The sharp and high little pediment, with a small window resembling an upturned eye, was painted all over with blue and yellow flowers and red crescents. It was held up by oak posts, the upper half rounded and the lower hexagonal, with fancy turning at the tops. Under this pediment was a small porch with benches on both sides. At the ends of the house were shed roofs on the same sort of posts, some of them twisted. A tall pear tree with a pyramidal top and trembling leaves greened in front of the house. Several barns stood in two rows in the yard, forming a sort of wide street leading to the house. Beyond the barns, toward the gates, the triangles of two cellars stood facing each other, also roofed with thatch. The triangular wall of each was furnished with a door and painted over with various images. On one of them a Cossack was portrayed sitting on a barrel, holding a mug over his head with the inscription: 'I'll Drink It All.' On the other, a flask, bottles, and around them, for the beauty of it, an upside-down horse, a pipe, tambourines, and the inscription: 'Drink-the Cossack's Delight.' From the loft of one of the barns, through an enormous dormer window, peeked a drum and some brass trumpets. By the gates stood two cannon. Everything showed that the master of the house liked to make merry and that the yard often resounded with the noise of feasting. Outside the gates were two windmills. Behind the house ran the gardens; and through the treetops one could see only the dark caps of chimneys hiding in the green mass of cottages. The entire settlement was situated on a wide and level mountain ledge. To the north everything was screened off by a steep mountain, the foot of which came right down to the yard. Looked at from below, it seemed steeper still, and on its high top the irregular stems of skimpy weeds stuck out here and there, black against the bright sky. Its bare and clayey appearance evoked a certain despondency. It was all furrowed with gullies and grooves left by rain. In two places, cottages were stuck to its steep slope; over one of them an apple tree, propped by small stakes and a mound of dirt at its roots, spread its branches broadly. Windfallen apples rolled right down into the master's yard. From the top a road wound down all over the mountain and in its descent went past the yard into the settlement. When the philosopher measured its terrible steepness and remembered the previous day's journey, he decided that either the master's horses were very smart or the Cossacks' heads were very strong to have managed, even in drunken fumes, not to tumble down head first along with the boundless wagon and the baggage. The philosopher stood on the highest point of the yard, and when he turned and looked in the opposite direction, he was presented with a totally different sight. The settlement, together with the slope, rolled down onto a plain. Vast meadows opened out beyond the reach of sight; their bright greenery became darker in the distance, and whole rows of villages blued far off, though they were more than a dozen miles away. To the right of these meadows, mountains stretched and the distant, barely noticeable strip of the Dnieper burned and darkled.
'Ah, a fine spot!' said the philosopher. 'To live here, to fish in the Dnieper and the ponds, to take a net or a gun and go hunting for snipe and curlew! Though I suppose there's also no lack of bustards in these meadows. Quantities of fruit can be dried and sold in town or, even better, distilled into vodka-because no liquor can touch vodka made from fruit. And it also wouldn't hurt to consider how to slip away from here.'
He noticed a small path beyond the wattle fence, completely overgrown with weeds. He mechanically stepped onto it, thinking at first only of taking a stroll, and then of quietly blowing out between the cottages into the meadows, when he felt a rather strong hand on his shoulder.
Behind him stood the same old Cossack who had grieved so bitterly yesterday over the death of his mother and father and his own loneliness.
'You oughtn't to be thinking, master philosopher, about skipping from the farmstead!' he said. 'It's not set up here so as you can run away; and the roads are bad for walking. Better go to the master: he's been waiting for you a long time in his room.'
'Let's go! Why not?… It's my pleasure,' said the philosopher, and he followed after the Cossack.
The chief, an elderly man with a gray mustache and an expression of gloomy sorrow, was sitting at a table in his room, his head propped in both hands. He was about fifty years old; but the deep despondency on his face and a sort of wasted pallor showed that his soul had been crushed and destroyed all of a sudden, in a single moment, and all the old gaiety and noisy life had disappeared forever. When Khoma came in together with the old Cossack, he took away one of his hands and nodded slightly to their low bow.
Khoma and the Cossack stopped respectfully by the door.
'Who are you, and where from, and of what estate, good man?' the chief said, neither kindly nor sternly.
'I'm the philosopher Khoma Brut, a student.'
'And who was your father?' 'I don't know, noble sir.' 'And your mother?'
'I don't know my mother, either. Reasonably considering, of course, there was a mother; but who she was, and where from, and when she lived-by God, your honor, I don't know.'
The chief paused and seemed to sit pondering for a moment.
'And how did you become acquainted with my daughter?'
'I didn't become acquainted, noble sir, by God, I didn't. I've never had any dealings with young ladies in all my born days. Deuce take them, not to say something improper.'
'Then why was it none other than you, precisely, that she appointed to read?'
The philosopher shrugged his shoulders:
'God knows how to explain that. It's a known fact that masters sometimes want something that even the most literate man can't figure out. And as the saying goes: 'Hop faster, mind the master!''
'And you wouldn't happen to be lying, mister philosopher?'
'May lightning strike me right here if I'm lying.'
'If you'd lived only one little minute longer,' the chief said sadly, 'I'd surely have learned everything. 'Don't let anybody read over me, daddy, but send to the Kiev seminary at once and bring the student Khoma Brut. Let him pray three nights for my sinful soul. He knows…' But what he knows, I didn't hear. She, dear soul, could only say that, and then she died. Surely, good man, you must be known for your holy life and God-pleasing deeds, and maybe she heard about you.'
'Who, me?' the student said, stepping back in amazement. 'Me, a holy life?' he said, looking the chief straight in the eye. 'God help you, sir! Indecent though it is to say, I went calling on the baker's wife on Holy Thursday itself.'
'Well… surely you were appointed for some reason. You'll have to start the business this same day.'
'To that, your honor, I'd reply… of course, anybody versed in Holy Scripture could commensurably… only here it would call for a deacon, or at least a subdeacon. They're smart folk and know how it's done, while I… And I haven't got the voice for it, and myself I'm-devil knows what. Nothing to look at.'
