by Grant Allen
“Friends,” the presiding Elder began, in fluent vulgar Russian, “we of the Lord’s folk have met in chapel this morning for the performance of a very solemn function. For the third time since we came here, to this lodge in the wilderness, our young men and maidens, by the Church’s desire, are to be joined together in holy wedlock. The Lord has prospered seven sons of our flock so that in due time they have become separate house-masters; and to these five of our daughters shall five of the seven be duly united. Not for the lust of the flesh or the pride of the eyes are they to be joined together, but for the godly upbringing of the lambs of the fold, in time to come, to fulfil our places. Therefore, according to the holy custom of the Church, to us Elders delivered, we do not permit that each man should choose for himself a wife, after the fashion of the world, according to his own carnal desires and longings. We bring our young men and maidens here bodily before the Lord, certain that He will choose for them of His Divine goodness more wisely than either they or we can. We will pray for His guidance on the lots that we cast; then we will proceed to assign husband to wife, in full confidence of right, after the wont of the Saints, under the heavenly benediction.”
The rude farmers and hard-worked housewifes in the body of the chapel fell on their knees in concert as he spoke these words. So did the Elders who stood by the table. The young men and women, whose fate was at issue, ranged still in their appointed place, bowing their heads silently.
The Elder prayed a long extempore prayer. The congregation listened, and answered “Amen.” Then the Elder said once more, “Our maidens will give praise.” The five girls, raising their heads, sang a favourite Russian hymn to a simple melody. Four of them sang like born drudges of the log-huts. But Karen’s voice, though untrained, was like the voice of the nightingale. When they had finished, the Elder placed seven slips of paper, with ostentatious openness, in a bag on his right, and five slips in a similar bag on his left. “Come up, Vera Rustoff!” he cried, singling a child with his eye from the congregation below. “For out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has He ordained praise. Come up, and be our minister.”
The child stood forward, half reluctant, and took her place with much trembling at the table beside him. She was a rosy, small girl, with fair hair, like one of Fra Angelico’s angels.
“Draw a paper!” the Elder said. The child drew one, and handed it to him.
“Nicolas Koscialkovski!” the Elder read out, unfolding it. “Draw another, Vera Rustoff.” And the child drew one. There was a deep pause of suspense. It was the name of a woman.
“Leopolda Sianojenska!” the Elder went on, still droning in the same business-like voice as before. “Nicolas and Leopolda, it is the Lord’s will. Stand forward, you two, and join hands for betrothal.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, without a word of reluctance, though with a painful twitching that he could not quite subdue at the corners of his mouth, one of the stalwart young men stepped forward, and accepted his destiny. At the same moment the least pleasing of the four born drudges stepped forward in turn, and took her future husband’s hand in hers with a certain stolid and honest uncomplaining indifference. It was the Lord’s doing. Who were they that they should repine at it?
“Draw yet a third,” the Elder went on, as those two clasped hands and stood aside from among the candidates. And the child, dipping her hand into the bag, drew one.
“Fedor Noross,” the old man read out, without one tinge of emotion. It was his own son’s name. He gazed at the lad blankly. Even he was interested now. What wife would be vouchsafed him?
“Again!”
And the child drew. Another deep pause.
“Sophie Alexandrovitch,” the Elder said, with a slight gasp. And silently a second pair stepped forward to the sacrifice.
The child drew again, this time unbidden. The Elder read out a name. “Peter Verstoff,” he said. Peter Verstoff’s face was rigid with suspense. The child’s hand plunged deep into the answering bag. “Karen Selistoff,” the Elder read out, unfolding the paper. A sigh of relief burst from many lips at once. Peter Verstoff’s face flushed crimson in a second. Karen’s grew white as the flowers at her bosom — the flowers that Ivan had placed there yesterday — two milky snow-blossoms backed with a spray of tamarack. There was a moment’s lull. Everybody felt the great event of the day was finished.
“Peter and Karen,” the presiding Elder said, breaking the solemn silence, “it is the Lord’s will. Come forward, you two, and join hands for betrothal.”
Peter Verstoff stepped forward — tremulous, ruddy, exultant. The Lord had indeed heard his earnest petition! The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much! He had won her! He had won her!
Karen hung back for a moment — pale, reluctant, uncertain. A terrible conflict was going on unseen in her breast. It was love against duty — duty as she conceived it. Nay, more, against conscience, religion, faith, authority, the express will of Heaven there openly revealed to her.
Ivan hung upon her movements with mute eagerness for a second. Would she obey or rebel? Oh, great heavens, what a sacrilege!
Then slowly, reluctantly, obeying, as she thought, the higher law, Karen stepped forward, and held out her hand, trembling. “It is the Lord’s will!” she said faintly, while two tears stole down her cheek. Her heart belied her words. But Religion had conquered.
At that second Ivan broke forth from the rank with an ashen face and quivering lips, held his hand up in warning, as if to forbid the betrothal. The revulsion of the moment had revealed many truths to him, hidden away till then behind the thick cloak of authority in the fanatical faith he had learnt from childhood to reverence. “It is not the Lord’s will!” he cried, with desperate energy, and with the wild force of helplessness, though the words half choked him. “It is not the Lord’s will! This thing is of Satan! Your lottery is a disgrace! We have guides with us far purer than any casting of paper lots — the voice of Nature, the voice of instinct, the voice of our own hearts, the voice of all that is most divine and most sacred within us. Let us listen to those, not to meaningless oracles. If we will not hear them, no lot will help us. This is heathenish divination, I tell you, not Christian worship. Is it for us to neglect the plain promptings of the good feelings that God has given us in favour of such chances as the tossing of names in a bag? Karen, Karen, hold forth your hand. It isn’t his. It is mine. I claim it! I claim it!”
Karen gazed up in his face, all aghast, with a thrill of wondering admiration. It was wrong of him; oh, how wrong! But still, she loved and admired him for it. Her cheek flushed red again. She clasped her hands hard for a moment over her heaving breast. Then she looked from Peter to Ivan, and from Ivan to Peter. Which of the two must she obey? Love or Religion?
But the presiding Elder, with the infinite quiet dignity of the Russian peasant, waving her aside to her place, took no notice of the brawler. “Karen Selistoff,” he said austerely, lifting her right hand in his, “the Lord has spoken. Disobey not His will for the will of the flesh, lest ill betide you. Resist the devil and he will flee from you! Take no heed of this apostate! Give your hand as the Lord ordains to Peter Verstoff.”
The colour fled suddenly from Karen’s face once more. She dared not turn her eyes for one glance at Ivan. The voice of the Elder was the voice of the Church. What woman could disregard it? With a deadly effort, she stretched forth that white marble hand. It was cold as ice. In a wild burst of delight, Peter Verstoff clasped it, for, in the eyes of the Church, they two were now finally married.
Ivan waited for no more; he could stand it no longer. Before the very faces of those harsh ascetics, he flung himself fiercely upon Karen’s neck; he kissed her on her lips; he strained her hard to his bosom. “Good-bye,” he said, in English, with hot tears on his cheek. “Good-bye, my darling! This is no place for me now; I will go to Toronto.”
And, shaking off the dust of the Mennonite faith from his feet, as it were, he strode forth alone, leaving the scandali
zed Church to rejoice at its leisure that it was so easily rid of so unworthy a member.
But Karen fell fainting into the arms of her betrothed husband.
III.
A great deal may happen in five years; above all, in a new country.
During the next five years, Ivan lived much; so much, indeed, that his previous existence seemed separated from him by the whole length of a lifetime. New ideas, new worlds crowded thick upon his brain. He had left the narrow age of the Mennonites behind for ever, and had emerged all at once into the full blaze and glare of the Nineteenth Century.
The Nineteenth Century laid hold upon him with a firm hand. In Toronto, that busy, bustling, modern Toronto, the quick young Russian, with his fresh intelligence all unwarped and undimmed by the blunting influence of custom, expanded and developed as none but a Russian could expand and develop — and even he only under the stimulus of the vivid and quickening Western environment. Ivan’s advance was rapid and steady. He began upon the railway, where he picked up with ease the first rudiments of mechanics; then he took a place in turn in an electric lighting establishment; after that, he soon set to work to make inventions of his own; and before three years were fairly over he had gone on so far that he perfected and patented an improved electro-motor on his special pattern. Edison spoke with respect of “this new man Utovitch,” and Erastus Wiman, the Canadian millionaire, helped to float the shares in all the young inventor’s new schemes and companies.
