I must admit I didn’t mean to tell you all this about my friend, but it’s too late to take it back now. I’ve begun the story and I shall go on to the end. A song’s not a song, they say, if a word is missing. And after all, if the miller doesn’t hide anything, why should I?
You see, the state of affairs was this. All old Yankel had ever wanted had been human money. If he heard with one corner of his ear that some one had a rouble or two loose in his pocket his heart would give him a little prod and he would immediately think of some way in which he could pull up that rouble and put it to work for him, as one might pull a fish out of somebody else’s pond. If he succeeded, he and his Sarah would rejoice over their good fortune.
But that wasn’t enough for the miller. Yankel had always grovelled before every one, but the miller held his head as high as a turkey cock. Yankel had always slipped up to the back door of the District policeman’s house and stood timidly on the threshold, but the miller swaggered all over the front steps as if he were at home there. Yankel never took it hard if he got his ears boxed by some drunken fellow. He howled a bit and then stopped, perhaps squeezing a few extra copecks out of his tormentor one day or another to make up for it. But if the miller ever got hold of a peasant’s top-knot it would probably stay in his hands, and his eyes would flash like the sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. With the miller it was: pay up both money and respect! And he got them both, there’s no use denying it. The people bowed low before their icons, but they bowed lower before my friend.
And yet he never could get enough. He went about as surly and angry as if a puppy were worrying his heart, thinking to himself all the time:
“Everything is wrong in this world, everything is wrong! Somehow money doesn’t make a man as happy as it ought to.”
Kharko once asked him:
“Why do you go about looking as cross as if some one had thrown a bucket of slops over you, master? What does my master want?”
“Perhaps if I got married I should be happier.”
“Then go ahead and get married.”
“That’s just the trouble. How can I get married when the thing’s impossible no matter how I tackle it? I’ll tell you the truth: I fell in love with Galya, the widow’s daughter, before I ever came to be a miller and while I was still a workman at the mill. If my uncle hadn’t got drowned I should be married to her to-day. But now you see yourself that she is below me.”