They worked from dawn till sunset with all their strength, fastening their belts tight round their bodies to stifle the pangs of hunger.
The summer passed in heat-waves, thunder and lightning. The forest gabbled in the storms at night. Towards autumn it began to rustle, leafless, beneath the showers of rain. The rye, oats, millet, and buckwheat were carried into the corn-kilns and barns, and the fields lay stripped and bare.
The corn had been harvested; there was enough and to spare till the fallow crop was reaped. The air in the peasants' cottages was bedimmed by the smoke from the stoves; Grandfather Yonov the One-Eyed climbed on to his, to tell his grandchildren fairytales and to rest.
The nights grew dark and damp, the forest began to rumble, and wolves approached from the marshlands. A new couple had grown up, bowed to the winds and wedded; half the village had perished the previous winter, and it was necessary to breed. The people lived in their cabins together with the calves, the sheep, and the swine. They used splinters for lights, striking the light from flint.
Often at night starving people from the towns brought money, clothes, foot-ware, bundles of odds-and ends—in short anything they could steal from the towns and exchange for flour. They rapped on the windows like thieves.
The Kononov women sat at their looms while the men went a-preying in the forest. And so they toiled on stubbornly, sternly, alone, fighting hand-to-hand with the night, with the forest and with the frost. The crossways to the forests became choked, and they made new ways to the marshlands, to the Seven Brothers, to the wastelands. Life was hard and stern. The peasants looked out upon the world from beneath their brows, as their cottages from beneath the pines; and they lived gladsomely, as they should.
They knew it was the Rising. And in the Rising there could be no falling back.
Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky—and crossways!… Sometimes the crossways joined the main-road that ran alongside the railway. Both led to the towns where dwelt Those Others who had yearned to march over the crossways, who had made the main-roads straight as rules. And to the towns the elemental Rising of the Crossways brought death.
There, lamenting the past, in terror before the people's Rising, all were employed in offices filling up papers. All for safety held official positions, all to a man busying themselves over papers, documents, cards, placards, and speeches until they were lost in a whirlwind of words.
The food of the towns was exhausted; the lights had gone out; there was neither fuel nor water. Dogs, cats, mice, all had disappeared— even the nettles on the outskirts had been plucked by famished urchins as vegetable for soup. Into the cookhouses, whence cutlery had vanished, crowded old men in bowlers and bonneted old women, whose bony fingers clutched convulsively at plates of leavings.