Page 64 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 5: The Spark Neglected Burns the House by Leo Tolstoy

servant, even as I had mercy on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, Notes
till he should pay all that was due. So shall also my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every
one his brother from your hearts.’-Matthew. xviii. 21-35.
There once lived in a village a peasant named Iván Stcherbakóf. He was comfortably off, in
the prime of life, the best worker in the village, and had three sons all able to work. The eldest
was married, the second about to marry, and the third was a big lad who could mind the
horses and was already beginning to plough. Ivan’s wife was an able and thrifty woman, and
they were fortunate in having a quiet, hard-working daughter-in-law. There was nothing to
prevent Iván and his family from living happily. They had only one idle mouth to feed; that
was Iván’s old father, who suffered from asthma and had been lying ill on the top of the brick
oven for seven years. Iván had all he needed: three horses and a colt, a cow with a calf, and
fifteen sheep. The women made all the clothing for the family, besides helping in the fields,
and the men tilled the land. They always had grain enough of their own to last over beyond
the next harvest and sold enough oats to pay the taxes and meet their other needs. So Iván and
his children might have lived quite comfortably had it not been for a feud between him and
his next-door neighbour, Limping Gabriel, the son of Gordéy Ivánof.
As long as old Gordéy was alive and Iván’s father was still able to manage the household, the
peasants lived as neighbours should. If the women of either house happened to want a sieve
or a tub, or the men required a sack, or if a cart-wheel got broken and could not be mended
at once, they used to send to the other house, and helped each other in neighbourly fashion.
When a calf strayed into the neighbour’s thrashing-ground they would just drive it out, and only
say, ‘Don’t let it get in again; our grain is lying there.’ And such things as locking up the barns
and outhouses, hiding things from one another, or backbiting were never thought of in those days.
That was in the fathers’ time. When the sons came to be at the head of the families, everything
changed.
It all began about a trifle.
Iván’s daughter-in-law had a hen that began laying rather early in the season, and she started
collecting its eggs for Easter. Every day she went to the cart-shed, and found an egg in the
cart; but one day the hen, probably frightened by the children, flew across the fence into the
neighbour’s yard and laid its egg there. The woman heard the cackling, but said to herself:
‘I have no time now; I must tidy up for Sunday. I’ll fetch the egg later on.’ In the evening she
went to the cart, but found no egg there. She went and asked her mother-in-law and brother-in-law
whether they had taken the egg. ‘No,’ they had not; but her youngest brother-in-law, Tarás,
said: ‘Your Biddy laid its egg in the neighbour’s yard. It was there she was cackling, and she
flew back across the fence from there.’

The woman went and looked at the hen. There she was on the perch with the other birds, her
eyes just closing ready to go to sleep. The woman wished she could have asked the hen and
got an answer from her.
Then she went to the neighbour’s, and Gabriel’s mother came out to meet her.
‘What do you want, young woman?’
‘Why, Granny, you see, my hen flew across this morning. Did she not lay an egg here?’

‘We never saw anything of it. The Lord be thanked, our own hens started laying long ago. We
collect our own eggs and have no need of other people’s! And we don’t go looking for eggs
in other people’s yards, lass!’
The young woman was offended, and said more than she should have done. Her neighbour
answered back with interest, and the women began abusing each other. Ivan’s wife, who had

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 59