Tales by Polish Authors Part 15

'Green?' Joy shone in Srul's eyes. 'Why, yes, yes--green:--and here it was freezing!'

Now at last I knew why he had come to me. Wis.h.i.+ng to make certain, however, I was silent: the Jew was evidently getting animated.

'Well, Sir, you might tell me if there is any--with us now ... but you see, I don't know what it's called; I have already forgotten Polish,'

he apologized shyly, as if he had ever known it--'it's white like a pea blossom, yet it's not a pea, and in summer it grows in gardens round houses, on those tall stalks?'

'Kidney beans?'

'That's just it! Kidney beans! Kidney beans!' he repeated to himself several times, as if wis.h.i.+ng to impress those words on his memory for ever.

'Of course there are plenty of those. But are there none here?'

'Here! I have never seen a single pod all these past three years. Here the peas are what at home we should not expect the ... the....'

'The pigs to eat,' I suggested.

'Well, yes! Here they sell them by the pound, and it's not always possible to get them.'

'Are you so fond of kidney beans?'

'It's not that I am so fond of them, but they are so beautiful that ... I don't know why ... I often get thinking and thinking how they may be growing round my house. Here there's nothing!'

'And now, Sir,' he recommenced, 'will you tell me, if those small grey birds are still there in the winter,--like this--' and he measured with his hand. 'I have forgotten their names too. Formerly there were a great many, when I used to pray by the window. They used to swarm round! Well, whoever even looked at them there? Do you know, Sir, I could never have believed that I should ever think about them! But here, where it's so cold that even the crows won't stop, you can't expect to see little things like that. But they are sure to be there with us? They are there, aren't they, Sir?...'

But I did not answer him now. I no longer doubted that this old fanatical Jew was pining for his country just as much as I was, and that we were both sick with the same sickness. This unexpected discovery moved me deeply, and I seized him by the hand, and asked in my turn:

'Then that was what you wished to talk to me about? Then you are not thinking of the people, of your heavy lot, of the poverty which is pinching you; but you are longing for the sun, for the air of your native country!... You are thinking of the fields and meadows and woods; of the little songsters, for whom you could not spare a moment's attention there when you were busy, and now that these beautiful pictures are fading from your recollection, you fear the solitude surrounding you, the vast emptiness which meets you and effaces the memories you value? You wish me to recall them to you, to revive them; you wish me to tell you what our country is like?...'

'Oh yes, Sir, yes, Sir! That was why I came here,' and he clasped my hands, and laughed joyfully, like a child.

'Listen, brother....'

And my friend, Srul, listened, all transformed by listening, his lips parted, his look rivetted to mine; he kindled, he inspired me by that look; he wrested the words from me, drank them in thirstily, and laid them in the very depth of his burning heart.... I do not doubt that he laid them there, for when I had finished my tale he began to moan bitterly, 'O weh mir! weh mir!' He struck his red beard, and in his misery tears like a child's rolled fast down his face.... And the old fanatic sat there a long time sobbing, and I cried with him....

Much water has flowed down the cold Lena since that day, and not a few human tears have rolled down suffering cheeks. All this happened long ago. Yet in the silence of the night, at times of sleeplessness, the statuesque face of Baldyga, bearing the stigma of great sorrow, often rises before me, and invariably beside it Srul's yellow, drawn face, wet with tears. And when I gaze longer at that night-vision, many a time I seem to see the Jew's trembling, pale lips move, and I hear his low voice whisper:

'Oh Jehovah, why art thou so unmerciful to one of Thy most faithful sons?...'

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Baldyga means 'lump' or 'clumsy lout.'

[11] The river near his home.

[12] 'Docha.'

[13] _i.e._ Polish.

IN AUTUMN

WACLAW SIEROSZEWSKI

The rain and bad weather, which had continued without interruption for several days, had kept the inhabitants of the hut, 'Talaki,'[14]

prisoners indoors, and condemned them to idleness. They constantly went out of the room to gaze long and sadly at the weeping sky, for the hay was rotting in the fields;--but alas! a grey film of rain hung over all the surrounding country, and in vain their eyes sought longingly for the smallest c.h.i.n.k of blue in the heavy, dark clouds.

To add to the misfortune, the rain, not content with the holes left in the roof from the year before, made a number of fresh ones. It thus poured into the room from all sides on to people's heads and shoulders, and formed quite a deep and ever-growing pool underfoot.

