The Project Gutenberg eBook of Orlóff and His Wife, by Maxim Gorky.

[9] The peasant wash-basin consists of a dosed vessel which is suspended from the wall, and contains water. The water trickles through a spout or faucet, on the hands—"running" water being regarded as the only clean water. The tub in which clothes are washed is a long trough, rounded at the bottom, and mounted on supports.—Translator.

Grigóry watched his operations with a smile of curiosity. Matréna sniffed from time to time; the policeman had disappeared.

"So you are to attend to the lime to-day, Mr. and Mrs. Occupant. There's a building going up alongside you, so the masons will give you all you need for about five kopéks. And as for you, good man, if you can't be moderate in your drinking, you must let it alone altogether.... We-ell, good-by for the time being.... I'll look in on you again."

And he vanished as swiftly as he had appeared, leaving as mementos of his laughing eyes abashed and satisfied smiles on the countenances of the Orlóff couple.

They remained silent for a minute, staring at each other, and as yet unable to formulate the impression left by this unexpected invasion of conscious energy into their dark, automatic life.

"A-aï!—" drawled Grigóry, shaking his head.—"So there's ... a chemist! It is said that they are poisoning folks! But would a man with a face like that occupy himself with that sort of thing? And then again, his voice! And all the rest.... No, his manner was perfectly frank, and immediately—'here now,—here I am!'—Lime ... is that injurious? Citric acid ... what's that? Simply acid, and nothing more! But the chief point is—cleanliness everywhere, in the air, and on the floor, and in the slop-bucket.... Is it possible to poison a man by such means? Akh, the devils! Poisoners, say they.... That hard-working young fellow, hey? Fie! A workingman ought always to drink in moderation, he says ... do you hear, Mótrya? So come now, pour me out a little glass ... there's liquor on hand, isn't there?"

She very willingly poured him out half a cup of vódka from the bottle, which she produced from some place known only to herself.

"That was really a nice fellow ... he had such a way of making one like him,—" she said, smiling at the remembrance of the student.—"But other fellows, the rest of them—who knows anything about them? Perhaps, they actually are engaged...."

"To exterminate the people.... They say there are so many poor folks, that an order has been issued—to poison the superfluous ones,"—Matréna communicated her information.

"Everybody says so.... The painters' cook said so, and a great many other folks...."

"Well, they're fools! Would that be profitable? Just consider: they are curing them! How is a body to understand that? They bury them! And isn't that a loss? For a coffin is needed, and a grave, and other things of that sort.... Everything is charged to the government treasury.... Stuff and nonsense! If they wanted to make a clearing-out and to reduce the number of people, they would have taken and sent them off to Siberia—there's plenty of room for them all there! Or to some uninhabited islands.... And after they had exiled them, they would have ordered them to work there. Work and pay your taxes ... understand? There's a clearing-out for you, and a very profitable one, to boot.... Because an uninhabited island will yield no revenue, if it isn't settled with people. And revenue is the first thing to the public treasury, so it's not to its interest to destroy folks, and to bury them at its expense.... Understand? And then, again, that student ... he's an impudent creature, that's a fact, but he had more to say about the riot; but kill people off,... no-o, you couldn't hire him to do that for any amount of pennies! Couldn't you see at a glance, that he wouldn't be capable of such a thing? His phiz wasn't of that calibre...."

All day long they talked about the student, and about everything he had told them. They recalled the sound of his laugh, his face, discovered that one button was missing from his white coat, and came near quarrelling over the question: 'on which side of the breast?' Matréna obstinately maintained that it was on the right side, her husband said—on the left, and twice cursed her stoutly, but remembering in season, that his wife had not turned the bottle bottom upward when she poured the vódka into the cup, he yielded the point to her. Then they decided that on the morrow, they would set to work to introduce cleanliness into their quarters, and again inspired by a breath of something fresh, they resumed their discussion of the student.

"Yes, what a go-ahead fellow he was, really now!"—said Grigóry rapturously.—"He came in, just exactly as though he'd known us for ten years.... He sniffed about everywhere, explained everything ... and that was all! He didn't shout or make a row, although he's one of the authorities, also, of course.... Akh, deuce take him! Do you understand, Matréna, they're looking after us there, my dear. That's evident at once.... They want to keep us sound, and nothing more, nor less .... That's all nonsense about killing us off ... old wives' tales.... 'How does your belly act?' says he.... And if they wanted to kill us off, what the devil should he have wanted to know about the action of my belly for? And how cleverly he explained all about those ... what's their name? those devils that crawl about in the bowels, you know?"

"Something after the fashion of cock and bull stories," laughed Matréna,—"I believe he only said that for the sake of frightening us, and making folks more particular to keep clean...."

"Well, who knows, perhaps there's some truth in that for worms breed from dampness.... Akh, you devil! What did he call those little bugs? It isn't a cock and bull story at all, but ... why, I remember what it is!... I've got the word on the tip of my tongue, but I don't understand...."

