Fifty-Two Stories

“Why are you telling me all this? I have no wish to hear it! No wish!” he shouted and banged his fist on the table. “I don’t need to know your banal secrets, devil take them! Don’t you dare tell me these banalities! Do you think I haven’t been insulted enough already? That I’m a lackey who can be insulted endlessly? Eh?”

Abogin backed away from Kirilov and stared at him in astonishment.

“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard shaking. “You go crazy from your fat life and act out melodramas, but why bring me into it? What have I got to do with your love affairs? Leave me alone! Exercise your noble eccentricity, flaunt your humane ideas, play”—the doctor cast a sidelong glance at the cello case—“play your double basses and trombones, fatten up like capons, but don’t you dare jeer at a human being! If you can’t respect me, at least spare me your attention!”

“Excuse me, but what’s the meaning of all this?” Abogin asked, turning red.

“It means that it’s base and vile to play with people like that! I’m a doctor, and you consider doctors and workers in general, who don’t smell of perfume and prostitution, as your lackeys and in mauvais ton²—well, go ahead, but no one gave you the right to turn a suffering man into a stage prop!”

“How dare you say that to me?” Abogin asked softly, and his face began to twitch again, this time clearly from wrath.

“No, knowing that I’m in grief, how could you dare bring me here to listen to banalities?” the doctor shouted, and again banged his fist on the table. “Who gave you the right to mock another man’s grief like this?”

“You’re out of your mind!” shouted Abogin. “That’s not magnanimous! I’m profoundly unhappy myself and…and…”

“Unhappy,” the doctor smirked contemptuously. “Don’t touch that word, it doesn’t concern you. A good-for-nothing who can’t pay off his debts also calls himself unhappy, a capon that suffocates from too much fat is also unhappy. Worthless people!”

“My dear sir, you are forgetting yourself!” shrieked Abogin. “Such words…call for a beating! Understand?”

Abogin hurriedly went to his side pocket, took out his wallet, and pulling two notes from it, flung them on the table.

“That’s for your visit!” he said, his nostrils twitching. “You’ve been paid!”

“Don’t you dare offer me money!” the doctor shouted and swept the notes from the table. “An insult isn’t paid for with money!”

Abogin and the doctor stood face to face and went on angrily hurling undeserved insults at each other. It seems that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they said so much that was unfair, cruel, and preposterous. In both men the egotism of the unhappy showed strongly. The unhappy are egotistic, spiteful, unfair, cruel, and less capable than the stupid of understanding each other. Unhappiness does not unite but divides people, and even where it seems that people should be united by the similarity of their grief, there is much more unfairness and cruelty done than in a comparatively contented milieu.

“Kindly send me home!” the doctor shouted, suffocating.

Abogin rang brusquely. When no one appeared at his call, he rang again and angrily threw the bell on the floor; it hit the rug dully and let out a plaintive, as if dying moan. A lackey appeared.

“Where are you all hiding, devil take you?!” The master fell upon him with clenched fists. “Where were you just now? Go, tell them to bring the carriage for this gentleman, and order the coach harnessed for me! Wait!” he shouted, when the lackey turned to go. “Let there not be a single traitor left in the house by tomorrow! Away with all of you! I’ll hire new ones. Vermin!”

While waiting for their vehicles, Abogin and the doctor were silent. To the first an expression of satiety and refined elegance had already returned. He paced the sitting room, gracefully shaking his head and obviously planning something. His wrath had not yet cooled down, but he tried to pretend that he did not notice his enemy…The doctor stood, holding the edge of the table with one hand and looking at Abogin with that profound, somewhat cynical and unattractive contempt which only grief and misery can express when faced with satiety and elegance.

When, a little later, the doctor got into the carriage and went off, his eyes still had a contemptuous look. It was dark, much darker than an hour earlier. The red half-moon had already gone behind a hill, and the clouds that had watched over it lay in dark spots near the stars. A coach with red lights rumbled down the road and overtook the doctor. It was Abogin going to protest and do stupid things…