Soon after the holidays I was taken ill and went into our military hospital. It stood apart, half a mile from the fortress. It was a long one-storey building painted yellow. In the summer when the buildings were done up, an immense quantity of yellow ochre was spent on it. Round the huge courtyard of the hospital were grouped the offices, the doctors’ houses and other buildings. The principal building consisted only of wards for the patients. There were a number of wards, but only two for the convicts, and these were always very crowded, especially in the summer, so that the beds had often to be moved close together. Our wards were full of all sorts of “unfortunate people.” Our convicts, soldiers of all sorts awaiting trial, men who had been sentenced and men who were awaiting sentence, and men who were on their way to other prisons, all came here. There were some, too, from the disciplinary battalion—a strange institution to which soldiers who had been guilty of some offence or were not trustworthy were sent for reformation, and from which two or more years later they usually came out scoundrels such as are rarely to be met with. Convicts who were taken ill in our prison usually informed the sergeant of their condition in the morning. Their names were at once entered in the book and with this book the invalid was sent to the battalion infirmary under escort. There the doctor made a preliminary examination of all the invalids from the various military divisions in the fortress, and any who were found to be really ill were admitted to the hospital. My name was entered in the book, and between one and two, when all the prisoners had gone out to work after dinner, I went to the hospital. The sick convict usually took with him all the money he could collect, some bread—for he could not expect to get rations at the hospital that day—a tiny pipe and a pouch of tobacco with a flint for lighting it. The latter articles he kept carefully hidden in his boots. I entered the precincts of the hospital, feeling some curiosity about this novel aspect of our prison life.
It was a warm, dull, depressing day, one of those days when an institution such as a hospital assumes a peculiarly callous, dejected and sour appearance. I went with the escort into the waiting-room, where there were two copper baths. There were two patients with their escort in the room already, not convicts, but men awaiting their trial. A hospital assistant came in, scanned us indolently with an air of authority, and still more indolently went to inform the doctor on duty. The latter soon made his appearance. He examined us, treated us very kindly, and gave each of us a medical chart with our name on it. The further description of the illness, the medicines and diet prescribed, were left for the doctor who was in charge of the convict wards. I had heard before that the convicts were never tired of praising the doctors. “They are like fathers to us,” they said in answer to my inquiries when I was going to the hospital. Meanwhile we had changed our clothes. The clothes we had come in were taken from us and we were dressed up in hospital underlinen and provided with long stockings, slippers, nightcaps and thick cloth dressing-gowns of dark brown colour, lined with something that might have been coarse linen or might have been sticking-plaster. In fact the dressing-gown was filthy to the last degree, but I only fully realized this later. Then they took us to the convict wards which were at the end of a very long, clean and lofty corridor. The appearance of cleanliness everywhere was very satisfactory; everything that caught the eye was shining. Though perhaps this may have seemed so to me by contrast with the prison. The two prisoners awaiting trial went into the ward on the left, while I went to the right. At the door, which fastened with an iron bolt, stood a sentry with a gun; beside him stood a sub-sentry to relieve him. The junior sergeant (of the hospital guard) gave orders I should be admitted, and I found myself in a long narrow room, along two walls of which were rows of beds, about twenty-two altogether, of which three or four were unoccupied. The bedsteads were wooden and painted green, of the kind only too familiar to all of us in Russia, the sort of bedstead which by some fatality is never free from bugs. I was put in the corner on the side where there were windows.
As I have said before, there were some convicts from our prison here. Some of these knew me already, or at least had seen me. But the majority were prisoners awaiting trial or from the disciplinary battalions. There were only a few who were too ill to get up. The others suffering from slight ailments, or convalescent, were either sitting on their beds or walking up and down the ward, where there was space enough for exercise between the two rows of beds. There was a suffocating hospital smell in the ward. The air was tainted with unpleasant effluvia of different sorts, as well as with the smell of drugs, although the fire was kept almost all day long in the stove in the corner. My bed had a striped quilt over it. I took it off. Under it was a cloth blanket lined with linen, and coarse sheets and pillow cases of very doubtful cleanliness. Beside the bed stood a small table with a jug and a tin cup. All this was tidily covered with a little towel put ready for me. Underneath the table was a shelf on which patients kept a jug of kvas, or any such thing, and those who drank tea, a teapot; but very few of them did drink tea. The pipes and tobacco pouches which almost all the patients, even the consumptive ones, possessed, were hidden under the mattresses. The doctor and the other attendants scarcely ever examined the beds, and, even if they did find a man smoking, they pretended not to notice it. But the convicts were almost always on their guard, and went to the stove to smoke. It was only at night that they sometimes smoked in bed; but no one ever went through the wards at night, except perhaps the officer of the hospital guard.
