The Swinging Caravan/The Gates of Tamerlane
THE GATES OF TAMERLANE
THE drab barrack with the imperial eagle above the door that housed the ugolovneuie soodd, Samarkand's Russian court of assizes and its half-hundred employees, stood within a stone's throw of the ancient Moslim college of the Lady Khanym, daughter of the Emperor of China and favorite wife of Tamerlane the Great, who had built it in the days of Tartar dominion nearly six centuries earlier. Here, in a small apartment that faced the street, lived Serge Denikoff, the soodya or magistrate. Here every morning before going to court he crossed himself and bowed ceremoniously to the gaily colored lithograph of Chrysostom, his patron Saint, looking out of the corner of his eye to make sure that Pavel Dmitritch Karp, his servant, was watching him; and every morning, again glancing surreptitiously at the other, he clenched his fists and muttered angrily when he heard the muezzin of the Lady Khanym's college drone his nasal chant of "Hasbi rabi jal Ullah—my defence is the Lord; magnify Allah!"
"They are heathen Asiatics," he would say, "enemies of the Dear Crucified One, and enemies of the Tsar—may God preserve him!"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"They must be ruled with a strong hand, Pavel Dmitritch."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Ali Tugluq, the blacksmith, came to me this morning with a complaint that Hassan Uzbek's dog had bitten him. Do you know what I did, Pavel Dmitritch?"
"You fined Hassan Uzbek ten roubles?"
"Better than that. I fined them both ten roubles. Justice must be impartial. They could not pay. They will both go to jail for a week."
"Very just, Your Honor."
"Pay money, or go to jail. That is life, Pavel Dmitritch, and death. Cough—a rouble; spit—a rouble; fight—a rouble; get drunk—a rouble; die—a hundred roubles. And then nothing after the burial except the inheritance tax."
"Hasbi rabi jal Ullah!" came the muezzin's drone, filling the gigantic, peacock-green dome of the college with twisting echoes.
"Jal Ullah!" chimed in the worshipers, Central Asians of many races, Turkomans and Karakalpaks, Khivans and Bokharans and Khokandians.
"Swine!" commented Serge Denikoff.
"Decidedly, Your Honor!"
"Goats of a smell most goatish!"
Serge Denikoff knew the chant well. He had joined in it often before he had become a Christian and an employee of the Russian government, before he had taken his present name—by special permission of the Tsar—and when he had still been known by his patronymic of Jagatai Khan, clearly indicative of his Moslim faith and Tartar origin.
Every Sunday, very early, he attended High Mass. Then he returned to his rooms and changed into boots and breeches, checkered red waistcoat, white hunting stock and broadcloth riding coat, all bought by mail order from M. Emile Rudolphovitch Schultze, Krassnaya Polshad, Moscow, furnisher by imperial appointment to His Majesty the Tsar. He put on his English cap of hairy, pea-green tweed that clashed ludicrously with his high-cheeked Mongol features, pinned on his two decorations, went to Mohamet Yar Khan's livery stable, mounted his shaggy Kirghiz pony, and rode out of Samarkand's western gate.
There was beyond the gate, beyond the bustle of the bazaars and the martial clank of the Tsar's garrison, the peace of the Central Asian steppe stretching yel low and brittle, with wind-flayed rocks towering like sentinels and, jerking out from their basalt bases, the shadows dancing to the sun's laughing ripple, with a far horizon of soft curves and blue vapors and here and there tufts of black trees and green trees. There was here an enduring, slightly ironic serenity of earth and sky and occasionally, in tight little villages folded compactly into narrow valleys where small rivers ran, the odor of hard, russet grain and great, ruddy melons and camel dung plowed under to mulch the ground.
There were in these villages bits of life and color: a pig-tailed, red-faced Kirghiz ambling flat-footedly, carrying a brace of earthen teapots or curd bags on the ends of a long pole; another Kirghiz shuffling along on a pious errand with a sheaf of silver papers to burn before the dead of his tribe; a Buddhist priest with shaven poll and orange duffel robe, chanting his incantations at a wayside shrine motley with the sculptures of intensely Chinese dragons; a Moslim Tartar looking on contemptuously, clad in loose, pigeon-blue trousers and deep-violet coat, gleaming like a statue against the lacquered gold of the rye stubble; a loitering, swaggering Buriat Cossack, flat features shaded by enormous fur cap; a tiny, naked, berry-brown girl child urging on a diminutive donkey with shouts of "Ho! butcher's meat! May Allah confound the father of thy unclean head!"; a melancholy Russian Jew, with pendulous nose and well-oiled love-locks, pack on back, counting his lean gains and dreaming of Kieff's smoky trakteers where a man might drink his fill of tea and vodka for twenty kopeks.
There was where the valley broadened the primitive symphony of all Central Asia; the protesting grunt and belch of ill-natured draught camels; the creak and crunch of the lumbering, two-wheeled carts that car ried the grain to the barn; the swish of the thrashing-flail; a land-loping desertman's raucous shouts of "Yellah! Yellah!" as he pastured his small, sorrel cattle through the laurel wold; the dull stamping of the muzzled, blunt-nosed oxen; the grating of the water wheels; the sharp scraping of the spike harrows; the "Zud! zud! tez! tez!—quick! quick! hurry! hurry!" of a feudal Turkoman landlord among his peasantry, bestriding a peak-withered, nervous Kabuli stallion which, like many a stout Sussex or Galway squire, he most decidedly could not afford.
"Zud! zud! tez! tez!—hurry—hurry...."
For the summer was short; there were many mouths to be fed and high taxes to be paid to the akpadishah, the White Tsar in far Moscow; and there was always the harsh steppe to be fought which rose again beyond the valley's rim, stretching out endlessly and leveling the tiny, focused points of human individualities with the calm of the unhastening and unchanging earth, touching as with hands of gentle disdain the smeared vulgarities of that turbulent Samarkand where in the shadow of the Lady Khanym's college, in the bloated, fantastic shadow of Shah Zindeh's rose-and-gray mosque, there droned the never-ceasing echo of Russian intrigue and Tartar resistance.
Serge Denikoff knew every trail of steppe and valleys. Each Sunday he crossed them. Nor was it because of his racial Tartar inheritance screaming in his veins and longing for the scent of the open, the smell of the nomads' camp fires, of sun-hot, tufted grass and over-ripe melons and the acrid odor of the black felt tents; but because of something that tugged at his soul, something mean and petty and yet overwhelming that drove him on each Sunday past the little town of Yany Kurgan, across the stone bridge of Tash-Kuprink where a gaunt Russian fort jutted out to break the desert-riders' sudden raids, toward the two huge slate rocks known to the natives as the Gates of Tamerlane.
Here he would dismount, eat his frugal lunch and, with always the same gestures—a spreading of flat, hairy hands and a shrugging of narrow shoulders—and the same expression of contempt curling his lips, study the Persian inscriptions cut into the rocks.
The first, in honor of Ulug Khan, Tamerlane's grandson, famed for his patronage of the arts, pro claimed:
"With the help of Allah, the great Sultan, conqueror of kings and nations, shadow of Allah on earth, the aid of the Faith, Ulug Bek Gurugan—may Allah prolong his reign!—undertook a campaign in the land of the Moguls and returned victorious, in the year of the Hegira 828."
The second inscription related to one of the victories of Abdullah Khan, a century and a half later:
"Let passers in the waste and travelers on the steppe know that in the year of the Hegira 979 there was a conflict between the army of the lieutenant of the Khalifate, the shadow of the Almighty, the Khakan Abdullah Khan, son of Iskandar Khan, and the army of Dervish Khan, son of Borak Khan. The army of Abdullah Khan obtained a victory so great that during a month blood ran on the river as far as Jilzakh. Let this be known to all passers in the waste, to all travelers on the steppe!"
Serge Denikoff would read the words aloud, smile, and shrug.
"Fools!" would come his comment, in Persian, deliberately, so that the dead Khans might understand. "Fools—weak, powerless—because you are dead! I am alive—and strong!" He would draw himself up. He was wizen, small-boned, with sunken chest, flabby muscles, and a bulbous head that seemed too heavy for his thin stalk of a neck. "Strong—I!"
Ludicrous the words seemed here in the swathing silence of the steppe, in the squat, sardonic circle of the Gates of Tamerlane, with the dead Tartar Khans sending down their soundless laughter of stone.
"Strong because I am alive and—" switching into Russian—"because I am a tchinovnik, an employee of the Tsar—may God preserve him!"
Then he would spit and mock the grim rocks with thumb on nose.
"Fools!" he would repeat. "Dead! Useless!"
