Pavel Ilitch Rashevitch marched up and down the room, stepping softly on the Little Russian parquet, and casting a long shadow on the walls and ceiling; and his visitor, Monsieur Meyer, Examining Magistrate, sat on a Turkish divan, with one leg bent under him, smoked, and listened. It was eleven o'clock, and from the next room came the sound of preparations for supper.
"I don't dispute it for a moment!" said Rashevitch. "From the point of view of fraternity, equality, and all that sort of thing the swineherd Mitka is as good a man as Goethe or Frederick the Great. But look at it from the point of view of science; have the courage to look actuality straight in the face, and you cannot possibly deny that the white bone[1] is not a prejudice, not a silly woman's invention. The white bone, my friend, has a natural-historical justification, and to deny it, in my mind, is as absurd as to deny the antlers of a stag. Look at it as a question of fact! You are a jurist, and never studied anything except the humanities, so you may well deceive yourself with illusions as to equality, fraternity, and that sort of thing. But, on my side, I am an incorrigible Darwinian, and for me such words as race, aristocracy, noble blood are no empty sounds."
Rashevitch was aroused, and spoke with feeling. His eyes glittered, his pince-nez jumped off his nose, he twitched his shoulders nervously, and at the word "Darwinian" glanced defiantly at the mirror, and with his two hands divided his grey beard. He wore a short, well-worn jacket, and narrow trousers; but the rapidity of his movements and the smartness of the short jacket did not suit him at all, and his big, longhaired, handsome head, which reminded one of a bishop or a venerable poet, seemed to be set on the body of a tall, thin, and affected youth. When he opened his legs widely, his long shadow resembled a pair of scissors.
As a rule he loved the sound of his own voice; and it always seemed to him that he was saying something new and original. In the presence of Meyer he felt an unusual elevation of spirits and flow of thought. He liked the magistrate, who enlivened him by his youthful ways, his health, his fine manners, his solidity, and, even more, by the kindly relations which he had established with the family. Speaking generally, Rashevitch was not a favourite with his acquaintances. They avoided him, and he knew it. They declared that he had driven his wife into the grave with his perpetual talk, and called him, almost to his face, a beast and a toad. Meyer alone, being an unprejudiced new-corner, visited him often and willingly, and had even been heard to say that Rashevitch and his daughters were the only persons in the district with whom he felt at home. And Rashevitch reciprocated his esteem—all the more sincerely because Meyer was a young man, and an excellent match for his elder daughter, Zhenya. And now, enjoying his thoughts and the sound of his own voice, and looking with satisfaction at the stout, well-groomed, respectable figure of his visitor, Rashevitch reflected how he would settle Zhenya for life as the wife of a good man, and, in addition, transfer all the work of managing the estate to his son-in-law's shoulders. It was not particularly agreeable work. The interest had not been paid into the bank for more than two terms, and the various arrears and penalties amounted to over twenty thousand roubles.
"There can hardly be a shadow of doubt," continued Rashevitch, becoming more and more possessed by his subject, "that if some Richard the Lion-hearted or Frederick Barbarossa, for instance, a man courageous and magnanimous, has a son, his good qualities will be inherited by the son, together with his bumps; and if this courage and magnanimity are fostered in the son by education and exercise, and he marries a princess also courageous and magnanimous, then these qualities will be transmitted to the grandson, and so on, until they become peculiarities of the species, and descend organically, so to speak, in flesh and blood. Thanks to severe sexual selection, thanks to the fact that noble families instinctively preserve themselves from base alliances, and that young people of position do not marry the devil knows whom, their high spiritual qualities have reproduced themselves from generation to generation, they have been perpetuated, and in the course of ages have become even more perfect and loftier. For all that is good in humanity we are indebted to Nature, to the regular, natural-historical, expedient course of things, strenuously in the course of centuries separating the white bone from the black. Yes, my friend! It is not the potboy's child, the cookmaid's brat who has given us literature, science, art, justice, the ideas of honour and of duty.... For all these, humanity is indebted exclusively to the white bone; and in this sense, from the point of view of natural history, worthless Sobakevitch,[2] merely because he is a white bone, is a million times higher and more useful than the best tradesman, let him endow fifty museums! You may say what you like, but if I refuse to give my hand to the potboy's or the cookmaid's son, by that refusal I preserve from stain the best that is on the earth, and subserve one of the highest destinies of mother Nature, leading us to perfection...."
Rashevitch stood still, and smoothed down his beard with both hands. His scissors-like shadow stood still also.
"Take our dear Mother Russia!" he continued, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and balancing himself alternately on toes and heels. "Who are our best people? Take our first-class artists, authors, composers.... Who are they? All these, my dear sir, are representatives of the white bone. Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontoff, Turgenieff, Tolstoy.... Were these cook-maids' children?"
"Gontcharoff was a tradesman," said Meyer.
"What does that prove? The exception, my friend, proves the rule. And as to the genius of Gontcharoff there can be two opinions. But let us leave names and return to facts. Tell me how you can reply, sir, to the eloquent fact that when the potboy climbs to a higher place than he was born in—when he reaches eminence in literature, in science, in local government, in law—what have you to say to the fact that Nature herself intervenes on behalf of the most sacred human rights, and declares war against him? As a matter of fact, hardly has the potboy succeeded in stepping into other people's shoes when he begins to languish, wither, go out of his mind, and degenerate; and nowhere will you meet so many dwarfs, psychical cripples, consumptives, and starvelings as among these gentry. They die away like flies in autumn. And it is a good thing. If it were not for this salutary degeneration, not one stone of our civilisation would remain upon another—the potboy would destroy it all.... Be so good as to tell me, please, what this invasion has given us up to the present time? What has the potboy brought with him?"
Rashevitch made a mysterious, frightened face, and continued:
"Never before did our science and literature find themselves at such a low ebb as now. The present generation, sir, has neither ideas nor ideals, and all its activity is restricted to an attempt to tear the last shirt off someone else's back. All your present-day men who give themselves out as progressive and incorruptible may be bought for a silver rouble; and modern intelligent society is distinguished by only one thing, that is, that if you mix in it you must keep your hand on your pocket, else it will steal your purse." Rashevitch blinked and smiled. "Steal your purse!" he repeated, with a happy laugh. "And morals? What morals have we?" Rashevitch glanced at the door. "You can no longer be surprised if your wife robs you and abandons you—that is a mere trifle. At the present day, my friend, every twelve-year-old girl looks out for a lover; and all these amateur theatricals and literary evenings are invented only for the purpose of catching rich parvenus as sweethearts. Mothers sell their daughters, husbands are asked openly at what price they will sell their wives, and you may even trade, my friend,..."
Up to this Meyer had said nothing, and sat motionless. Now he rose from the sofa, and looked at the clock.
"Excuse me, Pavel Ilitch," he said, "but it's time for me to go."
But Rashevitch, who had not finished, took him by the arm, set him down forcibly upon the sofa, and swore he should not leave the house without supper. Meyer again sat motionless and listened; but soon began to look at Rashevitch with an expression of doubt and alarm, as if he were only just beginning to understand his character. When at last the maid entered, saying that the young ladies had sent her to say that supper was ready, he sighed faintly, and went out of the study first.
In the dining-room, already at table, sat Rashevitch's daughters, Zhenya and Iraida, respectively aged twenty-four and twenty-two. They were of equal stature, and both black-eyed and very pale. Zhenya had her hair down, but Iraida's was twisted into a high top-knot. Before eating anything each drank a glass of spirits, with an expression meant to imply that they were drinking accidentally, and for the first time in their lives. After this they looked confused, and tittered.
"Don't be silly, girls!" said Rashevitch.
Zhenya and Iraida spoke French to one another and Russian to their father and the visitor.... Interrupting one another, and mixing French and Russian, they began to remark that just at this time of the year, that is in August, they used to leave home for the Institute. How jolly that was! But now there was no place to go to for a change, and they lived at the manor-house winter and summer. How tiresome!
"Don't be silly, girls!" repeated Rashevitch.
"In short, that is exactly how things stand," he said, looking affectionately at the magistrate. "We, in the goodness and simplicity of our hearts, and from fear of being suspected of retrograde tendencies, fraternise—excuse the expression—with all kinds of human trash, and preach equality and fraternity with upstarts and nouveaux riches! Yet if we paused to reflect for a single minute we should see how criminal is our kindness. For all that our ancestors attained to in the course of centuries will be derided and destroyed in a single day by these modern Huns."
After supper all went into the drawing-room. Zhenya and Iraida lighted the piano candles and got ready their music.... But their parent continued to hold forth, and there was no knowing when he would end. Bored and irritated, they looked at their egoist father, for whom, they concluded, the satisfaction of chattering and showing off his brains, was dearer than the future happiness of his daughters. Here was Meyer, the only young man who frequented the house—for the sake, they knew, of tender feminine society—yet the unwearying old man kept possession of him, and never let him escape for a moment.
"Just as western chivalry repelled the onslaught of the Mongols, so must we, before it is too late, combine and strike together at the enemy." Rashevitch spoke apostolically, and lifted his right hand on high. "Let me appear before the potboy no longer as plain Pavel Ilitch, but as a strong and menacing Richard the Lion-Heart! Fling your scruples behind you—enough! Let us swear a sacred compact that when the potboy approaches we will fling him words of contempt straight in the face! Hands off! Back to your pots! Straight in the face!" In ecstacy, Rashevitch thrust out a bent forefinger, and repeated: "Straight in the face! In the face! In the face!"
Meyer averted his eyes. "I cannot tolerate this any longer!" he said.
"And may I ask why?" asked Rashevitch, scenting the beginnings of a prolonged and interesting argument.
"Because I myself am the son of an artisan." And having so spoken, Meyer reddened, his neck seemed to swell, and tears sparkled in his eyes..
"My father was a plain working man," he said in an abrupt, broken voice. "But I can see nothing bad in that."
Rashevitch was thunderstruck. In his confusion he looked as if he had been detected in a serious crime; he looked at Meyer with a dumfounded face, and said not a word. Zhenya and Iraida blushed, and bent over their music. They were thoroughly ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in silence, and the situation was becoming unbearable when suddenly a sickly, strained voice—it seemed utterly mal À propos—stammered forth the words:
"Yes, I am a tradesman's son, and I am proud of it." And Meyer, awkwardly stumbling over the furniture, said good-bye, and walked quickly into the hall, although the trap had not been ordered.
"You will have a dark drive," stammered Rashevitch, going after him. "The moon rises late to-night." They stood on the steps in the darkness and waited for the horses. It was cold.
"Did you see the falling star?" asked Meyer, buttoning his overcoat.
"In August falling stars are very plentiful."
When at last the trap drove round to the door, Rashevitch looked attentively at the heavens, and said, with a sigh:
"A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion...."
Having parted from his guest, he walked up and down the garden, and tried to persuade himself that such a stupid misunderstanding had not really taken place. He was angry, and ashamed of himself. In the first place, he knew that it was extremely tactless and incautious to raise this accursed conversation about the white bone without knowing anything of the origin of his guest. He told himself, with perfect justice, that for him there was no excuse, for he had had a lesson before, having once in a railway carriage set about abusing Germans to fellow-passengers who, it turned out, were themselves Germans.... And in the second place he was convinced that Meyer would come no more. These intellectuels who have sprung from the people are sensitive, vain, obstinate, and revengeful.
"It is a bad business ... bad ... bad!" he muttered, spitting; he felt awkward and disgusted, as if he had just eaten soap. "It is a bad business!"
Through the open window he could see into the drawing-room where Zhenya with her hair down, pale and frightened, spoke excitedly to her sister.... Iraida walked from corner to corner, apparently lost in thought; and then began to speak, also excitedly and with an indignant face. Then both spoke together. Rashevitch could not distinguish a word, but he knew too well the subject of their conversation. Zhenya was grumbling that her father with his eternal chattering drove every decent man from the house, and had to-day robbed them of their last acquaintance, it might have been husband; and now the poor young man could not find a place in the whole district wherein to rest his soul. And Iraida, if judged correctly from the despairing way in which she raised her arms, lamented bitterly their wearisome life at home and their ruined youth.
Going up to his bedroom, Rashevitch sat on the bed and undressed himself slowly. He felt that he was a persecuted man, and was tormented by the same feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself. When he had undressed he gazed sadly at his long, veined, old-man's legs, and remembered that in the country round he was nicknamed "the toad," and that never a conversation passed without making him ashamed of himself. By some extraordinary fatality every discussion ended badly. He began softly, kindly, with good intentions, and called himself genially an "old student," an "idealist," a "Don Quixote." But gradually, and unnoticed by himself, he passed on to abuse and calumny, and, what is more surprising, delivered himself of sincere criticisms of science, art, and morals, although it was twenty years since he had read a book, been farther than the government town, or had any channel for learning what was going on in the world around him. Even when he sat down to write a congratulatory letter he invariably ended by abusing something or somebody. And as he reflected upon this, it seemed all the more strange, since he knew himself in reality to be a sensitive, lachrymose old man. It seemed almost as if he were possessed by an unclean spirit which filled him against his will with hatred and grumbling.
"A bad business!" he sighed, getting into bed. "A bad business!"
His daughters also could not sleep. Laughter and lamentation resounded through the house. Zhenya was in hysterics. Shortly afterwards Iraida also began to cry. More than once the barefooted housemaid ran up and down the corridor.
"What a scandal!" muttered Rashevitch, sighing, and turning uneasily from side to side. "A bad business!"
He slept, but nightmare gave him no peace. He thought that he was standing in the middle of the room, naked, and tall as a giraffe, thrusting out his forefinger, and saying:
"In the face! In the face! In the face!"
He awoke in terror, and the first thing he remembered was, that last evening a serious misunderstanding had occurred, and that Meyer would never visit him again. He remembered then that the interest had to be lodged in the bonk, that he must find husbands for his daughters, and that he must eat and drink. He remembered sickness, old age, and unpleasantness; that winter would soon be upon him, and that there was no wood....
At nine o'clock he dressed slowly, then drank some tea and ate two large slices of bread and butter.... His daughters did not come down to breakfast, they did not wish to see his face; and this offended him. For a time he lay upon the study sofa, and then sat at his writing-table and began to write a letter to his daughters. His hand trembled and his eyes itched. He wrote that he was now old, that nobody wanted him, and that nobody loved him; so he begged his children to forget him, and when he died, to bury him in a plain, deal coffin, without ceremony, or to send his body to Kharkoff for dissection in the Anatomical Theatre. He felt that every line breathed malice and affectation ... but he could not stop himself, and wrote on and on and on....
"The toad!" rang a voice from the next room; it was the voice of his elder daughter, an indignant, hissing voice. "The toad!"
"The toad!" repeated the younger in echo. "The toad!"
