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The frost crackled, his grandfather crackled, and as they both did, Vanka did the same. Then before cutting down the Christmas tree his grandfather smoked his pipe, took a long pinch of snuff, and made fun of poor frozen little Vanka... The young fir trees, wrapt in hoar-frost, stood motionless, waiting for which of them would die.
Poor, hard-worked Vanka slumbers all night on his box, with one eye open, or falls prone in death-like exhaustion over the dashboard upon his sleeping horse, while his cap lies on the snow, and his shaggy head is bared to the bitter blasts.
Alexey has been drinking, Vanka is laughing, Akulka's face he could not see, she had muffled herself up. "You never know, he'll get the children frozen..." thought Gusev. "Lord send them sense and judgment that they may honour their father and mother and not be wiser than their parents." "They want re-soleing," a delirious sailor says in a bass voice. "Yes, yes!"
Vanka ran to the nearest post-box, and thrust the precious letter in the slit. . . . An hour later, lulled by sweet hopes, he was sound asleep. . . . He dreamed of the stove. On the stove was sitting his grandfather, swinging his bare legs, and reading the letter to the cooks. . . . By the stove was Eel, wagging his tail.
But we were cordially received, assured that our visit was well timed and that there were no guests, and were installed in the room of the count's eldest son, who was at his business in St. Petersburg. Then I paid and dismissed the beaming Vanka, whose name chanced to be Alexei, adding liberal "tea-money" for his charming manners and conversation.
When Vanka's mother Pelageya was alive, and a servant in the big house, Olga Ignatyevna used to give him goodies, and having nothing better to do, taught him to read and write, to count up to a hundred, and even to dance a quadrille. When Pelageya died, Vanka had been transferred to the servants' kitchen to be with his grandfather, and from the kitchen to the shoemaker's in Moscow.
To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the paper with the renunciation from the table and, on his return, locked it in his safe. Nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprentice to the shoemaker Aliakhin for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.
But Vanka is usually good-natured, patient, and quite unconscious of his shabbiness, at least in the light of a grievance or as affecting his dignity. It was one of these shabby, but democratic and self-possessed fellows who furnished us with a fine illustration of the peasant qualities.
It’s like a drunken man in the street bawling how ‘Vanka went to Petersburg,’ and I would give a quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds of joy. You don’t know me! Oh, how stupid all this business is! Come, take me instead of him! I didn’t come for nothing.... Why, why is everything so stupid?...” And he began slowly, and as it were reflectively, looking round him again.
'Why, I said nothing Anna Vassilyevna was beginning. 'No, you said, ah! However that may be, I have thought it well to acquaint you with my way of thinking; and I venture to think I venture to hope Mr. Kurnatovsky will be received a bras ouverts. He is no Montenegrin vagrant. 'Of course; I need only call Vanka the cook and order a few extra dishes.
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