The Sowers | Page 6

a stunted pine a few paces removed from the road.
They laid him decently at full length, crossing his soil-begrimed hands
over his breast, tying the handkerchief down over his face.
Then they turned and left him, alone in that luminous night. A waif that
had fallen by the great highway without a word, without a sign. A
half-run race--a story cut off in the middle; for he was a young man still;
his hair, all dusty, draggled, and bloodstained, had no streak of gray;
his hands were smooth and youthful. There was a vague suspicion of
sensual softness about his body, as if this might have been a man who
loved comfort and ease, who had always chosen the primrose path, had
never learned the salutary lesson of self-denial. The incipient stoutness
of limb contrasted strangely with the drawn meagreness of his body,
which was contracted by want of food. Paul Alexis was right. This man
had died of starvation, within ten miles of the great Volga, within nine
miles of the outskirts of Tver, a city second to Moscow, and once her
rival. Therefore it could only be that he had purposely avoided the
dwellings of men; that he was a fugitive of some sort or another. Paul's
theory that this was an Englishman had not been received with
enthusiasm by Steinmetz; but that philosopher had stooped to inspect
the narrow, tell-tale fingers. Steinmetz, be it noted, had an infinite
capacity for holding his tongue.
They mounted their horses and rode away without looking back. But
they did not speak, as if each were deep in his own thoughts. Material
had indeed been afforded them, for who could tell who this featureless
man might be? They were left in a state of hopeless curiosity, as who,
having picked up a page with "Finis" written upon it, falls to wondering
what the story may have been.
Steinmetz had thrown the bridle of the straying horse over his arm, and
the animal trotted obediently by the side of the fidgety little Cossacks.

"That was bad luck," exclaimed the elder man at length, "d--d bad luck!
In this country the less you find, the less you see, the less you
understand, the simpler is your existence. Those Nihilists, with their
mysterious ways and their reprehensible love of explosives, have made
honest men's lives a burden to them."
"Their motives were originally good," put in Paul.
"That is possible; but a good motive is no excuse for a bad means. They
wanted to get along too quickly. They are pig-headed, exalted,
unpractical to a man. I do not mention the women, because when
women meddle in politics they make fools of themselves, even in
England. These Nihilists would have been all very well if they had
been content to sow for posterity. But they wanted to see the fruits of
their labors in one generation. Education does not grow like that. It
requires a couple of generations to germinate. It has to be manured by
the brains of fools before it is of any use. In England it has reached this
stage; here in Russia the sowing has only begun. Now, we were doing
some good. The Charity League was the thing. It began by training
their starved bodies to be ready for the education when it came. And
very little of it would have come in our time. If you educate a hungry
man, you set a devil loose upon the world. Fill their stomachs before
you feed their brains, or you will give them mental indigestion; and a
man with mental indigestion raises hell or cuts his own throat."
"That is just what I want to do--fill their stomachs. I don't care about
the rest. I'm not responsible for the progress of the world or the good of
humanity," said Paul.
He rode on in silence; then he burst out again in the curt phraseology of
a man whose feeling is stronger than he cares to admit.
"I've got no grand ideas about the human race," he said. "A very little
contents me. A little piece of Tver, a few thousand peasants, are good
enough for me. It seems rather hard that a fellow can't give away of his
surplus money in charity if he is such a fool as to want to."
Steinmetz was riding stubbornly along. Suddenly he gave a little

chuckle--a guttural sound expressive of a somewhat Germanic
satisfaction.
"I don't see how they can stop us," he said. "The League, of course, is
done; it will crumble away in sheer panic. But here, in Tver, they
cannot stop us."
He clapped his great hand on his thigh with more glee than one would
have expected him to feel; for this man posed as a cynic--a despiser of
men,