AN EVENT
Morning. Through the frosty lacework which covered the window-panes a host of bright sun-rays burst into the nursery. Vanya, a boy of six, with a nose like a button, and his sister Nina, aged four, curly-headed, chubby, and small for her age, awoke, and glared angrily at one another through the bars of their cots.
"Fie!" cried nurse. "For shame, children! All the good people have finished breakfast, and you can't keep your eyes open...."
The sun-rays played merrily on the carpet, on the walls, on nurse's skirt, and begged the children to play with them. But the children took no notice. They had awakened on the wrong side of their beds. Nina pouted, made a wry face, and drawled:
"Te-ea! Nurse, te-ea!"
Vanya frowned, and looked about for an opportunity to pick a quarrel and roar. He had just blinked his eyes and opened his mouth, when out of the diningroom rang mother's voice:
"Don't forget to give the cat milk; she has got kittens."
Vanya and Nina lengthened their faces and looked questioningly at one another. Then both screamed, jumped out of bed, and, making the air ring with deafening yells, ran barefooted in their nightdresses into the kitchen.
"The cat's got kittens! The cat's got kittens!" they screamed.
In the kitchen under a bench stood a small box, a box which Stepan used for coke when he lighted the stove. Out of this box gazed the cat. Her grey face expressed extreme exhaustion, her green eyes with their little black pupils looked languishing and sentimental. ... From her face it was plain that to complete her happiness only one thing was lacking, and that was the presence of the father of her children, to whom she had given herself heart and soul. She attempted to mew, and opened her mouth wide, but only succeeded in making a hissing sound.... The kittens squealed.
The children squatted on the ground in front of the box, and, without moving, but holding their breath, looked at the cat.... They were astonished and thunderstruck, and did not hear the grumbling of the pursuing nurse. In the eyes of both shone sincere felicity.
In the up-bringing of children, domestic animals play an unnoticed but unquestionably beneficent part. Which of us cannot remember strong but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds who died in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkey-cocks, kindly old-lady-cats who forgave us when we stood on their tails for a joke and caused them intense pain? It might even be argued that the patience, faithfulness, all-forgivingness and sincerity of our domestic animals act on the childish brain much more powerfully than the long lectures of dry and pale Earl Earlovitch, or the obscure explanations of the governess who tries to prove to children that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.
"What duckies!" cried Nina, overflowing with gay laughter. "They're exactly like mice!"
"One, two, three!" counted Vanya. "Three kittens. That is one for me, one for you, and one for somebody else."
"Murrrrm ... murrrrm," purred the mother, flattered by so much attention. "Murrrrm!"
When they had looked for a while at the kittens, the children took them from under the cat and began to smooth them down, and afterwards, not satisfied with this, laid them in the skirts of their nightdresses and ran from one room to another.
"Mamma, the cat's got kittens!" they cried. Mother sat in the dining-room, talking to a stranger. When she saw her children unwashed, undressed, with their nightdresses on high, she got red, and looked at them severely.
"Drop your nightdresses, shameless!" she said. "Run away at once, or you'll be punished."
But the children paid no attention either to their mother's threats or to the presence of the stranger. They put the kittens down on the carpet and raised a deafening howl. Beside them walked the old cat, and mewed imploringly. When in a few minutes the children were dragged off to the nursery to dress, say their prayers, and have their breakfast, they were full of a passionate wish to escape from these prosaic duties and return to the kitchen.
Ordinary occupations and games were quite forgotten. From the moment of their appearance in the world the kittens obscured everything, and took their place as the living novelty and heart-swelling of the day. If you had offered Vanya or Nina a bushel of sweets for each kitten, or a thousand threepenny-bits, they would have rejected the offer without a moment's hesitation. Till dinner-time, in spite of the warm protests of nurse and the cook, they sat in the kitchen and played with the kittens. Their faces were serious, concentrated, and expressive of anxiety. They had to provide not only for the present condition, but also for the future of the kittens. So they decided that one kitten would remain at home with the old cat, so as to console its mother, that the other would be sent to the country-house, and that the third would live in the cellar and eat the rats.
"But why can't they see?" asked Nina. "They have blind eyes, like beggars."
The question troubled Vanya. He did his best to open one of the kitten's eyes, for a long time puffed and snuffled, but the operation was fruitless. And another circumstance worried the children extremely—the kittens obstinately refused the proffered meat and milk. Everything that was laid before their little snouts was eaten up by their grey mother.
"Let's build houses for the kittens," proposed Vanya. "We will make them live in different houses, and the cat will pay them visits...." In three cornel's of the kitchen they set up old hat-boxes. But the separation of the family seemed premature; the old cat, preserving on her face her former plaintive and sentimental expression, paid visits to all the boxes and took her children home again.
"The cat is their mother," said Vanya, "but who is their father?"
"Yes, who is their father?" repeated Nina.
"They can't live without a father."
For a long time Vanya and Nina discussed the problem, who should be father of the kittens. In the end their choice fell on a big dark-red horse whose tail had been tom off. He had been cast away in the store-room under the staircase, together with the remnants of other toys that had outlived their generation. They took the horse from the store-room and stood it beside the box.
"Look out!" they warned him. "Stand there and see that they behave themselves."
All this was said and done in a serious manner, and with an expression of solicitude. Outside the box and the kittens, Vanya and Nina would recognise no other world. Their happiness had no bounds. But they were destined to endure moments of unutterable torture. Just before dinner Vanya sat in his father's study, and looked thoughtfully at the table. Near the lamp, across a packet of stamped paper, crawled a kitten. Vanya watched its movements attentively, and occasionally poked it in the snout with a pencil.... Suddenly, as if springing out of the floor, appeared his father.
"What is this?" cried an angry voice.
"It is ... it is a kitten, papa."
"I'll teach you to bring your kittens here, wretched child! Look what you've done! Ruined a whole package of paper!"
To Vanya's astonishment, his father did not share his sympathy with kittens, and, instead of going into raptures and rejoicing, pulled Vanya's ear, and cried:
"Stepan, take away this abomination!"
At dinner the scandal was repeated.... During the second course the diners suddenly heard a faint squeal. They began to search for the cause, and found a kitten under Nina's pinafore.
"Ninka! Go out of the room!" said her father angrily. "The kittens must be thrown into the sink this minute! I won't tolerate these abominations in the house!"
Vanya and Nina were terror-stricken. Death in the sink, apart from its cruelty, threatened to deprive the cat and the wooden horse of their children, to desolate the box, to destroy all their plans for the future—that beautiful future when one kitten would console its old mother, the second live in the country, and the third catch rats in the cellar.... They began to cry, and implored mercy for the kittens. Their father consented to spare them, but only on the condition that the children should not dare to go into the kitchen or touch the kittens again.
After dinner, Vanya and Nina wandered from one room to another and languished. The prohibition on going to the kitchen drove them to despair. They refused sweets; and were naughty, and rude to their mother. In the evening when Uncle Petrusha came they took him aside and complained of their father for threatening to throw the kittens into the sink.
"Uncle Petrusha," they implored, "tell mamma to put the kittens in the nursery.... Do!"
"Well ... all right!" said their uncle, tearing himself away. "Agreed!"
Uncle Petrusha seldom came alone. Along with him came Nero, a big black dog, of Danish origin, with hanging ears and a tail as hard as a stick. Nero was silent, morose, and altogether taken up with his own dignity. To the children he paid not the slightest attention; and, when he marched past them, knocked his tail against them as if they were chairs. Vanya and Nina detested him from the bottom of their hearts. But on this occasion practical considerations gained the upper hand over mere sentiment.
"Do you know what, Nina?" said Vanya, opening wide his eyes. "Let us make Nero the father instead of the horse! The horse is dead, but Nero's alive." The whole evening they waited impatiently for their father to sit down to his game of vint, when they might take Nero to the kitchen without being observed.... At last father sat down to his cards, mother bustled around the samovar, and did not see the children.... The happy moment had come!
"Come!" whispered Vanya to his sister.
But at that very moment Stepan came into the room, and said with a grin:
"I beg your pardon, ma'am. Nero has eaten the kittens."
Nina and Vanya turned pale, and looked with horror at Stepan.
"Yes, ma'am ..." grinned the servant. "He went straight to the box and gobbled them up."
The children expected everyone in the house to rise in alarm and fly at the guilty Nero. But their parents sat calmly in their chairs, and only expressed surprise at the appetite of the big dog. Father and mother laughed.... Nero marched up to the table, flourished his tail, and licked himself complacently. ... Only the cat seemed disturbed; she stretched out her tail, and walked about the room looking suspiciously at everyone and mewing plaintively.
"Now, children, time for bed! Ten o'clock!" cried mother.
And Vanya and Nina were put to bed, where they wept over the injured cat, whose life had been desolated by cruel, nasty, unpunished Nero.
WARD No. 6
At the side of the hospital yard stands a large wing, nearly surrounded by a forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. The roof is red, the chimney is on the point of tumbling, the steps are rotten and overgrown with grass, and of the plaster only traces remain. The front gazes at the hospital, the back looks into the fields, from which it is separated only by a grey, spiked fence. The spikes with their sharp points sticking upwards, the fence, the wing itself, have that melancholy, God-forsaken air which is seen only in hospitals and prisons.
If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, come along the narrow path, and see what is going on inside. Open the hall-door and enter the hall. Here, against the walls and around the stove, are heaped whole mountains of rubbish. Mattresses, old tattered dressing-gowns, trousers, blue-striped shills, worn-out footgear, all good-for-nothing, lie in tangled and crushed heaps, rot, and exhale a suffocating smell.
On the top of this rubbish heap, pipe eternally in mouth, lies the watchman Nikita, an old soldier. His face is coarse and drink-sodden, his hanging eye-brows give him the appearance of a sheep-dog, he is small and sinewy, but his carriage is impressive and his fists are strong. He belongs to that class of simple, expeditious, positive, and dull persons, who above all things in the world worship order, and find in this a justification of their existence. He beats his charges in the face, in the chest, in the back, in short, wherever his fists chance to strike; and he is convinced that without this beating there would be no order in the universe.
After you pass through Nikita's hall, you enter the large, roomy dormitory which takes up the rest of the wing. In this room the walls are painted a dirty blue, the ceiling is black with soot like the ceiling of a chimneyless hut; it is plain that in winter the stove smokes, and the air is suffocating. The windows are disfigured with iron bars, the floor is damp and splintered, there is a smell of sour cabbage, a smell of unsnuffed wicks, a smell of bugs and ammonia. And at the moment of entry all these smells produce upon you the impression that you have entered a cage of wild beasts.
Around the room stand beds, screwed to the floor. Sitting or lying on them, dressed in blue dressing-gowns, and wearing nightcaps after the manner of our forefathers, are men. It is the lunatic asylum, and these arc the lunatics.
There are only five patients. One is of noble birth, the others arc men of lower origin. The nearest to the door, a tall, thin man of the petty trading class, looks fixedly at one point. He has a red moustache and tear-stained eyes, and supports his head on one hand. In the books of the asylum his complaint is described as hypochondria; in reality, he is suffering from progressive paralysis. Day and night he mourns, shakes his head, sighs, and smiles bitterly. In conversation he seldom joins, and usually refuses to answer questions. He eats and drinks mechanically. Judged by his emaciation, his flushed cheeks, and his painful, hacking cough, he is wasting away from consumption.
Beside him is a little, active old man with a pointed beard, and the black, fuzzy hair of a negro. He spends all day in walking from window to window, or sitting on his bed, with legs doubled underneath him as if he were a Turk. He is as tireless as a bullfinch, and all day chirrups, titters, and sings in a low voice His childish gaiety and lively character are shown also at night, when he rises to "pray to God," that is, to beat his breast with his clenched fists, and pick at the doors. This is MosÉika, a Jew and an idiot. He went out of his mind twenty years ago when his cap factory was destroyed by fire.
Of all the captives in Word No. 6, he alone has permission to leave the asylum, and he is even allowed to wander about the yard and the streets. This privilege, which he has enjoyed for many years, was probably accorded to him as the oldest inmate of the asylum, and as a quiet, harmless fool, the jester of the town, who may be seen in the streets surrounded by dogs and little boys. Wrapped in his old dressing-gown, with a ridiculous nightcap and slippers, sometimes barefooted, and generally without his trousers, he walks the streets, stopping at doorways and entering small shops to beg for kopecks. Sometimes he is given kvas, sometimes bread, sometimes a kopeck, so that he returns to the ward wealthy and sated. But all that he brings home is taken by Nikita for his own particular benefit. The old soldier does this roughly and angrily, turning out the Jew's pockets, calling God to witness that he will never allow him outside the asylum again, and swearing that to him disorder is the most detestable thing in the world.
MosÉika loves to make himself useful to others. He fetches water for his companions, tucks them in when they go to bed, promises to bring each a kopeck when he next returns from the town, and to make them new caps. He feeds with a spoon his paralytic neighbour on the left; and all this he does, not out of sympathy for others or for considerations of humanity, but from a love of imitation, and in a sort of involuntary subjection to his neighbour on the right, IvÁn Gromof.
Ivan DmÍtritch Gromof is a man of thirty-three years of age. He is a noble by birth, and has been an usher in the law courts, and a government secretary; but now he suffers from the mania of persecution. He lies upon his bed twisted into a lump resembling a roll of bread, or marches from corner to corner for the sake of motion. He is always in a state of excitement and agitation; and seems strained by some dull, indefinable expectation. It needs but the slightest rustle in the hall, the slightest noise in the yard, to make him raise his head and listen intently. Is it for him they arc coming? Are they searching for him? And his face immediately takes on an expression of restlessness and repulsion.
There is something attractive about his broad, high cheek-boned face, which reflects, as a mirror, the tortured wrestlings and eternal terror of his mind. His grimaces arc strange and sickly; but the delicate lines engraven on his face by sincere suffering express reason and intelligence, and his eyes bum with a healthy and passionate glow. There is something attractive also in his character, in his politeness, his attentiveness, and in the singular delicacy of his bearing towards everyone except Nikita. If his neighbour drops a spoon or a button he jumps immediately out of bed and picks it up. When he wakes he invariably says, "Good morning!" to his companions; and every evening on going to bed wishes them "good night!"
But madness shows itself in other things besides his grimaces and continual mental tension. In the evening he wraps himself in his dressing-gown, and, trembling all over, and chattering his teeth, he walks from corner to corner, and in between the beds. He seems to be in a state of fever. From his sudden stoppages and strange looks at his fellow-prisoners it is plain that he has something very serious to say; but, no doubt, remembering that they will neither listen nor understand, he says nothing, shakes his head impatiently, and continues his walk. But at last the desire to speak conquers all other considerations, and he gives way, and speaks passionately. His words are incoherent, gusty, and delirious; he cannot always be understood; but the sound of his voice expresses some exceptional goodness. In every word you hear the madman and the man. He speaks of human baseness, of violence trampling over truth, of the beautiful life on earth that is to come, and of the barred windows which remind him every moment of the folly and cruelty of the strong. And he hums medleys of old but for gotten songs.
II
Fifteen years before, in his own house, in the best street in the town, lived an official named Gromof—a solid and prosperous man. Gromof had two sons, SergÉi and IvÁn. SergÉi, when a student in the fourth class, was seized with consumption and died; and his death was the first of a screes of misfortunes which overtook the Gromofs. A week after SergÉi's death his old father was tried for forgery and misappropriation of public moneys, and soon afterwards died of typhus in the prison infirmary. His house and all his belongings were sold by auction, and IvÁn DmÍtritch and his mother remained without a penny.
When his father was alive, IvÁn DmÍtritch studied at St. Petersburg University, received an allowance of sixty or seventy roubles a month, and had no idea of the meaning of poverty. Now he had to change his whole life. From early morning till late at night he gave cheap lessons to students and copied documents, yet starved, for all his earnings went to support his mother. The life was impossible, and IvÁn DmÍtritch ruined his health and spirits, threw up his university studies, and returned home. Through interest he obtained an appointment as usher in the district school; but he was disliked by his colleagues, failed to get on with the pupils, and gave up the post. His mother died. For six months he lived without resources, eating black bread and drinking water, until at last he obtained an appointment as Usher of the Court. This duty he fulfilled until he was discharged owing to illness.
Never, even in his student days, had he had the appearance of a strong man. He was pale, thin, and sensitive to cold; he ate little and slept foully. A single glass of wine made him giddy and sent him into hysterics. His disposition impelled him to seek companionship, but thanks to his irritable and suspicious character he never became intimate with anyone, and had no friends. Of his fellow-citizens he always spoke with contempt, condemning as disgusting and repulsive their gross ignorance and torpid, animal life. He spoke in a tenor voice, loudly and passionately, and always seemed to be in a sincere state of indignation, excitement, or rapture. However he began a conversation, it ended always in one way—in a lament that the town was stifling and tiresome, that its people had no high interests, but led a dull, unmeaning life, varied only by violence, coarse debauchery and hypocrisy; that scoundrels were fed and clothed while honest men ate crusts; that the town was crying out for schools, honest newspapers, a theatre, public lectures, an union of intellectual forces; and that the time had come for the townspeople to awaken to, and be shocked at, the state of affairs. In his judgments of men he laid on his colours thickly, using only white and black, and recognising no gradations; for him humanity was divided into two sections, honest men and rogues—there was nothing between. Of woman and woman's love he spoke passionately and with rapture. But he had never been in love.
In the town, notwithstanding his nervous character and censorious temper, he was loved, and called caressingly "Vanya." His innate delicacy, his attentiveness, his neatness, his moral purity, his worn coat, his sickly appearance, the misfortunes of his family, inspired in all feelings of warmth and compassion. Besides, he was educated and well-read; in the opinion of the townsmen he knew everything; and occupied among them the place of a walking reference-book. He read much. He would sit for hours at the club, pluck nervously at his beard, and turn over the pages of books and magazines—by his face it might be seen that he was not reading but devouring. Yet reading was apparently merely one of his nervous habits, for with equal avidity he read everything that fell into his hands, even old newspapers and calendars. At home he always read, lying down.
III
One autumn morning, IvÁn DmÍtritch, with the collar of his coat turned up, trudged through the mud to the house of a certain tradesman to receive money due on a writ of execution. As always in the morning, he was in a gloomy mood. Passing through a lane, he met two convicts in chains and with them four warders armed with rifles. IvÁn DmÍtritch had often met convicts before, and they had awakened in him a feeling of sympathy and confusion. But this meeting produced upon him an unusual impression. It suddenly occurred to him that he too might be shackled and driven through the mud to prison. Having finished his work, he was returning home when he met a police-inspector, an acquaintance, who greeted him and walked with him a few yards down the street. This seemed to him for some reason suspicions. At home visions of convicts and of soldiers armed with rifles haunted him all day, and an inexplicable spiritual dread prevented him from reading or concentrating his mind. In the evening he sat without a fire, and lay awake all night thinking how he also might be arrested, manacled, and flung into prison. He knew that he had committed no crime, and was quite confident that he would never commit murder, arson, or robbery; but then, he remembered, how easy it was to commit a crime by accident or involuntarily, and how common were convictions on false evidence and owing to judicial errors! And in the present state of human affairs how probable, how little to be wondered at, were judicial errors! Men who witness the sufferings of others only from a professional standpoint; for instance, judges, policemen, doctors, became hardened to such a degree that even if they wished otherwise they could not resist the habit of treating accused persons formally; they got to resemble those peasants who kill sheep and calves in their back-yards without even noticing the blood. In view of the soulless relationship to human personality which everywhere obtains, all that a judge thinks of is the observance of certain formalities, and then all is over, and an innocent man perhaps deprived of his civil rights or sent to the galleys. Who indeed would expect justice or intercession in this dirty, sleepy little town, two hundred versts from the nearest rail-way? And indeed was it not ridiculous to expect, justice when society regards every form of violence as rational, expedient, and necessary; and when an act of common mercy such as the acquittal of an accused man calls forth an explosion of unsatisfied vindictiveness!
Next morning IvÁn DmÍtritch awoke in terror with drops of cold sweat on his forehead. He felt convinced that he might be arrested at any moment. That the evening's gloomy thoughts had haunted him so persistently, he concluded, must mean that there was some ground for his apprehensions. Could such thoughts come into his head without cause?
A policeman walked slowly past the window; that must mean something. Two men in plain clothes stopped outside the gate, and stood without saying a word. Why were they silent?
For a time, IvÁn DmÍtritch spent his days and nights in torture. Every man who passed the window or entered the yard was a spy or detective. Every day at twelve o'clock the Chief Constable drove through the street on his way from his suburban house to the Department of Police, and every day it seemed to IvÁn DmÍtritch that the Constable was driving with unaccustomed haste, and that there was a peculiar expression on his face; he was going, in short, to announce that a great criminal had appeared in the town. IvÁn DmÍtritch shuddered at every sound, trembled at every knock at the yard-gate, and was in torment when any strange man visited his landlady. When he met a gendarme in the street, he smiled, whistled, and tried to assume an indifferent air. For whole nights, expecting arrest, he never closed his eyes, but snored carefully so that his landlady might think he was asleep; for if a man did not sleep at night it meant that he was tormented by the gnawings of conscience, and that might be taken as a clue. Reality and healthy reasoning convinced him that his fears were absurd and psychopathic, and that, regarded from a broad standpoint, there was nothing very terrible in arrest and imprisonment for a man whose conscience was clean. But the more consistently and logically he reasoned the stronger grew his spiritual torture; his efforts reminded him of the efforts of a pioneer to hack a path through virgin forest, the harder he worked with the hatchet the thicker and stronger became the undergrowth. So in the end, seeing that his efforts were useless, he ceased to struggle, and gave himself up to terror and despair.
He avoided others and became more and more solitary in his habits. His duties had always been detestable, now they became intolerable. He imagined that someone would hide money in his pockets and then denounce him for taking bribes, that he would make mistakes in official documents which were equivalent to forgery, or that he would lose the money entrusted to him. Never was his mind so supple and ingenious as when he was engaged in inventing various reasons for fearing for his freedom and honour. On the other hand, his interest in the outside world decreased correspondingly, he lost his passion for books, and his memory daily betrayed him.
Next spring when the snow had melted, the semi-decomposed corpses of an old woman and a boy, marked with indications of violence, were found in a ravine beside the graveyard. The townspeople talked of nothing but the discovery and the problem: who were the unknown murderers? In order to avert suspicion, IvÁn DmÍtritch walked about the streets and smiled; and when he met his acquaintances, first grew pale and then blushed, and declared vehemently that there was no more detestable crime than the killing of the weak and defenceless. But this pretence soon exhausted him, and after consideration he decided that the best thing he could do was to hide in his landlady's cellar. In the cellar therefore, chilled to the bone, he remained all day, all next night, and yet another day, after which, waiting until it was dark, he crept secretly back to his room. Till daylight he stood motionless in the middle of the room, and listened. At sunrise a number of artisans rang at the gate. IvÁn DmÍtritch knew very well that they had come to put up a new stove in the kitchen; but his terror suggested that they were constables in disguise. He crept quietly out of his room, and overcome by panic, without cap or coat, fled down the street. Behind him ran barking dogs, a woman called after him, in his ears the wind whistled, and it seemed to him that the scattered violences of the whole world had united and were chasing him through the town.
He was captured and brought home. His landlady sent for a doctor. Doctor AndrÉi YÉfimitch RÁgin, of whom we shall hear again, prescribed cold compresses for his head, ordered him to take drops of bay rum, and went away saying that he would come no more, as it was not right to prevent people going out of their minds. So, as there were no means of treating him at home, IvÁn DmÍtritch was sent to hospital, and put into the ward for sick men. He did not sleep at night, was unruly, and disturbed his neighbours, so that soon, by arrangement with Doctor AndrÉi YÉfimitch, he was transferred to Ward No. 6. Before a year had passed, the townspeople had quite forgotten IvÁn DmÍtritch; and his books, piled up in a sledge by his landlady and covered with a curtain, were torn to pieces by children.
IV
IvÁn DmÍtritch's neighbour on the left, I have already said, was the Jew MosÉika; his neighbour on the right was a fat, almost globular muzhik with a dull, meaningless face. This torpid, gluttonous, and uncleanly animal had long lost all capacity for thought and feeling. He exhaled a sharp, suffocating smell. When Nikita was obliged to attend on him he used to beat him terribly, beat him with all his strength and without regard for his own fists; and it was not this violence which was so frightful—the terror of that was mitigated by custom—but the fact that the stupefied animal made no answer to the blows either by sound or movement or even by expression in his eyes, but merely rocked from side to side like a heavy cask.
The fifth and last occupant of Ward No. 6 was a townsman who had served once as a sorter in the Post Office. He was a little, thin, fair-headed man, with a kindly, but somewhat cunning face. Judged by his clever, tranquil eyes, which looked out on the world frankly and merrily, he was the possessor of some valuable and pleasant secret. Under his pillow and mattress he had something hidden which he refused to show to anyone, not out of fear of losing it, but out of shame. Occasionally he walked to the window, and turning his back upon his fellow-prisoners, held something to his breast, and looked earnestly at it; but if anyone approached he became confused and hid it away. But it was not hard to guess his secret.
"Congratulate me!" he used to say to IvÁn DmÍtritch. "I have been decorated with the Stanislas of the second degree with a star. As a rule the second degree with a star is given only to foreigners, but for some reason they have made an exception in my case." And then, shrugging his shoulders as if in doubt, he would add: "That is something you never expected, you must admit."
"I understand nothing about it," answered IvÁn DmÍtritch, gloomily.
"Do you know what I shall get sooner or later?" continued the ex-sorter, winking slyly. "I shall certainly receive the Swedish Pole Star. An order of that kind is worth trying for. A white cross and a black ribbon. It is very handsome."
In no other place in the world, probably, is life so monotonous as in the wing. In the morning the patients, with the exception of the paralytic and the fat muzhik, wash themselves in a great bucket which is placed in the hall, and dry themselves in the skirts of their dressing-gowns. After this they drink tea out of tin mugs brought by Nikita from the hospital. At midday they dine on shtchi made with sour cabbage, and porridge, and in the evening they sup on the porridge left over from dinner. Between meals they lie down, sleep, look out of the windows, and walk from corner to corner.
And so on every day. Even the ex-sorter talks always of the same decorations.
Fresh faces are seldom seen in Ward No. 6. Years ago the doctor gave orders that no fresh patients should be admitted, and in this world people rarely visit lunatic asylums for pleasure.
But once every two months comes SemiÓn Lazaritch the barber. With Nikita's assistance, he cuts the patients hair; and on the consternation of the victims every time they see his drunken, grinning face, there is no need to dwell.
With this exception no one ever enters the ward. From day to day the patients are condemned to see only Nikita. But at last a strange rumour obtained circulation in the hospital. It was rumoured the doctor had begun to pay visits to Ward No. 6.
V
It was indeed a strange rumour!
Doctor AndrÉi YÉfimitch RÁgin was a remarkable man in his way. In early youth, so they said, he was very pious, and intended to make a career in the Church. But when in the year 1863 he finished his studies in the gymnasium and prepared to enter the Ecclesiastical Academy, his father, a surgeon and a doctor of medicine, poured ridicule on these intentions, and declared categorically that if AndrÉi became a priest he would disown him for ever. Whether this story is true or not it is impossible to say, but it is certain that AndrÉi YÉfimitch more than once admitted that he had never felt any vocation for medicine or, indeed, for specialised sciences at all.
Certain it is, also, that he never became a priest, but completed a course of study in the medical faculty of his university. He showed no particular trace of godliness, and at the beginning of his medical career was as little like a priest as at the end.
In appearance he was as heavy and rudely built as a peasant. His bearded face, his straight hair, and his strong, awkward build recalled some innkeeper on a main road—incontinent and stubborn. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and had enormous feet, and hands with which, it seemed, he could easily crush the life out of a man's body. Yet his walk was noiseless, cautious, and insinuating; and when he met anyone in a narrow passage he was always the first to step aside, and to say—not as might be expected in a bass voice—in a soft, piping tenor: "Excuse me!"
On his neck AndrÉi YÉfimitch had a small tumour which forbade his wearing starched collars; he always wore a soft linen or print shirt. Indeed, in no respect did he dress like a doctor; he wore the same suit for ten years, and when he did buy new clothing—at a Jew's store—it always looked as worn and crumpled as his old clothes. In one and the same frock-coat he received his patients, dined, and attended entertainments; and this not from penuriousness but from a genuine contempt for appearances.
When AndrÉi YÉfimitch first came to the town to take up his duties as physician to the hospital, that "charitable institution" was in a state of inconceivable disorder. In the wards, in the corridors, and even in the open air of the yard it was impossible to breathe owing to the stench. The male attendants, the nurses and their children, slept in the dormitories together with the patients. It was complained that the hospital was becoming uninhabitable owing to the invasion of beetles, bugs, and mice. In the surgical department there were only two scalpels, nowhere was there a thermometer, and the baths were used for storing potatoes in. The superintendent, the housekeeper, and the feldscher robbed the sick, and of the former doctor, AndrÉi YÉfimitch's predecessor, it was said that he sold the hospital spirits secretly, and kept up a whole harem recruited from among the nurses and female patients. In the town these scandals were well-known and even exaggerated; but the townspeople were indifferent, and even excused the abuses on the ground that the patients were all either petty tradespeople or peasants who lived at home among conditions so much worse that they had no right to complain; such gentry, they added, must not expect to be fed on grouse! Others argued that as no small town had sufficient resources to support a good hospital without subsidies from the Zemstvo, they might thank God they had a bad one; and the Zemstvo refused to open a hospital in the town on the ground that there was already one.
