Thank you.
Here I am, you sec.
I feel •o stupid.”
The effort tired him; he closed his eyes. I stroked his long cold fingers with the blue nails. The girl asked softly:
“Evgen Vassilvich, introduce us, please!”
“You must know each other,” he said, indicating her with his eyes. “A dear creature — ”
He stopped speaking, his mouth opened wider and wider, and he suddenly shrieked out hoarsely, like a raven. Throwing herself on the bed, clutching at the blanket, waving her bare arms about, the girl also screamed, burying her head in the tossed pillow.
My stepfather died quickly, and as soon as he was dead, he regained some of his good looks.
I left the hospital with the girl on my arm.
She staggered like a sick person, and cried.
Her handkerchief was squeezed into a ball in her hand; she alternately applied it to her eyes, and rolling it tighter, gazed at it as if it were her last and most precious possession.
Suddenly she stood still, pressing close to me, and said:
“I shall not live till the winter.
Oh Lord, Lord! What does it mean?”
Then holding out her hand, wet with tears, to me:
“Good-by.
He thought a lot of you.
He will be buried tomorrow.”
“Shall I see you home?’
She looked about her.
“What for?
It is daytime, not night.”
From the corner of a side street I looked after her. She walked slowly, like a person who has nothing to hurry for.
It was August. The leaves were already beginning to fall from the trees.
I had no time to follow my stepfather to the graveyard, and I never saw the girl again.
CHAPTER XVII
EVERY morning at six o’clock I set out tor my work in the market-place.
I met interesting people there. There was the carpenter, Osip, a gray-haired man who looked like Saint Nikolai, a clever workman, and witty; there was the humpbacked slater, Ephimushka, the pious bricklayer, Petr, a thoughtful man who also reminded me of a saint; the plasterer, Gregory Shishlin, a flaxen-bearded, blue-eyed, handsome man, beaming with quiet good-nature.
I had come to know these people during the second part of my life at the draughtsman’s house. Every Sunday they used to appear in the kitchen, grave, important-looking, with pleasant speech, and with words which had a new flavor for me.
All these solid-looking peasants had seemed to me then to be easy to read, good through and through, all pleasantly different from the spiteful, thieving, drunken inhabitants of the Kunavin and its environs.
The plasterer, Shishlin, pleased me most of all, and I actually asked if I might join his gang of workmen. But scratching his golden brow with a white finger, he gently refused to have me.
“It is too soon for you,” he said. “Our work is not easy; wait another year.”
Then throwing up his handsome head, he asked:
“You don’t like the way you are living?
Never mind, have patience; learn to live a life of your own, and then you will be able to bear it!”
I do not know all that I gained from this good advice, but I remember it gratefully.
These people used to come to my master’s house every Sunday morning, sit on benches round the kitchen-table, and talk of interesting things while they waited for my master.
When he came, he greeted them loudly and gayly, shaking their strong hands, and then sat down in the chief corner.
They produced their accounts and bundles of notes, the workmen placed their tattered account-books on the table, and the reckoning up for the week began.
Joking and bantering, the master would try to prove them wrong in their reckoning, and they did the same to him. Sometimes there was a fierce dispute, but more often friendly laughter.
“Eh, you’re a dear man; you were born a rogue!” the workmen would say to the master.
And he answered, laughing in some confusion:
“And what about you, wild fowl? There’s as much roguery about you as about me!”
“How should we be anything else, friend?” agreed Ephimushka, but grave Petr said:
“You live by what you steal; what you earn you give to God and the emperor.”
“Well, then I’ll willingly make a burnt offering of you,” laughed the master.
They led him on good-naturedly:
“Set fire to us, you mean?”
“Burn us in a fiery furnace?”
Gregory Shishlin, pressing his luxuriant beard to his breast with his hands, said in a sing-song voice: