I

IVAN TURGENEFF

[Selections continued from Volume xxv.]

BYEZHIN PRAIRIE

From A Sportsman's Sketches>

FOUND out at last where I had got to. This plain was well known in our parts under the name of Byezhin Prairie. But there was no possibility of returning home, especially at night; my legs were sinking under me from weariness. I decided to get down to the fires and to wait for the dawn in the company of these men, whom I took for drovers. I got down successfully; but I had hardly let go of the last branch I had grasped, when suddenly two large shaggy white dogs rushed angrily barking upon me. The sound of ringing boyish voices came from round the fires; two or three boys quickly got up from the ground. I called back in response to their shouts of inquiry. They ran up to me, and at once called off the dogs, who were especially struck by the appearance of my Dianka. I came down to them.

I had been mistaken in taking the figures sitting round the fires for drovers. They were simply peasant boys from a neighboring village, who were in charge of a drove of horses. In hot summer weather with us they drive the horses out at night to graze in the open country: the flies and gnats would give them no peace in the daytime; they drive out the drove towards evening, and drive them back in the early morning: it's a great treat for the peasant boys. Bare-headed, in old fur capes, they bestride the most spirited nags, and scurry along with merry cries and hooting and ringing laughter, swinging their arms and legs, and leaping into the air. The fine dust is stirred up in yellow clouds. and moves along the road; the tramp of hoofs in unison resounds afar: the horses race along, pricking up their ears; in front of all, with his tail in the air and thistles in his tangled mane, prances some shaggy chestnut, constantly shifting his paces as he goes.

I told the boys I had lost my way, and sat down with them. They asked me where I came from, and then were silent

for a little and turned away. Then we talked a little again. I lay down under a bush, whose shoots had been nibbled off, and began to look round. It was a marvelous picture: about the fire a red ring of light quivered, and seemed to swoon away in the embrace of a background of darkness; the flame, flaring up from time to time, cast swift flashes of light beyond the boundary of this circle; a fine tongue of light licked the dry twigs and died away at once; long thin shadows, in their turn breaking in for an instant, danced right up to the very fires: darkness was struggling with light. Sometimes when the fire burnt low and the circle of light shrank together, suddenly out of the encroaching darkness a horse's head was thrust in,-bay, with striped markings, or all white,-stared with intent black eyes upon us, nipped hastily the long grass, and drawing back again, vanished instantly. One could only hear it still munching and snorting. From the circle of light it was hard to make out what was going on in the darkness: everything close at hand seemed shut off by an almost black curtain; but farther away, hills and forests were dimly visible in long blurs upon the horizon.

Scarcely a sound was to be heard around; only at times, in the river near, the sudden splash of a big fish leaping, and the faint rustle of a reed on the bank, swaying lightly as the ripples reached it. The fires alone kept up a subdued crackling. The boys sat round them; there too sat the two dogs, who had been so eager to devour me. They could not for long after reconcile themselves to my presence, and drowsily blinking and staring into the fire, they growled now and then with an unwonted sense of their own dignity; first they growled, and then whined a little, as though deploring the impossibility of carrying out their desires. There were altogether five boys: Fedya, Pavlusha, Ilyusha, Kostya, and Vanya.- From their talk I learnt their names, and I intend now to introduce them to the reader.

The first and eldest of all, Fedya, one would take to be about fourteen. He was a well-made boy, with good-looking, delicate, rather small features, curly fair hair, bright eyes, and a perpetual half merry, half careless smile. He belonged by all appearances to a well-to-do family; and had ridden out to the prairie not through necessity, but for amusement. He wore a gay print shirt, with a yellow border; a short new overcoat slung round his neck was almost slipping off his narrow shoulders; a comb hung from his blue belt. His boots, coming a little way up the

leg, were certainly his own

- not his father's. The second boy,

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Pavlusha, had tangled black hair, gray eyes, broad cheek-bones, a pale face pitted with small-pox, a large but well-cut mouth; his head altogether was large-"a beer-barrel head," as they say and his figure was square and clumsy. He was not a good-looking boy- there's no denying it!- and yet I liked him: he looked very sensible and straightforward, and there was a vigorous ring in his voice. He had nothing to boast of in his attire: it consisted simply of a homespun shirt and patched trousers. The face of the third, Ilyusha, was rather uninteresting: it was a long face, with short-sighted eyes and a hook nose; it expressed a kind of dull, fretful uneasiness; his tightly drawn lips seemed rigid; his contracted brow never relaxed; he seemed continually blinking from the firelight. His flaxen-almost white -hair hung out in thin wisps under his low felt hat, which he kept pulling down with both hands over his ears. He had on new bast-shoes and leggings; a thick string, wound three times round his figure, carefully held together his neat black smock. Neither he nor Pavlusha looked more than twelve years old. The fourth, Kostya, a boy of ten, aroused my curiosity by his thoughtful and sorrowful look. His whole face was small, thin, freckled, pointed at the chin like a squirrel's; his lips were barely perceptible: but his great black eyes, that shone with liquid brilliance, produced a strange impression; they seemed trying to express something for which the tongue - his tongue, at leasthad no words. He was undersized and weakly, and dressed rather poorly. The remaining boy, Vanya, I had not noticed at first: he was lying on the ground, peacefully curled up under a square rug, and only occasionally thrust his curly brown head out from under it; this boy was seven years old at the most.

