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It was just what Golushkin wanted; this uproar seemed to him the real thing. He was triumphant. "Look at us! out of the way or I'll knock you on the head! Kapiton Golushkin is coming!" At last the clerk Vasia became so tipsy that he began to giggle and talk to his plate. All at once he jumped up shouting wildly, "What sort of devil is this PROgymnasium?"
"Vasia, my son, who has taken his musical degree, will stay up all night to look at this sight," said my hostess. "It moves something in his soul." It moved something in mine, and yet seemed strangely alien to the tale I was hearing. That moon had flung its mystery over an Eastern world, and it seemed an irrelevance beside the fortunes of a modern watering-place.
His head was aching from the wine he had drunk, there were ringing noises in his ears, and stars jumping about in front of his eyes, even though he shut them. Golushkin, Vasia the clerk, Fomishka and Fimishka, were dancing about before him, with Mariana's form in the distance, as if distrustful and afraid to come near.
Then he introduced them to the promised proselyte, who turned out to be no other than the sleek consumptive individual with the long neck whom they had seen in the morning, Vasia, Golushkin's clerk. "He hasn't much to say," Golushkin declared, "but is devoted heart and soul to our cause."
To this Vasia bowed, blushed, blinked his eyes, and grinned in such a manner that it was impossible to say whether he was merely a vulgar fool or an out-and-out knave and blackguard. "Well, gentlemen, let us go to dinner," Golushkin exclaimed. They partook of various kinds of salt fish to give them an appetite and sat down to the table.
The proselyte Vasia continued silent, and though he sat on the very edge of his chair and conducted himself generally with a servility quite out of keeping with the convictions to which, according to his master, he was devoted body and soul, yet gulped down the wine with an amazing greediness. The others made up for his silence, however, that is, Golushkin and Paklin, especially Paklin.
Golushkin sprang up too, and throwing back his hot, flushed face, on which an expression of vulgar self-satisfaction was curiously mingled with a feeling of terror, a secret misgiving, he bawled out, "I'll sacrifice another thousand! Get it for me, Vasia!" To which Vasia replied, "All right!" Sacrifice! What pollution of such a holy word! Sacrifice!
"We must do everything with one blow! With one blow, I say!" "What is the use of extreme measures? It's like jumping out of the window." "And I'll jump too, if necessary!" Golushkin shouted. "I'll jump! and so will Vasia! I've only to tell him and he'll jump! eh, Vasia? You'll jump, eh?" The clerk finished his glass of champagne. "Where you go, Kapiton Andraitch, there I follow.
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