The Duel

I

It was eight o’clock in the morning — the hour when officers, officials, and visitors, after a hot, stifling night, usually bathed in the sea and then went to the pavilion to drink coffee or tea. Ivan Andreich Laevsky, a young man of twenty-eight, thin and fair-haired, in the cap of the Ministry of Finance and in slippers, having come down to bathe, found on the shore many acquaintances, among them his friend, the army doctor Samoylenko.

With a large cropped head, no neck, red-faced, big-nosed, with shaggy black eyebrows and gray side-whiskers, fat, flabby, and with a hoarse army bass voice besides, this Samoylenko made an unpleasant impression on every newcomer — of a blustering old soldier with a wheeze — but two or three days after the first acquaintance his face would begin to seem extraordinarily kind, likable, even handsome. Despite his clumsiness and his rough tone, he was a mild man, boundlessly kind, good-natured, and obliging. He was on familiar terms with everyone in town, lent money to everyone, treated everyone, made matches, made peace, arranged picnics at which he grilled shashlik and cooked a very good mullet soup; he was always petitioning and interceding for someone, and always delighted about something. By general opinion he was without sin, and only two weaknesses were known to attach to him: first, he was ashamed of his own kindness and tried to disguise it behind a stern look and an assumed roughness, and second, he liked the medical orderlies and soldiers to call him Your Excellency, though he was only a civil councillor.

"Answer me one question, Aleksandr Davidych," Laevsky began, when the two of them, he and Samoylenko, had gone into the water up to their shoulders. "Suppose you fell in love with a woman and took up with her; you lived with her, say, more than two years, and then, as happens, fell out of love and began to feel that she was a stranger to you. What would you do in that case?"

"Very simple. Off you go, my dear, wherever you like — and that’s the end of it."

"Easy to say! But what if she has nowhere to go? She’s a solitary woman, without family, without a kopeck, doesn’t know how to work..."

"So what? Five hundred at once, or twenty-five a month — and that’s that. Very simple."

"Suppose you had both the five hundred and the twenty-five a month, but the woman I’m speaking of is intelligent and proud. Would you really bring yourself to offer her money? And in what form?"

Samoylenko wanted to answer something, but just then a big wave covered them both, then broke on the shore and rolled back with a noise over the small stones. The friends came out onto the shore and began to dress.

"Of course it’s hard to live with a woman if you don’t love her," said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boot. "But you must reason humanely about it, Vanya. If it were me, I wouldn’t show her that I’d fallen out of love — I’d live with her till death."

He suddenly felt ashamed of his words; he caught himself and said:

"As for me, I wish there were no women at all. To the devil with them!"

The friends dressed and went to the pavilion. Here Samoylenko was one of the family, and he even had his own special crockery. Every morning they brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall faceted glass of water with ice, and a small glass of cognac; he would first pour out the cognac, then the hot coffee, then the ice water, and this must have been very good, because after drinking it his eyes turned oily, he would smooth his side-whiskers with both hands, and, looking at the sea, say:

"A remarkably magnificent view!"

After a long night spent on gloomy, useless thoughts that kept him from sleeping and seemed to thicken the stuffiness and dark of the night, Laevsky felt broken and listless. The bathing and the coffee had not made him feel better.

"Let’s go on with our conversation, Aleksandr Davidych," he said. "I won’t hide it, I’ll tell you frankly, as a friend: things between me and Nadezhda Fyodorovna are bad... very bad! Forgive me for letting you into my secrets, but I have to speak out."

Samoylenko, sensing what the talk would be about, lowered his eyes and began drumming his fingers on the table.

"I’ve lived with her two years and fallen out of love..." Laevsky went on, "— that is, rather, I’ve come to understand that there was no love at all... These two years have been a deception."

Laevsky had a habit, while talking, of carefully examining his pink palms, biting his nails, or crumpling his cuffs between his fingers. And now he was doing the same thing.

"I know very well you can’t help me," he said, "but I’m telling you because for the likes of us — failures, superfluous men — all salvation lies in talk. I have to generalize every act of mine, I have to find explanation and justification for my absurd life in someone’s theories, in literary types, in the idea, say, that we, the gentry, are degenerating, and so on... And last night, for instance, I comforted myself by thinking the whole time: ah, how right Tolstoy is, mercilessly right! And it made things easier for me. Really, brother, a great writer! Say what you like."

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and every day meant to, grew embarrassed and said:

"Yes, all writers write out of imagination, but he writes straight from life..."

"My God," sighed Laevsky, "to what a degree we’re crippled by civilization! I fell in love with a married woman; she loved me too... At first there were kisses, and quiet evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and shared interests... What a lie! We were, in essence, running away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves that we were running from the emptiness of our educated life. We pictured our future like this: at first, in the Caucasus, while we got to know the place and the people, I would put on the civil-service uniform and take up a post; then, later, out in the open country, we would take ourselves a patch of land, work by the sweat of our brow, start a vineyard, a field, and so on. If you or that zoologist friend of yours, von Koren, had been in my place, you might have lived thirty years with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and left your heirs a rich vineyard and a thousand acres of maize, but I felt myself a bankrupt from the first day. In town there’s unbearable heat, boredom, no people, and you go out into the field and under every bush and stone you imagine solifuges, scorpions, and snakes, and beyond the field, mountains and desert. Alien people, alien nature, a wretched culture — all that, brother, isn’t as easy as strolling down the Nevsky in a fur coat, arm in arm with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of warm lands. Here you need a fight to the death, and what kind of fighter am I? A pathetic neurasthenic, a soft-handed idler... From the very first day I understood that my thoughts about a working life and a vineyard were worth nothing. And as for love, I must tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and went to the ends of the earth for you is no more interesting than living with any Anfisa or Akulina. The same smell of the flatiron, powder, and medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, and the same self-deception..."

"You can’t keep house without a flatiron," said Samoylenko, reddening because Laevsky was speaking to him so frankly about a lady they both knew. "You’re out of sorts today, Vanya, I notice. Nadezhda Fyodorovna is a splendid woman, educated, and you’re a man of the greatest intelligence... Of course, you’re not married in church," Samoylenko went on, glancing round at the neighboring tables, "but that’s not your fault, and besides... one must be free of prejudice and stand at the level of modern ideas. I myself am for civil marriage, yes... But in my opinion, once people have come together, they ought to live together till death."

"Without love?"

"I’ll explain it to you now," said Samoylenko. "About eight years ago we had an agent here, an old fellow, a man of the greatest intelligence. Well, he used to say: in family life the main thing is patience. You hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love can’t go on long. You’ve lived two years in love, and now, evidently, your family life has entered the period when, to keep your balance, so to speak, you must bring all your patience into play..."

"You believe your little old agent, but to me his advice is nonsense. Your old fellow may have been a hypocrite, he may have practiced patience while looking on a woman he didn’t love as an object necessary for his exercises, but I haven’t sunk that low yet; if I want to practice patience I’ll buy myself gymnastic dumbbells or a spirited horse, but I’ll leave a human being in peace."

Samoylenko asked for white wine with ice. When they had drunk a glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:

"Tell me, please, what does softening of the brain mean?"

"That’s, how shall I put it to you... a kind of disease, when the brain becomes softer... as if it liquefies."

"Is it curable?"

"Yes, if the disease isn’t neglected. Cold showers, a blister plaster... Well, something taken internally."

"So... So you see what my situation is. I can’t live with her: it’s beyond my strength. While I’m with you, I philosophize, I smile, but at home I fall completely into despair. It’s so oppressive that if I were told, say, that I had to live with her even one more month, I think I’d put a bullet in my forehead. And at the same time I can’t part with her. She’s alone, doesn’t know how to work, neither she nor I have any money... Where would she go? To whom? I can’t think of anything... Well, tell me: what am I to do?"

"M-yes..." Samoylenko mumbled, not knowing what to answer. "Does she love you?"

"Yes, she loves me as much as, at her age and with her temperament, she needs a man. It would be as hard for her to part with me as with her powder or her curl-papers. I’m a necessary part of the furniture of her boudoir."

Samoylenko grew embarrassed.

"You’re out of sorts today, Vanya," he said. "Didn’t sleep, I suppose."

"Yes, slept badly... In general, brother, I feel wretched. My head’s empty, my heart keeps sinking, some kind of weakness... I need to get away!"

"Where to?"

"There, to the north. To the pines, to the mushrooms, to people, to ideas... I’d give half my life to be able now, somewhere in Moscow province, or Tula province, to bathe in a river, get chilled, you know, then wander for three hours even with the shabbiest student and talk, talk... And how the hay smells! Remember? And in the evenings, when you walk in the garden, the sound of a piano carries from the house, you can hear a train going by..."

Laevsky laughed with pleasure, tears came to his eyes, and to hide them, without getting up from his seat, he reached over to the next table for matches.

"And I haven’t been in Russia for eighteen years," said Samoylenko. "I’ve forgotten what it’s like there. To my mind there’s no finer place than the Caucasus."

"Vereshchagin has a painting: at the bottom of a very deep well, men condemned to death languish. That’s exactly the well your magnificent Caucasus seems to me. If I were offered a choice of two things — to be a chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince here — I’d take the chimney-sweep’s place."

Laevsky fell to thinking. Looking at his bent body, at his eyes fixed on one point, at his pale, sweaty face and sunken temples, at his bitten nails and at the slipper hanging off his heel, showing a badly darned stocking, Samoylenko was filled with pity, and probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child, he asked:

"Is your mother living?"

"Yes, but we’ve broken with each other. She couldn’t forgive me this liaison."

Samoylenko loved his friend. He saw in Laevsky a good fellow, a student, an open-hearted man, with whom one could drink, and laugh, and talk heart to heart. What he understood in him he did not like at all. Laevsky drank too much and at the wrong times, played cards, despised his work, lived beyond his means, often used indecent expressions in conversation, walked the street in slippers, and quarreled with Nadezhda Fyodorovna in front of others — and Samoylenko did not like this. But that Laevsky had once studied in the philological faculty, now subscribed to two thick journals, often spoke so cleverly that only a few understood him, lived with an educated woman — all this Samoylenko did not understand, and he liked it, and he considered Laevsky above himself and respected him.

"One more detail," said Laevsky, shaking his head. "Only this is between us. I’m keeping it from Nadezhda Fyodorovna for now, don’t let it slip in front of her... The day before yesterday I got a letter that her husband died of softening of the brain."

"God rest his soul..." sighed Samoylenko. "Why are you keeping it from her, then?"

"To show her the letter would mean: kindly proceed to church to be married. But we need to sort out our relations first. When she’s convinced that we can’t go on living together, I’ll show her the letter. Then it will be safe."

"You know what, Vanya?" said Samoylenko, and his face suddenly took on a sad, pleading expression, as though he were about to ask for something very sweet and were afraid of being refused. "Marry her, my dear fellow!"

"What for?"

"Do your duty by this splendid woman! Her husband has died, and so Providence itself is showing you what to do!"

"But understand, you strange man, it’s impossible. To marry without love is just as base and unworthy of a human being as to serve the liturgy without believing."

"But you’re obliged to!"

"Why am I obliged to?" Laevsky asked irritably.

"Because you took her away from her husband and took her on your own responsibility."

"But I’m telling you in plain Russian: I don’t love her!"

"Well, if there’s no love, then honor her, indulge her..."

"Honor her, indulge her..." Laevsky mimicked. "As if she were a mother superior... You’re a poor psychologist and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get by on honor and respect alone. A woman needs a bedroom above all."

"Vanya, Vanya..." Samoylenko was embarrassed.

"You’re an old child, a theorist, and I’m a young old man and a practical one, and we’ll never understand each other. Let’s drop this conversation. Mustafa," Laevsky called to the waiter, "how much do we owe?"

"No, no..." the doctor said, alarmed, catching Laevsky by the arm. "I’ll pay. I insisted. Put it on my account!" he shouted to Mustafa.

The friends got up and walked in silence along the embankment. At the entrance to the boulevard they stopped and shook hands in parting.

"You gentlemen are very spoiled!" sighed Samoylenko. "Fate has sent you a young, beautiful, educated woman, and you turn her down, while if God gave me even a crooked little old woman, only affectionate and kind, how glad I’d be! I’d live with her on my vineyard and..."

Samoylenko caught himself and said:

"And let her, the old witch, put the samovar on there."

Having said goodbye to Laevsky, he walked on along the boulevard. When he, heavy, majestic, with a stern expression on his face, in his snow-white tunic and superbly polished boots, chest thrust forward, adorned with the Order of St. Vladimir with a bow, walked along the boulevard, he was, at such moments, very pleased with himself, and it seemed to him that the whole world watched him with pleasure. Without turning his head, he glanced from side to side and found that the boulevard was well kept, that the young cypresses, eucalyptuses, and the plain, spindly palms were very handsome and would in time give a wide shade, that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people. "Strange that Laevsky doesn’t like the Caucasus," he thought, "very strange." Five soldiers with rifles came toward him and saluted. On the right side of the boulevard the wife of some official walked past on the pavement with her schoolboy son.

"Marya Konstantinovna, good morning!" Samoylenko called to her, smiling pleasantly. "Been for a swim? Ha-ha-ha... My regards to Nikodim Aleksandrych!"

And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but on seeing an army medical orderly coming toward him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him, and asked:

"Anyone in the infirmary?"

"No one, Your Excellency."

"Eh?"

"No one, Your Excellency."

"Good, off you go..."

Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where behind the counter sat an old, full-bosomed Jewish woman passing herself off as a Georgian, and said to her as loudly as if he were commanding a regiment:

"Be so kind as to give me some soda water!"

II

Laevsky’s not loving Nadezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in this: that everything she said and did seemed to him a lie, or something like a lie, and everything he had read against women and love seemed to him to fit, as well as could be, himself, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and her husband. When he came home, she, already dressed and with her hair done, was sitting by the window, drinking coffee with a preoccupied face and leafing through the pages of a thick journal, and he thought that drinking coffee was not so remarkable an event as to be worth a preoccupied face over, and that she had wasted her time on a fashionable hairstyle for nothing, since there was no one here to please and no reason to. And in the pages of the journal, too, he saw a lie. He thought that she dressed and did her hair to seem beautiful, and read in order to seem intelligent.

"Is it all right if I go bathing today?" she asked.

"Well? Whether you go or don’t go, there won’t be an earthquake because of it, I imagine..."

"No, I ask because the doctor might be angry."

"Well, ask the doctor, then. I’m not a doctor."

This time what displeased Laevsky most about Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, bare neck and the little curls of hair at the back of her head, and he remembered that Anna Karenina, when she fell out of love with her husband, had disliked his ears above all, and thought: "How true that is! how true!" Feeling weakness and emptiness in his head, he went to his study, lay down on the sofa, and covered his face with a handkerchief so the flies wouldn’t bother him. Listless, dragging thoughts, all on the same subject, trailed through his brain like a long line of carts on a rainy autumn evening, and he sank into a drowsy, oppressed state. It seemed to him that he was guilty before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that the husband had died through his fault. It seemed to him that he was guilty before his own life, which he had ruined, and before the world of lofty ideas, knowledge, and labor, and this wonderful world seemed to him possible and existing not here, on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wander, but there, in the north, where there is opera, theaters, newspapers, and every kind of intellectual work. Only there, not here, can one be honest, intelligent, elevated, and pure. He blamed himself for having no ideals and no guiding idea in life, though he now vaguely understood what that meant. Two years before, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, it had seemed to him that he had only to take up with her and go off with her to the Caucasus to be saved from the vulgarity and emptiness of life; and now, in the same way, he was certain that he had only to abandon Nadezhda Fyodorovna and go off to Petersburg to get everything he needed.

"Get away!" he muttered, sitting up and biting his nails. "Get away!"

His imagination pictured him boarding the steamer, then breakfasting, drinking cold beer, talking with the ladies on deck, then, in Sevastopol, boarding a train and going. Hail, freedom! The stations flash by one after another, the air grows colder and sharper, here are birches and firs, here is Kursk, Moscow... In the buffets, cabbage soup, mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer — in a word, not Asia but Russia, real Russia. The passengers on the train talk about trade, about new singers, about Franco-Russian sympathies; everywhere one feels a living, cultured, educated, vigorous life... Faster, faster! Here at last is the Nevsky, the Bolshaya Morskaya, and here is Kovensky Lane, where he once lived with the students, here is the dear gray sky, the drizzling rain, the wet cabmen...

"Ivan Andreich!" someone called from the next room. "Are you home?"

"I’m here!" Laevsky answered. "What is it?"

"Papers!"

Laevsky got up lazily, with a dizzy head, and, yawning, shuffling in his slippers, went into the next room. There, at the open window facing the street, stood one of his young colleagues, laying out official papers on the sill.

"Right away, my dear fellow," Laevsky said gently, and went to look for the inkwell; coming back to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: "It’s hot!"

"Yes, sir. Will you come in today?"

"Hardly... I’m not quite well... Tell Sheshkovsky, my dear fellow, that I’ll drop in after dinner."

The clerk left. Laevsky lay down again on his sofa and began to think:

"So, I must weigh all the circumstances and figure this out. Before I leave here I must settle my debts. I owe about two thousand roubles. I have no money... That, of course, doesn’t matter; I’ll pay part of it somehow now, and send the rest later from Petersburg. The main thing is Nadezhda Fyodorovna... First of all, our relations must be settled... Yes."

A little later he was considering: shouldn’t he go to Samoylenko for advice?

"I could go," he thought, "but what good would it do? I’d only start talking to him again, out of place, about the boudoir, about women, about what’s honest or dishonest. What kind of talk, devil take it, can there be about honest or dishonest, when I need to save my life as quickly as possible, when I’m suffocating in this cursed captivity and killing myself?.. I must finally understand that going on living as I live is baseness and cruelty, beside which everything else is petty and worthless. Get away!" he muttered, sitting up. "Get away!"

The deserted seashore, the unquenchable heat, and the sameness of the smoky, lilac-colored mountains, forever alike and silent, forever solitary, brought on a longing in him and, it seemed, lulled and robbed him. Perhaps he was very intelligent, talented, remarkably honest; perhaps, if the sea and mountains did not close him in on every side, an excellent zemstvo worker, a statesman, an orator, a publicist, a man of great deeds might have come out of him. Who knows! If so, then isn’t it foolish to argue over whether it is honest or dishonest, when a gifted and useful man — a musician or an artist, say — breaks down a wall and deceives his jailers in order to escape from captivity? For a man in such a position everything is honest.

At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the cook served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:

"The same thing every day. Why not make cabbage soup?"

"There’s no cabbage."

"Strange. At Samoylenko’s they cook cabbage soup with cabbage, and at Marya Konstantinovna’s there’s cabbage soup, and I alone, for some reason, am obliged to eat this sweetish swill. This can’t go on, my dove."

As happens with the vast majority of married couples, in earlier days no dinner had passed for Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna without whims and scenes, but ever since Laevsky had decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to give way to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in everything, spoke to her gently and politely, smiled, and called her his dove.

"This soup tastes like licorice," he said, smiling; he made an effort to seem affable, but couldn’t restrain himself and said: "No one keeps an eye on the household here... If you’re really so unwell, or so busy reading, then, if you like, I’ll take over our kitchen myself."

Earlier she would have answered him: "Go ahead" or "You want to turn me into a cook, I see" — but now she only glanced at him timidly and blushed.

"Well, how are you feeling today?" he asked tenderly.

"Today it’s nothing. Just a little weakness."

"You must take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly afraid for you."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna was ill with something. Samoylenko said she had intermittent fever, and fed her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spare, unsociable man, who sat at home during the day and in the evenings, hands clasped behind his back and his cane held out along his spine, strolled slowly along the embankment coughing, considered that she had a woman’s complaint, and prescribed warming compresses. Formerly, when Laevsky loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness had aroused pity and fear in him; now, in her illness too, he saw a lie. The yellow, sleepy face, the languid look, and the yawning that came over Nadezhda Fyodorovna after her feverish attacks, and the fact that during an attack she lay under a plaid rug and looked more like a boy than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled unpleasant — all this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.

For the second course they served him spinach with hard-boiled eggs, and Nadezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, kissel with milk. When, with a preoccupied face, she first touched the kissel with her spoon and then began to eat it languidly, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallowing, such a heavy hatred took hold of him that his head even began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would be offensive even toward a dog, but he was not angry at himself, rather at Nadezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing this feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their mistresses. He himself would not have killed her, of course, but if he were now called to serve on a jury, he would acquit the murderer.

"Merci, my dove," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Coming back to his study, he paced from corner to corner for about five minutes, glancing sidelong at his boots, then sat down on the sofa and muttered:

"Get away, get away! Settle things and get away!"

He lay down on the sofa and again remembered that Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband had perhaps died through his fault.

"To blame a man for falling in love or falling out of love is foolish," he assured himself, lying there and kicking up his feet to pull his boots on. "Love and hatred are not in our power. As for the husband, I may, perhaps, have been indirectly one of the causes of his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife, and she with me?"

Then he got up and, having found his cap, set off for the rooms of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where officials gathered every day to play vint and drink cold beer.

"In my irresoluteness I resemble Hamlet," Laevsky thought on the way. "How truly Shakespeare observed that! Ah, how true!"

III

So as not to be bored, and taking pity on the extreme need of newcomers and single men who, for lack of a hotel in the town, had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept at his house something like a table d’hôte. At the time this story describes, only two men boarded with him: the young zoologist von Koren, who had come out for the summer to the Black Sea to study the embryology of jellyfish, and the deacon Pobedov, recently graduated from the seminary and sent to the little town to fill in for the old deacon, who had gone off for a cure. Both paid twelve rubles a month for dinner and supper, and Samoylenko had exacted their word of honor that they would present themselves punctually at two o’clock.

Von Koren usually arrived first. He would sit down in the drawing room in silence and, taking an album from the table, begin attentively examining the faded photographs of unknown men in wide trousers and top hats and ladies in crinolines and bonnets; Samoylenko remembered only a few of them by name, and of those he had forgotten he would say with a sigh, "A most excellent man, of the greatest intellect!" Having done with the album, von Koren would take a pistol from the shelf and, squinting his left eye, take long aim at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or else stand before the mirror and study his own swarthy face, his broad forehead, his black hair curly as a Negro’s, his shirt of dull chintz with large flowers, like a Persian carpet, and the broad leather belt he wore in place of a waistcoat. This self-contemplation gave him hardly less pleasure than examining the photographs or the pistol in its costly mounting. He was very pleased both with his face and with his handsomely trimmed little beard, and with his broad shoulders, which served as plain evidence of his good health and sturdy build. He was pleased, too, with his dandyish suit, from the necktie chosen to match his shirt down to his yellow shoes.

While he was examining the album and standing before the mirror, Samoylenko, in the kitchen and in the passage nearby, coatless and waistcoatless, his bare chest exposed, fretting and pouring with sweat, bustled about the tables preparing a salad, or some sauce, or meat, cucumbers, and onion for the cold soup, glaring furiously all the while at the orderly helping him and brandishing now a knife, now a spoon, at him.

"Bring the vinegar!" he ordered. "No, wait, not the vinegar — the olive oil!" he shouted, stamping his feet. "Where are you going, you brute?"

"For the oil, Your Excellency," said the bewildered orderly in a cracked tenor.

"Faster! It’s in the cupboard! And tell Darya to add more dill to the jar of cucumbers! Dill! Cover the sour cream, gawking idiot, or the flies will get at it!"

And his shouting seemed to make the whole house resound. When ten or fifteen minutes remained until two o’clock, the deacon would arrive, a young man of about twenty-two, thin, long-haired, beardless, with the barest trace of a mustache. Coming into the drawing room, he would cross himself before the icon, smile, and hold out his hand to von Koren.

"Good day," the zoologist would say coldly. "Where have you been?"

"Down at the jetty, catching gobies."

"Well, naturally. It seems, Deacon, you will never occupy yourself with any real work."

"Why so? Work is no bear — it won’t run off into the woods," said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the deep pockets of his white cassock.

"There’s no one to give you a good beating!" the zoologist would sigh.

Another fifteen or twenty minutes would pass and still no one called them to dinner, and one could still hear the orderly running from the passage to the kitchen and back, his boots thumping, and Samoylenko shouting:

"Put it on the table! Where are you shoving it? Wash it first!"

The famished deacon and von Koren would begin to drum their heels on the floor, expressing their impatience like spectators in the gallery of a theater. At last the door would open and the exhausted orderly announce: dinner is served! In the dining room they would be met by Samoylenko, crimson, steamed from the heat of the kitchen, and cross; he would glare at them furiously and, with an expression of horror on his face, lift the lid from the soup tureen and pour out a plate for each of them, and only when he was satisfied that they were eating with appetite and liked the food would he sigh with relief and settle into his deep armchair. His face would grow languid, oily... Unhurried, he would pour himself a glass of vodka and say:

"To the health of the younger generation!"

Ever since his talk with Laevsky, Samoylenko had felt, from morning until dinner, despite his excellent spirits, a certain heaviness deep down; he was sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him. Having drunk a glass of vodka before the soup, he sighed and said:

"I saw Vanya Laevsky today. A hard life the poor fellow has. The material side of things is discouraging, but the main thing is, the psychology has got the better of him. I feel sorry for the boy."

"There’s one I don’t feel sorry for!" said von Koren. "If that charming gentleman were drowning, I’d give him a push with a stick — drown, brother, drown away..."

"That’s not true. You wouldn’t do it."

"Why do you think not?" the zoologist shrugged. "I’m as capable of a good deed as you are."

"Is drowning a man a good deed?" the deacon asked, and laughed.

"Laevsky? Yes."

"There seems to be something missing in the cold soup..." said Samoylenko, wanting to change the subject.

"Laevsky is unconditionally harmful and just as dangerous to society as the cholera microbe," von Koren went on. "Drowning him would be a service."

"It does you no credit to speak of your neighbor that way. Tell me — why do you hate him?"

"Don’t talk nonsense, Doctor. To hate and despise a microbe is stupid, and to consider every passerby, without distinction, one’s neighbor no matter what — thank you very much, that means not thinking at all, giving up any just estimate of people, washing one’s hands of the whole business, in a word. I consider your Laevsky a scoundrel, I don’t conceal it, and I treat him as a scoundrel, in all good conscience. Well, and you consider him your neighbor — go on and kiss him, then; you consider him your neighbor, which means you treat him exactly as you treat me and the deacon — that is, not at all. You’re equally indifferent to everyone."

"To call a man a scoundrel!" Samoylenko muttered, wrinkling his face in disgust. "It’s so wrong I can’t even find words for it!"

"People are judged by their actions," von Koren went on. "Now, judge for yourself, Deacon — I’ll say this for your benefit. Mr. Laevsky’s activity lies openly spread before you, like a long Chinese scroll, and you can read it from beginning to end. What has he done in the two years he’s been living here? Let’s count on our fingers. First, he taught the townspeople to play vint; two years ago the game was unknown here, now they play it from morning till late at night, even the women and the adolescents; second, he taught the inhabitants to drink beer, which was likewise unknown here; to him, too, the inhabitants owe their knowledge of the various brands of vodka, so that blindfolded they can now tell Koshelev’s vodka from Smirnov’s No. 21. Third, in former days people here lived with other men’s wives in secret, for the same reasons thieves steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered something one was ashamed to display before the public; Laevsky, in this respect, has arrived as a pioneer — he lives openly with another man’s wife. Fourth..."

Von Koren quickly finished his cold soup and handed his plate to the orderly.

"I understood Laevsky within the first month of our acquaintance," he went on, turning to the deacon. "We arrived here at the same time. Men like him are very fond of friendship, closeness, solidarity, and all that, because they always need company for vint, drinking, and food; besides, they’re talkative, and they need listeners. We became friends — that is, he took to dragging himself over to my place every day, keeping me from my work, and confiding in me about his mistress. From the very first he struck me with an extraordinary mendacity that simply made me sick. As a friend, I scolded him — why does he drink so much, why does he live beyond his means and run up debts, why does he do nothing and read nothing, why is he so uncultured and knows so little — and to all my questions he would smile bitterly, sigh, and say, ’I’m a failure, a superfluous man,’ or, ’What do you want, old fellow, from the wreckage of serfdom?’ or, ’We’re degenerating...’ Or he would launch into a long farrago about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron’s Cain, Bazarov, of whom he would say, ’These are our fathers in flesh and spirit.’ The idea being, you understand, that it’s not his fault official packets lie unopened for weeks and that he drinks and gets others drunk — no, the fault lies with Onegin, Pechorin, and Turgenev, who invented the failure and the superfluous man. The cause of his extreme dissoluteness and disorder, you see, lies not in himself but somewhere outside, in space. And what’s more — a clever trick, this — it isn’t he alone who is dissolute, false, and vile, but all of us... ’We’re the men of the eighties,’ ’we’re the limp, nervous offspring of serfdom,’ ’civilization has crippled us’... In a word, we’re supposed to understand that so great a man as Laevsky is great even in his fall; that his depravity, his lack of education, his slovenliness constitute a natural-historical phenomenon, sanctified by necessity, that the causes here are cosmic, elemental, and that a lamp ought to be hung before Laevsky, since he is the fatal victim of the age, of currents, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and the ladies, listening to him, would sigh and marvel, and for a long time I couldn’t make out whom I was dealing with — a cynic or a clever swindler. Such types as he, intelligent-looking on the surface, a little polished, and much given to talk of their own nobility, know how to pass themselves off as extraordinarily complex natures."

"Be quiet!" Samoylenko flared up. "I won’t allow anyone to speak ill of the noblest of men in my presence!"

"Don’t interrupt, Aleksandr Davidych," von Koren said coldly. "I’m nearly finished. Laevsky is a rather simple organism. Here is his moral skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a swim, and coffee; then until dinner, slippers, a stroll, and conversation; at two o’clock, slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o’clock, a swim, tea, and wine; then vint and lying, and at ten, supper and wine, and after midnight, sleep and la femme a woman (French).. His whole existence is confined within this narrow program like an egg in its shell. Whether he’s walking, sitting, angry, writing, or rejoicing — it all comes down to wine, cards, slippers, and a woman. Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming role in his life. He tells the story himself, that at thirteen he was already in love; as a first-year student he lived with a lady who had a beneficial influence on him and to whom he owes his musical education. In his second year he bought a prostitute’s freedom from a brothel and raised her up to his own level, that is, took her as his mistress, and she lived with him half a year and ran back to her madam, and this flight caused him no small amount of soul-suffering. Alas, he suffered so much that he had to leave the university and live at home, doing nothing, for two years. But it was all for the best. At home he took up with a widow, who advised him to leave the law faculty and enroll in philology. He did so. Having finished his course, he fell passionately in love with his present... what’s her name... a married woman, and had to run off with her here to the Caucasus, ostensibly in pursuit of ideals... Any day now he’ll fall out of love with her and run back to Petersburg, also in pursuit of ideals."

"And how do you know that?" Samoylenko grumbled, glaring spitefully at the zoologist. "Better eat your dinner."

They were served boiled mullet with Polish sauce. Samoylenko gave each of his two boarders a whole mullet and poured the sauce over it with his own hands. Two minutes passed in silence.

"Woman plays an essential role in every man’s life," said the deacon. "There’s nothing to be done about it."

"Yes, but to what degree? For each of us a woman is a mother, a sister, a wife, a friend; for Laevsky she is everything, and moreover only a mistress. She — that is, cohabitation with her — is his happiness and the goal of his life; he’s cheerful, sad, bored, disillusioned — because of a woman; life has grown loathsome — a woman is to blame; the dawn of a new life has broken, ideals have been found — look for a woman there too... Only those works or paintings that contain a woman satisfy him. Our age, in his opinion, is bad, and worse than the forties or the sixties, only because we don’t know how to give ourselves up to erotic ecstasy and passion to the point of self-forgetting. These voluptuaries must have some special growth in the brain, like a sarcoma, that presses on the brain and governs the whole psyche. Just observe Laevsky sometime, sitting in company. Notice: when someone raises some general question in his presence — the cell, say, or instinct — he sits off to one side, silent, not listening; his expression is languid, disillusioned, nothing interests him, everything is banal and worthless — but the moment someone begins talking about males and females, about the fact, say, that among spiders the female eats the male after mating, his eyes light up with curiosity, his face brightens, and the man comes alive, in a word. All his thoughts, however noble, elevated, or indifferent they may be, always converge at the same one point. Walk down the street with him and, say, you meet a donkey — ’Tell me, please,’ he asks, ’what would happen if you crossed a she-donkey with a camel?’ And his dreams! Has he told you his dreams? They’re magnificent! One night he dreams he’s being married off to the moon, another that he’s summoned to the police station and ordered to live there with a guitar..."

The deacon burst into ringing laughter; Samoylenko frowned and screwed up his face in anger to keep from laughing, but he couldn’t restrain himself and burst out laughing too.

"And it’s all lies!" he said, wiping his eyes. "God’s truth, all lies!"

IV

The deacon was very given to laughter and laughed at every trifle till his side ached and he could hardly stand. It seemed he loved being among people only because they had their absurd sides and could be given absurd nicknames. He had nicknamed Samoylenko the tarantula, his orderly the drake, and had been delighted when von Koren once dubbed Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna macaques. He gazed hungrily into people’s faces, listened without blinking, and one could see his eyes filling with laughter and his face straining in expectation of the moment when he could give himself free rein and collapse with mirth.

"He’s a depraved and perverted specimen," the zoologist went on, while the deacon, waiting for the funny words, fixed his eyes on his face. "It’s rare to meet such a nonentity. In body he’s flabby, sickly, and old, and in intellect he’s no different from a fat merchant’s wife who does nothing but gorge, drink, sleep on a featherbed, and keep her coachman as a lover."

The deacon burst out laughing again.

"Don’t laugh, Deacon," said von Koren, "it’s foolish, really. I wouldn’t pay his nonentity any mind," he went on, once the deacon had stopped laughing, "I’d have passed him by, if he weren’t so harmful and dangerous. His harmfulness lies first of all in the fact that he has success with women and thus threatens to leave offspring — that is, to present the world with a dozen little Laevskys, as sickly and perverted as he is himself. Second, he’s infectious to the highest degree. I’ve already told you about vint and beer. Another year or two, and he’ll have conquered the whole Caucasian coast. You know to what degree the masses, especially the middling sort, believe in intelligence, in a university education, in nobility of manner, and in literary language. Whatever vileness he commits, everyone believes it’s good, that it must be so, since he’s an educated, liberal, university man. Besides, he’s a failure, a superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the times — which means everything is permitted him. He’s a nice fellow, a soulful man, he takes such heartfelt account of human weaknesses; he’s easy to get along with, pliant, accommodating, not proud, one can drink with him, and talk filth, and gossip... The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in religion and morals, love best of all those little gods who have the same weaknesses they have themselves. Judge for yourself, then, what a broad field he has for infection! Besides, he’s not a bad actor and a clever hypocrite, and knows perfectly well which way the wind blows. Take his dodges and tricks, for instance, his attitude toward civilization. He hasn’t so much as had a whiff of civilization, and yet: ’Ah, how civilization has crippled us! Ah, how I envy those savages, those children of nature, who know nothing of civilization!’ You’re meant to understand, you see, that once upon a time, in days gone by, he was devoted to civilization with his whole soul, served it, understood it through and through, but it wore him out, disillusioned him, deceived him; he is, you see, a Faust, a second Tolstoy... And he treats Schopenhauer and Spencer like schoolboys and pats them paternally on the shoulder — well, brother Spencer, how goes it? He hasn’t read Spencer, of course, but how charming he is when, with light, careless irony, he says of his lady: ’She’s read Spencer!’ And people listen to him, and no one wants to understand that this charlatan has no right, not merely to speak of Spencer in that tone, but even to kiss the sole of Spencer’s shoe! To rummage under civilization, under authorities, under someone else’s altar, to spatter mud and wink buffoonishly at them, only to justify and conceal his own feebleness and moral squalor — only a very vain, base, and vile animal is capable of that."

"I don’t know, Kolya, what you want from him," said Samoylenko, looking at the zoologist now not with anger but with a guilty air. "He’s a man like any other. Not without his weaknesses, of course, but he stands abreast of modern ideas, he’s in the service, he’s of use to his country. Ten years ago there was an old fellow serving here as an agent, a man of the greatest intellect... Well, he used to say..."

"Enough, enough!" the zoologist interrupted. "You say he’s in the service. But how does he serve? Has the order of things become any better, have the officials become more punctual, more honest, more polite, because he turned up here? On the contrary, with his authority as an educated university man, he’s only sanctioned their slackness. He’s only ever punctual on the twentieth, when he gets his salary; the rest of the month he does nothing but shuffle about his house in his slippers and try to give himself the air of doing the Russian government a great favor by living in the Caucasus. No, Aleksandr Davidych, don’t stand up for him. You’re not sincere from beginning to end. If you truly loved him and considered him your neighbor, then above all you wouldn’t be indifferent to his weaknesses, wouldn’t indulge them, but for his own good would try to render him harmless."

"Meaning what?"

"Render him harmless. Since he’s incorrigible, there’s only one way to render him harmless..."

Von Koren drew a finger across his own throat.

"Or drown him, perhaps..." he added. "In the interests of humanity, and in their own interests, such people ought to be destroyed. Absolutely."

"What are you saying?!" Samoylenko muttered, rising and staring in astonishment at the zoologist’s calm, cold face. "Deacon, what is he saying? Are you in your right mind?"

"I don’t insist on the death penalty," said von Koren. "If it’s proven harmful, think up something else. If Laevsky can’t be destroyed, then isolate him, strip him of his personality, put him to forced labor..."

"What are you saying?" Samoylenko was aghast. "Pepper, pepper!" he shouted in a desperate voice, noticing that the deacon was eating stuffed squash without pepper. "You, a man of the greatest intellect, what are you saying?! Our friend, a proud, educated man, sent to forced labor!!"

"And if he’s proud and resists, then chains!"

Samoylenko could no longer bring out a single word, and only worked his fingers; the deacon glanced at his stunned, genuinely comic face and burst out laughing.

"Let’s stop talking about this," said the zoologist. "Only remember one thing, Aleksandr Davidych: primitive mankind was protected from types like Laevsky by the struggle for existence and by selection; but now our culture has significantly weakened that struggle and that selection, and we must see to the destruction of the weak and worthless ourselves, or else, once the Laevskys have multiplied, civilization will perish, and mankind will degenerate entirely. It will be our fault."

"If people are to be drowned and hanged," said Samoylenko, "then to the devil with your civilization, to the devil with mankind! To the devil with it! Here’s what I’ll tell you: you’re the most learned man, of the greatest intellect, and the pride of your country, but the Germans have spoiled you. Yes, the Germans! The Germans!"

Since leaving Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, Samoylenko had rarely seen a German and had not read a single German book, but in his opinion all the evil in politics and science came from the Germans. Where he had picked up this opinion he couldn’t himself have said, but he held to it firmly.

"Yes, the Germans!" he repeated once more. "Let’s go have tea."

All three rose and, putting on their hats, went out into the front garden and sat down there in the shade of the pale maples, the pear trees, and the chestnut. The zoologist and the deacon sat on the bench by the little table, while Samoylenko settled into a wicker armchair with a broad, sloping back. The orderly brought tea, jam, and a bottle of syrup.

It was very hot, some thirty degrees in the shade. The sultry air stood frozen, motionless, and a long strand of spiderweb hanging from the chestnut to the ground drooped weakly and did not stir.

The deacon took up the guitar, which always lay on the ground by the table, tuned it, and began to sing softly in a thin little voice: "The seminary lads stood at the tavern door"... but broke off at once from the heat, wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked up at the blue, burning sky. Samoylenko dozed off; from the heat, the stillness, and the sweet, after-dinner drowsiness that quickly took hold of all his limbs, he grew weak and heavy-lidded; his hands hung slack, his eyes narrowed, his head sank onto his chest. He looked at von Koren and the deacon with tearful tenderness and muttered:

"The younger generation... A star of science and a lamp of the church... Look at him, the long-skirted hallelujah, he’ll leap up to metropolitan yet, mark my words, and we’ll have to kiss his hand... Well... God grant it..."

Soon there came the sound of snoring. Von Koren and the deacon finished their tea and went out into the street.

"Off to the jetty again, to catch gobies?" the zoologist asked.

"No, it’s too hot."

"Come to my place. You can pack up a parcel for me and copy out a few things. And while we’re at it, we’ll think about what you should be doing with yourself. You need to work, Deacon. This won’t do."

"Your words are just and logical," said the deacon, "but my laziness finds its excuse in the circumstances of my present life. You know yourself, the uncertainty of one’s position considerably encourages a state of apathy in a man. Whether I’ve been sent here for a time or for good, God alone knows; I live here in uncertainty, and my deacon’s wife languishes at her father’s house and is bored. And, I confess, in this heat my brains have gone soft."

"All nonsense," said the zoologist. "One can get used to the heat, and one can get used to doing without a deacon’s wife. You mustn’t indulge yourself. You have to hold yourself in hand."

V

Nadezhda Fyodorovna was walking down in the morning to bathe, and behind her, carrying a jug, a copper basin, sheets, and a sponge, walked her cook Olga. At the roadstead lay two unfamiliar steamers with dirty white funnels, evidently foreign cargo ships. Some men in white, in white shoes, walked along the jetty shouting loudly in French, and were answered from the ships. In the little town church the bells were ringing briskly.

"Today is Sunday!" Nadezhda Fyodorovna recalled with pleasure.

She felt perfectly well and was in a cheerful, holiday mood. In a new, loose-fitting dress of coarse man’s pongee, and a large straw hat whose wide brim was bent sharply down toward her ears, so that her face seemed to look out of a little box, she struck herself as very pretty. She thought that in the whole town there was only one young, beautiful, intelligent woman — herself — and that she alone knew how to dress cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. This dress, for instance, cost only twenty-two rubles, and yet how charming it was! In the whole town she alone could please, while there were many men, and so all of them, willy-nilly, must envy Laevsky.

She was glad that Laevsky had lately been cold to her, restrainedly polite, and at times even harsh and rude; toward all his outbursts and his contemptuous, cold, or strange, incomprehensible looks she would formerly have responded with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or starve herself to death, but now she only blushed, glanced at him guiltily, and was glad he wasn’t affectionate toward her. If he scolded her or threatened her it would be still better, still more welcome, since she felt herself wholly guilty before him. It seemed to her she was guilty, first of all, because she had not sympathized with his dreams of a laboring life, for the sake of which he had abandoned Petersburg and come here to the Caucasus, and she was sure that it was precisely for this that he had been angry with her of late. When she was traveling to the Caucasus, it had seemed to her that on the very first day she would find here a snug little corner on the shore, a cozy garden with shade, birds, and streams, where she could plant flowers and vegetables, raise ducks and hens, receive her neighbors, treat the poor peasants, and hand out books to them; but it turned out that the Caucasus was bald mountains, forests, and enormous valleys, where one had to spend a long time choosing, negotiating, building, and where there were no neighbors at all, and it was very hot, and one might be robbed. Laevsky was in no hurry to acquire a plot of land; she was glad of this, and the two of them seemed to have silently agreed never to mention the laboring life. He said nothing, she thought, which meant he was angry with her for saying nothing.

Second, without his knowledge, over these two years she had run up a debt of some three hundred rubles at Achmianov’s shop on various trifles. She would take a little material, a little silk, an umbrella, a bit at a time, and imperceptibly such a debt had accumulated.

"I’ll tell him about it today..." she decided, but at once reflected that, given Laevsky’s present mood, it was hardly convenient to speak to him of debts.

Third, twice already, in Laevsky’s absence, she had received Kirilin, the police superintendent, at her house: once in the morning, when Laevsky had gone off to bathe, and once at midnight, when he was playing cards. Remembering this, Nadezhda Fyodorovna flushed all over and glanced back at her cook, as if afraid the woman might overhear her thoughts. The long, unbearably hot, tedious days, the beautiful languorous evenings, the stifling nights, and this whole life in which, from morning till evening, one doesn’t know what to do with one’s superfluous time, and the obsessive thoughts that she was the most beautiful and youngest woman in the town and that her youth was passing for nothing, and Laevsky himself, honest, high-minded, but monotonous, forever shuffling about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearying her with his whims — all this had brought it about that desires had little by little taken hold of her, and she, like a madwoman, thought day and night of one and the same thing. In her breathing, in her glances, in the tone of her voice and her walk, she felt nothing but desire; the sound of the sea told her she must love, the darkness of evening said the same, the mountains said the same... And when Kirilin began courting her, she had neither the strength nor the will nor the power to resist, and gave herself to him...

Now the foreign steamers and the men in white reminded her, for some reason, of a great ballroom; along with the sound of French speech, the strains of a waltz rang in her ears, and her breast trembled with causeless joy. She wanted to dance and to speak French.

She reflected with pleasure that there was nothing terrible in her infidelity. Her soul had taken no part in her infidelity; she went on loving Laevsky, and this was proven by the fact that she was jealous of him, was sorry for him, and missed him when he wasn’t at home. As for Kirilin, he had turned out to be nothing much, rather coarse, though handsome; everything with him was already over, and there would be nothing more. What had happened had happened, it was no one’s business, and if Laevsky found out, he wouldn’t believe it.