Two years earlier, on a Saturday, he had received his appointment as soodya or magistrate, and to celebrate his new dignity had become very drunk on vodka and golden Kakhetian wine. Sunday had found him with a splitting head and a thick tongue, and he had gone for a ride to clear his brain. He had been sick and tired. But he had felt elated as, through the crimson velvet of the morning, through the whistle of the wind that whirled up the sand of the steppe in gusts of pure gold, through the staccato beat of his pony's dancing feet, the thought had come to him that now he was a somebody, a magistrate who could fine people and send them to jail and cause their eviction and confiscate their belongings if they did not pay their taxes. He had remembered his childhood: his father, a tough, gigantic old Moslim peasant plowing his stony acres on the outskirts of Samarkand, and his two lusty, strong-thewed brothers. One of them had donned the crimson silk tunic of the Turkoman Cossack Guards, while the other had become a horse trader— a horse thief, bazaar gossip had it—into Bokhara and Afghanistan. He had been the youngest, wizen, weak, puny.
"Azzaum—flea!" his father had called him, in his coarse Tartarized Persian. "What devil's devicing was there the matter with my loins when I conceived you?"
"Abishtgah—Dung-hill!" had come his brother's hooting laughter. "Bur da Khord andaum—dwarf!"
So on the advice of a passing Russian priest who with his shrewd, monachal eyes had seen fit makings in the boy for the church and state of the Tsar, they had sent him to a free Orthodox school in Orenburg.
"Let the Christians have him—and good luck to their bargain!" his father had commented.
He had done well in school; had learned Russian rapidly; had received prizes for scholarship and good behavior; had been praised by the protopope, the mitred, bearded high-priest himself.
Once during summer vacations he had gone home.
"Back again, flea?" his father had greeted him. "By Allah the Bountiful—you look already like half a Russian with your green coat and the brass eagles on your shoulder straps! And your flesh—" he had squeezed the boy's body and arms until the latter had winced with pain—"wah!—those Muscovies fed your head belike instead of your belly!"
Then again the hooting laughter of his brothers who had come home, one on furlough from the army, the other from a profitable trip with stallions into Bokhara. They had gorged themselves with fat mutton and melons and pilaff; and over the gurgling water-pipes his father had spoken of the days of his youth before the Russians had conquered and pacified the land. His words had pictured the crackle of steel, the thud of the war dromedaries, the beat of the kettle drums, the strangling of peaceful villages across the Persian border. His brothers had listened with glistening eyes, with guttural exclamations of approval and admiration:
"Subhaun Ullah!"
"Ba tufeeq!"
"Ghire a-mahood!"
"Once," the old Tartar had cried exultantly, warming to his reminiscences, "I remember well—I rode home with the head of a Persian governor tied to my saddle. Wah!—how the women clapped their hands—how they hailed me...."
Then, glancing at his youngest son, he had seen him tremble and turn pale. He had struck him heavily across the face.
"You are afraid even at the tale of strife!" he had exclaimed. "Allah curse you for a Jew, a Christian, a seller of unclean pig's tripe! A son of mine—and a coward! Back to your Russian sty, O shame to my manhood, and become you wholly a Russian!"
"I shall!" the boy had mumbled under his breath with sudden, bitter resolve.
He had returned to Orenburg, fear and hate mingling in his darkling soul, had matriculated with honors, had been granted an imperial scholarship, and had been sent to Kazan university to study administration and jurisprudence. There one day a high official of the Sviatiejechie Sinod, the Holy Synod, had given him advice; and he had become a Christian and a government employee, had changed his name to Serge Denikoff, rising steadily until on that Saturday two years earlier he had received his patent as a magistrate.
Galloping across the steppe, his brain clearing from the vodka fumes, he had considered that he was now a power in the land among Tartars as well as Russians, while his father had died, his oldest brother was still a trooper, and his other brother had been killed during a raid into the Afghan hills.
"God preserve the Tsar!" he had murmured as he had pulled up at the Gates of Tamerlane.
