“At the window?  It must have been a holy saint or angel, for there was no one else. . . .  When we drove out of the yard there wasn’t a soul in the street. . . .  It was the Lord’s doing.”

Panteley told other stories, and in all of them “long knives” figured and all alike sounded made up.  Had he heard these stories from someone else, or had he made them up himself in the remote past, and afterwards, as his memory grew weaker, mixed up his experiences with his imaginations and become unable to distinguish one from the other?  Anything is possible, but it is strange that on this occasion and for the rest of the journey, whenever he happened to tell a story, he gave unmistakable preference to fiction, and never told of what he really had experienced.  At the time Yegorushka took it all for the genuine thing, and believed every word; later on it seemed to him strange that a man who in his day had travelled all over Russia and seen and known so much, whose wife and children had been burnt to death, so failed to appreciate the wealth of his life that whenever he was sitting by the camp fire he was either silent or talked of what had never been.

Over their porridge they were all silent, thinking of what they had just heard.  Life is terrible and marvellous, and so, however terrible a story you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of robbers, long knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of reality in the soul of the listener, and only a man who has been a good deal affected by education looks askance distrustfully, and even he will be silent.  The cross by the roadside, the dark bales of wool, the wide expanse of the plain, and the lot of the men gathered together by the camp fire—­all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairy-tale were pale and blended with life.

All the others ate out of the cauldron, but Panteley sat apart and ate his porridge out of a wooden bowl.  His spoon was not like those the others had, but was made of cypress wood, with a little cross on it.  Yegorushka, looking at him, thought of the little ikon glass and asked Styopka softly: 

“Why does Grandfather sit apart?”

“He is an Old Believer,” Styopka and Vassya answered in a whisper.  And as they said it they looked as though they were speaking of some secret vice or weakness.

All sat silent, thinking.  After the terrible stories there was no inclination to speak of ordinary things.  All at once in the midst of the silence Vassya drew himself up and, fixing his lustreless eyes on one point, pricked up his ears.

“What is it?” Dymov asked him.

“Someone is coming,” answered Vassya.

“Where do you see him?”

“Yo-on-der!  There’s something white. . .”

There was nothing to be seen but darkness in the direction in which Vassya was looking; everyone listened, but they could hear no sound of steps.