“It’s impossible to respect you, my dear fellow.  You look like a real man.  You have the figure and deportment of the French President Carnot—­I saw a portrait of him the other day in an illustrated paper... yes....  You use lofty language, and you are clever, and you are high up in the service beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my dear boy... there’s no strength in it.”

“A Scythian, in fact,” I laughed.  “But what about my wife?  Tell me something about my wife; you know her better.”

I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and prevented me.

“I’ve had a sleep and a wash,” he said, looking at me naively.  “I’ll have a cup of tea with some rum in it and go home.”

VII

It was by now past seven.  Besides Ivan Ivanitch, women servants, the old dame in spectacles, the little girls and the peasant, all accompanied us from the hall out on to the steps, wishing us good-bye and all sorts of blessings, while near the horses in the darkness there were standing and moving about men with lanterns, telling our coachmen how and which way to drive, and wishing us a lucky journey.  The horses, the men, and the sledges were white.

“Where do all these people come from?” I asked as my three horses and the doctor’s two moved at a walking pace out of the yard.

“They are all his serfs,” said Sobol.  “The new order has not reached him yet.  Some of the old servants are living out their lives with him, and then there are orphans of all sorts who have nowhere to go; there are some, too, who insist on living there, there’s no turning them out.  A queer old man!”

Again the flying horses, the strange voice of drunken Nikanor, the wind and the persistent snow, which got into one’s eyes, one’s mouth, and every fold of one’s fur coat....

“Well, I am running a rig,” I thought, while my bells chimed in with the doctor’s, the wind whistled, the coachmen shouted; and while this frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the details of that strange wild day, unique in my life, and it seemed to me that I really had gone out of my mind or become a different man.  It was as though the man I had been till that day were already a stranger to me.

The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his coachman.  From time to time he overtook me, drove side by side, and always, with the same naive confidence that it was very pleasant to me, offered me a ci garette or asked for the matches.  Or, overtaking me, he would lean right out of his sledge, and waving about the sleeves of his fur coat, which were at least twice as long as his arms, shout: 

“Go it, Vaska!  Beat the thousand roublers!  Hey, my kittens!”

And to the accompaniment of loud, malicious laughter from Sobol and his Vaska the doctor’s kittens raced ahead.  My Nikanor took it as an affront, and held in his three horses, but when the doctor’s bells had passed out of hearing, he raised his elbows, shouted, and our horses flew like mad in pursuit.  We drove into a village, there were glimpses of lights, the silhouettes of huts.  Some one shouted: