Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series — Babanchik

I

IT was my smallest brother who called him that, because, at the time of their meeting, he could not manage the whole of his very long name.

But his friends took it up presently, liking the ridiculous yet oddly caressing sound of it, until all who knew him well knew him only as Babanchik.

I remember him first as a chance guest in my father’s house by the side of the Black Sea--a big, deep-chested man in a badly wrinkled pongee suit, who missed his train because we children had drawn him into a game of hide-and-seek.

I can still hear his laughter-filled voice demanding fiercely, 'Where are they?

Where are they?'

as he flung himself about the room, making wide détours to avoid our feet, which protruded from under the cloth-hung table, while the train, with his car attached, paused a moment at the 'half station' at the far end of the pasture and went roaring on along the shore.

He stayed the night with us, and our child-world changed forthwith.

During the two years which followed, the play-times of Babanchik and his children were inextricably bound with ours, and the distance between our homes grew very short.

At Christmas we danced around the scintillating tree in his spacious Tiflis house, and at Easter he helped us with the beating of the innumerable eggs which go into the Easter bread of Russia, spattering the kitchen wall most dreadfully.

Business brought him often to Batum, which lay just over the hill from us--so often that we fell into the habit of racing down to the pasture-bars every Saturday to wait for the afternoon train.

It was long and wearying, that walk back, on the days when the train clattered by without pausing.

But on other days, when, just this side of the cliff, the engine whistled to announce the stop,--when we listened, breathless, for the setting of the brakes, when we saw his huge figure swing lightly from the steps, coat-pockets bulging with mysteries, and heard the gay voice shouting that his own car would not come by until Monday,--the walk home was a march of triumph.

Two summers we spent together in a half-starved Georgian village high in the Caucasus Mountains, where we lived on bread and eggs, both reeking with the wild garlic which grew thick among the wheat; ran, bare of head and foot, over the pine-grown canons; and loved every moment of it.

It was in those two summers that we came to know Babanchik best and to adore him accordingly.

We might emulate the manners of Manya, his young-lady daughter of twelve; we might acknowledge the leadership of his harum-scarum son Kolya; but it was Babanchik who really counted.

It was he who led our marvelous expeditions to the neighboring peaks, his clothes steaming with the effort of that leadership--he who showed us where to look for mushrooms, and later fried those mushrooms for us, surreptitiously, lest mother begrudge us the butter where no new supply was to be had.

His mind it was which settled, wisely and fairly, all our momentous quarrels, and invented countless new and fascinating games when we had tired of the everlasting croquet.

But for him we should never have bathed in the yellow water of the mad Kura, water so muddy that it left great streaks across the bath-towels; but for him we should never have been forgiven for robbing the little forest church of candles with which to rub the porch floor whenever we wanted to dance.

That the merry existence of his vacations was but a small part of his life, we knew, even as we guessed that the man who frolicked with us lived only in the hours of play.

For often at tea-time on the porch we came upon the other Babanchik, a bitter and fearsome man who talked to father in a voice which, to us, was the voice of a stranger.

They made us very wretched, those tea-times, when from an obscure porch corner we watched him striding up and down along the railing, the smile gone from his eyes, his cheeks flushed, his arms waving wildly.

For we could never understand why the man who taught us that it was cruel to step on ants, seemed so ready and eager, at those times, to throttle some one, we knew not whom, unless it were the terrible creature he called the Russian government.

It all hurt us inexpressibly.

Yet hour after hour we watched him and listened to his long, involved denunciations of oppression and dishonesty and selfishness and class-distinction and many other long words which we could not grasp.

And most difficult to fathom was his oft-repeated assertion that he was doing all that talking in behalf of us.

'It is for the children that I fight!'

he would shout, stamping feverishly up and down the long porch; 'for my Manya and Kolya, and for your boys and girls and all the countless thousands of others whose lot has been cast with this accursed country!

I must fight, for I know what will come to them!

