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Title: The Duel and Other Stories

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release date: September 24, 2004 [eBook #13505]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUEL AND
OTHER STORIES ***

THE DUEL AND OTHER
STORIES

By Anton Tchekhov
Translated by Constance Garnett

CONTENTS
THE DUEL
EXCELLENT PEOPLE
MIRE
NEIGHBOURS
AT HOME
EXPENSIVE LESSONS
THE PRINCESS
THE CHEMIST’S WIFE

THE DUEL
I

I
t was eight o’clock in the morning—the time when the officers, the
local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the sea
after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea
or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight,
wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and with slippers on
his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of acquaintances on the
beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.
With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his
shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his
hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the
unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after making
his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily good-natured,
kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he
was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always
ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms with every one in the town,
lent every one money, doctored every one, made matches, patched up
quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked shashlik and an awfully good
soup of grey mullets. He was always looking after other people’s affairs and
trying to interest some one on their behalf, and was always delighted about
something. The general opinion about him was that he was without faults of
character. He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good
nature, and tried to disguise it by a surly expression and an assumed
gruffness; and he liked his assistants and his soldiers to call him “Your
Excellency,” although he was only a civil councillor.
“Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,” Laevsky began,
when both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders.
“Suppose you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or
three years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel

that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that
case?”
“It’s very simple. ‘You go where you please, madam’—and that would be
the end of it.”
“It’s easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no
friends or relations, without a farthing, who can’t work . . .”
“Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five
roubles a month—and nothing more. It’s very simple.”
“Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five
roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and
proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would
you do it?”
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered
them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the shingle.
The friends got out and began dressing.
“Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,” said
Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look at the
thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a sign that I
did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.”
He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and
said:
“But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go to
the devil!”
The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was
quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they
brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water, and a
tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the hot coffee,
then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for after drinking it
his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke his whiskers with both
hands, and say, looking at the sea:
“A wonderfully magnificent view!”

After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which
prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and
sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no better
for the bathe and the coffee.
“Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch,” he said. “I won’t make
a secret of it; I’ll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a bad way
with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way! Forgive me for
forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out.”
Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about,
dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.
“I’ve lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her,” Laevsky
went on; “or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her. . . .
These two years have been a mistake.”
It was Laevsky’s habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms
of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did so now.
“I know very well you can’t help me,” he said. “But I tell you, because
unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking.
I have to generalise about everything I do. I’m bound to look for an
explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else’s
theories, in literary types—in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are
degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted
myself by thinking all the time: ‘Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly
true!’ And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say
what you like!”
Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so
every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:
“Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from
nature.”
“My God!” sighed Laevsky; “how distorted we all are by civilisation! I
fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with, we
had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and
interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her

husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the
emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like this:
to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people
and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter the
service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in
the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on. If you
were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren, you might live
with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps, and might leave your
heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres of maize; but I felt like a
bankrupt from the first day. In the town you have insufferable heat,
boredom, and no society; if you go out into the country, you fancy
poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes lurking under every stone and
behind every bush, and beyond the fields—mountains and the desert. Alien
people, an alien country, a wretched form of civilisation—all that is not so
easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one’s fur coat, arm-in-
arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is
needed here is a life and death struggle, and I’m not a fighting man. A
wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . . From the first day I knew
that my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for
love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and
has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living
with any Anfissa or Akulina. There’s the same smell of ironing, of powder,
and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-
deception.”
“You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky’s speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew. “You
are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a
splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest
intellect. Of course, you are not married,” Samoylenko went on, glancing
round at the adjacent tables, “but that’s not your fault; and besides . . . one
ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level of modern
ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes. . . . But to my thinking, once you
have settled together, you ought to go on living together all your life.”
“Without love?”

“I will tell you directly,” said Samoylenko. “Eight years ago there was an
old fellow, an agent, here—a man of very great intelligence. Well, he used
to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you hear, Vanya?
Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have lived two years in
love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in
order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your
patience. . . .”
“You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your
old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of
patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an object
indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen so low. If I
want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells or a frisky horse,
but I’ll leave human beings alone.”
Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a
glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:
“Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?”
“How can I explain it to you? . . . It’s a disease in which the brain
becomes softer . . . as it were, dissolves.”
“Is it curable?”
“Yes, if the disease is not neglected. Cold douches, blisters. . . .
Something internal, too.”
“Oh! . . . Well, you see my position; I can’t live with her: it is more than I
can do. While I’m with you I can be philosophical about it and smile, but at
home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable, that if I were told,
for instance, that I should have to live another month with her, I should
blow out my brains. At the same time, parting with her is out of the
question. She has no friends or relations; she cannot work, and neither she
nor I have any money. . . . What could become of her? To whom could she
go? There is nothing one can think of. . . . Come, tell me, what am I to do?”
“H’m! . . .” growled Samoylenko, not knowing what to answer. “Does
she love you?”

“Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she
wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do
without her powder or her curl-papers. I am for her an indispensable,
integral part of her boudoir.”
Samoylenko was embarrassed.
“You are out of humour to-day, Vanya,” he said. “You must have had a
bad night.”
“Yes, I slept badly. . . . Altogether, I feel horribly out of sorts, brother. My
head feels empty; there’s a sinking at my heart, a weakness. . . . I must run
away.”
“Run where?”
“There, to the North. To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and
ideas. . . . I’d give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in the
province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to stroll for
three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and talk endlessly. . . .
And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And in the evening, when
one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano float from the house; one hears
the train passing. . . .”
Laevsky laughed with pleasure; tears came into his eyes, and to cover
them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table for the matches.
“I have not been in Russia for eighteen years,” said Samoylenko. “I’ve
forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country more splendid
than the Caucasus.”
“Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death are
languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent Caucasus
strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the choice of a chimney-
sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus, I should choose the job of
chimney-sweep.”
Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes fixed
dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken temples, at his
bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off his heel, displaying a

badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to pity, and probably because
Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child, he asked:
“Is your mother living?”
“Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this affair.”
Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a good-
natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him, with whom
one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve. What he understood in
him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a great deal and at unsuitable
times; he played cards, despised his work, lived beyond his means,
frequently made use of unseemly expressions in conversation, walked about
the streets in his slippers, and quarrelled with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
before other people—and Samoylenko did not like this. But the fact that
Laevsky had once been a student in the Faculty of Arts, subscribed to two
fat reviews, often talked so cleverly that only a few people understood him,
was living with a well-educated woman—all this Samoylenko did not
understand, and he liked this and respected Laevsky, thinking him superior
to himself.
“There is another point,” said Laevsky, shaking his head. “Only it is
between ourselves. I’m concealing it from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for the
time. . . . Don’t let it out before her. . . . I got a letter the day before
yesterday, telling me that her husband has died from softening of the brain.”
“The Kingdom of Heaven be his!” sighed Samoylenko. “Why are you
concealing it from her?”
“To show her that letter would be equivalent to ‘Come to church to be
married.’ And we should first have to make our relations clear. When she
understands that we can’t go on living together, I will show her the letter.
Then there will be no danger in it.”
“Do you know what, Vanya,” said Samoylenko, and a sad and imploring
expression came into his face, as though he were going to ask him about
something very touching and were afraid of being refused. “Marry her, my
dear boy!”
“Why?”

“Do your duty to that splendid woman! Her husband is dead, and so
Providence itself shows you what to do!”
“But do understand, you queer fellow, that it is impossible. To marry
without love is as base and unworthy of a man as to perform mass without
believing in it.”
“But it’s your duty to.”
“Why is it my duty?” Laevsky asked irritably.
“Because you took her away from her husband and made yourself
responsible for her.”
“But now I tell you in plain Russian, I don’t love her!”
“Well, if you’ve no love, show her proper respect, consider her wishes. . .
.”
“‘Show her respect, consider her wishes,’” Laevsky mimicked him. “As
though she were some Mother Superior! . . . You are a poor psychologist
and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get off with
nothing but respect and consideration. What a woman thinks most of is her
bedroom.”
“Vanya, Vanya!” said Samoylenko, overcome with confusion.
“You are an elderly child, a theorist, while I am an old man in spite of my
years, and practical, and we shall never understand one another. We had
better drop this conversation. Mustapha!” Laevsky shouted to the waiter.
“What’s our bill?”
“No, no . . .” the doctor cried in dismay, clutching Laevsky’s arm. “It is
for me to pay. I ordered it. Make it out to me,” he cried to Mustapha.
The friends got up and walked in silence along the sea-front. When they
reached the boulevard, they stopped and shook hands at parting.
“You are awfully spoilt, my friend!” Samoylenko sighed. “Fate has sent
you a young, beautiful, cultured woman, and you refuse the gift, while if
God were to give me a crooked old woman, how pleased I should be if only

she were kind and affectionate! I would live with her in my vineyard and . .
.”
Samoylenko caught himself up and said:
“And she might get the samovar ready for me there, the old hag.”
After parting with Laevsky he walked along the boulevard. When, bulky
and majestic, with a stern expression on his face, he walked along the
boulevard in his snow-white tunic and superbly polished boots, squaring his
chest, decorated with the Vladimir cross on a ribbon, he was very much
pleased with himself, and it seemed as though the whole world were
looking at him with pleasure. Without turning his head, he looked to each
side and thought that the boulevard was extremely well laid out; that the
young cypress-trees, the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic palm-trees were
very handsome and would in time give abundant shade; that the Circassians
were an honest and hospitable people.
“It’s strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus,” he thought, “very
strange.”
Five soldiers, carrying rifles, met him and saluted him. On the right side
of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking along the pavement
with her son, a schoolboy.
“Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna,” Samoylenko shouted to her
with a pleasant smile. “Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . . My respects
to Nikodim Alexandritch!”
And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant of the
military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him,
and asked:
“Is there any one in the hospital?”
“No one, Your Excellency.”
“Eh?”
“No one, Your Excellency.”

“Very well, run along. . . .”
Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a full-
bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and said to her
as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to a regiment:
“Be so good as to give me some soda-water!”

II

Laevsky’s not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the
fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent to a
lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to apply
perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband. When he
returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with her hair
done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and turning over the
leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such
a remarkable event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it,
and that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable style,
as there was no one here to attract and no need to be attractive. And in the
magazine he saw nothing but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done
her hair so as to look handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
“Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?” she said.
“Why? There won’t be an earthquake whether you go or not, I suppose . .
. .”
“No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed.”
“Well, ask the doctor, then; I’m not a doctor.”
On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her
head. And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her
husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: “How true
it is, how true!”
Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into
his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a handkerchief

that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent and oppressive
thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly across his brain like a
long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn evening, and he sank into a
state of drowsy oppression. It seemed to him that he had wronged
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and that it was through his fault
that her husband had died. It seemed to him that he had sinned against his
own life, which he had ruined, against the world of lofty ideas, of learning,
and of work, and he conceived that wonderful world as real and possible,
not on this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy mountaineers sauntering
upon it, but there in the North, where there were operas, theatres,
newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual activity. One could only there—not
here—be honest, intelligent, lofty, and pure. He accused himself of having
no ideal, no guiding principle in life, though he had a dim understanding
now what it meant. Two years before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, it seemed to him that he had only to go with her as his wife to
the Caucasus, and he would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the
same way now, he was convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna and to go to Petersburg, and he would get everything he
wanted.
“Run away,” he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails. “Run
away!”
He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer and
then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would talk on
deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and set off.
Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by, the air would
keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-trees, then
Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton with kasha,
sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia. The passengers
in the train would talk about trade, new singers, the Franco-Russian entente;
on all sides there would be the feeling of keen, cultured, intellectual, eager
life. . . . Hasten on, on! At last Nevsky Prospect, and Great Morskaya Street,
and then Kovensky Place, where he used to live at one time when he was a
student, the dear grey sky, the drizzling rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .
“Ivan Andreitch!” some one called from the next room. “Are you at
home?”

“I’m here,” Laevsky responded. “What do you want?”
“Papers.”
Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room,
yawning and shuffling with his slippers. There, at the open window that
looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks, laying out some
government documents on the window-sill.
“One minute, my dear fellow,” Laevsky said softly, and he went to look
for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without looking at
them, and said: “It’s hot!”
“Yes. Are you coming to-day?”
“I don’t think so. . . . I’m not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that I will
come and see him after dinner.”
The clerk went away. Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began
thinking:
“And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them. Before I
go away from here I ought to pay up my debts. I owe about two thousand
roubles. I have no money. . . . Of course, that’s not important; I shall pay
part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest, later, from Petersburg. The
chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . . First of all we must define our
relations. . . . Yes.”
A little later he was considering whether it would not be better to go to
Samoylenko for advice.
“I might go,” he thought, “but what use would there be in it? I shall only
say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women, about what is
honest or dishonest. What’s the use of talking about what is honest or
dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life, if I am suffocating in this
cursed slavery and am killing myself? . . . One must realise at last that to go
on leading the life I do is something so base and so cruel that everything
else seems petty and trivial beside it. To run away,” he muttered, sitting
down, “to run away.”

The deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the
smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly solitary,
overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made him drowsy and
sapped his energy. He was perhaps very clever, talented, remarkably honest;
perhaps if the sea and the mountains had not closed him in on all sides, he
might have become an excellent Zemstvo leader, a statesman, an orator, a
political writer, a saint. Who knows? If so, was it not stupid to argue
whether it were honest or dishonest when a gifted and useful man—an artist
or musician, for instance—to escape from prison, breaks a wall and
deceives his jailers? Anything is honest when a man is in such a position.
At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner.
When the cook gave them rice and tomato soup, Laevsky said:
“The same thing every day. Why not have cabbage soup?”
“There are no cabbages.”
“It’s strange. Samoylenko has cabbage soup and Marya Konstantinovna
has cabbage soup, and only I am obliged to eat this mawkish mess. We
can’t go on like this, darling.”
As is common with the vast majority of husbands and wives, not a single
dinner had in earlier days passed without scenes and fault-finding between
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Laevsky; but ever since Laevsky had made up
his mind that he did not love her, he had tried to give way to Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna in everything, spoke to her gently and politely, smiled, and
called her “darling.”
“This soup tastes like liquorice,” he said, smiling; he made an effort to
control himself and seem amiable, but could not refrain from saying:
“Nobody looks after the housekeeping. . . . If you are too ill or busy with
reading, let me look after the cooking.”
In earlier days she would have said to him, “Do by all means,” or, “I see
you want to turn me into a cook”; but now she only looked at him timidly
and flushed crimson.
“Well, how do you feel to-day?” he asked kindly.

“I am all right to-day. There is nothing but a little weakness.”
“You must take care of yourself, darling. I am awfully anxious about
you.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had
intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovitch, a
tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home in the daytime, and in
the evenings walk slowly up and down on the sea-front coughing, with his
hands folded behind him and a cane stretched along his back, was of
opinion that she had a female complaint, and prescribed warm compresses.
In old days, when Laevsky loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s illness had
excited his pity and terror; now he saw falsity even in her illness. Her
yellow, sleepy face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic expression, and the
yawning that always followed her attacks of fever, and the fact that during
them she lay under a shawl and looked more like a boy than a woman, and
that it was close and stuffy in her room—all this, in his opinion, destroyed
the illusion and was an argument against love and marriage.
The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a
preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was
possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle.
He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he
was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing
such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their
mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury
now, he would have acquitted the murderer.
“Merci, darling,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
on the forehead.
Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and fro,
looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:
“Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!”
He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.

“To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid,” he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in order to
put on his high boots. “Love and hatred are not under our control. As for her
husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of the causes of his death; but
again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and she with me?”
Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day to
play vint and drink beer.
“My indecision reminds me of Hamlet,” thought Laevsky on the way.
“How truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!”

III

For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight of
newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in the town,
had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table 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 the glass, at that
moment, in the kitchen and in the passage near, Samoylenko, without his
coat and waistcoat, with his neck bare, excited and bathed in perspiration,
was bustling about the tables, mixing the salad, or making some sauce, or
preparing meat, cucumbers, and onion for the cold soup, while he glared
fiercely at the orderly who was helping him, and brandished first a knife
and then a spoon at him.
“Give me the vinegar!” he said. “That’s not the vinegar—it’s the salad
oil!” he shouted, stamping. “Where are you off to, you brute?”
“To get the butter, Your Excellency,” answered the flustered orderly in a
cracked voice.
“Make haste; it’s in the cupboard! And tell Daria to put some fennel in
the jar with the cucumbers! Fennel! Cover the cream up, gaping laggard, or
the flies will get into it!”
And the whole house seemed resounding with his shouts. When it was
ten or fifteen minutes to two the deacon would come in; he was a lanky
young man of twenty-two, with long hair, with no beard and a hardly
perceptible moustache. Going into the drawing-room, he crossed himself
before the ikon, smiled, and held out his hand to Von Koren.
“Good-morning,” the zoologist said coldly. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been catching sea-gudgeon in the harbour.”
“Oh, of course. . . . Evidently, deacon, you will never be busy with
work.”
“Why not? Work is not like a bear; it doesn’t run off into the woods,”
said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the very deep pockets

of his white cassock.
“There’s no one to whip you!” sighed the zoologist.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed and they were not called to
dinner, and they could still hear the orderly running into the kitchen and
back again, noisily treading with his boots, and Samoylenko shouting:
“Put it on the table! Where are your wits? Wash it first.”
The famished deacon and Von Koren began tapping on the floor with
their heels, expressing in this way their impatience like the audience at a
theatre. At last the door opened and the harassed orderly announced that
dinner was ready! In the dining-room they were met by Samoylenko,
crimson in the face, wrathful, perspiring from the heat of the kitchen; he
looked at them furiously, and with an expression of horror, took the lid off
the soup tureen and helped each of them to a plateful; and only when he
was convinced that they were eating it with relish and liked it, he gave a
sigh of relief and settled himself in his deep arm-chair. His face looked
blissful and his eyes grew moist. . . . He deliberately poured himself out a
glass of vodka and said:
“To the health of the younger generation.”
After his conversation with Laevsky, from early morning till dinner
Samoylenko had been conscious of a load at his heart, although he was in
the best of humours; he felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him. After
drinking a glass of vodka before the soup, he heaved a sigh and said:
“I saw Vanya Laevsky to-day. He is having a hard time of it, poor fellow!
The material side of life is not encouraging for him, and the worst of it is all
this psychology is too much for him. I’m sorry for the lad.”
“Well, that is a person I am not sorry for,” said Von Koren. “If that
charming individual were drowning, I would push him under with a stick
and say, ‘Drown, brother, drown away.’ . . .”
“That’s untrue. You wouldn’t do it.”
“Why do you think that?” The zoologist shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just
as capable of a good action as you are.”

“Is drowning a man a good action?” asked the deacon, and he laughed.
“Laevsky? Yes.”
“I think there is something amiss with the soup . . .” said Samoylenko,
anxious to change the conversation.
“Laevsky is absolutely pernicious and is as dangerous to society as the
cholera microbe,” Von Koren went on. “To drown him would be a service.”
“It does not do you credit to talk like that about your neighbour. Tell us:
what do you hate him for?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, doctor. To hate and despise a microbe is stupid, but
to look upon everybody one meets without distinction as one’s neighbour,
whatever happens—thanks very much, that is equivalent to giving up
criticism, renouncing a straightforward attitude to people, washing one’s
hands of responsibility, in fact! I consider your Laevsky a blackguard; I do
not conceal it, and I am perfectly conscientious in treating him as such.
Well, you look upon him as your neighbour—and you may kiss him if you
like: you look upon him as your neighbour, and that means that your
attitude to him is the same as to me and to the deacon; that is no attitude at
all. You are equally indifferent to all.”
“To call a man a blackguard!” muttered Samoylenko, frowning with
distaste—“that is so wrong that I can’t find words for it!”
“People are judged by their actions,” Von Koren continued. “Now you
decide, deacon. . . . I am going to talk to you, deacon. Mr. Laevsky’s career
lies open before you, like a long Chinese puzzle, and you can read it from
beginning to end. What has he been doing these two years that he has been
living here? We will reckon his doings on our fingers. First, he has taught
the inhabitants of the town to play vint: two years ago that game was
unknown here; now they all play it from morning till late at night, even the
women and the boys. Secondly, he has taught the residents to drink beer,
which was not known here either; the inhabitants are indebted to him for the
knowledge of various sorts of spirits, so that now they can distinguish
Kospelov’s vodka from Smirnov’s No. 21, blindfold. Thirdly, in former
days, people here made love to other men’s wives in secret, from the same
motives as thieves steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered

something they were ashamed to make a public display of. Laevsky has
come as a pioneer in that line; he lives with another man’s wife openly. . . .
Fourthly . . .”
Von Koren hurriedly ate up his soup and gave his plate to the orderly.
“I understood Laevsky from the first month of our acquaintance,” he
went on, addressing the deacon. “We arrived here at the same time. Men
like him are very fond of friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and all the rest of
it, because they always want company for vint, drinking, and eating;
besides, they are talkative and must have listeners. We made friends—that
is, he turned up every day, hindered me working, and indulged in
confidences in regard to his mistress. From the first he struck me by his
exceptional falsity, which simply made me sick. As a friend I pitched into
him, asking him why he drank too much, why he lived beyond his means
and got into debt, why he did nothing and read nothing, why he had so little
culture and so little knowledge; and in answer to all my questions he used
to smile bitterly, sigh, and say: ‘I am a failure, a superfluous man’; or:
‘What do you expect, my dear fellow, from us, the debris of the serf-owning
class?’ or: ‘We are degenerate. . . .’ Or he would begin a long rigmarole
about Onyegin, Petchorin, Byron’s Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would
say: ‘They are our fathers in flesh and in spirit.’ So we are to understand
that it was not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his
office for weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but
Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the
superfluous man, were responsible for it. The cause of his extreme
dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but
somewhere outside in space. And so—an ingenious idea!—it is not only he
who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . ‘we men of the eighties,’
‘we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class’; ‘civilisation
has crippled us’ . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a great man as
Laevsky is great even in his fall: that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture
and of moral purity, is a phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by
inevitability; that the causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we
ought to hang up a lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the
age, of influences, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and their ladies
were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out for a
long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever rogue.

Such types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering of education
and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are very clever in posing as
exceptionally complex natures.”
“Hold your tongue!” Samoylenko flared up. “I will not allow a splendid
fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!”
“Don’t interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch,” said Von Koren coldly; “I am just
finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism. Here is his moral
skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till dinner-time,
slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two o’clock slippers, dinner,
and wine; at five o’clock a bathe, tea and wine, then vint and lying; at ten
o’clock supper and wine; and after midnight sleep and la femme. His
existence is confined within this narrow programme like an egg within its
shell. Whether he walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be
reduced to wine, cards, slippers, and women. Woman plays a fatal,
overwhelming part in his life. He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in
love; that when he was a student in his first year he was living with a lady
who had a good influence over him, and to whom he was indebted for his
musical education. In his second year he bought a prostitute from a brothel
and raised her to his level—that is, took her as his kept mistress, and she
lived with him for six months and then ran away back to the brothel-keeper,
and her flight caused him much spiritual suffering. Alas! his sufferings were
so great that he had to leave the university and spend two years at home
doing nothing. But this was all for the best. At home he made friends with a
widow who advised him to leave the Faculty of Jurisprudence and go into
the Faculty of Arts. And so he did. When he had taken his degree, he fell
passionately in love with his present . . . what’s her name? . . . married lady,
and was obliged to flee with her here to the Caucasus for the sake of his
ideals, he would have us believe, seeing that . . . to-morrow, if not to-day, he
will be tired of her and flee back again to Petersburg, and that, too, will be
for the sake of his ideals.”
“How do you know?” growled Samoylenko, looking angrily at the
zoologist. “You had better eat your dinner.”
The next course consisted of boiled mullet with Polish sauce.
Samoylenko helped each of his companions to a whole mullet and poured

out the sauce with his own hand. Two minutes passed in silence.
“Woman plays an essential part in the life of every man,” said the
deacon. “You can’t help that.”
“Yes, but to what degree? For each of us woman means mother, sister,
wife, friend. To Laevsky she is everything, and at the same time nothing but
a mistress. She—that is, cohabitation with her— is the happiness and object
of his life; he is gay, sad, bored, disenchanted—on account of woman; his
life grows disagreeable —woman is to blame; the dawn of a new life begins
to glow, ideals turn up—and again look for the woman. . . . He only derives
enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is woman. Our age is, to
his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and the sixties only because we
do not know how to abandon ourselves obviously to the passion and ecstasy
of love. These voluptuaries must have in their brains a special growth of the
nature of sarcoma, which stifles the brain and directs their whole
psychology. Watch Laevsky when he is sitting anywhere in company. You
notice: when one raises any general question in his presence, for instance,
about the cell or instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he
looks languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything
is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female—for
instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation, devours the
male—his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and the man revives,
in fact. All his thoughts, however noble, lofty, or neutral they may be, they
all have one point of resemblance. You walk along the street with him and
meet a donkey, for instance. . . . ‘Tell me, please,’ he asks, ‘what would
happen if you mated a donkey with a camel?’ And his dreams! Has he told
you of his dreams? It is magnificent! First, he dreams that he is married to
the moon, then that he is summoned before the police and ordered to live
with a guitar . . .”
The deacon burst into resounding laughter; Samoylenko frowned and
wrinkled up his face angrily so as not to laugh, but could not restrain
himself, and laughed.
“And it’s all nonsense!” he said, wiping his tears. “Yes, by Jove, it’s
nonsense!”

IV

The deacon was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he got
a stitch in his side, till he was helpless. It seemed as though he only liked to
be in people’s company because there was a ridiculous side to them, and
because they might be given ridiculous nicknames. He had nicknamed
Samoylenko “the tarantula,” his orderly “the drake,” and was in ecstasies
when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna as “Japanese monkeys.” He watched people’s faces greedily,
listened without blinking, and it could be seen that his eyes filled with
laughter and his face was tense with expectation of the moment when he
could let himself go and burst into laughter.
“He is a corrupt and depraved type,” the zoologist continued, while the
deacon kept his eyes riveted on his face, expecting he would say something
funny. “It is not often one can meet with such a nonentity. In body he is
inert, feeble, prematurely old, while in intellect he differs in no respect from
a fat shopkeeper’s wife who does nothing but eat, drink, and sleep on a
feather-bed, and who keeps her coachman as a lover.”
The deacon began guffawing again.
“Don’t laugh, deacon,” said Von Koren. “It grows stupid, at last. I should
not have paid attention to his insignificance,” he went on, after waiting till
the deacon had left off laughing; “I should have passed him by if he were
not so noxious and dangerous. His noxiousness lies first of all in the fact
that he has great success with women, and so threatens to leave descendants
—that is, to present the world with a dozen Laevskys as feeble and as
depraved as himself. Secondly, he is in the highest degree contaminating. I
have spoken to you already of vint and beer. In another year or two he will
dominate the whole Caucasian coast. You know how the mass, especially its
middle stratum, believe in intellectuality, in a university education, in
gentlemanly manners, and in literary language. Whatever filthy thing he
did, they would all believe that it was as it should be, since he is an
intellectual man, of liberal ideas and university education. What is more, he
is a failure, a superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the age, and that
means he can do anything. He is a charming fellow, a regular good sort, he
is so genuinely indulgent to human weaknesses; he is compliant,

accommodating, easy and not proud; one can drink with him and gossip and
talk evil of people. . . . The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in
religion and morals, like best of all the little gods who have the same
weaknesses as themselves. Only think what a wide field he has for
contamination! Besides, he is not a bad actor and is a clever hypocrite, and
knows very well how to twist things round. Only take his little shifts and
dodges, his attitude to civilisation, for instance. He has scarcely sniffed at
civilisation, yet: ‘Ah, how we have been crippled by civilisation! Ah, how I
envy those savages, those children of nature, who know nothing of
civilisation!’ We are to understand, you see, that at one time, in ancient
days, he has been devoted to civilisation with his whole soul, has served it,
has sounded it to its depths, but it has exhausted him, disillusioned him,
deceived him; he is a Faust, do you see?—a second Tolstoy. . . . As for
Schopenhauer and Spencer, he treats them like small boys and slaps them
on the shoulder in a fatherly way: ‘Well, what do you say, old Spencer?’ He
has not read Spencer, of course, but how charming he is when with light,
careless irony he says of his lady friend: ‘She has read Spencer!’ And they
all listen to him, and no one cares to understand that this charlatan has not
the right to kiss the sole of Spencer’s foot, let alone speaking about him in
that tone! Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other
people’s altars, spattering them with filth, winking jocosely at them only to
justify and conceal one’s own rottenness and moral poverty is only possible
for a very vain, base, and nasty creature.”
“I don’t know what it is you expect of him, Kolya,” said Samoylenko,
looking at the zoologist, not with anger now, but with a guilty air. “He is a
man the same as every one else. Of course, he has his weaknesses, but he is
abreast of modern ideas, is in the service, is of use to his country. Ten years
ago there was an old fellow serving as agent here, a man of the greatest
intelligence . . . and he used to say . . .”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” the zoologist interrupted. “You say he is in the
service; but how does he serve? Do you mean to tell me that things have
been done better because he is here, and the officials are more punctual,
honest, and civil? On the contrary, he has only sanctioned their slackness by
his prestige as an intellectual university man. He is only punctual on the
20th of the month, when he gets his salary; on the other days he lounges
about at home in slippers and tries to look as if he were doing the

Government a great service by living in the Caucasus. No, Alexandr
Daviditch, don’t stick up for him. You are insincere from beginning to end.
If you really loved him and considered him your neighbour, you would
above all not be indifferent to his weaknesses, you would not be indulgent
to them, but for his own sake would try to make him innocuous.”
“That is?”
“Innocuous. Since he is incorrigible, he can only be made innocuous in
one way. . . .” Von Koren passed his finger round his throat. “Or he might
be drowned . . .”, he added. “In the interests of humanity and in their own
interests, such people ought to be destroyed. They certainly ought.”
“What are you saying?” muttered Samoylenko, getting up and looking
with amazement at the zoologist’s calm, cold face. “Deacon, what is he
saying? Why—are you in your senses?”
“I don’t insist on the death penalty,” said Von Koren. “If it is proved that
it is pernicious, devise something else. If we can’t destroy Laevsky, why
then, isolate him, make him harmless, send him to hard labour.”
“What are you saying!” said Samoylenko in horror. “With pepper, with
pepper,” he cried in a voice of despair, seeing that the deacon was eating
stuffed aubergines without pepper. “You with your great intellect, what are
you saying! Send our friend, a proud intellectual man, to penal servitude!”
“Well, if he is proud and tries to resist, put him in fetters!”
Samoylenko could not utter a word, and only twiddled his fingers; the
deacon looked at his flabbergasted and really absurd face, and laughed.
“Let us leave off talking of that,” said the zoologist. “Only remember one
thing, Alexandr Daviditch: primitive man was preserved from such as
Laevsky by the struggle for existence and by natural selection; now our
civilisation has considerably weakened the struggle and the selection, and
we ought to look after the destruction of the rotten and worthless for
ourselves; otherwise, when the Laevskys multiply, civilisation will perish
and mankind will degenerate utterly. It will be our fault.”

“If it depends on drowning and hanging,” said Samoylenko, “damnation
take your civilisation, damnation take your humanity! Damnation take it! I
tell you what: you are a very learned and intelligent man and the pride of
your country, but the Germans have ruined you. Yes, the Germans! The
Germans!”
Since Samoylenko had left Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, he
had rarely seen a German and had not read a single German book, but, in
his opinion, every harmful idea in politics or science was due to the
Germans. Where he had got this notion he could not have said himself, but
he held it firmly.
“Yes, the Germans!” he repeated once more. “Come and have some tea.”
All three stood up, and putting on their hats, went out into the little
garden, and sat there under the shade of the light green maples, the pear-
trees, and a chestnut-tree. The zoologist and the deacon sat on a bench by
the table, while Samoylenko sank into a deep wicker chair with a sloping
back. The orderly handed them tea, jam, and a bottle of syrup.
It was very hot, thirty degrees Réaumur in the shade. The sultry air was
stagnant and motionless, and a long spider-web, stretching from the
chestnut-tree to the ground, hung limply and did not stir.
The deacon took up the guitar, which was constantly lying on the ground
near the table, tuned it, and began singing softly in a thin voice:
“‘Gathered round the tavern were the seminary lads,’”
but instantly subsided, overcome by the heat, mopped his brow and
glanced upwards at the blazing blue sky. Samoylenko grew drowsy; the
sultry heat, the stillness and the delicious after-dinner languor, which
quickly pervaded all his limbs, made him feel heavy and sleepy; his arms
dropped at his sides, his eyes grew small, his head sank on his breast. He
looked with almost tearful tenderness at Von Koren and the deacon, and
muttered:
“The younger generation. . . A scientific star and a luminary of the
Church. . . . I shouldn’t wonder if the long-skirted alleluia will be shooting

up into a bishop; I dare say I may come to kissing his hand. . . . Well . . .
please God. . . .”
Soon a snore was heard. Von Koren and the deacon finished their tea and
went out into the street.
“Are you going to the harbour again to catch sea-gudgeon?” asked the
zoologist.
“No, it’s too hot.”
“Come and see me. You can pack up a parcel and copy something for me.
By the way, we must have a talk about what you are to do. You must work,
deacon. You can’t go on like this.”
“Your words are just and logical,” said the deacon. “But my laziness
finds an excuse in the circumstances of my present life. You know yourself
that an uncertain position has a great tendency to make people apathetic.
God only knows whether I have been sent here for a time or permanently. I
am living here in uncertainty, while my wife is vegetating at her father’s
and is missing me. And I must confess my brain is melting with the heat.”
“That’s all nonsense,” said the zoologist. “You can get used to the heat,
and you can get used to being without the deaconess. You mustn’t be slack;
you must pull yourself together.”

V

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went to bathe in the morning, and her cook,
Olga, followed her with a jug, a copper basin, towels, and a sponge. In the
bay stood two unknown steamers with dirty white funnels, obviously
foreign cargo vessels. Some men dressed in white and wearing white shoes
were walking along the harbour, shouting loudly in French, and were
answered from the steamers. The bells were ringing briskly in the little
church of the town.
“To-day is Sunday!” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna remembered with pleasure.
She felt perfectly well, and was in a gay holiday humour. In a new loose-
fitting dress of coarse thick tussore silk, and a big wide-brimmed straw hat

which was bent down over her ears, so that her face looked out as though
from a basket, she fancied she looked very charming. She thought that in
the whole town there was only one young, pretty, intellectual woman, and
that was herself, and that she was the only one who knew how to dress
herself cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. That dress, for example, cost only
twenty-two roubles, and yet how charming it was! In the whole town she
was the only one who could be attractive, while there were numbers of men,
so they must all, whether they would or not, be envious of Laevsky.
She was glad that of late Laevsky had been cold to her, reserved and
polite, and at times even harsh and rude; in the past she had met all his
outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or strange incomprehensible glances,
with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or to starve herself to death;
now she only blushed, looked guiltily at him, and was glad he was not
affectionate to her. If he had abused her, threatened her, it would have been
better and pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly guilty towards him. She felt
she was to blame, in the first place, for not sympathising with the dreams of
a life of hard work, for the sake of which he had given up Petersburg and
had come here to the Caucasus, and she was convinced that he had been
angry with her of late for precisely that. When she was travelling to the
Caucasus, it seemed that she would find here on the first day a cosy nook
by the sea, a snug little garden with shade, with birds, with little brooks,
where she could grow flowers and vegetables, rear ducks and hens,
entertain her neighbours, doctor poor peasants and distribute little books
amongst them. It had turned out that the Caucasus was nothing but bare
mountains, forests, and huge valleys, where it took a long time and a great
deal of effort to find anything and settle down; that there were no
neighbours of any sort; that it was very hot and one might be robbed.
Laevsky had been in no hurry to obtain a piece of land; she was glad of it,
and they seemed to be in a tacit compact never to allude to a life of hard
work. He was silent about it, she thought, because he was angry with her for
being silent about it.
In the second place, she had without his knowledge during those two
years bought various trifles to the value of three hundred roubles at
Atchmianov’s shop. She had bought the things by degrees, at one time
materials, at another time silk or a parasol, and the debt had grown
imperceptibly.

“I will tell him about it to-day . . .”, she used to decide, but at once
reflected that in Laevsky’s present mood it would hardly be convenient to
talk to him of debts.
Thirdly, she had on two occasions in Laevsky’s absence received a visit
from Kirilin, the police captain: once in the morning when Laevsky had
gone to bathe, and another time at midnight when he was playing cards.
Remembering this, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna flushed crimson, and looked
round at the cook as though she might overhear her thoughts. The long,
insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and
stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night
one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that
she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was
passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and
idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his
nails, and wearying her with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming
possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing
else day and night. Breathing, looking, walking, she felt nothing but desire.
The sound of the sea told her she must love; the darkness of evening—the
same; the mountains—the same. . . . And when Kirilin began paying her
attentions, she had neither the power nor the wish to resist, and surrendered
to him. . . .
Now the foreign steamers and the men in white reminded her for some
reason of a huge hall; together with the shouts of French she heard the
strains of a waltz, and her bosom heaved with unaccountable delight. She
longed to dance and talk French.
She reflected joyfully that there was nothing terrible about her infidelity.
Her soul had no part in her infidelity; she still loved Laevsky, and that was
proved by the fact that she was jealous of him, was sorry for him, and
missed him when he was away. Kirilin had turned out to be very mediocre,
rather coarse though handsome; everything was broken off with him already
and there would never be anything more. What had happened was over; it
had nothing to do with any one, and if Laevsky found it out he would not
believe in it.

There was only one bathing-house for ladies on the sea-front; men bathed
under the open sky. Going into the bathing-house, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
found there an elderly lady, Marya Konstantinovna Bityugov, and her
daughter Katya, a schoolgirl of fifteen; both of them were sitting on a bench
undressing. Marya Konstantinovna was a good-natured, enthusiastic, and
genteel person, who talked in a drawling and pathetic voice. She had been a
governess until she was thirty-two, and then had married Bityugov, a
Government official—a bald little man with his hair combed on to his
temples and with a very meek disposition. She was still in love with him,
was jealous, blushed at the word “love,” and told every one she was very
happy.
“My dear,” she cried enthusiastically, on seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
assuming an expression which all her acquaintances called “almond-oily.”
“My dear, how delightful that you have come! We’ll bathe together —that’s
enchanting!”
Olga quickly flung off her dress and chemise, and began undressing her
mistress.
“It’s not quite so hot to-day as yesterday?” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,
shrinking at the coarse touch of the naked cook. “Yesterday I almost died of
the heat.”
“Oh, yes, my dear; I could hardly breathe myself. Would you believe it? I
bathed yesterday three times! Just imagine, my dear, three times! Nikodim
Alexandritch was quite uneasy.”
“Is it possible to be so ugly?” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, looking at
Olga and the official’s wife; she glanced at Katya and thought: “The little
girl’s not badly made.”
“Your Nikodim Alexandritch is very charming!” she said. “I’m simply in
love with him.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Marya Konstantinovna, with a forced laugh; “that’s
quite enchanting.”
Free from her clothes, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna felt a desire to fly. And it
seemed to her that if she were to wave her hands she would fly upwards.

When she was undressed, she noticed that Olga looked scornfully at her
white body. Olga, a young soldier’s wife, was living with her lawful
husband, and so considered herself superior to her mistress. Marya
Konstantinovna and Katya were afraid of her, and did not respect her. This
was disagreeable, and to raise herself in their opinion, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna said:
“At home, in Petersburg, summer villa life is at its height now. My
husband and I have so many friends! We ought to go and see them.”
“I believe your husband is an engineer?” said Marya Konstantinovna
timidly.
“I am speaking of Laevsky. He has a great many acquaintances. But
unfortunately his mother is a proud aristocrat, not very intelligent. . . .”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna threw herself into the water without finishing;
Marya Konstantinovna and Katya made their way in after her.
“There are so many conventional ideas in the world,” Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna went on, “and life is not so easy as it seems.”
Marya Konstantinovna, who had been a governess in aristocratic families
and who was an authority on social matters, said:
“Oh yes! Would you believe me, my dear, at the Garatynskys’ I was
expected to dress for lunch as well as for dinner, so that, like an actress, I
received a special allowance for my wardrobe in addition to my salary.”
She stood between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Katya as though to
screen her daughter from the water that washed the former.
Through the open doors looking out to the sea they could see some one
swimming a hundred paces from their bathing-place.
“Mother, it’s our Kostya,” said Katya.
“Ach, ach!” Marya Konstantinovna cackled in her dismay. “Ach,
Kostya!” she shouted, “Come back! Kostya, come back!”

Kostya, a boy of fourteen, to show off his prowess before his mother and
sister, dived and swam farther, but began to be exhausted and hurried back,
and from his strained and serious face it could be seen that he could not
trust his own strength.
“The trouble one has with these boys, my dear!” said Marya
Konstantinovna, growing calmer. “Before you can turn round, he will break
his neck. Ah, my dear, how sweet it is, and yet at the same time how
difficult, to be a mother! One’s afraid of everything.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna put on her straw hat and dashed out into the open
sea. She swam some thirty feet and then turned on her back. She could see
the sea to the horizon, the steamers, the people on the sea-front, the town;
and all this, together with the sultry heat and the soft, transparent waves,
excited her and whispered that she must live, live. . . . A sailing-boat darted
by her rapidly and vigorously, cleaving the waves and the air; the man
sitting at the helm looked at her, and she liked being looked at. . . .
After bathing, the ladies dressed and went away together.
“I have fever every alternate day, and yet I don’t get thin,” said
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, licking her lips, which were salt from the bathe,
and responding with a smile to the bows of her acquaintances. “I’ve always
been plump, and now I believe I’m plumper than ever.”
“That, my dear, is constitutional. If, like me, one has no constitutional
tendency to stoutness, no diet is of any use. . . . But you’ve wetted your hat,
my dear.”
“It doesn’t matter; it will dry.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna saw again the men in white who were walking
on the sea-front and talking French; and again she felt a sudden thrill of joy,
and had a vague memory of some big hall in which she had once danced, or
of which, perhaps, she had once dreamed. And something at the bottom of
her soul dimly and obscurely whispered to her that she was a pretty,
common, miserable, worthless woman. . . .
Marya Konstantinovna stopped at her gate and asked her to come in and
sit down for a little while.

“Come in, my dear,” she said in an imploring voice, and at the same time
she looked at Nadyezhda Fyodorovna with anxiety and hope; perhaps she
would refuse and not come in!
“With pleasure,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, accepting. “You know
how I love being with you!”
And she went into the house. Marya Konstantinovna sat her down and
gave her coffee, regaled her with milk rolls, then showed her photographs
of her former pupils, the Garatynskys, who were by now married. She
showed her, too, the examination reports of Kostya and Katya. The reports
were very good, but to make them seem even better, she complained, with a
sigh, how difficult the lessons at school were now. . . . She made much of
her visitor, and was sorry for her, though at the same time she was harassed
by the thought that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna might have a corrupting
influence on the morals of Kostya and Katya, and was glad that her
Nikodim Alexandritch was not at home. Seeing that in her opinion all men
are fond of “women like that,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna might have a bad
effect on Nikodim Alexandritch too.
As she talked to her visitor, Marya Konstantinovna kept remembering
that they were to have a picnic that evening, and that Von Koren had
particularly begged her to say nothing about it to the “Japanese monkeys”—
that is, Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna; but she dropped a word about
it unawares, crimsoned, and said in confusion:
“I hope you will come too!”

VI

It was agreed to drive about five miles out of town on the road to the
south, to stop near a duhan at the junction of two streams —the Black River
and the Yellow River—and to cook fish soup. They started out soon after
five. Foremost of the party in a char-à-banc drove Samoylenko and
Laevsky; they were followed by Marya Konstantinovna, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, Katya and Kostya, in a coach with three horses, carrying with
them the crockery and a basket with provisions. In the next carriage came
the police captain, Kirilin, and the young Atchmianov, the son of the

shopkeeper to whom Nadyezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred roubles;
opposite them, huddled up on the little seat with his feet tucked under him,
sat Nikodim Alexandritch, a neat little man with hair combed on to his
temples. Last of all came Von Koren and the deacon; at the deacon’s feet
stood a basket of fish.
“R-r-right!” Samoylenko shouted at the top of his voice when he met a
cart or a mountaineer riding on a donkey.
“In two years’ time, when I shall have the means and the people ready, I
shall set off on an expedition,” Von Koren was telling the deacon. “I shall
go by the sea-coast from Vladivostok to the Behring Straits, and then from
the Straits to the mouth of the Yenisei. We shall make the map, study the
fauna and the flora, and make detailed geological, anthropological, and
ethnographical researches. It depends upon you to go with me or not.”
“It’s impossible,” said the deacon.
“Why?”
“I’m a man with ties and a family.”
“Your wife will let you go; we will provide for her. Better still if you
were to persuade her for the public benefit to go into a nunnery; that would
make it possible for you to become a monk, too, and join the expedition as a
priest. I can arrange it for you.”
The deacon was silent.
“Do you know your theology well?” asked the zoologist.
“No, rather badly.”
“H’m! . . . I can’t give you any advice on that score, because I don’t
know much about theology myself. You give me a list of books you need,
and I will send them to you from Petersburg in the winter. It will be
necessary for you to read the notes of religious travellers, too; among them
are some good ethnologists and Oriental scholars. When you are familiar
with their methods, it will be easier for you to set to work. And you needn’t
waste your time till you get the books; come to me, and we will study the
compass and go through a course of meteorology. All that’s indispensable.”

“To be sure . . .” muttered the deacon, and he laughed. “I was trying to
get a place in Central Russia, and my uncle, the head priest, promised to
help me. If I go with you I shall have troubled them for nothing.”
“I don’t understand your hesitation. If you go on being an ordinary
deacon, who is only obliged to hold a service on holidays, and on the other
days can rest from work, you will be exactly the same as you are now in ten
years’ time, and will have gained nothing but a beard and moustache; while
on returning from this expedition in ten years’ time you will be a different
man, you will be enriched by the consciousness that something has been
done by you.”
From the ladies’ carriage came shrieks of terror and delight. The
carriages were driving along a road hollowed in a literally overhanging
precipitous cliff, and it seemed to every one that they were galloping along
a shelf on a steep wall, and that in a moment the carriages would drop into
the abyss. On the right stretched the sea; on the left was a rough brown wall
with black blotches and red veins and with climbing roots; while on the
summit stood shaggy fir-trees bent over, as though looking down in terror
and curiosity. A minute later there were shrieks and laughter again: they had
to drive under a huge overhanging rock.
“I don’t know why the devil I’m coming with you,” said Laevsky. “How
stupid and vulgar it is! I want to go to the North, to run away, to escape; but
here I am, for some reason, going to this stupid picnic.”
“But look, what a view!” said Samoylenko as the horses turned to the
left, and the valley of the Yellow River came into sight and the stream itself
gleamed in the sunlight, yellow, turbid, frantic.
“I see nothing fine in that, Sasha,” answered Laevsky. “To be in continual
ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination. In comparison with
what my imagination can give me, all these streams and rocks are trash, and
nothing else.”
The carriages now were by the banks of the stream. The high mountain
banks gradually grew closer, the valley shrank together and ended in a
gorge; the rocky mountain round which they were driving had been piled
together by nature out of huge rocks, pressing upon each other with such

terrible weight, that Samoylenko could not help gasping every time he
looked at them. The dark and beautiful mountain was cleft in places by
narrow fissures and gorges from which came a breath of dewy moisture and
mystery; through the gorges could be seen other mountains, brown, pink,
lilac, smoky, or bathed in vivid sunlight. From time to time as they passed a
gorge they caught the sound of water falling from the heights and splashing
on the stones.
“Ach, the damned mountains!” sighed Laevsky. “How sick I am of
them!”
At the place where the Black River falls into the Yellow, and the water
black as ink stains the yellow and struggles with it, stood the Tatar
Kerbalay’s duhan, with the Russian flag on the roof and with an inscription
written in chalk: “The Pleasant duhan.” Near it was a little garden, enclosed
in a hurdle fence, with tables and chairs set out in it, and in the midst of a
thicket of wretched thornbushes stood a single solitary cypress, dark and
beautiful.
Kerbalay, a nimble little Tatar in a blue shirt and a white apron, was
standing in the road, and, holding his stomach, he bowed low to welcome
the carriages, and smiled, showing his glistening white teeth.
“Good-evening, Kerbalay,” shouted Samoylenko. “We are driving on a
little further, and you take along the samovar and chairs! Look sharp!”
Kerbalay nodded his shaven head and muttered something, and only
those sitting in the last carriage could hear: “We’ve got trout, your
Excellency.”
“Bring them, bring them!” said Von Koren.
Five hundred paces from the duhan the carriages stopped. Samoylenko
selected a small meadow round which there were scattered stones
convenient for sitting on, and a fallen tree blown down by the storm with
roots overgrown by moss and dry yellow needles. Here there was a fragile
wooden bridge over the stream, and just opposite on the other bank there
was a little barn for drying maize, standing on four low piles, and looking
like the hut on hen’s legs in the fairy tale; a little ladder sloped from its
door.

The first impression in all was a feeling that they would never get out of
that place again. On all sides wherever they looked, the mountains rose up
and towered above them, and the shadows of evening were stealing rapidly,
rapidly from the duhan and dark cypress, making the narrow winding valley
of the Black River narrower and the mountains higher. They could hear the
river murmuring and the unceasing chirrup of the grasshoppers.
“Enchanting!” said Marya Konstantinovna, heaving deep sighs of
ecstasy. “Children, look how fine! What peace!”
“Yes, it really is fine,” assented Laevsky, who liked the view, and for
some reason felt sad as he looked at the sky and then at the blue smoke
rising from the chimney of the duhan. “Yes, it is fine,” he repeated.
“Ivan Andreitch, describe this view,” Marya Konstantinovna said
tearfully.
“Why?” asked Laevsky. “The impression is better than any description.
The wealth of sights and sounds which every one receives from nature by
direct impression is ranted about by authors in a hideous and
unrecognisable way.”
“Really?” Von Koren asked coldly, choosing the biggest stone by the side
of the water, and trying to clamber up and sit upon it. “Really?” he repeated,
looking directly at Laevsky. “What of ‘Romeo and Juliet’? Or, for instance,
Pushkin’s ‘Night in the Ukraine’? Nature ought to come and bow down at
their feet.”
“Perhaps,” said Laevsky, who was too lazy to think and oppose him.
“Though what is ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after all?” he added after a short pause.
“The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which
they try to hide its rottenness. Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all
the rest of us.”
“Whatever one talks to you about, you always bring it round to . . .” Von
Koren glanced round at Katya and broke off.
“What do I bring it round to?” asked Laevsky.

“One tells you, for instance, how beautiful a bunch of grapes is, and you
answer: ‘Yes, but how ugly it is when it is chewed and digested in one’s
stomach!’ Why say that? It’s not new, and . . . altogether it is a queer habit.”
Laevsky knew that Von Koren did not like him, and so was afraid of him,
and felt in his presence as though every one were constrained and some one
were standing behind his back. He made no answer and walked away,
feeling sorry he had come.
“Gentlemen, quick march for brushwood for the fire!” commanded
Samoylenko.
They all wandered off in different directions, and no one was left but
Kirilin, Atchmianov, and Nikodim Alexandritch. Kerbalay brought chairs,
spread a rug on the ground, and set a few bottles of wine.
The police captain, Kirilin, a tall, good-looking man, who in all weathers
wore his great-coat over his tunic, with his haughty deportment, stately
carriage, and thick, rather hoarse voice, looked like a young provincial chief
of police; his expression was mournful and sleepy, as though he had just
been waked against his will.
“What have you brought this for, you brute?” he asked Kerbalay,
deliberately articulating each word. “I ordered you to give us kvarel, and
what have you brought, you ugly Tatar? Eh? What?”
“We have plenty of wine of our own, Yegor Alekseitch,” Nikodim
Alexandritch observed, timidly and politely.
“What? But I want us to have my wine, too; I’m taking part in the picnic
and I imagine I have full right to contribute my share. I im-ma-gine so!
Bring ten bottles of kvarel.”
“Why so many?” asked Nikodim Alexandritch, in wonder, knowing
Kirilin had no money.
“Twenty bottles! Thirty!” shouted Kirilin.
“Never mind, let him,” Atchmianov whispered to Nikodim Alexandritch;
“I’ll pay.”

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was in a light-hearted, mischievous mood; she
wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her cheap
cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and the same straw hat,
she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly. She ran
over the rickety bridge and looked for a minute into the water, in order to
feel giddy; then, shrieking and laughing, ran to the other side to the drying-
shed, and she fancied that all the men were admiring her, even Kerbalay.
When in the rapidly falling darkness the trees began to melt into the
mountains and the horses into the carriages, and a light gleamed in the
windows of the duhan, she climbed up the mountain by the little path which
zigzagged between stones and thorn-bushes and sat on a stone. Down
below, the camp-fire was burning. Near the fire, with his sleeves tucked up,
the deacon was moving to and fro, and his long black shadow kept
describing a circle round it; he put on wood, and with a spoon tied to a long
stick he stirred the cauldron. Samoylenko, with a copper-red face, was
fussing round the fire just as though he were in his own kitchen, shouting
furiously:
“Where’s the salt, gentlemen? I bet you’ve forgotten it. Why are you all
sitting about like lords while I do the work?”
Laevsky and Nikodim Alexandritch were sitting side by side on the fallen
tree looking pensively at the fire. Marya Konstantinovna, Katya, and
Kostya were taking the cups, saucers, and plates out of the baskets. Von
Koren, with his arms folded and one foot on a stone, was standing on a
bank at the very edge of the water, thinking about something. Patches of red
light from the fire moved together with the shadows over the ground near
the dark human figures, and quivered on the mountain, on the trees, on the
bridge, on the drying-shed; on the other side the steep, scooped-out bank
was all lighted up and glimmering in the stream, and the rushing turbid
water broke its reflection into little bits.
The deacon went for the fish which Kerbalay was cleaning and washing
on the bank, but he stood still half-way and looked about him.
“My God, how nice it is!” he thought. “People, rocks, the fire, the
twilight, a monstrous tree—nothing more, and yet how fine it is!”

On the further bank some unknown persons made their appearance near
the drying-shed. The flickering light and the smoke from the camp-fire
puffing in that direction made it impossible to get a full view of them all at
once, but glimpses were caught now of a shaggy hat and a grey beard, now
of a blue shirt, now of a figure, ragged from shoulder to knee, with a dagger
across the body; then a swarthy young face with black eyebrows, as thick
and bold as though they had been drawn in charcoal. Five of them sat in a
circle on the ground, and the other five went into the drying-shed. One was
standing at the door with his back to the fire, and with his hands behind his
back was telling something, which must have been very interesting, for
when Samoylenko threw on twigs and the fire flared up, and scattered
sparks and threw a glaring light on the shed, two calm countenances with an
expression on them of deep attention could be seen, looking out of the door,
while those who were sitting in a circle turned round and began listening to
the speaker. Soon after, those sitting in a circle began softly singing
something slow and melodious, that sounded like Lenten Church music. . . .
Listening to them, the deacon imagined how it would be with him in ten
years’ time, when he would come back from the expedition: he would be a
young priest and monk, an author with a name and a splendid past; he
would be consecrated an archimandrite, then a bishop; and he would serve
mass in the cathedral; in a golden mitre he would come out into the body of
the church with the ikon on his breast, and blessing the mass of the people
with the triple and the double candelabra, would proclaim: “Look down
from Heaven, O God, behold and visit this vineyard which Thy Hand has
planted,” and the children with their angel voices would sing in response:
“Holy God. . .”
“Deacon, where is that fish?” he heard Samoylenko’s voice.
As he went back to the fire, the deacon imagined the Church procession
going along a dusty road on a hot July day; in front the peasants carrying
the banners and the women and children the ikons, then the boy choristers
and the sacristan with his face tied up and a straw in his hair, then in due
order himself, the deacon, and behind him the priest wearing his calotte and
carrying a cross, and behind them, tramping in the dust, a crowd of peasants
—men, women, and children; in the crowd his wife and the priest’s wife
with kerchiefs on their heads. The choristers sing, the babies cry, the
corncrakes call, the lark carols. . . . Then they make a stand and sprinkle the

herd with holy water. . . . They go on again, and then kneeling pray for rain.
Then lunch and talk. . . .
“And that’s nice too . . .” thought the deacon.

VII

Kirilin and Atchmianov climbed up the mountain by the path.
Atchmianov dropped behind and stopped, while Kirilin went up to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.
“Good-evening,” he said, touching his cap.
“Good-evening.”
“Yes!” said Kirilin, looking at the sky and pondering.
“Why ‘yes’?” asked Nadyezhda Fyodorovna after a brief pause, noticing
that Atchmianov was watching them both.
“And so it seems,” said the officer, slowly, “that our love has withered
before it has blossomed, so to speak. How do you wish me to understand it?
Is it a sort of coquetry on your part, or do you look upon me as a
nincompoop who can be treated as you choose.”
“It was a mistake! Leave me alone!” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna said
sharply, on that beautiful, marvellous evening, looking at him with terror
and asking herself with bewilderment, could there really have been a
moment when that man attracted her and had been near to her?
“So that’s it!” said Kirilin; he thought in silence for a few minutes and
said: “Well, I’ll wait till you are in a better humour, and meanwhile I
venture to assure you I am a gentleman, and I don’t allow any one to doubt
it. Adieu!”
He touched his cap again and walked off, making his way between the
bushes. After a short interval Atchmianov approached hesitatingly.
“What a fine evening!” he said with a slight Armenian accent.

He was nice-looking, fashionably dressed, and behaved unaffectedly like
a well-bred youth, but Nadyezhda Fyodorovna did not like him because she
owed his father three hundred roubles; it was displeasing to her, too, that a
shopkeeper had been asked to the picnic, and she was vexed at his coming
up to her that evening when her heart felt so pure.
“The picnic is a success altogether,” he said, after a pause.
“Yes,” she agreed, and as though suddenly remembering her debt, she
said carelessly: “Oh, tell them in your shop that Ivan Andreitch will come
round in a day or two and will pay three hundred roubles . . . . I don’t
remember exactly what it is.”
“I would give another three hundred if you would not mention that debt
every day. Why be prosaic?”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna laughed; the amusing idea occurred to her that if
she had been willing and sufficiently immoral she might in one minute be
free from her debt. If she, for instance, were to turn the head of this
handsome young fool! How amusing, absurd, wild it would be really! And
she suddenly felt a longing to make him love her, to plunder him, throw him
over, and then to see what would come of it.
“Allow me to give you one piece of advice,” Atchmianov said timidly. “I
beg you to beware of Kirilin. He says horrible things about you
everywhere.”
“It doesn’t interest me to know what every fool says of me,” Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna said coldly, and the amusing thought of playing with handsome
young Atchmianov suddenly lost its charm.
“We must go down,” she said; “they’re calling us.”
The fish soup was ready by now. They were ladling it out by platefuls,
and eating it with the religious solemnity with which this is only done at a
picnic; and every one thought the fish soup very good, and thought that at
home they had never eaten anything so nice. As is always the case at
picnics, in the mass of dinner napkins, parcels, useless greasy papers
fluttering in the wind, no one knew where was his glass or where his bread.
They poured the wine on the carpet and on their own knees, spilt the salt,

while it was dark all round them and the fire burnt more dimly, and every
one was too lazy to get up and put wood on. They all drank wine, and even
gave Kostya and Katya half a glass each. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna drank one
glass and then another, got a little drunk and forgot about Kirilin.
“A splendid picnic, an enchanting evening,” said Laevsky, growing lively
with the wine. “But I should prefer a fine winter to all this. ‘His beaver
collar is silver with hoar-frost.’”
“Every one to his taste,” observed Von Koren.
Laevsky felt uncomfortable; the heat of the campfire was beating upon
his back, and the hatred of Von Koren upon his breast and face: this hatred
on the part of a decent, clever man, a feeling in which there probably lay
hid a well-grounded reason, humiliated him and enervated him, and unable
to stand up against it, he said in a propitiatory tone:
“I am passionately fond of nature, and I regret that I’m not a naturalist. I
envy you.”
“Well, I don’t envy you, and don’t regret it,” said Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna. “I don’t understand how any one can seriously interest himself
in beetles and ladybirds while the people are suffering.”
Laevsky shared her opinion. He was absolutely ignorant of natural
science, and so could never reconcile himself to the authoritative tone and
the learned and profound air of the people who devoted themselves to the
whiskers of ants and the claws of beetles, and he always felt vexed that
these people, relying on these whiskers, claws, and something they called
protoplasm (he always imagined it in the form of an oyster), should
undertake to decide questions involving the origin and life of man. But in
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s words he heard a note of falsity, and simply to
contradict her he said: “The point is not the ladybirds, but the deductions
made from them.”

VIII

It was late, eleven o’clock, when they began to get into the carriages to
go home. They took their seats, and the only ones missing were Nadyezhda

Fyodorovna and Atchmianov, who were running after one another,
laughing, the other side of the stream.
“Make haste, my friends,” shouted Samoylenko.
“You oughtn’t to give ladies wine,” said Von Koren in a low voice.
Laevsky, exhausted by the picnic, by the hatred of Von Koren, and by his
own thoughts, went to meet Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and when, gay and
happy, feeling light as a feather, breathless and laughing, she took him by
both hands and laid her head on his breast, he stepped back and said dryly:
“You are behaving like a . . . cocotte.”
It sounded horribly coarse, so that he felt sorry for her at once. On his
angry, exhausted face she read hatred, pity and vexation with himself, and
her heart sank at once. She realised instantly that she had gone too far, had
been too free and easy in her behaviour, and overcome with misery, feeling
herself heavy, stout, coarse, and drunk, she got into the first empty carriage
together with Atchmianov. Laevsky got in with Kirilin, the zoologist with
Samoylenko, the deacon with the ladies, and the party set off.
“You see what the Japanese monkeys are like,” Von Koren began, rolling
himself up in his cloak and shutting his eyes. “You heard she doesn’t care to
take an interest in beetles and ladybirds because the people are suffering.
That’s how all the Japanese monkeys look upon people like us. They’re a
slavish, cunning race, terrified by the whip and the fist for ten generations;
they tremble and burn incense only before violence; but let the monkey into
a free state where there’s no one to take it by the collar, and it relaxes at
once and shows itself in its true colours. Look how bold they are in picture
galleries, in museums, in theatres, or when they talk of science: they puff
themselves out and get excited, they are abusive and critical . . . they are
bound to criticise—it’s the sign of the slave. You listen: men of the liberal
professions are more often sworn at than pickpockets—that’s because three-
quarters of society are made up of slaves, of just such monkeys. It never
happens that a slave holds out his hand to you and sincerely says ‘Thank
you’ to you for your work.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said Samoylenko, yawning; “the poor
thing, in the simplicity of her heart, wanted to talk to you of scientific

subjects, and you draw a conclusion from that. You’re cross with him for
something or other, and with her, too, to keep him company. She’s a
splendid woman.”
“Ah, nonsense! An ordinary kept woman, depraved and vulgar. Listen,
Alexandr Daviditch; when you meet a simple peasant woman, who isn’t
living with her husband, who does nothing but giggle, you tell her to go and
work. Why are you timid in this case and afraid to tell the truth? Simply
because Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is kept, not by a sailor, but by an official.”
“What am I to do with her?” said Samoylenko, getting angry. “Beat her
or what?
“Not flatter vice. We curse vice only behind its back, and that’s like
making a long nose at it round a corner. I am a zoologist or a sociologist,
which is the same thing; you are a doctor; society believes in us; we ought
to point out the terrible harm which threatens it and the next generation
from the existence of ladies like Nadyezhda Ivanovna.”
“Fyodorovna,” Samoylenko corrected. “But what ought society to do?”
“Society? That’s its affair. To my thinking the surest and most direct
method is—compulsion. Manu militari she ought to be returned to her
husband; and if her husband won’t take her in, then she ought to be sent to
penal servitude or some house of correction.”
“Ouf!” sighed Samoylenko. He paused and asked quietly: “You said the
other day that people like Laevsky ought to be destroyed. . . . Tell me, if
you . . . if the State or society commissioned you to destroy him, could you .
. . bring yourself to it?”
“My hand would not tremble.”

IX

When they got home, Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went into
their dark, stuffy, dull rooms. Both were silent. Laevsky lighted a candle,
while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down, and without taking off her cloak
and hat, lifted her melancholy, guilty eyes to him.

He knew that she expected an explanation from him, but an explanation
would be wearisome, useless and exhausting, and his heart was heavy
because he had lost control over himself and been rude to her. He chanced
to feel in his pocket the letter which he had been intending every day to
read to her, and thought if he were to show her that letter now, it would turn
her thoughts in another direction.
“It is time to define our relations,” he thought. “I will give it her; what is
to be will be.”
He took out the letter and gave it her.
“Read it. It concerns you.”
Saying this, he went into his own room and lay down on the sofa in the
dark without a pillow. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read the letter, and it seemed
to her as though the ceiling were falling and the walls were closing in on
her. It seemed suddenly dark and shut in and terrible. She crossed herself
quickly three times and said:
“Give him peace, O Lord . . . give him peace. . . .”
And she began crying.
“Vanya,” she called. “Ivan Andreitch!”
There was no answer. Thinking that Laevsky had come in and was
standing behind her chair, she sobbed like a child, and said:
“Why did you not tell me before that he was dead? I wouldn’t have gone
to the picnic; I shouldn’t have laughed so horribly. . . . The men said horrid
things to me. What a sin, what a sin! Save me, Vanya, save me. . . . I have
been mad. . . . I am lost. . . .”
Laevsky heard her sobs. He felt stifled and his heart was beating
violently. In his misery he got up, stood in the middle of the room, groped
his way in the dark to an easy-chair by the table, and sat down.
“This is a prison . . .” he thought. “I must get away . . . I can’t bear it.”

It was too late to go and play cards; there were no restaurants in the town.
He lay down again and covered his ears that he might not hear her sobbing,
and he suddenly remembered that he could go to Samoylenko. To avoid
going near Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, he got out of the window into the
garden, climbed over the garden fence and went along the street. It was
dark. A steamer, judging by its lights, a big passenger one, had just come in.
He heard the clank of the anchor chain. A red light was moving rapidly
from the shore in the direction of the steamer: it was the Customs boat
going out to it.
“The passengers are asleep in their cabins . . .” thought Laevsky, and he
envied the peace of mind of other people.
The windows in Samoylenko’s house were open. Laevsky looked in at
one of them, then in at another; it was dark and still in the rooms.
“Alexandr Daviditch, are you asleep?” he called. “Alexandr Daviditch!”
He heard a cough and an uneasy shout:
“Who’s there? What the devil?”
“It is I, Alexandr Daviditch; excuse me.”
A little later the door opened; there was a glow of soft light from the
lamp, and Samoylenko’s huge figure appeared all in white, with a white
nightcap on his head.
“What now?” he asked, scratching himself and breathing hard from
sleepiness. “Wait a minute; I’ll open the door directly.”
“Don’t trouble; I’ll get in at the window. . . .”
Laevsky climbed in at the window, and when he reached Samoylenko,
seized him by the hand.
“Alexandr Daviditch,” he said in a shaking voice, “save me! I beseech
you, I implore you. Understand me! My position is agonising. If it goes on
for another two days I shall strangle myself like . . . like a dog.”
“Wait a bit. . . . What are you talking about exactly?”

“Light a candle.”
“Oh . . . oh! . . .” sighed Samoylenko, lighting a candle. “My God! My
God! . . . Why, it’s past one, brother.”
“Excuse me, but I can’t stay at home,” said Laevsky, feeling great
comfort from the light and the presence of Samoylenko. “You are my best,
my only friend, Alexandr Daviditch. . . . You are my only hope. For God’s
sake, come to my rescue, whether you want to or not. I must get away from
here, come what may! . . . Lend me the money!”
“Oh, my God, my God! . . .” sighed Samoylenko, scratching himself. “I
was dropping asleep and I hear the whistle of the steamer, and now you . . .
Do you want much?”
“Three hundred roubles at least. I must leave her a hundred, and I need
two hundred for the journey. . . . I owe you about four hundred already, but
I will send it you all . . . all. . . .”
Samoylenko took hold of both his whiskers in one hand, and standing
with his legs wide apart, pondered.
“Yes . . .” he muttered, musing. “Three hundred. . . . Yes. . . . But I
haven’t got so much. I shall have to borrow it from some one.”
“Borrow it, for God’s sake!” said Laevsky, seeing from Samoylenko’s
face that he wanted to lend him the money and certainly would lend it.
“Borrow it, and I’ll be sure to pay you back. I will send it from Petersburg
as soon as I get there. You can set your mind at rest about that. I’ll tell you
what, Sasha,” he said, growing more animated; “let us have some wine.”
“Yes . . . we can have some wine, too.”
They both went into the dining-room.
“And how about Nadyezhda Fyodorovna?” asked Samoylenko, setting
three bottles and a plate of peaches on the table. “Surely she’s not
remaining?”
“I will arrange it all, I will arrange it all,” said Laevsky, feeling an
unexpected rush of joy. “I will send her the money afterwards and she will

join me. . . . Then we will define our relations. To your health, friend.”
“Wait a bit,” said Samoylenko. “Drink this first. . . . This is from my
vineyard. This bottle is from Navaridze’s vineyard and this one is from
Ahatulov’s. . . . Try all three kinds and tell me candidly. . . . There seems a
little acidity about mine. Eh? Don’t you taste it?”
“Yes. You have comforted me, Alexandr Daviditch. Thank you. . . . I feel
better.”
“Is there any acidity?”
“Goodness only knows, I don’t know. But you are a splendid, wonderful
man!”
Looking at his pale, excited, good-natured face, Samoylenko
remembered Von Koren’s view that men like that ought to be destroyed, and
Laevsky seemed to him a weak, defenceless child, whom any one could
injure and destroy.
“And when you go, make it up with your mother,” he said. “It’s not
right.”
“Yes, yes; I certainly shall.”
They were silent for a while. When they had emptied the first bottle,
Samoylenko said:
“You ought to make it up with Von Koren too. You are both such
splendid, clever fellows, and you glare at each other like wolves.”
“Yes, he’s a fine, very intelligent fellow,” Laevsky assented, ready now to
praise and forgive every one. “He’s a remarkable man, but it’s impossible
for me to get on with him. No! Our natures are too different. I’m an
indolent, weak, submissive nature. Perhaps in a good minute I might hold
out my hand to him, but he would turn away from me . . . with contempt.”
Laevsky took a sip of wine, walked from corner to corner and went on,
standing in the middle of the room:

“I understand Von Koren very well. His is a resolute, strong, despotic
nature. You have heard him continually talking of ‘the expedition,’ and it’s
not mere talk. He wants the wilderness, the moonlit night: all around in
little tents, under the open sky, lie sleeping his sick and hungry Cossacks,
guides, porters, doctor, priest, all exhausted with their weary marches, while
only he is awake, sitting like Stanley on a camp-stool, feeling himself the
monarch of the desert and the master of these men. He goes on and on and
on, his men groan and die, one after another, and he goes on and on, and in
the end perishes himself, but still is monarch and ruler of the desert, since
the cross upon his tomb can be seen by the caravans for thirty or forty miles
over the desert. I am sorry the man is not in the army. He would have made
a splendid military genius. He would not have hesitated to drown his
cavalry in the river and make a bridge out of dead bodies. And such
hardihood is more needed in war than any kind of fortification or strategy.
Oh, I understand him perfectly! Tell me: why is he wasting his substance
here? What does he want here?”
“He is studying the marine fauna.”
“No, no, brother, no!” Laevsky sighed. “A scientific man who was on the
steamer told me the Black Sea was poor in animal life, and that in its
depths, thanks to the abundance of sulphuric hydrogen, organic life was
impossible. All the serious zoologists work at the biological station at
Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren is independent and obstinate: he
works on the Black Sea because nobody else is working there; he is at
loggerheads with the university, does not care to know his comrades and
other scientific men because he is first of all a despot and only secondly a
zoologist. And you’ll see he’ll do something. He is already dreaming that
when he comes back from his expedition he will purify our universities
from intrigue and mediocrity, and will make the scientific men mind their
p’s and q’s. Despotism is just as strong in science as in the army. And he is
spending his second summer in this stinking little town because he would
rather be first in a village than second in a town. Here he is a king and an
eagle; he keeps all the inhabitants under his thumb and oppresses them with
his authority. He has appropriated every one, he meddles in other people’s
affairs; everything is of use to him, and every one is afraid of him. I am
slipping out of his clutches, he feels that and hates me. Hasn’t he told you
that I ought to be destroyed or sent to hard labour?”

“Yes,” laughed Samoylenko.
Laevsky laughed too, and drank some wine.
“His ideals are despotic too,” he said, laughing, and biting a peach.
“Ordinary mortals think of their neighbour—me, you, man in fact—if they
work for the common weal. To Von Koren men are puppets and nonentities,
too trivial to be the object of his life. He works, will go for his expedition
and break his neck there, not for the sake of love for his neighbour, but for
the sake of such abstractions as humanity, future generations, an ideal race
of men. He exerts himself for the improvement of the human race, and we
are in his eyes only slaves, food for the cannon, beasts of burden; some he
would destroy or stow away in Siberia, others he would break by discipline,
would, like Araktcheev, force them to get up and go to bed to the sound of
the drum; would appoint eunuchs to preserve our chastity and morality,
would order them to fire at any one who steps out of the circle of our
narrow conservative morality; and all this in the name of the improvement
of the human race. . . . And what is the human race? Illusion, mirage . . .
despots have always been illusionists. I understand him very well, brother. I
appreciate him and don’t deny his importance; this world rests on men like
him, and if the world were left only to such men as us, for all our good-
nature and good intentions, we should make as great a mess of it as the flies
have of that picture. Yes.”
Laevsky sat down beside Samoylenko, and said with genuine feeling:
“I’m a foolish, worthless, depraved man. The air I breathe, this wine, love,
life in fact—for all that, I have given nothing in exchange so far but lying,
idleness, and cowardice. Till now I have deceived myself and other people;
I have been miserable about it, and my misery was cheap and common. I
bow my back humbly before Von Koren’s hatred because at times I hate and
despise myself.”
Laevsky began again pacing from one end of the room to the other in
excitement, and said:
“I’m glad I see my faults clearly and am conscious of them. That will
help me to reform and become a different man. My dear fellow, if only you
knew how passionately, with what anguish, I long for such a change. And I
swear to you I’ll be a man! I will! I don’t know whether it is the wine that is

speaking in me, or whether it really is so, but it seems to me that it is long
since I have spent such pure and lucid moments as I have just now with
you.”
“It’s time to sleep, brother,” said Samoylenko.
“Yes, yes. . . . Excuse me; I’ll go directly.”
Laevsky moved hurriedly about the furniture and windows, looking for
his cap.
“Thank you,” he muttered, sighing. “Thank you. . . . Kind and friendly
words are better than charity. You have given me new life.”
He found his cap, stopped, and looked guiltily at Samoylenko.
“Alexandr Daviditch,” he said in an imploring voice.
“What is it?”
“Let me stay the night with you, my dear fellow!”
“Certainly. . . . Why not?”
Laevsky lay down on the sofa, and went on talking to the doctor for a
long time.

X

Three days after the picnic, Marya Konstantinovna unexpectedly called
on Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and without greeting her or taking off her hat,
seized her by both hands, pressed them to her breast and said in great
excitement:
“My dear, I am deeply touched and moved: our dear kind-hearted doctor
told my Nikodim Alexandritch yesterday that your husband was dead. Tell
me, my dear . . . tell me, is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true; he is dead,” answered Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.

“That is awful, awful, my dear! But there’s no evil without some
compensation; your husband was no doubt a noble, wonderful, holy man,
and such are more needed in Heaven than on earth.”
Every line and feature in Marya Konstantinovna’s face began quivering
as though little needles were jumping up and down under her skin; she gave
an almond-oily smile and said, breathlessly, enthusiastically:
“And so you are free, my dear. You can hold your head high now, and
look people boldly in the face. Henceforth God and man will bless your
union with Ivan Andreitch. It’s enchanting. I am trembling with joy, I can
find no words. My dear, I will give you away. . . . Nikodim Alexandritch
and I have been so fond of you, you will allow us to give our blessing to
your pure, lawful union. When, when do you think of being married?”
“I haven’t thought of it,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, freeing her hands.
“That’s impossible, my dear. You have thought of it, you have.”
“Upon my word, I haven’t,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, laughing.
“What should we be married for? I see no necessity for it. We’ll go on
living as we have lived.”
“What are you saying!” cried Marya Konstantinovna in horror. “For
God’s sake, what are you saying!”
“Our getting married won’t make things any better. On the contrary, it
will make them even worse. We shall lose our freedom.”
“My dear, my dear, what are you saying!” exclaimed Marya
Konstantinovna, stepping back and flinging up her hands. “You are talking
wildly! Think what you are saying. You must settle down!”
“‘Settle down.’ How do you mean? I have not lived yet, and you tell me
to settle down.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna reflected that she really had not lived. She had
finished her studies in a boarding-school and had been married to a man she
did not love; then she had thrown in her lot with Laevsky, and had spent all
her time with him on this empty, desolate coast, always expecting
something better. Was that life?

“I ought to be married though,” she thought, but remembering Kirilin and
Atchmianov she flushed and said:
“No, it’s impossible. Even if Ivan Andreitch begged me to on his knees—
even then I would refuse.”
Marya Konstantinovna sat on the sofa for a minute in silence, grave and
mournful, gazing fixedly into space; then she got up and said coldly:
“Good-bye, my dear! Forgive me for having troubled you. Though it’s
not easy for me, it’s my duty to tell you that from this day all is over
between us, and, in spite of my profound respect for Ivan Andreitch, the
door of my house is closed to you henceforth.”
She uttered these words with great solemnity and was herself
overwhelmed by her solemn tone. Her face began quivering again; it
assumed a soft almond-oily expression. She held out both hands to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, who was overcome with alarm and confusion, and
said in an imploring voice:
“My dear, allow me if only for a moment to be a mother or an elder sister
to you! I will be as frank with you as a mother.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna felt in her bosom warmth, gladness, and pity for
herself, as though her own mother had really risen up and were standing
before her. She impulsively embraced Marya Konstantinovna and pressed
her face to her shoulder. Both of them shed tears. They sat down on the sofa
and for a few minutes sobbed without looking at one another or being able
to utter a word.
“My dear child,” began Marya Konstantinovna, “I will tell you some
harsh truths, without sparing you.”
“For God’s sake, for God’s sake, do!”
“Trust me, my dear. You remember of all the ladies here, I was the only
one to receive you. You horrified me from the very first day, but I had not
the heart to treat you with disdain like all the rest. I grieved over dear, good
Ivan Andreitch as though he were my son —a young man in a strange place,
inexperienced, weak, with no mother; and I was worried, dreadfully

worried. . . . My husband was opposed to our making his acquaintance, but
I talked him over . . . persuaded him. . . . We began receiving Ivan
Andreitch, and with him, of course, you. If we had not, he would have been
insulted. I have a daughter, a son. . . . You understand the tender mind, the
pure heart of childhood . . . ‘who so offendeth one of these little ones.’ . . . I
received you into my house and trembled for my children. Oh, when you
become a mother, you will understand my fears. And every one was
surprised at my receiving you, excuse my saying so, as a respectable
woman, and hinted to me . . . well, of course, slanders, suppositions. . . . At
the bottom of my heart I blamed you, but you were unhappy, flighty, to be
pitied, and my heart was wrung with pity for you.”
“But why, why?” asked Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, trembling all over.
“What harm have I done any one?”
“You are a terrible sinner. You broke the vow you made your husband at
the altar. You seduced a fine young man, who perhaps had he not met you
might have taken a lawful partner for life from a good family in his own
circle, and would have been like every one else now. You have ruined his
youth. Don’t speak, don’t speak, my dear! I never believe that man is to
blame for our sins. It is always the woman’s fault. Men are frivolous in
domestic life; they are guided by their minds, and not by their hearts.
There’s a great deal they don’t understand; woman understands it all.
Everything depends on her. To her much is given and from her much will be
required. Oh, my dear, if she had been more foolish or weaker than man on
that side, God would not have entrusted her with the education of boys and
girls. And then, my dear, you entered on the path of vice, forgetting all
modesty; any other woman in your place would have hidden herself from
people, would have sat shut up at home, and would only have been seen in
the temple of God, pale, dressed all in black and weeping, and every one
would have said in genuine compassion: ‘O Lord, this erring angel is
coming back again to Thee . . . .’ But you, my dear, have forgotten all
discretion; have lived openly, extravagantly; have seemed to be proud of
your sin; you have been gay and laughing, and I, looking at you, shuddered
with horror, and have been afraid that thunder from Heaven would strike
our house while you were sitting with us. My dear, don’t speak, don’t
speak,” cried Marya Konstantinovna, observing that Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna wanted to speak. “Trust me, I will not deceive you, I will not

hide one truth from the eyes of your soul. Listen to me, my dear. . . . God
marks great sinners, and you have been marked-out: only think—your
costumes have always been appalling.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, who had always had the highest opinion of her
costumes, left off crying and looked at her with surprise.
“Yes, appalling,” Marya Konstantinovna went on. “Any one could judge
of your behaviour from the elaboration and gaudiness of your attire. People
laughed and shrugged their shoulders as they looked at you, and I grieved, I
grieved. . . . And forgive me, my dear; you are not nice in your person!
When we met in the bathing-place, you made me tremble. Your outer
clothing was decent enough, but your petticoat, your chemise. . . . My dear,
I blushed! Poor Ivan Andreitch! No one ever ties his cravat properly, and
from his linen and his boots, poor fellow! one can see he has no one at
home to look after him. And he is always hungry, my darling, and of course,
if there is no one at home to think of the samovar and the coffee, one is
forced to spend half one’s salary at the pavilion. And it’s simply awful,
awful in your home! No one else in the town has flies, but there’s no getting
rid of them in your rooms: all the plates and dishes are black with them. If
you look at the windows and the chairs, there’s nothing but dust, dead flies,
and glasses. . . . What do you want glasses standing about for? And, my
dear, the table’s not cleared till this time in the day. And one’s ashamed to
go into your bedroom: underclothes flung about everywhere, india-rubber
tubes hanging on the walls, pails and basins standing about. . . . My dear! A
husband ought to know nothing, and his wife ought to be as neat as a little
angel in his presence. I wake up every morning before it is light, and wash
my face with cold water that my Nikodim Alexandritch may not see me
looking drowsy.”
“That’s all nonsense,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sobbed. “If only I were
happy, but I am so unhappy!”
“Yes, yes; you are very unhappy!” Marya Konstantinovna sighed, hardly
able to restrain herself from weeping. “And there’s terrible grief in store for
you in the future! A solitary old age, ill-health; and then you will have to
answer at the dread judgment seat. . . It’s awful, awful. Now fate itself holds

out to you a helping hand, and you madly thrust it from you. Be married,
make haste and be married!”
“Yes, we must, we must,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna; “but it’s
impossible!”
“Why?”
“It’s impossible. Oh, if only you knew!”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna had an impulse to tell her about Kirilin, and how
the evening before she had met handsome young Atchmianov at the
harbour, and how the mad, ridiculous idea had occurred to her of cancelling
her debt for three hundred; it had amused her very much, and she returned
home late in the evening feeling that she had sold herself and was
irrevocably lost. She did not know herself how it had happened. And she
longed to swear to Marya Konstantinovna that she would certainly pay that
debt, but sobs and shame prevented her from speaking.
“I am going away,” she said. “Ivan Andreitch may stay, but I am going.”
“Where?”
“To Russia.”
“But how will you live there? Why, you have nothing.”
“I will do translation, or . . . or I will open a library . . . .”
“Don’t let your fancy run away with you, my dear. You must have money
for a library. Well, I will leave you now, and you calm yourself and think
things over, and to-morrow come and see me, bright and happy. That will
be enchanting! Well, good-bye, my angel. Let me kiss you.”
Marya Konstantinovna kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead,
made the sign of the cross over her, and softly withdrew. It was getting
dark, and Olga lighted up in the kitchen. Still crying, Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. She began to
be very feverish. She undressed without getting up, crumpled up her clothes
at her feet, and curled herself up under the bedclothes. She was thirsty, and
there was no one to give her something to drink.

“I’ll pay it back!” she said to herself, and it seemed to her in delirium that
she was sitting beside some sick woman, and recognised her as herself. “I’ll
pay it back. It would be stupid to imagine that it was for money I . . . I will
go away and send him the money from Petersburg. At first a hundred . . .
then another hundred . . . and then the third hundred. . . .”
It was late at night when Laevsky came in.
“At first a hundred . . .” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna said to him, “then
another hundred . . .”
“You ought to take some quinine,” he said, and thought, “To-morrow is
Wednesday; the steamer goes and I am not going in it. So I shall have to go
on living here till Saturday.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna knelt up in bed.
“I didn’t say anything just now, did I?” she asked, smiling and screwing
up her eyes at the light.
“No, nothing. We shall have to send for the doctor to-morrow morning.
Go to sleep.”
He took his pillow and went to the door. Ever since he had finally made
up his mind to go away and leave Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, she had begun to
raise in him pity and a sense of guilt; he felt a little ashamed in her
presence, as though in the presence of a sick or old horse whom one has
decided to kill. He stopped in the doorway and looked round at her.
“I was out of humour at the picnic and said something rude to you.
Forgive me, for God’s sake!”
Saying this, he went off to his study, lay down, and for a long while could
not get to sleep.
Next morning when Samoylenko, attired, as it was a holiday, in full-dress
uniform with epaulettes on his shoulders and decorations on his breast,
came out of the bedroom after feeling Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s pulse and
looking at her tongue, Laevsky, who was standing in the doorway, asked
him anxiously: “Well? Well?”

There was an expression of terror, of extreme uneasiness, and of hope on
his face.
“Don’t worry yourself; there’s nothing dangerous,” said Samoylenko;
“it’s the usual fever.”
“I don’t mean that.” Laevsky frowned impatiently. “Have you got the
money?”
“My dear soul, forgive me,” he whispered, looking round at the door and
overcome with confusion.
“For God’s sake, forgive me! No one has anything to spare, and I’ve only
been able to collect by five- and by ten-rouble notes. . . . Only a hundred
and ten in all. To-day I’ll speak to some one else. Have patience.”
“But Saturday is the latest date,” whispered Laevsky, trembling with
impatience. “By all that’s sacred, get it by Saturday! If I don’t get away by
Saturday, nothing’s any use, nothing! I can’t understand how a doctor can
be without money!”
“Lord have mercy on us!” Samoylenko whispered rapidly and intensely,
and there was positively a breaking note in his throat. “I’ve been stripped of
everything; I am owed seven thousand, and I’m in debt all round. Is it my
fault?”
“Then you’ll get it by Saturday? Yes?”
“I’ll try.”
“I implore you, my dear fellow! So that the money may be in my hands
by Friday morning!”
Samoylenko sat down and prescribed solution of quinine and kalii
bromati and tincture of rhubarb, tincturæ gentianæ, aquæ foeniculi —all in
one mixture, added some pink syrup to sweeten it, and went away.

XI

“You look as though you were coming to arrest me,” said Von Koren,
seeing Samoylenko coming in, in his full-dress uniform.
“I was passing by and thought: ‘Suppose I go in and pay my respects to
zoology,’” said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table, knocked together
by the zoologist himself out of plain boards. “Good-morning, holy father,”
he said to the deacon, who was sitting in the window, copying something.
“I’ll stay a minute and then run home to see about dinner. It’s time. . . . I’m
not hindering you?”
“Not in the least,” answered the zoologist, laying out over the table slips
of paper covered with small writing. “We are busy copying.”
“Ah! . . . Oh, my goodness, my goodness! . . .” sighed Samoylenko. He
cautiously took up from the table a dusty book on which there was lying a
dead dried spider, and said: “Only fancy, though; some little green beetle is
going about its business, when suddenly a monster like this swoops down
upon it. I can fancy its terror.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Is poison given it to protect it from its enemies?”
“Yes, to protect it and enable it to attack.”
“To be sure, to be sure. . . . And everything in nature, my dear fellows, is
consistent and can be explained,” sighed Samoylenko; “only I tell you what
I don’t understand. You’re a man of very great intellect, so explain it to me,
please. There are, you know, little beasts no bigger than rats, rather
handsome to look at, but nasty and immoral in the extreme, let me tell you.
Suppose such a little beast is running in the woods. He sees a bird; he
catches it and devours it. He goes on and sees in the grass a nest of eggs; he
does not want to eat them—he is not hungry, but yet he tastes one egg and
scatters the others out of the nest with his paw. Then he meets a frog and
begins to play with it; when he has tormented the frog he goes on licking
himself and meets a beetle; he crushes the beetle with his paw . . . and so he
spoils and destroys everything on his way. . . . He creeps into other beasts’
holes, tears up the anthills, cracks the snail’s shell. If he meets a rat, he
fights with it; if he meets a snake or a mouse, he must strangle it; and so the

whole day long. Come, tell me: what is the use of a beast like that? Why
was he created?”
“I don’t know what animal you are talking of,” said Von Koren; “most
likely one of the insectivora. Well, he got hold of the bird because it was
incautious; he broke the nest of eggs because the bird was not skilful, had
made the nest badly and did not know how to conceal it. The frog probably
had some defect in its colouring or he would not have seen it, and so on.
Your little beast only destroys the weak, the unskilful, the careless—in fact,
those who have defects which nature does not think fit to hand on to
posterity. Only the cleverer, the stronger, the more careful and developed
survive; and so your little beast, without suspecting it, is serving the great
ends of perfecting creation.”
“Yes, yes, yes. . . . By the way, brother,” said Samoylenko carelessly,
“lend me a hundred roubles.”
“Very good. There are some very interesting types among the
insectivorous mammals. For instance, the mole is said to be useful because
he devours noxious insects. There is a story that some German sent William
I. a fur coat made of moleskins, and the Emperor ordered him to be
reproved for having destroyed so great a number of useful animals. And yet
the mole is not a bit less cruel than your little beast, and is very mischievous
besides, as he spoils meadows terribly.”
Von Koren opened a box and took out a hundred-rouble note.
“The mole has a powerful thorax, just like the bat,” he went on, shutting
the box; “the bones and muscles are tremendously developed, the mouth is
extraordinarily powerfully furnished. If it had the proportions of an
elephant, it would be an all-destructive, invincible animal. It is interesting
when two moles meet underground; they begin at once as though by
agreement digging a little platform; they need the platform in order to have
a battle more conveniently. When they have made it they enter upon a
ferocious struggle and fight till the weaker one falls. Take the hundred
roubles,” said Von Koren, dropping his voice, “but only on condition that
you’re not borrowing it for Laevsky.”

“And if it were for Laevsky,” cried Samoylenko, flaring up, “what is that
to you?”
“I can’t give it to you for Laevsky. I know you like lending people
money. You would give it to Kerim, the brigand, if he were to ask you; but,
excuse me, I can’t assist you in that direction.”
“Yes, it is for Laevsky I am asking it,” said Samoylenko, standing up and
waving his right arm. “Yes! For Laevsky! And no one, fiend or devil, has a
right to dictate to me how to dispose of my own money. It doesn’t suit you
to lend it me? No?”
The deacon began laughing.
“Don’t get excited, but be reasonable,” said the zoologist. “To shower
benefits on Mr. Laevsky is, to my thinking, as senseless as to water weeds
or to feed locusts.”
“To my thinking, it is our duty to help our neighbours!” cried
Samoylenko.
“In that case, help that hungry Turk who is lying under the fence! He is a
workman and more useful and indispensable than your Laevsky. Give him
that hundred-rouble note! Or subscribe a hundred roubles to my
expedition!”
“Will you give me the money or not? I ask you!”
“Tell me openly: what does he want money for?”
“It’s not a secret; he wants to go to Petersburg on Saturday.”
“So that is it!” Von Koren drawled out. “Aha! . . . We understand. And is
she going with him, or how is it to be?”
“She’s staying here for the time. He’ll arrange his affairs in Petersburg
and send her the money, and then she’ll go.”
“That’s smart!” said the zoologist, and he gave a short tenor laugh.
“Smart, well planned.”

He went rapidly up to Samoylenko, and standing face to face with him,
and looking him in the eyes, asked: “Tell me now honestly: is he tired of
her? Yes? tell me: is he tired of her? Yes?”
“Yes,” Samoylenko articulated, beginning to perspire.
“How repulsive it is!” said Von Koren, and from his face it could be seen
that he felt repulsion. “One of two things, Alexandr Daviditch: either you
are in the plot with him, or, excuse my saying so, you are a simpleton.
Surely you must see that he is taking you in like a child in the most
shameless way? Why, it’s as clear as day that he wants to get rid of her and
abandon her here. She’ll be left a burden on you. It is as clear as day that
you will have to send her to Petersburg at your expense. Surely your fine
friend can’t have so blinded you by his dazzling qualities that you can’t see
the simplest thing?”
“That’s all supposition,” said Samoylenko, sitting down.
“Supposition? But why is he going alone instead of taking her with him?
And ask him why he doesn’t send her off first. The sly beast!”
Overcome with sudden doubts and suspicions about his friend,
Samoylenko weakened and took a humbler tone.
“But it’s impossible,” he said, recalling the night Laevsky had spent at
his house. “He is so unhappy!”
“What of that? Thieves and incendiaries are unhappy too!”
“Even supposing you are right . . .” said Samoylenko, hesitating. “Let us
admit it. . . . Still, he’s a young man in a strange place . . . a student. We
have been students, too, and there is no one but us to come to his
assistance.”
“To help him to do abominable things, because he and you at different
times have been at universities, and neither of you did anything there! What
nonsense!”
“Stop; let us talk it over coolly. I imagine it will be possible to make
some arrangement. . . .” Samoylenko reflected, twiddling his fingers. “I’ll
give him the money, you see, but make him promise on his honour that

within a week he’ll send Nadyezhda Fyodorovna the money for the
journey.”
“And he’ll give you his word of honour—in fact, he’ll shed tears and
believe in it himself; but what’s his word of honour worth? He won’t keep
it, and when in a year or two you meet him on the Nevsky Prospect with a
new mistress on his arm, he’ll excuse himself on the ground that he has
been crippled by civilisation, and that he is made after the pattern of Rudin.
Drop him, for God’s sake! Keep away from the filth; don’t stir it up with
both hands!”
Samoylenko thought for a minute and said resolutely:
“But I shall give him the money all the same. As you please. I can’t bring
myself to refuse a man simply on an assumption.”
“Very fine, too. You can kiss him if you like.”
“Give me the hundred roubles, then,” Samoylenko asked timidly.
“I won’t.”
A silence followed. Samoylenko was quite crushed; his face wore a
guilty, abashed, and ingratiating expression, and it was strange to see this
pitiful, childish, shamefaced countenance on a huge man wearing epaulettes
and orders of merit.
“The bishop here goes the round of his diocese on horseback instead of in
a carriage,” said the deacon, laying down his pen. “It’s extremely touching
to see him sit on his horse. His simplicity and humility are full of Biblical
grandeur.”
“Is he a good man?” asked Von Koren, who was glad to change the
conversation.
“Of course! If he hadn’t been a good man, do you suppose he would have
been consecrated a bishop?”
“Among the bishops are to be found good and gifted men,” said Von
Koren. “The only drawback is that some of them have the weakness to
imagine themselves statesmen. One busies himself with Russification,

another criticises the sciences. That’s not their business. They had much
better look into their consistory a little.”
“A layman cannot judge of bishops.”
“Why so, deacon? A bishop is a man just the same as you or I.”
“The same, but not the same.” The deacon was offended and took up his
pen. “If you had been the same, the Divine Grace would have rested upon
you, and you would have been bishop yourself; and since you are not
bishop, it follows you are not the same.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, deacon,” said Samoylenko dejectedly. “Listen to
what I suggest,” he said, turning to Von Koren. “Don’t give me that hundred
roubles. You’ll be having your dinners with me for three months before the
winter, so let me have the money beforehand for three months.”
“I won’t.”
Samoylenko blinked and turned crimson; he mechanically drew towards
him the book with the spider on it and looked at it, then he got up and took
his hat.
Von Koren felt sorry for him.
“What it is to have to live and do with people like this,” said the
zoologist, and he kicked a paper into the corner with indignation. “You
must understand that this is not kindness, it is not love, but cowardice,
slackness, poison! What’s gained by reason is lost by your flabby good-for-
nothing hearts! When I was ill with typhoid as a schoolboy, my aunt in her
sympathy gave me pickled mushrooms to eat, and I very nearly died. You,
and my aunt too, must understand that love for man is not to be found in the
heart or the stomach or the bowels, but here!”
Von Koren slapped himself on the forehead.
“Take it,” he said, and thrust a hundred-rouble note into his hand.
“You’ve no need to be angry, Kolya,” said Samoylenko mildly, folding
up the note. “I quite understand you, but . . . you must put yourself in my
place.”

“You are an old woman, that’s what you are.”
The deacon burst out laughing.
“Hear my last request, Alexandr Daviditch,” said Von Koren hotly.
“When you give that scoundrel the money, make it a condition that he takes
his lady with him, or sends her on ahead, and don’t give it him without.
There’s no need to stand on ceremony with him. Tell him so, or, if you
don’t, I give you my word I’ll go to his office and kick him downstairs, and
I’ll break off all acquaintance with you. So you’d better know it.”
“Well! To go with her or send her on beforehand will be more convenient
for him,” said Samoylenko. “He’ll be delighted indeed. Well, goodbye.”
He said good-bye affectionately and went out, but before shutting the
door after him, he looked round at Von Koren and, with a ferocious face,
said:
“It’s the Germans who have ruined you, brother! Yes! The Germans!”

XII

Next day, Thursday, Marya Konstantinovna was celebrating the birthday
of her Kostya. All were invited to come at midday and eat pies, and in the
evening to drink chocolate. When Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
arrived in the evening, the zoologist, who was already sitting in the
drawing-room, drinking chocolate, asked Samoylenko:
“Have you talked to him?”
“Not yet.”
“Mind now, don’t stand on ceremony. I can’t understand the insolence of
these people! Why, they know perfectly well the view taken by this family
of their cohabitation, and yet they force themselves in here.”
“If one is to pay attention to every prejudice,” said Samoylenko, “one
could go nowhere.”

“Do you mean to say that the repugnance felt by the masses for illicit
love and moral laxity is a prejudice?”
“Of course it is. It’s prejudice and hate. When the soldiers see a girl of
light behaviour, they laugh and whistle; but just ask them what they are
themselves.”
“It’s not for nothing they whistle. The fact that girls strangle their
illegitimate children and go to prison for it, and that Anna Karenin flung
herself under the train, and that in the villages they smear the gates with tar,
and that you and I, without knowing why, are pleased by Katya’s purity, and
that every one of us feels a vague craving for pure love, though he knows
there is no such love—is all that prejudice? That is the one thing, brother,
which has survived intact from natural selection, and, if it were not for that
obscure force regulating the relations of the sexes, the Laevskys would have
it all their own way, and mankind would degenerate in two years.”
Laevsky came into the drawing-room, greeted every one, and shaking
hands with Von Koren, smiled ingratiatingly. He waited for a favourable
moment and said to Samoylenko:
“Excuse me, Alexandr Daviditch, I must say two words to you.”
Samoylenko got up, put his arm round Laevsky’s waist, and both of them
went into Nikodim Alexandritch’s study.
“To-morrow’s Friday,” said Laevsky, biting his nails. “Have you got what
you promised?”
“I’ve only got two hundred. I’ll get the rest to-day or to-morrow. Don’t
worry yourself.”
“Thank God . . .” sighed Laevsky, and his hands began trembling with
joy. “You are saving me, Alexandr Daviditch, and I swear to you by God,
by my happiness and anything you like, I’ll send you the money as soon as
I arrive. And I’ll send you my old debt too.”
“Look here, Vanya . . .” said Samoylenko, turning crimson and taking
him by the button. “You must forgive my meddling in your private affairs,
but . . . why shouldn’t you take Nadyezhda Fyodorovna with you?”

“You queer fellow. How is that possible? One of us must stay, or our
creditors will raise an outcry. You see, I owe seven hundred or more to the
shops. Only wait, and I will send them the money. I’ll stop their mouths,
and then she can come away.”
“I see. . . . But why shouldn’t you send her on first?”
“My goodness, as though that were possible!” Laevsky was horrified.
“Why, she’s a woman; what would she do there alone? What does she know
about it? That would only be a loss of time and a useless waste of money.”
“That’s reasonable . . .” thought Samoylenko, but remembering his
conversation with Von Koren, he looked down and said sullenly: “I can’t
agree with you. Either go with her or send her first; otherwise . . . otherwise
I won’t give you the money. Those are my last words. . .”
He staggered back, lurched backwards against the door, and went into the
drawing-room, crimson, and overcome with confusion.
“Friday . . . Friday,” thought Laevsky, going back into the drawing-room.
“Friday. . . .”
He was handed a cup of chocolate; he burnt his lips and tongue with the
scalding chocolate and thought: “Friday . . . Friday. . . .”
For some reason he could not get the word “Friday” out of his head; he
could think of nothing but Friday, and the only thing that was clear to him,
not in his brain but somewhere in his heart, was that he would not get off on
Saturday. Before him stood Nikodim Alexandritch, very neat, with his hair
combed over his temples, saying:
“Please take something to eat. . . .”
Marya Konstantinovna showed the visitors Katya’s school report and
said, drawling:
“It’s very, very difficult to do well at school nowadays! So much is
expected . . .”
“Mamma!” groaned Katya, not knowing where to hide her confusion at
the praises of the company.

Laevsky, too, looked at the report and praised it. Scripture, Russian
language, conduct, fives and fours, danced before his eyes, and all this,
mixed with the haunting refrain of “Friday,” with the carefully combed
locks of Nikodim Alexandritch and the red cheeks of Katya, produced on
him a sensation of such immense overwhelming boredom that he almost
shrieked with despair and asked himself: “Is it possible, is it possible I shall
not get away?”
They put two card tables side by side and sat down to play post. Laevsky
sat down too.
“Friday . . . Friday . . .” he kept thinking, as he smiled and took a pencil
out of his pocket. “Friday. . . .”
He wanted to think over his position, and was afraid to think. It was
terrible to him to realise that the doctor had detected him in the deception
which he had so long and carefully concealed from himself. Every time he
thought of his future he would not let his thoughts have full rein. He would
get into the train and set off, and thereby the problem of his life would be
solved, and he did not let his thoughts go farther. Like a far-away dim light
in the fields, the thought sometimes flickered in his mind that in one of the
side-streets of Petersburg, in the remote future, he would have to have
recourse to a tiny lie in order to get rid of Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and pay
his debts; he would tell a lie only once, and then a completely new life
would begin. And that was right: at the price of a small lie he would win so
much truth.
Now when by his blunt refusal the doctor had crudely hinted at his
deception, he began to understand that he would need deception not only in
the remote future, but to-day, and to-morrow, and in a month’s time, and
perhaps up to the very end of his life. In fact, in order to get away he would
have to lie to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to his creditors, and to his superiors
in the Service; then, in order to get money in Petersburg, he would have to
lie to his mother, to tell her that he had already broken with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna; and his mother would not give him more than five hundred
roubles, so he had already deceived the doctor, as he would not be in a
position to pay him back the money within a short time. Afterwards, when
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna came to Petersburg, he would have to resort to a

regular series of deceptions, little and big, in order to get free of her; and
again there would be tears, boredom, a disgusting existence, remorse, and
so there would be no new life. Deception and nothing more. A whole
mountain of lies rose before Laevsky’s imagination. To leap over it at one
bound and not to do his lying piecemeal, he would have to bring himself to
stern, uncompromising action; for instance, to getting up without saying a
word, putting on his hat, and at once setting off without money and without
explanation. But Laevsky felt that was impossible for him.
“Friday, Friday . . .” he thought. “Friday. . . .”
They wrote little notes, folded them in two, and put them in Nikodim
Alexandritch’s old top-hat. When there were a sufficient heap of notes,
Kostya, who acted the part of postman, walked round the table and
delivered them. The deacon, Katya, and Kostya, who received amusing
notes and tried to write as funnily as they could, were highly delighted.
“We must have a little talk,” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read in a little note;
she glanced at Marya Konstantinovna, who gave her an almond-oily smile
and nodded.
“Talk of what?” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “If one can’t tell the
whole, it’s no use talking.”
Before going out for the evening she had tied Laevsky’s cravat for him,
and that simple action filled her soul with tenderness and sorrow. The
anxiety in his face, his absent-minded looks, his pallor, and the
incomprehensible change that had taken place in him of late, and the fact
that she had a terrible revolting secret from him, and the fact that her hands
trembled when she tied his cravat—all this seemed to tell her that they had
not long left to be together. She looked at him as though he were an ikon,
with terror and penitence, and thought: “Forgive, forgive.”
Opposite her was sitting Atchmianov, and he never took his black, love-
sick eyes off her. She was stirred by passion; she was ashamed of herself,
and afraid that even her misery and sorrow would not prevent her from
yielding to impure desire to-morrow, if not to-day —and that, like a
drunkard, she would not have the strength to stop herself.

She made up her mind to go away that she might not continue this life,
shameful for herself, and humiliating for Laevsky. She would beseech him
with tears to let her go; and if he opposed her, she would go away secretly.
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. It was from Atchmianov.
She would live in some far remote place, would work and send Laevsky,
“anonymously,” money, embroidered shirts, and tobacco, and would return
to him only in old age or if he were dangerously ill and needed a nurse.
When in his old age he learned what were her reasons for leaving him and
refusing to be his wife, he would appreciate her sacrifice and forgive.
“You’ve got a long nose.” That must be from the deacon or Kostya.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna imagined how, parting from Laevsky, she would
embrace him warmly, would kiss his hand, and would swear to love him all
her life, all her life, and then, living in obscurity among strangers, she
would every day think that somewhere she had a friend, some one she loved
—a pure, noble, lofty man who kept a pure memory of her.
“If you don’t give me an interview to-day, I shall take measures, I assure
you on my word of honour. You can’t treat decent people like this; you must
understand that.” That was from Kirilin.

XIII

Laevsky received two notes; he opened one and read: “Don’t go away,
my darling.”
“Who could have written that?” he thought. “Not Samoylenko, of course.
And not the deacon, for he doesn’t know I want to go away. Von Koren,
perhaps?”
The zoologist bent over the table and drew a pyramid. Laevsky fancied
that his eyes were smiling.
“Most likely Samoylenko . . . has been gossiping,” thought Laevsky.

In the other note, in the same disguised angular handwriting with long
tails to the letters, was written: “Somebody won’t go away on Saturday.”
“A stupid gibe,” 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 am I laughing at? Ha-ha-ha!”
He tried to restrain himself, covered his mouth with his hand, but the
laugh choked his chest and throat, and his hand could not cover his mouth.
“How stupid it is!” he thought, rolling with laughter. “Have I gone out of
my mind?”
The laugh grew shriller and shriller, and became something like the bark
of a lap-dog. Laevsky tried to get up from the table, but his legs would not
obey him and his right hand was strangely, without his volition, dancing on
the table, convulsively clutching and crumpling up the bits of paper. He saw
looks of wonder, Samoylenko’s grave, frightened face, and the eyes of the
zoologist full of cold irony and disgust, and realised that he was in
hysterics.
“How hideous, how shameful!” he thought, feeling the warmth of tears
on his face. “. . . Oh, oh, what a disgrace! It has never happened to me. . . .”
They took him under his arms, and supporting his head from behind, led
him away; a glass gleamed before his eyes and knocked against his teeth,
and the water was spilt on his breast; he was in a little room, with two beds
in the middle, side by side, covered by two snow-white quilts. He dropped
on one of the beds and sobbed.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Samoylenko kept saying; “it does happen . . .
it does happen. . . .”
Chill with horror, trembling all over and dreading something awful,
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna stood by the bedside and kept asking:
“What is it? What is it? For God’s sake, tell me.”

“Can Kirilin have written him something?” she thought.
“It’s nothing,” said Laevsky, laughing and crying; “go away, darling.”
His face expressed neither hatred nor repulsion: so he knew nothing;
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was somewhat reassured, and she went into the
drawing-room.
“Don’t agitate yourself, my dear!” said Marya Konstantinovna, sitting
down beside her and taking her hand. “It will pass. Men are just as weak as
we poor sinners. You are both going through a crisis. . . . One can so well
understand it! Well, my dear, I am waiting for an answer. Let us have a little
talk.”
“No, we are not going to talk,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, listening to
Laevsky’s sobs. “I feel depressed. . . . You must allow me to go home.”
“What do you mean, what do you mean, my dear?” cried Marya
Konstantinovna in alarm. “Do you think I could let you go without supper?
We will have something to eat, and then you may go with my blessing.”
“I feel miserable . . .” whispered Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she caught
at the arm of the chair with both hands to avoid falling.
“He’s got a touch of hysterics,” said Von Koren gaily, coming into the
drawing-room, but seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, he was taken aback and
retreated.
When the attack was over, Laevsky sat on the strange bed and thought.
“Disgraceful! I’ve been howling like some wretched girl! I must have
been absurd and disgusting. I will go away by the back stairs . . . . But that
would seem as though I took my hysterics too seriously. I ought to take it as
a joke. . . .”
He looked in the looking-glass, sat there for some time, and went back
into the drawing-room.
“Here I am,” he said, smiling; he felt agonisingly ashamed, and he felt
others were ashamed in his presence. “Fancy such a thing happening,” he
said, sitting down. “I was sitting here, and all of a sudden, do you know, I

felt a terrible piercing pain in my side . . . unendurable, my nerves could not
stand it, and . . . and it led to this silly performance. This is the age of
nerves; there is no help for it.”
At supper he drank some wine, and, from time to time, with an abrupt
sigh rubbed his side as though to suggest that he still felt the pain. And no
one, except Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, believed him, and he saw that.
After nine o’clock they went for a walk on the boulevard. Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, afraid that Kirilin would speak to her, did her best to keep all
the time beside Marya Konstantinovna and the children. She felt weak with
fear and misery, and felt she was going to be feverish; she was exhausted
and her legs would hardly move, but she did not go home, because she felt
sure that she would be followed by Kirilin or Atchmianov or both at once.
Kirilin walked behind her with Nikodim Alexandritch, and kept humming
in an undertone:
“I don’t al-low people to play with me! I don’t al-low it.”
From the boulevard they went back to the pavilion and walked along the
beach, and looked for a long time at the phosphorescence on the water. Von
Koren began telling them why it looked phosphorescent.

XIV

“It’s time I went to my vint. . . . They will be waiting for me,” said
Laevsky. “Good-bye, my friends.”
“I’ll come with you; wait a minute,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and
she took his arm.
They said good-bye to the company and went away. Kirilin took leave
too, and saying that he was going the same way, went along beside them.
“What will be, will be,” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “So be it. . . .”
And it seemed to her that all the evil memories in her head had taken
shape and were walking beside her in the darkness, breathing heavily, while
she, like a fly that had fallen into the inkpot, was crawling painfully along
the pavement and smirching Laevsky’s side and arm with blackness.

If Kirilin should do anything horrid, she thought, not he but she would be
to blame for it. There was a time when no man would have talked to her as
Kirilin had done, and she had torn up her security like a thread and
destroyed it irrevocably—who was to blame for it? Intoxicated by her
passions she had smiled at a complete stranger, probably just because he
was tall and a fine figure. After two meetings she was weary of him, had
thrown him over, and did not that, she thought now, give him the right to
treat her as he chose?
“Here I’ll say good-bye to you, darling,” said Laevsky. “Ilya Mihalitch
will see you home.”
He nodded to Kirilin, and, quickly crossing the boulevard, walked along
the street to Sheshkovsky’s, where there were lights in the windows, and
then they heard the gate bang as he went in.
“Allow me to have an explanation with you,” said Kirilin. “I’m not a boy,
not some Atchkasov or Latchkasov, Zatchkasov. . . . I demand serious
attention.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s heart began beating violently. She made no
reply.
“The abrupt change in your behaviour to me I put down at first to
coquetry,” Kirilin went on; “now I see that you don’t know how to behave
with gentlemanly people. You simply wanted to play with me, as you are
playing with that wretched Armenian boy; but I’m a gentleman and I insist
on being treated like a gentleman. And so I am at your service. . . .”
“I’m miserable,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna beginning to cry, and to
hide her tears she turned away.
“I’m miserable too,” said Kirilin, “but what of that?”
Kirilin was silent for a space, then he said distinctly and emphatically:
“I repeat, madam, that if you do not give me an interview this evening,
I’ll make a scandal this very evening.”
“Let me off this evening,” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she did not
recognise her own voice, it was so weak and pitiful.

“I must give you a lesson. . . . Excuse me for the roughness of my tone,
but it’s necessary to give you a lesson. Yes, I regret to say I must give you a
lesson. I insist on two interviews—to-day and to-morrow. After to-morrow
you are perfectly free and can go wherever you like with any one you
choose. To-day and to-morrow.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went up to her gate and stopped.
“Let me go,” she murmured, trembling all over and seeing nothing before
her in the darkness but his white tunic. “You’re right: I’m a horrible woman.
. . . I’m to blame, but let me go . . . I beg you.” She touched his cold hand
and shuddered. “I beseech you. . . .”
“Alas!” sighed Kirilin, “alas! it’s not part of my plan to let you go; I only
mean to give you a lesson and make you realise. And what’s more, madam,
I’ve too little faith in women.”
“I’m miserable. . . .”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna listened to the even splash of the sea, looked at
the sky studded with stars, and longed to make haste and end it all, and get
away from the cursed sensation of life, with its sea, stars, men, fever.
“Only not in my home,” she said coldly. “Take me somewhere else.”
“Come to Muridov’s. That’s better.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near the old wall.”
She walked quickly along the street and then turned into the side-street
that led towards the mountains. It was dark. There were pale streaks of light
here and there on the pavement, from the lighted windows, and it seemed to
her that, like a fly, she kept falling into the ink and crawling out into the
light again. At one point he stumbled, almost fell down and burst out
laughing.
“He’s drunk,” thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. “Never mind. . . . Never
mind. . . . So be it.”

Atchmianov, too, soon took leave of the party and followed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna to ask her to go for a row. He went to her house and looked
over the fence: the windows were wide open, there were no lights.
“Nadyezhda Fyodorovna!” he called.
A moment passed, he called again.
“Who’s there?” he heard Olga’s voice.
“Is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna at home?”
“No, she has not come in yet.”
“Strange . . . very strange,” thought Atchmianov, feeling very uneasy.
“She went home. . . .”
He walked along the boulevard, then along the street, and glanced in at
the windows of Sheshkovsky’s. Laevsky was sitting at the table without his
coat on, looking attentively at his cards.
“Strange, strange,” muttered Atchmianov, and remembering Laevsky’s
hysterics, he felt ashamed. “If she is not at home, where is she?”
He went to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings again, and looked at the
dark windows.
“It’s a cheat, a cheat . . .” he thought, remembering that, meeting him at
midday at Marya Konstantinovna’s, she had promised to go in a boat with
him that evening.
The windows of the house where Kirilin lived were dark, and there was a
policeman sitting asleep on a little bench at the gate. Everything was clear
to Atchmianov when he looked at the windows and the policeman. He made
up his mind to go home, and set off in that direction, but somehow found
himself near Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s lodgings again. He sat down on the
bench near the gate and took off his hat, feeling that his head was burning
with jealousy and resentment.
The clock in the town church only struck twice in the twenty-four hours
—at midday and midnight. Soon after it struck midnight he heard hurried

footsteps.
“To-morrow evening, then, again at Muridov’s,” Atchmianov heard, and
he recognised Kirilin’s voice. “At eight o’clock; good-bye!”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna made her appearance near the garden. Without
noticing that Atchmianov was sitting on the bench, she passed beside him
like a shadow, opened the gate, and leaving it open, went into the house. In
her own room she lighted the candle and quickly undressed, but instead of
getting into bed, she sank on her knees before a chair, flung her arms round
it, and rested her head on it.
It was past two when Laevsky came home.

XV

Having made up his mind to lie, not all at once but piecemeal, Laevsky
went soon after one o’clock next day to Samoylenko to ask for the money
that he might be sure to get off on Saturday. After his hysterical attack,
which had added an acute feeling of shame to his depressed state of mind, it
was unthinkable to remain in the town. If Samoylenko should insist on his
conditions, he thought it would be possible to agree to them and take the
money, and next day, just as he was starting, to say that Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna refused to go. He would be able to persuade her that evening
that the whole arrangement would be for her benefit. If Samoylenko, who
was obviously under the influence of Von Koren, should refuse the money
altogether or make fresh conditions, then he, Laevsky, would go off that
very evening in a cargo vessel, or even in a sailing-boat, to Novy Athon or
Novorossiisk, would send from there an humiliating telegram, and would
stay there till his mother sent him the money for the journey.
When he went into Samoylenko’s, he found Von Koren in the drawing-
room. The zoologist had just arrived for dinner, and, as usual, was turning
over the album and scrutinising the gentlemen in top-hats and the ladies in
caps.
“How very unlucky!” thought Laevsky, seeing him. “He may be in the
way. Good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” answered Von Koren, without looking at him.
“Is Alexandr Daviditch at home?”
“Yes, in the kitchen.”
Laevsky went into the kitchen, but seeing from the door that Samoylenko
was busy over the salad, he went back into the drawing-room and sat down.
He always had a feeling of awkwardness in the zoologist’s presence, and
now he was afraid there would be talk about his attack of hysterics. There
was more than a minute of silence. Von Koren suddenly raised his eyes to
Laevsky and asked:
“How do you feel after yesterday?”
“Very well indeed,” said Laevsky, flushing. “It really was nothing much.
. . .”
“Until yesterday I thought it was only ladies who had hysterics, and so at
first I thought you had St. Vitus’s dance.”
Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly, and thought:
“How indelicate on his part! He knows quite well how unpleasant it is for
me. . . .”
“Yes, it was a ridiculous performance,” he said, still smiling. “I’ve been
laughing over it the whole morning. What’s so curious in an attack of
hysterics is that you know it is absurd, and are laughing at it in your heart,
and at the same time you sob. In our neurotic age we are the slaves of our
nerves; they are our masters and do as they like with us. Civilisation has
done us a bad turn in that way. . . .”
As Laevsky talked, he felt it disagreeable that Von Koren listened to him
gravely, and looked at him steadily and attentively as though studying him;
and he was vexed with himself that in spite of his dislike of Von Koren, he
could not banish the ingratiating smile from his face.
“I must admit, though,” he added, “that there were immediate causes for
the attack, and quite sufficient ones too. My health has been terribly shaky
of late. To which one must add boredom, constantly being hard up . . . the

absence of people and general interests . . . . My position is worse than a
governor’s.”
“Yes, your position is a hopeless one,” answered Von Koren.
These calm, cold words, implying something between a jeer and an
uninvited prediction, offended Laevsky. He recalled the zoologist’s eyes the
evening before, full of mockery and disgust. He was silent for a space and
then asked, no longer smiling:
“How do you know anything of my position?”
“You were only just speaking of it yourself. Besides, your friends take
such a warm interest in you, that I am hearing about you all day long.”
“What friends? Samoylenko, I suppose?”
“Yes, he too.”
“I would ask Alexandr Daviditch and my friends in general not to trouble
so much about me.”
“Here is Samoylenko; you had better ask him not to trouble so much
about you.”
“I don’t understand your tone,” Laevsky muttered, suddenly feeling as
though he had only just realised that the zoologist hated and despised him,
and was jeering at him, and was his bitterest and most inveterate enemy.
“Keep that tone for some one else,” he said softly, unable to speak aloud
for the hatred with which his chest and throat were choking, as they had
been the night before with laughter.
Samoylenko came in in his shirt-sleeves, crimson and perspiring from the
stifling kitchen.
“Ah, you here?” he said. “Good-morning, my dear boy. Have you had
dinner? Don’t stand on ceremony. Have you had dinner?”
“Alexandr Daviditch,” said Laevsky, standing up, “though I did appeal to
you to help me in a private matter, it did not follow that I released you from
the obligation of discretion and respect for other people’s private affairs.”

“What’s this?” asked Samoylenko, in astonishment.
“If you have no money,” Laevsky went on, raising his voice and shifting
from one foot to the other in his excitement, “don’t give it; refuse it. But
why spread abroad in every back street that my position is hopeless, and all
the rest of it? I can’t endure such benevolence and friend’s assistance where
there’s a shilling-worth of talk for a ha’p’orth of help! You can boast of
your benevolence as much as you please, but no one has given you the right
to gossip about my private affairs!”
“What private affairs?” asked Samoylenko, puzzled and beginning to be
angry. “If you’ve come here to be abusive, you had better clear out. You can
come again afterwards!”
He remembered the rule that when one is angry with one’s neighbour,
one must begin to count a hundred, and one will grow calm again; and he
began rapidly counting.
“I beg you not to trouble yourself about me,” Laevsky went on. “Don’t
pay any attention to me, and whose business is it what I do and how I live?
Yes, I want to go away. Yes, I get into debt, I drink, I am living with another
man’s wife, I’m hysterical, I’m ordinary. I am not so profound as some
people, but whose business is that? Respect other people’s privacy.”
“Excuse me, brother,” said Samoylenko, who had counted up to thirty-
five, “but . . .”
“Respect other people’s individuality!” interrupted Laevsky. “This
continual gossip about other people’s affairs, this sighing and groaning and
everlasting prying, this eavesdropping, this friendly sympathy . . . damn it
all! They lend me money and make conditions as though I were a
schoolboy! I am treated as the devil knows what! I don’t want anything,”
shouted Laevsky, staggering with excitement and afraid that it might end in
another attack of hysterics. “I shan’t get away on Saturday, then,” flashed
through his mind. “I want nothing. All I ask of you is to spare me your
protecting care. I’m not a boy, and I’m not mad, and I beg you to leave off
looking after me.”
The deacon came in, and seeing Laevsky pale and gesticulating,
addressing his strange speech to the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, stood still

by the door as though petrified.
“This continual prying into my soul,” Laevsky went on, “is insulting to
my human dignity, and I beg these volunteer detectives to give up their
spying! Enough!”
“What’s that . . . what did you say?” said Samoylenko, who had counted
up to a hundred. He turned crimson and went up to Laevsky.
“It’s enough,” said Laevsky, breathing hard and snatching up his cap.
“I’m a Russian doctor, a nobleman by birth, and a civil councillor,” said
Samoylenko emphatically. “I’ve never been a spy, and I allow no one to
insult me!” he shouted in a breaking voice, emphasising the last word.
“Hold your tongue!”
The deacon, who had never seen the doctor so majestic, so swelling with
dignity, so crimson and so ferocious, shut his mouth, ran out into the entry
and there exploded with laughter.
As though through a fog, Laevsky saw Von Koren get up and, putting his
hands in his trouser-pockets, stand still in an attitude of expectancy, as
though waiting to see what would happen. This calm attitude struck
Laevsky as insolent and insulting to the last degree.
“Kindly take back your words,” shouted Samoylenko.
Laevsky, who did not by now remember what his words were, answered:
“Leave me alone! I ask for nothing. All I ask is that you and German
upstarts of Jewish origin should let me alone! Or I shall take steps to make
you! I will fight you!”
“Now we understand,” said Von Koren, coming from behind the table.
“Mr. Laevsky wants to amuse himself with a duel before he goes away. I
can give him that pleasure. Mr. Laevsky, I accept your challenge.”
“A challenge,” said Laevsky, in a low voice, going up to the zoologist
and looking with hatred at his swarthy brow and curly hair. “A challenge?
By all means! I hate you! I hate you!”

“Delighted. To-morrow morning early near Kerbalay’s. I leave all details
to your taste. And now, clear out!”
“I hate you,” Laevsky said softly, breathing hard. “I have hated you a
long while! A duel! Yes!”
“Get rid of him, Alexandr Daviditch, or else I’m going,” said Von Koren.
“He’ll bite me.”
Von Koren’s cool tone calmed the doctor; he seemed suddenly to come to
himself, to recover his reason; he put both arms round Laevsky’s waist, and,
leading him away from the zoologist, muttered in a friendly voice that
shook with emotion:
“My friends . . . dear, good . . . you’ve lost your tempers and that’s
enough . . . and that’s enough, my friends.”
Hearing his soft, friendly voice, Laevsky felt that something unheard of,
monstrous, had just happened to him, as though he had been nearly run over
by a train; he almost burst into tears, waved his hand, and ran out of the
room.
“To feel that one is hated, to expose oneself before the man who hates
one, in the most pitiful, contemptible, helpless state. My God, how hard it
is!” he thought a little while afterwards as he sat in the pavilion, feeling as
though his body were scarred by the hatred of which he had just been the
object.
“How coarse it is, my God!”
Cold water with brandy in it revived him. He vividly pictured Von
Koren’s calm, haughty face; his eyes the day before, his shirt like a rug, his
voice, his white hand; and heavy, passionate, hungry hatred rankled in his
breast and clamoured for satisfaction. In his thoughts he felled Von Koren
to the ground, and trampled him underfoot. He remembered to the minutest
detail all that had happened, and wondered how he could have smiled
ingratiatingly to that insignificant man, and how he could care for the
opinion of wretched petty people whom nobody knew, living in a miserable
little town which was not, it seemed, even on the map, and of which not one
decent person in Petersburg had heard. If this wretched little town suddenly

fell into ruins or caught fire, the telegram with the news would be read in
Russia with no more interest than an advertisement of the sale of second-
hand furniture. Whether he killed Von Koren next day or left him alive, it
would be just the same, equally useless and uninteresting. Better to shoot
him in the leg or hand, wound him, then laugh at him, and let him, like an
insect with a broken leg lost in the grass—let him be lost with his obscure
sufferings in the crowd of insignificant people like himself.
Laevsky went to Sheshkovsky, told him all about it, and asked him to be
his second; then they both went to the superintendent of the postal telegraph
department, and asked him, too, to be a second, and stayed to dinner with
him. At dinner there was a great deal of joking and laughing. Laevsky made
jests at his own expense, saying he hardly knew how to fire off a pistol,
calling himself a royal archer and William Tell.
“We must give this gentleman a lesson . . .” he said.
After dinner they sat down to cards. Laevsky played, drank wine, and
thought that duelling was stupid and senseless, as it did not decide the
question but only complicated it, but that it was sometimes impossible to
get on without it. In the given case, for instance, one could not, of course,
bring an action against Von Koren. And this duel was so far good in that it
made it impossible for Laevsky to remain in the town afterwards. He got a
little drunk and interested in the game, and felt at ease.
But when the sun had set and it grew dark, he was possessed by a feeling
of uneasiness. It was not fear at the thought of death, because while he was
dining and playing cards, he had for some reason a confident belief that the
duel would end in nothing; it was dread at the thought of something
unknown which was to happen next morning for the first time in his life,
and dread of the coming night. . . . He knew that the night would be long
and sleepless, and that he would have to think not only of Von Koren and
his hatred, but also of the mountain of lies which he had to get through, and
which he had not strength or ability to dispense with. It was as though he
had been taken suddenly ill; all at once he lost all interest in the cards and in
people, grew restless, and began asking them to let him go home. He was
eager to get into bed, to lie without moving, and to prepare his thoughts for

the night. Sheshkovsky and the postal superintendent saw him home and
went on to Von Koren’s to arrange about the duel.
Near his lodgings Laevsky met Atchmianov. The young man was
breathless and excited.
“I am looking for you, Ivan Andreitch,” he said. “I beg you to come
quickly. . . .”
“Where?”
“Some one wants to see you, some one you don’t know, about very
important business; he earnestly begs you to come for a minute. He wants
to speak to you of something. . . . For him it’s a question of life and death. .
. .” In his excitement Atchmianov spoke in a strong Armenian accent.
“Who is it?” asked Laevsky.
“He asked me not to tell you his name.”
“Tell him I’m busy; to-morrow, if he likes. . . .”
“How can you!” Atchmianov was aghast. “He wants to tell you
something very important for you . . . very important! If you don’t come,
something dreadful will happen.”
“Strange . . .” muttered Laevsky, unable to understand why Atchmianov
was so excited and what mysteries there could be in this dull, useless little
town.
“Strange,” he repeated in hesitation. “Come along, though; I don’t care.”
Atchmianov walked rapidly on ahead and Laevsky followed him. They
walked down a street, then turned into an alley.
“What a bore this is!” said Laevsky.
“One minute, one minute . . . it’s near.”
Near the old rampart they went down a narrow alley between two empty
enclosures, then they came into a sort of large yard and went towards a
small house.

“That’s Muridov’s, isn’t it?” asked Laevsky.
“Yes.”
“But why we’ve come by the back yards I don’t understand. We might
have come by the street; it’s nearer. . . .”
“Never mind, never mind. . . .”
It struck Laevsky as strange, too, that Atchmianov led him to a back
entrance, and motioned to him as though bidding him go quietly and hold
his tongue.
“This way, this way . . .” said Atchmianov, cautiously opening the door
and going into the passage on tiptoe. “Quietly, quietly, I beg you . . . they
may hear.”
He listened, drew a deep breath and said in a whisper:
“Open that door, and go in . . . don’t be afraid.”
Laevsky, puzzled, opened the door and went into a room with a low
ceiling and curtained windows.
There was a candle on the table.
“What do you want?” asked some one in the next room. “Is it you,
Muridov?”
Laevsky turned into that room and saw Kirilin, and beside him
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.
He didn’t hear what was said to him; he staggered back, and did not
know how he found himself in the street. His hatred for Von Koren and his
uneasiness—all had vanished from his soul. As he went home he waved his
right arm awkwardly and looked carefully at the ground under his feet,
trying to step where it was smooth. At home in his study he walked
backwards and forwards, rubbing his hands, and awkwardly shrugging his
shoulders and neck, as though his jacket and shirt were too tight; then he
lighted a candle and sat down to the table. . . .

XVI

“The ‘humane studies’ of which you speak will only satisfy human
thought when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress
side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or
in the monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but
I expect the earth will be covered with a crust of ice before it comes to pass.
Of all humane learning the most durable and living is, of course, the
teaching of Christ; but look how differently even that is interpreted! Some
teach that we must love all our neighbours but make an exception of
soldiers, criminals, and lunatics. They allow the first to be killed in war, the
second to be isolated or executed, and the third they forbid to marry. Other
interpreters teach that we must love all our neighbours without exception,
with no distinction of plus or minus. According to their teaching, if a
consumptive or a murderer or an epileptic asks your daughter in marriage,
you must let him have her. If crêtins go to war against the physically and
mentally healthy, don’t defend yourselves. This advocacy of love for love’s
sake, like art for art’s sake, if it could have power, would bring mankind in
the long run to complete extinction, and so would become the vastest crime
that has ever been committed upon earth. There are very many
interpretations, and since there are many of them, serious thought is not
satisfied by any one of them, and hastens to add its own individual
interpretation to the mass. For that reason you should never put a question
on a philosophical or so-called Christian basis; by so doing you only
remove the question further from solution.”
The deacon listened to the zoologist attentively, thought a little, and
asked:
“Have the philosophers invented the moral law which is innate in every
man, or did God create it together with the body?”
“I don’t know. But that law is so universal among all peoples and all ages
that I fancy we ought to recognise it as organically connected with man. It
is not invented, but exists and will exist. I don’t tell you that one day it will
be seen under the microscope, but its organic connection is shown, indeed,
by evidence: serious affections of the brain and all so-called mental

diseases, to the best of my belief, show themselves first of all in the
perversion of the moral law.”
“Good. So then, just as our stomach bids us eat, our moral sense bids us
love our neighbours. Is that it? But our natural man through self-love
opposes the voice of conscience and reason, and this gives rise to many
brain-racking questions. To whom ought we to turn for the solution of those
questions if you forbid us to put them on the philosophic basis?”
“Turn to what little exact science we have. Trust to evidence and the
logic of facts. It is true it is but little, but, on the other hand, it is less fluid
and shifting than philosophy. The moral law, let us suppose, demands that
you love your neighbour. Well? Love ought to show itself in the removal of
everything which in one way or another is injurious to men and threatens
them with danger in the present or in the future. Our knowledge and the
evidence tells us that the morally and physically abnormal are a menace to
humanity. If so you must struggle against the abnormal; if you are not able
to raise them to the normal standard you must have strength and ability to
render them harmless—that is, to destroy them.”
“So love consists in the strong overcoming the weak.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But you know the strong crucified our Lord Jesus Christ,” said the
deacon hotly.
“The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but the
weak. Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle for
existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement of the weak
and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that you succeeded in
instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form.
What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain
alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting
in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the
latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are
oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the
strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the
master. But we civilised men have crucified Christ, and we go on crucifying

Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . . And that something one ought
to raise up in ourselves, or there will be no end to these errors.”
“But what criterion have you to distinguish the strong from the weak?”
“Knowledge and evidence. The tuberculous and the scrofulous are
recognised by their diseases, and the insane and the immoral by their
actions.”
“But mistakes may be made!”
“Yes, but it’s no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when you are
threatened with the deluge!”
“That’s philosophy,” laughed the deacon.
“Not a bit of it. You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy that
you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract studies with
which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because they
abstract your minds from what is obvious. Look the devil straight in the
eye, and if he’s the devil, tell him he’s the devil, and don’t go calling to
Kant or Hegel for explanations.”
The zoologist paused and went on:
“Twice two’s four, and a stone’s a stone. Here to-morrow we have a duel.
You and I will say it’s stupid and absurd, that the duel is out of date, that
there is no real difference between the aristocratic duel and the drunken
brawl in the pot-house, and yet we shall not stop, we shall go there and
fight. So there is some force stronger than our reasoning. We shout that war
is plunder, robbery, atrocity, fratricide; we cannot look upon blood without
fainting; but the French or the Germans have only to insult us for us to feel
at once an exaltation of spirit; in the most genuine way we shout ‘Hurrah!’
and rush to attack the foe. You will invoke the blessing of God on our
weapons, and our valour will arouse universal and general enthusiasm.
Again it follows that there is a force, if not higher, at any rate stronger, than
us and our philosophy. We can no more stop it than that cloud which is
moving upwards over the sea. Don’t be hypocritical, don’t make a long
nose at it on the sly; and don’t say, ‘Ah, old-fashioned, stupid! Ah, it’s
inconsistent with Scripture!’ but look it straight in the face, recognise its

rational lawfulness, and when, for instance, it wants to destroy a rotten,
scrofulous, corrupt race, don’t hinder it with your pilules and misunderstood
quotations from the Gospel. Leskov has a story of a conscientious Danila
who found a leper outside the town, and fed and warmed him in the name
of love and of Christ. If that Danila had really loved humanity, he would
have dragged the leper as far as possible from the town, and would have
flung him in a pit, and would have gone to save the healthy. Christ, I hope,
taught us a rational, intelligent, practical love.”
“What a fellow you are!” laughed the deacon. “You don’t believe in
Christ. Why do you mention His name so often?”
“Yes, I do believe in Him. Only, of course, in my own way, not in yours.
Oh, deacon, deacon!” laughed the zoologist; he put his arm round the
deacon’s waist, and said gaily: “Well? Are you coming with us to the duel
to-morrow?”
“My orders don’t allow it, or else I should come.”
“What do you mean by ‘orders’?”
“I have been consecrated. I am in a state of grace.”
“Oh, deacon, deacon,” repeated Von Koren, laughing, “I love talking to
you.”
“You say you have faith,” said the deacon. “What sort of faith is it? Why,
I have an uncle, a priest, and he believes so that when in time of drought he
goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes his umbrella and leather
overcoat for fear of getting wet through on his way home. That’s faith!
When he speaks of Christ, his face is full of radiance, and all the peasants,
men and women, weep floods of tears. He would stop that cloud and put all
those forces you talk about to flight. Yes . . . faith moves mountains.”
The deacon laughed and slapped the zoologist on the shoulder.
“Yes . . .” he went on; “here you are teaching all the time, fathoming the
depths of the ocean, dividing the weak and the strong, writing books and
challenging to duels—and everything remains as it is; but, behold! some
feeble old man will mutter just one word with a holy spirit, or a new

Mahomet, with a sword, will gallop from Arabia, and everything will be
topsy-turvy, and in Europe not one stone will be left standing upon
another.”
“Well, deacon, that’s on the knees of the gods.”
“Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse still—
mere waste of time and nothing more.”
The doctor came into sight on the sea-front. He saw the deacon and the
zoologist, and went up to them.
“I believe everything is ready,” he said, breathing hard. “Govorovsky and
Boyko will be the seconds. They will start at five o’clock in the morning.
How it has clouded over,” he said, looking at the sky. “One can see nothing;
there will be rain directly.”
“I hope you are coming with us?” said the zoologist.
“No, God preserve me; I’m worried enough as it is. Ustimovitch is going
instead of me. I’ve spoken to him already.”
Far over the sea was a flash of lightning, followed by a hollow roll of
thunder.
“How stifling it is before a storm!” said Von Koren. “I bet you’ve been to
Laevsky already and have been weeping on his bosom.”
“Why should I go to him?” answered the doctor in confusion. “What
next?”
Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and the
street in the hope of meeting Laevsky. He was ashamed of his hastiness and
the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed it. He wanted to
apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him a good talking to, to
soothe him and to tell him that the duel was a survival of mediæval
barbarism, but that Providence itself had brought them to the duel as a
means of reconciliation; that the next day, both being splendid and highly
intelligent people, they would, after exchanging shots, appreciate each
other’s noble qualities and would become friends. But he could not come
across Laevsky.

“What should I go and see him for?” repeated Samoylenko. “I did not
insult him; he insulted me. Tell me, please, why he attacked me. What harm
had I done him? I go into the drawing-room, and, all of a sudden, without
the least provocation: ‘Spy!’ There’s a nice thing! Tell me, how did it begin?
What did you say to him?”
“I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. It is only honest
men or scoundrels who can find an escape from any position, but one who
wants to be at the same time an honest man and a scoundrel —it is a
hopeless position. But it’s eleven o’clock, gentlemen, and we have to be up
early to-morrow.”
There was a sudden gust of wind; it blew up the dust on the sea-front,
whirled it round in eddies, with a howl that drowned the roar of the sea.
“A squall,” said the deacon. “We must go in, our eyes are getting full of
dust.”
As they went, Samoylenko sighed and, holding his hat, said:
“I suppose I shan’t sleep to-night.”
“Don’t you agitate yourself,” laughed the zoologist. “You can set your
mind at rest; the duel will end in nothing. Laevsky will magnanimously fire
into the air—he can do nothing else; and I daresay I shall not fire at all. To
be arrested and lose my time on Laevsky’s account—the game’s not worth
the candle. By the way, what is the punishment for duelling?”
“Arrest, and in the case of the death of your opponent a maximum of
three years’ imprisonment in the fortress.”
“The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul?”
“No, in a military fortress, I believe.”
“Though this fine gentleman ought to have a lesson!”
Behind them on the sea, there was a flash of lightning, which for an
instant lighted up the roofs of the houses and the mountains. The friends
parted near the boulevard. When the doctor disappeared in the darkness and
his steps had died away, Von Koren shouted to him:

“I only hope the weather won’t interfere with us to-morrow!”
“Very likely it will! Please God it may!”
“Good-night!”
“What about the night? What do you say?”
In the roar of the wind and the sea and the crashes of thunder, it was
difficult to hear.

“It’s nothing,” shouted the zoologist, and hurried home.

XVII

“Upon my mind, weighed down with woe,
Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds
Her long, long scroll before my eyes.
Loathing and shuddering I curse
And bitterly lament in vain,
And bitter though the tears I weep
I do not wash those lines away.”

PUSHKIN.

Whether they killed him next morning, or mocked at him—that is, left
him his life—he was ruined, anyway. Whether this disgraced woman killed
herself in her shame and despair, or dragged on her pitiful existence, she
was ruined anyway.
So thought Laevsky as he sat at the table late in the evening, still rubbing
his hands. The windows suddenly blew open with a bang; a violent gust of
wind burst into the room, and the papers fluttered from the table. Laevsky
closed the windows and bent down to pick up the papers. He was aware of
something new in his body, a sort of awkwardness he had not felt before,
and his movements were strange to him. He moved timidly, jerking with his
elbows and shrugging his shoulders; and when he sat down to the table
again, he again began rubbing his hands. His body had lost its suppleness.
On the eve of death one ought to write to one’s nearest relation. Laevsky
thought of this. He took a pen and wrote with a tremulous hand:
“Mother!”
He wanted to write to beg his mother, for the sake of the merciful God in
whom she believed, that she would give shelter and bring a little warmth
and kindness into the life of the unhappy woman who, by his doing, had
been disgraced and was in solitude, poverty, and weakness, that she would
forgive and forget everything, everything, everything, and by her sacrifice
atone to some extent for her son’s terrible sin. But he remembered how his
mother, a stout, heavily-built old woman in a lace cap, used to go out into

the garden in the morning, followed by her companion with the lap-dog;
how she used to shout in a peremptory way to the gardener and the servants,
and how proud and haughty her face was—he remembered all this and
scratched out the word he had written.
There was a vivid flash of lightning at all three windows, and it was
followed by a prolonged, deafening roll of thunder, beginning with a hollow
rumble and ending with a crash so violent that all the window-panes rattled.
Laevsky got up, went to the window, and pressed his forehead against the
pane. There was a fierce, magnificent storm. On the horizon lightning-
flashes were flung in white streams from the storm-clouds into the sea,
lighting up the high, dark waves over the far-away expanse. And to right
and to left, and, no doubt, over the house too, the lightning flashed.
“The storm!” whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some one
or to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds. “Dear storm!”
He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without
a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue
eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain; they
laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder, the girls
used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed himself and made
haste to repeat: “Holy, holy, holy. . . .” Oh, where had they vanished to! In
what sea were they drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had
no fear of the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the
confiding girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and
those like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden,
nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had not saved
one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie. . . .
“What in my past was not vice?” he asked himself, trying to clutch at
some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches at the
bushes.
School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his work
and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country? That, too, was
a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a salary for doing nothing,
and it was an abominable swindling of the State for which one was not
punished.

He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by vice
and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a stranger, like an
alien from another planet, he had taken no part in the common life of men,
had been indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas, their religion, their
sciences, their strivings, and their struggles. He had not said one good word,
not written one line that was not useless and vulgar; he had not done his
fellows one ha’p’orth of service, but had eaten their bread, drunk their wine,
seduced their wives, lived on their thoughts, and to justify his contemptible,
parasitic life in their eyes and in his own, he had always tried to assume an
air of being higher and better than they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .
He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov’s, and
he was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and
Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had
begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young weak
woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of her
husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her here—to the
heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was bound to
reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his viciousness and falsity—and that was
all she had had to fill her weak, listless, pitiable life. Then he had grown
sick of her, had begun to hate her, but had not had the pluck to abandon her,
and he had tried to entangle her more and more closely in a web of lies. . . .
These men had done the rest.
Laevsky sat at the table, then got up and went to the window; at one
minute he put out the candle and then he lighted it again. He cursed himself
aloud, wept and wailed, and asked forgiveness; several times he ran to the
table in despair, and wrote:
“Mother!”
Except his mother, he had no relations or near friends; but how could his
mother help him? And where was she? He had an impulse to run to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands and 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 repeated, rubbing his hands. “Why am I still alive,
my God! . . .”

He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track was lost
in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky again, because life
was given only once and never came a second time. If he could have turned
back the days and years of the past, he would have replaced the falsity with
truth, the idleness with work, the boredom with happiness; he would have
given back purity to those whom he had robbed of it. He would have found
God and goodness, but that was as impossible as to put back the fallen star
into the sky, and because it was impossible he was in despair.
When the storm was over, he sat by the open window and thought calmly
of what was before him. Von Koren would most likely kill him. The man’s
clear, cold theory of life justified the destruction of the rotten and the
useless; if it changed at the crucial moment, it would be the hatred and the
repugnance that Laevsky inspired in him that would save him. If he missed
his aim or, in mockery of his hated opponent, only wounded him, or fired in
the air, what could he do then? Where could he go?
“Go to Petersburg?” Laevsky asked himself. But that would mean
beginning over again the old life which he cursed. And the man who seeks
salvation in change of place like a migrating bird would find nothing
anywhere, for all the world is alike to him. Seek salvation in men? In whom
and how? Samoylenko’s kindness and generosity could no more save him
than the deacon’s laughter or Von Koren’s hatred. He must look for
salvation in himself alone, and if there were no finding it, why waste time?
He must kill himself, that was all. . . .
He heard the sound of a carriage. It was getting light. The carriage passed
by, turned, and crunching on the wet sand, stopped near the house. There
were two men in the carriage.
“Wait a minute; I’m coming directly,” Laevsky said to them out of the
window. “I’m not asleep. Surely it’s not time yet?”
“Yes, it’s four o’clock. By the time we get there . . . .”
Laevsky put on his overcoat and cap, put some cigarettes in his pocket,
and stood still hesitating. He felt as though there was something else he
must do. In the street the seconds talked in low voices and the horses
snorted, and this sound in the damp, early morning, when everybody was

asleep and light was hardly dawning in the sky, filled Laevsky’s soul with a
disconsolate feeling which was like a presentiment of evil. He stood for a
little, hesitating, and went into the bedroom.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was lying stretched out on the bed, wrapped
from head to foot in a rug. She did not stir, and her whole appearance,
especially her head, suggested an Egyptian mummy. Looking at her in
silence, Laevsky mentally asked her forgiveness, and thought that if the
heavens were not empty and there really were a God, then He would save
her; if there were no God, then she had better perish—there was nothing for
her to live for.
All at once she jumped up, and sat up in bed. Lifting her pale face and
looking with horror at Laevsky, she asked:
“Is it you? Is the storm over?”
“Yes.”
She remembered; put both hands to her head and shuddered all over.
“How miserable I am!” she said. “If only you knew how miserable I am!
I expected,” she went on, half closing her eyes, “that you would kill me or
turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay . . . delay . .
.”
Warmly and impulsively he put his arms round her and covered her knees
and hands with kisses. Then when she muttered something and shuddered
with the thought of the past, he stroked her hair, and looking into her face,
realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear
to him, whom no one could replace.
When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to
return home alive.

XVIII

The deacon got up, dressed, took his thick, gnarled stick and slipped
quietly out of the house. It was dark, and for the first minute when he went
into the street, he could not even see his white stick. There was not a single

star in the sky, and it looked as though there would be rain again. There was
a smell of wet sand and sea.
“It’s to be hoped that the mountaineers won’t attack us,” thought the
deacon, hearing the tap of the stick on the pavement, and noticing how loud
and lonely the taps sounded in the stillness of the night.
When he got out of town, he began to see both the road and his stick.
Here and there in the black sky there were dark cloudy patches, and soon a
star peeped out and timidly blinked its one eye. The deacon walked along
the high rocky coast and did not see the sea; it was slumbering below, and
its unseen waves broke languidly and heavily on the shore, as though
sighing “Ouf!” and how slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time to
count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before,
nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid,
drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway,
inconceivable time when God moved above chaos.
The deacon felt uncanny. He hoped God would not punish him for
keeping company with infidels, and even going to look at their duels. The
duel would be nonsensical, bloodless, absurd, but however that might be, it
was a heathen spectacle, and it was altogether unseemly for an
ecclesiastical person to be present at it. He stopped and wondered—should
he go back? But an intense, restless curiosity triumphed over his doubts,
and he went on.
“Though they are infidels they are good people, and will be saved,” he
assured himself. “They are sure to be saved,” he said aloud, lighting a
cigarette.
By what standard must one measure men’s qualities, to judge rightly of
them? The deacon remembered his enemy, the inspector of the clerical
school, who believed in God, lived in chastity, and did not fight duels; but
he used to feed the deacon on bread with sand in it, and on one occasion
almost pulled off the deacon’s ear. If human life was so artlessly
constructed that every one respected this cruel and dishonest inspector who
stole the Government flour, and his health and salvation were prayed for in
the schools, was it just to shun such men as Von Koren and Laevsky, simply
because they were unbelievers? The deacon was weighing this question, but

he recalled how absurd Samoylenko had looked yesterday, and that broke
the thread of his ideas. What fun they would have next day! The deacon
imagined how he would sit under a bush and look on, and when Von Koren
began boasting next day at dinner, he, the deacon, would begin laughing
and telling him all the details of the duel.
“How do you know all about it?” the zoologist would ask.
“Well, there you are! I stayed at home, but I know all about it.”
It would be nice to write a comic description of the duel. His father-in-
law would read it and laugh. A good story, told or written, was more than
meat and drink to his father-in-law.
The valley of the Yellow River opened before him. The stream was
broader and fiercer for the rain, and instead of murmuring as before, it was
raging. It began to get light. The grey, dingy morning, and the clouds racing
towards the west to overtake the storm-clouds, the mountains girt with mist,
and the wet trees, all struck the deacon as ugly and sinister. He washed at
the brook, repeated his morning prayer, and felt a longing for tea and hot
rolls, with sour cream, which were served every morning at his father-in-
law’s. He remembered his wife and the “Days past Recall,” which she
played on the piano. What sort of woman was she? His wife had been
introduced, betrothed, and married to him all in one week: he had lived with
her less than a month when he was ordered here, so that he had not had time
to find out what she was like. All the same, he rather missed her.
“I must write her a nice letter . . .” he thought. The flag on the duhan
hung limp, soaked by the rain, and the duhan itself with its wet roof seemed
darker and lower than it had been before. Near the door was standing a cart;
Kerbalay, with two mountaineers and a young Tatar woman in trousers—no
doubt Kerbalay’s wife or daughter—were bringing sacks of something out
of the duhan, and putting them on maize straw in the cart.
Near the cart stood a pair of asses hanging their heads. When they had
put in all the sacks, the mountaineers and the Tatar woman began covering
them over with straw, while Kerbalay began hurriedly harnessing the asses.
“Smuggling, perhaps,” thought the deacon.

Here was the fallen tree with the dried pine-needles, here was the
blackened patch from the fire. He remembered the picnic and all its
incidents, the fire, the singing of the mountaineers, his sweet dreams of
becoming a bishop, and of the Church procession. . . . The Black River had
grown blacker and broader with the rain. The deacon walked cautiously
over the narrow bridge, which by now was reached by the topmost crests of
the dirty water, and went up through the little copse to the drying-shed.
“A splendid head,” he thought, stretching himself on the straw, and
thinking of Von Koren. “A fine head—God grant him health; only there is
cruelty in him. . . .”
Why did he hate Laevsky and Laevsky hate him? Why were they going
to fight a duel? If from their childhood they had known poverty as the
deacon had; if they had been brought up among ignorant, hard-hearted,
grasping, coarse and ill-mannered people who grudged you a crust of bread,
who spat on the floor and hiccoughed at dinner and at prayers; if they had
not been spoilt from childhood by the pleasant surroundings and the select
circle of friends they lived in—how they would have rushed at each other,
how readily they would have overlooked each other’s shortcomings and
would have prized each other’s strong points! Why, how few even
outwardly decent people there were in the world! It was true that Laevsky
was flighty, dissipated, queer, but he did not steal, did not spit loudly on the
floor; he did not abuse his wife and say, “You’ll eat till you burst, but you
don’t want to work;” he would not beat a child with reins, or give his
servants stinking meat to eat— surely this was reason enough to be
indulgent to him? Besides, he was the chief sufferer from his failings, like a
sick man from his sores. Instead of being led by boredom and some sort of
misunderstanding to look for degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other
such incomprehensible things in each other, would they not do better to
stoop a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets
resounded with moanings from coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity,
swearing, the shrieks of women. . . .
The sound of a carriage interrupted the deacon’s thoughts. He glanced
out of the door and saw a carriage and in it three persons: Laevsky,
Sheshkovsky, and the superintendent of the post-office.

“Stop!” said Sheshkovsky.
All three got out of the carriage and looked at one another.
“They are not here yet,” said Sheshkovsky, shaking the mud off. “Well?
Till the show begins, let us go and find a suitable spot; there’s not room to
turn round here.”
They went further up the river and soon vanished from sight. The Tatar
driver sat in the carriage with his head resting on his shoulder and fell
asleep. After waiting ten minutes the deacon came out of the drying-shed,
and taking off his black hat that he might not be noticed, he began threading
his way among the bushes and strips of maize along the bank, crouching
and looking about him. The grass and maize were wet, and big drops fell on
his head from the trees and bushes. “Disgraceful!” he muttered, picking up
his wet and muddy skirt. “Had I realised it, I would not have come.”
Soon he heard voices and caught sight of them. Laevsky was walking
rapidly to and fro in the small glade with bowed back and hands thrust in
his sleeves; his seconds were standing at the water’s edge, rolling cigarettes.
“Strange,” thought the deacon, not recognising Laevsky’s walk; “he
looks like an old man. . . .”
“How rude it is of them!” said the superintendent of the post-office,
looking at his watch. “It may be learned manners to be late, but to my
thinking it’s hoggish.”
Sheshkovsky, a stout man with a black beard, listened and said:
“They’re coming!”

XIX

“It’s the first time in my life I’ve seen it! How glorious!” said Von Koren,
pointing to the glade and stretching out his hands to the east. “Look: green
rays!”
In the east behind the mountains rose two green streaks of light, and it
really was beautiful. The sun was rising.

