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

 Peter Ivánovich allowed the ladies to precede him, and followed them up the staircase. Schwarz did not start to go down, but stopped up-stairs. Peter Ivánovich knew why he did so he evidently wanted to make an engagement to play a game of vint that day. The ladies went up-stairs to see the widow, and Schwarz, with seriously compressed, strong lips and playful glance, with a motion of his brows showed Peter Ivánovich to the right, to the room where the body lay.

Peter Ivánovich entered, as is always the case, perplexed as to what he would have to do. One thing he knew, and that was that under such circumstances it would never do any harm to make the sign of the cross. But he was not quite sure whether he ought also to make obeisances, and so he chose the middle way: upon entering the room, he began to make the sign of the cross and acted as though he were bowing. At the same time, as much as the motion of his hands and of his head permitted it, he surveyed the room. Two young men, one of them a gymnasiast,—he thought they were nephews,—were leaving the room, making the sign of the cross. An old woman stood motionless and a lady with queerly raised brows was telling her something in a whisper. A sexton, in a Prince Albert, a wide-awake, determined man, was reading something in a loud voice with an expression which excluded every contradiction; Gerásim, a peasant of the buffet-room, was with light steps strewing something on the floor, in front of Peter Ivánovich. As Peter Ivánovich saw this, he at once caught the light odour of the decomposing body.

During his last call on Iván Ilích, Peter Ivánovich had seen this peasant in the cabinet: he had been performing the duty of a nurse, and Iván Ilích was particularly fond of him. Peter Ivánovich kept making the sign of the cross and slightly inclined his head in a central direction between the coffin, the sexton, and the images on the