he
thermometer, and that trains never stopped passing and his own train was
always roaring over bridges. The noise, the whistle, the Finn, the
tobacco smoke--all mixed with the ominous shifting of misty shapes,
weighed on Klimov like an intolerable nightmare. In terrible anguish he
lifted up his aching head, looked at the lamp whose light was encircled
with shadows and misty spots; he wanted to ask for water, but his dry
tongue would hardly move, and he had hardly strength enough to answer
the Finn's questions. He tried to lie down more comfortably and sleep,
but he could not succeed; the Finn fell asleep several times, woke up
and lighted his pipe, talked to him with his "Ha!" and went to sleep
again; and the lieutenant could still not find room for his legs on the
seat, and all the while the ominous figures shifted before his eyes.

At Spirov he got out to have a drink of water. He saw some people
sitting at a table eating hurriedly.

"How can they eat?" he thought, trying to avoid the smell of roast meat
in the air and seeing the chewing mouths, for both seemed to him utterly
disgusting and made him feel sick.

A handsome lady was talking to a military man in a red cap, and she
showed magnificent white teeth when she smiled; her smile, her teeth,
the lady herself produced in Klimov the same impression of disgust as
the ham and the fried cutlets. He could not understand how the military
man in the red cap could bear to sit near her and look at her healthy
smiling face.

After he had drunk some water, he went back to his place. The Finn sat
and smoked. His pipe gurgled and sucked like a galoche full of holes in
dirty weather.

"Ha!" he said with some surprise. "What station is this?"

"I don't know," said Klimov, lying down and shutting his mouth to keep
out the acrid tobacco smoke.

"When do we get to Tver."

"I don't know. I am sorry, I ... I can't talk. I am not well. I have a
cold."

The Finn knocked out his pipe against the window-frame and began to talk
of his brother, the sailor. Klimov paid no more attention to him and
thought in agony of his soft, comfortable bed, of the bottle of cold
water, of his sister Katy, who knew so well how to tuck him up and
cosset him. He even smiled when there flashed across his mind his
soldier-servant Pavel, taking off his heavy, close-fitting boots and
putting water on the table. It seemed to him that he would only have to
lie on his bed and drink some water and his