She retreated sideways, never tearing her eyes away from Savel’s radiant face. Black-haired Olesha, waking up, stood by the brook, shaking his still more disheveled head, and watched the girl with a smile. Suddenly he pushed two fingers into his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. The girl staggered and dived like a fish into the dense waves of the thicket.

“You’re crazy, Olesha!” the old man reproved him.

Olesha, playing the buffoon, crouched on the ground, pulled a bottle out of the brook, and brandishing it in the air, suggested:

“Shall we have a drink, father?”

“Have one if you like. I can’t, not until tonight.”

“Well, I’ll wait till evening, too.…Ah, father—” and strong curses followed like an avalanche of bricks—“a sorcerer, that’s what you are—but a saint, too, ’pon my word! You play with the soul—the human soul, just as a child would. I lay here and thought to myself…”

“Don’t bawl, Olesha.…”

The old woman with the lad came back, and talked to Savel in a low and contrite tone. He shook his head distrustfully, and led them away into the cave, while Olesha, catching sight of me in the thicket, clumsily made his way across to me, breaking the branches as he came.

“A town bird, are you?”

He was in a cheerful and talkative mood, gently quarrel-some, and kept singing Savel’s praises:

“A great consoler, Savel. Take me, for instance, I simply live on his soul; my own is overgrown with malice, as with hair. I’m a desperate man, brother.…”

He painted himself for a long time in the most sinister colors, but I did not believe him.

The old woman emerged from the cave, and, with a deep bow to Savel, said:

“Don’t you be angry with me, father.…”

“Very well, friend…”

“You yourself know…”

“Yes, I know that everybody is afraid of poverty. A pauper is never liked by anyone, I know. But all the same: one should avoid offending God in oneself as well as in others. If we were to keep God in mind always, there would be no poverty in the world. So it is, friend. Now go, with God’s blessing.…”

The lad kept sniveling, glancing fearfully at the old man, and hiding behind his stepmother. Then a beautiful woman arrived, a woman from the town, to judge by her appearance; she wore a lavender-colored frock and a blue kerchief, from under which gleamed two large gray-blue eyes angrily and suspiciously.

And again the enchanting word resounded:

“Dee-ear…”

Olesha kept on talking, preventing me from hearing what the old man was saying:

“He can melt every soul like tin.…A great help he is to me. If it were not for him, Hell alone knows what I’d have done by now.…Siberia…”