fool--I'll go with you! Who's
to go, if not you?

"Well, am I ... well, am I? ..." babbled Little White Manka with barely
moving lips. "Let's go. It's all the same to me..."

The morgue was right here, behind the chapel--a low, already entirely
dark basement, into which one had to descend by six steps.

The watchman ran off somewhere, and returned with a candle-end and a
tattered book. When he had lit the candle, the girls saw a score of
corpses that were lying directly on the stone floor in regular
rows--extended, yellow, with faces distorted by pre-mortal convulsions,
with skulls split open, with clots of blood on their faces, with
grinning teeth.

"Right away ... right away..." the watchman was saying, guiding his
finger over the headings. "The day before yesterday ... that means, on
Saturday ... on Saturday ... What did you say her name was, now?"

"Raitzina, Susannah," answered Tamara.

"Rai-tzina Susannah ..." said the watchman, just as though he were
singing, "Raitzina, Susannah. Just as I said. Two hundred seventeen."
Bending over the dead and illuminating them with the guttered and
dripping candle-end, he passed from one to another. Finally he stopped
before a corpse, upon whose foot was written in ink, in large black
figures: 217.

"Here's the very same one! Let me, I'll carry her out into the little
corridor and run after her stuff ... Wait a while! ..."

Grunting, but still with an ease amazing in one of his age, he lifted
up the corpse of Jennka by the feet, and threw it upon his back with
the head down, as though it were a carcass of meat, or a bag of
potatoes.

It was a trifle lighter in the corridor; and, when the watchman had
lowered his horrible burden to the floor, Tamara for a moment covered
her face with her hands, while Manka turned away and began to cry.

"If you need anything, say so," the watchman was instructing them. "If
you want to dress the deceased as is fitting, then we can get
everything that's required--cloth of gold, a little wreath, a little
image, a shroud, gauze--we keep everything ... You can buy a thing or
two in, clothing ... Slippers, too, now..."

Tamara gave him money and went out into the air, letting Manka go in
front of her.

After some time two wreaths were brought; one from Tamara, of asters
and georginas with an inscription in black letters upon a white ribbon:
"To Jennie from a friend;" the other was from Ryazanov, all of red
flowers; upon its red ribbon