Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE BERMONDSEY BOOK
ducks and snipe until he had cut down all the woods, left the fields
lying fallow, and abruptly flying from his ancestral estate, had come
to rest in Warsaw, where he was now selling soda-water from a
street-stall.
When a new, wiser master made his appearance, he went stick in
hand over all the fields, and frequently halted by the marshes, pulling
reflectively at his nose.
He grabbled in the mud with his hands, dug holes, measured, and
sniffed, until finally a strange idea occurred to him. He ordered the
bailiff to hire day-labourers to dig up the peat, to carry the ooze in
wheel-barrows to the fields, piling it up there in heaps, and to dig out
a hole until a basin had been prepared for a pondj then the banks
were to be reinforced, and a basin for another pond was to be dug
lower down, until a dozen or more were ready; next, trenches were to
to be cut, sluices built and the ponds stocked with fish.
Valek Gibala, a landless labourer lodging in the neighbouring
village, had immediately hired himself out for the cartage of the peat.
Gibala had been in the service of the previous master as ostler, but
he had not been kept on by the new owner. For to start with, the new
master and the new bailiff had immediately reduced the allowances
and wages, and secondly they looked for thievery everywhere. In the
old master's time every ostler had deprived his pair of horses of half
a gallon of oats, and had carried it off of an evening to the inn to
exchange for tobacco and cigarette papers or a drop of whisky. As
soon as the new bailiff arrived he detected this little habit, and as
suspicion fell on Valek in particular he boxed his ears and dimisssed him.
From that time Valek and his wife had lodged in the village, for he
was unable to obtain any other situation j the bailiff had given him such
a testimonial that it was impossible for him to apply anywhere at all
for work. They both made a little at harvest time by working here and
there for peasants $ but in winter and springtime they were consumed
with a terrible, unimaginable hunger. The huge, bony peasant with
his iron muscles went as thin as a rake, his face darkened, he grew
weak and walked with a stoop. His wife, as a woman will, lived on
her neighbours, gathered mushrooms, raspberries and strawberries,
carried them to the house or to the Jews and made enough at least
for a loaf of bread. But a peasant is not equal to threshing without
food. When the bailiff announced the digging job in the marshes the
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