XIV

After he had dined he smoked and looked out of the window. It had grown dark. He knew that in the servants’ wing they were already baking the twisted buns of rye flour⁠—the “ceremonial patties.” They were making ready to boil two kettles of fish in jelly, a kettle of vermicelli-paste, a kettle of sour cabbage soup, a kettle of buckwheat groats⁠—all fresh from the slaughterhouse. And Syery was making himself very busy on a hillock of snow between the storehouses and the shed. On the snow-mound, in the bluish shades of twilight, there blazed with an orange-coloured flame the straw with which they had surrounded the slaughtered pig. Around the fire, awaiting their prey, sat the sheep dogs. Their muzzles shone white; their breasts were of a silky rose hue. Syery, stamping through the snow, ran hither and thither, mending the fire, swinging his arms at the dogs. He had tucked up high the tails of his coat, thrusting them into his belt, and kept pushing his cap to the back of his head with the wrists of his right hand, in which glittered a knife. Fleetingly and brilliantly illuminated, now from this side, now from that, Syery cast a huge, dancing shadow on the snow⁠—the shadow of a pagan. Then, past the storehouse along the footpath leading to the village, ran Odnodvorka, and disappeared beneath the snow-mound⁠—to summon the women for the ceremonial rites and to ask Domashka for the fir-tree, carefully preserved in her cellar and passed on from one bride’s party to another on the eve of the wedding. And when Kuzma, after brushing his hair and changing his round jacket with the ragged elbows for the conventional long-tailed frock coat, had donned his overcoat and emerged upon the porch, all white with the falling snow in the soft grey gloom, a large crowd of children, little girls and boys, were still outlined blackly against the lighted windows; they were screaming and talking, and three accordions were being played simultaneously, and all playing different tunes. Kuzma, his shoulders hunched, picking at his fingers and