The Fair at Sorochintsi

XIII

Fear not, fear not, little mother,
Put on your red boots
Trample your foes
Under foot
So that your ironshod
Heels may clang,
So that your foes
May be hushed and still.

A wedding song

Paraska mused, sitting alone in the hut with her pretty chin propped on her hand. Many dreams hovered about her little head. At times a faint smile stirred her crimson lips and some joyful feeling lifted her dark brows, while at times a cloud of pensiveness set them frowning above her clear brown eyes.

“But what if it does not come true as he said?” she whispered with an expression of doubt. “What if they don’t let me marry him? If… No, no; that will not be! My stepmother does just as she likes; why mayn’t I do as I like? I’ve plenty of obstinacy too. How handsome he is! How wonderfully his black eyes glow! How delightfully he says, ‘Paraska darling!’ How his white jacket suits him! But his belt ought to be a bit brighter!… I will weave him one when we settle in a new hut. I can’t help being pleased when I think,” she went on, taking from her bosom a little red-paper-framed mirror bought at the fair and gazing into it, “how I shall meet her one day somewhere and she may burst before I bow to her, nothing will induce me. No, stepmother, you’ve kicked me for the last time. The sand will rise up on the rocks and the oak bend down to the water like a willow before I bow down before you. But I was forgetting… let me try on a cap, even if it has to be my stepmother’s, and see how it suits me to look like a wife?”

Then she got up, holding the mirror in her hand and bending her head down to it, walked in excitement about the room, as though in dread of falling, seeing below her, instead of the floor, the ceiling with the boards laid on the rafters from which the priest’s son had so lately dropped, and the shelves set with pots.

“Why, I am like a child,” she cried, “afraid to take a step!”

And she began tapping with her feet, growing bolder as she went on; at last she laid her left hand on her hip and went off into a dance, clinking with her metaled heels, holding the mirror before her, and singing her favorite song:

Little green periwinkle,

  Twine lower to me!

And you, black-browed dear one,

  Come nearer to me!

Little green periwinkle,

  Twine lower to me!

And you, black-browed dear one,

  Come nearer to me!

At that moment Cherevik peeped in at the door, and seeing his daughter dancing before the mirror, he stood still. For a long time he watched, laughing at the innocent prank of his daughter, who was apparently so absorbed that she noticed nothing; but when he heard the familiar notes of the song, his muscles began working: he stepped forward, his arms jauntily akimbo, and forgetting all he had to do, began dancing. A loud shout of laughter from his friend Tsibulya startled both of them.

“Here is a pretty thing! The dad and his daughter getting up a wedding on their own account! Make haste and come along: the bridegroom has arrived!”

At the last words Paraska flushed a deeper crimson than the ribbon which bound her head, and her lighthearted parent remembered his errand.

“Well, daughter, let us make haste! Khivrya is so pleased that I have sold the mare,” he went on, looking timorously about him, “that she has run off to buy herself aprons and all sorts of rags, so we must get it all over before she is back.”

Paraska had no sooner stepped over the threshold than she felt herself caught in the arms of the young man in the white jacket who with a crowd of people was waiting for her in the street.

“God bless you!” said Cherevik, joining their hands. “May their lives together cleave as the wreaths of flowers they weave.”

At this point a hubbub was heard in the crowd.

“I’d burst before I’d allow it!” screamed Cherevik’s helpmate, who was being shoved back by the laughing crowd.

“Don’t excite yourself, wife!” Cherevik said coolly, seeing that two sturdy gypsies held her hands, “what is done can’t be undone: I don’t like going back on a bargain!”

“No, no, that shall never be!” screamed Khivrya, but no one heeded her; several couples surrounded the happy pair and formed an impenetrable dancing wall around them.

A strange feeling, hard to put into words, would have overcome anyone watching how the whole crowd was transformed into a scene of unity and harmony, at one stroke of the bow of the fiddler, who had long twisted mustaches and wore a homespun jacket. Men whose sullen faces seemed to have known no gleam of a smile for years were tapping with their feet and wriggling their shoulders; everything was heaving, everything was dancing. But an even stranger and more disturbing feeling would have been stirred in the heart at the sight of old women, whose ancient faces breathed the indifference of the tomb, shoving their way between the young, laughing, living human beings. Caring for nothing, indifferent, long removed from the joy of childhood, wanting only drink, it was as if a puppeteer were tugging the strings that held his wooden puppets, making them do things that seemed human; yet they slowly wagged their drunken heads, dancing after the rejoicing crowd, not casting one glance at the young couple.

The sounds of laughter, song, and uproar grew fainter and fainter. The strains of the fiddle were lost in vague and feeble notes, and died away in the wind. In the distance there was still the sound of dancing feet, something like the faraway murmur of the sea, and soon all was stillness and emptiness again.

Is it not thus that joy, lovely and fleeting guest, flies from us? In vain the last solitary note tries to express gaiety. In its own echo it hears melancholy and emptiness and listens to it, bewildered. Is it not thus that those who have been playful friends in free and stormy youth, one by one stray, lost, about the world and leave their old comrade lonely and forlorn at last? Sad is the lot of one left behind! Heavy and sorrowful is his heart and nothing can help him!