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A.P. Chekhov
- The Duel
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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'hte. 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!"
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