Repository path: workshop/translations/kamizelka/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kamizelka-R04-v1 — Bolesław Prus, «Kamizelka» (1882), Polish → English

The translation limb of ARM-r1-fresh-pair step 1 (T5). The whole story — 154 paragraphs, 2,883 Polish words — translated close from the source alone under R04. The single-pass draft was written first and committed as T-kamizelka-R06-v1 at 05948b7; this file is the revised text and the frozen log.

Polish → English is a pair framework/v0.1 §7 leaves in its every other pair — untested row. That is why this text was chosen: the release's registered prediction 1 is about fresh Class A sites in a new pair, and the two runs that have tried to discharge it (DE→EN void, FR→EN descriptive only) have left it open since S101.

Source

Bolesław Prus (Aleksander Głowacki, 1847–1912), «Kamizelka». First printed in Nowiny 1882, no. 292, dated by the author 19 October 1882. Text taken from Szkice i obrazki, tom I (Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1935), scanned pages 55–66, via pl.wikisource Strona:PL Bolesław Prus - Szkice i obrazki 01.djvu/055–066, proofread level 4. Public domain ({{TekstPD}}; author died 1912).

Cleaned to ../source-pl.txt, 154 paragraphs. Five run-together words in the transcription were separated and are listed here rather than silently fixed: takiechwile → takie chwile (¶6), kwietnia.Wstawali → kwietnia. Wstawali (¶48), znalazłbymiejsce → znalazłby miejsce (¶95), od latado jesieni → od lata do jesieni (¶122), wart,a ja → wart, a ja (¶33). All five are transcription artifacts of the scan, not variants. The {{JustowanieKoniec2}} markup token that fell between ¶150 and ¶151 was dropped.

Contamination — declared, and NOT measured

contamination: suspected. No published English rendering was consulted, and none is reachable. Three exist in print — N. B. Jopson, The Slavonic (and East European) Review IX, 1930–31, under the title "The Waistcoat"; Olga Scherer, 1955; Ilona Ralf Sues, 1960 — and none is freely available, so tools/dependence_check.py could not be run. Under CLAUDE.md's standing rule that is said here on the artifact rather than passed over: this is a declaration without a measurement, and it can hide either end of the measured range.

Two things bear on how much weight that should carry. The project's only previous Polish translation, T-janko-R06-v1-unitA (Sienkiewicz, 308 words, now retired), measured DEPENDENT? — 18 shared 7-grams, 7 shared 12-grams, longest common run 18 tokens against Curtin 1893. And the premise that an obscure comparator is a safe one has three measurements against it and none for it (CLAUDE.md; S065, S079). So suspected here means suspected, not "probably fine".

What the design that uses this text turns on. Its claim is existential — does an English rendering exist that carries the relation — and a rendering that reproduces a published translator's device is still an existence proof. So the design's validity does not turn on independence from a published rendering, and the standing constraint (the lead is never the independent third translator where validity does turn on that) is not engaged. Note (bhb) cuts toward the null and is the design's friend: the lead matches itself at up to 37 contiguous tokens across sessions, so a forced re-rendering that merely reproduces the filed one marks nothing.

Translator's log — frozen 2026-08-05, before any evaluation of this translation was designed

Decisions and alternatives. Not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence is internal-judgment-only, as is the whole page by its front matter.

D1 — the dealer's speech, and a marking moved off spelling (¶14–44)

Prus writes the old-clothes dealer's Polish as orthographically accented: Jake kamyzelkie for jaką kamizelkę, taky ubjór for taki ubiór, ten wjatr for ten wiatr, Pan sam wi for wie, serki owczych for serków owczych (a case error, not a spelling one). The marking is continuous and it is the only place in the story where anybody's speech is spelled differently from anybody else's.

The draft (R06) rendered this as English eye-dialect — vot, dis, vaistcoat, vind. The revision removed all of it. Two reasons, and the second is the one that decided it. First, English eye-dialect for Jewish speech is not a neutral device: it carries a specific and ugly nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in English writing, and importing it adds a stance Prus's spelling does not have in Polish, where the same spellings mark a Yiddish-speaker's Polish without that freight. Second, and separably: the case error in serki owczych cannot be spelled at all in English, because English has no case to get wrong — so eye-dialect was already failing to carry half of what Prus marks.

