here!’

‘But, Ivan Demianitch,’ I heard her voice, ‘ich habe keine Toilette gemacht!’

‘Macht nichts. Komm herein!’

Eleonora Karpovna came in, holding a kerchief over her neck with two fingers. She had on a morning wrapper, not buttoned up, and had not yet done her hair. Ivan Demianitch flew up to her.

‘You hear, Viktor’s calling for the horses,’ he said, hurriedly pointing his finger first to the door, then to the window. ‘Please, do see to it, as quick as possible! Der Kerl schreit so!’

‘Der Viktor schreit immer, Ivan Demianitch, Sie wissen wohl,’ responded Eleonora Karpovna, ‘and I have spoken to the coachman myself, but he’s taken it into his head to give the horses oats. Fancy, what a calamity to happen so suddenly,’ she added, turning to me; ‘who could have expected such a thing of Susanna Ivanovna?’

‘I was always expecting it, always!’ cried Ratsch, and threw up his arms, his dressing-gown flying up in front as he did so, and displaying most repulsive unmentionables of chamois leather, with buckles on the belt. ‘Rupture of the heart! rupture of the external membrane! Hypertrophy!’

‘To be sure,’ Eleonora Karpovna repeated after him, ‘hyper… Well, so it is. Only it’s a terrible, terrible grief to me, I say again…’ And her coarse-featured face worked a little, her eyebrows rose into the shape of triangles, and a tiny tear rolled over her round cheek, that looked varnished like a doll’s…. ‘I’m very sorry that such a young person who ought to have lived and enjoyed everything… everything… And to fall into despair so suddenly!’

‘Na! gut, gut… geh, alte!’ Mr. Ratsch cut her short.

‘Geh’ schon, geh’ schon,’ muttered Eleonora Karpovna, and she went away, still holding the kerchief with her fingers, and shedding tears.

And I followed her. In the passage stood Viktor in a student’s coat with a beaver collar and a cap stuck jauntily on one side. He barely glanced at me over his shoulder, shook his collar up, and did not nod to me, for which I mentally thanked him.

I went back to Fustov.

XXV

I found my friend sitting in a corner of his room with downcast head and arms folded across his breast. He had sunk into a state of numbness, and he gazed around him with the slow, bewildered look of a man who has slept very heavily and has only just been waked. I told him all about my visit to Ratsch’s, repeated the veteran’s remarks and those of his wife, described the impression they had made on me and informed him of my conviction that the unhappy girl had taken her own life…. Fustov listened to me with no change of expression, and looked about him with the same bewildered air.

‘Did you see her?’ he asked me at last.

‘Yes.’

‘In the coffin?’

Fustov seemed to doubt whether Susanna were really dead.

‘In the coffin.’

Fustov’s face twitched and he dropped his eyes and softly rubbed his hands.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, old man, I’m cold,’ he answered hesitatingly, and he shook his head stupidly.

I began to explain my reasons for thinking that Susanna had poisoned herself or perhaps had been poisoned, and that the matter could not be left so….

Fustov stared at me.

‘Why, what is there to be done?’ he said, slowly opening his eyes wide and slowly closing them. ‘Why, it’ll be worse… if it’s known about. They won’t bury her. We must let things… alone.’

This idea, simple as it was, had never entered my head. My friend’s practical sense had not deserted him.

‘When is… her funeral?’ he went on.

‘To-morrow.’

‘Are you going?’

‘Yes.’

‘To the house or straight to the church?’

‘To the house and to the church too; and from there to the cemetery.’

‘But I shan’t go… I can’t, I can’t!’ whispered Fustov and began crying. It was at these same words that he had broken into sobs in the morning. I have noticed that it is often so with weeping; as though to certain words, for the most of no great meaning,—but just to these words and to no others—it is given to open the fount of tears in a man, to break him down, and to excite in him the feeling of pity for others and himself… I remember a peasant woman was once describing before me the sudden death of her daughter, and she fairly dissolved and could not go on with her tale as soon as she uttered the phrase, ‘I said to her, Fekla. And she says, «Mother, where have you put the salt… the salt… sa-alt?»‘ The word ‘salt’ overpowered her.

But again, as in the morning, I was but little moved by Fustov’s tears. I could not conceive how it was he did not ask me if Susanna had not left something for him. Altogether their love for one another was a riddle to me; and a riddle it remained to me.

After weeping for ten minutes Fustov got up, lay down on the sofa, turned his face to the wall, and remained motionless. I waited a little, but seeing that he did not stir, and made no answer to my questions, I made up my mind to leave him. I am perhaps doing him injustice, but I almost believe he was asleep. Though indeed that would be no proof that he did not feel sorrow… only his nature was so constituted as to be unable to support painful emotions for long… His nature was too awfully well-balanced!

XXVI

The next day exactly at eleven o’clock I was at the place. Fine hail was falling from the low-hanging sky, there was a slight frost, a thaw was close at hand, but there were cutting, disagreeable gusts of wind flitting across in the air…. It was the most thoroughly Lenten, cold-catching weather. I found Mr. Ratsch on the steps of his house. In a black frock-coat adorned with crape, with no hat on his head, he fussed about, waved his arms, smote himself on the thighs, shouted up to the house, and then down into the street, in the direction of the funeral car with a white catafalque, already standing there with two hired carriages. Near it four garrison soldiers, with mourning capes over their old coats, and mourning hats pulled over their screwed-up eyes, were pensively scratching in the crumbling snow with the long stems of their unlighted torches. The grey shock of hair positively stood up straight above the red face of Mr. Ratsch, and his voice, that brazen voice, was cracking from the strain he was putting on it. ‘Where are the pine branches? pine branches! this way! the branches of pine!’ he yelled. ‘They’ll be bearing out the coffin directly! The pine! Hand over those pine branches! Look alive!’ he cried once more, and dashed into the house. It appeared that in spite of my punctuality, I was late: Mr. Ratsch had thought fit to hurry things forward. The service in the house was already over; the priests—of whom one wore a calotte, and the other, rather younger, had most carefully combed and oiled his hair—appeared with all their retinue on the steps. The coffin too appeared soon after, carried by a coachman, two door-keepers, and a water-carrier. Mr. Ratsch walked behind, with the tips of his fingers on the coffin lid, continually repeating, ‘Easy, easy!’ Behind him waddled Eleonora Karpovna in a black dress, also adorned with crape, surrounded by her whole family; after all of them, Viktor stepped out in a new uniform with a sword with crape round the handle. The coffin-bearers, grumbling and altercating among themselves, laid the coffin on the hearse; the garrison soldiers lighted their torches, which at once began crackling and smoking; a stray old woman, who had joined herself on to the party, raised a wail; the deacons began to chant, the fine snow suddenly fell faster and whirled round like ‘white flies.’ Mr. Ratsch bawled, ‘In God’s name! start!’ and the procession started. Besides Mr. Ratsch’s family, there were in all five men accompanying the hearse: a retired and extremely shabby officer of roads and highways, with a faded Stanislas ribbon—not improbably hired—on his neck; the police superintendent’s assistant, a diminutive man with a meek face and greedy eyes; a little old man in a fustian smock; an extremely fat fishmonger in a tradesman’s bluejacket, smelling strongly of his calling, and I. The absence of the female sex (for one could hardly count as such two aunts of Eleonora Karpovna, sisters of the sausagemaker, and a hunchback old maiden lady with blue spectacles on her blue nose), the absence of girl friends and acquaintances struck me at first; but on thinking it over I realised that Susanna, with her character, her education, her memories, could not have made friends in the circle in which she was living. In the church there were a good many people assembled, more outsiders than acquaintances, as one could see by the expression of their faces. The service did not last long. What surprised me was that Mr. Ratsch crossed himself with great fervour, quite as though he were of the orthodox faith, and even chimed in with the deacons in the responses, though only with the notes not with the words. When at last it came to taking leave of the dead, I bowed low, but did not give the last kiss. Mr. Ratsch, on the contrary, went through this terrible ordeal with the utmost composure, and with a deferential inclination of his person invited the officer of the Stanislas ribbon to the coffin, as though offering him entertainment, and picking his children up under the arms swung them up in turn and held them