The Bet, and other stories
mist, and surrounded with fine clouds which seemed to be gazing upon it
from every side, and guarding it, lest it should disappear.
In all nature one felt something hopeless and sick. Like a fallen
woman who sits alone in a dark room trying not to think of her past,
the earth languished with reminiscence of spring and summer and waited
in apathy for ineluctable winter. Wherever one’s glance turned nature
showed everywhere like a dark, cold, bottomless pit, whence neither
Kirilov nor Aboguin nor the red half-moon could escape....
The nearer the carriage approached the destination the more impatient
did Aboguin become. He moved about, jumped up and stared over the
driver’s shoulder in front of him. And when at last the carriage drew
up at the foot of the grand staircase, nicely covered with a striped
linen awning and he looked up at the lighted windows of the first floor
one could hear his breath trembling.
“If anything happens ... I shan’t survive it,” he said entering the
hall with the doctor and slowly rubbing his hands in his agitation.
“But I can’t hear any noise. That means it’s all right so far,” he
added, listening to the stillness.
No voices or steps were heard in the hall. For all the bright
illumination the whole house seemed asleep. Now the doctor and Aboguin
who had been in darkness up till now could examine each other. The
doctor was tall, with a stoop, slovenly dressed, and his face was
plain. There was something unpleasantly sharp, ungracious, and severe
in his thick negro lips, his aquiline nose and his faded, indifferent
look. His tangled hair, his sunken temples, the early grey in his long
thin beard, that showed his shining chin, his pale grey complexion
and the slipshod awkwardness of his manners--the hardness of it all
suggested to the mind bad times undergone, an unjust lot and weariness
of life and men. To look at the hard figure of the man, you could not
believe that he had a wife and could weep over his child. Aboguin
revealed something different. He was robust, solid and fair-haired,
with a big head and large, yet soft, features, exquisitely dressed in
the latest fashion. In his carriage, his tight-buttoned coat and his
mane of hair you felt something noble and leonine. He walked with his
head straight and his chest prominent, he spoke in a pleasant baritone,
and in his manner of removing his scarf or arranging his hair there
appeared a subtle, almost feminine, elegance. Even his pallor and
childish fear as he glanced upwards to the staircase while taking off
his coat, did not disturb his carriage or take from the satisfaction,
the health and aplomb which his figure breathed.
“There’s no one about, nothing I can hear,” he said walking upstairs.
“No commotion. May God be good!”
He accompanied the doctor through the hall to a large salon, where a
big piano showed dark and a lustre hung in a white cover. Thence they
both passed into a small and beautiful drawing-room, very cosy, filled
with a pleasant, rosy half-darkness.
“Please sit here a moment, Doctor,” said Aboguin, “I ... I won’t be a
second. I’ll just have a look and tell them.”
Kirilov was left alone. The luxury of the drawing-room, the pleasant
half-darkness, even his presence in a stranger’s unfamiliar house
evidently did not move him. He sat in a chair looking at his hands
burnt with carbolic acid. He had no more than a glimpse of the bright
red lampshade, the cello case, and when he looked sideways across the
room to where the clock was ticking, he noticed a stuffed wolf, as solid
and satisfied as Aboguin himself.
It was still.... Somewhere far away in the other rooms someone uttered
a loud “Ah!” A glass door, probably a cupboard door, rang, and again
everything was still. After five minutes had passed, Kirilov did not
look at his hands any more. He raised his eyes to the door through
which Aboguin had disappeared.
Aboguin was standing on the threshold, but not the same man as went
out. The expression of satisfaction and subtle elegance had disappeared
from him. His face and hands, the attitude of his body were distorted
with a disgusting expression either of horror or of tormenting physical
pain. His nose, lips, moustache, all his features were moving and as it
were trying to tear themselves away from his face, but the eyes were as
though laughing from pain.
Aboguin took a long heavy step into the middle of the room, stooped,
moaned, and shook his fists.
“Deceived!” he cried, emphasising the syllable _cei._ “She deceived me!
She’s gone! She fell ill and sent me for the doctor only to run away
with this fool Papchinsky. My God!” Aboguin stepped heavily towards
the doctor, thrust his white soft fists before his face, and went on
wailing, shaking his fists the while.
“She’s gone off! She’s deceived me! But why this lie? My God, my God!
Why this dirty, foul trick, this devilish, serpent’s game? What have I
done to her? She’s gone off.” Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on
his heel and began to pace the drawing-room. Now in his short jacket
and his fashionable narrow trousers in which his legs seemed too thin
for his body, he was extraordinarily like a lion. Curiosity kindled in
the doctor’s impassive face. He rose and eyed Aboguin.
“Well, where’s the patient?”
“The patient, the patient,” cried Aboguin, laughing, weeping, and still
shaking his fists. “She’s not ill, but accursed. Vile--dastardly. The
Devil himself couldn’t have planned a fouler trick. She sent me so that
she could run away with a fool, an utter clown, an Alphonse! My God,
far better she should have died. I’ll not bear it. I shall not bear it.”
The doctor stood up straight. His eyes began to blink, filled with
tears; his thin beard began to move with his jaw right and left.
“What’s this?” he asked, looking curiously about. “My child’s dead.
