At another place a peasant was kneeling before a wayside ikon. He knelt with his head bent and his beard on his chest, and crossed himself again and again.
An immense melancholy came out of this Russian landscape, and darkened Bertram’s spirit. In imagination, without knowledge, by instinct only, he was stirred by the sense of travelling through a country of despair and immeasurable misery. The silence of the countryside was intense and brooding. No sound of laughter, of human gossip, even of human toil, came from its woodlands or open fields. There was no clink of hammer on anvil, no rhythm of an axe at work, no shout of ploughman to his team. The peasants in the wayside stations seemed to have no work to do, no object in life, except to stand and stare with gloomy eyes. “God has forsaken Russia,” said the man from Ufa. The vital energy of life itself seemed to have burned low in these people.
Away back in the train an American chorus rang out.
“Just hear that whistle blow!
I want you all to know
That train is taking my sweet man away
From me to-day!
Don’t know the reason why,
I must just sit and cry—”
Nigger melodies, Russian forests, the chug-chug of the train, Cherry’s boisterous voice, the sad eyes of a peasant woman with a sick child, a line of bugs crawling up the carriage wall, the smell of a Latvian cheese, the melancholy of life, the isolation of the human soul, the death of Kenneth Murless, the mystery of Joyce, the typhus-stricken girl lying by the railway line, the endless monotone of this Russian landscape, the puzzle of his own life, made up the incoherence of Bertram’s thoughts on the way to Moscow.