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begged the doctor to go and examine him. “Do this for my sake,” the
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to him.
“I will do it for the sake of Russia, countess,” replied the doctor.
“A priceless man!” said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexey Alexandrovitch.
He found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive powers
weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been quite without
effect. He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and as
far as possible less mental strain, and above all no worry—in other
words, just what was as much out of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s power as
abstaining from breathing. Then he withdrew, leaving in Alexey
Alexandrovitch an unpleasant sense that something was wrong with
him, and that there was no chance of curing it.
As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the stair-
case an acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was secretary of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s department. They had been comrades at the univer-
sity, and though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and
were excellent friends, and so there was no one to whom the doctor
would have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.
“How glad I am you’ve been seeing him!” said Sludin. “He’s not
well, and I fancy.... Well, what do you think of him?”
“I’ll tell you,” said the doctor, beckoning over Sludin’s head to his
coachman to bring the carriage round. “It’s just this,” said the doctor,
taking a finger of his kid glove in his white hands and pulling it, “if you
don’t strain the strings, and then try to break them, you’ll find it a
difficult job; but strain a string to its very utmost, and the mere weight
of one finger on the strained string will snap it. And with his close
assiduity, his conscientious devotion to his work, he’s strained to the
utmost; and there’s some outside burden weighing on him, and not a
light one,” concluded the doctor, raising his eyebrows significantly. “Will
you be at the races?” he added, as he sank into his seat in the carriage.
“Yes, yes, to be sure; it does waste a lot of time,” the doctor re-
sponded vaguely to some reply of Sludin’s he had not caught.
Directly after the doctor, who had taken up so much time, came the
celebrated traveler, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, by means of the pam-
phlet he had only just finished reading and his previous acquaintance
with the subject, impressed the traveler by the depth of his knowledge
of the subject and the breadth and enlightenment of his view of it.
At the same time as the traveler there was announced a provincial
marshal of nobility on a visit to Petersburg, with whom Alexey
Alexandrovitch had to have some conversation. After his departure,
he had to finish the daily routine of business with his secretary, and
then he still had to drive round to call on a certain great personage on
a matter of grave and serious import. Alexey Alexandrovitch only just
managed to be back by five o’clock, his dinner-hour, and after dining
with his secretary, he invited him to drive with him to his country villa
and to the races.
Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexey
Alexandrovitch always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a
third person in his interviews with his wife.