V

Several more years have passed.  Startsev has grown stouter still, has grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown back.  When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets:  “Keep to the ri-i-ight!” it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot.  He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the doors with his stick, and says: 

“Is that the study?  Is that a bedroom?  And what’s here?”

And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.

He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as district doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places at once.  At Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply “Ionitch”:  “Where is Ionitch off to?” or “Should not we call in Ionitch to a consultation?”

Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has changed; it has become thin and sharp.  His temper has changed, too:  he has grown ill-humoured and irritable.  When he sees his patients he is usually out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and shouts in his disagreeable voice: 

“Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions!  Don’t talk so much!”

He is solitary.  He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.

During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had been his one joy, and probably his last.  In the evenings he plays vint at the club, and then sits alone at a big table and has supper.  Ivan, the oldest and most respectable of the waiters, serves him, hands him Lafitte No. 17, and every one at the club—­ the members of the committee, the cook and waiters—­know what he likes and what he doesn’t like and do their very utmost to satisfy him, or else he is sure to fly into a rage and bang on the floor with his stick.

As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his spoke in some conversation: 

“What are you talking about?  Eh?  Whom?”

And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks: 

“What Turkins are you speaking of?  Do you mean the people whose daughter plays on the piano?”

That is all that can be said about him.