Then, reading casually the ancient Persian inscriptions, the thought had come to him that here, with nothing left of past glory and prowess except the empty telling of their victories cut into the slate, were the spirits of the dead Tartar Khans who had once ruled from Pekin to Moscow, who had ruled the steppe and the valleys, the desert and the sown, Tamerlane, Ghingiz Khan, Iskandar Khan, Abdullah Khan, Ulug Khan, and a dozen others—where were they today? What did they matter? They had ridden over these plains with a loose rein and a sharp spur and the point of the sword when it was red. They had builded here their palaces, their mosques, their colleges, their observatories, their mausoleums, and their baths of olive-veined Yezd marble. Glorious they had been with their arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, their shimmering necklaces of pearls and moon-stones and yellow Poonah diamonds, their huge, carved emeralds falling like drops of green fire from their peaked astrakhan caps, their robes of motley silk, their pointed beards carefully curled and dyed a vivid blue with indigo or orange-yellow with saffron. They had lorded it over half the world; had lorded it, too, over his own people—the lowly Tartar peasants who had tilled these bitter, dry steppes, working, working through yellow summer and blue winter with hardly ever enough to eat; and then overnight the call to arms and follow the Khans into battle and steep the fields of the Khans' ambitions with their blood and their bones. And now the Khans were dead; their empire was shivered; and he himself was a power in the land, a soodya, a real Russian man who could fine people and send them to jail.
"Fools!" he had apostrophized the silent rocks. "Dead, useless fools!"
Such had been his thoughts and words on that Sunday two years earlier. He had returned the next Sunday and the next and the next, until finally this Sunday visit had become an obsession with him. It had grown into a ceremony to be executed with almost religious rite and pomp. For it was thus that he expressed himself to himself, that he measured himself against the world as he reckoned its worth.
He spat again, again mocked the Gates of Tamerlane with thumb on nose, mounted, and rode back toward Samarkand.
"Yesterday," he thought, "I fined Ali Tugluq and Hassan Uzbek ten roubles each. Tomorrow I shall give orders to evict Yakoff Moisevitch Feinberg, the tailor, for non-payment of rent. Decidedly—I am a power in the land!"
He rode on. Evening dropped with gossamer mists. There was a smell of moist earth. On the outskirts of Samarkand he passed a company of Turkoman camel drivers, perched like monkeys on the humps of their great, silent, shuffle-footed beasts, holding insolently their paths through the narrow alleys. They were preceded by half-a-dozen stalwart ruffians on foot who cleared the way for the caravan with long, knotted whips, shouting insulting and defying words at everybody and belaboring with a democratic impartiality the backs and thighs of Christians and Moslims, Buddhists and Jews, merchants and peasants alike.
"O thy right!" they cried, suiting their words to the part of Slav or Tartar anatomy which they were striking. "O thy left! O thy heel! O thy face! O thy back, thy back, thy back! Give way, sons of burnt fathers!"
Serge Denikoff held to the middle of the road until one of the Turkomans flicked at him with his whip, causing the pony to shy and plunge sideways. He kept his seat.
But he turned pale with rage.
"How dare you...?"
"Pushturum—pimple!" jeered the Turkoman.
Serge Denikoff looked about him. But no policeman was near. Nor could he stop the caravan and arrest the man himself. These were lawless nomads, quick with the dagger. But he said to himself that sooner or later the man would return to Samarkand. He would remember his face. He would have the police search the caravanserais. He would send him to jail for a month.
Why—he was a magistrate, a power in the land. Only three days earlier Prince Kutusoff, the governor-general, mellow with champagne, had addressed him as "Sergyetchik"—"Little Serge"; and last Easter Sunday Baron de Todleben, the commander-in-chief, had kissed him on both cheeks and had told him that men of his kidney were needed in Russia.
"Azthookh—wart!" the Turkoman shouted after him.
"You wait!" mumbled Serge Denikoff. "You just wait, you cursed heathen Asiatic!"
He turned into the street of Kara-Tepe; and a few minutes later his rage left him as he heard the rhythmic tramp of hob-nailed boots, as shortly afterwards he saw sweeping round the corner a company of Russian infantry, flanked by mounted officers with full-skirted, green coats reaching half-way down to their high patent leather boots, their narrow waists belted with gold. The colonel rasped out a word of command and immediately the soldiers broke into song, full-throated, vigorous, wild:
"Soldatushkil Bravo! Rebyatushki!
Droojno vraga beitye!
Smelye droojno,
Vo shtijki, vo roojya,
Beitye, no robeitye!
Soldatushki! Bravo!"
("Soldiers! Bravo! Comrades!
Cheerfully fight the enemy!
Fight him bravely and cheerfully!
With lance and bullet,
Fight on! Do not weaken!
Soldiers! Bravo!")
They passed on at a swinging gait into the darkness at the end of the street, the roar of their barbaric singing dying away, while Serge Denikoff looked after them, humming the refrain to himself:
"Soldatushki! Bravo! Rebyatushki!"
