“No, Nastenka, no, my dear!  I haven’t thrashed him enough, the torment!  He ought to have been thrashed, that’s what it is!  Ugh . . .  Jesuit, Mahomet, torment!” she shook her fist at her son.  “You want a flogging, but I haven’t the strength.  They told me years ago when he was little, ‘Whip him, whip him!’ I didn’t heed them, sinful woman as I am.  And now I am suffering for it.  You wait a bit!  I’ll flay you!  Wait a bit . . . .”

The mamma shook her wet fist, and went weeping into her lodger’s room.  The lodger, Yevtihy Kuzmitch Kuporossov, was sitting at his table, reading “Dancing Self-taught.”  Yevtihy Kuzmitch was a man of intelligence and education.  He spoke through his nose, washed with a soap the smell of which made everyone in the house sneeze, ate meat on fast days, and was on the look-out for a bride of refined education, and so was considered the cleverest of the lodgers.  He sang tenor.

“My good friend,” began the mamma, dissolving into tears.  “If you would have the generosity—­thrash my boy for me. . . .  Do me the favour!  He’s failed in his examination, the nuisance of a boy!  Would you believe it, he’s failed!  I can’t punish him, through the weakness of my ill-health. . . .  Thrash him for me, if you would be so obliging and considerate, Yevtihy Kuzmitch!  Have regard for a sick woman!”

Kuporossov frowned and heaved a deep sigh through his nose.  He thought a little, drummed on the table with his fingers, and sighing once more, went to Vanya.

“You are being taught, so to say,” he began, “being educated, being given a chance, you revolting young person!  Why have you done it?”

He talked for a long time, made a regular speech.  He alluded to science, to light, and to darkness.

“Yes, young person.”

When he had finished his speech, he took off his belt and took Vanya by the hand.

“It’s the only way to deal with you,” he said.  Vanya knelt down submissively and thrust his head between the lodger’s knees.  His prominent pink ears moved up and down against the lodger’s new serge trousers, with brown stripes on the outer seams.

Vanya did not utter a single sound.  At the family council in the evening, it was decided to send him into business.

VANKA

Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, who had been for three months apprenticed to Alyahin the shoemaker, was sitting up on Christmas Eve.  Waiting till his master and mistress and their workmen had gone to the midnight service, he took out of his master’s cupboard a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib, and, spreading out a crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, began writing.  Before forming the first letter he several times looked round fearfully at the door and the windows, stole a glance at the dark ikon, on both sides of which stretched shelves full of lasts, and heaved a broken sigh.  The paper lay on the bench while he knelt before it.