The spring sunshine was pouring through the brightly-polished windowpanes, and the leaves of the aspidistra gleamed.
Sitting up in bed Semyon stretched himself: he felt that the day and night passed in Matryona's company had almost restored his health.
He dressed and washed, and asked where his brother kept his razor. He shaved at the window in Alexei's room, in front of a fragment of glass.
Then he went out and stood at the gate, greeting a man seated in a neighbour's garden, an old man who could remember four tsars.
The old man took off his cap with a dignified bow; his numb legs in the felt boots were stretched out in front of him and his veined hands were folded symmetrically on the handle of his stick.
The familiar street was empty at that hour.
Between the huts could be seen strips of green, extending far into the distance.
On mounds, silhouetted here and there against the horizon, stood unharnessed carts.
Semyon glanced to his left—two windmills were lazily swinging their sails over the chalky sides of a gully.
Lower down, on the slope, amidst orchards and straw thatches, the belfry tower gleamed white.
Beyond the copse, still so leafless as to be almost transparent, the windows of what had formerly been a nobleman's mansion blazed in the sunshine.
Rooks were cawing around their nests.
The copse and the handsome facade of the house were reflected in the flooded pond.
Cows lay at the waterside, and children played about.
Semyon stood looking from under his brows, his hands thrust into the capacious pockets of his brother's jacket.
As he looked, sadness took possession of his heart, and gradually, through the transparent waves of heat streaming over the village, the bluish orchards, and the ploughed lands, another world, far from this tranquillity, began to form itself before his eyes.
Alexei drove up in a cart, hailing him gaily from afar.
He looked steadily at Semyon as he opened the gate.
After unharnessing the gelding, he went to the yard to wash his hands beneath the hanging wash-stand.
"Never mind, brother, it'll pass," he said kindly.
"When I came back from the German front I didn't want to look at anything either. Blood in my eyes, grief in my heart.... Damn the war.... Come and have breakfast."
Semyon said nothing.
But Matryona, too, could see that her husband was out of spirits.
After breakfast Alexei went back to the fields, and Matryona, barefoot, her skirts hitched up, carted away the dung.
Semyon lay down on his brother's bed.
He tossed and turned, but could not sleep.
His heart was assailed by melancholy.
Setting his teeth he told himself:
"They wouldn't understand—it's no use trying to talk to them."
But in the evening, when they all three went out to sit on some logs lying at the gate, Semyon could not resist saying:
"You might at least keep your rifle cleaned, Alexei."
"To hell with it.... We're not going to fight now, brother, for another hundred years."
"You're rejoicing too soon.
It's too early to be growing aspidistras."
"And don't you be angry too soon, Semyon," Alexei pulled at his pipe and spat between his feet.
"Let's talk like peasants, we're not at a meeting.
I know all the things they say at meetings—I've shouted myself hoarse at them.
You've got to know how to hear what you need, and take no notice of what you don't need.
The land to the toilers, now!
That's perfectly right.
And now—Poor Peasants' Committees.
In our village we've taken these committee persons in hand.
But the Poor Peasants' Committee at Sosnovka does just what it likes, and the requisitions and outrages are something awful.
Count Bobrinsky's estate all went to the sovkhoz, the peasants didn't get a foot of land.
And who was in the committee?
Two single men, with no horses, and the rest God knows who—strangers, convicts or something. D'you understand me?"
"Oh, that's not what I was talking about!" said Semyon, turning away.
"That's just it, but it is what I'm talking about!
In 1917 I ran about the front shouting against the bourgeoisie, too.
God bless the one who sent a bullet into my foot, I was straightaway evacuated home.