“It’s from your liver, sir, I know this!” Pavel Pavlovich suddenly became terribly animated. “Pyotr Kuzmich had it, Polosukhin, he had it in exactly the same way, from the liver, sir. It’s a case for poultices, sir. Pyotr Kuzmich always used poultices… You can die of it, sir! I’ll run and fetch Mavra—eh?”
“No need, no need,” Velchaninov waved him away vexedly, “no need for anything.”
But Pavel Pavlovich, God knows why, was almost beside himself, as if it were a matter of saving his own son. He would not listen, he insisted as hard as he could on the necessity for poultices and, on top of that, two or three cups of weak tea, drunk all at once—“not simply hot, sir, but boiling hot!” He did run to Mavra, without waiting for permission, made a fire with her in the kitchen, which had always stood empty, started the samovar; meanwhile he managed to put the sick man to bed, took his street clothes off, wrapped him in a blanket, and in no more than twenty minutes had cooked up some tea and the first poultice.
“It’s heated plates, sir, burning hot!” he said almost in ecstasy, placing the heated plate wrapped in a towel on Velchaninov’s pained chest. “There aren’t any other poultices, sir, and it would take too long to get them, and plates, I swear on my honor, sir, will even be best of all; it’s been tested on Pyotr Kuzmich, sir, with my own eyes and hands. You can die of it, sir. Drink the tea, swallow it—never mind if it burns you; life’s dearer… than foppery, sir…”
He got the half-asleep Mavra to bustle about; the plates were changed every three or four minutes. After the third plate and the second cup of boiling hot tea drunk at one gulp, Velchaninov suddenly felt relief.
“Once you’ve dislodged the pain, thank God for that, sir, it’s a good sign!” Pavel Pavlovich cried out and ran to fetch a fresh plate and fresh tea.
“Only to break the pain! If we can only turn the pain back!” he kept saying every moment.
After half an hour, the pain was quite weakened, but the patient was so worn out that, however Pavel Pavlovich begged, he would not agree to endure “one more little plate, sir.” His eyes were closing from weakness.
“Sleep, sleep,” he repeated in a weak voice.
“Right you are!” Pavel Pavlovich agreed.
“You spend the night… what time is it?”
“A quarter to two, sir.”
“Spend the night.”
“I will, I will.”
A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovich again.
“You, you,” he murmured when the man came running and bent over him, “you—are better than I! I understand everything, everything… thank you.”
“Sleep, sleep,” Pavel Pavlovich whispered, and hastened on tiptoe back to his sofa.
As he was falling asleep, the sick man could still hear Pavel Pavlovich quietly and hurriedly making his bed, taking off his clothes, and, finally, putting out the candle and, barely breathing, so as not to make any noise, stretching himself out on the sofa.
Undoubtedly Velchaninov did sleep and fell asleep very soon after the candles were put out; he clearly recalled it afterward. But all the while he slept, till the very moment he woke up, he dreamed that he was not asleep and that it was as if he was quite unable to fall asleep, despite his weakness. Finally, he dreamed he was having a sort of waking delirium and was quite unable to scatter the visions crowding around him, despite the full awareness that it was only delirium and not reality. The visions were all familiar ones; his room was as if filled with people, and the door to the front hall stood open; crowds of people poured in and thronged the stairs. At the table, moved out into the middle of the room, sat a man—exactly as the other time, in the identical dream he had had a month earlier. Just as then, this man sat with his elbow on the table and refused to speak; but now he was wearing a round hat with crape. “What? Could it have been Pavel Pavlovich then, too?” Velchaninov thought—but, peeking into the silent man’s face, he convinced himself that it was someone else entirely. “Why the crape, then?” Velchaninov puzzled. The noise, talk, and clamor of people crowding around the table were terrible. It seemed these people had still greater malice toward Velchaninov than in the other dream; they threatened him with their fists and shouted at him about something with all their might, but precisely what—he was quite unable to make out. “But this is a delirium, I know it!” the thought came to him. “I know that I couldn’t fall asleep and have now gotten up, because I couldn’t stay in bed from anguish!…” However, the shouting and the people, and their gestures, and all—were so vivid, so real, that he sometimes had doubts: “Can it really be a delirium? What do these people want from me, my God! But if it’s not a delirium, then is it possible that such a clamor has not awakened Pavel Pavlovich yet? That he’s here asleep, right here on the sofa?” Finally, something suddenly happened, again as in that other dream; everyone rushed to the stairs and got terribly jammed in the doorway, because a new crowd was pouring into the room from the stairs. These people were carrying something with them, something big and heavy; one could hear the heavy steps of the carriers resounding on the treads of the stairs and their puffing voices hurriedly calling to each other. Everyone in the room cried out: “They’re bringing it, they’re bringing it!” All eyes flashed and turned to Velchaninov; threatening and triumphant, everyone pointed to the stairs. No longer doubting in the least that it was all not delirium but the truth, he stood on tiptoe to see quickly, over people’s heads, what it was that they were bringing. His heart was pounding, pounding, pounding, and suddenly—exactly as then, in that other dream—there came three loud strokes of the doorbell. And once again this was so clear, so tangibly real a ringing, that, of course, such ringing could not have been merely dreamed in a dream!… He cried out and woke up.
But he did not, as then, go racing for the door. What thought guided his first movement and did he even have any sort of thought at that moment?—no, it was as if someone prompted him to what had to be done: he snatched himself from bed and rushed with outstretched arms, as if defending himself and warding off an attack, straight toward where Pavel Pavlovich lay sleeping. His arms at once met other arms already stretched out over him, and he seized them fast; someone therefore already stood bending over him. The curtains were drawn, but it was not totally dark, because a weak light was coming from the other room, where there were no such curtains. Suddenly something cut the palm and fingers of his left hand terribly painfully, and he instantly understood that he had seized the blade of a knife or razor and gripped it tightly in his hand… At the same moment something fell with a single weighty thump to the floor.
Velchaninov was perhaps three times stronger than Pavel Pavlovich, but their struggle continued for a long time, some three full minutes. He soon bent him down to the floor and twisted his arms behind his back, but for some reason he absolutely wanted to bind those twisted arms. With his right hand—his wounded left hand holding the murderer—he began to grope for the curtain cord, could not find it for a long time, but got hold of it at last and tore it from the window. He himself marveled later at the unnatural strength required for that. In all these three minutes neither of them said a word; one could hear only their heavy breathing and the muffled sounds of the struggle. Finally, having twisted and bound Pavel Pavlovich’s arms behind his back, Velchaninov left him on the floor, stood up, opened the window curtain, and raised the blind. It was already light in the solitary street. Opening the window, he stood for a few moments taking deep breaths of air. It was just past four. Closing the window, he walked unhurriedly to the cupboard, took out a clean towel, and wound it very tightly around his left hand to stop the blood flowing from it. Under his feet he found the open razor case, forgotten that morning on the little table just next to the sofa on which Pavel Pavlovich had slept, and locked this case in his bureau with a key. Only after doing all that did he go over to Pavel Pavlovich and begin studying him.