It was near noontide, and the heat greater and greater. The people were
all assembled outside the District Office; but the head of the District
had not yet appeared. The scrivener had several times come out upon the
threshold and, shading his eyes, looked down the broad highway, with its
borders of gnarled willow-trees. Nothing was visible but the glittering
pools which yesterday’s shower had left—one cart crawling along, and a
peasant’s white capote fluttering among the trees.
So they waited patiently. The Voyt alone rushed bustling to and fro,
restless and fidgety, now looking out upon the road, now urging forward
the work of the men who were filling up the hollows in the square before
the Office.
“Faster, lads! faster, for God’s sake! He will be here ere ye have done
the work!”
A voice from the crowd called out: “Beware lest ye be so scared that
some accident happen to you!”
“Now, men, stir yourselves! I am here on duty: such jests are untimely.”
“Our Voyt, ’tis known, fears God alone!” said one peasant, a man from
Rzepki.
The Voyt, now furious, shrieked: “If any man speak one word more, I’ll
have him thrown in jail!”—And then he ran round to the cemetery that
stood upon the height on which the District Office was perched.
It was overshadowed by many an ancient tree, through whose branches the
grey church tower was seen; the black arms of the crosses bent over the
stone wall, and above the road that led through the village.
Nothing was to be seen as yet. The Voyt left the Soltys along with the
people, and went into the Office. Here someone was continually entering,
called in by the scrivener, who took occasion to remind him gently of
taxes in arrears, unpaid subscriptions for the court buildings ... and
other things still more important. These reminders were truly very
distasteful to each of them: how could they pay in such hard times, and
just before the harvest? So they only made him a very deep bow, some
even kissing his hand, and some pressing their last _zloty_ into the
man’s outstretched palm. But they all implored him to wait till the
harvest, or till next fair.
That scrivener! he was a cunning blade, a wily crafty old fox! How many
a way he had of fleecing the people! To some he would make no end of
promises, others he wrought upon through fear of the gendarmes; these he
got the upper hand of through sheer flattery, and those, by treating
them with free and easy friendliness. But he always and somehow got
something out of every one of them. He was in need of oats, or he
required a few young goslings for the head of the District; or he
obtained a promise of some straw ropes for binding sheaves. And,
willingly or unwillingly, they promised whatever he wanted. And
then—just as they were leaving—he would take those apart whom he knew
best, and say to them in friendly guise:
“Look ye, vote for the school; for if ye should oppose it, our head may
wax angry, and peradventure cancel your agreement with the Squire as to
the forest.”
“How’s that?” cried Ploshka, in astonishment. “Why, we made the
agreement freely on either side.”
“Aye, but know ye not?—‘But noble with noble is hand in glove; for
peasants, never noble has love.’”
Much dismayed, Ploshka left him; and he continued to call the men in,
frightening each of them in a different way, but pressing them all to do
the same thing.
A good many people were gathered together—more than two hundred—who at
first grouped themselves by villages, each with his own acquaintances:
men of Lipka with men of Lipka, and so on. But now it was known to be
the head of the District’s will they should vote about the school, they
began to mingle together, passing from group to group as it suited them.
Only the “nobility” of Rzepki held proudly aloof, looking down upon the
other peasantry. All the rest had presently mixed together, like lentils
in a dish, all over the square, but congregating mostly in the shadow of
the churchyard trees, or about the wagons.
But it was round the large tavern that they thronged closest. This stood
opposite the District Office, surrounded by a clump of trees, as in a
shady grove; and many a one went that way to refresh himself with a
glass of beer, after standing so long in the hot glare. The tavern being
chock-full, quite a number of groups were lounging about under the
trees, discussing the news and attentively watching both the Office and
the other side of the house, where the scrivener lived, and where the
noise and bustle was greatest.
From time to time, the scrivener’s wife thrust her fat face out of a
back window, screaming:
“Make haste, Magda! O you sluggard! may you break both your legs!”
The girl was heard every now and then rushing about the rooms, the panes
quivering to her tread; a child would squall with shrill vehemence;
somewhere behind, the fowls were cackling in great trepidation, and a
panting constable was hunting chickens in the corn and down the road.
“Belike they are going to feast the head official,” someone remarked.
“They say the scrivener brought in half a cartload of liquor yesterday.”