Their souls will be dwarfed and crippled by our stupid schools and our stupid laws, and their minds poisoned and embittered by suspicion and hatred and the damning sense of their impotence, as long as conditions here remain what they are!

Our lives are behind us, yours and mine.

But we must make theirs different for them, must keep them away from strait-jacket regulations, must keep them happy and trustful and brave!

It is for this that I fight!

And I would fight if I knew that I could not change a word of our laws and our statutes!'

He did fight.

Unceasingly, along with his rouad, work,--he was one of the managers of a Caucasian railrotine--went the bigger work of making his corner of the world a better place for those who came behind him.

He fought in the ranks of his employees, that the least of these might claim justice and equality; pleaded with school boards and schoolmasters for patience and generosity toward their charges; and fought--and this was the most bitter fight of all--against those who held in their hands the destinies of his city.

In all this he was severely handicapped.

An Armenian by birth, which in itself matters even in cosmopolitan Caucasus, he had inherited the ungovernable temper and unbridled tongue of his people; and this, coupled with his love for truth, worked him unceasing woe among the hidebound conservatism of his associates.

All this Babanchik knew.

And yet, in spite of the knowledge, he had a dream of becoming a member of the city Duma, that he might have a real voice in the direction of the city’s fortunes.

It should not have been a thing so difficult of attainment.

Time after time his name was proposed for the city ballot; time after time hordes of enthusiastic friends made his election a certainty; and time after time, as the deciding day drew near, his candidature was suppressed, his name withheld from the ballot, his adherents silenced--and the dream remained a dream.

No one knew just when it happened, or just how: he was an Armenian and a revolutionist, a freethinker and an enemy of the government, marked '_neblagonadejny_' (not to be depended upon) in the police-books of the city--and no country knows so well as does Russia how best to curtail the activities of such men.

What he could do in spite of these drawbacks, he did.

Was he not our undauntable Babanchik?

If he could not insure fair play for the men of his railroad, he could give them of his advice and sympathy, and they forgot to ask for more.

If additional factory windows did not come into being at his command, he could still lend his money to those of the workers who fell victims to the foul air; and how beautifully he lost his temper when a borrower spoke of interest!

And if school boards and schoolmasters remained unyielding in their demands upon the children he loved, at least the holidays were his, when he could take those children on long walks in the open and teach them to respect their souls and not to step on ants.

All of which we learned much later.

At the time, he was merely our Babanchik, without whom the world could no longer be imagined; who came in the evening to blow out our candles because he had guessed that the memory of his good-night laugh cheated the dark of its dangers; whose rumbling shout awakened us in the morning and opened up for us a new day of unsuspected possibilities.

II

The third summer we did not go to the mountains.

Some one else was sharing Babanchik’s cottage in the Georgian village; he was leading a band of new children in search of mushrooms and adventure.

But we were too excited to care, even in the face of this.

A new unrest hung over our house.

All the day long father was showing strangers about the place, pointing out to them the value of the untouched forest, the richness of the pasture land, the clearness of the drinking water, the glories of the mountains and the sea.

In the sun-filled glass room which served as library mother was superintending the sorting and packing of books.

And a placid-faced woman with the patience of a saint was fitting our squirming bodies into trim, tight-fitting clothes, which, after the loose, shapeless things we had always worn, vexed us endlessly.

We were going to America.

Babanchik came to us often in those last weeks, inexpressibly saddened by our impending departure; and his discussions, to which father listened a bit abstractedly now, grew ever more violent.

Though their invariable ending filled us with an unexpected hope:-- 'When my work is done here, I will come to you, in the United States.

I

cannot, now--there is still so much to be done for my weaker friends.

But when I am very tired, so tired that I can no longer endure it, I shall take my children and come to you--to forget the Russia that I hate.'

So we parted.

We leaned over the rail of an Odessa steamer, our arms overflowing with the packages he had brought us; and he stood on the edge of the wharf, waving his hat and smiling.

But tears were running down his brown cheeks and losing themselves in his beard.

