The Duel and Other Stories | Page 7

coughing,
with his hands folded behind him and a cane stretched along his back,
was of opinion that she had a female complaint, and prescribed warm
compresses. In old days, when Laevsky loved her, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna's illness had excited his pity and terror; now he saw falsity
even in her illness. Her yellow, sleepy face, her lustreless eyes, her
apathetic expression, and the yawning that always followed her attacks
of fever, and the fact that during them she lay under a shawl and looked
more like a boy than a woman, and that it was close and stuffy in her
room--all this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an
argument against love and marriage.
The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a
preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was
possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head
tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a
dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers
sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course,

but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the
murderer.
"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna on the forehead.
Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and fro,
looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:
"Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"
He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna's husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.
"To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid," he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in order
to put on his high boots. "Love and hatred are not under our control. As
for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of the causes of
his death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and
she with me?"
Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day
to play vint and drink beer.
"My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevsky on the way.
"How truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!"
III
For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight of
newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in the town,
had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table d'hôte. At this
time there were only two men who habitually dined with him: a young
zoologist called Von Koren, who had come for the summer to the
Black Sea to study the embryology of the medusa, and a deacon called
Pobyedov, who had only just left the seminary and been sent to the
town to take the duty of the old deacon who had gone away for a cure.
Each of them paid twelve roubles a month for their dinner and supper,
and Samoylenko made them promise to turn up at two o'clock
punctually.
Von Koren was usually the first to appear. He sat down in the
drawing-room in silence, and taking an album from the table, began
attentively scrutinising the faded photographs of unknown men in full
trousers and top-hats, and ladies in crinolines and caps. Samoylenko
only remembered a few of them by name, and of those whom he had

forgotten he said with a sigh: "A very fine fellow, remarkably
intelligent!" When he had finished with the album, Von Koren took a
pistol from the whatnot, and screwing up his left eye, took deliberate
aim at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or stood still at the
looking-glass and gazed a long time at his swarthy face, his big
forehead, and his black hair, which curled like a negro's, and his shirt of
dull-coloured cotton with big flowers on it like a Persian rug, and the
broad leather belt he wore instead of a waistcoat. The contemplation of
his own image seemed to afford him almost more satisfaction than
looking at photographs or playing with the pistols. He was very well
satisfied with his face, and his becomingly clipped beard, and the broad
shoulders, which were unmistakable evidence of his excellent health
and physical strength. He was satisfied, too, with his stylish get-up,
from the cravat, which matched the colour of his shirt, down to his
brown boots.
While he was looking at the album and standing before