Antek rose, yawning drowsily.
“But,” his visitor concluded, “I’ll just wind up with this: you are only at liberty till your trial; and who knows how things will go with you then? In such a position, how can you meddle with other folk’s affairs?”
Antek sat down again, and was lost in a brown study. The smith did not wait for his answer, but went home.
Hanka more than once looked out at Antek, but he did not notice her. She at last called him in a tone of timid pleading:
“Come, Antek, ’tis bedtime; you must be very weary.”
“Coming, Hanka, coming!” he said, rising heavily.
She began to say her evening prayers with tremulous lips, while she undressed in haste.
But he went in, sorely troubled, and thinking: “What shall I do if I am sent to Siberia?”
V
“Pete, bring firewood in!” Hanka called out from the cabin-door. She was covered with flour and very untidy with bread-making.
A big fire roared in the baking-oven. She raked the coals to spread them out, and hastened to roll the dough and shape it into loaves, which she carried out into the passage upon a board that she set in the sunshine, for them to rise more quickly. She bustled about in a great hurry, for the dough was almost overbrimming the big kneading-trough, covered with bedding for warmth.
“Yuzka! more wood on the fire; one end of the oven is almost black!”
But no Yuzka was at hand, and Pete did not hasten to obey. He was loading dung on a cart, heaping and pressing it down, keeping up meanwhile a conversation with the blind dziad, who was occupied in making ropes of straw outside the barn.
The afternoon sun was so hot that the walls exuded liquid resin, and the wind blew like the blast from an oven, making every movement wearisome. The flies, too, hummed in myriads over the cart, and the horses, assailed, and maddened by them, came near breaking their halters, and perhaps their legs, in pulling and straining to avoid their bites.
The yard was so flooded with the heat, together with the pungent effluvium of the dung, that even the birds in the orchard close by could sing no longer; the hens had lain down half dead under the hedge, and the pigs wallowed squealing in the mud by the well. All at once the dziad fell a-sneezing furiously: a whiff yet more noisomely offensive had reached him from the cow-byre.
“God bless you, dziad!”
“That’s no incense-smoke, I wot; and used though I am to the smell, it is stronger than snuff in my nostrils.”
“But use makes all things pleasant.”
“Fool! don’t you think I ever smell aught but dung?”
“I was but repeating what my old grandsire told me when my drill-sergeant gave me slaps in the face.”
“Ha, ha, ha!—Did you get used to that, pray?”
“I soon had enough of such drilling, and meeting the ruffian one day in a quiet corner alone, I made his face swell like a pumpkin … and he never slapped mine any more!”
“Did you serve long?”
“The whole of my five years! I could not purchase my discharge; so I had to—shoulder arms.—At first, ere I knew a thing or two, anyone who would could ill-treat me, and I had to suffer want … till my comrades taught me to snap up anything I needed … or get some maidservant to give it me, whom I promised to marry. And what nicknames those Russian soldiers gave me! and how they laughed at my speech and at my manner of prayer!”
“Did they dare laugh at that, the plague-spotted heathen?”
“Aye, till I punched their ribs for them, one after another, and made them leave off!”
“You must be a strong fighter!”
“Not especially,” he answered with a boastful smile; “but I could drub any three of them at a time!”
“Have you seen warfare?”
“Of course. Against the Turks. We thrashed them soundly, we did!”
“Pete!” Hanka called out to him; “where’s the wood?”
“Where it was,” he muttered inaudibly.
“Your mistress is calling you,” the dziad said.
“Let her call! What, am I to wash up the pots for her?”
“Are you deaf?” she shouted, running out of the house towards him.
“I shall not feed the fire; ’tis no duty of mine!” he shouted back.
She began thereupon to rail at him to the best of her ability.
He, on his side, railed back at her, nothing loath, and when she presently gave him a harder home-thrust, he planted his pitchfork in the dunk and cried angrily:
“Ye have not to do with Yagna now: your screaming will not scare me away.”
“But what I will do, you shall see … and remember!”
She went on scolding the insolent fellow, while she carried the loaves of dough into the porch, or flung the logs into the oven, or looked after the children. But the labour and the intense heat were wearing her out terribly; for it was stiflingly hot within and in the passage on account of the fire in the oven. The flies, too, that swarmed on every wall, were so insupportable that she almost wept with rage as she beat them off with a branch, all streaming with perspiration, exasperated, and ever more impatient and slower at her work.
She was just patting the last loaf into shape for the oven, when Pete prepared to drive out of the yard.
“Wait a moment and take your afternoon meal!”
“Whoa!—Yes, I may as well: my stomach is empty enough after dinner.”
“Had you too little to eat?”
“The food is so wretched, it goes through the bowels as through a sieve.”
“There’s insolence for you! What, you must have meat? And am I munching sausages in corners, say? No other farmers can at this season give their men what you get. Look at the komorniki, how they feed!”
She set down in the porch a pot of sour milk and a loaf, and he began to cram himself gluttonously, now and again flinging
