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And quiet flows the Don; a novel

Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 1905-

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world war, 1914-1918, soviet union -- history revolution, 1917-1921 fiction

LIBRARY OF SOVIET LITERATURE

KEY TO PRS?!C1PAL CHARACTERS

ASTAKHOV. STEPAN. A Cossack.

ASTAKHOVA, AKSIiNYA. Wife of Stepan.

BUNCHUK, ILYA. A Cossack revolutionary.

FOMIN, YAKOV YEFIMOVICH. A Cossack command- er, f.t first a Red, tlien leader of a White bandit group.

KALMYKOV, White Guard officer.

KAPARlN. Captain. Red officer. Afterwards Fomin's chief of staff.

KOPYLOV, MIKHAIL GRIGORYEVICH. Captain. Chief of staff to Grigory Melekhov.

KORSHUNOV, GRISHAKA. An old Cossack.

KORSHUNOV, MIRON GRIGORYEVICH, His son, father of Natalya Melekhova.

KORSHUNOVA, iVlARYA LUKINICHNA. Wife of Miron.

KORSHUNOV, DIMITRY MIRONOVICH (Mitka). Son of Miron and Marya Korshunov.

KORSHUNOVA, AGRIPPINA MIRONOVNA. Daugh- ter of Miron and Marya.

KOSHEVOI, MIKHAIL (Misha). A Red Cossack.

KOTLYAROV, IVAN ALEXEYEVICH. A Red Cossack;

KRIVOSHLYKOV. A Cossack revolutionary.

KUDINOV. Commander of Don Cossack insurgent forces.

LISTNITSKY, NIKOLAI ALEXEYEVICH. A land- owner,

LISTNITSKY, YEVGENY NIKOLAYEVICH. Son of Nikolai Listnitsky, a Wliite officer.

MELEKHOV, PANTELEI PROKOFYEVICH. An elderly Cossack.

MELEKHOVA, ILYINICHNA. Wife of Pantelei.

MELEKHOV, PYOTR PANTELEYEVICH. Panlelei'S elder son, a Cossack officer.

MELEKHOV, GRIGORY PANTELEYEVICH (Grisha). Pantelei's younger son, a Cossack officer, com- mander of Cossack insurgent division.

MELEKHOVA, YEVDOKIYA PANTELEYEVNA (Du- nya). Pantelei's daughter.

MELEKHOVA, DARYA. Wife of Pyotr Melekhov.

MELEKHOVA, NATALYA, Wife of Grigory Melekhov;

MELEKHOVA, POLYA (Polyushka). Daughter of Gri- gory and Natalya.

MELEKHOV, MISHATKA. Son of Grigory and Na- talya.

MOKHOV, SERGEI PLATONOVICH. Shopkeeper and mill-owner in the village of Tatarsky.

MOKHOVA, YELIZAVETA SERGEYEVNA (Liza). Ser- gei's daughter.

PODTYOLKOV. A Cossack revolutionary. Commander of Red Cossack forces.

POGUDKO, ANNA. Machine-gunner in Bunchuk's detachment

SHAMIL, MARTIN, ALEXEI and PROKHOR. Cos- sacks, brothers.

STOCKMAN. OSIP DAVYDOVICH. A Communist organizer.

TIMOFEI, "Knave." Scalesman at Mokhov's mill.

TOKIN, CHRISTONYA. A Cossack.

ZYKOV, PROKHOR. A Cossack, orderly to Grigory Melekhov,

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MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON

A NOVEL IN FOUR BOOKS

BOOK ONE

FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE MOSCOW

A TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN BY STEPHEN GARRY

REVISED AND COMPLETED BY ROBERT DAGLISH

v.l

BOOK ONE

Not by the plough is our glorious earth furrowed. . , .

Our earth is turrowed by horses' hoots.

And sown is our earth with the heads of Cossacks.

Fair is our quiet Don with young widows.

Our father, the quiet Don, blossoms with orphans.

And the waves of the quiet Don are filled

with fathers' and mothers' tears.

Oh thou, our father, the quiet Don!

Oh why dost thou, our quiet Don, so sludgy flow?

How should I, the quiet Don, but sludgy Row!

From my depths the cold springs beat.

Amid me, the quiet Don, the lohite fish leap.

Old Cossack Songs.

PART ONE

he Melekhov farm was at the very end of the village. The gate of the cattle-yard opened northward towards the Don, A steep, fifty-foot slope between chalky, moss- grown banks, and there was the shore. A pearly drift of mussel-shells, a grey, broken edging of wave-kissed shingle, and then-the steel-blue, rippling surface of the Don, seething in the wind. To the east, beyond the willow-wattle fences of threshing-floors-the Hetman's high- way, grizzled wormwood scrub, the hardy greyish-brown, hoof-trodden plantain, a cross standing at the fork of the road, and then the steppe, enveloped in a shifting haze. To the south, a chalky ridge of hills. To the west, the street, crossing the square and nmning towards the leas.

The Cossack Prokofy Melekhov returned to the village during the last war but one with

Turkey, He brought back a wife-a little woman wrapped from head to foot in a shawl. She kept her face covered, and rarely revealed her wild, yearning eyes. The silken shawl bore the scent of strange, aromatic perfumes; its rainbow-hued patterns aroused the envy of the Cossack wom- en. The captive Turkish woman kept aloof from Prokofy's relations, and before long old Melekhov gave his son his portion. All his life the old man refused to set foot inside his son's house; he never got over the disgrace.

Prokofy speedily made shift for himself; car- penters built him a house, he himself fenced in the cattle-yard, and in the early autumn he took his bowed foreign wife to her new home. He walked with her through the village, behind the cart laden with their worldly goods. Every- body, from the oldest to the youngest, rushed into the street. The men laughed discreetly into their beards, the women passed vociferous re- marks to one another, a swarm of unwashed Cossack children shouted catcalls after Prokofy. But, with overcoat unbuttoned, he walked slowly along, as though following a freshly-ploughed furrow, squeezing his wife's fragile wrist in his own enormous, black palm, and holding his head with its straw-white mat of curls high in defiance. Only the wens below his cheek-bones

swelled and quivered, and the sweat stood out between his stony brows.

Thenceforth he was rarely seen in the village, and never even attended the Cossack gather- ings. He lived a secluded life in his solitary house by the Don. Strange stories were told of him in the village. The boys who pastured the calves beyond the meadow-road declared that of an evening, as the light was dying, they had seen Prokofy carrying his wife in his arms right as far as the Tatar burial mound. He would set her down, with her back to an an- cient, weather-beaten, porous rock, on the crest of the mound, sit down at her side, and they would gaze fixedly across the steppe. They would gaze until the sunset had faded, and then Prokofy would wrap his wife in his sheep- skin and carry her back home. The village was lost in conjecture, seeking an explanation for such astonishing behaviour. The women gos- siped so much that they had not even time to search each other's heads for lice. Rumour was rife about Prokofy's wife also; some declared that she was of entrancing beauty; others main- tained the contrary. The matter was settled when one of the most ^venturesome of the women, the soldier's wife Mavra, ran along to Prokofy's house on the pretext of getting some leaven; Prokofy went down into the cellar for the

leaven, and Mavra had time to discover thai Prokofy's Turkish conquest was a perfect fright.

A few minutes later Mavra, her face flushed and her kerchief awry, was entertaining a crowd of women in a by-lane:

"And what could he have seen in her, my dears? If she'd only been a woman now, but a creature like her! Our girls are far better covered! Why, you could pull her apart like a wasp. And those great big black eyes, she flashes them like Satan, God forgive me. She must be near her time, God's truth."

"Near her time?" the women marvelled.

"I wasn't bom yesterday! I've reared three myself."

"But what's her face like?"

"Her face? Yellow. No light in her eyes- doesn't find life in a strange land to her fancy, I should say. And what's more, girls, she wears . , . Prokofy's trousers!"

"No!" the women drew in their breath to- gether.

"I saw them myself; she wears trousers, only without stripes. It must be his everyday trou- sers she has. She wears a long shift, and under- neath you can see the trousers stuffed into socks. When I saw them my blood ran cold."

The whisper went round the village that Pro- kofy's wife was a witch. Astakhov's daughter-

in^aw (the Astakhovs were Prokofy's nearest neighbours) swore that on the second day of Trinity, before dawn, she had seen Prokofy's wife, barefoot, her hair uncovered, milking the Astakhovs' cow. Since then its udder had with- ered to the size of a child's fist, the cow had lost its milk and died soon after.

That year there was an unusual dying-off of cattle. By the shallows of the Don fresh car- casses of cows and young bulls appeared on the sandy shore every day. Then the horses v/ere affected. The droves grazing on the village pas- ture-lands melted away. And through the lanes and streets of the village crept an evil rumour.

The Cossacks held a meeting and went to Pro- kofy. He came out on tlie steps of his house and bowed.

"What can I do for you, worthy elders?"

Dumbly silent, the crowd drew nearer to the steps. One drunken old man was the first to cry:

"Drag your witch out here! We're going to try her. . . ."

Prokofy flung himself back into the house, but they caught him in the passage. A burly Cossack, nicknamed Lushnya, knocked his head against the wall and told him:

"Don't make a row, there's no need for you to shout. We shan't touch you, but we're going to trample your wife into the ground. Better to de-

stroy her than have all the village die for want of cattle. But don't you make a row, or I'll smash the wall in with your head!"

"Drag the bitch out into the yard!" came a roar from the steps. A regimental comrade of Prokofy's wound the Turkish woman's hair around one hand, clamped his other hand over her screaming mouth, dragged her at a run across the porch and flung her under the feet of the crowd. A thin shriek rose above the howl of voices. Prokofy flung off half a dozen Cossacks, burst into the house, and snatched a sabre from the wall. Jostling against one another, the Cos- sacks rushed out of the house. Swinging the gleaming, whistling sabre around his head, Prokofy ran down the steps. The crowd drew back and scattered over the yard.

Lushnya was heavy on his feet, and by the threshing-floor Prokofy caught up with hiin; with a diagonal sweep down across the left shoulder from behind, he clave the Cossack's body to the belt. The crowd, who had been tear- ing stakes out of the fence, fell back, across the threshing-floor into the steppe.

Half an hour later the Cossacks ventured to approach Prokofy's farm again. Two of them stepped cautiously into the passaae, O'l the kitchen threshold, in a pool of bloci, her head flung back awkwardly, lay Prokofy . wif^; her

lips were writhing tormentedly, her gnawed tongue protruded. Prokofy, with shaking head and glassy stare, was wrapping a squealing little ball-the prematurely-born infant-in a sheepskin.

Prokofy's wife died the same evening. His old mother had compassion on the child and took charge of it. They plastered it with bran-mash, fed it with mare's milk, and, after a month, as- sured that the swarthy, Turkish-looking boy would survive, they carried him to church and christened him. They named him Pantelei after his grandfather. Prokofy came back from penal servitude twelve years later. With his clipped, ruddy beard streaked with grey and his Russian clothing, he did not look like a Cossack. He took his son and returned to his farm.

Pantelei grew up swarthy, and ungovernable. In face and figure he was like his mother. Pro- kofy married him to the daughter of a Cossack neighbour.

From then on Turkish blood began to mingle with that of the Cossack, And that was how the hook-nosed, savagely handsome Cossack family of Melekhovs, nicknamed "Turks," came into the village.

When his father died Pantelei took over the farm; he had the house rethatched, added an acre of common land to the farmyard, built new

2—1933 17

sheds, and a barn with a sheet-iron roof. He or- dered the tinsmith to cut a couple of weather- cocks out of the scrap iron, and when these were set up on the roof of the barn they bright- ened the Melekhov farmyard with their care- free air, giving it a self-satisfied and prosperous appearance.

Under the weight of the passing years Pante- lei Prokofyevich grew gnarled and craggy; he broadened and acquired a stoop, but still looked a well-built old man. He was dry of bone, and lame (in his youth he had broken his leg while hurdling at an Imperial Review of troops), he wore a silver half-moon ear-ring in his left ear, and his beard and hair retained their vivid ra- ven hue until old age. When angry, he complete- ly lost control of himself and undoubtedly this had prematurely aged his buxom wife, whose face, once beautiful, was now a perfect spider- web of furrows.

Pyotr, his elder, married son, took after his mother: stocky and snub-nosed, a luxuriant shock of corn-coloured hair, hazel eyes. But the younger, Grigory, was like his father: half a head taller than Pyotr, some six years younger, the same pendulous hawk nose as his father's, the whites of his burning eyes bluish in their slightly oblique slits; brown, ruddy skin drawn tight over angular cheek-bones. Grigory stooped

slightly, just like his father; even in his smile there was a similar, rather savage quality.

Dunya-her father's favourite-a lanky large- eyed lass, and Pyotr's wife, Darya, with her small child, completed the Melekhov household.

Here and there stars still hovered in the ashen, early morning sky. The wind blew from under a bank of cloud. A mist rolled high over the Don, piling against the slope of a chalky hill, and creeping into the gullies like a grey, headless serpent. The left bank of the river, the sands, the wooded backwaters, the reedy marshes, the dewy trees, flamed in the cold, ecstatic light of dawn. Below the horizon the sun smouldered, and rose not.

In the Melekhov house Pantelei Prokofyevich was the first to awake. Buttoning the collar of his embroidered shirt, he walked out on to the steps. The grassy yaid was spread with a dewy silver. He let the cattle out into the street. Darya ran past in her shift to milk the cows. The dew sprinkled over the calves of her bare white legs, and she left a smoking, flattened trail behind her over the grass of the yard. Pantelei Proko- fyevich stood for a moment watching the grass

2* 19

rise from the pressure of Darya's feet then lurned back into the best room.

On the sill of the wide-open window lay the dead rose petals of the cherry-trees blossoming in the front garden. Grigory lay asleep face downward, one arm flung out sideways.

"Grigory, coming fishing?"

"What?" Grigory asked in a whisper, drop- ping his legs off the bed.

"Come out and fish till sunrise."

Breathing heavily through his nose, Grigory pulled his everyday trousers down from a peg, drew them on, tucked the legs into his white woollen socks, and slowly put on his sandals, straightening out the trodden-down heel.

"But has Mother boiled the bait?" he asked hoarsely, as he followed his father into the porch.

"Yes. Go to the boat. I'll come in a minute."

The old man poured the strong-smelling, boiled rye into a jug, carefully swept up the fallen grains into his palm, and limped down to the beach. He found his son sitting hunched in the boat.

"Where shall we go?"

"To the Black Bank. We'll try around the log where we were sitting the other day."

Its stern scraping the ground, the boat broke away from the shore and settled into the water.

The current carried it off, rocking it and trying to turn it broadside on. Grigory steered with the oar, but did not row.

"Why aren't you rowing?"

"Let's get out into midstream first."

Cutting across the swift mainstream current, the boat moved towards the left bank. The crow- ing of the village cocks rang out after them across the water. Its side scraping the black, craggy bank rising high above the river, the boat slid into the pool below. Some forty feet from the bank the twisted branches of a sunken elm emerged from the water. Around it turbu- lent flecks of foam eddied and swirled.

"Get the line ready while I scatter the bait," Pantelei whispered. He thrust his hand into the steaming mouth of the jug. The rye scattered audibly over the water, like a whispered "Sh-sh." Grigory threaded swollen grains on a hook, and smiled.

"Come on, you fish! Little ones and big ones too."

The line fell in spirals into the water and taut- ened, then slackened again. Grigory set his foot on the end of the rod and fumbled cautiously for his pouch.

"We'll have no luck today. Father. The moon is on the wane."

"Bring any matches?"

"Uh-huh."

"Give me a light."

The old man began to smoke, and glanced at the sun, stranded beyond the elm.

"You can't tell when a carp will bite/' he re- plied. "Sometimes he will when the moon is waning."

"Looks as if the small fish are nipping the bait," Grigory sighed.

The water slapped noisily against the sides of the boat, and a four-foot carp, gleaming as though cast from ruddy copper, leaped upward with a groan, threshing the water with its broad, curving tail. Big drops of spray scattered over the boat.

"Wait now!" Pantelei wiped his wet beard with his sleeve. '

Near the sunken tree, among the branching, naked boughs, two carp leaped simultaneously; a third, smaller, writhed in the air, and flapped stubbornly close to the bank.

Grigory impatiently chewed the wet end of his cigarette. The misty sun was half up. Pan- telei scattered the rest of the bait, and, glumly pursing his lips, gazed stolidly at the motion- less end of the rod.

Grigory spat out the stub of his cigarette, watching its rapid flight angrily. Inwardly he was cursing his father for waking him so early.

Smoking on an empty stomach had made his mouth reek like burnt bristles. He was about to bend and scoop up some water in his palm, but at that moment the end of the rod jerked feebly and began to sink.

"Hook him!" the old man breathed.

Grigory started up and grabbed the rod, but it bent in an arc from his hand, and the end plunged into the water.

"Hold him!" Pantelei groaned, as he pushed the boat off from the bank.

Grigory attempted to lift the rod, but the fish was too strong and the stout line snapped with a dry crack. Grigory staggered and almost fell.

"Strong as a bull!" his father whispered, try- ing to jab a hook into some fresh bait but miss- ing it. With an excited laugh Grigory fastened a new line to the rod, and made a cast. Hardly had the lead touched the bottom when the end of the rod bent.

"That's him, the devil," Grigory grunted, with difficulty holding in the fish, which was making for midstrccim.

The line cut the water with a loud swish, rais- ing a sloping, greenish rampart behind it. Pan- telei fumbled with the bailer handle in his stumpy fingers.

"Take care he doesn't snap the line."

"Don't worry,"

A great red and yellow carp rose to the sur- face, lashed the water into foam, and dived back into the depths.

"He's pulling my arm off! No, you don't!"

"Hold him, Grisha!"

"I am holding him!"

"Don't let him get under the boat!"

Taking breath, Grigory drew the played-out carp towards the boat. The old man thrust out the bailer, but with its last strength the carp again plunged into the depths.

"Get his head up! Make him swallow some air, that'll quiet him!" Pantelei ordered.

Once more Grigory drew the exhausted fish towards the boat. It floated open-mouthed with its nose against the rough gunwale, its orange- golden fins flickering.

"He's finished!" Pantelei croaked, lifting the fish in the bailer.

They sat on for another half hour. The carp stopped leaping.

"Wind in the line. We've had our catch for today!" the old man said at last.

Grigory pushed off from the bank. As he rowed he saw from his father's face that he wanted to say something, but Pantelei sat si- lently gazing at the houses of the village scat- tered under the hill.

"Look here, Grigory . . ." he began uncertain- ly, pulling at the knot of the sack under his feet. "I've noticed that you and Aksinya Astakho- va. . . ."

Grigory flushed violently, and turned away. His shirt collar cut into his muscular, sunburnt neck, pressing out a white band in the flesh.

"You watch out, young fellow," the old man continued, now roughly and angrily, "or I'll be having another kind of talk with you. Stepan's our neighbour, and I won't have any mucking about with his woman. That kind of thing can lead to mischief, and I warn you beforehand, if I see you at it I'll flay the hide off you!"

Pantelei clenched his gnarled fist, and with narrowed eyes watched the blood ebbing from his son's face.

"It's all lies!" Grigory muttered, and gazed straight at the bluish bridge of his father's nose.

"You keep quiet."

"People like to talk-"

"Hold your tongue, you son of a bitch!"

Grigory bent to the oars. The boat leapt for- ward. The bubbling water danced away from the stern in little scrolls.

They remained silent until, as they were ap- proaching the shore, his father reminded him:

"Mind what I've said, or from now on I'll

stop your going out at night. You won't stir a step outside the yard!"

Grigory made no answer. As he beached the boat he asked:

"Shall I give the fish to the women?"

"Go and sell it," the old man said more gen- tly. "You can have the money for tobacco."

Biting his lips, Grigory followed his father. "Try it. Dad! I'm going out tonight even if you hobble my feet!" he thought, his eyes boring fiercely into the back of the old man's head.

When he got home Grigory carefully washed the sand off the fish and fixed a twig through its gills.

At the farm gate he ran into his old friend Mitka Korshunov. Mitka was strolling along, toying with the end of his silver-studded belt. His round, yellow eyes glistened impudently in their narrow slits. Mitka's pupils were long, like a cat's, making his glance swift and elusive.

"Where are you off to with the fish?"

"We caught it today. I'm going to sell it."

"To Mokhov?"

"Uh-huh."

Mitka estimated the weight of the fish with a glance.

"Fifteen pounds?"

"Fifteen and a half. We weighed it on the scales."

"Take me with you. I'll do the bargaining."

"Come on."

"And what do I get?"

"You needn't fear. We shan't quarrel over that."

Church was over, and the villagers were fill- ing the streets. The three Shamil brothers came striding down the road side by side. The eldest, one-armed Alexei, was in the middle. The tight collar of his army tunic held his sinewy neck erect, his thin, curly, pointed little beard twisted provokingly sideways, his left eye winked nervously. His carbine had exploded in his hands at the shooting range many years previously, and a piece of the flying iron had ploughed into his cheek. Now his left eye winked in season and out of season, and a blue scar ran across his cheek, burying itself in his tow-like hair. His left arm had been torn off at the el- bow, but Alexei was a past master at rolling a cigarette with one hand. He would press his pouch against his chest, tear off the right quan- tity of paper with his teeth, bend it into a trough-shape, rake up the tobacco, roll the cig- arette and almost before you realized what he was doing, he would be asking you for a light.

Although he was one-armed he was the finest fighter in the village. His fist was not particular- ly large as fists go-about the size of a calabash

-but he had once happened to get annoyed with his bullock when ploughing, and being without his whip, gave it a blow with his fist that stretched the bullock out over the furrows, blood streaming from its ears. And it hardly recovered. The other brothers, Martin and Prokhor, resembled Alexei down to the last detail. They were just as stocky and broad- shouldered, only each had two arms.

Grigory greeted the Shamils, but Mitka walked on, turning his head aside sharply. At the fisticuffs during Shrovetide, Alexei Shamil had shown no regard for Mitka's youthful teeth. With a powerful swing, he had struck him in the mouth, and Mitka had spat out two good teeth on the grey-blue ice, scarred by the tram- pling of iron-shod heels.

As he came up to them, Alexei winked five times.

"Selling your load?"

"Want to buy it?"

"How much?"

"A couple of bullocks, and a wife thrown in."

Screwing up his eyes, Alexei jerked the stump of his arm.

"You're a card! Haw-haw! A wife thrown in! Will you take the brats, too?"

"Leave yourself some for breeding, or the Shamils will die out!" Grigory grinned.

In the square the villagers were gathered around the fence of the church. The church warden was holding a goose above his head and shouting: "Going for fifty kopecks. Any more offers?"

The goose craned its neck and peered round, its beady eye squinting contemptuously.

In the middle of a ring of people a grizzled old man, his chest covered with crosses and medals, stood brandishing his arms.

"Old Grishaka is telling one of his tales about the Turkish war," Mitka said, nodding towards the ring. "Let's go and listen."

"While we're listening to him the carp will start stinking and swell."

"If it swells it'll weigh more."

In the square beyond the firecart shed rose the green roof of the Mokhov's house. Passing the outhouse, Grigory spat and held his nose. From behind a barrel, an old man emerged, but- toning up his trousers, and holding his belt in his teeth.

"Hard pressed?" asked Mitka ironically.

The old man buttoned up the last button, and took the belt out of his mouth.

"What's it got to do with you?"

"Your nose ought to be stuck in it, or your beard; so that your old woman wouldn't be able to wash it off in a week."

"I'll stick you in it," said the old man, offend- ed.

Mitka screwed up his cat's eyes in the sun's glare.

"Aren't you touchy!"

"Get out, you son of a bitch. Why are you bothering me? Do you want a taste of my belt?"

Laughing quietly Grigory approached the steps. The balustrade was richly fretted with wild vine. The steps were speckled with lazy shadows.

"See how some folk live, Mitka!"

"Even the door-handle's got gold on it!" Mitka sniffed as he opened the door leading to the verandah. "Imagine that old fellow getting in here. . . ."

"Who's there?" someone called from the other side of the door.

Grigory entered shyly. The carp's tail trailed over the painted floor-boards.

"Whom do you want?"

A girl was sitting in a wicker rocking-chair, a dish of strawberries in her hand. Grigory stared silently at the full, rosy, heart-shaped lips embracing a berry. With her head on one side the girl looked the lads up and down.

Mitka came to Grigory's rescue. He coughed.

"Want to buy some fish?"

"Fish? I'll go and ask."

She rocked the chair upright, and rising pad- ded away in her embroidered slippers. The sun shone through her white dress, and Mitka saw the dim outline of full legs and the broad, bil- lowing lace of her underskirt. He was aston- ished at the satiny whiteness of her bare calves; only on the small round heels was the skin milkily yellow.

"Look, Grisha, what a dress ! Like glass ! You can see everything through it," he said, nudging Grigory.

The girl came back through the door leading to the corridor, and sat down gently on the chair.

"Go into the kitchen!"

Grigory tiptoed into the house. When he had gone Mitka stood blinking at the white thread of the parting that divided the girl's hair into two golden half-circles. She studied him with mischievous, restless eyes.

"Are you from the village?"

"Yes."

"Whose son are you?"

"Korshunov's."

"And what's your name?"

"Mitry!"

She examined her rosy nails attentively, and with a swift movement tucked up her legs.

"Which of you caught the fish?"

"My friend Grigory."

"And do you fish, too?"

"When I feel like it."

"With hook and line?"

"Yes."

"I'd like to go fishing some time," she said, after a pause.

"All right, I'll take you if you want to."

"Really? How can we arrange it?"

"You'll have to get up very early."

"I'll get up, only you'll have to wake me."

"I can do that. But how about your father?"

"What about my father?"

Mitka laughed. "He might take me for a thief and set the dogs on me."

"Nonsense! I sleep alone in the corner room. That's the window." She pointed. "If you come for me, knock at the window and I'll get up,"

The sound of Grigory's timid voice, and the thick, oily tones of the cook came intermittently from the kitchen. Mitka was silent, fingering the tarnished silver of his belt.

"Are you married?" she asked hiding a smile.

"Why?"

"Oh, I'm just curious."

"No, I'm single."

Mitka suddenly blushed, and she, smiling coquettishly and playing with a twig from the

hot-house strawberries scattered over the floor, asked:

"And do the girls like you, Mitka?"

"Some do, some don't."

"Really, , . . And why have you got eyes like a cat?"

"A cat?" Mitka was now completely abashed.

"Yes, that's just it, they're cat's eyes."

"Must have got them from my mother. I can't help it."

"And why don't they marry you off, Mitka?"

Mitka recovered from his momentary con- fusion, and sensing the hidden sneer in her words, let a glitter appear in the yellow of his eyes.

"The cock must grow before it finds a hen."

She raised her eyebrows in astonishment, flushed, and rose from her seat. There was a sound of footsteps ascending the steps from the street. Her fleeting smile lashed Mitka like a nettle.

Shuffling softly in his capacious kid boots, the master of the house, Sergei Platonovich Mo- khov, carried his corpulent body with dignity past Mitka.

"Want me?" he asked as he passed, without turning his head.

"They've brought some fish. Papa."

Grigory appeared without his carp,

3—1933 33

Ill

The first cock had crowed when Grigory re- turned from his evening out. From the porch came the scent of sour hops, and the spicy per- fume of stitchwort.

He tiptoed into the room, undressed, carefully hung up his Sunday trousers, crossed himself and lay down. There was a golden pool of moonlight on the floor, criss-crossed by the shadow of the window-frame. In the corner the silver of the icons gleamed dully under em- broidered towels, from the shelf over the bed came the droning hum of agitated flies.

He would have fallen asleep, but in the kitchen his brother's child started to cry. The cradle creaked like an ungreased cartwheel. He heard his brother's wife Darya mutter in a sleepy voice: "Go to sleep, you little brat! You don't give me a moment's peace!" And she be- gan crooning softly to the child:

Oh, where have you been? I've been watching the horses. And luhat did you see? A horse luith a saddle All fringed with gold. . . .

As he dozed off with the steady, soothing creak in his ears, Grigory remembered: "Tomor- row Pyotr goes off to the camp. Darya will be

left with the baby. . . . We'll have to do the mow- ing without him."

He buried his head in his hot pillow, but the chant seeped persistently into his ears:

And where is your horse? Outside the gate. And where is the gate? Swept away by the flood.

He was aroused from sleep by lusty neigh- ing. By its tone he recognized Pyotr's army horse. His sleep-numbed fingers were slow in buttoning up his shirt, and he almost dropped off again under the flowing rhythm of Darya's song.

And where are the geese?

They've gone into the reeds.

And where are the reeds?

The girls have mown them.

And where are the girls?

The girls have taken husbands.

And where are the Cossacks?

They've gone to the war.

Rubbing his eyes, Grigory made his way to the stable and led Pyotr's horse out into the street. A floating cobweb tickled his face, and his drowsiness unexpectedly left him.

Slanting across the Don lay the wavy never- ridden track of the moonlight. Over the river

3* S5

hung a mist, and above it, the stars, like sprin- kled grain. The horse set its hoofs down cau- tiously. The slope to the water was hard going. From the farther side of the river came the quacking of ducks. A sheat-fish jumped with a splash in the muddy shallows by the bank, hunt- ing at random for smaller fry.

Grigory stood a long time by the river. The bank exuded a dank and musty rottenness. A tiny drop of water fell from the horse's lips. There was a light, pleasant void in Grigory' s heart, he felt good and free from thought. As he walked back, he glanced towards the east, where the blue murk was already clearing.

By the stable he ran into his mother.

"Is that you, Grisha?"

"And who do you think it is?"

"Watered the horse?"

"Yes," he answered shortly.

His mother waddled away with an apronful of dried dung fuel, her bare withered feet slap- ping on the ground.

"You might go and wake up the Astakhovs. Stepan said he would go with our Pyotr."

The morning rawness set a spring stiffly quivering in Grigory. His body tingled with prickles. He ran up the three echoing steps leading to the Astakhovs' house. The door was unlatched. Stepan was asleep on an outspread

rug in the kitchen, his wife's head resting on his arm.

In the greying dawn light Grigory saw Ak- sinya's shift rumpled above her knees, and her unashamedly parted legs white as birch bark. For a moment he stood gazing, feeling his mouth going dry and his head bursting with an iron clangour.

He shifted his eyes stealthily. In a strange, hoarse voice he called:

"Hey! Anyone here? Get up."

Aksinya gave a sob of waking.

"Oh, who's that?" She hurriedly began to fumble with her shift, drawing it over her legs. A little drop of spittle was left on her pillow; a woman's sleep is sound at dawn.

"It's me. Mother sent me to wake you up."

"We'll be up in a minute. We're sleeping on the floor because of the fleas. Stepan, get up, d'you hear?" By her voice Grigory guessed that she felt embarrassed and he hastened to leave.

Thirty Cossacks were going from the village to the May training camp. Just before seven o'clock wagons with tarpaulin covers, Cossacks on foot and on horseback, in homespun shirts and carrying their equipment, began to stream towards the square.

Pyotr was standing on the steps, hurriedly stitching a broken rein.

Pantelei stamped about round Pyotr's horse, pouring oats into the trough. Every now and then he shouted:

"Dunya, have you put the rusks in the sack yet? Have you salted the bacon?"

Dunya, rosy and blooming, flew to and fro like a swallow and answered her father's shouts with a laugh:

"You look after your own affairs. Father, and I'll pack for Brother so well that nothing will budge till he reaches Cherkassk."*

"Not finished eating yet?" Pyotr asked, nod- ding towards the horse.

"Not yet," his father replied deliberately, testing the saddle-cloth with his rough palm. One little crumb sticking to the cloth can chafe a horse's back into a sore in a single march.

"When he's done eating, water him. Father."

"Grisha will take him down to the Don,"

Grigory took the tall, rawboned Don horse with a white blaze on its forehead, led it out through the gate, and resting his left hand lightly on its withers, vaulted on to its back and went off at a swinging trot. He tried to rein the horse in at the descent to the river, but the animal stumbled, quickened its pace, and flew down the slope. Leaning back until he

* Novocherkassk.

almost lay along the animal's spine, Grigory saw a woman with pails going down the hill. He turned sharply off the path and dashed into the water, leaving a cloud of dust behind him.

Aksinya came swinging down the slope. When still some distance away she shouted to him:

"You mad devil! You almost rode me down. You wait, I'll tell your father how you ride."

"Now, neighbour, don't get angry. When you've seen your husband off to camp maybe I'll be useful on your farm."

"How the devil could you be useful to me?"

"You'll be asking me when mowing time comes," Grigory laughed.

Aksinya dexterously drew a full pail of water from the river, and pressed her skirt between her knees away from the wind.

"Is your Stepan ready yet?" Grigory asked.

"What's that to do with you?"

"What a spitfire! Can't I ask?"

"He is, what of it?"

"So you'll be left a grass-widow?"

"Yes."

The horse raised its lips from the water, and stood gazing across the Don, its fore-feet tread- ing the stream. Aksinya filled her second pail, hoisted the yoke across her shoulders, and with a swinging stride set off up the slope.

Grigory turned the horse and followed her. The wind fluttered her skirt and played with the fine, fluffy curls on her swarthy neck. Her flat, embroidered cap flamed on her heavy knot of hair, her rose-coloured shift, gathered into her skirt at the waist, clung smoothly to her steep back and compact shoulders. As she climbed the slope she bent forward, and the hollow be- tween her shoulders showed clearly beneath her shift. He saw the brownish rings under her arms, where her shift was stained with sweat. Grigory watched her ever^^ movement. He wanted to renew the talk with her.

"You'll be missing your husband, won't

you

Without halting Aksinya turned her head and smiled.

"Of course I shall. Get married yourself," she caught her breath and went on jerkily, "then you'll know whether you miss your dar- ling or not."

Grigory brought the horse level with her and looked into her eyes.

"But other wives are glad when their hus- bands go. Our Darya will grow fat without her Pyotr."

Aksinya's nostrils quivered and she breathed hard.

"A husband's not a leech, but he sucks your

blood all the same." She pushed her hair straight. "Shall we be seeing you married soon?"

"I don't know, it depends on Father. After my army service, I suppose."

"You're still young; don't get married."

"Why not?"

"It dries you up." She looked up from under her brows, and smiled cheerlessly without part- ing her lips. For the first time Grigory noticed that her lips were shamelessly greedy and rath- er swollen. Stranding the horse's mane with his fingers, he replied:

"I don't want to get married. Someone will love me without that."

"Have you noticed anyone, then?"

"What should I notice? Now you're seeing your Stepan off. . .?"

"Don't try to play about with me!"

"What will you do about it?"

"I'll tell Stepan."

"I'll show your Stepan. . . ."

"You're so cocksure, mind you don't cry first."

"Don't try to scare me, Aksinya!"

"I'm not trying to scare you. You hang around with the girls, let them hem your han- kies for you, but keep your eyes off me,"

"I'll look at you all the more now."

"Well, look then."

Aksinya gave him a conciliatory smile and left the path, trying to pass the horse. Grigory turned the animal sideways and blocked the way.

"Let me pass, Grisha." |

"I won't."

"Don't be a fool. I must see to my husband."

Grigory smilingly teased the horse, and it edged Aksinya towards the bank.

"Let me pass, you devil! There are some peo- ple over there. If they see us what will they think?" she muttered.

She swept a frightened glance around and passed by, frowning and without a backward glance.

Pyotr was saying good-bye to his family on the steps. Grigory saddled the horse. His broth- er, holding his sabre to his side, hurried down the steps and took the reins. Scenting the road, the horse fretted and chewed the bit. With one foot in the stirrup, Pyotr said to his father :

"Don't overwork the baldheads. Father. In the autumn we'll sell them. Grigory will need a horse for the army, you know. And don't sell the steppe grass; you know yourself what hay we're likely to get in the meadow this year."

"Well, God be with you. Good luck," the old man replied, crossing himself.

Pyotr swung his firm body into the saddle, and adjusted the folds of his shirt in his belt at the back. The horse moved towards the gate. The sabre swung rhythmically, its pommel glittering dully in the sun.

Darya followed with the child on her arm. Wiping her eyes with her sleeve and her nose with the corner of her apron, his mother, Ilyi- nichna, stood in the middle of the yard.

"Brother! The pasties! You've forgotten the pasties! The potato pasties!" Dunya dashed to the gate.

"What are you bawling for, you fool!" Gri- gory snapped irritably.

"He's left his pasties behind," she moaned, leaning against the gate-post, and tears ran down her burning cheeks on to her blouse.

Darya stood gazing under her hand after her husband's white shirt through the screen of dust. Old Pantelei jerked the rotting gate-post and looked at Grigory:

"Mend the gate, and put a new post in." He stood in thought for a moment, then announced as if it were news:

"Pyotr's gone."

Over the wattle fence, Grigory saw Stepan getting ready, Aksinya, dressed up in a green

woollen skirt, led out his horse. Stepan smiling- ly said something to her. Unhurriedly, posses- sively, he kissed his wife, and his arm lingered long around her shoulder. His hand, darkened by sun and toil, looked coal-black against her white blouse. He stood with his back to Gri- gory; his firm, clean-shaven neck, his broad, rather sloping shoulders, and (whenever he bent towards his wife) the twisted ends of his light- brown moustache were visible across the fence.

Aksinya laughed at something and shook her head. The big black stallion lurched slightly as Stepan swung his great weight into the saddle. Sitting as though planted in the saddle, Stepan rode his black horse at a brisk trot through the gate, and Aksinya walked at his side, hold- ing the stirrup and looking up lovingly ard hungrily, like a dog, into his eyes.

Grigory watched them to the turn of the road with a long unblinking gaze.

Towards evening a thunderstorm gathered. A mass of heavy cloud lay over the village. Lashed into fury by the wind, the Don sent foaming breakers against its banks. The sky flamed with dry lightning, occasional peals of thunder shook the earth. A kite circled with

outspread wings just below the clouds and was pursued by croaking ravens. Spreading its cool breath, the cloud passed down the Don from the west. Beyond the meadows the heavens blackened menacingly, the steppe lay in expect- ant silence. In the village there was a rattle of closing shutters, the old people hurried home from vespers crossing themselves. A grey pillar of dust whirled over the square, and the heat- burdened earth was already beginning to be scattered with the first seeds of rain.

Shaking her braided tresses, Dunya flew across the yard, slammed the door of the chick- enhouse, and stood in the middle of the yard with nostrils distended like a horse at a hurdle. In the street the children were prancing about. Eight-year-old Mishka, his father's absurdly large peaked cap drawn over his eyes, was spinning round and chirruping shrilly:

Rain, rain, rain away. We're going ofi for the day. To pay God our vow. And to Christ to how.

Dunya enviously watched Mishka's chapped bare feet stamping the ground. She, too, want- ed to dance in the rain and to get her head wet, so that her hair might grow thick and cur- ly; she, too, wanted to stand on her hands like

Mishka's friend in the roadside dust, at the risk of falling into the nettles. But her mother was watching and angrily moving her lips at the window. With a sigh she ran into the house. The rain was now falling heavily. A peal of thunder broke right over the roof and went rolling away across the Don.

In the porch Pantelei and the perspiring Gri- gory were hauling a folded drag-net out of the side-room.

"Raw thread and a pack-needle, quick!" Gri- gory called to Dunya. Darya sat down to mend the net. Her mother-in-law grumbled as she rocked the baby:

"What else will you take into your head, man! Let's go to bed. Kerosene costs more and more. What do you think you'll catch now? Where the plague are you going? And you'll get drowned into the bargain, the terror of the Lord is upon us. Just look at the lightning! Lord Jesus Christ, Mother of Heaven. . . ."

For an instant it was dazzlingly blue and si- lent in the kitchen; the rain could be heard drumming on the shutters. A clap of thunder followed. Dunya whimpered and buried her face in the net. Darya made the sign of the cross to- wards the windows and door. The old woman stared with terrible eyes at the cat rubbing it- self against her legs:

"Dunya, chase this d-. Mother of Heaven, forgive me my sins. . . . Dunya, put the cat out into the yard! Shoo, evil spirit! May you. . . ."

Dropping the net, Grigory shook with silent laughter.

"Well, what are you fussing about? Enough of that!" shouted Pantelei. "Get on with your mending, women. I told you the other day to see to the net."

"There's no fish now," his wife ventured.

"If you don't understand, hold your tongue! The sterlet will make for the bank now, they're afraid of storms. The water must be muddy by now. Dunya, go out and see whether you can hear the stream running."

Dunya edged unwillingly towards the door.

Old Ilyinichna would not be repressed. "Who's going to wade with you? Darya mustn't, she'll catch cold in her chest," she persisted.

"Me and Grigory, and for the other net . . . we'll call Aksinya and another of the women."

Dunya ran in breathlessly. Drops of rain hung trembling on her lashes. She smelt of the dank, black earth.

"The stream's roaring like anything," she panted.

"You coming too?"

"Who else is going?"

"We'll get some of the women."

"All right."

"Put on your coat and run to Aksinya," her father told her. "If she'll go, ask her to fetch Malashka Frolova, too."

"That one won't freeze," Grigory said with a grin, "she's fat as a hog."

"Why don't you take some hay, Grisha dear," his mother advised. "Stuff some under your heart or you'll take a chill inside."

"Yes, go for some hay, Grigory. The old woman's quite right."

Dunya quickly returned with the women. Aksinya, in a blue skirt and a ragged jacket belted with rope, looked shorter and thinner. Exchanging laughs with Darya, she took off her kerchief, wound her hair into a tighter knot, and throwing back her head, stared cold- ly at Grigory. As the stout Malashka tied up her stockings, she said hoarsely:

"Have you got your sacks? We're sure to haul up the fish today."

They all went into the yard. The rain was still falling heavily on the sodden earth, froth- ing the puddles and trickling in streams down to the Don.

Grigory led the way down to the river.

For no reason he suddenly felt very gay.

"Mind the ditch. Dad."

"How dark it is!"

"Hang on to me, Aksinya," Malashka laughed hoarsely.

"Isn't that the landing stage, Grigory?"

"That's it."

"Begin from here," Pantelei shouted above the roar of the wind. ,

"Can't hear you, uncle," Malashka called throatily.

"Start wading, I'll take the deep side. . . . The deep ... I say. Malashka, you deaf devil, where are you dragging to? I'll go out into the deeps. . . . Grigory, Grisha, let Aksinya take the bank!"

A groaning roar from the Don. The wind was tearing the slanting sheet of rain to shreds. Feeling the bottom with his feet, Grigory wad- ed up to his waist into the water. A clammy cold crept into his chest, drawing tightly in a ring round his heart. The waves lashed his face and tightly screwed-up eyes like a knout. The net bellied out and was carried off into the deeps. Grigory's feet, in woollen socks, slipped over the sandy bottom. The net was being dragged out of his hand. Deeper, deeper. A sudden drop. His legs were carried away. The current snatched him up and bore him into midstream. With his right hand he vigorously paddled back to the bank. The black, swirling

4—1933 49

depths frightened him as never before. His feet joyously found the muddy bottom. A fish knocked against his knee.

"Take it deep!" his father's voice came from the clinging darkness.

Again the net heeled over and pulled down into the depths. Again the current carried the ground away from under his feet, and Grigory swam, spitting out water.

"Aksinya, you all right?"

"All right, so far."

"Isn't the rain stopping?"

"The fine rain is, now we'll get the heavy stuff."

"Talk quietly. If my father hears he'll go for me."

"Afraid of your father, huh?"

For a moment they hauled in silence.

"Grisha, there's a sunken tree by the bank, I think! We must get the net round it."

A terrible buffet flung Grigory far away from her.

"Ah-ah!" Aksinya screamed somewhere near the bank. Terrified, he swam in the direc- tion of her call.

"Aksinya!"

Wind, and the flowing roar of the water,

"Aksinya!" Grigory shouted again, going cold with fear,

"Hey, Grigory," he heard his father's voice from afar.

He struck out wildly. He felt something sticky under his feet, and caught it with his hand-it was the net.

"Grisha, where are you?" he heard Aksinya's tearful voice.

"Why didn't you answer my shout?" he bawled angrily, crawling on hands and knees up the bank.

Squatting down on their heels, they disen- tangled the net. The moon broke through the cracked shell of a cloud. There was a restrained mutter of thunder beyond the meadows. The earth gleamed with moisture. Washed clean by the rain, the sky was stern and clear.

As he disentangled the net Grigory stared at Aksinya. Her face was a chalky white, but her red, slightly upturned lips were smiling.

"The way I was knocked against the bank! I nearly went out of my mind. I was scared to death. I thought you were drowned."

Their hands touched. Aksinya tried to push hers into the sleeve of his shirt.

"How warm your arm is," she said plaintive- ly, "and I'm frozen!"

"Look where that bastard got away," Grigo- ry showed her a hole about five feet across in the middle of the net.

4* 51

Someone came running along the bank. Gri- gory guessed it was Dunya. He shouted to her:

"Got the thread?"

"Yes. What are you sitting here for? Father sent me for you to come at once to the point. We've caught a sackful of sterlet." Unconcealed triumph sounded in her voice.

With teeth chattering, Aksinya sewed up the hole in the net. Then, to get warm, they raced to the point.

Pantelei was rolling a cigarette with scarred fingers swollen by the water; jigging about, he boasted :

"The first time, eight fish; but the second time . . ." he paused and silently pointed with his foot to the sack. Aksinya peeped curiously inside: from it came the slithery scraping sound of stirring fish.

"Where were you?"

"A sheat-fish broke our net."

"Did you mend it?"

"Yes, somehow."

"Well, we'll wade in once more up to our "knees, and then home. In you go, Grisha; what are you waiting for?"

Grigory stepped out with numbed legs. Ak- sinya was shivering so much that he felt the net trembling.

"Stop shaking!"

"I wish I could, but I can't catch my breath." "Listen! Let's get out, and damn the fish!" At that moment a great carp leaped over the net. Grigory dragged the net into a tighter circle. Aksinya toiled up the bank. The water splashed on the sands and slopped back. Fish lay quivering in the net.

"Back through the meadow?" "It's nearer through the wood." "Hey there, are you coming?" "Go on ahead. We'll catch you up. We're cleaning the net."

Frowning, Aksinya wrung out her skirl, hoisted the sack of fish over her shoulder and set off almost at a trot. Grigory picked up the net. They had covered some two himdred yards when Aksinya began to groan:

"I can't go on. My legs are numb." "Look, there's an old haystack. Why don't you have a warm there."

"Good! I'll never get home otherwise." Grigory turned back the top of the stack and dug out a hole. The long-lying hay smelt warm and rotten. "Crawl into the middle. It's like a stove here." She threw down the sack and buried herself up to the neck in hay. Shivering with cold, Gri- gory lay down at her side. A tender agitating scent came from her damp hair. She lay with

head thrown back, breathing regularly through her half-open mouth.

"Your hair smells like henbane. Do you know that white flower?" Grigory whis- pered, bending towards her. She was silent. Her gaze was misty and distant, fixed on the wan- ing, crescent moon.

Taking his hand out of his pocket, Grigory suddenly drew her head towards him. She tore herself away fiercely, and raised herself from the hay.

"Let me go!"

"Keep quiet!"

"Let go, or I'll shout!"

"Wait, Aksinya!"

"Uncle Pantelei!"

"Have you got lost?" Pantelei's voice sound- ed quite close, from behind a clump of haw- thorn bushes. Clenching his teeth, Grigory jumped out of the stack.

"What are you shouting for? Are you lost?" the old man questioned as he approached.

Aksinya stood by the haystack adjusting her kerchief, steam rising from her clothes.

"We're not lost, but I'm nearly frozen."

"Look, woman, there's a haystack, warm yourself," the old man told her.

Aksinya smiled as she stopped to pick up the sack.

It was some sixty versts to the training camp at Setrakov. Pyotr Melekhov and Stepan Asta- khov rode in the same wagon. With them were three others from their village: Fedot Bodov- skov, a young Cossack with a pock-marked Kal- myk face, Christonya Tokin, a second-draft re- servist in the Ataman's Regiment of Lifeguards, and the artilleryman Ivan Tomilin. After the first halt for food they harnessed Christonya's and Astakhov's horses to the wagon, and the other horses were tethered behind. Christonya, burly and a bit queer in the head like all the men of the Ataman's Regiment, took the reins. He sat in front with his back, curved like a wheel, blocking out the light from the interior of the wagon, and urged on the horses in his deep, rumbling bass voice. Pyotr, Stepan and Tomilin lay smoking under the tightly-stretched tarpaulin cover. Bodovskov walked behind, his bandy Kalmyk legs making light of the dusty road.

Christonya's wagon led the way. Behind trailed seven or eight others, leading saddled and unsaddled horses. The road was noisy with laughter, shouts, songs, the snorting of horses, and the jingling of empty stirrups.

Pyotr's head rested on a bag of rusks. He lay still, twirling his tawny whiskers.

"Stepan!"

"Huh?"

"Let's have a song."

"It's too hot. My throat's dry as a bone!"

"You won't find any drink round here. So don't wait for that!"

"Well, sing up. Only you're no good at it. Your Grisha now, he can sing. His isn't a voice, it's a pure silver thread."

Stepan threw back his head, coughed, and began in a low, tuneful voice:

Oh, a fine glowing sunrise Came up early in the sky.

Tomilin rested his cheek on his palm like a woman and picked up the refrain in a thin, wailing voice. Smiling, Pyotr watched the little knotted veins on his temples turning blue with the effort.

Young was she, the little woman That went tripping to the stream.

Stepan, who was lying with his head towards Christonya, turned round on his elbow: "Come on, Christonya, join in!"

And the lad, he guessed her purpose. Saddled up his chestnut mare.

Stepan turned his smiling glance towards Pyotr, and Pyotr, flicking the tip of his mous- tache out of his mouth, added his voice. Open- ing wide his heavily-bearded jaws, Christonya roared in a voice that shook the tarpaulin cover:

Saddled up his chestnut mare To catch the little woman.

Christonya tucked his bare foot under him and waited for Stepan to begin again. Closing his eyes, his perspiring face in shadow, Stepan sang on gently, now dropping his voice to a whisper, now making it ring out metallically.

Let me, let me, little woman. Bring my chestnut to the stream.

And again Christonya's deep booming tones drowned the others. Voices from the neighbour- ing wagons took up the song. The wheels clanked on their iron rims, the horses snorted with the dust and the song floated on, strong and deep. A white-winged peewit flew up from the brown wilted steppe. It flew with a cry to- wards a hollow, turning an emerald eye to watch the chain of white-covered wagons, the horses kicking up clouds of dust with their hoofs, the men in white, dusty shirts, walking at the edge of the road. And as the peewit dropped into the hollow and its black breast

nestled into the damp grass pressed flat by roaming animals, it missed the scene that was taking place on the road. The wagons were trundling along as before, the sweating horses were still loping unwillingly through the dust, but now the Cossacks in their dust-grey shirts were running from their wagons to the leader, milling round it and roaring with laughter.

Stepan was poised at full height on the wag- on, holding the tarpaulin with one hand, beat- ing time with the other, and roaring out a catchy tune in double-quick time:

Oh, don't sit by me.

Folk will say you're in love with me,

In love ivith me

And coming to me.

In love with me

And coming to me.

But I'm. not one oi the common run. . . .

Dozens of rough voices took up the chorus with a roar that flattened the roadside dust:

But I'm not one oi the common run,

I'm not one oi the common run.

I'm brigand born.

And brigand bred-

Not one oi the common run.

And I'm in love with a prince's §Qn, . . .

Fedot Bodovskov whistled; the horses strained at the traces; leaning out of the wagon, Pyotr laughed and waved his cap; Stepan, with a dazzling smile on his face, impudently swung his shoulders; along the road the dust rolled in a cloud. Christonya jumped out of the wagon in his great long unbelted shirt, his hair mat- ted, his face streaming with sweat, and did the Cossack dance, whirling round like a fly-wheel, frowning and groaning, and leaving the huge splayed imprints of his bare feet in the silky- grey dust.

They stopped for the night by a mound with a sandy summit. Clouds gathered in the west. Rain dripped from their black wings. The horses were watered at a pond. Above the dyke dismal willows bowed before the wind. In the water, covered with stagnant duckweed and scaled with miserable little ripples, the light- ning was distortedly reflected. The wind crum- bled the raindrops sparingly as though scatter- ing alms into the earth's swarthy palms.

The hobbled horses were turned out to graze, three men being appointed as guards. The other men lit fires and hung pots on the wagon shafts,

Christonya was cooking millet. As he stirred it with a spoon, he told a story to the Cossacks sitting around:

"The mound was high, like this one. And I says to my now deceased father: 'Won't the ataman* give it us for digging up the mound without permission'?"

"What's he blathering about?" asked Stepan, as he came back from the horses. He squatted down by the fire and flicked an ember on to his palm, juggling it about for a long time while he lighted a cigarette.

"I'm telling how I and my father, may his soul rest in peace, looked for treasure. It was the Merkulov mound. Well, and Father says: 'Come on, Christonya, we'll dig up the Merku- lov mound.' He'd heard from his father that treasure was buried in it. You see. Father prom- ised God: 'Give me the treasure, and I'll build a fine church.' So we agreed and off we

* Atamans were elected by the Cossacks of tsarist Russia for posts of leadership at various levels. The chief of the Don Army was called the army ataman, the chief of a stanitsa, a Cossack district or district centre, the stanitsa ataman. When a Cossack detachment went out on a campaign it elected its own "campaign ataman." In a broad sense the word meant "chief." When the Don Cos- sacks finally lost their independence, the title of Ataman of all Cossack Forces became a hereditary title of the tsar and, in effect, all Cossack troops were commanded by appointed atamans.

went. It was on common land, so only the ata- man could stop us. We arrived late in the after- noon. So we waited until nightfall and then climbed up on top with shovels. We began to dig straight down from its top-knot. We'd dug a hole six feet deep; the earth was like stone. I was wet through. Father kept on muttering prayers, but believe me, brothers, my belly was grumbling so much. , . . You know what we eat in summer: sour milk and kvass. My father, he says: 'Pfooh!' he says, 'Christonya, you're a heathen. Here am I praying, and you can't hold your food, I can't breathe for the stink. Get off the mound, you ... or I'll split your head open with the shovel. Your stink's enough to make the treasure sink into the ground.' So I lay down by the mound, fit to die with my belly-ache, and my father-a strong man he was-goes on digging alone. And he digs down to a stone slab. He calls me. I push a crow-bar under it, and lift it up. Believe me, brothers, it was a moonlight night, and under this slab was such a glitter. . . ."

"Now you're lying, Christonya," Pyotr broke in, smiling and tugging at his whiskers.

"Who's lying? Go to the devil, and to the devil's dam!" ChriiStonya hitched up his sharo- vari and glanced round at his audience. "No, I'm not lying. It's God's truth! There it shone.

I look, and it's charcoal. Some forty bushels of it. Father says : 'Crawl in, Christonya, and dig it up.' So I dug out this rubbish. I went on dig- ging till daylight. And in the morning there he was."

"Who?" asked Tomilin.

"Why, the ataman, who else? He happens to come driving by. 'Who gave you permission?' and all the rest of it. He lays hold of us and hauls us off to the stanitsa. We were called before the court at Kamenskaya the year before last, but Father, he guessed what was coming, and managed to die beforehand. We wrote back saying he was not among the living."

Christonya took his pot of boiling millet and went to the wagon for spoons.

"Well, what about your father? He promised to build a church; didn't he do it?" Stepan asked, when he returned.

"You're a fool, Stepan. What could he build for charcoal?"

"Once he promised he ought to have done it."

"There was no agreement whatever about charcoal, and the treasure, . . ." The guffaw that went up made the flames of the fire tremble. Christonya raised his head from the pot, and not understanding what the laughter was about, drowned all the rest with his heavy roar.

VII

Aksinya was seventeen when she was given in marriage to Stepan Astakhov. She came from the village of Dubrovka, from the sands on the other side of the Don.

About a year before her marriage she was ploughing in the steppe eight versts or so from the village. In the night her father, a man of some fifty years, tied her hands and raped her.

"I'll kill you if you breathe a word, but if you keep quiet I'll buy you a plush jacket and gaiters with goloshes. Remember, I'll kill you if you . . ." he promised her.

Aksinya ran back through the night in her torn petticoat to the village. She flung herself at her mother's feet and sobbed out the whole story. Her mother and elder brother harnessed horses to the wagon, made Aksinya get in with them, and drove to the father. Her brother al- most drove the horses to death over the eight versts. They found the old man close to the field camp. He was lying on his overcoat in a drunken sleep with an empty vodka bottle by his side. Before Aksinya's eyes her brother un- hooked the swingle-tree from the wagon, brought him to his feet with a kick, curtly asked him a question or two and struck him a blow between the eyes with the iron-shod

swingle-tree. He and his mother went on beat- ing him steadily for an hour and a half. The ageing mother, who had always been an obe- dient wife, frenziedly tore at her unconscious husband's hair, the brother used his feet. Ak- sinya lay under the wagon, her head covered, shaking silently. They carried her father home just before dawn. He lay moaning pitifully, his eyes wandering around the room, seeking for Aksinya, who had hidden herself away. Blooid and puss ran from his torn ear on to the pillow. Towards evening he died. They told the neigh- bours he had fallen from the wagon.

Within a year match-makers arrived on a gaily bedecked wagonette to ask for Aksinya's hand. The tall Stepan with his clean-cut neck and well-proportioned figure appealed to his future bride, and the wedding was fixed for the autumn.

The day was frosty and the ice rang merrily on the roads when Aksinya was installed as young mistress of the Astakhov household. The morning after the festivities her mother-in-law, a tall old woman doubled up with some painful woman's disease, woke Aksinya, led her into the kitchen, and aimlessly shifting things about, said to her:

"Now, dear daughter, we didn't take you for making love, nor for you to lie abed. Go and

milk the cows, and then get some food ready. I'm old and sick. You must take over the house- hold, it will all fall on you,"

The same day Stepan took his young wife in- to the barn and beat her deliberately and ter- ribly. He beat her on the belly, the breasts and the back, taking care that the marks should not be visible to others. After that he neglected her, kept company with flighty grass-widows and went out almost every night, leaving Aksinya locked in the barn or the best room.

For eighteen months, until there was a child, he would not forgive her his disgrace. Then he was quieter, but was grudging with caresses and rarely spent the night at home.

The large farm with its numerous cattle burd- ened Aksinya with work. Stepan worked half- heartedly, and went off to smoke, to play cards, to learn the latest news, and Aksinya had to do everything. Her mother-in-law was a poor help. After bustling around a little she would drop on to the bed, and with lips tight- drawn and eyes gazing agonizedly at the ceil- ing, would lie groaning, rolled into a bundle. At such times her face, which was dotted all over with great ugly moles, broke out in per- spiration and tears slithered one by one down her cheeks. Throwing down her work, Aksinya

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would hide in a corner and stare at her mother- in-law's face in fear and pity.

The old woman died just before the child was born. In the morning Aksinya's labour pains began, and about noon, an hour or so be- fore the child came into the world, the grand- mother dropped dead by the stable door. The midwife ran out to warn the tipsy Stepan not to go into the bedroom, and saw the old wom- an lying with her legs tucked under her. After the birth of the child, Aksinya devoted herself to her husband, but she had no feel- ing for him, only a bitter womanly pity and force of habit remained. The child died within a year. The old life returned. And when Grisha Melekhov crossed Aksinya's path, she realized with terror that she was attracted to the gentle, swarthy young fellow. He waited on her with a persistent expectant love, and it was this per- sistence that Aksinya feared in him. She saw that he was not afraid of Stepan, she felt that he would not hold back because of him, and without consciously desiring it, resisting the feeling with all her might, she noticed that on Sundays and weekdays she was attiring herself more carefully. Making up excuses for her con- science, she tried to place herself more fre- quently in his path. It made her happy to feel Grigory's black eyes caressing her heavily and

rapturously. When she awoke of a morning and went to milk the cows she would smile, and without realizing why, think to herself: "Today's a happy day. But why. . .? Oh, Grigo- ry. , . . Grisha." She was frightened by the new feeling which filled her, and in her thoughts she felt her way gropingly, cautiously, as though crossing the Don over the melting ice of March.

After seeing Stepan off to camp she decided to see Grigory as little as possible. After the fishing, her decision was still further strength- ened.

VIII

Some two days before Trinity the distribu- tion of the village meadowland took place. Pan- telei attended the allotment. He came back at dinner-time, kicked off his boots with a groan, and noisily scratching his weary feet, an- nounced :

"We've got the stretch near the Red Bank. Not very good grass as grass goes. The upper part runs up to the forest, it's just scrub in places. And a bit of quitch coming through."

"When shall we do the mowing?" Grigory asked.

"After the holidays."

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"Are you going to take Darya along?" the old woman frowned. Pantelei Prokofyevich brushed her aside.

"Let me alone ! We'll take her if we need her. Get lunch ready. Why do you stand around gaping?"

The old wife opened the oven door with a clatter, and drew out the warmed-up cabbage soup. Pantelei sat over the meal a long time, telling of the day's events, and of the tricky ataman, who had all but swindled the whole assembly of Cossacks.

"He was up to his tricks last year," Darya put in. "The way he tried to swindle Malashka when they were sharing out the plots."

"He's always been a son of a bitch," Pan- telei muttered.

"But who's going to do the raking and stack- ing. Dad?" Dunya asked timidly.

"What about you?"

"I can't do it all by myself."

"We'll ask Aksinya Astakhova. Stepan asked us to mow for him."

The next morning Mitka Korshunov rode up to the Melekhov yard on his white-legged stal- lion. A fine rain was falling. Thick mist hung over the village. Mitka leaned out of his sad- dle, opened the wicket and rode in. The old wife hailed him from the steps.

"Hey, you rapscallion, what do you want?" she asked with evident dissatisfaction in her voice, for she had no love for the reckless and quarrelsome Mitka.

"What's that to you, Ilyinichna?" Mitka said in surprise, as he tied his horse to the rail- ing. "I want Grisha. Where is he?"

"He's asleep in the shed. But have you had a -stroke? Have you lost the use of your legs that you must ride?"

"You're always poking your nose in, old la- dy!" Mitka retorted huffily. Smacking an ele- gant whip against the legs of his glossy leather boots, he went to look for Grigory, and found him asleep in a cart. Screwing up his left eye, Mitka lashed Grigory with his whip.

"Get up, muzhik!"

"Muzhik" was the most abusive word Mitka could think of using. Grigory jumped up as though on springs.

"What do you want?"

"You've been in bed long enough."

"Stop fooling around, Mitka, before I get angry."

"Get up, I've got to talk to you."

"Well?"

Mitka sat down on the side of the cart, and scraping the dried mud off his boots with a stick, he said:

"I've been insulted, Grisha."

"Well?"

"You see, it's . . /' Mitka cursed heavily. "He's a lieutenant, so he likes to show off." He snapped out the words angrily, without open- ing his mouth, his legs were trembling. Grigory got up.

"What lieutenant?"

Seizing him by the sleeve, Mitka said more quietly :

"Saddle your horse at once, and come to the meadows. I'll show him! I said to him: 'Come on. Your Honour, and we'll see.' 'Bring all your friends and comrades,' he said, 'I'll beat the lot of you. My mare's dam took prizes at the of- ficers' hurdle-races at St. Petersburg.' What is his mare or her dam to me? Curse them! I won't let them outrace my stallion!"

Grigory hastily dressed. Choking with rage Mitka hurried him up,

"He's come to visit the merchant Mokhov. Wait, what's his name? Listnitsky, I think. Big, serious-looking fellow, wears glasses. Well, and let him! His glasses won't help him: I won't let him catch my stallion!"

With a laugh, Grigory saddled the old mare and, to avoid meeting his father, rode out to the steppe through the threshing-floor gate. They rode to the meadow at the foot of the hill,

Close to a withered poplar, horsemen were awaiting them: the officer Listnitsky on a hand- some, clean-limbed mare, and seven of the vil- lage lads mounted bareback.

"Where shall we start from?" the officer turned to Mitka, adjusting his pince-nez and admiring the stallion's powerful chest muscles.

"From the poplar to the Tsar's Pond."

"Where's the Tsar's Pond?" Listnitsky screwed up his eyes short-sightedly.

"There, Your Honour, on the edge of the wood."

They lined up the horses. The officer raised his whip above his head.

"When I say 'three.' All right? One . . . two . . . three!"

Listnitsky got away first, pressing close to the saddle-bow, holding his cap on with his hand. For a second he led all the rest. Mitka, his face desperately pale, rose in his stirrups-to Grigory he seemed unbearably slow in bringing the whip down on the croup of his stallion.

It was some three versts to the Tsar's Pond, Stretched out straight as an arrow, Mitka' s stal- lion caught up with Listnitsky' s mare when half the course had been covered. Left behind from the very beginning, Grigory trotted along, watching the straggling chain of riders.

By the Tsar's Pond was a sandy hillock, washed up by the spring floods. Its yellow cam- el-hump was overgrown with sandwort. Gri- gory saw the officer and Mitka gallop up the hillock and disappear over the brow together, the others following. When he reached the pond the horses were already standing in a group around Listnitsky. Mitka was sleek with re- strained delight, every movement expressing his triumph. Contrary to his expectations, the offi- cer did not seem at all disconcerted. He stood with his back against a tree, smoking a cigar- ette, and said, pointing to his foam-flecked horse:

"I've ridden a hundred and fifty versts on her already. I rode over from the stanitsa only yes- terday. If she were fresh, you'd never have caught me, Korshunov."

"Maybe," Mitka said magnanimously.

"His stallion's the best in the district," a freckled lad, who had come up last, remarked enviously.

"He's a good horse," said Mitka and stroked the stallion's neck, his hand trembling with emotion. He glanced at Grigory and grinned foolishly.

Grigory and Mitka left the others and rode home, skirting the village. The lieutenant took

a chilly leave of them, thrust two fingers under the peak of his cap and turned away.

As they were approaching home, Grigory saw Aksinya comimg towards them. She was strip- ping a twig as she walked. When she noticed him she bent her head lower.

"What are you blushing for, are we naked?" shouted Mitka and winked.

Gazing straight before him, Grigory almost rode by her, then suddenly struck the ambling mare with his whip. She sat back on her hind- legs and sent a shower of mud over Aksinya.

"Oh, you mad devil!"

Wheeling sharply and riding his excited mount at her, Grigory demanded:

"Why don't you say hullo?"

"You're not worth it!"

"And that's why I sent the mud over you. Don't think so much of yourself."

"Let me pass!" Aksinya shouted, waving her arms in front of the horse's nose. "What are you trampling me with your horse for?"

"She's a mare, not a horse."

"1 don't care; let me pass."

"What are you getting angry for, Aksinya? Siurely not because of the other day, in the meadow?"

Grigory gazed into her eyes. Aksinya tried to say something, but a little tear started from the

comer of her dark eye, and her lips quivered pitifully. Swallowing hard, she whispered:

"Go away, Grigory. . . . I'm not angry. . , , I. . . ." And she went.

The astonished Grigory overtook Mitka at the gate.

"Coming out for the evening?" Mitka asked.

"No."

"Why, what's on? Or did she invite you to spend the night with her?"

Grigory rubbed his forehead with his palm and made no reply.

All that was left of Trinity in the village houses was the dry thyme scattered over the floors, the dust of crumpled leaves, and the shrivelled, withered green of broken oak and ash branches fastened to the gates and stairs.

The haymaking began immediately after Trinity. From early morning the meadow blos- somed with women's holiday skirts, the bright embroidery of aprons, and coloured kerchiefs. The whole village turned out for the mowing. The mowers and rakers attired themselves as though for an annual holiday. So it had been from of old. From the Don to the distant alder

thickets the ravaged meadowland stirred and sighed.

The Melekhovs were late in starting. They set out when nearly half the village were al- ready in the meadow.

"You sleep late, Pantelei Prokofyevich," the perspiring haymakers greeted him.

"Not my fault . . . the women again!" the old man laughed, and urged on the bullocks with his knout of raw hide.

"Good-day to you, neighbour! You're a bit late, aren't you?" a tall Cossack in a straw hat said, shaking his head as he stood sharpening his scythe at the side of the road.

"You reckon the grass will be dry?"

"If you don't get a move on, it soon will be."

At the back of the cart sat Aksinya, her face completely covered to protect it from the sun. From the narrow slits left for her eyes she stared calmly and severely at Grigory seated op- posite her. Darya, also wrapped up and dressed in her Sunday best, her legs dangling between the rungs of the wagon-side, was giving her long blue-veined breast to the child dozing in her arms. Dunya fidgeted on the box, her happy eyes scanning the meadow and the people walk- ing along the road. Her face, cheerful and sun- burnt, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, seemed to say, "I feel gay and happy, be-

cause the day, with its blue and cloudless sky, is also happy; because my soul is filled with the same cloudless blue calm. I'm happy, I have everything I want."

Drawing the sleeve of his cotton shirt over his fists, Pantelei wiped away the sweat running down from under the peak of his cap. The shirt stretched tightly across his bent back, darkened with moist patches. The sun pierced slantingly through a grey fleecy cloud, and dropped a fan of misty, refracted rays over the meadov/, the village, and the distant, silvery hills of the Don.

The day was sultry. The little clouds crept along drowsily, not even overtaking Pantelei' s bullocks as they plodded along the road. The old man himself lifted and waved the knout languidly, as though in doubt whether to strike their bony flanks or not. Evidently realizing this, the bullocks did not hasten their pace, and slowly, gropingly set forward their cloven hoofs and swished their tails. A dusty gold-and-orange- tingled horsefly circled above them. The meadowland that had been scythed near the threshing-floors glowed with pale-green patches; where the grass had not yet been cut, the grassy silk, green with a gleam of black in it, rustled in the breeze,

"There's our strip," Pantelei waved his knout.

Grigory unharnessed the weary bullocks. The

old man, his ear-ring glittering, went to look for the mark he had made at the end of the strip.

"Bring the scythes," he called out after a moment, waving his hand.

Grigory went to him, treading down the grass, and leaving an undulating trail behind him, Pantelei faced the distant bell-tower and crossed himself. His hook-nose shone as though freshly varnished, the sweat clung to the hol- lows of his swarthy cheeks. He smiled, bar- ing a close-set row of white, gleaming teeth in his raven beard, and, with his wrinkled neck bent to the right, swept the scythe through the grass. A seven-foot semicircle of mown grass lay at his feet.

Eyes half closed, Grigory followed in his steps, laying the grass low with the scythe. The women's aprons blossomed in a scattered rain- bow before him, but his eyes sought only one, a white one with an embroidered border; he glanced at Aksinya and started mowing again, keeping pace with his father.

Aksinya was continually in his thoughts. Half closing his eyes, in imagination he kissed her and spoke to her in burning tender words that came to his tongue from he knew not where. Then he dropped such thoughts and stepped out again methodically, one . . . two . . . three; and his memory slipped in fragments of the

Ji>ast, Sitting under the damp hayrick . . . the moon over the meadow . . . now and then a drop falling from the bush into the puddle . . . one . . . two . . . three. . . . Good! Ah, that had been good !

He heard laughter behind him. He looked back: Darya lay under the cart and Aksinya was bending over her, telling her something. Darya waved her arms, and again they both laughed. Dunya was sitting on the shaft and singing in a shrill voice.

"I'll get to that bush, then I'll sharpen my scythe," Grigory thought. At that moment he felt the scythe pass through something soft and yielding. He bent down. A little wild duckling went scurrying into the grass with a squawk. By the hole where the nest had been another was huddled, cut in two by the scythe, the rest of the brood scattered twittering in the grass. He lay the dead bird on his palm. It had evi- dently come from the egg only a few days pre- viously; there was still a living warmth in the down.

On the flat, half-open beak there was a pink- ish bubble of blood, the beady eyes were puckered slyly, the little legs were still warm and quivering. With a sudden keen feeling of compassion he stared at the inert little ball ly- ing in his hand.

"What have you found, Grisha?''

Dunya came dancing along the mown alley, her pigtails tossing on her breast. Frowning, Grigory threw away the duckling and angrily wielded his scythe.

Dinner was eaten in haste. Bacon-fat and the Cossacks' stand-by, sour skimmed milk, brought from home in a bag, were the entire meal.

After dinner the women began to rake the hay. The cut grass wilted and dried, giving off a heavy, stupefying scent.

"No point in going home!" Pantelei said dur- ing dinner. "We'll turn the bullocks out to graze in the forest, and tomorrow as soon as the dew is off the grass we'll finish the mowing."

Dusk had fallen when they stopped for the day. Aksinya raked the last rows together, and went to the cart to cook some millet mash. All day she had maliciously made fun of Grigory, gazing at him with eyes full of hatred, as though in revenge for some great, unforgettable injury. Grigory, gloomy and faded somehow, drove the bullocks down to the Don for water. His father had watched him and Aksinya all day. Eyeing Grigory unpleasantly he said:

"Have your supper, and then guard the bul- locks. See that they don't get into the grass! Take my sheepskin."

Darya laid her child under the cart and went into the forest with Dunya for brushwood.

Over the meadow the waning moon mounted the dark, inaccessible heaven. A snowstorm of moths whirled around the flames. Near the fire supper was laid on a piece of coarse cloth. The millet boiled in the smoky field-pot. Wiping a spoon with the edge of her underskirt, Darya called to Grigory:

"Come and have your supper."

His father's sheepskin draped over his shoul- ders, Grigory emerged from the darkness and approached the fire.

"What's made you so moody?" Darya smiled.

"Got the back-ache. Must be going to rain," he countered lightly,

"He doesn't want to watch the bullocks," Dunya laughed, and, sitting down by her brother, she tried to start a conversation. But somehow her efforts were unsuccessful. Pan- telei supped his porridge, crunching the under- cooked millet with his teeth. Aksinya ate with- out lifting her eyes, smiling half-heartedly at Darya's jokes. A troubled flush burned in her cheeks.

Grigory got up first and went off to the bul- locks.

"Take care the bullocks don't trample some-

body else's grass," his father shouted after him, then a crumb of millet stuck in his throat and for a long time he coughed raspingly. Dunya's cheeks swelled as she tried to suppress her laughter.

The fire burned low. The smouldering brush- wood wrapped the little group in the honey scent of burning leaves.

At midnight Grigory stole up to the camp, and halted some ten paces away. His father was snoring tunefully on the cart. The unquenched embers stared out from the ash with golden peacock's eyes.

A grey, shrouded figure broke away from the cart and came slowly towards Grigory. Two or three paces away, it halted. Aksinya! Grigory's heart thumped fast and heavily; he stepped forward crouchingly, flinging back the edge of his sheepskin, and pressed her com- pliant, burning body to his own. Her legs bowed at the knees; she trembled, her teeth chat- tering. Grigory suddenly flung her over his arm as a wolf throws a slaughtered sheep across its back, and, stumbling over the trailing edges of his open coat, and panting hard, made off.

"Oh, Grisha, Grisha! Your father. . . ."

"Quiet!"

Tearing herself away, gasping for breath in the sour sheep's wool, choking with the bitter-

6—1933 81

ness of regret, Aksinya cried in a low moaning voice that was almost a shout:

"Let go, what does it matter now. . .? I'll go of my own accord."

Not azure and poppy-red, but rabid as the wayside henbane is a woman's belated love.

After the mowing Aksinya was a changed woman: as though someone had set a mark on her face, branded her. When other women met her they smiled slyly, and nodded their heads after her. The girls were envious, but she held her happy, shameful head proud and high.

Soon everybody knew of her affair with Gri- gory Melekhov. At first it was talked about in whispers-only half-believed-but after the vil- lage shepherd had seen them in the early dawn by the windmill, lying under the moon in the young rye, the rumour spread like a wave breaking turbidly on the shore.

It reached Pantelei's ears also. One Sunday he happened to go along to Mokhov's shop. The throng was so great that no more could have crowded through the door. He entered, and everybody seemed to be making way for him, smiling at him. He pushed towards the counter where the draperies were sold. The master, Ser-

gei Platonovich Mokhov, took it upon himself to attend to the old man.

"Where have you been all this long while, Prokofyevich?" he asked.

"Too much to do. Troubles with the farm." "What? Sons like yours, and troubles?" "What of my sons? I've seen Pyotr off to camp, there's only me and Grisha to do every- thing."

Mokhov divided his stiff, ruddy beard into two with his fingers and glanced significantly out of the corner of his eye at the crowd of Cossacks.

"Oh, yes, old man, and why haven't you told us anything about it?" "About what?"

"How d'you mean, what? Thinking of marry- ing your son, and not a word to anybody!" "Which son?"

"Why, your son Grigory isn't married." "And I'm not thinking of marrying him yet." "But I've heard that you're getting yourself a daughter-in-law . . . Stepan Astakhov's Aksi- nya."

"What? With her husband alive. . . , Why,

Platonovich, you must be joking! Aren't you?"

"Joking? But I've had it from others."

Pantelei smoothed out the piece of material

spread over the counter, then, turning sharply,

6* 83

limped towards the door. He made straight for home. He walked with his head lowered like a bull, his fingers knotted in his fist, hobbling more noticeably on his lame leg. As he passed the Astakhovs' house he glanced over the wat- tle fence: Aksinya, looking young and smart, with a lithe swing in her hips, was going into the house with an empty bucket.

"Hey, wait!" he called, and stumped in at the gate. Aksinya halted and waited for him. They went into the house. The cleanly-swept earthen floor was sprinkled with red sand; on the bench in the corner were pasties fresh from the oven. A smell of musty clothes and sweet apples came from the best room.

A tabby cat with a huge head purred round Pantelei's legs. It arched its back and pressed itself against his boots. With a fierce kick he sent it flying against the bench.

"What's all this I hear? Eh?" he shouted looking Aksinya straight in the eyes. "Your husband hardly out of sight, and you already setting your cap at other men! I'll make Grisha's blood flow for this, and I'll write to your Stepan! Let him hear of it! You whore, haven't you been beaten enough! Don't set your foot inside my yard from this day on. Carrying on with a young man, and when Stepan comes, I'll have to. . . ."

Aksinya listened with narrowed eyes. And suddenly she shamelessly swung the hem of her skirt, enveloped Pantelei in the smell of wom- an's clothes, and came breasting at him with writhing lips and bared teeth.

"What are you, my father-in-law? Eh? Who are you to teach me? Co and teach your own fat-bottomed woman! Keep order in your own yard! You limping, stump-footed devil! Clear out of here, you won't frighten me!"

"Wait, you daft hussy!"

"There's nothing to wait for! Get back where you came from! And if I want your Grisha, I'll eat him, bones and all, and answer for it my- self! Chew that over! What if I love Grisha? Beat me, will you? Write to my husband? Write to the ataman if you like, but Grisha belongs to me! He's mine! Mine! I have him and I shall keep him!"

Aksinya pressed against the quailing Pantelei with her breast (it beat against her thin blouse like a bustard in a noose), seared him with the flame of her black eyes, overwhelmed him with more and more terrible and shameless words. His eyebrows quivering, the old man backed to the door, groped for the stick he had left in the comer, and waving his hand, pushed open the door with his bottom, Aksinya pressed him out of the passage, pantingly, frenziedly shouting:

"I'll have my love, I'll make up for all the wrongs I've suffered! And then kill me if you like! He's my Grisha! Mine!"

Muttering something into his beard, Pantelei limped off to his house.

He found Grigory in the room. Without say- ing a word, he brought his stick down over his son's back. Doubling up, Grigory hung on his father's arm.

"What's that for. Father?"

"For your goings-on, you son of a bitch!"

"What goings-on?"

"Don't wrong your neighbour! Don't shame your father! Don't run after women, you young buck!" Pantelei snorted, dragging Grigory, who had grabbed the stick, around the room trying to wrest it from him.

"I'm not going to let you beat me'" Grigory cried hoarsely, and setting his teeth, he tore the stick out of his father's hand. Across his knee it went, and-snap!

Pantelei Prokofyevich struck him on the neck with his hard fist.

"I'll whip you in public. You accursed son of the devil! I'll marry you to the village idiot! I'll geld you!" his father roared.

The noise brought the old mother running into the room.

"Pantelei, Pantelei! Cool down a little! Wait!"

But the old man had lost his temper in real earnest. He sent his wife flying, overturned the table with the sewing-machine on it, and victo- riously flew out into the yard. Grigory, whose shirt had been torn in the struggle, had not had time to take it off when the door banged open again, and his father appeared once more like a storm-cloud on the threshold.

"I'll marry him off, the son of a bitch!" He stamped his foot like a horse and fixed his gaze on Grigory's muscular back. "I'll drive off to- morrow and arrange the match. To think that I should live to see people laugh in my face about my son."

"Let me get my shirt on first, then you can marry me off."

"I'll marry you to the village idiot!" The door slammed, and the old man clattered away down the steps.

Beyond the village of Setrakov the carts with tarpaulin covers stretched in rows across the steppe. At unbelievable speed a neat, white- roofed little town had grown up, with straight streets and a small square in the centre, where a sentry stood guard.

The men lived the usual monotonous life of a training camp. In the morning the detach- ment of Cossacks guarding the grazing horses drove them into the camp. Then followed clean- ing, grooming, saddling, the roll-call, and mus- ter. The staff officer in command of the camp, Lieutenant-Colonel Popov, bawled stentoriously; the sergeants training the young Cossacks shout- ed their orders. They staged mock attacks on a hill, they cunningly encircled the "enemy." They fired at targets. The younger Cossacks ea- gerly vied with one another in the sabre exer- cises, and the old hands dodged as much of the training as they could.

While voices grew hoarse with the heat and the vodka, a fragrant exciting wind blew over the long lines of covered wagons, the susliks whistled in the distance, and the steppe beck- oned away from the stuffiness and smoke of the whitewashed huts.

About a week before the break-up of the camp Andrei Tomilin's wife came to visit him. She brought him some home-made cracknel, an assortment of dainties and a sheaf of village news.

She left again very early in the morning, tak- ing the Cossacks' greetings and instructions to their families and relations in the village. Only Stepan Astakhov sent no message back by her.

He had fallen ill the evening before, drunk vodka to cure himself and was incapable of see- ing anything in the whole wide world, including Tomilin's wife. He did not turn up on parade; at his own request the doctor's assistant let his blood, setting a dozen leeches on his chest. Ste- pan sat in his undershirt against the wheel of his cart (making the white linen cover of his cap oily with cart grease) and stared sulkily at the leeches sucking at his barrel-like chest and swelling with dark blood.

The regiment medical orderly stood by smok- ing and letting the smoke filter through the wide gaps between his teeth.

"Feel any better?"

"They're drawing well. Easier for the heart somehow."

"Leeches are a great thing!"

Tomilin came up and gave Stepan a wink.

"Stepan, I'd like a word with you."

Stepan rose with a grunt and took Tomilin aside.

"My woman's been here on a visit. She left this morning."

"Well?"

"There's a lot of talk about your wife in the village."

"What?"

"Not pleasant talk, either."

"Well?"

"She's carrying on with Grigory Melekhov. Quite openly."

Turning pale, Stepan tore the leeches from his chest and crushed them underfoot. When he had crushed the last one, he buttoned up his shirt, and then, as though suddenly afraid, un- buttoned it again. His chalky lips moved inces- santly. They trembled, slipped into an awk- ward smile, then shrivelled and gathered into a livid pucker. Tomilin thought Stepan must be chewing something hard and solid. Gradually the colour returned to his face, the lips, caught by his teeth, froze into immobility. He took off his cap, smeared the grease over the white cover with his sleeve, and said aloud: "Thanks for the news."

"I just wanted to warn you. . . . You won't hold it against me."

Tomilin clapped his hands against his trou- sers in a gesture of sympathy, and went off to his horse. A sound of voices and shouting was heard from the camp, the Cossacks had re- turned from the sabre exercises, Stepan stood for a moment staring fixedly and sternly at the black smear on his cap.

A half-crushed, dying leech crawled up his boot.

XII

In ten more days the Cossacks would be re- turning from camp. Aksinya lived in a frenzy of belated bitter love. Despite his father's threats, Grigory slipped out and went to her at night, coming home at dawn.

In two weeks he had drained his strength, like a horse striving beyond its powers. From lack of sleep his brown face was suffused under the high cheek-bones with a blue tinge, his tired eyes gazed wearily out of their sunken sockets. Aksinya went about with her face com- pletely uncovered, the deep hollows under her eyes darkened funereally; her swollen, avid lips smiled with a restless challenge.

So extraordinary and open was their mad as- sociation, so ecstatically did they burn with a single, shameless flamie, neither conscience- stricken nor hiding their love from the world, becoming gaunt and dark before its very eyes, that people began to be ashamed to meet them in the street. Grigory's comrades, who previous- ly had chaffed him about Aksinya, now kept si- lent and felt awkward and constrained in his company. In their hearts the women envied Ak- sinya, yet they condemned her, gloating at the prospect of Stepan's return, and pining with cu- riosity as to how it would all end.

If Grigory had made some show of hiding from the world his affair with this grass-widow, and if the grass-widow Aksinya had kept her relations with Grigory comparatively secret, without shunning others, the world would have seen nothing unusual in it. The village would have gossiped a little and then forgotten. But they lived together almost openly, they were bound by something greater, which had no likeness to any temporary association, and for that reason the villagers decided it was immoral and held their breath in peeping expectation. Stepan would return and cut the knot.

Over the bed in the Astakhovs' bedroom ran a string threaded with empty white and black cotton-reels. They hung there for decoration. The flies spent their nights on the reels, and spi- ders' webs stretched from them to the ceiling. Grigory was lying on Aksinya's bare, cool arm and gazing up at the chain of reels. With the toil-roughened fingers of her other hand Aksi- nya was playing with the thick strands of hair on his head. Her fingers smelt of warm milk; when Grigory turned his head, pressing his nose into Aksinya's armpit, the pungent, sweetish scent of woman's sweat flooded his nostrils.

In addition to the wooden, painted bedstead with pointed pine cones at the comers, the room contained a capacious iron-bound chest that stood close to the door, holding Aksinya's dowry and all her finery. In the corner was a table, an oleograph of General Skobelev riding towards a row of flapping banners dipped before him, two chairs, and above them icons in gawdy pa- per aureoles. Along the side wall hung fly-blown photographs. One was a grotip of Cossacks, with curly forelocks, swelling chests decorated with watch chains, and drawn swords-Stepan and his comrades on active service. On a hook hung Stepan's uniform, it had not been put away. The moon stared through the window and uncertain- ly fingered the two white sergeant's straps on the shoulder.

With a sigh Aksinya kissed Grigory on the bridge of his nose, between his eyebrows.

"Grisha, my love."

"What?"

"Only nine days left."

"That's not so soon."

"What am I to do, Grisha?"

"How should I know?"

Aksinya restrained a sigh and again smoothed and parted Grigory's matted hair.

"Stepan will kill me," she half-asked, half- declared.

Grigory was silent. He wanted to sleep. With difficulty he forced open his clinging eyelids and saw above him the glittering bluish black- ness of Aksinya's eyes.

"When my husband comes back, you'll give me up, won't you? You'll be afraid?"

"Why should I be afraid of him? You're his wife, it's for you to be afraid."

"When I'm with you I'm not afraid, but when I think about it in the daytime I am."

Grigory yawned and said: "It doesn't matter so much about Stepan coming back. My father's talking of getting me married off."

He smiled and was going to add something, but he felt Aksinya's hand under his head sud- denly wilt and soften, bury itself in the pillow, and after a moment harden again.

"Who has he got in mind?" she asked in a stifled voice,

"He's only talking about it. Mother says he's thinking of Korshunov's Natalya."

"Natalya . . . she's a good-looking girl. Very good-looking. . . . Well, go ahead and marry her. I saw her in church the other day. Dressed up she was. . . ." Aksinya spoke rapidly, but he could scarcely hear her, her voice was so life- less and dull,

"I don't care two pins about her good looks. I'd like to marry you."

Aksinya sharply pulled her arm from undef Grigory's head and stared with dry eyes at the window. A frosty, yellow mist was in the yard. The shed cast a heavy shadow. The crickets were chirruping. Down by the Don the bitterns boomed; their deep sullen tones floated through the bedroom window.

"Grisha!"

"Thought of something?"

Aksinya seized Grigory's rough, unyielding hands, pressed them to her breast, and to her cold, almost lifeless cheeks, and cried:

"What did you take up with me for, curse you! What shall I do? Grisha! I'm finished. . . . Stepan is coming back, and what shall I tell him. . .? Who is there to help me?"

Grigory was silent. Aksinya gazed mournful- ly at his handsome eagle nose, his shadowed eyes, his dumb lips. . . . And suddenly a flood of feeling swept away the dam of restraint. Mad- ly she kissed his face, his neck, his arms, the rough, curly black hair on his chest, and Gri- gory felt her body trembling as, gasping for breath, she whispered:

"Grisha . . . my dearest . . , beloved . . . let's go away. My darling! We'll throw up everything and go. I'll leave my husband and everything, so long as you're with me. . . . We'll go far away,

to the mines. I'll love you and care for you. I've got an uncle who is a watchman at the Paramo- nov mines: he'll help us. . . . Grisha! Oh, say something!"

Grigory lay thinking, then unexpectedly opened his burning foreign-looking eyes. They were laughing, gleaming derision.

"You're a fool, Aksinya, a fool! You talk away, but you say nothing worth listening to. How can I leave the farm? I've got to do my military service next year. . . . I'll never stir any- where away from the land. Here there is the steppe, and something to breathe-but there? Last simimer I went with Father to the station. I nearly died. Engines roaring, the air all thick and heavy with burning coal. How people live there, I don't know; perhaps they're used to it!" Grigory spat and said again: "I'll never leave the village."

The night grew darker outside the window, a cloud passed over the moon. The frosty, yellow mist vanished from the yard, the shadows were washed away, and now there was no telling whether it was last year's faggots or some old bush that loomed darkly beyond the fence out- side the window.

The room, too, grew darker. The stripes on Stepan's uniform faded, and in the grey, stag- nant murk Grigory did not see the fine shiver that

shook Aksinya's shoulders, or her head pressed between her hands and silently shaking on the pillow.

XIII

After the visit of Tomilin's wife Stepan's fea- tures became distinctly less handsome. His brows drooped over his eyes, a deep and harsh frown puckered his forehead. He spoke little with his comrades, began to quarrel over trifles, had a cross with the sergeant-major and would hardly look at Pyotr Melekhov. The threads of friend- ship which had previously united them were snapped. In his sullen, seething rage Stepan plunged downhill like a bolting horse. They re- turned home enemies.

Of course something had to happen that brought the vague hostility of their relations to a head. They set out for their village in the same group as before. Pyotr's and Stepan's horses were harnessed to the wagon. Christonya rode behind on his own horse. Tomilin, who was suf- fering from fever, lay covered with his greatcoat in the wagon. Fedot Bodovskov was too lazy to drive, so Pyotr took the reins. Stepan walked along at the side of the wagon, lashing off the purple heads of the roadside thistles with his whip. Rain was falling. The rich black earth

7—1933 97

stuck to the wheels like tar. The sky was an au- tumnal blue, ashy with cloud. Night fell. No lights of any village were to be seen. Pyotr be- laboured the horses liberally with the knout. And suddenly Stepan shouted in the darkness:

"You, what the . . . you . . . ! You spare your own horse, but keep the knout on mine all the time."

"Keep your eyes open! I whip the one that doesn't pull."

"Mind I don't put you in the shafts. That's what Turks are good for."

Pyotr threw the reins down.

"What do you want?"

"Oh, stay where you are."

"Shut up."

"What are you flaring up at him for?" asked Christonya, riding up to Stepan.

Stepan did not reply. They rode on for another half hour in silence. The mud squelched under the wheels. The rain pattered drowsily on the tarpaulin. Pyotr dropped the reins and smoked, running over in his mind all the insulting words he would use in the next quarrel with Stepan.

"Out of the way. I want to get under cover." Stepan pushed Pyotr aside and jumped on the step of the cart.

The wagon suddenly jolted and stopped. Slip- ping in the mud, the horses pawed the earth.

Sparks shov/ered from their hoofs and the shaft groaned.

"Whoa!" Pyotr shouted and leaped to the ground.

"What's the matter?" Stepan snapped anx- iously.

"Show a light," Pyotr demanded.

In front a horse was struggling and snorting. Someone struck a match. A tiny orange ring of light, then darkness again. With trembling hands Pyotr felt the spine of the fallen horse, then pulled at the bridle.

The horse sighed and rolled over, the centre- shaft snapped in half. Stepan struck a bunch of matches. His horse lay craning her neck with one foreleg buried to the knee in a marmot's hole.

Christonya unfastened the traces.

"Unharness Pyotr's horse, look snappy," he ordered.

"Whoa! Easy there! Easy!"

At last Stepan's horse was lifted with difficul- ty to its feet. While Pyotr held it by the bridle, Christonya crawled on his knees in the mud, feeling the helplessly-hanging leg.

"Seems to be broken," he boomed.

"See if he can walk."

Pyotr pulled at the bridle. The horse hopped a step or two, not putting its left foreleg to the

7* 99

ground, and whinnied. Drawing on his great- coat, Tomilin stamped about bitterly.

"Broken, damn it! A horse lost!"

Stepan, who all this time had not spoken a word, almost seemed to have been awaiting such a remark. Thrusting Christonya aside he flung himself on Pyotr, He aimed at his head, but missed and struck his shoulder. They grappled together and fell into the mud. There was the sound of a tearing shirt. Stepan got Pyotr under him, and holding his head down with one knee, pounded away with his fists. Christonya dragged him off cursing.

"What's that for?" Pyotr shouted, spitting blood.

"Look where you drive, you snake!"

Pyotr tried to tear himself out of Christonya's hands.

"Now then! You try fighting me!" Christonya roared, holding Pyotr with one hand against the wagon.

They harnessed Bodovskov's small but sturdy horse with Pyotr's. Christonya gave his horse to Stepan to ride, and himself crawled into the cart with Pyotr. It was midnight when they arrived at a village. They stopped at the first house, and Christonya asked for a night's shelter.

Ignoring the dog snapping at the skirts of his coat, he squelched through the mud to the win-

100

dow, opened the shutter, and scratched at the pane with a horny fingernail.

"Master!"

Only the whisper of the rain and a peal of barking.

"Master! Good folk, hi! Let us in for the night, for Christ's sake. Eh? From the training camp. How many? Five of us. Well, Christ save you."

"Drive in!" he shouted turning to the gate.

Bodovskov led the horses in. He stumbled over a pig's trough thrown down in the middle of the yard, and cursed vigorously. They led the horses into a shed. Tomilin, his teeth chattering, went into the house, Pyotr and Christonya re- mained in the cart.

At dawn they made ready to set out again. Stepan came out of the house, an old hunch- backed woman hobbling after him. Christonya, who was harnessing the horses, shouted sympa- thetically:

"Ho, granny, what a hump they've given you! Bet you're all right at bowing down in church. You don't have far to bend to reach the floor!"

"If I'm good for bowing down, you're good for hanging dogs on, my lad. There's something for all of us," the old woman smiled severely, surprising Christonya with a full row cf small sound teeth.

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"And what teeth you've got, like a pike! Won't you give me a few? Here am I, a young man, and nothing to chew with."

"What shall I have left for myself, my dear?"

"We'll give you a horse's set, gran. You've got to die one day and they don't look at your teeth in the next world. The saints aren't horse- dealers, you know."

"Keep it up, Christonya," Tomilin grinned as he climbed into the cart.

The old woman followed Stepan into the shed.

"Which one is it?"

"The black," sighed Stepan.

The woman laid her stick on the ground, and with an unexpectedly strong, masculine move- ment raised the horse's damaged leg. She felt the knee-cap carefully with her thin, crooked fingers. The horse set back its ears and reared on to its hindlegs with the pain.

"No, there's no break there, Cossack. Leave him and I'll heal him."

Stepan waved his hand and went to the cart.

"Will you leave him or not?" the old woman watched him narrowly.

"Let him stay," he replied.

"She'll heal him for you. He won't have any legs left when you come back. The vet's a hunchback herself," Christonya said booming with laughter.

XIV

"Oh how I long for him, granny dear! I'm withering away before my own eyes. I can't put tucks into my skirt fast enough. Every time he goes past the house my heart burns. I'd fall to the ground and kiss his footprints. Help me! They're going to marry him off. . . . Help me, dear. . , . Whatever it costs, I'll give you. . . . I'll give you my last shirt, only help me!"

With luminous eyes set in a lacework of fur- rows the old crone Drozdikha looked at Aksi- nya, shaking her head at the bitter story.

"Which lad is it?"

"Pantelei Melekhov's."

"That's the Turk, isn't it?"

"Yes."

The old woman chewed away with her tooth- less gums, and hesitated with her answer.

"Come to me very early tomorrow, child, as soon as day is dawning. We'll go down to the Don, to the water. We'll wash away your yearn- ing. Bring a pinch of salt with you."

Aksinya wrapped herself in her yellow shawl and with drooping shoulders walked out through the gate. Her dark figure was swallowed up in the night, and the only sound was of her sandals scraping dryly on the earth. Then her steps died away. From somewhere at the end

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of the village came sounds of brawling and singing.

At dawn, Aksinya, who had not slept all night, was at Drozdikha's window.

"Granny!"

"Who's there?"

"It's me, Aksinya! Get up!"

They made their way by back lanes down to the river. The abandoned shafts of a wagon lay water-logged near the landing stage. At the water's edge the sand stung their bare feet icily. A damp, chilly mist crept up from the Don.

Drozdikha took Aksinya's hand in her own bony hand and drew her to the water.

"Give me the salt. Cross yourself to the sunrise."

Aksinya crossed herself, staring fiercely at the happy rosiness of the east.

"Take up some water in your palm and drink."

Aksinya drank, wetting the sleeves of her blouse. Like a black spider the old woman straddled the lapping waves, squatted down, and began to whisper.

"Icy streams from the deep. . . . Sorrowing flesh. ... A beast in the heart. . . . Yearning and fever. ... By the holy cross, by the pure and holy Mother. , . . The slave of God, Grigo- ry . . ." reached Aksinya's ears.

104

Drozdikha sprinkled some salt over the damp sand at her feet and some more into the water, then put the rest in Aksinya's bosom.

"Sprinkle some water over your shoulder. Quickly!"

Aksinya did so. She stared moodily and an- grily at Drozdikha's russet cheeks.

"Is that all?"

"Yes, that's all. Go and sleep."

Aksinya ran breathlessly home. The cows were lowing in the yard. Darya, sleepy-eyed and flushed, was driving her cows off to join the village herd. She smiled as she saw Aksi- nya run past.

"Slept well, neighbour?"

"Praise be!"

"And where have you been so early?"

"I had a call to make in the village."

The church bells were ringing for matins. The copper-tongued clapping broke apart in splashes of sound. The village herdsman cracked his stockwhip in the side-street. Aksinya hurriedly drove out the cows, then carried the milk into the porch to strain it. She wiped her hands on her apron, and, lost in thought, poured the milk into the strainer.

A heavy rattle of wheels and snorting of horses in the street. Aksinya set down the pail and went to look out of the front window.

105

Holding his sabre pommel, Stepan was coming through the wicket-gate. The other Cossacks were galloping away towards the village square. Aksinya crumpled her apron in her fin- gers and sat down on the bench. Steps in the porch. . . . Steps in the passage. . . . Steps at the very door. . . .

Stepan stood on the threshold, gaunt and estranged.

"Well?"

Aksinya, all her full, buxom body reeling, went to meet him.

"Beat me," she said slowly, and turned side- ways towards him.

"Well, Aksinya?"

"I shan't hide. I have sinned. Beat me, Ste-

pan

Her head drawn into her shoulders, crouch- ing down and protecting only her belly with her arms, she faced him. Her eyes stared un- blinkingly from their dark sockets, out of her dumb, fear-distorted face. Stepan swayed and walked past her. His unwashed shirt smelled of male sweat and bitter roadside scents. He dropped on to the bed without removing his cap. He lay for a moment, then jerked his shoul- ders, and threw off his sword-belt. His blond usually crisp moustache drooped limply. Not turning her head, Aksinya glanced sidelong at

106

him. Now and then she shuddered. Stepan put his feet on the foot of the bed. The mud slowly oozed from his boots. He stared at the ceiling and toyed with the leather tassel of his sword.

"Breakfast ready?"

"No. . . ."

"Get me something to eat."

He sipped some milk, wetting his moustache. He chewed slowly at the bread. Aksinya stood by the stove. In burning terror she watched her husband's little gristly ears rising and falling as he ate.

Stepan rose from the table and crossed him- self.

"Come on, m'dear, tell me about it," he curt- ly demanded.

With bowed head Aksinya cleared the table. She was silent.

"Tell me how you waited for your husband, how you guarded his honour. Well?"

A terrible blow on the head tore the ground from under Aksinya's feet and flung her to- wards the door. Her back struck against the door-post, and she groaned dully.

Women are weak and soft in the body, but Stepan could send lusty and sturdy guardsmen flying with a well-aimed blow on the head. It may have been fear that lifted Aksinya, or per- haps it was a woman's will to live-she cam^

107

to her senses, lay a moment, resting, then scrambled on to all fours.

Stepan was lighting a cigarette in the middle of the room and did not see her rising to her feet. He threw his tobacco pouch on the table, but Aksinya had already slammed the door be- hind her. He chased after her.

Her head streaming with blood, Aksinya ran towards the fence separating their yard from the Melekhovs'. Stepan overtook her at the fence. His black hand fell like a hawk on her head. His fingers wound into her hair. He tore at it and threw her to the ground, into the cin- ders that Aksinya dumped by the fence every day.

What if a husband does trample his wife with his boots, his hands behind his back? One- armed Alexei Shamil walked past the gate, looked in, blinked and parted his bushy little beard with a smile; after all it was quite under- standable why Stepan should be punishing his lawfully-wedded wife. Shamil was tempted to stop to see whether he would beat her to death or not, but his conscience would not allow him. After all, he wasn't a woman.

Watching Stepan from afar, you v/ould have thought he was doing the Cossack dance. And so Grigory thought, as through the window he saw Stepan jumping up and down. But he

108

looked again, and flew out of the house. Press- ing his heavy fists against his chest, he ran on his toes to the fence. Pyotr pounded after him.

Over the high fence Grigory flew like a bird. He charged Stepan from behind at full speed. Stepan staggered and turning round came at Grigory like a bear.

The Melekhov brothers fought desperately. They pecked at Stepan like carrion-crows at a carcass. Grigory went down several times un- der Stepan's rock-like fist. He was not quite a match for a hardened brawler like Stepan, but the stocky agile Pyotr, although he bent under the blows like a reed before the wind, stood firmly on his feet.

Stepan, one eye flashing (the other was turn- ing the colour of an underripe plum) retreated to the steps.

Christonya happened to come along to bor- row some harness from Pyotr, and he separat- ed them.

"Stop that!" He waved his arms. "Break away, or I'll report it to the ataman."

Pyotr carefully spat blood and half a tooth into his palm, and said hoarsely:

"Come on, Grigory. We'll get him some other time."

"Mind I don't get you!" Stepan threatened from the steps.

t09

"All right, all right!"

"And no 'all right' about it, I'll tear your guts out."

"Is that serious or joking?"

Stepan came swiftly down the steps. Grigory broke forward to meet him, but pushing him towards the gate, Christonya promised:

"Only dare, and I'll give you a good hid- ing."

From that day onward the hatred between the Melekhovs and Stepan Astakhov drew it- self into a tight knot. Grigory Melekhov was fated to untie that knot two years later in East Prussia, near the town of Stolypin.

"Tell Pyotr to harness the mare and his own horse."

Grigory went out into the yard. Pyotr was pushing a wagonette out of the lean-to shed by the bam.

"Dad says you've got to harness the mare and your own horse."

"I know that without him telling me. Tell him to mind his own business," Pyotr respond- ed, fixing the shaft-bow. Pantelei, solemn as a churchwarden at mass, although sweating like a bull, sat finishing his soup. Dunya was watch-

110

ing Grigory alertly, hiding a girlish twinkle somewhere in the shadowy cool of her long up- turned lashes. Ilyinichna, large and portly in her lemon-yellow Sunday shawl, a motherly anxiety lurking at the corners of her lips, said to the old man:

"Stop stuffing yourself, Prokofyevich. One would think you were starving."

"Won't even let me eat. What a nagger you are, woman."

Pyotr's long, wheaten-yellow moustache ap- peared at the door.

"Your carriage is ready, if you please!"

Dunya burst into a laugh, and hid her face in her sleeve. Darya passed through the kitch- en and looked the future bridegroom over with a flutter of her fine lashes.

Ilyinichna's shrewd widow cousin. Auntie Vasilisa, was to go with them as match-maker. She was the first to perch herself on the wagon- ette, twisting and turning her head, laughing, and displaying her crooked black teeth beneath the pucker of her lips.

"Don't show your teeth, Vasilisa," Pantelei warned her. "You'll ruin everything. Those teeth of yours look as if they had been on a night out, there's not one that can stand up straight."

///

"Ah, Cousin, I'm not the bridegroom-to- be. . . ."

"Maybe you're not, but don't laugh all the same. What teeth . . . the colour's enough to make you sick."

Vasilisa took umbrage, but meanwhile Pyotr had opened the gate. Grigory sorted out the good-smelling leather reins and jumped into the driver's seat. Pantelei and Ilyinichna sat side by side at the back just like newlyweds.

"Whip'em up!" shouted Pyotr, letting go the halter.

Grigory bit his lips and lashed the horses. They pulled at the traces and started off with- out warning.

"Look out! You'll catch your wheel!" Darya shrilled, but the wagonette swerved sharply and, bouncing over the roadside hummocks, rattled down the street.

Leaning to one side, Grigory touched up Pyotr's lagging horse with the whip. His fa- ther held his beard in his hand, as though afraid that the wind would snatch it away.

"Whip up the mare!" he cried hoarsely, leaning over Grigory's shoulder. With the lace sleeve of her blouse Ilyinichna wiped away the tear that the wind had brought to her eye, and blinked at Grigory's blue satin shirt flut- tering and billowing on his back. The Cossacks

fl2

along the road stepped aside and stood star- ing after them. The dogs came running out of the yards and yelped under the horses' feet. Their barking was drowned in the rumble of the freshly-shod wheels.

Grigory spared neither whip nor horses, and within ten minutes the village was left behind. Korshunov's large house with its plank fence soon came into view. Grigory pulled on the reins, and the wagonette, breaking off its iron song right in the middle, suddenly drew up at the painted finely-carved gates.

Grigory remained with the horses; Pantelei limped towards the steps. Ilyinichna and Va- silisa sailed after him with rustling skirts. The old man hurried, afraid of losing the courage he had summoned up during the ride. He stumbled over the high threshold, knocked his lame leg, and frowning with pain stamped fu- riously up the well-swept steps.

He and Ilyinichna entered the kitchen almost together. He disliked standing at his wife's side, as she was taller by a good six inches; so he stepped a pace forward, and removing his cap, crossed himself before the blackened icon.

"Good health to you!"

"Praise be!" the master of the house, a stocky, freckled old man replied, rising from the bench.

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"Some guests for you, Miron Grigoryevich," Pantelei continued,

"Guests are always welcome. Marya, give the visitors something to sit on."

His elderly, flat-chested wife wiped non-exist- ent dust from three stools, and pushed them towards the guests. Pantelei sat down on the very edge of one, and mopped his perspiring brow with his handkerchief.

"We've come on business," he began without beating about the bush. At this point Ilyinichna and Vasilisa, pulling up their skirts, also sat down.

"By all means. On what business?" the mas- ter smiled.

Grigory entered, stared around him and greet- ed the Korshunovs. A deep russet spread across Miron's freckled face. Only now did he guess the object of the visit. "Have the horses brought into the yard. Get some hay put down for them," he ordered his wife.

"We've just a little matter to talk over," Pantelei went on, twisting his curly beard and tugging at his ear-ring in his agitation. "You have a girl unmarried, we have a son. Couldn't we come to some arrangement? We'd like to know. Will you give her away now, or not? Mebbe we might become relations?"

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"Who knows?" Miron scratched his bald spot. "I must say, we weren't thinking of giv- ing her in marriage this autumn. We've our hands full with work here, and she's not so very old. She's only just past her eighteenth spring. That's right, isn't it, Marya?"

"That's it."

"She's the very age for marriage," Vasilisa put in. "A girl soon gets too old!" She fidget- ed on her stool, prickled by the besom she had stolen from the porch and thrust under her jacket. Tradition had it that match-makers who stole the girl's besom were never refused.

"We had proposals for our girl way back in early spring. Our girl won't be left en the shelf. We can't grumble to the good God. . . . She can do everything, in the field or at home . . ." Korshunov's wife replied.

"If a good man were to come along, you wouldn't say no," Pantelei broke into the wom- en's chatter.

"It isn't a question of saying no," the master scratched his head. "We can give her away at any time."

Pantelei thought he was going to be refused and got ruffled.

"Well, it's your own business, of course. A man's got his choice, he can ask where he likes. If you're keen on finding some merchant's son,

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or someone of that kind, it's a different matter and we beg your pardon."

The negotiations were on the point of break- ing down. Pantelei began to get agitated, and his face flushed a beetroot red, while the girl's mother clucked like a sitting hen shadowed by a kite. But Vasilisa intervened in the nick of time. She poured out a flood of quiet, soothing words, like salt on a burn, and healed the breach.

"Now, now, my dears! Once a matter like this is raised, it needs to be settled decently and for the happiness of your child. Natalya now-why, you might search far in broad day- light and not find another like her! Work bums in her hands! What a clever young woman! What a housewife! And as for her looks, you see for yourselves, good folk . . ." she opened her plump arms in a generous sweep, turning to Pantelei and the sulky Ilyinichna. "And he's a husband worthy of any. As I look at him my heart beats with yearning, he's so like my late husband, and his family are great workers. Ask anyone in these parts about Prokofyevich. In all the world he's known as an honest man and a kind one. ... In good faith, do we wish evil to our children?"

Her chiding little voice flowed into Pantelei's ears like syrup. He listened and thought admir-

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ingly to himself: "Ah, the smooth-tongued dev- il, how she talks! Just try to keep up with her! Some women can even dumbfound a Cos- sack with their words. . . . And this from a pet- ticoat!" He was lost in admiration of Vasilisa, who was now oozing praise for the girl and her family as far back as the fifth generation.

"Of course, we don't wish evil to our child."

"The point is it's early to give her in marriage," the master said pacifically, with a smile.

"It's not early! Honest to God it's not early," Pantelei rejoined.

"Sooner or later, we have to part with her," the mistress sobbed, half-hypocritically, half in earnest.

"Call your daughter, Miron Grigoryevich, and let's look at her."

"Natalya!"

A girl appeared timidly at the door, her dark fingers fidgeting with the frill of her apron.

"Come in! Come in! She's shy," the mother encouraged her, smiling through her tears.

Grigory looked at her.

Bold grey eyes under a black lace scarf. A small, rosy dimple in the supple cheek. Gri- gory turned his eyes to her hands: they were large and marred with hard work. Under the short green jacket embracing the strong body,

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the small, maidenly firm breasts rose outwards naively and pitifully, and their sharp little nip- ples showed like buttons.

In a moment Grigory's eyes had taken her all in, from the head to the long, beautiful legs. He looked her over as a horse-dealer surveys a mare before purchase, thought: "She'll do," then let his eyes meet hers. The simple, sin- cere, slightly embarrassed gaze seemed to be saying: "Here am I all, as I am. Judge of me as you wish." "Splendid!" Grigory replied with his eyes and smile.

"Well, that's all." Her father waved her out.

As she closed the door behind her, Natalya looked at Grigory without attempting to con- ceal her smile and her curiosity.

"Listen, Pantelei Prokofyevich," Korshunov began, after exchanging glances with his wife. "You talk it over, and we'll talk it over among the family. And then we'll decide whether we'll call it a match or not."

