Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (469 page)

CHAPTER VII

How sweetly and tranquilly he sleeps! When one gazes on this pale, tired face, on this childishly innocent smile, and listens to this regular breathing, one might think that it is not a magistrate who is lying here, but the personification of a quiet conscience! One might think that Count Karnév had not yet arrived, that there had been neither drunkenness nor gipsies, nor trips on the lake... Get up, you wretched man! You don’t deserve to enjoy such a blessing as peaceful sleep! Get up!’

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 poking around and sticking his nose 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. ‘We haven’t met for ages!’

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 today, and if not for you I would have slept on till evening.’

‘Indeed!’ I heard Poly carp’s bass voice say in the next room. ‘He hasn’t slept long enough yet! It’s the second day he’s been sleeping, and it’s still not enough! 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...’

‘Today’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 to retain a casual air, 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 the air of one discussing trifles that did not trouble him 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 casual air had produced on him a far from casual effect.

‘Why don’t you laugh, Screwy?’ I asked him when I had finished my description.

‘If it had not been you who had told me all this, and if it had not been for certain circumstances, I would not have believed a word of it. It’s all too bizarre, my friend!’

‘Of what circumstances 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. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard 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!’

‘So you admit it yourself?’

‘The muzhik evidently wants to make a case of it, but that’s not the important thing... The important thing 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 settle 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 drivel!’ I cried, trying to check his medical chatter. ‘Can’t you understand how tiresome all this stuff is?’

‘No matter that it’s tiresome... Pay heed, and take yourself in hand... 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 impassive 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 only to look once at his calm, intense expression 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 on the move — 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 a 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 without demur to whoever asked for it, 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 off 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 in the pages of this novel.

‘Good gracious! What a time I have been sitting here!’ he exclaimed suddenly, looking at the cheap half-hunter watch 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! Will you be going to Tenevo tomorrow?’

‘What’s up there tomorrow?’

‘The church fête! Everybody will be there, so be sure you come too! I have promised that you will be there. Don’t make me out 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.