Business brought him often to Batum, which lay just over the hill from us—so often that we fell into the habit of racing down to the pasture-bars every Saturday to wait for the afternoon train. It was long and wearying, that walk back, on the days when the train clattered by without pausing. But on other days, when, just this side of the cliff, the engine whistled to announce the stop,—when we listened, breathless, for the setting of the brakes, when we saw his huge figure swing lightly from the steps, coat-pockets bulging with mysteries, and heard the gay voice shouting that his own car would not come by until Monday,—the walk home was a march of triumph. Two summers we spent together in a half-starved Georgian village high in the Caucasus Mountains, where we lived on bread and eggs, both reeking with the wild garlic which grew thick among the wheat; ran, bare of head and foot, over the pine-grown canons; and loved every moment of it.
It was in those two summers that we came to know Babanchik best and to adore him accordingly. We might emulate the manners of Manya, his young-lady daughter of twelve; we might acknowledge the leadership of his harum-scarum son Kolya; but it was Babanchik who really counted. It was he who led our marvelous expeditions to the neighboring peaks, his clothes steaming with the effort of that leadership—he who showed us where to look for mushrooms, and later fried those mushrooms for us, surreptitiously, lest mother begrudge us the butter where no new supply was to be had. His mind it was which settled, wisely and fairly, all our momentous quarrels, and invented countless new and fascinating games when we had tired of the everlasting croquet. But for him we should never have bathed in the yellow water of the mad Kura, water so muddy that it left great streaks across the bath-towels; but for him we should never have been forgiven for robbing the little forest church of candles with which to rub the porch floor whenever we wanted to dance.
That the merry existence of his vacations was but a small part of his life, we knew, even as we guessed that the man who frolicked with us lived only in the hours of play. For often at tea-time on the porch we came upon the other Babanchik, a bitter and fearsome man who talked to father in a voice which, to us, was the voice of a stranger. They made us very wretched, those tea-times, when from an obscure porch corner we watched him striding up and down along the railing, the smile gone from his eyes, his cheeks flushed, his arms waving wildly. For we could never understand why the man who taught us that it was cruel to step on ants, seemed so ready and eager, at those times, to throttle some one, we knew not whom, unless it were the terrible creature he called the Russian government. It all hurt us inexpressibly. Yet hour after hour we watched him and listened to his long, involved denunciations of oppression and dishonesty and selfishness and class-distinction and many other long words which we could not grasp. And most difficult to fathom was his oft-repeated assertion that he was doing all that talking in behalf of us.
'It is for the children that I fight!' he would shout, stamping feverishly up and down the long porch; 'for my Manya and Kolya, and for your boys and girls and all the countless thousands of others whose lot has been cast with this accursed country! I must fight, for I know what will come to them! Their souls will be dwarfed and crippled by our stupid schools and our stupid laws, and their minds poisoned and embittered by suspicion and hatred and the damning sense of their impotence, as long as conditions here remain what they are! Our lives are behind us, yours and mine. But we must make theirs different for them, must keep them away from strait-jacket regulations, must keep them happy and trustful and brave! It is for this that I fight! And I would fight if I knew that I could not change a word of our laws and our statutes!'
He did fight. Unceasingly, along with his rouad, work,—he was one of the managers of a Caucasian railrotine—went the bigger work of making his corner of the world a better place for those who came behind him. He fought in the ranks of his employees, that the least of these might claim justice and equality; pleaded with school boards and schoolmasters for patience and generosity toward their charges; and fought—and this was the most bitter fight of all—against those who held in their hands the destinies of his city.
In all this he was severely handicapped. An Armenian by birth, which in itself matters even in cosmopolitan Caucasus, he had inherited the ungovernable temper and unbridled tongue of his people; and this, coupled with his love for truth, worked him unceasing woe among the hidebound conservatism of his associates.
All this Babanchik knew. And yet, in spite of the knowledge, he had a dream of becoming a member of the city Duma, that he might have a real voice in the direction of the city’s fortunes. It should not have been a thing so difficult of attainment. Time after time his name was proposed for the city ballot; time after time hordes of enthusiastic friends made his election a certainty; and time after time, as the deciding day drew near, his candidature was suppressed, his name withheld from the ballot, his adherents silenced—and the dream remained a dream. No one knew just when it happened, or just how: he was an Armenian and a revolutionist, a freethinker and an enemy of the government, marked 'neblagonadejny' (not to be depended upon) in the police-books of the city—and no country knows so well as does Russia how best to curtail the activities of such men.
What he could do in spite of these drawbacks, he did. Was he not our undauntable Babanchik? If he could not insure fair play for the men of his railroad, he could give them of his advice and sympathy, and they forgot to ask for more. If additional factory windows did not come into being at his command, he could still lend his money to those of the workers who fell victims to the foul air; and how beautifully he lost his temper when a borrower spoke of interest! And if school boards and schoolmasters remained unyielding in their demands upon the children he loved, at least the holidays were his, when he could take those children on long walks in the open and teach them to respect their souls and not to step on ants.
All of which we learned much later. At the time, he was merely our Babanchik, without whom the world could no longer be imagined; who came in the evening to blow out our candles because he had guessed that the memory of his good-night laugh cheated the dark of its dangers; whose rumbling shout awakened us in the morning and opened up for us a new day of unsuspected possibilities.