"This is weak tobacco, it's like grass," Miron said, puffing out a cloud of smoke.
"It's weak, but it's pleasant," Pantelei half-agreed.
"Give me an answer, Pantelei," Korshunov asked in a quieter tone, putting out his cigarette.
"Grigory never says anything about it in his letters. He's wounded now."
"Yes, I've heard. . . ."
"What will come after, I don't know. Maybe he'll be killed, and then what?"
"But how can it go on like this?" Miron blinked distractedly and miserably. "There she is, neither maid nor wife nor honest widow, and it's a disgrace. If I had known it was going to turn out like this I'd never have allowed the match-makers across my threshold. Ah, Pante-
lei. . . Pantelei. . . . Each is sorry for his own child. Blood is thicker than water."
"How can I help it?" Pantelei replied with restrained frenzy. "Tell me! Do you think I'm glad my son left home? Was it any gain to me? You people!"
"Write to him," Miron dictated, and the dust trickling from under his hands into the ditch kept time with his words. "Let him say once and for all."
"He's got a child by that. . . ."
"And he'll have a child by this!" Korshunov shouted, turning livid. "Can you treat a human being like that? Huh? She's already tried to kill herself and is maimed for life.... Do you want to trample her into the grave? Huh. . . . His heart, his heart. . ." Miron hissed, tearing at his breast with one hand, tugging at Pante-lei's coat tails with the other. "Is it a wolf's heart he's got?"
Pantelei wheezed and turned away.
"The woman's devoted to him, and there's no other life for her without him. Is she a serf in your service?"
"She's more than a daughter to us! Hold your tongue!" Pantelei shouted, and he rose from the bank.
They parted without a word of farewell, and went off in different directions.
When swept out of its normal channel, life scatters into many streams. It is difficult to foresee which it will take in its treacherous and winding course. Where today it trickles, like a rivulet over sand-banks, so shallow that the shoals are visible, tomorrow it will flow rich and full.
Suddenly Natalya came to the decision to go to Aksinya at Yagodnoye, and to ask, to beseech her to return Grigory to her. For some reason it seemed to Natalya that everything depended on Aksinya, that she had only to ask her and Grigory would return, and with him, her own former happiness. She did not stop to consider whether this was possible, or how Aksinya would receive her strange request. Driven on by subconscious motives, she sought to act upon her decision as quickly as possible.
At the end of the month a letter arrived from Grigory. After messages to his father and mother he sent his greeting and regards to Natalya. Whatever the reason inciting him to this, it was the stimulus Natalya required, and she made ready to go to Yagodnoye the very next Sunday.
"Where are you off to, Natalya?" Dunya
582
asked, watching her as she attentively studied her features in the scrap of looking-glass.
"I'm going to visit my people," Natalya lied, and blushed as she realized for the first time that she was risking great humiliation, a terrible moral test.
"You might have an evening out with me just for once," Darya suggested. "Come this evening, won't you?"
"I don't know, but I don't think so."
"You little nun! Our turn only comes when our husbands are away," Darya said with a wink and stooped to examine the embroidered hem of her new pale-blue skirt. Darya had altered considerably since Pyotr's departure. Unrest showed in her eyes, her movements and carriage. She arrayed herself more diligently on Sundays, and came back late in the evening sombre-eyed and out of temper, to complain to Natalya:
"It's terrible, really it is! They've taken away all the decent Cossacks, and left only boys and old men in the village!"
"Well, what difference does that make to you?"
"Why, there's nobody to lark about with of an evening. If only I could go off alone to the mill one day. There's no fun to be had here with our father-in-law." And with cynical frank-
ness she asked Natalya: "How can you bear it, dear; so long without a Cossack?"
"Shame on you! Haven't you any conscience?" Natalya blushed.
"Don't you feel any desire?"
"It's clear you do."
"Of course I do!" Darya flushed and laughed and the arches of her brows quivered. "Why should I hide it? I'd make even an old man hot and bothered this very minute! Just think, it's two months since Pyotr left."
