King Stakh's Wild Hunt

Chapter The Eighth

The day was grey and gloomy, such an indifferent grey day, that I wanted to cry on my way to the estate belonging to the Kulšas. Low grey clouds were creeping over the peat-bogs. The landscape lay before me looking like a monotonous barrack. Grey spots were moving about here and there on the smooth brown surface of the plain: a shepherd was grazing sheep there. I walked along the edge of the Giant's Gap, and there was no place, literally, for the eye to rest on. Something dark lay in the grass. I came up closer. It was an enormous stone cross about three metres long. It was knocked down long ago, for the hole in which it had stood was almost level with the ground and was covered with undergrowth. The letters on the cross were hardly visible:

“God's slave, Raman, died a quick death here. People wandering by, pray for his soul, so that someone should pray for yours, because it is your prayers that are especially to God's liking.”

I stood long near it. So this is where Raman the Elder perished!

“Sir, kind sir,” I heard a voice behind my back.

I turned around. A woman in fantastic rags was standing behind me with a hand outstretched. Young she was and quite pretty, but her face with its yellow skin was so frightful that I lowered my eyes. In her arms lay a child.

I gave her some money.

“Perhaps the gentleman has at least a tiny piece of bread? I'm afraid I won't be able to reach my place. And Jasik is dying…”

“But what's wrong with him?”

“I don't know,” she answered tonelessly.

I found a sweet in my pocket and gave it to the woman, but the baby remained indifferent to it.

“Then what shall I do with you, my poor one?”

A peasant was riding along the road in a cart driven by a bull. I called to him, took out a rouble and asked him to take the woman to Marsh Firs, she should be fed there and given shelter.

“May God give you health, sir,” the woman whispered, in tears. “Nobody anywhere has given us anything to eat. May God punish those who drive people from the land!”

“And who drove you off?”

“A gentleman.”

“What gentleman?”

“The gentleman, Antoś. Such a skinny one he is…”

“But what's his surname? Where's your village?”

“I don't know his surname, but the village is here, behind the forest. A good village. We had some money even, five roubles. But they drove us away.”

Her eyes expressed wonder: why didn't the owner take the five roubles, why did he drive them away?

“And where is your husband?”

“They killed him.”

“Who killed him?”

“We screamed, wept, didn't want to go away. Jazep also screamed. Then they shot him. And at night came the Wild Hunt and drowned those who screamed the loudest. They disappeared… Nobody screamed any more.”

I hastened to send them off, and myself walked on, desperate beyond description. God, what darkness! What oppression! How to move the mountain? At Dubatoŭk's we had guzzled so much it would have been sufficient to save the lives of forty Jasiks. The hungry man is not given any bread, his bread is given to the soldier who'll shoot at him since he is hungry. State wisdom! And these unfortunates keep silent! For what sins are you, my people, being chastised, why, on your own native land, are you stormily driven here and there like autumn foliage? What forbidden apple did the first Adam of my tribe eat?

Some guzzled more food than they could possibly eat, others died of hunger under their windows. This broken-down cross here over him who lived on the fat of the land, and here a child dying of hunger.

This boundary has existed for ages between the one and the other, — and this is the end, a logical completion, a running wild; throughout the entire state there is gloom, dull fright, hunger, madness. And all Belarus — a common battlefield for the dead over which the wind howls, dung under the hoofs of contented fat cattle.

Wanderers will not pray for you, Raman the Elder. Every man shall spit on your fallen cross. And may God give me strength to save the last one of your kin, she who is innocent of any crime against the inexorable truth of our stepmother, our Belarus.

Is my people really such a forgotten, such a dead nation?

I spent about forty minutes making my way through the damp forest behind the Giant's Gap and reached the narrow path covered with brushwood. Along both sides of the road stood aspens, their leaves were falling. Birches stood out in the midst of this crimson mass, birches that had already turned yellow, and oaks that were yet quite green. A small path led down into a ravine with a murmuring brook, its water the colour of strong tea. The banks of the brook were covered with soft green moss and connected by green bridges made of the trees that had been broken down by storms. It was along these tree-trunks — on some of which the moss was stripped off — that people crossed the brook.

All around was silent and solitary. No people anywhere. In tree-tops sounded the chirping of a tiny bird, and hanging down from the cobwebs among the trees were lonely leaves that had got caught falling down from the branches. Floating about in the brook were tiny red and yellow, sad leaf-boats, but in one place there was a small pool in which they whirled about as if they were being cooked there by a water-sprite for its supper. In order to cross the brook I had to break down a rather thick, but quite dry aspen to support me, and I broke it down with one kick of my foot.

