Everything was as if the town were not under guard and as if the Cossacks were not riding about in the streets.
Suddenly someone in the depth of the garden raised a cry.
A frightful confusion spread among the crowd. Many darted impetuously towards the exit. Others jumped over the fence. Suddenly the crowd, with frenzied cries, came sweeping in retreat from the exits back into the depth of the garden.
Cossacks darted in from somewhere and, crying savagely, made their way along the garden paths. Their sudden appearance gave the impression that they were waiting somewhere near by for the command. Their knouts began to work rapidly. The thin textures upon the girls’ shoulders were rent apart and delicate bodies were unbared, and beautiful blue-and-red spots showed themselves on the white-pink skin like quickly ripened flowers. Drops of blood, large like bilberries, splattered into the air, which had already quenched its thirst on the evening coolness, on the odour of the foliage and the aroma of artificial scents. Delicately shrill, loud sobs were the accompaniment to the dull, flat lashings of whips across the bodies.
They threw themselves this way and that way, they ran where they could. Several were caught—ragged young men and girls with short hair. Two or three of the girls were caught and beaten in error: they were from the most peaceful, even respected, families in town. These were afterwards permitted to go free.
The hooligans were making merry in a dirty, ill-smelling beerhouse. They were celebrating something or another, were jingling their money, discussing future earnings, and laughing uproariously. One table was especially absorbed in its noisy gaiety. There sat the celebrated town-rowdy Nil Krasavtsev with three of his friends. They drank, and sang hooligan songs, then paid their bill and went out. One could hear their savage outbursts:
“The Jew dogs are rebels, they are against the Tsar.”
“The Jews want to get hold of everything for themselves.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad thing to cut up a Jewess!”
“The Jews want to take over the whole earth.”
It had grown dark. The hooligans went into the main street, the Sretenka. It was very quiet, and only a few passersby were to be met with; people stood here and there at their gates and talked. A Jewish widow sat at the gate of a house and chatted with her neighbour, a Jewish tailor. Her children, a whole throng of them, one smaller than the other, played about here, deeply wrapt in their own affairs.
Nil walked up to the Jewess and shouted:
“You dog of a Jew, pray to God for the orthodox Tsar!”
“What do you want of me?” cried the Jewess. “I’m not touching you; you had better go away!”
“What’s that you say?” shouted the hooligan.
A broad knife was lifted in the darkness and, gleaming, came down in a swoop, piercing the old woman. She gave a quick, shrill cry—and fell back dead. The Jew, terrified, ran away, filling the night air with his piteous wails. The children began to whimper. The hooligans marched off, laughing uproariously.
XXI
Midday. It was quiet, innocent, and fresh in the depth of the wood, at the edge of the hollow—and the outer heat penetrated hither only by an infinite coiling as of a scaly serpent impotent at last and deprived of its poison.
Trirodov had found this place for himself and Elisaveta. More than once they came here together—to read, to talk, and to sit a while at the moss-covered stone, out of which, like a strange corporeal ghost, grew up all awry a slender quaking ash. Elisaveta, dressed in her simple short skirt, her long sunburnt arms and part of her legs showing, seemed so tall, so erect, and so graceful at this moss-covered stone.
Elisaveta was reading aloud—poems! How golden her voice sounded with its seductive, sun-like sonorousness! Trirodov listened with a slightly ironical smile to these familiar, infinitely deep and lovely words, so seemingly meaningless in life. When she finished Trirodov said:
“A man’s whole life is barely enough to think out a single idea properly.”
“You mean to say that each should choose for himself but a single idea.”
“Yes. If people could but grasp this fact human knowledge would take an unprecedented step forward. But we are afraid to venture.”
And coarse life already hovered near them behind their backs, and was about to intrude upon them. Elisaveta gave a sudden faint outcry at the unexpectedness of an unseemly apparition. A dirty, rough-looking man, all in tatters, was almost upon them; he had approached them upon the mossy ground as softly as a wood fairy. He stretched out a dirty, horny hand, and asked, not at all in a begging voice:
“Give a hungry man something to buy bread with.”
Trirodov frowned in annoyance, and without looking at the beggar took a silver coin out of the pocket of his waistcoat. He always kept a trifle about him to provide for unexpected meetings. The ragged one smiled, turned the coin, threw it upward, caught it, and hid it adroitly in his pocket.
“I thank your illustrious Honour most humbly,” he said. “May God give you good health, a rich wife, and assured success. Only I want to say something to you.”
He grew silent, and assumed a grave, important air. Trirodov frowned even more intensely than before, and asked stiffly:
“What is it you wish to tell me?”
The ragged one said with frank derision in his voice:
“It’s this. You were reading a book, my good people, but not the right one.”
He laughed a pathetic, insolent laugh. It was as if a timorous
