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Updated: May 21, 2025
Podtyagin shrugs his shoulders and slowly walks after the station-master. "There's no pleasing them!" he thinks, bewildered. "It was for his sake I brought the station-master, that he might understand and be pacified, and he . . . swears!" Another station. The train stops ten minutes.
Before the second bell, while Podtyagin is standing at the refreshment bar, drinking seltzer water, two gentlemen go up to him, one in the uniform of an engineer, and the other in a military overcoat. "Look here, ticket-collector!" the engineer begins, addressing Podtyagin. "Your behaviour to that invalid passenger has revolted all who witnessed it.
"Very well. . . . I won't take the ticket . . . as you like . . . . Only, of course, as you know very well, it's my duty to do so. . . . If it were not my duty, then, of course. . . You can ask the station-master . . . ask anyone you like. . . ." Podtyagin shrugs his shoulders and walks away from the invalid.
They don't know that I'm bound in duty . . . if they don't believe it, I can bring the station-master to them." A station. The train stops five minutes. Before the third bell, Podtyagin enters the same second-class carriage. Behind him stalks the station-master in a red cap.
The head ticket-collector touches him on the shoulder and repeats impatiently: "T-t-tickets, p-p-please!" The passenger starts, opens his eyes, and gazes in alarm at Podtyagin. "What? . . . Who? . . . Eh?" "You're asked in plain language: t-t-tickets, p-p-please! If you please!" "My God!" moans the scraggy-looking man, pulling a woebegone face. "Good Heavens!
Sleepy figures, shrouded in the twilight of the railway carriages, start, shake their heads, and produce their tickets. "T-t-t-tickets, please!" Podtyagin addresses a second-class passenger, a lean, scraggy-looking man, wrapped up in a fur coat and a rug and surrounded with pillows. "Tickets, please!" The scraggy-looking man makes no reply. He is buried in sleep.
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