'How about those Swabians?' asked the labourer.
Slimak sat down on the slope so that he could not be seen from the cottage, and pulled out his pipe.
'You might sit over there,' Maciek said, pointing with his whip to a raised place; 'then I could smell the smoke.'
'What's the good of the smoke to you? I'll give you my pipe to finish, and meanwhile it does not grieve the old woman to see me sitting here wasting my time.' He lit his pipe very deliberately, rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and looked into the valley, watching the crowd of Germans.
With their covered carts they had enclosed a square into which they had driven their cattle and horses; inside and outside of this the people were bustling about. Some put a portable manger on a stand and fed the cows, others ran to the river with buckets. The women brought out their saucepans and little sacks of vegetables and a crowd of children ran down the ravine for fuel.
'What crowds of children they have!' said Slimak; 'we have not as many in the whole village.'
'Thick as lice,' said Maciek.
Slimak could not wonder enough. Yesterday the field had been empty and quiet, to-day it was like a fair. People by the river, people in the ravines, people on the fields, who chop the bushes, carry wood, make fires, feed and water the animals! One man had already opened a retail-shop on a cart and was obviously doing good business. The women were pressing round him, buying salt, sugar, vinegar. Some young mothers had made cradles of shawls, suspended on short pitchforks, and while they were cooking with one hand they rocked the cradle with the other. There was a veterinary surgeon, too, who examined the foot of a lame horse, and a barber was shaving an old Swabian on the step of his cart.
'Do you notice how quickly they work? It's farther for them to fetch the firewood than for us, yet we take half the day over it and they do it before you can say two prayers.'
'Oh! oh!' said Maciek, who seemed to feel this remark as an aspersion.