ur eternal harmony, and
Mahomet was an epileptic. Be careful, Kirillov, it's epilepsy!"

"It won't have time," Kirillov smiled gently.

VI

The night was passing. Shatov was sent hither and thither, abused,
called back. Marie was reduced to the most abject terror for life. She
screamed that she wanted to live, that "she must, she must," and was
afraid to die. "I don't want to, I don't want to!" she repeated. If
Arina Prohorovna had not been there, things would have gone very badly.
By degrees she gained complete control of the patient--who began to obey
every word, every order from her like a child. Arina Prohorovna ruled by
sternness not by kindness, but she was first-rate at her work. It began
to get light... Arina Prohorovna suddenly imagined that Shatov had just
run out on to the stairs to say his prayers and began laughing. Marie
laughed too, spitefully, malignantly, as though such laughter relieved
her. At last they drove Shatov away altogether. A damp, cold morning
dawned. He pressed his face to the wall in the corner just as he had
done the evening before when Erkel came. He was trembling like a leaf,
afraid to think, but his mind caught at every thought as it does in
dreams.

He was continually being carried away by day-dreams, which snapped off
short like a rotten thread. From the room came no longer groans but
awful animal cries, unendurable, incredible. He tried to stop up his
ears, but could not, and he fell on his knees, repeating unconsciously,
"Marie, Marie!" Then suddenly he heard a cry, a new cry, which made
Shatov start and jump up from his knees, the cry of a baby, a weak
discordant cry. He crossed himself and rushed into the room. Arina
Prohorovna held in her hands a little red wrinkled creature, screaming,
and moving its little arms and legs, fearfully helpless, and looking
as though it could be blown away by a puff of wind, but screaming and
seeming to assert its full right to live. Marie was lying as though
insensible, but a minute later she opened her eyes, and bent a strange,
strange look on Shatov: it was something quite new, that look. What it
meant exactly he was not able to understand yet, but he had never known
such a look on her face before.

"Is it a boy? Is it a boy?" she asked Arina Prohorovna in an exhausted
voice.

"It is a boy," the latter shouted in reply, as she bound up the child.

When she had bound him up and was about to lay him across the bed
between the two pillows,