Moiseika likes to oblige. He brings his comrades water, covers them up when they sleep, promises to bring each of them a little kopeck from outside and to make them new hats. He also feeds his neighbor on the left, a paralytic, with a spoon. He acts this way not out of compassion, nor from any humane considerations, but imitating and involuntarily submitting to Gromov, his neighbor on the right.
Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a man of about thirty-three, of noble birth, a former bailiff and provincial secretary, suffers from persecution mania. He either lies curled up on the bed or paces from corner to corner, as if for exercise, but he very rarely sits. He is always agitated, excited, and tense with some vague, unfocused expectation. The slightest rustle in the front hall or shout in the yard is enough to make him raise his head and start listening: is it him they are coming for? Is it him they are looking for? And his face at those moments expresses extreme anxiety and revulsion.
I like his broad, high-cheekboned face, always pale and unhappy, reflecting as in a mirror his soul tormented by struggle and prolonged fear. His grimaces are strange and morbid, but the fine lines that deep and sincere suffering has drawn on his face are sensible and intelligent, and there is a warm, healthy brightness in his eyes. I like the man himself, polite, obliging, and of extraordinary delicacy in dealing with everyone except Nikita. When anyone drops a button or a spoon, he quickly jumps from his bed and picks it up. Every morning he wishes his comrades a good morning, and on going to bed he wishes them a good night.
Besides his permanently tense state and grimacing, his madness also expresses itself as follows. Sometimes in the evening he wraps himself in his robe and, trembling all over, teeth chattering, begins pacing rapidly from corner to corner and between the beds. It looks as if he has a very high fever. From the way he suddenly stops and gazes at his comrades, it is clear that he wants to say something very important, but, evidently realizing that he would not be listened to or understood, he shakes his head impatiently and goes on pacing. But soon the wish to speak overcomes all other considerations, and he gives himself free rein and speaks ardently and passionately His speech is disorderly, feverish, like raving, impulsive, and not always comprehensible, yet in it, in his words and in his voice, one can hear something extremely good. When he speaks, you recognize both the madman and the human being in him. It is hard to convey his insane speech on paper. He speaks of human meanness, of the violence that tramples on truth, of the beautiful life there will be on earth in time, of the grilles on the windows, which remind him every moment of the obtuseness and cruelty of the oppressors. The result is a disorderly, incoherent potpourri of old but still unfinished songs.
II
Some twelve or fifteen years ago there lived in town, right on the main street, in his own private house, the official Gromov, a solid and well-to-do man. He had two sons: Sergei and Ivan. When he was a fourth-year student, Sergei fell ill with galloping consumption and died, and this death seemed to mark the beginning of a whole series of misfortunes that suddenly rained down on the Gromov family. A week after Sergei’s funeral, the old father was taken to court for forgery and embezzlement, and soon afterwards died of typhus in the prison hospital. The house and all the move-able property was auctioned off, and Ivan Dmitrich and his mother were left without any means.
Formerly, when his father was alive, Ivan Dmitrich, who lived in Petersburg and studied at the university, received sixty or seventy roubles a month and had no notion of poverty, but now he was abruptly forced to change his life. He had to work from morning till night, giving penny lessons, doing copying work, and still go hungry, because all his earnings went to support his mother. Ivan Dmitrich proved unable to endure such a life, he lost heart, wasted away, and, quitting the university, went home. Here in town, through connections, he obtained a post as teacher in the local high school, but he did not get along with his colleagues, the students did not like him, and soon afterwards he quit the post. His mother died. For half a year he went without work, living on nothing but bread and water, then he was hired as a bailiff. That position he occupied until he was dismissed on account of illness.
Never, even in his young student years, did he give the impression of being a healthy person. He was always pale, thin, subject to colds, ate little, slept badly. One glass of wine made him dizzy and hysterical. He was always drawn to people, but, owing to his irritable character and mistrustfulness, he never became close to anyone and had no friends. He always spoke scornfully of the townspeople, saying that he found their coarse ignorance and sluggish animal existence loathsome and repulsive. He spoke in a tenor voice, loudly, ardently, and not otherwise than with indignation and exasperation, or with rapture and astonishment, and always sincerely. Whatever you touched upon with him, he brought it all down to one thing: life in town is stifling and boring, society has no higher interests, it leads a dull, meaningless life, finding diversion in violence, coarse depravity, and hypocrisy; the scoundrels are sleek and well-dressed, while honest men feed on crumbs; there is a need for schools, for a local newspaper with an honest trend, a theater, public readings, a uniting of intellectual forces; society needs to become aware of itself and be horrified. In his judgments of people he laid the paint on thick, only white and black, not recognizing any shades; mankind was divided for him into honest people and scoundrels; there was no middle ground. Of women and love he always spoke passionately, with rapture, but he was never once in love.
Despite his nervousness and the sharpness of his judgments, he was liked in town and, behind his back, was affectionately called Vanya. His innate delicacy, obligingness, decency, moral purity, and his worn little frock coat, sickly appearance, and family misfortunes, inspired a kindly, warm, and sad feeling; besides, he was educated and well-read, knew everything, in the townspeople’s opinion, and around town was something of a walking reference book.
He read a great deal. He used to sit in the club all the time, nervously pulling at his beard and leafing through magazines and books; one could see by his face that he was not reading but devouring, with barely any time to chew. It must be assumed that reading was one of his morbid habits, since he used to fall with equal appetite upon whatever was at hand, even the past year’s newspapers and calendars.1 At home he always read lying down.
III
One autumn morning, the collar of his coat turned up, splashing through the mud, Ivan Dmitrich was making his way by lanes and backyards to some tradesman to collect on a court claim. He was in a dark mood, as always in the morning. In one lane he met two prisoners in chains, being escorted by four armed soldiers. Ivan Dmitrich had often met prisoners before, and each time they called up feelings of compassion and awkwardness in him, but this time the encounter made a special, strange impression on him. For some reason it suddenly seemed to him that he, too, could be put in chains and led in the same way through the mud to prison. Returning home after calling on the tradesman, he met near the post office a police inspector he knew, who greeted him and walked a few steps down the street with him, and for some reason he found that suspicious. At home he could not get the prisoners and armed soldiers out of his head all day, and an incomprehensible inner anxiety kept him from reading and concentrating. He did not light the lamp in the evening, and during the night he did not sleep, but kept thinking about the possibility of his being arrested, put in chains, and taken to prison. He was not guilty of anything that he knew of and could pledge that he would never kill, or burn, or steal; yet it was not difficult to commit a crime accidentally, inadvertently, and was slander or, finally, a judicial error impossible? Not for nothing has age-old popular experience taught us that against poverty and prison there is no guarantee. And a judicial error, given present-day court procedures, was very possible, and it would be no wonder if it happened. Those who take an official, business-like attitude towards other people’s suffering, like judges, policemen, doctors, from force of habit, as time goes by, become callous to such a degree that they would be unable to treat their clients otherwise than formally even if they wanted to; in this respect they are no different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in his backyard without noticing the blood. With this formal, heartless attitude towards the person, a judge needs only one thing to deprive an innocent man of all his property rights and sentence him to hard labor: time. Only the time to observe certain formalities, for which the judge is paid a salary, and after that—it is all over. Then go looking for justice and protection in this dirty little town two hundred miles from the railroad! And is it not ridiculous to think of justice when society greets all violence as a reasonable and expedient necessity, and any act of mercy—an acquittal, for instance—provokes a great outburst of dissatisfied, vengeful feeling?