Chapters I–VII: The Idler and the Zoologist · Das Duell

It was eight o'clock in the morning — the hour when the officers, the local officials and the visitors usually took their dip in the sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreich Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight, in the cap of the Ministry of Finance and in slippers, came down to bathe, and found on the beach a number of acquaintances, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.

Samoylenko, with his big cropped head, his thick neck, his red face, his big nose, his shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, stout and puffy, with a hoarse military bass, made on every newcomer the unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after one had met him, his face began to seem extraordinarily kind, good-natured and even handsome. For all his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindness, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms with everyone in the town, lent everyone money, doctored everyone, made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked shashlik and an extremely good soup of grey mullet; he was always looking after other people's affairs, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion was that he was without faults. He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his good nature, and tried to hide it by a stern look and an affected roughness; and he liked the medical assistants and the soldiers to call him "Your Excellency," though he was only a civil councillor.

"Answer me one question, Alexander Davidich," Laevsky began, when they were both standing 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 cup and saucer of his own. 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, and 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, Alexander Davidich," 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 Nadezhda 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 deception."

Two years before, Laevsky had left Petersburg for the Caucasus with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, a married woman who had abandoned her husband for him. They were not married; they lived together, which in a small provincial town was a scandal.

"We came here," Laevsky said, "with our heads full of a new, honest life. We were going to work, to live on the land by the sweat of our brow, to have a vineyard, a field. We would be pure, honest, free. And instead — this dreary little town, a desk in a government office, people I despise, cards, wine, the heat. I don't love her. Everything about her irritates me. It's an intolerable situation, and I don't know how to get out of it."

Samoylenko told him, gruffly, kindly, that he was talking nonsense; that he had made his bed and must lie on it; that a woman who had given up everything for him must not be thrown over. "You must live with her, for God's sake. If it were me, I'd marry her and be done with it."

"Marry her? She has a husband."

Laevsky sighed. In his heart he envied Samoylenko his simple, robust sense of duty; and he felt that it would never do for him.

He talked a great deal — he always talked a great deal, and too cleverly. He explained his weakness by reference to his whole generation, to the writers of the age, to Onegin, Pechorin, Byron's Cain, Bazarov: "they are our fathers in the flesh and in the spirit." He was a superfluous man, a failure; it was not his fault; it was the age. Tolstoy, he said, had written on the subject. He had already decided, though he had not yet said so, that his salvation lay in flight — north, to Petersburg, to the old life, alone.

At home Laevsky found Nadezhda Fyodorovna in her morning wrapper, with her hair down, drinking coffee. She had on a white muslin dress, and a pink cap on her head; she was reading a French novel.

Everything in her irritated him now: the way she drank her coffee, slowly, with relish; the way she drew her cup to her lips; her white neck with the little curls on it, which he could not bear to see; the untidy rooms, the litter of hairpins and papers and torn letters on the floor, the stockings thrown over a chair; her talk about the sea, the mountains, the sky, which she was never tired of admiring, as he had long since tired of it. He looked at her, and thought that he hated her.

"I'll go for a bathe," she said gaily. "Isn't it a lovely day? What a wonderful sea!"

He said nothing. He went into his study and lay down on the sofa.

And he had a secret. Two days before, he had received a letter informing him that her husband had died. He had not told her. He knew that if he told her, she would expect him to marry her — or at least, that everyone would expect it; and he wanted only to escape.

He hid the letter in his desk, and said nothing, day after day.

He went to his office and did nothing there. He came home and lay on the sofa and read, or did not read. In the evening he played cards at the club, or drank wine with the officers. He thought of Petersburg: the fogs, the Nevsky Prospect, the bridges, the bookshops, the theatres, the clever, educated people, the cold. Everything here — the heat, the mountains, the Tatars and Abkhazians in the street, the dull officials, the sea — was hateful to him.

At night he lay awake and thought how he could get away: borrow money, go to Petersburg, get himself a post, and send for her afterwards — or not send for her.

Samoylenko kept a sort of table d'hôte. Two young men dined with him every day and paid him for it. One was a young zoologist called von Koren, who had come to the Black Sea for the summer to study the embryology of the medusae; the other was a deacon called Pobedov, who had only lately 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 dinner and supper, and Samoylenko made them promise to turn up punctually at two o'clock.

Von Koren was a young man of twenty-eight or so, dark-skinned, with a broad forehead and a black beard, carefully dressed, with a cool, self-assured, rather contemptuous manner. He was very hard-working: he worked all day at his medusae, and talked of nothing but science, the Arctic, and his coming expedition. He had already been on one expedition to the White Sea, and was preparing another, to the far north.

The deacon was very young, with a long neck and a sparse beard. He was good-natured, idle, and fond of fishing, and he laughed at everything — anything said with any vehemence sent him into peals of laughter, so that he had to hold his sides.

