In the spring, several months before the reconciliation with Tikhon, Kuzma heard that a garden in the village of Kazakoff, in his native district, was to be leased, and he hastened thither. It was a remote spot, with black loam soil, not far from the place where the Krasoffs had first taken root.
It was the beginning of May; cold weather and rain had returned after a hot spell; gloomy autumnal storm-clouds sailed over the town. Kuzma, in an old overcoat and without goloshes over his broken calfskin boots, was trudging to the railway station beyond the Cannon-makers’ Suburb, and, shaking his head and screwing up his face from the effects of the cigarette held in his teeth, with hands clasped behind his back under his overcoat, he was smiling to himself. A dirty little barefoot boy ran up to him with a pile of newspapers and, as he ran, shouted briskly the customary phrase: “Giniral strike!”
“You’re behind the times, my lad,” said Kuzma. “Isn’t there anything newer?”
The small boy came to a halt, with flashing eyes.
“The policeman has carried the news off to the station,” he replied.
“All hail to the constitution!” said Kuzma caustically, and pursued his course, skipping along through the mud, past fences darkened by the rain, past the branches of dripping gardens and the windows of lopsided hovels which were sliding down hill, to the end of the town street. “Wonders will never cease!” he said to himself as he went leaping along. “In former days, with such weather, people would have been yawning, hardly exchanging a word, in all the shops and eating-houses. But now,