“We are starving, Excellency,” the man was saying.  “I can get no work.  I had to sell my horse in the winter, and I cannot plough my little piece of land.  The Government will not help us.  The Prince—­curse him!—­does nothing for us.  He lives in Petersburg, where he spends all his money, and has food and wine more than he wants.  The Count Stepan Lanovitch used to assist us—­God be with him!  But he has been sent to Siberia because he helped the peasants.  He was like you; he was a great barin, a great noble, and yet he helped the peasants.”

Paul turned round sharply and shook the man off.

“Go,” he said, “with the starosta and get what I tell you.  A great, strong fellow like you has no business on his knees to any man!  I will not help you unless you help yourself.  You are a lazy good-for-nothing.  Get out!”

He pushed him out of the hut, and kicked after him a few rags of clothing which were lying about on the floor, all filthy and slimy.

“Good God!” muttered he under his breath, in English, “that a place like this should exist beneath the very walls of Osterno!”

From hut to hut he went all through that night on his mission of mercy—­without enthusiasm, without high-flown notions respecting mankind, but with the simple sense of duty that was his.  These people were his things—­his dumb and driven beasts.  In his heart there may have existed a grudge against the Almighty for placing him in a position which was not only intensely disagreeable, but also somewhat ridiculous.  For he did not dare to tell his friends of these things.  He had spoken of them to no man except Karl Steinmetz, who was in a sense his dependent.  English public school and university had instilled into him the intensely British feeling of shame respecting good works.  He could take chaff as well as any man, for he was grave by habit, and a grave man receives the most chaff most good-humoredly.  But he had a nervous dread of being found out.  He had made a sort of religion of suppressing the fact that he was a prince; the holy of holies of this cult was the fact that he was a prince who sought to do good to his neighbor—­a prince in whom one might repose trust.

This was not the first time by any number that he had gone down into his own village insisting in a rough-and-ready way on cleanliness and purity.

“The Moscow doctor”—­the peasants would say in the kabak over their vodka and their tea—­“the Moscow doctor comes in and kicks our beds out of the door.  He comes in and throws our furniture into the street But afterward he gives us new beds and new furniture.”

It was a joke that always obtained in the kabak.  It flavored the vodka, and with that fiery poison served to raise a laugh.