“Ah! Sultan! Kusch! Kusch!” exclaimed Soloveitchik, in order to give himself courage. In the darkness, Sultan thrust his cold, moist nose into his master’s hand.
“There you are!” said Soloveitchik, as he set down the bucket.
Sultan sniffed, and began to eat voraciously, while his master stood beside him and gazed mournfully at the surrounding gloom.
“Ah! what can I do?” he thought. “How can I force people to alter their opinions? I myself expected to be told how to live, and how to think. God has not given me the voice of a prophet, so, in what way can I help?”
“Eat away, old boy, eat away!” said Soloveitchik. “I would let you loose for a little run, but I haven’t got the key, and I’m so tired.” Then to himself, “What clever, well-informed people those are! They know such a lot; good Christians, very likely; and here am I…. Ah! well, perhaps it’s my own fault. I should have liked to say a word to them, but I didn’t know how to do it.”
From the distance, beyond the town, there came the sound of a long, plaintive whistle. Sultan raised his head, and listened. Large drops fell from his muzzle into the pail.
“Eat away,” said Soloveitchik, “That’s the train!”
“I wonder if men will ever live like that! Perhaps they can’t,” said Soloveitchik aloud, as he shrugged his shoulders, despairingly. There, in the darkness he imagined that he could see a multitude of men, vast, unending as eternity, sinking ever deeper in the gloom; a succession of centuries without beginning and without end; an unbroken chain of wanton suffering for which remedy there was none; and, on high, where God dwelt, silence, eternal silence.
Sultan knocked against the pail, and upset it. Then, as he wagged his tail, the chain rattled slightly.
Soloveitchik patted the dog’s shaggy coat and felt its warm body writhe in joyous response to his touch. Then he went back to the house.
He could hear Sultan’s chain rattle, and the yard seemed less gloomy than before, while blacker and more sinister was the mill with its tall chimney and narrow sheds that looked like coffins. From the window a broad ray of light fell across the garden, illuminating in mystic fashion the frail little flowers that shrank beneath the turbulent heaven with its countless banners, black and ominous, unfolded to the night.