“If your wife is here you want the samovar. But take it later. I’ve two. And now take the teapot from the table. It’s hot, boiling hot. Take everything, take the sugar, all of it. Bread … there’s plenty of bread; all of it. There’s some veal. I’ve a rouble.”
“Give it me, friend, I’ll pay it back to-morrow! Ach, Kirillov!”
“Is it the same wife who was in Switzerland? That’s a good thing. And your running in like this, that’s a good thing too.”
“Kirillov!” cried Shatov, taking the teapot under his arm and carrying the bread and sugar in both hands. “Kirillov, if … if you could get rid of your dreadful fancies and give up your atheistic ravings … oh, what a man you’d be, Kirillov!”
“One can see you love your wife after Switzerland. It’s a good thing you do—after Switzerland. When you want tea, come again. You can come all night, I don’t sleep at all. There’ll be a samovar. Take the rouble, here it is. Go to your wife, I’ll stay here and think about you and your wife.”
Marya Shatov was unmistakably pleased at her husband’s haste and fell upon the tea almost greedily, but there was no need to run for the samovar; she drank only half a cup and swallowed a tiny piece of bread. The veal she refused with disgust and irritation.
“You are ill, Marie, all this is a sign of illness,” Shatov remarked timidly as he waited upon her.
“Of course I’m ill, please sit down. Where did you get the tea if you haven’t any?”
Shatov told her about Kirillov briefly. She had heard something of him.
“I know he is mad; say no more, please; there are plenty of fools. So you’ve been in America? I heard, you wrote.”