And for a long time afterwards they tormented Klavdia with having eaten a pound of raisins. They deducted the price of the raisins from her wages and told the story to everyone who came to the house.
The cat, as if attracted by this uproar, had left the kitchen, sidling along the walls, sat down near Peredonov and looked at him with its avid, evil eyes. Peredonov bent down to catch the animal, which snarled savagely, scratched Peredonov's hand and ran and hid behind the sideboard. It peeped out from there and its narrow green eyes gleamed.
"It might be a were-wolf!" thought Peredonov in fear.
In the meantime Varvara, still thinking about Pilnikov, said:
"Why do you spend all your evenings playing billiards? You might occasionally drop in at the students' lodgings. They know that the instructors rarely come to see them and that the inspector only comes once a year, so that all sorts of indecencies, card-playing and drunkenness go on. You might, for instance, call on this disguised girl. You'd better go late, about bed-time—that would be a good time to find her out and embarrass her."
Peredonov reflected a while and then burst out laughing.
"Varvara's certainly a sly rogue!" he thought, "she can teach me a thing or two."
[CHAPTER XII]
Peredonov went to Vespers in the school chapel. There he placed himself behind the students and looked attentively to see how they behaved. It seemed to him that some of them were mischievous, talked, whispered and laughed. He noticed who they were and tried to memorise their names. There were a number of them and he reproached himself for not having brought a piece of paper and a pencil with him to write their names down. He felt depressed because the students behaved so badly and no one paid any attention to it, although the Head-Master and the inspector with their wives and children were present. As a matter of fact, the students were orderly and quiet—some of them crossed themselves absently, with their thoughts far away from the church, others prayed diligently. Only very rarely did one of them whisper to his neighbour—two or three words perhaps, without turning their heads, and the other always replied as briefly and quietly, sometimes with no more than a quick movement, a look, a shrug or a smile. But these insignificant movements, unnoticed by the form master, aroused an illusion of great disorder in Peredonov's dull, perturbed mind. Even in his tranquil moments Peredonov, like all coarse people, could not appraise small incidents: either he did not notice them at all or he exaggerated their importance. Now that he was agitated by expectations, his perceptions served him even worse, and little by little the whole reality became obscured before him by a thin smoke of detestable and evil illusions.