The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories-5

“Tell me where my horses are!” shouted Stepan, pale with fury, alternately

looking at the ground and at Ivan Mironov’s face.

Ivan Mironov denied his guilt. Then Stepan aimed so violent a blow at his

face that he smashed his nose and the blood spurted out.

“Tell the truth, I say, or I’ll kill you!”

Ivan Mironov kept silent, trying to avoid the blows by stooping. Stepan

hit him twice more with his long arm. Ivan Mironov remained silent,

turning his head backwards and forwards.

“Beat him, all of you!” cried the bailiff, and the whole crowd rushed upon

Ivan Mironov. He fell without a word to the ground, and then shouted,—“Devils,

wild beasts, kill me if that’s what you want! I am not afraid of you!”

Stepan seized a stone out of those that had been collected for the

purpose, and with a heavy blow smashed Ivan Mironov’s head.

XV

IVAN MIRONOV’S murderers were brought to trial, Stepan Pelageushkine among

them. He had a heavier charge to answer than the others, all the witnesses

having stated that it was he who had smashed Ivan Mironov’s head with a

stone. Stepan concealed nothing when in court. He contented himself with

explaining that, having been robbed of his two last horses, he had

informed the police. Now it was comparatively easy at that time to trace

the horses with the help of professional thieves among the gipsies. But

the police officer would not even permit him, and no search had been

ordered.

“Nothing else could be done with such a man. He has ruined us all.”

“But why did not the others attack him. It was you alone who broke his

head open.”

“That is false. We all fell upon him. The village agreed to kill him. I

only gave the final stroke. What is the use of inflicting unnecessary

sufferings on a man?”

The judges were astonished at Stepan’s wonderful coolness in narrating the

story of his crime—how the peasants fell upon Ivan Mironov, and how

he had given the final stroke. Stepan actually did not see anything

particularly revolting in this murder. During his military service he had

been ordered on one occasion to shoot a soldier, and, now with regard to

Ivan Mironov, he saw nothing loathsome in it. “A man shot is a dead man—that’s

all. It was him to-day, it might be me to-morrow,” he thought. Stepan was

only sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, which was a mild punishment for

what he had done. His peasant’s dress was taken away from him and put in

the prison stores, and he had a prison suit and felt boots given to him

instead. Stepan had never had much respect for the authorities, but now he

became quite convinced that all the chiefs, all the fine folk, all except

the Czar—who alone had pity on the peasants and was just—all

were robbers who suck blood out of the people. All he heard from the

deported convicts, and those sentenced to hard labour, with whom he had

made friends in prisons, confirmed him in his views. One man had been

sentenced to hard labour for having convicted his superiors of a theft;

another for having struck an official who had unjustly confiscated the

property of a peasant; a third because he forged bank notes. The

well-to-do-people, the merchants, might do whatever they chose and come to

no harm; but a poor peasant, for a trumpery reason or for none at all, was

sent to prison to become food for vermin.

He had visits from his wife while in prison. Her life without him was

miserable enough, when, to make it worse, her cottage was destroyed by

fire. She was completely ruined, and had to take to begging with her

children. His wife’s misery embittered Stepan still more. He got on very

badly with all the people in the prison; was rude to every one; and one

day he nearly killed the cook with an axe, and therefore got an additional

year in prison. In the course of that year he received the news that his

wife was dead, and that he had no longer a home.

When Stepan had finished his time in prison, he was taken to the prison

stores, and his own dress was taken down from the shelf and handed to him.

“Where am I to go now?” he asked the prison officer, putting on his old

dress.

“Why, home.”

“I have no home. I shall have to go on the road. Robbery will not be a

pleasant occupation.”

“In that case you will soon be back here.”

“I am not so sure of that.”

And Stepan left the prison. Nevertheless he took the road to his own

place. He had nowhere else to turn.

On his way he stopped for a night’s rest in an inn that had a public bar

attached to it. The inn was kept by a fat man from the town, Vladimir, and

he knew Stepan. He knew that Stepan had been put into prison through ill

luck, and did not mind giving him shelter for the night. He was a rich

man, and had persuaded his neighbour’s wife to leave her husband and come

to live with him. She lived in his house as his wife, and helped him in

his business as well.

Stepan knew all about the innkeeper’s affairs—how he had wronged the

peasant, and how the woman who was living with him had left her husband.

He saw her now sitting at the table in a rich dress, and looking very hot

as she drank her tea. With great condescension she asked Stepan to have

tea with her. No other travellers were stopping in the inn that night.

