The Witch | Page 9

eyes gleamed.
"The job's enough for you, and you can look for a wife in the forest,
blast you!" she said. "I am no wife for you, a clumsy lout, a slug-a-bed,
God forgive me!"
"Come, come . . . go to sleep!"

"How miserable I am!" sobbed his wife. "If it weren't for you, I might
have married a merchant or some gentleman! If it weren't for you, I
should love my husband now! And you haven't been buried in the snow,
you haven't been frozen on the highroad, you Herod!"
Raissa cried for a long time. At last she drew a deep sigh and was still.
The storm still raged without. Something wailed in the stove, in the
chimney, outside the walls, and it seemed to Savely that the wailing
was within him, in his ears. This evening had completely confirmed
him in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife,
with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges.
But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird
power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm
of which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his
stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her
seem, as it were, whiter, sleeker, more unapproachable.
"Witch!" he muttered indignantly. "Tfoo, horrid creature!"
Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched
her head with his finger . . . held her thick plait in his hand for a minute.
She did not feel it. Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.
"Leave off!" she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow
with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.
The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart
remained.
PEASANT WIVES
IN the village of Reybuzh, just facing the church, stands a two-storeyed
house with a stone foundation and an iron roof. In the lower storey the
owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his
family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer
and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or
landowners, who chance to be travelling that way. Dyudya rents some
bits of land, keeps a tavern on the highroad, does a trade in tar, honey,
cattle, and jackdaws, and has already something like eight thousand
roubles put by in the bank in the town.
His elder son, Fyodor, is head engineer in the factory, and, as the
peasants say of him, he has risen so high in the world that he is quite
out of reach now. Fyodor's wife, Sofya, a plain, ailing woman, lives at
home at her father-in-law's. She is for ever crying, and every Sunday

she goes over to the hospital for medicine. Dyudya's second son, the
hunchback Alyoshka, is living at home at his father's. He has only
lately been married to Varvara, whom they singled out for him from a
poor family. She is a handsome young woman, smart and buxom.
When officials or merchants put up at the house, they always insist on
having Varvara to bring in the samovar and make their beds.
One June evening when the sun was setting and the air was full of the
smell of hay, of steaming dung-heaps and new milk, a plain-looking
cart drove into Dyudya's yard with three people in it: a man of about
thirty in a canvas suit, beside him a little boy of seven or eight in a long
black coat with big bone buttons, and on the driver's seat a young
fellow in a red shirt.
The young fellow took out the horses and led them out into the street to
walk them up and down a bit, while the traveller washed, said a prayer,
turning towards the church, then spread a rug near the cart and sat
down with the boy to supper. He ate without haste, sedately, and
Dyudya, who had seen a good many travellers in his time, knew him
from his manners for a businesslike man, serious and aware of his own
value.
Dyudya was sitting on the step in his waistcoat without a cap on,
waiting for the visitor to speak first. He was used to hearing all kinds of
stories from the travellers in the evening, and he liked listening to them
before going to bed. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his
daughter-in-law Sofya, were milking in the cowshed. The other
daughter-in-law, Varvara, was sitting at the open window of the upper
storey, eating sunflower seeds.
"The little chap will be your son, I'm thinking?" Dyudya asked the
traveller.
"No; adopted. An orphan. I took him for my