V

The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy goods:  fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on.  The gross receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit was, no one knew but the old father.  The sons and the clerks estimated the profits at approximately three hundred thousand, and said that it would have been a hundred thousand more if the old man had not “been too free-handed”—­that is, had not allowed credit indiscriminately.  In the last ten years alone the bad debts had mounted up to the sum of a million; and when the subject was referred to, the senior clerk would wink slyly and deliver himself of sentences the meaning of which was not clear to every one: 

“The psychological sequences of the age.”

Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market in a building which was called the warehouse.  The entrance to the warehouse was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of matting and where the dray-horses were always stamping their hoofs on the asphalt.  A very humble-looking door, studded with iron, led from the yard into a room with walls discoloured by damp and scrawled over with charcoal, lighted up by a narrow window covered by an iron grating.  Then on the left was another room larger and cleaner with an iron stove and a couple of chairs, though it, too, had a prison window:  this was the office, and from it a narrow stone staircase led up to the second storey, where the principal room was.  This was rather a large room, but owing to the perpetual darkness, the low-pitched ceiling, the piles of boxes and bales, and the numbers of men that kept flitting to and fro in it, it made as unpleasant an impression on a newcomer as the others.  In the offices on the top storey the goods lay in bales, in bundles and in cardboard boxes on the shelves; there was no order nor neatness in the arrangement of it, and if crimson threads, tassels, ends of fringe, had not peeped out here and there from holes in the paper parcels, no one could have guessed what was being bought and sold here.  And looking at these crumpled paper parcels and boxes, no one would have believed that a million was being made out of such trash, and that fifty men were employed every day in this warehouse, not counting the buyers.

When at midday, on the day after his arrival at Moscow, Laptev went into the warehouse, the workmen packing the goods were hammering so loudly that in the outer room and the office no one heard him come in.  A postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in his hand; he was wincing at the noise, and he did not notice Laptev either.  The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother Fyodor Fyodorovitch, who was so like him that they passed for twins.  This resemblance always reminded Laptev of his own personal appearance, and now, seeing before him a short, red-faced man with rather thin hair, with narrow plebeian hips, looking so uninteresting and so unintellectual, he asked himself:  “Can I really look like that?”