PAGE 9
The Dead Man
by
At this point the sharp bristles of his beard so tickled my neck as to cause me to edge further away.
“You do not like me?” he queried. “Then go to sleep, and to the devil too!”
“It was your beard that was tickling me.”
“Indeed? Ought I to have shaved for your benefit before I came?”
He reflected awhile–then subsided on to the floor with a sniff and an angry exclamation of:
“Read, you, whilst I sleep. And see to it that you do not make off with the book, for it belongs to the church, and is very valuable. Yes. I know you hard-ups! Why do you go roaming about as you do–what is it you hope to gain by your tramping? . . . However, tramp as much as you like. Yes, be off, and tell people that a deacon has come by misfortune, and is in need of some good person to take pity upon his plight. . . . Diomid Kubasov my name is–that of a man lost beyond recall.”
With which he fell asleep. Opening the book at random, I read the words:
“A land unapportioned that shall produce a nourisher of humanity, a being that shall put forth the bounty of his hand to feed every creature.”
“A nourisher of humanity.” Before my eyes that “nourisher” lay outspread, a nourisher overlaid with dry and fragrant herbage. And as I gazed, in the haze of a vision, upon that nourisher’s dark and enigmatical face, I saw also the thousands of men who have seamed this earth with furrows, to the end that dead things should become things of life. And in particular, there uprose before me a picture strange indeed. In that picture I saw marching over the steppe, where the expanse lay bare and void–yes, marching in circles that increasingly embraced a widening area–a gigantic, thousand-handed being in whose train the dead steppe gathered unto itself vitality, and became swathed in juicy, waving verdure, and studded with towns and villages. And ever, as the being receded further and further into the distance, could I see him sowing with tireless hands that which had in it life, and was part of himself, and human as, with thoughts intent upon the benefiting of humanity, he summoned all men to put forth the mysterious force that is in them, and thus to conquer death, and eternally and invincibly to convert, dead things into things of life, while traversing in company the road of death towards that which has no knowledge of death, and ensuring that, in swallowing up mankind, the jaws of death should not close upon death’s victims.
And this caused my heart to beat with emotions the pulsing wings of which at once gladdened me, and cooled my fervour… And how greatly, at that moment, did I feel the need of someone able to respond to my questions without passion, yet with truth, and in the language of simplicity! For beside me there lay but a man dead and a man drunken, while without the threshold there was stationed one who had far outlived her span of years. No matter, however. If not today, then tomorrow, should I find a fellow- creature with whom my soul might commune.
Mentally I left the hut, and passed on to the steppe, that I might contemplate thence the little dwelling in which alone, though lost amid the earth’s immensity, the windows were not blind and black as in its fellow huts, but showed, burning over the head of a dead human being, the fire which humanity had conquered for humanity’s benefit.
And that heart which had ceased to beat in the dead man–had everything conceived in life by that heart found due expression in a world poverty, stricken of heart-conceived ideas? I knew that the man just passed away had been but a plain and insignificant mortal, yet as I reflected upon even the little that he had done, his labour loomed before me as greater than prowess of larger magnitude. Yes, to my mind there recurred the immature, battered ears of corn lying in the ruts of the steppe track, the swallows traversing the blue sky above the golden, brocaded grain, the kite hovering in the void over the landscape’s vast periphery.. . . .