Yegor!" he said, addressing his nephew. "Don't be troublesome; mind you
obey Nastasya Petrovna. . . . Good-bye; I am coming again to-morrow."
And he went away. Nastasya once more embraced Yegorushka, called him a
little angel, and with a tear-stained face began preparing for dinner.
Three minutes later Yegorushka was sitting beside her, answering her
endless questions and eating hot savoury cabbage soup.
In the evening he sat again at the same table and, resting his head on
his hand, listened to Nastasya Petrovna. Alternately laughing and
crying, she talked of his mother's young days, her own marriage, her
children. . . . A cricket chirruped in the stove, and there was a faint
humming from the burner of the lamp. Nastasya Petrovna talked in a low
voice, and was continually dropping her thimble in her excitement; and
Katka her granddaughter, crawled under the table after it and each time
sat a long while under the table, probably examining Yegorushka's feet;
and Yegorushka listened, half dozing and looking at the old woman's
face, her wart with hairs on it, and the stains of tears, and he felt
sad, very sad. He was put to sleep on a chest and told that if he were
hungry in the night he must go out into the little passage and take some
chicken, put there under a plate in the window.
Next morning Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher came to say good-bye.
Nastasya Petrovna was delighted to see them, and was about to set the
samovar; but Ivan Ivanitch, who was in a great hurry, waved his hands
and said:
"We have no time for tea! We are just setting off."
Before parting they all sat down and were silent for a minute. Nastasya
Petrovna heaved a deep sigh and looked towards the ikon with tear-
stained eyes.
"Well," began Ivan Ivanitch, getting up, "so you will stay. . . ."
All at once the look of business-like reserve vanished from his face; he
flushed a little and said with a mournful smile:
"Mind you work hard. . . . Don't forget your mother, and obey Nastasya
Petrovna. . . . If you are diligent at school, Yegor, I'll stand by
you."
He took his purse out of his pocket, turned his back to Yegorushka,
fumbled for a long time among the smaller coins, and, finding a ten-
kopeck piece, gave it to Yegorushka.
Father Christopher, without haste, blessed Yegorushka.
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. . . . Study,"
he said. "Work hard, my lad. If I die, remember me in your prayers. Here
is a ten-kopeck piece from me, too. . . ."
Yegorushka kissed his hand, and shed tears; something whispered in his
heart that he would never see the old man again.
"I have applied at the high school already," said Ivan Ivanitch in a
voice as though there were a corpse in the room. "You will take him for
the entrance examination on the seventh of August. . . . Well, good-bye;
God bless you, good-bye, Yegor!"
"You might at least have had a cup of tea," wailed Nastasya Petrovna.
Through the tears that filled his eyes Yegorushka could not see his
uncle and Father Christopher go out. He rushed to the window, but they
were not in the yard, and the red dog, who had just been barking, was
running back from the gate with the air of having done his duty. When
Yegorushka ran out of the gate Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher, the
former waving his stick with the crook, the latter his staff, were just
turning the corner. Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he
had known till then had vanished from him for ever. He sank helplessly
on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown
life that was beginning for him now. . . .
What would that life be like?
The Duel and Other Stories
THE DUEL I
It was eight o'clock in the morning--the time when the officers, the
local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the
sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to
drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of
twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and
with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of
acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the
army doctor.
With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his
shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his
hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the
unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after
making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily
good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and
rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and
goodness of heart, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms
with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one,
made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked
shashlik and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking
after other people's affairs and trying to interest some one on their
behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion
about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two
weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise
it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his
assistants and his soldiers to call him "Your Excellency," although he
was only a civil councillor.
"Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch," Laevsky began, when
both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. "Suppose
you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three
years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel
that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that
case?"
"It's very simple. 'You go where you please, madam'--and that would be
the end of it."
"It's easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no
friends or relations, without a farthing, who can't work . . ."
"Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five roubles
a month--and nothing more. It's very simple."
"Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five
roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and
proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would
you do it?"
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered
them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the
shingle. The friends got out and began dressing.
"Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don't love her,"
said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. "But one must look
at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a
sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I
died."
He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said:
"But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go
to the devil!"
The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was
quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they
brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water,
and a tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the
hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for
after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke
his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:
"A wonderfully magnificent view!"
After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which
prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and
sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no
better for the bathe and the coffee.
"Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch," he said. "I won't make
a secret of it; I'll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a
bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way! Forgive
me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out."
Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.
"I've lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her," Laevsky
went on; "or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her.
. . . These two years have been a mistake."
It was Laevsky's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink
palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did
so now.
"I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because
unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in
talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look
for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody
else's theories, in literary types--in the idea that we, upper-class
Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for
example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true
Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really,
brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!"
Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every
day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:
"Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight
from nature."
"My God!" sighed Laevsky; "how distorted we all are by civilisation! I
fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with,
we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and
interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her
husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the
emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like
this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the
people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter
the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground,
would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field,
and so on. If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von
Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years,
perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand
acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the
town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you go out
into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes
lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the
fields--mountains and the desert. Alien people, an alien country, a
wretched form of civilisation--all that is not so easy, brother, as
walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur coat, arm-in-arm with
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is needed here
is a life and death struggle, and I'm not a fighting man. A wretched
neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . . From the first day I knew that
my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for
love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer
and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting
than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of
ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every
morning, the same self-deception."
"You can't get on in the house without an iron," said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky's speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew. "You
are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a
splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest
intellect. Of course, you are not married," Samoylenko went on, glancing
round at the adjacent tables, "but that's not your fault; and besides .
. . one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level
of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes. . . . But to my
thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living
together all your life."
"Without love?"
"I will tell you directly," said Samoylenko. "Eight years ago there was
an old fellow, an agent, here--a man of very great intelligence. Well, he
used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you
hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have
lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached
the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you
ought to exercise all your patience. . . ."
"You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your
old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of
patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an
object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen
so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells
or a frisky horse, but I'll leave human beings alone."
Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a
glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:
"Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?"
"How can I explain it to you? . . . It's a disease in which the brain
becomes softer . . . as it were, dissolves."
"Is it curable?"
"Yes, if the disease is not neglected. Cold douches, blisters. . . .
Something internal, too."
"Oh! . . . Well, you see my position; I can't live with her: it is more
than I can do. While I'm with you I can be philosophical about it and
smile, but at home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable,
that if I were told, for instance, that I should have to live another
month with her, I should blow out my brains. At the same time, parting
with her is out of the question. She has no friends or relations; she
cannot work, and neither she nor I have any money. . . . What could
become of her? To whom could she go? There is nothing one can think of.
. . . Come, tell me, what am I to do?"
"H'm! . . ." growled Samoylenko, not knowing what to answer. "Does she
love you?"
"Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she
wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do
without her powder or her curl-papers. I am for her an indispensable,
integral part of her boudoir."
Samoylenko was embarrassed.
"You are out of humour to-day, Vanya," he said. "You must have had a bad
night."
"Yes, I slept badly. . . . Altogether, I feel horribly out of sorts,
brother. My head feels empty; there's a sinking at my heart, a weakness.
. . . I must run away."
"Run where?"
"There, to the North. To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and
ideas. . . . I'd give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in
the province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to
stroll for three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and
talk endlessly. . . . And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And
in the evening, when one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano float
from the house; one hears the train passing. . . ."
Laevsky laughed with pleasure; tears came into his eyes, and to cover
them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table for the
matches.
"I have not been in Russia for eighteen years," said Samoylenko. "I've
forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country more
splendid than the Caucasus."
"Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death are
languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent Caucasus
strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the choice of a
chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus, I should choose
the job of chimney-sweep."
Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes fixed
dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken temples,
at his bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off his heel,
displaying a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to pity, and
probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child, he asked:
"Is your mother living?"
"Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this
affair."
Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a good-
natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him, with whom
one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve. What he understood
in him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a great deal and at
unsuitable times; he played cards, despised his work, lived beyond his
means, frequently made use of unseemly expressions in conversation,
walked about the streets in his slippers, and quarrelled with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna before other people--and Samoylenko did not like this. But the
fact that Laevsky had once been a student in the Faculty of Arts,
subscribed to two fat reviews, often talked so cleverly that only a few
people understood him, was living with a well-educated woman--all this
Samoylenko did not understand, and he liked this and respected Laevsky,
thinking him superior to himself.
"There is another point," said Laevsky, shaking his head. "Only it is
between ourselves. I'm concealing it from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for the
time. . . . Don't let it out before her. . . . I got a letter the day
before yesterday, telling me that her husband has died from softening of
the brain."
