Selected Polish Tales Part 34

'I'll come, if you will sell me fodder.'

'Fodder won't help you. A peasant among settlers will always be at a disadvantage,' said the old man, with his pipe between his teeth. 'Sell me your land; I'll give you a hundred roubles an acre.'

Slimak shook his head. 'You are mad, Pan Hamer, I don't know what you mean. Isn't it enough that I am obliged to sell the beast? Now you want me to sell everything. If you want me to leave, carry me out into the churchyard. It is nothing to you Germans to move from place to place, you are a roving people and have no country, but a peasant is like a stone by the wayside. I know everything here by heart. I have moved every clod of earth with my own hands; now you say: sell and go elsewhere. Wherever I went I should be dazed and lost; when I looked at a bush I should say: that did not grow at home; the soil would be different and even the sun would not set in the same place. And what should I tell my father if he were to come looking for me when it gets too hot for him in Purgatory? He would ask me how I was to find his grave again, and Stasiek's, poor Stasiek who has laid down his head, thanks to you!'

Hamer was trembling with rage.

'What rubbish the man is talking!' he cried, 'have not numbers of peasants settled afresh in Volhynia? His father will come looking for him! ...You had better look out that you don't go to Purgatory soon yourself for your obstinacy, and ruin me into the bargain. You are ruining my son now, because I can't build him a windmill. Here I am offering you a hundred roubles an acre, confound it all!'

'Say what you like, but I won't sell you my land.'

'You'll sell it all right,' said Hamer, shaking his fist, 'but I shan't buy it; you won't last out a year among us.'

He turned away abruptly.

'And I don't want that lad to stroll in and out of the settlement,' he called back, 'I don't keep a schoolmaster here for you!'

'That's nothing to me; he needn't go if you grudge him the room.'

'Yes, I grudge him the room,' the old man retorted viciously, 'the father is a dolt, let the son be a dolt too.'

Slimak's regret for the cow was drowned in his anger. 'All right, let them cut her throat,' he thought, but remembering that the poor beast could not help his quarrel with Hamer, he sighed.

There were fresh lamentations at home; Magda was blubbering because she had been given notice. Slimak sat down on the bench and listened to his wife comforting the girl.

'It's true, we are not short of food,' she said, 'but how am I to get the money for your wages? You are a big girl and ought to have a rise after the New Year. We haven't enough work for you; go to your uncle at once, tell him how things are going from bad to worse here, and fall at his feet and ask him to find you another place. Please G.o.d, you will come back to us.' 'Ho,' murmured Maciek from his corner, 'there's no returning; when you're gone, you're gone; first the cow, then Magda, now my turn will come.'

'Oh, you, Maciek, you will stay,' said Slimakowa, 'there must be some one to look after the horses, and if we don't give you your wages one year, you'll get them the next, but we can't do that to Magda, she is young.'

'That's true,' said Maciek on reflection, 'and it's kind of you to think of the girl first.'

Slimak was silently admiring his wife's good sense, but at the same time he felt acute regret and apprehension at all these changes; everything had been going on harmoniously for years, and now one day sufficed to send both the cow and Magda away.

'What shall I do?' he ruminated, 'shall I try to set up as a carpenter, or shall I apply to his Reverence for advice? I might ask him at the same time to say a Ma.s.s, but maybe he would say the Ma.s.s and not give the advice. It will all come right; G.o.d strikes until His hand is tired; then He looks down in favour again on those who suffer patiently.' So he waited.

Magda had found another situation by November; her place in the gospodarstwo soon grew cold, no one thought or talked of her, and only the gospodyni asked herself sometimes: 'Were there really a Stasiek in this room once and a Magda pottering about, and three cows in the shed?'

Meanwhile the thieving increased. Slimak daily thought of putting bolts and padlocks on the farm-buildings, or at least long poles in front of the stable door. But whenever he reached for the hatchet, it always lay too far off, or his arm was too short; anyhow he left it, and the thought of buying padlocks when times were hard, made him feel quite faint. He hid the money at the bottom of the chest so that it should not tempt him. 'I must wait till the spring,' he thought; 'after all, there are Maciek and Burek, they are sharp enough.'

Burek confirmed this opinion by much howling.

