'How about a spot of beer, Daryushka ?' says Dr. Ragin.
They drink their first bottle in silence, the doctor rapt in thought, Michael Averyanovich with the jolly, vivacious air of one with something fascinating on his mind. It is always the doctor who opens their discussion.
'What a pity . ..' says he slowly and quietly, shaking his head, avoiding his companion's eyes (he never looks people in the eye). 'What a great pity, my dear Michael, that our townwn so totally lacks people who either can or will conduct an intelligent, interesting conversation. We're nnder such an enormous handicap. Even our professional men don't rise above vulgarity—they're no better than the lower classes in their level of maturity, you take it from me.'
'Perfectly true. Agreed.'
'As you well know, sir,' the doctor continues with quiet emphasis, 'everything in this world is trivial and boring, higher spiritual manifestations of the human intellect excepted. The intellect marks a clear boundary line between animal and man, it intimates man's divine nature and even compensates him to some extent for not being immortal. It follows that our intellect is our only possible source of pleasure. Neither seeing nor hearing anything intellectual around us, we are, accordingly, deprived ofpleasure. We do have books, granted, but that's nothing like living conversation and interchange. If you will permit a rather dubious comparison, books are sheet music, while conversation is song itself.'
'Perfectly true.'
Silence ensues. Daryushka comes out ofthe kitchen and pauses in the doorway to listen with an expression of dazed grief, propping her face on her fst.
'Ah me,' sighs Michael Averyanovich. 'You get no sense out of people these days.'
How healthy, happy and interesting life was in the old days, he says, and what a brilliant intelligentsia Russia once had: how highly they had prized the concepts ofhonour and friendship. They lent money with no security, and withholding help from a friend in need was thought disgraceful. And what crusades, adventures and skirmishes there were, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus . . . there was a wonderful land. A certain battalion commander's wife, an eccentric, would don officer's uniform and ride up into the mowitains of an evening, alone and unescorted. She was said to be having an affair with a local princeling in some tribal village.
'Holy Mother, help us,' sighs Daryushka.
'How we drank and ate, what frantic liberals we were!'
Dr. Ragin listens without hearing as he muses and sips his beer.
'I often dream of talking to clever people,' he says unexpectedly, interrupting Michael Averyanovich. 'My father gave me an excellent education, but then forced meto be a doctor, swayed by the ideas ofthe sixties. If I had disobeyed him then I think I should be at the very heart of the intellectual movement now, I'd probably belong to some faculty. Not that intellect lasts for ever, either—it is transitory, of course—but you already know why I have such a weakness for it. Life is a deplorable trap. When a thinking man attains adulthood and mature awareness he can't help feeling hopelessly ensnared. And it is against his will, actually, that he has been called into being from nothingness by certain chance factors.
'What for? What's the meaning and purpose of his existence? He wants to learn, but he isn't told—or he is fobbed off with absurdities. He knocks, but no one opens. Death approaches, and he hasn't asked for that either. You know how prisoners linked by common misfortune feel better when they're all together? In the same way the life- trap can be ignored when men with a flair for analysis and deduction forgather and pass the time exchanging proud, free ideas. In that sense intellectual activity is a unique pleasure.'
'Perfectly true.'
Avoiding his companion's eye, quietly, between pauses, Dr. Ragin continues to talk about conversing with intelligent people while Michael Averyanovich listens attentively and agrees.
'Perfectly true.'
'But don't you believe in immortality ?' the postmaster asks suddenly.
'No, my dear Michael, I do not, nor have I any grounds for so believing.'
'I admit I have my doubts too. Actually, though, I do sort of feel I shall never die. Dear me, thinks I to myself, it's time you were dead, you silly old buffer, but there's a little voice inside me saying don't you believe it, you aren't going to die.'
Michael Averyanovich leaves just after nine o'clock.
