In dismay the engineer pulled the handle again several times and listened, his heart beating fast.
There was a churchlike evening stillness.
A little light still filtered through the multicoloured glass of the high window.
A fine thing to happen, thought Shukin.
"You son of a bitch," he said to the door.
Downstairs, voices broke through the silence like exploding squibs.
Then came the muffled bark of a dog in one of the rooms.
Someone was pushing a pram upstairs.
Ernest Pavlovich walked timidly up and down the landing.
"Enough to drive you crazy!"
It all seemed too outrageous to have actually happened.
He went up to the door and listened again.
Suddenly he heard a different sort of noise.
At first he thought it was someone walking about in the apartment.
Somebody may have got in through the back door, he thought, although he knew that the back door was locked and that no one could have got in.
The monotonous sound continued.
The engineer held his breath and suddenly realized that the sound was that of running water.
It was evidently pouring from all the taps in the apartment.
Ernest Pavlovich almost began howling.
The situation was awful.
A full-grown man with a moustache and higher education was standing on a ninth-floor landing in the centre of Moscow, naked except for a covering of bursting soapsuds.
There was nowhere he could go.
He would rather have gone to jail than show himself in that state.
There was only one thing to do-hide.
The bubbles were bursting and making his back itch.
The lather on his face had already dried; it made him look as though he had the mange and puckered his skin like a hone.
Half an hour passed.
The engineer kept rubbing himself against the whitewashed walls and groaning, and made several unsuccessful attempts to break in the door.
He became dirty and horrible.
Shukin decided to go downstairs to the caretaker at any price.
There's no other way out. None.
The only thing to do is hide 10 the caretaker's room.
Breathing heavily and covering himself with his hand as men do when they enter the water, Ernest Pavlovich began creeping downstairs close to the banister.
He reached the landing between the eighth and ninth floors.
His body reflected multicoloured rhombuses and squares of light from the window.
He looked like Harlequin secretly listening to a conversation between Columbine and Pierrot.
He had just turned to go down the next flight when the lock of an apartment door below snapped open and a girl came out carrying a ballet dancer's attache case.
Ernest Pavlovich was back on his landing before the girl had taken one step.
He was practically deafened by the terrible beating of his heart.
It was half an hour before the engineer recovered sufficiently to make another sortie.
This time he was fully determined to hurtle down at full speed, ignoring everything, and make it to the promised land of the caretaker's room.
He started off.
Silently taking four stairs at a time, the engineer raced downstairs.
On the landing of the sixth floor he stopped for a moment.
This was his undoing.
Someone was coming up.
"Insufferable brat!" said a woman's voice, amplified many times by the stairway. "How many times do I have to tell him!"
Obeying instinct rather than reason, like a cat pursued by dogs Ernest Pavlovich tore up to the ninth floor again.
Back on his own land, all covered with wet footmarks, he silently burst into tears, tearing his hair and swaying convulsively.
The hot tears ran through the coating of soap and formed two wavy furrows.