o owned the shooting-gallery, and leaving a  long,
strangely bright trail of red on the grey, dusty road.
     Again Petya  saw the  snow-covered field and the dead bodies. But it no
longer tormented  him with unreality, for now  he understood the  meaning it
held. What it meant was that some people killed others because those  others
did not want to be slaves.
     Rage flooded Petya. He bit the pillow to hold back tears. But they came
nevertheless. In  the  morning he rose, weary from  a sleepless  night, with
dark circles under his eyes, haggard and sombre.
     Gavrik and Terenty  had not  yet come home. Motya, a grey knitted shawl
round  her head and shoulders, silently gave him a mug  of tea and a hunk of
bread and jam. She 'had not yet combed her hair, she stole  fearful looks at
the  boy  and  shivered  in the chill of early morning-probably she  had not
slept all night either. Her mother was washing clothes out in the yard, with
iridescent  soap-bubbles  rising from  her tub. She mournfully  wished Petya
good morning.
     On this day  Petya set off for school alone. The streets looked just as
they always did. Workers walked in groups on their way to the morning-shift.
They seemed to go  faster than  usual. Groups  knotted together  and in some
places  formed crowds. Passing them, Petya  could feel hostile looks cast at
his cap with its badge, his bright buttons and belt with the uniform buckle.
     Although the early sunshine filled the street with warm, rosy light and
the air was  clear and  fresh with the  scents of April, although the little
shunters  whistled  gaily  to  one another as  usual,  an invisible funereal
shadow seemed to lie over everything.
     Petya saw the elderly local policeman pacing his beat down  the street.
But at the cross-roads he saw another policeman, one he did  not know. Petya
greeted the old policeman  as  usual  with a courteous  lift  of his cap and
passed the stranger with head  down; but he could feel the man examining him
from head to foot with fierce eyes in a young, soldierly face.
     News-boys were running  about  the  town  shouting, "Lena events,  full
report, five hundred killed and wounded!"
     It  was strangely  quiet  at the  school, both  at  lessons and  during
recess. On his way home,  before he got to Near Mills, Petya heard a factory
whistle, then another, and a third, until their chorus made the air vibrate.
     At  the cross-roads  where the  strange  policeman  had  stood  in  the
morning, Petya found a thick crowd that swelled with every minute as  people
joined  it singly or in  groups, running out from all  the  nearby  streets,
gardens and waste lots.
     He realized that  this was a strike, and the men in this crowd were the
workers from various mills and factories who had just downed tools.
     He wanted to turn back and go another way, but a fresh crowd swelled up
behind him, carrying him along with it. The  two masses of people joined and
Petya  found himself in the middle, hemmed in on all sides. He  tried to get
out but  his satchel hindered him. One  strap  broke and the satchel slipped
down. With an effort Petya twisted round, slid it off his  shoulder and held
it in front  of him,  pushing away the backs and elbows that pressed against
him.
     Petya was  too small to see what was going on in front, all he knew was
that he was being carried along somewhere, that the crowd had some  definite
objective and  that somebody  was guiding  its movement.  He began to feel a
little calmer and with the corner of  his  satchel straightened the cap that
had been pushed to one side.
     The  people  moved very slowly. There  was  nothing  menacing in  their
movement, as Petya had thought at first,  rather it was resolute,  tense and
business-like.
     The factory whistles which had drowned  out every other sound gradually
died away, and he could hear the hum of voices.
     At last everyone  stopped. Petya  saw  the long  roofs  of  the  repair
workshops and  felt railway lines under  his feet-he stumbled and would have
fallen but  for somebody's big, strong hand. Then  there  was a general move
forward again, and frantic police whistles.
     The crowd separated into groups and Petya saw the familiar gates of the
workshops.  They were closed and before  them the  policeman with the fierce
eyes was running to and fro, sabre in hand, now and then blowing hard on his
whistle and shouting, "Disperse or I fire!"
     Another policeman, the old man Petya knew,  kept moving about aimlessly
in  front of  the crowd, waving his  hands  like  an orchestra conductor and
pleading in lachrymose tones,  "Gentlemen, do be  sensible, gentlemen, do be
sensible!"
     "Come on, break down the gates," said a man in an old railway  cap with
a red band  on the sleeve of his wadded jacket; he was standing  on the roof
of the  engine shop.  His voice  was not  loud  but  it carried  everywhere.
Evidently this was one of the leaders.
     The wrought-iron gates squealed on their rusty hinges and began to give
in under the pressure of the crowd. There was the sound of a chain snapping.
One leaf of the gates, torn away, fell with a  rattle in the yard, the other
hung crookedly from its brick gate-post.
     The crowd rushed in. Everything became confused.
     Later  on Petya learned  that  the management  had tried  to  crush the
strike by bringing in strike-breakers and locking the gates.
     Once inside,  the crowd scattered among  the shops, and then Petya  saw
something like the  kind of game children play, only  the players were angry
men. The shop door opened and men ran wildly out, followed  by other men who
overtook them and flogged them on the  head and neck  with oily rags twisted
into hard ropes as they ducked and dodged. It was like a  game of "tag." But
nobody laughed or shouted,  and one of the fleeing men  had  blood trickling
from his nose; he smeared it over his face with the sleeve of his torn shirt
as he ran.
     A  small  open  truck appeared at the shop door,  pushed by a couple of
dozen workers with tense, determined faces. And there in the truck, his legs
drawn up awkwardly, his hands gripping the sides,  sat the railway  engineer
whom Petya has seen the night he had gone with Gavrik to the  workshops. His
cap was back  to front,  which  gave his handsome  face with its well-tended
beard a very stupid look.
     Zhenya Chernoivanenko  and  the boys  who had shouted "Spoony,  spoony,
kissy-kissy-coo" after Petya and Motya, zealously helped the adults  to push
the truck.
     Petya was not frightened  any longer, nor did the  crowd seem alarming.
He  was caught up  in  the general  mood and ran after the truck, his  brows
drawn tangrily together. He pushed some of the boys aside, got  his  satchel
against the edge of the truck and began shoving with the  others. He felt as
though it were his effort alone that moved it.
     As soon as the truck and its burden emerged from the factory gates they
were greeted with  shouts  and whistles from all sides. Some  of the men had
picked  up the policeman with the fierce eyes.  Holding him by the shoulders
and top-boots', they gave him a swing and tossed him on to the engineer. His
sabre was gone, and so was his revolver.
     The other policeman, the old one, was not thrown into the truck; he got
a couple of  blows  on  the back of the head  with  a  hard  twisted rag and
shambled  away  by  the  fence,  without  sabre,  revolver  or  cap, smiling
foolishly.
     The truck was pushed for about half a mile, then abandoned on the line,
and  Petya,  Zhenya  and the other  boys  went  back  to the  workshop.  But
everybody  had gone,  only a few workers  with shot-guns  and  red arm-bands
paced up and down by the smashed gates.
     Petya and Zhenya made their way home through strangely deserted streets
and  lanes.  Motya  was standing by the gate -and at  once started  scolding
Zhenya:
     "You little ruffian, you tramp, where've you been all this time? And as
for you," she turned on Petya, "you ought to be  ashamed of yourself, taking
a child to a strike! Just look at yourself, if your father could see you!"
     Ever since  that walk to get snowdrops Motya had had a tendency to find
fault with Petya.
     He looked down at his boots  all  scratched by clinker,  at his crushed
satchel with the broken strap, at the buckle of his belt pushed to one side.
     "You're  all  dirty," Motya went on. "Go  and get washed quickly,  I'll
fetch water for you."
     "Stop ordering us about!" said Zhenya.  He pulled out of his pocket the
whistle which had only recently hung round the neck of the old policeman and
blew a shrill blast.
     "You scoundrel! You little ruffian!" Motya threw up her hands, but then
surrendered and burst into a fit of childlike laughter.
     At that moment  an open cab appeared in  the distance. Swaying over the
ruts,  wheels rattling, it  raced down  the  street.  Men with red arm-bands
bumped on the seats and shouted something as they passed each gate.
     Petya saw Terenty  among them, waving  his little cap. His face was red
and excited which  made  the white scar on his temple stand out all the more
sharply.
     "Out to  the common!"  he shouted, pointing  ahead with his cap, hardly
aware that it was his own house he was passing.
     Petya flung his satchel over  the  fence  and  raced  after  Motya  and
Zhenya. The common was already black with people.
     The sun had  only just sunk behind the barrows and great clouds sailing
through the sky  seemed  to shed their own light  over the meeting.  Terenty
stood erect on  the seat of  the cab, surrounded by the crowd. With one hand
he steadied  himself  on the driver's shoulder, and  gestured  energetically
with the  other. His  voice  carried to Petya in fragments borne on gusts of
wind. Sometimes he could make out whole sentences.
     The  wrathful voice that seemed to fly with the  breeze over the silent
crowd, over  the quiet steppe, filled Petya with a burning sense of struggle
for freedom. His  heart beat hard. And when the people sang in discord, "You
fell a victim in the fight"  and  there was a flicker of  movement as  heads
were bared, Petya  too removed his cap and  clutched it  to his  breast with
both hands,  singing with the others. He could  not hear himself, but beside
him he could hear the high  voice of Motya as she stood on tiptoe, her  neck
stretched, singing enthusiastically:
     "... Fresh ranks of the people have risen to fight...."
     Petya had the feeling that in a moment mounted Cossacks  would dash out
from somewhere and a massacre would begin. But everything was quiet, and the
silhouettes  of  the  sentries  stationed on the hillocks  and barrows  were
outlined black against the glow of the sunset.
     The   meeting  ended   and  the  people  dispersed   as   quickly   and
inconspicuously as they had gathered. The common emptied.  But on the  young
grass among  crushed dandelions Petya  saw a great  number  of sticks,  iron
bolts and pieces of brick which the  workers had brought with  them, just in
case.  Then Terenty and  Gavrik  appeared.  They walked in  step,  hands  in
pockets, looking well satisfied with the day's work.
     "Come  on, come on," said Terenty, passing one hand over Motya's  cheek
and holding out  the  other to  Petya.  "Don't dawdle. It's  true  there are
meetings and  demonstrations  all over  the town  and the  police don't know
which way to turn, and Tolmachov's sitting at home wondering what to do, but
all the same.... We'd better be getting along."
     This time,  however, the  police evidently were at a loss, and Governor
Tolmachov  did not venture  to send for  troop's. Throughout the twenty-four
hours  of the strike, not a single soldier or policeman was seen  about Near
Mills, except for the old local policeman who spent the whole day going from
house to house, begging tearfully for his sabre and revolver. He came to the
Chernoivanenkos' too, and Terenty went out into the yard to talk to him.
     "Terenty, lad," he pleaded,  "I knew you when you were in diddies. Have
a good heart. Tell your lads to give me my weapons back, or I'll be put  out
of the police. They're the property of the Crown."
     Terenty frowned.
     "What d'you mean by my lads? Think what you're saying."
     "As if  you didn't know yourself,"  said the  old man with a  wink, and
added  guilelessly, "your lads,  the  ones that are  revolutionaries. You're
their chief, aren't you?"
     Terenty took the man by the shoulder and led him out of the gate.
     "Get  along  with  you,  old 'un! And  don't  babble of things you know
nothing about. Or if you do-better keep off the streets at night. Get that?"
     "Ah, Terenty, Terenty." The old policeman sighed  and shambled along to
the next house.
     The  following day the strike ended and everything went  on as  before.
Factory whistles filled the  air every morning just as  they had, but now it
was  no longer cold and misty, but bright with sunshine  and filled with the
fragrance of flowers and the song of birds. And the people  going to work in
groups  and crowds seemed to  Petya  to be  different too,  they walked more
boldly,  they looked cheerful  and confident and in some  way  brighter  and
cleaner-probably because they had got rid of their clumsy winter clothes and
many were already in light canvas jackets and coloured cotton shirts.
     Coming home from school Petya felt very hot in his heavy uniform jacket
and cap, which soon became quite wet on the inside.
     Lessons finished a week before the exams. From morning  to night  Petya
sat at the table under the mulberry tree, his fingers in his  ears, learning
events and  dates, wagging his head like a Chinese  mandarin. He had made up
his mind to  get top marks in  all the exams whatever  happened, for he knew
full well that  no  leniency would be shown him,  he would be failed  on any
pretext. He got thin, and his hair, long uncut, straggled on his neck.


        THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE "PRAVDA"


     Come to the station with me?"  said Gavrik  one day, appearing suddenly
behind Petya.
     Petya was so  deep in  his  swotting  that  he did not even wonder  why
Gavrik was not at work. He only wagged his head a little faster and mumbled,
"Let me alone."
     Glancing up, however, he saw a very mysterious  smile on Gavrik's face.
Still more surprising was  his  carefully combed hair, the new cotton  shirt
held in by  a new belt, the pressed trousers and the new boots which he wore
only on very special occasions. All this must mean something unusual.
     "Why the station?" Petya asked.
     "To get the newspaper."
     "What newspaper?"
     "Our own. A daily.  The workers' paper,  lad.  Sent straight  from  St.
Petersburg by express. It's called the Pravda."
     Petya had already heard talk of the  new workers' paper the Beks  would
soon  be putting  out in St.  Petersburg. Collections had  been made for  it
among the workers, Petya had seen the money. Sometimes Terenty or Gavrik had
brought it home from work and  after counting it carefully, put it away in a
tin box that had once  held sweet drops. Once  a  week Terenty would send it
away by post, and put the receipt in the same box.
     The money was  mostly in small coins, even in single kopeks. Ruble  and
three-ruble notes appeared but rarely,  and it was  difficult to imagine how
such a big thing as a daily paper could possibly emerge from these coppers.
     But now  it  seemed  that it  could, and  it  was  coming  on  the  St.
Petersburg-Odessa express.
     To be frank, Petya was already heartily sick  of  grinding  away at his
books all day  and every day, from  morning  to night.  He  was glad of  the
excuse for a break. The idea of going to the station  was enticing. It was a
place  that  always  attracted  him.   The  network  of  rails  spurred  his
imagination to  picture the unknown regions  to which their smoothly curving
lines led.
     The west Petya had already seen. But there was still the north, all its
boundlessly vast expanses-Russia with Moscow, St. Petersburg, ancient  Kiev,
Arkhangelsk, the  Volga,  and Siberia  which  was Bo  hard  to  picture, and
finally  the Lena  River which was now not merely  a  river but  an event in
history,  reeking  with blood-like  Khodynka  (  A  place  in  Moscow  where
thousands of people were trampled to death in May 1896 during the coronation
of  Nicholas  II  due  to  the  authorities'  criminal  negligence.-Tr.)  or
Tsushima. And it was from there, from  the north, from the smoky,  foggy St.
Petersburg, that the express would today bring the newspaper Pravda.
     When Petya  and Gavrik arrived at the station, the train was already in
and stood  by the platform. It consisted entirely of shining  Pullmans, blue
or  yellow,  without a single third-class  green coach.  And there were  two
coaches such as neither Petya nor Gavrik had ever seen before; involuntarily
the lads stopped before them.
     They were faced with brightly polished wood, and  the door handles, the
corners of windows, the foreign letters  of the inscription and the badge of
the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits were of brass that glittered in
the sun. Even the outside conveyed a smart severity, like that of a ship.
     When the boys, nudging one another, peeped in through a window with its
narrow band of painted glass  at the top, they gasped at the luxury  inside,
at the  polished mahogany  panels,  the stamped-plush walls,  the snow-white
rumpled  bedding, the electric-light bulbs  like  milky tulips, the blue net
for light articles, the heavy bronze spittoon and the carpet on the floor.
     In the  other coach they  saw something even more  astounding-a  buffet
with  bottles  and  hors-d'oeuvres,  and  a waiter  in a  tailcoat  clearing
pyramidal  napkins from the  tables,  napkins so white and  stiff that  they
might have been made of marble.
     Even Petya who had been abroad had never  imagined anything  like this,
let alone Gavrik.
     "Oooh, just look!" Petya  whispered, pressing his face  so hard against
the thick glass that his nose left a moist imprint.
     Gavrik's  eyes  narrowed and with  a queer smile he hissed through  his
teeth, "That's how our fine gentry travel."
     "Keep off the coach, please!" said a stern voice with a foreign accent,
and  a  conductor  in  the   uniform  jacket   and  cap  of  the   Compagnie
Internationale des Wagons-Lits shoved the boys  away  with a firm hand as he
passed.
     Gavrik  wrinkled his  nose,  doubled up his  arm  and thrust the  elbow
towards  the  man-in Near  Mills  an  indication of  the utmost mockery  and
contempt. But the conductor, from the height of his superiority, ignored the
gesture, and the boys went on to the luggage coach.
     At  the moment  flat cane  baskets were being brought out; through  the
open  nets  covering them  the lads  could  see fresh,  moist  flowers-Parma
violets  and  roses,  sent through St. Petersburg from Nice to Werkmeister's
flower shop. Werkmeister himself, a gentleman in a short light bell-bottomed
coat with mourning bands on the sleeve and on a top hat, was supervising the
unloading, accompanying each  basket the  porter  carried to the cart with a
gentle touch from a finger bearing two wedding rings.
     The boys could smell  the perfume  of damp  flowers, strange among  the
coal and metal smells of the railway station, and this suddenly brought back
to Petya  that station in Naples, so like this one except  for the palms and
the  agaves,  and  the forgotten girl  with the black ribbon in her chestnut
braid. And again he  felt the bitter-sweet pang of parting. He  even fancied
that he saw her before him.
     But at that moment Gavrik  seized his sleeve and pulled him after a big
truck  loaded with  piles  of St. Petersburg  newspapers and magazines.  Two
porters  wheeled it  with  some difficulty, the  small iron  wheels striking
sparks as they rumbled over the asphalt.
     The boys  ran  alongside,  trying to  guess  which  pile contained  the
Pravda. The truck was wheeled off the platform into the station building and
came to a squealing stop beside a newspaper stall-a carved bookcase of fumed
oak, big as an organ, with hundreds of books, newspapers and magazines lying
.and hanging all over it.
     Petya loved  to look  at  all these novelties from St.  Petersburg. The
covers  of  love  and  detective  novels excited  him,  so did the  coloured
caricatures  of the Satirikon,  and  Alarm-Ctock,  and  the garlands of  The
Leichtweiss Cave, Nat  Pinkerton,  Nick Carter,  and Sherlock Holmes series,
that hung on lines like washing, with tiny pictures of  these famous foreign
detectives, with pipes or  without, among whom the famous Russian  detective
Putilin   looked   very   tnai've  and  provincial  with   his   ministerial
side-whiskers  and  his  old-fashioned  silk  hat.   Then  there  were   the
illustrated weekly journals-The Spark, Sun of Russia,  All the World,  Round
the World, and especially  that new magazine  which had only just come  out,
the Blue  Journal,  which really was  blue all  through, smelt  strongly  of
kerosene and stained the fingers.
     All these  dozens, hundreds,  thousands of printed sheets  promising  a
fantastic variety  of  ideas and  subjects,  but  actually  offering only an
appalling emptiness,  fascinated  Petya, and he stood before them as  though
spellbound.
     Meanwhile, the bundles of newspapers had been flung one after the other
beneath the counter. The  stout, long-bearded  old  man with  a  gold  chain
across his waistcoat, who rented  the stall, kept putting  a small pince-nez
on his  strawberry-coloured  nose,  leafing  through  his  account  book and
jotting down  notes with a pencil,  while  a very thin, bony  lady in a hat,
whose  pointed  angry  face made  her  look like  a pike,  flung  bundles of
newspapers  on  the  counter,  from  which they were quickly snatched up  by
news-boys and the owners of street stalls who had been queuing up for a long
time.
     "Fifty  New  Times,  thirty Country Life,  a  hundred  and fifty  Stock
Exchange, a hundred Speech. There you are, next!"  she  cried in a  croaking
voice, and in an instant the bundles were carried  off on shoulders or heads
across  the  station  square.  There  they  were  pitched  on to  handcarts,
wheelbarrows  or cabs  to  be distributed over the whole  city  as  fast  as
possible.
     Gavrik  took his place  at the end of the queue with a  little group of
people  who did not look like stall owners or news-boys. More  than anything
else they  looked  like  workers.  Gavrik  greeted some  of  them  and  they
exchanged  a  few quick words, impatiently  eyeing the bundles of newspapers
disappearing from the counter.
     Petya had the feeling they were apprehensive about something.
     At last their turn came.
     "And what do you want?" asked the pike-faced lady, with a stern look at
the strangers. She knew all her regular clients  by sight but these  she had
never seen before. "What have you come for?"
     "Our  paper's the Pravda." An  elderly worker with  a clipped moustache
wearing a  Sunday  jacket  and tie but smelling strongly  of  varnish pushed
forward to the counter. "We are from the Gena Factory,  the Ropit Wharf, the
repair  workshops, the Weinstein Flour Mill, the Schawald  Shipping  Company
and the  Zur and Co.  Furniture  Factory. To begin with we want fifty copies
apiece."
     "What's that you say? Pravda?  I've never heard of such a paper,"  said
the lady in an artificial voice and turned to the old man. "Ivan Antonovich,
does our agency handle the newspaper Pravda?"
     "What's  the  matter?" asked the old  man, and without raising his head
from his accounts  shot a hostile look  at the  customers out  of his small,
piercing eyes.
     "There's an application for three  hundred copies of some Pravda," said
the lady.
     "Not some Pravda," Gavrik corrected her, "but  the workers' daily paper
which has its office at 37, Nikolayevskaya Street, St. Petersburg. Isn't  it
there?"
     "It's not arrived," said the old man indifferently. "Come tomorrow."
     "Excuse me," said an elderly worker,  "but that's  not possible.  We've
had a telegram."
     "It's not arrived."
     "Not arrived, hasn't  it?" the  elderly worker snapped,  frowning. "The
Black-Hundred New Times  has  come, the  bourgeois Speech has come, but  the
workers' Pravda isn't here? Where's your lousy freedom, then?"
     "For  that sort  of  talk I  could-  Sofya  Ivanovna, go quick for  the
gendarme!"
     "What's that?" said the elderly worker very quietly, and his thick grey
brows drew  closer together. "Perhaps you want to send for the soldiers too?
As they did on the Lena?"
     "Don't waste your breath on them, Yegor Alexeyevich!"  shouted a lad in
a  seaman's cap  with  blue  tattooing on Ms  sinewy arm-evidently  from the
Schawald  Shipping Company. "Put  him out!" He made a rush for the  old man,
pushing aside the pike-faced lady, whose hat went askew.
     Petya shut his eyes. Now, he thought,  something terrible  will happen.
But all he heard was the old man whining, "Don't touch me, I'll have the law
on you...."
     When he  opened his  eyes he saw  Gavrik standing  behind  the counter,
triumphantly  pulling out  a  big package  of  the Pravda  printed  on cheap
yellowish paper with  the name in big,  black letters, as straight and stern
as the meaning of the word. (Pravda-truth.-Tr.)
     "But mark this, gentlemen, we don't sell retail!" hissed the lady. "And
don't  expect  credit.  Either  you  take  the whole  consignment-a thousand
copies, and pay  on the spot, or you  can get out and tomorrow your beggarly
Pravda  goes  back  to St.  Petersburg,  and  the sooner  it goes  smash the
better."
     The paper was a cheap  one, fitted for lean pockets. Other  papers cost
five kopeks, the  Pravda  only two.  But even so,  a  thousand copies  meant
twenty rubles, a big sum in those days.
     The six turned out their pockets  but found that they could only scrape
up sixteen rubles seventy-four kopeks.
     "Ragamuffins,  beggars,  rabble,  and  want to  push  your  noses  into
politics," rattled the lady all in one breath,  turned  her back and put her
lace-mittened hand on the pile of papers.
     "Just  a  minute,"  said  the young  fellow from  the Schawald Shipping
Company.
     He raced into the first-class  waiting-room, handed  his  silver  watch
over the refreshment counter and was back in a moment with a five-ruble note
crumpled in his hand.
     So ten minutes later Gavrik and Petya were marching towards Near Mills,
each with a package of papers on his shoulder.
     Although  the  newspaper  was  published  legally,  with  the necessary
permit, Petya felt like a  law-breaker. Whenever the boys passed a policeman
he  felt the  man was looking  at them with great  suspicion. As a matter of
fact, he was often right.
     It would have been hard not to notice two youths, one in school uniform
and the  other  dressed  as  a  workman, striding along very  quickly,  with
sizeable bundles on their shoulders and obviously excited, the boy in school
uniform looking round apprehensively  at  every  step and  the young workman
whistling the "Varshavyanka" as  loudly  as he could, beating out the rhythm
with his stride.
     The nearer  they  came to their house, the faster the  boys  went until
they were almost running. Sometimes Gavrik tossed his bundle in the air and,
imitating  newsboys, shouted, "New daily workers' paper, the Pravda!  Latest
news! All about the Lena massacre!" His eyes burned.
     When  they  came to  Sakhalinchik, quite close  to Near  Mills,  Gavrik
pulled out a number of copies and raced  ahead at full  speed,  waving  them
over  his head and  shouting, "The  Tsar's  Minister Makarov tells the State
Duma, 'What has been will be!' Down with the butcher Makarov! Long  live the
workers' Pravda! Buy  the workers' Pravda\ Two kopeks  a copy! What has been
won't be!"
     They came  to the  factory district and here Gavrik was quite  at home.
This was his own world, where he  felt free and independent. Big  gates with
brass lettering on wire  netting. Square  brick buildings and tall chimneys.
The squat concrete tower of the  "Cocovar" margarine factory  with  its huge
placard of a bulldog-faced chef offering a dish with a steaming pudding. The
waterworks, the depot, the elevators.. ..
     Here and there workers in blue shirts  and greasy overalls came running
out, drawn by Gavrik's cries. Some of them bought  papers and handed coppers
to Gavrik which he slipped into his mouth like a real news-boy.
     Once  a  policeman  noticed the disturbance  and  whistled, but  Gavrik
showed his elbow  from  the distance  and  the  boys dived  quickly  down an
alleyway.
     Petya's fears had almost left him, it was as though they  were  playing
some exciting, risky game.
     Suddenly they heard the  beat of running feet behind them. They turned.
A man with his jacket open and flying was racing after them. He had bow legs
and weaved from side to side, shouting, "Hi! You lads there! Stop!"
     At first  Petya thought  he  wanted  to  buy a paper and  waited, but a
second  glance showed  him his  mistake. The man running  after them  held a
short rubber truncheon  and  on his lapel was the badge of the Black-Hundred
Union with its tricolour ribbon.
     "Run!" shouted Gavrik.
     But the  man with the truncheon  was  there already; Petya felt a heavy
blow  which luckily missed  his head and  descended on the bundle of papers,
just clipping his ear in passing.
     Fragments of newsprint flew on all sides.
     "Hands off!"  Gavrik snarled, hoarse with rage; with  his free  hand he
gave the man such a blow that he staggered back and almost fell. "Hands off,
you blackguard! Murderer, bastard! I'll kill you!"
     Without removing his  eyes from  the man,  Gavrik slipped the bundle of
papers from his shoulder and reached them back to Petya.
     "Take those and run  to the repair shops, call the workers' squad,"  he
said rapidly, licking  his lips and forgetting Petya  might  not  know  what
workers' squads were.
     But Petya knew. Hugging the papers, he raced along the narrow street at
top speed.
     Gavrik and the man faced each other on the road. Still licking his lips
and breathing  heavily  through his nose, Gavrik  slowly slid his right hand
into  his  pocket. When he just  as  slowly  took  it  out,  it held a steel
knuckleduster.
     "I'll kill you!" he repeated, his hard eyes fixed on the man as  though
he wanted to fix in his  mind that puffy dark face that looked  as though it
had  been stung by  bees,  the little  pig's eyes, the bullet-head with hair
parted at the side and combed across  the low forehead, and the crooked grin
of a bully.
     "Now  then, you  scum!"  said  the man and aimed a blow with his rubber
truncheon; but Gavrik dodged it and raced after Petya.
     He heard the beat  of boots behind him, and  when the sound came  close
Gavrik  suddenly threw himself down on the ground;  the man caught his foot,
tripped and measured his length. Gavrik promptly sat down on him and started
hammering the man's black head with his knuckle-duster, repeating  fiercely,
"Hands off! Hands off! Hands off!"
     The man  got his  hand into his pocket  with a groan  and pulled out  a
small black Browning. A number of shots rang out, but Gavrik managed to  get
his foot on the man's  arm and  the bullets only struck harmless sparks from
the cobbles.
     "Help! Police!" sobbed  the man and,  twisting his head round, suddenly
hit Gavrik on the leg.
     Gavrik gasped and  the next  minute they were rolling  over and over on
the ground. It is hard to say how it would have ended,  for  Gavrik was much
smaller  and  weaker than his  opponent, but at  that moment assistance came
from the repair workshops.
     Five men of the workers' squad armed with pieces of piping and spanners
tore the Browning and the rubber truncheon out of the bully's hand, gave him
a  couple  of  buffets  and all but  carried Gavrik into the  yard.  It  all
happened so  quickly that when  a policeman  came  running up, drawn by  the
firing, he found nobody  in  the street except Gavrik's assailant sitting on
the ground, slumped against the fence of  the  "Cocovar" margarine  factory,
spitting out blood-covered teeth.
     From  then  on  the  new  paper   was  sold  regularly,  first  in  the
working-class districts  and round the factories, and then here and there in
the centre of the city.


