Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/287

 VII

In the village arrived “the gentleman,” as the peasants called the superintendent of police. Every one knew a week ahead the day and cause of his arrival. For though Zhukovo had only forty houses, it owed in arrears to the Imperial Treasury and the Zemstvo more than two thousand roubles.

The superintendent stopped at the inn, drank two glasses of tea, and then walked to the starostа's hut, where already waited a crowd of peasants in arrear. The starosta, Antip Siedelnikoff, despite his youth — he was little over thirty — was a stern man who always took the side of the authorities, although he himself was poor and paid his taxes irregularly. It was clear to all that he was flattered by his position and revelled in the sense of power, which he had no other way of displaying save by sternness. The mir feared and listened to him; when in the street or at the inn he met a drunken man he would seize him, tie his hands behind his back, and put him in the village gaol; once, indeed, he even imprisoned grandmother for several days, because, appearing at the mir instead of her husband, she used abusive language. The starosta had never lived in town and read no books; but he had a copious collection of learned words and used them so liberally