VI
Of course in other cases of this sort Kirsánof would not have thought of running such a risk; it would be more simple to take the girl from home, and let her marry whomsoever she pleased. But here the affair was complicated by the girl’s ideas, and the peculiarities of the man whom she loved. With her ideas of the inseparability of husband and wife, she would have clung to the wretched man even if she had found that to live with him was a torment. To unite them would be worse than to kill. Therefore there remained one choice, either to kill, or to give her the possibility of coming to reason.
On the next day the consultation was held, composed of some of the practitioners in the high world. There are five doctors, the most renowned; it is impossible not to have the best; how otherwise could they bend Pólozof? It was necessary that the sentence should be without appeal in his eyes. Kirsánof spoke; they listened with great condescension to what he said, and they all confirmed it with an air of great importance. It could not be otherwise, because, you remember, there is in existence a certain Claude Bernard, and he lives in Paris; and besides that, Kirsánof says such things which—but the plague take these boys! You can’t understand them! Then how can you help agreeing with them?
Kirsánof said that he had examined the invalid very carefully, and he entirely agreed with Karl Feodorvitch that the illness is incurable, and the agony of this disease is torture; and, generally speaking, every additional hour that the sick girl shall live is an additional hour of suffering. Therefore he considers that it is the duty of the consulting physicians to decide according to the dictates of humanity to shorten the sick girl’s sufferings by a dose of morphine, from which she would not awaken. The consulting physicians investigated the case, blinking their eyes under the hailstones of incomprehensible explanations on the part of Kirsánof; they came back from the sick girl’s room to the one where they had been sitting; and they decided to shorten the sick girl’s sufferings by a fatal dose of morphine.
After the decision was made, Kirsánof rang for the servant, and asked him to call Pólozof into the parlor, where the consultation was held. Pólozof came in. The most important of the sages, in appropriately gloomily solemn language and in a majestically funereal voice, announced the decision of the consulting physicians.
Pólozof started back as though struck on the forehead by a hammer. To be waiting for death, when death is at hand, but uncertain how soon it may come, or whether it may come at all, and to hear that in half an hour she will not be among the living, are two absolutely different things. Kirsánof looked at Pólozof with an intense gaze; he was absolutely sure of the effect, but still the thing was a strain on his nerves. Two minutes the old man stood silent, horror-stricken.
“No; it must not be! She is dying from my stubbornness. I am ready for anything. Can she get well?”
“Of course,” said Kirsánof.
The famous practitioners would have been greatly stirred to wrath, if they had had time for it; that is, to exchange glances, and to see that “my colleagues also like me understand that I have been a doll in the hands of this young boy.” But Kirsánof allowed them no time to turn their attention to the thought, “how others looked on me.” Kirsánof told the servant to conduct the frightened Pólozof from the room; thanked them for their shrewdness, which they had displayed in fathoming his intentions, for their understanding that the cause of the illness was mental suffering; that it was necessary to frighten the stubborn old man, who would otherwise have lost his daughter. The famous practitioners went each his way, satisfied that his scientific knowledge and shrewdness was recognized by all the others.
But having given them this brief testimony of their skill, Kirsánof went to tell the sick girl that the plan had succeeded. At the first words she seized his hand, and he had hardly time to take it away from her before she would have kissed it. “But I shall not let your father come quite yet, to tell you the same thing,” he said. “I shall first give him a lecture as to the way that he should behave himself towards you.” He told her that he was going to give her father some good advice, and that he should not leave him until he had firmly implanted it.
Shocked by the result of the consultation, the old man became very pliable; and he regarded Kirsánof, not with the same eyes as the day before, but with such as Marya Alekséyevna looked upon Lopukhóf, after dreaming of Lopukhóf as a monopolist.
Yesterday a natural thought was always in Pólozof’s mind, “I am older than you, and more experienced. Yes, there is no one in the world smarter than I am; and as for you, milk-sucker and bubby, so much the less reason have I to listen to you, since I, with my own reason, have made four millions” (although in reality they were only two, and not four). “You try to make two millions, and then talk.” But now he thought, “What a bear he is! how he routed me! He knows how to break one in.” And the more he spoke with Kirsánof, the more lively arose before him, in addition to the quality of “bear,” another picture—an old and forgotten recollection of his life as a hussar: his riding-master, Zakhártchenko, was sitting on his horse, “Gromoboï” (at that time Zhukóvsky’s ballads were fashionable among young ladies, and therefore to a certain extent among young cavaliers, both in the army and civil life), and “Gromoboï” was prancing under Zakhártchenko, only “Gromoboï’s” lips were covered with blood. Pólozof was somewhat horrified, as he heard Kirsánof’s answer to his first question.
“Would you really have given her a fatal dose?”
“Certainly I should,” replied Kirsánof, with absolute sangfroid.
“What a murderer! He talks like a cook about a dead chicken! And you would have courage for it?”
“Of course I should. What a clout I should be if I hadn’t!”
“You are a terrible man!” said Pólozof again.
“It shows that you have never seen any terrible men,” said Kirsánof, with an indulgent smile, thinking to himself, “I should like to show you Rakhmétof.”
“But how did you manage all those doctors?”
“As though it were hard to manage such men!” said Kirsánof, with a slight grimace.
Pólozof recollected Zakhártchenko, who said to the second-captain, Volutnof: “Did you bring me this lop-eared beast for me to ride on, your eminence? I am ashamed to mount him.”
After settling all of Pólozof’s endlessly repeated questions, Kirsánof began to suggest to him how he should comport himself.
“Remember that a person is able to reason only when he is entirely undisturbed; that he is not excited only when he is not stirred up; that he does not value his fancies except when they are taken from him, when he is allowed to find out for himself whether they are good or not. If Sólovtsof is as bad as you describe him—and I fully believe it—your daughter will see it herself. But only if you don’t interfere; if you don’t excite the thought in her mind that you are in any way intriguing against him, that you are trying to block them. One word on your part, one hostile word, will injure the case for two weeks; a few words may ruin it forever. You must keep yourself entirely apart.”
This course of conduct was inculcated with words like these: “It isn’t easy to compel you to do what you don’t like, is it? and yet I have brought you to it. This shows that I understand how to take charge of a case. Then believe that whatever I say must be done. Whatever I say; you only take it secondhand.”
With such people as Pólozof it was impossible at that time, otherwise than by force, and by stepping on his throat. Pólozof became more amenable to reason, and he promised to comport himself as he was told. But even after he became convinced that Kirsánof was saying the right thing, and that it was necessary to listen to him, Pólozof could not yet comprehend what kind of a man he was. He at one and the same time took both his side and his daughter’s. He compels him to yield to his daughter, and he wants his daughter to change; how to reconcile this?
“Very simply. I want you not to hinder her return to reason, and that is all.”
Pólozof wrote Sólovtsof a note, in which he asked him to come to see him about a very important matter. That same evening Sólovtsof came; he made the old man a gentle explanation, full of self-respect; he was acknowledged as “bridegroom,” on condition that the wedding should be in three months.