Stepan was given a place in the kitchen where he might sleep. Matrena—that

was the woman’s name—cleared the table and went to her room. Stepan

went to lie down on the large stove in the kitchen, but he could not

sleep, and the wood splinters put on the stove to dry were crackling under

him, as he tossed from side to side. He could not help thinking of his

host’s fat paunch protruding under the belt of his shirt, which had lost

its colour from having been washed ever so many times. Would not it be a

good thing to make a good clean incision in that paunch. And that woman,

too, he thought.

One moment he would say to himself, “I had better go from here to-morrow,

bother them all!” But then again Ivan Mironov came back to his mind, and

he went on thinking of the innkeeper’s paunch and Matrena’s white throat

bathed in perspiration. “Kill I must, and it must be both!”

He heard the cock crow for the second time.

“I must do it at once, or dawn will be here.” He had seen in the evening

before he went to bed a knife and an axe. He crawled down from the stove,

took the knife and axe, and went out of the kitchen door. At that very

moment he heard the lock of the entrance door open. The innkeeper was

going out of the house to the courtyard. It all turned out contrary to

what Stepan desired. He had no opportunity of using the knife; he just

swung the axe and split the innkeeper’s head in two. The man tumbled down

on the threshold of the door, then on the ground.

Stepan stepped into the bedroom. Matrena jumped out of bed, and remained

standing by its side. With the same axe Stepan killed her also.

Then he lighted the candle, took the money out of the desk, and left the

house.

XVI

IN a small district town, some distance away from the other buildings, an

old man, a former official, who had taken to drink, lived in his own house

with his two daughters and his son-in-law. The married daughter was also

addicted to drink and led a bad life, and it was the elder daughter, the

widow Maria Semenovna, a wrinkled woman of fifty, who supported the whole

family. She had a pension of two hundred and fifty roubles a year, and the

family lived on this. Maria Semenovna did all the work in the house,

looked after the drunken old father, who was very weak, attended to her

sister’s child, and managed all the cooking and the washing of the family.

And, as is always the case, whatever there was to do, she was expected to

do it, and was, moreover, continually scolded by all the three people in

the house; her brother-in-law used even to beat her when he was drunk. She

bore it all patiently, and as is also always the case, the more work she

had to face, the quicker she managed to get through it. She helped the

poor, sacrificing her own wants; she gave them her clothes, and was a

ministering angel to the sick.

Once the lame, crippled village tailor was working in Maria Semenovna’s

house. He had to mend her old father’s coat, and to mend and repair Maria

Semenovna’s fur-jacket for her to wear in winter when she went to market.

The lame tailor was a clever man, and a keen observer: he had seen many

different people owing to his profession, and was fond of reflection,

condemned as he was to a sedentary life.

Having worked a week at Maria Semenovna’s, he wondered greatly about her

life. One day she came to the kitchen, where he was sitting with his work,

to wash a towel, and began to ask him how he was getting on. He told her

of the wrong he had suffered from his brother, and how he now lived on his

own allotment of land, separated from that of his brother.

“I thought I should have been better off that way,” he said. “But I am now

just as poor as before.”

“It is much better never to change, but to take life as it comes,” said

Maria Semenovna. “Take life as it comes,” she repeated.

“Why, I wonder at you, Maria Semenovna,” said the lame tailor. “You alone

do the work, and you are so good to everybody. But they don’t repay you in

kind, I see.”

Maria Semenovna did not utter a word in answer.

“I dare say you have found out in books that we are rewarded in heaven for

the good we do here.”

“We don’t know that. But we must try to do the best we can.”

“Is it said so in books?”

“In books as well,” she said, and read to him the Sermon on the Mount. The

tailor was much impressed. When he had been paid for his job and gone

home, he did not cease to think about Maria Semenovna, both what she had

said and what she had read to him.

XVII

PETER NIKOLAEVICH SVENTIZKY’S views of the peasantry had now changed for

the worse, and the peasants had an equally bad opinion of him. In the

course of a single year they felled twenty-seven oaks in his forest, and

burnt a barn which had not been insured. Peter Nikolaevich came to the

conclusion that there was no getting on with the people around him.

At that very time the landowner, Liventsov, was trying to find a manager

for his estate, and the Marshal of the Nobility recommended Peter

Nikolaevich as the ablest man in the district in the management of land.

