IX

On a spring evening towards the end of March, when there was no

snow left on the ground and the starlings were singing in the

hospital garden, the doctor went out to see his friend the postmaster

as far as the gate. At that very moment the Jew Moiseika, returning

with his booty, came into the yard. He had no cap on, and his bare

feet were thrust into goloshes; in his hand he had a little bag of

coppers.

"Give me a kopeck!" he said to the doctor, smiling, and shivering

with cold. Andrey Yefimitch, who could never refuse anyone anything,

gave him a ten-kopeck piece.

"How bad that is!" he thought, looking at the Jew's bare feet with

their thin red ankles. "Why, it's wet."

And stirred by a feeling akin both to pity and disgust, he went

into the lodge behind the Jew, looking now at his bald head, now

at his ankles. As the doctor went in, Nikita jumped up from his

heap of litter and stood at attention.

"Good-day, Nikita," Andrey Yefimitch said mildly. "That Jew should

be provided with boots or something, he will catch cold."

"Certainly, your honour. I'll inform the superintendent."

"Please do; ask him in my name. Tell him that I asked."

The door into the ward was open. Ivan Dmitritch, lying propped on

his elbow on the bed, listened in alarm to the unfamiliar voice,

and suddenly recognized the doctor. He trembled all over with anger,

jumped up, and with a red and wrathful face, with his eyes starting

out of his head, ran out into the middle of the road.

"The doctor has come!" he shouted, and broke into a laugh. "At last!

Gentlemen, I congratulate you. The doctor is honouring us with a

visit! Cursed reptile!" he shrieked, and stamped in a frenzy such

as had never been seen in the ward before. "Kill the reptile! No,

killing's too good. Drown him in the midden-pit!"

Andrey Yefimitch, hearing this, looked into the ward from the entry

and asked gently: "What for?"

"What for?" shouted Ivan Dmitritch, going up to him with a menacing

air and convulsively wrapping himself in his dressing-gown. "What

for? Thief!" he said with a look of repulsion, moving his lips as

though he would spit at him. "Quack! hangman!"

"Calm yourself," said Andrey Yefimitch, smiling guiltily. "I assure

you I have never stolen anything; and as to the rest, most likely

you greatly exaggerate. I see you are angry with me. Calm yourself,

I beg, if you can, and tell me coolly what are you angry for?"

"What are you keeping me here for?"

"Because you are ill."

"Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking

about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing

them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up

here like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant, the

superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably

inferior to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and

you not? Where's the logic of it?"

"Morality and logic don't come in, it all depends on chance. If

anyone is shut up he has to stay, and if anyone is not shut up he

can walk about, that's all. There is neither morality nor logic in

my being a doctor and your being a mental patient, there is nothing

but idle chance."

"That twaddle I don't understand. . ." Ivan Dmitritch brought out

in a hollow voice, and he sat down on his bed.

Moiseika, whom Nikita did not venture to search in the presence of

the doctor, laid out on his bed pieces of bread, bits of paper, and

little bones, and, still shivering with cold, began rapidly in a

singsong voice saying something in Yiddish. He most likely imagined

that he had opened a shop.

"Let me out," said Ivan Dmitritch, and his voice quivered.

"I cannot."

"But why, why?"

"Because it is not in my power. Think, what use will it be to you

if I do let you out? Go. The townspeople or the police will detain

you or bring you back."

"Yes, yes, that's true," said Ivan Dmitritch, and he rubbed his

forehead. "It's awful! But what am I to do, what?"

Andrey Yefimitch liked Ivan Dmitritch's voice and his intelligent

young face with its grimaces. He longed to be kind to the young man

and soothe him; he sat down on the bed beside him, thought, and

said:

"You ask me what to do. The very best thing in your position would

be to run away. But, unhappily, that is useless. You would be taken

up. When society protects itself from the criminal, mentally deranged,

or otherwise inconvenient people, it is invincible. There is only

one thing left for you: to resign yourself to the thought that your

presence here is inevitable."

"It is no use to anyone."

"So long as prisons and madhouses exist someone must be shut up in

them. If not you, I. If not I, some third person. Wait till in the

distant future prisons and madhouses no longer exist, and there

will be neither bars on the windows nor hospital gowns. Of course,

that time will come sooner or later."

Ivan Dmitritch smiled ironically.

