He went into the study; it was the warmest room in the whole flat, but today even here it was cold.
He looked round, but could make out nothing—he could not even hear Dasha's breathing.
He was very hungry, and was longing for tea, but he felt sure Dasha had not got anything ready.
Turning down his coat collar, Ivan Ilyich sat down on the armchair near the sofa, his face towards the window.
Out there, in the snowy darkness, wavered a dim light.
From Kronstadt, or from somewhere nearer, perhaps, the searchlights were groping over the sky.
"I ought to light the stove," he said to himself.
And he tried to think of a way of asking Dasha where the matches were, without irritating her.
But he could not bring himself to ask her.
He wondered what exactly she was doing—crying or dozing?
It was really too quiet.
There was a tomblike silence throughout the many-storied house.
The only sounds were an occasional faint shot.
Six bulbs in the chandelier suddenly glowed, and a reddish light illuminated the room.
Dasha was seen to be seated at the desk, a coat flung over whatever she had on, one foot, in its felt boot, thrust forward.
Her head lay on the desk, one cheek resting on the blotting pad.
Her face was thin and harassed, her eyes were open—she had not even closed her eyes!—she sat there awkwardly, uncomfortably, all hunched up....
"Dasha, you mustn't go on like that!" said Telegin thickly.
He felt an intolerable pity for her.
He went up to the desk.
But the red filaments trembled and went out.
The light had only lasted a few seconds.
He stood behind Dasha, and bent over her, holding his breath.
It seemed as if nothing could be simpler than to stroke her hair without a word.
But she might have been a corpse, for all the response his approach evoked in her.
"Dasha! Why do you torture yourself so?"
A month before Dasha had given birth to a baby boy, which had scarcely lived three days.
The birth had been premature, the result of a terrible shock.
Two men of superhuman height, in fluttering shrouds, had leaped upon Dasha in the dusk, on the Field of Mars.
They must have been the notorious "hoppers," who, fastening springs to their feet, were, in those fantastic times, terrorizing the whole of Petrograd.
They whistled and gnashed their teeth at Dasha, and when she fell down tore off her coat, and hopped away across Lebyazhi Bridge.
Dasha had lain for some time on the ground.
There were showers of driving rain, and the naked lime trees in the Summer Park rattled their branches frenziedly.
Somewhere beyond the Fontanka River came long-drawn cries for help.
The unborn child kicked out vigorously, as if asking to be admitted into the world.
He was so insistent that Dasha at last got up and crossed the Troitsky Bridge.
The wind flattened her against the iron railing, and her damp dress clung to her legs.
There were neither lights nor passers-by.
Far below was the black, turbulent Neva.
Dasha felt the first pains as she stepped off the bridge.
Realizing that she would be unable to reach home, she thought only of getting to a tree for shelter from the wind.
In Krasnye Zori Street she was stopped by a patrol.
The soldier, rifle in hand, bent over her deathly pale countenance.
"They stripped her, the beasts!
And she in the family way!"
He took Dasha home and saw her to the fifth floor, where he banged on the door with the butt end of his rifle. When Telegin opened the door and thrust out his head, the soldier shouted at him:
"Is that the way? Letting a lady go out alone at night! She almost had her baby out in the street! You devils, you bourgeois boobies!"
Labour set in the same night.
A garrulous midwife appeared in the flat.
The pains continued a day and a night.