People rushed away from the table.
There was the sound of heavy breathing and a struggle.
A hand holding a revolver was struck upwards.
Several hands grasped it.
A shot rang out.
Stopping up her ears, Katya flung herself on the pillow.
Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling.
And once again there was a hum of voices, a cheerful one this time.
Colonel Petrichenko rose, his sheepskin cap almost touching the ceiling and went triumphantly out of the house surrounded by swaggering rowdies.
Outside the window all was stir and bustle.
Men were getting into the saddle and clambering on to carts.
Whips cracked, axles squeaked, men swore outrageously.
The hut emptied, and then Katya realized that if she had not been able till now to see the person who had shouted so imperiously in such womanish tones, it was because he was too small.
He was seated at the table, with his back to Katya, his elbows on a map.
His long, straight, chestnut-coloured hair fell over shoulders as narrow as a boy's.
A munitions strap crossed his black cloth jacket, two revolvers and a sword were thrust into his leather belt, and his feet, in elegant spurred riding boots, were crossed beneath the table.
Shaking his head from side to side, his greasy locks moving across his back, he was hastily writing something, his pen spluttering and making holes in the paper.
The peasant who had given up his bed to Katya came cautiously into the hut.
His fade was pink and propitiatory, and bits of hay were clinging to his hair.
Blinking foolishly, he sat down on a bench opposite the man writing, thrust his hands beneath him, and rubbed his bare feet against each other.
"All the time worrying, worrying, Nestor Ivanovich, and I was hoping you would stay to dinner.
We slaughtered a calf yesterday.... I must have felt you would come...."
"I have no time ... don't disturb me...."
"Aha!" (The peasant fell silent and stopped blinking.
His eyes became wise and heavy.
For a short time he sat watching the writer's hand.) "Nestor Ivanovich! Do you intend to give battle in our village?"
"We'll see...."
"Of course, in war, you can never tell.... I only thought if there is to be fighting, something ought to be done about the cattle.... Should we drive them into the farmsteads?"
The long-haired man threw down his pen and ran the fingers of his small hand through his locks as he read what he had written.
Feeling an itching in his beard and under his armpits, the peasant scratched himself.
This seemed to remind him of something:
"Nestor Ivanovich, and what about the material for us?
You let us have cloth—good cloth....
You can see at a glance it's army cloth. Six cartloads, there were...."
"Isn't it enough?
Aren't you satisfied?
Isn't it enough?"
"Why, of course it's enough.... We don't know how to thank you for that. You know very well—we sent you forty men from the village to fight. My own son went.
'I must shed my blood for the cause of the peasant, Father,' he said. If that isn't enough we old fellows will go and fight.... Just you fight, we'll support you.... And about the cloth, if the Germans (which God forbid!) should fall on us, you know what their reprisals are—what are we to do? Can we be sure about the battle?"
The back of the long-haired man lengthened.
He withdrew his hand from his head, and gripped the edge of the table.
His breathing could be heard.
He thrust his head forward.
The peasant began cautiously retreating from him along the bench, and, taking his hands away from beneath him, sidled out of the hut.
The chair on which the long-haired man had been sitting, tilted sideways, and he kicked it out of his way.
At last Katya, trembling, beheld the face of this little man in the black semimilitary attire.
He looked like a disguised monk.
Furious, piercing, brown eyes glanced at her out of deep hollows beneath powerful brows.
His face was slightly pock-marked, yellow-hued, clean-shaven—though effeminate-looking, there was something crude and fierce in it, as in the face of an adolescent.
But the eyes were old and full of wisdom.