The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood]
Page 16
"Well, then, teacher, it's all the same. The way he has educated those brats—I tell you, 'tis fine. He's a soldier. He beats them unmercifully, but on the other hand he has them well trained in all sorts of ways. Tikhon Hitch and I happened to drop in one day—and if they didn't all leap to their feet and bark out: 'We wish you health!' just as well as if they were soldiers!"
And once more Kuzma broke into a laugh.
But when he had passed the threshing-floor, had descended by the defective road past the cherry orchard and turned to the left, to the long farmyard, lying well dried and golden-hued in the sun, his heart actually began to beat violently. Here he was, at home, at last. And as he mounted the porch and stepped across the threshold, Kuzma gave vent to a sigh, and, making the sign of the cross on brow and breast, he bowed low before the dark holy picture in the corner of the ante-room. . . .
1 Thus manufacturing a family name out of "Mys," a promontory.— trans.
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And for a long time he cared not whether the Russian people had a future or not. He roamed about the manor estate, the village; he sat for hours at a time on the doorsteps of the cottages, on the threshing-floors—watching the inhabitants of Durnovka, enjoying the possibility of breathing pure air, of chatting with his new neighbours.
II
OPPOSITE the house, with their rear to Durnovka, to the wide ravine, stood the storehouses. From the porch, half of the village was visible, and beyond the storehouses the pond and a part of the promontory—one windmill and the schoolhouse. The sun rose to the left, beyond the fields, beyond the railway line on the horizon. In the morning the pond glittered with a bright, fresh exhalation, and from the park behind the house was wafted an odour of foliage from evergreens and leaf trees, steppe grass, apples, and dew. The rooms were small and empty. In the study, papered with old music sheets, rye was stored; in the hall and the drawing-room no furniture was left save a few Viennese chairs with broken seats and a large extension table. The windows of the drawing-room overlooked the park, and during almost the entire autumn Kuzma passed the night in it, on a broken-down couch, without closing the windows. The floor was never swept: the widow Odnodvorka lived there
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temporarily, in the capacity of cook; she had been the mistress of young Durnovo, and was obliged to run after her small children and prepare food, after a fashion, for herself, Kuzma, and the labourer. Kuzma himself prepared the samovar in the morning, after which he sat at the window in the hall and drank tea and ate apples.
Through the early glitter, beyond the brilliant mist over the ploughed fields, the railway train dashed past in the morning; and, above, rose-coloured wreaths floated behind it. Dense smoke hung over the roofs of the village. The garden was freshly fragrant; silvery hoar-frost lay upon the storehouses. At noon the sun stood over the village; it was hot out of doors;,in the park the maples and lindens grew thin, quietly dropping their leaves; the vast spaces and the transparent dry air of the fields were filled with silence and with peace. The doves, warmed up by the sun, dozed all day long on the sloping roof of the kitchen, whose new straw roof gleamed yellow against the clear blue sky. The labourer rested after his dinner. Odnodvorka went off to her own home.
But Kuzma roamed about. He went to the threshing-floor, rejoicing in the sun, the firm road, the withered steppe grass, the beet-tops which had turned dark brown, the charming late flower of the blue chicory, and the down of the cotton thistle floating quietly through the air. The ploughed spaces in the fields gleamed in the sunlight with the silken threads of barely visible spiders' webs, which extended to an immense distance. In the vegetable garden,
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goldfinches perched on the dry stalks of the burdocks. Upon the threshing-floor, amid the profound stillness in the sultry heat, grasshoppers diligently emitted their hoarse cry.
From the threshing-floor Kuzma climbed across the earthen well and returned to the manor-house through the orchard and the fir plantation. In the orchard he chatted with the petty burghers, the lessees of the orchard, with the Bride and the Goat, who were gathering up the windfalls, and forced his way, in their company, into the nettle patch where lay the ripest fruit of all. Sometimes he wandered to the village, to the schoolhouse. He became freshened up, sunburned; he felt himself almost happy.
