of the place is neither better nor worse than is to be encountered in similar places the Empire over. An unhappy mixture of vòdka, kwàss, red-cabbage soup—wherein clots of sour milk are wont to lurk—stale tobacco, and the odor of humanity clad in thick woolens and greasy sheepskins gives it its unfragrant character during the day, while at night these amiable factors are overtoned by the smoking kerosene-lamps which an all-wise Providence has been powerless to spare to the mujiks in this their era of progress.
Tverna has the fortune to be situated in one of Russia’s most prosperous provinces. Unlike Sámàrâ, Vintkà, and many others, it does not belong to a famine government, also the cholera is seldom heard of there, but, nevertheless, it has its drawbacks; for as it is of great agrarian and political importance, it is visited more frequently than is wholesome for it by professional agitators, who, daring the might of Prince Basil Palitzin, invade its purlieus whenever that kindly lord ventures to absent himself. It is well known that when the “presence flag” waves its silken folds above the Castle, peace and quiet abide in Tverna; but the minute it is hauled down and the tröika bearing him away has disappeared from view, the trouble-makers are once more at their evil work.
All day it had been raining densely, and a disheartening evening was setting in, with no prospect whatsoever of better things for the morrow. In the kabàk were assembled the more important members of the village council, the staròstá—a gigantic man, blond as ripe corn, pink-faced, and with a pair of prominent eyes—so beautifully blue that it is a pity to have to call them stupid—and a dozen or so of less illustrious persons, content with sitting in corners and listening to the pow-wow.