The Shot

From the Publisher

Having undertaken to publish the Tales of I. P. Belkin, we wished to add some account of the late author's life. For this we wrote to a worthy gentleman, his friend and neighbour, and print his answer as a sufficient biography.

"Ivan Petrovich Belkin was born of honest and noble parents in 1798, in the village of Goryukhino. He had his first schooling from the village sexton, to whom, it seems, he owed his love of reading and of Russian letters. From 1815 to 1823 he served in an infantry regiment; then the death of his parents brought him home. Being inexperienced and soft-hearted, he soon let the estate run down, dismissing the capable headman and handing everything to his old housekeeper, who had won his trust by her art of telling stories, and who could not tell a twenty-five-rouble note from a fifty. He was of middling height, with grey eyes and light brown hair, pale and thin; he lived most moderately; I never once saw him the worse for drink, which in our parts may be counted a miracle; and though he had a great inclination for the female sex, his modesty was truly maidenly. He left many manuscripts; some are with me, and some his housekeeper has used for household purposes — last winter all the windows of her wing were pasted over with the first part of an unfinished novel. In the autumn of 1828 he caught a cold that turned into a fever, and died in my arms, in his thirtieth year."

We add only that, by the author's own note, the tales were told to him by various persons: "The Shot" by Lieutenant-Colonel I. L. P., "The Stationmaster" by the titular councillor A. G. N., "The Undertaker" by the shop assistant B. V., and "The Blizzard" and "The Squire's Daughter" by the young lady K. I. T. — A. P.

I

We fought a duel. — Baratynsky I swore to shoot him by the rules of the duel; he still owes me my shot. — "An Evening in Bivouac"

We were stationed in the little town of ———. The life of an army officer is well known: drill and riding school in the morning; dinner with the commander or at a tavern; punch and cards in the evening. There was not one open house in the town, not one marriageable girl.

Only one man in our circle was not a soldier. He was about thirty-five, which made him an old man to us; his gloom, his harsh temper and his evil tongue had a strong hold on our young minds. Some mystery surrounded him. He seemed Russian, but bore a foreign name. He had once served, with success, in the hussars; no one knew why he had retired to a poor little town, where he lived both poorly and extravagantly: he walked everywhere in a worn black coat, but kept open table for all our officers, and the champagne flowed like a river. His one luxury was a rich collection of pistols, and his one exercise was shooting: the walls of his room were riddled like a honeycomb. Had he offered to shoot a pear off anyone's cap, not one of us would have hesitated to offer his head. We often talked of duels; Silvio (so I shall call him) never joined in, and we supposed that some unhappy victim of his skill lay on his conscience. It never entered our heads to suspect him of cowardice.

One evening, when Silvio was keeping the bank for us, a young officer, newly arrived and a little drunk, thought Silvio had made a mistake in the reckoning against him, and flung a brass candlestick at his head. Silvio, pale with anger, said only: "My dear sir, please leave, and thank God this happened in my house." We counted the young man already dead. But the next day he was alive, and the next; Silvio had been satisfied with the lightest of explanations. He did not fight.

Lack of courage is what young men forgive least. Little by little it was forgotten, and Silvio regained his old influence; but I could no longer go near him as before. I had been more attached to him than anyone; now I was ashamed to look at him, and he noticed it.

One day a letter came for him; his eyes flashed as he read it. "Gentlemen, I must leave tonight. I hope you will dine with me for the last time." After dinner he held me back. "You have perhaps found it strange," he said, "that I did not demand satisfaction from that drunken fool. Having the choice of weapons, I had his life in my hands. I could call my restraint generosity, but I will not lie. I have no right to expose myself to death. Six years ago I received a slap in the face, and my enemy is still alive."

"You didn't fight him?"

"I did fight him; and here is a souvenir of our duel." He took from a box a red cap with a gold tassel, shot through an inch above the forehead.

"I served in the hussars," he went on. "I am used to being first, and I was the first rowdy, the first drinker, the first duellist in the regiment. Then a young man of rich and noble family joined us — I will not name him. Imagine youth, wit, beauty, the wildest gaiety, careless bravery, a great name and money without end. My primacy was shaken. I came to hate him. My epigrams he answered with epigrams sharper and merrier than mine: he joked, and I was spiteful. At last, at a ball, I whispered some coarse rudeness in his ear; he struck me; and at dawn we met.

