The most unpleasant thing in the morning was—washing oneself. A frosty atmosphere was brought into the anteroom with the straw; ice that was like broken glass floated in the washbasin. Kuzma sometimes began to drink his tea after having washed only his hands and, thus fresh from his slumbers, appeared truly an old man. Thanks to lack of cleanliness and the cold, he had grown extremely thin and grey since the autumn. His hands had grown thinner, and the skin on them had become more delicate, shiny, and covered with certain tiny purplish spots.
“The old grey horse has gone down a steep hill,” he said to himself.
It was a grey morning. Beneath the crusted grey snow the village also had become quite grey in hue by St. Philip’s Day. The frozen household linen hung like grey boards from the rafters under the roofs of the sheds. Everything round about the cottages was frozen—they poured out the slops and threw out the ashes. Tattered little urchins hurried through the streets between the cottages and sheds to school, ran up the snowdrifts and slid down them on their bark slippers; all of them had heavy crash bags containing slates and bread. From the opposite direction came aged, ailing dark-faced Tohugunok, with not a trace of his former agility remaining, clad in his thin little overcoat, and bowed beneath the weight of his yoke, from which hung two buckets; stumbling along in his hideous felt boots, which had turned stiff as oaken boards, and were bound with pigskin. From drift to drift a horse dragged the water-cask, plugged with straw, rocking and splashing as it went; and behind it ran white-eyed Kobylyai—the stammerer. Women passed, on their way to borrow from one another salt, millet, a scoop of flour for griddlecakes, or a hasty pudding. The threshing-floors were deserted. Only at Yakoff’s place was smoke issuing from the gate of the kiln: in imitation of the rich