One very dark night, when sleet was falling, Maciek heard him barking more furiously than usual, and attacking some one in the direction of the ravines. He jumped up and waked Slimak; armed with hatchets they waited in the yard. A heavy tread approached behind the barn as of some one carrying a load. 'At them!' they urged Burek, who, feeling himself backed up, attacked furiously.

'Shall we go for them?' asked Maciek.

Slimak hesitated. 'I don't know how many there are.'

At that moment a light flashed up from the settlement, horses clattered. Seeing that help was approaching, Slimak dashed behind the barn and called out: 'Hey there! who are you?'

Something heavy fell to the ground.

'You wait! policeman for the Swabians, you shall soon know who we are!'

answered a voice in the darkness.

'Catch him!' cried Slimak and Maciek simultaneously, but the thief had escaped to the ravines. When the Germans on horseback came up, Slimak lit a torch and ran behind the barn. A pig's carca.s.s lay in a puddle.

'That's our hog,' cried Fritz, 'they stole it from under our noses and while there was a light in the house.'

'Daredevils!' muttered Maciek.

'To tell you the truth,' laughed Earner's farmhand, 'we thought it was you who had done it.'

'Go to the devil!'

'Let's go after them,' Fritz interrupted quickly.

'Go on! I... steal your hog! indeed!'

'Let me go, father,' begged Jendrek.

'Go indoors! We've saved them a hog and the thieves will revenge themselves on us; and here they come and accuse me of being a thief myself.' Fritz Hamer swore at the farm-hand for his clumsiness and tried to pacify the peasant, but he turned his back on him. Fritz had lost his zeal for pursuing the thieves, took up his hog and disappeared into the darkness.

After a few days the police-sergeant drove up, cross-examined every one, explored the ravines, perspired, made himself muddy, and found no one. He came to the very just conclusion that the thieves must have escaped long ago. So he told Slimakowa to put some b.u.t.ter and a speckled hen into his cart and returned home.

The thieving stopped for a while, and winter came on. The ground was warmly covered as with a sheepskin; ice as hard as flint froze on the Bialka, the Lord wrapped the branches of the trees securely in shirts of snow. But Slimak was still meditating on hasps and bolts.

One evening, as he sat filling the room with smoke from his pipe, shifting his feet and arriving at the second part of his meditations, namely that 'What is done too soon is the devil's,' Jendrek excitedly burst into the room. His mother was busy with the fire and paid no attention to him, but his father noticed, although they were sparing of light in the cottage, that his sukmana was torn and he looked bruised and dishevelled. Looking at him out of the corner of his eyes, Slimak emptied his pipe and said: 'Someone has been oxing your ears three times over.'

'I gave him one better,' said the boy scowling.

As the mother had gone out and did not hear the conversation, the father did not hurry himself; he cleaned his choked pipe, blew through it and indifferently inquired, 'Who's been treating you this?'

'That scoundrel, Hermann.' The boy was. .h.i.tching up his shoulders as if he had been stung.

'And what were you doing at Earner's when you had been told not to go there?'

'I was looking at the schoolmaster through the window,' said Jendrek blushing, and added quickly, 'That German dog ran out from the kitchen and shouted: "You are spying about here, you thief!" "What have I stolen?" I say, and he: "Nothing yet, but you will steal some day; be off, or I'll box your ears." "Try!" I say. "I've tried before," says he; "take this!"'

'That was smart of the Swabian,' said Slimak, 'and did you do nothing to him?'

'Why should I do nothing to him? I s.n.a.t.c.hed up a log and hit him over the head two or three times, but the coward started bleeding and gave in; I should have liked to have given him more, but they came running out of their houses and I made off.'

'So they didn't catch you?'

'Bah, how can they catch me, when I run like a hare?' 'Confound the boy,' said his mother, who had come in, 'the Swabians will beat him small.'

'He can always give them the slip,' said Slimak, lit his pipe, and resumed his meditations on hasps and bolts.

But these were interrupted the next afternoon by a visit from the Hamers; their cousin, Hermann, had his head so tightly bandaged that hardly anything was visible of his face. They stood outside the gate and shouted to Maciek to call his master. Slimak hastily fastened his belt and stepped out. 'What do you want?' he said.