On the shore there was only one bathhouse for ladies; the men bathed in the open. Going into the bathhouse, Nadezhda Fyodorovna found there an elderly lady, Marya Konstantinovna Bityugova, the wife of an official, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Katya, a schoolgirl; both were sitting on the bench, undressing. Marya Konstantinovna was a kind, ecstatic, and delicate person, who spoke in a drawn-out way and with pathos. Until the age of thirty-two she had lived as a governess, then married the official Bityugov, a small, bald man who combed his hair back at the temples and was very meek. She was still in love with him, was jealous of him, blushed at the word "love," and assured everyone that she was very happy.

"My dear!" she said ecstatically, seeing Nadezhda Fyodorovna and giving her face the expression all her acquaintances called almond-eyed. "Darling, how nice that you’ve come! We’ll bathe together — how enchanting!"

Olga quickly threw off her dress and shift and began undressing her mistress.

"It’s not as hot today as it was yesterday, is it?" said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, wincing at the rough touch of her naked cook. "Yesterday I nearly died of the closeness."

"Oh, yes, my dear! I very nearly suffocated myself. Would you believe it, I bathed three times yesterday... imagine, my dear, three times! Even Nikodim Aleksandrych was worried."

"Now, how can people be so unattractive?" thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna, glancing at Olga and at the official’s wife; she looked at Katya and thought: "The girl is not badly built." "Your Nikodim Aleksandrych is very, very sweet!" she said aloud. "I’m quite in love with him."

"Ha-ha-ha!" Marya Konstantinovna laughed with an effort. "How charming!"

Freed of her clothes, Nadezhda Fyodorovna felt a desire to fly. And it seemed to her that if she flapped her arms she would surely fly up into the air. Having undressed, she noticed that Olga was looking at her white body with distaste. Olga, a young soldier’s wife, lived with her lawful husband and therefore considered herself better and higher than her mistress. Nadezhda Fyodorovna also sensed that Marya Konstantinovna and Katya neither respected nor were afraid of her. This was unpleasant, and to raise herself in their estimation, she said:

"In Petersburg now, the dacha season is in full swing. I and my husband have so many acquaintances there! We ought to go and see them."

"Your husband is an engineer, I believe?" Marya Konstantinovna asked timidly.

"I mean Laevsky. He has a great many acquaintances. But unfortunately his mother, a proud aristocrat, not very quick-witted..."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna did not finish, and threw herself into the water; after her went Marya Konstantinovna and Katya.

"There’s a great deal of prejudice in our society," Nadezhda Fyodorovna went on, "and life isn’t as easy as it looks."

Marya Konstantinovna, who had served as a governess in aristocratic families and knew a thing or two about society, said:

"Oh yes! Would you believe it, my dear, at the Garatynskys’ both breakfast and dinner absolutely required proper dress, so that I, just like an actress, received an allowance for my wardrobe on top of my salary."

She placed herself between Nadezhda Fyodorovna and Katya, as if shielding her daughter from the water that washed against Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Through the open door leading out to the sea, someone could be seen swimming a hundred paces from the bathhouse.

"Mama, that’s our Kostya!" said Katya.

"Oh, oh!" Marya Konstantinovna clucked in fright. "Ah! Kostya," she cried, "come back! Kostya, come back!"

Kostya, a boy of about fourteen, to show off his courage before his mother and sister, dove under and swam on, but grew tired and hurried back, and by his serious, strained face one could see that he did not trust his own strength.

"Such trouble with these boys, my dear!" said Marya Konstantinovna, calming down. "Any moment he might break his neck. Ah, my dear, how pleasant and at the same time how hard it is to be a mother! You’re afraid of everything."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna put on her straw hat and threw herself out into the open sea. She swam out some four sazhens and lay on her back. She could see the sea all the way to the horizon, the steamers, the people on the shore, the town, and all of it together with the heat and the clear, tender waves irritated her and whispered to her that one must live, must live... A sailboat swept past her, cutting swiftly and energetically through the waves and the air; the man sitting at the tiller looked at her, and it was pleasant to her to be looked at...

Having bathed, the ladies dressed and walked on together.

"I have a fever every other day, and yet I’m not losing weight," Nadezhda Fyodorovna was saying, licking her lips, salty from the bathing, and answering the bows of acquaintances with a smile. "I’ve always been plump, and now I think I’ve grown even plumper."

"That, my dear, is a matter of constitution. If someone isn’t disposed to plumpness, as I am, for instance, no amount of food will help. But my dear, you’ve soaked your hat through."

"Never mind, it’ll dry."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna again saw the people in white walking along the embankment and speaking French; and for some reason a joy again stirred in her breast, and she dimly recalled some great hall in which she had once danced, or which she had perhaps once dreamed of. And something in the very depths of her soul whispered to her, dimly and dully, that she was a petty, vulgar, worthless, insignificant woman...

Marya Konstantinovna stopped by her gate and invited her to come in and sit awhile.

"Do come in, my dear!" she said in a pleading voice, while at the same time glancing at Nadezhda Fyodorovna with anguish and with hope: perhaps she would refuse and not come in!

"With pleasure," Nadezhda Fyodorovna agreed. "You know how I love visiting you!"

And she went into the house. Marya Konstantinovna seated her, gave her coffee, fed her sweet rolls, then showed her photographs of her former pupils — the young Garatynsky ladies, who had already married — and showed her also Katya’s and Kostya’s examination marks; the marks were very good, but to make them seem even better she complained with a sigh of how hard it was these days to study at the gymnasium... She fussed over her guest and at the same time pitied her and suffered at the thought that Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s presence might have a bad influence on the morals of Kostya and Katya, and rejoiced that her Nikodim Aleksandrych was not at home. For, in her opinion, all men were fond of "such women," and so Nadezhda Fyodorovna might have a bad influence on Nikodim Aleksandrych too.

Talking with her guest, Marya Konstantinovna kept remembering the whole time that there was to be a picnic that evening, and that von Koren had earnestly asked that nothing be said of it to the macaques — that is, to Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna — but she let it slip inadvertently, flushed all over, and said in confusion:

"I hope you’ll come too!"

VI

It was agreed to drive out seven versts from town along the road to the south, to stop by a duhan at the confluence of two streams — the Black and the Yellow — and cook fish soup there. They set out a little after five. In front, in a char-à-banc, rode Samoylenko and Laevsky; behind them, in a carriage drawn by a troika, Marya Konstantinovna, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, Katya, and Kostya, with a hamper of provisions and dishes beside them. In the next carriage rode the police superintendent Kirilin and young Achmianov, son of that same merchant Achmianov to whom Nadezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred rubles, and across from them, on a little seat, hunched up with his legs drawn in, sat Nikodim Aleksandrych, small and neat, his hair combed back at the temples. Bringing up the rear rode von Koren and the deacon; at the deacon’s feet stood a basket of fish.

"Right, keep right!" Samoylenko bawled at the top of his voice whenever an oxcart or an Abkhazian on a donkey came the other way.

"In two years, once I have the funds and the men ready, I’m setting out on an expedition," von Koren was telling the deacon. "I’ll go along the coast from Vladivostok to the Bering Strait and then from the strait to the mouth of the Yenisei. We’ll draw up a map, study the fauna and flora, and take up geology, anthropological and ethnographic research, thoroughly. It’s up to you whether you come with me or not."

"That’s impossible," said the deacon.

"Why?"

"I’m a dependent man, a family man."

"Your wife will let you go. We’ll provide for her. Better still, if you could persuade her, for the common good, to take the veil — that would allow you to take monastic vows yourself and go on the expedition as a hieromonk. I can arrange that for you."

The deacon said nothing.

"Do you know your theology well?" asked the zoologist.

"Not very well."

"Hm... I can’t give you any guidance on that score, since I’m not well acquainted with theology myself. Give me a little list of the books you need, and I’ll send them to you from Petersburg this winter. You’ll also need to read the accounts of the missionary travelers; among them there are some good ethnologists and connoisseurs of the Eastern languages. Once you’re familiar with their manner, it’ll be easier for you to get down to it. Well, and in the meantime, while there are no books, don’t waste your time — come to me, and we’ll take up the compass, go through some meteorology. All of it is necessary."

"That’s all very well..." the deacon muttered, and laughed. "I’ve applied for a post in central Russia, and my uncle, an archpriest, has promised to help me get it. If I go with you, it’ll turn out I troubled him for nothing."

"I don’t understand your hesitation. Go on being an ordinary deacon, obliged to serve only on feast days and to rest from his labors the rest of the time, and ten years from now you’ll be just the same as you are now, with only a mustache and a little beard added, whereas, coming back from the expedition, in that same ten years you’ll be a different man, enriched by the knowledge that you’ve accomplished something."

From the ladies’ carriage came shrieks of terror and delight. The carriages drove along a road cut into a sheer rocky bank, and it seemed to everyone that they were racing along a shelf fixed to a high wall, and that the carriages would topple into the abyss at any moment. To the right the sea spread out; to the left was an uneven brown wall with black patches, red veins, and creeping roots, while overhead, bending down as if in fear and curiosity, curly conifers peered below. A minute later, more shrieking and laughter: they had to drive under an enormous overhanging rock.

"I can’t understand what the devil I’m coming with you for," said Laevsky. "How stupid and vulgar! I ought to be going north, fleeing, saving myself, and instead here I am, for some reason, going to this idiotic picnic."

"But just look what a view!" Samoylenko said to him, as the horses turned left and the valley of the Yellow stream opened out, and the stream itself flashed into sight — yellow, turbid, mad...

"I don’t see anything good in it, Sasha," Laevsky answered. "Constantly rapturing over nature is a sign of a poverty of imagination. Compared to what my own imagination can give me, all these little streams and rocks are trash, and nothing more."

The carriages were now driving along the bank of the stream. The high mountainous banks were gradually drawing together, the valley narrowing and taking on ahead the look of a gorge; the rocky mountain along which they drove had been thrown together by nature out of enormous stones pressing against one another with such fearful force that at the sight of them Samoylenko involuntarily grunted every time. The gloomy, handsome mountain was cut here and there by narrow cracks and ravines, from which a dampness and a sense of mystery blew on the travelers; through the ravines other mountains could be seen — brown, pink, lilac, smoky, or drenched in bright light. Now and then, as they drove past the ravines, one heard water somewhere up above falling and slapping against the stones.

"Ah, the damned mountains," Laevsky sighed, "how sick I am of them!"

At the spot where the Black stream flowed into the Yellow, and the black water, like ink, stained the yellow and fought against it, off to one side of the road stood the duhan of the Tatar Kerbalai, with a Russian flag on the roof and a sign chalked up: "Pleasant Duhan"; near it was a small garden fenced with wattle, where tables and benches stood, and among the wretched thorny scrub rose a single cypress, dark and handsome.

Kerbalai, a small, nimble Tatar in a blue shirt and a white apron, stood on the road and, clasping his stomach, bowed low to the approaching carriages, smiling and showing his white, gleaming teeth.

"Hello there, Kerbalaika!" Samoylenko shouted to him. "We’ll drive on a little farther, and you bring the samovar and the chairs there! Look sharp!"

Kerbalai nodded his cropped head and muttered something, and only those sitting in the rear carriage could make out: "there are trout, Your Excellency."

"Bring them, bring them!" von Koren told him.

Having driven some five hundred paces from the duhan, the carriages stopped. Samoylenko chose a small meadow scattered with stones convenient for sitting, where a tree lay felled by a storm, its shaggy root torn up and its needles dried and yellow. Here a flimsy log bridge had been thrown across the stream, and on the other bank, directly opposite, stood on four low posts a little shed, a drying-shed for maize, that called to mind the fairy-tale hut on hen’s legs; a little ladder led down from its door.

Everyone’s first impression was that they would never get out of this place. On every side, wherever one looked, the mountains crowded and pressed in, and from the direction of the duhan and the dark cypress the evening shadow came rushing on fast, fast, so that the narrow, crooked valley of the Black stream seemed to grow narrower and the mountains taller. One could hear the river grumbling and the cicadas shrilling without pause.

"Enchanting!" said Marya Konstantinovna, taking deep breaths of delight. "Children, look how lovely it is! What stillness!"

"Yes, it really is lovely," Laevsky agreed; he liked the view, and for some reason, when he looked up at the sky and then at the blue smoke rising from the duhan’s chimney, he suddenly felt sad. "Yes, lovely!" he repeated.

"Ivan Andreich, describe this view!" Marya Konstantinovna said tearfully.

"What for?" asked Laevsky. "The impression is better than any description. This wealth of colors and sounds, which everyone receives directly from nature as an impression, writers blab out in an ugly, unrecognizable form."

"Is that so?" von Koren asked coldly, choosing the biggest stone by the water and trying to climb up onto it and sit down. "Is that so?" he repeated, looking straight at Laevsky. "And Romeo and Juliet? And, say, Pushkin’s Ukrainian Night? Nature ought to come and bow down at their feet."

"Perhaps..." Laevsky agreed, too lazy to think it through or argue. "Though," he said a little later, "what is Romeo and Juliet, essentially? Beautiful, poetic, saintly love — that’s roses meant to hide the rot underneath. Romeo is the same kind of animal as everyone else."

"Whatever one starts talking to you about, you reduce it all to..."

Von Koren glanced back at Katya and did not finish.

"Reduce it to what?" asked Laevsky.

"One says to you, for instance: ’how beautiful a bunch of grapes is!’ and you say: ’yes, but how ugly it is when it’s chewed and digested in stomachs.’ What’s the point of saying that? It’s not new, and... it’s a strange manner altogether."

Laevsky knew that von Koren did not like him, and therefore feared him, and in his presence felt as though everyone were cramped for room and someone were standing behind his back. He made no answer, moved off to one side, and regretted that he had come.

"Gentlemen, off you go for firewood!" commanded Samoylenko.

Everyone scattered wherever they pleased, and only Kirilin, Achmianov, and Nikodim Aleksandrych stayed behind. Kerbalai brought chairs, spread a carpet on the ground, and set out several bottles of wine. The police superintendent Kirilin, a tall, imposing man who wore an overcoat over his tunic in all weathers, with his proud bearing, his consequential walk, and his thick, somewhat hoarse voice, called to mind a young provincial chief of police. His expression was sad and sleepy, as though he had just been woken against his will.

"What’s this you’ve brought, you brute?" he asked Kerbalai, drawling out every word. "I told you to bring kvareli, and what have you brought, Tatar mug? Eh? What’s this?"

"We have plenty of our own wine, Yegor Alekseich," Nikodim Aleksandrych remarked timidly and politely.

"What’s that? But I want my own wine here too. I’m taking part in the picnic, and I believe I have every right to contribute my share. I be-lieve so! Bring ten bottles of kvareli!"

"Why so many?" Nikodim Aleksandrych wondered, knowing that Kirilin had no money.

"Twenty bottles! Thirty!" Kirilin shouted.

"Never mind, let him," Achmianov whispered to Nikodim Aleksandrych, "I’ll pay."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna was in a merry, playful mood. She wanted to jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her cheap calico dress with little blue dots, her red slippers, and the same straw hat, she seemed to herself small, simple, light, and airy as a butterfly. She ran across the flimsy little bridge and for a minute gazed down into the water to make her head spin, then shrieked and ran laughing to the other side, to the drying-shed, and it seemed to her that all the men, even Kerbalai, were admiring her. When, in the fast-falling dusk, the trees merged with the mountains and the horses with the carriages, and a little light flickered in the windows of the duhan, she climbed the mountain by a path that wound among the stones and thorny bushes, and sat down on a rock. Below, the campfire was already burning. Near the fire, his sleeves rolled up, the deacon was moving about, his long black shadow swinging around the fire like a radius; he kept feeding it brushwood and stirring the pot with a spoon tied to a long stick. Samoylenko, his face copper-red, bustled around the fire as if he were in his own kitchen, shouting fiercely:

"Where’s the salt, gentlemen? Forgotten it, I suppose? Why is everyone sitting about like landed gentry while I alone do the work?"

Laevsky and Nikodim Aleksandrych sat side by side on the fallen tree, gazing thoughtfully into the fire. Marya Konstantinovna, Katya, and Kostya were taking the tea things and plates out of the hampers. Von Koren, his arms crossed and one foot set on a stone, stood at the very edge of the water, thinking about something. Red patches from the campfire, together with the shadows, moved over the ground around the dark human figures, trembled on the mountainside, on the trees, on the bridge, on the drying-shed; on the other side, the steep, gouged-out bank was lit up all over, flickering and reflected in the stream, and the swift, seething water tore its reflection to pieces.

The deacon went to fetch the fish, which Kerbalai was cleaning and washing on the bank, but stopped halfway and looked around.

"My God, how good this is!" he thought. "People, stones, fire, dusk, an ugly tree — nothing more, but how good!"

On the other bank, near the drying-shed, some unfamiliar people had appeared. Because the light flickered and the smoke from the campfire drifted across to that side, it was impossible to make out all these people at once, but glimpses came through: now a shaggy cap and a gray beard, now a blue shirt, now rags reaching from shoulder to knee and a dagger slung across the stomach, now a young swarthy face with black eyebrows so thick and sharp they looked as if drawn in charcoal. About five of them sat down in a circle on the ground, and the other five went into the drying-shed. One stood in the doorway with his back to the fire and, clasping his hands behind him, began telling something that must have been very interesting, for when Samoylenko threw on more brushwood and the fire flared, threw off sparks, and lit up the drying-shed brightly, two faces could be seen looking out of the doorway, calm and full of deep attention, and those sitting in the circle turned and began listening to the story. A little later, the men sitting in the circle began softly singing something long-drawn-out and melodious, like a Lenten church chant... Listening to them, the deacon pictured what would become of him in ten years’ time, when he returned from the expedition: a young hieromonk-missionary, an author with a name and a splendid past; he is consecrated archimandrite, then bishop; he serves the liturgy in the cathedral; in a golden miter, with the panagia, he comes out onto the ambo and, blessing the throng of people with the trikirion and the dikirion, proclaims: "Look down from heaven, O God, behold and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted!" And the children sing back in angelic voices: "Holy God"...

"Deacon, where’s that fish?" came Samoylenko’s voice.

Going back to the fire, the deacon pictured how, on a hot July day, a religious procession moved along a dusty road; ahead, peasant men carry the banners, and the women and girls the icons, behind them the boy choristers and the sexton with his cheek bound up and straw in his hair, then, in his proper place, he himself, the deacon, and behind him priest-na-strastnoy-nedele/">the priest in his skufia and with the cross, while behind them all a crowd of peasant men, women, and boys raise the dust; there in the crowd, too, the priest’s wife and the deacon’s wife in their kerchiefs. The choristers sing, the children shout, the quail call, the lark pours out its song... Now they stop and sprinkle the herd with holy water... They go on and, kneeling, pray for rain. Then refreshments, talk...

"And this too is good..." thought the deacon.

VII

Kirilin and Achmianov were climbing the mountain by the path. Achmianov fell behind and stopped, while Kirilin went up to Nadezhda Fyodorovna.

"Good evening!" he said, touching his cap in salute.

"Good evening."

"Well now!" said Kirilin, looking up at the sky and thinking.

"Well what?" asked Nadezhda Fyodorovna, after a short silence, noticing that Achmianov was watching the two of them.

"So then," the officer pronounced slowly, "our love has withered, so to speak, without ever managing to bloom. How am I to understand this? Is it a kind of coquetry on your part, or do you take me for some good-for-nothing to be treated however you please?"

"It was a mistake! Leave me alone!" Nadezhda Fyodorovna said sharply, looking at him on this beautiful, wonderful evening with fear, and asking herself in bewilderment: could there really have been a moment when this man had pleased her and been close to her?

"I see!" said Kirilin; he stood silent a moment, thought, and said: "Well then? We’ll wait until you’re in a better mood, but in the meantime I dare assure you, I am a decent man, and I won’t allow anyone to doubt it. I am not to be trifled with! Adieu!"

He gave a salute and walked off to the side, picking his way among the bushes. A little later Achmianov approached, hesitant.

"A fine evening tonight!" he said, with a slight Armenian accent.

He was not bad-looking, dressed in the fashion, and carried himself simply, like a well-brought-up young man, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna did not like him because she owed his father three hundred rubles; it was also unpleasant to her that a shopkeeper had been invited to the picnic, and it was unpleasant that he should come up to her on this particular evening, when her soul felt so clean.

"The picnic’s turned out well, on the whole," he said, after a silence.

"Yes," she agreed, and, as though only just remembering her debt, said carelessly: "Yes, tell them at your shop that Ivan Andreich will come by one of these days and pay the three hundred there... or however much it is, I don’t remember."

"I’m ready to give another three hundred, if only you’d stop reminding me of that debt every day. What’s the use of such prose?"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna laughed; a funny thought had come into her head, that if she were not sufficiently moral and wished it, she could rid herself of the debt in one minute. If, say, she were to turn this handsome young fool’s head! How amusing, how absurd, how wild it would really be! And she suddenly felt a wish to make him fall in love, to fleece him, to drop him, and then see what came of it.

"Allow me to give you a piece of advice," Achmianov said timidly. "I beg you, be on your guard against Kirilin. He tells terrible things about you everywhere."

"It doesn’t interest me to know what every fool says about me," Nadezhda Fyodorovna said coldly, and uneasiness took hold of her, and the amusing idea of playing with the young, good-looking Achmianov suddenly lost its charm.

"We must go down," she said. "They’re calling."

Below, the fish soup was already ready. It was ladled out onto plates and eaten with that solemn ceremony that only happens at picnics; and everyone found the soup very tasty and agreed that at home they never ate anything so delicious. As always happens at picnics, lost among the mass of napkins, bundles, and useless greasy papers crawling about in the wind, no one knew whose glass or whose bread was whose, wine was spilled on the carpet and on people’s knees, salt was scattered, and all around it was dark, the fire no longer burned so brightly, and everyone was too lazy to get up and put on more brushwood. Everyone drank wine, and Kostya and Katya were each given half a glass. Nadezhda Fyodorovna drank one glass, then another, grew tipsy, and forgot about Kirilin.

"A splendid picnic, an enchanting evening," said Laevsky, growing merry from the wine, "but I’d prefer a good winter to all of this. ’His beaver collar silvered with the frosty dust.’"

"Every man to his own taste," von Koren remarked.

Laevsky felt awkward: at his back the fire’s heat beat against him, and at his chest and face beat von Koren’s hatred; this hatred of a decent, intelligent man, in which some solid reason was probably hidden, humiliated him, weakened him, and, unable to withstand it, he said in a fawning tone:

"I love nature passionately, and I’m sorry I’m not a naturalist. I envy you."

"Well, I neither envy nor am sorry," said Nadezhda Fyodorovna. "I can’t understand how one can seriously occupy oneself with bugs and beetles when the people are suffering."

Laevsky shared her opinion. He was wholly unacquainted with the natural sciences, and so could never reconcile himself to the authoritative tone and the learned, profound air of people who occupied themselves with the whiskers of ants and the legs of cockroaches, and it always vexed him that these people, on the strength of whiskers, legs, and some sort of protoplasm (which for some reason he pictured in the shape of an oyster), took it upon themselves to decide questions embracing the origin and life of man. But in Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s words he heard a lie, and he said, only to contradict her:

"It’s not a matter of beetles, but of conclusions!"

