“And if we should lack provender, we’ll buy some.”
“Oat-straw perhaps: our rye will last till spring.—Father, pray open our potato-pit: we must see if the potatoes we have are not frost-nipped.”
“Father, stay where you are, the work is too hard for you: I’ll do it.”
He rose, took his sheepskin down from the pole, and went outside.
The snow was almost as high as the roof, for the cabin stood in an open place, almost out of the village, a field’s length from the road, and with neither hedgerow nor orchard to keep the snow away. Several wild gnarled cherry-trees grew in front of the windows, but they were so buried in the drift that their branches alone stood protruding like human fingers twisted and bent by some disease.—Earlier in the day, the old man had already cleared away the snow in front of the cabin, but he had at the same time covered the mound21 so deep that it was impossible to distinguish it in the snow.—Antek set vigorously to work: the snow stood as high as a man, and—though lately fallen—it had caked together and hardened so much that it had to be cut out in lumps; and he sweated enough ere the potato-pit was dug open. But he worked willingly, now and then throwing a few flitters at the children, who were playing outside the threshold. At times, however, he would pause in his work to lean back against the cabin-wall and look around. Then he would heave a profound sigh, and his soul would once more go astray like a sheep lost in the shadows of the night. The sky was all covered with a whitish cloud, which hung at no great height. The snows lay extended like a huge soft fleece, forming, as far as the eye could reach, an immense plain, white with a tinge of blue; the air, misty with suspended crystals of frost, seemed to wrap the whole world in a delicate pellucid tissue. As Bylitsa’s hut was on rising ground, one saw thence the whole village spread out in a bird’s-eye view: those lines of snow-clad mounds, like huge molehills, straggling away in long strings round the pond, none completely bare, but all hid by the white sheet spread over them. Here and there a granary wall stood out, darkly prominent; ruddy-brown coils of curling peat-smoke went up; or a few trees peered out, grey beneath the dazzling mantle in which they were enveloped; and athwart this world all of silver tinges, voices travelled swift and sharp, heard together with the flails’ monotonous rutta-rutta-rutta, drumming underground, as it were. The ways were all snowed up; no one fared along them, nor did any living thing darken the silvery expanse of the fields. The hazy distances melted into one another, so that sky and earth were undistinguishable, save where the forest made a faint blue stain on the white, as if some cloud were hanging at the horizon.
Antek’s gaze wandered but for a little while over those snowy wastes; it presently returned and sought his father’s cabin; and in the search his attention was diverted by a cry from Hanka, who had gone down into the potato-pit.
“Ha! they are not frozen! Vahnik’s store has been so frostbitten that half must be given to the swine to eat; and ours—ours is quite untouched!”
“That is good news.—Pray go out and see, for if I mistake not, the Jews are coming at last, and we must take the cow out of the byre.”
“You are right: it is the Jews—who but they? Yes, it is.—Poisonous creatures!” she exclaimed with abhorrence.
Along a pathway just visible by the marks of Staho’s boots, made when he went out in the morning, there came two Jews from the tavern, heavily plodding along, followed by half the dogs in the village (that greatly enjoyed this opportunity to bark at them) until Antek arrived and drove them away.
“Oh, how do you do?—We come late, on account of the snow.—Such drifts!—No driving through them, no getting through on foot even, I tell you. They have had to employ forced labour to make the road passable through the forest.”
To these attempts at conversation he replied nothing, but made them enter his hut to warm themselves a little.
Hanka, having cleaned the cow’s soiled flanks and milked away what had gathered since the morning, brought her through the room into the yard. The cow made resistance, unwilling to go out; on passing the threshold, she sniffed, stretched her head forth into the air, licked the snow, and on a sudden burst into long plaintive lowing, pulling so hard at the rope that old Bylitsa could scarcely hold her.
Hanka broke down. Seized with an unbearable pang, she burst out crying, as did the children too, holding to their mother’s skirt.
Nor was Antek in much better mood. He ground his teeth, leaned back against the cabin wall, and stared doggedly at a lot of crows that had assembled on the snow dug from the pit. The dealers meanwhile jabbered in Yiddish to each other, and proceeded to feel the cow and examine her critically.
The whole family, sick at heart, turned away in deep dejection from the beast tugging at her halter and vainly looking to her masters with great frightened eyes, and lowing in vain.
“O Lord!—Was it for this, Krasula, that I fed you so well, and cared for all your wants, that these men should now take you to the slaughterhouse, and destroy you!” And in agony she struck the cabin wall with her head.
Alas! Wailing and lamenting were of no avail; for “What needs must be—no man can flee,” as the saying is.
“How much?” the elder of the couple, a grey-bearded Jew, asked at last.
“Three hundred zloty.”22
“What! for that scraggy brute—three hundred?—Anthony, is aught
