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His face looked blissful and his eyes grew moist. . . . He deliberately poured himself out a glass of vodka and said: "To the health of the younger generation." After his conversation with Laevsky, from early morning till dinner Samoylenko had been conscious of a load at his heart, although he was in the best of humours; he felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him.
The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearying her with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing else day and night.
"How stupid it is!" he thought, rolling with laughter. "Have I gone out of my mind?" The laugh grew shriller and shriller, and became something like the bark of a lap-dog. Laevsky tried to get up from the table, but his legs would not obey him and his right hand was strangely, without his volition, dancing on the table, convulsively clutching and crumpling up the bits of paper.
"'Show her respect, consider her wishes," Laevsky mimicked him. "As though she were some Mother Superior! . . . You are a poor psychologist and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get off with nothing but respect and consideration. What a woman thinks most of is her bedroom." "Vanya, Vanya!" said Samoylenko, overcome with confusion.
It seemed as though he only liked to be in people's company because there was a ridiculous side to them, and because they might be given ridiculous nicknames. He had nicknamed Samoylenko "the tarantula," his orderly "the drake," and was in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as "Japanese monkeys."
Without turning his head, he looked to each side and thought that the boulevard was extremely well laid out; that the young cypress-trees, the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic palm-trees were very handsome and would in time give abundant shade; that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people. "It's strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus," he thought, "very strange."
He listened, drew a deep breath and said in a whisper: "Open that door, and go in . . . don't be afraid." Laevsky, puzzled, opened the door and went into a room with a low ceiling and curtained windows. There was a candle on the table. "What do you want?" asked some one in the next room. "Is it you, Muridov?" Laevsky turned into that room and saw Kirilin, and beside him Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.
He remembered the rule that when one is angry with one's neighbour, one must begin to count a hundred, and one will grow calm again; and he began rapidly counting. "I beg you not to trouble yourself about me," Laevsky went on. "Don't pay any attention to me, and whose business is it what I do and how I live? Yes, I want to go away.
They put two card tables side by side and sat down to play post. Laevsky sat down too. "Friday . . . Friday . . ." he kept thinking, as he smiled and took a pencil out of his pocket. "Friday. . . ." He wanted to think over his position, and was afraid to think.
You would give it to Kerim, the brigand, if he were to ask you; but, excuse me, I can't assist you in that direction." "Yes, it is for Laevsky I am asking it," said Samoylenko, standing up and waving his right arm. "Yes! For Laevsky! And no one, fiend or devil, has a right to dictate to me how to dispose of my own money. It doesn't suit you to lend it me? No?" The deacon began laughing.
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