"Lay yourself down, Barin, and God bless you!"
The peasant climbed on to the stove and sighed. His old wife began to mutter something, the man grumbled, then said to the Prince:
"Barin, you can have your sleep, only get up in the morning and leave before daylight, so that none will see you. You know yourself these are troubled times, there is no gainsaying it. You are a gentleman, Barin, and gentlemen have got to be done away with. The old woman will wake you…. Sleep now."
Prozorovsky lay down without undressing, put his cape under his head— and at once caught a cockroach on his neck! Some young pigs grunted in a corner. The hut was swarming with vermin, blackened by smoke and filled with stenches. Here, where men, calves and pigs herded all together, the Prince lay on his straw, tossing about and scratching. He thought of how, some centuries hence, people would be writing of this age with love, compassion, and tenderness. It would be thought of as an epoch of the most sublime and beautiful manifestation of the human spirit.
A little pig came up, sniffed all round him, then trotted away again. A low, bright star peeped in through the window. How infinite the world seemed!
He did not notice when he fell asleep. The old woman woke him at daybreak and led him through the backyard. The dawn was bright and cold, and the grass was covered with a light frost. He walked along briskly, swinging his stick, the collar of his overcoat turned up. The sky was marvellously deep and blue.
At the station the Prince squeezed himself into a warm place on the train, amongst other passengers carrying little sacks and bags of flour. Thus, pressed against the sides of a truck, his clothes bedaubed with white flour, he journeyed off to—Moscow.
Prince Prozorovsky had left at evening. Immediately after, furniture was pulled about and re-arranged, the veneer was chipped off the desk. The clock was about to be transferred to the office, but some one noticed that it had only one hand. None of the men realised that Kuvaldin's old clocks were necessarily one-handed, and moved every five minutes simply because the minutes were not counted singly in those days. Somebody suggested that the clock could be removed from its case.
"Take the clock out of the box," Ivan Koloturov ordered. "Tell the joiners to put some shelves in it, it will do as a cupboard for the office…. Now then, don't stamp, don't stamp!"
That night an old woman came running in. There was a great turmoil in the village: a girl had been abused—no one knew by whom, whether by the villagers themselves or the people who had come from Moscow for flour; the old woman began to accuse the Committee men. She stood by the window and reviled them at the top of her voice. Ivan Koloturov drove her away with a blow on the neck, and she went off wailing bitterly.