“How sweetly and tranquilly he sleeps! When one gazes on this pale,
tired face, on this childishly innocent smile, and listens to this
regular breathing, one might think that it is not a magistrate who is
lying here, but the personification of a quiet conscience! One might
think that Count Karnéev had not yet arrived, that there had been
neither drunkenness nor gipsies, nor rows on the lake. . . . Get up,
you pernicious man! You are unworthy of enjoying such a blessing as
peaceful sleep! Arise!”
I opened my eyes and stretched myself voluptuously. . . . A broad
sunbeam, in which countless white dust atoms were agitated and chased
each other, streamed from the window on to my bed, causing the sunray
itself to appear as if tinged with some dull whiteness. . . . The ray
disappeared and reappeared before my eyes, as Pavel Ivanovich
Voznesensky, our charming district doctor, who was walking about my
bedroom, came into or went out of the stream of light. In the long,
unbuttoned frock-coat that flapped around him, as if hanging on a
clothes rack, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his
unusually long trousers, the doctor went from corner to corner of my
room, from chair to chair, from portrait to portrait, screwing up his
short-sighted eyes as he examined whatever came in his way. In
accordance with his habit of sticking his nose and letting his eyes
peer into everything, he either stooped down or stretched out, peeped
into the washstand, into the folds of the closed blinds, into the
chinks of the door, into the lamp . . . he seemed to be looking for
something or wishing to assure himself that everything was in
order. . . . When he looked attentively through his spectacles into a
chink, or at a spot on the wallpaper, he frowned, assumed an anxious
expression, and smelt it with his long nose. . . . All this he did
quite mechanically, involuntarily, and from habit; but at the same
time, as his eyes passed rapidly from one object to another, he had
the appearance of a connoisseur making an evaluation.
“Get up, don't you hear!” he called to me in his melodious tenor
voice, as he looked into the soap-dish and removed a hair from the
soap with his nail.
“Ah, ah, ah! How do you do, Mr. Screw!” I yawned, when I saw him
bending over the washstand. “What an age we haven't met!”
The whole district knew the doctor by the name of “Screw” from the
habit he had of constantly screwing up his eyes. I, too, called him by
that nickname. Seeing that I was awake, Voznesensky came and sat down
on a corner of my bed and at once took up a box of matches and lifted
it close to his screwed-up eyes.
“Only lazy people and those with clear consciences sleep in that way,”
he said, “and as you are neither the one nor the other, it would be
more seemly for you, my friend, to get up somewhat earlier. . . .”
“What o'clock is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
“The devil take you, Screwy! Nobody asked you to wake me so early. Do
you know, I only got to sleep at past five to-day, and if not for you
I would have slept on till evening.”
“Indeed!” I heard Polycarp's bass voice say in the next room. “He
hasn't slept long enough yet! It's the second day he's sleeping, and
it's still too little for him! Do you know what day it is?” Polycarp
asked, coming into the bedroom and looking at me in the way clever
people look at fools.
“Wednesday,” I said.
“Of course, certainly! It's been specially arranged for you that the
week shall have two Wednesdays. . . .”
“To-day's Thursday!” the doctor said. “So, my good fellow, you've been
pleased to sleep through the whole of Wednesday. Fine! Very fine!
Allow me to ask you how much you drank?”
“For twice twenty-four hours I had not slept, and I drank . . . I
don't know how much I drank.”
Having sent Polycarp away, I began to dress and describe to the doctor
what I had lately experienced of “Nights of madness, nights of
gladness” which are so delightful and sentimental in the songs and so
unsightly in reality. In my description I tried not to go beyond the
bounds of “light genre,” to keep to facts and not to deviate into
moralizing, although all this was contrary to the nature of a man who
entertained a passion for inferences and results. . . . I spoke with
an air as if I was speaking about trifles that did not trouble me in
the slightest degree. In order to spare the chaste ears of Pavel
Ivanovich, and knowing his dislike of the Count, I suppressed much,
touched lightly on a great deal but nevertheless, despite the
playfulness of my tone and the style of caricature I gave to my
narrative during the whole course of it, the doctor looked into my
face seriously, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders
impatiently from time to time. He never once smiled. It was evident
that my “light genre” produced on him far from a light effect.
