be. Your wife is pregnant. You struck her
last night on her sides and breast. That means that you beat not only
her but the child too. You may have killed him, and your wife might
have died or else have become seriously ill. To have the trouble of
looking after a sick woman is not pleasant. It is wearing, and would
cost you dear, because illness requires medicine, and medicine money.
If you have not killed the child, you may have crippled him, and he
will be born deformed, lop-sided, or hunch-backed. That means that he
will not be able to work, and it is only too important to you that he
should be a good workman. Even if he be born ill, it will be bad
enough, because he will keep his mother from work, and will require
medicine. Do you see what you are doing to yourself? Men who live by
hard work must be strong and healthy, and they should have strong and
healthy children.... Do I speak truly?"

"Yes," assented the listeners.

"But all this will never happen," says Yashka, becoming rather
frightened at the prospect held out to him by the teacher. "She is
healthy, and I cannot have reached the child ... She is a devil--a
hag!" he shouts angrily. "I would ... She will eat me away as rust
eats iron."

"I understand, Yakov, that you cannot help beating your wife," the
teacher's sad and thoughtful voice again breaks in. "You have many
reasons for doing so ... It is your wife's character that causes you to
beat her so incautiously ... But your own dark and sad life ..."

"You are right!" shouts Yakov. "We live in darkness, like the
chimney-sweep when he is in the chimney!"

"You are angry with your life, but your wife is patient; the closest
relation to you--your wife, and you make her suffer for this, simply
because you are stronger than she. She is always with you, and cannot
get away. Don't you see how absurd you are?"

"That is so.... Devil take it! But what shall I do? Am I not a man?"

"Just so! You are a man.... I only wish to tell you that if you
cannot help beating her, then beat her carefully and always remember
that you may injure her health or that of the child. It is not good to
beat pregnant women ... on their belly or on their sides and chests....
Beat her, say, on the neck ... or else take a rope and beat her on some
soft place ..."

The orator finished his speech and looked upon his hearers with his
dark, pathetic eyes, seeming to apologise to them for some unknown
crime.