Grushnitsky stood in front of me, having lowered his eyes, in fierce agitation. But the struggle between his conscience and his vanity was short-lived. The dragoon captain, sitting next to him, nudged him with his elbow. He flinched and quickly answered me without lifting his eyes:
“Gracious sir, when I say something, then it is what I think, and I am prepared to repeat it . . . I am not afraid of your threats and am prepared for anything . . .”
“You have already demonstrated the latter,” I replied to him coldly, and, taking the dragoon captain by the arm, I left the room.
“What can I do for you?” asked the captain.
“You are Grushnitsky’s friend, and will be his second, I assume?”
The captain bowed very importantly.
“You have guessed it,” he answered. “I am even obliged to be his second, since the insult caused to him concerns me too. I was with him yesterday night,” he added, straightening his slightly round-shouldered figure.
“Oh! So it was you whom I hit so clumsily on the head?”
He turned yellow, then blue. The concealed spite showed on his face.
“I will have the honor of sending my second to you today,” I added, bowing very politely and giving the impression that I wasn’t paying attention to his fury.
I met Vera’s husband on the terrace of the restaurant. It seems that he had been waiting for me.
He grasped my hand with a feeling that looked like delight.
“Noble young man!” said he, with tears in his eyes. “I heard everything. What a swine! Ingrate! . . . What proper household would entertain them after this?! Thank God I don’t have daughters. But you will be rewarded by the young lady for whom you are risking your life. You can be sure of my modesty for the time being,” he continued. “I was once young myself and served in the military—I know not to intervene in these matters. Farewell.”
Poor man! He is happy that he doesn’t have daughters . . .
I went straight to Werner, found him at home, and told him everything—my relations with Vera and with the princess and the conversation that I overheard, from which I learned the intention of these gentlemen to make a fool of me, to make me fire blank cartridges. But now the matter had departed from the boundaries of a joke. They probably didn’t expect such a result. The doctor agreed to be my second. I gave him several instructions concerning the stipulations of the duel. He should insist that the matter is worked out as secretly as possible, because though I am ready to expose myself to death at any time, I am not in the least inclined toward ruining my future in this world forever.
After this I went home. The doctor returned from his mission an hour later.
“There is definitely a plot against you,” he said. “I found the dragoon captain and another gentleman, whose last name I don’t remember, at Grushnitsky’s place. I paused for a minute in the entrance hall in order to remove my galoshes. There was a terrible noise and argument going on inside . . .
“‘I won’t agree to that for anything!’ Grushnitsky was saying. ‘He insulted me publicly—before that it was entirely different . . .’
“‘What is it to you?’ answered the dragoon captain. ‘I’ll take it all onto myself. I have been a second in five duels and I know well how to arrange it all. I have devised everything. If you please, just don’t get in my way. Giving someone a scare is no bad thing. And why expose yourself to danger, if you can escape it?’
“At that minute I walked up. They went silent. Our negotiations lasted rather a long time; finally we decided the matter thus: about five
verst
s from here, there is a hidden gully. They will go there tomorrow at four o’clock in the morning, and we will depart half an hour after them. Shots will be at six paces—this was requested by Grushnitsky. The dead body will be attributed to the Circassians. Now, these are my suspicions: they, the seconds that is, have somewhat changed their prior plans it seems, and they want to load a bullet into Grushnitsky’s pistol alone. This is a little similar to murder, but in wartime, and especially an Asiatic war, such stratagems are allowed. Only Grushnitsky, it would seem, is a little more noble than his friends. What do you think? Shall we reveal to him that we have figured it out?”
“Not for anything in this world, Doctor! Be calm, I will not give in to them.”
“What then do you want to do?”
“That is my secret.”
“Watch you don’t get caught . . . especially at six paces!”
“Doctor, I will wait for you tomorrow at four o’clock. The horses will be ready . . . Good-bye.”
I sat at home until evening, and shut myself in my room. A lackey came to call me to the Princess Ligovsky—I ordered him to tell them I was ill.
Two o’clock at night . . . I cannot sleep . . . But I must fall asleep, so that tomorrow my hand won’t shake. However, at six paces, it is hard to miss. Ah! Mr. Grushnitsky! You won’t succeed in your hoax . . . We will swap roles. Now it is I who shall look for the symptoms of secret fear on your pale face. Why did you set yourself these fateful six paces? You think that I will offer you my forehead without a struggle . . . but we are casting lots! . . . But then . . . then . . . what if his luck outweighs mine . . . if my star has at last betrayed me? . . . It would be no surprise: it has faithfully served my whims for so long, there is no more constancy in the heavens than on earth.
So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell!
I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . . There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . . But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life. Since then, how many times have I played the role of the ax in the hands of fate! Like an instrument of execution, I fell on the head of doomed martyrs, often without malice, always without regret . . . My love never brought anyone happiness, because I never sacrificed anything for those I loved: I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure. I was simply satisfying a strange need of the heart, with greediness, swallowing their feelings, their joys, their suffering—and was never sated. Just as a man, tormented by hunger, goes to sleep in exhaustion and dreams of sumptuous dishes and sparkling wine before him. He devours the airy gifts of his imagination with rapture, and he feels easier. But as soon as he wakes: the dream disappears . . . and all that remains is hunger and despair redoubled!
And, maybe, I will die tomorrow! . . . And not one being on this earth will have ever understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am . . . Some will say “he was a good fellow,” others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong. Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new . . . Amusing and vexing!
It is already a month and a half now since I arrived at Fortress N——. Maxim Maximych has gone hunting . . . I am alone. I am sitting at the window. Gray storm clouds have covered the mountains down to their foothills. The sun, through the mist, looks like a yellow stain. It’s cold. The wind is whistling and shaking the shutters . . . How boring! I will take up writing my diaries again, which was interrupted by many strange events.
As I re-read this last page: funny! I thought I would die. This was impossible. I had not yet drained the cup of suffering, and now feel that I have a long while still to live.
How clearly and sharply these past events flood back to my memory! Not one line, not one hue, has been wiped away by time!
I remember that for the duration of the night preceding the duel, I didn’t sleep a minute. I couldn’t write for long: a mysterious anxiety possessed me. For an hour I walked around my room, then I sat down and opened the novel by Walter Scott that had been lying on the table. Since it was
Old Mortality,
I read it at the start with strain, and then I sank into reveries, carried away by the magical flight of imagination . . . Do they recompense the Scottish bard in the next world for each gratifying minute that his book gives?
Finally the day dawned. My nerves had become calm. I looked at myself in the mirror: a dull pallor had spread over my face, preserving the traces of agonizing insomnia. But my eyes, though encircled with brown shadows, shone proudly and inexorably. I remained content with myself.
Having ordered the horses to be saddled, I dressed and ran down to the bathhouse. Plunging into the cold bubblings of the Narzan, I felt my bodily and spiritual strengths returning. I left the baths fresh and bright, as though I were preparing for a ball. Tell me that the soul and body aren’t connected after that!
Returning, I found the doctor at my quarters. He was wearing gray riding breeches, an
arkhaluk,
20
and a Circassian hat. I started roaring with laughter upon seeing this small figure under an enormous shaggy hat: his face was not at all bellicose and, at that moment in time, it was even longer than usual.
“What makes you so sad, doctor?” I said to him. “Haven’t you led people a hundred times to the next world with supreme indifference? Imagine that I have a bilious fever. I may recover, I may die. Either would be according to the order of things. Try to look at me as if I were a patient, afflicted by an illness that is unknown to you—and then your curiosity will be aroused to the highest degree. You can make some important physiological observations of me . . . Is not the expectation of a violent death a genuine illness in fact?”
This thought struck the doctor, and he cheered up.
We mounted our horses. Werner seized the reins with both hands, and we set off. In an instant we galloped past the fortress, through the
slobodka,
and entered the gully; the road twisted along it, half-overgrown with high grasses, intersecting constantly with a noisy stream, across which we had to ford frequently, to the great despair of the doctor, because each time we did his horse stopped in the water.
I don’t remember a morning more blue and fresh! The sun had barely appeared from behind the green heights, and the confluence of the heat of its rays and the dying chill of night brought feelings of a sort of sweet anguish to everything. The young day had not yet sent one joyful ray into the gully. But it gilded the summits of the crags hanging over us on either side. The thick-leaved bushes, growing in their deep cracks, showered us with silver rain at the least breath of wind. I remember, at this point, I felt a love for nature greater than at any time before. How interesting to watch a single dewdrop, quivering on a wide vine-leaf and reflecting millions of rainbow rays! How greedily my gaze sought to penetrate the foggy distance! There the path became narrower all the time, the crags bluer and more fearsome, and, finally, it seemed that they converged into an impenetrable wall. We rode in silence.
“Have you written your will?” Werner suddenly asked.
“No.”
“And in the case of your death?”
“My beneficiaries will appear by themselves.”
“Surely you have friends to whom you would like to send a final farewell?”
I shook my head.
“Surely there is one woman in the world to whom you might like to leave something for memory’s sake?”
“Would you like, doctor,” I replied to him, “that I bare my soul to you? . . . You see, I have grown out of the times when a person dies, pronouncing the name of their beloved, and bequeathing to their friend a lock of their pomaded or unpomaded hair. Considering near and possible death, I think only about myself—some don’t even do that. The friends who will tomorrow forget me, or, worse, those who will pin God knows what cock-and-bull stories on me, and the women who, embracing another, will laugh at me, in order not to arouse jealousy toward the deceased—good luck to them! I have carried only a few ideas out of life’s storm—and not one feeling. I have long lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him. The first, maybe, in an hour’s time may bid forevermore farewell to you and the world, and the second . . . the second? Look doctor: do you see there on that precipice, to the right, three figures blackening the landscape? They are our adversaries I suppose?”
We set off at a trot.
At the foot of the rock-face, in the bushes, three horses were tied up. We tied ours there too, and clambered up the narrow footpath to the little platform, where we were awaited by Grushnitsky, the dragoon captain, and his other second called Ivan Ignatievitch (I have never heard his last name).
“We have been expecting you for a long time,” said the dragoon captain with an ironic smile.