Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

is popping away right and left; like as not to get me any minute.⁠ ⁠… Then I got riled: ‘Ah,’ thinks I, ‘may your eyes bust out!’ I put the gun to my shoulder and I let ’er go: glory be to the Lord, I got him⁠—I hear by the sound that he must have fallen down. I let out two more shots toward the same spot, and ran; and there he was sitting on his bottom on the ground. He’s sitting down, propped up with his hands in the dirt; his teeth are bared, and he’s rattlin’: ‘Quick,’ says he, ‘quick, Russ, stick your bayonet into me right here.⁠ ⁠…’ Meaning his chest, that is. I charged with my bayonet on a run⁠—straight through his heart.⁠ ⁠… Why, the bayonet went right out at his back!”

“Good work!” said the old man. “Let’s have just one good puff.⁠ ⁠… Well, and where was Koslov at now?”

Pashka inhaled some smoke, deeply and quickly, and thrust the fag-end into the old man’s hand.

“Why, Koslov,” he answered, hurriedly and gaily, flattered by the praise, “why, Koslov is running, yelling with all his might: ‘Did you do for him?’ ‘I’ve done for him’ says I, ‘let’s drag the carcass away.⁠ ⁠…’ We took him by the shackles at once and dragged him back, to the porch.⁠ ⁠… I cut him down like a weed,” said he, changing his tone to a calmer and more self-satisfied one.

The old man cogitated for a while.

“And you say the officer rewarded you with a rouble each?”

“That’s straight,” answered Pashka. “He gave it to us right out of his own hands, with all the battalion lined up on parade.”

The old man, shaking his cap-covered head, spat into his palm and extinguished the cigarette end in the spittle.

Ivan, leisurely, through his teeth, drawled out:

“Well, it’s plain to be seen there’s lots of fools among the soldiers too.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Why, here’s how,” said Ivan, “you durn fool! What should you have done? You oughtn’t to have dragged him, but should have sent your mate with a report, and stood guard with a gun over the dead body. D’you understand now, or don’t you?”

III

Theodot began speaking even more plainly, after a general silence and a muttering of: “Ye-es⁠ ⁠… well done.⁠ ⁠…”

“Well, now,” he began slowly, lying back on his elbow and casting an occasional glance at the dark figure of the student, motionlessly stuck before him against the background of the starry sky; “well, now, I sinned absolutely over nothing. I killed a man over a mere trifle, you might say; all on account of a she-goat I had.”

“What do you mean⁠—over a she-goat?” the old man, Pashka, and the schoolboy interrupted him in unison.

“Honest to God, that’s the truth,” answered Theodot. “But you just listen a while to what sort of bane this she-goat was.⁠ ⁠…”

The old man and Pashka again lighted cigarettes and began to stamp down the straw, in preparation to listening. The student, too, wanted to light up, but his icy hands would not stir, would not come out of his pockets. As for Theodot, he continued seriously and calmly:

“The whole trouble was just on account of her. I didn’t do the murder on purpose, of course.⁠ ⁠… He was the first to beat me up.⁠ ⁠… And there was quarrelling, going to court.⁠ ⁠… He came, drunk, whilst I jumped out, all heated up, and hit him with a whetstone.⁠ ⁠… But what’s the sense of talkin’ about it; as it was, I done penance for half a year at a monastery on account of him; but if there hadn’t been this here she-goat, nothing at all would have happened. Main thing was, none of us had ever kept these here goats; they ain’t in the muzhik’s line, and we can’t understand the handling of them; and then, to top it all, the goat turned out to be a bad one, and frisky. What carrion she was⁠—the Lord save me from such another! Just the same as a little borzoi bitch, she was. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to get her⁠—everybody was laughing, talking me out of it as it was; but I was downright forced to it by need. We ain’t got any large, well-managed farms, nor any sort of free land or forests.⁠ ⁠… We ain’t had a common pasture land, of our own from time out of mind, and as to what small livestock we might have, it simply has to find forage on the wastelands. As for large cattle⁠—we used to put the cows into the big owner’s grounds, and for all that sort of thing us little fellers was supposed to mow, and bind in sheaves, two acres of grain, and plough two acres of fallow-land; and put in three days with the old woman at mowing, and three days at threshing.⁠ ⁠… Count it up⁠—and what don’t it come to?”

“The Lord deliver us!” the old man supported him sympathetically.

“Whereas to buy a she-goat,” Theodot went on, “well, that meant scraping off seven, or say eight, roubles to give away for her; on the other hand, if she tried hard, she’d yield four bottles, no less, of milk, and the milk she’d give was thicker and sweeter nor cow milk. The hard part about her was, of course, that you couldn’t keep her together with the sheep; a she-goat fights with them a lot, when she’s carrying a kid, and once she starts in she gets fiercer’n a dog⁠—just can’t bear to look at them. And what a creature she was for climbing⁠—it didn’t mean nothin’ to her to get up on top of a hut, or a clump of willows. Wherever there was a willow, she was dead sure to strip it bare, would strip off all its tender bark⁠—there was nothing she liked better’n that!”

“But you wanted to tell us how you killed a man,” the schoolboy uttered with difficulty, looking all the while at Pashka, at Pashka’s face, indistinct in the light of the stars; he