“Let my illness alone!” cried Sysoev, angrily.  “What is it to do with you?  They all keep repeating it at me:  illness! illness! illness! . . .  As though I need your sympathy!  Besides, where have you picked up the notion that I am ill?  I was ill before the examinations, that’s true, but now I have completely recovered, there is nothing left of it but weakness.”

“You have regained your health, well, thank God,” said the scripture teacher, Father Nikolay, a young priest in a foppish cinnamon-coloured cassock and trousers outside his boots.  “You ought to rejoice, but you are irritable and so on.”

“You are a nice one, too,” Sysoev interrupted him.  “Questions ought to be straightforward, clear, but you kept asking riddles.  That’s not the thing to do!”

By combined efforts they succeeded in soothing him and making him sit down to the table.  He was a long time making up his mind what to drink, and pulling a wry face drank a wine-glass of some green liqueur; then he drew a bit of pie towards him, and sulkily picked out of the inside an egg with onion on it.  At the first mouthful it seemed to him that there was no salt in it.  He sprinkled salt on it and at once pushed it away as the pie was too salt.

At dinner Sysoev was seated between the inspector and Bruni.  After the first course the toasts began, according to the old-established custom.

“I consider it my agreeable duty,” the inspector began, “to propose a vote of thanks to the absent school wardens, Daniel Petrovitch and . . . and . . . and . . .”

“And Ivan Petrovitch,” Bruni prompted him.

“And Ivan Petrovitch Kulikin, who grudge no expense for the school, and I propose to drink their health. . . .”

“For my part,” said Bruni, jumping up as though he had been stung, “I propose a toast to the health of the honoured inspector of elementary schools, Pavel Gennadievitch Nadarov!”

Chairs were pushed back, faces beamed with smiles, and the usual clinking of glasses began.

The third toast always fell to Sysoev.  And on this occasion, too, he got up and began to speak.  Looking grave and clearing his throat, he first of all announced that he had not the gift of eloquence and that he was not prepared to make a speech.  Further he said that during the fourteen years that he had been schoolmaster there had been many intrigues, many underhand attacks, and even secret reports on him to the authorities, and that he knew his enemies and those who had informed against him, and he would not mention their names, “for fear of spoiling somebody’s appetite”; that in spite of these intrigues the Kulikin school held the foremost place in the whole province not only from a moral, but also from a material point of view.”

“Everywhere else,” he said, “schoolmasters get two hundred or three hundred roubles, while I get five hundred, and moreover my house has been redecorated and even furnished at the expense of the firm.  And this year all the walls have been repapered. . . .”