King Stakh's Wild Hunt

I sat as one having lost his senses, noticing nothing. Ringing in my ears were the words that I had heard uttered some hours ago by one of the best of people.

“My heart aches… they go on, stray, perish, because it is shameful to stand still… and there is no resurrection for them after the crucifixion… But do you think that all were strangled? Years and years are ahead! What a golden, magic expanse is ahead! The sun!”

I began to groan. The future, murdered and growing cold in the rain, was lying here in my lap.

I wept, the rain flooded my eyes, my mouth. And my hands continued stroking this youth's golden head.

“My country! Wretched mother! Weep!”

Chapter The Twelfth

Crows sense a corpse from afar. The following day a police officer, a handsome man with a moustache, appeared in the Janoŭski region. He arrived without a doctor, examined the place of the murder, and with an air of importance that became a murder, said that because of the shower it was impossible to discover any traces of the crime. (Ryhor, who had accompanied him, only smiled bitterly into his moustache.) After examining the body of the murdered man, he turned the head around with his white fingers, and in a solemn voice, said:

“We-well! Finished him off how? Fell immediately.”

Then he drank vodka and had a bite to eat in Svetilpvich's house, in the room next to the hall in which the old servant was bitterly crying, his tears choking him, while I was sitting literally crushed by woe and remorse. At this time nothing existed for me besides the thin candle which Andrej held in his hands: it was throwing rosy streaks of light on his white shirt, the front of which was made of lace. It was an old shirt that the servant had dug out from a trunk. But I had to find out what the authorities thought about this murder and what they intended to do.

“Nothing, to our regret, nothing,” the police officer answered, his voice pleasant and well-modulated, his black velvety eyebrows playing. “This is a wild corner — impossible to carry out investigations here. I appreciate your noble grief… But what can be done here? Some years ago there was a vendetta here.” He pronounced it ‘vandetta’ and it was apparent he liked the word very much. “And we were powerless to do anything. Such a really damnable place. For example, we could have made you, too, answerable for this, because, as you yourself say, you applied a weapon against these… m-m… hunters. We won't do that. It's none of our business, not at all. Perhaps he was murdered because of a person of the beautiful sex. People say he was in love with this (he moved his eyebrows in satisfaction)… this lady, the mistress of Marsh Firs. Not bad… Or perhaps, this was a suicide? The deceased was a ‘melancholic’ fellow, ha-ha, suffered for the people.”

“But after all I myself saw the Wild Hunt.”

“Allow me not to believe you. Fairy-tales have outlived themselves… It seems to me that your acquaintance with him is, in general, somewhat m-m-… s-suspicious. I have no desire to complicate matters for you, however… it is also highly suspicious of you striving so stubbornly to shift the attention of the investigation onto others, onto some Wild Hunt.”

“I have a paper showing that he was enticed out of his house.”

The police-officer turned purple, his eyes became shifty.

“What paper?” he asked avidly, and he reached his hand out to me. “You must hand it over, and if it is considered that this scrap of paper is worth something, it will be filed with other material concerning this case.”

I hid the paper because neither his eyes nor his greedily outstretched hand inspired trust.

“I'll hand it over myself when and to whom I consider it necessary.”

“Well, so be it,” the police-officer swallowed something, “that's your own affair, most respected one. But I advise you not to tempt fate. The population here is a barbarous one,” he significantly looked at me, “they can kill.”' “I am not very much afraid of that. I can only say that if the police engage in discoursing instead of fulfilling their direct obligations, then it becomes necessary for the citizens themselves to take up their own defence. If the authorities exert all their efforts to hush up an affair, things give off a most unpleasant odour and make people think the most unpleasant thoughts.”

“What is this?” The brows of the police-officer began creeping smartly somewhere towards his hair: “Insulting the authorities, are you?”

“God forbid! But this gives me the right to send a copy of this letter to the provincial centre.”

“That's as you like,” the police-officer said, picking his teeth. “However, my dear Mr. Biełarecki, my advice to you is to reconcile yourself to things. And besides, it will hardly be pleasant for the authorities in the province to learn that a scientist is defending a former sedition-ary in this way.”

Gallantly, in a chesty baritone, he was persuading me: a father could not have been more attentive to his son than he was to me.