when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by
side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the
monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I
expect the earth will be covered with a crust of ice before it comes to
pass. Of all humane learning the most durable and living is, of course,
the teaching of Christ; but look how differently even that is
interpreted! Some teach that we must love all our neighbours but make an
exception of soldiers, criminals, and lunatics. They allow the first to
be killed in war, the second to be isolated or executed, and the third
they forbid to marry. Other interpreters teach that we must love all our
neighbours without exception, with no distinction of plus or minus.
According to their teaching, if a consumptive or a murderer or an
epileptic asks your daughter in marriage, you must let him have her. If
cr?ins go to war against the physically and mentally healthy, don't
defend yourselves. This advocacy of love for love's sake, like art for
art's sake, if it could have power, would bring mankind in the long run
to complete extinction, and so would become the vastest crime that has
ever been committed upon earth. There are very many interpretations, and
since there are many of them, serious thought is not satisfied by any
one of them, and hastens to add its own individual interpretation to the
mass. For that reason you should never put a question on a philosophical
or so-called Christian basis; by so doing you only remove the question
further from solution."
The deacon listened to the zoologist attentively, thought a little, and
asked:
"Have the philosophers invented the moral law which is innate in every
man, or did God create it together with the body?"
"I don't know. But that law is so universal among all peoples and all
ages that I fancy we ought to recognise it as organically connected with
man. It is not invented, but exists and will exist. I don't tell you
that one day it will be seen under the microscope, but its organic
connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious affections of the
brain and all so-called mental diseases, to the best of my belief, show
themselves first of all in the perversion of the moral law."
"Good. So then, just as our stomach bids us eat, our moral sense bids us
love our neighbours. Is that it? But our natural man through self-love
opposes the voice of conscience and reason, and this gives rise to many
brain-racking questions. To whom ought we to turn for the solution of
those questions if you forbid us to put them on the philosophic basis?"
"Turn to what little exact science we have. Trust to evidence and the
logic of facts. It is true it is but little, but, on the other hand, it
is less fluid and shifting than philosophy. The moral law, let us
suppose, demands that you love your neighbour. Well? Love ought to show
itself in the removal of everything which in one way or another is
injurious to men and threatens them with danger in the present or in the
future. Our knowledge and the evidence tells us that the morally and
physically abnormal are a menace to humanity. If so you must struggle
against the abnormal; if you are not able to raise them to the normal
standard you must have strength and ability to render them harmless--that
is, to destroy them."
"So love consists in the strong overcoming the weak."
"Undoubtedly."
"But you know the strong crucified our Lord Jesus Christ," said the
deacon hotly.
"The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but the
weak. Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle for
existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement of the weak
and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that you succeeded in
instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary
form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would
remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees,
resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the
degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with
humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by
civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he
is the chief and the master. But we civilised men have crucified Christ,
and we go on crucifying Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . .
And that something one ought to raise up in ourselves, or there will be
no end to these errors."
"But what criterion have you to distinguish the strong from the weak?"
"Knowledge and evidence. The tuberculous and the scrofulous are
recognised by their diseases, and the insane and the immoral by their
actions."
"But mistakes may be made!"
"Yes, but it's no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when you are
threatened with the deluge!"
"That's philosophy," laughed the deacon.
"Not a bit of it. You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy that
you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract studies with
which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because
they abstract your minds from what is obvious. Look the devil straight
in the eye, and if he's the devil, tell him he's the devil, and don't go
calling to Kant or Hegel for explanations."
The zoologist paused and went on:
"Twice two's four, and a stone's a stone. Here to-morrow we have a duel.
You and I will say it's stupid and absurd, that the duel is out of date,
that there is no real difference between the aristocratic duel and the
drunken brawl in the pot-house, and yet we shall not stop, we shall go
there and fight. So there is some force stronger than our reasoning. We
shout that war is plunder, robbery, atrocity, fratricide; we cannot look
upon blood without fainting; but the French or the Germans have only to
insult us for us to feel at once an exaltation of spirit; in the most
genuine way we shout 'Hurrah!' and rush to attack the foe. You will
invoke the blessing of God on our weapons, and our valour will arouse
universal and general enthusiasm. Again it follows that there is a
force, if not higher, at any rate stronger, than us and our philosophy.
We can no more stop it than that cloud which is moving upwards over the
sea. Don't be hypocritical, don't make a long nose at it on the sly; and
don't say, 'Ah, old-fashioned, stupid! Ah, it's inconsistent with
Scripture!' but look it straight in the face, recognise its rational
lawfulness, and when, for instance, it wants to destroy a rotten,
scrofulous, corrupt race, don't hinder it with your pilules and
misunderstood quotations from the Gospel. Leskov has a story of a
conscientious Danila who found a leper outside the town, and fed and
warmed him in the name of love and of Christ. If that Danila had really
loved humanity, he would have dragged the leper as far as possible from
the town, and would have flung him in a pit, and would have gone to save
the healthy. Christ, I hope, taught us a rational, intelligent,
practical love."
"What a fellow you are!" laughed the deacon. "You don't believe in
Christ. Why do you mention His name so often?"
"Yes, I do believe in Him. Only, of course, in my own way, not in yours.
Oh, deacon, deacon!" laughed the zoologist; he put his arm round the
deacon's waist, and said gaily: "Well? Are you coming with us to the
duel to-morrow?"
"My orders don't allow it, or else I should come."
"What do you mean by 'orders'?"
"I have been consecrated. I am in a state of grace."
"Oh, deacon, deacon," repeated Von Koren, laughing, "I love talking to
you."
"You say you have faith," said the deacon. "What sort of faith is it?
Why, I have an uncle, a priest, and he believes so that when in time of
drought he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes his
umbrella and leather overcoat for fear of getting wet through on his way
home. That's faith! When he speaks of Christ, his face is full of
radiance, and all the peasants, men and women, weep floods of tears. He
would stop that cloud and put all those forces you talk about to flight.
Yes . . . faith moves mountains."
The deacon laughed and slapped the zoologist on the shoulder.
"Yes . . ." he went on; "here you are teaching all the time, fathoming
the depths of the ocean, dividing the weak and the strong, writing books
and challenging to duels--and everything remains as it is; but, behold!
some feeble old man will mutter just one word with a holy spirit, or a
new Mahomet, with a sword, will gallop from Arabia, and everything will
be topsy-turvy, and in Europe not one stone will be left standing upon
another."
"Well, deacon, that's on the knees of the gods."
"Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse
still--mere waste of time and nothing more."
The doctor came into sight on the sea-front. He saw the deacon and the
zoologist, and went up to them.
"I believe everything is ready," he said, breathing hard. "Govorovsky
and Boyko will be the seconds. They will start at five o'clock in the
morning. How it has clouded over," he said, looking at the sky. "One can
see nothing; there will be rain directly."
"I hope you are coming with us?" said the zoologist.
"No, God preserve me; I'm worried enough as it is. Ustimovitch is going
instead of me. I've spoken to him already."
Far over the sea was a flash of lightning, followed by a hollow roll of
thunder.
"How stifling it is before a storm!" said Von Koren. "I bet you've been
to Laevsky already and have been weeping on his bosom."
"Why should I go to him?" answered the doctor in confusion. "What next?"
Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and the
street in the hope of meeting Laevsky. He was ashamed of his hastiness
and the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed it. He wanted
to apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him a good talking to,
to soothe him and to tell him that the duel was a survival of mediæval
barbarism, but that Providence itself had brought them to the duel as a
means of reconciliation; that the next day, both being splendid and
highly intelligent people, they would, after exchanging shots,
appreciate each other's noble qualities and would become friends. But he
could not come across Laevsky.
"What should I go and see him for?" repeated Samoylenko. "I did not
insult him; he insulted me. Tell me, please, why he attacked me. What
harm had I done him? I go into the drawing-room, and, all of a sudden,
without the least provocation: 'Spy!' There's a nice thing! Tell me, how
did it begin? What did you say to him?"
"I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. It is only
honest men or scoundrels who can find an escape from any position, but
one who wants to be at the same time an honest man and a scoundrel --it
is a hopeless position. But it's eleven o'clock, gentlemen, and we have
to be up early to-morrow."
There was a sudden gust of wind; it blew up the dust on the sea-front,
whirled it round in eddies, with a howl that drowned the roar of the
sea.
"A squall," said the deacon. "We must go in, our eyes are getting full
of dust."
As they went, Samoylenko sighed and, holding his hat, said:
"I suppose I shan't sleep to-night."
"Don't you agitate yourself," laughed the zoologist. "You can set your
mind at rest; the duel will end in nothing. Laevsky will magnanimously
fire into the air--he can do nothing else; and I daresay I shall not fire
at all. To be arrested and lose my time on Laevsky's account--the game's
not worth the candle. By the way, what is the punishment for duelling?"
"Arrest, and in the case of the death of your opponent a maximum of
three years' imprisonment in the fortress."
"The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul?"
"No, in a military fortress, I believe."
"Though this fine gentleman ought to have a lesson!"
Behind them on the sea, there was a flash of lightning, which for an
instant lighted up the roofs of the houses and the mountains. The
friends parted near the boulevard. When the doctor disappeared in the
darkness and his steps had died away, Von Koren shouted to him:
"I only hope the weather won't interfere with us to-morrow!"
"Very likely it will! Please God it may!"