As he went down the steps Pantelei slipped in a last word:

"We'll call again next Sunday."

Korshunov remained deliberately silent, pre- tending he had not heard.

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XVI

Only after he learned of Aksinya's conduct from Tomilin did Stepan, nursing his pain and hatred in his soul, realize that despite his poor sort of life with her he loved her with a dreary, hate- ful love. He had lain in the wagon at night, cov- ered with his greatcoat, his arms locked be- hind his head, and thought of how his wife would greet him on his return home. It was as if he had a scorpion in his breast in place of a heart. As he lay thinking over a thousand details of his revenge his teeth felt as if they were clogged with heavy grains of sand. The fight with Pyotr had spilled his anger. When he arrived home he had been tired out and Ak- sinya had got off lightly.

From the day of his homecoming an unseen spectre dwelt in the Astakhovs' house. Aksinya went about on tiptoe and spoke in whispers, but in her eyes, sprinkled with the ash of fear, lurked a small spark, left from the flame Gri- gory had kindled.

As he watched her, Stepan felt rather than saw this. He tormented himself. At night, when the drove of flies had fallen asleep on the cross- beam, and Aksinya, her lips trembling, had made the bed, he pressed his horny palm over her mouth and beat her. He demanded

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shameless details of her relations with Grigory. Aksinya tossed about and gasped for breath on the hard bed smelling of sheepskin. Tired of torturing her dough-soft body, he passed his hand over her face, seeking for tears. But her cheeks were bumingly dry, and only her jaws worked under his fingers.

"Will you tell?"

"No!"

"I'll kill you!"

"Kill me, kill me, for the love of Christ! This isn't life. . . ."

Grinding his teeth, Stepan twisted the fine skin, all damp with sweat, on her breast. Ak- sinya shuddered and groaned.

"Does it hurt?" Stepan said jocularly.

"Yes, it hurts."

"Do you think it didn't hurt me?"

It would be late before he fell asleep. In his sleep he clenched his fists. Rising on her el- bow, Aksinya would gaze at her husband's face, handsome and changed in slumber, then let her head fall back on the pillow, and whisper to herself.

She hardly saw Grigory now. Once she hap- pened to meet him down by the Don. Grigory had been watering the bullocks and was com- ing up the slope, waving a switch and staring at his feet. Aksinya was going down to the

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Don. She saw him, and felt the yoke of the buckets turn cold in her hands and the hot blood beat at her temples.

Afterwards, when she recalled the meeting, she found it difficult to convince herself that it had really happened. Grigory noticed her when she had all but passed him. At the insistent creak- ing of the buckets he raised his head, his eye- brows quivered and he smiled stupidly. Aksi- nya gazed straight over his head at the green waves of the Don, and beyond at the ridge of the sandy headland. A burning flush wrung tears from her eyes.

"Aksinya!"

She walked on several paces and stood with her head bent as though before a blow. Angri- ly whipping a lagging bullock, he said with- out turning his head:

"When is Stepan going out to cut the rye?"

"He's getting ready now."

"See him off, then go to our sunflower patch and I'll come along after."

Her pails creaking, Aksinya went down to the Don. The foam snaked along the shore, a yellow flare of lace on the green hem of the wave. White sea-gulls were hovering and mew- ing above the river. Over the surface of the water, tiny fish sprinkled in a silver rain. On the other side, beyond the white of the sandy

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headland, the grey tops of ancient poplars rose haughtily and sternly. As Aksinya was draw- ing water she dropped her pail. She pulled up her skirt and waded in up to her knees. The water tickled her calves, and for the first time since Stepan's return she laughed quietly and uncertainly.

She glanced back at Grigory. Still waving his switch, he was slowly climbing the slope. With eyes that were misty with tears Aksinya caressed his strong legs as they confidently trod the ground. His broad sharovari tucked into white woollen stockings were gay with crimson stripes. On his back, over his shoulder- blade, fluttered a strip of freshly-torn shirt, and a triangle of swarthy flesh showed through the hole. With her eyes Aksinya kissed this tiny scrap of the beloved body which once had been hers; and tears fell on her pallid, smiling lips.

She set her pails down on the sand to hook them on to the yoke, and noticed the imprints of Grigory's shoes. She looked stealthily around: no one in sight except some boys bathing from the distant jetty. She squatted down and covered the footprint with her palm; then rose, swung the yoke across her shoulders, and has- tened home, smiling to herself.

Caught in a muslin mistiness, the sun was passing over the village. Beyond the curly flock

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of small white clouds spread a deep, cool, azure pasture. Over the burning iron roofs, over the deserted dusty streets, over the farmyards with their parched, yellow grass, hung a deathly sultriness.

When Aksinya approached the steps Stepan, in a broad-brimmed straw hat, was harnessing the horses to the reaping machine. "Pour some wa- ter into the pitcher."

Aksinya poured a pail of water into the pitcher and burned her fingers on the hot iron rim,

"You ought to have some ice or the water will get warm soon," she said, looking at her husband's perspiring back.

"Go and borrow some from the Melekhovs. No, don't go," Stepan shouted, remember- ing.

Aksinya went to shut the wicket-gate. Ste- pan lowered his eyes and snatched up the knout.

"Where are you going?"

"To shut the gate."

"Come back, you bitch. I told you not to

go."

She hurriedly returned to the steps and tried to hang her yoke on the rails, but her hands were trembling too much. The yoke clattered down the steps.

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Stepan flung his tarpaulin coat over the front seat, and took up the reins,

"Open the gate."

As she did so, she ventured to ask: "When will you be back?"

"By evening. I've agreed to reap with Ani- kushka. Take the food along to him. He'll be coming out to the fields when he's finished at the smith's."

The wheels of the reaper squeaked as they carved into the grey plush of the dust. Aksinya went into the house and stood a moment with her hand pressed to her head, then, flinging a kerchief over her hair, ran down to the river.

"But suppose he comes back? What then?" the thought suddenly burned into her mind. She stopped as though she saw a deep pit at her feet, glanced back, and sped almost at a run along the river bank to the meadows.

Fences. Vegetable patches. A yellow sea of sunflowers outstaring the sun. The pale green of potato plants. There were the Shamil women hoeing their potato patch; bowed backs in pink shifts, hoes rising and falling sharply on the grey earth. Reaching the Melekhovs' garden Aksinya glanced around, then lifted the wattle hasp and opened the gate. She followed the path to the green stockade of sunflower stems. Stooping, she pressed into the midst of them,

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smothering her face with golden pollen, then gathered her skirt and sat down on the weed- woven ground.

She listened: the silence rang in her ears. From somewhere above her came the lonely drone of a bee. For perhaps half an hour she sat thus, torturing herself with doubt. Would he come? She was about to go, and was ad- justing her kerchief, when the gate scraped heavily.

"Aksinya!"

"This way."

"So you've come!" Rustling the leaves, Gri- gory approached and sat down at her side.

"What's that on your cheek?"

Aksinya smeared the fragrant golden dust with her sleeve.

"Must be from the sunflowers."

"There too, under your eye."

She brushed it off.

Their eyes met. And in reply to Grigory's mute inquiry, she broke into weeping.

"I can't stand it. . . . I'm lost, Grisha."

"What does he do?"

Fiercely she tore open the collar of her blouse. The pink, girlishly swelling breasts were covered with cherry-blue bruises.

"Don't you know? He beats me every day. He's sucking my blood. . . . And you're a fine

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one. . . . Soiled me like a dog, and off you go. . . . You're all. . . ." She buttoned her blouse with trembling fingers, and, frightened that he might be offended, glanced at his averted face.

"So you're trying to put the blame on me?" he said slowly, biting a blade of grass.

"And aren't you to blame?" she cried fiercely.

"A dog doesn't worry an unwilling bitch." Aksinya hid her face in her hands. The insult struck home like a hard, calculated blow.

Grigory frowned and glanced sidelong at her. A tear was trickling between her first and middle fingers. A broken dusty sunray gleamed on the transparent drop, and dried its damp trace on her skin.

Grigory could not endure tears. He fidgeted impatiently, ruthlessly brushed a brown ant from his trousers, and glanced again at Aksi- nya. She hadn't moved; but three runnels of tears were now chasing down the back of her hand.

"What's the matter? Have I offended you? Aksinya! Now, wait! Stop, I want to say some- thing."

She tore her hands from her face. "I came here to get advice. What did you do it for? It's bitter enough as it is. And you. . . /'

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Grigory flushed with remorse. "Aksinya . . . I didn't mean to say that, don't take on,"

"I haven't come to fasten myself on you. You needn't be afraid."

At that moment she really believed that she had not come to fasten herself on Grigory, but as she had run along by the Don she had vaguely thought: "I'll talk him round! He won't get married. Who else am I to live with?" Then she had remembered Stepan and had obstinately shaken her head to drive away the trou- blesome thought.

"So our love is over?" Grigory asked, and turned on to his stomach, resting on one elbow and spitting out the rosy petals of the bindweed flower he had been chewing.

"What do you mean-over?" Aksinya took alarm. "What do you mean?" she insisted, try- ing to look into his eyes. There was a gleam of bluish white as he turned them away.

The dry, exhausted earth smelled of dust and sun. The wind rustled among the big green leaves. For a moment the sun was darkened, overcast with a fleeting cloud; and over the steppe, over the village, over Aksinya's moody head, over the pink cup of the bindweed flower, there fell a smoky shadow.

Grigory sighed abruptly and lay on his back, pressing his shoulder-blades into the hot soil.

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"Listen, Aksinya!" he began slowly. "This is rotten somehow. . . . I've been thinking. . . ."

From the vegetable patch came the creaking sound of a cart, and a woman's voice: "Gee up, baldhead!"

To Aksinya the call seemed so close that she dropped flat on the ground. Raising his head, Grigory whispered:

"Take your kerchief off. It shows up. . . . They might see us."

She removed her kerchief. The burning breeze wandering among the sunflowers played with wisps of golden down on her neck. The noise of the cart slowly died away.

"Well, this is what I've been thinking," Gri- gory began again. Then, more animatedly: "What's done can't be undone. Why try to fix the blame? Somehow we've got to go on living."

Aksinya listened anxiously, breaking a stalk in her hand as she waited. She looked into Gri- gory's face and caught the dry and sober glitter of his eyes.

"I've been thinking, let us put an end to . . ."

Aksinya swayed. Her fingers clawed into the tough bindweed as she waited for the end of the sentence. A fire of terror and impatience avidly licked her face, her mouth went dry. She thought- he was about to say, "put an end to Stepan," but

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impatiently he licked his dry lips (they were working fiercely) and said:

". . . put an end to this affair. Eh?"

Aksinya stood up, and pressing through the swaying, yellow heads of the sunflowers, went towards the gate.

"Aksinya!" Grigory called chokingly.

The gate creaked heavily in reply.

XVII

Immediately after the rye was cut, and before it could be carried to the barns, the wheat ripened. In the clayey fields and on the slopes the parched leaves turned yellow and curled up into tubes, and the stalks, having served their pur- pose, withered.

Everybody boasted of the good harvest. The ears were full, the grain heavy and large.

After talking the matter over with Ilyinichna, Pantelei decided that if the Korshunovs agreed to the match, the wedding could not take place before the 6th of August. He had not yet called on the Korshunovs for an answer: first the har- vesting had to be done, and then he had waited for a holiday.

The Melekhovs began reaping on a Friday. Pantelei stripped the wagon and prepared the

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underframe for carrying the sheaves. Pyotr and Grigory went to the fields to reap. Pyotr rode and Grigory walked alongside. Grigory was moody, and the muscles worked between his lower jaw and his cheek-bones. Pyotr knew this to be a sure sign that his brother was seething and ready for a quarrel, but smiling under his wheaten moustache, he set to work to tease Gri- gory.

"God's truth, she told me herself!"

"Well, what if she did?" Grigory muttered, chewing a hair of his moustache.

" 'As I'm on my way back from town,' she says, 'I hear voices in the Melekhovs' sunflower patch.' "

"Pyotr, stop it!"

"Yes, voices. 'And I glance through the fence, . . .' "

Grigory's eyelids quivered. "Will you stop it, or won't you?"

"You're a queer lad! Let me finish!"

"I warn you, Pyotr, we'll be fighting each other in a minute," Grigory threatened, falling behind.

Pyotr raised his eyebrows and turned round in his seat to face Grigory.

" '. . .1 glance through the fence, and there I see them, the two lovers, lying in each other's arms!' she says. 'Who?' I asked, and she an-

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swers: "Why, Aksinya and your brother.' I

say "

Seizing the handle of a pitchfork lying at the back of the reaper, Grigory flung himself at his brother, Pyotr dropped the reins, leapt from his seat, and dodged in front of the horses.

"Pah, the devil!" he exclaimed. "He's gone mad! Pah! Just look at him. . . ."

Baring his teeth like a wolf, Grigory threw the pitchfork at his brother. Pyotr dropped tc his hands and knees, and flying over him the pitchfork buried its points a couple of inches into the earth and stuck upright, whanging and quivering.

Scowling, Pyotr caught at the bridles of the startled horses and swore lustily: "You might have killed me, you swine!"

"Yes, and I would have killed you!"

"You're a fool, a mad devil. You're your father's son all right, a true Turk."

Grigory pulled the pitchfork out of the ground and followed after the reaping ma- chine. Pyotr beckoned to him with his finger.

"Come here! Give me that pitchfork."

He passed the reins into his left hand, and took the pitchfork by the prongs. Then with the handle he struck Grigory across the back.

"Ought to have taken a better swing," he grumbled, keeping his eyes on Grigory, who

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had leaped away. After a moment or two they lit cigarettes, stared into each other's eyes and burst out laughing.

Christonya's wife, who was driving home along another road, had seen Grigory attack his brother. She stood up in her wagon but could not see what happened, for the Mele- khovs' reaping machine and horses were be- tween her and the brothers. Hardly had she reached the village street when she cried to a neighbour:

"Klimovna! Run and tell Prokofyevich the Turk that his boys have been fighting with pitchforks close to the Tatar mound. Grigory jabbed Pyotr in the side with the fork, and then Pyotr gave him. . . . The blood poured out. It was horrible!"

Pyotr had grown hoarse with bawling at the tired horses and was whistling instead, Grigory, his dust-blackened foot resting on the transom, was pitchforking the swathes off the reaper. The horses, bitten raw by the flies, swished their tails and pulled unwillingly. Reaping was in progress all over the steppe. The blades of the machines rattled and groaned, the steppe was dotted with swathes of corn. Mimicking the drivers, the marmots whistled on the hillocks. "Two more lengths, and we'll stop for a smoke!" Pyotr shouted above the noise of the

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machine. Grigory nodded. He could hardly open his parched lips. He gripped his pitchfork clos- er to the prongs in order to get a better lever- age on the heavy swathes, and breathed spas- modically. His dripping chest itched from sweat. From under his hat it poured down his face and stung his eyes like soap. Halting the horses, they had a drink and a smoke.

"There's someone riding a horse pretty hard along the road," Pyotr remarked, shading his eyes with his palm.

Grigory stared, and raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

"It looks like Father."

"You're mad! What could he be riding? We've got both horses here."

"It's him! God's truth, it's Father."

The rider drew nearer, and after a moment he could be seen clearly. "Yes, it's Father!" Pyotr stamped about in anxious surprise.

"Something's happened at home," Grigory gave expression to the thought troubling them both.

When still a hundred yards away, Pantelei reined his horse in. "I'll thrash you, you sons of a bitch!" he yelled, waving his leather whip above his head.

"What on earth...!" Pyotr was completely

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flabbergasted, and thrust half his moustache into his mouth.

"Get on the other side of the reaper! By God, he'll lash us with that knout. While we're getting to the bottom of this business, he'll whip our guts out," Grigory said with a grin, putting the machine between himself and his father.

The foaming horse came over the swathes of corn at a lumbering trot. His feet knocking against the horse's sides (for he was riding bareback), Pantelei shook his whip: "What have you been up to out here, you children of the devil?"

"We've been reaping," Pyotr swept his arms around, nervously eyeing the whip.

"Who's been sticking who with the fork? What have you been fighting about?"

Turning his back on his father, Grigory be- gan counting the clouds in a whisper.

"What fork? Who's been fighting?" Pyotr looked his father up and down.

"Why, she came running to me, the daughter of a hen, shrieking: 'Your boys have stuck each other with pitchforks.' What do you say to that?" Pantelei shook his head excitedly and, dropping the reins, jumped off his horse. "I grabbed a horse and came out at a gallop. Well?"

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"Who told you all this?"

"A woman!"

"She was lying. Father. She must have been asleep in her wagon and dreamed it."

"Women!" Pantelei half-shouted, half-whis- tled, slobbering down his beard. "That whore of Klimov's! My God! I'll whip the bitch!" he danced with rage.

Shaking with silent laughter, Grigory stared at the ground. Pyotr, keeping his eyes fixed on his father, stroked his perspiring brow.

Pantelei danced to his heart's content, and then calmed down. He took the seat of the reap- ing machine and reaped a couple of lengths, then mounted his horse and rode back to the village, leaving his whip forgotten on the ground. Pyotr picked it up and swung it ap- praisingly remarking to his brother:

"We'd have had a bad time, young man. This isn't a whip! It would have maimed you. Brother, It could cut your head clean off."

XVIII

The Korshunovs had the reputation of being the richest family in the village of Tatarsky. They had fourteen pairs of bullocks, as well as horses, mares from the Provalsk stud farm, fifteen cows, innumerable other cattle, and a

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flock of several hundred sheep. Their house with its six rooms and iron roof was as good as that of Mokhov the merchant. The outhouses were roofed with new and handsome tiles. The garden and meadow covered a good three acres. What more could a man want?

So it was rather timidly and with secret re- luctance that Pantelei had paid his first visit to the Korshunovs to propose the match. The Korshunovs could find a much richer husband than Grigory for their daughter. Pantelei knew this and was afraid of a refusal. He did not like to go begging to Korshunov, but Ilyinichna gnawed into him like rust into iron, and at last she overcame the old man's obstinacy. So finally he had visited the Korshunovs, heartily cursing Grigory and Ilyinichna and the whole wide world. Now it was time to go for an an- swer. They were only waiting for Sunday.

Meanwhile, under the painted iron roof of the Korshunovs' house burning dissension had arisen. After the Melekhovs' departure Natalya declared to her mother:

"I like Grigory, I'll never wed another."

"She's found herself a bridegroom, the idiot," her father replied. "The only good thing about him is that he's as black as a gypsy. My little berry, I could find you a much better husband."

"1 don't want any other. Father." The girl

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flushed and began to weep. "You can take me to the convent otherwise."

"He's a woman-chaser, he runs after sol- diers' wives. The whole village knows it," her father played his last card.

"Well, and let him!"

"Well, if it's 'let him' for you, then it's all the same to me."

Natalya, the eldest daughter, was her fa- ther's favourite, and he had not pressed her into a marriage. Proposals for her hand had been plentiful, some coming from distant villages, from rich, old-believer Cossacks. But Natalya had not taken to any of the prospective bride- grooms, and nothing had come of their efforts.

In his heart, Miron liked Grigory for his Cos- sack ardour, his love of farming and hard work. He had picked him out among the crowd of village youths when Grigory had won the first prize in the horse races, but he thought it a little humiliating to give his daughter to a man who was not rich, especially one who had a bad reputation.

"A hard-working lad and good-looking," his wife would whisper to him at night, stroking his freckled, hairy hand. "And Natalya is real- ly gone on him. . . ."

Miron turned his back on his wife's cold, withered breast, and shouted angrily:

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"Get off, you burr! Marry her off to an idiot, what do I care? God has taken away your rea- son. Good-looking!" he mimicked. "Will you reap a harvest off his face?"

"Harvests aren't everything. . . ."

"What does it matter about his looks? If only he had some standing. I must admit it's a bit of a come-down for me to give my daughter to the Turks."

"They're a hard-working family and comfort- ably off," his wife whispered, and moving closer to her husband's broad back, stroked his hand soothingly.

"Hey, the devil! Get away, can't you? Leave me a little room! Why are you stroking me as if I were a cow with calf? And do as you please with Natalya. Marry her to a close-cropped girl if that suits you."

"You should have some feeling for your child," she murmured into his ear. But Miron kicked, pressed himself against the wall and began to snore as though he had fallen asleep.

The Melekhovs' arrival for an answer took the Korshunovs by surprise. They came just after matins. As Ilyinichna set her foot on the step of the wagonette she nearly overturned it, but Pantelei jumped down from the seat like a young cockerel.

13S

"There they are! What devil brought them here today?" Miron groaned, as he looked out of the window.

"Oh dear, here I am just out of the kitchen. Haven't even had a chance to change my every- day skirt."

"You'll do as you are. Nobody's thinking of marrying you, who wants you, you horse mange!"

"You're a born ruffian and you've completely lost your senses in your old age."

"Hold your tongue, woman!"

"You might put on a clean shirt, your back- bone's showing through that one. Aren't you ashamed, you old devil?" his wife scolded, sur- veying her husband as the visitors walked across the yard.

"Don't worry, they'll recognize me in what I'm wearing. They wouldn't refuse if I put on sackcloth."

"Good health!" Pantelei crowed, stumbling over the door-step. He was at once abashed by the loudness of his own voice, and tried to mend matters by crossing himself twice over before the icon.

"Good-day," Miron replied, staring at them grimly.

"God is giving us good weather."

"Praise be, and it's lasting."

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"The people will be a little better off for it."

"That's so."

"Ye-e-es."

"Ahem."

"And so we've come, Miron Grigoryevich, to find out what you have decided among your- selves-whether we are to make a match of it or not."

"Come in, please. Sit down, please," the mistress of the house welcomed them, bowing and sweeping the floor with the edge of her long, pleated skirt.

Ilyinichna sat down, her poplin dress rus- tling. Miron Grigoryevich rested his elbows on the new oilcloth on the table, and was silent. An unpleasant smell of damp rubber and some- thing else came from the oilcloth. Its corners were adorned with pictures of the last tsar and tsaritsa, while in the centre were the august imperial princesses in white hats, and the fly-blown Tsar Nicholas II.

Miron broke the silence.

"Well . . . we've decided to give our daugh- ter. So we shall be kinsmen if we can agree on the dowry."

At this point, from somewhere in the mysterious depths of her glossy, puff-sleeved jacket, as if from behind her back, Ilyinichna drew out a great loaf of white bread and placed

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it on the table. For some unknown reason Pantelei wanted to cross himself, but his gnarled claw-like fingers, though set to the appropriate sign and raised half the requisite distance, suddenly changed their form. Against its master's will the great black thumb slipped unexpectedly between the index and middle fingers, and this shameless bunch of fingers stealthily slipped behind the open edge of his blue overcoat and drev/ out a red-topped bottle.

Blinking excitedly, Pantelei glanced at Miron's freckled face and caressingly slapped the bottom of the bottle with his broad, hoof- like palm.

"And now, dear friends, we'll offer up a prayer to God and drink and talk of our children and the marriage agreement," he pro- posed.

Within an hour the two men were sitting so close together that the tar-black rings of Melek- hov's beard were mingled with the straight red strands of Korshunov's. Pantelei's breath smelt of pickled cucumbers as he argued over the amount of the marriage settlement.

"My dear kinsman," he began in a hoarse whisper. "My dearest kinsman," he repeated, raising his voice to a shout. "Kinsman," he roared, baring his great, blunt teeth. "Your demands are far too heavy for me to stand.

Think, dear kinsman, think how you are trying to rob me. Gaiters and goloshes, one; a fur coat, two; two woollen dresses, three; a silk kerchief, four. Why, it's ruination!"

Pantelei stretched his arms wide till the seams of his tunic split. Miron lowered his head and stared at the oilcloth, flooded with spilt vodka and pickle. He read the inscription on the flowery scroll at the top. "The Russian Royal Family." He brought his eyes lower. "His Imperial Majesty and Sire, Emperor Nicholas. ..." A potato-skin lay over the rest. He stared at the picture. The emperor's features were invisible under an empty vodka bottle. Blinking reverently, Miron attempted to make out the style of the rich uniform with its white belt, but it was thickly covered with slippery cucumber seeds. The empress in a broad- brimmed hat stared up at him complacently, surrounded by the circle of insipid daughters. Miron felt so affronted that tears almost came to his eyes. "You look very proud now, like a goose staring out of a basket, but wait till you have to give your daughters away to be married, then I shall stare, and you'll flutter," he thought.

Pantelei droned on into his ear like a great black bumble-bee. Korshunov raised his tear- fully misty eyes, and listened.

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"In order to make such a gift in exchange for your, and now we can say our, daughter- these gaiters and goloshes and fur coats-we shall have to drive a cow to the market and sell it."

"And do you begrudge it?" Miron struck the table with his fist.

"It isn't that I begrudge it. . . ."

"Do you begrudge it?"

"Wait, kinsman!"

"And if you do begrudge it . . . the devil take you!" Miron swept his perspiring hand over the table and sent the glasses to the floor.

"It will be your daughter who'll work for it."

"Let her! But you must give the proper presents, otherwise there'll be no marriage!"

"A cow sold from the yard!" Pantelei shook his head.

"There has to be a gift. She's got plenty of clothes of her own, it's me you've got to show respect for if you've taken a fancy to her. That's our Cossack custom. That's how it was of old, and we stick to the old ways."

"I will show my respect!"

"Show your respect!"

"I will show it!"

"And let the youngsters work. We've worked, and we live as well as anybody. Let them do the same!"

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The two men's beards wove together colour- fully. They kissed and Pantelei began to eat a juiceless, shrivelled cucumber and wept with mixed, conflicting feelings.

The women were sitting locked in an embrace on the chest, deafening each other with the cackle of their voices. Ilyinichna glowed with a cherry-coloured flush, Marya had turned green from the vodka, like a winter pear nipped by the frost.

"You won't find a child like her anywhere else in the world. She'll be dutiful and obedient, and will never say a word to contradict you," said Marya.

"My dear," Ilyinichna interrupted her, sup- porting her cheek with her left hand and hold- ing her left elbow in her right hand, "so I've told him, I don't know how many times, the son of a bitch. He was getting ready to go out the other Sunday evening, putting some tobacco in his pouch, and I said to him, 'When will you throw her over, you accursed heathen? How long have I got to go on standing this shame in my old age? That Stepan will stop your little game one fine day!' "

Mitka stared into the room through the door crack, and below him Natalya's two younger sisters whispered to each other. Natalya herself was sitting in the farther room,

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wiping her tears on the tight sleeve of her blouse. She was afraid of the new life opening before her, oppressed by the unknown.

In the front room the third bottle of vodka was finished; it was decided to bring the bride and bridegroom together on the first of August.

XIX

The Korshunovs' house hummed like a bee- hive with the bustle of preparations for the wedding. Underclothes were hurriedly sewn for the bride. Natalya sat every evening knit- ting her bridegroom the traditional gloves and scarf of goat's wool. Her mother sat till dusk bent over a sev/ing-machine, helping the hired seamstress. When Mitka returned with his father and the farm-hands from the fields he did not stop to wash or pull off his heavy farm- ing boots, but went to keep Natalya compa- ny. He found great satisfaction in teasing his sister.

"Knitting?" he would ask briefly, nodding at the scarf.

"Yes, what of it?"

"Knit away, you idiot. Instead of being grateful to you, he'll break your jaw."

"What for?"

10—1933 tdfi

"Oh, I know Grisha, he's a friend of mine. He's that sort, he'll bite and not say what it's for."

"Don't tell lies. You think I don't know him."

"But I know him better. We went to school together." Mitka would simulate a deep sigh, look at his scratched hands and bend his long back.

"You'll be lost, Natalya, if you marry him. Better stay an old maid. What do you see in him anyhow? He's ugly enough to scare a horse. Stupid too. Just look at him a bit closer: he's a lousy fellow."

Natalya would grow angry, choke back her tears, and bend a miserable face over the scarf.

"But worst of all he's in love," Mitka went on mercilessly. "What are you grizzling for? You're a fool, Natalya! Throw him over! I'll saddle the horse and ride over and tell them. . . ."

Natalya was rescued from Mitka by Grand- father Grishaka, who would come into the room, groping over the floor with his knobbly stick and stroking his hempen-yellow beard. Poking his stick into Mitka's side, he would ask:

"What are you doing here, you good-for- nothing, huh?"

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"I came to pay a visit. Grandad/' Mitka would reply apologetically.

"To pay a visit? Well, I tell you to get out of here. Quick march!" The old man would lift his stick and approach Mitka on his shaky withered legs.

Grandad Grishaka had walked the earth for sixty-nine years. He had taken part in the Turkish campaign of 1877, had been orderly to General Gurko, but had fallen into dis- favour and been sent back to his regiment. He had been awarded two crosses and the medal of St. George for distinction under fire at Plevna and Rossitz. And now, living with his son, enjoying the universal respect of the vil- lage for his lucidity of mind, his incorrupti- ble honesty and his hospitable ways, he was spending his few remaining years in remi- niscences.

In the summer he sat from dawn till dusk on the earthen bank round the house, his head bowed, drawing his stick over the ground, while vague images and scraps of thought floated through his mind, dull gleams of memory amid the shadows of forgetfulness. The broken peak of his cap threw a dark shade over his closed eyes. The black blood flowed sluggishly through the fingers curved over his stick, through the swollen veins on his hands.

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His blood seemed to grow colder every year. He would complain to Natalya, his favourite grand-daughter:

"These socks are woollen, but they're not warm enough. You'd better crochet a pair for me, child."

"But it's summer. Grandad!" Natalya would laugh, and, seating herself on the bank by his side, would look at his big wrinkled yellow ear.

"What of it, child? It's summer, but my blood is as cold as the earth deep below."

Natalya looked at the network of veins on his hand and her mind flashed back to a day in her childhood. A well was being sunk in their yard, and she-still only a little girl-was taking clay out of the bucket and making heavy dolls, and cows with crumbling horns. She vividly recalled the feel of the lifeless icy earth, lifted up from a depth of thirty-five feet. And now, frightened, she stared at her grandfather's hands, covered with the brown clay-coloured freckles of old age. It seemed to her that dark, clayey earth was flowing in his veins instead of bright scarlet blood.

"Are you afraid to die. Grandad?" Natalya would ask.

The old man twisted his withered neck as though working it free of the stiff collar of his

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uniform coat, and shook his greenish-grey whiskers.

"I wait for death as I would for a dear guest. It's time-I've lived my days, I've served my tsars, and drunk vodka enough in my day," he replied showing his white teeth in a smile, his withered lids quivering.

Natalya would stroke her grandfather's hand and leave him, still bowed, sitting hunched on the bank in his patched grey uni- form, scraping the earth with his stick, while the bright red tabs twinkled gaily and youth- fully in his stiff upright collar.

He took the news of Natalya's approaching marriage with outward calm, but inwardly he grieved and was furious. At table Natalya always gave him the choicest pieces; she washed his linen, mended and knitted his stockings, his sharouari and shirts. And so, when the old man heard the news he gave her harsh, stern looks for a couple of days.

"The Melekhovs are good Cossacks. The late Prokofy, a fine Cossack he was. But what are his grandsons like? Huh?" he asked Miron.

"They're not so bad," Miron replied evasively.

"That Grigory's a disrespectful lad. I was coming from church the other day and he passed me without a word of greeting. The old men don't get much respect these days. , . ."

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"He's a nice lad," Lukinichna put in a word for her future son-in-law.

"Nice, you say? Oh well, so long as Nata- lya likes him. . . ."

He took almost no part in the negotiations; he came out of the kitchen and sat down at the table for a moment or two, drank a glass of vodka, and then, feeling himself getting drunk, went off again. For two days he silently watched the happy Natalya, then seemed to soften in his attitude.

"Natalya!" he called to her. "Well, my little grand-daughter, so you're very happy, huh?"

"I don't rightly know myself. Grandad," Natalya confided.

"Well, well! Christ be with you. God grant. . . ." And then he bitterly upbraided her. "Couldn't you have waited till I was dead, you little brat . . . my life will be bitter without you."

Mitka was listening to their talk, and he remarked :

"You're likely to live another hundred years. Grandfather. Is she to wait all that time? You're a fine one!"

The old man turned almost purple with anger. He rapped on the ground with his stick and feet:

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"Clear off, you son of a bitch! Clear off, I say! You devil's demon! Who told you to listen?"

Mitka ran out into the yard laughing.

Old Grishaka raged for a long time after, cursing Mitka; his legs in their short woollen stockings trembled at the knees.

Natalya's two little sisters-Marisha, a girl of twelve, and Grippa, an eight-year-old imp- waited impatiently for the wedding.

The farm-hands employed by Korshunov were also quite pleased. They expected a lavish treat from their master and several days off.

One of them-tall as a crane-a Ukrainian with the outlandish name of Het-Baba-went on a drinking spree about once every six months. He would drink away all his clothes as well as his wages. Although he had felt the familiar urge for a long time already, he had forced himself to delay the start of the drinking bout until the wedding.

The second farm-hand-a thin swarthy Cos- sack, named Mikhei, had been with the Kor- shunovs only a short time. Ruined by a fire, he had become a labourer. Having struck up a friendship with Het-Baba he gradually took to drink. He was a great lover of horses. When he was drunk he would weep, his angular, browless face smeared with tears, and pester Miron Grigoryevich:

I5t

"Master! Dear master! When you give your daughter away let me drive her horses. I'll show them some driving! I'll drive her through fire, and not a single hair on the horses will be burned. I myself once had horses. Oh. . . ."

The grim, unsociable Het-Baba for some reason or other became attached to Mikhei and constantly tormented him with the same old joke about the name of his native village. He would always laugh hoarsely at his own stale joke and slap his long, dry shanks. Mikhei would look disgustedly at Het-Baba's clean-shaven face and quivering Adam's apple, and curse him.

The wedding was to take place on the first day after Lent. Three weeks remained. On the Day of the Assumption Grigory came to visit his future bride. He sat at the round table in the best room, eating sunflower seeds and nuts with the bride's girl-friends, then drove away again. Natalya saw him off. In the lean-to shed, where his horse was standing saddled with a smart new saddle, she slipped her hand into her breast, and blushing, gazing at him with eyes that expressed her love, she thrust a soft little bundle, warm from her breast, into his hand. As he took the gift Grigory dazzled her with the whiteness of his wolfish teeth, and asked:

i52

"What is it?"

"You'll see. . . . I've embroidered you a tobacco pouch."

Grigory irresolutely drew her towards him, wanting to kiss her; but she held him off for- cibly with her hands against his chest, leaned away from him, and turned her eyes apprehen- sively towards the window of the house.

"They'll see us!"

"Let them!"

"I'm ashamed to!"

"That's only at first," Grigory explained.

Natalya held the reins while he mounted. Frowning, Grigory caught the stirrup with his foot, seated himself comfortably in the saddle and rode out of the yard. She opened the gate, and stood gazing after him. Grigory leaned over to the left in his saddle, Kalmyk fashion, waving his whip with a flourish.

"Eleven more days," Natalya thought to herself and sighed and smiled.

The green, sharp-leafed wheat breaks through the ground and grows; within a few weeks a rook can fly into its midst and not be seen. The com sucks the juices from the earth and comes to ear, then it flowers and the ears are pow-

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dered with a golden dust; the grain swells with sweet and scented milk. The farmer goes out into the steppe and stands gazing and is filled with joy. But then a herd of cattle stray into the corn; they tread the laden grain into the glebe. Round patches of crushed wheat are left where the cattle have lain; the farmer grows bitter and desperate at the sight.

So with Aksinya. Grigory had trampled her feelings that had ripened to golden flower with his heavy, raw-hide sandals. He had sullied them, burned them to ash-and that was all.

As she came back from the Melekhovs' sunflower patch Aksinya's spirit grew empty and wild, like a deserted farmyard overgrown with goose-grass and scrub. She walked along chewing the ends of her kerchief, and a cry swelled her throat. She entered the house and fell to the floor, choking with tears, with tor- ment, with the dreary emptiness that lashed through her head. But then it passed. The pierc- ing anguish was drawn down and exhausted at the bottom of her heart.

The grain trampled by the cattle stands again. With the dew and the sun the trodden stalks arise; at first, bowed like a man under a too heavy burden, then erect, lifting their heads; and the day is day again and the wind still blows.

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At night, as she passionately caressed her husband, Aksinya thought of another, and hatred was mingled with a great love in her heart. The woman was planning fresh dishonour, fresh shame; she had made up her mind to take Grigory from the happy Natalya, who had known neither the bitterness nor the joy of love. She lay thinking over her plans at night, her dry eyes blinking in the darkness. Stepan's handsome head lay heavily on her right arm, his long wavy forelock awry. He breathed through his half-opened lips, his black, toil-roughened fingers caressing his wife's breast in forgetfulness. Aksinya lay thinking and planning, but only one thing could she resolve firmly: she would take Grigory from everybody else, she would flood him with love, she would possess him as before she had possessed him. But at the bottom of her heart a deep pain, like the sting left by a bee, re- mained.

During the day Aksinya drowned her thoughts in household duties and cares. She met Grigory occasionally, and would turn pale, proudly carrying her beautiful body that yearned so much for him, gazing shamelessly, challengingly into the black wilderness of his eyes.

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After each meeting Grigory was seized with yearning for her. He grew angry without cause, and poured out his wrath on Dunya and his mother, but most frequently he took his sabre, went out into the backyard and slashed away at stout twigs planted in the ground until he was bathed in perspiration. It made Pantelei curse :

"The lousy devil, he's chopped up enough for a couple of fences. Go into the woods, if you must chop away. You wait, my lad! When you're called up for service, you'll have the chance to do it. That'll soon take it out of you!"

