“Varka, set the samovar!” shouts her mistress.  The samovar is a little one, and before the visitors have drunk all the tea they want, she has to heat it five times.  After tea Varka stands for a whole hour on the same spot, looking at the visitors, and waiting for orders.

“Varka, run and buy three bottles of beer!”

She starts off, and tries to run as quickly as she can, to drive away sleep.

“Varka, fetch some vodka!  Varka, where’s the corkscrew?  Varka, clean a herring!”

But now, at last, the visitors have gone; the lights are put out, the master and mistress go to bed.

“Varka, rock the baby!” she hears the last order.

The cricket churrs in the stove; the green patch on the ceiling and the shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes force themselves on Varka’s half-opened eyes again, wink at her and cloud her mind.

“Hush-a-bye, my baby wee,” she murmurs, “and I will sing a song to thee.”

And the baby screams, and is worn out with screaming.  Again Varka sees the muddy high road, the people with wallets, her mother Pelageya, her father Yefim.  She understands everything, she recognises everyone, but through her half sleep she cannot understand the force which binds her, hand and foot, weighs upon her, and prevents her from living.  She looks round, searches for that force that she may escape from it, but she cannot find it.  At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost, strains her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening to the screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.

That foe is the baby.

She laughs.  It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a simple thing before.  The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket seem to laugh and wonder too.

The hallucination takes possession of Varka.  She gets up from her stool, and with a broad smile on her face and wide unblinking eyes, she walks up and down the room.  She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot. . . .  Kill the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep. . . .

Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby.  When she has strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.

CHILDREN

Papa and mamma and Aunt Nadya are not at home.  They have gone to a christening party at the house of that old officer who rides on a little grey horse.  While waiting for them to come home, Grisha, Anya, Alyosha, Sonya, and the cook’s son, Andrey, are sitting at the table in the dining-room, playing at loto.  To tell the truth, it is bedtime, but how can one go to sleep without hearing from mamma what the baby was like at the christening, and what they