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BY UNA ELLIS-FERMOR

("Woe to the man who takes two wives!

Woe to the landsman who loves the seas!

But woe to that man a hundred-fold,

Gives his heart to two countries!')

I lie awake twixt three and five,
When the dawn is gloomy gray,
And the maple trees are shivering
With waiting for the day.

And I dare not think of Sussex,

Or how the dark hills go

Like a girdle around Lewes,

Where the chalk-scars gleam like snow.

Nor how the hills of Berkshire

Ride west into the sun;

Nor how the lanes at Appledore

Down to the marshes run.

Nor how the lights of Waterloo

Spring up in the blue sky,

While dark and broad and solemn,

The Thames goes sweeping by.

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'I AM going to tell you a story,' said my Russian friend one night, 'which will give you a glimpse of the little dark man whose figure will soon be more plainly seen in many countries of the world. And then he will look quite enormously large even in America.' even in America.' My curiosity was stirred. We were sitting in his small house, that night, up in the north of Russia. It was the autumn of 1917. When I asked what he meant by the little dark man, he smiled at me and answered:

'If I should try to tell you, I would be talking all the night, for this chap

has appeared in so many forms, since men began asking "What is the life?" In the Middle Ages he grew quite large, and they called him Saint or Sorcerer. Then came modern science and smiled at him; and as men smiled he grew small to their eyes, so small that soon those scientists forgot him like God, whom they also denied. But now I think he will grow again. So large will he grow at the end of this war that soon you will hear the millions of greatly puzzled people inquire, "Who is this psychic gentleman? He is doing the strange things. How does he do

them?" they will ask. And the orthodox atheist, sharply annoyed, will have to find some way to reply. . . . But But all this time while he was so dim to those learned people in the towns, to the simple peasants of our land he has always been quite real. And my story to-night is of such peasants, and of one who lived among them, and of a thing that I saw with my eyes. So now I shall tell - and at first you will hear a story beginning not strangely at all, but just very human, very Russian.'

He smiled again, and so began. And the tale that he told I shall try to repeat in his own words, as he told it to me.

I

'Surely we shall be too late! Make haste, go on!' my mother cried, although it was more than five hours yet before the train to Petrograd could possibly reach the station to which we were driving. For my good mother always loved to be 'a little before' a train. In all our trips, though I did my best to be as slow as possible, never could I manage so that we reached the station less than some two hours before the arrival of the train. And knowing this, our peasant driver only smiled when she implored him to be going like the wind.

'Barina,' he said, 'we shall have three hours still to wait, if the train is not late. But God only knows how late it will be. The last time it was fully six hours behind; so perhaps you will sit at the station all through the day and through the night.'

'Go on-oh, please!' my poor mother cried. So with an indignant grunt, the peasant beat his horses to the splendid gallop; and so we were going until at last we stopped with a jerk in the mud and snow before the gate to the station yard. "Thank God, now we are in time!' declared my

mother with content, while I went into the station to inquire about the train. Never in all my life have I heard of any train so far behind! Somewhere in Holy Russia it was, and this was all that I could learn. Many hours at least we should be here. I was in the despair, which was still increased when soon I found that the station buffet was hopelessly closed. The whole place was filled with emptiness!

I strolled upon the platform then, and at last discovered at one end a single living creature there — a blond and tall, quite nicely built young peasant woman, cleanly dressed, who sat immovable, calm like a cow. It seemed to me I had seen her before; but where, at first I could not guess. Then suddenly I recollected. Yes, this was the nice young woman I met not long ago on my way to Okuneff's, a neighbor of mine whose small estate was about fifty versts from our home. I had talked with her then, so I had learned that she was from the village of Bor; and now I was glad that I had discovered someone with whom my good mother could talk, since I knew that she did not like to be mute for any considerable length of time. So I brought the girl to her and said that here was a nice young woman from Bor. One glance of the keen pleased interest, and my mother knew at once that this young woman would soon have a child. So with full speed the gossip began; and in perhaps two hours, with never any silence at all, we knew all about this woman's life not only her name, but the names of all her relatives and all her friends, and all their lives from year to year, as though we ourselves were born in Bor. And only when she had recounted all this, did Maria quietly tell to us how early this morning she had come there, and already was on the train when off she ran to the buffet to fetch some hot

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water for her tea. The train went off while she was there and her luggage was now in Petrograd! At once my mother, in full dismay, was convinced it would be stolen there; but the girl Maria quite calmly replied:

'No, Barina, such a thing cannot be. Do you see? I am poor and with child, and my husband is sick from a wound in the war. Will he live or not, God only knows. So how could there be any people so bad, who would steal from such a girl as me, who goes to see her husband in Petrograd where he may die?'

