From the salle-a-manger hard by came now and then the melancholy, hollow tones of Viatkin’s and Osadchi’s improvised Mass for the Dead, which had a weird and threatening ring about it in the silent night.
Romashov seized his head with both hands.
“I beseech you, gentlemen, to stop this. I can’t stand it any longer.”
“Go to the devil!” roared Solotuchin.
“No, stop, dear boy—whither away?
But, by all that’s unholy, you shall first drink a glass with two fine fellows.
Catch tight hold of him, Captain, I’ll shut the door.”
With a yell of laughter the two scoundrels jumped up to seize Romashov; but the latter’s self-command was exhausted.
The whole hideous situation—this disgusting drinking-bout in the weird, dark room with its insufferable, stifling atmosphere—this mysterious midnight meeting between two individuals who were a danger to society—the vulgar bellowing of the drunken officers and their blasphemous parody of the Russian Mass—all this filled him with frantic terror and nausea.
With a piercing shriek, he thrust Solotuchin from him, and, trembling in every limb, rushed deliberately from the mortuary.
Common sense now urged him to go home, but a strange, unfathomable inward force again drove him, against his will, to the mess-room.
There some of the wine-soaked company were asleep on the window-sills and chairs.
A stifling heat prevailed, and, in spite of the wide-open windows, the drowsily burning lights and lamps were never reached by a quickening draught of air.
The poor, dead-tired soldiers who attended to the waiting could scarcely stand on their legs, and every moment stifled a yawn, but as yet none of the champion boozers had entertained a thought of breaking up.
Viatkin had again taken his place on a table, and was singing in his high, caressive tenor voice—
“Swift as the ocean’s Roaring billows, Vanishes life in eternity.”
There were several officers in the regiment with really beautiful voices, which even now were very effective in spite of the drink.
This simple, plaintive melody exercised, at this moment, an ennobling influence on all, and more than one of them experienced a pricking, remorseful feeling at the thought of his worthless, sinful life.
“Once you’re in your coffin, Soon the world forgets your name,”
continued Viatkin in a voice of emotion, and his sleepy but good eyes were dimmed with tears.
Artschakovski seconded him with unimpeachable care.
To make his voice thrill he grasped his larynx with two fingers and shook it.
Osadchi accompanied it all with his heavy, long-drawn, organ notes.
After the singing there reigned a deep silence for a few moments.
Suddenly Osadchi began again to recite in a subdued tone and eyes cast down—
“All ye who wander in sorrow’s heavy, narrow road——”
“No, that’s enough of it,” a voice exclaimed.
“This is now, I suppose, the tenth time we have taken up this cursed Mass of Requiem——”
But the rest had already intoned the solemn melody that divides the recitative of the antiphon, and once more, in the reeking and dirty room, resounded the requiem over St. John of Damascus in clear, full-voiced strains that express in so masterly a way the inconsolable sorrow for death’s inexorable cruelty—
“All ye who believe in Me enter into the joy of My Father.”
Artschakovski, who was as familiar with the ritual as the most experienced choir-singer, at once repeated the following answer in accordance with the text—
“With our whole soul we all praise,” etc.
And so the whole antiphon was chanted; but when Osadchi’s turn came to take up the recitation for the last time, he lowered his head like an infuriated bull, the veins in his neck swelled, and as he directed his melancholy, cruel, and threatening glances towards those present, he declaimed in a half-singing tone, and in a voice that resembled the roar of distant thunder—
“Give, O Lord, Thy departed slave, Nikifor, A blessed departure hence and eternal rest.” In the midst of this lofty and pious invocation he stopped short, and, to the horror of the bystanders, uttered two words of the most blasphemous, cynical, and disgusting import.
Romashov jumped up, and thumped his fist, like a madman, on the table.
“Be silent! I forbid this,” he roared in a voice trembling with anger and pain.
“What are you laughing at, Captain Osadchi? You ought to be ashamed. Your eyes are mocking, but I see and know that remorse, terror, and the tortures of hell are raging in your heart.”
A hideous silence on the part of all followed this outbreak of temper. Then a voice from the crowd was heard to exclaim—
“Is he drunk?”
These three words relaxed all the terrible tension of the situation; but at the same moment let loose afresh—just as a few hours previously in Schleyfer’s den of infamy—all the evil spirits of orgy. There was shrieking, hooting, stamping, jumping, and dancing; the whole room was turned in a trice into an indescribable, savage, motley chaos.
Viatkin, who jumped on to a table, hit his head against the big hanging lamp, which then swayed in awful zigzag curves, producing for some time a fantastic series of dissolving views on the ceiling and walls, on which drunken, frantic human beings were depicted as marvellous, gigantic shapes, or as huddled, dwarfish figures resembling embryos. The debauch seemed at last to reach its height.
All these wretched creatures were possessed, as it were, by a savage, exultant, ruthless fiend who, mocking at all the laws of sense and decency, forced his victims, by blasphemies, oaths, and all kinds of shamelessness, to abdicate the last shreds of their human dignity.
Romashov, in the smoke and stuffiness, suddenly caught sight of a person with features distorted by rage and incessant hooting, which for that reason seemed to him, in the first instant, unrecognizable.
It was none other than Nikolaiev, who, now foaming with hate and fury, roared to his enemy:
“You’re a disgrace to the whole regiment, you and Nasanski! Not a word or, by God! I’ll——”
Romashov felt that some one was pulling him, gently and cautiously, a few paces backwards.
He turned round and recognized Agamalov, but at the same instant forgot him, and turned quickly round to Nikolaiev.
White with suppressed rage, he answered in a low, hoarse voice and a forced and bitter smile—
“What reason have you to mention Nasanski’s name?
But perhaps you have some private, secret cause for hating him?”