The snow had been, since early morning, threatening to fall. The day rose, cloudy and very boisterous; grains of snow came down, minute, like unsifted groats; and the gale, gaining in strength as the morning advanced, and constantly changing its direction, howled loud and dismally.
The weather notwithstanding, Hanka had set out with her father and several komorniki immediately after noontide, to get dry wood for fuel in the forest.
The gusts raged over the fields, shaking the trees, blowing clouds of fallen snow into the air again, whistling and shrieking, and casting them down once more, as when a linen cloth, full of white hemp peel, is shaken out. Everything was lost to sight in the raging turmoil.
Once clear of the village, they went forward in single file along the pathways between the sown crops, towards the pine-forest, now scarce visible through the falling snow.
The wind, increasing in intensity, smote upon them from every quarter, dancing wildly round them, and buffeted and struck them so violently that they could hardly stand. They crawled along, bending down towards the ground; while it rushed on, gathered up dry snow mingled with sand, and returned to dash it in their faces.
Slowly they plodded onward, making half-audible sounds, and rubbing their hands with snow; for the piercing frost went through and through their thin garments; and the numerous snowdrifts around the piles of stones or the trees were continually blocking the way, and had to be turned, thus lengthening their journey a good deal.
Hanka walked foremost, often looking back at her father, bowed down, and with his head in a shawl. He was dressed in a cast-off sheepskin of Antek’s, and girt with a band of straw; and he dragged along at the tail, panting, forced every now and then to stop, rest, and wipe his eyes, which were watering with the blast. Then he would hasten on, crying: “I am coming, Hanka, I am coming; fear not, I shall not lag behind.”
Certainly he would have much preferred staying in the chimney corner. But when she, poor thing! went out in such weather, how could he remain at home? Besides, it was unbearably cold in the hut; the children shivered and shuddered all the time; they could not cook anything, and ate only dry bread.
Hanka, with set teeth, walked on in front of the komorniki.—Yes, it had come to that: Filipka, Krakalina, old Kobusova, Magda, Kozlova, the very poorest in the whole place, were now her companions.
She sighed to think of it: yet it was by no means the first time she had been out thus with them.
“Let it be so! Let it be so!” she said in a hard whisper, striving for strength and patience.
Since it had to be, well, she was willing; she would go and seek for firewood along with those paupers, and never weep, nor complain, nor beg anyone to help her.
And, indeed, to whom could she go? They might give her something, but with it also a word of pity … such pity as might well wring the lifeblood out of the heart! … No: the Lord Jesus was trying her, had sent her a cross: perhaps He would reward her ere long. … And, in any case, she would bear all—never give way or let anyone pity or mock her!
In these last times, she had suffered so much that every part of her shook with agony, each crushing her with its own particular pang.
It was not because of her poverty and the slights that went with it, the hunger in her cabin, and the food, insufficient even for the children; not because Antek drank his earnings away in the tavern with those boon companions of his, caring nothing for his family, and often (when he had crept home by stealth, like a vagabond dog) answering any word of remonstrance with a blow. She could forgive all that. “He was out of sorts, and his mood would pass, if she did but wait patiently.”—But that he was unfaithful to her, that she could not forget!
No, she could not! What, with a wife and children, yet mindful of neither, and so utterly absorbed in her!
The thought tore at her heart like the red-hot pincers of medieval tortures.
“He loves Yagna, he dotes upon her: she is the cause of all this!”
And the anguish of neglect and scorn and contumely; and her shame, her jealousy, her craving for revenge—all these monsters were incessantly tormenting her and plunging their venomous fangs into her heart!
“Have mercy, O Lord! Spare me, O Jesus!” she would groan in spirit, raising to Heaven those eyes of hers, red with ever-falling tears.
She quickened her pace; the gale was so high upon the hills not yet sheltered by the forest, that she felt intolerably cold. The women with her, on the contrary, slackened their steps and now lagged behind—blurs almost unseen in the mist of swirling whiteness. The forest was near; and when that mist cleared up for an instant, it suddenly appeared on the snowy plain like a huge wall of trunks in serried array.
“Come on faster,” she called out impatiently; “we shall rest when we get to the wood.”
But they were in no hurry, stopping frequently, and crouching down on the snow, heads away from the wind, like a covey of partridges, while they talked together.
To her call, Filipka answered in surly fashion:
“Hanka is like a dog speeding after a crow—thinks she will get it if she hastes.”
“Poor thing!” murmured Krakalina, sympathetically; “how she has come down in the world!”
“Oh, well, she was warm enough at Boryna’s, and has tasted good things: let her now taste things that are evil. Some starve all the years of their lives, yet none pities them.”
“There was a time when she would not have bid us good day.”
“My dear, there is a saying: ‘Wealth gives a wreath to the brow; poverty, wings to the feet.’ ”
“Once I would have borrowed a mallet of her, and she said it was for her
