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She had worked at this for three years, but any one who had not seen her at this occupation would have said that here was a strong organism which was beginning to break down. My friend, a kind and liberal man, hires these women to fill his cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks the thousand. He has money, and he spends it for work. What harm is there in that? My friend rises at twelve o'clock.
One was Piotr, a soldier from Kaluga; the other Semyon, a peasant from Vladimir. They possessed nothing except the wages of their body and hands. And with these hands they earned, by dint of very hard labor, from forty to forty-five kopeks a day, out of which each of them was laying by savings, the Kaluga man for a fur coat, the Vladimir man in order to get enough to return to his village.
In that night-lodging house, on the lower floor, in No. 32, in which my friend had spent the night, among the various, ever-changing lodgers, men and women, who came together there for five kopeks, there was a laundress, a woman thirty years of age, light-haired, peaceable and pretty, but sickly. The mistress of the quarters had a boatman lover.
If a man asks you for a light, you must strike a match for him, if you have one. If a man asks for three or for twenty kopeks, or even for several rubles, you must give them if you have them. This was the case in question: I have already mentioned the two peasants with whom I was in the habit of sawing wood three yeans ago.
A small fee of ten kopeks, which I placed in his hand, aided him in grasping at the mysteries of the case, and he unlocked the door and let me out, merely shaking his head gravely, as if he divined my purpose, but did not altogether approve of it in one of my age and sedate appearance. In that, however, he was mistaken: I had no disposition to form any tender alliances in Moscow.
And you must know that when a man complains about everything, and cries out and groans he is not worth more than two kopeks, he is not worthy of pity, and will be of no use to you if you do help him." Such the frank and militant commercialism, bellowed out between glasses of strong liquor. Now comes Mayakin, speaking softly and without satire: "Eh, my boy, what is a beggar?
Semyon, the Vladimir peasant, who had a wife and two children in Moscow, halted also, pulled round the skirt of his kaftan, and got out his purse, and from this slender purse he extracted, after some fumbling, three kopeks, handed it to the old man, and asked for two kopeks in change. The old man exhibited in his hand two three-kopek pieces and one kopek.
Tchartkoff experienced an unpleasant feeling, inexplicable even to himself, and placed the portrait on the floor. "Well, will you take the portrait?" said the dealer. "How much is it?" said the painter. "Why chaffer over it? give me seventy-five kopeks." "No." "Well, how much will you give?" "Twenty kopeks," said the painter, preparing to go. "What a price!
I rushed back, I found that box I have it still. Opening it, there, where I had left ingots, sacks of bright tomauns, kopeks and rupees, strings of diamonds as big as ducks' eggs, rubies as red as the lips of my Belinda, countless strings of pearls, amethysts, emeralds, piles upon piles of bank-notes I found a piece of paper! with a few lines in the Sanscrit language, which are thus, word for word, translated: "EPIGRAM.
Petersburg necessarily imperfect and superficial, but I trust not altogether destitute of amusing features. On a pleasant morning in August, I called for my "rechnung" at the German gasthaus on the Wasseli-Ostrow. The bill was complicated in proportion to its length. There was an extra charge of fifteen kopeks a day for the room over and above the amount originally specified.
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