“Then they’ll get as drunk as they did last year.”
“Oh, they can afford it. Do not the people pay, and is there anyone to
watch what their hands grab?” said Matthew: to whom another cried at
once:
“Be silent! the gendarmes have come.”
“They prowl about like wolves: where they go, and by which ways, who can
tell?”
So they stood mute with fear, when the gendarmes drew up in a line
before the Office, with a number of people round them: amongst whom were
conspicuous the miller, the Voyt, and—at a little distance—the
blacksmith, alert and attentive.
“That miller!—He fawns upon them, like a famished dog!”
“Wherever the gendarmes are seen, look out for the District Official!”
Gregory exclaimed, passing over to where Antek, Matthew, Klemba, and
Staho were talking together. Then they parted to mix with the people,
holding forth and expressing their opinions with much force. They were
listened to in silence; sometimes one or another of their hearers would
groan and scratch his head with an embarrassed air, or cast a glance at
the gendarmes, now drawing closer to one another.
Antek, with his back against the corner of the tavern, spoke curtly, but
with conviction, and an air of authority. In another group, Matthew was
talking humorously and making many a man laugh at his jests, while in a
third crowd, nearer the cemetery, Gregory lectured with much ability,
and as if he were reading out of an open book!
But their speeches all tended in one direction: to oppose the head
official, to vote against the school, and not to heed those who were
always on the side of the officials.
No one else uttered a word, but all nodded assent: even the greatest
fools among them knew well that such a school meant nothing but the
payment of new taxes for nothing: which no one cared for.
The multitude, however, were restless, shifting uneasily from one foot
to the other, coughing and clearing their throats.—They were terribly
afraid of opposing the head official and his satellites.
One man looked at another, secretly troubled what to do; and everyone
noted carefully what the richest among them seemed to think. As to the
miller and the foremost men in the other villages, they appeared to put
themselves forward on purpose to be favorably noticed by the gendarmes
and the scrivener.
Antek went to speak with them; but the miller said rudely: “Any man but
a fool can tell how he should vote!” and turned to the blacksmith, who
was of everybody’s opinion, and always gliding about from group to
group, guessing shrewdly how matters would turn out. He talked to the
scrivener, chatted with the miller, offered Gregory a pinch of snuff—and
kept his own counsel meanwhile so well that to the very end no one knew
on which side he was.
The majority were meanwhile gradually inclining not to vote for the
school. They now dispersed about the square, indifferent to the noonday
heat, and were setting to canvass their views still louder and more
boldly than before, when the scrivener called from the open window:
“Here, some one of you!”
No one stirred.
“Let someone run over to the Manor for the fish. ’Twas to be brought
here in the morning, and we are waiting still.—Come!” he shouted
masterfully; “make haste!”
Here a voice uttered the bold words:
“We are not here as your servants!”
“Let him run thither himself! It irks him to drag his paunch about!” At
this they laughed, for his belly was indeed as big as a drum.
The scrivener swore. But in a minute, out came the Voyt at the back of
the house, who, passing behind the tavern, slipped away to the Manor by
the outside of the village.
“He must have been changing the clothes of the babies at Madam
Scrivener’s, and cleaning them likewise: so he has gone out for a little
fresh air.”
“Ah, yes; Madam likes not her rooms to be noisome.”
“She will soon find other services for him to render her.”
“Strange that the Squire is not yet to be seen,” they said in some
surprise; but the smith returned, with a cunning smile:
“He has too much sense to come.”
They looked at him inquiringly.
“For why,” the smith explained, “should he have to vote for the school
... or go to loggerheads with the District Official? And he will never
vote: fancy what he would have to pay! No, he is wise.”
“But you—are you with us, Michael, say?” Matthew pressed him, eager to
know.
The smith wriggled like a worm trodden upon, but, being in a quandary,
grumbled a word or two, and went over to speak to the miller, who had
come round to the peasants, and was now talking to old Ploshka very
loud, for the rest to hear.
“My advice is: Vote as the officials wish. A school there must be: the
worst is better than none. The one you wish for, ye’ll not get: ’tis no
use knocking your heads against a wall. Won’t you vote?—Then they will
not ask your leave.”
“But,” cried a bystander, “what can they do, if we give no money?”
