Love and Other Stories Part 21

"Thirty . . . Thirty-one. . . . One ought to take a good whip, you know. Go out and give them Beaconsfield. I say, how their tongues are wagging! It's easier to babble than to work. I suppose you threw away the queen of clubs and I didn't realise it."

"Thirteen . . . Fourteen. . . . It's unbearably hot! One must be made of iron to sit in such heat on a seat in the full sun! Fifteen."

The first game is followed by a second, the second by a third. . . .

Finks loses, and by degrees works himself up into a gambling fever and forgets all about the cracking walls of the high school cellar.

As Lyashkevsky plays he keeps looking at the aborigines. He sees them, entertaining each other with conversation, go to the open gate, cross the filthy yard and sit down on a scanty patch of shade under an aspen tree. Between twelve and one o'clock the fat cook with brown legs spreads before them something like a baby's sheet with brown stains upon it, and gives them their dinner. They eat with wooden spoons, keep brus.h.i.+ng away the flies, and go on talking.

"The devil, it is beyond everything," cries Lyashkevsky, revolted.

"I am very glad I have not a gun or a revolver or I should have a shot at those cattle. I have four knaves--fourteen. . . . Your point. . . . It really gives me a twitching in my legs. I can't see those ruffians without being upset."

"Don't excite yourself, it is bad for you."

"But upon my word, it is enough to try the patience of a stone!"

When he has finished dinner the native in blue trousers, worn out and exhausted, staggering with laziness and repletion, crosses the street to his own house and sinks feebly on to his bench. He is struggling with drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him as dejectedly as though he were every minute expecting his end. His helpless air drives Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes his head out of the window and shouts at him, spluttering:

"Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling. He has been stuffing himself, and now he doesn't know what to do with his tummy!

Get out of my sight, you confounded fellow! Plague take you!"

The native looks sourly at him, and merely twiddles his fingers instead of answering. A school-boy of his acquaintance pa.s.ses by him with his satchel on his back. Stopping him the native ponders a long time what to say to him, and asks:

"Well, what now?"

"Nothing."

"How, nothing?"

"Why, just nothing."

"H'm. . . . And which subject is the hardest?"

"That's according." The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.

"I see--er . . . What is the Latin for tree?"

"Arbor."

"Aha. . . . And so one has to know all that," sighs the blue trousers.

"You have to go into it all. . . . It's hard work, hard work. . . .

Is your dear Mamma well?"

"She is all right, thank you."

"Ah. . . . Well, run along."

After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is horrified.

"Holy Saints, why it's three o'clock already. How I have been staying on. Good-bye, I must run. . . ."

"Have dinner with me, and then go," says Lyashkevsky. "You have plenty of time."

Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more than ten minutes. After dining he sits for some five minutes on the sofa and thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head on the cus.h.i.+on and fills the room with a shrill whistling through his nose. While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles:

"Race of curs! I wonder you don't choke with laziness. No work, no intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . .

disgusting. Tfoo!"

At six o'clock Finks wakes up.

"It's too late to go to the high school now," he says, stretching.

"I shall have to go to-morrow, and now. . . . How about my revenge?

Let's have one more game. . . ."

After seeing his visitor off, between nine and ten, Lyashkevsky looks after him for some time, and says:

"d.a.m.n the fellow, staying here the whole day and doing absolutely nothing. . . . Simply get their salary and do no work; the devil take them! . . . The German pig. . . ."

He looks out of the window, but the native is no longer there. He has gone to bed. There is no one to grumble at, and for the first time in the day he keeps his mouth shut, but ten minutes pa.s.ses and he cannot restrain the depression that overpowers him, and begins to grumble, shoving the old shabby armchair:

"You only take up room, rubbishly old thing! You ought to have been burnt long ago, but I keep forgetting to tell them to chop you up.

It's a disgrace!"

And as he gets into bed he presses his hand on a spring of the mattress, frowns and says peevishly:

"The con--found--ed spring! It will cut my side all night. I will tell them to rip up the mattress to-morrow and get you out, you useless thing."

He falls asleep at midnight, and dreams that he is pouring boiling water over the natives, Finks, and the old armchair.

AN INQUIRY

IT was midday. Voldyrev, a tall, thick-set country gentleman with a cropped head and prominent eyes, took off his overcoat, mopped his brow with his silk handkerchief, and somewhat diffidently went into the government office. There they were scratching away. . . .

"Where can I make an inquiry here?" he said, addressing a porter who was bringing a trayful of gla.s.ses from the furthest recesses of the office. "I have to make an inquiry here and to take a copy of a resolution of the Council."

"That way please! To that one sitting near the window!" said the porter, indicating with the tray the furthest window. Voldyrev coughed and went towards the window; there, at a green table spotted like typhus, was sitting a young man with his hair standing up in four tufts on his head, with a long pimply nose, and a long faded uniform. He was writing, thrusting his long nose into the papers.

A fly was walking about near his right nostril, and he was continually stretching out his lower lip and blowing under his nose, which gave his face an extremely care-worn expression.

"May I make an inquiry about my case here . . . of you? My name is Voldyrev. and, by the way, I have to take a copy of the resolution of the Council of the second of March."

The clerk dipped his pen in the ink and looked to see if he had got too much on it. Having satisfied himself that the pen would not make a blot, he began scribbling away. His lip was thrust out, but it was no longer necessary to blow: the fly had settled on his ear.

"Can I make an inquiry here?" Voldyrev repeated a minute later, "my name is Voldyrev, I am a landowner. . . ."

"Ivan Alexeitch!" the clerk shouted into the air as though he had not observed Voldyrev, "will you tell the merchant Yalikov when he comes to sign the copy of the complaint lodged with the police!

I've told him a thousand times!"

"I have come in reference to my lawsuit with the heirs of Princess Gugulin," muttered Voldyrev. "The case is well known. I earnestly beg you to attend to me."