Short Fiction Aleksandr Kuprin (free novel reading sites TXT) 📖

again. “Old folks say there were once.⁠ ⁠… May be it’s not true.⁠ ⁠…”

I was disappointed. Yarmola’s characteristic trait was a stubborn silence, and I had already given up hope of getting anything more out of him on this interesting subject. But to my surprise he suddenly began to talk with a lazy indifference as though he was addressing the roaring stove instead of me.

“There was a witch here, five years back.⁠ ⁠… But the boys drove her out of the village.”

“Where did they drive her to?”

“Where to? Into the forest, of course⁠ ⁠… where else? And they pulled her cottage down as well, so that there shouldn’t be a splinter of the cursed den left.⁠ ⁠… And they took her to the cross roads.⁠ ⁠…”

“Why did they treat her like that?”

“She did a great deal of harm. She quarrelled with everybody, poured poison beneath the cottages, tied knots in the corn.⁠ ⁠… Once she asked a village woman for fifteen kopeks. ‘I haven’t got a sixpence,’ says she. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’ll teach you not to give me a sixpence.’ And what do you think, sir? That very day the woman’s child began to be ill. It grew worse and worse and then died. Then it was that the boys drove her out⁠—curse her for a witch.”

“Well⁠ ⁠… where’s the witch now?” I was still curious.

“The witch?” Yarmola slowly repeated the question, as his habit was. “How should I know?”

“Didn’t she leave any relatives in the village?”

“No, not one. She didn’t come from our village; she came from the Big Russians, or the gipsies. I was still a tiny boy when she came to our village. She had a little girl with her, a daughter or grandchild.⁠ ⁠… They were both driven out.”

“Doesn’t anyone go to her now⁠—to get their fortunes told or to get medicine?”

“The womenfolk do,” Yarmola said scornfully.

“Ah, so it’s known where she lives?”

“I don’t know.⁠ ⁠… Folks say she lives somewhere near the Devil’s Corner.⁠ ⁠… You know the place⁠—the marsh behind the Trine road. She lives in that same marsh. May her mother burn in hell!”

“A witch living ten versts from my house⁠ ⁠… a real live Polyessie witch!” The idea instantly intrigued and excited me.

“Look here, Yarmola,” I said to the forester. “How could I get to know the witch?”

“Foo!” Yarmola spat in indignation. “That’s a nice thing!”

“Nice or nasty, I’m going to her all the same. As soon as it gets a little warmer, I’ll go off at once. You’ll come with me, of course?”

Yarmola was so struck by my last words that he jumped right off the floor.

“Me?” he cried indignantly. “Not for a million! Come what may, I’m not going with you.”

“Nonsense; of course, you’ll come.”

“No, sir, I will not⁠ ⁠… not for anything.⁠ ⁠… Me?” he cried again, seized with a new exasperation, “go to a witch’s den? God forbid! And I advise you not to either, sir.”

“As you please.⁠ ⁠… I’ll go all the same.⁠ ⁠… I’m very curious to see her.”

“There’s nothing curious there,” grunted Yarmola, angrily slamming the door of the stove.

An hour later, when he had taken the samovar off the table and drunk his tea in the dark passage and was preparing to go home, I asked him:

“What’s the witch’s name?”

“Manuilikha,” replied Yarmola with sullen rudeness.

Though he had never expressed his feelings, he seemed to have grown greatly attached to me. His affection came from our mutual passion for hunting, from my simple behaviour, the help I occasionally gave his perpetually hungry family, and above all, because I was the only person in the world who did not scold him for his drunkenness⁠—a thing intolerable to Yarmola. That was why my determination to make the acquaintance of the witch put him into such an ugly temper, which he relieved only by sniffing more vigorously, and finally by going off to the back-staircase and kicking his dog Riabchik with all his might. Riabchik jumped aside and began to howl desperately, but immediately ran after Yarmola, still whining.

III

About three days after the weather grew warmer. Very early one morning Yarmola came into my room and said carelessly:

“We shall have to clean the guns, sir.”

“Why?” I asked, stretching myself under the blankets.

“The hares have been busy in the night. There are any amount of tracks. Shall we go after them?”

I saw that Yarmola was waiting impatiently to go to the forest, but he hid his hunter’s passion beneath an assumed indifference. In fact, his single-barrelled gun was in the passage already. From that gun not a single woodcock had ever escaped, for all that it was adorned with a few tin patches, and spliced over the places where rust and powder gas had corroded the iron.

No sooner had we entered the forest than we came on a hare’s track. The hare broke out into the road, ran about fifty yards along it, and then made a huge leap into the fir plantation.

“Now, we’ll get him in a moment,” Yarmola said. “Since he’s shown himself, he’ll die here. You go, sir.⁠ ⁠…” He pondered, considering by certain signs known only to himself where he should post me. “You go to the old inn. And I’ll get round him from Zanilin. As soon as the dog starts him I’ll give you a shout.”

He disappeared instantly, as it were, plunging into a thick jungle of brushwood. I listened. Not a sound betrayed his poacher movements; not a twig snapped under his feet, in their bast shoes. Without hurrying myself I came to the inn, a ruined and deserted hut, and I stopped on the edge of a young pine forest beneath a tall fir with a straight bare trunk. It was quiet as it can be quiet only in a forest on a windless winter day. The branches were bent with the splendid lumps of snow which clung to them, and made them look wonderful, festive, and cold. Now and then a thin little twig broke off from the top, and with extreme clearness one could hear it as it fell with a