Philip,
I shall not give you another glass all this week," the Captain warned
him sternly.

"I shall be thankful! .... You will not give me one drop?"

The Captain heard in his voice a beseeching note to which he turned a
deaf ear.

"Even though you roar, I shall not give it you!"

"As you like, then," sighed the teacher, and went away to continue his
reporting. But after a day or two he would return tired and thirsty,
and would look at the Captain with a beseeching glance out of the
corners of his eyes, hoping that his friend's heart would soften.

The Captain in such cases put on a serious face and began speaking with
killing irony on the theme of weakness of character, of the animal
delight of intoxication, and on such subjects as suited the occasion.
One must do him justice: he was captivated by his role of mentor and
moralist, but the lodgers dogged him, and, listening sceptically to his
exhortations to repentance, would whisper aside to each other:

"Cunning, skilful, shifty rogue! I told you so, but you would not
listen. It's your own fault!"

"His honour is really a good soldier. He goes first and examines the
road behind him!"

The teacher then hunted here and there till he found his friend again
in some corner, and grasping his dirty coat, trembling and licking his
dry lips, looked into his face with a deep, tragic glance, without
articulate words.

"Can't you?" asked the Captain sullenly.

The teacher answered by bowing his head and letting it fall on his
breast, his tall, thin body trembling the while.

"Wait another day ... perhaps you will be all right then," proposed
Kuvalda. The teacher sighed, and shook his head hopelessly.

The Captain saw that his friend's thin body trembled with the thirst
for the poison, and took some money from his pocket.

"In the majority of cases it is impossible to fight against fate," said
he, as if trying to justify himself before someone. But if the teacher
controlled himself for a whole week then there was a touching farewell
scene between the two friends, which ended as a rule in the
eating-house of Vaviloff. The teacher did not spend all his money, but
spent at least half on the children of the main street. The poor are
always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street
there were groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and
dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the
appearance of flowers th