Chapter 15 - Page 2

and simply lifts you. Once this spring a
fine litter came near me, I saw something black. "In the name of
the Father and of the Son," and I was just about to fire when she
grunts to her pigs: "Danger, children," she says, "there's a man
here," and off they all ran, breaking through the bushes. And she
had been so close I could almost have bitten her.'

'How could a sow tell her brood that a man was there?' asked
Olenin.

'What do you think? You think the beast's a fool? No, he is wiser
than a man though you do call him a pig! He knows everything. Take
this for instance. A man will pass along your track and not notice
it; but a pig as soon as it gets onto your track turns and runs at
once: that shows there is wisdom in him, since he scents your
smell and you don't. And there is this to be said too: you wish to
kill it and it wishes to go about the woods alive. You have one
law and it has another. It is a pig, but it is no worse than you--
it too is God's creature. Ah, dear! Man is foolish, foolish,
foolish!' The old man repeated this several times and then,
letting his head drop, he sat thinking.

Olenin also became thoughtful, and descending from the porch with
his hands behind his back began pacing up and down the yard.

Eroshka, rousing himself, raised his head and began gazing
intently at the moths circling round the flickering flame of the
candle and burning themselves in it.

'Fool, fool!' he said. 'Where are you flying to? Fool, fool!' He
rose and with his thick fingers began to drive away the moths.

'You'll burn, little fool! Fly this way, there's plenty of room.'
He spoke tenderly, trying to catch them delicately by their wings
with his thick ringers and then letting them fly again. 'You are
killing yourself and I am sorry for you!'

He sat a long time chattering and sipping out of the bottle.
Olenin paced up and down the yard. Suddenly he was struck by the
sound of whispering outside the gate. Involuntarily holding his
breath, he heard a woman's laughter, a man's voice, and the sound
of a kiss. Intentionally rustling the grass under his feet he
crossed to the opposite side of the yard, but after a while the
wattle fence creaked. A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and a
white sheepskin cap passed along the other side of the fence (it
was Luke), and a tall woman with a white kerchief on her head went
past Olenin. 'You and I have nothing to do with one another' was
what Maryanka's firm step gave him to understand. He followed her
with his eyes to the porch of the hut, and he even saw her through
the window take off her kerchief and sit down. And suddenly a
feeling of lonely depression and some vague longings and hopes,
and