Ward Number Six and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov Ward Number Six

and Other Stories

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

WARD NUMBER SIX

AND OTHER STORIES

Anton Chekhov was born in i860 in south Russia, the son of a poor grocer. At the age of 19 he followed his family to Moscow, where he studied medicine and helped to support the household by writing comic sketches for popular magazines. By 1888 he was publishing in the prestigious literary monthlies of Moscow and St Petersburg: a sign that he had already attained maturity as a writer of serious fiction. During the next 1 5 years he wrote the short stories—so or more of them—which form his chief claim to world pre-eminence in the genre and are his main achievement as a writer. His plays are almost equally important, especially during his last years. He was closely associated with the Moscow Art Theatre and married its leading lady, Olga Knipper. In 1898 he was forced to move to Yalta, where he wrote his two greatest plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The premiиre of the latter took place on his forty-fourth birthday. Chekhov died six months later, on 2 July 1904.

Ronald Hingley, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, edited and translated The Oxford Chekhov (9 volumes), and is the author of A Life of Anton Chekhov (also published by Oxford University Press). He is the translator of four other volumes of Chekhov stories in the Oxford World's Classics: The Russian Master and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories, A Woman's Kingdom and Other Stories, and The Princess and Other Stories. His translations of all Chekhov's drama will be found in two Oxford World's Classics volumes, Five Plays and Twelve Plays.

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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

ANTON CHEKHOV

Ward Number Six

and Other Stories

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by RONALD HINGLEY

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

Introduction vii

Select Bibliography xviii

A Chronology ofAnton Chekhov xix

THE BUTTERFLY i

(Попрыгунья ; 1892)

WARD NUMBER SIX 23

(Палата No.6; 1892)

ARIADNE 70

(Apuadna; 1895)

A DREARY STORY 92

(Скучиоя история;i 889)

NEIGHBOURS 143

(Cocedu; 1892)

AN ANONYMOUS STORY i60

(Рассказ неизвестного человека; 1893)

DOCTOR STARTSEV 227

(Ионыч; 1898) Explanatory Notes 243

INTRODUCTION

Chekhov and the Short Story

Chekhov carne of humbler social origins than the leading Russian fiction-writers of earlier generations: he was the third son, born in i86o, of a struggling grocer in the southern Russian port ofTaganrog.

He was a lively boy: a gifted mimic, a keen attender of the gallery at his home-town theatre, a great practical joker. He read widely, and was fortunate in attending the local grammar school, where the study of Latin and Greek loomed large in the curriculum. Though these studies bored the boy—whose school marks tended to be average— his school provided him with a stimulating social framework within which to develop. It also helped to qualify him for entering Moscow University.

In I 879 the nineteen-year-old Chekhov moved more than six hundred miles north from Taganrog to settle in Moscow, after which that city and its environs remained his base for two decades. He qualified as a doctor in 1884, but was to practise only sporadically, having already become an established writer of short humorous sketches and tales. From the proceeds of these the undergraduate Chekhov had already been helping to support his family—including his once strict father (now often unemployed) and mother as well as a sister and two younger brothers.

Chekhov's first writings were published under a variety of comic pseudonyms in a variety of scurrilous comic magazines, and seem to have little in common with his mature work. Though he turned them out by the hundred, he had all along been unobtrusively experimenting with a more serious—at times tragic—approach. Meanwhile he was being awarded a sequence of literary promotions as his work found its way into increasingly respectable periodicals or newspapers published in the capital city, St. Petersburg: Fragments (1882), The St. Petersburg Gazette (1885), New Time (1886). Finally, in 1888, Chekhov breaks into one of the 'fat journals': literary monthlies in which nearly all the major works of Russian literature have first appeared in print.

With this event—the publication of the story Steppe in the Northern Herald in 1888—Chekhov has been accepted, in effect, as an author who might hope to claim a permanent place in Russian literature.

Henceforward most of his longer stories' are first issued in one or other of the 'fat journals' as a prelude to publication in book form. He is now concentrating on quality rather than quantity. He has also transformed his humorous approach, for though humour always remains a basic ingredient in his technique it is no longer cultivated for its own sake.

In 1890 Chekhov suddenly astounds his friends by undertaking a one-man expedition across Siberia to the convict settlement on the island of Sakhalin. He conducts a painstaking sociological survey and publishes the results in Sakhalin Island: a treatise as well as a travelogue, and a landmark in Russian penological literature.

In 1892 Chekhov buys a country estate at Melikhovo, about fifty miles south of Moscow, and embarks on the most fruitful period of his work as a short-story ^^rer—all but two of the items in this volume belong to his Melikhovo period. But he is increasingly incapacitated by tuberculosis. Compelled to winter in the south on doctors' orders, he builds a villa near the Crimean resort of Yalta in 1899 and abandons Melikhovo while continuing to return to Moscow as his health permits. His output of short stories declines, but he is now first making his mark as a dramatist with the successful production of his four-act plays The Seagull and Uncle Vanya by the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre. In 1901 Chekhov marries the actress Olga Knipper, a member of the Art Theatre Company. Between his marriage and his death in 1904 he writes two plays specially for the Art Theatre: Three Sisters and—his last work— The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov did not belong to the heroic epoch of Russian fiction: that of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. With the grand age of the Russian novel—the reign of the Emperor Alexander II (1855-81)—he was involved only in the sense of witnessing it from afar as a provincial schoolboy.

Alexander Il's reign had begun with general optimism and sweeping social reforms sponsored by the Emperor himself, among which the Emancipation of the Serfs had been the most important—it was enacted in 1861, when Chekhov (whose paternal grandfather had actually been a serf) was a mere babe in arms. As a schoolboy Chekhov was made aware, without becoming keenly interested, of political opposition to the Russian autocracy such as was now first finding serious organized expression. It was now that oppositionists of a more modern type than had hitherto surfaced in Russia—whether termed liberals, radicals or revolutionaries—first made themselves felt as a collective force, albeit on a small scale. Resistance to the Reforming Tsar (and for not reforming fast enough) culminated in his assassination on I March 1881 by a group of extremists. This momentous event coincided fairly closely with the deaths ofDostoyevsky and Turgenev, as also with the end of Tolstoy's major period as a novelist. The assassination was, accordingly, a literary as well as a political landmark, simultaneously signalling the end of the old heroic era and the begin­ning of a new and less flamboyant period.

Chekhov's dйbut as a writer came at just this time: it was in the Reforming Tsar's last year of life, to be precise, that he first began to publish his work.

With Alexander II's sudden death the age of reform and generous hopes—already in sad decline—seemed to have ended for the foreseeable future, and the political police moved in to crush the small but virulent revolutionary movement. Meanwhile the assassinated Emperor's successor, Alexander III, was embarking on 'counter-reforms' designed to put the clock back and protect the autocracy against the activities of political terrorists such as those who had blownwn his father to pieces. Despite all curbs on political and social reform, however, Russia under the new Tsar never developed into the police state which the world still seems to insist on conceiving it. Admittedly the peasants' condition remained unenviable, and they were exposed to terrible famines and epidemics. Equally unenviable was the plight of the urban proletariat, which still remained comparatively small in numbers. Ofsuch sufferings Chekhov's own works provide eloquent illustration. But, as they also show, at least the professional section of sociery, to which he himself belonged as a doctor and author, suffered from few indeed of the dis­advantages associated with a police state. Despite the existence of a literary censorship (a continual nuisance) and despite many another handicap, the Russian intellectual of the last two decades of the nine­teenth century enjoyed—provided always that he did not belong to the rump of active revolutionary conspirators insignificant until the mid-1 89os—a degree of real freedom for which later generations and societies may well envy him.

Himself no admirer of the autocratic system and on occasion its outspoken critic, Chekhov was even less sympathetic to revolutionary conspiracy. Not that this issue loomed prominently in his consciousness. As is abundantly clear from his voluminous surviving letters (over four thousand), and also from the many memoirs of his contemporaries, the emphasis was on quite other matters. Here was a lively, vigorous society—not least in Moscow: Chekhov's spiritual home at times, and an exhilarating milieu in which to write, paint, carouse, make love, gossip and argue about the meaning of exhtence over a combination of oysters, champagne, sturgeon, vodka, beer or tea in one of the many traktiry (taverns) in which Muscovite intellectuals seemed to spend half their time. Nor did the continued espousal of reactionary policies by Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894, succeed in suppressing the general feeling of excite­ment.

In enjoying these amenities fairly extensively, until frustrated by ill health, Chekhov was a man of his age. Yet he was conscious all the time of those less fortunate than himself, and more effectively con­scious than many a contemporary who posed as champion of the poor and downtrodden. Eloquent in words—as witness those numerous artistic works in which he depicts the plight of the unprivileged— Chekhov was also a man of action, working as doctor, health officer, builder of schools, patron of libraries and so on.

Though chosen (as noted in the Preface) for their excellence as short stories, the items in the present selection well typify Chekhov and his period by covering a wide spread of contemporary Russian settings. The Russian countryside provides the background for Neighbours and Ariadne, while provincial towns—characteristically anonymous— supply the stage for Ward Number Six and Doctor Startsev. In A Dreary Story and The Butterfly Moscow (loved and hated by Chekhov) appears to be the scene, though unavowedly so, while the capital, St. Peters­burg, figures memorably as the setting of An Anonymous Story. Less typically, Chekhov permits himself an excursion outside Russian national territory in the last-named story, and also in Ariadne. In each case his description of foreign parts seems to accord with a formula evolved in another context: that 'abroad is a bloody place'. Such was, incidentally, Chekhov's o^n frequent but by no means invariable reaction to his travels outside the Russian Empire.

So much for the geographical background. As for the social setting, we have provided a less characteristic spread, since—as stated above— stories focused on the life of the peasants have been omitted, as have studies of merchants, the urban lower middle class and the industrial worker. The main emphasis in this volume is on the gentry and on the professional class which Chekhov himself entered as a young man by becoming a doctor and self-supporting writer. Within that category the range is fairly wide. In Ariadne and Neighbours the dramatis personae belong to the landownwning milieu, while high officialdom is unforget­tably described in An Anonymous Story. The academic world dominates A Dreary Story, as do artistic circles The Butterfly and—on a pathetic provincial level—Doctor Startsev.

As these stories richly illustrate, Chekhov particularly liked to draw his heroes from the profession of medicine in which he himself had qualified but which he practised only occasionally (very rarely, inci­dentally, does he make a writer his hero). How little the mature Chekhov dealt in stereotypes, how rarely—if ever—he essentially repeated himself when creating new characters, the various doctors in the present volume richly illustrate. The saintly Dr. Dymov of The Butterfly becomes a victim of his own inability to assert himself and of his devotion to his profession. By contrast, Dr. Ragin of Ward Number Six is—ideologically speaking—a villain, or at least a non-approved figure. He is shown unavowedly espousing Tolstoy's doctrine of non-resis­tance to evil—a doctrine which Chekhov had briefly shared before rejecting it and embodying his changed attitude in this and other stories as well as in his correspondence. Between these two types falls Doctor Startsev, hero of the story of the same name, for he changes from hero to villain in the course of the narrative. But the fullest portrait of all—and the most remarkable of all Chekhov's innumerable fictional doctors—is the professor-hero whose litany of uninterrupted laments constitutes A Dreary Story. This is one of the most astonishing works ever penned by a Russian writer: on one level a hymn to the futility of existence, and yet a work which produces anything but the 'dreary' effect advertised in its title.

How, we may now ask, does Chekhov fit into the general pattern of nineteenth-century Russian literature? His is the last big name among the great Russian masters. He was the last gteat representative of the 'realist' school which has origins in the work of Pushkin and Lermon- tov, but which really began—according to a commonly accepted view—with Gogol, continuing with Turgcncv, Goncharov, Dostoyev- sky, Tolstoy and others.

Realist authors were concerned—some more, some less—to describe Russia contemporary to themselves, evoking a feeling of authenticity by a plain, factual, functional descriptive technique, emphasizing character rather than plot' and showing sympathy with all manner of men: even with such unfashionable targets for compassion as the rich and virtuous as well as with those more conventionally patronized: the poor, the downtrodden and the criminal. Determined to be more than mere story-tellers, all cultivating in some degree the role of prophets, teachers or guides, they surveyed the Russian and general human condition with high seriousness and deep concern. Some of them (notably Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Saltykov-Shchedrin) were at times actively engaged in propagating specific philosophical, social, political or religious doctrines. Others—such as' Turgenev, Leskov and Goncharov—considered the doctrines and social problems of their time from a less committed angle, yet often seemed to feel bound by an obligation at least to include these weighty issues in their thematic material.

Chekhov shared with these formidable predecessors a preference for subject-matter taken from contemporary Russian life experienced at first hand. He too tended to emphasize character rather than plot. He showed comparably wide human sympathies, he was similarly concerned with the Russian and general human predicament. He was, however, far less committed than his great predecessors to the propa­gation, illustration or exposition of specific social, political, philosophi­cal and religious panaceas. He differed from them also in adopting a less heavy and detailed descriptive technique. Hardly, indeed, did he need such a technique since he possessed an uncanny flair for conjuring up a human personality, a social setting or an entire complex situation with one or two deft strokes—as when (in Ariadne) he sums up the boredom of jaded tourists with the magnificent phrase 'like gorged boa-constrictors, we only noticed things that glittered'.

Adept at knowing what to leave unsaid, Chekhov is laconic, terse, pointed. He proceeds by hints, suggestions and telling silences. Where his great predecessors had orchestrated major climaxes in multi-decker novels, Chekhov did not even find it necessary to write novels at all, for he could say more in twenty pages than many another could convey in eight hundred. Where they dealt in climaxes, he cultivated anti­climaxes. He was above all the master of the miscued effect, the mis­directed pistol shot, the bungled seduction, the whimper which replaces the expected bang. Murder, lunacy, prostitution, felony .. . Chekhov by no means avoided such themes, as he himself liked to claim. On the contrary, he handled them expertly, with a deadly touch, while yet preserving his usual economy of means. His rare scenes of violence— such as Dr. Ragin's death in Ward Number Six and the slaughter of a religious maniac in Murder—are depicted with a lightness of touch spectacularly un-Tolstoyan, un-Dostoyevskian and un-Gogolesque; but are no less horrific for that.

Himself well aware of the gulf separating him from the literary dinosaurs of Russia's past, Chekhov takes issue with them in occasional ironical passages of fiction, as is well illustrated by his story The Duel. From Pushkin's and Lermontov's time onwards almost all major Russian writers had gone out of their way to portray splendid duelling scenes, these armed clashes between individuals being superbly qualified to provide fictional conflicts of the most dramatic kind. How differently though, does the anti-dramatic Chekhov handle this same bloody theme! When, at the climax of his narrative, pistols have been duly produced at dawn, it turns out that neither the contestants nor their seconds have the faintest idea what to do next.

A hitch occurred . ... It transpired that none of those present had ever attended a duel in his life, and no one knew exactly how they should stand, or what the seconds should say and do. . . . 'Any of you remember Lermontov's description?' Von Koren asked with a laugh. 'Turgenev's Bazarov also exchanged shots with someone or other '

That Chekhov's duel ends in fiasco—with one contestant firing into the air and the other put off his aim by a comic intruding cleric— need hardly be said.

In the present volume we find Chekhov once again pointing to the generation gap in Russian fiction. Zinaida, the heroine of An Anonymous Story, in effect gives up everything to follow her lover to the ends of the earth, and is thus a parody of the idealistic self-sacrificing girls whom Turgenev created in such large numbers. Unfortunately for her she does not find herself matched with one of Turgenev's no less numerous wishy-washy young men, but has a more modern lover to reckon with: the urbane and cynical Orlov, who explicitly states that he is not a Turgenev hero. He also goes out of his way to dissociate himselffrom Turgenev's Insarov; the heroic Bulgarian freedom-fighter in On the Eve, whose Russian lady-friend—the heroically self-sacrificing Helen—joins him in the battle to free his country from Turkish oppression. Orlov's is, as he points out, a different nature. 'Should I ever require to liberate Bulgaria I could dispense with any female escort/

Such was the irony with which Cheknov occasionally referred to his great precursors, and he could go beyond mere ironic flashes. In a private letter he once called Dostoyevsky's work long, immodest and pretentious. He seems to have held a fairly low opinion of Gon- charov. And though an unstinting admirer ofTolstoy's art, he came to reject Tolstoy's teachings and didacticism. But Chekhov came nowhere near to any blanket condemnation of earlier Russian writers and their work. Nothing could have been further from the temperament of a man who was always generous in his praise of fellow-authors and quite incapable of disparaging others in order to boost himself. Throughout his life he showed a modesty astounding in anyone and especially remarkable in a creative artist. Certainly he did not regard himself as the superior of his chief precursors as writers of Russian fiction. Equally certainly, though, he knew that he was a different man using different techniques and operating in a different age.

What of Chekhov's outlook on life as expressed in his stories?

To this question no neat, all-embracing answer will ever be given. Chekhov was no builder of watertight philosophical systems, but even less was he a pure aesthete indifferent to the ethical or other non- artistic implications of his work. A few of his stories are explicitly didactic—especially those reflecting his brief and fictionally disastrous flirtation with Tolstoyism in the late I88os. Others, by contrast, are mere 'slices of life' devoid of any homiletic element. More typical are items, of which all those in the present volume are samples, which fall between these two extremes. Here the author is doing more than just describing people and situations: he also seems to be saying some­thing about how they ought—or at least about how they ought not— to behave.

Of the works in the present volume Doctor Startsev comes nearest to conveying such an author's message. It is typical of Chekhov in pillory­ing the futility of existence in the Russian provinces: a favourite theme.

The town of S , in which the story is set, is yet another of those

anonymous Chekhovian provincial backwaters where the inhabitants do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play cards, gossip, ill-treat their servants, indulge in frivolous litigation .. . and engender children who will continue the eating, drinking, sleeping, card-playing, ill-treating and litigating processes. Their futility is only further emphasized by such pathetic cultural activities as they can contrive: Mrs. Turkin's novels, her daughter's piano-playing, her husband's 'wit' and the posturings of their servant Peacock. What, indeed, 'could be said of a town in which the most brilliant people were so dim'?

Doctor Startsev is much more than a mere denunciation of provindal Russia. It is one of those many stories in which Chekhov shows worth-while human values succumbing to trivial vulgarity and petty everyday material cares—to what the Russians call poshlost. These perils can surface just as easily in the Russian countryside or St Peters­burg as in the to^n of S . They can also appear in Moscow,

as The Butterfly shows. On Chekhov's characteristic use of symbolic consumables to stress his approval and non-approval of his characters this particular story provides an eloquent commentary, especially in the use made of food: the approved Dymov never seems to get anything to eat or drink, while his non-approved wife, her lover and their artistic friends are tainted by numerous food associations from caviare and grouse to wine and cabbage stew. Similarly, in Ward Number Six, the discredited Doctor Ragin is for ever nibbling gherkins and swilling vodka and beer.

It is, incidentally, often Chekhov's women who drag down the more idealistic men to the level of poshlost and vulgar domesticity— especially by the non-approved activity of makingjam. The Professor's wife inA Dreary Story with her tendency to fuss about food and money; Ariadne, who has to be served with roast beef and boiled eggs in the middle ot the night; Zinaida in An Anonymous Story, with her frills and fusses and copper saucepans ... all these are typically female intruders on a male world comparatively unmaterialistic.

