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"I used not to think of the hour of death. . . . I fancied I could have given death points and won the game if we had had an encounter; but now. . . . But what's the good of talking!" Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy. He suddenly had a passionate longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those tears would have tasted sweet and refreshing.
"She sleeps in peace," said Shapkin, breaking the silence. "It's nothing to her now that she took the blame on herself and drank brandy. You must own, Boris Petrovitch . . . ." "Own what?" Uzelkov asked gloomily. "Why. . . . However hateful the past, it was better than this." And Shapkin pointed to his grey head.
How could you?" cried Uzelkov, frowning. "If you couldn't or wouldn't have given it her, you might have written to me. . . . And I didn't know! I didn't know!" "My dear fellow, what use would it have been for me to write, considering that she wrote to you herself when she was lying in the hospital afterwards?" "Yes, but I was so taken up then with my second marriage.
He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . . His daughter was married the other day." Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office. When he walked out of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was midday. He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him.
There followed a shower of exclamations, questions, recollections. "This is a surprise! This is unexpected!" cackled Shapkin. "What can I offer you? Do you care for champagne? Perhaps you would like oysters? My dear fellow, I have had so much from you in my time that I can't offer you anything equal to the occasion. . . ." "Please don't put yourself out . . ." said Uzelkov.
A moisture came into his eyes and there was a lump in his throat, but . . . Shapkin was standing beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before a witness. He turned back abruptly and went into the church.
From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten. "And do you remember Uzelkov?" he asked the old waiter about himself. "Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember." "I don't remember, sir." "How is it you don't remember?
"I must have fallen asleep," she thought with a sigh of relief. UZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it.
After standing for ten minutes, with a gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin. A YOUNG peasant, with white eyebrows and eyelashes and broad cheekbones, in a torn sheepskin and big black felt overboots, waited till the Zemstvo doctor had finished seeing his patients and came out to go home from the hospital; then he went up to him, diffidently. "Please, your honour," he said.
"Our cemetery is a pretty one," said Uzelkov, "quite a garden!" "Yes, but it is a pity thieves steal the tombstones. . . . And over there, beyond that iron monument on the right, Sofya Mihailovna is buried. Would you like to see?" The friends turned to the right and walked through the deep snow to the iron monument. "Here it is," said Shapkin, pointing to a little slab of white marble.
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