But my good mother's concern increased. Earnestly turning to me, she implored, 'Junechka, please explain to her that there are such people in Petrograd - that the luggage men are scoundrels there. Perhaps she will be lieve you, since you are a man.'

But just because I was a man, off I walked from this hopeless talk. I walked and walked, the time went on, and at last arrived the train in the night.

By now my anxious mother resolved to take the girl with us, second class, since she had learned that Maria knew nobody in Petrograd except her husband, Peter, who was in a lazaret. On the train she gave us a letter from him a most typical one many peasants write so:

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II

In the station at Petrograd, where we arrived at the end of the night, I found at last the conductor of the early morning train, and soon, to my enormous surprise, the luggage of the girl was found. When he brought to Maria her huge bag, she took it without astonishment, quite calmly as a matter of course. 'Surely,' he said with the curious smile, 'you must be a girl from the North, where the people live without locks on their doors!' I paid the man five roubles for the trouble he took not to steal the bag, and then my mother asked Maria to come along with us that day and be safe from all the scoundrels. Without confusion the girl replied, "Thanks.' And she quietly climbed into the sledge.

It was now early in the dawn, but as we passed so many great houses, palaces, and God knows what, Maria looked calmly at them all and showed not even the small surprise, though never once yet in her life had she visited any town, and the only stone building she had seen was the little church in Bor, which was some seven centuries old. "This is the town. Then it must be so,' was the thought in her eyes, and nothing else. Like the splendid healthy ox she was! When we came to our lodging, Maria at once felt herself here quite at home, as though she had been years long with us. While eating some bread and sipping the tea, she now continued to us her tale. Her husband, she told, had been a soldier already for two years in the war. They had taken him off when he was eighteen. All the time near Riga he had been, digging many trenches there, 'so that men could be saved from the bullets,' she said. Eight months ago, he was with her in Bor for a few days; then away he went and not until now had she received any news of him.

Then, while I went to the telephone to ask the address of the lazaret, Maria was carefully making herself fit for her great visit that day 'to my deeply esteemed husband,' she said. She displayed before my mother the contents of her enormous bag. It was quite a museum of village fine art the laces made with needles so fine and with such perfect taste that they could easily compare with that coming from Venice my mother declared. Then came the fine and silk-like linen, spun in the home, some snowy white and some with faded green and pink woven into it, in such a way, and with a feeling of color so fime, that it was quite a wonder to see! My mother's good eyes came out of her head! With dry reproach she looked at me, and said,

"You have been many times to Bor! Were you always sleeping there, that you never saw such needlework, to buy some and to bring to me? This is exactly the way of a man!'

My position grew most unpleasant now. My God! And in order to save myself, I made the heroic proposition to make a special journey to Bor at once and fetch all the stuff I could buy.

While I was telling this splendid resolve, Maria at last was ready to start

quite in her best attire now, with her fair thick hair all shined with oil and tightly coiffed. 'My own husband I am going to see, so I must be at my best,' she said. Our dvornik fetched for her a sledge, and off on the dirty snow of the street she drove away to the lazaret.

III

In about three hours back she came quite terribly silent, with not a trace of the calm animation she had shown when she was preparing herself for the visit. She sat a long time so deeply sad that it was a woe to look at her. Her husband was so ill, she said, the doctors

even did not allow him to speak any word with his own wife. On the train from the front, I soon understood, the poor devil had caught a pneumonia, and now there was faint hope he could survive. Two-thirds of his lungs did not breathe, she told us. Still not a tear, nor any complaint. Silently she took off her fine clothes. She asked of my mother, 'Where is the church?" And off she went to pray to the God.

Now I telephoned to the lazaret, to find if nothing could be done; but they told me her husband was ill quite long, and was weak before the pneumonia came. Now he lived only by breathing the pure oxygen from the tank. No hope at all. Perhaps two days would be the longest time for him. . . . Well, poor lad another one dead. But death was so common in Russia now, that soon I dropped him off my mind, and went to attend to the business for which I had come to Petrograd. I accomplished it that afternoon; then, having nothing urgent to do, in order to please my mother I decided to go back to Bor and buy some linen and laces there, and also perhaps have a nice long chat with my friend Okuneff, who lived near by.

So I took the train from the city that night; and the next day, after quite a long drive over the clean white snow of a road through the silent forest of huge pines, I came to the little village which was the girl Maria's home. Soon I discovered the hut where she lived, and I found her younger sister there. She was a lass of perhaps sixteen, a nicelooking girl with brown-golden eyes, thick chestnut hair, and finely built but silent, silent like a fish. I explained to her the bad news about Peter, and also why I had come to Bor; and of course I mentioned that I was going to see my old friend Okuneff near by. This was to make my credit higher since no peasant likes to sell or have

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