After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at the
table and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening, and
afterwards of the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it
seemed as though time were standing still and brooding with the
doctor over the book, and as though there were nothing in existence
but the books and the lamp with the green shade. The doctor's coarse
peasant-like face was gradually lighted up by a smile of delight
and enthusiasm over the progress of the human intellect. Oh, why
is not man immortal? he thought. What is the good of the brain
centres and convolutions, what is the good of sight, speech,
self-consciousness, genius, if it is all destined to depart into
the soil, and in the end to grow cold together with the earth's
crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the earth round
the sun with no meaning and no object? To do that there was no need
at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out of
non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into
clay. The transmutation of substances! But what cowardice to comfort
oneself with that cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious
processes that take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity
of man, since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will,
while in those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the
coward who has more fear of death than dignity can comfort himself
with the fact that his body will in time live again in the grass,
in the stones, in the toad. To find one's immortality in the
transmutation of substances is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant
future for the case after a precious violin has been broken and
become useless.
When the clock struck, Andrey Yefimitch would sink back into his
chair and close his eyes to think a little. And under the influence
of the fine ideas of which he had been reading he would, unawares,
recall his past and his present. The past was hateful--better not
to think of it. And it was the same in the present as in the past.
He knew that at the very time when his thoughts were floating
together with the cooling earth round the sun, in the main building
beside his abode people were suffering in sickness and physical
impurity: someone perhaps could not sleep and was making war upon
the insects, someone was being infected by erysipelas, or moaning
over too tight a bandage; perhaps the patients were playing cards
with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the yearly return,
twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole hospital rested
as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth, scandals, gossip,
on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral institution
extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He knew that
Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of Ward
No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day begging alms.
On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken
place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was
studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon
be overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics; but now when
he was reading at night the science of medicine touched him and
excited his wonder, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected brilliance,
what a revolution! Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were
performed such as the great Pirogov had considered impossible even
_in spe_. Ordinary Zemstvo doctors were venturing to perform the
resection of the kneecap; of abdominal operations only one per cent.
was fatal; while stone was considered such a trifle that they did
not even write about it. A radical cure for syphilis had been
discovered. And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries
of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene based on statistics, and the work
of Zemstvo doctors!
Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods
of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison
with what had been in the past. They no longer poured cold water
on the heads of lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they
treated them with humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers,
got up balls and entertainments for them. Andrey Yefimitch knew
that with modern tastes and views such an abomination as Ward No.
6 was possible only a hundred and fifty miles from a railway in a
little town where the mayor and all the town council were half-illiterate
tradesmen who looked upon the doctor as an oracle who must be
believed without any criticism even if he had poured molten lead
into their mouths; in any other place the public and the newspapers
would long ago have torn this little Bastille to pieces.
"But, after all, what of it?" Andrey Yefimitch would ask himself,
opening his eyes. "There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch,
there is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit;
ill-health and mortality are still the same. They get up balls and
entertainments for the mad, but still they don't let them go free;
so it's all nonsense and vanity, and there is no difference in
reality between the best Vienna clinic and my hospital." But
depression and a feeling akin to envy prevented him from feeling
indifferent; it must have been owing to exhaustion. His heavy head
sank on to the book, he put his hands under his face to make it
softer, and thought: "I serve in a pernicious institution and receive
a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am not honest, but then,
I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an inevitable social evil:
all local officials are pernicious and receive their salary for
doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am
to blame, but the times.... If I had been born two hundred years
later I should have been different. . ."
When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his
bedroom; he was not sleepy.