Master and Man | Page 8

decision.
Vasili Andreevich took his advice and turned to the right, but still there
was no road. They went on in that direction for some time. The wind
was as fierce as ever and it was snowing lightly.
'It seems, Vasili Andreevich, that we have gone quite astray,' Nikita
suddenly remarked, as if it were a pleasant thing. 'What is that?' he
added, pointing to some potato vines that showed up from under the
snow.
Vasili Andreevich stopped the perspiring horse, whose deep sides were
heaving heavily.
'What is it?'
'Why, we are on the Zakharov lands. See where we've got to!'
'Nonsense!' retorted Vasili Andreevich.
'It's not nonsense, Vasili Andreevich. It's the truth,' replied Nikita. 'You
can feel that the sledge is going over a potato-field, and there are the
heaps of vines which have been carted here. It's the Zakharov factory
land.'
'Dear me, how we have gone astray!' said Vasili Andreevich. 'What are
we to do now?'
'We must go straight on, that's all. We shall come out somewhere--if
not at Zakharova, then at the proprietor's farm,' said Nikita.
Vasili Andreevich agreed, and drove as Nikita had indicated. So they
went on for a considerable time. At times they came onto bare fields
and the sledge-runners rattled over frozen lumps of earth. Sometimes
they got onto a winter-rye field, or a fallow field on which they could
see stalks of wormwood, and straws sticking up through the snow and
swaying in the wind; sometimes they came onto deep and even white
snow, above which nothing was to be seen.
The snow was falling from above and sometimes rose from below. The
horse was evidently exhausted, his hair had all curled up from sweat

and was covered with hoar-frost, and he went at a walk. Suddenly he
stumbled and sat down in a ditch or water-course. Vasili Andreevich
wanted to stop, but Nikita cried to him:
'Why stop? We've got in and must get out. Hey, pet! Hey, darling! Gee
up, old fellow!' he shouted in a cheerful tone to the horse, jumping out
of the sledge and himself getting stuck in the ditch.
The horse gave a start and quickly climbed out onto the frozen bank. It
was evidently a ditch that had been dug there.
'Where are we now?' asked Vasili Andreevich.
'We'll soon find out!' Nikita replied. 'Go on, we'll get somewhere.'
'Why, this must be the Goryachkin forest!' said Vasili Andreevich,
pointing to something dark that appeared amid the snow in front of
them.
'We'll see what forest it is when we get there,' said Nikita.
He saw that beside the black thing they had noticed, dry, oblong
willow-leaves were fluttering, and so he knew it was not a forest but a
settlement, but he did not wish to say so. And in fact they had not gone
twenty-five yards beyond the ditch before something in front of them,
evidently trees, showed up black, and they heard a new and melancholy
sound. Nikita had guessed right: it was not a wood, but a row of tall
willows with a few leaves still fluttering on them here and there. They
had evidently been planted along the ditch round a threshing-floor.
Coming up to the willows, which moaned sadly in the wind, the horse
suddenly planted his forelegs above the height of the sledge, drew up
his hind legs also, pulling the sledge onto higher ground, and turned to
the left, no longer sinking up to his knees in snow. They were back on a
road.
'Well, here we are, but heaven only knows where!' said Nikita.
The horse kept straight along the road through the drifted snow, and
before they had gone another hundred yards the straight line of the dark
wattle wall of a barn showed up black before them, its roof heavily
covered with snow which poured down from it. After passing the barn
the road turned to the wind and they drove into a snow-drift. But ahead
of them was a lane with houses on either side, so evidently the snow
had been blown across the road and they had to drive through the drift.
And so in fact it was. Having driven through the snow they came out
into a street. At the end house of the village some frozen clothes

hanging on a line--shirts, one red and one white, trousers, leg-bands,
and a petticoat--fluttered wildly in the wind. The white shirt in
particular struggled desperately, waving its sleeves about.
'There now, either a lazy woman or a dead one has not taken her
clothes down before the holiday,' remarked Nikita, looking at the
fluttering shirts.

III
At the entrance to the street the wind still raged and the road was
thickly covered with snow, but well within the village it was