“Yes,” said the soldier. “My parents were Jews. But I don’t believe in God!”
Nicholas Tarabas fell back another step. He beat against his high boot with his riding-whip. The redheaded man had grey-green eyes and short flaming bushes over them instead of eyebrows.
“So that’s what you are!” said the captain. “An atheist! Hm! Hm!”
He went on. The soldier lay down again on the edge of the road. Tarabas turned round once only. He saw the stranger’s red hair; it shone out amidst the meagre grass of the slope, a little fire on the grey and dusty highway.
7
FROM that very day the world of Captain Tarabas began to undergo a change. His men no longer obeyed him as before; they seemed to like him less and fear him less. And when he chastised any one of them, he felt an indefinable, invisible, inaudible resentment go through the ranks. The men no longer looked him straight in the face. One day two of his non-commissioned officers vanished, the best men in the regiment, at whose side he had fought since his first day in the field. A private or two followed them a week later. But the red-haired atheist did not leave, the only one whose desertion the captain ardently desired. He was certainly a faultless soldier. He was punctual and obedient. But Captain Tarabas seldom gave him any order. The others felt it. Yes, they knew. Sometimes Tarabas watched the red-haired one talking to the soldiers. They listened to him, surrounded him, hung on his words. Tarabas would then call one of them at random to him.
“What is he telling you, that red-headed one?”
“Stories, sir!” the soldier would answer.
“What sort of stories?”
“Oh, funny ones, sir — about women!”
And Tarabas knew the man was lying. But he was ashamed that he had been lied to, and asked no further questions.
One morning the captain found among his orderly’s things something he had never set eyes on until then, a Bolshevist pamphlet. He put a match to it; the pages burnt only half-way and then the flame went out. Tarabas threw it down. Thereafter he kept a more watchful eye upon his servant.
“Stepan,” he would say, “have you nothing to tell me? — Where is your mouth-organ, Stepan, wouldn’t you like to give me a tune?”
“Lost it, sir!” Stepan would answer, humble and sad.
And one evening Stepan, too, disappeared without warning. No one knew anything about it.
Captain Tarabas had the whole lot line up and called the roll. More than half were gone. He put the remnant through an hour’s drill. The red-haired private drilled sturdily, unshirkingly, immaculately, a faultless soldier.
A day or so later, at the hour when Tarabas, the colonel, and the other officers sat in council discussing how to cope with the desertions, the red-haired one appeared, two hand-grenades in his belt and a pistol in his hand, accompanied by two non-commissioned officers.
“Citizens,” said the red-haired atheist, “the revolution has triumphed. Give up your arms, you will be given safe conduct. You, Citizen Tarabas, and whatever other countrymen of yours are here, can go back home. Your people there have got their own government; it’s an independent country now.”
It was very quiet. The only sound was the ticking of the colonel’s big watch which lay open on the table; stitching time like a sewing-machine.
8
WHEN the red-haired soldier had left the room with his men, the colonel got up and stood a while as though meditating some plan, as though, in the hour which had sealed the army’s the regiment’s, and his own doom, a saving revelation had been vouchsafed him. Tarabas looked up from his chair with a questioning glance. The colonel turned away. He pushed his arm-chair back. The solid, leather-upholstered back met the plank floor with a thud. The colonel went over to the window. His broad back almost filled the wide frame. Tarabas did not move. Suddenly a sob broke from the colonel’s throat. It sounded like a short, abrupt, and quickly stifled cry, strange, as though it came not from the colonel’s throat but directly out of his heart; yes, as though the heart possessed its own quite special throat through which it cried its special pain into the world. The massive shoulders rose and fell for the space of a second. Then the old man turned round again and went back to the table. He stood a while looking at the big open watch ticking away with pitiless regularity; he gazed intently at it as though he had never before seen the swift circuit of the fine hand that marked the seconds. Tarabas too looked at the watch. Nothing stirred in him; his head was empty, his heart had gone cold. He thought he heard it beating, ticking in time with the watch upon the table. There was no other sound in the room. It seemed to Tarabas that a very long time had passed since the red-haired one had left them there. At last the colonel spoke.
“Tarabas,” he said, “I’d like to give you this watch as a memento.”
The colonel took out his pen-knife and opened the back. He read the inscription engraved in Russian characters: “To my son, Ossip Ivanovich Kudra,” and showed it to Tarabas.
“I got this watch on leaving the cadets’ school. My father was very proud of me. I was proud myself. I come of very humble people. My father’s father was still a serf on the Tsaritsyns’ estate. I’ve never been much of a soldier, Captain Tarabas. I’ve been lazy and negligent, I think. We’ve always had a lot of officers like that. Will you do me the honour of accepting the watch, Brother Tarabas?”
“I’ll take it,” said Tarabas, rising.
The colonel shut both covers of the watch and handed it across the table to Tarabas. He still stood there for a while, his grey head bowed down. Then he said: “Excuse me, I’ll just go and get my things!” went slowly round the table, past Tarabas, to the door, and went out. The next moment there was a shot. At once Tarabas said to himself: “That’s He!” He opened the door. The colonel lay at full length just outside. He must have laid himself down deliberately and then shot. His coat was open. The blood was soaking through the shirt. The dead man’s hands were still warm. The index finger still held the trigger. Tarabas took the weapon away. Then he folded the colonel’s hands across his breast.
A few soldiers came up and stood round the corpse and the kneeling Tarabas. They took off their caps; it was not clear to them what they were doing there, but they remained.
Tarabas stood up.
“We’ll bury him at once, here, in front of the house,” he ordered. “Dig a grave! Then line up. With rifles! Call Kontsev!”
Sergeant-Major Kontsev came. “I’ve only twenty-six men left, sir,” he said.
“Line them up!” commanded Tarabas.
They buried the colonel two hours later, ten paces from the door of the house. Twenty-six men, the faithful remnant of the regiment, fired three times into the air at Tarabas’s command.
Six pitiable ranks formed fours and faced about.
But Tarabas at their head marched as though he led an unscathed, intact regiment; he had by no means decided to admit that his world was destroyed or the war ended.
With his twenty-six men, some of whom were from the same part of the country as he, Tarabas started out for home, for the new chief city of the new state. Brand-new ministers, governors, and generals had been appointed there, and in all haste a small provisional army was being formed. Everywhere was turmoil — between the inhabitants and those in power, and among the latter themselves, there was nothing but confusion. Tarabas, however, filled with insatiable lust for adventure and with an honest, ardent hatred for the many offices and officials, bureaux and documents, was determined that his career had not yet reached its end. He was a soldier, nothing else. He had his trusty twenty-six, for whom, as for himself, the war had been the only home they knew, and to whom, as to himself, he owed a new home now. To make these twenty-six the nucleus of a whole new regiment — what a mission for a Tarabas! He was not the man to take his own life like the good old colonel. History, chipping small new countries that men should live and die for off the big old ones which they had lived and died for until then — history was no concern of Tarabas. As long as he lived he would refuse to recognize the so-called inevitable course of events. He was responsible to his twenty-six. What was the new War Minister of a new country to him? Less than any private in his company! He betook himself to the War Minister, splendidly equipped, heavily armed, followed by his twenty-six; ushers, clerks, and secretaries who asked him his errand he browbeat with his thundered orders, mightier in the ante-room than the minister himself. In this personage, however, the first few words sufficed to reveal to him a kinsman of his mother’s family.