The Duel and Other Stories | Page 2

been very nice, for after
drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke his
whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:
"A wonderfully magnificent view!"
After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which
prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and
sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no
better for the bathe and the coffee.
"Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch," he said. "I won't
make a secret of it; I'll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in
a bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way!
Forgive me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak
out."
Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.
"I've lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her," Laevsky
went on; "or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her. . . .

These two years have been a mistake."
It was Laevsky's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms
of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did so now.
"I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because
unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in
talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look
for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in
somebody else's theories, in literary types--in the idea that we,
upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last
night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah,
how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes,
really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!"
Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so
every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:
"Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight
from nature."
"My God!" sighed Laevsky; "how distorted we all are by civilisation! I
fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with,
we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals,
and interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away
from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran
away from the emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured
our future like this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were
getting to know the people and the place, I would put on the
Government uniform and enter the service; then at our leisure we
would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow,
would have a vineyard and a field, and so on. If you were in my place,
or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich
vineyard and three thousand acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt
from the first day. In the town you have insufferable heat, boredom,
and no society; if you go out into the country, you fancy poisonous
spiders, scorpions, or snakes lurking under every stone and behind
every bush, and beyond the fields--mountains and the desert. Alien
people, an alien country, a wretched form of civilisation--all that is not
so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur coat,
arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South.

What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I'm not a fighting
man. A wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . . From the first
day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were
worthless. As for love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who
has read Spencer and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no
more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the
same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same
curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception."
"You can't get on in the house without an iron," said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky's speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew.
"You are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna is a splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man
of the highest intellect. Of course, you are not married," Samoylenko
went on, glancing round at the adjacent tables, "but that's not