PART I
THE LION OF STARGOROD
CHAPTER I
BEZENCHUK AND 'THE NYMPHS'
THERE were so many hairdressers and undertakers in a certain Russian provincial town called N——that it looked as if the inhabitants were born for the sole purpose of having a shave, a hair-cut, or a refreshing shampoo, and then of dying immediately after. In actual fact, there were very few births, shaves, or deaths in the town, for life was very quiet there. The evenings in spring were intoxicating, the mud glistened in the moonlight like anthracite, and the young men in the town were so much in love with the secretary of the Union of Communist Youth that she could not collect the subscriptions properly.
The questions of love and death did not affect Hippolyte Matveyevich Vorobianinov, although he was Supposed to be busy with these matters every day from nine in the morning till five at night, with one hour off for lunch.
In the morning, after drinking a glass of hot milk which his mother-in-law gave him, he used to go out of the dingy house into the wide Comrade Gubensky Street, which was flooded with light. It was the pleasantest kind of street you could possibly find in a provincial town. On the left-hand side, behind some green shop windows there were the coffins belonging to Nymphs, the undertakers. On the right-hand side, behind some small windows out of which nearly all the putty had dropped, there were more coffins, dusty and made of oak, belonging to another undertaker,