        THE COTTAGE IN THE STEPPE


     A few days later exams  began. It cost Motya and her mother a good deal
of work to clean  and mend Petya's uniform, for it had been in more than one
adventure since its owner had come to live in Near Mills.
     Petya's ear, which caught a glancing  blow by the rubber truncheon, was
no longer painful but was still blue and swollen, and in general presented a
disreputable appearance. Petya hoped a dusting of tooth-powder would make it
look a little more presentable and allowed Motya to do the powdering,  which
she did, passing a rag very gently and carefully  over the injured  ear, her
tongue thrust out in concentrated effort.
     Petya  did not do at all badly  in  his  exams, although the  examiners
tried hard to fail him.
     The  tense, tiring examination period, which as always  coincided  with
the first May thunderstorms, thickly flowering lilacs, summer heat and short
sleepless  nights  filled  with  moonlight  and  the  whispers   of  lovers,
thoroughly exhausted Petya. When  he finally returned to Near Mills from the
last exam-eyes  sparkling,  hair rumpled, hands covered  with ink and chalk,
perspiring and happy-it would have been hard to recognize him for  the  same
boy he  had been a couple  of months before, so  much  older and  thinner he
looked.
     The next day he shouldered his pillow and blanket and set off for home.
     The first person  he  saw there was his father.  Vasily  Petrovich  was
weeding round the cherry trees, tearing out grass and chamomiles and tossing
them  into a  basket.  Petya  looked at  the kindly,  unshaven  face and the
noticeably greyer hair, the  dark-blue shirt, faded at the back and bleached
almost white under the arms, the old trousers, baggy at the knees, the dusty
sandals and the pince-nez that fell off and dangled on its  cord  every time
his father bent down-and a flood of warmth filled him.
     "Dad!" he called, "I'm through!"
     His father turned and a  happy smile lighted up the  wet  bearded  face
with a swollen vein running across the forehead.
     "Ah, Petya! Well, congratulations, that's fine."
     The  boy dropped his pillow  and blanket on the  dusty  grass and flung
both arms round his father's hot, sunburned neck, noticing with surprise and
a secret thrill of pride that they were almost the same height.
     Auntie appeared  from the flowering  lilacs with  the hoe in her hands.
Petya did not recognize her at once, for she had a kerchief fastened tightly
round her head, making her look like a peasant woman.
     "Auntie, I've passed them all!" Petya cried.
     "I  know,  I heard  you, congratulations," said Auntie, wiping  her wet
forehead with her arm. She beamed,  but she could not refrain from improving
the occasion. "Now you're in the seventh form, I hope you'll behave better."
     Dunyasha,  her head in a kerchief and a  hoe in her hands  like Auntie,
also congratulated the young master on his success.
     Then came  a creaking of wheels followed by a big, bony, very old horse
in funereal black blinkers pulling  a long water-cart. The horse was  led by
the lanky youth, Gavrila, whom Petya had seen before, and Pavlik sat astride
the barrel, barefoot and in a big straw hat, holding the reins and whip.
     "Hey,  Petya!  Hullo!"  he  called, spitting to  one  side like  a real
carter.  "Look, I can drive  him a bit already!  Here you,  stop!  Whoa!" he
shouted at the  horse, which at once stood motionless on its trembling legs,
evidently glad to do so.
     Gavrila set to  work watering the  trees,  pouring a bucketful into the
hollow dug round each. The dry earth absorbed  the water instantaneously. In
a few minutes Petya realized the work entailed in looking after an orchard.
     Summer  was  beginning and there  had  not  been a single  really  good
rainfall. In the cistern the water was right down to the bottom.  Now it had
to be brought from the horse-tram terminus.
     The orchard was  in blossom and the  trees  were covered  ,with ovaries
that  needed  moisture  all  the  time. It  was a good  thing  that with the
Vasyutinskaya orchard they had got that  old  horse, called Warden,  and the
water-cart. But a  tremendous amount  of water was needed, and  Warden could
barely crawl.
     From morning to night there was the creaking of  un-greased wheels from
the water-cart, the crack of the whip  .and the  heavy breathing of the bony
black nag  that  looked  ready to  fall down and  give  up the  ghost at any
moment. It was  hard  to make him rise from his wet straw in the morning. He
trembled all over,  weakly  shifting his great cracked hoofs, and  the flies
crawled round his blind, watering eyes.
     This somewhat  dashed their  spirits, and at times  seemed like  a  bad
omen. But the weather was wonderful and the crop promised to be so rich that
the Bachei  family, busy from  morning to night with their unaccustomed  but
enjoyable physical work, felt splendid.
     At first Petya thought he never would learn to dig round the trees. The
heavy spade  twisted awkwardly in his hands  and  seemed  too  blunt to  cut
deeply into the ground with its thick growth  of grass and  chamomiles.  His
hands smarted and he rubbed blisters on the palms. But by  the time they had
burst and turned into calluses, he began to understand the way of it.
     It seemed that the spade should be put down at  an angle, and he should
press not only with his hands but also, and mainly, with his foot-slowly and
evenly; there  was a crack of tearing roots and the spade went down into the
black soil right to the very top. Then came the blissful moment when he bore
down with all his  weight on the handle, felt it bend  a  little, and with a
pleasant effort turned over the heavy layer of soil  with its imprint of the
spade and half a wriggling red worm.
     At first Petya  worked in sandals, but then  began  digging barefoot to
save them, and the contact of his skin  with the warm iron was another thing
he enjoyed. He ^realized that  this was not play, it was work, the future of
the family depended on it.
     All of them worked in the sweat of their brows, it  was a real struggle
for  existence. They had dinner at midday on the big glassed-in veranda, hot
from the  sunshine. They ate  borshch,  boiled beef, and grey wheaten  bread
which  they bought from the German settlers at> Lustdorf. They were so tired
they  ate almost in silence, and  what  talk  there  was concerned  only the
weather, rain and the crop.
     Although  they were living in a summer cottage  they were quite  unlike
the usual holiday  crowd. They slept on folding beds in the big, comfortless
rooms,  with spades, hoes, buckets, watering-cans and other implements lying
about in the corners. They washed  at  dawn by  the water-cart, and although
the sea was  not  far away,  only about a  mile and a half, they seldom went
bathing- there was no time.
     Vasily Petrovich  became thin and haggard; he  was evidently overtaxing
his  strength but he refused to slacken off,  and  worked so hard that Petya
often worried about him.
     Everything appeared to be going  well.  It was the kind  of life Vasily
Petrovich  had  often  dreamed  of in secret, especially  after his European
tour-with something of Switzerland, something of the Rousseau spirit, a life
independent of the government or society. A little plot of land, an orchard,
a vineyard, healthy physical  toil  and leisure devoted to reading, walking,
philosophical conversation and all the rest of it.
     So far, it is true,  there had been only the healthy physical  toil, no
time was left for the leisure devoted to spiritual joys. But after all, that
was natural, the new life was only just beginning.
     Nevertheless, Vasily Petrovich  was never free from a  nagging sense of
worry. He was uneasy about the crop.
     The  ovaries stood thick  on the cherry  trees, fine, green balls  that
swelled day by  day, but who could  say how they would  go on? Suppose there
was no rain, the water carried proved insufficient  and the  crop  was lost?
And even if it was not lost, how were they to sell it?
     Up  to  now  the question of  selling the crop  had never been properly
discussed,  it had  been  somehow  taken  for  granted.  People would  come,
wholesale  dealers  from the market, and buy  up the whole of it. All right.
But what if they didn't come and didn't buy it?
     Meanwhile,  the date for the  second payment on  the note  of hand  was
drawing near, and  two  postcards had come from abroad, with a reminder from
the old woman and a warning that if the payment was not  made punctually she
would at  once protest the  bill, close the agreement and let  the  farm  to
other tenants.
     This took all peace of mind from Vasily Petrovich and he began to  lose
his temper about trifles.
     Auntie  remained cheerful, she made various  plans and fastened a sheet
of  paper  to a  telegraph  post  by the  horse-tram terminus  announcing  a
comfortable cottage of two completely isolated  rooms to let in a delightful
spot on the steppe not far from  the  sea, with  an orchard and vineyard; it
could be  rented  either  for the season or  by the month. Full  service  if
required.
     These  two  separate rooms were  nothing more  nor less  than the  tiny
neglected hut roofed with shingles where Madame Vasyutinskaya's servants had
once lived. It stood  by itself, its windows facing the steppe, amid a thick
growth of  silvery wormwood; to Petya, who had explored the whole place,  it
was a wonderful, mysterious, and very romantic spot.
     However,  people who read the notice and  came to take  a look were not
impressed.  One and all  said the same thing, "You call it 'not far from the
sea'?"
     Gavrik came a number of times to study Latin. He liked the farm, but he
still  had  no  use   for  all  this  business  of  physical  toil  and  the
sweat-of-your-brow, he looked upon it as an eccentric whim.  He  did not say
so straight out,  however.  On the  contrary, he asked very  seriously about
watering, hoeing, crop  prospects  and  the  wholesale price of cherries. He
gave no advice, only shook his head in concern and sighed so sympathetically
that Petya even began to have qualms about the success of their venture.
     Gavrik said little about his work in the print-shop  and  life in  Near
Mills,  he seemed  reluctant to discuss it, but from the little he  did  say
Petya concluded that things were  not going very smoothly. After the big May
Day demonstration which he  had  hardly noticed in his absorption  in exams,
the police had got busy again, there had been house searches and some people
had been arrested; the police had been to the Chernoivanenkos', too, but had
found nothing and Terenty was not arrested.
     "In general, it's hard to work," said Gavrik, and Petya was in no doubt
about the sense in which he used the word "work."
     On  one of his  visits, as  though  continuing that topic, Gavrik  said
suddenly,  "About  renting  out  that  cottage of yours-it's  not such a bad
idea."
     "Yes, but nobody wants it," said Petya.
     "If you look properly you may find someone," Gavrik answered, as though
he had thought it all over.  "There  are people for  whom a place like  that
would be just the very  thing. Not everyone likes to take  a  room in  town,
where you have to hand in your  papers for registration the moment you  move
in. Get me?" he ended sternly, looking very straight at Petya.
     "I get you all right," Petya answered with a shrug.
     "Well then, remember," said Gavrik still  more sternly. "The point is,"
he went on more  gently, almost casually, "I know a widow with  a child,  an
assistant  doctor, she's from another town and she wants  a room where  it's
quiet.  Of  course,  we could fix  her up  in our shed,  but  in  Near Mills
conditions aren't all we want-you understand? Such a watch kept, it's no use
trying. The widow's  got all her. papers  in order, you've no need  to worry
about that."
     "I understand," said Petya.
     "Well,  I needn't explain any more, then.  Terenty told me to sound you
out about it. I've never  seen her myself. But I'm sure  she'll be all right
with you. A quiet place,  like a farm really,  neither town nor village, and
plenty of  summer cottages all round. Who'll  ever notice her? Couldn't find
anything better. Now the next question- what's the rent?"
     "I believe it's seventy rubles for the season."
     "Eh, lad, that's opening your mouth a bit too wide! You'll get  nothing
that way. Fifteen rubles a month's a good fair price. She can pay two months
in advance. But what's the sense of talking to you about it? I'll go to your
aunt."
     Gavrik did talk  to  Auntie and  soon convinced  her that it  would  be
better to have a real, concrete thirty rubles-which weren't to be  picked up
on  the ground- rather than an imaginary seventy. As for the  widow  and her
child, Gavrik said nothing about her but made it clear that he had specially
sought out a suitable tenant for them and was thus doing the Bachei family a
very good turn-although he made no actual promises.
     The  rain  did  not  come.  The  drought continued  and  the  heat  was
suffocating.


