The story-teller had hardly uttered this last word, when suddenly both dogs leapt up and with a burst of barking rushed away from the fire and vanished into the darkness. The boys all jumped with fright. Vanya sprung up from under his matting, and Pavel darted off shouting after the dogs. Their barking quickly grew more distant. . . . We could hear the restless hooves of frightened horses. Pavel shouted loudly: “Gray! Beetle!” After a few moments the barking stopped. Pavel’s voice could be heard, already some way off. . . . A little time went by; the boys exchanged puzzled glances as if expecting something to happen. . . . Suddenly came the sound of a galloping horse; it stopped sharp at the very fireside and, holding on by the mane, Pavel jumped nimbly down. The two dogs came darting into the circle of firelight as well, and sat down at once with their red tongues hanging out.
“What was it? What was the matter?” asked the boys.
“Nothing,” answered Pavel, waving his hand at the horse. “The dogs just scented something. I thought it was a wolf,” he added in an indifferent voice, breathing quickly and full-chestedly.
I found myself involuntarily admiring Pavel. He was splendid at that moment. His ugly face, animated by the gallop, blazed with cool audacity and firm resolution. Without a stick in his hand, at night, he had ridden out alone after a wolf, without turning a hair. . . . That’s a fine boy, I thought, as I looked at him.
“Well, did you see them, the wolves?” asked Kostya the coward.
“There are always lots of them about here,” answered Pavel, “but they’re only troublesome in winter.”
He settled down again in front of the fire. Sitting on the ground, he propped his hand on the shaggy neck of one of the dogs and for a while the delighted animal never moved its head, but looked sideways at Pavel with grateful pride.
Vanya huddled up again under the matting.
“But that’s a terrible story you told us, Ilyusha,” said Fedya, who, as the son of a well-to-do peasant, was the right one to call the tune (while saying little himself, as if afraid of cheapening his dignity). “And some evil spirit made the dogs bark like that. . . . I’d certainly heard that the place was haunted.”
“Varnavitsy? . . . I should say it is! the old master is supposed to have been seen there more than once—the late master. They say he walks in a coat with long skirts and groans all the time and looks for something on the ground. Grandfather Trofimich met him once, and asked him: ‘What is it, Ivan Ivanich, sir, that your worship is looking for on the ground?’”
“He asked him?” interrupted Fedya in astonishment.
“Yes, he did.”
“Well, Trofimich is a stout fellow to have done that! And what answer did he get?”
“‘I am looking for saxifrage,’ he says: and he says it in such a flat, flat voice: ‘saxifrage.’ ‘But, Ivan Ivanich, sir, what do you want with saxifrage?’ ‘The grave presses hard on me, Trofimich,’ he says. ‘I want to get out and away. . . .’”
“Fancy that!” remarked Fedya. “As if he hadn’t lived enough.”
“That’s very strange!” said Kostya. “I thought you could only see the dead on All-Hallows day.”
“You can see the dead at any hour of the day or night,” asserted Ilyusha with conviction. So far as I could observe, he seemed to know all the village lore better than his fellows . . . “But on All-Hallows day you can see a living man too whose turn it is to die in the same year. All you have to do is to sit at night at the porch of the church and keep on looking at the road. The people who go past you on the road are those who are going to die in the same year. Ulyana in our village sat up like that last year.”
“Well, and did she see anybody?” asked Kostya curiously.
“Certainly she did. First of all she sat for a long, long while and never saw or heard anyone; she only thought she heard a dog barking, barking away somewhere the whole time . . . Suddenly she looks, and along the road comes a boy wearing nothing but a shirt; she looks closer, and it’s Ivashka Fedoseyev going by . . .”
“The one who died in the spring?” Fedya interrupted.
“Yes, that’s the one. He was walking along without lifting his head. But Ulyana recognizes him. . . . And then she looks—a woman is walking past. She looks and looks—and good Lord!—it’s she herself, Ulyana herself, walking along the road.”
“Really herself?” asked Fedya.
“Yes, by God, herself.”
“Well, what about it? She still hasn’t died.”
