“This I say: ye are a lot of drivelling fools!”
And once more he set to explain everything, till he was all in perspiration. The blacksmith, too, put things as strongly as he could: but there was no convincing old Ploshka. He only wagged his head and smiled sceptically, till Gregory leaped at him with fists clenched and trembling with restrained fury.
“Say your say, then, since you think ours to be worthless!”
“So will I.—Well do I know that set of hounds; and I tell you: believe naught till ye see it down in black and white. They have from all time grown fat by wronging us; and now they mean to make money by some other wrong.”
“If ye think thus, ye may withhold your vote; but do not prevent the others!” Klemba cried.
“And you—you, one of them that went up against him to the forest: do you now take his part?”
“As I went then, so will I go once more, if needful! I take not his part, but am only for a just agreement that shall advantage us all. Only a fool cannot see that such a contract is for the good of Lipka. Only a fool will refuse what is offered him.”
“ ’Tis ye that are all fools! Ye would sell your breeches for a pair of braces.—Aye, and doubly fools! for if the Squire will give so much, he will perchance give yet more.”
They went on disputing, while others took Klemba’s part, and the noise grew so deafening that Yankel came in, putting a bottleful of vodka on the table.
“Come, come, good farmers all!” he cried. “Here’s to Podlesie—a new Lipka!—And be ye all masters there!” And he passed the vodka from one to another.
This caused a still greater din; but everyone was now in favour of the agreement—except old Ploshka.
The smith—he must have been well paid for his good offices—spoke the loudest of all, extolling the Squire, and his honourable intentions; and he stood drinks to the whole company—now vodka, now beer, now rum with so-called “essence.”
They had thus enjoyed themselves a good deal—some indeed too well—when suddenly Kobus, who had hitherto not uttered one single word, started up and attacked them all with a savage onslaught of abuse.
“And where do we komorniki come in?” he shrieked. “Are we mere cat’s-paws? We all who are not landowners stand up against this agreement. What, shall one have a belly so great he can hardly walk, and another die of starvation? The lands must be meted out equally to all.—Ye are all of you carrion and Squires!—Look at them, those barebacked ones, who yet hold their heads as high as if they sneezed at us all!” He screamed so loud, and with such foul language, that they put him out of doors; but outside the tavern he still continued his invectives and imprecations.
They then separated, some to go home, and some to enjoy the dance, for the music had just struck up.
Evening was falling now. The sky, all in flames, tinged the orchard treetops and the ears of corn with crimson and gold. A soft damp wind had sprung up, and the croaking of frogs and the piping of quails resounded; the grasshoppers’ shrill notes were heard in the fields, mingling with the everlasting rustling of the cornstalks, the rumbling of the carts driving off, and now and then the drunken song of a man on his way home.
These noises gradually subsided. The villagers sat outside their huts, enjoying the quiet and the cool of the evening.
Boys were bathing near the mill, splashing and bawling; in the enclosures, the lasses were singing country songs.
There was next to no one at the Borynas’. Hanka had gone out with the children; Pete had absented himself somewhere, and Yagna had been away since Vespers.
Only Yuzka, busied with the evening household cares, was there with the blind dziad. He, sitting in the porch, inhaled the cool breeze and, while mumbling a prayer, lent an attentive ear to the approaches of Vitek’s stork, that was sidling up for a surprise attack on his legs with its beak.
“Ah, you villain, a murrain on you!—How hard it pecks!” he grumbled, drawing his feet under him, and waving his long rosary. But the stork only retreated a few paces, and again, with its long stretched-out beak, advanced in another direction.
“Oh, I hear you well! You shall not get at me this time.—A clever fowl, though!” he muttered. But just then he heard someone fiddling in the yard; so he drove the stork away with several cuts of his rosary, in order to listen with more pleasure to the sounds.
“Yuzka, who is it playing so featly?”
“Only Vitek! He has learned to play from Pete; and now he is forever playing, till one’s ears tingle.—Vitek, have done, and give the colts their clover now!” she called to him.
The fiddle was silent. But a thought had struck the dziad and when Vitek came in, he said to him in a most friendly tone:
“Here’s for you. Such good playing is well worth a five-kopek piece.”
Vitek was immensely gratified.
“Can you play pious tunes as well?”
“Whatsoever I hear, I can play.”
“Ah, but ‘every fox praises its own tail.’—Now, prithee, play this air.” And he bleated out something in his professional line, shrill, slow, and quavering.
Vitek brought his fiddle before the dziad had done, and after first imitating him exactly, then repeated the tune with such variations as he had heard in church. The dziad was astounded.
“Why, lad, you could even become an organist!”
“Oh, I can play anything—from the music heard in the Manors to the songs they sing in the taverns.” So Vitek boasted, and went on playing snatches of what he had heard, till the fowls at roost set to cackling, and Hanka, who had come back, sent him off to help Yuzka with her work.
Hanka then sat down in the porch, suckling her little ones, and conversing with the
