there
were lights and the sound of voices. In the yard girls were crowding
round the porch and the windows, and running backwards and forwards
between the hut and the outhouse. Some Cossacks rushed out of the hut
and could not refrain from shouting, re-echoing the refrain of Daddy
Eroshka's song and his shots.

'Why are you not at the betrothal?' asked Olenin.

'Never mind them! Never mind them!' muttered the old man, who had
evidently been offended by something there. 'Don't like them, I don't.
Oh, those people! Come back into the hut! Let them make merry by
themselves and we'll make merry by ourselves.'

Olenin went in.

'And Lukashka, is he happy? Won't he come to see me?' he asked.

'What, Lukashka? They've lied to him and said I am getting his girl for
you,' whispered the old man. 'But what's the girl? She will be ours if
we want her. Give enough money--and she's ours. I'll fix it up for you.
Really!'

'No, Daddy, money can do nothing if she does not love me. You'd better
not talk like that!'

'We are not loved, you and I. We are forlorn,' said Daddy Eroshka
suddenly, and again he began to cry.

Listening to the old man's talk Olenin had drunk more than usual. 'So
now my Lukashka is happy,' thought he; yet he felt sad. The old man had
drunk so much that evening that he fell down on the floor and Vanyusha
had to call soldiers in to help, and spat as they dragged the old man
out. He was so angry with the old man for his bad behaviour that he did
not even say a single French word.

Chapter XXIX

It was August. For days the sky had been cloudless, the sun scorched
unbearably and from early morning the warm wind raised a whirl of hot
sand from the sand-drifts and from the road, and bore it in the air
through the reeds, the trees, and the village. The grass and the leaves
on the trees were covered with dust, the roads and dried-up salt
marshes were baked so hard that they rang when trodden on. The water
had long since subsided in the Terek and rapidly vanished and dried up
in the ditches. The slimy banks of the pond near the village were
trodden bare by the cattle and all day long you could hear the
splashing of water and the shouting of girls and boys bathing. The
sand-drifts and the reeds were already drying up in the steppes, and
the cattle, lowing, ran into the fields in the day-time. The boars
migrated into the distant reed-beds and to the hills beyond the Terek.
Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed i