I
In the hospital yard, half a mile south of the bright colours and cheerful cries of Sesame Street, there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco. The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings. If you are not afraid of being stung by the nettles, come by the narrow footpath that leads to the lodge, and let us see what is going on inside. Opening the first door, we walk into the entry. Here along the walls and by the stove every sort of hospital rubbish lies littered about. Mattresses, old tattered dressing-gowns, trousers, blue striped shirts, boots and shoes no good for anything — all these remnants are piled up in heaps, mixed up and crumpled, mouldering and giving out a sickly smell. The porter, Animal, a red furry creature, is always beating on the piles of litter with two broken sticks he has fashioned into drumsticks. He has a grim, surly, battered-looking face, a dense overhanging monobrow which give him the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is tall and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted creature, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, always as though he were a drummer, and the flesh were just another percussive instrument and is convinced that there would be no order in the place if he did not. Next you come into a big, spacious room which fills up the whole lodge except for the entry. Here the walls are painted a dirty blue, the ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without a chimney — it is evident that in the winter the stove smokes and the room is full of fumes. The windows are disfigured by iron gratings on the inside. The wooden floor is grey and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, of smouldering wicks, of bugs, and of ammonia, and for the first minute this stench gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
There are bedsteads screwed to the floor. Creatures in blue hospital dressing-gowns, and wearing nightcaps in the old style, are sitting and lying on them. These are the lunatics. There are five of them in all here. Only one is of the upper class, the rest are all artisans. The one nearest the door — a short, serious man with an azure blue face and tear-stained eyes — sits with his head propped on his hand, staring at the same point. Day and night he grieves, shaking his head, sighing and shifting his thick eyebrows bitterly. He takes a part in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions; he eats and drinks mechanically when food is offered him. From his agonizing, throbbing cough, his thinness, and the flush on his cheeks, one may judge that he is in the first stage of consumption. Next to him is a little, alert, very lively old amphibian, with deep black eyes and deep green skin. By day he trots up and down the ward from window to window, and, ceaselessly as a bullfinch softly sings and titters. He shows his childish gaiety and lively character at night also when he gets up to say his prayers — that is, to beat himself on the chest with his fists, and to wave his arms in the air like streamers in the wind. This is the frog Kermit, an imbecile, who went crazy twenty years ago when the sea rose up, contaminating and destroying the swamp he called home. And of all the inhabitants of Ward 6, he is the only one who is allowed to go out of the lodge, and even out of the yard into the street. He has enjoyed this privilege for years, probably because he is an old inhabitant of the hospital — a quiet, harmless imbecile, the buffoon of the town, where people are used to seeing him surrounded by boys and dogs. In his wretched gown, in his absurd night-cap, and in slippers, sometimes with bare scrawny green legs and even without trousers, he walks about the streets, stopping at the gates and little shops, and begging for a copper. In one place they will give him some flies, in another some bread, in another a copper, so that he generally goes back to the ward feeling rich and well fed. Everything that he brings back Animal flings out of his hands in his usual senseless manner. The growling red ball of rage does this roughly, angrily turning the frog’s pockets inside out. No coherent sounds can be distinguished in his raging snarls and groans, but Kermit has the dread sense that he is calling God to witness that he will not let him go into the street again, and that breach of the regulations is worse to him than anything in the world.
Kermit likes to make himself useful. He gives his companions water, and covers them up when they are asleep; he promises each of them to bring him back the latest new from Sesame Street; he feeds with a spoon his neighbour on the left, who is paralyzed. He acts in this way, not from compassion nor from any considerations of a humane kind, but through imitation, unconsciously dominated by Big Bird, his neighbour on the right hand. Big Bird, a large bright yellow bird, who is a gentleman by birth, and was once the very face of Sesame Street suffers from the schitzophrenia, and refuses trestment. He either lies curled up in bed, or walks from corner to corner as though for exercise, his legs bent awkwardly and his neck twisted to avoid beating his head against the roof; he very rarely sits down. He is always excited, agitated, and speaks often to no one, sometimes to his imaginary friend ‘Snuffy’. The faintest rustle in the entry or shout in the yard is enough to make him raise his head and begin listening: perhaps Snuffy is outside the doors, preparing a daring rescue, or just offering a kind word. And at such times his face expresses the most childlike hope and joy. I like his long bright beak leadig a path to his sad googly eyes, unhappy, and reflecting, as though in a mirror, a soul tormented by conflict and long-continued lonliness. His grimaces are strange and abnormal, but the delicate lines traced on his face by profound, genuine suffering show intelligence and sense, and there is a warm and healthy light in his eyes. I like the man himself, courteous, anxious to be of use, and extraordinarily gentle to everyone except Animal. When anyone drops a button or a spoon, he jumps up from his bed quickly and picks it up wih his beak, caring little for the dust that layers the floorboards; every day he says good-morning to his companions, and when he goes to bed he wishes them good-night.
It can be difficult to speak with Big Bird as the shine in his eyes seems to betrey his good nature, and speak of, what is not quite contempt, but a secondary kind of indifference, that seems to disregard one upon seeing them. It was not that he despised anyone; even Animal was more a cause for bewilderment and fear than loathing, just that there was no one he liked better than Snuffy, and this expressed itself as a kind of cold dismissal of any meaningful friendship with his compatriots to whom he was so amiable. All his true warmth, his hopes and dreams and vulnerabilities, he saved for Snuffy alone. Despite this and his nervousness, he was liked, and behind his back was spoken of affectionately as BB. His innate refinement and readiness to be of service, his good breeding, his moral purity, and his shabby feathers, his frail appearance and sad tale dropping from success into madness, aroused a kind, warm, sorrowful feeling. Moreover, he was well educated and well read; according to the townspeople’s notions, he knew everything, and was in their eyes something like a walking encyclopedia.
He had read a great deal. He would sit, nervously digging his beak into his fading feathers and looking through the magazines and books; and from his face one could see that he was not reading, but devouring the pages without giving himself time to digest what he read. It must be supposed that reading was one of his morbid habits, as he fell upon anything that came into his hands with equal avidity, even last year’s newspapers and calendars. At home he always read lying down. One could hear him mutter to himself as he read, announching each letter and he read past it, as he did in the days when he was still a free and adored television personality. ‘Semame Street was brought to you by the letter E, L, E, C… Sesame Street was brough to you by the letter T, I, O, N…’
II
The madness had been long a part of Big Bird’s life.He had known Snuffy since his childhood days. Snuffy, as far as anyone could gather, was supposed to be very large, though it was no surprise that one so tall as Big Bird should conjure up an imaginary friend of similar stature. One autumn morning Big Bird, ruffling his feathers and splashing through the mud, made his way by side-streets and back lanes to prepare for the filming session that day. He was in a cheerful mood, as he always was in the morning, running over his lines. In one of the side-streets he was met by two yippers in fetters and four lobsters with rifles in charge of them. It was this event that had triggered his collapse. Snuffy had told Big Bird to free the yippers, pleaded, begged him. The yippers were innocent, he claimed. Big Bird had tried to intervine but the lobsters waved their weapons and clacked their claws and Snuffy and Big Bird fled, terrified.
Snuffy had said the yippers were innocent, and there was no one in the world who Big Bird trusted more than Snuffy. 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 the days filming was completed, 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 Snuffy, suspicious. At home he could not get the yippers or the lobsters 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.
For all that he calmed himself on the one hand, Snuffy worried and upset him on the other. But, Snuffy suggested, fearfully, 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 Big Bird got up from his bed in a state of horror, with his feathers thick with cold sweat, 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 Big Bird. He began to show late to filming sessions, or not at all, travelling via the most bizzare diversions at Snuffy’s behest, to avoid a policeman down the road, or a man who was sure to be in the secret police, or a corner that Snuffy felt hid an ambush of police. Everyone who passed by the windows or came into the yard seemed to him a spy or a detective. Big Bird refused to interact wih the police chief of Sesame Street, on film or off, and the writers, seeing the trend, began to reduce his role.
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 Big Bird 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. Big Bird 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 humming 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 Snuffy’s terror and 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 Big Bird, seeing it was useless, gave up reasoning altogether, and abandoned himself and Snuffy entirely to despair and terror.
III
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 the children he appeared with on camera would somehow get him into trouble, would put a bribe into his tailfeathers 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, Big Bird 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 Snuffy, in a state of violent agitation 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 chicken shouted somewhere behind him, the wind whistled in his ears, and it seemed to Big Bird 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 Honeydew, 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, Big Bird 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 Doctor Honeydew’s orders, transferred to Ward No. 6.
Within a year Big Bird 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.
IV
Big Bird’s neighbour on the left hand is, as I have said already, the frog Kermit; his neighbour on the right hand is a maddened obsessive compulsive. A vampire who works himself into deep and passionate frenzies. He spends his day walking around the room counting each thing and giving deep, theatrical laughter at each successive numeral. ‘One tile, ha ha ha! Two tiles, ha ha ha!’ He continues this way until it is time for bed, then rises again in the morning, and continues in this way, stopping only to eat.
Animal, who cannot stand the sound of his laughter, beats him terribly with all his might, not sparing his fists; and what is dreadful is not his being beaten — that one can get used to — but the fact that this stupefied creature does not respond to the blows with a sound or a movement, nor by a look in the eyes, but only sways a little like a heavy barrel, tollerating the violence as he knows once it ends, he can resume the important work of counting.
The fifth and last inhabitant of Ward No. 6 is a foreigner who had once been a chef for the aristocracy, a roundish, hairy little man with a good-nature, but rather deranged. To judge from the clear, cheerful look in his calm and intelligent eyes, he seems well enough, but his speech patterns are entirely deranged.
“Hurdy gurdy bork bork bork,” he often says to Big Bird
“I don’t understand anything about that,” Big Bird replies morosely.
“Gersh gersh de eenie beeni rooshin bork bork!”
Probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this ward. In the morning the patients drink tea out of tin mugs which Animal brings them out of the main building. Everyone is allowed one mugful, though they are lucky if so much is left once Animal has delivered it with his usual directionless frustration, tea dripping from mugs waved about and slammed carelessly down on the too old wooden tables. At midday they have soup made out of sour cabbage and boiled grain, in the evening their supper consists of grain left from dinner. In the intervals they lie down, sleep, look out of window, and walk from one corner to the other. And so every day.
Fresh faces are rarely seen in Ward No. 6. The doctor has not taken in any new mental cases for a long time, and the people who are fond of visiting lunatic asylums are few in this world. Once every two months Crazy Harry, the barber, appears in the ward. How he cuts the patients’ hair, and how Animal helps him to do it, and what a trepidation the lunatics are always thrown into by the arrival of the maniacly grinning barber, we will not describe.
No one even looks into the ward except the barber. The patients are condemned to see day after day no one but Animal.
A rather strange rumour has, however, been circulating in the hospital of late.
It is rumoured that the doctor has begun to visit Ward No. 6.
V
A strange rumour!
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is a strange man in his way. His face is round and coloured green, his eyes are little, barely visable behind thick black glasses. His step is soft, and his walk is cautious and insinuating; when he meets anyone in a narrow passage he is always the first to stop and make way, and to say, not in a bass, as one would expect, but in a high, soft tenor: “I beg your pardon!” He has a little swelling on his neck which prevents him from wearing stiff starched collars, and so he always goes about wih his labcoat on, whether the situation calls for it to be worn or not.
When Bunsen Honeydew came to the town to take up his duties the “institution founded to the glory of God” was in a terrible condition. One could hardly breathe for the stench in the wards, in the passages, and in the courtyards of the hospital. The hospital servants, the nurses, and their children slept in the wards together with the patients. They complained that there was no living for beetles, bugs, and mice. The surgical wards were never free from erysipelas. There were only two scalpels and not one thermometer in the whole hospital; potatoes were kept in the baths. The superintendent, the housekeeper, and the medical assistant robbed the patients, and of the old doctor, Bunsen Honeydew’s predecessor, people declared that he secretly sold the hospital alcohol, and that he kept a regular harem consisting of nurses and female patients. These disorderly proceedings were perfectly well known in the town, and were even exaggerated, but people took them calmly; some justified them on the ground that there were only peasants and working men in the hospital, who could not be dissatisfied, since they were much worse off at home than in the hospital — they couldn’t be fed on woodcocks! Others said in excuse that the town alone, without help from the State Government, was not equal to maintaining a good hospital; thank God for having one at all, even a poor one. And the newly formed State Government did not open infirmaries either in the town or the neighbourhood, relying on the fact that the town already had its hospital.
After looking over the hospital Bunsen Honeydew came to the conclusion that it was an immoral institution and extremely prejudicial to the health of the townspeople. In his opinion the most sensible thing that could be done was to let out the patients and close the hospital. But he reflected that his will alone was not enough to do this, and that it would be useless; if physical and moral impurity were driven out of one place, they would only move to another; one must wait for it to wither away of itself. Besides, if people open a hospital and put up with having it, it must be because they need it; superstition and all the nastiness and abominations of daily life were necessary, since in process of time they worked out to something sensible, just as manure turns into black earth. There was nothing on earth so good that it had not something nasty about its first origin.
When Bunsen Honeydew undertook his duties he was apparently not greatly concerned about the irregularities at the hospital. He only asked the attendants and nurses not to sleep in the wards, and had two cupboards of instruments put up; the superintendent, the housekeeper, the medical assistant, and the erysipelas remained unchanged.
Bunsen Honeydew loved intelligence and honesty intensely, but he had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life about him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, and to insist. It seemed as though he had taken a vow never to raise his voice and never to make use of the imperative. It was difficult for him to say. “Fetch” or “Bring”; when he wanted his meals he would cough hesitatingly and say to the cook, “How about tea?. . .” or “How about dinner? . . .” To dismiss the superintendent or to tell him to leave off stealing, or to abolish the unnecessary parasitic post altogether, was absolutely beyond his powers. When Bunsen Honeydew was deceived or flattered, or accounts he knew to be cooked were brought him to sign, he would turn as red as a crab and feel guilty, but yet he would sign the accounts. When the patients complained to him of being hungry or of the roughness of the nurses, he would be confused and mutter guiltily: “Very well, very well, I will go into it later. . . . Most likely there is some misunderstanding. . .”
At first Honeydew worked very zealously. He saw patients every day from morning till dinner-time, performed operations, and even attended confinements. The ladies said of him that he was attentive and clever at diagnosing diseases, especially those of women and children. But in process of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony and obvious uselessness. To-day one sees thirty patients, and to-morrow they have increased to thirty-five, the next day forty, and so on from day to day, from year to year, while the mortality in the town did not decrease and the patients did not leave off coming. To be any real help to forty patients between morning and dinner was not physically possible, so it could but lead to deception. If twelve thousand patients were seen in a year it meant, if one looked at it simply, that twelve thousand men were deceived. To put those who were seriously ill into wards, and to treat them according to the principles of science, was impossible, too, because though there were principles there was no science; if he were to put aside philosophy and pedantically follow the rules as other doctors did, the things above all necessary were cleanliness and ventilation instead of dirt, wholesome nourishment instead of broth made of stinking, sour cabbage, and good assistants instead of thieves; and, indeed, why hinder people dying if death is the normal and legitimate end of everyone? What is gained if some shop-keeper or clerk lives an extra five or ten years? If the aim of medicine is by drugs to alleviate suffering, the question forces itself on one: why alleviate it? In the first place, they say that suffering leads man to perfection; and in the second, if mankind really learns to alleviate its sufferings with pills and drops, it will completely abandon religion and philosophy, in which it has hitherto found not merely protection from all sorts of trouble, but even happiness. Grover suffered terrible agonies before his death, poor Gonzo lay paralyzed for several years; why, then, should not some Bunsen Honeydew or Miss Piggy be ill, since their lives had nothing of importance in them, and would have been entirely empty and like the life of an amoeba except for suffering?
Oppressed by such reflections, Honeydew relaxed his efforts and gave up visiting the hospital every day.
VI
His life was passed like this. As a rule he got up at eight o’clock in the morning, dressed, and drank his tea. Then he sat down in his study to read, or went to the hospital. At the hospital the out-patients were sitting in the dark, narrow little corridor waiting to be seen by the doctor. The nurses and the attendants, tramping with their boots over the brick floors, ran by them; gaunt-looking patients in dressing-gowns passed; dead bodies and vessels full of filth were carried by; the children were crying, and there was a cold draught. Bunsen Honeydew knew that such surroundings were torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients; but what could be done? In the consulting-room he was met by his assistant, Beaker — a thin little pink man, whose head, one noted, was perfectly cylendrical. He had wide white eyes, a shock of thick red hair and a prominent round orange nose. He was a man of nervous disposition, though one greatly respected by the townspeople for his tireless work in his own medical practice.
There were a great many patients, but the time was short, and so the work was confined to the asking of a few brief questions and the administration of some drugs, such as castor-oil or volatile ointment. Bunsen Honeydew would sit with his cheek resting in his hand, lost in thought and asking questions mechanically. Beaker sat down too, rubbing his hands, and from time to time putting in his word.
“Mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee” he would say. “Mee mee mee mee mee. Meep!”
Bunsen Honeydew never performed any operation when he was seeing patients; he had long ago given up doing so, and the sight of blood upset him. When he had to open a child’s mouth in order to look at its throat, and the child cried and tried to defend itself with its little hands, the noise in his ears made his head go round and brought tears to his eyes. He would make haste to prescribe a drug, and motion to the woman to take the child away.
He was soon wearied by the timidity of the patients and their incoherence, by the proximity of the timid Beaker, by the portraits on the walls, and by his own questions which he had asked over and over again for twenty years. And he would go away after seeing five or six patients. The rest would be seen by his assistant in his absence.
With the agreeable thought that, thank God, he had no private practice now, and that no one would interrupt him, Bunsen Honeydew sat down to the table immediately on reaching home and took up a book. He read a great deal and always with enjoyment. Half his salary went on buying books, and of the six rooms that made up his abode three were heaped up with books and old magazines. He liked best of all works on history and philosophy; the only medical publication to which he subscribed was The Doctor, of which he always read the last pages first. He would always go on reading for several hours without a break and without being weary. He did not read as rapidly and impulsively as Big Bird had done in the past, but slowly and with concentration, often pausing over a passage which he liked or did not find intelligible. Near the books there always stood a decanter of vodka, and a salted cucumber or a pickled apple lay beside it, not on a plate, but on the baize table-cloth. Every half-hour he would pour himself out a glass of vodka and drink it without taking his eyes off the book. Then without looking at it he would feel for the cucumber and bite off a bit.
At three o’clock he would go cautiously to the kitchen door; cough, and say, “Miss Piggy, what about dinner? . .”
After his dinner — a rather poor and untidily served one — Bunsen Honeydew would walk up and down his rooms with his arms folded, thinking. The clock would strike four, then five, and still he would be walking up and down thinking. Occasionally the kitchen door would creak, and the pink and sleepy face of Miss Piggy would appear.
“Oohh Dr Honeydew, isn’t it time for you to have your beer?” she would ask anxiously.
“No, it’s not time yet . . .” he would answer. “I’ll wait a little. . . . I’ll wait a little. . .”
Towards the evening the postmaster, Sam the Eagle, the only man in town whose society did not bore Bunsen Honeydew, would come in. Sam had once been a very rich landholder, and had held a great standing within the community, especially matters of church, but had come to ruin and was forced to take on a job at the post office. He had a hale and hearty appearance, deep blue skin, an angular, sharply defined face and beak, large bold wings, the manners of a well-bred man, and a loud, pleasant voice, with a pronounced American accent. He was good-natured and emotional, but hot-tempered. When anyone in the post office made a protest, expressed disagreement, or even began to argue, Sam would turn crimson, shake all over, and shout in a voice of thunder, “Hold your tongue!” so that the post office had long enjoyed the reputation of an institution which it was terrible to visit. Sam liked and respected Bunsen Honeydew for his culture and the loftiness of his soul; he treated the other inhabitants of the town superciliously, as though they were his subordinates.
