The Duel Read Free Page B

foremost, we must determine what our relationship is … Yes
.
    A little later on, he thought:
Wouldn’t it be better to go to Samoylenko for advice?
    It’s easy enough to go
, he thought,
but what’s the use of it? I’d just start telling him malapropos about the boudoir, about women, about what is or isn’t fair. Damn it, how can there be any question of what is or isn’t fair, when my life requires saving, and fast, when I’m suffocating in this damned captivity and killing myself? … It must, finally, be understood, that to continue a life like mine is underhanded and unrelenting, in the face of which all else is petty and insignificant. Run!
he muttered, sitting down.
Run!
    The emptiness of the seashore, the insatiable swelter and the monotony of the dusky, lilac mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally lonely, bore on his melancholy and, seemingly, sedated and looted him. It may well have been that he was a very smart, talented, remarkable straight-shooter; it may well have been that were he not surrounded by sea and mountains on all sides, a first-class regional director, a government man, an orator, a public figure, an ascetic would have emerged from within him. Who knows! What if a gifted and industrious man—a musician or an artist, for instance—were to escape captivity by tearing down a wall and tricking his jailers, isn’t it foolish to then expound on what’s fair and what’s not? In such a situation, everything that man does is fair.
    At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the scullery maid had served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:
    “It’s the same thing every day. Is there any reason why we can’t have shchi?”
    “There’s no cabbage.”
    “Strange. If they cook shchi with cabbage at Samoylenko’s, and there’s shchi at Maria Konstantinovna’s, it must just be me that’s supposed to eat this sweetish slop for some reason. This isn’t right, my dove.”
    As is the case among the vast majority of married couples, before neither Laevsky nor Nadezhda Fyodorovna could get through a dinner without caprices and a scene, but since Laevsky decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in all matters, speaking to her gently and politely, smiling at her, and calling her a dove.
    “The taste of this soup reminds me of licorice,” he said, smiling; he was straining himself so as to appear amicable, but couldn’t hold back and said: “No one is taking care of this household … If you’re too sick or too busy with your reading, then allow me, I’ll attend to our kitchen.”
    Earlier, she would have answered with
So attend to it or I see you want to make a scullery maid out of me
, but now she merely glanced at him sheepishly and turned red.
    “Well, how do you feel today?” he asked tenderly.
    “Today is not so bad. There is only a touch of weakness.”
    “You need to take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly worried about you.”
    Something ailed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Samoylenko said that she had remittent fever and fed her quinine. Another doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spindly, misanthropicman, who sat at home by day and strolled quietly along the embankment coughing with his hands folded behind him and his cane stretched lengthwise down his back by night, found that she had a female ailment, and prescribed warm compresses. Before, when Laevsky still loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness would arouse feelings of sympathy and fear in him, but now he considered even her illness to be a lie. The jaundiced, sleepy face, the faded expression and the yawning that would occasionally seize Nadezhda Fyodorovna after an onset of fever, and that she, while in the midst of the onset, would lie beneath a plaid blanket and resembled a boy, more than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed any illusion and was a protest against love and