“Hello,—­yourself,” the tartar answered grouchily and without looking at me, “there is.  Don’t let them skin you.  Ask fifty rubles, understand?”

“Is that so?” I said, spitting through my front teeth onto a sidewalk covered with gleaming white snow, “not me, damn them!  Whose baggage?”

They did not answer—­in their language it meant ’don’t know, don’t care, and go to hell!’

On the coach I saw “Moscow Special” written with white stone and I decided to take one more chance and ask for my handbag, presenting my luggage check.

“It came at last,” said the man in charge of the luggage depot, “thank God I won’t see your muzzle any more.  What’s in it?”

“Since when has it been your business, your burjooi honor?” I said, “You did not pay me for buying my belongings, so better keep your trap shut!”

I took the dear old bag—­it was Maroosia’s before, and came home.  What did Mlle. Goroshkin put in the bag in Moscow?  I opened the rusty lock—­and found my silver toilet kit, razors, “La Question du Maroc,” on which the shaving soap had made a big yellow spot, Laferme cigarettes, some linen (the thing I need the most), night slippers, manicuring box, and poor Maroossia’s fan,—­she wired me to take it to Gurzoof in the last telegram I ever got from her.

The fan was fragrant with her perfume on it; so I shed a few tears.  On the inside of the bag was written “All well, write often,” and on the bottom of the bag—­was this book of my notes.  I had decided to sell the silver kit and the fan and get some money as I was very short of it.  Both the fan and the silver outfit looked so inharmonious in my little room with a small window on a triste court with a yard full of blindingly white snow.

21

Here is what brought me here: 

I could not leave Petrograd on time on account of the house.  Nobody wanted it for 800,000.  I waited and waited—­day after day, week after week.  Many and many were giving me advice to leave and were warning me, but I would not listen.  When the wire came that poor Maroossia was killed,—­I lost interest in life completely.  So I was living in Petrograd, until the clash for the Assembly.  Then,—­perhaps my nerves needed a good shaking up,—­I became active again.  I went to the Volga Kama for my money,—­the were already closed and gave me 150 rubles, and allowed me to take another 150 in a week.  I went to the Volkov’s.  The clerk said that I had no right to withdraw more than 150.  I knew the man from Moscow well, and he recognized me from the time that I was coming to Bros.  Djamgarov Bank.  He was really kind, and said that he could at once arrange that I should receive 80% of my money and the contents in the safe, out of which 10% should be paid to some mysterious commissary.  “I advise you to take it.  The appetites are growing, and perhaps to-morrow it will be more,—­50% or 60%.”  I wrote out some kind of understanding, by which I sold my rights on the 10th of October to a certain Kagajitsky.  That was all fake, as my arrangement was made about the 23rd of November, I guess.