“What is it, brother doggie? Warm, eh?” asked grandfather.
The dog yawned, straining his jaws and curling his tongue into a little tube, shook all his body, and whimpered.
“Yes, yes, little brother, but it can’t be helped,” continued Lodishkin. “It is written, ‘In the sweat of thy face,’ though, as a matter of fact, it can hardly be said that you have a face, or anything more than a muzzle.... Be off! Go off with you.... As for me, Serozha, I must confess I just like this heat. Only the organ’s a bit of a nuisance, and if there were no work to do I’d just lie down somewhere in the grass in the shade, and have a good morning of it. For old bones this sunshine is the finest thing in the world.”
The footpath turned downward to a great highway, broad and hard and blindingly white. At the point where the troupe stepped on to it commenced an ancient baronial estate, in the abundant verdure of which were beautiful villas, flower-beds, orangeries and fountains. Lodishkin knew the district well, and called at each of the villas every year, one after another, during the vine-harvesting season, when the whole Crimea is filled with rich, fashionable, and pleasure-loving visitors. The bright magnificence of southern Nature did not touch the old man, but it enraptured Sergey, who was there for the first time. The magnolias, with their hard and shiny leaves, shiny as if lacquered or varnished, with their large white blossoms, each almost as big as a dinner-plate; the summer-houses of interwoven vines hanging with heavy clusters of fruit; the enormous century-old plane trees, with their bright trunks and mighty crowns; tobacco plantations, rivulets, waterfalls, and everywhere, in flower-beds, gardens, on the walls of the villas, bright sweet-scented roses—all these things impressed unceasingly the naïve soul of the boy. He expressed his admiration of the scene, pulling the old man’s sleeve and crying out every minute:
“Grandfather Lodishkin, but, grandfather, just look, goldfish in the fountain!... I swear, grandfather, goldfish, if I die for it!” cried the boy, pressing his face to a railing and staring at a large tank in the middle of a garden. “I say, grandfather, look at the peaches! Good gracious, what a lot there are. Look, how many! And all on one tree.”
“Leave go, leave go, little stupid. What are you stretching your mouth about?” joked the old man. “Just wait till we get to the town of Novorossisk, and give ourselves to the South. Now, that’s a place indeed; there you’ll see something. Sotchi, Adler, Tuapse, and then, little brother, Sukhum, Batum.... Your eyes’ll drop out of your head.... Palms, for instance. Absolutely astonishing; the trunks all shaggy like felt, and each leaf so large that we could hide ourselves in one.”
“You don’t mean it!” cried Sergey, joyfully.
“Wait a bit and you’ll see for yourself. Is there little of anything there? Now, oranges for instance, or, let us say, lemons.... You’ve seen them, no doubt, in the shops?”
“Well?”
“Well, you see them simply as if they were growing in the air. Without anything, just on the tree, as up here you see an apple or a pear.... And the people down there, little brother, are altogether out of the way: Turks, Persians, different sorts of Cherkesses, and all in gowns and with daggers, a desperate sort of people! And, little brother, there are even Ethiopians. I’ve seen them many times in Batum!”