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€œCouldn’t you give me one small smoke? I’m dying to smoke. Or he would suddenly say in a hoarse, ingratiating tone: But it was impossible to be very angry with him he was so helpless, so easily scared and simple, and if anyone lost patience and interrupted him, he only smiled and showed his gums with a foolish look, bowed hastily again and again, and rubbed his hands in confusion. He understood nothing, absolutely nothing.

In vain it was explained to him in the kindest possible way that he had come to the wrong place that he ought to apply at such and such a place that he must produce certain papers that they will let him know the result. His bustling and nervous familiarity, his startled, frightened look, which bordered strangely on impertinence, his stupidity, his persistent and frivolous curiosity taxed to the utmost the patience of men occupied in important and terribly responsible scribbling. Imagine only⁠—gangrene! Look yourself⁠—” and he put his wounded leg on a chair, and was already eagerly pulling up his trouser but he was stopped every time by a squeamish and compassionate shyness. But the cursed leg won’t heal⁠—a hundred devils take it.

“Why the devil hasn’t he received a gratuity before now! Why haven’t they given him his daily money and his travelling expenses! And his last two months pay! He is absolutely ready to give his last drop of blood⁠—damn it all⁠—for the Czar, the throne, and the country, and he will return to the Far East the moment his leg has healed. Already everyone knew by heart that he had served in the Army Transport, had been wounded in the head at Liao-Yang, and touched in the leg in the retreat from Mukden. He also appeared more than once at the Staff Office, the Committee for the Care of the Wounded, at police stations, at the office of the Military Governor, at the Cossack headquarters, and at dozens of other offices, irritating the officials by his senseless grumbling and complaints, by his abject begging, his typical infantry rudeness, and his noisy patriotism. He was strangely talkative, untidy, not particularly sober, dressed in an infantry uniform, with an allover red collar⁠—a perfect type of the rat attached to military hospitals, or the commissariat, or the War Office. Everywhere, in the streets, restaurants, theatres, tramcars, the railway stations, this dark lame little officer appeared. She could say nothing more, in spite of all her respectful terror of the inspector of gendarmerie, who moved his luxurious moustaches in a terrifying way and had a fine stock of abuse on hand.ĭuring this five days’ interval Staff-Captain Ribnikov ran or drove over the whole of Petersburg. He neither drank nor smoked, rarely went out of the house, and had no visitors. Her lodger was a quiet, poor, simple man, a moderate eater, and polite. She was a tall woman of forty-five, the honest widow of an ecclesiastical official, and in a simple and straightforward manner she told all that she knew of him. Only five days had passed when the landlady was summoned to the police station to give evidence about her missing lodger. Then he dressed himself, left the house, and never returned to it again. Staff-Captain Ribnikov immediately informed his landlady that he was called away from Petersburg on business for a day or two, and told her not to worry about his absence. On the very day when the awful disaster to the Russian fleet at Tsushima was nearing its end, and the first vague and alarming reports of that bloody triumph of the Japanese were being circulated over Europe, Staff-Captain Ribnikov, who lived in an obscure alley in the Pieski quarter, received the following telegram from Irkutsk: Send lists immediately watch patient pay debts.