        THE DEATH OF WARDEN


     Warden was fed  freshly cut hay instead of oats to save money, and fell
sick with a stomach disorder; for the fourth day he lay with distended belly
on his straw, too weak even to raise himself on his forefeet, let alone pull
the  water-cart. The German vet came from  Lustdorf, examined the  horse and
looked into his gaping mouth. To  Auntie's question whether he would be able
to  pull  the cart again, the  vet answered,  "That horse  has  done all his
pulling. Time to send him to the knacker's."
     The ovaries on the trees ceased to swell; they  looked as if they would
never grow any  bigger, but remain as they  were, the size of peas. And most
dreadful of all, some of them turned yellow and dropped off.
     The Bacheis continued earthing up trees from morning to night, although
they felt it was useless labour.
     "Auntie,  Daddy,  Petya, come  quick,  the Persians  are  here!"  cried
Pavlik, racing up  to them  under the  low boughs  of the trees,  waving his
straw hat.
     In  reality   these  were   not   Persians  at  all,  they   were   two
powerfully-built Jews  in dark-blue  belted  shirts hung to their  knees and
tall  sheepskin hats pulled  low over their brows-dealers who  bought  fruit
wholesale,  and were  called  Persians because in the old days Persians  had
done all this type of fruit-trading in Odessa.
     Petya  saw  two  men  standing by  the  dry  water  barrel  with  faces
expressionless as those of carved idols. He gazed at them as at the arbiters
of fate, with fear and hope. Even at the exams he had been less agitated.
     The whole Bachei family surrounded the Persians.
     One of them addressed Auntie.
     "Are you the  mistress  here?"  he asked in  a  low rumbling voice that
seemed to  issue from his stomach.  "We'll take a look  at  your crop, maybe
we'll buy it on the tree-if there's anything left of it."
     Without waiting for an answer, both Persians walked along the overgrown
paths, glancing carelessly  at the trees and now and  then stopping to touch
an ovary or feel the soil round the roots.
     The  Bacheis followed them  in silence, trying to guess their thoughts.
Although  the men's faces remained  expressionless, it  was  plain  that the
situation  was  really  bad. When they had  finished  their examination, the
Persians brought  their sheepskin hats  close together  and  whispered for a
moment.
     "They need water," said  one,  addressing Auntie;  they whispered again
and walked silently away.
     "Well?" asked  Auntie, following them  with tiny  steps  and overtaking
them at the gate.
     "They  need  water,"  the man repeated, halting, and after  a  moment's
thought he added, "fruit like that we wouldn't take even as a gift."
     "Come now,  you're  exaggerating," said Auntie  with a kind  of  forced
coquettishness, trying to turn it into a joke, "Let's be serious."
     "Well, we'll give you  twelve rubles for the whole crop as  it  stands,
take  it or  leave it,"  the  man answered and pushed his hat lower over his
brows.
     Auntie flushed with indignation. Such an  absurd sum  as  twelve rubles
was an insult. She could hardly believe her ears.
     "What's that? How much did you say?"
     "Twelve rubles," the man repeated roughly.
     "Vasily Petrovich,  you  hear  what they're  offering?"  cried  Auntie,
clasping her hands and forcing a laugh.
     "What's wrong with that?  It's a good price," said the Persian. "Better
take it  while you can get  it,  in another week you won't get five,  you'll
just have blistered your hands for nothing."
     "Boor!" said Auntie.
     "Sirs,  will you kindly  get out of here!" cried Vasily Petrovich,  and
his jaw shook. "Outside! Out, I say! Gavrila, put them out, throw them  out!
Robbers!" And Vasily Petrovich stamped his foot.
     "No  need for abuse," said the Persian quite  pacifically. "First learn
to look after your fruit, then it'll be time enough to shout."
     So the men left, not forgetting to shut the gate behind them.
     "Just think, the  impudence of it!"  Auntie kept repeating. She dropped
her spade and fanned herself with her handkerchief.
     "Now, don't you go getting upset about it, ma'am," said Gavrila.  "Just
take no  notice.  They only came to push  down the price. I know their sort.
But what they said  about  water, that's right. Our orchard has  to have it.
The trees  want  water. No  water, no crop. And  there you are, the horse is
down.  No  way to bring it. If  only  it would rain  now. Water-you can't do
without it."
     Scant comfort in that.
     They  tried to hire a horse from the  German settlers in  Lustdorf, but
nothing  came of it: first  the Germans named  an impossibly high price, and
then refused  point-blank,  saying they needed their  horses themselves. The
real  fact  was  that they  all  had their  own  orchards and the  ruin of a
competitor just suited them.
     "Amazing, how  unneighbourly  they are!"  cried Auntie  at dinner-time,
cracking her fingers, a thing she had never done before.
     "What's  to  be  done, what's  to  be done,"  mumbled Vasily Petrovich,
bending a little too low over his plate. "Homo homini lupus est, which means
'Man's a  wolf  to  man'.... If you  remember, I told  you at the time  this
stupid idea of trading  in fruit would end badly." His ears turned  red as a
cock's comb.
     He had said  it would end badly-he could well have said it would end in
complete ruin. It was clear without words. Auntie turned  pale with the pain
of hearing  these cruel,  unjust words. Her eyes filled with  tears  and her
lips trembled.
     "Vasily  Petrovich,  aren't  you  ashamed,"  she said imploringly,  her
fingers at her temples.
     "Why should I be  ashamed? It's all your fantastic idea ...  your crazy
idea...."
     Vasily  Petrovich could  no  longer stop,  he had  lost all control  of
himself. He jumped up and suddenly saw Pavlik apparently holding his nose so
as not  to  giggle; actually the boy was biting his fingers  desperately  to
keep himself from crying.
     "What!" yelled Vasily Petrovich  in  a voice not his own. "You have the
impudence to laugh! I'll  teach you  to respect your father! Stand  up,  you
rascal, when your father speaks to you!"
     "Dad-Daddy!" sobbed  Pavlik,  and clapped his hands  over  his face  in
terror.
     But Vasily Petrovich was beyond understanding. He  picked  up his plate
of soup  and smashed it down  on  the floor.  Then  he twisted his arm round
awkwardly, gave Pavlik a buffet on the back of the neck and rushed out  into
the  orchard,  slamming  the door  behind him  with  such violence  that the
coloured glass at the top fell in shattered fragments.
     "I  can't live  in this madhouse any longer!" Petya  suddenly screamed.
"Damn you! I'm going to Near Mills and I'm not coming back!" He ran into his
room to put his things together.
     Altogether,  it was a shameful, degrading scene. One might have thought
they had all lost their senses, gone mad as dogs do in the heat.
     The heat certainly was dreadful-close, exhausting,  dry, burning-enough
to  drive anybody mad.  The pale sky  seemed to have a  dull, scorching veil
drawn over it. Waves of heat came from the steppe as they come from the open
door of an  oven. Hot winds carried clouds of dust. The acacias rustled with
a dry, papery sound and the grass was grey. The strip of  sea on the horizon
looked brown, speckled with greyish-white foam; and whenever the roar of the
wind died down one could hear the sound of waves-dry and monotonous like the
distant rattle of pebbles thrown on to some huge sieve.
     The  dusty  shadows  of  trees  flickered on the walls and ceilings  of
rooms. A terrible day.... Not  only Petya but  Vasily Petrovich, Auntie  and
even Pavlik were ready to collect their belongings and run away-anywhere, to
get  away from the sight of  one another and the mutual sense of injury. But
of course nobody did run away, they only wandered aimlessly about in the hot
rooms  and along  the  rustling paths. They felt  fettered  to this wretched
place which had at first looked like heaven on earth.
     Towards evening a figure appeared in  the orchard-a short, stout man in
a tall sheepskin hat, but brown this time instead of black. This was another
Persian, a real one  this time, with long eastern moustaches  and languorous
eyes. He went quickly round the orchard  leaning ion a short stick, and then
stood beside the kitchen  waiting  for  somebody  to  come out.  As  no  one
appeared,  however, he went to the  house and rapped on the window  with his
stick.
     When Auntie  peeped out, he  said, "Hi, Mistress!"  and  pointed at the
orchard with a yellow hand adorned with dirty nails. "I'll buy your crop for
five rubles. Better take it or you'll be sorry later."
     "Ruffian!" cried  Auntie in a  dreadful voice. "Gavrila, what  are  you
about? Throw him out!"
     But the  real Persian did  not wait for Gavrila,  he ran off with small
limping steps and disappeared in an instant.
     Then came the third postcard from Madame  Vasyutinskaya, reminding them
of the date for the next payment.
     Nobody wanted  any  supper  that  day,  and for a long  time  the  four
soup-plates  of yoghurt sprinkled with sugar stood untouched on the table on
the veranda.
     In  the middle of  the  night a dreadful,  inhuman,  bloodcurdling  cry
awakened everybody. What could it be? Outside the windows the black outlines
of the fruit trees swayed as in fever. Then the cry was repeated, still more
dreadful,  with  a kind of  screaming, sobbing  laugh  in  it. Somebody came
running along the path, waving a lantern. Then there was  a battering on the
glazed  door  that shook  the  house. Gavrila  stood on the step, waving his
lantern.
     "Come quick, ma'am, Warden's dying," he cried in a frightened voice.
     Petya  flung something on  and raced to the stable, trembling from head
to foot. Auntie, Vasily Petrovich, Dunyasha and Pavlik, barefoot and wrapped
in a blanket, stood huddled round the door.
     Gavrila's  lantern  shed an ominous  light inside the stable.  He could
hear the deep,  vibrating groans of the dying horse. They  stood  petrified,
helpless, unable to think of any way to stave off this catastrophe.
     Just before  dawn the horse gave one last  dreadful scream vibrant with
pain  and terror,  and  then  fell silent for ever. In  the morning  a  cart
arrived  and he  was taken out  somewhere far away on the steppe-huge, bony,
black,  with bared teeth and long outstretched legs ending in cracked  hoofs
and shining, worn iron shoes.


        THE WIDOW WITH A CHILD


     They were all so crushed by this disaster that nobody did any work  all
day. The  death of Warden was not only a bad omen, it  was the final blow to
all  their  hopes, it  meant  inevitable ruin for the  family. Utter despair
reigned.
     After dinner the wind died down  somewhat but the sultry heat was worse
than ever. Not a cloud could be  seen in the pale, dusty-looking sky. A band
of  lilac  lay  along  the  horizon,  a   deceptive  reflection  of  distant
thunderstorms  that constantly  gathered  but never  broke. This was not the
first time there  had  been  a promise  of  storm, but  it  had always  been
followed by disappointment, either  the cloud had melted  away imperceptibly
in the scorching air or it had passed by  and broken somewhere  out  to sea,
with a useless rolling of thunder echoing over the steppe.
     Today it  was the same. The storm broke far away. Nobody was surprised,
they  had already  lost all hope of rain, although that was  the only chance
