At the Consulate the following morning he met Roach. The young courier was delighted with a companion the balance of that hectic journey. One week later they were on their way.
Nathan had recuperated quickly during that week. Plenty of food, plenty of soap and water, the chance to shave every morning—simple things—had given him a new lease on life.
Nathan had changed, anyway, during that year with the Czechs. Mental troubles had stopped bothering. He had far more to worry him than his culture. Despite his physical hardships, the young man had added weight. Hard, healthy exercise in the open, soldier fare, rough living, had toughened him. He was a stripling no longer. He had learned to walk erectly. His shoulders were square, almost burly. And his face——
Though Nathan knew it not, a whole life epilogue lay upon his features. He was bronzed to copper red with sunburn, wind-burn and snow-burn. At his temples was a faint sprinkling of gray. True, as Bernie had said, there was no woman in his life, and that also showed upon his features and in his strong, gray eyes. But Nathan had been through “a thousand measly little small-town hells” which can often take more from a man than a few big hells. He had lived above them. Then had come the few big hells also,—that autumn, winter and spring at Kolybelsk after the flight from Moscow. He had come through all that too—and lived. He would go on living. He had damned Russia and the war a hundred times, especially when poor Wiley’s surprised face came back to him with a body suddenly punctured by bullets; but what normal man without a heart of brass had not damned the war after seeing men die horribly? Still, that had not shaken Nathan’s faith in human nature. A peasant army gone mad was no criterion of the entire human race! And that Nathan had not lost faith in human nature showed in his face also. It was growing into a Lincolnesque face. Self-control, self-discipline, infinite patience, the capacity for fathomless tenderness. When I looked into Nathan’s features a year later and compared him with the fellow who had bade me good-by at the Paris railroad depot that sunny morning when old Caleb missed him by an hour, frankly I was shocked. But it was a thrilling shock. I felt a choke in my throat. Nathan’s face! A far, far cry from the little, freckled-blotched, snub-nosed countenance upturned to me that day when I belabored a barrel-stave on the fence boards in the yard of the Foxboro school. All that Nathan needed now was a great woman, an infinitely tender woman, a woman with a big soul, and there would be something rather glorious about my friend, though it is hard to say, looking back over the quite prosaic vicissitudes of his life, just wherein and why. It was a presentiment lying too deep for the intellect. It belonged in the realm of the emotions.
So Nathan started out of Irkutsk one morning with Roach—eastward, eastward—toward the greatest adventure in his life.
The country, up to the week of the fifth, had been riotous with the screaming yellows and flaming scarlets of autumn—not unlike New England—not unlike Vermont. Hour after hour as the dilapidated train crawled infinitesimally across moorlands and steppes, through mountain defiles, along valley bottoms, around the edges of great inland lakes—always eastward, eastward, eastward—he sat in the door of the howling, bumping, empty freight car and drank in the glory of titanic Siberia, the undiscovered wonderland of the planet.
Vastness, strength, poetry, he saw in that land through which he traveled. It was the home of a race still primitive, though old as the world, with deep faith, with curiosity, with many passions, with suspicions, with fears, with heartache,—striving piteously to work out a social and economic problem as far above their grasp as God. It was a land of brown steppes, blue waters, purple mountains; that barbaric, borderland world where troglodytes lived with large-bodied women who might have ridden with the Valkyries out to meet Brünhilde. The very proximity of death gave outlines to that wonderful land; that lucid sadness which is the essence of the soul of Russia. Deserts, distances, lisps of forms and ideas, the powerful simplicities of souls already in Infinity,—and yet too, a land of junk and chaos almost crashed into wreckage along with the thing that man called Civilization.
Colors, colors, riotous colors! Its yellows were great tartaric life-motives, thwarted and defiled; its blacks were terrible doubts, hatreds, abuses and cruelties; its reds were the accouchement of a great people where a nation’s natal pains were griping amid the roar of war; its blues were for simple strengths which could endure all and still survive, and loves which could never quite fade from life’s horizons. Colors, colors, riotous colors! And Nathan—the colorist, the emotionalist, the mystic, the romancer—drank them in deeply and let them cleanse him from the Terror through which he had slipped. No—life could never be small and petty and landlocked and drab again.
It was time for snow now, yet the weather had remained steaming warm. Instead of snow there had been rain. For hours the train had crawled through vast infinities of depressing fog. The entire day of the ninth the car doors had been closed to keep out the dismal mist and chill. They had no fire. They could only sit on the floor of that rocking box-on-wheels and play the hours away with a deck of cards which Roach had somehow managed to keep in his luggage. About seven o’clock the night of the ninth Roach arose and opened the door.
“We’re going through a lot of hills,” he declared. “And my God! It’s dark as the devil’s pocket! I never saw such fog. You can almost taste it!”