The
garret was locked up by means of a padlock that looked like a kalatch or
basket-shaped loaf, only black; the key of this padlock Gerasim always
carried about him in his girdle. He did not like people to come to his
garret.
So passed a year, at the end of which a little incident befell Gerasim.
The old lady, in whose service he lived as porter, adhered in everything
to the ancient ways, and kept a large number of servants. In her house
were not only laundresses, sempstresses, carpenters, tailors and
tailoresses, there was even a harness-maker--he was reckoned as a
veterinary surgeon, too,--and a doctor for the servants; there was a
household doctor for the mistress; there was, lastly, a shoemaker, by
name Kapiton Klimov, a sad drunkard. Klimov regarded himself as an
injured creature, whose merits were unappreciated, a cultivated man from
Petersburg, who ought not to be living in Moscow without occupation--in
the wilds, so to speak; and if he drank, as he himself expressed it
emphatically, with a blow on his chest, it was sorrow drove him to it.
So one day his mistress had a conversation about him with her head
steward, Gavrila, a man whom, judging solely from his little yellow eyes
and nose like a duck's beak, fate itself, it seemed, had marked out as a
person in authority.
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