King Stakh's Wild Hunt

Chapter The First

I was travelling in a hired carriage from the provincial city M. to the most remote corner of the province, and my expedition was coming to an end. Some two more weeks remained of sleeping in haylofts or under the stars in the carriage itself, of drinking water from earthenware pots, water that made the teeth and forehead ache, of listening to the long, drawn-out singing of the old women sitting in the yards in front of their houses, singing of the woe of the Belarusians. And of woe there was plenty in those days: the cursed eighties were coming to an end.

However, you must not think that the only thing we did at that time was to wail and ask of the mužyk[1]: “Where are you running to, mužyk?” or “Will you awaken in the morning strong and hearty?” The real compassion for the people — that came later. It is well-known that a man is very honest until the age of twenty-five. He cannot, organically cannot bear injustice when young: however, young people are too much taken up with themselves. Everything is new to them. They find it interesting to watch the development of new feelings awakening in their souls, and they are certain that no one has ever previously experienced anything equal to their emotions.

It is only later that the sleepless nights will come, when bending over a scrap of newspaper, you will read a notice in the same print as all the other news, that three were taken to the scaffold today — three, you understand, alive and merry fellows! It is only then that the desire will come to sacrifice yourself.

At that time, though, I was convinced in the depths of my soul (although I was considered a “Red”), that the forests which grow on earth are not only forests of scaffolds (which was, of course, true even during the times of Jazafat Kuncevič and the Belarusian “slander” inquisition), and that it was not only moaning which we heard in the singing. For me at that time it was much more important to understand who I was and which gods I should pray to. My surname, people said, was a Polish one, though even now I do not know what is Polish in it. In our high-school — and this was at the time when the dreadful memory of the trustee, Kornilov, Muravyov's associate, had not yet been forgotten, — our nationality was determined, depending on the language of our forefathers, “the eldest branch of the Russian tribe, pure-blooded, truly Russian people!” That's right, even more Russian than the Russians themselves!

Had they preached this theory to us before the beginning of the century, then Belarus would inevitably have broken down Germany's borders, while the Belarusians would have become the greatest oppressors on earth, going on to conquer the vital lands of the Russians who were not really Russians, especially if the good gods had given us of the horn of plenty.

I sought my people and began to understand, as did many others at that time, that my people was here, at my side, but that for two centuries the ability to comprehend that fact had been beaten out of the minds of our intelligentsia. That is why I chose an unusual profession for myself — I was going to study and to comprehend this people.

I graduated from high-school and the university and became an ethnographer. This kind of work was only in its beginning at that time and among the powers that be it was considered dangerous for the existing order.

But everywhere — and only this made my work easier for me — I met with aid and attention. Many people helped me: the clerk of our small district, a man of little education, who later on mailed me and Romanov notes on tales; the village teacher, shivering for his piece of bread; and (my people lived!) even the governor, an exceptionally kind man, a rarity, gave me a letter of recommendation in which he ordered under threat of severe punishment that I should be given the aid I needed.

My thanks to you, my Belarusian people! Even now I offer prayers for you. What then can be said about those years?

Gradually I began to understand who I was.

What was it that made me understand?

Perhaps it was the warm lights of the villages, and their names, which even to this very day fill my heart with warmth and a kind of pain: Linden-Land, Forty Tatars, Broken Horn, Oakland, Squirrels, Clouds, Birch-Land Freedom.

Or perhaps it was warm nights when tales are told and drowsiness is stealing up on you under the sheepskin coat together with the cold? Or the intoxicating fragrance of the fresh hay and the stars shining through the holes in the roof of the hayloft? Or not even this, perhaps? But simply the pine needles in the teapot, the smoky, black huts where the women in their warm, long skirts made of homespun material, sing their song, an endless song more like a groan?

All this was mine, my own. Over a period of two years I had travelled — on foot or in a carriage — across the Miensk, Mahiloŭ, Viciebsk provinces and part of the Vilnia province. And everywhere I saw blind beggars and dirty children, saw the woe of my people whom I loved more than anything else in the world — this I know now.

This region was an ethnographic paradise then, although the tale, especially the legend, as the most unstable products of a people's fantasy, began to retreat farther and farther into the backwoods, into the most remote, forsaken corners.

There, too, I went. My legs were young, and young was my thirst for knowledge. And the things that I saw!

I saw the ceremony, an extraordinarily important one, called in Belarusian “załom”, that is, if an enemy wished to bewitch somebody's field, he tied together a bunch of wheatears into a knot.

I saw the stinging nettle yuletide, the game “pangolin” (lizard), a rare one even for those days. But more often I would see the last potato in the soup-plate, bread as black as earth, the enormous eyes of the women crying their eyes out, and I would hear the sleepy “a-a-a” over the cradle.

This was the Byzantine Belarus!

This was the land of hunters and nomads, of the black tarsprayers, of the quiet and pleasant chimes coming across the quagmires from the distant churches, the land of lyric poets and of darkness.

It was just at this time that the long and painful decline of our gentry was coming to an end. This death, this being buried alive, continued over a long period, a period of almost two centuries.

