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The shears of Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long scissors which cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice of dry toast it served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder that my thoughts took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these changes and their melancholy consequences?
"It is said in the Gospels," ran the letter, "do good for evil. You have done me much harm; and in the coupon case you made me wrong the peasants greatly. But I have pity for you. Here are four hundred notes. Take them, and remember your porter Vassily." "Very extraordinary!" said Eugene Mihailovich to his wife and to himself.
She chuckled and handed me my tea, thin tea and a tiny slice of black bread, and a scrape of butter. There is no cheating of the regulations here, but the Sevres cup gave me satisfaction. "You have brought me your bread coupon, I hope?" she interrupted with, "if you eat without it one of my household has less!" I produced it.
Only after taking the advice of a drunken office clerk in the same cell with him, and bribing the police officer with five roubles, did Ivan Mironov get out of jail, without the coupon, and with only seven roubles left out of the twenty-five he had the day before. Of these seven roubles he spent three in the public-house and came home to his wife dead drunk, with a bruised and swollen face.
"I'm giving it to you cheap, just to please you, sir. Besides, I am glad it is not a long way to your house," he added. Eugene Mihailovich did not bargain very much. He did not mind paying a little more, because he was delighted to think he could make use of the coupon and get rid of it.
It seems, at first thought, as if the circular coupon system were ill fitted to furnish him with corroborative detail; but inasmuch as every traveller finds in a country only, so to speak, what he brings to it, he will gather statistics enough.
Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized, as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in the thaw of January?
Or if, in addition to the other discomforts, I am to be a unit among 100 excursionists, with a coupon that insures my being lodged on the sixth floor everywhere, I had rather take a month's quiet holiday in London at the House of Detention.
While Biffy and his chums could always be found together, there were other less-fortunate young fellows, not only without coupon shears, but sometimes without the means of paying their dues who formed a little coterie of their own, and who valued and used the club for what it brought them, their election carrying with it a certain social recognition: it also widened one's circle of acquaintances and, perhaps, of clients.
As she turned to go, he called her back. "Here, it is Christmas!" he said. "I'll run the risk." And he added the coupon to the little heap. The girl looked at it and at him questioningly. "It is all right," he said; "you can take it; I'm running short of change. Bring it back if they won't take it. I'm good for it." Uncle Sam had achieved a backer.
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