“Look, look at those little flames!” they said. “See this wound!” they said. “It hurts, I can tell you!” they said.
They had got used to the Jews, gradually. These had become, after the long-drawn torture they had been put through, an indispensable element in the triumphal procession. They could on no account be spared.
But the harmless words and gentle treatment frightened the Jews still more than blows and torments. They thought that the general mildness could be but a prelude to still more atrocious agonies to come. A peaceful hand moving towards their shoulders sent them cringing back as before a whip. They looked like a clump of madmen; they seemed to represent a special kind of stolid, feeble, anxious lunacy, amidst the dangerous and violent insanity of the others. They saw their houses burning; perhaps their wives and children, and their children’s children might be dead now; they would have gladly prayed, but they were afraid to utter the least sound. Why did their ancient God punish them so? For four long years He had heaped horror upon horror on the Jews of Koropta. The Tsar, the old Pharaoh, was dead; a new one had arisen in the eternal land of Egypt, yes, a perfectly new and very small, but most unnaturally cruel Egypt had replaced the old. Stifled sighs escaped their lips from time to time; they sounded like the hoarse and frightened crying of sea-gulls before a storm.
The guard on duty at the barracks had heard the shooting. So had the rest of Tarabas’s men, who had remained behind in Kristianpoller’s out-house. These awoke precipitately out of the drunken state into which alcohol, the miracle, the praying and the singing had put them. Fear seized upon them, fear of the trained soldier brought to book by his own soldier’s conscience, and dread of punishment at Tarabas’s terrible hands. Some of their weapons had gone with the deserters.
The soldiers in the out-house looked at each other silently, reproachfully, apprehensively; their eyes fell before each other’s eyes in consciousness of guilt. Now that their minds were cleared of the beclouding fumes they could recall each episode of this strange and dreadful day, but the evil spell which had been laid upon them remained inexplicable.
Innumerable candles still burnt and smoked before the Virgin’s image. But it had become invisible. It was as though it had gone away again, engulfed in the surrounding shadow.
“There’s hell let loose out there,” one of the soldiers began at last. “We’d best get back to barracks. We ought to let the old man know. Who’ll risk it?” There was no answer.
“Let’s all go together,” said another.
They put out the guttering candles with their fingers, and left the out-house. They saw the reflection of the fire, heard the commotion, broke into a run and set off for the barracks, giving the high street a wide berth. When they arrived, the regiment was drawn up in readiness to march. Tarabas was just about to mount his horse.
“Fall in, quick!” he shouted to them.
They ran inside, looked for and found a few forgotten carbines, and pushed their way into the column wherever they could find a place.
A few of the officers, not all, were on their feet again. The usual commands were given. The depleted regiment marched towards the town, Tarabas on horseback at its head, as prescribed, with drawn sword. They made straight for the high street.
The mighty Colonel Tarabas, twenty paces in advance of his first platoon, red in the light of the flames, was so terrible to see that the whole crazy mob was stricken dumb.
“Back!” thundered Tarabas.
And obediently they all began to back, still facing him. But suddenly they turned, as though the realization had come to them in a flash that walking backwards they could never hope to escape the awful Tarabas in time, or the innumerable fixed bayonets behind him, glinting in the firelight. They scattered headlong, running for their lives.
They left the Jews behind; they had forgotten them. The abandoned captives stood there huddled close against each other, like a black, glued-together bundle in the middle of the street. They sensed that rescue had arrived, but knew as well that it had come too late. They were lost, utterly and for all time. They did not move. Now let the rescuers trample and stamp them down to the end. Death and a mortal chill were in their hearts. They had ceased to feel even their physical hurts. Along the board sidewalks, where the fire had already taken foothold here and there, stood women and children with their burning houses behind them. They screamed no more. Even the children had done with crying.
“Out of the street!” commanded Tarabas. And before him the compact swarm of Jews dispersed to right and left; and the wooden planks echoed to the sound of the women’s and children’s fleeing footsteps.
The street cleared, the soldiers now began to salvage what they could out of the houses. They tried as best they could to quench the fires. But there was lack of water and containers. It was a hopeless undertaking. They threw coats, stones, mud upon the flames; not looking what it was they seized, they brought bedclothes and tables, candlesticks, lamps and pots, racks, cradles, bread and every kind of foodstuffs, household utensils of all species, out of the houses. The smouldering places on the sidewalks they trod out with their boots. What they could not extinguish they left to burn; they tried to wrench the burning roof-tiles loose with bayonet, sword, and rifle-butt; they tried to batter down the burning walls, and stamp the fire out of flaming bed-clothes.
An hour later there was nothing to be seen but the last blue flickering, yellow smouldering, red subsiding embers of the wholly and partly gutted houses of Koropta, and the blue-grey, suffocating smoke enveloping the town. Tired out, inert, the soldiers lay and sat about in the street. Fortunately there was not a breath of wind. Of the few houses which the fire had spared, only one still sheltered living inhabitants — the inn of the White Eagle, the inn of the vanished Jew Kristianpoller. Hither, in the yard and in the rooms, in the spacious parlour and in the cellar, Jews and peasants had come, and were coming still in crowds. Fright and fatigue, drink and the deafening uproar and their pains, had put a number of them to sleep. The peasants and the Jews lay side by side. There were no more soldiers in sight. The deserters, under Ramzin’s leadership, had already left Koropta. Some of the children screamed out in their sleep, women were weeping. A few Jews sat cowered together on the floor, unable to summon strength enough to rise, humming and murmuring their prayers, and rocking back and forward to the rhythm of their ancient melodies.
When the dawn came, a fair dawn heralding another of the golden days of that protracted and unusual autumn, the peasants were the first to wake. They rose somewhat unsteadily to their feet, woke their wives, and went out to see after their carts and horses. Dully and laggingly remembrance of the evening came back to them, and of the night, the fire, the fight, the miracle, and the Jews. They went into the out-house. And lo! the marvellous picture of the Madonna was still there upon the wall; innumerable logs lay on the ground beneath it, and on the logs were stuck innumerable burnt-out stumps of candles.
So it was true, then. The Virgin’s mild countenance was unaltered in the grey light of the morning. Tender, smiling, grieved, it rose in luminous ivory above the crimson robe. Its tenderness, its pain, its divine sadness, its celestial beauty, were more real than the morning, than the rising sun, than the memory of the bloody, fiery terrors of the night. The memory of all those things vanished before the picture’s holiness. And if in this or that one of the peasants there was a stirring of remorse, he felt that everything was pardoned in that it was vouchsafed him to look upon the lovely countenance.