Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/17

 in the service likely to happen in consequence of it, the very fact of the death of a close friend evoked in all those who heard of it, as it always does, a feeling of joy because it was Iván Ilích who had died and not they.

"How is this? It is he who is dead, and not I," each of them thought or felt.

But the close acquaintances, Iván Ilích's so-called friends, involuntarily thought also of this, that now they would have to perform some very tedious duties of propriety and go to the mass and call on the widow to express their condolence.

His nearest friends were Fédor Vasílevich and Peter Ivánovich.

Peter Ivánovich had been his schoolmate while studying law, and considered himself under obligation to Iván Ilích.

At dinner Peter Ivánovich gave his wife the news of Iván Ilích's death, and his reflections as to the possibility of his brother-in-law's transfer to their circuit, and, without lying down to rest himself, he put on his dress coat and drove to Iván Ilích's house.

At the entrance to Iván Ilích's apartments stood a carriage and two cabs. Down-stairs, in the antechamber, near the hat-rack, and leaning against the wall, stood a tinselled coffin-lid with its tassels and burnished galloons. Two ladies in black were taking off their fur coats. One of them, Iván Ilích's sister, he knew; the other was a stranger to him. Peter Ivánovich's friend, Schwarz, was coming down-stairs, and, seeing the newcomer from the upper step, he stopped and winked to him, as if to say: "Iván Ilích has managed things stupidly; you and I fixed things better."

Schwarz's face with its English side-whiskers and his whole lean figure in the dress coat had, as always, an elegant solemnity about them, and this solemnity, which always contradicted Schwarz's character of playfulness, had here its particular salt. So Peter Ivánovich thought.