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Read books online » Fiction » The Cossacks by graf Tolstoy Leo (leveled readers .txt) 📖

Book online «The Cossacks by graf Tolstoy Leo (leveled readers .txt) 📖». Author graf Tolstoy Leo



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time! I thought some of your soldiers,

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.

Chapter XVI

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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