Short Fiction

was from his eldest son, from that son who had been destined in his thoughts to attain the rank of a general. The mother would weep silently with no other trouble but that of his absence. They were two peasants. She was the daughter of a Village Elder, from the banks of the Dnieper. He was a liberated man born in the neighborhood who had wandered away, shrewd and restless, from his hamlet and became afterwards, from very small beginnings, a merchant of the first guild⁠—a very rich man. But however rich he always remained a peasant, a man with a beard. He was cunning, naive, unscrupulous, believing and tenderhearted. He gave largely in charity and would sometimes stand on the steps of the church chatting with a beggar and calling him “Brother” without the slightest affectation, as a matter of course. All men are brothers. When reproving his two pale and scrofulous clerks (that was the extent of his establishment; he did almost everything himself) he prefaced his remarks by the exclamation: “Thou! son of a dog,” without the faintest spark of animosity in his heart. He feared God, venerated the saints, bowed at every opportunity to holy images, crossed himself rapidly, with three bunched fingers, an incalculable number of times, on fitting occasions⁠—and would perjure his soul for three roubles with an innocent smile, like a little child fibbing before an indulgent father. He obtained government contracts. He amassed money. He became known in the government offices⁠—even in the capital⁠—where he could be seen standing at the doors, cap in hand, with a propitiatory face. Bull-necked officials in tight green uniforms addressed him⁠—from armchairs⁠—with caressing condescension as: “Thou little thief! O! thou perfect liar.” He was not spoiled by the commendation of the great. He gave bribes. He was greatly esteemed. He became necessary to many. He remained unassuming⁠—the peasant of old days.

Theirs had been a love-match. She was the beauty of the village, daughter of a rich man; he was looked upon as a wandering ne’er-do-well of colossal presumption. They fell in love violently with each other. They ran away. They never regretted it. In the early days (when the passions are strong) he beat her a little once or twice, just to place firmly the fact of his affection beyond the possibility of even the most fleeting doubt. Ever after, he treated her in a grave contained manner, with a patriarchal superiority of indulgence. She thought of him as the greatest of men and of herself as the happiest of women. They passed through some hard times. The father-in-law, almost unforgiving, would do nothing for the vagabond beyond giving him an old wooden cart and a pair of shaggy and diminutive horses. In that equipage they hawked from town to town the watermelons of central Russia. The first child⁠—the son Stephen⁠—was born in the casual shelter of a roadside hut; and before he was a fortnight old they were again on the road. The woman sat, on some rotten mats, perched high in the sunlight on top of the pile of fruit. The man trudged with silent footsteps in bark shoes, by the drooping heads of his horses, and glanced over his shoulder at the mother from time to time. Sometimes the great weariness of the limitless expanse of the plain would penetrate his very soul. Then he would turn half round⁠—not stopping⁠—and shout cheerily: “How is our Kossak, Malanya; our brave boy?” And she would answer, from above the cloud of dust, in a high pitched⁠—not yet a very strong voice: “He is getting on beautifully, Sydor!”

At night they often camped outside a village. With the mats and the cart, Sydor would make a shelter for his wife. If the night was fine they sat through the evening in the open. Long before its lips could shape a word the baby’s eyes had been turned, untrammeled, towards the great heaven. The father and the mother, sitting by a small fire conversed in murmurs. On a thin sheet of coarse linen, spread over the scanty grass of the roadside, lay the child⁠—open-eyed and quiet. Peasants’ children seldom cry. They seem to be born with a prescience of the inutility of lament. With a child’s fearless stare Stephen’s eyes exchanged placid and profound glances with the inscrutable stars. Ignorant and undismayed he stretched his unsteady little hands towards the universe in a desire to play with that brilliant dust which streams through infinite space into an infinity of time. The glory of heaven is very near a child’s soul, as the memory of his land is near the heart of an exile at the beginning of his pilgrimage. Afterwards the withering wisdom of the earth destroys the dreamy memories and longings in the awakening of a peal of laughter or a sigh of pain.

Stephen, unwinking, looked on⁠—smiled at Immensity. In the daytime, from his mother’s arms, he scrutinized with inarticulate comprehension the vast expanse of the limitless and fertile black-lands nursing life in their undulating bosom under the warm caress of sunshine. In the shallow folds of the plain dammed streams overflowed into an unruffled glimmer of small lakes, placid, as though soothed by the whispering tenderness of encircling reeds. On their banks dark willows and slim, unsteady birches stirred in the gentle and powerful breath of the indolent steppe. Here and there a clump of low oaks looked sombre and stolid, planted firmly above the dark patch of its own shade. On the slope hung a village, scattered white huts, with high, ragged, thatched roofs under which small unequal windows twinkled, like small eyes of a band of deformed and humorous dwarfs winking under high caps cavalierly aslant. Amongst them the green cupola of a village church, held up on high against the sky the gleam of a gilt cross. The cart would run down the declivity, dash through a troop of dogs barking about the wheels, rumble with loose traces over the dam⁠—and go on