CHAPTER IV.
HIS father's death stupefied Foma and filled him with a strange sensation; quiet was poured into his soul--a painful, immovable quiet, which absorbed all the sounds of life without accounting for it.
All sorts of acquaintances were bustling about him; they appeared, disappeared, said something to him--his replies to them were untimely, and their words called forth no images in him, drowning, without leaving any trace, in the bottomless depths of the death-like silence which filled his soul.

He neither cried, nor grieved, nor thought of anything; pale and gloomy, with knitted brow, he was attentively listening to this quiet, which had forced out all his feelings, benumbed his heart and tightly clutched his brains.

He was conscious but of the purely physical sensation of heaviness in all his frame and particularly in his breast, and then it also seemed to him that it was always twilight, and even though the sun was still high in the sky--everything on earth looked dark and melancholy.
The funeral was arranged by Mayakin.

Hastily and briskly he was bustling about in the rooms, making much clatter with the heels of his boots; he cried at the household help imperiously, clapped his godson on the shoulder, consoling him: "And why are you petrified?
Roar and you will feel relieved.

Your father was old--old in body.