‘Pyetka. Pyetka fell asleep.’
Pyotr Nikolayevich reported the theft to the police, to the district police superintendent and to the head of the zemstvo,7 and he sent out his own men to look for the horses. But they were not found.
‘Filthy peasants!’ said Pyotr Nikolayevich, ‘Doing this to me. Haven’t I been good to them? Just you wait. Bandits they are, the lot of them. From now on you’re going to get different treatment from me.’
X
But the horses – three chestnuts – had already been taken to outlying places. Mashka they sold to some gypsies for eighteen roubles; the second horse, Dapple, was exchanged for a peasant’s horse in a village forty versts away; and Beauty they simply rode until he dropped, then slaughtered him. They sold his hide for three roubles. The leader of this enterprise was Ivan Mironov. He had worked for Pyotr Nikolayevich in the past, knew his way round the estate, and had decided to get some of his money back. And had consequently thought up the whole plan.
After his misfortune with the forged coupon Ivan Mironov embarked on a long drinking bout and would have drunk away everything he possessed if his wife had not hidden from him the horse collars, his clothes, and anything else he might have sold to buy vodka. All the time he was on his binge Ivan Mironov was thinking incessantly not just about the individual who had wronged him, but about all the masters, some of them worse than others, who only lived by what they could filch from the likes of him. On one occasion Ivan Mironov was drinking with some peasants who came from a place near Podolsk. And as they travelled along the road the muzhiks told him about how they had driven off some horses belonging to another muzhik. Ivan Mironov began ticking off those horse-thieves for committing such an offence against another muzhik. ‘It’s a sin,’ he said. ‘To a muzhik his horse is just like a brother, yet you go and deprive him of it. If you want to steal horses, then steal them from the masters. That’s all those sons of bitches deserve anyway.’ The further they went the more they talked, and the muzhiks from Podolsk said that if you wanted to steal horses from the gentry you had to be clever about it. You needed to know all about the lie of the land, and if you hadn’t got someone on the inside, it couldn’t be done. Then Ivan Mironov remembered about Sventitsky, on whose estate he had once lived and worked, and he remembered how Sventitsky had held back a rouble and a half from his wages to pay for a broken kingpin, and he remembered too the chestnut horses he had worked with on the farm.
Ivan Mironov went and saw Sventitsky on the pretext of looking for work, but in reality he was there to see how things were and find out all he could. Having done that, and discovered that there was no night-watchman and that the horses were kept in separate loose-boxes in the stable, he called in the horse-thieves and saw the whole business through.
After splitting the proceeds with the muzhiks from Podolsk Ivan Mironov returned to his village with five roubles. At home there was no work for him to do: he had no horse. And from that time on Ivan Mironov took to associating with horse-thieves and gypsies.
XI
Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky did everything in his power to find the horse-thieves. He knew that the raid could not have been carried out without the help of one of his employees. And so he began to regard his farm-hands with suspicion and to enquire which of the farm-workers had not been sleeping at the farm on the night in question. He was told that Proshka Nikolayev had not spent that night at the farm. Proshka was a young fellow who had just returned from doing his military service, a good-looking, nimble fellow whom Pyotr Nikolayevich used to take with him on outings to serve as a coachman. The district superintendent of police was a friend of Pyotr Nikolayevich’s, and he was also acquainted with the chief constable, the marshal of the nobility, the leader of the zemstvo and the investigating magistrate. All these persons regularly came to his name-day celebrations and were familiar with his delicious fruit liqueurs and his pickled mushrooms – white mushrooms, honey agarics and milk agarics. They all sympathized with him and attempted to offer him their help.
‘There you are, and you are the one who is always defending the muzhiks,’ said the district superintendent. ‘I was telling the truth when I told you they were worse than wild animals. You can’t do a thing with them unless you use the knout and the rod. So you say it was this Proshka, the one who rides out with you as coachman, do you?’
‘Yes, he’s the one.’
‘Have him brought in here, please.’
Proshka was summoned and they began to question him.
‘Where were you that night?’
Proshka tossed his hair back and flashed them a glance.
‘At home.’
‘What do you mean, “at home”? All the farm-hands say you were not there.’
‘As you please, sir.’
‘We’re not talking about what I please. So where were you?’
‘At home.’
‘Very well, then. Constable, take this man to the district station.’
‘As you please, sir.’
So Proshka still refused to say where he had been on the night of the raid, but the reason for his obstinacy was that he had spent the night with his girlfriend Parasha and he had promised not to give her away, so he did not do so. But there was no evidence. Proshka was released again. However, Pyotr Nikolayevich was sure that the raid had been wholly the work of this Prokofy Nikolayev, and from that time on he began to hate him. One day when Pyotr Nikolayevich had taken him out with him as coachman, he sent him off to the posting station to fetch the horses some fodder. Proshka, as was his custom, bought two measures of oats at a coaching inn. He fed one-and-a-half measures to the horses and exchanged the remaining half-measure for vodka. Pyotr Nikolayevich found out about this and informed the local justice of the peace. The justice of the peace sentenced Proshka to three months in gaol. Prokofy was a man with a good opinion of himself. He considered himself superior to others and was proud of it. Being in prison was a humiliating experience for him. He could no longer give himself airs among his fellow men, and he fell at once into a gloomy state of mind.
Proshka returned home from gaol embittered, not so much against Pyotr Nikolayevich, as against the world in general. As everyone said, after his time in prison Prokofy lost heart, and he took to drinking, was soon caught stealing clothes from a tradesman’s wife, and again landed up in gaol.
Meanwhile all that Pyotr Nikolayevich could discover about the horses was that someone had come across the hide of a chestnut gelding, and Pyotr Nikolayevich identified it as Beauty’s. And the impunity of these thieves came to exasperate Pyotr Nikolayevich more and more. Now he could not set eyes on muzhiks or even talk about them without being filled with anger, and whenever he had the chance he came down on them as hard as possible.
XII
Although, once he had passed on the coupon, Yevgeny Mikhailovich had stopped thinking about it, his wife Mariya Vasilyevna was unable to forgive either herself for having been duped, or her husband for the cruel things he had said to her, or – and this was the main thing – those two young villains for having taken her in so cleverly.
From the day of the deception onwards she began to look very closely at any grammar-school boys she encountered. Once she actually met Makhin but did not recognize him because he saw her first and contorted his features so effectively that it completely altered his face. But when two weeks later she came face to face with Mitya Smokovnikov on the pavement, she recognized him at once. She let him go by, then turned on her heel and walked after him. On reaching the flat where he lived she made enquiries and found out whose son he was, and the next day she went to the grammar school, where in the entrance hall she met Mikhail Vvedensky, the scripture teacher. He enquired what he could do for her. She replied that she wanted to see the headmaster.