swim? Ha, ha, ha... My respects to Nikodim Alexandrych!’’
And he walked on, still smiling pleasantly, but, seeing an army medic coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him, and asked:
‘‘Is there anyone in the infirmary?’’
‘‘No one, Your Excellency.’’
‘‘Eh?’’
‘‘No one, Your Excellency.’’
‘‘Very well, on your way...’
Swaying majestically, he made for a lemonade stand, where an old, full-breasted Jewess who passed herself off as a Georgian sat behind the counter, and said to her as loudly as if he was commanding a regiment:
‘‘Be so kind as to give me a soda water!’’
II
LAEVSKY’S DISLIKE OF Nadezhda Fyodorovna expressed itself chiefly in the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie or the semblance of a lie, and that everything he read against women and love seemed to him to go perfectly with himself, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and her husband. When he came back home, she was sitting by the window, already dressed and with her hair done, drinking coffee with a preoccupied face and leafing through an issue of a thick journal, and he thought that drinking coffee was not such a remarkable event that one should make a preoccupied face at it, and that she need not have spent time on a modish hairdo, because there was no one there to attract and no reason for doing so. In the issue of the journal, he saw a lie as well. He thought she had dressed and done her hair in order to appear beautiful and was reading the journal in order to appear intelligent.
‘‘Is it all right if I go for a swim today?’’ she asked.
‘‘Why not! I suppose it won’t cause an earthquake whether you do or don’t go...’
‘‘No, I’m asking because the doctor might get angry.’’
‘‘Well, so ask the doctor. I’m not a doctor.’’
This time what Laevsky disliked most of all in Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, open neck and the little curls of hair on her nape, and he remembered that Anna Karenina, when she stopped loving her husband, disliked his ears first of all, and he thought: ‘‘How right that is! How right!’’ Feeling weak and empty in the head, he went to his study, lay down on the sofa, and covered his face with a handkerchief so as not to be bothered by flies. Sluggish, viscous thoughts, all about the same thing, dragged through his brain like a long wagon train on a rainy autumnal day, and he lapsed into a drowsy, oppressed state. It seemed to him that he was guilty before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that he was to blame for her husband’s death. It seemed to him that he was guilty before his own life, which he had ruined, before the world of lofty ideas, knowledge, and labor, and that this wonderful world appeared possible and existent to him not here on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wandered about, but there, in the north, where there were operas, theaters, newspapers, and all forms of intellectual work. One could be honest, intelligent, lofty, and pure only there, not here. He accused himself of having no ideals or guiding idea in his life, though now he vaguely understood what that meant. Two years ago, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, it had seemed to him that he had only to take up with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and leave with her for the Caucasus to be saved from the banality and emptiness of life; so now, too, he was certain that he had only to abandon Nadezhda Fyodorovna and leave for Petersburg to have everything he wanted.
‘‘To escape!’’ he murmured, sitting up and biting his nails. ‘‘To escape!’’
His imagination portrayed him getting on a steamer, then having breakfast, drinking cold beer, talking with the ladies on deck, then getting on a train in Sebastopol and going. Hello, freedom! Stations flash by one after another, the air turns ever colder and harsher, here are birches and firs, here is Kursk, Moscow... In the buffets, cabbage soup, lamb with kasha, sturgeon, beer, in short, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia. The passengers on the train talk about trade, new singers, Franco-Russian sympathies; everywhere you feel living, cultured, intelligent, vibrant life... Faster, faster! Here, finally, is Nevsky, Bolshaya Morskaya, and here is Kovensky Lane, where he once used to live with the students, here is the dear gray sky, the drizzling rain, the wet cabs...
‘‘Ivan Andreich!’’ someone called from the next room. ‘‘Are you at home?’’
‘‘I’m here!’’ Laevsky responded. ‘‘What do you want?’’
‘‘Papers!’’
Laevsky got up lazily, with a spinning head, and, yawning and dragging on his slippers, went to the next room. Outside, at the open window, stood one of his young colleagues laying out official papers on the windowsill.
‘‘One moment, my dear boy,’’ Laevsky said softly and went to look for an inkstand; coming back to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: ‘‘Hot!’’
‘‘Yes, sir. Will you be coming today?’’
‘Hardly... I’m a bit unwell. Tell Sheshkovsky, my dear boy, that I’ll stop by to see him after dinner.’’
The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the sofa again and began to think:
‘‘So, I must weigh all the circumstances and consider. Before leaving here, I must pay my debts. I owe around two thousand roubles. I have no money... That, of course, is not important; I’ll pay part of it now somehow and send part of it later from Petersburg. The main thing is Nadezhda Fyodorovna... First of all, we must clarify our relations... Yes.’’
A little later, he considered: hadn’t he better go to Samoilenko for advice?
I could go, he thought, but what use will it be? Again I’ll speak inappropriately about the boudoir, about women, about what’s honest or dishonest. Devil take it, what talk can there be here about honest or dishonest if I have to save my life quickly, if I’m suffocating in this cursed captivity and killing myself?... It must finally be understood that to go on with a life like mine is meanness and cruelty, before which everything else is petty and insignificant. ‘‘To escape!’’ he murmured, sitting up. ‘‘To escape!’’
The deserted seashore, the relentless heat, and the monotony of the smoky purple mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally solitary, aroused his anguish and, it seemed, lulled him to sleep and robbed him. Maybe he was very intelligent, talented, remarkably honest; maybe, if he weren’t locked in on all sides by the sea and the