Various forms of filth, remains of food, refuse of fish and game, the dung in the corner where the calves were kept, which had been trodden down and had dried in the course of the year, became moist, and filled the interior of the 'yurta'[15] with an unbearable smell. It was therefore stuffy, cold, and damp there. The fire, burning rather slowly, was choked by b.a.l.l.s of grey smoke, which went across the room.

The hut was tiny; it occupied no more than twenty-four square yards of the solitude surrounding it. The slanting walls, made of barked larch trees placed perpendicularly, and narrowing towards the top, diminished its size still more. The flat roof was built of rafters of the same wood, and came down so close to the inhabitants' heads that one of them, Michawio, a big lad, while unwinding a bundle of nets at the little window, hit his curly shock head against it.

A plank part.i.tion, hewn out with a hatchet, ran through the centre of the room, and divided it into equal parts, the right being for the men, the left for the women. By a post at the end of the room, with his face turned towards the fire, his hands on his right knee, and smoking a pipe, sat my host, Kyrsa,[16] a Yakut. Still hale, though no longer young, he was the wealthy and independent master of field labourers, and the owner of the house, of many nets, animals, and implements, as well as of three women:--a wife, and two daughters. The youngest was sold already, but she was living with her father, as the sum agreed upon for her had not yet been paid in full by the buyer.

There was deep silence in the room,--a rather unusual thing in a place where several Yakut people are together. The fire roared and hissed in the chimney, and behind the part.i.tion the girls made a squeaking sound as they rubbed the skins together. I had a foreboding that this silence would end badly; indeed, the storm soon broke out. The lad nicknamed 'Shmata' brought it on by his incompetence. After wandering from corner to corner all day, he now upset a bucket and spilt the water. This was the last straw. All eyes flashed, and faces grew pale.

The frightened Shmata tried to lay the blame on Michawio, who had been stooping down near him to look for a strap. Michawio in revenge reminded Shmata of what had happened about the rake the year before.

The quarrel had begun in earnest. Their tongues, moving with the speed of a windmill, and throwing out invectives and sneers, formed an accompaniment to the host's threatening shouts, which rang out like the trump of the Archangel. Nor did our hostess fail to leave her seclusion to take part in the skirmish with the excitement peculiar to women all the world over. The yurta suddenly became like a disturbed beehive. The host affirmed, the hostess denied, the labourers hurled abuses at one another, the girls uttered war cries, the baby woke up and screamed in its cradle, and the calves lowed in answer to the loud mooing of the cows, whom evening had driven near the house door. This last occurence had a perceptible influence in diminis.h.i.+ng the noise, for it caused the female element to withdraw from the fight; in fact, the disturbance might have been conjured away completely, if the happy thought of adding something at the very moment when everyone else was quieting down, had not entered our host's head.

This remark burst out unexpectedly, like a belated bomb after a battle, and produced such a din that the cows and calves were silent, the wind abated in fright, the clouds fled, and I became aware of a golden sunbeam penetrating the holes in the bladder at the window, and falling suddenly into the interior of our dark, dirty, noisy hovel.

Merrily and brightly it rested in a s.h.i.+ning circle on the closely cropped grey head of my host, before whose nose his wife's large closed fist was hovering at that moment. 'That's for you! Take that!

Go on!' Kuimis cried, still beautiful in her anger. The fist came closer and closer to the unfortunate man's mouth.

What happened further? Did Kyrsa avenge himself like a man for that greatest of all insults possible to a Yakut from a woman? Or did he show himself to be the 'wife of his wife,' an old woman and a simpleton, as the neighbours called him, and refrain from knocking out the teeth or breaking the ribs of the active woman by whose work he lived and had grown rich? I do not know, because, foreseeing the overthrow of my friend, in whom love for his wife was always struggling against a sense of duty, and not wis.h.i.+ng to be a witness of his defeat, I shouldered my gun and went out of the cottage.

The wind had dropped, the covering of clouds was torn open, and bits of pale blue sky were unveiled here and there. The sun peeped out suddenly through one of these little gaps, and the landscape, which had been dreary and joyless a moment before, brightened into a golden splendour. A light shadow, half cheerful, half sombre, fell across its faded autumn foliage, and in this half smile it resembled a forsaken woman, to whom the caprice of a lover, who has already grown cold, offers a moment of tenderness and happiness again. Drops of rain glistened like brilliants on the dark branches of the trees and bushes; the sky was coloured in shades of carmine, and the pearly tears of the pa.s.sing storm trembled on the willows, still swaying from it.