left for the crop. Petya was  weary after a sleepless night; he did not know
what to do with  himself  and wandered out on  the steppe, roaming aimlessly
until a  big circuit brought  him to the sea.  He  climbed down  the  cliff,
clutching at roots and boulders, and finally sat down on the hot pebbles.
     The water  was  still heaving after the storm  of the previous day, but
the waves, heavy with seaweed,  no longer beat angrily against the beach but
rolled smoothly up it, leaving stranded jelly-fish and dead sea-horses.
     It  was a wild, deserted strip of  coast,  and  Petya, who  had all day
longed to  be alone, felt easier there, lapped in a quiet melancholy. It was
a long  time since  he had bathed and now he  undressed quickly  and slipped
with pleasure into the warm, foamy water.
     There was a  special,  inexplicable delight in this bathe which he took
quite alone. First he  swam along the  shore for a little way among slippery
rocks washed by the sea and covered with  brown weeds, then he turned out to
sea. As usual,  he swam on  his  side, kicking  his legs  like  a  frog  and
flinging one hand forward in a broad  overarm swing.  He pushed his shoulder
through the waves, trying to raise  that splash which  made him feel  he was
cutting swiftly  through the water although in reality his speed was nothing
wonderful.  He was  very pleased with  himself. He  particularly  liked that
shoulder which  pushed  through  the  water-brown, smooth  as  silk under  a
gleaming wet film that reflected the sunshine.
     The time had long  passed when  he had been afraid to  go far  from the
shore. He would strike out boldly for the open sea and then turn over on his
back, let  the waves rock him, and  stare  up  at  the sky until he  had the
feeling  that he was looking down  at it, hanging, void of weight, in space.
The whole world  vanished, he  forgot  everything  but  himself,  alone  and
all-powerful.
     Now too, he  swam out about a  mile, turned  over... and gasped  at the
change that had taken place around him. The sky overhead was still clear and
the  sea shone with a  hot, blinding  glare, but it had a hard glitter, like
the glitter of anthracite.
     Petya looked  back to  the shore. Over the narrow  strip of cliff, over
the  steppe  hung  something  huge,  black,  surging  and-most  terrible  of
all-quite  silent.  Before  Petya  had  time  to  realize that  this  was  a
thundercloud it  rolled up  to the sun,  which was  blindingly white like  a
magnesium  flare, and  swallowed  it  up in  an  instant, extinguishing  all
colours from the world so that everything became a leaden grey.
     Petya swam back as fast as he could, and anyway he could, trying to get
ashore before  the storm burst. Far away on the steppe, under the slaty sky,
he could see whirling dust-devils chasing one another.  And when  he climbed
up the beach and turned to look at the sea, the place where he had only just
been was already a seething mass of foam whipped by a squall, with sea-gulls
flying wildly over.
     Petya barely managed to catch his  trousers and shirt as they fled with
the  wind along the beach. While he was climbing the cliff everything turned
as dark as late evening. He raced at  top  speed to  the horse-tram terminus
where rails were being laid for electric trams and concrete poured for a new
building. Just as  he got there lightning flashed, there was a great bang of
thunder and  in the  hush  that  followed  he  could  hear  the roar  of the
approaching downpour.
     Petya ran on to the road,  and as though some gate  had opened, a sharp
scent of wet hemp struck him, followed by a solid wall of rain.
     In an instant the road became a river. The lightning flashes showed him
the foaming torrent that swirled  round his  legs. His feet  'slipped. There
was no sense trying to get  home through  that. Up to the knees  in water he
made  his  way back  to the tram-shelter,  crossing  himself every time  the
lightning flashed close by with an almost  simultaneous clap of thunder.  It
was  only as he slipped down into a deep gutter that Petya suddenly realized
this  was  the thunderstorm, the downpour, for which the whole Bachei family
had waited so desperately. It was not ordinary water, it was the water which
would soak the orchard, fill the empty cistern and save them from ruin.
     "Hurrah!"  shouted Petya  and ran  through  the storm to  the farm,  no
longer afraid of anything.
     He slipped and fell several times on the way, flopping  full length  in
the mud, but  now this warm  mud felt  wonderful.  When  he reached home the
sunset showed dimly through a  break in the main-clouds and the storm rolled
away out to sea where  lightning flashed convulsively and thunder snarled on
a dark-blue horizon. But  Petya had hardly time to race along  the paths and
admire the muddy water filling the hollows round the trees, to plant a happy
kiss on  his father's wet beard, to give Pavlik a friendly buffet and shout,
"Grand,  Auntie,  isn't it?" before the storm came back,  more  violent than
ever.
     Several  times  after that it circled over the sea and returned  again.
The rain  continued  all  through the night, sometimes pouring in  torrents,
sometimes stealthily quiet, barely  audible, while under the trees thousands
of tiny  streams glittered in  the lightning  flashes  which  illumined  the
orchard with all its distant, mysterious corners.
     The whole night Gavrila, a sack over his head,  ran round the house and
over the roof fixing  up the pipes that collected the water and poured it in
rapid torrents  into the cistern.  And to the noise of the  filling  cistern
Petya fell into a deep, happy sleep.
     It was late when he awakened. A rosy sun shone like a jewel through the
warm  mist,  and the wet  garden  was full  of bird-song. Auntie  looked  in
through the open window.
     "Get up, lazy-bones!" she called gaily.  "While you've been asleep, our
tenants have come!"
     "The widow with a child?" asked Petya yawning.
     "The very same," Auntie answered with the mischievous smile that showed
her spirits were excellent. "There's tea ready, come along."
     Of course, Petya wanted to see  the  widow and child, so he  hurried to
the veranda.
     He halted, thunderstruck.
     Sitting at  the  table  between  Vasily  Petrovich  and Pavlik,  calmly
drinking  tea, were  that same  lady  and  that  same girl he  had  seen the
previous year at the station in Naples.
     He  gave his head a shake as  though a cinder  had  flown  into his eye
again.
     "Ah,  here's  our Petya,  let me introduce him,"  said  Auntie with her
society smile.
     Petya almost burst out with "We know each other already," but something
held him back. Blushing, he went round the table, clicked his heels politely
and waited for the lady to extend her hand first, as a well-bred boy should.
After clasping the  cool, slender  fingers of the mother, Petya looked  with
secret hope at  the  daughter,  asking  with  his  eyes whether she  did not
remember him.
     But the girl only looked surprised at Petya's queer expression and held
out  her  little  hand  indifferently,  saying,  "Marina."  That  was  quite
unexpected,  for in  accordance with  character  portrayal  by  Pushkin  and
Goncharov, Petya had  always thought of  her as Tanya or  Vera.  And now she
turned out to be  Marina.  Petya eyed her with frank reproach, as though she
had deceived him.
     She  looked  just  the same as she  had  in Naples, with the same short
summer  coat, the same black hair-ribbon and  the  same  little jutting chin
that  gave  her  pretty  face  with  its  rather high cheek-bones  a  lofty,
unapproachable expression.  Her  hazel  eyes  were cold and  disapproving as
though asking, "What do you want of me?"
     "Frailty, thy  name is  woman," thought Petya  bitterly, and then  with
still  greater bitterness realized that she had not  forgotten him, she  had
never even noticed him.
     Petya felt insulted, his pride had suffered a blow.
     "In that case, all is over between us," he said with his eyes, and with
a cold, indifferent shrug he turned and went to his place.
     "Stop making faces," said Auntie.
     "I'm  not making faces," Petya answered, and straightaway stuffed  soft
bread in his tea to make a "pudding." The way of making it was this: you put
pieces of soft bread in  a half-filled glass  of tea,  then  when  the bread
swelled  you turned the glass upside down on the saucer, producing something
which by  a  great  stretch  of imagination  resembled a pudding.  This  was
considered bad manners in the Bachei family, so Vasily Petrovich  gave Petya
a  very  stern look through his  glasses and tapped the table with his index
finger.
     "I shall send you away!"
     "Please, don't think he  doesn't  know how  to behave,  he's just shy,"
said  Auntie,  addressing  the  mother  but  with  a   sly  glance  at   the
daughter-which made Petya snort and start messing the "pudding"  up with his
teaspoon.
     Marina's  mother,  however,   was  disinclined   to  keep   the  polite
conversation going.  She evidently  found  no  pleasure  in this  ceremonial
tea-drinking with strangers, people who happened to be letting her rooms but
who otherwise did not interest her in the least.
     She was a brunette with a  small,  jutting chin  like her daughter's, a
dark shadow on her upper lip, a shabby widow's bonnet and wary eyes.
     "About the rent," she said, continuing the talk which Petya's  entrance
had interrupted. "I was told that it's fifteen rubles a month. That suits me
very  well  and I'd like to pay two months  in  advance, thirty rubles." She
opened a black bag like the ones midwives carry and took out some notes. "We
shan't  want board, we've a kerosene stove and  we'll  manage for ourselves.
Here is the money, exactly thirty rubles."
     "Oh, that's quite all right,"  mumbled Auntie, flushing and embarrassed
as  she always was when money  was discussed.  "You don't need to give it me
now  ...  later would do.... Well,  merci, then." She pushed the money which
had a slight hospital smell carelessly under the sugar-bowl.
     Marina's mother put  her  hand  in  her  bag again  as  though  seeking
something  else (her papers, thought Petya), but evidently changed her mind,
took her hand out and snapped the bag to with a decisive click.
     "And now if you don't mind, I'd like to go to our rooms," she said.
     Refusing assistance,  mother and daughter picked up their belongings-an
oilcloth satchel,  a  kerosene  stove  wrapped in newspaper,  a  bag  and an
umbrella-and crossed the garden to the cottage, leaving deep imprints on the
wet paths.
     "A  rather strange woman," observed  Vasily Petrovich. "But  after all,
what's that got to do with us?"
     "In any case,  she seems quite cultured," said Auntie with a sigh, took
the money out from under  the  sugar-bowl and  slipped it into the pocket of
her smart apron.
     For a little while  the weather cleared, and the garden sparkled in the
hot sunshine. But hardly had the Bacheis picked up their spades and gone out
to start work when the clouds gathered again and the  rain recommenced,  but
this  time a warm, gentle rain, just the kind needed to ensure  a good crop.
It went on  with short breaks for a whole week, and in that week  the garden
was literally transformed.
     The ovaries swelled before  their eyes, promising  excellent fruit. The
trees seemed to be thick  with cherries-still green, it is true, but getting
ready to change colour. With all this a spirit of gaiety, hope and affection
reigned among the Bacheis, and nobody noticed the change in Petya.


        THE SECRET NOTE


     For  some  time  the  boy  had been  in  a  constant  state of  subdued
excitement. A tense half-smile kept flitting over  his face. He did not know
what to do with himself, especially as all the trees were already earthed up
and  well watered  by  the rain,  so  that there was  no  work  to keep  him
occupied.  Petya's  heart  and mind were  concentrated  on  one aim -to  see
Marina. Simple  enough, one might think. She was  living  right beside  him.
They had been introduced. They could see each other a dozen times a day. But
it was not like that at all.
     The Pavlovskayas (that  was their  name) never left their rooms,  never
appeared in the garden. Evidently they avoided society-or to put it plainly,
they were in  hiding. Petya understood that well enough, but it made matters
no easier for him.
     For a whole week he saw Marina  only  once, and that was at a distance.
She was returning from  the terminus, waist-deep in wheat, holding up a  big
black umbrella and carrying a tin can-evidently for kerosene.
     Petya raced home, put on his cape  and started walking up  and down  by
the gate with a most  casual,  indifferent  air. But Marina  took  the  path
through  the fields  and  Petya only  caught a  glimpse  of her  closing the
umbrella and disappearing into the cottage.
     Petya roamed about  the orchard a long time  in the  rain, choosing the
parts  that  gave  him a  view of the cottage, but the girl did  not  appear
again.
     Late that  evening,  when darkness fell, Petya-holding his  breath  and
inwardly despising himself-crept up to the cottage  and crouched down in the
thick wormwood  that  showered him  from  head  to foot  with  the  aromatic
rain-water from its leaves.
     One  of the windows was dark but the  other was  pale with candlelight.
Looking  in, Petya saw Marina's bent head and her moving hand as  she  wrote
earnestly;  the  light  gave her  fingers the  faintly  transparent  look of
porcelain. Behind her  the large shadow of  Madame  Pavlovskaya moved up and
down  the  whitewashed  wall raising and lowing  an  open book-from which he
could conclude that Marina was writing dictation.
     This sobered Petya a little, it even brought a scornful smile.
     At that moment the girl's  hand  halted  in  indecision.  Marina sought
counsel on the ceiling. Petya could see her jutting chin,  frowning brow and
narrowed  eyes; on  one of them she  had a  sty  coming.  As  she  gazed  in
puzzlement at the  ceiling she  licked her lips once  or  twice, and  such a
sudden  wave of emotion shook Petya that  he shut his eyes. No, never in all
his  life had  he loved  anyone as  he  loved this dark-haired girl with the
independent, jutting chin and the sty coming on her eye.
     He had loved her for a  long time, a year  already. But before this she
had  been  a dream, a phantasy.  He  had  almost  ceased to  believe  in her
existence.-He had  forgotten her to  such an extent that  sometimes he could
not even picture  her. It had  not really  been love, only  a premonition of
love,  mingled with the blizzard in  the mountains,  the  black swans  round
Rousseau's island,  the sulphurous smoke  of Vesuvius, the  vague  imaginary
picture  of Paris, the magic words  "Longjumeau" and  "Marie Rose"-in short,
everything which  a  year before had captured  his imagination and wrung his
heart.
     Now   it  was  an  ordinary,  everyday  love,   alluring  in  its  very
accessibility. Marina  was no  longer loftily unapproachable,  there  was no
more  mystery about her. Just an  ordinary girl, not even especially pretty,
with a sty  on her eye, writing dictation. Tomorrow she would  go  out for a
walk in the garden and he would go up and talk to her. They would talk for a
long time and then they would never part again.
     Petya  went home to bed and fell asleep in the blissful certainty  that
on the morrow a new, delightful life  was going to begin. He could  even see
himself  as  Yevgeny  Onegin  and her  as  Tatyana, anticipating  the secret
rendezvous  at which he would at first "instruct the lady  of his heart" and
then say he'd been joking and take her arm.
     But nothing of the kind happened.
     Marina still did not  appear, and  Petya reproached  her inwardly, even
called her a fair deceiver, as though she had made him some promise. Then he
resolved to chastise her by indifference, to take no more notice of her. For
a whole day he kept his eyes away from their windows.  Of course it was very
cruel, but it had to  be done. Let her  realize what he was capable of if he
were deceived. She had only herself to blame.
     The  next day Petya  decided to let  wrath  give  way to kindness, for,
after all, he loved her. Again he began eyeing the cottage from afar. But it
was all no good, she did not appear.
     After that he so far lost the mastery over himself as to risk going  up
quite close a number  of times. He noticed that a  new path had been  beaten
from the door, leading out into the  steppe. Aha,  so that was why she never
appeared in the garden! She preferred wandering over the steppe. And what if
that narrow  path were nothing other than a hint, an  invitation to a secret
rendezvous?  Heavens above,  how had  he failed to understand!  Why,  it was
clear  as  daylight!  So  he  began  roaming  about  the   steppe,  glancing
impatiently at the cottage. At any moment she would see him and come out. He
would be tender, but firm.
     The only fly in the ointment was that the weather had turned hot again,
too hot for his cape.
     But  alas!-she  still  stayed   inside.  It   seemed  as  if  she  were
deliberately mocking him.
     "You wait,"  thought Petya.  "Your kerosene will come to  an end,  then
we'll see!"
     As though  to taunt him, the  weather  was  wonderful. The  lilacs were
over, but white acacia and jasmine were in full bloom,  filling the air with
their sweet, languorous fragrance. At night the added scent of night violets
and flowering tobacco made the air still more intoxicating, their pale stars
vaguely visible in the twilight on the luxuriant flower-beds in front of the
house.
     In the evening a great golden moon rose over the  sea, and by  midnight
it hung over the steppe, bathing everything in a warm, jasmine light.
     Could anything be more romantic? And all of it wasted!
     Weary of  idleness  and  love, Petya could  neither  sleep  nor eat. He
became thin and haggard and his eyes had a restless glitter.
     "What's the matter, fallen in love?"  asked Auntie, looking at him with
curiosity.
     Petya wanted to wither her with a glance, but all he managed was such a
pitiful travesty of a smile that she shrugged her shoulders.
     The end of it all was that Petya decided  to write a diary. He found an
old  exercise book, tore  out some  pages with algebra  problems and  wrote,
"Love has come to me...." He had expected it would be perfectly easy to fill
the whole book with a detailed description of his emotions, which he felt to
be so extraordinary and so vast. But try as he would, he could find -nothing
more to add, such was the surging confusion of his mind.
     Then he turned desperately to the last resort-to write her a letter and
appoint a rendezvous.
     Of  course,  there  was nothing so very  extraordinary  about that. But
Petya's condition had reached the stage where the object of one's love seems
a  being of a  loftier sphere, an ideal  far above ordinary human relations,
even though  she does go to buy kerosene with an umbrella over her head,  or
even writes dictation.
     However, there was nothing else left to do.
     For love-letters  it was common to use what were called "secret notes,"
very popular in the "flying post," game played at parties.  These were small
pieces of coloured paper with perforated glued edges, which could be doubled
and sealed, serving as notepaper and envelope. To open them one tore off the
perforated part. They came under the same category as confetti, serpentines,
silken masks and other ball-room trifles. These were  the proper medium  for
tender messages. But Petya had none, and  there was nowhere to buy them. The
best he could do was to fold a sheet of paper torn from an exercise book and
himself make pin-holes along its loose edges.
     This  took some effort,  but to write  the note itself was still worse.
Petya wrote five rough copies before he achieved the following:
     "Marina!! I must speak to you about  something very important. Come out
to the steppe tomorrow at exactly eight in  the evening. I do not sign this,
for I  hope  you can guess the sender." Petya  heavily  underlined the words
"something very important," secretly relying on feminine curiosity.
     He went into the orchard  and scratched some resin from a cherry  tree.
With  considerable satisfaction  he chewed it  soft, stuck the note together
with it and wrote on the outside, "To Marina. Personal and private."
     Petya slipped  the note into  his pocket and went straight  off to look
for  Pavlik. He found  him in the stable. And  found him playing  cards with
Gavrila. At  the  moment of Petya's appearance he was kneeling  with  raised
hand, preparing to slam down the ace of hearts  with all the force  of which
he was capable on a rubbed,  worn  knave that  lay on  the ground beside the
pack, surrounded by crawling insects and piles of small coins.
     Pavlik's  face  was  filled  with  reckless  excitement,  but  Gavrila,
kneeling opposite,  looked downcast, and drops  of sweat ran  down  his long
freckled nose.
     "Aha," thought Petya, "so this is  how my fine brother  spends the day,
this is what idleness can lead to!"
     "Pavlik, come here!" he said sternly.
     Pavlik jumped as though stung, and with a quick, agile movement twisted
round and sat on the pack, looking at his brother with innocent brown eyes.
     "Come here!" Petya repeated with increased sternness.
     "Now don't take it wrong, young master," said Gavrila, forcing a laugh.
"We're not gambling,  we're just fooling about to pass the time, like. May I
die here on the spot if we're not!"
     "Tell-tale-tit!" chanted Pavlik, just in case, inconspicuously scraping
out the money from under him.
     Petya, however, only frowned and shrugged his shoulders.
     "That's not what I'm after," he said. "Come here."
     He led Pavlik away into the bushes, halted with legs astride and bent a
stern look on him.
     "It's  this-"  He stopped,  at a loss for a  moment.  "I want you to do
something for me ... or rather, not to do something, to go on an errand."
     "I know, I know," said Pavlik quickly.
     "What do you know?" asked Petya, frowning.
     "I know what you want. You want me to take  a note to  that  new  girl.
Isn't that it?"
     "How did you guess?" cried the startled Petya.
     "Huh!" Pavlik answered scornfully. "D'you  think  I can't see the silly
way you're going on? But you needn't try to get me to take your notes 'cause
I won't!"
     "Oh yes, you will," said Petya menacingly.
     "Think you're somebody, don't you!" said Pavlik  boldly, but retreating
a step to be on the safe side.
     "You will go!" Petya hissed obstinately.
     "No I won't."
     "Yes you will!"
     "No I won't, and you  can stop ordering me about, too. I'm not a kid to
run after girls with  your notes. Go there and  have Madame Pavlovskaya pull
my ears, eh? I'm not such a fool!"
     "So you won't go, won't you?" asked Petya with an ominous smile.
     "No I won't!"
     "All right, so much the worse for you!"
     "And what'll happen?"
     "Simply that I'll go right away and tell Father you're gambling."
     "And I'll go right  away and  tell everyone you're in love with the new
girl and you're writing her sloppy notes and you sit in  the weeds under her
window and stop her learning her lessons and everybody'll laugh at you. Aha,
got you!"
     "You little worm," said Petya.
     "You're another."
     "All the same, you'd better hold your tongue," said Petya dully.
     "I'll hold mine if you hold yours."
     With  those  words Pavlik strutted back  to the  stable  where Gavrila,
bored with nothing to do, was lying en the ground shuffling the cards.
     No hope there.
     That night Petya again crept  to the cottage and sat among the wormwood
for  a long time, plucking up courage to  toss the note  in through the open
window. This time  the whole house  was dark, evidently  both  were  asleep.
Petya even thought  he could hear deep breathing. The moon shone so brightly
on  the whitewashed walls that they  looked blue, patterned by  the  swaying
shadows of acacias, while the wormwood in which Petya sat gleamed silver.
     Several  times Petya had to change  his position, seeking shadows  that
would hide  him from  the moonlight, and  finally  made so much noise that a
deep sigh sounded from inside and an irritated voice  said, "I'm sure I hear
someone walking round the house all the time."
     Then another voice, soft and sleepy,  replied,  "Go to sleep, Mum, it's
just cats."
     Petya  waited trembling until all was  quiet,  then  he took  from  his
pocket the  note, tied  round  a stone,  and tossed it  in through  the open
window.
     Covered  with cold  sweat he slunk  back. When he at  last  came to his
canvas  bed  and  started silently  undressing, he  heard  Pavlik's  ominous
whisper from under the blanket.
     "Aha! Think  I  don't  know  what  you've been  doing?  Throwing  in  a
note-huh! Thank your stars you didn't get your ears pulled!"
     "You little swine," hissed Petya.
     "You're another," mumbled Pavlik sleepily.