The estate owned by Liventsov was an extremely large one, but there was no

revenue to be got out of it, as the peasants appropriated all its wealth

to their own profit. Peter Nikolaevich undertook to bring everything into

order; rented out his own land to somebody else; and settled with his wife

on the Liventsov estate, in a distant province on the river Volga.

Peter Nikolaevich was always fond of order, and wanted things to be

regulated by law; and now he felt less able of allowing those raw and rude

peasants to take possession, quite illegally too, of property that did not

belong to them. He was glad of the opportunity of giving them a good

lesson, and set seriously to work at once. One peasant was sent to prison

for stealing wood; to another he gave a thrashing for not having made way

for him on the road with his cart, and for not having lifted his cap to

salute him. As to the pasture ground which was a subject of dispute, and

was considered by the peasants as their property, Peter Nikolaevich

informed the peasants that any of their cattle grazing on it would be

driven away by him.

The spring came and the peasants, just as they had done in previous years,

drove their cattle on to the meadows belonging to the landowner. Peter

Nikolaevich called some of the men working on the estate and ordered them

to drive the cattle into his yard. The peasants were working in the

fields, and, disregarding the screaming of the women, Peter Nikolaevich’s

men succeeded in driving in the cattle. When they came home the peasants

went in a crowd to the cattle-yard on the estate, and asked for their

cattle. Peter Nikolaevich came out to talk to them with a gun slung on his

shoulder; he had just returned from a ride of inspection. He told them

that he would not let them have their cattle unless they paid a fine of

fifty kopeks for each of the horned cattle, and twenty kopeks for each

sheep. The peasants loudly declared that the pasture ground was their

property, because their fathers and grandfathers had used it, and

protested that he had no right whatever to lay hand on their cattle.

“Give back our cattle, or you will regret it,” said an old man coming up

to Peter Nikolaevich.

“How shall I regret it?” cried Peter Nikolaevich, turning pale, and coming

close to the old man.

“Give them back, you villain, and don’t provoke us.”

“What?” cried Peter Nikolaevich, and slapped the old man in the face.

“You dare to strike me? Come along, you fellows, let us take back our

cattle by force.”

The crowd drew close to him. Peter Nikolaevich tried to push his way,

through them, but the peasants resisted him. Again he tried force.

His gun, accidentally discharged in the melee, killed one of the peasants.

Instantly the fight began. Peter Nikolaevich was trodden down, and five

minutes later his mutilated body was dragged into the ravine.

The murderers were tried by martial law, and two of them sentenced to the

gallows.

XVIII

IN the village where the lame tailor lived, in the Zemliansk district of

the Voronesh province, five rich peasants hired from the landowner a

hundred and five acres of rich arable land, black as tar, and let it out

on lease to the rest of the peasants at fifteen to eighteen roubles an

acre. Not one acre was given under twelve roubles. They got a very

profitable return, and the five acres which were left to each of their

company practically cost them nothing. One of the five peasants died, and

the lame tailor received an offer to take his place.

When they began to divide the land, the tailor gave up drinking vodka,

and, being consulted as to how much land was to be divided, and to whom it

should be given, he proposed to give allotments to all on equal terms, not

taking from the tenants more than was due for each piece of land out of

the sum paid to the landowner.

“Why so?”

“We are no heathens, I should think,” he said. “It is all very well for

the masters to be unfair, but we are true Christians. We must do as God

bids. Such is the law of Christ.”

“Where have you got that law from?

“It is in the Book, in the Gospels; just come to me on Sunday, I will read

you a few passages, and we will have a talk afterwards.”

They did not all come to him on Sunday, but three came, and he began

reading to them.

He read five chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and they talked. One man

only, Ivan Chouev, accepted the lesson and carried it out completely,

following the rule of Christ in everything from that day. His family did

the same. Out of the arable land he took only what was his due, and

refused to take more.

The lame tailor and Ivan had people calling on them, and some of these

people began to grasp the meaning of the Gospels, and in consequence gave

up smoking, drinking, swearing, and using bad language and tried to help

one another. They also ceased to go to church, and took their ikons to the

village priest, saying they did not want them any more. The priest was

frightened, and reported what had occurred to the bishop. The bishop was

at a loss what to do. At last he resolved to send the archimandrite

Missael to the village, the one who had formerly been Mitia Smokovnikov’s

teacher of religion.

XIX

ASKING Father Missael on his arrival to take a seat, the bishop told him

what had happened in his diocese.

“It all comes from weakness of spirit and from ignorance. You are a

learned man, and I rely on you. Go to the village, call the parishioners

together, and convince them of their error.”

