The Created Legend by Fyodor Sologub (ebook reader color screen TXT) 📕

neighbourhood, bewitched with mystery and fear, seemed oppressed. The flat field stretched far⁠—all enveloped in a light mist. Far to the left, the town fires showed their vague glimmers through the mist⁠—and marked off by the wall of mist, the town seemed to be very distant, and to be guarding jealously from the fields of night the tumultuous voices of life.

An old witch, grey, and all bent, appeared from somewhere; she swung a crutch and stumbled on in haste. She was mumbling angrily:

“It doesn’t smell of our spirit. Strangers have come! Why have they come? What can strangers want here? What are they seeking? They’ll find what they don’t want to find. Ours will see them, and will tear them to pieces, and will scatter the pieces before all the winds.”

Suddenly there was a weird rustle, there rose all about them the squeak of piping little voices, and the sounds of a confused scampering. At the crosspaths there darted in all directions, as thick as dust, countless hordes of grey sprites and evil spirits. Their running was so impetuous that they could have borne along with them every living, weak-willed soul. And it could already be seen that running in their midst were the pitiful souls of little people. Kirsha whispered in a voice full of fear:

“Quicker, quicker into the ring! They will bear us away if we don’t mark ourselves in.”

Trirodov called quietly:

“Come here, come here, quiet boy, draw a circle around us with your nocturnal little stick.”

They no sooner had succeeded in marking themselves in with the magic line than the dead began to pass down the Navii path. The throng of the dead, submitting to some evil malediction, walked towards the town. The spectres walked in the nocturnal silence and the traces they left behind them were light, curious, and hardly distinguishable. Whispered conversations were heard⁠—lifeless words. The dead walked at random, without any defined order. At the beginning the voices merged into a general drone, and only afterwards, by straining one’s ears, it was possible to distinguish separate words and whole phrases.

“Be good yourself, that’s the chief thing.”

“For mercy’s sake⁠—what perversion, what immorality!”

“Plenty of food and plenty of clothes⁠—what more can one want?”

“I haven’t sinned much.”

“That’s what they deserve. Kisses are not for them.”

In the beginning all the dead fused into one dark, grey mass. But gradually, if one looked intently one could distinguish the separate corpses.

One nobleman who passed by had a cap with a red band on his head; he was saying with calm and deliberation:

“The divine right of ownership should be inviolable. We and our ancestors have built up the Russian land.”

Another of the same class, who walked beside him, remarked:

“My motto⁠—autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality. My credo⁠—a strong redeeming power.”

A priest in a black vestment swung a censer, and cried in a tenor voice:

“Every soul should submit to sovereign dominion. The hand that gives will not grow poorer.”

A wise muzhik passed by muttering:

“We know everything, but are not saying anything just yet. When you don’t know anything they leave you alone. Only you can’t cover up your mouth with a handkerchief.”

Several soldiers walked past together. They bawled their indecorous songs. Their faces were grey-red in colour. They stank of sweat, putrescence, bad tobacco, and vodka.

“I have laid down my stomach for my faith, my Tsar, and my Fatherland,” a smart young colonel was saying.

After him came a thin man with the face of a Jesuit and cried out loudly:

“Russia for the Russians!”

A stout merchant kept on repeating:

“If you don’t cheat you can’t sell your goods. Even a fur coat might be turned inside out. Your penny makes you well thought of anywhere.”

An austere, freckled woman was saying:

“Beat me, seeing that I’m your woman, but there’s no law that’ll let you tie up with a girl so long as you’ve got a wife living.”

A muzhik walked at her side, a dirty, ill-smelling fellow, who said nothing and hiccuped.

Once more there was a nobleman, large, stout, bristling, savage-looking. He ranted:

“Hang them! Flog them!”

Trirodov turned to Kirsha:

“Don’t be afraid, Kirsha⁠—these are dead words.”

Kirsha silently nodded his head.

A mistress and her servant-maid walked together and exchanged quarrelsome words.

“God didn’t make all the trees in the forest alike. I am a white bone, you are a black bone. I am a gentlewoman, you are a peasant-woman.”

“You may be a gentlewoman, yet trash.”

“Maybe trash, but still from the gentry.”

Quite close to the magic line there was an apparent effort on the part of an elegantly dressed woman and a young man of the breed of dandies to emerge from the general throng. They had been only recently buried, and they exhaled the odour of fresh corpses. The woman coquettishly moved her half-putrefied lips and complained in a hoarse, creaking voice:

“They’ve forced us to walk with all these Khams.16 They might have let us walk separately from all this common folk.”

The dandy suddenly complained in a squeaking voice:

“Be careful, there, muzhik, don’t nudge. What a dirty fellow!”

The muzhik had evidently only just jumped out of his grave; he was barely awake, and he had not yet realized himself or understood his condition. He was all dishevelled and in rags. His eyes were turbid. Curses and indecent words issued from his dead lips. He was angry because he had been disturbed, and he bawled:

“By what right? You are lying there and not doing anyone any harm, and are roused and made to walk along. What new rules have they got for us⁠—disturbing the dead! You’ve only just found your earth⁠—when up you must be and moving.”

Unsteady on his feet, the muzhik continued to pour out his coarse abuse; when he saw Trirodov he opened his eyes wide and went straight to him. He was blindly conscious of being in the presence of a stranger and an enemy and he wished to destroy him. Kirsha trembled and grew pale. He clung to his father in fear. The quiet boy, retaining his tranquil sadness, stood at their side,