When he inspected the hospital for the first time AndrÉi YÉfimitch saw at once that the whole institution was hopelessly bad, and in the highest degree dangerous to the health of the inmates. He concluded that the best thing to do was to discharge the patients and to close the hospital. But he knew that to effect this his wish alone was not enough; and he reasoned that if the physical and moral uncleanliness were driven from one place it would merely be transplanted to another; it was necessary, in fact, to wait until it cleaned itself out. To these considerations he added that if people opened a hospital and tolerated its abuses they must have need of it; and, no doubt, such abominations were necessary, and in the course of time would evolve something useful, as good soil results from manuring. And, indeed, on this earth there is nothing good that has not had evil germs in its beginnings.
Having taken up his duties, therefore, AndrÉi YÉfimitch looked upon the abuses with apparent indifference. He merely asked the servants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and bought two cases of instruments; but he allowed the superintendent, the housekeeper, and the feldscher to remain in their positions.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch was passionately enamoured of intellect and honesty, but he had neither the character nor the confidence in his own powers necessary to establish around himself an intelligent and honest life. To command, to prohibit, to insist, he had never learned; It seemed almost that he had sworn an oath never to raise his voice or to use the imperative mood. ... Even to use the words "give" or "bring" was difficult for him. When he felt hungry, he coughed irresolutely and said to his cook, "Suppose I were to have a cup of tea," or "I was thinking about dining." To tell the superintendent that he must cease his robberies, to dismiss him, or to abolish altogether his parasitical office he had not the strength. "When he was deceived or flattered, or handed accounts for signature which he knew to have been falsified, he would redden all over and feel guilty, yet sign the accounts; and when the patients complained that they were hungry or had been ill-treated by the nurses, he merely got confused, and stammered guiltily:
"Very well, very well, I will investigate the matter. ... No doubt there is some misunderstanding...."
At first AndrÉi YÉfimitch worked very zealously. He attended to patients from morning until dinner-time, performed operations, and even occupied himself with obstetrics. He gained a reputation for exceptional skill in the treatment of women and children. But he soon began visibly to weary of the monotony and uselessness of his work. One day he would receive thirty patients, the next day the number had grown to thirty-five, the next day to forty, and so on from day to day, from year to year. Yet the death-rate in the town did not decrease, and the number of patients never grew less. To give any real assistance to forty patients in the few hours between morning and dinner-time was physically impossible; in other words, he became an involuntary deceiver. The twelve thousand persons received every year, he reasoned, were therefore twelve thousand dupes. To place the serious cases in the wards and treat them according to the rules of medical science was impossible, because there were no rules and no science; whereas if he left philosophy and followed the regulations pedantically as other doctors did, he would still be in difficulty, for in the first place were needed cleanliness and fresh air, and not filth; wholesome food, and not shtchi made of stinking sour cabbage; and honest assistants, not thieves.
And, indeed, why hinder people dying, if death is the normal and lawful end of us all? What does it matter whether some tradesman or petty official lives, or does not live, an extra five years? We pretend to see the object of medical science in its mitigation of suffering, but we cannot but ask ourselves the question: Why should suffering be mitigated? In the first place, we are told that suffering leads men to perfection; and in the second, it is plain that if men were really able to alleviate their sufferings with pills and potions, they would abandon that religion and philosophy in which until now they had found not only consolation, but even happiness. Pushkin suffered agonising torment before his death; Heine lay for years in a state of paralysis. Why, then, interfere with the sufferings of some mere AndrÉi YÉfimitch or Matrena Savishin, whose lives are meaningless, and would be as vacuous as the life of the amoeba if it were not for suffering?
Defeated by such arguments, AndrÉi YÉfimitch dropped his hands upon his knees, and ceased his daily attendances at the hospital.
VI
His life passed thus. At eight in the morning he rose and took his breakfast. After that he either sat in his study and read, or visited the hospital. In the hospital in a narrow, dark corridor waited the out-patients. With heavy boots clattering on the brick floor, servants and nurses ran past them; emaciated patients in dressing-gowns staggered by; and vessels of filth, and corpses were carried out. And among them children cried and draughts blew. AndrÉi YÉfimitch knew well that to the fevered, the consumptive, and the impressionable such surroundings were torment; but what could he do? In the reception-room he was met by the feldscher, SergÉi SergÉyitch, a little fat man, with a beardless, well-washed, puffy face, and easy manners. SergÉi SergÉyitch always wore clothes which resembled a senator's more than a surgeon's; in the town he had a large practice, and believed that he knew more than the doctor, who had no practice at all. In the corner of the room hung a case of ikons with a heavy lamp in front; on the walls were portraits of bishops, a view of Sviatogorsk Monastery, and garlands of withered corn-flowers. SergÉi SergÉyitch was religious, and the images had been placed in the room at his expense; every Sunday by his command one of the patients read the acathistus, and when the reading was concluded, SergÉi SergÉyitch went around the wards with a censer and sprinkled them piously.
There were many patients and little time. The examination was therefore limited to a few short questions, and to the distribution of such simple remedies as castor-oil and ointments. AndrÉi YÉfimitch sat with his head resting on his hands, lost in thought, and asked questions mechanically; and SÉrgei SergÉyitch sat beside him, and sometimes interjected a word.
"We become ill and suffer deprivation," he would sometimes say, "only because we pray too little to God."
In these hours AndrÉi YÉfimitch performed no operations; he had got out of practice, and the sight of blood affected him unpleasantly. When he had to open a child's mouth, to examine its throat for instance, if the child cried and defended itself with its hands, the doctor's head went round and tears came into his eyes. He made haste to prescribe a remedy, and motioned to the mother to take it away as quickly as possible.
He quickly wearied of the timidity of the patients, of their shiftless ways, of the proximity of the pompous SÉrgei SergÉyitch, of the portraits on the walls, and of his own questions—questions which he had asked without change for more than twenty years.
And he would sometimes leave the hospital after having examined five or six patients, the remainder in his absence being treated by the feldscher.
With the pleasant reflection that thank God he had no private practice and no one to interfere with him, AndrÉi YÉfimitch on returning home would sit at his study-table and begin to read. He read much, and always with pleasure. Half his salary went on the purchase of books, and of the six rooms in his flat three were crowded with books and old newspapers. Above all things he loved history and philosophy; but of medical publications he subscribed only to The Doctor, which he always began to read at the end. Every day he read uninterruptedly for several hours, and it never wearied him. He read, not quickly and eagerly as IvÁn DmÍtritch had read, but slowly, often stopping at passages which pleased him or which he did not understand. Beside his books stood a decanter of vodka, and a salted cucumber or soaked apple; and every half-hour he poured himself out a glass of vodka, and drank it without lifting his eyes from his book, and then—again without lifting his eyes—took the cucumber and bit a piece off.
At three o'clock he would walk cautiously to the kitchen door, cough, and say:
"DÁryushka, I was thinking of dining...."
After a bad and ill-served dinner, AndrÉi YÉfimitch walked about his rooms, with his arms crossed on his chest, and thought. Sometimes the kitchen door creaked, and the red, sleepy face of DÁryushka appeared.
"AndrÉi YÉfimitch, is it time for your beer?" she would ask solicitously.
"No, not yet," he would answer. "I'll wait a little longer...."
In the evening came the postmaster, Mikhail Averyanitch, the only man in the town whose society did not weary AndrÉi YÉfimitch. Mikhail Averyanitch had once been a rich country gentleman and had served in a cavalry regiment, but having ruined himself he took a position in the Post Office to save himself from beggary in his old age. He hod a brisk, wholesome appearance, magnificent grey whiskers, well-bred manners, and a loud but pleasant voice. When visitors at the Post Office protested, refused to agree with him, or began to argue, Mikhail Averyanitch became purple, shook all over, and roared at the top of his voice: "Silence!" so that the Post Office had the reputation of a place of terror. Mikhail Averyanitch was fond of AndrÉi YÉfimitch and respected his attainments and the nobility of his heart. But the other townspeople he treated haughtily as inferiors.
"Well, here I am!" he would begin. "How are you, my dear?... But perhaps I bore you? Eh?"
"On the contrary. I am delighted," answered the doctor. "I am always glad to see you."
The friends would sit on the study sofa and smoke for a time silently.
"DÁryushka, suppose I were to have a little beer..." said AndrÉi YÉfimitch.
The first bottle was drunk in silence. The doctor was lost in thought, while Mikhail Averyanitch had the gay and active expression of a man who has something very interesting to relate. The conversation was always begun by the doctor.
"What a pity!" he would say, slowly and quietly, looking away from his friend—he never looked anyone in the face. "What a pity, my dear Mikhail Averyanitch, what a pity it is that there is not a soul in this town who cares to engage in an intellectual or interesting conversation! It is a great deprivation for us. Even the so-called intelligent classes never rise above commonplaces; the level of their development, I assure you, is no higher than that of the lower order."
"Entirely true. I agree with you."
"As you yourself know very well," continued the doctor, pausing intermittently, "as you know, everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher phenomena of the human intellect. Intellect creates a sharp distinction between the animal and the man, it reminds the latter of his divinity, and to a certain extent compensates him for the immortality which he has not. As the result of this, intellect serves as the only fountain of enjoyment. When we say we see and hear around us no evidence of intellect, we mean thereby that we are deprived of true happiness. True, we have our books, but that is a very different thing from living converse and communication. If I may use a not very apt simile, books are the accompaniment, but conversation is the singing.'"
"That is entirely true."
A silence followed. From the kitchen came DÁryushka, and, with her head resting on her hands and an expression of stupid vexation on her face, stood at the door and listened.
"Akh!" sighed Mikhail Averyanitch, "why seek intellect among the men of the present day?" And he began to relate how in the old days life was wholesome, gay, and interesting, how the intellect of Russia was really enlightened, and how high a place was given to the ideas of honour and friendship. Money was lent without I. O. U.'s, and it was regarded as shameful not to stretch out the hand of aid to a needy friend. What marches there were, what adventures, what fights, what companions-in-arms, what women! The Caucasus, what a marvellous country! And the wife of the commander of his battalion—what a strange woman!—who put on an officer's uniform and drove into the mountains at night without an escort. They said she had a romance with a prince in one of the villages.
"Heavenly mother! Lord preserve us!" sighed DÁryushka.
"And how we drank! How we used to eat! What desperate Liberals we were!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch listened, but heard nothing; he was thinking of something else and drinking his beer.
"I often dream of clever people and have imaginary conversations with them," he said, suddenly, interrupting Mikhail Averyanitch. "My father gave me a splendid education, but, under the influence of the ideas current in the sixties, forced me to become a doctor. It seems to me that if I had disobeyed him I might now be living in the very centre of the intellectual movement—probably a member of some faculty. Of course intellect itself is not eternal but transitory—but you already know why I worship it so. Life is a vexatious snare. When a reflecting man attains manhood and ripe consciousness, he cannot but feel himself in a trap from which there is no escape.... By an accident, without consulting his own will, he is called from non-existence into life.... Why? He wishes to know the aim and significance of his existence; he is answered with silence or absurdities; he knocks but it is not opened to him; and death itself comes against his will. And so, as prisoners united by common misfortune are relieved when they meet, men inclined to analysis and generalisation do not notice the snare in which they live when they spend their days in the exchange of free ideas. In this sense intellect is an irreplaceable enjoyment."
"Entirely true!"
And still with his face averted from his companion, AndrÉi YÉfimitch, in a soft voice, with constant pauses, continues to speak of clever men and of the joy of communion with them, and Mikhail Averyanitch listens attentively and says: "It is entirely true."
"Then you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?" asks the postmaster.
"No, my dear Mikhail Averyanitch. I do not believe, and I have no reason for believing."
"I admit that I also doubt it. Still I have a feeling that I can never die. 'Come,' I say to myself, 'Come, old man, it's time for you to die.' But in my heart a voice answers: 'Don't believe it, you will never die.'"
At nine o'clock Mikhail Averyanitch takes leave. As he puts on his overcoat in the hall, he says with a sigh:
"Yes, what a desert fate has planted us in! And what is worst of all, we shall have to die here. Akh!"
VII
When he has parted from his friend, AndrÉi YÉfimitch sits at his table and again begins to read. The stillness of evening, the stillness of night is unbroken by a single sound; time, it seems, stands still and perishes, and the doctor perishes also, till it seems that nothing exists but a book and a green lamp-shade. Then the rude, peasant face of the doctor, as he thinks of the achievements of the human intellect, becomes gradually illumined by a smile of emotion and rapture. Oh, why is man not immortal? he asks. For what end exist brain-centres and convolutions, to what end vision, speech, consciousness, genius, if all are condemned to pass into the earth, to grow cold with it, and for countless millions of years, without aim or object, to be borne with it around the sun? In order that the human frame may decay and be whirled around the sun, is it necessary to drag man with his high, his divine mind, out of non-existence, as if in mockery, and to turn him again into earth?
Immortality of matter! What cowardice to console ourselves with this fictitious immortality! Unconscious processes working themselves out in Nature—processes lower even than folly, for in folly there is at least consciousness and volition, while in these processes there is neither! Yet they say to men, "Be at rest, thy substance, rotting in the earth, will give life to other organisms "—in other words, thou wilt be more foolish than folly! Only the coward, who has more fear of death than sense of dignity, can console himself with the knowledge that his body in the course of time will live again in grass, in stones, in the toad. To seek immortality in the indestructibility of matter is, indeed, as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future for the case when the costly violin is broken and worthless.
When the clock strikes, AndrÉi YÉfimitch leans back in his chair, shuts his eyes, and thinks. Under the influence of the lofty thoughts which he has just been reading, he throws a glance over the present and the past. The past is repellent, better not think of it! And the present is but as the past. He knows that in this very moment, while his thoughts are sweeping round the sun with the cooling earth, in the hospital building in a line with his lodgings, lie men tortured by pain and tormented by uncleanliness; one cannot sleep owing to the insects, and howls in his pain; another is catching erysipelas, and groaning at the tightness of his bandages; others are playing cards with the nurses, and drinking vodka. In this very year no less than twelve thousand persons were duped; the whole work of the hospital, as twenty years before, is based on robbery, scandal, intrigue, nepotism, and gross charlatanry; altogether, the hospital is an immoral institution, and a source of danger to the health of its inmates. And AndrÉi YÉfimitch knows that inside the iron bars of Ward No. 6, Nikita beats the patients with his fists, and that, outside, MosÉika wanders about the streets begging for kopecks.