It was not that he liked the army or could ever sympathize with what it stood for in strife and physical force. In fact, had he faced the truth, he would have admitted that he loathed the very sight of a uniform, that it caused in him the same sense of inferiority—inferiority which bred hate, and hate which bred the brutal will to succeed and, by the same token, to kill this consciousness of inferiority—which he had felt in the presence of his father and brothers, which he felt now every Sunday in the sardonic presence of the Gates of Tamerlane. This feeling of inferiority was not fear; it was a negative, not a positive quality. On the other hand the army was an expression of the Tsar's power, the power of the mighty in the land, as was he himself. They were wheels of the same machine. They might hate each other, but they must help each other, must run in the same, at least in parallel, grooves. Without it there would be revolution and chaos.
"Soldatushki! Bravo—" he hummed as he dismounted at Mohamet Yar Khan's place and stabled his horse.
Arrived home he changed and went to the Grand Hotel de Samarkand. He dined there every night, alone; dined well; tipped liberally. He did this because it was expected of a man in his position, but he felt it as a personal grievance. He considered the price of the restaurant exorbitant. He made up his mind that the next time Fyodor Guroff, the proprietor, broke one of the municipal regulations, such as serving liquor after midnight, he would fine him heavily. The same thing applied to Natasha, the sloe-eyed Circassian waitress. Every evening he gave her half a rouble. It was outrageous. But one of these days she would run foul of the law. Only the other night he had seen her on a park bench, hugging and kissing her lover. He believed that there was a regulation against it. He would look up the municipal code and proceed accordingly. He would instruct Piotr Antonovitch Moshkin, the policeman, to watch Natasha. He believed in justice and the balancing of justice.
He wondered if Fyodor Guroff or the waitress could read his intentions. Their greetings, tonight as always, were polite:
"Good evening, Your Honor!"
"Is the soup to your liking, Your Honor?"
Polite. Even obsequious. But somehow he imagined that beneath it he could detect an antagonism. He shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps they were afraid of him. He did not mind. He rather enjoyed the vicarious sensation.
He knew most of the guests in the restaurant. There was the district prosecutor with his family, the provincial revizor with his fiancée and his future mother-in-law, the aide-de-camp to the governor-general, the chief of the bureau of hygiene, and a number of other officials. They exchanged greetings with him. But he did not take part in their table to table conversation, their jovial jests and small, local allusions and catch-words. Nor did they seem to expect that he would. With them, too, he felt an estranging undercurrent. It was not because he was by birth a Tartar and a Moslim. Being Russians, these people had few racial or religious prejudices. Besides, the revizor was a Moslim from the Caucasus. Perhaps, he thought, they realized that he was a rising man. Thus it seemed natural that they should dislike him. He did not blame them. Always in his gradual rise in office had he hated and envied those directly superior to him and those directly inferior; the former because he wished to oust them from their positions, the latter because he felt that they wished to oust him from his.
He had no friends. This lack did not make him feel exactly unhappy; but it embarrassed him slightly, less with the world at large than with himself. He was content only during his long office hours looking up the law code, in his study sending voluminous re ports to the Ministry of Justice, and chiefly during the sessions of the court of assizes when he dispensed justice as he saw it.
His had been a grinding road to success. But today he was a magistrate, a somebody. He had two decorations, a decent income, people called him "Your Honor," and the other day the governor-general had addressed him as "Sergyetchik—little Serge." That had been a glorious moment. Yet more glorious in a way had been the occasion a fortnight earlier when he had fined Fatma Heireddin, the wife of Tcherkess Ali Heireddin, fifteen roubles for emptying a pail of slops from her window. Once Fatma had been his oldest brother's sweetheart. She, too, had called him "Azzaum—flea!"
Well-—she had found out that a flea could jump, jump straight into a magistrate's seat—and that a flea, furthermore, could bite.
Tomorrow would bring another fine moment, when he would cause the eviction of Yakoff Moisevitch Feinberg, the tailor. Perhaps he would supervise the eviction personally. He liked doing this. He liked to have the people ask him for pity and mercy and patience:
"Please, Your Honor!"
"For the sake of the dear Christ, Your Honor!"
"How could I help myself, Your Honor? My wife was expecting her third...."
He felt almost like a Tsar then, a master over life and death. He—the flea, the wart, the dung-hill—to what a high estate he had risen.
"Your Honor!"
"Soodya!"
"Sergyetchik!"
And whenever he felt like it he could put his feet on the desk and smoke cigarettes; and if he happened to be thirsty he could summon his servant who would come at a run.
"A glass of tea, Your Honor? At once."
