Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/212

200 shawls and in slippers with, no stockings, who flit about like bats at the street corners. Tchitchikov did not notice them and did not even observe many genteel government clerks with little canes, who were probably returning home from a walk. From time to time exclamations, sounds of feminine voices, reached his ears: 'That's a lie, you drunken sot, I never let him take such a liberty!' or, 'Don't fight, you low fellow, but go along to the police-station; I'll show you!' words, in fact, such as fall like scalding water on the ears of a dreamy youth of twenty, when returning from the theatre with his head full of a street in Spain, a summer night and an exquisite feminine figure with curls and a guitar. What fancies are not floating in his brain? He is in the clouds, or off on a visit to Schiller, when suddenly the fatal words burst upon him like thunder: and he sees that he is back on earth, and even in the hay market and near a pot-house, and life in its workaday garb flaunts itself before him again.

At last the chaise with a violent jolt seemed to drop into a hole, as it passed in at the gates of the hotel, and Tchitchikov was met by Petrushka, who with one hand held the skirts of his coat, for he could not bear them to fly apart, and with the other began helping his master out of the chaise. The waiter ran out too with a candle in his hand and a napkin over his shoulder. Whether Petrushka was pleased at his master's arrival no one can tell; anyway, Selifan and he