"You are jesting," he said, screwing up his eyes. "Such gentlemen

as you and your assistant Nikita have nothing to do with the future,

but you may be sure, sir, better days will come! I may express

myself cheaply, you may laugh, but the dawn of a new life is at

hand; truth and justice will triumph, and--our turn will come! I

shall not live to see it, I shall perish, but some people's

great-grandsons will see it. I greet them with all my heart and

rejoice, rejoice with them! Onward! God be your help, friends!"

With shining eyes Ivan Dmitritch got up, and stretching his hands

towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice:

"From behind these bars I bless you! Hurrah for truth and justice!

I rejoice!"

"I see no particular reason to rejoice," said Andrey Yefimitch, who

thought Ivan Dmitritch's movement theatrical, though he was delighted

by it. "Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you

have just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things,

you know, will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the

same. People will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do

now. However magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet

in the end be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole."

"And immortality?"

"Oh, come, now!"

"You don't believe in it, but I do. Somebody in Dostoevsky or

Voltaire said that if there had not been a God men would have

invented him. And I firmly believe that if there is no immortality

the great intellect of man will sooner or later invent it."

"Well said," observed Andrey Yefimitch, smiling with pleasure; its

a good thing you have faith. With such a belief one may live happily

even shut up within walls. You have studied somewhere, I presume?"

"Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies."

"You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man. In any surroundings you

can find tranquillity in yourself. Free and deep thinking which

strives for the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for

the foolish bustle of the world--those are two blessings beyond

any that man has ever known. And you can possess them even though

you lived behind threefold bars. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he

was happier than all the kings of the earth."

"Your Diogenes was a blockhead," said Ivan Dmitritch morosely. "Why

do you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of

life?" he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up. "I love

life; I love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a

continual agonizing terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed

by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad. I want

dreadfully to live, dreadfully!"

He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his

voice:

"When I dream I am haunted by phantoms. People come to me, I hear

voices and music, and I fancy I am walking through woods or by the

seashore, and I long so passionately for movement, for interests

. . . . Come, tell me, what news is there?" asked Ivan Dmitritch;

"what's happening?"

"Do you wish to know about the town or in general?"

"Well, tell me first about the town, and then in general."

"Well, in the town it is appallingly dull. . . . There's no one to

say a word to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. A young

doctor called Hobotov has come here recently."

"He had come in my time. Well, he is a low cad, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is a man of no culture. It's strange, you know. . . .

Judging by every sign, there is no intellectual stagnation in our

capital cities; there is a movement--so there must be real people

there too; but for some reason they always send us such men as I

would rather not see. It's an unlucky town!"

"Yes, it is an unlucky town," sighed Ivan Dmitritch, and he laughed.

"And how are things in general? What are they writing in the papers

and reviews?"

It was by now dark in the ward. The doctor got up, and, standing,

began to describe what was being written abroad and in Russia, and

the tendency of thought that could be noticed now. Ivan Dmitritch

listened attentively and put questions, but suddenly, as though

recalling something terrible, clutched at his head and lay down on

the bed with his back to the doctor.

"What's the matter?" asked Andrey Yefimitch.

"You will not hear another word from me," said Ivan Dmitritch rudely.

"Leave me alone."

"Why so?"

"I tell you, leave me alone. Why the devil do you persist?"

Andrey Yefimitch shrugged his shoulders, heaved a sigh, and went

out. As he crossed the entry he said: "You might clear up here,

Nikita . . . there's an awfully stuffy smell."

"Certainly, your honour."

"What an agreeable young man!" thought Andrey Yefimitch, going back

to his flat. "In all the years I have been living here I do believe

he is the first I have met with whom one can talk. He is capable

of reasoning and is interested in just the right things."

While he was reading, and afterwards, while he was going to bed,

he kept thinking about Ivan Dmitritch, and when he woke next morning

he remembered that he had the day before made the acquaintance of

an intelligent and interesting man, and determined to visit him

again as soon as possible.

X

Ivan Dmitritch was lying in the same position as on the previous

day, with his head clutched in both hands and his legs drawn up.

His face was not visible.

"Good-day, my friend," said Andrey Yefimitch. "You are not asleep,

are you?"

"In the first place, I am not your friend," Ivan Dmitritch articulated

into the pillow; "and in the second, your efforts are useless; you

will not get one word out of me."

