roof gleamed yellow against the clear blue sky. The labourer rested after his dinner. Odnodvorka went off to her own home.
But Kuzma roamed about. He went to the threshing-floor, rejoicing in the sun, the firm road, the withered steppe grass, the beet-tops which had turned dark brown, the charming late flower of the blue chicory, and the down of the cotton thistle floating quietly through the air. The ploughed spaces in the fields gleamed in the sunlight with the silken threads of barely visible spiders’ webs, which extended to an immense distance. In the vegetable garden, goldfinches perched on the dry stalks of the burdocks. Upon the threshing-floor, amid the profound stillness in the sultry heat, grasshoppers diligently emitted their hoarse cry.
From the threshing-floor Kuzma climbed across the earthen well and returned to the manor-house through the orchard and the fir plantation. In the orchard he chatted with the petty burghers, the lessees of the orchard, with the Bride and the Goat, who were gathering up the windfalls, and forced his way, in their company, into the nettle patch where lay the ripest fruit of all. Sometimes he wandered to the village, to the schoolhouse. He became freshened up, sunburned; he felt himself almost happy.
The Goat amazed him by her health, her cheery stupidity, her senselessly brilliant Egyptian eyes. The Bride was handsome and strange. With him, as with Tikhon, she remained silent; not a word was to be got out of her. But when one went away she gave vent to a harsh laugh, indulged in bawling conversations with the petty burghers, and would suddenly strike up:
“Let them thrash me, curse me— My pretty eyes will twinkle more …”
The soldier-teacher, born stupid, had lost in the service what small wits he had ever possessed. In appearance he was the most commonplace sort