pressure of the blood and might burst like a tight glove upon swollen
fingers.

His short, thick neck seemed terrible to him. It became unbearable for
him to look upon his short, swollen ringers-to feel how short they
were and how they were filled with the moisture of death. And if
before, when it was dark, he had had to stir in order not to resemble
a corpse, now in the bright, cold, inimical, dreadful light he was so
filled with horror that he could not move in order to get a cigarette
or to ring for some one. His nerves were giving way. Each one of them
seemed as if it were a bent wire, at the top of which there was a
small head with mad, wide-open frightened eyes and a convulsively
gaping, speechless mouth. He could not draw his breath.

Suddenly in the darkness, amidst the dust and cobwebs somewhere upon
the ceiling, an electric bell came to life. The small, metallic
tongue, agitatedly, in terror, kept striking the edge of the ringing
cap, became silent-and again quivered in an unceasing, frightened din.
His Excellency was ringing his bell in his own room.

People began to run. Here and there, in the shadows upon the walls,
lamps flared up -there were not enough of them to give light, but
there were enough to cast shadows. The shadows appeared everywhere;
they rose in the corners, they stretched across the ceiling;
tremulously clinging to each and every elevation, they covered the
walls. And it was hard to understand where all these innumerable,
deformed silent shadows- voiceless souls of voiceless objects-had been
before.

A deep, trembling voice said something loudly. Then the doctor was