Another minute of talk and the long enmity would have been on the point of dying out. Ivan Nikiforovich was already going to his pocket to produce his snuff botde and say, "Help yourself."
"Isn't it damage," Ivan Ivanovich replied, without raising his eyes, "if you, my dear sir, insult my rank and family name with a word that it is even indecent to utter here?"
"Allow me to tell you as a friend, Ivan Ivanovich" (with that, Ivan Nikiforovich touched Ivan Ivanovich's button with his finger, signifying his entire good will), "that you got offended over devil knows what-over my calling you a goose…"
Ivan Nikiforovich caught himself committing the carelessness of uttering this word; but it was already too late: the word had been uttered.
Everything went to the devil!
If the uttering of this word without any witnesses had put Ivan Ivanovich beside himself and in such a rage as God keep us from ever seeing in any man-what now, only consider, gentle readers, what now, when this deadly word was uttered in a gathering that included many ladies, before whom Ivan Ivanovich liked to be especially proper? If Ivan Nikiforovich had acted differently, if he had said bird instead of goose, things still might have been put right.
But-it was all over!
He cast a glance at Ivan Nikiforovich-and what a glance! If this glance had been endowed with executive power, it would have turned Ivan Nikiforovich to dust. The guests understood this glance and hastened to separate them. And this man, the epitome of mildness, who never passed over a beggar woman without questioning her, rushed out in a terrible fury. Such violent storms the passions can produce!
For a whole month nothing was heard of Ivan Ivanovich. He locked himself up in his house. The secret trunk was unlocked, and from the trunk were taken-what? silver roubles! old ones, his ancestral silver roubles! And these roubles passed into the soiled hands of ink-slingers. The case was transferred to the state court. And when Ivan Ivanovich received the joyful news that it was to be decided the next day, only then did he look outside and venture to leave his house. Alas! since then, the court has informed him daily for the past ten years that the case would be concluded the next day!
Some five years ago I passed through the town of Mirgorod. I was traveling in bad weather. It was autumn, with its damp, melancholy days, its mud and mists. Some sort of unnatural green-the creation of dull, ceaseless rains-covered the fields and meadows with a thin net, which was as becoming as pranks to an old man or roses to an old woman. Weather affected me strongly then-I was dull when it was dull. But, despite that, as I approached Mirgorod, I felt my heart beating fast. God, so many memories! I hadn't seen Mirgorod for twelve years. Here, in touching friendship, there had then lived two singular men, two singular friends. And how many notable people had died! The judge Demyan Demyanovich was dead by then; Ivan Ivanovich, the one with the blind eye, had also bid the world farewell. I drove into the main street; poles with bunches of straw tied to their tops stood everywhere: some new project was under way! Several cottages had been demolished. The remnants of palings and wattle fences stuck up dejectedly.
It was then a feast day. I ordered my bast-covered kibitka to stop in front of the church and went in so quietly that no one turned around. True, there was no one to do so. The church was empty. Almost no people. One could see that even the most pious were afraid of the mud. The candles in that bleak, or, better to say, sickly daylight, were somehow strangely unpleasant; the dark vestibule was melancholy; the oblong windows with round glass poured down rainy tears. I stepped into the vestibule and turned to one respectable, gray-haired old man:
"If I may ask, is Ivan Nikiforovich still living?"
Just then the lamp flashed more brightly before the icon, and the light fell directly on the face of my neighbor. How surprised I was when, peering at him, I saw familiar features! It was Ivan Nikiforovich himself! But how changed he was!
"Are you well, Ivan Nikiforovich? You've aged so!"
"Yes, I've aged. I came from Poltava today," replied Ivan Niki-forovich.
"You don't say! You went to Poltava in such bad weather?"
"No help for it! The lawsuit…"
At that, I, too, sighed involuntarily. Ivan Nikiforovich noticed this sigh and said:
"Don't worry, I have definite information that the case will be decided in my favor next week."
I shrugged and went to find out something about Ivan Ivano-vich.
"Ivan Ivanovich is here," someone told me, "he's in the choir."
Then I saw a skinny figure. Was this Ivan Ivanovich? His face was covered with wrinkles; his hair was completely white; but the bekesha was the same. After the preliminary greetings, Ivan Ivanovich turned to me with that joyful smile which was always so becoming to his funnel-like face, and said:
"Shall I inform you of some pleasant news?"
"What news?" I said.
"My case will be decided tomorrow without fail. The court says it's certain."
I sighed still more deeply and hastened to take my leave, because I was traveling on important business, and got into my kibitka. The skinny horses, known in Mirgorod as the posthaste kind, drew away, producing with their hooves, as they sank into the gray mass of mud, a sound unpleasant to the ear. Rain poured down in streams on the Jew who sat on the box covering himself with a bast mat. Dampness penetrated me thoroughly. The melancholy town gate, with a sentry box in which an invalid sat mending his gray armor, slowly passed by. Again the same fields, in places turned up and black, in others showing green, the wet jackdaws and crows, the monotonous rain, the sky tearful and without a bright spot.-It's dull in this world, gentlemen!
PETERSBURG TALES
Nevsky Prospect
Th ere is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least not in Petersburg; for there it is everything. What does this street- the beauty of our capital-not shine with! I know that not one of its pale and clerical inhabitants would trade Nevsky Prospect for anything in the world. Not only the one who is twenty-five years old, has an excellent mustache and a frock coat of an amazing cut, but even the one who has white hair sprouting on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish, he, too, is enchanted with Nevsky Prospect. And the ladies! Oh, the ladies find Nevsky Prospect still more pleasing. And who does not find it pleasing? The moment you enter Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but festivity. Though you may have some sort of necessary, indispensable business, once you enter it you are sure to forget all business. Here is the only place where people do not go out of necessity, where they are not driven by the need and mercantile interest that envelop the whole of Petersburg. A man met on Nevsky Prospect seems less of an egoist than on Morskaya, Gorokhovaya, Liteiny, Meshchanskaya, and other streets, where greed, self-interest, and necessity show on those walking or flying by in carriages and droshkies. Nevsky Prospect is the universal communication of Petersburg. Here the inhabitant of the Petersburg or Vyborg side who has not visited his friend in Peski or the Moscow Gate 1 for several years can be absolutely certain of meeting him. No directory or inquiry office will provide such reliable information as Nevsky Prospect. All-powerful Nevsky Prospect! The only entertainment for a poor man at the Petersburg feast! How clean-swept are its sidewalks, and, God, how many feet have left their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boot of the retired soldier, under the weight of which the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature shoe, light as smoke, of a young lady, who turns her head to the glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and the clanking sword of a hope-filled sub-lieutenant that leaves a sharp scratch on it-everything wreaks upon it the power of strength or the power of weakness. What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single day and night!