Behind the ravine the forest became dense. The path disappeard in an impassable thicket. It was surrounded by jungles of raspberry-canes, dry stinging-nettle, wild blackberries and other weeds. Hops climbed the trees like green flames, twined about them, hung down from them in sheaves that caught onto my head. There soon appeared the first signs of human life: bushes of wild lilac, squares of fertilized soil (former flower-beds), man's fellow-traveller — tall burdock. The lilac thickets were so dense that I could hardly get out of them and onto a small clearing in which a house stood safely hidden. It was built on a high stone foundation with a wing made of bricks. The wooden columns there had most likely been painted white in the lifetime of their grandfathers; it leaned over on one side, and as a man fatally wounded is about to fall, so was this house. Twisted platbands, boarding torn down, glass grown opalescent with age. Burdock, marigold, oleander in between the steps of the front wing almost blocking the way to the door. And on the way to the back door a puddle filled with bricks. The roof green, and thick with fat, fluffy moss. I took a look into the house through a little grey window: the inside of the house seemed gloomier and even more neglected. In a word it was a cottage standing on its last legs. Only the witch Baba Yaga was missing, she who should have been lying on the ninth brick, saying, “Fie! I smell the blood of a man!”

But she appeared very soon after. Through the window a woman's face was looking at me, a face so dry it seemed like a skull tightly covered by yellow parchment. Grey plaits fell on her shoulders. Then a hand appeared, a hand resembling a hen's claw. The hand beckoned me with a wrinkled finger.

I stood in the yard not knowing whom this gesture was meant for.

The door opened a little and that very same hand pushed itself through the slit.

“Here, come in, kind sir, Mr. Hryhor,” the head pronounced, “here unfortunate victims are murdered.”

I cannot say that after such a consoling piece of information I had a great desire to enter the house, but the old woman walked down to the last step of the porch, reached out her hand to me across the puddle.

“I've long been awaiting you, our courageous deliverer. The thing is that my slave Ryhor has turned out to be a man who stifles people as did Bluebeard. You remember our reading together about Zhila the Bluebeard, such a gallant cavalier? I'd have forgiven Ryhor everything if he'd done his murdering just as gallantly, but he's a serf. So what can one do?”

I followed after her. In the anteroom was a sheepskin coat on the floor, next to it a saddle, on the wall a whip and a few hardened fox-skins. Besides that, a three-legged stool and the portrait of a man lying on its side, a portrait dirty and torn through and through. The room itself was in such a mess as if a branch of the Grunwald Battle had been located there 400 years ago, and since that time nothing in the room had ever been dusted, nor had the windows been washed. A crooked table with legs the shape of antique hermae, next to it an armchair resembling war veterans without legs and hardly breathing. At the wall a closet leaning over and threatening to fall down on the first person who came up to it. On the floor near the door a large bust of Voltaire bearing a resemblance to the mistress of the house. He looked at me coquettishly from under the rags which crowned his head instead of laurels. A cheval-glass was squeezed into one corner and something resembling bird-droppings covered it. Its upper half was covered with a thick layer of dust. To make up for that, its lower half was carefully wiped clean. Fragments of dishes, bread crumbs, fishbones were thrown about everywhere. All as in a kingfisher's nest, where the bottom is covered with fish scales. And the mistress herself reminded one of a kingfisher, that gloomy and strange bird that prefers solitude.

She turned towards me, and again I saw her face, saw a nose hanging down to her very chin, and enormous teeth.

“My Knight, wouldn't it be nice if you wiped off the dust from the upper half of the cheval-glass? I'd like to see myself in my full height… In all my beauty…”

I shifted from one foot to the other, hesitating, not knowing how to fulfil her request, but she said suddenly:

“You see, you greatly resemble my deceased husband. What a man he was! He was taken alive up to heaven, the first among men after the prophet Elijah. But Raman fell alive into the nether regions. All due to the evil genius of the Janoŭski region — King Stach's Wild Hunt. From the day my husband died, I stopped cleaning the house as a sign of mourning. Beautiful, isn't it? And so romantic!”

She smiled a coquettish smile and began making eyes at me according to the unwritten rules at aristocratic girls' boarding-schools: “Keep your eyes on the person talking with you, then to the side with a slight bending of the head, again at the person you are talking to, then at the upper corner of the room and down at the ground.”

