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'Well, Mihal Savelitch, I began, 'have you caught any fish? 'Here, if you will deign to look in the basket: I have caught two perch and five roaches.... Show them, Styopka. Styopushka stretched out the basket to me. 'How are you, Styopka? I asked him. 'Oh oh not not not so badly, your honour, answered Stepan, stammering as though he had a heavy weight on his tongue. 'And is Mitrofan well?
Of course I'm going home. My wife, I suppose, is pretty well starved by now. 'You should then, Styopushka said suddenly. He grew confused, was silent, and began to rummage in the worm-pot. 'And shall you go to the bailiff? continued Tuman, looking with some amazement at Styopka. 'What should I go to him for? I'm in arrears as it is.
He had a small face, yellowish eyes, hair coming down to his eyebrows, a sharp nose, large transparent ears, like a bat's, and a beard that looked as if it were a fortnight's growth, and never grew more nor less. This, then, was Styopushka, whom I met on the bank of the Ista in company with another old man. I went up to him, wished him good-day, and sat down beside him.
Except Mitrofan and his family, and the old deaf churchwarden Gerasim, kept out of charity in a little room at the one-eyed soldier's widow's, not one man among the house-serfs had remained at Shumihino; for Styopushka, whom I intend to introduce to the reader, could not be classified under the special order of house-serfs, and hardly under the genus 'man' at all.
Every man has some kind of position in society, and at least some ties of some sort; every house-serf receives, if not wages, at least some so-called 'ration. Styopushka had absolutely no means of subsistence of any kind; had no relationship to anyone; no one knew of his existence.
After the conflagration, this forsaken creature sought a refuge at the gardener Mitrofan's. The gardener left him alone; he did not say 'Live with me, but he did not drive him away. And Styopushka did not live at the gardener's; his abode was the garden.
Sometimes Styopushka sits under the hedge and gnaws a radish or sucks a carrot, or shreds up some dirty cabbage-stalks; or he drags a bucket of water along, for some object or other, groaning as he goes; or he lights a fire under a small pot, and throws in some little black scraps which he takes from out of the bosom of his coat; or he is hammering in his little wooden den driving in a nail, putting up a shelf for bread.
It happened to me on two occasions to stay the night at this gardener's, and when I passed by I used to get cucumbers from him, which, for some unknown reason, were even in summer peculiar for their size, their poor, watery flavour, and their thick yellow skin. It was there I first saw Styopushka.
Grandfather Trofimitch, who knew all the pedigrees of all the house-serfs in the direct line to the fourth generation, had once indeed been known to say that he remembered that Styopushka was related to a Turkish woman whom the late master, the brigadier Alexy Romanitch had been pleased to bring home from a campaign in the baggage waggon.
Even on holidays, days of general money-giving and of feasting on buckwheat dumplings and vodka, after the old Russian fashion even on such days Styopushka did not put in an appearance at the trestle-tables nor at the barrels; he did not make his bow nor kiss the master's hand, nor toss off to the master's health and under the master's eye a glass filled by the fat hands of the bailiff.
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