        THE RENDEZVOUS


     It is hard to think how Petya would have got through the  following day
if the watering of the orchard had not started again.
     Petya stood zealously turning the cistern handle to pull up the bucket,
then letting the water out into the tank from which it  was carried all over
the garden. He had himself volunteered for this tiring, monotonous job which
would leave his mind free to think of the rendezvous.
     The unoiled axle of  the  latticed iron  drum  squealed mournfully. The
chain  rattled crisply as it  wound  and  unwound.  The heavy bucket crawled
slowly  up, the  falling  drops  sounding  metallically  hard in the echoing
darkness of the cistern, then it raced  down again, dragging the  wet  chain
after it,  so that the  drum whirled wildly round and one had to  skip aside
pretty quickly to avoid a sharp blow from the handle.
     His arms and back ached, his shirt was soaking, sweat ran down his face
and  dripped from  his chin, but Petya went on working, refusing to rest. He
was  in a state of  bliss which at one moment nearly turned to  despair when
the day darkened, clouds  came rolling up  and a few drops fell, promising a
downpour in the evening that would put any meeting on the steppe out of  the
question.
     However, the rain passed over, the clouds dispersed and towards evening
a cool breeze sprang up-a most fortunate  circumstance, since it allowed him
to put on his cape.
     When Petya, after making a wide detour for  caution's sake, came to the
little path by the cottage, the setting sun was blazing over  the steppe and
his shadow was so long that it looked as though he were on stilts.
     The monastery  bells  were ringing for  vespers. From the distance came
the  melancholy song  of  reapers. The white  wall of the cottage was tinted
pink by the sun and  the  windows were a blinding gold. Petya's  hands  were
like  ice,  and  his  mouth  felt  cold,  as  though  he  had  been  sucking
peppermints.
     Without  any real reason for it, Petya had told  himself that she would
most certainly come. But although he would not for  the  world have admitted
it, a secret doubt lurked at the bottom of his heart.
     He  Lay  prone on the grass, his  chin resting on his fists, staring at
the  cottage as though by sheer force of will he could compel  her now, this
very moment, to  come out on the steppe. Actually, this already was not love
but insistent pride, not passion but obstinacy; it was an aimless turbulence
of spirit, the wish  to bring his ideal down from heaven to earth and assure
himself that Marina was  not a  scrap better  than other girls-for instance,
Motya- probably worse.
     And  yet  his  imagination  still enthroned  her as the  only  one, the
unattainable one,  despite the sty and that chin like the  toe of a shoe-and
perhaps even because of that.
     Suddenly, between waves of despair and hope, he saw the familiar figure
pass the cottage, up to the  waist in wormwood; he  could hardly believe his
eyes,  so great was  his happiness.  Marina came  to him quickly, almost too
quickly, shading her eyes with her hand from the sun that beat straight into
her face.  She was in a  short summer coat with the  collar raised,  and her
hair was done  a  new  way; the same black  bow was  there,  but a  sprig of
jasmine had been added.
     "Good  evening," she  said,  holding out  her hand to Petya.  "I had an
awful  job getting away. You've no idea what  Mum's like. You'll see, she'll
call me back at once. Come along quick."
     She smiled and walked  along the path leading into the steppe, followed
by Petya, who was knocked right off his balance and even disappointed by her
confident ease, and especially by her frankly mischievous smile.
     Whatever he had expected, it had been something very different-shyness,
embarrassment, silent  reproach,  even severity-but most certainly not this.
One might think she had only been  waiting for the chance to run out to meet
a boy! She did not even ask why he  wanted her  to come. And that jasmine in
her hair! Petya could see now that  she was  small only in size, in age  she
must be  fifteen; and  she had  probably had plenty  of  experience  in love
affairs-perhaps she had even been kissed.
     In general, it was as though she had suddenly turned into her own elder
sister.
     "Aren't you hot in that cape?" she asked, glancing round.
     "Aren't you hot in your coat?" Petya retorted dully.
     Evidently she  did  not understand irony,  for  she answered,  "It's  a
summer coat, your cape's a heavy woollen one."
     "A  Swiss  cape,  specially  for the  mountains!" remarked  Petya,  not
without a boastful note.
     "Yes, I see that," answered Marina.
     When they  were a good distance from the  house, they left the path and
strolled  slowly side by side among the suslik holes and wild flowers, which
threw  down long  shadows. For a time  they said nothing,  listening  to the
rustle of the grass and flowers under their feet.
     The sun sank behind a distant barrow. A cool breeze rose.

