The Duel

Colonel Shulgovich was evidently not in a good humour. He wandered about the platoons, growling and swearing, all the while repeatedly trying to worry the life out of the unhappy recruits by catch-questions from the Military Regulations. Time after time he was heard to reel out the most awful strings of insults and threats, and in this he displayed an inventive power and mastery that could hardly be surpassed. The soldiers stood before him, transfixed with terror, stiff, motionless, scarcely daring to breathe, and, as it were, hypnotized by the incessant, steadfast glances, as hard as marble, from those senile, colourless, severe eyes. Colonel Shulgovich, although much troubled with fatness and advanced in years, nevertheless still contrived to carry his huge, imposing figure. His broad, fleshy face, with its bloated cheeks and deeply receding forehead, was surrounded below by a thick, silvery, pointed beard, whereby the great head came very closely to resemble an awe-inspiring rhomboid. The eyebrows were grey, bushy, and threatening. He always spoke in a subdued tone, but his powerful voice⁠—to which alone he owed his comparatively rapid promotion⁠—was heard all the same as far as the most distant point of the parade-ground, nay! even out on the high road.

“Who are you?” asked the Colonel, suddenly halting in front of a young soldier named Sharafutdinov, who was on sentry duty near the gymnastic apparatus.

“Recruit in the 6th Company, Sharafutdinov, your Excellency,” the Tartar answered in a strained and hoarse voice.

“Fool! I mean, of course, what post are you supposed to occupy?”

The soldier, who was frightened by his Commander’s angry tone, was silent: he could only produce one or two nervous twitchings of the eyebrows.

It was in the beginning of April. The dusk was deepening into night. The poplars that bordered the road, the small white houses with their red-tiled roofs, the few wanderers one met in the street at this hour⁠—all grew darker, lost colour and perspective. All objects were changed into black shadow, the lines of which, however, still showed distinctly against the dark sky. Far away westwards, outside the town, the sunset still gleamed fiery red. Vast dark-blue clouds melted slowly down into a glowing crater of streaming, flaming gold, and then assumed a bloodred hue with rays of violet and amber. But above the volcano, like a dome of varying green, turquoise and beryl, arose the boundless sky of a luminous spring night.

Romashov looked steadily at this enchanting picture whilst he slowly and laboriously dragged himself and his goloshes along the causeway. As he always did, even from childhood, he even now indulged in fancies of a mysterious, marvellous world that waited for and beckoned to him in the far distance, beyond the sunset. Just there⁠—there behind the clouds and the horizon⁠—is hidden a wonderfully beautiful city lighted up by the beams of a sun invisible from here, and protected against our eyes by heavy, inexorable, threatening clouds. There the human eye is blinded by streets paved with gold; there, to a dazzling height, the dome-capped towers rise above the purple-hued roofs, where the palace windows shimmer in the sun like innumerable gems, where countless flags and banners resplendent with colour sway in the breeze.

After this she began to speak with passionate earnestness of what was at present the goal of all her thoughts and aims.

“Romochka, please, try to understand me. I cannot⁠—cannot stand this any longer. To remain here is to deteriorate. To become a ‘lady of the regiment,’ to attend your rowdy soirées, to talk scandal and intrigue, to get into tempers every day, and wear out one’s nerves over the housekeeping, money and carriage bills, to serve in turn, according to precedency, on ladies’ committees and benevolent associations, to play whist, to⁠—no, enough of this. You say that our home is comfortable and charming. But just examine this bourgeois happiness. These eternal embroideries and laces; these dreadful clothes which I have altered and modernized God knows how often; this vulgar, ‘loud’-coloured sofa rug composed of rags from every spot on earth⁠—all this has been hateful and intolerable to me. Don’t you understand, my dear Romochka, that it is society⁠—real society⁠—that I want, with brilliant drawing-rooms, witty conversation, music, flirtation, homage. As you are well aware, our good Volodya is not one to set the Thames on fire, but he is a brave, honourable, and industrious fellow. If he can only gain admission to the Staff College I swear to procure him a brilliant career. I am a good linguist; I can hold my own in any society whatever; I possess⁠—I don’t know how to express it⁠—a certain flexibility of mind or spirit that helps me to hold my own, to adapt myself everywhere. Finally, Romochka, look at me, gaze at me carefully. Am I, as a human being, so uninteresting?

Out in the hall might be heard the incessant rumbling of the Colonel’s deep bass voice. The words themselves could not be distinguished, but the ferocious tone told the tale clearly enough that Colonel Shulgovich was scolding someone with implacable and sustained rage. This went on for about five minutes; after which Schulgovich suddenly became silent, a trembling, supplicating voice succeeded his, and, after a moment’s pause, Romashov clearly heard the following frightful tirade uttered with a terrible accent of pride, indignation, and contempt:

“What nonsense is it that you dare to talk about your wife and your children? What the devil have I to do with them? Before you brought your children into the world you ought to have considered how you could manage to feed them. What? So now you are trying to throw the blame on your Colonel, are you? But it has nothing to do with him. You know too well, Captain, that if I do not deliver you into the hands of justice I shall fail in my duty as your commander. Be good enough not to interrupt me. Here there is no question of an offence against discipline, but a glaring crime, and your place henceforward will certainly not be in the regiment, but you yourself best know where.” Again he heard that miserable, beseeching voice, so pitiful that it did not sound human.

“Good Lord! what is it all about?” thought Romashov, who, as if he were glued to the looking-glass, gazed at his pale face without seeing it, and felt his heart throbbing painfully. “Good Lord! how horrible!”

Romashov strode on, and followed a sort of path of bricks which led across the yard to the house. A couple of enormous, mouse-coloured young bulldogs ran out of a corner, and one of them greeted him with a rough but not unfriendly bark. Romashov snapped his fingers at it, which was answered in delight by awkward, frolicsome leaps and still noisier barking. The other bulldog followed closely on Romashov’s heels, and sniffed with curiosity between the folds of his cape. Far away in the court, where the tender, light green grass had already sprouted up, stood a little donkey philosophizing, blinking in delight at the sun, and lazily twitching its long ears. Here and there waddled ducks of variegated hues, fowls and Chinese geese with large excrescences over their bills. A bevy of peacocks made their earsplitting cluck heard, and a huge turkey-cock with trailing wings and tail-feathers high in the air was courting the favourite sultana of his harem. A massive pink sow of genuine Yorkshire breed wallowed majestically in a hole.

“Colonel Brehm,” dressed in a Swedish leather jacket, stood at a window with his back to the door, and he did not notice Romashov as the latter entered the room. He was very busy with his glass aquarium, into which he plunged one arm up to the elbow, and he was so absorbed by this occupation that Romashov was obliged to cough loudly twice before Rafalski turned round and presented his long, thin, unshaven face and a pair of old-fashioned spectacles with tortoiseshell rims.