“If your Grace bids me go, and you give me your blessing, I will do my

best,” said Father Missael. He was very pleased with the task entrusted to

him. Every opportunity he could find to demonstrate the firmness of his

faith was a boon to him. In trying to convince others he was chiefly

intent on persuading himself that he was really a firm believer.

“Do your best. I am greatly distressed about my flock,” said the bishop,

leisurely taking a cup with his white plump hands from the servant who

brought in the tea.

“Why is there only one kind of jam? Bring another,” he said to the

servant. “I am greatly distressed,” he went on, turning to Father Missael.

Missael earnestly desired to prove his zeal; but, being a man of small

means, he asked to be paid for the expenses of his journey; and being

afraid of the rough people who might be ill-dis-posed towards him, he also

asked the bishop to get him an order from the governor of the province, so

that the local police might help him in case of need. The bishop complied

with his wishes, and Missael got his things ready with the help of his

servant and his cook. They furnished him with a case full of wine, and a

basket with the victuals he might need in going to such a lonely place.

Fully provided with all he wanted, he started for the village to which he

was commissioned. He was pleasantly conscious of the importance of his

mission. All his doubts as to his own faith passed away, and he was now

fully convinced of its reality.

His thoughts, far from being concerned with the real foundation of his

creed—this was accepted as an axiom—were occupied with the

arguments used against the forms of worship.

XX

THE village priest and his wife received Father Missael with great

honours, and the next day after he had arrived the parishioners were

invited to assemble in the church. Missael in a new silk cassock, with a

large cross on his chest, and his long hair carefully combed, ascended the

pulpit; the priest stood at his side, the deacons and the choir at a

little distance behind him, and the side entrances were guarded by the

police. The dissenters also came in their dirty sheepskin coats.

After the service Missael delivered a sermon, admonishing the dissenters

to return to the bosom of their mother, the Church, threatening them with

the torments of hell, and promising full forgiveness to those who would

repent.

The dissenters kept silent at first. Then, being asked questions, they

gave answers. To the question why they dissented, they said that their

chief reason was the fact that the Church worshipped gods made of wood,

which, far from being ordained, were condemned by the Scriptures.

When asked by Missael whether they actually considered the holy ikons to

be mere planks of wood, Chouev answered,—“Just look at the back of

any ikon you choose and you will see what they are made of.”

When asked why they turned against the priests, their answer was that the

Scripture says: “As you have received it without fee, so you must give it

to the others; whereas the priests require payment for the grace they

bestow by the sacraments.” To all attempts which Missael made to oppose

them by arguments founded on Holy Writ, the tailor and Ivan Chouev gave

calm but very firm answers, contradicting his assertions by appeal to the

Scriptures, which they knew uncommonly well.

Missael got angry and threatened them with persecution by the authorities.

Their answer was: It is said, I have been persecuted and so will you be.

The discussion came to nothing, and all would have ended well if Missael

had not preached the next day at mass, denouncing the wicked seducers of

the faithful and saying that they deserved the worst punishment. Coming

out of the church, the crowd of peasants began to consult whether it would

not be well to give the infidels a good lesson for disturbing the minds of

the community. The same day, just when Missael was enjoying some salmon

and gangfish, dining at the village priest’s in company with the

inspector, a violent brawl arose in the village. The peasants came in a

crowd to Chouev’s cottage, and waited for the dissenters to come out in

order to give them a thrashing.

The dissenters assembled in the cottage numbered about twenty men and

women. Missael’s sermon and the attitude of the orthodox peasants,

together with their threats, aroused in the mind of the dissenters angry

feelings, to which they had before been strangers. It was near evening,

the women had to go and milk the cows, and the peasants were still

standing and waiting at the door.

A boy who stepped out of the door was beaten and driven back into the

house. The people within began consulting what was to be done, and could

come to no agreement. The tailor said, “We must bear whatever is done to

us, and not resist.” Chouev replied that if they decided on that course

they would, all of them, be beaten to death. In consequence, he seized a

poker and went out of the house. “Come!” he shouted, “let us follow the

law of Moses!” And, falling upon the peasants, he knocked out one man’s

eye, and in the meanwhile all those who had been in his house contrived to

get out and make their way home.

Chouev was thrown into prison and charged with sedition and blasphemy.

