“Often though they appear, they don't ever come on the eve of holy days or on Wednesdays and Fridays.”
“Strange ghosts... And on Sundays?” The desire to give this inert, weak-willed, porcelain fellow a good slap on the face was growing ever stronger within me, for such as he are unable to perform any kind of deed, be it good or evil. They are not people, but grass-lice that choke the flower-beds. “But on St. Philip's Day, on St. Peter's Day they appear if they are such holy saints, don't they!”
“God allows them to on Sundays, for, if you remember, it was on Sunday that Stach was killed,” he answered quite seriously.
“So what then is He, this God of yours?” I barked at him. “Has He then bumped into the devil? You mean to say that He takes the lives of innocent girls in whose blood there is perhaps but one drop of Raman's blood?”
Bierman was silent.
“A four thousand and ninety-sixth part of Raman's blood flows in her veins,” I counted up. “So what is He good for, anyway, this God of yours?”
“Don't blaspheme!” he groaned, frightened. “Whose part are you taking?”
“Too much devilry is going on here, even for such a house...” I didn't give in. “The Little Man, the Lady-in-Blue, and here, in addition, the Wild Hunt of King Stach. The house has been surrounded from without and within. May it burn, this house!”
“M'm, to be frank with you, Honourable Sir, I don't believe in the Little Man or the Lady.”
“Everybody has seen them.”
“I haven't seen, I've heard them. And the nature of the sound is unknown to us. And add to that the fact that I am a nervous person.”
“The mistress has seen him.”
Bierman lowered his eyes modestly. He hesitated and said quietly:
“I cannot believe everything she says... She... well, in a word, it seems to me that her poor head hasn't been able to cope with all these horrors. She... m-m... she's peculiar in her psychic condition, if not to say anything more.”
I had also thought of that, therefore I kept silent.
“But I, too, heard steps.”
“Wild fancy. Simply an acoustic illusion. Hallucinations, Honourable Sir.”
We sat silent, I felt that I myself was beginning to lose my reason, what with the adventures going on here.
In my dreams that night King Stach's Wild Hunt silently raced on: the horses silently neighed, their hoofs landed, and their engraved bridles rocked. Beneath their feet was the cold heather, bending forward, the grey shadows raced on, marsh lights glittering on the foreheads of the horses. And above them a lonely star was burning, a star as sharp as a needle.
Whenever I awoke I heard steps in the corridor made by the Little Man, and at times his quiet pitiful moaning and groaning. And then again the black abyss of heavy sleep, and again the Wild Hunt, as swift as an arrow, galloped across the heather and the quagmire.
The inhabitants of the Giant's Gap were, evidently, not very fond of attending large balls, because it is a rare occurrence in. such a corner for someone to inherit a large estate on coming of age. Nevertheless, within two days no less than forty persons arrived at Marsh Firs. I, too, was invited, although I agreed with great reluctance. I did not like the provincial gentry, and in addition, had done almost no work these days. I had made almost no new notes, and most important of all, had not advanced in unravelling the secret of this devilish den. In an old 17th century plan there weren't any air-vents for listening, while steps and moaning sounded with an enviable regularity each night.
I wracked my brains over all this devilry, but could not think of anything.
So thus, for the first time, perhaps, in the last twenty years, the castle was meeting guests. The lampions above the entrance were lit, the covers on the chandeliers were removed, the watchman became the doorman for the occasion, three servants were taken from the surrounding farmsteads. The castle reminded one of an old Grannie who had decided to attend a ball for the last time, and got herself all dressed up to recall her youth and then to lie down in her grave.
I do not know whether this gathering of the gentry is worth describing. You will find a good and quite a correct description of something like it in the poetic works of Phelka from Rukshanitzy, an unreasonably forgotten poet. My God, what carriages there were! Their leather warped by age, springs altogether lacking, wheels two metres high, but by all means at the back a footman (footmen's hands were black from the earth they worked on). And their horses! Rocinant beside them would have seemed Bucephalo. Their lower lips hanging down like a pan, their teeth eaten away. The harnesses almost entirely of ropes, but to make up for that here and there shone golden plates with numbers on them, plates that had been passed on from harnesses of the “Golden Age”.
“Goodness gracious! What is going on in this world? Long ago one gentleman rode on six horses, while now six gentlemen on one horse.” The entire process of the ruin of the gentry was put into a nut-shell in this mocking popular saying.
Behind my back Bierman-Hacevič was making polite but caustic remarks about the arriving guests.
“Just look, what a fury (in the Belarusian of the 16th century a jade was called a fury). Most likely one of the Sas' rode on her: a merited fighting horse... And this little Miss, you see how dressed up she is: as if for St. Anthony's holiday. And here, look at them, the gypsies.”
It was really an unusual company that he called “gypsies”. A most ordinary cart had rolled up to the entrance, in it there sat the strangest company I had ever seen. There were both ladies and gentlemen there, about ten of them, dressed gaudily and poorly. They were seated in the cart crowded like gypsies. And curtains were stretched on four sticks as on gypsy carts. Only the dogs running under the cart were lacking. This was the poor Hryckievič family roaming from one ball to another, feeding themselves mainly in this way. They were distant relatives of the Janoŭskis. And these were the descendants of the “crimson lord”! My God, what you punish people for!
Then there arrived some middle-aged lady in a very rich antique rather shabby velvet dress, accompanied by a young man as thin as a whip, clearly fawning upon her. This “whip” of a fellow gently pressed her elbow.
