“You think that twenty miles of snow would deter me,” he said.
“Well, they might.”
“They might if—well—”
He left the sentence unfinished—the last resource of the sneak and the coward who wishes to reserve to himself the letter of the denial in the spirit of the meanest lie.
XXIV
Home
A tearing, howling wind from the north—from the boundless snow-clad plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow.
The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty degrees below freezing-point. A drift—constant, restless, never altering—sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before a steady wind. This white scud—a flying scud of frozen water—was singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a cyclone in the China Seas. Any object that broke the wind—a stunted pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post—had at its leeward side a high, narrow snowdrift tailing off to the dead level of the plain. Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once. But these objects were few and far between. The deadly monotony of the scene—the trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of Gobi when the snow lies on it—all these tell the same grim truth to all who look on them: the old truth that man is but a small thing and his life but as the flower of the grass.
Across the plain of Tver, before the north wind, a single sleigh was tearing as fast as horse could lay hoof to ground—a sleigh driven by Paul Howard Alexis, and the track of it was as a line drawn from point to point across a map.
A striking feature of the winter of Northern Russia is the glorious uncertainty of its snowfalls. At Tver the weather-wise had said:
The snow has not all fallen yet. More is coming. It is yellow in the sky, although March is nearly gone.
The landlord of the hotel (a good enough resting-place facing the broad Volga) had urged upon M. le Prince the advisability of waiting, as is the way of landlords all the world over. But Etta had shown a strange restlessness, a petulant desire to hurry forward at all risks. She hated Tver; the hotel was uncomfortable, there was an unhealthy smell about the place.
Paul acceded readily enough to her wishes. He rather liked Tver. In a way he was proud of this busy town—a centre of Russian civilization. He would have liked Etta to be favorably impressed with it, as any prejudice would naturally reflect upon Osterno, 140 miles across the steppe. But with a characteristic silent patience he made the necessary preparations for an immediate start.
The night express from St. Petersburg had deposited them on the platform in the early morning. Steinmetz had preceded them. Closed sleighs from Osterno were awaiting them. A luxurious breakfast was prepared at the hotel. Relays of horses were posted along the road. The journey to Osterno had been carefully planned and arranged by Steinmetz—a king among organizers. The sleigh drive across the steppe was to be accomplished in ten hours.
The snow had begun to fall as they clattered across the floating bridge of Tver. It had fallen ever since, and the afternoon lowered gloomily. In America such visitations are called “blizzards”; here in Russia it is merely “the snow.” The freezing wind is taken as a matter of course.
At a distance of one hundred miles from Tver, the driver of the sleigh containing Etta, Maggie, and Paul had suddenly rolled off his perch. His hands were frostbitten; a piteous blue face peered out at his master through ice-laden eyebrows, mustache, and beard. In a moment Maggie was out in the snow beside the two men, while Etta hastily closed the door.
“He is all right,” said Paul; “it is only the cold. Pour some brandy into his mouth while I hold the ice aside. Don’t take off your gloves. The flask will stick to your fingers.”
Maggie obeyed with her usual breezy readiness, turning to nod reassurance to Etta, who, truth to tell, had pulled up the rime-covered windows, shutting out the whole scene.
“He must come inside,” said Maggie. “We are nice and warm with all the hot-water cans.”
Paul looked rather dubiously toward the sleigh.
“You can carry him, I suppose?” said the girl cheerfully. “He is not very big—he is all fur coat.”
Etta looked rather disgusted, but made no objection, while Paul lifted the frozen man into the seat he had just vacated.
“When you are cold I will drive,” cried Maggie, as Paul shut the door. “I should love it.”
Thus it came about that a single sleigh was speeding across the plain of Tver.
Paul, with the composure that comes of a large experience, gathered the reins in his two hands, driving with both and with extended arms, after the manner of Russian yamshchiks. For a man must accommodate himself to circumstance, and fingerless gloves are not conducive to a finished style of handling the ribbons.
This driver knew that the next station was twenty miles off; that at any moment the horses might break down or plunge into a drift. He knew that in the event of such emergencies it would be singularly easy for four people to die of cold within a few miles of help. But he had faced such possibilities a hundred times before in this vast country, where the standard price of a human life is no great sum. He was not, therefore, dismayed, but rather took delight in battling with the elements, as all strong men should, and most
