Short Stories by Chekhov
voice as though there were a corpse in the room. "You will take him for
the entrance examination on the seventh of August. . . . Well, good-bye;
God bless you, good-bye, Yegor!"
"You might at least have had a cup of tea," wailed Nastasya Petrovna.
Through the tears that filled his eyes Yegorushka could not see his
uncle and Father Christopher go out. He rushed to the window, but they
were not in the yard, and the red dog, who had just been barking, was
running back from the gate with the air of having done his duty. When
Yegorushka ran out of the gate Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher, the
former waving his stick with the crook, the latter his staff, were just
turning the corner. Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he
had known till then had vanished from him for ever. He sank helplessly
on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown
life that was beginning for him now. . . .
What would that life be like?
The Duel and Other Stories
THE DUEL I
It was eight o'clock in the morning--the time when the officers, the
local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the
sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to
drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of
twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and
with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of
acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the
army doctor.
With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his
shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his
hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the
unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after
making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily
good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and
rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and
goodness of heart, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms
with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one,
made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked
shashlik and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking
after other people's affairs and trying to interest some one on their
behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion
about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two
weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise
it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his
assistants and his soldiers to call him "Your Excellency," although he
was only a civil councillor.
"Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch," Laevsky began, when
both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. "Suppose
you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three
years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel
that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that
case?"
"It's very simple. 'You go where you please, madam'--and that would be
the end of it."
"It's easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no
friends or relations, without a farthing, who can't work . . ."
"Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five roubles
a month--and nothing more. It's very simple."
"Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five
roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and
proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would
you do it?"
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered
them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the
shingle. The friends got out and began dressing.
"Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don't love her,"
said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. "But one must look
at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a
sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I
died."
He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said:
"But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go
to the devil!"
The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was
quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they
brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water,
and a tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the
hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for
after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke
his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:
"A wonderfully magnificent view!"
After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which
prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and
sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no
better for the bathe and the coffee.
"Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch," he said. "I won't make
a secret of it; I'll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a
bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way! Forgive
me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out."
Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.
"I've lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her," Laevsky
went on; "or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her.
. . . These two years have been a mistake."
It was Laevsky's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink
palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did
so now.
"I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because
unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in
talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look
for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody
else's theories, in literary types--in the idea that we, upper-class
Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for
example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true
Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really,
brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!"
Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every
day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:
"Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight
from nature."
"My God!" sighed Laevsky; "how distorted we all are by civilisation! I
fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with,
we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and
interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her
husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the
emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like
this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the
people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter
the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground,
would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field,
and so on. If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von
Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years,
perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand
acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the
town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you go out
into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes
lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the
fields--mountains and the desert. Alien people, an alien country, a
wretched form of civilisation--all that is not so easy, brother, as
walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur coat, arm-in-arm with
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is needed here
is a life and death struggle, and I'm not a fighting man. A wretched
neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . . From the first day I knew that
my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for
love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer
and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting
than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of
ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every
morning, the same self-deception."
"You can't get on in the house without an iron," said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky's speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew. "You
are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a
splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest
intellect. Of course, you are not married," Samoylenko went on, glancing
round at the adjacent tables, "but that's not your fault; and besides .
. . one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level
of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes. . . . But to my
thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living
together all your life."
"Without love?"
"I will tell you directly," said Samoylenko. "Eight years ago there was
an old fellow, an agent, here--a man of very great intelligence. Well, he
used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you
hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have
lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached
the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you
ought to exercise all your patience. . . ."
"You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your
old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of
patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an
object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen
so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells
or a frisky horse, but I'll leave human beings alone."
Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a
glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:
"Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?"
"How can I explain it to you? . . . It's a disease in which the brain
becomes softer . . . as it were, dissolves."
"Is it curable?"
"Yes, if the disease is not neglected. Cold douches, blisters. . . .
Something internal, too."
"Oh! . . . Well, you see my position; I can't live with her: it is more
than I can do. While I'm with you I can be philosophical about it and
smile, but at home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable,
that if I were told, for instance, that I should have to live another
month with her, I should blow out my brains. At the same time, parting
with her is out of the question. She has no friends or relations; she
cannot work, and neither she nor I have any money. . . . What could
become of her? To whom could she go? There is nothing one can think of.
. . . Come, tell me, what am I to do?"
"H'm! . . ." growled Samoylenko, not knowing what to answer. "Does she
love you?"
"Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she
wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do
without her powder or her curl-papers. I am for her an indispensable,
integral part of her boudoir."
Samoylenko was embarrassed.
"You are out of humour to-day, Vanya," he said. "You must have had a bad
night."
"Yes, I slept badly. . . . Altogether, I feel horribly out of sorts,