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‘Those who need to know; but, there, of course–there’s danger from the police to be guarded against. Because, say what you will, such doings are forbidden anyway, and for the common people are a temptation; the common people–the mob, we all know, quickly come to blows.’

‘Has he shown you the dead?’ I asked Ardalion.

Ardalion nodded. ‘He has; my father he brought before me as if living.’

I stared at Ardalion. He laughed and played with his dinner-napkin, and condescendingly, but unflinchingly, looked at me.

‘But this is very curious!’ I cried at last. ‘Couldn’t I make the acquaintance of this artisan?’

‘You can’t go straight to him; but one can act through his mother. She’s a respectable old woman; she sells pickled apples on the bridge. If you wish it, I will ask her.’

‘Please do.’

Ardalion coughed behind his hand. ‘And a gratuity, whatever you think fit, nothing much, of course, should also be handed to her–the old lady. And I on my side will make her understand that she has nothing to fear from you, as you are a visitor here, a gentleman–and of course you can understand that this is a secret, and will not in any case get her into any unpleasantness.’

Ardalion took the tray in one hand, and with a graceful swing of the tray and his own person, turned towards the door.

‘So I may reckon upon you!’ I shouted after him.

‘You may trust me!’ I heard his self-satisfied voice say: ‘We’ll talk to the old woman and transmit you her answer exactly.’

* * * * *

I will not enlarge on the train of thought aroused in me by the extraordinary fact Ardalion had related; but I am prepared to admit that I awaited the promised reply with impatience. Late in the evening Ardalion came to me and announced that to his annoyance he could not find the old woman. I handed him, however, by way of encouragement, a three-rouble note. The next morning he appeared again in my room with a beaming countenance; the old woman had consented to see me.

‘Hi! boy!’ shouted Ardalion in the corridor; ‘Hi! apprentice! Come here!’ A boy of six came up, grimed all over with soot like a kitten, with a shaved head, perfectly bald in places, in a torn, striped smock, and huge goloshes on his bare feet. ‘You take the gentleman, you know where,’ said Ardalion, addressing the ‘apprentice,’ and pointing to me. ‘And you, sir, when you arrive, ask for Mastridia Karpovna.’

The boy uttered a hoarse grunt, and we set off.

* * * * *

We walked rather a long while about the unpaved streets of the town of T—-; at last in one of them, almost the most deserted and desolate of all, my guide stopped before an old two-story wooden house, and wiping his nose all over his smock-sleeve, said: ‘Here; go to the right.’ I passed through the porch into the outer passage, stumbled towards my right, a low door creaked on rusty hinges, and I saw before me a stout old woman in a brown jacket lined with hare-skin, with a parti-coloured kerchief on her head.

‘Mastridia Karpovna?’ I inquired.

‘The same, at your service,’ the old woman replied in a piping voice. ‘Please walk in. Won’t you take a chair?’

The room into which the old woman conducted me was so littered up with every sort of rubbish, rags, pillows, feather-beds, sacks, that one could hardly turn round in it. The sunlight barely struggled in through two dusty little windows; in one corner, from behind a heap of boxes piled on one another, there came a feeble whimpering and wailing…. I could not tell from what; perhaps a sick baby, or perhaps a puppy. I sat down on a chair, and the old woman stood up directly facing me. Her face was yellow, half-transparent like wax; her lips were so fallen in that they formed a single straight line in the midst of a multitude of wrinkles; a tuft of white hair stuck out from below the kerchief on her head, but the sunken grey eyes peered out alertly and cleverly from under the bony overhanging brow; and the sharp nose fairly stuck out like a spindle, fairly sniffed the air as if it would say: I’m a smart one! ‘Well, you’re no fool!’ was my thought. At the same time she smelt of spirits.