“What’s the matter with you?”
“Don’t touch her!” I just managed to say.
He burst out laughing.
“She is your lover?
Aie, that Natashka, she has devoured our little monk.”
Robenok laughed, too, holding his sides, and for a long time they roasted me with their hot obscenity. It was unbearable!
But while they were thus occupied, Natalia went away, and I, losing my temper at last, struck Robenok in the chest with my head, knocking him over, and ran away.
For a long time after that I did not go near Million! Street. But I saw Ardalon once again; I met him on the ferry-boat.
“Where have you been hiding yourself?” he asked joyfully.
When I told him that it was repulsive to me to remember how he had knocked Natalia about and ob — scenely insulted me, Ardalon laughed good-naturedly.
“Did you take that seriously?
We only rubbed it into you for a joke!
As for her, why shouldn’t she be knocked about, a street-walker?
People beat their wives, so they are certainly not going to have more mercy on such as that!
Still, it was only a joke, the whole thing.
I understand, you know, that the fist is no good for teaching!”
“What have you got to teach her?
How are you better than she is?”
He put his hands on my shoulders and, shaking me, said banteringly:
“In our disgraceful state no one of us is better than another.” Then he laughed and added boastfully:
“I understand everything from within and without, brother, everything!
I am not wood!”
He was a little tipsy, at the jovial stage; he looked at me with the tender pity of a good master for an unintelligent pupil.
Sometimes I met Pavl Odintzov. He was livelier than ever, dressed like a dandy, and talked to me condescendingly and always reproachfully.
“You are throwing yourself away on that kind of work!
They are nothing but peasants.”
Then he would sadly retail all the latest news from the workshop.
“Jikharev is still taken up with that cow. Sitanov is plainly fretting; he has begun to drink to excess.
The wolves have eaten Golovev; he was coming home from Sviatka; he was drunk, and the wolves devoured him.”
And bursting into a gay peal of laughter he comically added:
“They ate him and they all became drunk themselves!
They were very merry and walked about the forests on their hind legs, like performing dogs. Then they fell to fighting and in twenty-four hours they were all dead!”
I listened to him and laughed, too, but I felt that the workshop and all I had experienced in it was very far away from me now.
This was rather a melancholy reflection.
CHAPTER XIX
THERE was hardly any work in the market-square during the winter, and instead I had in numerable trivial duties to perform in the house. They swallowed up the whole day, but the evenings were left free. Once more I read to the household novels which were unpalatable to me, from the
“Neva” and the
“Moscow Gazette”; but at night I occupied myself by reading good books and by attempts at writing poetry.
One day when the women had gone out to vespers and my master was kept at home through indisposition, he asked me:
“Victor is making fun of you because he says you write poetry, Pyeshkov. Is that true?
Well then, read it to me!”
It would have been awkward to refuse, and I read several of my poetical compositions. These evidently did not please him, but he said:
“Stick to it! Stick to it!
You may become a Pushkin; have you read Pushkin?”
“Do the goblins have funeral rites?
Are the witches given in marriage?”
In his time people still believed in goblins, but he did not believe in them himself. Of course he was just joking.
“Ye-es, brother,” he drawled thoughtfully, “You ought to have been taught, but now it is too late.
The devil knows what will become of you!
I should hide that note-book of yours more carefully, for if the women get hold of it, they will laugh at you.