ou four
roubles for such a cigarette-case, but I won't take a farthing.' The
doctor will laugh and say: 'Oh, all right, all right.... I see! But
it's a pity you are a drunkard....' I know how to manage the gentry,
old girl. There isn't a gentleman I couldn't talk to. Only God grant we
don't get off the road. Oh, how it is blowing! One's eyes are full of
snow."

And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically
to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of
words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain
were even more numerous. Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares,
unlooked-for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could
not recover himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though
in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he
was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler
and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man,
weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.

The turner remembered that his trouble had begun the evening before.
When he had come home yesterday evening, a little drunk as usual, and
from long-established habit had begun swearing and shaking his fists,
his old woman had looked at her rowdy spouse as she had never looked
at him before. Usually, the expression in her aged eyes was that of a
martyr, meek like that of a dog frequently beaten and badly fed; this
time she had looked at him sternly and immovably, as saints in the holy
pictures or dying people look. From that strange, evil look in her eyes
the trouble had begun. The turner, stupefied with amazement, borrowed a
horse from a neighbor, and now was taking his old woman to the hospital
in the hope that, by means of powders and ointments, Pavel Ivanitch
would bring back his old woman's habitual expression.

"I say, Matryona,..." the turner muttered, "if Pavel Ivanitch asks
you whether I beat you, say, 'Never!' and I never will beat you again. I
swear it. And did I ever beat you out of spite? I just beat you without
thinking. I am sorry for you. Some men wouldn't trouble, but here I am
taking you.... I am doing my best. And the way it snows, the way it
snows! Thy Will be done, O Lord! God grant we don't get off the road....
Does your side ache, Matryona, that you don't speak? I ask you,
does your side ache?"

It struck him as strange that the snow on his old w