About three o'clock one afternoon it was so dark that Kamionka was forced to light a candle. And he was so weak that he did this with no little difficulty. Before he reached for a match he meditated a long time; then he extended his arm lazily; the thinness of this arm, evident through the shirt sleeve, filled him, as a sculptor, with repugnance and bitterness. When he had lighted the candle he rested again, without moving, till the evening arrival of the servant, listening with closed eyes to the drops sounding in the gutter.
His studio looked strange then. The flame of the candle lighted the bed with Kamionka lying on it, and came to a focus in a shining point on his forehead with its skin dry and yellow as if polished. The rest of the room was sunk in darkness, which grew denser each moment. But as it grew dark outside the statues became more rosy and acquired life. The flame of the candle now sank, now rose, and in that quivering light the statues too seemed to sink and rise exactly as if they were rising on tiptoe to gain a better look at the face of the sculptor, and be convinced that their creator was living.
And indeed there was a certain immobility of death in that countenance. But at times the blue lips of the sick man stirred with a slight movement, as if in prayer, or as if he were cursing his loneliness and those dreadful drops of moisture which measured with even monotony the hours of his sickness.
One evening the woman came a little drunk, therefore more talkative than usual.
"There is so much work on my head that I can barely look in twice a day," said she; "if you would call a religious, a sister of charity costs nothing, and she would be better for a sick man."
This advice pleased Kamionka, but he, like others who are afflicted, had the habit of always opposing whatever advice people gave him; so he would not agree.
But after the woman had gone he began to think thus: "A sister of charity costs nothing, but what aid she might give, and what comfort!" Kamionka, like every sick man left to himself, experienced much suffering and struggled with a thousand petty miseries, which annoyed him as much as they made him impatient. More than once he lay for whole hours with a crooked neck before he would move to arrange his own pillow. Often in the night he was cold and would have given God knows what for a cup of tea; but if it was difficult to light a candle, how was he to think of making tea? A sister of charity would do all this with the mild readiness usual to those sisters. Oh, how much easier to be sick if one had their assistance!
The poor man came at last to think of sickness under such conditions as something desirable and pleasant, and he wondered in his soul if the like happiness were accessible to him even.
It seemed, too, that if a sister were to come and bring with her a little joyousness and solace to the studio, perhaps the weather would clear up outside, and the sounding drops of water cease to pursue him.
He regretted at last that he had not accepted the advice of the woman immediately. Night was approaching, long and gloomy, and the woman was to look in at him only next morning. He understood now that that night would be for him more grievous than all the nights which had ever preceded it.