And if in the 18th century the gentry died out stormily, in duels, in the straw, squandering millions, if at the beginning of the 19th the dying out bore a quiet sadness for the neglected castles in the pine groves, there was already nothing poetic or sorrowful about it in my days; it was at times rather loathsome, at times horrifying even in its nakedness.

It was the death of the sluggards who had hidden themselves in their burrows, the death of the beggars, whose forefathers had been mentioned as the most distinguished nobles in the Horodlo privilege; they lived in old, dilapidated castles, went about dressed mostly in homespun clothing, but their arrogance was boundless.

It was a running wild without any hope for better times: abominable, and at times, disgusting deeds, the reasons for which one could have sought only in their eyes set either too closely or too far apart, eyes of wild fanatics and degenerates.

Their stoves faced with Dutch tile they heated with splintered fragments of priceless Belarusian 17th century furniture; they sat like spiders in their cold rooms, staring into the endless darkness through windows along which small fleets of drops floated obliquely.

Such were the times when I was preparing for an expedition that would take me to the remote provincial District N. I had chosen a bad time for the expedition. It is summer, of course, that is a good time for the ethnographer: it is warm, all around there are attractive landscapes. However, our work gets the best results in the late autumn or in winter. This is the time for games and songs, for gatherings of women spinners with their endless stories, and somewhat later — the peasant weddings. This period is a golden time for us.

But I had managed to leave only at the beginning of August, not the time for story-telling. One could hear then only the drawn-out songs of harvest time resounding through the fields. All August I travelled about, and September, and part of October, and only just managed to catch the dead of autumn — the time when I might find something worthwhile. In the province they were awaiting things that could not be put off.

My catch was nothing to boast of, and therefore I was as angry as the priest who came to a funeral and suddenly saw the corpse risen from the dead. An old long-neglected fit of the blues tormented me, a feeling that in those days stirred in the soul of every Belarusian: it was his lack of belief in the value of his cause, his inability to do anything, his deep pain — the main signs of those evil years, signs that arose, according to the words of a Polish poet, as a result of the persisting fear that someone in a blue uniform would come up to you, and smiling sweetly, say: “To the gendarmery, please!”

I had very few ancient legends, although it was for them that I was on the hunt. You probably know that all legends can be divided into two groups. The first are those that are alive everywhere amidst the greater part of the people. In the Belarusian folklore they are legends about a queen, about an amber palace, and also a great number of religious legends.

And the second are those which are rooted, as if by chains, in some one locality, district, or even in a village. They are connected with an unusual rock or cliff at the bank of a lake, with the name of a tree or a grove or with a particular cave nearby. It goes without saying that such legends die out more quickly, although they are sometimes more poetic than the well-known ones, and when published they are very popular.

I don't know how it is with other ethnographers, but it has always been difficult for me to leave any locality. It would seem to me that during the winter that I had to spend in town, some woman might die there, the woman, you understand, who is the only one who knows that enchanting old tale. And this story will die together with her, and nobody will hear it, and my people and I shall be robbed.

Therefore my anger and my fit of the blues should not surprise anyone.

I was in this mood when one of my friends advised me to go to the District N., which was even at that time considered a most out-of-the-way place.

Did he have any idea that I would almost lose my mind because of the horrors facing me there, that I would find courage and fortitude in myself, and discover?… However, I shall not forestall events.

My preparations for leaving did not take me long: I packed the necessary things into a medium-sized travelling-bag, hired a carriage, and soon left the “capital city” of a comparatively civilized region to take leave of all civilization as I came to the neighbouring district with its forestry and swamps, a territory which was no smaller than perhaps Luxemburg.

At first, along both sides of the road were the fields, and among them were scattered here and there wild pear trees resembling oaks. We came across villages on our way in which whole colonies of storks lived, but then the fertile soil came to an end and endless forest land appeared. Trees stood like columns, the brushwood along the road deadened the rumbling of the wheels. The forest ravines gave off a smell of mould and decay; sometimes from under the very hoofs of the horses flocks of heath-cocks would rise up into the air (in autumn heathcocks always bunch together in flocks) and here and there from beneath the brushwood and heather brown or black caps of nice thick mushrooms were already peeping out.

Twice we spent the nights in small forest lodges, glad to see their feeble lights in the blind windows. Night-time. A baby is crying, something in the yard seems to be disturbing the horses — a bear is probably passing nearby, and over the tree-tops, over the ocean — like forest a solid rain of stars.

In the lodge it is impossible to breathe, a little girl is rocking the cradle with her foot. Her refrain is as old as the hills:

Oh, how fearful, how eternal and immeasurable is thy sorrow, my Belarus!

Night-time. Stars. Primitive darkness in the forests.

And nevertheless even this was Italy in comparison with what we saw two days later.

The forest was beginning to wither, was less dense than before. And soon an endless plain came into view.

This was not an ordinary plain throughout which our rye rolls on in small rustling waves; it was not even a quagmire… a quagmire is not at all monotonous. You can find there some sad, warped saplings, a little lake may suddenly appear, whereas this was the gloomiest, the most hopeless of our landscapes: the peat-bogs. One has to be a misanthropist with the brain of a cave-man to imagine such places. Nevertheless, this was not the product of the imagination, here before our very eyes lay the swamp…

This boundless plain was brownish, hopelessly smooth, boring, gloomy.

