THE PEASANTS WINTER

ivCOPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1925 · SET UP, ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y. · ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLAND AND FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW YORK. · BOUND BY H. WOLFF ESTATE, NEW YORK. ·

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The Peasants has been translated from the original Polish by Michael H. Dziewicki, Professor of English Literature at the University of Cracow. I wish to make special acknowledgment to Dr. A. M. Nawench of Columbia University for his invaluable assistance in seeing the work through the press.

CHAPTER I

Winter had come.

In the first days, it was but trying its strength—wrestling with the autumn, and howling far away in the livid distance, like some ravenous monster.

Now dawned those chilly glacial days, days of dismal and mournful dejection, lit with a dribbling feeble light; corpse-like days, when the birds flew away to the woods with cries of dread, and the waters babbled fearsomely, rolling sluggishly on, as if palsied by the terror of the cold; and the very country-side seemed to shudder, and all that was therein to look in awe towards the north and its unfathomable depths of clouds.

As yet the nights were as those in autumn, full of dreary sighs and soughs; sounds as of struggling, and sudden hushes; the howl of dogs; the cracking snaps of freezing timber; the sad voices of shelter-seeking birds; horrible calls from weird woodlands and crossways, invisible in the dark; and the beating of eerie wings, and shadows lurking beneath the walls of the stupefied cottagers.

At evening, from time to time, the huge crimson bulk of the setting sun would still peer out of the west, going down ponderously—a globe of molten iron, whence blood-red floods would gush forth, with smoke-like pitch-black vapours rising round them, looking like a grand and gloomy conflagration.

They said: “The winter is growing harder, and ill winds will be rising soon.”

And indeed the winter did grow harder—every day, every hour, every minute.

Directly after the fourth of December (the day of St. 4Barbara, patroness of a holy death), the first of the winter gales began blowing in short whiffling puffs. They skimmed along the ground, with a baying like that of hounds hot on a trail. They bit into the ploughed fields, snarled about the bushes, worried the snow-drifts, tore at the orchard boughs, swept along the highways, sniffed in the streams; and here and there, with but little ado, they ruined every thatch and fence that was in poor condition. After which they fled, still baying, away to the forest lands; and after them out of the dusk came the great winds on the very same evening, their long sharp tongues lolling out of their wheezy jaws.

All night they blew, howling across the fields like packs of famished wolves. They did their work well, too. Ere morning the stark hardened earth had been quite stripped of its tattered and scattered covering of snow; only in places, in hollows and ditches, could a few white rags be seen on the fences. The fields too had some shiny white spots left; but the roads lay frozen deep—as it were, petrified—and the frost had bitten profoundly into the soil with its keen fangs, so that it resounded with a metallic ring like iron. But with the morning, the gales fled to hide in the woods, where they lurked, tremulous and shuddering.

The sky, too, was now overcast, ever with darker clouds, which came creeping up out of every cavern, raising heads of monstrous size, stretching forth long lean flanks, throwing their grey manes to the winds, baring gigantic discoloured teeth, and coming on in mighty battalions.—From the north: black, huge, all shredded and tattered, piled in tiers, branching out like a score of overthrown forests, one upon the other, separated by deep chasms, and with—so it seemed—great streaks scattered over them of greenish ice, as it were: these rushed forward with wild might and a dull murmuring sound. From the west: those advanced slowly—livid, enormously swollen bulks, which in places shone bright as fire; and they rolled one after another, more and more persistent in their long advance, not unlike flocks of great birds. From the east came sailing flattened, 5rusty-hued masses of vapour, monotonously the same, and forbidding to the eye as mouldering carcasses that drip with tainted gore. From the south, too, were wafted ancient-looking

clouds, reddish dark in hue, recalling clods of peat, striped and motley to see, though dingy and dull, as if vermin burrowed within them. There were also clouds floating on high, seeming to descend from the pale quenched orb of the sun, and forming dingy wisps, or spreading out in manifold tints, as embers that are dying. And they all came forward, built up mountains of prodigious height, and concealed all the sky under a black seething flood of squalor and grime.

