"Of course! Well, I am greatly smitten with her. Yes, my word I am!"
Nevertheless, when Mass comes to an end, and, to the sound of a merry peal of bells, the well-dressed local Cossacks file out of church, and distribute themselves in gaudy streams about the hamlet, no Tatiana makes her appearance.
"Then she IS gone," says Konev ruefully. "But I'll find her yet! I'LL come up with her!"
That this will happen I do not feel confident. Nor do I desire that it should.
Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement.
Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists. That is to say, it would seem as though, "by order of the authorities," the inmates are presenting a stage spectacle in which they are playing, willingly and zealously, but with a complete lack of experience, imperfectly comprehended roles as prisoners, warders, and gendarmes.
For instance, today, when a warder and a gendarme came to my cell to escort me to exercise, and I said to them, "May I be excused exercise today? I am not very well, and do not feel like, etcetera, etcetera," the gendarme, a tall, handsome man with a red beard, held up to me a warning finger.
"NO ONE," he said, "has given you permission to feel, or not to feel, like doing things."
To which the warder, a man as dark as a chimney-sweep, with large blue "whites" to his eyes, added stutteringly: