Occasionally a peasant, after a walk in the woods, feels himself indisposed without any apparent reason for his indisposition. When this is the case it may be assumed with practical certainty that he has crossed the path of a liéshui. The sick man must immediately return to the wood, bearing an offering of bread, salt, and a clean napkin. Over these goods he must pronounce a prayer, afterwards leaving them behind him for the use of the goblin, and returning to his home, when the sickness will quickly pass from him. If any favour is to be asked of the liéshui, he may be invoked for this purpose by the following process: Cut down a number of young birches and place them in a circle, taking care that the tops all converge towards the centre. Then stand in the middle, take the cross from your neck—every Russian wears this—and pocket it, and call out "Grandpapa!" The spirit will instantly appear. There is "another way," as the cookery books would say: Go into the wood on St. John's Eve and fell a tree, taking care that it falls towards the west. Stand on the stump, facing east, and look down at your toes; then invoke the liéshui thus: "Oh! grandfather, come, but not in the form of a grey wolf, nor of a black raven; but come in the shape I myself wear!" Whereupon the spirit appears immediately in the form of a human being, and, like a man, prepared to make a bargain, if favours are asked. The liéshui has quite a strong sense of the great modern principle of quid pro quo, and generally gets the best of it in his dealings with mankind.
Yet another peculiarity of the wood-goblin is his love for startling and frightening those whose business compels them to journey through his domain. He will take up a position among the boughs of a tree under which the traveller must pass, suddenly giving vent, on the approach of the latter, to all manner of terrifying sounds—loud frenzied laughter, barking, neighing, bellowing, howling as of a wolf, anything that will startle or alarm the intruder.
Undoubtedly the wood-goblin is the cause of a vast amount of trouble to poor Ivan Ivanovitch; and he is, therefore, far from occupying the snug place which his cousin, the domovoy, enjoys in the national imagination. On the other hand, he might be very much worse than he is, and he is undoubtedly, with all his faults and shocking vices, infinitely preferable to that mean and skulking and treacherous relative of his, the vodyánnui.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BEAR THAT DIED OF CURSES
The village folk of Spask were a good-natured lot, as most Russian villagers are, and old Tatiana Danilovna was a popular character in the community for many sufficient reasons. In the first place she was a widow with several children, whom she did her best to support without begging, which is in itself a great distinction for any widow in a Russian village; and Tatiana, her special talents and qualifications apart, had but her late husband's little allotment of land, the portion of one soul (and oh, what a drunken soul was Yashka Shagin, while still under bondage to the flesh!), wherewith to feed the whole five of her brats. But then, as I have just hinted, Tatiana had talents of her own, which enabled her to supplement the meagre income producible from her bit of the communal land, which, but for this fortunate provision of nature in her favour, would have been just about enough to starve upon handsomely. The fact of the matter is, old Tatiana was a znaharka. If the reader were to look out this word in the dictionary he would probably find the English equivalent given as "a sorceress"; but this is not exactly the meaning of the name, which is derived from the root zna, and signifies rather "a woman who knows her way about." This much old Tatiana certainly did know, as well as most people, although I am sorry to say that her education in the usual fields of even elementary learning had been entirely overlooked. As znaharka she did a considerable business, however, in all of the following useful departments of that avocation. She gave her blessing to couples about to be married; and bold indeed would that couple have been who presumed to approach the hymeneal altar without having previously insured themselves against the onslaughts of the evil eye by undergoing the ceremony indicated. Besides this she did a fairish bit of exorcising, for there were always plenty of evil spirits knocking about near Spask, and the priest of the nearest church could not always be got at very conveniently; besides her fee was, naturally, lower than that of his reverence, who could not be expected to come all that distance and bring a large ikon with him into the bargain, for nothing; also, the priest had to be refreshed, while Tatiana was frugal to a fault in her habits, and was far too wise a woman to go near the village beer-shop at any time for drinking purposes. She would use the resort as a convenient place for haranguing the assembled souls, indeed, and visited it also occasionally in a benevolent way, to haul some boosing moujik out of the den before he should have drunk his soul out of his body. Then, again, Tatiana was the sage femme of the district, and ushered into the world every little squalling moujik that was unfortunate enough to be born into this vale of tears and poverty. Lastly, for even the tale of Tatiana's accomplishments must end somewhere, she was the medico of the place. Tatiana did not attempt surgery, but she knew a number of incantations and charms, which, of course, are the same thing without the vivisection. Faith and Tatiana together effected many a cure in Spask; and it is marvellous, when one thinks of it, how very simple a matter will set right our suffering bodies if we only know how to "do the trick." Tatiana knew how to do the trick, and had herbs and potent decoctions which were able to remove every disease, unless, indeed, it was God's will that the patient should die, in which case, of course, neither Tatiana, nor Professor Virchow, nor any one else, would have kept the poor creature alive. When Providence was willing that the sick person should enjoy a further lease of life, then Tatiana and her herbs and her occasional blood-letting were safe things to resort to, as all Spask well knew, and were as sure as anything could be to pull the patient through with flying colours. She also dealt in charms for the use of lovers, mothers (or would-be mothers), hunters, farmers, &c.; and could doctor horses and cows and dogs and poultry with wonderful success, always, of course, under the saving clause as to force majeure, in the way of interferences from Providence. I will merely add that Tatiana was dear to all children, whom she regaled with prianniki (biscuits) after a good stroke of business, and that the whole village feared as well as respected the old woman.