I had never been a patient in a hospital till then, so everything surrounding me was perfectly new to me. I noticed that I excited some curiosity. They had already heard about me, and stared at me without ceremony, and even with a shade of superciliousness, as a new boy is looked at at school, or a petitioner is looked at in a government office. On the right of me lay a clerk awaiting his punishment, the illegitimate son of a captain. He was being tried for making counterfeit coin, and he had been for a year in the hospital apparently not ill in any way, though he assured the doctors that he had aneurism of the heart. He had attained his object and escaped penal servitude and corporal punishment. A year later he was sent to T—k to be kept at a hospital. He was a broad, sturdily built fellow of eight-and-twenty, a great rogue with a good knowledge of the law, very sharp, extremely self-confident, and free and easy in his behaviour. He was morbidly vain, had persuaded himself in earnest that he was the most truthful and honourable of men, and what is more, had done nothing wrong, and he clung to this conviction to the end. He spoke to me first; he began questioning me with curiosity, and described to me in some detail the external routine of the hospital. First of all, of course, he told me that he was the son of a captain. He was very anxious to make himself out a nobleman, or at least “of good family.”
The next one who approached me was a patient from the disciplinary battalion, and he began to assure me that he knew many of the “gentleman” exiles, mentioning them by their names. He was a grey-headed soldier; one could see from his face that he was romancing. His name was Tchekunov. He was evidently trying to make up to me, probably suspecting I had money. Noticing that I had a parcel containing tea and sugar, he at once proferred his services in getting a teapot and making tea. M. had promised to send me a teapot next day from prison by one of the convicts who came to the hospital to work. But Tchekunov managed all right. He got hold of an iron pot and even a cup, boiled the water, made the tea, in fact waited on me with extraordinary zeal, which at once called forth some malignant jeers at his expense from a patient lying opposite me. This was a man called Ustyantsev, a soldier under sentence, who from fear of corporal punishment had drunk a jug of vodka after steeping snuff in it, and had brought on consumption by so doing; I have mentioned him already. Till that moment he had been lying silent, breathing painfully, looking at me intently and earnestly and watching Tchekunov with indignation. His extraordinarily bitter intensity gave a comic flavour to his indignation. At last he could stand it no longer:
“Ugh, the flunkey! He’s found a master!” he said gasping, his voice broken with emotion. He was within a few days of his death.
Tchekunov turned to him indignantly.
“Who’s the flunkey?” he brought out, looking contemptuously at Ustyantsev.
“You are a flunkey!” the other replied in a self-confident tone, as though he had a full right to call Tchekunov over the coals, and in fact had been appointed to that duty.
“Me a flunkey?”
“That’s what you are. Do you hear, good people, he doesn’t believe it! He is surprised!”“What is it to you? You see the gentleman is helpless. He is not used to being without a servant! Why shouldn’t I wait on him, you shaggy-faced fool?”
“Who’s shaggy-faced?”
“You are shaggy-faced.”
“Me shaggy-faced?”
“Yes, you are!”
“And are you a beauty? You’ve a face like a crow’s egg . . . if I am shaggy-faced.”
“Shaggy-faced is what you are! Here God has stricken him, he might lie still and die quietly. No, he must poke his nose in! Why, what are you meddling for?”
“Why! Well, I’d rather bow down to a boot than to a dog. My father didn’t knuckle under to anybody and he told me not to. I . . . I . . .”
He would have gone on but he had a terrible fit of coughing that lasted for some minutes, spitting blood. Soon the cold sweat of exhaustion came out on his narrow forehead. His cough interrupted him, or he would have gone on talking; one could see from his eyes how he was longing to go on scolding; but he simply waved his hand helplessly, so that in the end Tchekunov forgot about him.
I felt that the consumptive’s indignation was directed rather at me than at Tchekunov. No one would have been angry with the latter, or have looked on him with particular contempt for his eagerness to wait upon me and so earn a few pence. Every one realized that he did this simply for gain. Peasants are by no means fastidious on that score, and very well understand the distinction. What Ustyantsev disliked was myself, he disliked my tea, and that even in fetters I was like “a master,” and seemed as though I could not get on without a servant, though I had not asked for a servant and did not desire one. I did, as a fact, always prefer to do everything for myself, and indeed I particularly wanted not even to look like a spoiled idle person, or to give myself the airs of a gentleman. I must admit while we are on the subject that my vanity was to some extent concerned in the matter. But—I really don’t know how it always came to pass—I never could get away from all sorts of helpers and servants who fastened themselves upon me, and in the end took complete possession of me, so that it was really they who were my masters and I who was their servant, though it certainly did appear as though I were a regular “gentleman,” as though I gave myself airs, and could not get on without servants. This annoyed me very much, of course. But Ustyantsev was a consumptive and an irritable man. The other patients preserved an air of indifference, in which there was a shade of disdain. I remember they were all absorbed in something particular: from their conversation I learnt that a convict who was then being punished with the sticks was to be brought to us in the evening. The patients were expecting him with some interest. They said, however, that his punishment was a light one—only five hundred blows.
By degrees I took in my surroundings. As far as I could see, those who were really ill were suffering from scurvy and affections of the eye—diseases frequent in that region. There were several such in the ward. Of the others who were really ill, some had fever, skin diseases, or consumption. This was not like other wards—here patients of all kinds were collected together, even those suffering from venereal diseases. I speak of “those who were really ill,” because there were some here who had come without any disease, “to have a rest.” The doctors readily admitted such sham invalids from sympathy, especially when there were many beds empty. Detention in the guard-houses and prisons seemed so disagreeable compared with the hospital, that many convicts were glad to come to the hospital in spite of the bad air and the locked ward. There were indeed some people, especially from the disciplinary battalion, who were fond of lying in bed and of hospital life in general. I looked at my new companions with interest, but I remember my curiosity was especially aroused by one from our prison, a man who was dying, also consumptive, and also at the last gasp. He was in the bed next but one beyond Ustyantsev, and so also almost opposite me. His name was Mihailov; a fortnight before I had seen him in the prison. He had been ill a long while and ought to have been in the doctor’s hands long before; but with obstinate and quite unnecessary patience he had controlled himself, and gone on, and only at Christmas he had come into the hospital to die three weeks later of galloping consumption; it was like a fire consuming him. I was struck this time by the awful change in his face, which was one of the first I noticed when I entered the prison; it somehow caught my eye then. Near him was a soldier of the disciplinary battalion, an old man of filthy and revolting habits. . . . However I cannot go over all the patients. I have mentioned this old man now simply because he made some impression on me at the time, and in the course of one minute gave me a full idea of some peculiarities of the convict ward. This old fellow, I remember, had a very heavy cold at the time. He was constantly sneezing, and went on sneezing for the whole of the following week, even in his sleep, in fits of five or six sneezes at a time, regularly repeating each time, “Oh Lord, what an affliction.” At that minute he was sitting on the bed greedily stuffing his nose with snuff from a paper parcel, so that his sneezes might be more violent and complete. He sneezed into a checked cotton handkerchief of his own, that had been washed a hundred times and was faded to the last extreme; and as he sneezed he wrinkled up his nose in a peculiar way into tiny innumerable creases, and showed the relics of ancient blackened teeth between his red dribbling jaws. Then at once he opened his handkerchief, scrutinized the phlegm in it, and immediately smeared it on his brown hospital dressing-gown, so that the handkerchief remained. comparatively clean. He did this the whole week. This persistent miserly care of his own handkerchief at the sacrifice of the hospital dressing-gown aroused no sort of protest from the other patients, though one of them would have to wear that dressing-gown after him. But our peasants are not squeamish and are strangely lacking in fastidiousness. I winced at that moment and I could not help at once beginning to examine with disgust and curiosity the dressing-gown I had just put on. Then I realized that it had been attracting my attention for a long time by its strong smell; by now it had become warm on me and smelt more and more strongly of medicines, plasters, and as I thought of something decomposing, which was not to be wondered at, since it had been for immemorial years on the backs of patients. Possibly the linen lining may have been washed sometimes; but I am not sure of that. At the present, anyway, it was saturated by all sorts of unpleasant discharges, lotions, matter from broken blisters, and so on. Moreover, convicts who had just received corporal punishment were constantly coming into the convict wards with wounded backs. Compresses were applied and then the dressing-gown being put on straight over the wet shirt could not possibly escape getting messed, and everything that dropped on it remained.
