Groaning, the old nurse slowly ascends the steps. Sofia Alexandrovna
pauses from her reading a moment and looks with fear at the old woman.
Natasha gives a nervous start and turns away. Elena Kirillovna reads on
calmly, without looking at the nurse.
The nurse sighs, sits down on the bench at the entrance, and asks in a
monotone the one and the same question that she asks each day:
“And how many folk are there in this morning’s paper that’s been
ordered to die? And how many are there that’s been hanged?”
Sofia Alexandrovna drops the paper, and suddenly rising, very pale,
looks upon the old woman. She is quivering from head to foot. Elena
Kirillovna, folding the paper, pushes it aside and looks straight
before her with arrested eyes. Natasha rises; she turns her face, which
has suddenly grown pale, toward the old woman, and utters in a kind of
wooden voice that does not seem like her own:
“In Ekaterinoslav—seven; in Moscow—one.”
Or other towns, and other figures—such as fresh newspaper lists bring
each day.
The nurse rises and crosses herself piously. She mutters:
“O Lord, rest the souls of Thy servants! And give them eternal life!”
Then Sofia Alexandrovna cries out in despair:
“Oh Borya, Borya, my Borya!”
Her face is as pale as though there were not a single drop of blood
left under her dull, elastic skin.
Wringing her hands with a convulsive movement, she looks with terror at
Elena Kirillovna and at her daughter. Elena Kirillovna turns aside,
and, looking at the old nurse, shakes her head reproachfully, while in
her eyes, like drops of early evening dew, appear a few scant tears.
Natasha, looking determinedly at her mother, says with pale, quivering
lips:
“Mamma, calm yourself.”
Suddenly her voice becomes cold and wooden again as though some evil
stranger compelled her each day to utter her words slowly and
deliberately.
“You yourself know, mamma, that Borya was hanged a full year ago!”
She looks at her mother with the motionless, pathetic gaze of her very
dark eyes, and repeats:
“You yourself know this, mamma!”
Sofia Alexandrovna’s eyes are widely dilated; dull, there is terror in
them, and the deep pupils burn with an impercipient lustre in their
dark depths. She repeats almost soundlessly, looking straight into
Natasha’s eyes:
“Hanged!”
She resumes her place, looks out of her sad eyes at the white Aphrodite
and the red roses at the goddess’s feet, and is silent. Her face is
white and rigid, her lips are red and tightly set; there is a
suggestion of latent madness in the still lustre of her eyes.
Before the image of eternal beauty, before the fragrance of the
short-lived, exultant roses, she is hardening as it were into an image
of the eternal grief of a disconsolate mother.