“He is referring to us, the likes of himself,” remarked Mitrofan. “I happened to mention that in Rostoff the poor folks—the proletariat, that is to say—save themselves in winter time in the manure—”
“They go outside the town,” cut in Akim cheerfully, “and—into the manure with them! They burrow in exactly like the pigs—and there’s no harm done.”
“Fool!” Mitrofan snapped him up, and so sternly that Kuzma turned round. “What are you gobbling about? You stupid fool, you rickety bandy-legs! When poverty overtakes you, you’ll burrow too.”
Akim, dropping his spoon, gazed sleepily at him and, with the same sudden irascibility which he had recently exhibited, opened wide his empty hawk-like eyes and yelled furiously: “A‑ah! Poverty! Did you want to work at so much the hour?”
“Of course!” angrily shouted Mitrofan, inflating his Dahomey-like nostrils and staring point-blank at Akim with blazing eyes. “Twenty hours for twenty kopeks?”
“A‑ah! But you wanted a ruble an hour? You’re a greedy one, devil take you!”
But the wrangle subsided as quickly as it had flared up. A minute later Mitrofan was talking quietly and scalding himself with the porridge: “As if he weren’t greedy himself! Why, he, that blind devil, would strangle himself in the sanctuary for the sake of a kopek. If you’ll believe it, he sold his wife for fifteen kopeks! God is my witness that I am not jesting. Off yonder in our village of Lipetzk there’s a little old man, Pankoff by name, who also used to work as gardener—well, and now he has retired and is very fond of that sort of affair.”
“Why, doesn’t Akim come from over Lipetzk way?” interrupted Kuzma.