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.