“You rogue, you are lying like a gipsy!—But come tomorrow, and you shall have the calf. … What I am asked for, I may give; but claim it as a right, and you’ll get only a broken cudgel—or worse.”
They continued their potations, the smith now treating Boryna, and inviting Ambrose to join them. This he did very willingly, and told many a merry tale and jest, so that they presently roared with laughter.
The two separated on good terms. But neither trusted the other a jot.—Each was transparent to each as a pane of glass, each as easy to know as a horse with a star on the forehead.
Ambrose remained, expecting gossips and acquaintances willing to offer him the least little drop. For “a hungry dog will try even to catch a fly.”
The fair was drawing to its close.
For a moment the sun had shone out at noon, flashing on the world like the glint of a brandished mirror; then it plunged anew behind the clouds. Before evening had come, everything was in profound gloom; heavy masses of vapour rolled down, almost touching the house-roofs, and a fine rain drizzled as though sifted through a sieve. … The folk therefore hastened to drive away, anxious to get home before nightfall and a heavy downpour.
Twilight fell, swift, louring, and dank: the town was once more empty and silent.
Only along a wall here and there, some dziads were moaning, and the voices of revelling and quarrelling were loud in the taverns.
Evening was well advanced when Boryna drove away with his people. They had sold all they brought, purchased various articles, and enjoyed the fair to the full. Antek flogged the horses with all his might, and the cart hurtled athwart the depths of the mud; for he felt cold, and they had all drunk plentifully. The old man, stingy though he was, and ready to make a fuss for a grosz14 had that day treated them so well with things to eat and drink, and friendly words, that they were all amazed at him.
When they reached the forest, it was black night—so dark that nothing could be seen. The rain was falling, ever in larger drops. Along the road a clatter of wagon-wheels, the brawling howl of a drunken song, or the sucking steps of someone plodding in the mire, were to be heard.
But, in the middle of the poplar-road, whose trees murmured and muttered as though shivering with cold, Ambrose, now quite drunk, staggered along from one side to the other, now stumbling against a tree, now falling into the mud; but he would quickly rise and go on, singing, as was his wont, with noisy vociferation.
VI
The rain had now begun to come down in earnest.
Ever since the fair, all things had been drowned in a grey turbid shimmer, through which only the dim outlines of the forest or the hamlet loomed, embroidered, as it were, on a ground of wet canvas.
The autumn downpours swooped down, icily cold, piercingly sharp, and never-ending.
The rain, like scourges of ashen-grey hue, unceasingly beat upon the earth, soaking every tree to its very centre, and making every blade of grass quiver, as in dire pain.
From underneath those thick clouds and that ghastly grey rain there would appear, now and again, strips of fields, blackened, flat, and sodden; or there would gleam forth streaks of foam-flecked water, flowing down the furrows; or the trees along the pathways would stand forth, dark and stark, as their dripping branches, wet to the inmost pith, shaking off the last rags of leaves, seemed struggling desperately, like hounds straining at a leash.
The deserted roads were now transformed into interminable quagmires of filth.
The short, sad, sunless days crawled by; bleak and dull, with ceaseless sounds of monotonous plashing, fell the nights.
Mute were the fields, dumb the hamlets, silent the woods. The houses dusky and colourless, seemed melting into and making one with the earth, the fences, and the stripped orchards, tossing their boughs with feeble moans.
A livid whirling downpour had covered the land, taken all colour out of it, quenched its tints, and plunged the world into twilight. All seemed confused, and as in a dream. A sadness rose up from the mouldering fields, from the palsy-stricken woods, from the dead wilderness; thence it floated like a heavy cloud, lingering about the melancholy crossways, under the crucifixes which stretched forth their mournful arms and on the waste roads, where the trees would suddenly quake as with dread, and sob as if in anguish; it looked with vacant stare into each deserted nest, and on each fallen cabin; it crept about the burial-places around the graves of the forgotten dead, and the decaying crosses; it spread over all the country.
And the drizzle was never-ceasing: but when the heavy rain swooped down, it wrapped all Lipka in its folds, so that the dark thatches, the dank stones of the enclosures, the dingy tangles of smoke which twirled above the chimneys and wandered over the orchards, were visible only at rare intervals.
The village was noiseless, except for some barns, where men were threshing. But these were few: the people were all out in the cabbage plantations. The miry roads lay waste; and waste, too, were the cabin-surroundings. If now and then anyone appeared, a ghost in the fog, he vanished at once, and only the sound of his wooden clogs was audible, as he trudged through the mud. Or from time to time a cart laden with cabbages would roll slowly away from the peat bogs, and scatter the geese wading about to snap up such leaves as it let fall.
The pond struggled within the narrow shores which confined it. It was continually rising; and ere it flooded the lower parts of the road on Boryna’s side, it came up to the enclosures, and splashed and foamed before the very cabin-walls.
But the whole village was out,
