Julia Reiss knelt down at the stove and raked the fire with a poker.
Alternately opening and closing his eyes in pain, Alexei watched her as she turned her head aside from the heat, screening it with her pale wrist. Her hair seemed to be an indefinite color which at one moment looked ash-blond shot with flame, at the next almost gold; but her eyebrows were as coal-black as her eyes.
He could not decide whether that irregular profile with its aquiline nose was beautiful or not.
The look in her eyes was a riddle.
There was fear, anxiety and perhaps - sensuality . . .
Yes, sensuality.
As she sat there lapped in a wave of heat she was miraculously attractive.
She had saved his life. #
For hours that night, when the heat of the stove had long since died down and burned instead in his head and arm, someone was twisting a red-hot nail into the top of his head and destroying his brain.
'I've got a fever', Alexei repeated drily and soundlessly, and tried to instil into his mind that he must get up in the morning and somehow make his way home.
As the nail bored into his brain it finally drove out his thoughts of Elena, of Nikolka, of home and of Petlyura.
Nothing mattered.
Peturra...
Peturra...
He could only long for one thing - for the pain to stop.
Deep in the night Julia Reiss came in wearing soft fur-trimmed slippers, and sat beside him and again, his arm weakly hooked around her neck, he passed through the two small rooms.
Before this she had gathered her strength and said to him:
'Get up, if only you can.
Don't pay any attention to me.
I'll help you.
Then lie right down . . .
Well, if you can't . . .'
He replied:
'No, I'll go . . . only help me . . .'
She led him to the little door of that mysterious house and then helped him back.
As he lay down, his teeth chattering from the cold, he felt some lessening and respite from his headache and said:
'I swear I won't forget what you've done.
Go to bed . . .'
'Be quiet, I'll soothe your head', she replied.
Then the dull, angry pain flowed out of his head, flowed away from his temples into her soft hands, through them and through her body into the floor, covered with a dusty, fluffy carpet, and there it expired.
Instead of the pain a delicious even heat spread all over his body.
His arm had gone numb and felt as heavy as cast-iron, so he did not move it but merely closed his eyes and gave himself up to the fever.
How long he lay there he could not have said: perhaps five minutes, perhaps hours.
But he felt that he could have lain like that, bathed in heat, for ever.
Whenever he opened his eyes, gently so as not to alarm the woman sitting beside him, he saw the same picture: the little lamp burning weakly but steadily under its red shade giving out a peaceful light, and the woman's unsleeping profile beside him.
Her lips pouting like an unhappy child, she sat staring out of the window.
Basking in the heat of fever, Alexei stirred and edged towards her . . .
'Bend over me', he said.
His voice had become dry, weak and high-pitched.
She turned to him, her eyes took on a frightened guarded look and the shadows around them deepened.
Alexei put his right arm around her neck, pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips.
It seemed to him that he was touching something sweet-tasting and cold.
The woman was not surprised by what Alexei did, but only gazed more searchingly into his face.
Then she said:
'God, how hot you. are.
What are we going to do?
We ought to call a doctor, but how are we going to do it?'
'No need', Alexei replied gently. 'I don't need a doctor.
Tomorrow I'll get up and go home.'
'I'm so afraid,' she whispered, 'that you'll get worse.