The Cossacks - graf Tolstoy Leo (suggested reading TXT) 📗
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the devils, must have got into a Tartar village and seized the
Chechen women, and one of the devils has killed the little one:
taken it by its legs, and hit its head against a wall. Don’t they
do such things? Ah! Men have no souls! And thoughts came to me
that filled me with pity. I thought: they’ve thrown away the
cradle and driven the wife out, and her brave has taken his gun
and come across to our side to rob us. One watches and thinks. And
when one hears a litter breaking through the thicket, something
begins to knock inside one. Dear one, come this way! “They’ll
scent me,” one thinks; and one sits and does not stir while one’s
heart goes dun! dun! dun! and simply lifts you. Once this spring a
fine litter came near me, I saw something black. “In the name of
the Father and of the Son,” and I was just about to fire when she
grunts to her pigs: “Danger, children,” she says, “there’s a man
here,” and off they all ran, breaking through the bushes. And she
had been so close I could almost have bitten her.’
‘How could a sow tell her brood that a man was there?’ asked
Olenin.
‘What do you think? You think the beast’s a fool? No, he is wiser
than a man though you do call him a pig! He knows everything. Take
this for instance. A man will pass along your track and not notice
it; but a pig as soon as it gets onto your track turns and runs at
once: that shows there is wisdom in him, since he scents your
smell and you don’t. And there is this to be said too: you wish to
kill it and it wishes to go about the woods alive. You have one
law and it has another. It is a pig, but it is no worse than you—
it too is God’s creature. Ah, dear! Man is foolish, foolish,
foolish!’ The old man repeated this several times and then,
letting his head drop, he sat thinking.
Olenin also became thoughtful, and descending from the porch with
his hands behind his back began pacing up and down the yard.
Eroshka, rousing himself, raised his head and began gazing
intently at the moths circling round the flickering flame of the
candle and burning themselves in it.
‘Fool, fool!’ he said. ‘Where are you flying to? Fool, fool!’ He
rose and with his thick fingers began to drive away the moths.
‘You’ll burn, little fool! Fly this way, there’s plenty of room.’
He spoke tenderly, trying to catch them delicately by their wings
with his thick ringers and then letting them fly again. ‘You are
killing yourself and I am sorry for you!’
He sat a long time chattering and sipping out of the bottle.
Olenin paced up and down the yard. Suddenly he was struck by the
sound of whispering outside the gate. Involuntarily holding his
breath, he heard a woman’s laughter, a man’s voice, and the sound
of a kiss. Intentionally rustling the grass under his feet he
crossed to the opposite side of the yard, but after a while the
wattle fence creaked. A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and a
white sheepskin cap passed along the other side of the fence (it
was Luke), and a tall woman with a white kerchief on her head went
past Olenin. ‘You and I have nothing to do with one another’ was
what Maryanka’s firm step gave him to understand. He followed her
with his eyes to the porch of the hut, and he even saw her through
the window take off her kerchief and sit down. And suddenly a
feeling of lonely depression and some vague longings and hopes,
and envy of someone or other, overcame the young man’s soul.
The last lights had been put out in the huts. The last sounds had
died away in the village. The wattle fences and the cattle
gleaming white in the yards, the roofs of the houses and the
stately poplars, all seemed to be sleeping the labourers’ healthy
peaceful sleep. Only the incessant ringing voices of frogs from
the damp distance reached the young man. In the east the stars
were growing fewer and fewer and seemed to be melting in the
increasing light, but overhead they were denser and deeper than
before. The old man was dozing with his head on his hand. A cock
crowed in the yard opposite, but Olenin still paced up and down
thinking of something. The sound of a song sung by several voices
reached him and he stepped up to the fence and listened. The
voices of several young Cossacks carolled a merry song, and one
voice was distinguishable among them all by its firm strength.
‘Do you know who is singing there?’ said the old man, rousing
himself. ‘It is the Brave, Lukashka. He has killed a Chechen and
now he rejoices. And what is there to rejoice at? … The fool,
the fool!’
‘And have you ever killed people?’ asked Olenin.
‘You devil!’ shouted the old man. ‘What are you asking? One must
not talk so. It is a serious thing to destroy a human being …
Ah, a very serious thing! Good-bye, my dear fellow. I’ve eaten my
fill and am drunk,’ he said rising. ‘Shall I come to-morrow to go
shooting?’
‘Yes, come!’
‘Mind, get up early; if you oversleep you will be fined!’
‘Never fear, I’ll be up before you,’ answered Olenin.
The old man left. The song ceased, but one could hear footsteps
and merry talk. A little later the singing broke out again but
farther away, and Eroshka’s loud voice chimed in with the other.
‘What people, what a life!’ thought Olenin with a sigh as he
returned alone to his hut.
