“There are hooligans that ought to have existed even if they never have. One of them stopped a young girl before Varsovie station. The girl, frightened, immediately held out her purse to him, with two roubles and fifty kopecks in it. The hooligan took it all. ‘Goodness,’ cried she, ‘I have nothing now to take my train with.’ ‘How much is it?’ asked the hooligan. ‘Sixty kopecks.’ ‘Sixty kopecks! Why didn’t you say so?’ And the bandit, hanging onto the two roubles, returned the fifty-kopeck piece to the trembling child and added a ten-kopeck piece out of his own pocket.”
“Something quite as funny happened to me two winters ago, at Moscow,” said la belle Onoto. “I had just stepped out of the door when I was stopped by a hooligan. ‘Give me twenty kopecks,’ said the hooligan. I was so frightened that I couldn’t get my purse open. ‘Quicker,’ said he. Finally I gave him twenty kopecks. ‘Now,’ said he then, ‘kiss my hand.’ And I had to kiss it, because he held his knife in the other.”
“Oh, they are quick with their knives,” said Thaddeus. “As I was leaving Gastinidvor once I was stopped by a hooligan who stuck a huge carving-knife under my nose. ‘You can have it for a rouble and a half,’ he said. You can believe that I bought it without any haggling. And it was a very good bargain. It was worth at least three roubles. Your health, belle Onoto.”
“I always take my revolver when I go out,” said Athanase. “It is more prudent. I say this before the police. But I would rather be arrested by the police than stabbed by the hooligans.”
“There’s no place any more to buy revolvers,” declared Ivan Petrovitch. “All such places are closed.”
Gounsovski settled his glasses, rubbed his fat hands and said:
“There are some still at my locksmith’s place. The proof is that to-day in the little Kaniouche my locksmith, whose name is Smith, went into the house of the grocer at the corner and wished to sell him a revolver. It was a Browning. ‘An arm of the greatest reliability,’ he said to him, ‘which never misses fire and which works very easily.’ Having pronounced these words, the locksmith tried his revolver and lodged a ball in the grocer’s lung. The grocer is dead, but before he died he bought the revolver. ‘You are right,’ he said to the locksmith; ‘it is a terrible weapon.’ And then he died.”
The others laughed heartily. They thought it very funny. Decidedly this great Gounsovski always had a funny story. Who would not like to be his friend? Annouchka had deigned to smile. Gounsovski, in recognition, extended his hand to her like a mendicant. The young woman touched it with the end of her fingers, as if she were placing a twenty-kopeck piece in the hand of a hooligan, and withdrew from it with disgust. Then the doors opened for the Bohemians. Their swarthy troupe soon filled the room. Every evening men and women in their native costumes came from old Derevnia, where they lived all together in a sort of ancient patriarchal community, with customs that had not changed for centuries; they scattered about in the places of pleasure, in the fashionable restaurants, where they gathered large sums, for it was a fashionable luxury to have them sing at the end of suppers, and everyone showered money on them in order not to be behind the others. They accompanied on guzlas, on castanets, on tambourines, and sang the old airs, doleful and languorous, or excitable and breathless as the flight of the earliest nomads in the beginnings of the world.
When they had entered, those present made place for them, and Rouletabille, who for some moments had been showing marks of fatigue and of a giddiness natural enough in a young man who isn’t in the habit of drinking the finest champagnes, profited by the diversion to get a corner of the sofa not far from Prince Galitch, who occupied the place at Annouchka’s right.
“Look, Rouletabaille is asleep,” remarked la belle Onoto.