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By Root 441 0

more for his friends and kin to do. The three men in the room made it crowded enough. One was the bear-like man with gold-rimmed spectacles; the other was young, clean-shaven and with a bearing more like a guards officer than a doctor, whilst the third was the gray-haired professor. His skill had revealed to him and to the Turbin family the joyless news when he had first called on December 16th. He had realised that Alexei had typhus and had said so at the time. Immediately the bullet wound near the left armpit seemed to become of secondary importance. An hour ago he had come out to Elena in the drawing-room and there, in answer to her urgent question, a question spoken not only with her tongue but with her dry eyes, her quivering lip and her disarranged hair, he had said that there was little hope, and had added, looking Elena straight in the eyes, with the gaze of a man of very great experience and therefore of very great compassion - 'very little'. Everybody, including Elena, knew that this meant that there was no hope at all and, therefore, that Alexei was dying. After Elena had gone into her brother's room and had stood for a long time looking at his face, and from this she too understood perfectly that there really was no hope. Even without the skill and experience of that good, gray-haired old man it was obvious that Doctor Alexei Turbin was dying.

He lay there, still giving off a feverish heat, but a fever that was already wavering and unstable, and which was on the point of declining. His face had already begun to take on an odd waxy tinge, his nose had changed and grown thinner, and in particular there was a suggestion of hopelessness about the bridge of his nose, which now seemed unnaturally prominent. Elena's legs turned cold and she felt overcome with a moment of dull despair in the reeking, camphor-laden air of the bedroom, but the feeling quickly passed.

Something had settled in Alexei's chest like a stone and he whistled as he breathed, drawing in through bared teeth a sticky, thin stream of air that barely penetrated to his lungs. He had long ago lost consciousness and neither saw nor understood what was going on around him. Elena stood and looked. The professor took her by the arm and whispered:

'Go now, Elena Vasilievna, we'll do all there is to do.'

Elena obeyed and went out. But the professor did not do anything more.

He took off his white coat, wiped his hands with some damp balls of cotton wool and looked again into Alexei's face. The bluish shadow around the folds of his mouth and nose was growing deeper.

'Hopeless', the professor said very quietly into the ear of the clean-shaven man. 'Stay with him, please, Doctor Brodovich.'

'Camphor?' asked Doctor Brodovich in a whisper.

'Yes, yes.'

'A full syringe?'

'No.' The professor looked out of the window and thought a moment. 'No, just three grams at a time. And often.' He thought again, then added: 'Telephone me in case of a termination' - the professor whispered very cautiously so that even through the haze of delirium Alexei should not hear him, - 'I'll be at the hospital. Otherwise I'll come back here straight after my lecture.'

# Year after year, for as long as the Turbins could remember, the

ikon lamps had been lit at dusk on December 24th, and in the evening they had lit the warm, twinkling candles on the Christmas tree in the drawing-room. But now that insidious bullet-wound and the rattle of typhus had put everything out of joint, had hastened the lighting of the ikon lamp. As she closed her bedroom door behind her, Elena went over to her bedside table, took from it a box of matches, climbed up on a chair and lit the wick in the lamp hanging on chains in front of the old ikon in its heavy metal covering. When the flame burned up brightly the halo above the dark face of the Virgin changed to gold and her eyes shone with a look of welcome. The face, inclined to one side, looked at Elena. In the two square panes of the window was a silent, white December day, and the flickering tongue of flame helped to create a sense of the approaching