He drank his glass almost in one gulp and poured more; in general he began to behave with a hitherto unusual casualness.

“See, Nadenka and Sashenka, dear little children—hee, hee, hee!”

He was beside himself with spite. There came another loud clap of thunder; lightning flashed blindingly, and the rain poured down in buckets. Pavel Pavlovich got up and closed the open window.

“And him asking you: ‘You’re not afraid of thunder?’—hee, hee! Velchaninov afraid of thunder! Kobylnikov has a—how is it—Kobylnikov has… And about being fifty years old—eh? Remember, sir?” Pavel Pavlovich went on sarcastically.

“You, incidentally, have settled in nicely here,” Velchaninov observed, barely able to utter the words from pain. “I’ll lie down… you do as you like.”

“One wouldn’t put a dog out in such weather!” Pavel Pavlovich picked up touchily, though almost glad that he had the right to be touchy.

“Well, so sit, drink… spend the night even!” Velchaninov mumbled, stretched out on the sofa, and groaned slightly.

“Spend the night, sir? Aren’t you… afraid, sir?”

“Of what?” Velchaninov suddenly raised his head.

“Never mind, sir, just so. Last time you were as if afraid, or else I only imagined it…”

“You’re stupid!” Velchaninov burst out and turned angrily to the wall.

“Never mind, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich responded.

The sick man somehow suddenly fell asleep, a moment after lying down. All the unnatural tension of this day, not to mention the great disorder of his health recently, somehow suddenly snapped, and he became as strengthless as a child. But the pain got its own back and overcame weariness and sleep; an hour later he awoke and with suffering got up from the sofa. The thunderstorm had abated; the room was filled with smoke, the bottle stood empty, and Pavel Pavlovich was sleeping on the other sofa. He was lying on his back, his head on a sofa pillow, fully dressed, with his boots on. His lorgnette, having slipped from his pocket, hung on its string almost to the floor. His hat lay near him, also on the floor. Velchaninov looked at him sullenly and decided not to wake him up. Bending over and pacing the room, because he was no longer able to lie down, he moaned and reflected on his pain.

He feared this pain in his chest not without reason. He had begun having these attacks long ago, but they visited him very rarely—once in a year or two. He knew it was from his liver. It began as if with a still dull, not strong, but bothersome pressure gathering at some point in his chest, in the pit of his stomach or higher up. Growing constantly, sometimes over the course of ten hours, the pain would finally reach such intensity, the pressure would become so unbearable, that the sick man would begin imagining death. During the last attack, which had come a year before, when the pain finally subsided after the tenth hour, he suddenly felt so strengthless that he could barely move his hand as he lay in bed, and for the whole day the doctor allowed him only a few teaspoons of weak tea and a little pinch of bread soaked in bouillon, like a nursing infant. This pain appeared on different occasions, but always with upset nerves to begin with. It would also pass strangely: sometimes, when caught at the very beginning, in the first half hour, everything would go away at once with simple poultices; but sometimes, as during the last attack, nothing would help, and the pain would subside only after a repeated and progressive taking of emetics. The doctor confessed afterward that he had been convinced it was poisoning. Now it was still a long time till morning, he did not want to send for a doctor during the night, and besides he did not like doctors. Finally, he could not help himself and started moaning loudly. The moans awakened Pavel Pavlovich: he sat up on the sofa and listened with fear for some time, his perplexed eyes following Velchaninov, who was nearly running all around the two rooms. The bottle he had drunk also affected him strongly, not in the usual way, and for a long time he could not collect himself; finally he understood and rushed to Velchaninov; the latter mumbled something in response.

“It’s from your liver, sir, I know this!” Pavel Pavlovich suddenly became terribly animated. “Pyotr Kuzmich had it, Polosukhin, he had it in exactly the same way, from the liver, sir. It’s a case for poultices, sir. Pyotr Kuzmich always used poultices… You can die of it, sir! I’ll run and fetch Mavra—eh?”

“No need, no need,” Velchaninov waved him away vexedly, “no need for anything.”

But Pavel Pavlovich, God knows why, was almost beside himself, as if it were a matter of saving his own son. He would not listen, he insisted as hard as he could on the necessity for poultices and, on top of that, two or three cups of weak tea, drunk all at once—“not simply hot, sir, but boiling hot!” He did run to Mavra, without waiting for permission, made a fire with her in the kitchen, which had always stood empty, started the samovar; meanwhile he managed to put the sick man to bed, took his street clothes off, wrapped him in a blanket, and in no more than twenty minutes had cooked up some tea and the first poultice.

