The Sparrow, however, overruled the whole plan. Father Michail had been connected with the prison for twenty years and the two gatemen knew him as they did their own wives. What was more, the day gateman and the priest were particularly fond of each other and often exchanged jokes.
Clara’s hands dropped to her sides. Then she clenched a fist and said: “Oh, nonsense. He’ll never know. If Father Michail did not speak to him he wouldn’t think it strange, would he?”
“No, but the gateman might speak to him. Besides, you’ll have to get up early to fool him, lady.” Every officer in the prison building had his nickname, and this vigilant gateman who was a very fat man was known as Double Chin. He seemed to be dozing half the time; but the Sparrow assured Clara that when his little eyes were shut they saw even better than when they were open.
“Nonsense. Your imagination carries you too far. Anyhow, nothing venture, nothing have. We must get that man out.”
“Ready to serve you, young lady, only if I may say so, I don’t like the plan at all, young lady.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
VLADIMIR FINDS HIS CAUSE.
THE next morning, as Clara walked along Kasimir Street, she saw Volodia Vigdoroff, her cousin, talking and laughing exuberantly to two elderly men in front of the flashy window of a drug store. One of his listeners wore a military uniform. It was Dr. Lipnitzky (Jewish physicians had not yet been proscribed from the Russian army)—a grey-haired, smooth-shaven, pudgy little man with three medals across his breast. It was at the Turkish war that he had won these decorations. Clara could never look at him without feeling a taste of sickness in her mouth like the one she had felt one day shortly after the war, when she was sick in bed and the little doctor, bending over, shouted to her to open her mouth wider. The best physician in town, he was the terror of his uneducated co-religionists. When a Jewish housewife paid him his fee in copper instead of silver, or neglected to wrap it up in paper, he would make an ugly scene, asking the poor woman at the top of his voice when she and others like her would learn to live like human beings. Sometimes, when a family failed to pay him altogether, pleading poverty, he would call them a lot of prevaricating knaves with a snug little hoard in the old woman’s stocking, and carry off a copper pan or brass candlestick. In every case of this sort, however, the pan or the brass candlestick was sure to come back, sometimes with a ruble or two into the bargain.