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A. Chekhov -
Ward No. 6
I
II
III IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
III One autumn morning Ivan Dmitritch, turning up the collar of his
greatcoat and splashing through the mud, made his way by
side-streets and back lanes to see some artisan, and to collect
some payment that was owing. He was in a gloomy mood, as he
always was in the morning. In one of the side-streets he was met
by two convicts in fetters and four soldiers with rifles in
charge of them. Ivan Dmitritch had very often met convicts
before, and they had always excited feelings of compassion and
discomfort in him; but now this meeting made a peculiar, strange
impression on him. It suddenly seemed to him for some reason
that he, too, might be put into fetters and led through the mud
to prison like that. After visiting the artisan, on the way home
he met near the post office a police superintendent of his
acquaintance, who greeted him and walked a few paces along the
street with him, and for some reason this seemed to him
suspicious. At home he could not get the convicts or the
soldiers with their rifles out of his head all day, and an
unaccountable inward agitation prevented him from reading or
concentrating his mind. In the evening he did not light his
lamp, and at night he could not sleep, but kept thinking that he
might be arrested, put into fetters, and thrown into prison. He
did not know of any harm he had done, and could be certain that
he would never be guilty of murder, arson, or theft in the
future either; but was it not easy to commit a crime by
accident, unconsciously, and was not false witness always
possible, and, indeed, miscarriage of justice? It was not
without good reason that the agelong experience of the simple
people teaches that beggary and prison are ills none can be safe
from. A judicial mistake is very possible as legal proceedings
are conducted nowadays, and there is nothing to be wondered at
in it. People who have an official, professional relation to
other men's sufferings -- for instance, judges, police officers,
doctors -- in course of time, through habit, grow so callous
that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal
attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not
different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in
the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this formal,
soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one
thing -- time -- in order to deprive an innocent man of all
rights of property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only
the time spent on performing certain formalities for which the
judge is paid his salary, and then -- it is all over. Then you
may look in vain for justice and protection in this dirty,
wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles from a railway
station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of justice
when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational
and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy -- for
instance, a verdict of acquittal -- calls forth a perfect
outburst of dissatisfied and revengeful feeling?
In the morning Ivan Dmitritch got up from his bed in a state of
horror, with cold perspiration on his forehead, completely
convinced that he might be arrested any minute. Since his gloomy
thoughts of yesterday had haunted him so long, he thought, it
must be that there was some truth in them. They could not,
indeed, have come into his mind without any grounds whatever.
A policeman walking slowly passed by the windows: that was not
for nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near
the house. Why were they silent? And agonizing days and nights
followed for Ivan Dmitritch. Everyone who passed by the windows
or came into the yard seemed to him a spy or a detective. At
midday the chief of the police usually drove down the street
with a pair of horses; he was going from his estate near the
town to the police department; but Ivan Dmitritch fancied every
time that he was driving especially quickly, and that he had a
peculiar expression: it was evident that he was in haste to
announce that there was a very important criminal in the town.
Ivan Dmitritch started at every ring at the bell and knock at
the gate, and was agitated whenever he came upon anyone new at
his landlady's; when he met police officers and gendarmes he
smiled and began whistling so as to seem unconcerned. He could
not sleep for whole nights in succession expecting to be
arrested, but he snored loudly and sighed as though in deep
sleep, that his landlady might think he was asleep; for if he
could not sleep it meant that he was tormented by the stings of
conscience -- what a piece of evidence! Facts and common sense
persuaded him that all these terrors were nonsense and
morbidity, that if one looked at the matter more broadly there
was nothing really terrible in arrest and imprisonment -- so
long as the conscience is at ease; but the more sensibly and
logically he reasoned, the more acute and agonizing his mental
distress became. It might be compared with the story of a hermit
who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in a virgin
forest; the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker
the forest grew. In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was
useless, gave up reasoning altogether, and abandoned himself
entirely to despair and terror.
He began to avoid people and to seek solitude. His official work
had been distasteful to him before: now it became unbearable to
him. He was afraid they would somehow get him into trouble,
would put a bribe in his pocket unnoticed and then denounce him,
or that he would accidentally make a mistake in official papers
that would appear to be fraudulent, or would lose other people's
money. It is strange that his imagination had never at other
times been so agile and inventive as now, when every day he
thought of thousands of different reasons for being seriously
anxious over his freedom and honour; but, on the other hand, his
interest in the outer world, in books in particular, grew
sensibly fainter, and his memory began to fail him.
In the spring when the snow melted there were found in the
ravine near the cemetery two half-decomposed corpses -- the
bodies of an old woman and a boy bearing the traces of death by
violence. Nothing was talked of but these bodies and their
unknown murderers. That people might not think he had been
guilty of the crime, Ivan Dmitritch walked about the streets,
smiling, and when he met acquaintances he turned pale, flushed,
and began declaring that there was no greater crime than the
murder of the weak and defenceless. But this duplicity soon
exhausted him, and after some reflection he decided that in his
position the best thing to do was to hide in his landlady's
cellar. He sat in the cellar all day and then all night, then
another day, was fearfully cold, and waiting till dusk, stole
secretly like a thief back to his room. He stood in the middle
of the room till daybreak, listening without stirring. Very
early in the morning, before sunrise, some workmen came into the
house. Ivan Dmitritch knew perfectly well that they had come to
mend the stove in the kitchen, but terror told him that they
were police officers disguised as workmen. He slipped stealthily
out of the flat, and, overcome by terror, ran along the street
without his cap and coat. Dogs raced after him barking, a
peasant shouted somewhere behind him, the wind whistled in his
ears, and it seemed to Ivan Dmitritch that the force and
violence of the whole world was massed together behind his back
and was chasing after him.
He was stopped and brought home, and his landlady sent for a
doctor. Doctor Andrey Yefimitch, of whom we shall have more to
say hereafter, prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel
drops, shook his head, and went away, telling the landlady he
should not come again, as one should not interfere with people
who are going out of their minds. As he had not the means to
live at home and be nursed, Ivan Dmitritch was soon sent to the
hospital, and was there put into the ward for venereal patients.
He could not sleep at night, was full of whims and fancies, and
disturbed the patients, and was soon afterwards, by Andrey
Yefimitch's orders, transferred to Ward No. 6.
Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the
town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in
the shed, were pulled to pieces by boys.
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