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“Do you know what, David?” I said in as unconcerned a tone as I could, “I have given away Nastasey’s watch.”

David looked at me and passed the brush over his temples.

“Yes,” I added in the same businesslike voice, “I have given it away. There is a very poor boy, a beggar, you know, so I have given it to him.”

David put down the brush on the washing-stand.

“He can buy something useful,” I went on, “with the money he can get for it. Anyway, he will get something for it.”

I paused.

“Well,” David said at last, “that’s a good thing,” and he went off to the schoolroom. I followed him.

“And if they ask you what you have done with it?” he said, turning to me.

“I shall tell them I’ve lost it,” I answered carelessly.

No more was said about the watch between us that day; but I had the feeling that David not only approved of what I had done but … was to some extent surprised by it. He really was!

V

Two days more passed. It happened that no one in the house thought of the watch. My father was taken up with a very serious unpleasantness with one of his clients; he had no attention to spare for me or my watch. I, on the other hand, thought of it without ceasing! Even the approval … the presumed approval of David did not quite comfort me. He did not show it in any special way: the only thing he said, and that casually, was that he hadn’t expected such recklessness of me. Certainly I was a loser by my sacrifice: it was not counter-balanced by the gratification afforded me by my vanity.

And what is more, as ill-luck would have it, another schoolfellow of ours, the son of the town doctor, must needs turn up and begin boasting of a new watch, a present from his grandmother, and not even a silver, but a pinch-back one….

I could not bear it, at last, and, without a word to anyone, slipped out of the house and proceeded to hunt for the beggar boy to whom I had given my watch.

I soon found him; he was playing knucklebones in the churchyard with some other boys.

I called him aside–and, breathless and stammering, told him that my family were angry with me for having given away the watch–and that if he would consent to give it back to me I would gladly pay him for it…. To be ready for any emergency, I had brought with me an old-fashioned rouble of the reign of Elizabeth, which represented the whole of my fortune.

“But I haven’t got it, your watch,” answered the boy in an angry and tearful voice; “my father saw it and took it away from me; and he was for thrashing me, too. ‘You must have stolen it from somewhere,’ he said. ‘What fool is going to make you a present of a watch?'”

“And who is your father?”

“My father? Trofimitch.”

“But what is he? What’s his trade?”

“He is an old soldier, a sergeant. And he has no trade at all. He mends old shoes, he re-soles them. That’s all his trade. That’s what he lives by.”

“Where do you live? Take me to him.”

“To be sure I will. You tell my father that you gave me the watch. For he keeps pitching into me, and calling me a thief! And my mother, too. ‘Who is it you are taking after,’ she says, ‘to be a thief?'”

I set off with the boy to his home. They lived in a smoky hut in the back-yard of a factory, which had long ago been burnt down and not rebuilt. We found both Trofimitch and his wife at home. The discharged sergeant was a tall old man, erect and sinewy, with yellowish grey whiskers, an unshaven chin and a perfect network of wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead. His wife looked older than he. Her red eyes, which looked buried in her unhealthily puffy face, kept blinking dejectedly. Some sort of dark rags hung about them by way of clothes.