And the whole time I was in prison, that is, several years, I used to put on the dressing-gown with fear and mistrust whenever I had to be in hospital (and I was there pretty often). I particularly disliked the huge and remarkably fat lice I sometimes came across in those dressing-gowns. The convicts enjoyed killing them, so that when one was squashed under the convict’s thick, clumsy nail, one could see from the hunter’s face the satisfaction it gave him. We particularly disliked bugs, too, and sometimes the whole ward joined in their destruction on a long dreary winter evening. And though, apart from the bad smell, everything on the surface was as clean as possible in the ward, they were far from being fastidious over the cleanliness of the inside, so to speak. The patients were accustomed to it and even accepted it as natural. And indeed the very arrangements of the hospital were not conducive to cleanliness. But I will talk of these arrangements later.
As soon as Tchekunov had made my tea (made, I may mention in parenthesis, with the water in the ward which was brought up only once in the twenty-four hours, and was quickly tainted in the foul atmosphere), the door was opened with some noise and the soldier who had just been punished was led in under a double escort. This was the first time I saw a man after corporal punishment. Afterwards they came in often, some so seriously injured that they had to be carried in, and this was always a source of great interest to the patients, who usually received them with an exaggeratedly severe expression and a sort of almost affected seriousness. However, their reception depended to some extent on the gravity of their crime, and consequently on the number of strokes they had received. Those who had been very badly beaten and were reputed to be great criminals enjoyed greater respect and greater consideration than a runaway recruit, like the one who was brought in now, for instance. But in neither case were there any remarks expressive of special compassion or irritation. In silence they helped the victim and waited upon him, especially if he could not do without assistance. The hospital attendants knew that they were leaving the patient in skilful and experienced hands. The necessary nursing usually took the form of constantly changing the sheet or shirt, which was soaked in cold water and applied to the torn flesh of the back, especially if the patient were too weak to look after himself. Another necessary operation was the skilful extraction of splinters which were often left in the wounds from broken sticks, and this was usually very painful to the patient. But I was always struck by the extraordinary stoicism with which the victims bore their sufferings. I have seen many of them, sometimes terribly beaten, and hardly one of them uttered a groan! Only their faces changed and turned white, their eyes glowed, they looked preoccupied and uneasy, their lips quivered, so that the poor fellows often bit them till they almost bled.
The soldier who had come in was a strongly built, muscular lad of twenty-three, with a handsome face, tall, well-made and dark-skinned. His back had been rather badly beaten. The upper part of his body was stripped to below the waist; on his shoulders was laid a wet sheet which made him shiver all over, as though he were in a fever, and for an hour and a half he walked up and down the ward. I looked into his face it seemed to me he was thinking of nothing at that moment; he looked strangely and wildly around with wandering eyes, which it was evidently an effort for him to fix on anything. It seemed to me that he looked intently at my tea. The tea was hot and steaming; the poor fellow was chilled and his teeth were chattering. I offered him a drink. He turned to me mutely and abruptly, took the cup, drank it off standing and without putting in sugar, in great haste, seeming purposely to avoid looking at me. When he had emptied it, he put back the cup without a word, and without even a nod to me began pacing up and down the ward again. He was beyond words or nods! As for the convicts, they all for some reason avoided speaking to him; on the contrary, though they helped him at first, they seemed to try expressly to take no further notice of him afterwards, perhaps feeling it best to leave him alone as much as possible, and not to bother him with questions or “sympathy,” and he seemed perfectly satisfied to be left alone.
