HE stars sparkle like burning salt, and from the woods comes the bark of a wolf—the bark of a dog wolf answered by the howl of his mate.
The same old woods, the same sky, the same night, but across the arch of the sky to-night, of all nights that ever shone on this world of snow and wrong and regret and exile, there is written in letters of fire, leaping like the stars, the words, "Russia is free! Russia is free!" The chains of the people are broken, and God has come to rule.
I have been six years in exile; or is it seven? I was forty when I came here, but now feel sixty, and the hands that were the hands of a journalist and man of letters are the claws of a beast; but my soul is still the soul of a man.
I have no hate left. It burned itself out long ago and left me in peace; there is not an old scar on my body that has not ceased to cry out against the ruler that made it, for I have recognized that he was a condition, not a man.
Well, well, it is easy to pride oneself. It was not I that told myself that, but the wind and the sun and the stars and the silence; for this is the country of silence and the country of signs. Here the stars beckon, and all nature talks to the heart in the alphabet of the deaf and dumb.
All things go forward, pressed by a tide that has its ebb and flow. It is useless to hate the ebb or love the flow; and look, if you doubt, out of the silence, which is the world beyond this silence, a hand has reached and written those words across the sky, "Russia is free!" Yet the wolf howls on the same.
We are free; we have been free a long time, yet we did not know. This little post is so far, so far, that the news forgot us. How long have we been free? Six months, eight months? I do not know. The messenger said, "Oh, a long time." Perhaps he was ashamed, perhaps he himself did not know; his very coming was an accident. That is Siberia.
He was a fat man in furs, with the face of a Mongol, and he sat in the warmth of the main hut, with his hands crossed on his big belly, half drowsy, resting before he went on. He seemed to care about nothing but that he and his horses were fed, and the number of versts between here and Berizov. He showed the guards papers; he told us we were free, that we could go back. How he did not say; where he did not say. "You can go back." We did not ask; we knew, and I sat for a long time, when he was gone, walking in the streets of Moscow. Moscow! with all things realized, and the past a bad dream.
Then comes the moment of grief: but why have my brothers forgotten me? And the answer. How could they know? I was moved here a year ago, the archives of the old Government may have been destroyed, they were busy completing that which I long ago lent my hand to, and the best men are men, and men are small. The wind has told that.
Then I woke to hear the others. The guards were one with us, as though they had been plotting revolution all their lives. Eight words dropped by the messenger had broken everything for them that had to do with the past: "The people are living in the Winter Palace."
are fifteen of us here, which, with the guards, makes twenty-two; yet when I woke from my reverie there might have been a hundred men talking. I have come to believe that there were forty-four men here, not twenty-two, each man being double; for, now when I heard them talking, each man was a different man from what he had been only an hour before. Truly the word "revolution" has its meaning, for here were men brooding who had been careless and laughing, and men laughing who had been brooding, and Chicherin, my friend and confidant, idealist, dreamer, was talking like a drunken man about women!
I had seen much, but this was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen. Here was a man with one burning ideal, freedom; in a moment it had been realized, and, -behold! in the next he was talking like an animal! It was as though the idealist had completed its cycle of existence and died; just as a butterfly completes its existence and dies.
Oppression made Chicherin great, made him even renounce those women whom he evidently loved so much, risk all, lose all. And now that oppression has vanished—
They say a business man, when he retires, deteriorates; relieved of hard work, he dies. Hard work, oppression, the things that seem to destroy the mind and soul, after all, may they not contain the true food of the mind and soul?