IVAN PYETUSHKOV.’
Onisim carried this letter to its address.
A fortnight passed. Onisim went every morning
as usual to the baker’s shop. One day Vassilissa
ran out to meet him.
‘Good morning, Onisim Sergeitch.’
Onisim put on a gloomy expression, and responded crossly,
‘’Morning.’
‘How is it you never come to see us, Onisim
Sergeitch?’
Onisim glanced morosely at her.
‘What should I come for? you wouldn’t
give me a cup of tea, no fear.’
’Yes, I would, Onisim Sergeitch, I would.
You come and see. Rum in it, too.’
Onisim slowly relaxed into a smile.
‘Well, I don’t mind if I do, then.’
‘When, then—when?’
‘When ... well, you are ...’
’To-day—this evening, if you like.
Drop in.
‘All right, I’ll come along,’ replied
Onisim, and he sauntered home with his slow, rolling
step.
The same evening in a little room, beside a bed covered
with a striped eider-down, Onisim was sitting at a
clumsy little table, facing Vassilissa. A huge,
dingy yellow samovar was hissing and bubbling on the
table; a pot of geranium stood in the window; in the
other corner near the door there stood aslant an ugly
chest with a tiny hanging lock; on the chest lay a
shapeless heap of all sorts of old rags; on the walls
were black, greasy prints. Onisim and Vassilissa
drank their tea in silence, looking straight at each
other, turning the lumps of sugar over and over in
their hands, as it were reluctantly nibbling them,
blinking, screwing up their eyes, and with a hissing
sound sucking in the yellowish boiling liquid through
their teeth. At last they had emptied the whole
samovar, turned upside down the round cups—one
with the inscription, ‘Take your fill’;
the other with the words, ’Cupid’s dart
hath pierced my heart’—then they cleared
their throats, wiped their perspiring brows, and gradually
dropped into conversation.
‘Onisim Sergeitch, how about your master ...’
began Vassilissa, and did not finish her sentence.
‘What about my master?’ replied Onisim,
and he leaned on his hand. ’He’s
all right. But why do you ask?’
‘Oh, I only asked,’ answered Vassilissa.
’But I say’—(here Onisim grinned)—’I
say, he wrote you a letter, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did.’
Onisim shook his head with an extraordinarily self-satisfied
air.
‘So he did, did he?’ he said huskily,
with a smile. ’Well, and what did he say
in his letter to you?’
’Oh, all sorts of things. “I didn’t
mean anything, Madam, Vassilissa Timofyevna,”
says he, “don’t you think anything of it;
don’t you be offended, madam,” and a lot
more like that he wrote.... But I say,’
she added after a brief silence: ‘what’s
he like?’
‘He’s all right,’ Onisim responded
indifferently.
