The Duel and Other Stories | Page 5

side of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking along the
pavement with her son, a schoolboy.
"Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna," Samoylenko shouted to her
with a pleasant smile. "Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . . My
respects to Nikodim Alexandritch!"
And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant of the
military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped
him, and asked:
"Is there any one in the hospital?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Eh?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Very well, run along. . . ."
Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a
full-bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and
said to her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to
a regiment:
"Be so good as to give me some soda-water!"
II
Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in
the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or

equivalent to a lie, and everything he read against women and love
seemed to him to apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
and her husband. When he returned home, she was sitting at the
window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face
was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and
he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable event that
she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been
wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no
one here to attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he
saw nothing but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair
so as to look handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
"Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?" she said.
"Why? There won't be an earthquake whether you go or not, I
suppose . . . ."
"No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed."
"Well, ask the doctor, then; I'm not a doctor."
On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of
her head. And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her
husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: "How
true it is, how true!"
Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went
into his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a
handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent
and oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly
across his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn
evening, and he sank into a state of drowsy oppression. It seemed to
him that he had wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and
that it was through his fault that her husband had died. It seemed to him
that he had sinned against his own life, which he had ruined, against the
world of lofty ideas, of learning, and of work, and he conceived that
wonderful world as real and possible, not on this sea-front with hungry
Turks and lazy mountaineers sauntering upon it, but there in the North,
where there were operas, theatres, newspapers, and all kinds of
intellectual activity. One could only there--not here--be honest,
intelligent, lofty, and pure. He accused himself of having no ideal, no
guiding principle in life, though he had a dim understanding now what

it meant. Two years before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, it seemed to him that he had only to go with her as his
wife to the Caucasus, and he would be saved from vulgarity and
emptiness; in the same way now, he was convinced that he had only to
part from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and to go to Petersburg, and he
would get everything he wanted.
"Run away," he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.
"Run away!"
He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer
and then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would
talk on deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and
set off. Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by,
the air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the
fir-trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup,
mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real
Russia. The passengers in the train would talk about trade, new singers,
the Franco-Russian _entente_; on all sides there would be the feeling of
keen, cultured,