The Duel and Other Stories
driving out the horses for the night and rejoicing in their freedom,
playing pranks like little children; their youthful voices rang out
musically in the still air, and she could distinguish every word.
It is nice to sit and listen to the silence: at one moment the wind
blows and stirs the tops of the birch-trees, then a frog rustles
in last year's leaves, then the clock on the belfry strikes the
quarter. . . . One might sit without moving, listen and think, and
think. . . .
An old woman passed by with a wallet on her back. The princess
thought that it would be nice to stop the old woman and to say
something friendly and cordial to her, to help her. . . . But the
old woman turned the corner without once looking round.
Not long afterwards a tall man with a grey beard and a straw hat
came along the walk. When he came up to the princess, he took off
his hat and bowed. From the bald patch on his head and his sharp,
hooked nose the princess recognised him as the doctor, Mihail
Ivanovitch, who had been in her service at Dubovki. She remembered
that some one had told her that his wife had died the year before,
and she wanted to sympathise with him, to console him.
"Doctor, I expect you don't recognise me?" she said with an affable
smile.
"Yes, Princess, I recognised you," said the doctor, taking off his
hat again.
"Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had forgotten your
princess. People only remember their enemies, but they forget their
friends. Have you, too, come to pray?"
"I am the doctor here, and I have to spend the night at the monastery
every Saturday."
"Well, how are you?" said the princess, sighing. "I hear that you
have lost your wife. What a calamity!"
"Yes, Princess, for me it is a great calamity."
"There's nothing for it! We must bear our troubles with resignation.
Not one hair of a man's head is lost without the Divine Will."
"Yes, Princess."
To the princess's friendly, gentle smile and her sighs the doctor
responded coldly and dryly: "Yes, Princess." And the expression of
his face was cold and dry.
"What else can I say to him?" she wondered.
"How long it is since we met!" she said. "Five years! How much water
has flowed under the bridge, how many changes in that time; it quite
frightens one to think of it! You know, I am married. . . . I am
not a countess now, but a princess. And by now I am separated from
my husband too."
"Yes, I heard so."
"God has sent me many trials. No doubt you have heard, too, that I
am almost ruined. My Dubovki, Sofyino, and Kiryakovo have all been
sold for my unhappy husband's debts. And I have only Baranovo and
Mihaltsevo left. It's terrible to look back: how many changes and
misfortunes of all kinds, how many mistakes!"
"Yes, Princess, many mistakes."
The princess was a little disconcerted. She knew her mistakes; they
were all of such a private character that no one but she could think
or speak of them. She could not resist asking:
"What mistakes are you thinking about?"
"You referred to them, so you know them . . ." answered the doctor,
and he smiled. "Why talk about them!"
"No; tell me, doctor. I shall be very grateful to you. And please
don't stand on ceremony with me. I love to hear the truth."
"I am not your judge, Princess."
"Not my judge! What a tone you take! You must know something about
me. Tell me!"
"If you really wish it, very well. Only I regret to say I'm not
clever at talking, and people can't always understand me."
The doctor thought a moment and began:
"A lot of mistakes; but the most important of them, in my opinion,
was the general spirit that prevailed on all your estates. You see,
I don't know how to express myself. I mean chiefly the lack of love,
the aversion for people that was felt in absolutely everything.
Your whole system of life was built upon that aversion. Aversion
for the human voice, for faces, for heads, steps . . . in fact, for
everything that makes up a human being. At all the doors and on the
stairs there stand sleek, rude, and lazy grooms in livery to prevent
badly dressed persons from entering the house; in the hall there
are chairs with high backs so that the footmen waiting there, during
balls and receptions, may not soil the walls with their heads; in
every room there are thick carpets that no human step may be heard;
every one who comes in is infallibly warned to speak as softly and
as little as possible, and to say nothing that might have a
disagreeable effect on the nerves or the imagination. And in your
room you don't shake hands with any one or ask him to sit down--
just as you didn't shake hands with me or ask me to sit down. . . ."
"By all means, if you like," said the princess, smiling and holding
out her hand. "Really, to be cross about such trifles. . . ."
"But I am not cross," laughed the doctor, but at once he flushed,
took off his hat, and waving it about, began hotly: "To be candid,
I've long wanted an opportunity to tell you all I think. . . . That
is, I want to tell you that you look upon the mass of mankind from
the Napoleonic standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon had
at least some idea; you have nothing except aversion."
"I have an aversion for people?" smiled the princess, shrugging her
shoulders in astonishment. "I have!"
