“Kindly send me home!” the doctor shouted, suffocating.
Abogin rang brusquely. When no one appeared at his call, he rang again and angrily threw the bell on the floor; it hit the rug dully and let out a plaintive, as if dying moan. A lackey appeared.
“Where are you all hiding, devil take you?!” The master fell upon him with clenched fists. “Where were you just now? Go, tell them to bring the carriage for this gentleman, and order the coach harnessed for me! Wait!” he shouted, when the lackey turned to go. “Let there not be a single traitor left in the house by tomorrow! Away with all of you! I’ll hire new ones. Vermin!”
While waiting for their vehicles, Abogin and the doctor were silent. To the first an expression of satiety and refined elegance had already returned. He paced the sitting room, gracefully shaking his head and obviously planning something. His wrath had not yet cooled down, but he tried to pretend that he did not notice his enemy…The doctor stood, holding the edge of the table with one hand and looking at Abogin with that profound, somewhat cynical and unattractive contempt which only grief and misery can express when faced with satiety and elegance.
When, a little later, the doctor got into the carriage and went off, his eyes still had a contemptuous look. It was dark, much darker than an hour earlier. The red half-moon had already gone behind a hill, and the clouds that had watched over it lay in dark spots near the stars. A coach with red lights rumbled down the road and overtook the doctor. It was Abogin going to protest and do stupid things…
All the way the doctor thought not about his wife, not about Andrei, but about Abogin and the people who lived in the house he had just left. His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He judged Abogin and his wife, and Papchinsky, and all those who live in rosy half-light and the smell of perfume, and all the way he hated them and despised them until his heart ached. And in his mind a firm conviction about these people was formed.
Time will pass, and Kirilov’s grief will pass, but this conviction, unjust, unworthy of the human heart, will not pass but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.
1887
THE LETTER
THE RURAL DEAN,1 Father Fyodor Orlov, a fine-looking, well-nourished man of about fifty, imposing and stern as always, with a habitual dignified expression that never left his face, but weary in the extreme, paced his small drawing room from corner to corner and thought strenuously about one thing: when would his visitor finally go away? This thought tormented him and did not leave him for a moment. The visitor, Father Anastasy, a priest in one of the outlying villages, had come to him some three hours earlier on his own business, very unpleasant and boring, had stayed on, and now, leaning his elbow on a thick accounting ledger, sat in the corner at a small, round table, and apparently had no thought of leaving, though it was already past eight o’clock in the evening.
Not everyone knows how to stop talking at the right time and leave at the right time. It often happens that even well-bred, tactful society people do not notice that their presence is provoking in a tired or busy host a feeling not unlike hatred, and that the feeling is being strenuously hidden and covered up by a lie. Father Anastasy saw and understood perfectly well that his presence was burdensome and inappropriate, that the dean, who had served matins late at night and a long liturgy at noon,2 was tired and wanted to rest; he was on the point of getting up and leaving any moment, but instead of getting up, he went on sitting as if he was waiting for something. He was an old man of sixty-five, decrepit beyond his years, bony and stoop-shouldered, with an age-darkened, haggard face, red eyelids, and a long, narrow back like a fish’s; he was dressed in a light-purple cassock, elegant but too ample for him (it had been given to him by the widow of a young priest who recently passed away), a broadcloth kaftan with a wide leather belt, and clumsy boots, the size and color of which clearly showed that Father Anastasy did without galoshes. Despite his clerical dignity and venerable age, something pathetic, downtrodden, and humiliated showed in his dull red eyes, the gray braids with a greenish tinge on his nape, the big shoulder blades on his skinny back…He was silent, did not stir, and coughed so discreetly as if he was afraid the sound of coughing would make his presence more conspicuous.
The old man had come to the dean on business. A couple of months earlier he had been forbidden to serve until further notice, and he had been put under investigation. His sins were many. He led an unsober life, did not get along with the clergy nor with the laity, neglected the parish register and the accounting—these were the formal accusations against him; but besides that there had long been rumors that he performed illegal marriages for money and sold certificates of fasting to clerks and officers who came to him from town.3 These rumors were the more stubborn in that he was poor and had nine children on his neck, who were failures just as he was. His sons were uneducated, spoiled, and sat around doing nothing, and his unattractive daughters were still not married.
Not having strength enough to be candid, the dean paced from corner to corner, saying nothing or speaking only in hints.
“So you’re not going home tonight?” he asked, stopping by the dark window and poking his little finger through the cage to the fluffed-up, sleeping canary.
Father Anastasy roused himself, coughed discreetly, and said in a quick patter:
“Home? God help me, no, Fyodor Ilyich. You yourself know that I can’t serve, so what am I to do there? I left on purpose so as not to meet peoples’ eyes. You yourself know: it’s shameful not to serve. And besides I have business here, Fyodor Ilyich. Tomorrow after breaking the fast4 I want to discuss something thoroughly with the father investigator.”
“So…” The dean yawned. “And where are you staying?”
“At Zyavkin’s.”
Father Anastasy suddenly remembered that in a couple of hours the dean was to serve the Easter matins, and he became so ashamed of his unpleasant, inhibiting presence that he decided to go away at once and give the weary man some peace. And the old man got up to go, but before he began to say goodbye he spent a whole minute clearing his throat and looking imploringly, with the same expression of vague expectation in his whole figure, at the dean’s back; shame, timidity, and a pathetic, forced laughter typical of people who do not respect themselves, played over his face. Waving his hand somehow resolutely, he said with a wheezing, jittery laughter:
“Father Fyodor, carry your mercy through to the end, tell them to give me before I go…a little glass of vodka!”
“This is no time to be drinking vodka,” the dean said sternly. “You should be ashamed.”
Father Anastasy became even more confused, laughed, and, forgetting his resolve to go home, sank back into the chair. The dean looked at his perplexed, embarrassed face, at his bent body, and felt sorry for the old man.
“God willing, we’ll have a drink tomorrow,” he said, wishing to soften his stern refusal. “All in good time.”
The dean believed in reforming people, but now, as the feeling of pity flared up in him, it began to seem to him that this man who was under investigation, haggard, covered with sins and ailments, was irretrievably lost for life, that there was no longer any power on earth that could unbend his back, give clarity to his gaze, restrain his unpleasant, timid laugh, which he laughed on purpose to smooth over, if only slightly, the repulsive impression he made on people.