then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would talk on
deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and set
off. Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by, the
air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-
trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton
with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia.
The passengers in the train would talk about trade, new singers, the
Franco-Russian entente; on all sides there would be the feeling of keen,
cultured, intellectual, eager life. . . . Hasten on, on! At last Nevsky
Prospect, and Great Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place, where he
used to live at one time when he was a student, the dear grey sky, the
drizzling rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .
"Ivan Andreitch!" some one called from the next room. "Are you at home?"
"I'm here," Laevsky responded. "What do you want?"
"Papers."
Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room,
yawning and shuffling with his slippers. There, at the open window that
looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks, laying out
some government documents on the window-sill.
"One minute, my dear fellow," Laevsky said softly, and he went to look
for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without
looking at them, and said: "It's hot!"
"Yes. Are you coming to-day?"
"I don't think so. . . . I'm not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that I
will come and see him after dinner."
The clerk went away. Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began
thinking:
"And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them. Before I
go away from here I ought to pay up my debts. I owe about two thousand
roubles. I have no money. . . . Of course, that's not important; I shall
pay part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest, later, from
Petersburg. The chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . . First of all
we must define our relations. . . . Yes."
A little later he was considering whether it would not be better to go
to Samoylenko for advice.
"I might go," he thought, "but what use would there be in it? I shall
only say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women, about what
is honest or dishonest. What's the use of talking about what is honest
or dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life, if I am suffocating
in this cursed slavery and am killing myself? . . . One must realise at
last that to go on leading the life I do 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
distaste--"that is so wrong that I can't find words for it!"
"People are judged by their actions," Von Koren continued. "Now you
decide, deacon. . . . I am going to talk to you, deacon. Mr. Laevsky's
career lies open before you, like a long Chinese puzzle, and you can
read it from beginning to end. What has he been doing these two years
that he has been living here? We will reckon his doings on our fingers.
First, he has taught the inhabitants of the town to play vint: two years
ago that game was unknown here; now they all play it from morning till
late at night, even the women and the boys. Secondly, he has taught the
residents to drink beer, which was not known here either; the
inhabitants are indebted to him for the knowledge of various sorts of
spirits, so that now they can distinguish Kospelov's vodka from
Smirnov's No. 21, blindfold. Thirdly, in former days, people here made
love to other men's wives in secret, from the same motives as thieves
steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered something they
were ashamed to make a public display of. Laevsky has come as a pioneer
in that line; he lives with another man's wife openly. . . . Fourthly .
. ."
Von Koren hurriedly ate up his soup and gave his plate to the orderly.
"I understood Laevsky from the first month of our acquaintance," he went
on, addressing the deacon. "We arrived here at the same time. Men like
him are very fond of friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and all the rest
of it, because they always want company for vint, drinking, and eating;
besides, they are talkative and must have listeners. We made
friends--that is, he turned up every day, hindered me working, and
indulged in confidences in regard to his mistress. From the first he
struck me by his exceptional falsity, which simply made me sick. As a
friend I pitched into him, asking him why he drank too much, why he
lived beyond his means and got into debt, why he did nothing and read
nothing, why he had so little culture and so little knowledge; and in
answer to all my questions he used to smile bitterly, sigh, and say: 'I
am a failure, a superfluous man'; or: 'What do you expect, my dear
fellow, from us, the debris of the serf-owning class?' or: 'We are
degenerate. . . .' Or he would begin a long rigmarole about Onyegin,
Petchorin, Byron's Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would say: 'They are
our fathers in flesh and in spirit.' So we are to understand that it was
not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his office for
weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but
Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the
superfluous man, were responsible for it. The cause of his extreme
dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but
somewhere outside in space. And so--an ingenious idea!--it is not only he
who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the
eighties,' 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning
class'; 'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to
understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall:
that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a
phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the
causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a
lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of
influences, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and their ladies
were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out
for a long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever
rogue. Such types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering
of education and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are very
clever in posing as exceptionally complex natures."
