The youngest princess, Sophie, the rosy-cheeked one with the mole and the sense of humour, had her eyes on him. She smiled, hid her face in her handkerchief and kept it there for some time, but soon looked at Pierre again, and gave another giggle. She was obviously incapable of looking at him without giggling, but she couldn’t resist looking at him, so she removed the temptation by gliding behind a column. In mid-service the voices of the priests suddenly ceased, and they started whispering to one another. The old servant, who was holding the count’s hand, straightened up and turned to the ladies. Anna Mikhaylovna stepped forward, bent down over the sick man and beckoned behind her back to Lorrain. The French doctor had been standing there without a candle, leaning against a column, but with the respectful attitude of a foreigner, who, despite differences of religion, fully acknowledges the solemnity of the ceremony and even approves of it. Now, with the noiseless steps of a man in his prime he strode over to his patient, extended delicate, white fingers to raise a hand from the quilt, turned to one side and began feeling the pulse thoughtfully. They gave the sick man something to drink, a few people around him stirred, then they all went back to their places, and the service continued. During this break in the proceedings Pierre watched Prince Vasily leave his chair-back, and with the same air of authority – he knew what he was doing and it was too bad for anyone who couldn’t understand him – he walked straight past the sick man and joined the eldest princess. Together they went off to the far end of the room towards the high bedstead with its silk hangings. They went past the bed and out through a rear door, but before the end of the service they came back in one after the other and resumed their places. Pierre paid no more attention to this development than to any other, having made up his mind once and for all that tonight everything unfolding before him was necessary and inevitable.
The sound of chanting stopped and the priest’s voice could be heard reverently congratulating the sick man on having received the mystery. The patient lay there, showing no sign of life or movement. Round about him there was a shuffling and a rustling and voices whispering, Anna Mikhaylovna’s louder than the rest. Pierre heard her say, ‘Yes, he must be moved across to the bed. It’s impossible here . . .’
The sick man was now so hemmed in by doctors, princesses and servants that Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face with the grey mane that he had never for a moment lost sight of during the ceremony, even though there had been other faces to watch as well. From the gingerly manoeuvring of people round the chair he surmised that they were lifting the dying man up and moving him over to the bed.
‘Hold on to my arm or you’ll drop him,’ he heard one of the servants whisper in panic. ‘Down a bit . . .’, ‘Somebody else here . . .’, said voices. Laboured breathing, heavy steps and a gathering rush made it seem as if the weight they were carrying was too much for them.
The bearers struggled past, Anna Mikhaylovna among them, and the young man caught a glimpse over their backs and necks of the sick man – the fleshy expanse of his huge chest, the curling grey of his leonine head and the massive shoulders, all hunched up as people grasped him under the armpits. That head, with its broad brow and prominent cheekbones, a handsome, sensual mouth and an aloof expression of high dignity, was not disfigured by the approach of death. It was the same head that Pierre remembered from three months ago, when his father had seen him off to Petersburg, but now it flopped about helplessly to the stumbling steps of the bearers, and the cold, apathetic eyes were focused on nothing.
