IV
Theodot’s tone had become so simple, so sincere, so filled with the tones of husbandry aggrieved, that it would never have entered anybody’s head that here was a murderer, confessing his sin. Then, too, he was listened to in a spirit of simplicity. Kiriushka was lying flat on his belly, his head covered with his great coat; his feet, in big bast sandals and thickly wrapped in foot cloths, were sticking out. Ivan, with his cap shoved down over his forehead, his hands tucked into his sleeves, was lying on his side, also without moving; as for his stern and serious silence, he maintained it because he deemed it beneath his dignity to be interested in fools. He was so little concerned whether those before him were murderers or not, that he had even called out once:
“Time to sleep! Finish that gabbing tomorrow!”
As for Pashka and the old man, both half-reclining and biting little straws, they merely shook their heads and grinned occasionally, as if to say: “Well, Theodot sure has known his fill of trouble with that she-goat!” And Theodot, evidently deeming himself already vindicated by this sympathy for his ridiculous and hard situation, lost entirely his diffidence about digressions. And the high school boy, gritting his teeth both from the wind and from the inner cold, would at times look about him wildly: Where was he, and what queer night was this? But it was still the same simple, familiar country night, of which there had been many. The field was dark, the corn-kiln stood out in a sharp triangle against the starry sky; through the underbrush, beyond which the stars flared up and fell, a wind was blowing; its cool breath, with the pleasant scent of the chaff, reached the face and hands, rustled in the straw, and again grew still, dying away. … The hounds—white balls sunk in the straw—were fast asleep. … And all the horror lay only in that it was late, that a small cluster of silver stars had risen high in the northeast, that the dark mass of the slumbrous garden was murmuring in the distance, dully, autumn-wise; that the eyes in the faces of those conversing were sparkling in the starlight.
“Yes, little brother of mine,” Theodot was saying, laughing over his own ridiculous and sad predicament, “nobody can’t say it weren’t a misfortune! At last they tell me, now, that a muzhik in the Prilepakh had driven my she-goat to his place. I start out to get her back; no help for it—such seemed to be my lot. I come to the village; there’s nobody around, wherever I look—everybody’s out in the fields. A lad is riding off for water; I ask him—‘Where’s Bockhov’s house?’ ‘Why,’ says he ‘right there, where the old woman in the red petticoat is sitting under a bush.’ I walk up: ‘Is this Bochkov’s place?’ The old woman waves her hand at me, pointing to a little yard in the blazing sun. …”
“Must have gone daft from old age,” put in Pashka, starting to laugh so pleasantly that the student looked around at him with amazement and fear, reflecting: “Why no—it can’t be true; he must have told lies about himself!”
“She was gone daft,” confirmed Theodot. “Just kept on waving her hand. But I had already been hearing a hog grunting in the little yard. I open the door to a sty, a corner fenced off with plaited willow, where this same pig was kept. I see a big sow pulling a woman around; the woman’s thrown her weight upon it, holding it with both hands, pouring out of a pail upon it with the other. And the sow is all black from mud, lugging the woman, dragging her along—the woman can’t manage her nohow, and her clothes is pulled up to her belly. It was both to sin and to grin! Soon as she saw me, she pulls down her skirt—her legs, her hands was all in manure. … ‘What d’you want?’ ‘What do I want? I’m here on business. You drove my she-goat up here; you’re keeping strayed cattle, but ain’t giving out no notice of it.’ ‘We ain’t keeping any she-goat of yours,’ says she. ‘We let her go. We drove her into the owner’s place.’ And she laughs at something. ‘So-o,’ thinks I, ‘that means I’m in hot water again: well, just you wait!’ I went out and kept on; I had just gone past the next farm, had turned up a path through some flax, when a red-haired little fellow bobs up from somewheres right in my way. ‘Did you come for the goat?’ ‘For the goat—but why?’ Suddenly I hear a woman yelling beyond the hut: ‘Where you gone to, Kuzka, damn your eyes!’ ‘Run quick,’ I says, ‘here’s your mother comin’ with some stinging nettles.’ And there she was, right on the spot; she sees him and runs: ‘Didn’t I tell you to look after the little one? But where did you go off to, you so-and-so?’ And then she pounces on me! ‘Where you from?’ ‘And what business of yours may that be now?’ ‘Oh, no, you tell me where you’re from!’ ‘I’m the man in the moon. What are you yelling about? I’m looking for my she-goat.’ ‘Oh, so it’s you, is it, damn your eyes, that don’t give any peace to the village with your goat!’ And suddenly I see a tall muzhik rushing toward me from the corn kiln—without a cap, beltless, in boots. He ran on me at full speed. ‘Your goat?’ ‘Mine. …’ He unwraps himself, swings back, and lets fly one in my ear.”
