“Please, a little,” I said.
The soldier’s wife hurried from the hut. Laughing and pushing, two or three women ran out after her. The hostess looked displeased but she put the samovar on the table and without a word she sat down on the bench and commenced to work. The children watched us curiously from their plank beds.
Laughing and panting, the soldier’s wife put on the table a bottle of some sort of greenish liquid. Then she walked away from the table and looked at us laughingly and boldly. Ivan Ivanovich coughed from embarrassment and the temporary widows still in the hut gazed at us in secret expectation. After the first cups, the preacher of the evening lifted the skirts of his cassock and stamped around the Gray Duck, who avoided his caresses.
“Go away!” She waved her hand, and, with a provokingly challenging glance at me, she walked up to the table.
“Why don’t you drink? Look at them,—they’ll finish it, I bet. Go ahead and drink.”
Smiling and shrugging her shoulders, she filled a glass and brought it to me.
“Don’t drink!” These words, in an unexpectedly venomous tone, came through the window, and out of the darkness appeared the bony face of Andrey Ivanovich.
“Don’t drink the vodka, I tell you!” he repeated, still more sternly, and again disappeared in the darkness.
The soldier’s wife let the glass tremble and spill. Thoroughly frightened she looked out of the window.
“May the power of the cross help us,—what was that?”