Life in the fortress did not attract me. I tried to picture Captain Mironov, my future chief, and thought of him as a stern, bad-tempered old man who cared for nothing but discipline and was ready to put me under arrest on a diet of bread and water for the least little trifle. Meanwhile it was growing dark. We were driving rather fast.

“Is it far to the fortress?” I asked the driver.

“No, not far,” he answered; “it’s over there, you can see it.”

I looked from side to side, expecting to see menacing battlements, towers, and a rampart, but saw nothing except a village surrounded by a log fence. On one side of it stood three or four haystacks, half covered with snow, on another a tumbledown windmill with wings of bark that hung idle.

“But where is the fortress?” I asked in surprise.

“Why here,” answered the driver, pointing to the village, and as he spoke we drove into it.

At the gate I saw an old cannon made of cast iron; the streets were narrow and crooked, the cottages low and, for the most part, with thatched roofs. I told the driver to take me to the Commandant’s, and in another minute the chaise stopped before a wooden house built upon rising ground close to a church, also made of wood.

No one came out to meet me. I walked into the entry and opened the door into the anteroom. An old soldier was sitting on the table, sewing a blue patch on the sleeve of a green uniform. I asked him to announce me.

“Go in, my dear,” he said, “our people are at home.”

I stepped into a clean little room, furnished in the old-fashioned style. In the corner stood a cupboard full of crockery; an officer’s diploma in a frame under glass hung on the wall; colored prints, representing “The Taking of Ochakoff and Küstrin,” “The Choosing of a Bride,” and “The Cat’s Funeral,” made bright patches on each side of it. An elderly lady, dressed in a Russian jacket† and with a kerchief on her head, was sitting by the window. She was winding yarn which a one-eyed man in an officer’s uniform held for her on his outstretched hands.

“What is your pleasure, sir?” she asked me, going on with her work.

I answered that I had come to serve in the army, and thought it my duty to present myself to the Captain, and with these words I turned to the one-eyed old man whom I took to be the Commandant, but the lady of the house interrupted the speech I had prepared.

“Ivan Kuzmich is not at home,” she answered; “he has gone to see Father Gerasim; but it makes no difference, sir; I am his wife. You are very welcome. Please sit down.”

She called the maid and asked her to call the sergeant. The old man kept looking at me inquisitively with his single eye.

“May I be so bold as to ask in what regiment you have been serving?”

I satisfied his curiosity.

“And may I ask,” he continued, “why you have been transferred from the Guards to the garrison?”

I answered that such was the decision of my superiors.

“I presume it was for behavior unseemly in an officer of the Guards?” the persistent old man went on.

“That’s enough nonsense,” the Captain’s lady interrupted him. “You see the young man is tired after the journey; he has other things to think of…. Hold your hands straight.

“And don’t you worry, my dear, that you have been banished to these wilds,” she went on, addressing herself to me. “You are not the first nor the last. You will like it better when you are used to it. Shvabrin, Alexey Ivanych, was transferred to us five years ago for killing a man. Heaven only knows what possessed him, but, would you believe it, he went out of town with a certain lieutenant and they both took swords and started prodding each other—and Alexey Ivanych did for the lieutenant, and before two witnesses, too! There it is—one never knows what one may do.”

At that moment the sergeant, a young and well-built Cossack, came into the room.

“Maximych!” the Captain’s lady said to him. “Find a lodging for this gentleman and mind it is clean.”

“Yes, Vasilisa Yegorovna,” the Cossack answered. “Shall I get rooms for his honor at Ivan Polezhayev’s?”

“Certainly not, Maximych,” said the lady. “Polezhayev is crowded as it is; besides, he is a friend and always remembers that we are his superiors. Take the gentleman … what is your name, sir?”

“Pyotr Andreyich.”

“Take Pyotr Andreyich to Semyon Kuzov’s. He let his horse into my kitchen-garden, the rascal. Well, Maximych, is everything in order?”

“All is well, thank God,” the Cossack answered; “only Corporal Prokhorov had a fight in the bathhouse with Ustinya Negulina about a bucket of hot water.”

“Ivan Ignatyich,” said the Captain’s lady to the one-eyed old man, “will you look into it and find out whether Ustinya or Prokhorov is to blame? And punish them both! Well, Maximych, you can go now. Pyotr Andreyich, Maximych will take you to your lodging.”

I took leave of her. The Cossack brought me to a cottage that stood on the high bank of the river at the very edge of the fortress. Half of the cottage was occupied by Semyon Kuzov’s family, the other was allotted to me.