On the threshold of that door stood Abogin, but not the one who had gone out. His expression of satiety and refined elegance had vanished; his face, his hands, and his posture were distorted by a repulsive expression of something like horror or a tormenting physical pain. His nose, lips, moustache, all his features were moving and seemed to be trying to detach themselves from his face, while his eyes were as if laughing from pain…
Abogin stepped with heavy, long strides to the middle of the sitting room, bent over, groaned, and shook his fists.
“She deceived me!” he cried, heavily emphasizing the syllable “-cei-”. “Deceived me! Left! Fell ill and sent me for a doctor only so as to run off with that buffoon Papchinsky! My God!”
Abogin strode heavily towards the doctor, brought his soft white fists close to the doctor’s face, and, shaking them, went on yelling:
“She left! Deceived me! What need was there for this lie?! My God! My God! Why this dirty, swindling trick, this devilish, viperish game? What did I do to her? She left!”
Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on one foot and began to pace the sitting room. Now, in his short frock coat and fashionably narrow trousers, which made his legs look too thin for his body, with his big head and mane, he very much resembled a lion. The doctor’s indifferent face brightened with curiosity. He stood up and looked at Abogin.
“Excuse me, but where is the sick woman?” he asked.
“The sick woman! The sick woman!” Abogin shouted, laughing, crying, and still shaking his fists. “She’s not sick, she’s accursed! Meanness! Vileness, nastier than anything Satan himself could think up! She sent me away so as to run off, run off with a buffoon, a stupid clown, an Alphonse!1 Oh, God, it would be better if she’d died! I can’t bear it! Can’t bear it!”
The doctor straightened up. His eyes blinked, filled with tears, his narrow beard moved right and left together with his jaw.
“Excuse me, but how is that?” he asked, looking around with curiosity. “My child died, my wife is alone in the house, in anguish…I myself can barely stand on my feet, I haven’t slept for three nights…and what then? I’ve been forced to play in some sort of banal comedy, to play the role of a stage prop! I…I don’t understand!”
Abogin opened one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor and stepped on it, as if it was an insect he wanted to squash.
“And I didn’t see…didn’t understand!” He spoke through clenched teeth, shaking one fist next to his face, and with such an expression as if someone had stepped on his callus. “I didn’t notice that he came every day, didn’t notice that today he came in a carriage! Why in a carriage? And I didn’t see! Dunce!”
“I…I don’t understand!” muttered the doctor. “What is all this! It’s a mockery of a living person, a jeering at human suffering! It’s something impossible…the first time in my life I’ve seen it!”
With the dull astonishment of a man who has just begun to realize that he has been deeply insulted, the doctor shrugged his shoulders, spread his arms, and, not knowing what to say or do, sank exhaustedly into the armchair.
“So, you fell out of love, fell in love with someone else—God help you, but why this deceit, why this vile, treacherous stunt?” Abogin was saying in a tearful voice. “How come? And what for? What did I do to you? Listen, doctor,” he said hotly, going up to Kirilov. “You’ve been an involuntary witness to my misfortune, and I won’t conceal the truth from you. I swear to you that I loved this woman, loved her devotedly, like a slave! I sacrificed everything for her: quarreled with my relations, abandoned my work and music, forgave her things I wouldn’t have been able to forgive my mother or my sister…Never once did I look askance at her…never gave her any reason! So why this lie? I don’t insist on love, but why this vile deception? If you don’t love me, say so outright, honestly, the more so as you know my views in that regard…”
With tears in his eyes, trembling all over, Abogin sincerely poured out his soul before the doctor. He spoke fervently, pressing both hands to his heart, exposed his family secrets without any hesitation, and was even as if glad that these secrets had finally burst from his soul. If he had spoken like that for an hour, two hours, pouring out his soul, he would undoubtedly have felt better. Who knows, if the doctor had heard him out, shown friendly compassion, perhaps, as often happens, he would have been reconciled to his loss without protest, without any unnecessary foolishness…But something else happened. As Abogin spoke, the insulted doctor changed noticeably. The indifference and astonishment on his face gradually gave way to an expression of bitter offense, indignation, and wrath. The features of his face became still sharper, harder, and more unpleasant. When Abogin placed before his eyes the photograph of a young woman with a beautiful, but dry and expressionless face, like a nun’s, and asked whether it was possible, looking at that face, to allow that it was capable of expressing a lie, the doctor suddenly jumped up, flashed his eyes, and said, rudely rapping out each word:
“Why are you telling me all this? I have no wish to hear it! No wish!” he shouted and banged his fist on the table. “I don’t need to know your banal secrets, devil take them! Don’t you dare tell me these banalities! Do you think I haven’t been insulted enough already? That I’m a lackey who can be insulted endlessly? Eh?”
Abogin backed away from Kirilov and stared at him in astonishment.
“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard shaking. “You go crazy from your fat life and act out melodramas, but why bring me into it? What have I got to do with your love affairs? Leave me alone! Exercise your noble eccentricity, flaunt your humane ideas, play”—the doctor cast a sidelong glance at the cello case—“play your double basses and trombones, fatten up like capons, but don’t you dare jeer at a human being! If you can’t respect me, at least spare me your attention!”
“Excuse me, but what’s the meaning of all this?” Abogin asked, turning red.
“It means that it’s base and vile to play with people like that! I’m a doctor, and you consider doctors and workers in general, who don’t smell of perfume and prostitution, as your lackeys and in mauvais ton2—well, go ahead, but no one gave you the right to turn a suffering man into a stage prop!”
“How dare you say that to me?” Abogin asked softly, and his face began to twitch again, this time clearly from wrath.
“No, knowing that I’m in grief, how could you dare bring me here to listen to banalities?” the doctor shouted, and again banged his fist on the table. “Who gave you the right to mock another man’s grief like this?”
“You’re out of your mind!” shouted Abogin. “That’s not magnanimous! I’m profoundly unhappy myself and…and…”
“Unhappy,” the doctor smirked contemptuously. “Don’t touch that word, it doesn’t concern you. A good-for-nothing who can’t pay off his debts also calls himself unhappy, a capon that suffocates from too much fat is also unhappy. Worthless people!”
“My dear sir, you are forgetting yourself!” shrieked Abogin. “Such words…call for a beating! Understand?”
Abogin hurriedly went to his side pocket, took out his wallet, and pulling two notes from it, flung them on the table.
“That’s for your visit!” he said, his nostrils twitching. “You’ve been paid!”
“Don’t you dare offer me money!” the doctor shouted and swept the notes from the table. “An insult isn’t paid for with money!”
Abogin and the doctor stood face to face and went on angrily hurling undeserved insults at each other. It seems that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they said so much that was unfair, cruel, and preposterous. In both men the egotism of the unhappy showed strongly. The unhappy are egotistic, spiteful, unfair, cruel, and less capable than the stupid of understanding each other. Unhappiness does not unite but divides people, and even where it seems that people should be united by the similarity of their grief, there is much more unfairness and cruelty done than in a comparatively contented milieu.