The Duel and Other Stories
is something so base and so cruel that everything else seems petty
and trivial beside it. To run away," he muttered, sitting down, "to
run away."
The deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the
smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly
solitary, overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made
him drowsy and sapped his energy. He was perhaps very clever,
talented, remarkably honest; perhaps if the sea and the mountains
had not closed him in on all sides, he might have become an excellent
Zemstvo leader, a statesman, an orator, a political writer, a saint.
Who knows? If so, was it not stupid to argue whether it were honest
or dishonest when a gifted and useful man--an artist or musician,
for instance--to escape from prison, breaks a wall and deceives
his jailers? Anything is honest when a man is in such a position.
At two o'clock Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner.
When the cook gave them rice and tomato soup, Laevsky said:
"The same thing every day. Why not have cabbage soup?"
"There are no cabbages."
"It's strange. Samoylenko has cabbage soup and Marya Konstantinovna
has cabbage soup, and only I am obliged to eat this mawkish mess.
We can't go on like this, darling."
As is common with the vast majority of husbands and wives, not a
single dinner had in earlier days passed without scenes and
fault-finding between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Laevsky; but ever
since Laevsky had made up his mind that he did not love her, he had
tried to give way to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna in everything, spoke to
her gently and politely, smiled, and called her "darling."
"This soup tastes like liquorice," he said, smiling; he made an
effort to control himself and seem amiable, but could not refrain
from saying: "Nobody looks after the housekeeping. . . . If you are
too ill or busy with reading, let me look after the cooking."
In earlier days she would have said to him, "Do by all means," or,
"I see you want to turn me into a cook"; but now she only looked
at him timidly and flushed crimson.
"Well, how do you feel to-day?" he asked kindly.
"I am all right to-day. There is nothing but a little weakness."
"You must take care of yourself, darling. I am awfully anxious about
you."
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had
intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor,
Ustimovitch, a tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home
in the daytime, and in the evenings walk slowly up and down on the
sea-front coughing, with his hands folded behind him and a cane
stretched along his back, was of opinion that she had a female
complaint, and prescribed warm compresses. In old days, when Laevsky
loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's illness had excited his pity and
terror; now he saw falsity even in her illness. Her yellow, sleepy
face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic expression, and the yawning
that always followed her attacks of fever, and the fact that during
them she lay under a shawl and looked more like a boy than a woman,
and that it was close and stuffy in her room--all this, in his
opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against love
and marriage.
The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with
a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he
was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his
head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult
even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why
lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her,
of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted
the murderer.
"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna on the forehead.
Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and
fro, looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:
"Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"
He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.
"To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid," he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in
order to put on his high boots. "Love and hatred are not under our
control. As for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of
the causes of his death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in
love with his wife and she with me?"
Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day
to play _vint_ and drink beer.
"My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevsky on the way.
"How truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!"
III
For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight
of newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in
the town, had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table
d'hôte. At this time there were only two men who habitually dined
with him: a young zoologist called Von Koren, who had come for the
summer to the Black Sea to study the embryology of the medusa, and
a deacon called Pobyedov, who had only just left the seminary and
been sent to the town to take the duty of the old deacon who had
gone away for a cure. Each of them paid twelve roubles a month for
their dinner and supper, and Samoylenko made them promise to turn
up at two o'clock punctually.
Von Koren was usually the first to appear. He sat down in the
drawing-room in silence, and taking an album from the table, began
attentively scrutinising the faded photographs of unknown men in
full trousers and top-hats, and ladies in crinolines and caps.
Samoylenko only remembered a few of them by name, and of those whom
he had forgotten he said with a sigh: "A very fine fellow, remarkably
intelligent!" When he had finished with the album, Von Koren took
a pistol from the whatnot, and screwing up his left eye, took
deliberate aim at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or stood still
at the looking-glass and gazed a long time at his swarthy face, his
big forehead, and his black hair, which curled like a negro's, and
his shirt of dull-coloured cotton with big flowers on it like a
Persian rug, and the broad leather belt he wore instead of a
waistcoat. The contemplation of his own image seemed to afford him
almost more satisfaction than looking at photographs or playing
with the pistols. He was very well satisfied with his face, and his
becomingly clipped beard, and the broad shoulders, which were
unmistakable evidence of his excellent health and physical strength.
