“What have you brought this for, you brute?” he asked Kerbalay, deliberately articulating each word.  “I ordered you to give us kvarel, and what have you brought, you ugly Tatar?  Eh?  What?”

“We have plenty of wine of our own, Yegor Alekseitch,” Nikodim Alexandritch observed, timidly and politely.

“What?  But I want us to have my wine, too; I’m taking part in the picnic and I imagine I have full right to contribute my share.  I im-ma-gine so!  Bring ten bottles of kvarel.”

“Why so many?” asked Nikodim Alexandritch, in wonder, knowing Kirilin had no money.

“Twenty bottles!  Thirty!” shouted Kirilin.

“Never mind, let him,” Atchmianov whispered to Nikodim Alexandritch; “I’ll pay.”

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was in a light-hearted, mischievous mood; she wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt.  In her cheap cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and the same straw hat, she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly.  She ran over the rickety bridge and looked for a minute into the water, in order to feel giddy; then, shrieking and laughing, ran to the other side to the drying-shed, and she fancied that all the men were admiring her, even Kerbalay.  When in the rapidly falling darkness the trees began to melt into the mountains and the horses into the carriages, and a light gleamed in the windows of the duhan, she climbed up the mountain by the little path which zigzagged between stones and thorn-bushes and sat on a stone.  Down below, the camp-fire was burning.  Near the fire, with his sleeves tucked up, the deacon was moving to and fro, and his long black shadow kept describing a circle round it; he put on wood, and with a spoon tied to a long stick he stirred the cauldron.  Samoylenko, with a copper-red face, was fussing round the fire just as though he were in his own kitchen, shouting furiously: 

“Where’s the salt, gentlemen?  I bet you’ve forgotten it.  Why are you all sitting about like lords while I do the work?”

Laevsky and Nikodim Alexandritch were sitting side by side on the fallen tree looking pensively at the fire.  Marya Konstantinovna, Katya, and Kostya were taking the cups, saucers, and plates out of the baskets.  Von Koren, with his arms folded and one foot on a stone, was standing on a bank at the very edge of the water, thinking about something.  Patches of red light from the fire moved together with the shadows over the ground near the dark human figures, and quivered on the mountain, on the trees, on the bridge, on the drying-shed; on the other side the steep, scooped-out bank was all lighted up and glimmering in the stream, and the rushing turbid water broke its reflection into little bits.

The deacon went for the fish which Kerbalay was cleaning and washing on the bank, but he stood still half-way and looked about him.

“My God, how nice it is!” he thought.  “People, rocks, the fire, the twilight, a monstrous tree—­nothing more, and yet how fine it is!”