Scene IV

BARSSEGH. Yes, yes; go and never come back.

KHALI. I wish water lay in front of him and a drawn sword behind.

BARSSEGH. This fellow is a veritable curse!

KHALI. Yes, he is, indeed.

BARSSEGH. The devil take him! If he is going to utter such slanders, I hope he will always do it here, and not do me harm with outsiders.

KHALI. You are to blame for it yourself. Why do you have anything to do with the good-for-nothing fellow?

BARSSEGH. There you go! Do I have anything to do with him? He is always at my heels, like my own shadow.

KHALI. Can't you forbid him to enter your doors?

BARSSEGH. So that he will not let me pass by in the streets? Do you want him to make me the talk of the town?

KHALI. Then don't speak to him any more.

BARSSEGH. As if I took pleasure in it! It is all the same to him whether one speaks to him or not.

KHALI. What are we to do with him, then?

BARSSEGH [

angrily

]. Why do you fasten yourself on to me like a gadfly? Have I not trouble enough already? [

Beating his hands together

.] How could you let him escape? You are good for nothing!

KHALI. What could I do, then, if you were stingy about the money? If you had promised the 10,000 rubles, you would have seen how easily and quickly everything would have been arranged.

BARSSEGH. If he insists upon so much he may go to the devil. For 10,000 rubles I will find a better man for my daughter.

KHALI. I know whom you mean. Give me the money and I will arrange the thing to-day.

BARSSEGH [

derisively

]. Give it! How easily you can say it! Is that a mulberry-tree, then, that one has only to shake and thousands will fall from it? Don't hold my rubles so cheaply; for every one of them I have sold my soul twenty times.

KHALI. If I can only get sight of that insolent Salome, I'll shake a

cart-load of dirt over her head. Only let her meet me!

[Exit, left.