The Duel and Other Stories
weep floods of tears. He would stop that cloud and put all those
forces you talk about to flight. Yes . . . faith moves mountains."
The deacon laughed and slapped the zoologist on the shoulder.
"Yes . . ." he went on; "here you are teaching all the time, fathoming
the depths of the ocean, dividing the weak and the strong, writing
books and challenging to duels--and everything remains as it is;
but, behold! some feeble old man will mutter just one word with a
holy spirit, or a new Mahomet, with a sword, will gallop from Arabia,
and everything will be topsy-turvy, and in Europe not one stone
will be left standing upon another."
"Well, deacon, that's on the knees of the gods."
"Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse
still--mere waste of time and nothing more."
The doctor came into sight on the sea-front. He saw the deacon and
the zoologist, and went up to them.
"I believe everything is ready," he said, breathing hard. "Govorovsky
and Boyko will be the seconds. They will start at five o'clock in
the morning. How it has clouded over," he said, looking at the sky.
"One can see nothing; there will be rain directly."
"I hope you are coming with us?" said the zoologist.
"No, God preserve me; I'm worried enough as it is. Ustimovitch is
going instead of me. I've spoken to him already."
Far over the sea was a flash of lightning, followed by a hollow
roll of thunder.
"How stifling it is before a storm!" said Von Koren. "I bet you've
been to Laevsky already and have been weeping on his bosom."
"Why should I go to him?" answered the doctor in confusion. "What
next?"
Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and
the street in the hope of meeting Laevsky. He was ashamed of his
hastiness and the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed
it. He wanted to apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him
a good talking to, to soothe him and to tell him that the duel was
a survival of mediæval barbarism, but that Providence itself had
brought them to the duel as a means of reconciliation; that the
next day, both being splendid and highly intelligent people, they
would, after exchanging shots, appreciate each other's noble qualities
and would become friends. But he could not come across Laevsky.
"What should I go and see him for?" repeated Samoylenko. "I did not
insult him; he insulted me. Tell me, please, why he attacked me.
What harm had I done him? I go into the drawing-room, and, all of
a sudden, without the least provocation: 'Spy!' There's a nice
thing! Tell me, how did it begin? What did you say to him?"
"I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. It is only
honest men or scoundrels who can find an escape from any position,
but one who wants to be at the same time an honest man and a scoundrel
--it is a hopeless position. But it's eleven o'clock, gentlemen,
and we have to be up early to-morrow."
There was a sudden gust of wind; it blew up the dust on the sea-front,
whirled it round in eddies, with a howl that drowned the roar of
the sea.
"A squall," said the deacon. "We must go in, our eyes are getting
full of dust."
As they went, Samoylenko sighed and, holding his hat, said:
"I suppose I shan't sleep to-night."
"Don't you agitate yourself," laughed the zoologist. "You can set
your mind at rest; the duel will end in nothing. Laevsky will
magnanimously fire into the air--he can do nothing else; and I
daresay I shall not fire at all. To be arrested and lose my time
on Laevsky's account--the game's not worth the candle. By the
way, what is the punishment for duelling?"
"Arrest, and in the case of the death of your opponent a maximum
of three years' imprisonment in the fortress."
"The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul?"
"No, in a military fortress, I believe."
"Though this fine gentleman ought to have a lesson!"
Behind them on the sea, there was a flash of lightning, which for
an instant lighted up the roofs of the houses and the mountains.
The friends parted near the boulevard. When the doctor disappeared
in the darkness and his steps had died away, Von Koren shouted to
him:
"I only hope the weather won't interfere with us to-morrow!"
"Very likely it will! Please God it may!"
"Good-night!"
"What about the night? What do you say?"
In the roar of the wind and the sea and the crashes of thunder, it
was difficult to hear.
"It's nothing," shouted the zoologist, and hurried home.
XVII
"Upon my mind, weighed down with woe,
Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds
Her long, long scroll before my eyes.
Loathing and shuddering I curse
And bitterly lament in vain,
And bitter though the tears I weep
I do not wash those lines away."
PUSHKIN.
Whether they killed him next morning, or mocked at him--that is,
left him his life--he was ruined, anyway. Whether this disgraced
woman killed herself in her shame and despair, or dragged on her
pitiful existence, she was ruined anyway.
