The Duel, Anton Chekhov [most interesting books to read TXT] 📗

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 today, 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 dumbbells 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