There are many solitary graves amid the woods of Kerschentz; within
them moulder the bones of old men, men of an ancient piety, and of
one of these old men, Antipa, this tale is told in the villages of
Kerschentz.
Antipa Lunev, a rich peasant of austere disposition, lived to his
fiftieth year, sunken in worldly sins, then was moved to profound
self-examination, and seized with agony of soul, forsook his family
and buried himself in the loneliness of the forest. There on the edge
of a ravine he built his hermit's cell, and lived for eight years,
summer and winter. He let no one approach him, neither acquaintances
nor kindred. Sometimes people who had lost their way in the woods came
by chance on his hut and saw Antipa kneeling on the threshold, praying.
He was terrible to see--worn with fasting and prayer, and covered with
hair like a wild beast. If he caught sight of any one, he rose up and
bowed himself to the ground before him. If he were asked the way out
of the forest, he indicated the path with his hand without speaking,
bowed to the ground again, went into his cell and shut himself in.
He was seen many times during the eight years, but no man ever heard
his voice. His wife and children used to visit him, he took food and
clothing from them, bowed himself before them as before others, but,
during the time of his anchorite life, spoke no word with them any more
than with strangers.
He died the same year that the hermitages of the wood were swept away,
and his death came in this fashion.
The Chief of Police came through the forest with a detachment of
soldiers, and saw Antipa kneeling, silently praying in his cell.
"You there!" shouted the officer. "Clear out of this, we're going to
smash up this den of yours!"
But Antipa heard nothing, and however loudly the captain shouted, the
pious hermit answered him never a word. Then the officer ordered his
men to drag Antipa out of his cell. But the soldiers were troubled
before the gaze of the old man, who continued in prayer so steadfastly
and earnestly, and paid no heed to them, and, shaken by such strength
of soul, they hesitated to carry out the command. Then the captain
ordered them to break up the hut, and they began to remove the roof
silently and very carefully, to avoid hurting the worshipper within.
The axes rang over Antipa's head, the boards split and fell to the
ground, the dull echo of the blows sounded through the wood, the birds
terrified by the noise fluttered uneasily round the cell, and the
leaves trembled on the trees. But the old man prayed on as though he
neither saw nor heard. They began to break up the flooring of the hut,
and still its owner knelt undisturbed, and only when the last timbers
were thrown aside and the captain himself went up to Antipa and caught
him by the hair, only then did he speak, his eyes lifted to heaven,
quietly, to God, "Merciful Father, forgive them."
Then he fell back and died.
When this happened, Jakov, the eldest son of Antipa, was twenty-three
years old, and Terenti, the youngest, eighteen. Jakov, handsome and
strong, gained the name of "scatter-brain," while still a youngster,
and by the time his father died, was already the chief loafer and bully
in the country-side. All complained of him--his mother, the Starost,
the neighbours: he was imprisoned, he was whipped, with and without
legal condemnation, but nothing tamed his wild disposition, and day
by day he felt more stifled and constrained in the village among the
pious people, busy and hard working as moles, scorners of every new
thing, holding fast to the precepts of their ancient faith. Jakov
smoked tobacco, drank brandy, wore clothes of German cut, and went to
no prayers or religious services, and if decent folk admonished him and
reminded him of his father, he would say scornfully, "Wait a bit, good
people, all in good time. When I have sinned enough, I will think of
repentance. It's too early yet; you need not hold up my father as an
example to me--he sinned for fifty years, and repented only for eight
after all. My sins now are nothing but as the down on the young bird,
but when my full feathers are grown, then I may think of repentance."
"An evil heretic," was Jakov Lunev's name in the village, where they
hated and feared him.
Some two years after his father's death, he married. The farm that his
father established by thirty years strenuous labour, he had thoroughly
ruined by his spendthrift life, and no one in the village would give
him a daughter in marriage. But somewhere in a distant village he found
a pretty orphan-girl, and he sold a pair of horses and his father's
bee-farm, to raise the money to celebrate his wedding. His brother
Terenti, a timid, silent, humpbacked youth, with unusually long arms,
was no hindrance to his mode of life; his mother lay sick on the
stove, and from there only called to him with hoarse foreboding voice,
"Accursed one! Take heed to your soul. Come to your senses."
"Don't worry yourself, my dear mother," answered Jakov. "Father will
put in a word for me with the Almighty."
At first, for close on a year, Jakov lived in peace and content with
his wife, and even took to working, but then began to loaf again,
disappeared from the house for a month at a time, and came back to his
wife, worn out, bruised and hungry.
Jakov's mother died; at the funeral, in a drunken fit he assaulted
the Starost, his old enemy, and was arrested in consequence, and
imprisoned. His term of imprisonment at an end, he reappeared in the
village, gloomy and ill-tempered. The village people hated him still
more and extended their hatred to his family, especially to the silent,
hump-backed Terenti who had been the sport of the boys and girls from
his childhood. They called Jakov jail-bird and thief, but Terenti,
monster and wizard. Terenti endured insult and mockery silently, but
Jakov broke out in open threats, "All right, just wait a bit, I'll
teach you."
