The Duel and Other Stories
"To the province of N. to do vaccination work." Her brother went
out into the street with her.
"So that's what you've decided upon, you queer girl," he muttered.
"Don't you want some money?"
"No, thank you. Good-bye."
The sister shook her brother's hand and set off.
"Why don't you have a cab?" cried Vladimir Semyonitch.
She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her
rusty-looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched
along, forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a
feeling of regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he
was a stranger to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.
Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.
I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know.
And Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths
on coffins, singing _Gaudeamus_, busying himself over the Mutual
Aid Society of Moscow Journalists.
He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for
three months--at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn
Hospital. An abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought
to be sent to the Crimea, and began getting up a collection for
him. But he did not go to the Crimea--he died. We buried him in
the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the left side, where artists and
literary men are buried.
One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars' restaurant. I mentioned
that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen
Vladimir Semyonitch's grave there. It was utterly neglected and
almost indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had
fallen; it was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in
order.
But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and
I could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch.
He was utterly forgotten.
MIRE
I
GRACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the snow-white
tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the vodka distillery
belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The sun smiled carelessly
on the lieutenant's little stars, on the white trunks of the
birch-trees, on the heaps of broken glass scattered here and there
in the yard. The radiant, vigorous beauty of a summer day lay over
everything, and nothing hindered the snappy young green leaves from
dancing gaily and winking at the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and
soot-begrimed appearance of the bricksheds and the stifling fumes
of the distillery did not spoil the general good impression. The
lieutenant sprang gaily out of the saddle, handed over his horse
to a man who ran up, and stroking with his finger his delicate black
moustaches, went in at the front door. On the top step of the old
but light and softly carpeted staircase he was met by a maidservant
with a haughty, not very youthful face. The lieutenant gave her his
card without speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on
it the name "Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky." A minute later she
came back and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see
him, as she was not feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked at the
ceiling and thrust out his lower lip.
"How vexatious!" he said. "Listen, my dear," he said eagerly. "Go
and tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to
speak to her--very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask her to
excuse me."
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
"Very well!" she sighed, returning after a brief interval. "Please
walk in!"
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously
furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large
and lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed
by the abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost
revoltingly heavy fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to
trellis-work along the walls, screening the windows, hung from the
ceiling, and were wreathed over the corners, so that the room was
more like a greenhouse than a place to live in. Tits, canaries, and
goldfinches chirruped among the green leaves and fluttered against
the window-panes.
"Forgive me for receiving you here," the lieutenant heard in a
mellow feminine voice with a burr on the letter _r_ which was not
without charm. "Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I'm trying to
keep still to prevent its coming on again. What do you want?"
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair,
such as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown,
with her head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could
be seen behind the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a
pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark
eye. Her ample dressing-gown concealed her figure, but judging from
her beautiful hand, from her voice, her nose, and her eye, she might
be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
"Forgive me for being so persistent . . ." began the lieutenant,
clinking his spurs. "Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come
with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov, who . . ."
"I know!" interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. "I know Kryukov. Sit down;
I don't like anything big standing before me."
"My cousin charges me to ask you a favour," the lieutenant went on,
clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. "The fact is, your
late father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and
a small sum was left owing. The payment only becomes due next week,
but my cousin begs you most particularly to pay him--if possible,
to-day."
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
"Surely I'm not in her bedroom?" he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and
tallest, under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not
yet made, with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two
arm-chairs lay heaps of crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and
sleeves with rumpled lace and flounces were trailing on the carpet,
on which here and there lay bits of white tape, cigarette-ends, and
the papers of caramels. . . . Under the bed the toes, pointed and
square, of slippers of all kinds peeped out in a long row. And it
seemed to the lieutenant that the scent of the jasmine came not
from the flowers, but from the bed and the slippers.
"And what is the sum owing?" asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
"Two thousand three hundred."
"Oho!" said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. "And you
call that--a small sum! However, it's just the same paying it
to-day or paying it in a week, but I've had so many payments to
make in the last two months since my father's death. . . . Such a
lot of stupid business, it makes my head go round! A nice idea! I
want to go abroad, and they keep forcing me to attend to these silly
things. Vodka, oats . . ." she muttered, half closing her eyes,
"oats, bills, percentages, or, as my head-clerk says, 'percentage.'
. . . It's awful. Yesterday I simply turned the excise officer out.
He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to him: 'Go to the devil
with your Tralles! I can't see any one!' He kissed my hand and went
away. I tell you what: can't your cousin wait two or three months?"
"A cruel question!" laughed the lieutenant. "My cousin can wait a
year, but it's I who cannot wait! You see, it's on my own account
I'm acting, I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money,
and by ill-luck my cousin hasn't a rouble to spare. I'm forced to
ride about and collect debts. I've just been to see a peasant, our
tenant; here I'm now calling on you; from here I shall go on to
somewhere else, and keep on like that until I get together five
thousand roubles. I need money awfully!"
"Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief.
Why, have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards?
Or are you getting married?"
"You've guessed!" laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from
his seat, he clinked his spurs. "I really am going to be married."
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face,
and sighed.
"I can't make out what possesses people to get married!" she said,
looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. "Life is so short,
one has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!"
"Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . ."
"Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things
. . . . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are
you passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why
won't four do, or three?"
"What a tongue she has!" thought the lieutenant, and answered: "The
difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till
he is twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the
Service or else pay a deposit of five thousand."
"Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has
his own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is
some one special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable
to understand how any decent man can live with a woman. I can't for
the life of me understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord,
twenty-seven years, and I have never yet seen an endurable woman.
They're all affected minxes, immoral, liars. . . . The only ones I
can put up with are cooks and housemaids, but so-called ladies I
won't let come within shooting distance of me. But, thank God, they
hate me and don't force themselves on me! If one of them wants money
she sends her husband, but nothing will induce her to come herself,
not from pride--no, but from cowardice; she's afraid of my making
a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very well! Rather! I openly
display what they do their very utmost to conceal from God and man.
How can they help hating me? No doubt you've heard bushels of scandal
about me already. . . ."
"I only arrived here so lately . . ."
"Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother's wife,
surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young
man come to see such an awful woman without warning him--how could
she? Ha, ha! . . . But tell me, how is your brother? He's a fine
fellow, such a handsome man! . . . I've seen him several times at
mass. Why do you look at me like that? I very often go to church!
We all have the same God. To an educated person externals matter
less than the idea. . . . That's so, isn't it?"
"Yes, of course . . ." smiled the lieutenant.
"Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You
are handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking.
There's wonderfully little likeness!"
"That's quite natural; he's not my brother, but my cousin."
"Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?"
"My furlough is over in a few days."
"Well, what's to be done with you!" sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. "So
be it. I'll give you the money, though I know you'll abuse me for
it afterwards. You'll quarrel with your wife after you are married,
and say: 'If that mangy Jewess hadn't given me the money, I should
perhaps have been as free as a bird to-day!' Is your fiancée pretty?"
"Oh yes. . . ."
"H'm! . . . Anyway, better something, if it's only beauty, than
nothing. Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up
to her husband for her silliness."
"That's original!" laughed the lieutenant. "You are a woman yourself,
and such a woman-hater!"
"A woman . . ." smiled Susanna. "It's not my fault that God has
cast me into this mould, is it? I'm no more to blame for it than
you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for