The Duel and Other Stories
grows every day. For me she is something higher than a wife--yes,
higher!" Vlassitch waved his hands. "She is my holy of holies. Since
she is living with me, I enter my house as though it were a temple.
She is an extraordinary, rare, most noble woman!"
"Well, he's off now!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch; he disliked the word
"woman."
"Why shouldn't you be married properly?" he asked. "How much does
your wife want for a divorce?"
"Seventy-five thousand."
"It's rather a lot. But if we were to negotiate with her?"
"She won't take a farthing less. She is an awful woman, brother,"
sighed Vlassitch. "I've never talked to you about her before--it
was unpleasant to think of her; but now that the subject has come
up, I'll tell you about her. I married her on the impulse of the
moment--a fine, honourable impulse. An officer in command of a
battalion of our regiment--if you care to hear the details--had
an affair with a girl of eighteen; that is, to put it plainly, he
seduced her, lived with her for two months, and abandoned her. She
was in an awful position, brother. She was ashamed to go home to
her parents; besides, they wouldn't have received her. Her lover
had abandoned her; there was nothing left for her but to go to the
barracks and sell herself. The other officers in the regiment were
indignant. They were by no means saints themselves, but the baseness
of it was so striking. Besides, no one in the regiment could endure
the man. And to spite him, you understand, the indignant lieutenants
and ensigns began getting up a subscription for the unfortunate
girl. And when we subalterns met together and began to subscribe
five or ten roubles each, I had a sudden inspiration. I felt it was
an opportunity to do something fine. I hastened to the girl and
warmly expressed my sympathy. And while I was on my way to her, and
while I was talking to her, I loved her fervently as a woman insulted
and injured. Yes. . . . Well, a week later I made her an offer. The
colonel and my comrades thought my marriage out of keeping with the
dignity of an officer. That roused me more than ever. I wrote a
long letter, do you know, in which I proved that my action ought
to be inscribed in the annals of the regiment in letters of gold,
and so on. I sent the letter to my colonel and copies to my comrades.
Well, I was excited, and, of course, I could not avoid being rude.
I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough copy of it put
away somewhere; I'll give it to you to read sometime. It was written
with great feeling. You will see what lofty and noble sentiments I
was experiencing. I resigned my commission and came here with my
wife. My father had left a few debts, I had no money, and from the
first day my wife began making acquaintances, dressing herself
smartly, and playing cards, and I was obliged to mortgage the estate.
She led a bad life, you understand, and you are the only one of the
neighbours who hasn't been her lover. After two years I gave her
all I had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. . . . And
now I pay her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman!
There is a fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider
so that the spider can't shake it off: the grub fastens upon the
spider and drinks its heart's blood. That was how this woman fastened
upon me and sucks the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me
for being so stupid; that is, for marrying a woman like her. My
chivalry seems to her despicable. 'A wise man cast me off,' she
says, 'and a fool picked me up.' To her thinking no one but a pitiful
idiot could have behaved as I did. And that is insufferably bitter
to me, brother. Altogether, I may say in parenthesis, fate has been
hard upon me, very hard."
Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity
what it was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not
young--he was forty-one--lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with
a long nose, and grey hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning
voice, had a sickly smile, and waved his hands awkwardly as he
talked. He had neither health, nor pleasant, manly manners, nor
_savoir-faire_, nor gaiety, and in all his exterior there was
something colourless and indefinite. He dressed without taste, his
surroundings were depressing, he did not care for poetry or painting
because "they have no answer to give to the questions of the day"
--that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch him.
He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was
paying twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand
on personal securities as well. When the time came to pay the
interest on the mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked
every one to lend him money with as much agitation as though his
house were on fire, and, at the same time losing his head, he would
sell the whole of his winter store of fuel for five roubles and a
stack of straw for three roubles, and then have his garden fence
or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat his stoves. His meadows
were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle strayed in the undergrowth
in his woods, and every year the old trees were fewer and fewer:
beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden and kitchen-garden.
He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even ordinary capacity
for living like other people. In practical life he was a weak, naïve
man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with good reason
called him "simple."