“You are foolish. They’ll take it. Will you refuse?—They will sell even
your last cow, and send you to prison for mutiny into the bargain. Is
that clear?—For,” he added, turning to the Lipka folk, “ye have to do
now, not with the Squire, but with the head official: a man who is not
to be trifled with!—I tell you, do as they bid, and thank God things are
no worse!”
Such as held his views here chimed in; and old Ploshka, after musing for
some time, said on a sudden:
“Ye say true; and Roch misleads and seduces our folk.”
To this, one of the Przylek husbandmen added with emphasis:
“He is with the Manor folk, and therefore stirs us up against the
Government.”
An outcry arose against him on every side; but he, undaunted, went on as
soon as they let him.
“Those,” he said, looking sagely around him, “those are fools that help
him. If anyone likes this not, let him come forward: I’ll call him a
fool to his face. Such men know not that it hath been so from all time:
the gentry rebel and drive our folk to ruin; but who has to pay, when
payday comes? Why, we peasants! When the Cossacks are quartered in your
villages, who will get the beatings? who will suffer and be sent to
prison? Only we peasants! The gentlefolk will not move a finger for you;
they will slink away and leave you in the lurch, the Judases!—and,
moreover, they will feast the officials in their manors!”
“Ha! What is the people in their eyes that they should stir for them?”
cried one; and another:
“If they could, serfdom would be restored to-morrow!”
“Gregory says,” the former speaker continued, “‘let them teach in
Polish; or, if they will not, let us vote no schools and no money for
them.’—Very fine. But ’tis only a labourer who can say to his master: ‘I
will not work,’ throw an insult in his face, and yet escape a thrashing
by running away. We farmer folk cannot flee, and must needs stay and
take the beating. Therefore I say it will come cheaper for you to build
the school than to resist the officials. True, they will not teach our
language; but they will never make Russians of us for all that: we shall
none of us pray to God or speak among ourselves save as we do now, even
as our mothers taught us!
“Finally, I repeat: Stand up for your own interests only! Let the nobles
tear each other to pieces: ’tis no affair of ours. Let them bite and
fight: these are no more our brethren than those. And a plague upon them
all!”
Here he was shouted down by the crowd that pressed about him. In vain
did the miller and a few others take his part. Those on Gregory’s side
came near using their fists, and things were looking very bad, when old
Prychek cried: “The gendarmes are listening!”
This silenced them and gave the old man an occasion to hold forth in an
angry tone:
“One very true thing he has said: we must look to our own interests!—Be
quiet there! You have said your say, let others say theirs!—These
fellows bawl and bawl, and think themselves great men!—If shrieking
meant thinking, then every loud-mouthed brawler would have a better head
than even our priest himself! You laugh at me; but I say to you: how was
it that year ... when our noblemen rebelled? Remember how they threw
dust in our eyes, and swore that as soon as Poland existed, we should
have our will ... our own lands ... and forests—and everything. And they
made promises and speeches, and every other man of us helped them; and
what have we of it now?—Ye may hearken to the nobles, if ye be fools;
but I am too old a bird to be caught with chaff!”
“Smite him on the mouth, that he may be still!” cried a voice.
He went on nevertheless: “And now I am a noble, as much as any of them
all: I have my rights, and none dares lay a finger on me!”
But his voice was drowned in a torrent of jeers that poured down on him
from all sides.
“You swine that grunt about your delights, and are happy to have a sty
and a full trough!”
“Once fatted, you shall feel the club on your skull, and the knife at
your throat!”
“Did not a gendarme flog him at last fair? And yet he prates about no
one daring to touch him!”
“A great noble he is, and most free to be eaten by lice!”
“Truly the straw stuffed in his boots could teach as much wisdom as he!”
“He knows not to judge a fowl’s worth, yet he comes here to enlighten
us!”
The old man was foaming with rage, but only said:
“Ye scum of the land! ... that cannot even respect grey hairs!”
“What then? Must a grey mare be respected, for that she is grey?”
They roared with laughter at this; but presently their attention was
diverted to the roof of the office, on to which the constable Joseph had
climbed, and, holding to a chimney, was gazing into the distance.
