Alexander Weber was now promoted in Anna’s mind to the status of a thing truly loved and terribly lost, and this process automatically involved a paroxysm of self-reproach on poor Anna’s part; “I could have said—why didn’t I insist?—if I had been wiser—I might have said—I might have done …” and now there he was, his blood running like a messenger out into the world, with a message of tacit reproach to a world full of blunderers.
Anna noticed that her husband had found and put on his old only Homburg hat. This hat, which Old Sergei scarcely ever wore, was his tribute to the solemnity and excitement of death. Like the screw top of an engine out of regular use and seldom assembled, it lidded a creaking, rusty organism, rarely set in motion but now profoundly pulsing and pounding, the reawakened essence of vitality running like a vapor from end to end of the feeble obsolete casing that enclosed it.
“Where are you going?” asked Anna, huskily. “I think you sit here and wait for disasters.”
“Well, we ought both to go and help, I think. The boy was of our race. Besides, he left a letter for you. Elyena Ivanovna has it.”
He clung with both hands to her arm as she led him through the streets. His body hung back, for fear of stumbling, but his spirit urged haste for fear of missing something. He was always in a hurry to be near the dead, forgetting that the dead are the only friends who can be really depended on to wait for us.
The Nikitin tribe, a group of promoted peasants—three or four interrelated families living in a maze of Korean houses that almost amounted to a hamlet—was divided between sentimentality and resentment, in the matter of Alexander Weber’s suicide. They had laid the body of the young man, as though it were in disgrace yet might hope to be forgiven, in a room in an outlying house. The grandmother of the various families, a very aged, crumpled, ivory creature, watched over the body, trimmed the candles, and read—or seemed to read—from the Bible, though much of what she mumbled was a half-remembered rigmarole, for she never had been able to read easily and was, in any case, almost blind now.
Alexander Weber lay on the bed, looking astounded. The bluish lids now covering his large, sunken, meditative eyes did not modify his expression of amazement. His lips were set in a tautness that was not so much a smile as a suggestion of an attempt to whistle through his teeth. “I’m not listening to you,” that mouth seemed to say, provocatively. “You can say what you like—you can’t annoy me now. I’m simply not listening.” His neck was rigidly bandaged with clean cloths, and this gave him a stiff, stuffed, shrugging look, like a skeleton George the Fourth. After so much talk of blood, it seemed to Anna that everything looked very wan—very thoroughly drained of color. The white bandages, the white clothes on the young man’s bleached body, the pale light of the candles competing with the cracks of denied daylight, the scrubbed boards, the wilderness of sheet, the quietness, the featureless old voice mumbling—everything seemed pale, stilled, and suspended.
Anna had snatched up, as she left her own home, a little silver cross that had been left to her by an old aunt long ago. It had little sentimental meaning for her, but she had so few possessions that, if she had thought a little longer, she would perhaps have found that she could not spare it. Now, however, it was in her hand; she had looked at it several times, on her way through the streets, not committing herself to sacrificing it, yet dedicating it to sacrifice … teaching her hand to give it away. And now, without saying anything, she laid it on Alexander’s breast above his clasped finger tips. “Easy to do—now,” she thought, self-reproachfully. “Everything I do is always easy and obvious by the time it occurs to me to do it.” But she was glad that she had laid her cross on his breast. That was the right, womanly thing to do, at last. She heard one of the Nikitin nieces making a little clucking sound of approval beside her, and was soberly relieved to have made no mistake in giving her gift. The cross made a little shining, definite meaning to the blank picture; it slipped into place as the moon slips into a blind evening sky, when the sunset has been drained away.
Old Sergei stood at the room door, hungrily craning his face toward the dead youth. “Shut away,” murmured Old Sergei, hoarse with the excitement that death always aroused in him. “Cut off—shut away. How curious it all is! … All the little things lost—his tastes in food, the jokes that amused him—how curious! Even perhaps a little plan that he had to buy himself a blue tie in Harbin or to see Charlie Chaplin in the cinema—all lost—nothing could be more lost; if you offered a reward of a million rubles, you could never know those things now. How curious! Perhaps there was something his whole heart was set on, yesterday—and yet, if it happened today, he wouldn’t turn his head to look.”
“No,” said Anna. “If she came now, he wouldn’t turn his head to look.”
“How curious—how curious—how very curious,” whispered Old Sergei, trembling with elemental bewilderment, “that he should make no sound. If he had left this room a thousand years ago, the room couldn’t have lost his voice more completely. I haven’t seen a dead man since I was blind, you know, Annitchka, and I had forgotten that dead men don’t breathe. Come away—come away now, Annitchka. I can’t bear to hear no