“Good-morning!” the zoologist went on, nodding to Laevsky’s seconds.
“I’m not late, am I?”
He was followed by his seconds, Boyko and Govorovsky, two very
young officers of the same height, wearing white tunics, and Ustimovitch,
the thin, unsociable doctor; in one hand he had a bag of some sort, and in
the other hand, as usual, a cane which he held behind him. Laying the bag
on the ground and greeting no one, he put the other hand, too, behind his
back and began pacing up and down the glade.
Laevsky felt the exhaustion and awkwardness of a man who is soon
perhaps to die, and is for that reason an object of general attention. He
wanted to be killed as soon as possible or taken home. He saw the sunrise
now for the first time in his life; the early morning, the green rays of light,
the dampness, and the men in wet boots, seemed to him to have nothing to
do with his life, to be superfluous and embarrassing. All this had no
connection with the night he had been through, with his thoughts and his
feeling of guilt, and so he would have gladly gone away without waiting for
the duel.
Von Koren was noticeably excited and tried to conceal it, pretending that
he was more interested in the green light than anything. The seconds were
confused, and looked at one another as though wondering why they were
here and what they were to do.
“I imagine, gentlemen, there is no need for us to go further,” said
Sheshkovsky. “This place will do.”
“Yes, of course,” Von Koren agreed.
A silence followed. Ustimovitch, pacing to and fro, suddenly turned
sharply to Laevsky and said in a low voice, breathing into his face:
“They have very likely not told you my terms yet. Each side is to pay me
fifteen roubles, and in the case of the death of one party, the survivor is to
pay thirty.”
Laevsky was already acquainted with the man, but now for the first time
he had a distinct view of his lustreless eyes, his stiff moustaches, and

wasted, consumptive neck; he was a money-grubber, not a doctor; his
breath had an unpleasant smell of beef.
“What people there are in the world!” thought Laevsky, and answered:
“Very good.”
The doctor nodded and began pacing to and fro again, and it was evident
he did not need the money at all, but simply asked for it from hatred. Every
one felt it was time to begin, or to end what had been begun, but instead of
beginning or ending, they stood about, moved to and fro and smoked. The
young officers, who were present at a duel for the first time in their lives,
and even now hardly believed in this civilian and, to their thinking,
unnecessary duel, looked critically at their tunics and stroked their sleeves.
Sheshkovsky went up to them and said softly: “Gentlemen, we must use
every effort to prevent this duel; they ought to be reconciled.”
He flushed crimson and added:
“Kirilin was at my rooms last night complaining that Laevsky had found
him with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and all that sort of thing.”
“Yes, we know that too,” said Boyko.
“Well, you see, then . . . Laevsky’s hands are trembling and all that sort
of thing . . . he can scarcely hold a pistol now. To fight with him is as
inhuman as to fight a man who is drunk or who has typhoid. If a
reconciliation cannot be arranged, we ought to put off the duel, gentlemen,
or something. . . . It’s such a sickening business, I can’t bear to see it.”
“Talk to Von Koren.”
“I don’t know the rules of duelling, damnation take them, and I don’t
want to either; perhaps he’ll imagine Laevsky funks it and has sent me to
him, but he can think what he likes—I’ll speak to him.”
Sheshkovsky hesitatingly walked up to Von Koren with a slight limp, as
though his leg had gone to sleep; and as he went towards him, clearing his
throat, his whole figure was a picture of indolence.
“There’s something I must say to you, sir,” he began, carefully
scrutinising the flowers on the zoologist’s shirt. “It’s confidential. I don’t

know the rules of duelling, damnation take them, and I don’t want to, and I
look on the matter not as a second and that sort of thing, but as a man, and
that’s all about it.”
“Yes. Well?”
“When seconds suggest reconciliation they are usually not listened to; it
is looked upon as a formality. Amour propre and all that. But I humbly beg
you to look carefully at Ivan Andreitch. He’s not in a normal state, so to
speak, to-day—not in his right mind, and a pitiable object. He has had a
misfortune. I can’t endure gossip. . . .”
Sheshkovsky flushed crimson and looked round.
“But in view of the duel, I think it necessary to inform you, Laevsky
found his madam last night at Muridov’s with . . . another gentleman.”
“How disgusting!” muttered the zoologist; he turned pale, frowned, and
spat loudly. “Tfoo!”
His lower lip quivered, he walked away from Sheshkovsky, unwilling to
hear more, and as though he had accidentally tasted something bitter, spat
loudly again, and for the first time that morning looked with hatred at
Laevsky. His excitement and awkwardness passed off; he tossed his head
and said aloud:
“Gentlemen, what are we waiting for, I should like to know? Why don’t
we begin?”
Sheshkovsky glanced at the officers and shrugged his shoulders.
“Gentlemen,” he said aloud, addressing no one in particular. “Gentlemen,
we propose that you should be reconciled.”
“Let us make haste and get the formalities over,” said Von Koren.
“Reconciliation has been discussed already. What is the next formality?
Make haste, gentlemen, time won’t wait for us.”
“But we insist on reconciliation all the same,” said Sheshkovsky in a
guilty voice, as a man compelled to interfere in another man’s business; he
flushed, laid his hand on his heart, and went on: “Gentlemen, we see no

grounds for associating the offence with the duel. There’s nothing in
common between duelling and offences against one another of which we
are sometimes guilty through human weakness. You are university men and
men of culture, and no doubt you see in the duel nothing but a foolish and
out-of-date formality, and all that sort of thing. That’s how we look at it
ourselves, or we shouldn’t have come, for we cannot allow that in our
presence men should fire at one another, and all that.” Sheshkovsky wiped
the perspiration off his face and went on: “Make an end to your
misunderstanding, gentlemen; shake hands, and let us go home and drink to
peace. Upon my honour, gentlemen!”
Von Koren did not speak. Laevsky, seeing that they were looking at him,
said:
“I have nothing against Nikolay Vassilitch; if he considers I’m to blame,
I’m ready to apologise to him.”
Von Koren was offended.
“It is evident, gentlemen,” he said, “you want Mr. Laevsky to return
home a magnanimous and chivalrous figure, but I cannot give you and him
that satisfaction. And there was no need to get up early and drive eight
miles out of town simply to drink to peace, to have breakfast, and to explain
to me that the duel is an out-of-date formality. A duel is a duel, and there is
no need to make it more false and stupid than it is in reality. I want to
fight!”
A silence followed. Boyko took a pair of pistols out of a box; one was
given to Von Koren and one to Laevsky, and then there followed a difficulty
which afforded a brief amusement to the zoologist and the seconds. It
appeared that of all the people present not one had ever in his life been at a
duel, and no one knew precisely how they ought to stand, and what the
seconds ought to say and do. But then Boyko remembered and began, with
a smile, to explain.
“Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?” asked Von
Koren, laughing. “In Turgenev, too, Bazarov had a duel with some one. . . .”
“There’s no need to remember,” said Ustimovitch impatiently. “Measure
the distance, that’s all.”

And he took three steps as though to show how to measure it. Boyko
counted out the steps while his companion drew his sabre and scratched the
earth at the extreme points to mark the barrier. In complete silence the
opponents took their places.
“Moles,” the deacon thought, sitting in the bushes.
Sheshkovsky said something, Boyko explained something again, but
Laevsky did not hear—or rather heard, but did not understand. He cocked
his pistol when the time came to do so, and raised the cold, heavy weapon
with the barrel upwards. He forgot to unbutton his overcoat, and it felt very
tight over his shoulder and under his arm, and his arm rose as awkwardly as
though the sleeve had been cut out of tin. He remembered the hatred he had
felt the night before for the swarthy brow and curly hair, and felt that even
yesterday at the moment of intense hatred and anger he could not have shot
a man. Fearing that the bullet might somehow hit Von Koren by accident,
he raised the pistol higher and higher, and felt that this too obvious
magnanimity was indelicate and anything but magnanimous, but he did not
know how else to do and could do nothing else. Looking at the pale,
ironically smiling face of Von Koren, who evidently had been convinced
from the beginning that his opponent would fire in the air, Laevsky thought
that, thank God, everything would be over directly, and all that he had to do
was to press the trigger rather hard. . . .
He felt a violent shock on the shoulder; there was the sound of a shot and
an answering echo in the mountains: ping-ting!
Von Koren cocked his pistol and looked at Ustimovitch, who was pacing
as before with his hands behind his back, taking no notice of any one.
“Doctor,” said the zoologist, “be so good as not to move to and fro like a
pendulum. You make me dizzy.”
The doctor stood still. Von Koren began to take aim at Laevsky.
“It’s all over!” thought Laevsky.
The barrel of the pistol aimed straight at his face, the expression of hatred
and contempt in Von Koren’s attitude and whole figure, and the murder just
about to be committed by a decent man in broad daylight, in the presence of

decent men, and the stillness and the unknown force that compelled
Laevsky to stand still and not to run —how mysterious it all was, how
incomprehensible and terrible!
The moment while Von Koren was taking aim seemed to Laevsky longer
than a night: he glanced imploringly at the seconds; they were pale and did
not stir.
“Make haste and fire,” thought Laevsky, and felt that his pale, quivering,
and pitiful face must arouse even greater hatred in Von Koren.
“I’ll kill him directly,” thought Von Koren, aiming at his forehead, with
his finger already on the catch. “Yes, of course I’ll kill him.”
“He’ll kill him!” A despairing shout was suddenly heard somewhere very
close at hand.
A shot rang out at once. Seeing that Laevsky remained standing where he
was and did not fall, they all looked in the direction from which the shout
had come, and saw the deacon. With pale face and wet hair sticking to his
forehead and his cheeks, wet through and muddy, he was standing in the
maize on the further bank, smiling rather queerly and waving his wet hat.
Sheshkovsky laughed with joy, burst into tears, and moved away. . . .

XX

A little while afterwards, Von Koren and the deacon met near the little
bridge. The deacon was excited; he breathed hard, and avoided looking in
people’s faces. He felt ashamed both of his terror and his muddy, wet
garments.
“I thought you meant to kill him . . .” he muttered. “How contrary to
human nature it is! How utterly unnatural it is!”
“But how did you come here?” asked the zoologist.
“Don’t ask,” said the deacon, waving his hand. “The evil one tempted
me, saying: ‘Go, go. . . .’ So I went and almost died of fright in the maize.
But now, thank God, thank God. . . . I am awfully pleased with you,”
muttered the deacon. “Old Grandad Tarantula will be glad . . . . It’s funny,

it’s too funny! Only I beg of you most earnestly don’t tell anybody I was
there, or I may get into hot water with the authorities. They will say: ‘The
deacon was a second.’”
“Gentlemen,” said Von Koren, “the deacon asks you not to tell any one
you’ve seen him here. He might get into trouble.”
“How contrary to human nature it is!” sighed the deacon. “Excuse my
saying so, but your face was so dreadful that I thought you were going to
kill him.”
“I was very much tempted to put an end to that scoundrel,” said Von
Koren, “but you shouted close by, and I missed my aim. The whole
procedure is revolting to any one who is not used to it, and it has exhausted
me, deacon. I feel awfully tired. Come along. . . .”
“No, you must let me walk back. I must get dry, for I am wet and cold.”
“Well, as you like,” said the zoologist, in a weary tone, feeling dispirited,
and, getting into the carriage, he closed his eyes. “As you like. . . .”
While they were moving about the carriages and taking their seats,
Kerbalay stood in the road, and, laying his hands on his stomach, he bowed
low, showing his teeth; he imagined that the gentry had come to enjoy the
beauties of nature and drink tea, and could not understand why they were
getting into the carriages. The party set off in complete silence and only the
deacon was left by the duhan.
“Come to the duhan, drink tea,” he said to Kerbalay. “Me wants to eat.”
Kerbalay spoke good Russian, but the deacon imagined that the Tatar
would understand him better if he talked to him in broken Russian. “Cook
omelette, give cheese. . . .”
“Come, come, father,” said Kerbalay, bowing. “I’ll give you everything .
. . . I’ve cheese and wine. . . . Eat what you like.”
“What is ‘God’ in Tatar?” asked the deacon, going into the duhan.
“Your God and my God are the same,” said Kerbalay, not understanding
him. “God is the same for all men, only men are different. Some are

Russian, some are Turks, some are English—there are many sorts of men,
but God is one.”
“Very good. If all men worship the same God, why do you
Mohammedans look upon Christians as your everlasting enemies?”
“Why are you angry?” said Kerbalay, laying both hands on his stomach.
“You are a priest; I am a Mussulman: you say, ‘I want to eat’—I give it you.
. . . Only the rich man distinguishes your God from my God; for the poor
man it is all the same. If you please, it is ready.”
While this theological conversation was taking place at the duhan,
Laevsky was driving home thinking how dreadful it had been driving there
at daybreak, when the roads, the rocks, and the mountains were wet and
dark, and the uncertain future seemed like a terrible abyss, of which one
could not see the bottom; while now the raindrops hanging on the grass and
on the stones were sparkling in the sun like diamonds, nature was smiling
joyfully, and the terrible future was left behind. He looked at Sheshkovsky’s
sullen, tear-stained face, and at the two carriages ahead of them in which
Von Koren, his seconds, and the doctor were sitting, and it seemed to him as
though they were all coming back from a graveyard in which a wearisome,
insufferable man who was a burden to others had just been buried.
“Everything is over,” he thought of his past, cautiously touching his neck
with his fingers.
On the right side of his neck was a small swelling, of the length and
breadth of his little finger, and he felt a pain, as though some one had
passed a hot iron over his neck. The bullet had bruised it.
Afterwards, when he got home, a strange, long, sweet day began for him,
misty as forgetfulness. Like a man released from prison or from hospital, he
stared at the long-familiar objects and wondered that the tables, the
windows, the chairs, the light, and the sea stirred in him a keen, childish
delight such as he had not known for long, long years. Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, pale and haggard, could not understand his gentle voice and
strange movements; she made haste to tell him everything that had
happened to her. . . . It seemed to her that very likely he scarcely heard and
did not understand her, and that if he did know everything he would curse

her and kill her, but he listened to her, stroked her face and hair, looked into
her eyes and said:
“I have nobody but you. . . .”
Then they sat a long while in the garden, huddled close together, saying
nothing, or dreaming aloud of their happy life in the future, in brief, broken
sentences, while it seemed to him that he had never spoken at such length or
so eloquently.

XXI

More than three months had passed.
The day came that Von Koren had fixed on for his departure. A cold,
heavy rain had been falling from early morning, a north-east wind was
blowing, and the waves were high on the sea. It was said that the steamer
would hardly be able to come into the harbour in such weather. By the time-
table it should have arrived at ten o’clock in the morning, but Von Koren,
who had gone on to the sea-front at midday and again after dinner, could
see nothing through the field-glass but grey waves and rain covering the
horizon.
Towards the end of the day the rain ceased and the wind began to drop
perceptibly. Von Koren had already made up his mind that he would not be
able to get off that day, and had settled down to play chess with
Samoylenko; but after dark the orderly announced that there were lights on
the sea and that a rocket had been seen.
Von Koren made haste. He put his satchel over his shoulder, and kissed
Samoylenko and the deacon. Though there was not the slightest necessity,
he went through the rooms again, said good-bye to the orderly and the cook,
and went out into the street, feeling that he had left something behind, either
at the doctor’s or his lodging. In the street he walked beside Samoylenko,
behind them came the deacon with a box, and last of all the orderly with
two portmanteaus. Only Samoylenko and the orderly could distinguish the
dim lights on the sea. The others gazed into the darkness and saw nothing.
The steamer had stopped a long way from the coast.

“Make haste, make haste,” Von Koren hurried them. “I am afraid it will
set off.”
As they passed the little house with three windows, into which Laevsky
had moved soon after the duel, Von Koren could not resist peeping in at the
window. Laevsky was sitting, writing, bent over the table, with his back to
the window.
“I wonder at him!” said the zoologist softly. “What a screw he has put on
himself!”
“Yes, one may well wonder,” said Samoylenko. “He sits from morning
till night, he’s always at work. He works to pay off his debts. And he lives,
brother, worse than a beggar!”
Half a minute of silence followed. The zoologist, the doctor, and the
deacon stood at the window and went on looking at Laevsky.
“So he didn’t get away from here, poor fellow,” said Samoylenko. “Do
you remember how hard he tried?”
“Yes, he has put a screw on himself,” Von Koren repeated. “His marriage,
the way he works all day long for his daily bread, a new expression in his
face, and even in his walk—it’s all so extraordinary that I don’t know what
to call it.”
The zoologist took Samoylenko’s sleeve and went on with emotion in his
voice:
“You tell him and his wife that when I went away I was full of admiration
for them and wished them all happiness . . . and I beg him, if he can, not to
remember evil against me. He knows me. He knows that if I could have
foreseen this change, then I might have become his best friend.”
“Go in and say good-bye to him.”
“No, that wouldn’t do.”
“Why? God knows, perhaps you’ll never see him again.”
The zoologist reflected, and said:

“That’s true.”
Samoylenko tapped softly at the window. Laevsky started and looked
round.
“Vanya, Nikolay Vassilitch wants to say goodbye to you,” said
Samoylenko. “He is just going away.”
Laevsky got up from the table, and went into the passage to open the
door. Samoylenko, the zoologist, and the deacon went into the house.
“I can only come for one minute,” began the zoologist, taking off his
goloshes in the passage, and already wishing he had not given way to his
feelings and come in, uninvited. “It is as though I were forcing myself on
him,” he thought, “and that’s stupid.”
“Forgive me for disturbing you,” he said as he went into the room with
Laevsky, “but I’m just going away, and I had an impulse to see you. God
knows whether we shall ever meet again.”
“I am very glad to see you. . . . Please come in,” said Laevsky, and he
awkwardly set chairs for his visitors as though he wanted to bar their way,
and stood in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.
“I should have done better to have left my audience in the street,”
thought Von Koren, and he said firmly: “Don’t remember evil against me,
Ivan Andreitch. To forget the past is, of course, impossible —it is too
painful, and I’ve not come here to apologise or to declare that I was not to
blame. I acted sincerely, and I have not changed my convictions since then.
. . . It is true that I see, to my great delight, that I was mistaken in regard to
you, but it’s easy to make a false step even on a smooth road, and, in fact,
it’s the natural human lot: if one is not mistaken in the main, one is
mistaken in the details. Nobody knows the real truth.”
“No, no one knows the truth,” said Laevsky.
“Well, good-bye. . . . God give you all happiness.”
Von Koren gave Laevsky his hand; the latter took it and bowed.

“Don’t remember evil against me,” said Von Koren. “Give my greetings
to your wife, and say I am very sorry not to say good-bye to her.”
“She is at home.”
Laevsky went to the door of the next room, and said:
“Nadya, Nikolay Vassilitch wants to say goodbye to you.”
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna came in; she stopped near the doorway and
looked shyly at the visitors. There was a look of guilt and dismay on her
face, and she held her hands like a schoolgirl receiving a scolding.
“I’m just going away, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna,” said Von Koren, “and
have come to say good-bye.”
She held out her hand uncertainly, while Laevsky bowed.
“What pitiful figures they are, though!” thought Von Koren. “The life
they are living does not come easy to them. I shall be in Moscow and
Petersburg; can I send you anything?” he asked.
“Oh!” said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and she looked anxiously at her
husband. “I don’t think there’s anything. . . .”
“No, nothing . . .” said Laevsky, rubbing his hands. “Our greetings.”
Von Koren did not know what he could or ought to say, though as he
went in he thought he would say a very great deal that would be warm and
good and important. He shook hands with Laevsky and his wife in silence,
and left them with a depressed feeling.
“What people!” said the deacon in a low voice, as he walked behind
them. “My God, what people! Of a truth, the right hand of God has planted
this vine! Lord! Lord! One man vanquishes thousands and another tens of
thousands. Nikolay Vassilitch,” he said ecstatically, “let me tell you that to-
day you have conquered the greatest of man’s enemies—pride.”
“Hush, deacon! Fine conquerors we are! Conquerors ought to look like
eagles, while he’s a pitiful figure, timid, crushed; he bows like a Chinese
idol, and I, I am sad. . . .”

They heard steps behind them. It was Laevsky, hurrying after them to see
him off. The orderly was standing on the quay with the two portmanteaus,
and at a little distance stood four boatmen.
“There is a wind, though. . . . Brrr!” said Samoylenko. “There must be a
pretty stiff storm on the sea now! You are not going off at a nice time,
Koyla.”
“I’m not afraid of sea-sickness.”
“That’s not the point. . . . I only hope these rascals won’t upset you. You
ought to have crossed in the agent’s sloop. Where’s the agent’s sloop?” he
shouted to the boatmen.
“It has gone, Your Excellency.”
“And the Customs-house boat?”
“That’s gone, too.”
“Why didn’t you let us know,” said Samoylenko angrily. “You dolts!”
“It’s all the same, don’t worry yourself . . .” said Von Koren. “Well, good-
bye. God keep you.”
Samoylenko embraced Von Koren and made the sign of the cross over
him three times.
“Don’t forget us, Kolya. . . . Write. . . . We shall look out for you next
spring.”
“Good-bye, deacon,” said Von Koren, shaking hands with the deacon.
“Thank you for your company and for your pleasant conversation. Think
about the expedition.”
“Oh Lord, yes! to the ends of the earth,” laughed the deacon. “I’ve
nothing against it.”
Von Koren recognised Laevsky in the darkness, and held out his hand
without speaking. The boatmen were by now below, holding the boat,
which was beating against the piles, though the breakwater screened it from

the breakers. Von Koren went down the ladder, jumped into the boat, and
sat at the helm.
“Write!” Samoylenko shouted to him. “Take care of yourself.”
“No one knows the real truth,” thought Laevsky, turning up the collar of
his coat and thrusting his hands into his sleeves.
The boat turned briskly out of the harbour into the open sea. It vanished
in the waves, but at once from a deep hollow glided up onto a high breaker,
so that they could distinguish the men and even the oars. The boat moved
three yards forward and was sucked two yards back.
“Write!” shouted Samoylenko; “it’s devilish weather for you to go in.”
“Yes, no one knows the real truth . . .” thought Laevsky, looking wearily
at the dark, restless sea.
“It flings the boat back,” he thought; “she makes two steps forward and
one step back; but the boatmen are stubborn, they work the oars
unceasingly, and are not afraid of the high waves. The boat goes on and on.
Now she is out of sight, but in half an hour the boatmen will see the steamer
lights distinctly, and within an hour they will be by the steamer ladder. So it
is in life. . . . In the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one
step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but
the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows?
Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last.”
“Go—o—od-by—e,” shouted Samoylenko.
“There’s no sight or sound of them,” said the deacon. “Good luck on the
journey!”
It began to spot with rain.

EXCELLENT PEOPLE

O
NCE upon a time there lived in Moscow a man called Vladimir
Semyonitch Liadovsky. He took his degree at the university in the
faculty of law and had a post on the board of management of some
railway; but if you had asked him what his work was, he would look
candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold
pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone:
“My work is literature.”
After completing his course at the university, Vladimir Semyonitch had
had a paragraph of theatrical criticism accepted by a newspaper. From this
paragraph he passed on to reviewing, and a year later he had advanced to
writing a weekly article on literary matters for the same paper. But it does
not follow from these facts that he was an amateur, that his literary work
was of an ephemeral, haphazard character. Whenever I saw his neat spare
figure, his high forehead and long mane of hair, when I listened to his
speeches, it always seemed to me that his writing, quite apart from what and
how he wrote, was something organically part of him, like the beating of his
heart, and that his whole literary programme must have been an integral
part of his brain while he was a baby in his mother’s womb. Even in his
walk, his gestures, his manner of shaking off the ash from his cigarette, I
could read this whole programme from A to Z, with all its claptrap, dulness,
and honourable sentiments. He was a literary man all over when with an
inspired face he laid a wreath on the coffin of some celebrity, or with a
grave and solemn face collected signatures for some address; his passion for
making the acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his faculty for
finding talent even where it was absent, his perpetual enthusiasm, his pulse
that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his ignorance of life, the
genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw himself into concerts and
literary evenings for the benefit of destitute students, the way in which he
gravitated towards the young—all this would have created for him the
reputation of a writer even if he had not written his articles.

He was one of those writers to whom phrases like, “We are but few,” or
“What would life be without strife? Forward!” were pre-eminently
becoming, though he never strove with any one and never did go forward. It
did not even sound mawkish when he fell to discoursing of ideals. Every
anniversary of the university, on St. Tatiana’s Day, he got drunk, chanted
Gaudeamus out of tune, and his beaming and perspiring countenance
seemed to say: “See, I’m drunk; I’m keeping it up!” But even that suited
him.
Vladimir Semyonitch had genuine faith in his literary vocation and his
whole programme. He had no doubts, and was evidently very well pleased
with himself. Only one thing grieved him—the paper for which he worked
had a limited circulation and was not very influential. But Vladimir
Semyonitch believed that sooner or later he would succeed in getting on to
a solid magazine where he would have scope and could display himself—
and what little distress he felt on this score was pale beside the brilliance of
his hopes.
Visiting this charming man, I made the acquaintance of his sister, Vera
Semyonovna, a woman doctor. At first sight, what struck me about this
woman was her look of exhaustion and extreme ill-health. She was young,
with a good figure and regular, rather large features, but in comparison with
her agile, elegant, and talkative brother she seemed angular, listless,
slovenly, and sullen. There was something strained, cold, apathetic in her
movements, smiles, and words; she was not liked, and was thought proud
and not very intelligent.
In reality, I fancy, she was resting.
“My dear friend,” her brother would often say to me, sighing and flinging
back his hair in his picturesque literary way, “one must never judge by
appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read. It is warped,
tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but open it, and it will make you
weep and turn pale. My sister is like that book. Lift the cover and peep into
her soul, and you will be horror-stricken. Vera passed in some three months
through experiences that would have been ample for a whole lifetime!”
Vladimir Semyonitch looked round him, took me by the sleeve, and
began to whisper:

“You know, after taking her degree she married, for love, an architect. It’s
a complete tragedy! They had hardly been married a month when—whew—
her husband died of typhus. But that was not all. She caught typhus from
him, and when, on her recovery, she learnt that her Ivan was dead, she took
a good dose of morphia. If it had not been for vigorous measures taken by
her friends, my Vera would have been by now in Paradise. Tell me, isn’t it a
tragedy? And is not my sister like an ingénue, who has played already all
the five acts of her life? The audience may stay for the farce, but the
ingénue must go home to rest.”
After three months of misery Vera Semyonovna had come to live with
her brother. She was not fitted for the practice of medicine, which
exhausted her and did not satisfy her; she did not give one the impression of
knowing her subject, and I never once heard her say anything referring to
her medical studies.
She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a
prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless apathy, with bowed
head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not completely
indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the twilight of her life,
was the presence of her brother, whom she loved. She loved him himself
and his programme, she was full of reverence for his articles; and when she
was asked what her brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued
voice as though afraid of waking or distracting him: “He is writing. . . .”
Usually when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed
on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick animal
warming itself in the sun. . . .
One winter evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table writing
a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was sitting beside
him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic wrote rapidly, without
erasures or corrections. The pen scratched and squeaked. On the table near
the writing hand there lay open a freshly-cut volume of a thick magazine,
containing a story of peasant life, signed with two initials. Vladimir
Semyonitch was enthusiastic; he thought the author was admirable in his
handling of the subject, suggested Turgenev in his descriptions of nature,
was truthful, and had an excellent knowledge of the life of the peasantry.
The critic himself knew nothing of peasant life except from books and

hearsay, but his feelings and his inner convictions forced him to believe the
story. He foretold a brilliant future for the author, assured him he should
await the conclusion of the story with great impatience, and so on.
“Fine story!” he said, flinging himself back in his chair and closing his
eyes with pleasure. “The tone is extremely good.”
Vera Semyonovna looked at him, yawned aloud, and suddenly asked an
unexpected question. In the evening she had a habit of yawning nervously
and asking short, abrupt questions, not always relevant.
“Volodya,” she asked, “what is the meaning of non-resistance to evil?”
“Non-resistance to evil!” repeated her brother, opening his eyes.
“Yes. What do you understand by it?”
“You see, my dear, imagine that thieves or brigands attack you, and you,
instead of . . .”
“No, give me a logical definition.”
“A logical definition? Um! Well.” Vladimir Semyonitch pondered. “Non-
resistance to evil means an attitude of non-interference with regard to all
that in the sphere of mortality is called evil.”
Saying this, Vladimir Semyonitch bent over the table and took up a
novel. This novel, written by a woman, dealt with the painfulness of the
irregular position of a society lady who was living under the same roof with
her lover and her illegitimate child. Vladimir Semyonitch was pleased with
the excellent tendency of the story, the plot and the presentation of it.
Making a brief summary of the novel, he selected the best passages and
added to them in his account: “How true to reality, how living, how
picturesque! The author is not merely an artist; he is also a subtle
psychologist who can see into the hearts of his characters. Take, for
example, this vivid description of the emotions of the heroine on meeting
her husband,” and so on.
“Volodya,” Vera Semyonovna interrupted his critical effusions, “I’ve
been haunted by a strange idea since yesterday. I keep wondering where we

should all be if human life were ordered on the basis of non-resistance to
evil?”
“In all probability, nowhere. Non-resistance to evil would give the full
rein to the criminal will, and, to say nothing of civilisation, this would leave
not one stone standing upon another anywhere on earth.”
“What would be left?”
“Bashi-Bazouke and brothels. In my next article I’ll talk about that
perhaps. Thank you for reminding me.”
And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the period
—in the eighties—when people were beginning to talk and write of non-
resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war; when some people
in our set were beginning to do without servants, to retire into the country,
to work on the land, and to renounce animal food and carnal love.
After reading her brother’s article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and
hardly perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
“Very nice!” she said. “But still there’s a great deal I don’t understand.
For instance, in Leskov’s story ‘Belonging to the Cathedral’ there is a queer
gardener who sows for the benefit of all—for customers, for beggars, and
any who care to steal. Did he behave sensibly?”
From his sister’s tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that she
did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his life, his vanity as
an author sustained a shock. With a shade of irritation he answered:
“Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of thieves
to existence. What would you think if I were to establish a newspaper and,
dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing as well as for liberal
ideas? Following the example of that gardener, I ought, logically, to provide
a section for blackmailers, the intellectual scoundrels? Yes.”
Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved
languidly to the sofa and lay down.
“I don’t know, I know nothing about it,” she said musingly. “You are
probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there’s something

false in our resistance to evil, as though there were something concealed or
unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of resisting evil belong to the
category of prejudices which have become so deeply rooted in us, that we
are incapable of parting with them, and therefore cannot form a correct
judgment of them.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in
thinking that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do so, just as he is
mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart looks like an ace of hearts.
It is very possible in resisting evil we ought not to use force, but to use what
is the very opposite of force—if you, for instance, don’t want this picture
stolen from you, you ought to give it away rather than lock it up. . . .”
“That’s clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar woman, she
ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening to make me an
offer herself!”
The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each
other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have been able to
make out what either of them was driving at.
They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends’ houses to
which they could go, and they felt no need for friends; they only went to the
theatre when there was a new play—such was the custom in literary circles
—they did not go to concerts, for they did not care for music.
“You may think what you like,” Vera Semyonovna began again the next
day, “but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am firmly
convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed against me
personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending myself will not
make the murderer better. All I have now to decide is the second half of the
question: how I ought to behave to evil directed against my neighbours?”
“Vera, mind you don’t become rabid!” said Vladimir Semyonitch,
laughing. “I see non-resistance is becoming your idée fixe!”
He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but
somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour. His sister

gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently at his writing hand,
and he felt every evening that behind him on the sofa lay a person who did
not agree with him. And his back grew stiff and numb, and there was a chill
in his soul. An author’s vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of
forgiveness, and his sister was the first and only person who had laid bare
and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy
to unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.
Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and did
not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch was
sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a novel which
described how a village schoolmistress refused the man whom she loved
and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because
marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible. Vera Semyonovna
lay on the sofa and brooded.
“My God, how slow it is!” she said, stretching. “How insipid and empty
life is! I don’t know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your best
years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist, you are rummaging in
old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!”
Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.
“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister. “Wagner in ‘Faust’ dug up
worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are looking for
worms for the sake of the worms.”
“That’s vague!”
“Yes, Volodya; all these days I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you are
hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself what is the
object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it? Why,
everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from that
rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a
mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you’ll make nothing more of it
than the chemists have made already. . . .”

“Indeed!” drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. “Yes, all this is old
rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new,
then?”
“You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think of
something new. It’s not for me to teach you.”
“Me—an alchemist!” the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing
up his eyes ironically. “Art, progress—all that is alchemy?”
“You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had set
yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions that you fuss
about now would solve themselves by the way. If you go up in a balloon to
see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort, see the fields and the
villages and the rivers as well. When stearine is manufactured, you get
glycerine as a by-product. It seems to me that contemporary thought has
settled on one spot and stuck to it. It is prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to
take a wide titanic flight, just as you and I are afraid to climb on a high
mountain; it is conservative.”
Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister’s presence, and grew irritable when he
knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the sister
frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the past, he
attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she complained
of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and those who are
in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna
proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional,
that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already
served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She made no
end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time to an alchemist,
then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die than listen to reason. By
degrees there was a perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was
capable of lying on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her
face wore a cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of
strong faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and
tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.

Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at her
cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which was
always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained and
false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing he
could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her like a
schoolboy.
“You won’t resist evil, but you resist my having servants!” he taunted
her. “If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That’s inconsistent!”
He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his
sister began doing odd things before strangers.
“It’s awful, my dear fellow,” he said to me in private, waving his hands in
despair. “It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in the farce,
too. She’s become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I’ve washed my
hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she talk, why does she
excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to listen to her. What I
feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to support her errors by
blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It chokes me! It makes me
hot all over to hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort
the Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how
the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple. That’s, my dear fellow,
what comes of being half educated, undeveloped! That’s what comes of
medical studies which provide no general culture!”
One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found
his sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing
her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic’s good
heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he longed to pet
his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to live as they used to
before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . .
She smiled, smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy
jumped up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly:
“Hurrah! We’ll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God’s blessing! And
I’ve such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion with
champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
“I’ve read it already! I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”
“When did you read it?”
“A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I know it!”
“H’m! . . . You’re a fanatic!” her brother said coldly, flinging the
magazine on to the table.
“No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into
tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering shoulders,
and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness endured by any
one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of the inevitable
sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the outrage of his
programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he
endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old women
that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing with him and
met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a condescending silence
which irritated him more than ever.
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him on
the forehead.
“Where are you going?” he asked with surprise.
“To the province of N. to do vaccination work.” Her brother went out
into the street with her.
“So that’s what you’ve decided upon, you queer girl,” he muttered.
“Don’t you want some money?”
“No, thank you. Good-bye.”
The sister shook her brother’s hand and set off.
“Why don’t you have a cab?” cried Vladimir Semyonitch.

She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-
looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along, forced
himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of regret. His sister
had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger to her. Anyway, she
did not once look round.
Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.
I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know.
And Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths on
coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual Aid Society
of Moscow Journalists.
He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for three
months—at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn Hospital. An
abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought to be sent to the
Crimea, and began getting up a collection for him. But he did not go to the
Crimea—he died. We buried him in the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the left
side, where artists and literary men are buried.
One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars’ restaurant. I mentioned that
I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir
Semyonitch’s grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost
indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it was
necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in order.
But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and I
could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He
was utterly forgotten.

MIRE
I

G
RACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the
snow-white tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the vodka
distillery belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The sun smiled
carelessly on the lieutenant’s little stars, on the white trunks of the birch-
trees, on the heaps of broken glass scattered here and there in the yard. The
radiant, vigorous beauty of a summer day lay over everything, and nothing
hindered the snappy young green leaves from dancing gaily and winking at
the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and soot-begrimed appearance of the
bricksheds and the stifling fumes of the distillery did not spoil the general
good impression. The lieutenant sprang gaily out of the saddle, handed over
his horse to a man who ran up, and stroking with his finger his delicate
black moustaches, went in at the front door. On the top step of the old but
light and softly carpeted staircase he was met by a maidservant with a
haughty, not very youthful face. The lieutenant gave her his card without
speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on it the
name “Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky.” A minute later she came back
and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see him, as she was not
feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked at the ceiling and thrust out his lower
lip.
“How vexatious!” he said. “Listen, my dear,” he said eagerly. “Go and
tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to speak to her—
very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask her to excuse me.”
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
“Very well!” she sighed, returning after a brief interval. “Please walk in!”
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously
furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and

lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the
abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy
fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the walls,
screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed over the
corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a place to live in.
Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the green leaves and
fluttered against the window-panes.
“Forgive me for receiving you here,” the lieutenant heard in a mellow
feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm.
“Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I’m trying to keep still to prevent its
coming on again. What do you want?”
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such as
old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her
head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could be seen behind
the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed,
somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown
concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice,
her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
“Forgive me for being so persistent . . .” began the lieutenant, clinking
his spurs. “Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come with a message
from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch Kryukov, who . . .”
“I know!” interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. “I know Kryukov. Sit down;
I don’t like anything big standing before me.”
“My cousin charges me to ask you a favour,” the lieutenant went on,
clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. “The fact is, your late father
made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small sum was
left owing. The payment only becomes due next week, but my cousin begs
you most particularly to pay him—if possible, to-day.”
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
“Surely I’m not in her bedroom?” he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and tallest,
under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not yet made, with

the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two arm-chairs lay heaps of
crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled lace and
flounces were trailing on the carpet, on which here and there lay bits of
white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels. . . . Under the bed
the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all kinds peeped out in a long
row. And it seemed to the lieutenant that the scent of the jasmine came not
from the flowers, but from the bed and the slippers.
“And what is the sum owing?” asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
“Two thousand three hundred.”
“Oho!” said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. “And you call
that—a small sum! However, it’s just the same paying it to-day or paying it
in a week, but I’ve had so many payments to make in the last two months
since my father’s death. . . . Such a lot of stupid business, it makes my head
go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep forcing me to
attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats . . .” she muttered, half closing her
eyes, “oats, bills, percentages, or, as my head-clerk says, ‘percentage.’ . . .
It’s awful. Yesterday I simply turned the excise officer out. He pesters me
with his Tralles. I said to him: ‘Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can’t see
any one!’ He kissed my hand and went away. I tell you what: can’t your
cousin wait two or three months?”
“A cruel question!” laughed the lieutenant. “My cousin can wait a year,
but it’s I who cannot wait! You see, it’s on my own account I’m acting, I
ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my cousin
hasn’t a rouble to spare. I’m forced to ride about and collect debts. I’ve just
been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I’m now calling on you; from here I
shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that until I get together five
thousand roubles. I need money awfully!”
“Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief.
Why, have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you
getting married?”
“You’ve guessed!” laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his
seat, he clinked his spurs. “I really am going to be married.”

Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and
sighed.
“I can’t make out what possesses people to get married!” she said,
looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. “Life is so short, one has so
little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!”
“Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . .”
“Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things . . . .
But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you
passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won’t
four do, or three?”
“What a tongue she has!” thought the lieutenant, and answered: “The
difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is twenty-
eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or else pay a
deposit of five thousand.”
“Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his
own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is some one special
and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable to understand how any
decent man can live with a woman. I can’t for the life of me understand it. I
have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I have never yet seen
an endurable woman. They’re all affected minxes, immoral, liars. . . . The
only ones I can put up with are cooks and housemaids, but so-called ladies I
won’t let come within shooting distance of me. But, thank God, they hate
me and don’t force themselves on me! If one of them wants money she
sends her husband, but nothing will induce her to come herself, not from
pride—no, but from cowardice; she’s afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I
understand their hatred very well! Rather! I openly display what they do
their very utmost to conceal from God and man. How can they help hating
me? No doubt you’ve heard bushels of scandal about me already. . . .”
“I only arrived here so lately . . .”
“Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother’s wife, surely
she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man come to
see such an awful woman without warning him—how could she? Ha, ha! . .
. But tell me, how is your brother? He’s a fine fellow, such a handsome

man! . . . I’ve seen him several times at mass. Why do you look at me like
that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To an educated
person externals matter less than the idea. . . . That’s so, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course . . .” smiled the lieutenant.
“Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are
handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There’s
wonderfully little likeness!”
“That’s quite natural; he’s not my brother, but my cousin.”
“Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?”
“My furlough is over in a few days.”
“Well, what’s to be done with you!” sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. “So be
it. I’ll give you the money, though I know you’ll abuse me for it afterwards.
You’ll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and say: ‘If that mangy
Jewess hadn’t given me the money, I should perhaps have been as free as a
bird to-day!’ Is your fiancée pretty?”
“Oh yes. . . .”
“H’m! . . . Anyway, better something, if it’s only beauty, than nothing.
Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up to her husband
for her silliness.”
“That’s original!” laughed the lieutenant. “You are a woman yourself,
and such a woman-hater!”
“A woman . . .” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me
into this mould, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having
moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case. I am
very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a woman, I
begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in
the drawing-room.”
The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep
breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to irritate
his throat and to make him feel giddy.

