And now I'm in your way. You bring me lemons.... I never asked you...."
"There's no talking to her," thought Ivan Ilyich.
He walked up and down the room, stopping every now and then at the window and drumming with his nails on the steamy glass.
The snow was whirling in a maze, the tempest was howling, the fierce wind swept by with such rapidity that it seemed to be trying to overtake time itself, as if anxious to project itself into the future, there to proclaim extraordinary events.
"Should I send her abroad?" thought Ivan Ilyich.
"To her father in Samara?
How difficult it all is! Anyhow we can't go on like this."
Dasha's sister Katya had taken Roshchin, now her husband, to her father in Samara, where they could live in peace till the spring, without watching every crumb they ate.
By spring, of course, the Bolsheviks would have come to an end.
Dr. Dmitri Stepanovich Bulavin had even named a date—between the time when the frost melted and the roads became impassable, the Germans would launch an offensive along the whole front, where the remnants of the Russian armies were now holding meetings, and the soldiers' committees were vainly endeavouring to find new forms of revolutionary discipline amidst chaos, treachery, and wholesale desertion.
The last few years had aged Dmitri Stepanovich, who had had a hard time, and had become still more fond of talking politics.
He was delighted at the arrival of his daughter, and started instantly upon Roshchin's political re-education.
They would sit for hours in the dining room, beside the samovar, a capacious battered vessel, which had yielded a veritable lake of boiling water in its time; it seemed to improve with age—you only had to throw a handful of charcoal into it, for it to start singing the endless song of a samovar in a country town.
Dmitri Stepanovich, in his fusty clothes, himself grown flabby and dingy, with tangled (grey curls, smoked foul-smelling cigarettes, coughed himself red in the face, and talked incessantly.
"Our poor old country's gone to the dogs.... We've lost the war.... No offence meant, Colonel!
Peace should have been concluded in 1915.... And we should have submitted ourselves to German rule and training.
Then they would have taught us something, then something might have been made of us.
But now everything's over.... Medical science is powerless in such a case, as they say.... What you say is nonsense!
What are we to arm ourselves with—three-pronged pitchforks?
This very summer the whole southern and central parts of Russia will be occupied by the Germans—Siberia by the Japanese; and our muzhiks, with their famous pitchforks, will be chased to the tundra of the Arctic Circle, and then a period of order, culture, and respect for humanity will set in. And our country will become Russland—and I, for one, shall be extremely pleased."
Dmitri Stepanovich was an old liberal and now mocked in bitter irony at what he had once held sacred.
His very house bore the impress of his self-contempt.
The rooms, with their dusty windows, were never swept and cleaned, the portrait of Mendeleyev in his study was thickly veiled with spiders' webs, the plants withered in their tubs, while books, carpets, and pictures were still in boxes beneath sofas, as they had been when Dasha had visited him in the summer of 1914.
When power was taken over by the Soviets of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies in Samara, and most of the doctors refused to work for the deputies of the "soldiery and the rabble," Dmitri Stepanovich had been offered the post of director of all municipal hospitals.
Since, according to his calculations, the Germans would be in Samara by spring anyhow, he accepted the appointment.
Medicaments were in a bad way, and Dmitri Stepanovich prescribed nothing but enemas.
"All troubles come from the bowels," he told his assistants, darting ironical, supercilious glances at them through his cracked pince-nez.
"During the war the population neglected its bowels.
If you dig about among the primal causes of our esteemed anarchy, you're sure to come up against constipation of the bowels.
Yes, gentlemen, the strict and wholesale application of the enema...."
These talks at the tea table made a painful impression on Roshchin.
He had not completely recovered from an injury which he had received on the first of November in Moscow, during street fighting.
He had been in command of a company of cadets defending the approaches to Nikitsky Gate.
Sablin, fighting on the Bolshevik side, had attacked from Strastnaya Square.
Roshchin had known him from his Moscow days—a cherubic schoolboy with blue eyes, and a tendency to blush.
It seemed incredible that this lad from an old Moscow family could be the ferocious Bolshevik or Left Socialist-Revolutionary (whatever they called themselves!), shouldering his rifle and dodging behind the lime trees of Tverskoi Boulevard—the Tverskoi Boulevard hallowed by the poems of Pushkin, where Sablin himself, a grammar book under his arm, had once walked so sedately.
"The betrayal of Russia, of the Army, to clear the way for the Germans and release the wild beast—that's what you're fighting for, Mr. Sablin!
The lower ranks, mere grovelling swine, may be forgiven, but you..." Roshchin himself was working a machine gun (in the trenches dug at the corner of Malaya Nikitskaya, in front of Chichkin's dairy), and when the slim figure in the long coat dodged out from behind the trees again, he peppered it with bullets.
Sablin dropped his rifle and sank to the ground, clutching at his thigh.
Almost at the same moment a fragment of shell carried off Roshchin's cap.
He was out of action.
On the seventh night of street fighting, Moscow was enveloped in a thick yellow fog.
The gurgling of shells had quieted down.
Isolated groups of cadets, students and officials, still kept up a desultory firing, but the Committee for Public Safety, with a Zemstvo doctor named Rudnev at its head, had ceased to exist.
Moscow was occupied by the troops of the Revolutionary Committee.
The very next day young men in civilian clothes, carrying bundles, were to be met with in the streets, making for the Kursk and Bryansk railway stations. There was an ominous expression in their eyes, and though they wore puttees or cavalry boots, no one stopped them.
But for his Injury Roshchin would have gone, too.
He had had a slight paralytic stroke, followed by temporary blindness, and heart trouble.
He kept waiting for the moment when the troops from General Headquarters should suddenly appear, and start firing on the Kremlin from Vorobyovy Hills.
But the revolution was only just beginning to strike root among the masses.