Daddy Eroshka was a superannuated and solitary Cossack: twenty
years ago his wife had gone over to the Orthodox Church and run
away from him and married a Russian sergeant-major, and he had no
children. He was not bragging when he spoke of himself as having
been the boldest dare-devil in the village when he was young.
Everybody in the regiment knew of his old-time prowess. The death
of more than one Russian, as well as Chechen, lay on his
conscience. He used to go plundering in the mountains, and robbed
the Russians too; and he had twice been in prison. The greater
part of his life was spent in the forests, hunting. There he lived
for days on a crust of bread and drank nothing but water. But on
the other hand, when he was in the village he made merry from
morning to night. After leaving Olenin he slept for a couple of
hours and awoke before it was light. He lay on his bed thinking of
the man he had become acquainted with the evening before. Olenin’s
‘simplicity’ (simplicity in the sense of not grudging him a drink)
pleased him very much, and so did Olenin himself. He wondered why
the Russians were all ‘simple’ and so rich, and why they were
educated, and yet knew nothing. He pondered on these questions and
also considered what he might get out of Olenin.
Daddy Eroshka’s hut was of a good size and not old, but the
absence of a woman was very noticeable in it. Contrary to the
usual cleanliness of the Cossacks, the whole of this hut was
filthy and exceedingly untidy. A bloodstained coat had been
thrown on the table, half a dough-cake lay beside a plucked and
mangled crow with which to feed the hawk. Sandals of raw hide, a
gun, a dagger, a little bag, wet clothes, and sundry rags lay
scattered on the benches. In a comer stood a tub with stinking
water, in which another pair of sandals were being steeped, and
near by was a gun and a hunting-screen. On the floor a net had
been thrown down and several dead pheasants lay there, while a hen
tied by its leg was walking about near the table pecking among the
dirt. In the unheated oven stood a broken pot with some kind of
milky liquid. On the top of the oven a falcon was screeching and
trying to break the cord by which it was tied, and a moulting hawk
sat quietly on the edge of the oven, looking askance at the hen
and occasionally bowing its head to right and left. Daddy Eroshka
himself, in his shirt, lay on his back on a short bed rigged up
between the wall and the oven, with his strong legs raised and his
feet on the oven. He was picking with his thick fingers at the
scratches left on his hands by the hawk, which he was accustomed
to carry without wearing gloves. The whole room, especially near
the old man, was filled with that strong but not unpleasant
mixture of smells that he always carried about with him.
‘Uyde-ma, Daddy?’ (Is Daddy in?) came through the window in a
sharp voice, which he at once recognized as Lukashka’s.
‘Uyde, Uyde, Uyde. I am in!’ shouted the old man. ‘Come in,
neighbour Mark, Luke Mark. Come to see Daddy? On your way to the
cordon?’
At the sound of his master’s shout the hawk flapped his wings and
pulled at his cord.
The old man was fond of Lukashka, who was the only man he excepted
from his general contempt for the younger generation of Cossacks.
Besides that, Lukashka and his mother, as near neighbours, often
gave the old man wine, clotted cream, and other home produce which
Eroshka did not possess. Daddy Eroshka, who all his life had
allowed himself to get carried away, always explained his
infatuations from a practical point of view. ‘Well, why not?’ he
used to say to himself. ‘I’ll give them some fresh meat, or a
bird, and they won’t forget Daddy: they’ll sometimes bring a cake
or a piece of pie.’
‘Good morning. Mark! I am glad to see you,’ shouted the old man
cheerfully, and quickly putting down his bare feet he jumped off
his bed and walked a step or two along the creaking floor, looked
down at his out-turned toes, and suddenly, amused by the
appearance of his feet, smiled, stamped with his bare heel on the
ground, stamped again, and then performed a funny dance-step.
‘That’s clever, eh?’ he asked, his small eyes glistening. Lukashka
smiled faintly. ‘Going back to the cordon?’ asked the old man.
‘I have brought the chikhir I promised you when we were at the
cordon.’
‘May Christ save you!’ said the old man, and he took up the
extremely wide trousers that were lying on the floor, and his
beshmet, put them on, fastened a strap round his waist, poured
some water from an earthenware pot over his hands, wiped them on
the old trousers, smoothed his beard with a bit of comb, and
stopped in front of Lukashka. ‘Ready,’ he said.
Lukashka fetched a cup, wiped it and filled it with wine, and then
handed it to the old man.
‘Your health! To the Father and the Son!’ said the old man,
accepting the wine with solemnity. ‘May you have what you desire,
may you always be a hero, and obtain a cross.’
Lukashka also drank a little after repeating a prayer, and then
put the wine on the table. The old man rose and brought out some
dried fish which he laid on the threshold, where he beat it with a
stick to make it tender; then, having put it with his horny hands
on a blue plate (his only one), he placed it on
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