At times we met great heaps of stones, at times it was a brown cone. Some god-forsaken man was digging peat, nobody knows why, — at times we came across a lonely little hut along the roadway, with its one window, with its chimney sticking out from the stove, with not a tree anywhere around. And the forest that dragged on beyond the plain seemed even gloomier than it really was. After a short while there began to appear little islands of trees even on this plain, trees overgrown with moss and covered with cobwebs, most of them as warped and ugly as those in the drawings that illustrate a horribly frightening tale.

I was ready to weep out loud, such resentment did I feel.

And as if to spite us, the weather changed for the worse: low dark clouds were creeping on to meet us, and here and there leaden strips of rain came slanting down at us. Not a single crested-lark did we see on the road, and this was a bad sign: it would rain cats and dogs all night through.

I was ready to turn in at the first hut, but none came in sight. Cursing my friend who had sent me here, I told the man to drive faster, and I drew my raincloak closer around me. But the sky became filled with dark, low rain-clouds; over the plain there descended such a gloomy and cold twilight that it made me shiver. A feeble streak of lightning flashed in the distance.

No sooner did the disturbing thought strike me that at this time of the year it was too late for thunder, than an ocean of cold water came pouring down on me, on the horses and the coachman.

Someone had handed the plain over into the clutches of night and rain.

And the night was as dark as soot, I couldn't see my fingers even, and only guessed that we were still moving on because of the jolting of the carriage. The coachman, too, could probably see nothing and gave himself up entirely to the instincts of the horses.

Whether they really had the instincts I don't know: the fact is that our closed carriage was thrown out from a hole onto a kind of hillock and back again into a hole.

Lumps of clay, marsh dirt and paling flew into the carriage, onto my cloak, into my face, but I resigned myself to this and prayed for only one thing: not to fall into the quagmire. I knew that the most forsaken places are met with in these marshes — the carriage, the horses, and the people, all would be swallowed up — and it would never enter anybody's mind that somebody had ever been there, that only a few minutes ago a human being had screamed there until the thick brown marsh mass had stopped his mouth, that now that being was lying together with the horses buried six metres down below the ground.

Suddenly there was a roar, a dismal howl: a long, drawn-out howl, an inhuman howl… The horses gave a jerk… I was almost thrown out… they ran on, heaven knows where, apparently straight on across the swamp. Then something cracked, and the back wheels of the carriage were drawn down. On feeling water under my feet, I grabbed the coachman by the shoulder and he, with a kind of indifference, uttered:

“It's all over with us, sir. We shall die here!”

But I did not want to die. I snatched the whip from out of the coachman's hand and began to strike in the darkness where the horses should have been.

An unearthly howl was heard and the horses neighed madly and pulled, the carriage trembled as if it were trying with all its might to pull itself out of that swamp, then a loud smacking noise from under the wheels, the cart bent, jolted even worse, the mare began to neigh! And lo! A miracle!.. The cart rolled on, and was soon knocking along on firm ground. Only now did I comprehend that it was none other than I myself who had uttered those heart-rending cries. How ashamed I felt!

I was about to ask the coachman to stop the horses on this relatively firm ground, and spend the night there, when the rain began to quiet down.

At this moment something wet and prickly struck me in the face. “The branch of a fir-tree,” I guessed. “Then we must be in a forest. The horses will stop of their own accord.”

However, time passed, once or twice fir-tree branches hit me in the face again, but the carriage slid on evenly and smoothly: a sign that we were on a forest path.

I decided that it had to lead somewhere and gave myself up to fate. And indeed, when about thirty minutes had passed, ahead of us in this dank and pitch-dark night a warm and beckoning light appeared.

We soon saw that it was not a woodsman's hut and not a tarsprayer's hut as I had thought at first, but some kind of a tremendous building, a building too large even for the city. In front of us — a flower-bed, a black opening in the fir-tree lane through which we had come, and all around wet grass.

The entrance had a kind of high roof over it, on the door there was a heavy bronze ring.

At first I and then the coachman, then again I, knocked on the door with this ring. We rang timidly, knocked a little louder, beat the ring very bravely, stopped, called, then beat the door with our feet — but to no avail. At last we heard somebody moving behind the door, uncertainly, timidly. Then from somewhere at the top came a woman's voice, hoarse and husky:

“Who's there?”

“We're travellers, dear lady, let us in.”

“You aren't from the Hunt, are you?”

“Whatever hunt are you speaking of? We're wet through, from head to foot, can hardly stand on our feet. For God's sake let us in.”

The woman remained silent, then in a hesitating voice:

“But whoever are you? What's your name?”

“Biełarecki is my name. I'm with my coachman.”

“Count Biełarecki?”

“I hope I am a Count,” I answered with the plebian's lack of reverence for titles.

