Then also would draw near the mechanic Pavel Sontseff, a consumptive of about thirty. The ribs on his left side had been broken in a street row; and his face, yellow and sharp, was constantly twisted into a cunning, wicked smile. His thin lips showed two rows of black, decayed teeth, and the rags on his thin shoulders seemed to be hanging on a peg. They used to call him "Scraps"; he earned his living by selling brooms of his own making, and brushes made of a certain kind of grass, which were very useful for brushing clothes.
Besides these, there was a tall, bony, one-eyed man with uncertain antecedents; he had a scared expression in his large, round, silent, and timid eyes. He had been three times condemned for thefts, and had suffered imprisonment for them. His name was Kisselnikoff, but he was nicknamed "Tarass and a half" because he was just half the size again of his inseparable friend Tarass, a former church deacon, but degraded now for drunkenness and dissipation. The deacon was a short, robust little man with a broad chest and a round, matted head of hair; he was famous for his dancing, but more so for his swearing; both he and "Tarass and a half" chose as their special work wood-sawing on the river-bank, and in their leisure hours the deacon would tell long stories "of his own composition," as he expressed it, to his friend or to anyone who cared to hear them. Whilst listening to these stories, the heroes of which were always saints, kings, clergy, and generals, even the habitués of the doss-house used to spit the taste of them out of their mouths, and opened wide eyes of astonishment at the wonderful imagination of the deacon, who would relate these shameless, obscene, fantastic adventures with great coolness, and with eyes closed in rapture. The imagination of this man was powerful and inexhaustible; he could invent and talk the whole day long, and never repeated himself. In him the world lost perhaps a great poet, and certainly a remarkable story-teller, who could put life and soul even into stones, by his foul but imaginatively powerful thought.
Besides these there was an absurd youth, who was called by Kouvalda "The Meteor." He once came to seek a night's lodging, and to the astonishment of all he never left. At first no one noticed him, for during the day he would go out to earn a livelihood, as did the rest, but in the evening he stuck closely to the friendly doss-house society. One day the captain asked him—
"My lad, what do you do in this world?"
The boy answered shortly and boldly, "I? I'm a tramp."
The captain looked at him critically. The lad had long hair, a broad, foolish face adorned with a snub nose; he wore a blue blouse without a belt, and on his head were the remains of a straw hat. His feet were bare.
"You are a fool!" said Aristide Kouvalda. "What are you doing here? You are of no use to us. Do you drink vodka? No! And can you steal? Not that either? Well, go and learn all that, and make a man of yourself, and then come back."
The lad smiled. "No, I shan't; I'll stay where I am!"
"Why?"
"Because"—