And she turned away, sat down at the table, and took up her book again.
In the early hours of the morning a horse was yoked, and Agrenev drove with Bitska over the main road to the station. It was wet. The sombre figures of workmen were dimly seen through the rain and darkness, hastening to the factory. The staff drove round in a motor as the shrill sound of the factory horn split the silence.
Bitska in a bowler-hat, red-faced, with thin whiskers such as are worn by the Letts, looked gravely round:
"You have not slept, Robert Edouardovitch?" asked Agrenev.
"No, I have not, and I am not in a good humour either." The man was silent a moment, then burst out; "Now I am forty years, and my vife she is eighteen. I am in vants of an earnest housekeeper. But my vife, she is always jesting and dragging me by the—how do you call it—the beard! And laughing and larking…." His little narrow eyes wrinkled up into a wry smile: "Ah, the larking vench!"
THE WOLF'S RAVINE
In childhood, as a small lad, Alexander Alexandrovitch Agrenev had heard from listening to his mother's conversation how—lo and behold! one morning at 9 o'clock Nina Kallistratovna Zamotkina had proceeded with her daughter to Doctor Chasovnikov's flat, in order to deliver a slap in the face to his wife for having broken up the family hearth by a liaison with Paul Alexander Zamotkin, Nina Kallistratovna's husband.
The child Agrenev had vividly pictured to himself how Nina Kallistratovna had walked, holding her daughter with one hand, an attaché-case in the other: of course her bearing must have been singular, as she was going to the flat to administer a slap in the face; no doubt she had walked either in a squatting or a bandy-legged fashion. The family hearth must have been something extremely valuable, as she was going to deliver a slap in the face on its account—perhaps it was some kind of stove.
It was highly interesting—in the child's imagination—to picture Nina Kallistratovna entering the flat, swinging back her arm, and delivering the slap: her gait, her arms, the flat—all had a sudden hidden and exceedingly curious meaning for the child.
This had remained out of his childhood memories of the little town and province, where all had seemed unusual as childhood itself.