37

PASSING by the fireman on duty at the gate of the police-station,¹ the cab with the convict drove into the police-station yard and stopped at one of the doors.

Some firemen in the yard, their sleeves rolled up, were laughing and talking loudly over a cart they were busy washing.

The moment the trap pulled up a number of policemen surrounded it, caught hold of the convict’s lifeless body Under the arms and by the legs, and lifted it from the vehicle, which creaked under their weight.

The policeman who had brought the body jumped out from the cab, began to swing his numbed arms about and, taking off his cap, crossed himself. The dead man was carried through the door and up the stairs. Nekhlyudov followed. There were four bunks in the dirty little room where they took the body. A couple of sick men in hospital dressing-gowns were sitting on two of them: one had a twisted mouth and bandaged neck, the other was a consumptive. The two remaining bunks were unoccupied. The body of the convict was laid on one of them. A little man with glittering eyes and quivering eyebrows, clad only in his underclothes and stockings, glided noiselessly over to the convict’s body, looked at it and then at Nekhlyudov, and burst into a peal of laughter. It was a madman who was being kept in the police hospital.

‘They are trying to scare me,’ he said. ‘Only they won’t succeed.’

The policemen who had carried the corpse in were followed by a police-officer and a medical assistant.

Going up to the body, the medical assistant touched the sallow freckled hand which, although not quite stiff, already had the pallor of death, held it for a moment, then let it drop. It fell lifelessly on the dead man’s stomach.

‘It’s all over with him,’ said the medical assistant, shaking his head, but, apparently to comply with the rules, he undid the coarse wet shirt and, tossing back his curly hair from his ear, bent over the convict’s yellow-skinned, motionless, high chest. Everyone was silent. The medical assistant straightened himself, shook his head again and with his finger touched first one, and then the other lid of the open, staring blue eyes.

‘You won’t scare me, you won’t scare me,’ the madman was saying, all the time spitting in the direction of the medical assistant.

‘Well?’ asked the police-officer.

‘Well?’ repeated the medical assistant. ‘You’ll have to take him away to the mortuary.’

‘Mind, are you sure?’ asked the police-officer.

‘I ought to be,’ said the medical assistant, for some reason drawing the shirt over the dead man’s chest. ‘However, I will send for Matvei Ivanych and let him have a look. Petrov, go and fetch him,’ said the medical assistant, moving away from the body.

‘Take him to the mortuary,’ said the police-officer. ‘And you come to the office and sign,’ he added to the convoy soldier, who had not left the convict for a single moment.

‘Very good, sir,’ replied the soldier.

The policemen lifted the body and carried it downstairs again. Nekhlyudov wanted to follow them but the madman stopped him.

‘You’re not in the plot, so give me a cigarette,’ he said.

Nekhlyudov took out his cigarette-case and gave him one. The madman, twitching his eyebrows, began talking quickly, telling Nekhlyudov how they tortured him by means of putting ideas into his head.

‘They are all against me, you see, and torment and torture me with their suggestions.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Nekhlyudov, and without waiting for him to finish went out into the yard, anxious to see where they would take the body.

The policemen with their burden had already crossed the yard and were about to enter the door of a cellar. Nekhlyudov made to follow them but the police-officer stopped him.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Nekhlyudov.

‘Nothing, then be off with you.’

Nekhlyudov obeyed and returned to his cab. The driver was dozing. Nekhlyudov roused him and they started once more towards the railway-station.

They had barely gone a hundred yards when they met a cart – also accompanied by a convoy soldier with a gun – in which another convict lay, apparently already dead. He was on his back, and his shaven head with its black beard covered by the pancake-shaped cap, which had slipped down over his nose, jerked and swayed at every jolt of the wagon. The driver in heavy boots walked beside the cart, holding the reins in his hands. A policeman walked behind. Nekhlyudov touched his cabby’s shoulder.

‘See what they’re doing!’ said the cabby, stopping his horse.

Nekhlyudov jumped down from his cab and following the driver of the cart past the fireman on duty at the gate went into the yard of the police-station again. By this time the firemen had finished washing the cart and in their place a tall bony man, the captain of the fire-brigade, a dark blue band round his cap, stood with his hands in his pockets, dourly inspecting a thick-necked bay stallion, which a fireman was leading up and down before him. The horse was slightly lame in one fore-leg and the captain was angrily saying something to the veterinary, who was standing near him.

