“Yes.”
“So we know each other – what of it?”
“Congratulations on having a friend like that, the bastard!”
Pyotr Ivanych suddenly stopped chewing and regarded his nephew with astonishment.
“Well, what do you know?” he said. “You really know him?”
“Very well.”
“Have you known him long?”
“About three months.”
“You surprise me. I’ve known him for five years, and have always found him a decent chap, and no one has anything but praise for him, and here you are vilifying him.”
“And since when have you been defending people, Uncle? You used to—”
“I’ve always defended decent people; but when did you start putting them down instead of calling them angels?”
“When I didn’t know any better, but now – people, people, ‘what a pathetic species, worthy only of laughter and tears!’”* I realize now that I am entirely to blame for not listening to you when you advised me to be wary of everyone…”
“And I’m advising you right now that it doesn’t hurt to be wary. So if someone turns out to be a scoundrel, you won’t be taken in, and if someone turns out to be a decent person, you will be pleasantly mistaken.”
“So tell me, where are decent people to be found?” Alexander retorted contemptuously.
“Well, let’s take you and me – aren’t we decent people? And since we were talking about the Count, he too is a decent fellow – as are plenty of others. Everyone has some bad in him, but no one is all bad, and not everyone is bad.”
“Yes, everyone!” said Alexander categorically.
“And you?”
“Me? I at least stand out from the crowd in that, although my heart is broken, it is untainted by anything base or ignoble – my soul is riven, but unsullied by deceit, pretence or betrayal – and I shall remain uncontaminated…”
“Very well. Let’s consider the matter. What has the Count done to you?”
“What has he done? Robbed me of everything.”
“Can you be a little more specific? The word ‘everything’ could mean anything at all – perhaps money, but the Count wouldn’t do that…”
“He has robbed me of something more precious than all the riches of the world.”
“And what might that be?”
“Everything – my happiness, my life.”
“But you’re alive!”
“Unfortunately, yes! But it’s a life worse than a hundred deaths.”
“But tell me what exactly you’re talking about.”
“It’s horrible!” Alexander exclaimed. “My God, my God!”
“You mean he’s stolen that beauty of yours – er… what’s-her-name? Oh yes, he’s an expert at that; you’re not in his league!” said Pyotr Ivanych, forking some turkey into his mouth.
“He will pay dearly for that expertise!” said Alexander in a fury. “I’m not giving up without a fight… Death will decide which of us will possess Nadenka. I will destroy that vile seducer – he will not live to enjoy his stolen treasure… I’ll wipe him off the face of the earth!”
Pyotr Ivanych broke out laughing. “There speaks the provincial!” he said. “À propos, about the Count, he didn’t happen to mention whether the porcelain he had ordered from abroad had been delivered? He sent away for it in the spring; I’d like to take a look…”
“This is not about porcelain, Uncle – didn’t you hear what I was telling you?” Alexander burst in belligerently.
“Mmm!” his uncle mumbled affirmatively, as he gnawed on a bone.
“So what do you have to say?”
“Nothing, I’m just listening to you.”
“Well, listen carefully for once in your life. I came here with a purpose: I want to set my mind at rest and resolve a million nagging questions which are worrying me… I don’t know where to turn… I don’t remember who I am – help me!”
“Certainly, I’m at your service, only tell me what it is you want… I’m even ready to help you out with money… provided you’re not going to waste it on trifles…”
“Trifles! Hardly trifles when in a few hours I may no longer be in this world – either that, or I’ll be a murderer – and you dare to sit there coolly eating your supper.”
“Well, thank you very much! I believe you’ve had a good supper, and yet you take exception to someone else having his supper!”
“For the last two days I’ve forgotten what it is to eat.”
“Now, that’s really something important?”
“Just say one word: will you do me an enormous favour?”
“What?”
“Will you agree to be my witness?”
“These cutlets are all cold!” Pyotr Ivanych observed with dissatisfaction, pushing his plate away.
