Part 9

She was sitting up.... She could walk a little.... She dressed herself and came out on the porch. They were kind. They never asked her anything. She knew they hoped she would tell them. The husband spoke clumsily to her. They were sorry--could they help her? She shook her head.

Early in the morning she awoke. She felt quite clear. She must be on the road. She dressed hastily, quietly, was out of the house. The road led her. She walked fast, following it through the forest. She did not know where she went. She simply went on. By and by she would come out of the forest and there would be a town and there she would step off the road.

She walked quickly, she felt so light. She was light for her Sin was gone. She walked quickly for a long time. She became tired. She sat down to rest. Nothing within her urged her on. There was a great emptiness within her, a consuming emptiness. She felt how heavy her breasts were and how great her emptiness was. She wanted to go up in the forest and lie down. She did not dare. The forest and earth seemed allied against her, trees and earth together, their oneness held her out.

She had a desire that the roots of the trees should take hold on her, disintegrate her, find a place for their support and nourishment. A great and horrible yearning took hold on her. She yearned that her emptiness should be filled, she yearned for her Sin, for the bundle that held her Sin, she yearned to nourish her Sin....

She threw herself in the dust of the road and sobbed. The forest repudiated her. The wall of the forest pushed her into the road. She was one with the road. Nothing grew out of her; she nourished nothing. She was a way, to be passed over, trampled upon....

She felt the throbbing ache of her breasts in the dust. She arose and stood quiet, looking sombrely at the dark, unrelenting wall of forest. Then she walked slowly along. Sadly, drearily, the life that lay behind her, the life that she had shut out from her when her feet first set out upon the road, began to filter back into her bruised mind. It came as something she had known long ago, so long that it seemed as though it must have been quite another life, and she another person, a young dreaming girl, moving about in the big white house set on the great planted space up against the forest, learning from a shadowy placid woman who called her daughter the ways of the little world of which she was a part, teased by a shadowy kindly man when the woman was not there to hear, captured by the shadowy grown-up figure of the little boy who had played games with her, come back from school and travel a mysterious young man....

How far away it was, how far and how long, long ago! Slowly, slowly, she walked along the road through the forest, carrying in her the dream fragments of her shattered world. Soon she would come out of the forest and there would be a town and there she would step off the road. She would leave the road that went on ceaselessly, in and out of forest, through towns, and again through forest.

[7] Copyright, 1922, by George H. Doran Company. Copyright, 1923, by Edna Bryner.

NATALKA’S PORTION[8]

By ROSE GOLLUP COHEN

(From _The Pictorial Review_)

Sabinka lay buried in snow. The hills, the forest, the lake, all lay hard, white, glittering, and the air also glittered and stung and cut.

Looking toward the village, the two rows of huts looked small, insignificant, mere specks of time-grayed timber weighed down with snow. Over each speck a thread of smoke rose, going straight up into the still, glittering air. Within, doors and windows sealed, the peasants huddled for warmth, here and there, together with their animals, to keep them alive, or for the life that they could give. In the chimneyless huts even the smoke was kept in for the warmth it gave. It poured from the oven into the room and hung there from the ceiling. Beneath it the peasants went about, their bodies bent to the ground. When at last the smoke settled on ceiling and walls they still went about bent, from habit now, and peering with weakened eyes.

Then winter ended! Suddenly, as if it spent itself in its own cruelty, it ended. The sun came out warm. From the ragged straw roofs of the huts the snow slipped and melted and fell in a thick shower. Birds appeared. The peasants came out to look at their fields. Their faces were sallow and pinched, and the smoke soaked into the skin showed plainer in the strong light.

The snow blackened with every moment, and suddenly the earth lay bare. The men began to scatter over the fields. The women tended nearer home.

One afternoon, when the air was sweet with the warmth and the moisture of the earth, and in the pastures about the village Sabinka a tint of green showed faintly, Katherina came to her husband, Gavrelo, where he was mending the fence around the field to be planted with wheat.

“Gavrelo,” she said, “I have come to plead with you again about the marriage portion of our daughter Natalka.” She stood meekly, a clumsy little body in a red plaid shawl. Her face was steaming with heat and perspiration, and her worn birch-bark sandals were clogged with earth from the soggy fields.

Gavrelo had not looked up when she had been coming to him through the fields, and now it was as if she were not there. Near him lay a pile of poles, a heap of freshly cut twigs and a hatchet. He selected a long, pliant twig and began twisting it in and out between two poles as a bar-rest. His face was sullen. He was short and wide and brown; his thick hair and beard, and worn homespun clothes, and his weather-beaten skin, all were brown. He was like the powerful trees about him, and, like these deep-rooted trees, he looked as capable of being moved.