VIII

They began getting into the carriages to drive home, late, toward eleven o’clock. Everyone had taken their seats, and only Nadezhda Fyodorovna and Achmianov were missing, who were on the far side of the river, racing each other and laughing.

"Hurry up, ladies and gentlemen!" Samoylenko called to them.

"One shouldn’t give the ladies wine," von Koren said quietly.

Laevsky, worn out by the picnic, by von Koren’s hatred, and by his own thoughts, went to meet Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and when she, merry and joyful, feeling herself light as a feather, out of breath and laughing, seized him by both hands and laid her head on his chest, he stepped back and said sternly:

"You’re behaving like... a tart."

This came out so harshly that he even felt sorry for her. On his angry, exhausted face she read hatred, pity, and vexation at himself, and she suddenly lost heart. She understood that she had overdone it, had behaved too freely, and, saddened, feeling herself heavy, coarse, and drunk, got into the first empty carriage that came to hand, together with Achmianov. Laevsky rode with Kirilin, the zoologist with Samoylenko, the deacon with the ladies, and the procession moved off.

"So that’s what the macaques are like..." von Koren began, wrapping himself in his cloak and closing his eyes. "You heard her — she wouldn’t want to occupy herself with bugs and beetles, because the people are suffering. That’s how all the macaques judge our kind. A slavish, cunning tribe, cowed for ten generations by the whip and the fist; it trembles, melts with tenderness, and burns incense only before violence, but let a macaque into a free domain, where there’s no one to take it by the scruff of the neck, and there it unfolds and shows what it’s made of. Just watch how bold it is at picture exhibitions, in museums, in theaters, or when it passes judgment on science: it bristles, rears up, curses, criticizes... And it’s sure to criticize — that’s the slavish trait! Listen closely: people in the free professions are abused more often than swindlers — that’s because society is three-quarters made up of slaves, of just such macaques. It never happens that a slave holds out his hand to you and sincerely says thank you for your work."

"I don’t know what you want!" said Samoylenko, yawning. "The poor thing simply wanted, in her simplicity, to have an intelligent talk with you, and you’re already drawing conclusions. You’re angry at him for something, so now you’re angry at her too, for company. But she’s a splendid woman!"

"Oh, enough! An ordinary kept woman, depraved and vulgar. Listen, Aleksandr Davidych, when you meet a simple peasant woman who doesn’t live with her husband, does nothing, and only giggles and titters, you tell her: go and work. Why is it, then, that you get timid here and are afraid to speak the truth? Only because Nadezhda Fyodorovna is kept not by a sailor but by an official?"

"What do you want me to do with her?" Samoylenko said, growing angry. "Beat her, is that it?"

"Not flatter vice. We curse vice only behind its back, and that’s like shaking a fist in your pocket. I’m a zoologist, or a sociologist, which is the same thing, and you’re a doctor; society trusts us; we’re obliged to point out to it the terrible harm that the existence of ladies like this Nadezhda Ivanovna threatens it and future generations with."

"Fyodorovna," Samoylenko corrected. "And what is society supposed to do?"

"Society? That’s its own affair. In my opinion, the most direct and reliable way is force. Manu militari, she ought to be sent back to her husband, and if the husband won’t take her, then packed off to penal labor or some house of correction."

"Ugh!" Samoylenko sighed; he was silent for a while, then asked quietly: "The other day you were saying that people like Laevsky ought to be destroyed... Tell me, if it came to that... suppose the state or society entrusted you with destroying him, would you... go through with it?"

"My hand wouldn’t tremble."

IX

Arriving home, Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna went into their dark, stuffy, dreary rooms. Both were silent. Laevsky lit a candle, and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down and, without taking off her cloak and hat, raised her sad, guilty eyes to him.

He understood that she was waiting for an explanation from him; but to explain himself would be tedious, useless, and wearying, and he felt heavy at heart for having failed to hold back and having spoken a coarse word to her. His hand happened on the letter in his pocket, which he had meant every day to read to her, and it occurred to him that if he showed her the letter now, it would draw her attention off in another direction.

"It’s time to settle things between us," he thought. "I’ll give it to her; whatever happens, happens."

He took out the letter and held it out to her.

"Read it. It concerns you."

Having said this, he went off to his study and lay down on the sofa in the darkness, without a pillow. Nadezhda Fyodorovna read the letter, and it seemed to her that the ceiling had come down and the walls had drawn close around her. It suddenly grew cramped, dark, and terrible. She quickly crossed herself three times and said:

"Rest, O Lord... rest, O Lord..."

And she began to weep.

"Vanya!" she called. "Ivan Andreich!"

There was no answer. Thinking that Laevsky had come in and was standing behind her chair, she sobbed like a child and said:

"Why didn’t you tell me sooner that he’d died? I wouldn’t have gone on the picnic, wouldn’t have laughed so dreadfully... The men said vile things to me. What a sin, what a sin! Save me, Vanya, save me... I’ve lost my senses... I’m lost..."

Laevsky heard her sobbing. He felt unbearably stifled, and his heart was pounding hard. In anguish he got up, stood in the middle of the room, felt his way in the dark to the armchair by the table, and sat down.

"This is a prison..." he thought. "I have to get away... I can’t..."

It was too late now to go and play cards, and there were no restaurants in town. He lay down again and stopped up his ears so as not to hear the sobbing, and suddenly remembered that he could go to Samoylenko’s. So as not to pass by Nadezhda Fyodorovna, he made his way through the window into the little garden, climbed over the fence, and went out into the street. It was dark. Some steamer had just come in, a big passenger one to judge by its lights... The anchor chain rattled. From the shore, moving quickly toward the steamer, a red light: it was the customs boat under way.

"The passengers are sleeping away in their cabins"... thought Laevsky, and envied the peace of strangers.

The windows of Samoylenko’s house stood open. Laevsky looked in at one, then at another: the rooms were dark and quiet.

"Aleksandr Davidych, are you asleep?" he called. "Aleksandr Davidych!"

There came a cough and an anxious challenge:

"Who’s there? What the devil?"

"It’s me, Aleksandr Davidych. Forgive me."

A little while later the door opened; a soft light gleamed from the icon lamp, and there appeared the enormous figure of Samoylenko, all in white, in a white nightcap.

"What do you want?" he asked, breathing heavily, still half asleep, scratching himself. "Wait, I’ll unlock it now."

"Don’t trouble, I’ll come in by the window..."

Laevsky climbed in through the window and, going up to Samoylenko, seized him by the hand.

"Aleksandr Davidych," he said in a trembling voice, "save me! I beg you, I implore you, understand me! My position is agonizing. If it goes on another day or two I’ll strangle myself, like... like a dog!"

"Wait a moment... What is it, exactly?"

"Light the candle."

"Oh, oh..." sighed Samoylenko, lighting the candle. "My God, my God... And it’s past one already, brother."

"Forgive me, but I can’t sit at home," said Laevsky, feeling a great relief from the light and from Samoylenko’s presence. "You, Aleksandr Davidych, are my one and only, my best friend... My whole hope rests on you. Whether you want to or not, for God’s sake help me out. Whatever happens, I have to leave here. Lend me some money!"

"Oh, my God, my God!.." sighed Samoylenko, scratching himself. "I fall asleep and I hear: a whistle, the steamer’s come in, and then it’s you... How much do you need?"

"At least three hundred roubles. I have to leave her a hundred, and two hundred for my journey... I already owe you about four hundred, but I’ll send it all... all of it..."

Samoylenko gathered both his side-whiskers into one hand, planted his feet apart, and fell to thinking.

"So..." he muttered thoughtfully. "Three hundred... Yes... But I haven’t got that much. I’ll have to borrow from someone."

"Borrow it, for God’s sake!" said Laevsky, seeing by Samoylenko’s face that he wanted to give him the money and certainly would. "Borrow it, and I’ll be sure to pay it back. I’ll send it from Petersburg the moment I get there. You can be easy about that. And here’s what, Sasha," he said, brightening, "let’s have some wine!"

"So... Wine we can have."

The two of them went into the dining room.

"But what about Nadezhda Fyodorovna?" asked Samoylenko, setting three bottles and a plate of peaches on the table. "Will she really stay behind?"

"I’ll arrange everything, everything..." said Laevsky, feeling a sudden rush of joy. "I’ll send her money afterward, and she’ll come to me... There we’ll sort out our relations. To your health, friend."

"Wait a moment!" said Samoylenko. "First try this one... It’s from my own vineyard. This bottle here is from Navaridze’s vineyard, and this one’s Akhatulov’s... Try all three kinds and tell me frankly... Mine seems to have a bit of an edge to it. Eh? Don’t you find?"

"Yes. You’ve comforted me, Aleksandr Davidych. Thank you... I’ve come back to life."

"An edge to it?"

"The devil knows, I can’t tell. But you’re a magnificent, wonderful man!"

Looking at his pale, agitated, kind face, Samoylenko remembered von Koren’s opinion, that people like him ought to be destroyed, and Laevsky struck him as a weak, defenseless child whom anyone could wrong and destroy.

"And when you go, make your peace with your mother," he said. "It’s not right."

"Yes, yes, certainly."

They were silent a little while. When they had finished the first bottle, Samoylenko said:

"You ought to make your peace with von Koren too. You’re both splendid, both highly intelligent men, and you look at each other like a pair of wolves."

"Yes, he’s a splendid, highly intelligent man," Laevsky agreed, ready now to praise and forgive everyone. "He’s a remarkable man, but it’s impossible for me to get close to him. No! Our natures are too different. I’m a listless, weak, submissive nature; perhaps in a good moment I’d hold out my hand to him, but he’d turn away from me... with contempt."

Laevsky took a gulp of wine, walked from one corner of the room to the other, and went on, standing in the middle of the room:

"I understand von Koren perfectly. His is a firm, strong, despotic nature. You’ve heard him — he’s always talking about his expedition, and it’s no idle talk. He needs a desert, a moonlit night: all around, in tents and under the open sky, his hungry and sick men lie sleeping, worn out by hard marches — Cossacks, guides, porters, doctor, priest — and only he does not sleep, and, like Stanley, sits on a folding stool and feels himself the king of the desert and the master of these people. He goes on and on, on and on somewhere, his men groan and die off one after another, and he goes on and on, and in the end he perishes himself and still remains the despot and king of the desert, since the cross over his grave can be seen by caravans thirty or forty miles off and reigns over the desert. I’m sorry that man isn’t in the army. He’d have made a superb, a brilliant commander. He’d know how to drown his cavalry in a river and build bridges out of corpses, and that kind of daring is more needed in war than any amount of fortification and tactics. Oh, I understand him perfectly! Tell me: why does he waste his time here? What does he need here?"

"He’s studying the marine fauna."

"No. No, brother, no!" sighed Laevsky. "A traveling scientist told me on the steamer that the Black Sea is poor in fauna and that at its depths, on account of the abundance of hydrogen sulfide, organic life is impossible. All the serious zoologists work at the biological stations in Naples or Villefranche. But von Koren is self-willed and stubborn: he works on the Black Sea because no one else works there; he’s broken with the university, doesn’t want to know scholars or colleagues, because before anything else he’s a despot, and only afterward a zoologist. And, you’ll see, something big will come of him. Even now he dreams that when he comes back from his expedition he’ll smoke intrigue and mediocrity out of our universities and twist the scholars into a ram’s horn. Despotism is as strong in science as it is in war. And he’s living his second summer in this stinking little town because it’s better to be first in the village than second in the city. Here he’s king and eagle; he keeps every inhabitant under his thumb and crushes them with his authority. He’s got everyone in hand, meddles in other people’s business, needs everything, and everyone’s afraid of him. I slip out from under his paw, he feels it, and he hates me for it. Didn’t he tell you I ought to be destroyed, or sent to hard labor?"

"Yes," Samoylenko laughed.

Laevsky laughed too, and drank some wine.

"And his ideals are despotic too," he said, laughing and eating a peach. "Ordinary mortals, when they work for the common good, have in mind their neighbor — me, you, a human being, in a word. But for von Koren, people are puppies and nonentities, too small to be the aim of his life. He works, he’ll go on his expedition and break his neck there, not for love of his neighbor but for the sake of abstractions like humanity, future generations, the ideal breed of man. He’s busy improving the human breed, and in that respect we’re nothing to him but slaves, cannon fodder, beasts of burden; some he’d destroy or pack off to penal servitude, others he’d break with discipline, make them, like Arakcheyev, rise and go to bed by the drum, he’d set up eunuchs to guard our chastity and morality, he’d order fire opened on anyone who steps outside the circle of our narrow, conservative morality, and all of it in the name of improving the human breed... And what is the human breed? An illusion, a mirage... Despots have always been visionaries. I, brother, understand him perfectly. I value him, I don’t deny his significance; the world rests on men like him, and if the world were left to the likes of us alone, then we, for all our kindness and good intentions, would make of it just what the flies have made of that picture there. Yes."

Laevsky sat down beside Samoylenko and said with genuine feeling:

"I’m an empty, worthless, fallen man! The air I breathe, this wine, love — life itself, in a word, I’ve been buying till now at the price of lies, idleness, and cowardice. Till now I’ve deceived people and myself, I’ve suffered for it, and my sufferings were cheap and vulgar. Before von Koren’s hatred I bow my back timidly, because at times I hate and despise myself too."

Laevsky again walked from corner to corner in agitation and said:

"I’m glad that I see my faults clearly and am aware of them. It will help me rise again and become a different man. My dear fellow, if only you knew how passionately, with what longing, I thirst for my renewal. And I swear to you, I will be a man! I will! I don’t know whether it’s the wine speaking in me, or whether it’s really so, but it seems to me I haven’t lived through such bright, pure moments in a long while as I have just now, at your place."

"Time to sleep, brother..." said Samoylenko.

"Yes, yes... Forgive me. This instant."

Laevsky fussed about among the furniture and the windows, hunting for his cap.

"Thank you..." he muttered, sighing. "Thank you... Kindness and a good word are worth more than alms. You’ve brought me back to life."

He found his cap, stopped, and looked at Samoylenko guiltily.

"Aleksandr Davidych!" he said in an imploring voice.

"What is it?"

"Let me, my dear fellow, stay the night here!"

"By all means... why not?"

Laevsky lay down to sleep on the sofa and went on talking with the doctor a good while longer.

X

About three days after the picnic Marya Konstantinovna came unexpectedly to see Nadezhda Fyodorovna and, without greeting her, without taking off her hat, seized her by both hands, pressed them to her breast, and said in great agitation:

"My dear, I’m shaken, I’m stunned. Our kind, dear doctor told my Nikodim Aleksandrych yesterday that your husband is supposed to have died. Tell me, my dear... tell me, is it true?"

"Yes, it’s true, he’s dead," answered Nadezhda Fyodorovna.

"How dreadful, how dreadful, my dear! But there’s no evil without some good in it. Your husband was, no doubt, a wonderful, splendid, saintly man, and such men are needed more in heaven than on earth."

Every little line and dot on Marya Konstantinovna’s face trembled, as if tiny needles were leaping under her skin; she smiled an almond smile and said rapturously, catching her breath:

"So then, you’re free, my dear. Now you can hold your head high and look people boldly in the eye. From now on God and the world will bless your union with Ivan Andreich. It’s enchanting. I’m trembling with joy, I can’t find the words. My dear, I’ll be your matchmaker... Nikodim Aleksandrych and I love you both so much, you’ll let us bless your lawful, pure union. When, when do you think of being married?"

"I hadn’t thought about it," said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, freeing her hands.

"That’s impossible, my dear. You have thought, you have thought about it!"

"I swear to God, I haven’t," laughed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. "What would we get married for? I don’t see any need for it. Let’s go on living as we’ve lived."

"What are you saying!" Marya Konstantinovna was horrified. "For God’s sake, what are you saying!"

"Because if we get married, things won’t be any better. On the contrary, worse even. We’ll lose our freedom."

"My dear! My dear, what are you saying!" cried Marya Konstantinovna, stepping back and throwing up her hands. "You’re extravagant! Come to your senses! Calm yourself!"

"How do you mean, calm myself? I haven’t even lived yet, and you tell me — calm yourself!"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna remembered that she really had not lived yet. She had finished her course at the institute and married a man she did not love, then had taken up with Laevsky and had lived with him all this time on this dull, deserted shore, waiting for something better. Was this really life?

"But I really ought to get married..." she thought, but remembered Kirilin and Achmianov, blushed, and said:

"No, it’s impossible. Even if Ivan Andreich were to beg me on his knees for it, I’d still refuse."

Marya Konstantinovna sat a moment in silence on the sofa, sad and grave, staring at one point, then got up and said coldly:

"Farewell, my dear! Forgive me for troubling you. Though it isn’t easy for me, I must tell you that from this day everything is over between us, and that, despite my deep respect for Ivan Andreich, the door of my house is closed to you."

She said this with solemnity, and was herself crushed by her own solemn tone; her face trembled again, took on its soft, almond expression, she held out both hands to the frightened, abashed Nadezhda Fyodorovna and said imploringly:

"My dear one, let me be your mother, or your elder sister, for just one minute! I’ll be frank with you, as a mother."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna felt in her breast such warmth, such joy and self-pity, as if her mother had truly risen from the dead and were standing before her. She threw her arms impulsively around Marya Konstantinovna and pressed her face to her shoulder. Both wept. They sat down on the sofa and for several minutes sobbed, not looking at each other and unable to utter a single word.

"My dear, my child," began Marya Konstantinovna, "I’m going to tell you harsh truths, without sparing you."

"For God’s sake, for God’s sake!"

"Trust me, my dear. Remember, of all the ladies here, I alone received you. You horrified me from the very first day, but I wasn’t able to treat you with contempt, as everyone else did. I suffered for dear, kind Ivan Andreich as for a son. A young man in a foreign land, inexperienced, weak, without a mother, and I tormented myself, tormented myself... My husband was against knowing him, but I persuaded him... convinced him... We began to receive Ivan Andreich, and with him, of course, you too, otherwise he’d have been offended. I have a daughter, a son... You understand, a tender child’s mind, a pure heart... whosoever shall offend one of these little ones... I received you and trembled for my children. Oh, when you’re a mother, you’ll understand my fear. And everyone was amazed that I received you, forgive me, as a respectable woman, they hinted to me... well, of course, gossip, conjecture... In the depths of my soul I condemned you, but you were unhappy, pitiable, extravagant, and I suffered from pity."

"But why? Why?" asked Nadezhda Fyodorovna, trembling all over. "What have I done to anyone?"

"You’re a terrible sinner. You broke the vow you gave your husband at the altar. You seduced a fine young man who, if he hadn’t met you, might have taken himself a lawful companion for life from a good family of his own circle, and would by now be like everyone else. You’ve ruined his youth. Don’t speak, don’t speak, my dear! I won’t believe a man is ever to blame in our sins. It’s always the women who are to blame. Men are frivolous in domestic life, they live by the mind and not by the heart, they understand much, but a woman understands everything. Everything depends on her. Much is given to her, and much will be required of her. Oh, my dear, if in this respect she were more stupid or weaker than a man, God wouldn’t have entrusted her with the raising of boys and girls. And besides, my dear, you set out on the path of vice, forgetting all modesty; another woman in your position would have hidden herself from people, would have sat locked up at home, and people would have seen her only in church, pale, dressed all in black, weeping, and everyone, in sincere contrition, would have said, ’God, this is a sinning angel returning to Thee again...’ But you, my dear, forgot all modesty, lived openly, extravagantly, as if you gloried in your sin, you frolicked, you laughed, and I, watching you, trembled with horror, afraid the heavenly thunder would strike our house at the very moment you were sitting with us. My dear, don’t speak, don’t speak!" cried Marya Konstantinovna, noticing that Nadezhda Fyodorovna wanted to speak. "Trust me, I won’t deceive you and won’t hide a single truth from the eyes of your soul. Listen to me, then, my dear... God marks out great sinners, and you were marked. Remember, your costumes were always dreadful!"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who had always thought very highly of her costumes, stopped crying and looked at her in astonishment.

"Yes, dreadful!" Marya Konstantinovna went on. "By the elaborateness and gaudiness of your outfits anyone could judge your conduct. Everyone, looking at you, chuckled and shrugged their shoulders, while I suffered, suffered... And forgive me, my dear, but you’re not clean! When we met at the bathing place, you made me shudder. The outer dress was one thing, but your skirt, your shift... my dear, I blush to say it! And poor Ivan Andreich — no one ever ties his necktie properly either, and by his linen, by his boots, poor fellow, one can see no one at home looks after him. And he’s always hungry at your place, my dear, and indeed, if there’s no one at home to see to the samovar and the coffee, one can’t help spending half one’s salary living at the pavilion. And at your house it’s simply a horror, a horror! In the whole town nobody has flies like you do, they’re swarming, all the plates and saucers are black. On the windows and tables, just look, dust, dead flies, glasses... What are the glasses doing there? And, my dear, to this day your table hasn’t been cleared. And one’s ashamed to go into your bedroom: linen scattered everywhere, those various rubber things of yours hanging on the walls, some sort of crockery standing about... My dear! A husband must know nothing, and a wife must be pure before him, like a little angel! Every morning I wake at first light and wash my face in cold water, so that my Nikodim Aleksandrych won’t notice I look as if I’ve just slept."

"That’s all nonsense," Nadezhda Fyodorovna burst into sobs. "If only I were happy — but I’m so unhappy!"

"Yes, yes, you’re very unhappy!" sighed Marya Konstantinovna, hardly able to keep from crying herself. "And a dreadful grief awaits you in the future! A lonely old age, illness, and then the reckoning at the dread tribunal... Dreadful, dreadful! Now fate itself is holding out its hand to help you, and you’re unwisely pushing it away. Marry, marry quickly!"

"Yes, I must, I must," said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, "but it’s impossible!"

"But why?"

"It’s impossible! Oh, if only you knew!"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna wanted to tell about Kirilin, and about how she had met the young, handsome Achmianov on the pier the evening before, and how a mad, ridiculous idea had come into her head of ridding herself of a debt of three hundred roubles, how very funny it had seemed to her, and how she had come home late in the evening feeling herself irrevocably fallen and venal. She herself did not know how it had happened. And now she wanted to swear before Marya Konstantinovna that she would certainly pay back the debt, but sobs and shame prevented her from speaking.

"I’ll go away," she said. "Let Ivan Andreich stay, but I’ll go."

"Where to?"

"To Russia."

"But what will you live on there? You have nothing."

"I’ll take up translating, or... or open a little library..."

"Don’t fantasize, my dear. A little library needs money. Well, I’ll leave you now, and you calm yourself and think it over, and come to me tomorrow looking cheerful. That will be enchanting! Well, farewell, my little angel. Let me kiss you."

