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I … it’s not that I …”
    “Ah, come now… I’ve already forgotten, and you keep at it!” said the general, impatiently twitching his lower lip.
    “Forgotten, but there’s malice in his eyes,” thought Cherviakov, glancing suspiciously at the general. “He doesn’t even want to talk. I must explain to him that I really didn’t mean it … that it’s a law of nature, otherwise he’ll think I wanted to spit. If he doesn’t think so now, he will later! …”
    On returning home, Cherviakov told his wife about his rudeness. His wife, it seemed to him, treated the incident much too lightly. She merely got frightened, but then, on learning that Brizzhalov served “elsewhere,” she calmed down.
    “But all the same you should go and apologize,” she said. “He might think you don’t know how to behave in public!”
    “That’s just it! I apologized, but he was somehow strange … Didn’t say a single sensible word. And then there was no time to talk.”
    The next day Cherviakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut, and went to Brizzhalov to explain … Going into the general’s reception room, he saw many petitioners there, and among them was the general himself, who had already begun to receive petitions. Having questioned several petitioners, the general raised his eyes to Cherviakov.
    “Yesterday, in the Arcadia, if you recall, Yr’xcellency,” the office manager began, “I sneezed, sir, and … accidentally sprayed you … Forg …”
    “Such trifles … God knows! Can I be of help to you?” the general addressed the next petitioner.
    “He doesn’t want to talk!” thought Cherviakov, turning pale. “That means he’s angry … No, it can’t be left like this … I’ll explain to him …”
    When the general finished his discussion with the last petitioner and headed for the inner rooms, Cherviakov followed him and murmured:
    “Yr’xcellency! If I venture to trouble Yr’xcellency, it’s precisely, I might say, from a feeling of repentance! … It wasn’t on purpose, you know that yourself, sir!”
    The general made a tearful face and waved his hand.
    “You must be joking, my dear sir!” he said, disappearing behind the door.
    “What kind of joke is it?” thought Cherviakov. “This is no kind of joke at all! A general, yet he can’t understand! If that’s the way it is, I won’t apologize to the swaggerer any more! Devil take him! I’ll write him a letter, but I won’t come myself! By God, I won’t!”
    So Cherviakov thought, walking home. He wrote no letter to the general. He thought and thought, and simply could not think up that letter. So the next day he had to go himself and explain.
    “I came yesterday to trouble Yr’xcellency,” he began to murmur, when the general raised his questioning eyes to him, “not for a joke, as you were pleased to say. I was apologizing for having sneezed and sprayed you, sir … and I never even thought of joking. Would I dare joke with you? If we start joking, soon there won’t be any respect for persons … left…”
    “Get out!!” barked the general, suddenly turning blue and shaking.
    “What, sir?” Cherviakov asked in a whisper, sinking with terror.
    “Get out!!” the general repeated, stamping his feet.
    Something in Cherviakov’s stomach snapped. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, he backed his way to the door, went out, and plodded off… Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and … died.
    J ULY 1883

S MALL F RY

    D ear sir, father and benefactor!” the clerk Nevyrazimov 1 wrote in the draft of a letter of congratulations. “May you spend this bright day, 2 and many more to come, in good health and prosperity And may your fam …”
    The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, smoked and stank of burning. On the table, near Nevyrazimov’s writing hand, a stray cockroach was anxiously running about. Two rooms away from the duty-room, the hall porter Paramon was polishing