United States or Spain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His hut was ten versts away from a railroad station in one direction and twelve versts away in the other. About four versts away there was a cotton mill that had opened the year before, and its tall chimney rose up darkly from behind the forest. The only dwellings around were the distant huts of the other track-walkers. Semyon Ivanov's health had been completely shattered.
The clock struck eleven, then half-past, someone passed along the corridor, Aganka cleared up in the dining-room, Mintz walked to and fro in the drawing-room, then all became quiet. Lydia Constantinovna went to the window and gazed out for a long time. Then, quietly, she left her bedroom and crept down to Ivanov's study.
When the coffin was finished Bronze put on his spectacles and wrote in his book: "Marfa Ivanov's coffin, two roubles, forty kopecks." And he heaved a sigh. The old woman lay all the time silent with her eyes closed. But in the evening, when it got dark, she suddenly called the old man. "Do you remember, Yakov," she asked, looking at him joyfully.
"Get the drosky out at dawn to-morrow," he ordered Ignat. "We will go to the Ratchinsky wood. I will go there now and have a look round." The panelled walls and the stove with its cracked tiles were only faintly visible in the soft twilight which filled Ivanov's study.
But the situation in the Balkans suggested the need for something less ambiguous nearer the Rumanian frontier if Rumanian neutrality was to be preserved; and the objective selected for Ivanov's new offensive was Czernowitz the capital of the Bukovina. The attack began on 24 December, and the struggle lasted for over three weeks.
Two separate forces were used; one moving southwest of Cracow along the Carpathian hills, struck directly at Ivanov's left; the other, operating from Hungary, threatened the Russian rear. These two divisions struck at the same time and the Russians found it necessary to fight rear actions as they moved forward.
At the beginning of the war Alexeiev, then Ivanov's chief of staff, is said to have counselled a Russian retreat like those which lured Charles XII and Napoleon to their doom; but the temptations of Austrian weakness and German concentration on the West and the plight of France and Belgium led to the adoption of other advice and the premature invasion of Prussia, Galicia, and Hungary; and in August 1915 it was too late for a voluntary and innocuous retreat.
Ivanov passed him. The artist's shrunken ruffled figure had an air of desolation and abandonment. The drawing-room was next to Ivanov's study. There still remained out of the ruin a carpet and some armchairs near the large, dirty windows, an old piano stood unmoved, and some portraits still hung on the walls. Lydia Constantinovna and Mintz came in from the back-room.
It is true that it had not then the dark red shingle roof which made Naum Ivanov's inn look like a gentleman's house; it was inferior in construction and had thatched roofs in the courtyard, and a humble fence instead of a wall of logs; nor had it been distinguished by the triangular Greek pediment on carved posts; but all the same it had been a capital inn roomy, solid and warm and travellers were glad to frequent it.
All around her it was dark, cold and silent as she passed through the empty, spacious rooms. A forgotten candle still burnt wanly in the drawing-room, and a rat ran out from under the table. She was again plunged in darkness when she entered Ivanov's study, and she was greeted by a smell of horse trappings and joiners' glue. Ivanov was asleep on the sofa.
Word Of The Day