“Well, why did you laugh?” said her husband.
“Oh, only foolishness. I was thinking all about those lilacs. And you?”
“Oh, mine was foolishness too—and the lilacs. I was just going to say that now the lilac will always be my favourite flower....”
[XIII]
ANATHEMA
“Father Deacon, you’re wasting the candles,” said the deacon’s wife. “It’s time to get up.”
This small, thin, yellow-faced woman treated her husband very harshly. In the school at which she had been educated there had been an opinion that—men were scoundrels, deceivers, and tyrants. But her husband, the deacon, was certainly not a tyrant. He was absolutely in awe of his half-hysterical, half-epileptic, childless wife. The deacon weighed about nine and a half poods[1] of solid flesh; he had a broad chest like the body of a motor-car, an awful voice, and with it all that gentle condescension of manner which often marks the behaviour of extraordinarily strong people in their relations towards the weak.
[1] A pood is 40 Russian lbs., about 36 lbs. English.
It always took the deacon a long time to get his voice in order. This occupation—an unpleasant, long-drawn-out torture—is, of course, well known to all those who have to sing in public: the rubbing with cocaine, the burning with caustic, the gargling with boracic acid. And, still lying upon his bed, Father Olympus began to try his voice.