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“Here!” I heard suddenly in answer.

Holy saints, how relieved I was! How I rushed in the direction from which the voice came…. A human figure loomed dark before me…. I made for it. At last!

But instead of Tyeglev I saw another officer of the same battery, whose name was Tyelepnev.

“Was it you answered me?” I asked him.

“Was it you calling me?” he asked in his turn.

“No; I was calling Tyeglev.”

“Tyeglev? Why, I met him a minute ago. What a fool of a night! One can’t find the way home.”

“You saw Tyeglev? Which way did he go?”

“That way, I fancy,” said the officer, waving his hand in the air. “But one can’t be sure of anything now. Do you know, for instance, where the village is? The only hope is the dogs barking. It is a fool of a night! Let me light a cigarette … it will seem like a light on the way.”

The officer was, so I fancied, a little exhilarated.

“Did Tyeglev say anything to you?” I asked.

“To be sure he did! I said to him, ‘good evening, brother,’ and he said, ‘good-bye.’ ‘How good-bye? Why good-bye.’ ‘I mean to shoot myself directly with a pistol.’ He is a queer fish!”

My heart stood still. “You say he told you …”

“He is a queer fish!” repeated the officer, and sauntered off.

I hardly had time to recover from what the officer had told me, when my own name, shouted several times as it seemed with effort, caught my ear. I recognised Semyon’s voice.

I called back … he came to me.

XVI

“Well?” I asked him. “Have you found Ilya Stepanitch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?”

“Here, not far away.”

“How … have you found him? Is he alive?”

“To be sure. I have been talking to him.” (A load was lifted from my heart.) “His honour was sitting in his great-coat under a birch tree … and he was all right. I put it to him, ‘Won’t you come home, Ilya Stepanitch; Alexandr Vassilitch is very much worried about you.’ And he said to me, ‘What does he want to worry for! I want to be in the fresh air. My head aches. Go home,’ he said, ‘and I will come later.'”

“And you left him?” I cried, clasping my hands.

“What else could I do? He told me to go … how could I stay?”

All my fears came back to me at once.

“Take me to him this minute–do you hear? This minute! O Semyon, Semyon, I did not expect this of you! You say he is not far off?”

“He is quite close, here, where the copse begins–he is sitting there. It is not more than five yards from the river bank. I found him as I came alongside the river.”

“Well, take me to him, take me to him.”

Semyon set off ahead of me. “This way, sir…. We have only to get down to the river and it is close there.”

But instead of getting down to the river we got into a hollow and found ourselves before an empty shed.

“Hey, stop!” Semyon cried suddenly. “I must have come too far to the right…. We must go that way, more to the left….”

We turned to the left–and found ourselves among such high, rank weeds that we could scarcely get out…. I could not remember such a tangled growth of weeds anywhere near our village. And then all at once a marsh was squelching under our feet, and we saw little round moss-covered hillocks which I had never noticed before either…. We turned back–a small hill was sharply before us and on the top of it stood a shanty–and in it someone was snoring. Semyon and I shouted several times into the shanty; something stirred at the further end of it, the straw rustled–and a hoarse voice shouted, “I am on guard.”

We turned back again … fields and fields, endless fields…. I felt ready to cry…. I remembered the words of the fool in King Lear: “This night will turn us all to fools or madmen.”