Marya Konstantinovna kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead, made the sign of the cross over her, and went out quietly. It was already growing dark, and Olga had lit the fire in the kitchen. Still crying, Nadezhda Fyodorovna went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. A violent fever began to shake her. Lying there, she undressed, crumpled her dress at her feet, and curled up under the blanket. She wanted a drink, and there was no one to give her one.

"I’ll pay it back!" she kept saying to herself, and in her delirium it seemed to her that she was sitting beside some sick woman and recognizing herself in her. "I’ll pay it back. It would be foolish to think it’s because of the money... I’ll go away and send him money from Petersburg. First a hundred... then a hundred... and then — a hundred..."

Late at night Laevsky came home.

"First a hundred..." Nadezhda Fyodorovna said to him, "then a hundred..."

"You ought to take some quinine," he said, and thought:

"Tomorrow’s Wednesday, the steamer leaves, and I’m not going. So I’ll have to stay here till Saturday."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna rose up on her knees in bed.

"Did I say anything just now?" she asked, smiling and screwing up her eyes against the candle.

"Nothing. We’ll have to send for the doctor in the morning. Sleep now."

He took a pillow and went toward the door. Ever since he had finally decided to leave and abandon Nadezhda Fyodorovna, she had begun to arouse in him pity and a sense of guilt; in her presence he felt a little ashamed, as in the presence of a sick person, or an old horse condemned to be shot. He stopped in the doorway and glanced back at her.

"At the picnic I was irritated and said something coarse to you. Forgive me, for God’s sake."

Having said this, he went to his study, lay down, and for a long time could not fall asleep.

When, the next morning, Samoylenko, dressed, on account of the holiday, in full parade uniform with epaulettes and decorations, having felt Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s pulse and looked at her tongue, came out of the bedroom, Laevsky, standing at the threshold, asked him anxiously:

"Well, what is it? What?"

His face expressed fear, extreme anxiety, and hope.

"Calm yourself, nothing dangerous," said Samoylenko. "An ordinary fever."

"That’s not what I mean," Laevsky said, wincing with impatience. "Did you get the money?"

"My dear fellow, forgive me," Samoylenko whispered, glancing round at the door and embarrassed. "For God’s sake forgive me! No one has spare money, and so far I’ve collected five here, ten there — a hundred and ten in all. Today I’ll speak to a few more people. Be patient."

"But the absolute deadline is Saturday!" whispered Laevsky, trembling with impatience. "For the sake of all the saints, by Saturday! If I don’t leave on Saturday, I won’t need anything... anything! I can’t understand how a doctor can be without money!"

"Well, God’s will," Samoylenko whispered quickly and with strain, and something even squeaked in his throat, "everyone’s taken everything from me, I’m owed seven thousand, and I’m in debt all round. Is that my fault?"

"So you’ll have it by Saturday? Yes?"

"I’ll try."

"I beg you, my dear fellow! So that Friday morning the money’s in my hands."

Samoylenko sat down and prescribed quinine in solution, kalii bromati, rhubarb tincture, tincturae gentianae, aquae foeniculi — all this in one mixture, added rose syrup so it wouldn’t be bitter, and went off.

XI

"You look as if you’re coming to arrest me," said von Koren, seeing Samoylenko come in to him in full parade uniform.

"I was passing by and thought: let me drop in, look in on zoology," said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table the zoologist himself had knocked together out of plain boards. "Good day, holy father!" he nodded to the deacon, who was sitting by the window copying something out. "I’ll sit a minute and run home to see about dinner. It’s time already... Am I not in your way?"

"Not at all," answered the zoologist, spreading finely written papers over the table. "We’re busy with correspondence."

"I see... Oh, my God, my God..." sighed Samoylenko; he carefully drew toward himself a dusty book on which lay a dead, dried scolopendra, and said: "Well now! Imagine some little green beetle going about its business and suddenly meeting an abomination like this on the way. I can just picture the horror!"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"It’s given poison to defend itself against enemies?"

"Yes, to defend itself, and to attack too."

"So, so, so... And everything in nature, my dear fellows, is purposeful and explicable," sighed Samoylenko. "Only there’s one thing I don’t understand. You, a man of the very greatest intelligence, explain it to me, if you please. There are, you know, little animals, no bigger than a rat, pretty to look at, but in the highest degree, I tell you, base and immoral. Say such a little beast is going through the forest, sees a bird, catches it, and eats it. It goes on and sees in the grass a little nest with eggs; it’s no longer hungry, it’s full, but all the same it bites open an egg and tosses the others out of the nest with its paw. Then it meets a frog and starts playing with it. It torments the frog to death, goes on licking its chops, and a beetle comes its way. It gives the beetle a swat with its paw... And it spoils and destroys everything in its path... It even climbs into other creatures’ burrows, tears up anthills for nothing, bites open snails... If it meets a rat, it fights it; if it sees a little snake or a mouse, it has to strangle it. And so the whole day long. Well, tell me, what’s such a beast needed for? Why was it created?"

"I don’t know which little animal you mean," said von Koren, "probably one of the insectivores. Well, what of it? The bird was caught because it was careless; he destroyed the nest with the eggs because the bird was unskilled, built its nest badly, and didn’t know how to conceal it. The frog probably had some flaw in its coloring, otherwise he wouldn’t have seen it, and so on. Your beast only destroys the weak, the unskilled, the careless — in a word, those with defects that nature finds no need to pass on to the next generation. Only the more agile, cautious, strong, and developed survive. In this way your little beast, without suspecting it himself, serves the great ends of improvement."

"Yes, yes, yes... By the way, brother," said Samoylenko off-handedly, "lend me a hundred roubles, will you."

"All right. Among the insectivores there are some very interesting subjects. The mole, for instance. They say it’s useful, since it destroys harmful insects. They tell a story that some German sent Emperor Wilhelm I a coat made of mole skins, and that the Emperor ordered him reprimanded for having destroyed so great a number of useful animals. And yet the mole is in no way behind your little beast in cruelty, and besides is very harmful, since it does terrible damage to meadows."

Von Koren unlocked the strongbox and took out a hundred-rouble note.

"The mole has a powerful ribcage, like a bat’s," he went on, locking the box, "terribly developed bones and muscles, extraordinary armament of the mouth. If it had the dimensions of an elephant, it would be an all-crushing, invincible animal. Interesting — when two moles meet underground, they both, as if by agreement, begin digging a level space; that space is needed so they can fight more conveniently. Once they’ve made it, they enter into a fierce battle and fight until the weaker one falls. Here, take the hundred roubles," said von Koren, lowering his voice, "but on condition that you’re not taking it for Laevsky."

"And what if it is for Laevsky!" Samoylenko flared up. "What business is it of yours?"

"I can’t give it for Laevsky. I know you like lending money. You’d give it even to the brigand Kerim, if he asked you, but forgive me, I can’t help you in that direction."

"Yes, I’m asking for Laevsky!" said Samoylenko, standing up and waving his right arm. "Yes! For Laevsky! And no devil, no fiend, has any right to teach me how I ought to manage my own money. You don’t care to give it? No?"

The deacon burst out laughing.

"Don’t get so hot, just reason it out," said the zoologist. "Doing good to Mr. Laevsky is, in my opinion, as unwise as watering a weed or feeding a locust swarm."

"But in my opinion, we’re obliged to help our neighbors!" cried Samoylenko.

"In that case, go help that hungry Turk lying under the fence! He’s a working man and more useful, more needed than your Laevsky. Give him the hundred roubles! Or donate a hundred roubles to me, for my expedition!"

"Will you give it or not, I’m asking you?"

"Tell me honestly: what does he need the money for?"

"It’s no secret. He has to go to Petersburg on Saturday."

"Well, well!" von Koren said, drawing it out. "Aha... I understand. And will she go with him, or how?"

"She’s staying here for now. He’ll settle his affairs in Petersburg and send her money, and then she’ll go."

"Neatly done!.." said the zoologist, and laughed a short tenor laugh. "Neatly done! Cleverly thought out."

He walked quickly up to Samoylenko and, standing face to face, looking him in the eye, asked:

"Tell me honestly: has he fallen out of love with her? Yes? Tell me: fallen out of love? Yes?"

"Yes," Samoylenko brought out, and broke into a sweat.

"How disgusting!" said von Koren, and his face showed that he felt revulsion. "One of two things, Aleksandr Davidych: either you’re in league with him, or, forgive me, you’re a simpleton. Can’t you see that he’s leading you along like a schoolboy, in the most shameless way? Why, it’s as plain as day that he wants to be rid of her and leave her behind here. She’ll be left on your hands, and it’s as plain as day that you’ll have to pack her off to Petersburg at your own expense. Has your splendid friend so blinded you with his virtues that you can’t see even the simplest things?"

"That’s all pure supposition," said Samoylenko, sitting down.

"Supposition? But why is he going alone, and not together with her? And why, ask him, doesn’t she go ahead and he follow after? A slippery scoundrel!"

Crushed by sudden doubts and suspicions about his friend, Samoylenko suddenly wilted and lowered his voice.

"But it’s impossible!" he said, remembering that night when Laevsky had slept at his house. "He suffers so!"

"What of it? Thieves and arsonists suffer too!"

"Grant even that you’re right..." Samoylenko said thoughtfully. "Let’s suppose it... But he’s a young man, in a foreign land... a university man, we’re university men too, and there’s no one here besides us to give him support."

"Help him do vile things just because you and he happened to be at the university at different times and both did nothing there! What nonsense!"

"Wait, let’s think it over calmly. It seems to me we can arrange it like this..." Samoylenko reasoned, wiggling his fingers. "I, you understand, will give him the money, but I’ll take his word of honor, his gentleman’s word, that within a week he’ll send Nadezhda Fyodorovna money for the journey."

"And he’ll give you his word of honor, he’ll even shed a tear over it and believe it himself, but what’s that word worth? He won’t keep it, and when in a year or two you meet him on the Nevsky arm in arm with a new love, he’ll excuse himself by saying he was crippled by civilization and that he’s a chip off Rudin. Drop him, for God’s sake! Get out of the mud and don’t go digging in it with both hands!"

Samoylenko thought a moment and said resolutely:

"But I’ll give him the money all the same. Say what you like. I’m not in a position to refuse a man on the strength of mere suppositions."

"Excellent. Go and kiss him, then."

"Well then, give me the hundred roubles," Samoylenko asked timidly.

"I won’t."

Silence fell. Samoylenko quite wilted: his face took on a guilty, shamed, ingratiating expression, and it was strange, somehow, to see that pitiful, childishly embarrassed face on such an enormous man in epaulettes and decorations.

"Our local bishop makes his rounds of the diocese not in a carriage but on horseback," said the deacon, laying down his pen. "The sight of him sitting on his little horse is exceedingly touching. His simplicity and modesty are full of biblical grandeur."

"Is he a good man?" asked von Koren, glad of a chance to change the subject.

"Of course — how else? If he weren’t good, would they have consecrated him a bishop?"

"Among bishops one finds some very good and gifted people," said von Koren. "It’s only a pity that many of them have a weakness — imagining themselves statesmen. One busies himself with russification, another criticizes the sciences. That’s not their business. They’d do better to look in at the consistory more often."

"A layman can’t judge bishops."

"Why not, deacon? A bishop’s a man like me."

"Like, but not like," the deacon took offense, and took up his pen again. "If you were like, then grace would have rested on you and you’d be a bishop yourself, and since you’re not a bishop, that means you’re not like."

"Don’t talk nonsense, deacon!" Samoylenko said in anguish. "Listen, here’s what I thought of," he turned to von Koren. "Don’t give me the hundred roubles. You’ll be boarding at my table another three months till winter, so give me the payment for the three months in advance."

"I won’t."

Samoylenko blinked and turned crimson; mechanically he drew the book with the scolopendra toward himself and looked at it, then stood up and took hold of his cap. Von Koren felt sorry for him.

"There you have it, doing business with such gentlemen!" said the zoologist, and in indignation kicked some paper into the corner. "Understand, this isn’t kindness, isn’t love, it’s weakness, laxity, poison! What reason builds, your flabby, good-for-nothing hearts destroy! When I was a schoolboy and had typhoid fever, my aunt out of pity stuffed me with pickled mushrooms, and I nearly died. Understand, you and my aunt both, that love for one’s fellow man ought to reside not in the heart, not under the spoon, not in the small of the back, but right here!"

Von Koren struck himself on the forehead.

"Here, take it!" he said, and flung the hundred-rouble note at him.

"You’re angry for nothing, Kolya," Samoylenko said mildly, folding the note. "I understand you perfectly, but... put yourself in my place."

"You’re an old woman, that’s what you are!"

The deacon burst out laughing.

"Listen, Aleksandr Davidych, one last request!" said von Koren hotly. "When you give that scoundrel the money, propose a condition to him: either he leaves together with his lady, or sends her ahead, or you don’t give it. There’s no need to stand on ceremony with him. Tell him so plainly, and if you don’t, I give you my word of honor, I’ll go to his office and throw him down the stairs, and I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mark my words!"

"Well? If he leaves with her, or sends her ahead, it’s more convenient for him anyway," said Samoylenko. "He’ll even be glad of it. Well, good-bye."

He said an affectionate farewell and went out, but before shutting the door behind him he glanced back at von Koren, made a terrible face, and said:

"It’s the Germans that have spoiled you, brother! Yes! The Germans!"

XII

The next day, Thursday, Marya Konstantinovna celebrated her Kostya’s birthday. At noon everyone was invited to eat pie, and in the evening to drink chocolate. When, that evening, Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna arrived, the zoologist, already sitting in the drawing room drinking his chocolate, asked Samoylenko:

"Have you spoken to him?"

"Not yet."

"Mind you don’t stand on ceremony. I don’t understand the impudence of these gentry! They know perfectly well what the local families think of their living together, and yet they push their way in here."

"If one paid attention to every prejudice," said Samoylenko, "one would have nowhere to go at all."

"Is the mass’s revulsion at illicit love and licentiousness really a prejudice?"

"Of course it is. Prejudice and hatred, nothing more. Soldiers, when they see a woman of loose conduct, laugh and whistle at her — but ask them who they are themselves."

"They don’t whistle for nothing. The fact that girls strangle their illegitimate children and go to penal servitude, and that Anna Karenina threw herself under a train, and that in the villages they smear gates with tar, and that you and I, for some reason unknown to us, like Katya for her purity, and that everyone feels a vague need for pure love, though he knows no such love exists — is all that a prejudice? That, brother, is the one thing left intact from natural selection, and if it weren’t for that dark force regulating the relations of the sexes, the Laevskys of this world would show you where the crawfish spend the winter, and mankind would degenerate within two years."

Laevsky came into the drawing room, greeted everyone, and, shaking von Koren’s hand, smiled ingratiatingly. He waited for a convenient moment and said to Samoylenko:

"Forgive me, Aleksandr Davidych, I need to say two words to you."

Samoylenko got up, put his arm around his waist, and the two of them went into Nikodim Aleksandrych’s study.

"Tomorrow’s Friday..." said Laevsky, biting his nails. "Did you get what you promised?"

"I’ve got only two hundred and ten so far. I’ll get the rest today or tomorrow. Set your mind at rest."

"Thank God!.." sighed Laevsky, and his hands trembled with joy. "You’re saving me, Aleksandr Davidych, and I swear to you by God, by my own happiness, by whatever you like, I’ll send you this money the moment I arrive. And I’ll send the old debt too."

"Now listen, Vanya..." said Samoylenko, taking hold of his button and reddening. "Forgive me for meddling in your family affairs, but... why not go together with Nadezhda Fyodorovna?"

"My dear fellow, how could that be? One of us absolutely has to stay, otherwise the creditors will start howling. I owe the shopkeepers about seven hundred roubles, if not more. Wait, I’ll send them the money, stop their mouths, then she can leave here too."

"So... But why not send her on ahead?"

"Ah, my God, how is that possible?" Laevsky was horrified. "Why, she’s a woman — what will she do there alone? What does she understand? It would only mean a delay and needless expense."

"Sound reasoning..." thought Samoylenko, but remembering his conversation with von Koren, he cast down his eyes and said gloomily:

"I can’t agree with you. Either you go together with her, or send her ahead, or else... else I won’t give you the money. That’s my last word..."

He backed away, leaned his back against the door, and went out into the drawing room, red, in terrible confusion.

"Friday... Friday," thought Laevsky, going back into the drawing room. "Friday..."

They handed him a cup of chocolate. He burned his lips and tongue on the hot chocolate and thought:

"Friday... Friday..."

The word "Friday" would not, for some reason, leave his head; he thought of nothing but Friday, and it was clear to him — not in his head, but somewhere under his heart — that he would not be able to leave on Saturday. Before him stood Nikodim Aleksandrych, neat, with his temples brushed forward, urging:

"Do eat, I humbly beg you..."

Marya Konstantinovna was showing the guests Katya’s marks and saying in a drawn-out voice:

"These days it’s dreadfully, dreadfully hard to study! They demand so much!"

"Mama!" moaned Katya, not knowing where to hide from the shame and the praise.

Laevsky too looked at the marks and praised them. Scripture, Russian, conduct, the fives and fours danced before his eyes, and all of it together, with Friday clinging to him, with Nikodim Aleksandrych’s brushed-forward temples and Katya’s red cheeks, seemed to him such an immense, invincible tedium that he nearly cried out in despair and asked himself: "Can it really be, can it really be that I won’t leave?"

Two card tables were set side by side and they sat down to play post. Laevsky sat down too.

"Friday... Friday..." he thought, smiling and taking a pencil from his pocket. "Friday..."

He wanted to think over his situation and was afraid to think. He was afraid to admit to himself that the doctor had caught him in the deception he had so long and so carefully concealed even from himself. Every time he thought about his future, he never let his thoughts run entirely free. He would get into the railway carriage and go — that settled the question of his life, and beyond that he did not let his thoughts pass. Like a distant dim light in a field, the thought sometimes flickered in his head that somewhere in one of the side streets of Petersburg, in the distant future, in order to part from Nadezhda Fyodorovna and pay off his debts, he would have to resort to a small lie; he would lie only the once, and then a complete renewal would come. And that was good: at the price of a small lie he would buy a great truth.

Now, though, when the doctor by his refusal had crudely hinted at the deception, it became clear to him that the lie would be needed not only in the distant future, but today, and tomorrow, and in a month, and perhaps even to the end of his life. Indeed, in order to leave, he would have to lie to Nadezhda Fyodorovna, to his creditors, and to his superiors; then, to get money in Petersburg, he would have to lie to his mother, tell her he had already parted from Nadezhda Fyodorovna; and his mother would give him no more than five hundred roubles, which meant he had already deceived the doctor, since he would not be in a position to send him the money soon. Then, when Nadezhda Fyodorovna arrived in Petersburg, he would have to employ a whole series of small and large deceptions in order to part from her; and again tears, tedium, a hateful life, remorse, and so no renewal at all. Deception and nothing more. In Laevsky’s imagination a whole mountain of lies had grown up. To leap over it all at once, rather than lying piece by piece, he would have to resolve on some drastic measure — for instance, without a word, to get up, put on his cap, and leave at once, without money, without saying a word — but Laevsky felt this was impossible for him.

"Friday, Friday..." he thought. "Friday..."

They wrote notes, folded them in two, and put them in Nikodim Aleksandrych’s old top hat, and when enough notes had gathered, Kostya, playing postman, went round the table handing them out. The deacon, Katya, and Kostya, receiving funny notes and trying to write the funniest ones themselves, were in raptures.

"We need to talk," Nadezhda Fyodorovna read on her little note. She exchanged glances with Marya Konstantinovna, who smiled an almond smile and nodded to her.

"What is there to talk about?" thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna. "If one can’t tell everything, there’s no point talking at all."

Before setting out for the visit, she had tied Laevsky’s necktie for him, and this trifling task filled her soul with tenderness and sorrow. The anxiety on his face, his wandering glances, his pallor, and the incomprehensible change that had come over him of late, and the fact that she was keeping from him a terrible, hateful secret, and the fact that her hands trembled as she tied the necktie — all this told her, somehow, that the two of them had not much longer left to live together. She looked at him as at an icon, with fear and remorse, and thought: "Forgive me, forgive me..." Across the table from her sat Achmianov, not taking his black, enamored eyes off her; desires stirred in her, she was ashamed of herself and afraid that even anguish and sorrow would not keep her from yielding to an impure passion, if not today then tomorrow — and that she, like a hopeless drunkard, no longer had the strength to stop herself.

So as not to go on with this life, shameful for her and insulting to Laevsky, she resolved to go away. She would beg him, weeping, to let her go, and if he resisted, she would leave him in secret. She would not tell him what had happened. Let him keep a pure memory of her.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," she read. "That’s from Achmianov."

She would live somewhere far away, work, and send Laevsky, "from an unknown well-wisher," money, embroidered shirts, tobacco, and would return to him only in old age, and only if he fell dangerously ill and needed a nurse. When, in his old age, he learned the reasons she had refused to be his wife and had left him, he would value her sacrifice and forgive her.

"You have a long nose." That one must be from the deacon or from Kostya.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna imagined how, saying good-bye to Laevsky, she would embrace him tightly, kiss his hand, and swear that she would love him her whole, her whole life, and then, living far away among strangers, she would think every day that somewhere she had a friend, a beloved man, pure, noble, and lofty, who kept a pure memory of her.

"If you don’t fix a meeting with me today, I’ll take measures, I give you my word of honor. One doesn’t treat decent people this way, you must understand that." That was from Kirilin.

XIII

Laevsky received two notes; he unfolded one and read: "Don’t leave, my dear one."

"Who could have written this?" he wondered. "Certainly not Samoylenko... And not the deacon, since he doesn’t know I want to leave. Von Koren, perhaps?"

The zoologist was bent over the table, drawing a pyramid. It seemed to Laevsky that his eyes were smiling.

"Samoylenko must have let it slip..." thought Laevsky.

On the other note, in the same jagged hand, with long tails and flourishes, was written:

"And someone won’t be leaving on Saturday."

"A stupid mockery," thought Laevsky. "Friday, Friday..."

Something rose in his throat. He touched his collar and coughed, but instead of a cough, a laugh broke from his throat.

"Ha-ha-ha!" he laughed. "Ha-ha-ha! What’s this I’m laughing at?" he wondered. "Ha-ha-ha!"

He tried to restrain himself, covered his mouth with his hand, but the laughter pressed against his chest and throat, and his hand could not close his mouth.

"How stupid this is, though!" he thought, rocking with laughter. "Have I gone out of my mind?"

The laughter rose higher and higher and turned into something like the yapping of a lapdog. Laevsky tried to get up from the table, but his legs would not obey him, and his right hand, strangely, against his will, jumped about on the table, convulsively snatching at the little notes and crumpling them. He saw astonished glances, Samoylenko’s serious, frightened face, and the zoologist’s look, full of cold mockery and disgust, and understood that he was in hysterics.