The new life, the new language, new interests, caught us.

From the first Russia seemed very far behind.

Several letters followed us.

Kolya wrote three or four in his uneven round hand--funny little letters which began, 'We have two ducks and two puppies.

How many dogs have you?'

and which were properly answered in kind.

After that, we forgot very quickly.

But Babanchik did not forget.

Once every month we found in our mail-box a fat, square, carelessly addressed envelope, which held a letter for father and a folded note for each of us.

The notes were full of gay nonsense, stories and rhymes and caricatures; but father grew very thoughtful over the letters.

Life was pressing Babanchik hard.

He was still without thought of defeat.

But his enemies were bringing more stringent methods into the combat; he was now being constantly watched.

Other troubles were even harder to bear.

The government was consciously setting the hot-headed Georgians and Armenians at each other’s throats, that neither might have time to think of greater issues.

And Babanchik could but stand by and watch the suffering of his people.

Manya was in school, in the hands of narrow and incompetent teachers, teachers selected for their political views.

Kolya’s turn would soon come.

After that, so ran the letters, his children would have the choice between becoming power-seeking sycophants of the government, and going, as he had gone, into battle with it, knowing beforehand of their certain defeat.

He could not take them away from it--yet.

But he realized, he said, that each day, besides giving to him its measure of sorrow, brought a little nearer the fulfillment of his new dream.

He was beginning to study English.

The years marched on.

The square envelopes came less often, but they came, still full of their old-time warmth for us--full, too, of increasing enmity toward the country which we had left.

Manya had gone to Petrograd to attend women’s 'courses.'

Two years later Kolya followed her, and entered the University in the same city at the time I was enrolled in mine.

And when, a care-free sophomore, I was working off surplus energy in basket-ball and dramatics, a new alarm crept into Babanchik’s letters.

Manya and Kolya were becoming involved in the revolutionary movement.

It is hard, in these clean war days, to remember the murky chaos of the Russia of 1904-06. If a revolution could have come at all, it would have come in those years, and it would have been led by students.

The younger minds were afire with visions of freedom,--irrepressible combinations of deep conviction and the ardor of youth,--visions which took no cognizance of the wide and weary space which lies between desire and accomplishment.

Class-rooms were hotbeds of revolutionary plots,--mad, illogical, glorious plots,--for which their authors, usually still in their teens, paid so heavily.

Too heavily, for the government, alarmed, was losing its head a bit.

The heart of Babanchik beat fearfully.

'I am proud of the trend of their convictions,' he wrote, 'but sometimes I am a little afraid.

They can so easily be led into a spectacular prank, a bit of mischief for which the government might take it into its head to punish them too harshly.

And though we have all become accustomed to that sort of thing, it would hurt me sorely to have them spend two or three months in prison.'

He conjectured mildly.

There was news one day, in our American newspapers, of the attempted assassination of a Petrograd official.

We passed it by--attempted assassinations were no rare events just then--until the next letter came from Babanchik, a letter of two brief paragraphs.

Both Manya and Kolya were implicated in the crime.

Manya had waved her handkerchief from a window which commanded a view of the official’s residence; Kolya had passed the signal to twenty fellow conspirators.

All had been caught and all had confessed.

The official was unhurt and there was hope of a light sentence.

Still--the two or three months of prison lengthened into a prospective two or three years.

Once more he conjectured mildly.

Manya was sentenced to be hanged.

Kolya, because of extreme youth, was punished by life-imprisonment.

We read the story of it, scarce believing, page after anguished page in a handwriting we did not recognize.

We never knew--no one ever did know, save Babanchik himself--all that went after that.

His letters no longer came regularly, and, when they did come, were so incoherent with rage and despair that we gathered little information from them.

We learned, however, that by some superhuman means he had obtained a stay in the execution of the sentence, had taken a leave of absence from his office in Tiflis, had called in all the money which he had loaned, borrowed what additional money he could, and had gone to Petrograd.

At the end of eighteen months there was a new trial, and we were left to guess of much that went between.

