“Ho‑o,” someone shouted, to an accompaniment of dull but lusty stamping of feet:
“Plough not, reap not,
But bring fritters to the maidens!”
And a peasant, short of stature, who was standing behind the crowd, suddenly began to flourish his arms. Everything about him was prosperous, clean, substantial—his bast-shoes, his leg-wrappers, his new trousers of heavy plaided homemade linen, and the pleated skirts of his undercoat, made of appallingly thick grey cloth and cut very short, with a bobtailed effect. It is probable that he had never danced before in his life, but now he began, softly and skilfully, to stamp with his bast-shoes, to wave his arms, and to shout in a tenor voice: “Stand aside, let the merchant have a peep!” and, leaping into the circle, which parted before him, he began to kick his legs about wildly in front of a tall young fellow, who, tossing away his peaked cap, twisted his boots about in devilish fashion and, as he did so, flung aside his black jacket and danced on in his new cotton print shirt. The face of the young man was pale and perspiring and wore a concentrated, gloomy expression which made his piercing yells seem all the more violent and unexpected.
“Son! Dear one!” shrieked an old crone in a plaided wool skirt of South Russian fashion, stretching out her hands. “Stop, for Christ’s sake! Dear boy, stop it—you’ll kill yourself!”
And her dear son suddenly threw back his head, clenched his fists and his teeth, and, with fury in his countenance and his trampling, screeched through his teeth:
“Tztzytz, good woman, shut your mouth with that cuckoo song.”
“And she has just sold the last bit of her homemade linen for him,” remarked Menshoff, as they crawled slowly across the pasture land. “She loves him passionately. She’s a widow. He raps her over the mouth when he is drunk. Of course, she deserves it.”
“What do you mean by that—‘she deserves it.’?” inquired Kuzma.
“Because she does. You shouldn’t be too indulgent—”
Yes, in the town, in the railway carriages, in the hamlets, in the villages, everywhere, one could feel the presence of something unusual, the echoes of some great festival, some great victory, great expectations. But back there in the suburb Kuzma had already realized that the farther one went into those limitless fields, beneath that cold, gloomy sky, the duller, the more irrational, the more melancholy would those echoes become. Now they had driven away, and the shouts in the crowd about the dram-shop had again become pitiful. There they were keeping festival and trying to “celebrate,” but ahead lay boredom, remote wilds, an empty street, smoky chimneyless hovels, water-casks with putrid pond water, and then more fields, the blue mist of the chilly distance, the dark forest on the horizon, low-hanging storm-clouds.
At one cottage—it had a broken window and a wheel on the rotten roof—a long-legged, ailing peasant sat on a bench. People look handsomer in their coffins than he looked in life. He resembled the poet Nekrasoff. Over his shoulders, above a long and soiled shirt of hemp crash, was thrown an old short sheepskin coat; his stick-like legs stood in felt boots; his huge dead-looking hands lay evenly spaced on his sharp knees, upon his ragged trousers. His cap was pulled far down on his forehead, after the fashion of old men; his eyes were suffering, entreating; his superhumanly meagre and emaciated face was drawn down, his ashen lips half open.
“That’s Tchutchen,”29 said Menshoff, nodding in the direction of the sick man. “He’s been dying these two years from trouble with his stomach.”
“Tchutchen? What’s that—a nickname?”
“Yes, a nickname.”
“Stupid!” said Kuzma. And he turned his head away, in order to avoid seeing the horrid little girl by the neighbouring cottage. She was leaning back and holding in her arms an infant in a cap, and, as she stared intently at the passersby and stuck out her tongue at them, she chewed on a bit of black bread, which she was preparing as a sucking-piece for the child. And in the last yard and threshing-floor the bushes hummed in the breezes, and a scarecrow, all awry, fluttered its empty sleeves. The threshing-floor, which adjoins the steppe, is always uncomfortable, dreary; and there were the scarecrow, the autumnal storm-clouds, the wind humming across the fields, ruffling up the tails of the fowls which roved about the threshing-floor, overgrown with pigweed and mugwort, alongside the grain-rick with its uncovered crest, alongside the threshing machine of Ryazan make, painted blue. …
VIII
The small forest which lay blue against the horizon consisted of two long ravines thickly overgrown with oak-trees. It was known by the name of Portotchka. Near this Portotchka Kuzma was overtaken by a driving downpour of rain mingled with hail, which accompanied him the whole way to Kazakovo. Menshoff whipped up his sorry nag into a gallop as they neared the village, while Kuzma sat with eyes tightly screwed up beneath the wet grain-cloth. His hands were stiff with cold; icy rivulets trickled down the collar of his greatcoat; the coarse cloth, heavy with the rain, stank of the sour grain-kiln. The hailstones rattled on his head, cakes of mud flew up into his face, the water in the ruts beneath the wheels splashed noisily; lambs were bleating somewhere or other. At last Kuzma became so stifled that he flung the cloth from his head and greedily gulped in the fresh air. The rain lessened in intensity. Evening drew on; the flocks dashed past the
