Yarmola was squatting on his heels in front of the stove door, poking
the coals in the stove, while I walked from corner to corner of the
room. Of all the twelve rooms of the huge country house I occupied only
one--the lounge that used to be. The other rooms were locked up, and
there, grave and motionless, mouldered the old brocaded furniture, the
rare bronzes, and the eighteenth-century portraits.
The wind was raging round the walls of the house like an old naked,
frozen devil. Towards evening the snowstorm became more violent. Some
one outside was furiously throwing handfuls of fine dry snow at the
window-panes. The forest near by moaned and roared with a dull, hidden,
incessant menace....
The wind stole into the empty rooms and the howling chimneys. The
old house, weak throughout, full of holes and half decayed, suddenly
became alive with strange sounds to which I listened with involuntary
anxiety. Into the white drawing-room there broke a deep-drawn sigh,
in a sad worn-out voice. In the distance somewhere the dry and rotten
floorboards began to creak under some one’s heavy, silent tread. I
think that some one in the corridor beside my room is pressing with
cautious persistence on the door-handle, and then, suddenly grown
furious, rushes all over the house madly shaking all the shutters and
doors. Or he gets into the chimney and whines so mournfully, wearily,
incessantly--now raising his voice higher and higher, thinner and
thinner, all the while, till it becomes a wailing shriek, then lowering
it again to a wild beast’s growling. Sometimes this terrible guest
would rush into my room too, run with a sudden coldness over my back
and flicker the lamp flame, which gave a dim light from under a green
paper shade, scorched at the top.
There came upon me a strange, vague uneasiness. I thought: Here am
I sitting, this bad, stormy night, in a rickety house, in a village
lost in woods and snowdrifts, hundreds of miles from town life, from
society, from woman’s laughter and human conversation.... And I began
to feel that this stormy evening would drag on for years and tens of
years. The wind will whine outside the windows, as it is whining now;
the lamp will burn dimly under the paltry green shade, as it burns now;
I will walk just as breathlessly up and down my room, and the silent,
intent Yarmola will sit so by the stove, a strange creature, alien to
me, indifferent to everything in the world, indifferent that his family
has nothing to eat, to the raging wind, and my own vague consuming
anxiety.
Suddenly I felt an intolerable desire to break this anxious silence
with some semblance of a human voice, and I asked:
‘Why is there such a wind to-day? What do you think, Yarmola?’
‘The wind?’ Yarmola muttered, lazily lifting his head. ‘Don’t you
really know?’
‘Of course I don’t. How could I?’
‘Truly, you don’t know?’ Yarmola livened suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he
continued with a mysterious note in his voice. ‘I’ll tell you this.
Either a witch is being born, or a wizard is having a wedding-party.’
‘A witch?... Does that mean a sorceress in your place?’
‘Exactly ... a sorceress.’
I caught up Yarmola eagerly. ‘Who knows,’ I thought, ‘perhaps I’ll
manage to get an interesting story out of him presently, all about
magic, and buried treasure, and devils.’
‘Have you got witches here, in Polyessie?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know ... may be,’ Yarmola answered with his usual
indifference, bending down to the stove again. ‘Old folks say there
were once.... May be it’s not true....’
I was disappointed. Yarmola’s characteristic trait was a stubborn
silence, and I had already given up hope of getting anything more out
of him on this interesting subject. But to my surprise he suddenly
began to talk with a lazy indifference as though he was addressing the
roaring stove instead of me.
‘There was a witch here, five years back.... But the boys drove her out
of the village.’
‘Where did they drive her to?’
‘Where to? Into the forest, of course ... where else? And they pulled
her cottage down as well, so that there shouldn’t be a splinter of the
cursed den left.... And they took her to the cross roads....’
‘Why did they treat her like that?’
‘She did a great deal of harm. She quarrelled with everybody, poured
poison beneath the cottages, tied knots in the corn.... Once she asked
a village woman for fifteen kopeks. “I haven’t got a sixpence,” says
she. “Right,” she says, “I’ll teach you not to give me a sixpence.” And
what do you think, sir? That very day the woman’s child began to be
ill. It grew worse and worse and then died. Then it was that the boys
drove her out--curse her for a witch.’
‘Well ... where’s the witch now?’ I was still curious.
‘The witch?’ Yarmola slowly repeated the question, as his habit was.
‘How should I know?’
‘Didn’t she leave any relatives in the village?’
‘No, not one. She didn’t come from our village; she came from the Big
Russians, or the gipsies. I was still a tiny boy when she came to our
village. She had a little girl with her, a daughter or grandchild....
They were both driven out.’
‘Doesn’t any one go to her now--to get their fortunes told or to get
medicine?’
‘The womenfolk do,’ Yarmola said scornfully.
‘Ah, so it’s known where she lives?’
‘I don’t know.... Folks say she lives somewhere near the Devil’s
Corner.... You know the place--the marsh behind the Trine road. She
lives in that same marsh. May her mother burn in hell!’
‘A witch living ten versts from my house ... a real live Polyessie
witch!’ The idea instantly intrigued and excited me.
‘Look here, Yarmola,’ I said to the forester. ‘How could I get to know
the witch?’
‘Foo!’ Yarmola spat in indignation. ‘That’s a nice thing!’
‘Nice or nasty, I’m going to her all the same. As soon as it gets a
little warmer, I’ll go off at once. You’ll come with me, of course?’
Yarmola was so struck by my last words that he jumped right off the
floor.
‘Me?’ he cried indignantly. ‘Not for a million! Come what may, I’m not
going with you.’
‘Nonsense; of course, you’ll come.’
‘No, sir, I will not ... not for anything.... Me?’ he cried again,
seized with a new exasperation, ‘go to a witch’s den? God forbid! And I
advise you not to either, sir.’
‘As you please.... I’ll go all the same.... I’m very curious to see
her.’
‘There’s nothing curious there,’ grunted Yarmola, angrily slamming the
door of the stove.
An hour later, when he had taken the samovar off the table and drunk
his tea in the dark passage and was preparing to go home, I asked him:
‘What’s the witch’s name?’
‘Manuilikha,’ replied Yarmola with sullen rudeness.
Though he had never expressed his feelings, he seemed to have grown
greatly attached to me. His affection came from our mutual passion
for hunting, from my simple behaviour, the help I occasionally gave
his perpetually hungry family, and above all, because I was the only
person in the world who did not scold him for his drunkenness--a thing
intolerable to Yarmola. That was why my determination to make the
acquaintance of the witch put him into such an ugly temper, which he
relieved only by sniffing more vigorously, and finally by going off to
the back-staircase and kicking his dog Riabchik with all his might.
Riabchik jumped aside and began to howl desperately, but immediately
ran after Yarmola, still whining.