The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (29 page)

“I didn’t become acquainted, noble sir, by God, I didn’t.
I’ve never had any dealings with young ladies in all my born days.
Deuce take them, not to say something improper.”

“Then why was it none other than you, precisely, that she appointed to read?”

The philosopher shrugged his shoulders:

“God knows how to explain that.
It’s a known fact that masters sometimes want something that even the most literate man can’t figure out.
And as the saying goes: ‘Hop faster, mind the master!’ ”

“And you wouldn’t happen to be lying, mister philosopher?”

“May lightning strike me right here if I’m lying.”

“If you’d lived only one little minute longer,” the chief said sadly, “I’d surely have learned everything.
‘Don’t let anybody read over me, daddy, but send to the Kiev seminary at once and bring the student Khoma Brut.
Let him pray three nights for my sinful soul.
He knows …’ But what he knows, I didn’t hear.
She, dear soul, could only say that, and then she died.
Surely, good man, you
must be known for your holy life and God-pleasing deeds, and maybe she heard about you.”

“Who, me?” the student said, stepping back in amazement.
“Me, a holy life?” he said, looking the chief straight in the eye.
“God help you, sir!
Indecent though it is to say, I went calling on the baker’s wife on Holy Thursday itself.”

“Well … surely you were appointed for some reason.
You’ll have to start the business this same day.”

“To that, your honor, I’d reply … of course, anybody versed in Holy Scripture could commensurably … only here it would call for a deacon, or at least a subdeacon.
They’re smart folk and know how it’s done, while I … And I haven’t got the voice for it, and myself I’m—devil knows what.
Nothing to look at.”

“That’s all very well, only I’ll do everything my little dove told me to do, I won’t leave anything out.
And once you’ve prayed over her properly for three nights, starting today, I’ll reward you.
Otherwise—I wouldn’t advise even the devil himself to make me angry.”

The chief uttered these last words with such force that the philosopher fully understood their meaning.

“Follow me!” said the chief.

They stepped out to the front hall.
The chief opened the door to another room opposite the first.
The philosopher stopped in the hall for a moment to blow his nose and then with some unaccountable fear crossed the threshold.
The whole floor was covered with red cotton cloth.
In the corner, under the icons, on a high table, lay the body of the dead girl, on a cover of blue velvet adorned with gold fringe and tassels.
Tall wax candles twined with guelder rose stood at her head and feet, shedding their dim light, lost in the brightness of day.
The face of the dead girl was screened from him by the disconsolate father, who sat before her, his back to the door.
The philosopher was struck by the words he heard:

“I’m not sorry, my darling daughter, that you, to my sorrow and grief, have left the earth in the flower of your youth, without living out your allotted term.
I’m sorry, my little dove, that I do not know who it was, what wicked enemy of mine, that caused your death.
And if I knew of anyone who might only think of insulting you or just of saying something unpleasant about you, I swear to
God he would never see his children again, if he happened to be as old as I am, or his father and mother, if he was still a young man; and his body would be thrown to the birds and beasts of the steppe.
But woe is me, my wild marigold, my little quail, my bright star, that I must live out the rest of my life with no delight, wiping the tears with my coattails as they flow from my aged eyes, while my enemy rejoices and laughs secretly at the feeble old man …”

He stopped, and the reason for it was the rending grief that resolved itself in a whole flood of tears.

The philosopher was moved by such inconsolable sorrow.
He coughed and gave a muffled grunt, wishing thereby to clear his voice a little.

The chief turned and pointed to the place at the dead girl’s head, before a small lectern on which some books lay.

“I can do the three nights’ work somehow,” thought the philosopher, “and the master will fill both my pockets with gold coins for it.”

