Part 6

I opened my eyes and stretched myself voluptuously. . . . A broad sunbeam, in which countless white dust atoms were agitated and chased each other, streamed from the window on to my bed, causing the sunray itself to appear as if tinged with some dull whiteness. . . . The ray disappeared and reappeared before my eyes, as Pavel Ivanovich Voznesensky, our charming district doctor, who was walking about my bedroom, came into or went out of the stream of light. In the long, unbuttoned frock-coat that flapped around him, as if hanging on a clothes rack, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his unusually long trousers, the doctor went from corner to corner of my room, from chair to chair, from portrait to portrait, screwing up his short-sighted eyes as he examined whatever came in his way. In accordance with his habit of sticking his nose and letting his eyes peer into everything, he either stooped down or stretched out, peeped into the washstand, into the folds of the closed blinds, into the chinks of the door, into the lamp . . . he seemed to be looking for something or wishing to assure himself that everything was in order. . . . When he looked attentively through his spectacles into a chink, or at a spot on the wallpaper, he frowned, assumed an anxious expression, and smelt it with his long nose. . . . All this he did quite mechanically, involuntarily, and from habit; but at the same time, as his eyes passed rapidly from one object to another, he had the appearance of a connoisseur making an evaluation.

“Get up, don't you hear!” he called to me in his melodious tenor voice, as he looked into the soap-dish and removed a hair from the soap with his nail.

“Ah, ah, ah! How do you do, Mr. Screw!” I yawned, when I saw him bending over the washstand. “What an age we haven't met!”

The whole district knew the doctor by the name of “Screw” from the habit he had of constantly screwing up his eyes. I, too, called him by that nickname. Seeing that I was awake, Voznesensky came and sat down on a corner of my bed and at once took up a box of matches and lifted it close to his screwed-up eyes.

“Only lazy people and those with clear consciences sleep in that way,” he said, “and as you are neither the one nor the other, it would be more seemly for you, my friend, to get up somewhat earlier. . . .”

“What o'clock is it?”

“Almost eleven.”

“The devil take you, Screwy! Nobody asked you to wake me so early. Do you know, I only got to sleep at past five to-day, and if not for you I would have slept on till evening.”

“Indeed!” I heard Polycarp's bass voice say in the next room. “He hasn't slept long enough yet! It's the second day he's sleeping, and it's still too little for him! Do you know what day it is?” Polycarp asked, coming into the bedroom and looking at me in the way clever people look at fools.

“Wednesday,” I said.

“Of course, certainly! It's been specially arranged for you that the week shall have two Wednesdays. . . .”

“To-day's Thursday!” the doctor said. “So, my good fellow, you've been pleased to sleep through the whole of Wednesday. Fine! Very fine! Allow me to ask you how much you drank?”

“For twice twenty-four hours I had not slept, and I drank . . . I don't know how much I drank.”

Having sent Polycarp away, I began to dress and describe to the doctor what I had lately experienced of “Nights of madness, nights of gladness” which are so delightful and sentimental in the songs and so unsightly in reality. In my description I tried not to go beyond the bounds of “light genre,” to keep to facts and not to deviate into moralizing, although all this was contrary to the nature of a man who entertained a passion for inferences and results. . . . I spoke with an air as if I was speaking about trifles that did not trouble me in the slightest degree. In order to spare the chaste ears of Pavel Ivanovich, and knowing his dislike of the Count, I suppressed much, touched lightly on a great deal but nevertheless, despite the playfulness of my tone and the style of caricature I gave to my narrative during the whole course of it, the doctor looked into my face seriously, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders impatiently from time to time. He never once smiled. It was evident that my “light genre” produced on him far from a light effect.

“Why don't you laugh, Screwy?” I asked when I had finished my description.

“If it had not been you who had told me all this, and if there had not been a certain circumstance, I would not have believed a word of it. It's all too abnormal, my friend!”

“Of what circumstance are you speaking?”

“Last evening the muzhik whom you had belaboured in such an indelicate way with an oar, came to me . . . Ivan Osipov. . . .”

“Ivan Osipov? . . .” I shrugged my shoulders. “It's the first time I hear his name!”

“A tall, red-haired man . . . with a freckled face. . . . Try to remember! You struck him on the head with an oar.”

“I can't remember anything! I don't know an Osipov. . . . I struck nobody with an oar. . . . You've dreamed it all, uncle!”

“God grant that I dreamed it. . . . He came to me with a report from the Karnéev district administration and asked me for a medical certificate. . . . In the report it was stated that the wound was given him by you, and he does not lie. . . . Can you remember now? The wound he had received was above the forehead, just where the hair begins. . . . You got to the bone, my dear sir!”

“I can't remember!” I murmured. . . . “Who is he? What's his occupation?”

“He's an ordinary muzhik from the Karnéev village. He rowed the boat when you were having your spree on the lake.”

“Hm! Perhaps! I can't remember. . . . I was probably drunk, and somehow by chance. . . .”

“No, sir, not by chance. . . . He said you got angry with him about something, you swore at him for a long time, and then getting furious you rushed at him and struck him before witnesses. . . . Besides, you shouted at him: ‘I'll kill you, you rascal!’”

I got very red, and began walking about from corner to corner of the room.

“For the life of me, I can't remember!” I said, trying with all my might to recall what had happened. “I can't remember! You say I ‘got furious. . . .’ When drunk I become unpardonably nasty!”

“What can you want more!”

“The muzhik evidently wants to make a case of it, but that's not the most important. . . . The most important is the fact itself, the blows. . . . Is it possible that I'm capable of fighting? And why should I strike a poor muzhik?”

“Yes, sir! Of course, I could not give him a certificate, but I told him to apply to you. . . . You'll manage to arrange the matter with him somehow. . . . The wound is a slight one, but considering the case unofficially a wound in the head that goes as far as the skull is a serious affair. . . . There are often cases when an apparently trifling wound in the head which had been considered a slight one has ended with mortification of the bone of the skull and consequently with a journey _ad patres_.”

And, carried away by his subject, “Screw” rose from his seat and, walking about the room along the walls and waving his hands, he began to unload all his knowledge of surgical pathology for my benefit. . . . Mortification of the bones of the skull, inflammation of the brain, death, and other horrors poured from his lips with endless explanations, macroscopic and microscopic processes, that accompany this misty and, for me, quite uninteresting _terra incognita_.

“Stop that effusion!” I cried, trying to stop his medical chatter. “Can't you understand how tiresome all this stuff is?”

“No matter that it's tiresome. . . . Listen, and punish yourself. . . . Perhaps another time you will be more careful. It may teach you not to do such stupidities. If you don't arrange matters with this scabby Osipov, it may cost you your position! The priest of Themis to be tried for thrashing a man! . . . What a scandal!”

Pavel Ivanovich is the only man whose judgments I listen to with a light heart, without frowning, whom I allow to gaze inquiringly into my eyes and to thrust his investigating hand into the depths of my soul. . . . We two are friends in the very best sense of the word; we respect each other, although we have between us accounts of the most unpleasant, the most delicate nature. . . . Like a black cat, a woman had passed between us. This eternal _casus belli_ had been the cause of reckonings between us, but did not make us quarrel, and we continued to be at peace. “Screw” is a very nice fellow. I like his simple and far from plastic face, with its large nose, screwed-up eyes and thin, reddish beard. I like his tall, thin, narrow-shouldered figure, on which his frock-coat and paletot hung as on a clothes-horse.

