Mishka set his teeth and made no sound.
When Katya began washing the terrible wound on the right side of his skull, Alexandra, who was holding the basin, groaned and staggered.
Seizing the basin, Alexei pushed her aside.
"There's a sharp bone sticking out at the side, see!" he' said to Katya.
"Alexandra, bring the sugar nippers...."
"There aren't any—they're broken!"
Katya picked out the fragments of bones from the wound with her fingernails.
She gave a pull.
Mishka bellowed with pain.
It must be a fragment.
Her nails slipped, she plunged deeper.
She pulled it out.
Alexei drew a loud sigh, and then laughed.
"That's the way we fight—the peasant way!"
Katya bandaged Mishka's head with clean linen.
Covered with sweat, quivering all over, he lay beneath a sheepskin coat. Suddenly he opened his eyes.
Alexei bent over him.
"Well now—are we going to live?"
"I boasted to her yesterday, and this is the end of my boasting," said Mishka with a smile like that of death itself.
He looked at Katya, who was drying her hands and had also come up to bend over him.
His lips moved:
"Look after her, Alyosha."
"All right, all right."
"I had evil thoughts about her.... She must be sent to the town."
Again he fixed an almost frenzied glance on Katya.
Pain and fever he overcame like some trifle, mere nonsense, a passing annoyance.
The proximity of death aroused in him a veritable whirlwind of passions and conflicting desires.
At that moment he did not think of himself as a drunkard and an evildoer, but as a Russian soul, tossed like a bird in the storm; it seemed to him that he was no less suitable than another for heroic deeds, and that the loftiest tasks were not too high for him....
"Let him sleep," said Alexei softly.
"He'll be all right.
He's a fine lad, he'll sleep it off."
Katya went out of the house with Alexei.
She still seemed to be living in a kind of waking trance beneath the boundless sky stretched over the sultry plain, beneath the immemorial smell of burning dung. Here once again, after an agelong halt, men were galloping over the steppe on horseback, baring their teeth to the free wind... here passions could be quenched, as thirst is quenched, at a brimming cup.
She felt no fear.
Her grief, not needed here by anyone, not needed by herself, seemed to have curled itself up for a sleep.
She would have answered the call to self-sacrifice, to great deeds, with unthinking ease.
If a voice had said: "Die", she would simply have sighed and raised clear eyes skyward.
"Vadim Petrovich is dead," she said,
"I'm not going back to Moscow. I have nobody there ... and nothing.... I don't know what's happened to my sister. I meant to go somewhere, to Ekaterinoslav, perhaps...."
His feet set well apart, Alexei looked down at the ground.
"A pity about Vadim Petrovich," he said, shaking his head. "He was a good man."
"He was," said Katya, her eyes filling with tears.
"He was a very good man."
"You wouldn't listen to me then.
Of course we stand for our side and you stand for yours.
There's nothing to get upset about in that.
But how can you fight against the people?
D'you suppose we'll ever give in?
You saw the peasants today, didn't you?
Still, he was a just man...."