The Duel - Anton Chekhov (books to read for teens .TXT) 📗
- Author: Anton Chekhov
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“I don’t know what it is you expect of him, Kolya,” said Samoylenko, looking at the zoologist, not with anger now, but with a guilty air. “He is a man the same as everyone else. Of course, he has his weaknesses, but he is abreast of modern ideas, is in the service, is of use to his country. Ten years ago there was an old fellow serving as agent here, a man of the greatest intelligence … and he used to say …”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” the zoologist interrupted. “You say he is in the service; but how does he serve? Do you mean to tell me that things have been done better because he is here, and the officials are more punctual, honest, and civil? On the contrary, he has only sanctioned their slackness by his prestige as an intellectual university man. He is only punctual on the 20th of the month, when he gets his salary; on the other days he lounges about at home in slippers and tries to look as if he were doing the government a great service by living in the Caucasus. No, Alexandr Daviditch, don’t stick up for him. You are insincere from beginning to end. If you really loved him and considered him your neighbour, you would above all not be indifferent to his weaknesses, you would not be indulgent to them, but for his own sake would try to make him innocuous.”
“That is?”
“Innocuous. Since he is incorrigible, he can only be made innocuous in one way. …” Von Koren passed his finger round his throat. “Or he might be drowned …” he added. “In the interests of humanity and in their own interests, such people ought to be destroyed. They certainly ought.”
“What are you saying?” muttered Samoylenko, getting up and looking with amazement at the zoologist’s calm, cold face. “Deacon, what is he saying? Why—are you in your senses?”
“I don’t insist on the death penalty,” said Von Koren. “If it is proved that it is pernicious, devise something else. If we can’t destroy Laevsky, why then, isolate him, make him harmless, send him to hard labour.”
“What are you saying!” said Samoylenko in horror. “With pepper, with pepper,” he cried in a voice of despair, seeing that the deacon was eating stuffed aubergines without pepper. “You with your great intellect, what are you saying! Send our friend, a proud intellectual man, to penal servitude!”
“Well, if he is proud and tries to resist, put him in fetters!”
Samoylenko could not utter a word, and only twiddled his fingers; the deacon looked at his flabbergasted and really absurd face, and laughed.
“Let us leave off talking of that,” said the zoologist. “Only remember one thing, Alexandr Daviditch: primitive man was preserved from such as Laevsky by the struggle for existence and by natural selection; now our civilisation has considerably weakened the struggle and the selection, and we ought to look after the destruction of the rotten and worthless for ourselves; otherwise, when the Laevskys multiply, civilisation will perish and mankind will degenerate utterly. It will be our fault.”
“If it depends on drowning and hanging,” said Samoylenko, “damnation take your civilisation, damnation take your humanity! Damnation take it! I tell you what: you are a very learned and intelligent man and the pride of your country, but the Germans have ruined you. Yes, the Germans! The Germans!”
Since Samoylenko had left Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, he had rarely seen a German and had not read a
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