And when they lay down to sleep, they were still talking about the event of the day, with the same ingenuous enthusiasm with which children communicate to one another their first experiences and the impressions which have surprised them. Then they fell asleep, in the midst of their discussion.

Early in the morning they were awakened. By their bedside stood the fat cook of the painters, and her face, which was always red, now, contrary to her wont, was gray and drawn.

"Why are you pampering yourselves?" she said hastily, making a rather peculiar noise with her thick, red lips.—"We've got the cholera in the court-yard.... The Lord has visited us!"—and she suddenly burst out crying.

"My dear folks, I'm going to get my wages. I'm going away.... I'll go, and go ... to the country," said the cook.

"The accordeon-player! He's got it.... He drank water out of the fountain last evening, do you hear, and he was seized in the night.... And it took him right in the belly, my good people, as though he'd swallowed rat-poison...."

"The accordeon-player...." muttered Grigóry. He could not believe that any disease could overcome the accordeon-player. Such a jolly, dashing young fellow, and he had walked through the court like a peacock, as usual, only last night.—"I'll go and take a look,"—Orlóff decided, with an incredulous laugh.

Grigóry uttered a violent oath, thrust his legs into his trousers, and dishevelled as he was, with shirt-collar unbuttoned, went toward the door. His wife clutched him by the shoulder, from behind, he felt her hands tremble, and suddenly flew into a rage, for some reason or other.

"I'll hit you in the snout! Get away!"—he roared, and went out, after striking his wife in the breast.

The court-yard was dark and deserted, and Grigóry, as he proceeded toward the accordeon-player's door, was simultaneously conscious of a chill of terror, and of a keen satisfaction at the fact that he, alone, out of all the denizens of the house, was going to the sick accordeon-player. This satisfaction was still further augmented when he perceived that the tailors were watching him from the second-story windows. He even began to whistle, wagging his head about with a dashing air. But a little disenchantment awaited him at the door of the accordeon-player's little den, in the shape of Sénka Tchízhik.

Having opened the door half way, he had thrust his sharp nose into the crack thus formed, and as was his wont, was taking his observations, captivated to such a degree that he did not turn round until Orlóff pulled his ear.

"Just see how it has racked him, Uncle Grigóry," he said in a whisper, raising toward Orlóff his dirty little face, rendered still more peaked than usual by the impressions he had undergone.—"And it's just as though he had shrunk up and got disjointed with dryness—like a bad cask ... by heaven!"

Orlóff, enveloped by the foul air, stood and listened in silence to Tchízhik, endeavoring to peer, with, one eye, through the crack of the door as it hung ajar.

"How would it do to give him some water to drink, Uncle Grigóry?" suggested Tchízhik.

Orlóff glanced at the boy's face, which was excited almost to the point of a nervous tremor, and felt something resembling a burst of excitement within himself.

"Go along, fetch the water!" he ordered Tchízhik, and boldly flinging the door wide open, he halted on the threshold, shrinking back a little.

Athwart the mist in his eyes, Grigóry beheld Kislyakóff:—the accordeon-player, dressed in his best, lay with his breast on the table, which he was clutching tightly with his hands, and his feet, in their lacquered boots, moved feebly over the wet floor.

"Who is it?" he asked hoarsely and apathetically, as though his voice had faded, and lost all its color.

Grigóry recovered himself, and stepping cautiously over the floor, he advanced to him, trying to speak bravely and even jestingly.

"I, brother, Mítry Pávloff.... But what are you up to ... did you overwork last night, pray?"—he surveyed Kislyakóff attentively and curiously, and did not recognize him.

The accordeon-player's face had grown peaked all over, his cheek-bones projected in two acute angles, his eyes, deeply sunken in his head, and surrounded by greenish spots, were frightfully immovable and turbid. The skin on his cheeks was of the hue which is seen on corpses in hot summer weather. It was a completely dead, horrible face, and only the slow movement of the jaws showed that it was still alive. Kislyakóff's motionless eyes stared long at Grigóry's face, and their dead gaze put the latter in a fright. Feeling his ribs with his hands, for some reason or other, Orlóff stood three paces distant from the sick man, and felt exactly as though someone were clutching him by the throat with a damp, cold hand,—were clutching him and slowly strangling him. And he wanted to get away, as speedily as possible, from this room, hitherto so bright and comfortable, but now impregnated with a suffocating odor of putrefaction, and with a strange chill.

"Well...." he was about to begin, preparatory to beating a retreat.. But the accordeon-player's gray face began to move in a strange way, his lips, covered with a black efflorescence, parted, and he said with his toneless voice:

The profound indifference, the inexplicable apathy of his three words echoed in Orlóff's head and breast, like three dull blows. With a senseless grimace on his countenance, he turned toward the door, but Tchízhik came flying to meet him, all flushed and perspiring, with a pail in his hand.

"Here it is ... from Spiridónoff's well ... they wouldn't let me have it, the devils...."

He set the pail on the floor, rushed into a corner, reappeared, and handing a glass to Orlóff, continued to prattle:

"They say you've got the cholera.... I say, well, what of that? You'll have it too,... now it'll run the rounds, as it did in the suburbs...? Whack! he gave me such a bang on the head that I yelled!"

