madness shows itself in the following way also. Sometimes in the
evenings he wraps himself in his dressing-gown, and, trembling all over,
with his teeth chattering, begins walking rapidly from corner to corner
and between the bedsteads. It seems as though he is in a violent fever.
From the way he suddenly stops and glances at his companions, it can be
seen that he is longing to say something very important, but, apparently
reflecting that they would not listen, or would not understand him, he
shakes his head impatiently and goes on pacing up and down. But soon the
desire to speak gets the upper hand of every consideration, and he will
let himself go and speak fervently and passionately. His talk is
disordered and feverish like delirium, disconnected, and not always
intelligible, but, on the other hand, something extremely fine may be
felt in it, both in the words and the voice. When he talks you recognize
in him the lunatic and the man. It is difficult to reproduce on paper
his insane talk. He speaks of the baseness of mankind, of violence
trampling on justice, of the glorious life which will one day be upon
earth, of the window-gratings, which remind him every minute of the
stupidity and cruelty of oppressors. It makes a disorderly, incoherent
potpourri of themes old but not yet out of date. II
Some twelve or fifteen years ago an official called Gromov, a highly
respectable and prosperous person, was living in his own house in the
principal street of the town. He had two sons, Sergey and Ivan. When
Sergey was a student in his fourth year he was taken ill with galloping
consumption and died, and his death was, as it were, the first of a
whole series of calamities which suddenly showered on the Gromov family.
Within a week of Sergey's funeral the old father was put on trial for
fraud and misappropriation, and he died of typhoid in the prison
hospital soon afterwards. The house, with all their belongings, was sold
by auction, and Ivan Dmitritch and his mother were left entirely without
means.
Hitherto in his father's lifetime, Ivan Dmitritch, who was studying in
the University of Petersburg, had received an allowance of sixty or
seventy roubles a month, and had had no conception of poverty; now he
had to make an abrupt change in his life. He had to spend his time from
morning to night giving lessons for next to nothing, to work at copying,
and with all that to go hungry, as all his earnings were sent to keep
his mother. Ivan Dmitritch could not stand such a life; he lost heart
and strength, and, giving up the university, went home.
Here, through interest, he obtained the post of teacher in the district
school, but could not get on with his colleagues, was not liked by the
boys, and soon gave up the post. His mother died. He was for six months
without work, living on nothing but bread and water; then he became a
court usher. He kept this post until he was dismissed owing to his
illness.
He had never even in his young student days given the impression of
being perfectly healthy. He had always been pale, thin, and given to
catching cold; he ate little and slept badly. A single glass of wine
went to his head and made him hysterical. He always had a craving for
society, but, owing to his irritable temperament and suspiciousness, he
never became very intimate with anyone, and had no friends. He always
spoke with contempt of his fellow-townsmen, saying that their coarse
ignorance and sleepy animal existence seemed to him loathsome and
horrible. He spoke in a loud tenor, with heat, and invariably either
with scorn and indignation, or with wonder and enthusiasm, and always
with perfect sincerity. Whatever one talked to him about he always
brought it round to the same subject: that life was dull and stifling in
the town; that the townspeople had no lofty interests, but lived a
dingy, meaningless life, diversified by violence, coarse profligacy, and
hypocrisy; that scoundrels were well fed and clothed, while honest men
lived from hand to mouth; that they needed schools, a progressive local
paper, a theatre, public lectures, the co-ordination of the intellectual
elements; that society must see its failings and be horrified. In his
criticisms of people he laid on the colours thick, using only black and
white, and no fine shades; mankind was divided for him into honest men
and scoundrels: there was nothing in between. He always spoke with
passion and enthusiasm of women and of love, but he had never been in
love.
In spite of the severity of his judgments and his nervousness, he was
liked, and behind his back was spoken of affectionately as Vanya. His
innate refinement and readiness to be of service, his good breeding, his
moral purity, and his shabby coat, his frail appearance and family
misfortunes, aroused a kind, warm, sorrowful feeling. Moreover, he was
well educated and well read; according to the townspeople's notions, he
knew everything, and was in their eyes something like a walking
encyclopedia.
