But the shoemaker's dream was not to be fulfilled. The house did not crumble down, but was bought by Petrusha. As soon as the sale was complete, Petrusha spent two days creeping into every hole and corner, and feeling and testing the old box of rubbish. Then came bricks and boards, scaffolding surrounded the whole house, and for three months on end it creaked and quivered under the blows of the workmen's hatchets. All round there was sawing and chopping, nails were driven in, old beams torn out with loud crackings and whirls of dust, and new ones put in the places, till at last the old shanty had received a new clothing of planks, and its façade was widened by a new outbuilding. Broad and thickset, the house rose now from the ground straight and sturdy, as though it had driven new roots far into the earth; along its front just below the roof, Petrusha had a big hanging sign put up, which bore the statement in golden letters on a blue ground:
"The Jolly Companions Tavern, P. S. Filimonov."
"And inside it's rotten through and through," said Perfishka mockingly.
Ilya, to whom he made this comment, smiled in sympathy. To him, too, this house, after its rebuilding, seemed a gigantic fraud. He remembered Pashka, who must now be living in another place, and seeing quite different things.
Ilya dreamed, like the cobbler, of other doors and windows and men. Now life in the house became even more unpleasant than before. The old lime-tree fell a victim to the axe, the intimate little corner in its shadow disappeared, and a new outbuilding occupied its place, and all the other favourite places where the children used to sit together and chatter, existed no longer. Only where once the smithy stood, there was one quiet little corner left, behind a heap of old chips and rotten wood. But to sit there was to court uncanny feelings, as though beneath the pile of wood lay Savel's wife with a shattered skull.
Petrusha set aside a new place for Terenti--a tiny little room next the big bar room. Through the thin partition with green paper penetrated all the noise, the smell of brandy and the reek of tobacco. It was clean and dry in Terenti's new room, and yet it was more uncomfortable there than in the cellar. The window looked on the grey wall of the shed, which concealed the sky with the sun and stars, whereas, from the old cellar window, any one kneeling down could see them all quite easily.