A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [74]
“Have you written your will?” Werner suddenly asked.
“No.”
“And in the case of your death?”
“My beneficiaries will appear by themselves.”
“Surely you have friends to whom you would like to send a final farewell?”
I shook my head.
“Surely there is one woman in the world to whom you might like to leave something for memory’s sake?”
“Would you like, doctor,” I replied to him, “that I bare my soul to you? . . . You see, I have grown out of the times when a person dies, pronouncing the name of their beloved, and bequeathing to their friend a lock of their pomaded or unpomaded hair. Considering near and possible death, I think only about myself—some don’t even do that. The friends who will tomorrow forget me, or, worse, those who will pin God knows what cock-and-bull stories on me, and the women who, embracing another, will laugh at me, in order not to arouse jealousy toward the deceased—good luck to them! I have carried only a few ideas out of life’s storm—and not one feeling. I have long lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him. The first, maybe, in an hour’s time may bid forevermore farewell to you and the world, and the second . . . the second? Look doctor: do you see there on that precipice, to the right, three figures blackening the landscape? They are our adversaries I suppose?”
We set off at a trot.
At the foot of the rock-face, in the bushes, three horses were tied up. We tied ours there too, and clambered up the narrow footpath to the little platform, where we were awaited by Grushnitsky, the dragoon captain, and his other second called Ivan Ignatievitch (I have never heard his last name).
“We have been expecting you for a long time,” said the dragoon captain with an ironic smile.
I pulled out my timepiece and showed it to him.
He apologized, saying that his watch was running fast.
An embarrassing silence endured for several minutes. Finally the doctor broke it, addressing himself to Grushnitsky.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that, having both demonstrated a readiness to fight and having paid these debts to the conditions of honor, you could both, gentlemen, make yourselves understood now and end this matter amicably.”
“I am willing,” I said.
The captain winked at Grushnitsky, and the latter, thinking I was being a coward, assumed a proud air, though until this minute a dull pallor had spread over his cheeks. For the first time since we arrived, he raised his eyes to me. But there was some sort of unrest in his gaze, indicating an inner struggle.
“Clarify your conditions,” he said, “and I will do everything that I can for you, you may rest assured . . .”
“Here are my conditions: that you now publicly retract your slander and ask my forgiveness . . .”
“Gracious sir, I am astonished that you deign to propose such things to me.”
“What could I propose to you otherwise?”
“We will shoot . . .”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“As you please, only remember that one of us will certainly be killed.”
“Would that it were you . . .”
“And I feel assured of the opposite . . .”
He became embarrassed, turned red, then laughed forcedly.
The captain took him by the arm and led him off to the side. They whispered for a long time. I had arrived in a rather peaceable mood, but all this was starting to madden me.
The doctor walked up to me.
“Listen,” he said with evident anxiety. “I suppose you have forgotten about their plot? . . . I don’t know how to load a pistol, but if it comes to that . . . You are a strange man! Tell them that you know their intentions, and they won’t dare . . . What is this—hunting? They’ll shoot you like a bird . . .”
“Please, don’t worry, doctor, and wait . . . I will arrange it all so that there is no advantage to their side. Let them whisper . . .”
“Gentlemen, this is getting tiresome!” I said to them loudly. “If