"Good," said Dorosh.
"The young miss would no sooner glance at him than he'd drop the bridle, call Robber Grouchy, stumble all over, and do God knows what. Once the young miss came to the stable where he was grooming a horse. 'Mikitka,' she says, 'let me lay my little leg on you.' And he, the tomfool, gets all happy. 'Not only your little leg,' he says, 'you can sit right on me.' The young miss lifted up her leg, and when he saw her bare leg, white and plump, the charm, he says, just stunned him. He bent his back, the tomfool, grabbed her bare legs with both hands, and went galloping like a horse all over the fields. And he couldn't tell anything about where they rode, only he came back barely alive, and after that he got all wasted, like a chip of wood. And once, when they came to the stable, instead of him there was just a heap of ashes and an empty bucket lying there: he burned up, burned up of his own self. And what a huntsman he was, you won't find another like him in the whole world."
When Spirid finished his story, talk came from all sides about the merits of the former huntsman.
"And have you heard about Shepchikha?" said Dorosh, addressing Khoma.
"No."
"Oh-ho! Then it's clear they don't teach you much sense there in your seminary. Well, listen! In our settlement there's a Cossack named Sheptun. A good Cossack! He likes to steal or tell a lie sometimes without any need, but.. a good Cossack! His place isn't far from here. At this same time as we're now having supper, Sheptun and his wife finished eating and went to bed, and since the weather was fine, Shepchikha slept outside and Sheptun inside on a bench; or, no, it was Shepchikha inside on a bench and Sheptun outside . . ."
"And not on a bench, Shepchikha lay on the floor," the woman picked up, standing in the doorway, her cheek propped on her hand.
Dorosh looked at her, then at the floor, then at her again, and after a pause said: "When I pull your underwear off in front of everybody, it won't be so nice."
This warning had its effect. The old woman fell silent and did not interrupt anymore. Dorosh went on.
"And in a cradle that hung in the middle of the hut lay their one-year-old baby—I don't know whether of male or female sex. Shepchikha lay there, and then she heard a dog scratching outside the door and howling so loud you just wanted to flee the house. She got frightened—for women are such foolish folk that you could stick your tongue out at her behind the door at night and she'd have her heart in her mouth. 'Anyhow,' she thinks, 'why don't I go and hit the cursed dog in the snout, maybe it'll stop howling.' And taking her poker, she went to open the door. As soon as it was slightly open, the dog darted between her legs and went straight for the baby's cradle. Shepchikha saw that it was no longer a dog but the young miss. And if it had been the young miss looking the way she knew her, it would have been nothing; but there was this one thing and circumstance: that she was all blue and her eyes were burning like coals. She grabbed the baby, bit its throat, and began drinking its blood. Shepchikha only cried out, 'Ah, evil thing!' and fled. But she saw that the front doors were locked. She ran to the attic. The foolish woman sat there trembling, and then she saw that the young miss was coming to the attic. She fell on the foolish woman and started biting her. It was morning before Sheptun got his wife out of there, blue and bitten all over. And the next day the foolish woman died. That's what arrangements and temptations can happen! Though she's the master's progeny, all the same a witch is a witch."
After this story, Dorosh looked around smugly and poked his forefinger into his pipe, preparing to fill it with tobacco. The material about the witch became inexhaustible. Each in turn hastened to tell something. The witch drove right up to the door of one man's house in the form of a haystack; she stole another's hat or pipe; cut off the braids of many village girls; drank several buckets of blood from others.
At last the whole company came to their senses and saw that they had been talking too much, because it was already quite dark outside. They all began trudging off to sleep, putting themselves either in the kitchen, or in the sheds, or in the middle of the yard.
"Well, now, Mr. Khoma, it's time we went to the deceased," said the gray-haired Cossack, turning to the philosopher, and the four of them, Spirid and Dorosh included, went to the church, swinging their knouts at the dogs, of which there were a great many and which angrily bit at their sticks.