"The Kingdom of Heaven be his!" sighed Samoylenko. "Why are you
concealing it from her?"
"To show her that letter would be equivalent to 'Come to church to be
married.' And we should first have to make our relations clear. When she
understands that we can't go on living together, I will show her the
letter. Then there will be no danger in it."
"Do you know what, Vanya," said Samoylenko, and a sad and imploring
expression came into his face, as though he were going to ask him about
something very touching and were afraid of being refused. "Marry her, my
dear boy!"
"Why?"
"Do your duty to that splendid woman! Her husband is dead, and so
Providence itself shows you what to do!"
"But do understand, you queer fellow, that it is impossible. To marry
without love is as base and unworthy of a man as to perform mass without
believing in it."
"But it's your duty to."
"Why is it my duty?" Laevsky asked irritably.
"Because you took her away from her husband and made yourself
responsible for her."
"But now I tell you in plain Russian, I don't love her!"
"Well, if you've no love, show her proper respect, consider her wishes.
. . ."
"'Show her respect, consider her wishes,'" Laevsky mimicked him. "As
though she were some Mother Superior! . . . You are a poor psychologist
and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get off
with nothing but respect and consideration. What a woman thinks most of
is her bedroom."
"Vanya, Vanya!" said Samoylenko, overcome with confusion.
"You are an elderly child, a theorist, while I am an old man in spite of
my years, and practical, and we shall never understand one another. We
had better drop this conversation. Mustapha!" Laevsky shouted to the
waiter. "What's our bill?"
"No, no . . ." the doctor cried in dismay, clutching Laevsky's arm. "It
is for me to pay. I ordered it. Make it out to me," he cried to
Mustapha.
The friends got up and walked in silence along the sea-front. When they
reached the boulevard, they stopped and shook hands at parting.
"You are awfully spoilt, my friend!" Samoylenko sighed. "Fate has sent
you a young, beautiful, cultured woman, and you refuse the gift, while
if God were to give me a crooked old woman, how pleased I should be if
only she were kind and affectionate! I would live with her in my
vineyard and . . ."
Samoylenko caught himself up and said:
"And she might get the samovar ready for me there, the old hag."
After parting with Laevsky he walked along the boulevard. When, bulky
and majestic, with a stern expression on his face, he walked along the
boulevard in his snow-white tunic and superbly polished boots, squaring
his chest, decorated with the Vladimir cross on a ribbon, he was very
much pleased with himself, and it seemed as though the whole world were
looking at him with pleasure. Without turning his head, he looked to
each side and thought that the boulevard was extremely well laid out;
that the young cypress-trees, the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic
palm-trees were very handsome and would in time give abundant shade;
that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people.
"It's strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus," he thought,
"very strange."
Five soldiers, carrying rifles, met him and saluted him. On the right
side of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking along the
pavement with her son, a schoolboy.
"Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna," Samoylenko shouted to her with a
pleasant smile. "Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . . My respects
to Nikodim Alexandritch!"
And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant of the
military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him,
and asked:
"Is there any one in the hospital?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Eh?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Very well, run along. . . ."
Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a full-
bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and said to
her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to a
regiment:
"Be so good as to give me some soda-water!" II
Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the
fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent
to a lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to
apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband.
When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with
her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and
turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking
of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a
preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time
doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to
attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing
but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look
handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
"Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?" she said.
"Why? There won't be an earthquake whether you go or not, I suppose . .
. ."
"No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed."
"Well, ask the doctor, then; I'm not a doctor."
On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her head.
And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what
she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: "How true it is, how
true!"
Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into
his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a
handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent and
oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly across
his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn evening, and
he sank into a state of drowsy oppression. It seemed to him that he had
wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and that it was through
his fault that her husband had died. It seemed to him that he had sinned
against his own life, which he had ruined, against the world of lofty
ideas, of learning, and of work, and he conceived that wonderful world
as real and possible, not on this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy
mountaineers sauntering upon it, but there in the North, where there
were operas, theatres, newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual
activity. One could only there--not here--be honest, intelligent, lofty,
and pure. He accused himself of having no ideal, no guiding principle in
life, though he had a dim understanding now what it meant. Two years
before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, it seemed to him
that he had only to go with her as his wife to the Caucasus, and he
would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the same way now, he was
convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and to go
to Petersburg, and he would get everything he wanted.
"Run away," he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.
"Run away!"