said.
"Deer didn't. I'm very grateful."
"Maybe wolves got them all."
"Boy—" Pyetr began, and found breath for argument too short and too hard come by. "Then they're well-fed wolves, and we'll be safe. Be cheerful. Stop wishing up trouble."
"I'm
not
," Sasha exclaimed, indignant. "I'm
not
, Pyetr Illitch,
you
are."
"Well, I'm not the wizard in the company, so it doesn't matter, does it?"
Sasha gave him a very worried look, as if he was not sure of that reasoning.
"There's no such thing as luck," Pyetr followed up his advantage, "with certain dice. And I doubt Father Sky needs your help with his."
Sasha's mouth was open. He shut it and walked without saying anything for a long while.
A man could feel ashamed of himself, the boy was so good at heart… precisely the sort of person who offered himself to persons like himself, Pyetr thought, and usually, at dice or in some prank, he was only too glad to find someone of Sasha's gullible sort; but Sasha had tallied up favor after favor until a body stopped looking for the turnaround. The boy simply was more persistent in giving things away than anyone Pyetr had ever encountered in his life, that was the addition and subtraction of the matter; and Pyetr had long since passed from reckoning Sasha Vasilyevitch as clever and apt to sell him to the highest bidder, to realizing him as gullibly useful (in which realization, being a moral sort of scoundrel, Pyetr had set himself certain strict limits of that use) and finally as a person who needed a keeper and a protector, which Pyetr was nobly resolved to be, at least as far as keeping the boy from hanging.
But this morning he revised all those calculations. The boy had some wit; the boy
knew
a scoundrel when he met one: one hardly, Pyetr reasoned now, worked at The Cockerel for ten years without knowing the breed. Certainly Sasha must have realized by now that his dear aunt and uncle were scoundrels, else he would be running back to The Cockerel; but Sasha, taking all that aside, had suddenly taken advantage of his pain-muddled wits to appoint himself the protector and Pyetr Ilitch Kochevikov the fool who needed looking after.
Pyetr could hardly understand how this had happened to him; and he had the most uneasy thought that perhaps he should come full circle, and conclude that the boy had in mind some nefarious scheme of his own—
Except the boy had every mark of the gullible.
It was all bewildering, and entirely seductive—considering Pyetr Ilitch remembered his father explaining there were two sorts of people in the world, those who lived by wit and those who lived on luck; and followed that by showing him what luck was worth with loaded dice…
A boy had sat on a Vojvoda street corner once upon a time, and watching a mother coddle a child, had suffered a certain pang of curiosity, which of them was gullible and whether either of them was a fool—
A boy had watched a father showing his son woodworking once, had seen the skill change hands and wondered if the father would deliberately hold back some things to stay better than his son—but perhaps, too, he had thought, the son was clever enough to spy out the things the father would not willingly pass on—
A young man had thought once that the right friends would make him rich and happy, and as far as fools went, that one was the worst, young Sasha was quite right to pity him.
Besides, his side hurt and his head ached, because this particular fool had also thought himself so handsome no lady could ever think of anything beyond him.
All in all, Sasha Vasilyevitch seemed to have very little need of him, and still kept on being kind to him, and this absolute persistence, while it looked altogether like stupidity or villainy, did not agree on the one hand with Sasha's competency in certain things; and on the other with Sasha's tenderheartedness.
All in all, it was too much to think about
"Deer didn't. I'm very grateful."
"Maybe wolves got them all."
"Boy—" Pyetr began, and found breath for argument too short and too hard come by. "Then they're well-fed wolves, and we'll be safe. Be cheerful. Stop wishing up trouble."
"I'm
not
," Sasha exclaimed, indignant. "I'm
not
, Pyetr Illitch,
you
are."
"Well, I'm not the wizard in the company, so it doesn't matter, does it?"
Sasha gave him a very worried look, as if he was not sure of that reasoning.
"There's no such thing as luck," Pyetr followed up his advantage, "with certain dice. And I doubt Father Sky needs your help with his."
Sasha's mouth was open. He shut it and walked without saying anything for a long while.
A man could feel ashamed of himself, the boy was so good at heart… precisely the sort of person who offered himself to persons like himself, Pyetr thought, and usually, at dice or in some prank, he was only too glad to find someone of Sasha's gullible sort; but Sasha had tallied up favor after favor until a body stopped looking for the turnaround. The boy simply was more persistent in giving things away than anyone Pyetr had ever encountered in his life, that was the addition and subtraction of the matter; and Pyetr had long since passed from reckoning Sasha Vasilyevitch as clever and apt to sell him to the highest bidder, to realizing him as gullibly useful (in which realization, being a moral sort of scoundrel, Pyetr had set himself certain strict limits of that use) and finally as a person who needed a keeper and a protector, which Pyetr was nobly resolved to be, at least as far as keeping the boy from hanging.
But this morning he revised all those calculations. The boy had some wit; the boy
knew
a scoundrel when he met one: one hardly, Pyetr reasoned now, worked at The Cockerel for ten years without knowing the breed. Certainly Sasha must have realized by now that his dear aunt and uncle were scoundrels, else he would be running back to The Cockerel; but Sasha, taking all that aside, had suddenly taken advantage of his pain-muddled wits to appoint himself the protector and Pyetr Ilitch Kochevikov the fool who needed looking after.
Pyetr could hardly understand how this had happened to him; and he had the most uneasy thought that perhaps he should come full circle, and conclude that the boy had in mind some nefarious scheme of his own—
Except the boy had every mark of the gullible.
It was all bewildering, and entirely seductive—considering Pyetr Ilitch remembered his father explaining there were two sorts of people in the world, those who lived by wit and those who lived on luck; and followed that by showing him what luck was worth with loaded dice…
A boy had sat on a Vojvoda street corner once upon a time, and watching a mother coddle a child, had suffered a certain pang of curiosity, which of them was gullible and whether either of them was a fool—
A boy had watched a father showing his son woodworking once, had seen the skill change hands and wondered if the father would deliberately hold back some things to stay better than his son—but perhaps, too, he had thought, the son was clever enough to spy out the things the father would not willingly pass on—
A young man had thought once that the right friends would make him rich and happy, and as far as fools went, that one was the worst, young Sasha was quite right to pity him.
Besides, his side hurt and his head ached, because this particular fool had also thought himself so handsome no lady could ever think of anything beyond him.
All in all, Sasha Vasilyevitch seemed to have very little need of him, and still kept on being kind to him, and this absolute persistence, while it looked altogether like stupidity or villainy, did not agree on the one hand with Sasha's competency in certain things; and on the other with Sasha's tenderheartedness.
All in all, it was too much to think about
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