"Fire! Fire!" desperate shouts sounded from below. "The place is on fire!"
Those who were sitting above looked back and a terrible and extraordinary spectacle presented itself to them. From the thatched roof of one of the last cabins in the village rose a pillar of flame, seven feet high, which coiled and scattered sparks in all directions as though it were a fountain playing. And all at once the whole roof burst into bright flame, and the crackling of the fire was heard.
The moonlight was dimmed, and now the whole vil- lage was enveloped in a quivering red glow: black shadows moved over the ground, there was a smell of burning, and those who ran up from below were all gasping and trembling so that they could not speak; they jostled each other, fell down, and, unaccustomed to the bright light, could hardly see and did not recognize each other. It was terrifying. What was particularly frightening was that pigeons were flying in the smoke above the flames, and that in the tavern, where they did not yet know of the fire, people were still singing and playing the accordion as though nothing was wrong.
"Uncle Semyon's place is on fire," someone shouted in a loud, coarse voice.
Marya was rushing about near her cabin, weeping and wringing her hands, her teeth chattering, though the fire was a long way off, at the other end of the vil- lage. Nikolay came out in felt boots, the children ran about in their little shifts. Near the village policeman's cabin an iron sheet was struck. Boom, boom, boom! floated through the air, and this rapid, incessant sound sent a pang to the heart and turned one cold. The old women stood about, holding the icons. Sheep, calves, cows were driven out of the courtyards into the street; chests, sheepskins, tubs were carried out. A black stal- lion, that was kept apart from the drove of horses be- cause he kicked and injured them, was set free and ran back and forth through the village once or twice, neigh- ing and pawing the ground, then suddenly stopped short near a cart and started kicking it with his hind legs.
The bells in the church on the other side of the river began ringing.
Near the burning cabin it was so hot and so bright that every blade of grass on the ground was distinctly visible. On one of the chests that they had managed to carry out sat Semyon, a carrot-haired peasant with a long nose, wearing a jacket and a cap pulled down over his ears; his wife was lying face down, unconscious and moaning. A little old man of eighty with a big beard, who looked like a gnome, a stranger to the village, but apparently connected in some way with the fire, walked about near it, bareheaded, with a white bundle in his arms. The flames were reflected on his bald spot. The village headman, Antip Sedelnikov, as swarthy and black-haired as a gypsy, went up to the cabin with an ax, and hacked out the windows one after another—no one knew why—and then began chopping up the porch.
"Women, water!" he shouted. "Bring the enginel Shake a leg!"
The peasants who had just been carousing in the tavern were dragging up the engine. They were all drunk; they kept stumbling and falling down, and all had a helpless expression and tears in their eyes.
"Girls, water!" shouted the headman, who was drunk, too. "Shake a leg, girls!"
The women and the girls ran downhill to a spring, and hauled pails and tubs of water up the hill, and, after pouring it into the engine, ran down again. Olga and Marya and Sasha and Motka, too, all carried water. The women and the boys pumped the water; the hose hissed, and the headman, directing it now at the door, now at the windows, held back the stre^ with his finger, which made it hiss yet more sharply.
"He's a top-notcher, Antip is!" voices shouted approv- ingly. "Keep it up!"
Antip dove into the burning cabin and shouted from within.
"Pump! Lend a hand, good Orthodox folk, on the occasion of such a terrible accident!"
The peasants stood round in a crowd, doing nothing and staring at the fire. No one knew what to do, no one knew how to do anything, and there were stacks of grain and hay, piles of faggots, and sheds all about.
Kiryak and old Osip, his father, both tipsy, stood there, too. And, as though to justify his inaction, old Osip said to the woman lying on the ground:
"Why carry on so, friend? The cabin's insured—why worry?"
Semyon, addressing himself now to one person, now to another, kept telling how the fire had started.
"That same old man, the one with the bundle, a house-serf of General Zhukov's— He was cook at our general's, God rest his soul! He came over this evening: 'Let me stay the night,' says he. Well, we had a glass, to be sure. The wife got busy with the samovar—we were going to give the old man some tea, and in an un- lucky hour she set the samovar in the entry. And the sparks from the chimney blew straight up to the thatch; well, that's how it was. We were nearly burnt up our- selves. And the old man's cap got burnt up; it's a shame!"
And the sheet of iron was struck tirelessly, and the bells of the church on the other side of the river kept ringing. Ruddy with the glow, and breathless, Olga, looking with horror at the red sheep and at the pink pigeons flying through the smoke, kept running downwn the slope and up again. It seemed to her that the ring- ing had entered her soul like a sharp thorn, that the fire would never be over, that Sasha was lost. . . . And when the ceiling of the cabin fell in with a crash, the thought that now the whole village was sure to burn down made her faint, and she could no longer go on carrying water, but sat down on the edge of the slope, setting the buckets near her; beside her and below her, the peasant women sat wailing as though at a wake.
Then, from the village across the river, came men in two carts, bringing a fire-engine with them. A very young student, his white tunic wide open, rode up on horseback. There was the sound of axes. A ladder was placed against the burning frame of the house, and five men ran up it at once, led by the student, who was red in the face and shouted in a harsh, hoarse voice, and in the tone of one who was used to putting out fires. They pulled the house to pieces, a log at a time; they took apart the stable and the wattled fence, and removed the near-by stack of hay.
"Don't let them smash things!" cried stem voices in the crowd. "Don't let them."
Kiryak made his way to the cabin with a resolute air, as though he meant to prevent the newcomers from smashing things, but one of the workmen turned him round and hit him on the neck. There was the sound of laughter, the workman struck him again, Kiryak fell and crawled back into the crowd on all fours.
Two pretty girls in hats, probably the student's sisters, came from the other side of the river. They stood at a distance, looking at the fire. The logs that had been pulled away were no longer burning, but were smoking badly; the student, who was working the hose, turned the stream first on the logs, then on the peasants, then on the women who were hauling the water.
"Georges!" the girls called to him reproachfully and anxiously, "Georges!"
The fire was over. And only when the crowd began to disperse they noticed that day was breaking, that aU were pale and rather dark in the face, as people always appear in the early morning when the last stars are fad- ing. As they separated, the peasants laughed and cracked jokes about General Zhukov's cook and his cap which had been burnt; they already wanted to turn the fire into a jest, and even seemed sorry that it had been put out so soon.
"You were good at putting out the fire, sir!" said Oiga
334 the portable chekhov
to the student. "You ought to come to us in Moscow:
there we have a fire 'most every day."
"Why, do you come from Moscow?" asked one of the young ladies.