Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/205

 or two later they begged that he should be transferred back. And, as there were two restless and quarrelsome lunatics in the hospital at once, the two convict wards had them turn and turn about and they were one worse than the other. We all breathed more freely when at last they were taken away.

I remember another strange madman. There was brought in one summer day a healthy and very clumsy-looking man of forty-five, with a face horridly disfigured by smallpox, with little red eyes buried in fat, and a very gloomy and sullen expression. They put him next to me. He turned out to be a very quiet fellow, he spoke to no one, but sat as though he were thinking about something. It began to get dark and suddenly he turned to me. He began telling me without the slightest preface, but as though he were telling me a great secret, that he was in a few days to have received two thousand “sticks,” but that now it would not come off because the daughter of Colonel G. had taken up his case. I looked at him in perplexity and answered that I should not have thought that the colonel’s daughter could have done anything in such a case. I had no suspicions at the time; he had been brought in not as a lunatic but as an ordinary patient. I asked him what was the matter with him. He answered that he did not know, that he had been brought here for some reason, that he was quite well, but that the colonel’s daughter was in love with him; that a fortnight ago she had happened to drive past the lock-up at the moment when he was looking out of the grated window. She had fallen in love with him as soon as she saw him. Since then on various pretexts she had been three times in the lock-up; the first time she came with her father to see her brother who was then an officer on duty there; another time she came with her mother to give them alms, and as she passed him she whispered that she loved him and would save him It was amazing with what exact details he told me all this nonsense, which, of course, was all the creation of his poor sick brain. He believed devoutly that he would escape corporal punishment. He spoke calmly and confidently of this young lady’s passionate love for him, and although the whole story was so absurd, it was uncanny to hear such a romantic tale of a love-sick maiden from a man nearly fifty of such a dejected, woebegone and hideous countenance. It is strange what the fear of punishment had done to that timid soul. Perhaps he had really seen some one from the window, and the insanity, begotten of terror and growing upon him every hour,