Something persistent, apart from fear and a feeling of offense, oppressed Andrei Yefimych all the while as evening drew on. Finally, he realized that he wanted to drink some beer and smoke.
“I’m getting out of here, my dear,” he said. “I’ll tell them to bring a light here … I can’t take this … I’m not able …”
Andrei Yefimych went to the door and opened it, but Nikita immediately jumped up and barred his way.
“Where are you going? You can’t, you can’t!” he said. “It’s bedtime!”
“But I’ll only go out for a minute to stroll in the yard!” said Andrei Yefimych, quite dumbstruck.
“You can’t, you can’t, it’s against orders. You know it yourself.”
Nikita slammed the door and leaned his back against it.
“But if I go out, what’s that to anyone?” Andrei Yefimych asked, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t understand! Nikita, I have to go out!” he said in a quavering voice. “I must!”
“Don’t start any disorder, it’s not good!” Nikita said admonishingly
“What the devil is all this!” Ivan Dmitrich suddenly shouted and jumped up. “What right does he have not to let you out? How dare they keep us here? I believe the law clearly states that no one can be deprived of freedom without a trial! This is coercion! Tyranny!”
“Of course it’s tyranny!” said Andrei Yefimych, encouraged by Ivan Dmitrich’s shout. “I must go out, I have to! He has no right. Let me out, I tell you!”
“Do you hear, you dumb brute?” shouted Ivan Dmitrich, and he banged on the door with his fist. “Open up, or I’ll break the door down! Butcher!”
“Open up!” cried Andrei Yefimych, trembling all over. “I demand it!”
“Keep talking!” Nikita answered from outside the door. “Keep talking!”
“At least call Evgeny Fyodorych here! Tell him I ask him kindly … for a minute!”
“He’ll come himself tomorrow.”
“They’ll never let us out!” Ivan Dmitrich went on meanwhile. “They’ll make us rot here! O Lord, can it be there’s no hell in the other world and these scoundrels will be forgiven? Where is the justice? Open up, scoundrel, I’m suffocating!” he shouted in a hoarse voice and leaned his weight against the door. “I’ll smash my head! Murderers!”
Nikita quickly opened the door, rudely shoved Andrei Yefimych aside with his hands and knee, then swung and hit him in the face with his fist. Andrei Yefimych felt as if a huge salt wave had broken over him and was pulling him towards the bed; in fact, there was a salt taste in his mouth: his teeth were probably bleeding. He waved his arms as if trying to swim and got hold of someone’s bed, and just then he felt Nikita hit him twice in the back.
Ivan Dmitrich gave a loud cry. He, too, must have been beaten.
Then all was quiet. Thin moonlight came through the grille, and a shadow resembling a net lay on the floor. It was frightening. Andrei Yefimych lay there with bated breath: he waited in terror to be hit again. It was as if someone had taken a sickle, plunged it into him, and twisted it several times in his chest and guts. He bit his pillow in pain and clenched his teeth, and suddenly, amidst the chaos, a dreadful, unbearable thought flashed clearly in his head, that exactly the same pain must have been felt day after day, for years, by these people who now looked like black shadows in the moonlight. How could it happen that in the course of more than twenty years he had not known and had not wanted to know it? He had not known, he had had no notion of pain, and therefore was not to blame, but his conscience, as rough and intractable as Nikita, made him go cold from head to foot. He jumped up, wanted to shout with all his might and run quickly to kill Nikita, then Khobotov, the superintendent, and the assistant doctor, then himself, but no sound came from his chest and his legs would not obey him; suffocating, he tore at the robe and shirt on his chest, ripped them, and collapsed unconscious on his bed.
XIX
The next morning his head ached, there was a ringing in his ears, and his whole body felt sick. Recalling his weakness yesterday, he was not ashamed. He had been fainthearted yesterday, afraid even of the moon, had sincerely uttered feelings and thoughts he had previously not suspected were in him. For instance, thoughts about the discontent of the philosophizing little folk. But now it made no difference to him.
He did not eat or drink, lay motionless and was silent.
“It makes no difference to me,” he thought, when he was asked questions. “I won’t answer … It makes no difference to me.”
After dinner Mikhail Averyanych came and brought a quarter of a pound of tea and a pound of fruit jellies. Daryushka also came and stood by his bed for a whole hour with a look of dumb grief on her face. Doctor Khobotov visited him, too. He brought a bottle of potassium bromide and told Nikita to fumigate the ward with something.
Towards evening Andrei Yefimych died of apoplexy. First he felt violent chills and nausea; something disgusting, which seemed to pervade his whole body, even his fingers, welled up from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. Everything turned green before him. Andrei Yefimych understood that his end had come and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mikhail Averyanych, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it was so? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it for only a moment. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, which he had read about the day before, ran past him; then a peasant woman reached out to him with a certified letter … Mikhail Averyanych said something. Then everything vanished and Andrei Yefimych lost consciousness forever.
Peasants came, picked him up by the arms and legs, and carried him to the chapel. He lay there on a table, his eyes open, and the moon shone on him at night. In the morning Sergei Sergeich came, prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former superior’s eyes.
The following day Andrei Yefimych was buried. Only Mikhail Averyanych and Daryushka attended the funeral.
NOVEMBER 1892
THE BLACK MONK
I
Andrei Vassilyich Kovrin, master of arts, was overworked and his nerves were upset. He was not being treated, but once in passing, over a bottle of wine, he talked about it with a doctor friend, who advised him to spend the spring and summer in the country. Quite opportunely, a long letter also came from Tanya Pesotsky, inviting him to come to Borisovka and stay for a while. And he decided that he did in fact need to get away.
First—this was in April—he went to his own place, his family estate Kovrinka, and there spent three weeks in solitude; then, having waited for good roads, he set out by carriage to visit his former guardian and tutor Pesotsky, a horticulturist well known in Russia. From Kovrinka to Borisovka, where the Pesotskys lived, was no more than fifty miles, and driving on a soft springtime road in a comfortable, well-sprung carriage was a true pleasure.
Pesotsky’s house was enormous, with columns, with lions whose plaster was peeling off, and with a tailcoated lackey at the entrance. The old park, gloomy and severe, laid out in the English manner, spread over more than half a mile from the house to the river and ended at a sheer, steep, clayey bank on which pine trees grew, their bared roots looking like shaggy paws; water glistened desolately below, snipe flitted about with a pitiful peeping, and the mood there always made you want to sit down and write a ballad. But near the house, in the yard and gardens, which together with the nursery took up some eighty acres, it was cheerful and exhilarating even in bad weather. Kovrin had never seen anywhere else such amazing roses, lilies, camellias, such tulips of every possible color, beginning with bright white and ending with sooty black, nor such a wealth of flowers in general, as in Pesotsky’s garden. Spring was only just beginning, and the real luxuriance of flowers was still hidden in the hothouse, yet what blossomed along the walks and here and there in the flower beds was enough so that, strolling in the garden, you felt yourself in a kingdom of tender colors, especially in the early hours when dew sparkled on every petal.