“What?”
“Your sight’s failing, I daresay?”
“Yes, it’s failing. At times I can hear nothing.”
“Then how can you be a watchman, eh?”
“Oh, my elders know about that.”
“Elders!” I thought, and I gazed not without compassion at the poor old man. He fumbled about, pulled out of his bosom a bit of coarse bread, and began sucking it like a child, with difficulty moving his sunken cheeks.
I walked in the direction of the copse, turned to the right, kept on, kept right on as the old man had advised me, and at last got to a large village with a stone church in the new style, i. e., with columns, and a spacious manor-house, also with columns. While still some way off I noticed through the fine network of falling rain a cottage with a deal roof, and two chimneys, higher than the others, in all probability the dwelling of the village elder; and toward it I bent my steps in the hope of finding, in this cottage, a samovár, tea, sugar, and some not absolutely sour cream. Escorted by my half-frozen dog, I went up the steps into the outer room, opened the door, and instead of the usual appurtenances of a cottage, I saw several tables, heaped up with papers, two red cupboards, bespattered inkstands, pewter boxes of blotting sand weighing half a hundred-weight, long penholders, and so on. At one of the tables was sitting a young man of twenty with a swollen, sickly face, diminutive eyes, a greasy-looking forehead, and long, straggling locks of hair. He was dressed, as one would expect, in a gray nankeen coat, shiny with wear at the waist and the collar.
“What do you want?” he asked me, flinging his head up like a horse taken unexpectedly by the nose.
“Does the bailiff live here—or—”
“This is the principal office of the manor,” he interrupted. “I’m the clerk on duty.—Didn’t you see the sign-board? That’s what it was put up for.”