214
PARTISAN REVIEW
appears later, very different from the ini tial one, plaintive, awash in self–
pity.
I was the district doctor and did my duty to the uttermost, to the
point where it became almost too much. I was badly paid and yet gen–
erous and helpful to the poor. ...What was I doing there in that
endless winter! My horse was dead, and not a single person in the vil–
lage would lend me another. I had to get my team out of the pigsty;
if they hadn't chanced to be horses I should have had to travel with
swine...
.I
had once more been called out needlessly, I was used to
that, the whole district made my life a torment with my night bell,
but that I should have to sacrifice Rose this time as well. ..was too
much to ask....
In contrast to the defense brief in the beginning of the story, this
monologue indicates, not an attempt to persuade, but an effort to arouse
pity. Perhaps it is a monologue beyond despair, since the speaker has at the
beginning expressed his desire to die (as soon as Rose is safe), and in the
end he sums up his visit to the patient-and his whole life-as an irrepara–
ble failure.
Yet the opening of the story is, at least superficially, a solid, irre–
proachable defense.
It
is a dramatic defense: it is written almost as one long
sentence, a multi-claused sentence whose parts are defined mainly by semi–
colons. The doctor's testimony is given in the present tense, like a live
broadcast ("at the moment she went to him and here, yes, the groom grabs
her and knocks his face against hers. The girl lets out a shriek and flees
toward me"). There are several such mid-sentence transitions from past to
present tense.
The doctor, who kicks the door open wi th his foot, delivers, to his
astonishment, a groom and a pair of horses from the abandoned pigsty. Like
the appearance of the nose from the roll in Gogol's story, the appearance
of the groom and the horses in "A Country Doctor" is described almost
as a birth: the groom crawled out "on all fours." And the horses "one after
the other, their legs tucked close to their bodies...by sheer strength of but–
tocking squeezed out through the...hole which they filled entirely... their
bodies steaming thickly." Biting Rose's cheek is the groom's first act, for
which the doctor-narrator calls him a "brute." The groom's lust and his
assault on the girl are indeed bestial. The doctor could hear the "door of
my house splitting and bursting as the groom charged at it." At the same
time, the groom fills the familiar role of the devil in a folk tale, proposing
and delivering an unnatural deal, leaping from nowhere, offering to grant
