From that day I began to be a frequent visitor to the chicken-legged
house. Every time I came Olyessia met me with her usual dignified
reserve. But I always could tell, by the first involuntary she made on
seeing me, that she was glad that I had come. The old woman still went
on grumbling as she used, muttering under her nose, but she expressed
no open malevolence, owing to her granddaughter’s intercession, of
which I was certain though I had not witnessed it. Also, the presents
I would bring her from time to time made a considerable impression in
my favour--a warm shawl, a pot of jam, a bottle of cherry brandy. As
though by tacit consent, Olyessia began to make a habit of accompanying
me as far as the Irenov road as I went home. And there always began
such a lively interesting conversation, that involuntarily we both made
an effort to prolong the journey, walking as slowly as possible in the
silent fringes of the forest. When we came to the Irenov road, I went
back half a mile with her, and even then before we parted we would
stand talking for a long while beneath the fragrant shade of the pine
branches.
It was not only Olyessia’s beauty that fascinated me, but her whole
free independent nature, her mind at once clear and enwrapped in
unshakable ancestral superstitions, childlike and innocent, yet not
wholly devoid of the sly coquetry of the handsome woman. She never
tired of asking me every detail concerning things which stirred her
bright unspoiled imagination--countries and peoples, natural phenomena,
the order of the earth and the universe, learned men, large towns....
Many things seemed to her wonderful, fairy, incredible. But from the
very beginning of our acquaintance I took such a serious, sincere, and
simple tone with her that she readily put a complete trust in all my
stories. Sometimes when I was at a loss for an explanation of something
which I thought was too difficult for her half-savage mind--it was
often by no means clear to my own,--I answered her eager questions
with, ‘You see.... I shan’t be able to explain this to you.... You
won’t understand me.’
Then she would begin to entreat me.
‘Please tell me, please, I’ll try.... Tell me somehow, though ... even
if it’s not clear.’
She forced me to have recourse to preposterous comparisons and
incredibly bold analogies, and when I was at a loss for a suitable
expression she would help me out with a torrent of impatient
conclusions, like those which we offer to a stammerer. And, indeed,
in the end her pliant mobile mind and her fresh imagination triumphed
over my pedagogic impotence. I became convinced that, considering her
environment and her education (rather, lack of education) her abilities
were amazing.
Once I happened in passing to mention Petersburg. Olyessia was
instantly intrigued.
‘What is Petersburg? A small town?’
‘No, it’s not a small one. It’s the biggest Russian city.’
‘The biggest? The very largest of all? There isn’t one bigger?’ she
insisted naïvely.
‘The largest of all. The chief authorities live there ... the big
folks. The houses there are all made of stone; there aren’t any wooden
ones.’
‘Of course, it’s much bigger than our Stiepany?’ Olyessia asked
confidently.
‘Oh, yes. A good bit bigger. Say five hundred times as big. There are
houses there so big that twice as many people live in a single one of
them as in the whole of Stiepany.’
‘My God! What kind of houses can they be?’ Olyessia asked almost in
fright.
‘Terrible houses. Five, six, even seven stories. You see that fir tree
there?’
‘The tall one. I see.’
‘Houses as tall as that, and they’re crammed with people from top to
bottom. The people live in wretched little holes, like birds in cages,
ten people in each, so that there isn’t enough air to breathe. Some of
them live downstairs, right under the earth, in the damp and cold. They
don’t see the sun from one end of the year to the other, some of them.’
‘Nothing would make me change my forest for your city,’ Olyessia said,
shaking her head. ‘Even when I go to the market at Stiepany, I’m
disgusted. They push, shout, swear ... and I have such a longing for
the forest, that I want to throw everything away and run and never look
back. God may have your city: I don’t want to live there.’
‘But what if your husband comes from a town?’ I asked with the trace of
a smile.
Her eyebrows frowned and her nostrils trembled.
‘What next!’ she said with scorn. ‘I don’t want a husband.’
‘You say that now, Olyessia. Nearly every girl says the same, but still
they marry. You wait a bit: you’ll meet somebody and you’ll fall in
love--and you’ll follow him, not only to town, but to the end of the
earth.’
‘No, no.... We won’t talk of that, please,’ she cut me short in
vexation. ‘Why should we talk like this? I ask you not to.’
‘How funny you are, Olyessia. Do you really believe you’ll never love a
man in your life? You’re so young, handsome, strong. If your blood once
catches fire, no oaths of yours will help you.’