Yet he knows very well that in the last twenty-five years a fabulous revolution has taken place in the doctor's art. When he studied at the university it had seemed to him that medicine would soon be overtaken by the lot of alchemy and metaphysics, but now the records of its feats which he reads at night touch him, astonish him, and even send him into raptures. What a revolution! what unexpected brilliance! Thanks to antiseptics, operations are every day performed which the great Pigorof regarded as impossible. Ordinary Zemstvo doctors perform such operations as the resection of the knee articulations, of a hundred operations on the stomach only one results in death, and the stone is now such a trifle that it has ceased to be written about. Complaints which were once only alleviated are now entirely cured. And hypnotism, the theory of heredity, the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch, statistics of hygiene, even Russian Zemstvo medicine! Psychiatry, with its classification of diseases, its methods of diagnosis, its method of cure—what a transformation of the methods of the past! No longer arc lunatics drenched with cold water and confined in strait waistcoats; they are treated as human beings, and even—as AndrÉi YÉfimitch read in the newspapers—have their own special dramatic entertainments and dances. AndrÉi YÉfimitch is well aware that in the modern world such an abomination as Ward No. 6 is possible only in a town situated two hundred versts from a railway, where the Mayor and Councillors are half-educated tradesmen, who regard a doctor as a priest to whom everything must be entrusted without criticism, even though he were to dose his patients with molten tin. In any other town the public and the Press would long ago have tom this little Bastille to pieces.
"But in the end?" asks AndrÉi YÉfimitch, opening his eyes. "What is the difference? In spite of antiseptics and Koch and Pasteur, the essence of the matter has no way changed. Disease and death still exist. Lunatics are amused with dances and theatricals, but they are still kept prisoners.... In other words, all these tilings are vanity and folly, and between the best hospital in Vienna and the hospital here there is in reality no difference at all."
But vexation and a feeling akin to envy forbid indifference. It all arises out of weariness. AndrÉi YÉfimitch's head falls upon his book, he rests his head comfortably on his hands and thinks:
"I am engaged in a bad work, and I receive a salary from the men whom I deceive. I am not an honest man.... But then by myself I am nothing; I am only part of a necessary social evil; all the officials in the district are bod, and draw their salaries without doing their work.... In other words, it is not I who am guilty of dishonesty, but Time.... If I were born two hundred years hence I should be a different man."
When the clock strikes three, he puts out his lamp and goes up to his bedroom. But he has no wish to sleep.
VIII
Two years ago, in a fit of liberality, the Zemstvo determined to appropriate three hundred roubles a year to the increase of the personnel of the hospital, until such time as they should open one of their own. They sent, therefore, as assistant to AndrÉi YÉfimitch, the district physician YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch KhobÓtoff. KhobÓtoff was a very young man, under thirty, bill and dark, with small eyes and high cheek-bones; evidently of Asiatic origin. He arrived in the town without a kopeck, with a small portmanteau as his only luggage, and was accompanied by a young, unattractive woman, whom he called his cook. This woman's child completed the party. KhobÓtoff wore a peaked cap and high boots, and—in winter—a short fur coat. He was soon on intimate terms with the feldscher, SergÉi SergÉyitch, and with the bursar, but the rest of the officials he avoided and denounced as aristocrats. He possessed only one book, "Prescriptions of the Vienna Hospital in 1881," and when he visited the hospital he always brought it with him. He did not care for cards, and in the evenings spent his time playing billiards at the club.
KhobÓtoff visited the hospital twice a week, inspected the wards, and received out-patients. The strange absence of antiseptics, cupping-glasses, and other necessaries seemed to trouble him, but he made no attempt to introduce a new order, fearing to offend AndrÉi YÉfimitch, whom he regarded as all old rogue, suspected of having large means, and secretly envied. He would willingly have occupied his position.
IX
One spring evening towards the end of March, when the snow had disappeared and starlings sang in the hospital garden, the doctor was standing at his gate saying good-bye to his friend the postmaster. At that moment the Jew MosÉika, returning with his booty, entered the yard. He was capless, wore a pair of goloshes on his stockingless feet, and held in his hand a small bag of coins.
"Give me a kopeck?" he said to the doctor, shuddering from the cold and grinning.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch, who could refuse no one, gave him a ten-kopeck piece.
"How wrong this is!" he thought, as he looked at the Jew's bare legs and thin ankles. "Wet, I suppose?" And impelled by a feeling of pity and squeamishness he entered the wing after MosÉika, looking all the time now at the Jew's bald head, now at his ankles. When the doctor entered, Nikita jumped off his rubbish-heap and stretched himself.
"Good evening, Nikita!" said the doctor softly. "Suppose you give this man a pair of boots ... that is ... he might catch cold."
"Yes, your Honour. I will ask the superintendent."
"Please. Ask him in my name. Say that I spoke about it."
The door of the ward was open. IvÁn DmÍtritch, who was lying on his bed, and listening with alarm to the unknown voice, suddenly recognised the doctor. He shook with anger, jumped oft his bed, and with a flushed, malicious face, and staring eyeballs, ran into the middle of the room.
"It is the doctor!" he cried, with a loud laugh. "At last! Lord, I congratulate you, the doctor honours us with a visit! Accursed monster!" he squealed, and in an ecstacy of rage never before seen in the hospital, stamped his feet. "Kill this monster! No, killing is not enough for him! Drown him in the closet!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch heard him. He looked into the ward and asked mildly:
"For what?"
"For what!" screamed IvÁn DmÍtritch, approaching with a threatening face, and convulsively clutching his dressing-gown. "For what! Thief!" He spoke in a tone of disgust, and twisted his lips as if about to spit.
"Charlatan! Hangman!"
"Be quiet!" said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, smiling guiltily. "I assure you I have never stolen anything.... I see that you are angry with me. Be calm, I implore you, if you can, and tell me why you want to kill me."
"For keeping me here."
"I do that because you are ill."
"Yes! Ill! But surely tens, hundreds, thousands of madmen live unmolested merely because you in your ignorance cannot distinguish them from the sane. You, the feldscher, the superintendent, all the rascals employed in the hospital are immeasurably lower in morals than the worst of us; why, then, are we here instead of you? Where is the logic?"
"It is not a question of morality or logic. It depends on circumstances. The man who is put here, here he stays, and the man who is not here lives in freedom, that is all For the fact that I am a doctor and you a lunatic neither morals nor logic is responsible, but only empty circumstance."
"This nonsense I do not understand!" answered IvÁn Dmitri tch, sitting down on his bed.
MosÉika, whom Nikita was afraid to search in the doctor's presence, spread out on his bed his booty—pieces of bread, papers, and bones; and trembling with the cold, talked Yiddish in a sing-song voice. Apparently he imagined that he was opening a shop.
"Release me!" said IvÁn DmÍtritch. His voice trembled.
"I cannot."
"Why not?"
"Because it is not in my power. Judge for yourself! What good would it do you if I released you? Suppose I do! The townspeople or the police will capture you and send you back."
"Yes, that is true, it is true ..." said IvÁn DmÍtritch, rubbing his forehead. "It is terrible! But what can I do? What?"
His voice, his intelligent, youthful face pleased AndrÉi YÉfimitch. He wished to caress him and quiet him. He sat beside him on the bed, thought for a moment, and said:
"You ask what is to be done. The best thing in your position would be to run away. But unfortunately that is useless. You would be captured. When society resolves to protect itself from criminals, lunatics, and inconvenient people, it is irresistible. One thing alone remains to you, to console yourself with the thought that your stay here is necessary."
"It is necessary to no one."
"Once prisons and asylums exist, someone must inhabit them. If it is not you it will be I, if not I then someone else. But wait! In the far future there will be neither prisons nor madhouses, nor barred windows, nor dressing-gowns.... Such a time will come sooner or later."
IvÁn DmÍtritch smiled contemptuously.
"You are laughing at me," he said, winking. "Such gentry as you and your assistant Nikita have no business with the future. But you may be assured, sir, that better times are in store for us. What if I do express myself vulgarly—laugh at me!—but the dawn of a new life will shine, and truth will triumph ... and it will be on our side the holiday will be. I shall not see it, but our posterity shall.... I congratulate them with my whole soul, and rejoice—rejoice for them! Forward! God help you, friends!"
IvÁn DmÍtritch's eyes glittered; he rose, stretched out his eyes to the window, and said in an agitated voice:
"For these barred windows I bless you. Hail to the truth! I rejoice!"
"I see no cause for rejoicing," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, whom IvÁn DmÍtritch's movements, though they seemed theatrical, pleased. "Prisons and asylums will no longer be, and justice, as you put it, will triumph. But the essence of things will never change, the laws of Nature will remain the same. Men will be diseased, grow old, and die, just as now. However glorious the dawn which enlightens your life, in the end of ends you will be nailed down in a coffin and flung into a pit."
"But immortality?"
"Nonsense!"
"You do not believe, but I believe. Dostoyeffsky or Voltaire or someone said that if there were no God men would have invented one. And I am deeply convinced that if there were no immortality it would sooner or later have been invented by the great human intellect."
"You speak well," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, smiling with pleasure. "It is well that you believe. With such faith as yours you would live happily though entombed in a wall. May I asked where you were educated?"
"I was at college, but never graduated."
"You are a thoughtful and penetrating man. You would find tranquillity in any environment. The free and profound thought which aspires to the comprehension of life; and high contempt for the vanity of the world—these are two blessings higher than which no man can know. And these you will enjoy though you live behind a dozen barred windows. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth."
"Your Diogenes was a blockhead!" cried IvÁn DmÍtritch gloomily. "What do you tell me about Diogenes and the understanding of life?" He spoke angrily, and sprang up. "I love life, love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a ceaseless, tormenting terror, but there are moments when I am seized by the thirst of life, and in those moments I fear to go out of my mind. I long to live ... terribly!"
He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and continued in a lower voice:
"When I meditate I am visited by visions. Men come to me, I hear voices and music, and it seems to me that I am walking through woods, on the shores of the sea; and I long passionately for the vanities and worries of life.... Tell me! What is the news?"
"You ask about the town, or generally?"
"First tell me about the town, and then generally?"
"What is there? The town is tiresome to the point of torment. There is no one to talk to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. But lately we got a new doctor, KhobÓtoff, a young man."
"He has been here. A fool?"
"Yes, an uneducated man. It is strange, do you know. If you judge by metropolitan life there is no intellectual stagnation in Russia, but genuine activity; in other words, there are real men. But for some reason or other they always send such fellows here. It is an unfortunate town.'"
"An unfortunate town," sighed IvÁn DmÍtritch. "And what news is there generally? What have you in the newspapers and reviews?"
In the ward it was already dark. The doctor rose, and told his patient what was being written in Russia and abroad, and what were the current tendencies of the world. IvÁn DmÍtritch listened attentively, and asked questions. But suddenly, as if he had just remembered something terrible, he seized his head and threw himself on the bed, with his back turned to the doctor.
"What is the matter?" asked AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "You will not hear another word from me," said IvÁn DmÍtritch rudely. "Go away!"
"Why?"
"I tell you, go away! Go to the devil!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and left the ward. As he passed through the hall, he said: "Suppose you were to clear some of this away; Nikita.... The smell is frightful."
"Yes, your Honour!"
"What a delightful young man!" thought AndrÉi YÉfimitch, as he walked home. "He is the first man worth talking to whom I have met all the time I have lived in this town. He can reason and interests himself only with what is essential."
As he read in his study, as he went to bed, all the time, he thought of IvÁn DmÍtritch. When he awoke next morning, he remembered that he had made the acquaintance of a clever and interesting man. And he decided to pay him another visit at the first opportunity.
X
IvÁn DmÍtritch lay in the same position as on the day before, holding his head in his hands, his legs being doubled up underneath him.
"Good morning, my friend," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "You are not asleep?"
"In the first place I am not your friend," said IvÁn DmÍtritch, keeping his face turned towards the pillow, "and in the second, you are troubling yourself in vain; you will not get from me a single word." "That is strange," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "Yesterday we were speaking as friends, but suddenly you took offence and stopped short.... Perhaps I spoke awkwardly, or expressed opinions differing widely from your own."
"You won't catch me!" said IvÁn DmÍtritch, rising from the bed and looking at the doctor ironically and suspiciously. "You may go and spy and cross-examine somewhere else; here there is nothing for you to do. I know very well why you came yesterday."
"That is a strange idea," laughed the doctor. "But why do you assume that I am spying?"
"I assume it.... Whether spy or doctor it is all the same."
"Yes, but ... excuse me...." The doctor sat on a stool beside the bed, and shook his head reproachfully. "Even suppose you are right, suppose I am following your words only in order to betray you to the police, what would happen? They would arrest you and try you. But then, in the dock or in prison would you be worse off than here? In exile or penal servitude you would not suffer any more than now.... What, then, do you fear?"
Apparently these words affected IvÁn DmÍtritch. He sat down quietly.
It was five o'clock, the hour when AndrÉi YÉfimitch usually walked up and down his room and DÁryushka asked him whether it was time for his beer. The weather was calm and clear.
"After dinner I went out for a walk, and you see where I've come," said the doctor. "It is almost spring."
"What month is it?" asked IvÁn DmÍtritch. "March?"
"Yes, we are at the end of March."
"Is it very muddy?"
"Not very. The paths in the garden are clear."
"How glorious it would be to drive somewhere outside the town!" said IvÁn DmÍtritch, rubbing his red eyes as if he were sleepy, "and then to return to a warm comfortable study ... and to be cured of headache by a decent doctor.... For years past I have not lived like a human being.... Things are abominable here,—intolerable, disgusting!"
After last evening's excitement he was tired and weak, and he spoke unwillingly. His fingers twitched, and from his face it was plain that his head ached badly.
"Between a warm, comfortable study and this ward there is no difference," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "The rest and tranquillity of a man are not outside but within him."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Ordinary men find good and evil outside, that is, in their carriages and comfortable rooms; but the thinking man finds them within himself."
"Go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it is warm and smells of oranges—it doesn't suit this climate. With whom was it I spoke of Diogenes? With you?"
"Yes, yesterday with me."
"Diogenes had no need of a study and a warm house, he was comfortable without them.... Lie in a tub and eat oranges and olives! Set him down in Russia—not in December, but even in May. He would freeze even in May with the cold."
"No. Cold, like every other feeling, may be disregarded. As Marcus Aurelius said, pain is the living conception of pain; make an effort of the will to change this conception, cease to complain, and the pain disappears. The wise man, the man of thought and penetration, is distinguished by his contempt for suffering; he is always content and he is surprised by nothing."
"That means that I am an idiot because I suffer, because I am discontented, and marvel at the baseness of men."
"Your discontent is in vain. Think more, and you will realise how trifling are all the things which now excite you.... Try to understand life—in this is true beatitude."
