V
Onisim Kozel lived with his grandson on the outskirts of the village, in a dilapidated little hut that seemed to have grown into the ground, with a broken flue and chipped whitewashing, behind which one could see the inner layer of yellow clay. The windowpanes, for which rags were substituted in many places, had become dull green with time and now shone with all the colors of the rainbow. Besides the two, the hut was inhabited by Prokhorovna, a deaf, hundred-year-old, insane woman. The three used the hut free of charge through the charity of their neighbors, especially since it was used for the performing of autopsies on suicides, the drowned, and murdered peasants. The very table at which the three village outlaws usually ate was used for the purposes of autopsy.
Vasil returned home tired and excited. Kozel was already there, lying on the stove, his head covered with a torn sheep-fur coat. The boy had succeeded in taking Buzyga safely as far as Perebrod. They had not been seen from the mill, although people were already stirring there and some wagons stood around. They had found the horses in the place indicated. There were four horses, but Cubik was not there. That circumstance disturbed Buzyga a great deal, so that he took with him only the two better horses, leaving the others tied to the post and ordered the boy to run home immediately and not along the road, but straight across the Marinkino swamp and through the government woods.
“Did Buzyga get scared?” asked Kozel hastily.
“No, he didn’t get scared,” answered Vasil, breathing with difficulty. “Only he was very angry, threatened to cut Cubik’s throat. … And he got angry with me, too. … I said to him: ‘It doesn’t make any difference, Buzyga. I am not afraid. Let’s take all the horses and go.’ And he started shouting at me; I thought he’d beat me, so I ran away from him. …”
“And what about me? Did he ask you to tell me anything?”
“Yes. He said: ‘You tell the old man to stay home all day long and not to stir out. And if anybody asks you about Buzyga or the horses, tell them you don’t know anything about it …’ ”
“What is it, O Lord?” exclaimed Kozel in a helpless, troubled voice.
Vasil was drinking water greedily out of a wooden dish.
“I guess they went after Buzyga,” said he, raising his face from the dish for a moment. “When I was running across the swamp I heard a lot of people riding down the road, on horseback and in wagons.”
The old man kept winking his red, wet eyes in confusion. His face was almost disfigured with fear, and one end of his mouth was twitching.
“Lie down, Vasil, lie down on the bed quickly!” he said in a broken voice. “Lie down quickly. O Lord, O Lord! Whose horses did he take? Did you see? Lie down, lie down!”
“One of them I did not know, but the other one was that roan mare of Kuzma Sotnik’s. …”
“Kuzma’s? O Lord! What are we going to do now? Didn’t I ask Buzyga not to touch any horses from our village? There you are!”
Kozel breathed heavily, moving on top of the stove. “Don’t forget, Vasil, that, if anybody asks you where we went, say that we went to the government woods for bast. And tell them that the guard took it away from us. Do you hear?”
“Yes, I hear,” said the boy roughly.
“O Lord, O Lord!” Kozel kept repeating. “It’s impossible that Cubik betrayed me. He isn’t that kind of a fellow. It’s all Buzyga’s fault, that iron head of his! What the deuce did he want to take the two horses for? You say there were a lot of people going down the road? Lord, O Lord! That’s the way he always is. Doesn’t care for his own head and still less for another man’s. Didn’t he see, the rascal, that the thing was off? Why not run away? No, he was ashamed of the boy and had to show what a brave fellow he was. … O Lord, O Lord! … Are you asleep, Vasil?”
The boy kept an angry silence. The old man moved about for a long time, groaning and sighing, and talking to himself in a rapid, frightened whisper. He tried to assure himself that there was no danger at all, that Cubik’s absence would be explained by and by as a mere accident, that the galloping riders of the road were simply an illusion of the frightened boy, and although he succeeded in deceiving his mind for a few short moments, he saw clearly and unmistakably in the depth of his soul that a terrible and inevitable death was moving toward him. At times he would break off his senseless whispering and listen with painful attention. And every rustle, every knock, or sound of a voice made him shiver and lie motionless. Once, when under the window a rooster crowed loudly and flapped his wings, the old beggar felt all the blood rushing from his head to his quivering heart, and his body became limp, and was covered with hot perspiration.
An hour went by. The sun rose from behind the yellow fields that stretched to the other side of the bridge. Two columns of merry, golden light in which numberless specks of dust were dancing joyfully, rushed in through the two windows of the dark, smoky hut, filled with an odor of sheep-fur and stale food. Suddenly Kozel threw the coat away and stood up on the stove. His old, colorless eyes were wide open and had an expression of mad fright. His blue lips were trembling, unable to pronounce the word.
