it is the truth; everyone about you has been noticing it for a long time.  Dr. Yevgeny Fyodoritch has just told me that it is essential for you to rest and distract your mind for the sake of your health.  Perfectly true!  Excellent!  In a day or two I am taking a holiday and am going away for a sniff of a different atmosphere.  Show that you are a friend to me, let us go together!  Let us go for a jaunt as in the good old days.”

“I feel perfectly well,” said Andrey Yefimitch after a moment’s thought.  “I can’t go away.  Allow me to show you my friendship in some other way.”

To go off with no object, without his books, without his Daryushka, without his beer, to break abruptly through the routine of life, established for twenty years—­the idea for the first minute struck him as wild and fantastic, but he remembered the conversation at the Zemstvo committee and the depressing feelings with which he had returned home, and the thought of a brief absence from the town in which stupid people looked on him as a madman was pleasant to him.

“And where precisely do you intend to go?” he asked.

“To Moscow, to Petersburg, to Warsaw. . . .  I spent the five happiest years of my life in Warsaw.  What a marvellous town!  Let us go, my dear fellow!”

XIII

A week later it was suggested to Andrey Yefimitch that he should have a rest—­that is, send in his resignation—­a suggestion he received with indifference, and a week later still, Mihail Averyanitch and he were sitting in a posting carriage driving to the nearest railway station.  The days were cool and bright, with a blue sky and a transparent distance.  They were two days driving the hundred and fifty miles to the railway station, and stayed two nights on the way.  When at the posting station the glasses given them for their tea had not been properly washed, or the drivers were slow in harnessing the horses, Mihail Averyanitch would turn crimson, and quivering all over would shout: 

“Hold your tongue!  Don’t argue!”

And in the carriage he talked without ceasing for a moment, describing his campaigns in the Caucasus and in Poland.  What adventures he had had, what meetings!  He talked loudly and opened his eyes so wide with wonder that he might well be thought to be lying.  Moreover, as he talked he breathed in Andrey Yefimitch’s face and laughed into his ear.  This bothered the doctor and prevented him from thinking or concentrating his mind.

In the train they travelled, from motives of economy, third-class in a non-smoking compartment.  Half the passengers were decent people.  Mihail Averyanitch soon made friends with everyone, and moving from one seat to another, kept saying loudly that they ought not to travel by these appalling lines.  It was a regular swindle!  A very different thing riding on a good horse:  one could do over seventy miles a day and feel fresh and well after it.  And our bad harvests were due to the draining of the Pinsk marshes; altogether, the way things were done was dreadful.  He got excited, talked loudly, and would not let others speak.  This endless chatter to the accompaniment of loud laughter and expressive gestures wearied Andrey Yefimitch.