CHAPTER X

HOW THREE PASSED WITHOUT MEETING

"On the Volga there is a Cliff," but the bureaucrats, for reasons of their own, object to all mention of it. For it recalls a glorious time, long since, when the bureaucrats went under, and for a space a free man ruled a free race--even in Russia. And the would-be-frees still sing of that time long since--but they sing of it below their breath, for the ears of the bureaucrats are long and their hands are heavy.

There are cliffs also on the Yenisei, blue and fair, across the mile-wide stretch of swift-flowing water; and these cliffs, too, are known to free men, and known still better to those who are not free.

In a cleft of the hills on the eastern bank, three free men lay in the sun and watched the slow, methodic passage of the pendulum ferry as it swung to and fro from bank to bank. It was loaded to the brim each time it left the further bank and it went back empty. But the crowd on this side grew but slowly, and the packed mass on the other side seemed undiminished by the stolid bites of the big black boat.

"Da!" said one of the men in the cleft. "There is no end to them."

"It is the first party of the season. They have been piling up," said one of the others.

"Women, too, and children," said the third, and thought of one woman and a possible child.

"Always women and children," said the first, "and it is a hard road they travel."

And on the crowded boat, as it swung down stream to the length of its tether, one woman looked across at the blue hills and thought that somewhere away behind them lay the man she had come so far to find, and she hoped that it was well with him.

When that load was landed there came a delay in the passage, and those who had already crossed stood up and crowded the bank to see why the boat was coming over empty. But as it drew in they saw that this journey was devoted entirely to the convenience of one passenger. He lay back in a three-horsed tarantas and seemed to eye the motley crowd on the bank with a more than usually keen and searching scrutiny.

At sight of him a hasty word flew round among the Cossack guards, and they threw up their rifles to the salute. And Hope Palma, who had been watching with the rest, sat down suddenly on the bare earth behind them, and her face was pinched and clouded as she recognised her old tormentor, Colonel Zazarin.

"Nu!" said a woman to one of the soldiers, as the carriage sped away in a cloud of dust. "The great man is in a hurry. Who is he, little father?"

"It is the new Governor of Kara. The last one is dead of the fever."

"Tell us, little father," said one of the three in the cleft, as they lay on their stomachs, chin in hand, and watched the traffic below, "why should one man have the power to do all this? After all, he is only a man like you or me. Strip him and set him alongside me and he is neither more nor less than a man. And yet----"

"The trouble is that if you kill him there is always another to step into his place," growled the other.

"And he, again, is only a man like the first."

"You cannot alter facts by killing men," said the third quietly, very intent upon the scene below--"unless you kill enough," he added meditatively, "as they did in France. It is a system, and he is at the head. He is probably no worse than any other man----"

"That is not enough. When all the rest are in his hand he ought to be more than that. He ought to be the strongest and the best."

"Originally--far back--I suppose he was. But it is the system that is wrong----"

"And we others suffer."

"Yes, we others suffer, and will suffer till the system is altered. And that will never be done from the top, and can only be done from the bottom by the shedding of much blood. In France it ran in rivers."

"Tell us how they did it in France, little father!"

So, lying with his chin in his hand, in the slant beams of the sun, Serge Palma told them how France had once shaken off the thrall and risen red and free. And below them the ferry swung slowly to and fro, and the crowd on this side grew greater and greater, till at last the other bank was bare, and the re-formed convoy crept slowly away along the road like a crippled snake. And Hope Palma's spirits were troubled at the thought that, in seeking the man she wished to find, she must encounter again a man whom she had every reason to fear and mistrust.

When the convoy was out of sight, and the eastern hills had relapsed into their natural solitude, the three men in the cleft stole away along the river to find some friendly fisherman who would put them across and keep his mouth shut. And so Serge Palma, known as Pavlof, six weeks escaped from Minusinsk, toiled west in quest of his wife, as she was toiling east in quest of him.

A strange chance, truly, that brought these two within touch of one another and yet withheld the meeting. But life is threaded with just such narrow dividing lines. And sometimes we cross them, and with a single step the whole complexion of a life is changed for good or ill. But more often we press on all unconscious of that which lies so close. We escape disaster by a hair's breadth and miss fortune by an inch. And, though man be never so much a free agent, it is comforting still to believe that there is a higher hand which holds the twisted threads and guides the shuttle in its flight.

The journey had been a terribly trying one, and in spite of her high spirit and her ministry of help, Hope had felt her bodily strength waning daily.

At Irkutsk, with still a thousand miles between her and Kara, and that the roughest part of the road, she broke down and lay there for a month with a recurrence of her fever, born, no doubt, of the deadly atmosphere of the rest-houses.

When at last she was able to take the road again, the summer was past. The bracing freshness of the autumn air was very sweet after the weariness of the sick-room. She was glad to be among her fellows in affliction again. She pressed on with new hope and unabated courage.