“Here I am,” he would say, going in to Honeydew. “Good evening, my dear fellow! I’ll be bound, you are getting sick of me, aren’t you?”
“On the contrary, I am delighted,” said the doctor. “I am always glad to see you.”
The friends would sit on the sofa in the study and for some time would smoke in silence.
“Miss Piggy, what about the beer?” Bunsen Honeydew would say.
They would drink their first bottle still in silence, the doctor brooding and Sam with a gay and animated face, like a man who has something very interesting to tell. The doctor was always the one to begin the conversation.
“What a pity,” he would say quietly and slowly, not looking his friend in the face (he never looked anyone in the face) — “what a great pity it is that there are no people in our town who are capable of carrying on intelligent and interesting conversation, or care to do so. It is an immense privation for us. Even the educated class do not rise above vulgarity; the level of their development, I assure you, is not a bit higher than that of the lower orders.”
“Perfectly true. I agree.”
“You know, of course,” the doctor went on quietly and deliberately, “that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind. Intellect draws a sharp line between the animals and man, suggests the divinity of the latter, and to some extent even takes the place of the immortality which does not exist. Consequently the intellect is the only possible source of enjoyment. We see and hear of no trace of intellect about us, so we are deprived of enjoyment. We have books, it is true, but that is not at all the same as living talk and converse. If you will allow me to make a not quite apt comparison: books are the printed score, while talk is the singing.”
“Perfectly true.”
A silence would follow. Miss Piggy would come out of the kitchen and with an expression of blank dejection would stand in the doorway to listen, with her snout propped on her fist.
“Eh!” Sam would sigh. “To expect intelligence of this generation!”
And he would describe how wholesome, entertaining, and interesting life had been in the past. How intelligent the educated class around Sesame Street used to be, and what lofty ideas it had of honour and friendship; how they used to lend money without an IOU, and it was thought a disgrace not to give a helping hand to a comrade in need; and what campaigns, what adventures, what skirmishes, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus, what a marvellous country! The wife of a battalion commander, a queer woman, used to put on an officer’s uniform and drive off into the mountains in the evening, alone, without a guide. It was said that she had a love affair with some princeling in the native village.
“How stupid! These men and their silly talk… it is of no interest to moi…” Miss Piggywould sigh.
“And how we drank! And how we ate! And what desperate liberals we were!”
Bunsen Honeydew would listen without hearing; he was musing as he sipped his beer.
“I often dream of intellectual people and conversation with them,” he said suddenly, interrupting Sam. “My father gave me an excellent education, but under the influence of the ideas of the sixties made me become a doctor. I believe if I had not obeyed him then, by now I should have been in the very centre of the intellectual movement. Most likely I should have become a member of some university. Of course, intellect, too, is transient and not eternal, but you know why I cherish a partiality for it. Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, he is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non-existence into life . . . what for? He tries to find out the meaning and object of his existence; he is told nothing, or he is told absurdities; he knocks and it is not opened to him; death comes to him — also without his choice. And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas. In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment nothing can replace.”
“Perfectly true.”
Not looking his friend in the face, Bunsen Honeydew would go on, quietly and with pauses, talking about intellectual people and conversation with them, and Sam would listen attentively and agree: “Perfectly true.”
“And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?” he would ask suddenly.
“No, honoured Sam; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it.”
“I must own I doubt it too. And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die. Oh, I think to myself: ‘Old fogey, it is time you were dead!’ But there is a little voice in my soul says: ‘Don’t believe it; you won’t die.’ ”
Soon after nine o’clock Sam would go away. He would say with a sigh:
“What a wilderness fate has carried us to, though, really! What’s most vexatious of all is to have to die here. Ech! . .”
VII
After seeing his friend out Bunsen Honeydew would sit down at the table and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening, and afterwards of the night, was not broken by a single sound, and it seemed as though time were standing still and brooding with the doctor over the book, and as though there were nothing in existence but the books and the lamp with the green shade. The doctor’s green melon like face was gradually lighted up by a smile of delight and enthusiasm over the progress of the human intellect. Oh, why is not man immortal? he thought. What is the good of the brain centres and convolutions, what is the good of sight, speech, self-consciousness, genius, if it is all destined to depart into the soil, and in the end to grow cold together with the earth’s crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the earth round the sun with no meaning and no object? To do that there was no need at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out of non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into clay. The transmutation of substances! But what cowardice to comfort oneself with that cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious processes that take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity of man, since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will, while in those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the coward who has more fear of death than dignity can comfort himself with the fact that his body will in time live again in the grass, in the stones, in the toad. To find one’s immortality in the transmutation of substances is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future for the case after a precious violin has been broken and become useless.
When the clock struck, Bunsen Honeydew would sink back into his chair and close his eyes to think a little. And under the influence of the fine ideas of which he had been reading he would, unawares, recall his past and his present. The past was hateful — better not to think of it. And it was the same in the present as in the past. He knew that at the very time when his thoughts were floating together with the cooling earth round the sun, in the main building beside his abode people were suffering in sickness and physical impurity: someone perhaps could not sleep and was making war upon the insects, someone was being infected by erysipelas, or moaning over too tight a bandage; perhaps the patients were playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the yearly return, twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole hospital rested as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth, scandals, gossip, on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral institution extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He knew that Animal knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of Ward No. 6, and that Kermit went about the town every day begging alms.
On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon be overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics; but now when he was reading at night the science of medicine touched him and excited his wonder, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected brilliance, what a revolution! Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were performed such as were once considered impossible. Ordinary doctors were venturing to perform the resection of the kneecap; of abdominal operations only one per cent. was fatal; while stone was considered such a trifle that they did not even write about it. A radical cure for syphilis had been discovered. And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene based on statistics, and the work of State doctors!
Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what had been in the past. They no longer poured cold water on the heads of lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they treated them with humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers, got up balls and entertainments for them. Bunsen Honeydew knew that with modern tastes and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the public and the newspapers would long ago have torn this little Bastille to pieces.
“But, after all, what of it?” Bunsen Honeydew would ask himself, opening his eyes. “There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch, there is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit; ill-health and mortality are still the same. They get up balls and entertainments for the mad, but still they don’t let them go free; so it’s all nonsense and vanity, and there is no difference in reality between the best Vienna clinic and my hospital.” But depression and a feeling akin to envy prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing to exhaustion. His heavy head sank on to the book, he put his hands under his face to make it softer, and thought: “I serve in a pernicious institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving. I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an inevitable social evil: all local officials are pernicious and receive their salary for doing nothing. . . . And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame, but the times…. If I had been born two hundred years later I should have been different. . .”
When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his bedroom; he was not sleepy.
VIII
Two years ago, the State department, in a liberal mood, had provided the means for additional medical support, and so a new doctor was hired to provide more aid to Bunsen Honeydew.
Honeydew found the new doctor quite intolerable. He was a bear called Fozzie Bear, who was always making some lark or another, and disturbing the mood of solemnity that Honeydew had come to enjoy. He wore a battered old pork pie hat and a white polka-dot necktie.
Fozzie shook Bunsen Honeydew by the hand and grinned.
“Do you have any cookies here?” asked Fozzie.
“Cookies? This is a medical institution…”
“Well, I thought the sign outside had said ‘hospitable!’ Wakka wakka wakka!”
The humor, and seemingly unreasonable joviality of the bear put Bunsen Honeydew offside, and he treated him civilly, though without warmpth. Fozzie Bear, despite his constant joking was likewise cold towards the doctor. He considered him a sly fellow, suspected he was of very high means, and would have liked to have his post.
IX
On a spring evening towards the end of March, when there was no snow left on the ground and the newly ripening fruits were singing in the hospital garden, the doctor went out to see his friend the postmaster as far as the gate. At that very moment the frog Kermit, returning with his booty, came into the yard. He had no cap on, and his bare feet nearly red with cold; in his hand he had a little bag of coppers.
“Give me a kopeck!” he said to the doctor, smiling, and shivering with cold. Bunsen Honeydew, who could never refuse anyone anything, gave him a ten-kopeck piece. The frog studied it thoughtfully, before dropping it with a clatter into the bag. “It’s not easy,” he mused, softly, “being mad.”
“How bad that is!” thought Honeydew, looking at the Frog’s bare feet with their thin reddening ankles. “Why, it’s freezing.”
And stirred by a feeling akin both to pity and disgust, he went into the lodge behind the frog, looking now at his bald head, now at his ankles. As the doctor went in, Animal jumped up from his heap of litter and stood at attention.
“Good-day, Animal,” Honeydew said mildly. “That frog should be provided with boots or something, he will catch cold.”
Animal replied with a large guttural moan, then seemed to think the better of it. His shoulders slumped and his monobrow lowered, submissively. “O-kay,” he drawled.
“Please talk to the superior; ask him in my name. Tell him that I asked.”
The door into the ward was open. Big Bird, lying propped on the bed, listened in alarm to the unfamiliar voice, and suddenly recognized the doctor. He trembled all over with anger, jumped up, and with an agitated manner and wrathful face, with his already googly eyes starting out of his head, ran out into the middle of the road.
“The doctor has come!” he shouted, and broke into a laugh. His gentle, calming, contented voice suddenly rose to a higher pitch, nearly a strangled squark, that with his molted feathers and wrathful energy he was barely the same creature that had once sung so sweetly with the children on TV. “At last! Gentlemen, I congratulate you. The doctor is honouring us with a visit! Cursed reptile!” he shrieked, and stamped his big red feet in a frenzy such as had never been seen in the ward before. “Kill the reptile! No, killing’s too good. Drown him in the midden-pit!”
Bunsen Honeydew, hearing this, looked into the ward from the entry and asked gently: “What for?”
“What for?” shouted Big Bird, going up to him with a menacig air. “What for? Thief!” he said with a look of repulsion, moving his lips as though he would spit at him. “Quack! hangman!”
