thick blood began to gush in a narrow
stream from his open mouth across his blue cheek.

Foma struck his breast with both hands, and kneeling before the dead
body, he wildly cried aloud. He was trembling with fright, and with eyes
like those of a madman he was searching for someone in the verdure of
the garden.

CHAPTER IV

HIS father's death stupefied Foma and filled him with a strange
sensation; quiet was poured into his soul--a painful, immovable quiet,
which absorbed all the sounds of life without accounting for it.
All sorts of acquaintances were bustling about him; they appeared,
disappeared, said something to him--his replies to them were untimely,
and their words called forth no images in him, drowning, without leaving
any trace, in the bottomless depths of the death-like silence which
filled his soul. He neither cried, nor grieved, nor thought of anything;
pale and gloomy, with knitted brow, he was attentively listening to this
quiet, which had forced out all his feelings, benumbed his heart and
tightly clutched his brains. He was conscious but of the purely physical
sensation of heaviness in all his frame and particularly in his breast,
and then it also seemed to him that it was always twilight, and even
though the sun was still high in the sky--everything on earth looked
dark and melancholy.

The funeral was arranged by Mayakin. Hastily and briskly he was bustling
about in the rooms, making much clatter with the heels of his boots;
he cried at the household help imperiously, clapped his godson on the
shoulder, consoling him:

"And why are you petrified? Roar and you will feel relieved. Your father
was old--old in body. Death is prepared for all of us, you cannot escape
it--consequently you must not be prematurely torpid. You cannot bring
him to life again with your sorrow, and your grief is unnecessary
to him, for it is said: 'When the body is robbed of the soul by the
terrible angels, the soul forgets all relatives and acquaintances,'
which means that you are of no consequence to him now, whether you cry
or laugh. But the living must care for the living. You had better cry,
for this is human. It brings much relief to the heart."

But neither did these words provoke anything in Foma's head or in his
heart. He came to himself, however, on the day of the funeral, thanks to
the persistence of his godfather, who was assiduously and oddly trying
to rouse his sad soul.

The day of the funeral was clou