IX
One spring evening towards the end of March, when the snow had disappeared and starlings sang in the hospital garden, the doctor was standing at his gate saying good-bye to his friend the postmaster. At that moment the Jew Moséika, returning with his booty, entered the yard. He was capless, wore a pair of goloshes on his stockingless feet, and held in his hand a small bag of coins.
"Give me a kopeck?" he said to the doctor, shuddering from the cold and grinning.
Andréi Yéfimitch, who could refuse no one, gave him a ten-kopeck piece.
"How wrong this is!" he thought, as he looked at the Jew's bare legs and thin ankles. "Wet, I suppose?" And impelled by a feeling of pity and squeamishness he entered the wing after Moséika, looking all the time now at the Jew's bald head, now at his ankles. When the doctor entered, Nikita jumped off his rubbish-heap and stretched himself.
"Good evening, Nikita!" said the doctor softly. "Suppose you give this man a pair of boots ... that is ... he might catch cold."
"Yes, your Honour. I will ask the superintendent."
"Please. Ask him in my name. Say that I spoke about it."
The door of the ward was open. Iván Dmítritch, who was lying on his bed, and listening with alarm to the unknown voice, suddenly recognised the doctor. He shook with anger, jumped oft his bed, and with a flushed, malicious face, and staring eyeballs, ran into the middle of the room.
"It is the doctor!" he cried, with a loud laugh. "At last! Lord, I congratulate you, the doctor honours us with a visit! Accursed monster!" he squealed, and in an ecstacy of rage never before seen in the hospital, stamped his feet. "Kill this monster! No, killing is not enough for him! Drown him in the closet!"
Andréi Yéfimitch heard him. He looked into the ward and asked mildly:
"For what?"
"For what!" screamed Iván Dmítritch, approaching with a threatening face, and convulsively clutching his dressing-gown. "For what! Thief!" He spoke in a tone of disgust, and twisted his lips as if about to spit.
"Charlatan! Hangman!"
"Be quiet!" said Andréi Yéfimitch, smiling guiltily. "I assure you I have never stolen anything.... I see that you are angry with me. Be calm, I implore you, if you can, and tell me why you want to kill me."
"For keeping me here."
"I do that because you are ill."
"Yes! Ill! But surely tens, hundreds, thousands of madmen live unmolested merely because you in your ignorance cannot distinguish them from the sane. You, the feldscher, the superintendent, all the rascals employed in the hospital are immeasurably lower in morals than the worst of us; why, then, are we here instead of you? Where is the logic?"
"It is not a question of morality or logic. It depends on circumstances. The man who is put here, here he stays, and the man who is not here lives in freedom, that is all For the fact that I am a doctor and you a lunatic neither morals nor logic is responsible, but only empty circumstance."
"This nonsense I do not understand!" answered Iván Dmitri tch, sitting down on his bed.
Moséika, whom Nikita was afraid to search in the doctor's presence, spread out on his bed his booty—pieces of bread, papers, and bones; and trembling with the cold, talked Yiddish in a sing-song voice. Apparently he imagined that he was opening a shop.
"Release me!" said Iván Dmítritch. His voice trembled.
"I cannot."
"Why not?"
"Because it is not in my power. Judge for yourself! What good would it do you if I released you? Suppose I do! The townspeople or the police will capture you and send you back."
"Yes, that is true, it is true ..." said Iván Dmítritch, rubbing his forehead. "It is terrible! But what can I do? What?"
His voice, his intelligent, youthful face pleased Andréi Yéfimitch. He wished to caress him and quiet him. He sat beside him on the bed, thought for a moment, and said:
"You ask what is to be done. The best thing in your position would be to run away. But unfortunately that is useless. You would be captured. When society resolves to protect itself from criminals, lunatics, and inconvenient people, it is irresistible. One thing alone remains to you, to console yourself with the thought that your stay here is necessary."
"It is necessary to no one."
"Once prisons and asylums exist, someone must inhabit them. If it is not you it will be I, if not I then someone else. But wait! In the far future there will be neither prisons nor madhouses, nor barred windows, nor dressing-gowns.... Such a time will come sooner or later."