The whole land had suddenly turned to darkness; a dull silence prevailed on every side; all the lights had grown dim; the bright eyes of the waters were glazing over; all beings felt petrified and stood in amazement with bated breath. Up out of the earth surged the fear of what was to come; the frost penetrated even to the marrow of the bones, and every living thing trembled with the terror of it. They saw the hare running through the village, with shaggy fur standing fluffy on end; they saw the ravens alighting with hoarse croaks upon the granaries, and even entering the houses. Dogs howled wildly outside in the yard; men sped in fear to take shelter in their huts: while along the pond the priest’s blind mare went to and fro with the ruins of the cart, and struck against the fences, and with a weird cry sought her way back to the stable.

The darkness began to be continual, murky and exceedingly depressing; daily the clouds sailed lower; they came creeping down from the forests, like thick volumes of dust, and rolled along the fields like floods of turbid water: then, coming to the village, plunged all things in a dingy ice-cold fog. And suddenly there would come a rent through the midst of the sky that shone dark-blue like the azure mirror of a well: a wild wind whistled through the dim space, the fogs at once were driven together on either side, and by the shattered gateway thus made came a first loud blast, soon followed by another, a score, and hundreds.

6They howled on in troops, they poured forwards in torrents that nothing could restrain; they rushed along as if coming out of broken fetters, in raging bellowing multitudes, striking at the gloom, dispelling it utterly, swallowing it up or sweeping it away like rotten chaff.

And out and far over the fields, in screaming turmoil, was driven the fog as froth before the wind.

The clouds, trampled down by the feet of the pitiless storm, fled and rolled off, to skulk in the woodlands and forests. The sky was swept clean; once more, though with dull and sullen mien, the day peered forth, and every creature drew a breath of relief.

For nearly the whole of Sunday the gales blew on without any surcease or abatement. In the day-time, they were not yet quite intolerable; but the nights became beyond bearing. These fell, bright and starlit, and it was then that the gales played their most furious pranks. Folks did not say (as they do when the wind is high): “Sure someone has hung himself,” but: “Fivescore men must be hanging now!” What with the howling, the banging, and the creaking as of a thousand empty wagons dashing at a gallop over hard-frozen ice, no one could sleep a wink.

The huts creaked likewise. Often and again did the storm come driving at the corners, heaving up the thatches, butting at the doors: sometimes even breaking in the panes so that they had to get up at night and stop them with pillows: for it then rushed in with a sound like the squealing of noisy swine—bringing along with it such fierce cold as benumbed the inmates under their eiderdown quilts.

None can say what the villagers suffered, in the course of those days, of those nights.

Nor what harm was done abroad. The blasts bore down the fences, plucked off the thatched roofs, and—at the Voyt’s—blew down a shed that was all but new. They tore the roof from Bartek Koziol’s granary, and carried it away more than a furlong’s distance into the fields; they threw down the chimney at the Vincioreks’; they wrenched a good bit of boarding from the mill-roof: and as to the multitudes 7of minor losses, and the many trees uprooted in the orchards and woods, who can tell them? Why, upon the highway alone, they tore up and cast across the road about a score of poplars, that lay like as many murdered and pitilessly mutilated corpses!

The oldest inhabitant could not remember when the winds had been so hostile and done so much injury.

Folk therefore kept at home, wrangling together beneath the smoky rafters of their own cabins; for it was no light matter to show one’s nose round the corner. Some of the women, however, being less patient, would at times cautiously step outside their enclosures and visit their gossip-loving neighbours: ostensibly to spin in company, but in reality to whet their tongues and give vent to their ill humour. Meanwhile, the men were threshing stubbornly on behind the closed granary-doors, and from morning till late at night the flails smote upon the floor. The frost had nipped the corn; and so the grain was more readily threshed out.

These gales brought with them more and more biting frosts. With mighty strokes they had frozen all the brooks and streamlets. The morasses were now solid. Even the mill-pond was coated over with a sheet of bluish transparent ice. Only close to the bridge, where the water grew deeper, was it still in motion: all the rest of its banks were fettered by the ice, and openings had to be cut for drawing water.

No change of weather came till St. Lucia’s day.

