of a chaos. The Secretary is on leave, Khrapov has gone to get married,
and the smaller fry is mostly in the country, making love or occupied
with amateur theatricals. Everybody is so sleepy, tired, and done up
that you can't get any sense out of them. The Secretary's duties are in
the hands of an individual who is deaf in the left ear and in love; the
public has lost its memory; everybody is running about angry and raging,
and there is such a hullabaloo that you can't hear yourself speak.
Confusion and smoke everywhere. And my work is deathly: always the same,
always the same--first a correction, then a reference back, another
correction, another reference back; it's all as monotonous as the waves
of the sea. One's eyes, you understand, simply crawl out of one's head.
Give me some water.... You come out a broken, exhausted man. You would
like to dine and fall asleep, but you don't!--You remember that you live
in the country--that is, you are a slave, a rag, a bit of string, a bit
of limp flesh, and you've got to run round and do errands. Where we live
a pleasant custom has grown up: when a man goes to town every wretched
female inhabitant, not to mention one's own wife, has the power and the
right to give him a crowd of commissions. The wife orders you to run
into the modiste's and curse her for making a bodice too wide across the
chest and too narrow across the shoulders; little Sonya wants a new pair
of shoes; your sister-in-law wants some scarlet silk like the pattern
at twenty copecks and three arshins long.... Just wait; I'll read you.
[Takes a note out of his pocket and reads] A globe for the lamp; one
pound of pork sausages; five copecks' worth of cloves and cinnamon;
castor-oil for Misha; ten pounds of granulated sugar. To bring with you
from home: a copper jar for the sugar; carbolic acid; insect powder, ten
copecks' worth; twenty bottles of beer; vinegar; and corsets for Mlle.
Shanceau at No. 82.... Ouf! And to bring home Misha's winter coat and
goloshes. That is the order of my wife and family. Then there are
the commissions of our dear friends and neighbours--devil take them!
To-morrow is the name-day of Volodia Vlasin; I have to buy a bicycle
for him. The wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Virkhin is in an interesting
condition, and I am therefore bound to call in at the midwife's every
day and invite her to come. And so on, and so on. There are five notes
in my pocket and my handkerchief is all knots. And so, my dea