It was only then that Ippolit Matveyevich noticed that he was blind drunk.
Ippolit Matveyevich felt singularly upset.
He tried to picture himself coming home to an empty, dirty house.
He was afraid his mother-in-law's death would deprive him of all those little luxuries and set ways he had acquired with such effort since the revolution-a revolution which had stripped him of much greater luxuries and a grander way of life.
"Should I marry?" he wondered. "But who?
The militia chief's niece or Barbara Stepanova, Prusis's sister?
Or maybe I should hire a housekeeper.
But what's the use?
She would only drag me around the law courts.
And it would cost me something, too!"
The future suddenly looked black for Ippolit Matveyevich.
Full of indignation and disgust at everything around him, he went back into the house.
Claudia Ivanovna was no longer delirious.
Lying high on her pillows, she looked at Ippolit Matveyevich, in full command of her faculties, and even sternly, he thought.
"Ippolit Matveyevich," she whispered clearly. "Sit close to me.
I want to tell you something."
Ippolit Matveyevich sat down in annoyance, peering into his mother-in-law's thin, bewhiskered face.
He made an attempt to smile and say something encouraging, but the smile was hideous and no words of encouragement came to him.
An awkward wheezing noise was all he could produce.
"Ippolit," repeated his mother-in-law, "do you remember our drawing-room suite?"
"Which one?" asked Ippolit Matveyevich with that kind of polite attention that is only accorded to the very sick.
"The one . . . upholstered in English chintz."
"You mean the suite in my house?"
"Yes, in Stargorod."
"Yes, I remember it very well . . . a sofa, a dozen chairs and a round table with six legs.
It was splendid furniture. Made by Hambs. . . . But why does it come to mind?"
Claudia Ivanovna, however, was unable to answer.
Her face had slowly begun to turn the colour of copper sulphate.
For some reason Ippolit Matveyevich also caught his breath.
He clearly remembered the drawing-room in his house and its symmetrically arranged walnut furniture with curved legs, the polished parquet floor, the old brown grand piano, and the oval black-framed daguerreotypes of high-ranking relatives on the walls.
Claudia Ivanovna then said in a wooden, apathetic voice:
"I sewed my jewels into the seat of a chair."
Ippolit Matveyevich looked sideways at the old woman.
"What jewels?" he asked mechanically, then, suddenly realizing what she had said, added quickly: "Weren't they taken when the house was searched?"
"I hid the jewels in a chair," repeated the old woman stubbornly.
Ippolit Matveyevich jumped up and, taking a close look at Claudia Ivanovna's stony face lit by the paraffin lamp, saw she was not raving.
"Your jewels!" he cried, startled at the loudness of his own voice. "In a chair?
Who induced you to do that?
Why didn't you give them to me?"
"Why should I have given them to you when you squandered away my daughter's estate?" said the old woman quietly and viciously.
Ippolit Matveyevich sat down and immediately stood up again.
His heart was noisily sending the blood coursing around his body.
He began to hear a ringing in his ears.
"But you took them out again, didn't you?
They're here, aren't they?"
The old woman shook her head.
"I didn't have time.
You remember how quickly and unexpectedly we had to flee.
They were left in the chair . .. the one between the terracotta lamp and the fireplace."
"But that was madness!