Orlóff took the glass, dipped up water from the pail, and swallowed it at one gulp. In his ears the dead words were ringing:

But Tchízhik hovered round him with swift darts, feeling himself thoroughly in his proper sphere.

"Give me a drink...." said the accordeon-player, moving himself and the table about on the floor.

Tchízhik hopped up to him, and held a glass of water to his black lips. Grigóry, as he leaned against the wall by the door, listened, as in a dream, to the sick man noisily drawing in the water; then he heard Tchízhik propose that they should undress Kislyakóff, and put him to bed, then the voice of the painters' cook rang out. Her broad face, with an expression of terror and compassion, was gazing in from the court-yard through a window, and she said in a snivelling tone:

"You ought to give him lamp-black and rum: a tea-glass full—two spoonfuls of lamp-black, and fill it with rum to the brim."

But some invisible person suggested olive-oil with the brine from cucumbers, and aqua regia.

Orlóff suddenly became conscious that the heavy, oppressive gloom within him was illuminated by some memory. He rubbed his brow hard, as though endeavoring to increase the brilliancy of the light, and all at once, he went swiftly thence, ran across the court-yard and disappeared down the street.

"Heavens! And the shoemaker has got it too! He's run off to the hospital,"—the cook commented upon his flight in a plaintively-shrill voice.

Matréna, who was standing beside her, gazed with widely opened eyes, and turning pale, she shook all over.

"You're mistaken," she said hoarsely, barely moving her white lips,—"Grigóry won't fall ill of that accursed sickness.... He won't yield to it...."

But the cook, howling wofully, had already disappeared somewhere, and five minutes later a cluster of neighbors and passers-by was muttering dully around the Petúnnikoff house. Over all faces the same, identical sentiments flitted in turn: excitement, which was succeeded by hopeless dejection, and something evil, which now and then made way for active audacity. Tchízhik kept flying back and forth between the court and the crowd, his bare feet twinkling, and reporting the course of events in the accordeon-player's room.

The public, collected together in a dense knot, filled the dusty, malodorous air of the street with the dull hum of their talk, and from time to time a violent oath, launched at someone, broke forth from their midst,—an oath as malicious as it was lacking in sense.

Orlóff drove up to the gate on the box of a wagon with a white canvas cover which was driven by a surly man all clad in white, also. This man roared, in a dull bass voice:

And he drove straight at the people, who sprang aside in all directions at his shout.

The aspect of this wagon, and the shout of its driver, rather subdued the high-strung mood of the spectators,—all seemed to grow dark at once, and many went swiftly away.

In the track of the wagon, the student who had visited the Orlóffs made his appearance from somewhere or other. His cap had fallen back on the nape of his neck, the perspiration streamed down his forehead in large drops, he wore a long mantle, of dazzling whiteness, and the lower part of its front was decorated with a large round hole, with reddish edges, evidently just burned in some way.

"Well, Orlóff, where's the sick man?"—he asked loudly, casting a sidelong glance at the public, which had assembled in a little niche by the gate, and had greeted his appearance with great ill-will, although they watched him not without curiosity.

Another voice, which was quieter and had a tinge of malice in it, made promises:

A laugh rang out, though it was not merry, but obscured by a timorous suspicion, it was not lively, though faces cleared somewhat.

"See, they ain't afraid of catching it themselves ... what's the meaning of that?"—very significantly inquired a man with a strained face and a glance filled with concentrated wrath.

And under the influence of this question, the countenances of the public darkened again, and their murmurs became still duller....

"Carefully, carefully, Orlóff! Lift his feet higher ... so! Ready! Drive off, Piótr!" ordered the student. "Tell the doctor I shall be there soon. Well, sir, Mr. Orlóff, I request that you will help me to exterminate the infection here.... By the way, you will learn how to do it, in case of need.... Do you agree? Can you come?"

"I can," said Orlóff, casting a glance around him, and feeling a flood of pride rising within him.

He had escorted the mournful wagon through the gate, and returned just in the nick of time to offer his services. The student stared at him through his glasses.

"Re-eally? That's clever! Now, see here, my friends."—The student seated himself on a cask which was lying on the ground, and rolling himself to and fro on it, he began to say that it was indispensably necessary that Orlóff and Tchízhik should give themselves a good washing.

They formed a group, which was soon joined by Matréna, smiling timidly. After her came the cook, wiping her wet eyes on her dirty apron. In a short time, several persons from among the spectators approached this group, as cautiously as cats approach sparrows. A small, dense ring of men, about ten in number, formed around the student, and this inspired him. Standing in the centre of these people, and briskly gesticulating, he began something in the nature of a lecture, which now awoke smiles on their faces, now aroused their concentrated attention, now keen distrust and sceptical grins.

"The principal point in all diseases is—cleanliness of the body, and of the air which you breathe, gentlemen,"—he assured his hearers.

