"Make haste, make haste! . . ." Vasilyev urged.
Mihail Sergeyich, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his face.
"Rybnikov and Meier have spoken to me of your il- ness already," he said. "Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg you."
He made Vasilyev sit down in a big armchair near the desk, and moved a box of cigarettes towards him.
"Now then!" he began, stroking his knees. "Let us get to work. . . . How old are you?"
He asked questions and the medical student an- swered them. He asked whether Vasilyev's father had suffered from certain special diseases, whether he drank to excess, whether he was remarkable for cruelty or any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grand- father, mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he suddenly grew more animated, and asked :
"Excuse me, but do you perhaps remember if your mother's interest in the stage was a passionate one?"
Twenty minutes passed. Vasilyev was annoyed by the way the doctor kept stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.
"So far as I understand your questions, doctor," he said, "you want to know whether my illness is heredi- tary or not. It is not."
The doctor proceeded to ask Vasilyev whether he had had any secret vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half the ques- tions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail Sergeyich, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if Vasilyev failed to an- swer one question all would be lost. As he received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip of paper. On learning that Vasilyev had taken his degree in the natural sciences and was now studying law, the doctor grew thoughtful.
"He wrote an excellent thesis last year, . . ." said the medical student.
"I beg your pardon, but don't interrupt me; you're preventing me from concentrating," said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his face. "Though, of course, that does enter into the case history. Intense intellectual work, nervous exhaustion. . . . Yes, yes. . . . And do you drink vodka?" he said, addressing Vasilyev.
"Very rarely."
Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of the attack, and related how the day before yesterday the artist, Vasilyev, and he had visited S Street.
The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vasilyev as strange in the extreme. • . .
"Doctor, tell me one thing only," he said, controlling himself so as not to speak rudely. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" said the doctor, with an expression that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long ago. "Who disputes it?"
"You are a psychiatrist, aten't you?" Vasilyev asked curtly.
"Yes, a psychiatrist."
"Perhaps all of you are right!" said Vasilyev, get- ting up and beginning to walk from one end of the room to the other. "Perhaps! But it all seems amazing to me! That I should have taken my degree in two faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have writ- ten a thesis which in three years will be thro^ aside and forgotten, I am praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as unconcernedly as oi these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am called mad, I am pitied!"
Vasilyev for some reason suddenly felt unutterably sorry for himself, for his companions, for all the people he had seen two days before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.
His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor. The lat- ter, with the air of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vasilyev and, without a word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer, undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.
And Vasilyev felt easier. When he came out from the doctor's office he was beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer irritated him, and the load under his heart grew lighter and lighter as though it were melting away. He had two prescriptions in his hand: one was for bromide, the other for morphine. . . . He had taken all these remedies before!
In the street he stood still for a while and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged himself languidly to the university.
1888
Gusev
I
T IS already dark, it will soon be night.
Gusev, a discharged private, half rises in his bunk and says in a low voice:
"Do you hear me, Pavel Ivanych? A soldier in Suchan was telling me: while they were sailing, their ship bumped into a big fish and smashed a hole in its bot- tom."
The individual of uncertain social status whom he is addressing, and whom everyone in the ship infirmary calls Pavel lvanych, is silent as though he hasn't heard.
And again all is still. The wind is flirting with the rigging, the screw is throbbing, the waves are lashing, the bunks creak, but the ear has long since become used to these sounds, and everything around seems to slum- ber in silence. It is dull. The three invalids—two sol- diers and a sailor—who were playing cards all day are dozing and talking deliriously.
The ship is apparently beginning to roll. The bunk slowly rises and falls under Gusev as though it were breathing, and this occurs once, twice, three times . . . Something hits the floor with a clang: a jug must have dropped.
"The wind has broken loose from its chain," says Gusev, straining his ears.
This time Pavel lvanych coughs and says irritably:
"One minute a vessel bumps into a fish, the next the wind breaks loose from its chain . . . Is the wind a beast that it breaks loose from its chain?"
"That's what Christian folks say."
"They are as ignorant as you . . . They say all sorts of things. One must have one's head on one's shoulders and reason it out. You have no sense."
Pavel lvanych is subject to seasickness. When the sea is rough he is usually out of sorts, and the merest trifle irritates him. In Gusev's opinion there is absolutely nothing to be irritated about. What is there that is strange or out of the way about that fish, for instance, or about the wind breaking loose from its chain? Sup- pose the fish were as big as the mountain and its back as hard as a sturgeon's, and supposing, too, that over yon- der at the end of the world stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to the walls. If they haven't broken loose, why then do they rush all over the sea like madmen and strain like hounds tugging at their leash? If they are not chained up what becomes of them when it is calm?
Gusev ponders for a long time about fishes as big as a mountain and about stout, rusty chains. Then he be- gins to feel bored and falls to thinking about his home, to which he is returning after five years' service in the Far East. He pictures an immense pond covered with drifts. On one side of the pond is the brick-colored building of the pottery with a tall chimney and clouds of black smoke; on the other side is a village. His brother Alexey drives out of the fifth yard from the end in a sleigh; behind him sits his little son Vanka in big felt boots, and his little girl Akulka also wearing felt boots. Alexey has had a drop, Vanka is laughing, Akul- ka's face cannot be seen, she is m^Hed up.
"If he doesn't look out, he will have the children frostbitten," Gusev reflects. "Lord send them sense that they may honor their parents and not be any wiser than their father and mother."