"Strange," muttered Andrey Yefimitch in confusion. "Yesterday we

talked peacefully, but suddenly for some reason you took offence

and broke off all at once. . . . Probably I expressed myself

awkwardly, or perhaps gave utterance to some idea which did not fit

in with your convictions. . . ."

"Yes, a likely idea!" said Ivan Dmitritch, sitting up and looking

at the doctor with irony and uneasiness. His eyes were red. "You

can go and spy and probe somewhere else, it's no use your doing it

here. I knew yesterday what you had come for."

"A strange fancy," laughed the doctor. "So you suppose me to be a

spy?"

"Yes, I do. . . . A spy or a doctor who has been charged to test

me--it's all the same ----"

"Oh excuse me, what a queer fellow you are really!"

The doctor sat down on the stool near the bed and shook his head

reproachfully.

"But let us suppose you are right," he said, "let us suppose that

I am treacherously trying to trap you into saying something so as

to betray you to the police. You would be arrested and then tried.

But would you be any worse off being tried and in prison than you

are here? If you are banished to a settlement, or even sent to penal

servitude, would it be worse than being shut up in this ward? I

imagine it would be no worse. . . . What, then, are you afraid of?"

These words evidently had an effect on Ivan Dmitritch. He sat down

quietly.

It was between four and five in the afternoon--the time when

Andrey Yefimitch usually walked up and down his rooms, and Daryushka

asked whether it was not time for his beer. It was a still, bright

day.

"I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you

see," said the doctor. "It is quite spring."

"What month is it? March?" asked Ivan Dmitritch.

"Yes, the end of March."

"Is it very muddy?"

"No, not very. There are already paths in the garden."

"It would be nice now to drive in an open carriage somewhere into

the country," said Ivan Dmitritch, rubbing his red eyes as though

he were just awake, "then to come home to a warm, snug study, and

. . . and to have a decent doctor to cure one's headache. . . .

It's so long since I have lived like a human being. It's disgusting

here! Insufferably disgusting!"

After his excitement of the previous day he was exhausted and

listless, and spoke unwillingly. His fingers twitched, and from his

face it could be seen that he had a splitting headache.

"There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this

ward," said Andrey Yefimitch. "A man's peace and contentment do not

lie outside a man, but in himself."

"What do you mean?"

"The ordinary man looks for good and evil in external

things--that is, in carriages, in studies--but a thinking man looks for

it in himself."

"You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's

warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is

not suited to the climate. With whom was it I was talking of Diogenes?

Was it with you?"

"Yes, with me yesterday."

"Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it's hot there

without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But

bring him to Russia to live: he'd be begging to be let indoors in

May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold."

"No. One can be insensible to cold as to every other pain. Marcus

Aurelius says: 'A pain is a vivid idea of pain; make an effort of

will to change that idea, dismiss it, cease to complain, and the

pain will disappear.' That is true. The wise man, or simply the

reflecting, thoughtful man, is distinguished precisely by his

contempt for suffering; he is always contented and surprised at

nothing."

"Then I am an idiot, since I suffer and am discontented and surprised

at the baseness of mankind."

"You are wrong in that; if you will reflect more on the subject you

will understand how insignificant is all that external world that

agitates us. One must strive for the comprehension of life, and in

that is true happiness."

"Comprehension . . ." repeated Ivan Dmitritch frowning. "External,

internal. . . . Excuse me, but I don't understand it. I only know,"

he said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor--"I only

know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed!

If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus.

And I do! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness

with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just

what is called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it

is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it

is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. How

is it you don't know that? A doctor, and not know such trifles! To

despise suffering, to be always contented, and to be surprised at

nothing, one must reach this condition"--and Ivan Dmitritch pointed

to the peasant who was a mass of fat--"or to harden oneself by

suffering to such a point that one loses all sensibility to

it--that is, in other words, to cease to live. You must excuse me, I

am not a sage or a philosopher," Ivan Dmitritch continued with

irritation, "and I don't understand anything about it. I am not

capable of reasoning."

"On the contrary, your reasoning is excellent."

"The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were remarkable people, but

their doctrine crystallized two thousand years ago and has not

advanced, and will not advance, an inch forward, since it is not

practical or living. It had a success only with the minority which

spends its life in savouring all sorts of theories and ruminating

over them; the majority did not understand it. A doctrine which

advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and

a contempt for suffering and death, is quite unintelligible to the

vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth

or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to it

despising life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up

of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, and a Hamlet-like dread

of death. The whole of life lies in these sensations; one may be

oppressed by it, one may hate it, but one cannot despise it. Yes,

so, I repeat, the doctrine of the Stoics can never have a future;

from the beginning of time up to to-day you see continually increasing

the struggle, the sensibility to pain, the capacity of responding

to stimulus."

