IX
The impatiently awaited Sunday came, we left Dementievna, the headman’s wife, to look after the house, and set out for Selivan’s forest. The whole public went on foot, keeping to the raised shoulders, which were already dry and where the first emerald-green grass was sprouting, while the train, which consisted of a cart hitched to an old dun horse, followed on the road. In the cart lay Apollinary’s guitar and the girls’ jackets, taken along in case of bad weather. I was the driver, and behind me, in the quality of passengers, sat Roska and the other little girls, one of whom carefully cradled a bag of eggs on her knees, while the other had general charge of various objects, but mainly supported with her hand my huge dagger, which I had slung over my shoulder on an old hussar cord from my uncle’s saber, and which dangled from side to side, interfering considerably with my movements and distracting my attention from guiding the horse.
The girls, walking along the shoulder, sang: “I plough the field, I sow the hemp,” and the rhetorician doubled them in the bass. Some muzhiks we met on the way bowed and asked:
“What’s up?”
The Annushkas replied:
“We’re going to take Selivan prisoner.”
The muzhiks wagged their heads and said:
“Besotted fools!”
We were indeed in some sort of daze, overcome by an irrepressible, half-childish need to run, sing, laugh, and do everything recklessly.
But meanwhile an hour’s driving on a bad road began to have an adverse effect on me—I was sick of the old horse, and the eagerness to hold the rope reins in my hands had gone cold in me; but nearby, on the horizon, Selivan’s forest showed blue, and everything livened up again. My heart pounded and ached as Varus’s had when he entered the forest of Teutoburg.7 And just then a hare leaped out from under the melting snow on the shoulder and, crossing the road, took off over the field.
“Phooey on you!” the Annushkas shouted after him.
They all knew that meeting a hare never portends anything good. I also turned coward and seized my dagger, but, in the effort of drawing it from the rusty scabbard, I didn’t notice that I had let go of the reins, and I quite unexpectedly found myself under the overturned cart, which the horse, who pulled towards the shoulder to get some grass, turned over in the most proper fashion, so that all four wheels were up, and Roska and I and all our provisions were underneath.
This misfortune befell us in a moment, but its consequences were countless: Apollinary’s guitar was smashed to bits, and the broken eggs ran down and plastered our eyes with their sticky content. What’s more, Roska was howling.
I was utterly overwhelmed and abashed, and so much at a loss that I even wished they would rather not free us at all, but I already heard the voices of all the Annushkas, who, while working to free us, explained the reason for our fall very much to my advantage. Neither I nor the horse was the reason: it was all Selivan’s doing.
This was his first ruse to keep us from coming to his forest, but it didn’t frighten anyone very much; on the contrary, it filled us all with great indignation and increased our resolve to carry out at all costs the whole program we had conceived.
It was only necessary to lift the cart and turn it right side up, wash off the unpleasant egg slime in some brook, and see what remained after the catastrophe of the things we had brought as the day’s provisions for our numerous group.
All this got done somehow. Roska and I were washed in a brook that ran just at the edge of Selivan’s forest, and when my eyes opened, the world seemed very unsightly to me. The girls’ pink dresses and my new blue cashmere jacket were good for nothing: the dirt and egg that covered them ruined them completely and couldn’t be washed off without soap, which we had not brought with us. The pot and the skillet were cracked, the trivet’s legs were broken off and lay about, and all that was left of Apollinary’s guitar was the neck with strings twined around it. The bread and other dry goods were covered with mud. At the very least, we were threatened with a whole day of hunger, to say nothing of the other horrors that could be felt in everything around us. The wind whistled over the stream in the valley, and the black forest, not yet covered with green, rustled and ominously waved its branches at us.
Our spirits sank considerably—especially in Roska, who was cold and wept. But still we decided to enter Selivan’s kingdom, and let come what might.
In any case, the same adventure could not repeat itself without some sort of change.
X
We all crossed ourselves and began to enter the forest. We entered timidly and hesitantly, but each of us concealed his timidity from the others. We all simply agreed to call out to each other as often as we could. However, there was no great need for that, because nobody went very far in, and, as if by chance, we all kept crowding towards the edge and strung ourselves out along it. Only Apollinary proved braver than the rest and went a little further into the depths; he was concerned with finding the most remote and frightening spot, where his declaiming could produce the most terrible impression on the listening girls. But Apollinary had no sooner disappeared from sight than the forest resounded with his piercing, frenzied cry. No one could imagine what danger Apollinary had met with, but everybody abandoned him and ran headlong out of the forest to the clearing, and then, without looking back, ran further down the road home. All the Annushkas fled, and all the Moskas, and after them, still crying out from fear, sped our pedagogue himself; and my little brother and I were left alone.
There was no one left of all our company: not only the people, but even the horse, following the inhuman example of the people, abandoned us. Frightened by their cries, it tossed its head and, turning away from the forest, raced home, scattering over the potholes and bumps whatever was still left in the cart.
This was not a retreat, it was a full and most shameful rout, because it was accompanied by the loss not only of the train, but of all good sense, and we children were thrown on the mercy of fate.
God knows what we would have to endure in our helplessly orphaned condition, which was the more dangerous because we couldn’t find the way home by ourselves, and our footgear consisted of soft goatskin boots with thin soles, not at all convenient for walking three miles over sodden paths, on which there were still cold puddles in many places. To complete the disaster, before my brother and I had time to fully realize all the horror of our situation, something rumbled through the forest and then a breath of cold dampness blew from the direction of the stream.
We looked across the hollow and saw, racing through the sky from the direction where our road lay and where our retinue had shamefully fled, a huge cloud laden with spring rain and the first spring thunder, when young girls wash themselves from silver spoons, so as to become whiter than silver themselves.
Seeing myself in this desperate situation, I was ready to burst into tears, and my little brother was already crying. He was all blue and trembling from fear and cold, and, with his head bent under a little bush, was fervently praying to God.
It seems God heeded his childish prayer and invisible salvation was sent to us. At the same moment when the thunder rumbled and we were losing our last courage, we heard a crunching in the forest behind the bushes, and from the thick branches of a tall hazel the broad face of a muzhik unknown to us peeked out. That face seemed so frightening that we cried out and rushed headlong towards the stream.