Short Fiction, Vladimir Korolenko [finding audrey TXT] 📗

money for taxes. Oho! In that case I might even open a little inn, and then I could either get someone to run the mill for me, or else sell it. Bother the mill, say I! Somehow a man isn’t a man as long as he has to work. The fact is, one copeck begets another. Only fools don’t know that. If you buy yourself a pair of pigs, for instance⁠—pigs are prolific animals⁠—in a year you’ll have a herd of them, and money’s just the same. If you put it out to pasture among stupid folk you can sit still and yawn until the time comes to drive it home. Every copeck will have brought forth ten copecks, every rouble will have brought forth ten roubles.”

The miller had now reached the crest of a hill from where the road sloped gently to the river. From here, when the night breeze breathed into his face, he could faintly hear the sleepy water murmuring in the millrace. Looking behind him, the miller could see the village sleeping among its gardens, and the widow’s little khata under its tall poplars. He stood plunged in thought for a few moments, scratching the back of his head.

“Ah, what a fool I am!” he said at last, resuming his journey. “If my uncle hadn’t taken it into his head to get drunk on gorelka and walk into the millpond I might have been married to Galya today, but now she’s beneath me. Okh, but that girl is sweet to kiss! Goodness, how sweet she is! That’s why I say that nothing ever goes right in this world. If that little face had a nice dowry behind it, if it had even as much as old Makogon is giving away with his Motria, there would be nothing more to be said!”

He cast one last look behind him, and turned on his way, when suddenly the stroke of a bell resounded from the village. Something seemed to have fallen from the church steeple that rose from a hill in the centre of the town, and to be flying, clanging and rocking, across the fields.

“Eh, hey, it is midnight on earth,” the miller mused, and with a great yawn he turned and walked rapidly down the hill, thinking of his flock as he went. He saw his roubles as if they had been alive, passing from hand to hand and from business to business, grazing and multiplying. He laughed to recall that some fools thought they worked for themselves. And when the time was ripe, he, the owner of the flock, would drive it and its increase back into his iron chest.

These thoughts were all pleasant ones, but the recollection of the Jew spoilt them again. The miller was provoked because that son of Israel had seized all the grazing for himself, leaving his poor roubles nowhere to feed and nothing to grow fat on, like a flock of sheep in a field where Jewish goats had already been pasturing. Everyone knew they never could fatten there!

“Oh, I wish the devil would get him, the foul brute!” the miller said to himself, and he decided it was the thought of the Jew that depressed him so. That’s what, was wrong with the world. Those infernal Jews prevented Christians from collecting their lawful profits.

Half way down the hill, where the peaceful, drowsy sound of the water in the millrace came unintermittently to his ears, the miller suddenly stopped and struck his forehead with the palm of his hand.

“Ha! What a joke it would be! It would be a grand joke, I swear! This the Day of Atonement. What if the Hebrew devil should take a fancy to our innkeeper Yankel? But he won’t! It couldn’t possibly happen. The town is crammed with Jews, and Yankel is a tipsy old wretch, as bony as a hedgehog. Who would want him? No,” thought the miller, “I’m not lucky enough for Khapun to choose our Yankel out of thousands of others.”

Then, like a nest of ants in a turmoil, another train of thought began to pass through his head.

“Ah, Philip, Philip!” he said to himself. “It isn’t right for a Christian to think such things! Recollect yourself! Yankel would leave children behind him, as well as debts. And another reason why it is sinful: Yankel has never done you any harm. If others have reason to blame the old innkeeper, you yourself are not guiltless of usury.”

But the miller hastily sent other and angrier thoughts to attack these last unpleasant reflections that had begun to bite his conscience like vicious dogs.

“But after all, a Sheeny is only a Sheeny, and isn’t in the same class with Christians at all. Even if I do lend money⁠—and I do, there’s no use denying it⁠—it’s better for Christians to pay interest to a brother Christian than to a heathen Jew.”

At that moment the last notes of the bell pealed out from the belfry.

Probably Ivan Kadilo, the bell-ringer, had gone to sleep in the church and had pulled the bell rope in his sleep, so long had he taken to sound the hour of midnight. To atone for his neglect, this last tug was so violent that the miller actually jumped as the sound came rolling over the hill, over his head, across the river, across the wood, and away over the distant fields through which wound the road to the city.

“Everyone is asleep now,” the miller thought, and something gripped his heart. “Everyone is asleep where he wants to be; all but the Jews crowded weeping into their churches, and I, who am standing here by my millpond like a lost soul, thinking wicked thoughts.”

And everything seemed very strange to him.

“I hear the sound of the bell dying away over the fields,” thought he, “and I feel as if something invisible were running, moaning, through the country. I see the woods beyond the river drenched with dew and shining in the