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Updated: May 8, 2025
"No, I don't like that," says Kiryakov, looking coldly and steadily at the midwife. "An arrangement beforehand is best. I don't want to take advantage of you and you don't want to take advantage of me. To avoid misunderstandings it is more sensible for us to make an arrangement beforehand." "I really don't know there is no fixed price."
The midwife looks intently but does not see a cab. "I suppose it is not far?" she asks. "No, not far," Kiryakov answers grimly. They walk down one turning, a second, a third. . . . Kiryakov strides along, and even in his step his respectability and positiveness is apparent. "What awful weather!" the midwife observes to him.
Kiryakov gets up with a sigh and walks with solid dignity out of the room. "What a man, bless him!" says the midwife to the mother. "He's so stern and does not smile." The mother tells her that he is always like that. . . . He is honest, fair, prudent, sensibly economical, but all that to such an exceptional degree that simple mortals feel suffocated by it.
"The basins must be properly washed and put away in the store cupboard," says Kiryakov, coming into the bedroom. "These bottles must be put away too: they may come in handy." What he says is very simple and ordinary, but the midwife for some reason feels flustered. She begins to be afraid of the man and shudders every time she hears his footsteps.
The astonished and disconcerted midwife fastens the door after him and goes back into her bedroom. "He's good-looking, respectable, but how queer, God bless the man! . . ." she thinks as she gets into bed. But in less than half an hour she hears another ring; she gets up and sees the same Kiryakov again. "Extraordinary the way things are mismanaged.
In the morning as she is preparing to depart she sees Kiryakov's little son, a pale, close-cropped schoolboy, in the dining-room drinking his tea. . . . Kiryakov is standing opposite him, saying in his flat, even voice: "You know how to eat, you must know how to work too.
Kiryakov takes off his overcoat and goes into the parlour. The greenish light of the lamp lies sparsely on the cheap furniture in patched white covers, on the pitiful flowers and the posts on which ivy is trained. . . . There is a smell of geranium and carbolic. The little clock on the wall ticks timidly, as though abashed at the presence of a strange man.
"In that case I regret that I have troubled you for nothing. . . . I have the honour to wish you good-bye." "Well, you are a man!" says Marya Petrovna, seeing him into the entry. "I will come for three roubles if that will satisfy you." Kiryakov frowns and ponders for two full minutes, looking with concentration on the floor, then he says resolutely, "No," and goes out into the street.
The gentleman walks into the entry and Marya Petrovna sees facing her a tall, well-made man, no longer young, but with a handsome, severe face and bushy whiskers. "I am a collegiate assessor, my name is Kiryakov," he says. "I came to fetch you to my wife. Only please make haste." "Very good . . ." the midwife assents. "I'll dress at once, and I must trouble you to wait for me in the parlour."
"Yes, that's agreeable," said Kiryakov, preserving the wooden expression of his face, "though indeed, on the other hand, to have more children you must have more money. The baby is not born fed and clothed." A guilty expression comes into the mother's face, as though she had brought a creature into the world without permission or through idle caprice.
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