The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [87]
it to me.' Silently and reluctantly Elena showed him the thermometer. Alexei looked at it and sighed deeply.
By five o'clock he was lying with a cold gray bag on his head, little lumps of ice melting and floating in the bag. His face had turned pink, his eyes glittered and looked very handsome.
'Thirty-nine point six . . . good . . .' he said, occasionally licking his dry, cracked lips. 'Ye-es . . . May be all right . . . Though I won't be able to practice . . . for a long time. If only I don't lose my arm . . . without an arm I'm useless . . .'
'Please don't talk, Alyosha', begged Elena, straightening the blanket around his shoulders . . . Alexei was silent, closing his eyes. From his wound in his left armpit, a dry prickly heat spread out over his whole body. Occasionally he filled his chest with a deep breath, which gave his head a misty feeling, but his legs were turning unpleasantly cold. Towards evening, when the lamps were lit everywhere and the other three - Elena, Nikolka and Lariosik -slowly ate their supper in silence and anxiety, the column of mercury, expanding and bursting magically out of its silver globule crawled up to the 40.2 mark. Then Alexei's alarm and depression began to melt away and dissipate. The depression, which had come to him like a gray lump that spread itself over the blanket, was now transformed into yellow strands which trailed out like seaweed in water. He forgot about his practice, forgot his anxiety about the future because everything was smothered by those yellow strands. The tearing pain in the left side of his chest grew numb and still. Fever gave way to cold. Now and again the burning flame in his chest was turned into an ice-cold knife twisting somewhere within his lung. When this happened, Alexei shook his head, threw off the ice-bag and crawled deeper under the blankets. The pain in his wound altered from a dull ache to a spasm of such intensity that the wounded man began involuntarily to complain, in a weak, dry voice. When the knife went away and was replaced by the flame, the fever flooded back again through his body and through the whole of the little cavity under the bedclothes and the patient asked for a drink. The faces of Nikolka, then of Elena and then of Lariosik appeared through the mist, bent
over him and listened. The eyes of all three looked terribly alike, frowning and angry. The hands on Nikolka's face dropped at once and stayed - like Elena's - at half past six. Every minute Nikolka went out into the dining-room - somehow that evening the lights all seemed to be flickering and dim - and looked at the clock. Tonkhh . . . tonkhh . . . the clock creaked on with an angry, warning sound as its hands pointed at nine, then at a quarter past, then half past nine . . .
'Oh lord', sighed Nikolka, wandering like a sleepy fly from the dining-room, through the lobby into the drawing-room, where he pushed aside the net curtain and stared through the french window into the street . . . 'Let's hope the doctor hasn't lost his nerve and isn't afraid to come . . .' he thought. The street, steep and crooked, was emptier than it had ever been recently, but it also looked somehow less menacing. The occasional cabman's sleigh creaked past. But they were very few and far between . . . Nikolka realised that he would probably have to go out and fetch the doctor, and wondered how to persuade Elena to let him go.
'If he doesn't come by half past ten,' said Elena, 'I will go myself with Larion Larionovich and you stay and keep an eye on Alyosha . . . No, don't argue . . . Don't you see, you look too like an officer cadet . . . We'll give Lariosik Alyosha's civilian clothes, and they won't touch him if he's with a woman . . .'
Lariosik assured them that he was prepared to take the risk and go alone, and went off to change into civilian clothes.
The knife had gone altogether, but the fever had returned, made worse by the onset of typhus, and in his fever Alexei kept seeing the vague, mysterious figure of a man in gray.
'I suppose you know