“Why did you not? Five acres are always worth having.”
“Oh, I had no mind for any woman. Of petticoats I have long had more than enough. They are always crying out and screaming, like magpies in a hedge: you say one word, and they bang a score at your head, like a handful of peas. You have your reason to go by; they have only their tongues. You talk to them, thinking to be understood: and they neither understand nor heed you, but jabber foolishness only.—They say our Lord created woman with only half a soul. It must be so—and the devil has supplied them with the other half.”
“Perhaps,” Antek put in sadly, “some women may be intelligent.”
“Some crows may be white, but none has ever seen any.”
“Tell me: were you ever married?”
“I was! Oh, yes, I was!” He stopped short, straightened himself, and his grey eyes looked far, far away. He was an old man, dry as a wood-shaving, but sinewy: and straight too, save when at times he drooped, and the pipe wobbled about in his mouth, and his eyes, as now, blinked with quick flutterings.
“Time for the next log!” cried the man at the saws.
“Hurry now, Bartek! Don’t dawdle there! The saws are stopping!” shouted Matthew.
“He’s a fool—wants things done quicker than possible.
“ ‘There comes a rook to church;
“A priest am I!” he screeches,
And croaks from pulpit-perch,
And fondly thinks he preaches,’ ”
Bartek grumbled, as in anger; but some other emotion had taken hold of him, and his rests were more frequent, and he sighed at times, looking southward for noon.
Luckily it came then: the women were there, with the dinners in the pots they carried. Hanka appeared from behind the mill. The saws ceased their rasping, and they all went to eat in the building, Antek, who knew the miller’s man, going to his room. At present he did not avoid folk, nor turn away from them, but would look them in the face with eyes that made them turn their own away.
In a room too hot almost to breathe in, there sat several persons in sheepskins, talking joyously. These were people from villages at some distance, who had brought corn that was to be ground while they waited. They had crammed with peat the little stove that was already red-hot, and were smoking cigarettes and chatting, so that the whole room was as dim as it was hot.
Antek seated himself on a sack near the window and, with the pot between his knees, he fell to with great zest, first upon the dish of cabbage with peas, and then upon another, made of potatoes mashed with milk. Hanka, crouching on the floor by his side, looked tenderly on him. Hard work had made him thinner, and in places the skin had peeled off his face: yet to her he seemed the handsomest man on earth. Yes, just as he was: tall, straight-limbed, lithe; slender-waisted, broad-shouldered, supple; his face a long thin oval, his nose like a hawk’s beak, but only slightly curved; his eyes full, a greyish green, under eyebrows that seemed drawn with charcoal from temple to temple in one straight line, and were terrible to behold when he knit them in angry mood; his forehead lofty, but half covered with hair that fell over it, straight down, like a mane, dark almost to blackness; and that upper lip of his, clean-shaven after the peasants’ fashion, disclosing a row of white teeth within crimson borders, like a string of ivory beads! Oh, she was never tired of gazing upon him!
“Could not your father bring the dinner? You have to go so far every day!”
“He had to remove the dung from our heifer’s stall; and besides, I preferred to come myself.”
And she always managed to do so, for the mere sake of gazing at his comely form.
“Any news?” he asked, as his dinner came to an end.
“Nothing much. I have spun one sack of wool, and taken the yarn—five hanks of it—to the organist’s wife. She was very much pleased.—Our little Peter is not well: he won’t eat and is hot and feverish.”
“He has only overeaten himself.”
“Surely, surely.—Oh, and Yankel came to buy our geese.”
“Will you sell them?”
“A likely thing, indeed! To buy others when spring comes round?”
“Do as you choose. I leave all that to you.”
“And at the Vahniks’ there has been a fight again, and his Reverence has been sent for to reconcile them.—And they say that the calf at the Paches’ has choked itself with eating carrots.”
“That’s all one to me,” he growled impatiently.
“—And the organist came collecting sheaves,” she said after a while, with a tremble in her voice.
“What did you give?”
“Two handfuls of carded flax, and four eggs.—And he said that, if we wished, he would let us have a wagonful of oat-straw, and wait till summer for payment. But I did not accept: why should we take aught from him? And moreover, we have a right to your father’s pasturage. We had only two cartloads—far too few for so many acres. …”
“I will not remind him of it, and I forbid you to do so. For the spinning you do, take the oat-straw from the organist. If you will not, then sell all our livestock. So long as I live, never will I ask my father for anything whatsoever.—Do you understand?”
“I do, and shall apply to the organist.”
“Your work, together with mine, will perhaps suffice.—Hanka, no weeping here: they see us!”
“I am not weeping.—Antek, pray ask the miller for half a hectolitre of barley to grind: if we bought it ready ground,
