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Updated: May 18, 2025
Daryushka would come out of the kitchen and with an expression of blank dejection would stand in the doorway to listen, with her face propped on her fist. "Eh!" Mihail Averyanitch would sigh. "To expect intelligence of this generation!" And he would describe how wholesome, entertaining, and interesting life had been in the past.
The wife of a battalion commander, a queer woman, used to put on an officer's uniform and drive off into the mountains in the evening, alone, without a guide. It was said that she had a love affair with some princeling in the native village. "Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother..." Daryushka would sigh. "And how we drank! And how we ate! And what desperate liberals we were!"
He was ashamed to pass by the shop and look at the woman who owned it. He owed thirty-two roubles for beer already. There was money owing to the landlady also. Daryushka sold old clothes and books on the sly, and told lies to the landlady, saying that the doctor was just going to receive a large sum of money.
There he lay on the table, with open eyes, and the moon shed its light upon him at night. In the morning Sergey Sergeyitch came, prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former chief's eyes. Next day Andrey Yefimitch was buried. Mihail Averyanitch and Daryushka were the only people at the funeral.
Every half-hour he would pour himself out a glass of vodka and drink it without taking his eyes off the book. Then without looking at it he would feel for the cucumber and bite off a bit. At three o'clock he would go cautiously to the kitchen door; cough, and say, "Daryushka, what about dinner? . ."
"I am always glad to see you." The friends would sit on the sofa in the study and for some time would smoke in silence. "Daryushka, what about the beer?" Andrey Yefimitch would say. They would drink their first bottle still in silence, the doctor brooding and Mihail Averyanitch with a gay and animated face, like a man who has something very interesting to tell.
The monotonous, tedious work lulled his thoughts to sleep in some unaccountable way, and the time passed quickly while he thought of nothing. Even sitting in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with Daryushka or picking over the buckwheat grain, seemed to him interesting. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church.
After his dinner a rather poor and untidily served one Andrey Yefimitch would walk up and down his rooms with his arms folded, thinking. The clock would strike four, then five, and still he would be walking up and down thinking. Occasionally the kitchen door would creak, and the red and sleepy face of Daryushka would appear.
His actions seemed strange. Often Mihail Averyanitch did not find him at home, which had never happened in the past, and Daryushka was greatly perturbed, for the doctor drank his beer now at no definite time, and sometimes was even late for dinner. One day it was at the end of June Dr. Hobotov went to see Andrey Yefimitch about something.
It was between four and five in the afternoon the time when Andrey Yefimitch usually walked up and down his rooms, and Daryushka asked whether it was not time for his beer. It was a still, bright day. "I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you see," said the doctor. "It is quite spring." "What month is it? March?" asked Ivan Dmitritch. "Yes, the end of March."
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