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Yielding to the luxury of shelter and to the effect of the brandy, Jacob sank into a sweet sleep. Mendel had in the meantime reached the village and knocked at the first house. A moujik emerged and eyed him suspiciously. "What do you want?" he asked, gruffly. "We have been caught in the storm and my brother is out on the road, dying. Please help me bring him here."
"That goes a long way with the moujik." They walked on together through the lane of cottages, where furtive forms lurked in door-ways and behind curtains. And Paul had only one word of advice to give, upon which he harped continually: "Be thou very courageous be thou very courageous." Nothing new, for so it was written in the oldest book of all.
The moujik, ever susceptible to influence, has been quick to become infected with this bacillus of agnosticism, and while he still professes the faith and observes many of the forms as by habit, his fervor is cooling and already is grown luke-warm.
He is harassed by a ruthless tax-collector; he is shut off from the world by enormous distances over impracticable roads. When the famine comes, and come it assuredly will, the moujik has no alternative but to stay where he is and starve.
"But would the moujik pause to enquire, my very dear De Chauxville?" "At all events, I should not pause to answer," replied the Frenchman, in the same, light tone. "I should evacuate. Ah, mademoiselle," he went on, addressing Maggie, "they have been attempting to frighten you, I suspect, with their stories of disturbed peasantry. It is to keep up the lurid local color.
At last, during the day, on the 8th of September, the kibitka stopped suddenly. The horse refused to advance. Serko barked furiously. "What is the matter?" asked Michael. "A corpse!" replied Nicholas, who had leapt out of the kibitka. The body was that of a moujik, horribly mutilated, and already cold. Nicholas crossed himself. Then, aided by Michael, he carried the body to the side of the road.
In the morning the servants opened the bath-house, and there were the Fool of the World and the moujik, alive and well, lying on the stove and singing songs. They told the Tzar, and the Tzar raged with anger. "There is no getting rid of this fellow," says he. "But go and tell him that I send him this message: 'If you are to marry my daughter, you must show that you are able to defend her.
Clusters of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and all among them were clumps of old boots, shriveled skins, battered pans, scrap-iron, sheep-skins, useless touloupes, and on the floor musty old clothes, moth-eaten furs, and sheep-skin coats that even a moujik of the swamps would not have deigned to wear.
That, at least, is the explanation Mishka gave me when we rode through a heap of still smouldering and indescribably evil-smelling ruins, where there was no sign of life, beyond a few disreputable-looking pigs and fowls grubbing about in what should have been the cultivated ground. The peasant's holdings are inconceivably neglected, for the moujik is the laziest creature on God's earth.
Strengthened by persecution and smacking of the soil, it was no wonder that stoundism became the religion par excellence of the Russian moujik, assuming in time proportions that were truly disquieting to the authorities.
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