The room contains beds which are screwed to the floor. Sitting or lying on them arc people in navy-blue hospital smocks and old- fashioned nightcaps: the lunatics.
There are five in all. Only one has genteel status, the rest being of the lower orders. The nearest to the door is a tall, lean wor^ng-class fellow with a glistening ginger moustache, tear-filled eyes and a fixed stare, who sits resting his head in his hands. He grieves all day and night, shaking his head, sighing, smiling a bitter smile. He seldom joins in any conversation and does not usually answer questions. At feeding time he eats and drinks like an automaton. His excruciatingly racking cough, emaciation and cheeks with red spots seem to be symptoms of incipient tuberculosis.
Next comes a small, lively, very nimble old man with a pointed little beard and black curly hair like a Negro's. He ambles about the ward from one window to another in daytime, or squats on his bed Turkish-fashion, whistling irrepressibly like a bullfinch, humming and giggling. At night-time too he evinces the same infantile gaiety and liveliness, getting up to pray: to beat his breast with his fists and pluck at the door with his finger, in other words. This is Moses the Jew, a loon who lost his reason twenty years ago when his hatter's workshop burnt do^n.
Alone among the denizens of Ward Number Six he is permitted to leave the hut and even to go out of the hospital yard into the street. He has long enjoyed this privilege, probably because he is a veteran inmate: a quiet, harmless idiot and the to^n buffoon, long a familiar sight in the streets with his entourage ofurchins and dogs. In his great smock, comic night-cap and slippers, sometimes barefoot and even untrousered, he walks the streets, stopping at gates and shops to beg. He gets kvass here, bread there, a copeck elsewhere—and so he usually returns to the hut well-fed and in funds, but Nikita confiscates all the takings for his o^ use. This the old soldier does roughly and angrily, turning out Moses's pockets, calling God to witness that he will never let theJew out in the street again and saying that if there is one thing he can't stand it's disorder.
Moses likes to be helpful. He brings his ward-mates water, tucks them up when they are asleep, promising to bring them all a copeck from the street and make them each a new hat. He also spoon-feeds his left-hand neighbour, who is paralysed. This is not done through pity or from humanitarian considerations, but in imitation of—and in automatic deference to—his right-hand neighbour Gromov.
Thirty-three years of age, a -gentleman, a former court usher and official of the twelfth grade, Ivan Gromov has persecution mania. He either lies curled up on his bed or paces from comer to corner as if taking a constitutional. He very seldom sits. He is always excited, agitated and tense with some dim, vague premonition. The merest rustle in the lobby, a shout outside, is enough to make him lift his head and cock an ear. Someone has come for him, haven't they ? It is him they're after, isn't it? At these times his face expresses extreme alarm and disgust.
I like his broad face with its high cheek-bones, always pale and unhappy, mirroring a soul racked by struggle and ever-present terror. His grimaces are weird and neurotic, but there is reason and intelligence in the subtle traits carved on his face by deeply felt suffering, and his eyes have a warm, healthy glint. I like him as a person polite, helpful and outstandingly delicate in his manner towards all except Nikita. If someone drops a button or spoon he leaps from his bed to pick it up. Every morning he wishes his fellow-inmates good day, and he bids them good night when he goes to bed.
Besides grimaces and unrelieved tension, his insanity also finds the following outlet. Some evenings he wraps himself in his smock, and starts pacing rapidly from comer to comer and between the beds, trembling all over, his teeth chattering. He acts as if he had a high temperature. His way of suddenly stopping to look at the others shows that he has something extremely important to say, but then he shakes his head impatiently and resumes his pacing, evidently considering that no one will heed or understand him. But soon an urge to speak swamps all other considerations and he unleashes an eager, passionate harangue. His speech is jumbled, feverish, delirious, jerky, not always comprehensible, but there is a fine ring about it, about his words and his voice. As he speaks you recognize both the lunatic and the man in him. It is hard to convey his insane babble on paper. He talks ofhuman viciousness, of brutality trampling on justice, of the heaven on earth which will come to pass in time, of the bars on the windows which constantly remind him of the obtuseness and cruelty of his oppressors. The result is like a chaotic, untidy, miscellany of old songs: old, but not yet stale.
II
Twelve or fifteen years ago a civil servant called Gromov, a man of weight and substance, was living in a house which he o^ed on the town's main street. He had two sons, Sergey and Ivan. Sergey contracted galloping consumption in his fourth year at college. He died, and this death seemed to herald a whole series of disasters which suddenly befell the Gromov family. A week after Sergey's funeral the old father was prosecuted for forgery and embezzlement, and died soon afterwards of typhus in the prison hospital. His house and all his effects were sold up at auction, Ivan and his mother being left utterly destitute.
While living in St. Petersburg and attending the university during his father's lifetime, Ivan had received sixty or seventy roubles a month and had not knownwn what hardship was, but now he had to change his way of life abruptly. All day long he had to do coaching for a pittance and he had to take on copying work—yet still go hungry since he sent all his earnings to keep his mother. Ivan couldn't stand the life. He lost heart, fell ill and gave up the university to come home. Through his connections he obtained a job as teacher in the connty school here in the little townwn, but he didn't get on with his colleagues, his pupils disliked him and he soon dropped it. Then his mother died. He was out of work for six months, living on bread and water, after which he became a court usher: a post which he held until dismissed through illness.
Even as a yonng man at college he had never looked healthy. He was always pale, thin and subject to colds, he ate little, he slept badly. One glass ofwine went to his head and made him hysterical. He had always needed company, but his petulance and touchiness prevented him from making close contacts and friends. He always spoke with contempt of the townsfolk, whose crass ignorance and torpid, brutish lives were, he felt, loathsome and nauseating. He spoke in a loud, urgent, high- pitched voice, always furiously indignant or admiringly ecstatic, always sincere. Whatever you spoke about he always reduced it to a single theme: the townwn was a stuffy, boring place to live, society lacked higher interests, leading a dim, meaningless existence and varying it with brutality, crude licentiousness and hypocrisy. Sconn- drels were well fed and well dressed, honest men ate crumbs. They needed schools, a local newspaper with an honest view-point, a theatre, public recitals, intellectual solidarity. Society must recognize its own nature and recoil from it with horror. In his judgements about people he laid things on witha trowel—seeing everything in black and white, acknowledging no intermediate shades. He divided humanity into honest men and sconndrels with nothing in between. Of women and love he always spoke with fervid enthusiasm, but he had never been in love.
Extreme though his views were, touchy as he was, he was popular in townwn, where he was fondly knownwn as 'good old Ivan' behind his back. His innate delicacy, helpfulness, decency and moral integrity inspired kindness, sympathy and sorrow, as also did his shabby old frock-coat, ailing appearance and family misfortunes. Besides, he was well educated and well read. He knew everything, according to the locals, and the town reckoned him a sort of walking encyclopaedia.