CHAPTER VII

HOW THE SEEDS BORE FRUIT AND FLOWER

The sleeping kameras of the half-way house were quieter than usual that night. So far as absence of noise was concerned it was almost possible to sleep. The gloom of the day's happenings hung heavy on them all. Perhaps the future also cast its shadow.

Ignatz, the chain-bearer, lay on the ground near Pavlof and Palma, and whenever he moved he rattled like an armoury.

The short remainder of the afternoon's march had told on him, strong as he was. They had seen the veins swell out in his neck and forehead till they looked like bursting. And his eyes, when he stumbled into the stockade, were dim and shot with blood; partly no doubt with the weight of his burden, for where five-pound fetters are a burden fifty-pound are torture; and more, perhaps, from the injustice of it, for he had spoken truly when he said the rest had gone against his advice.

"Can you stand it, my friend?" asked Pavlof.

"No, barin."

"They will see that and take them off."

"Yes, barin."

"If you can get through to-morrow, the next day is rest day, and then we change convoys, and the new man may not be a devil."

"Yes, barin."

They did what they could to ease his burdened state, fed him, gave him drink, packed his fetters with rags torn from their clothing; but not much was possible to them, and Ignatz lay brooding all night like a spirit in chains.

Next day his torment waxed with the sun. He plodded doggedly on, and Pavlof, from behind, watched the martyrdom keenly, and his trained eye told him that the man could not stand it much longer. It was painful to watch, even at a distance, the sufferer's vain attempts at easement; the chained hands knitted behind the swollen neck; clasped on the crown of his half-shaven head with the dangling chains about his ears; the heavy head thrown back to balance the weight in front; the gradual bowing of the broad shoulders; the blind, stumbling step.

"He can't stand much more of that," said Pavlof. "He'll either break down or break out."

But Ignatz staggered through the heat of the morning journey, and fell flat only when they reached the eating-place.

Pavlof tried to get him to eat, but the blood-shot eyes looked dumbly at him out of the black-flushed face and he only shook his head.

The captain strolled round smoking a cigarette. He came to have a look at his work.

"Well, Mr. President? How goes it now? Stand up when I speak to you!" he ordered, and Ignatz staggered to his feet and stood swaying.

"You won't be quite so forward in forming an artel another time, my man, or if you do you'll keep it in order, eh?"

But Ignatz had nothing to say.

"When you reach the étape to-night you shall shed one chain, and I shall advise the captain of the next convoy to take off one each night till you get back to normal. By that time you will have learned your lesson maybe."

He flicked the ash from his cigarette and turned to go.

Then, instantly, with the spring of a tiger, without a sound save the indrawing of a great breath, and a clank and a dull thud, Ignatz was on him. With his bunched fetters he felled him like an ox, sat on him, and, before the others had found their wits, was demolishing the captain's last semblance to humanity with smashing blows from twenty-five pounds of rusty iron chain.

It was done in a moment. The captain was probably dead before he reached the ground, for the great knots of chain came down on the back of his head with the force of a sledge-hammer But Ignatz sat on his body pounding away still as if his own life depended on it.

All who saw had leaped up with cries of horror. It was the sergeant of the convoy who took the only way to end the matter. He snatched a rifle from a gaping Cossack, took careful aim, and fired. Ignatz, in the act of pounding, rolled over on his victim and the episode was closed. The sergeant took charge of the convoy, the bodies were placed in one of the telégas, and the procession moved on.

The future is ever the outcome of the past, as every deed is the fruition of thought, conscious or otherwise. These dire happenings brought the travellers face to face, in the most abrupt and uncompromising fashion, with the great elemental facts of life and death; and close behind them, and interwoven with them, were the more complex perceptions of life in death and death in life. Their hearts were bruised and tender, their understandings were quickened to the mighty meanings of things.

They spoke less now, as they tramped side by side, but thought the more, and the thoughts of both were continually of the woman they both loved, and of her desolation in her loneliness.

Pavlof heard his friend murmur her name in his uneasy sleep. Once, as they tramped in silence, Palma broke out in unconscious utterance of his thoughts, "God! if I only knew that all was well with her!" and never knew that he had spoken. And Paul Pavlof, as he heard it, smiled to himself as he smiled of a night in the darkness of the kamera.

There come a day at last when they passed between two great brick pillars, set up one on each side of the road.

"What are these?" asked Palma.

"We were in Tomsk. Now we are in Yeniseisk."

"So!" and they went in silence and knew that the time drew near when they must part--one for the comparative freedom of the provinces, the other for the terrible tramp of two thousand rough miles to Kara, a dreary journey with a drearier ending.

"You will do that which I asked of you, Paul Ivanuitch?" said Palma presently. "You will escape, and seek out my wife, and tell her all that is in my heart for her? ... My God! My God! what a pitiful wreck I have made of her life, and I had hoped so much for her!"

"I will do what I can, Serge Petrovitch."

And that night, as they lay side by side in the kamera, Pavlof said to him, "Are you sleeping, Serge Petrovitch?"

"I cannot sleep."

"Then draw your coat above your head and put it close to mine. So! Now, listen! To-morrow we reach Achinsk, and there we part company. You made me promise to do something for you, for the sake of Hope Ivanovna. Will you promise now to do something for me?"

"Surely, Paul Ivanuitch! I will do anything you want."

"Swear it!"

"I swear it--if it is anything within my power."

"It is within your power and you are pledged. Listen! When they call the roll in Achinsk you will answer to my name and I to yours. You will become Paul Pavlof. I shall become Serge Palma."

"Good God, Paul Ivanuitch!--What----?"

"You will go to the provinces in place of me."

"But----"

"You will wait till the cuckoo sings in the spring----"

"But--Paul----"

"And then you will walk away and strike north for the land of the Ostiaks"--he felt Palma's body shaking as with an ague. "You will be very cautious, for Hope Ivanovna's sake. And when you find her you will tell her that Paul Pavlof did his best to live up to her teaching."

"It is your life you are giving for me, Paul Ivanuitch," said Palma hoarsely.

"For you and for Hope Ivanovna. But perhaps not. I shall try east from Kara if the chance offers."

Palma was silent for a time, the magnitude of the sacrifice struggling within him against the sudden mighty hope that Pavlof's offer had kindled.

"It is too much, Pavlof," he said brokenly at last.

"You promised."

"Ay, but--this----"

"You must think of your wife--and the child."

"Ah God--the child!" and he strove against it no more.

Nine months later, "Serge Palma," lean and wiry, and worn with the road, but cheerful of face, and with that in his deep-set eyes which drew men's liking, trudged through the deep spring snows into Kara and found his place among the forlorn and downtrodden.

And in Yeniseisk, "Paul Pavlof," big and bluff, fair-haired and blue-eyed, listened eagerly for the song of the cuckoo which should tell him it was time to be up and going.

And this great sacrifice and its acceptance were tribute to the love two men bore to one most gracious woman.