in a deep bass voice, with a grumbling sound in his throat, and almost without fail a German china pipe with a crooked bowl protruded from his teeth. When he was angry, the nostrils of his big red hooked nose swelled out and his lips quivered, exposing to view two rows of large and wolf-like yellow teeth. He had long arms, bandy legs, always wore an old officer’s cloak, a dirty greasy cap with a red band, but without a brim, and felt boots, with holes in them, which reached almost to his knees. He usually had a heavy drunken headache in the morning, and was slightly tipsy by night. But regardless of the amount of wine he absorbed he never got really drunk, and never lost his merry disposition.

In the evening, sitting on his brick bench with a pipe in his mouth, he received lodgers. “Now, what sort of a man is that?” he would ask the ragged and depressed object approaching him, evicted from the town for drunkenness or cast down for some still more legitimate reason. And after the man had answered him, he would say: “Let me see the legal papers that confirm your lies.” If there were such papers, they were produced. The Captain would put them close to his breast, seldom taking any interest in their contents and would say: “All right. Two kopecks for the night, ten kopecks for the week, and thirty kopecks for the month. Go and find a place, and see that it is not somebody else’s, or you’ll get a hiding. My lodgers are people with strict views.”

“Don’t you sell tea, bread, other eatables?”

“I trade only in walls and roofs, for which I pay the swindling proprietor of this hole—Judas Petunikoff, merchant of the second guild—five rubles a month,” explained Kuvalda in a business-like tone. “Only those come to me who are not used to luxuries…but if you are in the habit of guzzling every day, there is the eating-house opposite. You’d do better, however, you fragment of mankind, to abandon this fad. You see, you are not a gentleman. So what is it you eat? It is yourself you eat!”

Such speeches, delivered in an artificially business-like manner, but always with smiling eyes, and also the solicitude shown to his lodgers, made the Captain very popular among the paupers of the town. It often happened that a former client of his would appear, ragged and depressed, but more respectable- looking and with a happier face.

“Good day, your honor, and how are you keeping?”

“Alive, in good health! What next?”

“Don’t you know me?”

“I do not.”

“Don’t you remember that I lived here for nearly a month last winter…when the police came and three men were taken away?”

“Oh, well, the police come often enough under my hospitable roof.”

“But don’t you remember you cocked a snook at the district Police Inspector?”

“Now, stop these reminiscences. Say straight away what you want, my lad.”

“Won’t you accept a small entertainment from me? When I lived with you, you were…”

“Gratitude must be encouraged, my friend, because it is so seldom to be found in the world. You must be a good fellow, and though I don’t remember you, I will go with you to the pub and drink to your success in life with the greatest delight.”

“You are just the same, always joking.”

“What else can one do, living among you sad ’uns?”