grinning meaninglessly over his dishevelled beard;
he waved one hand from time to time, as much as to
say, ’Here goes!’ Nothing could be more
ludicrous than his face; however much he twitched
up his eyebrows, his heavy lids would hardly rise,
but seemed lying upon his scarcely visible, dim, and
mawkish eyes. He was in that amiable frame of
mind of a perfectly intoxicated man, when every passer-by,
directly he looks him in the face, is sure to say,
’Bless you, brother, bless you!’ The Blinkard,
as red as a lobster, and his nostrils dilated wide,
was laughing malignantly in a corner; only Nikolai
Ivanitch, as befits a good tavern-keeper, preserved
his composure unchanged. The room was thronged
with many new faces; but the Wild Master I did not
see in it.
I turned away with rapid steps and began descending
the hill on which Kolotovka lies. At the foot
of this hill stretches a wide plain; plunged in the
misty waves of the evening haze, it seemed more immense,
and was, as it were, merged in the darkening sky.
I walked with long strides along the road by the ravine,
when all at once from somewhere far away in the plain
came a boy’s clear voice: ‘Antropka!
Antropka-a-a!...’ He shouted in obstinate
and tearful desperation, with long, long drawing out
of the last syllable.
He was silent for a few instants, and started shouting
again. His voice rang out clear in the still,
lightly slumbering air. Thirty times at least
he had called the name, Antropka. When suddenly,
from the farthest end of the plain, as though from
another world, there floated a scarcely audible reply:
‘Wha-a-t?’
The boy’s voice shouted back at once with gleeful
exasperation:
‘Come here, devil! woo-od imp!’
‘What fo-or?’ replied the other, after
a long interval.
‘Because dad wants to thrash you!’ the
first voice shouted back hurriedly.
The second voice did not call back again, and the
boy fell to shouting Antropka once more. His
cries, fainter and less and less frequent, still floated
up to my ears, when it had grown completely dark, and
I had turned the corner of the wood which skirts my
village and lies over three miles from Kolotovka....
‘Antropka-a-a!’ was still audible in the
air, filled with the shadows of night.
PIOTR PETROVITCH KARATAEV
One autumn five years ago, I chanced, when on the
road from Moscow to Tula, to spend almost a whole
day at a posting station for want of horses.
I was on the way back from a shooting expedition, and
had been so incautious as to send my three horses
on in front of me. The man in charge of the station,
a surly, elderly man, with hair hanging over his brows
to his very nose, with little sleepy eyes, answered
all my complaints and requests with disconnected grumbling,
slammed the door angrily, as though he were cursing
his calling in life, and going out on the steps abused
