“And he’s so accessible to every one, so approachable!” she said--and Tikhon Ilitch roughly cut her short, while Kuzma did not know what to say, fearing to get mixed up in a quarrel. They had exchanged roles: now it was not he who suggested alarm, but his brother who frightened and exhorted him; it was not he but his brother who demonstrated that it was impossible to live in Russia. After an hour of that sort of conversation, Kuzma began to long to get home, to get back to the manor. “What is to become of me?” he thought in alarm, as he listened to his brother discussing the sale of the estate. And was it possible that that dreadful marriage between Deniska and the Bride would come off? And why did Tikhon so obstinately insist that the marriage must take place? “He has gone mad, he certainly has gone mad!” muttered Kuzma on his way home, as he called to mind Tikhon’s surly and malevolent face, his uncommunicativeness, his suspiciousness, and his wearisome repetition of one and the same thing over and over. He began to shout at Koshel, at the horse, feeling in a hurry to hide in his little house his sadness, his old, cold clothing, his loneliness, and his tenderness at the thought of the Bride’s sweet, sorrowful face, her womanliness and--her taciturnity. “Ekh, and how could she fail to go to ruin here!” he said sadly to himself, as he gazed through the twilight gloom at the meagre lights in Durnovka. IX During the Christmas holidays Ivanushka, from Basovka, dropped in to see Kuzma. He was an old-fashioned peasant who had grown foolish from old age, although once on a time he had been renowned for his bear-like strength. Thickset, bent into a bow, he never lifted his shaggy dark brown head. He always walked with his toes turned inward. And he amazed Kuzma even more than had Menshoff, Akim, and Syery. In the cholera year of ’ninety-two, the whole of Ivanushka’s huge family had died. All he had left was a son, a soldier, who was now working for the railway as a line-guard, about five versts from Durnovka. Ivanushka might have passed his declining days with his son, but he preferred to roam about and ask alms. He strode lightly, in his bandy-legged way, across the farmyard, with his cap and his staff in his left hand, a bag in his right, and his head, on which the snow shone white, uncovered--and for some reason or other the sheep dogs did not growl at him. He entered the house, mumbled “May God bless this house and the master of this house,” and seated himself on the floor against the wall. Kuzma dropped his book and in amazement stared timidly at him over his eyeglasses, as if he had been some wild beast from the steppe, whose presence inside a house was a prodigy.