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fingers slowly dangling a pair of spectacles. You wait! I'll pay you back for this! Some day you'll be bowing to me, and I'll tell you: "My dear man, the court will go into this..."
    There they were, bearing the coffin down the corridor, while messengers hurried past with papers and nobody sees or cares to see him being carried out. Only Aunt Dasha comes forward to meet it in a black shawl, like a nun.
    She comes forward, weeping. Then we stop, someone stands at the door, the coffin sways in the men's hands and is lowered to the floor. Mother bows, and looking up, I can see her lips quivering.
    I came to myself at the sound of my own voice. I must have been feverish, because I was uttering some incoherent nonsense, cursing myself and also, for some reason, my mother, and carrying on a conversation with Ivan Ivanovich, although I knew perfectly well that he had left long ago and that even his tracks in the field had kept for only two days until the snow had covered them up.
    But I had spoken-spoken loudly and clearly! I could now speak and explain what had happened that night on the pontoon bridge;
    I could show that knife was mine, that I had lost it when I bent over the murdered man. Too late! A whole lifetime too late; he was now beyond any help of mine.
    I lay in the dark with my head in my hands. It was cold indoors, my feet were chilled, but I stayed like that till morning. I decided that I would not speak any more. Why should I? All the same he was dead and I would never see him again. It did not matter any more.
    CHAPTER SEVEN MOTHER
    I have no very clear memory of the February Revolution, and until our return to town I did not understand that word. But I do remember associating all the strange excitement and puzzling talk around me with my nocturnal visitor who had taught me to speak.
    Spring passed before I was aware of it. But summer began on the day when the Neptune, hooting and backing in a menacing way, moored alongside the warf where Mother and us two had been waiting for it since the morning.
    We were going back to town. Mother was taking us home. She looked thinner and younger, and was wearing a new coat and a new brightly coloured shawl.
    I had often thought, during the winter, of how astonished she would be to hear me speak. But she only embraced me and laughed. She had changed a lot during the winter. All the time she was thinking about something-I could tell that by the quick changes of expression in her face: at one moment she looked anxious and was silent, the next she smiled, all to herself. Petrovna decided that she was going mad, and one day she asked her about it. Mother smiled and said she wasn't. In our presence she rarely mentioned Father, but whenever she spoke kindly to me I knew she was thinking of him. My sister she had always loved.
    On the boat her mind was busy all the time. She kept raising her eyebrows and shaking her head, as if arguing with somebody mentally.
    How poor and neglected our yard seemed to me when we got home! That year nobody had seen to the drain ditches, and the muddy water with bits of wood floating on it, had remained standing under every porch. The low sheds looked more ramshackle than ever, and the gaps in the fence were wide enough to drive a cart through, while back of the Skovorodnikovs' house a mountain of stinking bones, hoofs and scraps of hides lay piled up.
    The old man was making glue. "Everybody thinks this is just ordinary glue," he said to me. "It's an all-purpose glue. It'll fix anything-iron, glass, even bricks, if anyone's fool enough to want to glue bricks together.
    I invented it myself. Skovorodnikov's Skin Glue. And the stronger it stinks the stronger it sticks."
    He regarded me suspiciously over the top of his glasses.
    "Well, let's hear you say something."
    I spoke. He nodded approvingly.
    "Ah, that's too bad about Ivan!"
    Aunt Dasha was away, and did not come back before a couple of weeks. If there was anyone I gladdened-and frightened too-it was