"Once upon a time a wench Appeared before a judge's bench.."
Before he went to bed Agrenev laid out cards to play Patience, ate a cold supper, stood a long time staring at the light from under Anna's door, then knocked.
He entered for a moment, and found her sitting at a table with a book, which she laid down upon an open copybook diary. When, when is he to know what is written there?
"I go to Moscow the first thing to-morrow on Detachment. Here is some money for the housekeeping."
"In a week--that is, Friday next week. Is there anything you need?"
"No thanks." She rose, came close and kissed him on the cheek near his lips. "A safe journey. Goodbye. Do not waken Asya."
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!"
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.