The Created Legend, Fyodor Sologub [ebook reader with android os .txt] 📗

consisted of labouring men, and their wives and children. The large square in front of the hospital, with its dirty, unpaved spots, its trampled grass, its grey, gloomy little shops, appeared oppressed by an atmosphere of early morning fatigue. The slant rays of the rising Dragon, veiled with a light mist, fell upon the scowling faces of the crowd as indifferently as upon the fence or the closed gates. The Ancient Dragon is not our sun.

The faces of those who stood near the closed gates were scowling. No one was permitted to enter the hospital. Within, preparations were going on for a secret burial of the victims. Tumultuous voices of anger rose in the crowd.

A detachment of Cossacks soon appeared on the scene. They came on quickly, and paused near the crowd. The beautiful smooth horses trembled sensitively. The riders were handsome, sunburnt, black-eyed, and black-browed; their black hair, not cut in the military fashion, was visible from under their high hats. The women in the crowd looked at them now and then with involuntary admiration.

The tumult increased, the crowd continued to grow. The whole square was alive with people. There seemed to be imminent danger of a bloody collision.

Trirodov went that morning to the chief of the rural police and to the officer of the gendarmerie. He wished to convince them that a secret burial would only add to the workers’ excitement. The chief listened to him in a dull way, and kept on repeating:

“Impossible. I can’t.⁠ ⁠…”

He gazed down persistently. This caused his neck to look tight, poured out like copper. And he kept on turning his ring round his finger as if it were a talisman protecting him from hostile calumny.

The colonel of the gendarmes proved easier to deal with. In the end Trirodov succeeded in obtaining an order for the surrender of the bodies of the dead men to their families.

The chief of the rural police arrived in the square. The crowd greeted him with discordant and angry cries. He stood up in his trap and motioned with his hand. Everyone grew silent. He addressed them:

“Would you like to bury them yourselves? Very well, you shall have them. Only be careful that nothing happens which shouldn’t happen. In any case, the Cossacks will be present, in an emergency. And now I will see that the bodies of your comrades are delivered to you.”

XVI

The sun was already high when Elisaveta awoke. She quickly recalled all that happened the night before. She took but little time in dressing and, urged by a suppressed excitement, was soon on the way to Trirodov in her carriage. Trirodov met her at the gates. He was returning from town, and he told her briefly about his conferences with the authorities. Elisaveta said resolutely:

“I want to see the family of the dead man.”

“I don’t know where they live. We shall have to see Voronok first. He has all the information.”

“Shall we find him at home now?”

“I think so,” said Trirodov. “If he’s at home we’ll all start together.”

They drove off. The dusty road trailed behind the rapid wheels, and revealed vistas of depressing commonplaceness. The light dust, stirred by the wheels into the sultry air, trailed behind the carriage like a long serpent. The high flaming Dragon looked down from his inaccessible sky with furious eyes upon the impoverished earth. There was a thirst for blood in the hot glister of his rays, and there was a soaring exultation because men had shed some priceless drops of the wine of life. In the midst of these open, heat-swept spaces, Trirodov, drawn at this moment into the crowded town life, was addressing his companion in dull, everyday words:

“They searched many houses early this morning. They found a great deal of literature at Stchemilov’s. He’s been arrested.”

He also repeated the rumour of whippings at the police-station. Elisaveta was silent.

Voronok’s house was situated in a very convenient place, somewhere between the centre of the town and the factory section. This house had many visitors because Voronok was an assiduous worker in the local Social Democratic Party. His chief function was to carry on propaganda among the working men and the young, and incidentally to instil into them party views and a true understanding of the aims of the working classes.

Young boys used to come to Voronok, his pupils from the town school, and these brought their comrades and acquaintances with them⁠—those whom they met at home or by chance. They were for the most part charming, sincere, and intelligent youngsters, but very dishevelled and very self-conscious. Voronok taught them very heartily and with good results. They assimilated his teachings: a sympathy towards the working proletariat, a hate towards the satiated bourgeois, a consciousness of the irreconcilability of the interests of the two classes, and a few random facts from history. The ragamuffins from the town school invariably opened every visit to Voronok by complaining against the school rules and the inspector. They complained chiefly about trifles. They would say with an injured air:

“They compel us to wear official badges upon our caps.”

“They treat us as if we were little children.”

“They brand us, so that everyone may know that we are the boys of the town school.”

“They force us to cut our hair; why should our hair worry them?”

Voronok sympathized with them fully. This helped him to keep them in a state of revolt. Their no less unkempt friends, who did not go to school, also found something to complain about⁠—if not against their parents, then against the police, indeed against anything that occurred to them. But their complaints did not contain quite that poison and steadiness which was instilled into the schoolboys with all the force of a school. Voronok used to give both classes pamphlets that cost a kopeck and were intensely strict in their party purity.

The younger of the working men also used to come to Voronok’s house. There were still others, a ragged, grumbling lot, who appeared to