The philosopher, though he had fortified himself with a good mug of vodka, secretly felt timorousness creeping over him as they drew near the lighted church. The tales and strange stories he had heard helped to affect his imagination still more. The darkness under the paling and trees began to thin; the place was becoming more bare. They finally stepped past the decrepit church fence into the small yard, beyond which there were no trees and nothing opened out but empty fields and meadows swallowed by the darkness of night. Together with Khoma, the three Cossacks climbed the steep steps of the porch and went into the church.
Here they left the philosopher, having wished him a successful performance of his duty, and locked the door on him as the master had ordered.
The philosopher remained alone. First he yawned, then stretched himself, then blew on both hands, and finally looked around. In the middle stood the black coffin. Candles flickered before dark icons. Their light illumined only the iconostasis8 and, faintly, the middle of the church. The far corners of the vestibule were shrouded in darkness. The tall, ancient iconostasis showed a profound decrepitude; its openwork, covered in gold, now gleamed only in sparks. The gilding had fallen off in some places, and was quite blackened in others; the faces of the saints, completely darkened, looked somehow gloomy. The philosopher glanced around once more.
"Why," he said, "what's frightening about it? No man can get in here, and against the dead and visitors from the other world I've got such prayers that, once I've read them, they'll never lay a finger on me. Nothing to it," he said with a wave of the hand, "let's read!"
Going up to the choir, he saw several bundles of candles.
"That's good," thought the philosopher, "I must light up the whole church so that it's bright as day. Ah, too bad I can't smoke my pipe in God's church!"
And he began sticking wax candles to all the ledges, lecterns, and icons, not stinting in the least, and soon the whole church was filled with light. Only the darkness above seemed to become deeper, and the dark images looked more gloomily from the old carved frames on which gold gleamed here and there. He went up to the coffin, timidly looked into the dead girl's face, and could not help shutting his eyes with a slight start.
Such terrible, dazzling beauty!
He turned and wanted to step away; but with strange curiosity, with the strange, self-contradictory feeling that will not leave a man especially in a time of fear, he could not refrain from glancing at her as he went, and then, with the same feeling of trepidation, glancing once more. Indeed, the deceased girl's sharp beauty seemed frightful. Perhaps she even would not have struck him with such panic terror if she had been slightly ugly. But there was in her features nothing dull, lusterless, dead. The face was alive, and it seemed to the philosopher that she was looking at him through closed eyes. It even seemed to him that a tear rolled from under her right eyelash, and when it stopped on her cheek, he made out clearly that it was a drop of blood.
He hastily went over to the choir, opened the book and, to cheer himself up, began reading in his loudest voice. His voice struck the wooden walls of the church, long silent and deaf. Solitary, without echo, it poured in a low bass into the utterly dead silence and seemed a little wild even to the reader himself.
"What's there to be afraid of?" he thought to himself meanwhile. "She won't get up from her coffin, because she'll be afraid of God's word. Let her lie there! And what kind of Cossack am I if I'm scared? So I drank a bit—that's why it seems so frightening. If I could take some snuff-—ah, fine tobacco! Nice tobacco! Good tobacco!"
And yet, as he turned each page, he kept glancing sidelong at the coffin, and an involuntary feeling seemed to whisper to him: "Look, loo
k, she's going to get up, she's going to rise, she's going to peek out of the coffin!"
But there was a deathly silence. The coffin stood motionless. The candles poured out a whole flood of light. Terrible is a lit-up church at night, with a dead body and not a living soul!
Raising his voice, he began singing in various voices, trying to stifle the remnants of his fear. Yet he turned his eyes to the coffin every other moment, as if asking the inadvertent question: "What if she rises, what if she gets up?"
But the coffin did not stir. If only there was a sound, some living being, even the chirp of a cricket in the corner! There was just the slight sizzle of some remote candle and the faint spatter of wax dripping on the floor.
"Well, what if she gets up?. . ."
She raised her head . . .He gazed wildly and rubbed his eyes. But she was indeed no longer lying but sitting up in the coffin. He turned his eyes away, then again looked with horror at the coffin. She's standing up . . . she's walking through the church with her eyes closed, constantly spreading her arms as if wishing to catch someone.
She was walking straight toward him. In fear he drew a circle around himself. With an effort he began reading prayers and reciting the incantations that had been taught him by one monk who had seen witches and unclean spirits all his life.
She stood almost on the line itself; but it was clearly beyond her power to cross it, and she turned all blue, like someone dead for several days. Khoma did not have the courage to look at her. She was frightful. She clacked her teeth and opened her dead eyes. But, seeing nothing, she turned in the other direction with a fury that showed in her twitching face and, spreading her arms, clutched with them at every pillar and corner, trying to catch Khoma. Finally she stopped, shook her finger, and lay down in her coffin.
The philosopher still could not come to his senses and kept glancing fearfully at the witch's cramped dwelling. Finally the coffin suddenly tore from its place and with a whistle began flying all through the church, crossing the air in every direction. The philosopher saw it almost over his head, but at the same time he saw that it could not enter the circle he had drawn, so he stepped up his incantations. The coffin crashed down in the middle of the church and remained motionless. The corpse again rose up from it, blue, turning green. But just then came the distant crowing of a cock. The corpse sank back into the coffin and the coffin lid slammed shut.
The philosopher's heart was pounding and sweat streamed from him; but, encouraged by the crowing of the cock, he quickly finished reading the pages he ought to have read earlier. At daybreak he was relieved by the beadle and gray-haired Yavtukh, who on this occasion performed the duties of a church warden.
Having gone to lie down, the philosopher was unable to fall asleep for a long time, but fatigue overcame him and he slept till dinner. When he woke up, all the events of the night seemed to have happened in a dream. To bolster his strength, he was given a pint of vodka. At dinner he quickly relaxed, contributed observations on this and that, and ate a rather mature pig almost by himself. However, he did not venture to speak of his experiences in the church, from some feeling unaccountable to himself, and, to the questions of the curious, replied: "Yes, there were all sorts of wonders." The philosopher was one of those people in whom, once they have been fed, an extraordinary philanthropy awakens. Pipe in his teeth, he lay looking at them all with extraordinarily sweet eyes and kept spitting to the side.
After dinner the philosopher was in the highest spirits. He managed to walk about the whole village and make the acquaintance of nearly everybody; he was even chased out of two cottages; one comely young wench gave him a decent whack on the back with a shovel when he decided to feel and find out what kind of material her blouse and kirtle were made of. But the closer it came to evening, the more pensive the philosopher grew. An hour before supper, almost all the household people would gather to play kasha or kragli—a variety of skittles in which long sticks are used instead of balls and the winner has the right to ride on his partner's back. Then the game would become very interesting for the spectator: often the cowherd, broad as a pancake, got astride the swineherd, puny, short, consisting of nothing but wrinkles.
Another time the cowherd would bend his back and Dorosh would jump onto it, always saying: "Hey, what a hefty bull!" Those who were more sober-minded sat by the kitchen porch.
They had an extremely serious air as they smoked their pipes, even when the young people laughed heartily over some witticism of the cowherd or Spirid. In vain did Khoma try to take part in this fun: some dark thought, like a nail, was lodged in his head. Over supper, hard though he tried to cheer himself up, fear kindled in him as darkness spread over the sky.
"Well, our time has come, mister student!" the familiar gray-haired Cossack said to him, getting up from his place together with Dorosh. "Let's go to work."
Khoma was again taken to the church in the same way; again he was left alone, and the door was locked on him. No sooner was he left alone than timorousness began once more to creep into his breast. Again he saw the dark icons, the gleaming frames, and the familiar black coffin standing in menacing silence and immobility in the middle of the church.
"Well," he said, "this marvel doesn't make me marvel now. It's only frightening the first time. Yes! it's only a little frightening the first time, and then it's not frightening anymore, not frightening at all."
