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"Stay a little, we will have some tea; then you shall go." Finks obediently puts down his hat on the table and remains to drink tea. Over their tea Lyashkevsky maintains that the natives are hopelessly ruined, that there is only one thing to do, to take them all indiscriminately and send them under strict escort to hard labour.
BETWEEN nine and ten in the morning. Ivan Lyashkevsky, a lieutenant of Polish origin, who has at some time or other been wounded in the head, and now lives on his pension in a town in one of the southern provinces, is sitting in his lodgings at the open window talking to Franz Stepanitch Finks, the town architect, who has come in to see him for a minute.
He is struggling with drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him as dejectedly as though he were every minute expecting his end. His helpless air drives Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes his head out of the window and shouts at him, spluttering: "Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling.
They eat with wooden spoons, keep brushing away the flies, and go on talking. "The devil, it is beyond everything," cries Lyashkevsky, revolted. "I am very glad I have not a gun or a revolver or I should have a shot at those cattle. I have four knaves fourteen. . . . Your point. . . . It really gives me a twitching in my legs. I can't see those ruffians without being upset."
"You must not be too severe in your judgments, honoured friend," sighs Finks, mopping his big bald head with his handkerchief. "Put yourself in their place: business is slack now, there's unemployment all round, a bad harvest, stagnation in trade." "Good gracious, how you talk!" cries Lyashkevsky in indignation, angrily wrapping his dressing gown round him.
"Extraordinary people, I tell you," grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking angrily at the native, "here he has sat down on the bench, and so he will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers!
Staring wrathfully at the blue trousers, Lyashkevsky is gradually roused to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth.
The native looks indifferently at Lyashkevsky, tries to say something but cannot; sloth and the sultry heat have paralysed his conversational faculties. . . . Yawning lazily, he makes the sign of the cross over his mouth, and turns his eyes up towards the sky where pigeons fly, bathing in the hot air.
"She is all right, thank you." "Ah. . . . Well, run along." After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is horrified. "Holy Saints, why it's three o'clock already. How I have been staying on. Good-bye, I must run. . . ." "Have dinner with me, and then go," says Lyashkevsky. "You have plenty of time."
While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles: "Race of curs! I wonder you don't choke with laziness. No work, no intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . . disgusting. Tfoo!" At six o'clock Finks wakes up. "It's too late to go to the high school now," he says, stretching.
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