“By the way, you are summoned there.”
“I? To the court? By whom?”
“By Jegor Timofitsch Ivanov, your neighbor.”
“H’m! What is he after? Is it about the beating I gave him last spring?”
“Not at all; he must put up with that. It’s the affair of Jalo, his trotter, you know.”
“Well, what’s that to me?”
“I don’t know. Come to-morrow, and you’ll find out.”
The assessor uttered a sigh of relief, rose, took his leave, and went away.
Christian scratched himself behind the ear, and went out thoughtfully. Sighing heavily, he wandered restlessly over the pastures and meadows until late in the evening.
As it was still too warm in the room, he sat down on the steps to enjoy the cool evening air. It was a damp, hot night; the stars shone dimly through the air, which lay like a thin veil on the horizon. The full moon was rising in majesty above the moor, looming in a large, reddish gold disk through the firwood, which grew sparse and stunted upon the moss-covered hill. The last birds were twittering sleepily, and the night-jar flew clumsily, as if drunk, first to the right, and then to the left, sometimes vanishing in the gloom. Country folk hate the night-jar, and this aversion probably made Christian’s whole surroundings suddenly seem unspeakably desolate. His mood was transmitted to the scene about him. He could not possibly drive that business of Jalo the trotter out of his head. All the memories of his life were associated with the name. Everything he had dreamed and hoped, everything which had disturbed and alarmed him, had revolved wholly around Jalo. How well he recollected the day Jegor Timofitsch Ivanov opened his shop in the village of Tervola. Everything that previously was brought from the city could now be bought at Jegor Timofitsch’s. How humble and cringing the fellow had been then; how well he understood how to ingratiate himself with everybody.