So thought Laevsky as he sat at the table late in the evening, still
rubbing his hands. The windows suddenly blew open with a bang; a
violent gust of wind burst into the room, and the papers fluttered
from the table. Laevsky closed the windows and bent down to pick
up the papers. He was aware of something new in his body, a sort
of awkwardness he had not felt before, and his movements were strange
to him. He moved timidly, jerking with his elbows and shrugging his
shoulders; and when he sat down to the table again, he again began
rubbing his hands. His body had lost its suppleness.
On the eve of death one ought to write to one's nearest relation.
Laevsky thought of this. He took a pen and wrote with a tremulous
hand:
"Mother!"
He wanted to write to beg his mother, for the sake of the merciful
God in whom she believed, that she would give shelter and bring a
little warmth and kindness into the life of the unhappy woman who,
by his doing, had been disgraced and was in solitude, poverty, and
weakness, that she would forgive and forget everything, everything,
everything, and by her sacrifice atone to some extent for her son's
terrible sin. But he remembered how his mother, a stout, heavily-built
old woman in a lace cap, used to go out into the garden in the
morning, followed by her companion with the lap-dog; how she used
to shout in a peremptory way to the gardener and the servants, and
how proud and haughty her face was--he remembered all this and
scratched out the word he had written.
There was a vivid flash of lightning at all three windows, and it
was followed by a prolonged, deafening roll of thunder, beginning
with a hollow rumble and ending with a crash so violent that all
the window-panes rattled. Laevsky got up, went to the window, and
pressed his forehead against the pane. There was a fierce, magnificent
storm. On the horizon lightning-flashes were flung in white streams
from the storm-clouds into the sea, lighting up the high, dark waves
over the far-away expanse. And to right and to left, and, no doubt,
over the house too, the lightning flashed.
"The storm!" whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some
one or to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds.
"Dear storm!"
He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without
a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with
blue eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with
the rain; they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal
of thunder, the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly,
while he crossed himself and made haste to repeat: "Holy, holy,
holy. . . ." Oh, where had they vanished to! In what sea were they
drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had no fear of
the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding
girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those
like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden,
nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had
not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and
lie, lie. . . .
"What in my past was not vice?" he asked himself, trying to clutch
at some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches
at the bushes.
School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his
work and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country?
That, too, was a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a
salary for doing nothing, and it was an abominable swindling of the
State for which one was not punished.
He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by
vice and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a
stranger, like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part
in the common life of men, had been indifferent to their sufferings,
their ideas, their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and
their struggles. He had not said one good word, not written one
line that was not useless and vulgar; he had not done his fellows
one ha'p'orth of service, but had eaten their bread, drunk their
wine, seduced their wives, lived on their thoughts, and to justify
his contemptible, parasitic life in their eyes and in his own, he
had always tried to assume an air of being higher and better than
they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .
He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov's,
and he was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin
and Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what
he had begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This
young weak woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had
deprived her of her husband, of her friends and of her country, and
had brought her here--to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and
from day to day she was bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness,
his viciousness and falsity--and that was all she had had to fill
her weak, listless, pitiable life. Then he had grown sick of her,
had begun to hate her, but had not had the pluck to abandon her,
and he had tried to entangle her more and more closely in a web of
lies. . . . These men had done the rest.
Laevsky sat at the table, then got up and went to the window; at
one minute he put out the candle and then he lighted it again. He
cursed himself aloud, wept and wailed, and asked forgiveness; several
times he ran to the table in despair, and wrote:
"Mother!"
Except his mother, he had no relations or near friends; but how
could his mother help him? And where was she? He had an impulse to
run to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands
and feet, to beg her forgiveness; but she was his victim, and he
was afraid of her as though she were dead.
"My life is ruined," he repeated, rubbing his hands. "Why am I still
alive, my God! . . ."
He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track
was lost in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky
again, because life was given only once and never came a second
time. If he could have turned back the days and years of the past,
he would have replaced the falsity with truth, the idleness with
work, the boredom with happiness; he would have given back purity
to those whom he had robbed of it. He would have found God and
goodness, but that was as impossible as to put back the fallen star
into the sky, and because it was impossible he was in despair.
When the storm was over, he sat by the open window and thought
calmly of what was before him. Von Koren would most likely kill
him. The man's clear, cold theory of life justified the destruction