“Congratulations!” he grumbled. “You've enjoyed yourself.”
“Hold your tongue, fool!” I said.
His stupid face angered me. I undressed quickly, covered myself up with the bedclothes and closed my eyes.
My head became giddy and the world was enveloped in mist. Familiar figures flitted through the mist.… The Count, snakes, Franz, flame-coloured dogs, “the girl in red,” mad Nikolai Efimych.
“The husband killed his wife! Oh, how stupid you are!”
“The girl in red” shook her finger at me, Tina obscured the light with her black eyes, and … I fell asleep.
VII
“How sweetly and tranquilly he sleeps! When one gazes on this pale, tired face, on this childishly innocent smile, and listens to this regular breathing, one might think that it is not a magistrate who is lying here, but the personification of a quiet conscience! One might think that Count Karnéev had not yet arrived, that there had been neither drunkenness nor gipsies, nor rows on the lake.… Get up, you pernicious man! You are unworthy of enjoying such a blessing as peaceful sleep! Arise!”
I opened my eyes and stretched myself voluptuously.… A broad sunbeam, in which countless white dust atoms were agitated and chased each other, streamed from the window on to my bed, causing the sunray itself to appear as if tinged with some dull whiteness.… The ray disappeared and reappeared before my eyes, as Pavel Ivanovich Voznesensky, our charming district doctor, who was walking about my bedroom, came into or went out of the stream of light. In the long, unbuttoned frock-coat that flapped around him, as if hanging on a clothes rack, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his unusually long trousers, the doctor went from corner to corner of my room, from chair to chair, from portrait to portrait, screwing up his short-sighted eyes as he examined whatever came in his way. In accordance with his habit of sticking his nose and letting his eyes peer into everything, he either stooped down or stretched out, peeped into the washstand, into the folds of the closed blinds, into the chinks of the door, into the lamp … he seemed to be looking for something or wishing to assure himself that everything was in order.… When he looked attentively through his spectacles into a chink, or at a spot on the wallpaper, he frowned, assumed an anxious expression, and smelt it with his long nose.… All this he did quite mechanically, involuntarily, and from habit; but at the same time, as his eyes passed rapidly from one object to another, he had the appearance of a connoisseur making an evaluation.
“Get up, don't you hear!” he called to me in his melodious tenor voice, as he looked into the soap-dish and removed a hair from the soap with his nail.