"Rest?
Where is that to be found?
You come from the wealthy, my lad, I can see that.
Oh, no, I'm not going to give up fighting!
I've had my fill of grief from the bourgeois.
I've been in service since I was sixteen, all the time a watchman.
I was promoted to coachman when I was working for the Vasenkovs—they were merchants, perhaps you've heard of them—but I ruined their pair of bays, good horses they were, by watering them wrong. I ruined them, I admit it. Of course I was sacked.
My son was killed, my wife died long ago.
You tell me, now, who am I to fight for—the Soviets or the bourgeois?
I'm well fed, and last week I took a pair of boots from a corpse.
Good stuff—look at them! They don't let the damp through.
All I have to do now is shoot a bit and shout 'hurrah.' Then I can go and sit by the soup cauldron.
And here one is working for one's own side, my lad!
The poor, the portionless, the barebacked, those whose constant companions are grief and misfortune—that's our army.
And the Constituent Assembly—I saw who they elected to it in Nizhni—just the gentry and the wiseacres."
"You have learned to wag your tongue," said Roshchin, glancing furtively at his interlocutor.
His name was Kvashin.
They had jolted together a whole week in the same railway carriage, sleeping side by side on the top berth.
The carriage knew Kvashin by the name of Grandad.
He was always settling down somewhere with a newspaper, adjusting gold pince-nez on his withered nose, and reading under his breath.
"I got these pince-nez," he was fond of relating, "in Samara, on an order.
The millionaire Bashkirov ordered this pince-nez for himself, and I'm using it."
"I've learned to wag my tongue, it's true," he replied to Roshchin. "I never miss a single meeting.
At every station I read the decrees and edicts.
Our proletarian strength is in talk.
What would we be worth if we couldn't speak, if we weren't class conscious?
Mere small fry!"
He took out a newspaper, unfolded it carefully, put on the pince-nez with slow dignity, and began reading the leading article, pronouncing the words as if they came from a foreign language.
"... Remember that you are fighting for the happiness of all toilers and oppressed, you are fighting for the right to build up a better, juster life...."
Roshchin turned away without noticing that Kvashin, while uttering these words, was gazing intently at him over his pince-nez.
"Anyone can see, my lad, that you come from- the rich," said Kvashin in quite different tones,
"You don-'t like my reading.
You're not a spy, are you?"
From Afipskaya the column of the Varnav Regiment moved on foot towards the village of Novodmitrovskaya.
In the dark of the night the wind whistled among the bayonets, tore at clothing, blew icy pellets of snow into men's faces.
The feet sank through the upper crust of snow, into the sticky mud.
The howling of the wind was interspersed with cries:
"Stop!
Easy there!
Don't shove so, you devils!"
The cold penetrated the thin coats, chilled men's bones.
Roshchin thought:
"The only thing is not to fall. That would be the end, I should be trampled...." Worst of all were the sudden halts and cries from in front.
It was obvious they had lost their way, and were wandering along the edge of a ravine, on the bank of a river.
"I can't go on any longer, brothers," came in a broken voice from somewhere near.
"Could that have been Kvashin?
He was beside me all the time.
He guesses what I am, he doesn't believe a word I say." (Roshchin had shaken him off with difficulty the evening before.) "Now they've stopped again in front."
Roshchin's nose was pressed against the frost-stiffened coat of the man before him.
His numbed hands thrust into his sleeves, his head bowed, he stood and thought: