“To the forest!” they all roared in reply. The crowd broke up, and every man ran home shouting. There was an interval of confused preparation, while they made ready: horses neighed, children screamed, men swore, women bewailed themselves; but in a very short time, all were on their way to the poplar road, where Boryna, in his sledge, was waiting, together with Ploshka, Klemba and the other foremost men in Lipka.
All fell into line as they came—peasant-owners, labourers, and even a few women and youngsters: some in sledges, some on horseback, some in carts; but the rest (nearly all the village) trudged on foot, forming a dense mass, like a long field of waving rustling corn, with the women’s red garments for poppies, and, for the awns, bristling with good stout stakes and rusty pitchforks, with here and there a scythe, flashing brightly. The folk went out as if to reap—but not now with gay laughter and merry jokes. They stood silent, grim, relentless, ready for any encounter. And presently Boryna got into his sledge, eyed the people once more, and made the sign of the cross:
“In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen!”
“Amen, amen!” they repeated.—At that moment, they heard a tinkling bell, telling them that the priest had just begun mass. They crossed themselves, took off their caps, smote their breasts, some of them uttering a pious sigh, as they marched on in regular formation, strong silent men—almost all Lipka. But the blacksmith had slunk away somewhere amongst the hedges, and, creeping back to his hut, leaped on to his horse to take a straight cut to the manor. As for Antek, who had, ever since his father appeared, withdrawn into the tavern, he procured a gun from Yankel, and as soon as the march began, hid it beneath his sheepskin, and made direct for the woods through the fields, without so much as casting a glance at the men of Lipka.
These were following Boryna as fast as they could: he drove foremost of all.
After him came the Ploshka families, who dwelt in three separate cabins, and Staho was their leader: a weakly-looking crew, but loud of tongue, and noisy, and self-assured.
Then all the Soha kinsmen, led on by Simon the Soltys.
The Vahnik tribe marched next—short thin fellows all of them, but fierce as hornets.
In the fourth line walked the Golombs, with Matthew at their head: few in number, but such stalwart men and plucky fighters, they were as good as half a village.
The Sikora family came next: thickset as tree-stumps, and sturdy men, but great grumblers.
Klemba’s kin now advanced, and a host of striplings with them: tall young men, always fond of squabbles.—Over them was Gregory, brother to the Voyt.
And many another, too, brought up the rear, whose names were too many to mention.
Under their ponderous tread, the earth shook. The troop went forward, with dark and ominous faces; like a hail-cloud, bearing thunderbolts in its womb, showing a flash now and then, and, when it bursts, destroying all beneath it.
So they passed out; and then, how great was the lamentation of those left behind them at home!
The forest was standing, as yet torpid after the cold of the night, full of a drowsy stupor, and swathed in a mist of clotted opaqueness.
The woodland lay quiet, immersed in frost. The dawn reddened the treetops faintly, and fell here and there in streaks over the pallid snows below.
But, in Vilche Doly, there were heard, again and yet again, the thundering sound of falling trees, the clipping strokes of the axes, the harsh rough throbbing of the saws.
They were felling the forest!
Over forty men, hard at work, like a flock of woodpeckers, were assailing the trees, hacking at them with persistent fury. These fell, one after another, and the open space grew wider, as the fallen giants lay humbled to the ground, in longer and longer rows. Only in some places did a slender stripling, spared for seedlings, rise up in the midst of this desolation, as a tall thistle lifts its head over the lonely plain. But it seemed to stoop and mourn pitifully for its slain brothers.—The brushwood, too, that had been left untouched, and a few stunted trees which the ax had not deigned to sacrifice, also looked as though weeping over the dead. All round, upon the sheets of trampled snow, as if laid out to be wrapped in their shrouds, stiff and stark lay the murdered trees, and the heaps which had been their limbs, and the lopped crowns of the mighty trunks stripped of their boughs, like mangled mutilated corpses: while streams of yellow sawdust—the blood of the slaughtered forest, as it were—were sinking into the snow.
In a circle about the cleared space, like men standing around an open grave, towered the thick unbroken forest, multitudinous and lofty, as friends and kinsmen might stand around, drooping, sorrowful, with muffled sighs, listening to the thudding falls, and gazing in dull bewilderment at this harvest reaped by inexorable Fate!
With never a pause, the woodcutters went onward. Slowly, in one long line, they worked their way into the wood, which barred the way with its seemingly indestructible wall of close-set trunks. Its immensity swallowed them up; they were lost