Only the evenings were lonely, chiefly the hours which he spent in the restaurant with people all about him. Always at midnight he rose and left. Occasionally he stopped in dark alleys and talked to frowzy, prowling girls with arrogant eyes and pathetic mouths. Once in a while he walked home with one of them. He knew no other women.
"A most loyal official," the governor-general called him in his yearly provincial report. And Serge Denikoff was loyal. There was no doubt of it. Loyal in word and deed.
But there were his thoughts.
He himself was never quite sure if he loved the Tsar, the government, the mighty in the land, or if he hated them. Power had always fascinated him. But he had never surrendered to fascination. To do so—perhaps it was the Mongol blood in him—would have caused him to lose face. Thus, logically, he felt at times a terrible longing to smash the idols on the altar of power and to grind them into the dust; nor was it because he was opposed to the government's autocratic injustice, but because, through its very fascination of power over him, it made him feel inferior to his own imagining of himself.
It had always been so.
He remembered for instance how once, in the Orenburg school, a teacher had recited one of Lermontoff's glorious poems and had asked the boys how it had affected them. The answers had come, some florid, some halting and shy, some with stark, honest simplicity, but all testifying to their innate appreciation of Lermontoff's genius. Then the teacher had asked Serge Denikoff, and the latter had replied:
"Oh—when Lermontoff wrote this poem he had perhaps a cold in the head and a red nose...."
The boys had laughed. The teacher had called him idiot. Nobody had guessed that his reply had only been his way of avenging himself for the choking emotion which he had felt.
The same with girls. At Kazan university he had taken dancing lessons. There had been a pretty German girl from Riga, Elena Roggenfeldt, the daughter of Professor Roggenfeldt. To dance with her, to sense her physical nearness, had always affected him strangely. So one night when she had worn a new pink dress he had slipped off his white gloves and had soiled her waist with his perspiring hand. Thus had he avenged himself for the thrill of emotion she had caused in him.
It was so now. In his thoughts he avenged himself on those mightier than he. Had anybody made a slurring allusion to the Tsar he would have punished him. It was his duty. But deep in his soul there were moments when he mouthed foul threats against the Tsar, the governor-general, all official Russia.
The coming of the war did not affect him at first except as it increased his power. Some of the other officials of the court of assizes went to the front. That gave him more work. Besides, there were people to be suspected, shadowed, examined, and prosecuted.
His oldest brother had also died. It had been during a Cossack raid into East Prussia. He heard it casually; forgot it casually.
Then after the first six months of war came a distinct change in his relations to the world as expressed by his official position. For when some of the local soldiers, Russians as well as Jews and Tartars, came home on furlough with medals rattling on their tunics and spurs clicking, and when the people ran from their houses and pressed cigarettes on them and embraced and kissed them, it made him angry. It did not make him envious. But these soldiers broke many of the local laws and regulations. They were rough and got drunk and made love in public places and beat up the police whenever they had a chance. But he could not punish them. For they were heroes, and it seemed that heroes were above the civil and criminal code. Still, he consoled himself with the thought that the war would end some day, and then the heroes would no longer be heroes while he would still be a magistrate.
Then with utter suddenness had come the real catastrophe. The army was beaten. The western Allies were unable or unwilling to help. The Tsar was deposed. The revolution was no longer a frightening, pale dream, but a fact. It rolled on, from Moscow and Petrograd, north, east, south, west. It rushed Russia, across towns and villages, fields and steppes, like a sheet of smoldering fire, yellow, inexorable. It thundered with the hate and hope of all that motley Slav world. The Jaganath was in motion. Crunchingly, pitilessly, its wheels moved.
The cry was everywhere:
"Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia—long live the revolution!" and, more ominous, more bitter, more direct:
"Smyert boyarum—death to the ruling classes!"
And looking from his office upon the street where a huge procession with red banners swept down, the shattering realization came to Serge Denikoff that he, too, belonged to the ruling classes.
He listened, hiding behind the window curtains. From the street a great, zumming chorus rose, swelling, bloating, ever increasing—the dread hymn of the revolutionaries:
Slazamy zalit meer bezbrejny
Vsya nasha jizn—tyajoly trood!
No dyen nastanyett neysbejny
Nyomoleemo grozny sood!"
("The pitiful world is drowned in tears,
Our whole life is but blood-stained strife!
The fateful day of reckoning will come,
The merciless judgment day!")