"Oh Lord!" sighed the painted cook loudly.—"One must pray to Saint Varvára the martyr to be delivered from sudden death...."

"Gentlemen live in the body and in the air, but still, they die too,"—remarked one of the audience.

Orlóff stood beside his wife, and gazed at the face of the student, pondering something deeply the while. Someone gave his shirt a tug, from one side.

"Uncle Grigóry!"—whispered Sénka Tchízhik, raising himself on tiptoe, his eyes sparkling, blazing like coals,—"now that Mítry Pávlovitch is going to die, and he hasn't any relatives ... who'll get his accordeon?"

Sénka stepped aside, and stared through the window of the accordeon-player's little room, searching for something in it with an eager glance.

On the evening of that restless day, when the Orlóffs sat down to drink tea, Matréna asked her husband, with curiosity:

Grigóry looked into her face with eyes obscured by something, and different from usual, and, without replying, began to pour his tea from his glass into his saucer.

About mid-day, after he had finished scrubbing the accordeon-player's rooms, Grigóry had gone off somewhere with the sanitary officer, had returned at three o'clock thoughtful and taciturn, had thrown himself down on the bed, and there he had lain, face upward, until tea-time, never uttering a single word all that time, although his wife had made many efforts to draw him into conversation. He even failed to swear at her for nagging him, and this, in itself, was strange, she was not used to it, and it provoked her.

With the instinct of a woman whose whole life is bound up in her husband, she began to suspect that her husband had become interested in something new, she was afraid of something, and therefore, was the more passionately desirous of knowing what that thing was.

Grigóry poured the last gulp of tea from his saucer into his mouth, wiped his mustache with his hand, pushed his empty glass over to his wife without haste, and knitting his brows, he said:

"To the cholera barracks?" exclaimed Matréna, and tremblingly, with lowered voice, she asked: "are there many of them there?"

"Are they cholera-patients too? They're not, I suppose? ... They've put some others in there, to justify themselves: as much as to say—"look, we can cure!'"

"You're a fool!" said Grigóry with decision, and his eyes flashed angrily.—"You're all stupid folks! Lack of education and stupidity—that's all! You're enough to kill a man with your ignorance.... You can't understand anything,"—he sharply moved toward him his glass freshly filled with tea, and fell silent.

"Where did you get so much education?"—inquired Matréna viciously, and sighed.

Her husband, paying not the slightest heed to her words, remained silent, thoughtful and morose. The samovár, which had burned out, drawled a squeaking melody, full of irritating tediousness, an odor of oil-paints, carbolic acid, and stirred-up cesspools floated through the windows from the court-yard. The semi-twilight, the screeching of the samovár, and the smells—everything in the room became densely merged with one another, forming around the Orlóffs a setting which resembled a nightmare, while the dark maw of the oven stared at the husband and wife exactly as though it felt itself called upon to swallow them when a convenient opportunity should present itself. The silence lasted for a long time. Husband and wife nibbled away at their sugar, rattled their crockery, swallowed their tea.[10] Matréna sighed, Grigóry tapped the table with his finger.

[10] By way of economizing, the peasants do not put sugar into their tea, but nibble at it, and thus sweeten their mouths, an inelegant and inconvenient, but highly satisfactory method of operation.—Translator.

"You never saw such cleanliness as they have there!"—he suddenly began, irritably.—"All the attendants, down to the very last one—wear white. The sick people keep getting into the bath all the time.... They give them wine ... six bottles and a half! As for the food—the very smell of it would make you feel full-fed.... Care, anxiety.... They treat them in a motherly way..? and all the rest of it.... So they do. Please to understand: you live along upon the earth, and not even one devil would take the trouble to spit on you, much less call in now and then to inquire—what and how and, in general,... what your life is like, that is to say, whether it suits you, or whether it is the right sort for a man? Has he any means of breathing or not? But when you begin to die—they not only do not permit it, but even put themselves to expense. The barracks ... wine ... six bottles and a half! Haven't people any sense? For the barracks and the wine cost a lot of money. Couldn't that same money be used for improving life ... a little every year?"

His wife made no attempt to understand his remarks, it was enough for her to feel that they were new, and thence to deduce, with absolute accuracy, that something new concerning her was also in progress in Grigóry's mind. Convinced of this, she wished to learn, as promptly as possible, how all this concerned her. Fear was mingled with this desire, and hope, and a sort of hostility toward her husband.

"I suppose the people yonder know even more than you do,"—said she, when he had finished, and pursed up her lips in a sceptical way.

Grigóry shrugged his shoulders, cast a furtive glance at her, and then, after a pause, he began in a still more lofty tone:

"Whether they know or not, that's their business. But if I have to die, without having seen any sort of life, I can reason about that. Now see here, I'll tell you this: I don't want any more of this sort of thing—that is to say, I won't consent to sit and wait for the cholera to come and seize hold of me. I won't do it! Piótr Ivánovitch says: 'go ahead, and meet it half way! Fate is against you—but you can oppose it,—who'll get the upper hand? It's war! That's all there is to say about it....' So, what now? I'm going to enter the barracks as an orderly—and that's the end of it! Understand? I'm going to walk straight into its maw.—You may swallow me, but I'll make a play with my feet!... I shall not earn any the less there ... twenty rubles a month for wages, and they may add a gratuity besides.... I may die?... that's so, but I should die sooner here. And again, it's a change in my life...." and the excited Orlóff banged the table so vehemently with his fist, that all the crockery bounced up and down with a clatter.