He approached and, clearing his throat once more, began to read, paying no attention to anything around him and not daring to look into the dead girl’s face.
A deep silence settled in.
He noticed that the chief had left.
Slowly he turned his head to look at the dead girl, and …

A shudder ran through his veins: before him lay a beauty such as there had never been on earth.
It seemed that facial features had never before been assembled into such sharp yet harmonious beauty.
She lay as if alive.
Her brow, beautiful, tender, like snow, like silver, seemed thoughtful; her eyebrows—night amid a sunny day, thin, regular—rose proudly over her closed eyes, and her eyelashes, falling pointy on her cheeks, burned with the heat of hidden desires; her mouth—rubies about to smile … Yet in them, in these same features, he saw something terribly piercing.
He felt his soul begin to ache somehow painfully, as if, in the whirl of merriment and giddiness of a crowd, someone suddenly struck up a song about oppressed people.
The rubies of her mouth seemed to make the blood scald his heart.
Suddenly something terribly familiar showed in her face.

“The witch!” he cried out in a voice not his own, looked away, turned pale, and began reading his prayers.

It was the very witch he had killed.

When the sun began to set, the dead girl was taken to the church.
The philosopher supported the black-draped coffin with one shoulder, and on that shoulder he felt something cold as ice.
The chief himself walked in front, bearing the right side of the dead girl’s cramped house.
The blackened wooden church, adorned with green moss and topped by three conical cupolas, stood desolate almost at the edge of the village.
One could see it was long since any service had been celebrated in it.
Candles burned before almost every icon.
The coffin was placed in the middle, right in front of the altar.
The old chief kissed the dead girl once more, made a prostration, and walked out together with the bearers, ordering the philosopher to be given a good meal and taken to the church after supper.
Going into the kitchen, all those who had carried the coffin started touching the stove, something people in Little Russia have the custom of doing after they see a dead body.

The hunger that the philosopher began to feel just then made him forget all about the deceased for a few moments.
Soon all the household servants began gradually to gather in the kitchen.
The kitchen of the chief’s house was something like a club, to which everything that inhabited the yard flowed, including the dogs, who came right up to the door wagging their tails for bones and scraps.
Wherever anyone might be sent, on whatever errand, he would always stop at the kitchen first, to rest on a bench for a moment and smoke a pipe.
The bachelors who lived in the house and paraded around in Cossack blouses all lay about here for almost the whole day, on the benches, under the benches, on the stove—in short, wherever they could find a comfortable place to lie.
Besides, everybody was forever forgetting something in the kitchen—a hat, a knout for stray dogs, or the like.
But the most numerous gathering was at suppertime, when the horseherd came after rounding up all his horses, and the cowherd after bringing the cows home for milking, and all the rest who were not to be seen in the course of the day.
During supper, loquacity would come to the most taciturn
tongues.
Here everything was usually talked about: someone who was having new trousers made for himself … and what was inside the earth … and someone who had seen a wolf … There were numerous
bonmotists
⁷
here, of whom there is no lack among the people of Little Russia.

The philosopher sat down with the others in a wide circle under the open sky in front of the kitchen porch.
Soon a woman in a red cap stuck herself out the door holding a hot pot of dumplings with both hands, and placed it in the midst of those ready to eat.
Each of them took a wooden spoon from his pocket, or some, lacking a spoon, a splinter of wood.
As soon as the mouths began to move a bit more slowly and the wolfish appetite of the whole gathering subsided a little, many began to talk.
The talk naturally had to turn to the dead girl.

“Is it true,” said one young shepherd, who had stuck so many buttons and brass badges on his leather pipe strap that he looked like a mercer’s shop, “is it true that the young miss, not to speak ill of her, kept company with the unclean one?”

“Who?
The young miss?” said Dorosh, already known to our philosopher.
“But she was a downright witch!
I’ll swear she was a witch!”

“Enough, enough, Dorosh!” said another, the one who had shown such readiness to give comfort during the trip.
“God help them, it’s none of our business.
No point in talking about it.”

But Dorosh was not at all disposed to be silent.
He had only just gone to the cellar with the steward on some necessary business and, after bending a couple of times to two or three barrels, had come out extremely cheerful and talking nonstop.

“What do you want?
For me to keep quiet?” he said.
“But she rode on me, on me myself!
By God, she did!”

“And what, uncle,” said the young shepherd with the buttons, “are there some tokens you can tell a witch by?”

“No,” answered Dorosh.
“There’s no way to tell.
Read through all the psalters, you still won’t be able to tell.”

“You can, too, Dorosh.
Don’t say that,” said the same comforter.
“Not for nothing did God give everybody a special trait.
People who’ve got some learning say witches have little tails.”

“When a woman’s old, she’s a witch,” the gray-haired Cossack said coolly.

“Ah, you’re a good lot, too!” picked up the woman, who was just then pouring fresh dumplings into the emptied pot.
“Real fat boars!”

The old Cossack, whose name was Yavtukh but who was nicknamed Kovtun, showed a smile of pleasure on his lips, seeing that his words had struck the old woman to the quick; and the cowherd let out such dense laughter as if two bulls, facing each other, had bellowed at once.

The beginning conversation awakened an irrepressible desire and curiosity in the philosopher to learn more in detail about the chief’s deceased daughter.
And therefore, wishing to bring him back to the former matter, he addressed his neighbor with these words:

“I wanted to ask, why is it that all the folk sitting here over supper consider the young miss a witch?
What, did she cause some evil or put a hex on somebody or other?”

“There were all kinds of things,” replied one of the seated men, with a smooth face extremely like a shovel.

“And who doesn’t remember the huntsman Mikita, or that …”

“And what about the huntsman Mikita?” said the philosopher.

“Wait!
I’ll tell about the huntsman Mikita,” said Dorosh.

“I’ll tell about Mikita,” said the herdsman, “because he was my chum.”

“I’ll tell about Mikita,” said Spirid.

“Let him!
Let Spirid tell it!” shouted the crowd.

Spirid began:

“You, mister philosopher Khoma, didn’t know Mikita.
Ah, what a rare man he was!
He knew every dog like his own father, so he did.
The present huntsman Mikola, who’s sitting third down from me, can’t hold a candle to him.
He also knows his business, but next to Mikita he’s trash, slops.”

“You’re telling it good, really good!” said Dorosh, nodding approvingly.

Spirid went on:

“He’d spot a rabbit quicker than you could take a pinch of snuff.
He’d whistle: ‘Here, Robber!
Here, Racer!’ and be off at full speed on his horse, and there’d be no telling whether he was ahead of the dog or the dog ahead of him.
He’d toss off a pint of rotgut as if it had never been there.
A fine huntsman he was!
Only in more recent days he started staring at the young miss all the time.
Either he was really smitten, or she’d put a spell on him, only it was the end of the man, he went all soft, turned into devil knows what—pah!
it’s even indecent to say it.”

“Good,” said Dorosh.

“The young miss would no sooner glance at him than he’d drop the bridle, call Robber Grouchy, stumble all over, and do God knows what.
Once the young miss came to the stable where he was grooming a horse.
‘Mikitka,’ she says, ‘let me lay my little leg on you.’ And he, the tomfool, gets all happy.
‘Not only your little leg,’ he says, ‘you can sit right on me.’ The young miss lifted up her leg, and when he saw her bare leg, white and plump, the charm, he says, just stunned him.
He bent his back, the tomfool, grabbed her bare legs with both hands, and went galloping like a horse all over the fields.
And he couldn’t tell anything about where they rode, only he came back barely alive, and after that he got all wasted, like a chip of wood.
And once, when they came to the stable, instead of him there was just a heap of ashes and an empty bucket lying there: he burned up, burned up of his own self.
And what a huntsman he was, you won’t find another like him in the whole world.”

When Spirid finished his story, talk came from all sides about the merits of the former huntsman.

“And have you heard about Shepchikha?” said Dorosh, addressing Khoma.

“No.”

“Oh-ho!
Then it’s clear they don’t teach you much sense there in your seminary.
Well, listen!
In our settlement there’s a Cossack named Sheptun.
A good Cossack!
He likes to steal or tell a lie sometimes without any need, but … a good Cossack!
His place isn’t far from here.
At this same time as we’re now having supper, Sheptun and his wife finished eating and went to bed, and since the weather was fine, Shepchikha slept outside and Sheptun inside
on a bench; or, no, it was Shepchikha inside on a bench and Sheptun outside …”

“And not on a bench, Shepchikha lay on the floor,” the woman picked up, standing in the doorway, her cheek propped on her hand.