"In a printing works again," said Pavel, gloomily.
"Hard work?"
"Oh, no; more play than work."
Ilya felt a vague pleasure to see Pashka, once so gay and assertive, now sad and careworn. He wanted to find out what had changed his friend, and, filling Pashka's glass, began to question him.
"Well, and how does the poetry get on?"
"I let it alone now. But I made a lot of poems a while ago. I showed them to the doctor, he praised them. He got one of them printed in a paper. I got thirty-nine kopecks for it."
"Oho!" cried Ilya. "That's something like! What sort of verses were they? Let's hear them!"
Ilya's eager curiosity and a couple of glasses of beer brought Gratschev into the right mood. His eyes shone and his yellow cheeks reddened. "What shall I say to you?" he said, rubbing his forehead. "I've forgotten it all; by God, I've forgotten it. Wait, perhaps something'll come back to me. I've always a head full of this sort of stuff, like a swarm of bees inside, humming. Often when I sit down to compose, I'm in a fever, something boils away in my soul and tears come into my eyes."
"I say! How does that happen?" asked Ilya, astonished and suspicious.
"Oh! something burns and blazes in you, and you want to express it cleverly and you can't find words, and then it makes you rage." He sighed, shook his head, and went on: