Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who would deem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as a nobody and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he clenched his fists and said to himself, “I will be admitted to their set.”
In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to efface the affront he had offered her. “How can I rest until I have seen her and asked her pardon?” he said to himself. “If I were a real man and not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But, of course, I won’t do anything of the kind, and writing of such things is impossible. I am a phrase-maker. That’s all I am.”
But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was likely to know some of her imprisoned son’s friends, if, indeed, she was not in the “underground” world herself, and the very next morning found him in a railway car, bound for the south.
Pani Oginska’s estate was near the boundary line between the province to which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses’ manes were covered with frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road, seemingly endless and bottomless, destitute of any trace of life save for an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and outhouses of a shepherd in the distance—a domain of silence and numb monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months later, be transformed into a world of grass and birds seemed as inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.
The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel’s heart leaped with a foretaste of the exciting interview.
“Lively, my man,” he pressed the postilion. “Can’t your horses get a move on them?”
The postilion nodded his muffled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell ringing frostily.
“That’s better,” Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling the breath out of his lungs. “That’s better, my man. You shall get a good tip. But where have you learned the trick?”
The postilion gave a muffled grunt of appreciation and went on howling with all his might.