This was the death of his bosom friend Tihon Ivanovitch Nedopyuskin. His
health had begun to fail two years before his death: he began to suffer
from asthma, and was constantly dropping asleep, and on waking up could
not at once come to himself; the district doctor maintained that this
was the result of 'something rather like fits.' During the three days
which preceded Masha's departure, those three days when 'her heart was
heavy,' Nedopyuskin had been away at his own place at Bezselendyevka: he
had been laid up with a severe cold. Masha's conduct was consequently
even more unexpected for him; it made almost a deeper impression on him
than on Tchertop-hanov himself. With his natural sweetness and
diffidence, he gave utterance to nothing but the tenderest sympathy with
his friend, and the most painful perplexity... but it crushed and made
havoc of everything in him. 'She has torn the heart out of me,' he would
murmur to himself, as he sat on his favourite checked sofa and twisted
his fingers. Even when Tchertop-hanov had got over it, he, Nedopyuskin,
did not recover, and still felt that 'there was a void within him.'
'Here,' he would say, pointing to the middle of his breast above his
stomach. In that way he lingered on till the winter. When the frosts
came, his asthma got better, but he was visited by, not 'something
rather like a fit' this time, but a real unmistakable fit. He did not
lose his memory at once; he still knew Tchertop-hanov and his friend's
cry of despair, 'How can you desert me, Tisha, without my consent, just
as Masha did?' He even responded with faltering, uncertain tongue,
'O--P--a--ey--E--e--yitch, I will o--bey you.'
This did not, however, prevent him from dying the same day, without
waiting for the district doctor, who (on seeing the hardly cold body)
found nothing left for him to do, but with a melancholy recognition of
the instability of all things mortal, to ask for 'a drop of vodka and a
snack of fish.' As might have been anticipated, Tihon Ivanitch had
bequeathed his property to his revered patron and generous protector,
Panteley Eremyitch Tchertop-hanov; but it was of no great benefit to the
revered patron, as it was shortly after sold by public auction, partly
in order to cover the expense of a sepulchral monument, a statue, which
Tchertop-hanov (and one can see his father's craze coming out in him
here) had thought fit to put up over the ashes of his friend. This
statue, which was to have represented an angel praying, was ordered by
him from Moscow; but the agent recommended to him, conceiving that
connoisseurs in sculpture were not often to be met with in the
provinces, sent him, instead of an angel, a goddess Flora, which had for
many years adorned one of those neglected gardens near Moscow, laid out
in the days of Catherine. He had an excellent reason for doing so, since
this statue, though highly artistic, in the rococo style, with plump
little arms, tossing curls, a wreath of roses round the bare bosom, and
a serpentine figure, was obtained by him, the agent, for nothing. And so
to this day the mythological goddess stands, with one foot elegantly
lifted, above the tomb of Tihon Ivanovitch, and with a genuinely
Pompadour simper, gazes at the calves and sheep, those invariable
visitors of our village graveyards, as they stray about her.