"Try one more day; perhaps you will conquer yourself," proposed Kouvalda.
The schoolmaster would sigh and shake his head in a hopeless negative. When the captain saw that his friend's lean body was shaken with the thirst for poison, he would take the money out of his pocket.
"It's generally useless to argue with fate," he would say, as if wishing to justify himself.
But if the schoolmaster held out the whole week, the farewell of the friends terminated in a touching scene, the end of which generally took place in Vaviloff's vodka shop.
The schoolmaster never drank all his money; at least half of it he spent on the children of the High Street. Poor people are always rich in children, and in the dust and ditches in this street might be seen from morning till night groups of torn, hungry, noisy youngsters. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but in the High Street they were like flowers faded before their time; probably because they grew on soil poor in nourishing qualities.
Sometimes the schoolmaster would gather the children round him, buy a quantity of bread, eggs, apples, nuts, and go with them into the fields towards the river. There they would greedily eat up all he had to offer them, filling the air around with merry noise and laughter. The lank, thin figure of the drunkard seemed to shrivel up and grow small like the little ones round him, who treated him with complete familiarity, as if he were one of their own age. They called him "Philippe," not adding even the title of "uncle." They jumped around him like eels, they pushed him, got on his back, slapped his bald head, and pulled his nose. He probably liked it, for he never protested against these liberties being taken. He spoke very little to them, and his words were humble and timid, as if he were afraid that his voice might soil or hurt them. He spent many hours with them, sometimes as plaything, and at other times as playmate. He used to look into their bright faces with sad eyes, and would then slowly and thoughtfully slink off into Vaviloff's vodka shop, where he would drink till he lost consciousness.
Almost every day when he returned from his reporting, the schoolmaster would bring back a paper from the town, and the outcasts would form a circle round him. As soon as they saw him coming, they would gather from the different corners of the yard, some drunk, some in a state of stupor, all in different stages of raggedness, but all equally miserable and dirty.
First would appear Alexai Maximovitch Simtzoff, round as a barrel; formerly a surveyor of forest lands, but now a pedlar of matches, ink, blacking, and bad lemons. He was an old man of sixty, in a canvas coat and a broad-brimmed crushed hat, which covered his fat red face, with its thick white beard, out of which peeped forth a small red nose, and thick lips of the same colour, and weak, running, cynical eyes. They called him "Kubar," a top, and this nickname well portrayed his round,' slowly moving figure and his thick, humming speech.
Louka Antonovitch Martianoff, nicknamed Konetz, "The End," would come out of some corner, a morose, black, silent drunkard, formerly an inspector of a prison; a man who gained his livelihood at present by playing games of hazard, such as the three-card trick and thimble-rig, and by the display of other talents equally ingenious, but equally unappreciated by the police. He would drop his heavy, often ill-treated, body on the grass beside the schoolmaster, his black eyes glistening, and stretching forth his hand to the bottle, would ask in a hoarse bass voice—
"May I?"