"Hold your tongue!" Samoylenko flared up. "I will not allow a splendid
fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!"
"Don't interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch," said Von Koren coldly; "I am just
finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism. Here is his moral
skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till
dinner-time, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two
o'clock slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o'clock a bathe, tea and
wine, then vint and lying; at ten o'clock supper and wine; and after
midnight sleep and la femme. His existence is confined within this
narrow programme like an egg within its shell. Whether he walks or sits,
is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards,
slippers, and women. Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming part in his life.
He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in love; that when he was a
student in his first year he was living with a lady who had a good
influence over him, and to whom he was indebted for his musical
education. In his second year he bought a prostitute from a brothel and
raised her to his level--that is, took her as his kept mistress, and she
lived with him for six months and then ran away back to the brothel-
keeper, and her flight caused him much spiritual suffering. Alas! his
sufferings were so great that he had to leave the university and spend
two years at home doing nothing. But this was all for the best. At home
he made friends with a widow who advised him to leave the Faculty of
Jurisprudence and go into the Faculty of Arts. And so he did. When he
had taken his degree, he fell passionately in love with his present . .
. what's her name? . . . married lady, and was obliged to flee with her
here to the Caucasus for the sake of his ideals, he would have us
believe, seeing that . . . to-morrow, if not to-day, he will be tired of
her and flee back again to Petersburg, and that, too, will be for the
sake of his ideals."
"How do you know?" growled Samoylenko, looking angrily at the zoologist.
"You had better eat your dinner."
The next course consisted of boiled mullet with Polish sauce. Samoylenko
helped each of his companions to a whole mullet and poured out the sauce
with his own hand. Two minutes passed in silence.
"Woman plays an essential part in the life of every man," said the
deacon. "You can't help that."
"Yes, but to what degree? For each of us woman means mother, sister,
wife, friend. To Laevsky she is everything, and at the same time nothing
but a mistress. She--that is, cohabitation with her-- is the happiness and
object of his life; he is gay, sad, bored, disenchanted--on account of
woman; his life grows disagreeable --woman is to blame; the dawn of a new
life begins to glow, ideals turn up--and again look for the woman. . . .
He only derives enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is
woman. Our age is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and
the sixties only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves
obviously to the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must
have in their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which
stifles the brain and directs their whole psychology. Watch Laevsky when
he is sitting anywhere in company. You notice: when one raises any
general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or
instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks
languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything
is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female--for
instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation,
devours the male--his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and
the man revives, in fact. All his thoughts, however noble, lofty, or
neutral they may be, they all have one point of resemblance. You walk
along the street with him and meet a donkey, for instance. . . . 'Tell
me, please,' he asks, 'what would happen if you mated a donkey with a
camel?' And his dreams! Has he told you of his dreams? It is
magnificent! First, he dreams that he is married to the moon, then that
he is summoned before the police and ordered to live with a guitar . .
."
The deacon burst into resounding laughter; Samoylenko frowned and
wrinkled up his face angrily so as not to laugh, but could not restrain
himself, and laughed.
"And it's all nonsense!" he said, wiping his tears. "Yes, by Jove, it's
nonsense!" IV
The deacon was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he
got a stitch in his side, till he was helpless. It seemed as though he
only liked to be in people's company because there was a ridiculous side
to them, and because they might be given ridiculous nicknames. He had
nicknamed Samoylenko "the tarantula," his orderly "the drake," and was
in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as "Japanese monkeys." He watched people's faces
greedily, listened without blinking, and it could be seen that his eyes
filled with laughter and his face was tense with expectation of the
moment when he could let himself go and burst into laughter.
"He is a corrupt and depraved type," the zoologist continued, while the
deacon kept his eyes riveted on his face, expecting he would say
something funny. "It is not often one can meet with such a nonentity. In
body he is inert, feeble, prematurely old, while in intellect he differs
in no respect from a fat shopkeeper's wife who does nothing but eat,
drink, and sleep on a feather-bed, and who keeps her coachman as a
lover."
The deacon began guffawing again.