Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/330

 and then emitting strange sounds which resembled a clearing of the throat or a jerky laugh.

This gentleman during the whole journey carefully avoided conversing and becoming acquainted with the passengers. To his neighbours' remarks he answered curtly, or he read, or smoked, looking out of the window, or, fetching some provisions out of his old bag, drank tea or ate a lunch.

I thought that his loneliness weighed upon him, and I tried several times to start a conversation with him, but every time when our eyes met, which was often, because we were sitting diagonally opposite each other, he turned away and picked up a book, or looked out of the window.

During a stop, in the evening of the second day, at a large station, this nervous gentleman got some hot water and brewed some tea for himself, while the gentleman in the fashionable new clothes,—a lawyer, as I learned later,—with his neighbour, the smoking lady in the semi-masculine overcoat, went to drink tea at the station.

During the absence of the gentleman and the lady, a few new persons entered our car; among them was a tall, cleanly shaven, wrinkled old man, apparently a merchant, in a fitchew-fur coat and a cloth cap with an immense visor. The merchant sat down opposite the lady's and the lawyer's places, and immediately entered into a conversation with a young man, evidently a merchant's clerk, who had also entered the car at this station.

I was sitting diagonally across from them, and, as the train was not moving, was able to catch bits of their conversation whenever there was no one passing between us. The merchant informed him at first that he was going to his estate, which was but one station away; then, as is always the case, they began to speak about prices and about trade, and about business in Moscow and at the Nízhni-Nóvgorod Fair. The clerk began to tell about the carousals of a certain rich merchant, whom they both