The voice became severe:

“Well then, go your way, my good man, back to where you came from. Just think of it! He hopes he is a Count! Jokes in the night? Come on, off with you! Go back and look for some lair in the forest, if you're such a smart fellow.”

“My dear lady,” I begged, “gladly would I look for one and not disturb people, but I am a stranger in these parts. I'm from the district town, we've lost our way, not a dry thread on us.”

“Away, away with you!” answered an inexorable voice.

In answer to that, anybody else in my place would have probably grabbed a stone and begun beating on the door with it, swearing at the cruel owners, but even at such a moment I could not rid myself of the thought it was wrong to break into a strange house. Therefore I only signed and turned to the coachman.

“Well then, let's leave this place.”

We were about to return to our carriage, but our ready agreement had apparently made a good impression, for the old woman softening, called after us:

“Just a moment, wayfarers, but who are you, anyway?”

I was afraid to answer “an ethnographer”, because twice before after saying this I had been taken for a bad painter. Therefore I answered:

“A merchant.”

“But how did you happen into the park when a stone wall and an iron fence encircle it?”

“Oh! I don't know,” I answered sincerely. “We were riding somewhere through the marsh, fell somewhere through somewhere, we hardly got out… Something roared there…” Truth to tell, I had already given up all hope, however, after these words of mine the old woman quietly sighed and said in a frightened voice:

“Oh! Oh! My God! Then you must have escaped through the Giant's Gap, for it's only from that side that there's no fence. That's how lucky you were. You're a fortunate man. The Heavenly Mother saved you! Oh! Good God! Oh! God's martyrs!”

And such sympathy, and such kindness were heard in those words, that I forgave her the hour of questioning at the entrance. The woman thundered with the bolts, then the door opened, jand a dim orange-coloured stream of light pierced the darkness of the night.

A woman stood before us, short of stature, in a dress wide as a church bell with a violet-coloured belt, a dress which our ancestors wore in the times of King Sas, and on her head was a starched cap. The face was covered with kind wrinkles, the nose hooked, the mouth immence — resembling a nutcracker, the lips slightly protruding. She was round like a small keg, of medium height, with plump little hands, as if she were asking to be called “Mother dear”. In the hands of this old woman there were tremendous oven prongs: a weapon to defend herself with! I was about to burst into laughter, but remembered in time the cold outside and the rain, and kept silent. How many people even to this very day keep from laughing at things deserving to be laughed at, fearing the rain outside?

We went into a little room where it smelled of mice, and immediately pools of water ran down from our clothes onto the floor. I glanced at my feet and was horrified: almost up to my knees there was a brown mass of mud that looked like boots.

The old woman only shook her head.

“You, Mr. Merchant, must light a big candle as an offering to God for having escaped so easily!” And she opened a door leading into a neighbouring room where the fireplace was lit. “You've had a narrow escape. Take off your clothes, dry yourselves. Have you any other clothes to get into?”

My sack luckily was dry. I changed my clothing before the fireplace. Our clothes — mine and the coachman's — the woman dragged away somewhere and returned with dry clothing for the coachman. She came in paying no attention to the coachman being quite naked, standing bashfully with his back turned to her.

She looked at his back that had turned blue and said disapprovingly:

“You, young man, don't turn your back to me. I'm an old woman. And don't squeeze your toes. Here, take these and dress yourself.”

When we had somewhat warmed up at the fireplace, the old woman looked at us with her deep sunken eyes and said:

“Warmed up a bit? Good! You, young man, will go to sleep with Jan, it won't be comfortable for you here… Jan!”

Jan appeared. An almost blind old man about 60 years of age, with long grey hair, a nose as sharp as an awl, sunken cheeks, and a moustache reaching down to the middle of his chest.

At first I had been surprised that the old woman, alone with oven prongs in her hands, had not been afraid to open the door to two men who had appeared in the night from no one knew where, but after I had seen Jan, I understood that he had been somewhere in hiding and she had depended on him for help.

The help was “just grand”: in the hands of the old man I saw a gun. To be exact, it wasn't a gun: “a musket” would be a more correct name for the weapon the man was holding. It was approximately six inches taller than Jan himself, the gun barrel had notches in it and was bell-shaped at the end, the riflestock and butt-stock were worn from long handling, the slow match was hanging down. In a word its place was in an Armoury Museum. Such guns usually shoot as do cannon, and they recoil on the shoulder with such force that a person unprepared for the shock drops down like a sheaf on the ground.

And for some reason or other I thought with pleasure of the marvelous English six-shooter that was in my pocket.

Hardly able to move his unbending legs, Jan led the coachman to the door. I noticed that even his hands were trembling.

“Dependable aid for the mistress,” I thought.

But the mistress touched me by the shoulder and invited me to follow after her into the “apartments”. We passed through yet another small room, the old woman opened another door, and I quietly gasped in surprise and delight.

Meeting our gaze was a great entrance-hall, a kind of a drawing-room, a customary thing in ancient castles. And oh! The beauty there!

The room was so enormous that my gloomy reflection in the mirror somewhere on the opposite wall seemed no bigger than the joint of my little finger. The floor was made of oak “bricks” already quite worn, the exceptionally high walls were bordered at the edges with shining fretwork blackened by the years, the windows almost under the ceiling, small ones in deep lancet niches.

