The Cathedral Clergy: A Chronicle

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 The postmaster’s wife, impatiently pacing up and down her room in her dressing gown, was mentally trying to track down the primary culprit responsible for the horrible event that had just occurred. Who had started that farce? “No, the farce was nothing,” she reasoned. “More important, who invited Prepotensky? But that’s not it either—who introduced him to me in the first place? Who else but that hubby of mine… He comes walking in and says, ‘Here, let me present Varnava Vasilyich!’ Well, just you wait: I’ll teach you a lesson for that! Only where is my husband, anyway?” she wondered, looking around. “Surely he’s not asleep? Surely he can’t sleep after what happened?… Well, I can’t put up with that,” the postmaster’s wife thought, making up her mind, and impatiently dashed into the drawing room, where the postmaster usually spent the night when banished from the conjugal bedchamber during domestic disputes. But to the amazement of the mistress of the house, her husband was not there. “Ah! He’s hiding from me! Now he’s snoring away on the sofa in the office… Well, you won’t be snoring much longer, mister!” And the postmaster ’s wife set out for the office. She was almost entirely correct: her husband was indeed asleep in the office, but she had made just one little miscalculation—the postmaster was sleeping not on the sofa, as she supposed, but on the table. It was Prepotensky who slept on the sofa, for, after all that had happened to him, he was afraid to go home, fearing that Achilles might be lying in wait for him around some corner, so he had persuaded the postmaster to let him spend the night there for safety’s sake. The postmaster had agreed to this all the more willingly when he saw that his wife was in a state of extreme irritation; finding it advantageous to have a third party near him in the house at that time, he therefore not only did not refuse Varnava a place to stay for the night but, as a courteous host, even offered him the office sofa, while he himself lay down on the big sorting table and covered himself from head to toe with the government cloth taken from that same table. The door to the room where Prepotensky and the postmaster were sleeping was locked. This enraged the energetic lady even more, for, according to the rules of the household, no door was ever to be closed to the mistress, preventing her surveillance, and the postmaster’s wife con- CHAPTER 9 283 sidered herself as much in command in the post office as in her own bedroom. And now suddenly this unheard-of impertinence!… The postmaster’s wife flew into a rage. She tried the door again, but it would not open—the hook rattled but stayed in place—and meanwhile through the door she could hear two people breathing. Two! One can imagine the horror that gripped her wifely heart at this unexpected discovery! Outraged by the flouting of her rights as a spouse, she rushed back down the hall, ran into the kitchen, and dashed to the table. She stood in the dark for a long time groping in a big drawer teeming with cockroaches before she finally found exactly what she needed. It was a knife. The great interest sparked by the preceding sentence necessitates a pause in order to allow the reader to prepare to witness a horrible event. ...