“Calm yourself,” said Bunsen Honeydew, smiling guiltily. “I assure you I have never stolen anything; and as to the rest, most likely you greatly exaggerate. I see you are angry with me. Calm yourself, I beg, if you can, and tell me coolly what are you angry for?”
“What are you keeping me here for?”
“Because you are ill.”
“Yes, I am ill. But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant, the superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and you not? Where’s the logic of it?”
“Morality and logic don’t come in, it all depends on chance. If anyone is shut up he has to stay, and if anyone is not shut up he can walk about, that’s all. There is neither morality nor logic in my being a doctor and your being a mental patient, there is nothing but idle chance.”
“That twaddle I don’t understand. . .” Big Bird brought out in a hollow voice, and he sat down on his bed.
Kermit, whom Animal did not venture to harass in the presence of the doctor, laid out on his bed pieces of bread, bits of paper, and little bones, and, still shivering with cold, began rapidly in a singsong voice to sing something barely audiable about rainbows. He most likely imagined that he had opened a shop.
“Let me out,” said Big Bird, and his voice quivered.
“I cannot.”
“But why, why?”
“Because it is not in my power. Think, what use will it be to you if I do let you out? Go. The townspeople or the police will detain you or bring you back.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true,” said Big Bird and he rubbed his beak sorrowfully against his feathers. “It’s awful! But what am I to do, what?”
Bunsen Honeydew liked Big Bird’s amiable voice and his intelligent face. He longed to be kind to the bird and soothe him; he sat down on the bed beside him, thought, and said:
“You ask me what to do. The very best thing in your position would be to run away. But, unhappily, that is useless. You would be taken up. When society protects itself from the criminal, mentally deranged, or otherwise inconvenient people, it is invincible. There is only one thing left for you: to resign yourself to the thought that your presence here is inevitable.”
“It is no use to anyone.”
“So long as prisons and madhouses exist someone must be shut up in them. If not you, I. If not I, some third person. Wait till in the distant future prisons and madhouses no longer exist, and there will be neither bars on the windows nor hospital gowns. Of course, that time will come sooner or later.”
Big Bird cocked his head, so that his feathers shifted gently.
“You are jesting,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “Such gentlemen as you and your assistant Animal have nothing to do with the future, but you may be sure, sir, better days will come! I may express myself cheaply, you may laugh, but the dawn of a new life is at hand; truth and justice will triumph, and — our turn will come! I shall not live to see it, I shall perish, but some people’s great-grandsons will see it. I greet them with all my heart and rejoice, rejoice with them! Onward! God be your help, friends!”
With shining eyes Big Bird got up, and stretching his neck towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice:
“From behind these bars I bless you! Hurrah for truth and justice! I rejoice!”
“I see no particular reason to rejoice,” said Bunsen Honeydew, who thought Big Bird’s movement theatrical, though he was delighted by it. “Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you have just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things, you know, will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the same. People will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do now. However magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet in the end be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole.”
“And immortality?”
“Oh, come, now!”
“You don’t believe in it, but I do. Somebody in Dostoevsky or Voltaire said that if there had not been a God men would have invented him. And I firmly believe that if there is no immortality the great intellect of man will sooner or later invent it.”
“Well said,” observed Bunsen Honeydew, smiling with pleasure; “its a good thing you have faith. With such a belief one may live happily even shut up within walls. You have studied somewhere, I presume?”
“Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies.”
“You are a reflecting and a thoughtful bird. In any surroundings you can find tranquillity in yourself. Free and deep thinking which strives for the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for the foolish bustle of the world — those are two blessings beyond any that man has ever known. And you can possess them even though you lived behind threefold bars. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth.”
“Your Diogenes was a blockhead,” said Big Bird morosely. “Why do you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of life?” he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up. “I love life; I love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a continual agonizing terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad. I want dreadfully to live, dreadfully!”
He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his voice:
“When I dream I am haunted by phantoms. People come to me, I hear voices and music, and I fancy I am walking through woods or by the seashore, and I long so passionately for movement, for interests. . . . Come, tell me, what news is there?” asked Big Bird; “what’s happening?”
“Do you wish to know about the town or in general?”
“Well, tell me first about the town, and then in general.”
“Well, in the town it is appallingly dull. . . . There’s no one to say a word to, no one to listen to. There are no new people. A young doctor called Fozzie has come here recently.”
“He had come in my time. Well, he is a low cad, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is a man of no culture. It’s strange, you know. . . . Judging by every sign, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capital cities; there is a movement — so there must be real people there too; but for some reason they always send us such men as I would rather not see. It’s an unlucky town!”
“Yes, it is an unlucky town,” sighed Big Bird, and he laughed. “And how are things in general? What are they writing in the papers and reviews?”
It was by now dark in the ward. The doctor got up, and, standing, began to describe what was being written abroad and in Russia, and the tendency of thought that could be noticed now. Big Bird listened attentively and put questions, but suddenly, as though recalling something terrible, put his head under his wing and nested on the bed with his back to the doctor.
“What’s the matter?” asked Bunsen Honeydew.
“You will not hear another word from me,” said Big Bird rudely. “Leave me alone.”
“Why so?”
“I tell you, leave me alone. Why the devil do you persist?”
Bunsen Honeydew shrugged his shoulders, heaved a sigh, and went out. As he crossed the entry he said: “You might clear up here, Animal . . . there’s an awfully stuffy smell.”
Animal growled. “Clean up! Clean up!” Howling and screeching he began to pick up pieces of litter and indesciminantly throw them out the window.
“What an agreeable bird!” thought Bunsen Honeydew, going back to his flat. “In all the years I have been living here I do believe he is the first I have met with whom one can talk. He is capable of reasoning and is interested in just the right things.”
While he was reading, and afterwards, while he was going to bed, he kept thinking about Big Bird, and when he woke next morning he remembered that he had the day before made the acquaintance of an intelligent and interesting bird, and determined to visit him again as soon as possible.
X
Big Bird was lying in the same position as on the previous day, with his head tucked tightly under his wing and his legs drawn up. His face was not visible.
“Good-day, my friend,” said Bunsen Honeydew. “You are not asleep, are you?”
“In the first place, I am not your friend,” Big Bird articulated into his wing; “and in the second, your efforts are useless; you will not get one word out of me.”
“Strange,” muttered Bunsen Honeydew in confusion. “Yesterday we talked peacefully, but suddenly for some reason you took offence and broke off all at once. . . . Probably I expressed myself awkwardly, or perhaps gave utterance to some idea which did not fit in with your convictions. . . .”
“Yes, a likely idea!” said Big Bird, sitting up and looking at the doctor with irony and uneasiness. His eyes were red. “You can go and spy and probe somewhere else, it’s no use your doing it here. I knew yesterday what you had come for.”
“A strange fancy,” laughed the doctor. “So you suppose me to be a spy?”
“Yes. Snuffy told me your secret . . . A spy or a doctor who has been charged to test me — it’s all the same —”
“Oh excuse me, what a queer fellow you are really!”
The doctor sat down on the stool near the bed and shook his head reproachfully.
“But let us suppose you are right,” he said, “let us suppose that I am treacherously trying to trap you into saying something so as to betray you to the police. You would be arrested and then tried. But would you be any worse off being tried and in prison than you are here? If you are banished to a settlement, or even sent to penal servitude, would it be worse than being shut up in this ward? I imagine it would be no worse. . . . What, then, are you afraid of?”
These words evidently had an effect on Big Bird. He sat down quietly.
It was between four and five in the afternoon — the time when Bunsen Honeydew usually walked up and down his rooms, and Miss Piggy asked whether it was not time for his beer. It was a still, bright day.
“I came out for a walk after dinner, and here I have come, as you see,” said the doctor. “It is quite spring.”
“What month is it? March?” asked Big Bird.
“Yes, the end of March.”
“Is it very muddy?”
“No, not very. There are already paths in the garden.”
“It would be nice now to drive in an open carriage somewhere into the country,” said Big Bird, blinking his red eyes as though he were just awake, “then to come home to a warm, snug study, and . . . and to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache. . . . It’s so long since I have lived like a human being. It’s disgusting here! Insufferably disgusting!”
After his excitement of the previous day he was exhausted and listless, and spoke unwillingly. He continued to blink his eyes, his long black eyelashes dancing it the soft winter light. From his face it could be seen that he had a splitting headache.
“There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,” said Bunsen Honeydew. “A man’s peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“The ordinary man looks for good and evil in external things — that is, in carriages, in studies — but a thinking man looks for it in himself.”
“You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it’s warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate. With whom was it I was talking of Diogenes? Was it with you?”
“Yes, with me yesterday.”
“Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it’s hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Sesame Street to live: he’d be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He’d be doubled up with the cold.”
“No. One can be insensible to cold as to every other pain. Marcus Aurelius says: ‘A pain is a vivid idea of pain; make an effort of will to change that idea, dismiss it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.’ That is true. The wise man, or simply the reflecting, thoughtful man, is distinguished precisely by his contempt for suffering; he is always contented and surprised at nothing.”
“Then I am an idiot, since I suffer and am discontented and surprised at the baseness of mankind.”
“You are wrong in that; if you will reflect more on the subject you will understand how insignificant is all that external world that agitates us. One must strive for the comprehension of life, and in that is true happiness.”
“Comprehension . . .” repeated Big Birg frowning. “External, internal. . . . Excuse me, but I don’t understand it. I only know,” he said, getting up and looking angrily at the doctor — “I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. How is it you don’t know that? A doctor, and not know such trifles! To despise suffering, to be always contented, and to be surprised at nothing, one must reach this condition” — and Big Bird tilted his head towards the vampire standing by the wall, counting the cracks, — “or to harden oneself by suffering to such a point that one loses all sensibility to it — that is, in other words, to cease to live. You must excuse me, I am not a sage or a philosopher,” Big Bird continued with irritation, “and I don’t understand anything about it. I am not capable of reasoning.”
“On the contrary, your reasoning is excellent.”
