Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/105

Rh this time his man Mihailo was standing at the door with the washing basin and a towel. This poor Mihailo would stand waiting for an hour or two, then would go off to the kitchen and come back again—and his master was still sitting on the bed, rubbing his eyes. At last he got up from his bed, washed himself, put on his dressing-gown and went into the drawing-room, there to drink tea, coffee, cocoa, or even milk, sipping a little of each, crumbling up his bread in a merciless way and making a shameless mess everywhere with his tobacco ash. He would spend a couple of hours over his morning tea; and that was not all, he would take a cup of cold tea and go to the window looking out into the yard. The following scene took place every day before the window.

The unshaven butler Grigory would begin it by bawling at Perfilyevna the housekeeper, in the following terms: 'You paltry soul! You nonentity! You had better hold your tongue, you nasty woman.'

'I am not going to take my orders from you, anyway, you guzzling glutton!' the nonentity, alias Perfilyevna, would shout in reply.

'Nobody could get on with you: you quarrel even with the steward, you storeroom trash,' bawled Grigory.

'Yes, and the steward is as great a thief as you are!' shouted the nonentity, so that she could be heard in the village. 'You are both drunkards, wasting your master's substance,