Meanwhile it got dark and the night lamp was lighted. Some, though very few, of the convicts had, it appeared, candlesticks of their own. At last, after the doctor’s evening visit, the sergeant of the guard came in, counted over the patients and the ward was locked. A tub was first brought in, and I learnt with surprise that it was kept in the ward all night, for though there was accommodation only two steps away in the corridor, it was against the rules for the convicts to leave the ward on any pretext at night, and even during the day they were only allowed to be absent for a moment. The convict wards were not like the ordinary ones, and the convict had to bear his punishment even in illness. Who had first made this rule, I do not know; I only know that there was no reason for it, and the utter uselessness of such formalism was nowhere more apparent than in this case. The doctors were certainly not responsible for the rule. I repeat, the convicts could not say enough in praise of their doctors, they looked on them as fathers and respected them. Every one was treated with kindness, and heard a friendly word from the doctor, and the convicts, cast off by all men, appreciated it, for they saw the genuineness and sincerity of these friendly words and this kindness. It might have been different: no one would have called the doctors to account if they had behaved differently, that is, more roughly and inhumanely; so they were kind from real humanity. And of course they knew that a sick man, even though he were a convict, needed fresh air as much as any other patient, even of the highest rank. Patients in the other wards, those who were convalescent, I mean, could walk freely about the corridors, take plenty of exercise, and breathe fresher air than that of the ward, which was always tainted and inevitably charged with stifling fumes. It is both terrible and disgusting to me now to realize how foul the tainted atmosphere of our ward must have been at night after the tub had been brought into the heated room, where there were patients suffering from dysentery and such complaints. When I said just now that the convict had to bear his punishment even though he were sick, I did not and I do not, of course, suppose that such a rule was made simply as a form of punishment. Of course, that would be senseless calumny on my part. It is useless to punish a sick man. And, since that is so, it follows that probably some stern inevitable necessity had forced the authorites to a measure so pernicious in its effects. What necessity? But what is so vexatious is that it is impossible to find any explanation of this measure, and many others so incomprehensible that one cannot even conjecture an explanation of them. How explain such useless cruelty? On the theory that the convict will purposely sham illness to get into the hospital, will deceive the doctors, and if allowed to leave the ward at night will escape under cover of darkness? It is impossible to treat such a notion seriously. Where could he escape? How could he escape? In what clothes could he escape? By day they are allowed to leave the room one at a time, and it might be the same at night. At the door stands a sentinel with a loaded gun, and although the lavatory is only two steps from the door, the convict is always accompanied by a guard, and the one double window in it is covered by a grating. To get out of the window it would be necessary to break the grating and the double frame. Who would allow this? Even supposing anything so absurd as that he could first kill the guard without making a noise or letting him cry out, he would still have to break the window frame and the grating. Note that close beside the sentry sleep the ward attendants, and that ten paces away stands another armed sentinel at the door of another convict ward with another guard and other attendants beside him. And where can a man run in the winter in stockings and slippers, in a hospital dressing-gown and a night cap? And since this is so, since there is so little danger (that is, really, none at all) why a rule so burdensome to the patients, perhaps in the last days of their lives, sick men who need fresh air even more than the healthy? What is it for I could never understand it.
But since we have once begun asking why, I cannot pass over another point which for many years stood out as the most perplexing fact, for which I could never find a solution. I must say a few words about this before I go on with my description. I am thinking of the fetters, which are never removed from a convict, whatever illness he may be suffering from. Even consumptives have died before my eyes with their fetters on. Yet every one was accustomed to it, every one regarded it as an established fact that could not be altered. I doubt whether anybody even thought about it, since during the years I was there, it never struck one of the doctors even to petition the authorities that a patient seriously ill, especially in consumption, might have his fetters removed. The fetters were in themselves not a very great weight. They weighed from eight to twelve pounds. It is not too great a burden for a healthy man to carry ten pounds. I was told, however, that after several years the convict’s legs begin to waste from wearing fetters. I do not know whether it is true, though there is some probability of it. Even a small weight, a weight of no more than ten pounds, makes the limb abnormally heavy, and may have some injurious action after a length of time. But admitting that it is not too much for a healthy man, is it the same for a sick man? And even supposing it is not too much for an ordinary patient, is it not very different for the dangerously ill, for consumptives whose arms and legs waste away in any case, so that a straw’s weight is too heavy for them? And, indeed, if the doctors succeeded in freeing, if only the consumptives, that would be in itself a really great and good action. Some one will say perhaps that the convict is a wicked man and does not deserve kindness; but surely there is no need to double the sufferings of one who is already stricken by the hand of God! And one cannot believe that this is done simply for the sake of punishment. Even by law the consumptive is exempt from corporal punishment. Consequently we must look upon the retention of fetters as a mysterious and important measure of precaution. But what the reason for it is I cannot imagine. There can really be no fear that the consumptive will escape. Who would dream of such a thing, especially in the advanced stages of the disease? To sham consumption and to deceive the doctors in order to escape is impossible. It is not a disease that can be simulated; it is unmistakable. And by the way, are convicts put into fetters merely to prevent them escaping or to make it more difficult for them to do so? Certainly not. Fetters are simply a form of degradation, a disgrace, and a physical and moral burden. That at least is what they are meant to be. They could never hinder anyone from running away. The least skilful, the least expert convict can quickly and easily file them off or can smash the rivet with a stone. The fetters are no obstacle at all; and if that is so, if they are put on the condemned convict simply as a punishment, I ask again: is it right to punish a dying man in this way?