'Dear me, fate has landed us in a dump!' he sighs as he dons his fur coat in the hall. 'The most maddening thing is, we have even got to die here. Ah, me.'
VII
After showing his friend out Dr. Ragin sits at his desk and resumes his reading. The quiet of evening, and of the night which follows, is unbroken by any sound. Time appears to be standing still, sharing the doctor's immobility as he pores over his book, and nothing seems to exist beside that book and the green-globed lamp. The doctor's coarse, rough face gradually lights up with a smile ofjoyful delight at the stirrings of human intellect.
'Oh, why can't man be immortal?' he wonders. 'Why does the brain have its centres and cr^mies? Wherefore vision, speech, self- awareness, genius, if all these things are doomed to go into the soil and fmally to cool along with the earth's crust—and then to rotate with the eaith round the sun for millions of years, all for no reason? Cooling, rotating . .. these were no reasons for calling forth man, with his lofty, almost divine intellect, out of nothingness and then turning him into clay as if to mock him.
'The transmutation of matter ? But what cowardice to console oneself with such makeshift immortality! The blind workings of the natural process are even more primitive than human folly since folly does at least imply awareness and deliberate intent, of which natural processes are entirely devoid. Only a coward, one whose fear of death exceeds his self-respect, can fmd comfort in the thought of his body being reborn in due course as grass, as a stone, as a toad. To see one's immortality in the transmutation of matter is as strange as to forecast a brilliant future for the violin-case after a valuable fiddle has been smashed and rendered useless.'
When the clock strikes Dr. Ragin lolls back in his arm-chair, closing his eyes for a spot of meditation. Then suddenly, swayed by the fme ideas culled from his book, he casts a glance at his past and present. His past is odious and better forgotten, and the same is true of his present. He knows that, at the very time when he is mentally rotating round the sun along with the cooled earth, people are suffering from illness and unhygienic conditi,bns in the large hospital block adjoining his o^n quarters. There may be someone who can't sleep and is fighting off insects while someone else is contracting erysipelas or groaning because his bandage is too tight. Patients may be playing cards with lhe nurses and drinking vodka. Twelve thousand persons will have been swindled in the current year and the hospital's whole activities are still based on pilfering, squabbles, tittle-tattle, jobbery and rank charlatanism, just as they were twenty years ago. The place is still an immoral institution, detrimental to its inmates' health in the ultimate degree. Ragin knows that Nikita thrashes the patients behind the bars ofWard Number Six and that little Moses runs round to^n begging every day.
On the other hand, Ragin is also well aware of the fantastic changes which have taken place in medicine in the last quarter of a century.
In his college days he used to feel that medicine would go the way of alchemy and metaphysics, but now, when he reads at nights, medicine moves him, arousing his admiration—his enthusiasm, even. And, in very truth, what a dazzling break-through! What a revolution! Thanks to antiseptics, operations are performed such as the great Pirogov never even dreamt of. Ordinary general practitioners venture on resections of the knee-joint, abdominal surgery produces only one fatality per hundred operations and stone matters so little hat no one even bothers to write about it. There is a radical treatment for syphilis. And then there is the theory of heredity, isn't there, and hypnotism? There are Pasteur's and Koch's discoveries, there are hygiene statistics, there's our Russian rural medical welfare service. Psychiatry with its modern methods of classifying disorders, its techniques of diagnosis and treatment . . . a gigantic stride fo^ard, all that! The insane no longer have cold water poured over their heads, they are not put in strait-jackets, they are treated decently, they even have theatrical performances and dances arranged for them—or so the newspapers say. Modern views and tastes being what they are, Dr. Ragin knows that an abomination like Ward Number Six can only exist a hundred and twenty miles from the railway in a small to^ where the Mayor and Council are all semi-literate yahoos who regard a doctor as a sort of high-priest to be trusted blindly even when he's pouring molten lead do^ your throat. Anywhere else t4e public and the newspapers would have made mincemeat of this puny Bastille ages ago.