The brown steppe, denuded of snow, floated past the windows of the railway carnage.
A chill wind, smelling of the thawing earth, blew in through the broken glass.
Katya was looking out of the window.
Her head and shoulders were enveloped in a downy Orenburg shawl, knotted at the small of her back.
Roshchin, in a soldier's greatcoat and tattered peaked cap, lay dozing on the seat.
The train was going very slowly.
Tall trees came in sight, their enmeshed branches thickly clustered with nests.
Clouds of rooks were circling above them, or swaying on the branches.
Katya moved closer to the window.
The rooks cawed in vociferous anxiety, as in spring, as they had cawed when Katya was a little girl—about the torrents released in spring, the mists, the first storms....
Katya and Roshchin were travelling south. They were going they knew not where—to Rostov, to Novocherkassk, to the Don villages.
To some place where the knot of civil war was being tied.
Roshchin slept, his head drooping, his unshaven face thin, the harsh lines showing round his fastidiously compressed lips.
Katya felt a sudden panic. It was not his face, this unfamiliar countenance with the peaked nose.... The wind bore the sound of the cawing of the rooks through the window.
The train went slowly on, clattering over the points.
Over a muddy path slanting across the steppe, there stretched a train of carts—shaggy ponies, farm carts plastered with mud, and in them bearded men, of unfamiliar, terrible aspect.
Roshchin gave utterance in his sleep to something between a snore and a moan, a hoarse, painful sound.
Katya touched his face with trembling fingers.
"Vadim, Vadim!"
The alarming sounds ceased abruptly.
He opened eyes perfectly void of expression.
"Hell! I do have such beastly dreams!..."
The train came to a stop.
Now the sound of voices mingled with the cawing of rooks.
Women in men's boots, with sacks on their shoulders, came running up, pushing their way, exposing their white thighs as they climbed on to the goods truck.
A tousled head in a greasy peaked cap, with a shaggy beard growing right up to the eyes, thrust itself into the window of the carriage where Katya was sitting.
"You don't happen to have a machine gun for sale?"
There was a sound of loud coughing from the upper berth, as someone there turned heavily, and a jovial voice replied:
"The machine guns are all sold, but we have some cannon."
"We have no use for them," said the peasant, his beard sticking out like a broom when he opened his big mouth.
He thrust his head and shoulders into the carriage, and cast a shrewd glance around. "Anything to be had here?"
A tall soldier jumped down from the top berth—he had a broad face, childlike blue eyes, and a shapely, shaven skull.
He tightened the belt of his coat with an energetic gesture.
"You shouldn't be fighting, Dad, your time has come to rest on the stove ledge...."
"That's where I ought to be," agreed the peasant.
"But there's no sleeping on the stove ledge now, soldier.
Nobody's going to let you, and one has to get food some other way."
"By robbing?"
"Tut-tut!"
"What d'you want a machine gun for?"
"Well now..." the peasant rubbed his nose and passed a gnarled hand over his whiskers to hide the gleam and the sly laughter in his eyes.
"My son has come back from the war.
'You go to the station,' he told me, 'and find out the price of a machine gun.
I'd go up to four poods of wheat....'
Well?"
"Kulaks!" laughed the soldier. "Sly devils!
How many horses have you got, Dad?"
"God gave me eight.
Hasn't anyone got anything to sell—arms or something?"
Once more he glanced at the passengers, and suddenly his smile vanished, and his eyes went dull, and, turning away as if the people in the railway carriage were so much dung, he stumped back through the mud of the platform, flourishing his whip.