The song broke off in mid-air. There was a terrible void of silence, hushed, strained, as of a thousand unspoken questions; and, as if in answer to them, a single voice peaked up hysterically:
"Smyert boyarum—death to the ruling classes!"
Serge Denikoff shivered. He ran to the door and locked it. He was afraid to die. But what he feared more than death was the knowledge that today, even in his few remaining hours or minutes of life, he was a nobody, that the cataclysm of the revolution had stripped him naked of everything for which he had slaved, which he respected in himself: power, position, influence. Death was unavoidable. But he was no longer a soodya, since there was no longer a Tsar. He was a nobody. And so that nobody sank in a heap on the floor, and cried. He cried like a child, with high-pitched, broken sobs.
It took him several minutes to realize that the yelling and singing was dying away, that the mob had not invaded the building. He walked to the window and looked. The procession was sweeping out of sight, around the corner, toward the great square in front of the Mosque of Shah Zindeh. There were a few staccato shouts; then silence.
He rummaged about his rooms—his servants had left early that morning and had not returned—and found cigarettes and enough food for a few days. He barricaded the hall door with his heavy furniture, ate, smoked a number of cigarettes, and went to bed. He had no thought of trying to escape, to save his life. He knew that it would be impossible. His gestures—eating, smoking, sleeping—were purely mechanical.
The next day was Sunday. The town seemed strangely quiet. Only once or twice, peering from the window, he saw tight little groups at the street corner, talking excitedly, with wooden gestures like marionettes. They seemed unreal. The whole revolution seemed unreal.
He was no longer afraid. There was in him, in spite of his conversion to Christianity and his absorption into the Russian system, an atavistic Moslim fatalism. He must die. There was no getting away from it. Too, though less graciously, he bowed his head to the fact that he was no longer a soodya. What really enraged him now was the thought that today, Sunday, for the first time in years, he would be unable to ride across the steppe to the Gates of Tamerlane and mock the dead Tartar Khans; and then he laughed with blighting self-irony as he considered that there was nothing to choose between them and him. He, too, was stripped of power and glory. He, too, would have to die presently. They would come for him and hang him. There was no doubt of it.
But Monday passed and Tuesday and nobody came. Once he heard a commotion downstairs. At last! he thought with a curious feeling of exultation. And then, looking warily through the window curtains, he saw that it was only some Tartar workmen tearing down the imperial eagles above the door and replacing them with a crude, home-made revolutionary device. Trade seemed to be going on. The row of shops across the street was open. He saw a caravan passing with the cameleers' usual, insulting shouts:
"Give way, O ignoble ones!"
Very occasionally he heard isolated yells:
"Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia!"
"Smyert boyarum!"
Once there was the rat-tat-tat of musketry fire, and twice that night, very faintly from the distance, he heard a dramatic roar as the big guns slashed into the game, saw a splotch of whirling white shell stabbing the opaque purple of the heavens.
Came Wednesday. There was still enough food, if he was careful, to last him until the end of the week. But quite suddenly he decided to leave his rooms. For a strange reason.
It seemed to him that the town, the people, the whole world had forgotten him—had forgotten his existence, his name, had forgotten to hate him, forgotten to kill him. The thought was unbearable. It made him feel more keenly than ever his haunting subconsciousness of inferiority. He was no longer a soodya. True. But he had been a soodya once. Formerly he had demanded the respect entailed by his position. Now he demanded the share of hate and persecution which was his due. So he went out into the street to find it.
The first man whom he met, directly in front of the assizes building, was Mohamet Yar Khan, the livery stable keeper, wide-shouldered, moon-faced, his paunchy waist girded by a great crimson shawl, a wicked dagger dangling two inches below his left armpit, a rifle across his back. Serge Denikoff fingered for the revolver in his pocket. But before he could make up his mind to use it, Mohamet Yar Khan rushed up to him, clasped him to his breast, and kissed him loudly.
"Have you heard the news?" cried the Tartar.
"What news?"
"The comrades elected me temporary president of Samarkand's Tartar Republic. Allaho akbar—God is great! I am happy that I found you. I've been hunting for you everywhere"
"Oh—you have?" Again Serge Denikoff fingered for his revolver.
"Yes."
"You could have found me easily. I was in my rooms."
"The last place we thought of!" laughed Mohamet Yar Khan; and then, in answer to a passing Kirghiz peasant's similar shout: "Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia!"
He turned to Serge Denikoff, smiling rather apologetically. "I beg your pardon," he went on.
"What for?"
"I cheered for the revolution in your presence. I forgot that you are a soodya...."