“Good work!” exclaimed the old man and Pashka in the same breath; as for the schoolboy, he even let out a little squeal: this, then, was the most horrible part of all! But Theodot calmly pulled out the skirt of his short coat from under him, and calmly continued:
“Oh, yes, he warmed me up so that my head just begun to hum. I grab him by his hands, and ask him, what that was for? And by now people was running up. … Right in front of everybody, I ask them to be witnesses of this here matter; again I ask what it was my goat had gone and done? It turns out that she had knocked a child off its feet, had broken its head, making it bleed; had chewn up a shirt, and had trampled some rye. Very well—complain to the court about it; there I’ll be called to account and you won’t be let off either. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘you ain’t a-goin’ to get a durn thing off me!’ I put on my cap and went as fast as I could to the owner’s yard. I grew a trifle cheerier: the goat, thinks I, won’t get away from me now; and you can’t sue me now—you should have waited before you started in fighting with me. I draw near and I see, on a pony with a clipped tail, a lad in a satin cap, his legs and arms bare—a jockey, they calls it. The horse is playful, and he flicks it with a little whip. ‘How do you do, now; allow me to ask—has your grace got my she-goat?’ ‘And who may you be?’ ‘I’m the owner of that there goat.’ ‘Well, now, my daddy ordered it to be driven in.’ Things are going along fine; I go on farther and meet a beggar, from whom I lay in some bread—for the hounds in the owner’s yard are pretty big. I enter the yard and see a four-horse carriage standing on the gravelled drive near the house—the horses are well-fed, spirited. There’s a flunky at the grand entrance, his beard parted in two. A grownup young lady walks out in a hat trimmed with ribbons, her face all covered up with muslin. ‘Dasha!’ she yells to the maid in the house, ‘ask the master to come as soon as possible. He’s at the riding-ground.’ I start for the riding-ground. There I see the owner himself standing, in a uniform frock with a green collar; he wears a medal and carries his cap in his hand; his bald head simply blazes in the sun, his belly is all in creases, and he’s all red himself. And there’s a little lad perched up on the roof, his arm plunged in under the roofing, looking for something—must be for starlings, thinks I to myself. But no—he was taken up with sparrows. The owner looks on, yelling: ‘Catch them, catch, them, the sons of bitches!’ And the little boy catches the young sparrows, pulls them out, and knocks them against the ground. The owner catches sight of me: ‘What do you want?’ ‘Why, now,’ says I, ‘your gardener caught my she-goat at the strawberries. Allow me to take her away, so’s I may kill her.’ ‘This isn’t the first time, now,’ says he, ‘I shall fine you two roubles.’ ‘I agree with you,’ I says, ‘I’m at fault, and I admit it. What hard luck!’ I says, ‘I always have two wenches watching it; but yesterday, as though for spite—the deuce knows whether they ate too many raw mushrooms, or what it was—they was rolling around, spewing up; and as for my wife, she also didn’t watch out, to tell the truth—she was lying in the barn, yelling with all her might—her hand had all swollen up. …’ A man’s got to excuse himself somehow. I tell him all about what a baneful creature my she-goat is, how I was given one in the ear for her—he laughs and grows good-natured. ‘No matter how I chase her,’ says I, ‘I can’t catch her nohow; and I so wanted to ask your grace for a little gunpowder and to borrow a gun from the truck gardener, so’s to shoot her with it. Well, of course, he softened a lot, allowed me to take her, and I done for her on the spot.”
“You done for her?” asked the old man.
“Absolutely,” said Theodot. “ ‘Well, take it,’ says he, ‘only watch out, don’t mix it up with mine.’ ‘That won’t happen, nohow,’ says I, ‘I’d know her amongst a thousand.’ We went out to the fold, taking Pakhomka the shepherd along with us. I give one look—and at once notice her behind the sheep; she was standing, looking at me sharply for some reason, eyeing me askance. Me and Pakhomka got the sheep into a corner as tight as we could, and I began to walk up to her. I make two steps—she gives one jump over a ram! And again she stands, looking. Again I start for her. … And then, she points her head with its horns toward the ground and makes one dash for the sheep, and they all just rush away from her—they parted like water! Then I got mad. Says I to Pakhomka: ‘You just drive her up as easy as you can, the whilst I climb up on the shed, where it’s darker, and grab her by the horns.’ And it’s awful how much manure there was in that yard, right up to the very sheds in some places. I climbed up on the shed, laid down, grabbed a beam as hard as I could, whilst Pakhomka kept on scaring her on toward me. I waited and waited, until finally she came under the very shed—and then I made a grab for her horns! And then she starts in bleating. I even got scared! I fall off the shed; I dig my feet in, holding on to the horns, while she dashes with me all over the yard, drags me up to a pit; then she squirms out, scraping me with her horn over the beard, over the nose—till everything turned black. … When I look up, she’s already up on the roof: she’d jumped up on the pile of manure, from the manure on to the roof, from the roof into the tall grass. … We could hear the dogs getting noisy in the yard; the other dogs picked it up, raising a racket in the village. We, of course, jumped out after her. But she’s flying along with all her might, and straight for the last hut: there was a new hut being built there; the windows was still boarded up and there was no entry yet, while there was just bare poles laid aslant for the roof. So she clambered up them up to the very ridge—a power like a whirlwind must have carried her up there! We ran up as fast as we could; as for her, she must have felt her death coming—she was bleating for all she was worth, all scared. I picked up a hefty brick, took aim—and caught her so neat that she just jumped up in the air, and then started with a swish down the roof! We ran up, but she was just lying there, her tongue jerking in the dust. … She’d take a breath and then rattle, take a breath and rattle again—till the dust rose up near her nose. And her tongue was long, just like a snake. … Well, of course, after half an hour or so, she had croaked.”