The Goat amazed him by her health, her cheery stupidity, her senselessly brilliant Egyptian eyes. The Bride was handsome and strange. With him, as with Tikhon, she remained silent; not a word was to be got out of her. But when one went away she gave vent to a harsh laugh, indulged in bawling conversations with the petty burghers, and would suddenly strike up:
"Let them thrash me, curse me— My pretty eyes will twinkle more . . ."
The soldier-teacher, born stupid, had lost in the service what small wits he had ever possessed. In appearance he was the most commonplace sort of peasant, about forty years of age. But he always spoke in such an extraordinary manner, and uttered such
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nonsense, that all one could do was to throw up one's hands in despair. He was for ever smiling with the greatest appearance of slyness at something or other; he looked down upon his interlocutor condescendingly, with his eyes screwed up, and never replied to any question immediately.
"How am I to address you?" Kuzma asked him the first time he visited the school.
The soldier blinked and considered the matter. "The sheep without a name might be a ram," he said at last, at his leisure. "But I will ask you something also. Is Adam a name, or is it not?"
"It is."
"Very well. And about how many people, for example, have died since then?"
"I don't know," said Kuzma. "Why do you inquire?"
"Simply because that's one of the things we never were born to understand. Now, take any busybody you like. Do you indulge in revolt? Do it, my dear man: perhaps you will become a /z£-marshal! Only, at best, that they may stretch you out without your breeches for a flogging. Are you a peasant? Till the soil. Are you a cooper? In that case, equally, attend to your business. I, for example, am a soldier and a veterinary. Not long ago I was passing through the Fair, and what should I see but a horse with the glanders? I went at once to the policeman: 'Thus and so,' says I, 'Your High Well-born.' 'But can you kill that horse with a feather?' 'With the greatest pleasure!' "
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"With what sort of a feather?" inquired Kuzma.
"Why, a goose feather. I took it, sharpened it, jabbed it into his spinal cord, blew a little—into the feather, I mean—and the thing was done. Tis a simple matter, to all appearance, but just try to do it!" And the soldier winked craftily and tapped his brow with his finger: "Understanding is needed here."
Kuzma shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. And as he passed Odnodvorka's cottage he found out from her boy Senka what the soldier's name was. It turned out to be Parmen.
"And what's your task for to-morrow?" added Kuzma, gazing with curiosity at Senka's fiery red mop of hair, his lively green eyes, his pock-marked face, his rickety little body, and his hands and feet all cracked with mud and chaps.
"The tasks are verses," said Senka, grasping his uplifted foot in his right hand and hopping up and down on one spot.
"What sort of tasks?"
"Counting the geese. A flock of geese has flown past—"
"Ah, I know," said Kuzma. "And what else?"
"Also mice—"
"They are to be counted too?"
"Yes. Six mice were walking along carrying six copper coins," mumbled Senka rapidly, casting a sidelong glance at Kuzma's silver watch chain. "One mouse, which was bigger, carried two coins. How many does that make in all—?"
"Splendid. And what are the verses?"
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Senka released his foot.
"The verses are 'Who is he?'"
"Have you learned them?"
"Yes, I have."
"Well, then, say them."
And Senka muttere
d still more rapidly about a horseman who was riding above the Neva through the forests, where there were only—
"Firs, pine-trees, and green moss. . . .'"
"Grey," said Kuzma, "not green."
"Well, then, grey," assented Senka.
"And who was that horseman?"
Senka considered the matter. "Why, a sorcerer," said he.
"Exactly. Now, tell your mother that she ought to cut your hair, on your temples at least. Tis all the worse for you as it is, when the teacher pulls it."
"Then he'll find my ears," said Senka unconcernedly, again grasping his foot, and off he hopped on the pasture common.
Ill
THE promontory and Durnovka lived in a state of perpetual enmity and mutual disdain, as adjoining villages always do. The promontory dwellers regarded the Durnovka folk in the light of bandits and beggars, while the Durnovka people returned the compliment precisely and in full measure.
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Durnovka was "gentry property," while on the promontory dwelt "boors," one-farm petty owners—more properly speaking, the remains of the one-farm people who had emigrated to the Tomsk Government. Od-nodvorka was the only person who was not included in this enmity, these quarrels. Small, thin, dependable, she was lively, even-tempered, and agreeable in intercourse; and she was observant. She knew every family on the promontory and in Durnovka as well as if it were her own; she was the first to inform the manor-house of every smallest happening in the life of the village. And every one was also thoroughly well acquainted with her life.
