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.