"Yes, by gad! It was the very devil—"
Here my uncle became unexpectedly and strangely angry. He pushed away his plate of savories, frowned with an expression of loathing, and, smoking a cigarette, muttered:
"They rob one another; then they catch one another and put one another away in prisons in Siberia, in the galleys; but what is it to do with me? I spit upon them all! I have my own soul!"
The shaggy stoker stood before me; he also had been wont to "spit upon" people, and he also was called Yaakov.
"What are you thinking about?" asked my uncle softly.
"Were you sorry for the convicts?"
"It is easy to pity them, they are such children; it is amazing! Sometimes I would look at one of them and think: I am not worthy to black his boots; although I am set over him! Clever devils, skilful with their hands."
The wine and his reminiscences had again pleasantly animated him. With his elbows resting on the window-sill, waving his yellow hand with the cigarette between its fingers, he spoke with energy:
"One of them, a crooked fellow, an engraver and watchmaker, was convicted of coining. You ought to have heard how he talked! It was like a song, a flame! 'Explain to me,' he would say; 'why may the exchequer coin money while I may not? Tell me that!' And no one could tell him why, no one, not even I, and I was chief over him. There was another, a well-known Moscow thief, quiet mannered, foppish, neat as a pin, who used to say courteously: 'People work till their senses are blunted, and I have no desire to do the same. I have tried it. You work and work till weariness has made a fool of you, get drunk on two copecks, lose seven copecks at cards, get a woman to be kind to you for five copecks, and then, all over again, cold and hungry. No,' he says, 'I am not playing that game.'"
Uncle Yaakov bent over the table and continued, reddening to the tips of his ears. He was so excited that even his small ears quivered.