‘You want to work?’ he inquired, in a somewhat condescending voice.
‘No,’ answered Insarov; ‘to-day I could give up to walking.’
‘Ah!’ commented Shubin. ‘Well, that’s delightful. Run along, my friend, Andrei Petrovitch, put a hat on your learned head, and let us go where our eyes lead us. Our eyes are young—they may lead us far. I know a very repulsive little restaurant, where they will give us a very beastly little dinner; but we shall be very jolly. Come along.’
Half an hour later they were all three walking along the bank of the Moskva. Insarov had a rather queer cap with flaps, over which Shubin fell into not very spontaneous raptures. Insarov walked without haste, and looked about, breathing, talking, and smiling with the same tranquillity; he was giving this day up to pleasure, and enjoying it to the utmost. ‘Just as well-behaved boys walk out on Sundays,’ Shubin whispered in Bersenyev’s ear. Shubin himself played the fool a great deal, ran in front, threw himself into the attitudes of famous statues, and turned somersaults on the grass; Insarov’s tranquillity did not exactly irritate him, but it spurred him on to playing antics. ‘What a fidget you are, Frenchman!’ Bersenyev said twice to him. ‘Yes, I am French, half French,’ Shubin answered, ‘and you hold the happy medium between jest and earnest, as a waiter once said to me.’ The young men turned away from the river and went along a deep and narrow ravine between two walls of tall golden rye; a bluish shadow was cast on them from the rye on one side; the flashing sunlight seemed to glide over the tops of the ears; the larks were singing, the quails were calling: on all sides was the brilliant green of the grass; a warm breeze stirred and lifted the leaves and shook the heads of the flowers. After prolonged wanderings, with rest and chat between (Shubin had even tried to play leap-frog with a toothless peasant they met, who did nothing but laugh, whatever the gentlemen might do to him), the young men reached the ‘repulsive little’ restaurant: the waiter almost knocked each of them over, and did really provide them with a very bad dinner with a sort of Balkan wine, which did not, however, prevent them from being very jolly, as Shubin had foretold; he himself was the loudest and the least jolly. He drank to the health of the incomprehensible but great Venelin, the health of the Bulgarian king Kuma, Huma, or Hroma, who lived somewhere about the time of Adam.
‘In the ninth century,’ Insarov corrected him.
‘In the ninth century?’ cried Shubin. ‘Oh, how delightful!’
Bersenyev noticed that among all his pranks, and jests and gaiety, Shubin was constantly, as it were, examining Insarov; he was sounding him and was in inward excitement, but Insarov remained as before, calm and straightforward.
At last they returned home, changed their dress, and resolved to finish the day as they had begun it, by going that evening to the Stahovs. Shubin ran on before them to announce their arrival.