In the rear, the waves lashed us as though they had a mind to arrest our progress; from the gloom to our front came a sort of scraping and rasping; long black hands seemed to wave over our heads; just at the point where the mountain crests lay swathed in their dense coverlet of cloud,there rumbled once more the deafening iron chariot of the thunder-god; more and more frequently flashed the lightning as the earth rang, and rifts cleft by the blue glare disclosed, amid the obscurity, great trees that were rustling and rocking and, to all appearances, racing headlong before the scourge of a cold, slanting rain.
The occasion was a harassing but bracing one, for as the fine bands of rain beat upon our faces, our bodies felt filled with a heady vigour of a kind to fit us to run indefinitely--at all events to run until this storm of rain and thunder should be outpaced, and clear weather be reached again.
Suddenly Kalinin shouted: "Stop! Look!"
This was because the fitful illumination of a flash had just shown up in front of us the trunk of an oak tree which had a large black hollow let into it like a doorway. So into that hollow we crawled as two mice might have done--laughing aloud in our glee as we did so.
"Here there is room for THREE persons," my companion remarked.
"Evidently it is a hollow that has been burnt out--though rascals indeed must the burners have been to kindle a fire in a living tree!"
However, the space within the hollow was both confined and redolent of smoke and dead leaves. Also, heavy drops of rain still bespattered our heads and shoulders, and at every peal of thunder the tree quivered and creaked until the strident din around us gave one the illusion of being afloat in a narrow caique. Meanwhile at every flash of the lightning's glare, we could see slanting ribands of rain cutting the air with a network of blue, glistening, vitreous lines.
Presently, the wind began to whistle less loudly, as though now it felt satisfied at having driven so much productive rain into the ground, and washed clean the mountain tops, and loosened the stony soil.
"U-oh! U-oh!" hooted a grey mountain owl just over our heads.
"Why, surely it believes the time to be night!" Kalinin commented in a whisper.
"U-oh! U-u-u-oh!" hooted the bird again, and in response my companion shouted:
"You have made a mistake, my brother!"
By this time the air was feeling chilly, and a bright grey fog had streamed over us, and wrapped a semi-transparent veil about the gnarled, barrel-like trunks with their outgrowing shoots and the few remaining leaves still adhering.
Far and wide the monotonous din continued to rage--it did so until conscious thought began almost to be impossible. Yet even as one strained one's attention, and listened to the rain lashing the fallen leaves, and pounding the stones, and bespattering the trunks of the trees, and to the murmuring and splashing of rivulets racing towards the sea, and to the roaring of torrents as they thundered over the rocks of the mountains, and to the creaking of trees before the wind, and to the measured thud-thud of the waves; as one listened to all this, the thousand sounds seemed to combine into a single heaviness of hurried clamour, and involuntarily one found oneself striving to disunite them, and to space them even as one spaces the words of a song.
Kalinin fidgeted, nudged me, and muttered:
"I find this place too close for me. Always I have hated confinement."
Nevertheless he had taken far more care than I to make himself comfortable, for he had edged himself right into the hollow, and, by squatting on his haunches, reduced his frame to the form of a ball. Moreover, the rain-drippings scarcely or in no wise touched him, while, in general, he appeared to have developed to the full an aptitude for vagrancy as a permanent condition, and for the allowing of no unpleasant circumstance to debar him from invariably finding the most convenient vantage-ground at a given juncture. Presently, in fact, he continued:
"Yes; despite the rain and cold and everything else, I consider life to be not quite intolerable."
"Not quite intolerable in what?"
"Not quite intolerable in the fact that at least I am bound to the service of no one save God. For if disagreeablenesses have to be endured, at all events they come better from Him than from one's own species."
"Then you have no great love for your own species?"
"One loves one's neighbour as the dog loves the stick." To which, after a pause, the speaker added:
For WHY should I love him?"
It puzzled me to cite a reason off-hand, but, fortunately, Kalinin did not wait for an answer--rather, he went on to ask:
"Have you ever been a footman?"
"No," I replied.
"Then let me tell you that it is peculiarly difficult for a footman to love his neighbour."
"Wherefore?"
"Go and be a footman; THEN you will know. In fact, it is never the case that, if one serves a man, one can love that man. . . .
How steadily the rain persists!"
Indeed, on every hand there was in progress a trickling and a splashing sound as though the weeping earth were venting soft, sorrowful sobs over the departure of summer before winter and its storms should arrive.
"How come you to be travelling the Caucasus?" I asked at length.
"Merely through the fact that my walking and walking has brought me hither," was the reply. "For that matter, everyone ends by heading for the Caucasus."
"Why so?"
"Why NOT, seeing that from one's earliest years one hears of nothing but the Caucasus, the Caucasus? Why, even our old General used to harp upon the name, with his moustache bristling, and his eyes protruding, as he did so. And the same as regards my mother, who had visited the country in the days when, as yet, the General was in command but of a company. Yes, everyone tends hither. And another reason is the fact that the country is an easy one to live in, a country which enjoys much sunshine, and produces much food, and has a winter less long and severe than our own winter, and therefore presents pleasanter conditions of life."