In the dark we had evidently hit on a side porch, for to the right of me was the front entrance: a wide door, also a lancet one, divided by wooden columns into three parts. The flowers, leaves and fruit carved on the columns were cracked with time. Behind the door in the depth of the vestibule was the entrance door, — a massive, oak door, bound by darkened bronze nails with square heads. And above the door an enormous dark window into the night and darkness. On the window a ship of forged iron, a masterpriece of workmanship.

I walked along the hall in amazement: what splendour, and how all had been neglected due to people's carelessness. There was massive furniture along the walls — it squeaked even in answer to footfalls. Here an enormous wooden statue of St. George, one of the somewhat naive creations of the Belarusian national genius, and at the feet of the statue a layer of white dust, as if someone had spread flour over it; this unique work had been spoiled by wood-lice. And here hanging down from the ceiling was a chandelier, also of surprising beauty, but with more than half of its pendants missing.

It might have seemed that no one lived here, were it not for an enormous fireplace, its flames lighting up the entrance-hall with an uncertain flickering light.

Almost in the middle of this splendid entrance-hall a marble staircase led up to the first floor, where everything was almost the same as on the ground floor — the same enormous room, even a similar fireplace also lit, except that on the walls the black wood (probably oak) alternated with shabby coffee-coloured damask wall-paper and on this wall-paper in all their splendour were portraits in heavy frames. And in addition near the fireplace there stood a small table and two armchairs.

The old woman touched me by the sleeve:

“Now I'll lead you to your room. It's not far from here along the corridor. And afterwards… perhaps you would like to have supper?”

I did not refuse, for I hadn't eaten anything all day.

“Well then, sir, wait for me…”

She returned in about ten minutes, a broad smile on her face, and in a confidential tone said to me:

“You know the village goes to bed early. But we here don't like to sleep, we try to go to bed as late as possible. And the mistress doesn't like visitors. I don't know why she suddenly consented to admit you into her house, and even lets you share her supper-table. (I hope, sir, you will excuse me). You are evidently the most worthy of all those who have been here in the last three years.”

“You mean then,” I said, surprised, “that you are not the mistress?”

“I'm the housekeeper,” the old woman answered with dignity. “I am the housekeeper. In the best of the best houses, in a good family, understand this, Mr. Merchant. In the very best of the best families. This is even better than being the mistress of a family not of the very best.”

“Then what family is this?” I asked imprudently. “And where am I?”

The old woman's eyes blazed with anger.

“You are in the castle of Marsh Firs. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself not to know the owners. They are the Janoŭskis. You understand, the Janoŭskis! You must have heard of them!”

I answered that I had, of course, heard of them. And this reassured the old woman.

With a gesture worthy of a queen, she pointed to an armchair, (approximately as queens do in the theatre when they point to the executioner's block ready for their unlucky lover: “There's your place, you ill-fated one”), asked to be excused and left me alone.

The change in the old woman surprised me greatly. On the ground floor she moaned and lamented, spoke with that expressive intonation of the people, on the first floor she immediately changed, became the devil alone knows what. Apparently, on the ground floor she was at home, whereas on the first she was nothing but the housekeeper, a rare guest, and changed correspondingly with the passage.

Remaining alone, I began to examine the portraits that gleamed on the walls. There were about seventy of them, some ancient and some quite new — and a sad sight they made.

Here a nobleman dressed in something like a sheepskin coat — one of the oldest pictures — his face the face of a peasant, broad, healthy, with thick blood in his veins.

And here another, this one already in a long silver-woven tunic with a girdle, a wide beaver collar falling across his shoulders (a sly proto-beast you were, young man!). Next to him a powerful-looking man with shoulders like stone and a sincere look about him, in a red cloak (at his head a shield with the family coat-of-arms, the top half smeared with black paint). And farther on, others just as strong, but with oily eyes, lopped off noses, their lips hard.

Beyond them portraits of women with sloping shoulders, women created for caresses. Faces were such that would have made an executioner weep. Most likely some of these women did actually lay their heads on the executioner's block in those hard times. It is unpleasant to think that these women took their food from their plates with their hands, and bedbugs made their nests in the canopies of their beds.

I stopped off at one of the portraits, fascinated by a strangely wonderful, incomprehensible smile, a smile which our old masters so inimitably painted. The woman looked at me mysteriously and with compassion.

“You, you little man,” her look seemed to say. “What have you experienced in life? Oh! If you could have seen the torches blazing on the walls of the hall during feasting and revelry, if you could have known the delight in kissing your lovers till they bled, to make two men fight a duel, to poison one, to throw another to the executioner, to aid your husband to fire from the tower at the attacking enemies, to send yet another lover to the grave for love of you, and then to take the blame on yourself, to lay your head with its white wide forehead and intricate hair-do on the block.”

I swear upon my honour that that is what she said to me, and although I hate aristocrats, I understood, standing before these portraits, what a fearful thing is “an ancient family”, what an imprint it leaves on its descendants, what a heavy burden their old sins and degeneration lay on their shoulders.