"He came walking, with his coat on his sword and his cap full of cherries. The seconds measured twelve paces. We drew lots; he won the first shot, as he won everything, and put his bullet through my cap. It was my turn. His life was in my hands; I watched him greedily for a single shadow of fear — and he stood under my pistol, choosing ripe cherries from his cap and spitting out the stones, which flew as far as me. His indifference enraged me. What use is it, I thought, to take his life, when he does not value it? I lowered the pistol. 'You seem to prefer your breakfast to death,' I said. 'I won't disturb you.' 'As you please,' he answered. 'Your shot remains yours; I shall always be at your service.'

"I retired and came here. Not a day has passed since without my thinking of revenge. Now my hour has come." He showed me the letter: a certain person was soon to marry a young and beautiful girl. "We shall see whether he meets death as calmly before his wedding as he once waited for it over his cherries!"

That night he left, with two trunks, one of them full of pistols.

II

Some years later I was living alone on a poor little estate in the district of N., sighing for my old noisy life and dreading the long autumn evenings. Four versts away lay the rich estate of Countess B., who had stayed there only once, in the first month of her marriage. In my second spring there, the Count and Countess arrived for the summer.

I called. The Count, a handsome man of about thirty-two, received me with open friendliness; the Countess was truly a beauty. Walking about the study, I noticed a picture of a Swiss view, shot through by two bullets, one exactly on top of the other.

"There's a good shot," I said.

"Yes, a remarkable shot. Do you shoot well?"

"Fairly well. I shan't miss a card at thirty paces. But the pistol needs daily practice. The best shot I ever knew practised three times a day before dinner; if he saw a fly on the wall, he'd shout, 'Kuzka, a pistol!' — bang! — and the fly was pressed into the wall."

"And what was his name?"

"Silvio."

"Silvio!" cried the Count, jumping up. "You knew Silvio? Did he ever tell you of a slap he received from some rake at a ball?"

"Could it be... was it you?"

"It was I," said the Count, deeply troubled, "and that picture is the memorial of our last meeting." The Countess begged him not to tell it; he insisted.

"Five years ago, in our first month here, I came home from riding ahead of my wife, and found a man waiting in this room in the half-dark, dusty and overgrown with beard. 'You don't know me, Count?' 'Silvio!' I confess my hair stood on end. 'The shot remains with me,' he said. 'I have come to discharge my pistol. Are you ready?' I measured twelve paces and stood in that corner, begging him to be quick, before my wife came back. He hesitated, asked for candles, took aim — I counted the seconds; I thought of her — and lowered his hand. 'The pistol isn't loaded with cherry stones,' he said, 'and a bullet is heavy. This is not a duel but murder; I am not used to aiming at an unarmed man. Let us draw lots again.' My head was spinning; I don't know how he made me agree. Again I drew the first number. 'You are devilishly lucky, Count,' he said, with a smile I shall never forget. I fired — and hit that picture.

"Then Silvio — he was terrible at that moment — took aim at me. The door opened, and Masha ran in and threw herself on my neck. 'Don't you see we're joking?' I said. 'Is it true that you are both joking?' she asked him. 'He always jokes, Countess,' said Silvio. 'Once he struck me as a joke, shot through my cap as a joke, missed me just now as a joke; now I feel like joking too.' And he raised the pistol at me — in front of her! Masha threw herself at his feet. 'Get up, Masha, shame on you!' I shouted. 'And you, sir — will you shoot or not?' 'I will not,' said Silvio. 'I am satisfied. I have seen your confusion, your fear; I made you fire at me; that is enough. You will remember me. I leave you to your conscience.' At the door he turned, fired at that picture almost without aiming, and was gone."

So I learned the end of a story whose beginning had once struck me so. I never saw its hero again. They say that Silvio led a band of Greek rebels in the rising of Alexander Ypsilantis, and was killed at the battle of Skulyani.