“It’s heated plates, sir, burning hot!” he said almost in ecstasy, placing the heated plate wrapped in a towel on Velchaninov’s pained chest. “There aren’t any other poultices, sir, and it would take too long to get them, and plates, I swear on my honor, sir, will even be best of all; it’s been tested on Pyotr Kuzmich, sir, with my own eyes and hands. You can die of it, sir. Drink the tea, swallow it—never mind if it burns you; life’s dearer… than foppery, sir…”

He got the half-asleep Mavra to bustle about; the plates were changed every three or four minutes. After the third plate and the second cup of boiling hot tea drunk at one gulp, Velchaninov suddenly felt relief.

“Once you’ve dislodged the pain, thank God for that, sir, it’s a good sign!” Pavel Pavlovich cried out and ran to fetch a fresh plate and fresh tea.

“Only to break the pain! If we can only turn the pain back!” he kept saying every moment.

After half an hour, the pain was quite weakened, but the patient was so worn out that, however Pavel Pavlovich begged, he would not agree to endure “one more little plate, sir.” His eyes were closing from weakness.

“Sleep, sleep,” he repeated in a weak voice.

“Right you are!” Pavel Pavlovich agreed.

“You spend the night… what time is it?”

“A quarter to two, sir.”

“Spend the night.”

“I will, I will.”

A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovich again.

“You, you,” he murmured when the man came running and bent over him, “you—are better than I! I understand everything, everything… thank you.”

“Sleep, sleep,” Pavel Pavlovich whispered, and hastened on tiptoe back to his sofa.

As he was falling asleep, the sick man could still hear Pavel Pavlovich quietly and hurriedly making his bed, taking off his clothes, and, finally, putting out the candle and, barely breathing, so as not to make any noise, stretching himself out on the sofa.

Undoubtedly Velchaninov did sleep and fell asleep very soon after the candles were put out; he clearly recalled it afterward. But all the while he slept, till the very moment he woke up, he dreamed that he was not asleep and that it was as if he was quite unable to fall asleep, despite his weakness. Finally, he dreamed he was having a sort of waking delirium and was quite unable to scatter the visions crowding around him, despite the full awareness that it was only delirium and not reality. The visions were all familiar ones; his room was as if filled with people, and the door to the front hall stood open; crowds of people poured in and thronged the stairs. At the table, moved out into the middle of the room, sat a man—exactly as the other time, in the identical dream he had had a month earlier. Just as then, this man sat with his elbow on the table and refused to speak; but now he was wearing a round hat with crape. “What? Could it have been Pavel Pavlovich then, too?” Velchaninov thought—but, peeking into the silent man’s face, he convinced himself that it was someone else entirely. “Why the crape, then?” Velchaninov puzzled. The noise, talk, and clamor of people crowding around the table were terrible. It seemed these people had still greater malice toward Velchaninov than in the other dream; they threatened him with their fists and shouted at him about something with all their might, but precisely what—he was quite unable to make out. “But this is a delirium, I know it!” the thought came to him. “I know that I couldn’t fall asleep and have now gotten up, because I couldn’t stay in bed from anguish!…” However, the shouting and the people, and their gestures, and all—were so vivid, so real, that he sometimes had doubts: “Can it really be a delirium? What do these people want from me, my God! But if it’s not a delirium, then is it possible that such a clamor has not awakened Pavel Pavlovich yet? That he’s here asleep, right here on the sofa?” Finally, something suddenly happened, again as in that other dream; everyone rushed to the stairs and got terribly jammed in the doorway, because a new crowd was pouring into the room from the stairs. These people were carrying something with them, something big and heavy; one could hear the heavy steps of the carriers resounding on the treads of the stairs and their puffing voices hurriedly calling to each other. Everyone in the room cried out: “They’re bringing it, they’re bringing it!” All eyes flashed and turned to Velchaninov; threatening and triumphant, everyone pointed to the stairs. No longer doubting in the least that it was all not delirium but the truth, he stood on tiptoe to see quickly, over people’s heads, what it was that they were bringing. His heart was pounding, pounding, pounding, and suddenly—exactly as then, in that other dream—there came three loud strokes of the doorbell. And once again this was so clear, so tangibly real a ringing, that, of course, such ringing could not have been merely dreamed in a dream!… He cried out and woke up.