time to go bye-bye.'
When we were back in the hut the engineer began begging me to take his bed.
'Oh please!' he said imploringly, pressing both hands on his heart. 'I entreat you, and don't worry about me! I can sleep anywhere, and, besides, I am not going to bed just yet. Please do—it's a favour!'
I agreed, undressed, and went to bed, while he sat down to the table and set to work on the plans.
'We fellows have no time for sleep,' he said in a low voice when I had got into bed and shut my eyes. 'When a man has a wife and two children he can't think of sleep. One must think now of food and clothes and saving for the future. And I have two of them, a little son and a daughter. . . . The boy, little rascal, has a jolly little face. He's not six yet, and already he shows remarkable abilities, I assure you. . . . I have their photographs here, somewhere. . . . Ah, my children, my children!'
He rummaged among his papers, found their photographs, and began looking at them. I fell asleep.
I was awakened by the barking of Azorka and loud voices. Von Schtenberg with bare feet and ruffled hair was standing in the doorway dressed in his underclothes, talking loudly with some one . . . . It was getting light. A gloomy dark blue dawn was peeping in at the door, at the windows, and through the crevices in the hut walls, and casting a faint light on my bed, on the table with the papers, and on Ananyev. Stretched on the floor on a cloak, with a leather pillow under his head, the engineer lay asleep with his fleshy, hairy chest uppermost; he was snoring so loudly that I pitied the student from the bottom of my heart for having to sleep in the same room with him every night.
'Why on earth are we to take them?' shouted Von Schtenberg. 'It has nothing to do with us! Go to Tchalisov! From whom do the cauldrons come?'
'From Nikitin . . .' a bass voice answered gruffly.
'Well, then, take them to Tchalisov. . . . That's not in our department. What the devil are you standing there for? Drive on!'
'Your honour, we have been to Tchalisov already,' said the bass voice still more gruffly. 'Yesterday we were the whole day looking for him down the line, and were told at his hut that he had gone to the Dymkovsky section. Please take them, your honour! How much longer are we to go carting them about? We go carting them on and on along the line, and see no end to it.'
'What is it?' Ananyev asked huskily, waking up and lifting his head quickly.
'They have brought some cauldrons from Nikitin's,' said the student, 'and he is begging us to take them. And what business is it of ours to take them?'
'Do be so kind, your honour, and set things right! The horses have been two days without food and the master, for sure, will be angry. Are we to take them back, or what? The railway ordered the cauldrons, so it ought to take them. . . .'
'Can't you understand, you blockhead, that it has nothing to do with us? Go on to Tchalisov!'
'What is it? Who's there?' Ananyev asked huskily again. 'Damnation take them all,' he said, getting up and going to the door. 'What is it?'
I dressed, and two minutes later went out of the hut. Ananyev and the student, both in their underclothes and barefooted, were angrily and impatiently explaining to a peasant who was standing before them bare-headed, with his whip in his hand, apparently not understanding them. Both faces looked preoccupied with workaday cares.
'What use are your cauldrons to me,' shouted Ananyev. 'Am I to put them on my head, or what? If you can't find Tchalisov, find his assistant, and leave us in peace!'
Seeing me, the student probably recalled the conversation of the previous night. The workaday expression vanished from his sleepy face and a look of mental inertia came into it. He waved the peasant off and walked away absorbed in thought.
It was a cloudy morning. On the line where the lights had been gleaming the night before, the workmen, just roused from sleep, were swarming. There was a sound of voices and the squeaking of wheelbarrows. The working day was beginning. One poor little nag harnessed with cord was already plodding towards the embankment, tugging with its neck, and dragging along a cartful of sand.
I began saying good-bye. . . . A great deal had been said in the night, but I carried away with me no answer to any question, and in the morning, of the whole conversation there remained in my memory, as in a filter, only the lights and the image of Kisotchka. As I got on the horse, I looked at the student and Ananyev for the last time, at the hysterical dog with the lustreless, tipsy-looking eyes, at the workmen flitting to and fro in the morning fog, at the embankment, at the little nag straining with its neck, and thought:
'There is no making out anything in this world.'
And when I lashed my horse and galloped along the line, and when a little later I saw nothing before me but the endless gloomy plain and the cold overcast sky, I recalled the questions which were discussed in the night. I pondered while the sun-scorched plain, the immense sky, the oak forest, dark on the horizon and the hazy distance, seemed saying to me:
'Yes, there's no understanding anything in this world!'
The sun began to rise. . . .
A STORY WITHOUT AN END
SOON after two o'clock one night, long ago, the cook, pale and agitated, rushed unexpectedly into my study and informed me that Madame Mimotih, the old woman who owned the house next door, was sitting in her kitchen.
'She begs you to go in to her, sir . . .' said the cook, panting. 'Something bad has happened about her lodger. . . . He has shot himself or hanged himself. . . .'
'What can I do?' said I. 'Let her go for the doctor or for the police!'
'How is she to look for a doctor! She can hardly breathe, and she has huddled under the stove, she is so frightened. . . . You had better go round, sir.'
I put on my coat and hat and went to Madame Mimotih's house. The gate towards which I directed my steps was open. After pausing beside it, uncertain what to do, I went into the yard without feeling for the porter's bell. In the dark and dilapidated porch the door was not locked. I opened it and walked into the entry. Here there was not a glimmer of light, it was pitch dark, and, moreover, there was a marked smell of incense. Groping my way out of the entry I knocked my elbow against something made of iron, and in the darkness stumbled against a board of some sort which almost fell to the floor. At last the door covered with torn baize was found, and I went into a little hall.
I am not at the moment writing a fairy tale, and am far from intending to alarm the reader, but the picture I saw from the passage was fantastic and could only have been drawn by death. Straight before me was a door leading to a little drawing-room. Three five-kopeck wax candles, standing in a row, threw a scanty light on the faded slate-coloured wallpaper. A coffin was standing on two tables in the middle of the little room. The two candles served only to light up a swarthy yellow face with a half-open mouth and sharp nose. Billows of muslin were mingled in disorder from the face to the tips of the two shoes, and from among the billows peeped out two pale motionless hands, holding a wax cross. The dark gloomy corners of the little drawing-room, the ikons behind the coffin, the coffin itself, everything except the softly glimmering lights, were still as death, as the tomb itself.
'How strange!' I thought, dumbfoundered by the unexpected panorama of death. 'Why this haste? The lodger has hardly had time to hang himself, or shoot himself, and here is the coffin already!'
I looked round. On the left there was a door with a glass panel; on the right a lame hat-stand with a shabby fur coat on it. . . .
'Water. . . .' I heard a moan.
The moan came from the left, beyond the door with the glass panel. I opened the door and walked into a little dark room with a solitary window, through which there came a faint light from a street lamp outside.
'Is anyone here?' I asked.
And without waiting for an answer I struck a match. This is what I saw while it was burning. A man was sitting on the blood-stained floor at my very feet. If my step had been a longer one I should have trodden on him. With his legs thrust forward and his hands pressed on the floor, he was making an effort to raise his handsome face, which was deathly pale against his pitch-black beard. In the big eyes which he lifted upon me, I read unutterable terror, pain, and entreaty. A cold sweat trickled in big drops down his face. That sweat, the expression
