"A village? C'est charmant, I do believe I've heard..."
Stepan Trofimovich was still walking, and they still did not let him get in. A brilliant surmise flashed in his head.
"You think, perhaps, that I ... I have a passport, and I am a professor, that is, a teacher, if you wish... but a head one. I am a head teacher. Oui, c'est comme ça qu'on peut traduire.[clxvii] I would very much like to get in, and I'll buy you... I'll buy you a pint for it."
"It'll be fifty kopecks, sir, it's a rough road."
"Or else we'd be getting the bad end," the wench put in.
"Fifty kopecks? Very well, then, fifty kopecks. C'est encore mieux, j'ai en tout quarante roubles, mais . . ."[clxviii]
The peasant stopped, and by general effort Stepan Trofimovich was pulled into the cart and seated next to the woman on the sack. The whirl of thoughts would not leave him. At times he sensed in himself that he was somehow terribly distracted and not thinking at all of what he ought to be thinking of, and he marveled at that. This awareness of a morbid weakness of mind at times became very burdensome and even offensive to him.
"How ... how is it there's a cow behind?" he himself suddenly asked the wench.
"What's with you, mister, never seen one before?" the woman laughed.
"Bought her in town," the peasant intervened. "See, our cattle all dropped dead last spring—the plague. They all died, all, not even half was left, cry as you might."
And again he whipped up his nag, who had gotten stuck in a rut.
"Yes, that happens here in Russia... and generally we Russians... well, yes, it happens," Stepan Trofimovich trailed off.
"If you're a teacher, what do you want in Khatovo? Or maybe you're going farther?"
"I... that is, not actually farther... C'est-à-dire,[clxix] to a merchant."
"To Spasov, must be?"
"Yes, yes, precisely, to Spasov. It makes no difference, however."
"If you're going to Spasov, and on foot, it'll take you a good week in those pretty boots," the wench laughed.
"Right, right, and it makes no difference, mes amis, no difference at all," Stepan Trofimovich impatiently cut her short.
"Terribly curious folk; the wench speaks better than he does, however, and I notice that since the nineteenth of February[198] their style has changed somewhat, and ... and what do they care if it's Spasov or not Spasov? Anyhow, I'm paying them, so why are they pestering me?"
"If it's Spasov, then it's by steamer-boat," the peasant would not leave off.
"That's right enough," the wench put in animatedly, "because with horses along the shore you make a twenty-mile detour."
"Thirty."
"You'll just catch the steamer-boat in Ustyevo tomorrow at two o'clock," the woman clinched. But Stepan Trofimovich remained stubbornly silent. The questioners also fell silent. The peasant kept pulling up on the nag; the woman exchanged brief remarks with him from time to time. Stepan Trofimovich dozed off. He was terribly surprised when the woman, laughing, shook him awake and he saw himself in a rather large village at the front door of a cottage with three windows.
"You dozed off, mister?"
"What's that? Where am I? Ah, well! Well ... it makes no difference," Stepan Trofimovich sighed and got out of the cart.
He looked around sadly; the village scene seemed strange to him and in some way terribly alien.
"Ah, the fifty kopecks, I forgot!" he turned to the peasant with a somehow exceedingly hasty gesture; by now he was evidently afraid to part with them.
"Come in, you can pay inside," the peasant invited.
"It's a nice place," the wench encouraged.
Stepan Trofimovich climbed the rickety porch.
"But how is this possible?" he whispered in deep and timorous perplexity, and yet he entered the cottage. "Elle l'a voulu, "[clxx] something stabbed at his heart, and again he suddenly forgot about everything, even that he had entered the cottage.
It was a bright, rather clean peasant cottage with three windows and two rooms; not really an inn, but a sort of guesthouse, where passing acquaintances stopped out of old habit. Stepan Trofimovich, without embarrassment, walked to the front corner, forgot to give any greetings, sat down, and lapsed into thought. Meanwhile, an extremely pleasant sensation of warmth, after three hours of dampness on the road, suddenly spread through his body. Even the chill that kept running briefly and abruptly down his spine, as always happens with especially nervous people when they are feverish and pass suddenly from cold to warmth, all at once became somehow strangely pleasant to him. He raised his head and the sweet smell of hot pancakes, over which the mistress was busying herself at the stove, tickled his nostrils. Smiling a childlike smile, he leaned towards the mistress and suddenly started prattling:
"What's this now? Is it pancakes? Mais... c'est charmant.”
"Do you wish some, mister?" the mistress offered at once and politely.
"I do, I precisely wish some, and ... I'd also like to ask you for tea," Stepan Trofimovich perked up.
"Start the samovar? With the greatest pleasure."
On a big plate with a bold blue pattern, pancakes appeared—those well-known peasant pancakes, thin, half wheat, with hot fresh butter poured over them—most delicious pancakes. Stepan Trofimovich sampled them with delight.
"How rich and how delicious they are! If only one could have un doigt d'eau de vie. "[clxxi]
"You wish a little vodka, mister?"
"Precisely, precisely, just a bit, un tout petit rien, "[clxxii]
"Five kopecks' worth, you mean?"
"Five kopecks' worth—five—five—five, un tout petit rien," Stepan Trofimovich yessed her with a blissful little smile.
Ask a peasant to do something for you, and, if he can and wants to, he will serve you diligently and cordially; but ask him to fetch a little vodka—and his usual calm cordiality suddenly transforms into a sort of hasty, joyful obligingness, almost a family solicitude for you. Someone going to get vodka—though only you are going to drink it, not he, and he knows it beforehand—feels all the same, as it were, some part of your future gratification ... In no more than three or four minutes (the pot-house was two steps away), there stood on the table before Stepan Trofimovich a half-pint bottle and a large greenish glass.
"And all that for me!" he was greatly surprised. "I've always had vodka, but I never knew five kopecks' worth was so much."
He poured a glass, rose, and with a certain solemnity crossed the room to the other corner, where his companion on the sack had settled herself—the black-browed wench who had so pestered him with her questions on the way. The wench was abashed and started making excuses, but, having uttered all that decency prescribed, in the end she rose, drank politely, in three sips, as women do, and with a show of great suffering on her face handed the glass back and bowed to Stepan Trofimovich. He pompously returned her bow and went back to his table even with a look of pride.
All this happened in him by some sort of inspiration: he himself had not known even a second before that he would go and treat the wench.
"My knowledge of how to handle the people is perfect, perfect, I always told them so," he thought smugly, pouring himself the remaining drink from the bottle; though it turned out to be less than a glass, the drink produced a vivifying warmth and even went to his head a little.
"Je suis malade tout à fait, mais ce n'est pas trop mauvais d'être malade. "[clxxiii]
"Would you like to buy?" a woman's soft voice came from beside him.
He looked up and, to his surprise, saw before him a lady—une dame et elle en avait l'air[clxxiv]—now past thirty, with a very modest look, dressed town-fashion in a dark dress, and with a big gray kerchief on her shoulders. There was something very affable in her face, which Stepan Trofimovich immediately liked. She had just come back to the cottage, where she had left her things on a bench next to the place Stepan Trofimovich had taken—among them a briefcase at which, he remembered, he had glanced curiously as he entered, and a not very large oilcloth bag. From this same bag she took two handsomely bound books with crosses stamped on the covers and brought them to Stepan Trofimovich.