Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 02.djvu/57

 Rh Matryúshka, who lives in that hovel, also belongs to their family, and is the same kind of an accursed good-for-nothing. So you do not need me, your Grace?" added the manager, noticing that the master was not listening to him.

"No, you may go," Nekhlyúdov answered, absent-mindedly, and directed his steps to Davýdka the White.

Davýdka's hut stood crooked and alone at the edge of the village. Near it was no yard, no kiln, no barn; only a few dirty stalls clung to one side of it: on the other were heaped in a pile wattles and timber that were to be used for the yard. Tall, green steppe-grass grew in the place where formerly had been the yard. There was not a living being near the hut, except a pig that lay in the mud in front of the threshold, and squealed.

Nekhlyúdov knocked at the broken window; but, as nobody answered him, he walked up to the vestibule and shouted: "Ho there!" Nobody replied. He walked through the vestibule, looked into the empty stalls, and лvalked through the open door into the hut.

An old red cock and two hens promenaded over the floor and benches, jerking their crops, and clattering with their claws. When they saw a man, they fluttered with wide-spread wings against the walls with a clucking of despair, and one of them flew upon the oven.

The eighteen-foot hut was all occupied by the oven with a broken pipe, a weaver's loom which had not been removed in spite of summer, and a begrimed table with a warped and cracked board. Though it was dry without, there was a dirty puddle near the threshold which had been formed at a previous rain by a leak in the ceiling and roof. There were no beds. It was hard to believe that this was an inhabited place, there was such a decided aspect of neglect and disorder, both inside and outside the hut; and yet Davýdka the White lived in it with his whole family. At that particular moment, in spite of the heat of the June day, Davýdka lay, his