Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/249

Rh That night, however, fate discharged a terrible shot against him. He was informed that at the extraordinary meeting of the City Council, he and his associates at the bank were expelled from the Council, since serious charges were preferred against them. In the morning, he was informed that he was to give up immediately his position of church elder.

After that, Avdeyev lost count of the blows completely. Strange, unusual days now succeeded each other in rapid succession, and each day brought with it something new. Among other things, he received summons from the police to appear for a preliminary examination. He went away from the examination, insulted, flushed with anger.

"Wanted to know all the time why I signed. I signed, and that's all there is to it. As though I did it on purpose. They used to bring them to the store, so I signed them. Anyway, I'm not very strong at reading the written stuff."

Soon after this, some young men with expressionless faces came to his store and ordered it closed; then they came to his home and took possession of all his furniture. Suspecting some intrigue back of all this, and, as before, feeling himself entirely innocent, Avdeyev began to run from one administrative institution to another, complaining of the injustices done to him. He would sit for hours in the waiting-rooms, write long petitions, weep, curse. And the District Attorney and the Sheriff would merely say indifferently:

"Come when you are summoned. . . We are busy now."

Others would say:

It does not concern us."

And the Secretary of the City Council, who was an educated man, and the only human being, as Avdeyev thought, who could help him, merely shrugged his shoulders and said:

"It's all your own fault. You shouldn't have been an ass."

All these troubles made the old man's leg grow still more numb, and failed to improve his digestion. When he grew weary of doing nothing, and poverty began to pinch him, he decided to go to his father, or to his brother, and enter the flour business. But he was not allowed to leave the city. His family went to his father's, and so he remained alone.

Days went by, one after another. Without his family, with nothing to do, practically penniless, the former church elder, once respected and esteemed by everybody, now went from one of his friends to another, drank with them, and heard their advice. In order to kill time, he would go to church regularly every