With the card we'll get him from the bottom of the sea. Am I right?"
Ulita made no reply. The caustic quivering of her face showed more distinctly than before and it exasperated Porfiry Vladimirych.
"You are a mean thing," he said. "The devil dwells in you. Fi, fi!
Well, enough.
To-morrow, before the sun is up, you'll take Volodka and quickly, so that Yevpraksia does not hear you, and set out for Moscow.
You know where the Foundling Asylum is?"
"I've carried them," Ulita answered laconically, as if hinting at something in the past.
"Well, if you are used to it—all the better for you.
You must know all the ins and outs of the place.
Be sure to place him there and bow low before the authorities—like this."
Yudushka rose and bowed, touching the floor with his hands.
"Beg of them to make him comfortable.
And be sure to get the card, don't forget!
The card will help us find him anywhere.
I'll allow you two twenty-five ruble bills for expenses.
I know how it is—you'll have to give some here and put a couple of rubles there. Ah, ah, how sinful man is!
We are all human beings, nothing but human beings! We all like sweets and dainties.
Why, even our Volodka!
Look at him—he is no bigger than my finger nail—and see the money I've already spent on him."
Yudushka crossed himself and bowed low before Ulita, silently begging her to take good care of the little rascal.
Thus, in the simplest way, was the future of the little illegitimate arranged for.
The next morning, while the young mother was tossing about in delirium, Porfiry Vladimirych was standing at the window in the dining-room, moving his lips and making the sign of the cross on the window pane.
A cart, roofed over with mats, was leaving the front yard. It was carrying Volodka away.
It climbed up the hill, drove by the church, turned to the left and vanished in the village.
Yudushka made another sign of the cross and sighed:
"The other day the priest was speaking about thawing weather," he said to himself, "but God sent us a frost instead.
And a fine frost, at that.
So it always is with us.
We dream, we build castles in the air, we philosophize proudly and think we'll excel God Himself in His wisdom, but God in a trice turns our haughtiness of spirit into nothingness."
_____ BOOK VI THE DESERTED MANOR-HOUSE _____ CHAPTER I
Yudushka's agony commenced when the resources of loquaciousness, in which he had so freely indulged, began to give out.
A void had formed around him. Some had died, others had deserted him.
Even Anninka preferred the miserable future of a nomadic actress to the flesh-pots of Golovliovo.
Yevpraksia alone remained. But Yevpraksia's conversational gifts were limited, and, more than that, Yevpraksia was now a changed person. It was the difference that had occurred in her which convinced Yudushka that his halcyon days were gone forever.
Till then Yevpraksia had been so helpless that Porfiry Vladimirych could tyrannize over her without the slightest risk, and her mental development was so backward and her character so flabby that she had not even felt the oppression.
During Yudushka's harangues she would look into his eyes apathetically, and think of something else.
But now suddenly she grasped something important, and the first consequence of awakened understanding was repugnance, sudden and half-conscious, but vicious and insuperable.
Anninka's stay had evidently not been without results for Yevpraksia. The casual conversations with the young actress had quite upset her.
Previously she would never have dreamed of wondering why Porfiry Vladimirych, as soon as he met a man, instantly started to weave around him an oppressive net of words, sinister in their emptiness.
Now she perceived it was not talking that Yudushka did, but tyrannizing, and it would be well worth the while to pull him up short and make him feel the time had come for him, too, to go easy.
So, from now on, she listened to his endless flow of words and soon realized that the one purpose of Yudushka's talk was to worry, annoy, nag.
"The mistress herself said she didn't know why he talked so much," Yevpraksia reasoned. "No, it's his meanness working in him.
He knows who is unprotected and at his mercy. And so he turns and twists them anyway he wants to."
But that was only secondary.
The main effect of Anninka's visit was that it stirred up the instincts of youth in Yevpraksia, which had hitherto smouldered in her undeveloped mind and now suddenly flared up in a blaze.
Many things became clear to her—for instance, why Anninka had refused to remain at Golovliovo and why she had said flatly, "It's horrible here!"
She had acted that way because she was young and wanted to enjoy life.
Yevpraksia, too, was young, indeed she was!
It only seemed that her youth was crushed under a load of fat, in reality it manifested itself quite boldly.
It called and lured her; its flame now died down, now flared up.