War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [49]
Those who were in the dimly lit room talked together in broken whispers, and fell silent each time, turning with eyes full of inquiry and expectation to the door which led to the dying man’s room and which made a faint noise whenever someone went in or came out.
“A limit has been set,” said a little old man, a clerical person, to a lady who sat down beside him and listened to him naïvely, “a limit has been set to human life, which cannot be overstepped.”
“I wonder if it’s not too late to give extreme unction?” the lady asked, adding his clerical title, as if she had no opinion on the subject.
“It is a great sacrament, my dear,” the clerical person replied, passing his hand over his bald head, which had several strands of half-gray hair combed over it.
“Who was that? The commander in chief himself?” someone asked at the other end of the room. “What a youthful man!…”
“He’s in his sixties! Well, so they say the count no longer recognizes anyone? Do they mean to give him extreme unction?”
“I knew a man who received extreme unction seven times.”
The second princess came out of the sick man’s room with tearful eyes and sat down next to Dr. Lorrain, who was sitting in a graceful pose under a portrait of Catherine, leaning his elbow on a table.
“Très beau,” the doctor said in reply to a question about the weather, “très beau, princesse, et puis, à Moscou on se croit à la campagne.”*116
“N’est-ce-pas?”†117 said the princess, sighing. “So he’s allowed to drink?”
Lorrain pondered.
“Has he taken his medicine?”
“Yes.”
The doctor looked at his Breguet.41
“Take a glass of boiled water and put in une pincée” (with his slender fingers he showed what une pincée meant) “de cremortartari…”‡118
“Dere hass been no occasion,” a German doctor said to an adjutant, “dat one remains alife after a second shtroke.”
“And he was such a fresh man!” said the adjutant. “And to whom will all that wealth go?” he added in a whisper.
“Dere vill be no lack of seekers,” the German said, smiling.
Everyone looked at the door again: it creaked, and the second princess, having prepared the drink prescribed by Lorrain, carried it to the sick man. The German doctor went over to Lorrain.
“He may still last until tomorrow morning?” the German asked in poorly pronounced French.
Lorrain, compressing his lips, wagged his finger sternly and negatively in front of his nose.
“Tonight, no later,” he said softly, with a decent smile of self-satisfaction at being able to clearly understand and explain the patient’s condition, and walked away.
Meanwhile, Prince Vassily had opened the door to the princess’s room.
The room was in semi-darkness, only two icon lamps burned before the icons, and there was a good smell of incense and flowers. The whole room was filled with small furniture: little chiffoniers, cupboards, tables. Behind a screen the white covers of a high featherbed could be seen. A little dog barked.
“Ah, it’s you, mon cousin?”
She got up and straightened her hair, which was always, even now, so extraordinarily smooth that it seemed varnished and of one piece with her head.
“What, has something happened?” she asked. “I’m so frightened.”
“Nothing, it’s all the same; I have only come to have a talk with you, Catiche, about business,” said the prince, sitting with an air of fatigue in the armchair from which she had gotten up. “How warm you keep it, though,” he said. “Well, sit down here, causons.”*119
“I thought something had happened,” said the princess, and with her unchanging, stern and stony expression, she sat down opposite the prince and prepared to listen.
“I wanted to get some sleep, mon cousin, but I can’t.”
“Well, and so, my dear?” said Prince Vassily, taking the princess’s hand and pulling it down, as was his habit.
It was clear that this “and so” referred to many things they both understood