XXI

Two years previous to those events a strong and handsome young girl of an

eastern type, Katia Turchaninova, came from the Don military settlements

to St. Petersburg to study in the university college for women. In that

town she met a student, Turin, the son of a district governor in the

Simbirsk province, and fell in love with him. But her love was not of the

ordinary type, and she had no desire to become his wife and the mother of

his children. He was a dear comrade to her, and their chief bond of union

was a feeling of revolt they had in common, as well as the hatred they

bore, not only to the existing forms of government, but to all those who

represented that government. They had also in common the sense that they

both excelled their enemies in culture, in brains, as well as in morals.

Katia Turchaninova was a gifted girl, possessed of a good memory, by means

of which she easily mastered the lectures she attended. She was successful

in her examinations, and, apart from that, read all the newest books. She

was certain that her vocation was not to bear and rear children, and even

looked on such a task with disgust and contempt. She thought herself

chosen by destiny to destroy the present government, which was fettering

the best abilities of the nation, and to reveal to the people a higher

standard of life, inculcated by the latest writers of other countries. She

was handsome, a little inclined to stoutness: she had a good complexion,

shining black eyes, abundant black hair. She inspired the men she knew

with feelings she neither wished nor had time to share, busy as she was

with propaganda work, which consisted chiefly in mere talking. She was not

displeased, however, to inspire these feelings; and, without dressing too

smartly, did not neglect her appearance. She liked to be admired, as it

gave her opportunities of showing how little she prized what was valued so

highly by other women.

In her views concerning the method of fighting the government she went

further than the majority of her comrades, and than her friend Turin; all

means, she taught, were justified in such a struggle, not excluding

murder. And yet, with all her revolutionary ideas, Katia Turchaninova was

in her soul a very kind girl, ready to sacrifice herself for the welfare

and the happiness of other people, and sincerely pleased when she could do

a kindness to anybody, a child, an old person, or an animal.

She went in the summer to stay with a friend, a schoolmistress in a small

town on the river Volga. Turin lived near that town, on his father’s

estate. He often came to see the two girls; they gave each other books to

read, and had long discussions, expressing their common indignation with

the state of affairs in the country. The district doctor, a friend of

theirs, used also to join them on many occasions.

The estate of the Turins was situated in the neighbourhood of the

Liventsov estate, the one that was entrusted to the management of Peter

Nikolaevich Sventizky. Soon after Peter Nikolaevich had settled there, and

begun to enforce order, young Turin, having observed an independent

tendency in the peasants on the Liventsov estate, as well as their

determination to uphold their rights, became interested in them. He came

often to the village to talk with the men, and developed his socialistic

theories, insisting particularly on the nationalisation of the land.

After Peter Nikolaevich had been murdered, and the murderers sent to

trial, the revolutionary group of the small town boiled over with

indignation, and did not shrink from openly expressing it. The fact of

Turin’s visits to the village and his propaganda work among the students,

became known to the authorities during the trial. A search was made in his

house; and, as the police found a few revolutionary leaflets among his

effects, he was arrested and transferred to prison in St. Petersburg.

Katia Turchaninova followed him to the metropolis, and went to visit him

in prison. She was not admitted on the day she came, and was told to come

on the day fixed by regulations for visits to the prisoners. When that day

arrived, and she was finally allowed to see him, she had to talk to him

through two gratings separating the prisoner from his visitor. This visit

increased her indignation against the authorities. And her feelings become

all the more revolutionary after a visit she paid to the office of a

gendarme officer who had to deal with the Turin case. The officer, a

handsome man, seemed obviously disposed to grant her exceptional favours

in visiting the prisoner, if she would allow him to make love to her.

Disgusted with him, she appealed to the chief of police. He pretended—just

as the officer did when talking officially to her—to be powerless

himself, and to depend entirely on orders coming from the minister of

state. She sent a petition to the minister asking for an interview, which

was refused.

Then she resolved to do a desperate thing and bought a revolver.

XXII

THE minister was receiving petitioners at the usual hour appointed for the

reception. He had talked successively to three of them, and now a pretty

young woman with black eyes, who was holding a petition in her left hand,

approached. The minister’s eyes gleamed when he saw how attractive the

petitioner was, but recollecting his high position he put on a serious

face.

“What do you want?” he asked, coming down to where she stood. Without

answering his question the young woman quickly drew a revolver from under

her cloak and aiming it at the minister’s chest fired—but missed

him.

The minister rushed at her, trying to seize her hand, but she escaped, and

taking a step back, fired a second time. The minister ran out of the room.

