“Plague on the hour, that lets one not distinguish field from wood!” he grumbled, casting his eyes around him. All about him was palpitating darkness: only above were there a few pale gold streaks.
Waiting was irksome, so he tried to say his morning prayer, but ever and anon, laying his hand upon the dew-drenched soil, forgot what words to say because of the pleasant thought which then would rush in upon him—that he was now on his own land, his own farm!
“I hold you now, nor ever will let you go!” he thought; and full of the courage and joy and infinite determination given by love, he let his ardent glances wander over the dark blurred expanse by the forest, where the six acres the Squire had sold him awaited his tillage.
“Dear orphan land, I will take you unto my heart, and never, whilst I have life, will I forsake you!” And as he spoke, he wrapped his sheepskin closer over his ragged garments. The cool of the night had been somewhat penetrating: he leaned back against the cross, and soon fell into a sound but noisy slumber.
When he leapt again to his feet, the fields were just growing visible, though yet indiscernible from a grey sheet of water, and the corn dripping with dew had touched him with its drooping wavy ears.
“ ’Tis broad day!—To work!” he said, stretching his limbs and kneeling down for a prayer before the cross; but this time not mechanically, as he usually did, to get it over speedily. Today it was otherwise, and he most fervently besought the Lord’s help. With all his soul, embracing the feet of the Crucified Jesus, he entreated Him, his eyes earnestly fixed upon that sacred suffering face.
“Help, O merciful Jesus! My own mother has wrought me grievous wrong. I am Thine, I, a poor destitute orphan: come Thou to mine aid! Yes, I am sinful; but succour me, O Lord of mercy!—I shall order a Mass to be said—nay, two! Also I shall bring tapers; and—if I do well enough—will have a baldachin constructed for Thy service!” So he vowed, pressing his lips lovingly to the crucifix; and then walked round it on his knees and kissed the earth humbly—to rise up unspeakably refreshed and fortified.
And then, to the holding he was now entering upon, he cried out joyfully: “You shall see! Ha! You shall see!” It was situated at the edge of the wood, one side of it joining the fields of Lipka. But, Lord! what land! what land! A mere stretch of desolate wilderness, pitted all over with hollows from disused clay and sandpits, and overgrown with wild pear-trees, surrounded everywhere with thorns and brambles. On each eminence, torchweed, wild camomile, and dockweed grew in rank abundance, with (in places) a scraggy stunted pine-tree, or a clump of alders or juniper-bushes. On the lower grounds and in the swampy parts, there were reeds and bulrushes in luxuriant growth. In short, it was a piece of land that, as the saying is, “a dog might weep over.” Even the Squire himself had advised Simon not to buy. He, however, had stood firm.
“ ’Tis just the thing for me! I shall make something of it!”
Matthew too, appalled at the sight of the bleak dreary waste, dissuaded him from purchasing it. “It was a bit of sterile moorland, fit only for the farmyard dogs to celebrate their nuptials upon.”—But Simon held out stubbornly, and ended the matter by saying:
“I have decided. Any soil is good, when there’s a good pair of hands to work at it!”
He had taken it because of the low price—only sixty roubles per acre—and the Squire had promised besides to help him both with timber and otherwise.
“And what I said then, I stand by now!” he cried, and gazed round with beaming eyes. Setting the barrow down on the pathway, he walked round the borders of his territory, marked off by branches stuck into the ground.
Pacing on slowly, full of deep joy, he settled in his mind the order of his work: what to do, and with what to begin. It was for himself, for Nastka, for the whole future race of Paches, that he was about to work, and he felt as fiercely ravenous to begin as the wild wolf that has just seized a lamb and tasted its quivering flesh.
He then proceeded to choose carefully the situation of his cabin.
“Best build it over against the village, with the forest close on one side of it: so, ’twill be storm-protected, and the timber not so far to bring.”
Having decided this, and marked the place of the four corners with stones, he threw off his sheepskin, crossed himself devoutly, spat on his hands and set himself to level the ground and fill the hollows left by the uprooted trees.
And now the day had risen, golden: cattle bellowed, well-sweeps creaked, and the fresh breeze, running over the corn, brought with it as usual the clatter of carts and the hum of voices. To none of these things did Simon pay any heed, but plunged furiously into his work, only at intervals stopping to straighten his back for a moment and wipe the sweat from his forehead. … Then he repeated his onset, with the clinging and insatiable pertinacity of a leech: all the while, according to his custom, talking to each object as if it were animated.
If he had to get a rock out of the earth:
“You,” he would explain to it, “have lain and rested long: come, help to sustain my hut, ’tis high time.”
Cutting down a blackthorn bush, he would remark, with a jeer:
“No use resisting, foolish one: you cannot withstand me. What, should I leave you standing here to tear my galligaskins?”
And to the wild old pear-trees he would say:
“Ye grow too close together, and must be moved; but ye shall make a floor for my byre, as