“The year isn’t up yet. But you just look at her. Her soul only just hangs on to her body.”
They all fell silent again. Pavel threw a handful of dry twigs on the fire. They showed up sharp and black against the sudden blaze of flame, crackled, smoked, and started to shrivel and lift their charred ends. Flickering and trembling, the reflection of the blaze struck out in all directions, especially upwards. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a white pigeon flew straight into this reflection, pulled up in fright, hovered, all suffused with the warm glow, and vanished with a whirr of wings.
“He must have escaped from home,” observed Pavel. “Now he’ll fly until he strikes something, and wherever he does he’ll stay until daybreak.”
“Why, Pavel,” said Kostya, “wasn’t that a just soul flying to heaven?”
Pavel threw another handful of twigs on the fire. “Perhaps,” he said at length.
“But tell me, Pavel,” began Fedya, “in your village, too, in Shalamovo, did you see the heavenly portent?”*
“When the sun hid itself? Of course we did.”
“I suppose you were frightened, too?”
“Yes, and we were not the only ones. Our master, although he told us beforehand that there would be a portent, yet, when it got dark, it seems he got so scared himself, you wouldn’t believe it. And in the servants’ quarters, as soon as it got dark, the cook went and broke all the pots in the oven with the oven-fork: ‘Who’s going to eat now,’ she says, ‘now the end of the world has come?’ So the soup was all spilled. And in our village they were saying that white wolves would run about the earth and eat people up, and birds of prey would fly about, and that we would see Trishka* himself.”
“Who is Trishka?” asked Kostya.
“Don’t you know?” took up Ilyusha excitedly. “Where do you come from, not to know about Trishka? They must all be stay-at-homes in your village, that’s what they must be! Trishka’s a marvellous sort of man who’s going to come one day; such a marvellous sort of man that you won’t be able to take hold of him or do anything to him, such a marvellous man he’ll be that some Christian folk will want to get hold of him, they’ll go at him with sticks, they’ll surround him, but he’ll lead their eyes astray, so that they’ll start beating each other. Say they put him in prison, he’ll ask for a drink of water in a bowl; they’ll bring him the bowl, and he’ll dive into it and vanish right away. They’ll throw him in chains, but he’ll clap his hands and the chains’ll just fall off him. Well, this Trishka will walk in village and town; and this Trishka, the sly fellow that he is, will tempt Christian folk. . . . But there’ll be nothing that you can do to him. That’s the sort of marvellous, sly fellow he’ll be.”
“Yes,” continued Pavel in his unhurried voice, “that’s how he’ll be. We were expecting him, too. The old people told us that as soon as the heavenly portent started, Trishka would come. Well, the portent started. Everyone went out into the road and into the fields and waited for what would happen next. Round us, you know, the country is clear and open. They looked, and suddenly down from the village on the hill came an odd sort of man with a marvellous sort of head . . . and everybody shouted: ‘Oy, Trishka is come! Oy, Trishka is come!’ And everyone hid where they could. The village elder crept into a ditch; his wife got stuck under the gate and screamed for all she was worth, and gave the dog in her yard such a fright that it snapped its chain and went off through the fence into the forest; and Kuzka’s father, Dorofeich, jumped into a field of oats, sat down, and started calling like a
quail: ‘Surely,’ he thought, ‘a bird ought to be safe from him, fiend and destroyer though he is!’ That’s how scared we all were! . . . And all the time it was our barrelmaker, Vavila: he’d bought himself a new jug, and had put the empty jug over his head.”
All the boys laughed, and again fell silent for a moment, as often happens when people are talking in the open air. I looked round: night reigned in all the majesty of its empire; the moist freshness of late evening had given place to the dry warmth of midnight, which would lie for some while yet, in a soft veil, over the sleeping fields; we were still a long time from the first murmur, the first rustlings and swishings of dawn, the first dewdrops of daybreak. There was no moon in the heavens; it was the period of late moonrise. The numberless golden stars, twinkling in rivalry, seemed all to be floating gently in the direction of the Milky Way, and, indeed, looking at them, you felt yourself vaguely aware of the earth’s purposeful, unceasing course . . . A strange, sharp, ailing cry sounded, suddenly, twice together, from above the river and, after a few moments, it came again from farther in the distance. . . .