“Joseph!” they cried to him in a merry mood. “Shut your mouth, lest
something fall into it!” For a flock of pigeons was wheeling above his
head. But he only shouted with all his might:
“He is coming ... coming! Has passed the turning from Krylak!”
The assembly now gathered close round the building, and gazed quietly
along the road that as yet lay empty.
The scrivener hastily donned his very best clothes; again the air rang
with his wife’s outcries, and the clinking of plates, and the rumbling
of displaced furniture, and the noise of many feet. In a short time, the
Voyt too appeared on the scene: standing on the door-step, red as a
beetroot, perspiring, breathless, but adorned with his chain of office.
Casting his eyes on the crowd around him, he shouted in fierce tones:
“Silence, men! This Office is not a tavern.”
“Come round here, Peter! I’ll tell you what!” Klemba cried to him.
“There is no Peter here! I am an official,” he answered loftily.
The words were taken up at once and made great fun of, till they shook
with laughter; but, all at once, the Voyt cried solemnly:
“Make way there! Way for the head of the District!”
A coach appeared on the road, jolting over the ruts and hollows, and
pulling up in front of the office.
The head official raised his hand to his cap, the peasants took their
hats off, and silence followed, while the Voyt and the scrivener darted
forward to assist him from the coach, and the gendarmes stood erect at
attention beside the doorway.
He alighted, divested himself of his white dust-coat, turned round to
gaze at the assembled crowd, stroked his blond beard, assumed a severe
look, and nodded his head. Then he entered the scrivener’s dwelling,
into which the latter, bent like a hoop, ushered him.
The coach drove away, and the peasants thronged round the table that had
been set up. They thought the meeting was now about to begin. But it was
a very long while indeed before the head official showed himself: while
from the scrivener’s apartments there came the noise of jingling
glasses, and laughter, and certain fragrant scents that made the mouth
water.
They were weary both of waiting and of the broiling heat, and many a one
tried to slip away to the tavern. But this the Voyt would not have.
“Do not go away!—Whosoever is absent shall be put down for a fine.”
This kept them back, but they uttered many an invective, as they looked
impatiently towards the scrivener’s curtained windows.
“They are ashamed to be seen drinking!”
“Quite right of them: it would only make us more thirsty that we have
but our spittle to swallow!”
From the lock-up, in the same building as the Office, now came the
constable, dragging by a halter a large calf that resisted with might
and main and, making a sudden rush at him, upset the man and set off at
a run, tail in air in a cloud of dust.
“Stop thief! Stop thief!” they cried, laughing.
“Oh, the bold rascal, to break prison so, even lifting up his tail
against my Lord the Voyt!”
They also aimed a good many jibes at the constable, who was not able to
get the calf into the yard without the assistance of all the Soltyses
present. They were not yet fully breathed after their hunt, when the
Voyt ordered them all to cleanse the lock-up thoroughly; he himself saw
that the work was well done, and helped them a good deal, fearing lest
the District Official should make a tour of inspection.
“But, Voyt dear! ye’ll have to burn incense there, or his nose will tell
him who the prisoner was!”
“Have no fear: after a few drams he will scent naught in the world.”
And other gibes were thrown at the Voyt, which he only received with
clenched teeth and glaring eyes.—At last, however, they had enough of
sun, and hunger, and waiting—and could not even jest any longer. So, in
spite of the Voyt’s objurgations, they all made tracks for the tavern
and the trees, Gregory flinging these words at him:
“Ye may cry till nightfall: we are no dogs to follow you to heel!”
Saying this, and glad to be no longer under the gendarmes’ inspection,
he again went about amongst the people, reminding each man apart in what
sense he should give his vote.
“And,” he would wind up, “fear ye not: right is on our side. As we vote,
so things shall be; and what we will not have, no man can force upon
us.”
They had, however, not yet begun to stretch themselves in the shade, or
to eat a morsel, when each village was called by its Soltys, and the
Voyt came roaring:
“Here’s the head!—Come quick!—We are to begin now!”
“The smell of good things has wrought upon him,” they muttered in a bad
temper, walking slowly towards the Office. “We are in no hurry; let him
wait!”
Each Soltys stood at the head of his own village; but the Voyt was
seated at the table, beside the scrivener’s assistant, who whistled to
frighten the pigeons, that circled round above the roof in a white
fluttering cloud.
