‘Oy! oy! oy!’ he shrieked: ’oy...
wait! I’ve something to tell you... a lot
to tell you. Mr. Under-sergeant, you know me.
I’m an agent, an honest agent. Don’t
hold me; wait a minute, a little minute, a tiny minute—wait!
Let me go; I’m a poor Hebrew. Sara... where
is Sara? Oh, I know, she’s at his honour
the quarter-lieutenant’s.’ (God knows why
he bestowed such an unheard-of grade upon me.) ’Your
honour the quarter-lieutenant, I’m not going
away from the tent.’ (The soldiers were taking
hold of Girshel... he uttered a deafening shriek, and
wriggled out of their hands.) ’Your Excellency,
have pity on the unhappy father of a family.
I’ll give you ten golden pieces, fifteen I’ll
give, your Excellency!...’ (They dragged him
to the birch-tree.) ’Spare me! have mercy! your
honour the quarter-lieutenant! your Excellency, the
general and commander-in-chief!’
They put the noose on the Jew.... I shut my eyes
and rushed away.
I remained for a fortnight under arrest. I was
told that the widow of the luckless Girshel came to
fetch away the clothes of the deceased. The general
ordered a hundred roubles to be given to her.
Sara I never saw again. I was wounded; I was
taken to the hospital, and by the time I was well
again, Dantzig had surrendered, and I joined my regiment
on the banks of the Rhine.
Yes, yes, began Piotr Gavrilovitch; those were painful
days... and I would rather not recall them....
But I have made you a promise; I shall have to tell
you the whole story. Listen.
I was living at that time (the winter of 1835) in
Moscow, in the house of my aunt, the sister of my
dead mother. I was eighteen; I had only just
passed from the second into the third course in the
faculty ’of Language’ (that was what it
was called in those days) in the Moscow University.
My aunt was a gentle, quiet woman—a widow.
She lived in a big, wooden house in Ostozhonka, one
of those warm, cosy houses such as, I fancy, one can
find nowhere else but in Moscow. She saw hardly
any one, sat from morning till night in the drawing-room
with two companions, drank the choicest tea, played
patience, and was continually requesting that the
room should be fumigated. Thereupon her companions
ran into the hall; a few minutes later an old servant
in livery would bring in a copper pan with a bunch
of mint on a hot brick, and stepping hurriedly upon
the narrow strips of carpet, he would sprinkle the
mint with vinegar. White fumes always puffed
up about his wrinkled face, and he frowned and turned
away, while the canaries in the dining-room chirped
their hardest, exasperated by the hissing of the smouldering
mint.
