And Kuzma confirmed him: “That’s so, that’s right!”
When he had conquered his intoxication and come to his senses, Kuzma felt that he was already an old man. Since that trip to Kieff three years had elapsed. And, during that space of time, something extremely important had indubitably been effected within him. How it had been effected, he himself did not even attempt to define. Life during those three years had been too abnormal—his own life and the life of the community. Of course, he had understood while still in Kieff that he would not remain long with Kasatkin, and that ahead of him lay poverty, the loss of even the semblance of manhood. And so it came to pass. He managed to scrape along through two more jobs, but under very humiliating and oppressive conditions: eternally half-drunk, slovenly, with voice turned hoarse, permeated through and through with the reek of cheap, strong tobacco, making herculean efforts to conceal his unfitness for business. Then he fell lower still; he returned to his native town, and ran through his last kopeks; he spent his nights all winter long in the general room of the lodging-house of Khodoff, whiled away the days in Avdyeef’s eating-house in the Women’s Bazaar. Out of these last kopeks many went for a stupid caprice, the publication of a little volume of verses—after which he had to stroll about among the patrons of Avdyeef’s establishment and force his booklet on them at half-price.
But even that was not all: he came near turning into a buffoon! Once, on a frosty, sunny morning, he was standing in the bazaar near the flour shops and gazing at a barefoot beggar cutting up antics before Mozzhukin the merchant, who had come out on his threshold. Mozzhukin, drowsily derisive, with a face resembling the reflection in a samovar, was chiefly interested in a cat which was licking his polished boot. But the beggar did not stop. He thumped his breast with his fists and, humping his shoulders, began in a hoarse voice to declaim:
“He who drinks when he is already drunk,
Plays the part of a wise man....”
And Kuzma, his swollen eyes beaming, suddenly cut in:
“Then long live jollity,
Long life to good liquor!”
And an old woman of the petty burgher class, who was passing by—she had a face like that of an aged lioness—halted, cast a sidelong glance at him, and, elevating her crutch, remarked distinctly and maliciously: “’Tis likely you don’t know your prayers as well as that!”