Matréna, at the beginning of her husband's speech, had stared at him with an expression of uneasiness, but by the time he had finished, she had screwed up her eyes in a hostile manner.

"I have wits of my own ... I can judge,"—for some reason, Grigóry evaded a direct reply.

"From you?"—Grigóry was somewhat disconcerted—he had not yet succeeded in thinking out that matter. Of course, one can leave a woman in lodgings, as is generally done, but there are different sorts of women. Matréna, was one of the dangerous sort. One must keep her directly under his eyes. Settling down on this thought, Orlóff went on with a scowl:—"The student ... what ails you? You will live here ... and I shall be earning wages ... ye-es...."

"Just so,"—said the woman briefly and calmly, and laughed with that very significant and purely feminine smile, which is capable of evoking in a man thoughts of jealousy which pierce his heart.

Orlóff, who was nervous and quick of apprehension, felt this, but, being loath to betray himself, out of self-love, he flung at his wife the curt remark:

"Quack and grunt—make up all your speeches...." and he pricked up his ears, in anticipation of what she would say.

"Viper! None of your shiftiness—I'll damage you!" Orlóff boiled up.—"Perhaps I'm going to my death."

She made no reply. Her silence enraged him, but he restrained himself from his customary expression of the feelings which such scenes called forth in him. He restrained himself under the influence of a very venomous thought, as it appeared to him, which flashed through his brain. He even gave vent to a malicious smile. "I know you'd like to have me tumble down even to the very depths of hell. Well, we shall see which of us comes off best ... yes! I, also, can take such a course—akh, I've no patience with you!"

He sprang up from the table, snatched up his cap from the window-sill, and went off, leaving his wife dissatisfied with her policy, disconcerted by his threats, and with a growing feeling within her of alarm for the future. As she gazed out of the window, she whispered to herself:

Besieged by a throng of disquieting problems, she remained sitting, for a long time, at the table, endeavoring to foresee what Grigóry would do. Before her stood the cleanly-washed table appurtenances; and on the principal wall of the neighboring house opposite her windows, the setting sun cast a reddish spot; reflected from the white wall, it penetrated into the room, and the edge of the glass sugar-bowl which stood in front of Matréna glittered. She stared at this faint reflection, with contracted brow, until her eyes ached. Then, rising from her chair, she cleared away the dishes and lay down on the bed. She felt disgusted.

Grigóry arrived when it was already entirely dark. From his very footsteps on the stairs she decided that he was in good spirits. He swore at the darkness in the room, called to his wife, approached the bed, and sat down on it. His wife raised herself, and sat beside him.

She threw her arms round his neck, and clasping him tightly, kissed him straight on the lips. He had not expected this, and thrust her away. She was pretending ... she didn't want to be with him at all, rogue that she was! The viper was pretending, she regarded her husband as a fool....

"What are you delighted about?"—he asked roughly and suspiciously, conscious of a desire to hurl her to the floor.

[11] The hero of a seventeenth century Russian fairy-tale, after the Persian tale of "Rustem."—Translator.

The first day of the Orlóffs' service in the hospital coincided with a very great influx of patients, and the two novices, accustomed, as they were, to their slowly-moving existence, felt worried and hampered in the midst of this seething activity which had seized them in its grasp. Awkward, unable to comprehend orders, overwhelmed by impressions, they immediately lost their heads, and although they incessantly ran hither and thither, in the effort to work, they hindered others rather than accomplished anything themselves. Several times, Grigóry felt, with all his being, that he merited a stem shout or a scolding for his incompetence, but, to his great amazement, no one shouted at him.

When one of the doctors, a tall, black-mustached man, with a hooked nose, and a huge wart over his right eyebrow, ordered Grigóry to assist one of the patients to sit down in the bath-tub, Grigóry gripped the sick man under the arms with so much zeal that the man groaned and frowned.

"Don't break him to pieces, my dear fellow, he'll fit into the bath-tub whole...." said the doctor seriously.

Orlóff was abashed; but the sick man, a long, gaunt fellow, laughed with all his might, and said hoarsely: "He's new to it.... He doesn't know how."

Another doctor, an old man, with a pointed gray beard, and large, brilliant eyes, gave the Orlóffs instructions, when they reached the barracks, how to treat the patients, what to do in this case and that, how to handle the sick people in transferring them. In conclusion, he asked them whether they had been to the bath the day before, and gave them white aprons. This doctor's voice was soft, he spoke rapidly; he took a great liking to the married pair, but half an hour later they had forgotten all his instructions, overwhelmed with the stormy life of the barracks. All about them flitted people in white, orders were issued, caught on the fly by the orderlies, the sick people rattled in their throats, moaned and groaned, water flowed and splashed; and all these sounds floated on the air, which was so thickly saturated with penetrating odors that tickled the nostrils disagreeably, that it seemed as though every word of the doctors, every sigh of the patients, stunk also, and irritated the nose....

