“You hand over a ruble, and I will go,” announced Tchurka, gruffly.
Kostrom at once asked spitefully:
“But for two greven — you would be afraid?”
Then he said to Valek: “Give him the ruble. But he won’t go; he is only making believe.”
“Well, take the ruble.”
Tchurka rose, and, without saying a word and without hurrying, went away, keeping close to the fence.
Kostrom, putting his fingers in his mouth, whistled piercingly after him.; but Ludmilla said uneasily:
“O Lord, what a braggart he is! I never!”
“Where are you going, coward?” jeered Valek.
“And you call yourself the first fighter in the street!”
It was offensive to listen to his jeers. We did not like this overfed youth; he was always putting up little boys to do wrong, told them obscene stories of girls and women, and taught them to tease them. The children did what he told them, and suffered dearly for it.
For some reason or other he hated my dog, and used to throw stones at it, and one day gave it some bread with a needle in it.
But it was still more offensive to see Tchurka going away, shrinking and ashamed.
I said to Valek:
“Give me the ruble, and I will go.”
Mocking me and trying to frighten me, he held out the ruble to Ludmilla’s mother, who would not take it, and said sternly:
“I don’t want it, and I won’t have it!”
Then she went out angrily.
Ludmilla also could not make up her mind to take the money, and this made Valek jeer the more.
I was going away without obtaining the money when grandmother came along, and, being told all about it, took the ruble, saying to me softly:
“Put on your overcoat and take a blanket with you, for it grows cold toward morning.”
Her words raised my hopes that nothing terrible would happen to me.
Valek laid it down on a condition that I should either lie or sit on the coffin until it was light, not leaving it, whatever happened, even if the coffin shook when the old man Kalinin began to climb out of the tomb.
If I jumped to the ground I had lost.
“And remember,” said Valek, “that I shall be watching you all night.”
When I set out for the cemetery grandmother made the sign of the cross over me and kissed me.
“If you should see a glimpse of anything, don’t move, but just say, ‘Hail, Mary.’ ”
I went along quickly, my one desire being to begin and finish the whole thing.
Valek, Kostrom, and another youth escorted me thither.
As I was getting over the brick wall I got mixed up in the blanket, and fell down, but was up in the same moment, as if the earth had ejected me.
There was a chuckle from the other side of the wall.
My heart contracted; a cold chill ran down my back.
I went stumblingly on to the black coffin, against one side of which the sand had drifted, while on the other side could be seen the short, thick legs. It looked as if some one had tried to lift it up, and had succeeded only in making it totter.
I sat on the edge of the coffin and looked around. The hilly cemetery was simply packed with gray crosses; quivering shadows fell upon the graves.
Here and there, scattered among the graves, slender willows stood up, uniting adjoining graves with their branches. Through the lace-work of their shadows blades of grass stuck up.
The church rose up in the sky like a snow-drift, and in the motionless clouds shone the small setting moon.
The father of Yaz, “the good-for-nothing peasant,” was lazily ringing his bell in his lodge. Each time, as he pulled the string, it caught in the iron plate of the roof and squeaked pitifully, after which could be heard the metallic clang of the little bell. It sounded sharp and sorrowful.
“God give us rest!” I remembered the saying of the watchman.
It was very painful and somehow it was suffocating. I was perspiring freely although the night was cool.
Should I have time to run into the watchman’s lodge if old Kalinin really did try to creep out of his graved
I was well acquainted with the cemetery. I had played among the graves many times with Yaz and other comrades.
Over there by the church my mother was buried.
Every one was not asleep yet, for snatches of laughter and fragments of songs were borne to me from the village.
Either on the railway embankment, to which they were carrying sand, or in the village of Katizovka a harmonica gave forth a strangled sound. Along the wall, as usual, went the drunken blacksmith Myachov, singing. I recognized him by his song:
“To our mother’s door One small sin we lay.
The only one she loves Is our Papasha.”
It was pleasant to listen to the last sighs of life, but at each stroke of the bell it became quieter, and the quietness overflowed like a river over a meadow, drowning and hiding everything.
One’s soul seemed to float in boundless and unfathomable space, to be extinguished like the light of a catch in the darkness, be — coming dissolved without leaving a trace in that ocean of space in which live only the unattainable stars, shining brightly, while everything on earth disappears as being useless and dead.
Wrapping myself in the blanket, I sat on the coffin, with my feet tucked under me and my face to the church. Whenever I moved, the coffin squeaked, and the sand under it crunched.
Something twice struck the ground close to me, and then a piece of brick fell near by. I was frightened, but then I guessed that Valek and his friends were throwing things at me from the other side of the wall, trying to scare me.