His badly made trousers formed ugly creases at the knees, and his boots were terribly trodden down at the heels; his white tie was always in the wrong place. But do not think that he was slovenly. . . . You had but to look once at his kind, concentrated face to understand that he had no time to trouble about his own appearance; besides, he did not know how to. . . . He was young, honest, not vain, and loved his medicine, and he was always moving about—this in itself is sufficient to explain to his advantage all the defects of his inelegant toilet. He, like an artist, did not know the value of money, and imperturbably sacrificed his own comfort and the blessings of life to one of his passions, and thus he gave the impression of being a man without means, who could scarcely make both ends meet. . . . He neither smoked nor drank, he spent no money on women, but nevertheless the two thousand roubles he earned by his appointment at the hospital and by private practice passed through his hands as quickly as my money does when I am out on the spree. Two passions drained him: the passion of lending money, and the passion of ordering things he saw advertised in the newspapers. . . . He lent money to whoever asked for it, without any demur not uttering a single word about when it was to be returned. It was not possible either by hook or by crook to eradicate in him his heedless trust in people's conscientiousness, and this confidence was even more apparent in his constantly ordering things that were lauded in newspaper advertisements. . . . He wrote for everything, the necessary and the unnecessary. He wrote for books, telescopes, humorous magazines, dinner services “composed of 100 articles,” chronometers. . . . And it was not surprising that the patients who came to Pavel Ivanovich mistook his room for an arsenal or for a museum. He had always been cheated, but his trust was as strong and unshakable as ever. He was a capital fellow, and we shall meet him more than once on the pages of this novel.

“Good gracious! What a time I have been sitting here!” he exclaimed suddenly, looking at the cheap watch with one lid he had ordered from Moscow, and which was “guaranteed for five years,” but had already been repaired twice. “I must be off, friend! Good-bye! And mark my words, these sprees of the Count's will lead to no good! To say nothing about your health. . . . Oh, by-the-by! Shall you go to Tenevo to-morrow?”

“What's up there to-morrow?”

“The fête of the Church! Everybody will be there, so come too! You must positively come! I have promised that you will come. Don't make me a liar!”

It was not necessary to ask to whom he had given his word. We understood each other. The doctor then took leave, put on his well-worn overcoat, and went away.

I remained alone. . . . In order to drown the unpleasant thoughts that began to swarm in my head, I went to my writing-table and trying not to think nor to call myself to account, I began to open my post. The first envelope that caught my eye contained the following letter:

“My Darling Serezha,

“Forgive me for troubling you, but I am so surprised that I don't know to whom to apply. . . . It is shameful! Of course, now it will be impossible to get it back, and I'm not sorry, but judge for yourself: if thieves are to enjoy indulgence, a respectable woman cannot feel safe anywhere. After you left I awoke on the divan and found many of my things were missing. Somebody had stolen my bracelet, my gold studs, ten pearls out of my necklace, and had taken about a hundred roubles out of my purse. I wanted to complain to the Count, but he was asleep, so I went away without doing so. This is very wrong! The Count's house—and they steal as in a tavern! Tell the Count. I send you much love and kisses.

“Your loving, “Tina.”

That his Excellency's house was swarming with thieves was nothing new to me; and I added Tina's letter to the information I had already in my memory on this count. Sooner or later I would be obliged to use this intelligence in a case. . . . I knew who the thieves were.

VIII

Black-eyed Tina's letter, her large sprawling handwriting, reminded me of the mosaic room and aroused in me desires such as a drunkard has for more drink; but I overcame them, and by the strength of my will I forced myself to work. At first I found it unspeakably dull to decipher the bold handwriting of the various commissaries, but gradually my attention became fixed on a burglary, and I began to work with delight. All day long I sat working at my table, and Polycarp passed behind me from time to time and looked suspiciously at my work. He had no confidence in my sobriety, and at any moment he expected to see me rise from the table and order Zorka to be saddled; but towards evening, seeing my persistence, he began to give credence to my good intentions, and the expression of moroseness on his face gave place to one of satisfaction. . . . He began to walk about on tiptoe and to speak in whispers. . . . When some young fellows passed my house, playing on the accordion, he went into the street and shouted:

“What do you young devils mean by making such a row here? Can't you go another way? Don't you know, you Mahommedans, that the master is working?”