"Yes, you! You want facts? By all means. In Mihaltsevo three former
cooks of yours, who have gone blind in your kitchens from the heat
of the stove, are living upon charity. All the health and strength
and good looks that is found on your hundreds of thousands of acres
is taken by you and your parasites for your grooms, your footmen,
and your coachmen. All these two-legged cattle are trained to be
flunkeys, overeat themselves, grow coarse, lose the 'image and
likeness,' in fact. . . . Young doctors, agricultural experts,
teachers, intellectual workers generally--think of it!--are
torn away from their honest work and forced for a crust of bread
to take part in all sorts of mummeries which make every decent man
feel ashamed! Some young men cannot be in your service for three
years without becoming hypocrites, toadies, sneaks. . . . Is that
a good thing? Your Polish superintendents, those abject spies, all
those Kazimers and Kaetans, go hunting about on your hundreds of
thousands of acres from morning to night, and to please you try to
get three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak disconnectedly, but
that doesn't matter. You don't look upon the simple people as human
beings. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to come
and see you, you looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as
living beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts
me, is having a fortune of over a million and doing nothing for
other people, nothing!"
The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing what to say
or how to behave. She had never before been spoken to in such a
tone. The doctor's unpleasant, angry voice and his clumsy, faltering
phrases made a harsh clattering noise in her ears and her head.
Then she began to feel as though the gesticulating doctor was hitting
her on the head with his hat.
"It's not true!" she articulated softly, in an imploring voice.
"I've done a great deal of good for other people; you know it
yourself!"
"Nonsense!" cried the doctor. "Can you possibly go on thinking of
your philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a
mere mummery? It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing
at loving your neighbour, the most open farce which even children
and stupid peasant women saw through! Take for instance your--
what was it called?--house for homeless old women without relations,
of which you made me something like a head doctor, and of which you
were the patroness. Mercy on us! What a charming institution it
was! A house was built with parquet floors and a weathercock on the
roof; a dozen old women were collected from the villages and made
to sleep under blankets and sheets of Dutch linen, and given toffee
to eat."
The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and went on
speaking rapidly and stammering:
"It was a farce! The attendants kept the sheets and the blankets
under lock and key, for fear the old women should soil them--'Let
the old devil's pepper-pots sleep on the floor.' The old women did
not dare to sit down on the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk
over the polished floors. Everything was kept for show and hidden
away from the old women as though they were thieves, and the old
women were clothed and fed on the sly by other people's charity,
and prayed to God night and day to be released from their prison
and from the canting exhortations of the sleek rascals to whose
care you committed them. And what did the managers do? It was simply
charming! About twice a week there would be thirty-five thousand
messages to say that the princess--that is, you--were coming
to the home next day. That meant that next day I had to abandon my
patients, dress up and be on parade. Very good; I arrive. The old
women, in everything clean and new, are already drawn up in a row,
waiting. Near them struts the old garrison rat--the superintendent
with his mawkish, sneaking smile. The old women yawn and exchange
glances, but are afraid to complain. We wait. The junior steward
gallops up. Half an hour later the senior steward; then the
superintendent of the accounts' office, then another, and then
another of them . . . they keep arriving endlessly. They all have
mysterious, solemn faces. We wait and wait, shift from one leg to
another, look at the clock--all this in monumental silence because
we all hate each other like poison. One hour passes, then a second,
and then at last the carriage is seen in the distance, and . . .
and . . ."
The doctor went off into a shrill laugh and brought out in a shrill
voice:
"You get out of the carriage, and the old hags, at the word of
command from the old garrison rat, begin chanting: 'The Glory of
our Lord in Zion the tongue of man cannot express. . .' A pretty
scene, wasn't it?"
The doctor went off into a bass chuckle, and waved his hand as
though to signify that he could not utter another word for laughing.
He laughed heavily, harshly, with clenched teeth, as ill-natured
people laugh; and from his voice, from his face, from his glittering,
rather insolent eyes it could be seen that he had a profound contempt
for the princess, for the home, and for the old women. There was
nothing amusing or laughable in all that he described so clumsily
and coarsely, but he laughed with satisfaction, even with delight.
"And the school?" he went on, panting from laughter. "Do you remember
how you wanted to teach peasant children yourself? You must have
taught them very well, for very soon the children all ran away, so
that they had to be thrashed and bribed to come and be taught. And
you remember how you wanted to feed with your own hands the infants
whose mothers were working in the fields. You went about the village
crying because the infants were not at your disposal, as the mothers
would take them to the fields with them. Then the village foreman
ordered the mothers by turns to leave their infants behind for your
entertainment. A strange thing! They all ran away from your benevolence
like mice from a cat! And why was it? It's very simple. Not because
our people are ignorant and ungrateful, as you always explained it
to yourself, but because in all your fads, if you'll excuse the
word, there wasn't a ha'p'orth of love and kindness! There was
nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets, nothing
else. . . . A person who does not feel the difference between a
human being and a lap-dog ought not to go in for philanthropy. I
assure you, there's a great difference between human beings and
lap-dogs!"