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Why, you couldn't buy the frame for that! Perhaps you will decide to purchase to-morrow. Sir, sir, turn back! Add ten kopeks. Take it, take it! give me twenty kopeks. To tell the truth, you are my only customer to-day, and that's the only reason." Thus Tchartkoff quite unexpectedly became the purchaser of the old portrait, and at the same time reflected, "Why have I bought it? What is it to me?"
If one wishes to obtain the address of any person, he goes or sends to this Address Office, fills out a blank, for which he pays a couple of kopeks, and, after patient waiting for the over-busy officials to search the big files, he receives a written reply, with which he must content himself.
Neither you nor he can dispute it. Then he counts the remainder, and finds that it amounts to seventy therefore your change is seventy kopeks! Do you dispute it? Then you can count for yourself.
A mortifying incident that occurred to me not long ago vividly reminded me of that shame, and led me to an explanation of that shame which I had felt when bestowing money on the poor. I wanted twenty kopeks to give to a poor pilgrim; I sent my son to borrow them from some one; he brought the pilgrim a twenty-kopek piece, and told me that he had borrowed it from the cook.
"Listen to me," a priest would say, as an ultimatum, to a lackey who was trying to beat down the price: "if you don't give me seventy-five kopeks without further ado, I'll take a bite of this roll, and that will be an end to it!" And that would have been an end to the bargaining, for, according to the rules of the Church, a priest cannot officiate after breaking his fast.
This was a memorable Sunday for Slimak and his wife. She had bought a silk kerchief at a stall, given twenty kopeks to the beggars, and sat down in the front pew, where Grybina and Lukasiakowa had at once made room for her. As for Slimak, everyone had something to say to him.
When he was some distance away, Iakov said: "In our village such a braggart would goon have been put in his place. Here, every one seems afraid of him." Malva looked at Iakov and replied, disdainfully: "You don't know his worth." "There's nothing to know. He's worth five kopeks a hundred."
He did understand this, and he would not go with the peasant to tend cattle, and to eat potatoes and kvas with him, but he went to the zoological garden in the costume of a savage, to lead the elephant at thirty kopeks a day.
He was a tall, slender young fellow, about seven-and-twenty years of age. Though he used the customary forms, "Give me something, sudarynya* if only a few kopeks, Khristi radi!" there was something about him, despite his rags, there was an elegance of accent in his language, to which I was not accustomed in the "poor brethren" generally. * Madam. For Christ's sake.
The Officials drank coffee and rolls, then put on their uniforms and drove to the Pension Bureau. How much money they collected there is another thing that can neither be told nor described. Nor was the Muzhik forgotten. The Officials sent a glass of whiskey out to him and five kopeks. Now, Muzhik, rejoice.
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