He looked on this stony ground, and his stout heart was torn with pity. It is easy to be patient in social economy when that vague jumble of impossible ideas is calmly discussed across the dinner-table. But the result seems hopelessly distant when the mass of the poor and wretched stand before one in the flesh.
Paul knew that this little room was only a specimen of the whole of Russia. Each of these poor peasants represented a million—equally hopeless, equally powerless to contend with an impossible taxation.
He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck. The question was far above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position without fear.
He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a hopeless cause.
“Well,” he said. “Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?”
“You know him,” answered the man who had spoken from the safe background. “We need not tell you.”
“Yes,” answered Paul; “I know him.”
He would not defend himself.
“There,” he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged. “You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?”
The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a baby in her arms.
Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy child playing at her mother’s cottage door.
She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little waif of humanity.
“When he was born he was a very fine child,” said the mother.
Paul glanced at her. She was quite serious. She was looking at him with a strange pride on her face. Paul nodded and drew aside the shawl. The baby was staring at him with wise, grave eyes, as if it could have told him a thing or two if it had only been gifted with the necessary speech. Paul knew that look. It meant starvation.
“What is it?” asked the child-mother. “It is only some little illness, is it not?”
“Yes; it is only a little illness.”
He did not add that no great illness is required to kill a small child. He was already writing something in his pocketbook. He tore the leaf out and gave it to her.
“This,” he said, “is for you—yourself, you understand? Take that each day to the starosta and he will give you what I have written down. If you do not eat all that he gives you and drink what there is in the bottle as he directs you, the baby will die—you understand? You must give nothing away; nothing even to your husband.”
The next patient was the man whose voice had been heard from the safe retreat of the background. His dominant malady was obvious. A shaky hand, an unsteady eye, and a bloated countenance spoke for themselves. But he had other diseases more or less developed.
“So you have no good to tell of your prince,” said Paul, looking into the man’s face.
“Our prince, Excellency! He is not our prince. His forefathers seized this land; that is all.”
“Ah! Who has been telling you that?”
“No one,” grumbled the man. “We know it; that is all.”
“But you were his father’s serfs, before the freedom. Let me see your tongue. Yes; you have been drinking—all the winter. Ah! is not that so, little father? Your parents were serfs before the freedom.”
“Freedom!” growled the man. “A pretty freedom! We were better off before.”
“Yes; but the world interfered with serfdom, because it got its necessary touch of sentiment. There is no sentiment in starvation.”
The man did not understand. He grunted acquiescence nevertheless. The true son of the people is always ready to grunt acquiescence to all that sounds like abuse.
“And what is this prince like? Have you seen him?” went on Paul.
“No; I have not seen him. If I saw him I would kick his head to pieces.”
“Ah, just open your mouth a little wider. Yes; you have a nasty throat there. You have had diphtheria. So you would kick his head to pieces. Why?”
“He is a chinovnik—a government spy. He lives on the taxes. But it will not be for long. There is a time coming—”
“Ah! What sort of a time? Now, you must take this to the starosta. He will give you a bottle. It is not to drink. It is to wash your throat with. Remember that, and do not give it to your wife by way of a tonic as you did last time. So there are changes coming, are there?”
“There is a change coming for the prince—for all the princes,” replied the man in the usual taproom jargon. “For the Emperor too. The poor man has had enough of it. God made the world for the poor man as well
