Here he was shouted down by the crowd that pressed about him. In vain did the miller and a few others take his part. Those on Gregory’s side came near using their fists, and things were looking very bad, when old Prychek cried: “The gendarmes are listening!”
This silenced them and gave the old man an occasion to hold forth in an angry tone:
“One very true thing he has said: we must look to our own interests!—Be quiet there! You have said your say, let others say theirs!—These fellows bawl and bawl, and think themselves great men!—If shrieking meant thinking, then every loud-mouthed brawler would have a better head than even our priest himself! You laugh at me; but I say to you: how was it that year … when our noblemen rebelled? Remember how they threw dust in our eyes, and swore that as soon as Poland existed, we should have our will … our own lands … and forests—and everything. And they made promises and speeches, and every other man of us helped them; and what have we of it now?—Ye may hearken to the nobles, if ye be fools; but I am too old a bird to be caught with chaff!”
“Smite him on the mouth, that he may be still!” cried a voice.
He went on nevertheless: “And now I am a noble, as much as any of them all: I have my rights, and none dares lay a finger on me!”
But his voice was drowned in a torrent of jeers that poured down on him from all sides.
“You swine that grunt about your delights, and are happy to have a sty and a full trough!”
“Once fatted, you shall feel the club on your skull, and the knife at your throat!”
“Did not a gendarme flog him at last fair? And yet he prates about no one daring to touch him!”
“A great noble he is, and most free to be eaten by lice!”
“Truly the straw stuffed in his boots could teach as much wisdom as he!”
“He knows not to judge a fowl’s worth, yet he comes here to enlighten us!”
The old man was foaming with rage, but only said:
“Ye scum of the land! … that cannot even respect grey hairs!”
“What then? Must a grey mare be respected, for that she is grey?”
They roared with laughter at this; but presently their attention was diverted to the roof of the office, on to which the constable Joseph had climbed, and, holding to a chimney, was gazing into the distance.
“Joseph!” they cried to him in a merry mood. “Shut your mouth, lest something fall into it!” For a flock of pigeons was wheeling above his head. But he only shouted with all his might:
“He is coming … coming! Has passed the turning from Krylak!”
The assembly now gathered close round the building, and gazed quietly along the road that as yet lay empty.
The scrivener hastily donned his very best clothes; again the air rang with his wife’s outcries, and the clinking of plates, and the rumbling of displaced furniture, and the noise of many feet. In a short time, the Voyt too appeared on the scene: standing on the doorstep, red as a beetroot, perspiring, breathless, but adorned with his chain of office. Casting his eyes on the crowd around him, he shouted in fierce tones:
“Silence, men! This Office is not a tavern.”
“Come round here, Peter! I’ll tell you what!” Klemba cried to him.
“There is no Peter here! I am an official,” he answered loftily.
The words were taken up at once and made great fun of, till they shook with laughter; but, all at once, the Voyt cried solemnly:
“Make way there! Way for the head of the District!”
A coach appeared on the road, jolting over the ruts and hollows, and pulling up in front of the office.
The head official raised his hand to his cap, the peasants took their hats off, and silence followed, while the Voyt and the scrivener darted forward to assist him from the coach, and the gendarmes stood erect at attention beside the doorway.
He alighted, divested himself of his white dust-coat, turned round to gaze at the assembled crowd, stroked his blond beard, assumed a severe look, and nodded his head. Then he entered the scrivener’s dwelling, into which the latter, bent like a hoop, ushered him.
The coach drove away, and the peasants thronged round the table that had been set up. They thought the meeting was now about to begin. But it was a very long while indeed before the head official showed himself: while from the scrivener’s apartments there came the noise of jingling glasses, and laughter, and certain fragrant scents that made the mouth water.
They were weary both of waiting and of the broiling heat, and many a one tried to slip away to the tavern. But this the Voyt would not have.
“Do not go away!—Whosoever is absent shall be put down for a fine.”
This kept them back, but they uttered many an invective, as they looked impatiently towards the scrivener’s curtained windows.
“They are ashamed to be seen drinking!”
“Quite right of them: it would only make us more thirsty that we have but our spittle to swallow!”
From the lockup, in the same building as the Office, now came the constable, dragging by a halter a large calf that resisted with might and main and, making a sudden rush at him, upset the man and set off at a run, tail in air in a cloud of dust.
“Stop thief! Stop thief!” they cried, laughing.
“Oh, the bold rascal, to break prison so, even lifting up his tail against my Lord the Voyt!”
They also aimed a good many jibes at the constable, who was not able to get the calf into the yard without the assistance of all the Soltyses present. They were not yet fully breathed after their hunt, when the Voyt ordered them all to cleanse the lockup thoroughly; he himself saw that the work was well
