The crowd poured out of the drawing room into the ballroom. In the midst of them, loudly joking and assuring everyone that he was perfectly unharmed, walked Kornakov, pressing a clean napkin to the bleeding scratch on his slightly wounded left hand. In another group a little to the side and behind, Lara was being led by the arms.
Yura was dumbfounded when he saw her. The same girl! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again this graying one. But now Yura knows him. He is the distinguished lawyer Komarovsky; he was involved in the trial over father’s inheritance. No need to greet him, he and Yura pretend they’re not acquainted. But she … So it was she who fired the shot? At the prosecutor? It must be something political. Poor girl. She’ll get it now. What a proud beauty she is! And these! They’re dragging her by the arms, the devils, like a caught thief.
But he realized at once that he was mistaken. Lara’s legs had given way under her. They were holding her by the arms so that she would not fall, and they barely managed to drag her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.
Yura ran to her, so as to bring her to her senses, but for greater propriety he decided first to show concern for the imaginary victim of the attempt. He went to Kornakov and said:
“There was a request for medical assistance here. I can render it. Show me your hand. Well, you have a lucky star. It’s such a trifle I wouldn’t even bandage it. However, a little iodine won’t do any harm. Here’s Felitsata Semyonovna, we’ll ask her.”
Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya, who were quickly approaching Yura, did not look themselves. They said he should drop everything and fetch his coat quickly, they had been sent for, something was wrong at home. Yura became frightened, supposing the worst, and, forgetting everything in the world, ran for his coat.
15
They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive when they came running headlong into the house from the Sivtsev entrance. Death had occurred ten minutes before their arrival. It was caused by a long fit of suffocation, resulting from an acute edema of the lungs that had not been diagnosed in time.
During the first hours Tonya cried her head off, thrashed in convulsions, and recognized no one. The next day she calmed down, listened patiently to what her father and Yura told her, but was able to respond only by nodding, because the moment she opened her mouth, grief overwhelmed her with its former force and howls began to escape her of themselves, as if she were possessed.
She spent hours on her knees beside the dead woman, in the intervals between panikhidas,6 embracing with her big, beautiful arms a corner of the coffin along with the edge of the platform it stood on and the wreaths that covered it. She did not notice anyone around her. But the moment her gaze met the gaze of her relations, she hurriedly got up from the floor, slipped out of the room with quick steps, swiftly ran upstairs to her room, holding back her sobs, and, collapsing on the bed, buried in her pillow the outbursts of despair that raged within her.
From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.
Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror. Then the main thing was not in him. Then he was hardly even aware that there was some him, Yura, who had a separate existence and was of interest or value. Then the main thing was in what stood around him, the external. The outside world surrounded Yura on all sides, tangible, impenetrable, and unquestionable, like a forest, and that was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her. This forest consisted of everything in the world—clouds, city signboards, the balls on fire towers, and the servers riding ahead of the carriage bearing the icon of the Mother of God, with earmuffs instead of hats on their heads, uncovered in the presence of the holy object. This forest consisted of shop windows in the arcades and the unattainably high night sky, with stars, dear God, and the saints.
This inaccessibly high sky bent down low, very low to them in the nursery, burying its head in the nanny’s skirt, when she told them something about God, and became close and tame, like the tops of hazel bushes when their branches are bent down in the ravines for picking hazelnuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilded basin in their nursery and, having bathed in fire and gold, turned into an early or late liturgy in the little church in the lane where his nanny took him. There the stars of the sky became icon lamps, dear God became the priest, and everyone was assigned his duties more or less according to ability. But the main thing was the actual world of the grown-ups and the city, which stood dark around him like a forest. Then, with all his half-animal faith, Yura believed in the God of this forest, as in a forest warden.
It was quite a different matter now. All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary. He felt himself on an equal footing with the universe, and he stood through the panikhidas for Anna Ivanovna quite differently than in time past for his mother. Then he had been oblivious from pain, felt timorous, and prayed. But now he listened to the funeral service as information immediately addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened attentively to the words and demanded meaning from them, comprehensibly expressed, as is demanded of every matter, and there was nothing in common with piety in his feeling of continuity in relation to the higher powers of earth and heaven, which he venerated as his great predecessors.
16
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.”7 What is it? Where is he? The carrying out. They are carrying the coffin out. He must wake up. He had collapsed fully clothed on the sofa before six in the morning. He probably has a fever. Now they are looking all over the house for him, and no one has guessed that he is asleep in the library, in the far corner, behind the tall bookshelves that reach the ceiling.
“Yura, Yura!” the yard porter Markel is calling him from somewhere close by. They are carrying out the coffin. Markel has to take the wreaths down to the street, and he cannot find Yura, and besides he has gotten stuck in the bedroom, because the door is blocked by the open door of the wardrobe, preventing Markel from coming out.
“Markel! Markel! Yura!” they call for them from downstairs. With one shove, Markel makes short work of the obstruction and runs downstairs with several wreaths.
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal”—gently drifts down the lane and lingers there, like a soft ostrich feather passing through the air, and everything sways: the wreaths and the passersby, the plumed heads of the horses, the censer swinging on its chain in the priest’s hand, the white earth underfoot.
“Yura! My God, at last. Wake up, please,” Shura Schlesinger, who has finally found him, shakes him by the shoulder. “What’s the matter with you? They’re carrying out the coffin. Are you coming?”
“Why, of course.”
17
The funeral service was over. The beggars, shifting their feet from the cold, moved closer together in two files.
