We simply live from hand to mouth, yet she owed us six roubles in the five months she lived with us.
We buried her, too. My husband made the coffin.”
“How was it then that woman said she’d buried her?”
“As though she’d buried her!”
“And what was her surname?”
“I can’t pronounce it, sir. It’s difficult. It must have been German.”
“Smith?”
“No, not quite that.
Well, Anna Trifonovna took charge of the orphan, to bring her up, she says.
But it’s not the right thing at all.”
“I suppose she took her for some object?”
“She’s a woman who’s up to no good,” answered the woman, seeming to ponder and hesitate whether to speak or not.
“What is it to us? We’re outsiders.”
“You’d better keep a check on your tongue,” I heard a man’s voice say behind us.
It was a middleaged man in a dressinggown, with a fullcoat over the dressinggown, who looked like an artisan, the woman’s husband.
“She’s no call to be talking to you, sir; it’s not our business,” he said, looking askance at me.
“And you go in.
Goodbye, sir; we’re coffinmakers.
If you ever need anything in our way we shall be pleased . . . but apart from that we’ve nothing to say.
I went out, musing, and greatly excited.
I could do nothing, but I felt that it was hard for me to leave it like this.
Some words dropped by the coffinmaker’s wife revolted me particularly.
There was something wrong here; I felt that.
I was walking away, looking down and meditating, when suddenly a sharp voice called me by my surname.
I looked up. Before me stood a man who had been drinking and was almost staggering, dressed fairly neatly, though he had a shabby overcoat and a greasy cap.
His face was very familiar.
I looked more closely at it.
He winked at me and smiled ironically.
“Don’t you know me?”
Chapter V
AH, why it’s you, Masloboev!” I cried, suddenly recognizing him as an old schoolfellow who had been at my provincial gymnasium. “Well, this is a meeting! ”
“Yes, a meeting indeed!
We’ve not met for six years.
Or rather, we have met, but your excellency hasn’t deigned to look at me.
To be sure, you’re a general, a literary one that is, eh!...”
He smiled ironically as he said it.
“Come, Masloboev,, old boy, you’re talking nonsense!” I interrupted.
“Generals look very different from me even if they are literary ones, and besides, let me tell you, I certainly do remember having met you twice in the street. But you obviously. avoided me. And why should I go up to a man if I see he’s trying to avoid me?
And do you know what I believe?
If you weren’t drunk you wouldn’t have called to me even now.
That’s true, isn’t it?
Well, how are you?
I’m very, very glad to have met you, my boy.”
“Really?
And I’m not compromising you by my . . . ‘unconventional’ appearance?
But there’s no need to ask that. It’s not a great matter; I always remember what a jolly chap you were, old Vanya.
Do you remember you took a thrashing for me?
You held your tongue and didn’t give me away, and, instead of being grateful, I jeered at you for a week afterwards.
You’re a blessed innocent!
Glad to see you, my dear soul!” (We kissed each other.) “How many years I’ve been pining in solitude – ‘From morn till night, from dark till light but I’ve not forgotten old times.