He hastened to the choir, drew a circle around himself, spoke several incantations, and began reading loudly, resolved not to raise his eyes from the book or pay attention to anything. He had been reading for about an hour already, and had begun to weary and to cough a little. He took a snuff bottle from his pocket and, before taking a pinch, timorously turned his gaze to the coffin. His heart went cold.
The corpse was already standing before him, right on the line, fixing her dead green eyes on him. The student shuddered and felt a chill run through all his veins. Dropping his eyes to the book, he began reading his prayers and exorcisms louder and heard the corpse clack her teeth again and wave her arm, wishing to seize him. But, looking out of the corner of one eye, he saw that the corpse was trying to catch him in the wrong place and evidently could not see him. She was growling hollowly, and began to utter dreadful words with her dead lips; they spluttered hoarsely, like the gurgling of boiling pitch. He could not have said what they meant, but something dreadful was contained in them. The philosopher fearfully realized that she was reciting incantations.
Wind swept through the church at these words, and there was a noise as of a multitude of fluttering wings. He heard wings beating against the glass of the church windows and their iron frames, heard claws scratching iron with a rasping noise and countless powers banging on the doors, trying to break in. His heart pounded heavily all the while; shutting his eyes, he kept reading incantations and prayers. At last something suddenly whistled far away. It was the distant crowing of a cock. The exhausted philosopher stopped and rested his soul.
Those who came to relieve the philosopher found him barely alive. He was leaning back against the wall, goggle-eyed, and stared fixedly at the Cossacks who where shaking him. They practically carried him out and had to support him all the way. Coming to the master's yard, he roused himself and asked to be given a pint of vodka. After drinking it, he smoothed the hair on his head and said: "There's all sorts of trash in this world! And such horrors happen as—oh, well. . ." At that the philosopher waved his hand.
The circle that had gathered around him hung their heads on hearing such words. Even the young boy whom all the servants considered their rightful representative when it came to such matters as cleaning the stables or toting water, even this poor boy also stood gaping.
Just then a not entirely old wench passed by in a tight-fitting apron that displayed her round and firm shape, the old cook's assistant, a terrible flirt, who always found something to pin to her cap—a bit of ribbon, or a carnation, or even a scrap of paper if there was nothing else. "Greetings, Khoma!" she said, seeing
the philosopher. "Ai-yai-yai! what's happened to you?" she cried out, clasping her hands.
"What do you mean, foolish woman?"
"Ah, my God! But you've gone all gray!"
"Oh-oh! And it's the truth she's telling!" said Spirid, studying him intently. "You've really gone all gray like our old Yavtukh."
On hearing this, the philosopher rushed headlong to the kitchen, where he had noticed a triangular piece of mirror glued to the wall and stained by flies, in front of which forget-me-nots, periwinkles, and even a garland of marigolds were stuck, showing that it was intended for the stylish flirt's toilette. He saw with horror the truth of their words: half of his hair had indeed turned white.
Khoma Brut hung his head and gave himself over to reflection.
"I'll go to the master," he said finally, "tell him everything, and explain that I don't want to read anymore. Let him send me back to Kiev right now."
In such thoughts, he directed his steps toward the porch of the master's house.
The chief was sitting almost motionless in his room; the same hopeless sorrow that the philosopher had met on his face earlier remained there still. Only his cheeks were much more sunken than before. It was clear that he had taken very little food, or perhaps not touched anything at all. His extraordinary pallor gave him a sort of stony immobility.
"Greetings, poor lad," he said, seeing Khoma, who stood hat in hand in the doorway.
"Well, how is it with you? Everything fine?"
"Fine, fine indeed. Such devilish goings-on, I'd like to just grab my hat and flee wherever my legs will take me."
"How's that?"
"It's your daughter, sir . . . Reasonably considering, of course, she's of noble birth; nobody will maintain the contrary; only, not to anger you by saying so, God rest her soul. . ."