"PAVEL VASSILITCH!" cries Pelageya Ivanovna, waking her husband.
"Pavel Vassilitch! You might go and help Styopa with his lessons,
he is sitting crying over his book. He can't understand something
again!"
Pavel Vassilitch gets up, makes the sign of the cross over his mouth
as he yawns, and says softly: "In a minute, my love!"
The cat who has been asleep beside him gets up too, straightens out
its tail, arches its spine, and half-shuts its eyes. There is
stillness. . . . Mice can be heard scurrying behind the wall-paper.
Putting on his boots and his dressing-gown, Pavel Vassilitch,
crumpled and frowning from sleepiness, comes out of his bedroom
into the dining-room; on his entrance another cat, engaged in
sniffing a marinade of fish in the window, jumps down to the floor,
and hides behind the cupboard.
"Who asked you to sniff that!" he says angrily, covering the fish
with a sheet of newspaper. "You are a pig to do that, not a cat. . . ."
From the dining-room there is a door leading into the nursery.
There, at a table covered with stains and deep scratches, sits
Styopa, a high-school boy in the second class, with a peevish
expression of face and tear-stained eyes. With his knees raised
almost to his chin, and his hands clasped round them, he is swaying
to and fro like a Chinese idol and looking crossly at a sum book.
"Are you working?" asks Pavel Vassilitch, sitting down to the table
and yawning. "Yes, my boy. . . . We have enjoyed ourselves, slept,
and eaten pancakes, and to-morrow comes Lenten fare, repentance,
and going to work. Every period of time has its limits. Why are
your eyes so red? Are you sick of learning your lessons? To be sure,
after pancakes, lessons are nasty to swallow. That's about it."
"What are you laughing at the child for?" Pelageya Ivanovna calls
from the next room. "You had better show him instead of laughing
at him. He'll get a one again to-morrow, and make me miserable."
"What is it you don't understand?" Pavel Vassilitch asks Styopa.
"Why this . . . division of fractions," the boy answers crossly.
"The division of fractions by fractions. . . ."
"H'm . . . queer boy! What is there in it? There's nothing to
understand in it. Learn the rules, and that's all. . . . To divide
a fraction by a fraction you must multiply the numerator of the
first fraction by the denominator of the second, and that will be
the numerator of the quotient. . . . In this case, the numerator
of the first fraction. . . ."
"I know that without your telling me," Styopa interrupts him,
flicking a walnut shell off the table. "Show me the proof."
"The proof? Very well, give me a pencil. Listen. . . . Suppose we
want to divide seven eighths by two fifths. Well, the point of it
is, my boy, that it's required to divide these fractions by each
other. . . . Have they set the samovar?"
"I don't know."
"It's time for tea. . . . It's past seven. Well, now listen. We
will look at it like this. . . . Suppose we want to divide seven
eighths not by two fifths but by two, that is, by the numerator
only. We divide it, what do we get?
"Seven sixteenths."
"Right. Bravo! Well, the trick of it is, my boy, that if we . . .
so if we have divided it by two then. . . . Wait a bit, I am getting
muddled. I remember when I was at school, the teacher of arithmetic
was called Sigismund Urbanitch, a Pole. He used to get into a muddle
over every lesson. He would begin explaining some theory, get in a
tangle, and turn crimson all over and race up and down the class-room
as though someone were sticking an awl in his back, then he would
blow his nose half a dozen times and begin to cry. But you know we
were magnanimous to him, we pretended not to see it. 'What is it,
Sigismund Urbanitch?' we used to ask him. 'Have you got toothache?'
And what a set of young ruffians, regular cut-throats, we were, but
yet we were magnanimous, you know! There weren't any boys like you
in my day, they were all great hulking fellows, great strapping
louts, one taller than another. For instance, in our third class,
there was Mamahin. My goodness, he was a solid chap! You know, a
regular maypole, seven feet high. When he moved, the floor shook;
when he brought his great fist down on your back, he would knock
the breath out of your body! Not only we boys, but even the teachers
were afraid of him. So this Mamahin used to . . ."
Pelageya Ivanovna's footsteps are heard through the door. Pavel
Vassilitch winks towards the door and says:
"There's mother coming. Let's get to work. Well, so you see, my
boy," he says, raising his voice. "This fraction has to be multiplied
by that one. Well, and to do that you have to take the numerator
of the first fraction. . ."
"Come to tea!" cries Pelageya Ivanovna. Pavel Vassilitch and his
son abandon arithmetic and go in to tea. Pelageya Ivanovna is already
sitting at the table with an aunt who never speaks, another aunt
who is deaf and dumb, and Granny Markovna, a midwife who had helped
Styopa into the world. The samovar is hissing and puffing out steam
which throws flickering shadows on the ceiling. The cats come in
from the entry sleepy and melancholy with their tails in the
air. . . .
"Have some jam with your tea, Markovna," says Pelageya Ivanovna,
addressing the midwife. "To-morrow the great fast begins. Eat well
to-day."
Markovna takes a heaped spoonful of jam hesitatingly as though it
were a powder, raises it to her lips, and with a sidelong look at
Pavel Vassilitch, eats it; at once her face is overspread with a
sweet smile, as sweet as the jam itself.
"The jam is particularly good," she says. "Did you make it yourself,
Pelageya Ivanovna, ma'am?"
"Yes. Who else is there to do it? I do everything myself. Styopotchka,
have I given you your tea too weak? Ah, you have drunk it already.
Pass your cup, my angel; let me give you some more."
"So this Mamahin, my boy, could not bear the French master," Pavel
Vassilitch goes on, addressing his son. "'I am a nobleman,' he
used to shout, 'and I won't allow a Frenchman to lord it over me!
We beat the French in 1812!' Well, of course they used to thrash
him for it . . . thrash him dre-ead-fully, and sometimes when he
saw they were meaning to thrash him, he would jump out of window,
and off he would go! Then for five or six days afterwards he would
not show himself at the school. His mother would come to the
head-master and beg him for God's sake: 'Be so kind, sir, as to
find my Mishka, and flog him, the rascal!' And the head-master would
say to her: 'Upon my word, madam, our five porters aren't a match
for him!'"
"Good heavens, to think of such ruffians being born," whispers
Pelageya Ivanovna, looking at her husband in horror. "What a trial
for the poor mother!"
A silence follows. Styopa yawns loudly, and scrutinises the Chinaman
on the tea-caddy whom he has seen a thousand times already. Markovna
and the two aunts sip tea carefully out of their saucers. The air
is still and stifling from the stove. . . . Faces and gestures
betray the sloth and repletion that comes when the stomach is full,
and yet one must go on eating. The samovar, the cups, and the
table-cloth are cleared away, but still the family sits on at the
table. . . . Pelageya Ivanovna is continually jumping up and, with
an expression of alarm on her face, running off into the kitchen,
to talk to the cook about the supper. The two aunts go on sitting
in the same position immovably, with their arms folded across their
bosoms and doze, staring with their pewtery little eyes at the lamp.
Markovna hiccups every minute and asks:
"Why is it I have the hiccups? I don't think I have eaten anything
to account for it . . . nor drunk anything either. . . . Hic!"
Pavel Vassilitch and Styopa sit side by side, with their heads
touching, and, bending over the table, examine a volume of the
"Neva" for 1878.
"'The monument of Leonardo da Vinci, facing the gallery of Victor
Emmanuel at Milan.' I say! . . . After the style of a triumphal
arch. . . . A cavalier with his lady. . . . And there are little
men in the distance. . . ."
"That little man is like a schoolfellow of mine called Niskubin,"
says Styopa.
"Turn over. . . . 'The proboscis of the common house-fly seen under
the microscope.' So that's a proboscis! I say--a fly. Whatever
would a bug look like under a microscope, my boy? Wouldn't it be
horrid!"
The old-fashioned clock in the drawing-room does not strike, but
coughs ten times huskily as though it had a cold. The cook, Anna,
comes into the dining-room, and plumps down at the master's feet.
"Forgive me, for Christ's sake, Pavel Vassilitch!" she says, getting
up, flushed all over.
"You forgive me, too, for Christ's sake," Pavel Vassilitch responds
unconcernedly.
In the same manner, Anna goes up to the other members of the family,
plumps down at their feet, and begs forgiveness. She only misses
out Markovna to whom, not being one of the gentry, she does not
feel it necessary to bow down.
Another half-hour passes in stillness and tranquillity. The "Neva"
is by now lying on the sofa, and Pavel Vassilitch, holding up his
finger, repeats by heart some Latin verses he has learned in his
childhood. Styopa stares at the finger with the wedding ring, listens
to the unintelligible words, and dozes; he rubs his eyelids with
his fists, and they shut all the tighter.
"I am going to bed . . ." he says, stretching and yawning.
"What, to bed?" says Pelageya Ivanovna. "What about supper before
the fast?"
"I don't want any."
"Are you crazy?" says his mother in alarm. "How can you go without
your supper before the fast? You'll have nothing but Lenten food
all through the fast!"
Pavel Vassilitch is scared too.
"Yes, yes, my boy," he says. "For seven weeks mother will give you
nothing but Lenten food. You can't miss the last supper before the
fast."
"Oh dear, I am sleepy," says Styopa peevishly.
"Since that is how it is, lay the supper quickly," Pavel Vassilitch
cries in a fluster. "Anna, why are you sitting there, silly? Make
haste and lay the table."
Pelageya Ivanovna clasps her hands and runs into the kitchen with
an expression as though the house were on fire.
"Make haste, make haste," is heard all over the house. "Styopotchka
is sleepy. Anna! Oh dear me, what is one to do? Make haste."
Five minutes later the table is laid. Again the cats, arching their
spines, and stretching themselves with their tails in the air, come
into the dining-room. . . . The family begin supper. . . . No one
is hungry, everyone's stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.