"Good-night!"
"What about the night? What do you say?"
In the roar of the wind and the sea and the crashes of thunder, it was
difficult to hear.
"It's nothing," shouted the zoologist, and hurried home. XVII
"Upon my mind, weighed down with woe, Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds Her long, long scroll before my eyes. Loathing
and shuddering I curse And bitterly lament in vain, And bitter though
the tears I weep I do not wash those lines away."
PUSHKIN.
Whether they killed him next morning, or mocked at him--that is, left him
his life--he was ruined, anyway. Whether this disgraced woman killed
herself in her shame and despair, or dragged on her pitiful existence,
she was ruined anyway.
So thought Laevsky as he sat at the table late in the evening, still
rubbing his hands. The windows suddenly blew open with a bang; a violent
gust of wind burst into the room, and the papers fluttered from the
table. Laevsky closed the windows and bent down to pick up the papers.
He was aware of something new in his body, a sort of awkwardness he had
not felt before, and his movements were strange to him. He moved
timidly, jerking with his elbows and shrugging his shoulders; and when
he sat down to the table again, he again began rubbing his hands. His
body had lost its suppleness.
On the eve of death one ought to write to one's nearest relation.
Laevsky thought of this. He took a pen and wrote with a tremulous hand:
"Mother!"
He wanted to write to beg his mother, for the sake of the merciful God
in whom she believed, that she would give shelter and bring a little
warmth and kindness into the life of the unhappy woman who, by his
doing, had been disgraced and was in solitude, poverty, and weakness,
that she would forgive and forget everything, everything, everything,
and by her sacrifice atone to some extent for her son's terrible sin.
But he remembered how his mother, a stout, heavily-built old woman in a
lace cap, used to go out into the garden in the morning, followed by her
companion with the lap-dog; how she used to shout in a peremptory way to
the gardener and the servants, and how proud and haughty her face was--he
remembered all this and scratched out the word he had written.
There was a vivid flash of lightning at all three windows, and it was
followed by a prolonged, deafening roll of thunder, beginning with a
hollow rumble and ending with a crash so violent that all the window-
panes rattled. Laevsky got up, went to the window, and pressed his
forehead against the pane. There was a fierce, magnificent storm. On the
horizon lightning-flashes were flung in white streams from the storm-
clouds into the sea, lighting up the high, dark waves over the far-away
expanse. And to right and to left, and, no doubt, over the house too,
the lightning flashed.
"The storm!" whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some one or
to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds. "Dear
storm!"
He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a
hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue
eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain;
they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder,
the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed
himself and made haste to repeat: "Holy, holy, holy. . . ." Oh, where
had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days
of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now;
he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been
ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one
tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among
the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy
and ruin, and lie, lie. . . .
"What in my past was not vice?" he asked himself, trying to clutch at
some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches at the
bushes.
School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his work
and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country? That, too,
was a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a salary for doing
nothing, and it was an abominable swindling of the State for which one
was not punished.
He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by vice
and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a stranger,
like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part in the common
life of men, had been indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas,
their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and their struggles. He
had not said one good word, not written one line that was not useless
and vulgar; he had not done his fellows one ha'p'orth of service, but
had eaten their bread, drunk their wine, seduced their wives, lived on
their thoughts, and to justify his contemptible, parasitic life in their
eyes and in his own, he had always tried to assume an air of being
higher and better than they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .
He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov's, and he
was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and
Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had
begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young weak
woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of
her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her
here--to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was
bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his viciousness and
falsity--and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless,
pitiable life. Then he had grown sick of her, had begun to hate her, but
had not had the pluck to abandon her, and he had tried to entangle her
more and more closely in a web of lies. . . . These men had done the
rest.
Laevsky sat at the table, then got up and went to the window; at one
minute he put out the candle and then he lighted it again. He cursed
himself aloud, wept and wailed, and asked forgiveness; several times he
ran to the table in despair, and wrote:
"Mother!"
Except his mother, he had no relations or near friends; but how could
his mother help him? And where was she? He had an impulse to run to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands and feet,
to beg her forgiveness; but she was his victim, and he was afraid of her
as though she were dead.
"My life is ruined," he repeated, rubbing his hands. "Why am I still
alive, my God! . . ."
He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track was
lost in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky again,
because life was given only once and never came a second time. If he
could have turned back the days and years of the past, he would have
replaced the falsity with truth, the idleness with work, the boredom
with happiness; he would have given back purity to those whom he had
robbed of it. He would have found God and goodness, but that was as
impossible as to put back the fallen star into the sky, and because it
was impossible he was in despair.