What the revision does instead is carry the marking on syntax and idiom: fronted objects ("For this waistcoat the good gentleman is asking?"), the un-English conditional politeness of "Let the gentleman say himself what it's worth", the untranslated-formula quality of "I fall at your feet", and the dropped article. This is R1's own move, made here as a craft decision and before the census was built — and it is recorded so that a later reader knows this text is not a neutral witness on the question of whether that move is available: at this site the translator already took it.

What is declared lost either way: the dealer's speech is marked as foreign-accented in Polish and is marked only as foreign-idiomed in this English. Orthography is not a grammatical category, so this site is deliberately not used as an R1 site in the study limb.

D2 — the three-step honorific ladder (¶14, ¶16, ¶24, ¶27, ¶40)

The dealer climbs: Pan dobrodziej (¶14, ¶22) → wielmożny pan (¶16, ¶18, ¶24, ¶27, ¶31, ¶44) → jaśnie pan (¶40, at the moment he asks for more money). Three rungs of a Polish honorific system that English does not have as a system. Rendered the good gentleman / the worshipful gentleman / the illustrious gentleman — which preserves that there is a ladder and preserves the third-person construction, and does not preserve that each rung is a fixed social form with a known addressee-class. Alternative considered and rejected: flattening all three to sir, which is what an idiomatic English text would do and which destroys the climb.

Note against my own interest: rendering these third-person is a choice, not a necessity, and English does have an archaic third-person address to fall back on. So at this site the close rendering already carries the construction, and the site is a poor candidate for testing whether a marking can be recovered — it was never lost.

D3 — the asymmetry, which is the thing English cannot do (¶15, ¶19, ¶25, ¶28, ¶30, ¶32, ¶34, ¶38, ¶41)

Throughout the bargaining scene the narrator addresses the dealer with the intimate/inferior 2sg: chcę od ciebie, Co chcesz, Ile chcesz, Dam ci, nie możesz, ja ci daję, Czegoż ty tam szukasz, bywaj zdrów. The dealer addresses the narrator in the third person honorific throughout. Neither man ever uses the other's form. In Polish this is a single grammatical fact with a single social content — the narrator is a gentleman and the dealer is not, and both of them know it in every sentence.

English has one you. The third-person half survives (D2); the 2sg half does not survive at all, and this is the sharpest declared loss in the text. Alternatives considered: inserting my good man or my friend as vocatives (rejected in the filed text — Prus's narrator never uses a vocative to him, and adding one puts a warmth or a contempt in that the Polish does not specify); using imperative bluntness (be off, ¶32) as a partial carrier, which the filed text does do at that one sentence and nowhere else.

D4 — the diminutives (¶1, ¶6, ¶16, ¶27, ¶49, ¶7, ¶37)

Polish makes them freely and English does not. zbiorek (¶1) → a little collection. kamizelczyna (¶6) → an ailing scrap of a waistcoat: the -ina/-yna suffix is pejorative-pitying, a different suffix from the affectionate -ka in the title's own kamizelka, and English has one register for both. Żydek (¶16) → the little Jew: a diminutive the narrator applies to a grown man, and the whole of his attitude is in the suffix. rubelka (¶27, ¶33) → a little rouble, in the dealer's mouth, wheedling. urzędniczek (¶49) → a minor little clerk, where Polish has one word and I have used three. pokoiku (¶7), stolikiem (¶49), kuferku (¶8) → little room, little table, trunk.

Declared loss: in Polish the diminutive is a grammatical option available on almost any noun, so its repeated use is a texture; in English each one is a lexical choice that draws attention to itself, so the same texture reads as fussiness. I have taken little five times where Prus takes a suffix eight times, and dropped it at kuferku.

D5 — the vocative, and third-person reference to the addressee (¶80, ¶85, ¶81, ¶86)

panie doktorze (¶80) is a vocative case form; English has no vocative and doctor is the same word as the nominative. To co, panie? (¶85) is bare vocative panie — rendered Then what, sir?

małżonek pani (¶81) and Mąż pani (¶86) are the doctor saying, to the wife, the lady's husband — third-person reference to his own addressee's husband, which is the polite form and not a distancing one. Rendered the lady's husband in both places rather than your husband: it keeps the construction and it does read oddly in English, which the Polish does not.

