ur practice?"

"Perhaps." He nodded to me. "Strange to find you here...." he said. "We
shall meet again. Good-night."

He closed the door behind me.

XIV

Next day I fell ill. I had felt unwell for several weeks, and now I woke
up to a bad feverish cold, my body one vast ache, and at the same time
impersonal, away from me, floating over above me, sinking under me, tied
to me only by pain....

I was too utterly apathetic to care. The old woman who looked after my
rooms telephoned to my doctor, a stout, red-faced jolly man, who came
and laughed at me, ordered me some medicine, said that I was in a high
fever, and left me. After that, I was, for several days, caught into a
world of dreams and nightmares. No one, I think, came near me, save my
old woman, Marfa, and a new acquaintance of mine, the Rat.

The Rat I had met some weeks before outside my house. I had been
returning one evening, through the dark, with a heavy bag of books which
I had fetched from an English friend of mine who lodged in the
Millionnaya. I had had a cab for most of the distance, but that had
stopped on the other side of the bridge--it could not drive amongst the
rubbish pebbles and spars of my island. As I staggered along with my bag
a figure had risen, as it seemed to me, out of the ground and asked
huskily whether he could help me. I had only a few steps to go, but he
seized my burden and went in front of me. I submitted. I told him my
door and he entered the dark passage, climbed the rickety stairs and
entered my room. Here we were both astonished. He, when I had lighted my
lamp, was staggered by the splendour and luxury of my life, I, as I
looked at him, by the wildness and uncouthness of his appearance. He was
as a savage from the centre of Africa, thick ragged hair and beard, a
powerful body in rags, and his whole attitude to the world primeval and
utterly primitive. His mouth was cruel; his eyes, as almost always with
the Russian peasant, mild and kindly. I do not intend to take up much
space here with an account of him, but he did, after this first meeting,
in some sort attach himself to me. I never learned his name nor where he
lived; he was I should suppose an absolutely abominable plunderer and
pirate and ruffian. He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by the
door and talk--but talk with the ignorance, naivete, brutal simplicity
of an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about the
Rat. He did not disguise