“What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him. “She talks
fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic.”
The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly furnished,
and had pretensions to luxury and style. There were dark bronze dishes with
patterns in relief, views of Nice and the Rhine on the tables, old-fashioned
sconces, Japanese statuettes, but all this striving after luxury and style only
emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly apparent in the gilt
cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet table-cloths, the common
oleographs in heavy frames. The bad taste of the general effect was the
more complete from the lack of finish and the overcrowding of the room,
which gave one a feeling that something was lacking, and that a great deal
should have been thrown away. It was evident that the furniture had not
been bought all at once, but had been picked up at auctions and other
favourable opportunities.
Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even he
noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place, which no
luxury or style could efface—a complete absence of all trace of womanly,
careful hands, which, as we all know, give a warmth, poetry, and snugness
to the furnishing of a room. There was a chilliness about it such as one finds
in waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at the theatres.
There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except,
perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant
looked round about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his
strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of
talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady
herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure
looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the lieutenant saw not
only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black and as curly
as lamb’s-wool. She did not attract him, though she did not strike him as
ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general, and he
considered, too, that the lady’s white face, the whiteness of which for some
reason suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her little
black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears were astoundingly
white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or had been moulded out of

transparent wax. When she smiled she showed pale gums as well as her
teeth, and he did not like that either.
“Anæmic debility . . .” he thought; “she’s probably as nervous as a
turkey.”
“Here I am! Come along!” she said, going on rapidly ahead of him and
pulling off the yellow leaves from the plants as she passed.
“I’ll give you the money directly, and if you like I’ll give you some
lunch. Two thousand three hundred roubles! After such a good stroke of
business you’ll have an appetite for your lunch. Do you like my rooms? The
ladies about here declare that my rooms always smell of garlic. With that
culinary gibe their stock of wit is exhausted. I hasten to assure you that I’ve
no garlic even in the cellar. And one day when a doctor came to see me who
smelt of garlic, I asked him to take his hat and go and spread his fragrance
elsewhere. There is no smell of garlic here, but the place does smell of
drugs. My father lay paralyzed for a year and a half, and the whole house
smelt of medicine. A year and a half! I was sorry to lose him, but I’m glad
he’s dead: he suffered so!”
She led the officer through two rooms similar to the drawing-room,
through a large reception hall, and came to a stop in her study, where there
was a lady’s writing-table covered with little knick-knacks. On the carpet
near it several books lay strewn about, opened and folded back. Through a
small door leading from the study he saw a table laid for lunch.
Still chatting, Susanna took out of her pocket a bunch of little keys and
unlocked an ingeniously made cupboard with a curved, sloping lid. When
the lid was raised the cupboard emitted a plaintive note which made the
lieutenant think of an Æolian harp. Susanna picked out another key and
clicked another lock.
“I have underground passages here and secret doors,” she said, taking out
a small morocco portfolio. “It’s a funny cupboard, isn’t it? And in this
portfolio I have a quarter of my fortune. Look how podgy it is! You won’t
strangle me, will you?”
Susanna raised her eyes to the lieutenant and laughed good-naturedly.
The lieutenant laughed too.

“She’s rather jolly,” he thought, watching the keys flashing between her
fingers.
“Here it is,” she said, picking out the key of the portfolio. “Now, Mr.
Creditor, trot out the IOU. What a silly thing money is really! How paltry it
is, and yet how women love it! I am a Jewess, you know, to the marrow of
my bones. I am passionately fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but how I loathe
that passion for gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and they don’t know
what they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy oneself, but they’re
afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I am more like an hussar
than a Shmul. I don’t like money to be kept long in one place. And
altogether I fancy I’m not much like a Jewess. Does my accent give me
away much, eh?”
“What shall I say?” mumbled the lieutenant. “You speak good Russian,
but you do roll your r’s.”
Susanna laughed and put the little key in the lock of the portfolio. The
lieutenant took out of his pocket a little roll of IOUs and laid them with a
notebook on the table.
“Nothing betrays a Jew as much as his accent,” Susanna went on, looking
gaily at the lieutenant. “However much he twists himself into a Russian or a
Frenchman, ask him to say ‘feather’ and he will say ‘fedder’ . . . but I
pronounce it correctly: ‘Feather! feather! feather!’”
Both laughed.
“By Jove, she’s very jolly!” thought Sokolsky.
Susanna put the portfolio on a chair, took a step towards the lieutenant,
and bringing her face close to his, went on gaily:
“Next to the Jews I love no people so much as the Russian and the
French. I did not do much at school and I know no history, but it seems to
me that the fate of the world lies in the hands of those two nations. I lived a
long time abroad. . . . I spent six months in Madrid. . . . I’ve gazed my fill at
the public, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there are no decent
peoples except the Russian and the French. Take the languages, for
instance. . . . The German language is like the neighing of horses; as for the

English . . . you can’t imagine anything stupider. Fight—feet—foot! Italian
is only pleasant when they speak it slowly. If you listen to Italians gabbling,
you get the effect of the Jewish jargon. And the Poles? Mercy on us!
There’s no language so disgusting! ‘Nie pieprz, Pietrze, pieprzem wieprza
bo mozeoz przepieprzyé wieprza pieprzem.’ That means: ‘Don’t pepper a
sucking pig with pepper, Pyotr, or perhaps you’ll over-pepper the sucking
pig with pepper.’ Ha, ha, ha!”
Susanna Moiseyevna rolled her eyes and broke into such a pleasant,
infectious laugh that the lieutenant, looking at her, went off into a loud and
merry peal of laughter. She took the visitor by the button, and went on:
“You don’t like Jews, of course . . . they’ve many faults, like all nations. I
don’t dispute that. But are the Jews to blame for it? No, it’s not the Jews
who are to blame, but the Jewish women! They are narrow-minded, greedy;
there’s no sort of poetry about them, they’re dull. . . . You have never lived
with a Jewess, so you don’t know how charming it is!” Susanna
Moiseyevna pronounced the last words with deliberate emphasis and with
no eagerness or laughter. She paused as though frightened at her own
openness, and her face was suddenly distorted in a strange, unaccountable
way. Her eyes stared at the lieutenant without blinking, her lips parted and
showed clenched teeth. Her whole face, her throat, and even her bosom,
seemed quivering with a spiteful, catlike expression. Still keeping her eyes
fixed on her visitor, she rapidly bent to one side, and swiftly, like a cat,
snatched something from the table. All this was the work of a few seconds.
Watching her movements, the lieutenant saw five fingers crumple up his
IOUs and caught a glimpse of the white rustling paper as it disappeared in
her clenched fist. Such an extraordinary transition from good-natured
laughter to crime so appalled him that he turned pale and stepped back. . . .
And she, still keeping her frightened, searching eyes upon him, felt along
her hip with her clenched fist for her pocket. Her fist struggled convulsively
for the pocket, like a fish in the net, and could not find the opening. In
another moment the IOUs would have vanished in the recesses of her
feminine garments, but at that point the lieutenant uttered a faint cry, and,
moved more by instinct than reflection, seized the Jewess by her arm above
the clenched fist. Showing her teeth more than ever, she struggled with all
her might and pulled her hand away. Then Sokolsky put his right arm firmly

round her waist, and the other round her chest and a struggle followed.
Afraid of outraging her sex or hurting her, he tried only to prevent her
moving, and to get hold of the fist with the IOUs; but she wriggled like an
eel in his arms with her supple, flexible body, struck him in the chest with
her elbows, and scratched him, so that he could not help touching her all
over, and was forced to hurt her and disregard her modesty.
“How unusual this is! How strange!” he thought, utterly amazed, hardly
able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from the scent of jasmine.
In silence, breathing heavily, stumbling against the furniture, they moved
about the room. Susanna was carried away by the struggle. She flushed,
closed her eyes, and forgetting herself, once even pressed her face against
the face of the lieutenant, so that there was a sweetish taste left on his lips.
At last he caught hold of her clenched hand. . . . Forcing it open, and not
finding the papers in it, he let go the Jewess. With flushed faces and
dishevelled hair, they looked at one another, breathing hard. The spiteful,
catlike expression on the Jewess’s face was gradually replaced by a good-
natured smile. She burst out laughing, and turning on one foot, went
towards the room where lunch was ready. The lieutenant moved slowly
after her. She sat down to the table, and, still flushed and breathing hard,
tossed off half a glass of port.
“Listen”—the lieutenant broke the silence—“I hope you are joking?”
“Not a bit of it,” she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into her mouth.
“H’m! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?”
“As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!”
“But . . . it’s dishonest!”
“Perhaps. But don’t trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own way of
looking at things.”
“Won’t you give them back?”
“Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing to eat,
then it would be a different matter. But—he wants to get married!”

“It’s not my money, you know; it’s my cousin’s!”
“And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable
clothes for his wife? But I really don’t care whether your belle-soeur has
dresses or not.”
The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He strode
up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his waistcoat. The
fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes by her dishonest action,
made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.
“The devil knows what to make of it!” he muttered. “Listen. I shan’t go
away from here until I get the IOUs!”
“Ah, so much the better,” laughed Susanna. “If you stay here for good, it
will make it livelier for me.”
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna’s laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and grew
bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU he began for
some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin’s stories of the
Jewess’s romantic adventures, of her free way of life, and these
reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat
down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. . . .
“Will you have vodka or wine?” Susanna asked with a laugh. “So you
will stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and nights you
will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won’t your fiancée
have something to say about it?”

II

Five hours had passed. The lieutenant’s cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his dressing-
gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window. He was a tall,
sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly face; and as the Jewess
had truly said, he was handsome, though he had reached the age when men
are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and bald. By mind and temperament he was

one of those natures in which the Russian intellectual classes are so rich:
warm-hearted, good-natured, well-bred, having some knowledge of the arts
and sciences, some faith, and the most chivalrous notions about honour, but
indolent and lacking in depth. He was fond of good eating and drinking,
was an ideal whist-player, was a connoisseur in women and horses, but in
other things he was apathetic and sluggish as a seal, and to rouse him from
his lethargy something extraordinary and quite revolting was needed, and
then he would forget everything in the world and display intense activity; he
would fume and talk of a duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister,
gallop at breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly “a
scoundrel,” would go to law, and so on.
“How is it our Sasha’s not back yet?” he kept asking his wife, glancing
out of window. “Why, it’s dinner-time!”
After waiting for the lieutenant till six o’clock, they sat down to dinner.
When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was listening to every
footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept shrugging his shoulders.
“Strange!” he said. “The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant’s.”
As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant’s, where after a festive
evening he was staying the night.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked
extremely crumpled and confused.
“I want to speak to you alone . . .” he said mysteriously to his cousin.
They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced for a
long time up and down before he began to speak.
“Something’s happened, my dear fellow,” he began, “that I don’t know
how to tell you about. You wouldn’t believe it . . .”
And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what had
happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide apart and his
head bent, listened and frowned.

“Are you joking?” he asked.
“How the devil could I be joking? It’s no joking matter!”
“I don’t understand!” muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging up
his hands. “It’s positively . . . immoral on your part. Before your very eyes a
hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious crime, plays a nasty trick, and
you go and kiss her!”
“But I can’t understand myself how it happened!” whispered the
lieutenant, blinking guiltily. “Upon my honour, I don’t understand it! It’s
the first time in my life I’ve come across such a monster! It’s not her beauty
that does for you, not her mind, but that . . . you understand . . . insolence,
cynicism. . . .”
“Insolence, cynicism . . . it’s unclean! If you’ve such a longing for
insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the mire and
have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway! Instead of
two thousand three hundred!”
“You do express yourself elegantly!” said the lieutenant, frowning. “I’ll
pay you back the two thousand three hundred!”
“I know you’ll pay it back, but it’s not a question of money! Damn the
money! What revolts me is your being such a limp rag . . . such filthy
feebleness! And engaged! With a fiancée!”
“Don’t speak of it . . .” said the lieutenant, blushing. “I loathe myself as it
is. I should like to sink into the earth. It’s sickening and vexatious that I
shall have to bother my aunt for that five thousand. . . .”
Kryukov continued for some time longer expressing his indignation and
grumbling, then, as he grew calmer, he sat down on the sofa and began to
jeer at his cousin.
“You young officers!” he said with contemptuous irony. “Nice
bridegrooms.”
Suddenly he leapt up as though he had been stung, stamped his foot, and
ran about the study.

“No, I’m not going to leave it like that!” he said, shaking his fist. “I will
have those IOUs, I will! I’ll give it her! One doesn’t beat women, but I’ll
break every bone in her body. . . . I’ll pound her to a jelly! I’m not a
lieutenant! You won’t touch me with insolence or cynicism! No-o-o, damn
her! Mishka!” he shouted, “run and tell them to get the racing droshky out
for me!”
Kryukov dressed rapidly, and, without heeding the agitated lieutenant,
got into the droshky, and with a wave of his hand resolutely raced off to
Susanna Moiseyevna. For a long time the lieutenant gazed out of window at
the clouds of dust that rolled after his cousin’s droshky, stretched, yawned,
and went to his own room. A quarter of an hour later he was sound asleep.
At six o’clock he was waked up and summoned to dinner.
“How nice this is of Alexey!” his cousin’s wife greeted him in the dining-
room. “He keeps us waiting for dinner.”
“Do you mean to say he’s not come back yet?” yawned the lieutenant.
“H’m! . . . he’s probably gone round to see the tenant.”
But Alexey Ivanovitch was not back by supper either. His wife and
Sokolsky decided that he was playing cards at the tenant’s and would most
likely stay the night there. What had happened was not what they had
supposed, however.
Kryukov returned next morning, and without greeting any one, without a
word, dashed into his study.
“Well?” whispered the lieutenant, gazing at him round-eyed.
Kryukov waved his hand and gave a snort.
“Why, what’s the matter? What are you laughing at?”
Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and shook
with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking at the
surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from laughing, said:
“Close the door. Well . . . she is a fe-e-male, I beg to inform you!”

“Did you get the IOUs?”
Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.
“Well! she is a female!” he went on. “Merci for the acquaintance, my
boy! She’s a devil in petticoats. I arrived; I walked in like such an avenging
Jove, you know, that I felt almost afraid of myself . . . . I frowned, I
scowled, even clenched my fists to be more awe-inspiring. . . . ‘Jokes don’t
pay with me, madam!’ said I, and more in that style. And I threatened her
with the law and with the Governor. To begin with she burst into tears, said
she’d been joking with you, and even took me to the cupboard to give me
the money. Then she began arguing that the future of Europe lies in the
hands of the French, and the Russians, swore at women. . . . Like you, I
listened, fascinated, ass that I was. . . . She kept singing the praises of my
beauty, patted me on the arm near the shoulder, to see how strong I was, and
. . . and as you see, I’ve only just got away from her! Ha, ha! She’s
enthusiastic about you!”
“You’re a nice fellow!” laughed the lieutenant. “A married man! highly
respected. . . . Well, aren’t you ashamed? Disgusted? Joking apart though,
old man, you’ve got your Queen Tamara in your own neighbourhood. . . .”
“In my own neighbourhood! Why, you wouldn’t find another such
chameleon in the whole of Russia! I’ve never seen anything like it in my
life, though I know a good bit about women, too. I have known regular
devils in my time, but I never met anything like this. It is, as you say, by
insolence and cynicism she gets over you. What is so attractive in her is the
diabolical suddenness, the quick transitions, the swift shifting hues. . . .
Brrr! And the IOU— phew! Write it off for lost. We are both great sinners,
we’ll go halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not two thousand three
hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at the tenant’s.”
Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and broke
into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another, and again
subsided into their pillows.
“Engaged! A lieutenant!” Kryukov jeered.
“Married!” retorted Sokolsky. “Highly respected! Father of a family!”

At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another, and, to
the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with laughter into their
dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best of spirits, they dressed up as
Turks, and, running after one another with guns, played at soldiers with the
children. In the evening they had a long argument. The lieutenant
maintained that it was mean and contemptible to accept a dowry with your
wife, even when there was passionate love on both sides. Kryukov thumped
the table with his fists and declared that this was absurd, and that a husband
who did not like his wife to have property of her own was an egoist and a
despot. Both shouted, boiled over, did not understand each other, drank a
good deal, and in the end, picking up the skirts of their dressing-gowns,
went to their bedrooms. They soon fell asleep and slept soundly.
Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The
shadows lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time to time
the wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature, too, could
lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity of these people. Of
Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing. Both of them felt,
somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it
and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had
unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be
pleasant to recall in old age.
On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov was
sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory letter to his aunt.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro near the table in silence.
The lieutenant had slept badly that night; he woke up depressed, and now
he felt bored. He paced up and down, thinking of the end of his furlough, of
his fiancée, who was expecting him, of how people could live all their lives
in the country without feeling bored. Standing at the window, for a long
time he stared at the trees, smoked three cigarettes one after another, and
suddenly turned to his cousin.
“I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha,” he said. “Let me have a saddle-
horse for the day. . . .”
Kryukov looked searchingly at him and continued his writing with a
frown.

“You will, then?” asked the lieutenant.
Kryukov looked at him again, then deliberately drew out a drawer in the
table, and taking out a thick roll of notes, gave it to his cousin.
“Here’s five thousand . . .” he said. “Though it’s not my money, yet, God
bless you, it’s all the same. I advise you to send for post-horses at once and
go away. Yes, really!”
The lieutenant in his turn looked searchingly at Kryukov and laughed.
“You’ve guessed right, Alyosha,” he said, reddening. “It was to her I
meant to ride. Yesterday evening when the washerwoman gave me that
damned tunic, the one I was wearing then, and it smelt of jasmine, why . . .
I felt I must go!”
“You must go away.”
“Yes, certainly. And my furlough’s just over. I really will go to-day! Yes,
by Jove! However long one stays, one has to go in the end. . . . I’m going!”
The post-horses were brought after dinner the same day; the lieutenant
said good-bye to the Kryukovs and set off, followed by their good wishes.
Another week passed. It was a dull but hot and heavy day. From early
morning Kryukov walked aimlessly about the house, looking out of
window, or turning over the leaves of albums, though he was sick of the
sight of them already. When he came across his wife or children, he began
grumbling crossly. It seemed to him, for some reason that day, that his
children’s manners were revolting, that his wife did not know how to look
after the servants, that their expenditure was quite disproportionate to their
income. All this meant that “the master” was out of humour.
After dinner, Kryukov, feeling dissatisfied with the soup and the roast
meat he had eaten, ordered out his racing droshky. He drove slowly out of
the courtyard, drove at a walking pace for a quarter of a mile, and stopped.
“Shall I . . . drive to her . . . that devil?” he thought, looking at the leaden
sky.

And Kryukov positively laughed, as though it were the first time that day
he had asked himself that question. At once the load of boredom was lifted
from his heart, and there rose a gleam of pleasure in his lazy eyes. He
lashed the horse. . . .
All the way his imagination was picturing how surprised the Jewess
would be to see him, how he would laugh and chat, and come home feeling
refreshed. . . .
“Once a month one needs something to brighten one up . . . something
out of the common round,” he thought, “something that would give the
stagnant organism a good shaking up, a reaction . . . whether it’s a drinking
bout, or . . . Susanna. One can’t get on without it.”
It was getting dark when he drove into the yard of the vodka distillery.
From the open windows of the owner’s house came sounds of laughter and
singing:
“‘Brighter than lightning, more burning than flame. . . .’”
sang a powerful, mellow, bass voice.
“Aha! she has visitors,” thought Kryukov.
And he was annoyed that she had visitors.
“Shall I go back?” he thought with his hand on the bell, but he rang all
the same, and went up the familiar staircase. From the entry he glanced into
the reception hall. There were about five men there—all landowners and
officials of his acquaintance; one, a tall, thin gentleman, was sitting at the
piano, singing, and striking the keys with his long, thin fingers. The others
were listening and grinning with enjoyment. Kryukov looked himself up
and down in the looking-glass, and was about to go into the hall, when
Susanna Moiseyevna herself darted into the entry, in high spirits and
wearing the same black dress. . . . Seeing Kryukov, she was petrified for an
instant, then she uttered a little scream and beamed with delight.
“Is it you?” she said, clutching his hand. “What a surprise!”
“Here she is!” smiled Kryukov, putting his arm round her waist. “Well!
Does the destiny of Europe still lie in the hands of the French and the

Russians?”
“I’m so glad,” laughed the Jewess, cautiously removing his arm. “Come,
go into the hall; they’re all friends there. . . . I’ll go and tell them to bring
you some tea. Your name’s Alexey, isn’t it? Well, go in, I’ll come directly. .
. .”
She blew him a kiss and ran out of the entry, leaving behind her the same
sickly smell of jasmine. Kryukov raised his head and walked into the hall.
He was on terms of friendly intimacy with all the men in the room, but
scarcely nodded to them; they, too, scarcely responded, as though the places
in which they met were not quite decent, and as though they were in tacit
agreement with one another that it was more suitable for them not to
recognise one another.
From the hall Kryukov walked into the drawing-room, and from it into a
second drawing-room. On the way he met three or four other guests, also
men whom he knew, though they barely recognised him. Their faces were
flushed with drink and merriment. Alexey Ivanovitch glanced furtively at
them and marvelled that these men, respectable heads of families, who had
known sorrow and privation, could demean themselves to such pitiful,
cheap gaiety! He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and walked on.
“There are places,” he reflected, “where a sober man feels sick, and a
drunken man rejoices. I remember I never could go to the operetta or the
gipsies when I was sober: wine makes a man more good-natured and
reconciles him with vice. . . .”
Suddenly he stood still, petrified, and caught hold of the door-post with
both hands. At the writing-table in Susanna’s study was sitting Lieutenant
Alexandr Grigoryevitch. He was discussing something in an undertone with
a fat, flabby-looking Jew, and seeing his cousin, flushed crimson and
looked down at an album.
The sense of decency was stirred in Kryukov and the blood rushed to his
head. Overwhelmed with amazement, shame, and anger, he walked up to
the table without a word. Sokolsky’s head sank lower than ever. His face
worked with an expression of agonising shame.

“Ah, it’s you, Alyosha!” he articulated, making a desperate effort to raise
his eyes and to smile. “I called here to say good-bye, and, as you see. . . .
But to-morrow I am certainly going.”
“What can I say to him? What?” thought Alexey Ivanovitch. “How can I
judge him since I’m here myself?”
And clearing his throat without uttering a word, he went out slowly.
“‘Call her not heavenly, and leave her on earth. . . .’”
The bass was singing in the hall. A little while after, Kryukov’s racing
droshky was bumping along the dusty road.

NEIGHBOURS

P
YOTR MIHALITCH IVASHIN was very much out of humour: his
sister, a young girl, had gone away to live with Vlassitch, a married
man. To shake off the despondency and depression which pursued
him at home and in the fields, he called to his aid his sense of justice, his
genuine and noble ideas—he had always defended free-love! —but this was
of no avail, and he always came back to the same conclusion as their foolish
old nurse, that his sister had acted wrongly and that Vlassitch had abducted
his sister. And that was distressing.
His mother did not leave her room all day long; the old nurse kept
sighing and speaking in whispers; his aunt had been on the point of taking
her departure every day, and her trunks were continually being brought
down to the hall and carried up again to her room. In the house, in the yard,
and in the garden it was as still as though there were some one dead in the
house. His aunt, the servants, and even the peasants, so it seemed to Pyotr
Mihalitch, looked at him enigmatically and with perplexity, as though they
wanted to say “Your sister has been seduced; why are you doing nothing?”
And he reproached himself for inactivity, though he did not know precisely
what action he ought to have taken.
So passed six days. On the seventh—it was Sunday afternoon—a
messenger on horseback brought a letter. The address was in a familiar
feminine handwriting: “Her Excy. Anna Nikolaevna Ivashin.” Pyotr
Mihalitch fancied that there was something defiant, provocative, in the
handwriting and in the abbreviation “Excy.” And advanced ideas in women
are obstinate, ruthless, cruel.
“She’d rather die than make any concession to her unhappy mother, or
beg her forgiveness,” thought Pyotr Mihalitch, as he went to his mother
with the letter.
His mother was lying on her bed, dressed. Seeing her son, she rose
impulsively, and straightening her grey hair, which had fallen from under
her cap, asked quickly:

“What is it? What is it?”
“This has come . . .” said her son, giving her the letter.
Zina’s name, and even the pronoun “she” was not uttered in the house.
Zina was spoken of impersonally: “this has come,” “Gone away,” and so
on. . . . The mother recognised her daughter’s handwriting, and her face
grew ugly and unpleasant, and her grey hair escaped again from her cap.
“No!” she said, with a motion of her hands, as though the letter scorched
her fingers. “No, no, never! Nothing would induce me!”
The mother broke into hysterical sobs of grief and shame; she evidently
longed to read the letter, but her pride prevented her. Pyotr Mihalitch
realised that he ought to open the letter himself and read it aloud, but he
was overcome by anger such as he had never felt before; he ran out into the
yard and shouted to the messenger:
“Say there will be no answer! There will be no answer! Tell them that,
you beast!”
And he tore up the letter; then tears came into his eyes, and feeling that
he was cruel, miserable, and to blame, he went out into the fields.
He was only twenty-seven, but he was already stout. He dressed like an
old man in loose, roomy clothes, and suffered from asthma. He already
seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly country bachelor.
He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and loved no one but his
mother, his sister, his old nurse, and the gardener, Vassilitch. He was fond of
good fare, of his nap after dinner, and of talking about politics and exalted
subjects. He had in his day taken his degree at the university, but he now
looked upon his studies as though in them he had discharged a duty
incumbent upon young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five;
at any rate, the ideas which now strayed every day through his mind had
nothing in common with the university or the subjects he had studied there.
In the fields it was hot and still, as though rain were coming. It was
steaming in the wood, and there was a heavy fragrant scent from the pines
and rotting leaves. Pyotr Mihalitch stopped several times and wiped his wet
brow. He looked at his winter corn and his spring oats, walked round the

clover-field, and twice drove away a partridge with its chicks which had
strayed in from the wood. And all the while he was thinking that this
insufferable state of things could not go on for ever, and that he must end it
one way or another. End it stupidly, madly, but he must end it.
“But how? What can I do?” he asked himself, and looked imploringly at
the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.
But the sky and the trees were mute. His noble ideas were no help, and
his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no
solution but a stupid one, and that to-day’s scene with the messenger was
not the last one of its kind. It was terrible to think what was in store for
him!
As he returned home the sun was setting. By now it seemed to him that
the problem was incapable of solution. He could not accept the
accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there was no
intermediate course. When, taking off his hat and fanning himself with his
handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and had only another mile
and a half to go before he would reach home, he heard bells behind him. It
was a very choice and successful combination of bells, which gave a clear
crystal note. No one had such bells on his horses but the police captain,
Medovsky, formerly an officer in the hussars, a man in broken-down health,
who had been a great rake and spendthrift, and was a distant relation of
Pyotr Mihalitch. He was like one of the family at the Ivashins’ and had a
tender, fatherly affection for Zina, as well as a great admiration for her.
“I was coming to see you,” he said, overtaking Pyotr Mihalitch. “Get in;
I’ll give you a lift.”
He was smiling and looked cheerful. Evidently he did not yet know that
Zina had gone to live with Vlassitch; perhaps he had been told of it already,
but did not believe it. Pyotr Mihalitch felt in a difficult position.
“You are very welcome,” he muttered, blushing till the tears came into
his eyes, and not knowing how to lie or what to say. “I am delighted,” he
went on, trying to smile, “but . . . Zina is away and mother is ill.”
“How annoying!” said the police captain, looking pensively at Pyotr
Mihalitch. “And I was meaning to spend the evening with you. Where has

Zinaida Mihalovna gone?”
“To the Sinitskys’, and I believe she meant to go from there to the
monastery. I don’t quite know.”
The police captain talked a little longer and then turned back. Pyotr
Mihalitch walked home, and thought with horror what the police captain’s
feelings would be when he learned the truth. And Pyotr Mihalitch imagined
his feelings, and actually experiencing them himself, went into the house.
“Lord help us,” he thought, “Lord help us!”
At evening tea the only one at the table was his aunt. As usual, her face
wore the expression that seemed to say that though she was a weak,
defenceless woman, she would allow no one to insult her. Pyotr Mihalitch
sat down at the other end of the table (he did not like his aunt) and began
drinking tea in silence.
“Your mother has had no dinner again to-day,” said his aunt. “You ought
to do something about it, Petrusha. Starving oneself is no help in sorrow.”
It struck Pyotr Mihalitch as absurd that his aunt should meddle in other
people’s business and should make her departure depend on Zina’s having
gone away. He was tempted to say something rude to her, but restrained
himself. And as he restrained himself he felt the time had come for action,
and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at once or fall on
the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor. He pictured
Vlassitch and Zina, both of them progressive and self-satisfied, kissing each
other somewhere under a maple tree, and all the anger and bitterness that
had been accumulating in him for the last seven days fastened upon
Vlassitch.
“One has seduced and abducted my sister,” he thought, “another will
come and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and sack the
place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship, lofty ideas,
unhappiness!”
“No, it shall not be!” Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought his
fist down on the table.

He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. In the stable the steward’s
horse was standing ready saddled. He got on it and galloped off to
Vlassitch.
There was a perfect tempest within him. He felt a longing to do
something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all his life
afterwards. Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard, slap him in the face, and
then challenge him to a duel? But Vlassitch was not one of those men who
do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in the face would only
make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink into himself more
than ever. These unhappy, defenceless people are the most insufferable, the
most tiresome creatures in the world. They can do anything with impunity.
When the luckless man responds to well-deserved reproach by looking at
you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling, and with a sickly smile bends
his head submissively, even justice itself could not lift its hand against him.
“No matter. I’ll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I think
of him,” Pyotr Mihalitch decided.
He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina
would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of women and
individual freedom, and about there being no difference between legal
marriage and free union. Like a woman, she would argue about what she
did not understand. And very likely at the end she would ask, “How do you
come in? What right have you to interfere?”
“No, I have no right,” muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. “But so much the better.
. . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the better.”
It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste
places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain, but he
could not see a cloud in the sky. Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary of
his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field. He often went along this
road and knew every bush, every hollow in it. What now in the far distance
looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he could picture it all
down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves that
were always grazing in the church enclosure. Three-quarters of a mile to the
right of the church there was a copse like a dark blur—it was Count
Koltonovitch’s. And beyond the church Vlassitch’s estate began.

From behind the church and the count’s copse a huge black storm-cloud
was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning.
“Here it is!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch. “Lord help us, Lord help us!”
The horse was soon tired after its quick gallop, and Pyotr Mihalitch was
tired too. The storm-cloud looked at him angrily and seemed to advise him
to go home. He felt a little scared.
“I will prove to them they are wrong,” he tried to reassure himself. “They
will say that it is free-love, individual freedom; but freedom means self-
control and not subjection to passion. It’s not liberty but license!”
He reached the count’s big pond; it looked dark blue and frowning under
the cloud, and a smell of damp and slime rose from it. Near the dam, two
willows, one old and one young, drooped tenderly towards one another.
Pyotr Mihalitch and Vlassitch had been walking near this very spot only a
fortnight before, humming a students’ song:
“‘Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless.’”
A wretched song!
It was thundering as Pyotr Mihalitch rode through the copse, and the
trees were bending and rustling in the wind. He had to make haste. It was
only three-quarters of a mile through a meadow from the copse to
Vlassitch’s house. Here there were old birch-trees on each side of the road.
They had the same melancholy and unhappy air as their owner Vlassitch,
and looked as tall and lanky as he. Big drops of rain pattered on the birches
and on the grass; the wind had suddenly dropped, and there was a smell of
wet earth and poplars. Before him he saw Vlassitch’s fence with a row of
yellow acacias, which were tall and lanky too; where the fence was broken
he could see the neglected orchard.
Pyotr Mihalitch was not thinking now of the horsewhip or of a slap in the
face, and did not know what he would do at Vlassitch’s. He felt nervous. He
felt frightened on his own account and on his sister’s, and was terrified at
the thought of seeing her. How would she behave with her brother? What
would they both talk about? And had he not better go back before it was too
late? As he made these reflections, he galloped up the avenue of lime-trees

to the house, rode round the big clumps of lilacs, and suddenly saw
Vlassitch.
Vlassitch, wearing a cotton shirt, and top-boots, bending forward, with
no hat on in the rain, was coming from the corner of the house to the front
door. He was followed by a workman with a hammer and a box of nails.
They must have been mending a shutter which had been banging in the
wind. Seeing Pyotr Mihalitch, Vlassitch stopped.
“It’s you!” he said, smiling. “That’s nice.”
“Yes, I’ve come, as you see,” said Pyotr Mihalitch, brushing the rain off
himself with both hands.
“Well, that’s capital! I’m very glad,” said Vlassitch, but he did not hold
out his hand: evidently he did not venture, but waited for Pyotr Mihalitch to
hold out his. “It will do the oats good,” he said, looking at the sky.
“Yes.”
They went into the house in silence. To the right of the hall was a door
leading to another hall and then to the drawing-room, and on the left was a
little room which in winter was used by the steward. Pyotr Mihalitch and
Vlassitch went into this little room.
“Where were you caught in the rain?”
“Not far off, quite close to the house.”
Pyotr Mihalitch sat down on the bed. He was glad of the noise of the rain
and the darkness of the room. It was better: it made it less dreadful, and
there was no need to see his companion’s face. There was no anger in his
heart now, nothing but fear and vexation with himself. He felt he had made
a bad beginning, and that nothing would come of this visit.
Both were silent for some time and affected to be listening to the rain.
“Thank you, Petrusha,” Vlassitch began, clearing his throat. “I am very
grateful to you for coming. It’s generous and noble of you. I understand it,
and, believe me, I appreciate it. Believe me.”

He looked out of the window and went on, standing in the middle of the
room:
“Everything happened so secretly, as though we were concealing it all
from you. The feeling that you might be wounded and angry has been a blot
on our happiness all these days. But let me justify myself. We kept it secret
not because we did not trust you. To begin with, it all happened suddenly,
by a kind of inspiration; there was no time to discuss it. Besides, it’s such a
private, delicate matter, and it was awkward to bring a third person in, even
some one as intimate as you. Above all, in all this we reckoned on your
generosity. You are a very noble and generous person. I am infinitely
grateful to you. If you ever need my life, come and take it.”
Vlassitch talked in a quiet, hollow bass, always on the same droning
note; he was evidently agitated. Pyotr Mihalitch felt it was his turn to speak,
and that to listen and keep silent would really mean playing the part of a
generous and noble simpleton, and that had not been his idea in coming. He
got up quickly and said, breathlessly in an undertone:
“Listen, Grigory. You know I liked you and could have desired no better
husband for my sister; but what has happened is awful! It’s terrible to think
of it!”
“Why is it terrible?” asked Vlassitch, with a quiver in his voice. “It
would be terrible if we had done wrong, but that isn’t so.”
“Listen, Grigory. You know I have no prejudices; but, excuse my
frankness, to my mind you have both acted selfishly. Of course, I shan’t say
so to my sister—it will distress her; but you ought to know: mother is
miserable beyond all description.”
“Yes, that’s sad,” sighed Vlassitch. “We foresaw that, Petrusha, but what
could we have done? Because one’s actions hurt other people, it doesn’t
prove that they are wrong. What’s to be done! Every important step one
takes is bound to distress somebody. If you went to fight for freedom, that
would distress your mother, too. What’s to be done! Any one who puts the
peace of his family before everything has to renounce the life of ideas
completely.”