And yet Chekhov himself enjoyed his food, his drink, and even his female company—at least until his later years, when illness made inroads on his appetites. Nor, despite the high-minded implications of many of his stories, was he any philosophical idealist He was, rather, a materialist with a straightforward, typically Victorian belief in human progress: to which we must hasten to add that this belief tended to sag and recede at times—and that it was in any case no 'burning faith', as some memoirists and critics have maintained. By training a scientist, Chekhov on the whole contented himself with observed fact, and if he showed any passion in his thinking it was in rejecting metaphysical and religious speculations. Similarly, he avoided the extravagances of artistic experimentation and 'modernism' which (one would hardly suspect from his own work) were coming into fashion during his mature years as a writer. Nor did he hold fanatical political views such as have been so tediously and catastrophically fashionable among Russian intellectuals of his own and other periods. Still less, though, would it be fair to repeat the criticism often levelled at Chekhov during his lifetime: that he was a-political, a-philosophical, and lacked principles of any kind. The accusation infuriated him, and he rightly thought it ill-founded. Chekhov held a variety of con­victions, they fluctuated as his life developed, they were often mutually inconsistent—in other words, they resembled the views or convictions of many another educated and intelligent man who has never sought to work out an all-embracing system of belief. To claim that his views on life are all-important to his writings is as misleading as to maintain that they have no bearing on his work at all. In discussing such matters critics would do well to cultivate the restraint and common sense of the man whom they often misrepresent.

Chekhov's stories are by no means as shapeless as is commonly suggested. In the present volume The Butterfly, Ward Number Six and Doctor Startsev all have a well-defined plot, constructed with consider­able balance and symmetry, and culminating with the death—actual or spiritual—of a main character. By contrast, other stories do indeed fizzle out in accordance with the formula so often applied to Chekhov: 'life goes on. . . .' One such tale is Neighbours, where the very pointless- ness of the action or non-action is the main point of a saga which also hinges on a characteristic ironical twist: the man who so eloquently denounces his sister's ineffectual lover is his spiritual twin, being just as futile as the object of his tirades.

As the superb harangues in this story so richly illustrate, Chekhov by no means always depends on mere hints and pregnant silences. The eloquent over-statement of a case is often as important to the charac­terization of his figures as is the frequent use of deadly understatement. A Dreary Story is all harangue—and nowhere is its submerged irony more telling than in the passages where the Professor so violently carps at a university colleague . . . for continually carping at his university colleagues.

Arrivals, departures and journeys seem to have had a particular significance for Chekhov, almost every one of whose mature stories offers such a change of scene. One function of these episodes, without which no story or play of Chekhov's seems complete, is to extend a work's frame of reference by taking it temporarily out of its immediate spatial context. The same function is also performed in a different way by the frequent evocation of distant noises such as bands playing, church bells or drunken shouting. Similarly, Chekhov will extend his temporal frame of reference by constant harkings back to the past: often to the period when one or other of the characters was a child. ('Long ago, when he had been a small boy, his mother had.. . .') The same function is also performed by the many occasions on which characters look forward—hopefully, but often so pathetically—to the future when everything is somehow going to be wonderful, and when those of them who have never yet done a stroke of work will—they unconvincingly predict—devote their days to honest toil. ('Life in X years will be wonderful. . . .')

Illusions about the future, regrets for the past, high hopes collapsing among jam jars, fried onions and copper saucepans, the incongruities and inconsistencies of human beings, their mannerisms, their selfishness and their unselfishness, their tendency to say far too much or far too little, their inability—whether silent or garrulous—to communicate effectively with each other . . . these are some of the elements which make up Chekhov's thematic arsenal. His artistic aim—as he himself kept repeating—was simply to reflect the world as he saw it. And though life could never, in his portrayal, be fated to a single all- embracing pattern, it was not altogether lacking in patterns and parts of patterns either. An observer rather than an inventor, dependent on watchful personal experience rather than on a fertile creative imagina­tion, he had the knack of noticing ordinary aspects of human behaviour such as had existed—but existed unrecorded—ever since civilization began. Chekhov observed and registered, often embedding in his record some strong implicit bias of his ownwn, while yet leaving the reader unharassed by overt homilies and exhortations.

Rarely did he operate this technique more movingly and effectively than in the seven samples of his work which now follow.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biography and Autobiography

Heim, Michael Henry (trans.), and Karlinsky, Simon (ed.), Letters of

Anton Chekhov (New York, 1973). Hingley, Ronald, A Life of Chekhov (Oxford, 1989). Rayfield, Donald, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London, 1997).

Bibliography

Lantz, Kenneth, Anton Chekhov: A Reference Guide to Literature (Boston, 1985).

Background

Druford, W H., Chekhov and His Russia (London, 1948). Tulloch, John, Chekhov: A Structuralist Study (London, 1980).

Criticism

Bitsilli, Peter M., Chekhov's Art: A Stylistic Analysis (Ann Arbor, 1983). Clyman, Toby W. (ed.), A Chekhov Companion (Westport, Conn., 1985). Gerhardi, William, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London, 1923). Hahn, Beverly, Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays (Cambridge,

1977).

Jackson, Robert Louis (ed.), Reading Chekhov's Text (Evanston, 1993). Kramer, Karl D., The Chameleon and the Dream: The Image of Reality in

CCexov's Stories (The Hague, 1970). Llewellyn Smith, Virginia, Anton Chekhov and the Lady with the Dog (Oxford,

1973).

Turner, C. J. G., Time and Temporal Structure in Chekhov (Birmingham,

1994).

Winner, Thomas, Chekhov and His Prose (New York, 1966). Further Reading in Oxford 'World's Classics

Twelve Plays; translated and edited by Ronald Hingley (On the High Road; Swan Song; The Bear, The Proposal; Tatyana Repin; A Tragic Role; The Wedding; The Anniversary; Smoking is Bad for You; The Night Before the Trial; The Wood-Demon; Platonov). Early Stories, translated and edited by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher. The Steppe and Other Stories, translated and edited by Ronald Hingley. The Russian Master and Other Stories, translated and edited by Ronald Hingley.

A CHRONOLOGY OF ANTON CHEKHOV

All dates are given old style.

i860 16 or 17 January. Born in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in south Russia.

1876 His father goes bankrupt. The family moves to Moscow, leaving Anton to finish his schooling.

Joins family and enrols in the Medical Faculty of Moscow University.

Begins to contribute to Strekoza ('Dragonfly'), a St. Petersburg comic weekly.

1882 Starts to write short stories and a gossip column for Oskolki ('Splinters') and to depend on writing for an income.

1884 Graduates in medicine. Shows early symptoms of tuber­culosis.

1885--6 Contributes to Peterburgskaya gaze/a ('St. Petersburg Gazette') and Novoye vremya ('New Time').

March. Letter from D. V. Grigorovich encourages him to take writing seriously.

First collection of stories: Motley Stories.

Literary reputation grows fast. Second collection ofstories: In the Twilight.

19 November. First Moscow performance of Ivanov: mixed reception.

First publication (The Steppe) in a serious literary journal, Severny vestnik ('The Northern Herald').

31 January. First St. Petersburg performance of luanou: widely and favourably reviewed.

June. Death of brother Nicholas from tuberculosis.

April-December. Crosses Siberia to visit the penal settle­ment on Sakhalin Island. Returns via Hong Kong, Singa­pore and Ceylon.

First trip to western Europe: Italy and France.

March. Moves with family to small country estate at Melikhovo, fifty miles south of Moscow.

1895 First meeting with Tolstoy.

CHRONOLOGY

17 October. First—-disastrous—performance of The Seagull in St. Petersburg.

Suffers severe haemorrhage.

1897—8 Winters in France. Champions Zola's defence of Dreyfus.

Beginning of collaboration with the newly founded Mos­cow Art Theatre. Meets Olga Knipper. Spends the winter in Yalta, where he meets Gorky.

17 December. First Moscow Art Theatre performance of The Seagull: successful.

Completes the building of a house in Yalta, where he settles with mother and sister.

26 October. First performance by Moscow An Theatre of Uncle Vanya (written ?i896).

1899—1901 First collected edition of his works (io volumes).

1901 3 I January. Three Sisters fiTSt performed.

25 May. Marries Olga Knipper.

I 904 I 7 January. First performance of The Cherry Orchard.

XX

2 July. Dies in Badenweiler, Germany.

THE BUTTERFLY

I

All Olga's friends, everyone she knew well, came to her wedding. 'Just look at him,' she told her friends. 'There's something about him; isn't there?'

And she nodded towards her husband as if trying to explainjust why she was marrying so simple, so very ordinary, so utterly undistinguished a man.

The bridegroom, Osip Dymov, was a rather junior doctor on the staff of two hospitals: a temporary registrar in one, and an assistant pathologist in the other. He saw his patients and worked in his ward from nine til noon every day, then took the horse-tram to his other hospital in the afternoon and performed autopsies on deceased patients. His private practice was negligible, worth about five hundred roubles a year. That's all. What else can one say about him? Whereas Olga, her friends and her cronies were not quite ordinary people. Each one of them was somehow distinguished and somewhat famous, was already something of a name and was reckoned a celebrity. Or even if he wasn't quite a celebrity yet, he at least showed brilliant promise. There was an established and extremely gifted actor from the 'straight' theatre: an elegant, intelligent, modest ^^ with a superb delivery who had taught Olga elocution. There was an opera singer, a jolly fat man who sighed that Olga was ruining herself. If she hadn't been lazy, he told her, if she had taken herself in hand, she might have become a dis­tinguished singer. Then there were several artists, headed by the genre- painter, animal-painter and landscapist Ryabovsky, a very handsome, fair young man of about twenty-five who had exhibited successfully and had sold his last picture for five hundred roubles. He touched up Olga's sketches and used to say that she might possibly come to something. Then there was a 'cellist whose instrument sobbed and who openly declared that Olga was the only woman he knew who could play an accompaniment. And there was also an author, young but already famous, who wrote short novels, plays and stories. Who else was there? Well, there was a Vasily Vasilyevich: squire, lando^er, amateur iUustrator and vignettist with a great feel for the old Russian style, for the folk ballad and for epic. On paper, china and smoked plates he could work absolute miracles. In this spoilt, free-and-easy, Bohemian milieu—admittedly sensitive and modest, but conscious of such as doctors only at times of illness—the name Dymov cut no ice whatever. In this ambience he seemed an alien, superfluous, shrunken figure, tall and broad-shouldered though_ he was. He looked as if he had borrowed someone else's coat, and his beard seemed like a shop- assistant's. Had he been a writer or artist, though, they would have called his beard Zolaesque.

With Olga's flaxen hair, the actor said, and in her wedding dress, she much resembled a shapely young cherry-tree festooned with delicate white blossom in spring.

'Now, just listen to me,' Olga told him, clutching his hand. 'How did all this happen so suddenly? Well, listen, won't you? The thing is, my father worked at the same hospital as Dymov. When poor Father fell ill Dymov watched at his bed-side day and night. Such self- sacrifice! Now, listen, Ryabovsky. And you'd better listen too, Mr. Author, this is most interesting. Come closer. What self-sacrifice, what true sympathy! I stayed up every night too and sat with Father, when suddenly—what do you know?—the handsome prince is at my feet! Brother Dymov's in love, head over heels! Funny things do happen, I must say. Well, he took to calling after Father's death, or we would meet in the street. Then, one fme evening, suddenly—hey presto! He's proposing! You could have knocked me down with a feather! I cried all night and fell fiendishly in love myself. And now I'm Mrs. Dymov, as you see. There's something tough and rugged about him, isn't there, a sort of bear-like quality? You see him in three- quarter face now and badly lit, but when he turns just you look at that forehead. Ryabovsky, what say you to that forehead?

'We're discussing you, Dymov,' she shouted to her husband. 'Come here. Hold out your honest hand to Ryabovsky. That's the spirit. Now, be friends.'

With a good-natured, unsophisticated smile Dymov held out his hand to Ryabovsky.

'How do you do?' he said. 'There was a Ryabovsky in my year at college. I don't suppose he's a relative of yours?'

II

Olga was twenty-two years old, Dymov thirty-one. They settled do^ splendidly after their wedding. Olga plastered all the drawing-

seeking new and ever newer great men . . . and, finding them, began the scarch afresh. One wonders why.

She would have a meal with her husband at about half past four. His good nature, common sense and kindness had her in transports of joy. She kept jumping up, impulsively hugging his head, bestrewing him with kisses.

'You're so clever, Dymov, you're such a fine man,' she would say. 'But you do have one great defect. You take no interest whatever in art. Music, painting . . . you reject them both.'

'I don't understand them,' was his gentle reply. 'I have worked at science and medicine all my life, and I've had no time to be interested in the arts.'

'But I say, that's absolutely awful, Dymov.'

'Why so? Your friends know nothing of science and medicine, but you don't hold that against them. Everyone has his o^n line. I don't understand landscapes and operas, but if highly intelligent people give their whole lives to them and other intelligent people pay vast sums for them, then they must be important, as I see it. I don't understand, but not understanding doesn't mean rejecting.'

'Let me shake your honest hand!'

After their meal Olga would visit friends, then go to a theatre or concert and come home after midnight. So it went on every day.

On Wednesdays she was 'at home'. Hostess and guests did not play cards or dance on these occasions, but diverted themselves with various artistic activities. The actor recited, the singer sang, the artists sketched in albums (of which Olga had many), the 'cellist played and the hostess herself also sketched, modelled, sang and played accompani­ments. In the gaps between recitals, music and singing there was talk and argument about literature, theatre and painting. Ladies were not present since Olga considered all women dreary and vulgar, actresses and her dressmaker excepted. Not' one party passed without the hostess trembling at every ring.

'It is he,' she would say triumphantly, understanding by 'he' some new invited celebrity.

Dymov would not be in the drawing-room, nor would anyone remember his existence. But at exactly half past eleven the dining-room door would open and he would appear, smiling his good-natured, gentle smile.

'Supper is served, gentlemen,' he would say, rubbing his hands.

Then all would go into the dining-room, where they always saw the same array on the table: a dish of oysters, a joint of ham or veal, sardines, cheese, caviare, mushrooms, vodka and two carafes of wine.

'My dear maitre d'hotel,' said Olga, throwing up her hands in ecstasy. 'You're too, too adorable! Look at that forehead, gentlemen. Turn your profile, Dymov. See, gentlemen: the face of a Bengal tiger, but a kindly, charming expression like a fawn^. Now, isn't he perfectly sweet?'

The visitors ate and looked at Dymov.

'He really is a splendid chap,' they thought, but soon forgot him and went on talking about theatre, music and painting.

The young couple were happy and everything went swimmingly. The third week of their married life was not altogether serene, though —it was rather the opposite. Dymov caught erysipelas in hospital, spent six days in bed and had to have his magnificent black hair shaved to the scalp. Olga sat by him weeping bitterly, but when he felt better she put a white kerchief round his cropped head and began to paint him as a Bedouin. That was great fun, they both found. Then, a day or two after he had recovered and gone back to his hospital work, a new misfortune befell him.

'I'm out of luck, my dear', he said at dinner one day. 'I did four post­mortems today and I went and scratched two fingers. I only noticed when I got home.'

Olga was scared, but he smiled and said it was nothing, and that he often cut his hands when dissecting.

'I get carried away, my dear, and don't concentrate.'

Olga was worried. She feared blood poisoning and prayed about it every night, but all was well and their quiet, happy life resumed its course free from worry and alarm. The present was wonderful and spring was at hand, already smiling from afar and promising a thousand delights. They would live happily ever after! For April, May and June there was a holiday cottage some distance from town^. There would be walking, sketching, fishing and nightingales, and then, from July right through till autumn, a painting party on the Volga, in which trip Olga would take part as an indispensable member of their society. She had already had two linen travelling dresses made, and she had bought paints, brushes, canvases and a new palette for the journey. Ryabovsky visited her almost daily to see how her painting progressed. When she showed him her work he would thrust his hands deep into his pockets, purse his lips and sniff.

'Quite so,' he would say. 'That cloud of yours is a bit oJf, the light's wrong for evening. The foreground's rather chewed up and there's something, you know, not quite. . . . And your cottage has choked on something, it's more than a bit squeaky. And you should dim out that corner a shade. But altogether it's not so dusty. Nice work.'

And the more obscurely he spoke the more easily Olga understood him.

III

On Whit Monday afternoon Dymov bought some food and sweets, and set off to visit his wife at their cottage. Not having seen her for a fortnight, he missed her terribly. While in the train and then while searching a huge wood for the cottage, he felt famished and exhausted, looking forward to an informal supper with his wife, after which he would flop into bed and sleep. It cheered him up to look at the bundle in which he had wrapped caviare, cheese and white salmon.

By the time that he had found and identified his cottage the sun was setting. An ancient maid said that the mistress was out, but would be home directly for sure. The cottage was extremely unprepossessing, its low ceilings papered with writing-paper and its floors uneven and cracked. It had only three rooms. In one stood a bed, in another chairs and window-sills were bestrewn with canvases, brushes, greasy paper, and with men's overcoats and hats, while in the third Dymov found three strange men. Two were dark with little beards, while the third was clean-shaven and fat: an actor, apparently. A samovar hissed on the table.

'Can I help you?' boomed the actor, surveying Dymov frigidly. 'Looking for Olga, are you? Then wait, she'll be here any moment.'

Dymov sat and waited. One of the dark men gave him a few sleepy, languid glances and poured himself some tea.

'Perhaps you'd like a glass?' he asked.

Dymov was thirsty, and hungry too, but refused tea, not wanting to spoil his supper. Soon he heard footsteps and a familiar laugh, the door slammed and Olga swept into the room in a wide-brimmed hat with a box in her hand, followed by jolly, rosy-cheeked Ryabovsky ca^^g a huge parasol and c^p-stool.

'Dymov!' shrieked Olga, flushing with joy.

'Dymov!' she repeated, laying head and both hands on his chest. 'Can it be you? Why have you been so long? Why, why, why?'

'But I never have rime, my dear. I'm always busy, and when I am free the railway timetable never fits.'

'Now, I'm so glad to see you! I dreamt of you all night long, I was afraid you might be ill. Oh, if you did but know how sweet you are, you've come just in the nick of time, you'll be my salvation: only you can do it!

'We're having a quite fantastic wedding here tomorrow,' she went on, laughing and tying her husband's tie. 'A young telegraph clerk at the station's getting married, one Chikeldeyev. He's a good-looking boy, er, by no means unintelligent, and there's something rugged about his face, you know, a sort of bear-like quality. He could model a young Viking. We holiday visitors are all taking an interest in him and we have promised to be at his wedding. He's not well off, he has no relatives, he's a bit bashful and to let him down would be unforgivable, of course. Just think, the wedding will be after the service and then everyone will troop off from church to the bride's house. We'll have the copse, see? We'll have bird-song, sunlit patches on grass and all of us as variegated blobs against a bright green background: quite fantastic, in French impressionist style.

'But what can I wear in church, Dymov?' Olga asked with a tearful simper. 'I have nothing here, literally nothing: no dress, no flowers, no gloves. You must save me. The very fates bid you rescue me, your arrival shows it. Take your keys, dear man, go home and get my pink dress from the wardrobe. You remember it, it's hanging in front. Now, on the right of the closet, on the floor, you'll see two cardboard boxes. When you open the top one you'll find tulle all over the place and various bits and pieces, and underneath those some flowers. Take all the flowers out carefully, try not to crush them, darling, and I'll choose the ones I want later. And buy me some gloves.'

'All right,' said Dymov. 'I'll go back tomorrow and send them.'

' TomorrowOlga stared at him in amazement. 'But you won't have time tomorrow: the first train leaves here at nine in the morning and the wedding's at eleven. No, darling, you must go tonight, tonight without fail, and if you can't come yourself tomorrow you must send the stuff by messenger. Come on, now, hurry up! There's a passenger train due in directly. Don't miss it, darling.'

'Very well.'

'Oh, how I late letting you go,' said Olga, and tears came to her eyes. 'Oh, silly me, why ever did I promise that telegraph clerk?'

Dymov gulped a glass of tea, seized a roll, smiled gently and made for the station. His caviare, cheese and white salmon were consumed by the two dark men and the fat actor.

IV

One quiet, moonlit July night Olga stood on the deck of a Volga steamer, gazing alternately at the water and the picturesque banks. Ryabovsky stood by her side. The black shadows on the water were not shadows, he told her, but phantoms. This enchanted water with its eerie glitter, this unplumbed sky, these sad, pensive banks eloquent of our life's vanity and of some higher world of everlasting bliss . . . they were sights to make one swoon, die, become a memory. The past was vulgar and dreary, the future was meaningless, and this superb, unique night would soon end and melt into eternity. So why live?

Lending an ear, now to Ryabovsky's voice, now to the night's stillness, Olga thought that she was immortal and could never die. Turquoise-hued water such as she had never seen before, sky, banks, black shadows, mysterious joy flooding her inmost being . . . these things said that she would be a great artist and that out there, beyond that far horizon, beyond this moonlit night, in the vastness of space, she was heading for success, fame and a place in people's hearts.

She gazed nnwinking into distance for some time, her fancy pic­turing crowds, lights, solenm music, triumphant shouts, herself in a white dress, flowers strewn on her from all around. She also reflected that by her side, leaning his elbows on the ship's rail, stood a truly great man, a genius, one of God's elect.

His present achievements were superb, fresh, extraordinary, but what he would achieve in time, with the mature development of his peculiar gifts . . . that would be something spectacular, something ineffably sublime, as could be seen by his face, his way of expressing things, his attitude to nature. He had his o^n special language for describing shadows, evening tints and moonlight, so that his power over nature cast an irresistible spell. He was a very handsome man, very much of an individual. Independent, free, a stranger to everything pedestrian, he seemed to live the life of a bird.

'It's a bit chilly,' said Olga with a shiver.

Ryabovsky wrapped his cloak round her.

'I feel I'm in your power,' he said mournfully. 'I'm your slave. Why are you so bewitching tonight?'

He gazed at her, he could not take his eyes off her and those eyes so scared her that she feared to look at him.

'I love you madly,' he whispered, breathing on her cheek. 'Say the word and I'll end my life.

TU abandon art,' he muttered with violent emotion. 'Love me, love me '

'Don't say such things.' Olga closed her eyes. 'That's terrible. What about Dymov?'

'And what about Dymov? Why Dymov? What do I care for Dymov? There's Volga, moon, beauty, there's my love, my ecstasy, but there's no such thing as Dymov. Oh, I don't know anything, I don't care about the past. Just give me one second, one fleeting moment.'

Olga's heart was thumping. She tried to think about her husband, but al her past life—her wedding, Dymov, her At Homes ... it all seemed so small, worthless, dull, superfluous and far, far away.

What did Dymov matter, actually? Why Dymov? What did she care about Dymov? Did such a phenomenon really exist? Or had she just imagined him?

'For so simple, so very ordinary a man the happiness which he has already received is quite adequate,' she thought, covering her face with her hands. 'Let them condemn me, let them curse me back there, but I'll ruin myself just to annoy them, I'll just jolly well wreck my life. One must experience ever^hing in this world. God, how frightening, and how marvellous!'

'Well, what do you say?' muttered the artist, embracing her and hungrily kissing the ^rnds with which she feebly tried to push him away. 'Do you love me? You do, don't you? Oh, what a night, what a fantastic night!'

'Yes, what a night!' she whispered, gazing into his eyes now bright with tears. Then she looked quickly round, embraced him and kissed him firmly on the lips.

'We're approaching Kineshma,' said someone on the far side of the deck.

Heavy footsteps were heard as the waiter came past them from the bar.

'Waiter!' said Olga, laughing and crying for joy. 'Would you bring us some wine?'

Pale with emotion, the artist sat on a bench and gazed at Olga in grateful adoration, then closed his eyes.

'I'm tired,' he said, smiling languidly.

He leant his head against the rail.

v

The second of September was a warm, calm, but overcast day. A thin early-morning mist drifted over the Volga, and at nine o'clock it began to drizzle. There was no chance of the sky clearing. Over morning tea Ryabovsky told Olga that painting was the most ungrate­ful and boring of the arts, that he was not an artist and that only idiots thought he was any good. Then suddenly, with absolutely no warning, he snatched up a knife and made scratches on his best sketch. After his tea he sat gloomily by a window, gazing at the Volga. No longer did the river glisten. It was dim and lustreless, it had a cold look to it. Everything around seemed to presage a melancholy, gloomy autumn. Sumptuous, green-carpeted banks, brilliantly reflected sunbeams, translucent blue distance . . . nature seemed to have taken everything showy and flamboyant from the Volga and packed it away until the corning spring, while crows flew above the river taunting its nakedness with their raucous caws. Hearing their noise, Ryabovsky reflected that he had gone to seed, that he was no good any more, that everything in this world is conditional, relative, idiotic—and that he should never have become involved with this woman.

He was in a bad mood, in other words, and felt depressed.

Olga sat on the bed behind a screen, running her fingers through her lovely flaxen hair and imagining herself first in her drawing-room, then in her bedroom, then in her husband's study. Her fancy bore her to the theatre, to her dressmaker's, to her famous friends. What were they up to now? Did they remember her? The season had started and it would have been time to think about her soirees. And what ofDymov? Dear old Dymov! How tenderly, in what childlike, pathetic terms his letters begged her to hurry home! He sent her seventy-five roubles each month, and when she wrote that she had borrowed a hundred roubles from the others he sent her the hundred too. How kind, how generous a man! Olga was weary of travelling, she was bored, she wanted to get away as fast as she could: away from these peasants, away from that damp river smell. She wanted to shed the sensation of physical impurity which she always felt while living in peasant huts and wandering from village to village. If Ryabovsky hadn't promised the others to stay till the twentieth of the month she could have left today, which would have been wonderful.

'Ye gods, will the sun never shine?' groaned Ryabovsky. 'How can I get on with my sunny landscape if it's not sunny?'

'But there is that cloud scene you're doing,' said Olga, coming out from behind the screen. 'With the wood in the right foreground, remember, and a herd of cows and some geese on the left. Now would be the time to finish that.'

'Oh, really!' Ryabovsky frownwned. 'Finish it! Do you really think I'm such an ass that I don't know my o^n mind?'

'How you have changed towards me,' sighed Olga.

'And a very good thing too.'

Olga's face trembled, she moved awayto the stove and burst into tears.

'Crying! Oh, this really is the limit. Stop it. I have umpteen reasons for tears, but you don't find me crying.'

'Reasons?' sobbed Olga. 'The chief one is that you're fed up with me.

'Yes,' she said, bursting into sobs. 'You are ashamed of our affair, truth to tell. You keep trying to hide it from the others, though it can't be concealed and they've known all about it for ages.'

'I ask only one thing of you, Olga,' begged the artist, laying his hand on his heart. Just this: stop tormenting me, that's all I want from you.'

'But swear you still love me.'

'Oh, this is sheer hell,' Ryabovsky muttered through clenched teeth and jumped to his feet. 'I'll end up throwing myself in the Volga or going mad. Leave me alone.'

'Then why don't you kill me?' shouted Olga. 'Kill me!'

She sobbed again and went behind the screen. Rain swished on the thatch, Ryabovsky clutched his head and paced the room. Then, with the resolute air of one bent on proving a point, he put on his cap, slung his gun over his shoulder and left the hut.

For some time after he had gone Olga lay on the bed crying. Her first thought was to take poison so that Ryabovsky should find her dead when he came back, but then her fancies swept her into her drawing-room, into her husband's study. She saw herself sitting quite still by Dymov's side, enjoying physical calm and cleanliness, she imagined hearing Masini in the theatre one evening. And a pang of longing for civilization, for the bustle of the city, for famous people, plucked at her heart. A local woman came into the hut and began slowly lighting the stove so that she could cook dinner. There was a fumy smell, and the air filled with blue smoke. The artists arrived in muddy top-boots, their faces wet with rain. They looked over their sketches and consoled themselves by saying that the Volga had a charm of its o^n, even in bad weather. The cheap clock on the wall ticked monotonously. Cold flies crowded and buzzed in the corner by the icons, and cockroaches were heard scuttling in the thick portfolios under the benches.

Ryabovsky came home at sunset and flung his cap on the table. Pale, exhausted, in muddy boots, he sank on to a bench and closed his eyes.

'I'm tired,' he said, and twitched his brows, trying to lift his eyelids.

Olga wanted to be nice to him and show that she wasn't angry, so she went up, silently kissed him and ran a comb through his fair hair. She wanted to do his hair properly.

'What's this?' he asked, staning as if from a cold touch.

He opened his eyes. 'What's going on? Oh, leave me alone, for heaven's sake.'

Pushing her away, he moved off—looking disgusted and dismayed, she felt. Then the peasant woman brought him a bowl of cabbage stew, carrying it with great care in both hands, and Olga saw the stew wetting her thumbs. The dirty woman with her tightly belted stomach, the stew so greedily gulped by Ryabovsky, the hut, this whole way of life so adored at first for its simplicity and Bohemian disorder ... it all struck her as perfectly odious now. She suddenly felt insulted.

'We must separate for a bit,' she said coldly, 'or else we may quarrel seriously out of sheer boredom. I'm fed up with this, I shall leave today.'

'How, pray? By broom-stick?'

'It's Thursday today so there's a boat at half past nine.'

'Eh? Yes, quite so. All right then, you go,' said Ryabovsky gently, wiping his mouth on a towel instead of a napkin. 'You're bored here, you're at a loose end and it would be most selfish of me to keep you. So go, and we'll meet after the twentieth.'

Olga cheerfully packed her things, her cheeks positively glowing with pleasure. Could it really be true, she wondered, that she would soon be painting in a drawing-room, sleeping in a bedroom, dining with a cloth on the table? She felt relieved and was no longer angry with the artist.

'I am leaving you my paints and brushes, Ryabovsky dear,' said she. 'You can bring me anything I leave behind. Now, mind you aren't lazy when I'm gone, and don't mope. You do some work. You're a good chap, Ryabovsky old sport.'

Ryabovsky kissed her good-bye at ten o'clock—this was so that he needn't kiss her on the boat in front of the others, she thought—and took her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon came and bore her off.

Two and a half days later she arrived home. Breathless with excite­ment, she went into her drawing-room without removing hat or rain­coat and thence into her dining-room. Dymov was sitting at the table in his shirt-sleeves with his waistcoat unbuttoned and was sharpening a knife on a fork. There was a grouse on the plate in front of him. At the time of entering her apartment Olga had been quite sure that she must keep her husband in ignorance and that she possessed the requisite wit and strength to do so, but now that she saw his broad, gentle, happy smile and his eyes alight with pleasure, she felt that deceiving the man would be mean, odious, out of the question—and as far beyond her as bearing false witness, robbing or murdering. So she made a sudden decision to tell him all. She let him kiss and embrace her, then knelt before him and covered her face.

'Now, what is it, my dear?' he asked gently. 'Did you miss me?'

She lifted her face, red with shame, and looked at him guiltily and beseechingly, but fear and embarrassment stopped her telling the truth.

'It's all right', she said. 'It's nothing '

'Let's sit down,' he said, lifting her up and seating her at the table. 'There you are. Have some grouse. My poor darling, you're famished.'

She eagerly breathed in the air of home and ate the grouse, while he watched her tenderly and smiled happily.

VI

Half-way through winter Dymov evidently began to suspect that he was a deceived husband. It was as if he was the guilty party, for he could no longer look his wife in the face, nor did he smile happily when they met. So as to be alone with her less he often asked his colleague Korostelyov in for a meal. This was a small, dose-cropped person with a wrinkled face who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket in embarrassment when talking to Olga, and would then start tweaking the left side ofhis moustache with his right hand. Over their meal both doctors would talk about how an upward displacement of the diaphragm is sometimes accompanied by pulse irregularities, about how wide­spread compound neuritis is nowadays, and about how Dymov had found cancer of the pancreas when performing yesterday's autopsy on a cadaver bearing a diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. Doth apparently discussed medicine only to give Olga the chance to remain silent, and hence to avoid lying. After the meal Korostclyov would sit at the piano.

'Ah me, old chap,' Dymov would sigh. 'Ah, well. Play something melancholy.'

Hunching his shoulders and splaying his fmgers, Korostelyov would strike a few chords and start singing in his tenor voice:

'Do you know any place in all Russia Where no suffering peasantry groans ?'

Dymov would sigh again, prop his head on his fist and sink into thought.

Olga had been behaving most indiscreetly of late. Each morning she woke up in an appalling temper, with the notion that she no longer loved Ryabovsky and that the affair was over, thank God. By the time that she had finished her coffee she was fancying that Ryabovsky had taken her husband from her, that she was now bereft of both husband and Ryabovsky. Then she would recall her friends' talk about how Ryabovsky was working on something outstanding for exhibition, a mixture of landscape and genre a la Polenov—visitors to his studio were in ecstasies about it. But that work had been done under her influence, had it not ? It was her influence, by and large, that had changed him so much for the better. So beneficent, so vital was this influence that he might well come to grief should she abandon him. She also recalled that he had worn a kind of grey, flecked frock-coat and a new tie on his last visit.

'Am I handsome?' he had asked languorously.

Elegant he indeed was with his long curls and blue eyes, and very handsome too—unless that was just an illusion—and he had been nice to her.

After many rememberings and imaginings, Olga would dress and drive to Ryabovsky's studio in a great pother. She would fmd him cheerful and delighted with his picture, which really was marvellous. He would skip about and fool around, returning joke answers to serious questions. Olga was jealous of that picture, she hated it, but she would stand in front of it without speaking for five minutes out of politeness, then sigh like one contemplating a holy relic.

'No, you've never done anything like this before,' she would say quietly. 'It's positively awesome, actually.'

Then she would implore him to love her, not to desert her, and she begged him to pity poor, unhappy her. She would weep and kiss his hands as she insisted on him swearing that he loved her, arguing that he would go astray and come to grief without her good offices. Then, having spoilt his mood, feeling degraded, she would drive off to her dressmaker's or to an actress friend to wangle a theatre ticket.

Should she miss him in his studio she would leave a note swearing to poison herself without fail if he did not come and see her that day. He would panic, go along and stay to a meal. Ignoring her husband, he spoke to her rudely and she repaid him in kind. Each found the other a drag, a tyrant, an enemy. Growing angry, they failed to notice in their rage that both were being indiscreet, that even crop-headed Koro- stelyov knew what was going on. After the meal Ryabovsky was quick to say good-bye and leave.

'Where are you off to?' Olga would ask him in the hall, looking at him with hatred.

Scowling, screwing up his eyes, he would name some woman kno^n to them both, obviously mocking her jealousy and trying to annoy her. She would go to her bedroom and lie on the bed, biting the pillow and sobbing aloud in her jealousy, vexation, humiliation and shame. Dymov would leave Korostelyov in the drawing-room and come into the bedroom, embarrassed and frantic.

'Don't cry so loudly, my dear,' he would say gently. 'Why should you? You must say nothing about it. You mustn't let on. What's done can't be undone, you know.'

Not knowing how to tame this bothersome jealousy, which even gave her a headache, and thinking that matters might still be mended, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face and rush off to sec the woman friend in question. Not fmding Ryabovsky, she went to a second, then a third.

She was ashamed ofgoing about like this at first, but then it became a habit and there were times when she toured all her female acquaintance­ship in a single evening—looking for Ryabovsky, as everyone very well knew.

She once told Ryabovsky that 'that man' (meaning her husband) 'overwhelms me with his magnanimity.'

Such a liking did she take to this sentence that she always used it on meeting artists who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky.

'That man ove^helms me with his magnanimity,' she would say with a sweeping gesture.

Her routine remained that of the year before. There were the Wednesday soirees. The actor recited, the artists sketched, the 'cellist played, the singer sang and at half past eleven without fail the dining- room door opened.

'Supper is served, gentlemen,' Dymov would smile.

As of old, Olga sought great men and found them—but then found them wanting and sought more. As of old, she came home late each night. Dymov would no longer be asleep as in the previous year, though, but sat in his study doing some work. He went to bed at about three o'clock and rose at eight.

One evening, when she was standing in front of her pier-glass before going to the theatre, Dymov came into the bedroom in his tails and white tie. He smiled gently and looked his wife in the eye as delightedly as of old. He was beaming.

'I've just been defending my thesis,' he said, sitting do^n and stroking his knees.

'And did you succeed?' Olga asked.

He chuckled and craned his neck to see his wife's face in the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to him, doing her hair.

He chuckled again. 'I shall very likely be offered a lectureship in general pathology, you know. It's in the air.'

His beatific, beaming expression showed that if Olga were to share his joy and triumph he would forgive her everything, both present and future, and would dismiss it from his mind. But she didn't know what a lectureship was or what general pathology was. And besides, she was afraid of being late for the theatre, so she said nothing.

He sat there for two minutes, then went out with a guilty smile.

VII

It was a very disturbed day.

Dymov had a bad headache. He took no breakfast, stayed away from hospital and just lay there on his study sofa. Olga set off for Ryabovsky's at about half past twelve as usual to show him her still-life sketch and ask why he hadn't visited her on the previous day. She didn't think the sketch was very good and she had only done it to give herself an excuse for visiting the artist.

Entering his apartment without ringing, and removing her galoshes in the hall, she heard the sound of someone running quietly through the studio and the rustle of a woman's dress. She quickly peeped inside and just glimpsed a flash of bro^n petticoat whisking past to vanish behind the large picture draped downwn to the floor with black calico, easel and all. That a woman was hiding there was beyond doubt —Olga herself had taken refuge behind that picture often enough! Obviously much embarrassed, Ryabovsky held out both hands as if surprised at her arrival.

'Aha, delighted to see you,' he said with a forced smile. 'And what news do we bring ?'

Olga's eyes brimmed with tears and she felt bitterly ashamed. Not for a million roubles would she have consented to speak before that strange woman, her rival: the false creature who now stood behind the picture, probably giggling at her discomfiture.

'I have brought you a sketch,' she said timidly in a thin little voice, her lips trembling. 'A still life.'

'Aha, a sketch?'

The artist picked up the sketch. As he examined it he went into the next room, affecting a disinterested air.

Olga followed him-submissively.

'A nature morte, the frnest sort,' he muttered, seeking a rhyme. 'Resort, port '

From the studio came the sound of hurried steps and the rustle of a skirt. So the creature had left. Olga felt like shouting aloud, hitting the artist with a blunt instrument and leaving, but she could see nothing for tears and she was overwhelmed with shame, feeling as if she were no longer Olga, no longer an artist, but a small insect.

'I'm tired,' said Ryabovsky languidly, looking at the sketch and shaking his head to conquer his drowsiness. 'It's all very charming, of course, but a sketch today, a sketch last year and another sketch in a month's time ... I wonder you don't get bored with it. I'd give up painting ifl were you and take up music really seriously, or something. You're no artist, after all, you're a musician. I say, I am tired, you know. I'll have tea served, shall I?'

He left the room and Olga heard him giving orders to his servant. To avoid farewells and explanations, and above all to avoid bursting into tears, she darted into the hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes and went into the street. There she breathed more easily and felt free once and for all: free from Ryabovsky, from painting, from the load ofshame which had so overwhelmed her in the studio. It was all over.

She drove to her dressmaker's and then to see the actor Barnay, who had only arrived the day before. From Barnay she went to a music shop, brooding the while on how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, harsh letter full of her o^n dignity. That spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, where she would shake off the past once and for all and start a new life.

Reaching home late that night, she sat down in the drawing-room without changing her clothes in order to write her letter. Ryabovsky had said that she was no good at painting, so she would revenge herself by telling him that he painted the same picture year in year out and said the same thing day in day out, that he was stagnating, and that he would achieve nothing beyond what he had already achieved. She also felt like telling him how much he owed to her good offices, whereas if he behaved badly it was only because her influence was paralysed by sundry dubious personages such as the one who had hidden behind the picture today.

'My dear,' Dyrnov called from the study, not opening the door. 'My dear!'

'What is it?'

'Don't come into my room, dear, just come to the door. Look, I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital the day before yesterday, and now I'm feeling awful. Send for Korostclyov as quick as you can.'

Olga always called her husband by his surname, as she did all the other men she knew. She disliked the name Osip because it reminded her of Gogol' s Osip. And wasn't there that jingle about the old fellow called Osip, who 'grew hoarse from a surfeit ofgossip', or something vaguely like that? Now, however, Olga shouted: 'That's not possible, Osip!'

'Send for him, I'm in a bad way,' Dyrnov said behind the door, and was heard going back to the sofa and lying do^.

'Send for him.' His voice had a hollow ring.

Cold with fear, Olga wondered whatever the matter could be. 'Why, this is dangerous!' she thought.

For no special reason she took a candle and went into her bedroom, where, as she tried to work out what to do, she chanced to glimpse herself in the pier-glass. Her pale, frightened face, her jacket with its high sleeves, the yellow flounces at her breast, her skirt with the stripes running in unorthodox directions . . . these things made her seem horrible and disgusting in her o^ eyes. She felt a sudden stab ofpity: for Dyrnov, for his boundless love ofher, for his young life and even for this orphaned bed in which he had not slept for so long, and she remembered his usual smile, so gentle and so meek. She wept bitterly and 'wrote a note imploring Korostelyov to come. It was two o'clock in the morning.

VIII

When Olga carne out ofher bedroom at about half past seven, her head heavy from lack of sleep, her hair unbrushed, ugly, and guilty- looking, some gentleman with a black beard—a doctor, apparently— went past her into the hall. There was a smell of medicine. Near the study door Korostelyov stood twisting the left side of his moustache with his right hand.

'I can't let you go in, I'm sorry,' he told Olga grimly. 'It's catching. And actually there's no point, he's delirious anyway.'

'Is it really diphtheria?' Olga whispered.

'It should be a criminal offence, actually, asking for trouble like that,' muttered Korostelyov without answering Olga's question. 'You know how he caught it ? He sucked some diphtherial membrane from a boy's throat on Tuesday, through a tube. Whatever for? It was so stupid, sheer folly '

'Is it dangerous? Very?' asked Olga.

'Yes, it's the malignant kind, they say. We should really send for Schreck.'

There arrived a red-haired little man with a long nose and a Jewish accent, then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual who looked like an archdeacon, then a very stout, bespectacled young man with a red face. These were doctors coming to take their turns at their colleague's bedside. Korostelyov had done his stint, but stayed on instead of going home, positively haunting the flat. The maid served tea to the doctors on watch and was constantly running to the chemist's. There was no one to tidy the rooms. It was quiet and gloomy.

Olga sat in her bedroom and thought how God was punishing her for deceiving her husband. A silent, uncomplaining, mysterious creature, robbed of individuality by its very gentleness, characterless, weak from superfluity of kindness, was dumbly suffering without complaint somewhere in there on the sofa. And were it to complain, even in delirium, the doctors at the bedside would know that the fault was more than just diphtheria alone. They could ask Korostelyov: he knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he looked at his friend's wife as if she were the true, the chief culprit, the diphtheria being merely her accomplice. Oblivious now of that moonlit evening on the Volga, of declarations of love, of their romantic life in the peasant's hut, she remembered only that an idle whim, sheer self-indulgence, had made her smear herself all over, hand and foot, with sticky filth that would never wash off.

'Oh, how horribly false I have been,' she thought, remembering her turbulent affair with Ryabovsky. 'Damn, damn, damn all that!'

At four o'clock she joined Korostelyov for a meal. He ate nothing, just drank red wine and frowned. She too ate nothing. At times she prayed silently, vowing to God that, should Dymov recover, she would love him again and be a faithful wife. At times she lost track of things and gazed at Korostelyov.

'How boring,' thought she, 'to be an ordinary, utterly obscure nonentity, besides having a wrinkled face and no social graces.'

At other times she felt that God would strike her dead that very instant because she had never once been in her husband's room, fearing infection. There was also a general sensation of hopelessness, a certainty that her life already lay in ruins beyond all hope of recovery.

After the meal it grew dark. Olga went into the drawing-room and Korostclyov slept on a couch with a gold-embroidered silk cushion under his head. He snored raucously and rhythmically.

The doctors came to do their stint and went away again without noticing this disarray. A snoring stranger asleep in the drawing-room, the sketches on the walls, the quaint furnishings, the mistress of the house with her dishevelled hair and slovenly dress . . . none of that aroused the faintest interest now. One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and his laugh had a ring strange, timid and positively unnerving.

When Olga returned to the drawing-room Korostelyov had woken up and sat smoking.

'He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity,' he said in a low voice. 'His heart's not too good either. Things are pretty bad, reaUy.'

'Then send for Schreck,' said Olga.

'He's been. It was he who noticed that the infection had passed to the nose. What is Schreck, anyway? He's nothing, really, Schreck isn't. He's Schreck, I'm Korostelyov—and that's that.' •

Time dragged on terribly slowly. Olga lay fully-clothed on her unmade bed and dozed. She fancied that the whole apartment was jammed from floor to ceiling with a huge chunk of iron, that if only one could remove this iron everyone would be happy and cheerful. Then she woke and realized that it was not iron that weighed her do^n, it was Dymov's illness.

'Nature morte, port,' she thought, lapsing into forgetfulness again. 'Sport, resort—. And what ofSchreck? Schreck, greek, Greek, shriek—. But where are my friends now? Do they know we're in trouble? Lord, help us, save us! Schreck, greek '

And again the iron appeared. Time dragged terribly, a clock on the gronnd floor kept striking. The door-bell was continually ringing as doctors arrived. The housemaid came in with an empty glass on a tray.

'Shall I make the bed, ma'am?' she asked, and went out after receiving no answer.

The clock struck do^rntairs, Olga dreamt of rain on the Volga and once again someone came into the bedroom: a stranger, it seemed. Olga jumped up and saw that it was Korostelyov.

'What's the time?' she asked.

'About three.'

'Well, what is it?'

'What indeed? I've come to tell you that he's sinking.'

He gulped, sat by her on the bed and wiped his tears with his sleeve. Unable to grasp it all at once, she turned cold all over and began slowly crossing herself.

'He's sinking,' he repeated in a shrill voice and sobbed again. 'He's dying because he martyred himself

'What a loss to science!' he said bitterly. 'Compared with the rest of us he was a great man, he was quite outstanding. What gifts!

'What hopes we all had for him,' Korostelyov continued, wrwringing his hands. 'Lord above us, he was a real scientist..you don't find his sort any more. Osip, Osip Dymov, how could you? Oh, oh, my God!'

Frantic, Korostelyov covered his face with both hands and shook his head.

'And what moral strength!' he went on, his anger moWlting. 'That kind, pure, loving heart as clear as crystal. He served science, he died for science. He slaved away day in day out, nobody spared him—and a young scholar, a budding professor, had to tout for private patients and spend his nights translating to pay for these . . . disgusting rags!'

Korostelyov glared at Olga with hatred, snatched the sheet in both hands and tore it angrily as if he blamed the sheet.

'He didn't spare himself and no one spared him. Oh, what's the usc of talking ?'

'Yes, he was quite outstanding,' said a deep voice in the drawing- room.

Olga remembered their life together from beginning to end in all its details and she suddenly saw that he really had been an outstanding, rare person: a great man compared with everyone else she had known. Recalling what her dead father and all his doctor-colleagues had thought ofDymov, she realized that they had all seen him as a future notability. Walls, ceiling, lamp, the carpet on the floor ... all seemed to wink at her sardonically.

'You're too late now,' they seemed to say. 'You've lost your chance.'

She rushed wailing out ofthe bedroom, darted past some stranger in the dining-room and ran to her husband's study. He lay quite still on the sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was 'terribly thin and sunken, with a greyish-yellow hue never seen on living man. Only the forehead, black brows and familiar smile showed that this was Dymov. Olga quickly felt his chest, forehead, hands. His chest was still warm, but his forehead and hands were disagreeably cold. And his half open eyes gazed at the quilt, not at Olga.

'Dymov !' she called aloud. 'Dymov !'

She wanted to tell him that there had been a mistake, that all was not yet lost, that life could still be wonderfully happy, that he was a rare, an outstanding, a great man—and that she would worship him all her life, adore him, revere him and do him homage.

'Dymov!' she called, feeling his shoulder, unable to believe that he would never wake again. 'Dymov! Answer me, Dymov!'

In the drawing-room Korostelyov was speaking to the maid.

'It's perfectly simple. Go to the church lodge and ask for the alms­house women. They'll wash the body, they'll lay it out and do whatever needs doing.'

WARD NUMBER SIX

I

In the hospital courtyard stands a small building surrounded by a jungle of burdock, nettle and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney halfcollapsed. The porch steps have rotted and are overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of plaster are left. The front faces the hospital and the rear looks into open country, cut off from it by a grey hospital fence with nails on top. Those nails with spikes uppermost, the fence, the hut itself ... all have the melancholy, doomed air peculiar to hospital and prison buildings.

Unless you are afraid of nettle stings, let us take the narrow path to this shack and see what goes on inside. Opening the first door we enter the lobby, where great stacks of hospital rubbish are piled by walls and stove. Mattresses, tattered old smocks, trousers, blue-striped shirts and useless, dilapidated footwear ... all this junk is dumped around any old how, mouldering and giving off an acrid stench.

On the rubbish, a pipe always clenched between his teeth, lies the warder Nikita, an old soldier with faded chevrons. He has a red nose and a stern, haggard visage to which pendulous eyebrows give the look of a prairie sheepdog. Short of stature, he appears gaunt and sinewy, but has an air of authority and knows how to use his fists. He is one of those dull, self-assured, punctilious simpletons who believe in discipline above all things and who are therefore convinced that people need hitting.' He hits them on face, chest, back or anywhere handy, being firmly convinced that this is the only way to keep order in the place.

Next you enter a large, capacious room which is all the hut consists of, apart from the lobby. Its walls are daubed with dirty-blue paint, the ceiling is caked with soot as in a chimneylcss peasant hut, and you can tell that these stoves smoke and fill the place with fumes in winter. The windows are disfigured by iron bars on the inside, the floor is grey and splintery, and there is such a stink of sour cabbage, burnt wicks, bed­bugs and ammonia that your first impression is of entering a zoo.

The room contains beds which are screwed to the floor. Sitting or lying on them arc people in navy-blue hospital smocks and old- fashioned nightcaps: the lunatics.

There are five in all. Only one has genteel status, the rest being of the lower orders. The nearest to the door is a tall, lean wor^ng-class fellow with a glistening ginger moustache, tear-filled eyes and a fixed stare, who sits resting his head in his hands. He grieves all day and night, shaking his head, sighing, smiling a bitter smile. He seldom joins in any conversation and does not usually answer questions. At feeding time he eats and drinks like an automaton. His excruciatingly racking cough, emaciation and cheeks with red spots seem to be symptoms of incipient tuberculosis.

Next comes a small, lively, very nimble old man with a pointed little beard and black curly hair like a Negro's. He ambles about the ward from one window to another in daytime, or squats on his bed Turkish-fashion, whistling irrepressibly like a bullfinch, humming and giggling. At night-time too he evinces the same infantile gaiety and liveliness, getting up to pray: to beat his breast with his fists and pluck at the door with his finger, in other words. This is Moses the Jew, a loon who lost his reason twenty years ago when his hatter's workshop burnt do^n.

Alone among the denizens of Ward Number Six he is permitted to leave the hut and even to go out of the hospital yard into the street. He has long enjoyed this privilege, probably because he is a veteran inmate: a quiet, harmless idiot and the to^n buffoon, long a familiar sight in the streets with his entourage ofurchins and dogs. In his great smock, comic night-cap and slippers, sometimes barefoot and even untrousered, he walks the streets, stopping at gates and shops to beg. He gets kvass here, bread there, a copeck elsewhere—and so he usually returns to the hut well-fed and in funds, but Nikita confiscates all the takings for his o^ use. This the old soldier does roughly and angrily, turning out Moses's pockets, calling God to witness that he will never let theJew out in the street again and saying that if there is one thing he can't stand it's disorder.

Moses likes to be helpful. He brings his ward-mates water, tucks them up when they are asleep, promising to bring them all a copeck from the street and make them each a new hat. He also spoon-feeds his left-hand neighbour, who is paralysed. This is not done through pity or from humanitarian considerations, but in imitation of—and in automatic deference to—his right-hand neighbour Gromov.

Thirty-three years of age, a -gentleman, a former court usher and official of the twelfth grade, Ivan Gromov has persecution mania. He either lies curled up on his bed or paces from comer to corner as if taking a constitutional. He very seldom sits. He is always excited, agitated and tense with some dim, vague premonition. The merest rustle in the lobby, a shout outside, is enough to make him lift his head and cock an ear. Someone has come for him, haven't they ? It is him they're after, isn't it? At these times his face expresses extreme alarm and disgust.

I like his broad face with its high cheek-bones, always pale and unhappy, mirroring a soul racked by struggle and ever-present terror. His grimaces are weird and neurotic, but there is reason and intelligence in the subtle traits carved on his face by deeply felt suffering, and his eyes have a warm, healthy glint. I like him as a person polite, helpful and outstandingly delicate in his manner towards all except Nikita. If someone drops a button or spoon he leaps from his bed to pick it up. Every morning he wishes his fellow-inmates good day, and he bids them good night when he goes to bed.

Besides grimaces and unrelieved tension, his insanity also finds the following outlet. Some evenings he wraps himself in his smock, and starts pacing rapidly from comer to comer and between the beds, trembling all over, his teeth chattering. He acts as if he had a high temperature. His way of suddenly stopping to look at the others shows that he has something extremely important to say, but then he shakes his head impatiently and resumes his pacing, evidently considering that no one will heed or understand him. But soon an urge to speak swamps all other considerations and he unleashes an eager, passionate harangue. His speech is jumbled, feverish, delirious, jerky, not always comprehensible, but there is a fine ring about it, about his words and his voice. As he speaks you recognize both the lunatic and the man in him. It is hard to convey his insane babble on paper. He talks ofhuman viciousness, of brutality trampling on justice, of the heaven on earth which will come to pass in time, of the bars on the windows which constantly remind him of the obtuseness and cruelty of his oppressors. The result is like a chaotic, untidy, miscellany of old songs: old, but not yet stale.

II

Twelve or fifteen years ago a civil servant called Gromov, a man of weight and substance, was living in a house which he o^ed on the town's main street. He had two sons, Sergey and Ivan. Sergey con­tracted galloping consumption in his fourth year at college. He died, and this death seemed to herald a whole series of disasters which suddenly befell the Gromov family. A week after Sergey's funeral the old father was prosecuted for forgery and embezzlement, and died soon afterwards of typhus in the prison hospital. His house and all his effects were sold up at auction, Ivan and his mother being left utterly destitute.

While living in St. Petersburg and attending the university during his father's lifetime, Ivan had received sixty or seventy roubles a month and had not knownwn what hardship was, but now he had to change his way of life abruptly. All day long he had to do coaching for a pittance and he had to take on copying work—yet still go hungry since he sent all his earnings to keep his mother. Ivan couldn't stand the life. He lost heart, fell ill and gave up the university to come home. Through his connections he obtained a job as teacher in the connty school here in the little townwn, but he didn't get on with his colleagues, his pupils disliked him and he soon dropped it. Then his mother died. He was out of work for six months, living on bread and water, after which he became a court usher: a post which he held until dismissed through illness.

Even as a yonng man at college he had never looked healthy. He was always pale, thin and subject to colds, he ate little, he slept badly. One glass ofwine went to his head and made him hysterical. He had always needed company, but his petulance and touchiness prevented him from making close contacts and friends. He always spoke with contempt of the townsfolk, whose crass ignorance and torpid, brutish lives were, he felt, loathsome and nauseating. He spoke in a loud, urgent, high- pitched voice, always furiously indignant or admiringly ecstatic, always sincere. Whatever you spoke about he always reduced it to a single theme: the townwn was a stuffy, boring place to live, society lacked higher interests, leading a dim, meaningless existence and varying it with brutality, crude licentiousness and hypocrisy. Sconn- drels were well fed and well dressed, honest men ate crumbs. They needed schools, a local newspaper with an honest view-point, a theatre, public recitals, intellectual solidarity. Society must recognize its own nature and recoil from it with horror. In his judgements about people he laid things on witha trowel—seeing everything in black and white, ack­nowledging no intermediate shades. He divided humanity into honest men and sconndrels with nothing in between. Of women and love he always spoke with fervid enthusiasm, but he had never been in love.

Extreme though his views were, touchy as he was, he was popular in townwn, where he was fondly knownwn as 'good old Ivan' behind his back. His innate delicacy, helpfulness, decency and moral integrity inspired kindness, sympathy and sorrow, as also did his shabby old frock-coat, ailing appearance and family misfortunes. Besides, he was well educated and well read. He knew everything, according to the locals, and the town reckoned him a sort of walking encyclopaedia.

He read a great deal. He would sit in the club sometimes, nervously plucking at his beard and leafing through magazines and books, and showing by his expression that he was not so much reading as gulping the stuff downwn with barely time to chew it. Reading must have been one ofhis morbid symptoms since he pounced with equal zeal on whatever carne his way, even last year's newspapers and calendars. At home he always lay down to read.

III

His coat collar turned up, Ivan Grornov was splashing his way through the mud of alleys and back lanes one autu^fl morning to collect a fine from some tradesman or other. He was in a black mood, as he always was in the mornings. In a certain alley he carne across two convicts wearing foot-irons and escorted by four guards with rifles. Grornov had met convicts often enough before—they had always made him feel sympathetic and uncomfortable—but now this latest encounter had a peculiarly weird effect on him. Somehow it suddenly dawnwned on him that he himself might be clapped in irons and similarly hauled off to prison through the mud. He was passing the post office on his way home after paying this call when he met a police inspector of his acquaintance who gave him good day and walked a few steps downwn the street with him. This somehow struck Grornov as suspicious. At home he was obsessed by convicts and armed gJiards all day, and a mysterious psychic unease prevented him from reading and concentrat­ing. That evening he did not light his lamp and he lay awake all night, brooding on the prospect of being arrested, c!apped in irons and flung into jail. He had done nothing wrong so far as he knew and could vouch that he would never commit murder, arson or burglary in the future. But was it so difficult to commit a crime accidentally and against one's will? Can false accusations—canjudicial miscarriages, for that matter— really be ruled out? And hasn't immemorial folk wisdom taught that going to jail is like being poor: there isn't much you can do to escape from either? Now, a judicial miscarriage was only too possible with present-day court procedures, and no wonder. People with a bureaucratic, official relationship to others' woes—judges, policemen and doctors, for instance—eventually grow so callous through force of habit that they can react to their clients only on a formal level, much as they would like to do otherwise. In this respect they are just like the peasant who slaughters sheep and cattle in his backyard without noticing the blood. Having this formal, heartless attitude to the individual, a judge needs only one thing to deprive an innocent man of all his citizen's rights and sentence him to hard labour: enough time. Only give thejudge time to carry out certain formalities, for which he is paid a salary, and that is the end of the matter. A fat hope, then, of finding justice and protection in this filthy little town a hundred and twenty miles from the railway! And how absurd to think of justice, anyway, in a society which welcomes every kind of brutality as a rational and functional necessity, while every merciful act—the acquittal of an accused person, for instance—provokes a great howl of indignation and vindictiveness!

Next morning Ivan Gromov rose from his bed aghast, his brow cold with sweat, now fully convinced that he was liable to be arrested any minute. If yesterday's irksome thoughts had remained with him so long, he reflected, there must be a grain of truth in them, they really couldn't have occurred to him for no reason whatever.

A police constable strolled past his windows: no accident, that. And over there two people had stopped near the house. They were not speaking. Now, why not?

Days and nights of agony began for Gromov. When anyone passed his windows or entered his courtyard he took them for spies and detectives. At noon a police inspector usually drove down the street in his carriage and pair. He was on his way to police headquarters from his near-by country estate, but Gromov always felt that he drove too fast, with a special air, and was evidently haste^ng to report that a most important criminal was in town. Gromov trembled at every ring and knock on the gate, and he suffered when he met any stranger visiting his landlady. On encountering policemen and gendarmes he would smile and whistle to convey an air of nonchalance. For nights on end he lay awake expecting to be arrested, but snoring aloud and sighing as if in slumber so that his landlady should think him asleep. If he couldn't sleep he must be suffering the pangs of conscience, musm't he? Rather a give-away, that! Facts and common sense argued &at all these phobias were neurotic nonsense, and that there was really nothing so terrible about arest and prison, if you took the broad view and had a clear conscience. But the more intelligent and logical his reasoning, the stronger and more harrowing became his mental anguish. He was like a certain hermit who wanted to hew himself a home in virgin forest, but the more forcefully he plied his axe the more densely and vigorously did the trees burgeon around him. In the end Gromov saw how useless it all was, gave up reasoning altogether and yielded to utter despair and terror.