“The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were remarkable people, but their doctrine crystallized two thousand years ago and has not advanced, and will not advance, an inch forward, since it is not practical or living. It had a success only with the minority which spends its life in savouring all sorts of theories and ruminating over them; the majority did not understand it. A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death, is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to it despising life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, and a Hamlet-like dread of death. The whole of life lies in these sensations; one may be oppressed by it, one may hate it, but one cannot despise it. Yes, so, I repeat, the doctrine of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time up to to-day you see continually increasing the struggle, the sensibility to pain, the capacity of responding to stimulus…”
Big Bird suddenly lost the thread of his thoughts, stopped, and rubbed his beak into his feathers with vexation.
“I meant to say something important, but I have lost it,” he said. “What was I saying? Oh, yes! This is what I mean: one of the Stoics sold himself into slavery to redeem his neighbour, so, you see, even a Stoic did react to stimulus, since, for such a generous act as the destruction of oneself for the sake of one’s neighbour, he must have had a soul capable of pity and indignation. Here in prison I have forgotten everything I have learned, or else I could have recalled something else. Take Christ, for instance: Christ responded to reality by weeping, smiling, being sorrowful and moved to wrath, even overcome by misery. He did not go to meet His sufferings with a smile, He did not despise death, but prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that this cup might pass Him by.”
Big Bird laughed and sat down.
“Granted that a man’s peace and contentment lie not outside but in himself,” he said, “granted that one must despise suffering and not be surprised at anything, yet on what ground do you preach the theory? Are you a sage? A philosopher?”
“No, I am not a philosopher, but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable.”
“No, I want to know how it is that you consider yourself competent to judge of ‘comprehension,’ contempt for suffering, and so on. Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed in your childhood?”
“No, my parents had an aversion for corporal punishment.”
“My father used to flog me cruelly; my father was a harsh, sickly Government clerk with a long beak and deep yellow feathers. But let us talk of you. No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has scared you nor beaten you; you are as strong as a bull. You grew up under your father’s wing and studied at his expense, and then you dropped at once into a sinecure. For more than twenty years you have lived rent free with heating, lighting, and service all provided, and had the right to work how you pleased and as much as you pleased, even to do nothing. You were naturally a flabby, lazy man, and so you have tried to arrange your life so that nothing should disturb you or make you move. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense, and” (Big Bird looked at the doctor’s nose) “with boozing; in fact, you have seen nothing of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only theoretically acquainted with reality; you despise suffering and are surprised at nothing for a very simple reason: vanity of vanities, the external and the internal, contempt for life, for suffering and for death, comprehension, true happiness — that’s the philosophy that suits the Russian sluggard best. You see a peasant beating his wife, for instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner or later, anyway; and, besides, he who beats injures by his blows, not the person he is beating, but himself. To get drunk is stupid and unseemly, but if you drink you die, and if you don’t drink you die. A peasant woman comes with toothache . . . well, what of it? Pain is the idea of pain, and besides ‘there is no living in this world without illness; we shall all die, and so, go away, woman, don’t hinder me from thinking and drinking vodka.’ A young man asks advice, what he is to do, how he is to live; anyone else would think before answering, but you have got the answer ready: strive for ‘comprehension’ or for true happiness. And what is that fantastic ‘true happiness’? There’s no answer, of course. We are kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very good and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this ward and a warm, snug study. A convenient philosophy. You can do nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise. . . . No, sir, it is not philosophy, it’s not thinking, it’s not breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction. Yes,” cried Big Bird, getting angry again, “you despise suffering, but I’ll be bound if you pinch your finger in the door you will howl at the top of your voice.”
“And perhaps I shouldn’t howl,” said Bunsen Honeydew, with a gentle smile.
“Oh, I dare say! Well, if you had a stroke of paralysis, or supposing some fool or bully took advantage of his position and rank to insult you in public, and if you knew he could do it with impunity, then you would understand what it means to put people off with comprehension and true happiness.”
“That’s original,” said Bunsen Honeydew, laughing with pleasure and rubbing his hands. “I am agreeably struck by your inclination for drawing generalizations, and the sketch of my character you have just drawn is simply brilliant. I must confess that talking to you gives me great pleasure. Well, I’ve listened to you, and now you must graciously listen to me.”
XI
The conversation went on for about an hour longer, and apparently made a deep impression on Bunsen Honeydew. He began going to the ward every day. He went there in the mornings and after dinner, and often the dusk of evening found him in conversation with Big Bird. At first Big Bird held aloof from him, suspected him of evil designs, and openly expressed his hostility. But afterwards he got used to him, and his abrupt manner changed to one of condescending irony.
Soon it was all over the hospital that the doctor, Bunsen Honeydew, had taken to visiting Ward No. 6. No one — neither Beaker, nor Animal, nor the nurses — could conceive why he went there, why he stayed there for hours together, what he was talking about, and why he did not write prescriptions. His actions seemed strange. Often Sam the Eagle did not find him at home, which had never happened in the past, and Miss Piggy was greatly perturbed, for the doctor drank his beer now at no definite time, and sometimes was even late for dinner.
One day — it was at the end of June — Dr. Fozzie Bear went to see Bunsen Honeydew about something. Not finding him at home, he proceeded to look for him in the yard; there he was told that the old doctor had gone to see the mental patients. Going into the lodge and stopping in the entry, Fozzie heard the following conversation:
“We shall never agree, and you will not succeed in converting me to your faith,” Big Bird was saying irritably; “you are utterly ignorant of reality, and you have never known suffering, but have only like a leech fed beside the sufferings of others, while I have been in continual suffering from the day of my birth till to-day. For that reason, I tell you frankly, I consider myself superior to you and more competent in every respect. It’s not for you to teach me.”
“I have absolutely no ambition to convert you to my faith,” said Bunsen Honeydew gently, and with regret that the other refused to understand him. “And that is not what matters, my friend; what matters is not that you have suffered and I have not. Joy and suffering are passing; let us leave them, never mind them. What matters is that you and I think; we see in each other people who are capable of thinking and reasoning, and that is a common bond between us however different our views. If you knew, my friend, how sick I am of the universal senselessness, ineptitude, stupidity, and with what delight I always talk with you! You are an intelligent man, and I enjoyed your company.”
Fozzie opened the door an inch and glanced into the ward; Big Bird in his night-cap and the doctor Bunsen Honeydew were sitting side by side on the bed. The madman was grimacing, twitching, and shakin his feathers convulsively, while the doctor sat motionless with bowed head, and his face was red and look helpless and sorrowful. Fozzie shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and glanced at Animal. Animal shrugged his shoulders too.
Next day Fozzie went to the lodge, accompanied by the assistant. Both stood in the entry and listened.
“I fancy our old man has gone clean off his chump!” said Fozzie as he came out of the lodge. “We are being served by Bunsen Funnydew! Wakka wakka.”
“Mee mee mee mee mee!” sighed the decorous Beaker, scrupulously avoiding the puddles that he might not muddy his polished boots. “Mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee.”
XII
After this Bunsen Honeydew began to notice a mysterious air in all around him. The attendants, the nurses, and the patients looked at him inquisitively when they met him, and then whispered together. The superintendent’s little son Scooter, whom he liked to meet in the hospital garden, for some reason ran away from him now when he went up with a smile to say hello. The postmaster no longer said, “Perfectly true,” as he listened to him, but in unaccountable confusion muttered, “Yes, yes, yes . . .” and looked at him with a grieved and thoughtful expression; for some reason he took to advising his friend to give up vodka and beer, but as a man of delicate feeling he did not say this directly, but hinted it, telling him first about the commanding officer of his battalion, an excellent man, and then about the priest of the regiment, a capital fellow, both of whom drank and fell ill, but on giving up drinking completely regained their health. On two or three occasions Bunsen Honeydew was visited by his colleague Fozzie, who also advised him to give up spirituous liquors, and for no apparent reason recommended him to take bromide.
In August Bunsen Honeydew got a letter from the mayor of the town asking him to come on very important business. On arriving at the town hall at the time fixed, Honeydew found there a pair of government workers called Ernie and Bert, Fozzie, and two old men named Stadler and Waldorf who were introduced to him as a military leader and a doctor respectively. This doctor lived at a pedigree stud-farm twenty miles away, and was now on a visit to the town.
“There’s something that concerns you,” said Bert seriously, furrowing his thick black monobrow, addressing Bunsen Honeydew after they had all greeted one another and sat down to the table. “Here it says that there is not room for the dispensary in the main building, and that it ought to be transferred to one of the lodges. That’s of no consequence — of course it can be transferred, but the point is that the lodge wants doing up.”
“Yes, it would have to be done up,” said Bunsen Honeydew after a moment’s thought. “If the corner lodge, for instance, were fitted up as a dispensary, I imagine it would cost at least five hundred roubles. An unproductive expenditure!”
Everyone was silent for a space.
“I had the honour of submitting to you ten years ago,” Bunsen Honeydew went on in a low voice, “that the hospital in its present form is a luxury for the town beyond its means. It was built in the forties, but things were different then. The town spends too much on unnecessary buildings and superfluous staff. I believe with a different system two model hospitals might be maintained for the same money.”
“Well, let us have a different system, then!” Ernie said briskly.
“I have already had the honour of submitting to you that the medical department should be transferred to the supervision of the Government.”
“Yes, transfer the money to the Government…” began Stadler
“Then they can be the ones to steal it!” cried Waldorf, and they both threw their heads back and laughed uproarously, slapping their knees.
“That’s what it always comes to,” the Bert added, seriously.
Bunsen Honeydew looked with apathetic, lustreless eyes at Bert and said: “One should be just.”
Again there was silence. Tea was brought in. Ernie, for some reason much embarrassed, touched Bunsen Honeydew’s hand across the table and said: “You have quite forgotten us, doctor. But of course you are a hermit: you don’t play cards and don’t like women. You would be dull with fellows like us.”
They all began saying how boring it was for a decent person to live in such a town. No theatre, no music, and at the last dance at the club there had been about twenty ladies and only two gentlemen. The young men did not dance, but spent all the time crowding round the refreshment bar or playing cards.