XXI

Four gaily-decorated two-horse wagonettes were to drive to fetch the bride. A crowd of village folk in holiday attire thronged around them as they stood in the Melekhovs' yard.

Pyotr was the best man. He was dressed in a black frock-coat and blue striped trousers, his left arm was bound with two white ker- chiefs, and he wore a fixed scornful smile under his wheaten whiskers.

"Don't be shy, Grigory!" he said to his brother. "Hold your head up like a young cock, don't get sulky!"

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Darya, as slender and supple as a willow branch, attired in a woollen, raspberry-coloured skirt, twitched the pencilled arches of her brows and gave Pyotr a nudge:

"Tell Father it's time we were off. They're waiting for us."

"Take your places," Pyotr ordered, after a whispered consultation with his father. "On my wagon, five and the bridegroom." They climbed into the wagonettes. Flushed and triumphant, Ilyinichna opened the gates. The four wagonettes chased after one another along the street.

Pyotr sat at Grigory's side. Opposite them Darya waved a lace handkerchief. The ruts and bumps interi*upted the voices that had struck up a song. The crimson bands of the Cossack caps, the blue and black uniforms and frock-coats, the sleeves bound with white kerchiefs, the scattered rainbow of the women's kerchiefs, the gay skirts, and muslin trains of dust behind each wagonette made a colourful picture.

Grigory's second cousin, Anikei, drove the bridegroom's wagonette. Leaning forward over the tails of the horses, almost falling off his seat, he cracked his whip and whistled, and the perspiring horses pulled harder at the tautened traces.

757

"Give it to 'em/' roared Pyotr.

The moustacheless hawk-like Anikei winked at Grigory, wrinkled his hairless womanish face into a thin smile, gave a whistle and belaboured the horses with his whip.

"Make way!" Ilya Ozhogin, the bride- groom's uncle on his mother's side, roared as he tried to overtake them with the second wagonette. Grigory recognized Dunya's sun- burnt face behind his uncle's back.

"No, you don't!" Anikei shouted, jumping to his feet and emitting a piercing whistle. He whipped up the horses into a frenzied gallop. "You'll fall!" Darya exclaimed, encircling Anikei's patent leather top-boots with her arms. "Hold on!" Uncle Ilya called at their side, but his voice was lost in the continual groan and rattle of the wheels.

The two other wagonettes, tightly packed with whooping men and women, drove along side by side. The horses with red, blue, and pink cloths on their backs, paper flowers and ribbons woven into their manes and forelocks, and bells on their harness, tore over the bumpy road, scattering flakes of soapy foam, and the cloths on their wet, lathered backs flapped and billowed in the wind.

At the Korshunovs' gate a horde of village lads was on the look-out for the cavalcade.

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They saw the dust rising from the road and ran into the yard bawling:

"They're coming!" "Here they are!" They surrounded Het-Baba who had just come out.

"Why the crowd? Get away, you little devils. What a noise you make! I can't hear myself speak."

The children jumped around Het-Baba's wide baggy sharouari, shouting and poking fun at the Ukrainian. Het-Baba, his head bent as if he were peeping into a deep well, looked down at the frenzied children and scratched his firm long belly with an indulgent smile.

The wagonettes came rattling up to the gate. Pyotr led Grigory to the steps, the others followed behind.

The door from the porch to the kitchen was shut fast. Pyotr knocked.

"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!" he intoned.

"Amen!" came from the other side of the door.

Pyotr repeated the words and the knock three times, each time receiving the same answer.

"May we come in?"

"You are welcome."

The door was thrown open. The parents' re- presentative, Natalya's godmother, a good-

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looking widow, greeted Pyotr with a curtsey and a thin raspberry-lipped smile. "Take this for your health's sake, best man!" she said, handing him a glass of cloudy, over-fresh kvass. Pyotr smoothed his whiskers, drank it down, and spluttered amid a general restrained laugh: "Well, you've made me welcome! You wait, my blackberry, wait till I treat you. I'll make you pay for it."

While the best man and Natalya's godmother were competing in a duel of wits, the relatives of the bridegroom were brought three glasses of vodka each, in accordance with the marriage agreement.

Natalya, already attired in her wedding dress and veil, sat at the table, guarded by her two sisters. Marishka held a rolling pin in her outstretched hand, and Grippa, a challenging fervour in her eyes, brandished a mixing spoon. Sweating, and slightly tipsy with vodka, Pyotr bowed and offered them a fifty-kopeck piece in his glass. But Marishka struck the table with her rolling pin,

"Not enough! We shan't sell the bride!"

Once more Pyotr offered them some small silver in the glass:

"We won't let you have her!" the sisters raged, elbowing the downcast Natalya.

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"Here, what's all this? We've already paid and overpaid."

"Give way, girls!" Miron ordered, and smilingly pressed towards the table. His ruddy hair, smeared with melted butter, smelt of sweat and dung. At this signal the bride's rel- atives and friends seated round the table stood up and made room for the newcomers.

Pyotr thrust the end of a handkerchief into Grigory's hand, jumped on to a bench, and led him to the bride, who had seated herself under the icons. Natalya took the other end of the handkerchief in her moist and agitated hand.

There was a champing of teeth around the table. The guests tore the boiled chicken apart with their hands, afterwards wiping them on their hair. As Anikei chewed at a breast bone the yellow fat ran down his bare chin on to his collar.

Feeling sorry for himself, Grigory stared first at his own and Natalya's spoons tied together in the handkerchief, then at the noo- dles steaming in a bowl. He badly wanted to eat; his stomach was rolling over with hunger.

Dar^'^a was helping herself. Uncle Ilya who sat next to her, nibbling at a rib of mutton with his large teeth, was evidently whispering improprieties to her, for she screwed up her eyes and lifted her brows, blushing and giggling.

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The guests ate long and heartily. The reek of resinous masculine sweat mingled with the more caustic and spicy scent of the women. The skirts, frock-coats and shawls that had for long been packed away in chests, smelled of moth- balls and something else, heavy and cloying, like an old woman's much-used honey pot.

Grigory glanced sidelong at Natalya. And for the first time he noticed that her upper lip was swollen, and hung like the peak of a cap over her underlip. He also noticed that on the right cheek, below the cheek-bone, was a brown mole, and that two golden hairs were growing out of the mole; and for some reason this irritated him. He recalled Aksinya's slender neck with its curly, fluffy locks, and he had the feeling that someone had dropped a handful of prickly hay down his sweating back. He bristled, and with a suppressed feeling of wretchedness watched the others munching, chewing and smacking their lips.

When they got up from the table someone, breathing stewed fruit-juice and the sour scent of wheaten bread over him, poured a handful of millet down the leg of his boot in order to protect him against the evil eye. All the way back to his own house the millet hurt his feet; the tight collar band of his shirt

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choked him, and under the depressing influence of the marriage rites, in a cold, desperate fury Grigory muttered curses to himself.

XXII

By the time they reached the Melekhovs' yard, the horses, though they had rested a bit at the Korshunovs, were exhausted. Their harnesses were spattered with foam. But the drunken drivers urged them on ruthlessly.

The procession was met by the old Mele- khovs. Pantelei, his silver-inlaid black beard glistening, held the icon, and his wife stood at his side, her thin lips set stonily.

Amid a shower of hops and wheat grain Grigory and Natalya approached them to receive their blessing. As he blessed them a tear ran down Pantelei's face, and he frowned and fidgeted, annoyed that anyone should be witness of his frailty.

The bride and bridegroom went into the house. Darya, red from the vodka, the ride, and the sun, dashed out on to the steps and pounced on Dunya.

"Where's Pyotr?"

"I haven't seen him!"

"He ought to go for the priest, and he's nowhere to be found, curse him!"

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She found Pyotr, who had drunk more vodka than was good for him, lying in a cart, groan- ing. She swooped on him like a kite. "You've had too much, you heathen! Get up and run for the priest!"

"Clear off! I don't know you. Who are you ordering about?" Pyotr protested, scrabbling about in the straw and fowls' dung.

With tears in her eyes Darya thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his lolling tongue, and helped him to ease himself. Then she poured a pitcher of cold well-water over his head, wiped him dry with the horse blanket and took him to the priest.

Less than an hour later Grigory was stand- ing at Natalya's side in the church, clutching a wax candle in his hand, his eyes wandering over the wall of whispering people round him, and repeating to himself four words that would not leave his head: "You've had your fling!" Behind him the puffy-faced Pyotr coughed. Somewhere in the crowd he saw Dunya's eyes twinkling; he thought he recognized other faces. He heard the dissonant chorus of voices and the droning responses of the deacon. He was fettered with apathy. He followed Father Vissarion round the lectern, treading on the heels of the priest's battered boots; he halted when Pyotr gave a gentle tug at his frock-coat.

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He stared at the flickering little tongues of candleflame, and struggled with the sleepy tor- por which had taken possession of him.

"Exchange rings!" said Father Vissarion, giving Grigory a lukewarm smile.

They obeyed. "Will it be over soon?" Grigory mutely asked, as he caught Pyotr's glance. And the corners of Pyotr's lips twitched, stifling a smile. "Soon now." Then Grigory kissed his wife's moist, insipid lips three times, the church began to smell foully of extinguished candles, and the crowd pressed towards the door.

Holding Natalya's large, rough hand in his, Grigory went out into the porch. Someone clapped his hat on his head. A warm breeze from the east brought the scent of wormwood to his nostrils. The cool of evening came from the steppe. Lightning flickered beyond the Don, rain was coming; outside the white church fence, above the hum of voices he heard the gentle inviting tinkle of the bells on the restive horses.

xxni

The Korshunovs did not arrive at the Melekhovs' house until after the bride and bridegroom had gone to the church. Several times Pantelei went to the gate to see whether

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they were coming, but the grey road, lined with a growth of prickly thorns, was completely deserted. He shifted his eyes towards the Don. The forest was turning a golden yellow. The ripened reeds bent wearily over the Don-side marshes. Blending with the dusk, the sad blue drowsiness of early autumn enwrapped the village, the Don, the chalky ridge of hills, the forest lurking in a lilac mist beyond the river, and the steppe. At the cross-roads the sharp outline of the wayside cross was silhouetted against the sky.

Pantelei's ears caught the scarcely audible sound of wheels and the yapping of dogs. Two wagonettes turned out of the square into the street. In the first sat Miron with his wife at his side; opposite them was Grandad Grishaka in a new uniform, wearing his Cross of St. George and his medals. Mitka drove, sit- ting carelessly on the box, and not troubling to show the foaming horses his whip. In the second wagonette, Mikhei, leaning backward, tugged at the reins, trying to reduce the horses' gallop to a trot. His angular browless face was scarlet, sweat was streaming down from under the broken peak of his cap.

Pantelei threw open the gate, and the two wagonettes drove into the yard. Ilyinichna

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sailed down from the porch, the hem of her dress trailing in the dust.

"Welcome, dear friends! Do our poor house the honour of entering." She bent her corpulent waist in a bow.

His head on one side, Pantelei flung open his arms and welcomed them: "We humbly invite you to come in!"

He called for the horses to be unharnessed and went up to the father of his daughter-in- law. Miron brushed his sharovari with his hand to get the dust off them. Old Grishaka, shaken up by the wild ride, lagged behind.

"Come in, come in, my dears!" Ilyinichna insisted.

"Thank you, we're just coming."

"We've been waiting for you, do come in. I'll bring a besom for you to brush your uni- form with. There's so much dust about at this time of the year, it's hard to breathe."

"Yes, indeed, it's very dry. . . , That's what makes the dust. . . . Don't trouble yourself, my dear, I'll just. . . ." Bowing to his slow-witted hostess, old Grishaka backed away towards the bam and took refuge behind a painted winnowing machine.

"Can't you leave the old man alone, you fool!" Pantelei snorted, intercepting his wife on the steps. "He wants to do something,

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and you keep. . . . Where are your brains, woman!"

"How should I know?" Ilyinichna protested blushing. "You ought to guess. Never mind, take the guests to table."

The bride's family were taken into the best room, where a crowd of already half-intoxicat- ed guests was sitting round the table. Soon after their arrival the newly-married couple returned from the church. As they entered Pantelei filled the glasses from a half-gallon bottle, tears standing in his eyes.

"Well, Miron Grigoryevich, here's to our children! May their life be filled with good, as ours has been. May they live happily, and enjoy the best of health."

They poured Grandfather Grishaka a large glass of vodka, and succeeded in sending half of it into his beard-mildewed mouth and half down the stiff collar of his uniform. Glasses were clinked together. The company drank and drank. The hubbub was like the noise of a market. A distant relation of the Korshunovs, Nikifor Koloveidin, who was sitting at the far end of the table, raised his glass and roared the traditional words:

"It's bitter!"

"Bitter! Bitter!" the guests seated around the table clamoured after him.

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"Oh, bitter!" came the response from the crowded kitchen.

Scowling, Grigory kissed his wife's insipid lips and sent a hunted glance round the room. A crimson fever of faces. Coarse, drunkenly muddy glances and smiles. Mouths chewing greedily, slobbering on the embroidered tablecloth. A howl of voices.

Koloveidin opened wide his gap-toothed mouth.

"It's bitter!" the long-service badges on the sleeve of his blue Guards uniform wrinkled as he raised his glass.

"Bitter!" the cry was taken up once more.

Grigory stared with hatred into Koloveidin's mouth and noticed the livid tongue between his teeth as he cried, "Bitter!"

"Kiss, little chicks!" Pyotr spluttered, twitch- ing his vodka-soaked moustache.

In the kitchen Darya, flushed and intoxicated, began a song. It was taken up by the others and passed into the best room. The voices blended, but above all the rest rose Christonya's rumble, shaking the window-panes.

The song ended and eating was resumed.

"Here's to a good time, good people...!"

"Try this mutton!"

"Take your paw away, my husband's look- ing!"

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"Bitter! Bitter!"

"No, I don't want any of your mutton. May- be I like sterlet better. Yes, I do . . . it's juicy.''

"Cousin Proshka, let's have another one."

"Ah, that warms the cockles of your heart. . . ."

In the kitchen the floor groaned and shook, heels clattered, and a glass fell to the floor, but the crash was lost in the general uproar. Across the heads of those sitting at the table Grigory glanced into the kitchen. The women were dancing now, to the accompaniment of shouts and whistles. They shook their ample bottoms (there was not a thin one there, for each was wearing five or six skirts), waved lace handkerchiefs, and worked their elbows in the dance.

The grating notes of the accordion sounded imperatively. The player began the tune of the Cossack dance. A shout went up:

"A circle! Form a circle!"

"Squeeze up a bit!" Pyotr begged, pushing the perspiring women aside.

Grigory roused himself and winked at Natalya:

"Pyotr's going to dance the 'Cossack'! You watch him!"

"Who with?"

"Don't you see? With your mother."

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Marya Lukinichna set her arms akimbo, her handkerchief in her left hand. Pyotr went up to her with mincing steps, cut a fine caper and retreated to his place. Lukinichna picked up her skirt as though about to step over a puddle, picked out the rhythm with her toe, and danced amid a roar of approbation, kicking out her legs like a man.

The accordion player rushed out a volley of low notes that swept Pyotr into action, and with a shout he dropped to a squatting position and danced round, smacking the palms of his hands against the legs of his boots and biting the tip of his moustache in the corner of his mouth. He swung his feet in and out at great speed; his damp forelock tossed wildly on his head, but could not keep up with his feet.

Grigory's view was blocked by the crowd at the door. He heard only the shouts of the drunken guests and the drumming of iron- shod heels, like the crackle of a burning pine- board.

Then Miron danced with Ilyinichna; he stepped out seriously and with his accustomed businesslike air. Pantelei stood on a stool to watch them, dangling his lame leg and click- ing his tongue. Instead of his legs his lips and ear-ring danced.

The dance was taken up by experts and by

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others who could not even bend a leg proper- ly. All of them were shouted at:

"Go it!"

"Smaller steps! Oh, you. . . \"

"His legs are light enough, but his bottom gets in his way."

"Oh, get on with it!"

"Our side's winning."

"Come on!"

"Tired, are you? I'll crack a bottle over your head if you don't dance."

Grandfather Grishaka was completely drunk. He embraced the bony back of his neighbour on the bench, and buzzed like a mosquito in his ear:

"What year did you first see service?"

His neighbour, an old man bent like an ancient oak, replied:

"1839, my son!"

"When?" Grishaka stuck out his ear.

"1839, I told you."

"What's your name? What regiment did you serve in?"

"Maxim Bogatiryov. I was corporal in Baklanov's regiment."

"Are you related to the Melekhovs?"

"What?"

"I asked, are you related?"

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"Uh-huh! I'm the bridegroom's grandfather on his mother's side."

"In Baklanov's regiment, did you say?"

The old man, vainly munching a piece of bread with his toothless gums, gazed at Grishaka with faded eyes, and nodded.

"So you must have been through the Caucasian campaign?"

"I served under Baklanov himself, may he rest in heaven, helped to conquer the Caucasus. We had some rare Cossacks in our regiment. They were as tall as the guards, though they weren't so straight. Great, long-armed, broad- shouldered fellows, not like the ones nowadays. That's the men we had, my son! His excellency the late general was good enough to give me the cat for stealing a carpet. . . ."

"And I was in the Turkish campaign. Eh? Yes, I was there."

Old Grishaka puffed out his sunken chest jingling with medals.

"We took a village at dawn, and at mid-day the bugler sounded the alarm."

"We were fighting around Rossitz and our regiment, the Twelfth Don Cossack, was engaged with the janissaries."

"The bugler sounded that alarm. . . ."

"Yes," Grishaka went on, beginning to get annoyed and angrily waving his hand. "The

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Turkish janissaries serve their tsar and wear white sacks on their heads. Huh? White sacks on their heads."

", . . The bugler sounded the alarm, and I said to my comrade: 'We'll have to retreat, Timofei, but first we'll have that carpet off the wall.' "

"I have been decorated with two Georges, awarded for heroism under fire. I took a Turkish major alive." Grandfather Grishaka began to weep and to bang his withered fist on his neighbour's spine. But the latter, dipping a piece of chicken in the cherry jelly, lifeless- ly stared at the soiled tablecloth and mumbled:

"And just listen to what sin the evil spirit led me into, my son!" The old man's eyes stared fixedly at the white creases of the tablecloth as if they saw not a tablecloth soaked in vodka and soup but the dazzling snowy folds of the Caucasian mountains. "I'd never before taken anything that wasn't mine, but now I happened to see that carpet, and I thought, 'That would make a good horsecloth.' "

"I've seen those parts myself. I've been in lands across the sea as well," Grishaka tried to look his neighbour in the eyes, but the deep sockets were overgrown with shaggy thickets of eyebrows and beard. So he resorted to craft. He wanted to win his neighbour's atten-

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tion for the climax of his story, and he plunged into the middle of it without any preliminaries: "And the captain gives the order: 'In troop columns at the gallop! Forward!'"

But the old Baklanov regiment Cossack threw back his head like a charger at the sound of the trumpet and, dropping his fist on the table, whispered:

"Lances at the ready! Draw sabres, Bakla- nov's men!" His voice suddenly grew stronger, his faded eyes glittered and blazed. "Baklanov's boys!" he roared, opening wide his toothless yellow jaws. "Into attack-forward!"

And he gazed at Grishaka with a youthful and intelligent look, and let the tears trickling over his beard fall unwiped.

Grishaka also grew excited:

"He gave us this command, and waved his sword. We galloped forward, and the janis- saries were drawn up like this," he drew a square on the tablecloth with a shaky finger, "and firing at us. Twice we charged them. Each time they beat us back. Whenever we tried, their cavalry came out of a little wood on their flank. So our troop commander gave the order and we turned and went at them. We smashed them. Rode them down. What cavalry in the world can stand up against Cossacks? They fled into the wood. I saw

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their officer just in front of me, riding on a bay. A good-looking officer, black whiskers he had. He looked back at me and drew his pistol. Bang! But he missed me. I spurred my horse and caught up with him. I was going to cut him down, but then I thought better of it. After all, he was a man too. So I grabbed him round the waist with my right arm, and he flew out of the saddle. He bit my arm, but I took him all the same. . . ."

Grishaka glanced triumphantly at his neigh- bour, but the old man's great angular head had fallen on to his chest, and he was snoring contentedly.

PART TWO

ergei Platonovich Mokhov could trace his ancestry a long way back.

During the reign of Peter the First a state barge had been travelling down the Don to Azov with a cargo of biscuit and gunpowder. The Cossacks of the little rebel town of Chigo- naki, nestling on the bank of the upper Don, fell on the barge by night, destroyed the sleepy guards, pillaged the biscuit and gunpowder and sank the vessel.

The tsar ordered out soldiers from Voronezh, and they burned down the town of Chigonaki, ruthlessly put the guilty Cossacks to the sword, and hanged forty of them on a floating gallows, which, as warning to the unruly vil- lages, was sent sailing down the Don.

12—1933 m

Some ten years later the spot where the hearths of the Chigonaki huts had smoked began again to be inhabited by Cossack set- tlers and those who had survived the sacking. The stanitsa grew up again with defensive ramparts round it. At the same time, a secret agent of the tsar, a Russian peasant named Mokhov, was sent to Chigonaki from Voronezh. He traded in knife-hafts, tobacco, flints, and the other odds and ends necessary to the Cos- sacks' everyday life. He bought up and resold stolen goods, and twice a year journeyed to Voronezh, ostensibly to replenish his stocks, but in reality to report to the authorities that the stanitsa was for the time being quiet and the Cossacks were not contemplating any fresh mischief.

It was from this Russian peasant Nikita Mokhov that the merchant family of Mokhovs was descended. They took deep root in the Cossack earth; they multiplied and grew into the district like sturdy roadside weeds, rev- erently preserving the half-rotten credentials given to their ancestor by the governor of Voronezh. The credentials might have been preserved until this day had they not been burned in their wooden box behind the icon during a great fire which occurred in the life- time of Sergei Mokhov's grandfather. This

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Mokhov had already ruined himself once by card-playing, but was getting on to his feet again when the fire engulfed everything. After burying his paralytic father, Sergei had to begin afresh, starting by buying bristles and feathers. For five years he lived miserably, swindling and squeezing the Cossacks of the district out of every kopeck, then he suddenly jumped from "peddler Seryozhka" to "Sergei Platonovich," opened a little drapery shop, married the daughter of a half-demented priest, from whom he got a sizeable dowry, and set up as a linen draper. Sergei Platonovich began to trade in textiles at just the right moment. On the instructions of the army authorities, about this time the Cossacks were migrating in entire villages from the left bank of the Don, where the ground was unproductive and sandy, to the right bank. Buildings sprang up round the young stanitsa of Krasnokutskaya; new villages hatched out on the edge of former estates, on the banks of the rivers Chir, Chomaya and Frolovka, and over valleys and ravines in the steppe, side by side with Ukrain- ian settlements. And instead of having to journey fifty versts or more for goods they found Sergei Mokhov's shop, its fresh deal shelves packed with attractive commodities, right on the spot. Sergei flung his business

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wide, like a full-size accordion, and traded in everything requisite to simple village life- hides, salt, kerosene, haberdashery. He even began to supply agricultural machinery. Reap- ers, seeders, ploughs, winnowers from the Aksaisk factory were drawn up in neat order outside the shop, whose cool green shutters kept it well protected from the summer's heat. It is hard to count the money in another's purse, but it seems that the quick-witted Sergei's trading yielded him considerable profit, for within three years he had opened a grain ele- vator, and the following year after the death of his first wife he began the construction of a steam flour-mill.

He squeezed Tatarsky and the neighbouring villages tightly in his swarthy fist with its sparse covering of glossy black hairs. There was not a home that was not in debt to Sergei Mokhov: a green slip with an orange border saying that a reaper had been given on credit to so-and-so, a bride's outfit for the daughter to someone else (time to marry the girl off and the Paramonovo elevator was cutting its prices on wheat-"Put it on my account, Mokhov"), and so it went on. Nine hands were employed at the mill, seven in the shop, and four la- bourers: altogether twenty mouths dependent on the merchant's pleasure for their daily bread.

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He had two children by his first wife: the girl Liza and a boy two years younger, the sluggish, scrofulous Vladimir. His second wife, Anna, a dry, sharp-nosed creature, was childless. All her belated mother-love and accumulated spleen (she had not married until the age of thirty- four) were poured out on the children. Her nerv- ous temperament had a bad influence on them, and their father paid them no more attention than he gave his stable-hand or cook. His business activities occupied all his time. The children grew up uncontrolled. His insen- sitive wife made no attempt to penetrate into the secrets of the child mind, the affairs of her large household took too much of her time, and the brother and sister grew up alien to each other, different in character, as though they were not related. Vladimir was sullen, sluggish, with a sly look and unchildish seriousness. Liza, who lived in the society of the maid and the cook (the latter a dissolute, much too ex- perienced woman), early saw the seamy side of life. The women aroused an unhealthy curi- osity in her, and while still an angular and bash- ful adolescent, left to her own devices, she had grown as wild as the true-love flower in the forest.

The unhurrying years flowed by. The old girew older and the young grew green of leaf,

IB!

One evening Sergei Platonovich glanced at his daughter across the tea-table, and was startled, Liza, who had just left high school, had grown into a slender good-looking girl. He looked at her and the saucer filled with amber- coloured tea trembled in his hand. How like her mother she was! God, her very image! "Liza, turn your head sideways!" He had never before noticed how amazingly his daughter resembled her mother.

Vladimir Mokhov, a narrow-chested, sickly- yellow lad now in the fifth form at school, was walking through the mill yard. He and his sister had recently returned home for the sum- mer vacation, and, as usual, he had gone along to look at the mill, jostle among the flour- sprinkled crowd and listen to the steady rum- ble of cog-wheels and rollers, and the hiss of whirling belts. It ministered to his vanity to hear the respectful murmur of the Cossack customers: "The master's heir. . . ."

Carefully picking his way among the wagons and the heaps of dung, Vladimir reached the gate. Then he remembered he had not been to see the engine room, and turned back.

Close to the red oil-tank, at the entrance to the engine room, the mill-hand Timofei, a scalesman nicknamed "Knave," and Timofei's

assistant David were kneading a great ring of clay with bare feet, their trousers rolled up above their knees.

"Ah! The master!" the scalesman greeted him jokingly,

"Good-afternoon. What are you doing?"

"Mixing clay," David said with an unpleas- ant smile, dragging his feet out of the clinging mass, which smelled of dung. "Your father's careful of the rubles, and won't hire women to do it. Your father's a screw, that he is," he added, making a squelching noise with his feet.

Vladimir flushed. He felt an unconquerable dislike for the ever-smiling David and his contemptuous tone, even for his white teeth.

"What do you mean, 'a screw'?"

"He's terribly mean, he'd eat his own dirt if it paid him," David explained with a smile.

The others laughed approvingly. Vladimir felt all the smart of the insult. He stared cold- ly at David.

"So you're . . , dissatisfied?"

"Come into this mess and mix it yourself, and then you'll know. What fool would be satisfied? It would do your father good to do some of this. Take some of the fat off his belly," David replied. He trod heavily around the ring of clay, kneading it with his feet, now smiling gaily. Foretasting a sweet revenge,

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Vladimir turned over a fitting reply in his mind.

"Good!" he said slowly. "I'll tell Papa you're not satisfied with your work."

He glanced sidelong at the man's face, and was startled by the impression he had caused. David's lips were twisted in a forced pitiful smile, and the faces of the others were cloud- ed over. All three went on kneading the clay for a moment in silence. Then David tore his eyes away from his muddy feet, and said in a wheedling, bitter tone: "I was only joking, Volodya."

"I'll tell Papa what you said." With tears of injury in his eyes for his father and himself, and for David's miserable smile, Vladimir walked away.

"Volodya! Vladimir Sergeyevich !" David called after him in alarm, and stepped out of the clay, letting his trousers fall over his be- spattered legs.

Vladimir halted. David ran to him breathing heavily.

"Don't tell your father! Forgive me, fool that I am. Honest to God, I just said it to tease you."

"All right, I won't tell him," Vladimir replied with a grimace, and walked on towards the gate. Pity for David had won. He walked along by

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the white fence with a feeling of relief. From the forge in the corner of the mill-yard, the cheerful tapping of a hammer could be heard, now soft and muffled as it struck the iron, now a hard and ringing double tap on the anvil.

"What did you want to say that for?" Knave's deep voice reached his ears. "Don't stir dung, and it won't stink."

"The swine!" Vladimir thought indignantly. "So he answers back. . . , Shall I tell Father or not?" Glancing back, he saw David wearing his everlasting smile, and decided: "I'll tell!"

A horse and wagon stood hitched to a post outside the shop. Children were chasing a twit- tering grey cloud of sparrows off the roof of the fire-house. From the verandah came the sonorous baritone of the student Boyarishkin, and another voice-cracked and husky.

Vladimir went up the steps of the house. The leaves of the wild vine grew thickly over the porch and verandah and hung in foaming green bunches from the carved blue-painted eaves.

Boyarishkin was shaking his blue-shaven head and addressing the teacher Balanda, a young man but already bearded.

"When I read him, despite the fact that I'm the son of a toiling Cossack and naturally hate all privileged classes, just imagine it, I feel an

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acute pity for that moribund section of so- ciety. I nearly turn into a nobleman and land- lord myself, I study their ideal woman with rapture. I even take their interests to heart, damn it! Yes, my friend, that's what a genius can do. He can even make you change your creed."

Balanda toyed with the tassel of his silk sash and examined the red embroidery on the hem of his shirt, smiling ironically. Liza lay back in the armchair. The conversation evidently did not interest her in the least. With eyes that always seemed to be looking for something they had lost she was staring aimlessly at Boyarishkin's blue, razor-scratched head.

Bowing to them, Vladimir went to his fa- ther's private room and knocked. Sergei Plato- novich was sitting on a cool leather couch, turn- ing over the pages of the June issue of Rus- skoye Bogatstvo. A yellowed bone paper-knife lay at his feet.

"Well, what do you want?"

Vladimir hunched his shoulders slightly and straightened the folds of his shirt.

"As I was coming back from the mill," Vladimir began uncertainly. But then he re- called David's dazzling smile, and gazing at his father's corpulent belly in its tussore waist-

coat, he resolutely continued: "I heard David, the mill-hand, say. . . ."

Sergei Platonovich listened attentively to his son's story, and said: "I'll sack him. You may go." Then he bent with a groan to pick up the paper-knife.

In the evenings the intelligentsia of the vil- lage were in the habit of gathering at Sergei Mokhov's house. There was Boyarishkin, a stu- dent of the Moscow Technical School; the puny teacher Balanda, eaten up with conceit and tu- berculosis; his cohabitant the teacher Marfa, a shapely girl whose petticoat always showed indecently, and who never seemed to grow any older; and the postmaster, an eccentric, rather musty bachelor smelling of sealing-wax and cheap scent. Occasionally the young lieutenant, Yevgeny Listnitsky, rode over from his father's estate. The company would sit drinking tea on the verandah, carrying on a pointless conver- sation, and when there was a lull in the talk one of the guests would get up and set going the host's expensive inlaid gramophone.

On rare occasions, during the great holidays, Sergei Platonovich liked to cut a dash: he in- vited guests and regaled them with expensive wines, fresh caviare, ordered from Bataisk for the occasion, and the finest of hors-d'oeuvres. At other times he lived frugally. The one thing

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in regard to which he exercised no self-re- straint was the purchase of books. He loved reading, and liked to get to the bottom of things with his own mind, which was tenacious as bindweed.

His partner, Yemelyan Konstantinovich Atyopin, a fair-haired man with a pointed beard and hidden slits of eyes, rarely visited Mokhov. He was married to a former nun, had had eight children by her in fifteen years of married life, and stayed at home most of the time. He had begun his career as a regimental clerk, and the fusty spirit of cringing and in- gratiation brought from there permeated his family also. His children walked on tiptoe in his presence, and talked in whispers. Every morning after washing, they lined up in the dining-room under the black hanging coffin of the huge clock. Their mother stood behind them, and as soon as the dry cough was heard from the bedroom, they would begin discordantly "Our Father" and other prayers.

Yemelyan Konstantinovich would be dressed and emerge from the bedroom by the time the prayers were ended. Screwing up his tiny green eyes, he would extend his fleshy hand as though he were a bishop, while the children ap- proached him in single file to kiss it. Then Yeme-

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lyan Konstantinovich would kiss his wife on the cheek and ask, lisping:

"Polya, is the tea ready?"

"It is, Yemelyan Konstantinovich."

"Pour me some strong tea."

He was the shop's accountant. He covered the pages under their bold-faced headings, "Debit" and "Credit," with his flowery clerk's handwriting. He read the Stock Exchange News, adorning his lumpy nose with a gold-rimmed pince-nez for which he had no need. He treated his employees politely.

"Ivan Petrovich, please show the Taurida calico to the customer."

His wife called him Yemelyan Konstantino- vich, his children-Papa, his shop assistants- blah-blah.

The two village priests. Father Vissarion and the pious Father Pankraty, were not on friendly terms with Sergei Platonovich. They had a long-standing quarrel with him. Nor were they on very amicable terms with each other. The fractious, intriguing Father Pankraty was clev- er at making trouble for his neighbours, and the widower Father Vissarion with a syphilitic twang in his voice that belied his affable na- ture, who lived with a Ukrainian housekeeper, held himself aloof, and had no love for Father

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Pankraty because of his inordinate pride and intriguing character.

All except the teacher Balanda owned their own houses. Mokhov's big house, faced with match-board and painted blue, stood in the square; right opposite, in the centre of the square squatted his shop with its glass door and faded signboard. Attached to the shop was a long, low shed with a cellar, and a hundred paces farther on rose the brick wall of the church yard and the church itself with a cupola that looked like a ripe green onion. Beyond the church were the whitewashed, officially severe walls of the school, and two smart-looking houses, one blue, with blue-painted fences, be- longing to Father Pankraty; the other brown (to avoid any resemblance) with carved fencing and a broad balcony, belonging to Father Vis- sarion. Then came Atyopin's strangely narrow two-storied house, the post office, the thatched and iron-roofed houses of the Cossacks and finally the sloping back of the mill, with rusty tin cocks on its roof.

The inhabitants of the village lived behind their barred and bolted double shutters, cut off from all the rest of the world. Every eve- ning, unless they were paying a visit to a neigh- bour, each family shot the bolts of their doors,

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unchained their dogs in the yards, and only the sound of the wooden tongue of the night watchman's clapper disturbed the silence.

One day towards the end of August Mitka Korshunov happened to meet Liza Mokhova down by the river. He had just rowed across from the other side, and as he was fastening up his boat he saw a light gaily-painted skiff skimming the stream. It was being rowed by the student Boyarishkin. His shaven head glistened with perspiration, and the veins stood out on his forehead.

Mitka did not recognize Liza in the skiff at first, for her straw hat threw her face into shad- ow. Her sunburnt hands were pressing a bunch of yellow water-lilies to her breast.

"Korshunov!" she called, shaking her head at Mitka. "You've deceived me."

"Deceived you?"

"Don't you remember, you promised to take me fishing?"

Boyarishkin dropped the oars and straight- ened his back. The skiff thrust its nose into the shore with a scrunch.

"Do you remember?" Liza laughed, as she jumped out.

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"I haven't had the time. Too much work to do," Mitka said apologetically, catching his breath as the girl approached him.

"No, it's impossible," Boyarishkin inter- rupted. "I've had enough, Yelizaveta. You have had all the service you will get from me! The distance we have covered over this confounded v/ater! My hands are all blisters. Give me dry land."

Boyarishkin planted a long bare foot on the gravelly shore and mopped his forehead with the top of his crumpled student's cap. Without replying, Liza went up to Mitka. He clumsily shook the hand she offered him.

"Well, then, when shall we go fishing?" she asked with a toss of her head, narrowing her eyes.

"Tomorrow if you like. We've done the threshing and I've got more time now."

"You're not deceiving me this time?"

"No, I'm not!"

"Will you come early?"

"At dawn."

"I'll be waiting for you."

"I'll come, honestly I will."

"You haven't forgotten the window?"

"I'll find it."

"I am going away soon, I expect. And I'd like to go fishing first."

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Mitka toyed silently with the rusty key for locking up the boat, and looked straight at her lips.

"Will you be through soon?" asked Boyarish- kin, examining a shell lying in his palm.

"In a minute."

She was silent a moment, then, smiling to herself, she asked:

"You've had a wedding in your family, haven't you?"

"Yes, my sister's."

"Whom did she marry?" Then, without wait- ing for an answer, she smiled again mysterious- ly and fleetingly. "Do come, won't you?" Once again, as it had on the verandah of Mokhov's house her smile stung Mitka like a nettle.

He watched her to the boat. Boyarishkin pushed off clumsily and rowed away, while Liza smiled over his head at Mitka, who was still toying with the key, and nodded farewell.

When the boat was well out, Mitka heard Boyarishkin quietly ask: "Who is that fellow?"

"Just an acquaintance."

"Not an affair of the heart?"

Mitka did not catch her answer above the creak of the rowlocks. He saw Boyarishkin throw himself back with a laugh, but could not see Liza's face. The lilac ribbon on her hat, stirring gently in the breeze, caressed the slope

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of her bare shoulder with a melting softness that teased Mitka's misty glance.