He began seeking seclusion and avoiding people. His job had always been uncongenial, but now it became downright unbearable. He was afraid of trickery: of having a bribe slipped surreptitiously into his pocket and then being caught, of making a chance error tantamount to forgery with official papers, or of losing someone else's money. Never, oddly enough, had his imagination been as supple and ingenious as it now was when he daily concocted thousands of miscellaneous pretexts for serious apprehension about his freedom and honour. But with this went a considerable weakening of interest in the external world, especially in books, and his memory began to fail notably.

When the snow melted in spring two semi-decomposed corpses were found in a gulley near the cemetery: an old woman and a young boy bearing signs of death by violence. These corpses and the wiknown murderers became the talk of the town. To show that he was not the killer Gromov would walk the streets smiling, and on meeting anyone he knew he would blench, blush and assert that there was no fouler crime than the murder of the weak and defenceless. But soon wearying of this lie, he decided on reflection that the best thing for someone in his position was to hide in the landlady's cellar. He sat in that cellar for a day, a night and another day, frozen to the marrow, then waited for darkness and crept stealthily up to his room like a burglar. He stood in the middle of that room until dawnwn, perfectly still, his cars cocked. In the early morning before sunrise some stove-makers called on his landlady. They had come to rebuild the kitchen stove, as Gromov was well aware, but his fears told him that they were policemen in stove- makers' clothing. Stealing out of the flat, he dashed panic-stricken down the street without hat or coat. Barking dogs chased him, a man shouted somewhere behind him, the wind whistled in his cars, and Gromov thought that all the violence on earth had coiled itself together behind his back and was pursuing him.

He was caught and taken home, his landlady was sent for a doctor. Dr. Andrew Ragin (of whom more later) prescribed cold compresses for his head and laurel-water drops, then shook his head sadly and went away, telling the landlady that he did not propose to call again because one shouldn't do anything to stop a man taking leave of his senses. Unable to afford living and being treated at home, Gromov was soon sent to hospital and put in the ward for venereal diseases. He could not sleep at night, he behaved childishly, he disturbed other patients and soon Dr. ilagin arranged for his transfer to Ward Number Six.

A year later the to^n had quite forgotten Gromov, and his landlady dumped his books in a sledge in an out-building where they were pilfered by urchins.

IV

As I said before, Gromov's left-hand neighbour is the little Jew Moses, while his right-hand neighbour is a bloated, nearly globular peasant with an obtuse, utterly witless expression. This is an inert, gluttonous animal with dirty habits. Long bereft of all capacity to think and feel, it constantly exudes a sharp, acrid stench.

Cleaning up the mess, Nikita beats the creature cruelly, takes a real swing, doesn't pull his punches. The odd thing, though, is not the beating, because you can get used to that, but the failure of that stupefied animal to respond to blows with any sound, movement or expression of the eyes: it only rocks gently, like a heavy barrel.

The fifth and last denizen ofWard Number Six is a townsman of the lower sort, a former post-

'You must congratulate me,' he often tells Gromov. 'I have been put in for the Order of St. Stanislaus, second class with star. The second class with star is only given to foreigners, but for some reason they want to make an exception in my case.'

He smiles, shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment. 'I must say I never expected this.'

'I know nothing about these things,' Gromov grimly avers.

'But do you know what I'm going to get sooner or later?' continues the ex-sorter, slyly screwing up his eyes. 'I mean to have the Swedish "Pole Star". That's a decoration worth angling for: a white cross with black ribbon. Most handsome.'

This hut is probably the most boring place on earth. Each morning the patients (the paralytic and the fat peasant excepted) wash from a big tub in the lobby and dry themselves on the tails of their smocks. Then they drink tea in tin mugs brought from the main building by Nikita. Each rates one mugful. At noon they eat sour cabbage stew and gruel, in the evenings they sup on gruel left over from lunch. In between times they lie, sleep, look out of the windows, pace the ward. And so it goes on every day. Even the ex-sorter always talks about the same old medals.

Fresh faces are rarely seen in Ward Number Six. The doctor stopped admitting new lunatics long ago and there are few people in this world with a taste for visiting asylums. Simon the barber attends the ward once every two months. How he shears the maniacs, how Nikita helps him, how the appearance of this drunken, grinning barber always strikes panic into the patients . . . over all that we shall draw a veil.

No one ever looks into the ward besides the barber, the patients are doomed to see no one but Nikita day in day out.

Recently, though, a rather odd rumour has swept the hospital.

The rumour is this: Ward Number Six has, allegedly, begun to receive visits from the doctor!

V

An odd rumour indeed!

Dr. Andrew Yefimovich Ragin was a remarkable man in his way. In early youth he was extremely pious, it is said, and he was preparing for a church career, proposing to enter theological college after leaving school in 1863, but his father, a Doctor of Medicine and surgeon, supposedly uttered a scathing laugh and announced categorically that he would disown the boy if he became a cleric. How true that is I have no idea, but Ragin himself has often confessed that he never had any vocation for medicine or for science in general.

Be that as it may, he did not take holy orders after graduating in medicine. He evinced no piety, bearing as little resemblance to a man of God at the beginning of his medical career as he docs now.

He lus a heavy, rough, uncouth look, his face, beard, flat hair and powerful, clumsy build reminding one of some paunchy, high­handed, cantankerous highway inn-keeper. His face is stern and covered with blue veins, the eyes are small, the nose is red, he is tall and broad-shouldered, he has enormous hands and feet, and he looks as if he could kill a man with a single blow. But he treads softly, walking cautiously and stealthily. Meeting someone in a narrow corridor, he is always first to stop and give way, apologizing in a gentle, reedy little voice: not in the bass tones which one might have expected. He has a small growth on his neck which prevents his wearing hard, starched collars, so he always goes about in a soft linen or cotton shirt. Alto­gether he doesn't dress like a medical man. He wears the same suit for ten years on end, while his new clothes, which he usually buys in a Jewish shop, look just as worn and dishevelled on him as the old. He sees his patients, eats his meals and goes visiting, all in the same old frock-coat: and this not out of meanness but because he just doesn't care about his appearance.

When Ragin came to to^ to take up his post in the hospital, that stalled charitable institution was in a parlous plight. In wards, corridors and hospital courtyard you could barely draw breath for the stink. The ambulance men, the nurses and their children slept in the wards with the patients, complaining that the cockroaches, bed-bugs and mice made their lives a misery. There was endemic erysipelas in the surgical department, the entire hospital boasted only two scalpels and not a single thermometer, and potatoes were kept in the baths. The manager, the matron and the assistant doctor robbed the patients, and the old doctor (Ragin's predecessor) was reputed to have sold surgical spirit on the sly, having also set up a regular harem among his nurses and women patients. These irregularities were common knowledge in to^ and were even exaggerated, but people took them calmly. Some defended them by saying that only lower-class to^sfolk and peasants went to hospital, and such people couldn't complain because they were far worse off at home. They could hardly expect to be fed on the fat of the land! Others pleaded that the to^ lacked the resources to maintain a good hospital on its o^, unaided by the Rural District. People should be grateful to have any hospital at all. But the newly established Rural District Council opened no clinic either in the to^ or its environs on the grounds that the to^ already had its hospital.

Having looked the hospital over, Ragin concluded that it was an immoral institution, detrimental to its ^mates' health in the ultimate degree. The wisest course would be to discharge the patients and close the place do^n, he felt; but he decided that he lacked the will-power to accomplish this on his o^n, and that it would be useless anyway. Expel physical and moral filth from one place and it will only crop up elsewhere, so one should wait for it to evaporate spontaneously. Besides, ifpeople have opened a hospital and tolerate it they must have a need for it. Now, these superstitions and all these sickeningly foul living conditions are needed since they become transformed into something useful in due course, as dung produces fertile soil. There is nothing on earth so fine that some element ofpollution was not present at its birth.

Having taken on the job, Ragin adopted an attitude of apparent indifference ro the irregularities. He only asked the orderlies and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and installed two cupboards of instruments. The manager, the matron, the chief medical assistant and the surgical erysipelas all stayed put.

Andrew Ragin much admires intellect and integrity, but lacks the character and confidence to create a decent, intelligent environment. As for issuing orders and prohibitions or insisting on anything, he is positively impotent, as ifhe had taken a vow never to raise his voice or use the imperative mood. He finds it hard to say 'give me this' or 'bring me that'. When he feels hungry he will cough indecisively.

'I wouldn't mind a bit of tea,' he will tell his cook. Or: 'How about a spot of lunch?'

But to tell his manager to stop pilfering, to sack him, to do away with his parasitical sinecure entirely . . . such things are absolutely beyond him. When people try to hoodwink Dr. Ragin, when they flatter him or bring him some blatantly falsified account to sign, he turns red as a beetroot and feels guilty—but signs it all the same. He squirms when his patients complain of hunger or rude nurses.

'All right, all right,' he mutters guiltily. Til go into it later, it's probably a misunderstanding.'

At first Dr. Ragin worked very hard, seeing his patients daily from early morning until lunch, performing operations—attending confim."- mcnts, even. The ladies used to say how considerate he was, and what a first-class diagnostician, especially of children's and women's ailments. But in due course he has become obviously bored with the monotony and palpable futility of his job. He will sec thirty patients today, and tomorrow, like as not, thirty-five will roll up, then forty on the next day—and so on, day in day out, year in year out. But the town's mortality rate does not decline, the patients don't stop coming. To give serious help to forty out-patients between breakfast and lunch is a physical impossibility, and the upshot can only be total fraudulence. In the current year twelve thousand out-patients have been seen, and so twelve thousand people have been cheated, not to put too fme a point on it. But it was also out of the question to install seriously Ш patients in the wards and treat them on scientific principles since such principles as they possessed had nothing scientiftc about them. Moreover, if one left theory out of it and stuck blindly to the rules like other doctors, then the crying need was for hygiene and ventilation instead ofdirt, for healthy food instead of stinking sour cabbage stew, and for decent subordinates instead of crooks.

And then, why stop people dying if death is every man's normal, regular end ? Who cares if some huckster or bureaucrat survives an extra five or ten years? And then again, if one sees medicine's function as relieving pain with drugs the question naturally arises why pain should be relieved. Firstly, suffering is said to bring man nearer to perfection. And, secondly, if mankind should really learn to relieve its sufferings with pills and drops it would completely turn its back on religion and philosophy which have hitherto furnished a bulwark against all manner of ills, and have even brought happiness too. Pushkin suffere"d terribly before he died, and poor Heine lay paralysed for several years. So why should an Andrew Yefimovich or Matryona Savishna be spared pain when they lead such blank lives: lives that would be utterly void and amoeba-like but for these sufferings ?

Depressed by such considerations, Dr. Ragin let things slide and ceased to attend hospital every day.

VI

His routine is as follows. He usually rises at about eight a.m., dresses and has breakfast. Then he sits in his study reading or attends hospital. Here in the' narrow, dark, little hospital corridor sit out-patients waiting to see him. Orderlies and nurses dash past them clattering their boots on the brick floor, scrawny in-patients go through in smocks, corpses and slop-pails are hauled past, children cry, there is a piercing draught. Dr. Ragin knows what sufferings such an ambience causes to those Stricken with fever and tuberculosis, as also to impressionable patients in general, but it can't be helped. He is met in the surgery by his assistant Sergey Sergeyevich. This little fat man with his clean-shaven, freshly washed, plump face and soft, fluid manners resembles a senator more than a doctor's aide in his ample new suit. He has a vast practice in townwn, wears a white tie and thinks limself better qualified than the doctor, who has no practice at all. In a corner of the surgery stands a large icon in a case with a heavy icon-lamp and near that a big candle-holder with a white cover. On the walls are archbishops' portraits, a view of Svyatogorsk Monastery and wreaths of dry corn­flowers. Sergey Sergeyevich is religious, he likes pomp and ceremony. That icon was put here at his expense. On Sundays a patient reads the hy^fls of praise aloud in the surgery on his orders and after the reading Sergey Sergeyevich tours the wards in person, wafting incense from a censer.

The patients are many and time is short, so transactions are confined to brief questions and the issue of some nostrum such as ammoniated liniment or castor oil. Dr. Ragin sits plunged in thought, his cheek propped on his fist, and asks his questions like an automaton. Sergey Sergeyevich also sits there, rubbing his hands and occasionally inter­vening.

'The reason why we fall ill and suffer privation,' says he, 'is that we pray badly to All-Merciful God. Yes, indeed.'

Dr. Ragin does not perform operations during surgery hours. He has been out of practice for so long and the sight of blood upsets him. When he has to open a child's mouth to look in its throat, lis head spins from the din in his ears and tears appear in his eyes if the child shouts and tries to ward him off with its little hands. Hurriedly pre­scribing something, he gestures for the mother to remove her child quickly.

At surgery he soon wearies of his patients' timidity, of their muddled talk, of the proximity of the grandiose Sergey Sergeyevich, of the portraits on the wall and of his own questions which he has been asking for over twenty years without variation. So he leaves after seeing half a dozen people and his assistant receives the rest after he has gone.

With the pleasant thought that he has not practised privately for ages, thank God, and that he won't be interrupted, Dr. Ragin sits down at the desk in his study and starts reading the moment he arrives home. He reads a lot and always much enjoys it. He spends half his salary on books, and three of the six rooms in his apartment are crammed with books and old magazines. His preference is for historical and philo­sophical works, and in the medical field he subscribes only to The

Physician, which he invariably starts reading from the back. He always reads non-stop for several hours on end, without tiring. He does not read rapidly and jerkily, as Ivan Gromov once did, but slowly, pene­tratingly, often pausing at passages which he likes or cannot understand. Near his book he always keeps a carafe of vodka, while a salted gherkin or pickled apple lies directly on the tablecloth, not on a plate. Every half hour he pours himself a glass ofvodka and drinks it without taking his eyes offhis book, then gropes for the gherkin and takes a small bite.

At three o'clock he cautiously approaches the kitchen door and coughs. 'Daryushka, how about a spot to eat?'

After a rather poor and messy meal Dr. Ragin paces his quarters, his arms folded on his chest. He is thinking. Four o'clock strikes, then five, and still he paces about, deep in thought. From time to time the kitchen door creaks and Daryushka's red, sleepy face appears.

'Isn't it time for your beer, Doctor?' she aiks anxiously.

'No, not yet,' he answers. 'I'll just, er, wait a little '

Towards evening Michael Averyanovich, the postmaster, usually arrives: the one person in townwn whose company does not depress Dr. Ragin. Once a very wealthy landowner and cavalry officer, he lost all his possessions and was driven to take a job with the post office in late middle age. He has a sound, healthy look, prolific grey side-whiskers, cultivated m^rners and a loud, agreeable voice. He is kind and sensi­tive, but irascible. When a post-office customer protests, expresses disagreement or simply starts an argument, Michael Averyanovich turns crimson and trembles from head to foot.

'Silence!' he thunders.

His post office has, accordingly, long rated as an institution terrifying to its visitors. Michael Averyanovich respects and likes Dr. Ragin for his erudition and high-mindedness, but he looks downwn on the other to^refolk, regarding them as subordinates.

'Well, here I am,' says he, entering Ragin's quarters. 'Hello there, my good fellow. You must be tired of me by now, what?'

'Far from it, I'm delighted to see you,' answers the doctor. 'You're always welcome.'

The friends sit on the study sofa, smoking in silence for a while.

'How about a spot of beer, Daryushka ?' says Dr. Ragin.

They drink their first bottle in silence, the doctor rapt in thought, Michael Averyanovich with the jolly, vivacious air of one with some­thing fascinating on his mind. It is always the doctor who opens their discussion.

'What a pity . ..' says he slowly and quietly, shaking his head, avoid­ing his companion's eyes (he never looks people in the eye). 'What a great pity, my dear Michael, that our townwn so totally lacks people who either can or will conduct an intelligent, interesting conversation. We're nnder such an enormous handicap. Even our professional men don't rise above vulgarity—they're no better than the lower classes in their level of maturity, you take it from me.'

'Perfectly true. Agreed.'

'As you well know, sir,' the doctor continues with quiet emphasis, 'everything in this world is trivial and boring, higher spiritual mani­festations of the human intellect excepted. The intellect marks a clear boundary line between animal and man, it intimates man's divine nature and even compensates him to some extent for not being immortal. It follows that our intellect is our only possible source of pleasure. Neither seeing nor hearing anything intellectual around us, we are, accordingly, deprived ofpleasure. We do have books, granted, but that's nothing like living conversation and interchange. If you will permit a rather dubious comparison, books are sheet music, while conversation is song itself.'

'Perfectly true.'

Silence ensues. Daryushka comes out ofthe kitchen and pauses in the doorway to listen with an expression of dazed grief, propping her face on her fst.

'Ah me,' sighs Michael Averyanovich. 'You get no sense out of people these days.'

How healthy, happy and interesting life was in the old days, he says, and what a brilliant intelligentsia Russia once had: how highly they had prized the concepts ofhonour and friendship. They lent money with no security, and withholding help from a friend in need was thought disgraceful. And what crusades, adventures and skirmishes there were, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus . . . there was a wonderful land. A certain battalion commander's wife, an eccentric, would don officer's uniform and ride up into the mowitains of an evening, alone and unescorted. She was said to be having an affair with a local princeling in some tribal village.

'Holy Mother, help us,' sighs Daryushka.

'How we drank and ate, what frantic liberals we were!'

Dr. Ragin listens without hearing as he muses and sips his beer.

'I often dream of talking to clever people,' he says unexpectedly, interrupting Michael Averyanovich. 'My father gave me an excellent education, but then forced meto be a doctor, swayed by the ideas ofthe sixties. If I had disobeyed him then I think I should be at the very heart of the intellectual movement now, I'd probably belong to some faculty. Not that intellect lasts for ever, either—it is transitory, of course—but you already know why I have such a weakness for it. Life is a deplorable trap. When a thinking man attains adulthood and mature awareness he can't help feeling hopelessly ensnared. And it is against his will, actually, that he has been called into being from nothingness by certain chance factors.

'What for? What's the meaning and purpose of his existence? He wants to learn, but he isn't told—or he is fobbed off with absurdities. He knocks, but no one opens. Death approaches, and he hasn't asked for that either. You know how prisoners linked by common mis­fortune feel better when they're all together? In the same way the life- trap can be ignored when men with a flair for analysis and deduction forgather and pass the time exchanging proud, free ideas. In that sense intellectual activity is a unique pleasure.'

'Perfectly true.'

Avoiding his companion's eye, quietly, between pauses, Dr. Ragin continues to talk about conversing with intelligent people while Michael Averyanovich listens attentively and agrees.

'Perfectly true.'

'But don't you believe in immortality ?' the postmaster asks suddenly.

'No, my dear Michael, I do not, nor have I any grounds for so believing.'

'I admit I have my doubts too. Actually, though, I do sort of feel I shall never die. Dear me, thinks I to myself, it's time you were dead, you silly old buffer, but there's a little voice inside me saying don't you believe it, you aren't going to die.'

Michael Averyanovich leaves just after nine o'clock.

'Dear me, fate has landed us in a dump!' he sighs as he dons his fur coat in the hall. 'The most maddening thing is, we have even got to die here. Ah, me.'

VII

After showing his friend out Dr. Ragin sits at his desk and resumes his reading. The quiet of evening, and of the night which follows, is unbroken by any sound. Time appears to be standing still, sharing the doctor's immobility as he pores over his book, and nothing seems to exist beside that book and the green-globed lamp. The doctor's coarse, rough face gradually lights up with a smile ofjoyful delight at the stirrings of human intellect.

