Chapter 35

The next day was a holiday. In the evening all the villagers,
their holiday clothes shining in the sunset, were out in the
street. That season more wine than usual had been produced, and
the people were now free from their labours. In a month the
Cossacks were to start on a campaign and in many families
preparations were being made for weddings.

Most of the people were standing in the square in front of the
Cossack Government Office and near the two shops, in one of which
cakes and pumpkin seeds were sold, in the other kerchiefs and
cotton prints. On the earth-embankment of the office-building sat
or stood the old men in sober grey, or black coats without gold
trimmings or any kind of ornament. They conversed among themselves
quietly in measured tones, about the harvest, about the young
folk, about village affairs, and about old times, looking with
dignified equanimity at the younger generation. Passing by them,
the women and girls stopped and bent their heads. The young
Cossacks respectfully slackened their pace and raised their caps,
holding them for a while over their heads. The old men then
stopped speaking. Some of them watched the passers-by severely,
others kindly, and in their turn slowly took off their caps and
put them on again.

The Cossack girls had not yet started dancing their khorovods, but
having gathered in groups, in their bright coloured beshmets with
white kerchiefs on their heads pulled down to their eyes, they sat
either on the ground or on the earth-banks about the huts
sheltered from the oblique rays of the sun, and laughed and
chattered in their ringing voices. Little boys and girls playing
in the square sent their balls high up into the clear sky, and ran
about squealing and shouting. The half-grown girls had started
dancing their khorovods, and were timidly singing in their thin
shrill voices. Clerks, lads not in the service, or home for the
holiday, bright-faced and wearing smart white or new red
Circassian gold-trimmed coats, went about arm in arm in twos or
threes from one group of women or girls to another, and stopped to
joke and chat with the Cossack girls. The Armenian shopkeeper, in
a gold-trimmed coat of fine blue cloth, stood at the open door
through which piles of folded bright-coloured kerchiefs were
visible and, conscious of his own importance and with the pride of
an Oriental tradesman, waited for customers. Two red-bearded,
barefooted Chechens, who had come from beyond the Terek to see the
fete, sat on their heels outside the house of a friend,
negligently smoking their little pipes and occasionally spitting,
watching the villagers and exchanging remarks with one another in
their rapid guttural speech. Occasionally a workaday-looking