ads:
The Duel
Anton Chekhov
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
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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:
ads:
"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!"
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!"
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 dÕhôte. 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!"
IV
The deacon was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he got a stitch in his
side, till he was helpless. It seemed as though he only liked to be in people's company
because there was a ridiculous side to them, and because they might be given ridiculous
nicknames. He had nicknamed Samoylenko "the tarantula," his orderly "the drake," and was
in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna as "Japanese monkeys." He watched people's faces greedily, listened without
blinking, and it could be seen that his eyes filled with laughter and his face was tense with
expectation of the moment when he could let himself go and burst into laughter.
"He is a corrupt and depraved type," the zoologist continued, while the deacon kept his eyes
riveted on his face, expecting he would say something funny. "It is not often one can meet
with such a nonentity. In body he is inert, feeble, prematurely old, while in intellect he
differs in no respect from a fat shopkeeper's wife who does nothing but eat, drink, and sleep
on a feather-bed, and who keeps her coachman as a lover."
The deacon began guffawing again.
"Don't laugh, deacon," said Von Koren. "It grows stupid, at last. I should not have paid
attention to his insignificance," he went on, after waiting till the deacon had left off
laughing; "I should have passed him by if he were not so noxious and dangerous. His
noxiousness lies first of all in the fact that he has great success with women, and so
threatens to leave descendants -- that is, to present the world with a dozen Laevskys as
feeble and as depraved as himself. Secondly, he is in the highest degree contaminating. I
have spoken to you already of vint and beer. In another year or two he will dominate the
whole Caucasian coast. You know how the mass, especially its middle stratum, believe in
intellectuality, in a university education, in gentlemanly manners, and in literary language.
Whatever filthy thing he did, they would all believe that it was as it should be, since he is an
intellectual man, of liberal ideas and university education. What is more, he is a failure, a
superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the age, and that means he can do anything. He
is a charming fellow, a regular good sort, he is so genuinely indulgent to human
weaknesses; he is compliant, accommodating, easy and not proud; one can drink with him
and gossip and talk evil of people. . . . The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in
religion and morals, like best of all the little gods who have the same weaknesses as
themselves. Only think what a wide field he has for contamination! Besides, he is not a bad
actor and is a clever hypocrite, and knows very well how to twist things round. Only take
his little shifts and dodges, his attitude to civilisation, for instance. He has scarcely sniffed
at civilisation, yet: 'Ah, how we have been crippled by civilisation! Ah, how I envy those
savages, those children of nature, who know nothing of civilisation!' We are to understand,
you see, that at one time, in ancient days, he has been devoted to civilisation with his whole
soul, has served it, has sounded it to its depths, but it has exhausted him, disillusioned him,
deceived him; he is a Faust, do you see? -- a second Tolstoy. . . . As for Schopenhauer and
Spencer, he treats them like small boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way:
'Well, what do you say, old Spencer?' He has not read Spencer, of course, but how
charming he is when with light, careless irony he says of his lady friend: 'She has read
Spencer!' And they all listen to him, and no one cares to understand that this charlatan has
not the right to kiss the sole of Spencer's foot, let alone speaking about him in that tone!
Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's altars, spattering
them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to justify and conceal one's own rottenness
and moral poverty is only possible for a very vain, base, and nasty creature."
"I don't know what it is you expect of him, Kolya," said Samoylenko, looking at the
zoologist, not with anger now, but with a guilty air. "He is a man the same as every one
else. Of course, he has his weaknesses, but he is abreast of modern ideas, is in the service,
is of use to his country. Ten years ago there was an old fellow serving as agent here, a man
of the greatest intelligence . . . and he used to say . . ."
"Nonsense, nonsense!" the zoologist interrupted. "You say he is in the service; but how
does he serve? Do you mean to tell me that things have been done better because he is here,
and the officials are more punctual, honest, and civil? On the contrary, he has only
sanctioned their slackness by his prestige as an intellectual university man. He is only
punctual on the 20th of the month, when he gets his salary; on the other days he lounges
about at home in slippers and tries to look as if he were doing the Government a great
service by living in the Caucasus. No, Alexandr Daviditch, don't stick up for him. You are
insincere from beginning to end. If you really loved him and considered him your
neighbour, you would above all not be indifferent to his weaknesses, you would not be
indulgent to them, but for his own sake would try to make him innocuous."
"That is?"
"Innocuous. Since he is incorrigible, he can only be made innocuous in one way. . . ." Von
Koren passed his finger round his throat. "Or he might be drowned . . .," he added. "In the
interests of humanity and in their own interests, such people ought to be destroyed. They
certainly ought."
"What are you saying?" muttered Samoylenko, getting up and looking with amazement at
the zoologist's calm, cold face. " Deacon, what is he saying? Why -- are you in your
senses?"
"I don't insist on the death penalty," said Von Koren. "If it is proved that it is pernicious,
devise something else. If we can't destroy Laevsky, why then, isolate him, make him
harmless, send him to hard labour."
"What are you saying!" said Samoylenko in horror. "With pepper, with pepper," he cried in
a voice of despair, seeing that the deacon was eating stuffed aubergines without pepper.
"You with your great intellect, what are you saying! Send our friend, a proud intellectual
man, to penal servitude!"
"Well, if he is proud and tries to resist, put him in fetters!"
Samoylenko could not utter a word, and only twiddled his fingers; the deacon looked at his
flabbergasted and really absurd face, and laughed.
"Let us leave off talking of that," said the zoologist. "Only remember one thing, Alexandr
Daviditch: primitive man was preserved from such as Laevsky by the struggle for existence
and by natural selection; now our civilisation has considerably weakened the struggle and
the selection, and we ought to look after the destruction of the rotten and worthless for
ourselves; otherwise, when the Laevskys multiply, civilisation will perish and mankind will
degenerate utterly. It will be our fault."
"If it depends on drowning and hanging," said Samoylenko, "damnation take your
civilisation, damnation take your humanity! Damnation take it! I tell you what: you are a
very learned and intelligent man and the pride of your country, but the Germans have ruined
you. Yes, the Germans! The Germans!
Since Samoylenko had left Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, he had rarely seen a
German and had not read a single German book, but, in his opinion, every harmful idea in
politics or science was due to the Germans. Where he had got this notion he could not have
said himself, but he held it firmly.
"Yes, the Germans!" he repeated once more. "Come and have some tea."
All three stood up, and putting on their hats, went out into the little garden, and sat there
under the shade of the light green maples, the pear-trees, and a chestnut-tree. The zoologist
and the deacon sat on a bench by the table, while Samoylenko sank into a deep wicker chair
with a sloping back. The orderly handed them tea, jam, and a bottle of syrup.
It was very hot, thirty degrees Réaumur in the shade. The sultry air was stagnant and
motionless, and a long spider-web, stretching from the chestnut-tree to the ground, hung
limply and did not stir.
The deacon took up the guitar, which was constantly lying on the ground near the table,
tuned it, and began singing softly in a thin voice:
" 'Gathered round the tavern were the seminary lads,' "
but instantly subsided, overcome by the heat, mopped his brow and glanced upwards at the
blazing blue sky. Samoylenko grew drowsy; the sultry heat, the stillness and the delicious
after-dinner languor, which quickly pervaded all his limbs, made him feel heavy and sleepy;
his arms dropped at his sides, his eyes grew small, his head sank on his breast. He looked
with almost tearful tenderness at Von Koren and the deacon, and muttered:
"The younger generation. . . A scientific star and a luminary of the Church. . . . I shouldn't
wonder if the long-skirted alleluia will be shooting up into a bishop; I dare say I may come
to kissing his hand. . . . Well . . . please God. . . ."
Soon a snore was heard. Von Koren and the deacon finished their tea and went out into the
street.
"Are you going to the harbour again to catch sea-gudgeon?" asked the zoologist.
"No, it's too hot."
"Come and see me. You can pack up a parcel and copy something for me. By the way, we
must have a talk about what you are to do. You must work, deacon. You can't go on like
this."
"Your words are just and logical," said the deacon. "But my laziness finds an excuse in the
circumstances of my present life. You know yourself that an uncertain position has a great
tendency to make people apathetic. God only knows whether I have been sent here for a
time or permanently. I am living here in uncertainty, while my wife is vegetating at her
father's and is missing me. And I must confess my brain is melting with the heat."
"That's all nonsense," said the zoologist. "You can get used to the heat, and you can get
used to being without the deaconess. You mustn't be slack; you must pull yourself
together."
V
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went to bathe in the morning, and her cook, Olga, followed her
with a jug, a copper basin, towels, and a sponge. In the bay stood two unknown steamers
with dirty white funnels, obviously foreign cargo vessels. Some men dressed in white and
wearing white shoes were walking along the harbour, shouting loudly in French, and were
answered from the steamers. The bells were ringing briskly in the little church of the town.
"To-day is Sunday!" Nadyezhda Fyodorovna remembered with pleasure.
She felt perfectly well, and was in a gay holiday humour. In a new loose-fitting dress of
coarse thick tussore silk, and a big wide-brimmed straw hat which was bent down over her
ears, so that her face looked out as though from a basket, she fancied she looked very
charming. She thought that in the whole town there was only one young, pretty, intellectual
woman, and that was herself, and that she was the only one who knew how to dress herself
cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. That dress, for example, cost only twenty-two roubles,
and yet how charming it was! In the whole town she was the only one who could be
attractive, while there were numbers of men, so they must all, whether they would or not, be
envious of Laevsky.
She was glad that of late Laevsky had been cold to her, reserved and polite, and at times
even harsh and rude; in the past she had met all his outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or
strange incomprehensible glances, with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or to
starve herself to death; now she only blushed, looked guiltily at him, and was glad he was
not affectionate to her. If he had abused her, threatened her, it would have been better and
pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly guilty towards him. She felt she was to blame, in the
first place, for not sympathising with the dreams of a life of hard work, for the sake of
which he had given up Petersburg and had come here to the Caucasus, and she was
convinced that he had been angry with her of late for precisely that. When she was
travelling to the Caucasus, it seemed that she would find here on the first day a cosy nook
by the sea, a snug little garden with shade, with birds, with little brooks, where she could
grow flowers and vegetables, rear ducks and hens, entertain her neighbours, doctor poor
peasants and distribute little books amongst them. It had turned out that the Caucasus was
nothing but bare mountains, forests, and huge valleys, where it took a long time and a great
deal of effort to find anything and settle down; that there were no neighbours of any sort;
that it was very hot and one might be robbed. Laevsky had been in no hurry to obtain a
piece of land; she was glad of it, and they seemed to be in a tacit compact never to allude to
a life of hard work. He was silent about it, she thought, because he was angry with her for
being silent about it.
In the second place, she had without his knowledge during those two years bought various
trifles to the value of three hundred roubles at Atchmianov's shop. She had bought the
things by degrees, at one time materials, at another time silk or a parasol, and the debt had
grown imperceptibly.
"I will tell him about it to-day . . .," she used to decide, but at once reflected that in
Laevsky's present mood it would hardly be convenient to talk to him of debts.
Thirdly, she had on two occasions in Laevsky's absence received a visit from Kirilin, the
police captain: once in the morning when Laevsky had gone to bathe, and another time at
midnight when he was playing cards. Remembering this, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna flushed
crimson, and looked round at the cook as though she might overhear her thoughts. The
long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights,
and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the
useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the
town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest
and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and
wearying her with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as
though she were mad, she thought of nothing else day and night. Breathing, looking,
walking, she felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love; the
darkness of evening -- the same; the mountains -- the same. . . . And when Kirilin began
paying her attentions, she had neither the power nor the wish to resist, and surrendered to
him. . . .
Now the foreign steamers and the men in white reminded her for some reason of a huge
hall; together with the shouts of French she heard the strains of a waltz, and her bosom
heaved with unaccountable delight. She longed to dance and talk French.
She reflected joyfully that there was nothing terrible about her infidelity. Her soul had no
part in her infidelity; she still loved Laevsky, and that was proved by the fact that she was
jealous of him, was sorry for him, and missed him when he was away. Kirilin had turned
out to be very mediocre, rather coarse though handsome; everything was broken off with
him already and there would never be anything more. What had happened was over; it had
nothing to do with any one, and if Laevsky found it out he would not believe in it.
There was only one bathing-house for ladies on the sea-front; men bathed under the open
sky. Going into the bathing-house, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna found there an elderly lady,
Marya Konstantinovna Bityugov, and her daughter Katya, a schoolgirl of fifteen; both of
them were sitting on a bench undressing. Marya Konstantinovna was a good-natured,
enthusiastic, and genteel person, who talked in a drawling and pathetic voice. She had been
a governess until she was thirty-two, and then had married Bityugov, a Government official
-- a bald little man with his hair combed on to his temples and with a very meek disposition.
She was still in love with him, was jealous, blushed at the word "love," and told every one
she was very happy.
"My dear," she cried enthusiastically, on seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, assuming an
expression which all her acquaintances called "almond-oily." "My dear, how delightful that
you have come! We'll bathe together -- that's enchanting!"
Olga quickly flung off her dress and chemise, and began undressing her mistress.
"It's not quite so hot to-day as yesterday?" said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, shrinking at the
coarse touch of the naked cook. "Yesterday I almost died of the heat."