'Oh, why can't man be immortal?' he wonders. 'Why does the brain have its centres and cr^mies? Wherefore vision, speech, self- awareness, genius, if all these things are doomed to go into the soil and fmally to cool along with the earth's crust—and then to rotate with the eaith round the sun for millions of years, all for no reason? Cooling, rotating . .. these were no reasons for calling forth man, with his lofty, almost divine intellect, out of nothingness and then turning him into clay as if to mock him.

'The transmutation of matter ? But what cowardice to console one­self with such makeshift immortality! The blind workings of the natural process are even more primitive than human folly since folly does at least imply awareness and deliberate intent, of which natural processes are entirely devoid. Only a coward, one whose fear of death exceeds his self-respect, can fmd comfort in the thought of his body being reborn in due course as grass, as a stone, as a toad. To see one's immortality in the transmutation of matter is as strange as to forecast a brilliant future for the violin-case after a valuable fiddle has been smashed and rendered useless.'

When the clock strikes Dr. Ragin lolls back in his arm-chair, closing his eyes for a spot of meditation. Then suddenly, swayed by the fme ideas culled from his book, he casts a glance at his past and present. His past is odious and better forgotten, and the same is true of his present. He knows that, at the very time when he is mentally rotating round the sun along with the cooled earth, people are suffering from illness and unhygienic conditi,bns in the large hospital block adjoining his o^n quarters. There may be someone who can't sleep and is fighting off insects while someone else is contracting erysipelas or groaning because his bandage is too tight. Patients may be playing cards with lhe nurses and drinking vodka. Twelve thousand persons will have been swindled in the current year and the hospital's whole activities are still based on pilfering, squabbles, tittle-tattle, jobbery and rank charlatan­ism, just as they were twenty years ago. The place is still an immoral institution, detrimental to its inmates' health in the ultimate degree. Ragin knows that Nikita thrashes the patients behind the bars ofWard Number Six and that little Moses runs round to^n begging every day.

On the other hand, Ragin is also well aware of the fantastic changes which have taken place in medicine in the last quarter of a century.

In his college days he used to feel that medicine would go the way of alchemy and metaphysics, but now, when he reads at nights, medicine moves him, arousing his admiration—his enthusiasm, even. And, in very truth, what a dazzling break-through! What a revolution! Thanks to antiseptics, operations are performed such as the great Pirogov never even dreamt of. Ordinary general practitioners venture on resections of the knee-joint, abdominal surgery produces only one fatality per hundred operations and stone matters so little hat no one even bothers to write about it. There is a radical treatment for syphilis. And then there is the theory of heredity, isn't there, and hypnotism? There are Pasteur's and Koch's discoveries, there are hygiene statistics, there's our Russian rural medical welfare service. Psychiatry with its modern methods of classifying disorders, its techniques of diagnosis and treatment . . . a gigantic stride fo^ard, all that! The insane no longer have cold water poured over their heads, they are not put in strait-jackets, they are treated decently, they even have theatrical performances and dances arranged for them—or so the newspapers say. Modern views and tastes being what they are, Dr. Ragin knows that an abomination like Ward Number Six can only exist a hundred and twenty miles from the railway in a small to^ where the Mayor and Council are all semi-literate yahoos who regard a doctor as a sort of high-priest to be trusted blindly even when he's pouring molten lead do^ your throat. Anywhere else t4e public and the newspapers would have made mincemeat of this puny Bastille ages ago.

'But what does it matter?' Ragin wonders, opening his eyes. 'What does it all matter? There are antiseptics, there is Koch, there's Pasteur— yet the essence of things has not changed a bit, sickness and mortality still remain. People arrange dances and shows for the lunatics, but they still don't let them loose. So it's all a snare and delusion, and between the best Viennese clinic and my hospital there is no real difference at all.'

Yet grief and a feeling akin to envy prevent him from feeling detached: through fatigue, presumably. His heavy head slumps towards his book and he cushions his face in his hand.

'I am serving a bad cause,' thinks he, 'and I get a salary from those whom I swindle, so I'm dishonest. But I am nothing in myself, am I? I'm only part of an inevitable social evil. All the provincial officials are up to no good, they al get paid for doing nothing. So it's not my fault I'm dishonest, it's the fault of the age. If I had been born two hundred years later I'd have been different.'

When three o'clock strikes he puts out his lamp and goes to his bedroom. He doesn't feel sleepy.

In a fit of generosity Rural District had decided two years previously to make a yearly grant of three hundred roubles towards reinforcing the to^n hospital's medical staff until a country hospital should be opened. The to^n invited a local doctor, a Eugene Khobotov, to help Dr. Ragin. This Khobotov is very young, still in his twenties. He is tall and dark with broad cheek-bones and small eyes: his ancestors must have been Asiatic^, He arrived in town penniless with a small suitcase and an ugly young woman whom he calls his cook, and who has a young baby. Dr. Khobotov wears a peaked cap, jack-boots, and a short fur coat in winter. He is very friendly with Dr. Ragin's assistant Sergey Sergeyevich and with the local treasurer, but calls the other officials aristocrats for some reason and shuns them. In his whole flat there is only one book: The Latest Prescriptions of the Vienna Clinic for 1881. He always takes this book with him when visiting a patient. He plays billiards in the club of an evening, but dislikes cards. He is very much given to such expressions as 'rigmarole', 'mumbo-jumbo with trim­mings', 'don't cloud the issue' and so on.

He attends hospital twice a week, does his ward rounds, sees his patients. Though dismayed by the cupping-glasses and total lack of antiseptics, he does not introduce improvements lest he offend Dr. Ragin. He considers his colleague Dr. Ragin an old rogue, sus­pects him of being pretty well off and secretly envies him. He would like Ragin's job.

One spring evening at the end of March, when the snow had all melted and starlings sang in the hospital garden, the doctor came out to see his friend the postmaster to the gate. At that very moment the little Jew Moses was entering the yard on his way back from a foraging expedition. He wore no hat, he had thin galoshes on bare feet and he carried a small bag which contained his takings.

'Give us a copeck,' he asked the doctor, shivering with cold and smiling.

Dr. Ragin, who could never say no, gave him a ten-copeck piece.

'This is quite wrong,' he thought, looking at the hare feet and thin red ankles. 'And in this damp weather too!'

Moved by mingled pity and distaste, he followed the Jew into the hut, glancing now at the bald pate, now at the ankles. As the doctor entered Nikita sprang from his pile ofjunk and stood to attention.

'Good day, Nikita,' said Dr. Ragin softly. 'You might perhaps give this Jew some hoots or something, or else he'll catch cold.'

'Very good, sir. I'll notify the manager, sir.'

'Please do. Ask him in my name, will you? Tell him I said so.'

The door leading from lobby to ward was open. Ivan Gromov was lying on his bed, leaning on one elbow and listening anxiously to the strange voice, when he suddenly recognized the doctor. Vibrating with fury, he leapt up and ran into the centre of the ward, his face crimson with rage, his eyes bulging.

'The doctor's here!' he shouted with a bellow of laughter. 'And about time too! Congratulations, gentlemen! The doctor honours us with his presence!

'You bloody rat!' he shrieked, stamping his foot in a frenzy never witnessed in the ward before. 'Kill the vermin! No, ^^ing's too good for him—drownwn him in the latrine!'

Hearing this, Dr. Ragin peeped into the ward from the lobby.

'What for?' he asked softly.

'What for?' shouted Gromov, approaching with a minatory air and frantically wrapping his smock around him. 'Well may you ask!

'Thief!' he brought out with abhorrence, his lips working as if he wanted to spit. 'Charlatan! Butcher!'

'Calm yourself,' said Dr. Ragin with a guilty smile. 'I have never stolen anything, I do assure you. As for the other things, you are prob­ably much exaggerating. I see you are angry with me. Calm yourself, please, if you can, and tell me quietly what you're so angry about.'

'Well, why do you hold me here?'

'Because you are ill.'

'Yes, I am. But aren't there dozens—hundreds—of other madmen at large because you're too ignorant to distinguish them from the sane? So why should 1—why should these other wretches—be cooped up here as scapegoats for everyone else? You, your assistant, the manager and all the other hospital riff-raff are immeasurably lower on the moral scale than any one of us. So why are we shut up? Why not you? Where's the logic of it?'

'Morality and logic are neither here nor there. It's al due to chance. Whoever has been put in here stays put, and whoever hasn't runs about outside, that's all. There is no morality or logic about my being a doctor and your being a mental patient, it's sheer blind chance.'

'That gibberish means nothing to me,' said Gromov in a hollow voice, and sat on his bed.

Little Moses, whom Nikita hesitated to search in the doctor's presence, had deployed some hunks of bread, pieces ofpaper and little bones on his bed. Still shivering with cold, he intoned something quickly in Yiddish. He probably imagined that he had opened a shop.

'Let me out of here,' said Gromov in quavering tones.

't i, »

'I can't.'

'Why not? Why ever not?'

'It's not in my power, that's why. And just think: what would you gain if I did release you ? If you went off the townspeople or police would only pick you up and bring you back.'

'Yes, yes, quite true,' said Gromov, and wiped his forehead. 'It's awful. But what am I to do? You tell me that.'

Dr. Ragin liked Gromov's voice and intelligent, grimacing young face. Wanting to comfort the young man and soothe him, he sat down on the bed beside him.

'You ask me what to do,' Ragin said after a little thought. 'The best thing in your position would be to run away, but that's no use unfor­tunately as you'd only be picked up. Society's all-powerful when it protects itself from criminals, mental patients and other awkward customers. There's only one thing you can do: accept the idea that you're a fixture here.'

'But what use is it to anyone?'

'Since there are such things as prisons and lunatic asylums someone must be shut up in them, mustn't they? If not you, then I, if not I, then someone else. Just wait until prisons and asylums cease to exist in the distant future, then there won't be any bars on the windows or hospital smocks. Sooner or later, of course, that time will come.'

Gromov smiled derisively.

'You'rejoking,' he said, screwing up his eyes. 'You aid your minion Nikita . . . you have no concern with the future, your sort of gentry haven't. But better times are on the way, my dear sir, you take that from me. I may sound banal, you may laugh at me, but a new life will dawnwn. Justice shall triumph, our day will come. I shan't see it, I shall be dead, but someone's great-grandchildren will live to sec it. I greet them with all my heart and I'm glad for their sake: glad, I tell you! March forward, my friends, and may God be with you.'

Eyes shining, Gromov arose and stretched his arms towards the window.

'From behind these bars I bless you,' he continued in throbbing tones. 'Long live justice! I rejoice!'

'I see no special cause for rejoicing,' said Dr. Ragin, who found Gromov's gesture theatrical, yet most pleasing. 'There will be no prisons or asylums, and justice shall indeed prevail: as you say, sir. But the real essence ofthings won't change, will it? The laws ofnature will stay as they are. People are going to fall ill, grow old and die, just as they do now. And gloriously as your dawnwn may irradiate your life, you'll still end up nailed in your coffin and thrownwn in a pit.'

'But what about immortality?'

'Oh, really!'

'You may not believe in it, but I do. Someone in Dostoyevsky or Voltaire says that if God hadn't existed man would have invented him. And I profoundly believe that if there's no such thing as immortality human genius will sooner or later invent it.'

'Well said,' remarked Ragin, smiling delightedly. 'I'm glad you're a believer. With such faith a man can live a merry life, even immured inside a wall. Did you receive any education, sir?'

'Yes, I went to university, but didn't take my degree.'

'You're a thinking man and a thoughtful one. You can find conso­lation inside yourself in any surroundings. Free, profound speculation on the meaning oflife, utter contempt for the world's foolish vanities ... those are two blessings higher than any other knownwn to man. And you can possess them though you live behind triple rows of bars. Diogenes lived in a barrel, but was happier than all the emperors of this world.'

'Your Diogenes was an ass,' Gromov pronounced morosely. 'But why all this stuff about Diogenes and the meaning of something or other?'

He jumped up in sudden rage.

'I love life, love it passionately! I have a persecution complex, I suffer constant, agonizing fears, but there are moments when such a lust for life comes over me that I fear my brain will burst. I have such a tremendous appetite for life, tremendous!'

He paced the ward excitedly.

'In my day-dreams I see visions,' he said in hushed tones. 'People sort of haunt me, I hear voices and music, I seem to be walking through a forest or along a beach, and I do so long for the hum and bustle of life.

'Tell me now, what's the news ?' Gromov asked. 'What's going on?'

'In townwn, you mean, or in general ?'

'Oh, tell me about the town firrt and then about things generally.'

'All right. The townwn is an abysmal bore, what with no one to talk to, no one to listen to and no new faces. Actually, though, a young doctor did turn up recently: Khobotov.'

'He came while I was still in circulation. What's he like then, pretty crude?'

'Well, he's not exactly cultured. It's odd, you know, there's no mental stagnation in St. Petersburg and Moscow, so far as one can see. Things are humming there, so they must have some pretty impressive people around. But why do they always send us people of whom the less said the better? Unfortunate town!'

'Yes, unfortunate indeed,' sighed Gromov, and laughed. 'But how are things in general ? What do the newspapers and magazines say?'

The ward was already in darkness. The doctor stood up to describe what was being written, abroad and in Russia, and spoke of current intellectual trends. Gromov listened carefully and asked questions, but then suddenly clutched his head as ifgripped by some hideous memory and lay on the bed, his back to the doctor.

'What's the matter?' the doctor asked.

'Not one more word will you hear from me,' said Gromov roughly. 'Leave me alone.'

'Why, what's the matter ?'

'Leave me alone, I tell you. To blazes '

Dr. Ragin shrugged his shoulders, sighed and went out.

'You might clean up a bit, Nikita,' he said as he passed through the lobby. 'The smell's absolutely frightful.'

'Oh, yes sir. Oh certainly, sir.'

'Now, what a nice young man,' thought Ragin as he went to his quarters. 'I think he's the first person I've been able to talk to since I've been here. He can use his brain and he is interested in just the right things.'

While reading, and then as he went to bed, he kept thinking of Gromov, and on waking up next morning he remembered meeting so intelligent and entertaining a person on the previous day, and decided to call on him again at the first opportunity.

X

Gromov lay in the same posture as yesterday, his head clutched in his hands, his legs tucked beneath him. His face was hidden.

'Hello there, my dear friend,' said Ragin. 'Not asleep, are you?'

'Firstly, I'm not your dear friend,' said Gromov into his pillow. 'And secondly, you are wasting your time. Not one word will you get out of me.'

'Odd,' muttered Ragin, flustered. 'We were having such a friendly chat yesterday, but you suddenly took offence and broke off abruptly. I put something clumsily, very likely, or I may have expressed an idea contrary to your convictions.'

'Catch me trusting you? Not likely!' said Gromov, raising himself slightly, and looking at the doctor with contempt and misgiving. His eyes were bloodshot. 'Do your spying and snooping somewhere else, there's nothing for you here. I spotted your little game yesterday.'

'What a strange delusion,' the doctor laughed. 'So you take me for a ^sp^y?'

'I do. A spy or a doctor I'm to be examined by ... what's the difference?'

'Oh, really, I must say! I'm sorry, but you are a fi^^y chap.'

The doctor sat on a stool near the bed and shook his head reproach­fully.

'But let's suppose you are right,' he said. 'Let's suppose I am a deceiver trying to catch you out and give you away to the police. You'll be arrested and tried, but will you be any worse off in court and prison than you are here? And if you're sent to Siberia as an exile—or as a convict, even—would that really be worse than sitting cooped up in this hut? I don't think so. So what have you to fear?'

These words obviously had their effect on Gromov. He quietly sat ^up.

It was about halfhalf past four in the afternoon: the time when Ragin usually paced his rooms and Daryushka asked ifit was time for his beer. The weather was calm and clear.

'I came out for an afternoon stroll,' the doctor said, 'and I'm calling on you, as you see. Spring is here.'

'What month is it now, March?' asked Gromov.

'Yes, it's the end of March.'

'Is it muddy outside?'

'No, not very. ^^ garden paths are walkable.'

'I'd like to go for a carriage drive now, somewhere out of town,' said Gromov, rubbing bloodshot eyes as if half asleep. 'Then I'd like to come home to a warm, comfortable study where some proper doctor would cure my headache. It's ages since I lived like a hu^n being. This place is so foul, it's unbearably disgusting.'

He was tired after the previous day's excitement: inert and reluctant to speak. His fmgers shook and he looked as ifhe had an acute headache.

'There's no difference whatsoever between a warm, comfortable study and this ward,' Ragin said. 'Man finds peace and contentment within him, not in the world outside.'

'Meaning what?'

'The man in the street seeks good or evil in externals—in carriages and studies, that is—but a thinking individual looks to the world within him.'

'Go and -preach that philosophy in Greece where it's warm and smells oforanges. It doesn't fit our climate. Now, who was I discussing Diogenes with—not you, was it?'

'Yes it was—yesterday.'

'Diogenes needed no study or warm building. It was warm there anyway, and he could just lie around in his barrel munching oranges and olives. Now, if he had to live in Russia he'd be begging to be allowed indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with cold, you mark my words.'

'No. One can ignore cold, just like any other pain. "Pain is the vivid impression of feeling pain," Marcus Aurelius said. "Will yourself to change that impression, jettison it, stop complaining—and the pain will vanish." That's quite right. Your sage, or your ordinary thinking, thoughtful individual . . . it's this very contempt for suffering which distinguishes them. They are always content and nothing ever surprises them.'

'I must be an idiot then, since I suffer, since I'm discontented and since I am surprised at human depravity.'

'Don't say that. If you meditate more you will appreciate the insignificance of all those exte^^s that so excite us. One must seek the meaning of life, for therein lies true happiness.'

'Meaning of life. . . .' Gromov frowned. 'Exte^ls, internals. . . . This makes no sense to me, sorry.

'I know only one thing,' he said, standing up and looking angrily at the doctor. 'I know God made me of warm blood and nerves, that I do know, sir. Now, organic tissue with any spark of vitality must react to every stimulus. So react I do! To pain I respond with shouts and t^^, me^mess makes me indignant, revolting behaviour sickens me. This is what life means, actuary, or so I The lower the organism the

less sensitive it is and the weaker its response to stimuli, whereas the higher it is the more receptively and forcefully does it react to reality. Why, it's so obvious! The man's a doctor and doesn't even know a little thing like that! Contempt for suffering, per^^ent contentment, never being surprised ... it just means s^tang to that condition.'

Gromov pointed to the obese, bloated pedant.

'Or else it means so hardening oneself through suffering that one loses all sensitivity—gives up living, in other words.

'I'm no sage or philosopher, sorry,' Gromov went on irritably. 'These things are beyond me and I'm in no state to argue.'

'Far from it, you argue very weU.'

'The Stoics whom you caricature ... they were remarkable men, but their doctrine ground to a halt two thousand years ago, it hasn't budged an inch since. Nor wiU it, impractical and moribund as it is. It has only succeeded with the minority which spends its time studying and sampling various creeds. The maues haven't grasped it, A doctrine of indifference to wealth and comfort, of contempt for suffering and death . . . it's quite beyond the great majority of people since both wealth and comfort have passed them by. If such people despised suffering they would be despising life itself. Hunger, cold, injury, loss, fear of death a la Hamlet . •. why, these feelings are the very essence of being a man! They're the whole of life, these sensations are. Life may irk you, you may loathe it, but despise it you mustn't. And so, I repeat, Stoicism can never have a future, whereas sensitivity to pain, the capacity for response to stimuli . . . these things have been moving forward from the beginning of time to our o^ day, as you can see for yourself.'

Gromov suddenly lost track ofhis thoughts, paused and rubbed his forehead with annoyance.

'I had something vital to say, but I've lost the thread,' he remarked. 'Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Now, this is my point. A Stoic once sold himself into slavery to ransom a neighbour. So even a Stoic reacted to a stimulus, you see, since so generous a deed as self-denial for one's neighbour's sake presupposes feelings of outraged sympathy. In this prison I have forgotten eve^^^g I ever studied, or else I should remember a few other things too. Well, take Christ. He reacted to the external world with tears, smiles, grief, wrath—with anguish, even.

