Stepan knew all about the innkeeper’s affairs—­how he had wronged the peasant, and how the woman who was living with him had left her husband.  He saw her now sitting at the table in a rich dress, and looking very hot as she drank her tea.  With great condescension she asked Stepan to have tea with her.  No other travellers were stopping in the inn that night.  Stepan was given a place in the kitchen where he might sleep.  Matrena—­that was the woman’s name—­cleared the table and went to her room.  Stepan went to lie down on the large stove in the kitchen, but he could not sleep, and the wood splinters put on the stove to dry were crackling under him, as he tossed from side to side.  He could not help thinking of his host’s fat paunch protruding under the belt of his shirt, which had lost its colour from having been washed ever so many times.  Would not it be a good thing to make a good clean incision in that paunch.  And that woman, too, he thought.

One moment he would say to himself, “I had better go from here to-morrow, bother them all!” But then again Ivan Mironov came back to his mind, and he went on thinking of the innkeeper’s paunch and Matrena’s white throat bathed in perspiration.  “Kill I must, and it must be both!”

He heard the cock crow for the second time.

“I must do it at once, or dawn will be here.”  He had seen in the evening before he went to bed a knife and an axe.  He crawled down from the stove, took the knife and axe, and went out of the kitchen door.  At that very moment he heard the lock of the entrance door open.  The innkeeper was going out of the house to the courtyard.  It all turned out contrary to what Stepan desired.  He had no opportunity of using the knife; he just swung the axe and split the innkeeper’s head in two.  The man tumbled down on the threshold of the door, then on the ground.

Stepan stepped into the bedroom.  Matrena jumped out of bed, and remained standing by its side.  With the same axe Stepan killed her also.

Then he lighted the candle, took the money out of the desk, and left the house.

XVI

In a small district town, some distance away from the other buildings, an old man, a former official, who had taken to drink, lived in his own house with his two daughters and his son-in-law.  The married daughter was also addicted to drink and led a bad life, and it was the elder daughter, the widow Maria Semenovna, a wrinkled woman of fifty, who supported the whole family.  She had a pension of two hundred and fifty roubles a year, and the family lived on this.  Maria Semenovna did all the work in the house, looked after the drunken old father, who was very weak, attended to her sister’s child, and managed all the cooking and the washing of the family.  And, as is always the case, whatever there was to do, she was expected to do it, and was, moreover, continually scolded by all the three people in the house; her brother-in-law used even to beat her when he was drunk.  She bore it all patiently, and as is also always the case, the more work she had to face, the quicker she managed to get through it.  She helped the poor, sacrificing her own wants; she gave them her clothes, and was a ministering angel to the sick.