The next morning when the painter and the medico came to see him,
they found him in a shirt torn to ribbons, his hands bitten all over,
tossing about in the room and moaning with pain.
“For God’s sake!” he began to sob, seeing his comrades, “Take me
anywhere you like, do what you like, but save me, for God’s sake now,
now! I’ll kill myself.”
The painter went pale and was bewildered. The medico, too, nearly began
to cry; but, believing that medical men must be cool and serious on
every occasion of life, he said coldly:
“It’s a fit you’ve got. But never mind. Come to the doctor, at once.”
“Anywhere you like, but quickly, for God’s sake!”
“Don’t be agitated. You must struggle with yourself.”
The painter and the medico dressed Vassiliev with trembling hands and
led him into the street.
“Mikhail Sergueyich has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a
long while,” the medico said on the way. “He’s a very nice man, and
knows his job splendidly. He took his degree in ’82, and has got a huge
practice already. He keeps friends with the students.”
“Quicker, quicker....” urged Vassiliev. Mikhail Sergueyich, a stout
doctor with fair hair, received the friends politely, firmly, coldly,
and smiled with one cheek only.
“The painter and Mayer have told me of your disease already,” he said.
“Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, please.”
He made Vassiliev sit down in a big chair by the table, and put a box
of cigarettes in front of him.
“Well?” he began, stroking his knees. “Let’s make a start. How old are
you?”
He put questions and the medico answered. He asked whether Vassiliev’s
father suffered from any peculiar diseases, if he had fits of drinking,
was he distinguished by his severity or any other eccentricities. He
asked the same questions about his grandfather, mother, sisters, and
brothers. Having ascertained that his mother had a fine voice and
occasionally appeared on the stage, he suddenly brightened up and asked:
“Excuse me, but could you recall whether the theatre was not a passion
with your mother?”
About twenty minutes passed. Vassiliev was bored by the doctor stroking
his knees and talking of the same thing all the while.
“As far as I can understand your questions, Doctor,” he said. “You want
to know whether my disease is hereditary or not. It is not hereditary.”
The doctor went on to ask if Vassiliev had not any secret vices
in his early youth, any blows on the head, any love passions,
eccentricities, or exceptional infatuations. To half the questions
habitually asked by careful doctors you may return no answer without
any injury to your health; but Mikhail Sergueyich, the medico and the
painter looked as though, if Vassiliev failed to answer even one single
question, everything would be ruined. For some reason the doctor wrote
down the answers he received on a scrap of paper. Discovering that
Vassiliev had already passed through the faculty of natural science and
was now in the Law faculty, the doctor began to be pensive....
“He wrote a brilliant thesis last year....” said the medico.
“Excuse me. You mustn’t interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating,” the doctor said, smiling with one cheek. “Yes,
certainly that is important for the anamnesis.... Yes, yes.... And do
you drink vodka?” he turned to Vassiliev.
“Very rarely.”
Another twenty minutes passed. The medico began _sotto voce_ to give
his opinion of the immediate causes of the fit and told how he, the
painter and Vassiliev went to S----v Street the day before yesterday.
The indifferent, reserved, cold tone in which his friends and the
doctor were speaking of the women and the miserable street seemed to
him in the highest degree strange....
“Doctor, tell me this one thing,” he said, restraining himself from
being rude. “Is prostitution an evil or not?”
“My dear fellow, who disputes it?” the doctor said with an expression
as though he had long ago solved all these questions for himself. “Who
disputes it?”
“Are you a psychiatrist?”
“Yes-s, a psychiatrist.”
“Perhaps all of you are right,” said Vassiliev, rising and beginning
to walk from corner to corner. “It may be. But to me all this seems
amazing. They see a great achievement in my having passed through two
faculties at the university; they praise me to the skies because I have
written a work that will be thrown away and forgotten in three years’
time, but because I can’t speak of prostitutes as indifferently as I can
about these chairs, they send me to doctors, call me a lunatic, and
pity me.”
For some reason Vassiliev suddenly began to feel an intolerable pity
for himself, his friends, and everybody whom he had seen the day before
yesterday, and for the doctor. He began to sob and fell into the chair.
The friends looked interrogatively at the doctor. He, looking as though
he magnificently understood the tears and the despair, and knew himself
a specialist in this line, approached Vassiliev and gave him some drops
to drink, and then when Vassiliev grew calm undressed him and began to
examine the sensitiveness of his skin, of the knee reflexes....
And Vassiliev felt better. When he was coming out of the doctor’s he
was already ashamed; the noise of the traffic did not seem irritating,
and the heaviness beneath his heart became easier and easier as though
it were thawing. In his hand were two prescriptions. One was for
kali-bromatum, the other--morphia. He used to take both before.
He stood still in the street for a while, pensive, and then, taking
leave of his friends, lazily dragged on towards the university.