In the evening, after they had seen to their horses, they used to gather in a ring near the stables, and a little red-haired Cossack, shaking his tufts of hair, sang softly in a high-pitched voice, like a trumpet. The long-drawn-out, sad song flowed out upon the Don and the blue Dounia.
His eyes were closed, like the eyes of a linnet, which often sings till it falls dead from the branch to the ground. The collar of his Cossack shirt was undone. His collar-bone was visible, looking like a copper band. In fact, he was altogether metallic, coppery.
Swaying on his thin legs, as if the earth under him were rocking, spreading out his hands, he seemed sightless, but full of sound. He, as it were, ceased to be a man, and became a brass instrument.
Sometimes it seemed to me that he was falling, that he would fall on his back to the ground, and die like the linnet, because he put into the song all his soul and all his strength.
With their hands in their pockets or behind their broad backs, his comrades stood round in a ring, sternly looking at his brassy face. Beating time with their hands, softly spitting into space, they joined in earnestly, softly, as if they were in the choir in church.
All of them, bearded and shaven, looked like icons, stern and set apart from other people.
The song was long, like a long street, and as level, as broad and as wide. When I listened to him I forgot everything else, whether it was day or night upon the earth, whether I was an old man or a little boy. Everything else was forgotten.
The voice of the singer died away. The sighs of the horses were audible as they grieved for their native steppes, and gently, but surely, the autumn night crept up from the fields. My heart swelled and almost burst with a multitude of extraordinary feelings, and a great, speechless love for human creatures and the earth.
The little copper-colored Cossack seemed to me to be no man, but something much more significant — a legendary being, better and on a higher plane than ordinary people.
I could not talk to him.
When he asked me a question I smiled blissfully and remained shyly silent.
I was ready to follow him anywhere, silently and humbly, like a dog. All I wanted was to see him often, and to hear him sing.
CHAPTER VIII
WHEN the snows came, grandfather once more took me to grandmother’s sister.
“It will do you no harm,” he said to me.
I seemed to have had a wonderful lot of experience during the summer. I felt that I had grown older and cleverer, and the dullness of my master’s house seemed worse than ever.
They fell ill as often as ever, upsetting their stomachs with offensive poisons, and giv — ing one another detailed accounts of the progress of their illnesses.
The old woman prayed to God in the same terrible and malignant way. The young mistress had grown thin, but she moved about just as pompously and slowly as when she was expecting her child.
When she stitched at the baby-clothes she always sang the same song softly to herself:
“Spiria, Spiria, Spiridon,
Spiria, my little brother,
I will sit in the sledge myself
And Spiria on the foot-board.”
If any one went into the room she left off singing at once and cried angrily:
“What do you want?”
I fully believed that she knew no other song but that.
In the evenings they used to call me into the sitting-room, and the order was given: i8o
“Now tell us how you lived on the boat.”
I sat on a chair near the door and spoke. I liked to recall a different life from this which I was forced to lead against my will.
I was so interested that I forgot my audience, but not for long. The women, who had never been on a boat, asked me:
“But it was very alarming, wasn’t it?”
I did not understand. Why should it be alarming?
“Why, the boat might go down any moment, and every one would be drowned.”
The master burst out laughing, and I, although I knew that boats did not sink just because there were deep places, could not convince the women.
The old woman was certain that the boat did not float on the water, but went along on wheels on the bottom of the river, like a cart on dry land.
“If they are made of iron, how can they float?
An ax will not float; no fear!”
“But a scoop does not sink in the water.”
“There’s a comparison to make!
A scoop is a small thing, nothing to speak of.”
When I spoke of Smouri and his books they regarded me with contempt. The old lady said that only fools and heretics wrote books.
“What about the Psalms and King David?”
“The Psalms are sacred writings, and King David prayed God to forgive him for writing the Psalms.”
“Where does it say so?”
“In the palms of my hands; that’s where! When I get hold of you by the neck you will learn where.”
She knew everything; she spoke on all subjects with conviction and always savagely.
“A Tatar died on the Pechorka, and his soul came out of his mouth as black as tar.”
“Soul? Spirit?” I said, but she cried contemptuously:
“Of a Tatar!
Fool!”