He had read a great deal. He would sit at the club, nervously pulling at
his beard and looking through the magazines and books; and from his face
one could see that he was not reading, but devouring the pages without
giving himself time to digest what he read. It must be supposed that
reading was one of his morbid habits, as he fell upon anything that came
into his hands with equal avidity, even last year's newspapers and
calendars. At home he always read lying down. III
One autumn morning Ivan Dmitritch, turning up the collar of his
greatcoat and splashing through the mud, made his way by side-streets
and back lanes to see some artisan, and to collect some payment that was
owing. He was in a gloomy mood, as he always was in the morning. In one
of the side-streets he was met by two convicts in fetters and four
soldiers with rifles in charge of them. Ivan Dmitritch had very often
met convicts before, and they had always excited feelings of compassion
and discomfort in him; but now this meeting made a peculiar, strange
impression on him. It suddenly seemed to him for some reason that he,
too, might be put into fetters and led through the mud to prison like
that. After visiting the artisan, on the way home he met near the post
office a police superintendent of his acquaintance, who greeted him and
walked a few paces along the street with him, and for some reason this
seemed to him suspicious. At home he could not get the convicts or the
soldiers with their rifles out of his head all day, and an unaccountable
inward agitation prevented him from reading or concentrating his mind.
In the evening he did not light his lamp, and at night he could not
sleep, but kept thinking that he might be arrested, put into fetters,
and thrown into prison. He did not know of any harm he had done, and
could be certain that he would never be guilty of murder, arson, or
theft in the future either; but was it not easy to commit a crime by
accident, unconsciously, and was not false witness always possible, and,
indeed, miscarriage of justice? It was not without good reason that the
agelong experience of the simple people teaches that beggary and prison
are ills none can be safe from. A judicial mistake is very possible as
legal proceedings are conducted nowadays, and there is nothing to be
wondered at in it. People who have an official, professional relation to
other men's sufferings--for instance, judges, police officers, doctors--in
course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if
they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this
respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and
calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this
formal, soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one
thing--time--in order to deprive an innocent man of all rights of
property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on
performing certain formalities for which the judge is paid his salary,
and then--it is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and
protection in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles
from a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of
justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational
and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy--for instance, a verdict
of acquittal--calls forth a perfect outburst of dissatisfied and
revengeful feeling?
In the morning Ivan Dmitritch got up from his bed in a state of horror,
with cold perspiration on his forehead, completely convinced that he
might be arrested any minute. Since his gloomy thoughts of yesterday had
haunted him so long, he thought, it must be that there was some truth in
them. They could not, indeed, have come into his mind without any
grounds whatever.
A policeman walking slowly passed by the windows: that was not for
nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near the house. Why
were they silent? And agonizing days and nights followed for Ivan
Dmitritch. Everyone who passed by the windows or came into the yard
seemed to him a spy or a detective. At midday the chief of the police
usually drove down the street with a pair of horses; he was going from
his estate near the town to the police department; but Ivan Dmitritch
fancied every time that he was driving especially quickly, and that he
had a peculiar expression: it was evident that he was in haste to
announce that there was a very important criminal in the town. Ivan
Dmitritch started at every ring at the bell and knock at the gate, and
was agitated whenever he came upon anyone new at his landlady's; when he
met police officers and gendarmes he smiled and began whistling so as to
seem unconcerned. He could not sleep for whole nights in succession
expecting to be arrested, but he snored loudly and sighed as though in
deep sleep, that his landlady might think he was asleep; for if he could
not sleep it meant that he was tormented by the stings of
conscience--what a piece of evidence! Facts and common sense persuaded
him that all these terrors were nonsense and morbidity, that if one
looked at the matter more broadly there was nothing really terrible in
arrest and imprisonment--so long as the conscience is at ease; but the
more sensibly and logically he reasoned, the more acute and agonizing
his mental distress became. It might be compared with the story of a
hermit who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in a virgin forest;
the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker the forest grew.
In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was useless, gave up reasoning
altogether, and abandoned himself entirely to despair and terror.
He began to avoid people and to seek solitude. His official work had
been distasteful to him before: now it became unbearable to him. He was
afraid they would somehow get him into trouble, would put a bribe in his
pocket unnoticed and then denounce him, or that he would accidentally
make a mistake in official papers that would appear to be fraudulent, or
would lose other people's money. It is strange that his imagination had
never at other times been so agile and inventive as now, when every day
he thought of thousands of different reasons for being seriously anxious
over his freedom and honour; but, on the other hand, his interest in the
outer world, in books in particular, grew sensibly fainter, and his
memory began to fail him.