Katherina turned her eyes away from him. It crushed her to see him so. It had always crushed her--even so long ago when he used to come to court her at her father’s house--the way he would sit there of a Sunday, sullen, silent, never a kind word, never a smile, contrary, scowling at the whole world.

“Gavrelo,” she repeated her sentences in a way peculiar to the people of Sabinka, “I have come to plead with you about Natalka’s marriage portion.” Her voice was full of restrained passion.

“Look, Gavrelo, at your home.” She pointed to a hut across the great field. In one of the two dingy windows a young girl could be seen, though vaguely, at a spinning-board.

“There is your home. Moldy and rotten, it is sinking to the ground. You were supposed to have built twenty years ago, soon after we were married. All you have built are barns. There they stand, shaming your house. And there is your daughter, as pretty as the prettiest in Sabinka, in that rotting home. Yet, Gavrelo, have I ever pestered you about it? But now it is about Natalka that I beg you.” Her clumsy little body leaned toward him. But her voice became more patient, more restrained.

“Gavrelko!” She used the diminutive, and then stood dumbly looking down a moment. Yes, she could have cared for him if he had let her. “Gavrelko, you are not going to send Natalka away without a portion to her husband’s home, a strange home in a strange village! You are not going to do it!”

Dumb and silent, Gavrelo’s scowl never relaxed. It was always so, always--except--except when he stood looking at his fields--at his wheat. Then his furrowed face smoothed and the light in his eyes reflected the light in the fields.

Gavrelo now selected a long pole, sharpened it, and began driving it into the ground. “Hagh!” his breath echoed, and the pole sank deep into the earth.

“And you have so much, Gavrelo.” She glanced about. Their hut stood a good distance away from the village, and all surrounding it was Gavrelo’s.

“All that, all about us is yours, and your barns are stacked with wheat. You will not send Natalka away with empty hands.” Her own clasped in agony. “You won’t do it. I know, Gavrelo, how bitter it is to come with empty hands.” Her head drooped, her voice sank low.

“I know how it is. I came to your home, Gavrelo, without a portion. My people were very poor. You have never thrown it up to me, Gavrelo, but your mother cast it in my face every day as long as she lived. And I was never able to lift my head.”

Gavrelo’s face was turned from her, and he worked on steadily.

“And Natalka, too, is marrying into a large family. It is perhaps a disadvantage to marry into a large family. There are so many to find fault with your ways, a mother-in-law and sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law. All watching and criticizing you. And when you have come without a portion--Ach! Gavrelko! They will throw it up to her, the mother-in-law and the sisters-in-law--and--and even Simyonka--Simyonka is a fine fellow. And yet--in a quarrel--would he not remember?” She began to weep passionately. “You won’t do it, Gavrelo. And Natalka has really earned it. You know how she can spin and weave. Her cloth is straight and fine. And during the harvest she has been among the quickest hands. You won’t bring this shame upon her, Gavrelo!”

Gavrelo turned to her. At last she had touched him. His face was distorted with anger, and he stopped his work for a moment. “Why does she want to marry, the fool!” The words burst from him through his teeth, and he bent down to pick up his tools. He had finished the fence. Katherina stared at him.

“What--what else do you expect? Oh! It is a harvest hand you are thinking of!” Then realizing that he was going, she ran to him.

“Gavrelo!” she cried, “what do you say? What will you say when at the wedding Simyonka’s father will ask, ‘And what do you give Natalka as her portion?’ What will you say, Gavrelo?”

Gavrelo lifted a few poles to his shoulder and slipped the hatchet into his girdle. “I told you,” he said doggedly. “Simyonka has enough!” And he walked away with his long, even stride, his sandals making deep prints in the soft earth.

Katherina staggered to the newly mended fence and buried her face in her arms. “_Ach, Boshi Moi!_” she cried. With the habit of the lonely she talked to herself. Gavrelo did not tolerate neighbors. Indeed, he was hated because of his hardness and meanness.

“Life is bitter,” she wept. Her own had been a cruel fate.

“You have come like a beggar.” Her mother-in-law had cast it in her face. And now her own fate was to be Natalka’s fate! And why? Because Gavrelo was an unnatural father, because he was stingy and cared for nothing--but--his fields, his wheat, more and more wheat. His barns were stacked with wheat. He kept them under lock and key, and he sowed still more wheat. She raised her head and looked about. This field was to be all wheat, acres and acres. And Natalka was to go to her husband like a beggar. “They will throw it up to her, the mother-in-law and the sisters-in-law. And Natalka is young; she will never be able to lift her head!” Her own head sank into her arms again.

It was late when she started for the hut. The red sun hung on the very edge of the forest. She picked her way to a back road not far off which would be less soggy than the fields, though roundabout and longer. Trudging along, her eyes on the path, her sandals heavy with the mud, she at once upbraided and defended Gavrelo, and analyzed and schemed.

It would take so little to give Natalka a fine portion. There, for instance, was the little pig, only a year old, but so aggressive that he had to be fed with the old hogs. Parshuchuck would be an excellent gift. He could take care of himself anywhere. Even in a litter of strange pigs he could hold his own. Also there was Chulka, a heifer, for whom no fence was too high. She used her knobby little horns with such skill that often won a long stare of surprise from the old cows. Chulka, too, could take care of herself in a strange herd. These two would be an excellent gift. It would be pleasant for little Natalka to have something of her own that was alive, in a strange home, in a strange village. Parshuchuck and Chulka might even be an example to her, not to bend her head too low.

But what was the use in thinking about it? “Ach! The mean peasant! The unnatural father!” She stumbled, unable to see the path through her tears.

“Bah! They are fools, those wise men,” she shook her head disgustedly. “They are fools who say that it is better to have a relative rich, though a miser, than one who is poor and generous. Both are like death. Can you take from the miser? Nor can you take from the one who has nothing to give.”

Presently, on reaching a sudden turn in the road, she heard a merry voice babbling incoherent fits of song. That was Addom on his way home from the _kabock_. Addom was a drunkard. He drank like a fish. Addom, too, was often idle, she mused. Gavrelo never drank, though he liked a glass of vodka. But what would Gavrelo do in a _kabock_ where men talked as they drank? Gavrelo never talked to any one. He only worked. That was why her parents had made her marry him instead of Addom, who drank and who never kept his word, just as Gavrelo never broke his word. But Addom’s daughter Anulia, who was also to marry this spring, was to receive one of her father’s two cows as her wedding-gift. Anulia Addom also wore machine-made stockings which she bought from the Jewess Deborah--stockings and boots every Sunday! Natalka bound her ankles in cloths and wore birch-bark sandals to church. Katherina shook her head. A man who drank was perhaps better-natured, more generous.

Reaching the yard, she saw Natalka still in the window spinning.

Natalka was eighteen. She was small like her mother, but she was rosy and healthy. Her hair lay in two thick, brown braids on her back. Her faded red kerchief was tied with a coquettish knot, and her little round nose had a mischievous tilt. But just now she was neither coquettish nor mischievous. She was very earnest. Her wedding was to be the first in the village this spring, and she was hurrying to finish all her mother’s spinning before it came. Her hands twirled the spindle rapidly; her head scarcely moved except to moisten the thread with her lips, or to extricate a knot in the flax with her small white teeth.

Katherina watched her a moment. Should she tell her--that her father would send her away with empty hands? No! There was time enough. But as she stood watching she saw Natalka stop her work suddenly; her hands became still, her head drooped for a moment. In agony, Katherina wondered. Could she know, then? Perhaps she guessed! Katherina turned away from the window.

About the yard all the buildings stood facing in a semicircle, the hut, the barns, the pig-pen, the chicken-coop. Katherina went toward the coop. In the barn she heard Gavrelo. He rarely forgot the keys. “He rarely forgets them,” she muttered to herself. The corners of her mouth lifted firmly. “Well, Natalka shall have a fine trousseau, anyway. Her _kubial_, at any rate, shall not go off empty!”

Late that night the full moon rose, and Sabinka, with its two rows of huts, its hills and dales and lakes, lay transformed in silver light.

In the shadow of the fences a woman went stealing along. Climbing, here forcing a way through the bars, running a step where the shadow broke, and again lingering where it resumed, she reached a small hut standing in the full light. She rapped on the door and shook the latch impatiently.

“Open, Deborah!” she whispered. “It is I, Katherina.” A tall, thin woman with a white kerchief about her head came out on the threshold.

“So late, Katherina!”

“Yes, and I must hurry back. Here.” Katherina took a large ball of thread from her _swita_ pocket. “You are to knit a pair of stockings for my daughter Natalka’s wedding,” she whispered. “But mind, Jewess,” her voice rose suspiciously, “you are to return to me what is left of the thread.”

“We are not thieves!” came from Deborah in a tone hurt, yet patient.

“Well, perhaps not,” Katherina said, softening slightly. “Perhaps not. But all Jews are swindlers.”

“We are what we are forced to be.” Restraint and infinite patience were in Deborah’s voice. Hesitating an instant, she turned suddenly. “Look, Katherina, would you not much rather come along the road, in the light of day, to order stockings for Natalka, instead----”

“Do you mean to insinuate, Jewess?” Katherina flamed.

“No, no,” Deborah hastened to assure her. “I am not insulting you. I am not blaming you. I just want you to see, Katherina, how one may be forced to become what one does not want to be.”

“Well,” said Katherina, somewhat mollified, “I suppose so. I suppose Jews, like people, have their troubles.”

