"What is?" Listnitsky turned to him. With his eyes Bunchuk indicated the bee, and Listnitsky smiled:
"Its honey will be bitter, don't you think?" It was not Bunchuk that answered him. From a distant clump of pines a piercing magpie stutter shattered the silence, and a spurt of bullets tore through the birches, sending a branch crashing on to the neck of Listnitsky's horse.
They turned and galloped back towards the village, urging on their horses with shout and whip. The Austrian machine-gun flung the rest of its ammunition after them.
After this first encounter Listnitsky had more than one talk with the volunteer Bunchuk. On each occasion he was struck by the inflexible
will that gleamed in the man's eyes, and could not discover what lay behind the intangible secrecy that veiled the face of one so ordinary-looking. Bunchuk always spoke with a smile compressed in his firm lips, and he gave List-nitsky the impression that he was applying a definite rule to trace a tortuous path. He was transferred to a machine-gun detachment. A few days later, while the regiment was resting behind the front, Listnitsky overtook him walking along by the wall of a burned-out shed.
"Ah! Volunteer Bunchuk!"
The Cossack turned his head and saluted.
"Where are you going?" Listnitsky asked,
"To my commander."
"Then we're going the same way."
For some time they walked along the street of the ruined village in silence.
People were moving about round the few outbuildings that remained intact, horsemen rode past, a field-kitchen was smoking in the middle of the street with a long queue of Cossacks waiting their turn beside it; there was a cold drizzle in the air.
"Well, are you learning the art of war?" Listnitsky asked, glancing sidelong at Bunchuk, who was slightly behind him.
"Yes, I am,"
"What do you propose to do after the war?" asked the lieutenant, glancing for some reason at Bunchuk's hands.
"Some will reap what is sown . . . but I shall see," Bunchuk replied.
"How am I to interpret that remark?"
"You know the proverb, 'Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind'? Well, that's how."
"But dropping the riddles?"
"It's quite clear as it is. Excuse me, I'm turning to the left here."
He put his fingers to the peak of his cap and turned off the road. Shrugging his shoulders, Listnitsky stood staring after him.
"Is the fellow trying to be original, or is he just someone with a bee in his bonnet?" he wondered in irritation, as he stepped into the squadron-commander's well-kept dug-out.
XVI
The second and third lines of reserves were called up together. The villages of the Don were as deserted as though everybody had gone out to mow or reap at the busy time of harvest.
But a bitter harvest was reaped along the frontiers that year; death dogged the footsteps of the men, and many a Cossack's wife wailed
bare-headed for her departed one: "Oh, my darling, who has taken you from me?" The dear heads were laid low on all sides, the Cossack blood was shed, and glassy-eyes, unwake-able, they rotted while the artillery thundered its funeral dirge in Austria, in Poland, in Prussia. ... For the eastern wind did not carry the weeping of their wives and mothers to their ears.
The flower of the Cossackry had left the villages and perished amid the lice and horror of the battle-fields.
One pleasant September day a milky gossamer web, fine and cottony, hung over the village of Tatarsky. The bloodless sun smiled like one bereft, the stern, virginal blue sky was re-pellently clear and proud. Beyond the Don the forest was a jaundiced yellow, the poplar gleamed pallidly, the oak dropped occasional figured leaves; only the alder remained gaudily green, gladdening the keen eye of the magpie with its hardiness.
That day Pantelei Prokofyevich received a letter from the army on active service. Dunya brought it back from the post. As the postmaster handed it to her he bowed, shook his old bald pate, and deprecatingly opened his arms.
"Forgive me for the love of God for opening the letter. Tell your father I opened it. I badly
wanted to know how the war was going. . .. Forgive me and tell Pantelei Prokofyevich what I said." He seemed confused and, unaware of the ink-smear on his nose, came out of his office v/ith Dunya, muttering something unintelligible. Filled with foreboding, she returned home, and fumbled at her breast a long time for the letter.
"Hurry up!" Pantelei shouted, plucking at his beard.
As she drew it out she said breathlessly:
"The postmaster told me he had read the letter and that you mustn't be angry with him."
