The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] Read Online Free PDF

proprietors, putting on swagger at the Fair—they, with their wretched troika teams! Ekh, and the poverty on every side! The peasants were utterly ruined, with not a scrap left on their impoverished little farms scattered about the country. A master .was needed here—a master!
    "But you're not the right master, my good fellow!" he announced to himself with a spiteful grin. "You're a poor, crazy, landless stick yourself!"
    Midway of his journey lay Rovnoe, a large village in which the inhabitants were freeholders. A scorching breeze coursed through the deserted streets and across the heat-singed bushes. Fowls were ruffling up their feathers and burying themselves in the ashes at the thresholds. A church of crude hue reared itself starkly, harshly on the bare common. Beyond the church a tiny clayey pond gleamed in the sunlight below a dam of manure, a sheet of thick yellow water in

    THE VILLAGE
    which stood a herd of cows, incessantly discharging according to the demands of nature; and there a naked peasant was soaping his head. He, too, had waded into the water up to his waist; on his breast glistened his brass baptismal cross; his neck and face were black with sunburn, his body strikingly white, pallid. - "Unbridle my horse for me," said Tikhon Hitch, driving into the pond, which reeked of the cattle.
    The peasant tossed his fragment of blue-marbled soap on the shore, black with cow-dung, and, his head all grey, with a modest gesture as though to cover himself, he made haste to comply with the command. The mare bent greedily to the water, but it was so warm and repulsive that she raised her muzzle and turned away. Whistling to her, Tikhon Hitch waved his cap:
    "Well, nice water you have! Do you drink it?"
    "Well, then, and is yours sugar-water, I wonder?" retorted the peasant, amiably and gaily. "We've been drinking it these thousand years! But what's water? —'tis bread we're lacking."
    And Tikhon Hitch was forced to hold his tongue; for in Durnovka the water was no better, and there was no bread there either. What was more, there would be none.
    Beyond Rovnoe the road ran again through fields of rye—but what fields! The grain was spindling, weak, almost wholly lacking in ears, and smothered in corn-flowers. And near Vyselki, not far from Durnovka, clouds of rooks perched on the gnarled, hollow willow-trees with their silvery beaks wide open.

    THE VILLAGE
    Nothing was left of Vyselki that day save its name— the rest was only black skeletons of cottages in the midst of rubbish! The rubbish was smoking, with a milky-bluish emanation; there was a rank odour of burning. And the thought of a conflagration from lightning transfixed Tikhon Hitch. "Calamity!" he said to himself, turning paler Nothing he owned was insured: everything might be reduced to ashes in an hour.
    VII
    FROM that Fast of St. Peter, that memorable trip to the Fair, Tikhon Hitch began to drink frequently—not to the point of downright drunkenness, but to the stage at which his face became passably red. This did not, however, interfere in the slightest degree with his business, and, according to his own account, it did not interfere with his health. "Vodka polishes the blood," he was wont to remark; and, truth to tell, to all appearances he became more robust than ever. Not infrequently now he called his life that of a galley-slave—the hangman's noose—a gilded cage. But he strode along his pathway with ever-increasing confidence, paying no attention to the condition of the weather or the road. Commonplace, uneventful days ruled supreme in his house, and several years passed in such monotonous fashion that everything merged together into one long working-day. But certain new, vast events which no one had

    THE VILLAGE
    looked for came to pass—the war with Japan and the revolution.
    The rumours concerning the war began, of course, with bragging. "The kazaks will soon flay his yellow skin off him, brother!" But it smouldered so very short a time, this