“Swine find it hard to raise their snouts to the sky—and so do men!” So he thought, sorely troubled, but yet got no profit of his pain, further than the feeling that he himself was in as bad a case as anyone else—perhaps worse.
“Only those can live their lives contentedly who never think!”
He waved his hand with a gesture of despair, and then walked on, plunged in so deep a reverie that he nearly stumbled over a Jew—a ragpicker—sitting at the edge of a cornfield.
“Resting, are ye? Indeed, the heat is terrible,” he said, stopping for an instant.
“Heat? We are in a furnace: ’tis a judgment of God!” the Jew ejaculated. Getting up, he passed a strap over his round old shoulders, and, thus harnessed to his wheelbarrow, set about pushing it along with infinite toil. It was chock-full of rags and wooden boxes; above these towered baskets of eggs and a coop full of chickens; and, the road being deep with sand, and the weather unbearably hot, he had to struggle along desperately, and sit down to rest every now and then.
“Nuchim, you’ll be late, Sabbath is at hand,” he soliloquized, chiding himself with tears. “Push, Nuchim, push on! you’re strong as a horse! Now, Nuchim!—One—two—three! …” And with a cry of desperation, he would wheel the barrow on for a score of paces, and then stop again.
Antek was for passing him by with a nod, but the Jew called to him earnestly:
“Master Farmer, I pray you! Help me, and I will pay you well. I can no more, in truth I can no more!” And he fell forward against the handbarrow, breathless and as white as a sheet.
Without a word, Antek turned round, threw his capote and boots on to the barrow, seized it by the handle and pushed it forward so lustily that the wheel hummed and the dust flew. The Jew trotted beside him, catching his breath as he went, and chattering by the way to interest his helper.
“Only as far as the wood: the road is good there. ’Tis not far. And I’ll give you five whole kopeks!”
“Confound your kopeks! Fool, do I care for your money? But ye Jews think money is everything in the world.”
“Be not angry, Master, I’ll give you pretty toys for your children.—No?—Then needles, thread, ribbons peradventure?—No?—Then may I offer rolls or scones or caramels … or aught else? For I have everything—Or would ye, Master Farmer, buy of me a packet of tobacco? Or may I give you a glass of quite superior vodka? such as I have only for my very good friends—on my conscience, only for my very good friends.”
And here a fit of coughing made his eyes almost start from their sockets. … Antek went a little more slowly, and the Jew, catching at the barrow, managed to drag himself along.
“We shall have a good harvest,” he continued, starting another subject; “the price of rye is falling.”
“Aye, and when the crop is scanty, it must bring us in less: either way, it is ill for farmers!”
“But the Lord God has granted us fine weather, and the corn in the ear is dry.” He rubbed some in his hands and tasted it.
“Well and good; but the Lord Jesus is hard upon us for the barley crop: it is quite lost.”
From topic to topic, they came to talk about the morning’s assembly. It appeared that the Jew had special information on this point. Looking cautiously about him, he said:
“Do ye know? The District Official made a contract as far ago as last winter with a builder about that Lipka school! My son-in-law acted as his agent.”
“What, in winter, and before it was voted? What is this ye tell me?”
“Was he to ask anyone for leave? Is he not throughout his District like a Squire on his estate?”
Antek put him a few more questions, which Nuchim answered, giving many curious particulars, and finally saying, with tolerant amenity:
“Things have to be so. The husbandman lives on the land he tills, the tradesman on what he sells, the Squire on his estate, the priest on his parish … and the official, on everybody. It must be so, and ’tis well so. All men should get their livelihood, should they not?”
“To my mind, that one man should fleece the others is not well; but that all men should live justly, and as the Lord hath commanded.”
“What’s to be done? Folk must live as they can.”
“Oh, I know the saying: ‘Every man peels his own turnip’; but therefore do things go so badly.”
The Jew nodded, but kept his own counsel.
They at last got to the wood, where the road was less deep in sand. Antek gave up the barrow, bought a zloty’s worth of sweets for his children, and, when the Jew wanted to thank him, cried out:
“You are foolish! To help you was but a whim of mine.”
And then he started off at a good pace for Lipka. He was now in the cool grateful shadow of the trees, with only a tiny strip of sky overhead, and a thin bright stream of sunshine beneath. The wood—of oak, pine and birch—was old and tall, and the trees were pressed close, with a thick undergrowth at their feet of hazels, aspens, juniper-bushes, and hornbeams, with here and there a few groves of firs, pushing greedily skywards to get at the sun.
There still were plenty of pools glittering on the road after yesterday’s rain; plenty of broken boughs, too, and treetops scattered on the ground. In some places, a slender tree had been uprooted, and lay across the way, which was quiet and cool and
