A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov Page B

else, and to remove the clerk to a distant room. There I said to him:
    â€˜If you won’t allow us to inject you with a sedative, we can’t do anything. You are distracting us and preventing us from working.’
    Finally he agreed. Weeping quietly, he took off his jacket, we rolled up the sleeve of the smart new shirt he had bought specially for his engagement party and gave him a morphine injection. The other doctor returned to the dead girl on the pretext of attending to her, while I stayed with the clerk. The morphine worked sooner thanI had expected. Within a quarter of an hour his maudlin laments became more and more incoherent, he grew drowsy, then laid his tear-stained face on his arm and fell asleep, oblivious at last to the weeping, the movement, the rustling and muffled sobs around us.
    â€˜Look, my dear fellow, it’s dangerous to try and go back now. You could easily lose your way,’ the doctor whispered to me in the hallway. ‘Stay and spend the night here.’
    â€˜No, I can’t. I must go at all costs. The driver promised that I would be taken back at once.’
    â€˜They can certainly take you back, but you must realise …’
    â€˜I have three typhus patients whom I can’t leave. I have to see them every night.’
    â€˜Well, if that’s the case …’
    As we stood there in the hall he diluted some spirit with water and gave it to me to drink, which I immediately followed by eating a piece of ham. I felt a warm glow in my stomach and my sense of depression was dulled a little. I went back into the bedroom for a last look at the dead girl, glanced once more at the clerk, left the doctor a capsule of morphine, wrapped myself up and went out on to the porch.
    The horses stood hanging their heads as the storm whistled and snow lashed at their flanks. A torch flickered.
    â€˜Do you know the way?’ I enquired as I wound a muffler across my mouth.
    â€˜We know the way all right,’ the driver replied gloomily (he was no longer wearing his helmet), ‘but you ought to stop here for the night …’
    The very earflaps of his hat told me that he would almost rather die than go.
    â€˜You ought to stay, sir,’ added another man, who was holding the guttering torch. ‘It’s bad out there.’
    â€˜Eight miles …’ I grumbled. ‘We’ll make it. I have patients who are seriously ill …’ And I climbed into the sleigh.
    I confess I omitted to say that the mere thought of staying in that house of misfortune, where I was impotent and useless, was intolerable.
    Hopelessly, the coachman sat down heavily on the driver’s seat, straightened up and gave a jerk as we moved off through the gateway at a smart pace. The torch went out as though it had vanished or been doused. A minute later, though, something else caught my attention: turning round with difficulty, I noticed that not only was the torch no more to be seen but Shalometyevo itself and all its buildings had disappeared as if in a dream. This gave me an unpleasant shock.
    â€˜That’s pretty odd,’ I half-thought, half-mumbled to myself. I stuck my nose out for a moment, but the weather was so terrible that I stuck it in again. The whole world had been rolled into one bundle that was being buffeted in every direction at once.
    For a moment I wondered whether to turn back, but I rejected the idea, burrowed deeper into the hay at the bottom of the sledge as though in a boat, hunched myself up and closed my eyes. At once the scrap of green material on the lamp and a white face floated before my inner eye, immediately followed by a flash of realisation: ‘It’s a fracture of the base of the skull … Yes, of course … that’s it!’ In a burst of confidence I felt that this must be the correct diagnosis. A brainwave—but what good was it? It was as useless now as it would have been earlier; there wasnothing