He spent the night at the police station; all night he was aware of a loathing for fish, and was thinking about the three roubles and the quarter of a pound of tea.  Early in the morning, when the sky was beginning to turn blue, he was told to dress and set off.  Two soldiers with bayonets took him to prison.  Never before had the streets of the town seemed to him so long and endless.  He walked not on the pavement but in the middle of the road in the muddy, thawing snow.  His inside was still at war with the fish, his left leg was numb; he had forgotten his goloshes either in the court or in the police station, and his feet felt frozen.

Five days later all the prisoners were brought before the court again to hear their sentence.  Avdeyev learnt that he was sentenced to exile in the province of Tobolsk.  And that did not frighten nor amaze him either.  He fancied for some reason that the trial was not yet over, that there were more adjournments to come, and that the final decision had not been reached yet. . . .  He went on in the prison expecting this final decision every day.

Only six months later, when his wife and his son Vassily came to say good-bye to him, and when in the wasted, wretchedly dressed old woman he scarcely recognized his once fat and dignified Elizaveta Trofimovna, and when he saw his son wearing a short, shabby reefer-jacket and cotton trousers instead of the high-school uniform, he realized that his fate was decided, and that whatever new “decision” there might be, his past would never come back to him.  And for the first time since the trial and his imprisonment the angry expression left his face, and he wept bitterly.

FROST

A “Popular” fete with a philanthropic object had been arranged on the Feast of Epiphany in the provincial town of N——.  They had selected a broad part of the river between the market and the bishop’s palace, fenced it round with a rope, with fir-trees and with flags, and provided everything necessary for skating, sledging, and tobogganing.  The festivity was organized on the grandest scale possible.  The notices that were distributed were of huge size and promised a number of delights:  skating, a military band, a lottery with no blank tickets, an electric sun, and so on.  But the whole scheme almost came to nothing owing to the hard frost.  From the eve of Epiphany there were twenty-eight degrees of frost with a strong wind; it was proposed to put off the fete, and this was not done only because the public, which for a long while had been looking forward to the fete impatiently, would not consent to any postponement.

“Only think, what do you expect in winter but a frost!” said the ladies persuading the governor, who tried to insist that the fete should be postponed.  “If anyone is cold he can go and warm himself.”

The trees, the horses, the men’s beards were white with frost; it even seemed that the air itself crackled, as though unable to endure the cold; but in spite of that the frozen public were skating.  Immediately after the blessing of the waters and precisely at one o’clock the military band began playing.