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Luckily, Father Yakov, in his haste, had forgotten to take the sermons. Kunin rushed up to them, tore them into pieces, and with loathing thrust them under the table. "And I did not know!" he moaned, sinking on to the sofa. "After being here over a year as member of the Rural Board, Honorary Justice of the Peace, member of the School Committee! Blind puppet, egregious idiot!
"Twenty-eight, . . ." said Father Yakov, faintly pressing Kunin's outstretched hand, and for some reason turning crimson. Kunin led his visitor into his study and began looking at him more attentively. "What an uncouth womanish face!" he thought.
"Do you remember fifty years ago God gave us a little baby with flaxen hair? We used always to be sitting by the river then, singing songs . . . under the willows," and laughing bitterly, she added: "The baby girl died." Yakov racked his memory, but could not remember the baby or the willows. "It's your fancy," he said. The priest arrived; he administered the sacrament and extreme unction.
Yakov understood that to beat her incautiously might be injurious to his wife. He is silent, replying to his companions' jokes with confused smiles. "Then again, what is a wife?" philosophises the baker, Mokei Anisimoff. "A wife ... is a friend ... if we look at the matter in that way. She is like a chain, chained to you for life ... and you are both just like galley slaves.
In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With him lived his father's sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked after his household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit. Other relations he had none.
Just as on his first visit, he was hot and perspiring, and sat down on the edge of his chair as he had done then. Kunin determined not to talk about the school not to cast pearls. "I have brought you a list of books for the school, Pavel Mihailovitch, . . ." Father Yakov began. "Thank you." But everything showed that Father Yakov had come for something else besides the list.
"Eh!" exclaimed Yakov Tarasovich regretfully, with a shake of the head. "You've spoilt the whole mass for me, dear! How could you be so straightforward in your dealings with the man? Psha! The devil drove me to send you there! I should have gone myself. I would have turned him around my finger!" "Hardly! He says, 'I am an oak." "An oak? And I am a saw. An oak!
It often happened, too, that the teacher read lectures on practical morality in the eating-house. "I saw you," he said to the painter Yashka Tyarin, "I saw you, Yakov, beating your wife ..." Yashka was "touched with paint" after two glasses of vodki, and was in a slightly uplifted condition. The people looked at him, expecting him to make a row, and all were silent. "Did you see me?
Yakov, I am going to send a telegram to the station myself, in a few minutes, by my coachman. You can give him the general's telegram, too." "Very well, madam." "And another thing. I shall not go to bed. If there is any change in your master's condition, Yakov, come and knock at my door at once. I beg of you, tell me the very moment anything happens.
Some dogs joined in the chase barking. Someone burst into a roar of laughter, then gave a whistle; the dogs barked with even more noise and unanimity. Then a dog must have bitten Rothschild, as a desperate, sickly scream was heard. Yakov went for a walk on the grazing ground, then wandered on at random in the outskirts of the town, while the street boys shouted: "Here's Bronze! Here's Bronze!"
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