He didn't greet suffering with a smile or despise death, but prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that this cup should pass Him by.'

Gromov laughed and sat do^.

'Let's admit that man's peace and contentment arc within him, not outside him,' said he. 'And let's admit that one should despise suffering and never feel surprise. Dut you, now—what grounds have you for preaching this doctrine? Arc you a sage? A philosopher?'

'No, I'm no philosopher, but everyone should prcach this doctrine. because it's rational.'

'Now, why do you think yourself competent in the search for meanings, contempt for suffering and the rest of it? That's what I'd like to know. Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea what suffering is? Tell me, were you beaten as a child?'

'No, my parents abhorred corporal punishment.'

'Well, my father beat me cruelly. My father was a cantankerous government official with a long nose, a yellow neck and piles. But let's go on about you. No one ever laid a finger on you in your life, no one ever frightened you, no one hit you. You're as strong as an ox. You grew up under your father's wing, you studied at his expense, you picked up a soft job straight away. For twenty years and more you've had rent-free accommodation with heating, lighting and service, besides which you have been entitled to work how you liked, as much as you liked: even to do nothing at all. Being lazy and spineless by nature, you tried to arrange things so that nothing bothered you or budged you from the spot. You delegated your job to your assistant and those other swine while you sat in the warmth and quiet, saving money, reading a book or two, indulging yourself with speculations in the sphere of higher nonsense, andalso'—Gromov looked at the doctor's red nose—'by hitting the bottle. You've never seen life, in other words, you know nothing about it. You're conversant with reality only in theory. And why is it you despise suffering, why don't you ever feel surprise? There's a very simple reason. The vanity ofvanities, externals, inte^ls, despising life, suffering and death, the meaning of existence, true happiness ... it's the philosophy best suited to a typical lackadaisical Russian. Say you see a peasant beating his wife. Why meddle? Let him beat away, they're both going to die anyway sooner or later. Besides, that peasant is degrading himself with his blows, not the person he's hitting. Getting drunk is stupid, it's not respectable, but you die ifyou drink and you die ifyou don't. A peasant woman comes along with toothache. So what? Pain is just the impression of feeling pain, besides which no one can get through life without sickncss and we are all going to die. So let that woman clear out and leave me to my meditations and vodka. A young man wants advice on what to do, how to live. Anyone else might reflect before answering, but you have your ready-made reply: seek the meaning oflife or true bliss. But just what is this fantastic "true bliss"? That, of course, we're never told. We are kept behind these bars, we're left to rot, we're given hell, but that is all splendidly rational because there's no difference between this ward and a warm, comfortable study. Oh, it's a convenient philosophy, this is! You don't have to do anything, your conscience is clear and you think yourself a sage.

'No, sir, there is no philosophy, no thought, no breadth of vision in that, there's only laziness, mumbo-jumbo and a sort ofdrugged trance.

'Yes, indeed,' said Gromov, angry again. 'You may despise suffering, but you catch your fmger in the door and I bet you'll scream your head 0ff!'

'Or perhaps not,' Ragin said with a gentle smile.

'You damn well would! And suppose you suddenly became para­lysed. Or say some crass upstart used his rank and position to insult you in public, and you knew he was bound to get away with it—that would teach you to refer people to the meaning of existence and true bliss.'

'This is highly original,' said Dr. Ragin, smiling with pleasure and rubbing his hands. 'Your bent for generalizations impresses me most agreeably, while your character-sketch of me . . . quite brilliant, sir! I enjoy talking to you hugely, I do confess. Well, sir, I've heard you out. Now will you be so good as to listen to me?'

XI

The conversation lasted another hour or so and obviously made a great impression on Ragin. He took to visiting the ward daily. He went there in the mornings and afternoons, and the evening darkness often overtook him deep in discussion with Gromov. Gromov was wary of him at first, suspecting him of evil intent and expressing open hostility, but then grew used to him, changing his harsh attitude for ironical condescension.

Soon rumours of Dr. Ragin's visits to Ward Number Six spread through the hospital. Why did he go there? Why did he stay for hours on end, what did he talk about, why didn't he write any prescriptions ? His assistant, Nikita, the nurses ... none of them could make sense ofit.

His conduct seemed peculiar. He was often out when Michael Avcrya- novich called, which had never happened before, and Daryushka was extremely put out because the doctor no longer had his beer at a definite hour and wa.s even late for his meals sometimes.

Once, at the end ofJune, Dr. Khobotov called to sec Ragin about something. Not finding him at home, he sought him in the yard, where he learnt that the old doctor was visiting the mental patients. Khobotov went into the hut and paused in the lobby, where he heard the following conversation.

'We shall never sec eye to eye and you'll never convert me,' said Gromov irritably. 'Yon arc totally ignorant of life, you have never suffered, you've only battened, leech-like, on others' woes, whereas I've never stopped suffering from my day of birth until now. So I frankly tell you I think myself your superior, more competent in every way. I have nothing to learn from you.'

'I have absolutely no idea of converting you,' Ragin brought out quietly, regretting the other's unwillingness to understand him. 'Anyway, that's not the point, my friend. The point is not that you have suffered and I haven't. Suffering and joy are transitory, so let's ignore the wretched things. The point is that you and I are thinking beings. We see each other as people capable of meditation and dis­cussion, and that makes for our solidarity, different as our views may be. My friend, if you did but know how bored I am with general idiocy, mediocrity, obtuseness—and how glad I always am to talk to you. You are an intelligent man and I revel in your company.'

Khobotov opened the door an inch or two and peeped into the ward. The nightcapped Gromov and Dr. Ragin sat side by side on the bed. The madman grimaced and shuddered, frenziedly wrapping his smock about him, while the doctor sat perfectly still, his head lowered, his face red, helpless and sad-looking. Khobotov shrugged his shoulders, grinned and exchanged glances with Nikita. Nikita too shrugged.

Next day Khobotov came into the hut with Dr. Ragin's assistant. Both stood and eavesdropped in the lobby.

'The old man seems to have a screw loose,' said Khobotov, coming out of the hut.

'Lord, have mercy on our souls,' sighed the grandiose Scrgcy Sergeycvich, carefully avoiding the puddles so as not to dirty his brightly polished boots. 'Quite frankly, I've been expecting this for some time, my dear Eugene.'

XII

From now onwards Dr. Ragin began to notice an aura of mystery around him. Orderlies, nurses and patients would shoot him quizzical glances when they met him and then whisper to each other. Little Masha, the manager's daughter, whom he used to enjoy meeting in the hospital garden . . . when he smiled and went to stroke her head she now ran away for some reason. The postmaster Michael Averyanovich no longer said 'Perfectly true!' when listening to Ragin, but became mysteriously embarrassed, looked thoughtful and sad, and muttered 'Yes, quite so.' For some reason he was advising his friend to give up vodka and beer, but he didn't come straight out with this, he hinted at it, as a man of tact, and spoke of some battalion commanding officer ('grand chap') or else of a regimental chaplain ('first-rate bloke') who had taken to drink and fallen ill, but completely recovered after going on the wagon. Dr. Ragin's colleague Khobotov visited him a couple of times, also advising him to give up spirits, and recommending him to take potassium bromide for no obvious reason.

In August Dr. Ragin received a letter from the Mayor asking him to call on most urgent business. Reaching the to^n hall at the appointed time, Ragin found the district military commander, the county school superintendent, a town councillor, Khobotov, and also a stout, fair individual who was introduced as a doctor. This doctor had an unpronounceable Polish surname, lived on a stud farm about twenty miles away and happened to be passing through to^n.

'There's a memorandum here that's up your street, like,' the councillor told Ragin after they had exchanged greetings and sat do^n at the table. 'Dr. Khobotov here says there ain't enough space for the dispensary in the main block. It ought to be moved to one of the huts, he reckons. Now, moving it ain't no problem', of course—but the thing is, that hut's in need of repair, like.'

'Yes, there will have to be repairs,' said Ragin after some thought. 'Say we take the corner hut as our dispensary, then I suppose it will require five hundred roubles at least. It's an unproductive expense.'

There was a short pause.

'Ten years ago,' Ragin continued quietly, 'I had the honour to report that this hospital as it stood was a luxury which the to^n couldn't afford. It was built in the forties, but things were different then, weren't they? The townwn spends too much on unneeded buildings and unnecessary posts. If we changed the system we could maintain two model hospitals on the same money, I reckon.'

'Oh, so it's the system we want to change now, is it?' the councillor asked forcefully.

'I have already had the honour of reporting that our health depart­ment should be transferred to the Rural District.'

'You give the R.D.C. money and they'll only steal it,' the fair-haired doctor laughed.

'That's the way of it,' agreed the councillor, also with a laugh.

Dr. Ragin gazed with dull, lack-lustre eyes at the fair-haired doctor.

'One should be fair,' he said.

Another pause followed. Tea was served. Very embarrassed for some reason, the military commander reached across the table to touch Ragin on the arm.

'You've quite forgotten us, Doctor,' he said. 'But then you are a bit of a monk—don't play cards, don't like women. You're bored with the likes of us.'

Living in this town . .. oh, what a bore for any self-respecting man, they all started saying. There was no theatre, no music. At the last club dance there had been about twenty ladies and only two gentlemen. Young people didn't dance, but they were always swarming round the bar or playing cards. Without looking at anyone, Dr. Ragin spoke slowly and quietly about what a great, great pity it was that the towns­folk squandered their vital energies, their hearts and their minds on cards and gossip, that they neither could nor would find time for interest­ing conversation and reading, that they had no use for intellectual pleasures. Intellect was the one fascinating and remarkable thing, all the rest was vulgar triviality.

Khobotov listened carefully to his colleague. Then he suddenly asked a question.

'What is today's date, Dr. Ragin.'

After receiving an answer, Khobotov and the fair-haired doctor began questioning Ragin in the manner of examiners aware of their own incompetence. What day of the week was it? How many days were there in the year? And was it true that Ward Number Six housed a remarkable prophet?

Ragin blushed at this last question.

'Yes, it's a patient, but an interesting young fellow,' he said.

They asked no more questions.

As Ragin was putting his coat on in the hall the nilitary com­mander laid a hand on his shoulder.

'It's time we old fellows were put out to grass,' he sighed.

As he left the townwn hall, Ragin realized that this had been a com­mission appointed to assess his sanity. He blushed as he remembered their questions and for the first time in his life he somehow found himself terribly upset about the state of medicine.

'My God,' thought he, remembering the doctors who had just investigated him. 'Why, these people took a course in psychiatry only recently, they sat an examination. So why such crass ignorance? They have no conception of psychiatry.'

And for the first time in his life he felt insulted and enraged.

Michael Averyanovich called that evening. He came up to Ragin without greeting him and took him by both hands.

'My dear, good friend,' said the postmaster in a voice vibrant with emotion, 'prove that you believe in my sincere good will and consider me your friend. My friend . . •

'I like you because you're so well-educated and generous-hearted,' he went on excitedly, not letting Ragin speak. 'Now, listen to me, my dear fellow. Medical etiquette obliges those doctors to keep the truth from you, but I'm going to give it you straight from the shoulder, soldier-fashion. You're not well. I'm sorry, my dear fellow, but it is so—everyone round here noticed it some time ago. As Dr. Eugene Khobotov was saying just now, you need rest and a change for your health's sake. Perfectly true, that—a capital idea! Now I'm taking my leave in a day or two and I'm going away for a whiff of fresh air. So prove you're my friend—come with me. It will be quite like old times.'

'I feel completely well,' said Ragin after a little thought, 'and I can't go with you. Permit me to prove my friendship in some other way.'

Going off on some trip without rhyme or reason, without books, without Daryushka, without beer, while so brusquely shattering a routine of twenty years' standing ... at first the idea struck him as wildly grotesque. But remembering the interview at the town hall and his depressed state on the way home, he suddenly warmed to the pros­pect of a short break from this abode of morons who thought him insane.

'Now, where are you thinking of going ?' he asked.

'Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw. I spent the five happiest years of my life in Warsaw. A staggering city, that! Let's go, my dear fellow!'

XIII

A week later Dr. Ragin was invited to 'take a holiday': to resign, in other words. He didn't mind and a week later he and Michael Averya- novich were bowling along in a post-chaise on their way to the nearest railway station. The days were cool and bright, the sky was blue, the distant view was clear. They did the hundred and twenty miles to the station in forty-eight hours, with two overnight stops. Whenever they were served tea in dirty glasses at the coaching inns, whenever harnes­sing their horses took too much time, Michael Avcryanovich turned crimson and shook all over.

'Shut up!' he would shout. 'Don't you bandy words with me!'

In the carriage he kept up a non-stop account of his trips in the Caucasus and Poland—so many adventures he had had, such meetings! He spoke so loudly and he looked so amazed about it all that he might have been supposed to be lying, besides which he breathed into Ragin's face while describing all this and guffawed into his ear. This irked the doctor—prevented him from thinking and concentrating.

On the train they went by third-class non-smoker to save money. Half the passengers were of the respectable sort. Michael Averyanovich quickly got to know them all, moving from one seat to another and loudly averring that one shouldn't usc these disgusting railways: the whole thing was such a racket! Now, horseback riding was a different. matter! You could knock up your sixty miles a day, and you felt healthy and hearty afterwards. Now, the reason why we had bad harvests was the draining of the Pripet Marshes. By and large things were in a pretty pickle! He grew heated, spoke loudly and no one else could get a word in edgeways. This endless natter interspersed with loud guffaws and eloquent gestures ... it wearied Ragin.

'Which of us two is the lunatic?' he wondered indignantly. 'Is it I, who try not to annoy the other passengers ? Or this megalomaniac who thinks he is cleverer and more interesting than everyone else, and so won't leave anyone alone?'

In Moscow Michael Averyanovich donned a military tunic without cpaulcttes and trousers with red piping. He wore an officer's peaked cap and cloak in the streets, and the soldiers saluted him. The man had squandered all the good patrician qualities which he had once possessed, Ragin now felt, and had kept only the bad ones. He liked being waited on, even when it was completely pointless. There might be matches on the table in front of his eyes, but that wouldn't stop him shouting for a waiter to bring him a light. When the chambermaid was in his room he walked around in his unde^ear and made no bones about it. He was very off-hand with all the servants, even the old ones, and called them oafs and blockheads when he lost his temper. These were the manners of the squirearchy, Ragin thought, but they were odious.

Michael Averyanovich first took his friend to see the Iverian Madonna. He prayed fervently, bowing to the ground and weeping, and sighed deeply when he had finished.

'Even if you aren't a believer you'll feel easier somehow after a spot of prayer. Kiss the icon, old man.'

Embarrassed, Ragin did so. Michael Averyanovich mouthed a whispered prayer, while his head swayed and his eyes once more brimmed with tears. Then they went to the Kremlin, where they saw the 'Tsar Cannon' and the 'Tsar Bell', even touching them with their fingers. They enjoyed the view across the river, they visited St. Saviour's Temple and the Rumyantsev Museum.

They dined at Testov's. Michael Averyanovich scrutinized the menu for some time, stroking his side-whiskers and adopting the tone of a lusty trencherman completely at home in restaurants.

'Now, my good man,' he would say. 'What treat have you in store today ?'

XIV

The doctor went about, saw the sights, ate and drank, but his sole sensation was of annoyance with Michael Averyanovich. He wanted a holiday from his friend, he wanted to go away and hide, but his friend felt in duty bound not to let Ragin out ofhis sight and to furnish him with as much entertainment as possible. When there were no sights to see he entertained Ragin with talk. Ragin stood it for two days, but on the third he told his friend that he was ill and wanted to stay in all day. In that case, said his friend, he would stay in too. They did need a rest, actually, if their feet were going to stay the course. Ragin lay facing the back of the sofa and listened, teeth clenched, to the friend who fervently assured him that France would certainly smash Germany sooner or later, that Moscow was teeming with crooks and that one should neverjudge a horse's qualities by its looks. The doctor's ears buzzed and his heart pounded, but he was too tactful to ask the friend to go away or be quiet. Luckily Michael Averyanovich tired of being cooped up in a hotel room and went for a stroll in the after­noon.

Left on his o^n, Ragin relaxed completely. How pleasant to lie perfectly still on a sofa and know you are alone in the room! True happiness is impoffiible without privacy. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he wanted the privacy denied to an angel. Ragin wanted to think about what he had seen and heard during the last few days, but he was obsessed with thoughts of Michael Averyanovich.

'He took his holiday and made this trip with me out of friendship and generosity, didn't he?' the doctor brooded in dismay. 'There's nothing worse than such paternalism. Oh, he seems kind and generous all right, he is cheerful enough, but he's such a bore, such a shattering bore! He is like those people who can't speak without uttering wit­ticisms and bons mots, yet leave you feeling how very dull they are.'

On the following days Ragin said he was ill and did not leave his hotel room. He lay facing the back of the sofa, suffering while his friend entertained him with conversation or resting during his friend's absence. He was angry with hirnselffor making the trip, and angry with his friend who became more garrulous and hail-fellow-well-met every day. Ragin simply could not pitch his thoughts in a serious and elevated key.

'I am suffering from the very environment that Ivan Gromov spoke of,' he thought, incensed at his o^n pettiness. 'Anyway, that's all nonsense. When I'm back home everything will be the same as ever.'

St. Petersburg was no different. He stayed in his hotel room for days on end, lying on the sofa, and only got up for a glass of beer.

Michael Averyanovich kept urging him on to Warsaw.

'What do I want there, old man?' pleaded Ragin. 'You go by your­self and let me go home, I beg you.'

'Most certainly not!' Michael Averyanovich protested. 'It's a stagger­ing city. It was there that I spent the five happiest years of my life.'

Lacking the strength of character to get his own way, Ragin went to Warsaw much against his will. There he stayed in his hotel room and lay on the sofa, furious with himself, with his friend and with the servants who stubbornly refused to understand Russian, while Michael Averyanovich—hale, hearty and jolly as ever—scoured the city from morning till evening looking up his old pals. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. After one such night, spent heaven knows where, he returned in the early morning, greatly agitated, red-faced, with hair awry. He spent some time pacing the room muttering to himself, then stood still and said:

'Honour above everything!'

After a little more pacing he clutched his head.

'Yes, honour above everything!' he pronounced tragically. 'I curse the moment when I first thought of corning to this hell-hole.

'Despise me, dear friend,' he told the doctor. 'I have lost all my money gambling. You must lend me five hundred roubles!'

Counting out five hundred roubles, Ragin silently handed them to his friend, who, still crimson with shame and rage, mumbled some superfluous oath, put his cap on and went out. Returning two hours later, he flopped in an arm-chair and gave a loud sigh.

'Honour is saved,' said he. 'So let us be on our way, my friend. I won't stay one minute longer in this bloody city. Swindlers! Austrian spies!'

It was November when the friends returned to their to^n and snow lay deep in the streets. Dr. Khobotov was doing Ragin's job, but was still living in his old lodgings, waiting for Ragin to come back and move out of his hospital rooms. The ugly woman whom he called his cook was already established in one of the out-buildings.

In to^n new rumours were circulating about the hospital. The ugly woman was said to have quarrelled with the manager, and he was alleged to have gone do^n on his knees and asked her forgiveness.

Ragin had to find himself new lodgings on the day after his arrival.

'Excuse an indiscreet question, my friend,' said the postmaster timidly, 'but what are your means?'

Ragin silently counted his money.

'Eighty-six roubles,' he replied.

'I didn't mean that.' Michael Averyanovich was embarrassed, not grasping the doctor's purport. I meant how much money do you have altogether.'

'I've just told you, eighty-six roubles. I have no more.'

Michael Averyanovich had thought the doctor a man ofhonour and integrity, but he still suspected him of having tucked away at least twenty thousand. Now that he knew Ragin for a pauper with nothing to live on, he suddenly burst into tears for some reason and embraced his friend.