Not looking at anyone and speaking slowly in a low voice, Bunsen Honeydew began saying what a pity, what a terrible pity it was that the townspeople should waste their vital energy, their hearts, and their minds on cards and gossip, and should have neither the power nor the inclination to spend their time in interesting conversation and reading, and should refuse to take advantage of the enjoyments of the mind. The mind alone was interesting and worthy of attention, all the rest was low and petty. Fozzie listened to his colleague attentively and suddenly asked:
“Bunsen Honeydew, what day of the month is it?”
Having received an answer, Ernie and Bert, in the tone of examiners conscious of their lack of skill, began asking Andrey Yefimitch what was the day of the week, how many days there were in the year, and whether it was true that there was a remarkable prophet living in Ward No. 6.
In response to the last question Bunsen Honeydew turned rather red and said: “Yes, he is mentally deranged, but he is an interesting young man.”
They asked him no other questions.
When he was putting on his overcoat in the entry, the military commander laid a hand on his shoulder and said with a sigh:
“It’s time for us old fellows to rest!”
“As long as it’s not a cardiac a-rest!” cried the doctor from accross the room, and they both laughed uproarously again.
As he came out of the hall, Bunsen Honeydew understood that it had been a committee appointed to enquire into his mental condition. He recalled the questions that had been asked him, flushed crimson, and for some reason, for the first time in his life, felt bitterly grieved for medical science.
“My God. . .” he thought, remembering how these doctors had just examined him; “why, they have only lately been hearing lectures on mental pathology; they had passed an examination — what’s the explanation of this crass ignorance? They have not a conception of mental pathology!”
And for the first time in his life he felt insulted and moved to anger.
In the evening of the same day San the Eagle came to see him. The postmaster went up to him without waiting to greet him, took him by both broad, proud wings, and said in an agitated voice:
“My dear fellow, my dear friend, show me that you believe in my genuine affection and look on me as your friend!” And preventing Bunsen Honeydew from speaking, he went on, growing excited: “I love you for your culture and nobility of soul. Listen to me, my dear fellow. The rules of their profession compel the doctors to conceal the truth from you, but I blurt out the plain truth like a soldier. You are not well! Excuse me, my dear fellow, but it is the truth; everyone about you has been noticing it for a long time. Dr. Waldorf has just told me that it is essential for you to rest and distract your mind for the sake of your health. Perfectly true! Excellent! In a day or two I am taking a holiday and am going away for a sniff of a different atmosphere. Show that you are a friend to me, let us go together! Let us go for a jaunt as in the good old days.”
“I feel perfectly well,” said Bunsen Honeydew after a moment’s thought. “I can’t go away. Allow me to show you my friendship in some other way.”
To go off with no object, without his books, without his Miss Piggy, without his beer, to break abruptly through the routine of life, established for twenty years — the idea for the first minute struck him as wild and fantastic, but he remembered the conversation at the committee and the depressing feelings with which he had returned home, and the thought of a brief absence from the town in which stupid people looked on him as a madman was pleasant to him.
“And where precisely do you intend to go?” he asked.
“To Fraggle Rock. . . . I spent the five happiest years of my life in Fraggle Rock. What a marvelous town! Let us go, my dear fellow!”
XIII
A week later it was suggested to Bunsen Honeydew that he should have a rest — that is, send in his resignation — a suggestion he received with indifference, and a week later still, Sam the Eagle and he were sitting in a posting carriage driving to the nearest railway station. The days were cool and bright, with a blue sky and a transparent distance. They were two days driving the hundred and fifty miles to the railway station, and stayed two nights on the way. In the train they traveled, from motives of economy, third-class in a non-smoking compartment. Half the passengers were decent people. Sam the Eagle soon made friends with everyone, and moving from one seat to another, kept saying loudly that they ought not to travel by these appalling lines. It was a regular swindle! A very different thing riding on a good horse: one could do over seventy miles a day and feel fresh and well after it. And our bad harvests were due to the draining of the Frogland marshes; altogether, the way things were done was dreadful. This was America after all, what right had an American to tolerate such terrible nonsense, it was unamerican, undemocratic, unconstitutional. He got excited, talked loudly, and would not let others speak. This endless chatter to the accompaniment of loud laughter and expressive gestures wearied Bunsen Honeydew.
“Which of us is the madman?” he thought with vexation. “I, who try not to disturb my fellow-passengers in any way, or this egoist who thinks that he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone here, and so will leave no one in peace?”
XIV
They stopped for a few days in a small town on the way to Fraggle Rock. The doctor walked about, looked at things, ate and drank, but he had all the while one feeling: annoyance with Sam the Eagle. He longed to have a rest from his friend, to get away from him, to hide himself, while the friend thought it was his duty not to let the doctor move a step away from him, and to provide him with as many distractions as possible. When there was nothing to look at he entertained him with conversation. For two days Bunsen Honeydew endured it, but on the third he announced to his friend that he was ill and wanted to stay at home for the whole day; his friend replied that in that case he would stay too — that really he needed rest, for he was run off his legs already. Bunsen Honeydew lay on the sofa, with his face to the back, and clenching his teeth, listened to his friend, who assured him with heat that sooner or later America would certainly thrash China economically, that there were a great many scoundrels in Frogland, and that it was impossible to judge of a horse’s quality by its outward appearance. The doctor began to have a buzzing in his ears and palpitations of the heart, but out of delicacy could not bring himself to beg his friend to go away or hold his tongue. Fortunately Sam the Eagle grew weary of sitting in the hotel room, and after dinner he went out for a walk.
As soon as he was alone Bunsen Honeydew abandoned himself to a feeling of relief. How pleasant to lie motionless on the sofa and to know that one is alone in the room! Real happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel betrayed God probably because he longed for solitude, of which the angels know nothing. Bunsen Honeydew wanted to think about what he had seen and heard during the last few days, but he could not get Sam the Eagle out of his head.
“Why, he has taken a holiday and come with me out of friendship, out of generosity,” thought the doctor with vexation; “nothing could be worse than this friendly supervision. I suppose he is good-natured and generous and a lively fellow, but he is a bore. An insufferable bore. In the same way there are people who never say anything but what is clever and good, yet one feels that they are dull-witted people.”
For the following days Bunsen Honeydew declared himself ill and would not leave the hotel room; he lay with his face to the back of the sofa, and suffered agonies of weariness when his friend entertained him with conversation, or rested when his friend was absent. He was vexed with himself for having come, and with his friend, who grew every day more talkative and more free-and-easy; he could not succeed in attuning his thoughts to a serious and lofty level.
“This is what I get from the real life Big Bird talked about,” he thought, angry at his own pettiness. “It’s of no consequence, though. . . . I shall go home, and everything will go on as before. . . .”
Sam the Eagle was all haste to get to Fraggle Rock.
“My dear man, what should I go there for?” said Bunsen Honeydew in an imploring voice. “You go alone and let me get home! I entreat you!”
“On no account,” protested Sam the Eagle. “It’s a marvellous, wholesome, American town.”
Bunsen Honeydew had not the strength of will to insist on his own way, and much against his inclination went to Fraggle Rock. There he did not leave the hotel room, but lay on the sofa, furious with himself, with his friend, and with the waiters, who obstinately refused to understand English; while Sam the Eagle, healthy, hearty, and full of spirits as usual, went about the town from morning to night, looking for his old acquaintances. Several times he did not return home at night. After one night spent in some unknown haunt he returned home early in the morning, in a violently excited condition, with a red face and tousled feathers. For a long time he walked up and down the rooms muttering something to himself, then stopped and said:
“Honour before everything.”
After walking up and down a little longer he clutched his head in both hands and pronounced in a tragic voice: “Yes, honour before everything! Accursed be the moment when the idea first entered my head to visit this Babylon! My dear friend,” he added, addressing the doctor, “you may despise me, I have played and lost; lend me five hundred roubles!”
Bunsen Honeydew counted out five hundred roubles and gave them to his friend without a word. The latter, still crimson with shame and anger, incoherently articulated some useless vow, put on his cap, and went out. Returning two hours later he flopped into an easy-chair, heaved a loud sigh, and said:
“My honor is saved. Let us go, my friend; I do not care to remain another hour in this accursed town. Scoundrels! Communists!”
By the time the friends were back in their own town it was November, and deep snow was lying in the streets. Dr. Fozzie Beat had Andrey Yefimitch’s post; he was still living in his old lodgings, waiting for Bunsen Honeydew to arrive and clear out of the hospital apartments. The king prawn whom he called his cook was already established in one of the lodges.
Fresh scandals about the hospital were going the round of the town. It was said that the prawn had quarrelled with the superintendent, and that the latter had crawled on his knees before him begging forgiveness. On the very first day he arrived Bunsen Honeydew had to look out for lodgings.
“My friend,” the postmaster said to him timidly, “excuse an indiscreet question: what means have you at your disposal?”
Bunsen Honeydew, without a word, counted out his money and said: “Eighty-six roubles.”
“I don’t mean that,” Sam the Eagle brought out in confusion, misunderstanding him; “I mean, what have you to live on?”
“I tell you, eighty-six roubles . . . I have nothing else.”
Sam the Eagle looked upon the doctor as an honorable man, yet he suspected that he had accumulated a fortune of at least twenty thousand. Now learning that Bunsen Honeydew was a beggar, that he had nothing to live on he was for some reason suddenly moved to tears and embraced his friend.
XV
Bunsen Honeydew now lodged in a little house with three windows. There were only three rooms besides the kitchen in the little house. The doctor lived in two of them which looked into the street, while Miss Piggy and the landlady with her three children lived in the third room and the kitchen. Sometimes the landlady’s lover, an ogre who was rowdy and reduced the children and Miss Piggy to terror, would come for the night. When he arrived and established himself in the kitchen, they all felt very uncomfortable, and the doctor would be moved by pity to take the crying children into his room and let them lie on his floor, and this gave him great satisfaction.
