"Is he traveling with you?" I asked, pointing to the man who was slinging the grain-bags round the horses' necks.
"Yes. I picked him up along the road. His horse had died under him and he counted himself no longer a human being. What was he, indeed, with nothing he could call his own in the world any more? I let him come along with me. I had extra room. So I let him come along with me." His voice had no expression in it.
"But haven't you a family?" I asked.
"I have three children," he replied.
"It must be hard to take care of children at such a time as this."
"God knows it is," he replied. There was a sudden desperate note in his voice. "It's a woman's business. But my wife died on the way. A month and a half ago—soon after we started. It seems soon, now, but we'd been long enough on the road to kill her with the jolting and misery of it."
"Was she sick?"
"She died in childbirth. There was no one to take care of her, and nothing for her to eat. I made a fire, and she lay on the ground. All night she moaned. She died toward morning. The baby only lived a few hours. It was better it should die. What was ahead of it but suffering? It was a boy, and my wife and I had always wanted a boy. But I wouldn't have minded so much if the little wife had lived. It's hard without her."
The man returned with the tobacco and the three peasants lighted cigarettes. All was quiet. I heard nothing but the champing of the horses as they munched the grain and the whistling of the wind through the poplars in the convent garden.
"Kiev is a big city—a holy city, I've heard. Many from our town have made a pilgrimage here," the rich peasant observed.