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[Illustration: [Russian font: B. N. Nemirovitch-Dantchenko.]]

  PEASANT TALES OF RUSSIA

  BY

  V. I. NEMIROVITCH-DANTCHENKO

  TRANSLATED BY

  CLAUD FIELD, M.A.
  Editor of "Jewish Legends of the Middle Ages."


[Illustration: [_Frontispiece._

"Holding his torch high, Ivan skirted the precipice."]

[Illustration]


  PEASANT TALES
  OF RUSSIA

  [Illustration]

  LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT
  ROXBURGHE HOUSE
  PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.

 _All rights reserved_

  MCMXVII




CONTENTS


                                                           PAGE

  THE DESERTED MINE                                           3

  MAHMOUD'S FAMILY                                           61

  A MISUNDERSTANDING                                         91

  THE LUCK OF IVAN THE FORGETFUL                            129




_LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_


                                                                    PAGE

  "Holding his torch high, Ivan skirted the
  precipice"                                               _Frontispiece_

  "Your prediction is fulfilled. The Turk has
  escaped"                                                            60

  "From all directions nuns came gliding
  towards the lighted portal"                                         90

  "A strange sight brought her to a standstill"                      128

  "At the edge of the wood lay a dead woman,
  with a little living creature sobbing over
  her"                                                               145




_THE DESERTED MINE_

[Illustration]




_THE DESERTED MINE_


I

At the entrance of the Voskressensky mine stood a group of miners. All
were quite silent.

It was still dark, for the autumn days begin late. Heavy grey clouds
glided slowly over the sky, in which the first streaks of dawn were
hardly visible. These clouds glided so low that they seemed to wish to
lie on the earth in order to hide this black hole, this well-like
orifice which was about to swallow up the miners one by one. The air was
saturated with a cloud of damp dust, particles of which fell on the
men's hair and faces. The miners wore leather jerkins, and small lamps,
whose light flickered fitfully, hung at their belts. An imaginative
person might have thought that they trembled with fear at having to
descend into the heavy dense darkness of the mine.

"Listen, old man! You can never go down alone," said the young overseer
to an old miner who was of tall stature, thin and withered. His long
grey beard fell in disarray over his hollow chest, and his breath came
and went with a thin whistling sound, as though the damp air of this
dark morning found as much difficulty in entering as in leaving it. The
features of the old miner's face were strongly marked, and his two black
eyes burned in the depths of their sockets with a brilliant, almost
fantastic light. This death's-head seemed almost buried from sight
between two very high shoulders. When he walked, his back was arched,
and his whole long body leaned forward, so that he seemed to be looking
for something he had lost, or to be picking his steps very carefully.
His feeble arms hung languidly by his side, and his legs tottered and
gave way every moment under the weight of his body, slight as it was.

"You will never be able to descend the ladders! We will put you into the
basket! Hullo! you fellows over there, come and help to start old
Ivan!" the overseer called to the rest.

"Here we are, Father Ivan!" they cried, saying to each other jocosely,
"Fancy his wishing to go down the ladders with us!"

The old miner turned towards them. It was a long time ago since he had
been born in a mine about five versts distant which had been
subsequently closed. His mother, who had lost her husband by the
falling-in of one of the mine-galleries, continued to work in the same
gallery after it had been repaired. Ivan had been born in the eternal
darkness. His first cry had been drowned by the noise of blasting rocks,
his first glance met nothing but the gloom of the subterranean gallery.
He was hoisted to the surface of the ground in a large bucket full of
ore. All the first impressions of his sad childhood were intimately
connected with the mine where his mother, who was obliged to earn her
living, always worked. As she had no one to whom to entrust the child,
she took him with her, and he remained lying beside her, fixing his
wide-open eyes on his mother's flickering lamp, while he sucked at his
milk-bottle. It was this black hole which echoed to his laughter and his
crying, especially to the latter. His mother, who was naturally
taciturn, had scarcely time to caress her child, for she would have had
to quit her work; when she heard the little one's sobs, she redoubled
the blows of her pickaxe against the dark mass of coal, as though she
wished by the noise they made to drown the feeble wailing of the infant.

It was in this mine that he grew and made his first experiments in
walking; later on he began to explore, first the narrow passage where
his mother worked at her daily task, then venturing into the other
galleries of this subterranean kingdom. As his mind developed, a whole
world of phantoms created by his imagination rose around him. All these
masses of black earth with their blocks of metal, which had slumbered
for centuries in the depths, seemed to him living beings, and all the
mysterious muffled sounds which came one knew not whence, sounded in his
ears like the groans of victims imprisoned by evil genii in gloomy
caves. For him the water which filtered through the walls of the mine
was a shower of tears, and that which trickled, yellow of tint, across
the ore resembled flowing blood. The darkness was constantly traversed
by vague and ever new apparitions, vanishing as soon as they appeared,
which nevertheless left a trace of their passage on the child's
impressionable mind.

When a miner's song reached him, deadened by distance, it seemed to him
to issue from the depths of the rocks. By dint of practice, his sense of
hearing had acquired a fine subtlety, and sometimes putting his ear to
the rugged walls, he listened with so much attention that he could catch
the faintest unknown and inexplicable sounds. It was perhaps only the
wrathful murmur of some imprisoned spring, but for Ivan it was the groan
of a human being struggling in his dungeon. All the objects round
him--the ore, the rocks, the water--were animated with a life visible
and comprehensible to him alone. These things were not for him, simple
parts of inanimate nature, but creatures with souls, full of life,
similar to himself, watching and listening to him as he watched and
listened to them.

Later on he made friends with an old man. He was a miner of a somewhat
sombre disposition, but his eyes always grew moist when the child ran
towards him. He would lay his wrinkled hand, hard as iron, tenderly on
the head of the little one, and, as he rested, tell him how one day our
Lord Jesus Christ had descended to the depths of this subterranean
kingdom, and since then remained there with the miners. "Jesus is in the
midst of us, I tell you," the old man would say dreamily, peering
intently into the darkness, as though his half-blind eyes could really
distinguish the divine Saviour there. As long as he was a child, Ivan
saw Him also, and seeing Him feared Him, because he knew that Jesus does
not love evil deeds and dark thoughts. Jesus is everywhere at once; He
has thousands of eyes at His disposal; He sees and knows the slightest
movements of men's hearts.

One day when the child was sitting on the old miner's knees, they heard
far off in the direction where Ivan's mother was working a dull shock--a
noise like a sigh escaping from the breast of Mother Earth herself. The
shock re-echoed in all the mine-shafts and smallest recesses of all the
galleries. The earth fell in in several places.

"Save us, Lord!" cried the old man, rising quickly. "Pray to God, little
one. A child's prayer avails much with Him."

Little Ivan knelt down, and prayed without knowing why or for what. All
his prayer consisted in repeating, "Kind Jesus!... Good Jesus!... Dear
old Jesus!" Since for him goodness was personified in the old miner, and
as on the other hand Jesus was the very incarnation of goodness, it
followed that Jesus must be old, very old. It was thus that the child
imagined Him, and under this aspect that he sometimes saw Him standing
in the darkness of the mine.

The subterranean shocks re-echoed to a great distance and did not cease
till they passed beyond the boundaries of the mine. Then only a vague
vibration remained in the air like the presentiment of a great calamity.
The old miner turned in the direction where Ivan's mother had been
working. He walked with uncertain steps and then returned hesitatingly
towards the child. When they reached the gallery they found it narrower
and contracted above where the earth had sunk. Presently they came to a
point where it shrank to a narrow hole. The old man and the child
crawled through it with difficulty. Soon, fortunately, they could stand
upright. A few steps more and the old man abruptly fell on his knees.

The place where Ivan's mother had been working no longer existed. The
child and the old man were confronted by a huge mass of damp earth. Its
dampness was constantly increasing, for it was traversed by a thread of
water from a spring which had suddenly been liberated, one knew not how,
from its long imprisonment. From underneath this damp mass projected the
feet of Ivan's mother. The child rushed forward, seized the coarse boots
which she wore and tugged at them, but in vain; the earth which lay on
his mother guarded its prey well.

"Maria! Maria!" cried the old miner in a despairing voice.

There was no reply. The feet in their coarse boots, feebly lighted by
the little lamp, remained motionless.

