第42章(2/4)
“Then he was an author?”
“Yes, Mr. Captain, and what an ungentlemanly visitor in an honourable house. …”
“Now then! Enough! I have told you already …”
“Ilya Petrovitch!” the head clerk repeated significantly.
The assistant glanced rapidly at him; the head clerk slightly shook his head.
“… So I tell you this, most respectable Luise Ivanovna, and I tell it you for the last time,” the assistant went on. “If there is a scandal in your honourable house once again, I will put you yourself in the lock-up, as it is called in polite society. Do you hear? So a literary man, an author took five roubles for his coat-tail in an ‘honourable house’? A nice set, these authors!”
And he cast a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. “There was a scandal the other day in a restaurant, too. An author had eaten his dinner and would not pay; ‘I’ll write a satire on you,’ says he. And there was another of them on a steamer last week used the most disgraceful language to the respectable family of a civil councillor, his wife and daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a confectioner’s shop the other day. They are like that, authors, literary men, students, town-criers. … Pfoo! You get along! I shall look in upon you myself one day. Then you had better be careful! Do you hear?”
With hurried deference, Luise Ivanovna fell to curtsying in all directi-->>