His skin jacket was sticking to Agrenev's back, as, no doubt, Bitska's was also.
"My missus will soon be home," Bitska said cheerfully--he had recently been married. He spoke in broken Russian, with a foreign accent.
In Agrenev's house it was dark. The warm glow from the torches outside fell on the window-ledges and illuminated them, but inside the only light was that visible through the crevices of his wife's tightly closed door: his beloved wife--so aloof--so strange. The rain had started, and its drip on the roof was like the sound of water- falls: he changed, washed, took up a newspaper. The maid entered and announced that tea was ready.
His wife--tall, slim, beautiful, and strange--was standing by the window, her back to him, a book in her hand; a tumbler was on the window-sill close beside her. She did not turn round as he entered, merely murmuring: "Have some tea."
The electric light gave a brilliant glow. The freshly varnished woodwork smelt of polish. She did not say another word, but returned to her book, her delicate fingers turning over the leaves as, standing with bent head, she read.
"Are you going out this evening, Anna?" he asked.
"I am not sure. I am going to-morrow on Detachment duty for a week."
Always the same! No interest in him; indifferent, absorbed in other things. How he longed to stay and talk to her, on and on, of everything; of the utter impossibility of life without love or sympathy, of the intensity of his own love, and the melancholy of his evenings. But he was silent.
A nickel tea-pot and a solitary tumbler stood on the table with its white cloth falling in straight folds. The ticking of the clock sounded monotonously.
"She does not deceive, nor betray, nor leave me," he thought; "but she is strange, strange--and a mother!"
At last the earth was cloaked in darkness, the torches hung like gleaming balls of fire, the pattering of the rain echoed dismally, and above it, drowning all other sounds, was the dreary roar of the factory.
He sauntered through the straight-cut avenues of the park towards his club, but near the school turned aside and went in to see Nina. They had known each other from childhood, attending the same school, Nina his faithful comrade and devoted slave--and ever since he had remained for her the one and only man, for she was of those who love but once. Since then she had been flung about Russia, striven to retain her honour, vainly tilting against the windmills of poverty and temptation--had failed, been broken, and now had crept back that she might live near him.