"You're laying up sorrow for yourself, Darya."
"Shut up, you respectable old woman! We know you quiet ones! You would never admit it."
"I've nothing to admit."
Darya gave her an amused sidelong glance, and bit her lips with her small snappish teeth.
"The other day Timofei Manitsev, the ataman's son, sat down beside me. I could see he was afraid to begin. Then he quietly slipped his hand under my arm, and his hand was trembling. I just waited and said nothing, but I was getting angry. If he had been a lad now -but he's only a little snot. Sixteen years old, not a day more. I sat without speaking, and he pawed and pawed, and whispered: 'Come along to our shed.' Then I gave him something!"
She laughed merrily; her brows quivered and laughter spurted from her half-closed eyes.
"What a ticking off I gave him! I jumped up. 'Oh, you this and that! You yellow-necked whelp! Do you think you can wheedle me like that? When did you wet the bed last?' I gave him a fine talking to."
Darya's attitude to Natalya had changed of late, and their relations had grown simple and friendly. The dislike which she had felt for the younger woman was gone, and the two, different in every respect, lived together amicably.
Natalya finished dressing and went out. Darya overtook her in the porch.
"You'll open the door for me tonight?" she asked.
"I expect I shall stop the night with my people."
Darya thoughtfully scratched her nose with her comb and shook her head:
"Oh, all right. I didn't want to ask Dunya, but I see I shall have to."
Natalya told Ilyinichna she was going to visit her people, and went into the street. The wagons were rattling away from the market in the square, and the villagers were coming from church. She turned up a side lane and hurriedly climbed the hill. At the top she turned and
looked back. The village lay flooded in sunlight, the little limewashed houses looked daz-zlingly white, and the sun glittered on the steep roof of the mill, making the sheet-iron glitter like molten ore.
XIX
Yagodnoye also had been plucked of its menfolk by the war. Venyamin and Tikhon had gone, and the place was even sleepier, drearier and more isolated than before. Aksinya waited on the general in Venyamin's place, while fat-bottomed Lukerya took over all the cooking and fed the fowls. Old Sashka tended the horses and looked after the orchard. There was only one new face, an old Cossack named Niki-tich who had been taken on as coachman.
This year old Listnitsky sowed less, and supplied some twenty horses for army remounts, leaving only three or four for the needs of the estate. He passed his time shooting bustards and hunting with the borzois.
Aksinya received only brief, infrequent letters from Grigory, informing her that so far he was well and going through the grind. He had grown stronger, or else he did not want to tell her of his weakness, for he never let slip any complaint that he found active service difficult
and dreary. There was a cold note in his let ters, as though he had written them because he felt he had to, and only in one did he write: "All the time at the front, and I'm fed up with fighting and carrying death on my back." In every letter he asked after his daughter, telling Aksinya to write about her.
Aksinya seemed to bear the separation bravely. All her love for Grigory was poured out on her child, especially after she became convinced that it was really his. Life gave irrefutable proofs of that: the girl's chestnut hair was replaced
by a black, curly growth; her eyes changed to a dark tint, and grew elongated in their slits. With every day she became more and more like her father; even her smile was Grigory's. Now Aksinya could see him beyond all doubt in the child, and her feeling for it deepened. No longer did she start back from the cradle, as she sometimes had before, thinking she discerned in the child's sleeping face some likeness to the hated features of Stepan.
But the days crawled on, and at the end of each a caustic bitterness settled in Aksinya's breast. Anxiety for the life of her beloved pierced her mind like a sharp needle; it left her neither day nor night. Restrained during the hours of labour, it burst all dams at night, and she tossed and turned, weeping soundlessly
and biting her hand to avoid awakening the child with her sobs; she tried to kill her mental anguish with a physical pain. She wept the rest of her tears into the baby's napkins, th.ink-ing in her childish naivete: "It's Grisha's child, he must feel in his heart how I yearn for him."
