The Duel

unusual tone of the question made Romashov uneasy and suspicious, and he instinctively uttered a falsehood. He answered carelessly⁠—
“No, certainly not often. I just happened to look them up.”
Nasanski, who had been walking up and down the room during the conversation, now stopped before the little cupboard, the door of which he opened. On one of its shelves stood a bottle of vodka, and beside it lay an apple cut up into thin, even slices. Standing with his back to his guest, Nasanski poured out for himself a glass, and quickly drained it. Romashov noticed how Nasanski’s back, under its thin linen shirt, quivered convulsively.
“Would you like anything?” asked Nasanski, with a gesture towards the cupboard. “My larder is, as you see, poor enough; but if you are hungry one can always try and procure an omelette. Anyhow, that’s more than our father Adam had to offer.”
“Thanks, not now. Perhaps later on.”
Nasanski stuck his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. After pacing up and down twice he began talking as though resuming an interrupted conversation.
“Yes, I am always walking up and down and thinking. But I am quite happy. Tomorrow, of course, they will say as usual in the regiment, ‘He’s a drunkard.’ And that is true in a sense, but it is not the whole truth. All the same, at this moment, I’m happy; I feel neither pain nor ailments. It is different, alas! in ordinary circumstances. My mind and willpower are paralysed; I shall again become a cowardly and despicably mean creature, vain, shabby, hypocritical⁠—a curse to myself and everyone else. I loathe my profession, but, nevertheless, I remain in it. And why? Ah! the devil himself could not explain that. Because I had it knocked into me in my childhood, and have lived since in a set where it is held that the most important thing in life is to serve the State, to be free from anxiety as to one’s clothes and daily bread. And philosophy, people say, is mere rubbish, good enough for one who has nothing else to do or who has come into a goodly heritage from his dear mamma.
“Thus I, too, occupy myself with things in which I don’t take the slightest interest, or issue orders that seem to me both harsh and unmeaning. My daily life is as monotonous and cheerless as an old deal board, as rough and hard as a soldier’s regulation cap. I dare scarcely think of, far less talk of, love, beauty, my place in the scheme of creation, of freedom and happiness, of poetry and God. They would only laugh ha! ha! ha! at me, and say: ‘Oh, damn it! That, you know, is philosophy. It is not only ridiculous but even dangerous for an officer to show he holds any high views,’ and at best the officer escapes with being dubbed a harmless, hopeless ass.”
“And yet it is this that alone gives life any value,” sighed Romashov.
“And now the happy hour is drawing nigh about which they tattle so heartlessly and with so much contempt,” Nasanski went on to say without listening to Romashov’s words. He walked incessantly backwards and forwards, and interpolated his speech, every now and then, with striking gestures, which were not, however, addressed to Romashov, but were always directed to the two corners of the room which he visited in turn. “Now comes my turn of freedom, Romashov⁠—freedom for soul, thought, and will. Then I shall certainly live a peculiar, but nevertheless rich, inner life. All that I have seen, heard, and read will then gain a deeper meaning, will appear in a clear and more distinct light, and receive a deep, infinite significance. My memory will then be like a museum of rare curiosities. I shall be a very Rothschild. I take the first object within my reach, gaze at it long, closely, and with rapture. Persons, events, characters, books, women, love⁠—nay, first and last, women and love⁠—all this is interwoven in my imagination. Now and then I think of the heroes and geniuses of history, of the countless martyrs of religion and science. I don’t believe in God, Romashov, but sometimes I think of the saints and martyrs and call to mind the Holy Scriptures and canticles.”
Romashov got up quietly from his seat at the edge of the bed and walked away to the open window, and then he sat down with his back resting against the sill. From that spot, from the lighted room, the night seemed to him still darker and more fraught with mystery. Tepid breezes whispered just beneath the window, amongst the dark foliage of the shrubs. And in this mild air, charged with the sharp, aromatic perfume of spring, under those gleaming stars, in this dead silence of the universe, one might fancy he felt the hot breath of reviving, generating, voluptuous Nature.
Nasanski continued all along his eternal wandering, and indulged in building castles in the air, without looking at Romashov, as if he were talking to the walls.
“In these moments my thoughts⁠—seething, motley, original⁠—chase one another. My senses acquire an unnatural acuteness; my imagination becomes an overwhelming flood. Persons and things, living or dead, which are evoked by me stand before me in high relief and also in an extraordinarily intense light, as if I saw them in a camera obscura. I know, I know now, that all that is merely a super-excitation of the senses, an emanation of the soul flaming up like lightning, but in the next instant flickering out, being produced by the physiological influence of alcohol on the nervous system. In the beginning I thought such psychic phenomena implied an elevation of my inner, spiritual Ego, and that even I might have moments of inspiration. But no; there was nothing permanent or of any value in this, nothing creative or fructifying. Altogether it was only a morbid, physiological process, a river wave that at every ebb that occurs sucks away with it and destroys the beach.