“ ’Sdeath! I am a farmer. The property is mine, and I drink, if I choose; and if I choose, I work!—Jew! more rum!—Thwart me, and I turn you out!”
“Simon! Simon! For God’s sake!” whimpered Andrew, weeping abundantly; “come home, Mother is after you!”
Indeed, she was there directly, together with Yagna; and they both got the lads from beneath the hedge, where they were making some feeble attempts to fight.
After their departure, other people also went out, and the tavern grew somewhat less noisy. At last no one remained there but Boryna and his messengers, with Ambrose and the blind beggar, all now drinking at one table.
Ambrose was very mellow indeed. He stood up in their midst, now singing, now shouting very loud.
“He was quite black—black as that pot! He aimed … but where did he hit me? where? … And I—I thrust my bayonet into him, and twisted it: I heard his inside gurgle!—So we halt—halt! And the commander himself arrives with more men.—Ah! the commander! ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘boys!’ ”
“ ‘Attention!’ ” the old man cried, in a voice of thunder. And he stood stiffly erect, and stepped slowly backwards, his wooden leg stumping along the floor: “Drink to me, Peter! to me who am an orphan!” he bleated out; but when close to the wall, suddenly he whipped out of the place. But they could still hear the braying of his voice, raised in song outside.
Just then the miller entered the tavern: a big burly fellow, red-faced, dressed town-fashion, and with small keen eyes.
“Drink, lads, drink together!—Ho, ho! the Voyt, the Soltys, and Boryna!—Is it a wedding?”
“No, it is not.—Sir miller, take a drink with us,” Boryna said.
And once more the vodka went round.
“Well, now to you all three thus together, I shall tell some news that will sober you in no time.”
All stared at him vacantly.
“Not an hour since, the Squire sold the clearing of Vilche Doly!”
“The hound! the miscreant! What, sell a clearing that belongs to our village!” Boryna shouted, smashing a bottle on the floor in a fit of rage. “Sold it, has he? But there is law—law both for the Squire and for all of us!” Simon stammered; he was completely intoxicated.
“It’s false! I, your Voyt, have spoken: believe me, it’s false!”
“Sold it! Ha!—But we won’t let anyone take it: as there’s a God in heaven, we won’t!” Boryna growled, and he brought his fist down upon the table.
The miller left them, and they stayed there far into the night, taking counsel together, and breathing threats against the manor-folk.
IX
It was shortly after Yagna’s engagement had taken place; All Souls’ Day had dawned.
Ever since morning, the church-bells of Lipka had tolled incessantly, slowly; their doleful and sorrowful notes, floating over the desolate fields, called the people together with deep-sounding voices of sadness on this day, which rose pallid and swaddled in fog, as far as the far-off horizon—where the earth and the sky met, no one knew where, in a vague unfathomed abyss of vacuity.
Now, as soon as the sun arose in the east, which still glowed red as copper molten and cooling, hosts of crows and daws had been coming thence, winging their flight from beyond the lurid clouds.
They flew very high; so high that neither the eye could well make them out, nor the ear catch distinctly the wild and melancholy harshness of their croaking, which sounded like weeping in the autumn night.
And from the belfry, the tolling sounded continually.
The deep notes of that doleful hymn rolled heavily through the thick nebulous air—rolled all over the countryside, and men and fields and villages seemed as one vast heart, throbbing to the dismal dirge.
And still the flocks of birds increased, even to the dismay and stupefaction of the people; for now they flew lower, ever in vaster multitudes, sprinkling the sky as with scattered specks of soot; and the dull flapping and croaking was now louder, more boisterous, more turbulent—like a storm that is drawing nigh. They swept in circles over the village: and as a heap of dead leaves the blast plays with, so they wheeled over the ploughed lands, floated down to the woods, hung above the skeleton poplar-trees, took possession of the lindens round about the church, and perched upon the trees in the burial-ground.
“A severe winter it will be,” people said.
“Snow is going to fall—they are flying towards the woods.”
They now approached the huts in still greater numbers; never before had so many been seen together. People looked at them, sighing, in fear of an evil omen, and some made on their brows the sign of the Cross, as a protection from the evil to come, and put on their garments to set out for church. And continually the tolling sounded with a dull roar; from the neighbouring villages the people were already coming to pray.
An all-pervading sense of desolation filled every soul; in every heart, there reigned a strange distressful silence: the stillness of mournful reminiscences, the recollections of those who had gone before, gone to lie beneath the drooping birch-trees, and the darkly looming crosses, that stood slantwise in the churchyard.
“O my Jesus! O my beloved Jesus!” they would murmur, and then raise up their ashen-grey faces, and fear no longer, plunging into the mystery of futurity: and they calmly went forward to present their offerings and to say their prayers for the dead.
The whole village was as though lost in a sea of grave and heart-stricken quietude: only the whining singsong of the dziads at the church-door now and then broke the stillness.
At Boryna’s, the silence was especially deep: though indeed it was of that hell which reigned amongst them, and was on the point of bursting forth.
His children knew all by that time.
The day before being Sunday, the first banns had been published from the pulpit. On Saturday, Boryna had gone with