Kostya shuddered . . . “What was that?”
“It was a heron calling,” rejoined Pavel calmly.
“A heron,” repeated Kostya. “But, Pavel, what was it that I heard yesterday evening?” He added after a pause: “You may know . . .”
“What did you hear?”
“This is what I heard. I was going from Stone Ridge to Shashkino; first I went right along our hazel-wood, then across the meadow—you know the place where it comes out at the corner of the ravine—well, there, you know, there’s a dewpond; it’s all overgrown with reeds; well, I was walking past this dewpond, when suddenly, from out of it, someone sort of groaned, and so sadly, so sadly: ‘u—u . . . u—u . . . u—u! . . .’ Such a fright took hold of me: it was late, and the voice sounded so ill. It was enough to make you cry yourself. . . . What could that have been, eh?”
“In that dewpond, the summer before last, Akim, the forester, was drowned by thieves,” observed Pavel. “So perhaps it’s his soul complaining.”
“Well, there you are, boys,” rejoined Kostya, widening his eyes, which were anyway huge enough. “I never even knew that Akim was drowned in that dewpond: if I’d known, I’d have been ever so frightened.”
“Or else, there are tiny little frogs, so they say,” continued Pavel, “which call out sadly like that.”
“Frogs? No, it wasn’t frogs . . . it wasn’t frogs that made that noise.”
A heron called again from over the river: “Ooh, there he is!” said Kostya involuntarily. “Like a wood-goblin calling.”
“The wood-goblin doesn’t call, he’s dumb,” asserted Ilyusha. “He can only clap his hands and rattle! . . .”
“I suppose you’ve seen him?” Fedya interrupted, in a mocking voice.
“Certainly not, and heaven preserve me from doing so: but others have. Why, the other day, he led one of our peasants astray: took him round and round in the forest, all the way round the same clearing. . . . He hardly got home before dawn.”
“Did he see him?”
“Yes, he said he was a great big dark fellow, all muffled up, he seemed to be hiding behind a tree; you couldn’t make him out clearly, he seemed to be hiding from the moon, and he looked and looked with his great eyes, and twinkled and twinkled away with them. . . .”
“Ugh!” exclaimed Fedya, trembling slightly and shuddering at the shoulders. “Phew!”
“And what’s this pest doing walking the earth?” observed Pavel. “What does he think he’s doing?”
“Don’t curse him: look out, or he’ll hear you,” said Ilyusha.
Silence fell again. “Look, look, boys,” came suddenly Vanya’s childish voice. “Look at God’s little stars—like bees swarming.” He stuck out his fresh little face from under the matting, leant on his fist and slowly raised his big, calm eyes aloft. All the boys gazed up to the sky and didn’t look down for quite a while.
“Well, Vanya,” began Fedya tenderly, “is your sister Anyutka well?”
“Very well,” answered Vanya, slightly slurring the “r.”
“Tell her to come and see us; why doesn’t she come?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell her to come.”
“I will.”
“Tell her that I’ll give her a present.”
“And me too?”
“Yes, you too.”
Vanya sighed.
“Well, no, I don’t need one. Better give it to her, she’s so good and kind.”
Vanya rested his little head on the ground again. Pavel stood up and took the empty pot in his hands.
“Where are you going?” Fedya asked him.
“To the river, to draw water: I feel like a good drink of water.”
The dogs rose and went after him.
“Mind you don’t fall into the river,” Ilyusha called after him.
“Why should he fall?” said Fedya. “He’ll take care.”
“Yes, he’ll take care. But anything may happen. Say he bends down and begins to draw water, and the water-goblin takes him by the hand and pulls him under. Afterwards they’ll say the lad fell into the water. . . . Fell in, indeed! . . . There, he’s gone down into the rushes,” he added, listening hard.
There came the rustle of parting reeds.