At first, it seemed to Orlóff that utterly restless chaos reigned there, wherein he could not possibly find his place, and that he would choke, grow deaf, fall ill.... But a few hours passed, and Grigóry, invaded by the breath of energy everywhere disseminated, pricked up his ears, and became permeated with a mighty desire to adjust himself to his business as speedily as possible, conscious that he would feel calmer and easier if he could turn in company with the rest.

"More hot water in this bath-tub!" commanded a scraggy little medical student, with red, inflamed eyelids.

"Here you ... what's your name? Orlóff ... yes! rub his feet.... There, that's the way ... you understand.... So-o, so-o.... More lightly—you'll take the skin off.... Oï, how tired I am...."

Another long-haired and pock-marked student gave Grigóry orders and showed him how to work.

Grigóry displayed great zeal—all covered with perspiration, dizzy, with dimmed eves and a heavy darkness in his head. At times, the feeling of personal existence in him completely vanished under the pressure of the mass of impressions which he underwent every moment. The green spots under the clouded eyes on earth-colored faces, bones which seemed to have been sharpened by the disease, the sticky, malodorous skin, the strange convulsions of the hardly living bodies—all this made his heart contract with grief, and caused a nausea which he could, with difficulty, control.

Several times, in the corridor of the barracks, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his wife; she had grown thin, and her face was gray and abstracted. He even managed to ask her, with a voice which had grown hoarse:

A totally unaccustomed thought stung Grigóry: perhaps he had done wrong in forcing his wife to come hither, to such filthy work. She would fall ill of the infection.... And the next time he met her, he shouted at her severely:

"And what if I don't?"—she asked, teasingly, displaying her small, white teeth.

This enraged him. A pretty place she had chosen for mirth, the fool! And how mean they were, those women! But he did not succeed in saying anything to her; catching his angry glance, Matréna went rapidly away to the women's section.

And a minute later he was carrying his acquaintance the policeman to the dead-house. The policeman rocked gently to and fro on the stretcher, with his eyes fixed in a stare, from beneath contorted brows, on the clear, hot sky. Grigóry gazed at him with dull terror in his heart: The day before yesterday he had seen that policeman at his post, and had even sworn at him as he went past—they had some little accounts to settle between them. And now, here was this man, so healthy and malicious, lying dead, all disfigured, drawn up with convulsions.

Orlóff felt that this was not right,—why should a man be born into the world at all, if he must die, in one day, of such a dirty disease? He gazed down upon the policeman from above, and pitied him. What would become of his children ... three in all? The dead man had buried his wife a year ago, and had not yet succeeded in marrying for the second time.

He even ached, somewhere inside, with this pity. But, all at once, the clenched left hand of the corpse slowly moved and straightened itself out. At the same moment, the left side of the distorted mouth, which had been half open up to now, closed.

"Halt!"—shouted Orlóff hoarsely, setting the stretcher down on the ground.—"Be quick!"—he said in a whisper to the orderly who was carrying the corpse with him. The latter turned round, cast a glance at the dead man, and said angrily to Orlóff:

"What are you lying for? Don't you understand that he's only putting himself in order for the coffin? You see how it has twisted him up? He can't be put into the coffin like that. Hey there, carry him along!"

"Carry him along, do you hear, you queer man! Don't you understand words? I tell you: he's putting himself in order,—well, that means that he's moving. This ignorance of yours may lead you into sin, if you don't look out.... Look lively there! Can a man make such speeches about a dead body? That signifies a riot, brother ... that's what it is! Understand? In other words, hold your tongue, and don't utter a syllable to anyone about his moving,—they're all like that. Otherwise, the sow will tell it to the boar-pig, and the boar will tell it to the whole town, well, and the result will be a riot—'they're burying people alive!' The populace will come here, and tear us in bits. There'll be about enough of you left for a breakfast-roll.[12] Understand? Shunt him here, on the left."

[12] A kalátch—a delicious and favorite form of bread, particularly good in Moscow.—Translator.

"Only don't let your spirits sink, my good fellow-you'll get used to it. We're well off here. Victuals, treatment and all the rest—everything is just as it should be. We shall all be corpses, my boy; it's the commonest thing in life. And, in the meanwhile, brisk up, you know, and only don't get scared—that's the chief thing! Do you drink vódka?"

"Well then. Yonder in the ditch I have a little bottle, in case of need. Come and let's swallow a little of it." They went to the pit, round the corner of the barracks, took a drink, and Prónin, pouring some drops of mint on sugar, gave it to Orlóff, with the words:

"Eat that, otherwise you'll smell of vódka. They're strict here about vódka. For it's injurious to drink it, they say."

