Short Fiction

rest.⁠ ⁠… Give me some more water to drink, friend Darnu.⁠ ⁠…”

“Drink, Purana. I still see a tear on your cheek. Did not the blessedness of peace press it from your eyes?”

The wise sages spent the next three weeks in accustoming their mouths to eating and drinking and their limbs to moving, and during these three weeks they slept in the temple and warmed each other with the heat of their bodies till their strength returned.

At the beginning of the fourth week, they stood at the threshold of the ruined temple. Below at their feet lay the green slopes of the mountain descending into the valley.⁠ ⁠… Far in the distance were the winding rivers, the white houses of the villages and cities where people lived their normal lives, busied with cares, passions, love, anger and hate, where joy was changed for sorrow, and sorrow was healed by new joy, and where amid the roaring torrent of life men raised their eyes to heaven, seeking a star to guide them.⁠ ⁠… The sages stood and looked at the picture of life spread out at the entrance to the old temple.

“Where shall we go, friend Darnu?” asked the blinded Purana. “Are there no directions on the walls of the temple?”

“Leave the temple and its deity in peace,” answered Darnu. “If we go to the right, that will be in accordance with Necessity. If we go to the left, that too is in accordance with her. Don’t you understand, friend Purana, that this deity acknowledges as its laws everything that our choice decides upon. Necessity is not the master but merely the soulless accountant of our movements. The accountant marks only what has been. What must be⁠—will be only by our will.⁠ ⁠…”

“It means.⁠ ⁠…”

“It means⁠—let us permit Necessity to worry over her calculations, as she will. Let us choose that path which leads us to the homes of our brothers.”

With cheerful steps both sages went down from the mountain heights into the valley, where human life flows on amid cares, love, and sorrow, where laughter echoes and tears flow.⁠ ⁠…

“And where our steward, O Kassapa, covers the back of the slave Jebaka with welts,” added wise Darnu with a smile of reproach.

This is the story which the cheerful sage Ulaya told to the young son of the Rajah Lichava, when he had fallen into the idleness of despair.⁠ ⁠… Darnu and Purana smiled, denying nothing and affirming nothing, and Kassapa heard the story. Buried in thought he went away toward the home of his father, the powerful Rajah Lichava.

On the Volga

I

As he went out on the deck of the steamer which was running upstream, Dmitry Parfentyevich drew a deep breath.

The day was ending and the sun was hanging low above the forest-covered mountain. The river furnished a majestic and peaceful picture. Somewhere in the distance a steamboat whistled; a sailboat heavily laden lay on the river and seemed as immobile as the sleepy wife of a merchant. The rafts all carried fires⁠—the men were cooking their dinners. Two small barks, fastened together and heading obliquely across stream, floated by, hardly touching the glassy surface of the river, and beneath them, swinging and swaying, hung their reflection in the blue depths. When the wake of the steamer, spreading ever wider and wider, touched this image, it suddenly broke and scattered. It was a sudden shattering of a mirror and the fragments floated and sparkled for a long time.

“Are you all right, Grunya?” asked Dmitry Parfentyevich, sitting down beside his daughter.

“Yes,” she answered briefly.

The girl wore a dark dress. A Scythian kerchief on her forehead threw a shadow over her pale young face; her large eyes were dreamy and thoughtful.

“The main thing is heavenly blessing and quiet,” moralized Dmitry Parfentyevich.

His life was moving toward its close and he thought that nothing could be better than the quiet of a dying day.⁠ ⁠…

Only quiet and prayer after sinful vanity and weakness.⁠ ⁠… May God grant no new wishes, but save from every new temptation.

“Grunya?” Dmitry Parfentyevich looked at his daughter and he wished to ask about her own thoughts.

“Yes,” answered the girl, but her gaze, dreamily running far ahead over the golden river and the mountains with their quiet veil of bluish mist, seemed to be seeking something else.

The passengers on the deck were just as quiet. Some were carrying on private conversations; others were getting ready for tea at the little tables.

In the stern sat a group of Tatars, returning home from Astrakhan. There was an old patriarch with three sons. A fourth, the favorite, had been buried in a strange city. Akhmetzyan had been taken ill with an unknown disease, lay a week and died.

“All is as Allah wills,” said the stern face of the old man, but he had still to tell the mother of the death of her beloved son.

Everything breathed of silence and peace and the mountains on the right bank swam up one after the other and then, receding into the distance, they seemed to wrap themselves in a blue haze.

II

Near Dmitry Parfentyevich were the knots of passengers, some on benches by the table, others on the deck and sitting on bundles.

There were several raftsmen from Unzha, a fat and good-natured country woman, and an old man, probably also a small farmer. The centre of the group at this moment was a steward for the third class passengers. He was still young and was dressed in a worn and dirty frock coat, with the number “2” on the left side. A napkin hung over his shoulder and with this he attained remarkable success in rubbing the wet tables and the glasses. He had just brought to the deck a tray of dishes with his arms wide open and with his eyes looking ahead and at his feet at the same instant. He had put the tray on the table, wiped off the dust around it with his napkin, and then joining this group of his