Queen Margot never carried out her project of having me taught, for an unpleasant affair happened on the feast of the Holy Trinity that nearly ruined me.
Not long before the holiday my eyelids became terribly swollen, and my eyes were quite closed up. My employers were afraid that I should go blind, and I also was afraid. They took me to the well-known doctor, Genrikh Rodzevich, who lanced my eyelids and for days I lay with my eyes bandaged, in tormenting, black misery. The day before the feast of the Trinity my bandages were taken off, and I walked about once more, feeling as if I had come back from a grave in which I had been laid alive. Nothing can be more terrible than to lose one's sight. It is an unspeakable injury which takes away a hundred worlds from a man.
The joyful day of the Holy Trinity arrived, and, as an invalid, I was off duty from noon and went to the kitchen to pay a visit to the orderlies. All of them, even the strict Tuphyaev, were drunk, and toward evening Ermokhin struck Sidorov on the head with a block of wood. The latter fell senseless to the ground, and Ermokhin, terrified, ran out to the causeway.
An alarming rumor that Sidorov had been murdered soon spread over the yard. People gathered on the steps and looked at the soldier stretched motionless across the threshold. There were whispers that the police ought to be sent for, but no one went to fetch them, and no one could be persuaded to touch the soldier.
Then the washerwoman Natalia Kozlovski, in a new, blue frock, with a white neckerchief, appeared on the scene. She pushed the people aside angrily, went into the entrance passage, squatted down, and said loudly:
"Fools! He is alive! Give me some water!"
They began to protest.
"Don't meddle with what is not your business!"
"Water, I tell you!" she cried, as if there were a fire. She lifted her new frock over her knees in a businesslike manner, spread out her underskirt, and laid the soldier's bleeding head on her knees.
The crowd dispersed, disapproving and fearful.