“Why don't you laugh, Screwy?” I asked when I had finished my
description.
“If it had not been you who had told me all this, and if there had not
been a certain circumstance, I would not have believed a word of it.
It's all too abnormal, my friend!”
“Of what circumstance are you speaking?”
“Last evening the muzhik whom you had belaboured in such an indelicate
way with an oar, came to me . . . Ivan Osipov. . . .”
“Ivan Osipov? . . .” I shrugged my shoulders. “It's the first time I
hear his name!”
“A tall, red-haired man . . . with a freckled face. . . . Try to
remember! You struck him on the head with an oar.”
“I can't remember anything! I don't know an Osipov. . . . I struck
nobody with an oar. . . . You've dreamed it all, uncle!”
“God grant that I dreamed it. . . . He came to me with a report from
the Karnéev district administration and asked me for a medical
certificate. . . . In the report it was stated that the wound was
given him by you, and he does not lie. . . . Can you remember now? The
wound he had received was above the forehead, just where the hair
begins. . . . You got to the bone, my dear sir!”
“I can't remember!” I murmured. . . . “Who is he? What's his
occupation?”
“He's an ordinary muzhik from the Karnéev village. He rowed the boat
when you were having your spree on the lake.”
“Hm! Perhaps! I can't remember. . . . I was probably drunk, and
somehow by chance. . . .”
“No, sir, not by chance. . . . He said you got angry with him about
something, you swore at him for a long time, and then getting furious
you rushed at him and struck him before witnesses. . . . Besides, you
shouted at him: ‘I'll kill you, you rascal!’”
I got very red, and began walking about from corner to corner of the
room.
“For the life of me, I can't remember!” I said, trying with all my
might to recall what had happened. “I can't remember! You say I ‘got
furious. . . .’ When drunk I become unpardonably nasty!”
“What can you want more!”
“The muzhik evidently wants to make a case of it, but that's not the
most important. . . . The most important is the fact itself, the
blows. . . . Is it possible that I'm capable of fighting? And why
should I strike a poor muzhik?”
“Yes, sir! Of course, I could not give him a certificate, but I told
him to apply to you. . . . You'll manage to arrange the matter with
him somehow. . . . The wound is a slight one, but considering the case
unofficially a wound in the head that goes as far as the skull is a
serious affair. . . . There are often cases when an apparently
trifling wound in the head which had been considered a slight one has
ended with mortification of the bone of the skull and consequently
with a journey _ad patres_.”
And, carried away by his subject, “Screw” rose from his seat and,
walking about the room along the walls and waving his hands, he began
to unload all his knowledge of surgical pathology for my
benefit. . . . Mortification of the bones of the skull, inflammation
of the brain, death, and other horrors poured from his lips with
endless explanations, macroscopic and microscopic processes, that
accompany this misty and, for me, quite uninteresting _terra
incognita_.
“Stop that effusion!” I cried, trying to stop his medical chatter.
“Can't you understand how tiresome all this stuff is?”
“No matter that it's tiresome. . . . Listen, and punish
yourself. . . . Perhaps another time you will be more careful. It may
teach you not to do such stupidities. If you don't arrange matters
with this scabby Osipov, it may cost you your position! The priest of
Themis to be tried for thrashing a man! . . . What a scandal!”