And I understood also that uncountable decades had flown by since the time when this woman sat for the painter. Where are they now, all these people with their hot blood and passionate desires, how many centuries have thundered over their decaying bones?

I felt the wind of the centuries whistling past my back, and the hair on my head stood on end.

And I felt also the cold that reigned in this house, a cold that even the fireplaces burning night and day could not drive out.

Enormous, gloomy halls with their dusty smell, with their creaking parquet floors, their gloomy corners, their eternal draughts, the smell of mice and dust and cold, such a cold that made your heart freeze, a cold that centuries had gone into making, a cold created by an entailed estate, the exclusive right of inheritance belonging to the eldest son, by an enormous, now impoverished and almost extinct family.

Oh! What a cold it was! If our late decadents, singing praises to the dilapidated castles of the gentry, were left here overnight, for just one night even, they would very soon ask to be taken out and put on the grass in the warm sunshine.

A brave rat ran diagonally across the hall. I winced.

I turned to more of the portraits. These portraits were of a later period. And altogether different. The men had a kind of a hungry look, a discontented look. Their eyes like those in old seladons, on their lips an incomprehensible, a subtle smile and unpleasant causticity. And the women were different: their lips too full of lust, their look mannered and cold. And very obvious were their hands, now much weaker hands: beneath their white skin, both in the men and the women, blue veins were visible. Their shoulders had become narrower and were thrust forward, while the expression on their faces showed a markedly increased voluptuousness.

Life, what cruel jokes you play on those who for centuries live an isolated life, and come into contact with the people only to bring bastards into the world!

It was difficult and unpleasant for me to look at all this. And again that feeling of a sharp, incomprehensible cold…

I did not hear any steps behind my back, it was as if someone had come flying through the air. I simply felt suddenly that someone was standing behind my back, looking at me. Then under the influence of this look, I turned around. A woman stood behind me, looking at me questioningly, her head slightly bent. I was stunned. It seemed to me as if the portrait that had just been talking to me, had suddenly come to life and the woman in it had stepped down from it.

I don't even know what they had in common. The one in the portrait (I looked around at it and saw that she was in her place) was tall, well-built, with a great reserve of vitality, merry, strong and beautiful. While this one was simply a puny creature.

Still there was a resemblance, a kind of super-resemblance that can force us to recognize two men in a crowd as being brothers, although they do not resemble each other: one a brunette and the other a blond. Yes, and here there was even more. Their hair exactly alike, their noses of the same form, their mouths with the same kind of slit and the same white even teeth. Added to this there was a general resemblance in the expression on their faces, something ancestral, eternal.

And nevertheless I had never before seen such an unpleasant-looking person. Everything alike and everything somehow different. Short of stature, thin as a twig, thighs almost undeveloped and a pitiable chest, light blue veins on the neck and hands, in which there seemed to be no blood at all — so weak she was, like a small stem of wormwood.

Very thin skin, a very thin neck, even the hair-do somehow inexpressive. Which seemed so very strange because her hair was of the colour of gold, fluffy and surprisingly beautiful. Whatever was that absurd knot for at the back of her head?

Her features were so expressive, sharply defined, regularly proportioned that they would have served as a model for even a great sculptor, but I doubt whether any sculptor would have been tempted to use her as a model for Juno: seldom does one see such an unpleasant face, a face to be pitied. Crooked lips, deep shadows about her nose, her face a greyish colour, black eyes, their expression fixed and incomprehensible.

“The poor thing is devilish ugly,” I thought, sympathizing with her, and I lowered my eyes.

I know many women who would never to their dying days have forgiven me my lowered eyes, but this one was probably accustomed to seeing something similar on the faces of the people she met with: she paid absolutely no attention to my eyes.

I was unpleasantly surprised by this frankness, to put it mildly. What was it? A subtle calculation or naivete? But no matter how much I looked into this distorted face, I couldn't see in it any ulterior motive.

Her face was artless, like that of a child. But her voice was most convincing: slow, lazy, indifferent, and simultaneously timid and broken like the voice of a forest bird.

“And also, as a matter of fact, I saw you even before that!”

“Where?” I was frankly amazed.

“I don't know. I see many people. It seems to me that I've seen you in my sleep… Often… Didn't you ever happen to feel as if you had lived somewhere formerly and long ago… and now you discover you are looking at something you had seen long, long ago?…”

I am a healthy man. And I had not yet known then that something similar sometimes happens to nervous people with a very keen perception. The connection between primary conceptions, and subsequent notions is somehow disturbed in the memory, and things very much alike seem identical to them; in objects entirely unknown to them they reveal something long known to them. Whereas the consciousness — ever a realist — resists this. And so it happens that an object is simultaneously unfamiliar and mysteriously familiar.

I repeat I had not known that. And even so it never for a moment entered my head that this girl could tell a lie, such sincerity and indifference were felt in her words.

“I have seen you,” she repeated. “But who are you? I do not know you.”

“My name is Andrej Biełarecki, Miss Janoŭskaja. I am an ethnographer.”