     "Are you fond of the steppe?" asked Marina.
     "I love the mountains," Petya answered sombrely.
     He had  not  the faintest idea  how he ought to proceed now. He had got
what he wanted, this  was a  real 'rendezvous, it was even more-a long  walk
out  on  the  steppe  at  sunset.  But  all  the  same he  was  awkward  and
embarrassed. In some way  she had got  the upper hand over  him in the first
moment. And well he knew it.
     "I love the steppe," said Marina, "though I like mountains too."
     "No, the mountains are finer," said Petya stubbornly.
     He  had  never in his life found it so difficult to talk to a girl. How
much easier  it had been with Motya,  for  instance.  Of course, Motya loved
him, while this one-you couldn't  guess. ... But the worst  of  all was that
she did not display the faintest desire to know why he had asked her to meet
him. What was that-pretence or indifference?
     With  every  moment  that  passed  he  loved  her  more,  he  was  most
desperately in love. And not at all as he had been  before, he was no longer
in love with a far-away dream, but with an enchantingly close reality.
     As they strolled  along she would now  and  then  give  a  little laugh
without any visible reason, and  that teasing laughter seemed  very familiar
to Petya, although he could not for the life  of him remember where and when
he had heard it.
     "Just wait, my dear," thought Petya, admiring Marina's pretty head with
the  black ribbon and the sprig of jasmine. "Just wait,  we'll see what song
you'll sing in a little while."
     "Just  imagine," he said  with a crooked, sarcastic smile, "once upon a
time I was most tremendously in love with you."
     "You-with me?"  asked Marina  in  surprise and shrugged  her shoulders.
"When could that have been?"
     "A long time ago.  Last year," sighed Petya.  "And you, I suppose,  you
never even guessed?"
     She halted and looked up at him with grave probing eyes.
     "That is quite impossible."
     "But it was so."
     "Where, and when?"
     Petya  looked at her  with  tender reproach  and said very  slowly  and
distinctly, "June. Italy. Naples. The railway station. Can you deny it?"
     In  an  instant  Marina's face changed completely;  she looked serious,
alarmed. Her colour mounted.
     "You're making a mistake," she said curtly,  with a look that seemed to
shut him out  at  once. "We've never been in Italy ... or any other  foreign
country."
     Petya knew this was not true.
     "Yes, you have, you were wearing the same  coat and  the same black bow
in  your hair!" he cried eagerly. "You walked along  the platform  with your
mother. And Maxim Gorky was there. Our train started and I leaned out of the
window and looked at you, and you looked  back at me. Wasn't that so? Didn't
you look at me? Can you deny it?"
     She frowned and shook her head in  silence, but the deep colour did not
leave her face, even her chin was red. She was beginning to be angry.
     "Can you deny it? Can you?" Petya insisted.
     "Nothing of the kind ever happened, you've just dreamed it!"
     "I even know where you were going. Shall I  tell you? Well? To  Paris!"
cried Petya with a kind of bitter triumph.
     She shook her head land the colour began to leave her face.
     "Marie Rose, Longjumeau," said Petya softly, impressively, looking bard
into her eyes and enjoying her discomfiture.
     She turned so pale that Petya was frightened.  Then her face  stiffened
in a look of contempt.
     "You're making it all up,"  she said carelessly and even forced herself
to laugh, a strange laugh that sounded so familiar.
     Suddenly he realized it  was  Vera's mermaid laugh from  The Precipice,
and he himself was the miserable Raisky.
     "Remember once  and for  all that nothing of the  sort  ever happened,"
Marina said. She turned and walked rapidly back towards the house.
     Petya ran after her.
     "Don't follow me," she said without turning.
     "Marina, wait a bit ... but why?" Petya groaned piteously.
     She  turned,  let  her eyes travel  over  him from  head to foot with a
contemptuous look, said, "Babbler!" and ran home.
     Petya had never expected the  long-awaited rendezvous to end in fiasco.
He was completely puzzled  by her anger. All he  knew  was that he  had lost
her, if not for ever, at least  for a very long  time. And when? At the very
moment everything was  perfect, when dusk was creeping over the steppe and a
great moon hung over the distant hills, with a pale light like the glow of a
paper lantern.


     CAESAR'S COMMENTARIES


     For some days after that Marina did not appear  at  all. Petya tossed a
number of notes  in through  the window,  trying on various pretexts to lure
her  to meet  him,  even  promising  to  reveal some tremendously  important
secret, but nothing helped. And he realized he had lost her for ever.
     He was in despair.  And his despair was deepened by the fact that there
was absolutely  nobody to whom he could  confide  his  unsuccessful romance,
pour out in eloquent words his "tormented soul," as Petya mentally described
the painful sting of hurt pride. So Gavrik's appearance was a godsend.
     He  turned up quite suddenly,  as was his  wont of  late. Petya saw him
standing in  the  orchard,  but it  was  a  puzzle how he had got there. Not
through  the  gate, that  was  certain, for  Petya himself had been standing
there  all  the  time,  watching  to  see whether anyone  would  go to fetch
kerosene.
     Gavrik  had  a  worn  textbook tricked under  his  belt and carried  an
exercise  book rolled into  a  tube with  which he kept angrily striking his
knee. In general, his look was sombre.
     "Hullo, come to study a bit?"
     "No, to catch sparrows," Gavrik answered curtly.
     Petya chose a shady spot with a view of the cottage, and they sat  down
among the chamomiles beneath a cherry tree.
     "Well, what have you got there?" asked Petya languidly.
     "I have to learn De hello Gallico."
     "Aha. Now  listen, and  I'll explain it all. The point is that De hello
Gallico  was written by Caesar. He was called  Gaius Julius and he  was  the
Roman emperor who-"
     "I  know all  that.  I have to read it  and translate it, and learn the
first chapter by heart."
     "All right, we can do that," said Petya obligingly. "Open your book and
start translating."
     "I've done the translation," said Gavrik.
     "What do you want, then?"
     "I've  got  to  learn  the  first  chapter.  And  that's far worse than
learning poetry so far as I'm concerned."
     "But it is necessary," Petya said didactically, gradually slipping into
the role of teacher.  "Give me  your book, I'll  read aloud  and  you repeat
everything after me."
     "But don't you know it by heart?" asked Gavrik suspiciously.
     Petya, however, ignored this  indiscreet question; he took the book out
of Gavrik's hand and began reading with great expression:
     "Gallia est omnis divisa in paries tres. Repeat that."
     "Gallia est omnis divisa  in paries ires" Gavrik repeated, his forehead
deeply creased.
     "Good!" said Petya. "Now-"
     But at that moment  he thought  he  saw a  movement by the  cottage. He
craned his neck to see better.
     "No good looking over there," Gavrik said quietly.
     Petya started.
     "How did you guess?" he asked, blushing. They knew one another too well
for pretence.
     "Oh,  don't  play the  bread-and-butter  miss!" snapped Gavrik. "Anyone
might think the Pavlovskayas had dropped down from the skies.  You know very
well it was we who sent them-to keep them out of the  way of the police. You
need a  head  on  your  shoulders, not a  turnip.  They're not just ordinary
people  getting  out  of  the  summer  heat,  they're  in  hiding," he  said
incisively. "And they're working.  And  then you  had to  start off with all
that romantic nonsense! All  right, amuse yourself  with it if you like, but
don't  bother them with your  talk. And that's just what you've  been doing.
'Why, I  know you. Why, I saw you abroad!  Marie Rose, Longjumeau!' Have you
any  idea what. Marie Rose and Longjumeau mean?"  Gavrik  suddenly  realized
that his  voice had risen;  he stopped short and looked about him. There was
nobody near, but he continued  in a lower tone,  "It is from there  that all
the instructions come. And since I've gone so far,  I don't mind telling you
that  if they catch Pavlovskaya, it'll be a serious blow. I'm talking to you
like this because we consider you one of us. Am I right?"
     Gavrik looked hard at Petya through narrowed  eyes, awaiting a straight
answer to a straight question.
     Petya  thought a moment, then  nodded  silently.  It was the first time
Gavrik  had spoken  so  openly,  definitely,  keeping  nothing back, calling
everything by its name.
     "I swear-" Petya began and felt his throat close up with excitement. He
wanted badly  to say something deeply significant,  perhaps  impressive.  "I
swear-" he repeated, and tears welled in his eyes.
     "There you  are, I knew you'd start right off  with something  of  that
sort," said Gavrik. "You needn't bother. Fine words butter no  parsnips, and
we've heard plenty of talkers."
     "I'm not just a talker," Petya said in a huff.
     "I don't  mean  you, though you're not  the silent  type-  Marie  Rose,
Longjumeau. You  drop that  sort of thing. This isn't  a game, it's serious.
And if it comes to the point, we shan't stand on ceremony with you. You know
what underground work is?"
     "Of course I do," said Petya, not without dignity.
     "Oh no, you  don't,"  Gavrik  answered. "In the first  place  it  means
holding your  tongue.  Tell  one  person today,  and he'll spill  everything
tomorrow.  You can never  get back what you've said.  Do you  know what  she
thought?"
     "Who?"
     "Marina. She thought you'd been sent after her. A busy."
     "What's a busy?"
     "You're really slow to catch on.  A busy's a detective. A police agent.
It's  time  you knew things like that. You alarmed the Pavlovskayas so badly
they  were planning to  leave  that  very  night,  to  get somewhere  a safe
distance from your place. A good thing I happened along just then, or they'd
have  been gone. They'd got their things packed,  but I told  them  you were
more or less one of us, and not to worry."
     Petya sat silent, crushed. He had never imagined his romance could have
such serious consequences. In general there was much that had never occurred
to him.
     "She's  certainly a nice  girl. I wouldn't mind  taking a stroll arm in
arm with her at twilight myself. But I've no time," Gavrik sighed.
     Petya stared at him  with something like horror, unable to believe  his
ears. To talk like that about "her"! It was sacrilege. But Gavrik, stretched
out  among the chamomiles, his arms  under his head,  continued  in the same
tone, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world:
     "On  the  other hand, think of  her.  She has no father. He died abroad
last  year of  galloping  consumption. He belonged to our organization, too.
Her mother's a Party worker. She's got a false passport. They always have to
be moving from place to place, hiding, changing their rooms. The  girl's got
to study  somehow, and not fall  behind.  They stay  at  home  all the  time
because they  can only go out when it's absolutely necessary.  And after all
she's young, it's dull for her. So it was natural enough that when you threw
that note in, she was  pleased. Why shouldn't  she go for  a walk with a boy
once in a while? And  by the way, believe it or not, she liked you, too. But
then you went and spoiled everything with your big mouth."
     Petya flinched as from a toothache.
     "Wait a moment," he said, "how do you know all this?"
     Gavrik stared at Petya with unconcealed surprise.
     "Well!  Do you think they  feed  on air? Incidentally, that's not their
name  at  all, but  it  doesn't matter.  I  dash  over  twice  a  week  with
provisions. Well, and sometimes there  are  instructions from the  committee
too."
     Another unpleasant  surprise for Petya. So Gavrik often visited Marina,
he was a friend of the family.
     "So that's it! But why do you  never come  to  us?"  asked  Petya, with
something like jealousy.
     "Because I generally come at night."
     "Cloak and dagger stuff?" Petya asked with a note of irony.
     "What do  you think? Why attract attention? You never can tell who  may
notice,  especially in  times like  these. Don't  you  know what's going on?
There are strikes all  over. The  secret  police  are going crazy,  sniffing
everywhere-no joke about it. It's worse than 1905."
     Again Petya felt the  atmosphere of Near Mills, which had faded away of
late.
     "What about  a smoke, comrade?" Gavrik said, pulling a package of cheap
cigarettes from his pocket.
     Petya  had  never  smoked and he  felt  no  desire  to.  But  the  word
"comrade,"  which Gavrik  pronounced with  a kind  of  special intonation of
stern independence, the very look of the package of Peal Cigarettes made  by
the Laferrne Co., five kopeks for twenty, advertised in the Pravda, made him
pull a stiff cigarette from the package and place it awkwardly in his mouth.
     "Good idea," said Petya, imitating Gavrik's sternness and independence,
and squinting at the end of the cigarette as Gavrik held a match to it.
     They smoked for a few moments, Gavrik  with obvious enjoyment, inhaling
and spitting like a real workman, Petya removing his cigarette  every moment
from  his mouth and for some reason eyeing the cardboard end that emitted  a
white trickle of heavy smoke.
     Nothing  more was said about the Pavlovskayas.  They worked a little on
Caesar,  then Gavrik left, saying in farewell, "Well,  that's that. The main
thing is not to lose your nerve."
     What that applied to, Petya did not know.
     Now  he was filled  with a  turmoil of contradictory emotions-jealousy,
anger  at himself, hope, despair  and,  strangest of all, an ardent, surging
thirst for life.
     He thought of all kinds of ways to remedy his error and draw Marina out
for a m