Kuzma spent the evening and the night in the garden, in the old bathhouse. The superintendent, on arriving from the fields on horseback, had remarked angrily that the garden had been “leased long ago,” and in reply to a request for lodging overnight had expressed insolent amazement. “Well, but you are a sensible fellow!” he had shouted, without either rhyme or reason. “A nice posting-station you’ve picked out! Are there many of your stamp roving about at present?” But he took pity on Kuzma in the end, and gave him permission to go into the bathhouse. Kuzma paid off Menshoff and walked past the manor-house to the gate into the linden avenue. Through the unlighted open windows, from beyond the wire fly-screens, thundered a grand piano, drowned by a magnificent baritone-tenor voice, lifted in intricate vocalizations which were completely out of harmony with both the evening and the manor. Along the muddy sand of the sloping avenue, at the end of which, as if at the end of the world, the cloud-flecked sky gleamed dully white, there advanced toward Kuzma a poor-looking peasant, short of stature, with dark reddish hair, his shirt minus a belt; he was capless, wore heavy boots, and was carrying a bucket in his hand.
“Oho, ho!” he said, jeeringly, as he listened to the singing while he walked on. “Oho, he’s going it strong, may his belly burst!”
“Who is going it strong?” inquired Kuzma.
The peasant raised his head and halted. “Why, that young gentleman of ours,” he said, merrily, making havoc with his consonants. “They say he has been doing that these seven years.”
“Which one—the one who was chasing the dogs?”