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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Better with cognac," said Foma, shaking the lean, burning hand which was outstretched to him, and staring fixedly into the face of the little man. "Yegorovna!" cried the latter at the door, and turning to Foma, asked: "Don't you recognise me, Foma Ignatyevich?" "I remember something. It seems to me we had met somewhere before." "That meeting lasted for four years, but that was long ago! Yozhov."
He saw that these people who defended him from Yozhov's attacks were now purposely ignoring the feuilleton-writer, and he understood that this would pain Yozhov if he were to notice it. And in order to take his friend away from possible unpleasantness, he nudged him in the side and said, with a kind-hearted laugh: "Well, you grumbler, shall we have a drink? Or is it time to go home?" "Home?
Foma's approbation, his eyes burning with satisfaction, and his excited face gave Yozhov still more inspiration, and he cried and roared ever louder and louder, now falling on the lounge from exhaustion, now jumping up again and rushing toward Foma. "Come, now, read about me!" exclaimed Foma, longing to hear it.
Foma looked at him with a strange, mixed sensation; he pitied Yozhov, and at the same time he was pleased to see him suffering. "I am not alone, he is suffering, too," thought Foma, as Yozhov spoke. And something clashed in Yozhov's throat, like broken glass, and creaked like an unoiled hinge.
They did not seem to notice Gordyeeff, although, when Yozhov introduced Foma to them, they shook hands with him and said that they were glad to see him. He lay down under a hazel-bush, and watched them all, feeling himself a stranger in this company, and noticing that even Yozhov seemed to have got away from him deliberately, and was paying but little attention to him.
"Do you remember, when I was going to school, a Gymnasium student used to come up to us. Yozhov? Such a dark little fellow!" "Mm! Of course, I saw him. I know him. So it's he?" "Yes." "The little mouse! Even at that time one could see already that something wrong would come out of him. Even then he stood in the way of other people. A bold boy he was. I should have looked after him then.
When the teacher, a bald-headed man, whose lower lip hung down, called out: "Smolin, African!" the red-headed boy arose slowly, walked up to the teacher, calmly stared into his face, and, having listened to the problem, carefully began to make big round figures on the blackboard with chalk. "Good enough!" said the teacher. "Yozhov, Nicolai. Proceed!"
Enough, aren't you ashamed?" But Yozhov was not ashamed; he struggled on the ground, like a fish just taken from the water, and when Foma had lifted him to his feet, he pressed close to Foma's breast, clasping his sides with his thin arms, and kept on sobbing. "Well, that's enough!" said Foma, with his teeth tightly clenched. "Enough, dear."
They held peculiar conversations, words and gestures for use in the room, and all this was changed outside the room, into the most commonplace and human. Sometimes, in the room, they all blazed up like a huge woodpile, and Yozhov was the brightest firebrand among them; but the light of this bonfire illuminated but faintly the obscurity of Foma Gordyeeff's soul.
Without lifting his eyes off the forest and the fire, so beautiful in the darkness, Foma made a few steps aside from Yozhov and said to him in a low voice: "Don't play the fool. Why do you abuse me at random?" "I want to remain alone, and finish singing my song." Staggering, he, too, moved aside from Foma, and after a few seconds again exclaimed in a sobbing voice: "My song is done!
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