“Are you laughing, Uncle?”
“What do you think? How can one take such nonsense seriously? Wanting me to be your second!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know very well – of course I won’t.”
“Very well, then I’ll have to find some stranger who will be privy to my profound mortification. I would just ask you to undertake to talk to the Count and agree on the formalities…”
“I can’t – I simply couldn’t bring myself to make such an idiotic proposal.”
“Then goodbye!” said Alexander, picking up his hat.
“What? You’re really leaving – without even drinking any wine?”
Alexander was on his way to the door, but just before reaching it he sat down, utterly dejected.
“Who can I go to, who can I find to help?” he said quietly.
“Listen, Alexander,” Pyotr Ivanych began, wiping his mouth with a napkin and moving an armchair up to his nephew. “I can see I’m really going to have to talk to you seriously. So let’s proceed. You’ve come to me for help, and I will help you, but in a different way from what you think – and there’s a condition: you must do as I say. Don’t ask anyone to be your witness: it won’t do you any good. If you start spreading the story of all this nonsense, everyone will get to hear of it and it will make you a laughing stock and, worse still, will cause you trouble. In any case, no one will agree, and if you should find someone crazy enough to accept, it would serve no purpose, since the Count will not fight you; I know him.”
“He won’t! Then he doesn’t possess a shred of honour!” Alexander burst out in fury. “I never imagined he was so contemptible.”
“He’s not contemptible, just too intelligent.”
“So, according to you, I must be a fool?”
“No, it’s just that you’re in love,” said Pyotr Ivanych, choosing his words carefully.
“Uncle, if you’re going to explain to me the pointlessness of a duel, and how it’s nothing but an outdated custom, then I should warn you that you would be wasting your time; I’m not budging!”
“No; it has long been established that fighting is stupid in general; people are always fighting; there’s no shortage of asses, and there’s no way of making them see reason. All I want to do is to convince you that you in particular should not be fighting.”
“I’m curious; how do you propose to do that?”
“Listen to me! Now tell me, who is it you are so angry with, the Count or that… Anyuta, or whatever her name is?”
“I hate him and despise her,” said Alexander.
“Let’s begin with the Count. Let’s suppose that he accepts your challenge, and even that you find someone who’s fool enough to act as your witness – what will be the result? The Count will kill you as easily as swatting a fly, and afterwards everyone will be laughing at you, and a fine revenge that will be! I know you don’t want that to happen; what you wanted was to destroy the Count.”
“No o
ne knows who will kill whom!”
“Most probably he will kill you. I mean, you don’t know the first thing about shooting, and by the rules the first shot is his.”
“The outcome is in God’s hands.”
“Well, if that’s the way you want it, God will rule in his favour. They say the Count can hit a bullet with a bullet at fifteen paces, so you think he will miss you on purpose? Let’s suppose even that God would permit such ineptitude and injustice, and that you were to kill him by some fluke – where would that get you? Would it win you back the love of your beauty? No, she would hate you for it – and, what’s more, you would be forced to join the army, and the end result would be that on the very next day you would be tearing your hair out in despair and your love for your darling would turn to ice on the spot.”
Alexander shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. “Since you’re so clever at expounding all this, Uncle,” he said, “why don’t you do some expounding about what I should do in my situation?”
“Nothing! Just leave things the way they are. This business is beyond repair.”
“You mean leave him with happiness in his grasp, as the proud possessor?… Oh no! Do you think there’s any threat that can stop me? You have no idea what I’m going through! You can never have been in love, if you thought you could stop me with this unfeeling homily… it’s milk that flows in your veins, not blood…”
“Stop talking such rot, Alexander! This Maria or Sofia, or whatever, of yours – there are plenty more like her in the world.”
“Her name is Nadezhda.”
“Then who is this Sofia?”
“Sofia… she’s the one in my village,” Alexander said with reluctance.
