We bought him everything he needed, kitted the dear chap out. There, I thought: there’s our Musk-Ox installed in a position! But a month later he turned up again on our doorstep as if he’d never left it. He’d taken up his studying again, and had left all his clean clothes back there.’

‘Well, what of it? There was nothing else for it,’ Musk-Ox said, frowning, and rose from his chair.

‘And do you know why there was nothing else for it?’ Chelnovsky said, turning to me. ‘It was because they wouldn’t allow him to pull the boy by the hair.’

‘Tell me another,’ Musk-Ox growled.

‘Well, why was it, then?’

‘It was because there was nothing else for it.’

Musk-Ox came to a halt in front of me and, after a moment’s reflection, said:

‘It was a thoroughly unusual business!’

‘Sit down, Vasily Petrovich,’ I said, moving along the bed a bit.

‘No, I don’t want to. A thoroughly unusual business,’ he began again. ‘The boy was nearly fifteen, and what’s more he was your real gentry – a shameless rascal, in other words.’

‘That’s how it is in Russia!’ Chelnovsky said, jokingly.

‘Yes,’ Musk-Ox went on. ‘They had a male cook there, a young fellow named Yegor. He’d married a subdeacon’s daughter from one of our impoverished clerical families. The young master of the house was up to all the tricks, and he set straight about murmuring small nothings in her ear. But the girl was young, and that wasn’t her style; she complained to her husband, and he complained to the mistress. She had a word with her son, but he just carried on regardless. It happened a second time, and a third – the cook went to see the mistress, complaining that his wife was getting no respite – and again nothing happened. I started to get annoyed. “Listen,” I said to him. “If you so much as give Alyonka another pinch, I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.” He flushed with anger; that was his noble blood playing up, you know. He flew off to his mother, and I followed him along. I looked: she was in an armchair, she was all flushed, too, and her son was complaining to her about me in French. As soon as she caught sight of me, she took him by the hand and smiled, the devil only knows why. “That’s enough, my dear,” she said. “Vasily Petrovich was probably only imagining things; he was joking, and you must show him that he was wrong.” I could see she was giving me a sly look. My young charge went off and then, instead of having a word with me about her son, she said: “What a knight in shining armour you are, Vasily Petrovich! Don’t you have a sweetheart?” Well, I can’t abide talk about subjects like that,’ Musk-Ox said, waving one hand energetically. ‘I can’t stay in the same room where things like that are said,’ he repeated, raising his voice and beginning to stride about once again.

‘Well, so did you leave the house immediately?’

‘No – only six weeks later.’

‘And you managed to live there peacefully?’

‘Well, I didn’t speak to anyone.’

‘What about at mealtimes?’

‘I used to have my meals with the clerk.’

‘With the clerk?’

‘Yes, in the servants’ pantry. Well, I didn’t mind. I mean, it’s impossible to offend me.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course … anyway, what’s the point of talking about this … Well, one day I was sitting near the window after dinner, reading Tacitus, and I could hear somebody shouting in the servants’ room. Who was doing the shouting, I couldn’t make out: but I could hear Alyonka’s voice. That’ll be the young master having a bit of fun, I thought. I got up and went along to the servants’ room. I listened. Alyonka was weeping and shouting through clenched teeth: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself” and “You’ve no fear of God in you”, and various other similar things. I looked.