One of the gendarmes suddenly stood at attention, and cried: “Silence!”
in Russian.
To their disappointment, however, no one came out but the scrivener,
holding some papers in his hand, and edging himself to a seat behind the
table. The Voyt then rang the bell, and said, majestically:
“Good people! we open the meeting.—Be still there, ye men of
Modlitsa!—Our secretary will read you things concerning this school:
only hearken ye diligently, that ye may know all about it.”
Putting on his spectacles, the scrivener began to read, very slowly and
distinctly.
After a short interval of breathless silence, someone exclaimed:
“Why, we understand naught!”
“Read it in our tongue! We cannot make it out!” repeated many voices.
The gendarmes here began to fix a steady glare upon the people.
The scrivener looked very black, but went on with the document,
translating it into Polish.
All now were still, listening to each word with the most concentrated
attention. The scrivener continued deliberately:
“Whereas it hath been decided to found a school in Lipka, the same being
also for the use of Modlitsa, Przylek, Rzepki, and the neighbouring
hamlets....”
The rescript then pointed out how great a benefit education was; how the
Government was night and day only thinking of means to aid the progress
and enlightenment of the people, and to defend it from all evil
influences ... and then passed on to reckon how much would be required
for the ground, for the building itself, and (yearly) for the teacher:
concluding with the estimate that they ought to vote a supplementary
rate of twenty kopeks per acre.—He paused, wiped his spectacles, and
added as an observation of his own:
“The head of the District has assured me that, if ye vote the rate now,
he will allow the building to commence this year, so that next year in
autumn your children will go to school.”
When he ended thus, no one made any remark. Everyone reflected with
heads bent as under the weight of this fresh burden. At last the Voyt
said:
“Have ye heard all that our secretary has read to you?”
“We have indeed! We are not deaf!” several voices replied.
“Then whoso is against this plan, let him step forward and say so.”
No one, however, was so bold as to put himself forward first, or go
beyond glances and nudges.
“Then,” the Voyt proposed, “let us vote the rate directly, and go home.”
“Very well,” the scrivener asked, with solemn formality. “Ye do all
unanimously agree to this plan?”
“No! No!” vociferated Gregory, and about a score of others with him.
“We need no such schools! We will not have them! The taxes are heavy
enough as it is!—No!” and cries of opposition now resounded on every
side, and ever more boldly.
At the sound, the head official came forth and stood in the doorway. At
the sight, the tumult died away. Stroking his beard, he said, with much
affability:
“Well, good husbandmen, how goes it with you?”
“The better that your Honour asks us!” answered the foremost men,
swaying to and fro under the pressure of those behind, pushing forward
to hear the District Official. Now he, leaning against the door-post,
uttered some sentences in Russian; but their effect was impaired by
constant hiccups.
The gendarmes started forward, crying to the people:
“Hats off! Hats off!”
A voice was thereupon heard abusing them roundly: “Get out, ye vermin,
and meddle not with our business.”
But the head official, though he had spoken very affably, concluded in
Polish, and in a tone of command:
“Vote the rate, and at once, for I have no time to spare.”
And he looked on them with an ominous scowl. Fear seized upon them; they
wavered, and low timorous whispers ran through their ranks.
“Ah, shall we vote?—Say, Ploshka, what are we to do?—Where’s
Gregory?—The head commands us to vote!—Come, then, brethren, let us do
so!”
But the tumult swelled to a storm, when Grzela came forward, and
declared fearlessly: “For such a school we’ll not vote half a kopek!”
“We will not! No, we will not!” a hundred voices repeated.
At this, the head official knitted his brows.
The Voyt was terror-struck, and the scrivener’s spectacles fell from his
nose. But Gregory met the great man’s glance without fear, and was about
to speak further, when Ploshka, pushing forward, and louting very low,
said humbly:
“May it please your Honour the District Official if I speak in our
tongue, and think with our own thoughts.—As to voting the school, we are
willing; but twenty kopeks an acre seems to us very much. Times are hard
just now, and money is short. And that is all.”
The head made no reply, and seemed plunged in thought, only nodding his
head at times, and rubbing his eyes. Encouraged by these gestures, the
Voyt spoke strongly in favour of the school, and those of his party
likewise, the miller distinguishing himself amongst them, and scorning
the interruptions of Gregory’s partisans, until the latter grew angry
and shouted: “We are pouring empty vessels into the void!” and availed
himself of an opportunity to step forward and ask boldly:
“We would know what kind of school this new one is to be.”