After nights such as this she arose in the morning as though she had been beaten unmercifully. All her body ached, little silver hammers knocked incessantly in her veins, and sorrow lurked in the corners of her lips. The nights of yearning aged Aksinya.
One Sunday she had given her master his breakfast, and was standing on the steps when she saw a woman approaching the gate. The eyes under the white kerchief seemed strangely familiar. The v/oman opened the gate and entered the yard. Aksinya turned pale as she recognized Natalya. She slowly went to meet her. A heavy layer of dust had settled on Na-talya's shoes. She halted, her big, toil-roughened hands hanging lifelessly at her sides, and breathed heavily, trying to straighten her scarred neck and failing, so that it seemed she looked sideways. "I've come to see you, Aksinya," she said, running her dry tongue over her lips.
Aksinya gave a swift glance at the windows of the house and silently led Natalya into her
room. Natalya followed her. To her straining ears the rustle of Aksinya's skirt seemed unnaturally loud. "There's something wrong with my ears, it must be the heat," the confused thought scratched at her brain with a host of others.
Aksinya closed the door, and standing in the middle of the room with her hands under her apron, took charge of the situation.
"What have you come for?" she asked stealthily, almost in a whisper,
"I'd like a drink," Natalya replied, staring heavily about the room,
Aksinya waited. Natalya began to speak, with difficulty raising her voice:
"You've taken my husband from me. . . . Give me my Grigory back. You've broken m.y life. You see how. . . ."
"You want your husband?" Aksinya clenched her teeth, and the words fell steadily like slow raindrops on stone. "You want your husband? Who are you asking? Why did you come? You've thought of it too late. Too late!"
Laughing caustically, her whole body swaying, Aksinya went close up to Natalya. She sneered as she stared in the face of her enemy. There she stood, the lawful but abandoned wife, humiliated, crushed with misery. She who had come between Aksinya and Grigory, sep-
arating them, causing a bloody pain in Aksi-nya's heart. And while she had been wearing herself out with mortal longing, this other one, this Natalya, had been caressing Grigory and no doubt laughing at her, the unsuccessful, forsaken mistress.
"And you've come to ask me to give him up?" Aksinya panted. "You creeping snake! You took Grisha away from me first! You knew he was living with me. Why did you marry him? I only took back my own. He's mine. I have a child by him, but you...."
With stormy hatred she stared into Natalya's eyes, and, waving her arms wildly, poured out a boiling torrent of words.
"Grisha's mine, and I'll give him up to no one! He's mine, mine! D'you hear...? Mine! Clear out, you shameless bitch, you're not his wife. You want to rob a child of its father? And why didn't you come before? Well, why didn't you come before?"
Natalya went sideways to the bench and sat down, dropping her head and covering her face with her hands.
"You left your husband. Don't shout like that."
"I have no husband but Grisha. No one, nowhere in the whole world." Feeling an anger that could not find vent raging within her, Ak-
sinya gazed at the strand of black hair that had slipped from under Natalya's kerchief.
"Does he need you?" she demanded, "Look at your twisted neck! And do you think he longs for you? He left you when you were well, and is he likely to look at a cripple? I won't give Grisha up! That's all I have to say. Clear out!"
Aksinya grew ferocious in defence of her nest, in revenge for all the suffering of the past. She could see that, despite the slightly crooked neck, Natalya was as good-looking as before. Natalya's cheeks and lips were fresh, untouched by time, while her own eyes were webbed with wrinkles, and all because of Natalya.
"Do you think I had any hope of getting him back by asking?" Natalya raised her eyes, drunk with suffering,
"Then why did you come?" Aksinya panted.
"My yearning drove me on,"
Awakened by the voices, Aksinya's daughter stirred in the bed and broke into a cry. The mother took up the child, and sat down with her face to the window. Trembling in every limb, Natalya gazed at the infant. A dry spasm clutched her throat. Grigory's eyes stared at her inquisitively from the baby's face.