She never concealed anything from anybody; she talked calmly and simply about her husband and Durnovo and stated that she had become a procuress when he went away. "What could I do?" she said, with a faint sigh. "I was dreadfully poor; I had not enough bread even after the new harvest. My good husband loved me, to speak the plain truth, but one has to submit, you know. The master gave three whole carloads of rye for me. 'What can I do?' I said to my husband. Twas plain, I must go, he said. He went for the rye, dragged home measure after measure, and his tears drip-dripped, drip-dripped all the while." And, after a moment's thought, she added: "Well, and later on, when the master went away, and my husband went to RostofT, I began to bring people together, as chance occurred. You're immoral dogs, the Lord forgive you!"
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By day she toiled, never pausing for a moment; by night she mended, sewed, stole snow-screens from the railway. Once late at night, when Kuzma was driving to Tikhon Hitch, he ascended a hillock and halted paralyzed with fright: across the ploughed land, half deluged in darkness, on a faintly smouldering strip of the sunset, something black, huge, sprang up and bore down smoothly on Kuzma.
"Who's that?" he shouted feebly, tugging at his reins.
"Oil" feebly and in affright shouted that which had so swiftly and smoothly sprung up against the sky; and it disappeared with a crash.
Kuzma recovered himself—and instantly recognized, in the darkness, Odnodvorka. She had been running toward him on her light, unshod feet, all bent together with the weight of two screens a fathom long— the sort that are set up, in winter, along the railway line, to protect it from snowdrifts. And, having rearranged herself, she whispered, with a quiet laugh:
"You frightened me to death. When one runs off somewhere of a night, one is all a-tremble, but what can one do? The whole village uses these for firewood, and that's the only way we save ourselves from freezing."
The farm-hand Koshel, on the other hand, was a man not devoid of interest. There was nothing one could talk about with him, and he was not loquacious by nature. Like the majority of the Durnovka people, he merely repeated antiquated, insignificant apophthegms, reasserted that which had been known for
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many a long year. If the weather turned bad he cast an eye at the sky: "The weather's spoiling. Rain is what the growing green things most need at the present moment." The fields were ploughed a second time, and he remarked: "If you won't give a second ploughing you'll be left without bread. That's what the old people have always said."
He had been a soldier in his day—had been in the Caucasus—but the military life had left no traces on him. He was unable to pronounce the word "post-office" properly: he called it "spost-office." He could tell absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Caucasus, with the exception of the facts that mountain followed mountain there, and that terribly hot and strange waters spurted out of the ground. If you placed a piece of mutton in them, it was boiled in one minute, and if you didn't take it out at the proper time, it got raw again. And he was not in the least proud of the fact that he had seen the world; he even bore himself with scorn toward people who knew the world. It is well understood that people only "rove about" because they are forced to do so, or through poverty. He never believed a single rumour—"all lies!"—but he did believe, and swore to it as a fact, that not long ago a witch had rolled in the form of a wheel through the twilight shades near Basovka, and that one peasant, who was no fool, had taken and caught hold of that wheel and thrust his belt through the hub and tied it fast.
"Well, and what happened next?" asked Kuzma.
"What?" replied Koshel. "That witch waked up
the Village early in the morning, and, lo and behold, that belt was sticking out her mouth and behind, and was tied fast over her stomach."
"But why didn't she .untie it?"
"Evidently, the knot had had the sign of the cross made over it."
"And aren't you ashamed to believe such nonsense?"
"What is there for me to be ashamed of? People lie, and I let them talk."
