XI

her hands, and ran out into the passage crying. The crowd thronged into the cubicle, wailing and weeping. They carried out the little body and began rubbing it, but in vain. Akoulína tossed about on the bed, and laughed⁠—laughed so that all who heard her were frightened. Only now, seeing this motley crowd of men and women, old people and children, did one fully realize what a number, and what sort, of people lived in the serfs’ quarters. Everybody fussed and spoke; many wept, but nobody did anything. The joiner’s wife still found people who had not heard her tale about the way her tender feelings were shocked by the unexpected sight, and how God had saved her from falling down the ladder. An old man who had been a footman, with a woman’s jacket thrown over his shoulders, was relating how in the days of the old proprietor a woman drowned herself in the pond. The steward sent messengers to the priest and to the policeman, and appointed men to keep guard. Aksyúta, the maid from “up there,” kept gazing with staring eyes at the opening that led to the garret, and though she could not see anything, was unable to tear herself away and go back to her mistress. Agatha Miháylovna, who had been lady’s-maid to the former proprietress, was weeping and asking for some tea to soothe her nerves. Anna, the midwife, was laying out the little body on the table, with her practised, plump, oily hands. Other women stood in front of Akoulína, silently looking at her. The children, huddled together in a corner, kept glancing at their mother and bursting into howls; and then, growing silent for a moment, glanced again, and huddled still closer. Boys and men thronged round the porch, looking in at the door and the windows with frightened faces; and, unable to see or understand anything, asking one another what it was all about. One said the joiner had chopped off his wife’s foot with an axe. Another said that the laundress had borne triplets; a third, that the cook’s cat had gone mad and bitten the people. But the truth gradually spread, and at last it reached the proprietress. And apparently no one understood how to prepare her! That rough Egór blurted the facts straight out to her, and so upset the lady’s nerves that it was a long time before she could recover.