‘Ah! he’s a fine lad,’ said the Elder.
‘But I’m at the end of my tether with him! To-morrow I shall let Ignát come, and his wife wanted to come too.’
‘All right – let them come,’ said the Elder, rising and climbing onto the stove. ‘What is money? Money is dross!’
‘If one had the money, who would grudge it?’ muttered one of the inn-keeper’s men, lifting his head.
‘Ah, money, money! It causes much sin,’ replied Dútlov. ‘Nothing in the world causes so much sin, and the Scriptures say so too.’
‘Everything is said there,’ the workman agreed. ‘There was a man told me how a merchant had stored up a heap of money and did not want to leave any behind; he loved it so that he took it with him to the grave. As he was dying he asked to have a small pillow buried with him. No one suspected anything, and so it was done. Then his sons began looking for his money and nothing was to be found. At last one of them guessed that probably the notes were all in the pillow. The matter went to the Tsar, and he allowed the grave to be opened. And what do you think? They opened the coffin. There was nothing in the pillow, but the coffin was full of small snakes, and so it was buried again.… You see what money does!’
‘It’s a fact, it brings much sin,’ said Dútlov, and he got up and began saying his prayers.
When he had finished he looked at his nephew. The lad was asleep. Dútlov came up to him, untied the girdle with which he was bound, and then lay down. Another peasant went out to sleep with the horses.
IX
As soon as all was quiet Polikéy climbed down softly, like a guilty man, and began to get ready. For some reason he felt uneasy at the thought of spending the night there among the recruits. The cocks were already crowing to one another more often. Drum had eaten all his oats and was straining towards the drinking-trough. Polikéy harnessed him and led him out past the peasants’ carts. His cap with its contents was safe, and the wheels of the cart were soon rattling along the frosty road to Pokróvsk. Polikéy felt more at ease only when he had left the town behind. Till then he kept imagining that at any moment he might hear himself being pursued, that he would be stopped, and they would tie up his arms instead of Elijah’s, and he would be taken to the recruiting station next morning. It might have been the frost, or it might have been fear, but something made cold shivers run down his back, and again and again he touched Drum up. The first person he met was a priest in a tall fur cap, accompanied by a one-eyed labourer. Taking this for an evil omen Polikéy grew still more alarmed, but outside the town this fear gradually passed. Drum went on at a walking pace and the road in front became more visible. Polikéy took off his cap and felt the notes. ‘Shall I hide it in my bosom?’ he thought. ‘No; I should have to undo my girdle.… Wait a bit! When I get to the foot of the hill I’ll get down and put myself to rights.… The cap is sewn up tight at the top, and it can’t fall through the lining. After all, I’d better not take the cap off till I get home.’ When he had reached the foot of the incline Drum of his own accord galloped up the next hill and Polikéy, who was as eager as Drum to get home, did not check him. All was well – at any rate so Polikéy imagined, and he gave himself up to dreams of his mistress’s gratitude, of the five rubles she would give him, and of the joy of his family. He took off his cap, felt for the envelope, and, smiling, put the cap tighter on his head. The velveteen crown of the cap was very rotten, and just because Akulína had carefully sewn up the rents in one place, it burst open in another; and the very movement by which Polikéy in the dusk had thought to push the envelope with the money deeper under the wadding, tore the cap farther and pushed out a corner of the envelope through the velveteen crown.
The dawn was appearing, and Polikéy, who had not slept all night, began to drowse. Pulling his cap lower down and thereby pushing the envelope still farther out, Polikéy in his drowsiness let his head knock against the front of the cart. He woke up near home and was about to catch hold of his cap, but feeling that it sat firmly on his head he did not take it off, convinced that the envelope was inside. He gave Drum a touch, arranged the hay in the cart again, assumed once more the appearance of a well-to-do peasant, and proudly looking about him rattled homewards.
There was the kitchen, there the house-serfs’ quarters. There was the carpenter’s wife carrying some linen; there was the office, and there the mistress’s house where in a few moments Polikéy would show that he was a trustworthy and honest man. ‘One can say anything about anybody,’ he would say; and the lady would reply, ‘Well, thank you, Polikéy! Here are three (or perhaps five, perhaps even ten) rubles,’ and she would tell them to give him some tea, or even some vodka. It would not be amiss, after being out in the cold! ‘With ten rubles we would have a treat for the holiday, and buy boots, and return Nikíta his four and a half rubles (it can’t be helped! … He has begun bothering)….’ When he was about a hundred paces from the house, Polikéy wrapped his coat round him, pulled his girdle straight and his collar, took off his cap, smoothed his hair, and without haste thrust his hand under the lining. The hand began to fumble faster and faster inside the lining, then the other hand went in too, while his face grew paler and paler. One of the hands went right through the cap. Polikéy fell on his knees, stopped the horse, and began searching in the cart among the hay and the things he had bought, feeling inside his coat and in his trousers. The money was nowhere to be found.
‘Heavens! What does it mean?… What will happen? He began to roar, clutching at his hair.
But recollecting that he might be seen, he turned the horse round, pulled the cap on, and drove the surprised and disgusted Drum back along the road.
‘I can’t bear going out with Polikéy,’ Drum must have thought. ‘For once in his life he has fed and watered me properly, and then only to deceive me so unpleasantly! How hard I tried, running home! I am tired, and hardly have we got within smell of our hay than he starts driving me back!’
‘Now then, you devil’s jade!’ shouted Polikéy through his tears, standing up in the cart, pulling at Drum’s mouth, and beating him with the whip.
X
ALL that day no one saw Polikéy in Pokróvsk. The mistress asked for him several times after dinner, and Aksyútka flew down to Akulína; but Akulína said he had not yet returned, and that evidently the market-gardener had detained him or something had happened to the horse. ‘If only it has not gone lame!’ she said. ‘Last time, when Maxim went, he was on the road a whole day – had to walk back all the way.’
And Aksyútka turned her pendulums back to the house again, while Akulína, trying to calm her own fears, invented reasons to account for her husband’s absence, but in vain! Her heart was heavy and she could not work with a will at any of the preparations for the morrow’s holiday. She suffered all the more because the carpenter’s wife assured her that she herself had seen ‘a man just like Polikéy drive up to the avenue and then turn back again’. The children, too, were anxiously and impatiently expecting ‘Daddy’, but for another reason. Annie and Mary, being left without the sheepskin and the coat which made it possible to take turns out of doors, could only run out in their indoor dresses with increasing rapidity in a small circle round the house. This was not a little inconvenient to all the dwellers in the serfs’ quarters who wanted to go in or out. Once Mary ran against the legs of the carpenter’s wife who was carrying water, and though she began to howl in anticipation as soon as she knocked against the woman’s knees, she got her curls cuffed all the same, and cried still louder. When she did not knock against anyone, she flew in at the door, and immediately climbing up by means of a tub, got onto the top of the oven. Only the mistress and Akulína were really anxious about Polikéy; the children were concerned only about what he had on.