Читать книгу Peter and Alexis - Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky - Страница 10

Ye hollowed oak trunks, ye will prove

Fit house for us who on earth did move,

Night approacheth, endeth day,

And Death his scythe doth lay

To the root of all that live....

The song made the silence only more intense, more awful. Suddenly, with a rumbling and a hiss, up soared a rocket, dissolving in the dark vault into a rain of iridescent stars. The Neva reflecting them doubled their number in her black mirror. Fireworks flared, screens with transparent pictures were lit, fiery wheels began to whirl, fountains of fire surged forth, and halls appeared, resembling a temple of white sun-like flame. And from the Pavilion overlooking the Neva, where the Goddess already stood, along the smooth surface of the waters, came the cry of the revellers—“Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! Peter the Great! Father of his country! Emperor of all the Russians!” and music rang forth in the air.

“This, brethren, is the last of the signs,” exclaimed Cornelius, pointing with his outstretched arm to the rocket. “As St. Hippolitus testifies: ‘Antichrist will be glorified, praised by sundry songs and many voices and loud crying. And a light greater than all lights will surround him, the master of darkness. Night will be changed into day, and day into night; the sun and the moon will become red as blood, and he will take the fire away from the heavens.”

In the centre of the luminous hall appeared the statue of Peter the Sculptor of Russia, in the image of the Titan Prometheus.

“And all will fall down before him,” concluded Cornelius, “and exclaim ‘Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! who is like unto the Beast? who is able to make war with him; he has brought us fire from the heavens!’”

Nearly all on the raft watched the fireworks terror-stricken. And when, shrouded in clouds of smoke, illumined by many coloured bengal-lights, there appeared the sea monster, with prickly fins and wings and tail covered with scales, floating along the Neva from the fortress towards the Summer Garden, they deemed this to be the Beast, coming up out of the depths, as predicted in the book of Revelation. Every moment they expected to see Antichrist coming towards them on the water, or flying through the air on wings of fire, amidst thunder and lightning, and armies of evil spirits with him.

“Friends, friends,” sobbed Petka, trembling like a leaf, and his teeth chattering, “I feel frightened; we speak about him, but is he himself not somewhere close by? See how we are all troubled!”

“I don’t know where you get all this old woman’s fear. Ram a pike down his throat, and that’ll finish him,” boastingly began Furlong; but he too grew pale, and began to quake when Kilikeya, who was sitting next to him, suddenly called out in a piercing voice, fell on the ground, twisting her body in convulsions, and began to shriek.

Kilikeya had been injured in her childhood. Once, so she herself was wont to relate, her stepmother had poured out some soup in a wooden bowl, and passed it to her to eat—reviling her at the same time, saying, “there, sup it up, the devil be with you,” and three weeks later she fell ill, and it seemed to her that something had begun to growl audibly within her, like a dog, so that everybody could hear it. And really an evil spirit did seem to growl with human and animal voices within her. She had been imprisoned according to the Tsar’s law, concerning such nervous women; she had been questioned, judged, even whipped. She had signed promises, not to call out again under pain of punishment with the lash or of being convicted to lifelong labour in the weaving mill. Yet lashes could not cast out demons, and she continued to have fits.

Kilikeya moaned: “I feel sick, so sick,” and then she would laugh, and cry, and bark like a dog and bleat like a sheep, and croak like a frog, grunt like a pig, and many other animals did she imitate.

The watch dog, which lived on the raft, roused by these unwonted sounds came out of its kennel: a hungry, lean cur, with sunken flanks and prominent ribs; it walked up to the edge of the raft, and paused at the side of Ivan, who continued to chant, neither seeing nor hearing anything around him, and the dog lifting its muzzle into the air, its tail between its legs, howled piteously at the fireworks. The howl of the dog and the howl of the sick woman blended into one.

They poured water on Kilikeya. Cornelius bending over her, was reciting incantations for the driving out of demons, blowing and spitting on her face, and lashing it with his leather thong. At last she grew calmer, and fell into a heavy swoon-like slumber. The fireworks had died away. The embers of the fire were faintly glowing; darkness reigned once more. Nothing had happened; Antichrist had not appeared; the fear had passed away. Yet the distress they all felt was more terrible than any fear. They sat as before on the low raft, whose black outlines scarcely stood out against the dark water and the black heavens; their little group, lonely and forlorn, suspended as it were, somewhere in space twixt the two skies. All was quiet, the raft motionless, and yet it seemed to them, they were being precipitated into and were sinking down, engulphed in this gloom, as in some yawning black abyss, the jaws of the Beast itself, the inevitable end of all things. And into this black oppressive darkness, luminous with the blue tremulous heat-lightning, floated from the Summer Garden the music of the minuet, tender as the languid sighs of the kingdom of Venus, where the shepherd Daphnis loosens the girdle of Chloe,

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

Cupid, we all are, in thy sway.

Thy golden love-awaking dart

Hath reached and wounded every heart!