“I don’t mean that.”  Laevsky frowned impatiently.  “Have you got the money?”

“My dear soul, forgive me,” he whispered, looking round at the door and overcome with confusion.

“For God’s sake, forgive me!  No one has anything to spare, and I’ve only been able to collect by five- and by ten-rouble notes. . . .  Only a hundred and ten in all.  To-day I’ll speak to some one else.  Have patience.”

“But Saturday is the latest date,” whispered Laevsky, trembling with impatience.  “By all that’s sacred, get it by Saturday!  If I don’t get away by Saturday, nothing’s any use, nothing!  I can’t understand how a doctor can be without money!”

“Lord have mercy on us!” Samoylenko whispered rapidly and intensely, and there was positively a breaking note in his throat.  “I’ve been stripped of everything; I am owed seven thousand, and I’m in debt all round.  Is it my fault?”

“Then you’ll get it by Saturday?  Yes?”

“I’ll try.”

“I implore you, my dear fellow!  So that the money may be in my hands by Friday morning!”

Samoylenko sat down and prescribed solution of quinine and kalii bromati and tincture of rhubarb, tincturae gentianae, aquae foeniculi —­all in one mixture, added some pink syrup to sweeten it, and went away.

XI

“You look as though you were coming to arrest me,” said Von Koren, seeing Samoylenko coming in, in his full-dress uniform.

“I was passing by and thought:  ’Suppose I go in and pay my respects to zoology,’” said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table, knocked together by the zoologist himself out of plain boards.  “Good-morning, holy father,” he said to the deacon, who was sitting in the window, copying something.  “I’ll stay a minute and then run home to see about dinner.  It’s time. . . .  I’m not hindering you?”

“Not in the least,” answered the zoologist, laying out over the table slips of paper covered with small writing.  “We are busy copying.”

“Ah! . . .  Oh, my goodness, my goodness! . . .” sighed Samoylenko.  He cautiously took up from the table a dusty book on which there was lying a dead dried spider, and said:  “Only fancy, though; some little green beetle is going about its business, when suddenly a monster like this swoops down upon it.  I can fancy its terror.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Is poison given it to protect it from its enemies?”

“Yes, to protect it and enable it to attack.”

“To be sure, to be sure. . . .  And everything in nature, my dear fellows, is consistent and can be explained,” sighed Samoylenko; “only I tell you what I don’t understand.  You’re a man of very great intellect, so explain it to me, please.  There are, you know, little beasts no bigger than rats, rather handsome to look at, but nasty and immoral in the extreme, let me tell you.  Suppose such a little beast is running in the woods.