“How could a sow tell her brood that a man was there?” asked Olénin.
“What do you think? You think the beast’s a fool? No, he is wiser than a man though you do call him a pig! He knows everything. Take this for instance. A man will pass along your track and not notice it; but a pig as soon as it gets onto your track turns and runs at once: that shows there is wisdom in him, since he scents your smell and you don’t. And there is this to be said too: you wish to kill it and it wishes to go about the woods alive. You have one law and it has another. It is a pig, but it is no worse than you—it too is God’s creature. Ah, dear! Man is foolish, foolish, foolish!” The old man repeated this several times and then, letting his head drop, he sat thinking.
Olénin also became thoughtful, and descending from the porch with his hands behind his back began pacing up and down the yard.
Eróshka, rousing himself, raised his head and began gazing intently at the moths circling round the flickering flame of the candle and burning themselves in it.
“Fool, fool!” he said. “Where are you flying to? Fool, fool!” He rose and with his thick fingers began to drive away the moths.
“You’ll burn, little fool! Fly this way, there’s plenty of room.” He spoke tenderly, trying to catch them delicately by their wings with his thick fingers and then letting them fly again. “You are killing yourself and I am sorry for you!”
He sat a long time chattering and sipping out of the bottle. Olénin paced up and down the yard. Suddenly he was struck by the sound of whispering outside the gate. Involuntarily holding his breath, he heard a woman’s laughter, a man’s voice, and the sound of a kiss. Intentionally rustling the grass under his feet he crossed to the opposite side of the yard, but after a while the wattle fence creaked. A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and a white sheepskin cap passed along the other side of the fence (it was Luke), and a tall woman with a white kerchief on her head went past Olénin. “You and I have nothing to do with one another” was what Maryánka’s firm step gave him to understand. He followed her with his eyes to the porch of the hut, and he even saw her through the window take off her kerchief and sit down. And suddenly a feeling of lonely depression and some vague longings and hopes, and envy of someone or other, overcame the young man’s soul.
The last lights had been put out in the huts. The last sounds had died away in the village. The wattle fences and the cattle gleaming white in the yards, the roofs of the houses and the stately poplars, all seemed to be sleeping the labourers’ healthy peaceful sleep. Only the incessant ringing voices of frogs from the damp distance reached the young man. In the east the stars were growing fewer and fewer and seemed to be melting in the increasing light, but overhead they were denser and deeper than before. The old man was dozing with his head on his hand. A cock crowed in the yard opposite, but Olénin still paced up and down thinking of something. The sound of a song sung by several voices reached him and he stepped up to the fence and listened. The voices of several young Cossacks carolled a merry song, and one voice was distinguishable among them all by its firm strength.
“Do you know who is singing there?” said the old man, rousing himself. “It is the Brave, Lukáshka. He has killed a Chéchen and now he rejoices. And what is there to rejoice at? ... The fool, the fool!”
“And have you ever killed people?” asked Olénin.