"Get that?" said the soldier, looking frankly at Katya.
"Eight horses!
And probably has twelve sons.
He just gets them into the saddle, and off they go over the steppe —plunderers.
And he lies on the stove ledge, resting his backside on the grain, keeping guard on the booty."
The soldier transferred his glance to Roshchin, and suddenly his brows lifted, and his face lit up.
"Vadim Petrovich—is it you?"
Roshchin glanced swiftly at Katya but there was no help for it.
He had to stretch out his hand in greeting. The soldier pressed it warmly, and sat down beside him.
Katya could see that Roshchin was put out.
"So we meet again," he said sourly.
"Glad to see you looking so well, Alexei Ivanovich. You see how I've had to rig myself out!"
Then Katya understood that this soldier was Alexei Krasilnikov, Roshchin's former orderly.
Vadim Petrovich had often spoken of him, and considered him a splendid specimen of a talented and intelligent Russian peasant.
She wondered why he was so cold to him.
Krasilnikov, however, seemed to understand.
Smiling, he lit a cigarette, asking in a low, matter-of-fact voice:
"That your wife?"
"Yes, I'm married.
Let me introduce you.
Katya, this is my guardian angel—you remember me telling you about him. Well, we fought the good fight together, Alexei Ivanovich, and now allow me to congratulate you on the filthy peace. The Russian eagles...." (He laughed bitterly.) "And now my wife and I are making for the South... nearer to the sun..." (The words sounded false in his own ears, and Roshchin frowned. Krasilnikov gave not the slightest sign of emotion.) "Nothing else left now.... Our grateful country has rewarded us with a bayonet in our bellies...." (He shuddered, as if bitten all over by lice.) "Outlawed, enemies of the people.... That's what we are...."
"You're in a difficult situation!"
Krasilnikov wagged his head, looking out of the window through narrowed lids.
On the other side of a broken fence a crowd was gathering on the plot of ground belonging to the station. ''Just as if you were a foreigner.
I understand you, Vadim Petrovich, but not everybody would.
You don't know our people!"
"What d'you mean by that?"
"Simply that you never did know them.
And you've been deceived all along."
"By whom?"
"By us, us soldiers and muzhiks.... The moment you turned your back, we laughed.
Vadim Petrovich!
Selfless heroism, love for the tsar, for the native land—the gentry invented all that, and we were made to repeat it in the army.... I'm just a muzhik.
I'm going to fetch my younger brother in Rostov. He's lying there wounded, with an officer's bullet in his chest. I'm going to take him back to the village. Perhaps we shall till the soil, or perhaps we'll fight.... We'll see when we get there. But if we do fight, it'll be of our own free will, without any drums, and we'll fight like hell! Better not go south, Vadim Petrovich.
I don't think it'll agree with you."
Roshchin gazed at him with shining eyes, passing his tongue over his parched lips.
Krasilnikov was looking more and more attentively at what was going on at the other side of the fence.
The buzz of angry voices was getting louder and louder.
A few people climbed trees, to get a better view.
"You won't be able to manage the people, I tell you!
You're no better than foreigners, you bourgeois.
That's a bad word nowadays, like saying—horse thief.
An old soldier like Kornilov—he pinned the St. George's cross on my tunic with his own hands—tried to get the Cossacks to fight for the Constituent Assembly, and what has come of it—nothing! He couldn't find the right words, though you'd think he knew the people...: Now they say he's roaming about the Kuban steppe, like a dog among a pack of wolves.... The muzhiks say:
'The bourgeois are furious at not having their way in Moscow....' They're keeping their rifles oiled and clean in case of anything happening. Make no mistake about it!
No, no, Vadim Petrovich, you go back to the capital, you and your wife.… It'll be safer for you there than here, among the muzhiks.... Just look at them...." (Suddenly he raised his voice, frowning.) "They'll kill him...."
Behind the railings things seemed to be coming to a head.
Two stocky soldiers with ferocious expressions on their faces, were firmly holding a frail man dressed in a torn jacket made from a flannel blanket.
His unshaven face was deathly pale, the nose swollen, and blood was trickling down from the corner of his quivering lips.
He was watching the movements of an infuriated young woman, from eyes in which there was a pale gleam.
She kept tearing her thick shawl from her head, squatting down and spreading out her skirts, and throwing herself upon the man with the pale face, seizing him by his bristling hair, and screaming almost exultantly: