Tales by Polish Authors Part 28

I set out about five o'clock, relying on the kindness--or unkindness--of the frost, which, if it had sent out its murderous "chijus," could have completely upset my plans by driving me to the nearest acquaintance's house. But, fortunately for me, although the frost was fiendish, it was as silent as the grave. The terrible "chijus" had not yet left its Polar hiding-place, and the air was absolutely still. Thanks to this circ.u.mstance, I reached the place unharmed.

The echo of my footsteps, with the creaking snow under my boots, played sharply and shrilly round the two unheated rooms through which I was obliged to pa.s.s in order to reach the inhabited part of the house. It seemed to be even colder here than out of doors. The windows were boarded up. But although in the impenetrable darkness I hit against fragments of pots and other useless lumber at every turn, and they tumbled about or broke with a crash, though the door grated on its rusty hinges, none of the people living there even looked out or paid any attention to it. At last I came into the inhabited part of the house.

It was not much lighter in the large room than in those through which I had just pa.s.sed. A thin tallow candle on a shoemaker's low bench barely lighted one corner of the room. Two people were working at the bench.

The one sitting nearer me, a tall thin man, unmistakably a born shoemaker, was knocking wooden pegs into a sole with an expert and sure hand. He had not been long in the town, but he already had plenty of work, and would be certain not to remain long in this solitude.

The second, sitting farther off, a handsome man, was considerably shorter than Pan Jzef. He was planing and polishing a heel, but slowly, without that deftness with which Pan Jzef worked. One glance at the short shoemaker's face would have been enough to convince the most ardent opponent of all theories on heredity that this man had not always sat at a cobbler's bench.

As a matter of fact, Pan Jan Horodelski had once been a medical student; later ... but what he was later could not be told in two evenings. He had now been a shoemaker for five years, and, to speak the candid truth, a drunken shoemaker. His bad habit did not allow him even to think of carrying on business for himself; he therefore wandered round to all the local workshops, using other people's tools, and finding life very hard. Each master took a large percentage for the tools, and it is probable that Pan Jzef charged him no less than other masters did.

His spirit had once been proud and audacious, but life had bruised it and trodden it into the dust. Some souls emerge thence not only beautiful and n.o.ble, but even strong. Horodelski had not that strength which braves all storms, and was now a permanent inhabitant of this solitude. His days were numbered; the intellect and knowledge he once possessed made him now fully conscious of his condition and filled up his cup of bitterness, the depth of which was known only to himself.

It was either the seal of death on his forehead, or possibly other and deeper reasons, which gave his face its particular expression. I said before that it was the face of a very handsome man, and I ought to add that it also expressed that gentleness and tenderness which belongs essentially to feminine beauty, and that it was stamped with indescribable sadness. He varied a good deal in his behaviour; his way of expressing himself and his manners frequently betrayed the influence of the surroundings in which he had been living for long past. Frequently--though not always--he could control himself, however, and then there appeared on his face a new sign of the manhood not yet completely crushed--namely, a blush of shame at his present position.

The shoemakers, as became busy men, did not even move on their stools when I entered. I therefore took off my things and brushed away the h.o.a.r-frost in silence, and it was only when I went up nearer to them that they both raised their bent heads, welcoming me with a friendly smile. As he was holding his pegs in his teeth, Pan Jzef was able to offer me his hand, dropping it again immediately with a mechanical movement, and murmuring something indistinctly. Horodelski, after giving his greeting, looked at the heel, still unfinished, and, setting the boot on the ground, exclaimed with a sigh: "Well, that's finished!"

This was his favourite expression.

"What's finished?" I asked, however.

"Everything," came the equally stereotyped answer.

"Except the heel," Pan Jzef muttered, taking the last peg from his teeth.

"It's possible the heel may get done too--that is, of course, if I don't leave this cursed ruin and go back to the church clerk,"

Horodelski answered quickly.

"Are you uncomfortable here, or what's up?" chaffed Pan Jzef. "The Lord be praised, it's a good workshop, there are enough tools--and rooms, too; if you like, you can dance a quadrille."

