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How can I serve you?" and his face unbent with a welcoming smile. "A little food, brother, if you will," Paul replied, "for we have come many leagues." The moujik made sign for Paul and his men to enter, and soon at a rude table they were eating black bread and drinking kvass. Fresh from the cafés of Paris, Paul delighted in this primitive simplicity.
We needn't talk of your mother; she has never touched a drop of anything since she was born, except 'kvass. So whose fault is it? Whose but the confounded 'moussié; he taught you fine things, that son of a dog, and well worth the trouble of taking a Pagan for your servant, as if our master had not had enough servants of his own!" I was ashamed. I turned round and said to him
"What can I do, madam?" she said. "You say that I am a low woman and that I have ruined Nikolay Petrovitch, and I assure you . . . before God Almighty, I have had nothing from him whatever. . . . There is only one girl in our chorus who has a rich admirer; all the rest of us live from hand to mouth on bread and kvass.
A cock crowed in the street, hoarsely protracting its final note, a cart rattled past, a gate creaked in the village. "What?" suddenly screeched a woman's voice. "Ah, young lady!" said Anton to a little girl of two years old whom he was carrying in his arms. "Bring the kvass here," continued the same woman's voice. Then a death-like silence suddenly ensued.
This new acquaintance, whom we will call Emilie, led him through a dark, damp little lobby into a fairly large but low-pitched and untidy room with a huge cupboard against the further wall and a sofa covered with American leather; above the doors and between the windows hung three portraits in oils with the paint peeling off, two representing bishops in clerical caps and one a Turk in a turban; cardboard boxes were lying about in the corners; there were chairs of different sorts and a crooked legged card table on which a man's cap was lying beside an unfinished glass of kvass.
But no drink is so ancient as kvass, which, according to the chronicle of Nestor, was in use among the Sclavonians in the first century of our era. Among the laws of Yaroslaff there is an old edict determining the quantity of malt to be furnished for making kvass to workmen engaged in building a town.
They had to run, to carry, to talk incessantly, but more than that, they had to be polite, too, to be tactful, to try to arrange that the Greeks from Mariupol, accustomed to live more comfortably than the Little Russians, should be put with other Greeks, that some shopkeeper from Bahmut or Lisitchansk, dressed like a lady, should not be offended by being put with peasants There were continual cries of: "Father, kindly give us some kvass!
In his wretched gown, in his absurd night-cap, and in slippers, sometimes with bare legs and even without trousers, he walks about the streets, stopping at the gates and little shops, and begging for a copper. In one place they will give him some kvass, in another some bread, in another a copper, so that he generally goes back to the ward feeling rich and well fed.
When old Natalia Petrovna, who lives on the floor below with great-aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna, pours herself out a glass of kvass, he picks it up and drinks it right off, then says, "Oh, I'm so sorry, Natalia Petrovna; I made a mistake!" We all laugh delightedly, and it seems odd that papa is not in the least afraid of Natalia Petrovna.
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