“They are coming!” said he finally, through hiccups, shaking his head. “Vasil, they are coming. … Our death. … Vasil. …”
The boy already heard an indistinct, dull, low rumbling which rose and fell like wind-ridden waves, becoming more terrible and more distinct every moment. But it seemed that a faraway barrier held it back. But now this invisible wall suddenly gave way and the sounds rushed from behind it with terrible force.
“They are coming here. They will kill us, Vasil!” cried Kozel wildly.
Now one could hear the sound of a vast crowd of people, frenzied and blinded by the cruel, unbounded, merciless peasant wrath, running down the street, shouting fiercely, and stamping with their heavy, iron-shod boots.
“Drag them over here! Break the door!” howled under the very window of the hut someone’s voice, and it had not a single human tone in it.
The unlocked door, torn off its hinges, opened and struck against the wall, while a black, shouting crowd rushed into the bright oblong formed by its opening. Their faces disfigured with anger, pushing and shoving each other without noticing it, dozens of frenzied men rushed into the hut, forced in from behind. Dishevelled, frenzied faces were looking in through the window, darkening the room and preventing the golden columns of dust from entering.
Vasil sat motionless with his back pressed against the wall, pale and trembling but not frightened. He saw the sheep-fur coat fly down from the stove, and directly after it came Kozel helplessly flying over the heads of the crowd. The old beggar was shouting something, opening wide his toothless mouth, twitching his face into shameless contortions of cringing terror, which made his whole wrinkled face horribly disgusting. He waved his mutilated hands, pointing them at the image, hastily making the sign of the cross, and striking his bosom with them. And from all sides men rushed upon him, their bloodshot eyes almost glassy with anger, their lips twisted out of shape by their mad shouting. The old man was twirling in the midst of their hot, sweating bodies like a splinter of wood in a whirlpool.
“Kill him! Kill him! The scoundrel! No, you won’t get away! Tsypenuk, give it to him! Drag him out into the street, boys, drag him out! You’ve pestered us long enough. We’ll bury you alive! … Kill him!” was heard as separate exclamations in the midst of the general uproar.
Suddenly, covering all this tempest of curses and vituperations, was heard the mighty voice of Kuzma Sotnik, who shouted, towering above the crowd, his face red with the effort.
“Wait a moment, brethren, we have to investigate this. Take him over to where Buzyga is!”
“Drag him! Take him! Let’s put an end to them all! …”
With the same elemental impetuosity with which it rushed into the hut, the crowd now surged back into the street. Somebody picked up Vasil and threw him into this crowd of wriggling bodies. Crushed in on all sides, deafened by the noise, he was thrown outside by this rushing current.
The village presented an unusual, peculiar sight on that beautiful summer morning. Despite the fact that it was a working day, in the middle of the week, the streets were crowded with people. And wagons and ploughs with horses already harnessed, stood abandoned in front of almost every gate. Children and women were running in one direction, toward the church. Dogs barked all around; hens cackled, flapping their wings and flying to all sides. The crowd was growing fast and occupied the whole width of the street. Crowded in a dense mass, half suffocated, constantly pushing and shoving each other, these men were running along, shouting hoarsely, their mouths foaming as though they were a pack of wild beasts.
On a little meadow in front of the wine-shop, there was a dense, black ring of people. The two crowds joined together, mingled, and pressed against each other. Some monstrously elastic force threw Kozel and Vasil forward.
In the middle of a narrow spot instinctively set apart by the crowd, Buzyga was lying on the grass, which was wet and dark with blood. His face had the appearance of a large piece of bloody meat, torn to shreds. One of his eyes was torn out and was hanging on something that looked like a red rag. The other eye was closed. What had been his nose was now a large bloody, round cake. His mustaches were covered with blood. But what was most terrible, inexpressibly terrible, was the fact that this mutilated and disfigured man was lying on the ground in silence, while around him the wild crowd was shouting and howling, intoxicated with cruelty.
Kuzma Sotnik caught Kozel by the collar of his coat and bent him down with such force that the old man fell on his knees.
“Hey, there! Quiet!” shouted Kuzma, turning around. “Keep quiet there!”
He was the leader on that day and his word was obeyed. The crowd’s roar gradually died away, as though running back from rank to rank.
“Buzyga!” shouted Kuzma when silence set in, bending low over the horse-thief. “Do you hear me? We won’t beat you any more. Will you tell me truly whether Kozel was with you or not?”
Buzyga remained silent and did not open his one eye. His chest rose often and so high that it seemed impossible for a man to breathe in that way, and each breath made something whistle in his throat, as though a fluid were flowing with difficulty through a narrow tube.
“Don’t try to bluff us, you devil!” shouted Kuzma threateningly, and raising his foot, he struck Buzyga on the lower part of the chest with all the force of his iron-shod boot.
“Ukh!” the whole crowd sighed in unison, heavily and greedily.
Buzyga groaned and opened his eye slowly. It fell on Vasil’s face.
Buzyga looked at the boy slowly for a long time, closely and indifferently, and then it suddenly seemed to Vasil that the bloody mouth of the horse-thief twisted into a suffering, tender smile, and this seemed so unnatural, so pitiful, and so dreadful that Vasil cried involuntarily, and covered his face with his hands.
“Now, tell us, you Satan!” Sotnik shouted this in Buzyga’s ear. “Listen. If you will tell us who helped you, we’ll let you go immediately. Otherwise, we’ll kill you like a dog. Am I telling the truth or not, boys? Tell him. …”
“That’s right. … Tell us, Buzyga, and we won’t do anything else to you,” rumbled through the crowd like a dull wave of sound.
Buzyga looked at Vasil with that same long and peculiar gaze and, opening with difficulty his mutilated lips, said in a scarcely audible voice:
“No one … was there. … I was alone. …”
He closed his eye and his chest began to rise and fall.
“Kill him!” came a tremulous, nervous, half-childish voice, shrieking somewhere in the back ranks. The crowd moved forward, howled dully, and closed in on the spot where the horse-thief was lying.
Without rising, Kozel dragged himself over to where Kuzma was standing and threw his arms about his feet.
“My benefactor!” he was saying senselessly and entreatingly. “See, I kiss your feet. … God knows that I was home all the time. I went for some bast. … God knows and the Holy Virgin. My benefactors! Here I kiss your feet! … I am only a poor cripple. …”
And he was really dragging himself around on his knees, holding on to Kuzma’s boot and kissing it in such frenzy as though his whole safety lay in this. Kuzma slowly turned around and looked at the crowd.
“Let him go to the devil!” said an old man standing there.
“To the devil with him!” caught up several voices. “Maybe it wasn’t he. It was a Kreshevo horse anyway! What’s the use? Let Kozel go. … We’ll ask the elder afterward.”
Kozel was still dragging himself on his knees from one peasant to another. The terror of the imminent and cruel death had now changed to delirious joy. He pretended that he did not understand what was going on. Tears were running down his horribly twisted face. He caught the hands and the boots of the peasants and kissed them greedily. Vasil stood to one side, pale and motionless, with his eyes burning. He could not turn his face away from Buzyga’s terrible face, seeking yet fearing his glance.
“Go away!” Kuzma Sotnik suddenly said and kicked the old man in the back with his boot. “You go away too, Vasil! Buzyga!” he shouted almost immediately, turning to the dying horse-thief, “do you hear? I am asking you for the last time: ‘Who was with you?’ ”
The crowd moved in again. The same force that threw Kozel and the boy forward was now bearing them back, and the people whom they met turned away, made room for them impatiently, as if they were disturbing their strained attention. Through the soft and dense barrier of human bodies, Vasil heard the loud bass of Kuzma who was still questioning Buzyga. Suddenly the same thin, hysterical voice shouted almost above Vasil’s head: “Kill Buzyga! …”
All those who were standing behind pushed forward, shoving in those before them. Kozel and Vasil found themselves outside of the crowd.
“Lord be praised!” the old man muttered joyously, drying his tears with one of his stumps and making the sign of the cross with the other. “Vasil, Vasil! O Lord! We have escaped! … Vasil! O Lord! … We have escaped! Why do you stand there? Let’s run home!”
“You go; I won’t,” said Vasil gloomily.
It seemed that it was outside of his power to draw his burning eyes away from the black, motionless, and dreadfully silent crowd. His blue lips trembled and became distorted, as they whispered unintelligible words.
“Let’s go, Vasil!” Kozel entreated him, dragging his grandson by the hand.
At that moment the black mass suddenly quivered and swayed like a forest that was suddenly struck by the wind. A dull and short groan of fury rolled over it. In an instant it pressed together, then tore apart again, then pressed together once more. And deafening each other with their frenzied cries, the men mingled together in the horrible fray.
“Vasil, for God’s sake!” the old man muttered, “let’s go away. … They will kill us!”
It was with great difficulty that he succeeded in dragging the boy away from the mob, but on the corner, struck by the dead silence that suddenly set in, Vasil drew away and glanced back.
“O Lord have mercy on thy sinful slave, Levonty, and take him to Paradise,” Kozel suddenly began to whisper. “They have killed Buzyga,” he said with pretended sadness.
He knew that the people’s wrath was allayed with blood and that death had gone past him. He could not conceal his deep, animal joy. He alternately cried and laughed with noiseless, long laughter. He spoke feverishly, without pauses, without sense, and made idiotic faces at himself. Vasil looked at him from time to time in aversion, knitting his brows with an expression of deep hatred.