Once more over the tombs, there came floating the languid, metallic notes of " N-n-o-u! N-n-o-u!"
The oily gloss on the withered grass had vanished, faded, and everything turned dull, though the air remained charged with the spring perfume of the geraniums, stocks, and narcissi which encircled some of the graves.
"You see," continued the Lieutenant, "one could not deny that each of us has his value. By the time that one has lived threescore years, one perceives that fact very clearly. Never CONCEAL things, since every life lived ought to be set in the light. And is capable of being so, in that every man is a workman for the world at large, and constitutes an instructor in good or in evil, and that life, when looked into, constitutes, as a whole, the sum of all the labour done by the aggregate of us petty, insignificant individuals. That is why we ought not to hide away a man's work, but to publish it abroad, and to inscribe on the cross over his tomb his deeds, his services, in their entirety. Yes, however negligible may have been those deeds, those services, hold them up for the perusal of those who can discover good even in what is negligible. NOW do you understand me?"
"I do," I replied. "Yes, I do."
"Good!"
The bell of the monastery struck two hasty beats--then became silent, so that only the sad echo of its voice remained reverberating over the cemetery. Once more my interlocutor drew out his cigarette-case, silently offered it to myself, and lighted and puffed industriously at another cigarette. As he did so his hands, as small and brown as the claws of a bird, shook a little, and his head, bent down, looked like an Easter egg in plush.
Still smoking, he looked me in the eyes with a self-diffident frown, and muttered:
"Only through the labour of man does the earth attain development. And only by familiarising himself with, and remembering, the past can man obtain support in his work on earth."
In speaking, the Lieutenant lowered his arm; whereupon on to his wrist there slipped the broad golden bracelet adorned with a medallion, and there gazed at me thence the miniature of a fair-haired woman: and since the hand below it was freckled, and its flexible fingers were swollen out of shape, and had lost their symmetry, the woman's fine-drawn face looked the more full of life, and, clearly picked out, could be seen to be smiling a sweet and slightly imperious smile.
"Your wife or your daughter?" I queried.
"My God! My God!" was, with a subdued sigh, the only response vouchsafed. Then the Lieutenant raised his arm, and the bracelet slid back to its resting place under his cuff.
Over the town the columns of curling smoke were growing redder, and the clattering windows blushing to a tint of pink that recalled to my memory the livid cheeks of Virubov's "niece," of the woman in whom, like her uncle, there was nothing that could provoke one to "take liberties."
Next, there scaled the cemetery wall and stealthily stretched themselves on the ground, so that they looked not unlike the far-flung shadows of the cemetery's crosses, a file of dark, tattered figures of beggars, while on the further side of the slowly darkening greenery a cantor drawled in sluggish, careless accents:
"E-e-ternal me-e--"
"Eternal memory of what?" exclaimed Lieutenant Khorvat with an angry shrug of his shoulders. "Suppose, in his day, a man has been the best cucumber-salter or mushroom-pickler in a given town. Or suppose he has been the best cobbler there, or that once he said something which the street wherein he dwelt can still remember. Would not THAT man be a man whose record should be preserved, and made accessible to my recollection?"
And again the Lieutenant's face wreathed itself in solid rings of pungent tobacco smoke.
Blowing softly for a moment, the wind bent the long stems of grass in the direction of the declining sun, and died away. All that remained audible amid the stillness was the peevish voices of women saying:
"To the left, I say."
"Oh, what is to be done, Tanechka?"
Expelling a fresh cloud of tobacco smoke in cylindrical form, the old man muttered:
"It would seem that those women have forgotten the precise spot where their relative or friend happens to lie buried."
As a hawk flew over the sun-reddened belfry-cross, the bird's shadow glided over a memorial stone near the spot where we were sitting, glanced off the corner of the stone, and appeared anew beyond it. And in the watching of this shadow, I somehow found a pleasant diversion.
Went on the Lieutenant:
