King Stakh's Wild Hunt (3 page)

For some reason, perhaps unrelated, I recalled with pleasure the marvellous English six-shooter, now sitting tight 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 noble castles of the old time. 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 that was blackened by the years and the windows were sitting 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 lancet door, divided by wooden columns into three parts. Flowers, leaves and fruit carved on the columns were cracked with time. Behind the door in the depth of the hall was the entrance door, a massive piece of oak, bound by darkened bronze nails with square heads. And above the door I saw an enormous dark window, looking into the night and darkness. The window was embraced in a ship of forged iron, a masterpiece of workmanship.

I walked along the hall in amazement of this kind of splendour, and how all had been neglected. 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 woodlice. 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 space around it 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 wallpaper and on this wallpaper in all their splendour hung portraits in heavy frames. In addition, a small table and two armchairs stood near the fireplace.

The old woman touched me by the sleeve:

“Now I’ll lead you to your room. It’s not far from here along the hall. 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 with a broad smile on her face and in a confidential tone delivered the following:

“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. 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.”

“What family is this?” I asked imprudently. “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 Yanovskys. You understand, the Yanovskys! You must have heard of them!”

I answered that I had, of course, heard of them. This statement of mine must have 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”. Then she 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 her demeanour changed accordingly.

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

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

Here another, this one already in a long silver-woven tunic with a girdle, a wide beaver collar falling across his shoulders.
A
sly
weasel
you
were,
young
man!
Next to him a mighty man with rocks for shoulders and sincere eyes, in a red cloak, at his head a shield with the family coat-of-arms, the top half smeared with black paint. Farther on the wall 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 was 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 paused at one of the portraits, fascinated by a strangely wonderful, incomprehensible smile, a smile that our old masters painted so inimitably. The woman looked at me mysteriously and compassionately.

“You there, you little man,” her look seemed to say. “What have you seen in life? Oh! If only you could have seen the torches ablaze on the walls of this hall during our parties, if only 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 in firing from the tower at the attackers, 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 under the axe.”

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.

I understood also that uncountable decades had gone 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 time whistling past my back, and the hair on my head stood on end. I also felt a kind of cold that reigned in this house, the cold that the fireplaces could not drive out even if they burned day and night.

Enormous, gloomy halls with their dusty air, with their creaking floors, their dark corners, their eternal draughts, the smell of mice, and their cold. Such a cold that made your heart freeze, a cold of which 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, once singing praises to the dilapidated castles of the gentry, were left here overnight, for just one night, 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 and 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, subtle smile and an unpleasant causticity. The women were different too. Their lips too full of lust, their looks mannered and cold. And very obvious were their hands, now much weaker hands. Beneath their white skin, both in the men and the women, one could visibly distinguish blue veins. 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. 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 all of a sudden that someone was already standing behind me, piercing my back. Under the influence of this look, I turned around. A woman stood behind me, staring at me with an inquiry in her eyes, 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 the two had in common. The one in the portrait – and I made sure to confirm that she was in her place – was tall, well built, with a great reserve of vitality, quite cheerful, strong and beautiful. At the same time the one that stood in front of me was simply a puny creature.

Still there was a resemblance, a kind of a prompt that can force us to recognize two men in a crowd as being brothers, although they may not have too many similarities, one a dark haired and the other a blond.

Yet, there was more. The women’s hair was exactly alike, their noses of the same form, their mouths with the same kind of slit and their identically white even teeth. Add to this 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 yet everything somehow different. Short of stature, thin as a twig, thighs almost underdeveloped 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 appeared, like a small stem of wormwood.

Very thin skin, a very fragile neck, even her hair styled in a near inexpressive fashion. This seemed so very strange because her hair was actually of the colour of gold, voluminous and surprisingly beautiful. Whatever for was that absurd knot at the back of her head, escaped me.

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 artist 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 on both sides of her nose, pale greyish complexion, black eyes with a fixed and incomprehensible expression.

“The poor thing is devilish in her ugliness,” I thought, sympathizing with her, and I lowered my gaze.

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 behaviour.

I was unpleasantly surprised by this frankness of hers, to put it mildly. What was it, a subtle calculation or naivety? But no matter my effort to analyze this distorted face, I couldn’t see in it any ulterior motive.

No doubt her face was artless, like that of a child. But her voice was most convincing. Slow, lazy, indifferent, at the same time timid and broken like the voice of a forest bird.

“To your knowledge, as a matter of fact, I saw you before!”

“Where?” I was frankly amazed.

“Not that I know for sure. 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 a long, long time ago..?”

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

I must emphasize I had not known this fact of medical science at the time. And even though a thought that this girl could tell a lie never even for a moment entered my head, sincerity and indifference that I felt in her words alerted me.

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

“My name is Andrey Belaretsky, Miss Yanovsky. 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 Yanovsky, old local legends.”

I got terribly frightened. It was no laughing matter for 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 her senses. 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; I hadn’t had the faintest idea why I should not have spoken about my profession. A vague thought flashed through my mind that something was connected with the old rule to never speak of woe in the house whose master has been hanged.