The Duel and Other Stories
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He
strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his
waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes
by her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.
"The devil knows what to make of it!" he muttered. "Listen. I shan't
go away from here until I get the IOUs!"
"Ah, so much the better," laughed Susanna. "If you stay here for
good, it will make it livelier for me."
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna's laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and
grew bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU
he began for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin's
stories of the Jewess's romantic adventures, of her free way of
life, and these reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity.
Impulsively he sat down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of
the IOUs began to eat. . . .
"Will you have vodka or wine?" Susanna asked with a laugh. "So you
will stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and
nights you will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won't
your fiancée have something to say about it?"
II
Five hours had passed. The lieutenant's cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his
dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window.
He was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly
face; and as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he
had reached the age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and
bald. By mind and temperament he was one of those natures in which
the Russian intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted,
good-natured, well-bred, having some knowledge of the arts and
sciences, some faith, and the most chivalrous notions about honour,
but indolent and lacking in depth. He was fond of good eating and
drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a connoisseur in women and
horses, but in other things he was apathetic and sluggish as a seal,
and to rouse him from his lethargy something extraordinary and quite
revolting was needed, and then he would forget everything in the
world and display intense activity; he would fume and talk of a
duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at
breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly "a
scoundrel," would go to law, and so on.
"How is it our Sasha's not back yet?" he kept asking his wife,
glancing out of window. "Why, it's dinner-time!"
After waiting for the lieutenant till six o'clock, they sat down
to dinner. When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was
listening to every footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept
shrugging his shoulders.
"Strange!" he said. "The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant's."
As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant's, where after a
festive evening he was staying the night.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked extremely
crumpled and confused.
"I want to speak to you alone . . ." he said mysteriously to his
cousin.
They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced
for a long time up and down before he began to speak.
"Something's happened, my dear fellow," he began, "that I don't
know how to tell you about. You wouldn't believe it . . ."
And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what
had happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide
apart and his head bent, listened and frowned.
"Are you joking?" he asked.
"How the devil could I be joking? It's no joking matter!"
"I don't understand!" muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging
up his hands. "It's positively . . . immoral on your part. Before
your very eyes a hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious
crime, plays a nasty trick, and you go and kiss her!"
"But I can't understand myself how it happened!" whispered the
lieutenant, blinking guiltily. "Upon my honour, I don't understand
it! It's the first time in my life I've come across such a monster!
It's not her beauty that does for you, not her mind, but that . . .
you understand . . . insolence, cynicism. . . ."
"Insolence, cynicism . . . it's unclean! If you've such a longing
for insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the
mire and have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway!
Instead of two thousand three hundred!"
"You do express yourself elegantly!" said the lieutenant, frowning.
"I'll pay you back the two thousand three hundred!"
"I know you'll pay it back, but it's not a question of money! Damn
the money! What revolts me is your being such a limp rag . . . such
filthy feebleness! And engaged! With a fiancée!"
"Don't speak of it . . ." said the lieutenant, blushing. "I loathe
myself as it is. I should like to sink into the earth. It's sickening
and vexatious that I shall have to bother my aunt for that five
thousand. . . ."
Kryukov continued for some time longer expressing his indignation
and grumbling, then, as he grew calmer, he sat down on the sofa and
began to jeer at his cousin.
"You young officers!" he said with contemptuous irony. "Nice
bridegrooms."
Suddenly he leapt up as though he had been stung, stamped his foot,
and ran about the study.
"No, I'm not going to leave it like that!" he said, shaking his
fist. "I will have those IOUs, I will! I'll give it her! One doesn't
beat women, but I'll break every bone in her body. . . . I'll pound
her to a jelly! I'm not a lieutenant! You won't touch me with
insolence or cynicism! No-o-o, damn her! Mishka!" he shouted, "run
and tell them to get the racing droshky out for me!"
Kryukov dressed rapidly, and, without heeding the agitated lieutenant,
got into the droshky, and with a wave of his hand resolutely raced
off to Susanna Moiseyevna. For a long time the lieutenant gazed out
of window at the clouds of dust that rolled after his cousin's
droshky, stretched, yawned, and went to his own room. A quarter of
an hour later he was sound asleep.
At six o'clock he was waked up and summoned to dinner.
"How nice this is of Alexey!" his cousin's wife greeted him in the
dining-room. "He keeps us waiting for dinner."
"Do you mean to say he's not come back yet?" yawned the lieutenant.
"H'm! . . . he's probably gone round to see the tenant."
But Alexey Ivanovitch was not back by supper either. His wife and
Sokolsky decided that he was playing cards at the tenant's and would
most likely stay the night there. What had happened was not what
they had supposed, however.
Kryukov returned next morning, and without greeting any one, without
a word, dashed into his study.
"Well?" whispered the lieutenant, gazing at him round-eyed.
Kryukov waved his hand and gave a snort.
"Why, what's the matter? What are you laughing at?"
Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and
shook with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking
at the surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from
laughing, said:
"Close the door. Well . . . she _is_ a fe-e-male, I beg to inform
you!"
"Did you get the IOUs?"
Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.
"Well! she is a female!" he went on. "_Merci_ for the acquaintance,
my boy! She's a devil in petticoats. I arrived; I walked in like
such an avenging Jove, you know, that I felt almost afraid of myself
. . . . I frowned, I scowled, even clenched my fists to be more
awe-inspiring. . . . 'Jokes don't pay with me, madam!' said I, and
more in that style. And I threatened her with the law and with the
Governor. To begin with she burst into tears, said she'd been joking
with you, and even took me to the cupboard to give me the money.
Then she began arguing that the future of Europe lies in the hands
of the French, and the Russians, swore at women. . . . Like you, I
listened, fascinated, ass that I was. . . . She kept singing the
praises of my beauty, patted me on the arm near the shoulder, to
see how strong I was, and . . . and as you see, I've only just got
away from her! Ha, ha! She's enthusiastic about you!"
"You're a nice fellow!" laughed the lieutenant. "A married man!
highly respected. . . . Well, aren't you ashamed? Disgusted? Joking
apart though, old man, you've got your Queen Tamara in your own
neighbourhood. . . ."
"In my own neighbourhood! Why, you wouldn't find another such
chameleon in the whole of Russia! I've never seen anything like it
in my life, though I know a good bit about women, too. I have known
regular devils in my time, but I never met anything like this. It
is, as you say, by insolence and cynicism she gets over you. What
is so attractive in her is the diabolical suddenness, the quick
transitions, the swift shifting hues. . . . Brrr! And the IOU--
phew! Write it off for lost. We are both great sinners, we'll go
halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not two thousand three
hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at the tenant's."
Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and
broke into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another,
and again subsided into their pillows.
"Engaged! A lieutenant!" Kryukov jeered.
"Married!" retorted Sokolsky. "Highly respected! Father of a family!"
At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another,
and, to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with
laughter into their dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best
of spirits, they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another
with guns, played at soldiers with the children. In the evening
they had a long argument. The lieutenant maintained that it was
mean and contemptible to accept a dowry with your wife, even when
there was passionate love on both sides. Kryukov thumped the table
with his fists and declared that this was absurd, and that a husband
who did not like his wife to have property of her own was an egoist
and a despot. Both shouted, boiled over, did not understand each
other, drank a good deal, and in the end, picking up the skirts of
their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms. They soon fell asleep
and slept soundly.
Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The
shadows lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time
to time the wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature,
too, could lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity
of these people. Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said
nothing. Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident
aloud. Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as
of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played
upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.
On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov
was sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory
letter to his aunt. Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro
near the table in silence. The lieutenant had slept badly that
night; he woke up depressed, and now he felt bored. He paced up and
down, thinking of the end of his furlough, of his fiancée, who was
expecting him, of how people could live all their lives in the
country without feeling bored. Standing at the window, for a long
time he stared at the trees, smoked three cigarettes one after
another, and suddenly turned to his cousin.
"I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha," he said. "Let me have a
saddle-horse for the day. . . ."
Kryukov looked searchingly at him and continued his writing with a
frown.
"You will, then?" asked the lieutenant.