[CHAPTER V]
During the first days of their service, the Orloffs found an immense deal to do. Many sick people were daily brought to the Infirmary, and the two novices, who were only accustomed to the tedious weariness of their former life, felt at first very uncomfortable in the midst of this rapid, pulsating, busy rush into which they were suddenly thrown. They lost their heads, and failed to understand at once the orders that were given them; whilst they became confused with all the different impressions that poured in upon them. And though they had the firm intention of making themselves useful, running hither and thither full of zeal, they succeeded nevertheless in doing very little work, and too often got into the way of other people. Grigori felt more than once that he had indeed deserved a reproof for his clumsiness, but to his astonishment no one took it upon them to reprove him.
One of the doctors, a tall dark man with a black moustache and a hooked nose, with an enormous wart over his right eyebrow, told Grigori to help one of the patients into the bath-room; the new attendant, eager to be useful, seized hold of the patient with such a show of zeal that he called out and groaned.
"Take care, my man! Don't break him in two!" said the doctor quite seriously. "We've got to get him into the bath-room whole.... These words confused Orloff. The patient, however, a long thin fellow, smiled constrainedly, and said in a hollow voice—" He doesn't understand yet ... he's a new hand....
The head doctor, an old gentleman with a pointed grey beard and great flashing eyes, had told the Orloffs when they first came into the Infirmary how they should manage the patients, and what they had to do under certain circumstances. At the end of his instructions he asked them if they had taken a bath lately, and then gave them out white aprons. The voice of this old gentleman had in it something pleasing and sympathetic, and the Orloffs felt they should like him. But half-an-hour afterwards they had forgotten all his instructions in the noisy rush of work in the Infirmary.
People in white clothes ran up against them; commands which were carried out with lightning speed by the attendants, sounded in their ears; the patients groaned, sobbed and sighed; water flowed splashing and hissing from the taps; and this blending of sounds seemed to fill the air, which was already saturated with sharp unpleasant smells that irritated the nose; and it seemed to Orloff that every word of the doctors, every sigh of the patients, was impregnated with the same smell.
At first all this appeared to him like a wild chaos, in which he could never feel at home, but which worked on him increasingly in a depressing, bewildering way. But after a few hours he was seized by the strong current of energy which flowed through everything. He pricked up his ears, and felt a burning desire to get into the swim, and learn how to do all these things that others were doing; joined with the feeling that he would be lighter-hearted and happier if he could be swept away in this whirlpool.
"Corrosive sublimate!" shouted one of the doctors.
"Some more hot water in the bath over there!" a thin little student with red eyes ordered.