Ivan Dmitritch suddenly lost the thread of his thoughts, stopped,

and rubbed his forehead with vexation.

"I meant to say something important, but I have lost it," he said.

"What was I saying? Oh, yes! This is what I mean: one of the Stoics

sold himself into slavery to redeem his neighbour, so, you see,

even a Stoic did react to stimulus, since, for such a generous act

as the destruction of oneself for the sake of one's neighbour, he

must have had a soul capable of pity and indignation. Here in prison

I have forgotten everything I have learned, or else I could have

recalled something else. Take Christ, for instance: Christ responded

to reality by weeping, smiling, being sorrowful and moved to wrath,

even overcome by misery. He did not go to meet His sufferings with

a smile, He did not despise death, but prayed in the Garden of

Gethsemane that this cup might pass Him by."

Ivan Dmitritch laughed and sat down.

"Granted that a man's peace and contentment lie not outside but in

himself," he said, "granted that one must despise suffering and not

be surprised at anything, yet on what ground do you preach the

theory? Are you a sage? A philosopher?"

"No, I am not a philosopher, but everyone ought to preach it because

it is reasonable."

"No, I want to know how it is that you consider yourself competent

to judge of 'comprehension,' contempt for suffering, and so on.

Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me

to ask you, were you ever thrashed in your childhood?"

"No, my parents had an aversion for corporal punishment."

"My father used to flog me cruelly; my father was a harsh, sickly

Government clerk with a long nose and a yellow neck. But let us

talk of you. No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one

has scared you nor beaten you; you are as strong as a bull. You

grew up under your father's wing and studied at his expense, and

then you dropped at once into a sinecure. For more than twenty years

you have lived rent free with heating, lighting, and service all

provided, and had the right to work how you pleased and as much as

you pleased, even to do nothing. You were naturally a flabby, lazy

man, and so you have tried to arrange your life so that nothing

should disturb you or make you move. You have handed over your work

to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace

and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with

all sorts of lofty nonsense, and" (Ivan Dmitritch looked at the

doctor's red nose) "with boozing; in fact, you have seen nothing

of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only theoretically

acquainted with reality; you despise suffering and are surprised

at nothing for a very simple reason: vanity of vanities, the external

and the internal, contempt for life, for suffering and for death,

comprehension, true happiness--that's the philosophy that suits

the Russian sluggard best. You see a peasant beating his wife, for

instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner

or later, anyway; and, besides, he who beats injures by his blows,

not the person he is beating, but himself. To get drunk is stupid

and unseemly, but if you drink you die, and if you don't drink you

die. A peasant woman comes with toothache . . . well, what of it?

Pain is the idea of pain, and besides 'there is no living in this

world without illness; we shall all die, and so, go away, woman,

don't hinder me from thinking and drinking vodka.' A young man asks

advice, what he is to do, how he is to live; anyone else would think

before answering, but you have got the answer ready: strive for

'comprehension' or for true happiness. And what is that fantastic

'true happiness'? There's no answer, of course. We are kept here

behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very good

and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this

ward and a warm, snug study. A convenient philosophy. You can do

nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise

. . . . No, sir, it is not philosophy, it's not thinking, it's not

breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction.

Yes," cried Ivan Dmitritch, getting angry again, "you despise

suffering, but I'll be bound if you pinch your finger in the door

you will howl at the top of your voice."

"And perhaps I shouldn't howl," said Andrey Yefimitch, with a gentle

smile.

"Oh, I dare say! Well, if you had a stroke of paralysis, or supposing

some fool or bully took advantage of his position and rank to insult

you in public, and if you knew he could do it with impunity, then

you would understand what it means to put people off with comprehension

and true happiness."

"That's original," said Andrey Yefimitch, laughing with pleasure

and rubbing his hands. "I am agreeably struck by your inclination

for drawing generalizations, and the sketch of my character you

have just drawn is simply brilliant. I must confess that talking

to you gives me great pleasure. Well, I've listened to you, and now

you must graciously listen to me."