"'I've two children,' he said to me, 'one five years old, one three,'" explained Perfishka, "'and I shall have to get a nurse. But a nurse,' he says, 'is always a stranger. She'll rob me, and that sort of thing. Speak to your daughter, if she'll marry me!' Well, so I spoke to her, and Matiza spoke to her, and since Masha is a reasonable child, she understood it all, and what else was she to do? 'All right,' she says, 'I'll do it!' And so she went to him. It was all settled in three days. We two—I and Matiza—got three roubles, so yesterday we got drunk. Heavens! how Matiza drinks, like a horse!"
Ilya listened in silence. He understood that Masha had done better for herself than would have been generally expected. But all the same, his heart ached for the girl. He had seen little of her of late, and hardly thought of her, but now, without her, the house felt dirtier and more hateful than ever.
The yellow, bloated face of the cobbler grinned down at Ilya from the stove, and his voice creaked like a broken branch in the autumn wind. Lunev looked at him disgustedly.
"Ehrenov made one condition: I'm never to show up at his house! 'You can come to the shop,' he says. 'I'll give you schnapps and odds and ends, but to the house—never! It's shut to you, like Paradise.' Now then, Ilya Jakovlevitch, couldn't you hunt up a five-kopeck piece, to get a drink. Please give me five kopecks."
"You shall have 'em in a minute," said Ilya. "What are you going to do now?"
The cobbler spat on the ground, and replied: "I'll just become an out-and-out drunkard. Till Masha was provided for, I used to worry. I worked sometimes. I had a sort of conscience with her. But now I know she's enough to eat and shoes and clothes, and is shut up in a box, so to speak, I can devote myself, free and unhindered, to the drinking profession."
"Can't you really give up brandy?"
"Never!" answered the cobbler, and shook his shaggy head in a vigorous negative. "Why should I?"
"Is there nothing else in life you want?"
"Give me five kopecks. I don't want anything else."