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.