It was not difficult to guess, in part.

His way to that new trial had lain along the ways of personal influence, and the men who possessed that influence were the officials whom all his life he had hated and who knew him only as one 'not to be depended upon.'

Could he have abandoned to their fate the twenty whom he did not even know, and worked for his children alone, his task would have been less difficult; but then he would not have been Babanchik.

So for eighteen months he worked; seeking audience in the studies of his enemies, humbling himself before their insolent eyes, accepting from them what taunts they chose to give, holding in calm control the hot temper which was hourly made less manageable by the strain under which he lived, pleading where he longed to curse, smiling where he would kill--and knowing, with a knowledge which made all these things possible, that a careless word on his part would take forever from twenty-two youngsters the one hope to which they clung.

And so he accomplished the inconceivable.

Somehow the new trial was held, somehow the twenty-two sentences were made lighter, unbelievably lighter.

For Manya was sent into a far province and given hard labor for life, and Kolya would be free in ten years.

But what those eighteen months did to the loving big soul of Babanchik can best be told in the barely legible words of the letter which brought us the news.

'It has finished us at last, this country!

It has strangled my children and torn my heart to shreds!

I burn with shame at the thought of being its subject, and there is no wretchedness which I hold too great for it, no plague which I would not send upon it if I could!

I long to take the first steamer away from it.'

But he had his lost fortune to recover before he could go.

There were his debts, too; and the children needed money, even in prison.

He went back to his work with redoubled energy.

But as he fought for the money which would bring him to America, he found himself fighting against a new enemy.

The splendid body had not been able to with-stand the ravages upon his mind; he remembered suddenly that he was nearly seventy.

He spoke little of this,--perhaps he would not believe it, quite,--but there was dejection in every word he wrote.

And we began to wonder whether we should ever see our Babanchik again.

Yet in the winter of 1913 he came to us, a tired and feeble old man.

There was a burned-out look in his eyes, and his wrinkled pongee suit hung limp from stooping shoulders.

The journey across Siberia had been hard, that across the Pacific still more trying; there had been an alarming wireless from the nurse who accompanied him.

But he reached us, and as I remember the sound of his laugh on that first day twenty years ago, so shall I never forget the ineffable happiness in his face when he stood, a few days after his coming, and looked out over our sunlit valley.

'Peace,' he said, 'and joy.

And the end of Russia forever.

God has been good.'

He built for himself a tiny bungalow in a corner of our garden,--one that could be moved when Kolya should have come to him,--and was soon deeply engrossed in the simple tasks in which erstwhile busy men sometimes find such keen delight.

All day long he spaded and raked and planted, wrote letters home, and went on ever-lengthening walks; but evening brought him to our living-room where, beside the humming samovar, we swung the conversation round to his wild Caucasian tales.

The stories he told were not new; we had heard them all many times before.

Accounts of his own trips in pathless mountains, adventures of the danger-loving Georgians, legends of his own people, the Armenians--they had lost not a shade of their interest in the years which had gone since those other winter evenings, when the sea raged just beyond the pasture-bars and made us crowd close to the fireplace and to him.

Often, too, he talked of his children, but always it was of their life before Manya had waved her handkerchief from a window.

Only of Russia itself he would not speak, nor would he read our Russian newspapers.

'Let her be,' he once said, 'the vampire!

I ask only to forget.'

And we thought that he did forget, for the months brought to him an ever-deepening contentment.

His shoulders were squaring themselves into old accustomed lines, the illness which had menaced gave no sign.

Spring found him searching for a plot of land which would be his own, for Kolya had but two more years to serve.

III

And then, in the summer, came the war.

We translated the news to Babanchik--he had never finished learning his English.

A smile twisted his mouth.

'Retribution!'

he said; and there was something very dreadful in his uplifted hand.

'I pray that Germany will destroy all Russia.'

We turned upon him in indignation.

Under our accusing eyes his arm came down and hung limp by his side.

