safe
side he dropped back a little from the cart, so that he was walking on a
level with the cow.

"Must be a gentleman," the man decided, hearing words not Russian, and
he gave a tug at the horse.

"That's what set us wondering. You are out for a walk seemingly?" the
woman asked inquisitively again.

"You... you ask me?"

"Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots
don't seem to be from hereabouts...."

"They are army boots," the man put in complacently and significantly.

"No, I am not precisely in the army, I..."

"What an inquisitive woman!" Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation.
"And how they stare at me... _mais enfin_. In fact, it's strange that I
feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done
them no harm."

The woman was whispering to the man.

"If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable."

Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.

"Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired;
but how am I to get in?"

"How wonderful it is," he thought to himself, "that I've been walking
so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a
lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it."

But the peasant had not, however, pulled up the horse.

"But where are you bound for?" he asked with some mistrustfulness.

Stepan Trofimovitch did not understand him at once.

"To Hatovo, I suppose?"

"Hatov? No, not to Hatov's exactly... And I don't know him though I've
heard of him."

"The village of Hatovo, the village, seven miles from here."

"A village? _C'est charmant,_ to be sure I've heard of it...."

Stepan Trofimovitch was still walking, they had not yet taken him into
the cart. A guess that was a stroke of genius flashed through his mind.

"You think perhaps that I am... I've got a passport and I am a
professor, that is, if you like, a teacher... but a head teacher. I am a
head teacher. _Oui, c'est comme ca qu'on peut traduire._ I should be very
glad of a lift and I'll buy you... I'll buy you a quart of vodka for
it."

"It'll be half a rouble, sir; it's a bad road."

"Or it wouldn't be fair to ourselves," put in the woman.

"Half a rouble? Very good then, half a rouble. _C'est encore mieux; j'ai
en tout quarante roubles mais_..."

The peasant stopped the horse and by their united efforts Stepan
Trofimovitch was dragged into the cart, and seated on the sack by the
woman.