There are five of them in all here.  Only one is of the upper class, the rest are all artisans.  The one nearest the door—­a tall, lean workman with shining red whiskers and tear-stained eyes—­sits with his head propped on his hand, staring at the same point.  Day and night he grieves, shaking his head, sighing and smiling bitterly.  He takes a part in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions; he eats and drinks mechanically when food is offered him.  From his agonizing, throbbing cough, his thinness, and the flush on his cheeks, one may judge that he is in the first stage of consumption.  Next to him is a little, alert, very lively old man, with a pointed beard and curly black hair like a negro’s.  By day he walks up and down the ward from window to window, or sits on his bed, cross-legged like a Turk, and, ceaselessly as a bullfinch whistles, softly sings and titters.  He shows his childish gaiety and lively character at night also when he gets up to say his prayers —­that is, to beat himself on the chest with his fists, and to scratch with his fingers at the door.  This is the Jew Moiseika, an imbecile, who went crazy twenty years ago when his hat factory was burnt down.

And of all the inhabitants of Ward No. 6, he is the only one who is allowed to go out of the lodge, and even out of the yard into the street.  He has enjoyed this privilege for years, probably because he is an old inhabitant of the hospital—­a quiet, harmless imbecile, the buffoon of the town, where people are used to seeing him surrounded by boys and dogs.  In his wretched gown, in his absurd night-cap, and in slippers, sometimes with bare legs and even without trousers, he walks about the streets, stopping at the gates and little shops, and begging for a copper.  In one place they will give him some kvass, in another some bread, in another a copper, so that he generally goes back to the ward feeling rich and well fed.  Everything that he brings back Nikita takes from him for his own benefit.  The soldier does this roughly, angrily turning the Jew’s pockets inside out, and calling God to witness that he will not let him go into the street again, and that breach of the regulations is worse to him than anything in the world.

Moiseika likes to make himself useful.  He gives his companions water, and covers them up when they are asleep; he promises each of them to bring him back a kopeck, and to make him a new cap; he feeds with a spoon his neighbour on the left, who is paralyzed.  He acts in this way, not from compassion nor from any considerations of a humane kind, but through imitation, unconsciously dominated by Gromov, his neighbour on the right hand.

Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, a man of thirty-three, who is a gentleman by birth, and has been a court usher and provincial secretary, suffers from the mania of persecution.  He either lies curled up in bed, or walks from corner to corner as though for exercise; he very rarely sits down.  He is always excited, agitated, and overwrought by a sort of vague, undefined expectation.  The faintest rustle in the entry or shout in the yard is enough to make him raise his head and begin listening:  whether they are coming for him, whether they are looking for him.  And at such times his face expresses the utmost uneasiness and repulsion.