He read a great deal. He would sit in the club sometimes, nervously plucking at his beard and leafing through magazines and books, and showing by his expression that he was not so much reading as gulping the stuff downwn with barely time to chew it. Reading must have been one ofhis morbid symptoms since he pounced with equal zeal on whatever carne his way, even last year's newspapers and calendars. At home he always lay down to read.
III
His coat collar turned up, Ivan Grornov was splashing his way through the mud of alleys and back lanes one autu^fl morning to collect a fine from some tradesman or other. He was in a black mood, as he always was in the mornings. In a certain alley he carne across two convicts wearing foot-irons and escorted by four guards with rifles. Grornov had met convicts often enough before—they had always made him feel sympathetic and uncomfortable—but now this latest encounter had a peculiarly weird effect on him. Somehow it suddenly dawnwned on him that he himself might be clapped in irons and similarly hauled off to prison through the mud. He was passing the post office on his way home after paying this call when he met a police inspector of his acquaintance who gave him good day and walked a few steps downwn the street with him. This somehow struck Grornov as suspicious. At home he was obsessed by convicts and armed gJiards all day, and a mysterious psychic unease prevented him from reading and concentrating. That evening he did not light his lamp and he lay awake all night, brooding on the prospect of being arrested, c!apped in irons and flung into jail. He had done nothing wrong so far as he knew and could vouch that he would never commit murder, arson or burglary in the future. But was it so difficult to commit a crime accidentally and against one's will? Can false accusations—canjudicial miscarriages, for that matter— really be ruled out? And hasn't immemorial folk wisdom taught that going to jail is like being poor: there isn't much you can do to escape from either? Now, a judicial miscarriage was only too possible with present-day court procedures, and no wonder. People with a bureaucratic, official relationship to others' woes—judges, policemen and doctors, for instance—eventually grow so callous through force of habit that they can react to their clients only on a formal level, much as they would like to do otherwise. In this respect they are just like the peasant who slaughters sheep and cattle in his backyard without noticing the blood. Having this formal, heartless attitude to the individual, a judge needs only one thing to deprive an innocent man of all his citizen's rights and sentence him to hard labour: enough time. Only give thejudge time to carry out certain formalities, for which he is paid a salary, and that is the end of the matter. A fat hope, then, of finding justice and protection in this filthy little town a hundred and twenty miles from the railway! And how absurd to think of justice, anyway, in a society which welcomes every kind of brutality as a rational and functional necessity, while every merciful act—the acquittal of an accused person, for instance—provokes a great howl of indignation and vindictiveness!
Next morning Ivan Gromov rose from his bed aghast, his brow cold with sweat, now fully convinced that he was liable to be arrested any minute. If yesterday's irksome thoughts had remained with him so long, he reflected, there must be a grain of truth in them, they really couldn't have occurred to him for no reason whatever.
A police constable strolled past his windows: no accident, that. And over there two people had stopped near the house. They were not speaking. Now, why not?
Days and nights of agony began for Gromov. When anyone passed his windows or entered his courtyard he took them for spies and detectives. At noon a police inspector usually drove down the street in his carriage and pair. He was on his way to police headquarters from his near-by country estate, but Gromov always felt that he drove too fast, with a special air, and was evidently haste^ng to report that a most important criminal was in town. Gromov trembled at every ring and knock on the gate, and he suffered when he met any stranger visiting his landlady. On encountering policemen and gendarmes he would smile and whistle to convey an air of nonchalance. For nights on end he lay awake expecting to be arrested, but snoring aloud and sighing as if in slumber so that his landlady should think him asleep. If he couldn't sleep he must be suffering the pangs of conscience, musm't he? Rather a give-away, that! Facts and common sense argued &at all these phobias were neurotic nonsense, and that there was really nothing so terrible about arest and prison, if you took the broad view and had a clear conscience. But the more intelligent and logical his reasoning, the stronger and more harrowing became his mental anguish. He was like a certain hermit who wanted to hew himself a home in virgin forest, but the more forcefully he plied his axe the more densely and vigorously did the trees burgeon around him. In the end Gromov saw how useless it all was, gave up reasoning altogether and yielded to utter despair and terror.
He began seeking seclusion and avoiding people. His job had always been uncongenial, but now it became downright unbearable. He was afraid of trickery: of having a bribe slipped surreptitiously into his pocket and then being caught, of making a chance error tantamount to forgery with official papers, or of losing someone else's money. Never, oddly enough, had his imagination been as supple and ingenious as it now was when he daily concocted thousands of miscellaneous pretexts for serious apprehension about his freedom and honour. But with this went a considerable weakening of interest in the external world, especially in books, and his memory began to fail notably.
When the snow melted in spring two semi-decomposed corpses were found in a gulley near the cemetery: an old woman and a young boy bearing signs of death by violence. These corpses and the wiknown murderers became the talk of the town. To show that he was not the killer Gromov would walk the streets smiling, and on meeting anyone he knew he would blench, blush and assert that there was no fouler crime than the murder of the weak and defenceless. But soon wearying of this lie, he decided on reflection that the best thing for someone in his position was to hide in the landlady's cellar. He sat in that cellar for a day, a night and another day, frozen to the marrow, then waited for darkness and crept stealthily up to his room like a burglar. He stood in the middle of that room until dawnwn, perfectly still, his cars cocked. In the early morning before sunrise some stove-makers called on his landlady. They had come to rebuild the kitchen stove, as Gromov was well aware, but his fears told him that they were policemen in stove- makers' clothing. Stealing out of the flat, he dashed panic-stricken down the street without hat or coat. Barking dogs chased him, a man shouted somewhere behind him, the wind whistled in his cars, and Gromov thought that all the violence on earth had coiled itself together behind his back and was pursuing him.
He was caught and taken home, his landlady was sent for a doctor. Dr. Andrew Ragin (of whom more later) prescribed cold compresses for his head and laurel-water drops, then shook his head sadly and went away, telling the landlady that he did not propose to call again because one shouldn't do anything to stop a man taking leave of his senses. Unable to afford living and being treated at home, Gromov was soon sent to hospital and put in the ward for venereal diseases. He could not sleep at night, he behaved childishly, he disturbed other patients and soon Dr. ilagin arranged for his transfer to Ward Number Six.
A year later the to^n had quite forgotten Gromov, and his landlady dumped his books in a sledge in an out-building where they were pilfered by urchins.
IV
As I said before, Gromov's left-hand neighbour is the little Jew Moses, while his right-hand neighbour is a bloated, nearly globular peasant with an obtuse, utterly witless expression. This is an inert, gluttonous animal with dirty habits. Long bereft of all capacity to think and feel, it constantly exudes a sharp, acrid stench.