n all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating,
and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey
Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to
be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle,
thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast
and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and
all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible
unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black
shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day by day for
years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years
he had not known it and had refused to know it? He knew nothing of
pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his
conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Nikita, made him turn
cold from the crown of his head to his heels. He leaped up, tried
to cry out with all his might, and to run in haste to kill Nikita,
and then Hobotov, the superintendent and the assistant, and then
himself; but no sound came from his chest, and his legs would not
obey him. Gasping for breath, he tore at the dressing-gown and the
shirt on his breast, rent them, and fell senseless on the bed.

XIX

Next morning his head ached, there was a droning in his ears and a
feeling of utter weakness all over. He was not ashamed at recalling
his weakness the day before. He had been cowardly, had even been
afraid of the moon, had openly expressed thoughts and feelings such
as he had not expected in himself before; for instance, the thought
that the paltry people who philosophized were really dissatisfied.
But now nothing mattered to him.

He ate nothing; he drank nothing. He lay motionless and silent.

"It is all the same to me," he thought when they asked him questions.
"I am not going to answer. . . . It's all the same to me."

After dinner Mihail Averyanitch brought him a quarter pound of tea
and a pound of fruit pastilles. Daryushka came too and stood for a
whole hour by the bed with an expression of dull grief on her face.
Dr. Hobotov visited him. He brought a bottle of bromide and told
Nikita to fumigate the ward with something.

Towards evening Andrey Yefimitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At
first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness;
something revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole
body, even to his finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his