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A.P. Chekhov
- The Duel
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XXI
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!"
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