“Is it true,” asked Kostya, “that crazy Akulina went off her head when she fell into the water?”
“Yes. . . . Just look at her now! . . . But they say that she used to be beautiful. The water-goblin spoilt her. I suppose he didn’t expect that they’d pull her out so soon. So he spoilt her, down there at the bottom where he lives.”
(I had met this Akulina more than once. Covered in rags, dreadfully thin, with a face as black as coal, a clouded look and teeth ever-bared, she would stamp for whole hours on the same spot on the road, tightly pressing her bony hands to her breast and slightly shifting her weight from one leg to the other, like a wild creature in a cage. She understood not a word of what was said to her, but only laughed convulsively from time to time.)
“But, they say,” continued Kostya, “that Akulina threw herself into the river because her lover played her false.”
“Yes, that was why.”
“D’you remember Vasily?” added Kostya suddenly.
“What Vasily?” asked Fedya.
“The one who was drowned,” answered Kostya. “In this very same river. What a fine chap he was! Oh, what a fine chap! His mother, Feklista, how she loved him! It was as if she felt, Feklista did, that his death would come by water. Vasily used to come with us in summer to bathe in the river—and she’d get all of a fluster. The other mothers didn’t care a bit, they’d walk past with their washpails, they’d waddle by, but Feklista would put her pail down and start calling him. ‘Come back, come back,’ she’d say, ‘come back, light of my eyes! Oh, come back, my little eagle!’ And how he came to drown, Lord alone knows. He was playing on the bank, and his mother was there too, raking hay, and suddenly she heard what sounded like someone blowing bubbles under water—she looked, and there was only Vasily’s cap floating in the water. Well, since then, Feklista, too, hasn’t been right in the head. She comes and lies at the place where he drowned; there she lies, boys, and starts to sing—d’you remember, Vasily always used to sing a song—well that’s the one she sings, too, and cries and cries, and complains bitterly to God . . .”
“Here comes Pavel,” said Fedya.
Pavel came up to the fire with a full pot in his hand.
“Well, boys,” he began after a silence, “there’s something bad.”
“What?” asked Kostya hurriedly.
“I heard Vasily’s voice.”
Everyone shuddered.
“What’s that you say?” whispered Kostya.
“So help me God. I’d just begun to bend down to the water, and suddenly I heard my name being called, in Vasily’s voice, like it was from under the water: ‘Pavel, Pavel, come he
re!’ I went away. I got the water, though.”
“Good Lord!” said the boys, crossing themselves.
“That was a water-goblin calling you, Pavel,” added Fedya. “And we were just talking about Vasily.”
“Oh, that’s an evil sign,” said Ilyusha, with deliberation.
“Well, never mind, forget about it!” said Pavel resolutely, and sat down again. “You can’t escape your fate.” The boys became quieter. It was clear that Pavel’s story had made a deep impression on them. They began to settle down in front of the fire, as if preparing to sleep.
“What’s that?” asked Kostya suddenly, lifting his head.
Pavel listened intently.
“That’s curlews flying past and whistling.”
“Where are they flying to?”
“To the country where there’s supposed to be no winter.”
“Is there really such a country?”
“Yes, there is.”
“Far away?”
“Far, far away, beyond the warm seas.”
Kostya sighed and closed his eyes. More than three hours had passed since I had been in company with the boys. At last the moon rose; I didn’t notice her at once, so small and thin she was. The moonless night seemed still as magnificent as before. . . . But many stars, which, not long ago, had stood high in the heavens, were now stooping towards the earth’s dark rim; everything was perfectly silent all around, with the special silence that usually falls towards daybreak: everything was sunk in the heavy, immobile sleep that precedes the dawn. There was no longer the same strong scent in the air—moisture seemed to be distilled in it afresh. Oh, the short nights of summer! . . . The boys’ talk had died down with the fires. . . . Even the dogs were dozing; the horses, as far as I could make out, in the hardly-discernible, feebly pulsing light of the stars, were lying down too, with sunken heads. . . . A gentle drowsiness came over me and merged into slumber.
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