and fetch the doctor or the midwife! Has
Vassily gone? Send some one else. Send your husband!"

"It's the birth," Olga Mihalovna thought. "Varvara," she moaned,
"but he won't be born alive!"

"It's all right, it's all right, mistress," whispered Varvara.
"Please God, he will be alive! he will be alive!"

When Olga Mihalovna came to herself again after a pain she was no
longer sobbing nor tossing from side to side, but moaning. She could
not refrain from moaning even in the intervals between the pains.
The candles were still burning, but the morning light was coming
through the blinds. It was probably about five o'clock in the
morning. At the round table there was sitting some unknown woman
with a very discreet air, wearing a white apron. From her whole
appearance it was evident she had been sitting there a long time.
Olga Mihalovna guessed that she was the midwife.

"Will it soon be over?" she asked, and in her voice she heard a
peculiar and unfamiliar note which had never been there before. "I
must be dying in childbirth," she thought.

Pyotr Dmitritch came cautiously into the bedroom, dressed for the
day, and stood at the window with his back to his wife. He lifted
the blind and looked out of window.

"What rain!" he said.

"What time is it?" asked Olga Mihalovna, in order to hear the
unfamiliar note in her voice again.

"A quarter to six," answered the midwife.

"And what if I really am dying?" thought Olga Mihalovna, looking
at her husband's head and the window-panes on which the rain was
beating. "How will he live without me? With whom will he have tea
and dinner, talk in the evenings, sleep?"

And he seemed to her like a forlorn child; she felt sorry for him
and wanted to say something nice, caressing and consolatory. She
remembered how in the spring he had meant to buy himself some
harriers, and she, thinking it a cruel and dangerous sport, had
prevented him from doing it.

"Pyotr, buy yourself harriers," she moaned.

He dropped the blind and went up to the bed, and would have said
something; but at that moment the pain came back, and Olga Mihalovna
uttered an unseemly, piercing scream.

The pain and the constant screaming and moaning stupefied her. She
heard, saw, and sometimes spoke, but hardly understood anything,
and was only conscious that she was in pain or was just going to
be in pain. It seemed to her that the nameday party had been long,
long ago--not yesterday, but a year ago perhaps;