It had grown dark. The hooligans went into the main street, the Sretenka. It was very quiet, and only a few passers-by were to be met with; people stood here and there at their gates and talked. A Jewish widow sat at the gate of a house and chatted with her neighbour, a Jewish tailor. Her children, a whole throng of them, one smaller than the other, played about here, deeply wrapt in their own affairs. Nil walked up to the Jewess and shouted: “You dog of a Jew, pray to God for the orthodox Tsar!” “What do you want of me?” cried the Jewess. “I’m not touching you; you had better go away!” “What’s that you say?” shouted the hooligan. A broad knife was lifted in the darkness and, gleaming, came down in a swoop, piercing the old woman. She gave a quick, shrill cry--and fell back dead. The Jew, terrified, ran away, filling the night air with his piteous wails. The children began to whimper. The hooligans marched off, laughing uproariously. CHAPTER XXI Midday. It was quiet, innocent, and fresh in the depth of the wood, at the edge of the hollow--and the outer heat penetrated hither only by an infinite coiling as of a scaly serpent impotent at last and deprived of its poison. Trirodov had found this place for himself and Elisaveta. More than once they came here together--to read, to talk, and to sit a while at the moss-covered stone, out of which, like a strange corporeal ghost, grew up all awry a slender quaking ash. Elisaveta, dressed in her simple short skirt, her long sunburnt arms and part of her legs showing, seemed so tall, so erect, and so graceful at this moss-covered stone. Elisaveta was reading aloud--poems! How golden her voice sounded with its seductive, sun-like sonorousness! Trirodov listened with a slightly ironical smile to these familiar, infinitely deep and lovely words, so seemingly meaningless in life. When she finished Trirodov said: “A man’s whole life is barely enough to think out a single idea properly.” “You mean to say that each should choose for himself but a single idea.” “Yes. If people could but grasp this fact human knowledge would take an unprecedented step forward. But we are afraid to venture.” And coarse life already hovered near them behind their backs, and was about to intrude upon them. Elisaveta gave a sudden faint outcry at the unexpectedness of an unseemly apparition. A dirty, rough-looking man, all in tatters, was almost upon them; he had approached them upon the mossy ground as softly as a wood fairy. He stretched out a dirty, horny hand, and asked, not at all in a begging voice: “Give a hungry man something to buy bread with.” Trirodov frowned in annoyance, and without looking at the beggar took a silver coin out of the pocket of his waistcoat. He always kept a trifle about him to provide for unexpected meetings. The ragged one smiled, turned the coin, threw it upward, caught it, and hid it adroitly in his pocket.