The Duel Read Online Free

marriage.
    For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna was served kissel and milk, like an invalid. When she, with an anxious expression, first touched her spoon to the kissel and then began to lazily eat it, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallows, he was overcome by such an intense feeling of hatred that his head began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would have been insulting even in the society of dogs, although he was not aggravated with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for having aroused such a feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their beloved. He couldn’t kill her himself, of course, but if he ever found himself serving on a jury, he would exonerate the murderer.
    “Merci, my dove,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.
    Retiring to his study, he spent about five minutes pacing the room from corner to corner, cast a sidelong glance at his boots, then sat down on the divan and began to mutter:
    “Run! Run! I must determine what our relationship is and run!”
    He lay down on the divan and again remembered that the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband could have been his fault.
    It’s foolish to accuse a man of falling in or out of love
, he convinced himself, leaning back and lifting his legs to put on his boots.
It’s not in our power to control love and hate. As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?
    At that he rose and, having located his service cap, set off in the direction of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants would gather every day to play Vint and drink cold beer.
    My indecision is reminiscent of Hamlet
, thought Laevsky en route.
How astute Shakespeare’s observation was. Oh, how astute
.

III
    To keep from getting bored and to accommodate the basic needs of new arrivals and those without families who had nowhere to dine due to the lack of hotels in town, Dr. Samoylenko held a kind of table d’hote at his home. At the time this was written, he had only two diners: the young zoologist Von Koren, who had traveled to the Black Sea this summer to study the embryology of jellyfish; and Deacon Pobedov, recently released from seminary and assigned to town to carry out the duties of an elderly deacon who had left to pursue medical treatment. They both paid twelve rubles per month for dinner, and Samoylenko had made them give their word of honor that they would report for dinner precisely at two o’clock.
    Von Koren was typically the first to arrive. He would silently have a seat in the drawing room, and taking an album from the table, would begin to attentively survey the faded photographs of certain unidentified men in wide pants and top hats and ladies in crinoline and bonnets. Samoylenko remembered only a few of them by name, but of those he had forgotten he would sigh and say: “A splendiferous man, of superior intellect!” Having finished with the album, Von Koren would take a pistol from the shelf-stand and, squinting his left eye, aim it at a portrait of Prince Vorontsov for a long time, or he would stand before the mirror surveying his own swarthy complexion, his large forehead and his hair, black and woolly as a Negro’s, and his shirt of lackluster chintz withblossoming flowers that resembled a Persian rug, and the wide leather belt he wore instead of a waistcoat. He derived nearly as much satisfaction from scrutinizing himself as looking over the photographs or the pistol in its expensive case. He was not only very happy with his face but also with his attractively trimmed facial hair, and his broad shoulders that clearly served as a visible declaration of his good health and his solid build. He was happy with his dandyish outfit, beginning with the necktie, picked to match the color of