Mitka, who rarely went fishing with rod and line, had never prepared for the occasion with such zeal as on that evening. He chopped some dung straw and boiled up the millet over a fire on the vegetable patch, then sorted out his hooks, renewing the lines that were rotten.

Mikhei, who was watching his preparations, asked: "Take me with you, Mitka. You won't be able to manage alone,"

"I'll manage."

Mikhei sighed.

"It's a long time since we went out together. I'd just like the feel of a twenty-pounder pull- ing on the line."

Mitka frowned into the hot column of steam rising from the pot and said nothing. When he had finished he went into the back room. Grandfather Grishaka was sitting by the win- dow, with round, copper-rimmed spectacles on his nose, studying the Gospels.

"Grandad!" Mitka said, leaning his back against the door-frame.

The old man looked at him over his specta- cles.

"Eh?"

"Wake me up at the first cock."

"Where are you off to so early?"

t94

"Fishing."

The old man had a weakness for fish but he made a pretence of opposing Mitka's designs.

"Your father said the hemp must be beaten tomorrow. There's no time to laze about."

Mitka stirred from the door and tried strat- egy-

"Oh, all right then. I wanted to give you a treat but as there's the hemp to be done, I won't

go."

"Stop, where are you off to?" the old man took alarm and pulled off his spectacles. "I'll speak to your father about it, you can go. Tomorrow's Wednesday, I could just do with a bit of fish. All right, I'll wake you up. Go on, you young ass, what are you grinning at?"

At midnight the old man, holding up his linen trousers with one hand and gripping his stick in the other, floated like a trembling white shadow across the yard to the barn, entered the bam and jabbed his crutch into Mitka's sleeping body. In the barn the smell of newly- threshed grain and mice droppings mingled with the stale cobweb-choked air of a place that is never lived in.

Mitka was sleeping on a rug by the corn-bin. Grishaka poked at him with his stick, but could not rouse him for some time. At first he poked lightly, whispering:

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"Mitka! Mitka! Hey, Mitka!"

But Mitka only sighed and drew his legs up. Grishaka grew more ruthless and began to bore the stick into Mitka's stomach. With a gasp Mitka seized the end of the stick and woke up suddenly.

"How you sleep!" grumbled the old man.

"Quiet, Grandad. Don't bumble," Mitka muttered sleepily, groping for his boots.

The lad made his way to the square. The vil- lage cocks were already crowing for the second time. As he passed Father Vissarion's house he heard a cock flap its wings in the hen-coop and give a mighty bellow worthy of the head dea- con, while the hens clucked in alarm,

A night watchman was asleep on the steps of the shop, his nose tucked into the sheepskin warmth of his collar.

Mitka reached Mokhov's fence, set down his fishing tackle, and on tiptoe, so as not to dis- turb the dogs, crept into the porch. He tried the cold iron latch. The door was shut fast. He clambered across the banister of the verandah and went up to the window. It was half-closed. Through the black gap came the sweet scent of a girl's warm, sleeping body and the mysteri- ously sweet smell of perfume.

"Yelizaveta Sergeyevna!"

Mitka thought he had called very loudly. He

196

waited. Silence. "Suppose I'm at the wrong window! Suppose Mokhov's asleep in there! I'll be for it then. He'll use a gun!"

"Yelizaveta Sergeyevna, coming fishing?"

If he'd mistaken the window there'd be some fish caught all right!

"Are you getting up?" he said in irritation, and thrust his head through the window open- ing.

"Who's there?" a low startled voice sounded in the darkness.

"It's me, Korshunov. Coming fishing?"

"Oh! Just a minute."

There was a sound of movement inside. Her warm, sleepy voice seemed to smell of mint. Mitka saw something white and rustling mov- ing about the room.

"I'd rather sleep with her than get cold fishing," he thought vaguely with the smell of the bedroom in his nostrils.

After a while her smiling face, framed in a white kerchief, appeared at the window.

"I'm coming out this way. Give me your hand." As he helped her down, she looked close- ly into his eyes.

"I didn't take long, did I?"

"It's all right, we'll be in time."

They went down to the Don. She rubbed her sleep-swollen eyes with a pink hand.

197

"I was sleeping so sweetly. I could have slept on. It's too early to go yet."

"We'll be just in time."

They followed the first lane from the square leading down to the river. During the night the river had risen, and the boat, which had been left high and dry the evening before, was now rocking on the water a little way out.

"I'll have to take off my shoes," she sighed, measuring the distance to the boat with her eyes.

"Let me carry you," Mitka proposed.

"No, I'd better take my shoes off."

"Carrying you would be easier."

"I'd rather not," she said, with embarrass- ment in her voice.

Mitka embraced her legs above the knees with his left arm, and, lifting her easily, splashed through the water. She clutched in- voluntarily at the finn, dark column of his neck and laughed with a cooing softness.

If Mitka had not stumbled over a stone used by the village women when washing clothes, there would not have been a brief, accidental kiss. She gasped and pressed her face against Mitka's hard cracked lips, and he came to a halt two paces away from the boat. The water swirled over the tops of his boots and chilled his feet.

198

Unfastening the boat, he pushed it off and jumped in. He rowed standing. The water rustled and wept under the stern. The boat gently breasted the stream, making for the opposite bank. The fishing rods jumped and clattered at the bottom of the boat.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked, glancing back.

"To the other side."

The keel grated on the sandy shore. Without asking permission he picked the girl up in his arms, and carried her into a clump of haw- thorn. She bit at his face, scratched, gave one or two stifled screams, and feeling her strength ebbing, she wept angrily, but without tears.

They returned about nine o'clock. The sky was wrapped in a ruddy yellow haze. A strong breeze danced over the river, maning the waves. The boat danced over the waves, and the cold frothy spray sprinkled on Liza's pallid face and clung to her lashes and the strands of her hair. She wearily closed her vacant eyes, twisting in her fingers a flower that had fallen into the boat. Mitka rowed without looking at her. A small carp and a bream lay goggle-eyed at his feet, their mouths twisted in death; Mit- ka's face wore an expression of mingled guilt, content and anxiety.

"I'll take you to Semyonov's landing stage.

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It will be nearer for you," he told her, as he turned the boat into the stream.

"All right/' she whispered.

Along the deserted shore the dusty wattle fences pined in the hot wind, drenching the air with the smell of burnt brushwood. The heavy over-ripe caps of the sunflowers, pecked by sparrows, drooped low, scattering fluffy seeds over the ground. The meadowland was emerald with the young aftermath. Colts were frisking about in the distance; and the hot southerly wind wafted up the echoing laughter of the bells tied round their necks.

As Liza was getting out of the boat Mitka picked up a fish and held it out to her.

"Here, take the catch."

Her lashes flickered in alarm, but she took the fish.

"Well, I'm going."

Holding the fish by the willow twig Mitka had fixed through their gills, she turned miser- ably away. Gone were her recent assurance and gaiety, left behind in the hawthorn bushes.

"Liza!"

She turned round, surprise and irritation in her frown.

"Come back a minute."

And when she came closer he said, annoyed at his own embarrassment, "We were a bit care-

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less. Your dress at the back . . . there's a stain on it. It's only a little one. . . ."

A hot flush spread over her face and neck. After a moment's silence, Mitka advised: "Go by the back ways,"

"I'll have to pass through the square in any case. ... I meant to put my black skirt on," she whispered, looking at Mitka with regret and sudden hatred.

"Let me green it a bit with a leaf," Mitka suggested simply, and was surprised to see the tears come into her eyes.

Like the rustling whisper of a summer breeze the news flew round the village. "Mitka Kor- shunov's been out all night with Sergei Plato- novich's daughter." The women talked about it as they drove out the cattle to join the village herd in the morning, as they stood in the nar- row shade of the well-sweeps with the grey dust swirling round them and water dripping from their buckets, or as they beat out their washing on the flat stones down by the river.

"Her own mother's dead you know."

"Her father never has a minute to spare, and her stepmother just doesn't trouble."

"The watchman says he saw a man tapping at the end window at midnight. He thought at first it was someone trying to break in. He ran to see who it waS/ and found it was Mitka."

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"The girls these days, I don't know what they're coming to."

"Mitka told my Nikita he's going to marry her."

"He'd better wipe his nose first."

"He forced her, they say."

"Don't you believe it. . . ."

The rumours flowed round main street and back street, smearing the girl's good name, as a clean gate is smeared with thick tar.

Finally they descended on the greying head of Mokhov himself and crushed him to the ground. For two days he went neither to the shop nor to the mill. His servants, who lived downstairs, came to him only at dinner.

On the third day Sergei Platonovich had his dapple-grey stallion harnessed to his droshki, and drove to the stanitsa, bowing remotely to the Cossacks he met on the way. The droshki was followed by a highly-varnished carriage, which swished out of the yard, drawn by a pair of prancing black horses. Yemelyan the coach- man, sucking his pipe, which had become permanently attached to his greying beard, shook out the blue silk of the reins and the two black horses went prancing down the street. Liza could be seen sitting pale-faced behind Yemelyan's craggy back. She held a light valise on her knees and was smiling sadly. At the

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gate she waved her glove to Vladimir and her stepmother.

Pantelei Prokofyevich happened to be limp- ing out of the shop at the moment, and he stopped to ask the yardman Nikita: "Where's the master's daughter going?"

And Nikita, condescending to the simple hu- man weakness, replied: "To Moscow, to study."

The next day an incident occurred which was long the subject of talk down by the river, un- der the shadow of the well-sweeps, and when the cattle were being driven out to graze. Just before nightfall (the village herd had already returned from the steppe) Mitka went to see Sergei Platonovich. He had waited until evening in order to avoid meeting anyone, for he came not merely to make a friendly call, but to ask for the hand of Mokhov's daughter, Liza.

He had met her perhaps four times, not more. At the last meeting the conversation had taken the following course:

"Liza, will you marry me?"

"Nonsense!"

"I shall care for you, I'll love you. We have people to work for us, you shall sit at the win- dow and read your books."

"You're a fool!"

Mitka took offence, and said no more. That evening he went home early, and in the

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morning he announced to his astonished father:

"Father, arrange for my marriage."

"Don't be a fool."

"Honestly, Father, I'm not joking."

"In a hurry, aren't you? Who're you smitten on-crazy Marfa?"

"Send the match-makers to Sergei Platono- vich."

Miron Grigoryevich carefully set down the cobbling tools with which he was mending har- ness, and roared with laughter.

"You're in a funny vein today, my son."

But Mitka stuck to his guns, and his father flared up.

"You fool! Sergei Platonovich has a capital of over a hundred thousand rubles. He's a mer- chant, and what are you? Clear off, or I'll leather you with this strap."

"We've got fourteen pairs of bullocks, and look at the land we own. Besides he's a muzhik, and we're Cossacks."

"Clear off!" Miron said curtly. He did not like long discussions.

Mitka found a sympathetic listener only in his grandfather. The old man attempted to per- suade Miron in favour of his son's suit.

"Miron!" old Grishaka said. "Why don't you agree? As the boy's taken it into his head. . , ."

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"Father, you're a great baby, God's truth you are! Mitka's silly enough, but you're...."

"Hold your tongue!" Grishaka rapped his stick on the floor. "Aren't we good enough for them? He ought to take it as an honour for a Cossack's son to wed his daughter. He'll give up, and gladly too. We're known all over the countryside. We're not farm-hands, we're mas- ters. Go and ask him, Miron. What's stopping you? Let him give his mill as the dowry."

Miron snorted and went out into the yard. So Mitka decided to wait until evening and then go to Mokhov himself. He knew that his fa- ther's obstinacy was like a well-rooted elm: you might bend it, but you could never break it. It was not worth trying.

He went whistling as far as Mokhov's front door, then grew timid. He hesitated a moment, and finally went through the yard to the side door. On the steps he asked the maid in her crackling starched apron: "Master at home?" "He's drinking his tea. Wait!" Mitka sat down and waited, lit a cigarette, smoked it, and crushed the end on the floor. Mokhov came out, brushing crumbs off his waistcoat. When he saw Mitka he frowned, but said: "Come in."

Mitka entered Mokhov's cool private room that smelled of books and tobacco, feeling that

205

the courage with which he had been charged so far had been sufficient to last only to the merchant's threshold. The merchant went to his table, and swung round on his heels: "Well?" Behind his back his fingers scratched at the top of the table.

"I've come to find out . . ." Mitka plunged into the cold slime of Mokhov's piercing eyes and shuddered. "Perhaps you'll give me Liza?" Despair, anger, fear, all combined to bring his face out in perspiration, fine as dew during a drought.

Mokhov's left eyebrow quivered, and his up- per lip writhed back from the gums. He stretched out his neck and leaned all his body forward:

"What? Wha-a-at? You scoundrel! Get out! I'll have you before the ataman! You son of a bitch!"

Encouraged by this shout, Mitka watched the grey-blue blood flooding into Mokhov's cheeks.

"Don't take it as an insult. I only wanted to make up for what I've done."

Mokhov rolled his bloodshot eyes and threw a massive iron ash-tray at Mitka' s feet. It re- bounded and struck him on the knee. But he stoically bore the pain, and jerking open the door, shouted, baring his teeth with resentment and pain:

"As you like, Sergei Platonovich, just as you

206

like, but I meant it. . . . Who would want her now? I thought I'd cover her shame. But now . . . even a dog won't touch a gnawed bone."

Pressing a crumpled handkerchief to his lips, Mokhov followed on Mitka's heels. He barred the way to the main door, and Mitka ran out into the yard. Here the master had only to wink to Yemelyan the coachman, and as Mitka was struggling with the stout latch at the wicket- gate, four unleashed hounds tore round the cor- ner of the barn. Seeing a stranger, they bound- ed across the clean-swept yard straight at him.

In 1910, Sergei Platonovich had brought back a pair of black curly-haired pups from the fair at Nizhny Novgorod. In a year those black, curly, big-mouthed pups shot up like yearling calves. At first they snapped at the skirts of the women who passed Mokhov's yard, then they learned to pull the women to the ground and bite their legs, and it was only when they had killed Father Pankraty's calf and a pair of Atyopin's hogs that Sergei Platonovich ordered them to be chained up. Now the dogs were let loose only at night, and once every spring for the mating.

Before Mitka could turn round the foremost dog was up at his shoulders with its teeth fas- tened into his jacket. The writhing black bodies bit and tore at him. Mitka fought them off

207

and tried to keep his balance. He saw Yeme- lyan, his pipe scattering sparks, disappear into the kitchen, and heard the door slam behind him.

By the steps, leaning against a drain-pipe, stood Sergei Platonovich, his hairy white fists clenched. Swaying and staggering, Mitka tore open the gate and dragged the bunch of snarl- ing, hot-breathed dogs after him on his bleed- ing legs. He seized one by the throat and choked it, and passing Cossacks with difficulty beat off the others.

Ill

Natalya fitted well into the Melekhov house- hold. Although he was rich and employed la- bourers, her father had brought up his chil- dren to work. Hard-working Natalya won the hearts of her husband's parents. Ilyinichna, who secretly did not like her elder clothes-loving daughter-in-law Darya, took to Natalya from the very first.

"Sleep on, sleep on, little one! What are you out so early for?" she would protest kindly, bustling about the kitchen on her stout legs. "Go back to bed, we'll manage without you."

And Natalya who had got up at dawn to help in the kitchen would go back to the best room to complete her rest,

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Even Pantelei, who was usually strict in re- gard to household matters, said to his wife:

"Listen, wife, don't wake Natalya. She works hard enough as it is. She's going out with Grisha to plough today. But whip up that Darya. She's a lazy woman, and bad. She paints her face and blacken^ her brows, the bitch."

"Let her take it a bit easy, the first year," sighed Ilyinichna, remembering her own back- breaking life,

Grigory had begun to get used to his newly- married state; but after two or three weeks he realized with fear and chagrin that he had not completely broken with Aksinya. Something was left like a thorn in his heart, and the pain would not go soon. The feeling which, in the excitement of marriage, he had dismissed with a careless wave of the hand was deep-rooted. He thought he could forget, but it refused to be forgotten, and the wound bled. Even before the wedding Pyotr had asked him when they were threshing together:

"Grisha, but what about Aksinya?"

"Well, what about her?"

"Won't you feel sorry to throw her over?"

"Someone else will pick her up," Grigory had said with a laugh.

"Well, you know best," Pyotr said, biting at

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the chewed tip of his moustache, "but don't make a hash of your marriage."

"Love grows old and the body cold," Grigory replied lightly.

But it had not worked out like that. As he dutifully caressed his wife, trying to inflame her with his own youthful zest, he met with only coldness and an embarrassed submission from her. Natalya shrank from bodily delights; she had inherited something of her mother's slow, unresponsive blood, and as he recalled Aksinya's passionate fervour Grigory sighed: "Your father must have made you on ice, Na- talya. You're too chilly by half."

And when he met Aksinya she would smile with a vague darkening of the pupils and her words clung like the mud at the bottom of a stream.

"Hullo, Grisha! How's love with your young wife?"

"All right," Grigory would reply evasively, and escape as quickly as possible from her ca- ressing glance.

Stepan had evidently made up his quarrel with his wife. He visited the tavern less fre- quently, and one evening, as he was winnowing grain on the threshing-floor, he suggested, for the first time since the beginning of the trou- ble: "Let's sing a song, Aksinya!"

210

They sat down, their backs against a heap of threshed, dusty wheat. Stepan began an army song, Aksinya joined in with her full, throaty voice. They sang well together, as they had in the first years of their married life, when they used to jog back from the fields under the crim- son hem of the sunset glow and Stepan would sit on the load and sing an old song, as long and sad as the wild and desolate road across the steppe. Aksinya with her head resting on the bulging hoops of her husband's chest would take up the tune. The horses would pull the creaking wagon and the shaft-bow would bob up and down. And from afar the old men of the village would listen to the song.

"She's got a fine voice, that wife of Stepan's."

"Aye, nice singing."

"And what a voice Stepan has got, clear as a bell."

And as they sat on the earthen banks round their cottages watching the dusty purple of the sunset, the old men would exchange remarks across the street, about the song, where it came from, and about those who had loved it.

Grigory heard the Astakhovs singing, and while he was threshing (the two threshing-floors adjoined) he could see Aksinya as self-assured as before, and apparently happy. Or so it seemed to him.

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Stepan was not on speaking terms with the Melekhovs. He worked on the threshing-floor, swinging his great sloping shoulders, occasion- ally making a jesting remark to Aksinya. And she would respond with a smile, her black eyes flashing. Her green skirt hovered constantly before Grigory's eyes. His neck was continually being twisted by a strange force which turned his head in the direction of Stepan's yard. He did not notice that Natalya, who was helping Pantelei. spread out the sheaves for threshing, intercepted every involuntary glance with her own yearning, jealous gaze; he did not see Pyotr, who was driving the horses round the threshing circle, wrinkling his nose with a faint grin as he watched his brother.

The earth groaned under the crushing weight of the stone rollers and with the muffled rumble in his ears Grigory groped hazily in his mind and failed to catch the scraps of thought that slipped elusively out of range of his conscious- ness.

From near and distant threshing-floors came the sound of threshing: the shouts of drivers, the whistle of knouts, the rattle of the winnow- ing drums. The village, fat with the harvest, basked in the September warmth, stretching along the Don like a beaded snake across a road. In every farmyard with its wattle fence,

212

under every Cossack roof, each brimming bit- ter-sweet life whirled on, separate and apart from the rest. Old Grishaka had taken a chill and was suffering with his teeth; Mokhov, crushed by his shame, clawed his beard, weeping and grinding his teeth in solitude; Stepan nursed his hatred for Grigory in his heart and his iron fingers tore at the patchwork quilt in his sleep; Natalya would run to the shed and threw herself on the heap of cowdung fuel, shaking and huddling into a ball as she wept over her desecrated happiness; Christonya, who had sold a calf at the fair, then spent the money on drink, was tortured by pangs of conscience; Grigory sighed with insatiable longing and renewed pain; Aksinya, as she caressed her husband, flooded her undying hatred for him with tears. David had been discharged from the mill, and sat night after night with Knave in the carters' shed, while Knave, his angry eyes flashing, would declare:

"Just wait! They'll have their throats cut be- fore long. One revolution wasn't enough for them. Wait till we have another 1905, then we'll settle scores. We'll settle scores!" he shook his scarred finger threateningly, and with a shrug adjusted the jacket flung across his shoulders.

And over the village slipped the days, pass ing into the nights; the weeks flowed by, the

2tS

months crept on, the wind howled over the hill, warning of bad v/eather to come, and, glazed with the clear greenish-blue of autumn, the Don flowed on indifferently to the sea.

One Sunday at the end of October Fedot Bo- dovskov drove to the stanitsa on business. He took with him four braces of fattened ducks and sold them at the market; he bought his wife some cotton print, and was on the point of driv- ing home (with one foot on the wheel he was tightening the hame strap), when a stran- ger, obviously not of those parts, came up to him.

"Good-afternoon," he greeted Fedot, putting a sunburnt hand to the edge of his black hat.

" 'Afternoon," said Fedot and paused inquir- ingly, narrowing his Kalmyk eyes.

"Where are you from?"

"One of the villages."

"And which village may that be?"

"Tatarsky."

The stranger drew a silver cigarette-case out of his pocket and offered Fedot a cigarette.

"Is yours a large village?"

"No thanks, just had one. Our village? Pret- ty big. Three hundred families or thereabouts."

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"Is there a church there?"

""Of course."

"Any blacksmiths there?"

"Aye, there's a smithy."

"Is there a workshop at the mill?"

Fedot fastened the rein to his horse's bit, and looked distrustfully at the man's black hat and the furrows in the broad white face, fringed with a black beard.

"What do you want to know for?"

"I'm coming to live at your village. I've just been to the district ataman. Are you going back empty?"

"Aye."

"Will you take me back with you? I'm not alone. I have my wife with me and a couple of boxes."

"I can take you."

Having agreed about the price, they drove to Froska the bun-maker's where his passenger was lodging, collected the man's thin, blond wife, put the boxes in the back and set out on the return journey. Clicking his tongue and flicking the plaited reins over the horse's backs, Fedot twisted his angular head round from time to time; he was eaten up with curiosity. His passengers sat quietly behind him. Fedot first asked for a cigarette, then he inquired:

"Where are you from?"

21^

"From Rostov."

"One o' them?"

"What did you say?"

"Were you born there?"

"Er, yes."

Fedot wrinkled his bronzed cheeks and peered at the distant clumps of steppe grass. The road began to climb and half a verst from the road, in the grey-brown brushwood on top of the ridge Fedot's practised eye spotted the scarcely visible movements of bustards' heads.

"Pity I haven't got a gun, or Fd be out after the bustards. There they go," he sighed, point- ing with his thumb.

"I don't see anything," his passenger replied, blinking shortsightedly.

Fedot watched the bustards flutter into a gully and twisted himself round to study his passen- gers more closely. The man was of average height, but thin; his close-set eyes had a sly twinkle in them. He smiled frequently as he talked. His wife, wrapped in a knitted shawl, was dozing and Fedot couldn't see her face.

"What are you coming to live in our village for?"

"Fm a mechanic. Fm thinking of starting a workshop. I can do carpentry too."

Fedot stared suspiciously at the man's big hands, and catching his gaze, the stranger add-

ed: "I'm also an agent for the Singer Sewing- Machine Company."

"What's your name?" Fedot asked.

"Stockman."

"So you're not Russian, then?"

"Yes, I'm a Russian. But my grandfather was a Lett by birth."

In a short while Fedot had learned that Osip Davydovich Stockman had formerly worked at a factory, then somev/here in the Kuban, then in the South-Eastern Railway workshops. And a great number of other facts the inquisi- tive Fedot elicited concerning the stranger's life.

After a while the conversation flagged. Fedot watered his sweating horse at a wayside spring, and drowsy with the journey and the jolting of the cart, he began to doze. It was another five versts to the village. He fastened the reins to the wagon and lay back comfortably. But he was not allowed to go to sleep.

"How's life in your parts?" Stockman asked him bouncing and swaying with the motion of the cart.

"Not so bad, we get our bread."

"And the Cossacks generally, are they satis- fied with life?"

"Some are, some aren't. You can't please everybody,"

217

"That's true," the man assented, and went on asking his tricky probing questions.

"You live pretty well, you say?"

"Pretty well."

"The annual army training must be a nui- sance? Eh?"

"Army training? We're used to it. Nothing to worry about when you're in the army."

"But it's hard on you Cossacks to have to sup- ply all the equipment."

"Yes, the sons of swine!" Fedot said with sudden animation and glanced sidelong at the woman. She averted her eyes.

"Our authorities are a bad lot. . . . When I went to do my service I sold my bullocks and bought a horse and they rejected him."

"Rejected him?" Stockman said with as- sumed amazement.

"Right out. His legs were no good, they said. I argued with them, I tried everything. 'He's got legs like a prize stallion,' I said, 'it's just his funny way of stepping, that's all.' But no, they wouldn't pass him. It's enough to ruin you!"

The conversation went on briskly. Fedot jumped off the wagon and began to talk freely of the village life. He cursed the village ataman for his unjust division of the meadowland, and praised the way things were run in Poland,

218

where his regiment had been stationed. Stock- man, casting sharp glances at Fedot from his narrowed eyes, smoked mild cigarettes in a ringed bone holder and smiled frequently, but the frown furrow in his white sloping forehead stirred slowly and heavily, as though driven from within by hidden thoughts.

They reached the village in the early eve- ning. On Fedot's advice Stockman went to the widow Lukeshka and rented two rooms from her.

"Who is that you brought back with you?" Fedot's neighbours asked him as he drove past their gates.

"An agent."

"What kind of angel?"

"You're fools, that's what you are. An agent, I said. He sells machines. He gives them away free to the handsome ones, but to such as you. Auntie Marya, he sells them."

"Look at yourself, you devil. Your Kalmyk snout is ugly enough to frighten a horse!"

"Kalmyks and Tatars come first in the steppe, so don't you joke about them," Fedot parried.

Mechanic Stockman lodged at the cross-eyed, long-tongued Lukeshka's. And the night had scarcely passed before all the women's tongues in the village were wagging.

219

"Have you heard the news, neighbour?"

"What news?"

"Fedot the Kalmyk has brought a foreigner down."

"Really?"

"So help me God. He wears a hat and his name is Shtopel or Shtokal. . . ."

"He's not from the police?"

"No, he's an exciseman."

"It's all lies, my dears. He's a book-keeper, they say, just like Father Pankraty's son."

"Pashka, my dove, run to Lukeshka and ask her quietly: 'Who's that living with you, auntie?' "

"Run quickly, child!"

Next day Stockman reported to the village ataman.

Fyodor Manitskov, who was in his third year as ataman, turned the newcomer's passport over and over, then handed it to the clerk, who also turned it over and over. They exchanged glances, and the ataman, once a sergeant-major, authoritatively waved his hand.

"You can stay."

The newcomer bowed and left the room. For a week he did not put his nose outside Lukesh- ka's house keeping like a suslik to his burrow. He could be heard tapping with an axe, prepar- ing a workshop in the tumble-down outdoor

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kitchen. The women's interest in him died away; only the children spent all day peeping over the fence and watching the stranger with unabashed curiosity.

Three days before Intercession Grigory and his wife drove out to the steppe to plough. Pan- telei was unwell; he leaned heavily on his stick and wheezed with pain as he stood in the yard seeing them off.

"Plough up the two strips on the other side of the common, by Red Dell, Grisha."

"All right. What about the one up by Willow Bank?" Grigory asked in a hoarse whisper; he had caught a cold while fishing and had a cloth round his throat.

"That can wait till after the holiday. You'll have enough to do as it is, so don't be greedy. There must be fifteen acres up there."

"Will Pyotr be coming to help?"

"He's going to the mill with Darya. We want to get our milling done before the crowds be- gin."

As Ilyinichna put some freshly-baked buns in Natalya's jacket she whispered: "Perhaps you'll take Dunya with you, to lead the bull- ocks?"

"Two people are enough."

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"All right, my dear. Christ be with you."

Arching her slender figure under the weight of a load of damp washing, Dunya went past on her way to the Don to rinse the clothes. As she went by she called to Natalya:

"Natalya, there's lots of sorrel in Red Dell. Pull some up and bring it home."

"Now then, be off with you, chatterbox!" Pantelei said shaking his stick at Dunya.

The three pairs of bullocks dragged the up- turned plough out of the yard, gouging the drought-hardened earth. Grigory kept adjusting the kerchief bound round his neck as he v/alked along at the roadside, coughing. Natalya walked at his side, a bag with their food in it swinging on her back.

A crystal stillness enveloped the steppe. Be- yond the common, on the other side of the hump- backed hill the earth was being combed with ploughs, and the drivers were whistling; but here along the high-road there was only the blue-grey of stunted wormwood, the roadside clover nibbled by sheep, and the ringing glassy cool of the sky above, criss-crossed with fly- ing threads of jewelled gossamer.

After seeing the ploughmen on their way, Pyotr and Darya made ready to drive to the mill. Pyotr winnowed the wheat in the granary, Darya sacked it and carried it to the cart.

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Pantelei harnessed the horses carefully adjust- ing the traces.

"Going to be long?"

"Coming," Pyotr answered from the granary.

When they arrived at the mill they found the yard crowded with wagons. The scales were surrounded by a dense throng. Pyotr threw the reins to Darya and jumped down from the cart.

"My turn soon?" he asked Knave the scales- man.

"You'll get there."

"Who's being served now?"

"Number thirty-eight."

Pyotr turned to fetch his sacks. As he did so he heard cursing behind him. A hoarse, ill-tem- pered voice barked: "You oversleep yourself, and then you want to go out of your turn. Get away, khokhol*, or I'll give you one."

Pyotr recognized the voice of Horseshoe Yakov. He stopped to listen. The sound of shouting swelled in the weighing-room. Then came the sharp smack of a blow and an elder- ly, bearded Ukrainian with his cap crushed on the back of his head came tumbling out through the doorway.

"What's that for?" he shouted, holding his cheek.

* Khokhol -a derogatory term for a Ukrainian. 223

"I'll wring your neck!"

"But look here. . , ,"

"Mikifor, help!"

Horseshoe Yakov, a spirited, stocky artil- leryman, who had earned his nickname because of the horseshoe marks left on his face by the kick of a horse, came running out of the weigh- ing-room, rolling up his sleeves. A tall Ukrain- ian in a pink shirt struck hard at him from be- hind. But Yakov stayed on his feet.

"Brothers, they're beating up the Cossacks!" he cried.

Cossacks and Ukrainians, who were at the mill in large numbers, came running from all sides into the wagon-filled yard. A fight began round the main entrance. The door gave way under the pressure of the struggling bodies. Pyotr threw down his sack and with a grunt ran lightly towards the melee. Standing up on the cart, Darya saw him press into the middle of the crowd, knocking the others aside. She groaned as she saw him carried to the mill wall, flung down and trampled underfoot.

Mitka Korshunov came skipping round the corner from the machine-room, brandishing an iron bar. The same Ukrainian who had struck at Yakov from behind burst out of the strug- gling crowd, a torn pink sleeve fluttering out behind him like a bird's broken wing. Bent dou-

224

ble, his hands touching the ground, he ran to the nearest cart and pulled out a shaft as if it were a match-stick. Hoarse cries rang out over the yard. A crunching sound. Blows. Groaning. A steady roar of shouting. The three Shamil brothers came running out of their house. One- armed Alexei caught his feet in a pair of reins left lying on the ground and sprawled at the gate. He jumped up and went bounding across the lined-up cart-shafts, pressing his armless left sleeve to his stomach. His brother Martin bent down to tuck in the trouser leg, which had come out of his white sock. The shouting at the mill rose to a crescendo. Somebody let out a cry that floated high over the mill roof like a wind-blown thread of cobweb, and Martin straightened up and dashed after his brothers.

Darya stood watching from the cart, panting and wringing her hands. Around her, women were squealing and wailing, horses pricked up their ears restlessly, bullocks bellowed and pressed against the carts. Pursing his lips Mo- khov stalked past pale-faced, his belly bobbing up and down like an egg under his waistcoat. Da- rya saw the Ukrainian with the tattered shirt cut Mitka Korshunov down with the shaft, the next moment he himself was sent headlong by one-armed Alexei's iron fist. Scenes from the

15—1933 225

fight passed before Darya's eyes like scraps of coloured rag. Without surprise she saw Mitka, on his knees, sweep Mokhov's legs from un- der him with the iron bar. Mokhov threw out his arms and crawled like a crab to the weigh- ing-shed, there to be kicked and trodden under- foot. Darya laughed hysterically, the black arches of her painted brows cracked with her laughter. But she stopped abruptly as she saw Pyotr; swaying, he had made his way out of the heaving, yelling mob, and was lying under a cart, spitting blood. Darya ran to him with a shriek. Cossacks came hurrying from the vil- lage with stakes; one of them flourished a crow- bar. The fighting was taking on fantastic pro- portions. It was no mere tavern brawl or Shrove- tide fisticuffs between villages. At the door of the weighing-shed a young Ukrainian lay with a broken head in a pool of blood; bloody strands of hair fell over his face. It looked as though he was departing his pleasant life.

Herded together like sheep, the Ukrainians were slowly being driven towards the unload- ing-shed. Things would have taken a bad turn, had not an old Ukrainian had an inspiration. Darting into the shed, he pulled a flaming brand out of the furnace and ran towards the shed where the milled grain was stored: a thousand poods and more of flour. Smoke streamed over

226

his shoulder like muslin and sparks, daylight- dimmed, scattered about.

"I'll set it afire!" he screamed, raising the crackling brand towards the thatched roof.

The Cossacks wavered and came to a halt. A dry, blustering wind was blowing from the east, carrying the smoke away from the roof of the shed towards the group of Ukrainians. One goodly spark in the dry rush thatch, and the whole village would go up in flames.

A low murmur arose from the Cossacks. Some of them began to back away towards the mill, while the Ukrainian, waving the brand above his head and scattering fiery rain, shouted:

"I'll burn it! I'll burn it! Out of the yard!"

With fresh red-blue bruises on his scarred face Horseshoe Yakov, the man who had start- ed the fight, was the first to leave the yard. The other Cossacks streamed hurriedly after him. Throwing their sacks hastily on to their wagons, the Ukrainians harnessed their horses, then, standing up in their wagons, waving the ends of the leather reins around their heads, and whipping up their horses frantically, they tore out of the yard and away from the village.

One-armed Alexei stood in the middle of the yard, his empty knotted sleeve jerking on his hard flat belly, his eye and cheek twitching as usual.

15* 227

"To horse, Cossacks!"

"After them!"

"They'll not go far."

Mitka Korshunov, the worse for wear, made as if to dash out of the yard. A fresh ripple of disturbance passed over the crowd of Cossacks round the mill. But at that moment an unfamil- iar figure in a black hat appeared from the engine room and approached the group with hasty steps; his piercing eyes narrowed into slits darted over the crowd as he raised his hand and shouted:

"Stop!"

"Who are you?" Yakov demanded, scowling.

"Where'd you spring from?"

"Bash him!"

"Stop, villagers!"

"Who are you calling villagers, you bob- tail?"

"Muzhik. Give him one, Yakov!"

"The dirty bumpkin!"

"That's right, black his eyes for him!"

The man smiled diffidently, but without a sign of fear. He took off his hat and wiped his brow with a gesture of complete simplicity; his smile was utterly disarming.

"What's the matter?" he asked, waving his hat at the blood by the door of the weighing- shed.

228

"We've been beating up the khokhols," one- armed Alexei replied peaceably, eye and cheek twitching.

"But what for?"

"They wanted to go out of turn/' Yakov ex- plained, stepping forward and wiping a clot of blood from his nose with a sweep of the arm.

"We gave 'em something to remember us by."

"Pity we didn't go after them. . . . Nothing to burn in the steppe."

"We got scared, he wouldn't have dared set fire to it."

"He'd have done it all right, he was desper- ate."

"The khokhols are a mighty bad-tempered lot," Afonka Ozerov said with a grin.

The m.an waved his hat in Ozerov's direction. "And who are you?"

Ozerov spat contemptuously through his widely-spaced teeth, and, watching the flight of the spittle, planted his feet apart.

"I'm Cossack. But you . . . what are you, a

gypsy?"

"You and I are both Russians."

"You're lying," Afonka declared deliberately.

"The Cossacks are descended from the Rus- sians. Do you know that?"

"And I tell you the Cossacks are the sons of Cossacks."

229

"Long ago," the man explained, "serfs ran away from the landowners and settled along the Don, They came to be known as Cossacks."

"Go your own way, man!" Alexei said with restrained anger, clenching his ■ heavy fist and blinking hard.

"The swine wants to make muzhiks out of us ! Who is he?"

"He's the new fellow living with cross-eyed Lukeshka," another explained.

But the moment for pursuit of the Ukrainians was past. The Cossacks dispersed, animatedly discussing the fight.

That night, in the steppe some eight versts from the village, as Grigory wrapped himself in his thick prickly sheepskin, he said wistfully to Natalya:

"You're a stranger, somehow! You're like that moon, you neither chill a man, nor warm him. I don't love you, Natalya; you mustn't be an- gry, I didn't want to say anything about it, but there it is; we can't go on like this. I'm sorry for you; it looked as if we were coming closer lately, but I can't feel anything in my heart. It's just empty. Like the steppe tonight."

Natalya stared up at the inaccessible starry pastures, at the shadowy, ghost-like cloak of the clouds floating above her, and was silent.

230

From somewhere in the bluish-black wilderness above a belated flight of cranes called to each other with voices like little silver bells.

