Page:Garshin - A Red Flower (1911).djvu/12

10 in the garden, and, all the iron-barred windows being kept tightly shut, it would become very suffocating.

The new patient was taken to the bathroom. This room would have produced a painful impression even upon a healthy man; upon a diseased and excited imagination it had a still more distressing effect. It was a large vaulted room with a stone floor, and lighted with but one corner window; the walls and the arches were painted dark red; on the level with the floor, which was thick with dirt, were incased two stone bathtubs; these seemed like two oval pits filled with water. The enormous copper stove, with a cylinder boiler for warming the water, and with an elaborate system of tubes and stopcocks, occupied a place opposite the window. Everything bore for a deranged mind a gloomy and fantastic character, and the bathroom attendant, a stout man, an ever-silent Little Russian, increased this impression by his sombre countenance.

When they brought the patient into this terrible room to give him a bath, and also, in accordance with the doctor's orders, to place on the nape of his neck a big Spanish fly, he became terror stricken. Thoughts