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Updated: June 4, 2025
Fyokla, young and vigorous as a girl, with her black eyebrows and her loose hair, jumped off the bank and began splashing the water with her feet, and waves ran in all directions from her. "Shameless dreadfully!" repeated Marya. The river was crossed by a rickety little bridge of logs, and exactly below it in the clear, limpid water was a shoal of broad-headed mullets.
"They were flying looking for a home, and when the rain came down upon them they settled. If a swarm is flying, you need only sprinkle water on them to make them settle. Now if, say, you wanted to take the swarm, you would bend the branch with them into a sack and shake it, and they all fall in." Little Fyokla suddenly frowns and rubs her neck vigorously.
Fyokla suddenly broke into a loud, coarse howl, but immediately checked herself, and only uttered sobs from time to time, growing softer and on a lower note, until she relapsed into silence. From time to time from the other side of the river there floated the sound of the beating of the hours; but the time seemed somehow strange five was struck and then three. "Oh Lord!" sighed the cook.
Terenty stumbles over stumps and begins to slacken his pace. "Whereabouts is Danilka?" he asks. "Lead me to him." Fyokla leads him into a thicket, and, after going a quarter of a mile, points to Danilka. Her brother, a little fellow of eight, with hair as red as ochre and a pale sickly face, stands leaning against a tree, and, with his head on one side, looking sideways at the sky.
One morning, it was at the beginning of September, Fyokla, vigorous, good-looking, and rosy from the cold, brought up two pails of water; Marya and Olga were sitting meanwhile at the table drinking tea. "Tea and sugar," said Fyokla sarcastically. "The fine ladies!" she added, setting down the pails. "You have taken to the fashion of tea every day.
Marya, the wife of Nikolay's brother Kiryak, had six children, and Fyokla, the wife of Nikolay's brother Denis who had gone for a soldier had two; and when Nikolay, going into the hut, saw all the family, all those bodies big and little moving about on the lockers, in the hanging cradles and in all the corners, and when he saw the greed with which the old father and the women ate the black bread, dipping it in water, he realized he had made a mistake in coming here, sick, penniless, and with a family, too a great mistake!
Stunned by the blow, she did not utter a sound, but sat down, and her nose instantly began bleeding. "What a disgrace! What a disgrace!" muttered the old man, clambering up on to the stove. "Before visitors, too! It's a sin!" The old mother sat silent, bowed, lost in thought; Fyokla rocked the cradle.
The women the sisters-in-law Marya and Fyokla who had been working on the landowner's estate beyond the river, arrived home, too.
She did not remember the prayers, and usually in the evenings, before lying down to sleep, she would stand before the ikons and whisper: "Holy Mother of Kazan, Holy Mother of Smolensk, Holy Mother of Troerutchitsy..." Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves, fasted, and took the sacrament every year, but understood nothing.
Her daughter, the child who had been sitting on the stove and looked so apathetic, suddenly broke into loud weeping. "What are you howling for, you plague?" Fyokla, a handsome woman, also strong and broad-shouldered, shouted to her. "He won't kill you, no fear!"
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