‘‘Ivan Ivanych and Father Khristofor have come!’’ Moisei Moiseich said to him in such a tone as if he was afraid his brother might not believe him. ‘‘Oi, weh, amazing business, such good people up and came! Well, take the things, Solomon. Come in, dear guests!’’
A little later Kuzmichov, Father Khristofor, and Egorushka were sitting in a big, gloomy, and empty room at an old oak table. This table was almost solitary, because apart from it, a wide sofa covered with torn oilcloth, and three chairs, there was no other furniture in the room. And not everyone would have ventured to call those chairs chairs. They were some pitiful semblance of furniture, with oilcloth that had outlived its time, and a highly unnatural bend to their backs, which gave them a great likeness to a child’s sled. It was hard to see what comfort the unknown cabinetmaker had in mind in bending the backs so mercilessly, and one would rather have thought that it was the fault not of the cabinetmaker but of some itinerant strongman who, wishing to boast of his strength, had bent the chairs’ backs, then tried to set them straight and bent them still more. The room looked gloomy. The walls were gray, the ceiling and cornices were covered with soot, the floor was cracked and had holes of unknown origin gaping in it (one might have thought the same strongman had broken through it with his heel), and it seemed that if a dozen lamps were hung up in the room, it would not stop being dark. There was nothing resembling decoration either on the walls or on the windows. However, on one wall, in a gray wooden frame, hung a list of rules of some sort with a double-headed eagle, and on another, in the same sort of frame, some lithograph with the caption: ‘‘Men’s Indifference.’’ What it was that men were indifferent to was impossible to tell, because the lithograph was badly faded with time and generously flyblown. The room smelled of something musty and sour.
Having led the guests into the room, Moisei Moiseich went on writhing, clasping his hands, squirming, and making joyful exclamations—he considered it necessary to perform all this in order to appear extremely polite and amiable.
‘‘When did our carts pass by here?’’ Kuzmichov asked him.
‘‘One party passed this morning, and another, Ivan Ivanych, rested here at dinnertime and left before evening.’’
‘‘Ah ... Did Varlamov pass this way or not?’’
‘‘No, Ivan Ivanych. Yesterday morning his agent, Grigory Egorych, passed by and said he must now be at the Molokan’s8 farmstead.’’
‘‘Excellent. That means we’ll catch up with the train now, and then go to the Molokan’s.’’
‘‘God help you, Ivan Ivanych!’’ Moisei Moiseich clasped his hands, horrified. ‘‘Where are you going to go with night falling? Have a nice little bite of supper, spend the night, and tomorrow morning, with God’s help, you can go and catch up with anybody you want!’’
‘‘No time, no time ... Sorry, Moisei Moiseich, some other occasion, but now is not the time. We’ll stay for a quarter of an hour and then go, and we can spend the night at the Molokan’s.’’
‘‘A quarter of an hour!’’ shrieked Moisei Moiseich. ‘‘You have no fear of God, Ivan Ivanych! You’ll force me to hide your hats and lock the door! At least have a bite to eat and some tea!’’
‘‘We have no time for any teas and sugars,’’ said Kuzmichov.
Moisei Moiseich inclined his head, bent his knees, and held his palms up in front of him as if defending himself from blows, and with a painfully sweet smile began to implore:
‘‘Ivan Ivanych! Father Khristofor! Be so kind, have some tea with me! Am I such a bad man that you can’t even have tea with me? Ivan Ivanych!’’
‘‘Why, we might just have a drop of tea,’’ Father Khristofor sighed sympathetically. ‘‘It won’t keep us long.’’
‘‘Well, all right!’’ Kuzmichov agreed.
Moisei Moiseich roused himself, gasped joyfully, and, squirming as if he had just jumped out of cold water into the warmth, ran to the door and shouted in a wild, strangled voice, the same with which he had called Solomon earlier:
‘‘Rosa! Rosa! Bring the samovar!’’
A minute later, the door opened and Solomon came into the room with a big tray in his hands. Setting the tray on the table, he looked mockingly somewhere to the side and smiled strangely, as before. Now, in the light of the lamp, it was possible to examine his smile; it was very complex and expressed many feelings, but one thing was predominant in it—an obvious contempt. It was as if he was thinking of something funny and stupid, could not stand someone and was contemptuous of him, was glad of something and waiting for the appropriate moment to sting someone with his mockery and roll with laughter. His long nose, fat lips, and sly, protruding eyes seemed to be straining with the wish to burst out laughing. Looking at his face, Kuzmichov smiled mockingly and asked:
‘‘Solomon, why didn’t you come to the fair this summer in N. to play the Yid for us?’’
Two years ago, as Egorushka also remembered perfectly well, in one of the show booths at the fair in N., Solomon had narrated some scenes from Jewish everyday life and had been a great success. The reminder of it did not make any impression on Solomon. He went out without answering and a little later came back with the samovar.
After doing what was to be done at the table, he went to one side and, crossing his arms on his chest, thrusting one foot forward, fixed his mocking eyes on Father Khristofor. There was something defiant, haughty, and contemptuous in his pose, and at the same time something pathetic and comical in the highest degree, because the more imposing it became, the more conspicuous were his short trousers, his skimpy jacket, his caricature of a nose, and his whole plucked-bird-like little figure.
Moisei Moiseich brought a stool from another room and sat down at some distance from the table.
‘‘Good appetite! Tea and sugar!’’ he began to entertain his guests. ‘‘Good health to you. Such rare guests, rare guests, and Father Khristofor I haven’t seen for five years already. And does nobody want to tell me whose nice little boy this is?’’ he asked, looking affectionately at Egorushka.
‘‘He’s the son of my sister Olga Ivanovna,’’ answered Kuzmichov.
‘‘And where is he going?’’
‘‘To study. We’re taking him to school.’’
Moisei Moiseich, for the sake of politeness, gave his face a look of astonishment and wagged his head meaningfully.
‘‘Oh, this is good!’’ he said, shaking his finger at the samovar. ‘‘This is good! You’ll come out of school such a gentleman we’ll all take our hats off. You’ll be intelligent, rich, ambitious, and your mama will rejoice. Oh, this is good!’’
He paused for a while, stroked his knees, and began to speak in a respectfully jocular tone:
‘‘You forgive me now, Father Khristofor, but I’m going to write a letter to the bishop that you’re cutting into the merchants’ bread. I’ll take official paper and write that it means Father Khristofor hasn’t got enough money, if he’s gone into trade and started selling wool.’’
‘‘Yes, I’ve taken a notion in my old age . . .’’ Father Khristofor said and laughed. ‘‘I’ve gone over from the priests to the merchants, old boy. Instead of staying home and praying to God, I gallop around like pharaoh in his chariot ... Vanity!’’
‘‘But you’ll get a lot of moneys!’’
‘‘Oh, yes! A fig9 under my nose, not moneys! The goods aren’t mine, they’re my son-in-law Mikhailo’s!’’
‘‘Why didn’t he go himself ?’’
‘‘Because ... The mother’s milk still hasn’t dried on his lips. Buy the wool he did, but sell it—no, he’s not clever enough, he’s still young. He spent all his money, meaning to gain by it and kick up the dust, but he tried here and there, and nobody would even give him what he paid. So the lad knocked about for a year, then came to me and— ‘Papa, do me a favor, sell the wool! I don’t understand anything about these things!’ There you have it. So now I’m papa, but before, he could do without papa. When he bought the wool, he didn’t ask, but now he’s in a pinch, and so I’m papa. And what about papa? If it weren’t for Ivan Ivanych, papa wouldn’t be able to do a thing. What a bother they are!’’