Through Russia. Максим Горький

though to go and lean over the well. Independently of my own volition I forestalled what Gubin might next have been going to say by remarking:

      "I must tell you that last night he saw you walking in the garden here."

      "Indeed?" she ejaculated, and drew herself to her full height. Yet in doing so she blushed to her shoulders, and, clapping plump hands to her bosom, and opening dark eyes to their fullest, said in a hasty and confused whisper as, again paling and shrinking in stature, she subsided like a piece of pastry that is turning heavy:

      "Good Lord! WHAT did he see?.. If the lame woman should call, you must not admit her. No, tell her that she will not be wanted, that I cannot, that I must not – But see here. Here is a rouble for you. Oh, good Lord!"

      By this time even louder and more angry exclamations had begun to ascend from Gubin. Yet the only sound to reach my ears was the woman's muttered whispering, and as I glanced into her face I perceived that its hitherto high-coloured and rounded contours had fallen in, and turned grey, and that her flushed lips were trembling to such an extent as almost to prevent the articulation of her words. Lastly, her eyes were frozen into an expression of pitiful, doglike terror.

      Suddenly she shrugged her shoulders, straightened her form, put away from her the expression of terror, and said quietly, but incisively:

      "You will not need to say anything about this. Allow me."

      And with a swaying step she departed – a step so short as almost to convey the impression that her legs were bound together. Yet while the gait was the gait of a person full of suppressed fury, it was also the gait of a person who can scarcely see an inch in advance.

      "Haul away, you!" shouted Gubin.

      I hauled him up in a state of cold and wet; whereafter he fell to stamping around the coping of the well, cursing, and waving his arms.

      "What have you been thinking of all this time?" he vociferated. "Why, for ever so long I shouted and shouted to you!"

      "I have been telling Nadezhda that last night you saw her walking in the garden."

      He sprang towards me with a vicious scowl.

      "Who gave you leave to do so?" he exclaimed.

      "Wait a moment. I said that it was only in a dream, that you saw her crossing the garden to the washhouse."

      "Indeed? And why did you do that?"

      Somehow, as, barelegged and dripping with mud, he stood blinking his eyes at me with a most disagreeable expression, he looked extremely comical.

      "See here," I remarked, "you have only to go and tell her husband about her for me to go and tell him the same story about your having seen the whole thing in a dream."

      "Why?" cried Gubin, now almost beside himself. Presently, however, he recovered sufficient self-possession to grin and ask in an undertone:

      "HOW MUCH DID SHE GIVE YOU?"

      I explained to him that my sole reason for what I had done had been that I pitied the woman, and feared lest the brothers Birkin should do an injury to one who at least ought not to be betrayed. Gubin began by declining to believe me, but eventually, after the matter had been thought out, said:

      "Acceptance of money for doing what is right is certainly irregular; but at least is it better than acceptance of money for conniving at sin. Well, you have spoilt my scheme, young fellow. Hired only to clean out the well, I would nevertheless have cleaned out the establishment as a whole, and taken pleasure in doing so."

      Then once more he relapsed into fury, and muttered as he scurried round and round the well:

      "How DARED you poke your nose into other people's affairs? Who are YOU in this establishment?"

      The air was hot and arid, yet still the sky was as dull as though coated throughout with the dust of summer, and, as yet, one could gaze at the sun's purple, rayless orb without blinking, and as easily as one could have gazed at the glowing embers of a wood fire.

      Seated on the fence, a number of rooks were directing intelligent black eyes upon the heaps of mud which lay around the coping of the well. And from time to time they fluttered their wings impatiently, and cawed.