"The devil take him! Is it from Grigory?" the old man asked, breathing agitatedly into her face. "From Grigory? Or from Pyotr?"
"No, Father. ... I don't know the writing."
"Read it!" Ilyinichna cried, tottering heavily to the bench. Her legs were giving her much trouble these days. Natalya ran in from the yard and stood by the stove with her head on one side, her elbows pressing into her breasts. A smile trembled like sunlight on her lips. She still hoped for a message from Grigory or the slightest reference to her in his letters, in reward for her dog-like devotion and fidelity.
"Where's Darya?" Ilyinichna whispered.
"Shut up!" Pantelei shouted. "Read it!" he added to Dunya.
" 1 have to inform you,' " she began, then, slipping off the bench where she had been sitting, she screamed:
"Father! Mother...! Oh, Mama Our Gri-
sha. . . ! Oh, oh. . . ! Grisha's . . . been killed."
Entangled among the leaves of a half-dead geranium, a wasp beat against the window, buzzing furiously. In the yard a hen clucked contentedly; through the open door came the sound of ringing, childish laughter.
A shudder ran across Natalya's face, though her lips still wore her quivering smile. Rising to his feet, his head twitching paralytically, Pantelei stared in frantic perplexity at Dunya.
The communication read:
I have to inform you that your son Grigory Panteleyeuich Melekhou, a Cossack in the Twelfth Don Cossack Regiment, was killed on the 16th of September near the town of Ka-menka-Strumilovo. Your son died the death of the brave; may that be your consolation in your irreplaceable loss. His personal effects will be handed to his brother, Pyotr Melekhov. His horse will remain with the regiment.
Commander of the Fourth Squadron,
Junior Captain Polkovnikov. Field Army
18th September, 1914.
After the arrival of the letter Pantelei seemed suddenly to wilt. He grew noticeably older every day. His memory began to go and his mind lost its clarity. He walked about with bowed back, his face an iron hue; and the feverish gleam in his eyes betrayed his mental stress.
He put the letter away under the icon. Several times a day he went into the porch to beckon to Dunya. When she came in he would order her to get the letter and read it to him, fearfully glancing at the door of the best room where his wife was mourning. "Read it quietly, to yourself like," he would say, winking cunningly. Choking down her tears, Dunya would read the first sentence, and then Pantelei, squatting on his heels, would raise his huge, hoof-like brown hand:
"All right. I know the rest. Take the letter back and put it where you found it. Quietly, or Mother. . . ." And he would wink repulsively, his whole face contorted like burnt tree-bark.
He began to go grey, and the dazzling grey hairs swiftly patched his head and wove threads into his beard. He grew gluttonous too, and gobbled his food.
Nine days after the requiem mass, the Me-Ickhovs invited Father Vissarion and their rela-
tions to the repast in memory of the fallen Gri-gory. Pantelei ate fast and ravenously with the noodles hanging from his beard like ringlets. Ilyinichna, who had been anxiously watching him during the past few days, burst into tears;
"Father, what's the matter with you?"
"Eh?" the old man said with a start, raising his bleary eyes from his plate. Ilyinichna waved her hand and turned
away, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Father, you eat as though you had fasted for three days," Darya said angrily, her eyes glittering.
"I eat...? All right, I won't," Pantelei replied, overcome with embarrassment. He glanced around the table, then, pressing his lips together, and sitting with knitted brows, he lapsed into silence, not even replying to questions.
"Have courage, Prokofyevich! What's the good of grieving so much?" Father Vissarion attempted to rally him when the meal was ended. "Grigory's death was a holy one; don't offend God, old man. Your son has received a crown of thorns for his tsar and his fatherland. And you ... it's a sin, and God won't pardon you."
"That's just it. Father! 'Died the death of the brave.' That's what his commander said."
Kissing the priest's hand, the old man leaned
against the door-post, and for the first time since the arrival of the letter he burst into tears, his body shaking violently.
From that day he regained his self-control and recovered a little from the blow.
Each licked the wound in his own way. When Natalya heard Dunya scream that Grigory was dead she ran into the yard. "I'll kill myself. It's all over for me," the thought drove her on like fire. She struggled in Darya's arms, and then with joyful relief she swooned, for at least it postponed the moment when consciousness would return and violently remind her of what had happened. She passed a week in dull oblivion, and returned to the world of reality changed, quieter, gnawed by a black impotence.
An invisible corpse haunted the Melekhovs' house and the living breathed in its mouldering scent.
XVII
On the twelfth day after the news of Gri-gory's death the Melekhovs received two letters by the same post from Pyotr. Dunya read them at the post office, and went speeding home like a stalk caught up by the wind, then swayed and stopped, leaning against a fence. She caused a great fluster in the village, and carried
an indescribable feeling of agitation into the house.
"Grisha's alive! Our dear one's alive!" she sobbed and cried when still some distance away. "Pyotr's written. Grisha's wounded, but he isn't dead. He's alive, alive!"
In his letter dated September 20th, Pyotr had written:
Greetings, dear parents, I must tell you that our Grisha all but gave up the ghost, but now. glory be, he's alive and well, as we wish you in the name oi the Lord God health and well-being. Close to the town oi Kamenka-Strumilo-vo his regiment was in battle, and in the attack the Cossacks oi his troop saw him cut down by a Hungarian hussar, and Grigory iell irom his horse and aiter that nobody knew anything, and when I asked them they could tell me nothing. But aiterwards I learned irom Misha Koshevoi that Grigory lay till night-time, but that in the night he came round and started crawling away. He crawled along making his way by the stars, and came across one oi our oiBcers wounded in the belly and legs by a shell. He picked him up and dragged him ior six versts. And ior this Grigory has been given the Cross oi St. George and has been raised to the rank oi corporal. Think oi that! His wound
isn't serious, he only received a skin wound on the scalp, hut he tell iroin his horse, and got stunned. Misha told me he is already hack at the front. You must excuse this letter, I'm writing in the saddle.
In his second letter Pyotr asked his family to send him some dried cherries from their own orchard, and told them not to forget him but to write more often. In the same letter he upbraided Grigory because, so he had been told, he was not looking after his horse properly, and Pyotr was angry, as the horse was really his. He asked his father to write to Grigory, and said he had sent a message to him that if he did not look after the horse he would give him one on the nose that would draw blood, even if he had got the Cross of St. George. The letter ended with an endless list of greetings and between the crumpled, rain-blotted lines it was not hard to detect a feeling of bitterness and grief. Evidently Pyotr was not having an easy time at the front either.
Old Pantelei was a pitiful sight to see. He was dazed with joy. He seized both letters and went into the village with them, stopping all who could read and forcing them to read the letters. It was not vanity but belated joy made him brag all through the village,
"Aha! What do you think of my Grisha?" he raised his hand when the stumbling reader came to the passage where Pyotr described Gri-gory's exploit. "He's the first to get the Cross in our village," he declared proudly. And jealously taking the letters, he would thrust them into the lining of his cap and go off in search of another reader.
Even Sergei Mokhov, who saw him through his shop window, came out, taking off his cap.
"Come in for a minute, Prokofyevich!"
Inside, he squeezed the old man's fist in his own puffy white hand and said:
"Well, I congratulate you; I congratulate you. You must be proud to have such a son. I've just been reading about his exploit in the newspapers."
"Is it in the papers?" Pantelei's throat went dry and he swallowed hard.
"Yes, I've just read it."
Mokhov took a packet of the finest Turkish tobacco down from a shelf, and poured out some expensive sweets into a bag without troubling to weigh them. Handing the tobacco and sweets to Pantelei, he said:
"When you send Grigory Panteleyevich a parcel, send him a greeting and these from me."
"My God! What an honour for Grisha! The whole village is talking about him. I've lived to see ..." the old man muttered, as he went down the steps of the shop. He blew his nose violently and wiped the tears from his cheek with his sleeve, thinking: "I'm getting old. Tears come too easily. Ah, Pantelei, what has life done to you? You were as hard as flint once, you could carry eight poods on your back as easily as a feather, but now. . . . Grisha's business has taken it out of you a bit!"