"Understand!" frowned IvÁn DmÍtritch. "External, internal.... Excuse me, but I cannot understand you. I know only one thing," he continued, rising and looking angrily at the doctor. "I know only that God created me of warm blood and nerves; yes! and organic tissue, if it be capable of life, must respond to irritation. And I respond to it! Pain I answer with tears and cries, baseness with indignation, meanness with repulsion. In my mind, that is right, and it is that which is called life. The lower the organism the less susceptible is it, and the more feebly it responds to irritation; the higher it is the more sensitively it responds. How is it you do not know that? A doctor—yet you do not know such truisms! If you would despise suffering, be always contented, and marvel at nothing, you must lower yourself to the condition of that...." IvÁn DmÍtritch pointed to the fat, greasy muzhik, "or inure yourself to suffering until you lose all susceptibility—in other words, cease to live. Excuse me, but I am not a wise man and not a philosopher," continued IvÁn DmÍtritch irritably, "and I do not understand these things. I am not in a condition to reason."
"But you reason admirably."
"The Stoics whom you travesty were remarkable men, but their teaching died two thousand years ago, and since then it has not advanced, nor will it advance, an inch, for it is not a practical or a living creed. It was successful only with a minority who spent their lives in study and trifled with gospels of all sorts; the majority never understood it.... A creed which teaches indifference to wealth, indifference to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering, is quite incomprehensible to the great majority who never knew either wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for suffering would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings of hunger, cold, loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All life lies in these feelings, and life may be hated or wearied of, but never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teaching of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in sensibility to pain and response to irritation.[1] IvÁn DmÍtritch suddenly lost the thread of his thoughts, ceased speaking, and nibbed his forehead irritably.
"I had something important to say, but have gone off the track," he continued. "What was I saying? Yes, this is it. One of these Stoics sold himself into slavery to redeem a friend. Now what does that mean but that even a Stoic responded to irritation, for to perform such a magnanimous deed as the min of one's self for the sake of a friend demands a disturbed and sympathetic heart I have forgotten here in prison all that I learnt, otherwise I should have oilier illustrations. But think of Christ! Christ rebelled against actuality by weeping, by smiling, by grieving, by anger, even by weariness. Not with a smile did He go forth to meet suffering, nor did He despise death, but prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that this cup might pass from Him."[2]
IvÁn DmÍtritch laughed and sat down.
"Suppose that contentment and tranquillity are not outside but within a man," he continued. "Suppose that we must despise suffering and marvel at nothing. But you do not say on what foundation you base this theory. You are a wise man? A philosopher?"
"I am not a philosopher, but everyone must preach this because it is rational."
"But I wish to know why in this matter of understanding life, despising suffering, and the rest of it, you consider yourself competent to judge? Have you ever suffered? What is your idea of suffering? Were you ever flogged when you were a child?"
"No, my parents were averse to corporal punishment."
"But my father flogged me cruelly. He was a stern hemorrhoidal official with a long nose and a yellow neck. But what of you? In your whole life no one has ever laid a finger on you, and you are as healthy as a bull. You grew up under your father's wing, studied at his expense, and then dropped at once into a fat sinecure. More than twenty years you have lived in free lodgings, with free fire and free lights, with servants, with the right to work how, and as much as, you like, or to do nothing. By character you were an idle and a feeble man, and you strove to build up your life so as to avoid trouble. You left your work to feldschers and other scoundrels, and sat at home in warmth and quiet, heaped up money, read books, and enjoyed your own reflections about all kinds of exalted nonsense, and"—IvÁn DmÍtritch looked at the doctor's nose—"drank beer. In one word, you have not seen life, you know nothing about it, and of realities you have only a theoretical knowledge. Yes, you despise suffering and marvel at nothing for very good reasons; because your theory of the vanity of things, external and internal happiness, contempt for life, for suffering and for death, and so on—this is the philosophy best suited to a Russian lie-abed. You see, for instance, a muzhik beating his wife. Why interfere? let him beat her! It is all the same, both will be dead sooner, or later, and then, does not the wife-beater injure himself and not his victim? To get drunk is stupid and wrong, but the man who drinks dies, and the woman who drinks dies also! A woman comes to you with a toothache. Well, what of that? Pain is the conception of pain, without sickness you cannot live, all must die, and therefore take yourself off, my good woman, and don't interfere with my thoughts and my vodka! A young man comes to you for advice: what should he do, how ought he to live? Before answering, most men would think, but your answer is always ready: Aspire to understand life and to real goodness! And what is this fantastic real goodness? No answer! We are imprisoned behind iron bars, we rot and we are tortured, but this, in reality, is reasonable and beautiful because between this ward and a comfortable warm study there is no real difference! A convenient philosophy; your conscience is clean, and you feel yourself to be a wise man. No, sir, this is not philosophy, not breadth of view, but idleness, charlatanism, somnolent folly.... Yes," repeated IvÁn DmÍtritch angrily. "You despise suffering, but squeeze your finger in the door and you will howl for your life!"
"But suppose I do not howl," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, smiling indulgently.
"What! Well, if you had a stroke of paralysis, or if some impudent fellow, taking advantage of his position in the world, insulted you' publicly, and you had no redress—then you would know what it meant to tell others to understand life and aspire to real good."
"This is original," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, beaming with satisfaction and rubbing his hands. "I am delighted with your love of generalisation; and the character which you have just drawn is simply brilliant. I confess that conversation with you gives me great pleasure. Rut now, as I have heard you out, will you listen to me...."
XI
This conversation, which lasted for an hour longer, apparently made a great impression on AndrÉi YÉfimitch. He took to visiting the ward every day. He went there in the morning, and again after dinner, and often darkness found him in conversation with IvÁn DmÍtritch. At first IvÁn DmÍtritch was shy with him, suspected him of some evil intention, and openly expressed his suspicions. But at last he got used to him; and his rude bearing softened into indulgent irony.
A report soon spread through the hospital that Doctor AndrÉi YÉfimitch paid daily visits to Ward No. 6. Neither the feldscher, nor Nikita, nor the nurses could understand his object; why he spent whole hours in the ward, what he was talking about, or why he did not write prescriptions. His conduct appeared strange to everyone. Mikhail Averyanitch sometimes failed to find him at home, and DÁryushka was very alarmed, for the doctor no longer drank his beer at the usual hour, and sometimes even came home late for dinner.
One day—it was at the end of June—Doctor KhobÓtoff went to AndrÉi YÉfimitch's house to sec him on a business matter. Not finding him at home, he looked for him in the yard, where he was told that the old doctor was in the asylum. KhobÓtoff entered the hall of the ward, and standing there listened to the following conversation:
"We will never agree, and you will never succeed in converting me to your faith," said IvÁn DmÍtritch irritably. "You are altogether ignorant of realities, you have never suffered, but only, like a leech, fed on the sufferings of others. But I have suffered without cease from the day of my birth until now. Therefore I tell you frankly I consider myself much higher than you, and more competent in all respects. It is not for you to teach me."
"I certainly have no wish to convert you to my faith," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch softly, and evidently with regret that he was misunderstood. "That is not the question, my friend. Suffering and joy are transitory—leave them, God be with them! The essence of the matter is that you and I recognise in one another men of thought, and this makes us solid however different our views. If you knew, my friend, how I am weary of the general idiocy around me, the lack of talent, the dullness—if you knew the joy with which I speak to you! You are a clever man, and it is a pleasure to be with you."
KhobÓtoff opened the door and looked into the room. IvÁn DmÍtritch with a nightcap on his head and Doctor AndrÉi YÉfimitch sat side by side on the bed. The lunatic shuddered, made strange faces, and convulsively clutched his dressing-gown; and the doctor sat motionless, inclining his head, and his face was red and helpless and sad. KhobÓtoff shrugged his shoulders, laughed, and looked at Nikita. Nikita also shrugged his shoulders.
Next day KhobÓtoff again came to the wing, this time together with the feldscher. They stood in the hall and listened:
"Our grandfather, it seems, is quite gone," said KhobÓtoff going out of the wing.
"Lord, have mercy upon us—sinners!" sighed the pompous SergÉi SergÉyitch, going round the pools in order to keep his shiny boots clear of the mud. "I confess, my dear YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch, I have long expected this."
XII
After this incident, AndrÉi YÉfimitch began to notice that he was surrounded by a strange atmosphere of mystery.... The servants, the nurses, and the patients whom he met looked questioningly at one another, and whispered among themselves. When he met little Masha, the superintendent's daughter, in the hospital garden, and smilingly went over to her, as usual, to stroke her hair, for some inexplicable reason she ran away. When the postmaster, Mikhail Averyanitch, sat listening to him he no longer said: "Entirely true!" but got red in the face and stammered, "Yes, yes ... yes ..." and sometimes, looking at his friend thoughtfully and sorrowfully, advised him to give up vodka and beer. But when doing this, as became a man of delicacy, he did not speak openly, but dropped gentle hints, telling stories, now of a certain battalion commander, an excellent man, now of the regimental chaplain, a first-rate little fellow, who drank a good deal and was taken ill, yet having given up drink got quite well. Twice or thrice AndrÉi YÉfimitch was visited by his colleague KhobÓtoff, who also asked him to give up spirits, and, without giving him any reason, advised him to try bromide of potassium.
In August AndrÉi YÉfimitch received a letter from the Mayor asking him to come and see him on very important business. On arriving at the Town Hall at the appointed time he found awaiting him the head of the recruiting department, the superintendent of the district school, a member of the Town Council, KhobÓtoff, and a stout, fair-haired man, who was introduced as a doctor. This doctor, who bore an unpronounceable Polish name, lived on a stud-farm some thirty versts away, and was passing through the town on his way home.
"Here is a communication about your department," said the Town Councillor, turning to AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "You see, YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch says that there is no room for the dispensing room in the main building, and that it must be transferred to one of the wings. That, of course, is easy, it can be transferred any day, but the chief thing is that the wing is in want of repair."
"Yes, we can hardly get on without that," answered AndrÉi YÉfimitch after a moment's thought. "But if the corner wing is to be fitted up as a dispensary you will have to spend at least five hundred roubles on it. It is unproductive expenditure."
For a few minutes all were silent.
"I had the honour to announce to you, ten years ago," continued AndrÉi YÉfimitch in a soft voice, "that this hospital, under present conditions, is a luxury altogether beyond the means of the town. It was built in the forties, when the means for its support: were greater. The town wastes too much money on unnecessary buildings and sinecure offices. I think that with the money we spend we could keep up two model hospitals; that is, of course, with a different order of things."
"Well, then, let us reform the present order," said the Town Councillor.
"I have already had the honour to advise you to transfer the medical department to the Zemstvo."
"Yes, and hand over to the Zemstvo funds which it will pocket," laughed the fair-haired doctor.
"That is just what happens," said the Town Councillor, laughing also.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch looked feebly at the fair-haired doctor, and said:
"We must be just in our judgments."
Again all were silent. Tea was brought in. The chief of the recruiting department, apparently in a state of confusion, touched AndrÉi YÉfimitch's hand across the table, and said:
"You have quite forgotten us, doctor. But then you were always a monk; you don't play cards, and you don't care for women. We bore you, I'm afraid." And all agreed that it was tiresome for any decent man to live in such a town. Neither theatres, nor concerts, and at the last dub-dance about twenty women present and only two men. Young men no longer danced, but crowded round the supper-table or played cards together. And AndrÉi YÉfimitch, in a slow and soft voice, without looking at those around him, began to lament that the citizens wasted their vital energy, their intellects, and their feelings over cards and scandal, and neither cared nor knew how to pass the time in interesting conversation, in reading, or in taking advantage of the pleasures which intellect alone yields. Intellect is the only interesting and distinguished thing in the world; all the rest is petty and base. KhobÓtoff listened attentively to his colleague, and suddenly asked:
"AndrÉi YÉfimitch, what is the day of the month?"
Having received an answer, he and the fair-haired doctor, both in the tone of examiners convinced of their own incapacity, asked AndrÉi YÉfimitch a number of other questions: what was the day of the week, how many days were there in the year, and was it true that in Ward No. 6 there was a remarkable prophet?
In answer to this last question AndrÉi YÉfimitch got red in the face, and said:
"Yes, he is insane.... But he is a most interesting young man."
No other questions were asked.
As AndrÉi YÉfimitch put on his coat, the chief of the recruiting department put his hand on his shoulder and said, with a sigh:
"For us—old men—it is time to take a rest."
As he left the Town Hall, AndrÉi YÉfimitch understood that he had been before a commission appointed to test his mental sanity. He remembered the questions put to him, reddened, and for the first time in his life felt pity for the medical art.
"My God!" he thought. "These men have only just been studying psychiatry and passing examinations! Where does their monstrous ignorance come from? They have no ideas about psychiatry." For the first time in his life he felt insulted and angry.
Towards evening Mikhail Averyanitch came to see him. Without a word of greeting, the postmaster went up to him, took him by both hands, and said in an agitated voice:
"My dear friend, my dear friend, let me see that you believe in my sincere affection for you. Regard me as your friend!" And preventing AndrÉi YÉfimitch saying a word, he continued in extreme agitation: "You know that I love you for the culture and nobility of your mind. Listen to me, like a good man! The rules of their profession compel the doctors to hide the truth from you, but I, in soldier style, will tell it to you flatly. You are unwell! Excuse me, old friend, but that is the plain truth, and it has been noticed by everyone around you. Only this moment Doctor YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch said that for the benefit of your health you needed rest and recreation. It is entirely true! And things fit in admirably. In a few days I will take my leave, and go oft for change of air. Trove to me that you are my friend, and come with me. Come!"
"I feel very well," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, after a moment's thought; "and I cannot go. Allow me to prove my friendship in some other way."
To go away without any good reason, without his books, without DÁryushka, without beer—suddenly to destroy the order of life observed for twenty years—when he first thought of it, the project seemed wild and fantastic. But he remembered the talk in the Town Hall, and the torments which he had suffered on the w ay home; and the idea of leaving for a short time a town where stupid men considered him mad, delighted him.
"But where do you intend to go?" he asked.
"To Moscow, to Petersburg, to Warsaw.... In Warsaw I spent some of the happiest days of my life. An astonishing city! Come!"
XIII
A week after this conversation, AndrÉi YÉfimitch received a formal proposal to take a rest, that is, to retire from his post, and he received the proposal with indifference. Still a week later, he and Mikhail Averyanitch were sitting in the post tarantass and driving to the railway station. The weather was cool and clear, the sky blue and transparent. The two hundred versts were traversed in two days and two nights. When they stopped at the post-houses and were given dirty glasses for tea, or were delayed over the horses, Mikhail Averyanitch grew purple, shook all over, and roared "Silence! Don't argue!"... And as they sat in the tarantass he talked incessantly of his travels in the Caucasus and in Poland. What adventures he had, what meetings! He spoke in a loud voice, and all the time made such astonished eyes that it might have been thought he was lying. As he told his stories he breathed in the doctor's face and laughed in his ear. All this incommoded the doctor and hindered his thinking and concentrating his mind.
