If you keep your eyes fixed for a long while on the vast sky, somehow your thoughts and your soul acquire the con- sciousness of solitude. You begin to feel yourself irrevocably lonely; all which you had considered previously as close to you and related to you becomes illimitably distant and of no value. The stars which have been looking from the skies for thousands of years, and the incomprehensible sky itself, and the mist, unconcerned as they all are with man's short life, oppress you by their silence when you stand face to face with them and strive to fathom their thoughts. The thought comes into one's mind of that loneliness which awaits each one of us by the grave, and the barrenness of life seems something despairing and dreadful. . . .
Egorooshka thought of his grandmother, now sleeping in the cemetery under the cherry trees: he remembered her lying in her coffm with the five-kopeck pieces on her eyes, how they afterwards closed her in and put her in the grave; he remembered the dull thuds of the clods of earth on the lid. • . . He represented to himself his grandmother in her dark narrow coffin, helpless and by all forsaken. His imagination drew his grandmother as suddenly awakening and not under- standing where she was, knocking on the lid, calling for help, and in the end fainting away with fright and dying over again. He pictured to himself as dead, his mother, Father Christo- pher, Countess Dranitska, Solomon. But, try as he would, he could not picture himself in a dark grave, far from home, abandoned, helpless, dead—it would not come; for himself personally he could not admit the possibility of death, and felt he would never die. . . . And Panteli, whose time it was to dit:!, walked below calling over the roll of his thoughts:
"Nitchevo . . . nice gentleman . . ." he mumbled—■ "took the little sir to study, and how he does there, never heard about that. . . . In Slavianoserbska, they say, there is no institution to lead to much learning. . . . There isn't, that's true. . . . The little sir was all right, nitchevo . . . when he grows up he will help his father. Egor, you are young .;till, but when you are a big man you'll support your father and mother. It is so ordained by God. . . . Honour your father and mother. ... I my own self had some children; they were burnt . . . my wife was burnt, and the children. . . . That's true . . . on Christmas night our cottage was burnt. It was not my house, I had gone to Orel. In Orel . . . Mary ran out into the street, then remembered that the chil- dren were asleep in the cottage, ran back, and was burnt with the children. . . . Yes. . . . The next day we found only the bones."
Towards midnight, the drivers and Egorooshka were again assembled around a fire. While the steppe-grass was kindling, Kiruha and Vassia went somewhere to a marsh for water; they disappeared in the darkness, but the clank of their buckets and their voices could be heard all the time, therefore the marsh could not be very far away. The light of the fire cast a large flickering halo on the ground; although the moon was shining, the things outside the red halo looked impene- trable and dark. The drivers were partly dazzled by this light, and they could only see a portion of the great road; the wag- gons with the bales, and the horses were hardly noticeable in the gloom except in the semblance of a mountain of undefined outline. Some twenty s^eps from the fire, by the edge of the road, stood a wooden grave-cross leaning over to one side. Egorooshka, before the fire was aflame and it was possible to see some distance away, had noticed that just another such a leaning cross stood on the other side of the great highway.
When Kiruha and Vassia returned with water, they filled up the cauldron and fixed it over the fire. Stepka, with the jagged spoon in his hand, took up his post in the smoke by the cauldron, and, looking thoughtfully into the water, waited for the first signs of scum bubbles. Panteli and Emilian sat side by side in silence, deep in thought; Dimov lay belly downwards, resting his head in his hands and looking into the fire; Stepka's shadow danced over him, and at times it hid and at times it revealed his handsome face. . . . Kiruha and Vassia wandered some little distance away gathering grass and birchbark for the fire. Egorooshka, with his hands in his pockets, stood by Panteli and watched how the flames devoured the grass.
Everyone was resting, thinking, looking casually at the grass over which danced the red light. There is something very melancholy, dreamy, and in the highest degree poetic in a lonely grave. . . . You hear its silence, and in this silence you feel the presence of the soul of the unknown being who lives beneath that cross. How do their souls like the steppe? Do they not feel sad on moonlit nights? And the steppe around a grave seems sorrowful, dismal, museful, the grass more afflicted, and it would seem as if even the grasshoppers' cry were in some measure subdued. There is no passer-by who would not mention that soul in his prayers, and look back at that grave until it remained far behind veiled in mist.
"Dad, why is that cross there?" asked Egorooshka.
Panteli looked at the cross, then at Dimov, and asked:
"l\Iike, this must be the place where the mowers murdered the traders?"
Dimov reluctantly turned over on his elbow, looked at the road, and answered:
"The very same. . . ."
There was a silence. Kiruha broke up and kneaded the dry grass, then shoved it under the cauldron; the fire flared up. Stepka was enveloped in the black smoke, and in the gloom on the road among the waggons flickered the shadow of the cross.
"Aye, murdered . • Dimov said reluctantly. "The traders, a father and son, were on their way to sell a picture. They stopped at a tavern not far from here, kept now by Ignatius Thomin. The old man drank to excess, and began to boast that he had a lot of money with him. Traders are a boastful lot if ever there were. . . • He could not refrain from showing off before our friend. At this time some mowers were spending the night at the tavern, whereupon, hearing how this merchant boasted, they took counsel together. . . ."
"Oh, Lord. . . • Holy Virgin!" sighed Panteli.
"The next day, when it was scarce light," Dimov continued, "the traders prepared to continue their journey, and the mowers attached themselves to them: 'Let us go, your Honour, together. It is merrier, and the peril will be lessened, as not far from here is a dark spot.' The traders drove at a foot's pace so as not to break the picture, and this quite suited the mowers. ..."
Dimov knelt up and stretched himself.
"Yes," he continued with a yawn. "It was no good; as soon as the traders reached that spot, they set on them with their scythes. The son, brave fellow, snatched a scythe from one of them and went for them. . . . But of course they were overpowered—there were eight of them. They hacked the traders so that thre was not a sound place left on their bodies. When they had finished, they dragged them off the road, the father to one side, the son to the other. . . . If it is whole, I don't know. . . . Can't see from here."
"It is whole," said Kiruha.
"They say there was very little money.''
"Very little," Panteli affirmed. "A hundred roubles.''
"Yes; and three of them died, for the young trader, had also hacked well with his scythe. . . . Died of loss of blood. He caught one on the arm, and he ran, so they say, four versts without his hand; they found him on a mound at Kurikovo; he was squatting with his head on his knees as if he were thinking, they looked—there was no breath in him —he was dead."
"They found him by the bkody trail," said Panteli.
Everyone looked at the cross in silence. Somewhere, prob- ably from the marsh, came the mournful note of a bird: "Splu, splu, splu. . . ."