"I should think so! I've been here from the start. A lot of folks have died here since I've been here—hundreds, to speak plainly. It's an uneasy life, but a good life here, to tell the truth. It's a pious work. Like the ambulance-corps in time of war ... you've heard about the ambulance-corps and the sisters of mercy? I watched them during the Turkish campaign. I was at Adragan and Kars. Well, my boy, they're purer than we are, we soldiers and people in general. We fight, we have guns, bullets, bayonets; but they—they walk about without any weapons, as though they were in a green garden. They pick up our men, or a Turk, and carry them to the field-hospital. And around them ... zh-zhee! ti-in! fi-it! Sometimes the poor ambulance man gets it in the neck—tchik!... and that's the end of him!..."

After this conversation, and a good swallow of vódka, Orlóff plucked up a little courage.

"You've put your hand to the rope, don't say it's too thick,"—he exhorted himself, as he rubbed a sick man's legs. Someone behind him entreated piteously, in a moaning voice:

"Oho-ho-ho! Hotter! Mis-mister doctor, it relieves me! Christ reward you,—I can feel! Permit him to pour in some more boiling water!"

Orlóff worked away, lending an attentive ear to what went on around him, and found that, as a matter of fact, everything was not so nasty and strange as it had seemed to him a little while before, and that chaos did not reign, but a great and intelligent power was acting regularly. But he shuddered, nevertheless, when he recalled the policeman, and cast a furtive glance through the window of the barracks into the yard. He believed that the policeman was dead, but still there was an element of wavering in this belief. Wouldn't the man suddenly spring up and shout? And he remembered that he seemed to have heard someone tell: that one day, somewhere or other, people who had died of the cholera leaped out of their coffins and ran away.

As Orlóff ran to and fro in the barracks, now rubbing one patient, now placing another in the bath-tub, he felt exactly as though gruel were boiling in his brain. He recalled his wife: how was she getting on yonder? Sometimes with this recollection mingled a transitory desire to steal a minute to have a look at Matréna. But after this, Orlóff felt, somehow, disconcerted at his desire, and exclaimed to himself:

"Come, bustle about, you fatmeated woman! You'll dry up, never fear.... You'll get rid of your intentions...."

He had always suspected that his wife cherished, in her heart of hearts, intentions very insulting to him as a husband, and now and then, when he rose in his suspicions to a sort of objectiveness, he even admitted that there was some foundation for these intentions. Her life, also, was tinged with yellow, and all sorts of trash creeps into one's head with such a life. This objectiveness was generally converted into certainty during the period of his suspicions. Then he would ask himself: why had he found it necessary to crawl out of his cellar into this boiling cauldron?—and he wondered at himself. But all these thoughts worked round and round, somewhere deep within him, and were fenced off, as it were, from the direct line of his work by the strained attention which he devoted to the actions of the medical staff. Never, in any sort of labor, had he beheld men wear themselves out, as the men did here, and he reflected, more than once, as he surveyed the exhausted faces of the doctors and students, that all these men really did not get paid for doing nothing!

When relieved from duty, hardly able to stand on his feet, Orlóff went out into the court-yard of the barracks, and lay down against its wall, under the window of the apothecary's shop. There was a ringing in his head, there was a pain under his shoulder-blades, and his legs ached with the gnawing pangs of fatigue. He no longer thought of anything, or wanted anything, he simply stretched himself out on the sod, stared at the sky, in which hung magnificent clouds, richly adorned with the rays of sunset, and fell into a sleep like death.

He dreamed that he and his wife were the guests of Doctor Váshtchenko in a huge room, with rows of Vienna chairs ranged around the walls. On the chairs all the patients from the barracks were sitting. The doctor and Matréna were executing the "Russian Dance" in the middle of the hall, while he himself was playing the accordeon and laughing heartily, because the doctor's long legs would not bend at all, and the doctor, a very grave and pompous man, was stalking about the hall after Matréna exactly as a heron stalks over a marsh.

"Aha!" he exclaimed saturninely and menacingly.—"Did you think, Gríshka, that I was completely dead? You're playing the accordeon, but you dragged me out to the dead-house! Come along with me, now! Get up!" Seized with a fit of trembling, all bathed in perspiration, Orlóff raised himself quickly and sat on the ground. Opposite, was squatting Doctor Váshtchenko, who said to him reproachfully:

"What sort of an ambulance nurse are you, my friend, if you go to sleep on the ground, and lie down on it upon your belly, to boot, hey? Now, you'll take cold in your bowels,—you'll take to your cot, and the first you know, you'll die.... It's not right, my friend,—you have a place in the barracks to sleep. Why didn't they tell you so? Besides, you are in a perspiration, and have a chill. Come along with me, now, I'll give you something."

"So much the worse. You must take care of your-self—it is a dangerous time, and you are a valuable man."

Orlóff followed the doctor in silence along the corridor of the barracks, in silence drank some sort of medicine out of a wine-glass, drank something more out of another, frowned and spat.

"Come, go and have a sleep now.... Farewell for a while!" and the doctor began to move his long, slender feet over the floor of the corridor.