As he limped along the street, pressing the bag of sweets to his chest, his thoughts again fluttered around Grigory like a lapwing over a marsh, and the words of Pyotr's letter wandered through his mind. Grigory's father-in-law Korshunov was coming along the road, and he called to Pantelei:
"Hey, Pantelei, stop a minute!"
The two men had not met since the day war was declared. A cold, constrained relationship had arisen between them after Grigory left home. Miron was annoyed with Natalya for humbling herself to Grigory, and for forcing her father to endure a similar humiliation.
"The wandering bitch," he would rail against Natalya to his family. "Why can't she live at home instead of going to her in-laws. As if they
fed her better there. It's through her foolishness that her father has to bear such shame and can't hold up his head in the village."
Miron went straight up to Pantelei and thrust out his oak-coloured hand:
"How are you?"
"Thanks be to God. . . ."
"Been shopping?"
Pantelei shook his head. "These are gifts to our hero. Sergei Platonovich read about his deed in the peapers and has sent him some sweets and tobacco. Do you know, the tears came to his eyes," the old man boasted, staring fixedly into Miron's face in the attempt to discover what impression his words had made.
The shadows gathered under Miron's blond eye-lashes, giving his face a condescending smile.
"I see!" he croaked, and turned to cross the street. Pantelei hurried after him, opening the bag and trembling with anger.
"Here, try these chocolates, they're as sweet as honey," he said spitefully. "Try them, I offer them in my son's name. Your life is none too sweet, so you can have one; and your son may earn such an honour some day, but then he may not."
"Don't pry into my life. ... I know best what it's like."
''Just try one, do me the favour." Pantelei bowed with exaggerated affability, running in front of Miron and fumbling with the paper bag.
"We're not used to sweets," Miron pushed away his hand. "Gifts from strangers are bad for our teeth. It was hardly decent of you to go begging alms for your son. If you're in need, you can come to me. Our Natalya's eating your bread. We could have given to you in your p
overty."
"Don't you tell those lies, no one has ever begged for alms in our family. You're too proud, much too proud. Maybe it's because you're so rich that your daughter came to us."
"Wait!" Miron said authoritatively. "There's no point in our quarrelling. I didn't stop you to have a quarrel. I've some business I want to talk over with you."
"We have no business to talk over."
"Yes, we have. Come on."
He seized Pantelei's sleeve and dragged him into a side-street. They walked out of the village into the steppe.
"Well, what's the business?" Pantelei asked in more amiable tones. He glanced sidelong at Korshunov's freckled face. Folding the tail of his long coat under him, Miron sat down on
the bank of a ditch and pulled out his old tobacco pouch.
"You know, Prokofyevich, the devil knows why you went for me like a quarrelsome cock. As it is, things aren't too good, are they? I want to know," his voice changed to a hard, rough tone, "how long your son's going to make a laughing-stock of Natalya. Tell me that!"
"You must ask him about it, not me."
"I've nothing to ask him; you're the head of your house and I'm talking to you."
Pantelei squeezed the chocolate he still held in his hand, and the sticky mess oozed through his fingers. He wiped his palm on the brown clay of the bank and silently began to make a cigarette, opening the packet of Turkish tobacco and taking a pinch. Then he offered the packet to Miron. Korshunov took it without hesitation and made a cigarette from the tobacco Mokhov had presented so generously. Above them hung a sumptuous foaming white cloud, and a tender thread stretched up towards it, wavering in the wind.
The day came to its close. The September stillness was lulled in peace and inexpressible sweetness. The sky had lost its full summer gleam, and was a hazy dove colour. Apple-leaves, brought from God knows where,
scattered the ditch with vivid purple. The road disappeared over the undulating ridge of the hill; in vain did it beckon towards the unknown regions beyond the emerald, dream-vague thread of the horizon. Held down to their huts and their daily round, the people pined in their labour, exhausted their strength on the threshing-floor; and the road, a deserted, yearning track, flowed across the horizon into the unseen. The wind trod along it, stirring up the dust.
And quiet flows the Don; a novel Page 36