Such being Tatiana's position in the community, it is not surprising that the entire population of Spask were ready and willing to lend a hand whenever the word went round that the znaharka was about to mow her field of grass, or to dig up her potatoes, or whatever may have been the particular nature of the work to be done upon her bit of land. On the occasion which we have to consider to-day there was hay to be made, and as Tatiana's allotment adjoined others upon which a similar work had to be performed, nearly all the "souls," or ratepayers, of the village were present and busy with their scythes, while there was assuredly no single child in the place absent; all were there, tossing Tatiana's hay about ("tedding" is the word, I believe), and making themselves more or less useful and entirely happy over the job. The field was a large one, for it comprised the whole of the hay allotments of the souls of the community, about twenty-five in all; hence Tatiana's strip, which was but one twenty-fifth of the whole, was soon mown by so large a body of workers, who then passed on to the next strip, and thence to a third and a fourth, until all was mown. The field lay close up to the very edge of the pine forest, Tatiana's strip being actually the nearest to the wood, so that, as the work went on, the whole body of workers gradually drew further and further from the cover, until towards evening the busy, noisy crowd were at quite a considerable distance from the spot at the edge of the forest where work had commenced in early morning. On such occasions as mowing day at Spask there is no question of returning to the village during working hours; for once in a way Ivan Ivanich sticks to business, and meals, as well as any little refreshers of a liquid nature, are partaken of upon the spot; hunks of black bread tied up in red handkerchiefs, salted herrings in grimy bits of newspaper, and kvass, in dirty-looking bottles, forming the principal items of the food and drink brought by the moujiks to be consumed upon the ground. Kvass is a drink to which I should recommend every reader to give a very wide berth, for it is without exception the nastiest decoction that ever the perverted ingenuity of mankind invented, and is calculated to nauseate the toughest British palate to such an extent that the said Britisher will flee the country rather than taste the noxious stuff a second time.
On this occasion there was quite an array of red handkerchiefs left at the edge of the field, together with sundry loose hunks of black bread and other comestibles, and half-a-dozen tiny children of a non-perambulating age, which latter had been brought to the field by their mothers for the excellent reason that there was no one left in the village to look after them, and were now peacefully sleeping, like so many little bundles of rags, each under the tree selected by its parent for the office of shade-giver. Assuredly not one of the red-shirted souls so busily wielding their scythes, or of the gaily-kerchiefed women tossing and drying the grass, ever bethought herself of the possibility of danger to the little ones thus left a hundred or so of yards away: for who would hurt them? There were no gipsies to carry them away, or brigands—they had never heard of such gentry; it was perfectly safe, and nobody bothered his head about the babies. Therefore it came as a terrible shock to every person present when of a sudden some one raised the cry: "Medvyed, medvyed!" (a bear, a bear!) There was no mistake about it, it was indeed a bear, and a big one, too—"the tsar of the bears," as a moujik expressed it afterwards. The brute was apparently busy searching among the red handkerchiefs for something to eat, when first seen; but at the general shout or howl of fear and surprise which immediately arose from the whole body of peasants in the field, he raised his nose and deliberately scanned the assembled villagers, showing his teeth and growling unpleasantly.
The villagers were too frightened, at first, to either move or utter a sound. The spectacle of a bear in their midst was too unusual in that portion of Russia in which Spask lay to be other than intensely horrifying. Spask did not even boast of an ochotnik, or hunter, among its inhabitants; the population, one and all, were as ignorant of the best course to pursue under the circumstances as though the foul fiend himself had suddenly appeared among them, and their tongues, as well as their arms, were absolutely paralysed with amazement and terror.
Meanwhile the bear, seeing that none seemed anxious to dispute his presence, turned his attention to the red bundles which contained the food whose good smell had probably attracted him, visiting several of these in turn and rolling them about in his attempts to get at their contents. Then he visited a bundle which contained a baby. The child was, fortunately, fast asleep; neither did it awake when Bruin rolled it over to sniff at it; if it had moved the consequences might perhaps have been fatal. But, as matters turned out, the child slept on, and the bear, satisfied that it was dead, left it. Then at length the spirit of the assembled population returned to them, and, as though with one accord, the entire crowd gave vent to a shriek of relief and rage; men began to finger their scythes and women their rakes, and the whole assembly moved a step or two towards the intruder. Then Bruin began to think that discretion was, perhaps, after all, the better part of valour, and, with a few savage snarls and grunts, he retired into the forest, stepping upon a sleeping baby as he withdrew, and causing the child to wake and scream with pain or fright. Then he disappeared among the dark pines, moaning and grunting so as to be heard for a considerable distance.
The villagers lost no time in rushing to the assistance of the screaming child, now that danger was over; when it was seen that the baby was quite uninjured, and, further, that the child was a relative and goddaughter of old Tatiana, whose bundle of black bread the bear had also honoured with particular attention. These facts amounted, in the minds of the good people of Spask, to a coincidence. Why had the brute thus chosen out the znaharka for special and deliberate insult? Undoubtedly he was an evil spirit, and these acts of hostility on his part directed against the chief local enemy of evil spirits must be regarded as something in the nature of a challenge. Tatiana's bread was all eaten or spoiled, and Tatiana's godchild still lay screaming, though unhurt, in her mother's arms. There was more in this than appeared on the surface.