第15章

Taras Bulba and his sons had been in the Setch about a week.Ostap and Andrii occupied themselves but little with the science of war.The Setch was not fond of wasting time in warlike exercises.The young generation learned these by experience alone, in the very heat of battles, which were therefore incessant.The Cossacks thought it a nuisance to fill up the intervals of this instruction with any kind of drill, except perhaps shooting at a mark, and on rare occasions with horse-racing and wild-beast hunts on the steppes and in the forests.

All the rest of the time was devoted to revelry--a sign of the wide diffusion of moral liberty.The whole of the Setch presented an unusual scene: it was one unbroken revel; a ball noisily begun, which had no end.Some busied themselves with handicrafts; others kept little shops and traded; but the majority caroused from morning till night, if the wherewithal jingled in their pockets, and if the booty they had captured had not already passed into the hands of the shopkeepers and spirit-sellers.This universal revelry had something fascinating about it.It was not an assemblage of topers, who drank to drown sorrow, but simply a wild revelry of joy.Every one who came thither forgot everything, abandoned everything which had hitherto interested him.He, so to speak, spat upon his past and gave himself recklessly up to freedom and the good-fellowship of men of the same stamp as himself--idlers having neither relatives nor home nor family, nothing, in short, save the free sky and the eternal revel of their souls.This gave rise to that wild gaiety which could not have sprung from any other source.The tales and talk current among the assembled crowd, reposing lazily on the ground, were often so droll, and breathed such power of vivid narration, that it required all the nonchalance of a Zaporozhetz to retain his immovable expression, without even a twitch of the moustache--a feature which to this day distinguishes the Southern Russian from his northern brethren.It was drunken, noisy mirth; but there was no dark ale-house where a man drowns thought in stupefying intoxication: it was a dense throng of schoolboys.

The only difference as regarded the students was that, instead of sitting under the pointer and listening to the worn-out doctrines of a teacher, they practised racing with five thousand horses; instead of the field where they had played ball, they had the boundless borderlands, where at the sight of them the Tatar showed his keen face and the Turk frowned grimly from under his green turban.The difference was that, instead of being forced to the companionship of school, they themselves had deserted their fathers and mothers and fled from their homes; that here were those about whose neck a rope had already been wound, and who, instead of pale death, had seen life, and life in all its intensity; those who, from generous habits, could never keep a coin in their pockets; those who had thitherto regarded a ducat as wealth, and whose pockets, thanks to the Jew revenue-farmers, could have been turned wrong side out without any danger of anything falling from them.Here were students who could not endure the academic rod, and had not carried away a single letter from the schools; but with them were also some who knew about Horace, Cicero, and the Roman Republic.There were many leaders who afterwards distinguished themselves in the king's armies; and there were numerous clever partisans who cherished a magnanimous conviction that it was of no consequence where they fought, so long as they did fight, since it was a disgrace to an honourable man to live without fighting.There were many who had come to the Setch for the sake of being able to say afterwards that they had been there and were therefore hardened warriors.But who was not there? This strange republic was a necessary outgrowth of the epoch.Lovers of a warlike life, of golden beakers and rich brocades, of ducats and gold pieces, could always find employment there.The lovers of women alone could find naught, for no woman dared show herself even in the suburbs of the Setch.

It seemed exceedingly strange to Ostap and Andrii that, although a crowd of people had come to the Setch with them, not a soul inquired, "Whence come these men? who are they? and what are their names?" They had come thither as though returning to a home whence they had departed only an hour before.The new-comer merely presented himself to the Koschevoi, or head chief of the Setch, who generally said, "Welcome! Do you believe in Christ?"--"I do," replied the new-comer.

"And do you believe in the Holy Trinity?"--"I do."--"And do you go to church?"--"I do." "Now cross yourself." The new-comer crossed himself.