“To me? Nothing. I like to hear them read a book, if it’s a holy one.…In our village there was a discharged soldier, Afrikan was his name, and when he would begin reading the Psalms, it was like the roll of a drum. It was grand!”

“Well, what of it?” Syomka asked again, rolling a cigarette.

“Nothing. But it was fine! You couldn’t quite make it out, but still…It was…You don’t hear anything like that on the street.…You don’t understand it, but you feel that these are words for the soul.”

“You don’t understand it, you say, but it’s plain that you’re as stupid as an ox,” Syomka mimicked his companion.

“Of course you always swear at me,” he sighed.

“How else can you talk to fools? Can they understand anything? Now take a whack at this rotten one. Ho!”

The pile of debris was growing around the bath-house as it was falling to pieces, and the structure was enveloped in clouds of dust which was turning the leaves of the nearby trees gray. The July sun was unmercifully baking our backs and shoulders.

“The book’s got silver on it,” Mishka returned to the subject.

Syomka raised his head and shot a keen glance in the direction of the summer-house.

“Looks that way,” he declared briefly.

“Then it’s the Gospels.”

“Maybe the Gospels.…What of it?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what my pockets are filled with. And if you’re so keen on Scripture, why don’t you go to her and say: ‘Read me a little of it, Granny. There’s no other way of our getting it. We don’t go to church, we’re not proper, we’re dirty.…And we’ve got souls too, just as they ought to be…in the right place.…’ Now you go and tell her that.”

“Should I really?”

“Go ahead.”

Mishka threw down the lever, pulled his shirt straight, smeared the dust over his face with his sleeve, and jumped down from the roof of the bath-house.

“She’ll send you packing, you devil you,” grumbled Syomka, grinning skeptically, but with extreme curiosity following with his eyes the figure of his comrade, who was making his way through the burdocks to the summer-house. Tall, stooped, his dirty arms bare, he was advancing clumsily, swaying as he walked, and brushing against the bushes, all the while smiling self-consciously and meekly. As the man approached, the old woman raised her head and calmly looked him up and down. The rays of the sun were playing on the lenses of her spectacles and on their silver rims.

Contrary to Syomka’s prediction, she did not send him packing. Because of the rustling of the leaves we could not hear what Mishka was saying to the mistress, but presently we saw him lower himself heavily to the ground at the old woman’s feet so that his nose almost touched the open book. His face was calm and composed; we saw him blow on his beard, trying to remove the dust from it, shift about and