The Sowers | Page 7

a scoffer at charity.
"They'll find it very difficult to stop me," muttered Paul Alexis.
It was now dark--as dark as ever it would be. Steinmetz peered through
the gloom toward him with a little laugh--half tolerance, half
admiration.
The country was here a little more broken. Long, low hills, like vast
waves, rose and fell beneath the horses' feet. Ages ago the Volga may
have been here, and, slowly narrowing, must have left these hills in
deposit. From the crest of an incline the horsemen looked down over a
vast rolling tableland, and far ahead of them a great white streak
bounded the horizon.
"The Volga!" said Steinmetz. "We are almost there. And there, to the
right, is the Tversha. It is like a great catapult. Gott! what a wonderful
night! No wonder these Russians are romantic. What a night for a pipe
and a long chair! This horse of mine is tired. He shakes me most
abominably."
"Like to change?" enquired Paul curtly.
"No; it would make no difference. You are as heavy as I, although I am
wider! Ah! there are the lights of Tver."
Ahead of them a few lights twinkled feebly, sometimes visible and then
hidden again as they rode over the rolling hillocks. One plain ever
suggests another, but the resemblance between the steppes of Tver and

the great Sahara is at times startling. There is in both that roll as of the
sea--the great roll that heaves unceasingly round the Capes of Good
Hope and Horn. Looked at casually, Tver and Sahara's plains are level,
and it is only in crossing them that one realizes the gentle up and down
beneath the horses' feet.
Soon Steinmetz raised his head and sniffed in a loud Teutonic manner.
It was the reek of water; for great rivers, like the ocean, have their
smell. And the Volga is a revelation. Men travel far to see a city, but
few seem curious about a river. Every river has, nevertheless, its
individuality, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its
influence, which extends to the people who pass their lives within sight
of its waters. Thus the Guadalquivir is rapid, mysterious,
untrammelled--breaking frequently from its boundary. And it runs
through Andalusia. The Nile--the river of ages--runs clear, untroubled
through the centuries, between banks untouched by man. The
Rhine--romantic, cultivated, artificial, with a rough subcurrent and a
muddy bed--through Germany. The Seine and the
Thames--shallow--shallow--shallow. And we--who live upon their
banks!
The Volga--immense, stupendous, a great power, an influence two
thousand four hundred miles long. Some have seen the Danube, and
think they have seen a great river. So they have; but the Russian giant
is seven hundred miles longer. A vast yellow stream, moving on to the
distant sea--slow, gentle, inexorable, overwhelming.
All great things in nature have the power of crushing the human
intellect. Russians are thus crushed by the vastness of their country, of
their rivers. Man is but a small thing in a great country, and those who
live by Nile, or Guadalquivir, or Volga seem to hold their lives on
condition. They exist from day to day by the tolerance of their river.
Steinmetz and Paul paused for a moment on the wooden floating bridge
and looked at the great river. All who cross that bridge, or the railway
bridge higher up the stream, must do the same. They pause and draw a
deep breath, as if in the presence of something supernatural.

They rode on without speaking through the squalid town--the whilom
rival and the victim of brilliant Moscow. They rode straight to the
station, where they dined in, by the way, one of the best railway
refreshment rooms in the world. At one o'clock the night express from
Moscow to St. Petersburg, with its huge American locomotive, rumbled
into the station. Paul secured a chair in the long saloon car, and then
returned to the platform. The train waited twenty minutes for
refreshments, and he still had much to say to Steinmetz; for one of
these men owned a principality and the other governed it. They walked
up and down the long platform, smoking endless cigarettes, talking
gravely.
Steinmetz stood on the platform and watched the train pass slowly
away into the night. Then he went toward a lamp, and taking a
pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, examined each corner of it in
succession. It was a small pocket-handkerchief of fine cambric. In one
corner were the initials S.S.B., worked neatly in white--such
embroidery as is done in St. Petersburg.
"Ach!" exclaimed Steinmetz shortly; "something told me that that was
he."
He turned the little piece of cambric over and over, examining it slowly,
with a heavy Germanic cunning. He had taken this handkerchief from
the body of the nameless rider who was now