He was a Liberal, and in the district was regarded as a "Red," but
even his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor
moving power about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant,
and delighted always on the same note; it was always spiritless and
ineffective. Even in moments of strong enthusiasm he never raised
his head or stood upright. But the most tiresome thing of all was
that he managed to express even his best and finest ideas so that
they seemed in him commonplace and out of date. It reminded one of
something old one had read long ago, when slowly and with an air
of profundity he would begin discoursing of his noble, lofty moments,
of his best years; or when he went into raptures over the younger
generation, which has always been, and still is, in advance of
society; or abused Russians for donning their dressing-gowns at
thirty and forgetting the principles of their _alma mater_. If you
stayed the night with him, he would put Pissarev or Darwin on your
bedroom table; if you said you had read it, he would go and bring
Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people
looked upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity;
it made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot
of which he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and
was sucking his life-blood. In his past there had been the strange
marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written
in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with great feeling,
endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments, then
debts, a second mortgage, the allowance to his wife, the monthly
borrowing of money--and all this for no benefit to any one, either
himself or others. And in the present, as in the past, he was still
in a nervous flurry, on the lookout for heroic actions, and poking
his nose into other people's affairs; as before, at every favourable
opportunity there were long letters and copies, wearisome, stereotyped
conversations about the village community, or the revival of
handicrafts or the establishment of cheese factories--conversations
as like one another as though he had prepared them, not in his
living brain, but by some mechanical process. And finally this
scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end!
And meanwhile Zina was young--she was only twenty-two--good-looking,
elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a
passionate musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in
books, and in her own home she would not have put up with a room
like this, smelling of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced
ideas, but in her free-thinking one felt the overflow of energy,
the vanity of a young, strong, spirited girl, passionately eager
to be better and more original than others. . . . How had it happened
that she had fallen in love with Vlassitch?
"He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as
I am. . . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves
him; but, then, I, too, love him in spite of everything."
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man,
but narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings,
and in fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or
immediate; he saw nothing but boredom and incapacity for life. His
self-sacrifice and all that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions
or noble impulses seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary
blank shots which consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch's
fanatical belief in the extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness
of his own way of thinking struck him as naïve and even morbid; and
the fact that Vlassitch all his life had contrived to mix the trivial
with the exalted, that he had made a stupid marriage and looked
upon it as an act of heroism, and then had affairs with other women
and regarded that as a triumph of some idea or other was simply
incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious
of a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the
heart to contradict him.
Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to
the accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a
prelude to beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of
his marriage. But it was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen
to him; he was tormented by the thought that he would see his sister
directly.
"Yes, you've had bad luck," he said gently; "but, excuse me, we've
been wandering from the point. That's not what we are talking about."
"Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point," said
Vlassitch, and he stood up. "I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience
is clear. We are not married, but there is no need for me to prove
to you that our marriage is perfectly legitimate. You are as free
in your ideas as I am, and, happily, there can be no disagreement
between us on that point. As for our future, that ought not to alarm
you. I'll work in the sweat of my brow, I'll work day and night--
in fact, I will strain every nerve to make Zina happy. Her life
will be a splendid one! You may ask, am I able to do it. I am,
brother! When a man devotes every minute to one thought, it's not
difficult for him to attain his object. But let us go to Zina; it
will be a joy to her to see you."
Pyotr Mihalitch's heart began to beat. He got up and followed
Vlassitch into the hall, and from there into the drawing-room. There
was nothing in the huge gloomy room but a piano and a long row of
old chairs ornamented with bronze, on which no one ever sat. There
was a candle alight on the piano. From the drawing-room they went
in silence into the dining-room. This room, too, was large and
comfortless; in the middle of the room there was a round table with
two leaves with six thick legs, and only one candle. A clock in a
large mahogany case like an ikon stand pointed to half-past two.
Vlassitch opened the door into the next room and said:
"Zina, here is Petrusha come to see us!"
At once there was the sound of hurried footsteps and Zina came into
the dining-room. She was tall, plump, and very pale, and, just as