"What think you of the place?" Gubin muttered as he peered into the well. "Isn't it a barbarous hole? The right thing would be to pull it down wholesale, and then rebuild it on larger and less restricted lines. Yet these fools merely go tacking new additions on to the old."
For awhile his lips moved as in an incantation. Then he frowned, glanced shrewdly at the structures in question, and continued softly:
"I may say in passing that the place is MINE."
"YOURS?"
"Yes, mine. At all events, so it used to be."
And he pulled a grimace as though he had got the toothache before adding with an air of command:
"Come! I will pump out the water, and YOU shall carry it to the entrance-steps and fill the water-butts. Here is a pail, and here a ladder."
Whereafter, with a considerable display of strength, he set about his portion of the task, whilst I myself took pail in hand and advanced towards the steps to find that the water-butts were so rotten that, instead of retaining the water, they let it leak out into the courtyard. Gubin said with an oath:
"Fine masters these—masters who grudge one a groat, and squander a rouble! What if a fire WERE to break out? Oh, the blockheads!"
Presently, the proprietors in person issued into the courtyard—the stout, bald Peter Birkin, a man whose face was flushed even to the whites of his shifty eyes, and, close behind him, eke his shadow, Jonah Birkin—a person of sandy, sullen mien, and overhanging brows, and dull, heavy eyes.