Petrov’s and Yegorov’s marks for conduct,
kept them in, and in the end expelled them both.
He had a strange habit of visiting our lodgings.
He would come to a teacher’s, would sit down,
and remain silent, as though he were carefully inspecting
something. He would sit like this in silence for
an hour or two and then go away. This he called
’maintaining good relations with his colleagues’;
and it was obvious that coming to see us and sitting
there was tiresome to him, and that he came to see
us simply because he considered it his duty as our
colleague. We teachers were afraid of him.
And even the headmaster was afraid of him. Would
you believe it, our teachers were all intellectual,
right-minded people, brought up on Turgenev and Shtchedrin,
yet this little chap, who always went about with goloshes
and an umbrella, had the whole high-school under his
thumb for fifteen long years! High-school, indeed—he
had the whole town under his thumb! Our ladies
did not get up private theatricals on Saturdays for
fear he should hear of it, and the clergy dared not
eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under
the influence of people like Byelikov we have got
into the way of being afraid of everything in our
town for the last ten or fifteen years. They
are afraid to speak aloud, afraid to send letters,
afraid to make acquaintances, afraid to read books,
afraid to help the poor, to teach people to read and
write....”
Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say
something, but first lighted his pipe, g azed at the
moon, and then said, with pauses:
“Yes, intellectual, right minded people read
Shtchedrin and Turgenev, Buckle, and all the rest
of them, yet they knocked under and put up with it...
that’s just how it is.”
“Byelikov lived in the same house as I did,”
Burkin went on, “on the same storey, his door
facing mine; we often saw each other, and I knew how
he lived when he was at home. And at home it was
the same story: dressing-gown, nightcap, blinds,
bolts, a perfect succession of prohibitions and restrictions
of all sorts, and—’Oh, I hope nothing
will come of it!’ Lenten fare was bad for him,
yet he could not eat meat, as people might perhaps
say Byelikov did not keep the fasts, and he ate freshwater
fish with butter—not a Lenten dish, yet
one could not say that it was meat. He did not
keep a female servant for fear people might think
evil of him, but had as cook an old man of sixty, called
Afanasy, half-witted and given to tippling, who had
once been an officer’s servant and could cook
after a fashion. This Afanasy was usually standing
at the door with his arms folded; with a deep sigh,
he would mutter always the same thing:
“‘There are plenty of them about
nowadays!’