Our wagons, drawn up together, resembled
in the twilight strange beasts; the two Sisters lay down on one wagon,
Semyonov, Andrey Vassilievitch, Trenchard and I on another. My
irritated mood had returned. I had been the last to climb on to the
straw and the others had so settled themselves that I had no room to
lie flat. Semyonov's big body occupied half the wagon, Andrey
Vassilievitch's boots touched my head and at intervals his whole body
gave nervous jerks. It was also quite bitterly cold, which was curious
enough after the warmth of the earlier nights. And always, at what
seemed to be regular intervals, there came, from the forest, the
banging of the iron door.
I felt a passionate irritation against Andrey Vassilievitch. Why could
he not keep quiet? What, after all, was he doing here? I could hear
that he was dreaming. He muttered some woman's name:
"Sasha ... Sasha ... Sasha...."
"Can't you keep still?" I whispered to him, but in the cold I myself
was trembling. The dawn came at last with reluctance, flushing the air
with colour, then withdrawing into cold grey clouds, then stealing out
once more behind the forest in scattered strips of pale green gold,
then suddenly sending up into the heaven a flock of pink clouds like a
flight of birds, that spread in extending lines to the horizon,
covering at last a sky now faintly blue, with rosy bars.
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