There was a vivid flash of lightning at the window, and the lightning
seemed to change the course of Vlassitch’s thoughts. He sat down beside
Pyotr Mihalitch and began saying what was utterly beside the point.
“I have such a reverence for your sister, Petrusha,” he said. “When I used
to come and see you, I felt as though I were going to a holy shrine, and I
really did worship Zina. Now my reverence for her grows every day. For
me she is something higher than a wife—yes, higher!” Vlassitch waved his
hands. “She is my holy of holies. Since she is living with me, I enter my
house as though it were a temple. She is an extraordinary, rare, most noble
woman!”
“Well, he’s off now!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch; he disliked the word
“woman.”
“Why shouldn’t you be married properly?” he asked. “How much does
your wife want for a divorce?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“It’s rather a lot. But if we were to negotiate with her?”
“She won’t take a farthing less. She is an awful woman, brother,” sighed
Vlassitch. “I’ve never talked to you about her before—it was unpleasant to
think of her; but now that the subject has come up, I’ll tell you about her. I
married her on the impulse of the moment—a fine, honourable impulse. An
officer in command of a battalion of our regiment—if you care to hear the
details—had an affair with a girl of eighteen; that is, to put it plainly, he
seduced her, lived with her for two months, and abandoned her. She was in
an awful position, brother. She was ashamed to go home to her parents;
besides, they wouldn’t have received her. Her lover had abandoned her;
there was nothing left for her but to go to the barracks and sell herself. The
other officers in the regiment were indignant. They were by no means saints
themselves, but the baseness of it was so striking. Besides, no one in the
regiment could endure the man. And to spite him, you understand, the
indignant lieutenants and ensigns began getting up a subscription for the
unfortunate girl. And when we subalterns met together and began to
subscribe five or ten roubles each, I had a sudden inspiration. I felt it was an
opportunity to do something fine. I hastened to the girl and warmly

expressed my sympathy. And while I was on my way to her, and while I
was talking to her, I loved her fervently as a woman insulted and injured.
Yes. . . . Well, a week later I made her an offer. The colonel and my
comrades thought my marriage out of keeping with the dignity of an officer.
That roused me more than ever. I wrote a long letter, do you know, in which
I proved that my action ought to be inscribed in the annals of the regiment
in letters of gold, and so on. I sent the letter to my colonel and copies to my
comrades. Well, I was excited, and, of course, I could not avoid being rude.
I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough copy of it put away
somewhere; I’ll give it to you to read sometime. It was written with great
feeling. You will see what lofty and noble sentiments I was experiencing. I
resigned my commission and came here with my wife. My father had left a
few debts, I had no money, and from the first day my wife began making
acquaintances, dressing herself smartly, and playing cards, and I was
obliged to mortgage the estate. She led a bad life, you understand, and you
are the only one of the neighbours who hasn’t been her lover. After two
years I gave her all I had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. . . .
And now I pay her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman!
There is a fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider so that the
spider can’t shake it off: the grub fastens upon the spider and drinks its
heart’s blood. That was how this woman fastened upon me and sucks the
blood of my heart. She hates and despises me for being so stupid; that is, for
marrying a woman like her. My chivalry seems to her despicable. ‘A wise
man cast me off,’ she says, ‘and a fool picked me up.’ To her thinking no
one but a pitiful idiot could have behaved as I did. And that is insufferably
bitter to me, brother. Altogether, I may say in parenthesis, fate has been hard
upon me, very hard.”
Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity what it
was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not young—he was
forty-one—lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with a long nose, and grey hairs
in his beard. He talked in a droning voice, had a sickly smile, and waved his
hands awkwardly as he talked. He had neither health, nor pleasant, manly
manners, nor savoir-faire, nor gaiety, and in all his exterior there was
something colourless and indefinite. He dressed without taste, his
surroundings were depressing, he did not care for poetry or painting

because “they have no answer to give to the questions of the day” —that is,
he did not understand them; music did not touch him. He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was
paying twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand on
personal securities as well. When the time came to pay the interest on the
mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked every one to lend him
money with as much agitation as though his house were on fire, and, at the
same time losing his head, he would sell the whole of his winter store of
fuel for five roubles and a stack of straw for three roubles, and then have his
garden fence or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat his stoves. His
meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants’ cattle strayed in the
undergrowth in his woods, and every year the old trees were fewer and
fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden and kitchen-garden.
He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even ordinary capacity for living
like other people. In practical life he was a weak, naïve man, easy to
deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with good reason called him
“simple.”
He was a Liberal, and in the district was regarded as a “Red,” but even
his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor moving power
about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant, and delighted
always on the same note; it was always spiritless and ineffective. Even in
moments of strong enthusiasm he never raised his head or stood upright.
But the most tiresome thing of all was that he managed to express even his
best and finest ideas so that they seemed in him commonplace and out of
date. It reminded one of something old one had read long ago, when slowly
and with an air of profundity he would begin discoursing of his noble, lofty
moments, of his best years; or when he went into raptures over the younger
generation, which has always been, and still is, in advance of society; or
abused Russians for donning their dressing-gowns at thirty and forgetting
the principles of their alma mater. If you stayed the night with him, he
would put Pissarev or Darwin on your bedroom table; if you said you had
read it, he would go and bring Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked upon
this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it made him
profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which he had

just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his life-blood.
In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky;
long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with
great feeling, endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments,
then debts, a second mortgage, the allowance to his wife, the monthly
borrowing of money—and all this for no benefit to any one, either himself
or others. And in the present, as in the past, he was still in a nervous flurry,
on the lookout for heroic actions, and poking his nose into other people’s
affairs; as before, at every favourable opportunity there were long letters
and copies, wearisome, stereotyped conversations about the village
community, or the revival of handicrafts or the establishment of cheese
factories—conversations as like one another as though he had prepared
them, not in his living brain, but by some mechanical process. And finally
this scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end!
And meanwhile Zina was young—she was only twenty-two—good-
looking, elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a
passionate musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and
in her own home she would not have put up with a room like this, smelling
of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced ideas, but in her free-
thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong,
spirited girl, passionately eager to be better and more original than others. . .
. How had it happened that she had fallen in love with Vlassitch?
“He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac,” thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, “and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am. . . .
She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but, then, I, too,
love him in spite of everything.”
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man, but
narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings, and in fact in
his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or immediate; he saw nothing
but boredom and incapacity for life. His self-sacrifice and all that Vlassitch
himself called heroic actions or noble impulses seemed to him a useless
waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which consumed a great deal of
powder. And Vlassitch’s fanatical belief in the extraordinary loftiness and
faultlessness of his own way of thinking struck him as naïve and even
morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all his life had contrived to mix the

trivial with the exalted, that he had made a stupid marriage and looked upon
it as an act of heroism, and then had affairs with other women and regarded
that as a triumph of some idea or other was simply incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious of
a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the heart to
contradict him.
Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to the
accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a prelude to
beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of his marriage. But it
was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen to him; he was tormented by
the thought that he would see his sister directly.
“Yes, you’ve had bad luck,” he said gently; “but, excuse me, we’ve been
wandering from the point. That’s not what we are talking about.”
“Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point,” said Vlassitch,
and he stood up. “I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience is clear. We are not
married, but there is no need for me to prove to you that our marriage is
perfectly legitimate. You are as free in your ideas as I am, and, happily,
there can be no disagreement between us on that point. As for our future,
that ought not to alarm you. I’ll work in the sweat of my brow, I’ll work day
and night— in fact, I will strain every nerve to make Zina happy. Her life
will be a splendid one! You may ask, am I able to do it. I am, brother! When
a man devotes every minute to one thought, it’s not difficult for him to
attain his object. But let us go to Zina; it will be a joy to her to see you.”
Pyotr Mihalitch’s heart began to beat. He got up and followed Vlassitch
into the hall, and from there into the drawing-room. There was nothing in
the huge gloomy room but a piano and a long row of old chairs ornamented
with bronze, on which no one ever sat. There was a candle alight on the
piano. From the drawing-room they went in silence into the dining-room.
This room, too, was large and comfortless; in the middle of the room there
was a round table with two leaves with six thick legs, and only one candle.
A clock in a large mahogany case like an ikon stand pointed to half-past
two.
Vlassitch opened the door into the next room and said:

“Zina, here is Petrusha come to see us!”
At once there was the sound of hurried footsteps and Zina came into the
dining-room. She was tall, plump, and very pale, and, just as when he had
seen her for the last time at home, she was wearing a black skirt and a red
blouse, with a large buckle on her belt. She flung one arm round her brother
and kissed him on the temple.
“What a storm!” she said. “Grigory went off somewhere and I was left
quite alone in the house.”
She was not embarrassed, and looked at her brother as frankly and
candidly as at home; looking at her, Pyotr Mihalitch, too, lost his
embarrassment.
“But you are not afraid of storms,” he said, sitting down at the table.
“No,” she said, “but here the rooms are so big, the house is so old, and
when there is thunder it all rattles like a cupboard full of crockery. It’s a
charming house altogether,” she went on, sitting down opposite her brother.
“There’s some pleasant memory in every room. In my room, only fancy,
Grigory’s grandfather shot himself.”
“In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden,”
said Vlassitch.
“For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather,” Zina went
on. “And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to death.”
“That’s an actual fact,” said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open
eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch. “Sometime in the forties this place was let to a
Frenchman called Olivier. The portrait of his daughter is lying in an attic
now—a very pretty girl. This Olivier, so my father told me, despised
Russians for their ignorance and treated them with cruel derision. Thus, for
instance, he insisted on the priest walking without his hat for half a mile
round his house, and on the church bells being rung when the Olivier family
drove through the village. The serfs and altogether the humble of this world,
of course, he treated with even less ceremony. Once there came along this
road one of the simple-hearted sons of wandering Russia, somewhat after
the style of Gogol’s divinity student, Homa Brut. He asked for a night’s

lodging, pleased the bailiffs, and was given a job at the office of the estate.
There are many variations of the story. Some say the divinity student stirred
up the peasants, others that Olivier’ s daughter fell in love with him. I don’t
know which is true, only one fine evening Olivier called him in here and
cross-examined him, then ordered him to be beaten. Do you know, he sat
here at this table drinking claret while the stable-boys beat the man. He
must have tried to wring something out of him. Towards morning the
divinity student died of the torture and his body was hidden. They say it
was thrown into Koltovitch’s pond. There was an inquiry, but the
Frenchman paid some thousands to some one in authority and went away to
Alsace. His lease was up just then, and so the matter ended.”
“What scoundrels!” said Zina, shuddering.
“My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well. He used to say she
was remarkably beautiful and eccentric. I imagine the divinity student had
done both—stirred up the peasants and won the daughter’s heart. Perhaps
he wasn’t a divinity student at all, but some one travelling incognito.”
Zina grew thoughtful; the story of the divinity student and the beautiful
French girl had evidently carried her imagination far away. It seemed to
Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the least during the last week,
except that she was a little paler. She looked calm and just as usual, as
though she had come with her brother to visit Vlassitch. But Pyotr
Mihalitch felt that some change had taken place in himself. Before, when
she was living at home, he could have spoken to her about anything, and
now he did not feel equal to asking her the simple question, “How do you
like being here?” The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. Probably
the same change had taken place in her. She was in no haste to turn the
conversation to her mother, to her home, to her relations with Vlassitch; she
did not defend herself, she did not say that free unions are better than
marriages in the church; she was not agitated, and calmly brooded over the
story of Olivier. . . . And why had they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?
“You are both of you wet with the rain,” said Zina, and she smiled
joyfully; she was touched by this point of resemblance between her brother
and Vlassitch.

And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his position. He
thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and Zina’s bright little room
into which no one went now; he thought there were no prints of little feet on
the garden-paths, and that before tea no one went off, laughing gaily, to
bathe. What he had clung to more and more from his childhood upwards,
what he had loved thinking about when he used to sit in the stuffy class-
room or the lecture theatre—brightness, purity, and joy, everything that
filled the house with life and light, had gone never to return, had vanished,
and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy story of some battalion officer, a
chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved woman and a grandfather who had shot
himself. . . . And to begin to talk about his mother or to think that the past
could ever return would mean not understanding what was clear.
Pyotr Mihalitch’s eyes filled with tears and his hand began to tremble as
it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her eyes,
too, glistened and looked red.
“Grigory, come here,” she said to Vlassitch.
They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a
whisper. From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the way she
looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything was
irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything. Zina went out of
the room.
“Well, brother!” Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing his hands
and smiling. “I called our life happiness just now, but that was, so to speak,
poetical license. In reality, there has not been a sense of happiness so far.
Zina has been thinking all the time of you, of her mother, and has been
worrying; looking at her, I, too, felt worried. Hers is a bold, free nature, but,
you know, it’s difficult when you’re not used to it, and she is young, too.
The servants call her ‘Miss’; it seems a trifle, but it upsets her. There it is,
brother.”
Zina brought in a plateful of strawberries. She was followed by a little
maidservant, looking crushed and humble, who set a jug of milk on the
table and made a very low bow: she had something about her that was in
keeping with the old furniture, something petrified and dreary.

The sound of the rain had ceased. Pyotr Mihalitch ate strawberries while
Vlassitch and Zina looked at him in silence. The moment of the inevitable
but useless conversation was approaching, and all three felt the burden of it.
Pyotr Mihalitch’s eyes filled with tears again; he pushed away his plate and
said that he must be going home, or it would be getting late, and perhaps it
would rain again. The time had come when common decency required Zina
to speak of those at home and of her new life.
“How are things at home?” she asked rapidly, and her pale face quivered.
“How is mother?”
“You know mother . . .” said Pyotr Mihalitch, not looking at her.
“Petrusha, you’ve thought a great deal about what has happened,” she
said, taking hold of her brother’s sleeve, and he knew how hard it was for
her to speak. “You’ve thought a great deal: tell me, can we reckon on
mother’s accepting Grigory . . . and the whole position, one day?”
She stood close to her brother, face to face with him, and he was
astonished that she was so beautiful, and that he seemed not to have noticed
it before. And it seemed to him utterly absurd that his sister, so like his
mother, pampered, elegant, should be living with Vlassitch and in
Vlassitch’s house, with the petrified servant, and the table with six legs—in
the house where a man had been flogged to death, and that she was not
going home with him, but was staying here to sleep.
“You know mother,” he said, not answering her question. “I think you
ought to have . . . to do something, to ask her forgiveness or something. . .
.”
“But to ask her forgiveness would mean pretending we had done wrong.
I’m ready to tell a lie to comfort mother, but it won’t lead anywhere. I know
mother. Well, what will be, must be!” said Zina, growing more cheerful
now that the most unpleasant had been said. “We’ll wait for five years, ten
years, and be patient, and then God’s will be done.”
She took her brother’s arm, and when she walked through the dark hall
she squeezed close to him. They went out on the steps. Pyotr Mihalitch said
good-bye, got on his horse, and set off at a walk; Zina and Vlassitch walked
a little way with him. It was still and warm, with a delicious smell of hay;

stars were twinkling brightly between the clouds. Vlassitch’s old garden,
which had seen so many gloomy stories in its time, lay slumbering in the
darkness, and for some reason it was mournful riding through it.
“Zina and I to-day after dinner spent some really exalted moments,” said
Vlassitch. “I read aloud to her an excellent article on the question of
emigration. You must read it, brother! You really must. It’s remarkable for
its lofty tone. I could not resist writing a letter to the editor to be forwarded
to the author. I wrote only a single line: ‘I thank you and warmly press your
noble hand.’”
Pyotr Mihalitch was tempted to say, “Don’t meddle in what does not
concern you,” but he held his tongue.
Vlassitch walked by his right stirrup and Zina by the left; both seemed to
have forgotten that they had to go home. It was damp, and they had almost
reached Koltovitch’s copse. Pyotr Mihalitch felt that they were expecting
something from him, though they hardly knew what it was, and he felt
unbearably sorry for them. Now as they walked by the horse with
submissive faces, lost in thought, he had a deep conviction that they were
unhappy, and could not be happy, and their love seemed to him a
melancholy, irreparable mistake. Pity and the sense that he could do nothing
to help them reduced him to that state of spiritual softening when he was
ready to make any sacrifice to get rid of the painful feeling of sympathy.
“I’ll come over sometimes for a night,” he said.
But it sounded as though he were making a concession, and did not
satisfy him. When they stopped near Koltovitch’s copse to say good-bye, he
bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:
“You are right, Zina! You have done well.” To avoid saying more and
bursting into tears, he lashed his horse and galloped into the wood. As he
rode into the darkness, he looked round and saw Vlassitch and Zina walking
home along the road—he taking long strides, while she walked with a
hurried, jerky step beside him—talking eagerly about something.
“I am an old woman!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch. “I went to solve the
question and I have only made it more complicated—there it is!”

He was heavy at heart. When he got out of the copse he rode at a walk
and then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and think
without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected in a streak of red
on the other side of the pond. There were low rumbles of thunder in the
distance. Pyotr Mihalitch looked steadily at the water and imagined his
sister’s despair, her martyr-like pallor, the tearless eyes with which she
would conceal her humiliation from others. He imagined her with child,
imagined the death of their mother, her funeral, Zina’s horror. . . . The
proud, superstitious old woman would be sure to die of grief. Terrible
pictures of the future rose before him on the background of smooth, dark
water, and among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a weak, cowardly
man with a guilty face.
A hundred paces off on the right bank of the pond, something dark was
standing motionless: was it a man or a tall post? Pyotr Mihalitch thought of
the divinity student who had been killed and thrown into the pond.
“Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle the
question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it worse,” he
thought, gazing at the dark figure that looked like a ghost. “He said and did
what he thought right while I say and do what I don’t think right; and I
don’t know really what I do think. . . .”
He rode up to the dark figure: it was an old rotten post, the relic of some
shed.
From Koltovitch’s copse and garden there came a strong fragrant scent of
lilies of the valley and honey-laden flowers. Pyotr Mihalitch rode along the
bank of the pond and looked mournfully into the water. And thinking about
his life, he came to the conclusion he had never said or acted upon what he
really thought, and other people had repaid him in the same way. And so the
whole of life seemed to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was
reflected and water-weeds grew in a tangle. And it seemed to him that
nothing could ever set it right.

AT HOME
I

T
HE Don railway. A quiet, cheerless station, white and solitary in the
steppe, with its walls baking in the sun, without a speck of shade,
and, it seems, without a human being. The train goes on after leaving
one here; the sound of it is scarcely audible and dies away at last. Outside
the station it is a desert, and there are no horses but one’s own. One gets
into the carriage—which is so pleasant after the train—and is borne along
the road through the steppe, and by degrees there are unfolded before one
views such as one does not see near Moscow—immense, endless,
fascinating in their monotony. The steppe, the steppe, and nothing more; in
the distance an ancient barrow or a windmill; ox-waggons laden with coal
trail by. . . . Solitary birds fly low over the plain, and a drowsy feeling
comes with the monotonous beat of their wings. It is hot. Another hour or
so passes, and still the steppe, the steppe, and still in the distance the
barrow. The driver tells you something, some long unnecessary tale,
pointing into the distance with his whip. And tranquillity takes possession
of the soul; one is loth to think of the past. . . .
A carriage with three horses had been sent to fetch Vera Ivanovna Kardin.
The driver put in her luggage and set the harness to rights.
“Everything just as it always has been,” said Vera, looking about her. “I
was a little girl when I was here last, ten years ago. I remember old Boris
came to fetch me then. Is he still living, I wonder?”
The driver made no reply, but, like a Little Russian, looked at her angrily
and clambered on to the box.
It was a twenty-mile drive from the station, and Vera, too, abandoned
herself to the charm of the steppe, forgot the past, and thought only of the
wide expanse, of the freedom. Healthy, clever, beautiful, and young—she
was only three-and-twenty—she had hitherto lacked nothing in her life but
just this space and freedom.

The steppe, the steppe. . . . The horses trotted, the sun rose higher and
higher; and it seemed to Vera that never in her childhood had the steppe
been so rich, so luxuriant in June; the wild flowers were green, yellow, lilac,
white, and a fragrance rose from them and from the warmed earth; and
there were strange blue birds along the roadside. . . . Vera had long got out
of the habit of praying, but now, struggling with drowsiness, she murmured:
“Lord, grant that I may be happy here.”
And there was peace and sweetness in her soul, and she felt as though she
would have been glad to drive like that all her life, looking at the steppe.
Suddenly there was a deep ravine overgrown with oak saplings and alder-
trees; there was a moist feeling in the air—there must have been a spring at
the bottom. On the near side, on the very edge of the ravine, a covey of
partridges rose noisily. Vera remembered that in old days they used to go for
evening walks to this ravine; so it must be near home! And now she could
actually see the poplars, the barn, black smoke rising on one side—they
were burning old straw. And there was Auntie Dasha coming to meet her
and waving her handkerchief; grandfather was on the terrace. Oh dear, how
happy she was!
“My darling, my darling!” cried her aunt, shrieking as though she were in
hysterics. “Our real mistress has come! You must understand you are our
mistress, you are our queen! Here everything is yours! My darling, my
beauty, I am not your aunt, but your willing slave!”
Vera had no relations but her aunt and her grandfather; her mother had
long been dead; her father, an engineer, had died three months before at
Kazan, on his way from Siberia. Her grandfather had a big grey beard. He
was stout, red-faced, and asthmatic, and walked leaning on a cane and
sticking his stomach out. Her aunt, a lady of forty-two, drawn in tightly at
the waist and fashionably dressed with sleeves high on the shoulder,
evidently tried to look young and was still anxious to be charming; she
walked with tiny steps with a wriggle of her spine.
“Will you love us?” she said, embracing Vera, “You are not proud?”
At her grandfather’s wish there was a thanksgiving service, then they
spent a long while over dinner—and Vera’s new life began. She was given

the best room. All the rugs in the house had been put in it, and a great many
flowers; and when at night she lay down in her snug, wide, very soft bed
and covered herself with a silk quilt that smelt of old clothes long stored
away, she laughed with pleasure. Auntie Dasha came in for a minute to wish
her good-night.
“Here you are home again, thank God,” she said, sitting down on the bed.
“As you see, we get along very well and have everything we want. There’s
only one thing: your grandfather is in a poor way! A terribly poor way! He
is short of breath and he has begun to lose his memory. And you remember
how strong, how vigorous, he used to be! There was no doing anything with
him. . . . In old days, if the servants didn’t please him or anything else went
wrong, he would jump up at once and shout: ‘Twenty-five strokes! The
birch!’ But now he has grown milder and you never hear him. And besides,
times are changed, my precious; one mayn’t beat them nowadays. Of
course, they oughtn’t to be beaten, but they need looking after.”
“And are they beaten now, auntie?” asked Vera.
“The steward beats them sometimes, but I never do, bless their hearts!
And your grandfather sometimes lifts his stick from old habit, but he never
beats them.”
Auntie Dasha yawned and crossed herself over her mouth and her right
ear.
“It’s not dull here?” Vera inquired.
“What shall I say? There are no landowners living here now, but there
have been works built near, darling, and there are lots of engineers, doctors,
and mine managers. Of course, we have theatricals and concerts, but we
play cards more than anything. They come to us, too. Dr. Neshtchapov from
the works comes to see us—such a handsome, interesting man! He fell in
love with your photograph. I made up my mind: he is Verotchka’s destiny, I
thought. He’s young, handsome, he has means—a good match, in fact. And
of course you’re a match for any one. You’re of good family. The place is
mortgaged, it’s true, but it’s in good order and not neglected; there is my
share in it, but it will all come to you; I am your willing slave. And my

brother, your father, left you fifteen thousand roubles. . . . But I see you
can’t keep your eyes open. Sleep, my child.”
Next day Vera spent a long time walking round the house. The garden,
which was old and unattractive, lying inconveniently upon the slope, had no
paths, and was utterly neglected; probably the care of it was regarded as an
unnecessary item in the management. There were numbers of grass-snakes.
Hoopoes flew about under the trees calling “Oo-too-toot!” as though they
were trying to remind her of something. At the bottom of the hill there was
a river overgrown with tall reeds, and half a mile beyond the river was the
village. From the garden Vera went out into the fields; looking into the
distance, thinking of her new life in her own home, she kept trying to grasp
what was in store for her. The space, the lovely peace of the steppe, told her
that happiness was near at hand, and perhaps was here already; thousands of
people, in fact, would have said: “What happiness to be young, healthy,
well-educated, to be living on one’s own estate!” And at the same time the
endless plain, all alike, without one living soul, frightened her, and at
moments it was clear to her that its peaceful green vastness would swallow
up her life and reduce it to nothingness. She was very young, elegant, fond
of life; she had finished her studies at an aristocratic boarding-school, had
learnt three languages, had read a great deal, had travelled with her father—
and could all this have been meant to lead to nothing but settling down in a
remote country-house in the steppe, and wandering day after day from the
garden into the fields and from the fields into the garden to while away the
time, and then sitting at home listening to her grandfather’s breathing? But
what could she do? Where could she go? She could find no answer, and as
she was returning home she doubted whether she would be happy here, and
thought that driving from the station was far more interesting than living
here.
Dr. Neshtchapov drove over from the works. He was a doctor, but three
years previously he had taken a share in the works, and had become one of
the partners; and now he no longer looked upon medicine as his chief
vocation, though he still practised. In appearance he was a pale, dark man in
a white waistcoat, with a good figure; but to guess what there was in his
heart and his brain was difficult. He kissed Auntie Dasha’s hand on greeting
her, and was continually leaping up to set a chair or give his seat to some
one. He was very silent and grave all the while, and, when he did speak, it

was for some reason impossible to hear and understand his first sentence,
though he spoke correctly and not in a low voice.
“You play the piano?” he asked Vera, and immediately leapt up, as she
had dropped her handkerchief.
He stayed from midday to midnight without speaking, and Vera found
him very unattractive. She thought that a white waistcoat in the country was
bad form, and his elaborate politeness, his manners, and his pale, serious
face with dark eyebrows, were mawkish; and it seemed to her that he was
perpetually silent, probably because he was stupid. When he had gone her
aunt said enthusiastically:
“Well? Isn’t he charming?”

II

Auntie Dasha looked after the estate. Tightly laced, with jingling
bracelets on her wrists, she went into the kitchen, the granary, the cattle-
yard, tripping along with tiny steps, wriggling her spine; and whenever she
talked to the steward or to the peasants, she used, for some reason, to put on
a pince-nez. Vera’s grandfather always sat in the same place, playing
patience or dozing. He ate a very great deal at dinner and supper; they gave
him the dinner cooked to-day and what was left from yesterday, and cold
pie left from Sunday, and salt meat from the servants’ dinner, and he ate it
all greedily. And every dinner left on Vera such an impression, that when
she saw afterwards a flock of sheep driven by, or flour being brought from
the mill, she thought, “Grandfather will eat that.” For the most part he was
silent, absorbed in eating or in patience; but it sometimes happened at
dinner that at the sight of Vera he would be touched and say tenderly:
“My only grandchild! Verotchka!”
And tears would glisten in his eyes. Or his face would turn suddenly
crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the servants, and
ask, tapping with his stick:
“Why haven’t you brought the horse-radish?”

In winter he led a perfectly inactive existence; in summer he sometimes
drove out into the fields to look at the oats and the hay; and when he came
back he would flourish his stick and declare that everything was neglected
now that he was not there to look after it.
“Your grandfather is out of humour,” Auntie Dasha would whisper. “But
it’s nothing now to what it used to be in the old days: ‘Twenty-five strokes!
The birch!’”
Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did
anything, and that the estate yielded no profit. Indeed, there was no
systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from habit, and
in reality did nothing and lived in idleness. Meanwhile there was a running
to and fro, reckoning and worrying all day long; the bustle in the house
began at five o’clock in the morning; there were continual sounds of “Bring
it,” “Fetch it,” “Make haste,” and by the evening the servants were utterly
exhausted. Auntie Dasha changed her cooks and her housemaids every
week; sometimes she discharged them for immorality; sometimes they went
of their own accord, complaining that they were worked to death. None of
the village people would come to the house as servants; Auntie Dasha had
to hire them from a distance. There was only one girl from the village living
in the house, Alyona, and she stayed because her whole family—old people
and children—were living upon her wages. This Alyona, a pale, rather
stupid little thing, spent the whole day turning out the rooms, waiting at
table, heating the stoves, sewing, washing; but it always seemed as though
she were only pottering about, treading heavily with her boots, and were
nothing but a hindrance in the house. In her terror that she might be
dismissed and sent home, she often dropped and broke the crockery, and
they stopped the value of it out of her wages, and then her mother and
grandmother would come and bow down at Auntie Dasha’s feet.
Once a week or sometimes oftener visitors would arrive. Her aunt would
come to Vera and say:
“You should sit a little with the visitors, or else they’ll think that you are
stuck up.”
Vera would go in to the visitors and play vint with them for hours
together, or play the piano for the visitors to dance; her aunt, in high spirits

and breathless from dancing, would come up and whisper to her:
“Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna.”
On the sixth of December, St. Nikolay’s Day, a large party of about thirty
arrived all at once; they played vint until late at night, and many of them
stayed the night. In the morning they sat down to cards again, then they had
dinner, and when Vera went to her room after dinner to rest from
conversation and tobacco smoke, there were visitors there too, and she
almost wept in despair. And when they began to get ready to go in the
evening, she was so pleased they were going at last, that she said:
“Do stay a little longer.”
She felt exhausted by the visitors and constrained by their presence; yet
every day, as soon as it began to grow dark, something drew her out of the
house, and she went out to pay visits either at the works or at some
neighbours’, and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits, suppers. . . .The
young people in the works or in the mines sometimes sang Little Russian
songs, and sang them very well. It made one sad to hear them sing. Or they
all gathered together in one room and talked in the dusk of the mines, of the
treasures that had once been buried in the steppes, of Saur’s Grave. . . .
Later on, as they talked, a shout of “Help!” sometimes reached them. It was
a drunken man going home, or some one was being robbed by the pit near
by. Or the wind howled in the chimneys, the shutters banged; then, soon
afterwards, they would hear the uneasy church bell, as the snow-storm
began.
At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was
invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most interesting
man. There was very little reading either at the works or at the country-
houses; they played only marches and polkas; and the young people always
argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the effect was crude.
The discussions were loud and heated, but, strange to say, Vera had
nowhere else met people so indifferent and careless as these. They seemed
to have no fatherland, no religion, no public interests. When they talked of
literature or debated some abstract question, it could be seen from Dr.
Neshtchapov’s face that the question had no interest for him whatever, and
that for long, long years he had read nothing and cared to read nothing.

Serious and expressionless, like a badly painted portrait, for ever in his
white waistcoat, he was silent and incomprehensible as before; but the
ladies, young and old, thought him interesting and were enthusiastic over
his manners. They envied Vera, who appeared to attract him very much.
And Vera always came away from the visits with a feeling of vexation,
vowing inwardly to remain at home; but the day passed, the evening came,
and she hurried off to the works again, and it was like that almost all the
winter.
She ordered books and magazines, and used to read them in her room.
And she read at night, lying in bed. When the clock in the corridor struck
two or three, and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she sat
up in bed and thought, “What am I to do? Where am I to go?” Accursed,
importunate question, to which there were a number of ready-made
answers, and in reality no answer at all.
Oh, how noble, how holy, how picturesque it must be to serve the people,
to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she, Vera, did not know
the people. And how could she go to them? They were strange and
uninteresting to her; she could not endure the stuffy smell of the huts, the
pot-house oaths, the unwashed children, the women’s talk of illnesses. To
walk over the snow-drifts, to feel cold, then to sit in a stifling hut, to teach
children she disliked—no, she would rather die! And to teach the peasants’
children while Auntie Dasha made money out of the pot-houses and fined
the peasants—it was too great a farce! What a lot of talk there was of
schools, of village libraries, of universal education; but if all these
engineers, these mine-owners and ladies of her acquaintance, had not been
hypocrites, and really had believed that enlightenment was necessary, they
would not have paid the schoolmasters fifteen roubles a month as they did
now, and would not have let them go hungry. And the schools and the talk
about ignorance—it was all only to stifle the voice of conscience because
they were ashamed to own fifteen or thirty thousand acres and to be
indifferent to the peasants’ lot. Here the ladies said about Dr. Neshtchapov
that he was a kind man and had built a school at the works. Yes, he had built
a school out of the old bricks at the works for some eight hundred roubles,
and they sang the prayer for “long life” to him when the building was
opened, but there was no chance of his giving up his shares, and it certainly
never entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself,

and that they, too, needed university teaching, and not merely lessons in
these wretched schools.
And Vera felt full of anger against herself and every one else. She took
up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down and
thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an
examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to corpses
and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a commander
of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she could put all her
powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at
night; to give up her life to something that would make her an interesting
person, able to attract interesting people, to love, to have a real family of
her own. . . . But what was she to do? How was she to begin?
One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning to
fetch her umbrella. Vera was sitting up in bed clasping her head in her
hands, thinking.
“You ought to go to church, darling,” said her aunt, “or people will think
you are not a believer.”
Vera made no answer.
“I see you are dull, poor child,” said Auntie Dasha, sinking on her knees
by the bedside; she adored Vera. “Tell me the truth, are you bored?”
“Dreadfully.”
“My beauty, my queen, I am your willing slave, I wish you nothing but
good and happiness. . . . Tell me, why don’t you want to marry Nestchapov?
What more do you want, my child? You must forgive me, darling; you can’t
pick and choose like this, we are not princes . . . . Time is passing, you are
not seventeen. . . . And I don’t understand it! He loves you, idolises you!”
“Oh, mercy!” said Vera with vexation. “How can I tell? He sits dumb and
never says a word.”
“He’s shy, darling. . . . He’s afraid you’ll refuse him!”
And when her aunt had gone away, Vera remained standing in the middle
of her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed. The bed was

hateful; if one looked out of the window there were the bare trees, the grey
snow, the hateful jackdaws, the pigs that her grandfather would eat. . . .
“Yes, after all, perhaps I’d better get married!” she thought.

III

For two days Auntie Dasha went about with a tear-stained and heavily
powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking towards the ikon.
And it was impossible to make out what was the matter with her. But at last
she made up her mind, went in to Vera, and said in a casual way:
“The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the
tenant hasn’t paid his rent. Will you let me pay it out of the fifteen thousand
your papa left you?”
All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the
garden. Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and from the
garden to the house and back again to the cellar.
When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though
she were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed her
strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants ran about
incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never taste, there was
always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. . . .
The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal stove had
been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered in the air.
Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new labourer, a young
soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her express orders, making
new paths. He was cutting the turf with a spade and heaping it up on a
barrow.
“Where were you serving?” Vera asked him.
“At Berdyansk.”
“And where are you going now? Home?”
“No,” answered the labourer. “I have no home.”

“But where were you born and brought up?”
“In the province of Oryol. Till I went into the army I lived with my
mother, in my step-father’s house; my mother was the head of the house,
and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared for. But while I
was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. . . . And now I
don’t seem to care to go home. It’s not my own father, so it’s not like my
own home.”
“Then your father is dead?”
“I don’t know. I am illegitimate.”
At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said:
“Il ne faut pas parler aux gens . . . . Go into the kitchen, my good man.
You can tell your story there,” she said to the soldier.
And then came as yesterday and every day supper, reading, a sleepless
night, and endless thinking about the same thing. At three o’clock the sun
rose; Alyona was already busy in the corridor, and Vera was not asleep yet
and was trying to read. She heard the creak of the barrow: it was the new
labourer at work in the garden. . . . Vera sat at the open window with a
book, dozed, and watched the soldier making the paths for her, and that
interested her. The paths were as even and level as a leather strap, and it
was pleasant to imagine what they would be like when they were strewn
with yellow sand.
She could see her aunt come out of the house soon after five o’clock, in a
pink wrapper and curl-papers. She stood on the steps for three minutes
without speaking, and then said to the soldier:
“Take your passport and go in peace. I can’t have any one illegitimate in
my house.”
An oppressive, angry feeling sank like a stone on Vera’s heart. She was
indignant with her aunt, she hated her; she was so sick of her aunt that her
heart was full of misery and loathing. But what was she to do? To stop her
mouth? To be rude to her? But what would be the use? Suppose she
struggled with her, got rid of her, made her harmless, prevented her

grandfather from flourishing his stick— what would be the use of it? It
would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The
vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life, instil a
sense of helplessness; the position seems hopeless, and one wants to do
nothing—everything is useless.
Alyona came in, and bowing low to Vera, began carrying out the arm-
chairs to beat the dust out of them.
“You have chosen a time to clean up,” said Vera with annoyance. “Go
away.”
Alyona was overwhelmed, and in her terror could not understand what
was wanted of her. She began hurriedly tidying up the dressing-table.
“Go out of the room, I tell you,” Vera shouted, turning cold; she had
never had such an oppressive feeling before. “Go away!”
Alyona uttered a sort of moan, like a bird, and dropped Vera’s gold watch
on the carpet.
“Go away!” Vera shrieked in a voice not her own, leaping up and
trembling all over. “Send her away; she worries me to death!” she went on,
walking rapidly after Alyona down the passage, stamping her feet. “Go
away! Birch her! Beat her!” Then suddenly she came to herself, and just as
she was, unwashed, uncombed, in her dressing-gown and slippers, she
rushed out of the house. She ran to the familiar ravine and hid herself there
among the sloe-trees, so that she might see no one and be seen by no one.
Lying there motionless on the grass, she did not weep, she was not horror-
stricken, but gazing at the sky open-eyed, she reflected coldly and clearly
that something had happened which she could never forget and for which
she could never forgive herself all her life.
“No, I can’t go on like this,” she thought. “It’s time to take myself in
hand, or there’ll be no end to it. . . . I can’t go on like this. . . .”
At midday Dr. Neshtchapov drove by the ravine on his way to the house.
She saw him and made up her mind that she would begin a new life, and
that she would make herself begin it, and this decision calmed her. And

following with her eyes the doctor’s well-built figure, she said, as though
trying to soften the crudity of her decision:
“He’s a nice man. . . . We shall get through life somehow.”
She returned home. While she was dressing, Auntie Dasha came into the
room, and said:
“Alyona upset you, darling; I’ve sent her home to the village. Her
mother’s given her a good beating and has come here, crying.”
“Auntie,” said Vera quickly, “I’m going to marry Dr. Neshtchapov. Only
talk to him yourself . . . I can’t.”
And again she went out into the fields. And wandering aimlessly about,
she made up her mind that when she was married she would look after the
house, doctor the peasants, teach in the school, that she would do all the
things that other women of her circle did. And this perpetual dissatisfaction
with herself and every one else, this series of crude mistakes which stand up
like a mountain before one whenever one looks back upon one’s past, she
would accept as her real life to which she was fated, and she would expect
nothing better. . . . Of course there was nothing better! Beautiful nature,
dreams, music, told one story, but reality another. Evidently truth and
happiness existed somewhere outside real life. . . . One must give up one’s
own life and merge oneself into this luxuriant steppe, boundless and
indifferent as eternity, with its flowers, its ancient barrows, and its distant
horizon, and then it would be well with one. . . .
A month later Vera was living at the works.

EXPENSIVE LESSONS

F
OR a cultivated man to be ignorant of foreign languages is a great
inconvenience. Vorotov became acutely conscious of it when, after
taking his degree, he began upon a piece of research work.
“It’s awful,” he said, breathing hard (although he was only twenty-six he
was fat, heavy, and suffered from shortness of breath).
“It’s awful! Without languages I’m like a bird without wings. I might just
as well give up the work.”
And he made up his mind at all costs to overcome his innate laziness, and
to learn French and German; and began to look out for a teacher.
One winter noon, as Vorotov was sitting in his study at work, the servant
told him that a young lady was inquiring for him.
“Ask her in,” said Vorotov.
And a young lady elaborately dressed in the last fashion walked in. She
introduced herself as a teacher of French, Alice Osipovna Enquête, and told
Vorotov that she had been sent to him by one of his friends.
“Delighted! Please sit down,” said Vorotov, breathing hard and putting
his hand over the collar of his nightshirt (to breathe more freely he always
wore a nightshirt at work instead of a stiff linen one with collar). “It was
Pyotr Sergeitch sent you? Yes, yes . . . I asked him about it. Delighted!”
As he talked to Mdlle. Enquête he looked at her shyly and with curiosity.
She was a genuine Frenchwoman, very elegant and still quite young.
Judging from her pale, languid face, her short curly hair, and her
unnaturally slim waist, she might have been eighteen; but looking at her
broad, well-developed shoulders, the elegant lines of her back and her
severe eyes, Vorotov thought that she was not less than three-and-twenty
and might be twenty-five; but then again he began to think she was not
more than eighteen. Her face looked as cold and business-like as the face of

a person who has come to speak about money. She did not once smile or
frown, and only once a look of perplexity flitted over her face when she
learnt that she was not required to teach children, but a stout grown-up man.
“So, Alice Osipovna,” said Vorotov, “we’ll have a lesson every evening
from seven to eight. As regards your terms—a rouble a lesson—I’ve
nothing to say against that. By all means let it be a rouble. . . .”
And he asked her if she would not have some tea or coffee, whether it
was a fine day, and with a good-natured smile, stroking the baize of the
table, he inquired in a friendly voice who she was, where she had studied,
and what she lived on.
With a cold, business-like expression, Alice Osipovna answered that she
had completed her studies at a private school and had the diploma of a
private teacher, that her father had died lately of scarlet fever, that her
mother was alive and made artificial flowers; that she, Mdlle. Enquête,
taught in a private school till dinnertime, and after dinner was busy till
evening giving lessons in different good families.
She went away leaving behind her the faint fragrance of a woman’s
clothes. For a long time afterwards Vorotov could not settle to work, but,
sitting at the table stroking its green baize surface, he meditated.
“It’s very pleasant to see a girl working to earn her own living,” he
thought. “On the other hand, it’s very unpleasant to think that poverty
should not spare such elegant and pretty girls as Alice Osipovna, and that
she, too, should have to struggle for existence. It’s a sad thing!”
Having never seen virtuous Frenchwomen before, he reflected also that
this elegantly dressed young lady with her well-developed shoulders and
exaggeratedly small waist in all probability followed another calling as well
as giving French lessons.
The next evening when the clock pointed to five minutes to seven, Mdlle.
Enquête appeared, rosy from the frost. She opened Margot, which she had
brought with her, and without introduction began:
“French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first letter is called A, the
second B . . .”