When the storm was over, he sat by the open window and thought calmly of
what was before him. Von Koren would most likely kill him. The man's
clear, cold theory of life justified the destruction of the rotten and
the useless; if it changed at the crucial moment, it would be the hatred
and the repugnance that Laevsky inspired in him that would save him. If
he missed his aim or, in mockery of his hated opponent, only wounded
him, or fired in the air, what could he do then? Where could he go?
"Go to Petersburg?" Laevsky asked himself. But that would mean beginning
over again the old life which he cursed. And the man who seeks salvation
in change of place like a migrating bird would find nothing anywhere,
for all the world is alike to him. Seek salvation in men? In whom and
how? Samoylenko's kindness and generosity could no more save him than
the deacon's laughter or Von Koren's hatred. He must look for salvation
in himself alone, and if there were no finding it, why waste time? He
must kill himself, that was all. . . .
He heard the sound of a carriage. It was getting light. The carriage
passed by, turned, and crunching on the wet sand, stopped near the
house. There were two men in the carriage.
"Wait a minute; I'm coming directly," Laevsky said to them out of the
window. "I'm not asleep. Surely it's not time yet?"
"Yes, it's four o'clock. By the time we get there . . . ."
Laevsky put on his overcoat and cap, put some cigarettes in his pocket,
and stood still hesitating. He felt as though there was something else
he must do. In the street the seconds talked in low voices and the
horses snorted, and this sound in the damp, early morning, when
everybody was asleep and light was hardly dawning in the sky, filled
Laevsky's soul with a disconsolate feeling which was like a presentiment
of evil. He stood for a little, hesitating, and went into the bedroom.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was lying stretched out on the bed, wrapped from
head to foot in a rug. She did not stir, and her whole appearance,
especially her head, suggested an Egyptian mummy. Looking at her in
silence, Laevsky mentally asked her forgiveness, and thought that if the
heavens were not empty and there really were a God, then He would save
her; if there were no God, then she had better perish--there was nothing
for her to live for.
All at once she jumped up, and sat up in bed. Lifting her pale face and
looking with horror at Laevsky, she asked:
"Is it you? Is the storm over?"
"Yes."
She remembered; put both hands to her head and shuddered all over.
"How miserable I am!" she said. "If only you knew how miserable I am! I
expected," she went on, half closing her eyes, "that you would kill me
or turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay . . .
delay . . ."
Warmly and impulsively he put his arms round her and covered her knees
and hands with kisses. Then when she muttered something and shuddered
with the thought of the past, he stroked her hair, and looking into her
face, realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near
and dear to him, whom no one could replace.
When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to
return home alive. XVIII
The deacon got up, dressed, took his thick, gnarled stick and slipped
quietly out of the house. It was dark, and for the first minute when he
went into the street, he could not even see his white stick. There was
not a single star in the sky, and it looked as though there would be
rain again. There was a smell of wet sand and sea.
"It's to be hoped that the mountaineers won't attack us," thought the
deacon, hearing the tap of the stick on the pavement, and noticing how
loud and lonely the taps sounded in the stillness of the night.
When he got out of town, he began to see both the road and his stick.
Here and there in the black sky there were dark cloudy patches, and soon
a star peeped out and timidly blinked its one eye. The deacon walked
along the high rocky coast and did not see the sea; it was slumbering
below, and its unseen waves broke languidly and heavily on the shore, as
though sighing "Ouf!" and how slowly! One wave broke--the deacon had time
to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third.
As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the
languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway,
inconceivable time when God moved above chaos.
The deacon felt uncanny. He hoped God would not punish him for keeping
company with infidels, and even going to look at their duels. The duel
would be nonsensical, bloodless, absurd, but however that might be, it
was a heathen spectacle, and it was altogether unseemly for an
ecclesiastical person to be present at it. He stopped and
wondered--should he go back? But an intense, restless curiosity triumphed
over his doubts, and he went on.
"Though they are infidels they are good people, and will be saved," he
assured himself. "They are sure to be saved," he said aloud, lighting a
cigarette.
By what standard must one measure men's qualities, to judge rightly of
them? The deacon remembered his enemy, the inspector of the clerical
school, who believed in God, lived in chastity, and did not fight duels;
but he used to feed the deacon on bread with sand in it, and on one
occasion almost pulled off the deacon's ear. If human life was so
artlessly constructed that every one respected this cruel and dishonest
inspector who stole the Government flour, and his health and salvation
were prayed for in the schools, was it just to shun such men as Von
Koren and Laevsky, simply because they were unbelievers? The deacon was
weighing this question, but he recalled how absurd Samoylenko had looked
yesterday, and that broke the thread of his ideas. What fun they would
have next day! The deacon imagined how he would sit under a bush and
look on, and when Von Koren began boasting next day at dinner, he, the
deacon, would begin laughing and telling him all the details of the
duel.