While he was musing thus Ivanoff suddenly hailed him in a loud voice.
"Ah! it's you! Where are you going?" asked Yourii, shuddering.
"To say a mass for our departed friend," replied Ivanoff, with brutal
jocularity. "You had better come with us. What's the good of being
always alone?"
Feeling sad and dispirited, Yourii did not find Sanine and Ivanoff as
distasteful to him as usual.
"Very well, I will," he replied, but suddenly recollecting his
superiority, he thought to himself, "what have I really in common with
such fellows? Am I to drink their vodka, and talk commonplaces?"
He was on the point of turning back, but he felt such an utter horror
of solitude that he went along with them. Ivanoff and Sanine proffered
no remarks, and thus in silence they reached the former's lodging. It
was already quite dark. At the door, the figure of a man could be dimly
seen. He had a thick stick with a crooked handle.
"Oh! it's Uncle Peter Ilitsch!" exclaimed Ivanoff gleefully.
"Yes! that's he!" replied the figure, in a deep, resonant voice. Yourii
remembered that Ivanoff's uncle was an old, drunken church chorister.
He had a grey moustache like one of the soldiers at the time of
Nicholas the First, and his shabby black coat had a most unpleasant
smell.
"Boum! Boum!" His voice seemed to come out of a barrel, when Ivanoff
introduced him to Yourii, who awkwardly shook hands with him, hardly
knowing what to say to such a person. He recollected, however, that for
him all men should be equal, so he politely gave precedence to the old
singer as they went in.
Ivanoff's lodging was more like an old lumber-room than a place for
human habitation, being very dusty and untidy. But when his host had
lighted the lamp, Yourii perceived that the walls were covered with
engravings of pictures by Vasnetzoff, and that what had seemed rubbish
were books piled up in heaps. He still felt somewhat ill at ease, and,
to hide this, he began to examine the engravings attentively.
"Do you like Vasnetzoff?" asked Ivanoff as, without waiting for an
answer, he left the room to fetch a plate. Sanine told Peter Ilitsch
that Semenoff was dead. "God rest his soul!" droned the latter. "Ah!
well, it's all over for him now."
Yourii glanced wistfully at him, and felt a sudden sympathy for the old
man.
Ivanoff now brought in bread, salted cucumbers, and glasses, which he
placed on the table that was covered with a newspaper. Then, with a
swift, scarcely perceptible movement, he uncorked the bottle, not a
drop of its contents being spilt.