“Like all the others!” he said, opening his eyes very wide.
“That is the very sort we do not want. We’d vote even half a rouble an
acre for a Polish school, but not a stiver for any other.”
“Those schools are good for nothing!” cried one. “My children learned
there for three years, and do not know their A B C.”
“Be still, good folk, be still!” growled the head.
The sheep were getting lively, and the wolf was biding his time.
“Those infernal talkers! they will talk the people to its ruin!”
And now every man was striving to speak louder than his neighbours, and
the din became deafening, each one maintaining his own view. They had
broken up into small groups, disputing with one another, and getting
ever more and more excited, Gregory’s party especially standing up most
stubbornly against the school. It was to no purpose that the Voyt, the
miller, and the others of that side went about explaining, beseeching,
even threatening awful things that might come to pass: the greater part
of the assembly had got quite out of hand, excited to exasperation, and
talking themselves hoarse.
The District Official, who sat seemingly indifferent to the hubbub,
conferred in whispers with the scrivener, and let them talk their fill;
and when he judged they had enough of that senseless noise, he told the
Voyt to ring the bell.
“Silence there!” thundered the Soltyses of each village. “Silence! and
lend your ears.”
Then, before all was quite still, rose the voice of command:
“The school, look ye! has to be built. Obey, then, and do as ye are
bidden.”
His tone was as hard and stern as could be; but they were no longer
afraid, and Klemba answered him back on the spot.
“We force no one to walk on his head: let others likewise allow us to
speak in our tongue, as God has given it us!”
“Hold your tongue!” shrieked the Voyt, ringing the bell to no purpose.
“Peace, you son of a dog!”
“What I have said, I repeat: in our schools our language must be
taught!”
“Karpenko! Ivanoff!” the Voyt cried to the gendarmes who stood in the
centre of the throng; but the peasants pressed round them directly, and
they heard a whisper: “Let but one of you touch one of us—we are three
hundred—ye shall see!”
Then their ranks opened slowly to let them pass, and closed after them,
surging round the head official, with the dull angry hum of a furious
mob; catching their breaths, cursing low, and one or other of them every
now and then uttering such words as these:
“Every creature has its own voice; we alone are forbidden our own!”
“Always commands, and naught except commands! Obey, and pay, and sweep
the ground with your hat, you peasant!”
“They’ll make us soon ask leave ... to go behind the barn!”
“So mighty a man, let him command swine to sing as nightingales!” Antek
cried. They laughed, and he went on, greatly excited:
“Or bid geese to low like cows! When they do, we’ll vote the school!”
“They tax us, we pay; they recruit us, we go; but beware of....”
“Hold your peace, Klemba!—His Majesty the Czar himself has decreed in
the clearest words that our schools and law courts are to use Polish!
Yes, the Czar himself has decreed it: him shall we obey!” Antek
vociferated.
“Who are you?” the head official said to him, with eyes intently fixed
upon his face.
“Who am I?—It stands there in black and white,” Antek replied boldly,
pointing to the papers on the table, though he felt his heart throb as
he did so. “I am no magpie’s dropping!” he added with bravado.
The head spoke to the scrivener, who after a while proclaimed the fact
that Antek Boryna, not being yet cleared of a criminal charge, had no
right to take any part in the Assembly of the Commune.
Antek flushed angrily, but, before he could utter a word, the District
Official cried out to him: “Get him out!” indicating him to the
gendarmes with a significant look.
“Boys, never vote this school! Right is on our side: have no fear!”
Antek shouted indomitably.
And with slow steps he went out of the village, looking back at the
gendarmes following him yet more slowly still, as a wolf might glare at
a couple of curs.
But the incident had brought disorder into the meeting again. Each man
seemed possessed of a devil—screaming, cursing, quarrelling,
threatening—no one knew why or wherefore!
Their invectives bore, not only on the school and Antek, but on
indifferent and wholly irrelevant matters—just as if a sudden madness
had seized upon them. Gregory and others of his party strove to calm
them, but unavailingly: they were blind and deaf to everything, gobbling
one at another furiously, like irritated turkeys in a poultry-yard.
