Then I lost my temper. I took her by the neck, turned her round, and struck her with my shovel below the back, so that she skipped out of the gate and ran across the yard, crying out three times in great surprise: "О! О! О!"
After that, I got my passport from her confidant, Pauline—also a drunken but very wily woman—took my bundle under my arm, and left the place; and the General's widow, standing at the window with a red shawl in her hand, shouted:—
"I won't call the police—it's all right—listen—come back—don't be afraid."
XXIX
I ASKED him: "Do you agree with Poznyshiev[1] when he says that doctors have destroyed and are destroying thousands and hundreds of thousands of people?"
"Are you very interested to know?"
"Very."
"Then I shan't tell you."
And he smiled, playing with his thumbs.
I remember in one of his stories he makes a comparison between a quack village vet. and a doctor of medicine:—
"The words 'giltchak,' 'potchetchny,' 'blood-letting,'[2] are they not precisely the same as nerves, rheumatism, organisms, etc.?"
And this was written after Jenner, Behring, Pasteur. It is perversity!
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