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Varvara laughed into her kerchief and whispered: "I have just been with the priest's son." "Nonsense!" "I have!" "It's a sin!" whispered Sofya. "Well, let it be.... What do I care? If it's a sin, then it is a sin, but better be struck dead by thunder than live like this. I'm young and strong, and I've a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than Dyudya himself, curse him!
Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the neighbouring watchman were all asleep, Sofya went out to the gate and sat down on the bench. She felt stifled and her head ached from weeping. The street was a wide and long one; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right and as far to the left, and the end of it was out of sight. The moon was now not over the yard, but behind the church.
Kuzka, too, said a prayer, lay down in the cart, and covered himself with his little overcoat; he made himself a little hole in the hay so as to be more comfortable, and curled up so that his elbows looked like knees. From the yard Dyudya could be seen lighting a candle in his room below, putting on his spectacles and standing in the corner with a book.
God has afflicted him with a hump, so we are not very hard on him." "And he's always drinking with the other fellows, always drinking," sighed Afanasyevna. "Before Carnival we married him, thinking he'd be steadier, but there! he's worse than ever." "It's been no use. Simply keeping another man's daughter for nothing," said Dyudya.
"Once married, with her husband she must live," said Dyudya. "'Man and wife are one flesh. We have sinned, I said, 'you and I, and it is enough; we must repent and fear God. We must confess it all to Vasya, said I; 'he's a quiet fellow and soft he won't kill you.
I tried to defend her, but he snatched up the reins and thrashed her with them, and all the while, like a colt's whinny, he went: 'He he he!" "I'd take the reins and let you feel them," muttered Varvara, moving away; "murdering our sister, the damned brutes!..." "Hold your tongue, you jade!" Dyudya shouted at her. "'He he he!" Matvey Savitch went on.
And Dyudya at the same instant shouted from the window: "Sofya, take a farthing from the Jewess for the horse's drink! They're always in here, the mangy creatures!" In the street sheep were running up and down, baaing; the peasant women were shouting at the shepherd, while he played his pipes, cracked his whip, or answered them in a thick sleepy bass.
The stranger seemed to be a man fond of talking and ready of speech, and Dyudya learned from him that he was from the town, was of the tradesman class, and had a house of his own, that his name was Matvey Savitch, that he was on his way now to look at some gardens that he was renting from some German colonists, and that the boy's name was Kuzka.
His head propped in both hands, he gazed at the sky, and in the distance he looked in the dark like a stump of wood. "Kuzka, come to bed," Matvey Savitch bawled to him. "Yes, it's time," said Dyudya, getting up; he yawned loudly and added: "Folks will go their own way, and that's what comes of it."
In the lower storey the owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or landowners, who chance to be travelling that way.
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