to you for a hundred years, not reckoning what you’ve lived already! He emptied his cup, cleared his throat and wiped his mouth. “I could carry a lot of vodka in my day, lads,” he observed with grave dignity, addressing the world in general and no one in particular, “but now it seems age is coming upon me. Thank you, Stepan Dorofeitch.”
“Not at all.”
“But I shall always tell you of it, Styopka, and besides your behaving like a regular scoundrel to me, I tell I tell you . . .”
“And I’ve something to tell you, you drunken lout,” Styopka broke in, losing all patience. “Listen and mark my words. Look here: we’ll halve the world between us—you take one half, and I’ll take the other. You go your way and don’t let me meet you again. I am sick of you.”
“Then you won’t pay me the money?”
“What money, you drunken fool?”
“Ah, in the next world you’ll be wanting to pay it, but I won’t take it. We work hard for our money, with sweat on our brows and blisters on our hands. You’ll suffer for my five kopecks in the other world.”
“Oh, go to the devil!”
“Don’t drive me, I am not in harness yet.”
“Go on, go on!”
“Scoundrel!”
“You jail-bird!”
And abuse followed again, more violent than before. Here two friends were sitting apart on the bed. One of them, a tall, thick-set, fleshy fellow, with a red face, who looked like a regular butcher was almost crying, for he was very much touched. The other was a frail-looking, thin, skinny little man with a long nose which always looked moist, and little piggy eyes which were fixed on the ground. He was a polished and cultivated individual, he had been a clerk and treated his friend a little superciliously, which the other secretly resented. They had been drinking together all day.
“He’s taken a liberty!” cried the fleshy friend, shaking the clerk’s head violently with his left arm which he had round him. By “taking a liberty” he meant that he had hit him. The stout one, who had been a sergeant, was secretly envious of his emaciated friend and so they were trying to outdo one another in the choiceness of their language.
“And I tell you that you are wrong too . . .” the clerk began
