Page:Leskov - The Sentry and other Stories.djvu/148

 132 All crowded together, then formed into some sort of order and started.

It was a most desolate picture: a small number of people torn from the light and deprived of every shadow of hope of a better future—sinking into the cold black mud of the common road. Everything around was frightfully ugly: unending mud, a grey sky, the leafless wet cytisus and the ravens with bristling feathers sitting in their spreading branches. The wind sighed and raged, howled and tore.

In these hellish, soul-rending sounds that completed the horror of the picture there seemed to echo the advice of the wife of the biblical Job: "Curse the day of your birth and die."

Those who do not wish to listen to these words; those who are not attracted by the thoughts of death even in this sorrowful position, but are frightened by them, must try to silence these warring voices by something even more monstrous. The simple man understands this very well; he lets lose all his animal simplicity, begins to play the fool, to laugh at himself, at other people and at feelings. At no time very delicate he becomes doubly bad.

"Well, my merchant's wife, is your honour in good health?" Sergei asked Katerina Lvovna