The withered grass had a sad, dead smell about it. On a hillock flickered the ruddy glow of a ploughman's camp-fire.

Grigory awoke just before dawn. A three- inch layer of snow covered his sheepskin. The steppe was hidden beneath the shimmering, vir- ginal blue of the fresh fall; the clearly-marked tracks of a hare that had lost its way on the first snow ran close by the spot where he lay.

For many years past, if a Cossack travelled alone along the road to Millerovo and fell in with Ukrainians (the Ukrainian villages began at Lower Yablonovsky and stretched for seven- ty-five versts, as far as Millerovo), he had been obliged to yield them the road, or they would set about him. So the Cossacks were in the habit of driving to the railway station in groups, and then they were not afraid of fall- ing in with Ukrainians out in the steppe and exchanging invective:

"Hey, khokhol! Give us the road! Think you can live on the Cossacks' land, you swine, and not let them pass!"

231

The Ukrainians, who had to cart their grain to the elevator at Paramonovo on the Don, were not to be envied either. Fights would break out without cause, simply because they were "kho- khols," and once a man was a "khokhol," he had to be beaten up.

Many centuries ago a diligent hand had sown the seeds of caste hatred in the Cossack land and cultivated them with care, and the seed had yielded rich fruit. The earth flowed with the blood shed in these brawls between Cossack and newcomer from the Ukraine and Russia.

Some two weeks after the battle of the mill a district police officer and an inspector arrived in the village. Stockman was the first to be ex- amined. Rummaging in his brief case, the inspec- tor, a young official from the Cossack nobility, asked him: "Where were you living before you came here?"

"At Rostov."

"What were you imprisoned for in 1907?"

Stockman's eyes glided over the inspector's brief case and his bowed head with its scurfy side parting.

"For disturbances."

"Hm! Where were you working then?"

"At the railway workshops,"

"What as?"

"Mechanic."

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"You're not a Jew, are you? Or a converted one?"

"No. I think "

"I'm not interested in what you think. Have you been in exile?"

"Yes, I have."

The inspector raised his head, and bit his clean-shaven, pimply lips.

"I advise you to clear out of this district," he said, adding to himself, "and I'll see to it that you do."

"Why, inspector?"

The answer was another question.

"What did you talk to the Cossacks about on the day of the fight at the mill?"

"Well. . . ."

"All right, you can go."

Stockman went out on to the verandah of Mokhov's house (the authorities always made the merchant's house their headquarters) and glanced back at the painted double doors with a shrug.

VII

Winter came on slowly. After Intercession the snow melted and the herds were driven out to pasture again. For a week a south wind blew, warming the earth; a late stunted green gave a last bright gleam in the steppe. The thaw

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lasted until St. Michael's Day, then the frost returned and heavy snow fell, and the vegetable patches by the Don, where the snow had drift- ed to the top of the fences, were criss-crossed with the marks of hares' feet. The streets were deserted.

The smoke of dung fuel hung low over the village, and rooks pecked about on the heaps of ash scattered by the roadside. The smooth sledge-track wound in a faded grey-blue rib- bon through the village.

A village assembly was to be held to arrange for the allotment and cutting of brushwood. The Cossacks crowded round the steps of the vil- lage administration in their sheepskins and greatcoats, until the cold drove them inside. Be- hind a table, beside the ataman and clerk, the respected village elders with their silvery beards were gathered; the younger Cossacks with beards of various colours and those with no beard at all stood round in groups and muttered to one another out of the warmth of their coat collars. The clerk covered sheet after sheet of pa- per with close writing, while the ataman watched over his shoulder, and a restrained hum filled the chilly room,

"The hay this year. . . ,"

"Aye, the meadow hay is good, but the steppe hay is all clover,"

234

"In the old days they'd be grazing in the steppe till Christmas."

"That was all right for the Kalmyks."

A throaty cough.

"The ataman's getting a neck like a wolf's on him. So fat he can't turn his head."

"Fed himself up like a pig, the devil!"

"Hullo, Grandpa, trying to scare the winter away? What a sheepskin you've got on!"

"Time for the gypsy to sell his coat soon."

"Did ye hear of the gypsy lad who spent the night in the steppe and hadn't anything to cover himself with except a fishing net? When the cold started creeping round his guts, he wakes up, pushes his finger through a loop in the net and says to his mother: 'So that's where the draught's coming from. I thought it was chilly.' "

"I fear we'll have some slippery days soon."

"Better get the oxen shod."

"I've been cutting the willows down in Devil's gully. Good stuff there."

"Button your fly, Zakhar. If you get frost- bite, your woman'll turn you out of the house,"

"What's this I hear about you taking over one of the common bulls, Avdeyich?"

"I decided not to. That Parasha woman's going to take care of it. I'm a widow, she says, the more the merrier. All right, I says, it may give you an addition to the family, , , ."

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"Haw-haw-haw!"

"Now, elders! What about the wood-cutting? Quiet there!"

"Yes, I says, if you get an addition, you'll need a godfather."

"A little quieter, please."

The meeting began. Toying with his rod of office, the ataman called out the names, pluck- ing icicles out of his beard with his little finger. Now and then the door slammed at the back of the room and people squeezed in amid clouds of cold air.

"You can't fix the wood-cutting for Thurs- day!" Ivan Tomilin attempted to shout down the ataman and rubbed his purple ears, cock- ing his head in its blue artillery cap on one side.

"Why not?"

"You'll rub your ears off, gunner!" somebody called out.

"We'll sew on a pair of bull's ears for him."

"On Thursday half the village will be going out to bring in hay. A fine way to arrange things. . , ."

"You can leave that till Sunday!"

"Elders!"

"What now!"

"Good luck to him!"

A howl of derision arose from the assembly.

23&

Old Matvei Kashulin leaned across the rick- ety table and, pointing his smooth ash stick at Tomilin, croaked furiously.

"The hay can wait! It's for the community to say. Ye're always agin everybody else. Ye're a young fool, my lad! And that's that!"

"You've got no brains to boast about, any- way . . ." one-armed Alexei joined in, his disfig- ured cheek twitching. For six years he had been quarreling with old Kashulin over a strip of land. Alexei beat up the old man every spring, although the strip that Kashulin had grabbed was not big enough to swing a cat in anyway.

"Shut up, jelly-face!"

"Pity you're out of my reach, or I'd bloody your nose for you," Alexei threatened, "Why, you one-armed twitcher. . .!" "Now then, enough of this bickering. , . ." "Go outside if you want to try your strength." "Chuck it, Alexei, look how the old fellow's bristling up, he'll lose his hat in a minute." "Put 'em in the cooler if they won't behave." The table groaned as the ataman brought his heavy fist down on it with a crash.

"I'll call the watchman in in a moment, if there isn't silence." When order was restored, he added: "Wood-cutting will begin on Thurs- day at dawn."

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"Well, what do you say, elders?"

"Good luck to it!"

"God grant it!"

"They don't listen much to the old folk now- adays!"

"They'll listen all right. Do they think they can do what they like? My Alexander, when I gave him his portion, he wanted to start a fight over it, laid hands on me, he did. I put him in his place though. 'I'll go to the ataman this minute,' I says, 'and have you thrashed, . . .' That cooled him off all right. . . ."

"And one other thing, elders. I've received an order from the district ataman." The village ataman raised his voice and twisted his neck; the stiff collar of his uniform was cutting into his chin, "Next Saturday the youngsters are to go to be sworn in at the district ataman's of- fice. They are to be there by the afternoon."

Pantelei Prokofyevich was standing by the window nearest the door, holding up his lame leg like a crane. At his side Miron Grigorye- vich was sitting on the window-sill, smiling into his ruddy beard. His short fair eye-lashes were fluffed with hoar-frost, his big brown freckles had turned grey in the cold. The younger Cos- sacks were crowded close by, winking and smil- ing at one another. In the middle of their group, his blue-topped quardsman's cap thrust

238

back on his smooth bald head, his unageing face everlastingly blushing like a ruddy winter apple, stood Avdeyich Sinilin,

Avdeyich had served in the Ataman's Life- guards, and had come back with the nick- name "Braggart." He had been one of the first in the village to be assigned to the Ataman's Reg- iment. He had always been a little queer in the head, but on active service something very strange had happened to him. From the very first day of his return he had begun to tell as- tonishing stories of service at the court and his extraordinary adventures in St. Petersburg. His astounded listeners at first believed him, drinking it all in with gaping mouths, but then they discovered that Avdeyich was the biggest liar the village had ever produced, and they openly laughed at him. But he was not to be abashed (although he was always so red in the face you could never tell if he was blushing), and did not give up his lying. As he grew older he began to get annoyed when caught out in a lie, and would resort to his fists; but if his lis- teners only laughed and said nothing he grew more and more expansive in his story-telling.

As far as his farming was concerned he was a practical and hard-working Cossack, in every- thing he acted sensibly, sometimes cunningly, but when the subject turned to his service in

239

the Lifeguards-everyone simply threw up their hands and doubled up with laughter.

Avdeyich stood in the middle of the room, rocking on his heels. Glancing round the as- sembled Cossacks, he observed in his ponder- ous, bass voice:

"Speaking of service, these days the Cossacks aren't at all what they were. They're just shrimps, no size at all. You could crack any one of 'em in half just by sneezing at him. But . . .'' and he smiled contemptuously, "I saw some Cossack skeletons once! Ah! They were Cos- sacks in those days!"

"Where did you dig the skeletons up, Av- deyich?" smooth-faced Anikushka asked, nudging his neighbour.

"Don't start telling any of your lies, Avdey- ich, with the Holy Day so near," Pantelei said, wrinkling up his nose and tugging his ear-ring. He did not like Avdeyich's bragging habits.

"It isn't in my nature to lie, brother," Avdey- ich replied firmly, and stared in astonishment at Anikushka, who was shaking as though with fever. "I saw these skeletons when we were building a house for my brother-in-law. As we were digging the foundation we came to a grave. So down here by the Don, next the church there must have been a cemetery in the old days,"

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"Well, what about the skeletons?" Pantelei asked impatiently, getting ready to go,

"Arms-that long." Avdeyich said extending both his rake-like arms. "Head as big as a caul- dron-true as I live!"

"You'd better tell the youngsters how you caught a robber in St. Petersburg," Miron sug- gested, as he rose from the window-sill.

"There's nothing really to tell," Avdeyich re- plied, affected by a sudden attack of modesty

"Tell us, tell us, Avdeyich!"

"Well, it was like this," Avdeyich cleared his throat and drew his tobacco pouch out of his trouser pocket. He replaced the two copper coins that had dropped out of the pouch, poured a pinch of tobacco on to his palm, and ran a beaming eye over his audience. "Some vil- lain had escaped from prison. They looked for him all over the place, but do you think they could find him? They just couldn't. All the au- thorities were beaten.

"Well, one night the officer of the guard calls me to him: 'Go into the imperial palace,' he says. 'His Imperial Majesty wants to see you.' So in I went. I stood to attention, but he claps me on the shoulder and says: 'Listen!' he says, 'Ivan Avdeyich, the biggest villain in our king- dom has done a bunk. Find him, even if you have to stand on your head to do it. And don't

16—1933 241

let me see you till you have!' 'Very good. Your Imperial Majesty!' I says. Yes, lads, that was a facer. ... So I took three of the best horses in the tsar's stables and set out."

Lighting a cigarette, Avdeyich surveyed the bowed heads of his listeners and, warming to his subject, boomed out of the cloud of smoke enveloping his face:

"I rode all day, and I rode all night, until on the third day I came up with the villain near Moscow. I clapped the bird into my coach, and hauled him back to St. Petersburg. I arrived at midnight, all covered with mud, and went straight to His Imperial Majesty himself. All sorts of counts and princes tried to stop me, but in I marched. Hm. . . . Well, I knocks at the door. 'May I come in. Your Imperial Majesty?' 'Who is it?' 'It's me,' I says, 'Ivan Avdeyich Si- nilin.' I heard a noise in the room, and heard His Majesty himself cry out: 'Maria Fyodo- rovna, Maria Fyodorovna! Get up quick and get a samovar going. Ivan Avdeyich has arrived.' "

There was a roar of laughter from the Cos- sacks at the back of the crowd. The clerk, who had been reading a notice about stray cattle, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and the ataman stretched out his neck like a goose and stared hard at the guffawing crowd.

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Avdeyich's face clouded and his eyes wan- dered uncertainly over the faces before him.

"Wait a bit!"

"Ha-ha-ha!"

"Oh, he'll be the death of us!"

" 'Get a samovar going! Avdeyich has ar- rived!' Ha-ha-ha!"

The assembly began to break up. A constant steady creaking rose from the frozen steps of the administration house. On the trampled snow outside Stepan Astakhov and a tall, long- slianked Cossack, the owner of the windmill, were wrestling to get themselves warm.

The Cossacks gathered round shouting ad- vice.

"Throw him, the heathen!"

"Knock the stuffing out of him, Stepan!"

"Don't grab him there! Think you're clever!" old Kashulin shouted, hopping about like a sparrow; and in his excitement he failed to no- tice a large bright dewdrop hanging shyly from the tip of his bluish nose,

VIII

When Pantelei returned from the meeting he went at once to the room which he and his wife occupied. Ilyinichna had been unwell for some days, and her puffy face reflected her weariness

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and pain. She lay propped up high on a plump feather bed with a pillow at her back. At the sound of Pantelei's footsteps she turned her head; her eyes rested on his breath-dampened beard and matted whiskers with the look of severity that had become a habit with her, and her nostrils twitched. But the old man smelled only of frost and sour sheepskin. "Sober to- day," she thought, and contentedly laid down her knitting-needles.

"Well, what about the wood-cutting?"

"They've decided to begin on Thursday." Pantelei stroked his moustache. "Thursday morning," he added, sitting down on a chest at the side of the bed. "Well, feeling any better?"

"Just the same. Shooting pains in all my joints."

"I told you not to go into the water, you fool. And in autumn too ! You knew what would hap- pen," Pantelei fumed, tracing broad circles on the floor with his stick. "There were plenty of other women to ret that hemp, curse the stuff . . . curse it all!"

"I couldn't let the hemp be wasted. There weren't any women. Grisha was out ploughing with his. Pyotr and Darya had gone off some- where."

The old man blew into his cupped hands and bent towards the bed.

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"And how's Natalya?"

There was a note of anxiety in Ilyinichna's voice as she replied:

"I don't know what to do. She was crying again the other day. I went out in the yard and found someone had left the bam door wide open. I went up to shut it, and there she was standing by the millet bin. I asked her what was the matter, but she said she only had a headache. I can't get the truth out of her."

"Maybe she's poorly?"

"I don't think so. Either someone's given her the evil eye, or else it's Grisha. . . ."

"He hasn't taken up again with that woman, by any chance?"

"Goodness, no! What a thing to say!" Ilyi- nichna exclaimed in alarm. "What do you take Stepan for-a fool? No, I haven't heard any- thing."

Pantelei sat with his wife a little longer, then went out. Grigory was in his room sharpening fishing hooks with a file. Natalya was smear- ing them with lard, and carefully wrapping each in a separate rag. As Pantelei limped by he stared at her inquisitively. Her sallow cheeks were flushed like an autumn leaf. She had grown noticeably thinner during the past month, and there was a new, wretched look in her eyes. The old man paused at the door.

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"He's killing the girl!" he thought, as he glanced back at Natalya's smooth head bowed over the bench. Grigory sat near the window. His black tousled forelock jerked with every stroke of the file.

"Drop that, devil take you!" the old man shouted, turning livid in a sudden frenzy. Gri- gory looked up startled.

"I've got two more points to sharpen. Dad."

"Drop it, I tell you! Get ready for the wood- cutting. The sledges aren't ready at all, and you sit there sharpening hooks," he added more quietly, and lingered at the door, evidently wanting to say something else. But he went out. Grigory heard him giving vent to the rest of his anger on Pyotr.

As Grigory pulled on his coat, he heard his father shouting in the yard:

"Haven't you watered the cattle yet, you young lounger? And who's been meddling with that stack by the fence? Didn't I say it wasn't to be touched? You'll use up all the best hay, damn you, then what will you feed the bullocks on in spring?"

A good two hours before dawn on Thursday, Ilyinichna woke Darya: "Get up! Time to light the fire!"

Darya ran in her shift to the stove, found some matches and struck a light,

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"Get a move on!" Pyotr nagged his wife, coughing as he lit a cigarette.

"They don't go and wake that Natalya up! Am I to tear myself in two?" Darya grumbled crossly, still only half-awake.

"Go and wake her up yourself," Pyotr advised her. But the advice was unnecessary, for Na- talya was already up. Pulling on her blouse, she went out to get fuel for the fire.

"Fetch some kindling," her sister-in-law com- manded.

"Tell Dunya to fetch the water, Darya, do you hear?" Ilyinichna called hoarsely, moving about the kitchen with difficulty.

The kitchen smelled of fresh hops, harness, and the warmth of human bodies. Darya shuf- fled about in her felt boots, rattling the pots; under her pink shift her small breasts quivered. Married life had not soured or withered her. Tall and slender, supple as a willow switch, she looked like a girl.

She walked with a twisting movement of the shoulders; she laughed at the shouts of her hus- band; a firm row of small close-set teeth showed under the fine rim of her shrewish lips.

"You ought to have brought some fuel- bricks in overnight. They would have dried in the stove," Ilyinichna grumbled.

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"I forgot. Mother, It can't be helped," Darya answered.

Dawn broke before the meal was ready. Pan- telei hurried over his breakfast,. blowing on the thin porridge. Grigory ate slowly and moodily, his jaw muscles working up and down, and Pyotr, unnoticed by his father, amused himself with teasing Dunya, who was suffering with toothache and had her face bound up.

The sound of sledge-runners was heard from the street. Bullock sledges were moving down to the river in the grey dawn. Grigory and Pyotr went out to harness their sledges. As he went Grigory wound a soft scarf, his wife's gift, around his neck, and gulped in the dry frosty air. A raven flew overhead with a full, throaty cry. The swish of its slowly flapping wings could be heard distinctly in the frosty stillness. Pyotr watched its flight and re- marked :

"Flying south, to the warm."

Behind a rosy little cloud, as gay as a girl- ish smile, a tiny slip of moon gleamed dimly. The smoke from the chimneys rose in columns, reaching towards the inaccessibly distant, gold- en pointed blade of the waning moon:

The river was not quite frozen over opposite the Melekhovs' house. Along the edges of the stream the ice was firm and green under drifts

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of snow. But beyond the middle where springs flowed from the Black Bank, a gap in the ice yawned sombre and menacing out of the cor- roded whiteness. The water was freckled with the wild duck that were wintering there.

Pantelei drove off first with the old bullocks, leaving his sons to follow later. On the slope down to the river-crossing Pyotr and Grigory caught up with Anikushka. With a new axe handle sticking out of his sledge, and wearing a broad green sash he was walking at the side of his bullocks, while his wife, a stunted sickly woman, held the reins.

"Hullo, neighbour, surely you're not taking your woman with you?" Pyotr shouted to him.

Anikushka, hopping up and down to keep warm, grinned and went over to the brothers.

"Yes, I am, to keep me warm."

"You'll get no warmth from her, she's too lean."

"That's true; and I feed her with oats, but still she doesn't fatten!"

"Shall we be cutting in the same strip?" Gri- gory asked, jumping off the sledge.

"Yes, if you'll give me a smoke."

"You've always been a scrounger, Anikushka."

"The sweetest things in life are begged and stolen," Anikushka chuckled, wrinkling his hairless womanish face in a smile.

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The three drove on together. The forest was laced with rime, and of a virgin whiteness. Ani- kushka rode in front, lashing his whip against the branches overhead. The needle-sharp snow crystals showered down on his wife.

"Don't play about, you devil!" she shouted at him, as she shook the snow off.

"Drop her into the snow head first," Pyotr advised trying to get his whip under the bul- lock's belly to speed its pace.

At a turn of the road they met Stepan Asta- khov driving two yoked bullocks back towards the village. The leather soles of his felt boots squeaked on the snow as he strode along. His curly forelock hung below his fur cap like a bunch of white grapes.

"Hey, Stepan, lost your way?" Anikushka shouted as he passed.

"Lost my way be damned! We swung over, and the sledge snapped its runner on a stump. So I've got to go back," Stepan cursed obscene- ly and his fierce light eyes narrowed insolently as he passed Pyotr.

"Left your sledge behind?" Anikushka asked, turning round.

Ignoring the remark, Stepan cracked his whip at the bullocks that were heading away from the track and gave Grigory a long hard stare as he passed on. A little farther on the

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group came to a sledge abandoned in the middle of the road. Aksinya was standing by it. Hold- ing down the edge of her sheepskin with her left hand, she was gazing along the road in their direction.

"Out of the way or I'll run you over. Oho, you're the wife for me!" Anikushka roared. Ak- sinya stepped aside with a smile, and sat down on the overturned sledge.

"You've got your own wife with you."

"Yes, she sticks to me like a burr on a pig's tail, otherwise I'd give you a lift."

"Thank you kindly."

As Pyotr came up to her he gave a quick glance back at Grigory. Grigory was smiling uncertainly, anxiety and expectation expressed in all his movements.

"Good health to you, neighbour," Pyotr greet- ed her, touching his cap with his mitten.

"Praise be."

"What, sledge broken?" Pyotr asked.

"Yes, it is," she replied slowly without look- ing at Pyotr, and rising to her feet, turned towards Grigory. "Grigory Panteleyevich, I'd like a word with you," she said as he came up.

Asking Pyotr to look after his bullocks for a moment, Grigory turned to her. Pyotr laughed suggestively, and drove on.

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The two stood silently regarding each other. Aksinya glanced cautiously around, then turned her liquid black eyes again to Grigory's face. Shame and joy flamed in her cheeks and dried her lips. Her breath came in sharp gasps.

At a turn in the road Anikushka and Pyotr disappeared behind the brown oak trunks.

Grigory looked straight into Aksinya's eyes and saw in them a spark of stubborn reckless- ness.

"Well, Grisha, do as you please, but I can't live without you," she said firmly, and pressed her lips together waiting for his answer.

Grigory made no reply. The forest was locked in silence. A glassy emptiness rang in his ears. The surface of the road, polished smooth by sledge-runners, the grey rag of sky, the forest, dumb, deathly drowsy. ... A sudden cry of a raven near by seemed to rouse Grigory from his momentary lethargy. He raised his head and watched the bird winging away in silent flight. He was surprised when he heard him- self say:

"It's going to be warm. He's making for the warm." He seemed to shake himself and laughed hoarsely. "Well. . . ." He turned his intoxi- cated eyes furtively on Aksinya, and suddenly snatched her to him.

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During the winter evenings a little group of villagers gathered in Stockman's room at Lu- keshka's house. There were Christonya, and Knave from the mill, a greasy jacket draped over his shoulders, the ever-smiling David (now three months a loafer), the engineman, Ivan Alexeyevich Kotlyarov, sometimes Filka the cobbler, and always Misha Koshevoi, a young Cossack who had not yet done his regular army service.

At first the group played cards. Then Stock- man casually brought out a book of Nekrasov's poetry. They began to read the volume aloud, and liked it. Then they went on to Nikitin, and about Christmas-time Stockman suggested the reading of a dog-eared, unbound booklet. Koshevoi, who had been to the church school and could read aloud, glanced contemptuously at the greasy pages.

"You could make noodles of it, it's so greasy," he said in disgust.

Christonya roared with laughter; David smiled dazzlingly. But Stockman waited for the merriment to die away, and then said:

"Read it, Misha. It's interesting. It's all about the Cossacks."

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Bending his head over the table, Koshevoi spelt out laboriously:

"A Short History oi the Don Cossacks," and then glanced around expectantly.

"Read it!" Kotlyarov said.

They laboured through the book for three evenings, reading about the free life of the past, about Pugachov, Stenka Razin and Kon- draty Bulavin. Finally they came down to re- cent times. The unknown author poured scorn on the Cossacks' miserable existence; scoffed at the authorities and the system, the tsar's government and the Cossackry itself which had hired itself out to the monarchs as their henchmen. The listeners grew excited and be- gan to quarrel among themselves. Christonya, his head touching the roof-beam, spoke up in his booming voice. Stockman sat at the door, smoking a pipe, his eyes smiling.

"He's right! It's all true!" Christonya burst out.

"It's not our fault such shame was brought upon the Cossacks." Koshevoi spread his arms in perplexity and puckered up his handsome face.

He was thick-set, broad in the shoulders and hips, almost square. From the cast-iron founda- tion of his body rose a firm brick-red neck on which his small, gracefully set head looked

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strange, with its effeminately soft cheeks, small obstinate mouth and dark eyes under the golden slab of curly hair.

The engineman Kotlyarov, a tall thin Cos- sack, was steeped to the bone in Cossack tra- ditions, and his round protruding eyes flashed as he vigorously defended the Cossacks:

"You're a muzhik, Christonya, you've only got a drop of Cossack blood in you to a bucketful of water. Your mother was mated with a mu- zhik from Voronezh."

"You're a fool, you're a fool, brother!" Christonya boomed. "I stand for the truth."

"I wasn't in the Lifeguards," Kotlyarov said slyly. "They're all fools there."

"There are some pretty hopeless cases in the rest of the army too."

"Shut up, muzhik!"

"And aren't the muzhiks just as much men as you?"

"They're muzhiks, they're made of bast and stuffed with brushwood."

"When I was serving in Petersburg, brother, I saw many things," Christonya said, his southern accent coming out strongly. "Once it happened that we were on guard at the tsar's palace, inside and outside. We used to ride round the walls on horseback, two this way and two that. When we met we used to ask:

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'All quiet, no disorders anywhere?' and then we'd ride on. We weren't allowed to stop and talk. And they chose us for our looks. When we had to take our turn on guard at the doors they'd choose each pair so as they should be alike in their faces and their figures. Once the barber even had to dye my beard because of this stupidity. I had to take a turn at guard with a Cossack in our squadron with hair that was a kind of bay colour. Plagued if I know how he got like it, must have been scorched by a fire or something. They searched all through the regiment and there wasn't another like him. So the troop commander sent me to the barber to have my beard dyed. When I looked in the glass afterwards my heart al- most broke. I looked as if I was on fire. Honestly I did. Made my fingers sizzle to touch the thing!"

"Now he's off, the old windbag. But what were we talking about?" Kotlyarov interrupted him,

"About the people."

"Well, tell us about them. What the blither- ing hell do we want to hear about your beard for!"

"Well, as I was saying-I once had to take a turn on guard outside. We were riding along, me and my comrade, when a mob of students

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came running round the corner. Thick as flies they were! As soon as they saw us they roared: Hah!' and then again: 'Hah!' And before we knew where we were they had surrounded us, 'What are you riding about for, Cossacks?' they asked. And I said: 'We're keeping guard, and you let go those reins, young fella' ' and clapped my hands on my sword. 'Don't get me wrong, Cossack, I'm from Kamenskaya Dis- trict myself, and I'm studying in the uniservity, or the univorsity, or whatever you call it, one said. We make to ride on, and one fellow with a big nose pulls out a ten-ruble piece and says: 'Drink to the health of my dead father,' And then he pulls a picture out of his pocket. 'Look, that's my father,' he says, 'take it as a keepsake.' Well, we took it, we couldn't refuse. And they went off again. Just then a lieutenant comes riding out of the back gates of the palace with a troop of men. 'What's happened?' he shouts. And I tell him students had come and begun talking to us, and we had wanted to sabre them according to instructions, but as they had set us free we had ridden off. When we went off duty later, we told the corporal we'd earned ten rubles and wanted to drink them to the memory of the old man, showing him the picture. In the evening the corporal brought some vodka, and we had a good time

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for a couple of days. But afterwards we found out what the trick was. It turned out that this student, the young bastard, had given us a picture of the biggest trouble-maker in Ger- many. I had hung it over my bed; he had a grey beard and looked a decent sort of chap. But the lieutenant saw it and asked: 'Where did you get that picture from, you son of a gun?' So I told him, and he began swearing at me and punching me in the face: 'Do you know who that is? He's their ataman Karl. . . .' Drat it, I've forgotten his name. Now, what was it. . . ?"

"Karl Marx?" Stockman suggested with a broad smile.

"That's it, Karl Mars," Christonya exclaimed joyfully. "He got me into trouble all right. Why, sometimes the tsarevich Alexei and his tutors used to come into the guardroom. They might have seen it. What would have happened then?"

"And you keep praising the muzhiks. What a trick they played on you," Kotlyarov chuckled.

"But we drank the ten rubles. It was the bearded Karl we drank to, but we drank all the same!"

"He deserves to be drunk to," Stockman smiled, playing with his cigarette-holder.

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"Why, what good did he do?" Koshevoi queried.

"I'll tell you another time, it's getting late now." Stockman held the holder between his fingers, and ejected the dead cigarette-end with a slap from the other hand.

After long sifting and testing, a little group of ten Cossacks began to meet regularly in Stockman's workshop. Stockman was the heart and soul of the group and he worked straight towards a goal that only he fully understood. He ate into the simple understandings and conceptions like a worm into wood, instilling repugnance and hatred towards the existing system. At first he found himself confronted with the cold steel of distrust, but he was not to be repulsed. Even that could be worn away.

On the sandy slope of the left bank of the Don lies Vyeshenskaya stanitsa, the most an- cient stanitsa of the upper Don. Originally called Chigonaki, it was moved to a new site after being sacked during the reign of Peter the First, and renamed Vyeshenskaya, It was formerly an important link along the great water-way from Voronezh to Azov.

Opposite Vyeshenskaya the Don bends like

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a Tatar bow, turns sharply to the right, and by the little village of Bazki majestically straightens again, carries its greenish-blue waters over the chalky base of the hills on the west bank, then, with thickly-clustered villages on the right and occasional stanitsas on the left, down to the sea, to the blue Sea of Azov.

At Ust-Khoperskaya it joins with its tribu- tary the Khoper, and at Ust-Medveditskaya, with the Medveditsa, and then it flows on deep and full-watered amid a riotous growth of populous villages and stanitsas.

The stanitsa of Vyeshenskaya stands among yellow sand-drifts. It is a bald cheerless place without orchards. In the square stands an old church, grey with age, and six streets run out of the square in lines parallel with the river. Where the Don bends towards Bazki, a lake, about as wide as the Don in the dry season, branches off into a thicket of poplars. The far end of Vyeshenskaya slopes down to this lake, and in a smaller square, overgrown with golden prickly thorn, is a second church, with green cupolas and green roof, matching the green of the poplars on the other side of the lake.

Beyond the village to the north stretches a saffron waste of sands, a stunted pine planta- tion, and creeks whose water is pink from the red-clay soil. Here and there in the sandy

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wilderness are rare oases of villages, meadow- land, and a rusty scrub of willows.

One Sunday in December a dense crowd of five hundred young Cossacks from all the vil- lages in the district was assembled in the square outside the old church. Mass ended, the senior sergeant, a gallant old Cossack with long-service decorations, gave an order, and the youngsters drew up in two long straggling ranks. Sergeants rushed to and fro to get them dressed off.

"Ranks!" the sergeant boomed and making a vague gesture with his hand, snapped: "Form fours."

The ataman entered the churchyard, dressed according to form and wearing a new officer's greatcoat, his spurs jingling, and followed by the military policeman,

Grigory Melekhov who was standing next to Mitka Korshunov heard him whisper:

"My boot pinches like hell."

"Stick it out, they'll make you an ata- man."

"We'll be going inside soon."

As if to confirm this, the senior sergeant fell back a pace or two, turned sharply on his heels and shouted:

"Right turn. Forward march!"

The column filed through the wide-open

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gate, and the church dome rang with the sound of tramping feet.

Grigory paid no attention to the words of the oath of allegiance being read by the priest. By his side stood Mitka Korshunov, his face contorted with the pain of his tight new boots. Grigory's upraised arm grew numb, an aching jumble of thoughts was running through his mind. As he came up to the crucifix and kissed the silver, damp with the moisture of many lips, he thought of Aksinya, and of his wife With the suddenness of a flash of forked light- ning he had a vision of the forest, its brown trunks and branches fluffed with white down, and the humid gleam of Aksinya's black eyes under her kerchief. . . .

When the ceremony was ended they were marched out into the square and were again drawn up in ranks. Blowing his nose and stealthily wiping his fingers on the lining of his coat, the sergeant addressed them:

"You're not boys any longer now, you're Cossacks. You've taken the oath and you ought to understand what's what. You've grown up into Cossacks and you've got to guard your honour, obey your fathers and mothers and all the rest of it. You were boys once, you've had your fun and games-used to play tipcat in the road, I expect-but now you must think about

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your future service. In a year's time they'll be calling you up into the army. . . ." Here the sergeant blew his nose again, shook his hand clean and, drawing on his rabbit's down gloves, ended: "And your fathers and mothers must think about getting you your equipment. They must fit you out with an army horse, and . . . in general. . . . And now, home you go and God be with you, my lads."

Grigory and Mitka joined up with the rest of the lads from their village, and they set off together for home.

They walked back along the Don. The smoke of cottage stoves hung in wisps over the village of Bazki, and bells were ringing faintly. Mitka limped along behind the others, leaning on a knotty stake that he had broken out of a fence.

"Take your boot off," one of the lads advised.

"I'll get my foot frost-bitten," Mitka replied hesitantly.

"You can keep your sock on."

Mitka sat down on the snow and tugged off his boot. Then he walked on, stepping heavily on his stockinged foot. The thick knitted stock- ing made a sharp imprint in the crisp snow.

"What road shall we take?" the stumpy shock-headed Alexei Beshnyak asked.

"Along the Don," Grigory answered for them all.

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They walked on, talking and jostling one another off the road. Each of them was pulled over by the others, who piled on top of him. Between Bazki and Gromkovsky Mitka was the first to spot a wolf crossing the Don.

"Look, lads, there's a wolf!"

The young Cossacks started shouting and catcalling and the wolf loped off, then halted, standing sideways, not far from the opposite bank.

"Catch him!"

"Yah!"

"It's you he's looking at, Mitka, walking in your sock."

"What a fat neck he's got!"

"Look, there he goes!"

The grey form stood stiffly for a moment, as though carved out of granite, then took a hurried leap and slunk away into the willows girding the bank.

It was dusk when they reached the village. Grigory made his way along the ice to the path that led up to his home. A disused sledge stood in the yard; in a heap of brushwood piled near the fence the sparrows were twittering. He felt the smell of habitation, of charred soot, and the steamy odour of the stables.

Grigory went up the steps of the house and glanced in at the window. The hanging lamp

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shed a dim yellow glow through the room. Pyotr was standing in its light with his back to the window. Grigory brushed the snow off his boots with the besom at the door, and entered the kitchen amid a flurry of steam.

"Well, I'm back."

"You've been quick. You got frozen, I ex- pect," Pyotr replied in an anxious and hurried tone.

Pantelei was sitting with his head bowed in his hands, his elbows on his knees. Darya was spinning at the droning spinning-wheel. Nata- lya was standing at the table with her back to Grigory, and did not turn round on his entry. Glancing hastily around the kitchen Grigory rested his eyes on Pyotr. His brother's agitat- edly expectant face told him that something was amiss.

"Taken the oath?"

"Uh-huh."

Grigory took off his outdoor clothes slowly, playing for time, and turning over in his mind all the possibilities which might have led to this chilly and silent welcome. Ilyinichna came out of the best room, her face expressing her agitation.

"It's Natalya!" Grigory thought, as he sat down on the bench beside his father.

''Get him some supper," his mother said to

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Darya, indicating Grigory with her eyes. Darya stopped in the middle of her spinning- song, and went to the stove, her girlish figure swaying from the waist. The kitchen was en- gulfed in a silence broken only by the heavy breathing of a goat and its newly-born kid.

As Grigory sipped his soup he glanced at Natalya. But he could not see her face. She was sitting sideways to him, her head bent over her knitting-needles. Pantelei was the first to be provoked into speech by the general silence. Coughing artificially, he said:

"Natalya is talking about going back to her parents."

Grigory pressed some bread-crumbs into a ball, and said nothing.

"And why's that?" his father asked, his lower lip quivering: the first sign of a coming outburst of frenzy.

"I don't know," Grigory replied as he rose and crossed himself.

"But I know!" his father raised his voice.

"Don't shout, don't shout!" Ilyinichna inter- posed.

"Yes, there's no cause for shouting." Pyotr moved from the window to the middle of the room. "It's up to her. If she wants to stay, she can stay; if she doesn't, well . . . God be with her!"

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"I'm not blaming her. Of course it's a dis- grace and a sin before God to leave your hus- band, but I don't blame her. It's not her fault, but that son of a bitch's." Pantelei pointed to Grigory who was warming himself at the stove.

"Who have I done wrong?" Grigory asked.

"You don't know? You don't know, you devil?"

"No, I don't."

Pantelei jumped up, overturning the bench, and went close up to Grigory. Natalya dropped her stocking and the needles clattered to the floor. At the sound a kitten jumped down from the stove and, with its head on one side and paw curved, began to pat the ball of wool to- wards the chest.

"What I say to you is this," the old man be- gan slowly and deliberately. "If you won't live with Natalya, you can clear out of this house and go wherever your feet will carry you. That's what I say to you. Go where your feet will carry you," he repeated in a calm voice, and turned and picked up the bench.

Dunya sat on the bed, her round frightened eyes darting from one to the other.

