The Duel - Aleksandr Kuprin (best summer reads of all time TXT) 📗

was⁠—an archbishop. Osadchi intoned in reply with the most serious countenance and a low, rolling bass, whilst carefully following the ecclesiastical ritual⁠—

“Your high, refulgent Excellency, the hour of burial has struck. Give us your blessing, etc.”

As the soirée approached its end, the gathering in the dining-room grew more noisy and lively. The room was already so full of tobacco smoke that those sitting at opposite sides of the table could not recognize each other. Cards were being played in one corner; by the window a small but select set had assembled to edify one another by racy stories⁠—the spice most appreciated at officers’ dinners and suppers.

“No, no, no, gentlemen,” shrieked Artschakovski, “allow me to put in a word. You see it was this way: a soldier was quartered at the house of a khokhol14 who had a pretty wife. Ho, ho, thought the soldier, that is something for me.”

Then, however, he was interrupted by Vasili Vasilievich, who had been waiting long and impatiently⁠—

“Shut up with your old stories, Artschakovski. You shall hear this. Once upon a time in Odessa there⁠—”

But even he was not allowed to speak very long. The generality of the stories were rather poor and devoid of wit, but, to make up for that, they were interspersed with coarse and repulsive cynicisms. Viätkin, who had now returned from the street, where he had been paying his respects to Liech’s “interment” and holy “departure,” invited Romashov to sit down at the table.

“Sit you here, my dear Georginka.15 We will watch them. Today I am as rich as a Jew. I won yesterday, and today I shall take the bank again.”

Romashov only longed to lighten his heart, for a friend to whom he might tell his sorrow and his disgust at life. After draining his glass he looked at Viätkin with beseeching eyes, and began to talk in a voice quivering with deep, inward emotion.

“Pavel Pavlich, we all seem to have completely forgotten the existence of another life. Where it is I cannot say; I only know that it exists. Even in that men must struggle, suffer, and love, but that life is rich⁠—rich in great thoughts and noble deeds. For here, my friend, what do you suppose our life is, and how will such a miserable existence as ours end some day?”

“Well, yes, old fellow⁠—but it’s life,” replied Viätkin in a sleepy way. “Life after all is⁠—only natural philosophy and energy. And what is energy?”

“Oh, what a wretched existence,” Romashov went on to say with increasing emotion, and without listening to Viätkin. “Today we booze at mess till we are drunk; tomorrow we meet at drill⁠—‘one, two, left, right’⁠—in the evening we again assemble round the bottle. Just the same, year in, year out. That’s what makes up our life. How disgusting!”

Viätkin peered at him with sleepy eyes, hiccuped, and then suddenly started singing in a weak falsetto:⁠—

“In the dark, stilly forest
There once dwelt a maiden,
She sat at her distaff
By day and by night.

“Take care of your health, my angel, and to the deuce with the rest.

“Romashevich! Romaskovski! let’s go to the board of green cloth. I’ll lend you a⁠—”

“No one understands me, and I have not a single friend here,” sighed Romashov mournfully. The next moment he remembered Shurochka⁠—the splendid, high-minded Shurochka, and he felt in his heart a delicious and melancholy sensation, coupled with hopelessness and quiet resignation.

He stayed in the mess-room till daybreak, watched them playing schtoss, and now and then took a hand at the game, yet without feeling the slightest pleasure or interest in it. Once he noticed how Artschakovski, who was playing at a little private table with two ensigns, made rather a stupid, but none the less successful, attempt to cheat. Romashov thought for a moment of taking up the matter and exposing the fraud, but checked himself suddenly, saying to himself: “Oh, what’s the use! I should not improve matters by interfering.”

Viätkin, who had lost, in less than five minutes, his boasted “millions,” sat sleeping on a chair, with his eyes wide open and his face as white as a sheet. Beside Romashov sat the eternal Lieschtschenko with his mournful eyes fixed on the game. Day began to dawn. The guttering candle-ends’ half-extinguished, yellowish flames flickered dully in their sticks, and illumined by their weak and uncertain light the pale, emaciated features of the gamblers. But Romashov kept staring at the cards, the heaps of silver and notes, and the green cloth scrawled all over with chalk; and in his heavy, weary head the same cruel, torturing thoughts of a worthless, unprofitable life ran incessantly.

X

It was a splendid, though somewhat chilly, spring morning. The hedges were in bloom. Romashov, who was still, as a rule, a slave to his youthful, heavy sleep, had, as usual, overslept himself, and was late for the morning drill. With an unpleasant feeling of shyness and nervousness, he approached the parade-ground, and his spirits were not cheered by the thought of Captain Sliva’s notorious habit of making a humiliating and painful situation still worse by his abuse and rudeness.

This officer was a survival of the barbaric times when an iron discipline, idiotic pedantry⁠—parade march in three time⁠—and inhuman martial laws were virtually epidemic. Even in the 4th Regiment, which, from being quartered in a Godforsaken hole, seldom came into contact with civilization, and, moreover, did not bear the reputation for much culture, Captain Sliva was looked upon as a rough and boorish person, and the most incredible anecdotes were current about him. Everything outside the company, service, and drill-book, and which he was accustomed to call “rot” or “rubbish,” had no existence so far as he was concerned. After having borne for nearly all his life the heavy burden of military service, he had arrived at such a state of savagery that he never opened a book, and, as far as newspapers were concerned, he