The Jew and Other Stories eBook

I read these lines and unconsciously sank into musing.  Susanna’s image rose before me; once more I seemed to see the frozen window in my room; I recalled that evening and the blustering snowstorm, and those words, those sobs....  I began to ponder how it was possible to explain Susanna’s love for Fustov, and why she had so quickly, so impulsively given way to despair, as soon as she saw herself forsaken.  How was it she had had no desire to wait a little, to hear the bitter truth from the lips of the man she loved, to write to him, even?  How could she fling herself at once headlong into the abyss?  Because she was passionately in love with Fustov, I shall be told; because she could not bear the slightest doubt of his devotion, of his respect for her.  Perhaps; or perhaps because she was not at all so passionately in love with Fustov; that she did not deceive herself about him, but simply rested her last hopes on him, and could not get over the thought that even this man had at once, at the first breath of slander, turned away from her with contempt!  Who can say what killed her; wounded pride, or the wretchedness of her helpless position, or the very memory of that first, noble, true-hearted nature to whom she had so joyfully pledged herself in the morning of her early days, who had so deeply trusted her, and so honoured her?  Who knows; perhaps at the very instant when I fancied that her dead lips were murmuring, ‘he did not come!’ her soul was rejoicing that she had gone herself to him, to her Michel?  The secrets of human life are great, and love itself, the most impenetrable of those secrets....  Anyway, to this day, whenever the image of Susanna rises before me, I cannot overcome a feeling of pity for her, and of angry reproach against fate, and my lips whisper instinctively, ’Unhappy girl! unhappy girl!’

1868.

THE DUELLIST

I

A regiment of cuirassiers was quartered in 1829 in the village of Kirilovo, in the K—–­ province.  That village, with its huts and hay-stacks, its green hemp-patches, and gaunt willows, looked from a distance like an island in a boundless sea of ploughed, black-earth fields.  In the middle of the village was a small pond, invariably covered with goose feathers, with muddy, indented banks; a hundred paces from the pond, on the other side of the road, rose the wooden manor-house, long, empty, and mournfully slanting on one side.  Behind the house stretched the deserted garden; in the garden grew old apple-trees that bore no fruit, and tall birch-trees, full of rooks’ nests.  At the end of the principal garden-walk, in a little house, once the bath-house, lived a decrepit old steward.  Every morning, gasping and groaning, he would, from years of habit, drag himself across the garden to the seignorial apartments, though there was nothing to take care of in them except a dozen white arm-chairs, upholstered in faded stuff, two