"I don't say this in anger. Dad," Grigory's voice was jarringly hollow. "I didn't marry of my own choice, it was you who married me

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off. As for Natalya, I'm not stopping her. She can go to her father, if she wants to." "You clear out yourself." "I will!"

"Go to the devil!"

"I'm going. I'm going, don't be in a hurry." Grigory reached for the sleeve of his short fur coat lying on the bed, his nostrils dilated, his whole body quivering with a boiling anger that was just like his father's. The same mingled Turkish and Cossack blood flowed in their veins, and at that moment their resemblance to each other was extraordinary.

"Where are you going?" Ilyinichna groaned, seizing Grigory' s arm. But he pushed her away forcibly and snatched up his fur cap.

"Let him go, the sinful swine! Let him go, curse him! Go on, go! Clear out!" the old man thundered throwing the door wide open.

Grigory ran out on to the steps, and the last sound he heard was Natalya's loud uncontrol- lable weeping.

The frosty night held the village in its grip, prickly snow was falling from the black sky, the cracking of the ice on the Don resounded like cannon shots. Grigory ran panting out of the gate. At the far end of the village dogs were barking discordantly, and yellow points of light shone through the frosty haze.

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He walked aimlessly down the street. The blackness of the Astakhovs' windows gleamed with the brilliance of a diamond.

"Grisha!" he heard Natalya's yearning cry from the gate.

"You go to hell!" Grigory grated his teeth and hastened his steps.

"Grisha, come back!"

He stumbled drunkenly into the first cross- lane, and for the last time heard her distant, anguished cry:

"Grisha, darling. . . ."

He swiftly crossed the square and stopped at a fork in the road, wondering where to spend the night. He decided on Misha Koshe- voi. Misha lived with his mother, sister and two little brothers in a lonely straw-thatched house right by the hill, Grigory entered their yard and knocked at the tiny window.

"Who is it?"

"Is Misha there?"

"Yes, who is it wants him?"

"It's me, Grigory Melekhov."

After a moment, Misha, awakened from his first sleep, opened the door.

"You, Grisha?"

"Me."

"What do you want at this time of night?"

"Let me in, we'll talk inside,"

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In the passage, Grigory gripped Misha's elbow and cursing himself for being unable to find the right words, whispered: "I want to spend the night with you. I've fallen out with my people. Have you got room for me? Any- where will do."

"We'll fix you up somewhere. What's the row about?"

"I'll tell you later. , . . Where's the door here? I can't see it."

They made Grigory a bed on the bench. He lay thinking, his head tucked under his sheep- skin so as not to hear the whispering of Misha's mother, who slept in the same bed as her daughter. What was happening at home now, he wondered. Would Natalya go back to her father or not? Well, life had taken a new turn. Where should he go? And the answer came swiftly. He would send for Aksinya to- morrow, and go with her to the Kuban, far away from here . . . far, far away. . . .

Rolling steppeland, villages, stanitsas, un- known, unloved, floated before Grigory's closed eyes. And beyond the rolling hills, be- yond the long grey road lay a welcoming land of blue skies, a fairy-tale land with Aksinya's love, in all its rebellious late-flowering strength, to make it the more attractive.

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His sleep was troubled by the approaching unknown. Before he finally dozed off he tried hard to recall what it was that oppressed him. In his drowsy state his thoughts would flow easily and smoothly, like a boat going down- stream, then suddenly they would come up against something, as though the boat had struck a sandbank. He wrestled with the baffl- ing obstacle. What was it that lay in his path?

In the morning he awoke and at once re- membered what it was-his army service! How could he go away with Aksinya? In the spring there was the training camp, and in the autumn the army draft.

He had some breakfast, and called Misha out into the passage.

"Misha, go to the Astakhovs for me, will you?" he said. "Tell Aksinya to come to the windmill this evening after dark."

"But what about Stepan?" Misha said hesi- tantly.

"Say you've come on some business or other."

"All right, I'll go."

"Tell her to be sure to come."

"Oh, all right."

In the evening Grigory went to the mill and sat there smoking, hiding the cigarette in his cuff. Beyond the mill the wind was stumbling

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over withered maize stalks. A scrap of torn canvas flapped on the chained and motionless sail. It sounded like a great bird flapping round the mill, unable to fly away. Aksinya did not appear. The sun had set in the west in a fad- ing, gilded lilac, from the east the wind began to blow freshly; darkness was overtaking the moon stranded among the willows. Above the windmill the ruddy, blue-streaked sky was deathly dark; the last sounds of busy day hovered over the village.

He smoked three cigarettes in succession, thrust the last end into the trodden snow, and gazed round in anxious irritation. Half-thawed cart-tracks from the mill to the village showed darkly in the snow. There was no one in sight. He rose, stretched himself, and moved towards the light twinkling invitingly in Misha's window. He was approaching the yard, whis- tling through his teeth, when he stumbled into Aksinya. She had evidently been running: she was out of breath, and the faint scent of the winter wind, or perhaps of fresh steppe hay, came from her fresh cold mouth.

"I waited and waited, I thought you weren't coming."

"I had to get rid of Stepan."

"You've made me frozen, you wretch!"

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"I'm hot, I'll warm you." She flung open her wool-lined coat and wrapped herself round Grigory like hops round an oak,

"Why did you send for me?"

"Take your arms away, somebody may pass."

"You haven't quarrelled with your people, have you?"

"I've left them. I spent the night with Misha. I'm a homeless dog now."

"What will you do now?" Aksinya relaxed the grip of her arms and drew her coat tight with a shiver. "Let's go over to the fence, Grisha, We can't stand here in the middle of the road."

They turned off the road, and Grigory, sweeping away the drift-snow, leaned against the frosty crackling wattle fence.

"You don't know whether Natalya has gone home, do you?"

"I don't. . . . She'll go, I expect. How can she stay here?"

Grigory slipped Aksinya's frozen hand up the sleeve of his coat, and squeezing her slender wrist, he said:

"And what about us?"

"I don't know, dear. Whatever you think best."

"Will you leave Stepan?"

"Without a sigh. This evening, if you like."

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"And we'll find work somewhere, and live somehow."

"They can put me in the shafts as long as I'm with you, Grisha. Anything to be with you."

They stood close together, each warming the other. Grigory did not want to stir; he stood facing into the wind, his nostrils quivering, his eyelids closed. Aksinya, her face pressed into his armpit, breathed in the familiar, intoxicat- ing scent of his sweat; and on her shamelessly avid lips, hidden from Grigory's eyes, trembled a joyous smile of happiness fulfilled.

"Tomorrow I'll go and see Mokhov. He may be able to give me work," Grigory said, shift- ing his grip on Aksinya's wrist, which had grown damp with perspiration under his fingers. Aksinya did not speak, nor did she raise her head. The smile slipped like a dying wind from her face, and the anxiety and fear lurking in her dilated eyes gave them the look of a frightened animal. "Shall I tell him or not?" she thought, as she remembered that she was pregnant. "I must tell him," she decided, but immediately, trembling with fear, she drove away the terrible thought. With a woman's in- stinct she sensed that this was not the moment to tell him; she realized that she might lose Grigory for ever; and uncertain whether the

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child leaping beneath her heart was Grigory's or Stepan's, she deceived her conscience, and did not tell him.

"Why are you trembling? Are you cold?" Grigory asked, wrapping his coat about her.

"I am a little. ... I must go, Grisha. Stepan will come back and find me away."

"Where's he gone?"

"To Anikei's to play cards."

They parted. The agitating scent of her lips remained on Grigory's lips; the scent of the winter wind, or perhaps that faint, faraway scent that comes from the hay after a spring shower in the steppe.

Aksinya turned into a by-way; bending low, she almost ran. By a well, where the cattle had churned up the autumn mud, she stumbled awk- wardly, her foot slipping on a frozen clod; and feeling a lacerating pain in her belly she caught at the fence. The pain died away, but in her side something living, moving, beat angrily and strongly time and again.

Next morning Grigory went to see Mokhov. Mokhov had just returned from the shop and was sitting with Atyopin in the dining-room with its rich oak-coloured wall-paper, sipping

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strong, claret-coloured tea. Grigory left his cap in the hall and went in,

"I'd like to have a word with you, Sergei Pla- tonovich,"

"Ah, Pantelei Melekhov's son, isn't it? What do you want?"

"I've come to ask whether you could give me a job."

As Grigory spoke the door creaked, and a young officer in a khaki tunic with a lieutenant's epaulettes entered. Grigory recognized him as the young Listnitsky whom Mitka Korshunov had outraced the previous summer. Mokhov moved a chair up for the officer, and turned back to Grigory.

"Has your father come down in the world, that he is putting his son out to work?" he in- quired,

"I'm not living with him any more,"

"Left him?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'd gladly take you on. I know your family to be a hard-working lot, but I'm afraid I haven't any work for you to do."

"What's the matter?" Listnitsky inquired, pulling his chair up to the table.

"This lad is looking for work."

"Can you look after horses? Can you drive a team?" the officer asked as he stirred his tea.

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"I can. I've had the care of our own six horses."

"I want a coachman. What are your terms?"

"I'm not asking for much."

"In that case come to my father at our estate tomorrow. You know the house? At Yagodnoye, about twelve versts from here." i

"Yes, I know it."

"Then come tomorrow morning and we shall settle the matter."

Grigory went to the door. As he turned the handle he hesitated, and said: "I'd like to have a word with you in private. Your Honour."

Listnitsky followed Grigory out into the semi- darkness of the passage. A rosy light filtered dimly through the Venetian glass of the door leading to the balcony.

"Well, what is it?"

"I'm not alone. . . ." Grigory flushed darkly. "I've got a woman with me. . . . Perhaps you can find something for her to do?"

"Your wife?" Listnitsky inquired, smiling and raising his eyebrows.

"Someone else's."

"Oh, I see. All right, we'll fix her up as cook for the servants. But where is her husband?"

"Here in the village."

"So you've stolen another man's wife?"

"She wanted to come."

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"A romantic affair! Well, come along tomor- row. You may go now."

Grigory arrived at Yagodnoye at about eight the next morning. The house was surrounded by a peeling brick and plaster wall. Outbuild- ings straggled over the big yard: a wing with a tiled roof, the date 1910 picked out with tiles of a different colour; the servants' quarters, a bath-house, stables, poultry-house and cattle- shed, a long barn and coach-house.

The house was large and old, and nestled in an orchard. Beyond it rose a grey wall of bare poplars and the meadow willows, empty rooks' nests swinging in their brown tops.

As he entered the yard Grigory was welcomed by a pack of Crimean borzois. An old bitch, rheumy-eyed and lame, was the first to sniff at him and follow him with drooping head. In the servants' quarters a cook was quarrelling with a young, freckled maid. A thick-lipped old gaf- fer was sitting in a cloud of tobacco smoke on the door-step. The maid conducted Grigory to the house. The hall reeked of dogs and uncured pelts. On a table lay the case of a double-bar- relled gun and a game-bag with a frayed green silk fringe.

"The young master will see you," the maid called to Grigory through a side door.

Grigory glanced apprehensively at his muddy

27B

boots, and entered. Listnitsky was lying on a bed next to the window. On the eider-down was a box containing tobacco and smoking utensils. The officer made himself a cigarette, buttoned up the collar of his white shirt, and remarked:

"You're in good time. Wait, my father will be here in a minute."

Grigory stood by the door. Presently he heard the sound of footsteps in the ante-room, and a deep bass voice asked through the door: "Are you asleep, Yevgeny?"

"Come in."

An old man wearing black Caucasian felt boots entered. Grigory gave him a sideways glance. He was immediately struck by the thin crooked nose and the white arch of his mous- tache, stained yellow by tobacco under the nose. Old Listnitsky was tall and broad-shouldered, but gaunt. He wore a long camel-hair tunac that hung loosely, the collar encircling his brown wrinkled neck like a noose. His faded eyes were set close to the bridge of his nose.

"Papa, here's the coachman I spoke to you about. The lad's from a decent family."

"Whose son is he?" the old man asked in a booming voice.

"Melekhov's."

"Which Melekhov's?"

"Pantelei Melekhov's."

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"I knew Prokofy, I remember Pantelei too. Lame, isn't he?"

"Yes, Your Excellency," Grigory replied, com- ing stiffly to attention. He recalled his father's stories of the retired General Listnitsky, a hero of the Russo-Turkish war.

"Why are you seeking work?" the old man inquired.

"I'm not living with my father. Your Excel- lency."

"What sort of Cossack will you make if you hire yourself out? Didn't your father provide for you when you left him?"

"No, Your Excellency."

"Hm, that's another matter. You want work for your wife as well?"

The younger Listnitsky's bed creaked heavily. Grigory, glancing in his direction, saw the of- ficer winking and nodding his head.

"That's right. Your Excellency."

"None of your 'excellencies.' I don't like them. Your wage will be eight rubles a month. For both of you. Your wife will cook for the serv- ants and seasonal workers. Is that satisfac- tory?"

"Yes."

"Move in tomorrow morning. You'll occupy the previous coachman's quarters."

"How did the hunting go yesterday?" List-

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nitsky asked his father, lowering his narrow feet on to the carpet.

"We started a fox out of the gully at Gremya- chy and chased it as far as the woods, but it was an old one and fooled the dogs."

"Is Kazbek still limping?"

"He must have sprained his foot. Hurry up, Yevgeny, breakfast is getting cold."

The old man turned to Grigory and snapped his bony fingers.

"Quick march! Be here at eight."

Grigory went out. On the far side of the bam the borzois were sunning themselves on a patch of ground bare of snow. The old bitch with the rheumy eyes trotted up to Grigory, sniffed at him from behind and followed him a little way with head still drooping mournfully, then turned back.

XII

Aksinya had finished her cooking early. She banked up the fire, washed the dishes, and glanced out of the window looking on to the yard. Stepan was standing by the wood-pile close to the fence bordering on the Melekhovs' yard. A half-smoked cigarette hung from the corner of his firm lips. The left-hand corner of the shed was tumbling down, and he was select- ing posts suitable for its repair.

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Aksinya had arisen with two rosy blushes in her cheeks and a youthful glitter in her eyes. Stepan noticed the change, and as he was hav- ing breakfast he could not forbear to ask: "What's happened to you?"

"What's happened?" Aksinya echoed him, flushing.

"Your face is shining as though you had smeared yourself with oil."

"It's the heat of the fire." And turning away she glanced stealthily out of the window to see whether Misha Koshevoi's sister was coming.

But the girl did not arrive until late in the afternoon. Tormented with waiting, Aksinya started up:

"Do you want me, Mashutka?"

"Come out for a moment."

Stepan was standing before a scrap of mirror fixed into the whitewashed stove, combing his forelock and chestnut moustache with a stumpy ox-horn comb. Aksinya looked at him nervously.

"You aren't going out, are you?"

He did not answer immediately, but put the comb into his trouser pocket, and picked up a pack of cards and his tobacco pouch which were lying on the stove ledge. Then he said: "I'm going along to Anikushka's for a while."

"And when are you ever at home? You spend every night at cards. And all night, too."

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"All right, I've heard that before."

"Are you going to play pontoon again?"

"Oh, drop it, Aksinya. Look, there's someone coming to see you."

Aksinya sidled out into the passage. The freckled, rosy-faced Mashutka welcomed her with a smile.

"Grisha's back."

"Well?"

"He told me to tell you to come along to our house as soon as it's dark."

Seizing the girl's hand, Aksinya drew her to- wards the outer door.

"Softer, softer, dear! Did he tell you to say anything else?"

"He said you're to get your things together and take them along."

Burning and trembling, unable to keep her feet still, Aksinya turned and glanced at the kitchen door.

"Lord, how am I to. ... So quickly? Well . . . wait. Tell him I'll be along as soon as I can. But where will he meet me?"

"You're to come to our house."

"Oh, no!"

"All right, I'll tell him to come out and wait for you."

Stepan was drawing on his coat as Aksinya went in.

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"What did she want?" he asked between two puffs at a cigarette.

"Who?"

"The Koshevois' girl."

"Oh, she came to ask me to cut out a skirt for her,"

Blowing the ash off his cigarette, Stepan went to the door.

"Don't wait up for me," he said as he went out.

Aksinya ran to the frosted window and dropped to her knees before the bench. Stepan's footsteps sounded along the path trodden out in the snow to the gate. The wind caught a spark from his cigarette and carried it back to the window. Through the melted circle of glass Ak- sinya caught a glimpse of his fur cap and the outline of his swarthy cheek.

Feverishly she turned jackets, skirts and ker- chiefs-her dowry-out of the great chest and threw them into a large shawl. Panting and wild-eyed, she passed through the kitchen for the last time, and putting out the light, ran on to the steps. Someone emerged from the Mele- khovs' house to see to the cattle. She waited un- til the footsteps had died away, fastened the door by the chain, then ran down to the Don. Strands of hair escaped from her kerchief and tickled her cheeks, and as she made her way by

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side lanes to the Koshevois' hut, clutching her bundle, her strength ebbed and her feet dragged leadenly, Grigory was waiting for her at the gate. He took the bundle and silently led the way into the steppe.

Beyond the threshing-floor Aksinya slowed her pace and caught at Grigory's sleeve. "Wait a moment," she said.

"What for? The moon will be late tonight, we must hurry."

"Wait, Grisha!" She halted, doubled up with pain,

"What's the matter?" Grigory turned back to her.

"Something . . , inside me. I must have lifted something heavy." She licked her dry lips, screwing up her eyes in pain till she saw pin- points of fire, and clutched at her belly. She stood a moment, bowed and miserable, and then, poking her hair under her kerchief, set off again.

"I'm all right now, come along."

"You haven't even asked where I'm taking you to. I might be leading you to the nearest cliff to push you over," Grigory said smiling in the darkness.

"It's all the same to me now. I can't go back." Her voice trembled with an unhappy laugh.

That night Stepan returned at midnight as

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usual. He went first to the stable, threw the scattered hay back into the manger, removed the horse's halter, then went to the house. "She must have gone out for the evening," he thought, as he unfastened the chain. He entered the kitchen, closed the door fast, and struck a match. He had been in a winning vein that evening, and so was quiet and drowsy. He lit the lamp, and gaped at the disorder of the kitch- en, not guessing the reason, A little aston- ished, he went into the best room. The open chest yawned blackly. On the floor lay an old jacket which Aksinya had forgotten in her hur- ry. Stepan tore off his sheepskin and ran back to the kitchen for the light. He stared around the best room, and at last he understood. He dropped the lamp, and, scarcely aware of what he was doing, tore his sabre from the wall, gripped the hilt until the veins swelled in his fingers, raised Aksinya's blue and yellow jacket on its point, threw the jacket up in the air and with a short swing of the sabre slashed it in two as it fell.

Grey, savage in his wolfish grief, he threw the pieces of the old jacket up to the ceiling again and again; the sharp steel whistled as it cut them in their flight.

Then, tearing off the sword-knot, he threw the sabre into a corner, went into the kitchen,

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and sat down at the table. His head bowed, with trembling iron fingers he sat stroking the unwashed table-top.

XIII

Troubles never come singly. The morning after Grigory left home, through Het-Baba's carelessness Miron Korshunov's pedigree bull gored the throat of his finest mare. Het-Baba came running into the house, white, distracted and trembling:

"Trouble, master! The bull, curse him, the damned bull. . . ."

"Well, what about the bull?" Miron asked in alarm.

"He's done the mare in. Gored her. . . ."

Miron ran half-dressed into the yard. By the well Mitka was beating the red five-year- old bull with a stake. The bull, his head down and dewlap dragging over the ground, was churning up the snow with his hoofs and scat- tering a silvery powder around his tail. Instead of yielding before the drubbing, he bellowed huskily and stamped his hind-feet as though about to charge. Mitka beat him on his nose and sides, cursing the while and paying no heed to Mikhei, who was trying to drag him back by his belt,

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"Keep back, Mitka ... for Lord's sake. He'll gore you! Master, why don't you tell him?"

Miron ran to the well. The mare was stand- ing by the fence, her head drooping sadly. Her dark heaving flanks were wet with sweat, and blood was running down her chest. Her light- bay back and sides were quivering, causing great shivers in her groin,

Miron ran to look at her front. A rose-col- oured wound, big enough to take a man's hand, and revealing the windpipe, gaped in her neck. Miron seized her by the forelock and raised her head. The mare fixed her glittering violet eyes on her master as though mutely asking: "What next?" And as if in answer to the question Mi- ron shouted: "Run and tell someone to scald some oak bark. Hurry!"

Het-Baba, his Adam's apple trembling in his dirty neck, ran to strip some bark from a tree, and Mitka came across to his father, one eye fixed on the bull circling and bellowing about the yard.

"Hold the mare by her forelock," his father ordered. "Someone run for some twine. Quick! Or do you want a box on the ears?"

They tied the string tightly round the mare's velvety, slightly hairy upper lip so that she should not feel the pain.

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Old Grishaka came hobbling up. An infu- sion, the colour of acorns, was brought out in a painted bowl.

"Cool it down," he croaked. "It's too hot, isn't it? Miron, do you hear me?"

"Go inside. Dad. You'll catch cold out here."

"I tell you to cool it down. Do you want to kill the mare?"

The wound was bathed. With freezing fin- gers Miron threaded raw twine through a darn- ing needle and sewed up the edges, making a neat seam. He had hardly turned away to go back to the house when his wife came running from the kitchen, alarm written large on her flabby cheeks. She called her husband aside:

"Natalya's here, Miron. . .! Oh, my God!"

"Now what's the matter?" Miron demanded, his face paling.

"It's Grigory. He's left home!" Lukinichna flung out her arms like a rook preparing for flight, clapped her hands against her skirt, and broke into a wail:

"Disgraced before the whole village! Lord, what a blow! Oh. . ,!"

Miron found Natalya in a shawl and short winter coat standing in the middle of the kitchen. Two tears welled in her eyes, and her cheeks were deeply flushed.

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"What are you doing here?" her father blus- tered as he ran into the room. "Has your hus- band beaten you? Can't you get on together?" "He's gone away!" Natalya groaned, swal- lowing dry tears, and she swayed and fell on her knees before her father. "Father, my life is ruined. . . . Take me back. . , . Grigory's gone away with that woman. He's left me. Father, I've been crushed into the dust!" she sobbed out the half-finished phrases, gazing imploring- ly up at her father's ruddy beard. "Wait, wait now, . . ."

"There's nothing for me to live for there! Take me back!" She crawled on her knees to the chest and dropped her head on to her arms. Her kerchief slipped off her head and her smooth straight black hair fell over her pale ears. Tears at such a time are like rain in a May drought. Her mother pressed Natalya's head against her sunken belly, whispering motherly foolish words of comfort; but Miron, infuriated, ran out to the steps,

"Harness up two sleighs!" he shouted. On the steps a cock, perched busily on the back of a hen, took fright at the shout, jumped clear, and stalked off towards the bam, squawk- ing indignantly.

"Harness up two sleighs!" Miron kicked again and again at the fretted balustrade of the

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steps until it was hopelessly ruined. He re- turned to the house only when Het-Baba hurried out from the stables with a pair of horses, harnessing them as he ran.

Mitka and Het-Baba drove to the Melekhovs' for Natalya's possessions. In his abstraction Het-Baba sent a young pig in the road flying. "Mebbe the master will forget all about the mare now," he was thinking, and rejoiced, let- ting the reins hang loose. "But he's such an old devil, he'll never forget," and sneering to himself, Het-Baba tried to get the whip lash under the tenderest part of the horse's belly.

XIV

Yevgeny Listnitsky held a commission as lieutenant in the Ataman's Lifeguards Regiment. Having had a tumble during the officers' hurdle races and broken his left arm, he took furlough when he came out of hospital and went to stay with his father for six weeks.

The old general lived alone at Yagodnoye. He had lost his wife while driving in the sub- urbs of Warsaw in the 1880's. Shots fired at the Cossack general had missed him, but rid- dled the carriage, killing his wife and coach- man. Listnitsky was left with his two-year-old son Yevgeny. Soon after this event the gen-

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eral retired, abandoned an estate of ten thou- sand acres in the Saratov Province which had been granted to his great-grandfather in recog- nition of his services during the war of 1812, and moved to Yagodnoye, where he lived an austere and rigorous life. i

He sent his son Yevgeny to the cadets' corps as soon as the lad was old enough, and oc- cupied himself with farming. He purchased blood stock from the imperial stables, crossed them with the finest mares from England and from the famous Provalsky stables, and reared a new breed. He raised cattle and livestock on his own, and bought land, sowed grain (with hired labour), hunted with his borzois in the autumn and winter, and occasionally locked himself in the dining hall and drank for weeks on end. He was troubled with a stomach complaint, and his doctor had strictly forbid- den him to swallow anything solid; he had to extract the goodness from all his food by mastication, spitting out the residue on to a silver tray held by his personal servant Venyamin.

Venyamin was a half-witted, swarthy young peasant, with a shock of thick black hair. He had been in Listnitsky's service for six years. When he first had to wait on the general it made him feel sick to watch the old man

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spitting out the chewed food. But he got used to it.

The other inhabitants of the estate were the cook Lukerya, the ancient stableman Sashka, and the shepherd Tikhon. From the very first the flabby pock-marked Lukerya, who with her huge bottom looked like a yellow lump of un- risen dough, would not allow Aksinya near the stove.

"You can cook when the master takes on ex- tra workers in the summer. Now I can manage by myself,"

Aksinya was set to work washing the floors of the house three times a week, feeding the innumerable fowls, and keeping the fowl-house clean. She worked with a will, trying to please everyone, even the cook. Grigory spent much of his time in the spacious log-built stables with Sashka the stableman. The old man was one mass of grey hair, but everybody still fa- miliarly called him "Sashka." Probably even old Listnitsky, for whom he had worked more than twenty years, had forgotten his surname. In his youth Sashka had been the coachman, but as he grew old and feeble and his sight began to fail he was made stableman. Stocky, covered with greenish-grey hair (even the hair on his hands was grey), with a nose that had been flattened by a club in his youth, he wore

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an everlasting childish smile and gazed out on the world with blinking artless eyes. The apostolic expression of his face was marred by his broken nose and his hanging scarred un- derlip.

In his army days Sashka had once got drunk and taken by mistake a swill of aqua regia instead of vodka. The fiery liquid had welded his lower lip to his chin, leaving a crooked glowing pink scar. Sashka was fond of vodka, and when he was in his cups he would strut about the yard as though he were master. Stamping his feet, he would stand under old Listnitsky's bedroom and call loudly and sternly: '

"Mikolai 'Lexeyevich! Mikolai Xexeyevich!"

If old Listnitsky happened to be in his bed- room he would come to the window.

"You're drunk, you good-for-nothing!" he would thunder.

Sashka would hitch up his trousers, and wink and smile. His smile danced diagonally right across his face, from his puckered left eye to the pink scar trailing from the right corner of his mouth; it was a crooked smile but a pleasant one.

"Mikolai 'Lexeyevich, Your Excellency, I know you!" he would wag his lean, dirty finger threateningly.

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"Go and sleep it off!" his master would smile pacifyingly, twisting his drooping mous- tache with all five nicotine-stained fingers.

"You can't take me in!" the stableman would laugh, going up to the railings of the fence. "Mikolai 'Lexeyevich, you're like me. You and me-we know each other like a fish knows water. You and me, we're rich. Ah!" Here he would fling his arms wide open to show how rich. "We're known by everybody, all over the Don District, We, , . ." Sashka's voice would suddenly grow mournful and in- gratiating: "Me and you-Your Excellency, everything's all right, only we've both got rot- ting noses,"

"Why is that?" his master would ask, turn- ing purple with laughter and twitching his moustache,

"Through vodka!" Sashka would bark out the words, blinking rapidly and licking his lips. "Don't drink, Mikolai 'Lexeyevich, or we'll go broke-you and me. We'll drink every- thing away!"

"Go and drink this away!" old Listnitsky would throw out a twenty-kopeck piece, and Sashka would catch it and hide it in his cap, crying: i

"Well, good-bye. General,"

"Have you watered the horses yet?" his

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master would ask with a smile, knowing what was coming.

"Oh, you lousy devil! You son of a swine!" Sashka would turn livid, and his voice would crack with anger. "Sashka forget to water the horses? Eh? Even if I was dead I'd still crawl for a pail to water the horses. And he thinks. . , ."

The old man would march off fuming at the undeserved reproach, cursing and shaking his fist. Everything he did was forgiven, even drinking and his familiarity with his master. He was indispensable as a stableman. Winter and summer he slept in the stables, in an empty stall. He was stableman and horse-doctor; he gathered herbs for the horses in the spring, and dug up medicinal roots in the steppe and in the valleys. Bunches of dried herbs hung high up on the stable walls: milfoil to cure heaves, snake-eye grass as an antidote for ad- der-bite, blackleaf for the feet, a small white herb that grows at the root of the willow to treat sores, and many other little-known rem- edies for all the various ailments and dis- eases of horses.

Winter and summer, a subtle throat-tickling aroma hung like a fine-spun web about the stall in which Sashka slept. Hay packed as

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hard as a board, covered with a horse-cloth, and his coat, smelling of horse sweat, served as mattress and bedding to his plank-bed. The coat and a sheepskin were all the old man's worldly goods.

Tikhon, a huge, dull-witted Cossack, lived with Lukerya, and secretly nursed a quite need- less jealousy of her and Sashka, Once every month he would take the old man by the but- ton of his greasy shirt and lead him round to the back of the house.

"Old man, don't you set your cap at my woman,"

"That depends . . ." Sashka would wink sig- nificantly.

"Keep off her!" Tikhon begged.

"I like 'em pock-marked, lad. I don't need vodka if you can give me a pock-marked wench. The more pock-marked they are the fonder they are of us menfolk, the hussies."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself at your age, . . . And you a doctor, too; you look after the horses, you know all the secrets."

"I can do all kinds of doctoring," Sashka persisted.

"Keep off her, grandad. It's wrong,"

"I'll get that Lukerya one of these days, lad, I'll have her, my lad. You can say good-bye to Lukerya, I'll be taking her away from you.

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She's like a currant pie, only with the currants picked out. That's the kind for me!"

"Don't let me catch you or I'll kill you!" Tikhon would say, sighing and drawing some copper coins out of his pocket.

And so it went on month after month.

Life mouldered away in a sleepy torpor at Yagodnoye, The estate lay in a valley remote from all frequented roads, and from the autumn onward all communication with the neigh- bouring villages was broken. In the winter nights the wolf packs emerged from their for- est lairs and terrified the horses with their howling. Tikhon used to go to the meadow to frighten them off with his master's double- barrelled gun, and Lukerya, wrapping her ample bottom in her rough blanket, would wait in suspense for the sound of the shots, her little eyes disappearing into her greasy pock- marked cheeks. At such times her imagination transformed the ugly bald-headed Tikhon into a handsome and reckless youth, and when the door of the servants' quarters slammed and Tikhon entered in a cloud of steam, she made room for him on the bed and, cooing affec- tionately, warmly embraced her frozen mate.

In summer-time Yagodnoye hummed till late at night with the voices of labourers. The mas- ter sowed some forty dessiatines with various

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crops, and hired labourers to harvest them. Occasionally Yevgeny came home, and would stroll through the orchard and over the mead- ow, and feel bored. The mornings he spent fishing in the pond. Plump^chested and of me- dium height, he wore a forelock Cossack fash- ion on the right side of his head. His officer's tunic fitted him snugly.

During the first days of Grigory's life on the estate he was frequently in the young master's company. One day Venyamin came smiling into the servants' quarters and, bowing his fuzzy head, announced:

"The young master wants you, Grigory."

Grigory, as on many other occasions, went to Yevgeny's room and stood at the door. The master pointed to a chair. Grigory seated him- self on the very edge.

"How do you like our horses?"

"They're good horses. The grey is fine."

"Give him plenty of exercise, but don't gal- lop him."

"So Grandad Sashka told me."

"What about Sturdy?"

"The bay? He's a fine horse. Shoe's loose though, I'll have to get him reshod."

Screwing up his piercing grey eyes, the young master said: "You have to go to the training camp in May, don't you?"

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"Yes."

"I'll speak to the ataman about it. You won't have to go."

"Thank you, sir."

There was a momentary silence. Unbutton- ing the collar of his uniform, Yevgeny scratched his womanishly white chest.

"Aren't you afraid of Aksinya's husband taking her from you?"

"He's thrown her over; he won't take her back."

"How do you know?"

"I saw one of the men from the village the other day when I went there for nails. He told me Stepan was drinking hard. Says he doesn't want Aksinya any more, thinks he'll find some- one hotter."

"Aksinya's a fine-looking woman," Listni- tsky remarked thoughtfully, staring over Gri- gory's head with something licentious in his smile.

"Not bad," Grigory agreed, and his face clouded.

Yevgeny's furlough was nearly over. He no longer wore a sling and could bend his arm freely.

During the last few days of his stay Yev- geny spent a great deal of his time in Gri- gory's room. Aksinya had whitewashed the

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dirt-caked walls, scrubbed the window-frames, and scoured the floor with broken brick. There was a feminine warmth and cosiness in the cheerful empty little room. The officer, his short, fashionably-out coat thrown over his shoulders, chose times for his visits when Gri- gory was occupied with the horses. He would first go into the kitchen, stand joking with Lukerya for a minute or two, then pass into the farther room. He would sit down on a stool, hunching his shoulders, and fix a shame- lessly smiling gaze on Aksinya. She was embarrassed by his presence, and the knitting- needles trembled in her fingers.

"Well, Aksinya, how are you getting on?" he would ask, puffing at his cigarette until the room was filled with blue smoke.

"Very well, thank you." Aksinya would raise her eyes, and meeting the lieutenant's transparent gaze, silently telling of his desire, she turned crimson. That naked stare of his was unpleasant and annoying. She replied dis- connectedly to his questions, avoiding his eyes and seeking an opportunity to leave the room.

"I must go and feed the ducks now,"

"There's no hurry. The ducks can wait," he smiled, and his legs trembled in his tight rid- ing breeches, and he continued to ply her with questions concerning her past life, using the

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deep tones of his voice, which was like his fa- ther's and pleading lewdly with his crystal- clear eyes.

When Grigory came in, the fire would die out of Yevgeny's eyes and he would offer him a cigarette, leaving soon after.

"What did he want?" Grigory would ask Aksinya, not looking at her.

"How should I know?" Remembering the officer's look, Aksinya would laugh forcedly. "He came in and just sat there like this, Gri- sha," (she showed him how Yevgeny had sat with hunched back) "and sat and sat until I was sick of him."

"Did you ask him in?" Grigory's eyes would narrow angrily,

"What do I need him for?"

"You watch out, or I'll kick him down the steps one day."

Aksinya would gaze at Grigory with a smile on her lips, and not be sure whether he was speaking in jest or earnest.

The winter broke up during the fourth week of Lent. Open water began to fringe the edges of the Don; the ice, melting from the top, turned grey and swelled spongily. In the evening

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a low murmur came from the hills, indicating frost according to the time-honoured saying, but in reality the thaw was already on its way. In the morning the air tingled with the light frost, but by noon the earth was bare in patches, and in the nostrils was the scent of March, of the frozen bark, of cherry-trees, and rotting straw.

Miron Korshunov took his time preparing for the ploughing season, spending the length- ening days in the shed sharpening the teeth of the harrows and repairing cartwheels. Old Grishaka usually fasted in the fourth week of Lent, He would come home from church, blue with cold, and complain to his daughter-in- law Lukinichna:

"That priest makes me sick. He's no good. He's as slow with the service as a carter with a load of eggs."

"You'd have been wiser to have fasted dur- ing Passion Week, it's warmer by then."

"Call Natalya," he replied. "I'll get her to make me a pair of warmer stockings."

Natalya still lived in the belief that Grigory would return to her; her heart longed and waited for him, and would not listen to the warning whisper of sober reason. She spent the nights in weary yearning, tossing on her bed, crushed by her undeserved and unexpect-

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ed shame. Another woe was now added to the first, and she awaited its sequel in cold terror, fluttering about in her maiden room like a wounded lapwing in a forest glade. From the earliest days of her return home her brother Mitka had begun to give her odd glances, and one day, catching her in the porch, he asked frankly :

"Still hankering after Grisha?"

"What's it got to do with you?"

"I want to cheer you up."

Natalya glanced into his eyes and was terri- fied by what she saw there. Mitka's green cat's eyes glittered and their slits gleamed greasily in the dim light of the porch. Natalya slammed the door and ran to her grandfather's room, where she stood listening to the wild beating of her heart. The next day Mitka came up to her in the yard. He had been tui^ning over fresh hay for the cattle, and green stalks of grass hung from his straight hair and his fur cap, Natalya was chasing the dogs away from the pigs' trough.

"Don't fret yourself, Natalya. . . ."

"I'll tell Father," she cried, raising her hands to protect herself.

"You're an idiot!"

"Keep away, you beast!"

"What are you shouting for?"

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"Go away, Mitka! I'll go at once and tell Father. How dare you look at me like that? Have you no shame! It's a wonder the earth doesn't open and swallow you up."

"Well, it doesn't, does it?" Mitka stamped with his boots to confirm the statement and edged up to her.

"Don't come near me, Mitka!"

"I won't now, but I'll come at night. By God, I'll come!"

Trembling, Natalya left the yard. That evening she made her bed on the chest, and took her younger sister to sleep with her. All night she tossed and turned, her burning eyes seeking to pierce the darkness, her ears alert for the slightest sound, ready to scream the house down. But the silence was broken only by the snores of Grishaka slee

And quiet flows the Don; a novel

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