When next morning the artist and the medical student went in to him,
he was moving about the room with his shirt torn, biting his hands and
moaning with pain.
“For God’s sake!” he sobbed when he saw his friends, “take me where you
please, do what you can; but for God’s sake, save me quickly! I shall
kill myself!”
The artist turned pale and was helpless. The medical student, too,
almost shed tears, but considering that doctors ought to be cool and
composed in every emergency said coldly:
“It’s a nervous breakdown. But it’s nothing. Let us go at once to the
doctor.”
“Wherever you like, only for God’s sake, make haste!”
“Don’t excite yourself. You must try and control yourself.”
The artist and the medical student with trembling hands put Vassilyev’s
coat and hat on and led him out into the street.
“Mihail Sergeyitch has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long
time,” the medical student said on the way. “He is a very nice man and
thoroughly good at his work. He took his degree in 1882, and he has
an immense practice already. He treats students as though he were one
himself.”
“Make haste, make haste!...” Vassilyev urged.
Mihail Sergeyitch, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends
with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his
face.
“Rybnikov and Mayer have spoken to me of your illness already,” he said.
“Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg....”
He made Vassilyev sit down in a big armchair near the table, and moved a
box of cigarettes towards him.
“Now then!” he began, stroking his knees. “Let us get to work.... How
old are you?”
He asked questions and the medical student answered them. He asked
whether Vassilyev’s father had suffered from certain special diseases,
whether he drank to excess, whether he were remarkable for cruelty or
any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grandfather,
mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a
beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he grew more animated
at once, and asked:
“Excuse me, but don’t you remember, perhaps, your mother had a passion
for the stage?”
Twenty minutes passed. Vassilyev was annoyed by the way the doctor kept
stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.
“So far as I understand your questions, doctor,” he said, “you want to
know whether my illness is hereditary or not. It is not.”
The doctor proceeded to ask Vassilyev whether he had had any secret
vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had
any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half
the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left
unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail
Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though
if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he
received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip
of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had taken his degree in natural
science, and was now studying law, the doctor pondered.
“He wrote a first-rate piece of original work last year,...” said the
medical student.
“I beg your pardon, but don’t interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating,” said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his
face. “Though, of course, that does enter into the diagnosis. Intense
intellectual work, nervous exhaustion.... Yes, yes.... And do you
drink vodka?” he said, addressing Vassilyev.
“Very rarely.”
Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the
doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of
the attack, and described how the day before yesterday the artist,
Vassilyev, and he had visited S. Street.
The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the
doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vassilyev as
strange in the extreme....
“Doctor, tell me one thing only,” he said, controlling himself so as not
to speak rudely. “Is prostitution an evil or not?”
“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” said the doctor, with an expression
that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long
ago. “Who disputes it?”
“You are a mental doctor, aren’t you?” Vassilyev asked curtly.
“Yes, a mental doctor.”
“Perhaps all of you are right!” said Vassilyev, getting up and beginning
to walk from one end of the room to the other. “Perhaps! But it all
seems marvelous to me! That I should have taken my degree in two
faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have written
a work which in three years will be thrown aside and forgotten, I am
praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as
unconcernedly as of these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am
called mad, I am pitied!”
Vassilyev for some reason felt all at once unutterably sorry for
himself, and his companions, and all the people he had seen two days
before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.
His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor. The latter, with the
air of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling
himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vassilyev and, without
a word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer,
undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the
skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.
And Vassilyev felt easier. When he came out from the doctor’s he
was beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer
irritated him, and the load at his heart grew lighter and lighter as
though it were melting away. He had two prescriptions in his hand:
one was for bromide, one was for morphia.... He had taken all these
remedies before.
In the street he stood still and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged
himself languidly to the University.