“Who are you?” asked the doctor.
“Conshtable,...” answered the constable.
He used to spell it “conshtable” when he signed the receipts at the post office.
“And where are the witnesses?”
“They must have gone to tea, your honor.”
On the right was the parlor, the travelers’ or gentry’s room; on the left the kitchen, with a big stove and sleeping shelves under the rafters. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the constable, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the parlor. Here a still, long body covered with white linen was lying on the floor close to the table-legs. In the dim light of the lamp they could clearly see, besides the white covering, new rubber goloshes, and everything about it was uncanny and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and the goloshes, and the stillness of the dead body. On the table stood a samovar, cold long ago; and round it parcels, probably the eatables.
“To shoot oneself in the Zemstvo hut, how tactless!” said the doctor. “If one does want to put a bullet through one’s brains, one ought to do it at home in some outhouse.”
He sank on to a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his felt overboots; his fellow-traveler, the examining magistrate, sat down opposite.
“These hysterical, neurasthenic people are great egoists,” the doctor went on hotly. “If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he gets up a scene with his wife without troubling about your presence; and when he feels inclined to shoot himself, he shoots himself in a village in a Zemstvo hut, so as to give the maximum of trouble to everybody. These gentlemen in every circumstance of life think of no one but themselves! That’s why the elderly so dislike our ‘nervous age.’”
“The elderly dislike so many things,” said the examining magistrate, yawning. “You should point out to the elder generation what the difference is between the suicides of the past and the suicides of to-day. In the old days the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had made away with Government money, but nowadays it is because he is sick of life, depressed.... Which is better?”