“What do you want?”
“We have two sons, kind master, and they should have been sent to school long ago, but nobody ever comes here and we have no one to tell us anything. I myself know nothing. If they don’t go to school, they will be taken into the army as common Cossacks. That is hard, master. They can’t read or write, they are worse off than peasants, and their father himself despises them, and won’t let them come into the house. Is it their fault? If only the younger one, at least, could be sent to school! It’s a pity to see them so!” she wailed, and her voice trembled. It seemed incredible that a woman so little and young could already have grown-up children. “Ah, it is such a pity!” she said again.
“You know nothing about it, mother, and it’s none of your business,” said Jmukin, appearing in the doorway. “Don’t pester our guest with your wild talk. Go away, mother!”
Lyuboff went out, repeating once more in a high little voice as she reached the hall:
“Ah, it is such a pity!”
A bed was made up for the attorney on a sofa in the drawing-room, and Jmukin lit the little shrine lamp, so that he might not be left in the dark. Then he lay down in his own bedroom. Lying there he thought of many things: his soul, his old age, and his recent stroke which had given him such a fright and had so sharply reminded him of his approaching death. He liked to philosophise when he was alone in the dark, and at these times he imagined himself to be a very deep and serious person indeed, whose attention only questions of importance could engage. He now kept thinking that he would like to get hold of some one idea unlike any other idea he had ever had, something significant that would be the lodestar of his life. He wanted to think of some law for himself, that would make his life as serious and deep as he himself personally was. And here was an idea! He could go without meat now, and deprive himself of everything that was superfluous to his existence! The time would surely come when people would no longer kill animals or one another, it could not but come, and he pictured this future in his mind’s eye, and distinctly saw himself living at peace with all the animal world. Then he remembered the pigs again, and his brain began to reel.
“What a muddle it all is!” he muttered, heaving a deep sigh.
“Are you asleep?” he asked.
“No.”
Jmukin rose from his bed, and stood on the threshold of the door in his nightshirt, exposing to his guest’s view his thin, sinewy legs, as straight as posts.