gh . . . it's very damp!
And you, too, are enjoying Nature?"

"Yes," grunted Zaikin, "I am enjoying it, too. . . . Do you know
whether there is any sort of tavern or restaurant in the neighbourhood?"

Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.

TYPHUS

A YOUNG lieutenant called Klimov was travelling from Petersburg to
Moscow in a smoking carriage of the mail train. Opposite him was
sitting an elderly man with a shaven face like a sea captain's, by
all appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede. He pulled at his pipe
the whole journey and kept talking about the same subject:

"Ha, you are an officer! I have a brother an officer too, only he
is a naval officer. . . . He is a naval officer, and he is stationed
at Kronstadt. Why are you going to Moscow?"

"I am serving there."

"Ha! And are you a family man?"

"No, I live with my sister and aunt."

"My brother's an officer, only he is a naval officer; he has a wife
and three children. Ha!"

The Finn seemed continually surprised at something, and gave a broad
idiotic grin when he exclaimed "Ha!" and continually puffed at his
stinking pipe. Klimov, who for some reason did not feel well, and
found it burdensome to answer questions, hated him with all his
heart. He dreamed of how nice it would be to snatch the wheezing
pipe out of his hand and fling it under the seat, and drive the
Finn himself into another compartment.

"Detestable people these Finns and . . . Greeks," he thought.
"Absolutely superfluous, useless, detestable people. They simply
fill up space on the earthly globe. What are they for?"

And the thought of Finns and Greeks produced a feeling akin to
sickness all over his body. For the sake of comparison he tried to
think of the French, of the Italians, but his efforts to think of
these people evoked in his mind, for some reason, nothing but images
of organ-grinders, naked women, and the foreign oleographs which
hung over the chest of drawers at home, at his aunt's.

Altogether the officer felt in an abnormal state. He could not
arrange his arms and legs comfortably on the seat, though he had
the whole seat to himself. His mouth felt dry and sticky; there was
a heavy fog in his brain; his thoughts seemed to be straying, not
only within his head, but outside his skull, among the seats and
the people that were shrouded in the darkness of night. Through the
mist in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices,
t