The Duel and Other Stories
when he had seen her for the last time at home, she was wearing a
black skirt and a red blouse, with a large buckle on her belt. She
flung one arm round her brother and kissed him on the temple.
"What a storm!" she said. "Grigory went off somewhere and I was
left quite alone in the house."
She was not embarrassed, and looked at her brother as frankly and
candidly as at home; looking at her, Pyotr Mihalitch, too, lost his
embarrassment.
"But you are not afraid of storms," he said, sitting down at the
table.
"No," she said, "but here the rooms are so big, the house is so
old, and when there is thunder it all rattles like a cupboard full
of crockery. It's a charming house altogether," she went on, sitting
down opposite her brother. "There's some pleasant memory in every
room. In my room, only fancy, Grigory's grandfather shot himself."
"In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden,"
said Vlassitch.
"For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather,"
Zina went on. "And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to
death."
"That's an actual fact," said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open
eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch. "Sometime in the forties this place was
let to a Frenchman called Olivier. The portrait of his daughter is
lying in an attic now--a very pretty girl. This Olivier, so my
father told me, despised Russians for their ignorance and treated
them with cruel derision. Thus, for instance, he insisted on the
priest walking without his hat for half a mile round his house, and
on the church bells being rung when the Olivier family drove through
the village. The serfs and altogether the humble of this world, of
course, he treated with even less ceremony. Once there came along
this road one of the simple-hearted sons of wandering Russia,
somewhat after the style of Gogol's divinity student, Homa Brut.
He asked for a night's lodging, pleased the bailiffs, and was given
a job at the office of the estate. There are many variations of the
story. Some say the divinity student stirred up the peasants, others
that Olivier' s daughter fell in love with him. I don't know which
is true, only one fine evening Olivier called him in here and
cross-examined him, then ordered him to be beaten. Do you know, he
sat here at this table drinking claret while the stable-boys beat
the man. He must have tried to wring something out of him. Towards
morning the divinity student died of the torture and his body was
hidden. They say it was thrown into Koltovitch's pond. There was
an inquiry, but the Frenchman paid some thousands to some one in
authority and went away to Alsace. His lease was up just then, and
so the matter ended."
"What scoundrels!" said Zina, shuddering.
"My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well. He used to say
she was remarkably beautiful and eccentric. I imagine the divinity
student had done both--stirred up the peasants and won the
daughter's heart. Perhaps he wasn't a divinity student at all, but
some one travelling incognito."
Zina grew thoughtful; the story of the divinity student and the
beautiful French girl had evidently carried her imagination far
away. It seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the
least during the last week, except that she was a little paler. She
looked calm and just as usual, as though she had come with her
brother to visit Vlassitch. But Pyotr Mihalitch felt that some
change had taken place in himself. Before, when she was living at
home, he could have spoken to her about anything, and now he did
not feel equal to asking her the simple question, "How do you like
being here?" The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. Probably
the same change had taken place in her. She was in no haste to turn
the conversation to her mother, to her home, to her relations with
Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she did not say that free
unions are better than marriages in the church; she was not agitated,
and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . . . And why had
they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?
"You are both of you wet with the rain," said Zina, and she smiled
joyfully; she was touched by this point of resemblance between her
brother and Vlassitch.
And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his
position. He thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and
Zina's bright little room into which no one went now; he thought
there were no prints of little feet on the garden-paths, and that
before tea no one went off, laughing gaily, to bathe. What he had
clung to more and more from his childhood upwards, what he had loved
thinking about when he used to sit in the stuffy class-room or the
lecture theatre--brightness, purity, and joy, everything that
filled the house with life and light, had gone never to return, had
vanished, and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy story of some
battalion officer, a chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved woman and a
grandfather who had shot himself. . . . And to begin to talk about
his mother or to think that the past could ever return would mean
not understanding what was clear.
Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with tears and his hand began to
tremble as it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking
about, and her eyes, too, glistened and looked red.
"Grigory, come here," she said to Vlassitch.
They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a
whisper. From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the
way she looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything
was irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything.
Zina went out of the room.
"Well, brother!" Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing
his hands and smiling. "I called our life happiness just now, but
that was, so to speak, poetical license. In reality, there has not
been a sense of happiness so far. Zina has been thinking all the
time of you, of her mother, and has been worrying; looking at her,
I, too, felt worried. Hers is a bold, free nature, but, you know,
it's difficult when you're not used to it, and she is young, too.
The servants call her 'Miss'; it seems a trifle, but it upsets her.
There it is, brother."