At dinner the talk turned, as it often did, to Laevsky.

"He is a very pleasant fellow," said Samoylenko. "A good-hearted man, educated. He's a bit weak, but there's no harm in him."

"No harm in him!" said von Koren. "He is as harmful to society as the cholera microbe. He is a parasite; he lives on others; he does nothing, and he corrupts everyone round him. He has taught the clerks in his office to drink and to play cards; he has taught the young people that idleness is interesting, that it is a sign of a fine and sensitive nature. And his woman — living openly with him, without marriage — she sets an example to the whole town. The young ladies look at her, and think it's very romantic."

"But what's to be done with him?"

"To drown him would be a service to humanity," said von Koren coldly.

The deacon laughed.

"You're joking," said Samoylenko, shocked.

"Not at all. If he cannot be improved, he should be rendered harmless. Humanity has always done that; nature does it by natural selection. Mankind, in its own interests and in the interests of the race, is bound to destroy the weak, the useless, the degenerate. If we do not, they will multiply and corrupt the strong."

"Do you mean," said Samoylenko, "that you would kill him?"

"In a well-ordered society he would be sent to forced labour. But since we have not such a society, I say: he must at least be prevented from doing harm."

The deacon roared with laughter, and Samoylenko, red and indignant, said that von Koren was talking like a heathen.

Von Koren's talk of "destroying" the weak for the good of the species echoes the popular Darwinism of Chekhov's day.

On Sunday a picnic was arranged. Samoylenko took charge of it, as he took charge of all picnics. They were to go some five miles from the town, to the place where two rivers — the Black River and the Yellow River — flowed together, and where a Tatar named Kerbalai kept a little dukhan, an inn.

They set off at five in the afternoon, in carriages and on horseback: Samoylenko and Laevsky in a chaise; Nadezhda Fyodorovna with Marya Konstantinovna Bityugova, the wife of a local official, with her two children, Katya and Kostya; von Koren and the deacon in another carriage, with the provisions; the police captain Kirilin, and a young man called Achmianov, the son of the owner of the chief shop in the town, on horseback; and Marya Konstantinovna's husband, and others.

The road ran along the shore, then up into the mountains, through ravines, past ruined Tatar huts and orchards. The scenery was magnificent. On the right, the mountains rose in a solid wall; on the left, the sea glittered below. The air was fragrant. Nadezhda Fyodorovna, who felt young and pretty in her new dress, with a parasol, was in high spirits; she laughed, she exclaimed at every view.

Laevsky, sitting beside Samoylenko, saw nothing. He was thinking of how to get the money for his flight.

At the dukhan, the men gathered wood and built a great fire on the bank; Samoylenko, in a white apron, cooked fish soup in a cauldron. The deacon fished. The others walked about, or sat on the grass.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna ran about, laughed, sang, picked flowers, waded in the river; she wanted to be admired. She flirted with Kirilin and with Achmianov. Laevsky, watching her, was sick with disgust and shame. It seemed to him that everyone saw through her, and laughed at him.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred roubles at the shop of Achmianov's father, for dresses and other things; the young man was in love with her, and had told her he would not ask for the money. And once, in a moment of boredom and weakness, she had let the police captain, Kirilin, become her lover. She was frightened of both of them now.

Von Koren, watching Laevsky, despised him.

It grew dark. The fire blazed up; the faces round it were red; the mountains were black against a starry sky. They ate the fish soup, drank wine, and talked. Laevsky, half drunk, made speeches; Nadezhda Fyodorovna laughed too loudly.

On the way home, in the darkness, in the carriage, alone with her at last, Laevsky said abruptly, roughly:

"Your husband is dead."

She cried out, and wept. And he felt, with surprise and contempt, that she was weeping not for her husband, but for herself — out of fear, out of confusion, because she did not know what would become of her.

Next day Laevsky went to Samoylenko.

"Sasha, my dear friend, lend me three hundred roubles. I must go to Petersburg. I'll get money there and send it to you. As soon as I have a post and a place to live, I'll send for Nadezhda Fyodorovna. I can't stay here; I shall go mad."

He lied a little, and Samoylenko knew it. He did not believe that Laevsky would ever send for her. But he could never refuse anyone anything.

"I haven't got three hundred roubles," he said. "But I'll borrow them. I'll get them for you."

And Laevsky, relieved, already saw himself in the train, rushing north.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna, meanwhile, lay awake at night in misery. She had done wrong; she knew it. She owed money she could not pay; Kirilin was pestering her for another meeting, and threatening a scandal; Achmianov looked at her with eyes that frightened her. Laevsky was cold. She thought that if only she could begin again, she would be good, pure, honest; she would work; she would be a real wife. She wanted to be loved.