The child was born half-strangled, having swallowed water in the process of birth.
They slapped him, rubbed him, blew into his mouth.
He wrinkled up his face and cried.
The midwife would not give up hope, though the child had begun to cough.
He wailed, like a kitten, with shallow, pitiful cries, and would not take the breast.
Then he stopped crying and only coughed.
And on the morning of the third day Dasha put out her hand to the cradle, and drew it back hastily—the little body she touched was cold.
She seized him with eager hands and unwrapped him. His fair, sparse hair was standing straight up from his peaked skull.
Dasha gave a frantic shriek.
She flung away from the bed, making for the window—to break it, to throw herself out, to end her life....
"I failed him!" she exclaimed over and over again. "I can't bear it!"
Telegin had difficulty in restraining her and laying her on the bed.
The tiny corpse was taken away.
Dasha said to her husband:
"Death came to him while I was asleep.
Only think— his hair stood on end. He suffered alone. And I slept."
Nothing he said could dispel her vision of the child's solitary struggle with death.
"All right, Ivan, I won't go on any more," she would answer Telegin, so as not to have to listen to her husband's reasonable voice, not to have to see his healthy, rosy face, from which no distress could drive away the look of content.
Telegin's exuberant health enabled him to rush about the town in torn galoshes from morning to night, looking for odd jobs, food, firewood, and the like.
Several times a day he would run home, all solicitude and kindness.
But these tender cares were what Dasha needed least of all just now.
The greater the practical activities displayed by Ivan Ilyich, the more hopelessly estranged was Dasha.
She sat all day alone in the cold room.
An occasional nap was her greatest blessing. She would doze, pass her hands over her eyes, and feel a little better.
Then she would go to the kitchen, remembering that Ivan Ilyich had asked her to do something.
But the simplest of tasks was beyond her abilities just now.
The November rain drummed against the windows.
The wind howled over Petersburg.
And in this cold, in the cemetery on the seashore, lay the tiny dead body of her son, who had not even been able to complain....
Ivan Ilyich realized that she was mentally sick.
It was enough for the electricity to go out for her to huddle up in a chair, her head covered with a shawl, silently absorbed in her mortal grief.
But life had to be lived.... One must live.... He wrote to Katya, who was in Moscow, about Dasha, but the letters must have gone astray, for there was no answer.
Perhaps Katya herself had had some mishap.
Times were hard.
Standing behind Dasha, Ivan Ilyich moved his feet and trod on a box of matches.
He understood it all immediately: when the light had gone out, Dasha to combat the darkness and solitude, had lit matches every now and then.
"Oh, the poor darling!" he thought. "Alone all day!"
Cautiously he picked up the box. There were still a few matches in it.
He fetched from the kitchen the sticks made ready in the morning—the carefully sawed remnants of the old wardrobe.
Squatting on his heels in the study, he began lighting the small brick stove from which a bent iron pipe stretched right across the room.
The smoke from the burning splinters smelt nice.
A little wind moaned through the crevices around the door of the stove.
A trembling disc of light appeared on the ceiling.
These homemade stoves were afterwards nicknamed "Bourgeoise," or "Bumblebee," nicknames that spread far and wide.
They served humanity honestly all through the period of military communism.
The simpler ones were of iron, on four feet, with a single opening for cooking, or— in exceptional cases—with an oven, in which pancakes of coffee grounds, or even pies made with salt dried fish, could be baked. The more elaborate ones had tiles torn from the fireplace; but all of them heated and cooked, and chanted the immemorial song of fire to the accompaniment of the blizzard's howl.
People gathered round the burning embers as in times of old around the hearth, warming their frozen fingers, and waiting patiently for the lid of the kettle to start dancing.
Conversations were carried on which, unfortunately, were never written down.
Drawing their broken-down armchairs nearer, professors, their beards grown bushy, their feet in felt boots, blankets round their shoulders, or over their knees, wrote their remarkable books.
Poets, grown almost transparent from hunger, composed verses about love and revolution; plotters, gathering in a circle, their heads almost touching, whispered fragments of news, each more terrible and fantastic than the one before.