XV

Dr. Ragin was now living in a three-windowed cottage belong­ing to a Mrs. Belov, a to^nswoman of the lower sort. This cottage had only three rooms apart from the kitchen. Two of them, with win­dows on the street, were occupied by the doctor while Dar^^hka,

Mrs. Belov and her three children lived in the third and the kitchen. The landlady's lover, a rowdy, drunken yokel who terrified the child­ren and Daryushka, sometimes stayed the night. When he turned up and installed himself in the kitchen, clamouring for vodka, everyone felt uncomfortable. Taking pity on the crying children, the doctor took them into his room and laid them to rest on the floor, which gave him great pleasure.

He still rose at eight in the morning, had tea and then sat down to read his old books and magazines—he couldn't afford new ones. Whether because the books were old, or perhaps because ofhis changed circumstances, reading no longer held his attention, but tired him. For the sake of something to do, he was making a detailed catalogue of his books, gluing labels to the spines and finding this meticulous, mechanical work more interesting than reading. In some mysterious way the monotonous fiddling relieved his brain, his mind would go blank and time passed quickly. Peeling potatoes in the kitchen with Daryushka or picking dirt out ofthe buckwheat ... even that he found interesting. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing by the wall and screwing up his eyes, he listened to the choir and thought about his father, his mother, his university and about different religions. He felt relaxed and sad. Leaving the church later, he would find himself regretting that the service had ended so soon.

He twice went to the hospital to talk to Gromov, but on each occasion Gromov was unusually agitated and angry. He asked to be left in peace, saying that he was utterly sick of trivial tittle-tattle and required of these damn blackguards only one recompense for his sufferings: solitary confinement. Would they deny him even that? As Ragin was taking farewell and wishing him good night each time, Gromov snarled and told him to go to hell.

Now Ragin didn't know whether to go and sec Gromov a third time. He wanted to, though.

Ragin had been accustomed to patrolling his rooms in the afternoons and thinking, but now he would lie facing the back of his sofa between lunch and afternoon tea, indulging in niggling reflections which he was quite unable to repress. He was hurt at receiving neither a pension nor a lump sum in return for more than twenty years' service. He hadn't done an honest job, admittedly, but all functionaries receive pensions without distinction, don't they, honest or dishonest ? It's just the way things are done nowadays, to be fair to every one—it isn't your moral qualities or competence, it's just doing your job, however you do it, that earns you your rank, medals and pension. So why should Ragin be the one exception? He had absolutely no money. He was ashamed to pass the local shop and see the woman who kept it. There were thirty-two roubles owing for beer already and Mrs. Belov was owed money too. Daryushka was selling old clothes and books on the side, and she lied to the landlady: said the doctor was expecting a large sum of money shortly.

He was angry with himself for spending a thousand roubles' savings on his holiday. How useful that sum would be now! He was also annoyed at not being left in peace. Khobotov thought himself in duty bound to visit his sick colleague from time to time. Everything about the mandisgusted Ragin: his smug face, his bad m^^ers, his patronizing air, his use of the word 'colleague', his jack-boots. Most odious of all, Khobotov felt obliged to give Ragin medical treatment and believed that he was actually doing so. He brought a phial ofpotassium bromide on each visit, and some rhubarb pills.

Michael Averyanovich also felt obliged to visit his friend and amuse him. He always entered Ragin's room with an air ofbogus nonchalance, uttering an affected guffaw, and assuring his friend that he looked splendid today and that matters were on the mend, thank God—from which it might be deduced that he thought his friend's situation desperate. He still hadn't paid back the money borrowed in Warsaw and was weighed do^ by a burden of guilt. Being on edge, he tried to guffaw the more uproariously and to tell funnier stories. Now apparently never-ending, his anecdotes and tales were excruciating both to Ragin and himself.

Ragin usually lay on the sofa during these visits, listening with his face to the wall and his teeth clenched. Layers of scum seemed to be forming inside him, and after each of his friend's visits he felt as if these deposits were mounting higher and higher until they seemed to be clutching at his throat.

Trying to suppress trivial worries, he quickly thought about himself, Khobotov and Michael Averyanovich all being bound to die and vanish without trace sooner or later. If one imagined a ghost flashing through space past the earth in a million years' time, it would sec nothing but clay and naked crags. Culture, moral laws ... it will all disappear, it won't even have burdocks growing on it. So what if you are ashamed to face a shopkeeper? What о/the wretched Khobotov? Or Michael Averyanovich's irksome friendship? These things were mere insubstantial trifles.

Such arguments no longer helped, though. Barely had he pictured the earth's globe in a million years' time beforejack-booted Khobotov pop­ped up behind anaked crag—or MichaelAveryanovich, forced guffawand all. One could even hear his mortified whisper about that Warsaw loan.

'I'll pay you back in a day or two, old man. You rely on me.'

XVI

One afternoon Michael Averyanovich arrived when Ragin was lying on the sofa and Khobotov chanced to turn up with his potassium bromide at the same time. Ragin rose ponderously to a sitting position and braced both hands on the sofa.

'Well, old man, you're a far better colour than you were yesterday,' began Michael Averyanovich. 'You look no end of a lad—by golly, so you do!'

'It's high time you were on the mend, dear colleague,' yawned Khobotov. 'You must be sick of all this rigmarole.'

'Oh, we're on the mend all right,' said jolly Michael Averyanovich. 'We shall live another hundred years, shan't we now?'

'I won't say a hundred, but we'll hold out for another twenty,' Khobotov consoled him. 'Don't worry, dear colleague, don't despair. And don't cloud the issue, now.'

'We'll show what stuff we're made of,' guffawed Michael Avery­anovich, slapping his friend on the knee. 'We'll show them a thing or two. We'll be off to the Caucasus next summer with a bit of Iuck, and we'll ride all over it on horseback—clip-

Michael Averyanovich gave a crafty wink.

'We'll marry you, my dear old pal, we'll marry you off.'

Ragin suddenly felt the deposit of scum reach the level ofhis throat. His heart pounded violently.

'That's pretty cheap,' he said, quickly rising to his feet and going over to the window. 'Can't you see you're talking vulgar nonsense?'

He wanted to continue gently and politely, but suddenly clenched his fists in spite of himself, lifting them above his head.

'Leave me alone!' he shouted in a strange voice, turning crimson and trembling all over. 'Clear out of here! Both of you, clear out!'

Michael Averyanovich and Khobotov stood up aid stared at him: first with amazement, then in fear.

'Get out, both ofyou!' Ragin kept shouting. 'Imbeciles! Half-wits! I don't need your friendship, you oaf, or your medicines. Oh, what a rotten, dirty business!'

Exchanging frantic glances, Khobotov and Michael Averyanovich backed towards the door and debouched into the lobby. Ragin seized the bottle ofpotassium bromide. He hurled it after them and it crashed, ringing, on the threshold.

'You go to hell!' Ragin bellowed tearfully, rushing into the lobby. 'To blazes with you!'

After his visitors had left Ragin lay on the sofa, trembling as if with a fever.

'Imbeciles! Half-wits!' he kept repeating for some time.

His first thought on calming downwn was how terribly embarrassed and depressed poor Michael Averyanovich must feel, and how horrible all this was. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Where were his intellect and tact ? What of his search for the meaning of things, his philosophical detachment ?

Ashamed and annoyed with himself, the doctor lay awake al night and went to the post office at ten o'clock next morning to apologize to Michael Averyanovich.

The postmaster was deeply moved.

'We'll forget the whole thing,' sighed he, firmly shaking Ragin's hand. 'Let bygones be bygones.

'Bring a chair, Lyubavkin!' he suddenly yeUed, so loudly that the postal staff and customers all started.

'And you can wait!' he yelled at a peasant woman who was thrusting a registered letter towards him through the griUe. 'Can't you see I'm busy?

'We'll forget al about it,' he continued, addressing Ragin affec­tionately. 'Now, sit downwn, my dear chap, I do implore you.'

He stroked his knees in silence for a minute.

'I never even dreamt of taking offence,' he said. 'One must make allowances for illness, I know that. Yesterday's attack alarmed the doctor and myself, and we had a long talk about you afterwards. Why won'tyou take your health seriously, old man ? You can't go on like this.

'Excuse an old friend's bluntness,' Michael Averyanovich whispered, 'but you do live under most unsuitable conditions: cramped and dirty, with no one to nurse you and no money for treatment. My dear friend, the doctor and I do beg you most earnestly to heed our advice and go into hospital. You will be properly fed there, you'll be nursed and you'll receive treatment. Eugene Khobotov may be a bit uncouth, between ourselves. Still, he does know his stuff and he is completely reliable. He has promised to attend to you.'

Ragin was moved by the postmaster's sincere sympathy and by the tears which suddenly glistened on his cheeks.

'Don't believe a word of it, my good sir,' he whispered, laying his hand on his heart. 'Don't believe them, it's al a trick. There's only one thing wrong with me: it has taken me twenty years to find a single intelligent man in the whole townwn, and he is insane. I'm not ill at all, I'm just trapped in a vicious circle from which there is no way out. But I don't mind, I'm ready for anything.'

'Then go into hospital, my dear fellow.'

'It can be a hole in the ground for all I care.'

'Promise me you'll do everything Dr. Khobotov says, old man.'

'All right, I promise. But I repeat, sir, I am caught up in a vicious circle. Everything, even my friends' sincere sympathy, tends the same way now: to my ruin. I'm finished and I'm man enough to recognize it.'

'You'll get better, old chap.'

'Why talk like that?' asked Ragin irritably. 'What I am now ex­periencing ... most people go through it at the end of their lives. When you are told you have something like bad kidneys or an enlarged heart and you take treatment, when you're called a lunatic or a criminal— when people suddenly take notice of you, in other words—then you can be sure you are trapped in a vicious circle from which you wiU never escape. The more you try to get away the more you are enmeshed in the toils. You may as well give in becauso no human effort will save you now, or that's what I think.'

Meanwhile a crowd was gathering by the grille. Not wanting to be a nuisance, Ragin stood up and began saying good-bye. Michael Averyanovich made him repeat his promise and saw him to the outside door.

Late that afternoon Khobotov unexpectedly presented himself to Dr. Ragin in his short fur coat and jack-boots.

'I have some business with you, dear colleague,' he said in a tone which seemed to dismiss the previous day's happenings. 'Now, how about corning along to a little consultation, eh ?'

Believing that Khobotov wanted to take him for a stroll or really would help him to earn some money, Ragin put his hat and coat on, and they went into the street together. Ragin was glad ofthe chance to redress the wrong which he had done on the previous day and to make peace, so he felt grateful to Khobotov for not breathing a hint about the matter: evidently, to spare his feelings. Such delicacy was hardly to be expected from a being so uncivilized.

'And where is your patient?' asked Ragin.

'In the hospital. I've been wanting to show you this for some time: a most fascinating case.'

Entering the hospital yard, they skirted the main block on their way to the hut where the lunatics were housed: all this in silence for some reason. When they entered the hut Nikitajumped up as usual and stood to attention.

'One of these people has a lung complication,' said Khobotov in an undertone, entering the ward with Ragin.

'Now, you wait here, I'll be back in a moment. I'll just fetch my stethoscope.'

He left.

XVII

Darkness was already falling and Ivan Gromov lay on his bed with his face buried in his piUow. The paralysed patient sat immobile, quietly weeping and moving his lips. The fat peasant and the former post-office sorter were asleep. It was quiet.

Ragin sat on Gromov's bed and waited. But half an hour passed, and instead of Khobotov it was Nikita who came into the ward with a hospital smock, underclothes and slippers clasped in his arms.

'Kindly put these on, sir,' he said quietly.

'Now, here's your bed, you come this way,' he added, pointing to an empty bed which had obviously been brought in recently. It's all right, you'U get better, God willing.'

Now Ragin understood. He went wordlessly to the bed indicated by Nikita and sat do^. Seeing Nikita standing there waiting, he took off all his clothes and felt embarassed. Then he put on the hospital clothes. The pants were too short, the shirt was too long, the smock stank of smoked fish.

'You'll get better, God willing,' repeated Nikita.

He collected Ragin's clothing in his arms, went out and closed the door behind him.

'Oh, who cares?' thought Ragin, bashfully wrapping his smock around him and feeling like a convict in his new garb. 'Nothing matters. Tail-<:oat, uniform or smock .. • whatever you wear, it's all the same.'

What about his watch, though? And the notebook inhis side pocket? What ofhis cigarettes? And where had Nikita taken his clothes? Now perhaps he would never have occasion to put on his trousers, waistcoat and boots for the rest of his life. All this was a bit weird at first— mysterious, even. Ragin was still convinced that there was no differ­ence at all between Mrs. Belov's house and Ward Number Six, that everything on this earth is folly and vanity—yet his hands trembled, his legs grew cold, and he was afraid of Gromov suddenly standing up and seeing him in this smock. He got up, paced about, then sat down again.

He sat for a further half hour, then another hour, and was bored to tears. Could one really spend a day or a week here—years, even, like these people? Here he was having sat do^n, walked about, then sat do^n again. One could go and look out ot the window and cross the room again. But what next? Was one to sit like this all the time like a stuffed dummy, just thinking ? No, one could hardly do that.

Ragin lay do^n, but at once stood up again, wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve and smelt his whole face stinking of smoked fish.- He paced about again.

'This is some misunderstanding,' he said, spreading his arms in perplexity. 'It must be cleared up, it's a misunderstanding '

Then Ivan Gromov awoke, sat up, propped his cheeks on his fists. He spat. He gave the doctor a lazy glance, obviously not understanding for a minute, but then a malevolent leer suddenly came over his sleepy face.

'Oho, so they've shoved you in here too, have they, old man,' he said in a voice hoarse with sleep, closing one eye. 'Welcome, indeed. So far you've been the vampire, now it's your turn to be thrown to the blood­suckers! An excellent idea!'

'This is some misunderstanding,' Ragin said, fearing Gromov's words. He shrugged his shoulders.

'It's a misunderstanding,' he repeated.

Gromov spat again and lay do^n.

'Oh, blast this life!' he grumbled. 'And the really galling, wounding thing is that it won't end with any recompense for sufferings or operatic apotheosis, will it? It will end in death. Some peasants will come and drag one's corpse into a cellar by its hands and feet. Ugh! Oh well, never mind, we'll have our fun in the next world. I shall come back from the other world and haunt these rats. I'll scare them, I'll turn their hair white.'

Little Moses came in, saw the doctor and held out his hand.

'Give us a copeck,' he said.

XVIII

Ragin went over to the window and looked out into open country. Darkness was already falling and a cold, crimson moon was rising above the horizon on the right. Not far from the hospital fence, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, stood a tall white building with a stone wall round it: the prison.

'So this is reality,' thought Ragin, terrified.

Moon, prison, the nails on the fence, a distant flame in the glue factory ... it all terrified him. Hearing a sigh behind him, Ragin tun;^.ed and saw a man with shining stars and medals on his chest who smiled and artfully winked an eye. That too struck Ragin as terrifying.

Ragin told himself that there was nothing peculiar about a moon and a prison, that even sane persons wear medals, and that everything would rot and turn to clay in time, but despair suddenly overwhelmed him and he clutched the window-bars with both hands, shaking them with all his strength. The iron grille did not yield.

Then, to lull his fears, he went to Gromov's bed and sat do^.

'I don't feel too grand, old chap,' he muttered, trembling and wiping off the cold sweat. 'I'm feeling a little low.'

'Then how about a spot of philosophy?' jeered Gromov.

'Oh, God, my God! Yes, er, quite so. You, sir, once remarked that there's no Russian philosophy, but that all Russians, nonentities in­cluded, are philosophers.

'But the philosophic theorizings of nonentities don't do any harm, do they?' Ragin asked, his tone suggesting that he wanted to weep and arouse sympathy. 'So why laugh at my misfortunes, dear friend? And why shouldn't nonentities talk philosophy if they're dissatisfied? An intelligent, well-educated, proud, freedom-loving man made in God's image . . . and his only outlet is to be a doctor in a dirty, stupid little townwn surrounded by cupping-glasses, leeches and mustard plasters all his life! How bogus, how parochial, ye Gods, how cheap!'

'Stuff and nonsense. If you hated doctoring you should have been a Minister of the Crown.'

'There's nothing one can be, I tell you. And we're so feeble, my friend. I used to be detached, I used to argue confidently arid sensibly, but it only took a bit ofrough handling to make me lose heart and cave in. We're a rotten, feeble lot. You are the same, my dear chap. You're intelligent, you have integrity, you imbibed high principles at your mother's breast, but barely were you launched on life before you tired and sickened. You're feeble, I tell you.'

Besides fear and resentment, some other depressing sensation had been nagging at Ragin ever since nightfall. In the end he realized that he wanted his beer and a smoke.

'I'm just going out, my dear chap,' he said. 'I'll tell them to bring us a light. I can't manage like this, can't cope '

Ragin went and opened the door, but Nikita jumped up in a flash and blocked his path.

'Andjust where do you think you're off to?' he asked. 'None of that, now! It's bed-time.'

Ragin was flabbergasted. 'But I only want a t^^ in the yard for a minute.'

'None of that, now. It ain't allowed, you know that.'

Slamming the door behind him, Nikita leant his back against it.

Ragin shrugged his shoulders. 'But what does it matter if I go out for a bit?' he asked.

'I don't understand, Nikita, I must go out,' he said in quavering tones. 'I've got to.'

'Don't you give me no trouble, we can't have that,' Nikita cautioned him.

'Oh, what the blazes is going on?' Gromov suddenly shouted and jumped up. 'What right has he to stop you? How dare they keep us here ? The law, I think, states clearly enough that no one may be deprived of his liberty without a court order. It's an outrage, it's sheer tyranny!'

'Of course it is,' said Ragin, encouraged by Gromov's shout. 'I must go out, I've got to! He has no right to do this. Let me out of here, I tell you !'

'Do you hear me, you stupid bastard ?' shouted Gromov, banging his fist on the door. 'Open up or I'll break down the door, you bloody savage!'

'Open up!' shouted Ragin, shaking all over. 'I insist!'

'You just say one word more!' Nikita answered from behind the door. 'Just you try it, that's all!'

'At least go and fetch Dr. Khobotov. Tell him I asked him to come over, er, for a minute.'

'The doctor will be along tomorrow anyway.'

'They'll never let us out,' Gromov was saying. 'They'll let us rot here. Oh Lord, can there really be no hell in the next world, will these blackguards really get away with it? It's so unfair!

'Open up, scum, I'm choking!' he shouted hoarsely, charging the door. 'I'll beat my brains out! Murdering bastards!'

Nikita swiftly opened the door, roughly shoved Ragin back with both hands and a knee, then swung and punched him in the face. Ragin felt as if a vast wave of salt water had broken over his head and swept him to his bed. And his mouth did indeed taste salty—because blood was corning from his teeth, probably. As if trying to swim away, he struck out and gripped someone's bed. As he did so he felt Nikita hit him twice in the back.

Gromov gave a loud shriek. He must have been hit too.

Then all was quiet. Moonlight filtered through the bars, a network of shadows lay on the floor. It was horrible. Ragin lay downwn and held his breath—terrified, awaiting another blow. He felt as ifsomeone had stuck a sickle in him and twisted it a few times inside his chest and guts. He bit the pillow in his pain and clenched his teeth. Then suddenly a fearful thought past all bearing flashed through the chaos of his mind: thatjust such a pain must be the daily lot, year in year out, ofthese men who loomed before him like black shadows in the moonlight. How could it be that for twenty years and more he had ignored that—and ignored it wilfully? He had not knownwn pain, he had had no conception of it, so this wasn't his fault. And yet his conscience proved as tough and obdurate as Nikita, flooding him from head to heels with an icy chill. He leapt up, wanting to shout at the top of his voice, wanting to rush off and kill Nikita, then Khobotov, then the manager, then Khobo- tov's assistant and fmally himself But no noise came from his chest, his legs would not obey him. Panting, he ripped the smock and shirt on his chest, and flopped unconscious on his bed.