Chapter I: Leaving Home

Early one morning in July, a shabby, covered britzka rattled out of N., a district town in the province — one of those old-fashioned carriages, without springs, in which only merchants' clerks, cattle dealers and poor priests travel nowadays. It creaked and squeaked at every jolt, and a pail tied on behind joined in sullenly.

In the britzka sat two inhabitants of N. One was Ivan Ivanych Kuzmichov, a merchant, clean-shaven, in spectacles and a straw hat, looking more like a government clerk than a merchant. The other was Father Christopher Siriysky, the priest of the church of St Nicholas, a little old man with long hair, in a grey canvas cassock and a wide-brimmed top hat, with a coloured embroidered belt. Kuzmichov was absorbed in thought, and kept tossing his head to shake off drowsiness; on his face, a habitual businesslike dryness was struggling with the good-nature of a man who has just said goodbye to his family and had a good drink. Father Christopher looked with moist eyes at God's world, and smiled so broadly that the smile seemed to reach the brim of his hat. His face was red, and looked as if he were cold. Both of them were going to sell wool. They had just had tea, with cream and buns, at home, and a drink, though it was morning.

On the box sat the coachman, Deniska, a young man with a sunburnt face, who was continually lashing at the horses. And beside him on the box sat a third traveller: a boy of nine, with a face burnt dark by the sun and wet with tears. This was Yegorushka, Kuzmichov's nephew. With his uncle's permission and Father Christopher's blessing, he was going away to school, to the gymnasium in the city. His mother, Olga Ivanovna, a collegiate secretary's widow and Kuzmichov's sister, who loved educated people and the gentry, had begged her brother, who was going to sell wool, to take Yegorushka with him and put him in the school. And now the boy sat beside Deniska, holding on to his elbow so as not to fall off, and hopped about like a kettle on the hob, with no notion where he was going or why. The rapid motion through the air blew his red shirt out like a balloon; his new hat with a peacock's feather in it, like a coachman's, kept slipping down to the back of his head. He felt himself an intensely unfortunate person, and had an inclination to cry.

When the britzka passed the prison, Yegorushka looked at the sentinels pacing slowly by the high white walls, at the little barred windows, at the cross shining on the roof, and remembered how, a week before, on the day of the Feast of the Holy Mother of Kazan, he had been with his mother to the prison church. And earlier still, at Easter, he had gone there with the cook Lyudmila and Deniska, taking Easter bread, eggs, pies and roast beef to the prison; the prisoners had thanked them, and crossed themselves. Then they passed the cemetery, with its white walls and the cherry trees showing above them like white patches; under those trees, Yegorushka knew, lay his father and his grandmother, Zinaida Danilovna. When his grandmother died, she had been put in a long coffin, and two five-kopek pieces were laid on her eyes, which would not keep shut. Before her death she had been alive, and used to bring him soft rolls from the market sprinkled with poppy seeds; now she was asleep, asleep . . .

Behind the cemetery, the brickworks smoked; and then the town was left behind, and there was nothing but the steppe.

Beyond the town stretched the broad, boundless plain, fenced off by a chain of low hills. Pressing close to one another and peeping out from behind each other, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac distance. One drives on and on, and cannot make out where it begins or where it ends . . . The sun had already peeped out from behind the town, and was quietly, without fuss, setting to work.

At first, in the far distance, a broad, bright-yellow strip of light crept over the ground; it moved and drew nearer, and suddenly the whole wide steppe flung off the twilight of early morning, smiled, and sparkled with dew. The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp, all withered by the heat, brown and half dead, now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again. Arctic petrels flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots called to one another in the grass; somewhere, far to the left, peewits uttered their plaintive notes. A covey of partridges, scared by the britzka, fluttered up and with their soft "trrr!" flew off to the hills. Grasshoppers, crickets and field-crickets kept up their churring, monotonous music in the grass.

But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew stagnant, and the disillusioned steppe resumed its jaded July aspect. The grass drooped, everything living was hushed. The sunburnt hills, brown-green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet, shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance, and, arched above them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness . . .

How stifling and depressing it was! The britzka raced along, while Yegorushka saw always the same — the sky, the plain, the low hills . . . A windmill appeared far away to the left, on a low hill, waving its sails. It seemed close; but they drove on and on, and it did not get any nearer, and did not disappear, but was always visible, now on the left, now on the right.

As they drove, Kuzmichov and Father Christopher talked of their business: they were hurrying to sell their wool before the price fell, and everything depended on finding a certain Varlamov — Semyon Aleksandrovich Varlamov — a rich man, whose name was on everyone's lips, and who was somewhere on the steppe, nobody knew exactly where.