“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted, smiling. “I must warn you,
mademoiselle, that you must change your method a little in my case. You
see, I know Russian, Greek, and Latin well. . . . I’ve studied comparative
philology, and I think we might omit Margot and pass straight to reading
some author.”
And he explained to the French girl how grown-up people learn
languages.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “wanting to learn modern languages, laid
before him the French, German, and Latin gospels, and read them side by
side, carefully analysing each word, and would you believe it, he attained
his object in less than a year. Let us do the same. We’ll take some author
and read him.”
The French girl looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion
seemed to her very naïve and ridiculous. If this strange proposal had been
made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry and have
scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout and she could not
scold him, she only shrugged her shoulders hardly perceptibly and said:
“As you please.”
Vorotov rummaged in his bookcase and picked out a dog’s-eared French
book.
“Will this do?”
“It’s all the same,” she said.
“In that case let us begin, and good luck to it! Let’s begin with the title . .
. ‘Mémoires.’”
“Reminiscences,” Mdlle. Enquête translated.
With a good-natured smile, breathing hard, he spent a quarter of an hour
over the word “Mémoires,” and as much over the word de, and this wearied
the young lady. She answered his questions languidly, grew confused, and
evidently did not understand her pupil well, and did not attempt to
understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and at the same time kept
looking at her fair hair and thinking:

“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it. It’s a strange thing! She works
from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her hair.”
At eight o’clock precisely she got up, and saying coldly and dryly, “Au
revoir, monsieur,” walked out of the study, leaving behind her the same
tender, delicate, disturbing fragrance. For a long time again her pupil did
nothing; he sat at the table meditating.
During the days that followed he became convinced that his teacher was
a charming, conscientious, and precise young lady, but that she was very
badly educated, and incapable of teaching grown-up people, and he made
up his mind not to waste his time, to get rid of her, and to engage another
teacher. When she came the seventh time he took out of his pocket an
envelope with seven roubles in it, and holding it in his hand, became very
confused and began:
“Excuse me, Alice Osipovna, but I ought to tell you . . . I’m under painful
necessity . . .”
Seeing the envelope, the French girl guessed what was meant, and for the
first time during their lessons her face quivered and her cold, business-like
expression vanished. She coloured a little, and dropping her eyes, began
nervously fingering her slender gold chain. And Vorotov, seeing her
perturbation, realised how much a rouble meant to her, and how bitter it
would be to her to lose what she was earning.
“I ought to tell you,” he muttered, growing more and more confused, and
quavering inwardly; he hurriedly stuffed the envelope into his pocket and
went on: “Excuse me, I . . . I must leave you for ten minutes.”
And trying to appear as though he had not in the least meant to get rid of
her, but only to ask her permission to leave her for a short time, he went
into the next room and sat there for ten minutes. And then he returned more
embarrassed than ever: it struck him that she might have interpreted his
brief absence in some way of her own, and he felt awkward.
The lessons began again. Yorotov felt no interest in them. Realising that
he would gain nothing from the lessons, he gave the French girl liberty to
do as she liked, asking her nothing and not interrupting her. She translated
away as she pleased ten pages during a lesson, and he did not listen,

breathed hard, and having nothing better to do, gazed at her curly head, or
her soft white hands or her neck and sniffed the fragrance of her clothes. He
caught himself thinking very unsuitable thoughts, and felt ashamed, or he
was moved to tenderness, and then he felt vexed and wounded that she was
so cold and business-like with him, and treated him as a pupil, never
smiling and seeming afraid that he might accidentally touch her. He kept
wondering how to inspire her with confidence and get to know her better,
and to help her, to make her understand how badly she taught, poor thing.
One day Mdlle. Enquête came to the lesson in a smart pink dress, slightly
décolleté, and surrounded by such a fragrance that she seemed to be
wrapped in a cloud, and, if one blew upon her, ready to fly away into the air
or melt away like smoke. She apologised and said she could stay only half
an hour for the lesson, as she was going straight from the lesson to a dance.
He looked at her throat and the back of her bare neck, and thought he
understood why Frenchwomen had the reputation of frivolous creatures
easily seduced; he was carried away by this cloud of fragrance, beauty, and
bare flesh, while she, unconscious of his thoughts and probably not in the
least interested in them, rapidly turned over the pages and translated at full
steam:
“‘He was walking the street and meeting a gentleman his friend and
saying, “Where are you striving to seeing your face so pale it makes me
sad.”’”
The “Mémoires” had long been finished, and now Alice was translating
some other book. One day she came an hour too early for the lesson,
apologizing and saying that she wanted to leave at seven and go to the Little
Theatre. Seeing her out after the lesson, Vorotov dressed and went to the
theatre himself. He went, and fancied that he was going simply for change
and amusement, and that he was not thinking about Alice at all. He could
not admit that a serious man, preparing for a learned career, lethargic in his
habits, could fling up his work and go to the theatre simply to meet there a
girl he knew very little, who was unintelligent and utterly unintellectual.
Yet for some reason his heart was beating during the intervals, and
without realizing what he was doing, he raced about the corridors and foyer
like a boy impatiently looking for some one, and he was disappointed when

the interval was over. And when he saw the familiar pink dress and the
handsome shoulders under the tulle, his heart quivered as though with a
foretaste of happiness; he smiled joyfully, and for the first time in his life
experienced the sensation of jealousy.
Alice was walking with two unattractive-looking students and an officer.
She was laughing, talking loudly, and obviously flirting. Vorotov had never
seen her like that. She was evidently happy, contented, warm, sincere. What
for? Why? Perhaps because these men were her friends and belonged to her
own circle. And Vorotov felt there was a terrible gulf between himself and
that circle. He bowed to his teacher, but she gave him a chilly nod and
walked quickly by; she evidently did not care for her friends to know that
she had pupils, and that she had to give lessons to earn money.
After the meeting at the theatre Vorotov realised that he was in love. . . .
During the subsequent lessons he feasted his eyes on his elegant teacher,
and without struggling with himself, gave full rein to his imaginations, pure
and impure. Mdlle. Enquête’s face did not cease to be cold; precisely at
eight o’clock every evening she said coldly, “Au revoir, monsieur,” and he
felt she cared nothing about him, and never would care anything about him,
and that his position was hopeless.
Sometimes in the middle of a lesson he would begin dreaming, hoping,
making plans. He inwardly composed declarations of love, remembered that
Frenchwomen were frivolous and easily won, but it was enough for him to
glance at the face of his teacher for his ideas to be extinguished as a candle
is blown out when you bring it into the wind on the verandah. Once,
overcome, forgetting himself as though in delirium, he could not restrain
himself, and barred her way as she was going from the study into the entry
after the lesson, and, gasping for breath and stammering, began to declare
his love:
“You are dear to me! I . . . I love you! Allow me to speak.”
And Alice turned pale—probably from dismay, reflecting that after this
declaration she could not come here again and get a rouble a lesson. With a
frightened look in her eyes she said in a loud whisper:
“Ach, you mustn’t! Don’t speak, I entreat you! You mustn’t!”

And Vorotov did not sleep all night afterwards; he was tortured by
shame; he blamed himself and thought intensely. It seemed to him that he
had insulted the girl by his declaration, that she would not come to him
again.
He resolved to find out her address from the address bureau in the
morning, and to write her a letter of apology. But Alice came without a
letter. For the first minute she felt uncomfortable, then she opened a book
and began briskly and rapidly translating as usual:
“‘Oh, young gentleman, don’t tear those flowers in my garden which I
want to be giving to my ill daughter. . . .’”
She still comes to this day. Four books have already been translated, but
Vorotov knows no French but the word “Mémoires,” and when he is asked
about his literary researches, he waves his hand, and without answering,
turns the conversation to the weather.

THE PRINCESS

A
CARRIAGE with four fine sleek horses drove in at the big so-
called Red Gate of the N—- Monastery. While it was still at a
distance, the priests and monks who were standing in a group round
the part of the hostel allotted to the gentry, recognised by the coachman and
horses that the lady in the carriage was Princess Vera Gavrilovna, whom
they knew very well.
An old man in livery jumped off the box and helped the princess to get
out of the carriage. She raised her dark veil and moved in a leisurely way up
to the priests to receive their blessing; then she nodded pleasantly to the rest
of the monks and went into the hostel.
“Well, have you missed your princess?” she said to the monk who
brought in her things. “It’s a whole month since I’ve been to see you. But
here I am; behold your princess. And where is the Father Superior? My
goodness, I am burning with impatience! Wonderful, wonderful old man!
You must be proud of having such a Superior.”
When the Father Superior came in, the princess uttered a shriek of
delight, crossed her arms over her bosom, and went up to receive his
blessing.
“No, no, let me kiss your hand,” she said, snatching it and eagerly kissing
it three times. “How glad I am to see you at last, holy Father! I’m sure
you’ve forgotten your princess, but my thoughts have been in your dear
monastery every moment. How delightful it is here! This living for God far
from the busy, giddy world has a special charm of its own, holy Father,
which I feel with my whole soul although I cannot express it!”
The princess’s cheeks glowed and tears came into her eyes. She talked
incessantly, fervently, while the Father Superior, a grave, plain, shy old man
of seventy, remained mute or uttered abruptly, like a soldier on duty,
phrases such as:

“Certainly, Your Excellency. . . . Quite so. I understand.”
“Has Your Excellency come for a long stay?” he inquired.
“I shall stay the night here, and to-morrow I’m going on to Klavdia
Nikolaevna’s—it’s a long time since I’ve seen her—and the day after to-
morrow I’ll come back to you and stay three or four days. I want to rest my
soul here among you, holy Father. . . .”
The princess liked being at the monastery at N—-. For the last two years
it had been a favourite resort of hers; she used to go there almost every
month in the summer and stay two or three days, even sometimes a week.
The shy novices, the stillness, the low ceilings, the smell of cypress, the
modest fare, the cheap curtains on the windows—all this touched her,
softened her, and disposed her to contemplation and good thoughts. It was
enough for her to be half an hour in the hostel for her to feel that she, too,
was timid and modest, and that she, too, smelt of cypress-wood. The past
retreated into the background, lost its significance, and the princess began
to imagine that in spite of her twenty-nine years she was very much like the
old Father Superior, and that, like him, she was created not for wealth, not
for earthly grandeur and love, but for a peaceful life secluded from the
world, a life in twilight like the hostel.
It happens that a ray of light gleams in the dark cell of the anchorite
absorbed in prayer, or a bird alights on the window and sings its song; the
stern anchorite will smile in spite of himself, and a gentle, sinless joy will
pierce through the load of grief over his sins, like water flowing from under
a stone. The princess fancied she brought from the outside world just such
comfort as the ray of light or the bird. Her gay, friendly smile, her gentle
eyes, her voice, her jests, her whole personality in fact, her little graceful
figure always dressed in simple black, must arouse in simple, austere people
a feeling of tenderness and joy. Every one, looking at her, must think: “God
has sent us an angel. . . .” And feeling that no one could help thinking this,
she smiled still more cordially, and tried to look like a bird.
After drinking tea and resting, she went for a walk. The sun was already
setting. From the monastery garden came a moist fragrance of freshly
watered mignonette, and from the church floated the soft singing of men’s
voices, which seemed very pleasant and mournful in the distance. It was the

evening service. In the dark windows where the little lamps glowed gently,
in the shadows, in the figure of the old monk sitting at the church door with
a collecting-box, there was such unruffled peace that the princess felt
moved to tears.
Outside the gate, in the walk between the wall and the birch-trees where
there were benches, it was quite evening. The air grew rapidly darker and
darker. The princess went along the walk, sat on a seat, and sank into
thought.
She thought how good it would be to settle down for her whole life in
this monastery where life was as still and unruffled as a summer evening;
how good it would be to forget the ungrateful, dissipated prince; to forget
her immense estates, the creditors who worried her every day, her
misfortunes, her maid Dasha, who had looked at her impertinently that
morning. It would be nice to sit here on the bench all her life and watch
through the trunks of the birch-trees the evening mist gathering in wreaths
in the valley below; the rooks flying home in a black cloud like a veil far,
far away above the forest; two novices, one astride a piebald horse, another
on foot driving out the horses for the night and rejoicing in their freedom,
playing pranks like little children; their youthful voices rang out musically
in the still air, and she could distinguish every word. It is nice to sit and
listen to the silence: at one moment the wind blows and stirs the tops of the
birch-trees, then a frog rustles in last year’s leaves, then the clock on the
belfry strikes the quarter. . . . One might sit without moving, listen and
think, and think. . . .
An old woman passed by with a wallet on her back. The princess thought
that it would be nice to stop the old woman and to say something friendly
and cordial to her, to help her. . . . But the old woman turned the corner
without once looking round.
Not long afterwards a tall man with a grey beard and a straw hat came
along the walk. When he came up to the princess, he took off his hat and
bowed. From the bald patch on his head and his sharp, hooked nose the
princess recognised him as the doctor, Mihail Ivanovitch, who had been in
her service at Dubovki. She remembered that some one had told her that his

wife had died the year before, and she wanted to sympathise with him, to
console him.
“Doctor, I expect you don’t recognise me?” she said with an affable
smile.
“Yes, Princess, I recognised you,” said the doctor, taking off his hat
again.
“Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had forgotten your princess.
People only remember their enemies, but they forget their friends. Have
you, too, come to pray?”
“I am the doctor here, and I have to spend the night at the monastery
every Saturday.”
“Well, how are you?” said the princess, sighing. “I hear that you have lost
your wife. What a calamity!”
“Yes, Princess, for me it is a great calamity.”
“There’s nothing for it! We must bear our troubles with resignation. Not
one hair of a man’s head is lost without the Divine Will.”
“Yes, Princess.”
To the princess’s friendly, gentle smile and her sighs the doctor
responded coldly and dryly: “Yes, Princess.” And the expression of his face
was cold and dry.
“What else can I say to him?” she wondered.
“How long it is since we met!” she said. “Five years! How much water
has flowed under the bridge, how many changes in that time; it quite
frightens one to think of it! You know, I am married. . . . I am not a countess
now, but a princess. And by now I am separated from my husband too.”
“Yes, I heard so.”
“God has sent me many trials. No doubt you have heard, too, that I am
almost ruined. My Dubovki, Sofyino, and Kiryakovo have all been sold for
my unhappy husband’s debts. And I have only Baranovo and Mihaltsevo

left. It’s terrible to look back: how many changes and misfortunes of all
kinds, how many mistakes!”
“Yes, Princess, many mistakes.”
The princess was a little disconcerted. She knew her mistakes; they were
all of such a private character that no one but she could think or speak of
them. She could not resist asking:
“What mistakes are you thinking about?”
“You referred to them, so you know them . . .” answered the doctor, and
he smiled. “Why talk about them!”
“No; tell me, doctor. I shall be very grateful to you. And please don’t
stand on ceremony with me. I love to hear the truth.”
“I am not your judge, Princess.”
“Not my judge! What a tone you take! You must know something about
me. Tell me!”
“If you really wish it, very well. Only I regret to say I’m not clever at
talking, and people can’t always understand me.”
The doctor thought a moment and began:
“A lot of mistakes; but the most important of them, in my opinion, was
the general spirit that prevailed on all your estates. You see, I don’t know
how to express myself. I mean chiefly the lack of love, the aversion for
people that was felt in absolutely everything. Your whole system of life was
built upon that aversion. Aversion for the human voice, for faces, for heads,
steps . . . in fact, for everything that makes up a human being. At all the
doors and on the stairs there stand sleek, rude, and lazy grooms in livery to
prevent badly dressed persons from entering the house; in the hall there are
chairs with high backs so that the footmen waiting there, during balls and
receptions, may not soil the walls with their heads; in every room there are
thick carpets that no human step may be heard; every one who comes in is
infallibly warned to speak as softly and as little as possible, and to say
nothing that might have a disagreeable effect on the nerves or the
imagination. And in your room you don’t shake hands with any one or ask

him to sit down— just as you didn’t shake hands with me or ask me to sit
down. . . .”
“By all means, if you like,” said the princess, smiling and holding out her
hand. “Really, to be cross about such trifles. . . .”
“But I am not cross,” laughed the doctor, but at once he flushed, took off
his hat, and waving it about, began hotly: “To be candid, I’ve long wanted
an opportunity to tell you all I think. . . . That is, I want to tell you that you
look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic standpoint as food for
the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea; you have nothing except
aversion.”
“I have an aversion for people?” smiled the princess, shrugging her
shoulders in astonishment. “I have!”
“Yes, you! You want facts? By all means. In Mihaltsevo three former
cooks of yours, who have gone blind in your kitchens from the heat of the
stove, are living upon charity. All the health and strength and good looks
that is found on your hundreds of thousands of acres is taken by you and
your parasites for your grooms, your footmen, and your coachmen. All
these two-legged cattle are trained to be flunkeys, overeat themselves, grow
coarse, lose the ‘image and likeness,’ in fact. . . . Young doctors, agricultural
experts, teachers, intellectual workers generally—think of it!—are torn
away from their honest work and forced for a crust of bread to take part in
all sorts of mummeries which make every decent man feel ashamed! Some
young men cannot be in your service for three years without becoming
hypocrites, toadies, sneaks. . . . Is that a good thing? Your Polish
superintendents, those abject spies, all those Kazimers and Kaetans, go
hunting about on your hundreds of thousands of acres from morning to
night, and to please you try to get three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak
disconnectedly, but that doesn’t matter. You don’t look upon the simple
people as human beings. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who
used to come and see you, you looked upon simply as decorative figures,
not as living beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts me, is
having a fortune of over a million and doing nothing for other people,
nothing!”

The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing what to say or
how to behave. She had never before been spoken to in such a tone. The
doctor’s unpleasant, angry voice and his clumsy, faltering phrases made a
harsh clattering noise in her ears and her head. Then she began to feel as
though the gesticulating doctor was hitting her on the head with his hat.
“It’s not true!” she articulated softly, in an imploring voice. “I’ve done a
great deal of good for other people; you know it yourself!”
“Nonsense!” cried the doctor. “Can you possibly go on thinking of your
philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a mere
mummery? It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving
your neighbour, the most open farce which even children and stupid peasant
women saw through! Take for instance your— what was it called?—house
for homeless old women without relations, of which you made me
something like a head doctor, and of which you were the patroness. Mercy
on us! What a charming institution it was! A house was built with parquet
floors and a weathercock on the roof; a dozen old women were collected
from the villages and made to sleep under blankets and sheets of Dutch
linen, and given toffee to eat.”
The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and went on speaking
rapidly and stammering:
“It was a farce! The attendants kept the sheets and the blankets under
lock and key, for fear the old women should soil them—‘Let the old devil’s
pepper-pots sleep on the floor.’ The old women did not dare to sit down on
the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk over the polished floors.
Everything was kept for show and hidden away from the old women as
though they were thieves, and the old women were clothed and fed on the
sly by other people’s charity, and prayed to God night and day to be
released from their prison and from the canting exhortations of the sleek
rascals to whose care you committed them. And what did the managers do?
It was simply charming! About twice a week there would be thirty-five
thousand messages to say that the princess—that is, you—were coming to
the home next day. That meant that next day I had to abandon my patients,
dress up and be on parade. Very good; I arrive. The old women, in
everything clean and new, are already drawn up in a row, waiting. Near

them struts the old garrison rat—the superintendent with his mawkish,
sneaking smile. The old women yawn and exchange glances, but are afraid
to complain. We wait. The junior steward gallops up. Half an hour later the
senior steward; then the superintendent of the accounts’ office, then another,
and then another of them . . . they keep arriving endlessly. They all have
mysterious, solemn faces. We wait and wait, shift from one leg to another,
look at the clock—all this in monumental silence because we all hate each
other like poison. One hour passes, then a second, and then at last the
carriage is seen in the distance, and . . . and . . .”
The doctor went off into a shrill laugh and brought out in a shrill voice:
“You get out of the carriage, and the old hags, at the word of command
from the old garrison rat, begin chanting: ‘The Glory of our Lord in Zion
the tongue of man cannot express. . .’ A pretty scene, wasn’t it?”
The doctor went off into a bass chuckle, and waved his hand as though to
signify that he could not utter another word for laughing. He laughed
heavily, harshly, with clenched teeth, as ill-natured people laugh; and from
his voice, from his face, from his glittering, rather insolent eyes it could be
seen that he had a profound contempt for the princess, for the home, and for
the old women. There was nothing amusing or laughable in all that he
described so clumsily and coarsely, but he laughed with satisfaction, even
with delight.
“And the school?” he went on, panting from laughter. “Do you remember
how you wanted to teach peasant children yourself? You must have taught
them very well, for very soon the children all ran away, so that they had to
be thrashed and bribed to come and be taught. And you remember how you
wanted to feed with your own hands the infants whose mothers were
working in the fields. You went about the village crying because the infants
were not at your disposal, as the mothers would take them to the fields with
them. Then the village foreman ordered the mothers by turns to leave their
infants behind for your entertainment. A strange thing! They all ran away
from your benevolence like mice from a cat! And why was it? It’s very
simple. Not because our people are ignorant and ungrateful, as you always
explained it to yourself, but because in all your fads, if you’ll excuse the
word, there wasn’t a ha’p’orth of love and kindness! There was nothing but

the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets, nothing else. . . . A person
who does not feel the difference between a human being and a lap-dog
ought not to go in for philanthropy. I assure you, there’s a great difference
between human beings and lap-dogs!”
The princess’s heart was beating dreadfully; there was a thudding in her
ears, and she still felt as though the doctor were beating her on the head
with his hat. The doctor talked quickly, excitedly, and uncouthly,
stammering and gesticulating unnecessarily. All she grasped was that she
was spoken to by a coarse, ill-bred, spiteful, and ungrateful man; but what
he wanted of her and what he was talking about, she could not understand.
“Go away!” she said in a tearful voice, putting up her hands to protect her
head from the doctor’s hat; “go away!”
“And how you treat your servants!” the doctor went on, indignantly.
“You treat them as the lowest scoundrels, and don’t look upon them as
human beings. For example, allow me to ask, why did you dismiss me? For
ten years I worked for your father and afterwards for you, honestly, without
vacations or holidays. I gained the love of all for more than seventy miles
round, and suddenly one fine day I am informed that I am no longer
wanted. What for? I’ve no idea to this day. I, a doctor of medicine, a
gentleman by birth, a student of the Moscow University, father of a family
—am such a petty, insignificant insect that you can kick me out without
explaining the reason! Why stand on ceremony with me! I heard afterwards
that my wife went without my knowledge three times to intercede with you
for me—you wouldn’t receive her. I am told she cried in your hall. And I
shall never forgive her for it, never!”
The doctor paused and clenched his teeth, making an intense effort to
think of something more to say, very unpleasant and vindictive. He thought
of something, and his cold, frowning face suddenly brightened.
“Take your attitude to this monastery!” he said with avidity. “You’ve
never spared any one, and the holier the place, the more chance of its
suffering from your loving-kindness and angelic sweetness. Why do you
come here? What do you want with the monks here, allow me to ask you?
What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? It’s another farce, another
amusement for you, another sacrilege against human dignity, and nothing

more. Why, you don’t believe in the monks’ God; you’ve a God of your
own in your heart, whom you’ve evolved for yourself at spiritualist séances.
You look with condescension upon the ritual of the Church; you don’t go to
mass or vespers; you sleep till midday. . . . Why do you come here? . . . You
come with a God of your own into a monastery you have nothing to do
with, and you imagine that the monks look upon it as a very great honour.
To be sure they do! You’d better ask, by the way, what your visits cost the
monastery. You were graciously pleased to arrive here this evening, and a
messenger from your estate arrived on horseback the day before yesterday
to warn them of your coming. They were the whole day yesterday getting
the rooms ready and expecting you. This morning your advance-guard
arrived—an insolent maid, who keeps running across the courtyard, rustling
her skirts, pestering them with questions, giving orders. . . . I can’t endure
it! The monks have been on the lookout all day, for if you were not met
with due ceremony, there would be trouble! You’d complain to the bishop!
‘The monks don’t like me, your holiness; I don’t know what I’ve done to
displease them. It’s true I’m a great sinner, but I’m so unhappy!’ Already
one monastery has been in hot water over you. The Father Superior is a
busy, learned man; he hasn’t a free moment, and you keep sending for him
to come to your rooms. Not a trace of respect for age or for rank! If at least
you were a bountiful giver to the monastery, one wouldn’t resent it so
much, but all this time the monks have not received a hundred roubles from
you!”
Whenever people worried the princess, misunderstood her, or mortified
her, and when she did not know what to say or do, she usually began to cry.
And on this occasion, too, she ended by hiding her face in her hands and
crying aloud in a thin treble like a child. The doctor suddenly stopped and
looked at her. His face darkened and grew stern.
“Forgive me, Princess,” he said in a hollow voice. “I’ve given way to a
malicious feeling and forgotten myself. It was not right.”
And coughing in an embarrassed way, he walked away quickly, without
remembering to put his hat on.
Stars were already twinkling in the sky. The moon must have been rising
on the further side of the monastery, for the sky was clear, soft, and

transparent. Bats were flitting noiselessly along the white monastery wall.
The clock slowly struck three quarters, probably a quarter to nine. The
princess got up and walked slowly to the gate. She felt wounded and was
crying, and she felt that the trees and the stars and even the bats were
pitying her, and that the clock struck musically only to express its sympathy
with her. She cried and thought how nice it would be to go into a monastery
for the rest of her life. On still summer evenings she would walk alone
through the avenues, insulted, injured, misunderstood by people, and only
God and the starry heavens would see the martyr’s tears. The evening
service was still going on in the church. The princess stopped and listened
to the singing; how beautiful the singing sounded in the still darkness! How
sweet to weep and suffer to the sound of that singing!
Going into her rooms, she looked at her tear-stained face in the glass and
powdered it, then she sat down to supper. The monks knew that she liked
pickled sturgeon, little mushrooms, Malaga and plain honey-cakes that left
a taste of cypress in the mouth, and every time she came they gave her all
these dishes. As she ate the mushrooms and drank the Malaga, the princess
dreamed of how she would be finally ruined and deserted—how all her
stewards, bailiffs, clerks, and maid-servants for whom she had done so
much, would be false to her, and begin to say rude things; how people all
the world over would set upon her, speak ill of her, jeer at her. She would
renounce her title, would renounce society and luxury, and would go into a
convent without one word of reproach to any one; she would pray for her
enemies—and then they would all understand her and come to beg her
forgiveness, but by that time it would be too late. . . .
After supper she knelt down in the corner before the ikon and read two
chapters of the Gospel. Then her maid made her bed and she got into it.
Stretching herself under the white quilt, she heaved a sweet, deep sigh, as
one sighs after crying, closed her eyes, and began to fall asleep.
In the morning she waked up and glanced at her watch. It was half-past
nine. On the carpet near the bed was a bright, narrow streak of sunlight
from a ray which came in at the window and dimly lighted up the room.
Flies were buzzing behind the black curtain at the window. “It’s early,”
thought the princess, and she closed her eyes.

Stretching and lying snug in her bed, she recalled her meeting yesterday
with the doctor and all the thoughts with which she had gone to sleep the
night before: she remembered she was unhappy. Then she thought of her
husband living in Petersburg, her stewards, doctors, neighbours, the
officials of her acquaintance . . . a long procession of familiar masculine
faces passed before her imagination. She smiled and thought, if only these
people could see into her heart and understand her, they would all be at her
feet.
At a quarter past eleven she called her maid.
“Help me to dress, Dasha,” she said languidly. “But go first and tell them
to get out the horses. I must set off for Klavdia Nikolaevna’s.”
Going out to get into the carriage, she blinked at the glaring daylight and
laughed with pleasure: it was a wonderfully fine day! As she scanned from
her half-closed eyes the monks who had gathered round the steps to see her
off, she nodded graciously and said:
“Good-bye, my friends! Till the day after tomorrow.”
It was an agreeable surprise to her that the doctor was with the monks by
the steps. His face was pale and severe.
“Princess,” he said with a guilty smile, taking off his hat, “I’ve been
waiting here a long time to see you. Forgive me, for God’s sake. . . . I was
carried away yesterday by an evil, vindictive feeling and I talked . . .
nonsense. In short, I beg your pardon.”
The princess smiled graciously, and held out her hand for him to kiss. He
kissed it, turning red.
Trying to look like a bird, the princess fluttered into the carriage and
nodded in all directions. There was a gay, warm, serene feeling in her heart,
and she felt herself that her smile was particularly soft and friendly. As the
carriage rolled towards the gates, and afterwards along the dusty road past
huts and gardens, past long trains of waggons and strings of pilgrims on
their way to the monastery, she still screwed up her eyes and smiled softly.
She was thinking there was no higher bliss than to bring warmth, light, and
joy wherever one went, to forgive injuries, to smile graciously on one’s

enemies. The peasants she passed bowed to her, the carriage rustled softly,
clouds of dust rose from under the wheels and floated over the golden rye,
and it seemed to the princess that her body was swaying not on carriage
cushions but on clouds, and that she herself was like a light, transparent
little cloud. . . .
“How happy I am!” she murmured, shutting her eyes. “How happy I
am!”

THE CHEMIST’S WIFE

T
HE little town of B——, consisting of two or three crooked streets,
was sound asleep. There was a complete stillness in the motionless
air. Nothing could be heard but far away, outside the town no doubt,
the barking of a dog in a thin, hoarse tenor. It was close upon daybreak.
Everything had long been asleep. The only person not asleep was the
young wife of Tchernomordik, a qualified dispenser who kept a chemist’s
shop at B——. She had gone to bed and got up again three times, but could
not sleep, she did not know why. She sat at the open window in her
nightdress and looked into the street. She felt bored, depressed, vexed . . .
so vexed that she felt quite inclined to cry—again she did not know why.
There seemed to be a lump in her chest that kept rising into her throat. . . . A
few paces behind her Tchernomordik lay curled up close to the wall,
snoring sweetly. A greedy flea was stabbing the bridge of his nose, but he
did not feel it, and was positively smiling, for he was dreaming that every
one in the town had a cough, and was buying from him the King of
Denmark’s cough-drops. He could not have been wakened now by
pinpricks or by cannon or by caresses.
The chemist’s shop was almost at the extreme end of the town, so that the
chemist’s wife could see far into the fields. She could see the eastern
horizon growing pale by degrees, then turning crimson as though from a
great fire. A big broad-faced moon peeped out unexpectedly from behind
bushes in the distance. It was red (as a rule when the moon emerges from
behind bushes it appears to be blushing).
Suddenly in the stillness of the night there came the sounds of footsteps
and a jingle of spurs. She could hear voices.
“That must be the officers going home to the camp from the Police
Captain’s,” thought the chemist’s wife.
Soon afterwards two figures wearing officers’ white tunics came into
sight: one big and tall, the other thinner and shorter. . . . They slouched

along by the fence, dragging one leg after the other and talking loudly
together. As they passed the chemist’s shop, they walked more slowly than
ever, and glanced up at the windows.
“It smells like a chemist’s,” said the thin one. “And so it is! Ah, I
remember. . . . I came here last week to buy some castor-oil. There’s a
chemist here with a sour face and the jawbone of an ass! Such a jawbone,
my dear fellow! It must have been a jawbone like that Samson killed the
Philistines with.”
“M’yes,” said the big one in a bass voice. “The pharmacist is asleep. And
his wife is asleep too. She is a pretty woman, Obtyosov.”
“I saw her. I liked her very much. . . . Tell me, doctor, can she possibly
love that jawbone of an ass? Can she?”
“No, most likely she does not love him,” sighed the doctor, speaking as
though he were sorry for the chemist. “The little woman is asleep behind
the window, Obtyosov, what? Tossing with the heat, her little mouth half
open . . . and one little foot hanging out of bed. I bet that fool the chemist
doesn’t realise what a lucky fellow he is. . . . No doubt he sees no difference
between a woman and a bottle of carbolic!”
“I say, doctor,” said the officer, stopping. “Let us go into the shop and
buy something. Perhaps we shall see her.”
“What an idea—in the night!”
“What of it? They are obliged to serve one even at night. My dear fellow,
let us go in!”
“If you like. . . .”
The chemist’s wife, hiding behind the curtain, heard a muffled ring.
Looking round at her husband, who was smiling and snoring sweetly as
before, she threw on her dress, slid her bare feet into her slippers, and ran to
the shop.
On the other side of the glass door she could see two shadows. The
chemist’s wife turned up the lamp and hurried to the door to open it, and
now she felt neither vexed nor bored nor inclined to cry, though her heart

was thumping. The big doctor and the slender Obtyosov walked in. Now
she could get a view of them. The doctor was corpulent and swarthy; he
wore a beard and was slow in his movements. At the slightest motion his
tunic seemed as though it would crack, and perspiration came on to his face.
The officer was rosy, clean-shaven, feminine-looking, and as supple as an
English whip.
“What may I give you?” asked the chemist’s wife, holding her dress
across her bosom.
“Give us . . . er-er . . . four pennyworth of peppermint lozenges!”
Without haste the chemist’s wife took down a jar from a shelf and began
weighing out lozenges. The customers stared fixedly at her back; the doctor
screwed up his eyes like a well-fed cat, while the lieutenant was very grave.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen a lady serving in a chemist’s shop,” observed
the doctor.
“There’s nothing out of the way in it,” replied the chemist’s wife, looking
out of the corner of her eye at the rosy-cheeked officer. “My husband has no
assistant, and I always help him.”
“To be sure. . . . You have a charming little shop! What a number of
different . . . jars! And you are not afraid of moving about among the
poisons? Brrr!”
The chemist’s wife sealed up the parcel and handed it to the doctor.
Obtyosov gave her the money. Half a minute of silence followed. . . . The
men exchanged glances, took a step towards the door, then looked at one
another again.
“Will you give me two pennyworth of soda?” said the doctor.
Again the chemist’s wife slowly and languidly raised her hand to the
shelf.
“Haven’t you in the shop anything . . . such as . . .” muttered Obtyosov,
moving his fingers, “something, so to say, allegorical . . . revivifying . . .
seltzer-water, for instance. Have you any seltzer-water?”

“Yes,” answered the chemist’s wife.
“Bravo! You’re a fairy, not a woman! Give us three bottles!”
The chemist’s wife hurriedly sealed up the soda and vanished through the
door into the darkness.
“A peach!” said the doctor, with a wink. “You wouldn’t find a pineapple
like that in the island of Madeira! Eh? What do you say? Do you hear the
snoring, though? That’s his worship the chemist enjoying sweet repose.”
A minute later the chemist’s wife came back and set five bottles on the
counter. She had just been in the cellar, and so was flushed and rather
excited.
“Sh-sh! . . . quietly!” said Obtyosov when, after uncorking the bottles,
she dropped the corkscrew. “Don’t make such a noise; you’ll wake your
husband.”
“Well, what if I do wake him?”
“He is sleeping so sweetly . . . he must be dreaming of you. . . . To your
health!”
“Besides,” boomed the doctor, hiccupping after the seltzer-water,
“husbands are such a dull business that it would be very nice of them to be
always asleep. How good a drop of red wine would be in this water!”
“What an idea!” laughed the chemist’s wife.
“That would be splendid. What a pity they don’t sell spirits in chemist’s
shops! Though you ought to sell wine as a medicine. Have you any vinum
gallicum rubrum?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, give us some! Bring it here, damn it!”
“How much do you want?”
“Quantum satis. . . . Give us an ounce each in the water, and afterwards
we’ll see. . . . Obtyosov, what do you say? First with water and afterwards

per se. . . .”
The doctor and Obtyosov sat down to the counter, took off their caps, and
began drinking the wine.
“The wine, one must admit, is wretched stuff! Vinum nastissimum!
Though in the presence of . . . er . . . it tastes like nectar. You are
enchanting, madam! In imagination I kiss your hand.”
“I would give a great deal to do so not in imagination,” said Obtyosov.
“On my honour, I’d give my life.”
“That’s enough,” said Madame Tchernomordik, flushing and assuming a
serious expression.
“What a flirt you are, though!” the doctor laughed softly, looking slyly at
her from under his brows. “Your eyes seem to be firing shot: piff-paff! I
congratulate you: you’ve conquered! We are vanquished!”
The chemist’s wife looked at their ruddy faces, listened to their chatter,
and soon she, too, grew quite lively. Oh, she felt so gay! She entered into
the conversation, she laughed, flirted, and even, after repeated requests
from the customers, drank two ounces of wine.
“You officers ought to come in oftener from the camp,” she said; “it’s
awful how dreary it is here. I’m simply dying of it.”
“I should think so!” said the doctor indignantly. “Such a peach, a miracle
of nature, thrown away in the wilds! How well Griboyedov said, ‘Into the
wilds, to Saratov’! It’s time for us to be off, though. Delighted to have made
your acquaintance . . . very. How much do we owe you?”
The chemist’s wife raised her eyes to the ceiling and her lips moved for
some time.
“Twelve roubles forty-eight kopecks,” she said.
Obtyosov took out of his pocket a fat pocket-book, and after fumbling for
some time among the notes, paid.

“Your husband’s sleeping sweetly . . . he must be dreaming,” he
muttered, pressing her hand at parting.
“I don’t like to hear silly remarks. . . .”
“What silly remarks? On the contrary, it’s not silly at all . . . even
Shakespeare said: ‘Happy is he who in his youth is young.’”
“Let go of my hand.”
At last after much talk and after kissing the lady’s hand at parting, the
customers went out of the shop irresolutely, as though they were wondering
whether they had not forgotten something.
She ran quickly into the bedroom and sat down in the same place. She
saw the doctor and the officer, on coming out of the shop, walk lazily away
a distance of twenty paces; then they stopped and began whispering
together. What about? Her heart throbbed, there was a pulsing in her
temples, and why she did not know. . . . Her heart beat violently as though
those two whispering outside were deciding her fate.
Five minutes later the doctor parted from Obtyosov and walked on, while
Obtyosov came back. He walked past the shop once and a second time. . . .
He would stop near the door and then take a few steps again. At last the bell
tinkled discreetly.
“What? Who is there?” the chemist’s wife heard her husband’s voice
suddenly. “There’s a ring at the bell, and you don’t hear it,” he said
severely. “Is that the way to do things?”
He got up, put on his dressing-gown, and staggering, half asleep, flopped
in his slippers to the shop.
“What . . . is it?” he asked Obtyosov.
“Give me . . . give me four pennyworth of peppermint lozenges.”
Sniffing continually, yawning, dropping asleep as he moved, and
knocking his knees against the counter, the chemist went to the shelf and
reached down the jar.

Two minutes later the chemist’s wife saw Obtyosov go out of the shop,
and, after he had gone some steps, she saw him throw the packet of
peppermints on the dusty road. The doctor came from behind a corner to
meet him. . . . They met and, gesticulating, vanished in the morning mist.
“How unhappy I am!” said the chemist’s wife, looking angrily at her
husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. “Oh, how
unhappy I am!” she repeated, suddenly melting into bitter tears. “And
nobody knows, nobody knows. . . .”
“I forgot fourpence on the counter,” muttered the chemist, pulling the
quilt over him. “Put it away in the till, please. . . .”
And at once he fell asleep again.

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