"Oh, yes, my dear; I could hardly breathe myself. Would you believe it? I bathed yesterday
three times! Just imagine, my dear, three times! Nikodim Alexandritch was quite uneasy."
"Is it possible to be so ugly?" thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, looking at Olga and the
official's wife; she glanced at Katya and thought: "The little girl's not badly made."
"Your Nikodim Alexandritch is very charming!" she said. "I'm simply in love with him."
"Ha, ha, ha!" cried Marya Konstantinovna, with a forced laugh; "that's quite enchanting."
Free from her clothes, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna felt a desire to fly. And it seemed to her that
if she were to wave her hands she would fly upwards. When she was undressed, she noticed
that Olga looked scornfully at her white body. Olga, a young soldier's wife, was living with
her lawful husband, and so considered herself superior to her mistress. Marya
Konstantinovna and Katya were afraid of her, and did not respect her. This was
disagreeable, and to raise herself in their opinion, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna said:
"At home, in Petersburg, summer villa life is at its height now. My husband and I have so
many friends! We ought to go and see them."
"I believe your husband is an engineer?" said Marya Konstantinovna timidly.
"I am speaking of Laevsky. He has a great many acquaintances. But unfortunately his
mother is a proud aristocrat, not very intelligent. . . ."
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna threw herself into the water without finishing; Marya
Konstantinovna and Katya made their way in after her.
"There are so many conventional ideas in the world," Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went on, "and
life is not so easy as it seems."
Marya Konstantinovna, who had been a governess in aristocratic families and who was an
authority on social matters, said:
"Oh yes! Would you believe me, my dear, at the Garatynskys' I was expected to dress for
lunch as well as for dinner, so that, like an actress, I received a special allowance for my
wardrobe in addition to my salary."
She stood between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Katya as though to screen her daughter
from the water that washed the former.
Through the open doors looking out to the sea they could see some one swimming a
hundred paces from their bathing-place.
"Mother, it's our Kostya," said Katya.
"Ach, ach!" Marya Konstantinovna cackled in her dismay. "Ach, Kostya!" she shouted,
"Come back! Kostya, come back!"
Kostya, a boy of fourteen, to show off his prowess before his mother and sister, dived and
swam farther, but began to be exhausted and hurried back, and from his strained and serious
face it could be seen that he could not trust his own strength.
"The trouble one has with these boys, my dear! said Marya Konstantinovna, growing
calmer. "Before you can turn round, he will break his neck. Ah, my dear, how sweet it is,
and yet at the same time how difficult, to be a mother! One's afraid of everything."
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna put on her straw hat and dashed out into the open sea. She swam
some thirty feet and then turned on her back. She could see the sea to the horizon, the
steamers, the people on the sea-front, the town; and all this, together with the sultry heat
and the soft, transparent waves, excited her and whispered that she must live, live. . . . A
sailing-boat darted by her rapidly and vigorously, cleaving the waves and the air; the man
sitting at the helm looked at her, and she liked being looked at. . . .
After bathing, the ladies dressed and went away together.
"I have fever every alternate day, and yet I don't get thin," said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
licking her lips, which were salt from the bathe, and responding with a smile to the bows of
her acquaintances. "I've always been plump, and now I believe I'm plumper than ever."
"That, my dear, is constitutional. If, like me, one has no constitutional tendency to
stoutness, no diet is of any use. . . . But you've wetted your hat, my dear."
"It doesn't matter; it will dry."
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna saw again the men in white who were walking on the sea-front and
talking French; and again she felt a sudden thrill of joy, and had a vague memory of some
big hall in which she had once danced, or of which, perhaps, she had once dreamed. And
something at the bottom of her soul dimly and obscurely whispered to her that she was a
pretty, common, miserable, worthless woman. . . .
Marya Konstantinovna stopped at her gate and asked her to come in and sit down for a little
while.
"Come in, my dear," she said in an imploring voice, and at the same time she looked at
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna with anxiety and hope; perhaps she would refuse and not come in!
"With pleasure," said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, accepting. "You know how I love being with
you!"
And she went into the house. Marya Konstantinovna sat her down and gave her coffee,
regaled her with milk rolls, then showed her photographs of her former pupils, the
Garatynskys, who were by now married. She showed her, too, the examination reports of
Kostya and Katya. The reports were very good, but to make them seem even better, she
complained, with a sigh, how difficult the lessons at school were now. . . . She made much
of her visitor, and was sorry for her, though at the same time she was harassed by the
thought that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna might have a corrupting influence on the mora
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