a sickening ache stirring in his heart, as though, in the midst of a whirl of gaiety and dancing crowds, someone had begun singing a funeral dirge. The rubies of her lips looked like blood surging up from her heart. All at once he was aware of something dreadfully familiar in her face. ‘The witch!’ he cried in a voice not his own, as, turning pale, he looked away and fell to repeating his prayers. It was the witch that he had killed!
When the sun was setting, they carried the corpse to the church. The philosopher supported the coffin swathed in black on his shoulder, and felt something cold as ice on it. The sotnik walked in front, with his hand on the right side of the dead girl’s narrow resting home. The wooden church, blackened by age and overgrown with green lichen, stood disconsolately, with its three cone-shaped domes, at the very end of the village. It was evident that no service had been performed in it for a long time. Candles had been lighted before almost every image. The coffin was set down in the centre opposite the altar. The old sotnik kissed the dead girl once more, bowed down to the ground, and went out together with the coffin bearers, giving orders that the philosopher should have a good supper and then be taken to the church. On reaching the kitchen all the men who had carried the coffin began putting their hands on the stove, as the custom is with Little Russians, after seeing a dead body.
The hunger, of which the philosopher began at that moment to be conscious, made him for some minutes entirely oblivious of the dead girl. Soon all the servants began gradually assembling in the kitchen, which in the sotnik’s house was something like a club, where all the inhabitants of the yard gathered together, including even the dogs, who wagging their tails, came to the door for bones and slops. Wherever anybody might be sent, and with whatever duty he might be charged, he always went first to the kitchen to rest for at least a minute on the bench and smoke a pipe. All the unmarried men in their smart Cossack tunics lay there almost all day long, on the bench, under the bench, or on the stove – anywhere, in fact, where a comfortable place could be found to lie on. Then everybody invariably left behind in the kitchen either his cap or a whip to keep stray dogs off or some such thing. But the biggest crowd always gathered at supper-time, when the drover who had taken the horses to the paddock, and the herdsman who had brought the cows in to be milked, and all the others who were not to be seen during the day, came in. At supper, even the most taciturn tongues were moved to loquacity. It was then that all the news was talked over: who had got himself new breeches, and what was hidden in the bowels of the earth, and who had seen a wolf. There were witty talkers among them; indeed, there is no lack of them anywhere among the Little Russians.
The philosopher sat down with the rest in a big circle in the open air before the kitchen door. Soon a peasant woman in a red bonnet popped out, holding in both hands a steaming bowl of dumplings, which she set down in their midst. Each pulled out a wooden spoon from his pocket, or, for lack of a spoon, a wooden stick. As soon as their jaws began moving more slowly, and the wolfish hunger of the whole party was somewhat assuaged, many of them began talking. The conversation naturally turned on the dead maiden.
‘Is it true,’ said a young shepherd who had put so many buttons and copper discs on the leather strap on which his pipe hung that he looked like a small haberdasher’s shop, ‘is it true that the young lady, saving your presence, was on friendly terms with the Evil One?’
‘Who? The young mistress?’ said Dorosh, a man our philosopher already knew, ‘why, she was a regular witch! I’ll take my oath she was a witch!’
‘Hush, hush, Dorosh,’ said another man, who had shown a great disposition to soothe the others on the journey, ‘that’s no business of ours, God bless it! It’s no good talking about it.’
But Dorosh was not at all inclined to hold his tongue; he had just been to the cellar on some job with the butler, and, having applied his lips to two or three barrels, he had come out extremely merry and talked away without ceasing.
‘What do you want? Me to be quiet?’ he said, ‘why, I’ve been ridden by her myself! Upon my soul, I have!’
‘Tell us, uncle,’ said the young shepherd with the buttons, ‘are there signs by which you can tell a witch?’
‘No, you can’t,’ answered Dorosh, ‘there’s no way of telling: you might read through all the psalm-books and you couldn’t tell.’
‘Yes, you can, Dorosh, you can; don’t say that,’ the former comforter objected; ‘it’s with good purpose God has given every creature its peculiar habit; folks that have studied say that a witch has a little tail.’
‘When a woman’s old, she’s a witch,’ the grey-headed Cossack said coolly.
‘Oh! you’re a nice set!’ retorted the peasant woman, who was at that instant pouring a fresh lot of dumplings into the empty pot; ‘regular fat hogs!’
The old Cossack, whose name was Yavtuh and nickname Kovtun, gave a smile of satisfaction seeing that his words had cut the old woman to the quick; while the herdsman gave vent to a guffaw, like the bellowing of two bulls as they stand facing each other.
The beginning of the conversation had aroused the philosopher’s curiosity and made him intensely anxious to learn more details about the sotnik’s daughter, and so, wishing to bring the talk back to that subject, he turned to his neighbour with the words: ‘I should like to ask why all the folk sitting at supper here look upon the young mistress as a witch? Did she do a mischief to anybody or bring anybody to harm?’
‘There were all sorts of doings,’ answered one of the company, a man with a flat face strikingly resembling a spade. ‘Everybody remembers the dog-boy Mikita and the …’
‘What about the dog-boy Mikita?’ said the philosopher.
‘Stop! I’ll tell about the dog-boy Mikita,’ said Dorosh.
‘I’ll tell about him,’ said the drover, ‘for he was a great crony of mine.’
‘I’ll tell about Mikita,’ said Spirid.
‘Let him, let Spirid tell it!’ shouted the company.
Spirid began: ‘You didn’t know Mikita, Mr Philosopher Homa. Ah, he was a man! He knew every dog as well as he knew his own father. The dog-boy we’ve got now, Mikola, who’s sitting next but one from me, isn’t worth the sole of his shoe. Though he knows his job, too, but beside the other he’s trash, slops.’
‘You tell the story well, very well!’ said Dorosh, nodding his head approvingly.
Spirid went on: ‘He’d see a hare quicker than you’d wipe the snuff from your nose. He’d whistle: “Here, Breaker! here Swift-foot!” and he in full gallop on his horse; and there was no saying which would outrace the other, he the dog, or the dog him. He’d toss off a mug of vodka without winking. He was a fine dog-boy! Only a little time back he began to be always staring at the young mistress. Whether he had fallen in love with her, or whether she had simply bewitched him, anyway the man was done for, he went fairly silly; the devil only knows what he turned into … pfoo! No decent word for it …’
‘That’s good,’ said Dorosh.
‘As soon as the young mistress looks at him, he drops the bridle out of his hand, calls Breaker Bushy-brow, is all of a fluster and doesn’t know what he’s doing. One day the young mistress comes into the stable where he is rubbing down a horse.
‘“I say, Mikita,” says she, “let me put my foot on you.” And he, silly fellow, is pleased at that. “Not your foot only,” says he, “you may sit on me altogether.” The young mistress lifted her foot, and, as soon as he saw her bare, plump, white leg, he went fairly crazy, so he said. He bent his back, silly fellow, and, clasping her bare legs in his hands, ran galloping like a horse all over the countryside. And he couldn’t say where he was driven, but he came back more dead than alive, and from that time he withered up like a chip of wood; and one day when they went into the stable, instead of him they found a heap of ashes lying there and an empty pail; he had burnt up entirely, burnt up of himself. And he was a dog-boy such as you couldn’t find another all the world over.’
When