The woman was immediately seized. She was trembling violently, and could

not utter a single word; after a while she suddenly burst into a

hysterical laugh. The minister was not even wounded.

That woman was Katia Turchaninova. She was put into the prison of

preliminary detention. The minister received congratulations and marks of

sympathy from the highest quarters, and even from the emperor himself, who

appointed a commission to investigate the plot that had led to the

attempted assassination. As a matter of fact there was no plot whatever,

but the police officials and the detectives set to work with the utmost

zeal to discover all the threads of the non-existing conspiracy. They did

everything to deserve the fees they were paid; they got up in the small

hours of the morning, searched one house after another, took copies of

papers and of books they found, read diaries, personal letters, made

extracts from them on the very best notepaper and in beautiful

handwriting, interrogated Katia Turchaninova ever so many times, and

confronted her with all those whom they suspected of conspiracy, in order

to extort from her the names of her accomplices.

The minister, a good-natured man at heart, was sincerely sorry for the

pretty girl. But he said to himself that he was bound to consider his high

state duties imposed upon him, even though they did not imply much work

and trouble. So, when his former colleague, a chamberlain and a friend of

the Turins, met him at a court ball and tried to rouse his pity for Turin

and the girl Turchaninova, he shrugged his shoulders, stretching the red

ribbon on his white waistcoat, and said: “Je ne demanderais pas mieux que

de relacher cette pauvre fillette, mais vous savez le devoir.” And in the

meantime Katia Turchaninova was kept in prison. She was at times in a

quiet mood, communicated with her fellow-prisoners by knocking on the

walls, and read the books that were sent to her. But then came days when

she had fits of desperate fury, knocking with her fists against the wall,

screaming and laughing like a mad-woman.

XXIII

ONE day Maria Semenovna came home from the treasurer’s office, where she

had received her pension. On her way she met a schoolmaster, a friend of

hers.

“Good day, Maria Semenovna! Have you received your money?” the

schoolmaster asked, in a loud voice from the other side of the street.

“I have,” answered Maria Semenovna. “But it was not much; just enough to

fill the holes.”

“Oh, there must be some tidy pickings out of such a lot of money,” said

the schoolmaster, and passed on, after having said good-bye.

“Good-bye,” said Maria Semenovna. While she was looking at her friend, she

met a tall man face to face, who had very long arms and a stern look in

his eyes. Coming to her house, she was very startled on again seeing the

same man with the long arms, who had evidently followed her. He remained

standing another moment after she had gone in, then turned and walked

away.

Maria Semenovna felt somewhat frightened at first. But when she had

entered the house, and had given her father and her nephew Fedia the

presents she had brought for them, and she had patted the dog Treasure,

who whined with joy, she forgot her fears. She gave the money to her

father and began to work, as there was always plenty for her to do.

The man she met face to face was Stepan.

After he had killed the innkeeper, he did not return to town. Strange to

say, he was not sorry to have committed that murder. His mind went back to

the murdered man over and over again during the following day; and he

liked the recollection of having done the thing so skilfully, so cleverly,

that nobody-would ever discover it, and he would not therefore be

prevented from murdering other people in the same way. Sitting in the

public-house and having his tea, he looked at the people around him with

the same thought how he should murder them. In the evening he called at a

carter’s, a man from his village, to spend the night at his house. The

carter was not in. He said he would wait for him, and in the meanwhile

began talking to the carter’s wife. But when she moved to the stove, with

her back turned to him, the idea entered his mind to kill her. He

marvelled at himself at first, and shook his head; but the next moment he

seized the knife he had hidden in his boot, knocked the woman down on the

floor, and cut her throat. When the children began to scream, he killed

them also and went away. He did not look out for another place to spend

the night, but at once left the town. In a village some distance away he

went to the inn and slept there. The next day he returned to the district

town, and there he overheard in the street Maria Semenovna’s talk with the

schoolmaster. Her look frightened him, but yet he made up his mind to

creep into her house, and rob her of the money she had received. When the

night came he broke the lock and entered the house. The first person who

heard his steps was the younger daughter, the married one. She screamed.

Stepan stabbed her immediately with his knife. Her husband woke up and

fell upon Stepan, seized him by his throat, and struggled with him

desperately. But Stepan was the stronger man and overpowered him. After

murdering him, Stepan, excited by the long fight, stepped into the next

room behind a partition. That was Maria Semenovna’s bedroom. She rose in

her bed, looked at Stepan with her mild frightened eyes, and crossed

herself.