“No, I can’t sleep,” sighed Ginger Trousers. “I am enjoying Nature . . . . A welcome visitor, my wife’s mother, arrived by the night train, you know. She brought with her our nieces . . . splendid girls! I was delighted to see them, although . . . it’s very damp! And you, too, are enjoying Nature?”
“Yes,” grunted Zaikin, “I am enjoying it, too. . . . Do you know whether there is any sort of tavern or restaurant in the neighbourhood?”
Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.
TYPHUS
A YOUNG lieutenant called Klimov was travelling from Petersburg to Moscow in a smoking carriage of the mail train. Opposite him was sitting an elderly man with a shaven face like a sea captain’s, by all appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede. He pulled at his pipe the whole journey and kept talking about the same subject:
“Ha, you are an officer! I have a brother an officer too, only he is a naval officer. . . . He is a naval officer, and he is stationed at Kronstadt. Why are you going to Moscow?”
“I am serving there.”
“Ha! And are you a family man?”