Peasant Tales of Russia

Excerpt

At the entrance of the Voskressensky mine stood a group of miners. All were quite silent.

It was still dark, for the autumn days begin late. Heavy grey clouds glided slowly over the sky, in which the first streaks of dawn were hardly visible. These clouds glided so low that they seemed to wish to lie on the earth in order to hide this black hole, this well-like orifice which was about to swallow up the miners one by one. The air was saturated with a cloud of damp dust, particles of which fell on the men's hair and faces. The miners wore leather jerkins, and small lamps, whose light flickered fitfully, hung at their belts. An imaginative person might have thought that they trembled with fear at having to descend into the heavy dense darkness of the mine.

"Listen, old man! You can never go down alone," said the young overseer to an old miner who was of tall stature, thin and withered. His long grey beard fell in disarray over his hollow chest, and his breath came and went with a thin whistling sound, as though the damp air of this dark morning found as much difficulty in entering as in leaving it. The features of the old miner's face were strongly marked, and his two black eyes burned in the depths of their sockets with a brilliant, almost fantastic light. This death's-head seemed almost buried from sight between two very high shoulders. When he walked, his back was arched, and his whole long body leaned forward, so that he seemed to be looking for something he had lost, or to be picking his steps very carefully. His feeble arms hung languidly by his side, and his legs tottered and gave way every moment under the weight of his body, slight as it was.

"You will never be able to descend the ladders! We will put you into the basket! Hullo! you fellows over there, come and help to start old Ivan!" the overseer called to the rest.

"Here we are, Father Ivan!" they cried, saying to each other jocosely, "Fancy his wishing to go down the ladders with us!"

The old miner turned towards them. It was a long time ago since he had been born in a mine about five versts distant which had been subsequently closed. His mother, who had lost her husband by the falling-in of one of the mine-galleries, continued to work in the same gallery after it had been repaired. Ivan had been born in the eternal darkness. His first cry had been drowned by the noise of blasting rocks, his first glance met nothing but the gloom of the subterranean gallery. He was hoisted to the surface of the ground in a large bucket full of ore. All the first impressions of his sad childhood were intimately connected with the mine where his mother, who was obliged to earn her living, always worked. As she had no one to whom to entrust the child, she took him with her, and he remained lying beside her, fixing his wide-open eyes on his mother's flickering lamp, while he sucked at his milk-bottle. It was this black hole which echoed to his laughter and his crying, especially to the latter. His mother, who was naturally taciturn, had scarcely time to caress her child, for she would have had to quit her work; when she heard the little one's sobs, she redoubled the blows of her pickaxe against the dark mass of coal, as though she wished by the noise they made to drown the feeble wailing of the infant....