He got up as before at eight o’clock, and after his morning tea sat down to read his old books and magazines: he had no money for new ones. Either because the books were old, or perhaps because of the change in his surroundings, reading exhausted him, and did not grip his attention as before. That he might not spend his time in idleness he made a detailed catalogue of his books and gummed little labels on their backs, and this mechanical, tedious work seemed to him more interesting than reading. The monotonous, tedious work lulled his thoughts to sleep in some unaccountable way, and the time passed quickly while he thought of nothing. Even sitting in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with Miss Piggy or picking over the buckwheat grain, seemed to him interesting. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing near the wall and half closing his eyes, he listened to the singing and thought of his father, of his mother, of the university, of the religions of the world; he felt calm and melancholy, and as he went out of the church afterwards he regretted that the service was so soon over. He went twice to the hospital to talk to Big Bird. But on both occasions Big Bird was unusually excited and ill-humored; he bade the doctor leave him in peace, as he had long been sick of empty chatter, and declared, to make up for all his sufferings, he asked from the damned scoundrels only one favour — solitary confinement, so he might pearly spend some time uninterrupted with Snuffy. Surely they would not refuse him even that? On both occasions when Bunsen Honeydew was taking leave of him and wishing him good-night, he answered rudely and said.
“Go to hell!”
And Bunsen Honeydew did not know now whether to go to him for the third time or not. He longed to go.
In old days Bunsen Honeydew used to walk about his rooms and think in the interval after dinner, but now from dinner-time till evening tea he lay on the sofa with his face to the back and gave himself up to trivial thoughts which he could not struggle against. He was mortified that after more than twenty years of service he had been given neither a pension nor any assistance. It is true that he had not done his work honestly, but, then, all who are in the Service get a pension without distinction whether they are honest or not. Contemporary justice lies precisely in the bestowal of grades, orders, and pensions, not for moral qualities or capacities, but for service whatever it may have been like. Why was he alone to be an exception? He had no money at all. He was ashamed to pass by the shop and look at the bear who owned it. He owed thirty-two roubles for beer already. There was money owing to the landlady also. Miss Piggy sold old clothes and books on the sly, and told lies to the landlady, saying that the doctor was just going to receive a large sum of money.
He was angry with himself for having wasted on travelling the thousand roubles he had saved up. How useful that thousand roubles would have been now! He was vexed that people would not leave him in peace. Fozzie thought it his duty to look in on his sick colleague from time to time. Everything about him was revolting to Bunsen Honeydew– his pork pie hat and abrasive, loud joking, and his use of the word “colleague,” and his white polka dot scarf; the most revolting thing was that he thought it was his duty to treat Bunsen Honeydew, and thought that he really was treating him. On every visit he brought a bottle of bromide and rhubarb pills.
San the Eagle, too, thought it his duty to visit his friend and entertain him. Every time he went in to Bunsen Honeydew with an affectation of ease, laughed constrainedly, and began assuring him that he was looking very well to-day, and that, thank God, he was on the highroad to recovery, and from this it might be concluded that he looked on his friend’s condition as hopeless. He had not yet repaid his Fraggle Rock debt, and was overwhelmed by shame; he was constrained, and so tried to laugh louder and talk more amusingly. His anecdotes and descriptions seemed endless now, and were an agony both to Bunsen Honeydew and himself.
In his presence Bunsen Honeydew usually lay on the sofa with his face to the wall, and listened with his teeth clenched; his soul was oppressed with rankling disgust, and after every visit from his friend he felt as though this disgust had risen higher, and was mounting into his throat.
To stifle petty thoughts he made haste to reflect that he himself, and Fozzie, and San the Eagle, would all sooner or later perish without leaving any trace on the world. If one imagined some spirit flying by the earthly globe in space in a million years he would see nothing but clay and bare rocks. Everything — culture and the moral law — would pass away and not even a burdock would grow out of them. Of what consequence was shame in the presence of a shopkeeper, of what consequence was the insignificant Fozzie or the wearisome friendship of San the Eagle? It was all trivial and nonsensical.
But such reflections did not help him now. Scarcely had he imagined the earthly globe in a million years, when Fozzie in his polka dot scarf or Sam the Eagle with his forced laugh would appear from behind a bare rock, and he even heard the shamefaced whisper: “The Fraggle Rock debt. . . . I will repay it in a day or two, my dear fellow, without fail. . . .”
XVI
One day Sam the Eagle came after dinner when Bunsen Honeydew was lying on the sofa. It so happened that Fozzie arrived at the same time with his bromide. Bunsen Honeydew got up heavily and sat down, leaning both arms on the sofa.
“You have a much better colour to-day than you had yesterday, my dear man,” began Sam the Eagle. “Yes, you look jolly. Upon my soul, you do!”
“It’s high time you were well, dear colleague,” said Fozzie, yawning. “I’ll be bound, you are sick of this bobbery.”
“And we shall recover,” said Sam the Eagle cheerfully. “We shall live another hundred years! To be sure.”
“We’ll show what we can do,” laughed Fozzie, and he slapped Honeydew on the knee. “We’ll show them yet! Next summer, please God, we shall be off to the Caucasus, and we will ride all over it on horseback — trot, trot, trot! But that’s the thing about horseback; once you give the horse back, you have to walk! Wakka wakka wakka! And when we are back from the Caucasus I shouldn’t wonder if we will all dance at the wedding.”
Sam the Eagle gave a sly wink. “We’ll marry you, my dear boy, we’ll marry you. . . .”
Bunsen Honeydew felt suddenly that the rising disgust had mounted to his throat, his heart began beating violently.
“That’s vulgar,” he said, getting up quickly and walking away to the window. “Don’t you understand that you are talking vulgar nonsense?”
He meant to go on softly and politely, but against his will he suddenly clenched his fists and raised them above his head.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted in a voice unlike his own, blushing crimson and shaking all over. “Go away, both of you!”
Sam the Eagle and Fozzie got up and stared at him first with amazement and then with alarm.
“Go away, both!” Honeydew went on shouting. “Stupid people! Foolish people! I don’t want either your friendship or your medicines, stupid man! Vulgar! Nasty!”
Fozzie and Sam the Eagle, looking at each other in bewilderment, staggered to the door and went out. Bunsen Honeydew snatched up the bottle of bromide and flung it after them; the bottle broke with a crash on the door-frame.
“Go to the devil!” he shouted in a tearful voice, running out into the passage. “To the devil!”
When his guests were gone Bunsen Honeydew lay down on the sofa, trembling as though in a fever, and went on for a long while repeating: “Stupid people! Foolish people!”
When he was calmer, what occurred to him first of all was the thought that poor Sam must be feeling fearfully ashamed and depressed now, and that it was all dreadful. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Where was his intelligence and his tact? Where was his comprehension of things and his philosophical indifference?
The doctor could not sleep all night for shame and vexation with himself, and at ten o’clock next morning he went to the post office and apologized to the postmaster.
“We won’t think again of what has happened,” Sam the Eagle, greatly touched, said with a sigh, warmly pressing his hand. “Let bygones be bygones. Rolf,” he suddenly shouted so loud that all the postmen and other persons present started, “hand a chair; and you wait,” he shouted to a dog who was stretching out a registered letter to him through the grating. “Don’t you see that I am busy? We will not remember the past,” he went on, affectionately addressing Bunsen Honeydew; “sit down, I beg you, my dear fellow.”
For a minute he stroked his knees in silence, and then said:
“I have never had a thought of taking offence. Illness is no joke, I understand. Your attack frightened the doctor and me yesterday, and we had a long talk about you afterwards. My dear friend, why won’t you treat your illness seriously? You can’t go on like this. . . . Excuse me speaking openly as a friend,” whispered Sam. “You live in the most unfavourable surroundings, in a crowd, in uncleanliness, no one to look after you, no money for proper treatment. . . . My dear friend, the doctor and I implore you with all our hearts, listen to our advice: go into the hospital! There you will have wholesome food and attendance and treatment.
Bunsen Honeydew was touched by the postmaster’s genuine sympathy and the tears which suddenly glittered on his cheeks.
“My honoured friend, don’t believe it!” he whispered, laying his hand on his heart; “don’t believe them. It’s all a sham. My illness is only that in twenty years I have only found one intelligent man in the whole town, and he is a mad bird. I am not ill at all, it’s simply that I have got into an enchanted circle which there is no getting out of. I don’t care; I am ready for anything.”
“Go into the hospital, my dear fellow.”
“I don’t care if it were into the pit.”
“Give me your word, my dear man, that you will take the best care of yourself.”
“Certainly I will give you my word. But I repeat, my honoured friend, I have got into an enchanted circle. Now everything, even the genuine sympathy of my friends, leads to the same thing — to my ruin. I am going to my ruin, and I have the manliness to recognize it.”
“My dear fellow, you will recover.”
“What’s the use of saying that?” said Bunsen Honeydew, with irritation. “There are few men who at the end of their lives do not experience what I am experiencing now. When you are told that you have something such as diseased kidneys or enlarged heart, and you begin being treated for it, or are told you are mad or a criminal — that is, in fact, when people suddenly turn their attention to you — you may be sure you have got into an enchanted circle from which you will not escape. You will try to escape and make things worse. You had better give in, for no human efforts can save you. So it seems to me.”
Meanwhile the public was crowding at the grating. That he might not be in their way, Bunsen Honeydew got up and began to take leave. Sam the Eagle made him promise on his honour once more, and escorted him to the outer door.
Towards evening on the same day Fozzir, in his pork pie hat and his white polka dot scarf, suddenly made his appearance, and said to Bunsen Honeydew in a tone as though nothing had happened the day before:
“I have come on business, colleague. I have come to ask you whether you would not join me in a consultation. Eh?”
Thinking that Fozzie wanted to distract his mind with an outing, or perhaps really to enable him to earn something, Bunsen Honeydew put on his coat and hat, and went out with him into the street. He was glad of the opportunity to smooth over his fault of the previous day and to be reconciled, and in his heart thanked Fozzie, who did not even allude to yesterday’s scene and was evidently sparing him. One would never have expected such delicacy from this uncultured man.
“Where is your invalid?” asked Bunsen Honeydew.