"For the work. Now I shall try with all my might to please you! Because your anxiety is agreeable to me ... and ... you said I was a valuable man ... and, altogether, I'm most si-sincerely grateful to you!" The doctor gazed intently and in surprise at the agitated face of his hospital orderly, and smiled also.

"You're a queer fellow! However, never mind,—you'll turn out splendidly ... genuine. Go ahead, and do your best; it will not be for me, but for the patients. We must wrest a man from the disease, tear him out of its paws,—do you understand me? Well, then, go ahead and try your best to conquer the disease. And, in the mean-while—go and sleep!"

Orlóff was soon lying on his cot, and fell asleep with a pleasing sensation of warmth in his bowels. He felt joyful, and was proud of his very simple conversation with the doctor.

But he sank into slumber regretting that his wife had not heard that conversation. He must tell her to-morrow.... That devil's pepper-pot would not believe it, in all probability.

He raised his head, and looked at her. She smiled at him. She was so calm and fresh, with her hair smoothly brushed, and clad in her white slip.

It pleased him to see her thus, and, at the same time, he reflected that the other men in the barracks certainly must see her in the same light.

"What do you mean—what tea? I have my own tea;—where am I to go?" he asked gloomily.

"What a woman! She invites me to drink tea, she's affectionate.... But she has grown thin in one day." He felt sorry for her, and wanted to do something which would please her. Should he buy something sweet to eat with the tea? But while he was washing himself he rejected that idea,—why pamper the woman? Let her live as she is!

They drank tea in a bright little den with two windows, which looked out on the plain, all flooded with the golden radiance of the morning sun. On the grass, under the windows, the dew was still glistening, far away on the horizon in the nebulous rose-colored morning mist stood the trees along the highway. The sky was clear, and the fragrance of damp grass and earth floated in through the windows from the meadows.

The table stood against the wall between the windows, and at it sat three persons: Grigóry and Matréna with the latter's companion,—a tall, thin, elderly woman, with a pock-marked face, and kindly gray eyes. They called her Felitzáta Egórovna; she was unmarried, the daughter of a Collegiate Assessor, and could not drink tea made with water from the hospital boiler, but always boiled her own samovár. As she explained all this to Orlóff, in a cracked voice, she hospitably suggested that he should sit by the window, and drink his fill of "the really heavenly air," and then she disappeared somewhere.

"Just frightfully tired!" replied Matréna with animation.—"I could hardly stand on my feet, my head reeled, I couldn't understand what was said to me, and the first I knew, I was lying at full length on the floor, unconscious. I barely—barely held out until relief-time came.... I kept praying; 'help, oh Lord,' I thought."

"I'm afraid of the dead people. Do you know...." she bent over to her husband, and whispered to him in affright:—"they move after they are dead.... God is my witness, they do!"

"I've se-een that!"—laughed Grigóry sceptically.—"Yesterday, Nazároff the policeman came near giving me a box on the ear after his death. I was carrying him to the dead-house, and he gave su-uch a flourish with his left hand ... I hardly managed to get out of the way ... so there now!"—He was not telling the strict truth, but it seemed to come out that way of itself, against his will.

He was greatly pleased at this tea-drinking in the bright, clean room, with windows opening on a boundless expanse of green plain and blue sky. And something else pleased him, also,—not exactly his wife, nor yet himself. The result of it all was that he wished to show his best side, to be the hero of the day which was just beginning.

"When I start in to work—even the sky will become hot, so it will! For there is a cause for my doing so. In the first place, there are the people here,—there aren't any more like them on earth, I can tell you that!"

He narrated his conversation with the doctor, and as he again exerted his fancy, unconsciously to himself—this fact still further strengthened his mood.

"In the second place, there's the work itself. It's a great affair, my friend, in the nature of war, for example. The cholera and people—which is to get the better of the other? Brains are needed, and everything must be just so. What's cholera? One must understand that, and then—go ahead and give it what it can't endure! Doctor Váshtchenko says to me: 'you're a valuable man in this matter, Orlóff,' says he. 'Don't get scared,' says he; 'and drive it up from the patient's legs into his belly, and there,' says he, 'I'll nip it with something sour. That's the end of it, and the man lives, and ought to be eternally grateful to you and me, because who was it that took him away from death? We!'"—And Orlóff proudly inflated his chest as he gazed at his wife with kindling eyes.

She smiled pensively into his face; he was handsome, and bore a great resemblance to his old self, the Grísha whom she had seen some time, long ago, before their marriage.

"All of them in our division are just such hard-working, kind folks. The woman doctor, a fa-at woman with spectacles, and then the female medical students. They're nice people, they talk to a body so simply, and you can understand everything they say."

"So that signifies that you're all right, satisfied?"—asked Grigóry, whose excitement had somewhat cooled off.

"Do you mean me? Oh Lord! Judge for yourself: I get twelve rubles, and you get twenty ... that makes thirty-eight a month![13] We're lodged and fed! That means, that if people keep on getting sick until the winter, how much shall we amass?... And then, God willing, we'll raise ourselves out of that cellar...."