'It's a good thing I did not marry her then.'
He began taking leave.
'You have no human right to go before supper,' said Ivan Petrovitch as he saw him off. 'It's extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now, perform!' he added, addressing Pava in the hall.
Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:
'Unhappy woman, die!'
All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at the dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear, he thought of everything at once—Vera Iosifovna's novels and Kitten's noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovitch's jokes and Pava's tragic posturing, and thought if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what must the town be?
Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.
'You don't come and see us—why?' she wrote to him. 'I am afraid that you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.
'I must talk to you.—Your E. I.'
He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:
'Tell them, my good fellow, that I can't come to-day; I am very busy. Say I will come in three days or so.'
But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening once to drive past the Turkins' house, he thought he must go in, if only for a moment, but on second thoughts ... did not go in.
And he never went to the Turkins' again.
V
Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets: 'Keep to the ri-i- ight!' it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot. He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the doors with his stick, and says:
'Is that the study? Is that a bedroom? And what's here?'
And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.
He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as district doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places at once. At Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply 'Ionitch': 'Where is Ionitch off to?' or 'Should not we call in Ionitch to a consultation?'
Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has changed; it has become thin and sharp. His temper has changed, too: he has grown ill-humoured and irritable. When he sees his patients he is usually out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and shouts in his disagreeable voice:
'Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions! Don't talk so much!'
He is solitary. He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.
During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had been his one joy, and probably his last. In the evenings he plays
As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his spoke in some conversation:
'What are you talking about? Eh? Whom?'
And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:
'What Turkins are you speaking of? Do you mean the people whose daughter plays on the piano?'
That is all that can be said about him.
And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovitch has grown no older; he is not changed in the least, and still makes jokes and tells anecdotes as of old. Vera Iosifovna still reads her novels aloud to her visitors with eagerness and touching simplicity. And Kitten plays the piano for four hours every day. She has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to the Crimea with her mother. When Ivan Petrovitch sees them off at the station, he wipes his tears as the train starts, and shouts:
'Good-bye, if you please.'
And he waves his handkerchief.
THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY
IT is, as a rule, after losing heavily at cards or after a drinking-bout when an attack of dyspepsia is setting in that Stepan Stepanitch Zhilin wakes up in an exceptionally gloomy frame of mind. He looks sour, rumpled, and dishevelled; there is an expression of displeasure on his grey face, as though he were offended or disgusted by something. He dresses slowly, sips his Vichy water deliberately, and begins walking about the rooms.
'I should like to know what b-b-beast comes in here and does not shut the door!' he grumbles angrily, wrapping his dressing-gown about him and spitting loudly. 'Take away that paper! Why is it lying about here? We keep twenty servants, and the place is more untidy than a pot-house. Who was that ringing? Who the devil is that?'
'That's Anfissa, the midwife who brought our Fedya into the world,' answers his wife.
'Always hanging about ... these cadging toadies!'
'There's no making you out, Stepan Stepanitch. You asked her yourself, and now you scold.'
'I am not scolding; I am speaking. You might find something to do, my dear, instead of sitting with your hands in your lap trying to pick a quarrel. Upon my word, women are beyond my comprehension! Beyond my comprehension! How can they waste whole days doing nothing? A man works like an ox, like a b-beast, while his wife, the partner of his life, sits like a pretty doll, sits and does nothing but watch for an opportunity to quarrel with her husband by way of diversion. It's time to drop these schoolgirlish ways, my dear. You are not a schoolgirl, not a young lady; you are a wife and mother! You turn away? Aha! It's not agreeable to listen to the bitter truth!
'It's strange that you only speak the bitter truth when your liver is out of order.'
'That's right; get up a scene.'
'Have you been out late? Or playing cards?'
'What if I have? Is that anybody's business? Am I obliged to give an account of my doings to any one? It's my own money I lose, I suppose? What I spend as well as what is spent in this house belongs to me—me. Do you hear? To me!'
And so on, all in the same style. But at no other time is Stepan Stepanitch so reasonable, virtuous, stern or just as at dinner, when all his household are sitting about him. It usually begins with the soup. After swallowing the first spoonful Zhilin suddenly frowns and puts down his spoon.
'Damn it all!' he mutters; 'I shall have to dine at a restaurant, I suppose.'
'What's wrong?' asks his wife anxiously. 'Isn't the soup good?'
'One must have the taste of a pig to eat hogwash like that! There's too much salt in it; it smells of dirty rags ... more like bugs than onions.... It's simply revolting, Anfissa Ivanovna,' he says, addressing the midwife. 'Every day I give no end of money for housekeeping.... I deny myself everything, and this is what they provide for my dinner! I suppose they want me to give up the office and go into the kitchen to do the cooking myself.'