"I was one—you mean."
"But you are still a Russian and a Tsarist. That's what I told the comrades when they suggested that I look for you and ask you to continue in your position as magistrate—of the Tartar Republic of course...."
"I—" stammered Serge Denikoff, taken aback, "I—a magistrate of...?"
"Forgive me. But you have always been a good judge. Harsh? Yes"
"It was my duty!" interrupted Serge Denikoff stonily. "A judge is a judge!"
"I know," admitted the other. "That's just it! And the comrades decided that we need men like you, strict judges who know the law and who are fearless if the people love or hate them. Still—" he smiled disarmingly—"I should not have suggested it to you. It was unkind of me. You are a Christian—a Tsarist—a Russian"
"You are wrong!" calmly cut in Serge Denikoff.
"Wrong? How?"
"I am a Tartar, a Moslim, and my name is Jagatai Khan—as was my father's name before me!"
And, very loudly:
"Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia!"
"You are one of us, a comrade?" came the naïve question.
"Decidedly!"
"Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia!" exclaimed Mohamet Yar Khan enthusiastically.
"Da zdrastvooyet revolutzia!" chimed in a third voice as Yakoff Moisevitch Feinberg, the tailor, ran from his shop and embraced Serge Denikoff.
"Allaho akbar—God is great!" was the chorus that night of Samarkand's revolutionary committee. "We have again an honest, fearless judge!"
So Serge Denikoff remained a soodya, a power in the land. He had no trouble in reconciling himself to this complete political apostasy. For again it made no difference if he liked or disliked the machine. He only liked what the machine—this time the Tartar Republic—meant in power since, as during the days of the Tsar, he was of this power an echo and a gesture. The machine had made him a magistrate. Therefore he was loyal to it as long as its wheels moved.
Yet was there a slight difference. He was no longer as thoroughly satisfied with his position as formerly. For there was the new slogan of liberty, and the Tartars, a good-natured, rather bovine race, tried naïvely to live up to it. So when gradually some of the Tsarist officers and officials who had settled in Samarkand, amongst them Prince Kutusoff, the governor-general who had once called Serge Denikoff "Sergyetchik—little Serge," drifted back, the Tartars let them be. Nor did they interfere when, in spite of the newly passed law against it, the men of the old régime walked about in their uniforms, with their imperial decorations and insignia of rank.
Several times Serge Denikoff—known once more as Jagatai Khan—protested to Mohamet Yar Khan. But the latter shrugged his shoulders.
"What difference?" he asked. "The jackal howls in the distance—but will my old buffalo die? It makes these Russians happy—and it does not hurt us."
"But—the law?"
"There are always laws. But there is also kindliness. We made a revolution—less because of the former laws than because of the unkindliness," came Mohamet Yar Khan's simple reply. "You are a valuable judge, comrade, but you must not be too strict."
But it rankled in Serge Denikoff's soul. Again it made him feel his haunting subconsciousness of inferiority. These men of the old régime were poor. Some of them cleaned shoes for a living, others sold newspapers or ran errands for Tartar shop-keepers and kosher butchers. But they were still arrogant in the glory of their former strength, and their poverty only accentuated their arrogance. So he began to hate them, to see red whenever he passed them. He always felt like slapping their faces and tearing off their glittering decorations. But he never dared. They looked so big and calm. And so one Sunday, the first since the revolution, he mounted his pony and rode across the steppe to the Gates of Tamerlane to avenge himself, to mock at the dead Tartar Khans.
As he pulled up in front of the rocks he saw there a tall, broad-shouldered man standing, evidently deep in thought, looking up at the ancient Persian inscriptions. The man turned. It was the former governor-general, Prince Kutusoff, in a threadbare uniform, the cross of Saint Vladimir pinned over his heart. He smiled when he saw Serge Denikoff.
"I have been communing with the dead Khans," he said, "I have been thinking of their past glory—and ours—eh, Sergyetchik?"
Then the latter made up his mind. He spurred his horse close up to Prince Kutusoff.
"Aristocrat!" he said. "I am not Sergyetchik. I am Jagatai Khan, a soodya of the Tartar Republic. And—aristocrat!—it is against the law to wear the decorations conferred by the cursed Romanoffs!"
And suddenly he bent from his horse, ripped the glittering cross off the other's uniform, turned and rode away at a gallop, toward Samarkand, crying hysterically, at the top of his lungs:
"Smyert boyarum—death to the ruling classes!"