Viy — Страница 2

The classroom would suddenly be filled with the hum of many
voices: the monitors listened to their charges, the ringing treble of a
grammarian would fall in tune with the jingling of the windowpanes in the
small windows, the glass echoing with almost the same sound; from the corner
came the low buzz of a rhetorician whose mouth and thick lips ought to have
belonged to philosophy at the least. He buzzed in 3 bass, and from afar all
you heard was: boo, boo, boo, boo . . . The monitors, as they heard the
lessons, looked with one eye under the desk, where a roll or dumpling or
pumpkin seeds stuck out of their subordinate's pocket.
If all this learned crowd managed to come a little earlier, or if they
knew that the professors would be later than usual, then, with universal
agreement, a battle would be planned, and in this battle everyone had to
take part, even the censors, whose duty was to look after the order and
morals of all the student estate. Usually two theologians decided bow the
battle would go; whether each class should stand separately for itself, or
they should divide themselves into two halves, the boarders and the
seminary. In any case, it was the grammarians who would begin it first, but
as soon as the rhetoricians mixed in, they would flee and stand on higher
ground to watch the battle. Then philosophy with long black mustaches would
step forth, and finally theology in terrible ballooning trousers and with
the thickest necks. The usual end was that theology would beat them all, and
philosophy, rubbing its sides, would be hustled into class, where it settled
down to rest at the desks. A professor who had once taken part in such
battles himself, on entering the classroom, would know at once from his
students' flushed faces that it had been a fine battle, and while he gave
the rhetorics a knuckle-rapping, in another class another professor would be
applying the wooden slats to the hands of philosophy. With the theologians
it was done in a totally different way: each was allotted, as the professor
of theology put it, a measure of "big peas," dealt out with a short leather
whip.
For feast days and solemnities, the boarders and seminarians went
around visiting houses with miracle plays. Sometimes they performed a
comedy, and on such occasions some theologian, nearly as tall as the Kiev
belfry, would always distinguish himself playing Herodias or the wife of the
Egyptian courtier Fotiphar.² As a reward they might get a length
of linen, or a sack of millet, or half a boiled goose, or the like.