At last, one of the Soltyses, seeing an empty barrel that stood under
the eaves of the house, had the idea of beating upon it with his stick
so frantically, so madly, and with such loud and hollow bombilation,
that it partly brought them to their senses again.
Thereupon the head official, who was beside himself with rage,
exclaimed: “Enough of this prating! Silence! Silence, when I speak!—Obey
me.—Vote the school.”
All were in a moment struck dumb with fear: a cold thrill went through
them. They looked at one another, without dreaming of defying the man
who stood there, grim and threatening before them, rolling savage eyes
over the terrified multitude.
Again he sat down, while the Voyt and his party once more attempted to
frighten the peasants into obedience.
“Vote for the school!—We must!”
“Have ye not heard? An ill thing is impending!”
Meanwhile, the scrivener read the list of names, and the cry, “Here!
Here!” was heard with incessant reiteration.
This done, the Voyt ordered those who were for the school to pass to the
right and raise their hands.
A good many did so, but the bulk of the assembly would not budge.
The head official then, knitting his brows, ordered the votes to be
taken by name, “that all might be done with strict justice.”
Gregory was dismayed on hearing this order. He was but too sure that the
majority would weaken, and not venture to oppose the vote.
The polling took a long time, for the people were very numerous; but the
result was given at last:
“Ayes, two hundred; noes, eighty.”
Gregory’s party raised a great protest.
“We have been cheated!—Vote again!”
“I said, No! and they put my vote down for the school!” one man, soon
followed by many others, declared persistently; and the more zealous
proposed to tear up the papers and thus annul the voting.
A coach from the Manor then passed by good fortune outside the Office,
and the people had to draw back willy-nilly. The District Official,
having read the list, handed to him by a manservant, declared solemnly:
“It is well; ye shall have a school in Lipka.”
No one spoke a word any more; they all stood gazing at him in silence.
He then, after signing a few papers, got into his coach and drove away.
They all bowed to the ground. He took no notice of them, even by a
glance; but, having spoken a few words with the gendarmes, turned off to
the Manor of Modlitsa by a side road.
Their eyes followed him in silence. At last, one of Gregory’s men said:
“That lamb, so meek and mild, can show fangs that bite deeper than a
wolf’s—aye, and when we least expect it, trample us under his feet!”
“How could they govern at all, unless we were fools and they scared us?”
Gregory breathed hard, looked round, and whispered:
“For to-day, we have lost: it is hard; but the people have not yet
learned how to resist.”
“And that they will hardly learn, so long as everything can frighten
them.”
“My God! what a man! He tramples even the laws underfoot.”
“Aye, they are for us, not him!”
Here a peasant from Przylek came complaining to Gregory.
“I meant to vote for you; but behold! when he fixed his eyes on me, I
could not speak a word, and the scrivener wrote down what he pleased.”
“There have been so many abuses that we might well make an appeal.”
“Come all to the tavern!” cried Matthew. “May a brimstone thunderbolt
smash them all!” Then, turning to the crowd, he shouted:
“Do ye know, my men, that the head has forgotten to tell you one
thing?—That ye are a rabble of sheep and curs. Ye will be well paid for
your obedience; but such idiots as ye are deserve to be flayed alive—not
only fleeced.”
They answered him back, some even abusing him roundly; but their
attention was then drawn off by a cart with a Jewish driver, and Yanek
sitting in it.
Yanek was soon surrounded by a crowd, and Gregory told him what had
occurred. Yanek listened, talked to them for a while, and then drove on.
The others repaired to the tavern, where, after a couple of glasses,
Matthew roared out:
“I tell you, the Voyt and the miller are to blame for everything!”
“Quite true,” Ploshka chimed in; “they were all the time canvassing and
pressing and bullying us!”
“And the head official threatened us, just as if he knew all about
Roch!” someone faltered.
“If he does not, he is sure to be told. We have informers amongst us!”
“What,” Gregory inquired with an uneasy glance, “what has become of
those gendarmes?”
“Gone somewhere in the direction of Lipka.”
Gregory for a short time lounged about the tavern with the others, but
presently he slipped out unnoticed by anyone, making for Lipka by a
short cut across the fields.