The darkness began to be continual, murky and exceedingly depressing; daily the clouds sailed lower; they came creeping down from the forests, like thick volumes of dust, and rolled along the fields like floods of turbid water: then, coming to the village, plunged all things in a dingy ice-cold fog. And suddenly there would come a rent through the midst of the sky that shone dark-blue like the azure mirror of a well: a wild wind whistled through the dim space, the fogs at once were driven together on either side, and by the shattered gateway thus made came a first loud blast, soon followed by another, a score, and hundreds.
They howled on in troops, they poured forwards in torrents that nothing could restrain; they rushed along as if coming out of broken fetters, in raging bellowing multitudes, striking at the gloom, dispelling it utterly, swallowing it up or sweeping it away like rotten chaff.
And out and far over the fields, in screaming turmoil, was driven the fog as froth before the wind.
The clouds, trampled down by the feet of the pitiless storm, fled and rolled off, to skulk in the woodlands and forests. The sky was swept clean; once more, though with dull and sullen mien, the day peered forth, and every creature drew a breath of relief.
For nearly the whole of Sunday the gales blew on without any surcease or abatement. In the daytime, they were not yet quite intolerable; but the nights became beyond bearing. These fell, bright and starlit, and it was then that the gales played their most furious pranks. Folks did not say (as they do when the wind is high): “Sure someone has hung himself,” but: “Fivescore men must be hanging now!” What with the howling, the banging, and the creaking as of a thousand empty wagons dashing at a gallop over hard-frozen ice, no one could sleep a wink.
The huts creaked likewise. Often and again did the storm come driving at the corners, heaving up the thatches, butting at the doors: sometimes even breaking in the panes so that they had to get up at night and stop them with pillows: for it then rushed in with a sound like the squealing of noisy swine—bringing along with it such fierce cold as benumbed the inmates under their eiderdown quilts.
None can say what the villagers suffered, in the course of those days, of those nights.
Nor what harm was done abroad. The blasts bore down the fences, plucked off the thatched roofs, and—at the Voyt’s—blew down a shed that was all but new. They tore the roof from Bartek Koziol’s granary, and carried it away more than a furlong’s distance into the fields; they threw down the chimney at the Vincioreks’; they wrenched a good bit of boarding from the mill-roof: and as to the multitudes of minor losses, and the many trees uprooted in the orchards and woods, who can tell them? Why, upon the highway alone, they tore up and cast across the road about a score of poplars, that lay like as many murdered and pitilessly mutilated corpses!
The oldest inhabitant could not remember when the winds had been so hostile and done so much injury.
Folk therefore kept at home, wrangling together beneath the smoky rafters of their own cabins; for it was no light matter to show one’s nose round the corner. Some of the women, however, being less patient, would at times cautiously step outside their enclosures and visit their gossip-loving neighbours: ostensibly to spin in company, but in reality to whet their tongues and give vent to their ill humour. Meanwhile, the men were threshing stubbornly on behind the closed granary-doors, and from morning till late at night the flails smote upon the floor. The frost had nipped the corn; and so the grain was more readily threshed out.
These gales brought with them more and more biting frosts. With mighty strokes they had frozen all the brooks and streamlets. The morasses were now solid. Even the millpond was coated over with a sheet of bluish transparent ice. Only close to the bridge, where the water grew deeper, was it still in motion: all the rest of its banks were fettered by the ice, and openings had to be cut for drawing water.
No change of weather came till St. Lucia’s day.
Then the frost slackened somewhat; the winds paused to take breath: they swept the plain more seldom and with less boisterous fury; the grey sky grew smooth as a well-harrowed field’s vast hempen-coloured surface, and so low that it seemed resting on the poplar treetops along the road.
But presently, after the noonday Angelus, the frost increased a little and the snow fell in large flakes.
Dusk then came earlier, and the snow still fell thicker and thicker, though drier and more powdery, until the night closed in.
By morning the snow was three good spans deep; it covered the whole land like a fleece, veiled it under its own white expanse, shaded with bluish tints; and still it continued to fall without intermission.
And so great a stillness came over the land that no noise, no sound pierced the
