The horses snorted.
Innumerable carts stretched in front and behind them over the steppe, moving through the darkness of the starry night.
Alexei Krasilnikov, the reins held loosely in his hand, was sitting in front.
Semyon was perched on the side of the cart, his boots slapped at by burdock leaves and clover.
There was a smell of horses and wormwood.
Katya's thoughts wandered in a kind of stupor.
The wind was chill on her shoulders.
The steppe seemed boundless, the road endless.
The horses seemed to have been plodding forward, the wheels creaking, since the beginning of time, on and on like the ghosts of ancient nomads.
Happiness is nothing but infinite yearning, the edge of the steppe, azure shores, caressing waves, peace, plenty.
Matryona looked into Katya's face and gave a chuckle.
And again nothing but the thudding of hoofs broke the silence.
The army was emerging from encirclement.
Makhno had told them to move as quietly as possible.
Alexei's heavy shoulders began to droop—he, too, must have been overcome by drowsiness.
"It isn't that I want to cut adrift from you," Semyon was saying quietly. "Don't keep on at me with your 'Semyon, Semyon'...." (Matryona gave a brief sigh, turned away her face, and gazed out over the steppe.) "I tried to explain to Alexei in the spring that it's not the ribbons on the sailor's cap I care about.... It's the cause...." (Alexei said nothing.) "Who does the fleet belong to now?
To us peasants.
And if we all run away....
We're all fighting for the same cause—you here, we there...."
"What do they say in their letters?" asked Matryona.
"They say I've got to go back to the destroyer if I don't want to be considered a deserter, an outlaw from the revolution...."
Matryona shrugged up one shoulder.
She was obviously seething with rage.
But she restrained herself, and said nothing.
A short time afterwards Alexei straightened himself on his perch, as if he could hear something, and pointed into the dark with his whip.
"The Ekaterinoslav express," he said.
Katya looked, but she could not see the train bearing the sleeping Vadim Petrovich on an upper berth— she only heard the whistle, drawn-out, remote, evoking a piercing grief within her....
Vadim Petrovich went straight from the station at Ekaterinoslav to the confectioners' shops, trying to get news of Katya.
He went into stifling cafes, with flies on the smeared windows and the butter muslin spread over the cakes. He read the cardboard signs,
"Versailles,"
"Eldorado,"
"Cosy Nook," over the doors of dubious eating houses, from which there glared at him swarthy, bewhiskered individuals, with dazzling, bulging eyeballs, who looked as if they were ready, if required, to make shashlyk out of anything they could lay their hands on.
Even here he made enquiries.
Then he visited all the shops in turn.
The sun blazed pitilessly.
A variegated crowd buzzed and jostled one another in the double avenues, beneath the thick foliage of the ash trees lining Ekaterininski Prospect.
Dilapidated trams clattered by.
Before the war something like a new capital for the southern Ukraine had begun to spring up here.
The war had halted its growth.
Under the power of the hetman and the protection of the Germans, the town had come to life once more, but in a different way: in the place of offices, banks, and warehouses, there were gaming houses, exchange booths, steak shops and lemonade stands. The hum of business and the bustle of commerce had been exchanged for the hysterical activities of currency-mongers, running hither and thither from cafe to street corner, with unshaven chins, and caps on the backs of their heads. The cries of the innumerable bootblacks and sellers of boot polish (the manufacture of boot polish was the only industry of those times) mingled with the importunities of sinister tramps, the wailings of orchestras from the "Cosy Nooks," amidst the meaningless jostlings of the idle crowd, living on the purchase and sale of false money and nonexistent commodities.
Frantic with his fruitless searchings, half-stunned and wholly exhausted, Vadim Petrovich sat down on a bench beneath an acacia.
The crowd swept past: women, some elegant, some looking very odd, in dresses made from curtains, in Ukrainian national costumes; women with sweating eyelids and lines drawn beneath the eyes, the sweat pouring in streamlets down their rouged and powdered cheeks; excited profiteers, pushing their way like maniacs, with extended arms, through this crowd of women; hetman officials, with tridents on the front of their caps, pompous, absorbed in financial schemes and ideas for stealing State property; hetman Cossacks, tall and broad-shouldered, with apoplectic necks; moustached haidamaks in huge caps with crimson crowns, sky-blue cloaks and exaggeratedly baggy trousers, such as Ukrainian nationalist schoolmasters had been longing to wear for two centuries.
Here and there sacrosanct German officers floated among the crowd, glancing over the heads of the passers-by with contemptuous smiles....
As Roshchin looked, his heart swelled with rage.
"Oh, to soak them in petrol and set fire to the beastly lot...." He had a glass of fruit juice at a mineral-water stand and once more went from door to door.
Only now did he begin to realize the hopelessness of his search.
Katya in this half-crazed crowd—penniless, alone, unpractical, timid, broken-hearted (with keen anguish his thoughts went back again and again to the bottle of poison in the Moscow flat). The greasy hands of the moneychangers, the pimps, the restaurant-keepers were touching her, loathsome glances were stealing over her....
Almost choking with rage, he elbowed his way into the thick of the crowd, heedless of cries and oaths.
In the evening he took a room in a hotel at an enormous price— a dark hole, in which there was only room for an iron bedstead with a worn mattress—and taking off his boots lay down and buried his grey head in the pillows, weeping silently and tearlessly....
After crossing the frontier of the Don on foot, Telegin put his lieutenant colonel's shoulder straps into his kit-bag; he went by train as far as Tsaritsyn and from there embarked on an enormous river steamer, crammed from top deck to hold with peasants, returning soldiers, deserters, refugees.