Cleaning up the mess, Nikita beats the creature cruelly, takes a real swing, doesn't pull his punches. The odd thing, though, is not the beating, because you can get used to that, but the failure of that stupefied animal to respond to blows with any sound, movement or expression of the eyes: it only rocks gently, like a heavy barrel.
The fifth and last denizen ofWard Number Six is a townsman of the lower sort, a former post-<Jffice sorter: a small, thin, fair man with a kindly but somewhat sly expression. To judge from his clever, quiet eyes with their serenely cheerful look, he has his wits about him and knows some momentous and delightful secret. He keeps under his pillow or mattress an object which he never shows to anyone: not from fear of its being removed or stolen, but from modesty. Sometimes he goes to the window, turns his back on his fellows, puts something on his chest and crooks his head to look at it. Should one approach him at these times he will grow flustered and snatch something off his chest. But his secret is not difficult to guess.
'You must congratulate me,' he often tells Gromov. 'I have been put in for the Order of St. Stanislaus, second class with star. The second class with star is only given to foreigners, but for some reason they want to make an exception in my case.'
He smiles, shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment. 'I must say I never expected this.'
'I know nothing about these things,' Gromov grimly avers.
'But do you know what I'm going to get sooner or later?' continues the ex-sorter, slyly screwing up his eyes. 'I mean to have the Swedish "Pole Star". That's a decoration worth angling for: a white cross with black ribbon. Most handsome.'
This hut is probably the most boring place on earth. Each morning the patients (the paralytic and the fat peasant excepted) wash from a big tub in the lobby and dry themselves on the tails of their smocks. Then they drink tea in tin mugs brought from the main building by Nikita. Each rates one mugful. At noon they eat sour cabbage stew and gruel, in the evenings they sup on gruel left over from lunch. In between times they lie, sleep, look out of the windows, pace the ward. And so it goes on every day. Even the ex-sorter always talks about the same old medals.
Fresh faces are rarely seen in Ward Number Six. The doctor stopped admitting new lunatics long ago and there are few people in this world with a taste for visiting asylums. Simon the barber attends the ward once every two months. How he shears the maniacs, how Nikita helps him, how the appearance of this drunken, grinning barber always strikes panic into the patients . . . over all that we shall draw a veil.
No one ever looks into the ward besides the barber, the patients are doomed to see no one but Nikita day in day out.
Recently, though, a rather odd rumour has swept the hospital.
The rumour is this: Ward Number Six has, allegedly, begun to receive visits from the doctor!
V
An odd rumour indeed!
Dr. Andrew Yefimovich Ragin was a remarkable man in his way. In early youth he was extremely pious, it is said, and he was preparing for a church career, proposing to enter theological college after leaving school in 1863, but his father, a Doctor of Medicine and surgeon, supposedly uttered a scathing laugh and announced categorically that he would disown the boy if he became a cleric. How true that is I have no idea, but Ragin himself has often confessed that he never had any vocation for medicine or for science in general.
Be that as it may, he did not take holy orders after graduating in medicine. He evinced no piety, bearing as little resemblance to a man of God at the beginning of his medical career as he docs now.
He lus a heavy, rough, uncouth look, his face, beard, flat hair and powerful, clumsy build reminding one of some paunchy, highhanded, cantankerous highway inn-keeper. His face is stern and covered with blue veins, the eyes are small, the nose is red, he is tall and broad-shouldered, he has enormous hands and feet, and he looks as if he could kill a man with a single blow. But he treads softly, walking cautiously and stealthily. Meeting someone in a narrow corridor, he is always first to stop and give way, apologizing in a gentle, reedy little voice: not in the bass tones which one might have expected. He has a small growth on his neck which prevents his wearing hard, starched collars, so he always goes about in a soft linen or cotton shirt. Altogether he doesn't dress like a medical man. He wears the same suit for ten years on end, while his new clothes, which he usually buys in a Jewish shop, look just as worn and dishevelled on him as the old. He sees his patients, eats his meals and goes visiting, all in the same old frock-coat: and this not out of meanness but because he just doesn't care about his appearance.
When Ragin came to to^ to take up his post in the hospital, that stalled charitable institution was in a parlous plight. In wards, corridors and hospital courtyard you could barely draw breath for the stink. The ambulance men, the nurses and their children slept in the wards with the patients, complaining that the cockroaches, bed-bugs and mice made their lives a misery. There was endemic erysipelas in the surgical department, the entire hospital boasted only two scalpels and not a single thermometer, and potatoes were kept in the baths. The manager, the matron and the assistant doctor robbed the patients, and the old doctor (Ragin's predecessor) was reputed to have sold surgical spirit on the sly, having also set up a regular harem among his nurses and women patients. These irregularities were common knowledge in to^ and were even exaggerated, but people took them calmly. Some defended them by saying that only lower-class to^sfolk and peasants went to hospital, and such people couldn't complain because they were far worse off at home. They could hardly expect to be fed on the fat of the land! Others pleaded that the to^ lacked the resources to maintain a good hospital on its o^, unaided by the Rural District. People should be grateful to have any hospital at all. But the newly established Rural District Council opened no clinic either in the to^ or its environs on the grounds that the to^ already had its hospital.
Having looked the hospital over, Ragin concluded that it was an immoral institution, detrimental to its ^mates' health in the ultimate degree. The wisest course would be to discharge the patients and close the place do^n, he felt; but he decided that he lacked the will-power to accomplish this on his o^n, and that it would be useless anyway. Expel physical and moral filth from one place and it will only crop up elsewhere, so one should wait for it to evaporate spontaneously. Besides, ifpeople have opened a hospital and tolerate it they must have a need for it. Now, these superstitions and all these sickeningly foul living conditions are needed since they become transformed into something useful in due course, as dung produces fertile soil. There is nothing on earth so fine that some element ofpollution was not present at its birth.
Having taken on the job, Ragin adopted an attitude of apparent indifference ro the irregularities. He only asked the orderlies and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and installed two cupboards of instruments. The manager, the matron, the chief medical assistant and the surgical erysipelas all stayed put.
Andrew Ragin much admires intellect and integrity, but lacks the character and confidence to create a decent, intelligent environment. As for issuing orders and prohibitions or insisting on anything, he is positively impotent, as ifhe had taken a vow never to raise his voice or use the imperative mood. He finds it hard to say 'give me this' or 'bring me that'. When he feels hungry he will cough indecisively.
'I wouldn't mind a bit of tea,' he will tell his cook. Or: 'How about a spot of lunch?'
But to tell his manager to stop pilfering, to sack him, to do away with his parasitical sinecure entirely . . . such things are absolutely beyond him. When people try to hoodwink Dr. Ragin, when they flatter him or bring him some blatantly falsified account to sign, he turns red as a beetroot and feels guilty—but signs it all the same. He squirms when his patients complain of hunger or rude nurses.