"No, but what a devil he is! He has beaten her again, has he not, till she is bleeding?" asked one of them.
"Her nose is all over blood.... It is running down," Senka informed them.
"Ah! good heavens! What a terror, what a wretch he is!" cried some women, full of sympathy.
The men regarded the matter from a more abstract and philosophic point of view.
"He will certainly end by killing her," they said.
The accordion-player remarked in a prophetic voice—
"He'll stick a knife into her some day; you take my word for it He'll get tired of always knocking her about, and some day will put an end to the whole business in a hurry."
"Now he has let go of her," said Senka in a whisper, springing up from the ground, and bounding on one side like an india-rubber ball. Immediately afterwards he took up another post of observation in a corner of the court, for he knew that Grischka Orloff would now appear above ground.
Most of the spectators went off rapidly, for they had no desire to come face to face with the enraged cobbler. Now that the fight was over Grischka had lost all interest in their eyes, and besides it was not without danger to come across him under these circumstances.
So it happened that when Orloff emerged from his cellar, there was generally, with the exception of Senka, no living soul to be seen in the courtyard. Breathing heavily, his shirt torn, his hair tumbled, with fresh scratches on his still excited and perspiring face, Grischka Orloff, with bloodshot eyes would glance suspiciously round the court. With his hands behind his back, he would walk slowly towards an old sledge which was leaning against the wall of a dilapidated wool-shed. Sometimes he would whistle and throw threatening glances around, as if he were challenging all the dwellers in Petounukoff's house to battle. Then he would sit down on the sledge, and with the sleeve of his shirt wipe the blood away from his face. He would remain for a long time motionless, glowering darkly at the wall of the opposite house, where the plaster was crumbling away, and where a variety of colours had been smeared on by the house-painter Soutchkoff's apprentices, who had the habit, when they left off work, of cleaning their brushes on this part of the wall.