‘Hush, you fool.... What are you shouting for? He’ll hear you——’
‘What if he does hear?’ the peasant replied tauntingly. ‘What the hell’s he got to do with me? Is he an official? He’s only in the forest with his——’
A long, filthy, horrible phrase hung in the air, with a burst of frantic, roaring laughter. I quickly turned my horse round, and seized the handle of my whip convulsively, overwhelmed by the mad fury which sees nothing, thinks of nothing, and is afraid of nothing. In a flash, a strange, anxious, painful thought went through my mind: ‘All this has happened once before in my life, many years ago.... The sun blazed just as it does now.... The whole of the big square was overflowing with a noisy, excited crowd just as it is now.... I turned back in a paroxysm of wild anger just in the same way.... But where was it? When? When?’ I lowered my whip and madly galloped home.
Yarmola came out of the kitchen at his leisure, and said rudely, as he took my horse: ‘The bailiff of the Marenov farm is sitting in your room.’
I had the fancy that he wanted to add something more that was important to me and painful too; I even imagined that a fleeting expression of evil derision sped over his face. Intentionally I stopped dead in the doorway and gave Yarmola a look of challenge, but without looking at me he was already dragging the horse away by the rein. The horse’s head was stretched forward, and it stepped delicately.
In my room I found the agent of the neighbouring estate, Nikita Nazarich Mishtchenko. He was dressed in a grey jacket with large ginger checks, in narrow cornflower blue trousers, and a fiery red necktie. There was a deep parting down the middle of his hair, which shone with pomade, and from the whole of him exuded the scent of Persian lilac. When he saw me he jumped up from his chair and began to curtsy, not bowing, but somehow breaking at the waist, and at the same time unsheathing the pale gums of both his jaws.
‘Extremely delighted to have the honour,’ Nikita Nazarich jabbered courteously. ‘Very glad indeed to see you. I’ve been waiting for you here ever since the service. I hadn’t seen you for so long that I was bored, and missed you very much. Why is it you never look us up? The girls in Stiepany laugh at you nowadays.’
Suddenly he was seized by an instantaneous recollection, and broke out into an irresistible giggle.
‘What fun it was to-day!’ he cried out, choking and chuckling. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha.... I fairly split my sides with laughing.’
‘What do you mean? What fun?’ I asked without troubling to conceal my annoyance.