In the evening when he served the samovar in the dining-room, he quietly opened my door and called me graciously to come to tea.

“Will you please come to tea?” he said, sighing gently and smiling respectfully.

And while I was drinking my tea he came up behind me and kissed me on the shoulder.

“Now that's better, Sergei Petrovich,” he mumbled. “Why don't you let that white-eyebrowed devil be hanged, may he be. . . . Is it possible with your high understanding and your education to occupy yourself with pusillanimousness? Your work is noble. . . . Everybody must glorify you, be afraid of you; but if you break people's heads with that devil and bathe in the lake in all your clothes, everyone will say: ‘He has no sense! He's an empty-headed fellow!’ And so that reputation will be noised about the whole world! Foolhardiness is suitable for merchants, but not for noblemen. . . . Noblemen require science and office. . . .”

“All right! Enough, enough. . . .”

“Sergey Petrovich, don't keep company with that Count. If you want to have a friend, who could be better than Doctor Pavel Ivanovich? He goes about shabbily dressed, but how clever he is!”

I was melted by Polycarp's sincerity. . . . I wanted to say an affectionate word to him. . . .

“What novel are you reading now?” I asked.

“‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ That's a Count for you! That's a real Count! Not like your smut-Count!”

After tea I again sat down to work and worked until my eyelids began to droop and close my tired eyes. . . . When I went to bed I ordered Polycarp to wake me at five o'clock.

The next morning, before six o'clock, whistling gaily and knocking off the heads of the field flowers, I was walking towards Tenevo, where the fête of the church to which my friend “Screw” had invited me to come was being celebrated that day. It was a glorious morning. Happiness itself appeared to be hanging above the earth, and reflected in every dewdrop, enticed the soul of the passer-by to itself. The woods enwrapped in morning light, were quiet and motionless as if listening to my footsteps, and the chirping brotherhood of birds met me with expressions of mistrust and alarm. . . . The air, impregnated with the evaporations of the fresh green, caressed my healthy lungs with its softness. I breathed it in, and casting my enraptured eyes over the whole distant prospect, I felt the spring and youth, and it seemed to me that the young birches, the grass at the roadside, and the ceaselessly humming cockchafers shared these feelings with me.

“Why is it that there in the world men crowd together in their miserable hovels, in their narrow and limited ideas,” I thought, “while they have here so much space for life and thought? Why do they not come here?”

And my poetic imagination refused to be disturbed by thoughts of winter and of bread, those two sorrows that drive poets into cold, prosaic Petersburg and uncleanly Moscow, where fees are paid for verse, but no inspiration can be found.

Peasants' carts and landowners' britzkas hurrying to the liturgy or to market passed me constantly as I trudged along. All the time I had to take off my cap in answer to the courteous bows of the muzhiks and the landowners of my acquaintance. They all offered to give me a lift, but to walk was pleasanter than to drive, and I refused all their offers. Among others the Count's gardener, Franz, in a blue jacket and a jockey cap, passed me on a racing droshky. . . . He looked lazily at me with his sleepy, sour eyes and touched his cap in a still more lazy fashion. Behind him a twelve-gallon barrel with iron hoops, evidently for vodka, was tied to the droshky. . . . Franz's disagreeable phiz and his barrel somewhat disturbed my poetical mood, but very soon poetry triumphed again when I heard the sound of wheels behind me, and looking round I saw a heavy wagonette drawn by a pair of bays, and in the heavy wagonette, on a leathern cushion on a sort of box seat, was my new acquaintance, “the girl in red,” who two days before had spoken to me about the “electricity that had killed her mother.” Olenka's pretty, freshly washed and somewhat sleepy face beamed and blushed slightly when she saw me striding along the footpath that separated the wood from the road. She nodded merrily to me and smiled in the affable manner of an old acquaintance.

“Good morning!” I shouted to her.