This was a malicious parody on human feelings. It was all the same as if a monkey had unexpectedly begun performing Ophelia's song in its English original.

“It is beautiful here. Only frightening. Oh! How frightening!”

Suddenly she threw herself on the floor away from me and buried her head in a pile of some old rags.

“Away! Away with you! You are King Stach!”

The woman beat herself hysterically and shouted loudly. Horrified, I thought that such a fate probably awaited all the people in this region if the black wing of incomprehensible fear were to remain hanging over this land.

I was standing at a loss, when somebody's hand was laid on my shoulder and a man's rough voice said:

“Why are you here? Don't you see that she is a bit — not in her right mind? A wonder, isn't she?”

The fellow went to the ante-room, brought a portrait full of holes from there, and put it on the table. A middle-aged man was depicted in the portrait in a dress-coat and with a “Vladimir”[8] in a button-hole.

Then he dragged the woman out from among the rags, seated her in front of the portrait.

“Mrs. Kulša, this is not King Stach, not at all. Mr. Fieldmarshal has come to take a look at our well-known local beauty. And King Stach — this one here in the portrait — is dead and cannot kill anybody.”

The woman looked at the portrait. Fell silent. The man took out a piece of bread from his bosom, bread as black as earth. The old woman started laughing happily. She began to pinch off bits of bread and put them in her mouth, but kept her eyes on the portrait.

“King Stach! My dear husband. Why do you turn up your nose?”

She either scratched the portrait or happily whispered something to him, continuing to eat her bread. It was possible to examine the unknown man. He was about 30 years old, in a peasant's cloth coat and in leather sandals. Tall he was, well-built, his chest powerful and bulging. Whiskers made his face look severe and somewhat harsh. This impression was strengthened by two little wrinkles between the eyebrows and widely-set burning eyes. A white felt hat was lowered down on his forehead. Something about him breathed of freedom, of the forest.

“You are Ryhor, aren't you? Kulša's watchman?”

“Yes,” he answered, irony in his voice. “And you, apparently, are Miss Janoŭskaja's guest. I've heard of such a bird. You sing well.”

“And are you always like that with her?” I showed at the old woman who was spitting on the portrait with great concentration.

“Always. She's been this way for two years already.”

“But why don't you take her to the district centre for treatment?”

“I pity her. Guests would come when she was in good health, but now not a single dog. The gentry! Our young ladies, to the devil with them…”

“But isn't it difficult for you?”

“No, not at all. If I'm a-hunting, then Zosia looks after her. Nor does she often play pranks. And demands nothing. Only bread, a lot of bread. She wants nothing else.”

He took out an apple from his pocket and offered it to the old woman.

“Highly respected lady, take this.”

“Don't want it,” eating her bread with gusto. “Everywhere poison, bread alone is pure, godly.”

“You see,” Ryhor said gloomily. “Once a day we force her to eat something cooked. Sometimes she bites my fingers: when we give her food — she grabs it… But she wasn't bad when young. Even if she were bad, we couldn't leave her to herself.”

And he smiled such a guilty, childish smile that I was surprised.

“But why is she like that?”

“Got frightened after Raman's death. They all live in fear, and I can tell you, for most of them it's what they deserve.”

“But how about Janoŭskaja?”

“It would be evil to speak badly about her. A kind woman. I'm sorry for her.”

I became bolder now, for I understood — this was not a traitor.

“Listen, Ryhor, I came here to ask you about something.”

“Ask away,” he said.

“I have decided to unravel this Wild Hunt of King Stach's. You understand. I've never seen a ghost, want to feel it with my own hands.”

“Ghosts… spooks,” he grumbled. “Fine ghosts they are, if their horses leave very real excrement along the road! However, sir, why do you want to do that? What reasons have you?”

Now I did not like the way he addressed me.

“Don't call me ‘sir!’ I'm no more a ‘sir’ than you. While as to my reason why… well… it is interesting, that's all. And I feel sorry for the lady and many other people.”

“We understand such things. Like Zosia is for me… But why don't you say that you are angry with them, that you want to take revenge? You see, I know how you escaped from the Wild Hunt near the river.” I was astonished.

“You know about that, do you? How?”

“Every person has eyes, and every person leaves footprints in the earth. You ran away like a sensible man. What's bad is that I always lose their footprints. And they begin and end on the highway.”

I told him about everything from the very beginning. Ryhor listened, sitting motionless, his large rough hands on his knees.

“I've listened attentively,” he said, when I had finished. “I like you, sir. From the peasantry, aren't you? From mužyks, I think; yes, and if not from mužyks, you're not far from them. I, too, have long wanted to get at these spooks, crush them, and make their feathers fly, but I've had no comrade. If you're not joking, then let's get together. However, I see that this idea has only just now come to you: to turn to me. So why suddenly now? And what did you have in mind before?”

“I don't know, why I decided to. People speak well of you: when Janoŭskaja became an orphan, you took pity on her. She told me that you even wanted to come to Marsh Firs to work as watchman, but something interfered. Well, and then I like your being independent, and that you take care of the sick woman, and pity her. But previously I simply wanted to ask you how it had come about that Janoŭskaja was delayed at the Kulša's that evening when Raman was killed.”

“Why she was delayed I, myself, don't know. That day a number of girls had gathered from neighbouring estates at the house of my mistress. They were having a good time there. And why Janoŭskaja was invited — that, too, I don't know. She hadn't been there, you see, many years. And you see for yourself what this woman is like now, she won't tell…”

“Why won't she tell?” the old woman suddenly smiled almost quite sensibly. “I will tell. I'm not mad, it's simply more convenient this way and safer. It was Haraburda who asked that poor Nadzieja should be invited. And his niece was in my house then. You are such a knight, Mr. Fieldmarshal, that I shall tell you everything. Yes, yes, it was Haraburda who advised us then to take the child. Our people are all very kind. Mr. Dubatoŭk had our promissory notes — he didn't begin proceedings against us for their recovery. That's so to speak, a guarantee that you will come to visit me more often and drink wine. Now I can force you to drink even vodka.' Yes, everybody invited Nadzieja. Haraburda, and Fieldmarshal Kamienski, and Dubatoŭk, and Raman, and King Stach, this one here. But your poor little head, Nadzieja, and your golden braids, lie together with your father's bones!”

These lamentations for a living person were distasteful to me and made me wince.

“You see, you've learned something,” Ryhor said gloomily.

When we left, the old woman's wailing quieted down.

“Well then,” Ryhor said, “all right, let's look for them together. I want to see this suprising marvel. I'll try to find out something among the common people, while you'll look among papers and ask the gentry. And maybe we'll learn something…”

His eyes suddenly became bitter, the corners of his eyebrows meeting at the bridge of his

nose.

“Girls were invented by the devil. All of them should be strangled to death, and the boys fighting among themselves for the few remaining ones, will kill themselves out. But nothing can be done…” Unexpectedly he ended up with: “Take me, for instance. Although my forest freedom is dear to me, still I sometimes think about Zosia, who also lives here. Maybe I'll live alone all my life in the forest. That's why I believed you, because I sometimes begin to go mad for those devilish female eyes…” (I didn't think so at all, but didn't consider it necessary to convince this bear that he was wrong.) “But, my friend, remember this well. If you have come to stir me up and then to betray me — there are many who have a grudge against me here — so know this — your stay will not be long on this earth. Ryhor is not afraid of anybody. Quite the opposite, everybody is afraid of Ryhor. And Ryhor has friends. It's impossible to live here otherwise. And his hand shoots accurately. In a word, you must know this, I'll kill!”

I looked at him reproachfully, and he, glancing at my eyes, burst out laughing loudly, and his tone, as he ended up, was quite a different one:

“And anyway, I've been waiting for you a long time. For some reason or other it seemed to me that you wouldn't leave things alone, and if you took to clearing them up, you wouldn't pass me by. So well then, why not help each other?”

We parted at the edge of the forest near the Giant's Gap, arranging to meet in the future. I went home straight through the park.

When I returned to Marsh Firs, twilight had already descended on the park, the woman and her child were sleeping in one of the rooms on the first floor, but the mistress was not in the house. I waited about an hour, and when it was quite dark, I could not bear it any longer and went out in search of her. I hadn't walked far along the dark lane when I saw a white figure moving towards me in fright.

“Miss Nadzieja!”

“Oh! Oh, it's you? Thank God! I was so worried! You came straight here?”

Bashfully she looked down at the ground. When we came up to the castle, I said to her quietly:

“Miss Nadzieja, never leave this house in the evening. Promise me that.”

She promised, but only reluctantly.