When Ivan grew up and became a miner in his turn his surroundings
changed their aspect in his eyes and became inanimate. The springs and
the metals, these bondslaves of the earth, no longer possessed a soul
for him. The dark rocks, when his pickaxe laid their sides open, were as
inanimate as the damp masses of ore. Jesus also, Whom he saw so clearly
in his childhood, had disappeared from the time that they had abandoned
the old mine for another one. But the impressions made on him in
childhood remained hidden and shut up in the profoundest depth of Ivan's
heart, resembling in this the hidden springs in the heart of the rock.
Later on, under the inexorable pressure of time when Ivan had become
old, these impressions rose again to the surface, and he found himself
once more surrounded by vague apparitions and mysterious murmurs. Only
Jesus remained absent, though the fixed gaze of the old Ivan searched
for Him perseveringly in the darkness of the subterranean kingdom.


II

"Well, old man, get in!" said the miners. The moving windlass brought to
the mouth of the shaft the bucket in which the ore was brought up. The
rusty iron chain unrolled slowly with a harsh grating sound. Below the
darkness was so dense that one could not even perceive the reflection of
water which is always visible at the bottom of the deepest wells. Ivan
squatted down in the bucket.

"Now, in the name of God! you will turn round a bit, old man."

"It won't hurt him to swing a little," said others jokingly.

"Look, you fellows, we will get him down in the twinkling of an eye."

The windlass creaked, the rusty chain groaned plaintively, and the
bucket began to descend by jerks, knocking against the wooden lining of
the shaft with a metallic echo. Ivan raised his eyes; above him the
pit-mouth looked like a greyish patch, round him was impenetrable
darkness. The bucket turned with the chain and descended slowly. The
little lamp fastened to his waist cast trembling gleams on the damp
walls, and its light flickered timidly, hardly making visible the drops
of water which trickled across the wooden lining of the shaft; in fact
it seemed on the point of going out. Any one unused to such a descent
would at once have become giddy, but to old Ivan it seemed a mere
trifle. How often already he had thus descended and come up!

The walls of the shaft became more and more damp. Above, the grey patch
shrank and shrank. It seemed as though the day staring fixedly into the
darkness of the pit gradually closed its grey eye, baffled at its depth.

"Yes, this shaft is very old," thought the miner to himself; "I remember
the day it was sunk, and it must be quite sixty years ago, if I
recollect right. It is quite time to repair the lining; the wood has
decayed till it is black. I wonder how it can still hold together. Jesus
must certainly be watching over us. I am getting old too; they say I am
eighty-four. It is a lucky thing that they don't dismiss me, and only
give me easy work; otherwise I should starve, or at any rate be obliged
to beg."

Thoughts of all kinds passed through the old man's head. He was
accustomed to think much but never spoke. It was a long time since any
one had heard the sound of his voice, and it was thought that he had
forgotten how to speak because he had always lived surrounded by the
silence of the mine. The fact was that, hearing nothing but the sound
of his pickaxe, the noise of the ore being crushed, etc., he had lost
the habit of replying to questions. When any one spoke to him, he
quickly removed his leather cap, and answered by a bow so low that one
could see the top of his head adorned only by two locks of yellow hair.
People finished by leaving him in peace.

No one went so far as to ridicule him. He was, so to speak, one of the
curiosities of the mine, for it was known that he had been present at
its opening. The proprietors of the mine knew that in former days he was
always the first to go down, and that it was he who had loosened the
first yellow block from which the first piece of copper had been
extracted. All his contemporaries who were not dead had grown old around
him, and he himself, decrepit and bent, was still alive and even worked,
as far as his strength permitted.

"Old Ivan is a true miner; he was born in a gallery of the old mine,"
the workmen often said to one another. They had forgotten for a long
time past where the old worked-out mine which had been abandoned sixty
years ago was situated. His disuse of speech only augmented the respect
they felt for him. Some even thought that his silence was in consequence
of a vow. "He is Ivan the Silent," they would say. "Disbelieve it if
you like, but it is quite ten years since he has been silent."

Meanwhile the bucket suspended from the chain which rattled
remorselessly continued to descend. The greyish patch of the orifice was
no more visible at all, and its last vague glimmer had been swallowed up
in the damp cold darkness of the pit. The wooden lining had come to an
end, and the walls were formed of strata of different metals. On one
hand the sides and sharp edges of a great black stone projected, on the
other was damp mud encrusted with fragments of rock. Then the pale light
of the little lamp glided windingly over the rounded outlines of flint
fossils. It then zigzagged over a layer of brilliant white mineral,
which was soon succeeded by another of mud.

