‘‘Let’s stop talking about it,’’ the zoologist said. ‘‘Remember only one thing, Alexander Davidych, that primitive mankind was protected from the likes of Laevsky by the struggle for existence and selection; but nowadays our culture has considerably weakened the struggle and the selection, and we ourselves must take care of destroying the feeble and unfit, or else, as the Laevskys multiply, civilization will perish and mankind will become totally degenerate. It will be our fault.’’
‘‘If it comes to drowning and hanging people,’’ said Samoilenko, ‘‘then to hell with your civilization, to hell with mankind! To hell! I’ll tell you this: you’re a man of the greatest learning and intelligence, and the pride of our fatherland, but you’ve been spoiled by the Germans. Yes, the Germans! The Germans!’’
Since leaving Dorpat,11 where he had studied medicine, Samoilenko had seldom seen Germans and had not read a single German book, but in his opinion, all the evil in politics and science proceeded from the Germans. Where he had acquired such an opinion, he himself was unable to say, but he held fast to it.
‘‘Yes, the Germans!’’ he repeated once more. ‘‘Let’s go and have tea.’’
The three men got up, put on their hats, went to the front garden, and sat down there under the shade of pale maples, pear trees, and a chestnut. The zoologist and the deacon sat on a bench near a little table, and Samoilenko lowered himself into a wicker chair with a broad, sloping back. The orderly brought tea, preserves, and a bottle of syrup.
It was very hot, about ninety-two in the shade. The torrid air congealed, unmoving, and a long spiderweb, dangling from the chestnut to the ground, hung slackly and did not stir.
The deacon took up the guitar that always lay on the ground by the table, tuned it, and began to sing in a soft, thin little voice: ‘‘ ‘Seminary youths stood nigh the pot-house ...’ ’ but at once fell silent from the heat, wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked up at the hot blue sky. Samoilenko dozed off; the torrid heat, the silence, and the sweet after-dinner drowsiness that quickly came over all his members left him weak and drunk; his arms hung down, his eyes grew small, his head lolled on his chest. He looked at von Koren and the deacon with tearful tenderness and murmured:
‘‘The younger generation . .. A star of science and a luminary of the Church... This long-skirted alleluia may someday pop up as a metropolitan, 12 for all I know, I may have to kiss his hand... So what... God grant it...’
Soon snoring was heard. Von Koren and the deacon finished their tea and went out to the street.
‘‘Going back to the pier to fish for bullheads?’’ asked the zoologist.
‘‘No, it’s too hot.’’
‘‘Let’s go to my place. You can wrap a parcel for me and do some copying. Incidentally, we can discuss what you’re going to do with yourself. You must work, Deacon. It’s impossible like this.’’
‘‘Your words are just and logical,’’ said the deacon, ‘‘but my laziness finds its excuse in the circumstances of my present life. You know yourself that an uncertainty of position contributes significantly to people’s apathy. God alone knows whether I’ve been sent here for a time or forever; I live here in uncertainty, while my wife languishes at her father’s and misses me. And, I confess, my brains have melted from the heat.’’
‘‘That’s all nonsense,’’ said the zoologist. ‘‘You can get used to the heat, and you can get used to being without a wife. It won’t do to pamper yourself. You must keep yourself in hand.’’
V
NADEZHDA FYODOROVNA WAS going to swim in the morning, followed by her kitchen maid, Olga, who was carrying a jug, a copper basin, towels, and a sponge. Two unfamiliar steamships with dirty white stacks stood at anchor in the roads, evidently foreign freighters. Some men in white, with white shoes, were walking about the pier and shouting loudly in French, and answering calls came from the ships. The bells were ringing briskly in the small town church.
‘‘Today is Sunday!’’ Nadezhda Fyodorovna recalled with pleasure.
She felt perfectly well and was in a gay, festive mood. Wearing a new loose dress of coarse man’s tussore and a big straw hat, its wide brim bent down sharply to her ears, so that her face looked out of it as if out of a box, she fancied herself very sweet. She was thinking that in the whole town there was only one young, beautiful, intelligent woman—herself— and that she alone knew how to dress cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. For example, this dress had cost only twenty-two roubles, and yet how sweet it was! In the whole town, she alone could still attract men, and there were many, and therefore, willy-nilly, they should all envy Laevsky.
She was glad that lately Laevsky had been cold, politely restrained, and at times even impertinent and rude with her; to all his outbursts and all his scornful, cold, or strange, incomprehensible glances, she would formerly have responded with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him, or to starve herself to death, but now her response was merely to blush, to glance at him guiltily and be glad that he was not nice to her. If he rebuked her or threatened her, it would be still better and more agreeable, because she felt herself roundly guilty before him. It seemed to her that she was guilty, first, because she did not sympathize with his dreams of a life of labor, for the sake of which he had abandoned Petersburg and come here to the Caucasus, and she was certain that he had been cross with her lately precisely for that. As she was going to the Caucasus, it had seemed to her that on the very first day, she would find there a secluded nook on the coast, a cozy garden with shade, birds, brooks, where she could plant flowers and vegetables, raise ducks and chickens, receive neighbors, treat poor muzhiks and distribute books to them; but it turned out that the Caucasus was bare mountains, forests, and enormous valleys, where you had to spend a long time choosing, bustling about, building, and that there weren’t any neighbors there, and it was very hot, and they could be robbed. Laevsky was in no rush to acquire a plot; she was glad of that, and it was as if they both agreed mentally never to mention the life of labor. He was silent, she thought, that meant he was angry with her for being silent.
Second, over those two years, unknown to him, she had bought all sorts of trifles in Atchmianov’s shop for as much as three hundred roubles. She had bought now a bit of fabric, then some silk, then an umbrella, and the debt had imperceptibly mounted.
‘‘I’ll tell him about it today ...’ she decided, but at once realized that, given Laevsky’s present mood, it was hardly opportune to talk to him about debts.
Third, she had already twice received Kirilin, the police chief, in Laevsky’s absence: once in the morning, when Laevsky had gone to swim, and the other time at midnight, when he was playing cards. Remembering it, Nadezhda Fyodorovna flushed all over and turned to look at the kitchen maid, as if fearing she might eavesdrop on her thoughts. The long, unbearably hot, boring days, the beautiful, languorous evenings, the stifling nights, and this whole life, when one did not know from morning to evening how to spend the useless time, and the importunate thoughts that she was the most beautiful young woman in town and that her youth was going for naught, and Laevsky himself, an honest man with ideas, but monotonous, eternally shuffling in his slippers, biting his nails, and boring her with his caprices— resulted in her being gradually overcome with desires, and, like a madwoman, she thought day and night about one and the same thing. In her breathing, in her glance, in the tone of her voice, and in her gait—all she felt was desire; the sound of the sea told her she had to love, so did the evening darkness, so did the mountains... And when Kirilin began to court her, she had no strength, she could not and did not want to resist, and she gave herself to him...