The Duel and Other Stories
And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the
period--in the eighties--when people were beginning to talk and
write of non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make
war; when some people in our set were beginning to do without
servants, to retire into the country, to work on the land, and to
renounce animal food and carnal love.
After reading her brother's article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and
hardly perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
"Very nice!" she said. "But still there's a great deal I don't
understand. For instance, in Leskov's story 'Belonging to the
Cathedral' there is a queer gardener who sows for the benefit of
all--for customers, for beggars, and any who care to steal. Did
he behave sensibly?"
From his sister's tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that
she did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his
life, his vanity as an author sustained a shock. With a shade of
irritation he answered:
"Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of
thieves to existence. What would you think if I were to establish
a newspaper and, dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing
as well as for liberal ideas? Following the example of that gardener,
I ought, logically, to provide a section for blackmailers, the
intellectual scoundrels? Yes."
Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved
languidly to the sofa and lay down.
"I don't know, I know nothing about it," she said musingly. "You
are probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there's
something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were
something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of
resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have
become so deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting
with them, and therefore cannot form a correct judgment of them."
"How do you mean?"
"I don't know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in
thinking that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do
so, just as he is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart
looks like an ace of hearts. It is very possible in resisting evil
we ought not to use force, but to use what is the very opposite of
force--if you, for instance, don't want this picture stolen from
you, you ought to give it away rather than lock it up. . . ."
"That's clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar
woman, she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening
to make me an offer herself!"
The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding
each other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have
been able to make out what either of them was driving at.
They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends'
houses to which they could go, and they felt no need for friends;
they only went to the theatre when there was a new play--such was
the custom in literary circles--they did not go to concerts, for
they did not care for music.
"You may think what you like," Vera Semyonovna began again the next
day, "but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am
firmly convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed
against me personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending
myself will not make the murderer better. All I have now to decide
is the second half of the question: how I ought to behave to evil
directed against my neighbours?"
"Vera, mind you don't become rabid!" said Vladimir Semyonitch,
laughing. "I see non-resistance is becoming your _idée fixe_!"
He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but
somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour.
His sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently
at his writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on
the sofa lay a person who did not agree with him. And his back grew
stiff and numb, and there was a chill in his soul. An author's
vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his
sister was the first and only person who had laid bare and disturbed
that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy to
unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.
Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and
did not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch
was sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a
novel which described how a village schoolmistress refused the man
whom she loved and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual,
simply because marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible.
Vera Semyonovna lay on the sofa and brooded.
"My God, how slow it is!" she said, stretching. "How insipid and
empty life is! I don't know what to do with myself, and you are
wasting your best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist,
you are rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!"
Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.
"It's depressing to look at you!" said his sister. "Wagner in 'Faust'
dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you
are looking for worms for the sake of the worms."
"That's vague!"
"Yes, Volodya; all these days I've been thinking, I've been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that
you are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself
what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me,
what is it? Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can
be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging.
You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like,
you'll make nothing more of it than the chemists have made
already. . . ."
"Indeed!" drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. "Yes, all this
is old rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you
consider new, then?"
"You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to
think of something new. It's not for me to teach you."
"Me--an alchemist!" the critic cried in wonder and indignation,
screwing up his eyes ironically. "Art, progress--all that is
alchemy?"
"You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people
had set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little
questions that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the
way. If you go up in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally,
without any effort, see the fields and the villages and the rivers
as well. When stearine is manufactured, you get glycerine as a
by-product. It seems to me that contemporary thought has settled
on one spot and stuck to it. It is prejudiced, apathetic, timid,
afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just as you and I are afraid
to climb on a high mountain; it is conservative."
Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister's presence, and grew irritable
when he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back;
while the sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to
bring back the past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with
her. Every evening she complained of being bored, and talked about
independence of mind and those who are in the rut of tradition.
Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna proved that the work
that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional, that it was
a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already
served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She
made no end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time
to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die
than listen to reason. By degrees there was a perceptible change
in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying on the sofa
all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold,
dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith.
She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and tidied
her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred
at her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work,
which was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something
strained and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected.
And knowing he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her
and teased her like a schoolboy.
"You won't resist evil, but you resist my having servants!" he
taunted her. "If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That's
inconsistent!"
He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when
his sister began doing odd things before strangers.
"It's awful, my dear fellow," he said to me in private, waving his
hands in despair. "It seems that our _ingénue_ has remained to play
a part in the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her
bones! I've washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but
why does she talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what
it means for me to listen to her. What I feel when in my presence
she has the effrontery to support her errors by blasphemously quoting
the teaching of Christ! It chokes me! It makes me hot all over to
hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort the
Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how
the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple. That's, my dear
fellow, what comes of being half educated, undeveloped! That's what
comes of medical studies which provide no general culture!"
One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found
his sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed,
wringing her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks.
The critic's good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his
eyes, too, and he longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg
her forgiveness, and to live as they used to before. . . . He knelt
down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled,
smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped
up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly:
"Hurrah! We'll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God's blessing!
And I've such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the
occasion with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid,
wonderful thing!"
"Oh, no, no!" cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
"I've read it already! I don't want it, I don't want it!"
"When did you read it?"
"A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it,
I know it!"
"H'm! . . . You're a fanatic!" her brother said coldly, flinging
the magazine on to the table.
"No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!" And Vera Semyonovna dissolved
into tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her
quivering shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies
of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way
of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual
revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his
author's vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony,
and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence
of old women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off
disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks
with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed
him on the forehead.
"Where are you going?" he asked with surprise.