He was close on forty years of age when a conflagration broke out in
the village; he was accused of incendiarism and sent, a prisoner, to
Siberia.
Jakov's wife, who lost her reason at the time of the fire, was left in
the care of Terenti, and with her, her son Ilya, a boy of ten, sturdy,
black-eyed, and serious beyond his years. Whenever the lad appeared in
the village streets, the other children ran after him, throwing stones
at him, and the bigger ones would shout, "Ah! the young devil the
prison brat, bad luck to you!"
Terenti, unfitted for laborious work, dealt up to the time of the fire
in tar, needles and thread, and such small wares, but the catastrophe
which destroyed half the village made an end both of the Lunevs'
house and Terenti's whole stock-in-trade, so that all the Lunevs then
possessed in the world amounted to one horse and thirty-three roubles
in money.
As soon as Terenti found that his native village would offer him no way
whatever to earn a living, he entrusted his sister-in-law to the care
of an old peasant woman at fifty kopecks a month, bought a ricketty old
cart, and placed his nephew in it, determined to make for the chief
town of the district, where he hoped for some assistance from a distant
relative, Petrusha Filimonov, a servant in a small tavern.
Secretly and like a thief in the night, Terenti left his home. He
guided his horse silently, often looking back with his large dark
eyes. The horse trotted on, the cart jolted from side to side and Ilya
nestled into the hay, and soon slept the deep sleep of childhood.
In the middle of the night the boy was awakened by a strange terrifying
sound, like the howl of a wolf. It was a clear night, the cart was
standing at the outskirts of a wood, and the horse moved round it
cropping the dewy grass. A great pine tree, its highest branches
scorched, stood far apart in the plain, as though driven out from
the forest. The boy's eager eyes looked anxiously for his uncle; but
through the quiet night from time to time the only distant sound was
the dull thud of the horse's hoofs, or the noise of its breathing like
heavy sighs, and the same mysterious terrifying sound filled the air,
and frightened the lad.
"Uncle?" he called softly.
"What is it?" answered Terenti, at once, and the doleful sound ceased
suddenly.
"Where are you?"
"Here. Go to sleep again."
Then Ilya saw his uncle, sitting on a mound at the edge of the wood,
like a black tree-stump rising out of the earth.
"I'm frightened," said the boy.
"What then--frightened? Why? there's nothing here."
"Some one was crying."
"You've been dreaming," said the hunchback softly.
"No! truly, he _was_ crying."
"A wolf perhaps, far away. Go to sleep again."
But Ilya could sleep no more. He was frightened at the clear stillness,
and in his ears the mournful sound still rang. He looked cautiously
at the country round, and then saw that his uncle was gazing in the
direction where, over the mountain, far in the midst of the wood, stood
a white church with five towers, the large round moon shining brightly
above it. Ilya knew that this was the church of Romodanov, and that two
versts from it nearer to them, in the wood above the valley, lay their
village Kitschnaja.
"We haven't come far," he said, thoughtfully.
"What?" asked his uncle.
"We must get on further, I said, some one might come."
Ilya nodded in the direction of the village with a look of hate.
"We'll get on presently," replied his uncle.
And again all was quiet round about. Ilya squatted with his knees up to
his chin, supported himself against the front of the cart and began to
gaze in the same direction as his uncle. The village was not visible in
the dense black shadow of the forest, but it seemed to him that he saw
clearly every house and all its people, and the old white willow by the
well in the middle of the street. Against the willow's roots lay his
father bound with a rope, his shirt torn to rags, his hands tied behind
his back, his naked breast thrust forward, and his head as though it
had grown to the willow stem. He lay motionless as a dead man, and
looked with terrible eyes at the peasants, crowding before the house
of the Starost, There were very many, all angry, they shouted, cursed
him----. The memory troubled the boy, and a lump came in his throat. He
felt he must soon cry for sorrow and the coldness of the night, but he
did not wish to disturb his uncle, and mastering himself he huddled his
little body closer together.
Suddenly a low wail sounded again. First a deep sigh, then sobs, then
loud, unspeakable lamentation.
"Oh--oh! oh--oh--oh!"
The boy shivered with terror and stared round him. But the sound
quivered again through the air and grew in volume.
"Uncle! Is it you crying?" called Ilya.
Terenti neither spoke nor moved.
Then the boy sprang from the cart, ran to his uncle, fell in front of
him, clasped his knees, and burst into tears. He heard his uncle's
voice broken by sobs.
"They've driven us out--driven us out. Oh! God! Where shall we go?
Where? oh!"
But the boy said, swallowing down his tears:
"Wait--when I grow up--I'll show them--just wait."
He cried his sorrow out and then fell asleep. His uncle lifted him in
his arms and laid him in the cart, but he himself went apart again and
cried aloud once more, lamenting in bitter agony.