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A.P. Chekhov
- The Duel
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VIII
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XXI
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.
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