Zina brought in a plateful of strawberries. She was followed by a
little maidservant, looking crushed and humble, who set a jug of
milk on the table and made a very low bow: she had something about
her that was in keeping with the old furniture, something petrified
and dreary.
The sound of the rain had ceased. Pyotr Mihalitch ate strawberries
while Vlassitch and Zina looked at him in silence. The moment of
the inevitable but useless conversation was approaching, and all
three felt the burden of it. Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with
tears again; he pushed away his plate and said that he must be going
home, or it would be getting late, and perhaps it would rain again.
The time had come when common decency required Zina to speak of
those at home and of her new life.
"How are things at home?" she asked rapidly, and her pale face
quivered. "How is mother?"
"You know mother . . ." said Pyotr Mihalitch, not looking at her.
"Petrusha, you've thought a great deal about what has happened,"
she said, taking hold of her brother's sleeve, and he knew how hard
it was for her to speak. "You've thought a great deal: tell me, can
we reckon on mother's accepting Grigory . . . and the whole position,
one day?"
She stood close to her brother, face to face with him, and he was
astonished that she was so beautiful, and that he seemed not to
have noticed it before. And it seemed to him utterly absurd that
his sister, so like his mother, pampered, elegant, should be living
with Vlassitch and in Vlassitch's house, with the petrified servant,
and the table with six legs--in the house where a man had been
flogged to death, and that she was not going home with him, but was
staying here to sleep.
"You know mother," he said, not answering her question. "I think
you ought to have . . . to do something, to ask her forgiveness or
something. . . ."
"But to ask her forgiveness would mean pretending we had done wrong.
I'm ready to tell a lie to comfort mother, but it won't lead anywhere.
I know mother. Well, what will be, must be!" said Zina, growing
more cheerful now that the most unpleasant had been said. "We'll
wait for five years, ten years, and be patient, and then God's will
be done."
She took her brother's arm, and when she walked through the dark
hall she squeezed close to him. They went out on the steps. Pyotr
Mihalitch said good-bye, got on his horse, and set off at a walk;
Zina and Vlassitch walked a little way with him. It was still and
warm, with a delicious smell of hay; stars were twinkling brightly
between the clouds. Vlassitch's old garden, which had seen so many
gloomy stories in its time, lay slumbering in the darkness, and for
some reason it was mournful riding through it.
"Zina and I to-day after dinner spent some really exalted moments,"
said Vlassitch. "I read aloud to her an excellent article on the
question of emigration. You must read it, brother! You really must.
It's remarkable for its lofty tone. I could not resist writing a
letter to the editor to be forwarded to the author. I wrote only a
single line: 'I thank you and warmly press your noble hand.'"
Pyotr Mihalitch was tempted to say, "Don't meddle in what does not
concern you," but he held his tongue.
Vlassitch walked by his right stirrup and Zina by the left; both
seemed to have forgotten that they had to go home. It was damp, and
they had almost reached Koltovitch's copse. Pyotr Mihalitch felt
that they were expecting something from him, though they hardly
knew what it was, and he felt unbearably sorry for them. Now as
they walked by the horse with submissive faces, lost in thought,
he had a deep conviction that they were unhappy, and could not be
happy, and their love seemed to him a melancholy, irreparable
mistake. Pity and the sense that he could do nothing to help them
reduced him to that state of spiritual softening when he was ready
to make any sacrifice to get rid of the painful feeling of sympathy.
"I'll come over sometimes for a night," he said.
But it sounded as though he were making a concession, and did not
satisfy him. When they stopped near Koltovitch's copse to say
good-bye, he bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:
"You are right, Zina! You have done well." To avoid saying more and
bursting into tears, he lashed his horse and galloped into the wood.
As he rode into the darkness, he looked round and saw Vlassitch and
Zina walking home along the road--he taking long strides, while
she walked with a hurried, jerky step beside him--talking eagerly
about something.
"I am an old woman!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch. "I went to solve the
question and I have only made it more complicated--there it is!"
He was heavy at heart. When he got out of the copse he rode at a
walk and then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and
think without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected in a
streak of red on the other side of the pond. There were low rumbles
of thunder in the distance. Pyotr Mihalitch looked steadily at the
water and imagined his sister's despair, her martyr-like pallor,
the tearless eyes with which she would conceal her humiliation from
others. He imagined her with child, imagined the death of their
mother, her funeral, Zina's horror. . . . The proud, superstitious
old woman would be sure to die of grief. Terrible pictures of the
future rose before him on the background of smooth, dark water, and
among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a weak, cowardly man
with a guilty face.
A hundred paces off on the right bank of the pond, something dark