“Anisim and you, my child, love one another, live in God’s way, little children, and the Heavenly Mother will not abandon you.”

He leaned his face on the old father’s shoulder and gave a sob.

“Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!” he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw.  “Ho-ho-ho!  This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too!  Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it.”

He was a native of the Yegoryevsky district, but had worked in the factories in Ukleevo and the neighborhood from his youth up, and had made it his home.  He had been a familiar figure for years as old and gaunt and lanky as now, and for years he had been nicknamed “Crutch.”  Perhaps because he had been for forty years occupied in repairing the factory machinery he judged everybody and everything by its soundness or its need of repair.  And before sitting down to the table he tried several chairs to see whether they were solid, and he touched the smoked fish also.

After the Don wine, they all sat down to the table.  The visitors talked, moving their chairs.  The singers were singing in the outer room.  The band was playing, and at the same time the peasant women in the yard were singing their songs all in chorus—­and there was an awful, wild medley of sounds which made one giddy.

Crutch turned round in his chair and prodded his neighbours with his elbows, prevented people from talking, and laughed and cried alternately.

“Little children, little children, little children,” he muttered rapidly.  “Aksinya my dear, Varvara darling, we will live all in peace and harmony, my dear little axes....”

He drank little and was now only drunk from one glass of English bitters.  The revolting bitters, made from nobody knows what, intoxicated everyone who drank it as though it had stunned them.  Their tongues began to falter.

The local clergy, the clerks from the factories with their wives, the tradesmen and tavern-keepers from the other villages were present.  The clerk and the elder of the rural district who had served together for fourteen years, and who had during all that time never signed a single document for anybody nor let a single person out of the local court without deceiving or insulting him, were sitting now side by side, both fat and well-fed, and it seemed as though they were so saturated in injustice and falsehood that even the skin of their faces was somehow peculiar, fraudulent.  The clerk’s wife, a thin woman with a squint, had brought all her children with her, and like a bird of prey looked aslant at the plates and snatched anything she could get hold of to put in her own or her children’s pockets.

Lipa sat as though turned to stone, still with the same expression as in church.  Anisim had not said a single word to her since he had made her acquaintance, so that he did not yet know the sound of her voice; and now, sitting beside her, he remained mute and went on drinking bitters, and when he got drunk he began talking to the aunt who was sitting opposite: