mountains, he would make an excellent zemstvo activist,8 a statesman, an orator, a publicist, a zealot. Who knows! If so, wasn’t it stupid to discuss whether it was honest or dishonest if a gifted and useful man, a musician or an artist, for example, breaks through the wall and deceives his jailers in order to escape from captivity? In the position of such a man, everything is honest.
At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the cook served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:
‘‘The same thing every day. Why not make cabbage soup?’’
‘‘There’s no cabbage.’’
‘‘Strange. At Samoilenko’s they make cabbage soup, and Marya Konstantinovna has cabbage soup, I alone am obliged for some reason to eat this sweetish slop. It’s impossible, my dove.’’
As happens with the immense majority of spouses, formerly not a single dinner went by for Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna without caprices and scenes, but ever since Laevsky had decided that he no longer loved her, he had tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in everything, spoke gently and politely to her, smiled, called her ‘‘my dove.’’
‘‘This soup tastes like licorice,’’ he said, smiling; he forced himself to appear affable, but he could not restrain himself and said: ‘‘Nobody looks after the household here... If you’re so sick or busy reading, then, if you please, I’ll take care of our cooking.’’
Formerly she would have replied: ‘‘Go ahead’’ or: ‘‘I see you want to make a cook out of me,’’ but now she only glanced at him timidly and blushed.
‘‘Well, how are you feeling today?’’ he asked affectionately.
‘‘Not bad today. Just a little weak.’’
‘‘You must take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly afraid for you.’’
Nadezhda Fyodorovna was sick with something. Samoilenko said she had undulant fever and gave her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, lean, unsociable man who sat at home during the day and, in the evening, putting his hands behind him and holding his cane up along his spine, quietly strolled on the embankment and coughed, thought she had a feminine ailment and prescribed warm compresses. Formerly, when Laevsky loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s ailment had aroused pity and fear in him, but now he saw a lie in the ailment as well. The yellow, sleepy face, the listless gaze and fits of yawning that Nadezhda Fyodorovna had after the attacks of fever, and the fact that she lay under a plaid during the attack and looked more like a boy than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.
For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while Nadezhda Fyodorovna, being sick, had custard with milk. When, with a preoccupied face, she first prodded the custard with her spoon and then began lazily eating it, sipping milk along with it, and he heard her swallow, such a heavy hatred came over him that his head even began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would be insulting even to a dog, but he was vexed not with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for arousing this feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their mistresses. He himself would not kill, of course, but if he had now been on a jury, he would have acquitted the murderer.
‘‘Merci, my dove,’’ he said after dinner and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.
Going to his study, he paced up and down for five minutes, looking askance at his boots, then sat down on the sofa and muttered:
‘‘To escape, to escape! To clarify our relations and escape!’’
He lay down on the sofa and again remembered that he was perhaps to blame for the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband.
‘‘To blame a man for falling in love or falling out of love is stupid,’’ he persuaded himself as he lay there and raised his feet in order to put on his boots. ‘‘Love and hate are not in our power. As for the husband, perhaps in an indirect way I was one of the causes of his death, but, again, am I to blame that I fell in love with his wife and she with me?’’
Then he got up and, finding his peaked cap, took himself to his colleague Sheshkovsky’s, where officials gathered each day to play vint and drink cold beer.
‘‘In my indecision I am reminiscent of Hamlet,’’ Laevsky thought on the way. ‘‘How rightly Shakespeare observed it! Ah, how rightly!’’
III
SO AS NOT to be bored and to condescend to the extreme need of newcomers and the familyless who, for lack of hotels in the town, had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoilenko kept something like a table d’hote in his home. At the time of writing, he had only two people at his table: the young zoologist von Koren, who came to the Black Sea in the summers to study the embryology of jellyfish; and the deacon Pobedov, recently graduated from the seminary and sent to our town to take over the functions of the old deacon, who had gone away for a cure. They each paid twelve roubles a month for dinner and supper, and Samoilenko made them give their word of honor that they would appear for dinner at precisely two o’clock.
Von Koren was usually the first to come. He would sit silently in the drawing room and, taking an album from the table, begin studying attentively the faded photographs of some unknown men in wide trousers and top hats and ladies in crinolines and caps. Samoilenko remembered only a few of them by name, and of those he had forgotten he said with a sigh: ‘‘An excellent man, of the greatest intelligence!’’ Having finished with the album, von Koren would take a pistol from the shelf and, squinting his left eye, aim for a long time at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or station himself in front of the mirror and study his swarthy face, big forehead, and hair black and curly as a Negro’s, and his faded cotton shirt with large flowers, which resembled a Persian carpet, and the wide leather belt he wore instead of a waistcoat. Self-contemplation afforded him hardly less pleasure than looking at the photographs or the pistol in its costly mounting. He was very pleased with his face, and his handsomely trimmed little beard, and his broad shoulders, which served as obvious proof of his good health and sturdy build. He was also pleased with his smart outfit, starting with the tie, picked to match the color of the shirt, and ending with the yellow shoes.
While he was studying the album and standing in front of the mirror, at the same time, in the kitchen and around it, in the hall, Samoilenko, with no frock coat or waistcoat, bare-chested, excited, and drenched in sweat, fussed about the tables, preparing a salad, or some sort of sauce, or meat, cucumbers, and onions for a cold kvass soup, meanwhile angrily rolling his eyes at the orderly who was helping him, and brandishing a knife or a spoon at him.
