Part 44 (2/2)

I might add:

A man of eighty-two, swollen feet, a household of seventeen persons.

THE EMIGRANT

I open a door.

A room without beds, without furniture, carpeted with hay and straw. In the middle of the room stands a barrel upside down. Round the barrel, four starved-looking children, with frowzy hair, hang over a great earthenware dish of sour milk, out of which they eat, holding a greenish metal spoon in their right hand and a bit of bran-bread in their left.

In one corner, on the floor, sits a pale woman, and the tears fall from her eyes on the potatoes she is about to peel. In the second corner lies ”he,” also on the floor, and undressed.

”It was no good your coming, neighbor,” he says to me, without rising, ”no good at all! I don't belong here now!”

But when he sees that I have no intention of going away, he raises himself slowly.

”_Nu_, where am I to seat you?” he asks sadly.

I a.s.sure him that I can write standing.

”You will get nothing out of me! I am only waiting for a boat ticket--you see, I have sold everything, even my tools....”

”You are a mechanic?” I ask.

”A tailor.”

”And what obliges you to emigrate?”

”Hunger.”

And there was hunger in _his_ face, in _her_ face, and still more in the gleaming eyes of the children round the barrel.

”No work to be had?”

He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, he and work had long been strangers.

”Where are you going to?”

”To London. I was there once already, and made money. I sent my wife ten rubles a week, and lived like a human being. The bad luck brought me home again.”

I wondered if the ”bad luck” were his wife.

”Why not have sent for your family to join you?”

”It drew me back! It's black as night over there. As soon as ever I closed an eye, I dreamt of the little town, the river round it, ... I felt suffocated there, and it drew me and drew me....”

”This is certainly,” I remark, ”a beautiful bit of country.”

”The air costs nothing, and we have been living on air, heaven be praised, these three years. This time I am going with wife and child. I mean to put an end to it.”

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