Carefully she put her hand into her bosom and counted slowly six eggs into the apron Deborah held out. “There,” she said, brushing her hands with an air as if the transaction was quite satisfactorily completed.

“My dear Katherina!” Deborah exclaimed, “you expect me to knit a pair of stockings for six eggs?”

“How much then?” Katherina’s voice was suspicious again and cross.

“Twelve, Katherina; at least twelve. This is not winter, you know.”

“In the next village----”

“I know,” Deborah broke in. “In the next village lives a Jewess who knits a pair of stockings for six eggs. Don’t believe it, Katherina. It’s a fairy-tale. Anyway, I cannot do it. We have to live, too. And little Miriam is growing up. There is no chance for a penniless girl here, a girl without a dowry.” Deborah’s voice came brooding.

Katherina put her hand into her _swita_ again. The trouble of a dowry she could easily understand.

“Here, Deborah,” she said sympathetically, “here are twelve eggs. But remember every inch of the thread you are to return. And don’t let your blind mother-in-law knit the stockings. She might drop a stitch!”

A whispered good night followed, and Katherina stole forth into the shadows again.

The village peeped through a mist of tender green buds. Warm sunshine, dazzling blue skies were continuous. Scattered over the fields far and near the peasants were. Mere specks between earth and sky, their bodies moved slowly, heavily, all day long. Nearer the homes the women labored, digging in the gardens, bleaching at the lake. At dawn and after dark they took the time to prepare for the weddings in the village.

When the mud in the road had dried a peddler came driving through the village with summer finery and pots to sell.

“Pots to sell! Earthen pots to sell!” the peddler cried in a ringing voice. And the dogs barked, and the children stared, and the women left their work and hurried to the wagon with their bundles of rags.

Katherina was digging a draining-canal between two long beds in the garden. When the peddler stopped at her gate she left her spade and looked around. Natalka was at the lake bleaching. And Gavrelo--she could see him in a far field, his arm swinging rhythmically back and forth. Hastening to the outhouse, she came out with two bundles, one of rags, and one small sackful of wheat. She carried it with difficulty and threw it over the fence into the road, where it lay hidden among some weeds.

“Did you see, little Jew?” she called to the peddler. “It is wheat!”

“I saw,” the peddler answered significantly. He was as accustomed to this kind of transaction among the peasants as they themselves were.

Katherina hurried out to the wagon and climbed onto the axle.

“Quick, little Jew, let me see what you have. And don’t think you can rob me. Wheat is dear now! Have you ribbons? And I want two red bandannas, but of different patterns. And show me beads. Have you got rings? Yes, show me that one with the red stone.”

And the peddler measured, using the length of his arm, and watched Katherina. And she picked and fussed and worried in indecision, her eyes never quite leaving the distant field where Gavrelo was working.

Her selections made finally, she gathered them into her apron jealously, and a haggling ensued between the two, not unlike the transaction some weeks earlier at Deborah’s hut.

“Now, peddler, how much? That sack of wheat is almost a bushel.”

“Almost!” he cried. “That should have been a full bushel for all you have taken.”

“Don’t shriek!” she paled. “There are those rags. What do you give for the rags?”

“The rags go to make up the full bushel of wheat.” His dark eyes snapped.

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Take it! Take it! You are a robber.” She climbed down and hurried away. The peddler threw his bundles into the wagon and touched his pony with the end of his whip, his dark eyes measuring the distance to the next hut.

Katherina breathed a sigh of relief as his wagon creaked away, and she slowly entered the deep interior of the outhouse which adjoined the living room. It was late afternoon, and the road was hot and dusty. But here it was cool and dark; the only light came from the door opening on the garden path.

In the dimmest corner Natalka’s _kubial_ stood, filled with her trousseau. Katherina reached it by a small step-ladder and dipped down into its tank-like body. She touched and patted the cool, smooth linens, heavily embroidered and plain pieces. She added the newly-purchased treasures. Yes, Natalka’s _kubial_ was filling--but of the portion there was no prospect. She sighed hopelessly. There was no prospect, and the day of the wedding was drawing nearer. Gavrelo had ordered vodka from the _kabock_, and told her she might have all the pork she wanted for the wedding-feast. But that was all. Natalka must enter into a strange family owning nothing, come with nothing belonging to her, nothing familiar. Everything she will look at will be strange, his! Nothing that she had brought, that she could feel pride in. “_Ach, Boshi Moi!_”

She finally climbed down the ladder. It had grown late. Outside the mellow sunset lay full on the path and the bit of road she could see before the gate. But in the outhouse the dimness was quite deep. And the living room, through its door, looked out at her, a dark hole with its sooty walls; the two tiny windows in it admitted but little light. Only one bright spot--the icon in vivid red and blue of the “Gracious Mother” looked out at her from the dimness.