'They're on about me hitting the orderly,' thought the doctor. 'This ^^dal will be al over the county by tonight. Very well then. "Dear Sir, unles your Committee discharges " '
The doctor was well aware that the Council would never prefer the orderly to ^m, and would rather dispense with every medical assistant in the county than deprive itself of so distinguished an indi- vidual as Doctor Ovchinnikov. Barely would the letter have ^rived before Leo Trofimovich would undoubtedly be rolling up in his troika with his 'What crazy notion is this, old man?'
'My dear chap, what's it all about?' he would ask. 'May you be for- given! Whatever's the idea? What's got into you? Where is the fellow? Bring the blackguard here! He must be fired! Chuck him outl I insist! That swine shan't be here tomorrow!'
Then he would dine with the doctor, and after dinner he would lie belly upwards on this same crimson sofa and more with a newspaper over his face. After a good sleep he would have tea and drive the doctor over to spend the night at his house. The upshot would be that the orderly would keep his job and the doctor would not resign.
But this was not the result that the doctor secretly desired. He wanted the orderly's Auntie to triumph, he wanted the Council to accept his resignation without more ado—with satisfaction, even—and despite his eight years' conscientious service. He imagined leaving the hospital, where he had settled in nicely, and writing a letter to Tht Physidan. He imagined his colleagues presenting him with an addres of ^mpathy.
The Mermaid appeared on the road. With mincing gait and swish- ing dres she came up to the ^mdow.
'Will you see the patientl yourself, Doctor?' she asked. 'Or do you want us to do it on our o^?'
'You lost your temper,' said her eyes. 'And now that you've calmed do^wn you're ashamed ofyourself. But I'm too magnanimous to take any notice.'
'All right, I'll come,' said the doctor. He put on his apron again, belted it with the towelling and went to the hospital.
'I was wrong to run off after hitting him,' he thought on the way. 'It made me look embarrassed or frightened. I acted like a schoolboy. It was all wrong.'
He imagined the patients looking at him with discomfiture when he entered the ward, imagined himself feeling guilty. But when he went in they lay quietly in their beds, hardly paying him any attention. The tubercular Gerasim's face expressed total unconcern.
'He didn't do his job right, so you taught him what's what,' he seemed to be saying. 'That's the way to do things, old man.'
The doctor lanced two abscesses on the purple arm and bandaged it, then went to the women's wards and performed an operation on a peasant woman's eye, while the Mermaid followed him around, helping him as if nothing had happened and all was as it should be. His ward rounds done, he began receiving his out-patients. The win- dow in the small surgery was wide open. You had only to sit on the sill and lean over a little to see young grass a foot or two below. There had been thunder and a heavy do^pour on the previous even- ing, and so the grass was somewhat beaten downwn and glossy. The path ^^ing from just beyond the window to the gully looked washed clean, and the bits ofbroken dispensary jars and bottles stre^ on both sides—they too had been washed clean, and sparkled in the sun, radiat- ing dazzling beams. Farther on, beyond the path, young firs in sump- tuous green robes crowded each other. Beyond chem were birches with paper-white trunks, and through their foliage, as it gently quivered in the breeze, the infmite depths of the azure sky could be seen. As you looked out there were starlings hopping on the path, turning their foolish beaks towards your window and debating whether to take fright or not. Then, having decided on taking fright, they darted up to the tops of the birches, one after the other with happy chirps, as if making fun of the doctor for not knowing how to fly.
Through the heavy smell of iodoform the fresh fragrance of the spring day could be sensed. It was good to breathe.
'Anna Spiridonovna,' the doctor called.
A young peasant woman in a red dress entered the surgery and said a prayer before the icon.
'What's troubling you?' the doctor asked.
Glancing mis^^tfully at the door through which she had come, and at the door to the dispensary, the woman approached the doctor.
'I don't have no children,' she whispered.
'Who else hasn't registered yet?' shouted the Mermaid from the dispensary. 'Report here!'
'What makes him such a swine is compelling me to hit someone for the first time in my life,' thought the doctor as he cxamined the woman. 'I was never involved in fisticuffs before.'
Anna Spiridonovna left. ln came an old man with a venereal com- plaint, and then a pe^^t woman with three children who had scabies, and things began to hum. There was no sign of the orderly. Beyond the dispe^^y door the Mermaid merrily chirped, swishing her dres and clinking her jars. Now and then she came into the surgery to help with a minor operation, or to fetch a prescription—all with that same air of everything being as it should be.
'She's glad I hit the man,' thought the doctor, listening to her voice. 'Those two have always been at loggerheads, and she'll be overjoyed if we get rid of him. The nurses are glad too, I think. How revolting!'
When his surgery was at its busiest he began to feel that the Sister, the nurses, and the very patients, had deliberately assumed carefree, cheerful exprewions. They seemed to realize that he was ashamed and hun, but pretended not to out of delicacy. As for him, wishing to demonstrate that he was no whit disconcerted, he was shouting roughly.
'Hey, you there! Close that door, it's draughty.'
But ashamed and dejected he was, and after seeing forty-five parienc he strolled slowly away from the hospital.
The Sister had already contrived to visit her lodgings. A gaudy crimson shawl round her shoulders, a cigarette between her teeth, and a flower in her flowing tresses, she was hurrying off. probably on a professional or private visit. Patients sat in the hospital porch, silently sunning themselves. Rowdy as ever, the starlings were hunting beetles.
Looking around him, the doctor reflected that among all these stable, serene lives only two stuck out like sore thumbs as obviously useless—the orderly's and his o^. By now the orderly must have gone to bed to sleep it off. but was surely kept awake by knowing that he was in the wrong, had been maltreated, and had lost his job. His pre- dicament was appalling. As for the doctor, having never struck anyone before, he felt as if he had lost his virginity. No longer did he blame his assistant, or seek to exculpate himself. He was merely perplexed. How had a decent man like himself, who had never even kicked a dog, come to strike that blow? Returning to his quarters, he lay on the study sofa with his face to the back.
'He's a bad man and a profesional liability,' he thought. 'During his three years here I've reached the end of my tether. Still, what I did is inexcusable. I took advantage of my position. He's my subordinate, he was at fault and he was drunk to boot, whereas I'm his superior, I had right on my side and I was sober—which gave me the upper hand. Secondly, I struck him in front of people who look up to me, thus setting them a dreadful example.'
The doctor was called to dinner. After eating only a few spoonfuls of cabbage stew he left the table, lay on the sofa again and resumed his meditations.
'So what shall I do now? I must put things right with him as soon as possible. But how? As a practical man he probably thinks duelling stupid or doesn't recognize it. If I apologized to him in the same ward in front of the nurses and patients, that apology would only satisfy me, not him. Being a low type of person, he would put it do^ to cowardice, to fear of his complaining to the authorities. Besides, an apology would mean the end of hospital discipline. Should I offer him money? No, that would be i^moral, and it would smack of bribery. Well, suppose we were to put the problem to our immediate superiors, the County Council, that is. They could reprimand or dis- mia me, but they wouldn't. And, anyway, it wouldn't be quite the thing to involve the Council—which, incidentally, has no jurisdiction —in the hospital's domestic affairs.