"Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots don't seem to be from hereabouts...."
"They are army boots," the man put in complacently and significantly.
"No, I am not precisely in the army, I..."
"What an inquisitive woman!" Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. "And how they stare at me... mais enfin. In fact, it's strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done them no harm."
The woman was whispering to the man.
"If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable."
Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.
"Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired; but how am I to get in?"
"How wonderful it is," he thought to himself, "that I've been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it."
But the peasant had not, however, pulled up the horse.
"But where are you bound for?" he asked with some mistrustfulness.
Stepan Trofimovitch did not understand him at once.
"To Hatovo, I suppose?"
"Hatov?
No, not to Hatov's exactly... And I don't know him though I've heard of him."
"The village of Hatovo, the village, seven miles from here."
"A village?
C'est charmant, to be sure I've heard of it...."
Stepan Trofimovitch was still walking, they had not yet taken him into the cart.
A guess that was a stroke of genius flashed through his mind.
"You think perhaps that I am... I've got a passport and I am a professor, that is, if you like, a teacher... but a head teacher.
I am a head teacher.
Oui, c'est comme ca qu'on peut traduire.
I should be very glad of a lift and I'll buy you... I'll buy you a quart of vodka for it."
"It'll be half a rouble, sir; it's a bad road."
"Or it wouldn't be fair to ourselves," put in the woman.
"Half a rouble?
Very good then, half a rouble.
C'est encore mieux; j'ai en tout quarante roubles mais..."
The peasant stopped the horse and by their united efforts Stepan Trofimovitch was dragged into the cart, and seated on the sack by the woman.
He was still pursued by the same whirl of ideas.
Sometimes he was aware himself that he was terribly absent-minded, and that he was not thinking of what he ought to be thinking of and wondered at it.
This consciousness of abnormal weakness of mind became at moments very painful and even humiliating to him.
"How... how is this you've got a cow behind?" he suddenly asked the woman.
"What do you mean, sir, as though you'd never seen one," laughed the woman.
"We bought it in the town," the peasant put in. "Our cattle died last spring... the plague.
All the beasts have died round us, all of them. There aren't half of them left, it's heartbreaking."
And again he lashed the horse, which had got stuck in a rut.
"Yes, that does happen among you in Russia... in general we Russians. .. Well, yes, it happens," Stepan Trofimovitch broke off.
"If you are a teacher, what are you going to Hatovo for?
Maybe you are going on farther."
"I... I'm not going farther precisely.... C'est-a-dire, I'm going to a merchant's."
"To Spasov, I suppose?"
"Yes, yes, to Spasov.
But that's no matter."
"If you are going to Spasov and on foot, it will take you a week in your boots," laughed the woman.
"I dare say, I dare say, no matter, mes amis, no matter." Stepan Trofimovitch cut her short impatiently.
"Awfully inquisitive people; but the woman speaks better than he does, and I notice that since February 19, their language has altered a little, and... and what business is it of mine whether I'm going to Spasov or not?
Besides, I'll pay them, so why do they pester me."
"If you are going to Spasov, you must take the steamer," the peasant persisted.