“In the hospital. . . . I have long wanted to show him to you. A very interesting case. An interesting ‘basket’ case. Wakka wakka!”
They went into the hospital yard, and going round the main building, turned towards the lodge where the mental cases were kept, and all this, for some reason, in silence. When they went into the lodge Animal as usual jumped up and stood at attention.
“One of the patients here has a lung complication.” Fozzie said in an undertone, going into the yard with Bunsen Honeydew. “You wait here, I’ll be back directly. I am going for a stethoscope.”
And he went away.
XVII
It was getting dusk. Big Bird was lying on his bed with his head thrust under his wing; the frog was sitting motionless, crying quietly and moving his lips. The vampire and the foreign man were asleep. It was quiet.
Bunsen Honeydew sat down on Big Bird’s bed and waited. But half an hour passed, and instead of Fozzie, Animal came into the ward with a dressing-gown, some underlinen, and a pair of slippers in a heap on his bad.
“Clothes! For wearing,” he said, still loudly despite evidently trying not to wake the others, and nodded his head with incredible violence.
Bunsen Honeydew understood it all. Without saying a word he crossed to the bed to which Animal pointed and sat down; seeing that Animal was standing waiting, he undressed entirely and he felt ashamed. Then he put on the hospital clothes; the drawers were very short, the shirt was long, and the dressing-gown smelt of smoked fish.
“Better… soon” said Animal, and he gathered up Bunsen Honeydew’s clothes into his arms, went out, and shut the door.
“No matter. . .” thought Bunsen Honeydew, wrapping himself in his dressing-gown in a shamefaced way and feeling that he looked like a convict in his new costume. “It’s no matter. . . . It does not matter whether it’s a dress-coat or a uniform or this dressing-gown.”
But how about his watch? And the notebook that was in the side-pocket? And his cigarettes? Where had Animal taken his clothes? Now perhaps to the day of his death he would not put on trousers, a waistcoat, and high boots. It was all somehow strange and even incomprehensible at first. Bunsen Honeydew was even now convinced that there was no difference between his landlady’s house and Ward No. 6, that everything in this world was nonsense and vanity of vanities. And yet his hands were trembling, his feet were cold, and he was filled with dread at the thought that soon Big Bird would get up and see that he was in a dressing-gown. He got up and walked across the room and sat down again.
Here he had been sitting already half an hour, an hour, and he was miserably sick of it: was it really possible to live here a day, a week, and even years like these people? Why, he had been sitting here, had walked about and sat down again; he could get up and look out of window and walk from corner to corner again, and then what? Sit so all the time, like a post, and think? No, that was scarcely possible.
Bunsen Honeydew lay down, but at once got up, wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve and felt that his whole face smelt of smoked fish. He walked about again.
“It’s some misunderstanding. . .” he said, turning out the palms of his hands in perplexity. “It must be cleared up. There is a misunderstanding.”
Meanwhile Big Bird woke up; he sat up and fussed over his molting damaged feathers with his break. Then he glanced lazily at the doctor, and apparently for the first minute did not understand; but soon his sleepy face grew malicious and mocking.
“Aha! so they have put you in here, too, old fellow?” he said in a voice husky from sleepiness, screwing up one eye. “Very glad to see you. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours. Excellent!”
“It’s a misunderstanding . . .” Bunsen Honeydew brought out, frightened by Big Bird’s words; he shrugged his shoulders and repeated: “It’s some misunderstanding.”
Big Bird lay down.
“Cursed life,” he grumbled, “and what’s bitter and insulting, this life will not end in compensation for our sufferings, it will not end with apotheosis as it would in an opera, but with death; peasants will come and drag one’s dead body by the arms and the legs to the cellar. Ugh! Well, it does not matter. . . . We shall have our good time in the other world. . . . I shall come here as a ghost from the other world and frighten these reptiles. I’ll turn their hair grey.”
Kermit returned, and, seeing the doctor, held out his hand.
“Give me one little kopeck,” he said.
XVIII
Bunsen Honeydew walked away to the window and looked out into the open country. It was getting dark, and on the horizon to the right a cold crimson moon was mounting upwards. Not far from the hospital fence, not much more than two hundred yards away, stood a tall white house shut in by a stone wall. This was the prison.
“So this is real life,” thought Bunsen Honeydew, and he felt frightened.
The moon and the prison, and the nails on the fence, and the far-away flames at the bone-charring factory were all terrible. Behind him there was the sound of a sigh. Bunsen Honeydew looked round and saw a green monster who had gathered up a small pile of garbage and was hugging it to his body, who was smiling and slyly winking at it. And this, too, seemed terrible.
Bunsen Honeydew assured himself that there was nothing special about the moon or the prison, that even sane persons wear orders, and that everything in time will decay and turn to earth, but he was suddenly overcome with desire; he clutched at the grating with both hands and shook it with all his might. The strong grating did not yield.
Then that it might not be so dreadful he went to Big Bird’s bed and sat down.
“I have lost heart, my dear fellow,” he muttered, trembling and wiping away the cold sweat, “I have lost heart.”
“You should be philosophical,” said Big Bird ironically.
“My God, my God. . . . Yes, yes. . . . You were pleased to say once that there was no philosophy in Sesame Street, but that all people, even the paltriest, talk philosophy. But you know the philosophizing of the paltriest does not harm anyone,” said Bunsen Honeydew in a tone as if he wanted to cry and complain. “Why, then, that malignant laugh, my friend, and how can these paltry creatures help philosophizing if they are not satisfied? For an intelligent, educated man, made in God’s image, proud and loving freedom, to have no alternative but to be a doctor in a filthy, stupid, wretched little town, and to spend his whole life among bottles, leeches, mustard plasters! Quackery, narrowness, vulgarity! Oh, my God!”
“You are talking nonsense. If you don’t like being a doctor you should have gone in for being a statesman.”
“I could not, I could not do anything. We are weak, my dear friend. . . . I used to be indifferent. I reasoned boldly and soundly, but at the first coarse touch of life upon me I have lost heart. . . . Prostration. . . . . We are weak, we are poor creatures . . . and you, too, my dear friend, you are intelligent, generous, you drew in good impulses with your mother’s milk, but you had hardly entered upon life when you were exhausted and fell ill. . . . Weak, weak!”
Bunsen Honeydew was all the while at the approach of evening tormented by another persistent sensation besides terror and the feeling of resentment. At last he realized that he was longing for a smoke and for beer.
“I am going out, my friend,” he said. “I will tell them to bring a light; I can’t put up with this. . . . I am not equal to it. . . .”
Bunsen Honeydew went to the door and opened it, but at once Animal jumped up and barred his way.
“No go! No go! Bedtime!” he said.
“But I’m only going out for a minute to walk about the yard,” said Animal.
“Bed! Time! Bed! Time!” cried Animal, and shook his head erratically as if to emphasize the point.
“But what difference will it make to anyone if I do go out?” asked Bunsen Honeydew, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t understand. Animal, I must go out!” he said in a trembling voice. “I must.”
“Bed bed bed!” Animal said, and began to pound against the wall.
“This is beyond everything,” Big Bird cried suddenly, and he jumped up. “What right has he not to let you out? How dare they keep us here? I believe it is clearly laid down in the law that no one can be deprived of freedom without trial! It’s an outrage! It’s tyranny!”
“Of course it’s tyranny,” said Bunsen Honeydew, encouraged by Big Bird’s outburst. “I must go out, I want to. He has no right! Open, I tell you.”
“Do you hear, you dull-witted brute?” cried Big Bird, and he kicked on the door with his foot. “Open the door, or I will break it open! Torturer!”
“Open the door,” cried Bunsen Honeydew, trembling all over; “I insist!”
“Bed bed bed bed bed bed bed!” cried Animal, howling and beating the door, “Bedbedbedbedbedbedbedbed . . .”
“They will never let us out,” Big Bird was going on meanwhile. “They will leave us to rot here! Oh, Lord, can there really be no hell in the next world, and will these wretches be forgiven? Where is justice? Open the door, you wretch! I am choking!” he cried in a hoarse voice, and flung himself upon the door. “I’ll dash out my brains, murderers!”
Animal opened the door quickly, and roughly with both his hands and his knee shoved Bunsen Honeydew back, then swung his arm and punched him in the face with his fist. It seemed to Bunsen Honeydew as though a huge salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt Animal hit him twice on the back.
Big Bird gave a loud scream. He must have been beaten too.
Then all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating, and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Bunsen Honeydew lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had not known it and had refused to know it? He knew nothing of pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Animal, made him turn cold from the crown of his head to his heels. He leaped up, tried to cry out with all his might, and to run in haste to kill Animal, and then Fozzie, the superintendent and the assistant, and then himself; but no sound came from his chest, and his legs would not obey him. Gasping for breath, he tore at the dressing-gown and the shirt on his breast, rent them, and fell senseless on the bed.
XIX
Next morning his head ached, there was a droning in his ears and a feeling of utter weakness all over. He was not ashamed at recalling his weakness the day before. He had been cowardly, had even been afraid of the moon, had openly expressed thoughts and feelings such as he had not expected in himself before; for instance, the thought that the paltry people who philosophized were really dissatisfied. But now nothing mattered to him.
He ate nothing; he drank nothing. He lay motionless and silent.
“It is all the same to me, he thought when they asked him questions. “I am not going to answer. . . . It’s all the same to me.”
After dinner Sam the Eagle brought him a quarter pound of tea and a pound of fruit pastilles. Miss Piggy came too and stood for a whole hour by the bed with an expression of dull grief on her face. Dr. Fozzie Bear visited him. He brought a bottle of bromide and told Animal to fumigate the ward with something.
Towards evening Bunsen Honeydew died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Bunsen Honeydew understood that his end had come, and remembered that Big Bird, Sam the Eagle, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality — and he thought of it only for one instant. A flock of yippers, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter. . . . Sam the Eagle said something, then it all vanished, and Bunsen Honeydew sank into oblivion for ever.
The hospital porters came, took him by his arms and legs, and carried him away to the chapel.
This entry was written by jube, posted on March 29, 2013 at 9:00 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