In the spring when the snow melted there were found in the ravine near
the cemetery two half-decomposed corpses--the bodies of an old woman and
a boy bearing the traces of death by violence. Nothing was talked of but
these bodies and their unknown murderers. That people might not think he
had been guilty of the crime, Ivan Dmitritch walked about the streets,
smiling, and when he met acquaintances he turned pale, flushed, and
began declaring that there was no greater crime than the murder of the
weak and defenceless. But this duplicity soon exhausted him, and after
some reflection he decided that in his position the best thing to do was
to hide in his landlady's cellar. He sat in the cellar all day and then
all night, then another day, was fearfully cold, and waiting till dusk,
stole secretly like a thief back to his room. He stood in the middle of
the room till daybreak, listening without stirring. Very early in the
morning, before sunrise, some workmen came into the house. Ivan
Dmitritch knew perfectly well that they had come to mend the stove in
the kitchen, but terror told him that they were police officers
disguised as workmen. He slipped stealthily out of the flat, and,
overcome by terror, ran along the street without his cap and coat. Dogs
raced after him barking, a peasant shouted somewhere behind him, the
wind whistled in his ears, and it seemed to Ivan Dmitritch that the
force and violence of the whole world was massed together behind his
back and was chasing after him.
He was stopped and brought home, and his landlady sent for a doctor.
Doctor Andrey Yefimitch, of whom we shall have more to say hereafter,
prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel drops, shook his head,
and went away, telling the landlady he should not come again, as one
should not interfere with people who are going out of their minds. As he
had not the means to live at home and be nursed, Ivan Dmitritch was soon
sent to the hospital, and was there put into the ward for venereal
patients. He could not sleep at night, was full of whims and fancies,
and disturbed the patients, and was soon afterwards, by Andrey
Yefimitch's orders, transferred to Ward No. 6.
Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and
his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were
pulled to pieces by boys. IV
Ivan Dmitritch's neighbour on the left hand is, as I have said already,
the Jew Moiseika; his neighbour on the right hand is a peasant so
rolling in fat that he is almost spherical, with a blankly stupid face,
utterly devoid of thought. This is a motionless, gluttonous, unclean
animal who has long ago lost all powers of thought or feeling. An acrid,
stifling stench always comes from him.
Nikita, who has to clean up after him, beats him terribly with all his
might, not sparing his fists; and what is dreadful is not his being
beaten--that one can get used to--but the fact that this stupefied
creature does not respond to the blows with a sound or a movement, nor
by a look in the eyes, but only sways a little like a heavy barrel.
The fifth and last inhabitant of Ward No. 6 is a man of the artisan
class who had once been a sorter in the post office, a thinnish, fair
little man with a good-natured but rather sly face. To judge from the
clear, cheerful look in his calm and intelligent eyes, he has some
pleasant idea in his mind, and has some very important and agreeable
secret. He has under his pillow and under his mattress something that he
never shows anyone, not from fear of its being taken from him and
stolen, but from modesty. Sometimes he goes to the window, and turning
his back to his companions, puts something on his breast, and bending
his head, looks at it; if you go up to him at such a moment, he is
overcome with confusion and snatches something off his breast. But it is
not difficult to guess his secret.
"Congratulate me," he often says to Ivan Dmitritch; "I have been
presented with the Stanislav order of the second degree with the star.
The second degree with the star is only given to foreigners, but for
some reason they want to make an exception for me," he says with a
smile, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity. "That I must confess I did
not expect."
"I don't understand anything about that," Ivan Dmitritch replies
morosely.
"But do you know what I shall attain to sooner or later?" the former
sorter persists, screwing up his eyes slyly. "I shall certainly get the
Swedish 'Polar Star.' That's an order it is worth working for, a white
cross with a black ribbon. It's very beautiful."
Probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this ward. In the
morning the patients, except the paralytic and the fat peasant, wash in
the entry at a big tab and wipe themselves with the skirts of their
dressing-gowns; after that they drink tea out of tin mugs which Nikita
brings them out of the main building. Everyone is allowed one mugful. At
midday they have soup made out of sour cabbage and boiled grain, in the
evening their supper consists of grain left from dinner. In the
intervals they lie down, sleep, look out of window, and walk from one
corner to the other. And so every day. Even the former sorter always
talks of the same orders.
Fresh faces are rarely seen in Ward No. 6. The doctor has not taken in
any new mental cases for a long time, and the people who are fond of
visiting lunatic asylums are few in this world. Once every two months
Semyon Lazaritch, the barber, appears in the ward. How he cuts the
patients' hair, and how Nikita helps him to do it, and what a
trepidation the lunatics are always thrown into by the arrival of the
drunken, smiling barber, we will not describe.
No one even looks into the ward except the barber. The patients are
condemned to see day after day no one but Nikita.
A rather strange rumour has, however, been circulating in the hospital
of late.
It is rumoured that the doctor has begun to visit Ward No. 6. V
A strange rumour!
Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin is a strange man in his way. They say that
when he was young he was very religious, and prepared himself for a
clerical career, and that when he had finished his studies at the high
school in 1863 he intended to enter a theological academy, but that his
father, a surgeon and doctor of medicine, jeered at him and declared
point-blank that he would disown him if he became a priest. How far this
is true I don't know, but Andrey Yefimitch himself has more than once
confessed that he has never had a natural bent for medicine or science
in general.
However that may have been, when he finished his studies in the medical
faculty he did not enter the priesthood. He showed no special
devoutness, and was no more like a priest at the beginning of his
medical career than he is now.
His exterior is heavy--coarse like a peasant's, his face, his beard, his
flat hair, and his coarse, clumsy figure, suggest an overfed,
intemperate, and harsh innkeeper on the highroad. His face is surly-
looking and covered with blue veins, his eyes are little and his nose is
red. With his height and broad shoulders he has huge hands and feet; one
would think that a blow from his fist would knock the life out of
anyone, but his step is soft, and his walk is cautious and insinuating;
when he meets anyone in a narrow passage he is always the first to stop
and make way, and to say, not in a bass, as one would expect, but in a
high, soft tenor: "I beg your pardon!" He has a little swelling on his
neck which prevents him from wearing stiff starched collars, and so he
always goes about in soft linen or cotton shirts. Altogether he does not
dress like a doctor. He wears the same suit for ten years, and the new
clothes, which he usually buys at a Jewish shop, look as shabby and
crumpled on him as his old ones; he sees patients and dines and pays
visits all in the same coat; but this is not due to niggardliness, but
to complete carelessness about his appearance.
When Andrey Yefimitch came to the town to take up his duties the
"institution founded to the glory of God" was in a terrible condition.
One could hardly breathe for the stench in the wards, in the passages,
and in the courtyards of the hospital. The hospital servants, the
nurses, and their children slept in the wards together with the
patients. They complained that there was no living for beetles, bugs,
and mice. The surgical wards were never free from erysipelas. There were
only two scalpels and not one thermometer in the whole hospital;
potatoes were kept in the baths. The superintendent, the housekeeper,
and the medical assistant robbed the patients, and of the old doctor,
Andrey Yefimitch's predecessor, people declared that he secretly sold
the hospital alcohol, and that he kept a regular harem consisting of
nurses and female patients. These disorderly proceedings were perfectly
well known in the town, and were even exaggerated, but people took them
calmly; some justified them on the ground that there were only peasants
and working men in the hospital, who could not be dissatisfied, since
they were much worse off at home than in the hospital--they couldn't be
fed on woodcocks! Others said in excuse that the town alone, without
help from the Zemstvo, was not equal to maintaining a good hospital;
thank God for having one at all, even a poor one. And the newly formed
Zemstvo did not open infirmaries either in the town or the
neighbourhood, relying on the fact that the town already had its
hospital.
After looking over the hospital Andrey Yefimitch came to the conclusion
that it was an immoral institution and extremely prejudicial to the
health of the townspeople. In his opinion the most sensible thing that
could be done was to let out the patients and close the hospital. But he
reflected that his will alone was not enough to do this, and that it
would be useless; if physical and moral impurity were driven out of one
place, they would only move to another; one must wait for it to wither
away of itself. Besides, if people open a hospital and put up with
having it, it must be because they need it; superstition and all the
nastiness and abominations of daily life were necessary, since in
process of time they worked out to something sensible, just as manure
turns into black earth. There was nothing on earth so good that it had
not something nasty about its first origin.
When Andrey Yefimitch undertook his duties he was apparently not greatly
concerned about the irregularities at the hospital. He only asked the
attendants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and had two cupboards
of instruments put up; the superintendent, the housekeeper, the medical
assistant, and the erysipelas remained unchanged.
Andrey Yefimitch loved intelligence and honesty intensely, but he had no
strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and
honest life about him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to
forbid things, and to insist. It seemed as though he had taken a vow
never to raise his voice and never to make use of the imperative. It was
difficult for him to say "Fetch" or "Bring"; when he wanted his meals he
would cough hesitatingly and say to the cook, "How about tea?. . ." or
"How about dinner? . . ." To dismiss the superintendent or to tell him
to leave off stealing, or to abolish the unnecessary parasitic post
altogether, was absolutely beyond his powers. When Andrey Yefimitch was
deceived or flattered, or accounts he knew to be cooked were brought him
to sign, he would turn as red as a crab and feel guilty, but yet he
would sign the accounts. When the patients complained to him of being
hungry or of the roughness of the nurses, he would be confused and
mutter guiltily: "Very well, very well, I will go into it later . . . .
Most likely there is some misunderstanding. . ."