He remembered on
holidays the wild racing and chasing and the sports in the saddle, the
picking up of the tiny ten-kopek bit from the earth at a full gallop, the
startling game in which a row of fearless Cossack girls join hands
together, daring the best rider to break their rank with his plunging
horse if he can, the mad laughter of the maidens, the snorting and rearing
of the animal as he checks himself before the human wall that will not
part to make way for him. All these things he recalled, the change of the
seasons, the iron winter, the scorching summer, the glory of autumn and
the freshness of spring. Born to such a liberty, he had fallen into the
captivity of a common life; bred in the desert, he knew that his declining
years would be spent in the eternal cutting of tobacco in the close air of
a back shop; trained to the saddle, he spent his days seated motionless
upon a wooden chair. The contrast was bitter enough, between the life he
was meant to lead by nature, and the life he was made to lead by
circumstances. And all this was the result in the first instant of a
girl's caprice, of her fancy for another man, so little different from
himself that a Western woman could hardly have told the two apart. For
this, he had left the steppe, had wandered westward to the Dnieper and
southward to Odessa, northward again to Kiew, to Moscow, to
Nizni-Novgorod, back again to Poland, to Krakau, to Prague, to Munich at
last. Who could remember his wanderings, or trace the route of his endless
journeyings? Not he himself, surely, any more than he could explain the
gradual steps by which he had been transformed from a Don Cossack to a
German tobacco-cutter in a cigarette manufactory.
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