So Kuzma only liked to hear the man's songs. As he sat in the darkness at the open window, without a light anywhere, with the village barely discernible like a black spot on the other side of the ravine, it was so quiet round about that the apples could be heard falling from the wild apple trees beyond the corner of the house. And Koshel walked slowly about the farmyard with his mallet, and with a serene melancholy hummed to himself in his falsetto voice: "Cease your song, canary, little bird." He kept watch over the manor until morning and slept by day. He had hardly anything to do: Tikhon Hitch had made haste to settle up Durnovka affairs betimes that year, and out of all the cattle only one horse and a cow remained. So things were quiet, even rather bore-some, at the manor-house. The clear days were followed by colder days, bluish-grey, soundless. The goldfinches and tomtits began to whistle in the bare park, the cross-bills to pipe in the fir trees, the cedar-birds made their appearance, bullfinches, and some sort of leisurely tiny birds which hopped in flocks from place to place on the threshing-floor, whose supports
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were already sprouting with bright green new growths; sometimes a very silent, light little bird of that sort perched all alone on a spear of grass in the field. In the vegetable gardens behind Durnovka, the last potatoes were being dug among the sheaves. And at times, as evening drew on, some one of the peasants would stand there for a long space, absorbed in thought and gazing at the fields, as he bore on his back a plaited basket filled with ears of grain. Darkness began to fall early, and at the manor-house they said: "How late the train passes by nowadays!" although there had been no change in the schedule of the trains. Kuzma sat near the window and read newspapers all day long; he had written down his spring trip to Kazakovo and his conversations with Akim; he had jotted down remarks in an old account book —all he had seen and heard in the village. What occupied his attention most of all was Syery, the Grey Man.
IV
THE village was deserted. Many had gone away to work on the clover. Trifon had died in mid-August, at Assumption-tide—he had choked himself, as he broke the fast, on a bit of raw ham. At the beginning of September Komar, one of the chief rioters, renowned for his strength, his cleverness, and his daring in his dealings with the members
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of the gentry class, had entered a distillery near Eletz, fallen into the malt-kiln while in a state of intoxicatio
n, and been suffocated. No one had known that he was there, and the door had been bolted. Komar had bent the door in his efforts to escape into the air, but evidently such a death had been written in his fate. Another rebel, Vanka Krasny, had again betaken himself to the Donetz mines. The harness-maker was working about on different estates. Rodka was working on the railway. Deniska had disappeared somewhere. And everybody hypocritically pitied Syery, taking advantage of the opportunity to ridicule both son and father. Yakoff's hands trembled when he began to talk about Syery. And what could they do but tremble? What had that Syery done with the land which Yakoff was ready to "devour in handfuls"? No one in all Durnovka suffered the hundredth part of what Yakoff suffered when rumours became current about rebellions, cases of arson, and the expropriation of land. He merely held his peace —thanks to that subterranean secretiveness which thousands of his forebears had sucked in with their mothers' milk. And, indeed, his breath would have failed him had he tried to speak. Now, when the rumours became more and more desperate, he even became reconciled to his son Vaska, for the sake of the land. His son was a pock-marked, rough, thickset young fellow, all overgrown with a beard at the age of twenty, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and so strong that even pincers could not have pulled out a single one of his hairs. The son, with that beard,
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his head closely clipped, garbed in a red shirt, resembled a convict, but he dressed his wife in the style of a petty citizen of the towns. He had turned out the image of his father so far as greed was concerned, and had already begun to trade secretly in vodka, coarse tobacco, soap, and kerosene. And Yakoff became reconciled, in the hope of satisfying his land-hunger by the aid of his son—in the hope that he might become rich and begin to lease it. Why did Syery make peace with Deniska, who had repeatedly given him "a healthy drubbing"? What was he hoping for, that he thus altered his course, like the poorest beggar? He had leased his land, he did not live out on jobs. He sat at home cold and hungry and had no thought for anything save how he might procure the wherewithal for a smoke: he could not get through the day without his pipe. He attended all the village assemblies, but always arrived just as they were coming to an end. He never missed a single wedding or baptism or funeral, although he huddled up against the door; and when he extended his hand to the host, who was serving refreshments to his guests, he not infrequently received nothing but rough denunciations. Syery did not care greatly for liquor, but no drinking to seal a bargain ever passed off without his presence: he intruded himself not only into all the community drinking-bouts, but also into all those of his neighbours—after purchases, sales, and exchanges. And his neighbours had grown so accustomed to this that they were not even surprised