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!"