Before me, between two high promontories overgrown by woods which ran in opposite directions, sparkled the surface of the lake. In proportion as it stretched into the distance, its bank became more winding, lower, and mistier, until it disappeared at the outlet of a gorge. Owing to the distance, the tall, thin larches, the thick willows, bushes, and gra.s.s growing there looked quite small, but the rays of the sunset, falling on them from behind, produced a wonderful lace-work of dark branches and leaves against a pale-rose sky. Grey clouds hung above them, heavily embroidered with gold and purple. The waves sported and chased one another below on the foam-splashed banks of the lake, which was painted with colours from the sky.

I walked towards the gorge, by the footpath leading through a meadow which was now turning yellow.

That 'demons' forest'[17] looked dark and horrible close at hand. The flat hills, uniformly covered with soft moss of a dirty green, and with cranberry leaves, undulated gently westwards towards the sinking sun. The wood covering these hills was spa.r.s.e and stunted, and disfigured them rather than otherwise, for single trees stood out here and there like the remaining hair on a bald man's head. Silence, and the gloom of oncoming night already filled the interior of the forest.

Only here and there a forgotten ray of suns.h.i.+ne was burning itself out above in the bare, wind-twisted summits of the larches.

I stood for a moment, looking at that wild spot, which no native would have dared to approach. A deep stillness lay upon it; the waves beat more and more gently and noiselessly; the sunset was fading away, and only where the network of bushes was less close a transient gleam lighted the surface of some lakes, which had hitherto been unknown to me. I walked on towards them, impelled by curiosity and a feeling of longing.

The way proved more difficult than I had expected. At every moment I was obliged to jump or climb over bushes and avoid the deep, narrow wells, boarded round with tree-trunks felled a hundred years before and perfidiously concealed by the mosses and plants overgrowing them.

As these wells were full of water, with bottoms as slippery as ice, an unwary pedestrian could easily break his neck or fracture a leg by falling into them. In many places swampy streams trickled along undefined channels, and though their banks were shallow, they were boggy and difficult to cross on account of the trunks and branches lying in them. The wood was full of trees with projecting, mud-covered roots, which now, when everything was a.s.suming an indefinite shape in the twilight, looked twisted and monstrous. The white patches of lichen s.h.i.+ning in the darkness at the foot of the trees like the immense shreds of a pall, emphasized and doubled their weird appearance. It is, therefore, no wonder that in the purple light of dawn, or in the moonlight, the natives should here see the tall wood-demon's pale face,--the Slav hunter who came from the South and now roams near the Yakut cottages, injuring cattle.

Woe to the district where his shadow pa.s.ses! Often from fifty to two hundred beasts fall dead at one shot from those terrible Southern arms.

That evening, however, I met none of these inhabitants of the wood. I also did not see the 'demons,'--the dry Tungus corpses. At one time they were to be found here quite frequently, and the forest takes its name from them. Shrivelled and horrible, they usually sit somewhere under a tree or cleft in a rock, gazing eastwards with eye-sockets pecked by the birds. On their knees they hold a wooden bow, or a rifle, at their feet lies a hatchet with a broken handle, and at their belt, inlaid with silver and beads, hangs a broken knife in its sheath,--also broken, in order to prevent the dead man from doing any mischief after death. A little to one side lie scattered the bones of the reindeer, killed on his grave, the harness, and the small Tungus sledge. No one ever dares to possess himself of any of these considerably valuable articles, for punishment threatens the foolhardy, inasmuch as he loses his way all day long until he returns to the same place and restores the stolen object. Until they give ample satisfaction, and atone to the angered owner by a gift, obstinate people return some thirty, even a hundred times without being able to escape from the magic circle. It is dangerous even to touch any of the things belonging to the dead man, since that evokes a storm, or, at best, a high wind. Although the kindly natives had advised me to avoid meeting with the 'demon,' since it brings early, and sometimes immediate death, I was very sorry not to have seized him red-handed that evening. However, I came to be severely punished for this sinful wish.

The twilight deepened. The last purple resplendance had already faded from the sunset, when tired and tattered, I at last succeeded in pus.h.i.+ng my way through the bushes of the 'demon's forest.' The sky was dark, and twinkling with myriads of stars. My expedition had failed in every respect. To complete the misfortune, the white mists hung like muslin over the valley, and entirely prevented me from satisfying my curiosity. I was therefore only able to take pleasure in the play of the moonlight.

It was really a beautiful view, although rather wild and gloomy.