D6 — the impersonal past (¶9, ¶95)

sprzedano z licytacji niepotrzebne rzeczy (¶9) and dłużej niż myślano (¶95) are the Polish impersonal -no/-to past: an action with a grammatically absent agent, not a suppressed one. English must choose a passive (were sold off, than had been thought) or supply somebody. Rendered as passives. Declared loss: the Polish says nobody in particular did this and the English says somebody did it and I am not telling you who.

D7 — aspect (¶5, ¶114, ¶118, ¶139)

codzień chudnął (¶5, imperfective) against Czybym aż tak schudł? (¶118, perfective) — kept growing thinner every day against have I grown as thin as that. miewał też jakby gorączkę (¶114) is the iterative of mieć: he did have something like a fever from time to time. Co parę zaś dni wołał (¶139) iterative: every couple of days he would call. English carries these with adverbs and would, at a cost in weight — Polish puts it inside the verb and spends no words on it.

D8 — Tyś taki tęgi (¶80)

The clitic -ś is the copula fused onto the fronted pronoun: emphatic, intimate, and reassuring all at once, in two syllables. You are so stout has the words and not the fusion. Rendered without compensation in the filed text; Why, you're so stout was the live alternative and was not taken, because why imports a rhetorical stance the Polish clitic does not carry.

D9 — the second person addressed to the reader (¶5)

odrazu domyślasz się — the narrator addresses his reader with the intimate 2sg, which in a Polish essayistic frame is a deliberate move into familiarity. You guess at once. English you is the same word for a stranger and an intimate, so the move is invisible.

D10 — państwa (¶8)

przeniosła się do takich państwa, którzy płacili jej trzy ruble — państwo is the honorific plural noun for a married couple of the propertied class, taking virile agreement. The servant left for gentlefolk; the joke is that gentlefolk here means three roubles a year and a hot dinner. Rendered the sort of people, which loses the class term. The sort of gentlefolk was the alternative and was rejected in the filed text as too visibly archaic for the sentence's flatness — recorded because the loss is real and the alternative was live.

D11 — the title

Kamizelka is itself a diminutive of kamizela. The Waistcoat takes the noun and drops the suffix. No English title carries both; The Little Waistcoat is a children's book. Kept as The Waistcoat, with the loss noted.

D12 — two places where the Polish is doing something the English simply does

chciałabyś tak zaraz (¶134): the conditional carries a feminine ending, so the verb alone says the addressee is a woman. English you would like says nothing, and nothing needs to be said, because the surrounding paragraphs have already established who is speaking to whom. Recorded as a formally-lost marking that costs nothing, which is not the same thing as a marking that survived.

Weszli do domu (¶77): virile plural agreement, so the verb says the group includes a man. Same comment.

The translation

[1] Some people have a bent for collecting curiosities, dearer or less dear, according to what each can afford. I too own a little collection, a modest one, as collections usually are at the start.

[2] There is my play in it, the one I was writing at grammar school during the Latin lessons... There are a few dried flowers, which will have to be replaced with new ones, there is...

[3] It seems there is nothing more, apart from a certain very old and ruined waistcoat.

[4] Here it is. The front faded, the back worn through. Plenty of stains, buttons missing, a small hole at the edge, burnt no doubt by a cigarette. But the most interesting thing about it is the straps. The one that carries the buckle has been shortened and sewn back on in a way no tailor would own, and the other, along almost its whole length, is pricked full of holes by the buckle's teeth.

[5] Looking at it, you guess at once that the owner of the garment must have grown thinner every day, and reached at last the point at which a waistcoat stops being necessary and what becomes very necessary indeed is a dress coat, buttoned up under the chin, from the undertaker's warehouse.

[6] I confess that today I would gladly make somebody a present of this rag of cloth, which is rather a nuisance to me. I have no cabinets for my collection yet, and I should not care, again, to keep an ailing scrap of a waistcoat among my own things. There was a time, though, when I bought it for a price remarkably above its worth, and would have paid dearer still if the man had known how to haggle. A man has moments in his life when he likes to surround himself with objects that remind him of sorrow.

[7] That sorrow was not lodged with me, but in the flat of some near neighbours. From my window I could look every day into the inside of their little room.

[8] In April there were still three of them: the gentleman, the lady, and a small servant girl who slept, as far as I know, on a trunk behind the wardrobe. The wardrobe was dark cherry. In July, if my memory does not deceive me, there were only two of them left, the lady and the gentleman, because the servant had moved to the sort of people who paid her three roubles a year and cooked a dinner every day.

[9] In October there was only — the lady, alone. That is, not entirely alone, since there was still a good deal of furniture in the room: two beds, a table, a wardrobe... But at the beginning of November the unneeded things were sold off at auction, and of all the keepsakes of her husband there remained with the lady only the waistcoat which I now own.

[10] And then at the end of November, one day, the lady called an old-clothes dealer up to the empty flat and sold him her umbrella for two zloty and her husband's waistcoat for forty groszy. Then she locked the flat, crossed the courtyard slowly, gave the key to the porter at the gate, looked for a moment at the window that had once been hers, on which fine flakes of snow were falling, and — vanished beyond the gate.

[11] The dealer was left in the courtyard. He turned up the great collar of his coat, tucked the just-bought umbrella under his arm and, wrapping his hands, red with cold, in the waistcoat, muttered:

[12] "Old clothes, gentlemen... old clothes!..."

[13] I called him up.

[14] "Has the good gentleman something to sell?" he asked, coming in.

[15] "No, I want to buy something off you."

[16] "Then it will be an umbrella the worshipful gentleman is wanting?..." replied the little Jew.

[17] He threw the waistcoat down on the floor, shook the snow off his collar and set about opening the umbrella with great exertion.

[18] "Now that is an article!" he said. "For snow like this, only an umbrella like this... I know the worshipful gentleman could have an umbrella all of silk, two of them even. But that is only good for the summer!..."

[19] "What do you want for the waistcoat?" I asked.

[20] "What waistcoat?..." he answered, taken aback, thinking no doubt of his own.

[21] But he collected himself at once and quickly picked up the one lying on the floor.

[22] "For this waistcoat?... The good gentleman is asking about this waistcoat?..."

[23] And then, as though a suspicion had woken in him, he asked:

[24] "And what would the worshipful gentleman want with a waistcoat like this?!..."

[25] "How much do you want for it?"

[26] The whites of the Jew's eyes flashed yellow, and the tip of his long nose reddened still further.

[27] "The worshipful gentleman will give... a little rouble!" he answered, spreading the goods out before my eyes in such a way as to show all their merits.

[28] "I'll give you half a rouble."

[29] "Half a rouble?... for a garment like this?... It cannot be!" said the dealer.

[30] "Not a grosz more."

[31] "May the worshipful gentleman joke and keep well!" he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "The gentleman knows himself what a thing like this is worth. It is not a garment for a small child, after all, it is for grown persons..."

[32] "Well, if you can't let it go for half a rouble, then be off. I shan't give more."

[33] "Only let the gentleman not be angry!" he broke in, softening. "On my conscience, for half a little rouble I cannot, but — I put myself in the gentleman's own judgment... Let the gentleman say himself what it is worth, and I will agree!... I would sooner make it up out of my own pocket, so long as what the gentleman wants comes about."

[34] "The waistcoat is worth fifty groszy, and I am giving you half a rouble."

[35] "Half a rouble?... Let it be half a rouble then!..." he sighed, pressing the waistcoat into my hands. "Let the loss be mine, so long as I am not left here making wind with my mouth... this wind!..."

[36] And he pointed with his hand at the window, beyond which a cloud of snow was whirling.

[37] When I reached for the money, the dealer, evidently remembering something, snatched the waistcoat away from me once more and began rapidly going through its little pockets.

[38] "What are you looking for in there?"

[39] "Maybe I left something in the pocket, I don't remember!" he answered in the most natural tone in the world, and, handing back my purchase, added:

[40] "Let the illustrious gentleman throw in a ten-piece at least!..."

[41] "Well, keep well!" I said, opening the door.

[42] "I fall at your feet!... I have a very decent fur coat at home besides..."

[43] And sticking his head back in over the threshold, he asked:

[44] "And perhaps the worshipful gentleman would have me bring some sheep's cheeses?..."

[45] A few minutes later he was calling in the yard again: "Old clothes! old clothes!..." — and when I stood at the window, he bowed to me with a friendly smile.

[46] The snow began to fall so heavily that it grew almost dark. I laid the waistcoat on the table and fell to musing, now about the lady who had gone out beyond the gate to nobody knew where, now about the flat standing empty beside my own, now again about the owner of the waistcoat, over whom an ever thicker layer of snow was piling up...

[47] Only three months ago I heard the two of them talking together on a fine September day. In May the lady even — hummed some song once, and he laughed as he read the Holiday Courier. And today...

[48] They had moved into our tenement at the beginning of April. They got up fairly early, drank tea from a tin samovar and went out into town together. She to her lessons, he to his office.

[49] He was a minor little clerk, who looked at his department heads with the sort of wonder a traveller feels at the Tatras. For that he had to work a great deal, whole days at a stretch. I even used to see him at midnight, by the lamp, bent over his little table.

[50] His wife usually sat beside him and sewed. Sometimes, glancing at him, she would break off her work and say in an admonishing tone:

[51] "Come, that will be enough now, go to bed."

[52] "And when will you go to bed?..."

[53] "I... I'll just finish a few more stitches..."

[54] "Well... then I'll write a few more lines..."

[55] Again the two of them bent their heads and did their own work. And again after a while the lady would say:

[56] "Lie down!... lie down!..."

[57] Sometimes my clock answered her words, striking one.

[58] They were young people, neither handsome nor plain, altogether quiet. As far as I remember, the lady was considerably slighter than her husband, who was of quite a stout build. Too stout, I would say, for so small a clerk.

[59] Every Sunday, around noon, they went out for a walk, arm in arm, and came home late in the evening. Their dinner they no doubt ate in town. Once I met them at the gate that divides the Botanical Garden from the Łazienki. They had bought themselves two mugs of excellent water and two large gingerbreads, and wore the calm faces of townspeople accustomed to hot ham with horseradish at their tea.

[60] On the whole, poor people need very little to keep their spiritual balance. A little food, a great deal of work and a great deal of health. The rest somehow finds itself.

[61] My neighbours, so far as it appeared, lacked neither food nor at any rate work. But the health did not always hold.

[62] Somewhere about July the gentleman caught cold, and not badly at that. By a strange coincidence, however, he suffered at the same time a haemorrhage so violent that he actually lost consciousness.

[63] It was night by then. His wife, having settled him on the bed, brought the porter's wife into the room and ran herself for a doctor. She enquired at five doors, but found barely one, and that by accident, in the street.

[64] The doctor, glancing at her in the light of a flickering lamp, thought it proper to calm her first of all. And since she staggered at moments, no doubt from exhaustion, and there was no cab in the street, he gave her his arm, and explained as they went that a haemorrhage proves nothing yet.

[65] "A haemorrhage may come from the larynx, from the stomach, from the nose; from the lungs, rarely ever. Besides, if a man has always been well, has never coughed..."

[66] "Oh, only sometimes!" whispered the lady, stopping to catch her breath.

[67] "Sometimes? That is nothing yet. He may have a slight bronchial catarrh."

[68] "Yes... it is a catarrh!" the lady repeated, aloud now.

[69] "He has never had pneumonia?..."

[70] "Indeed he has!..." the lady answered, stopping again.

[71] Her legs were shaking a little under her.

[72] "Yes, but a long time ago, I suppose?..." the doctor caught it up.

[73] "Oh, very... very long ago!..." she confirmed, hurrying. "Back that winter."

[74] "Eighteen months ago."

[75] "No... But still before the new year... Oh, a long time ago!"

[76] "Ah!... What a dark street this is, and the sky a little overcast into the bargain..." said the doctor.

[77] They went into the house. The lady asked the porter fearfully what news there was — and learned that there was none. In the flat the porter's wife also told her that nothing had been heard, and that the sick man had been dozing.

[78] The doctor woke him carefully, examined him, and also said that it was nothing.

[79] "I said at once that it was nothing!" put in the sick man.

[80] "Oh, nothing!..." the lady repeated, pressing his sweating hands. "I know perfectly well that a haemorrhage may come from the stomach, or from the nose. With you it is certainly from the nose... You are so stout, you need exercise, and you sit still the whole time... Isn't it true, doctor, that he needs exercise?..."

[81] "Yes! yes!... Exercise is necessary in general, but the lady's husband must lie up for a few days. Can he go away to the country?"

[82] "He cannot..." the lady whispered sadly.

[83] "Well — never mind! Then he will stay in Warsaw. I shall come and see him, and in the meantime — let him lie still and rest.

[84] But should the haemorrhage repeat itself..." the doctor added.

[85] "Then what, sir?" asked the wife, going white as wax.

[86] "Well, then nothing. The lady's husband will rest, and it will seal itself over in there..."

[87] "In there... in the nose?" said the lady, clasping her hands before the doctor.

[88] "Yes... in the nose! Of course. Let the lady calm herself, and leave the rest to God. Good night."

[89] The doctor's words so calmed the lady that, after the fright she had been in for several hours, she felt almost gay.

[90] "Well, and what was so terrible about it!" she said, laughing a little and crying a little.

[91] She knelt by the sick man's bed and began kissing his hands.

[92] "What was so terrible!" the gentleman repeated quietly, and smiled. "Think how much blood runs out of a man in war, and afterwards he is well all the same!..."

[93] "Only don't say anything now," the lady begged him.

[94] Outside it had begun to grow light. In summer, as everyone knows, the nights are very short.

[95] The illness dragged on considerably longer than had been thought. The husband no longer went to the office, which troubled him the less in that, being a clerk on wages, he did not need to take leave, and could come back whenever he pleased and — in so far as he might find a place. Since he was healthier when he sat at home, the lady arranged for a few more lessons in the week and met the household's needs with them.

[96] She usually went out into town at eight in the morning. Around one she came back for a couple of hours to cook her husband's dinner on the little stove, and then ran out again for a time.

[97] The evenings, at least, they spent together. And the lady, so as not to be idle, took in a little more sewing.

[98] Somewhere at the end of August the lady met the doctor in the street. They walked a long time together. At last the lady seized the doctor by the hand and said in a pleading tone:

[99] "But do come to us all the same. Perhaps God will grant it!... He grows so much calmer after every visit of yours..."

[100] The doctor promised, and the lady went home looking as though she had been crying. The gentleman too, from being forced to sit still, had turned irritable and full of doubt. He began reproaching his wife with being too anxious over him, with his being going to die in spite of it all, and at last he asked:

[101] "Didn't the doctor tell you that I shan't live a few months?"

[102] The lady went numb.

[103] "What are you saying?" she said. "Where do you get such thoughts?..."

[104] The sick man flew into a rage.

[105] "Oh, come here to me, here!..." he said violently, seizing her by the hands. "Look me straight in the eyes and answer: didn't the doctor tell you?"

[106] And he sank a feverish stare into her. It seemed that under such a look a wall would have whispered out a secret, if it had had one.

[107] A strange calm appeared on the woman's face. She smiled gently, bearing that wild stare. Only her eyes seemed to have glazed over.

[108] "The doctor said," she answered, "that it is nothing, only that you must rest a little..."

[109] The husband suddenly let her go, began to tremble and to laugh, and then, waving his hand, said:

[110] "There, you see what a nervous creature I am!... I had got it fixed in my head that the doctor had given me up... But... you have convinced me... I am easy now!..."

[111] And he laughed more and more merrily at his own fancies.

[112] Nor did such a fit of suspicion ever recur. The wife's gentle calm was, after all, the best indication the sick man had that his condition was not a bad one.

[113] And on what grounds should it have been bad?

[114] There was a cough, true, but — that was from the bronchial catarrh. Sometimes, from sitting so long, blood appeared — from the nose. Well, and he did have something like a fever from time to time, but properly speaking it was not a fever, only — a nervous state of that kind.

[115] On the whole he felt healthier and healthier. He had an irresistible desire for long excursions of some sort, only — he was a little short of strength. There even came a time when he would not lie in bed by day, but sat on a chair, dressed, ready to go out, if only this momentary weakness would leave him.

[116] Only one detail disturbed him.

[117] One day, putting on his waistcoat, he felt that it was somehow very loose.

[118] "Can I have grown as thin as that?..." he whispered.

[119] "Well, naturally you must have got a little thinner," his wife answered. "But one mustn't exaggerate, after all..."