Then the frost slackened somewhat; the winds paused to take breath: they swept the plain more seldom and with less boisterous fury; the grey sky grew smooth as a well-harrowed field’s vast hempen-coloured surface, and so low that it seemed resting on the poplar tree-tops along the road.

But presently, after the noonday Angelus, the frost increased a little and the snow fell in large flakes.

Dusk then came earlier, and the snow still fell thicker and thicker, though drier and more powdery, until the night closed in.

8By morning the snow was three good spans deep; it covered the whole land like a fleece, veiled it under its own white expanse, shaded with bluish tints; and still it continued to fall without intermission.

And so great a stillness came over the land that no noise, no sound pierced the masses of down, now floating to the ground. All had grown silent, dumb: as though, by some miracle, all things had stopped in awe, listening to the all but inaudible rustle of the falling flakes, so quietly floating earthward—a dim flickering whiteness, unceasingly descending!

The night was now a whitish obscurity, a glimmering, pearly, immaculate dawn, like the finest bleached wool on earth; this glimmering from out of the infinite abyss—as it were, the frozen shimmer of the light of all stars, condensed and ground to dust in its downward flight from heaven—now besprinkled the whole country; and soon the pine-woods were shrouded, the meadows disappeared, the highways vanished, and all the village was lost in the silvery haze and blinding dust, and nothing more was to be seen but streams of sifted snow, wafted down as still and smooth and soft as cherry-blossoms in a moonlit night!

At three paces’ distance, there was no making out either huts or trees or fences, or any human face; human voices alone, like butterflies on wearied wings, flitted about in the nebulous whiteness.

This went on for two whole days and nights. In the end, the cabins were all snowed up, and rose, each like a snow-covered hill, with a long tress of smoke waving from its top. Roads and fields had become one vast plain: the orchards were all filled with snow, even above the tops of the enclosures; the pond had become quite invisible beneath the avalanche and, in place of the ground, there was but a pale, flat, impassable, miraculous plain of down.

The snow fell still, though now more dry and scantier. At night the stars would twinkle athwart its curtain: by day, at times, the blue sky would show beyond the whirl of floating specks and flitters; voices sounded more sonorous 9and came no longer muffled through the veil. The village seemed to wake up a little, and folk began to stir themselves. Some even attempted to drive out in sledges, but soon returned, finding the ways impracticable. Here and there, they dug paths through the snow from cabin to cabin; every heart rejoiced. Especially the children were beside themselves with delight; and dogs rushed about everywhere, barking, licking the snow, and scampering with the urchins, who swarmed on to the roadways, clamoured in the enclosures, shouted, pelted one another with snowballs, built horrible monsters, and dragged each other about on toboggans; their joyful cries and merry sports filled all the place with din. Roch had to give up teaching that day, for keeping them in the house over their primers was impossible.

About the third day, the snow ceased as twilight fell; and though there were still a few flakes, they were like the shakings out of an empty sack of flour—nothing to speak of. But the sky was overcast, crows flapped their wings about the houses and alighted on the roads; the night came down starless and leaden, its obscurity diminished only by the whiteness of the frosty snow—and as still as one shorn of strength to the uttermost.

“Let but the slightest wind spring up, and we shall have a snowstorm,” muttered old Bylitsa the next morning, as he peeped out at the window.

Hanka lit the fire on the hearth, and looked into the passage. It was early yet: all over the hamlet, the cocks were crowing. The twilight was still dusky, as if lime and soot had been mingled and spread over the world; but in the east there glowed a heap, as it were, of ash-covered embers.

The cold in the room was so keen, so damp and bitterly piercing, that Hanka had to put on her clogs in the house over her bare feet. On the hearth, there was scarce any fire at all; the green juniper brushwood only crackled and smoked. Hanka hacked a few chips off a board, poked some straw under them, and at last got the fire to blaze.

“Enough snow has fallen for a whole winter,” the old 10man said again, blowing on the window, crusted over with a thick coating of greenish ice.

The eldest boy, now entering on his fourth year, began crying in bed; and from Staho’s lodgings on the other side of the hut, angry voices, the weeping of children, and the slamming of doors were heard.