“Well, there you are,” his uncle continued. “A Sofia there, a Nadezhda here, a Maria somewhere else. The heart is an immensely deep well, and it takes ages to grope your way to the bottom of it: it can continue falling in love even in old age…”
“No, the heart loves only once…”
“And you’re just repeating what you’ve heard others say! The heart continues to fall in love until its energy gives out. It lives out its life, and just like everything else in a human being, it has a youth and an old age. If one love doesn’t work out, it marks time and stays quiescent until the next one. If there’s an impediment to that one, or a separation, the power to love remains undiminished until the one after that, and so on until finally the heart invests itself entirely in the one successful encounter to which there is no impediment, and then it slowly and gradually cools down. For some people, love works out the very first time, and they go around proclaiming that you can only love once. As long as a man stays youthful and healthy…”
“You keep on talking about youth, Uncle, which means material love…”
“I talk about youth because love in old age is a mistake, an aberration. And as for material love, it does not exist, or it is not love in precisely the same way that there is no such thing as one ideal love. Both body and soul must be partners in love, otherwise love is incomplete; we’re not spirits and we’re not beasts. But you yourself said: ‘It’s milk that flows in the veins, not blood.’ Well, there you are: on the one hand, take blood in the veins – that’s material; on the other hand, take pride, habit – that’s spiritual. And that’s love for you!
“Now, what was I saying?… Oh yes, about the army; furthermore, after all this business, your beauty won’t let you come near her, so you will have done harm to both yourself and her – and for nothing, don’t you see? I hope we’ve now said everything there is to say about one aspect of the matter. Now…”
Pyotr Ivanych poured himself some wine and drank it.
“What a blockhead!” he said. “The Lafite he brought was cold.”
Alexander remained silent, his head lowered.
“Now, tell me,” his uncle continued, warming the wine glass in his hands, “why is it that you wanted to wipe the Count from the face of the earth?”
“I’ve already told you why! Wasn’t he the one who destroyed my happiness? He burst in like a wild beast…”
“Into the sheepfold!” his uncle interposed.
“He robbed me of everything,” Alexander continued.
“He didn’t rob you, he just came and took. Was he obliged to enquire whether your beauty was taken or not? I don’t understand this idiocy which most lovers have been committing since the beginning of time, namely getting angry with a rival. Can there be anything more idiotic than ‘wiping him off the face of the earth’? What for? Because she took a liking to him! As if he did something wrong, and as if it would make things better if we punished him! And this – what’s-her-name – Katenka of yours, did she offer any resistance? Did she make any effort to avert the danger? No, she surrendered, and stopped loving you. There’s no point in arguing – you won’t get her back! To persist is sheer egoism! To demand faithfulness from a wife, yes, that makes sense. There’s an obligation involved: that’s something on which the material well-being of a family depends – and even then you can’t demand that she love no one… but only that she… er… well, you know. Anyway, didn’t you yourself hand her over to the Count on a plate? Did you even compete for her?”
“Well, here I am trying to do just that,” said Alexander, leaping up from his seat. “But here you are trying to thwart my noble impulse—”
He was interrupted by his uncle. “Yes, but you want to compete with a club in your hands! We’re not in the steppes of Kyrgyzstan. In the civilized world we have other weapons. You should have competed at the right time and in a different way, by fighting a different kind of duel with the Count in full view of your beauty.”
Alexander looked at his uncle in bewilderment.
“What kind of duel then?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you in a moment. What have you been doing up to now?”
Alexander began to narrate the whole course of events with a mishmash of “ifs”, “ands” and “buts”, reservations and evasiveness – and grimaces.
“You see, it’s you who are wholly to blame in all this,” said his uncle, after listening and frowning. “You’ve blundered right, left and centre. Oh Alexander, why the devil did you come here? Was it really worth the ride? You could have got up to all this back there at home on the lake with your aunt. How could you have acted so childishly, throwing tantrums, flying off the handle? Bah! Who behaves like that these days? What if that Yulia – or whatever – of yours were to tell everything to the Count? But, thank Heavens, nothing to worry about on that score! If the Count had asked her, she was probably smart enough to say…”
“To say what?” Alexander hastened to ask.
