When Zarden regained his senses he was in hospital, weak and spent by fever; his brain had hardly as yet recovered from the shock. "Have I been ill?" he inquired, but the nurse told him to lie still and ask no questions. As yet he could remember nothing. The sun glinted in through the windows and flecked the white-washed walls here and there with gleams of golden light. There were rows and rows of beds in the long ward, placed side by side, and Red Cross nurses were flitting about among them. It was all very strange to him. After a while his eyes rested upon the ikon hanging on the wall. This was the first time he had noticed it, and his memory brought him fitful shadows of the last occasion on which he had seen one. An aged woman, of whom he had but a hazy remembrance, was kneeling before it.
While he was trying to straighten out the tangle of mixed-up ideas in his mind, a cry from one of the beds in the ward held his attention. "Save me; I am sinking!" cried an agonized voice. Then, in a flash, he remembered those pitiful shrieks of despair, and he covered his face with his hands. Memory, that fickle jade, had come back at the point where she had deserted him, and he lay back with closed eyes while pictures floated through his brain of what he had passed through that dreadful day, followed by the starlit night when he could hear the troop-horse cropping the herbage at his side and the strike of the animal's iron-shod hoofs as he slipped over stones, weighted with his burden. Soon it all came back to him. "Bring me a mirror, nurse," he said. It was the first thing he had asked for. He looked at it; then, with a wild shriek, he flung it away.
"It is another—not me! Who am I?" he cried. "My hair and beard are as white as snow! It is not me, Mooska Zarden, any more."
The nurse picked up the fragments of the broken glass hastily, and he lay back raving as he had done in his fever.
"You must dye his hair and beard at once," the doctor ordered, "otherwise he will lose his reason. With care, however, he will recover; it is a nervous breakdown."
IV—AT THE DOOR OF HIS MOTHER'S HOME
Slowly the Cossack pulled round, as the doctor thought he would, and ere long he was sent home to recuperate. The smiling Dvina spread out before him in the early dawn, with the blue, cloudless sky above and the golden sun shining on its shimmering water. On the banks green trees waved in the breeze, and away in the distance the blurred outline of a town was visible in the purple morning haze. As he came nearer to the city, however, and the buildings took distinctive objects of Dvinsk, some of the familiar houses and churches and towers that he knew so well. It was a city shorn of its beauty, a ghost of what it had once been. He thought that his recent illness must have impaired his eyesight, but when he neared the town and beheld great heaps of stones, roofless houses, and walls crumbled to dust a great panic seized his heart. Where was the mother whom he had left there in the house they called their own? Was it, too, a mass of dust and stones? With trembling knees he turned to find the well-known street. A few stray dogs, thin and hungry, wandered about among the rubbish in search of food. A strange silence seemed everywhere.
At last he reached his mother's house. Yes, the roof was still intact; a little broken glass lay about, and there were marks of shrapnel on the wall, but the house stood firm and unharmed. This would be about the hour, he remembered, that his mother would be rising to prepare the morning meal. He put his hand on the latch of the door, and his heart was thumping with emotion. Slowly he pushed it open and entered the little kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean and neat, and everything stood just where he had seen it last. The kettle was hissing with a welcome sound, and the old black cat was asleep on the hearth, but the bench beside it was empty. He looked round, and the morning sun shone on the polished brasses and lit them up like burnished gold. The pendulum of the big clock was swaying monotonously as of old, and pointing to the hour when the household used to assemble round the oaken table for their morning meal. As the last stroke of the hour ceased to vibrate, a bent figure kneeling in front of the ikon raised her trembling hands to it, clasped in an agony of prayer. "Send him home to me, good Lord, that I may see his face once more," she cried.
Mooska Zarden stooped and lifted the prostrate form and folded his mother closely to his heart. Then he told her the strange story of his miraculous escape, and showed her the well-worn leather belt, with the marks of the teeth of the faithful horse that had saved his life, and recounted to her again and again the tale of the brave animal's pluck and endurance during that long night and those dreadful days of suffering.