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A.P. Chekhov
- The Duel
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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!"
He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the
steamer and 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!"
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