III. Медицинская экспертиза и один фунт орехов

And Fetyukovich himself, it seems, had not counted on it for much — as in fact proved to be the case afterward.

At bottom it had come about solely at the insistence of Katerina Ivanovna, who had deliberately summoned a celebrated doctor from Moscow.

The defense, of course, could lose nothing through it, and in the best case might even gain something.

As it turned out, however, something almost comic came of it, owing precisely to a certain disagreement among the doctors.

The experts who appeared were these: the celebrated doctor who had come from Moscow, then our own Doctor Herzenstube, and finally the young physician Varvinsky.

The last two also figured simply as witnesses, called by the prosecutor.

The first to be questioned in the capacity of expert was Doctor Herzenstube.

He was an old man of seventy, gray-haired and bald, of middle height and sturdy build.

Everyone in our town held him in great esteem and respect.

He was a conscientious physician, an excellent and devout man, some sort of Herrnhuter or "Moravian Brother" — I cannot say for certain.

He had lived among us a very long time already and carried himself with extraordinary dignity.

He was kind and humane, treated the poor and the peasants for nothing, went himself into their hovels and huts, and left money behind for medicine — yet for all that he was stubborn as a mule.

To knock him off an idea, once it had lodged itself in his head, was impossible.

Incidentally, almost everyone in town already knew that the visiting celebrated physician, in the two or three days of his stay among us, had permitted himself several extremely cutting remarks about Doctor Herzenstube's gifts.

The point was that, although the Moscow physician charged no less than twenty-five rubles a visit, still a few people in our town were glad of the chance his coming offered, did not begrudge the money, and rushed to him for advice.

All these patients had, of course, been treated previously by Doctor Herzenstube, and now the celebrated physician criticized his treatment everywhere with extraordinary harshness.

Toward the end he even took, on arriving at a patient's bedside, to asking outright: "Well, who has been bungling you here — Herzenstube? Heh-heh!"

Doctor Herzenstube, of course, learned of all this.

And so all three physicians appeared one after another to be questioned.

Doctor Herzenstube declared straight out that "the abnormality of the defendant's mental faculties is self-evident."

Then, having set out his reasoning, which I omit here, he added that this abnormality was to be seen, above all, not only in many of the defendant's earlier actions but even now, at this very minute; and when he was asked to explain in what it could be seen now, at this present minute, the old doctor, with all the directness of his simple heart, pointed to the fact that the defendant, on entering the courtroom, "had an extraordinary and, under the circumstances, peculiar air about him, marched forward like a soldier and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead of him, planting them there, whereas it would have been more natural for him to look to the left, where the ladies sit among the public, for he was a great admirer of the fair sex and must have been thinking a great deal about what the ladies would now say of him" — so the little old man concluded in his own idiosyncratic language.

I should add that he spoke Russian readily and at length, but somehow every phrase came out of him in the German manner — which, however, never embarrassed him, for all his life he had had the weakness of considering his own Russian speech exemplary, "better even than the Russians' own," and was even very fond of resorting to Russian proverbs, assuring everyone each time that Russian proverbs were the best and most expressive of all the proverbs in the world.

I will note further that in conversation, out of some absentmindedness or other, he often forgot the most ordinary words, which he knew perfectly well, but which for some reason would suddenly slip his mind.

The same thing happened, by the way, when he spoke German, and at such times he always waved his hand before his face, as though groping to catch the lost little word, and no one could have made him go on with the speech he had begun until he had found the missing word.

His remark, that the defendant, on entering, ought to have looked at the ladies, set off a playful murmur among the public.

All our ladies were very fond of our little old man, and they knew, too, that a lifelong bachelor, devout and chaste, he looked upon women as higher and ideal beings.

And so his unexpected remark struck everyone as terribly strange.

The Moscow doctor, questioned in his turn, confirmed sharply and insistently that he considered the defendant's mental state to be abnormal, "even in the highest degree."

He spoke at length and cleverly about "affect" and "mania," and deduced that, by all the data gathered, the defendant, for several days before his arrest, had been in an unmistakably morbid state of affect, and that if he had committed the crime, then, even while conscious of it, he had done so almost involuntarily, having no power at all to fight against the morbid moral compulsion that had seized him.

But besides affect, the doctor discerned mania as well, which already foretold, in his words, a direct road ahead to outright madness.

({{NB}}. I give it in my own words; the doctor himself expressed it in very learned and specialized language.)

"All his actions run contrary to common sense and logic," he went on. "I say nothing of what I did not see — that is, the crime itself and all this catastrophe — but even the day before yesterday, while talking with me, he had an inexplicable, fixed stare.

Unexpected laughter, when there is no occasion for it whatever.

An incomprehensible, constant irritability, strange words: 'Bernard, ethics,' and others that have no place there."

But above all the doctor discerned this mania in the fact that the defendant could not so much as speak of those three thousand rubles, over which he believed himself cheated, without some extraordinary irritation, whereas about all his other misfortunes and grievances he spoke and reminisced rather easily.

Finally, according to inquiries, he had been exactly the same before, too: every time the matter touched those three thousand, he flew into something like frenzy, and yet witnesses testified of him that he was disinterested and unacquisitive.

"As for the opinion of my learned colleague," the Moscow doctor added ironically, finishing his speech, "that the defendant, on entering the courtroom, ought to have been looking at the ladies — I will say only this: that, apart from the frivolity of such a conclusion, it is, moreover, radically mistaken; for although I fully agree that the defendant, entering the courtroom in which his fate is being decided, ought not to have stared so fixedly before him, and that this could indeed be taken as a sign of his abnormal state of mind at the given moment, still at the same time I maintain that he ought to have been looking not to the left at the ladies but, on the contrary, precisely to the right, seeking with his eyes his defense counsel, in whose help lies all his hope and on whose defense his whole fate now depends."

The doctor delivered his opinion resolutely and emphatically.

But the special comedy of the disagreement between the two learned experts was supplied by the unexpected conclusion of the physician Varvinsky, who was questioned after all the rest.

In his view, the defendant, both now and before, was in a perfectly normal condition, and although he had indeed, before his arrest, been bound to be in a nervous and extremely agitated state, this could have arisen from many of the most obvious causes: from jealousy, anger, an unbroken state of drunkenness, and so on.

But this nervous condition could not have contained within it any particular "affect" of the kind just spoken of.

As for whether the defendant ought to have been looking to the left or to the right on entering the courtroom, then, "in his humble opinion," the defendant ought, on entering the courtroom, to have looked precisely straight ahead, as in fact he did, for directly before him sat the presiding judge and the members of the court, on whom his whole fate now depends — "so that, by looking straight ahead, he proved by that very act the perfectly normal condition of his mind at the given moment" — with some heat the young physician concluded his "humble" testimony.

"Bravo, sawbones!" Mitya shouted from his place. "Just so!"

Mitya was, of course, silenced, but the young physician's opinion had the most decisive effect on both the court and the public, for, as it turned out afterward, everyone agreed with him.

And yet Doctor Herzenstube, questioned now as a witness, quite unexpectedly turned out, all at once, to serve in Mitya's favor.

As an old resident of the town, long acquainted with the Karamazov family, he gave several pieces of testimony highly interesting to the "prosecution," and then suddenly, as though something had just occurred to him, added:

"And yet the poor young man might have had an incomparably better lot, for he was of a good heart, both in childhood and after childhood — for I know it.

But a Russian proverb says: 'If a man has one mind, that is good; but if another clever man comes to visit, it will be better still, for then there will be two minds, and not just one…'"