The Duel and Other Stories | Page 6

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