Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/204

192 in old days. I should think I do know him! We were boys together, we used to climb the fences together. Not know him? I should think I do! … Shouldn't I write to him?'

'Why, of course, write to him!'

'To be sure, he is a friend! We used to be friends at school.'

And, all at once, something like a ray of warmth glided over that wooden face, there was an expression not of feeling, but of a sort of pale reflection of feeling.

It was an apparition, like the sudden appearance of a drowned man at the surface of the water, that calls forth a shout of joy in the crowd upon the bank; but in vain the rejoicing brothers and sisters let down a cord from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the arms exhausted with struggling—that appearance was the last. All is still, and the unrippled surface of the implacable element is still more terrible and desolate than before. So the face of Plyushkin, after the feeling that glided for an instant over it, looked harder and meaner than ever.

'There was a sheet of clean paper lying here on the table,' he said, 'but I don't know what could have become of it, my servants are so untrustworthy!' Thereupon he began looking on the table and under the table and fumbled everywhere, and at last shouted: 'Mavra, Mavra!' His summons was answered by a woman with a plate in her hand on which lay the piece of dry cake of which the reader has heard already. And