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Updated: June 18, 2025
Never did this man put a hand actually to the work; always he kept roaming about with the large, rigid-looking fingers of his hands tucked into his belt, and his fixed and expressionless eyes scanning the barraque, the men, and the work as his lips vented some such lines as: Oh God our Father, bound hast Thou A crown of thorns upon my brow! Listen to my humble prayer!
At the present moment her head and yellow scarf were just showing over the tops of the bushes; and while I noted that now it was swaying from side to side like a sunflower shaken by the wind, I recalled the fact that she was a woman whose husband had been carried off at Sukhum by a surfeit of fruit this fact being known to me through the circumstance that in the workmen's barraque where we had shared quarters these folk had observed the good old Russian custom of confiding to a stranger the whole of their troubles, and had done so in tones of such amplitude and penetration that the querulous words must have been audible for five versts around.
Finally the torch holder straightened his back, threw his torch into the river, expectorated after it, and said to his companion as he smoothed a flaxen poll which, in the darkness, looked almost greenish: "Do you go to the barraque, and tell them that a man has been done to death." "No; I should be afraid to go alone." "Come, come! Nothing is there to be afraid of. Go, I tell you."
To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath of the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and shrubs so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you felt as if you might get samples of something at each barraque, as the French termed the little houses.
In every way the evening resembled the previous one; there were to be observed the same luscious flooding of the defile with dove-coloured mist, the same flashing of the silver crags in the roseate twilight, the same rocking of the dense, warm forest's soft, leafy tree-tops, the same softening of the rocks' outlines in the gloom, the same gradual uplift of shadows, the same chanting of the "matchmaking" river, the same routine on the part of the big, sleek carpenters around the barraque a routine as slow and ponderous in its course as the movements of a drove of wild boars.
The ex-soldier squatted down before the little blaze, and rearranged some fuel under the kettle. "Where is the other man?" said he. "Go and fetch him." I departed for the purpose, and, on my way, heard one of the carpenters in the neighbourhood of the barraque say in a thick, unctuous, sing-song voice. "A great work is it indeed!"
Meanwhile the black, fringed boughs of the pine trees hung stretched over the flames of the Molokans' fire as though they would catch some of the fire's glow and warmth, or seize it altogether, and put it out. And when, at times, their red tongues projected beyond the corner of the barraque, they made the building look as though it had caught alight, and extended their glow even to the rivulet.
We talk of bygone, happy days, of the war, and of their present needs so few! Then I tell them I am American. "American?" says the old man, peering into my face, "that means friend." "Yes," I reply, "that means friend." Then I come to a wooden barraque, a hive buzzing with children.
Well, never again will he write, and as likely as not his kinsfolk will end by saying to themselves: 'He has taken to bad ways, and forgotten his family. Yes, good sir." By this time the clamour around the barraque had ceased, and the two fires had burnt themselves out, and most of the men dispersed.
By this time the carpenters had ceased singing around the barraque, and let their fire die down until quivering on the wall of the edifice there was only a fiery-red patch, a patch barely sufficient to render visible the shadows of the rocks; while beside the fire there was seated only a tall figure with a black beard which had, grasped in its hands, a heavy cudgel, and, lying near its right foot, an axe.
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