So I lay under the bush at one side and looked at the boys. A small pot was hanging over one of the fires: in it potatoes were cooking. Pavlusha was looking after them, and on his knees he was trying them by poking a splinter of wood into the boiling water. Fedya was lying leaning on his elbow, and smoothing out the skirts of his coat. Ilyusha was sitting beside Kostya, and still kept blinking constrainedly. Kostya's head drooped despondently, and he looked away into the distance. Vanya did not stir under his rug. I pretended to be asleep. Little by little, the boys began talking again.

At first they gossiped of one thing and another, the work of to-morrow, the horses; but suddenly Fedya turned to Ilyusha,

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and as though taking up again an interrupted conversation, asked him:

"Come then, so you've seen the domovoy?"

"No, I didn't see him, and no one ever can see him," answered Ilyusha, in a weak hoarse voice, the sound of which was wonderfully in keeping with the expression of his face: "I heard him. Yes, and not I alone."

"Where does he live-in your place?" asked Pavlusha. "In the old paper-mill."

"Why, do you go to the factory ? »

"Of course we do.

paper-glazers."

My brother Avdushka and I, we are

"I say factory hands!"

"Well, how did you hear it, then?" asked Fedya.

some

"It was like this. It happened that I and my brother Avdushka, with Fyodor of Mihyevska, and Ivashka the Squinteyed, and the other Ivashka who comes from the Red Hills, and Ivashka of Suhorukov too, and there were some other boys there as well, there were ten of us boys there altogether,the whole shift that is, it happened that we spent the night at the paper-mill; that's to say, it didn't happen, but Nazarov the overseer kept us. 'Why,' said he, 'should you waste time. going home, boys? There's a lot of work to-morrow; so don't go home, boys.' So we stopped, and were all lying down together; and Avdushka had just begun to say, 'I say, boys, suppose the domovoy were to come?' And before he'd finished saying so, one suddenly began walking over our heads: we were lying down below, and he began walking up-stairs overhead where the wheel is. We listened: he walked; the boards seemed to be bending under him, they creaked so; then he crossed over, above our heads: all of a sudden the water began to drip and drip over the wheel; the wheel rattled and rattled and again began to turn, though the sluices of the conduit above had been let down. We wondered who could have lifted them up so that the water could run; anyway, the wheel turned and turned a little, and then stopped. Then he went to the door overhead, and began coming down-stairs, and came down like this, not hurrying himself; and the stairs seemed to groan under him too.

"Well, he came right down to our door, and waited and waited -and all of a sudden the door simply flew open. We were in a fright; we looked there was nothing. Suddenly what if the net

15095 on one of the vats didn't begin moving; it got up, and went rising and ducking and moving in the air as though some one were stirring with it, and then it was in its place again. Then at another vat a hook came off its nail, and then was on its nail again; and then it seemed as if some one came to the door, and suddenly coughed and choked like a sheep, but so loudly! We all fell down in a heap and huddled against one another. Just weren't we in a fright that night!"

"I say!" murmured Pavel, "what did he cough for?" "I don't know: perhaps it was the damp."

All were silent for a little.

"Well," inquired Fedya, "are the potatoes done?" Pavlusha tried them.

"No, they are raw.- My, what a splash!" he added, turning his face in the direction of the river: "that must be a pike. And there's a star falling."

"I say, I can tell you something, brothers," began Kostya in a shrill little voice: "listen what my dad told me the other day." "Well, we are listening," said Fedya with a patronizing air. "You know Gavrila, I suppose, the carpenter up in the big village ? »

"Yes, we know him."

"And do you know why he is so sorrowful always, never speaks? do you know? I'll tell you why he's so sorrowful; he went one day, daddy said,- he went, brothers, into the forest nutting. So he went nutting into the forest and lost his way; he went on God only can tell where he got to. So he went on and on, brothers; but 'twas no good! he could not find the way: and so night came on out of doors. So he sat down under a tree. 'I'll wait till morning,' thought he. He sat down and began to drop asleep. So as he was falling asleep, suddenly he heard some one call him. He looked up: there was no one. He fell asleep again; again he was called. He looked and looked again; and in front of him there sat a russalka on a branch, swinging herself and calling him to her, and simply dying with laughing, she laughed so. And the moon was shining bright, so bright, the moon shone so clear,—everything could be seen plain, brothers. So she called him, and she herself was as bright and as white sitting on the branch as some dace or roach, or like some little carp so white and silvery. Gavrila the carpenter almost fainted, brothers; but she laughed without stopping, and