Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,89

out exactly as he had predicted. The wretched, helpless look of the man in the jacket lined with fox fur seemed to afford him great pleasure.

“It’s messy traveling now, Vassily Sergeich,” he said, as the horses were being harnessed on the bank. “You should hold off going for a couple of weeks, until it gets more dry. Or else not go at all … As if there’s any use in your going, when you know yourself how people are eternally going, day and night, and there’s still no use in it. Really!”

Vassily Sergeich silently gave him a tip, got into the tarantass, and drove off.

“There, galloping for a doctor!” said Semyon, hunching up from the cold. “Yes, go look for a real doctor, chase the wind in the field, catch the devil by his tail, damn your soul! Such odd birds, Lord, forgive me, a sinner!”

The Tartar came up to the Explainer and, looking at him with hatred and revulsion, trembling and mixing Tartar words into his broken language, said:

“He good … good, and you—bad! You bad! Gentleman a good soul, excellent, and you a beast, you bad! Gentleman alive, and you dead … God created man for be alive, for be joy, and be sorrow, and be grief, and you want nothing, it means you not alive, you stone, clay! Stone want nothing, and you want nothing … You stone—and God not love you, but love gentleman.”

Everybody laughed. The Tartar winced squeamishly, waved his arm and, wrapping himself in his rags, went towards the fire. The boatmen and Semyon trudged to the hut.

“It’s cold!” croaked one of the boatmen, stretching out on the straw that covered the damp clay floor.

“Yes, it’s not warm!” another agreed. “A convict’s life! …”

They all lay down. The wind forced the door open, and snow blew into the hut. Nobody wanted to get up and shut the door: it was cold, and they were lazy.

“And I’m fine!” Semyon said as he was falling asleep. “God grant everybody such a life.”

“We know you, a convict seven times over. Even the devils can’t get at you.”

Sounds resembling a dog’s howling came from outside.

“What’s that? Who’s there?”

“It’s the Tartar crying.”

“Look at that… Odd bird!”

“He’ll get u-u-used to it!” said Semyon, and he fell asleep at once.

Soon the others also fell asleep. And so the door stayed open.

MAY 1892

WARD NO. 6

I

In the hospital yard stands a small annex surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles, and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney is half fallen down, the porch steps are rotten and overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of stucco remain. The front façade faces the hospital, the back looks onto a field, from which it is separated by the gray hospital fence topped with nails. These nails, turned point up, and the fence, and the annex itself have that special despondent and accursed look that only our hospitals and prisons have.

If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go down the narrow path that leads to the annex and see what is going on inside. Opening the first door, we go into the front hall. Here whole mountains of hospital rubbish are piled against the walls and around the stove. Mattresses, old torn dressing gowns, trousers, blue-striped shirts, worthless, worn-out shoes—all these rags are piled in heaps, crumpled, tangled, rotting and giving off a suffocating smell.

On top of this rubbish, always with a pipe in his mouth, lies the caretaker Nikita, an old retired soldier with faded tabs. He has a stern, haggard face, beetling brows, which give his face the look of a steppe sheepdog, and a red nose; he is small of stature, looks lean and sinewy, but his bearing is imposing and his fists are enormous. He is one of those simple-hearted, positive, efficient, and obtuse people who love order more than anything in the world and are therefore convinced that they must be beaten. He beats them on the face, the chest, the back, wherever, and is certain that without that there would be no order here.

Further on you enter a big, spacious room that takes up the entire annex, except for the front hall. The walls here are daubed with dirty blue paint, the ceiling is as sooty as in a chimneyless hut— clearly the stoves smoke in winter and the place is full of fumes. The windows are disfigured inside by iron grilles. The floor is gray and splintery. There is a