My wife in anguish, alone in all the house.... I can hardly stand on
my feet, I haven’t slept for three nights ... and I’m made to play in
a vulgar comedy, to play the part of a stage property! I don’t ... I
don’t understand it!”
Aboguin opened one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor and trod on
it, as upon an insect he wished to crush.
“And I didn’t see ... didn’t understand,” he said through his set
teeth, brandishing one fist round his head, with an expression as
though someone had trod on a corn. “I didn’t notice how he came to see
us every day. I didn’t notice that he came in a carriage to-day! What
was the carriage for? And I didn’t see! Innocent!”
“I don’t ... I don’t understand,” the doctor murmured. “What’s it all
mean? It’s jeering at a man, laughing at a man’s suffering! That’s
impossible.... I’ve never seen it in my life before!”
With the dull bewilderment of a man who has just begun to understand
that someone has bitterly offended him, the doctor shrugged his
shoulders, waved his hands and not knowing what to say or do, dropped
exhausted into a chair.
“Well, she didn’t love me any more. She loved another man. Very well.
But why the deceit, why this foul treachery?” Aboguin spoke with tears
in his voice. “Why, why? What have I done to you? Listen, doctor,” he
said passionately approaching Kirilov. “You were the unwilling witness
of my misfortune, and I am not going to hide the truth from you. I
swear I loved this woman. I loved her with devotion, like a slave. I
sacrificed everything for her. I broke with my family, I gave up the
service and my music. I forgave her things I could not have forgiven
my mother and sister.... I never once gave her an angry look ... I
never gave her any cause. Why this lie then? I do not demand love, but
why this abominable deceit? If you don’t love any more then speak out
honestly, above all when you know what I feel about this matter....”
With tears in his eyes and trembling in all his bones, Aboguin was
pouring out his soul to the doctor. He spoke passionately, pressing
both hands to his heart. He revealed all the family secrets without
hesitation, as though he were glad that these secrets were being torn
from his heart. Had he spoken thus for an hour or two and poured out
all his soul, he would surely have been easier.
Who can say whether, had the doctor listened and given him friendly
sympathy, he would not, as so often happens, have been reconciled to
his grief unprotesting, without turning to unprofitable follies? But
it happened otherwise. While Aboguin was speaking the offended doctor
changed countenance visibly. The indifference and amazement in his face
gradually gave way to an expression of bitter outrage, indignation, and
anger. His features became still sharper, harder, and more forbidding.
When Aboguin put before his eyes the photograph of his young wife,
with a pretty, but dry, inexpressive face like a nun’s, and asked if
it were possible to look at that face and grant that it could express
a lie, the doctor suddenly started away, with flashing eyes, and said,
coarsely forging out each several word:
“Why do you tell me all this? I do not want to hear! I don’t want
to,” he cried and banged his fist upon the table. “I don’t want your
trivial vulgar secrets--to Hell with them. You dare not tell me such
trivialities. Or do you think I have not yet been insulted enough! That
I’m a lackey to whom you can give the last insult? Yes?”
Aboguin drew back from Kirilov and stared at him in surprise.
“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, shaking his beard.
“You marry out of high spirits, get angry out of high spirits, and
make a melodrama--but where do I come in? What have I got to do with
your romances? Leave me alone! Get on with your noble grabbing,
parade your humane ideas, play--” the doctor gave a side-glance at the
cello-case--“the double-bass and the trombone, stuff yourselves like
capons, but don’t dare to jeer at a real man! If you can’t respect him,
then you can at least spare him your attentions.”
“What does all this mean?” Aboguin asked, blushing.
“It means that it’s vile and foul to play with a man! I’m a doctor.
You consider doctors and all men who work and don’t reek of scent and
harlotry, your footmen, your _mauvais tons._ Very well, but no one gave
you the right to turn a man who suffers into a property.”
“How dare you say that?” Aboguin asked quietly. Again his face began to
twist about, this time in visible anger.
“How dare _you_ bring me here to listen to trivial rubbish, when you
know that I’m in sorrow?” the doctor cried and banged his fists on the
table once more. “Who gave you the right to jeer at another’s grief?”
“You’re mad,” cried Aboguin. “You’re ungenerous. I too am deeply
unhappy and ... and ...”
“Unhappy”--the doctor gave a sneering laugh--“Don’t touch the word,
it’s got nothing to do with you. Wasters who can’t get money on a bill
call themselves unhappy too. A capon’s unhappy, oppressed with all its
superfluous fat. You worthless lot!”
“Sir, you’re forgetting yourself,” Aboguin gave a piercing scream. “For
words like those, people are beaten. Do you understand?”
Aboguin thrust his hand into his side pocket, took out a pocket-book,
found two notes and flung them on the table.
“There’s your fee,” he said, and his nostrils trembled. “You’re paid.”
“You dare not offer me money,” said the doctor, and brushed the notes
from the table to the floor. “You don’t settle an insult with money.”
Aboguin and the doctor stood face to face, heaping each other with
undeserved insults. Never in their lives, even in a frenzy, had
they said so much that was unjust and cruel and absurd. In both the
selfishness of the unhappy is violently manifest. Unhappy men are
selfish, wicked, unjust, and less able to understand each other than
fools. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them; and just