“What an inquisitive woman!” Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. “And how they stare at me . . . mais enfin. In fact, it's strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done them no harm.”
The woman was whispering to the man.
“If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable.”
Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.
“Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired; but how am I to get in?”
“How wonderful it is,” he thought to himself, “that I've been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it.”
But the peasant had not, however, pulled up the horse.
“But where are you bound for?” he asked with some mistrustfulness.
Stepan Trofimovitch did not understand him at once.
“To Hatovo, I suppose?”
“Hatov? No, not to Hatov's exactly? . . . And I don't know him though I've heard of him.”
“The village of Hatovo, the village, seven miles from here.”
“A village? C'est charmant, to be sure I've heard of it. . . .”
Stepan Trofimovitch was still walking, they had not yet taken him into the cart. A guess that was a stroke of genius flashed through his mind.
“You think perhaps that I am . . . I've got a passport and I am a professor, that is, if you like, a teacher . . . but a head teacher. I am a head teacher. Oui, c'est comme ca qu'on pent traduire. I should be very glad of a lift and I'll buy you . . . I'll buy you a quart of vodka for it.”
“It'll be half a rouble, sir; it's a bad road.”
“Or it wouldn't be fair to ourselves,” put in the woman.
“Half a rouble? Very good then, half a rouble. C'est encore mieux; fai en tout quarante roubles mais . . . ”
The peasant stopped the horse and by their united efforts Stepan Trofimovitch was dragged into the cart, and seated on the sack by the woman. He was still pursued by the same whirl of ideas. Sometimes he was aware himself that he was terribly absent-minded, and that he was not thinking of what he ought to be thinking of and wondered at it. This consciousness of abnormal weakness of mind became at moments very painful and even humiliating to him.
“How . . . how is this you've got a cow behind?” he suddenly asked the woman.
“What do you mean, sir, as though you'd never seen one,” laughed the woman.
“We bought it in the town,” the peasant put in. “Our cattle died last spring . . . the plague. All the beasts have died round us, all of them. There aren't half of them left, it's heartbreaking.”
And again he lashed the horse, which had got stuck in a rut.
“Yes, that does happen among you in Russia ... in general we Russians . . . Well, yes, it happens,” Stepan Trofimovitch broke off.
“If you are a teacher, what are you going to Hatovo for? Maybe you are going on farther.”
“I ... I'm not going farther precisely. . . . C'est-d-dire, I'm going to a merchant's.”
“To Spasov, I suppose?”
“Yes, yes, to Spasov. But that's no matter.”
“If you are going to Spasov and on foot, it will take you a week in your boots,” laughed the woman.
“I dare say, I dare say, no matter, mes amis, no matter.” Stepan Trofimovitch cut her short impatiently.
“Awfully inquisitive people; but the woman speaks better than he does, and I notice that since February 19,* their language has altered a little, and . . . and what business is it of mine whether I'm going to Spasov or not? Besides, I'll pay them, so why do they pester me.”
“If you are going to Spasov, you must take the steamer,” the peasant persisted.
.” That's true indeed,” the woman put in with animation, “for if you drive along the bank it's twenty-five miles out of the way.”
“Thirty-five.”
“You'll just catch the steamer at Ustyevo at two o'clock tomorrow,” the woman decided finally. But Stepan Trofimovitch was obstinately silent. His questioners, too, sank into silence. The peasant tugged at his horse at rare intervals; the peasant woman exchanged brief remarks with him. Stepan Trofimovitch fell into a doze. He was tremendously surprised when the woman, laughing, gave him a poke and he found himself in a rather large village at the door of a cottage with three windows.
“You've had a nap, sir?”
“What is it? Where am I? Ah, yes! Well . . . never mind,” sighed Stepan Trofimovitch, and he got out of the cart.
He looked about him mournfully; the village scene seemed strange to him and somehow terribly remote.
*February 19, 1861, the day of the Emancipation of the Serfs, is meant.— Translator's note.
“And the half-rouble, I was forgetting it!” he said to the peasant, turning to him with an excessively hurried gesture; he was evidently by now afraid to part from them.
“We'll settle indoors, walk in,” the peasant invited him.
“It's comfortable inside,” the woman said reassuringly.
Stepan Trofimovitch mounted the shaky steps. “How can it be?” he murmured in profound and apprehensive perplexity. He went into the cottage, however. “Elle Pa voulu ” he felt a stab at his heart and again he became oblivious of everything, even of the fact that he had gone into the cottage.
It was a light and fairly clean peasant's cottage, with three windows and two rooms; not exactly an inn, but a cottage at which people who knew the place were accustomed to stop “on their way through the village. Stepan Trofimovitch, quite unembarrassed, went to the foremost corner; forgot to greet anyone, sat down and sank into thought. Meanwhile a sensation of warmth, extremely agreeable after three hours of travelling in the damp, was suddenly diffused throughout his person. Even the slight shivers that spasmodically ran down his spine — such as always occur in particularly nervous people when they are feverish and have suddenly come into a Warm room from the cold — became all at once strangely agreeable. He raised his head and the delicious fragrance of the hot pancakes with which the woman of the house was busy at the stove tickled his nostrils. With a childlike smile he leaned towards the woman and suddenly said:
“What's that? Are they pancakes? Mais . . . c'est char-mant. ”
“Would you like some, sir?” the woman politely offered him at once.
“I should like some, I certainly should, and . . . may I ask you for some tea too,” said Stepan Trofimovitch, reviving.
“Get the samovar? With the greatest pleasure.”
On a large plate with a big blue pattern on it were served the pancakes — regular peasant pancakes, thin, made half of wheat, covered with fresh hot butter, most delicious pancakes. Stepan Trofimovitch tasted them with relish.
“How rich they are and how good! And if one could only have un doigt d'eau de vie. ”
“It's a drop of vodka you would like, sir, isn't it?”
“Just so, just so, a little, un tout petit new,”
“Five farthings' worth, I suppose?”
“Five, yes, five, five, five, un tout petit rien, ” Stepan Trofimovitch assented with a blissful smile.
Ask a peasant to do anything for you, and if he can, and will, he will serve you with care and friendliness; but ask him to fetch you vodka — and his habitual serenity and friendliness will pass at once into a sort of joyful haste and alacrity; he will be as keen in your interest as though you were one of his family. The peasant who fetches vodka — even though you are going to drink it and not he and he knows that beforehand — seems, as it were, to be enjoying part of your future gratification. Within three minutes (the tavern was only two paces away), a bottle and a large greenish wineglass were set on the table before Stepan Trofimovitch.