Pavel Ivanovich is the only man whose judgments I listen to with a
light heart, without frowning, whom I allow to gaze inquiringly into
my eyes and to thrust his investigating hand into the depths of my
soul. . . . We two are friends in the very best sense of the word; we
respect each other, although we have between us accounts of the most
unpleasant, the most delicate nature. . . . Like a black cat, a woman
had passed between us. This eternal _casus belli_ had been the cause
of reckonings between us, but did not make us quarrel, and we
continued to be at peace. “Screw” is a very nice fellow. I like his
simple and far from plastic face, with its large nose, screwed-up eyes
and thin, reddish beard. I like his tall, thin, narrow-shouldered
figure, on which his frock-coat and paletot hung as on a
clothes-horse.
His badly made trousers formed ugly creases at the knees, and his
boots were terribly trodden down at the heels; his white tie was
always in the wrong place. But do not think that he was
slovenly. . . . You had but to look once at his kind, concentrated
face to understand that he had no time to trouble about his own
appearance; besides, he did not know how to. . . . He was young,
honest, not vain, and loved his medicine, and he was always moving
about—this in itself is sufficient to explain to his advantage all the
defects of his inelegant toilet. He, like an artist, did not know the
value of money, and imperturbably sacrificed his own comfort and the
blessings of life to one of his passions, and thus he gave the
impression of being a man without means, who could scarcely make both
ends meet. . . . He neither smoked nor drank, he spent no money on
women, but nevertheless the two thousand roubles he earned by his
appointment at the hospital and by private practice passed through his
hands as quickly as my money does when I am out on the spree. Two
passions drained him: the passion of lending money, and the passion of
ordering things he saw advertised in the newspapers. . . . He lent
money to whoever asked for it, without any demur not uttering a single
word about when it was to be returned. It was not possible either by
hook or by crook to eradicate in him his heedless trust in people's
conscientiousness, and this confidence was even more apparent in his
constantly ordering things that were lauded in newspaper
advertisements. . . . He wrote for everything, the necessary and the
unnecessary. He wrote for books, telescopes, humorous magazines,
dinner services “composed of 100 articles,” chronometers. . . . And it
was not surprising that the patients who came to Pavel Ivanovich
mistook his room for an arsenal or for a museum. He had always been
cheated, but his trust was as strong and unshakable as ever. He was a
capital fellow, and we shall meet him more than once on the pages of
this novel.
“Good gracious! What a time I have been sitting here!” he exclaimed
suddenly, looking at the cheap watch with one lid he had ordered from
Moscow, and which was “guaranteed for five years,” but had already
been repaired twice. “I must be off, friend! Good-bye! And mark my
words, these sprees of the Count's will lead to no good! To say
nothing about your health. . . . Oh, by-the-by! Shall you go to Tenevo
to-morrow?”
“What's up there to-morrow?”
“The fête of the Church! Everybody will be there, so come too! You
must positively come! I have promised that you will come. Don't make
me a liar!”
It was not necessary to ask to whom he had given his word. We
understood each other. The doctor then took leave, put on his
well-worn overcoat, and went away.
I remained alone. . . . In order to drown the unpleasant thoughts that
began to swarm in my head, I went to my writing-table and trying not
to think nor to call myself to account, I began to open my post. The
first envelope that caught my eye contained the following letter:
“My Darling Serezha,
“Forgive me for troubling you, but I am so surprised that I don't
know to whom to apply. . . . It is shameful! Of course, now it will
be impossible to get it back, and I'm not sorry, but judge for
yourself: if thieves are to enjoy indulgence, a respectable woman
cannot feel safe anywhere. After you left I awoke on the divan and
found many of my things were missing. Somebody had stolen my
bracelet, my gold studs, ten pearls out of my necklace, and had
taken about a hundred roubles out of my purse. I wanted to complain
to the Count, but he was asleep, so I went away without doing so.
This is very wrong! The Count's house—and they steal as in a tavern!
Tell the Count. I send you much love and kisses.
“Your loving,
“Tina.”
That his Excellency's house was swarming with thieves was nothing new
to me; and I added Tina's letter to the information I had already in
my memory on this count. Sooner or later I would be obliged to use
this intelligence in a case. . . . I knew who the thieves were.