“Oh, Veronka is already at her morning prayers!” Antek remarked satirically, as he wound round his legs the bands he had previously warmed at the fire.

“Ah, well,” the old man mumbled, “she has learned to talk—and she talks. A little too much perhaps, but she means no harm.”

“Means no harm! And does she mean no harm when she beats her children? Does she mean no harm when she leads poor Staho a dog’s life, with never a good word for him?” Thus Hanka made reply, as she knelt down by the cradle to suckle her little baby, which was crying and kicking its legs about.

“Since we came, three Sundays have gone by: not one day has passed without a quarrel and fighting and curses. She a woman? No, she’s a brute.... But Staho too is a mollycoddle, who lets her swinge and cuff him at will. He works like a horse, and she treats him worse than a dog.”

The old man cast a deprecating look at Hanka, and was about to say a word in Veronka’s behalf, when the door opened and Staho himself, flail on shoulder, peeped in.

“Antek, will you come and thresh? The organist told me to get someone for his barley, which is dry and good, and comes splendidly out of the husk.... Philip begged me to take him; but if you will, here’s work for you.”

“Thanks kindly,” was Antek’s reply; “but I am not going to work at the organist’s. Philip will do very well.”

“Please yourself. Good day.”

At her husband’s refusal, Hanka had started up; but she at once bent down, her head over the cradle, to hide the tears that gushed forth.

“What! in this fearful winter, so poor that we have only a few potatoes and salt, and having not a stiver to bless 11himself with ... he refuses work offered! Sits all day long in the hut, smoking cigarettes and brooding!... Or else roams and prowls about like one distraught, seeking ... what? The wind perhaps? O my God, my God!” she sobbed in her distress.... “And now, even Yankel will trust us no more: and we shall have to sell the cow.... True, it is not beseeming that he should work on another peasant’s land.... But what—what can we do?—Lord! were I a man, I would not spare myself nor shirk toil, but work till my arms dropped.... Alas! poor thing that I am, what can I do?” And she set about her household duties, now and then casting a furtive glance at Antek, who sat close to the hearth, with his eldest son on his lap, wrapped in his sheepskin, and chafed his little feet with a hand warmed at the fire, but sighed and stared moodily into the blaze the while. The old man was peeling potatoes at the window.

Silence had arisen between them, disquieting, pregnant with hidden griefs, and heightened by the stifling sensation of misery. They would not look into each other’s eyes, nor talk; their words trailed off into plaints, their smiles faded and went out; in their looks flamed suppressed reproaches; in their pallid emaciated faces harsh feelings were to be read, and their minds burned with bitter resentment. Three weeks had passed since they had been turned from Boryna’s door: so many long days and nights, and they had every detail of the expulsion yet distinct in their memories. The injury was as fresh as ever, the stubborn sense of revolt as strong.

The fire was now burning merrily, and its warmth spread through the room, till the frost melted on the window-panes, and the snow in the chinks outside the hut trickled down in water, while a little moisture oozed from the hard-beaten floor.

“Those Jews ... are they coming?” she asked at length.

“They said they would.”

And again not one word more. Indeed, who should speak first? Should Hanka?... She, who durst not open her 12mouth, lest the gall that filled her heart should flow forth in spite of her!—Or Antek? What had he to say? That he was miserable? They both knew that. He never had been prone to make friends; and as to pouring out his heart, even to his own wife, he had no wish to do that! Besides, how could he speak, now that his soul was eaten up with hatred, and every memory made him writhe and clench his fists in such rage that he would willingly have vented it upon the whole village!

He now treasured no longer the sweet recollection of Yagna, any more than if he had never known her, than if he never had held in his arms the girl whom he now could tear in pieces.

And yet what he felt was not hatred. “Some women” (thus he thought of her) “are like stray dogs, always ready to follow anyone who offers a bigger morsel, or shakes a stick to be obeyed.” Even these thoughts were not very frequent: in presence of the avalanche of deadly wrongs done him by his father, he forgot hers. The old man was guilty of all: yes, it was his father—the villain, the tyrant, the thorn in his side that ever rankled deeper and more cruelly!—it was through him—through him!—that all had come to pass.