For reasons of economy they travelled third-class, in a non-smoking carriage. Half of the passengers were clean. Mikhail Averyanitch struck up acquaintance with all, and as he shifted from seat to seat, announced in a loud voice that it was a mistake to travel on these tormenting railways. Nothing but rascals around! What a different thing to ride on horseback; in a single day you cover a hundred versts, and at the end feel wholesome and fresh. Yes, and we had been cursed with famines as the result of the draining of the Pinsky marshes! Everywhere nothing but disorder! Mikhail Averyanitch lost his temper, spoke loudly, and allowed no one else to say a word. His incessant chatter, broken only by loud laughter and expressive gesticulations, bored AndrÉi YÉfimitch.
"Which of us is the more mad?" he asked himself. "I who do my best not to disturb my fellow-travellers, or this egoist who thinks he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone else, and gives no one a moment's rest?"
In Moscow, Mikhail Averyanitch donned his military tunic without shoulder-straps, and trousers with red piping. Out of doors he wore an army forage-cap and cloak, and was saluted by the soldiers. To AndrÉi YÉfimitch he began to seem a man who had lost all the good points of the upper classes and retained only the bad. He loved people to dance attendance on him even when it was quite unnecessary. Matches lay before him on the table and he saw them, yet he roared to the waiter to hand them to him; he marched about in his underclothing before the chambermaid; he addressed the waitresses—even the elderly ones—indiscriminately as "thou," and when he was irritated called them blockheads and fools. This, thought AndrÉi YÉfimitch, is no doubt gentlemanly, but it is detestable.
First of all, Mikhail Averyanitch brought his friend to the Iverskaya.[1] He prayed piously, bowed to the ground, shed teal's, and when he had finished, sighed deeply and said:
"Even an unbeliever feels himself at peace after he has prayed. Kiss the image, dear!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch got red in the face and kissed the image; and Mikhail Averyanitch puffed out his lips, shook his head, prayed in a whisper; and again into his eyes came tears. After this they visited the Kremlin and inspected the Tsar-Cannon and the Tsar-Bell, touched them with their fingers, admired the view across the Moscow River, and spent some time in the Temple of the Saviour and afterwards in the Rumiantseff Museum.
They dined at Testoffs.[2] Mikhail Averyanitch stroked his whiskers, gazed long at the menu, and said to the waiter in the tone of a gourmet who feels at home in restaurants:
"Well see what you'll feed us with to-day, angel!"
XIV
The doctor walked and drank and ate and inspected, but his feelings remained unchanged; he was vexed with Mikhail Averyanitch. He longed to get a rest from his companion, to escape from him, but the postmaster considered it his duty not to let him out of his sight, and to see that he tasted every possible form of recreation. For two days AndrÉi YÉfimitch endured it, but on the third declared that he was unwell, and would remain all day at home. Mikhail Averyanitch said that in that case he also would remain at home. And indeed, he added, a rest was necessary, otherwise they would have no strength left. AndrÉi YÉfimitch lay on the sofa with his face to the wall, and with clenched teeth listened to his friend, who assured him that France would sooner or later inevitably destroy Germany, that in Moscow there are a great many swindlers, and that you cannot judge of the merits of a horse by its appearance. The doctor's heart throbbed, his ears hummed, but from motives of delicacy he could not ask his friend to leave him alone or be silent. But happily Mikhail Averyanitch grew tired of sitting in the room, and after dinner went for a walk.
Left alone, AndrÉi YÉfimitch surrendered himself to the feeling of rest. How delightful it was to lie motionless on the sofa and know that he was alone in the room! Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angels knew not. AndrÉi YÉfimitch wished to reflect upon what he had seen and heard in the last few days. But he could not drive Mikhail Averyanitch out of his mind.
"But then he obtained leave and came with me purely out of friendship and generosity," he thought with vexation. "Yet there is nothing more detestable than his maternal care. He is good and generous and a gay companion—but tiresome! Intolerably tiresome! He is one of those men who say only clever things, yet you cannot help feeling that they are stupid at bottom."
Next day AndrÉi YÉfimitch said he was still ill, and remained in his loom. He lay with his face to the back of the sofa, was bored when he was listening to conversation, and happy only when he was left alone. He was angry with himself for leaving home, he was angry with Mikhail Averyanitch, who every day became more garrulous and free-making; to concentrate his thoughts on a serious, elevated plane he failed utterly.
"I am now being tested by the realities of which IvÁn DmÍtritch spoke," he thought, angered at his own pettiness. "But this is nothing.... I will go home, and things will be as before."
In St. Petersburg the incidents of Moscow were repeated; whole days he never left his room, but lay on the sofa, and rose only when he wanted to drink beer.
All the time, Mikhail Averyanitch was in a great hurry to get to Warsaw.
"My dear friend, why must I go there?" asked AndrÉi YÉfimitch imploringly. "Go yourself, and let me go home. I beg you!"
"Not for a million!" protested Mikhail Averyanitch. "It is an astonishing city! In Warsaw I spent the happiest days of my life."
AndrÉi YÉfimitch had not the character to persist, and with a twinge of pain accompanied his friend to Warsaw. When he got there he stayed all day in the hotel, lay on the sofa, and was angry with himself, and with the waiters who stubbornly refused to understand Russian. Mikhail Averyanitch, healthy, gay, and active as ever, drove from morning to night about the city and sought out his old acquaintances. Several nights he stayed out altogether. After one of these nights, spent it is uncertain where, he returned early in the morning, dishevelled and excited. For a long time he walked up and down the room, and at last stopped and exclaimed:
"Honour before everything!"
Again he walked up and down the room, seized his head in his hands, and declaimed tragically:
"Yes! Honour before everything! Cursed be the hour when it entered my head to come near this Babylon!... My dear friend," he turned to AndrÉi YÉfimitch, "I have lost heavily at cards. Lend me five hundred roubles!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch counted the money, and gave it silently to his friend. Mikhail Averyanitch, purple from shame and indignation, cursed incoherently and needlessly, put on his cap, and went out. After two hours' absence he returned, threw himself into an armchair, sighed loudly, and said:
"Honour is saved! Let us go away, my friend! Not another minute will I rest in this accursed city! They are all scoundrels!... Austrian spies!"
When the travellers returned it was the beginning of November, and the streets were covered with snow. Doctor KhobÓtoff occupied AndrÉi YÉfimitch's position at the hospital, but lived at his own rooms, waiting until AndrÉi YÉfimitch returned and gave up the official quarters. The ugly woman whom he called his cook already lived in one of the wings.
Fresh scandals in connection with the hospital were being circulated in the town. It was said that the ugly woman had quarrelled with the superintendent, who had gone down before her on his knees and begged forgiveness. On the day of his return AndrÉi YÉfimitch had to look for new lodgings.
"My friend," began the postmaster timidly, "forgive the indelicate question, what money have you got?"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch silently counted his money, and said:
"Eighty-six roubles."
"You don't understand me," said Mikhail Averyanitch in confusion. "I ask what means have you—generally?"
"I have told you already—eighty-six roubles.... Beyond that I have nothing."
Mikhail Averyanitch was well aware that the doctor was an honest and straightforward man. But he believed that he had at least twenty thousand roubles in capital. Now learning that his friend was a beggar and had nothing to live on, he began to cry, and embraced him.
XV
AndrÉi YÉfimitch migrated to the three-windowed house of Madame Byelof, a woman belonging to the petty trading class. In this house were only three rooms and a kitchen. Of these rooms two, with windows opening on the street, were occupied by the doctor, while in the third and in the kitchen lived DÁryushka, the landlady, and three children. Occasionally the number was added to by a drunken workman, Madame Byeloff's lover, who made scenes at night and terrified DÁryushka and the children. When he came, sat in the kitchen, and demanded vodka, the others were crowded out, and the doctor in compassion took the crying children to his own room, and put them to sleep on the floor. This always gave him great satisfaction.
As before, he rose at eight o'clock, took his breakfast, and sat down and read his old books and reviews. For new books he had no money. But whether it was because the books were old or because the surroundings were changed, reading no longer interested him, and even tired him. So to pass the time he compiled a detailed catalogue of his books, and pasted labels on the backs; and this mechanical work seemed to him much more interesting than reading. The more monotonous and trifling the occupation the more it calmed his mind, he thought of nothing, and time passed quickly. Even to sit in the kitchen and peel potatoes with DÁryushka or to pick the dirt out of buckwheat meal interested him. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing at the wall, he blinked his eyes, listened to the singing, and thought of his father, his mother, the university, religion; he felt calm and melancholy, and when leaving the church, regretted that the service had not lasted longer.
Twice he visited the hospital for the purpose of seeing IvÁn DmÍtritch. But on both occasions Gromof was unusually angry and excited; he asked to be left in peace, declared that he had long ago wearied of empty chatter, and that he would regard solitary confinement as a deliverance from these accursed, base people. Was it possible they would refuse him that? When AndrÉi YÉfimitch took leave of him and wished him good night, he snapped and said:
"Take yourself to the devil!"
And AndrÉi YÉfimitch felt undecided as to whether he should go a third time or not. But he wished to go.
In the old times AndrÉi YÉfimitch had been in the habit of spending the time after dinner in walking about his rooms and thinking. But now from dinner to tea-time he lay on the sofa with his face to the wall and surrendered himself to trivial thoughts, which he found himself unable to conquer. He considered himself injured by the fact that after twenty years' service he had been given neither a pension nor a grant. True he had not done his duties honestly, but then were not pensions given to all old servants indiscriminately, without regard to their honesty or otherwise? Modern ideas did not regard rank, orders, and pensions as the reward of moral perfection or capacity, and why must he alone be the exception? He was absolutely penniless. He was ashamed to pass the shop where he dealt or to meet the proprietor. For beer alone he was in debt thirty-two roubles. He was in debt also to his landlady. DÁryushka secretly sold old clothing and books, and lied to the landlady, declaring that her master was about to come in to a lot of money.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch was angry with himself for having wasted on his journey the thousand roubles which he had saved. What could he not do with a thousand roubles now? He was annoyed, also, because others would not leave him alone. KhobÓtoff considered it his duty to pay periodical visits to his sick colleague; and everything about him was repulsive to AndrÉi YÉfimitch—his sated face, his condescending bad manners, the word "colleague," and the high boots. But the greatest annoyance of all was that he considered it his duty to cure AndrÉi YÉfimitch, and even imagined he was curing him. On every occasion he brought a phial of bromide of potassium and a rhubarb pill.
Mikhail Averyanitch also considered it his duty to visit his sick friend and amuse him. He entered the room with affected freeness, laughed unnaturally, and assured AndrÉi YÉfimitch that to-day he looked splendid, and that, glory be to God! he was getting all right. From this alone it might be concluded that he regarded the case as hopeless. He had not yet paid off the Warsaw debt, and being ashamed of himself and constrained, he laughed all the louder, and told ridiculous anecdotes. His stories now seemed endless, and were a source of torment both to AndrÉi YÉfimitch and to himself.
When the postmaster was present, AndrÉi YÉfimitch usually lay on the sofa, his face turned to the wall, with clenched teeth, listening. It seemed to him that a crust was forming about his heart, and after; every visit he felt the crust becoming thicker, and; threatening to extend to his throat. To exorcise these trivial afflictions he reflected that he, and KhobÓtoff, and Mikhail Averyanitch would, sooner or later, perish, leaving behind themselves not a trace. When a million years had passed by, a spirit flying through space would see only a frozen globe and naked stones. All—culture and morals—everything would pass away; even the burdock would not grow. Why, then, should he trouble himself with feelings of shame on account of a shopkeeper, of insignificant KhobÓtoff, of the terrible friendship of Mikhail Averyanitch. It was all folly and vanity.
But such reasoning did not console him. He had hardly succeeded in painting a vivid picture of the frozen globe after a million yearn of decay, when from behind a naked rock appeared KhobÓtoff in his top boots, and beside him stood Mikhail Averyanitch, with an affected laugh, and a shamefaced whisper on his lips: "And the Warsaw debt, old man, I will repay in a few days ... without fail!"
XVI
Mikhail Averyanitch arrived after dinner one evening when AndrÉi YÉfimitch was lying on the sofa. At the same time came KhobÓtoff with his bromide of potassium. AndrÉi YÉfimitch rose slowly, sat down again, and supported himself by resting his hands upon the sofa edge.
"To-day, my dear," began Mikhail Averyanitch, "to-day your complexion is much healthier than yesterday. You are a hero! I swear to God, a hero!"
"It's time, indeed it's time for you to recover, colleague," said KhobÓtoff, yawning. "You must be tired of the delay yourself."
"Never mind, we'll soon be all right," said Mikhail Averyanitch gaily. "Why, we'll live for another hundred years! Eh?"
"Perhaps not a hundred, but a safe twenty," said KhobÓtoff consolingly. "Don't worry, colleague, don't worry!"
"We'll let them see!" laughed Mikhail Averyanitch, slapping his friend on the knee. "We'll show how the trick is done! Next summer, with God's will, we'll fly away to the Caucasus, and gallop all over the country—trot, trot, trot! And when we come back from the Caucasus we'll dance at your wedding!"
Mikhail Averyanitch winked slyly. "We'll marry you, my friend, we'll find the bride!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch felt that the crust had risen to his throat. His heart beat painfully.
"This is absurd," he said, rising suddenly and going over to the window. "Is it possible you don't understand that you are talking nonsense?"
He wished to speak to his visitors softly and politely, but could not restrain himself, and, against his own will, clenched his fists, and raised them threateningly above his head.
"Leave me!" he cried, in a voice which was not his own. His face was purple and he trembled all over. "Begone! Both of you! Go!"
Mikhail Averyanitch and KhobÓtoff rose, and looked at him, at first in astonishment, then in tenor. "Begone both of you!" continued AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "Stupid idiots! Fools! I want neither your friendship nor your medicines, idiots! This is base, it is abominable!"
KhobÓtoff and the postmaster exchanged confused glances, staggered to the door, and went into the hall. AndrÉi YÉfimitch seized the phial of bromide of potassium, and flung it after them, breaking it upon the threshold.
"Take yourselves to the devil!" he cried, running after them into the hall. "To the devil!"
After his visitors had gone he lay on the sofa, trembling as if in fever, and repeated—
"Stupid idiots! Dull fools!"
When he calmed down, the first thought that entered his head was that poor Mikhail Averyanitch must now be terribly ashamed and wretched, and that the scene that had passed was something very terrible. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before. What had become of his intellect and tact? Where were now his understanding of the world and his philosophical indifference?
