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About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 16, 1893)
V & THE HESPERIAN I I she had heard it from returned convicts; all about the awful marches in the mud and ice, and how on the boundary line the men would weep and fall down and kiss the soil of Rus sia. When her brother reached the prison, he and his wife used to work in the mines. His wife was too good a woman to get on well in the prison, the haba said, and one day she had been knouted to death at the command of an officer. After that her hus band tried in many ways to kill himself, but they always caught him at it. At last, one night, he bit deep into his arm and tore open the veins with his teeth and bled to death. The officials found him dead with his teeth still set in his lacerated arm. When she finished the little boys used to cry out at the awfulness of it, but their mother would soothe them and tell them that such things could not possibly happen here, because in this country the State took care of people. In Russia there was no State, only the great Tzar. Ah, yes, the State would take care of the children! The labahnd heard a Fourth-6f-July speech once, and she had great ideas about the State. Serge used to listen till his eyes grew big, and play that he was that brother of the ldba8 and that he had been knouted by the officials and that was why his little legs smarted so. Sometimes he would steal out in the snow in his bare feet and take a sun flower stalk and play he was hunting bears in Russia, or would walk about on the little frozen pond where his mother had died and think it was the Volga. Before his birth his mother used to go off alone and sit in the snow for hours to cool the fever in her head and weep and think about her own country. The feeling for the snow and the love for it seemed lo go into the boy's blood, somehow. He was never so happy as when he saw the white flakes whirling. When he was twelve years old a farmer took him to work for his board and clothes. Then a change came into Serge's life. That first morning lie stood, awkward and embar rassed, in the Davis kitchen, holding his hands under his hat and shuffling his bare feet over the floor, a little yellow cur came up to him and began to rub its nose against his leg. He held out his hand and the dog licked it. Serge bent over him, stroking him and calling him Russian pet names. For the first time in his lonely, loveless life, he felt that something liked him. The Davises gave him enough to eat and enough to wear and they did not beat him. He could not read or talk English, so they treated him very much as they did the horses. He stayed there seven years because he did not have sense enough to know that he was utterly miserable and could go somewhere else, and because the Slavonic instinct was in him to labor and keep silent. The dog was the only thing that made life endurable. He called the dog Matusika, which was the name by which he always thought of his mother. He used to go to town sometimes, but he did not enjoy it, people frightened him so. When the town girls used to pass him dressed in their pretty dresses with their clean, white hands, ho thought of his bare feet and his rough, tawny hair and his ragged overalls, and he would slink away behind his team with Matiishka. On the coldest winter nights he always slept in the barn with the dog for a bedfellow. As he and the dog cuddled up to each other in the hay, he used to think about things, most often about Rus sia and the State. Russia must be a fine country but he was glad he did not live there, because the State was much better. The State was so very good to people. Once a man came there to get Davis to vote for him, and he asked Serge who his father was. Serge said he had none. The man only smiled and said, "Well, never mind, the State will be a father to you, my lad, and a mother." Serge had a vague idea that the State must be an abstract thing of some kind, but he always thought of her as a vroraan with kind eyes, dressed in white with a yellow light about her head, and a little child in her arms, like the picture of the virgin in the church. He always took off his hat when ho passed TmmwmmiMmmmtMmimiMu ESWK mmmmmmmmmmm