The police-officer was also there. Seeing another corpse, he went up to the cart.

‘Where did you pick him up?’ he asked, shaking his head disapprovingly.

‘In Old Gorbatovsky Street,’ replied the policeman.

‘A prisoner?’ asked the captain of the fire-brigade.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s the second today,’ said the police-officer.

‘They have a funny way of doing things, I must say. And in this heat, too,’ said the captain, and turning to the fireman who was leading the lame stallion, he shouted: ‘Put him in the corner stall! I’ll teach you, you son of a bitch, to go maiming a horse worth more than yourself, you bastard you!’

The second corpse, like the first, was lifted from the cart by the policemen and carried into the casualty room. Nekhlyudov followed as though hypnotized.

‘What do you want?’ asked one of the policemen.

Not answering, he went into the room where they carried the body.

The madman, seated on a bunk, was greedily smoking the cigarette Nekhlyudov had given him.

‘So you’ve come back,’ he said, and roared with laughter. Catching sight of the dead body, he made a wry face and said, ‘Another one! I am sick of them. I’m not a child, am I?’ he asked Nekhlyudov, with an inquiring smile.

Nekhlyudov was looking at the dead man: there was no one standing between them now, and the face which before had been hidden by the cap was in full view. This convict was as handsome in face and form as the other had been ugly. He was still in the full bloom of life. In spite of the disfigured, half-shaven head, the low straight forehead, that bulged slightly above the black, now lifeless eyes, was very fine, and so was the small aquiline nose above the thin black moustaches. A smile still hovered on his lips, now turning blue; a little beard only fringed the lower part of the face, and the shaven side of the skull revealed a small, firm, well-shaped ear. The expression on the face was tranquil, stern and kind. Let alone the fact that it was evident from the face what possibilities of spiritual life had been lost in this man, one could see by the fine bones of his hands and shackled feet, and the powerful muscles of the well-proportioned limbs what a fine vigorous agile human animal this had been – a far more perfect animal of its kind than the bay stallion, the laming of which had roused the captain of the fire-brigade to such fury. And yet he had been done to death, and no one regretted him as a human being – no one even regretted him as a working animal that had perished uselessly. The only feeling evoked by his death was a unanimous one of annoyance at the bother of having to dispose of this body which was threatening to decompose.

The doctor accompanied by his assistant and a police-inspector entered the room. The doctor was a stocky duck-set man in a tussore-silk jacket and narrow trousers of the same material that clung to his muscular thighs. The inspector was short and fat, with a round red face that looked rounder still from his habit of filling his cheeks with air and slowly letting it out again. The doctor sat down on the bunk by the side of the dead man, and, just as his assistant had done, touched the hands, put his ear to the heart, and rose, smoothing down his trousers.

‘Couldn’t be deader,’ he said.

The inspector filled his mouth with air and slowly let it out again.

“Which prison is he from?’ he asked the convoy soldier.

The convoy soldier told him, and drew his attention to the shackles on the dead man’s feet.

‘I’ll have them removed; we have got smiths about, thank the Lord,’ said the captain, and went towards the door, again puffing out his cheeks and slowly allowing the air to escape.

‘Why did this happen?’ Nekhlyudov asked the doctor.

The doctor looked at him over his spectacles.

“What do you mean, why did it happen? Why men the of sunstroke? It is like this: they keep ‘em locked up all through the winter, without exercise, without light, and suddenly bring ‘em out into the sun, and on a day like this, too, and march ‘em in a crowd so that there’s not a breath of air. And the result is sunstroke.’

‘Then whatever do they send them out for?’

‘You ask them! But who are you, anyway?’

‘I am a stranger here.’

‘Ah! I wish you good day, I am busy,’ said the doctor, annoyed. And giving his trousers a downward pull, he crossed over to the other bunks.

‘Well, how are you feeling?’ he asked the pale man with the crooked mouth and bandaged neck.

Meanwhile the madman, sitting on his bunk, had finished smoking and was now spitting towards the doctor.

Nekhlyudov went down into the yard and, past the fire-brigade’s horses, and some hens, and the sentry in his brass helmet, walked through the gate, where he seated himself in his cab, the driver of which was dozing again, and was driven to the railway-station.