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"Humph!" muttered Trofimytsch, who still did not understand, but continued to gaze at me attentively as if I were his superior officer. "So that's the way the matter stands? Well, then, take it. Be still, Uliana!" he screamed angrily at his wife, who opened her mouth as if she were about to speak.
"There is the watch," he continued, opening a drawer: "if it's yours, be kind enough to take it, but why should I take the ruble?" "Take the ruble, Trofimytsch, you fool!" sobbed his wife. "Have you gone crazy, old man? Not a single farthing have we left in our pockets if we were to turn them inside out, and here you are putting on airs! They've cut off your pigtail, but you're an old woman still.
Trofimytsch uttered these incoherent exclamations in falsetto: he had apparently understood nothing. "If you will give me back the watch," I explained I did not venture to say "thou" to him, although he was but a common soldier "I'll willingly give you a ruble for it. I don't think it's worth more."
I was only a few steps from David when he sprang from the railing, but I can't remember whether I cried out. I don't think I was even frightened: it was as if I had been struck by lightning. I lost all consciousness: my hands and feet were powerless. People ran and pushed by me: some of them it seemed as if I knew. Suddenly Trofimytsch appeared.
The boy and I went together to his house. It was merely a rickety hut built in the back yard of a factory that had been burned down and never built up again. We found Trofimytsch and his wife at home. The discharged sergeant was a tall old man, straight and strong, with grayish-yellow whiskers, unshaven chin, a network of wrinkles on his forehead and cheeks.
How can you act so? Take the money! Would you give the watch away?" "Be still, you chatterbox!" repeated Trofimytsch. "When did one ever see such a sight? A woman reasoning! ha! Her husband is the head, and she disputes! Petka, don't mutter, or I'll kill you. There's the watch." Trofimytsch held out the watch toward me, but would not let go of it.
"But I haven't got your watch," answered the boy with a tearful voice. "My father saw me have it and took it away from me: he did, and he wanted to whip me too. He said I must have stolen it somewhere. He said, 'Who would be such a fool as to give you a watch?" "And who is your father?" "My father? Trofimytsch." "But what is he? what's his business?"
I was fully determined not again to lay myself open to the charge of having no character, for this watch, this hateful present of my hateful godfather, had become so detestable that I could not understand how I could ever have been sorry to lose it, how I could have brought myself to begging it from a man like Trofimytsch, and give him the right to believe that he had behaved generously to me in regard to it.
His wife looked older than he: her eyes shone dimly from the midst of a somewhat swollen face, into which they seemed to have been driven. Both wore dirty rags for clothes. I explained to Trofimytsch what I wanted and why I had come. He listened in silence, without even winking or turning his dull, attentive, soldierlike glance away from me.
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