But Horodelski did not listen, and continued:

"Yes, it may very possibly be that I shall give up shoemaking, if only for as long as I stay with the clerk. I shall leave it just because this shoemaker has made it as clear as day to me that I am no good at my trade, and can only be a.s.sistant to a bungling clerk."

Pan Jzef t.i.ttered, highly pleased, and was just preparing to answer suitably, when a grave ba.s.s voice interrupted him.

"You may go to the clerk or not, but you'll never be a shoemaker."

The ba.s.s voice came from a dark corner of the same room. I therefore looked more attentively in that direction.

On a low plank bed, with his head bent forward, and emptying his pipe, sat a stalwart peasant, known as Bartek the Shepherd.

"Why not?" I asked, greeting the speaker.

"Why not?" Bartek answered. "Because no one can escape his destiny. A dog can't become a b.i.t.c.h, nor a woman a man."

"That is quite a different matter."

"So you'd think; but it's really all the same. Take me, for example.

No one could say of me that I'm work-shy, yet nothing I have to do with ever comes off. And why?--Why? Because I'm not at my own work. So though I work and don't drink, I'm wasting like sheep in rough weather. I'm already more like a dog at a fair than a man,--only there's no fair. I saw that from the moment I came here. For isn't it a queer thing that a land like this, with rivers like the sea, mountains as big as the Lysia Gra at home, meadows with gra.s.s up to your middle, should have no sheep! Our shepherds are wise men; they can bewitch you and free you from spells, and have remedies for this and that; yet if you told them that in all this big country there are no sheep, they wouldn't believe you."

Bartek was a temporary inhabitant of this desert solitude. He was a very respectable man, but a kind of fatality hung over him; he was industrious and honest, yet he had never been able to find an occupation in which he could display his qualities and draw attention to himself. He had come here not long beforehand, attracted by the promises of some emigration agents. The promises had not been fulfilled, and Bartek, taking advantage in the meantime of this shelter, was only waiting for the frosts to abate a little before setting out on his return journey. He was a grave man--in fact, almost too serious. He did not care for idle talk, and rarely started a conversation; but when he did speak, it was always laconically and with decision, brooking no contradiction. As the representative of a cla.s.s which for long ages had been fairly privileged, he was an ardent Conservative, and did not admit the desirability of social reform. "A dog is a dog, and a sheep is a sheep," was his maxim. He raised the authority of his moral leaders almost to a religious cult, and it was not always safe to express an opinion before him, which even remotely reflected on the authority he acknowledged.

"Who says so?" Bartek would ask threateningly on such occasions. And when he was not too much irritated, and able to control himself, he would shake his thick fist in the speaker's face, and solemnly announce:

"Only fools talk like that!"

In the other equally large room two more permanent inhabitants of this solitude were to be found: the locksmith, Porankiewicz, and the ex-landowner, once Pan Feliks Babinski.

If Horodelski was a man standing on the edge of a precipice, Porankiewicz had rolled to the very bottom long ago. When I went into the room, he was sc.r.a.ping together something near the little table which he called his bench. He was pale, thin, and very small, and appeared still smaller owing to his stoop; few quite old men would walk more bent.

"Do hold yourself straight just for once," I often used to say to him.

"Hah, hah, hah!" Porankiewicz would laugh good-naturedly; "only the ground, the ground, my dear sir, will straighten me. I have sat working from morning till night since I was ten years old, and even steel gets bent at last."

This man's life was a real Odyssey--only he, poor wretch! was no Odysseus. Ill-fortune had driven him through all parts of Siberia, and it was his lot to breathe his last in the worst of them.

Babinski was asleep when I went in, but our conversation woke him, and he got up. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a strong physique, and his dark face with large projecting eyebrows and surrounded by a beard as black as coal, always had a stern expression. I never saw him moved to tears; when something touched him very deeply, he would only blink hard and stretch out his hand for the vodka. He was indefatigable and competent and knew how to work and had worked like an ox until two years previously, when he had begun to drink desperately. "He has either been 'overlooked' or he has a screw loose," Bartek used to say of him. So now he seemed to be lost irretrievably, although under favourable circ.u.mstances he might perhaps yet draw himself out of the abyss into which he had rolled; for he was a man of exceptionally strong character.

There are black cart-horses in Russia, called "bitiugs," which are bad-tempered, tall, and uncommonly strong. These animals walk with an even, measured step, and without the least effort. When you inquire what weight they are drawing, you will find that it is at least sixty poods, and they frequently draw a hundred.

Babinski was like a "bitiug"; he even walked with a "bitiug's" step.

When he slouched along with his big strides, it was never possible to keep pace with him. He always did the shopping in the town--bread, meat, and vodka--for no one walked as quickly as he, and no one could stand frost, however severe, as he could.

He was a very hard man, and however much there might be weighing upon him, no one would have guessed it;--he was a real "bitiug." He also possessed a certain shrewdness, which often saved him from sinking altogether. It was he who had occupied this solitary house, and was the host _de jure_; but what was still more remarkable was that he had succeeded in finding a Yakut woman, as hideous as h.e.l.l, who had consented to be cook in the colony, and was as honest as only savage people can be. Eudoxia was thus the sixth soul in this lonely place.

Not all the inhabitants agreed to the festive celebration of Christmas. Bartek, and, stranger still, Horodelski, were most strongly opposed to it. "No, never!" Horodelski persisted. "I will drink as much vodka as you like, and eat what you give me--but Christmas? No!"

And he only gave way after Bartek's refractoriness also had been softened by unusual eloquence on Porankiewicz's part.

The usual order of these social gatherings was that first of all Babinski rushed off without delay for provisions, and quickly returned with flour, b.u.t.ter, "pepki,"[12] and a large bottle of wine. Having stilled our hunger a little, and refreshed ourselves by a good gla.s.s of wine, we went out into the front room in order not to hinder the preparations which Eudoxia was making under Porankiewicz's direction.

He was immensely proud of the honour shown him, and threw his head back, as he always did when trying to hold himself straighter, a.s.suming an air of extreme gravity. He was so deeply moved he was almost unable to speak, and instead of words gave indistinct grunts which, especially at first, nearly choked him. Ultimately the grunts ceased, and the sounds proceeding from the kitchen, of hissing b.u.t.ter, logs being split, and dough kneaded, told us that, having overcome his emotion, Porankiewicz was directing culinary affairs in his own way.

Things were now becoming noisier in the front room. Bartek and Horodelski, relaxing their restraint, were already growing boisterous.

They began to recall and count up how many years it was since they had last kept Christmas Eve; and when Bartek remarked that it would be worth while "getting a little clean to sit down to such a great festivity," a public washing and changing began, as though everyone were preparing for a ball.

Pan Jzef produced a very fetching collar, reaching halfway up his cheek, and ornamented his throat with a fascinating tie, made out of a checked handkerchief. Bartek pulled a small bag out of the cupboard, and, after rummaging in it for a long time, took out a threadbare piece of cheap ribbon, which he tried unsuccessfully to tie round his neck. His clumsy, unaccustomed hands quite refused to obey him, and the ribbon slipped through his fingers. But attracted by the sight of the shoemaker's tie, Bartek turned to him with the request: "Help me with this, will you?" The shoemaker set himself to the task, yet he either undertook it carelessly or murmured something about the shabbiness of the ribbon; for only when Bartek had said in a low voice, "But it comes from home," the shoemaker answered "A-ah!" in a different tone, and, leading Bartek to the light, arranged a tie for him with which "one might dare to go courting." Bartek walked about with this as if he had swallowed a poker. Then, when Babinski also pinned on a freshly starched collar, and Horodelski sported an antiquated jacket, on which he had been working for the last half-hour to get out the stains, the external appearance of our whole party harmonized with its inner sense of festivity.

Of the whole party, I repeat; for, when the door of the next room opened wide, Porankiewicz appeared dressed equally smartly in a long, threadbare coat, and although his collar was smaller, his tie was by no means inferior to the shoemaker's.

Porankiewicz cleared his throat once or twice--indeed, he cleared it a third time. Holding the door with one hand, and waving the other towards us, he said with a solemn bow:

"Dinner is ready!"

The sight which met us on entering was so unexpected that we stood thunderstruck.