Through all--the earth, the flints, the edges of rent rocks--there
trickled innumerable water-drops. Was it the blood of the earth
escaping from a deep wound? Or was it shedding tears over the hard lot
of hundreds of men shut up in the eternal darkness of its mysterious
kingdom?

The tears fell thickly, one by one, forming threads of water, which in
their turn formed rivulets. Now the old man heard something else beside
the creaking of the rusted chain, every link of which seemed to be
complaining of extreme weariness, the result of long service. His ear,
accustomed to silence, caught the murmur of rivulets, and the noise of
water-drops, falling one by one, resembling the sound of grains of lead
falling on stone. Here is a spring which has escaped from its narrow
prison in the heart of the mountain and which forms a wide stream, but
which, finding on its escape from its long bondage only darkness as deep
as that of its prison, seems to moan as it glides over the damp stones.

The bucket continued its descent. He could no longer see above or below
him and the journey appeared interminable. The light of the little lamp,
which had nearly gone out, grew suddenly brighter. Around him
innumerable springs were trickling, running and descending on all sides.
Here and there uniting in large streams, they came down in cascades,
splashing Ivan's clothes. The darkness was full of the babbling, rushing
and noise of this water.

The old man knew that for sixty years it had been ceaselessly
undermining this shaft. Long ago, when he first went down it, only a few
drops of water used to filter through its sides. Later on these became
more numerous, and collecting together, finished by channelling for
themselves convenient passages and by flowing in streams. By this time
the work of destruction had become more and more threatening and the
earth was everywhere like a sponge. It seemed as though the springs
imprisoned in the mountain had found out the existence of this shaft and
had united to flow into it.

"They will certainly end by flooding the shaft," thought the old man.
"What is to be done? One can only hope in God. As long as He wills, the
shaft will exist, but as soon as He does not will it, it will be
destroyed from top to bottom."

Formerly the shaft was supported by the rocks, but the water had
succeeded in undermining them, sometimes by infiltration underneath
them, sometimes by dislodging them from their places and making them
lose their equilibrium; some of them projected through the walls of the
shaft and their sides were black with moisture. Presently these
undermined rocks would collapse, dragging down in their fall all the
surrounding earth. What a disaster it would be. The miners would be
buried alive like earth-worms. Only their feet would be visible, thought
the old man, as had been the case with his mother. "Entombed by the will
of God." It would be no use digging and trying to reach them; they would
be too far down; the shaft was three hundred fathoms deep and the whole
mine was dangerous. The walls of its galleries were as thin as those of
a bee-hive. So much ore had been extracted from it that entire caves had
been formed in the spongy earth. Whenever the shaft should collapse, the
walls of the galleries would not hold out any more, the whole mine would
fall in, and nothing would be left but an enormous cavity to show the
curious sightseer.

The old man regarded the prospect of such a collapse calmly, for to die
in a mine seemed to him quite natural as he had been born there. He
would have found it strange if his sad existence had ended on the
surface of the ground; on the other hand a death down here seemed quite
simple and natural. Here he felt at home. He remembered how when seized
with illness on one occasion, before he had become old, he had not even
ascended to the surface, but remained in the gallery where he worked all
the time, his comrades bringing him food. He had often passed the night
in his gallery stretched on comparatively soft ground. In old times he
had been often seized with a desire to ascend, to see again the sun and
the starry nights, but all that was now far away. Now he felt at home
here in this darkness where it was so warm and so comfortable, that,
but for the dampness, one would like to remain there always!

The water kept on coming down in resonant cascades. But in spite of
this, the old man distinctly heard not far off the blows of the miners'
innumerable pickaxes, the dull echoes of explosions in distant
galleries, and vague human noises. Here and there in the walls of the
shaft one saw black holes, once the entrances to ancient galleries which
had long ago been exhausted of their ore and abandoned.

The miners were now working in another stratum. But the old Ivan had not
forgotten these ancient galleries, for he had left in each of them a
little of his strength, and each of them had been moistened by his
perspiration. He rose and looked downwards; the flickerings of little
lamps like his own were visible, and vague sounds came up to him. The
gleam of water was also to be seen, for the bottom of the shaft was
entirely flooded. Pumps were no longer of any use to expel the water,
for pump as one might, the water kept pouring in. However, they had to
keep on pumping, for if they stopped, even for an hour, the whole mine
would have been flooded and the water would have rapidly penetrated all
the galleries, drowning the miners who were working in them.

