“The wedding has cost two thousand.”

As the party was breaking up, someone took the Shikalovo innkeeper’s good coat instead of his own old one, and Anisim suddenly flew into a rage and began shouting: 

“Stop, I’ll find it at once; I know who stole it, stop.”

He ran out into the street and pursued someone.  He was caught, brought back home and shoved, drunken, red with anger, and wet, into the room where the aunt was undressing Lipa, and was locked in.

IV

Five days had passed.  Anisim, who was preparing to go, went upstairs to say good-bye to Varvara.  All the lamps were burning before the ikons, there was a smell of incense, while she sat at the window knitting a stocking of red wool.

“You have not stayed with us long,” she said.  “You’ve been dull, I dare say.  Oh, tut, tut.  We live comfortably; we have plenty of everything.  We celebrated your wedding properly, in good style; your father says it came to two thousand.  In fact we live like merchants, only it’s dreary.  We treat the people very badly.  My heart aches, my dear; how we treat them, my goodness!  Whether we exchange a horse or buy something or hire a labourer—­it’s cheating in everything.  Cheating and cheating.  The Lenten oil in the shop is bitter, rancid, the people have pitch that is better.  But surely, tell me pray, couldn’t we sell good oil?”

“Every man to his job, mamma.”

“But you know we all have to die?  Oy, oy, really you ought to talk to your father...!”

“Why, you should talk to him yourself.”

“Well, well, I did put in my word, but he said just what you do:  ’Every man to his own job.’  Do you suppose in the next world they’ll consider what job you have been put to?  God’s judgment is just.”

“Of course no one will consider,” said Anisim, and he heaved a sigh.  “There is no God, anyway, you know, mamma, so what considering can there be?”

Varvara looked at him with surprise, burst out laughing, and clasped her hands.  Perhaps because she was so genuinely surprised at his words and looked at him as though he were a queer person, he was confused.

“Perhaps there is a God, only there is no faith.  When I was being married I was not myself.  Just as you may take an egg from under a hen and there is a chicken chirping in it, so my conscience was beginning to chirp in me, and while I was being married I thought all the time there was a God!  But when I left the church it was nothing.  And indeed, how can I tell whether there is a God or not?  We are not taught right from childhood, and while the babe is still at his mother’s breast he is only taught ‘every man to his own job.’  Father does not believe in God, either.  You were saying that Guntorev had some sheep stolen....  I have found them; it was a peasant at Shikalovo stole them; he stole them, but father’s got the fleeces... so that’s all his faith amounts to.”