With a quiet trickle there came a swirl of water around me, while an adjacent pine bough cracked and squeaked as though it too had come to life. My companions shouted, and collected into a knot; whereupon, at once dominating and quelling the tense, painful hubbub of sounds, there rang forth the voice of Ossip.
"Mother of God!" he shouted. "Scatter, lads! Get away from one another, and keep each to himself! Now! Courage!"
With that, springing towards us as though wasps had been after him, and grasping the spirit-level as though it had been a weapon, he jabbed it to every side, as though fighting invisible foes, while, just as the quivering town began, seemingly, to glide past us, and the ice at my feet gave a screech and crumbled to fragments beneath me, so that water bubbled to my knees. I leapt up from where I was, and rushed blindly in Ossip's direction.
"Where are you coming to, fool?" was his shout as he brandished the spirit-level. "Stand still where you are!"
Indeed, Ossip seemed no longer to be Ossip at all, but a person curiously younger, a person in whom all that had been familiar in Ossip had become effaced. Yes, the once blue eyes had turned to grey, and the figure added half an arshin to its stature as, standing as erect as a newly made nail, and pressing both feet together, the foreman stretched himself to his full height, and shouted with his mouth open to its widest extent:
"Don't shuffle about, nor crowd upon one another, or I'll break your heads!"
Whereafter, of myself in particular, he inquired as he raised the spirit-level:
"What is the matter with YOU, pray?"
"I am feeling frightened," I muttered in response.
"Feeling frightened of WHAT, indeed?"
"Of being drowned."
"Pooh! Just you hold your tongue."
Yet the next moment he glanced at me, and added in a gentler, quieter tone:
"None but a fool gets drowned. Pick yourself up and come along."
Then once more he shouted full-throated words of encouragement to his men; and as he did so, his chest swelled and his head rocked with the effort.
Yet, crackling and cracking, the ice was breaking up; and soon it began slowly to bear us past the town. 'Twas as though some unknown force ashore had awakened, and was striving to tear the banks of the river in two, so much did the portion of the landscape downstream seem to be standing still while the portion level with us seemed to be receding in the opposite direction, and thus causing a break to take place in the middle of the picture.
And soon this movement, a movement agonisingly slow, deprived me of my sense of being connected with the rest of the world, until, as the whole receded, despair again gripped my heart and unnerved my limbs. Roseate clouds were gliding across the sky and causing stray fragments of the ice, which, seemingly, yearned to engulf me, to assume reflected tints of a similar hue. Yes, it was as though the birth of spring had reawakened the universe, and was causing it to stretch itself, and to emit deep, hurried, broken pants that cracked its bones as the river, embedded in the earth's stout framework, revivified the whole with thick, turbulent, ebullient blood.
And this sense of littleness, of impotence amid the calm, assured movement of the earth's vast bulk, weighed upon my soul, and evoked, and momentarily fanned to flame in me, the shameless human question: "What if I should stretch forth my hand and lay it upon the hill and the banks of the river, and say, 'Halt until I come to you!'? "
Meanwhile the bells continued the mournful moaning of their resonant, coppery notes; and that moaning led me to reflect that within two days (on the night of the morrow) they would be pealing a joyous welcome to the Resurrection Feast.
"Oh that all of us may live to hear that sound!" was my unspoken thought.
Before my vision there kept quavering seven dark figures--figures shuffling over the ice, and brandishing planks like oars. And, wriggling like a lamprey in front of them was a little old fellow, an old fellow resembling Saint Nicholas the Wonder-Worker, an old fellow who kept crying softly, but authoritatively:
"Do not stare about you!"
And ever the river was growing rougher and ruder; ever its backbone was beginning to puiver and flounder like a whale underfoot, with its liquescent body of cold, grey, murky water bursting with increasing frequency from its shell of ice, and lapping hungrily at our feet.
Yes, we were human beings traversing, as it were, a slender pole over a bottomless abyss; and as we walked, the water's soft, cantabile splash set me in mind of the depths below, of the infinite time during which a body would continue sinking through dense, chilly bulk until sight faded and the heart stopped beating. Yes, before my mind's eye there arose men drowned and devoured by crayfish, men with crumbling skulls and swollen features, and glassy, bulging eyes and puffy hands and outstretched fingers and palms of which the skin had rotted off with the damp.
The first to fall in was Mokei Budirin. He had been walking next ahead of the Morduine, and, as a man habitually silent and absorbed, proceeding on his way more quietly than the rest.
Suddenly something had seemed to catch at his legs, and he had disappeared until only his head and his hands, as the latter clutched at his plank, had been left above-level.
"Run and help him, somebody!" was Ossip's instant cry. "Yes, but not all of you--just one or two. Help him I say!"
The spluttering Mokei, however, said to the Morduine and myself:
"No; do you move away, mates, for I shall best help myself.
Never you mind."
And, sure enough, he did succeed in drawing himself out on to the ice without assistance. Whereafter he remarked as he shook himself:
"A nice pickle, this, to be in! I might as well have been drowned!"
And, in fact, at the moment he looked, with his chattering teeth and great tongue licking a dripping moustache, precisely like a large, good-natured dog.