The perfume the lady used was so bad that Bierman began to sneeze as soon as she entered the hall. And it seemed to me that, together with her, someone had brought into the room a large sack of hoopoes and left it there for the people to enjoy. The lady spoke with a real French accent, an accent, as is known, that has remained in the world in two places only: in the Paris salons and in the backwaters of Kabylany near Vorša.
And the other guests were also very curious people. Faces either wrinkled or too smooth, eyes full of pleading, worried, devouring eyes, eyes with a touch of madness. One dandy had extremely large, bulging eyes like those of the salamanders in subterranean lakes. From behind the door I watched the ceremony of introductions. (Some of these close neighbours had never seen one another, and probably never would again in the future.)
Sounds reached me badly, for in the hall the orchestra was already piping away, an orchestra that consisted of eight invalids of the Battle of Poltava. I saw oily faces that gallantly smiled, saw lips that reached the mistress' hand. When they bent down, the light fell on them from the top, and their noses seemed surprisingly long while their mouths seemed to have vanished. They shuffled their feet without making a sound and bowed, spoke noiselessly, then smiled and floated off, and new ones came floating over to take their place. This was like an awful dream.
They grinned and it was as if they were apparitions from the graves, they kissed her hand (it seemed to me that they were sucking the blood out of her) and noiselessly floated on. She was so pure in her low-necked dress, but her back reddened when some newly-arriven Don Juan in close-fitting trousers showed too great an ardour as he pressed her hand. These kisses, it seemed to me, smeared her hand with something sticky and filthy.
And only now did I realize how solitary she was, not only in her own house, but also in the midst of this crowd.
“What does this remind me of?” I thought. “Aha, Pushkin's Tatyana among the monsters in the hut. Closed round her, poor girl, as round a doe during a hunt.”
Almost no pure looks to be seen here, but to make up for it what names! It seemed as if I were sitting in an archive and was reading ancient documents of some Court of Acts and Pleas.
“Mr. Sava Matfiejevič Stachoŭski and sons,” the lackey announced.
“Mrs. Ahata Jurjeŭna Falendyš-Chobaleva with her husband and friends.”
“Mr. Jakub Barbare-Haraburda.”
“Mr. Maciej Mustafavič Asanovič.”
“Mrs. Hanna Aŭramovič-Basiackaja and daughter.”
And Bierman, standing behind me, was passing remarks.
For the first time in these days I liked him, so much malice was there in his utterances, with what blazing eyes he met each newly arrived guest, and especially the young ones.
But then there was a flash in his eyes that I couldn't understand. I involuntarily looked in that direction, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head, such a strange sight did I see. Down the steps into the hall a person came rolling, that's right, “rolling”, no other word for it. The man was over two metres in height, approximately like myself, but three Andrej Biełareckis would have fitted into his clothes. A tremendous abdomen, the lower legs like the thighs, as if they were hams, an incredibly broad chest, palms like tubs. Few such giants had ever come my way. Though this was not the most surprising thing. The clothes he was wearing can be seen today only in a museum: red, high-heeled horseshoed boots (our ancestors called them “kabci”), tight-fitting trousers made of a thin cloth. The caftan made of cherrycoloured gold cloth ready to split on his chest and abdomen! This giant had pulled over it a “chuga”, an ancient Belarusian coat. The chuga hung loosely in pretty folds and the designs in it were green, gold and black, and a bright Turkish shawl was tied around it almost up to the man's arm-pits.
And on top of all this sat a surprisingly small head for such a body. His cheeks were puffed as if the man was about to burst out laughing. His long grey hair gave a roundness to his head, his grey eyes were very small, and his long dark whiskers — they had very few grey hairs in them, — reached down to his chest. The appearance of this man was a most peaceful one, but from his left hand hung a “karbač” — a thick, short lash with a silver wire at its end.
In a word, a provincial bear, a merry fellow and a drunkard — this was immediately apparent.
While yet at the door he began to laugh, in such a robust, merry bass voice, that I involuntarily smiled. He walked, and people stepped aside to make way for him, answering him with smiles, such smiles that could have appeared on the sour faces of these people of caste only because they, evidently, loved him. “At last, at least one representative of the good old century,” I thought. “Not a degenerate, not a madman who could as well commit a crime as a heroic deed. And how rich his Belarusian is and how beautifully he speaks it!”
Don't let this last thought surprise you. Although Belarusian was spoken among the petty gentry at this time, the gentry of that stratum of society that this gentleman apparently belonged to did not know the language: among the guests no more than a dozen spoke the language of Marcinkievič and Karatynski, the language of the rest was a mixture of Polish, Russian and Belarusian.
But out of the mouth of this one, while he was walking from the door to the hall on the upper floor, poured apt little words, jokes, and sayings as out of the mouth of any village match-maker. I must confess that he captured me at first sight. Such a colourful person he was that I did not immediately notice his companion, although he also deserved attention. Imagine for yourself a young man, tall, very well-built, and what was rare in this remote corner, dressed in the latest fashion. He would have been handsome were it not for his excessive paleness, sunken cheeks, and an inexplicable expression of animosity that lay on his compressed lips. In his face it was his large eyes with their watery lustre that deserved the greatest attention. Set in a handsome though bilious face they were so lifeless that it made me shiver. Lazarus, when he was risen from the dead, probably had just such eyes.