She wasn't at all surprised. On the contrary, on learning that she knew this word, it was I who was surprised.

“Well, that is very curious. And what interests you? Songs? Sayings? Proverbs?”

“Legends, Miss Janoŭskaja, old local legends.”

I got terribly frightened. It was no laughing matter: she suddenly straightened up as if an electric current had been passed through her, torturing her. Her face became pale, her eyelids closed.

I rushed over to her, supported her head, and put a glass of water to her lips, but she had already come to. And her eyes sparkled with such indignation, with such an inexplicable reproach in them, that I felt as if I were the worst scoundrel on earth, although I had not the faintest idea why I should not speak about my profession. A vague idea flashed through my mind that something was connected with the old rule: “never speak of woe in the house whose master has been hanged.”

In a broken voice she said:

“And you… And you, too… why do you torture me, why does everybody?…”

“My dear lady! Upon my word of honour, I had nothing harmful in mind, I don't know anything… Look, here is my certificate from the Academy. Here is a letter from the governor. I've never been here before. Please forgive me, for heaven's sake, if I have caused you any pain.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Never mind, calm yourself, Mr. Biełarecki… It's simply that I hate what savages can create in the minds of savages. Perhaps you, too, will some day understand what it is… this gloom. Whereas I understood what it is long ago. But I'll be dead long before everything will have become clear to me.”

I realized it would be tactless to question her any further, and I kept silent. It was only after a while, when she had calmed down that I said:.

“I beg your pardon for having disturbed you, Miss Janoŭskaja, I see that I have immediately become an unpleasant person for you. When must I leave? It seems to me the sooner the better.”

Again that distorted face!

“Ah! As if that were the trouble! Don't leave us. You will offend me deeply if you leave now. And besides,” her voice began to tremble, “what would you say if I asked you to remain here, in this house, for at least two or three weeks? Until the time when the dark autumn nights are over?”

Her look began to wander. On her lips a pitiful smile appeared.

“Afterwards there will be snow… And footprints in the snow. Of course, you will do as you see fit. However, it would be unpleasant for me were it to be said of the last of the Janoŭskis that she had forgotten the custom of hospitality.”

She said “the last of the Janoŭskis” in such a way, this eighteen-year-old girl, that my heart was wrung with pain.

“Well then,” she continued, “if this awful stuff interests you, how can I possibly object? Some people collect snakes. We here have more spectres and ghosts than living people. Peasants, shaken with fever, tell amazing and fearful stories. They live on potatoes, bread made of grasses, porridge without butter, and on fantasy. You mustn't sleep in their huts: it's dirty there and congested, and all is evilly neglected. Go about the neighbouring farmsteads, there for money that will go to buy bread or vodka, warming up for a moment the blood that is everlastingly cold from malaria, they will tell you everything. And in the evening return here. Dinner will be ready, awaiting you here, and a place to sleep in, and a fire in the fireplace. Remember this — I am the mistress here, and the peasants obey me. Agreed?”

By this time I was already quite certain that nobody obeyed this child, nobody was afraid of her, and nobody depended on her. Perhaps, had it been anybody else, I might have smiled into her eyes, but in this “command” of hers there was so much entreaty that I did not yet quite understand, and I said with my eyes lowered:

“Alright. I agree to your wish.”

She did not notice the ironic gleam in my eyes and for a moment even blushed, apparent-ly because somebody had obeyed her.

The left-overs of a very modest supper were removed from the table. We remained in our armchairs before the fireplace. Janoŭskaja looked around at the black windows behind which the branches of enormous trees rubbed against, and said:

“Perhaps you are ready for sleep now?”

This strange evening had put me into such a mood that I had lost all desire for sleep. And here we were sitting side by side looking into the fire.

“Tell me,” she suddenly said. “Do people everywhere live as we do here?”

I glanced at her, puzzled: hadn't she ever been anywhere outside of her home? As if she had understood me, she said: “I've never been anywhere beyond this plain in the forest… My father, he was the best man living on earth, taught me himself, he was a very educated man. I know, of course, what countries there are in the world. I know that not everywhere do our fir-trees grow, but tell me, is it everywhere so damp and cold for man to live on this earth?”

“Many find life cold on this earth, Miss Janoŭskaja. The people who thirst for power are to blame for that, they wish for power that is beyond their ability to exert. Also money is guilty, money for the sake of which people grab each other by the throat. However, it seems to me that not everywhere is it so lonely as it is here. Over there, beyond the forests, there are warm meadows, flowers, storks in the trees, as well as impoverished and oppressed people; but there the people somehow seek escape. They decorate their homes, women laugh, children play. While here there is very little of all that.”

“I suspected that,” she said. “That world is alluring, but I am not needed anywhere except at Marsh Firs. And what should I do there for money if money is necessary? Tell me: such things as love and friendship, do they exist there, at least now and then? Or is it so only in the books that are in my father's library?”

Again I did not for a moment suspect that this was an equivocal joke, though I was in quite an awkward position: sitting at night in a room and conversing with a young lady whom I hardly knew, talking about love, the subject having been brought up by her…

“Sometimes those things happen there.”

