''Thank you, my good man; the same to you."
And as he walked upstairs the general asked, nodding towards a door (he asked the same question every day and always forgot the answer) :
"And what's in that room?"
"That's the massage room, Your Excellency."
When the general's steps had died away, Andrey Hrisanfych looked over the mail and found one letter addressed to himself. He opened it, read several lines, then, glancing at the newspaper, walked unhurriedly to his own quarters, which were on the same floor, at the end of the corridor. His wife Yefimya was sitting on the bed, nursing her baby; another child, the eldest, was standing close by, his curly head resting on her knee; a third was asleep on the bed.
Entering the room, Andrey handed his wife the let- ter, and said:
"Must be from the village."
Then he walked out again without removing his eyes from the paper, and stopped in the corridor, not far from his door. He could hear Yefimya reading the first lines in a trembling voice. She read them and could read no more; these lines were enough for her. She burst into tears, and hugging and kissing her eldest child, she began to speak—and it was impossible to teU whether she were laughing or crying.
"It's from granny, from grandpa," she said. "From the country. Queen of Heaven, saints and martyrs! The snow is piled up to the roofs there now—the trees are white as white can be. Children are out on tiny little sleds—and darling bald old grandpa is up on the stove —and there is a little yellow puppy— My precious darlings!"
Hearing this, Andrey Hrisanfych recalled that three or four times his wife had given him letters and asked him to send them to the village, but some important business had always intervened; he had not sent the let- ters and somehow they were mislaid.
"And little hares hop about in the fields," Yefimya continued mournfully, bathed in tears, and kissing her boy. "Grandpa is gentle and good; granny is good, too, and kindhearted. In the village folks are friendly, they fear God—and there is a little church in the village; the peasants sing in the choir. If only the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God would take us away from here!"
Andrey Hrisanfych returned to his room to have a smoke before another patient arrived, and Yeflmya sud- denly stopped speaking, grew quiet, and wiped her eyes, and only her lips quivered. She was very much afraid of him—oh, how afraid of him she was! She trembled and was terrorized at the sound of his steps, his look, she dared not say a word in his presence.
Andrey Hrisanfych lit a cigarette, but at that very moment there was a ring from upstairs. He put out his cigarette and, assuming a very grave face, hastened to the front door.
The general was coming downstairs, fresh and rosy from his bath.
"And what's in that room?" he asked, pointing to a door.
Andrey Hrisanfych came to attention, and announced loudly:
"Charcot douche, Your Excellency!"
1900
On Offuial Business
T
HE deputy examining magistrate and the county physician were on their way to an autopsy in the vil- lage of Syrnya. En route they were caught in a blizzard; they wasted a great deal of time traveling in circles and arrived at their destination not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was already dark. They put up for the night at the village headquarters.^ It was here that the dead body happened to be lying, the corpse of the Zemstvo insurance agent Lesnitzky, who had come to Syrnya three days previously and, af-
1 a cottage in which community meetings and sessions of the vil- lage elders were held and which was sometimes used as a hostelry.
ter settling in the village headquarters and ordering the samovar, had shot himself, to the complete surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life under such strange circumstances, with the samovar before him and the food he had brought along laid out on the table, led many to suspect murder; an inquest was in order.
In the entry the doctor and the examining magistrate stamped their feet to shake off the snow, and near by stood an old man who belonged to the lowest order of rural police: Ilya Loshadin; he was holding a little tin lamp in his hands to give them light. There was a strong smell of kerosene.
"Who are you?" asked the doctor.
"The p'liceman," answered Loshadin.
He used to spell it "pleaceman" when he signed the receipts at the post office.
"And where are the inquest witnesses?"
"They must have gone to have tea, your honor."
To the right was the best room, the travelers' or gentry's room; to the left a room for the lower orders with a big stove and a sleeping platform. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the police- man, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the best room. Here, motionless on the floor, close to the table legs, lay a long body, covered with a white sheet. In the dim light of the lamp, in addition to the white cover, a pair of new rubbers could be clearly seen, and everything about the place was weird and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and the mbbers, and the immobility of the dead body. On the table stood a samovar, long since cold; and round it packages, prob- ably containing food.
"To shoot oneself in the village headquarters, how tactless!" said the doctor. "If you do want to put a buUet
through your brain, you ought to do it at home, in some
shed."
He sank onto a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his felt boots; his companion, the magis- trate, sat down opposite him.
"These hysterical and neurasthenic people are great egoists," the doctor went on bitterly. "If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his news- paper; when he dines with you, he has a row with his wife unrestrained by your presence; and when he feels like shooting himself, he shoots himself in village head- quarters, so as to give everybody the greatest amount of trouble. Under all circumstances these gentlemen think only of themselves! That's why elderly people so dislike our 'nervous age.' "
"Elderly people dislike so many things," said the mag- istrate, yawning. "You ought to point out to the old fel- lows the difference between the suicides of the past and the suicides of the present. Formerly the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had embezzled Gov- ernment funds, but nowadays it's because he's fed up with life, depressed. Which is better?"
"Fed up with life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot himself somewhere else than at the village headquarters."
"Such aggravation!" said the policeman, "such ag- gravation! It's a regular punishment. Folks are all upset, your honor; they've not slept these three nights. The children are crying. The cows ought to be milked but the women won't go to the barn—they're scared—that they may see the dead gentleman in the dark. Sure they're foolish women, but some of the men is scared, too. As soon as it's dark they won't pass the place alone, but only in a drove. And the witnesses too—"
Dr. Starchenko, a middle-aged, dark-bearded man in spectacles, and the magistrate Lyzhin, a fair-haired man, still young, who had taken his degree only two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat in silence, musing. They were annoyed at having been delayed. Now, although it was not yet six o'clock, they had to wait till morning, spending the night here; and they pictured a long evening, a long, dark night, boredom, wretched beds, cockroaches, morning chill; and listening to the storm that howled in the chimney and in the garret, they both thought how unlike all this was the life they would have wished for themselves and of which they had once dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who at that moment were walking about the lighted streets in town without noticing the weather, or getting ready for the theater, or sitting in their studies over a book. Oh, how much they would have given now only to stroll along the Nevsky or along Petrovka in Moscow, to listen to decent singing, to spend an hour or so in a restaurant!