During those five rapid years in Toronto, however, Ivan heard little or nothing in any way of Karen. She was married to Peter Verstoff — so much he knew from stray letters from the village; but soon after her wedding, the couple had left Nijni Ouralsk in search of work, and had “gone forth into the world,” as his simple correspondents phrased it in their native Russian. But the world is big even in this age of steam. Where Karen might be Ivan hadn’t the least idea. Nevertheless, for her sake he still held himself always disengaged and unmarried. Perhaps the Muscovite leaven in part wrought that resolve within him. Your Russian is always ascetic in heart. If he couldn’t have Karen he would die a bachelor.
Well, at the end of five years, the prospects of the electro-motor had improved so immensely that the directors of his company urged Ivan with great warmth to undertake a journey to England and France in order to push his patents with European capitalists. Ivan consented, nothing loth, and took his passage from New York, to see for himself, for the first time in his life, the wonders and glories of old-world civilization.
It is an event in a man’s life, his maiden trip to Europe.
As Ivan lounged on the deck of the Atlas, the first day out from Sandy Hook, in a long wicker chair, a fellow-passenger, well dressed in a handsome fur-lined overcoat, attracted his attention, leaning against the bulwarks. Something in the man’s figure and build seemed strangely familiar to him. Surely, Ivan thought, he had seen that tall shape and that well-set head before. In Toronto? or where? The passenger turned round as he gazed, and their eyes met with a start. Ivan turned pale with surprise. It was Peter Verstoff!
Could Karen be on board? Was he once more to see her?
Too full of that one absorbing thought to remember all the incidents of their last meeting, Ivan Utovitch stepped forward with outstretched hand to greet his old friend of the Upper Ottawa clearing. But Verstoff — naturally enough, no doubt — seemed somewhat less eager than Ivan himself to renew their lapsed acquaintance. He held out his hand coldly; it was sleek and well-gloved. Ivan surveyed the man as he did so from head to foot. A great change had come over the simple Russian backwoodsman — as great as the change in Ivan himself, possibly. His very dress, his manner — his whole mien proclaimed it. Verstoff was rich, well-clad, cosmopolitanized, European.
“How’s this?” Ivan cried in surprise. “You’ve got on, like myself! You seem to have done well for yourself in this world’s goods. How are you? And Karen?”
“Thanks,” his fellow-countryman answered in a more frigid tone, with just a trifle of affectation, “Madame Verstoff is well. Many things have happened to us since I had the pleasure of seeing you last at Nijni Ouralsk. We don’t live in America now. I’m on my way back to Europe.”
“And your wife?” Ivan cried, unable to repress his eagerness.
“No, not my wife,” Verstoff answered, still stiffly, looking hard at his fur cuffs. “Her professional engagements didn’t allow her, in fact, to accompany me on this trip across the water. I came over alone, to make arrangements beforehand for the American tour she proposes to undertake next winter.”
“Karen’s not on the stage, surely?” Ivan exclaimed, bewildered. His beautiful, pure Karen? Such a profanation as that would indeed be too terrible.
“No, not on the stage, unfortunately,” her husband echoed with a faint tone of half-suppressed regret. “Madame Verstoff’s profound religious convictions won’t allow her to sing in opera, I grieve to say — at least, not as yet. A year or two more may, of course, do wonders. She has broadened: she has broadened. Indeed, we’ve all of us broadened a good deal, no doubt, Utovitch, since we left Nijni Ouralsk. Oh, yes, we’ve heard of your discoveries and your rise in life. You must have heard of my wife’s, too, though perhaps you didn’t recognize her under the Italianized name. She sings only in oratorio, and as Madame Catarina Veristo.”
“What! not the great soprano?” Ivan exclaimed, astonished. For her fame had reached even to the Toronto workshops.
Peter Verstoff nodded. “Yes, she had always a good voice,” he admitted with marital pride. “We thought so at Ouralsk.”
“She sang like an angel!” Ivan put in enthusiastically.