"What a disgrace, what shame," he thought, feeling the warmth on his face from the tears... "Ah, ah, what a scandal! This has never happened to me before..."

Now they had taken him under the arms and, supporting his head from behind, were leading him somewhere; now a glass flashed before his eyes and knocked against his teeth, and water spilled onto his chest; now a small room, with two beds side by side in the middle, covered with clean covers, white as snow. He collapsed onto one bed and sobbed.

"Never mind, never mind..." Samoylenko was saying. "It happens... It happens..."

Chilled with fear, trembling all over and foreboding something dreadful, Nadezhda Fyodorovna stood by the bed and kept asking:

"What’s wrong with you? What is it? For God’s sake, tell me..."

"Has Kirilin written him something?" she thought.

"Nothing..." said Laevsky, laughing and crying. "Go away from here... my dove."

His face expressed neither hatred nor revulsion: so he knew nothing; Nadezhda Fyodorovna calmed down a little and went into the drawing room.

"Don’t be upset, my dear!" Marya Konstantinovna said to her, sitting down beside her and taking her by the hand. "It will pass. Men are just as weak as we sinful women. The two of you are living through a crisis now... it’s so understandable! Well, my dear, I’m waiting for an answer. Let’s talk."

"No, let’s not talk..." said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, listening to Laevsky’s sobbing. "I have such anguish... Let me go."

"What do you mean, my dear!" Marya Konstantinovna was alarmed. "Surely you don’t think I’ll let you go without supper? Let’s have a bite, and then, God be with you."

"I have such anguish..." whispered Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and to keep from falling, took hold of the armchair with both hands.

"He’s got the falling sickness!" said von Koren cheerfully, coming into the drawing room, but seeing Nadezhda Fyodorovna, grew embarrassed and went out.

When the hysterics were over, Laevsky sat on the strange bed and thought:

"What a disgrace, bawling like a little girl! I must be ridiculous and vile. I’ll leave by the back door... Though that would mean I attach serious importance to my hysterics. I ought to turn it into a joke..."

He looked at himself in the mirror, sat a while, and went out into the drawing room.

"Here I am!" he said, smiling; he felt agonizingly ashamed, and sensed that the others were ashamed too in his presence. "The strangest things happen," he said, sitting down. "I was sitting there and suddenly, you know, I felt a terrible stabbing pain in my side... unbearable, my nerves couldn’t stand it, and... and out came this foolish business. Our nervous age – nothing to be done about it!"

At supper he drank wine, talked, and now and then, sighing convulsively, stroked his side, as if to show that the pain could still be felt. And no one but Nadezhda Fyodorovna believed him, and he saw it.

At ten o’clock they went out to walk on the boulevard. Nadezhda Fyodorovna, afraid that Kirilin would speak to her, kept trying to stay near Marya Konstantinovna and the children the whole time. She had grown weak from fear and anguish and, sensing a fever coming on, was languid and could barely move her legs, but did not go home, being certain that Kirilin, or Achmianov, or both together, would follow her. Kirilin walked behind, beside Nikodim Aleksandrych, humming under his breath:

"I won’t let myself be tri-ifled with! I won’t let it be!"

From the boulevard they turned toward the pavilion and walked along the shore, and for a long time watched the sea phosphoresce. Von Koren began explaining why it did so.

XIV

"Well, it’s time I went to my whist... They’re expecting me," said Laevsky. "Good-bye, everyone."

"I’ll come with you, wait," said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and took his arm.

They said good-bye to the company and set off. Kirilin also said good-bye, saying it was on his way, and walked alongside them.

"Whatever will be, will be..." thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna. "Let it..."

It seemed to her that all her bad memories had come out of her head and were walking beside her in the dark, breathing heavily, while she herself, like a fly that had fallen into ink, crawled with great effort along the pavement, staining Laevsky’s side and arm black. If Kirilin, she thought, did something bad, it would not be his fault but hers alone. There had once been a time when no man spoke to her the way Kirilin had, and she herself had torn that time apart like a thread and ruined it beyond return – who was to blame for that? Intoxicated by her own desires, she had begun smiling at a man she scarcely knew, probably only because he was tall and well built; after two meetings he had already bored her, and she had cast him off, and was that not why, she thought now, he had every right to do with her as he pleased?

"Here, my dove, I’ll say good-bye to you," said Laevsky, stopping. "Ilya Mikhailych will see you home."

He bowed to Kirilin and walked quickly across the boulevard, crossed the street to Sheshkovsky’s house, where the windows were lit, and one could hear, a moment later, the click of the gate latch.

"Allow me to have this out with you," began Kirilin. "I’m no boy, no one’s little Achkasov or Lachkasov or Zachkasov... I demand serious attention!"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s heart began to pound. She answered nothing.

"Your sharp change in manner toward me I explained to myself at first as coquetry," Kirilin went on, "but now I see that you simply do not know how to behave with decent people. You merely wanted to play with me as with that Armenian boy, but I am a decent man and demand to be treated as one. So, I am at your service..."

"I have such anguish..." said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and burst into tears, and turned away to hide them.

"I too have anguish, but what does that prove?" Kirilin fell silent a moment and said distinctly, with pauses between the words:

"I repeat, madam, that if you do not give me a meeting today, I shall make a scandal this very day."

"Let me go, just for today," said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and did not recognize her own voice, so plaintive and thin it had become.

"I must teach you a lesson... Forgive my rough tone, but I have no choice but to teach you a lesson. Yes, unfortunately, I must teach you a lesson. I demand two meetings: today and tomorrow. The day after you’re entirely free and may go to all four winds with whomever you please. Today and tomorrow."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna came up to her gate and stopped.

"Let me go!" she whispered, trembling all over and seeing nothing before her in the darkness but a white tunic. "You’re right, I’m a terrible woman... I’m guilty, but let me go... I beg you..." – she touched his cold hand and shuddered – "I implore you..."

"Alas!" sighed Kirilin. "Alas! It is not in my plans to let you go, I only want to teach you a lesson, to make you understand, and besides, madam, I have very little faith in women."

"I have such anguish..."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna listened to the even murmur of the sea, looked up at the sky strewn with stars, and wished she could be done with it all at once and free herself from the accursed sensation of life, with its sea, its stars, its men, its fever...

"Only not at my house..." she said coldly. "Take me somewhere else."

"Let’s go to Muridov’s. That’s best."

"Where is that?"

"Near the old rampart."

She walked quickly down the street and then turned into a lane leading toward the mountains. It was dark. Here and there on the pavement lay pale stripes of light from lit windows, and it seemed to her that she, like a fly, kept falling into the ink and then crawling out again into the light. Kirilin walked behind her. At one spot he stumbled, nearly fell, and laughed.

"He’s drunk..." thought Nadezhda Fyodorovna. "It doesn’t matter... it doesn’t matter... Let it be."

Achmianov too had quickly said good-bye to the company and set off after Nadezhda Fyodorovna, to invite her for a boat ride. He came up to her house and looked through the fence: the windows were wide open, there was no light.

"Nadezhda Fyodorovna!" he called.

A minute passed. He called again.

"Who’s there?" came Olga’s voice.

"Is Nadezhda Fyodorovna at home?"

"No. She hasn’t come back yet."

"Strange... Very strange," thought Achmianov, beginning to feel a strong uneasiness. "She went home..."

He walked along the boulevard, then along the street, and glanced in at Sheshkovsky’s windows. Laevsky, without his coat, sat at the table, looking intently at his cards.

"Strange, strange..." Achmianov muttered, and at the memory of the hysterics Laevsky had had, he felt ashamed. "If she’s not home, then where?"

He went again to Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings and looked at the dark windows.

"It’s a deception, a deception..." he thought, remembering that she herself, meeting him that very noon at the Bityugovs’, had promised to go boating with him in the evening.

The windows of the house where Kirilin lived were dark, and at the gate a policeman sat on a bench, asleep. To Achmianov, looking at the windows and at the policeman, everything became clear. He resolved to go home, and started off, but found himself again near Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings. There he sat down on the bench and took off his hat, feeling his head burning with jealousy and hurt.

In the town church the clock struck only twice a day: at noon and at midnight. Shortly after it struck midnight, hurried footsteps were heard.

"So, tomorrow evening again at Muridov’s!" Achmianov heard, and recognized Kirilin’s voice. "At eight o’clock. Good-bye for now!"

Nadezhda Fyodorovna appeared near the fence. Not noticing Achmianov sitting on the bench, she passed by him like a shadow, opened the gate, and, leaving it unlatched, went into the house. In her room she lit a candle, quickly undressed, but did not lie down on the bed; instead she sank to her knees before a chair, embraced it, and pressed her forehead to it.

Laevsky came home after two.

XV

Having decided to lie not all at once but by degrees, Laevsky, the next day, at about two o’clock, went to Samoylenko’s to ask for money, so as to be sure to leave on Saturday. After yesterday’s hysterics, which had added a sharp sense of shame to the already heavy state of his soul, staying on in the town was unthinkable. If Samoylenko insisted on his conditions, he thought, one could agree to them and take the money, and then tomorrow, at the very hour of departure, say that Nadezhda Fyodorovna had refused to go; by evening she could be persuaded that it was all for her own good. But if Samoylenko, evidently under von Koren’s influence, refused the money outright or proposed some new conditions, then he, Laevsky, would leave that very day on a cargo steamer, or even a sailboat, for New Athos or Novorossiysk, would send his mother a humiliating telegram from there, and would live there until his mother sent him the money for the journey.

Arriving at Samoylenko’s, he found von Koren in the drawing room. The zoologist had just come to dine and, as usual, had opened an album and was looking at men in top hats and ladies in bonnets.

"How inconvenient," thought Laevsky, seeing him. "He might get in the way." – "Good afternoon!"

"Good afternoon," answered von Koren, without looking at him.

"Is Aleksandr Davidych at home?"

"Yes. In the kitchen."

Laevsky went toward the kitchen, but seeing through the door that Samoylenko was busy with a salad, went back to the drawing room and sat down. In the zoologist’s presence he always felt awkward, and now he was afraid the talk would turn to his hysterics. More than a minute passed in silence. Von Koren suddenly raised his eyes to Laevsky and asked:

"How are you feeling after yesterday?"

"Excellent," answered Laevsky, blushing. "In fact, there was really nothing much to it..."

"Until yesterday I supposed hysterics happened only to ladies, and so at first I thought you had Saint Vitus’s dance."

Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly and thought:

"How indelicate of him. He knows perfectly well how painful this is for me..." – "Yes, it was a funny business," he said, still smiling. "I laughed about it all morning today. What’s curious about a hysterical fit is that you know it’s absurd and you’re laughing at it inside even while you’re sobbing. In our nervous age we’re slaves to our nerves; they’re our masters and do with us as they please. Civilization has done us a disservice in that respect..."

Laevsky went on talking, and it was unpleasant to him that von Koren listened seriously and attentively, looking at him fixedly, without blinking, as if studying him; and he was vexed with himself that, despite his dislike of von Koren, he simply could not drive the ingratiating smile from his face.

"Though, I must admit," he went on, "there were immediate causes for the attack, and fairly solid ones at that. My health has been badly shaken lately. Add to that boredom, constant lack of money... the absence of people and shared interests... My situation is worse than a governor’s."

"Yes, your situation is hopeless," said von Koren.

These calm, cold words, carrying something between mockery and an unsolicited prophecy, offended Laevsky. He remembered the zoologist’s look of yesterday, full of mockery and disgust, was silent a moment, and asked, no longer smiling:

"And how do you happen to know my situation?"

"You’ve just been speaking of it yourself, and besides, your friends take such warm interest in you that all day one hears nothing but talk of you."

"What friends? Samoylenko, is it?"

"Yes, him too."

"I would ask Aleksandr Davidych, and my friends in general, to trouble themselves a little less about me."

"Here comes Samoylenko – ask him yourself to trouble himself less about you."

"I don’t understand your tone..." Laevsky muttered; he was seized by the feeling, as though he had only just now understood, that the zoologist hated him, despised him, and mocked him, and that the zoologist was his most vicious and irreconcilable enemy. "Save that tone for someone else," he said quietly, unable to speak louder from the hatred that already gripped his chest and throat, as yesterday’s urge to laugh had done.

Samoylenko came in without his coat, sweaty and crimson from the kitchen heat.

"Ah, you’re here?" he said. "Hello, my dear fellow. Have you dined? Don’t stand on ceremony, tell me – have you dined?"

"Aleksandr Davidych," said Laevsky, standing up, "if I ever came to you with some intimate request, that did not mean I released you from the obligation to be discreet and to respect other people’s secrets."

"What’s this?" Samoylenko was astonished.

"If you have no money," Laevsky went on, raising his voice and shifting from foot to foot in his agitation, "then don’t give it, refuse me, but why go proclaiming in every side street that my situation is hopeless and so on? I cannot bear these acts of kindness and friendly services where a kopeck’s worth is done and a ruble’s worth is talked about! You may boast of your good deeds as much as you please, but no one gave you the right to expose my secrets!"

"What secrets?" asked Samoylenko, bewildered and beginning to grow angry. "If you’ve come to quarrel, then go. Come back later!"

He remembered the rule that when you are angry at your neighbor, you should begin counting mentally to a hundred and you will calm down; and he began counting quickly.

"I ask you not to trouble yourselves about me!" Laevsky went on. "Pay no attention to me. And what business is it of anyone’s, how I live? Yes, I want to leave! Yes, I run up debts, I drink, I live with another man’s wife, I have hysterics, I am vulgar, not as profound as some, but whose business is that? Respect the individual!"

"You, brother, forgive me," said Samoylenko, having counted to thirty-five, "but..."

"Respect the individual!" Laevsky interrupted him. "These constant conversations at someone else’s expense, the sighs and moans, the constant watching, eavesdropping, this friendly sympathizing... to the devil with it! People lend me money and set me conditions like a schoolboy! I’m treated like the devil knows what! I want nothing!" cried Laevsky, swaying with agitation and afraid he might have another attack of hysterics. "So, then, I won’t leave on Saturday," flashed through his mind. "I want nothing! I only ask, please, to be relieved of this guardianship. I am not a schoolboy and not a madman, and I ask that this supervision be lifted from me!"

The deacon came in and, seeing Laevsky, pale, waving his arms, and addressing his strange speech to the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, stopped by the door as though rooted to the spot.

"This constant peering into my soul," Laevsky went on, "offends my human dignity, and I ask these volunteer detectives to stop their spying! Enough!"

"What did you... what did you say?" asked Samoylenko, having counted to a hundred, turning crimson and coming up to Laevsky.

"Enough!" Laevsky repeated, gasping for breath and picking up his cap.

"I am a Russian doctor, a nobleman, and a state councillor!" said Samoylenko with deliberate emphasis. "I have never been a spy and I will not allow anyone to insult me!" he cried in a quavering voice, stressing the last word. "Be silent!"

The deacon, who had never seen the doctor so majestic, puffed up, crimson, and terrible, clapped his hand over his mouth, ran out into the hall, and there rolled about with laughter. As if through a fog, Laevsky saw von Koren rise and, thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, stop in a pose as if waiting to see what would happen next; this composed pose struck Laevsky as insolent and insulting in the highest degree.

"Take back your words this instant!" cried Samoylenko.

Laevsky, no longer remembering what words he had said, answered:

"Leave me in peace! I want nothing! I only want you and these German upstarts sprung from Jews to leave me be! Otherwise I’ll take measures! I’ll fight a duel!"

"Now it’s clear," said von Koren, coming out from behind the table. "Monsieur Laevsky wants some amusement before he leaves – a duel. I can provide him that pleasure. Monsieur Laevsky, I accept your challenge."

"Challenge?" said Laevsky quietly, coming up to the zoologist and looking with hatred at his swarthy forehead and curly hair. "Challenge? By all means! I hate you! I hate you!"

"Delighted. Tomorrow morning, early, near Kerbalai’s, with every detail to your taste. And now get out."

"I hate you!" Laevsky said quietly, breathing hard. "I’ve hated you a long time! A duel! Yes!"

"Take him away, Aleksandr Davidych, or I’ll leave – he’ll bite me," said von Koren.

Von Koren’s composed tone had a cooling effect on the doctor; he suddenly seemed to come to himself, sobered, took Laevsky by the waist with both hands and, leading him away from the zoologist, muttered in a gentle voice trembling with emotion:

"My friends... my good, kind friends... You’ve lost your tempers, and that’s enough... enough now... My friends..."

Hearing the soft, friendly voice, Laevsky felt that something unprecedented, monstrous had just happened in his life, as though a train had very nearly crushed him; he almost burst into tears, waved his hand, and ran out of the room.

"To feel another’s hatred upon oneself, to show oneself before a man who hates you in the most pitiful, contemptible, helpless light – my God, how hard that is!" he thought, a little later, sitting in the pavilion and feeling as if there were rust on his body from the hatred he had just endured. "How coarse it is, my God!"

Cold water with brandy cheered him. He pictured with great clarity von Koren’s composed, haughty face, his look of yesterday, his shirt like a rug, his voice, his white hands, and a heavy hatred, passionate and hungry, stirred in his chest and demanded satisfaction. In his mind he knocked von Koren to the ground and began trampling him with his feet. He recalled everything that had happened, in the smallest detail, and marveled that he could have smiled so ingratiatingly at so worthless a man, could have cared at all what the opinion was of petty, wholly unknown little people, living in this most insignificant of towns, which, it seemed, was not even on the map, and of which not a single respectable person in Petersburg had ever heard. If this wretched little town were suddenly to collapse or burn down, the telegram about it would be read in Russia with the same boredom as an advertisement for the sale of used furniture. To kill von Koren tomorrow or leave him alive – it made no difference, equally useless and uninteresting either way. To shoot him in the leg or the arm, wound him, then laugh at him, and let him, like an insect with a torn-off leg lost in the grass, lose himself afterward, with his dull suffering, in a crowd of little people as worthless as himself.

Laevsky went to Sheshkovsky, told him everything, and invited him to be his second; then the two of them went to the head of the post-and-telegraph office, invited him to be a second as well, and stayed to dine with him. At dinner they joked and laughed a great deal; Laevsky poked fun at his own inability to shoot at all, calling himself a royal marksman and a William Tell.

"This gentleman needs to be taught a lesson..." he said.

After dinner they sat down to cards. Laevsky played, drank wine, and thought that a duel was, on the whole, stupid and senseless, since it did not resolve a question but only complicated it, though there were times one could not do without it. In the present case, for instance – one hardly went and hauled von Koren before a magistrate! And the coming duel had this further good in it, that afterward he would no longer be able to stay in the town. He grew slightly drunk, was diverted by the cards, and felt at ease.

But when the sun set and it grew dark, a restlessness took hold of him. It was not fear of death, because all through dinner and cards a certainty had sat in him, for some reason, that the duel would come to nothing; it was fear of something unknown, that was to happen tomorrow morning for the first time in his life, and fear of the coming night... He knew the night would be long and sleepless, and that he would have to think not only of von Koren and his hatred, but of the whole mountain of lies he had ahead of him, which he had neither the strength nor the skill to get around. It was as though he had suddenly fallen ill; he lost all interest in the cards and the people at once, grew fussy, and began asking to be let go home. He wanted to lie down as soon as possible, not move, and prepare his thoughts for the night. Sheshkovsky and the post official saw him off and then went to von Koren’s to talk over the arrangements for the duel.

Near his lodgings Laevsky met Achmianov. The young man was out of breath and agitated.

"I’ve been looking for you, Ivan Andreich!" he said. "Please, come quickly..."

"Where to?"

"A gentleman you don’t know wishes to see you, on a matter of great importance to you. He earnestly asks you to come for just a moment. He needs to speak with you about something... For him it’s as if a matter of life and death..."

Agitated, Achmianov said this with a strong Armenian accent, so that "life" came out not as "zhizn" but as "zhizen."

"Who is he?" asked Laevsky.

"He asked me not to say his name."

"Tell him I’m busy. Tomorrow, if he likes..."

"How can you!" Achmianov was alarmed. "He wants to tell you something very important to you... very important! If you don’t go, something bad will happen."

"Strange..." muttered Laevsky, unable to understand why Achmianov was so agitated and what secrets there could possibly be in this dull, useless little town. "Strange," he repeated, thinking it over. "Still, let’s go. It’s all the same to me."

Achmianov walked quickly ahead, and he followed. They went along the street, then through a lane.

"How tedious this is," said Laevsky.

"Just now, just now... It’s close by."

Near the old rampart they passed through a narrow lane between two fenced-off waste lots, then entered some large courtyard and made for a small house...

"Is this Muridov’s house?" asked Laevsky.

"Yes."

"But why are we going by the back way, I don’t understand? We could have gone by the street. It’s nearer that way..."

"Never mind, never mind..."

It also struck Laevsky as strange that Achmianov led him to the back entrance and waved his hand, as if inviting him to walk more quietly and keep silent.

"This way, this way..." said Achmianov, carefully opening the door and stepping into the entryway on tiptoe. "Quiet, quiet, I beg you... They might hear."

He listened, drew a heavy breath, and said in a whisper:

"Open this door and go in... Don’t be afraid." Laevsky, bewildered, opened the door and went into a room with a low ceiling and curtained windows. A candle stood on the table.

"Who’s wanted?" someone asked in the next room. "Is that you, Muridka?"

Laevsky turned toward that room and saw Kirilin, and beside him Nadezhda Fyodorovna.

He did not hear what was said to him, backed away, and did not notice how he found himself in the street. His hatred of von Koren and his uneasiness – all of it had vanished from his soul. Walking home, he swung his right arm awkwardly and looked closely at his feet, trying to walk on the smooth ground. At home, in his study, rubbing his hands and hunching his shoulders and neck at odd angles, as if his jacket and shirt were too tight for him, he paced from corner to corner, then lit a candle and sat down at the table...

XVI

"The humane sciences you speak of will only satisfy human thought when, in the course of their movement, they meet the exact sciences and go forward side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a microscope, or in the monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I think the earth will be covered in a shell of ice before that happens. The most stable and enduring of all the humane teachings is, of course, the doctrine of Christ, but see how variously even that is understood! Some teach that we should love all our neighbors, and make an exception in this for soldiers, criminals, and madmen: the first they permit to be killed in war, the second to be isolated or executed, and the third they forbid to marry. Other interpreters teach us to love all our neighbors without exception, drawing no distinction between pluses and minuses. By their teaching, if a consumptive, or a murderer, or an epileptic comes and asks for your daughter’s hand – give her to him; if idiots make war on the physically and mentally sound – offer up your heads. This preaching of love for love’s sake, like art for art’s sake, if it were ever to prevail, would in the end lead mankind to complete extinction, and thus the most monstrous of all the crimes that have ever been on earth would be accomplished. There are a great many interpretations, and where there are many, a serious mind is satisfied by none of them and hastens to add its own to the mass of all the rest. So never put the question, as you say, on a philosophical, or so-called Christian, footing; by doing so you only remove yourself further from its solution."

