Viy — Страница 22

Only the darkness above seemed to become deeper, and the dark, images
looked more gloomily from the old carved frames on which gold gleamed here
and there. He went up to the coffin, timidly looked into the dead girl's
face, and could not help shutting bis eyes with a slight start.
Such terrible, dazzling beauty!
He turned and wanted to step away; but with strange curiosity, with the
strange, self-contradictory feeling that will not leave a man especially in
a time of fear, he could not refrain from glancing at her as he went, and
then, with the same feeling of trepidation, glancing once more. Indeed, the
deceased girl's sharp beauty seemed frightful. Perhaps she even would not
have struck him with such panic terror if she had been slightly ugly. But
there was in her features nothing dull, lusterless, dead. The face was
alive, and it seemed to the philosopher that she was looking at him through
closed eyes. It even seemed to him that a tear rolled from under her right
eyelash, and when it stopped on her cheek, he made out clearly that it was a
drop of blood.
He hastily went over to the choir, opened the book and, to cheer
himself up, began reading in his loudest voice. His voice struck the wooden
walls of the church, long silent and deaf. Solitary, without echo, it poured
in a low bass into the utterly dead silence and seemed a little wild even to
the reader himself.
"What's there to be afraid of?" he thought to himself meanwhile. "She
won't get up from her coffin, because she'll be afraid of God's word. Let
her lie there! And what kind of Cossack am I if I'm scared? So I drank a
bit--that's why it seems so frightening. If I could take some snuff---ah,
fine tobacco! Nice tobacco! Good tobacco!"
And yet, as he turned each page, he kept glancing sidelong at the
coffin, and an involuntary feeling seemed to whisper to him: "Look, look,
she's going to get up, she's going to rise, she's going to peek out of the
coffin!"
But there was a deathly silence. The coffin stood motionless. The
candles poured out a whole flood of light. Terrible is a lit-up church at
night, with a dead body and not a living soul!
Raising his voice, he began singing in various voices, trying to stifle
the remnants of his fear. Yet he turned his eyes to the coffin every other
moment, as if asking the inadvertent question: "What if she rises, what if
she gets up?"
But the coffin did not stir. If only there was a sound, some living
being, even the chirp of a cricket in the corner! There was just the slight
sizzle of some remote candle and the faint spatter of wax dripping on the
floor.
"Well, what if she gets up? . . ."
She raised her head . . .
He gazed wildly and rubbed his eyes. But she was indeed no longer lying
but sitting up in the coffin.