“The fox! What a tongue he has! ‘I told you so,’ says he, ‘but you would not listen to me. Now you have only yourself to thank!’ ”

“His honor is indeed a good soldier, always first in line, but keeping an eye on the road back.”

The teacher would then get hold of his friend in a dark corner, clutching at his dirty cloak, trembling and passing his tongue over his dry lips, and look into his face with a deep, inexpressibly tragic glance.

“Can’t you bear it any longer?” the Captain would ask sullenly.

The teacher would answer by shaking his head.

“Wait another day…perhaps you’ll get over it,” Kuvalda would propose. The teacher would sigh, and shake his head hopelessly once more.

The Captain, seeing that his friend’s thin body trembled with the thirst for the poison, would take some money from his pocket.

“In the majority of cases it is impossible to fight against fate,” he would say, as if trying to justify himself before someone. The teacher, however, did not spend all his money on drink. At least half of it went to the children of the street. The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there were crowds of them noisily seething from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers prematurely faded. Often the teacher would gather them round him, would buy them bread, eggs, apples and nuts, and take them into the fields by the riverside. There they would sit and first greedily eat everything he offered them, and then begin to play, filling the fields for a mile around with noise and laughter. The tall, gaunt figure of the drunkard seemed to shrink among these small people, who treated him as if he were of their own age. They called him “Philip” and did not trouble to prefix “Uncle” to his name. Playing around him, like little sprites, they pushed him about, jumped upon his back, beat him upon his bald head, caught hold of his nose. All this must have pleased him, as he did not protest against such liberties. He spoke very little to them, and when he did so it was cautiously and timidly as if afraid that his words would hurt or contaminate them. He passed many hours thus as their companion and plaything, watching their lively faces with his gloomy eyes. Then he would thoughtfully direct his steps to Vaviloff’s pub where he would drink himself silently into unconsciousness.

Almost every day after his reporting he would bring a newspaper, and then gather round him all these creatures that once were men. They would come towards him drunk, or suffering from drunken headaches, in different stages of disorder, but equally pitiable and filthy. There would come Aleksei Maksimovitch Simtsoff, stout as a barrel, at one time had been a forester, but now traded in matches, ink, and blacking. He was an old man of sixty, in a canvas overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, the creased broders of which concealed his fat, red face with its thick white beard, from which a small red nose peered gaily heavenwards and a pair of watery eyes gleamed cynically. They called him “Spinning Top,” a name which well described his round figure and wheezing speech. After him “Bad End” appeared from some corner—a dark, sinister, silent drunkard; then the former prison warden, Luka Antonovitch Martyanoff, a man who existed by gambling at “strap,” “three-leaves,” “bank-note,” and by other arts equally cunning and equally disapproved of by the police. He would throw his hard and oft-scourged body on the grass beside the teacher, and, flashing around with his black eyes, point to the bottle, and ask in a hoarse, bass voice: “May I?”

Then appeared the mechanical engineer Pavel Solntseff, a man of some thirty years of age, suffering from consumption. His left ribs had been crushed in a quarrel, and his sharp, yellow, foxy face wore a malicious smile. The thin lips exposed two rows of black teeth, decayed by illness, and the rags on his narrow and bony shoulders swayed backwards and forwards as on a clothes pole. They called him “Bag of Bones.” He hawked brushes and bath brooms of his own manufacture, made from a peculiar kind of grass, very useful for brushing clothes.