‘Well, ... then, I’ll love,’ Olyessia answered with a challenge in her
flashing eyes. ‘I shan’t ask anybody’s leave.’
‘So you’ll have to marry too,’ I teased her.
‘I suppose you’re meaning the church?’ she guessed.
‘Exactly--the church. The priest will lead you round the altar; the
deacon will sing, “Isaiah, rejoice!” they’ll put a crown on your
head....’
Olyessia cast down her eyes and shook her head, faintly smiling.
‘No, dear.... Perhaps you won’t like what I say, but in our family no
one was ever married in church. My mother and my grandmother before
her managed to live without that.... Besides, we must not enter a
church....’
‘All because of your witchery?’
‘Yes, because of our witchery,’ Olyessia replied with a calm
seriousness. ‘How could I dare to appear in a church? From my very
birth my soul was sold to _Him_.’
‘Olyessia, dear.... Believe me, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s wild
and ridiculous what you say.’
Once more there appeared on Olyessia’s face the strange expression of
convinced and gloomy submissiveness to her mysterious destiny, which I
had noticed before.
‘No, no.... You can’t understand it.... But I feel it.... Just
here....’ She pressed her hand strongly to her heart. ‘I feel it in my
soul. All our family is cursed for ever and ever. But think yourself,
who is it that helps us if it is not _He_? Can an ordinary person do
the things I can do? All our power comes from _Him_.’
Every time our conversation touched upon this strange theme it ended
in the same way. In vain I exhausted every argument to which Olyessia
was sensible; in vain I spoke in simple terms of hypnotism, suggestion,
mental doctors, and Indian fakirs; in vain I endeavoured to explain
certain of her experiments by physiology, such, for instance, as blood
charming, which is easily produced by skilful pressure on a vein. Still
Olyessia, who believed me so implicitly in all else, refuted all my
arguments and explanations with obstinate insistence.
‘Very well, I’ll make you a present of blood charming,’ she said,
raising her voice in the heat of the discussion. ‘But where do the
other things come from? Is blood charming the only thing I know? Would
you like me to take away all the mice and beetles from a hut in a
single day? If you like, I’ll cure the most violent fever in two days
with plain cold water, even though all your doctors give the patient
up. I can make you forget any word you like, completely? And how is it
I interpret dreams? How is it I can see the future?’
The discussion always ended by our mutual silence, from which a certain
inward irritation against each other was not wholly absent. Indeed,
for much of her black art I could find no explanation in my small
science. I do not know and cannot say whether Olyessia possessed one
half the secrets of which she spoke with such naïve belief. But the
things which I frequently witnessed planted an unshakable conviction
in me that Olyessia had access to that strange knowledge, unconscious,
instinctive, dim, acquired only by accidental experience, which has
outrun exact science for centuries, and lives intertwined with wild and
ridiculous superstitions, in the obscure impenetrable heart of the
masses, where it is transmitted from one generation to another as the
greatest of all secrets.
For all our disagreement on this single point, we became more and more
strongly attached to one another. Not a word had been spoken between us
of love as yet, but it had become a necessity for us to be together;
and often in moments of silence I saw Olyessia’s eyes moisten, and a
thin blue vein on her temple begin to pulse.
But my relations with Yarmola were quite ruined. Evidently my visits
to the chicken-legged hut were no secret to him, nor were my evening
walks with Olyessia. With amazing exactness, he always knew everything
that went on in the forest. For some time I noticed that he had begun
to avoid me. His black eyes watched me from a distance, with reproach
and discontent every time I went out to walk in the forest, though he
did not express his reproof by so much as a single word. Our comically
serious studies in reading and writing came to an end; and if I
occasionally called Yarmola in to learn during the evening he would
only wave his hand.
‘What’s the good? It’s a peggling business, sir!’ he would say with
lazy contempt.
Our hunting also ceased. Every time I began to talk of it, Yarmola
found some excuse or other for refusing. Either his gun was out of
order, or his dog was ill, or he was too busy. ‘I have no time, sir....
I have to be ploughing to-day,’ was Yarmola’s usual answer to my
invitation; but I knew quite well that he would do no ploughing at all,
but spend a good hour outside the inn in the doubtful hope of somebody
standing him a drink. This silent, concealed animosity began to weary
me, and I began to think of dispensing with Yarmola’s services, on the
first suitable occasion.... I was restrained only by a sense of pity
for his enormous poverty-stricken family, whom Yarmola’s four weekly
roubles just saved from starvation.