“A White Nun?”
“God knows. She had some white rags hanging to her body, and dark hair clipped like a boy’s.”
“That–was–she!” said the soldier with slow conviction. He turned and looked down the long perspective of the forest road. Only a raven stalked there all alone over the fallen leaves.
“Certainly,” he said, “that was our White Nun. The Cossacks took her with them. They must have ridden fast, the horsemen of Kaledines.”
“Like a swift storm. Like the souls of the damned,” replied a peasant.
The soldier shrugged: “If there’s still a Romanoff loose in the world, God save the world!.. And that big heifer of a Swedish wench!–she was a bad one, I tell you!–Took six of us to catch her and ten to hold her by her ten fingers and toes! Hey! God bless me, but she stands six feet and is made of steel cased in silk–all white, smooth and iron-hard–the blond young snow-tiger that she is!–the yellow-haired, six-foot, slippery beastess! God bless me–God bless me!” he muttered, staring down the wood-road to its vanishing point against the grey horizon.
Then he hitched his slung rifle to a more comfortable position, turned, gazed at the convent across the fields, which his distant comrades were now approaching.
“A German nest,” he said aloud to himself, “full of their damned Deaconesses! Hey! I’ll be going along to see what’s to be done with them, also!”
He nodded to the wood-cutters:
“Vermin-killing time,” he remarked cheerily. “After the dirty work is done, peace, land enough for everybody, ease and plenty and a full glass always at one’s elbows–eh, comrades?”
He strode away across the fields.
It had begun to snow.
ARGUMENT
The Cossacks sang as they rode:
“Life is against us
We are born crying:
Life that commenced us
Leaves us all dying.
We were born crying;
We shall die sighing.
“Shall we sit idle?
Follow Death’s dance!
Pick up your bridle,
Saddle and lance!
Cossacks, advance!”
They were from the Urals: they sat their shaggy little grey horses, lance in hand, stirrup deep in saddle paraphernalia–kit-bags, tents, blankets, trusses of straw, a dead fowl or two or a quarter of beef. And from every saddle dangled a balalaika and the terrible Cossack whip.
The steel of their lances flashed red in the setting sun; snow whirled before the wind in blinding pinkish clouds, powdering horse and rider from head to heel.
Again one rider unslung his balalaika, struck it, looking skyward as he rode:
“Stars in your courses,
This is our answer;
Women and horses,
Singer and dancer
Fall to the lancer!
That is your answer!
“Though the Dark Raider
Rob us of joy–
Death, the Invader,
Come to destroy–
Nichevo! Stoi!”
They rode into a forest, slowly, filing among the silver birches, then trotting out amid the pines.
The Swedish girl towered in her saddle, dwarfing the shaggy pony. She wore her grey wool cap, overcoat, and boots. Pistols bulged in the saddle holsters; sacks of grain and a bag of camp tins lay across pommel and cantle.
Beside her rode the novice, swathed to the eyes in a sheepskin greatcoat, and a fur cap sheltering her shorn head.
Her lethargy–a week’s reaction from the horrors of the convent–had vanished; and a feverish, restless alertness had taken its place.
Nothing of the still, white novice was visible now in her brilliant eyes and flushed cheeks.
Her tragic silence had given place to an unnatural loquacity; her grief to easily aroused mirth; and the dark sorrow in her haunted eyes was gone, and they grew brown and sunny and vivacious.
She talked freely with her comrade, Ilse Westgard; she exchanged gossip and banter with the Cossacks, argued with them, laughed with them, sang with them.
At night she slept in her sheepskin in Ilse Westgard’s vigorous arms; morning, noon and evening she filled the samovar with snow beside Cossack fires, or in the rare cantonments afforded in wretched villages, where whiskered and filthy mujiks cringed to the Cossacks, whispering to one another: “There is no end to death; there is no end to the fighting and the dying, God bless us all. There is no end.”
In the glare of great fires in muddy streets she stood, swathed in her greatcoat, her cap pushed back, looking like some beautiful, impudent boy, while the Cossacks sang “Lada oy Lada!”–and let their slanting eyes wander sideways toward her, till her frank laughter set the singers grinning and the gusli was laid aside.
And once, after a swift gallop to cross a railroad and an exchange of shots with the Red guards at long range, the sotnia of the Wild Division rode at evening into a little hamlet of one short, miserable street, and shouted for a fire that could be seen as far as Moscow.
That night they discovered vodka–not much–enough to set them singing first, then dancing. The troopers danced together in the fire-glare–clumsily, in their boots, with interims of the pas seul savouring of the capers of those ancient Mongol horsemen in the Hezars of Genghis Khan.
But no dancing, no singing, no clumsy capers were enough to satisfy these riders of the Wild Division, now made boisterous by vodka and horse-meat. Gossip crackled in every group; jests flew; they shouted at the peasants; they roared at their own jokes.
“Comrade novice!–Pretty boy with a shorn head!” they bawled. “Harangue us once more on law and love.”
She stood with legs apart and thumbs hooked in her belt, laughing at them across the fire. And all around crowded the wretched mujiks, peering at her through shaggy hair, out of little wolfish eyes.
A Cossack shouted: “My law first! Land for all! That is what we have, we Cossacks! Land for the people, one and all–land for the mujik; land for the bourgeois; land for the aristocrat! That law solves all, clears all questions, satisfies all. It is the Law of Peace!”
A Cossack shoved a soldier-deserter forward into the firelight. He wore a patch of red on his sleeve.
“Answer, comrade! Is that the true law? Or have you and your comrades made a better one in Petrograd?”
The deserter, a little frightened, tried to grin: “A good law is, kill all generals,” he said huskily. “Afterward we shall have peace.”
A roar of laughter greeted him; these dark, thickset Cossacks with slanting eyes were from the Urals. What did they care how many generals were killed? Besides, their hetman had already killed himself.
Their officer moved out into the firelight–a reckless rider but a dull brain–and stood lashing at his snow-crusted boots with the silver-mounted quirt.
“Like gendarmes,” he said, “we Cossacks are forever doing the dirty work of other people. Why? It begins to sicken me. Why are we forever executing the law! What law? Who made it? The Tzar. And he is dead, and what is the good of the law he made?
“Why