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Updated: May 21, 2025
The next moment the barefooted, red-cheeked young woman showed herself at the gate, and asked in tones rather less vehement than recently: "Are you coming, or are you not?" "Presently," replied Ufim. "One thing at a time."
One of the old women shook her head vigorously at this, and croaked: "The badness lies not in any word of a priest, but in what you yourself have just said. You are greyheaded, Ufim, yet often you speak without thought." Presently Ufim's wife reappeared, and, waving her hands as though she were brandishing a sieve, began to vent renewed volleys of virulent abuse.
"Ufim!" came at this moment in the strident voice of a woman unseen, but incensed; upon which my companion bestowed upon me a sidelong nod, and muttered with an air of appreciation: "THERE'S lungs for you!" Whereafter, he fell to twitching the toes of a chafed and blackened foot, and to gazing at their nails. His next question was: "Are you, maybe, a scholar?" "Why do you ask?"
"As a Psalter a book?" No answer followed. Faster and faster the southern night went on descending, and wiping the land clean of heat, as though that heat had been dust. Upon me there came a feeling that I should like to go and bury myself in some sweet-smelling hay, and sleep there until sunrise. "Maybe Panek has one of those things?" hazarded Ufim after a long pause.
"My God," she cried, "what sort of a man is that? Why, a man who neither speaks nor listens, but for ever keeps baying at the moon like a dog!" "NOW she's started!" Ufim drawled. Westward there were arising, and soaring skyward, clouds of such a similarity to blue smoke and blood-red flame that the steppe seemed almost to be in danger of catching fire thence.
At intervals there came vented from the window above my head the hot odour of a dead body; and, whenever that happened, the dog's grey nostrils and muzzle would quiver, and its eyes would blink pitifully as it gazed aloft. Glancing at the heavens, Ufim remarked with conviction: "There will be no rain tonight." "Do you keep such a thing as a Psalter here?" I inquired. "Such a thing as a what?"
"Aye, never a good word dies, but, wheresoever it be uttered, flies thence through the world like a swallow." Ufim corroborated this with a nod. "True indeed!" he remarked. "Though also it has been said that a good word is Christ's, and a bad word the priest's."
One of them was as rotund and dishevelled as a battered, leathern ball, and the other one was a woman bony and crooked of back, swarthy of skin, and irritable of feature. At the women's feet lay, lolling out a rag-like tongue, a shaggy dog which, red and pathetic of eye, could boast of a frame nearly as large as a sheep's. First of all, Ufim related in detail how he had fallen in with myself.
Also, as evening descended, I could see an ever-increasing number of grey shadows come creeping forth from the forecourt's recesses, and overlaying and darkening the turf. "One day all of us must die," remarked Ufim, with empressement as he tapped the bowl of his pipe against a wall.
Next there popped up from somewhere or another a barefooted young woman. Clapping her hands, she bawled: "Here, you Ufim, how I have been calling for you, and calling for you!" "Eh? Well, I never heard you." "Where were you, then?" By way of reply, my conductor silently pointed in my direction with the stem of his pipe.
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