She kissed her hand to me and disappeared from my sight, together with her heavy wagonette, without giving me enough time to admire her fresh, pretty face. This day she was not dressed in red. She wore a sort of dark green costume with large buttons and a broad-brimmed straw hat, but even in this garb she pleased me no less than she had done before. I would have talked to her with pleasure, and I would gladly have heard her voice. I wanted to gaze into her deep eyes in the brilliancy of the sun, as I had gazed into them that night by the flashes of lightning. I wanted to take her down from the ugly wagonette and propose that she should walk beside me for the rest of the way, and I certainly would have done so if it had not been for the “rules of society.” For some reason it appeared to me that she would have gladly agreed to this proposal. It was not without some cause that she had twice looked back at me as the wagonette disappeared behind some old alders! . . .

It was about six versts from the place of my abode to Tenevo—nothing of a distance for a young man on a fine morning. Shortly after six I was already making my way between loaded carts and the booths of the fair towards the Tenevo church. Notwithstanding the early hour and the fact that the liturgy in the church was not over as yet, the noise of trade was already in the air. The squeaking of cart wheels, the neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle, and the sounds of toy trumpets were intermixed with the cries of gipsy horse-dealers and the songs of muzhiks, who had already found time to get drunk. What numbers of gay, idle faces! What types! What beauty there was in the movements of these masses, bright with brilliant coloured dresses, on which the morning sun poured its light! All this many-thousand-headed crowd swarmed, moved, made a noise in order to finish the business they had to do in a few hours, and to disperse by the evening, leaving after them, on the market place as a sort of remembrance, refuse of hay, oats spilt here and there, and nutshells. . . . The people, in dense crowds, were going to and coming from the church.

The cross that surmounts the church emitted golden rays, bright as those of the sun. It glittered and seemed to be aflame with golden fire. Beneath it the cupola of the church was burning with the same fire, and the freshly painted green dome shone in the sun, and beyond the sparkling cross the clear blue sky stretched out in the far distance. I passed through the crowds in the churchyard and entered the church. The liturgy had only just begun and the Gospel was being read. The silence of the church was only broken by the voice of the reader and the footsteps of the incensing deacon. The people stood silent and immovable, gazing with reverence through the wide-open holy gates of the altar and listening to the drawling voice of the reader. Village decorum, or, to speak more correctly, village propriety, strictly represses every inclination to violate the reverend quiet of the church. I always felt ashamed when in a church anything caused me to smile or speak. Unfortunately it is but seldom that I do not meet some of my acquaintances who, I regret to say, are only too numerous, and it generally happens that I have hardly entered the church before I am accosted by one of the “intelligentsia” who, after a long introduction about the weather, begins a conversation on his own trivial affairs. I answer “yes” and “no,” but I am too considerate to refuse to give him any attention. My consideration often costs me dear. While I talk I glance bashfully at my neighbours who are praying, fearing that my idle chatter may wound them.

This time, as usual, I did not escape from acquaintances. When I entered the church I saw my heroine standing close to the door—that same “girl in red” whom I had met on the way to Tenevo.

Poor little thing! There she stood, red as a crawfish, and perspiring in the midst of the crowd, casting imploring glances on all those faces in the search for a deliverer. She had stuck fast in the densest crowd and, unable to move either forward or backward, looked like a bird who was being tightly squeezed in a fist. When she saw me she smiled bitterly and began nodding her pretty chin.

“For God's sake, escort me to the front!” she said, seizing hold of my sleeve. “It is terribly stuffy here—and so crowded. . . . I beg you!”

“In front it will be as crowded,” I replied.

“But there, all the people are well dressed and respectable. . . . Here are only common people. A place is reserved for us in front. . . . You, too, ought to be there. . . .”

Consequently she was red not because it was stuffy and crowded in the church. Her little head was troubled by the question of precedence. I granted the vain girl's prayer, and by carefully pressing aside the people I was able to conduct her to the very dais near the altar on which the flower of our district _beau-monde_ was collected. Having placed Olenka in a position that was in accordance with her aristocratic desires, I took up a post at the back of the _beau-monde_ and began an inspection.