He swung on his heel and left us, muttering as he went,-- 'Nothing but German shells will ever break down her prisons.'

There followed the weeks and months of tense living.

The Russian papers were filled with opportunities for the new work; names of old friends appeared in committee lists.

As for us, we could but talk of it endlessly, and dream of it, wait for the morning paper, and talk again.

We still saw Babanchik every day, but, every day, he mattered less.

We could, and did, accept without comment his attitude toward the country which still held our affection, but, somehow, we had lost interest in his stories.

The war went on.

The enemy was halted before Paris; the Russians swarmed over Prussia and were promptly driven back, far over their own boundary.

Riga began to figure in the dispatches, and life seemed a solemn thing--so solemn that we had no time at all for noticing that something was very much amiss with Babanchik, until he said one evening, diffidently,-- 'If you could ask your doctor to stop in--some day.'

We stared at him curiously.

Why did he have that ghastly look about him?

He was perfectly well only the day before--or was it last week--or was it a month ago?

When was it that we had really looked at him?

What had checked so suddenly the straightening of his shoulders?

We could not say.

But we were vaguely ashamed.

The doctor was terse and explicit.

'There is nothing wrong, chronically, save a general hardening of the arteries and a very high blood-pressure.

He must have had bad news recently, a sorrow of some sort.'

'Nothing new,' I contradicted.

'He has been perfectly happy until now.'

'The war perhaps?

or Russian reverses?'

'Oh,' I answered lightly, 'he cares nothing for the war, and Russian reverses would cause him no sorrow.'

The doctor left no medicine.

'Keep him amused,' he ordered, 'and don’t let him grow excited.

That is the only remedy.'

Keep him amused!

With no thought in our minds, no word on our tongues which did not deal with the war, the war of which he never spoke, with which he had no concern!

It was the youngest brother who broke through our quandary.

'I think we have all been blind--and stupid!

Babanchik never asks for war news.

But why does he always happen to be about when the paper comes in the morning?

Why does he never change the subject as long as we talk of the battles?

Haven’t you seen the embarrassed look on his face when Germany claims victory?

And why didn’t he need the doctor until Warsaw was endangered?'

Thus did we chance upon the truth.

Though even then we were not certain--not until a letter, six months delayed, came to him from Kolya.

Babanchik’s hands shook when he laid it down.

'The little rat!

What do you think he has done?

He has sent a petition to the Tsar, the Tsar himself!

To beg to be released from prison that he may join the army.

He promises to go to the most dangerous position, to do the hardest work, if the Tsar will only set him free and let him fight.

The blessed little rat!'

'Fight?'

I asked, and looked Babanchik straight in the face, 'fight for Russia?'

The embarrassed look came into his eyes.

But, even then, he did not at once capitulate.

'O my dear,' he replied, 'youth forgets so easily!'

After that it was not difficult to keep him amused.

But to keep him from growing excited was not a task for human minds.

Already he was fighting with Kolya.

At night he lay awake, gleefully devising a thousand sly schemes whereby, single-handed, Kolya should take captive a hundred Germans; the days he spent in filling his letters to the boy with a detailed description of these schemes.

Each morning we were introduced to marvels of unheard-of strategy, and called upon to translate from the newspaper every word of the long and conflicting dispatches.

He was forgetting to eat, he had no time for exercise.

An alarming shortness of breath followed, and we sent for the doctor again.

The latter’s visit was short, his opinion no less so:-- 'If he continues to live at this tension he will not last until winter.

Keep him quiet.'

And he left some pills.

And then came another letter from Kolya.

I stepped into Babanchik’s room a few minutes after he had read it and found him at his open window, staring out at the sky.

He brushed his hands across his eyes before he turned and held out the letter to me.

'Read it, my dear.'

The uneven round handwriting was pathetically reminiscent of the letters which used to deal with ducks and puppies, and there was boyish heartbreak in every word of the curt, matter-of-fact sentences.

Kolya’s petition had not been granted.

'And now, father,' the letter ran on, 'you will have to come back.

