Besides the reflections upon the changes and promotions in the service likely to ensue from this death, the very fact of the death of an intimate acquaintance excited in everyone who heard of it, as such a fact always does, a feeling of relief that “it is he that is dead, and not I.”
“Only think! he is dead, but here am I all right,” each one thought or felt. The more intimate acquaintances, the so-called friends of Ivan Ilyitch, could not help thinking too that now they had the exceedingly tiresome social duties to perform of going to the funeral service and paying the widow a visit of condolence.
The most intimately acquainted with their late colleague were Fyodor Vassilievitch and Pyotr Ivanovitch.
Pyotr Ivanovitch had been a comrade of his at the school of jurisprudence, and considered himself under obligations to Ivan Ilyitch.
Telling his wife at dinner of the news of Ivan Ilyitch’s death and his reflections as to the possibility of getting her brother transferred into their circuit, Pyotr Ivanovitch, without lying down for his usual nap, put on his frockcoat and drove to Ivan Ilyitch’s.
At the entrance before Ivan Ilyitch’s flat stood a carriage and two hired flies. Downstairs in the entry near the hatstand there was leaning against the wall a coffin-lid with tassels and braiding freshly rubbed up with pipeclay. Two ladies were taking off their cloaks. One of them he knew, the sister of Ivan Ilyitch; the other was a lady he did not know. Pyotr Ivanovitch’s colleague, Shvarts, was coming down; and from the top stair, seeing who it was coming in, he stopped and winked at him, as though to say: “Ivan Ilyitch has made a mess of it; it’s a very different matter with you and me.”
Shvarts’s face, with his English whiskers and all his thin figure in his frockcoat, had, as it always had, an air of elegant solemnity; and this