“I know what you are thinking now!” said the old man, after drinking more and passing into his habitual state of drunken excitement.  “You think I have let myself sink into the mire, that I am to be pitied, but to my thinking, this simple life is much more normal than your life, . . .  I don’t need anybody, and . . . and I don’t intend to eat humble pie. . . .  I can’t endure a wretched boy’s looking at me with compassion.”

After tea he cleaned a herring and sprinkled it with onion, with such feeling, that tears of emotion stood in his eyes.  He began talking again about the races and his winnings, about some Panama hat for which he had paid sixteen roubles the day before.  He told lies with the same relish with which he ate herring and drank.  His son sat on in silence for an hour, and began to say good-bye.

“I don’t venture to keep you,” the old man said, haughtily.  “You must excuse me, young man, for not living as you would like!”

He ruffled up his feathers, snorted with dignity, and winked at the women.

“Good-bye, young man,” he said, seeing his son into the entry.  “Attendez.”

In the entry, where it was dark, he suddenly pressed his face against the young man’s sleeve and gave a sob.

“I should like to have a look at Sonitchka,” he whispered.  “Arrange it, Borenka, my angel.  I’ll shave, I’ll put on your suit . . .  I’ll put on a straight face . . .  I’ll hold my tongue while she is there.  Yes, yes, I will hold my tongue!”

He looked round timidly towards the door, through which the women’s voices were heard, checked his sobs, and said aloud: 

“Good-bye, young man!  Attendez.”

ON THE ROAD

"Upon the breast of a gigantic crag, A golden cloudlet rested for one night."

LERMONTOV.

IN the room which the tavern keeper, the Cossack Semyon Tchistopluy, called the “travellers’ room,” that is kept exclusively for travellers, a tall, broad-shouldered man of forty was sitting at the big unpainted table.  He was asleep with his elbows on the table and his head leaning on his fist.  An end of tallow candle, stuck into an old pomatum pot, lighted up his light brown beard, his thick, broad nose, his sunburnt cheeks, and the thick, black eyebrows overhanging his closed eyes. . . .  The nose and the cheeks and the eyebrows, all the features, each taken separately, were coarse and heavy, like the furniture and the stove in the “travellers’ room,” but taken all together they gave the effect of something harmonious and even beautiful.  Such is the lucky star, as it is called, of the Russian face:  the coarser and harsher its features the softer and more good-natured it looks.  The man was dressed in a gentleman’s reefer jacket, shabby, but bound with wide new braid, a plush waistcoat, and full black trousers thrust into big high boots.

On one of the benches, which stood in a continuous row along the wall, a girl of eight, in a brown dress and long black stockings, lay asleep on a coat lined with fox.  Her face was pale, her hair was flaxen, her shoulders were narrow, her whole body was thin and frail, but her nose stood out as thick and ugly a lump as the man’s.  She was sound asleep, and unconscious that her semi-circular comb had fallen off her head and was cutting her cheek.