[120] The husband looked at her attentively. She did not even lift her eyes from her work. No, that calm could not be put on!... His wife knows from the doctor that he is not so very ill after all, so she has no reason to be troubled.

[121] At the beginning of September the nervous states, so like a fever, came on more and more strongly, almost whole days at a time.

[122] "It is nonsense!" said the sick man. "On the turn from summer to autumn the healthiest man gets some irritation or other, everybody is out of sorts... The one thing that surprises me is this: why does my waistcoat sit looser and looser on me?... I must have grown dreadfully thin, and naturally I cannot be well until my flesh comes back to me, there is nothing for it!..."

[123] The wife listened to this attentively and had to admit that her husband was right.

[124] The sick man got up out of bed every day and dressed, although without his wife's help he could not pull on a single article of clothing. This much at least she got out of him, that on top he wore not a frock coat but a paletot.

[125] "It's a wonder," he said more than once, looking in the glass, "it's a wonder I have no strength. Why, look at me!..."

[126] "Well, the face always changes easily," his wife put in.

[127] "True, only that I am growing thinner in myself as well..."

[128] "Are you sure it isn't your imagination?" the lady asked, with an accent of great doubt.

[129] He fell to thinking.

[130] "Ha! perhaps you are right... Because even... for some days now I have noticed that... somehow... my waistcoat..."

[131] "Oh, give over!" the lady broke in. "Surely you haven't got fatter..."

[132] "Who knows? Because, so far as I can judge by the waistcoat, then..."

[133] "In that case your strength ought to be coming back."

[134] "Oho! you would like it all at once... First I must at least put on some flesh, surely. I will even tell you that when I do get my flesh back, I still shan't get my strength back at once...

[135] And what are you doing there behind the wardrobe?..." he asked suddenly.

[136] "Nothing. I am looking in the trunk for a towel, and I don't know... whether it is clean."

[137] "Don't strain yourself so, your voice is changing with it... That is a heavy trunk, after all..."

[138] Indeed, the trunk must have been heavy, for the lady had flushed patches on her face. But she was calm.

[139] From then on the sick man paid more and more diligent attention to his waistcoat. And every couple of days he would call his wife over and say:

[140] "There now... just look. Convince yourself: yesterday I could still get a finger in here, look — here... And today I cannot any more. I really am beginning to put on flesh!..."

[141] But one day the sick man's joy knew no bounds. When his wife came back from her lessons, he greeted her with shining eyes and said, deeply moved:

[142] "Listen to me, I will tell you a secret... I have been cheating a little, you see, with this waistcoat. To set your mind at rest, I took the strap in a little myself every day, and that is why — the waistcoat was tight... That way I took the strap yesterday to the very end. I was worrying already, thinking the secret would come out, when suddenly today... Do you know what I am going to tell you?... Today, I give you my most sacred word, instead of taking the strap in, I had to let it out a little!... It was positively tight on me, though only yesterday it was somewhat looser...

[143] Well, now I believe it too, that I shall be well. I myself!... Let the doctor think what he likes..."

[144] The long speech had so exhausted him that he had to move to the bed. There, however, as a man who is beginning to put on flesh without taking in any straps, he did not lie down, but leaned back in his wife's arms as though in an armchair.

[145] "Well, well!..." he whispered. "Who would have expected it?... For two weeks I deceived my wife that the waistcoat was tight, and today it is really tight of itself!...

[146] Well... well!..."

[147] And they sat on, nestling against each other, the whole evening.

[148] The sick man was moved as he had never been.

[149] "My God!" he whispered, kissing his wife's hands, "and I thought I should go on growing thinner like that until... the end. In two months, today is the first time I have believed that I can get well.

[150] Because everyone lies to a sick man, and a wife most of all. But the waistcoat — that will not lie!..."

[151] Today, looking at the old waistcoat, I see that two people worked at its straps. The gentleman — moved the buckle along every day, to set his wife's mind at rest, and the lady every day — shortened the strap, to give her husband heart.

[152] "Will the two of them ever come together again, to tell each other the whole secret of the waistcoat?..." I thought, looking at the sky.

[153] There was almost no sky left above the earth. Only snow was falling, so thick and so cold that even in the graves the ashes of men were freezing.

[154] Yet who shall say that beyond those clouds there is no sun?...