Viy — Страница 17

Her brow, beautiful, tender, like snow, like silver, seemed thoughtful; her
eyebrows--night amid a sunny day, thin, regular--rose proudly over her
closed eyes, and her eyelashes, falling pointy on her cheeks, burned with
the heat of hidden desires; her mouth--rubies about to smile . . . Yet in
them, in these same features, he saw something terribly piercing. He felt
his soul begin to ache somehow painfully, as if, in the whirl of merriment
and giddiness of a crowd, someone suddenly struck up a song about oppressed
people. The rubies of her mouth seemed to make the blood scald his heart.
Suddenly something terribly familiar showed in her face.
"The witch!" he cried out in a voice not his own, looked away, turned
pale, and began reading his prayers.
It was the very witch he had killed.
When the sun began to set, the dead girl was taken to the church. The
philosopher supported the black-draped coffin with one shoulder, and on that
shoulder he felt something cold as ice. The chief himself walked in front,
bearing the right side of the dead girl's cramped house. The blackened
wooden church, adorned with green moss and topped by three conical cupolas,
stood desolate almost at the edge of die village. One could see it was long
since any service had been celebrated in it. Candles burned before almost
every icon. The coffin was placed in the middle, right in front of the
altar. The old chief kissed the dead girl once more, made a prostration, and
walked out together with the bearers, ordering the philosopher to be given a
good meal and taken to the church after supper. Going into the kitcheu, all
those who had carried the coffin started touching the stove, something
people in Little Russia have the custom of doing after they see a dead body.
The hunger that the philosopher began to feel just then made him forget
all about the deceased for a few moments. Soon all the household servants
began gradually to gather in the kitchen. The kitchen of the chief's house
was something like a club, to which everything that inhabited the yard
flowed, including the dogs, who came right up to the door wagging their
tails for bones and scraps. Wherever anyone might be sent, on whatever
errand, he would always stop at the kitchen first, to rest on a bench for a
moment and smoke a pipe. The bachelors who lived in the house and paraded
around in Cossack blouses all lay about here for almost the whole day, on
the benches, under the benches, on the stove--in short, wherever they could
find a comfortable place to he. Besides, everybody was forever forgetting
something in the kitchen--a hat, a knout for stray dogs, or the like. But
the most numerous gathering was at suppertime, when the horseherd came after
rounding up all his horses, and the cowherd after bringing the cows home for
milking, and all the rest who were not to be seen in the course of the day.