“My ho-ome’s there.”

“Come, it’s no good giving way to the dismal dumps.  These neurotic feelings are the limit, old man.  You must get well, for you have to play Mitka in ‘The Terrible Tsar’ to-morrow.  There is nobody else to do it.  Drink something hot and take some castor-oil?  Have you got the money for some castor-oil?  Or, stay, I’ll run and buy some.”

The comic man fumbled in his pockets, found a fifteen-kopeck piece, and ran to the chemist’s.  A quarter of an hour later he came back.

“Come, drink it,” he said, holding the bottle to the “heavy father’s” mouth.  “Drink it straight out of the bottle. . . .  All at a go!  That’s the way. . . .  Now nibble at a clove that your very soul mayn’t stink of the filthy stuff.”

The comic man sat a little longer with his sick friend, then kissed him tenderly, and went away.  Towards evening the jeune premier, Brama-Glinsky, ran in to see Shtchiptsov.  The gifted actor was wearing a pair of prunella boots, had a glove on his left hand, was smoking a cigar, and even smelt of heliotrope, yet nevertheless he strongly suggested a traveller cast away in some land in which there were neither baths nor laundresses nor tailors. . . .

“I hear you are ill?” he said to Shtchiptsov, twirling round on his heel.  “What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with you, really? . . .”

Shtchiptsov did not speak nor stir.

“Why don’t you speak?  Do you feel giddy?  Oh well, don’t talk, I won’t pester you . . . don’t talk. . . .”

Brama-Glinsky (that was his stage name, in his passport he was called Guskov) walked away to the window, put his hands in his pockets, and fell to gazing into the street.  Before his eyes stretched an immense waste, bounded by a grey fence beside which ran a perfect forest of last year’s burdocks.  Beyond the waste ground was a dark, deserted factory, with windows boarded up.  A belated jackdaw was flying round the chimney.  This dreary, lifeless scene was beginning to be veiled in the dusk of evening.

“I must go home!” the jeune premier heard.

“Where is home?”

“To Vyazma . . . to my home. . . .”

“It is a thousand miles to Vyazma . . . my boy,” sighed Brama-Glinsky, drumming on the window-pane.  “And what do you want to go to Vyazma for?”

“I want to die there.”

“What next!  Now he’s dying!  He has fallen ill for the first time in his life, and already he fancies that his last hour is come. . . .  No, my boy, no cholera will carry off a buffalo like you.  You’ll live to be a hundred. . . .  Where’s the pain?”

“There’s no pain, but I . . . feel . . .”

“You don’t feel anything, it all comes from being too healthy.  Your surplus energy upsets you.  You ought to get jolly tight—­drink, you know, till your whole inside is topsy-turvy.  Getting drunk is wonderfully restoring. . . .  Do you remember how screwed you were at Rostov on the Don?  Good Lord, the very thought of it is alarming!  Sashka and I together could only just carry in the barrel, and you emptied it alone, and even sent for rum afterwards. . . .  You got so drunk you were catching devils in a sack and pulled a lamp-post up by the roots.  Do you remember?  Then you went off to beat the Greeks. . . .”