Weeping and swaying, she walked out into the porch. Aksinya did not see her off.
A minute or two later Sashka came into the room.
"Who was that woman?" he asked, evidently half-guessing.
"Someone from our village."
Natalya walked back about three versts, and then lay down under a wild thorn. Crushed by her yearning, she lay thinking of nothing. Grigory's gloomy black eyes staring cut of a child's face were continually before her.
XX
So vivid that it was almost a blinding pain, the night after the battle remained for ever imprinted in Grigory's memory. He returned to consciousness some time before dawn; his hands stirred among the prickly stubble, and he groaned with the pain that filled his head. With an effort he raised his hand, drew it up to his brow, and felt his blood-clotted hair. When his finger touched the wound it was as if a red-hot ember had been placed there. Then, grinding his teeth, he rolled over. Above him the frost-nipped leaves of a tree rustled mournfully with a glassy tinkle. The black branches were clearly outlined against the deep blue background of the sky, and stars glittered
among them. Grigory gazed unwinkingly, and the stars seemed to him like strange, bluish-yellow fruits hanging from the twigs.
Realizing what had happened to him, and conscious of an inescapable horror, he crawled away on all fours, grinding his teeth. The pain played with him, threw him down headlong. He seemed to be crawling for an eternity. He forced himself to look back; the tree stood out blackly some fifty paces away. Once he crawled across a corpse, resting his elbows on the dead man's hard, sunken belly. He was sick with loss of blood, and he wept like a babe, and chewed the dewy grass to avoid losing consciousness. By an overturned case of shells he managed to get on to his feet, and stood a long time swaying, then started to walk. His strength began to return; he stepped out more firmly, and was even able to take his bearings by the Great Bear, moving in an easterly direction.
At the edge of the forest he was halted by a sudden warning shout:
"Stop, or I'll fire!"
He heard the click of a revolver, and looked in the direction of the sound. A man was leaning against a pine-tree,
"Who are you?" he asked, listening to the sound of his voice as though it were another's.
"A Russian? My God! Come here!" the man by the pine slipped to the ground. Grigory went to him.
"Bend down!"
"I can't." I
"Why not?"
"I shall fall and not be able to get up again. I'm wounded in the head."
"What regiment are you from?"
"The Twelfth Don Cossack."
"Help me, Cossack!"
"I shall fall. Your Honour,"
Grigory replied, recognizing the man as an officer by his shoulder-straps.
"Give me your hand at least,"
Grigory helped the officer to rise, and they went off together. But with every step the officer himg more heavily on his arm. As they rose out of a dell he seized Grigory by the sleeve and said:
"Leave me, Cossack. I've got a woimd .,. right through the stomach."
His eyes were dull behind his pince-nez and the breath came from his open bearded mouth in hoarse gasps. He fainted, but Grigory dragged him along, falling and rising again and again. Twice he dropped his burden and left it; but each time he returned, lifted it, and stumbled on as if walking in his sleep.
At eleven o'clock they were picked up by a patrol and taken to a dressing station.
Grigory slipped away from the station the very next day. Once on the road he tore the bandage from his head, and walked along waving the blood-soaked bandage in his relief.
"Where have you come from?" his squadron commander asked him in amazement, when he turned up at regimental headquarters.
"I've returned to duty. Your Honour."
When he left the squadron commander, Grigory saw his troop sergeant.
"My horse . . . the bay, where is it?"
"He's all right, lad. We caught him as soon as we had finished with the Austrians. But what about you? We were praying for you to go to heaven."
"You were in a hurry," Grigory said with a grim smile.
An extract from regimental orders read as
follows: ) 1
"For saving the life of the commander of the 9th regiment of dragoons Lieutenant-Colonel Gustav Grozberg, Cossack of the 12th Don Cossack Regiment Melekhov Grigory is promoted to the rank of corporal and recommended for the St. George Cross, 4th class."
And quiet flows the Don; a novel Page 37