“There, that's what I say. It's impossible that people lie. But here we have nothing of the kind. Here we have the quagmire and gloom. Here we have wolves… wolves with fiery eyes. On such nights it seems to me that nowhere on this earth, nowhere does the sun shine.”

It was terrifying to see a dry black gleam in her eyes, and in order to change the subject, I said:

“It can't be that your father and mother did not love each other.”

Her smile was enigmatic:

“Our people do not love. This house sucks the life out of its people. And then who told you that I had a mother? I don't remember her, nobody in this house remembers her. At times it seems to me that my appearance in this world was of my own doing.”

In spite of the naivety of these words, I understood that this was an unknown scene from Decameron and one must not laugh, because it was all so terrible. A young girl was sitting near me talking of things that she had long been hiding in her heart and which, however, had no greater reality for her than angels in heaven had for me.

“You are mistaken,” I growled, “love nevertheless, even though rarely, does come our way on earth.”

“Wolves cannot love. And how can one love, if death is all around? Here it is, beyond the window.”

A very thin, transparent hand pointed to the black spots on the windows. And again her fine voice:

“Your lying books write that it is a great mystery, that it is happiness and light, that when love comes to a man and there is no reciprocation, he kills himself.”

“Yes,” I answered, “otherwise there would be neither men nor women.”

“You lie. People kill others, not themselves. I don't believe in it, I've never experienced it, which means that it doesn't exist. I don't wish to kiss anybody, about which your books write so much and so queerly, — people bite each other.”

Even now such talk frightens some men, what then is there to say about those times? I am not an unfeeling sort of person, but I felt no shame: she spoke about love as other women do about the weather. She did not know it, she had not been awakened, was quite cold, cold as ice. She could not even understand whether it was shameful or not. And her eyes looked frankly into mine.

This could not have been coquetry. This was a child, not a child even, but a living corpse.

She wrapped her shawl about her and said:

“Death reigns on earth. That I know. I don't like it when people lie about what has never existed on our earth.”

Beyond the walls the wind howled. She shrugged her shoulders and said quietly:

“A terrible land, terrible trees, terrible nights.”

And again I saw that same expression on her face and did not understand it.

“Tell me, they are large cities — Vilnia and Miensk?”

“Rather large, but Moscow and Petersburg are larger.”

“And there, too, the nights bring no comfort to people?”

“Not at all. In the windows lights burn, in the streets people laugh, skates ring, street lamps shine.”

She became thoughtful.

“That's so there. But here not a single light. Surrounding this old park two versts on every side, lonely huts are asleep, sleeping without any lights. In this house there are about fifty rooms, many corridors and passages with dark corners. It was built so long ago… And it is a cold house, for our ancestors forbade laying stoves, they allowed only fireplaces in order to be unlike their common neighbours. The fireplaces burn day and night, but even so there is dampness in the corners and cold everywhere. And in these fifty rooms there are only three people. The housekeeper sleeps on the ground floor and the watchman also. And in one of the wings behind the alleys and the park the cook and the washerwoman live. They live well. And in the second annex to this house, with its separate entrance, my manager lives, Ihnat Bierman-Hacevič. Whatever we need this manager for, I do not know, but such is the law. And in this house, on the entire first floor with its 30 rooms, I am the only one. And it is so uncomfortable here that I'd like to get into some corner, wrap myself up in my blanket as a child does, and sit there. Now for some reason or other it feels good and so quiet here as it has not been for two years, since the time my father died. And it is all the same to me now whether there are lights beyond these windows or not. You know, it is very good when there are people beside you…”

She led me to my room (her room was only two doors away) and when I had already opened the door, she said:

“If old legends and traditions interest you, look for them in the library, in the book-case for manuscripts. A volume of legends about our family must be there. And some other papers as well.”

And she added: “Thank you, Mr. Biełarecki.”

I don't know why she thanked me, and I confess that I didn't think about it much when I entered a small room without any door-bolts, arid put my candle on the table.

There was a bed there as wide as the Kojdanava Battlefield. Over the bed was an old canopy. On the floor a threadbare carpet that had been a wonderful piece of work. The bed, evidently, was made up with the help of a special stick (as they used to do 200 years ago), and such a big stick it was. The stick stood near the bed. Besides the bed there were a chest of drawers, a high writing-desk and a table. Nothing else.

I undressed, lay down under a warm blanket, having put out the candle. And immediately beyond the window the black silhouettes of the trees appeared on a blue background, and sounds were heard, sounds evoking dreams.

For some reason or other a feeling of abandonment overcame me to such a degree that I stretched out, drew my hands over my head and, almost beginning to laugh, so happy did I feel, I fell asleep, as if I had fallen into some kind of a dark abyss over a precipice. It seemed to me I was dreaming that someone was making short and careful steps along the corridor, but I paid no attention to that, and I slept and in my dream I was glad that I was asleep.

This was my first night and the only peaceful one in the house of the Janoŭskis at Marsh Firs.

The abandoned park, wild and blackened by age and moisture, was disturbed for many acres around, filled with the noise of an autumn rain.