We are the men of our family.

And, since the Tsar has decided that I must not help, the honor of that family rests with you.

For, if you fail, I also fail.'

I looked up over the page.

What could he do, a sick old man, in a country which was calling forth the finest of its young strength?

He answered my unspoken question, hastily.

'There is much for me.

The wounded are coming home; I could read to them in the hospitals, and tell stories--you know how well I tell stories.

And I can count cars--that is the logical work for one who had been so long with the road.

Right in Tiflis I can count them,--supply-trains go out from there,--and release a younger man for the front.

Will you get me a schedule of the sailings of Japanese steamers, my dear?'

So came his decision.

At dinner-time he could not eat.

Morning found him with a newspaper in his hand.

Out of his meagre knowledge of English he was trying to decipher the flaming headlines.

He waved away the suggestion of breakfast.

Food interfered with his breathing, he said;

but would we not bring in his trunks and suitcases?

By afternoon he was shivering, and the tea I made for him failed to warm his hands.

And once more we called the doctor.

He fought with all the strength which was left him, our gentle Babanchik, fought with tears of helpless fury coursing down his face, when we took him from the chaos of his packing and put him to bed.

And a hard three months began for all of us.

It was a cold and cheerless autumn of early rains.

The doctor came every day.

And every day I sat at the bedside, translating to him Babanchik’s entreaties and commands.

I had procured for him the schedule of Japanese steamers, and he had marked the dates of their sailing with red ink.

'Tell him,' he would say, his unsteady forefinger on the first of these, 'that I must be fit for travel by this date.

Tell him to give me more medicine--I shall take two pills every half hour.

Tell him I cannot wait.'

And again, two or three days later, his finger back on the page,-- 'There is no use in trying to catch this boat now.

But tell him that the next one goes two weeks later.

Surely he can cure me in two weeks; tell him that that’s fourteen days.'

The weeks crept by and, one after another, the Japanese steamers sailed without him; but in his mind, which was slowly losing its clearness, a new hope dawned each day.

I began to dread the hours beside his bed.

It was hard to listen to the plans for his work which, under the stress of mounting fever, often trailed off to incoherent muttering, and to watch the thin profile of his face showing an ever sharper line against the pillow; hard to follow the doctor to his car and hear his passionless, hopeless words; harder still to go back and face the crazily bright eyes of Babanchik and, in response to his questions, lie cheerfully and so extravagantly that it seemed that only a madman could believe.

Yet he believed.

For, one morning, I found him ruling a sheet of paper on a lapboard--he had fumed until the nurse had given him his pen.

The vertical lines cut unsteadily across the page, and at the top of the columns he had written:-- 'Date.'

--'Car Number.'

--'Destination.'

--'Cargo.'

'You see, my dear,' he explained eagerly, 'there will be a great deal of purely mechanical work, such as this, to be done, and much of it I can do beforehand.

For I shall be too busy, in Tiflis, and I cannot expect an assistant at this time.'

On that day I did not go back to his room.

The doctor’s words had been fewer than usual, and there are times when one does not lie.

But, before bedtime, seeing his light burning, I tiptoed in.

He stared dully.

'You have been talking long--I fell asleep waiting.

And I wanted you to tell your doctor that I am losing all patience.

If he cannot make me well enough to go at once, I shall find some other way to go--without his help.

Keeping me in a warm room, the rain shut out, while my boys are lying in trenches!

When I could be counting cars--' His breath failed him and he closed his eyes.

Only when I looked back at him, with my hand on the door-knob, did he finish the sentence--'for Russia.'

When again I saw him he was neither old nor feeble nor ill.

By some untold magic he had become the undauntable Babanchik of twenty years ago.

Only, his pongee suit had been very carefully pressed, and this, together with his unsmiling mouth, made him look strange--strange and a little forbidding, as if the way for which he had been searching was one with which we could have no concern.

And, presently, one of the Japanese steamers was taking him back to Russia.

ROSITA