The deacon listened attentively to the zoologist, thought a moment, and asked:

"Did philosophers invent the moral law inherent in every man, or did God create it together with the body?"

"I don’t know. But this law is so universal, common to all peoples and all ages, that it seems to me it must be recognized as organically bound up with man. It was not invented; it exists and will go on existing. I won’t tell you it will one day be seen under a microscope, but its organic connection is already proven by the evidence: serious brain disorders and all the so-called mental illnesses express themselves, first of all, in a distortion of the moral law, as far as I know."

"Very well. So, just as the stomach wants to eat, the moral sense wants us to love our neighbors. Is that it? But our natural self-love resists the voice of conscience and reason, and so many perplexing questions arise. To whom, then, should we turn to resolve these questions, if you won’t allow us to put them on a philosophical footing?"

"Turn to the few exact kinds of knowledge that we do have. Trust the evidence and logic of facts. True, it’s meager, but at least it’s not as unstable and vague as philosophy. The moral law, let us say, requires that you love people. Very well? Love must consist in removing everything that in one way or another harms people and threatens them with danger, now and in the future. Our knowledge and the evidence tell us that mankind is threatened by the morally and physically abnormal. If so, then fight the abnormal. If you lack the strength to raise them to the norm, you have strength and skill enough to render them harmless – that is, to destroy them."

"So love means that the strong should conquer the weak?"

"Unquestionably."

"But it was the strong who crucified our Lord Jesus Christ!" the deacon said heatedly.

"That’s just the point – it was not the strong who crucified him, but the weak. Human culture has weakened, and strives to reduce to nothing, the struggle for existence and natural selection; hence the rapid multiplication of the weak and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that you managed to instill humane ideas, in their crude, rudimentary form, into bees. What would come of it? The drones, who ought to be killed, would remain alive, would go on eating the honey, corrupting and stifling the bees – the result being the predominance of the weak over the strong, and the degeneration of the latter. The very same thing is happening now with mankind: the weak oppress the strong. Among savages, whom culture has not yet touched, the strongest, wisest, and most moral man goes in front; he is chief and ruler. But we, the cultured, crucified Christ and go on crucifying him. So something is lacking in us... And this "something" we must restore in ourselves, or there will be no end to these misunderstandings."

"But by what criterion do you distinguish the strong from the weak?"

"Knowledge and evidence. Consumptives and scrofulous people are recognized by their diseases, and the immoral and insane by their acts."

"But mistakes are possible!"

"Yes, but there’s no need to fear wet feet when a flood is threatening."

"That’s philosophy," laughed the deacon.

"Not at all. You’ve been so spoiled by your seminary philosophy that you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract sciences that stuff your young head are called abstract because they abstract your mind from the evidence. Look the devil straight in the eye, and if he’s the devil, say so – don’t go climbing to Kant or Hegel for explanations."

The zoologist was silent a moment and went on:

"Two times two is four, and a stone is a stone. Tomorrow we have a duel. You and I will say that it’s stupid and absurd, that the duel has outlived its age, that an aristocratic duel is in essence no different from a drunken brawl in a tavern – and yet we won’t stop, we’ll go and we’ll fight. So there’s a force stronger than our reasoning. We cry out that war is robbery, barbarism, horror, fratricide, we can’t look at blood without fainting; but let the French or the Germans insult us, and at once we feel a lift of spirit, we shout hurrah in perfect sincerity and throw ourselves at the enemy, you’ll call down God’s blessing on our weapons, and our valor will arouse a universal and quite sincere delight. So again, there’s a force which, if not higher than us and our philosophy, is at least stronger. We can’t stop it any more than that cloud moving in from over the sea. So don’t be hypocrites, don’t make a fig at it in your pocket and say, "ah, how stupid! ah, how outdated! ah, how unscriptural!" – look it straight in the eye, acknowledge its rational lawfulness, and when it wants, say, to destroy a sickly, scrofulous, corrupted tribe, don’t get in its way with your pills and quotations from a badly understood Gospel. Leskov has his conscientious Danila, who found a leper outside the town and feeds him and warms him in the name of love and of Christ. If this Danila truly loved people, he’d have dragged the leper further from the town and thrown him in a ditch, and gone himself to serve the healthy. Christ, I hope, commanded us a love that is rational, considered, and useful."

"What a fellow you are!" laughed the deacon. "But you don’t believe in Christ – why do you mention him so often, then?"

"No, I do believe. Only in my own way, of course, not yours. Ah, deacon, deacon!" the zoologist laughed; he took the deacon by the waist and said cheerfully: "Well, then? Will you come to the duel tomorrow?"

"My office doesn’t allow it, or I’d come."

"And what does ’office’ mean?"

"I’m consecrated. Grace is on me."

"Ah, deacon, deacon," von Koren repeated, laughing. "I do love talking with you."

"You say you have faith," said the deacon. "What kind of faith is that? Now, I have an uncle who’s a priest, and he believes in such a way that when he goes out to the fields in a drought to pray for rain, he takes along a rain umbrella and a leather coat, so the rain won’t wet him on the way back. That’s faith! When he speaks of Christ, a radiance comes off him and all the peasant men and women weep aloud. He’d stop that cloud of yours, and put any power of yours to flight. Yes... Faith moves mountains."

The deacon laughed and clapped the zoologist on the shoulder.

"There you are..." he went on. "Here you go on studying, fathoming the deep of the sea, sorting out the weak from the strong, writing your books and calling men out to duels – and everything stays right where it was; but look, some feeble little elder babbles out one single word by the Holy Spirit, or a new Mohammed comes riding out of Arabia on a horse with a saber, and it’ll all go flying topsy-turvy, and not one stone will be left on another in Europe."

"Well now, deacon, that’s written on the sky with a pitchfork!"

"Faith without works is dead, and works without faith are worse still – nothing but a waste of time and nothing more."

The doctor appeared on the embankment. He saw the deacon and the zoologist and came up to them.

"It seems everything’s ready," he said, out of breath. "The seconds will be Govorovsky and Boyko. They’ll come by at five in the morning. Look how it’s piled up!" he said, glancing at the sky. "Can’t see a thing. There’s going to be rain any moment."

"You’ll come with us, I hope?" asked von Koren.

"No, God forbid, I’m worn out as it is. Ustimovich will go instead of me. I’ve already spoken with him."

Far off over the sea lightning flashed, and there came the muffled rolling of thunder.

"How stifling it is before a storm!" said von Koren. "I’ll wager you’ve already been to Laevsky’s and wept on his chest."

"Why would I go to him?" the doctor answered, embarrassed. "As if!"

Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and the street, hoping to meet Laevsky. He was ashamed of his outburst and of the sudden rush of kindness that had followed it. He wanted to apologize to Laevsky in a joking tone, to scold him a little, to calm him, and to tell him that a duel was a relic of medieval barbarism, but that providence itself had pointed them to the duel as a means of reconciliation: tomorrow the two of them, the finest, the greatest-minded men, having exchanged shots, would appreciate each other’s nobility and become friends. But he never once ran into Laevsky.

"Why would I go to him?" Samoylenko repeated. "It wasn’t I who insulted him, it was he who insulted me. Tell me, for pity’s sake, what did he pounce on me for? What harm did I do him? I walk into the drawing room and out of nowhere, how do you like that: spy! There’s a fine thing! Tell me, how did it start between you two? What did you say to him?"

"I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. Only honest men and only scoundrels can find a way out of any position; but a man who wants to be honest and a scoundrel at the same time has no way out. However, gentlemen, it’s already eleven, and we have to get up early tomorrow."

Suddenly the wind swept in; it raised the dust on the embankment, whirled it up, roared, and drowned out the noise of the sea.

"A squall!" said the deacon. "We’d better go, or the dust will get in our eyes."

As they walked, Samoylenko sighed and said, holding on to his cap:

"I don’t suppose I’ll sleep tonight."

"Well, don’t fret," laughed the zoologist. "You can rest easy, the duel won’t come to anything. Laevsky will magnanimously fire into the air, he can’t do otherwise, and I probably won’t even fire at all. To be brought to trial over Laevsky, to lose the time – the game’s not worth the candle. By the way, what’s the penalty for dueling?"

"Arrest, and in the event of the opponent’s death, confinement in a fortress for up to three years."

"In the Peter and Paul Fortress?"

"No, in a military one, I believe."

"Though that young fellow ought to be taught a lesson!"

Behind them lightning flashed over the sea and for an instant lit up the roofs of the houses and the mountains. Near the boulevard the friends parted. When the doctor had vanished into the darkness and his footsteps were already dying away, von Koren called after him:

"I hope the weather doesn’t hinder us tomorrow!"

"It might well! God grant it doesn’t!"

"Good night!"

"What – night? What are you saying?"

Over the noise of the wind and the sea and the rolling of thunder it was hard to make anything out.

"Never mind!" the zoologist shouted, and hurried home.

XVII

...in a mind oppressed with anguish

crowds a surfeit of heavy thoughts;

Silent, remembrance before me

unrolls its long scroll.

And reading my life with revulsion,

I tremble, and I curse it,

and bitterly complain, and bitterly weep,

but I do not wash away the sorrowful lines.

Pushkin.

Whether they killed him tomorrow morning or laughed at him – that is, left him this life – he was ruined all the same. Whether that disgraced woman killed herself out of despair and shame, or dragged out her wretched existence, she was ruined all the same...

So Laevsky thought, sitting at the table late in the evening, still rubbing his hands. The window suddenly swung open and banged shut; a strong wind burst into the room, and papers flew off the table. Laevsky shut the window and bent to gather the papers from the floor. He felt something new in his body, a certain awkwardness that had not been there before, and he did not recognize his own movements; he walked timidly, jabbing his elbows out to the sides and twitching his shoulders, and when he sat down at the table he began rubbing his hands again. His body had lost its suppleness.

On the eve of death one ought to write to those close to one. Laevsky remembered this. He took up a pen and wrote in a trembling hand:

"Mother!"

He wanted to write to his mother, asking that in the name of the merciful God in whom she believed she should give shelter to, and warm with tenderness, the unfortunate woman he had dishonored – lonely, destitute, and weak – that she should forget and forgive everything, everything, everything, and by her sacrifice atone, if only in part, for her son’s terrible sin; but he recalled how his mother, a stout, heavy old woman in a lace cap, came out of the house into the garden in the morning, followed by a hanger-on with a lapdog, how she shouted at the gardener and the servants in a commanding voice, and how proud and haughty her face was – he remembered this and struck out the word he had written.

Lightning flashed brightly in all three windows, and after it came a deafening, rolling thunderclap, muffled at first, then crashing and cracking, so violent that the glass rang in the windows. Laevsky got up, went to the window, and pressed his forehead to the glass. Outside a powerful, beautiful storm was raging. On the horizon lightning flung itself continuously in white ribbons from the clouds into the sea, lighting up, far into the distance, the high black waves. Lightning flashed to the right, to the left, and, probably, over the house as well.

"A storm!" Laevsky whispered; he felt a desire to pray to someone or something, if only to the lightning or the clouds. "Dear storm!"

He remembered how, as a child, during a storm, he used to run bareheaded into the garden, chased by two fair-haired girls with blue eyes, and the rain would soak them; they laughed with delight, but when a loud thunderclap came, the girls pressed trustingly against the boy, and he crossed himself and hurried to say: "Holy, holy, holy..." Oh, where have you gone, in what sea have you drowned, you beginnings of a beautiful, pure life? He no longer fears storms and does not love nature, he has no God, all the trusting girls he has ever known have already been destroyed by him and by men like him, in his own family garden he has not in his whole life planted a single tree or grown a single blade of grass, and living among the living, he has not saved so much as a single fly, but has only destroyed, ruined, and lied, and lied...

"What in my past is not a vice?" he asked himself, trying to catch hold of some bright memory, as a man falling into an abyss clutches at the bushes.

The gymnasium? The university? But that was a sham. He had studied badly and forgotten what he had been taught. Service to society? That too was a sham, because in his post he did nothing, drew his salary for nothing, and his service was nothing but a vile embezzlement of public funds, of the kind for which no one is brought to trial.

He had no need of truth, and he had not sought it; his conscience, bewitched by vice and lying, either slept or was silent; a stranger, or a man hired from another planet, he took no part in the common life of men, was indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas, their religions, their knowledge, their searchings, their struggle, he had not said one kind word to people, had not written one useful, one non-vulgar line, had done people not a single kopeck’s worth of good, but had only eaten their bread, drunk their wine, run off with their wives, lived on their thoughts, and, to justify his contemptible, parasitic life before them and before himself, had always tried to give himself the air of being above them and better than them. Lies, lies, and lies...

He vividly recalled what he had seen that evening in Muridov’s house, and it was unbearably horrible to him with disgust and anguish. Kirilin and Achmianov were repulsive, but after all they had only continued what he had begun; they were his accomplices and his pupils. From a young, weak woman who trusted him more than a brother, he had taken away her husband, her circle of acquaintances, and her homeland, and had brought her here – into the heat, the fever, and the tedium; day after day, like a mirror, she had had to reflect back his idleness, his depravity, and his lying – and with this, and only this, her life was filled, weak, listless, pitiful; then he grew tired of her, came to hate her, but lacked the courage to leave her, and tried to entangle her ever more tightly in lies, like a spiderweb... The rest these men had finished.

Laevsky would sit down at the table, then go back to the window; he would blow out the candle, then light it again. He cursed himself aloud, wept, complained, begged forgiveness; several times, in despair, he ran to the table and wrote: "Mother!"

Besides his mother, he had no one close to him, no family; but how could his mother help him? And where was she? He wanted to run to Nadezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands and her 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 muttered, rubbing his hands. "Then why am I still alive, my God!..."

He had knocked his dim star down from the sky, it had set, and its trace had mingled with the darkness of night; it would never return to the sky, because life is given only once and does not repeat itself. If it were possible to bring back the past days and years, he would replace the lies in them with truth, idleness with labor, tedium with joy, he would return purity to those from whom he had taken it, he would find God and justice – but this was as impossible as bringing a set star back into the sky. And because it was impossible, he fell into despair.

When the storm had passed, he sat by the open window and thought calmly about what would become of him. Von Koren would probably kill him. That man’s clear, cold worldview allowed for the destruction of the sickly and the worthless; and if it should fail him at the decisive moment, he would be helped by the hatred and the sense of revulsion that Laevsky aroused in him. But if he missed, or, in order to mock his hated opponent, merely wounded him, or fired into the air – then what was to be done? Where was he to go?

"Go to Petersburg?" Laevsky asked himself. "But that would mean starting the same old life again, the life I curse. And whoever seeks salvation in a change of place, like a bird of passage, will find nothing, because for him the earth is the same everywhere. Seek salvation in people? In whom, and how? Samoylenko’s kindness and generosity save no more than the deacon’s laughter or von Koren’s hatred. Salvation must be sought only in oneself, and if it isn’t found, then why waste time – one must kill oneself, that’s all..."

The sound of a carriage was heard. It was already growing light. The carriage drove past, turned, and, its wheels creaking over the wet sand, stopped by the house. There were two men sitting in it.

"Wait, I’ll be right there!" Laevsky called to them through the window. "I’m not asleep. Is it time already?"

"Yes. It’s four o’clock. By the time we get there..."

Laevsky put on his coat and cap, took a packet of cigarettes in his pocket, and stopped, thinking; it seemed to him that there was something else he still needed to do. Outside, the seconds were talking quietly and the horses were snorting, and these sounds, in the early damp morning when everyone is asleep and the sky is only just growing pale, filled Laevsky’s soul with a dejection like a bad presentiment. He stood a little while, thinking, and went into the bedroom.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna lay stretched out in her bed, wrapped head and all in a plaid rug; she was not moving and resembled, especially in the head, an Egyptian mummy. Looking at her in silence, Laevsky silently asked her forgiveness and thought that if the sky was not empty and there truly was a God there, He would preserve her; and if there was no God, then let her perish, for she had no reason to live.

She suddenly started up and sat up in bed. Raising her pale face and looking at Laevsky in terror, she asked:

"Is that you? Has the storm passed?"

"It’s passed."

She remembered, put both hands to her head, and shuddered all over.

"How heavy my heart is!" she said. "If you only knew how heavy my heart is! I was waiting," she went on, screwing her eyes shut, "for you to kill me, or drive me out of the house into the rain and the storm, but you delay... you delay..."

He embraced her suddenly and tightly, showered her knees and hands with kisses, then, as she murmured something to him and shuddered at her own memories, he smoothed her hair, and, gazing into her face, understood that this unfortunate, sinful woman was, for him, the only close, dear, irreplaceable person in the world.

When he went out of the house and got into the carriage, he wanted to come home alive.

XVIII

The deacon got up, dressed, took his thick knotted stick, and went quietly out of the house. It was dark, and for the first minutes, as he walked along the street, the deacon could not even see his own white stick; there was not a single star in the sky, and it looked as though it would rain again. There was a smell of wet sand and sea.

"I hope no Chechens attack me," the deacon thought, listening to his stick knocking against the pavement, and how ringing and lonely that knocking sounded in the nighttime stillness.

Once outside the town, he began to make out both the road and his stick; here and there dim patches showed in the black sky, and soon a single star peeped out and blinked timidly with its one eye. The deacon walked along the high, rocky shore and could not see the sea; it was falling asleep below, and its invisible waves struck the shore lazily and heavily, as though sighing: oof! And how slowly! One wave struck, and the deacon had time to count eight steps before the next one struck, and six steps later a third. Just as before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness could be heard the lazy, drowsy noise of the sea, could be heard an infinitely distant, unimaginable time, when God moved over chaos.

The deacon grew uneasy. He thought that God might punish him for keeping company with unbelievers and even going to watch their duel. The duel would be a trifling, bloodless, ridiculous affair, but all the same it was a pagan spectacle, and it was quite unbecoming for a churchman to be present at it. He stopped and thought: shouldn’t he turn back? But a strong, restless curiosity got the better of his doubts, and he went on.

"They may be unbelievers, but they’re good men, and they’ll be saved," he reassured himself. "They’ll certainly be saved!" he said aloud, lighting a cigarette.

By what measure ought one to gauge people’s worth, to judge them justly? The deacon recalled his enemy, the inspector of the seminary, who believed in God, and never fought duels, and lived chastely, but who had once fed the deacon bread mixed with sand, and had once nearly torn his ear off. If human life was arranged so unwisely that this cruel and dishonest inspector, who stole government flour, was respected by everyone, and the seminary prayed for his health and salvation, was it right to shun men like von Koren and Laevsky simply because they were unbelievers? The deacon set about resolving this question, but he remembered what a comical figure Samoylenko had cut today, and this broke the thread of his thoughts. How much laughter there would be tomorrow! The deacon imagined how he would hide under a bush and spy on it all, and how tomorrow at dinner, when von Koren began to boast, he, the deacon, would laugh as he told him every detail of the duel.

"How do you know all this?" the zoologist would ask. "That’s just it. I sat at home, and yet I know."

It would be a fine thing to describe the duel in a comic light. His father-in-law would read it and laugh – don’t feed his father-in-law porridge, only tell or write him something funny.

The valley of the Yellow Stream opened out. The rain had made the stream wider and fiercer, and it no longer grumbled as before but roared. Dawn was beginning. The gray, dim morning, and the clouds racing westward to catch up with the storm cloud, and the mountains girdled in mist, and the wet trees – all of it seemed to the deacon ugly and ill-tempered. He washed himself in a brook, read his morning prayers, and found himself wanting tea and hot fritters with sour cream, the kind served every morning at his father-in-law’s table. He remembered his deaconess and the piece called "Never to Return" that she played on the piano. What sort of woman was she? He had been introduced to her, matched with her, and married to her within a single week; he had lived with her less than a month before being sent out here, so that to this day he had not made out what kind of person she was. And yet, without her it was rather dull.

"I ought to write her a little letter..." he thought.

The flag on the tavern had gone limp with the rain and hung down, and the tavern itself, with its wet roof, looked darker and lower than before. An oxcart stood by the door; Kerbalai, a couple of Abkhazians, and a young Tatar woman in wide trousers, probably Kerbalai’s wife or daughter, were carrying sacks of something out of the tavern and loading them onto the cart on top of corn straw. A pair of donkeys stood by the cart with their heads down. Once the sacks were loaded, the Abkhazians and the Tatar woman began covering them with straw on top, and Kerbalai set about harnessing the donkeys in haste. "Smuggling, most likely," thought the deacon.

There was the fallen tree with its dried needles, there the black patch left by the bonfire. He remembered the picnic in all its detail, the fire, the singing of the Abkhazians, the sweet dreams of becoming a bishop and leading a religious procession... The Black Stream had grown blacker and wider with the rain. The deacon carefully crossed the flimsy little footbridge, which the muddy waves were already reaching with their crests, and climbed the ladder into the drying shed.

"A splendid head!" he thought, stretching out on the straw and recalling von Koren. "A good head, God grant him health. Only there’s a cruelty in him..."

Why did he hate Laevsky, and the other him? Why should they fight a duel? If from childhood they had known want the way the deacon had, if they had been raised among people ignorant, hard of heart, greedy for gain, grudging every crust of bread, coarse and uncouth in their manners, spitting on the floor and belching at dinner and at prayer, if from childhood they had not been spoiled by comfortable surroundings and a select circle of people, how they would have clung to one another, how gladly they would have forgiven each other’s failings and valued what good there was in each! For even outwardly decent people are so few in the world! True, Laevsky was flighty, dissolute, strange, but after all he would not steal, would not spit loudly on the floor, would not reproach his wife – "you gobble your food and won’t work" – would not beat a child with the reins or feed his servants stinking salt beef – was that not enough to treat him with indulgence? Besides, he was the first to suffer from his own failings, as a sick man suffers from his wounds. Instead of, out of boredom and some sort of misunderstanding, searching in each other for degeneration, extinction, heredity, and the rest, which is little understood, would it not be better for them to come down a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets groan aloud with crude ignorance, greed, reproaches, filth, cursing, and women’s shrieking...

The sound of a carriage was heard and broke into the deacon’s thoughts. He glanced out the door and saw the carriage, with three men in it: Laevsky, Sheshkovsky, and the chief of the post-and-telegraph office.

"Stop!" said Sheshkovsky.

All three climbed out of the carriage and looked at one another.

"They’re not here yet," said Sheshkovsky, shaking off the mud. "Well then? While we’re waiting, let’s go look for a convenient spot. There’s no room to turn around here."