He was satisfied, too, with his stylish get-up, from the cravat,
which matched the colour of his shirt, down to his brown boots.
While he was looking at the album and standing before the glass,
at that moment, in the kitchen and in the passage near, Samoylenko,
without his coat and waistcoat, with his neck bare, excited and
bathed in perspiration, was bustling about the tables, mixing the
salad, or making some sauce, or preparing meat, cucumbers, and onion
for the cold soup, while he glared fiercely at the orderly who was
helping him, and brandished first a knife and then a spoon at him.
"Give me the vinegar!" he said. "That's not the vinegar--it's the
salad oil!" he shouted, stamping. "Where are you off to, you brute?"
"To get the butter, Your Excellency," answered the flustered orderly
in a cracked voice.
"Make haste; it's in the cupboard! And tell Daria to put some fennel
in the jar with the cucumbers! Fennel! Cover the cream up, gaping
laggard, or the flies will get into it!"
And the whole house seemed resounding with his shouts. When it was
ten or fifteen minutes to two the deacon would come in; he was a
lanky young man of twenty-two, with long hair, with no beard and a
hardly perceptible moustache. Going into the drawing-room, he crossed
himself before the ikon, smiled, and held out his hand to Von Koren.
"Good-morning," the zoologist said coldly. "Where have you been?"
"I've been catching sea-gudgeon in the harbour."
"Oh, of course. . . . Evidently, deacon, you will never be busy
with work."
"Why not? Work is not like a bear; it doesn't run off into the
woods," said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the
very deep pockets of his white cassock.
"There's no one to whip you!" sighed the zoologist.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed and they were not called
to dinner, and they could still hear the orderly running into the
kitchen and back again, noisily treading with his boots, and
Samoylenko shouting:
"Put it on the table! Where are your wits? Wash it first."
The famished deacon and Von Koren began tapping on the floor with
their heels, expressing in this way their impatience like the
audience at a theatre. At last the door opened and the harassed
orderly announced that dinner was ready! In the dining-room they
were met by Samoylenko, crimson in the face, wrathful, perspiring
from the heat of the kitchen; he looked at them furiously, and with
an expression of horror, took the lid off the soup tureen and helped
each of them to a plateful; and only when he was convinced that
they were eating it with relish and liked it, he gave a sigh of
relief and settled himself in his deep arm-chair. His face looked
blissful and his eyes grew moist. . . . He deliberately poured
himself out a glass of vodka and said:
"To the health of the younger generation."
After his conversation with Laevsky, from early morning till dinner
Samoylenko had been conscious of a load at his heart, although he
was in the best of humours; he felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted
to help him. After drinking a glass of vodka before the soup, he
heaved a sigh and said:
"I saw Vanya Laevsky to-day. He is having a hard time of it, poor
fellow! The material side of life is not encouraging for him, and
the worst of it is all this psychology is too much for him. I'm
sorry for the lad."
"Well, that is a person I am not sorry for," said Von Koren. "If
that charming individual were drowning, I would push him under with
a stick and say, 'Drown, brother, drown away.' . . ."
"That's untrue. You wouldn't do it."
"Why do you think that?" The zoologist shrugged his shoulders. "I'm
just as capable of a good action as you are."
"Is drowning a man a good action?" asked the deacon, and he laughed.
"Laevsky? Yes."
"I think there is something amiss with the soup . . ." said Samoylenko,
anxious to change the conversation.
"Laevsky is absolutely pernicious and is as dangerous to society
as the cholera microbe," Von Koren went on. "To drown him would be
a service."
"It does not do you credit to talk like that about your neighbour.
Tell us: what do you hate him for?"
"Don't talk nonsense, doctor. To hate and despise a microbe is
stupid, but to look upon everybody one meets without distinction
as one's neighbour, whatever happens--thanks very much, that is
equivalent to giving up criticism, renouncing a straightforward
attitude to people, washing one's hands of responsibility, in fact!
I consider your Laevsky a blackguard; I do not conceal it, and I
am perfectly conscientious in treating him as such. Well, you look
upon him as your neighbour--and you may kiss him if you like: you
look upon him as your neighbour, and that means that your attitude
to him is the same as to me and to the deacon; that is no attitude
at all. You are equally indifferent to all."
"To call a man a blackguard!" muttered Samoylenko, frowning with