“Exactly,” Verstoff assented. “So all the critics say. Well, when we moved to New York, we learned for the first time its commercial value, and found it had only to be cultivated aright to make it one of the most paying concerns in all America. So I made up my mind at once to exploit the discovery. I borrowed money for the speculation from admiring friends, took Madame Verstoff for three years to Brussels and Munich, gave her the best musical training that Europe could afford — and at the end of that time launched her on the world fully found — launched her off hand in Vienna. She took the stage by storm; ever since, it has been one long triumphal progress. Ever since she’s been coining money — that’s the only word I know for it; just coining money!”
Ivan gazed at him aghast. And this was the simple, toilsome, God-fearing Peter Verstoff, who, as Karen had said, wrestled hard in prayer for her! Ah, well — ah, well, it is an age of evolution! Truly, as he himself so tersely expressed it, Verstoff had broadened a good deal since leaving Nijni Ouralsk. But some natures, Ivan thought to himself, with a curl of the lip, are just like rivers — as they grow broad, they grow shallow, most painfully shallow. The deceitfulness of riches had been too much for Verstoff. Better one day of that old Mennonite earnestness than a hundred years of this Mammonite self-complacency. The old-fashioned backwoodsman in his woollen shirt and toque was worth fifty of the new-fangled, fine-spoken, cosmopolitan gentleman in his fur-lined coat and his neatly buttoned gaiters!
And Karen? Had she “broadened,” too, in the same way, Ivan wondered? Had she developed into a worldly-wise professional singer? Had she taken kindly to that sea on which Verstoff had “launched” her? And even as he thought so, Ivan hated himself in his heart for so much as thinking it.
IV.
After this first recognition, Verstoff seemed for the next few days rather to avoid Ivan Utovitch. At that, Ivan, after his kind, was somewhat naïvely surprised. For he was still in many ways the unsophisticated son of the soil. Too loyal himself to dream of rousing jealousy, he hardly knew how easily jealousy can be aroused in the minds of others.
So for the first three days, Verstoff lounged about on deck in his fur-lined coat, taking little notice in any way of Ivan Utovitch.
On the third night out, they were off the Banks of Newfoundland. You know the Banks of old, no doubt — cold, calm, and foggy. Iv
an sat on deck, wrapped in his warmest coat. Verstoff stood a little way off by the companion-ladder, looking over into the water, and smoking a very fragrant cigar. It was a dark, raw night. The sea was smooth, with a long, glassy swell, but the engines had slowed, and were going half-speed. Impossible from the bridge to see as far as the bow for fog and darkness.
But Ivan, who was quite new to sea-going ways, watched the sailors languidly, as they threw something overboard, attached to a cord, and then hauled it up quick again in monotonous succession. What it all meant, he hadn’t the slightest idea: not soundings certainly. For at each rapid haul, they called out a number afresh, in a sing-song voice: “Thirty-seven; thirty-six; thirty-four and a half; thirty-four; thirty-three and three-quarters!”
Ivan listened unconcerned. It was nothing to him. On so calm a night the bare notion of danger seemed absolutely inconceivable.
At last the sailors hauled, and gave an audible “Whew!” “How much?” the officer cried who superintended the work. And the quarter-master answered, in a hushed tone of expectation, “Just above thirty-two! They can’t be far off now, sir!”
At the word, Verstoff lounged over with a rather pale face. “That’s bad,” he said quietly, “very bad indeed; they must stop her, or back her!”
“Why so?” Ivan asked innocently. “What’s wrong? What are they trying to find out with this thing there, anyhow?”
“Trying?” Verstoff echoed. “Why, don’t you know? The temperature of the water, to be sure! It’s almost on freezing. You can guess what that means. We must be close upon icebergs!”
Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when a terrible jar thrilled loud and fierce through the hull from stem to stern. The whole framework staggered. Three bells rang sharp, with a quick note, in the engine-room below. The great ship stopped dead short, and seemed to reel in terror. She had struck against something huge, that shattered her bows like glass. Then Ivan was aware that tons and tons of ice lay tossed in vast fragments over the forward deck. All was tremor and gurgle. Black water was rushing in as he looked towards the forecastle. They had come into collision, end on, with an iceberg!
