Page:Stories from Garshin.djvu/40

Rh 'Ring, I can't; you've tied my hands.'

The porter opened the door, and the new arrival entered the asylum.

It was a large stone building of the old-fashioned state-barrack type. Two large halls—the dining-hall and a general living-room for quiet patients, a wide corridor with a glass door leading to the gardens and flower-beds, and about a score of separate rooms in which the patients lived—occupied the ground floor. There were on this floor also two dark rooms—one lined with mattrasses, the other with boards, and a huge gloomy, vaulted bath-room. The upper floor was occupied by the women. A confused noise, broken by shrieks and howls, came from that quarter. The asylum was built to accommodate eighty persons; but, as it served for several provinces, up to three hundred patients were crowded into it. Four or five beds were placed in each little cell; and during the winter, when the patients were not allowed out into the garden, and all the iron-grated windows were fast shut, the air became intolerably close.

The new patient was taken into the bath-room. Even on a healthy person that room would have produced a dismal imprestion, and on his excited, over-strung imagination the impression was morbidly vivid. It was a great, vaulted room, with a clammy