All night the doctor was kept awake by feelings of shame and vexation. At nine o'clock next morning, he went to the post office and apologised to the postmaster.
"Do not refer to what happened!" said the postmaster, with a sigh. Touched by AndrÉi YÉfimitch's conduct, he pressed his hands warmly. "No man should trouble over such trifles.... Lubiakin!" he roared so loudly that the clerks and visitors trembled. "Bring a chair!... And you just wait!" he cried to a peasant woman, who held a registered letter through the grating. "Don't you see that I am engaged? ... We will forget all that," he continued tenderly, turning to AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "Sit down, my old friend!"
He stroked his eyebrows silently for a minute, and continued:
"It never entered my head to take offence. Illness is a very strange thing, I understand that. Yesterday your fit frightened both the doctor and myself, and we talked of you for a long time. My dear friend, why will you not pay more attention to your complaint? Do you think you can go on living in this way? Forgive the plain speaking of a friend." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "But you live among hopeless surroundings—closeness, uncleanliness, no one to look after you, nothing to take for your ailment.... My dear friend, both I and the doctor implore you with all our hearts—listen to our advice—go into the hospital. There you will get wholesome food, care and treatment. YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch—although, between ourselves, de mauvais ton—is a capable man, and you can fully rely upon him. He gave me his word that he would take care of you."
AndrÉi YÉfimitch was touched by the sincere concern of his friend, and the tears that trickled down the postmaster's cheeks.
"My dear friend, don't believe them!" he whispered, laying his hand upon his heart. "It is all a delusion. My complaint lies merely in this, that in twenty years I found in this town only one intelligent man, and he was a lunatic. I suffer from no disease whatever; my misfortune is that I have fallen into a magic circle from which there is no escape. It is all the same to me—I am ready for anything."
"Then you will go into the hospital?"
"It is all the same—even into the pit."
"Give me your word, friend, that you will obey YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch in everything."
"I give you my word. But I repeat that I have fallen into a magic circle. Everything now, even the sincere concern of my friends, tends only to the same thing—to my destruction. I am perishing, and I have the courage to acknowledge it."
"Nonsense, you will get all right!"
"What is the use of talking like that?" said AndrÉi YÉfimitch irritably. "There are very few men who at the close of their lives do not experience what I am experiencing now. When people tell you that you have disease of the kidneys or a dilated heart, and set about to cure you; when they tell you that you are a madman or a criminal—in one word, when they begin to turn their attention on to you—you may recognise that you are in a magic circle from which there is no escape. You may try to escape, but that makes things worse. Give in, for no human efforts will save you. So it seems to me."
All this time, people were gathering at the grating. AndrÉi YÉfimitch disliked interrupting the postmaster's work, and took his leave. Mikhail Averyanitch once more made him give his word of honour, and escorted him to the door.
The same day towards evening KhobÓtoff, in his short fur coat and high boots, arrived unexpectedly, and, as if nothing had happened the day before, said: "I have come to you on a matter of business, colleague, I want you to come with me to a consultation. Eh?"
Thinking that KhobÓtoff wanted to amuse him with a walk, or give him some opportunity of earning money, AndrÉi YÉfimitch dressed, and went with him into the street. He was glad of the chance to redeem his rudeness of the day before, thankful for the apparent reconciliation, and grateful to KhobÓtoff for not hinting at the incident. From this uncultured man who would have expected such delicacy?
"And where is your patient?" asked AndrÉi YÉfimitch.
"At the hospital. For a long time past I have wanted you to see him.... A most interesting case."
They entered the hospital yard, and passing through the main building, went to the wing where the lunatics were confined. When they entered the hall, Nikita as usual jumped up and stretched himself.
"One of them has such strange complications in the lungs," whispered KhobÓtoff as he entered the ward with AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "But wait here. I shall be back immediately. I must get my stethoscope."
And he left the room.
XVII
It was already twilight. IvÁn DmÍtritch lay on his bed with his face buried in the pillow; the paralytic sat motionless, and wept softly and twitched his lips; the fat muzhik and the ex-sorter slept. It was very quiet.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch sat on IvÁn DmÍtritch's bed and listened. Half an hour passed by, but KhobÓtoff did not come. Instead of KhobÓtoff came Nikita carrying in his arm a dressing-gown, some linen, and a pair of slippers.
"Please to put on these, your Honour," he said calmly. "There is your bed, this way, please," he added, pointing at a vacant bed, evidently only just set up. "And don't take on; with God's will you will soon be well!"
AndrÉi YÉfimitch understood. Without a Word he walked over to the bed indicated by Nikita and sat upon it. Then, seeing that Nikita was waiting, he stripped himself and felt ashamed. He put on the hospital clothing; the flannels were too small, the shirt was too long, and the dressing-gown smelt of smoked fish.
"You will soon be all right, God grant it!" repeated Nikita.
He took up AndrÉi YÉfimitch's clothes, went out, and locked the door.
"It is all the same," thought AndrÉi YÉfimitch, shamefacedly gathering the dressing-gown around him, and feeling like a convict in his new garments. "It is all the same. In dress clothes, in uniform ... or in this dressing-gown."
But his watch? And the memorandum book in his side pocket? And the cigarettes? Where had Nikita taken his clothes? To the day of his death he would never again wear trousers, a waistcoat, or boots. It was strange and incredible at first. AndrÉi YÉfimitch was firmly convinced that there was no difference whatever between Madame Byelof's house and Ward No. 6, and that all in this world is folly and vanity; but he could not prevent his hands trembling, and his feet were cold. He was hurt, too, by the thought that IvÁn DmÍtritch would rise and see him in the dressing-gown. He rose, walked up and down the room, and again sat down.
He remained sitting for half an hour, weary to the point of grief. Would it be possible to live here a day, a week, even years, as these others had done? He must sit down, and walk about and again sit down; and then he might look out of the window, and again walk from end to end of the room. And afterwards? Just to sit all day still as an idol, and think! No, it was impossible.
AndrÉi YÉfimitch lay down on his bed, but almost immediately rose, rubbed with his cuff the cold sweat from his forehead, and felt that his whole face smelt of dried fish. He walked up and down the ward.
"This is some misunderstanding...." he said, opening his arms. "It only needs an explanation, it is a misunderstanding...."
At this moment IvÁn DmÍtritch awoke. He sat up in bed, rested his head on his hands, and spat. Then he looked idly at the doctor, apparently at first understanding nothing. But soon his sleepy face grew contemptuous and malicious.
"So they have brought you here, my friend," he began in a voice hoarse from sleep. He blinked one eye. "I am very glad! You drank other men's blood, and now they will drink yours! Admirable!"
"It is some misunderstanding ..." began AndrÉi YÉfimitch, frightened by the lunatic's words. He shrugged his shoulders and repeated. "It is a misunderstanding of some kind."
IvÁn DmÍtritch again spat, and lay down on his bed.
"Accursed life!" he growled. "But what is most bitter, most abominable of all, is that this life ends not with rewards for suffering, not with apotheoses as in operas, but in death; men come and drag the corpse by its arms and legs into the cellar. Brrrrrr!... Well, never mind!... For all that we have suffered in this, in the other world we will be repaid with a holiday! From the other world I shall return hither as a shadow, and terrify these monsters!... I will turn their heads grey!"
MosÉika entered the ward, and seeing the doctor, stretched out his hand, and said:
"Give me a kopeck!"
XVIII
AndrÉi YÉfimitch went across to the window, and looked out into the fields. It was getting dark, and on the horizon rose a cold, livid moon. Near the hospital railings, a hundred fathoms away, not more, rose a lofty, white building, surrounded by a stone wall. It was the prison.
"That is actuality," thought AndrÉi YÉfimitch, and he felt terrified.
Everything was terrible: the moon, the prison, the spikes in the fence, and the blaze in the distant bone-mill. AndrÉi YÉfimitch turned away from the window, and saw before him a man with glittering stars and orders upon his breast. The man smiled and winked cunningly. And this, too, seemed terrible.
He tried to assure himself that in the moon and in the prison there was nothing peculiar at all, that even sane men wear orders, and that the best of things in their turn rot and turn into dust. But despair suddenly seized him, he took hold of the grating with both hands, and jerked it with all his strength. But the bars stood firm.
That it might be less terrible, he went to IvÁn DmÍtritch's bed, and sat upon it.
"I have lost my spirits, friend," he said, stammering, trembling, and rubbing the cold sweat from his face. "My spirits have fallen."
"But why don't you philosophise?" asked IvÁn DmÍtritch ironically.
"My God, my God!... Yes, yes!... Once you said that in Russia there is no philosophy; but all philosophise, even triflers. But the philosophising of triflers does no harm to anyone," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch as if he wanted to cry. "By why, my dear friend, why this malicious laughter? Why should not triflers philosophise if they are not satisfied? For a clever, cultivated, proud, freedom-loving man, built in the image of God, there is no course left but to come as doctor to a dirty, stupid town, and lead a life of jars, leeches, and gallipots. Charlatanry, narrowness, baseness! Oh, my God!"
"You chatter nonsense! If you didn't want to be a doctor, why weren't you a minister of state?"
"I could not. We are weak, my friend. I was indifferent to things, I reasoned actively and wholesomely, but it needed but the first touch of actuality to make me lose heart, and surrender.... We are weak; we are worthless!... And you also, my friend. You are able, you are noble, with your mother's milk you drank in draughts of happiness, yet hardly had you entered upon life when you wearied of it.... We are weak, weak!"
In addition to terror and the feeling of insult, AndrÉi YÉfimitch had been tortured by sonic importunate craving ever since the approach of evening. Finally he came to the conclusion that he wanted to smoke and drink beer.
"I am going out, my friend," he said. "I will tell them to bring lights.... I cannot in this way.... I am not in a state...."
He went to the door and opened it, but immediately Nikita jumped up and barred the way.
"Where are you going to? You can't, you can't!" he cried. "It's time for bed!"
"But only for a minute.... I want to go into the yard.... I want to have a walk in the yard," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch.
"You can't. I have orders against it.... You know yourself."
Nikita banged the door and set his back against it. "But if I go out what harm will it do?" asked AndrÉi YÉfimitch. "I don't understand! Nikita, I must go out!" he cried in a trembling voice. "I must go!"
"Don't create disorder; it is not right!" said Nikita in an edifying tone.
"The devil knows what is the meaning of this!" suddenly screamed IvÁn Dmitri tch, jumping from his bed. "What right has he to refuse to let us go? How dare they keep us here? The law allows no man to be deprived of freedom without a trial! This is violence ... tyranny!"
"Of course it is tyranny," said AndrÉi YÉfimitch, encouraging Gromof. "I must go! I have to go out! He has no right! Let me out, I tell you!"
"Do you hear, stupid dog!" screamed Ivrin DmÍtritch, thumping the door with his fists. "Open, or I will smash the door! Blood-sucker!"
"Open!" cried AndrÉi YÉfimitch, trembling all over: "I demand it!"
"Talk away!" answered Nikita through the door. "Talk away!"
"Go, then, for YevgÉniÏ FeÓdoritch! Say that I ask him to come ... For a minute!"
"To-morrow he will come all right."
"They will never let us go!" cried IvÁn DmÍtritch. "We will all die here! Oh, God, is it possible that in the other world there is no hell, that these villains will be forgiven? Where is there justice? Open, scoundrel, I am choking!" Gromof cried out in a hoarse voice, and flung himself against the door. "I will dash my brains out! Assassins!"
Nikita flung open the door, and with both hands and his knees roughly pushed AndrÉi YÉfimitch back into the room, and struck him with his clenched fist full in the face. It seemed to AndrÉi YÉfimitch that a great salt wave had suddenly dashed upon his head and flung him upon his bed; in his mouth was a taste of salt, and the blood seemed to burst from his gums. As if trying to swim away from the wave, he flourished his arms and seized the bedstead. But at this moment Nikita struck him again and again in the back. IvÁn DmÍtritch screamed loudly. He also had evidently been beaten.
Then all was quiet Liquid moonlight poured through between the iron bars, and on the floor lay a network shadow. All were terrified. AndrÉi YÉfimitch lay on the bed and held his breath in terror, awaiting another blow.
It seemed as if someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into his chest and turned it around. In his agony he bit his pillow and ground his teeth, and suddenly into his head amid the chaos flashed the intolerable thought that such misery had been borne year after year by these helpless men who now lay in the moonlight like black shadows about him. In twenty years he had never known of it, and never wanted to know. He did not know, he had no idea of their wretchedness, therefore he was not guilty; but conscience, as rude and unaccommodating as Nikita's fists, sent an icy thrill through him from head to foot. He jumped from his bed and tried to scream with all his might, to fly from the ward and kill Nikita, and KhobÓtoff, and the superintendent, and the feldscher, and himself. But not a sound came from his throat, his feet rebelled against him, he panted, he tore his gown and shirt, and fell insensible on the bed.
XIX
Next morning his head ached, his cars hummed, and he was weak. The memory of his weakness of the day before made him feel ashamed. Yesterday he had shown a petty spirit, he had feared even the moon, and honestly expressed feelings and thoughts which he had never suspected could exist in himself. For instance, the thought about the discontent of philosophic triflers. But now he was quite indifferent.
He neither ate nor drank, but lay motionless and silent.
"It is all the same to me," he thought when he was questioned. "I shall not answer.... It is all the same...."
After dinner Mikhail Averyanitch brought him a quarter of a pound of tea and a pound of marmalade. DÁryushka also came, and for a whole hour stood beside the bed with a dull expression of uncomprehending affliction. Doctor KhobÓtoff also paid him a visit. He brought a phial of bromide of potassium, and ordered Nikita to fumigate the ward.
Towards evening AndrÉi YÉfimitch died from an apoplectic stroke. At first he felt chill, and sickness; something loathsome like rotting sour cabbage or bad eggs seemed to permeate his whole body even to his fingers, to extend from his stomach to his head, and to flow in his eyes and ears. A green film appeared before his eyes. AndrÉi YÉfimitch realised that his hour had come; and remembered that IvÁn DmÍtritch, Mikhail Averyanitch, and millions of others believed in immortality. But immortality he did not desire, and thought of it only for a moment. A herd of antelopes, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, rushed past him; then a woman stretched out to him a hand holding a registered letter.... Mikhail Averyanitch said something. Then all vanished and AndrÉi YÉfimitch died.
The servants came in, took him by the shoulders and legs, and carried him to the chapel. There he lay on a table with open eyes, and at night the moon shone down upon him. In the morning came SergÉi SergÉyitch, piously prayed before a crucifix, and closed the eyes of his former chief. Next day AndrÉi YÉfim itch was buried. Only Mikhail Averyanitch and DÁryushka were present at the funeral.
