Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

it burst open in another; and the very movement by which Polikéy in the dark had thought to push the envelope with the money deeper under the wadding, tore the cap farther, and pushed out a corner of the envelope through the velveteen crown.

The dawn was appearing, and Polikéy, who had not slept all night, began to drowse. Pulling his cap lower down, and thereby pushing the envelope still farther out, Polikéy let his head droop forward towards the front of the cart. He awoke near home, and was about to catch hold of his cap; but, feeling that it sat firmly on his head, he did not take it off, convinced that the envelope was inside. He gave Drum a touch, arranged the hay in the cart again, put on the appearance of a well-to-do peasant, and, proudly looking about him, rattled homewards.

There was the kitchen; there the domestic serfs’ quarters. There was the joiner’s wife carrying some linen cloth; there was the office, and there the house of the proprietress, where in a few moments Polikéy would be proving himself to be a trustworthy and honest man. “One can say anything about anybody,” he would say; and the lady would reply, “Well, thank you, Polikéy! Here are three (or perhaps five, perhaps even ten) roubles,” and she would order tea for him, or even vodka. “It would not be amiss, after being out in the cold. With ten roubles we would have a treat on the holiday, and buy boots, and return Nikíta his four and a half roubles (it can’t be helped!⁠ ⁠… He has begun bothering).⁠ ⁠…”

When he was some hundred steps from his home, Polikéy wrapped his coat round him, pulled his girdle straight, took off his cap, smoothed his hair, and without haste thrust his hand inside the lining. The hand began to move faster and faster inside the lining, then the other hand went in too, while his face grew paler and paler. One of the hands went right through the cap.

Polikéy fell on his knees, stopped the horse, and began searching in the cart among the hay and the things he had bought, feeling inside his coat and in his trouser pockets. The money was nowhere to be found.

“Dear me! What does it mean?⁠ ⁠… What is going to happen?⁠ ⁠…” He began howling, clutching at his hair. But recollecting that he might be seen, he turned the horse back, pulled the cap on, and drove the dissatisfied Drum back along the road.

“I can’t bear going out with Polikéy,” Drum must have thought. “Once in all his life he has fed and watered me at the right time, and then only in order to deceive me so unpleasantly! How hard I tried to run home! I am tired, and hardly have we got within smell of our own hay before he starts driving me back!”

“Now then, you devil’s jade!” shouted Polikéy through his tears, standing up in the cart, pulling at Drum’s mouth and beating him with the whip.

X

All that day no one in Pokróvsk saw Polikéy. The mistress asked for him several times after dinner, and Aksyúta came flying to Akoulína; but Akoulína said he had not yet returned, and that evidently the customer had detained him, or something had happened to the horse. “If only it has not gone lame!” she said. “Last time, when Maxím went, he was on the road a whole day⁠—had to walk back all the way.”

And Aksyúta turned her pendulums in the opposite direction, while Akoulína, trying to calm her own fears, invented reasons to account for her husband’s absence; but in vain. Her heart was heavy, and she could not work with a will at any of the preparations for the morrow’s holiday. She was suffering all the more because the joiner’s wife assured her that she herself had seen “a man just like Polikoúshka drive up to the avenue, and then turn back again.”

The children were also anxiously expecting “Daddy,” but for another reason. Annie and Mary, being left without the sheepskin and the coat which made it possible to take turns out of doors, could only run out in their indoor dresses, quickly and in a small circle round the house. This was not a little inconvenient for all the dwellers in the serfs’ quarters who wanted to go in or out. Once Mary ran against the legs of the joiner’s wife, who was carrying water, and though she began to howl in anticipation as soon as she knocked against the woman’s knees, she got her hair pulled all the same, and cried still louder. When she did not knock against anyone, she flew in at the door, and, straightway climbing on a tub, got onto the top of the oven. Only the mistress and Akoulína were really anxious about Polikéy; the children were concerned only about what he had on.

Egór Miháylovitch, in answer to the mistress’s questions, “Has Polikoúshka not yet returned?” and “Where can he be?” answered: “I can’t say,” and seemed pleased that his expectations were being fulfilled. “He ought to have been back by dinnertime,” said he significantly.

All that day no one heard anything of Polikéy; only later on it was known that some neighbouring peasants had seen him running about on the road, bareheaded, and asking everybody whether they had seen a letter. Another man had seen him asleep by the roadside, beside a horse and cart tied up. “I thought he was tipsy,” the man said; “and the horse looked as if it had not been fed for two days, its sides were so fallen in.”

Akoulína did not sleep all night, and kept listening; but Polikéy did not return that night. Had she been alone, and had she kept a cook and a maid, she would have felt still more unhappy; but as soon as the cocks crowed and the joiner’s wife got up, Akoulína was obliged to rise and light the fire. It was a