An old woman was there, with a child in her arms. She lifted up a cloth around its body, and showed a little skeleton figure, with a strangely distended stomach.
“Starvation,” said Dr. Weekes. “They swell out like that in the last stage.”
The old woman talked with passionate grief, to which Jemmy Hart listened with his head bent.
“She says this child belongs to her son. His wife died a week ago, of dysentery. There was no more food in the house. He walked away into the snow, and has not come back.”
A group of women gathered in the farm-yard next to this old woman’s cottages. In some way they had learnt that strangers had come—perhaps with rescue. They pressed round Bertram, plucking at his coat, crying out to him, weeping, yet with a kind of anger, as though fierce with despair.
One of them brought out a bowl filled with bits of black stone, as it seemed, or lead. She took out a bit of it, and flung it on the ground, and then raised both arms to heaven and gave a loud wailing cry. The other women spoke to Jemmy Hart, and seemed to explain.
“It’s clay,” said Jemmy. “They dig it out of a hill called Bitarjisk. It’s sold for five hundred roubles a pood. They powder it up and mix it with water and swallow it. It has some nutritive quality, I guess, but these women say it bursts the bowels of their little ones.”
The tall peasant who was their guide, elbowed his way through the women who clung to Bertram and his companions with shrill cries. He led them to another cottage, and bade the women stay outside.
Inside it was very quiet and cold. For a moment there was no sign of any life here. But from a pile of rags on a wooden bench against one of the walls, a man rose to a half-sitting posture. He was nearly naked, with but a tattered shirt over his body. His chest was bare, and showed deep hollows below the bones of the neck, and his arms were like withered sticks, and his legs had no flesh on their bones, but only a scabby skin. He was bleeding from the mouth, and there were bloody rims round his eyes. He seemed to Bertram like Lazarus risen from the tomb.
There were other living people in the room. Bertram heard a faint stir above the stove where, on the shelf above, Russians sleep in winter. A woman lay there with a little girl. They raised their heads feebly, and let them drop again. They were nearly dead, it seemed. At the far end of the room, on the window seat, with his head back against the framework, was a young lad—eighteen, perhaps—with a fair, handsome face, and blue eyes. He did not move his body, or alter the position of his head, but his eyes stared at the strangers in his father’s house. He was still alive, but too weak to raise a hand or stir a limb.