And now as I write this, I vividly recall the death of the consumptive patient, Mihailov, whose bed was nearly opposite mine, not far from Ustyantsev’s. He died, I remember, four days after I came in. Possibly I have mentioned the case of the consumptives through unconsciously recalling the impressions and ideas which came into my mind at the sight of that death. I knew little of Mihailov himself, however. He was quite young, not more than five-and-twenty, tall, thin, and of extremely attractive appearance. He was in the “special division,” and was strangely silent, always gently and quietly melancholy, as though he were “drying up” in prison, as the convicts said of him. He left a pleasant memory among them. I only remember that he had fine eyes, and I really do not know why he comes back to my mind so distinctly. He died at three o’clock in the afternoon on a bright frosty day. I remember the glowing slanting rays of the sun pierced through the green frozen panes of our windows. The sunshine was streaming full on the dying man. He was unconscious, and lay for several hours in the death agony. From early morning he had scarcely recognized those who went up to him. The patients would have liked to do something for him, seeing his distress; his breathing was deep, painful and raucous; his chest heaved as though he could not get air. He flung off his quilt and his clothes, and began at last to tear off his shirt; even that seemed a weight to him. The other patients went to his help and took off his shirt. It was terrible to see that long, long body, the arms and legs wasted to the bone, the sunken belly, the strained chest, the ribs standing out like a skeleton’s. Nothing remained on his body but a wooden cross and a little bag with a relic in it, and his fetters which might, it seemed, have slipped off his wasted legs. Half an hour before his death the whole ward was hushed, we began to talk almost in whispers. Every one moved about noiselessly. The patients did not talk much, and then of other things; they only looked now and then at the dying man who was gasping more and more terribly. At last, with a straying and uncertain hand, he fumbled at the cross on his chest and began pulling it off, as though even that were a weight that worried and oppressed him. The patients removed the cross, too. Ten minutes later he died. They knocked at the door for the sentry and told him. An attendant came in, looked blankly at the dead man, and went to fetch a medical assistant. The medical assistant, a good-natured young fellow somewhat excessively occupied with his personal appearance, which was prepossessing however, soon came in, went up to the dead man with rapid steps that sounded noisy in the silent ward, and with a particularly unconcerned air which he seemed to have assumed for the occasion, took his wrist, felt his pulse and went away with a wave of his hand. Word was sent to the sergeant in charge: the criminal was an important one and could not be certified as dead without special ceremony. While we were waiting for the sergeant, one of the convicts suggested in a low voice that it might be as well to close the dead man’s eyes. Another man listened attentively, without a word went up to the dead man and closed his eyes. Seeing the cross lying on the pillow, he picked it up, looked at it, and put it round Mihailov’s neck again; then he crossed himself. Meanwhile the dead face was growing rigid; the sunlight was flickering on it; the mouth was half open; two rows of white young teeth glistened between the thin parched lips.
At last the sergeant on duty came in, in a helmet and with a sabre, followed by two guards. He went up, moving more slowly as he got nearer, looking in perplexity at the hushed convicts who were gazing grimly at him from all sides. When he was a little way off, he stood stock-still, as though he were scared. The sight of the naked and wasted body with nothing on but the fetters impressed him, and he suddenly unbuckled his sword-belt, took off his helmet, which he was not required to do, and solemnly crossed himself. He was a grim-looking, grey-headed man who had seen many years of service. I remember that at that moment Tchekunov, also a grey-headed man, was standing near. He stared the whole time mutely and intently into the sergeant’s face, and with strange attention watched every movement he made. But their eyes met and something made Tchekunov’s lower lip quiver; he twisted it into a grin and nodding rapidly, as it were involuntarily, towards the dead man, he said to the sergeant:
“He too had a mother!” and he walked away. I remember those words stabbed me to the heart. What made him say them, what made him think of them? They began lifting the dead body: they lifted the bed as well; the straw rustled, the chains clanked loudly on the floor in the silent ward . . . they were picked up. The body was carried out. Suddenly every one began talking aloud. We could hear the sergeant in the corridor sending some one for the smith. The fetters were to be removed from the dead man. . . .
But I am digressing.