They went on farther up the river and soon disappeared from sight. The Tatar coachman got into the carriage, bowed his head to his shoulder, and fell asleep. After waiting some ten minutes, the deacon came out of the drying shed and, taking off his black hat so as not to be noticed, crouching and glancing around, began making his way along the bank among the bushes and the rows of corn; big drops fell on him from the trees and the bushes, the grass and the corn were wet.

"What a disgrace!" he muttered, gathering up his wet and muddy coattails. "If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come."

Soon he heard voices and saw people. Laevsky, his hands tucked into his sleeves and stooping, was pacing quickly back and forth across a small clearing; his seconds stood right by the bank rolling cigarettes.

"Strange..." thought the deacon, not recognizing Laevsky’s gait. "Like an old man."

"How impolite of them!" said the post office clerk, glancing at his watch. "Maybe by learned standards it’s fine to be late, but in my opinion it’s a piggish thing to do."

Sheshkovsky, a stout man with a black beard, listened and said:

"They’re coming!"

XIX

"First time in my life I’ve seen this! How splendid!" said von Koren, appearing in the clearing and stretching both hands toward the east. "Look: green rays!"

In the east, two green rays stretched up from behind the mountains, and it was, indeed, beautiful. The sun was rising.

"Good morning!" the zoologist went on, nodding to Laevsky’s seconds. "Am I not late?"

Behind him came his seconds, two very young officers of the same height, Boyko and Govorovsky, in white tunics, and the thin, unsociable Dr. Ustimovich, who carried a bundle of something in one hand and held the other behind his back; as usual, a cane was tucked lengthwise along his spine. Setting the bundle on the ground and greeting no one, he put the other hand behind his back as well and paced across the clearing.

Laevsky felt the weariness and awkwardness of a man who might soon die and who therefore draws everyone’s attention. He wished they would kill him quickly, or else take him home. He was seeing the sunrise now for the first time in his life; this early morning, the green rays, the dampness, and the men in wet boots seemed to him superfluous in his life, unnecessary, and oppressive; none of it had any connection with the night he had lived through, with his thoughts and his sense of guilt, and so he would gladly have left without waiting for the duel.

Von Koren was noticeably agitated and tried to hide it by pretending that nothing interested him more than the green rays. The seconds were embarrassed and exchanged glances, as if asking one another why they were here and what they were supposed to do.

"I imagine, gentlemen, there’s no need for us to go any farther," said Sheshkovsky. "This will do."

"Yes, of course," von Koren agreed.

A silence fell. Ustimovich, still pacing, suddenly turned sharply toward Laevsky and said in a low voice, breathing into his face:

"They probably haven’t had time to inform you of my terms yet. Each side pays me fifteen rubles, and in the event of the death of one of the opponents, the survivor pays the whole thirty."

Laevsky had known this man before, but only now, for the first time, did he clearly see his dull eyes, his stiff mustache, and his thin, consumptive neck: a moneylender, not a doctor! His breath had an unpleasant, beefy smell.

"What sorts of people there are in this world," thought Laevsky, and answered:

"Very well."

The doctor nodded and paced off again, and it was plain that he had no need of the money at all, and had asked for it simply out of spite. Everyone felt that it was time either to begin or to end what had already begun, but they neither began nor ended, only walked about, stood, and smoked. The young officers, who were present at a duel for the first time in their lives and now had little faith in this, in their opinion, unnecessary civilian duel, examined their tunics attentively and smoothed their sleeves. Sheshkovsky came up to them and said quietly:

"Gentlemen, we must make every effort to see that this duel doesn’t take place. We must reconcile them."

He reddened and went on:

"Yesterday Kirilin came to see me and complained that Laevsky had caught him yesterday with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and all sorts of things."

"Yes, we know about that too," said Boyko.

"Well, you see... Laevsky’s hands are shaking and all that... He can’t even lift a pistol right now. Fighting him would be as inhuman as fighting a drunk man or a man with typhus. If a reconciliation can’t be reached, then, gentlemen, we ought at least to put off the duel, or something... Such devilry – I can hardly bear to look at it."

"You talk to von Koren."

"I don’t know the rules of dueling, the devil take them entirely, and I don’t want to know them; he might think Laevsky lost his nerve and sent me to him. Still, whatever he likes, I’ll talk to him."

Sheshkovsky, hesitantly, limping slightly as though his leg had gone to sleep, made his way toward von Koren, and as he walked, grunting, his whole figure breathed laziness.

"Here’s what I have to tell you, my dear sir," he began, examining closely the flowers on the zoologist’s shirt. "This is confidential... I don’t know the rules of dueling, the devil take them entirely, and I don’t want to know them, and I’m speaking not as a second and all that, but simply as a man."

"Yes. Well?"

"When the seconds propose reconciliation, they’re usually not listened to – it’s looked on as a formality. Self-esteem and all that. But I beg you most humbly to give some thought to Ivan Andreich. He isn’t in a normal state today, so to speak, he’s out of his mind, and pitiful. He’s had a misfortune. I can’t stand gossip," Sheshkovsky reddened and glanced around, "but in view of the duel I find it necessary to tell you. Last evening, in Muridov’s house, he caught his lady with... a certain gentleman."

"What filth!" the zoologist muttered; he went pale, winced, and spat loudly: "Pah!"

His lower lip trembled; he stepped away from Sheshkovsky, unwilling to hear any more, and, as though he had accidentally tasted something bitter, spat loudly again, and, for the first time that whole morning, glanced at Laevsky with hatred. His agitation and awkwardness had passed; he shook his head and said loudly:

"Gentlemen, what exactly are we waiting for, one might ask? Why don’t we begin?"

Sheshkovsky exchanged glances with the officers and shrugged.

"Gentlemen!" he said loudly, addressing no one in particular. "Gentlemen! We propose that you reconcile!"

"Let’s get the formalities over with quickly," said von Koren. "The reconciliation has already been discussed. Now what’s the next formality? Let’s be quick, gentlemen, time doesn’t wait."

"But we insist on reconciliation all the same," said Sheshkovsky, in a guilty voice, like a man forced to meddle in other people’s affairs; he reddened, laid his hand on his heart, and went on: "Gentlemen, we see no causal connection between an insult and a duel. The offense that we sometimes, out of human weakness, inflict on one another has nothing in common with a duel. You are university men, educated men, and of course you yourselves see in a duel nothing but an outdated, empty formality, and all that. We look at it the same way ourselves – otherwise we wouldn’t have come, since we can’t allow that in our presence men should shoot at each other, and that’s that." Sheshkovsky wiped the sweat from his face and went on: "So settle your misunderstanding, gentlemen, shake hands, and let’s go home and drink to reconciliation. My word of honor, gentlemen!"

Von Koren said nothing. Laevsky, noticing that they were looking at him, said:

"I have nothing against Nikolai Vasilyich. If he considers that I am at fault, I’m prepared to apologize to him."

Von Koren took offense.

"Evidently, gentlemen," he said, "you would like Mr. Laevsky to go home a magnanimous knight, but I can’t provide either you or him with that satisfaction. And there was no need to get up early and ride ten versts out of town simply to drink to reconciliation, have a bite to eat, and explain to me that a duel is an outdated formality. A duel is a duel, and there’s no need to make it any more stupid or false than it already is. I wish to fight!"

A silence fell. The officer Boyko took two pistols out of a case: one was handed to von Koren, the other to Laevsky, and then there was some confusion, which briefly cheered up the zoologist and the seconds. It turned out that of all those present, not one had ever been present at a duel in his life, and no one knew exactly how the men should stand or what the seconds were supposed to say and do. But then Boyko remembered, and, smiling, began to explain.

"Gentlemen, who remembers how it’s described in Lermontov?" asked von Koren, laughing. "In Turgenev too, Bazarov fights a duel with someone or other..."

"What is there to remember?" said Ustimovich impatiently, stopping. "Measure out the distance – that’s all there is to it."

And he took three paces or so, as if to show how the measuring should be done. Boyko counted off the paces, and his fellow officer drew his saber and scratched the ground at the outer points to mark the barrier.

The opponents, amid a general silence, took their places.

"Moles," the deacon, sitting in the bushes, recalled.

Sheshkovsky was saying something, Boyko was again explaining something, but Laevsky did not hear, or rather, heard but did not understand. When the moment for it came, he cocked the hammer and raised the heavy, cold pistol, muzzle upward. He had forgotten to unbutton his coat, and it pinched hard at the shoulder and under the arm, and his arm rose with such awkwardness, as if the sleeve were sewn out of tin. He remembered his hatred of the previous day for the swarthy forehead and curly hair, and thought that even yesterday, in a moment of strong hatred and anger, he would not have been able to fire at a man. Afraid that the bullet might somehow accidentally hit von Koren, he raised the pistol higher and higher, and felt that this too-conspicuous magnanimity was neither delicate nor magnanimous, but he did not know how, and could not do otherwise. Looking at von Koren’s pale, mockingly smiling face – who had evidently been certain from the very start that his opponent would fire into the air – Laevsky thought that now, thank God, it would all be over, and that all that remained was to press the trigger a little harder...

There was a strong recoil into his shoulder, a shot rang out, and in the mountains an echo answered: pah-takh!

And von Koren cocked his hammer and glanced toward Ustimovich, who was still pacing as before, his hands behind his back, paying no attention to anything.

"Doctor," said the zoologist, "would you be so kind as not to walk about like a pendulum. You’re making my eyes swim."

The doctor stopped. Von Koren began taking aim at Laevsky.

"It’s over!" thought Laevsky.

The muzzle of the pistol, aimed straight at his face, the expression of hatred and contempt in von Koren’s posture and in his whole figure, and this killing, which a decent man was about to carry out in broad daylight in the presence of decent men, and this silence, and the unknown force compelling Laevsky to stand there and not run – how mysterious it all was, and incomprehensible, and terrible! The time while von Koren took aim seemed to Laevsky longer than the whole night. He looked pleadingly at the seconds; they did not stir, and were pale.

"Fire, then, quickly!" thought Laevsky, and felt that his pale, trembling, pitiful face must be arousing in von Koren an even greater hatred.

"I’ll kill him now," thought von Koren, aiming at his forehead and already feeling the trigger under his finger. "Yes, of course I’ll kill him..."

"He’ll kill him!" a desperate cry suddenly came from somewhere very close.

At once a shot rang out. Seeing that Laevsky was still standing where he was and had not fallen, everyone looked toward where the cry had come from and saw the deacon. Pale, his hair wet and plastered to his forehead and cheeks, soaked and muddy all over, he stood on the far bank in the corn, smiling somehow strangely and waving his wet hat. Sheshkovsky laughed with joy, burst into tears, and turned away...

XX

A little later von Koren and the deacon met by the little bridge. The deacon was agitated, breathing hard, and avoided meeting his eyes. He was ashamed both of his fear and of his dirty, wet clothes.

"It seemed to me you meant to kill him..." he muttered. "How repugnant that is to human nature! To what a degree it’s unnatural!"

"How did you come to be here, though?" the zoologist asked.

"Don’t ask!" the deacon waved his hand. "The unclean one led me astray: go on, go on... And so I went, and nearly died of fright there in the corn. But now, thank God, thank God... I’m very pleased with you," the deacon muttered. "And our old tarantula grandfather will be pleased too... What laughter, what laughter there’ll be! Only I beg you most earnestly, don’t tell anyone I was here, or I’ll catch it from the authorities. They’ll say: the deacon was a second."

"Gentlemen!" said von Koren. "The deacon asks that you tell no one you saw him here. There could be trouble."

"How repugnant that is to human nature!" the deacon sighed. "Forgive me, generously, but your face was such that I thought you were certain to kill him."

"I had a strong temptation to finish off that scoundrel," said von Koren, "but you shouted just as I fired, and I missed. The whole procedure, though, is repellent when one isn’t used to it, and it’s worn me out, deacon. I’m terribly weak. Let’s go..."

"No, let me walk, if you please. I need to dry off, I’m soaked through and chilled."

"Well, as you like," said the weakened zoologist in a languid voice, getting into the carriage and closing his eyes. "As you like..."

While they were moving about the carriages and taking their seats, Kerbalai stood by the road, holding his stomach with both hands, bowing low and baring his teeth; he thought the gentlemen had come to enjoy nature and drink tea, and could not understand why they were now getting into their carriages. Amid general silence the procession set off, and only the deacon remained by the tavern.

"Went tavern, drank tea," he said to Kerbalai. "Me want eat."

Kerbalai spoke Russian well, but the deacon thought the Tatar would understand him more readily if he spoke to him in broken Russian.

"Fry eggs, give cheese..."

"Come, come, priest," said Kerbalai, bowing. "I give everything... Cheese there is, and wine there is... Eat whatever you like."

"How do you say ’God’ in Tatar?" the deacon asked, going into the tavern.

"Your God and my God all the same," said Kerbalai, not understanding him. "God is one for everybody, only people different. Some Russian, some Turk, or some English – all kinds of people plenty, but God one."

"Very well, then. If all peoples worship the one God, why is it that you Muslims regard Christians as your eternal enemies?"

"Why you angry?" said Kerbalai, clutching his stomach with both hands. "You priest, I Muslim, you say – want eat, I give... Only rich man asks which god yours, which mine; for poor man all the same. Eat, please."

While this theological conversation was going on in the tavern, Laevsky was riding home and remembering how frightening it had been to ride out at dawn, when the road, the cliffs, and the mountains had been wet and dark, and the unknown future had seemed as terrible as an abyss whose bottom cannot be seen; and now the raindrops hanging on the grass and the stones sparkled in the sun like diamonds, nature smiled joyfully, and the terrible future lay behind him. He glanced at Sheshkovsky’s gloomy, tear-stained face, and ahead at the two carriages carrying von Koren, his seconds, and the doctor, and it seemed to him as though they were all returning from a cemetery where they had just buried a heavy, unbearable man who had hindered everyone from living.

"It’s all over," he thought of his past, carefully stroking his neck with his fingers.

On the right side of his neck, near the collar, a small swelling had risen up, about the length and thickness of a little finger, and there was a pain, as though someone had run an iron over his neck. It was the bullet that had grazed him.

Then, when he got home, a long, strange day stretched out before him, sweet and hazy as a swoon. Like a man let out of prison or a hospital, he gazed at long-familiar objects and marveled that the tables, the windows, the chairs, the light, and the sea aroused in him a lively, childlike joy such as he had not felt for a very long time. Pale and greatly thinned, Nadezhda Fyodorovna did not understand his gentle voice and his strange gait; she hurried to tell him everything that had happened to her... It seemed to her that he probably heard badly and did not understand her, and that if he learned everything he would curse her and kill her, but he listened to her, stroked her face and her hair, looked into her eyes, and said:

"I have no one, no one but you..."

Then they sat for a long time in the little front garden, pressed close together, and were silent, or, dreaming aloud of their future happy life, spoke in short, broken phrases, and it seemed to him that he had never before spoken so long and so beautifully.

XXI

More than three months passed.

The day set by von Koren for his departure arrived. From early morning a heavy, cold rain was falling, a nor’easter was blowing, and a strong swell had risen on the sea. It was said that in such weather the steamer would scarcely come in to the roadstead. By the timetable it was due to arrive at around ten in the morning, but von Koren, who went out onto the embankment at noon and again after dinner, saw through his binoculars nothing but gray waves and rain shrouding the horizon.

By the end of the day the rain stopped and the wind began noticeably to die down. Von Koren had already resigned himself to the thought that he would not get away that day, and sat down to play chess with Samoylenko; but when it grew dark, the orderly reported that lights had appeared on the sea and that a rocket had been seen.

Von Koren hurried. He put his bag over his shoulder, kissed Samoylenko and the deacon, went, quite needlessly, through every room, said goodbye to the orderly and the cook, and went out into the street with the feeling that he had forgotten something either at the doctor’s or at his own lodgings. Outside he walked beside Samoylenko, the deacon behind them with a box, and behind everyone the orderly with two suitcases. Only Samoylenko and the orderly could make out the dim lights on the sea; the rest looked into the darkness and saw nothing. The steamer had stopped far from the shore.

"Faster, faster," von Koren hurried them. "I’m afraid it will leave!"

Passing by the little three-windowed house into which Laevsky had moved soon after the duel, von Koren could not resist and glanced in at the window. Laevsky, stooped over, sat at the table with his back to the window, writing.

"I marvel," the zoologist said quietly. "How he’s pulled himself together!"

"Yes, it’s a marvel," Samoylenko sighed. "He sits like that from morning till night, sits and works and works. He wants to pay off his debts. And he lives, my friend, worse than a beggar!"

Half a minute passed in silence. The zoologist, the doctor, and the deacon stood at the window and went on looking at Laevsky.

"So he never did get away from here, poor fellow," said Samoylenko. "And do you remember how he fretted over it?"

"Yes, he’s pulled himself together powerfully," von Koren repeated. "His marriage, this working all day long for a crust of bread, some new expression on his face, even his gait – all of it is so extraordinary that I don’t know what to call it," the zoologist took hold of Samoylenko’s sleeve and went on with feeling in his voice: "Tell him and his wife that when I left, I marveled at them, wished them every good... and ask him, if he can, not to think ill of me. He knows me. He knows that if I could have foreseen this change back then, I might have become his best friend."

"Why don’t you go in and say goodbye to him."

"No. That would be awkward."

"Why? God knows, you may never see him again."

The zoologist thought a moment and said:

"That’s true."

Samoylenko tapped quietly on the window with his finger. Laevsky started and looked around.

"Vanya, Nikolai Vasilyich wants to say goodbye to you," said Samoylenko. "He’s leaving right now."

Laevsky got up from the table and went into the entryway to open the door. Samoylenko, von Koren, and the deacon went into the house.

"Just for a minute," the zoologist began, taking off his galoshes in the entryway and already regretting that he had given way to feeling and come in without an invitation. "It’s as if I’m forcing myself on him," he thought, "and that’s foolish." "Forgive me for troubling you," he said, following Laevsky into his room, "but I’m leaving now, and I felt drawn to you. God knows whether we’ll ever see each other again."

"Very glad... Please, do come in," said Laevsky, and awkwardly set out chairs for his guests, as though wanting to block their way, and stopped in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.

"I ought not to have left the witnesses out in the street," thought von Koren, and said firmly: "Don’t think ill of me, Ivan Andreich. The past, of course, cannot be forgotten – it is too sad – and I have not come here to apologize or to assure you that I am not to blame. I acted sincerely, and I have not changed my convictions since then... True, as I see now, to my great joy, I was mistaken about you, but then men stumble even on level ground, and such is human fate: if you are not mistaken about the main thing, you will be mistaken about the particulars. No one knows the real truth."

"Yes, no one knows the truth..." said Laevsky.

"Well, farewell... God grant you everything good."

Von Koren held out his hand to Laevsky; the latter shook it and bowed.

"Don’t think ill of me, then," said von Koren. "Give my regards to your wife, and tell her I was very sorry not to be able to say goodbye to her."

"She’s at home."

Laevsky went to the door and called into the other room:

"Nadya, Nikolai Vasilyevich would like to say goodbye to you."

Nadezhda Fyodorovna came in; she stopped near the door and glanced timidly at the guests. Her face had a guilty, frightened look, and she held her hands the way a schoolgirl does when she is being scolded.

"I’m leaving now, Nadezhda Fyodorovna," said von Koren, "and I’ve come to say goodbye."

She held out her hand to him hesitantly, and Laevsky bowed.

"How pitiful the two of them are, though!" thought von Koren. "This life doesn’t come cheap to them." "I’ll be in Moscow and in Petersburg," he asked, "is there anything you’d like me to send you from there?"

"What could there be?" said Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and exchanged an anxious glance with her husband. "I don’t think there’s anything..."

"No, nothing..." said Laevsky, rubbing his hands. "Give our regards."

Von Koren did not know what else could or should be said, though earlier, when he had come in, he had thought he would say a great many kind, warm, and meaningful things. He silently shook hands with Laevsky and his wife and left them with a heavy feeling.

"What people!" the deacon said in a low voice, walking behind. "My God, what people! Truly the right hand of God has planted this vine! Lord, Lord! One conquered thousands, and the other tens of thousands. Nikolai Vasilyich," he said rapturously, "know that today you have conquered the greatest of the enemies of mankind – pride!"

"Enough, deacon! What sort of conquerors are we? Conquerors look like eagles, and he’s pitiful, timid, browbeaten, he bows like a Chinese nodding doll, and I... I feel sad."

Footsteps sounded behind them. It was Laevsky catching up to see them off. At the pier stood the orderly with the two suitcases, and a little way off, four oarsmen.

"There’s a bit of a wind, though... brr!" said Samoylenko. "Out at sea it must be a real gale by now – oh, oh! You’re leaving at a bad time, Kolya."

"I’m not afraid of seasickness."

"That’s not it... I’m afraid those fools might tip you over."

"You ought to go out on the agent’s launch. Where’s the agent’s launch?" he shouted to the oarsmen.

"Gone, Your Excellency."

"And the customs boat?"

"Gone too."

"Why wasn’t I told, then?" Samoylenko flared up. "Blockheads!"

"It’s all the same, don’t worry..." said von Koren. "Well, farewell. God keep you."

Samoylenko embraced von Koren and made the sign of the cross over him three times.

"Don’t forget us now, Kolya... Write... We’ll be waiting for you next spring."

"Farewell, deacon," said von Koren, shaking the deacon’s hand. "Thank you for your company and for the good talks. Think over what I said about the expedition."

"Why, Lord, to the edge of the world if need be!" laughed the deacon. "Am I against it?"

Von Koren made out Laevsky in the darkness and silently held out his hand to him. The oarsmen were already standing below, holding the boat, which was beating against the piles, though the breakwater sheltered it from the heavy swell. Von Koren went down the ladder, jumped into the boat, and sat down at the tiller.

"Write!" Samoylenko shouted after him. "Take care of your health!"

"No one knows the real truth," thought Laevsky, turning up the collar of his coat and thrusting his hands into his sleeves.

The boat rounded the pier smartly and came out into open water. It vanished in the waves, but at once slid up out of the deep trough onto a high crest, so that the men, even the oars, could be made out. The boat advanced some three fathoms and was thrown back some two.

"Write!" shouted Samoylenko. "What devil possessed you to travel in such weather!"

"Yes, no one knows the real truth..." thought Laevsky, gazing with anguish at the restless dark sea.

"The boat is thrown back," he thought, "it makes two steps forward and one step back, but the oarsmen are stubborn, they row on tirelessly and are not afraid of the high waves. The boat goes on and on forward, and now it can’t be seen at all, but in half an hour the oarsmen will clearly see the steamer’s lights, and in an hour they’ll already be at the steamer’s gangway. So it is in life too... In the search for truth, people take two steps forward, one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and the tedium of life throw them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last..."

"Farewe-e-ell!" shouted Samoylenko.

"Can’t see him, can’t hear him anymore," said the deacon. "A safe journey!"

Rain began to patter down.