Iván Dmítritch smiled contemptuously.
"You are laughing at me," he said, winking. "Such gentry as you and your assistant Nikita have no business with the future. But you may be assured, sir, that better times are in store for us. What if I do express myself vulgarly—laugh at me!—but the dawn of a new life will shine, and truth will triumph ... and it will be on our side the holiday will be. I shall not see it, but our posterity shall.... I congratulate them with my whole soul, and rejoice—rejoice for them! Forward! God help you, friends!"
Iván Dmítritch's eyes glittered; he rose, stretched out his eyes to the window, and said in an agitated voice:
"For these barred windows I bless you. Hail to the truth! I rejoice!"
"I see no cause for rejoicing," said Andréi Yéfimitch, whom Iván Dmítritch's movements, though they seemed theatrical, pleased. "Prisons and asylums will no longer be, and justice, as you put it, will triumph. But the essence of things will never change, the laws of Nature will remain the same. Men will be diseased, grow old, and die, just as now. However glorious the dawn which enlightens your life, in the end of ends you will be nailed down in a coffin and flung into a pit."
"But immortality?"
"Nonsense!"
"You do not believe, but I believe. Dostoyeffsky or Voltaire or someone said that if there were no God men would have invented one. And I am deeply convinced that if there were no immortality it would sooner or later have been invented by the great human intellect."
"You speak well," said Andréi Yéfimitch, smiling with pleasure. "It is well that you believe. With such faith as yours you would live happily though entombed in a wall. May I asked where you were educated?"
"I was at college, but never graduated."
"You are a thoughtful and penetrating man. You would find tranquillity in any environment. The free and profound thought which aspires to the comprehension of life; and high contempt for the vanity of the world—these are two blessings higher than which no man can know. And these you will enjoy though you live behind a dozen barred windows. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth."
"Your Diogenes was a blockhead!" cried Iván Dmítritch gloomily. "What do you tell me about Diogenes and the understanding of life?" He spoke angrily, and sprang up. "I love life, love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a ceaseless, tormenting terror, but there are moments when I am seized by the thirst of life, and in those moments I fear to go out of my mind. I long to live ... terribly!"
He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and continued in a lower voice:
"When I meditate I am visited by visions. Men come to me, I hear voices and music, and it seems to me that I am walking through woods, on the shores of the sea; and I long passionately for the vanities and worries of life.... Tell me! What is the news?"
"You ask about the town, or generally?"
"First tell me about the town, and then generally?"
"What is there? The town is tiresome to the point of torment. There is no one to talk to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. But lately we got a new doctor, Khobótoff, a young man."
"He has been here. A fool?"
"Yes, an uneducated man. It is strange, do you know. If you judge by metropolitan life there is no intellectual stagnation in Russia, but genuine activity; in other words, there are real men. But for some reason or other they always send such fellows here. It is an unfortunate town.'"
"An unfortunate town," sighed Iván Dmítritch. "And what news is there generally? What have you in the newspapers and reviews?"
In the ward it was already dark. The doctor rose, and told his patient what was being written in Russia and abroad, and what were the current tendencies of the world. Iván Dmítritch listened attentively, and asked questions. But suddenly, as if he had just remembered something terrible, he seized his head and threw himself on the bed, with his back turned to the doctor.
"What is the matter?" asked Andréi Yéfimitch. "You will not hear another word from me," said Iván Dmítritch rudely. "Go away!"
"Why?"
"I tell you, go away! Go to the devil!"
Andréi Yéfimitch shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and left the ward. As he passed through the hall, he said: "Suppose you were to clear some of this away; Nikita.... The smell is frightful."
"Yes, your Honour!"
"What a delightful young man!" thought Andréi Yéfimitch, as he walked home. "He is the first man worth talking to whom I have met all the time I have lived in this town. He can reason and interests himself only with what is essential."
As he read in his study, as he went to bed, all the time, he thought of Iván Dmítritch. When he awoke next morning, he remembered that he had made the acquaintance of a clever and interesting man. And he decided to pay him another visit at the first opportunity.