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"Have you gone cracked, you old dog? Look where you are going!" "Drive on! drive on!..." says the officer. "We shan't get there till to-morrow going on like this. Hurry up!" The sledge-driver cranes his neck again, rises in his seat, and with heavy grace swings his whip. Several times he looks round at the officer, but the latter keeps his eyes shut and is apparently disinclined to listen.
Klimov put on his great-coat, mechanically followed the other passengers out of the carriage, and it seemed to him that not he, but some one else was moving, and he felt that his fever, his thirst, and the menacing images which had not let him sleep all night, came out of the carriage with him. Mechanically he took his luggage and engaged a sledge-driver.
All the best in the world, as I have said already, was at her service, and she received it absolutely for nothing, and even ideas and the intellectual movement in vogue served simply for her recreation, giving variety to her life, and I was only the sledge-driver who drove her from one entertainment to another. Now she did not need me. She would take flight, and I should be alone.
In the street he stood still and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged himself languidly to the University. "To whom shall I tell my grief?" THE twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses' backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost.
Masha and I drove out together in the racing droshky to the fields to look at the oats. She used to drive, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised and the wind played with her hair. "Keep to the right!" she shouted to those she met. "You are like a sledge-driver," I said to her one day. "Maybe! Why, my grandfather, the engineer's father, was a sledge-driver.
I could not go on there it was evidently stupid, and I could not leave things as they were, because that would seem as though ... Heavens, how could I leave things! And after such insults! "No!" I cried, throwing myself into the sledge again. "It is ordained! It is fate! Drive on, drive on!" And in my impatience I punched the sledge-driver on the back of the neck. "What are you up to?
"Any one been here, Jackpine?" The old sledge-driver gave his head a negative shake and hunched his shoulders, pointing at the same time to the table, on which lay a carefully folded piece of paper. "Thorne," he grunted.
"You are a scoundrel," a thought flashed through my mind, "if you laugh at this now." "No matter!" I cried, answering myself. "Now everything is lost!" There was no trace to be seen of them, but that made no difference I knew where they had gone. At the steps was standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough peasant coat, powdered over with the still falling, wet, and as it were warm, snow.
So one day I engaged such a sledge-driver.... He was a lad of twenty, tall and well-made, a splendid fellow with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks; his fair hair curled in little ringlets under the shabby little patched cap that was pulled over his eyes. And how had that little torn smock ever been drawn over those gigantic shoulders!
And through it all it was DeBar's voice that rose in encouragement to the dog limping behind him and to the man limping behind the dog now in song, now in the wild shouting of the sledge-driver, his face thin and gaunt in its starved whiteness, but his eyes alive with a strange fire.
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