"Earth and water--both are in the hands of God," said the miner to
himself.

The rusty chain ceased to unwind and the bucket stopped its descent
half-submerged in the water which covered the bottom of the shaft. The
miners ran up from all sides, holding their little lamps. "See who
comes!" they said with a laugh. "Good day, father!" They laid a plank
for him and helped him to get out. Then, as he always did, he removed
his cap and made a low bow to the miners, showing his bald head.

Numerous galleries diverged from this point in all directions, and their
darkness was pierced by little lights which ran hither and thither.
Sounds of voices were heard clearly as well as the noise of subterranean
explosions, but all other sounds were dominated by the roar of the
waters.

The old man re-lighted his little lamp, which had gone out, and stooping
forward, as though he were examining some mysterious footprints, he went
towards his gallery with unsteady steps.


III

The gallery in which the old man worked was fairly high. Here and there
beams sustaining the roof were visible, but their decrepit condition
testified to their age. Above these worm-eaten beams, the earth formed
protuberances bristling with pointed rocks. The ground was strewn with
fragments of rock which had fallen from the roof.

Old Ivan remembered having seen one day one of these fragments kill as
it fell a little boy who had been a great pet of his. This little boy
generally accompanied his father, and his gay bursts of careless
laughter animated a little the sepulchral silence of the mine. It seemed
but yesterday that the old man had seen the child running merrily along
the gallery. All at once a misshapen block protruded from the roof. The
child stopped, out of curiosity, raised his clear eyes to see what it
was, and the huge stone suddenly dropped, burying and crushing him
entirely. His father was in utter despair and the other miners could not
restrain their tears; as for Ivan, he persisted in prowling for a long
time round the great black stone, as though he were expecting to hear
from under the enormous block the well-known laugh of the little one.
But nothing came to awaken the melancholy silence of the gallery.

The old man now halted near this murderous rock and held his lamp near
it, lighting up the indistinct outlines of a cross rudely engraved in
the stone. After looking round, as though he were afraid of being seen,
he rapidly made the sign of the cross above the "tomb." If the miners
had been able to watch him just then, they would have been astonished to
his perpetually closed lips moving. But no one could have said whether
he only wished to speak or actually spoke, for none but himself heard
the vague murmur which issued from his lips.

On his left hand there was an extremely narrow passage; the old man
entered it, crawled through it, and stood upright again, for he had
reached the place where he worked, which was fairly roomy. However,
although one could stand upright in it, the place had a sepulchral
aspect.

The old man raised his lamp, whose tiny gleam lit up for a moment the
black walls discoloured by stains of yellowish rust. Here it was almost
dry and the light of the lamp revealed no moisture. Little irregular
heaps of ore dotted the ground. However, there was one damp corner, and
in it grew thickly together a little group of mushrooms with little flat
hoods of a sickly white colour on stalks which were also white and very
slender. The old man took care of them and avoided covering them with
any of the earth which he dug out. One day he had even brought to this
corner a piece of turf in the midst of which were some field-flowers.
But neither the buttercups nor the daisies consented to live without
the sun; they gradually died, fading away by stages like consumptives
who are deprived of the sun and of its warmth. Only one little flower
had a tougher life than the rest and held out a long time, although it
completely lost its colour in the eternal darkness of this tomb. Ivan
watched it with curiosity until it also hung its head over its
desiccated stalk. Then he had nothing left but the mushrooms and a kind
of greyish lichen which spotted the rock at intervals.

To-day old Ivan was very tired; he sat down on a heap of ore, placed his
little lamp in a niche of the rock, which was already blackened with
smoke, and buried his head in his hands. Not a single echo reached this
spot. A melancholy silence reigned in this vault, but the old man was
accustomed to it. He for whom the darkness was peopled by mysterious
apparitions vanishing as soon as they appeared, heard also strange
voices down here. Sometimes it was like the fragment of an incomplete
song or a distant call which pierced the silence. At other times, when
his pickaxe penetrated deeply the heart of the rock, he fancied he heard
a stifled sigh as if the tool had pierced the breast of a living
creature. All these vague sounds seemed to him full of significance.
Having nothing in common with the world of reality, he lived in fancies
and dreams.

Sometimes, after making sure that he