“That she was just leading you on, and that you were in love with her, but that she didn’t find you in the least attractive and got on her nerves – it’s what they always say…”
“You really think that’s what she actually said?” asked Alexander, growing pale.
“No doubt about it. Do you really imagine that she would tell him that you picked yellow flowers for her in the garden? How naive can you be?”
“So, what kind of duel with the Count?” Alexander asked impatiently.
“It’s like this: don’t be boorish with him, don’t avoid him and don’t sulk – in fact, go out of your way to be extra nice to him – ten times as nice to him as he is to you! And that – what’s-her-name, Nadenka – did I get it right this time? – don’t antagonize her with your reproaches, and be indulgent with her caprices. Don’t make it appear that you notice anything, or even that you have the slightest suspicion of betrayal, as if you thought that was out of the question. You shouldn’t have let them get so close as to permit intimacy, but somehow contrived artfully to block their chances of their being alone together. You should have stayed with them wherever they went and gone out with them, even on horseback. At the same time, you should subtly and tacitly have been
challenging your rival to battle, and equipping yourself and bringing to bear all your mental resources for the fight. Your artillery barrage should have been your wit and cunning; and then, stepping up the fight, you should have exposed and probed your rival’s weakness, quite inadvertently, and without meaning to, of course, and in the friendliest of spirits, however reluctantly and however much it went against the grain, so as to strip from him little by little that disguise in which a young man drapes himself for the benefit of an attractive woman. You should have made a point of noticing what it is that is particularly striking or dazzling about him and then focus your attack on precisely those attributes, explain them in simple terms, show that they are nothing out of the ordinary, just like the hero himself, who has simply been putting on a show in order to impress her. All this should have been done coolly, patiently and skilfully – now that is the kind of duel that should be fought today! But it’s beyond you!”
Pyotr Ivanych drained his glass and immediately refilled it.
“To win a woman’s heart by resorting to such low cunning and guile is contemptible!” Alexander retorted indignantly.
“Do you think resorting to the club is any better? At least, using guile as your weapon, you can salvage someone’s affection for you, but brute force – I don’t think so. Wanting to get your rival out of the way is understandable; to strive to preserve the love of the woman you love and to avert the danger and remove the threat is only natural, but to punish a rival simply because he has won a woman’s heart is no different from kicking something you’ve bumped into and hurt yourself – it’s what children do. Like it or not, the Count is not to blame! I can see that you understand nothing of the workings of the heart, and that is why you have had so little success in the field of love and your writing.”
“The field of love!” said Alexander, shaking his head contemptuously. “But can any love earned by guile ever be honourable and lasting?”
“I don’t know about ‘honourable’: that depends on what a person is looking for, but it doesn’t matter to me; I don’t have a very high opinion of love in general, as you know: I would just as soon do without it altogether, but as to whether it’s more lasting – yes, it is. In matters of the heart, you can’t act straightforwardly. It’s a complicated device, and if you don’t know which button to press, there’s no telling how it may react. Get someone to love you in any way you want, but to keep it you must use your wits. Guile is just one of the mind’s functions, and there’s nothing at all despicable about it. There’s no need to humiliate your rival or slander him: all you succeed in doing like that is antagonizing the woman you love… All you have to do is to strip him of all the gloss and glitter that bedazzle her, and show her that he is no hero, but just an average, run-of-the-mill human being. I believe that it is legitimate to defend a good cause by means of trickery – something which is not scorned in warfare. For instance, you wanted to get married, but what kind of a husband do you think you would make by throwing tantrums with your wife and threatening your rivals with a blunt instrument? And what would that make you?” Pyotr Ivanych pointed a finger at his forehead. “Your Varenka was twenty per cent smarter than you, when she suggested that you wait a year.”
The Same Old Story Page 18
